✒️ The best horror doesn’t shout. It stays quiet. It stays with you.
The Dark Descent Writers’ Workshop is open.
🕯️ 20 weeks of eerie craft, emotional control, and writing that lingers.
📚 Access anytime. No deadlines. No fluff. Just what you meant—and what they’ll remember.
🎓 Join now:
https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/product/writers-workshop-access
#writingcommunity #WritersWorkshop #WriteHorror #DarkestTales #YouveWritten
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morning thumps wake me
Mr. Butters meowing,
human, break my fast!
#haiku #poetry #writing #PoetryCommunity #WritingCommunity #MrButtersTheCat
Where do you sit on that lifelong seesaw of work & play?
https://happytales.substack.com/p/finding-balance
My weekly roundup of #publishing news #writing craft tips and #bookmarketing links is up.
Who Has The Power?
https://buff.ly/qNSZqGZ
#writingcommunity
"Love Knows I’m Hurting" by Martin Hooijmans (art by Lars de Ruyter): https://thestoryshack.com/flash-fiction/drama/martin-hooijmans-love-knows-im-hurting #flashfiction #WritingCommunity
#WordWeavers 26, MC POV: Would you rather be able to see 1 week into the future on your birthday OR always remember where you put something you keep losing?
Freya: "Seeing one week into the future on my birthday would help discover when my birthday is. Aion is rather convinced I don't have one, and I'd love to prove him wrong."
☕️#coffeewithdarkholme #bookstagram #horrorcommunity #writingcommunity #readingcommunity #darkfiction #darkesttales #beautifulnightmares
#ScribesAndMakers Jun 26: What?
In one of his Civics lessons, Mr Rafone explains *what*.
“What do you want, do you really, really want?”
“A decent standard of living, and complete peace of mind.”
“Am I wrong?”
“In any case” Mr Rafone concludes “you want a job.”
(CopperWolf - Conflicts and Alliances)
#scifi #CopperWolf #writing #writingCommunity #ClimateChange #sustainability
bird chorus - new day's
trellis, add vinyl, stew till
vagary r'visits
---
#vss365 - #vagary
#WordedArt - #revisit
#BlueSkyRelay - #vinyl, #chorus
#DailyHaikuPrompt - trellis / stew
#WritersCoffeeClub 06/26—How much of the finished work do you need to have in mind before you start writing?
Main characters and main themes, an opening (although that usually changes) and an ending. Everything else is a surprise.
Hey #writingcommunity and #booksky!
Here’s the fully rendered version of Jack Beckett — half-fae, half-phoenix with fiery red wings and flame tattoos 🔥🪽
#art #oc #author #artist #comm #fantasy #amwriting #ttrpg #bookcharacter #x
#PennedPossibilities 711 — SC POV: To continue with last night’s prompt, what was something you were never sure of?
[Devil-girl:] If I'm honest with myself, the one thing I was never sure of was whether I'd see my mother again. She sang opera and performed musical theatre, and was an internationally renowned recording artist. As an infant and later a young child, I could not travel with her as she toured. She returned home whenever she could. I had this feeling, though. It wasn't that I felt unloved. She was autistic; her life outside of home was a supreme job of acting, but her singing never was. She always sang for me. No, it was that feeling that when I said goodbye, it would be the last time.
Before I was five, it was the last time. Turns out she was also a spy. There was no body to mourn at her funeral, though my soon to be nemesis Rainy Days, The Director of Home and the Nine Outer Worlds, eulogized her as a hero.
It had been her who had sent my mother on the mission from which she had never returned…
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2025.06.25 — How frequently do other languages (or conlangs) appear in your writing?
Other languages "appear" in my writing, despite all my stories being written in English. The story line in Mars Needed Women implies that Japanese is a popular language amongst native-born Martians and might become their official language. Some words appear in the text. (I learned enough Japanese to get around Japan.) Other stories use some Argentine Spanish (mostly cursing). Other languages that would be similar to Chaucer's English or Latin, appear and are referred to mostly in thaumaturgic tomes and grimoires. I believe night angels speak something akin to Spanish in their native land, and due to how I portray Thorn Rose's immigrant mother, a refugee from the Dragon Lands, her accent is likely from Yiddish and Russian, with all the discrimination and prejudice you can imagine from the 1960s showing up when she or her daughter, who otherwise blend in, open their mouths. Mind you in these cases, it isn't those languages but they work as stand ins. I even fashion matching accents.
As for why, it adds a level of verisimilitude. Even in our connected world, hundreds of languages are in daily use. Few places are so purely isolated that there isn't a loan word or a traveler who sounds foreign.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
My new flash is out: TRIBUTE, in which the deposed leader of an authoritarian regime meets the Devil, and pays his due.
Read it here! https://joshsutphin.com/stories/tribute.html
#PennedPossibilities 711 — SC POV: To continue with last night’s prompt, what was something you were never sure of?
Dante: One thing comes to mind for me... Why people gave a f*ck about who you loved, how you loved, or what gender you were. Never made sense to me. I was never sure why it mattered so much to people. Now, much older, I do of course know about the cruelty in the world. Hatred is an easier emotion for those kinds of assholes, I guess. Screw 'em.
#WritingCommunity #TheCityOfOpulence #DigitalDystopiaSeries #Cyberpunk #SFF #ScienceFiction #Romance #Worldbuilding #AmWriting #LGBT #LGBTQIA
"I was stalked for years. Writing thrillers gave me a way to reclaim the narrative, to give power back to women who are often silenced or disbelieved. I write to process, to provoke, and to fight back."
https://inkican.com/author-interview-s-z-estavillo-feminist-thrillers/
#authorinterview #author #books #writingcommunity #thrillers #feminist
We like to think
that results...
https://crewmansixrants.wordpress.com/2025/06/25/strategic-promises/
THE FORETHOUGHT
In the neglected garage
there lies a forethought,
a patient prophecy,
a pair of ruthlessly
clear eyes for what’s to come. [...]
A poem from Winter 2023, originally published in Schuylkill Valley Journal
#WIP Wednesday!
One more chapter to go in this edit. Then, guess what? I get to do it again. I. KNOW. HOW. TO. LIVE!!
I'm still not thrilled with chapter one, but I think I figured out how to fix it. However I threw it at my crit group & we meet tomorrow. So, I'll see what they have to say before I tackle it with what I think it needs.
How's your WIP?
#writingcommunity #writers #writer #writing #amwriting #WIPWednesday
#PennedPossibilities 710 — SC POV: When you were a child, what was one thing you could always be sure of?
[Devil-girl, a daemon, in her midteens:] When you are young, you can be sure of a lot of stuff because you don't know better. It was him I thought I could always be sure of.
My earliest recollection of him was us in a tub, floating wooden duckies bobbing, lots of laughing and splashing of suds, and some sibling of his scrubbing us. Three, maybe? Playmates forever, forever together, and I expected it would last forever. He was differently talented than I; he could not work the miracles I could, like lighting up a room, making dishes scrub themselves, thaumaturgically entangling a pair of coins with which we could talk between houses when we ought have been sleeping, if we each put one in our mouth. He was good at logic and semantics, I could do any math in horn. He could tell me what I didn't understand, I could work miracles for him. Give us a book and we did stuff. We were a team, the very definition of synergy. Even after I was orphaned, after Rainy Days took her dreaded interest in me and gave me a guardian who planned an unwanted future of governmental responsibility for me, he remained with me, helped me, played with me. I remembered envisioning the stout handsome man he would grow up to become, feeling my heart grow in my chest.
Yes, I speak of him, not saying his name. Definitely, yes. In the end he proved that the one thing I could not be sure of was human behavior, or the reliability of friendship.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
