Category: WIP Wednesday

SPOILERY little WIP (wip it like you stole it eyy)

Hope ZaneWIP Wednesday

But in this, even Iseult is surprised—she gives birth not to one babe, but to two.

All told, her birth is a strange and involved affair.

There are cunning folk that Iseult has kept in touch with, and even those of the fey courts have a hand.

They all turn up at the doors of Domhan Mhín, one after another, and Jenny is sore beside herself. After the first, second, and third visitors come, Iseult thinks that Jenny will start turning them away at the door.

Certainly that’s the way it seems as she stands poised there, dressed in cursed coins with her hair ringing her head like a fury, barring the entrance.

“We come to visit the mother and child,” one fey man who Iseult does not recognize says.

He is stooped and hunched, with a kind of wheedling voice. He carries a satchel that bulges oddly. It stops when he compresses it in his hands, as if cowed, but then soon after starts up again. To watch it is to feel strangely and vaguely ill.

“I didn’t ask what you were doing here,” Jenny says, her already strong voice rising and growing tarter. “I asked what that has to do with me.”

WIP Saturday cause fuck it, we ball

Hope ZaneWIP Wednesday

Caerlon is only nice if you think living in the bottom of a hollowed-out glass bottom boat is nice.

If you don’t ever want to go back. If you’re that kind of bitch.

Soldier is that kind of bitch.

She has a scar over her lip, right in the middle, splitting it like a cupid’s bow. Harlot has pretty, slivered silverfish scars crisscrossing all up and down her arms. Ghostly white—pale, like the moon.

Soldier’s scars are all ugly. She doesn’t have flesh that heals well. Her body is aggressive, scar tissue like an overachiever, knotted and red and welty as if daring the world to try to split it again.

that boy you once loved so much

Hope ZaneWIP Wednesday

Excerpts from a new book, ch. 3

Far away, on the other side of campus, a man with long, slender legs and a head full of mussed blue hair stirs. He groans faintly, and the body beside him stirs with him, making an inquisitive sound while still mostly sunk in slumber, barely waking up.

Robin reaches out and pats him a few times with his eyes still slitted shut—

Nothing to see here, just go back to bed.

Robin groans as he dredges himself back to the land of the living. It hurts waking up. The sunlight stings his eyes, and he has to practically force them open.

“Where you goin’, baby?” a sweet voice slurs behind him.

“Nowhere,” Robin says. “Keep dreaming.”

It could come off a little acerbic, but the alpha in bed takes it as sweet pillow talk. He rumbles slightly and shoves his face back into his pillow. His hair is a sandy blond color, wavy and tousled with sleep, and his sheets are clean for a college student’s—Robin’s insistence. He’s not going to sleep somewhere with a dirty bed.

Blue-haired Robin touches his slender feet down to the ground, recoiling slightly at the chill. He looks like a towheaded swan as he glides around the small and messy room, unselfconscious with all of his smooth, clear skin on display—the slender and shapely line of his back, his smooth and clean limbs. It’s still dark with early morning, but Robin’s eyes have always been good. He fishes around in the pockets of the alpha’s pants until he finds a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

He opens the window, letting in a refreshing trace of early morning air that blows the haze of sex and pheromones away.

The sun is just starting to rise over the grand, old pine trees that line the campus, touching the dew-swept grass with orange.

Robin doesn’t pay any special attention to it. His eyes rove past it, settling on the horizon while he smokes his cigarette calmly.

He purses his lips, blowing another puff of smoke off the window. The white smoke rises, trailing lazily like a dragon’s plume up to the sky.

“Baby?” the voice calls when he’s almost finished with his cigarette, lightly wheedling with sleep. That tangled mess of sandy blond hair peeks up from the bed. “Baby, it’s cold. Shut the window and come back to bed.”

“Coming,” Robin says lightly.

He finishes the last of his cigarette before stubbing it out on the window sill.

He does leave the window open, but he goes back to bed to warm his companion with his body.

Not a Short Story

Hope ZaneGeneral

So the Illness that I mentioned last week continued. Woof. Somewhere in all that fever-brained mess, I decided to write a short story. It’s… not really turning out to be a short story.

Well, I have my hopes, but it seems to be turning into a novel, like all things tend to do. Fairytale started as ostensibly a short story, and now I’m 100k in the thick of it. It’s funny, this was supposed to be a quick smut fic, but as I started writing the characters, there was just so much more to them. I think I tend to write long because I get curious. Curious about who these people are, what happened to them, and what’s going to happen to them. You know how it goes.

Anyway, it’s interesting because I don’t think this is a story I could have started except when I was so sick that I couldn’t possibly give a fuck about anything besides clawing onto my continued existence. Talking about art school is kind of funny that way, and it is about art school—about two painters.

Here’s a little snippet of it. I’m thinking of putting it up on my Patreon for patrons to read, and that might be the only place it lives until I have enough short stories to put together a collection.

Heechul wakes in the night with his heart pounding. He doesn’t know what time it is. Kaoru’s room is an unfamiliar place, and there are no clocks. He could have been sleeping for a few minutes or a few hours.

He startles a little when he feels a warm, heavy body beside him, its heat leaching into his own.

Of course it’s Kaoru. Who else would it be? Even so, it takes a while for Heechul’s heart to calm down.

He doesn’t have nightmares, that he knows of. Or at least, not nightmares in the way anyone else can talk about them. Since he was little, he’s often woken feeling frightened. And how do you talk about that?