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f/f romantasy writer. busybody by trade

@livums / livums.tumblr.com

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

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a writeblr intro! {out of date, lol, lmao}

🌹 Lyrra | she/he/they | 25 🌹

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 :)

🌹 my WIPs + tags 🌹

OUT OF DATE!!! CURRENTLY REVAMPING, THANK U 🙇🏽‍♀️

Tag, DM, reply, or fill out

to be added/removed from any taglist!

[More below the cut]

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??

I remember at least two posts about this subject. Alas, I was only able to find one.

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.

In the meantime - I know you said you've seen ref posts for drawing fat characters...but here's one I like (in case you haven't come across it) that is nicely wordy: https://www.tumblr.com/bacchicly/677854396964634625?source=share

Ok as promised I've written my own post - idk if it will be helpful to anyone - but here's the link:

Happy writing!

mega-list of book recommendations

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
  • poet x - elizabeth avecedo

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

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

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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)

Her name is Nanshé, her friends call her Nahna <3

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WIP Acrostic Tag

Thank you for the tag @winterandwords! I did some cafe writing today, which was lovely, and left me in a place where I'm excited to pick up where I left off as soon as I have more time -- the best feeling :D My word today is ALONE, and I'll look through what I wrote today, which is from a Peter Pan inspired idea...

Rules: given a word, find a sentence in your WIP that starts with each letter

A. “Aw, shut up,” another pirate said.

L. Lily, Magnolia, and Poppy converged on Belle the moment he was gone. “Good heavens,” Lily said in concern. “How dreadful.”

O. One of the other boys called out, “Don’t get anyone started on Edward’s stench!”

N. New stares were sent Gwendolyn's way, slightly appraising, slightly surprised. “And is the baby on friendly terms with [the prisoners]?” Hook asked.

E. “Embarrassing, dangerous, or just plain irritating, it’s happened,” he snapped. “What are we going to do about it, sit here and quarrel? What kind of pirates are you?”

I'll pass on the tags to @tragicheirs @enchanted-lightning-aes @livums @vacantgodling @kaylinalexanderbooks and anyone else that sees this!

Your word is START 🧭

Just a quick note from your friendly neighborhood bookworm/indie author

if you use kindle for the majority of your library, they will be shutting down the function that allows you to download your files and transfer them via USB on the 26th of February. Which doesn't sound like a huge deal, but this also means that if a book is taken off Amazon for any reason—like it being banned—they can scrape it off your kindle as well. So maybe backup your library?

How to Download Your Kindle Books (with screenshots)

  • From your Amazon homepage, click "Account & Lists" then click "Content Library"
  • Click "Books"
  • Find the book you want to download and click "More actions"
  • Click "Download & transfer via USB"
  • Click the button next to your device, then click "Download"
  • That's it! Your book file is now downloaded to your device. To my knowledge there isn't a way to bulk download everything, which means that your have to download books individually. (If anyone knows how to download multiple books at a time, please let me know!)
  • I use the free software Calibre to organize my ebook files. This video gives a good basic overview of how to download your ebooks from Amazon to Calibre, and also goes over how to use Calibre to transfer your ebooks to Kobo. I recently got a Kobo and have slowly been transferring my ebooks to it, and it is actually pretty easy!
  • If you're looking for ways to get ebooks without supporting Amazon, check out Smashwords, Bookshop.org, or see if your favorite author/publisher sells ebooks directly from their website.
  • Go forth and read!

If you use Epubor to convert and backup your book files in multiple formats, be aware that the current version of the Kindle for PC/Mac does NOT create file formats that Epubor can use.

However the Epubor site does have the last Kindle app version that they could work with available for you to download, and at least as of this morning (February 17, 2025) you could still download your books onto that version of the Kindle for PC app and convert them into any of Epubor's file options.

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