You’re a powerful dragon that lived next to a small kingdom. For centuries you ignored humanity and lived alone in a cave, and the humans also avoided you. As the kingdom fell to invaders, a dying soldier approaches you with the infant princess, begging you to take care of her.
“cool,” you say, picking a bone from your teeth. it’s a power move you saw on VHS, but it actually just makes your gums kind of hurt. feels like ripping a popcorn kernel out.
around you, the abandoned subway is dripping. your horde of slightly-used-but-still-good Items Of Debatable Usage shifts under the scales of your tail.
“so, like, how did you find me, again?” you curl your tail up, around, through the air. the soldier looks bad, but you also don’t want him to die on your rug because you just got that cleaned. it’s really sixty rugs sewn together and to be honest? talk about a cleaning charge. used to be a dragon’s promise was worth something in this world.
you weren’t listening. “then she sent me here to you,” the man is saying.
you curl your tail around a handkerchief and pass it to him to clean up his blood. when it lands on him, you realize you’ve sort of erred. it is not a kerchief. it is a full king-sized sheet that is a replica from the set of the That’s 70′s Show. you’ve never seen an episode.
“she?” you taste the pronoun in your mouth. “let me guess. tall, green-black hair, very like a snake, but like, in a way that feels sort of human. like if a human was being a snake more than if a person was snake-ish.”
the soldier, with his one free arm, is trying to wrap parts of the sheet around his wounds. he barely nods. it’s kind of rude he’s so distracted.
you appraise him. “she didn’t like you,” you say, and hop off the ledge you’re lurking on. you feel graceful usually, but the smallness of this man makes you feel sort of crowded. like if you walk the wrong way you’ll squish him.
he coughs into his hand. the baby is fussing. “she… what? how do you know?”
“sent you the hard way,” you say, “quest and everything.”
you sniff downwards. the baby is absolutely Royalty, capital R. smells like a future princess. smells like hidden-in-a-wood. you smell again. actually, maybe it’s a tower. she smells like a tower princess.
maybe he thinks that you’re gonna eat her, because he wraps her tight against his chest. he smells like not-related, but absolutely sworn-to-protect. ugh.
you swipe your tail. clear off a space, dive in your claw. fish around. pluck out what is not a crib (cribs are useful) but instead a race car bed that has high enough walls it could convince itself to be a crib. “plop her down,” you say, “she’ll be safe here.”
“how do i know?” his voice is scratchy.
“call her,” you say, “call steph.”
he doesn’t move. you roll your eyes. “ugh. is she still going by that name? call The Witch of Night”. a name, which, not that it matters, you suggested to her about six eons ago. now it’s more like “One of the Several Witches Of New York City And Surrounding Boroughs.”
“i trust her,” he says, “i don’t trust you. how do you two even…?”
“she’s punishing me,” you say, because honestly! when is she not! she has no idea what a prank is supposed to look like! “this is to remind me that i belong in a Tale, and i escaped, and it totally ruined a Very Good Spell.”
he’s staring at you. his eyes are glassy. he stumbles. you edge the racecar bed closer. he puts the baby in it and she hushes, which you take to be a good sign. you rock it gently with your tail. if you took care of her (which, you won’t, obviously) you’d have to do some Small Magic and turn human for a while, even though you always feel kind of tiny and weak in human bodies. it would make it easier to hold and carry and take outside this little bundle of joy. no, not joy. Royalty.
“dragons are supposed to die in Tales,” you say, “and i didn’t die, clearly.” you begin to hunt for something that can function as a bottle. “major disappointment for all involved, myself included, trust me.”
the man drops to his knees. you suck in your breath between your teeth. he flinches like he expects flames, which is kind of hurtful. if you had wanted to eat him, you would have just done that already. but really, barbecue in front of a baby? even dragons have morals.
“ugh,” you say, and you pull out your old talking stone you can’t afford (Verizon has great coverage for hidden supernatural beasts, but really, at what cost) “hang on.”
the phone rings about two whole times. your heart always flutters, just a little, because it’s her on the other end. “sophie?” you ask.
“yeah?” her voice holds a smile in it.
“steph sent me another baby,” you say. you meanwhile pull what-is-not-a-rattle out of the pile and shake it for the girl. “the guy who brought it, is, like… toast.”
he looks pale.
“not literal toast,” you amend, “absolutely could be worse.”
“i keep telling her,” sophie sighs, “we’re not ready.”
“she’s just excited,” you say placidly. it’s not good to speak ill of your inlaws.
“how much longer for the guy?”
you sniff. “uh, forty minutes, tops. how fast can you get him to the hospital?”
“oh, twelve with traffic.” in the background, you hear her moving, already on her way, her keys jingling.
“what do we do with … uh Recent Acquisition.” you tickle the baby with a tail. it giggles and it sounds like bells. you roll your eyes. absolutely Royalty, kind-as-kittens, pure-of-heart, some-bullshit-yet-to-be-written. you want to snuggle with her, which is just completely unbecoming of a dragon.
“i’m going to kill her,” sophie says, “what kind of baby?”
“tower princess.” you gently push the man and his blood off your rug. ugh. he’s moaning and groaning, so you tell him, “dude i’m on the phone.”
he’s going to be fine. sophie never met someone she couldn’t heal. she healed up the big old wound that was your heart, after all, cleaned it out and patched it up and made you whole. and she’d done that literally a few times, too. your Day Witch. the dawn star of your heart.
there’s a little laugh. “remember our tower?”
“babe,” you say, “how can i forget.” you look over to the Dying Man on his Final Quest. you offer him a partially-burned cellphone and mouth call who you need to. you need to say it a few times, because he isn’t good at reading dragon lips.
“sorry about steph,” sophie sighs. “she just wants to be an aunt.”
there’s kind of a pause and sophie adds, gently, in a way that your heart breaks to hear, “and maybe …. i kind of told her i wanna be a mom.”
sure, steph is much nicer since six eons ago when she went through a totally-edgy there-can-only-be-one-powerful-twin phase (and really, aren’t we all like that as teenagers), but as an aunt? she’s not like sophie, who is kind and gentle and good and whole and has loved you in any form you choose, who has held your claw when your cried and shined your scales and sorted your Horde and helped you find new bodies and helped you escape a Tale (her Tale too) and who ran off with you and survived, and thrived, and lived in a world that forgot magic, and live, and love, and watch lots of netflix, which, along with vaccines, is your absolute favorite New Era thing.
but anyway. what if steph goes dark again. what if you forget to invite her to the birthday party or it gets lost in the mail and lo and behold, eternal sleep. what if she don’t like how the baby speaks and decides Toads For Tongues. what if she goes through the whole mirror-mirror bullshit. not with your baby.
your baby. is this, like, your baby now?
“i kinda,” the words feel so Right. like Tale kinds of Right. like somehow when he showed up he wasn’t finishing his quest but starting yours. the baby laughs again and you realize: she doesn’t sound like bells. she sounds normal, you just already love her, “i kinda wanna be a mom too.”
and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.
but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.
time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.
as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.
cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.
so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.
summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.
this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.
cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…
from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…
after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.
aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.
time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.
one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.
she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.
she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.
years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.
two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.
or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.
her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.
hello. i am writing to let you know you did good job on the stars, and also on cats.
yours respectfully, me
dear universe,
in the original post of this, it says “dogs” where it now says “cats”. i do not know when (or how) it got changed, but i am glad that someone loved cats enough to do that, because i love my dog and i also love my cats and i felt bad about not mentioning it that first time. i’m also glad for all the tags where people told me what i should have added (like libraries and waffles and maple syrup) and i am glad for all the comments about how much they love their pets (and some people have such cool pets!)
i kind of think, universe, if we are your children, this is our macaroni art. see, see, see, you gave us a little bit of the stars, and we’ve made our own constellations. we tried to give back to you by making art and music and books and bad poetry and our laughter and our love and our tv dramadies. we took pictures of the night sky and pictures of sunsets and pictures of dew, we fell in love with space and the rivers and the rain. i personally have my desktop background as a picture of one of your nebulas. your hair looked great that day.
i think…. you did a good job, universe, on the stars, and what the stars became, because you put us together and yes, yes, things might be terrible – but good gracious did we make so many things worth loving, worth writing to you about, worth telling you – thank you, i’m taking the spark you put in me and using it to be kind, to be alive, to be wildly fierce about our gardens and gentle about our pets.
so hello. i amend my previous memo. i am writing to let you know you did a good job on the stars, and on my dog and my cats and the lizard i kept illegally in my apartment. and universe, i hope you’re watching, because some of the people you made? they’re great, universe, and they’re full of love, just endlessly capable of loving. and they give me hope.
and through them, universe, that’s you. that’s how the stars sing.
There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters
“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying
“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.
hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters
“The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.
And the fourth type, which is, “I dunno, but it sure ain’t a deer.” Which implies complete confusion about what the creature could be, to the point that even a person as comfortable in this world as someone who would use the word ain’t unironically is uncertain, which should horrify you to the deepest depths of your soul.
one that i particularly enjoyed was the ‘nonesuch’, a beast which when you see it your brain convinces you ‘nope, no way that shit is real’. on some level it becomes less real after having been seen by someone who disbelieves its existence as well
May I propose the additional type of “that’s definitely a deer but deer are much more fucked up than previous realized”, because turning the corner on a trail and having half a dozen deer suddenly turn and look up from eating Thier companion’s remains is a special kind of spooky.
after dying god informs you that hell is a myth, and “everyone sins, its ok”. instead the dead are sorted into six “houses of heaven” based on the sins they chose.
We arrived first at the House of Lust. “House” is a misleading term. It was more of a camp, spread over acres and acres of lush forest. There was a white sandy beach (nude, of course) full of copulating couples. There were little cabins sprinkled all along the path, from which orgasmic moans regularly came belting out. Men with six pack abs and women with perky breasts strolled by without even noticing me and God. They only had eyes for each other, tickling and pinching each other with flirtatious giggles.
“What do you think?” God asked as we passed a nineteen-way taking place in a pool of champagne. Little cherubs flitted overhead armed with mops and cleaning supplies, thankfully. “Lust is our most popular sin.” I eyed the supermodel-like figures of a couple passing nearby, and could easily see why. “You can look however you want. Hell, you can be whatever gender you want. No fetish is too taboo, and no desire can be denied here.”
It was quite tempting, but I wasn’t ready to make a permanent decision here. “Let’s see the others,” I told God.
We carried on to Greed. We passed rows and rows of mansions, each more opulent than the next. Some of them were so large that they would have had enough bed rooms to fit my entire hometown. And so many different styles: one second, we were in a beautiful French vineyard in front of a gorgeous chateau with the Alps in the background. The next second, a warm tropical beach with a modern mansion atop breathtaking cliffs. After that, a ski chalet in Colorado with a roaring fire in a hearth large enough to fit an ox. Each one had various Italian sports cars and Rolls Royces parked in front, with the occasional smattering of boats, helicopters, etc.
“Any material desire you ever wanted,” God explained. “Your own world, where you can have everything. You want the Hope Diamond? You can fly to Washington DC in your own solid gold helicopter and buy it from the Smithsonian. Hell, you can just buy the Smithsonian.”
Also tempting, but I decided to keep looking.
Gluttony was next up. Tables and tables of the very finest foods: beautiful steaks cooked medium rare; butter-poached lobster tail; fresh oysters on a half shell; exotic wines in dusty bottles that had been hiding in the cellars of the world’s finest restaurants. Everyone had a glass of champagne in hand and simply lounged on couches and chairs near the tables, eating endlessly. As soon as the inhabitants took a bite, the food just instantly came back. My mouth watered even watching them.
“In every other House, the food is practically sawdust compared to Gluttony,” God explained. “You haven’t truly experienced heaven until you’ve been to Gluttony.”
I shook my head, and we kept moving.
Sloth was as you’d expect. An endless sea of the softest mattresses, stacked with cushions and pillows that made the story of the princess and the pea seem minimalist. Little angels visited each resident, giving them massages that made them all melt into their blankets.
Wrath was… well, a lot like what I’d expect Hell to be like. Fire, brimstone, whips, torture.. you know, the works. Except here, you weren’t the one being tortured. Every enemy you’d ever made in your real life was now under your thumb. “Lots of people choose their fathers,” God explained. “Lots of grudges against parents in general, you know. But you’re not limited to that. Someone beat you out for a big promotion back on Earth? Take your pound of flesh here.”
Then we arrived at Envy. It looked… well, a lot like home.
“Go on in,” God said, gesturing toward the door. I turned the knob and walked in… and found Emily waiting inside. She ran forward, wrapped her arms around my neck, and planted a kiss right on my lips. “Welcome home, honey.”
I looked back toward God. “Oh, don’t be coy,” he said. “You have no secrets from me. We all know that you were in love with your best friend’s wife.” She didn’t seem to hear him at all; she went back into the hall. “We all know that you just settled for your own wife while secretly pining after her. Well, this is your chance to live happily ever after.”
I peered into the kitchen. Emily was baking something, wearing nothing but an apron. Her curly black hair fell softly over her shoulder as she whisked ingredients. She turned back, noticed I was observing her, and an enthusiastic smile spread across her face.
“It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” God whispered in my ear.
I wanted to take it. God damn did I want to take it. But I shook my head.
God seemed puzzled. “You need to make a decision,” he told me.
“I haven’t seen Pride yet.”
He scoffed. “No one ever wants Pride, trust me.”
“Well, I want to see it.”
_________________________
Pride was boring. Just a row of workbenches in a bare white room.
“I don’t get it,” I told God.
“Yeah, no one does,” he answered. “That’s why no one ever chooses it. Doesn’t cavorting in Lust sound better than sitting here building little trinkets for the rest of eternity? Wouldn’t you rather gorge yourself in Gluttony? Or spend time with Emily in Envy?”
I considered the options again. “I pick Pride,” I finally told him.
He narrowed his eyes. “What? Look at it!” He gestured around the room again. There wasn’t much to look at. “Why would you choose this for the rest of time?”
“Because you don’t want me to pick it,” I told him. If he was really God, he’d know what a contrarian I can be. And I knew he was hiding something, trying to pretend like Pride didn’t exist. There was something special about it.
God scowled back. “Fine.” He led me over to one of the workbenches. In the center, there was a black space. A blank, empty void that went on forever. “Here’s your universe,” he said. “You’ve got seven days to get started.” He took his seat at the bench next to me and went back to tinkering in his own world. After a long pause, he finally spoke again: “You know, it might be nice for me to actually have some company for once.”
This one saves me on the regular. When you’re done with your writing session, make a note to yourself in your document about what you were working on and what you intend to do the next time you open your WIP. It helps if you make this note right at the spot you were working on, and another reminder at the top of the document. I like to change the font color and increase the size so I see it right away the next time I open my document.
You might not always go back to what you were working on before. But this trick can save you a lot of time reading through your WIP and trying to remember where you were going. Plus it can keep your WIP from becoming a giant mess of half-started ideas and editing tweaks.
Some examples of recent notes I’ve made to myself in my WIP:
“…working on adding more detail to the dormitory scene. Two more paragraphs to go… left off HERE.”
“…got confused about the layout of the house and stopped to make a map. Refer to map and finish editing this scene.”
“…changing scene from past to present tense… left off HERE”
“…finish writing the breakfast scene”
At the very least, making a note to yourself will give you a clear direction the next time you approach your WIP. If you choose not to follow it, that’s fine, but it’s nice to have the option, and it only takes a few seconds to jot down a reminder to yourself.
I would also recommend using a marking word that you wouldn’t use in your story to make it easier to find, particularly if you’re prone to jumping all over the place. It’s also great to use as a placeholder for when you just can’t think of a name for something.
I use caps, italics, or put commentary to myself in parentheses. It helps when I don’t have time to write down a full idea or to remind myself to go back and fix something. Usually I just yell at myself for being a fantastic/horrible writer, but I’m good at ignoring my past selves.
Figment, the recently closed writing website, has just launched (after a long delay) their long-awaited successor to figment known as Underlined, where users can post their work and receive feedback, supposedly.
DO NOT USE UNDERLINED. DO NOT POST YOUR WORK ON UNDERLINED.
Underlined’s terms and conditions contains a clause stating that the rights to all your work that you post on their website belongs to them!!!!
Underlined belongs to Penguin Random House. This is an extremely dirty trick for them to play on writers, especially young writers and children, who come to the internet to get feedback and will lose the rights to their work. Please boost!!!
For my writing friends looking for an online writing community, DO NOT USE Underlined.
I went to confirm @greater-than-the-sword‘s post, because seriously publishers are still pulling this garbage? And yes, they are. If you want to check out the full terms and conditions, have at it. They are full of writers’ nightmares, a few of which I’ll highlight under the cut.
So PRH not only owns all rights to your work (for which you are not compensated), they also retain the right to “sub license” – which means they are free to hand it out (for profit) to anyone else.
Wow.
If my reblog keeps just one creator off their site, it’s worth it.
Yeah, that is a good question – why do some scifi twist endings fail?
As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.
The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked.
According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion.
The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story.
One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised.
Steel Phoenix Studios 