It’s that special time again - I hit another 100 followers, so it’s time for a ficlet fest because you guys rock! Y'all send me prompts and I’ll write you a ficlet (up to 1000 words). My last two ficlet fests are on AO3 here and here, and scattered around my tumblr if you’re really desperate 😂
Anyway if you want a ficlet the prompt is simple - we’re going back to timestamps bc I think they’re neat!
Drop into my askbox and leave: - a timestamp (ex: 3:46pm or 18:21) - a location (ex: haus kitchen, the linden tree, New Hope, The Spotted Custard…) - a character (ex: Lardo, Bea Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor, Keladry of Mindelan, Alexia Tarabotti…) ((more characters may appear at my own whim but not guaranteed))
I’ll do my best to fulfill whatever prompt you leave, but just know that I’m most familiar with Check Please!, RWRB, The Parasol Protectorate, and the Tortall series.
Prompts will be open the entire month of July 2023so you’ll have plenty of time :D
Can’t wait to see what y'all send in this time around!
Why is it that every werewolf book is this weird testosterone fueled alpha male/female romance thing?
Like guys. Werewolves are family groups. They are basically big ol’ dog families. Your werewolf family wouldn’t be made up of alpha males fighting each other for dominance and subjugating females.
If there was a werewolf in your neighborhood, they’d be that family of 10 kids always roughhousing outside and their house is the one all the neighborhood kids go to hang out at because Mr. Werewolf and Mrs. Werewolf are the Cool Parents that their kids find really embarrassing.
“Wait…Emily? Aren’t she and her whole family…you know?”
“Don’t believe everything you’ve heard; worst thing that’s ever happened over there is the twins teething on visitors’ shoes.”
Here’s the thing, though.
While the notion of the “alpha wolf” is indeed misguided, being based on observations of wolves in captivity, the dominance thing does happen. And it’s not just the adult males; adult females do it too - but it’s only a thing when wolves who aren’t related by blood end up sharing a habitat.
So consider: by some happenstance, two unrelated werewolf families end up living across the street from one another. Of course they’re not going to start brawling in the streets - they’re civilised people, after all - but that urge to show the other pack who’s boss comes out in other ways, resulting in the two clans getting, like, weirdly competitive about everything.
Imagine the Hallowe’en displays.
Are you trying to tell me that the most hardcore ride-or-die PTA mothers are probably actually werewolves?
“We’re settling this through the old ways, Helen.”
“Spiked silver chains on the night of the blood moon?”
“The spring bake sale, Helen. Turn it down a notch.”
“Fine. But when they taste my lemon squares you’re going to wish we’d gone with the silver chains, Jessi.”
Meanwhile, across the room.
“You know what I like doin’ Rob?”
“What’s that Bill?”
“Peeing out of doors.”
“Me too, Bill. But I thought you just married into the whole werewolf thing.”
“I’m just making conversation, Rob.”
I like it. The house inbetween their two houses is owned by a vampire family who deliberately fuel the fire because they like to watch the drama. (What? Just because you’re not allowed to kill werewolves anymore, doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with them.)
“Oh, hi Helen. Putting up the Christmas decorations, I see?”
“Yep, this light show’ll make this our best Christmas display yet.”
“Oh great! You know the Johnsons have got lifesize singing reindeer as part of their display.”
Helen’s perfectly manicured nails grow another two centimetres. “Oh they have, have they? Oh is that the time! I’m sorry Lilith, I’ve just got to go and pick something up from the shops.” She returns three hours later with six reindeer and a giant inflatable Father Christmas. Lilith runs off to tell the neighbours.
The only thing we were robbed of is a scene where Toph says “so was anybody going to tell me Teo can’t walk or was i just supposed to see that for myself?”
Katara: we just thought it was obvious. Couldn’t you hear his wheels?“
Toph: i didn’t know he needed them to move! I thought he just liked to sit! He’s been asking me to toss him the water skin in the middle of the night and i’ve been telling him to get up and get it himself this whole time!
Aang: oh, i just figured the fact we needed to take his chair would have tipped you off.
Toph: i never left my hometown before you guys showed up from way different parts of the world with practices i’ve never heard of. I thought it was another weird cultural thing!
Sokka: wait, you thought chairs with wheels where part of a culture of people living on a mountain? What exactly is the logic there?
Toph: i don’t know, why does Twinkle Toes need to be a vegetarian to float in the air?
I love you beat up books I love you old book smell I love you yellow pages I love you cracked spines I love you secondhand bookshops I love you library books I love you I love you I love you
you want to help stop tumblr from murdering itself? here’s how!
click this link and go to the support page, then click “contact support”
click on the category list and click on feedback
now you need to tell staff WHY putting in an algorithm will cause the site to fucking die, and be sure to be detailed and not a dick in it. theyre not gonna listen to feedback calling them assholes
i encourage you to reblog this so we can get as many people leaving feedback as humanly possible. we need to let staff know this is an utterly terrible idea
by the way, tumblr has turned off asks on all of their staff blogs, so this is the only way to tell tumblr how you feel
Written for @thebrownstone’s anniversary swap event for ACDs_Coffee – snippet below! 💜💜💜
The scrape of a chair pulls his attention away from his phone and Alex feels his mouth go dry. The man hovering uncertainly next to the table is fucking tall, taller than anyone else tonight, with broad shoulders and a jaw that he wants to get his mouth on. But it’s the man’s eyes that really hold his gaze: the color a sharp, bright blue that reminds him of a summer’s day at the lake house.
“Er, hello. I just wanted to check that you were part of the speed dating event and I wasn’t about to impose on a random stranger.”
The soft accent intrigues him immediately and Alex hurriedly swallows and gestures for him to sit, recovering at least part of his cool. “It’s speed dating. Imposing on random strangers is sort of the point, right?”
The small laugh he lets out makes Alex want to pull another one out of him by any means necessary. “I suppose I should say I didn’t want to insert myself into someone’s evening who hadn’t signed up for this event.”
“I can’t imagine anyone turning down the opportunity for you to insert yourself, to be honest,” Alex says with a silly eyebrow waggle. The almost-definitely-mortified blush that creeps across the man’s cheekbones pulls a grin across his own face. “But I am here for the speed dating event, yes. Super glad about that right now actually.”
“Moving past the accidental innuendo—”
“I’ll allow it.”
“—I’m Henry,” he says, reaching across the table, hand outstretched. Alex takes it and almost gasps at the tingle that runs through him at the contact.
Lardo wouldn’t fuck any of Jack’s family but she would fuck Jack if they were worse friends. there comes a point in friendship where hooking up would just feel sooo weird & they’re at that level imo
the closest they get to kissing is during a slaphappy walk home from the library at 1 am & Jack looks very pretty under the streetlights and Lardo sits him down & sketches him very loosely, and he’s looking at her very intently, and there’s a Moment, and then there’s a fire truck screaming past & they’re like “haha hope the Haus isn’t on fire.” and the moment’s over so they keep walking & the Haus is on fire.
@jankwritten: #YEAHHHHH #jack and lardo are so fucking important to me there’s just something about them #that counterbalances how jack and shitty are #like shitty is the energetic dog while lardo is the subdued cat. Jack is like the new pet introduced to the home yknow #they just have a Vibe to them UGH #love love love the possibility of lardo and jack studying in his room together and it gets to that point of the night where nothing feels #real and the world is gone and it’s just them and the walls and shitty snoring on the other side of the bathroom #and jack asks Lardo if she’s ever been in love. just because he’s curious and tired of reading about beheaded royal after beheaded royal #and lardo shrugs and says maybe but she’s got no concrete proof. no repeated data points. jack gives her a funny look. she flicks an eraser #at his head and says ‘what about you then.’ and jack thinks for a really long time. he stares up at the ceiling with his textbook on his #chest and his arms behind his head and he says 'yeah maybe. once. but i don’t know if i was really in love or just. sixteen.’ #and they sit there in silence and think about it for a while.#and then lardo falls asleep at jack’s desk and jack doesn’t really know what to do with that so he stays in bed watching her #wondering what love feels like. wondering what shitty would say if jack asked him the same question. wondering if he’ll ever even know. #(jack quietly decides that he loves Lardo. and he loves Shitty too. He rolls back over and goes to sleep.)
i’m just… so tired of reading posts complaining about problems that only exist because people won’t read romance novels… it is a huge genre there are books about werewolf dukes, there are books about black revolutionary war soldiers, there are books about south asian doms who care about enthusiastic consent, there are books about shape-shifting cowboys who turn into bears, there are books about lady scientists learning how to trust that their boundaries will be respected, there are books about alien barbarian warriors, there are books about genies, there are books about women of color in victorian london, there are books about polyamorous earls, there are fake marriages and marriages of convenience and basically every fanfic trope that people lose it for exists as a book with original characters but some of the same people who complain about how books no longer satisfy them turn a blind eye to a whole genre because it never occurs to them to read a ~bodice-ripper~ when they could read romantic fanfic of a more respectable genre instead
look, if you:
don’t wanna read about two people falling in love and fuckin’
just wanna read more about some specific characters
good news! this post is not about you. here are some posts i have seen with great regularity on this site:
no one who writes original fiction is capable of writing good sex
no one who writes original fiction understands tropes
original fiction doesn’t understand kinks
too many books are about high-stakes things and not enough books focus on character development and interaction
all of which is blatantly and on the face of it absurd to anyone who reads a lot of romance and which is what this post is about. it downplays and devalues the good work being done, especially by marginalized authors, in the romance space. authors should get paid! authors should get rewarded for originality! if you read a shitty romance novel once, i don’t care! so have i! i’ve read a lot of shitty books in a lot of perfectly good genres. if you can spend three hours sifting through pairing tags on ao3 to find the one fic that doesn’t suck, you can look through ebook previews to find something that looks good.
‘books are expensive’ is almost a compelling argument, except that romances and mysteries are two genres where ebooks go on sale for $1-2 with startling regularity. my bookbub emails regularly get ebook boxed sets with tons of different books by different authors going on sale for a buck, which is a great way to find new authors. most authors have newsletters where they let you know about sales and send out freebies. and if your library has overdrive, you can request books. you don’t have to just… see they don’t have it and give up.
anyway, here’s books:
will i ever stop recommending courtney milan’s brothers sinister series? literally never. if you prefer contemporary and don’t mind first person there’s also the cyclone series. if your local library does not have at least one courtney milan book i will be shocked. don’t worry about it if they’re not the first in a series. you can read it out of order. that’s how romance novels work. lots of her books also go on sale for the low price of free on the regular, especially the novellas.
alisha rai’s forbidden hearts series also rules.it’s got starcrossed lovers, it’s got feuding families, it’s got hatefucking, what more could you want
alyssa cole has never written anything bad in her entire life, i’m pretty sure. you want historicals? you want contemporary? contemporary but there’s still sexy dukes? post-apocalyptic? pick your poison, enjoy.
i just read this one recently and now i need to read all the other cat sebastian books i’ve acquired over the years because whenever a book is a dollar and looks like this i buy it immediately (it’s literally a dollar right now). this graphic was very helpful and i wish more authors had ones like it. it’s 2019, bring back web banners for link pages.
i discovered six de los reyes when courtney milan recced beginner’s guide: love and other chemical reactions and i’m really interested to read more of her books. also it made me realize i’d never read a book that took place in the philippines before? no one fucks in this but it’s really cute and sweet and involves a hyper-logical lady scientist, an artist/barista/bad boy, a coffee shop, and Making Out For Entirely Scientific Reasons.
bound with honor is the only book i’ve read from the regency reimagined series. the reimagining seems to be that it’s very bisexual and polyamorous and everyone fucks a lot and also there’s bondage. i am cool with this. i actually bought the whole series at some point?? i… should read these.
i haven’t gotten around to reading tess bowery’s treading the boards series (i have bought so many books) (i was not kidding about the one dollar sales) but i’ve got high hopes because look at them
kj charles is… prolific. and another author whose books i haven’t gotten around to despite owning a lot of them. i actually just bought that one on the right, just now, because i saw that it was a dollar when taking this screenshot.
we need a universal grocery classification system like the dewey decimal to aid in shelving, so i don’t have to figure out whether you think maple syrup goes with the sauces, breakfast foods, jams, or condiments
Written for @thebrownstone’s anniversary swap event for ACDs_Coffee – snippet below! 💜💜💜
The scrape of a chair pulls his attention away from his phone and Alex feels his mouth go dry. The man hovering uncertainly next to the table is fucking tall, taller than anyone else tonight, with broad shoulders and a jaw that he wants to get his mouth on. But it’s the man’s eyes that really hold his gaze: the color a sharp, bright blue that reminds him of a summer’s day at the lake house.
“Er, hello. I just wanted to check that you were part of the speed dating event and I wasn’t about to impose on a random stranger.”
The soft accent intrigues him immediately and Alex hurriedly swallows and gestures for him to sit, recovering at least part of his cool. “It’s speed dating. Imposing on random strangers is sort of the point, right?”
The small laugh he lets out makes Alex want to pull another one out of him by any means necessary. “I suppose I should say I didn’t want to insert myself into someone’s evening who hadn’t signed up for this event.”
“I can’t imagine anyone turning down the opportunity for you to insert yourself, to be honest,” Alex says with a silly eyebrow waggle. The almost-definitely-mortified blush that creeps across the man’s cheekbones pulls a grin across his own face. “But I am here for the speed dating event, yes. Super glad about that right now actually.”
“Moving past the accidental innuendo—”
“I’ll allow it.”
“—I’m Henry,” he says, reaching across the table, hand outstretched. Alex takes it and almost gasps at the tingle that runs through him at the contact.
