#and i've created the story in my head

[bookshelf-in-progress]

Now that I know more about writing, I'm upset at all the writing advice that urged new writers to find the one best way to write stories, when they should be telling us to play with writing techniques like toys.

Don't tell us to avoid certain points of view! Don't box us into the one currently popular prose style! Let us play and see what effects different techniques achieve, so we can learn the best ways to make use of them! Give us a whole ton of possibility instead of one cookie-cutter template!

[front-facing-pokemon]

[geuretea]

I've been making some character references for artfight! (A bit late tho)

It's midnight so I'll upload the characters tomorrow

I also had to say that I think I won't be able to send attacks in the next few days but I'll try to ;)

[mymarifae]

honkai star rail

[mcalhenwrites]

Writing is for everyone, but writing is not for everyone.

There's nothing to gatekeep. Only jerks put down specific criteria that must be met before one can write or call themselves a writer. The rules are made up and the word count doesn't matter.

But it's not always going to be the right hobby - or career - for you. If you don't enjoy it, you don't. Nonetheless, here's some things we're not going to do: 1. Downplay the hard work that another writer has done and make it seem like they sold their soul for their word count and skill. It requires a vast amount of reading (which if you don't do, I'll be honest, you're going to struggle) and practicing writing. Your early attempts will be messy. Born talent is not a fucking thing. 2. Continue working on something we don't enjoy! Find something else if it makes you miserable! I promise there will be something else for you to spend your time on if writing isn't vibing well for you. And it is also 100% possible that it's not the right time, but later on, you'll want to write and love doing so. 3. Threaten people with violence for not writing what you want. This is specifically inspired by all the people who get mad that a hobby like writing fanfiction is not catering to their ships, and they go "ew, where are the f/f ships, I'm gonna kill fujos" and shit like that. People do this as a hobby. No one goes to the tennis court saying, "I'm gonna play tennis for random person online bc they don't wanna do it themselves." NO ONE WRITES FOR YOU. Unless they want to, as a gift, and then a thank you might just be in order. :) 4. I just edited this in but it should be obvious: WE ARE NOT GONNA USE AI! That's not fun, it's clearly not for you if you need to rely on the "steals work and reguritates it all while hitting the environment hard each time" machine to produce some low-quality shit with no heart in it. Okay, so there are some rules. They essentially are "don't be an asshole" and a ton of people seem to break that. Don't be that asshole, I guess. Is all I'm saying. I've had so many people put me on guilt trips for being able to write while they struggle to do so, and I am not talking about anyone venting here. Venting is okay. It's when you go, "Well it's so easy for you" and expect me to either hand out advice (which is never taken) or apologize for being a miracle author??? Which I am not? Have you seen my engagement? It is crickets out there. lmao shut up and go do the thing you love, and if that's not writing, please just find something the fuck else that you DO like.

[destinyandcoins]

bruh idk what's the damage on all those spiteful writers who have to have a twist ending and change shit at the last minute when people guess what's going on. when someone speculates about an upcoming twist or catches on to what I've been doing I light up like the fucking vegas strip at dusk

[steakout-05]

quick post clarifying what i'm gonna do with my Crarry art and my Craig design moving forward

i just wanna make this post as short and sweet as i can as i've been struggling to find a way to write this in a coherent fashion (i'm VERY tired today, lol), especially with everything that's been going down in the fandom lately. people are not happy right now. this is a post meant to explain what i'm going to be doing with my Crarry stuff from now on, as well as how i'm gonna be using my fan design for Craig.

on the topic of my Craig x Barry art: i've been a little bit conflicted on what to do with it for a little bit, but i've mostly decided towards keeping it up on my blog for archival purposes. i don't like having to remove my art, especially when 1. it was made with the context that the (at the time) canon truth was that Barry and Craig were nothing but unrelated friends, and 2. it's still good art and it brought me a lot of joy when i first created it. i've regretted deleting art in the past and i think that i'd definitely regret deleting it now, especially if there was a threat of it becoming lost media and i didn't have the files to back it up. i care too much about my art to do that. so, it's all staying up on my blog, with the added disclaimer that it was made before August 17th 2024 and that it was obviously not supposed to portray weird incest stuff. can't do much about putting a disclaimer on it if it's already been reblogged though, so it's only gonna appear on the original post :/

on the topic of Craig himself: this is the bit i'm most excited about, but it's also the hardest bit to explain in a way that makes sense, so i'll try not to get ahead of myself here.

so, to start off with: in this post, i made some doodles showing an improved fan design i had made for Craig that portrays him as a blond nerdy guy with glasses and an injured eye. this is obviously not how Craig ended up looking like in canon and wasn't what i expected him to look like, it was something i made for myself and my own art. even so, he was practically just a skin applied to a pre-existing character whose personality had already been established. but now that the Craig i intended that design to be attached to has been revealed to be something we thought he wasn't (barry's entire freaking dad), i'm gonna do something a little different with my Craig to differentiate him from canon. i'm gonna take everything i liked about him before the reveal, retool him and his personality to better match the ideas and headcanons i had brewing in my head for him, and create a whole new canon for him to reside in. i've basically made him into a slightly divergent alternate version of canon Craig, basically. and it is incredibly self-indulgent, lol. (isn't that what being a creative is all about though..... self indulgence and insane storycrafting)

this bit might be slightly controversial, but what i'm planning with this version of Craig is that i'm gonna continue shipping Barry with him instead of Canon Craig like before. i really like the dynamic that Barry and Craig had in canon before the Dad Reveal Jumpscare Incident, with them sort of being polar opposites who would have some silly banter with each other, but also having a few similarities and shared interests that would bring them together, so that dynamic is gonna be brought over to this canon i've created for myself. it's basically gonna be a smorgasbord of everything i like about these characters with some expansions and slight changes to better fit with what i think would have been cool to see actually happen in canon. i'm likely gonna make a post about how i want to characterise my Craig later, but just know that 1. CranBarry is a thing in my little universe and 2. my Craig =/= Canon Craig and there will be a disclaimer explaining that on each fanwork i make depicting the ship from now on. i should probably give my Craig a last name so i don't have to keep calling him "my Craig" for disambiguation......

this hasn't been done out of spite or disrespect towards HB or anything at all. i'm disappointed with the change they made, and i do think it was very poorly executed, but at the end of the day, what happens in canon is not my story to write no matter how much i want to see in the series, and all i can do is sigh, shrug, pick up a pencil and start enacting the change i want to see for myself. i'm someone who believes that, while art can absolutely be criticised, it's up to the artist to decide what they want to do, and they don't have to cater to feedback if they don't want to. granted, it is a little different in Halfbrick's case because Jetpack Joyride is their product, and they are a sizable company who also makes money and business decisions and has a big audience and whatnot, but you get it right? it sucks, but like.... there's not really much you can do about it apart from write something you'd want to see.

so yeah, that's pretty much everything. i'm hoping this will go over well with everything that's happened because i really do love the gay little relationship i've given these two, i just can't continue doing it with the canon version of Craig for obvious reasons. the only problem i really see this causing is the very slight irritation that will come with possibly having to clarify this every time i post a Crarry thing. it'll probably be no biggie though, i'll just link to this post explaining everything. i sure do love coming up with incredibly convoluted solutions to simple problems looolll, it's my special talent at this point XD ahh well. if there's a bright side, it means i get to be even more self-indulgent and creative with these doofuses, and there might be some new headcanon and fanfic stuff coming later, as well as new Craig art. sucks that canon decided to fold in on itself, but i'm gonna try to ignore it for the most part.

[dontmesswithnoheroin]

I finally got the romanced spawn!Astarion epilogue and my first epilogue in the game I'm ,,,,,,,,,,

I need to lie down

[xalonelydreamerx]

I think I'm gonna write an analysis as soon as I finish rereading the trilogy but yeah s2 was fucking terrible.

I've seen many people saying they're happy about Alina, and while yes, I'm glad she didn't lose her powers and didn't end up with Mal, there are so much bigger problems with this season

Aside the costume still looking bad, pacing being all over the place because there are simply too many characters and the annoying repentance of the flashbacks, Alina comes as extremely annoying, stuck up, tone deaf and overall a bitch.

Unlike some, I do love book!Alina because she's a very flawed character but lots of her mistakes actually do make sense if you're able to let go of the grudge that comes from reading a YA 2010 book.

Show! Alina was intentionally supposed to be portrayed as strong, bold, confident and smart since s1. She's not supposed to be naive, ignorant, selfish and emotional like book!Alina but somehow she ends up coming across as so much worse.

The Darkling is no better. He comes off as extremely pathetic. He already was in s1, but I was hoping he was gonna have an arc in this season and become more like his canon self. Sadly, that wasn't meant to be.

Show!Darkling has no personality other than wanting Alina in such a desperate way that is hard to look at. I know the girlies gash over him being a ✨ simp ✨ but there's a difference between pathetic (affectionate) and pathetic (degoratory). He wants to keep the grisha safe but even that a aspect suffers from a very detrimental alteration they did on the show which I will now mention.

Apparently, grisha aren't the oppressed group we know in canon. On no, the season hits you with the hammer about how it's the fold and everything that happened in s1 that made everybody turn against grisha. Not that they've been capturing them, enslaving them and burning them for hundred of years, na-ah.

I have no comment on the crows since I hardly ever cared for them. Some scenes were good, but they suffered with how much the story was rushed.

The ending was shit, because while it's cool that alina kept her powers and an arc of her becoming basically a new antagonist is interesting on paper, it doesn't work here because it wasn't built up well and as I mentioned Alina came off as incredible unlikable and darklina was extremely one-sided.

The script was very poor and this isn't a hate towards the actors because they don't really have any control of it.

While I'll continue shipping darklina they were both done very dirty because they were ooc since the first season and the second one reduced them both to something beyond recognition.

[fingertipsmp3]

Ughhhhhhh I hate writing and I hate not writing and I hate myself

[bookshelf-in-progress]

There's always a danger of caring too much about a story, and then getting paralyzed by the need to do it justice, so it never gets written.

I've solved this problem in the past by writing stories so fast that I don't have time to get too invested, or writing stories that I'm not that attached to.

But maybe the trick is to love the story so much that I want to share it any way I can, even if it's imperfect. To feel that any version of this story is better than the story never getting written at all. To get out of my own way and stop worrying about what other people will think of my writing, or even what I think of my writing, and love the story for its own sake, love the readers enough to want to have the joy of sharing the story with them.

Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. But so far it feels like a much better approach.

[you-are-my-neverland]

ok. nano in one week and i have two (2) options:

drafting the post-chosen one wip. obviously this is the choice is should do with it as it is already started, i just kind of dropped off the last couple weeks. unfortunately, i have one glaring problem, which is that the most recent chapter went off the rails and i also reached the stopping point in my plot and now idk how to move forward. i know what's theoretically going to happen later on, but i need to seriously sit down and outline to smoothly draft. will i actually do that in a week? who knows.

start my pirate wip. the option i want because it's my current obsession, but i'm also very much in the creation stages and fleshing out worldbuilding details. so it's all bare bones, and i know starting it might be fun, but i don't have a firm enough grasp on the story itself yet unless i plan like crazy over this week. again, do i have time to do that? who knows.

[magic-allity]

What sorts of things or aspects do you like to get to know about a character and their story? Like, if you were to make some sort of form or layout, what criteria or questions would you ask?

[arcanchrys-fr]

wait wait wait hold up

before FR staff publishes any new lore or about about the suspected Arcane Ancient, i NEED to say my fanlore story NOW

i've never gotten around to properly typing it, but i have bits and pieces around my lair lore project all over my lair and den, as well as snippets here on my blog and on my discord. and in notebooks and sketchbooks i'm sure. i'm getting so energetically defensive right now because i've literally had this story in my head and heart for YEARS, and it is TERRIFYING to see how similar it's going to sound now that i'm typing out a summary as fast as i can, to "Look! A shooting star!"

my lair's lore...literally begins like that

there is a meteor approaching the ground of sorienth, and it collides into a great, vast land of one of the floating crystalline terra, and this floating terra explodes into many gigantic shards. these shards were shot across the land in sorienth, each shard piercing the ground in several areas:

shard 1 (the arcaned shard): a smallish-medium sized shard in the less dense zone of the starwood strand some distance away from the Archive

shard 2 (the macabre shard): a large shard the land between Wispwillow Grove and the Emperor's Wake, on the Tangle Wood's side before the staircase before Luminax

shard 3 (the scorched shard): a medium-large shard some distance southeast of Cinderslag, towards the Emberglow Hearth and slightly nearing the Shifting Expanse

shard 4 (the woodland shard): a medium shard hitting just outside a [fanmade] town on the nature's domain, close to the earth's domain. the town has a bridge on the outskirts that bridges nature and earth together, and traveler's and merchant's passage that is kept peaceful. north of the Everbloom Gardens on the main continent.

shard 5 (the hollows shard): about halfway between the Zephyr Steppes and Singer's Brook, slightly more towards the Steppes

shard 6 (the glaciered shard): near an icy crystalized castle-esque mansion kept by an icy prince, on a [fan] claimed ice floe of many acres that has access to the sea shared between the Southern Icefield, the Windswept Plateau, and the Ashfall Waste.

shard 7 (the decomposing shard):

i was planning to have one or two more shards. i started to plan out shard 8, but i forget where i wrote it, where i wanted it to have landed, its theme, etc.

at the crash site, the largest shard of the meteorite remained. where it had pierced the earth, it began to pulsate a powerful magical energy that began to interact with the earth it touched. it happened to have collided with an old, old, oooold fae's nest, long left behind and left for the wild to reclaim, but the wild of the starwoods had not yet decomposed the shards of an egg that had hatched, long, long ago. as the meteorite pulsed and hummed, the shards of the egg began to find it self back together, slowly wiggling and scooting back to one another. each little piece within enough distance of the meteorite. where there were pieces that must have been blown away and otherwise eroded, crystalspine, crystal rocks, minerals, and other bits of geology filled in the gaps. the shell of an egg crept its way back to fuse together...and had bored its way down, down, down beneath the meteorite, that had pierced into a small cavern under the land. now a unified, solid object partially built with rock and minerals, it sank down onto the cavern floor, soft metallic sand catching its fall and insulating it.

(earlier, before the crash...) a young guardian dragon, nomadic and native to Scarred Wasteland, had left his family/clan/pack long ago to wander. he had stayed at his childhood pack for decades, watching each of his littermates, younger siblings, and cousins of all kinds grow and gain their spark for each of their guardian pilgrimages, but he, none to follow. a more gentle, patient, calmer, more observant dragon than the most of his plague family. after watching and waiting as each of his chaotic siblings grow and reach their epiphanies for decades, he bid his pack goodbye and became a wanderer, depressed, but quietly optimistic that perhaps he needed to stir something within him, travel to induce his Search. a couple years have gone, when one night as he wandered by the coast of where the Scarred Wasteland and the Windswept Plateau converged, he looked up at the starry sky, idly gazing, and then a particularly bright and twinkling star seemed to be growing brighter with a streaking tail following behind it. a falling star? as he began to understand that something was falling from the sky and was about to strike the earth, he felt his heart beating faster, harder, livelier. in fact, he had never felt more alive in his life. he packed up his small camp and began to follow this star, towards the Starfall Isles, a land he had been too hesitant to approach until now. his body full of jubilant energy, his wings stretching with a new kind of air, his bones feeling lighter, as if full of radiant light itself. he flew for days without a break, not even for food or water. he was still flying in the sky as he watched this great meteorite strike the ground, and kept flying until the knockback of the collision wave finally met his being, knocking him back and onto the ground. the initial wave just knocked him onto the ground with some bumps and bruises. as he shook himself off and stood back up, he could see the second wave bringing a massive wall of dust and debris coming. his heart leaped with joy but his gut sank with fear. he knew, deep down, that this is where his heart wanted to go, that whatever this star had brought him would bring his purpose in life, but this massive dust cloud was dangerous. he had had no rest, no food, no water for days, and that worried him deeply. but he could feel in his chest that he had the energy and vigor to go in. he leapt back into the air to fly a short while longer, before the dust became to great to fly. he landed onto the ground, unable to see the land before him as the mixture of dust, rock, contagion, blue leaves and petals, and threads of membranes were being swept passed him and against him. he persisted. the dust and contagion dried out any hydration left on the outside of his body and scratched against him, scraping against his face and into his eyes. even if he had water left in his eyes, it would not be enough to blink out. his eyes stung deep into his head as his vision blackened, unable to see, and permanently losing his sight. he could only navigate with the direction of his heart and through the touch of his toes. and yet, he persisted.

he could not tell how long it must have been that he had been walking, fighting against the aftershock of the collision. the pads of his feet ached so deeply that they were numb. his beard was caked with mixture of the debris. he could feel his body thin as a skeleton, malnourished, but eerily the fibers of his muscles and bones still strong and determined enough to just, keep, crawling, forward.

he could not tell how much time had passed, only that it was a long time before the rumble of the aftershock began to decline, and sudden, halt. frozen in time. the air felt as still as a vacuum. terrifying, he thought, and he could not stop his feet from wanting to move forward. there was no sound to be heard other than his own movement and the gray noise around him, until he touched something new:

his paw touched a new kind of grass that he had not felt before, that was long and luscious enough to softly poke between his toes. and the absence of noise now filling with the sounds of wildlife, though of wildlife he was unfamiliar with. he knew what birdsong was like, and the sound of wind rushing over plants. he could feel and he could hear, but as he tried to blink the crust from his eyes, he could not. the lids to his eyes simply ached too much to push the dirt and dust off.

though he still felt alive enough to press forward, he finally began to feel the effect of fatigue and lack of nourishment. he ached in more ways he could count, but his heart sang in his mind to keep moving forward, that he had come so far and done so well to have survive, and that he will rest, soon.

so soon, in fact, that the ground beneath him betrayed him, a hole in the ground. he had just enough momentum in his step and not enough strength in his muscles to stop himself from tumbling down an awkward, rocking slope, into a hole in the ground large enough to house him. he tumbled, feeling pathetic that he had lost the traction under his feet as he rolled down a steady gentle slope underground. as he inevitable came to a stop, he let himself lie there for a moment to breathe, to feel if there was anything broken.

his lungs continued. his heart continued, singing the grandest melody he had ever felt. whatever he had found, his Search, was now over. his legs could no longer hold him up, his wings hardly able to cover his body as a blanket. he trembled with these movements, but found himself at peace. his lungs continued, and he fell asleep for the first time in...days? weeks? months?

he could not tell how much time had passed when his eyes began to open. no pain, no strain. his eyes strong and hydrated, but there was something new about his vision. a soft neon pink now gently lit the features of his skull around his eyes. a gentle pink glow on his brow bones, his cheek bones, his snout and the bumps under his lip where his teeth sheathed. his eyes adjusted to the new light, and he felt well enough to lift his head and neck, to lift up his wings and tuck them onto his back, to lift himself upright just with his front arms.

his heart sang: You have done well. You have reached your reward. Look.

nestled away in a soft blanket of dust, a soft glowing orb peeked out. its light steadily swirled with blue, violet, pink, and magenta glitz and gleams, almost cosmic. he felt his heart swoon and lifted himself up to walk over to the orb, the colors and glimmer speeding up as he moved and approached. he brushed away some of the dust, examining, what this orb was... and deep inside, a dark violet, fluid-like object bounced. an egg?

My chrysalis. I need my chrysalis. Please, pick me up and take me to my chrysalis.

His heart gave a hard thump once in his chest, then once in his ears. Then once in his feet, and then under his feet, in the floor below him... No, not below... The walls thumped with a strong, but slow heartbeat. A pulse. He took a slow and deep breath in, and the cave room pulsed again through the walls, through his feet, through his body, into his head. It seemed to be coming from something behind him, but this cavern room was nearly completely dark, except for the glow he could somewhat see on his face, and the radiant glow from the egg on the ground.

I have cleaned your eyes. Can you see? You should be able to find my chrysalis behind you. It is bigger than you.

With a slow turn of his head, he could begin to seem something massive, and polished like glass, only barely noticeable by the faint glow of two dragon eyes, and an arcane egg. He had only ever heard of glass this lustrous when the lightning meets the sands of the Shifting Expanse.

[found--family]

Helluva name for an ep! I'm thinking it's a trifecta: 

Steph dealing with her father - again, though hopefully less heartbreaking than last time; maybe something happens and he comes around to her way of thinking ie. her mom needs professional help. (I hope Steph gets someone on her side) 

Duela's mom visits her for her birthday - she got out of prison, maybe escaped? Or maybe Duela goes to visit her for her birthday. Either way, Duela's mom reveals The Joker is not her father. (I'm still on the Duela Dent train but I don't know if they'll reveal that as well; if Duela's father is fugue!Dent, her mom might leave clues for her to figure it out for herself which would mean a second reveal maybe at the end of the season, maybe just before or after Harvey's Two-Face incident leaving a cliffhanger for season 2.) 

Harvey encounters his father. The way it's worded - 'collision course' - is intriguing. Will he encounter fugue!father? Will fugue!Harvey encounter his father? Did he think his father was dead? We've only had scraps of his past and whatever the comics say, GK is doing it's own thing so who knows what could happen. If his father is alive and it's a surprise maybe fugue!Harvey will kill him? But there's still the possibility that fugue!father is in league with the owls somehow (how else would they know about the piano trigger? Unless fugue!Harvey himself gave it to them..) 

I love the crew's passion for creating this story! They care about good storytelling, they care about the details, they want to entertain and surprise us! They're taking the best bits of the DCU and giving us something new! I'm very excited for the possibilites of this ep. This story continues to keep me guessing, has me caring about the characters, and keeps me invested in how things will unfold. 

[poetinprose]

I drew my OC Kendra!

The horns didn't turn out 100% like I imagined them but they're very close ^-^