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Okay, I might be pulling this out of my ass but since that finals match was in Evermore that means the foxes should have been wearing their white away jerseys. Which means: the final match was a game of chess.

Not only are they wearing white, but they have first serve (Dan won the coin toss), and near the end the Foxes' king (Neil, because this is a battle between Riko and Neil) changes positions with the tower (Matt, a defenseman that towers over most people) creating the illusion of a castling.

And right there at the end, Riko attempts to kill Neil because they're in front of each other, but that's not how kings work. In the time it takes him to take that step, Andrew closes the gap and strikes. Check mate.

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i saw this post this morning and promised myself if i finished two shots of my grad film i’d let myself draw it. i finished one shot….but anyway

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Love from loss WIP 2024

So you remember those pockets I wove into this fabric couple months ago? Back then I was charmed by the idea that I could hide a small item in there - I could give this fabric a secret that is part of its structure and impossible to get out unless you break the fabric itself.

So I wrote this little poem, a gentle call out for being curious enough to break my beautiful hand woven linen fabric and messaged my lovely sculptor/jewel smith friend.

Yesterday we were finally able to realize my vision! These tiny bronze plaques are made to hide in the fabric - peeking through shiny enough that you see that there is something there to tease at your imagination but - impossible to get out or read without breaking it.

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Victor Hugo when writing Enjoltaire: I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your great great great great grandkids are gonna love it

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I was about to make a post about like… how my family has this lemon tree out front, and one of the funniest things about having a lemon tree is occasionally I’ll be out in front doing whatever and I’ll see someone walking past and quickly grab a lemon off the tree and stuff it in their pockets as quick as they can like they’re shoplifting. 

I was about to make a post about how that’s funny and how, y’know people can have our lemons, it’s not a big deal because the tree pumps them out like gangbusters, but I really can’t make that post without thinking of… them…

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Thank god soulmates (one person destined for you that you will never be happy without) aren't real but soulmates (people you understand and connect with on a special level, multiple, some of which you havent met yet) are real

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You Signed Up For This by Solmussa 🌊☀️

@solmussa, thank you for your permission to let me and @moonysbookshelves host the Only The Brave Signed Up For This Exchange!!

One thing that I was obsessed with while reading YSUFT was their playlists. Just the most perfect summer vibes. James' playlist in particular reignited my love for reggaeton and it brings me so much joy. Thus, these binds were born - each volume is a song that best represents Regulus and James.

🌊 Regulus' summer - You Signed Up For This 🌊

Art by the most amazing @ashbee_.art (on Instagram). He nailed it out of the park. It couldn't have been more perfect for Reg's volume. I couldn't stop staring at it.

☀️ James' summer - Besos En Guerra ☀️

Sol said that this song best represents James' feelings towards Reg and I just ran with the idea. The cover art is done by me. I still suck at drawing and it's incredibly intimidating to make a bind with my own art (if you can even call it art hahaha it's literally a sketch that took me days to finish). But I really did my best!

Sol, I hope you feel the love we all have for your gifts to the fandom! 💞

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Fic: Only the Brave by @solmussa

This was probably one of my biggest projects. I wanted to really go all out and make this look like an old, ancient tome you could find in the Black family library. You can see I used the family tree them on the cover and spine. I enjoyed all of the details I put into it. I especially loved my chapter headers, which shifted with each volume. The incredible art is by @illustrationsbylyd (on ig) and features Regulus at different stages throughout the fic.

I rounded and backed each of these and learned a valuable lesson: when you get to 750 pages, it won’t fit in the guillotine. And it will be a bitch to round and back. And you’ll want to crawl in a hole. I really wanted to have lovely smooth edges and the sanding gods frowned upon me. My friend @copticcowgirl was so lovely and made me a make shift grattoir out of a farrier rasp and it made backing so much easier! The edges are decorated with acrylic ink and end bands sewn with soie perlee thread.

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just read the last couple chapters of amtc again and honestly i still dont know how else this fic could have ever ended, like i know i originally had plans for a different story line but from how i set up my characters and my themes there was just no way it would have ever gone there. my ending was so right for the story i was telling and i genuinely still care for it so much and i am so so upset that ive had enough negative comments on this that im now scared to even open the comments on the last chapter. i wish i could love this story as unapologetically as i did when i was writing it

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⭐star⭐ <3333333

hi hello!! once again, i struggled with freely picking something to yap about sorryy

i know i technically already talked about it in my comment section and on an ask here on tumblr but i will talk about it again. this is about ritardando chapter 16 so spoiler warnings for that!!

ok so. they make out and then some, right? and they both get a little too into it and very much do forget the fake part of their fake relationship because everything they're doing is real and nothing shows that more than james forgetting to heed regulus' boundary, and regulus not even realising that's what happened. at the very end james calls him love which is one of the very first things regulus insisted james is not allowed to do in the confines of their fake relationship. and then james does it. because it's not a fake relationship. and that 'love' is SO important to me and i am so incredibly soft about it and i thought for ages about whether or not i can makes james actually say it but in the end it just made the most sense, for all of it. it's the switch from 'sweetheart' to 'love' during that scene that really shows that there had been a bit of a difference between the fake dating and the real feelings, because they were both holding back and both were pretending (although not in the way the other things they are) and then they cross that boundary. and both don't even know. they don't realise, don't remember, and while it's probably better that way it is also incredibly sad

(also little shoutout to reg in chapter 8 being like “don’t praise me unless you intend to fuck me as well" and james absolutely taking that to heart 8 chapters later lmao)

fic directors cut!

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Emotional support Montparnasse

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⭐ for the directors cut!

i thought about this for So Long because I really really do struggle with remembering any thought I've ever had about a specific thing i've written unless I'm asked about specifics sldkj sorry

anyway!! this is a general ritardando directors cut looking into various magic related rules!!

ok so obviously james is english. that guy is so incredibly english i was not going to change that. however, james' favourite team being the caerphilly catapults is canon to me, that team just fits him far too well imho so i obviously wanted him to play with them. the issue that arises here is clearly that the catapults are welsh so james playing for them seems a bit odd, right? but the thing is, with our sports you can play just about anything if a team signs you (if its not a national team we're talking about but eg just some football club). you then just have to move to that city to join regular trainings and stuff because the local thing is the stadium. wizards dont have that issue with their easy and nearly instant way of travelling by either floopowder or apparition, so i ultimately decided that james is allowed to play for a welsh team, because most of the players are probably from all over the place. obviously, if he eventually becomes really fucking good he's not allowed to play for wales, he'd then have to join the english national team, but honestly i think he'd want to play for them anyways

now as for another general magic rule! maybe there's been some wondering before about my weird approach to apparition, because they rarely ever apparate anywhere in ritardando, and when they do there's also always quite a lot of walking involved. reason here is varied. 1) i obviously needed reason for them to take some time to get from a to b and if they could just immediately pop over there thatd defeat the purpose. however 2) i also don't think it makes sense that wizards are allowed to?? just apparate in a busy muggle street as harry has witnessed several times before going to hogwarts?? like what is the statute of secrecy for if wizards can just disappear and appear out of nothing in front of a dozen muggles??? so ive decided to be a bit more strict on them for this and ensure they have to make absolutely certain they won't be seen by a stray muggle walking around, hence the going into very abandoned streets or the nearby forests to apparate. 3) now you could argue that they could just apparate out of their own flats, right? well. yeah. however, that would mean that anyone could also just apparate into their flat and that seems like a huge security and privacy breach so, no, thank you. there is a general ban on apparation inside muggle buildings ive decided. if youre a wizard and you own a house then you can establish your own rules for that, but other then that there is no apparating into (or out of) private living spaces. to make life for everyone more comfortable and plot points for myself more accessible :)

fic directors cut!

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Andrew being a goal keeper was quite literally the peak of character building in the entire literature history.

wdym he is THE protector of the team during a game? he is THE last line of defense? he has EVERYONE’s back? and he is AMAZING AT IT?!

and not just in the metaphorical sense (although as establish that too) but down to a literal physical level too. like? oh my god of course the character with the best reflexes that won’t let a ball past him is the character that grew up abused and constantly aware of his surroundings. and of courseeee the character that has issues with being touched and struggles to protect himself from abusers is the one wearing the most padding on the court.

nora you own my heart

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Some of you on this site are so scared of writing fairly conventional anatomy-based sex porn because of the cringe-words and general discomfort with sex. It helps to have had sex, but that's not necessary. After the break, as it is somewhat explicit, here is all you need to do, and it is not a list of euphemisms for penis or vagina or xenoapparatus:

Choreograph it in the same respect that you would any scene. If you can do this, you can have some confidence that your porn is exactly as good as your fights, your key gambling maneuvers, your political oneupsmanship, whatever. The key to writing any scene is to know where everyone is and what they are doing and impart this from the lens of the point of view character. If something feels "off" or weird, check in with yourself: what is the point of view character doing? Say it. She has her nails digging into her lover's shoulders. Was that, what she's doing, the last sentence? Let her react to it instead: the thrill of hot blood against her fingertips is intoxicating.

Many of the "porn mistakes" are just writing mistakes, and writing is an unending dialogue between the material (what is physically happening) and the ideal (how a perspective processes the material, with human and personal limitations but also human and personal additions). When you've firmly established the material, you move back to the ideal, the thought-space, the recollection-space, the processing. Then back to the material. Each action spins out and away from the earth, into the ether, where it is reintegrated, leveraged, subverted, and then returns, changed, to collide with the earth again, changing it in turn.

You do not have to say words for penis over and over any more than you need to keep clarifying proper names in a dialogue, and in fact, even less than this. Remember, unless your character is specifically having sex with the penis, she is in fact having sex with a woman, and her feelings and reactions and ideal likely center that woman more than her penis. Put her in dialogue with the woman rather than the penis and you have your answer: you only need to say cock as many times as you would say "rapier" in a swordfight. Once you know what sword it is, you move to sensation, movement, "large scale choreography", and processing.

The unique thing when talking about genitals is that most people don't think much about genitals when they are having sex. They think about sensations: what feels good, unexpected, painful, pleasant, intimate, jarring, etc. Saying "her cock" over and over is not just a little offputting because it's excessively repetitive; it's like putting "gauntlet" in five subsequent paragraphs. We get that there's a gauntlet and a penis. It feels wrong because the gauntlet is an extension of the striking-appendage and the penis is an extension of a character.

To avoid saying gauntlet over and over, as in any writing, you either get vaguer or get specificer. You describe the interaction with the wrist-plate, where the rapier rebounds from the shape of the steel, or the fingertip sliced-through by the superior blade, just barely shallow enough to spare the digit beneath (specific). Alternately, you get vaguer and describe the strike itself - the reader knows there's a gauntlet there! - a fist thrown in desperation after losing hold of a dagger, the weight both pulling down the blow and putting momentum behind it until it meets the enemy's helmet with more of a thud than a clang as the cheap steel crumples into the leather padding beneath, dented skull-deep.

Neither of those used "gauntlet". Both used the concept of the gauntlet. This can be done with anything that you establish - once it's on the stage, it's not off until you take it off.

Of course it helps, to an extent, to have had the kind of sex you are describing. It helps more to have been thoughtful about your own sensation and reaction and action during sex in general; few people really do this, but doing it is extremely useful for writing, the same way riding a horse and not thinking about it will lead you to over-describe the tack you're familiar with vs. riding a horse and thinking about it will help you develop a coherent material dialogue with the content of your own narrative. To an extent, to write about sex, you need to have some level of comfort thinking and reading about sex. Anyone can do those two things, and allow themself to think: at the moment of being penetrated, is her shaft sliding into my fragrant blossom? Or is the sensation more like pressure, more like pain, more like an insistent heat, more like an awareness of her and her shape or an awareness of myself and my limits or my pleasure?

As in sword fights, it helps to imagine yourself in the scene rather than only observing it, when it comes to blocking out a scene like something other than stage directions or a video game novelization.

The last thread this leads me to is pussy. No one wants to write pussy, unless they do. So they write entrance, which you can only really write once before it sounds goofy. Or cunt, which not every character would say. There is not really a cock of pussy, at least in my literary opinion. So how do you say this stuff? How do you say "into her pussy" if it causes you physical pain to write pussy?

You may not need to specify at all. When penetrating someone, you are penetrating a person, not just an organ. Depending on the nature of the sex, you may want to get into more or less detail, but I'm not talking to the people who are already writing about the color of the labia and the specific tactile sensation of a blood-flushed clit, okay? I'm speaking to you if you have stopped and made a terrible face at the thought of "pussy" and then deleted it and written "cunt" and cringed again.

My hot tip, as connects to all the rest of this, is that if there is not a word for the place you are stabbing her, you are just stabbing her. You are dragging your fingers over her until she yields. You are lining yourself up with her, pressing in, adjusting cautiously until she wriggles her hips, urging you to get on with it already. You are drawing your hips back against the friction of her trembling body. Could any of these be her asshole? Her neovagina? Her alien hole where she excretes salt waste? Of course! If it's important to specify, specify! If what's hot about fucking someone is the logistics of the hole, then by God, logistics the shit out of that hole without shame. But what makes porn hot is not the hole itself. It's the interaction with the hole, gone warm and molten as her desperate breaths come quicker. It's how the hole makes you feel. Fuck you.

Word choices for describing sex organs are an expression of how the perspective character feels about them. A heavily euphemistic description may either reveal something important about the character and her misgivings or set the narrative itself up for subversion - the girl who winces and thinks of her penis as "her manhood" is going to have something to unpack later or even during sex. The dispassionate "shaft" could either reflect disinvestment, to be dramatized later on, or set up that disinvestment to be subverted, as the humble shaft becomes the instrument of orgasm.

Think of how anime often has internal-monologue turning points to explain where a character's last reserve of energy comes from - the setup, the dead parent, the tragic past, the loss of a friend, it comes from somewhere, and the payoff to winning the duel is catharsis. It's just a more straightforward way of illustrating the point of most building-to-a-climax, which porn often deliberately does: you can only pay off on what you set up. Otherwise you revert to tropes and the underdog-hero wins for no reason and the girl-hero cums and it doesn't even matter because ten thousand she/hers have cum exactly that way in ten thousand prior okay scenes. The difference in payoff is all in a setup that the payoff can reintegrate: a material and an ideal that unite in a moment of pure emotional release.

I can't make you better at writing sex scenes than you are at writing fight scenes, but if you follow this advice you can be just as good.

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The urge to lie down. The urge to just lie the fuck down and do nothing.

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been getting really into bed recently