sat down tonight and wrote most of a first draft at a guide ahead essay. I think I might delete it. it… it’s not… capturing it yet.

Update 14/03/2023

Good evening!

You can get these updates directly to your inbox here.

That glorious time of the year is so very nearly upon us, and with that in mind, the prompts for this year's Monstrous May have now been released!

I started running Monstrous May in 2021, so this is my third year putting a prompt list together with a monstrous prompt for every day of the month of May! There's a bit more focus on monsterfuckery this year than previous years, and I'm excited to see what comes from the prompts. :)

Here's the prompt post on Tumblr.

If you're planning on running any events or tie-in things alongside Monstrous May, please reach out and let me know via my Tumblr asks or via email, so I can promo you and share your schedule!

During the month of May I always scroll through the tags and share a lot of the artwork, but for events and tie-in things I'm more than happy to promo them in advance, such as through these regular updates, as well as sharing them directly.

Some media recs for this week:

Cocaine Bear (2023, dir. Elizabeth Banks) - Cocaine Bear is a feminist blockbuster, it is CAMP, it is perfection. Is Cocaine Bear a girlboss? Yes. Of course she is. How could you even ask that question? This movie has everything: a big fucking bear, 80s camp gay guys, rainbow gym bags, character actress Margo Martindale, gratutious gore, a big fucking bear's actual vulva directly to a man's face, that hot white dude with the moustache that does the customer service suffering TikToks, a cute little puppy with a pink bow, did I mention the big fucking bear? Did I mention that the bear is on a fuckton of cocaine, did I mention that she is a working mother and that her cubs are also on cocaine, did I mention that these two (human) thirteen year olds also literally do cocaine by the teaspoon and I've never envied a fictional character more? Please watch Cocaine Bear. It's the only movie that's ever mattered.

Final Fantasy XII (OG release 2006) - I've just started replaying FFXII to wash the terrible taste of God of War: Ragnarok (2022) out of my mouth, because GOW pissed me off with how poor its writing was toward the end, and I want to put myself back into a videogame that makes me love videogames rather than hate them.

I'm hoping to do some more writing about FFXII in the next few weeks because I love it to pieces and I've played it through time after time, played hundreds of hours - it's my favourite of the Final Fantasy narratives, and while I do have a lot of criticism of it, it just really delves into identity around nation and culture and war and imperialism - as well as the ethics around nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction - that I just fucking love. If you haven't played it before, I totally recommend it!

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy (2022) - I finished this earlier today, and I wanted to particularly recommend the audiobook, which is very well-written by the author. This book is super heavy hitting, delves a lot into emotional abuse and religious trauma, eating disorders, and a lot of the lack of agency McCurdy had around her life as a child actress and her life in general. If you can handle the subject matter, I do absolutely recommend it as a read.

New Works Published

Erotic Short: Unethical Experimentation

An apothecary captures a fairy to... make use of.

2.3k. Rated E, cis M/trans M. Silly and utterly horrible porn - a fairy is captured and used as a fucksleeve by an apothecary! He absolutely loves it!

Featuring size difference with macro/micro, implied body transformation, stretchy skin, belly bulging, objectification, overstimulation, and predicament bondage.

On Medium / / On Patreon

Mini Essay: Do I have to be masculine to be a top?

A few thousand words digging into conflation of gender identities with sexual positioning and actions, going through the steps of unpacking and untangling those gendered rules and conventions within one's own head and one's own biases.

On Tumblr / / On Medium

Book Review: A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

I have not had much opportunity to read for fun since graduating college this spring. “Fun” is a very subjective word here, mostly referring to picking something not necessarily related to academia but laced with an underwritten tension of reading something relevant to current events. I ended up borrowing an ebook copy of A Good Neighborhood somewhat at random. I was not looking for anything “serious,” but at the same time, reading with a disconnection to literature’s political implications makes reading for fun—particularly after recently graduating with a degree in English—nearly impossible. Therefore, my conclusions from reading this novel reflect the often simultaneous pros and cons of producing racial discourse. A Good Neighborhood deals in racial politics as its explicit subject, but the narrative itself is also deeply embedded in unavoidable racial politics that may be detrimental to the issues it attempts to illuminate.

The story follows two families in a North Carolinian suburb. One family consists of widowed mother, Valerie, a professor of ecology, and her son Xavier, a freshly-graduated teen preparing to pursue his promising career in music at a school in San Francisco. Next door, the Whitman family has recently moved into their custom-built house: Julia, mother of teenage daughter Juniper, who married wealthy HVAC business-owner Brad and added their grade-school age daughter Lily. It is important to note that Valerie is black, her son Xavier being mixed (but for all intents and purposes, counted as black by society), while the Whitmans are white. Valerie sues Brad for damage caused during the construction of the Whitmans’ new home to the roots of her massive, ancient oak tree; at the same time, the teenagers, Xavier and Juniper, fall in love. The racial politics of the book are evident from the start, with Brad, for example, appearing to assume Xavier is hired help as he does yard work for his mother. Over the course of the novel, these racial dynamics escalate into the main conflict, and the story ends in tragedy.

It is impossible to understand the novel’s complexity without also understanding the circumstances under which the novel was written. Reading the beginning acknowledgements reveals some important information about the author: first, she is white, and second, she wrote this novel for its relevancy to current issues in the hopes of spurring conversation about race. I would be interested to have had the experience of reading the novel without knowing such information first. Whatever the case, this story about racial politics is itself steeped in the racial politics which birthed it.

The novel exhibits an awareness of the many dimensions of power. For example, race, class, education, gender, and life experience all compound to complicate relations between the families. For example, Julia Whitman and her daughter Juniper both experienced a large class jump when Julia married Brad. Julia used these newfound opportunities to place Juniper in a religious program meant to support teenage girls in the way that religious programs often do: emphasizing traditional gender roles and conducting ceremonies such as making a purity vow with her stepfather Brad. We also see that Valerie and her son deviate from the poor urban stereotype often associated with POC: Valerie is a single black mother working as a college professor in STEM, and Xavier has received a generous scholarship to pursue his love of music at a school in San Francisco.

And yet, some of these aspects can feel heavy-handed. Is Xavier portrayed as a “good kid” because of author bias toward what constitutes the “proper conduct” of a POC in society? Does he obtain a scholarship because, as the societal narrative goes, hard work always pays off (no matter your race or privilege)? Readers cannot be certain, but the questions remain. These multi-faceted power dynamics, on the one hand, capture the complexities that arise from conflict, as they do in real life. On the other hand, the presence of these traits may at times reduce characters to tokens, making them feel more like the sum of their traits (as given to them by a white author) rather than complex characters.

The narration style of the novel provides an interesting perspective into racial tension. Written in the collective first person perspective “we,” it is the titular neighborhood that narrates the story. The omnipresent perspective is offset by explicit reminders that neighborhood, despite its collective and wide perspective, is ultimately limited by the boundaries of privilege and the limitations of the human perspective. Though at times the narrative seems to provide a neutral understanding of the situation, we are reminded that this neutrality is not total: the narrative perspective exemplifies the collective consciousness of white society when faced with issues of race. This type of narrative perspective enables the narrative to draw explicit attention to overt and covert racism in ways which feel a bit more organic than if an impersonal third-person narrative were to suddenly launch into an explanation about racism.

There are pros and cons to explicit acknowledgement of racism in narrative: on the one hand, racism often acts very covertly, and pointing it out explicitly means one is aware of the narrative they are narrating/writing and wants to make their readers aware of the issue rather than hoping (white) people will pick up on it. On the other hand, it may make the writing feel inauthentic, a moral lesson to be conveyed, which the collective narrative style mitigates but does not do away with altogether. The novel’s resigned ending feels intimidated by its own implications, edging into the all-too-common resolution of “let us witness the tragedy inherent in being black and use it to make us all more conscientious people.” Such a resolution leaves too much at stake for very real issues of systemic racism and violence, sacrificing the individual for the sake of the whole and reproducing the violence it attempts to combat.

When I was about halfway through the novel, I was chatting with a friend who suggested we start a book club. Because I was reading A Good Neighborhood, I suggested this novel. Upon completing the novel, I feel like I would genuinely discourage my friend from reading this book. What concerns me about this specific novel is that this novel’s reality is not what we need right now, especially in the realm of fiction. Not that creating a fictional racism-free world is the answer—such a perspective exemplifies white desire to simply make the problem go away, to rectify without facing reality—but one must ask the question about how effective repeatedly reiterating the violence enacted on black bodies is in the fiction genre. Coupled with the fact that most readers may not dwell on the complexities of the internal narrative and the external politics that produced it, I do not feel the book is productive for racial discourse and runs a high risk of only adding to the trauma that our society forces black persons to confront daily, ultimately desensitizing us to reality. Though there are black characters and references and quotes to the work of famous black activists, the book lacks a black voice, which I believe it what we need most right now.

I would not prioritize this book on your to-read list. If you choose to read this book, make sure you do not read it in a vacuum. Read what other people—especially POC—have to say about such books. Better yet, read novels and essays by POC. If you are looking to understand racism through literature, there are far better options. This book may serve better as an example of how white writers attempt to talk about race with varying degrees of success.

I understand that this is a difficult subject matter to handle, and I understand that a novel cannot cover everything. However, I think considering all the facets of the narrative, and the circumstances which produced the narrative, is what ultimately produces a productive reading. I am just unsure how many people will have the time or knowledge to do such work, and therefore would recommend other works before this one.

Check out this book on Goodreads