not-poignant

Hi! Welcome to Pia Foxhall’s Tumblr! (Also the Tumblr for my AO3 not_poignant / thespectaclesofthor names too) If you’re here to ask about a reading order, check out this post!

I’m a queer writer in Western Australia who writes queer m/m fiction across genres like romance, fantasy, science fiction, omegaverse, contemporary, and literary. Almost all my fiction is FREE to read.

Feel free to scroll, look through the tags, and ask any questions you might have. This is where I’m most active online, and am happy to talk about writing, editing, upcoming stories, I also frequently share excerpts, talk characters, and more.

You can find my original and freely available Fae Tales series and Rise of the Guardians fanfic here at not_poignant, and all the rest of my fanfic over at thespectaclesofthor

I’ve published books as Pia Foxhall, and you can find the Perth Shifters series here:

Blackwood (Perth Shifters #1) - Buy links
The Gentle Wolf (Perth Shifters #2) - Buy links

Please feel free to support my AO3 original serials here at Patreon or Ream (these are identical mirrors of each other, pick the one you like more!) or at my Ko-Fi account!

This (subscription) is my main writing income, and the Patreon and Ream account are what allow me to write freely available serials for everyone. If you want to see these stories continue to exist and get access to extras in thanks, please feel free to sign up!

If you sign up to the Gary+Efnisien tiers or higher, you also get access to the exclusive, complete m/m romance e-book/novel Tradewinds, which is a Fae Tales Verse romance story featuring an entirely new cast of merchant trader characters!

You can also join my mailing list here! (It’s not very active, I will – at most – bother you 2-4 times a year, but at the moment it’s much, much less).

Pinned Postlanding page housekeeping fae tales fae tales verse perth shifters pia foxhall not poignant thespectaclesofthor sorry everyone i need a pinned post at the top of my tumblr lol blackwood the gentle wolf tags for days there's also a fae tales wiki (just google 'fae tales wiki')anyway welcome aboard!

not-poignant theficlistpodcast

queenangst

idk if this is a young fan thing or new fandom culture but some of yall think fics are abandoned way too quickly. a few months or a year or two is not unusual to go without a fic update. sometimes fics take longer to write, other times writers have rl events, or maybe there's multiple fics and one gets more priority. there are tons of reasons for fics not to be updated every week or every month. it also isn't uncommon for people to come back and update fics after a number of years—ive read updates that took five, or ten years. people's lives change, but they still want to tell their stories. personally, i never consider a fic abandoned unless the author has said so; though if it's been a few years i manage my expectations. but a last update being a year ago is... generally not a sign that a writer has abandoned their fic

swapauanon

Someone once assumed I had abandoned a fic because there were seven days between updates.

not-poignant

^^^ I once had someone assume a fic was abandoned after like 10 days which was like ‘wh….at world are you living in?’

on fandom on writing

not-poignant

Anonymous asked:

I have been crying off and on with your updates. I know you have more important things going on, but thank you for the updates. I feel like a longtime friend is in jeopardy. We've never met, only spoken through fic comments, but you've been an almost daily part of my life for years. Your wisdom, art, and writing have been so important to me, so treasured. I find checking your updates on tumblr part of my routine, and find myself hoping you are having a good day as I read your stories. It's unfair how big of an impact you can have on others, yet when something like this happens there's not much we can do. I know the most I can do is send you well wishes and support your Patreon, but it doesn't feel like enough for someone whose work helped me work out so much of myself. You deserve the world. Thank you for sharing yourself with us. May the doctors do good work and your body begin recovering.

I have been crying on and off with my updates too, anon, we can do it together (actually hopefully not so much anymore <333)

I appreciate your words so much, really, also I’m so sorry to everyone for not replying while I was in the hospital, I only had one finger to write with due to the cannula + pain situation, so I mostly restricted myself to just broader general updates and that one anon who reminded me that actually when someone is scared they are dying maybe don’t.

(But for everyone else, all of your like, replies and messages have just been so incredibly kind and warm and wonderful, and I’m going to spend some time replying to them over the next few days when I have energy to. They helped so much.)

Anyway, back to you specifically, anon, sending well wishes is huge, actually. Sending an ask like this is huge actually. I appreciate you, and the time you took to write this, and getting it in a hospital bed at probably 4.00am knowing me, is really lovely and kind and I am grateful. Like, one of the reasons I spent what energy I had updating here is because the folks I’ve gotten to meet through my writing are some of the best people in the world, and I felt so guilty I couldn’t update lol, and y'all deserved an explanation, and now that I am back I can release what I’ve missed (probably one chapter a day until I’m back up to date with the schedule if I can manage it!)

I’ll probably keep up with the health updates too, tbh, for folks who don’t want to read them they can always blacklist the tag ‘health’

asks and answers personal am about to have dinner (well like in an hour or so)and going to organise some shopping but wow i'm fatiguing easily at the moment post hospital experiences are always a little liminal and weird!

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Anonymous asked:

Hi Pia! I just started reading FFS, because I can't keep rereading UtB, and I was wondering if there's an actual title for the jellyfish book Efnisien buys in chapter 9? I also get nonfiction or textbooks for fun 😅 and kinda wanna try that out after my cloud book because I love jellyfish

Hi anon!

Not all the books in Falling Falling Stars are real, but that one is! It’s called Spineless by Juli Berwald, and it’s part autobiography and part reflections on the complicated lives that are jellyfish and their relatives. It really is a beautiful cover / spine, though it may have been altered with reprints!

If you find it, I hope you enjoy it! :D

asks and answers falling falling stars i was captivated by the cover for that one because i love jellyfish too inadvertent recs

not-poignant

Stardew Valley - 75/? - A Stain that Won’t Dissolve - Alex/Sebastian

Title: A Stain that Won’t Dissolve

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Alex/Sebastian

Tags: Hurt/comfort, aged-up characters (mid 20s), minor character death, angst, injury, grief, miscommunication, bullying, enemies to lovers, dubious consent, internalised homophobia, closeted character, past child abuse, dyslexia, antagonist farmer, unrequited love, pining, acceptance, top!Sebastian, bottom!Alex, power dynamics, happy ending.

Summary: Alex hates Sebastian – which is great because Sebastian more than returns the favour – and what starts out as revenge fantasy turns into unironic lust, which evolves into unrequited love. Alex gets a job, Sebastian marries the farmer, and both of them lose almost everything before finding each other again. A story of two mutual bullies who learn how to messily grow up.

A Stain that Won’t Dissolve - Chapter 75 - Let Go Of Your Shame

In which Alex has a timely session with Tim, vents about everything that’s happened since the last time they caught up and gets some advice that helps Alex see clearer into his past than ever before.

chapter update sdv fic sdv alex sdv sebastian mm romance a stain that won't dissolve thespectaclesofthor queer romance okay putting this up was actually a lot harder than i thought it would be whoops but that's okay i don't have to do something else this hard again today

not-poignant

Anonymous asked:

I'm so glad you've improved enough to be allowed to go home and am wishing you the very best. Please take care of yourself and take whatever time and measures you need. Glad you're still with us.

Thank you so much anon, it’s good to be home! I actually just woke up and am feeling a bit out of it, and it’s hard to not be afraid that it’s my blood pressure that has tanked or that the infection has rebounded, and I think it’s honestly just that I slept and I’m tireder here because I’m already doing more here lol

Anyway, thanks again, I’m glad to still be here! Y'all have been incredible

asks and answers just smashed a carrot and a whole lot of water and put up a chapter!it's going to be weird not being interrupted by medical alarms or like people coming in for obs?there's always a moment of adjustment after like obs / blood tests / cannula re-placements etc.i had the best nurses on the planet though and have to organise a thank you gift for them

not-poignant

CRP finally dropped from 204 to 130~ overnight, and while that’s still pretty bad, they’re trusting me to go home and I’ve been discharged. I do actually still have sepsis lol, and 4 boxes of antibiotics (don’t worry I’ll take the full course), and a lot of instructions and warnings, but…I’m home.

I’ll be updating a chapter tonight, but I’ll also be changing the way I’m working for the next few months as I properly recover. Thanks for all your patience, I wouldn’t wish a January near death experience on anyone.

housekeeping health fuckdamn am I glad to be home though and also still really scared to be this sick

not-poignant

today I can say I have no idea when they’re going to let me out and nor do they. My CRP (C-Reactive Protein), a measure of inflammation processes in the blood, remains at 200.

they won’t even consider letting me go until it reaches 100. A CRP of 200 is what you’d expect to see in severe life-threatening illness like extensive third degree burns, certain kinds of metastatic cancer and, well, sepsis.

they were very much expecting a rapid response to the antibiotics where my CRP would fall fast from the 264 it reached with targeted antibiotics, however, it’s only falling around 10 points a day with bumps in the road.

a normal CRP btw, is 0-5. Even 100 is severe. But for me it would be a miracle.

I’ve been at or over 200 CRP since Saturday. So, 6 days. Tomorrow they measure it again. Every day I spend at this level of inflammation puts my internal organs (inc heart and brain) under intense pressure and strain, and there’s nothing much more they can do except what they’re doing (IV antibiotics and supplemental potassium and magnesium because I can’t keep my levels up on my own), and what I’m doing (resting, walking a little, eating well, crying like a little child (sigh), and watching Vic Michaelis and Angela Giarratana videos because I genuinely believe laughter is good for the soul.)

but the situation is very serious still, and the doctors I can tell wish I would recover faster, for my own sake.

anyway gotta go for today, it’s time for more IV antibiotics. Take care, everyone

Housekeeping Health Today has been hard because the doctor told me explicitly what they need From the bloodtests For a discharge And I’m still so far away and going home with a 100 CRP is still bad But it feels like a miracle to even make it that far I hope I hope But we’ll see

not-poignant

Anonymous asked:

Pia, hang in there. I can't imagine my world without you. You still have so much to write, and I still have so much to read.

You know, anon, I have value outside of being able to write.

As I lay here in a hospital bed, with swelling and one of my fingers going into spasm from a cannula that finally crapped itself after three days (already a replacement of the other cannula that bruised another vein), a low blood pressure that refuses to consistently stabilise to the chagrin of nurses, I am disinclined to indulge this attitude.

If I come home - as in, if I live through this, which is not guaranteed - and get to sleep in my bed again, or pat my dog again, or see my friends and family again in a place where we aren’t all worried about my outcomes, I will have a lot to live for that literally has nothing to do with my writing.

It’s possible that if/when I get to come home, I won’t be able to write anymore. Post Sepsis Syndrome is a thing. Some people’s lives are changed permanently, and I don’t mean for the positive. I’ve already been advised that the next 6-12 months at least are going to be rough, because I had a lot of pre-existing issues before I came in, and my body is fighting, but it’s struggling to fight. Maybe look up sepsis and septic shock on Wikipedia, anon. I’ve been recommending most people *don’t* do that, because it’s pretty awful, but you might need to do some learning.

The idea that the only or main reason I should live is that I have ‘so much left to write’ because you have ‘so much left to read’ when I will be frankly lucky just to live and walk out of here, was not fun to read at 5:00am this morning, after nurse observations (blood pressure: bad, temp: average, oxygen sat: good), while E. coli tries to convince my body to kill itself in its response to the bacteria in my blood stream, knowing I might not be able to write again even if I do live. Let alone do all the other things I love, too. It’s not like any doctor has yet to say to me ‘we’re hopeful about your odds’ or ‘things are looking good/great.’

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing so much, but my life is a lot more than that, and has value outside of that, and amazingly being reduced to a single function that exists to gratify someone else’s desire, as though nothing else about me matters, just didn’t feel that great this morning. It sucks you’re not getting the writing you want to read. But I’m gonna make the call that it sucks more that I still don’t know if I get to live or not yet.

Ask and answers I get you probably mean nothing by it But this is what it means to dehumanise someone anon You stopped seeing me as a person or maybe never did And are seeing me instead as simply an entertainment generator for your pleasure And you can do that in private But you don’t have to loop me in on that while I’m dealing with this Okay? Okay.

not-poignant

Excerpt from chapter 15 of Underline the Red:

‘He just cancelled the conference,’ Faber said to no one, hanging up the phone after Dr Gary called him. ‘He just cancelled the conference where he’s the fucking keynote speaker.’

Faber stared at the ceiling.

‘He did that last minute.’

It was like he’d never met Dr Gary in his life. What on earth was happening?

‘What the fuck does it mean his home office was destroyed?’ he almost shouted, barely managing to keep his voice even.

He forced himself to take several deep breaths and then did something he almost never did these days, and texted Kenneth.

Does your job ever make you want to sprint off the Busselton Jetty directly into the sun? Because I’m putting my running shoes on, right now. How are things with you? Better, I hope.

He sent the message, then picked up a cushion and screamed into it – the one time he happened to be at home – and threw it back down to the couch viciously.

‘The flight is tomorrow! It’s tomorrow! You told me you were packing today, you daft motherf-!’

Faber fell heavily to the couch and pressed his phone to his forehead. He had…

Fuck. He had so much to do.

daily excerpt underline the red underline the rainbow kenneth leone faber castle mm romance queer romance omegaverse hurt/comfort angst with a happy ending i just imagine faber is screaming inside near-constantly throughout this chapter the poor guy is really going through it ldkfjasdlkfa

not-poignant

Nurse this morning: You might get to go home this afternoon!

me (confused but very pleased): omg!!!

doctor an hour later: so… you are definitely not going home tomorrow and we’ll see about Friday okay?

me (nodding and extremely unsurprised): I fully understand, we don’t fuck with sepsis *

doctor soberly: we don’t fuck with sepsis *

*author has taken some liberties here because this makes it cooler. What I said was ‘I don’t want to take my chances with sepsis’ and the doctor nodded and said ‘that’s right so we’re all going to be very sensible here’ thanks Dr Chandra you absolute goat

Health Housekeeping I haven’t written anything in 5 days what the hecky