wafflestoast @openbookends

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In a world where music is outlawed and silence is law, a boy inherits a legendary pirate's name, and the enemies that come with it. Caspen Red Song has no ship, no crew, and no idea what his voice can do. He's about to find out. Book 1 is complete and up now. If you love found family, space pirates, and stories with a little soul, come check it out. wattpad.com/story/41289184… #Wattpad #WattpadStory #Fantasy #SpaceOpera #Booktwt #WritingCommunity #FantasyBooks #NewStory #AmWriting #FreeToRead Chapter 1 There is a planet at the edge of an unremarkable system, and on that planet a city, and in that city a narrow house with a crooked door, and behind that door, once, before the silence, there lived a boy who could not carry a tune to save his life. This is where we begin. Not with the legend. The legend comes later, and you'll have your fill of it. There will be ballads enough to drown in before we're through, and most of them will get the details wrong. We begin here, on a kitchen floor, because every legend is only a frightened person the world hasn't finished with yet. And because somebody ought to remember the boy the way he was, before the galaxy got its hands on him and decided what he'd be. His name was Caspen. He was small for his age and stubborn for any age at all, and on the evening this story opens he was lying flat on his stomach on the cold kitchen tile, tongue pushed into the corner of his mouth, in the middle of committing a crime against music. He was writing a song. It was a bad song. This is not unkind; it is simply true, and the boy himself suspected as much, which was the whole trouble. He had a stub of pencil and a sheet of paper gone soft and grey from erasing, and on it he had written and crossed out and written again until the words had lost whatever small sense they'd started with. The rhymes did not rhyme. The line he'd meant to be sad came out funny, and the line he'd meant to be funny had made him a little sad, and he could not for the life of him work out how to fix either one. He glared at the page as though it had insulted him. The page, being a page, said nothing back. Behind him the door let in a gust of cold evening, and his father, in that order. The man came in the way working men come in at the end of a shift; heavy in the boots, smelling of the yards, of cut metal and machine oil and that tiredness that has actual weight to it. He set his kit down by the door and worked his gloves off one finger at a time, and then he stood a moment in the doorway looking at the small fierce shape of his son scowling at a scrap of paper on the floor, and something in the man went soft that he'd never have admitted to out loud. "That bad?" he said. "It's terrible," said Caspen, with the flat honesty of the very young. "It's the worst one yet." His father crossed the little kitchen and lowered himself down onto the floor beside him, knees complaining the whole way, a grunt, the floor was no place for a man his age and he sat on it anyway, and held out his hand for the page. Caspen gave it over the way you hand someone a wound. His father read it. He took his time about it. He read it the way you'd read something far more important, mouthing the odd word, and the boy watched his face for the wince and was surprised when the wince didn't come. "This bit." His father tapped a line near the bottom, the one Caspen had hated most, scratched through so hard the pencil had nearly gone through the paper. "Why'd you kill it?" "Because it's wrong." "It's not wrong. It's just not finished." He handed the page back. "You wrote it like it's already carved in stone. Like somebody else give it to you and now you're stuck with it." He reached over and tapped the boy once, gently, on the chest, over the heart. "It's yours, Cas. You can always change the script. Any time you like. That's the whole trick of the thing. That's the only trick there is." Caspen looked down at the line. It still looked wrong to him. But his father had said it wasn't, and his father was the sort of man whose saying-so could hold a thing up off the ground, and so the boy decided, for the moment, to believe him. "Sing it for me," his father said. "The whole thing. Bad bits and all." "It's not done." "Nothing's ever done. Sing it anyway." And so the boy sang his terrible, unfinished song in a thin and wandering voice, there on the kitchen floor, and his father, who couldn't have written a note of music to save his own life but who had a voice on him like a warm room, came in low underneath it. He caught the tune where it stumbled and steadied it, the way you'd slip a hand under a child who's only just learning to swim. And where the boy's song fell apart altogether his father simply slid into the old one instead, the one he always sang, the one about the earth and the moon and the long dark water in between, and after a moment the two songs had become one song, and it no longer mattered in the slightest which of them was bad. It is a small thing, a man and a boy singing on a kitchen floor. It changes nothing. No king falls because of it. No war turns on it. But the boy would carry that tune for the rest of his life. He would hum it without knowing he was humming it, in cells, on stolen ships, in the long cold between the stars, and it would be years before anyone told him where it had come from, and longer still before he understood what it was he'd been carrying all that time. He doesn't know any of that yet. He's young, and his song is bad, and his father is singing, and the kitchen is warm. Let him have it. — and then he was seventeen, and the kitchen was gone, and the house was gone, and the man was gone, and there had not been a song anywhere in the world for three years.

I’m not an artist but when I was a kid I would draw these guys fighting each other. Recently got an ipad and decided to give it a go again. Took all of about one and a half minute for this guy lol. #madmagazine #art

Pink Mood, photos by Carol M. Highsmith "Berwyn Car Spindle" Carol M. Highsmith Library of Congress "Sand Dunes in Southern California" Carol M. Highsmith Library of Congress "South Beach Lifeguard Stands at Miami Beach, Florida" Carol M. Highsmith Library of Congress All Public Domain (CC0) #artㅤㅤㅤㅤ

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Women & Moons "Spring Scattering Stars," 1927 Edwin Blashfield "Selene," 1880 Albert Aublet "Reaching for the Moon," 1933 Edward Mason Eggleston "The Universal Favorite," 1889 Geo. H. Walker & Co. Library of Congress All public domain (CC0) #artㅤㅤㅤㅤ

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KENT WILLIAMS | Vanitas Opening, 5pm - 7pm Friday, Sept 26 - Oct 25 EVOKE Contemporary Santa Fe, NM