If you love: -grumpy x sunshine -semi-homicidal houseplants -oh no! There’s only one greenhouse! -healthy processing of trauma -so many plant puns There’s still time to preorder VIOLET THISTLEWAITE IS NOT A VILLAIN ANYMORE! And just look at that gorgeous cover!

Wanted to do a fun photo shoot with @writersofrohan.bsky.social’s book, and then I read the dedication and ended up crying in the mall!! I’m so excited to hold this book in my hands, and I’m so PROUD of you!! 🥰🥰🥰

You sip a cup of spiced cider as you watch the sun melting its way across the frosted garden, twisted and brown with winter. But as the light climbs the dead bean vines, you notice the ice there doesn't drip and disappear. Instead, it gleams faintly, like silver.

I fully believe in the corporate death penalty and believe we would be a better world if OpenAI lost its corporate charter and was forcibly dissolved. www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

I've got meeting slots available in November and would love to chat with you about your work!

If writing obscure background history and world-building lore were a viable career…oh man

😍😍

The boy fell asleep against the willow, his hands unfurled, and driven by her loneliness, the East Wind scoured the earth for treasures to leave on his palm, so that when he awoke, he would see that there was someone who loved him.

Artist Helen Ahpornsiri creates intricate collage artworks created with real pressed flowers and leaves. #WomensArt #Autumn #Fall

You push your fingers into the windowpane, watching the glass stretch and bubble, and then blow gently until each pops free. The glass orbs reshape and settle. They float away like dandelion seeds, like unspoken words between friends who wished they were lovers.

Entering that wonderful time of year when I start periodically muttering to myself, “The turkey’s the turkey, you turkey.”

Having booked with Kelly twice to talk about a query, and now being agented for that project, I can confidently say that not only is she knowledgeable and incredibly helpful, she was also so kind and encouraging. Highly recommend!

This feels like an old, unwieldy key ka-chunking open an even older lock, to a room I didn’t know was there. …I need to go freewrite in my crow notebook now.

'Luck' often comes up in How I Got Published stories. In a non-writing white male success story I recently saw luck defined as preparation+opportunity. My immediate reaction was 'yes, we all have to do the work but opportunity isn't equally distributed'. This is exactly the sort of thing I mean.

The art is GORGEOUS. I’ll shamelessly plead my own case here! And in exchange, have Lenny the Emu:

Those talking openly about witchery often focus on the active aspects – possibly because they like telling people what to do. There's a neglect of passive enchantments, those parts of witchery where we listen, where we commune with the land. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

I can’t help it. I feel so hopeful right now.

man I'm so excited to be on the internet with 100k-500k of my favorite emotionally dysregulated neurodivergents as we wait for election results in places we have never visited and freak the fuck out!!!!!!!

*incoherent screaming and Kermit flailing*

Please don’t make “Ding dong the witch is dead” posts about Dick Cheney. It is disrespectful to witches, who are awesome.

A variety of mosses go in first to kickstart the O2 cycle, and of course the dwarf goldenberry shrubs that luminesce in 14-hour cycles (and whose vitamin C is uniquely bioavailable for most humanoid travellers). The furred dragonflies with wings like stained glass, though, those are just for her…

The professor in "Imagine Yourself Happy" by Premee Mohamed takes just four minutes to record a message. Take a few to read it and a few more to have a cry afterward:

Good morning. You're a writer even if you don't write today, tomorrow, this entire month. You're a writer because of the stories in your heart, even if you can't get them down for now. 💜

The wall is lined from floor to rounded ceiling with narrow wooden shelves, each laden with glass jars of honey in every shape and size, all warm and golden. On the floor, a thick layer of dust and a set of footprints. Leading in, but not out.

Stay for the alt-text.

#writingcommunity #writers #writing

I want very badly to migrate my (admittedly quite small) newsletter away from Substack, but I do not have the funds for a monthly fee. What are your favourite free newsletter platforms? I don’t need any bells and whistles - literally just want to send a little note every month or so.

We're in the world, not against it.

Four knocks on the small wooden door in the corner. A door that wasn't there yesterday, but that shimmers now like a freshwater pearl in the thin shaft of moonlight.

Of all the Holmes that ever Holmes-ed, Jeremy Brett remains my absolute favourite.

I’d say I got lucky with 4/4, but he hasn’t quite mastered the bread recipe yet.

You can curse daylight saving time, daylight saving, daylight savings, daylight savings time, and/or daylight time. All are considered acceptable so go off.

Quetzalcoatlus was as big as a fighter jet!!

This one wants to be something much longer *beats back toppling WIP list with a chair*

The cottage trembles as its walls move and the floor changes from tile to burnished copper. A small blade, rough gems on its handle, clatters suddenly through the window with a fading raven's croak. You grimace. The path will bring a traveller from the Jeweled Coast today.

About to try and be artsy with my pumpkin 😬

It’s okay if you wake up some days and you don’t know how to human. Being human can be our aspirational goal. Let’s focus on being the best forest cryptids we can be today. One crunching leaves step at a time.

I’m more than a little terrified to read @tkingfisher.com’s horror (being an absolute chicken) but this entire, amazing thread is convincing me

The ultimate jump scare

I *cannot wait* to see what titles come out of this submission call 👀

Children have an innate sense of which trees are possessed by Wood Sprites. It's a faculty not ever adult loses. Some of us still hear trees whisper with withered bark voices in our minds. Still see their wooden bones as alphabet. We know they watch. – Joanna Vickers #VOH

they’re quiet; they know they aren’t wanted. it doesn’t stop them checking handles and windows. they know it’s warm in here. they can feel our blood. the chill autumn air scatters them up from the soft sighing loam to whisper down the darkened alley. I wonder if you remembered to lock your back door

The thing to remember is that bones have memories. They carry stories in the marrow, lichen-coated and dusty, maybe, but alive in their own way. So mind your footfalls when you pass through the ossified fields, and listen carefully.

Every time I see one of Tom’s posts, it convinces me further that all the magic I’ve ever believed in does *actually* exist - it’s just well-camouflaged between the hedgerows and fields of England.

There's nothing wrong with you. There's something wrong with the world. Keep being weird. Keep howling against the storm. Keep writing erotic stories about moon ghosts. Keep being a spark in the darkness, and hope for a better tomorrow.

singing October

1/?

It’s vital, every so often, to become suddenly awake and walk barefoot from our warm homes and stand in the cold rain just to remind ourselves that many of the established borders of our lives are not made of iron bars, they are made of choices.