Eat

Friends, if you've enjoyed the work of the many and wonderful fine authors on this website, then I have something for you. The Cohost Writer's Salon Zine is a small sampling of the work of many of the truly wonderful authors here, and is now available for free on itch.io. You can print it out and have a little physical artifact of this place, in half-page zine form! Or you can just download the pdf and read it on your device.

I spent a lot of time trying to get it to look nice, but ultimately the people who contributed to it spent a whole lot more time writing these wonderful pieces. We, collectively, sincerely hope that you enjoy it.

Hey y'all, we made a zine!

By which I mean Relia made a zine and it includes writing by a whole bunch of extremely cool cohost writers (including me). I think the selection captures the best of what was a really remarkable little scene, not least for how strongly it was dominated by truly complex WLW stories. Not everything here is WLW but if you want some real sad and/or angry girls, this is the anthology for you!

(huge huge huge thanks to Relia for organising all of this)

I feel like I've seen a few people expressing incredulity or bemusement over this idea that Campster describes up there that every story is a distinct real universe into which the medium by which it is told provides some sort of metaphysical window - which, to be clear, yes, it's an idea that has become powerful in the Age Of The Fanwiki and yes, it's a bad thing (and yes, the other person in the screencap is just wasting words at best)

but also this reaction of 'where did this come from?' makes me feel crazy because I remember literally hearing this as orthodoxy in genre writer training like fifteen years ago. Folks presenting themselves as professional genre writers who were to some degree sufficiently expert on their craft to teach or blog or podcast to others about it straightforwardly advocated this as a conceptual approach to worldbuilding (I am terrified to look back at the - often in retrospect deeply misguided - blog I kept at the time, because among other things I'm sure I'll see myself blithely repeating the idea too).

It maybe wasn't ubiquitous advice in the way that 'kill your darlings' and 'show don't tell' were at the time, but it was certainly widespread among fantasy and sci-fi authors that I was paying attention to. I was fully sold (obviously I've changed my mind since, for many reasons). So I'm like, was I just listening to different podcasts to other folks? Was this not a piece of advice that ever spread beyond the kinds of people (yours truly) who obsessively collected writing advice from specific sources? Is this a diet coke and mentos thing that no-one's written a widely-read Post about anywhere?

Idk that I have the sources at my fingertips to evidence what I'm remembering, especially given how much decay has affected Stuff On The Internet From Fifteen Years Ago (and also, personally, I'd be more interested in writing about why I think this attitude of 'the fictional world is real Somewhere' was so useful to writer training in that period), but I can't have just confabulated this whole thing, can I??? Please???

Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig turning point in today's chapter of The Dragon Racer. Can't have a noirish PI, even a disaster gay one, running around poking at things without him eventually stirring up trouble...

sometimes I worry that I'm not really into my more out-there kinks (obviously, links go to lewd- or lewd-adjacent writings), but then I remember things like today's episode of The Dragon Racer, which opens with a paragraph describing an especially fancy dining room and which might be the piece of this entire 200k-word story that feels most sensual and erotic to me.

Now, granted, the bar for that is low, The Dragon Racer is not a story with much sex in (there was very limited room, given the pining quota), but still, this scene feels like slipping into or out of a slinky black minidress in an expensive hotel room with the lights down low and a finger of absurdly overpriced spirit in a glass with lipstick on the rim just placed down on the dresser.

Well, ok, I've never done any of that stuff, it feels like how perfume adverts are supposed to suggest all that feels. Probably dresses like that are pretty uncomfortable when they actually fit tightly enough to have the intended effect.

ANYWAY

Right now, TDR is coming up to some of my favourite stuff in the run, especially the rest of this week; please consider checking it out, I promise it has more to offer than just sexy(?) tableware: