"someone asked me
to describe home
and i started talking about your hair color
and the sound of your voice
and the taste of your lips
and how your skin feels like
until i realized
they had expected to hear a place"
--Daria M
“I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything. Maybe we’re from the same star.” --Emery Allen
In the wake of the Great War, disgraced and having lost everything he held dear, former RFC pilot Captain Daniel Morrow clings precariously to life. At last understanding how far into the darkness he’s fallen, he admits himself to Yarrow Hill War Hospital. If he can be saved at all, if he’s worth saving, the shell shock ward is his only chance.
Celia Fabre didn’t come through the war unscathed – not that she would admit it, even to herself. Her life as a nurse began with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, stationed near the front lines and steeped in blood. By the time she made it home, she knew she was meant for medicine. With a job that she loves in spite of a rather unfit head nurse, and a fiancé who doesn’t seem to be all she once thought, she finds herself faced with decisions she never intended to have to make.
A new patient is assigned the empty bed in Celia’s section of the east ward, and she can’t help gravitating to him. In one another, she and Captain Morrow find a surprising friend and a kindred spirit. And that’s all. That’s all either can afford to allow…
Okay, here we go. IT’S LIVE! FINALLY! AHHHHHHHH?
A Place in the Line
I started this story in 2014, estimating that it would take me around 30 chapters to finish. It took a solid three years, 150 chapters, and over 500k words to get to the end of it. *stares into the void*
I meant to publish it as one volume. Turns out Amazon has an 800 page restriction. (Which, y’know, can’t blame them. Paperbacks get unwieldy and fragile if they’re too big.) But that meant I had to split it in half. Each book turned out approximately 700 pages (Part 1 is a tad over, part 2 is a tad under, because I halved it in a place that was closest to the center that still felt okay being divided).
There were a few chapters that I originally split because I was on a schedule of a chapter/week, so the finished editing made 140 chapters. Please keep in mind that this is de-fandomed and edited for a wider audience. That means name changes and blurred sex scenes. I also removed the, um, “private” self-enjoyment scenes that the main characters had in the original. *cough* The sex scenes are now more along the lines of spicy romance novel instead of downright erotica.
But there are also some little additions here and there. I can’t remember what/where they are, because my brain is mush from editing almost every waking hour for the last… I don’t remember how many months at this point. But yeah.
Paperbacks are $24.15 and ebooks are $9.99 (priced so that I can get about $5 per copy either way). If you get ebooks via Kindle Unlimited, please remember to at least flip through all the way through to the end so I get the fraction of a cent per page they allow me through that? And please consider leaving a great review!
“biblical angels” you do realise there are angels in the old testament that are literally just regular looking guys, right? you do know that the hallucinogenic incoherent descriptions are in like. two books. and the rest of the time angels are just guys. you know that, right?
and I’m not saying don’t have fun with weird angels. I’m saying, either the eldritch forms are for special occasions, or the society of the angels is Many-Eyed-Many-Winged-Interlocking-Circles, Four-Faces-Six-Wings, and Mike.
Literally Raphael is just a normal person!
this is what the heavenly breakroom is like
So weird that there’s a biblical angel who looks just like a water cooler
Once again, thank you everyone for reading, enjoying, and sharing this comic. Not just sharing in the sense of re-posting this comic, (which you should totally do) but also sharing your stories with me, letting my know how my comics have touched you. It means so much to me. Love ya!
Stay tuned for more comics! <3
It gives me tremendous joy to see people still reading this comic, and especially when they get something out of it.
Over the years I have faced many ups and downs, just like everyone else. Sometimes it really gets to me how mean people can be to each other. How mean I can be to myself.
But for all the Level 1 Trans Fighters out there please know with acceptance, mindfulness, and self compassion I did in fact find my balance. Not a fast process. Basically a complete lifestyle change.
Sometimes I lose that balance, sure. But when I choose to present my authentic identity? I’m objectively drop dead gorgeous.
Here are a hand full of my looks. You’ll notice none of them are 100% masculine or feminine.
Peace be with you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for being you.
-J
You deserve to feel comfortable, so don’t push yourself to go at a faster pace. It’ll hurt you more.
Reblogging both for stellar comic and wonderful mustache
always reblog! I love this comic, so very much. *offers all the kudos* Thank you for this, it continues to help a lot. You look amazing in those lipstick shades, by the way.
i think especially with relatively near future sci-fi and alternate present/just off reality sci-fi and fantasy, it’s a lot more effective to play off of “this word is the same, but the thing it refers to is in fact different than what you’ll initially picture or assume” than to invent a bunch of cutesy fake slang (again, ESPECIALLY for things we already have good words for)
like, for a real life example of what im talking about– we had “phones” in 1977, and we still have “phones” in 2017, but MAN would a time traveler from the 70s be confused by the things we call “phones” now, and the ways we use and relate to them– “im typing this text post on my phone, and autocorrect keeps cramping my style” is a straightforward and easily understandable sentence to me in 2017. it would sound like word salad to someone from 1977. (how can you TYPE something on a PHONE?? what does “post” mean in this context, or “text”? the fuck is “autocorrect”??)
but we still call them “phones”, you know, and not, idk, “cyberrectangles”
interplanetary shuttle system makes use of automated, pre-scheduled wormholes to get you to your day job on mars every morning – still called taking the bus.
super high-tech window protectors that keep out the deadly light of the ultra-bright sun? “close the curtains, tom, it’s almost dawn.”
your zero-g space station’s air filtration system is malfunctioning, threatening to cause a fiery explosion as all the waste co2 builds up in the engine room rather than the greenhouse? time to call the plumber.
Every other day you have to go out and squeegee the space dust accumulating on your solar panels… it’s still called “dusting.”
Light cargo shuttles used for transporting a few passengers at a time, or maybe small packages, they still call them cars.
Every six months, you have to replace the layer of ablative panels on your car, designed to absorb micrometeor impacts, they still call it an undercoating, and garages still overcharge you for it, but it’s definitely worth the reduced maintenance costs in the long run.
Consider how the terms we use now could change depending on context, tho:
“Stellar” as short for “interstellar,” meaning “vast nothingness, really boring.” so: “How was the concert?” “Meh… pretty stellar, I guess.” “Oh, sorry.” “So, how was your weekend?” “Family gathering, it was toootally stellar.”
Suns radiate tremendous quantities of lethal radiation, so when you say your day was “sunny,” it means you nearly died five times just getting out of bed… which, depending on the space station, isn’t much of a stretch (picture: reaching over to hit the snooze alarm, and hitting the airlock instead). Having a “sunny” disposition means “your expression conveys murderous rage.”
“Chill” in reference to the cold hard vacuum of space, so when someone says “chill out,” it’s equivalent to saying “go jump out the airlock and die.”
Even just a small adjustment to how we use contemporary words can signal to the audience that we’re using them differently – in the first example, compare “close the curtains” with “drop the curtain.”
Summer heat so oppressive, it makes the mosquitos pant? check. A family curse going back a couple of centuries? check. Secrets festering in every corner? Eldritch things lurking in the dark? check.
How to Start a Wildfire by Elisabeth S. Elliott
A Southern Gothic mystery set in the small town of Edom, Louisiana.
Most of the future that Cara Deerfield hoped for fell by the wayside a long while back, a casualty of more dire obligations. In a life riddled with loss, she fights to hold onto what little she has. For as long as Cara can remember, she’s been visited by dreams of a burning tree – the enormous live oak in front of the abandoned house right down the hill. When a stranger moves in, she catches people in town talking about him like he’s some kin to the boogeyman. It doesn’t stop her from meeting him or trying to befriend him. After all, whispers have gone around about her own family.
Coming home is no easy thing for Thierry Cotton. He’s been gone for a very long time, and returning to Edom feels like slogging into darkness. When the woman who lives in the only other house on his backroad comes drifting into his yard, it’s like she’s set a spark to tinder. There’s something about her, something familiar that draws him. He can’t ignore her any more than he can ignore what goes on in his home or the woods surrounding them. There are things that he needs to face, though, before he can find any sort of peace with the past that drove him away in the first place. He has work to do.
There’s always been something seething beneath the surface of Edom, smothered under blissful disregard and sweet Louisiana manners. When the unthinkable happens, when it seems the community has a murderer in its midst, some old ideals rear their ugly heads. What was left in the dark long ago must come to light. And as evil flirts with Edom right out in the open, Cara and Thierry find themselves connected through the past and present in more ways than one.
How to Start a Wildfire has reached the end of the in-depth outline process, resulting in 26k words of pre-writing. I’m about to dive into work on chapter one. Aiming to publish in mid to late 2024.
If Patreon is something you participate in, please consider having a look at mine (link in my pinned post). There’s at least one update every Saturday morning (usually a second with some kind of extras), and quite a bit of backlog to enjoy at this point. Ongoing, there are progress updates, inspiration image posts, character introduction posts, and there will be excerpts of actual story soon. The occasional poll turns up, as well!
And if you’ve read this far, thank you for reading and for your time!
Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.
And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.
this is such a beautiful post it doesn’t need my dumb addition, but i can’t fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I’m only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.
at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we’re not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child
so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world’s oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any “useful” items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios’ grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we’ve all been the same for 30,000 years.
I have had it with this likescolding. “Tumblr doesn’t have an algorithm so likes don’t actually do anything” motherfucker I am not clicking that heart to give some post better ~algorithmic visibility~ I am clicking that heart to help my internet friend microdose on serotonin as god fucking intended
