I’m on the aro spectrum, but also obsessed with romance, so I often feel separated from the community… And yet, nothing reaffirms me being aromantic than finding advice on how to write romance, and disagreeing with basically all of it.

That is a MOOD lol

I love love writing romance. I love reading it. It's great.

I actually think being aromantic might have made me a better romance writer. Because I don't get the ooey gooey romantic feels, the romance I write often becomes deeply rooted in platonic understanding. My lovebird characters aren't only just lovers, they are also people who understand each other on a deep level. They may not get along (I love rivals to lovers) but they get and appreciate each other on some deeper level. It's great. :D

Scott Skylark Kaufner: has the most severe anger issue out of the entire cast. Possessed by an entity since the age of 12 that only heightened his manic streak and filled his head with increasingly violent and chaotic intrusive thoughts. Fiercely protective of his loved ones to a point that terrifies everyone because they all, he included, understand that he is absolutely capable of taking another human life. Most likely to wake up covered in blood and not understand what happened.

Also Scott Skylark Kaufner:

Five foot five femme-y intersex man in a soft, flowy dress and sweater combo. Probably smiling or laughing. Very much wants to tell you about a bug or mushroom or stray cat he spoke to on his way here.

Stoooop you're making me wanna read it but I can't hyperfixate on something rn 😭 (need to finish my thesis outline first)

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Me: oh look an artist comm... hmmm... for some reason the art style looks familiar

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The Causal Chain And Why Your Story Needs It

The most obnoxious thing my writing teacher taught me every story needed, that I absolutely loathed studying in the moment and that only later, after months of resisting and fighting realized she was right, was something called the causal chain.

Simply put, the causal chain is the linked cause-and-effect that must logically connect every event, reaction, and beat that takes place in your story to the ones before and after.

The Causal Chain is exhausting to go through. It is infuriating when someone points out that an event or a character beat comes out of nowhere, unmoored from events around it.

It is profoundly necessary to learn and include because a cause-and-effect chain is what allows readers to follow your story logically which means they can start anticipating what happens next, which is what is required for a writer to be able to build suspense and cognitively engage the audience, to surprise them, and to not infuriate them with random coincidences that hurt or help the characters in order to clumsily advance the author's goals.

By all means, write your story as you want to write it in the first draft, and don't worry about this principle too much. This is an editing tool, not a first draft tool. But one of the first things you should do when retroactively begin preparing your story to be read by others is going step by step through each event and confirming that a previous event leads to it and that subsequent events are impacted by it on the page.

When your character is standing knee-deep in literal or metaphorical shit with a weapon in one hand and their last hope of surviving evaporating around them, and they’re wondering how their simple smuggling job/adulthood ritual/simple morning in an ordinary village led to ALL OF THIS, both they and the reader need to be able to backtrack through every single choice, mishap, attempt at fixing earlier problems and panicky flight or fib led them unerringly to this moment. That chain cannot have breaks in it, or you lose the whole impact. 

The causal chain is something I always implement on my stories. Or at least try to. It's fun.

Stop Calling Yourself an Aspiring Author: A Proposition

So this post is dedicated to @dreambigdreamz, who asked me a question about when you can stop calling yourself an aspiring author. I had to wait until I could go to sleep to properly answer, because this is going to be a long one, probably. I'm actually doing this before I get to work for the day, because if I could get one goddamned person to stop labeling themselves like this I will feel success for at least three days.

It's a question for new writers - the difference between a writer and an author. If you Google the difference it appears there are two camps:

This is odd to me already. It's odd and it's immediately gatekeep-y, and it's so fucking surreal that ours is the only artistic field that has this strange distinction. For most other outlets there's still a separation between hobbyist and professional, but that's considered optional as far as I've seen.

Someone who paints or does digital art isn't likely to call themselves a hobbyist artist, even if they aren't doing it as their main source of income. They're just an artist.

If someone practices the piano but isn't actively in a performing band or symphony, they probably don't call themselves an aspiring pianist. They're already doing it. They're a pianist.

I briefly considered cook versus chef, but in that context cook doesn't necessarily mean amateur. There are line cooks and prep cooks and fry cooks and sauté cooks who work professionally. I have the qualifications of a prep or line cook, but I'm currently only cooking meals at home. So does that mean I'm an aspiring cook? That's weird. That doesn't sound right.

So by this point it should be clear that I find it deeply reductive to say that you can only call yourself an author if you've professionally published a work of writing. Maybe that was the case, like, a hundred years ago? Even then, though, one of the definitions of author is a verb describing the act of writing something. You could author a scientific paper. You could author a poem.

It's 2002. The scope of what it means to publish is infinitely vaster than it was in the days of Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway. You could traditionally publish your novel - that's still an option. But you could also indie-publish. Or self-publish. Or produce your own zines or chapbooks and distribute them online. Or send our newsletters on platforms like Substack. Or serialize through websites like Wattpad, Tapas, Itch.io, Patreon, AO3, or even tumblr.

I never called myself an author, but my reasons have nothing to do with whether or not I've been published. I prefer writer, as it has a more versatile feel that tracks whether I'm working on a novel or a poem or a play. But that's beside the point.

Personally, I'm in the first camp. Writer and author are essentially synonymous, only in my eyes an author is someone who writes fiction or nonfiction prose. That's it. Have you done that? Cool. Good job no longer being "aspiring".

If you have the words aspiring author in your life somewhere, there's a good chance you're actively gatekeeping yourself from feeling good enough to do your own thing. Why not replace it with something like the following?

If someone does the whole "you're a writer? what have you published?" welcome to the conversation that all writers have to tolerate at some point. People are dumb. People typically don't know our industry and how it functions, and that's fine. Just smile and nod and shrug your way out of the conversation.

Yes, there's infighting within writers who should very much be spending less time arguing who gets to wear the nametag and who doesn't. Those people are lame dipshits who should shut the fuck up and get back to writing. If you have a passion for writing, be it fanfic or scripts or short stories or novels, you are my peer and colleague. I might not like the structure or content of your writing - which is fine, by the way - but I would never even say that you aren't a writer holy shit.

I don't care if you use every genre and trope that I find trite and excessive. If you genuinely care about the stories you tell and you still present yourself as an aspiring author, you have a duty to take yourself more seriously than that.

You are a writer. You are an author. This should not be a question.

We need to move past this and start asking ourselves the real questions that come after you answer "Am I an author". Am I a safe author? Am I an advocate and an ally? Am I a supportive member of the community? Am I still learning? Am I a capable author? Am I adaptable? Am I resourceful? Am I determined?

I'm running out of steam here. I need the writers here, especially the younger writers, to move past this stage of their creative careers as quickly as fucking possible. I was there too. I get it. And I'm telling you it's time to soak the label of aspiring so as to loosen the adhesive, gently peel it off, and throw it in the trash forever. Don't even keep it for sentimental reasons to look back on later.

Toss it. Burn it. Eat it. It is not helping you.

Okay that's all. You should close this now and write three hundred words of whatever the fuck you want. I love you.

Author's Note

Hallo! Thank you for your interest in reading this. This story is finished and will update every Saturday starting May 4, 2024. If you are impatient and have some money to spare, or just would like to support me, early access of 5 advance chapters (plus patreon-exclusive post canon content, once we get there!) is available here!

Chapter Masterlist

Working Title: Project Heartless

Genre: Queer, Dystopian Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Horror

Length: 118K

This story was written because there is a severe lack of aromantic characters and queerplatonic relationships in media. If you like: 

*A primarily aromantic cast being unapologetically aro (feat. other aspec identities)

*a generous sprinkle of body horror and action

*focus on a queerplatonic relationship between the MC and their partner

*focus on a nonbinary characters and identities

*found family

*fighting monsters

*fighting against an oppressive system

*a rainy atmospheric setting

Then this novel is for you!

I am very active on Tumblr and my handle is @rkmoon! If you wanna see what I'm working on, ask me questions or just talk to me, you can find me there.

That is all! I hope you like it! 

writers who can also draw, how does it feel to be God's favorite?

i sacrificed a lot for this don’t assume i’m god’s favorite. made a deal with the devil. god hates me

Why pick one when you can be mediocre at both? 🥲

hey, false! your writing is really impressive <3

uijdhfbjdfb Thank you 😭

i dont think anything compares to the joy of getting asks on tumblr or getting comments on ao3

its like, wow. human communication thru the internet. except it feels personal. but yknow, in a nice way, not in an invasive way

its like, you CLICKED on MY account and read thru MY posts and cared enough to leave me a personal message. smth so cute abt that