Marshmallow Puff

goeswiththeflo:

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

ursulavernon:

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…

!.

You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.

Seriously, wow.

this made me smile.

i’m still smiling.

I love this one. Thank you.

(via goeswiththeflo)

bucksangel:

this is immensely funny to me

(via seananmcguire)

nonasuch:

systlin:

randomitemdrop:

myloveisfree:

Item: Cargo Gown

Oh shit I want one

“I like your dress!”

“thanks! it ɦǟֆ p̵̢͆͗̑̀ͅ ọ̶̐͠ c̶͓̲̳̖̲̻̈́̎̅̒̆͒̅͛̿ k̵̡̨̺̹͉̑͐̊̓ ë̸̫́͒ t̴̨̮̰̥̘͑̈̃́͒̅̈́͝͝ s̴̢̛̘̲̯̲̰̥̟̳͙͌͆̌̓̌̀̚̚”

(via geekandmisandry)

taraljc:

carrieonwriting:

some highlights from my writing seminar with honestly one of my favourite authors of all time who shall remain nameless bc i dont want her to know i was spilling her secrets online

• The first trick is to detach yourself from your idea. You don’t have just one novel inside you, and it’s not a big deal if you don’t finish this novel.
  
• She was skeptical of the common advice “just write!!1!” - she talked about how long ideas for her most popular novels were marinating inside her before she properly wrote them
• As a continuation of that, she was a big believer in knowing what you want to write before you write it. Not what you’re going to write, what you want to write. 
• The first thing she decides about a novel is what the mood is going to be, and this informs every other decision (e.g. the mood for Shiver was bittersweet)
• Ideas should be personal, specific, exciting and they should exclude secondary sources. A personal idea isn’t necessarily autobiographical (which should be avoided), but it speaks to your emotional truth. 
• She said she had been read Ronsey fanfiction and she couldn’t view her car in the same way since. 
• Story is the thing that seems most important to reader but is most changeable to the author - story is subservient to your mood and your message. Change what you like in the plot as long as your book retains its sense of self.
• Story is conflict, exploration and change. A good story has active tension -the characters want something, instead of just wanting something not to happen (e.g. wanting to kill an enemy instead of simply defending a stronghold against an enemy) 
• A story needs to have a concrete end, something to be done. 
• Satisfaction is important - deliver what you promise to the reader. The other shoe has to drop. Ronan Lynch doesn’t ever talk about his feelings, so its rewarding when he does. 
• Earn your emotional moments (she threw shade at Fantastic Beasts lmao)
• Forcing a character to be passive is dissatisfying to the reader. 
• Characters are products of their environments, consistent/predictable, nuanced and specific, moving the plot, and subservient to other story elements. 
• She always starts with tropes for ensemble casts like sitcoms. Helpful for building good character dynamics.
• Write scenes with characters saying explicitly what they’re thinking and then go back and make them talk like real people in the edit. 
• An action can also prove what they’re thinking, instead of making them say it or another character guess it (e.g. Ronan punching a wall). 
• Move the reader’s emotional furniture around without them noticing. 
• All her books follow the three act structure. Established normal -> inciting incident -> character makes an Active Decision -> fun and games -> escalation -> darkest moment -> climax. 
• Promise what you’re going to do in the first five pages. 
• Read your book out loud. Record yourself reading it. 
• If you have writer’s block, it’s because you’ve stopped writing the book you want to write. She likes to delete everything she’s written until she gets back to a point where she knew she was writing what she wanted to write, and then carrying on from there. 

this is AWESOME.

tigergingicat:

bairnsidhe:

trusmurff:

A Beauty and the Beast AU where Belle realizing she loves Beast isn’t at some dramatic climactic event but during some randome everyday moment. Like, she’s filing her nails and just kinda glances up at him and he’s like doing something just as dull and it just kinda dawns on her that she loves him but she doesn’t voice it cause she isn’t exactly ready to confront thoes emotions and what they mean so she goes back to filing her nails but then is starts raining glitter and Beast is defying gravity in a glowing ball of light and the castle is changing back and everyone becomes human again. Then everyone is left in silent moment of shock and confusion and Belle, being completely unaware of what it takes to break the curse, is just staring around in horror while everyone freshly humanized comes running into whatever room she and Beast were in (probably the library) expecting to see something other than human Beast in a heap on the ground and Belle across the room in a chair frozen in shock and confusion and everyone just kinda looks at each other for a couple of seconds not realy sure what to say cause nobody is entirely sure what happened other than the curse was broken. Then Beast finaly gets up and looks around and realizes what this means and looks at Belle and is just like “you love me?” And Belle is just like “wat?”

ALTERNATELY: Belle falls in love slowly.  As a result, Beast turns back into a human slowly.  She overhears him singing in the shower (it’s amazing how old pipes echo) and realizes it’s that song she was trying to teach herself on the piano (okay, that the piano was teaching her).  It’s sweet and mundane, and lovely.  Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Beast is humming nervously as he looks at the fur clogging the drain.  He thought at least he’d be free of male pattern balding since he’s cursed!  Later, Belle gets a cold, and Beast brings her soup and sandwiches, and she curses at him because how dare he have such a hearty immune system, and he chuckles and leaves it.  After he’s gone, she notices he cut the grilled cheese on the diagonal, crusts off, exactly right.  Beast, downstairs, trips and falls, because the sudden lack of toe-claws threw off his balance.

And so on and so forth, so slowly she doesn’t really see it, she just assumes her memories were colored by her fear.  Until one day, as he goes out to tend his roses, she yells “Bye, love you!” and when he comes back in, all excited, she nearly beans him with an encyclopedia, because “WHAT THE FUCK, WHO ARE YOU?” and Beast is just “You seriously didn’t notice me turning back into a human?  You are so smart… and SO DUMB, I BEEN NEARLY DYING EVERY TIME, WHY DO I LOVE YOU, YOU BEAUTIFUL DISASTER WOMAN!”

And Belle goes “…what?”

Either of these are so much better!

(via taraljc)