Why might you want to hop aboard the Good Ship Hartebeast?
TRUE TALES
Do you enjoy Damsel-to-Dangerous stories? Better yet, do you need them like I do? Then maybe you’re in the right place. Maybe you’re a dastardly disabled dancer with Dain Bramage, doing daring deeds while—no wait. That’s me.
But maybe you’re like me. Or maybe you’re nothing like me but someone you love is and you want to understand them better. Maybe you’re just curious. Maybe you’re seeking new tools & toys for navigating Traumatic Brain Injury, cluelessly undiagnosed neurodivergence, sensory overload, or that devastating plague called people-pleasing.
You need to understand—we’re not plowing head-first toward some Grand Overcomer’s Hollywood Happy Ending around here. (Who really gets to have one of those, anyway?) This is a dance of endurance and creative jerry-rigging. It’s a story about being blown off course, smashed against the rocks, caught in the doldrums with no oars—and transforming all that feces into fuel and artistic fertilizer.
It’s also a treasure hunt: silver linings, rainbows, and the awe of lightning just before it crumbles the tower to make room for something new.
Something that turned out to be even better than the course I’d had so strategically mapped out for my life. Maybe you know exactly what I mean.
If so, I’ve been searching for you. This publication is the hoist of my freak-flag.
1978 - Silencing of the Lamb
1995 - Warrior Princess - first time in medieval armor
2000 - My first TBI & spinal injuries
2005 - Little Tiger: itsy-bitsy orange belt
2020 - Becoming a Warrior Queen - eternally training
If you stick around you’ll also get:
LIES, ALL LIES! (That sometimes tell deeper truths than what I’m willing to share in my memoirs.)
Are you obsessed with the 80s? I’m not. I lived it. It was glorious! It was hideous, and it has infiltrated my fiction. Welcome to coming-of-age in the era that birthed the walkman and the boombox, Pac-man and Nintendo, Jazzercise and Flashdance, the mullet and hair-metal.
As I transform my atrocious blackmail fodder—I mean, the floppy disks and dot-matrix printouts of my adventures from the 1980s into serial novels, novellas, and short stories, I’ll be sharing the behind-the-scenes research and geeking out while prepping them for publication HERE in this Section.
And yes. That includes the mixtapes, yo. (Duh. 80s) Watch Notes for those.
If you smash the subscribe button
You’ll get updates about both the non-fiction and fiction I post. Every new edition sails directly into your inbox.
At the moment, all my content here is free. Eventually, some of it might be for paid subscribers, but NOT my posts about Traumatic Brain Injury, trauma, and healing. Those are my Pay It Forward offerings to anyone who needs them, as a thanks for everybody who has ever helped me understand my own struggles and conditions.
Then why should I sign up for a paid subscription?
If you generously subscribe with a paid membership…whuff. I SALUTE YOU. You have my deepest gratitude, because you will be helping to save my disabled butt!
(I actually don’t qualify for Disability Assistance because I was not a minor, not elderly, and yet too young to have earned enough working credits when a drunk driver gave me my first TBI.)
When brain glitches or other un-fun adventures occur, I stop being able to be consistent. I mean, everybody does, but this happens to me so frequently and hits me like a tank, which prevents me from promising you some sort of clockwork special subscriber somethin’-somethin’. This is why I don’t feel right about charging a specified price for what I do.
As such, if there is something you’d like from me as a paid subscriber, please ask. I’ll let you know if I’m up to it, and if it’s something I’m willing to give.
Since $5/month is a hefty commitment but it’s the lowest option I can set my memberships to, I offer you THE DAILY SPECIAL - 50% off by using this code:
https://bellanthebeastie.substack.com/6dc12320
Hi. I’m Alexx Hart, writey fighty dancer nerd. Both Bella and Beast. I’ll be your navigator on this high-seas clown-ride. It spans my days as a geeky Valedictorian and college honors brainiac…to twitching-n-drooling behind blackout curtains amidst the ravages of Dain Bramage, unable to shop for groceries, brush my own hair, or get the simplest words out of my mouth. We’ll range from the glamour and glitz of an international touring belly dancer to the grunge and grit of medieval armored combat. From black belt test crucibles to the even harder, more grueling ones.
Like sitting in silence and truly hearing my own thoughts for the first time.
Like staring into the mirror and meeting my own eyes.
Like learning to face what I found there, much less love it.
Love her.
Me.
Like reading my journals and finding out who I have been for the first time (and again for the second first time, and again for the third first time) because I don’t form consistent memories after falling asleep anymore.
We’ll be headed through some NSFW, adult-content waters—of both the stormy and the steamy variety—so if you’re uncomfy with that or you’re under 18, abandon ship now!
HERE THERE BE BEASTIES!
**If you followed me here from my old blog and you’re looking for all my creative process, 5 Elements, art & nature stuff under my dance name, Isidora Hart, I’ll be posting that on my other, safer Stack:
**If you migrated with me from the Speakeasy and want to keep up with my dastardly fantasy fiction, this will be its new home:
A final tip of the hat to those who provide the tech for all this shenaniganry: Substack.com. Check it! You could have a Stack of your very own.
