[image Description: A Marble Staircase In A Grand Hallway With Brown Tones And A General Dark Academia

[image description: a marble staircase in a grand hallway with brown tones and a general dark academia vibe. there’s a chandelier and a painting on the wall. serif font that reads: the house with crooked pantings. camp nano 2021. end id.]

DISCLAIMER: this is my original work that i have chosen to share on this platform. plagiarism in any form will NOT be tolerated. 

Okay hi everyone new WIP!! Yay camp!! This is one of three short stories I’m hoping to complete in April, and is a part of my untitled short story collection including Death Wears Daisy-Chains and The Ribs of Saint Anthony. 

WHO: Augustina, Freddie, Aunt Mags

WHAT: A teenage girl and her cousin reflect on their very different relationships with their grandmother after her funeral. It gets very dramatic & very traumatic.

WHERE: Their deceased grandmother’s house

WHEN: mid-century America, like 1940s to 1960s ish. 

POV: probably third person limited we’ll find out when we get there

STATUS: planning/outlining

WORD COUNT GOAL: 3,000

THEMES: difficult family relationships, suppressed trauma, art appreciation, jealousy, 

AESTHETIC: old mansions with marble staircases, the renaissance section of an art museum, rainy days, wearing fancy dresses with stockings and no shoes, playing a grand piano, elaborate frames, candelabras, taking walks when you can’t sleep

Let’s break down these characters! 

AUGUSTINA

-19

-raised by her grandmother, aka Auntie Mags

-suppresses everything and keeps it all to herself

-refuses to see the bad in people

-impeccable fashion sense

FREDDIE

-21

-also raised by Auntie Mags, in part

-keeps absolutely nothing to himself

-he gets mad about things a lot but only cause he cares and he hates things that aren’t fair

-really likes art history

AUNTIE MAGS

-dead

-totally sucks

-i hate her and so does freddie

-augustina’s indifferent though (that is, indeed, the main source of conflict)

WHEE i’m really excited to write this Augustina and Freddie have a great dynamic and the aesthetic of the house and setting is absolutely beautiful. The Ribs of Saint Anthony did a LOT in helping me with descriptive imagery, but I so prefer writing nature imagery. This story is entirely set on one staircase so that'll be a challenge and I’m very excited. 

Intros for the other two stories coming later this month!

send me an ask to be added to my taglist!

hi? jenna? this is so cool? i love it

THREADBARE // short stories update

Hey all! I can’t stop thinking about this story at the moment, so I’m here to talk about it!

Threadbare is a story about Daughter, who returns to her childhood home after hearing about her Mother’s death. Mother was extremely emotionally distant and abusive, and she was also a magical seamstress and millionaire. We also get flashbacks to Daughter when she was younger and see what life was like with a emotionally distant Mother. And to complicate things there’s a third… timeline? POV? (who knows! why do I do this though) where young Daughter imagines an alternate life where her and Mother have a close relationship. Their mansion is an old hotel and in this imaginary timeline Daughter imagines they’re in the 1920s and hosting a lavish party (with a very basic naive view of how the 1920s are). The three timelines criss-cross and blend together as the story progresses and Daughter moves through the mansion and dissociates more.

The characters!

Mother

Dead (I listened to Dead Mom from the Beetlejuice musical on repeat while drafting this I’m so sorry)

Millionaire

Owned a chain of clothes shops and made high-end commissioned pieces for rich folks

Major recluse

~magical~

Could bring fabric to life

WE HATE HER she was a neglectful and abusive mum

Daughter

Very dissociated and when she steps back into Mother’s mansion at the beginning of the story her reality abstracts a ton, to the point where she can’t remember the name she’s chosen for herself so she starts thinking of herself as “Daughter” again because Mother never gave her a real name

Pretty broken

There’s a flashback to when she’s like 5 and a baby tooth falls out and she thinks her mum has cursed her because she makes too much disruptive noise and honestly my heart breaks for her

We want to protect her and help her heal

Clothes (are side characters in a weird way I guess)

the mansion is populated with clothes that have been enchanted to work (either working in the household or as factory workers producing non-sentient clothes to be sold I promise it makes sense okay)

A bit creepy?

Mother controls them by humming

And they constantly hum the songs Mother teaches them

Daughter is terrified of them

How the writing went: I wrote a very basic draft of this last spring, put it to the side, then picked it up, brainstormed major changes and completely rewrote it in January. The drafting process was super enjoyable, and I loved getting very abstract with the language and blurring reality!

I’m really proud of this story! I’ve done several rounds of edits and now it’s at the point where it needs feedback so I can edit it further, then hopefully begin to submit it!

Thanks for reading <3

Taglist! (please ask to be added or removed)

@ahowlinwolf​ @alicewestwater​ @coffeeandcalligraphy​ @chloeswords​ @sophiewritingstuff @laughtracksonata​ @sienna-writes​ @august-iswriting​ @yanittawrites​ @mjmnorwood​ @oasis-of-you​ @shaelinwrites​

THAT LINE “WEARING THE CLOTHES SHE’D DIE IN” WOAHHHHG DUDE THIS IS AMAZING

Insect Poison - Update 4

covering chapters 11 (used to be 12 but got switched around), 13, 14 and 15. most of these are pretty short, finally starting to get ahold on the vignette sort of thing I’ve been been trying to figure out forever. some structural stuff needs to be changed to line up with the decisions I made last week (or whenever I made them I can’t remember), but overall I’m really happy with everything I wrote for these chapters! I’ve also started including content warnings before individual chapters so that if you want to skip something, you can still read the rest of the update!

links: WIP intro - update 1 - update 2 - update 3

chapter 11 (formerly 12): hush, now

this chapter is a little more insight into the night Ramona died, and it’s only 208 words so you can just have the whole thing! mentions of violence and stuff here.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been here at night before,” said Ramona, fifteen, wearing the clothes she’d die in. “It’s so quiet.” It wasn’t quiet at all, really—the water pleated around their bony wrists and ankles and swaddled their twigs of necks like they were the shore; these children lacked appetites, lacked the life they should have inherited, lacked the naivety that a child needed to feel young, but they were always knee-deep in noise. The water, the wind in the trees, and everything they didn’t have filled their ears just fine.

“I guess not.” A pause. Not silence—not yet. Too much movement, too many children for silence. Robert’s hair was dry, still, but long, then, the ends dripping with water and the rest still hanging like a great, curling curtain. If he were kind, he could have been a radiant boy. If he were softer, he would have been too bright to look at. But with nothing but his bitterness and fear, he was simply an act of vandalism. Crimes, the two of them. “You’re mad at me.”

“No I’m not,” Ramona said, and this was when everything sunk in at once. A lunge, hands on a throat, a girl underwater. Only one of them was going home.

I wrote this chapter in one sitting, edited it in another sitting. it was basically like writing a poem with some dialogue and it’s maybe one of my favorite chapters so far!

chapter 13: moonflower

this is Lori’s chapter!! her Moment™!! It’s still pretty short so I’m going to put most of it here, I had so much fun writing it and then wrote a poem based on it because it just hits different folks.

Later, Lori would recognize this as the eye of her hurricane, a moment of peace, a stillness in the air she would never be able to replicate. And there, on a sheet in the grass, brown eyes and brown hair and brown skin and a denim jacket in the dark. Mercy, waiting. Two girls who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Two girls who were sixteen and wouldn’t be able to name love until a few hours later. They’d built themselves a temporary home of blankets and a picnic basket behind a fence of flowering vines, and would make sure they abandoned it long before they met the morning glories.

They spoke infinities to each other under that darkness, had entire conversations about homework and siblings and constellations, until it turned into Mercy’s smile, Lori’s curls; beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Four hands, three hours, two girls, a single kiss. That night, they named themselves love. Years later, they’d tag first onto the front of it. They’d look back with watering eyes, hopeful smiles, half-hearted regret at not keeping in touch after high school. Still, nostalgia was not always a desire to go back into hiding. Sometimes, love was meant to stay young. A picnic in the night, a polaroid in the woods, a glance from the other side of the room. Not everyone was meant to grow old together—sometimes, a love like this was meant to teach you how to grow on your own.

very wholesome chapter. it felt nice to not have anything bad happen at all, 10/10. highly recommend adding a single Wholesome Chapter to your book.

(other half of the update under the cut but I don’t wanna clog up the dash)

Keep reading

SLOW POISON

GENRE : litfic

SETTING : a women's college in 90's massachusetts

POV : third person limited, present tense, with some poetry.

THEMES : addiction, beauty, poetry, tragedy, jealousy, devotion, descent.

IF YOU LIKE : lesbians, morally grey women, toxic romance, campus novels, character-driven stories, dark and quiet plots

SUMMARY : romantic, selfish, charming, rosalie is the centerpiece of her "fridays" at valencourt college, a club where the only cardinal sin is banality. when her girlfriend graduates— and stops answering her calls— she sets her sights on quiet, intelligent vivien, and the two begin a doomed, obsessive love affair, colored irreparably by addiction, jealousy, and poetry.

PRINCIPLE CAST :

rosalie, she/her, 19 : english major. more in love with being in love than she is with any person.

vivien, she/her, 18 : poet. more in love with rosalie than anything else in the world.

avi, she/they, 19 : classics major. rosalie's childhood friend.

iris, she/her, 19 : mathematics major. worried about vivien.

I'm very excited about reviving this from the... questionable first draft I wrote in 2019. anyways I've rly switched up the setting since then (can you tell I'm so ready for college decisions to come out lmao) and I think it's gonna be fun and sexy and sapphic! feel free to ask/comment to be added/removed to the taglist <3

tagging some friends and a couple people who might be interested: @goose-books @avi-burton-writing @wren-is-writing

litfic writeblr is just *making nouns into verbs* *naming your mc juniper/june* *characters doing arson* *finding epigraphs*

Painter's Palette | First Lines.

The (current) first lines from each short story from my short story collection, Painter's Palette! TW: gun mention, suicide mention blood mention, death mention.

Intro Post

At age 14, I gave my best friend of six years the gun he would later use to kill himself.

Don't get confused; this is a story of love first and foremost.

Her name was Jericho Jacobs and she was both hysteria and euphoria in denim overalls and ratty sneakers.

Simply put, I was a menace in the most glorious and glamorous ways.

Somewhere in the forest around Camp Wayward lies a gravestone with my name on it.

To think that my life started going downhill the moment I realized I wasn't who I thought I was.