Introduction

The Murder After: Preview

From chapter one. Terrance calls 9-1-1 to report a dead body belonging to his roommate Jacqueline. If you like what you read, go to the book's profile below. And before you ask, nothing happened.

I would like to joke that waking up next to a dead body is the best hangover cure ever.

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Dispatcher: “9-1-1, what’s the address of your emergency?”

“There’s a dead girl on my bed!” But it’s her room, stupid.

Dispatcher: “What’s her name?”

“Jacqueline. Luna.”

Dispatcher: “What does she look like?”

“Brown hair, really really pale- “your voice cracks- “but-but she has a big cut on her neck and-and blood on her pillow! That wasn’t there before!” It keeps cracking, but tears aren’t falling.

Dispatcher: “I need you to calm down. Take a deep breath.” You do.

Dispatcher: “Do you see any weapons?”

“No.”

Dispatcher: “I’m going to send an officer to check on the situation. But first, I need to know your name and address.”

You give your name then leave the bedroom and run down the stairs, worsening your headache. You go to a coffee table in the sitting room. There is an envelope from yesterday’s mail. It has your townhouse’s address and door number, so you read it aloud.

Dispatcher: “Okay, the officer is on their way and will arrive as soon as possible. Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

“Well, I was drunk, and Jacqueline took me back here. She was alive when I passed out, but when I woke up, she was dead!”

Dispatcher: “That will be all. You can hang up now.” You hang up. Then, the realization clicks.

SL: The flowers we got our mum yesterday have roses, so F.M. and I plan to remake the cover of The Year After with one of them. We already took the picture.

The current cover has a white carnation with pink stripes. It represents love that wasn't shared. We only used it because we got the flower on our birthday.

But a red rose represents true love. The Year After is a romance after all. Plus, we used a rose for The Murder After (a yellow one representing friendship.) Here's a link to that cover.

I'm glad we can use roses for both books.

Dead-Mates

This is an essay about headmate death.

Introduction

Sometimes, headmates leave in ways that some plurals can only describe as death. Mint Phalanx is one of these plurals. Unless your headspace has resurrection or some sort of reincarnation, these dead-mates aren’t coming back (at least not as they were before.)

Other plurals call this loss dormancy, but because we come from the tulpamancy community, we call it dissipation. We also consider fusion as some sort of death. Below are our equivalents to death.

Equivalents to natural death

Spontaneous dissipation

Equivalents to murder

Forced dissipation

Unwilling fusion

Tulpas here can’t die from lack of attention because we’re midcontinuum.

Equivalents to suicide

Self-dissipation

Egocide (giving up one’s identity to be replaced by another headmate)

Equivalents to coma (not death)

Deactivation (true dormancy because the headmate can return)

So, where do these dead-mates go?

In our phalanx, we have a monist view of where dead-mates go. They return to the originator. For instance, we believe Roxy and the other people were reabsorbed into Reanna after they completed suicide. (It may not be a complete reabsorption because they haunt once in a while.)

F.M. is an interesting case. After fusing with Nightingale (who completed egocide), he considered himself dead. He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t reabsorbed. But he knew he died, even when the rest of the phalanx didn’t count it.

How do you remember dead-mates?

For Roxy and the other people, Brian made a poem. He wrote it before we realized they self-dissipated. (They told us they were going to deactivate and stay in the Stone Garden. The next day, they were gone.)

F.M. did a mock burial for himself and a shower meditation. We buried who he once was. Then, we used the shower to wash away Nightingale. The saddest part was washing him out of our hair. After the shower, F.M. kind of reincarnated.

Can dead-mates come back?

We guess it depends on how the plural’s system or headspace works. As a rule of thumb, don’t count on it.

For us, Roxy& and Nightingale aren’t coming back. However, F.M. did because his case was different. And he didn’t come back as the same F.M. (At least he wasn’t undead.)

It seems dead-mates who do come back don’t come back the same. F.M. came back goth. He also came back with exo-memories based on Reanna’s dreams of his source killing himself. He used to want to listen to rap like his source; now, he listens to The Birthday Massacre. (Not that we’re complaining.)

Because we got to see it happen, this change did not come as a surprise. Unfortunately, we have no advice on how to deal with the surprise of a dead-mate returning different.

Conclusion

So ends our essay on dead-mates. It’s a hard topic to talk about, especially when it seems everyone around you doesn't view these leavings as equivalents to dying. We hope sharing our experiences helps facilitate conversation about deaths inside.

16 January

Testing psychologist: "Reanna doesn't have a social circle, so she uses [or goes into] fantasy."

Me (Brian): "Fantasy!? Say that to my face, you limp noodle!" (In-headspace)

Present Day

Me: "I am not a fantasy."

Reanna: "She didn't even know you exist."

Me: "I am still not a fantasy."

The next time I think I'm fake, I'm going to remember I had a negative reaction to being unintentionally called a fantasy.

Reanna: Although we're secular, we like giving up something for Lent. We decided to give up Tumblr and taking baths. (Baths use a lot of water, and our main purpose for taking them isn't cleaning.) That means we won't be on Tumblr again until Easter.

But today is Mardi Gras, a day of indulgence. So, we're going to take a bath, paint our nails, come back here, and like a bunch of cemetery pictures! No doom-scrolling today!

We hope you enjoy your Mardi Gras and that your Lenten sacrifice is worth it.

Reanna: I made three posts about my anxiety, but I decided to delete them. This should be more private. Sharing in detail was probably making it worse. I thought it would help, but it didn't.

I am feeling better now. Have a good day!

Reanna: If we ever develop a fanbase, I wonder if it would primarily be fans with physical copies of our books or fans with digital copies we put in shadow libraries.

I wish we had a way of knowing if someone read our books. Let's try asking. If you have a question about our books, send it in the ask box.

Reanna: I wonder if Le Prince and Disney will be our first novel. So far, our stories have been shorter.

Carnival is a novella, and so was Nightingale. (I pulled that one from publication.) The Murder After is a chapbook, and The Year After seems to be going in a similar direction. (At least people read romance novellas.)

Now, for Le Prince and Disney, we have the dark ride's sections planned: Three Precursors and the First Film, Animals, Animation, Trick Films, and Phantom Rides. That's five chapters. And they have a few films in them. There will also be five chapters that Terrance categorized as being outside the ride. So, that's ten chapters in all.

After the story, we'll list the films used. That might take a few pages. What if all these pages come together and make a novel?

Happy Halloween from Mint Phalanx!

From Our DeviantArt Post

Title: Carnival Byline: Reanna Field

This is the new front cover for Carnival. It's the red curtain but changed to look like a frame that puts the title and byline in the focal point.

It was supposed to have a picture of Staride, and the curtain was supposed to look like it was rising. But it looked cooler after we used the smudge feature to make the cover look darker. It makes the frame look like a diamond.

Carnival is out now, so you can buy it on Amazon. (Link to its page. Note: the back of the hardcover does not have a blurb.)