One of my favorite tricks for designing alien species/cultures is to take a real animal with an interesting lifecycle and think about what that biology would translate to if they had human intelligence

Example: silk moths as a base species

Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.

Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.

Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.

Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.

Between mating seasons, their culture is extremely food-oriented, because everyone is growing and silkworms eat nigh constantly. They spend most of their lives outdoors but sleep and shelter from bad weather in large family dwellings made from wood and the remains of the silk cocoons of prior generations.

everyone is really vibing with the silkworm aliens I see

okay but "the symbolism is Real and Trying to Kill You" is my favorite kind of symbolism

like yeah the monster is a representation of your unresolved trauma and guilt and a manifestation of the sins of your past but it's also a real creature and it's going to fucking Get you

i like sailing myths and superstitions because most of them can be boiled down to "if the ocean doesn't like you it will chew you up and spit out your bones. and if it really loves you it will swallow you whole and never let you go. good luck 👍"

inside of you there are two wolves.

one is fighting to have you write the new sci-fi fantasy project. the other is fighting for you to write the small town mystery project.

and then there is a third wolf howling loud that you should write the gay eldritch cowboy project. and this is a lie, there are multiple wolves inside you all trying to get you to write fifteen different things.

WE ARE LIVING THE SAME STRUGGLE YOU ARE NOT ALONE SOLDIER

and then there is the most dangerous wolf of all. its saying you should write all of them as the same project.

there's strange secrets in this small town colony, we've been abandoned on this foreign planet, thrust into a world of bizarre magic and wild beasts that only storybooks could warn us of. they're withholding resources unless we can get results to show its worth bringing more people in, so we're gonna have to get to work. we follow a ship engineer whose ship has been possessed by a horse god and the grizzled and mysterious merc, we don't really know why he got brought into this project, but he seems to be looking for something, something that we have been told not to find.

Text: My family breeds monsters to sell to the Hunt. When a prophet says the Queen will die in one’s jaws, they come to slaughter them all, and us for good measure. I escape, with one newborn.

God I'm a sucker for characters who are so utterly loyal to someone that they're completely unhinged. Characters who have no moral compass except their overwhelming devotion to whoever they've chosen to listen to. That's the good shit

unmatched ship dynamic: "i've done terrible things in the past" x "all i care about is who you are in the present"

The whole “we both know we’re on borrowed time but we fall for each other anyways” trope is one the most romantic things ever and here’s why:

That trope is basically saying “I know this will break my heart and I know I will never fully recover from this, what’s more I know if I walk away now this will only be an occasional twinge in my heart and nothing more. But for YOU I’m willing to suffer that passion and the heartache it brings, for our short time together I’m willing to spend the rest of my eternity slowly growing my agonizing way around it. Because you surpass my self-preservation and everything I could ever want and I will forgo anything if it means I can have THIS LOVE WITH YOU in my life.”

And it all boils down to: “I will willingly endure the darkness that comes after if it means I can have the most dazzling firework for one fleeting second in my entire life. And that firework, is being in love with you.”

This trope burns me from the core of my heart and I relish in that flame every. single. time.

ALT

ALT

🖤 SATURDARK • MAGIC

A snippet from my achillean (m/m) romantasy that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world reclaimed by the fae, called A HUNT OF BLOOD & IRON that's coming out next year.

Add it on Goodreads

in desperate need of relationships that blur the line between romantic and platonic and are fundamentally neither. they don't conform, they have no label, they are whatever they deem themselves to be, and that's important.

i absoultely get this and hey that's a fear for me too. but write it anyway. because there are absolutely readers out there who want this or didn't know they wanted it.

it is a v arospec relationship, which lacks a lot of rep. and fuck, the nearest we got to anything like this was good omens but people screamed queerbait, because it's not normalised. and i personally take that as encouragement to do it.

if there isn't currently an audience for something, make that audience. nudge them with a hey maybe you'd like this [include an achingly beautiful analysis of a relationship and how the nature of the love shouldn't matter because love is love is love is beautiful]