Sweet Little Lies
[ID: The title of the story, Sweet Little Lies, written in a pink to yellow gradient over a picture of various glass jars filled with assorted, colorful candies. All other images in this post are decorative dividers showing a row of round, white, flat candies with a pink heart in the middle. End ID]
“I don’t want to keep you from working. Which is what I assume you were doing before I came in, not that it’s any of my business what you’re doing back there.” He nodded in the direction of the backroom, aware that he was talking too much. Again. “If you’re worried about leaving me alone up front, I can stand in the doorway and keep in your line of sight.”
“My line of sight, huh.” A moment of silence settled between them in which the woman inclined her head. “I wouldn’t mind some company,” she then said. “Name’s Aurelia, by the way.”
“Laurent,” Laurent said before he remembered that he should not have given her his real name. Whatever. He was only here to buy some candy, right? “Pleased to meet you.”
📖 Synopsis
Aurelia’s days are filled with work. A charming stranger with a voice like soft caramel is a welcome distraction, even though she has more to worry about than the question of whether his lips are as sweet as his words. Someone is trying to put her out of business, and their methods keep escalating.
Laurent is scouting a target for his best friend’s heist when he dives into a candy store to avoid being spotted by the guards. What starts as an attempt to kill some time ends with his heart lost to the store owner’s warm smile. He wants to see her again but returning to the scene of the crime is playing with fire.
Fortunately, Laurent is a fire mage.
📖 About
Genre: Fantasy romance
POV: Third person past tense, split POV
Word Count: 37k
Status: Editing and formatting
Content Warnings: Genre-typical violence, off-screen deaths. That's it. That's the warnings.
Vibes: dark wooden shelves filled with glass jars / the smell of warm sugar / a bloody handprint on the window / blueberry muffins and lavender tea / stolen touches between fire and ice / a rainbow of candies / dancing slowly at a grand ball
Other Things:
Moodboard | Character Art by @bumblingdragon | Rainbow Tag
📖 Cast
Aurelia
“I don’t believe a single word you say, Mister Beaufort.”
As a candy-smith, Aurelia is a master of her craft, and her store a paradise filled everything from fruit drops to rainbow lollipops. She doesn't need much to be happy: good friends, a nice cup of tea, and a stranger who promises to get rid of the man trying to destroy her life.
Laurent
“Am I too late to witness the miracle of rainbow candy making?”
Accountant by day and fence by night, Laurent is used to lying, and his charm has saved him more often than his magic has. He doesn’t like candy, but he will try every single flavor in this store if it means he gets to spend more time with the owner who stole his heart.
📖 Tags
I haven't posted much about this yet, but the few tags that exist are:
#wip: lies
#Laurent is a guy to count on
#Aurelia is a sweetheart
Currently aiming for a mid-May release, which would give me two months for editing and formatting. Fingers crossed.
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i really love the rivalry that forms between two e-liters on different teams in splatoon. something about this matchup is inherently fun to me; it's a very unique experience that comes from playing the weapon with the longest range in the game.
you're unreachable. you're a dominating presence, the anchor to keep your teammates afloat. the battlefield is yours to watch over. your laser sight line sees all, aiding your teammates from a place of safety.
even as you snipe the frontliners who challenge you and your teammates, there's always one person who remains. they're just like you. another who pressures the enemy from afar, intimidating those who dare to push further. they're always within your sight, as are you to them.
your teammates want them splatted. and so do you. the rivalry begins.
it's about the refusal to get in range of them. the refusal to give up the space you control to the other e-liter. the dedication to staying alive for your team.
in spite of all these reasons to live, there's an undeniable temptation to throw yourselves at them. to try and surprise them with your superior range in a way your teammates can't. it's the ego of believing that you can get a good shot at them.
and so it becomes a dance, with your pride on the line. a dance to stay out of range of the other, alternating shots at each other as you rotate around the map. peeking out of cover, jumping behind blocks at the chance to splat them. any minute now, they'll slip up.
but you know that it's not that easy. after all, they know your tricks, and practiced the same techniques themselves.
they've splatted you. it's a death more embarrassing than letting a frontliner slip into your perch unnoticed. you overstepped. and yet, you can't help but respect them. their aim was just better than yours in that moment.
you're back behind cover. you find an opening, and jump over the block to shoot your shot. you've splatted them. more than any other opponent, you've watched and studied their positioning like a hawk, all for this moment.
and the cycle begins again. (until you pick a different weapon on the weapon select screen.)
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I am sorry you've been harrassed by terfs, but the way you are currently trying to weed them out seems a bit misguided. As in, the vast majority of terfs are in fact ok with big hairy CIS men. The so-called men they are actively hating are trans women/transfem people. So by acting like you proclaiming your love to big hairy dudes is the best terf-repellant you seem to be missing the point at best.
i'd love to actually respond to your concerns or whatever the hell it was that you were trying to convey with this ask, but it has almost no basis in reality so i literally cant.
thats the one statement on how effective i think the banners are that has left my queue so far. which is: i hope it works but also have literally 2 other backup plans already in case it does not. i dont know why youre calling that "acting like [me] proclaiming [my] love to big hairy dudes is the best terf-repellant", because thats wildly off target from what i have actually said at any point. everything else youve said is also pretty much either dead wrong or ignorant, so im getting the feeling that you not reading has been a problem for a while.
(ive also not mentioned terfs this entire time--ive been talking about radfems and using the word radfems. they're not the same thing although there's large overlap. so like. thats strike two for zero reading comprehension, buddy. cause you are literally not talking about the group im talking about and youre also inventing whole new sentences that i didnt say.)
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Absolutely wheezing at the idea that a writer ~might not know~ that what they're writing is ~bad irl~. How fucking condescending is that? As someone who mostly creates and consumes horror media, my perspective might be a little skewed- but c'mon, people KNOW that dubcon/gaslighting/torture/murder/&c is not okay in real life. Inadequately tagged fic (& media which deals with these topics poorly) might well be a problem, but people still know the TOPICS are morally bad (& illegal) & not ok irl
I really weighed whether to give your mockery a platform on my blog, so I might still delete this response later, but I'm just going to say a few things.
Firstly, my post was around people having irrational emotoinal responses and having subsequent thoughts that try to make sense of those emotional responses. This isn't really about what the author knows, it's about the emotional response. (But even then, anon, abusers exist in fandom, abusers write fic, and it's very naive to not know this). At any rate, my whole point was that if an author is tagging or warning, they generally know, lol. But there's reasons readers might not know that.
Since my post was solely about reader response I'm going to address the readers who don't know or realise something in the moment, because they're having an irrational emotional response.
Readers having emotional responses to something that squicks them or hits them the wrong way are rarely rational and based in what people 'know.' You might want to research emotions and emotional responses in order to understand this better.
Secondly, there are actually some fairly prevalent reasons why people may be unable to give others the benefit of the doubt in the moment and assume that the author knows what they know (not least: fic authors are often complete strangers). Some of those reasons are as simple as 'I've been raised to be wary of other people and what they believe.' But others include having been abused themselves, or alternatively, knowing that abusers and rapists write fiction and live in the world among us, and sometimes having a moment where they're just not sure based off what they've just read. (It's nice to assume that not everyone thinks abuse is okay, but it's a lot harder to assume that once you've been abused by someone you know, you might want to apply some compassion to other people on this - folks who are paranoid of others often have reasons for doing so, even though that never excuses abuse or bullying in turn).
At any rate, I can think of a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't automatically just 'know' something in the moment, especially if they've been triggered or squicked (which I mention in my post). It doesn't excuse bullying or abuse, which I say in my post, but the emotions themselves and the irrational thoughts they can lead to aren't bad by default - that's part of the normal human experience, you're having it yourself right now anon - that's an attempt the brain makes to protect the person who's just had that experience. After that, we make a choice re: our behaviours.
Your perspective is a little skewed, anon, simply because you've made the mistake of assuming everyone must think the same way you do - but not everyone has had the same experiences, upbringing and education you've had. And vice versa. Someone who has been abused by someone in fandom, for example, may struggle to assume benefit of the doubt in certain circumstances where something - the person or product - reminds them of that abuse.
You might want to research the cognitive impacts that abuse and interpersonal trauma have on people, anon, especially if you mostly create and consume horror media, because that is pretty important in the understanding of some horror. This struggle doesn't make their behaviours right if they're hurting others, but judging folks for not knowing what you do, or for the things that make them uncomfortable is rude and patronising.
It bothers me that you can't conceive of a world where folks might have frankly understandable but strong and irrational emotional responses to fictional content. If you can accept that for example, some horror will make people scared or too unable to engage with it (can you accept this?), even if they do know it's not real, then I think this is a concept you do foundationally understand, and are just not applying to this situation, perhaps because it disturbs you to think that some people don't just know this by default. I don't know.
Finally, given you felt the urge to come into a complete stranger's inbox and speak derisively and with open mockery towards a bunch of folks who don't make the same assumptions you do, or have the same knowledge base that you do, it's fairly obvious that you yourself know exactly what it's like to engage in behaviours based off irrational emotional responses. So maybe you have more in common with the people you're mocking than you think? Food for thought.
You probably know - when you stop and think about it - that there are many reasons why people may not 'know' or be able to assume what you know in this circumstance, but if you don't:
Highly recommend you do deeper dives into aversive emotional responses and emotions, and also look into how abuse and trauma can cognitively affect some people.
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