K. Locke
writer | dreamer | secret | spy
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News from Alex London (and a PROXY short story!)
Still getting asked a lot about the Proxy finale short story.
It’s free to download via my newsletter at the link above and it should give some sense of closure to Syd and Liam and Marie and Knox’s story. Yes, even Knox’s story.
Obviously, in it, there are spoilers for Proxy and Guardian. It’s not a standalone, but if you liked the books, feel free to check it out and read it via the link above! Enjoy!
<shameless self promotion>…and then pre-order my new YA fantasy novel, Black Wings Beating! </shameless self-promotion>
Reblogged from:alex--london
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Everyone has these amazing Love, Simon stories. The theater applauds. People stand up and cheer. People shout out loud. My experience was…nothing like that.
I live in a conservative town. We were on spring break. There are max 8 people in the theater. During the movie, everyone was silent. All you could hear were the girls behind me crying and laughing, the quiet gasps from the male and female couple in front of me, my friends whispered words under their breath, and my own quiet sobbing into my glove. The movie ends. The credits roll. We all get out of our seats. Someone holds the door for me, I hold it for someone else. We all make eye contact with each other at some point and we come to an unspoken agreement. They weren’t there, I wasn’t there, we saw no one we knew. Except we all knew each other, I knew everyone’s names and they knew mine. But the fear in their eyes, that gave way to understanding, acceptance, agreement and camaraderie, made us all silently promise in that split second of eye contact to take a vow of silence. We held the door for each other. Nodded at each other. We walked away to our respective cars. We said nothing.
I haven’t given away any of their names. I haven’t asked them about it either. But a couple of them I’ve seen since. One, a person I have never talked to in my life, saw me and we nodded at each other in recognition. It’s no empowering story. It isn’t loud or great or revolutionary. But I have some new people watching my back. And I’m watching theirs. Because in the end, we are all the same, with the same secret. And even in such a conservative town, we are not alone.
Reblogged from:yahighway
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(x)
Reblogged from:esheerans
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Shiiiiiips 😭😭
Reblogged from:purple-hazard
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A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER
by Tiffany D. Jackson
You never forget the day you realize your relationship is over. The details are painted on your brain, a picture clear as a Kodak print. If those exist anymore.
The date, February thirteenth, senior year of high school, on my fourth day of skipping school.
Time, somewhere between my Netflix binge hangover and noon.
The weather, sunny, twenty-eight degrees with a high wind advisory.
I remember the wind, like a violent tornado ripping through the streets of Brooklyn, blowing down dead trees and bodega awnings. Tears brushed off my face into my hair, a tangle of coarse black curls, like Mother Nature wiping them away.
Despite the debilitating sadness that weighed me down, Cliff, my chocolate cocker spaniel, convinced me to get out of bed. Cliff liked to stop at every street sign, fire hydrant, and pile of leftover black snow, to sniff what he has sniffed hundreds of times over, so that day I let him walk me. Passed the Crowns Fried Chicken, the unpaved parking lot where car were left to die, then around the bordered up old elementary school.
The chill in the air numbed my fingers and I regretted the thin denim jacket threw on over my hoodie. But even indoors, my whole body felt like a block of ice. It helped not to feel.
Seventy two hours.
That’s how long we had gone without talking. He chose to be with Her. Her. The girl from Chem Lab he told me not to worry about. The girl he swore I was better than and I believed him. Who wouldn’t believe those eyes…that smile…those hands.
Cliff dragged me down another street, passed Troy Projects, then passed the Jehovah Witness Hall. I didn’t care where we were headed. Nothing mattered anymore.
Cliff stopped in front of a tall black mesh gate, sniffing the pile of black leaves left over from the fall. The gate made a perfect vertical rectangle around the property. An aged house snuggled between two apartment buildings sat far from the curb, shaded by large drooping evergreens. Empty glass bottles, molded newspapers, and apple cores covered a lawn of dead grass. At the base of the home was a chicken coop, right out of Old McDonald’s farm.
But it wasn’t a farm. The house belonged to the Troy Ave Witch. Or that’s what I grew up calling her.
People didn’t know much about her. Don’t know how she ate ‘cause no one’s ever seen her in the grocery store. Don’t know how she survived the brutal hot summers when she never opened a window. Don’t know how she kept her lights on, when she never gets the bill since the mailman is too shook to bring her mail. But we all knew how she made her money. Folks went to her when prayers weren’t working fast enough. Some say the bodies stacked in the basement kept the house from collapsing.
“She wasn’t always like that,” I remembered my grandma saying, years before she passed. “She was sweet as pie. Always smiling, laughing. Then, something happened. No one knows what.”
But Grandma was like that. Could see the good in just about anyone.
Cliff sniffed the gate and plopped down on his butt as if someone told him to. The padlock hung ajar, a sign that she was opened for business. It cost one hundred dollars just to walk through her door, I was told. The price of desperation. The exact amount I happened to have had in my wallet. Only twice in my life have I thought about walking through her gates. Once, when grandma was sick and I heard the Witch had cured folks of cancer. The other was the moment I saw HIM change his Facebook status that he was now with her.
The wind stopped with a chilling stillness, nearby traffic on Atlantic Avenue muted. Not a car, truck, or ambulance in sight. Nothing but eerie silence as my feet found their way through the weeds. One foot slipped, I assumed on the wet pavement from the melting snow, but then I looked down at the path, frosted with gigantic earthworms. I tiptoed my red converse over them, a slimy tightrope walk towards the porch steps.
Cliff watched from the gate, his face blank, black eyes boring into mine. It wasn’t like I hadn’t heard the stories of the people she ate on Thanksgiving or the curse she put on Darlene Brown that left her bald, after she let her dog pee on the Witch’s lawn. But I couldn’t shake the image of his picture on Instagram, with arms wrapped around her waist, placing the lips that once belonged to me on her HER forehead. The witch had to help me.
The wooden door swung open with a shriek before my foot touched the landing.
Reblogged from:hanginggardenstories
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The Aftermath
Note: I wrote this November 9th. As I know many of us are still grieving, I’m sharing it today. Stay safe out there. <3
It’s November 9 when I’m writing this, and today my heart hurts. My head hurts. My body hurts. When you’re chronically ill, stress can cause flares, so I’m not surprised it’s 9AM and I’m already thinking about painkillers.
And still, I have work to do. NaNo words to write. This post. Editing work for clients. An overflowing e-mail inbox that needs attention. A vlog to record—and hopefully record without it being obvious I was crying this morning. I’ll get through it one step at a time, but right now moving forward feels like walking through molasses.
I’m scared for myself. For so many of my friends. For what this will mean tomorrow, and the day after, and every day for the next four years and two months.
I’m telling myself I have today to process emotionally but tomorrow I have to start fighting.
Among the grieving, I’ve seen a lot of inspirational threads online. About the importance of writing children’s literature, especially now. About art. About supporting people who need it. About loving each other.
I’m going to share them here:
Sending love and hugs to all my scared friends. We’ll get through this one day at a time.
Reblogged from:avajae
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Reblogged from:
fatedefied
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Dear Scared Queer Teen,
I see you. I see you. I see you. I don’t know you, but I see you.
I know this week seems unbearably long. I know this week is unspeakably painful. I know that you are afraid. I’m not going to tell you not to be afraid. I think fear and sorrow and anger are completely rational responses to this election.
But here’s the thing: we’re going to survive. You and I. We’re going to make it.
For a long time, I strung together things to keep me going. I wasn’t allowed to leave (and you know what I mean by leave), I told myself, until I read all the Harry Potter books.
And after I read all the Harry Potter books, I said I’m not allowed to leave until I’ve seen all the movies.
And then all the movies wrapped up, and I said, I’m not allowed to leave until I’ve seen all the Hunger Games movies.
When those movies wrapped up, I found myself on firm enough footing that I could internalize my anchors. I could say that I wasn’t leaving until I had written the books I wanted to write.
Spoiler alert, I want to write all the books.
But this week has been hard. And I found myself reaching for little anchors again. Things to keep my head above water. The two new tracks on the Hamilton Mixtape. Seeing Hamilton in January. My brother’s wedding. My first book signing.
Sadness is acceptable and understandable. But I don’t want to lose you to drowning in it. You are incredible. Yes. You. I know you’re saying that I justsaid I didn’t know you, but I do.
I see you all over the internet and in real life, brimming with tenacity and determination, even when you’re hiding. You are brilliant and full of life and even when you’re not sure that this is a world to which you want to belong, you stay. And God, that’s a feat. That’s a fight that we don’t honor enough.
I know that our world depends on you making it because we’re going to do better than the generations before us. We are. We’re going to talk about sexism and racism, about gender equality and gender as a spectrum, not a binary. We’re going to create safe spaces for the young people behind us, and we’re going to hang on, because that’s what we’ve done. The people who came before you and I, they hung on. They made safe spaces, they organized, they fought back, they mourned their losses, and they hung on.
And to some of you, hanging on means just keeping your head down. We don’t like to talk about this, but it’s important. I want you to be safe. If you’re not out at home or in your community, your safety comes first. That is hanging on. If you can safely be out online and find safe spaces and cover those tracks, excellent. If you can’t, I want you to know that we are here. We know you’re out there. We love you.
Hang on. Stay here.
And if you can, and only if you can in ways that don’t prevent you from hanging on and staying here, fight back.
Write letters to your congressional representatives. Here’s how to find your House representative and here’s how to find your Senate representative. If you need to be anonymous, go by snail mail or call. Tell them about issues that are important to you.
Raise money for the ACLU and The Trevor Project, two organizations which may be very busy over the next few years and who help queer teens like you.
If you can safely do so, calmly confront racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny where you hear it. “Hey, what you just said was [racist/homophobic/sexist]. That’s not cool.” This thread on Twitter is really excellent on how to talk about racism in a way that is confrontational without escalating. You can basically sub in anything for racism and it works.
Read Rules for Survival. It’s long, but good. Here’s the takeaways:
1. Believe the autocrat
2. Do not allow normalization
3. Don’t rely on institutions
4. Be mad
5. Don’t compromise
6. Remember the futureAnd I’ll add one.
7. Watch out for people more marginalized than you.
We must have each other’s backs. Inside this community of ours, if you’re white, this means queer and/or disabled people of color. If you’re cis, this means trans folk. It means that there are undocumented immigrants in this country who are queer and we need to have their backs too.
I have one more.
8. Be yourself.
We cannot accept the normalization of this candidate as a president, especially with his platform and the unprecedented nature of his campaign.
But we can accept and normalize you, and you, and you, and all of us wherever we fall on the incredibly diverse LGBTQIA+ spectrum. We have to check our internalized misogyny, our internalized homophobia, our internalized and often too vocal transphobia, our biphobia.
There’s work to do inside of this community, and there’s no better time to do it. Be yourself, but demand excellence from yourself in accepting others and their queerness, their expression, their life. Leave your baggage from this white, ableist, heteronormative world at the door.
And if that’s a lot right now, only three days after the election, I understand. Right now, all you have to do is stay here.
Stay here. Make a list of anchors. If you’re struggling to find anchors, ask me and I’ll find books or movies coming out in the next few months, and a few months after that. Don’t give up. Reach out if you need help. You are loved. You are strong. You are important. We queer adults see you and we will fight for you. Hang on.
If you need them, here they are.
National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1–800–273–8255
Hopeline Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1–800-SUICIDE
Hopeline for Veterans: 1–877–838–2838
For Young People who are LGBTQIA, The Trevor Project: 1–866–488–7386
For Post Partum Depression: 1–800–773–6667
For Young People who are LGBTQIA, here are non-voice options.
TrevorText- Available on Fridays (4:00 p.m. — 8:00 p.m. ET / 1:00 p.m. — 5:00 p.m. PT). Text the word “Trevor” to 1–202–304–1200. Standard text messaging rates apply.
TrevorChat — Available 7 days a week (3:00 p.m. — 9:00 p.m. ET / 12:00 p.m. — 6:00 p.m. PT).
And for what it’s worth, I’ve opened up my asks again. I’m here. -
Reblogged from:title2come
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“A very old man came in to my Starbucks. Halfway through struggling to understand his order through his thick accent, he noticed my necklace. He stopped and said “Your star is beautiful.”, and I thanked him. There was a long pause before he spoke again. When he did, he said “It is beautiful, but I am having a hard time looking at it. The last time I wore one, it was mandatory.”
We then spoke to each other in Hebrew for a bit. But soon enough he stopped again, and looked back to my star. With one hand he held mine, and used his other hand to shakily touch the sapphires on my necklace. His lip shook, and tears rolled down his cheeks. In a shaky, heavily German-accented whisper, he said “I am so happy you are here. Your generation is here. We won.” and kissed my hand.✡”From Humans of Judaism
Everyone should start out their day sobbing a little, right?
Reblogged from:robintalley
