14 Comments
User's avatar
Tracy's avatar

This was captivating and horrifying- most excellent! 🙏🏼✨

Expand full comment
EJ Trask's avatar

that kill scene kicks ass

Expand full comment
Honeygloom's avatar

Ha! Thank you, it was a fun one to write.

Expand full comment
Liz Zimmers's avatar

I love the delight Ida and Melon take in their, er, craft. Charmingly horrifying!

Expand full comment
Honeygloom's avatar

Ha! They are quite the pair😂

Expand full comment
A.P. Murphy's avatar

Superb HG.

I was chatting with a friend of ours a while back about wish fulfilment in fiction and I was just thinking 'My wish fulfilment wouldn't be some Hero's Journey where Frodo comes back to the happy Shire, it would be where everybody in the world simultaneously had a brain seizure and a transformation and became a completely fresh being, freed of all their crabbed habits of mind'.

Your best stories kind of achieve that sort of transformation in narrative form. This is a cheeky version of that.

Expand full comment
Honeygloom's avatar

I do love a little cheek😏I do love a transformation, too, maybe it’s a kind of envy. Mammals never really undergo this process, even puberty pales in comparison to what most insects go through. Also I was thinking about what you said about taking in all the news and letting it come out in your writing. I don’t know that it was successful, I’m not great at overt messages, but it was a goal with this piece.

Expand full comment
A.P. Murphy's avatar

I really think you are very successful and I also don’t think it’s an overt message. It comes off as what I said, a cheeky black-comic apocalypse which is seen as welcome. The transformation is not obviously but rather craftily seen as a beneficial thing, a cleansing.

Since we don’t take it literally, we can just take it as a creepy tale, but the ‘something else’ is there lurking.

I honestly think most readers won’t even perceive it as any kind of message at all, but the suggestion will be there working its brain-transforming effects, like some ovipositor with a benign little egg ready to hatch one day.

I also feel humbled that I in any small way contributed to this mighty little thing of yours. I have and was preparing to dust off a similar type of thing but which featured a brain virus rather than a god-creature.

Expand full comment
Honeygloom's avatar

You actually really helped me over the paralysis. Stuff that’s bothering me always makes it into my writing, but what’s going on now is so big I was afraid if I tried to write about it it would end up preachy or boring. But I was like, “Prof said to do it and I have to at least try.” So thank you 🙏

Expand full comment
Nick Winney's avatar

wow that's excellent!

such musical writing and such a bizarre world of magic powers.

Expand full comment
Honeygloom's avatar

Thank you!!

Expand full comment
Shawn Brooks's avatar

Brutal and cool!

Expand full comment
Honeygloom's avatar

Thank you!!

Expand full comment
Shawn Brooks's avatar

Of course!

Expand full comment