notbecauseofvictories:

notbecauseofvictories:

@anghraine tagged me in the “post-a-bit-of-something-you’re-working-on” meme, so for your previewing pleasure, here’s the opening scene of the Devil Went Down to Georgia (And Then Went Down On Johnny) fic:

He does try the play the goddamn thing once or twice.

But a fiddle of gold is heavy as shit, and the sound’s all wrong—loveless, and cold as Hell, with vicious strings that split Johnny’s fingers when he plays. (There’s never any blood when he looks, and Johnny wonders if it’s drinking him up, dry; leaving scars at his fingertips and an ache in his hand that won’t quite ease. Then again, it’s the Devil’s instrument; it can probably do any evil thing it likes.)

In the end, he loosens the bow-hair and puts the thing away in a battered, borrowed case, goes back to playing his box maple. Wood is living, it breathes and breaks; swells like your best girl’s clit under your tongue, shivers like a warm wind through leaves. Wood remembers the sun, wants to sing about it.

There’s nothing gold wants to sing about, except being dead.

Johnny’s playing the maple that night at the Bellows Club—well, used to be ‘Club’ until the owner’s second wife decided they were destined for better things, had it rechristened ‘Café’. The Tuesday-night regulars are the same, though, and they whistle or lazily applaud when he finishes his set, greet him by name after he’s put the fiddle away and come down off that high-as-Heaven stage. Johnny wades out among them to make a little small talk, then wanders his way to the bar.

The Devil is waiting for him there.

“Do you not like my gift, Johnny?” the Devil asks, smiling. He’s handsomer than Johnny remembers, but then Johnny supposes every man is better-looking on his own turf. (His grandmother always said that since Babel, the Devil claimed every spit of land taller than two stories. And here, among the old cigarette butts and sin, it’s likely to be true.)

The Devil smells of mint gum, something rotten underneath.

“Your gift?” Johnny laughs. “The way I remember, you lost it to me.”

“Fair and square,” the Devil says, still smiling.

so, update, this absolute motherfucker is going to be over 15k by the time I’m done, I am at 13.5k and they haven’t even made out yet

waxjism:

“I remember the turning point moment. I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my roommates, and it went into a backstory flashback set in high medieval Germany. ”Why are you sighing?” one asked, noticing that I’d laid back and deflated rather gloomily. I answered: ”She’s not of sufficiently high social status to have domesticated rabbits in Northern Europe in that century. But I guess it’s not fair to press a point since the research on that hasn’t been published yet.” It made me laugh, also made me think about how much I don’t know, since I hadn’t known that a week before. For all the visible mistakes in these shows, there are even more invisible mistakes that I make myself because of infinite details historians haven’t figured out yet, and possibly never will. There are thousands of artifacts in museums whose purposes we don’t know. There are bits of period clothing whose functions are utter mysteries. There are entire professions that used to exist that we now barely understand. No history is accurate, not even the very best we have.”

— How History Can Be Used in Fiction – Ada Palmer (via smokeandsong)

hexmaniacciaran:

witchgays:

does anyone actually know what happened at the salem witch trials or do they just pull it out of their asses

Goodie Proctor threw the first brick at Salem

a-queer-seminarian:

you tell me King James’ Bible
is the one true Bible, and that
it condemns me unequivocally.
but what do you know of King
James?

do you know he was like me?
do you know he had a passageway
connecting his chamber to his lover’s
do you know he said “David had
his Jonathon, and I have my George”
do you know that David was like me? that Jonathon was like
me?

and do you know, do you
understand that you
can never stomp out,
you can never ever quell
what is queer in the Body of
Christ

for that queerness sings from
every page of that book you and I both call good
and pumps through the blood of so
many breathing bodies
that I and our God call Good

and where you point at dry pages
and see only dry bones for me
God points and says look! these bones shall live!
So I live.

– a scrapped fragment from a poem i wrote for an assignment on biblical authority