ELLIE RENAE

They/them. The reason I’m doing all of this is my wonderful friends. I write for my friends, to see them laugh or cry. I want to help them find humor in even the tragedies we’ve seen together.

When no one is around to please and I’m writing only for myself, I create… knick-knacks. Glass bottles of “star shards” from a time traveler. Love letters, hand-written by immortals. A slice of the stump a magical creature resides within.

Hoarding is my second favorite hobby.

AVAILABLE WORK

Chinese Spoons - A poem within a collection by many artists.

The collection, RENAISSANCE, was published by Yellow Arrow Journal with the theme “cultural renaissance”. This concise poem captures the feeling of being torn between two identities, never fully acknowledged as one or the other.

Available here

in paperback

On the Subject of Control - A short science fiction story. Dark and sapphic.

This high-concept short, informed by an education in biological psychology, follows a pair of institutionalized lovers as they navigate their newfound relationship under experimental (not mind-altering, but behavior-altering) drugs.

Available here

in paperback

Violence Without Plot - A chapbook / single short story.

This dark comedy shines a light on the lack of agency given to feminine people in fiction. Its Patrick-Bateman styled protagonist is tossed from woman to woman, never getting the chance to make a plot-driving decision. His “hero’s journey” is to realize that the story was never about him.

Available here

in paperback

Available here

digitally

The Notebook of a Fictional Man - The photocopied notes of a time traveler.

The Notebook of a Fictional Man (a travel diary meant to impress historians), accidentally centers itself around the gentle giant with whom the writer is secretly in love.

Available here

in paperback

Available here

digitally

WIP LIST

Ouroboros Hivemind - Mind-bending sapphic erotica.

Two immortals, one who drinks blood and one who drinks souls, consuming each other to the point of becoming a single entity.

i have always used MS Word for writing, but my laptop wheezed and went into a coma last fall and took my MS 2007 with it.

i carefully switched some projects to Google Docs, but now it's promoting its "AI" software to me.

so i just downloaded LibreOffice and moved my GDocs over to that.

anyway, if anyone has bad news for me about LibreOffice, tell me now, please, thx

ALT

Pre-MS 365, afaik, you didn't need an account to use what you paid for. You bought a CD-rom and it installed the software on a limited number of devices. There was no oversight from MS, no remembering passwords or agreeing to updates, if you bought it you owned it. I MISS that.

I did get MS 365 through my college, but either because I eventually left college or MS changed their policies I got locked out of 365. Since there was no major difference in the two programs anyway, I just adapted new docs back to MS 2007, but my computer would never open any MS files after that without me first starting up a (loyal, reliable) 2007 program. I truly loathe login/subscription/online-only software.

Anyway, most of my MS Word files are backed up on a flash drive but my new PC won't let me use the pre-installed MS products without a product key/login and I'm too petty to bother with that nightmare.

Google Docs was always a temporary solution to this mess.

a ton of great advice in the notes for anyone looking for writing software!

Additional info:

• OpenOffice is defunct, kaput, no longer exists. Those of you who have it, hooray for you! Enjoy your rare little software. Apparently LibreOffice is a successor of OpenOffice and as "Libre" suggests, it is $$ free $$
• Celtx, heretofore unmentioned, is primarily for screenwriting, but when I downloaded it back in 2014 it also had templates for writing and outlining novels. It was free then and the site says it's still free if anyone wants to try it (there is a one-time signup but I used a burner email and still got the program)

my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss

Okay, let's try and break this down.

Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn't cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.

And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.

But here's the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.

Being into dubcon or noncon doesn't mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn't make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn't mean you wouldn't run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.

If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women's sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.

And, for most of them, even when they don't actively realize it, it's about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It's about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it's gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don't really matter, they're just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you're dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.

For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it's very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It's a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.

And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don't actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they're actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe... just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let's not mince words, there's also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.

Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you're feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.

Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn't simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!

So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone's kink truly offends you this much.

"Booping the forbidden snoot" is a good way of putting it

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I'm going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let's call them horses and unicorns.

a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.

a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it's not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it's in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!

I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can't have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying "I want a pet tiger" is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.

now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it's tempting to assume that something like "I want to fuck a serial killer" is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.

but for the vast majority of people, that's not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy ("he's a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he's nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain") is what makes it a unicorn.

...huh. My thanks to @bemusedlybespectacled​ for putting NAMES to those things, “horse fantasy” and “unicorn fantasy”; because I’ve come across those concepts before, but never with WORDS for them. I hope that those terms become commonly understood, so then people can have discussions about them without having to spend an hour ahead of time just making sure that everyone’s talking about the same thing.

My favourite type of movie is “period piece romance but fantasy-horror hijinks happen and now everyone has to adapt to the new genre or die,” ala Curse of the Black Pearl, Anastasia, The Mummy (1999)

"everybody has to adapt to the new genre" is really criminally underutilized in general

I love playing with my OCs like dolls in my head rather than actually writing the novel I created them for.

Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on

Nobody:

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

I drew 14 pictures during the day, and wrote 32 pages a night. Now I can’t do shit.

A huge part of this is because you've gotten better! And now, when you're drawing/writing/doing whatever creative task, you're not just mindlessly throwing thoughts at your paper, you're thinking as you do it. Children can churn out a lot more work because it's not yet refined, but when you're older and have more practice, you work with all these thoughts running through your head about form and shape, color palettes or word choice. Now, you're making a dozen decisions with every moment of work, and you're also questioning the decisions you've just made, wondering if you can do it better. Don't beat yourself up about producing less work now than you did back then, because every sentence or shape involves a lot more effort for you now, than it did when you were ten and brand new to this hobby.

Also you have a job now and the never-ending bullshit that is laundry and dishes and feeding yourself.

pirates of the caribbean really introduced an eldritch octopus man who kills indiscriminately and torments the dead as their poster villain and then you watch the movies and it's like, "oh no, actually the worst villain in this series is a small white british man who functions as the herald of capitalism" and that was very very brave of them

#here is a man so heartless he has literally cut his own heart out of his chest #but he's still not as evil as the fucking east india trading company

Don't you sometimes get an absolutely extrodinary, mind blowing, such an awesome idea for a story, but you just don't have enough skill level to pull it off?

Write it anyway.

Write it anyway, write it anyway, write it anyway.

There are so, so, so many reasons:

• You gain that skill level only through practice. So practice.
• No matter what you’re writing, no matter how badly you think you’ve written it, there is ALWAYS some audience that will love it and cherish it.
• You can use what you write the first time around as a first draft and just rewrite it again later when you feel like tackling the story again!
• Rewriting the same story over and over is a valid writing process. It’s literally just creating new drafts. Each iteration will be better than the last, because each is building on your growing skill and experience.
• If you love the story, it will always be worth telling simply for your own enjoyment. If no one else ever sees it, that’s okay! Your art should be for you first, anyway.

Write it anyway.

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Among professional writers there's a category called trunk stories. A trunk story is one that you feel inspired to write but you know isn't ready for prime time. Before the computer age, when it was all hardcopy, the writer put trunk stories away, in a drawer or box early in their career, then in an actual trunk or a filing cabinet as the number of trunk stories grew. When writers find themselves stuck for ideas, they often read some of the trunk stories, hoping to be inspired to rewrite one into something they'd actually be willing to let their fandom see. Some stories stay in the trunk for decades before finally seeing the light of day. Some are still there when the writer dies. The Silmarilion was basically pieced together from trunk stories after JRRT's death. If you have an inspiring idea but don't think you can do it justice now, write as much as you have and put it in the trunk.

you really do learn so much by doing an amateur job of a compelling idea. it's better than writing something you don't care about, or sitting around with no ideas at all

the daily kirby where i spend 4 hours drawing cakes
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