Writing sideblog! | Lyrra | Black/mixed | 25 | she/he/they | ask to be added/removed from tag lists! | I follow and like from @girlfriend-champion | Full art blog: @lyrring
Hello 🎉! My name is Lyrra! I am a Black fantasy & romance author who focuses on themes of queer love & longing, sapphic intimacy, generational wounds & complicated familial relationships.
I also spend quite a bit of time creating digital art! A lot of it revolves around my WIPs these days, lol. You will certainly see art on this blog of my characters. Feel free to check out my art blog @lyrring, or my art twitter here.
I am always looking for more authors/writing advice blogs to follow! Fellow writers please feel free to interact! I follow, like, and reply from my main/personal blog, @girlfriend-champion :)
I am always open to ask and tag games!
I am tentatively open to critique partners–if we’re mutuals and we have similar reading/writing interests, please feel free to ask! <3
If we are mutuals puhleeeeaaase add me to your taglists I mean it I promise u I want to inhale your content give it to me yumyum thanks love u bye
🌹 about my work 🌹
My writing tends to skew towards adult/emerging adult. I LOVE various flavors of fantasy (high, low, urban, action-adventure, Gothic). I like to spend time crafting intricate worlds (lore bibles are some of my favorite things to write) and magic systems.
My favorite works (to write and to read) all include some form of romance. I write romantic love and attraction between all genders, but ladies craving each other carnally is like music to me. LOL. So, some of my work features sexual intimacy, but this certainly varies widely from project to project (and I certainly will not be sharing this sort of content on tumblr, for reasons that should be obvious.lol).
I love to include elements of complex relationships in my writing–romantic, platonic, or familial. Human relationships are complicated and messy and awesome and frequently painful–and it’s important to me that my work reflects that.
I try particularly to explore in my work the lives and relationships of queer women of color (particularly Black & biracial women). I am always open to fantasy, romance, and sci-fi recs written by Black authors :)
okay hey real question: what are good ways to describe fat characters?
I see a lot of ‘have more fat characters’ and I’m Here For It but as someone who is skinny and in a world where most existing literature makes characters fat only as a joke or an indication of some variety of moral badness, I’m not really sure how to describe them in a way that’s not objectifying or insulting. like, I’ve grown up on poetic descriptions of thin characters ('long slim fingers’ and 'willow figure’ etc etc) but I haven’t read flattering descriptions of fat characters and I don’t know where to start. I’ve seen a lot of 'how to describe poc’ or 'how to describe disabled characters’ or whatever and I’ve seen art ref posts for drawing fat characters, but no posts about how to write them well. so. open call for advice or for examples you’ve found and like??
Howdy! Fat short white woman here. I’ve got some hopefully helpful thoughts on this which I will share a little later (I’ve got a few things to do first sadly).
In the meantime, OP (or anyone else) if you have specific questions about what it feels like for me to be in a fat body or what I personally do and don’t worry / think about… I’m more than happy to answer.
saw a mega-list of literary recommendations going around recently and was struck by the dearth of titles by poc, so i made a list of just poc titles to course-correct. keep in mind that i can only in good faith recommend what i’ve read, so i’m sure i’ve absolutely missed some integral titles. drop me an inbox message if you have more recs, i’m always open
canonical
the narrative of frederick douglass - frederick douglass
incidents in the life of a slave girl - harriet jacobs
the souls of black folk - w.e.b. dubois
montage of a dream deferred - langston hughes
cane - jean toomer
their eyes were watching god - zora neale hurston
the bean eaters - gwendolyn brooks
a raisin in the sun - lorraine hansberry
invisible man - ralph ellison
native son - richard wright
the autobiography of malcolm x - malcolm x
the fire next time - james baldwin
sister outsider: essays and speeches - audre lorde
things fall apart - chinua achebe
the garden of forking paths - jorge luis borges
one hundred years of solitude - gabriel garcia marquez
the color purple - alice walker
the woman warrior - maxine hong kingston
satanic verses - salman rushdie
beloved - toni morrison
sula - toni morrison
the house on mango street - sandra cisneros
the joy luck club - amy tan
DAMN. - kendrick lamar
plays
a tempest - aime cesaire
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf - ntozake shange
fences - august wilson
dutchman - amiri baraka
the american play - suzan-lori parks
memoir
the light of the world - elizabeth alexander
how we fight for our lives - saeed jones
between the world and me - ta-nehisi coates
persepolis - marjane satrapi
men we reaped - jesmyn ward
heavy - kiese laymon
black boy - richard wright
the yellow house - sarah m broom
brothers and keepers - john edgar wideman
zami: a new spelling of my name - audre lorde
poetry
american sonnet for my past and future assassin - terrance hayes
the tradition - jericho brown
night sky with exit wounds - ocean vuong
citizen: an american lyric - claudia rankine
twenty love poems and a song of despair - pablo neruda
don’t call us dead - danez smith
eye level - jenny xie
life on mars - tracy k smith
a fortune for your disaster - hanif abdurraqib
postcolonial love poem - natalie diaz
i can’t talk about the trees without the blood - tiana clark
i wore my blackest hair - carlina duan
an american sunrise - joy harjo
oculus - sally wen mao
short stories
her body & other stories - carmen maria machado
interpreter of maladies - jhumpa lahiri
exhalation - ted chiang
ficciones - jorge louis borges
what is not yours is not yours - helen oyeyemi
sour heart - jenny zhang
essays
how to write an autobiographical novel: essays - alexander chee
trick mirror - jia tolentino
bad feminist - roxane gay
they can’t kill us until they kill us - hanif abdurraqib
we were eight years in power: an american tragedy - ta-nehisi coates
borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza - gloria anzaldua
this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color - ed. cherrie moraga and gloria anzaldua
white girls - hilton als
non-fiction
the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the era of colorblindness - michelle alexander
stamped from the beginning: the definitive history of racist ideas in america - ibram x kendi
bunk: the rise of hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies, post-facts, and fake news - kevin young
an alchemy of race and rights - patricia j williams
looking for lorraine: the radiant and radical life of lorraine hansberry - imani perry
the next billion users: digital life beyond the west - payal arora
fiction
passing - nella larson
caucasia - danzy senna
trust exercise - susan choi
on earth we’re briefly gorgeous - ocean vuong
corregidora - gayl jones
the fifth season - nk jemisin
the brief wondrous life of oscar wao - junot diaz
the round house - louise erdrich
there, there - tommy orange
little fires everywhere - celeste ng
the supervisor - viet than nguyen
kindred - octavia butler
the known world - edward p jones
the underground railroad - colson whitehead
the god of small things - arundhati roy
the vegetarian - han king
theory
playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination - toni morrison
black skin, white masks - frantz fanon
mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book - hortense spillers
discourse on colonialism - aime cesaire
scenes of subjection - saidiya hartman
the signifyin(g) monkey - henry louis gates jr
pedagogy of the oppressed - paulo freire
feminist theory: from margin to center - bell hooks
black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america - tricia rose
decolonizing the mind: the politics of language in african literature - ngũgĩ wa thiong’o
black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition - cedric robinson
black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment - patricia hill collins
black and blur (consent not to be a single thing) - fred moten
young adult
diary of a part-time indian - sherman alexei
the hate u give - angie thomas
emergency contact - mary hk choi
i am not your perfect mexican daughter - erika sanchez
been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call “is this book afraid of me?” and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don’t come after the writer on twitter
Tags via @deadpanwalking, editor and ass-kicker extraordinaire
God what a book. If you’ve ever said to yourself “why are all the Chosen Ones bright young teens or twentysomethings, I want a Chosen One who is a forty-year-old mother of two with major depression” then this is the book for you
really hilarious and unsexy when hetero romantasy authors refer to love interests as males and females. you sound like david attenborough narrating a special documentary on two turtles humping in the mud
i don’t care if he’s the king of the fae. if that man called me a desirable female i’d have him gelded
y'all i don’t think i ever posted her here before ….. anyways one of the mcs/love interests for a comic im never gonna make but from which i will draw character designs (lol)
