Haunted Chest of Drawers
Marcelin (Ed.): "La Vie Parisienne" (1863)

And a special shout out to @weirdlitmag.bsky.social and @thenulla.bsky.social —meeting you were highlights of the conference.

Attended @awpwriter.org in Baltimore. What a treat. I spent the first two days talking about how charming it was, only to find out it's called Charm City! I friggin love you, Bmore, can't wait to come back.

Graveyard growth

Did I find the spirit of Christmas already?

It's an unopened, 100% juice, apple Capri Sun left on the desk of an empty English building classroom during finals week, so I'm not totally sure.

I'll keep searching.

This is the year I discover the spirit of Christmas.

After that, I'm not sure. I guess, learn and incorporate its true name into a pentacle written on virgin parchment, summon it, bind it within a magic circle of salt, then bend it to my mortal will? We'll see if there's time.

Exactly what I need, just a few months before I need it. Thank you very much!

"I simply want ice cream and to be alive until I am dead."

- "The House Call" from Near Flesh, by Katherine Dunn.

#writingcommunity

The obsession many writers pour into living alongside their characters, I pour into language. And out of that language, or perhaps these languages, characters emerge. Images and worlds, too. Theme, voice, pace, subtext. For me, every facet of good writing is language cunningly, carefully, wrought.

I've always felt a gap between myself & writers who experience their characters as alive, in the room with them. It just isn't how my mine work. This is not to diminish the importance of fully realized characters or the value of their living presence for many writers. It's a reminder of alterities.

"I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed."
- Evelyn Waugh

This quote gifted me the fulfilling experience of reading something I already knew, but couldn't yet voice.

#writingcommunity

Move over annelids, handelids are the new it-worm!

Carolina anole(?) enjoying a warm right triangle.

Sound on! A magical and chilling experience at Congaree National Park.

Arboretum: Bassoons in the Congaree National Park put on by @sc.edu

I think what I want is to live without knowing or feeling it.

Antisocieties, by michaelcisco.bsky.social

"So, how was your life? What did you do?"
- my toddler

Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.
1984, by George Orwell

"My girl always wakes up with a smile!" and Margaret would smile the best way she could, to fulfill her mother's prophecy.
POOR DEER by Claire Oshetsky

The girl woke up feeling entirely at ease. She knew from habit that her mother would soon come into her room to open the curtains and let the morning in. Her mother would look at her with tender love, and say:

I call it "relief", though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW, by Henry James

Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived.

But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result.

FRANKENSTEIN, by Mary Shelley
Bookthreads

The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation of my toils.

What she doesn't see through her milky cataracts would fit in a baby's sock.

SAVING THE GLEEFUL HORSE, by K. J. Bishop

The White Ma'at: a woman, or a woman-shaped thing, built in a long and heavy way, with a tall forehead like a white wall and a knotty blue vein labouring up it. What lies on the other side is a great store of irregular, wonderful knowledge; a cellar provisioned with all the vintages of magic.

Of course I was under the spell—and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it: it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW, by Henry James

Devil eggs; hail Satan.

Happy Christmas to me! Can't wait to crack this one open.

My secret Santa says there is even more coming from @tenebrouspress.bsky.social too!

2/2 The spot is evil—it is unholy in a way that I simply can't describe. I was compelled to make a drawing of it, almost against my will, since anything so outré is hardly in my line. In fact, I made two drawings. I'll show them to you like.

GENIUS LOCI, by Clark Ashton Smith