Dylan Freeman

@freemanwrites.bsky.social

141 Followers 243 Following

Amateur Author, reluctant citizen of Ohio. Retired SCP Contributor. Stories forth/in [RECORDED], Hell Itself, Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain, Shadows Over Avalon. Any pronouns fine.

Kathryn drank from the mug and sighed, letting the alcohol loosen her tongue a little. “I’m wondering why the guards don’t do something about Carlisle, considering he’s literally robbing us blind,” she said. “Or why someone with the Prerogative doesn’t get him.” Rachel shook her head. “Provincial Court has essentially ruled that ‘high-value citizens’ are exempted from bein’ persecuted by adventurers with the Prerogative unless said citizen takes up arms against the people first.” “High-value citizens?” Kathryn squinted. “What, like magistrates and governors?” “Among others, but most of ‘em are small potatoes compared to oligarchs,” Rachel said. “They can buy and sell most of the province and we’d never have a say in it.” “How rich are we talking?” Kathryn asked. “The word ‘oligarch’ comes from an old Heptradic word meaning ‘recipient of a dragon’s hoard’. I’ll let you connect the dots.”
Like several technologies in the Seven Provinces, phantography had been invented— or rather, rediscovered— through dungeoneering. The Temple of Light and Dreams, discovered in the Province of Poud, had lifelike recreations of scenes from ancient history on the walls, which thaumo-archaeologists determined were retrieved from the minds and dreams of the ancient people of that province. While the magical processes were long since lost, the alchemical processes used to develop the images had been reverse-engineered by Harol Mafell. While phantographs were only capable of capturing light instead of mental images, but retained their name, due to the fact that, with the correct processes, they could detect magical auras.
A scrivener window for a project titled Corpus, with approximately 22,000 words out of a 40,000 word goal achieved under "Manuscript Target", and a session target showing a total of 3840 words have been written this session.
Block of text from the schedule for a writer's conference which reads: "Meeting Room A/B/C Discover how to leverage Artificial Intelligence tools to streamline your publishing journey and boost productivity. Learn how to train AI to assist with essential tasks such as creating sticky marketing copy, creating a publishing strategy, analyzing market trends, and even generating creative writing prompts to assist with those edge-of-your-seat plot twists."
The national anthem claimed that United States was the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave. As the daughter of an Egyptian migrant, Yasmine had never understood why Americans bought into this particular load of horseshit—it was a marketing slogan, nothing more, nothing less. Another circus to attend, another piece of stale bread to feed people with, another piece of comfort to quell the urges of revolution.
Then, the being stood before Yasmine in a different form that her human mind could more easily process. She had the head of a lioness still and skin that was covered in golden fur. She wore a red linen t-shirt, black jeans, and sandals, with a black and red baseball cap on her head that seemed to be a variant of the long misappropriated “Don’t tread on me” design, but with a coiling cobra instead of a rattlesnake.
The strangest thing was how free people were, despite the cage that had been built. You could vote for whoever you wanted to, eat what you wanted, pray to whoever you liked, could save up for a vacation, or try to get a better job. You could live your life however and with whoever you wanted, but it was like a video game. The choices mankind made, on a macroscopic scale, didn’t matter. The average person had full control over their actions and lives, but those actions felt empty when, even after the Wage Wars, one had to work for twenty years to afford their own vehicle. It was little wonder that houses had largely been abolished in favor of the concrete and steel flats, or sub-basement apartments, like the one Yasmine lived in.
Text reading: The way the school was built reminded me of a wheel with half of the spokes broken off. The hub was where the main entrance was, but the primary spoke off of that led to a ‘Meifert Performing Arts Center’, which is where I assumed the auditorium was. That name again… it felt like it was going to be unfortunately very important in the near future. The other four spokes were each two floors tall, and the school orientation video I’d been sent explained that every single spoke (or ‘wing’ as they insisted) contained a different educational discipline, along with rows of locker on both floors. The red, western wing was social sciences like economics, history, and art. The walls in this wing were painted red. Just north of that was a purple wing dedicated to math and ‘hard’ sciences. Next to that was a yellow-colored wing that was dedicated to the various ‘language arts’ classes— English literature, foreign languages, grammar classes. Finally, along the northern, blue spoke was the gym, weight room, and locker rooms for the various athletic teams. The last time I could find any member of the Vidal Memorial Hodags (which sounded like a slur at first, before I met one of them in the flesh) got beyond local competitions since the 1960s. The football team was the Wisconsite secondary school equivalent of the Cleveland Browns; I hadn’t seen so many goose eggs on a team’s record… ever. Even my high school team back in Portland had a championship season under their belt." The word "other" is highlighted in Yellow.
An image of four books with their spines visible to the camera: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones.
A scrivener document with text that reads: "I didn’t talk to my dad for almost a month after he declared that we’d be moving to Wisconsin. It was the middle of June—Pride Month— and I figured that telling my parents that I was non-binary was best to do before senior year started. The day I was intending to tell them was the same day my dad declared we were moving."
Scrivener window showing a manuscript target of 80,000 words and a session target of 3,000. The total words written this session is 7,287 words.
A cartoon by Sigyn Books, where an opossum is sat at a laptop with the word "The" on a word processor on the laptop's screen. The caption reads "ON A REGULAR BASIS", while the opossum has a thought balloon filled with static, and the words "I've forgotten how to write" above its head.
Photograph of a tuxedo cat on the highest level of a cat tree.
Screencap from the film "We're the Millers", where the character of Kenny asks "You guys are getting paid?" often widely used as a meme or image macro.
Scrienver box showing the Manuscript and Session Target both reading 5090 words.
A tweet from Ohio State Representative Josh Williams which reads "I am proud to introduce the O.H.I.O. Sportsmanship Act to make flag planting at midfield a felony in the state of Ohio. Behavior that incites violent brawls and puts our law enforcement officers in danger has no place on the football field." above a video of the brawl at the 2024 Ohio State-Michigan Game.
An excerpt from an urban fantasy novel which reads: "Merlin relaxed, thumping on his chest, sputtering on the last of the IRN-BRU in his throat. “Don’t do that,” he gasped. “I’m younger than I used to be, but this body had a heart condition when I was in my fifties, and I don’t want it exacerbated."