thedustatdawn

[thedustatdawn]

Dan heng in v.1.2 | v.3.3

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Some Sylus fluff cuz I need it~ More art on my Patreon♥

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escape from the metaverse

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she checks the floor vents every day to see if the furnace is on yet and today was the day :)

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Josh Johnson's delivery is so funny 😭

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i feel like we as a digital society have forgotten the important rules of the internet

Don't feed the trolls

Never give out personal information

Anonymity is the best defense

Don't click suspicious links

Don't click popups and ads

Just because it's written doesn't mean it's true

You are responsible for your own experience

There is porn of everything, act accordingly

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well anyways. back to hoping for the downfall of the catholic church

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I think it's also worth noting how rapidly (relatively speaking) the fic landscape has changed. When I was reading and writing fic, it would have been unheard of to refer to fics as "books". People really embraced the fact that a lot of what was acceptable in fic *wasn't* acceptable in the mainstream, and that was why it existed.

There was drama, don't get me wrong (Cassie Clare, baby!) but I think there was less of this concept of fic competing with *books* especially. A lot of popular fic wasn't based on books at all (and it still isn't—the connection between fic and publishing has just grown and become more transparent, right?). Supernatural "fix it" Destiel fics weren't supposed to compete with novels; they were supposed to compete with canon.

People recommended fics as fics. They recommended one-shots as much as they recommended 500,000 word tomes ("books"). We saw the celebration of drabbles, which to me always very much read as great writing exercises whether or not people aspired to write beyond fic.

It's not that "You should make this into a book" didn't exist, by any means. But I feel like the sentiment was more often "You should write A BOOK".

There were fic awards, fic collections, fic whatever. But the focus remained... on fic as fic. If you were going to write original fiction, you went to Fictionpress.

(Which is where I ended up haunting the internet more often, tbh.)

It's not that this behavior has gone away, but the trends have changed, and I don't think that's entirely unnatural or bad. But some of it's bad. And some of it has been actively encouraged by the publishing industry. I don't think that an agent connecting with a fic author they think is great is an evil thing, by any means. I get why publishers lean in to the fic connections with the marketing. But lines are being crossed, and while not all of it has to do with the publishing industry (I don't know that the people re-publishing Manacled as a book loooove those binds selling on Etsy) that is an undeniable factor. And that's capitalism.

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From Jenny’s Birthday Book, written and illustrated by Esther Averill, 1954.

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the capy is too stunned to speak

this particular scene from sylus birthday card is so cute 😂😂

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The Pope, desperate to avoid ever interacting with JD Vance again, went to the one place the Vice President couldn't follow: heaven.

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Rihanna attends the 2025 Met Gala Celebrating "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style" at Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 05, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/FilmMagic) if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

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Do you think authors sometimes don't realize how their, uh, interests creep into their writing? I'm talking about stuff like Robert Jordan's obvious femdom kink, or Anne Rice's preoccupation with inc*st and p*dophilia. Did their editors ever gently ask them if they've ever actually read what they've written?

Firstly, a reminder: This is not tiktok and we just say the words incest and pedophilia here.

Secondly, I don't know if I would call them 'interests' so much as fixations or even concerns. There are monstrous things that people think about, and I think writing is a place to engage with those monstrous things. It doesn't bother me that people engage with those things. I exist somewhere within the whump scale, and I would hope no one would think less of me just because sooner or later I like to rough a good character up a bit, you know? It's fun to torture characters, as a treat!

But, anyway, assuming this question isn't, "Do writers know they're gross when I think they are gross" which I'm going to take the kind road and assume it isn't, but is instead, "Do you think authors are aware of the things they constantly come back to?"

Sometimes. It can be jarring to read your own writing and realize that there are things you CLEARLY are preoccupied with. (mm, I like that word more than concerns). There are things you think about over and over, your run your mind over them and they keep working their way back in. I think this is true of most authors, when you read enough of them. Where you almost want to ask, "So...what's up with that?" or sometimes I read enough of someone's work that I have a PRETTY good idea what's up with that.

I've never read Robert Jordan and I don't intend to start (I think it would bore me this is not a moral stance) and I've really never read Rice's erotica. In erotica especially I think you have all the right in the world to get fucking weird about it! But so, when I was young I read the whole Vampire Chronicles series. I don't remember it perfectly, but there's plenty in it to reveal VERY plainly that Anne Rice has issues with God but deeply believes in God, and Anne Rice has a preoccupation with the idea of what should stay dead, and what it means to become. So, when i found out her daughter died at the age of six, before Rice wrote all of this, and she grew up very very Catholic' I said, 'yeah, that fucking checks out'.

Was Rice herself aware of how those things formed her writing? I think at a certain point probably yes. The character of Claudia is in every way too on the nose for her not to have SOME idea unless she was REAL REAL dense about her own inner workings. But, sometimes I know where something I write about comes from, that doesn't mean I'm interested in sharing it with the class. I would never ever fucking say, 'The reasons I seem to write so much of x as y is that z happened to me years ago' ahaha FUCK THAT NOISE. NYET. RIDE ON, COWBOY.

But I've known some people in fandom works who clearly have something going on and don't seem to realize it. Or they're very good at hiding it. Based on the people I'm talking about I would say it's more a lack of self-knowledge, and I don't even mean that unkindly. I have, in many ways, taken myself down to the studs and rebuilt it all, so I unfortunately am very aware of why I do and write the things I do most of the time. It's extremely annoying not to be able to blame something. I imagine it must be very freeing. But it ain't me, babe.

Anyway, a lot of words to say: Maybe! But that might not stop them from writing it, it might be a useful thing for them to engage with, and you can always just not read it.

Also, we don't censor words here.