Indie Writer - Blog Posts
Oh my god! Great job on the first chapter!!!! If anyone's interested go check it put and give them some love!
I just published the first chapter of my first book! Go check it out!
I’m writing this so there’s some kind of record in case I die. When I die, maybe. The longer this has gone on the more inevitable that has felt. I don’t know why this is happening or who is doing it to me. I wish I could point a finger at someone so the cops or whoever finds me after all this is over can get the bastard doing this, but…there’s nothing. Nothing!
I think I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
I’ll start at the beginning.
No one gets regular mail anymore. Everything is done through email or DMs. I mean, people still get junk mail and stuff, but not like mail-mail. I think that’s what made me so curious when I got the first envelope.
It didn’t have my address on it, or any stamps, or even a return address. Just my name written in a tidy script in the very center of the white rectangle. It wasn’t a legal envelope—more like the kind birthday cards come in. I don’t know why, but at the time it unnerved me. It wasn’t anywhere near my birthday, and the handwriting didn’t look like anyone’s I knew.
The envelope isn’t what’s important, though. I mean, it kind of is, but what was inside the envelope was more important.
The flap was tucked into the envelope, unsealed. When I opened it, two Polaroid pictures spilled out into my hand, one after the other in an eager cascade. If I didn’t know better, I would have said they jumped out of the envelope.
Curious and more confused by the moment, I flipped the pictures over.
The first one looked like something out of a horror movie. It showed a large concrete (or what I assumed was concrete) room. Concrete walls, floor, ceiling. In the center of the room was a hooded lamp hanging down over a person, naked, and tied to a chair. They were slumped forward, body weight straining against the ropes that bound them to the non-descript metal chair.
I blinked down at the thing, confused and more than a little worried. I had no idea why someone would send this to me. The shadows in the picture were too thick to make out the person’s face. I wondered if it was someone I knew, if this was supposed to be some kind of ransom demand, but there was no note accompanying the photos. My heart was already hammering as I looked at the other photo, hoping to find answers.
Instead, I found a picture of my face.
There, in halide and plastic, was my fucking face.
A pit opened up in my stomach as I stared down at it and my brain went blank. It refused to comprehend what was in front of it. In the photo, a gloved hand held a fistful of my hair, yanking it backward so my limp head rose enough to make me recognizable. My features were slack, like I was half-asleep or maybe drugged. I looked back to the gloved hand, but the wrist and arm were both covered by the sleeve of a sweater, making any guess as to who they were impossible.
It felt like the air had been punched out of me. I realized I was shaking, but couldn’t bring myself to look away from the half-lidded eyes—my eyes—in the picture.
I thought it had to be Photoshop—what else could it be?—but how do you Photoshop a Polaroid? It was one thing to create a Polaroid effect in the program, but that didn’t mean you could create a physical one. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know much about photo editing, but I supposed it was possible to Photoshop something like this and then take a picture with the Polaroids. But I couldn’t see anything in the pictures to indicate they weren’t legitimate. Either way, I couldn’t stomach whatever sick joke someone was trying to play.
I tossed the photos in the trash, and tried to put it from my mind.
And before you ask: yes, I thought about going to the police, but I didn’t think they would do anything. Technically speaking, no crime had been committed so even if I insisted on making a report, and even if I could convince them to dust for fingerprints or whatever cops do, I had little confidence that whatever this was wouldn’t be filed away and never see the light of day again. And, I guess, part of me just wanted to forget about it. Can you blame me? Those pictures freaked me out and I just wanted to pretend it never happened.
A week later, thought, there was another envelope in my mailbox. Same nondescript white envelope, unsealed, with my name written in unfamiliar, tidy handwriting.
My first instinct was to toss it into the trash without looking at the contents. No way in hell did I want to see more freaky pictures made to look like I was being held captive or…or worse.
To this day, I wish I had listened to my gut and thrown the envelope away—better yet, I wish I had burned it.
But I didn’t.
I can’t explain it. Even if I was a better wordsmith, I don’t think I could put into words the compulsion I had to open that envelope. It would be easier, even, to say that it was as if I was possessed—that it wasn’t really me unfurling the flap that had been tucked into the stiff white paper backing, or like I was being controlled when I pulled the next two photos out of the sheaf. But none of that is true. It was me. I did those things and I will never—never—stop regretting that I did.
Like last time, there were a pair of Polaroid pictures in the envelope.
But the images were…not like last time.
It was still my face in the images, and as best I could tell they—I?—was still in the concrete room. The same black-gloved hand had a grip on my hair, but this time…
(Jesus fucking Christ even just typing the words is hard; my hands are shaking just remembering it)
This time it looked as if I had been beaten bloody. The face—my face—was beaten almost beyond recognition. The only thing I had to really indicate that it was still me was the bone-deep feeling of recognition I had with the person in the image. My lips were swollen, bleeding from a split in the corner of the bottom lip. Bruises darkened my face, a cut on one cheek bone indicated where I’d been hit especially hard, and the eye on that side looked swollen and bloodied. Blood dribbled from my hairline and ran in rivulets down the side of my face.
Just looking at the picture made me feel like I needed to bolt. I wasn’t sure where I would go or for how long, but the need to get out of my home and go somewhere—anywhere else—was intense. But how could I go? I had no way of knowing who was doing this. They could be anyone I spoke to on the street. Someone I knew. A stranger. Where could I even go that would be safe?
I fought to control my breathing as I paced in my kitchen, needing to move my body before I screamed. It took all of my willpower just to stay indoors instead of running out into the streets and just run, run, run.
Finally, I looked at the other image.
A second hand had entered the frame, wearing black gloves like the first one and holding a pair of pliers. The rusted metal tips were inside my mouth, clamped onto a bloodied tooth already halfway out of a socket. My face was still swollen and beaten, lips stretched wide in a silent scream that I could all but hear. Tears made clean streaks through the rivers of blood on my face.
I remembering swearing over and over, my spine slick with sweat as I looked at the image over and over, trying to discern anything that could help me find out who was sending these fucked up images and why, but there was nothing. It felt like there was too much air in my little kitchen and yet I couldn’t get any of it into my lungs.
That was the first time I’d had a panic attack.
I didn’t know what it was until my friends found me a short time later, huddled in a corner and hyperventilating. In full honesty, the rest of that night was a blur. I remember my friends helping me drink water, trying to talk me down from whatever ledge they thought I’d climbed to. Despite my fears and uncertainties of who could be sending the pictures, I made the choice to trust them. Desperate for someone to see what I was seeing and help me figure out what to do or who to talk to, I tried to show them the Polaroids, but when they looked at the pictures, there was only a square of darkness, as if whoever had taken the picture had left the lens cap on.
The pictures were gone.
And yeah, I get the whole ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ thing. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to convince my friends or the police without proof. The next time the envelope showed up, I tried to take pictures with my phone. The one after that, I tried to record a video. It didn’t matter. No matter what I did, the files were corrupted, unusable, or gone. Just gone. Deleted themselves so thoroughly I couldn’t even dig them out of the trash folder in my phone gallery.
At that point, I thought I’d lost my mind. I couldn’t think of a single logical reason why or how this was happening. Not for the Polaroids, or why no one else could see them, or what was going on with the digital files. None of it.
Meanwhile, the images in the Polaroids were getting…worse.
A sick feeling rolled in my stomach daily. As much as I wanted to believe these were some kind of deep fake, there was something about it that felt so undeniably real. It got to a point where I couldn’t go out to my mailbox without the anxiety forcing me to empty the contents of my stomach. I had to wait until someone came to visit and ask if they could get my mail for me. And there was always an envelope along with whatever junk or bills that had been piling up. Every. Single. Time.
The stress made my life impossible. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t even leave the house most days. If I did, there was always the chance that my tormentor could find me and make good on all the threats they’d been sending me. At that point, that was all I could think of those Polaroids as: promises of violence.
Even now, I feel like I’m marching toward an inevitable pain. A future filled with only pain and suffering and that no matter what I do, there’s no stopping it. Only delaying it.
But I digress.
One of my friends said I needed to get help. Maybe I should have listened to them back then, but I was convinced that if I couldn’t get proof of the pictures themselves, then I would get proof of whoever was putting the envelopes in my mailbox. I figured I could at least that that to the police.
I ordered one of those self-installation security systems—the one with the off-brand Ring doorbell, cameras on my front door, mail box, etc. I even bought extra locks for my doors and windows. I spent the rest of the day setting up and testing my new security system. By the end of it, I felt pretty proud of myself. I was certain I was going to catch whoever was doing this and could turn them into the cops and all of this would just be a big bad dream. But I was wrong.
Sure enough, the security system picked up on movement around midnight that night. The new motion sensor light on the porch sprang to life, illuminating a figure wearing a dark hoodie. I jolted as fear struck me like lightning. They were tall, wide, imposing. They seemed impossibly large. Unavoidable. Undeniable.
I was watching them through the lens of a camera with two locked doors between us, and yet I felt as small and vulnerable as if they were in the room with me at that moment.
My eyes roamed the figure over and over, trying to find some kind of distinguishing features, but they angled themselves so the light shone from behind them. They became a dark silhouette—a shadow of death.
They stood there, still and stone for what seemed like hours. Even with the video on fast-forward, they hardly even swayed. Near 3AM, they turned, very slowly, toward the camera as though they knew exactly where to look for it. With agonizing slowness, they reached a gloved hand into their pocket and pulled out three polaroid photos. The camera refocused as the figure brought the pictures closer to the lens.
The first picture showed me duct tapped to the same chair with the figure standing behind me. Instead of pliers, they held a knife. The figure on my screen held up the second photo. In one hand they held the knife. In the other, an ear.
I wanted to look away, wanted to delete the video and crawl deep, deep under the covers of my bed, but I couldn’t move. I was transfixed at a cellular level as the figure showed the third picture. The same bloodied knife hovered over the image of my downcast head. For a moment, I thought all that had changed between photos was the position of my head, but I soon realized something else had changed. The ear in the hooded figure's hand...it was the other ear.
My hands were shaking as I watched the figure pull the photo away from the lens. They dropped them onto the doorstep and walked away into the night.
I was practically soiling my pants but I took the security footage down to the police. When I pulled it up to show them…you guessed it. The file was corrupted and unusable. The police told me that without evidence or a suspect, they couldn’t even make a report. Useless bastards. No wonder people don’t like cops! I was basically trapped in my house, terrified, at my absolute wit’s end, and they couldn’t even make a report?!
Anyway, like I said at the beginning, I’m writing all of this in the inevitability of my death.
It’s been a few weeks since I was able to capture that first video, and my large friend has been on my doorstep every night. They don’t always have pictures. Sometimes they just stand there, staring at the camera lens as if they can see through it and into my eyes. My soul?
On the nights when they do have photos, they’re…I can’t even say. Each one is worse than the last, detailing my slow and steady dismemberment.
I can’t explain why, but I know that once the photos finally detail my death, that this figure is going to come for me. It isn’t going to matter how many locks I have on my doors, or how many weapons I horde in order to protect myself. It’s going to get in here and it’s going to take me and it’s going to do to me every single thing that happened in those pictures.
I still don’t know how or why this is happening, only that I can’t avoid it any longer.
I’m scared. God, I’m so fucking scared, but I don’t know what else I can do. If there’s even anything that can be done.
My friends have given up on me and I don’t have any family. Not even a pet. I’m alone. Just like in those photos. So, if you’re reading this, know that they’re my last words. I needed someone else—anyone else—to know what happened to me. I don’t know if you’ll believe a word of it, but if nothing else, can you do me a favor? Remember me. Please. I’m so alone and so afraid and I know that eventually I’m going to disappear. I just don’t want to be forgotten, too.
Hey! I hope your week’s going well. I know that I’m supposed to @ you when my pirate fantasy novel is out, so that led me to thinking about a community I’m going to start on Friday. It plays out the scenario, “What if bookstores were run by the authors?” Published and aspiring fiction authors can engage with readers, who, in turn, can ask about non-spoiler information and interact with their new favorite writers. The target demographic of the books is roughly 13-25, but older readers can come too. (Basically, the books are just a minimum of PG-13) I want this to be a very unique and fun experience for everybody and am super excited to get it started! Do you think you’d like an invite when it’s ready?
Yes that’d be lovely
Hey you. Yes you. Go to sleep.
That one phineas and ferb episode
You have a brick. It looks like a brick. It feels like a brick. Yet, over the past few days, people have been desperately trying to buy or steal the brick from you. You're starting to feel scared.
Random Rant
Good night, the writing advice on this website feels samesy as fuck.
It reminds me of when everyone in 2013 had an art OC and you legitimately couldn’t tell the difference.
“This is how you’re writing wrong, write like this instead.”
Congrats Brenda but you write just like Hannah. Who also write just like Lukas who writes just like Hayden.
Please for the love of EVERYTHING. Develop your own writing style.
Don’t copy and paste the writing patterns of others on this website to your own writing style. Because I legitimately can’t tell the difference anymore.
And it’s just really sad to see.
(I also don’t know how tumblr’s algorithm decided I wanted to see writing advice. I don’t. I take all my writing advice from my friend Ralph the alien cricket.)
This is a hot take on threads. I almost got run off the site for it. Lol
If you clicked on and read a fanfiction that had tags or a description that upset you and you were upset by it, that's your responsibility, not the author's responsibility.
If you were reading a fanfiction and you got to an unexpected part that disturbed you and you kept reading after you were disturbed, that was your choice and your responsibility, not the author's.
No one is forcing you to read fanfiction that upsets you. The back button is your friend.
If you are reading a piece of fanfiction it's because it interests you. Horrified fascination counts as interest. No fanfiction is holding you hostage and forcing you to read it.
Being a writer is writing your story the way you want and then that one character insists on a different outcome. So you change that scene but then another character complains too. Now you have to decide what to smother and what to allow! That is so hard to do.
Fanfic is a good and healthy part of creative storytelling.
However some of you are depriving the world of great art. Simple because you’re busy working within the copyright of existing art.
This is coming from someone that used to spend years writing fanfic before officially publishing original fiction.
Please publish your own work too. It’s scary but you’ll be better off for it. Especially when your original story starts getting love too.
Nobody knew they needed certain story worlds until someone took the chance and started a new one.
You can still write your fanfics but don’t miss your true calling.
I usually stop watching Dexter around Season 4, Episode 7.
Rant
Dexter not killing Trinity feels like a plot contrivance; there’s no real reason for him to let him live. He just decides not to kill him after already receiving the proof he needed. Instead, he gets sidetracked with some serial killer of the week because “he threatened Deb.” Really, Dexter? Do you not remember what happened just a few episodes ago because of Trinity?
The idea that “Trinity is on cooldown” doesn’t make sense. When has that ever been a consideration for him? It felt like the showrunners didn't want a predictable series, so they made Dexter act out of character. Trinity isn’t just another Miguel situation; Dexter has seen him kill innocents live. There’s no justification for not dealing with him ASAP.
You could argue that Dexter is struggling with parenthood and being a husband, which clouds his judgment. However, he has never allowed his role as a boyfriend and pseudo-father to so severely distort his logical reasoning. Show runners wanted Trinity to hurt Dexter. The only way they could get that outcome was to make Dexter act outside of his norm.
“Maybe he wanted to learn more about having a normal family life from Trinity.”
Dexter has tabled other serial killers with normal lives. He knows how’s to put on a show and still exist.
“Well Rita needed to go out that way for the set up!” (in a totally different show that the writers definitely knew would be a reality someday)
Actual take I’ve seen before. That show also shifts the dynamics around with the audiences relationship with Dexter so not a fan. I’ll explain. Imagine if Supernatural had a spin-off show that said: “erm actually the Winchesters were pieces of shit the entire time. You should hate them actually. Because technically they were still killing people even if they were irredeemable monsters!”
Then Sam and Dean are killed off by Adam and that found footage werewolf they chose not to hunt.
That’s how that ending feels. So no that “setup” isn’t a good payoff to either series. I’ll just pretend the show ended after S3.
“Erm Hollywood/ Gaming Industry/ Music/ publishers don’t make anything original anymore it’s just sequels, remakes, samples, and prequels!”
I’m going to hold your hand when I tell you this:
Support original art outside of existing pillar franchises and labels.
If you remain inactive in supporting new things, everything will stay the same. Studios, producers, and executives only produce games, movies, music, and TV shows if they believe there’s a fanbase for it. Many book publishers won't take risks on picking up an existing series unless they can prove a major return.
I’m done with this stale argument that everything sucks now. If you’re unhappy with the industry, do something about it or stop complaining. Stop hate watching and start engaging with content you enjoy. Take a chance on new content, you might be missing out.
The era of the hate-watching YouTube essay reviewer is slowly ending, and that's a good thing. Don’t let these reviewers, who often don't even watch what they critique, deter you from trying new things. They often have agendas to convince you that only their specific taste of art is worthwhile. They also don’t like a majority of things even indie.
Form your own opinions and seek out new things to enjoy. Deconstructing and hating is easy; constructing and loving is much harder.
There’s no way this is a real person. Nothing in the original post was said about having kids. Typical internet.
Long rant
I find it funny too because someone pointed out that almost nobody in the US pays for these. Most people, if they want one, will wrangle a stray one from around the airport. Not to mention typically luggage has had wheels since the 70s.
A rich businessman mad that he has to pay $6 out of his expenses. In an economy where most people struggle to afford groceries, this guy is upset about the possibility of spending $6 after traveling around Europe.
I was curious though if OP did have kids and simply didn’t mention them. If I was missing some crucial context that the replier had that I missed. So I checked OP’s profile. OP was traveling alone and has one daughter that appears to be an adult.
So nothing close to this imagined scenario in the comment replying to me. I realize the replier was projecting his scenario onto my comment. But my comment isn’t to the replier it’s to OP. Who clearly doesn’t have that specific scenario to worry over.
Additional Context:
(I made the original comment because I’m tired of people engagement baiting on there. Originally this site was about creatives showing off art.
Now it’s about non-stop engagement baiting like any other corner of the internet. A popular one atm is Europe vs USA .)
Me: only interacts with writing posts and anime
Tumblr: you want to see politics?!
Me: *not interested x1000*
Tumblr: oh so you *really* wanna see politics huh?!
I know it’s an election season but ffs.
Yes yes we all read "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury
I’m so sick and tired of automod systems in social media. I can’t even say “Gay lil —“ without the automod assuming I’m being offensive. Then appealing it sends it off to an ai that keeps the rejection.
Please for the love of EVERYTHING hire actual people from the same countries to review this stuff.
That way even if it goes to an actual human they’ll be judging it within cultural context.
Guess I’m asking too much of a service that offers no product except hosting and makes all its money off the users’ product.
Here’s a meme based off my first books MMC.
Hey everyone, would you be interested in a story told from the first-person perspective of a young woman who’s stuck living in a creepy underground town and has to face seriously chilling horrors? Let me know!
Rewatching gravity falls since the first time it aired. Lots of setup in this series. Even season 1 did that well. Very impressive. If the series came back I would want Dipper to own the shack as an older man.
I think I will have made it as an author when I start getting fanfiction of my books. As long as it’s not anything illegal, I don’t care what the fanfic is about.
I wrote and published my book. This book is very important to me. I never thought I’d live this long to write and publish a book. That’s all.
This is one of the memes I’ve made about my first book.
