It has come to my attention
that people like me
are generally not welcome in fairy tales.

It’s the talking birds that do it.

It was all very well to go away in the night with an elfin boy with laughing eyes who taught you how to fly, and promised that you’d never have to grown up, but it turned out that grown-ups had a great deal to do with meals arriving regularly and on time. To get food, you had to beg it off the Indians or steal it from the pirates, and as a result, nearly everyone was hungry all the time, except perhaps Pan.

Here. Listen.

I’ll tell you a story.

Listen.

Once upon a time there was a girl. She was probably about twelve or thirteen, but that was an age when children were older than their years and expected to do real work and help with the harvest, so perhaps she was only nine or ten.

http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1464434.html (part 2)

“Do you know why I am going to kill you?”

The Prince Regent was foxed. He knew he was foxed. He was pretty sure that someone had just threatened him, but here was the Duke of Foxmoor on his right, and Warthington on his left, and there was the young man with the gun in front of him…oh. Hmm.

The Dreamlands are, simultaneously, both the easiest of the otherworlds to get into and one of the hardest.

Miss Tansybaum did not have a freakshow (at least not in the conventional sense, although the less charitable would argue that the entire operation qualified.) Instead she had Sister Rosemary's Curious Convent.

twisted fantasy AU of the Little House on the Prairie books

The problem with crying in the woods, by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn’t mostly inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch, and you will still be stuck in the woods halfway to somewhere terrible.

Whenever possible, I have attempted to verify Eland’s writings against other sources, but our information about the clockwork labyrinth, the “gear world” Eland the Younger describes, is so fragmentary that Eland’s writings must often stand on their own. Additionally, past librarians have often jumbled these sources together with Eland’s own work, so that one may occasionally find fragments from other writings related to the subject, or inclusions from other volumes of Terra Absurdium, or in one case, for no reason that I can determine, three volumes of the formerly lost work "Ganesh's Guide To Tchang Cooking," rendering the process even more frustrating.

The golem girl sat in the corner of a ruined basement.

There are a number of smells one expects to encounter in a dungeon. Fresh rosemary generally isn’t one of them.

Many people have a very skewed vision of what druids do...
I do not wear oak leaves. I have yanked up so many goddamn oak seedlings—pin oak, black oak, water oak, thrush oak, the squirrels bury the acorns, the acorns sprout, and suddenly there’s hungry roots everywhere and perfectly decent plants who never had an unkind word for anybody are getting smothered under an ocean of ravenous oak—I cannot abide oak.

The donkey’s name was Quick.

Like many of the better run asylums--and they had, after all, the sort of unlimited budget that only omnipotence can achieve--this one was neat and clean and unspeakably dreary.

Over the years, people have gone to truly extraordinary lengths in pursuit of fashion. A catalog of peculiar gowns would fill several volumes, even without getting into bizarre hats, wigs, gloves, codpieces, shoes, eyeglasses, and all manner of other demented accessories, and I will not so tax the reader except to mention a few highlights.

All wizards are crazy.

Not the quaint, colloquial “crazy” where you have an offbeat sense of humor and wear brightly colored socks, not mild eccentricity coupled with a general lack of fashion sense, not “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” Wizards aren’t weird. They are genuinely, legitimately, around the bend.

This is because magic is a form of psychosis.

Sings-to-Trees had hair the color of sunlight and ashes, delicately pointed ears, and eyes the translucent green of new leaves. His shirt was off, revealing the sort of tanned muscle acquired from years of healthy outdoor living, and you could have sharpened a sword on his cheekbones.

He was saved from being a young maiden’s fantasy—unless she was a very peculiar young maiden—by the fact that he was buried up to the shoulder in the unpleasant end of a heavily pregnant unicorn. Bits of unicorn dung, which was not noticeably more ethereal than horse dung, were sliding down his arm, and every time the mare had a contraction, he lost feeling in his hand.

strange castles

uddenly I find myself thinking "Not only was I not born when this art came out, thirty-eight years ago, my parents were still good Catholic teenagers waiting for marriage. This painting pre-dates not just my birth, but even the possibility of my conception."

Thirty-eight years, and somebody somewhere is on a blog, ranting semi-coherently about it.

"Christianity would not be notably improved by inclusion of a gospel where Jesus turns into a teenage girl with a telepathic unicorn pet."

Self insertion in early writing

unfinished story snippets

There is obviously a sadistic streak in writers, and it's kind of scary how fun it is sometimes, when you feel you've really earned it.

an LJ with a very cool exploration log of a very strange place

starring Chu the chupacabra

A wombat. A dead god. A very peculiar epic.