we'll live to tell the tale (l.s.)

arethusa

tw// purging , mentions of self harm , eating disorder thoughts

hi, sorry this took so long! brace yourself, the next chapter is the last. love you alllllll!!!!! thank you so much riyaaa for being so supportive. and maddy and alana and marce and sun :) i don't know how good this is, but i spent a lot of time on it. 

this is my bandcamp and my soundcloud, with my first release. next time you'll be hearing from it is when i have a full EP done. 

https://newworldofmine.bandcamp.com/releases

https://soundcloud.com/newworldofmine

i will start a new fic when i get around to it, but probably gonna chill for a little bit. i've been tired and my brain has been kinda mean which is awkward. trying my best, though. hope you guys are doing okay. 

twitter: @louflymehome

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it was perhaps presumptuous of him to think even for a second that the "betterness" that he'd experienced would be permanent. he hoped, for just a second, that maybe things would be different, that nights wouldn't be as hard.

he ended up fixing all the parts that tom (skinny tom, that is. balding tom. editor tom.) had highlighted with bright pink highlighter; it was so bright that he thought he could feel his every individual vision receptor cell shriveling and dying. the editing process took long, far longer than louis ever imagined it to be, but he did finally drag his way through the grueling steps.

he never thought he would grow to hate his story, but maybe such a response was normal. every time he read his words, each of them lost more meaning and grew more disjointed. it was the overfixation that came with editing and revising that caused letters to contort into nothing more than meaningless shapes; ones that didn't tell a story at all but instead looked like random splatters of ink on a page. revising, in more ways than one, felt more difficult that the initial regurgitation of thoughts on a notebook—a mental battle, if anything, of convincing himself that his work was still indeed adequate even after fifty rereads.

it got to a point where he feared that his writing would no longer sound like his own at all, after such tampering. he'd heard horror stories of publishers deconstructing an author's work to the point of unsalvageable degeneration, writing almost indistinguishable as that particular author's. he didn't want to be one of those people—the harder someone tries at appealing to an audience in a field as personal as literature, he knew, the less likely the general public will be to notice it. after all, everyone wants to be rich and famous and successful. there will always be those who try to pursue that more materialistically, but there is no audience more observant of such fine details than the general public.

and after the process of taking apart his sentences word by word, he had to settle matters regarding the actual aesthetics of the book, publication date, where it would go, the summary, etc. hardcover books, as louis saw it, were an art of their own; carefully chosen book jackets, title font, thread color, paper material, finish. it was more difficult than he expected, with the potency of his pickiness, his indecisiveness, to choose how he actually wanted his novel to look. the difficulty was partially a result of how downright unreal it felt, that his writing was going to be materialized from shitty notebooks in his ugly scrawl to proper, professional books in the shelves of bookstores he never thought he'd find himself in.

he and skinny tom decided that simplicity would best fit the premise of his novel. the final product ended up having small font, silver thread for the binding, inside cover pages adorned by new york landscapes. the book jackets had matte finishes, raised red embellishments, small references to new york that only new yorkers would catch.