Hello and welcome! First posts on a blog are always awkward, aren’t they? I’ve written my fair share over the years (RIP Writing from the Tub / Life from the Tub) but there doesn’t seem to be a way of welcoming people that doesn’t sound overly saccharine and trite.
So, hello. I’m Carly (a Sagittarius sun, Scorpio moon, Libra rising if it matters, which it does) and after a long, long blog hiatus I wanted to create a new space where I can share longer form content and keep a record of my journey with projects, hobbies, and life updates.
This is me. Big fan of frolicking in fields of sunflowers.
Also a big fan of frolicking in the woods.
On this blog I plan to talk about my life as an academic, my life as a writer, and my life as a witchy queer who tries to embody Hobbitcore in every facet of her life. I live in a sweet little cottage with my sweet little wife and sweet little dog and count my lucky stars every day that this is the life I get to wake up to.
I recently handed in my Masters by Research thesis in English Literature, looking at mattering in sapphic young adult literature published between 1990-2020, and am in the process of applying for a PhD that explores the representation of the queer community as folk devils in moral panic literature, particularly focusing on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. The road to a PhD is a long one and that’s one of the things I want to talk about here – I’m slowly but surely getting there!
I’m currently working on the first novel in a fantasy series set in a world that revolves around the Seven Deadly Sins. The main themes are sin, collective outrage, the demonisation of the ‘other’, and chosen family. I have a second project called Doves and Ravens that is shelved for the time being – a reimagining of a fanfiction series I wrote between 2019-2021 and I hope to talk about it from time to time, especially charting my process of rewriting fanfiction as original content.
Aside from writing and academia, I hope to talk about my life as a pagan, our gardening and vegetable growing pursuits, crafting, and some other (nerdy) pursuits that I don’t have an outlet for elsewhere – we’re talking board games and Hobbit cosplay, in case you were wondering.
Right then, that’s quite enough for an awkward first post, I think.
