I recently published a piece of creative nonfiction, "The Last One Who Wasn't a Rabbit", in Whale Review. It moves between an absurd fable about conformity, personal reflections on love and death, and thoughts on war and human nature.

Here are some excerpts:

...You devoured my parents, relatives, and close friends. Give them back to me.

But who are “you”?

Each one of “them” (“you”) might also be howling into the endless black air: you devoured my parents, relatives, and close friends—give them back to me—

My hatred, fear, and hopes all fall into the void. No one can find the true “enemy.” There is only a vast, cold machine rumbling rhythmically in the immense black air. We clearly hear the sound of the gears turning, but even this machine is hidden in the black air, untraceable.

In a legend, a juvenile in a white shirt defeated and killed an evil dragon. He ascended to the throne, but gradually, horns grew from his head, and scales and spikes appeared on his body. He became the evil dragon himself, waiting for the next juvenile in a white shirt to come and defeat him.

Or: one day, the first child in the class turned into a rabbit: long ears stood up (to pry), red eyes (to envy), and a small tail hidden between the legs (to be cautious yet hypocritical). The teacher, already a rabbit long ago, quickly praised and rewarded him, encouraging the whole class to learn from him and turn into rabbits soon. Eventually, all the students eagerly turned into rabbits one by one. Later, the only child left who hadn’t turned into a rabbit was labelled sick, accused of having borderline personality disorder, and so on. Subjected to the ridicule of all classmates and the continuous insults and “education” from teachers and his own parents, he finally wore a rabbit costume every day.

Or: there was once a monster that kept giving birth to a large number of children, only to devour them one by one.

You are reading the Bible. You tell me that in the Bible, the “dragon” symbolizes Satan, the evil spirit:

"The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him." (Revelation 12:9)...

I'm curious: do you think adapting to society inevitably involves giving up some of our individuality? And where would you draw the line between adapting and conforming?

Read the full piece (free): https://whalereview.uk/read/the-last-one-who-wasnt-a-rabbit-xi-nan

I'm also one of the editors of Whale Review, an independent literary journal based in the UK, where this piece was published. We welcome submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, literary criticism, and translations into English. Please visit our website for more details.

Need honest criticism

Under the right circumstances a backyard can feel like a monastery. Eucalyptus and chlorine become the myrrh and frankincense. And the emptiness of a suburban home during the canicule can feel sacred. The most tender part of the summer is when everyone leaves the city and I am appointed as the watchdog. Three day bedroom hair, cigarette in hand, phone in my waistband, watering the flowers on the patio. I feel like Bukowski in his California home. I am unfaithful to the local time zone, my body rises when the London sun does.

I've got you on speed dial

Can I find an ARC reader here for a Weird Wild West novella?

"Too many of us are simultaneously awake and asleep, smart and dumb, privileged and frivolous, informed and foolish, caring and selfish. I will not be alive to witness the fruits of our contradictions, and perhaps I will find greater peace on the other side than I have found on this one." - #williamsdwight3

When I first met you, something deep inside me had woke up
a force I had no language for, a tide within me that rose beyond reason, that rose beyond the borders of my heart, beyond all that I had believed a human soul could feel.
I loved you, as if in wonder of discovery,
as though the universe itself,had hidden one final secret beneath the stars, and at last, had placed it in my hands.

And then I looked into your eyes and there you were.
Looking back at me within the same place, standing at the edge of the very same impossible ocean,
trying to understand
the waves that had carried us there.

I saw you feeling it, I noticed you searching my face
for an explanation neither of us possessed.
And perhaps that was the miracle
That somehow, without promise, without warning,
without knowing how, we had found the same impossible place.

It was as though the universe had opened a hidden door and allowed us, just for a moment,to step beyond the ordinary world.
And there,beneath the silence of eternity,
it revealed something too immense for ordinary words: us.
apart of a love so vast, that if we gathered every word
ever spoken by humankind and tried to build a language for it, we would still fall silent before its magnitude.

A secret written between the stars.
A truth the universe had known long before we did.
And perhaps it smiled, watching us stumble through the wonder of it, knowing that we would never fully understand what had been placed between us.
Yet still, it gave us the desire to spend our lives trying.

And maybe that is the greatest beauty of love, that it remains partly unknowable.
For if I could understand you completely,
if I could measure every depth of your soul,
if I could name every reason my heart chose yours,
perhaps one day the mystery would fade.

But you were never meant to become something I could solve.
You were meant to remain the horizon I could spend forever approaching.
The star I could follow without ever reaching its end.
The song I could hear a thousand times,and still discover another note.

And I wish with everything that lives inside me, that we could have held on to that impossible thing.
That love which felt so far beyond this world,
that perhaps, this world could only exist inside of it.

A love so powerful that standing before it made us feel weak. not because we lacked strength, but because we were witnessing something stronger than either of us.

Something ancient. Something fierce. Something willing to fight for the two souls who had somehow found each other.
And if the years should carry you far beyond my reach,
if the winds of this life should scatter us across distant skies, then let this be the prayer I send after you

May our love become the wind beneath your wings.
May it find you when the night is darkest.
May it rise beneath you when your strength is gone.
May it whisper my name through every storm and remind you that somewhere in this vast universe,
there is a heart that still knows yours.

And if the heavens are kind, if fate is not finished with us, if the stars still remember the secret they once revealed, then let that wind carry you home.
Back to me.
Because you are not simply the love of my life.
You are the love that changed the way I understand love itself.
The miracle I never knew I was waiting for.
The mystery I would spend eternity trying to understand.

The impossible thing that became real when I looked into your eyes.
And wherever you are, whatever distance lies between us, whatever storms the universe chooses to place upon our path
know this
No matter where life takes us

Some part of me will always belong to what we found in each other.

I am making a 3D puzzle game in Unreal and would need a writer to come up with creative and intellectual puzzles and riddles along with clues for them in the themes of history, literature and myth & religion.

The players can research in free accessible documents / online e.g. Wikipedia, the Bible, works of Shakespeare and so on.

Here you can see some mechanics a example puzzle solve and some locations I made already: https://youtu.be/jpvhmeZ6Mj8

If you like create puzzles, see them come to life in the game and the feedback from the players, then just message me directly for more.

Humans have the tendency to fill their minds with the notions of a noble purpose, which reality proves otherwise by snapping them out of their cage of such fantasies, because when the bars are cut, either they keep it going until they reach nowhere, or they redirect their path to safety. There were four secret agents operating under multiple aliases that changed annually, but their parents knew them as Karl Schier, Otto Emmerich, Edmund Wagner, and Markus Bormann. Since the mid-2000s, they have pledged allegiance to a communist party called the NMV, which has been operating for half a century. One cold night on the second day of February 2022, they crept into an outpost in Serrahn armed with SIG 550s and silenced Glock 17s. They had a new mission assigned by their clan’s leader Leopold Brück. Their task is to steal a couple of paper journals containing important information from the Mecklenburgian military, the NSVM. The group walked around the headquarters dressed as soldiers of the enemy they were fighting while using fake credentials on a customized NSVM-ID. Upon entering the main corridor, Karl and his squad proceeded to the left. Three armed guards stood next to the wooden door of the war room along with a lone yet unblinking CCTV on the ceiling. “Halt, your identifications.” Karl, upon hearing the command, proceeded to slip out his tiny placard. “I’m sorry, but this is a fake identification card.” The four spies walked away. After turning left to the exit of the hallway, they hid behind the wall, carefully drawing their pistols. Metallic pops sounded as the guards crumpled on the thick concrete in smoke. A bullet bounced off the button of an intruder alarm as a cacophony of electronic wails echoed across the base as Karl and his comrades darted off with their energy fueled by their pulsing heartbeats. Two officers burst out of the room and noticed the three guards lying motionless and a shattered camera on the floor. “SOMEONE STOP THE INTRUDERS!” Shouted the officer through his walkie-talkie as he commanded the other guards to hunt the four spies. Several guards surrounded them armed with Steyr AUGs as Karl and his companions retaliated back. More troops arrived as gunfire cracked through the hall. One bullet punctured Otto in his shoulder, and another struck Edmund directly on his left leg. As they both tumbled to the ground, their companions took the two by their arms as well as their weapons after shooting the running backups to neutralize the threat. They ran as more soldiers charged towards the agents across the hallway. The quartet eventually fled just in time, dashing through the chilly thicket. They were scarred and bruised both inside and outside, heading back to their bunker in Schwinzer Heide, panting rapidly all the way until the very end. After Otto and Edmund were sent to the medical room for treatment, Karl and Markus chucked the suits they used in that mission before heading out to Leopold Brück’s office for a conversation. Edmund lashed out in a letter he wrote to Brück with his uninjured left arm while undergoing treatment. He blamed the defections of many Mecklenburgian communist party members over the past years for causing the near deaths of their spies, but Brück reassured him and Karl through a quick face-to-face meeting that his party will find a way to enter resurgence in popularity. “Don’t fret, my friend. We may be undergoing a period of turmoil, but we will eventually overcome this. Trust me.” Edmund forcefully raised his thumb into the air. Otto reluctantly nodded, torn between duty and morality as he continued to rest after the band aids were taped on him. There were no bullets stuck in their bruises, but it still meant they had to take time to recover. The NMV’s spy group went temporarily inactive as Otto and Edmund recuperated from the encounter, but eventually they were able to recover. By December 2022, the quartet returned to their duties. While they still reeled from the ambush slightly, they helped continue the revolution. The four agents commenced with their usual activities while exercising more caution simultaneously. But they, along with their fellow comrades, clung to the same old philosophy. It was no other than extremist self-reliance while still retaining their former leader’s outdated ideals. Meanwhile, Mecklenburg continued to thrive well to the present under the control of their democratic party, the AFA, even if they faced decades of armed danger from the communists.

You have just read an excerpt from my all-new novella "Josef, Wilhelm, and the Specialists" which is part of the ongoing Substack anthology serial "The Trilogy of the Helm".

Start reading the first two chapters on Substack here:

https://tgjoe1.substack.com/p/the-trilogy-of-the-helm-a-dramedy

Release Schedule (Saturdays at 8PM PHT / 7AM EST / 1PM CET / 12PM GMT):

Week 1 (Released Yesterday): Prologue and the first two chapters.

Weeks 2-5: Three new chapters every Saturday.

Week 6: Last three chapters followed by the epilogue and the appendix.

Week 7 (Christmas Day Finale): Pie for a Lie and Land of the Future to wrap up the anthology full circle, releasing at the exact same time slots.

Written by TG Joe.

Copyright 2026.

Hello everyone,

I’d like to share a piece I wrote and get your feedback.

I originally wrote it in Arabic and then translated it into english. I know some of the soul of the text is inevitably lost in translation, but I’ve reviewed and edited it carefully. I’m posting in English because there aren’t many Arabic-speaking communities on Reddit, and English reaches far more readers.

Here it is:

You agree with every sermon you hear. You nod your head, murmur, "That's true," and your mind obliges, convincing you that all of it is wisdom, that these are lessons, that they are great, that they will make you a better person.

You nod your head, yes, yes.

The schoolboy nods his head in class.

Even the mountains nod their heads, agreeing with the tremors of the earthquake.

You nod your head because you are a child, and what else could you do, small as you are, needing the bottle and the diapers and safety.

But you are past twenty now.

And you still nod your head, because you need the bottle and the diapers and safety, and maxims, and lessons, and a mind that obeys you whenever it sees what is right.

But you are still a child, and children nod their heads a lot.

One maxim says: Love is a lack.

You agree.

Another says: There is no completeness except through love.

You agree with that too, and if need be, you would tear a piece of your body away in your imagination, to be lacking, so that love could complete you, so that the maxim could come true.

You read one that said: He who nods at everything he hears will nod before the noose.

So you nodded, very, very much in agreement.

A little schoolboy has no right to object to history lessons.

And you are so incomplete without a bottle to soothe you, and you are nothing before the sermons everyone delivers to you.

Even your wiser half preaches to you, and you kneel to it and applaud.

Even if the sun told you it isn't right to be sad on a sunny day, you would say that this is true, the very essence of right.

You are now a child in your twenties, endorsing everything that poets and writers and family and clerics and friends and your own thoughts and your demons tell you.

You endorse the opinions of the grown-ups.

So they won't get angry.

Then so the bottle won't fly away from you.

Then so they won't get angry, for they truly do know.

Then so you can finish what you began the day you were born.

That silly nod, the one that will spare you some pain and a headache.

Oh, the headache!

Why do you feel like beating it with your slippers now? Why are there currents of pain running through it?

The maxims say: Work hard and smile.

Fine, fine, you took painkillers.

And you did not work hard, because you are tired.

And you did not smile, because you lost your mouth, and your lips, and your teeth.

You flinched, and felt your body in panic, searching for your mouth so you could smile, and for your hand so you could work hard, and you found nothing but a lump of jelly.

You checked again: something like a head still sits on your shoulders.

You nodded it.

At least you agree, even now, dissolved into an inhuman mass.

You agree that smiling and love and work and sadness and the sky and investing in banks are all good things.

Yes, yes, yes!

You will do it all.

Now, or maybe tomorrow.

Tomorrow is better, tomorrow you'll be ready to be a better person.

Tomorrow you'll perhaps be a person, for today you are a melted freak.

Yes, yes.

They know how to make you that way.

How they say you are a successful, calm, complete person.

And you agreed with them with that slight motion of your head, and so you secured your humanity.

The maxim says: Love is only for the first and last beloved, and for work, and for sex, and for deep Russian literature, and for vegetarians, and for circus men and lightness, and for politicians, and for parliamentary resolutions, and for broad smiles.

How beautiful these maxims are.

Tomorrow you will begin, surely tomorrow.

Now you will drag the weight of the mass you have become to your bed.

And you will sleep.

Check: yes, you still have two eyes to close, good, good, you will enjoy full sleep cycles, as they say, as science says, and the truth, and...

You will stop the chatter and the pain.

You will sleep now so you can produce enough melatonin.

When you lay down on the bed, you spread out like spilled soup, and the covers soaked you up.

And you vanished.

The maxim says: Love is dissolving to the point of vanishing, to the point of merging, to the point of non-humanity.

When your mattress soaked you into itself, you lost the shape of the pale head you had been nodding a moment ago, and then you let out a deafening scream of terror.

And you vanished.

99k words in less than three months.. Now is the time for draft four

we've been dealing with a lot of heavy personal problems lately and my wife has been struggling a lot with her anxiety. she's loved writing for so long, but she was stuck in a massive creative block because she kept overthinking everything and kept all her writing in her drafts because she was terrified it wasn't "good" or "polished" enough.

recently she decided to drop all the rules, and just write to get everything out of her head. writing is the one thing she genuinely loves and it's become her main outlet to survive everything we're going through right now.

she wrote this today!!! and it honestly blew me away, it’s a longer piece, so here’s just a snippet of it.. i just want her art to be seen because she’s worked so hard to push through her own head to get these words out:

“ i hold an unjust trial in my head with a pocket of different versions of me as the presenting jury – all of them proudly wear their varied biases based on different, separate timelines of me, and none of them seem to ever be present to the current reality in question. there is no impartiality. i present my best case but the crowd seems dead or they’re all laughing at me.

there is always something wrong, either in what i am doing or how i am feeling. but really – who’s deciding that? i can only hear myself in these decisions. i seem to be creating imaginary foes within my own being. it seems to be voluntary. i want to override my system. i want to override myself. i want to throw away certain things i don’t feel like feeling... it. does. not. get. rid. of. the. anger. i want it gone. gone gone gone."

she just started a Substack to keep this going: Substack

if her writing resonates with you… would appreciate if you could go show her some love… she’s nervous about putting herself out there and it would mean a lot to her <33

Hey everyone!

I’m one of the co-authors of Naraku-no-Ink, and I was wondering: what kind of music do you blast when writing (or reading) sad, emotional, or heavy action scenes? Music always helps me push through writer's block and really nail the vibe of an emotional chapter.

I also have a small favor to ask! We are putting together an official Spotify playlist for our web novel and its website. Since the story takes place in a late-90s alternative dark fantasy Japan, we are specifically hunting for 90s tracks.

Any genre works—we’d love to hear your recommendations so we can build a seriously awesome tracklist together!

Take care, and feel free to check out our website in the meantime (maybe it'll give you some inspiration). Have a great day!