Thanks @mysticaltorque for the tag! Can’t format like you are cause I’m on mobile and underlining is for some reason AWOL.

What are five songs you’ve been listening to?

Duk Koo Kim by Sun Kil Moon

Sometimes moody early 00s rock hits the spot when I’m trying to get into a groove with writing, and this one does especially well for ones where I’m trying to write that moody drifting late 20s male protagonist who can’t grasp the influence of the grown-ups in his teenage years had on him etc etc. I like this one when I’m trying to write Mathieu in particular. Just vibes, no analysis.

Starshine by LSD and the Search for God

Similar reasons with more of a hypnotic tone to them, and I use it more with Primož.

In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song) by David Lynch/Alan Splet

You’re probably noticing the pattern now that I mostly like slower moody songs with slight surrealist elements here and there haha (not clear in the song itself but because of its context in Eraserhead). It’s also got a faint sensual edge to it that’s fun also.

Gently Johnny by The Woodbine and Ivy Band

The Wicker Man’s song for people fucking but if the tone itself was an order of magnitude more horny. Specific genre of song I like is music from horror movies that is horny and/or folk music that is horny. Hope this helps 👍

09-15-00 by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Incredible dark instrumental post-rock piece by the pros; 09-15-00 refers (albeit incorrectly) to when Ariel Sharon (a Likud—right wing—politician visited Al-Aqsa/the Temple Mount with 1,000 armed police officers, prompting the Second Intifada). The track itself contains no explicit political content and serves to effectively get your hackles up with artistry alone. Really unsettling and good piece with a good build.

I’ll tag @jantratnik and @flourbray on this one next!

Also Daniel is in character despite the seeming sappiness of it bc he’s kind of always desperate and pathetic and needs love and he’s such a shitty and bitter teenager who wants very hard to just be a person LOL

Apokatastasis - this one intrigues me tell me more 🤲

This is a Max and Daniel fic from back when I predominantly wrote them—it’s the most slash fic gen fic I could conjure up, I think, because the love in it runs deep for them, but its mostly familial. It’s about after the societal collapse following a staggeringly lethal plague, and Daniel (an angry and desperate to survive teenager), ends up taking care of a young Max who follows after him like a duckling (after surviving the religious murder suicide of the rest of his family and trying to follow others to look after him). It takes place over about ten years, until Max is in early adulthood and succumbs to chronic illness brought on by when he had contracted the illness. Daniel has great tenderness and familial affection for him that developed slowly. At the beginning he had seen him as a nuisance. Max, never having the chance to build adult bonds to another person, does fall in love with him without Daniel ever reciprocating. They’re living in the woods not terribly far from a deserted town they source many supplies from. The symbolism is predominated by a kind of death-of-god theology, a god that may have once touched that earth, but is deaf to cries and pleas for absolution or relief from devastation. Daniel cannot save his own family, who he abandoned out of fear of watching them die. He cannot save Max, who he is trying to make up for it for. It’s not bleak though, it’s full of a lot of natural beauty from the landscape and from human love. It doesn’t matter that he can’t get what he wants and keep Max alive, because the love will have always been there anyway. It does still include graphic depictions of violence and implied sexual abuse (before the main events of the plot).

Apokatastasis is a Greek word that refers to the idea of God restoring all things to a condition of perfection indiscriminately (and thus is referenced in some Universalist theology).

Apokatastasis - this one intrigues me tell me more 🤲

This is a Max and Daniel fic from back when I predominantly wrote them—it’s the most slash fic gen fic I could conjure up, I think, because the love in it runs deep for them, but its mostly familial. It’s about after the societal collapse following a staggeringly lethal plague, and Daniel (an angry and desperate to survive teenager), ends up taking care of a young Max who follows after him like a duckling (after surviving the religious murder suicide of the rest of his family and trying to follow others to look after him). It takes place over about ten years, until Max is in early adulthood and succumbs to chronic illness brought on by when he had contracted the illness. Daniel has great tenderness and familial affection for him that developed slowly. At the beginning he had seen him as a nuisance. Max, never having the chance to build adult bonds to another person, does fall in love with him without Daniel ever reciprocating. They’re living in the woods not terribly far from a deserted town they source many supplies from. The symbolism is predominated by a kind of death-of-god theology, a god that may have once touched that earth, but is deaf to cries and pleas for absolution or relief from devastation. Daniel cannot save his own family, who he abandoned out of fear of watching them die. He cannot save Max, who he is trying to make up for it for. It’s not bleak though, it’s full of a lot of natural beauty from the landscape and from human love. It doesn’t matter that he can’t get what he wants and keep Max alive, because the love will have always been there anyway. It does still include graphic depictions of violence and implied sexual abuse (before the main events of the plot).

Apokatastasis is a Greek word that refers to the idea of God restoring all things to a condition of perfection indiscriminately (and thus is referenced in some Universalist theology).

Made it

I want to make a mini discord server for people who are weirder/more abstract/more detailed/more fucking SICK IN THE BRAIN about writing their cycling fic

In the kitchen straight up "chopping it". And by "it" haha well. Let justr say. My vegetble

I want to make a mini discord server for people who are weirder/more abstract/more detailed/more fucking SICK IN THE BRAIN about writing their cycling fic

Jordan London 2018 / Instagram / Oliraptor

Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, Toyama, Japan.

hearing your mutuals voices for the first time is wild some of them are literally british

❗ dailyquests Follow

Be Normal about That Old Man.

we can debate the ethics of rpf all day long but the bottom line that we can’t get away from is that its funny to edit black and white images of celebrities into the “rpf is fine” image with their name as the source

Max | Abu Dhabi 2014 by Sutton Images.

Туманный тлен

all of your wips sound so interesting!! but if i had to ask about just one, what's “die middag als een open wond” ? :)

Overly meandering response to this here :)

ears perked up like a dog's when i saw apokastasis ichmfs and go in fear of the sun in there... are you still working on them? would love to hear about die middag als een open wond...

I poke at these every so often still because they've got so much narrative meat to them that it would be a waste to abandon them, you know?

Die middag als een open wond (english: that noontime like an open wound) is kind of a very very refashioned version of I Could Hear My Father Sing that's more grounded in the version of the Netherlands I've seen in person than the version I'd made up in my head before I lived here. It has a consistently darker, more plain and muted tone than how I'd written ICHMFS, and centers on different characters and different familial dynamics (this fic centers on Mathieu van der Poel/Christoph Roodhooft, and focuses more on the later rehabilitation of his relationship with his brother David after the disintegration of the family).

For those who followed me after my F1 stint, the short form of ICHMFS is 1) Jos sexually abuses Max, kills himself when he is confronted by Sophie with the prospect of being caught, 2) a couple of years later, Sophie begins dating Daniel who moves in two years after that, 3) Daniel grooms Max, and at 17, they run away when Sophie finds out about their relationship, 4) after a stretch of horrible mental health, they manage to build a life, marry in the early 00s, and adopt a daughter, 5) the daughter finds out in her late teens, confronts Daniel who dies in the ensuing few months, and she, Max, and Sophie are left to pick up the pieces and reconcile.

More symbolic hand-waves and explanations of the differences below if that's interesting at all.

In the NL, autumn-through-early spring is all brown and gray in the cities and even small towns with few reprieves of bright color. I haven't seen many personal gardens at all compared to the US. And then in the spring you get the green you've been praying for. The countryside is all green. It's the only real "color" to speak of, and it's mind numbingly vibrant. I'm a storyteller with a strong emphasis on color, so it's probably one of the biggest notable differences I lean into with this new version.

More than that though, it's the tone, which really doesn't serve the setting I'm trying to create, which is much deeper isolation with regard to Mathieu in die middag als een open wond. The method of suicide is more brutal, the surrounding not a tightly coiled small town with everyone pressed ear to ear (like the Verstappens and Schumachers in ICHMFS). They're in the Kapellenbos, and while neighbors aren't too far everyone takes pains to feel like they're far from each other. There are cultivated rows of enormous trees in front of the houses, hedgerows. Mathieu is a restless and difficult child frustrated by what is being done to him, and after his father's death, he is annoyed by all the grief. The Mathieu that Christoph abuses is a vulnerable and angry Mathieu prone to age-inappropriate self directed tantrums (biting his hands, hitting his thighs and stomach). He is easily cowed by praise about his athletics. It's the only place that gives him adequate direction.

Anyway, a small bit of what I'm trying to show:

Additionally, despite Max being a man, ICHMFS is ultimately a 3-generation mother-daughter story, with his daughter Mirjam coping with the reality of her parents and the pains her father suffered, pains that were necessary for the life she knows now. Mirjam had up to that point largely only known a kind home life.

Die middag is ultimately about brothers and the ugly bits of two siblings experiencing a trauma very differently. Mathieu, who was sexually abused, is angry and indifferent to his father's death, and later resistant to demands, constantly dissatisfied, self destructive, with unbearable ambition (that drives him to a career ending injury at 18). David resents how Mathieu draws attention, doesn't grieve normally, for reasons he can't understand. How he does better despite his unruliness. And eventually, for not only tearing the family apart, but for leaving him behind to clean up the mess without ever contacting him. In their mid to late twenties, they're reconciling. To me, that's the emotional meat of the story.