heads up seven up

thank uuu for the tag @encrucijada <3

okay for novel writing technically the last thing i wrote was edits (not even with the intention of editing really just playing around) on the until heaven opening (which is like. months old now but i'm not ready to actually draft the story so i keep quietly tinkering with the same set of 300 words and they don't feel first draft-y anymore) and the last thing i drafted was the lover boy opening so i'm just going to share both hehe 🫶 (also because the difference in sentence structure and thus length is sooooo fun to me)  

from lover boy:

“I’m good.” The man smiles like he believes him. He unzips and starts rummaging through a brown backpack and feels a need to keep a stream of words as he does so, fill the beachy quiet. How he and his friend — his best friend — had just got into San Francisco this morning. How they haven't slept and how they'd had been planning it for months, thinking about it for years, dreaming about it, how they stargazed the skyline from a gas station last night and couldn’t believe they had finally made it. Beau props himself up onto his elbows, half-listening, the man’s voice starting to blend into the waves, until he produces a Polaroid camera. “Could you get a photo of us, underneath the lights?.”

from until heaven (cw paternal death and vomit mention):

Joanne likes big parties, likes please, invite everyone! parties, likes what she calls chandelier parties: a self-defined philosophy that everyone’s lives would benefit from frequent doses of glamour, like a chandelier over an everyday dinner table. Felix has little experience with glamour; he'd brought a lemon risotto and gotten so wine drunk that, for a dizzy moment, he felt twenty-one again. He does not remember the party. All he knows is that he’s still drunk – in that half-melted, sludgy way that wine stays in you – and that right now, on the other side of the city, his sister is waiting for him because their father is dead and instead he’s here, stuck in a suburb he could never afford to live in, where he doesn’t know the way home and is still wine drunk with cherry-coloured blots down the front of his white button up which had, at some point unknown to him, become half undone. He knows that his headache is quietly growing vicious and he should take off his headphones, but they’re singing about Heaven and Las Vegas again – two places he has never been – and he knows that at some point, still unknown to him, his father died, and maybe that means he’s now stuck in Heaven or Las Vegas or somewhere in between. Or maybe that means he’ll just be everywhere, in the rain on Felix’s face and the ache behind his eyelids, and that’s how it’ll stay. It had been these revelations that woke him up before anyone else, on the couch of a seventies style conversation pit, dazed and then suddenly terrified, and it had been this terror that drove him to the bathroom because he thought he would vomit, but then didn't, and then noticed the roof was accessible through the window — which was when the cactus casualty took place — and now he's lying here, in the rain, all from a sudden and dire need for air.

tagging w/ no pressure @onomatopiya @musingsbycaitlin @filmografo and anyone who wants to be tagged!