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V. Astor Solomon

@howsweetthewords.bsky.social

1.7K followers 530 following 680 posts

They/them Trans, disabled, neurodivergent, mixed-race Committing expansively queer, often dark, speculative short fiction Living in both Tampa and Seattle Links: https://linktr.ee/howsweetthewords icon: Amelie Lavender

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · Nov 13

Hi everyone!
If you don't know me, I'm V. Astor Solomon, an author of queer speculative fiction. I use Vale most of the time, but if you can think of a V name I like, I'll probably respond to it. Names should be a lot more like fancy hats if you ask me.

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Reposted by V. Astor Solomon

OTHERSIDE - Kickstarter is LIVE! @othersidespec.bsky.social · 1d

Make that $224 away from nonfiction and 5 backers from our final backer goal! We are SO CLOSE! Thank you!!!

OTHERSIDE - Kickstarter is LIVE! @othersidespec.bsky.social · 1d

We’re $436 away from unlocking nonfiction! That means we’ll open to submissions of everything from moving personal essays to excavations of queer SFF history to incisive literary criticism.

PLUS we’re only 8 backers from our final backer goal—help us get there!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/hyb...

OTHERSIDE 2026: A New Magazine of Queer SFF!

A new queer-led literary magazine devoted to speculative fiction, poetry, and art by 2SLGBTQIA+ authors and artists.

www.kickstarter.com

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Reposted by V. Astor Solomon

Gabino Iglesias @gabino.bsky.social · 1d

Here’s some Nen Chang art to make your Sunday a little better.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

I just learned about this movie a few weeks ago and it's available for me too. I'm determined to watch it before the end of the month.

Reposted by V. Astor Solomon

Tyler Hayes @bytylerhayes.bsky.social · 1d

Happy Indigenous People’s Day; may restitution one day be more than a holiday renaming, land acknowledgments, and some old creeps insisting it‘s already gone too far.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

Hee, thank you for sharing! I hope you had a good time with this. It was a fun prompt for sure.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

On the off chance you'd like to leave me a tip, here's where you can do that! Obviously not required to get your story, I'm just putting it out there just in case.

ko-fi.com/howsweetthew...

Buy V. Astor Solomon a Coffee

Become a supporter of V. Astor Solomon today!

ko-fi.com

V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

It's my birthday!

And, becasue I'm me, I now want to write more tiny stories after catching up with ones I owed. So yes, let's do this thing.

Leave me a prompt of some kind and get a tiny story in exchange.

(Optional themes: trick or treat, or secrets and confessions)

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

Oh, thank you for reading! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

For now, you appease it and are allowed to keep this space you've built together. One day though, maybe you won't be, though. One day, maybe someone will forget to leave an

V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

About what you consider when you grab something, or what you think about when you set it down. It tastes the ritual, devours the honoring.
Maybe one day you'll open the gate, let it out and see what happens, but you know better than that right now. The whole community knows.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 1d

You're taught to leave an offering at the gate. Every time you come to the garden, you leave something small. A rock, a flower. Leaves or a stick. It doesn't matter what it is as long as you approach with intent.
What waits behind it doesn't care about the actual thing as much as the act.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 3d

But the reward is enough. When someone tries to see if it fits, it gives them enough chance to slip into new skin and exist as they had once been, if only for the briefest moment.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 3d

Again and again, they streak the sky, the ring clutched between their talons, their eyes scanning the ground.
Then they’ll drop it, and someone will pick it up, and over and over the cycle goes.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 3d

No one knows how hungry it is, how it yearns to close its doors forever, how all it wants is to fall, fall, fall until it and everyone inside it have become one. All it wants is to hold onto something instead of watching everyone leave.
Maybe one day it will get that chance. Maybe it won't be lonely

Reposted by V. Astor Solomon

Rath Mercury @rathmercury.com · 13d

This post it just the prompt; there's a story in the replies from @howsweetthewords.bsky.social that I loved

Rath Mercury @rathmercury.com · Sep 10

A mismatched tea set in a box on the corner. 🫖

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

You bring one of the cups downstairs, then make yourself a cup of store-bought chai. It makes your chest feel hollow, but you can't help but hope that maybe, if you have just a little bit in one of the cups, you can dance with ghosts just once too.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

But she's gone now, and you're sitting here with a box full of teacups you didn’t know she kept, and your heart hurts so much. You want her to tell you a story, or take you out to thrift a new cup so you two can have tea. You want to smell her perfume, or hear her turning on the kettle.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

When you grew older, she still tried telling you, but you stopped believing. Instead you assumed she bought the cups when she was out, or her sister gave them to her. You'd see them for a few days after she’d tell you another weird story, and then they’d vanish.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

Places where she’d dance with ghosts, sit in the sky and have deserts with the birds. She told you amazing things, but when you asked why she never took you, she said she had never found one of the cups when you were close, and she only had a few minutes to decide if she wanted to see where she’d go

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

content note: this does deal with parental death.

When you were a kid and your mom told you about the teacups, you believed her. She would whisper stories about all the strange places she'd gone with them.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

Their brittle bodies will be one and the same, and it makes everything in them embrace what's to come.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

They feel it calling, reaching, pulling one, and one, and one closer until they’re brought into the depths.
Yet none of them is afraid. They know the kind of darkness that draws them in will bring them closer, crush them until they're the same nothingness.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

They sing out to each other, not with sound, but with bodies revolving.
All of them dancing, spinning and glittering together, hoping to create something that is bigger than any of them, than all of them.
But there are already things bigger than stars, vast and hungry and reaching.

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V. Astor Solomon @howsweetthewords.bsky.social · 14d

The stars tremble under the weight of blackness. They struggle to keep their light going, their bodies turning, their inhabitants thriving. They reach, reach, reach for each other amidst the infinite spaces. Every moment is a fight.
One of them hums, then another, and another still.

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Reposted by V. Astor Solomon

Dim Shores @dimshores.bsky.social · 27d

Cover design by Shi Briggs. www.etsy.com/shop/grossan...

www.etsy.com

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