It’s Finally December Which Means It’s Green Knight Season. Who Wants Me To Be Their Third

Thanks @achillesuwu for the tag!

I was listening to I Might Float by Syd Matters for maybe the thousandth time and I suddenly realised I'd never looked up the meaning (it has some fairly unusual lyrics). So my last googled thing was "Syd Matters I Might Float meaning." The search was a little fruitless and I only found a few people speculating on Reddit. Oh well!

@breadkween and @liviapeleia tagging ye if you feel like doing it!

last google search, go

um. Tag four people.

what do they make sewer tunnels out of

@ncc1701ohno @affixjoy @the-magpieprince @twinkboimler

dandelions are magic. literally tiny suns in the grass that turn into the moon and then the stars when you blow on them. fucking insane.

Thanks @liviapeleia for tagging me, your wip excerpts made me very curious to know what's next :D!

Rules: you will be given a word. Then you share one sentence/excerpt from your wip(s) that starts with each letter of your word!

Tagging @breadkween, @achillesuwu and @futurepastme if you're interested! Your word should you choose to accept it is FISH!

Livia you gave me 'myth.'

M

“Merlin is a-” 

But he knew, he had known for a long time. 

Across from him his servant looked like a startled hare, wide-eyed, gaunt in the dim light. The thing they had not been saying had almost been said. Did Merlin think that just because it was said aloud that suddenly Arthur would change his mind, have him executed? 

Instead he made a show of sagging in relief and Merlin hesitated and then sagged with him. 

Y

“You’re lying. You have something you must do, something that might help me. Maybe it'll turn the tide of this battle.” 

“Arthur-”

“Whatever you're about to say, let it be the truth for once. I need to hear it, finally hear it. How many years has it been? We never spoke about your magic, not once, not really, not like we should have.” 

“My-?” 

“It’s said now, I don't care, not anymore. I can't go into this battle without you, not unless I know it’s for a good cause and not unless I know that you’ll be safe.” 

T

“The spitting, what's that then?”

“To ward off curses! Anyone can do it!”

“The asphodel?” 

“The dead need appeasing!” Merlin threw his hands in the air and then towards Arthur. “You’ve seen the ghost of your father, you've fought the undead!” 

Arthur was throwing his hands too now. “The cabbage leaves? Prophetic dreams have to be sorcerery?!” 

“Yes but not the kind you get from cabbage leaves!” 

H

He is the custodian of our stories, the golden age we brought about together and he’ll be the custodian of the stories after I’m gone, learn them from him, help him to hold them and share them, I think some days he might find them too heavy to carry.

He’s the most powerful and the most precious thing to ever walk this Earth, it would be a tragedy too immense to imagine or bear thinking about if he lost what made him human. But more than that, I ask you to do this, to pass on this message to those who come after you because I love him and I cannot do all of these things myself. 

the way ppl have designated cuddling as a purely romantic thing and is weird outside of that context has done widespread damage to our pack animal nature

Today will be attempt 37 of trying to get something other than a bob.

You see, I have these duel curses and there are that 1. I'm apparently not enough of baddie to be given a not-bob and 2. that I belong in bob-jail for even asking.

Last time, I fought tooth and nail (asked very politely and over-explained myself and my choices) for an undercut that no one could even see under the bob I was given.

Wish me luck.

one thing the show doesn't care about enough: the dragonlords and the dragons themselves. they were hunted to extinction. merlin is the last of his kind. and he'll never know anything about being a dragonlord because his entire family and anyone who might've known about them is gone. how do you fix that? you can't. there's nothing you can ever do to make up for something like that. absolutely nothing.

and i love fics that explore arthur surviving and struggling through the realisation of just what kind of monster his father was for everyone else but also. they rarely focus on that bit of history, on the fact that uther actually managed to destroy that part of magic completely as merlin is the very last of his kin and there are only two dragons left (the first one won't live much longer and he has no knowledge on how to help the second). uther actually did eradicate something, it wasn't magic as a whole maybe but an entire branch of it is just gone.

I also love how audio fiction has always been a highly experimental medium, and likely always will be.

Financially, it has a low barrier for entry, a low point of diminishing returns, and a relatively small potential market. It's basically impervious to being taken over by giant studios - even the "big" networks like RQ would be considered indie in the film or game dev industries. With the exception of the BBC, they tend to dip their toes into audio fiction, figure out quickly that, although it's beloved by its fans, there isn't that kind of money in it, and proceed to leave us alone forever.

Then there's the fact that it propagates largely by word of mouth. Audio dramas owe everything to obsessive nerds forcing nearly everyone they know to listen to that podcast they just discovered.

So it's more about the thing being actually good, plus a decent amount of luck and persistence.

There's no optimally marketable success formula being relentlessly enforced by gatekeeping jellybean-counters because they don't exist here. So people make whatever they want. So it draws people to it who are looking for something different. And the cycle feeds itself, and the medium gets weirder (in a good way).

It may very well ALWAYS remain the wild west of storytelling.

So listeners tell your friends about that podcast!

And creators, make the weird thing! There are no rules! It can be an hour long or Breaker Whiskey short, or Re:Dracula all over the place length. It can be another tape recorder framing or another voicemail framing or basically just an audiobook. It can be any genre or blend of genres. This creative space gives us the opportunity to be our own target audience in a way rarely found elsewhere.

If you enjoy the thing you're making, odds are somone else out there will enjoy it too. I've already found this to be true, and my time as an audio fiction creator is still just beginning.

Peace and love on every planet, y'all!

'The Milky Way' (detail) by Frida Hansen, (1855 - 1931).