Rynling R&D

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Like 2024, this year was mostly about figuring out how to make good art, as well as how to find a place for it in the world despite being shut out by gatekeepers. Next year I will continue to challenge the gatekeepers! In the meantime, I’ll keep cultivating the most beautiful garden I can outside the wall.

Here’s to lots of green and growing energy in 2026. 🌿

I just had a terrible idea:

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I just had another terrible idea:

I bet I could use this conceit to write really interesting porn.

ETA: I outlined the story. This is going to be a good one. 🍸

For me, the fantasy of this story is “what if the people pushed to the margins are actually very important,” which is something I’ve been thinking about lately.

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But also the fantasy is, like. What if tech oligarchs actually cared about culture and education. Imagine that lmao.

I'm thinking about getting started on a new novel. I'm calling the project "The Dark Archive" until I figure out a better title. It might be worthwhile to assemble a set of query materials as I go along, but I'm not against the idea of writing something self-indulgent and unmarketable. If I were to self-publish, what an adventure that would be.

The basic premise:
An archivist relegated to a basement room under a museum is pressured by a wealthy donor who wants access to the collection. When she investigates the objects of his interest, she finds that a number of the museum's more obscure holdings are imbued with magic.

Writing goals:
1. One chapter = one scene. A chapter doesn’t need to be longer than a thousand words.
2. There should be spice every four chapters. Even in this house of death we fuck.
3. This could perhaps be a Zelda fanfic, and it’s okay to use Zelda names as placeholders.
4. I want there to be academic marginalia – index cards, articles, bibliographies. Footnotes!

“The Case of the Phantom Portrait” is a fun short story with an interesting conceit and a satisfying resolution. It’s also quite original, I think. How many stories have you read about wizard detectives?

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Is there a market for this? No. Is it likely that anyone will buy it? Also no.

But is it good and noble and worthwhile to put art into the world? Hell yeah brother.

I'm currently writing an original piece of flash fiction called "In This House We Love Hello Kitty," which is about an aging Millennial who's doing some urban exploration and comes across an old CRT monitor that reminds him of how his grandmother used to defend him against his homophobic parents before she got numerology brainrot from Facebook.

For this story, I had to come up with some original numerology rants, and it was surprisingly easy to do.

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I'm good, right? And I could do this all damn day. I'm sure this has nothing to do with ADHD

People who have been accepted by Clarkesworld or have been slush readers, what exactly does Clarkesworld look for?
https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/1mi8uym/people_who_have_been_accepted_by_clarkesworld_or/

Generally the two traits I've noticed among the authors we've published is that they steadily improve over time and persist long enough to cross the line. How long that can take is wildly variable. Some manage to land on their first try, but others have sold stories after 80 or more. Most authors give up before the third submission.

Words of wisdom from Neil Clarke himself. I love that he's not only active on Reddit but genuinely supportive of emerging writers. What a legend.

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Earlier this year, I wrote and published an essay called “Dark Academia for Dark Times.” The editor of an emerging horror fiction magazine shared a link to the essay in an appreciative post on Bluesky and tagged me, and this morning I retweeted it. I instantly lost ten followers.

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The funny thing is that I didn't even know that ten people cared about anything I did. Like, I feel lucky if any of my posts on Bluesky gets ten notes. Once again I find myself wishing that people who consider themselves to be LGBTQ+ activists were as quick to support work made by LGBTQ+ creators as they are to call out what they perceive to be community infractions.

“The Case of the Phantom Portrait” is a wizard detective story loosely inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray. The wizard detective, Fhiad, is a university mage who travels to a Gothic manor after being hired by a duchess to locate a portrait that’s gone missing after her husband died. The scenes of the story are divided by Fhiad’s letters to a colleague at his university, Agnes, and he’s able to solve the mystery because of the assistance she provides in her terse replies.

Fhiad and Agnes are characters from An Unfound Door, an original gothic fantasy novel that I’m currently preparing to query. They’re in their mid-twenties in the novel, and the story takes place a decade or two later, when they have more stable personalities. Fhiad is charming and kind, and Agnes is as sharp as a knife and uninterested in bullshit.

To simplify somewhat, Agnes is Sherlock Holmes, and Fhiad is William of Baskerville (from The Name of the Rose).

Agnes never actually appears in person in “The Case of the Phantom Portrait,” and I was worried that she’s an extraneous element. I sent the story to three separate copy editors, though, and all three of them said – completely independently of the job they were hired to do – that Agnes was their favorite character.

That’s good, then. I’d love to write more wizard detective stories. In the meantime, I hope Agnes is a compelling enough character to get at least one agent interested in the novel.

This is Fhiad (as drawn by Armd39), by the way. I like to think he has a certain appeal of his own:

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The copy editor I hired to look over my wizard detective story says that "conspectus" is not a word that exists. This is a silly thing to say, because:

(1) Magic also does not exist.
(2) We therefore have to invent words to talk about it.
(3) It would make sense for wizards to use these words.
(4) The meaning is 100% clear from context.

Also: I would love to have the talent to invent fancy Latinate words, but "conspectus," meaning "a subdiscipline of a broader field of study," is very much a real word that exists. Which the copy editor would know if she googled it.

She said the same thing about "ensorcelled," as in "a magically ensorcelled object." That's definitely a real word, and it makes sense for its meaning to shift to become more literal in a story where magic is real.

Like what's the point of writing fantasy if you don't get to make things up?

And also, what's the point of copy editing if you have no sense of style?