One of the things with writing poetry as part of this convoluted painting process, is that I frequently just write a thing and have no idea why that idea was ping-ponging around my mind.
Except when I do.
Like this one, this is me thinking about Final Fantasy XIV: Heavenward's main quest. Among other things.

*

Dragon wisdom


The dragons have got it the right way
yes, the ones with the princess in the tower
because there is no good way
to be a man-eating monster.

If I was big and threatening,
with flesh-tearing teeth
and iridescent scales
to protect and adorn
If only, I say
if only
I too would wish for the peace
of ruins
and the companionship of one
with the eventual take-out
in the shape of a knight.

but, ethically superior as it sounds
eating locally sourced
certified horrible humans
implies you'd get to know people
deep and hard
before you devour them
and that is
not for me.

Then I'd watch for those
that won't be missed,
says another
and while I recognize
the tried and true
predatorial technique
this is still too close
too personal
no,
it's not for me.

I would go live far from humanity,
someone else says,
and live on wild hunt alone
which is a choice a person can have
even if that person is massive
and scaled
and breathes fire
but when has self-isolation
stopped others from reaching you
with torches and pitchforks
or shiny metal armor
and shinier words?

No.

There's a reason the damsel
is always a princess
it's leverage against
the King's army
keep beauty hostage
encase it in a tower
high up
so you both can sleep
the sleep of dragons
safe in the knowledge
that danger will come
but only in small doses
good enough for a bite.

Thoughts that linger hours after a conversation


I wanted to love you like Vinicius
maybe Yeats or Neruda
or, even, Sappho.
All that bright, open devotion
that clearness of intention
the immortal flame
the glittering armor
the distant stars
the spread of dreams

That.

Instead, I love you the way
the honeyed scent of amber drifts
from an open drawer
and makes itself known
with the hopeful caution of birds
calling out the clear skies
after a month of rainfall
and with the same promising warmth
as soft winter sunlight
that cuts through the cold
and feels almost like summer again.

So, please, have three love poems. And don't ask me hard questions ^^

*

Anything can happen

The age of miracles is long gone
and men might strive to forget it
but magic is still out there
waiting
and everyday all day it happens
seeds sends out speculative shoots
a fledgling falls and then flies
the wind presses through a canopy
and sings
even asphalt hides the magic
of the distant, illusory seas
so maybe a city does have a heart
and maybe it can tell I'm sad
and lead me to you.

*

On being a fool

Love called to me one night,
and I, ever too gentle, took pity
fed it scraps of attention, a gentle word or two
I should've known it would come back,
with feline assurance, demanding,
in a whimper at first,
then louder and with such urgency
that now I hear it roar
at every casual touch
at simple thought
at you.

*

My lips are sealed

No. I will not say the words.
Not unless you ask for them.
Will you ask?
Please ask
and I'll love you
forever
and if that's too much
for as long as it takes
or, yes, until you tire of me.

But damn it felt nice to post those last time, so now, in lieu of talking about my inner struggle with writing a low-stakes, straightforward romance fic (okay, as straightforward as I can make them. In this case involves kidnapping), I'll drop another poem I've been working on.

Because, you see, poetry might be mostly a way to work around my ideas but I do enjoy it, so I've been doing some exercises from Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook (and, yes, I should get something like that but for my native language) and this is something I wrote trying to think about the sounds of the words:

blend by difference

hers is the loneliness of the conch
of the seashore as sunshine returns
licking the shadows with color
painting seafoam desires
over perfect pearly sand.

mine is one of the open skies
a brushstroke of cloud across sunny horizons
the white flash of fleeting wings
as foolish life pushes through, blindly
unaware of this moment
and its finest gold.

In first place: this is not a review.
If you are Travis Baldree, the author, please don't read this. It will do you no good reading some random person's thoughts about your beloved baby. Your book is loved! Bask in that. This is not a place of honor.
If you are a reader that enjoyed the book, don't read this as well. I'm not trying to make fun of anyone for liking things. These are my thoughts and I'm mostly posting them so I can use the search and tags to find them for future reference.
Because, yes, whenever I have to sit down and think really hard about how and why a book bothered me, what I'm actually thinking about is "Why do I hate this?" and "What would I have done here?" and "What can I learn from this book?" If I sound harsh, imagine how much worse it is inside my mind.

That said, what bothered me about Legends & Lattes is that for a book recommended as a gentle, breezy read full of heart, it felt very lacking in emotion. But allow me to unpack that sentence for *checks* about 2k words:

Setting
It bothers me how much that setting is superficial and derivative. The world feels flat and not in a fun way. There are some attempts at Pratchett-like jokes (the "latte" from the title is indeed coffee with milk, but it comes from the name of the gnome that invented the drink!) but the fact that the world and the city feel extremely depersonalized, deeply generic took away what little fun I could have with those small jokes.

Most coffee shop AU fanfiction does this sort of thing-- the setting is not only sidelined but mostly ignored-- but then at least the reader already cares enough for the characters that the world isn't important.

The issue here was the lack of research. I'll go back to this point later.

Characters
This might sound rough, but for a story in which more than one character raises a stink at being possibly seen as a racial stereotype, there are certainly a lot of stereotypes going on. They're just not the D&D 3rd Edition stereotypes, but modern takes, and believe me when I say I mean modern in a snide art history way. I mean, the protagonist is a smart, resourceful, non-aggressive orc. This is not as mindblowing as it would be in the 1980's. At this point, I've seen that same character in everything, from webcomics to anime to blockbuster movies.

There's a gnome thief with spiky hair who is gleeful about murdering people in their beds. There's a human bard with a guitar-analog, he looks and acts like a grunge kid. There's an autistic-coded human mage.

The book depends on us knowing what it means that this is a dwarf and that is a "hob" (can't have hobbits or halflings, both are copyrighted) and that one over there is a succubus (because you also can't have tieflings, but it's fine if your horned, tailed infernal is something else). Also, Our Elves Are Different (they're called fey).

Okay, so maybe calling someone out for having 2D side characters and rehashed tropes for races is unkind since you can do a lot even doing those things. But it really shows up as a lack of craft when you're halfway through a book and notice you still don't know enough about the protagonists that you'd care to cheer for their romance. I'm supposed to be invested in Viv's success just because she worked hard for it and seems like a nice enough person, but I don't know anything about her. She's very blank, which the author seems to have picked up on since he sells her lack of personality as a crisis and part of the reason she's retiring from adventuring.

But when Tandri calls out Viv for not having a bed, I was reminded that she also, as far as I knew, has no home. She never showed anything besides a little mystery concerning her schooling, and a decent-person level of emotional investment in her job. She also had very little personality besides being smart and snarky. It felt like as much as you'd know from a coworker you see every day but have no other contact with, which is not how I expect romance to brew.

And that goes for everyone else. No one talks about having a life outside the coffee shop. The city has little else going on even if it's talked about as being big and bustling. It's like a game with a map you can't open.

The only characters I truly loved were Thimble, the ratkin baker, and Amity, the shop's dire-cat. I am always there for shop cats but Thimble was interesting for not feeling like a human in a suit (unlike the other non-humans in the book).

The other side characters lack personality and humanity in a way that mirrors city NPCs from a game. Everyone feels like a cardboard cutout of a client in a child's play.

The lack of research
This targets me in specific since I'm a certified cook and pastry chef who has owned a coffee shop and has an interest in traditional methods and techniques. So, please, understand that this was the first time I felt the way doctors feel while reading CPR techniques in books.

I don't think most readers would care that you can't just fire up a wood stove and expect it to heat enough to bake bread in the next action, but it grated at me. You need to get the fire going at 4am if you want bread by 8!

I don't think most readers even know you need to keep your wood stove lit throughout the day or were wondering where they kept the huge amounts of wood they'd need to bake all those cinnamon rolls. Or about the cinders.

I also don't think most people can tell that glaze Would Not Work Like That or that bread needs yeast and you need a basement to keep it alive (how is it that that shop had no basement at all?), or know that the biscotti recipe is ancient as fuck, and very similar to the rations Ves was eating a few pages earlier so she would have thought "wow this is sweet, nicer hardtack!" because that's how people think when they eat something previously unknown.

Also, hardtack WAS EATEN SOFTENED IN MILK OR WATER. It's not like you have to invent dunking biscuits when biscuits already exist!

Yeah, see what I mean about being targeted by the lack of research? *deep breaths* As you can see the whole food industry part of it bothered me deeply. I should just leave it at this.

...

Okay, I'm not done complaining about the lack of research because there is the spices thing.

Lack of Research Part II: The Spices Attack
So you're setting this in pseudo-europe in a... feudal... country (there is not a wisp of thought given to government, I can't tell if it's feudalism or some other more interesting sort) in which spices are rare, but at the same time you can buy them from A Guy.

No.

It's one or the other!

Either spices are rare because you have to be noble/rich/own a ship to know they exist, or the local equivalent to the great navigations has already solved the rareness issue and EVERYONE eats spicy food.

I won't get into the sugar debate because who knows what the local sugar is made of. Cinnamon and cardamom, on the other hand, were called by name and considered special items you had to Know a Guy to get. Since the author establishes that you can mail-order things from who-knows-where-gnomedom-is, I assume there are good, safe trade routes, so it's not like spices are rare, which makes it a worldbuilding issue that bothers me in several ways. There are levels of thought here and I'll separate them:

• Spices were traditionally used to make food taste more filling. The reasoning here is that you fool your brain into thinking you're eating something more interesting than cabbage and radish stew if it tastes really good. This reasoning still works and you should use it in any vegan recipes.
• Other traditional uses are masking bad ingredients (raw ingredients spoil fast! Unless you're introducing magical refrigeration, you need a coldroom and trustworthy suppliers to work with anything that might spoil) and making a meal last longer, since several spices work or were believed to work as conservatives and, I can't stress this enough, refrigeration wasn't on the cards.
• I cannot talk about spices without a reminder that for a long-ass time, humanity believed that what made you feel bad wasn't that the meat you bought yesterday from that dodgy butcher was less than fresh, but the fact that it was stinking. To this day we associate good smells with safe food. So it doesn't matter if the spices won't really keep the food fresh since food spoils at the same rate whether or not you pump it full of cumin and garlic, people did it based on belief.
• So the moment it was possible to buy spices at the market, everyone who could afford it bought them. I'm sure you understand supply and demand, so I'm also sure you understand that the spice merchants wouldn't be as rich if there wasn't demand for their products.
• The whole thing about why spiceless French haute cuisine was considered refined was that it didn't taste like poor people's food, which was chock-full of spices for the aforementioned reasons. There are several historical recipes that attest to this (I'm writing this as a memo to myself so I won't bother quoting anything.)
• Anyway it annoys me because it's such a fucking easy research. History of food is absolutely the low-hanging fruit of new history, there are a bunch of books but most of them will give you a good idea of the facts.
• And the facts say that, if you really wanted to do the "I know a guy" thing, all you had to do is have Thimble stop Viv from buying low-quality cinnamon at the regular market and taking her to see his guy.

And I have to remind you, this is a book about food. It annoys THE FUCK outta me that the dude burned the really cool concept of introducing coffee shops into a fantasy setting and didn't even bother going into the fun details about trade, religious taboos, that whole thing about coffee shops in Renaissance being the gathering spot for philosophers (Genshin Impact writers remembered to nod to that. GENSHIN IMPACT!) There is a whole lot to pull out of the concept and the dude just wrote a coffee shop AU.

Other craft-related issues
I would probably have overlooked most of the other issues if the writing was interesting. This is a horrible thing to say, but when I say I was bored, I mean I wasn't even finding it funny or beautiful. The author has a good grasp of language and can be very concise, which are good things. Sadly, he's a little too concise with description, depending too much on the reader knowing what he means instead of painting a picture.

He's also not very good at displaying personality or motivation through dialogue. There was a clear feel of "first draft" to all of his dialogue. You know when all characters just say what they think and go away? Good dialogue tags, though.

In terms of plot, well, this is slice-of-life so I'm not judging him there. He's not very good with pace and calendar time, though, which are aspects of slice-of-life as a genre. I understand it's a hard balance, you need to establish the routine without being so repetitive it stops being soothing and starts going into Haruhi Suzumiya places, but it feels like he spent a lot of time on practical details that weren't relevant to any of the emotional threads in the story (and slice-of-life is a lot about emotion and the coming together of things) and passed a lot of time when we should be right there next to the characters as they got to know each other.

If only the slice-of-life felt like those isekai anime/manga/light novels... But I guess what makes those is really the setting. I can read countless volumes about a woman getting reborn as a side character from a book and setting up a chocolate empire in a fantasy setting so she'll survive. I'll even go along with her inventing chocolate from a vague idea of how it's made, but that only really works because the author read a bunch of things about chocolate and will gleefully infodump.

Most of these issues would be forgiven if he had a distinct authorial voice. I don't know if he was edited into silence or if he never really had much of a voice, but there wasn't even a faint feeling of style. It didn't feel like he was imitating someone else's voice, like it does in so many first novels, but more like there wasn't anything there. So it bored me. I dropped the book at about 70%, not really remembering to pick it up again.

Maybe expecting the person writing a coffee shop AU to know about coffee, pastry, and shops is too much, but this is a published novel.

Anyway, DNF.

I'm digging through my scrapped scenes, looking for something I'm sure I wrote and that I could use for the next chapter, and I found this lovely scene I won't be using (because I decided to be evil and not solve their romantic tension this way.) It's sweet, it's touching, it's the Let's Talk About Our Relationship scene my beloved three needed.

And I won't be using it.

So, here you go. Please note that I haven't really filled in with all descriptions. This is how my writing looks before I give it the final pass, which is also before the revision rounds.

Tales from the scrap file: OT3

[Lumine takes care of Diluc for a day before Ajax returns. She’s already in pieces, so she runs and tackles him into a hug when he shows.]

“I take it back, I don’t care what happened. You’re here.”

He hugs her back, lifting her from the floor.

“You were right, though.” “Most of them were just caught in those contracts.”

She pulled back, looked at him. Whatever she saw must have bothered her, because the anxiety in her face turned into soft sadness. “So, what did you do?”

“I trussed up Lawrence for them, burned down the contracts. Had to fight some of his loyal men, but there weren’t a lot of those. [lady from before] saw me at it and rallied her friends to help. It was a mess, but any coup would be.”

“No injuries?”

“Come on, have some faith. Treasure Hoarders.”

She still hadn’t moved out of his arms. He didn’t want to let her go, but he did, stepping past her. She let her hands drift over his arms as he passed. He tried not to think about it, just asked, “How’s Diluc?”

“Mending,” his voice sounded. He limped closer.

Now Lumine was the one that let him go, running over to her beloved, taking his elbow and helping him to a chair.

He had to talk to them. Had to tell them.

Pulling the chair opposite them, he sat down, resting his arms over the table so he could avoid those looks. “There’s something I should say. A confession, so to say.”

“I love you too,” Diluc said.

Surprise. Hope, even. He tried to think about anything else so that his face wouldn’t flush, but the thing with discarding the ‘lovingly shameless idiot’ mask was that he was actually himself while having emotions and oh boy. He lifted his eyes because he was, indeed, a love-struck fool. Diluc was smiling. It was blinding.

He should have said something at this point, but his heart was beating too fast and his skin was tingling with the need to do something, he had no idea what.

“Red, you broke him.”

This was not what he needed to talk about. This was the one thing he shouldn’t ever talk about. This was the thing he should have buried in the snow along with his heart. He heard himself speaking.

“You don’t understand. Love is sacred. You’re clearly back together, I don’t want to… I won’t come between you.”

“Now that’s an image,” Lumine said.

“What about your love? Is that not sacred as well?”

He couldn’t answer that and look at him at the same time, so he looked away. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. His breath left him in a small laugh. It felt self-deprecating. “I’m used to it.”

“Well, I’m not.”

The words shot straight through him. He closed his eyes on the feeling.

“I’ve only ever loved three people in my life and two of them are in this room.” “I’m not willing to give up on you, just as I was not willing to give up on Lumi.”

“What if I break your heart?”

Lumine went still at his words, gave him a fleeting look before looking away. Of course. Way to stick your foot in your mouth, Ajax.

Diluc took Lumine’s hand, kissed it. “That’s life.” “I want you to know don’t intend to hold you down with my feelings. I also know that a lot of people don’t agree with how we see things in Mondstadt, so it’s fine if you want nothing to do with it. Half the time we disagree about these things amongst ourselves.”

“These things?”

“A heart’s freedom.” “The fact that love gives you no right over anyone and that it’s possible to love more than one person at a time.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

She shrugged, “He’s right on both counts.”

He pressed both hands to his face. This was not what he should be talking about. When he looked up again, Diluc was watching him, chin resting on his hand. Waiting, a mere breath away.

So he crossed it, leaning over the table, he took his between his hands and kissed him feverishly, desperately.

The actual confession he pushed deeper into his heart. Some other day, perhaps. Not today.

<3

Link here.

Synopsis:
Some plans are too hare-brained to actually work.

I think this one is just a week late? I don't even know anymore, so I'll just restart the count from this week (just pretend I posted this sunday and we'll be golden.)

A big fight scene
Yes, yes, exactly the same way people that write smut will make a special chapter for their sex scenes, I made a special chapter for a big fight scene. And it's not even about fighting the villain!
I think it was quite obvious, from the way I set up things with Childe, that eventually everything would come crashing down. This here chapter is the moment things start going bad. So exciting.

First of all, thank you for participating in this exchange! I'm threading_in_dreams, but you can call me Thread.
I don't know how it is with you, but I get very nervous about writing something that will make the other person happy, so I wrote this letter to make sure you get a better feel for the sort of story I enjoy.

There are no format constraints. I read all POVs and love a story structured around a fun gimmick, be it different characters telling their views of the same events (and disagreeing!), reports/found files/epistolary fiction or even a classic 5+1. I once read a fic structured around recipes and it lives in my mind to this day.

For romance, I enjoy fluff, but I like it better when there is something bittersweet about it or when it's part of a hurt/comfort scenario. My own fics run angsty, because I favor slow burn and pining, so I would actually enjoy a short fic about a character having feelings while in company of their unrequited love.

Besides romance, I also enjoy action/adventure a whole lot. These can be serious or played for humor, the problem can be life-threatening or a non-issue made big by the characters' own intermission. Fighting can be lovingly described or smoothed over, I have no issue at all with blood and depictions of violence.

In horror I prefer things to be psychological and understated, unless you have a really good monster (I love monsters). I got no issues with gore or body horror, but actual hate crimes can keep me awake at night.
You can torture my blorbos and put them through the wringer, but don't kill them.

In the smut side, I prefer when things are soft and loving, rather than rough. I'm on the ace spectrum, so most of my interest in smut depends on whether the characters are into it and enjoying themselves.
I could give a massive list of kinks that do nothing for me, but instead of that I'll give you the few that I actually enjoy. Please keep in mind that this assumes everyone is having fun:

• bondage and domination, when no one is being hurt or humiliated.
• biting, scratching and hair-pulling.
• light spanking from the point of view of the D.
• exhibitionism/voyeurism.

Any other kinks will just make me slightly confused.

***

I tried to write all this without naming tags, because I'd rather you wrote however you prefer instead of taking a recipe from me. I really like seeing how other people tackle my beloved blorbos. Whatever is your headcanon, I'll probably find it interesting, so don't worry too much about it.

Thanks again, I hope this helped!

Of masks and dances
Chapter 25: Ripples and swells
In which our heroes find their way around the darkness.

It took me a whole day to notice I kept some sort of thematic semblance from the last chapter name. Huh. Now I guess it's on purpose.
Anyway, this was another chapter that was mostly already written. Because I wrote it while I should be writing the previous chapter. I also worked on 26 while I was supposed to be working on this one and am now working on 27 instead of 26, so I guess this is a weird habit.

The thing about the Abyss arc is that I have so many things I want to show about my idea for the Abyss in this fic, but in order to show that I need to write the cool things inside scenes that actually move the plot. That's a lot of work for someone that just wants to drop shinies in front of readers' feet and fly away cawing.

This chapter in specific needed to establish where everyone was emotionally and spark up the relationship conflicts that will be developed later on. Doing that and sprinkling setting around is easy, even fun. So much that I went ahead and wrote extra 7k words of that, which I'll have to fix now because next chapter I have to actually move plot and tighten conflict.

I guess I could have a nice action sequence as a treat, but honest, I just want to write Diluc, Lumine and Childe being soft with each other.

Can't, though. That would be chapter 27.

Of masks and dances
Chapter 23: Lies and sweet things
In which everyone has a little lie to share, but they all have good reasons.

I should write this postmortem before I forget about it. Writing this is very interesting to me, because while I might mostly know what I'm doing while I'm writing, I don't really notice a lot of things until afterwards (yes, even after about 10 rounds of revision) (most of my writing time is revising, I revise each chapter for about a week's worth of time). Writing this helps a lot with finding out what I need to pick up in another chapter.

Not that I needed much of it for this chapter, though, this one was mostly following the outline. And, oh, I had stupid amounts of fun being contrarian to my own outline and pushing scenes towards things they were not really meant to do. There were also just Fun With Words moments.

That first Lumine fragment in which she isn't seeing things, so I have to rely on what she thinks is going on? I loved doing that.

Diluc trying to piece together things and noticing it doesn't really matters because he's worried about her and will Be There regardless? Lovely. Fun with words all of it.

Kaeya acting like a dick to Diluc while trying to communicate, then turning around and being stupidly in love with Albedo? Yes, please.

I don't have many things to say plot-wise, because this is a "moving things along" chapter. If this story was a tabletop RPG, this would be the session in which the players run around like headless chickens before they find out what they really need to do. Since that isn't as much fun to read as it is to play, I chose to focus on Diluc and Lumine, on how they'll rebuild their relationship.
There's still much water to sail until we see land, though, so all I can offer is some sweetness to offset the exposition fest of this chapter. I truly hope the readers had fun.

Next chapter, though? Next chapter I'll have some real fun.