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And shameless promotion of my other account :3

Leures Redesigns!!

[smzeszikorova]

Seven Last Lines

@late-to-the-fandom, thanks so much for the tag. Happy to get back into things. I'm trying to hold off on sharing P&K stuff for now, which means y'all are getting a seven-sentence glimpse into my collection of short stories, which I'm not gonna publish. Enjoy! :3

Tagging: @dogmomwrites @clairelsonao3 @fragrant-stars @agirlandherquill @ryns-ramblings @mjparkerwriting @kyofsonder

From what the fuck is this:

And yet, there’s a kind of appeal in it: the same appeal that compels us to lower ourselves into the deepest, darkest crevices of the earth, shining our artificial light on the rock formations and towering pillars of crystal, crawling through the tunnels, marveling at the underground lakes that teem with life unadjusted to the light of the surface. (My God, what an analogy.) There’s a sort of fear it evokes. When you first enter the cave, all you can see is that gaping entry, lit by the sun. And if you linger there, absorbing all the beauty and oddity without delving too deep, there’s nothing to be afraid of, because the surface is within arm’s reach. There’s no risk of disturbing the bottomless lakes, trapping yourself within the tunnels, losing yourself to the abyss . . . But our obsessive curiosity knows no bounds, and so we lower ourselves anyway.

[smzeszikorova]

Seven Last Lines

Thank you blessed @owlsandwich for the tag game from a couple of days ago which sponsored this morning's writing time (I wanted to skip). I've spent so long just revising and revising a first draft, it's been a while since I had to write basically from scratch and I forgot that's its own different skill set (the imagination muscles are flabby).

Tagging: @mysticstarlightduck @by-allison-kai @danafaithwriting @tildeathiwillwrite @smzeszikorova @virgolioness @composterhedgehog

“And that never struck you as suspicious?” Renathal grimaced. The arm not trapping Elisewin to him contorted to reach the teacup on the nearby nightstand. “Historically,” he explained, fumbling for the tiny porcelain handle, “even when Denathrius was more inclined to approve the practice, it was only ever among the lower classes of venthyr.” He angled his neck to take an awkward sip of long-cold tea, before admitting, “I always assumed its falling off had more to do with a fashionable imitation of nobility.” An echo of the day’s congealed amalgamation of horror, anger, and shame - at the Master’s long-standing manipulations and Renathal’s own willful ignorance of them - shuddered through him. He gulped down the last bitter dregs of tea, feeling the meagre anima content seep into his thirsty veins, but it was the soft pattern Elisewin’s fingers traced across his bare chest, and the memory of her yes, that soothed him.

[smzeszikorova]

A More Thorough Introductory Post:

Hello, friends, and welcome to our semi-official P&K content blog. I'm @smzeszikorova, and I'm working with @adrielcastlyre on a series of four books, currently titled Pemoki & Kenacia, though that name may be subject to change. We've spent about ten years world-building and character-building. Not an ideal timeline, but I regret nothing. The joy's in the process.

We've laid out the foundations for all four of our books—made the transition from pantsers to planners. The outline's all there, and though there's a few important details to work out, we know what direction we're taking. Phase one's complete. Once I've submitted my thesis (UPDATE: SUCCESS) , we'll be set to hammer out our drafts.

For newcomers:

Pemoki & Kenacia's a bit ambiguous, genre-wise. The closest thing to it's probably hard fantasy. As for our target audience, I'd go with "adult". our POV characters' age range is pretty broad, and their interests and concerns vary accordingly, but they're written with adult readers in mind. I'm cautious to reduce P&K to a string of TikTok tropes. That said, here are some things you can expect to find here:

Multiple protagonists. Our cast is large. We've got approximately 90 named characters in-universe whose appearances in the end product are more or less guaranteed. Granted, most of these aren't central to the plot. But our main cast is on the large side. Each book generally has one to two protagonists; they change from book to book.

Multiple POVs. And to ensure that each character's arc comes to a satisfying conclusion, I switch between points of view somewhat regularly. (My tendency's to head-hop. For college degree reasons, I read a lot of old-timey Russian literature in the vein of Anna Karenina, and it influences my style, but I know head-hopping's a bit of a controversial writing choice these days. Whether we'll try to shift toward a purely omniscient style is currently under debate. Regardless, expect to get to know a lot of characters.)

War and international conflict. Our story's very concerned with the personal struggles of our characters—familial conflict, romance, friendship, betrayal, etc.—but it all takes place within the broader backdrop of these warring countries we've invented. And the war takes center stage often.

Deep worldbuilding. This universe is large—well suited for such a large cast. Currently, it involves five multinational regions, eleven countries, and nineteen cities. With limited space to explore all these places, we highlight what's essential and let the rest inform the narrative in subtler ways.

More reality than fantasy. People who’ve had a look at our works in progress say that we’re pretty grounded in reality for a couple of fantasy writers. All our main characters are human. Magic is a genetically-inherited phenomenon with rules loosely based in science. And while none of our fantasy regions, ethnicities, or religions are meant to be read as directly analogous to any real-world ones, they do draw influence from the real world at times. I’m sure you’ll notice this in the Russian-based languages of the Sitrii Elariny, the English-based language of Kenacia, and the language of Qhiron, which draws from both but perhaps not quite so obviously. In our worldbuilding, we make a point to give our invented nations believable complexity, heterogeneity, and political and economic motivations. We’re not too big on the “This region is inhabited by the stouthearted, down-to-earth Welverpeople who universally prefer farming tools to swords, are warm and inviting to outsiders, practice simple domestic magic, and make for extremely loyal allies” vibe.

Conlang. Fairly self-explanatory. Usually I'll just say, "[Insert sentence here]," Character X said in Pemokese. But now and again, when I feel it enhances the narrative, I'll leave it in my invented language and let readers draw their conclusions about the meaning.

Problematic characters, dark topics, and complex, incomplete redemptions. It's very important to us that we approach our darker topics with caution and sensitivity, but we're not writing Aesop's fables. Don't expect comfortable, obvious answers to the ethical questions we pose. Folks looking for escapism or retributive justice narratives should probably look elsewhere.

Queerness; disability; ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. Our story isn't really about these elements, per se, but our characters come from a variety of backgrounds, both real and invented, and it does inform the story. (We're both white and culturally Christian, and in terms of our relationships with queerness and disability, we'd both make for lousy representation, so we're operating with the understanding that we're gonna need hella beta reading once all this is done.) And on a similar note . . .

We take some unusual liberties with our world. Fake religions (Dzulyan, Kvotyj, etc.) coexist with real ones. And though our languages and cultures are obviously influenced by the real world, they're all explicitly invented. We're not too concerned with making our universe consistent with real-world history, so while we do touch on issues related to queerness, ethnicity, etc., we don't go out of our way to align the experiences of our cast with those of people living within a certain real-world time period. When we decide what scientific knowledge and technology to include, our key is internal consistency. We'll guide you through the rules of this universe as needed, but if at any point you find yourself wondering what time period we're supposed to be in, just know that the answer is "none of the above".

Now, with all that said...

What are you likely to find on this blog?

Updates. If you want to know how P&K's coming along, here's where we'll ramble about the process.

Art or other related side projects.

Requests for beta readers, once we get to that stage.

This blog's a writeblr of sorts, but we won't discuss anything unrelated to P&K here. My coauthor's not very involved with social media in general, and I'm in and out of the writers' community on this site. So if you're here for tag games, community events, etc., @smzeszikorova's where you'll find all that. This blog's essentially a dumping ground for P&K materials. I can't imagine it'll be too effective as a hype builder, but once our books are released, everything we post here will be available for our readers to see. And on the off chance that our books get big (which I'm not counting on, but it'd be pretty cool), those of you who join in the fun now will have special clout. "We were here from the beginning." Do with that what you will.

We take asks! If you're interested in putting our characters in (non-erotic) situations, feel free to send in an art prompt.

As for the books themselves, I've tried to be sparing about plot reveals. (That'll be truer from here on out than it was on my other blog. Current mutuals, I swear I'm not kidding when I say all those art posts, quotes, and snippets I used to post are basically void. That's how much we've changed over the past few months. But the first book's premise remains the same:

As the threat of war looms on the horizon, Catherine Leures, an impoverished Kenacian woman living in the north of Pemoki, enlists in an effort to pull her family from the depths of financial ruin.

(I think I'll hold off on descriptions of the other books for now. They'd be pretty spoilery. But I'll post more thorough blurbs as I start getting these published. We do have titles for the second, third, and fourth books: Fledgling's Descent, Stirrings of a Silent War, and The Fallen Star of Thaeryvon.)

What do I mean when I say everything's changed, then?

I mean the process of filling plot holes, removing extraneous plotlines, and accounting for sensitivity in our characterization has resulted in a good number of our characters' personalities, relationships, and arcs being completely revamped. Lucky you! Aside from knowing the names, national and moral alignments, and general appearances of most of the first book's main cast, you'll be on about the same page as new readers if/when P&K gets published.

Before I go, a couple updates about P&K:

Since I started writing my thesis, my writing style has changed significantly. We've been making stylistic revisions to our original draft. Thankfully for our future editors, our first draft's gotten a lot more concise.

All the canon events are essentially set. The "outline" I did for my thesis is basically one long synopsis. All that's left for our first draft is to fill everything out with dialogue and detail. (Easier said than done, but I'm excited anyway.)

My coauthor and I have been playing with the idea of a character narrator: someone with a personal investment in the story. We're not sure yet, but it's a fun experiment.

If you've gotten this far, thanks so much for reading this incredibly long post.

[smzeszikorova]

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!

It is four in the morning. I’m half-insane. My thesis is finally done!!!!!!! Sort of. I’m sending it in for review tomorrow morning, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot to edit, but FUCKKKKKK! I did it!!!

Now, to catch up on all the trillion things I’ve been neglecting these past few months.

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Reintroduction Time!

Tumblr Update: @adrielcastlyre and I recently took a bit of a break from P&K posting, but we’ve returned, and we’re back at work. Folks who are still waiting on art projects or ask responses from @smzeszikorova, I’m still there, and I haven’t forgotten about any of you. (Apologies for the delay. I’d like to make the excuse that I’ve been busy with my last semester of school, but as you can see, I haven’t been nearly busy enough to warrant this long of a break. This is why I don’t do paid commissions.)

If you’re looking for writeblr community engagement and tag games, that’s where you’ll find them. For now, this blog’s for updates, mainly. We’ll probably also post P&K art every now and again. If I find the time this week, I’ll put up a more thorough introductory post. Something friendlier for newcomers.

Writing update: I’ve been hard at work on my undergrad thesis, which is essentially a collection of letters exchanged between characters in-universe, along with a complete outline of all four books. The letters are in progress; the outline is complete. We’ve reviewed everything we have, and the narrative’s more coherent than ever. It’s also changed a lot, to the degree that a lot of my old art posts read like mediocre P&K fanfiction. Such is the nature of this eternal revision process, I suppose.

Art update: In the spirit of growth and change, I’ve posted a redesigned Alan Winson—the least spoilery of my recent art projects. Enjoy!

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"Chat is a fourth person pronoun—" NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! It's a COLLECTIVE NOUN, DAMMIT!

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I'll play the entire two-hour playlist that effectively summarizes the plot of all four of my books in-progress and not let anyone talk or leave the room until the last song ends.

what is YOUR specific personal reason you shouldn’t be handed the aux? call urself out (in the tags or not. cmon this is public)

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character who is sun-coded but not in the traditional ray-of-sunshine way. character who is sun-coded in the sense that they burn hot and bright and powerful, that they're a raging fury of fire and passion, and that maybe, just maybe, they are destroying themselves as they do so.

[smzeszikorova]

I've been having a tough time lately, and when I don't have the energy for everything keeping up with social media is one of the first things I slip on. But I still care about all my writing buddies, so:

Reblog if you're not offended when people take a long time to answer asks, forget to reply to your replies, lag behind in tag games, or skip several weekly ask games.

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These people all need fucking help.

Can you introduce your WIP in one sentence?

[smzeszikorova]

Aaaand For people like me who have the opposite problem and desperately want their page counts to go down, consider:

Make your font size and line spacing smaller!

I dunno, I just found myself constantly panicking over how ridiculously long my chapters were getting instead of . . . actually trimming superfluous shit and moving forward. But then I played around with the formatting a bit, and it helped so much.

Legit, this time around, I'm at the same part of the story on page 19 where I was in the original on page 45. And I'm moving a lot faster, too, now that I'm not faced with a daunting-ass hundred-page, six-chapter document every time I sit down to write.

Make your margins wider in your writing

Writing what feels like a dozen pages only to figure out after that you haven't even gotten through half a page is a universal experience across all writers.

What I'm about to tell you is one way I've found helps getting through that psychological toll.

One day I was writing my novel (a-luchador-detective-versus-a-lady-vampire sort of affair) when I got a certain idea. I picked up my copy of Authority by Jeff Vandermeer that I had on the desk and decided to make the line length in my work the same as that paperback edition. Margins were widened and line spacing was adjusted, leaving me with a sort of narrow manuscript.

You've no idea how much my productivity went up.

Logically, finishing a line became much faster, which lead to quicker finished pages, which produced a longer-looking manuscript. Of course, this doesn't mean that my writing was immediately faster per se,

but the feeling of being faster placebo-ed me in a way that increased my output.

Now I'm hitting my daily word-count much more consistently and I believe this was partly responsible.

Humans like numbers going up, if we wouldn't both videogames and billionares wouldn't exist. Seeing my page count increase is a reward to my brain which gives me a boost to get to the next page. By decreasing the length between rewards I'm put in a more constant progression loop, no longer feeling the slog of going up a hill and being met with a thousand more.

And at the end, if I want to check my actual progress, the real gauge will forever be the total word count, which we shouldn't obsess over, anyways.

The journey to create a novel or other piece of long-form media will always be more of a marathon than a race, and should be undertaken with the mindset of a marathon. All progress is incremental, and you should not be emotionally punishing yourself for not finishing a quarter of your book in the last week, as if that were somehow possible.

The length of a novel is such that any time-saving and efficiency-increasing life hacks we apply would only be reducing our-time-finish by weeks at the most, so why the rush?

I believe the key to writing faster is to write constantly first.

Can't be fast without stamina. So go ahead; write and make writing easier on you.

[smzeszikorova]

Ghost reblogs are great. I welcome any and all forms of interaction. Not everybody has the energy to leave detailed comments / feedback. (I generally don't, either.) It's nice enough knowing that someone thought my work was worth sharing.

Writers.

How do you feel about ghost reblogs?

People who will like and reblog to add notes to your fics without either having commented/provided feedback or read it in the guise of a signal boost of sorts?

Other reasons may include, reblog for queue or to-read later... But primarily just to get those notes growing for more exposure?

Asking for a friend. Friend may or may not be me.

Idk, cause some of your teasers are pretty dope. Summaries, art for the promo, etc.

Also, have a Boba to keep you safe today ♥

[smzeszikorova]

just saw someone post “it’s common knowledge ur not supposed to spam reblog from someone ur not mutuals with” …..?????????? am i confused??? IS that common knowledge???? i try not to spam if i can help it but i actually personally love seeing spam notifs lmao??? unless i dont know what spam reblog means