Dear Universe,

I want to go home. I just want to go home, I just want to go. Home.

So come home, said the voice from the stars.

Writing is from Grace by Kae Tempest

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War on humanity in an ice cream franchise shop

Cloudy day, windy

Your boss' makin a loss

But I told you I'd never eaten this kind of ice cream before

And now I'm back for a second helping

First day it was sunny and I was in a good mood

Today I got no such excuse

The word "smile" is overused by corporate and music that's gentrification misspelled

So I'll commit the greatest rebellion of the industry:

You just looked at me.

Desperate claws in a sunny smile I've trained to be a good customer to the service

I ask you if I should take a cup or cone, your opinion

Well, it's my choice

But you can give me a little more in a cup.

I laugh too loud. Answer too loud. You're making money, I'm spending money.

'i hope to see you again, miss.'

That's not part of the script.

They don't say miss here.

Danez Smith, from "summer, somewhere"

Philip Levine, “The Mercy”

I have … a tip.

If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.

But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.

I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.

But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.

I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.

I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.

When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.

The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.

But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.

This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.

Doctor of Fire and Madness. I love it.

Lord of Nightmares and Madness

catch 22 by joseph heller // mash (peace on us)

Burning Your Boats The Collected Short Stories, Black Venus, Angela Carter / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / Unknown / Tell Me No Secrets, Joy Fielding / Stop the World and Get Off, Peggy Toney Horton / Grief, Barbera Crooker / Unknown / A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / William Stanley Merwin / Maurice, E. M. Forster / Dear Would be Wife, Gala Mukomolova / Unknown / Anne of Avonlea, L.M. Montgomery / Anvita Bhogadi / Peace Like a River, Leif Enger / Unknown / Unknown / The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare / @honeytuesdy / October, Robert Frost / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot / Georgia Grace / Alexander Smith / Unknown / Insta: sarahkjp

A young student's selfie

Early summer, just before our last summer holidays, we got into a discussion with a teacher at recess.

He had a topic for us. Evidence. An opinion.

One more year and we'd be done with school. We felt so mature.

His discussion? Why, young girls and body images of course.

Oh, we were so in. He started on the young girls in his class, how they dressed. How they walked. How social media was trapping them. We nodded along, thinking we were talking about the same thing.

We thought we were talking about Instagram's clutch on our young sisters. The twelve year olds with eating disorders. The sleekly styled hair of middle schoolers with baby fat and round eyes.

He pulled out a photo.

A girl. We'd seen her. It was a good pic, her at eye level with a statue in a museum they'd gone to. A class trip. She'd asked this teacher to make the picture of her, all golden curls and brown lashes.

Look at what I had to photograph, he said. Showing us the lace bra peeking through her shirt, the pose she stroke like she was twenty-five.

We said all the right things. How horrifying it was. That society shouldn't do this to girls. Satisfied, he left, pocketing his phone.

That was two months ago.

Someone realised it yesterday. That class trip to the museum was four months ago.

He had kept the picture of her on his camera roll.

Lace bra and baby round eyes.