authoralexharvey

[authoralexharvey]

I rolled over onto my back, with my body only too aware of where Qavan's was. We lay there in the meadow for a while, tipsy and sun-warmed, watching the white clouds go by. I saw from the corner of my eye as he turned his face towards me again, but I didn't look back over. I wasn't sure what exactly I would do if he was looking at me with that happy, sleepy look, his wing not two feet away from my arm and his cotton shirt clinging to the slim lines of his torso. Not with half a bottle of wine in me, too, and the feeling that we were all alone in the world, out here in the middle of nowhere. "You are very beautiful," he said, with the same sort of half-drowsing voice. I snapped my head to the side to stare at him. He looked like he had just accidentally put his fist through a hornet's nest. It was the expression of a man who could not believe that he had actually said those words, and wished that he could make time flow backwards so that he could take them back. I stared at him, not breathing, and he stared back at me like he wanted the earth to swallow him whole.

The Changeling and the Dragon

#writing from others

[authoralexharvey]

The Watcher: Unsealed (1 of 2) - Kez Laczin

#art from others #story inspo

[authoralexharvey]

Text: We raise Cockatrices among other magical creatures, for their strange, sometimes useful byproducts. An unfertilized egg will blind anyone who so much as touches it for 24 hours.

#writing prompt

[authoralexharvey]

ICE UPON A PIER

An award-nominated fantasy lesbianoir taking place in a reimagining of New York City in the 70's and 80's. Be crime, do gay interviews.

ebook | itch | paperback

#writing from others

[authoralexharvey]

I’ve said this before but I think all sci-fi and fantasy adventure needs a little bit of horror as seasoning. It doesn’t need to be full sci-fi horror or fantasy horror but a little bit of scary adds flavor. Build a world and then explore the fucked up implications of that world a little bit

[authoralexharvey]

。・°°・(＞_＜)・°°・。

happy monday :D

#story inspo #twefa #character inspo #maka willards #dakota locke

[authoralexharvey]

Neo-Gothic architecture of The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

#setting inspo #twefa

[authoralexharvey]

— WHEN THE STARS ALIGHT

#writing from others

[authoralexharvey]

Advice/hard truths for writers?

The best piece of practical advice I know is a classic from Hemingway (qtd. here):

The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.

Also, especially if you're young, you should read more than you write. If you're serious about writing, you'll want to write more than you read when you get old; you need, then, to lay the important books as your foundation early. I like this passage from Samuel R. Delany's "Some Advice for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student" (collected in both Shorter Views and About Writing):

You need to read Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola; you need to read Austen, Thackeray, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy; you need to read Hawthorne, Melville, James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner; you need to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncherov, Gogol, Bely, Khlebnikov, and Flaubert; you need to read Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Dahlberg, John Steinbeck, Jean Rhys, Glenway Wescott, John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens, Angus Wilson, Patrick White, Alexander Trocchi, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Vladimir Nabokov; you need to read Nella Larsen, Knut Hamsun, Edwin Demby, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, John Barth, Philip Roth, Coleman Dowell, William Gaddis, William Gass, Marguerite Young, Thomas Pynchon, Paul West, Bertha Harris, Melvin Dixon, Daryll Pinckney, Darryl Ponicsan, and John Keene, Jr.; you need to read Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Richard Powers, Carroll Maso, Edmund White, Jayne Ann Phillips, Robert Gluck, and Julian Barnes—you need to read them and a whole lot more; you need to read them not so that you will know what they have written about, but so that you can begin to absorb some of the more ambitious models for what the novel can be.

Note: I haven't read every single writer on that list; there are even three I've literally never heard of; I can think of others I'd recommend in place of some he's cited; but still, his general point—that you need to read the major and minor classics—is correct.

The best piece of general advice I know, and not only about writing, comes from Dr. Johnson, The Rambler #63:

The traveller that resolutely follows a rough and winding path, will sooner reach the end of his journey, than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hours of day-light in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages.

I've known too many young writers over the years who sabotaged themselves by overthinking and therefore never finishing or sharing their projects; this stems, I assume, from a lack of self-trust or, more grandly, trust in the universe (the Muses, God, etc.). But what professors always tell Ph.D. students about dissertations is also true of novels, stories, poems, plays, comic books, screenplays, etc: There are only two kinds of dissertations—finished and unfinished. Relatedly, this is the age of online—an age when 20th-century institutions are collapsing, and 21st-century ones have not yet been invented. Unless you have serious connections in New York or Iowa, publish your work yourself and don't bother with the gatekeepers.

Other than the above, I find most writing advice useless because over-generalized or else stemming from arbitrary culture-specific or field-specific biases, e.g., Orwell's extremely English and extremely journalistic strictures, not necessarily germane to the non-English or non-journalistic writer. "Don't use adverbs," they always say. Why the hell shouldn't I? It's absurd. "Show, don't tell," they insist. Fine for the aforementioned Orwell and Hemingway, but irrelevant to Edith Wharton and Thomas Mann. Freytag's Pyramid? Spare me. Every new book is a leap in the dark. Your project may be singular; you may need to make your own map as your traverse the unexplored territory.

Hard truths? There's one. I know it's a hard truth because I hesitate even to type it. It will insult our faith in egalitarianism and the rewards of earnest labor. And yet, I suspect the hard truth is this: ineffables like inspiration and genius count for a lot. If they didn't, if application were all it took, then everybody would write works of genius all day long. But even the greatest geniuses usually only got the gift of one or two all-time great work. This doesn't have to be a counsel of despair, though: you can always try to place yourself wherever you think lightning is likeliest to strike. That's what I do, anyway. Good luck!

#writing advice

[authoralexharvey]

wakaranai boku no kokoro ni aru koto mo kakitudzuketara kimi ni todoku kamo

わからない僕の心にあることも書き続けたら君に届くかも

if I keep writing then perhaps even the things inside my heart that I don't understand will reach you some day

#writing from others

[authoralexharvey]

cardan and jude ♔

idk if i like this but whatever

this will also be available to buy on my inprnt so stay tuned 🫶🏻

(based on dolce&gabbana 2006 fall/winter collection cover by Steven Meisel)

characters by Holly Black

#art from others #story inspo #oh wow this slaps

[authoralexharvey]

making a collection

#character inspo #nadia dupont #etienne lachance

[authoralexharvey]

Just a few kind words from some author peers 🥰

[authoralexharvey]

In the Basement, In the Sky

Jen is trying his best, okay? His best is just… never good enough. His boyfriend thinks he’s cheating, his ex-girlfriend wants him back more than anything, and they’re all terrible at laying down boundaries, so all that results in is a world of heartache and hurt for everyone. He suffers from depression and ADHD that he medicates with street drugs, which only makes everything worse, and with every step up the ladder he has to climb to get to the top, he slides back ten more rungs.

But at least once you hit rock bottom you don’t have anywhere to go but up.

A Sheraton Academy AU.

Contemporary Drama. M/M, M/F, and F/NB with a bisexual male lead and multiple trans and gnc characters.

Ao3 || Wattpad

#writing from others

[authoralexharvey]

akamatsu wa hi moteru yō ni yuki motsu ka

赤松は日持てるように雪持つか

does the red pine only hold on to snow, so it can carry the sun?

#writing from others

[authoralexharvey]

Innocence

#story inspo #art from others #fans

[authoralexharvey]

JENNIFER’S BODY (2009) dir. Karyn Kusama

#character inspo