#(things will improve but not for at least another few thousand words)

[boyfhee]

✶ THINKING ABOUT. . . ft. lhs

g fluff w drinking ( he's drunk again ) wc 1.3k note for my darl @isoobie, all my hee works are for her anyway

heeseung doesn't have a high alcohol tolerance.

in fact, he doesn't have any— maybe a little bit— but mostly no, and yet still, he doesn't refuse whenever someone offers him a drink. you've been over this many times, telling him that drinking is not comparable to singing and continuing to drink probably won't improve his tolerance, though your effort is of no avail.

because if it were, you wouldn't have been standing inside a restaurant-bar at eleven pm, watching jay and jake trying to get a hold of an almost-passed-out heeseung, who, for some reason, smiles the moment you enter his currently blurry field of vision.

“we're sorry you had to come here this late again,” jake shoots you an apologetic smile, throwing one of heeseung's arms over his shoulder, making sure he doesn't fall because of the lack of sense of balance as jay was at the counter, making payments. “you know how he is, just wouldn't let us drive him back,”

which is another reason why you want him to stop drinking.

the first one being him wanting to only go back with you when he’s drunk out of his mind, pleading to you with the most irresistible pout to let him stay over at your place— it once dragged the two of you into a scandal. it’s worse since he refuses to let anyone else drive him back when he’s drunk off limits, only wanting you to pick him up even if it’s only to drop him at the dorms.

while being your best friend makes him one of your top priorities, it absolutely doesn't mean he can call you at the most ungodly hours and have you pick him up after heavy drinking sessions. and even if he does, he can at least try to be a little decent and cooperate instead of saying that you're the one who's drunk and he will drive you back to your place and even look after you for the rest of the night.

“heeseung, i don't think i'm the one who needs supervision today,” a sigh escapes your lips as you and the boys manage to get him in the back seat of your car.

“i will look after you so, don't worry,” his replies are followed by soft giggles.

then it goes quiet.

you steal a glance at him through the front-view mirror. heeseung is busy basking in the city noise and street lights. cold winds brush past the rosy dust on his cheeks, strands of purple hair dancing in the wind that make him look angelic, his ocean deep eyes telling a story of a million stars under the crescent moon, as if they're communicating in a language so foreign for the humankind to comprehend.

these are the moments when you realise that one could ask why you like heeseung, and you could give a thousand reasons why you're actually in love with him.

“we’re having another comeback,” he speaks above the blaring horns of vehicles. he’s telling you that for the ninth time— six times sober, three drunk, including this one.

“is that why you drank so much? to celebrate?” your chuckle resonates with a hint of sarcasm, words keeping up with him although, your mind is busy focusing on driving as you filter through the traffic. on other days, the roads would've been tamer, a little emptier. though, the weekends are not.

heeseung exhales heavily. “maybe,”

and it gets quiet once again.

you can hear him say a few things here and there, giggling about something amidst himself, his words too quiet to be coherent to your ears. you don’t quite remember when you and him got so close, to the point where he started calling you for help in every minor inconvenience instead of his brother. you were just a neighbour he bumped into around the dorms, voluntarily and willingly, and now you’re his best friend in just ten months.

“are you still thinking about the comeback?” the question leaves your mouth the moment you park in front of his dorms, holding the door open for him to get out of the car. “can i get a spoiler, or do you still remember the company guidelines even when you’re drunk?”

heeseung and you have been on opposite tracks ever since the day you met, and it doesn't even have to do with your zodiacs and personality— you can’t sing to save your life, while he earns off music— and, you don't know how you both got to a point where he's the person you trust blindly and you're the one he seeks for in the dead of the nights. it's something that comforts you while reminding you how you both have completely different worlds. perhaps, it's in the habits and insecurities that follow, or the simple realisation that heeseung is a star while you're just a planet revolving around.

there's a line between him and you that's stopping you from entering his world, and vice-versa.

“heeseung,” you call him again, putting an extra emphasis to get his head out of whatever comeback related thoughts he’s having, grabbing his arm to get him out of the car.

“i'm thinking about something else,” you scrunch up your nose when he speaks while practically reeking off alcohol. “i'm thinking about you,”

that’s not the first.

and then, he settles his eyes on you, one arm around your waist for support, fixating his gaze on you for a better look as if he has never seen you before. heeseung leans against your car, spending the next five minutes staring at you as you stare back at him with the same interest, or perhaps more, before he breaks into a soft giggle. “you're cute,”

that’s a first.

you don't want to overthink and assume a completely different meaning of his words, changing the trajectory of your relationship— which is actually what you want but, not this way— you decide to play along. “well, i believe i'm more than just cute for being the one to pick you up whenever you're wasted—”

“and pretty,” another first, and then follows a step that he takes towards you. “you're beautiful, smart and cute and. . .and did i tell you that you’re beautiful? i don't know what i'm saying,” a hiccup, his hand brushes against yours, it’s not an accident. he caresses your hand, looking at you with a flushed face and speaking with soft giggles, “i think i'm in love with you,”

“i think, you don't know what you're saying,” you interject with a chuckle, trying to put up a normal front while in reality, you're losing sense of everything because heeseung is confessing to you; and, it's both an honour and a shame because he is intoxicated at the moment.

“i don't,” he exhales.

heeseung falls quiet once again. there's dejection on his face along with hints of desperation to voice his exact feelings, to make sure you understand how he feels about you, and you know his words couldn't be clearer, but he is drunk. you know better than trusting saccharine words laced with the smell of alcohol, although you would've already kissed him if you were braver and he was sober.

“but i really love you,” he says again, chanting the same words to you as if those three words are the only thing that make sense right now. "we’re having a comeback,"

and heeseung also has a habit of talking pointlessly, repeating the same things over and over again when he’s drunk. another step towards, his hands brush against yours before he links his index finger with yours. you almost give in, almost, finding it hard to control yourself through the close proximity between him and you. you find yourself getting drunk on the alcohol in the breathe, or the way his lips are barely centimetres away from yours.

“i love you,” he repeats again, and you’re frozen in your stance, and he has no plans of backing out, you’re expecting him to bring up the comeback again, but he just presses his lips against yours before pulling back. “so please remind me if i forget any of this tomorrow,”

and then his lips are back on yours. 

[strangererotica]

EXPLICIT CONTENT | MINORS DNI

Reader is female • Y/N is Billie in this story; Josef uses the alias John • Christian/Catholic imagery mentioned, as well as cancer/death • dry humping, breast worship, coming in clothes, some aggression/biting, squirting, Josef lying/manipulating but he’s hella cute doing it… 😊 🥳 happy new year 2025!

You never did anything like this. It was fucking insane. Risky at the very least, and at the worst, potentially deadly. Yes you were strapped for cash, but responding to an anonymous Craigslist ad to record a man in private-with god knows what in mind-was an incredibly bold move, even for you. Thankfully, you were meeting at a hotel, instead of his private residence, a fact that made you feel slightly less worried. If the guy did turn out to be a serial killer or something, you at least had the guarantee of people close by who could hear you scream for help. That is, of course, if you were able to scream at all. You considered that the ‘audience,’ you were hoping for in the form of hotel guests may turn out to be witnesses instead.

The thought chilled you, and you tried to put it out of your mind. This was a responsible act, you told yourself, not the reverse. It would be irresponsible to miss rent again, to potentially lose your home. Times were tough; the debt you’d acquired from college wasn’t going anywhere soon. It was time to put the creative arts degree you’d worked for to use. Filming some guy in a hotel room for a few hours, for well over a thousand dollars, balanced things out in your mind. He was probably just some weirdo making an avant-garde film, you assured yourself. And if by chance the guy ended up having genuine talent himself, combined with your editing skills, the film might actually be an important addition to your resume.

Finding the hotel was easy enough. You’d driven past it on the highway probably hundreds of times in your life, so the name was familiar to you. But you’d never been a guest at the hotel, nor had you really seen it up close. In perspective, it wasn’t quite as clean-cut as your brief glimpses from the highway had suggested. The word that came to mind for describing the place was ‘seedy,’ like you were walking onto the location of Dan Bell’s Another Dirty Room series. Your instincts told you this was a bad sign, both figuratively and literally, as you took in the sun-bleached name of the hotel emblazoned above the lobby entrance. You reminded yourself of the money you needed, the money that was promised for you on the other side of Room 222’s door. The outside condition of the hotel didn’t really matter, you reasoned. Maybe the man who hired you was strapped for cash himself? Perhaps he didn’t have many options in terms of location, and simply chose the hotel that suited his budget? Maybe I shouldn’t be such a stuck-up bitch, you wondered, feeling a little ashamed. You’d been trying to work on slowing your initial responses to people and places, not wanting to judge a book by its cover, so to speak. It was a new year, and a new start for you towards being a more open-minded individual. This experience was testing your commitment to improving yourself, because your intuition was practically screaming at you to get the hell out of there.

Taking a deep, mindful breath, you entered the elevator. Its interior was just as dingy as the rest of the hotel, and when the doors opened on the second floor, you were hit immediately with the smell of stale cigarettes and booze. Another sigh, this one a little less mindful, left your lungs heavily. You adjusted the strap of your camera bag on your shoulder, and proceeded to room 22…

When you’d reached the stranger’s door, you took a second to settle your nerves before knocking twice. “John?’ you called, forcing your voice steady. “It’s Billie.” Only silence responded from behind the door at first, followed by the sound of footsteps quickly approaching. The door pulled open, just a crack, but enough for you to see the face of the man who’d hired your services for the next few hours. The first thing you noticed were his eyes. They were kind eyes, you assessed, a warm hazel with flecks of copper that revealed themselves when the light caught them just right.

“You’re Billie?” Josef asked. He was obviously surprised, and you quickly realized why. “I was expecting someone…someone-.” Josef paused.

“Male?” you offered. “I get that a lot.” Josef chuckled good-naturedly, his friendly smile easing your nerves. “Well with a name like Billie,” he said, pulling back the door for you. “I can imagine it happens a lot. Please-.” He waved his hand past himself to the room. “-Come in.”

The more you saw of Josef, the more you liked him. He was taller than you, but not so tall that it was off-putting. He was just right, the kind of height you wouldn’t even have to lift on your tiptoes to kiss. The mental image flickered through your mind, and you cleared your throat, remembering why you were there in the first place. Yes he was a good looking guy, who for some reason put you at ease in a way you’d never felt when meeting someone new before. But you were there for the sole purpose of capturing his artistic vision on film, and for that purpose alone.

“So what did you have in mind, John?” you asked, setting your bag down on one of the two queen beds. Josef cocked his head, his curious expression returning. The door clicked shut behind him. You watched to make sure he didn’t turn the lock. Even though you really liked this guy, he was still a stranger. And you were still standing here with him in a sleazy hotel room, with his body currently between you and the door.

“I appreciate your question, Billie,” he said, emphasizing your name. “Billie. Billie the Kid. Anyone ever call you that, Billie?”

You felt your cheeks flush a little, because for some reason, his question felt like a compliment, even though it wasn’t. “I-um,” you distractedly tucked a strand of hair behind your ear. “My dad used to call me that. When I was little.”

Josef nodded, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “Smart man. He had vision. As do I-.” He ducked suddenly around a corner and returned with what looked to be a veil, like the kind you’d seen the Virgin Mary depicted wearing in art. Josef draped the lace fabric over his shoulders and approached you, his face and tone solemn with importance: “…And with your creative direction, Billie, my vision will be brought to life…It was fate herself that willed our paths should cross…” Josef took another step closer, close enough that you began to worry he could hear your heart racing. “You could have been any other Billy…even a Bill, even a William for that matter but no, my dear sweet Billie-.” Here, Josef’s hands moved to cup your face in his palms, your eyes going wide in surprise. “…This is destiny,” he continued, almost in a whisper. “We’re partners now.” He went slowly to his knees before you, his palms together as if in reverence. “Blood of my blood…flesh of my flesh…” You recognized the paraphrased scripture as you gazed down on the strange man knelt at your feet. Josef took your hands in his, rising to a standing position, his eyes never leaving yours. “Oh my god, Billie…Oh my god,” he said through a warm smile, eyes lit with excitement. “This is gonna be a good night...”

Over the course of the following hour, you watched and recorded, offering input as requested from your client: a little change in lighting here, a play with background props there. From what you could tell, the vision Josef had in mind was a sort of religious horror short. His ‘character,’ was meant to be a man possessed by unholy forces. The Devil has a deadline, a certain amount of time he’ll allow the man before the demons take over completely. The man knows his time is up, that he’s in his final hours. He hires someone to document on film his last night on earth, before he’s unwillingly summoned to his unavoidable fate in Hell.

As a concept, it all sounded really cool. Bringing that concept to life however, with no budget and a lead who couldn’t act, was not cool by any stretch of the imagination.

Regardless of the details and Josef’s lackluster performance, nothing could have prepared you for what happened next. Whereas his character was standing strong in the trenches of spiritual warfare, it appeared that Josef himself was breaking down. You knew something was wrong, that he was no longer acting when he deviated sharply from the script and began to shed real tears, not the miserably-unconvincing ones he’d faked for a scene.

“Hey…it’s okay, John,” you assured him. He knelt at the bedside on which you were seated, resting his head in your lap. Your pulse lurched, heart thudding inside your chest. You weren’t sure what to do, so you did the only thing that seemed right: you gently stroked Josef’s cheek in an awkward attempt at comfort. The tears had slowed, but they picked right up again when Josef revealed his left hand, which bore a wedding ring. Your heart sank at seeing it. “My wife,” Josef began solemnly. “This whole project was her idea…She wrote the script, created this character, his whole history…”

You nodded as you listened, your hands dropping to your sides. There’s no way you were going to be touching a married man like that. “…She wanted me to play him, to bring her creation to life,” Josef continued. “It was her greatest wish…and sadly, her last wish…” You hated yourself for feeling it, but a sense of relief washed over you. He wasn’t married after all. At least, not anymore.

“…The cancer took her three years ago,” Josef tearfully revealed. “Three years and I still haven’t made her dream come true…I’m still letting her down, to this day…” His lament was cut short by a sob, words fading into your lap as he wept there. You reflexively began to stroke Josef’s cheek again, because you’d only seen someone this upset a few times in your life. You couldn’t not offer him some kind of comfort; he was obviously hurting, deeply. “I think what we’ve made so far is great, John,” you told him. “From the looks of the script, it seems like you’re following it exactly as your wife wrote it.”

He tilted his head to look up at you, eyes wide and hopeful. “Do you mean it?” Josef asked. With a nod of confirmation, you replied “yeah, I do. I think you’re doing a great job.” His eyes narrowed slightly, a darker look overtaking them. Josef rose abruptly to his feet, and began to pace back and forth around the room. “I don’t believe you,” he declared flatly, in a voice so low you had to ask him to repeat himself. “I don’t BELIEVE you,” Josef insisted, adding “You’re probably sitting there thinking this guy can’t act worth a goddamn…you know I can’t do her dream justice, you’re just refusing to say it! You probably think I’m a failure, don’t you Billie?” He almost sneered your name at you, and normally, you wouldn’t have taken this kind of verbal abuse from anyone. But you knew this wasn’t a normal kind of hurt that Josef was feeling. This man was grieving, haunted by a level of grief you hoped never to experience. Remembering your commitment to judging others less, you knew that right now, Josef wasn’t behaving rationally. He was acting in his grief, and you wouldn’t let yourself take his sharp change in attitude personally. Instead, you calmly came to Josef’s side. You turned his face to yours, letting your fingertips linger along his jawline. The muscles in his throat tensed against your palm, veins pulsing with the rhythm of his heartbeat.

Josef’s eyes were wet and wide, like a puppy who’d been scolded. “I don’t think you’re a failure, John,” you told him confidently, a warm smile on your lips as your thumb brushed Josef’s. “I think your wife was lucky to have a husband who loved her so much. I think you’re a very special man.” He swallowed, his Adams apple bobbing under your fingertips. “Do that again,” Josef told you, his voice as much a prayer as a command.

“Do what?” you asked. Every indication of sadness had faded from Josef’s face, the tension in his body evaporating. “Tell me I’m special,” he replied. Josef’s hands went to your shoulders, gripping softly. “You’re special, John,” you said. “So, so special…” You brushed your mouth lightly against his, breath hitching as Josef’s tongue slipped between your lips unexpectedly. He was aggressive, impatient in a way that told you he hadn’t been touched in a long time. Josef’s hands were everywhere at once, finding your ass and clutching it in one hand while clumsily groping for your tits with the other. You let him lay you back against one of the beds, his hand pawing between your legs and massaging you through your jeans. You arched upward, keening into Josef’s thrusts, his bulge grinding into your thigh as he clumsily humped against it. Your hips trembled as his fingertips found your clit. The front seam in your jeans was positioned between your labia; Josef’s fingertips rubbed rough circles into the denim, kneading your cunt through the fabric. He buried his head against your shoulder, his mouth a wet mess of tongue and teeth, consuming the feel of your skin, its texture, its taste.

You curled your fingers in the hair at the back of Josef’s head, clutching him into you. His lips traveled down your neck and along your collarbone, tongue gliding between your breasts. Opening his jaw wide, Josef drew as much of your breast inside his mouth as he could. Your nipple hardened to meet his tongue, a warm, wet pressure flicking against it. Your grip in Josef’s hair tightened as you arched, pressing your tit against his face, offering as much of your breast as his mouth could hold. Josef sucked at your breast in a rhythmic tug, massaging your aerola between the muscles in his cheeks. He whimpered softly, a sign you interpreted as an expression of pure need. Josef needed to be held, to be cherished. He needed to be desired by a woman again.

You tugged back Josef’s hair to lift his head from your breast. He groaned at the pull to his scalp. A dark smile briefly touched his lips as he indulged himself to enjoy the sting. Josef’s mouth crashed against yours, his tongue forcing past your lips in a kiss that was somehow more greedy than the ones before it. His hands were on your hips, keeping them spread. Your clit throbbed against the bulky outline of Josef’s erection. He ground his hips forward, rutting his cock into the now-saturated crotch of your jeans. He whimpered again, returning his mouth to your breast. Josef clutched your other breast tightly, kneading the soft mound in his hand. Your nipple was swollen and sensitive against Josef’s rough palm as he groped you, his mouth busy at work suckling your other breast while his cock strained at the seams separating your skin. You came hard, rocking beneath the weight of Josef’s body pressing down on you. Your orgasm completely soaked through your jeans and wet the bed under you. Every punch of Josef’s hips produced a slick, saturated sound as he rutted your ass inside a puddle of your own juices. He growled into your breast, like something animalistic. The vibration of his chest against yours was like the low purr of a lion, rattling your lungs as if Josef was inside you, replacing the very air you breathed with himself. His thrusts grew sharper, his fingernails digging into your skin. You winced as Josef’s teeth suddenly nipped at your breast, his bite grazing your nipple as you pulled back in pain. Josef’s hands went quickly to your shoulders, pinning you down, his mouth immediately returning to your breast. Josef tugged and licked and sucked your breast till he was gushing cum into the crotch of his pants, a feral growl rolling from his chest as he claimed you…

In retrospect, you wish you hadn’t fallen asleep. You wish you could have checked in to make sure Josef was okay, to make sure he knew the brief time you spent together meant all that it meant to you. And even if none of that had been said, you would at least have liked the chance to say goodbye.

When you woke, Josef was already gone. He’d left your money on the bedside table, along with a note. The text read: Billie: Thanks for a special night. Beneath the text was what appeared to be a doodle of a wolf’s face. You knew it was unlikely you’d ever see Josef again. But just in case, you keep the note he left you, hoping that somehow, someday, you’ll have the chance to ask him what the little wolf doodle means… 🐺

[strawberrystepmom]

senku x f!reader. reader has a background in agriculture. reader is referred to as princess in jest and the unpacking of the reason it upsets reader follows. reader and senku are both 25. post canon au where he and the other ishigami village settlers find a small settlement in california. robert is an oc created specifically for the au. wc 1.7k

divider thanks to @/cafekitsune as always

“You and Gen have a lot in common.”

Snorting at Senku’s words, you dab at the droplets of sweat on your hairline with the back of your gloved hand. He hasn’t been superbly helpful weeding the carrot patch but at least he has been decent company, the two of you working in parallel worlds and occasionally exchanging remarks about what you’re doing. This is generally how things just go when you’re together.

You won’t go so far as to say that you enjoy him, you barely know the man who stepped foot on shores not far from where you are now a little over a month ago, but it’s pleasant to have someone around who will listen to you ramble about whatever has been on your mind. You don’t judge him and he has never judged you, a silent mutual understanding that people will be people, the thread that ties the two of you together.

It doesn’t mean he isn’t observant, though, and he’s all too apt to share said observations with you.

“Why do you say that? Is it because we are both charming, hilarious, and beautiful?”

Senku chuckles while you wipe your free hand on your pants. Very glamorous, you think and laugh to yourself quietly. The sun hangs high enough in the sky you know it’s midday and you offer small waves to everyone who passes by you, smiling big enough people can see it even from a few feet away. You don’t have to do this but you go out of your way to do it, something that always strikes Senku as funny.

“Humble, too.” The scientist remarks and you look up at him, noticing he’s jotting notes away in a leatherbound notebook he swiped from the medical barn.

He has a makeshift ink pen, an invention of his own making, and he’s jotting down thoughts of how to improve the settlement. Watch towers, another well, perhaps mechanized farming equipment to keep you from having to do as much heavy lifting as you do.

“So you agree?” He chuckles again at your words and keeps scribbling, raising his brows. “You know I don’t point out the obvious, princess.”

The recent nickname makes you scoff but your cheeks warm. He heard the village doctor and navigator, two of your closest friends, call you the name in jest and he couldn’t possibly let it go considering what an apt descriptor it is.

“Don’t call me that, it’s bad enough that they do.” Sighing, you reposition your sunhat before leaning down to dig up another weed. “There’s nothing princess-y about me.”

Tossing a carrot down, you decide to rest a moment and sit down next to him in the yellowing grass. The weather is still moderate and pleasant but six weeks from now, it’s likely a small blanket of snow and frost will cover the world and your plants in the process so time is of the essence with the less hearty members of the settlement garden. You feel Senku looking at you but don’t entertain him by glancing back, situating yourself and stretching your legs out in front of you.

“No?” Senku shoots back and you groan, laying back in the grass and closing your eyes. He looks over you and shakes his head, placing the notebook on his thighs where his legs are crossed. “Let’s be honest with ourselves here. If this were thousands of years ago, you’d be in a big tower in a pretty dress waiting for some muscle-brained knight to come and slay a dragon for you.”

You want to be offended but you’re instead curious about what exactly makes him feel that way and how it relates to you and Gen at all.

“What do you mean? I can take care of myself and have managed to do it pretty well so far.”

Senku shakes his head. He can tell you aren’t offended thanks to the lightness in your tone and he appreciates that you don’t read between the lines considering there are none when he comes to him. He says what he means and you listen to it appreciatively.

“I’m not saying you can’t, I’m saying you inspire that kind of action in people.” He shrugs. “Think about the stories I know you used to read. A princess never has to ask for devotion, she simply gets it.”

Raising a brow, he meets your eyes and glances further out in the distance where one of the villagers he brought with him, Ginro, slumps in the fields while pulling weeds. The blonde man keeps glancing in your direction and waving before tilting his face downward to make sure you notice that he’s doing what you asked him to.

“I’ve never seen Ginro work so hard,” the scientist sniffs and you laugh louder than intended, bringing your hand to cover your mouth to stifle the noise.

“Not very fair of you to start with the easy target, Ishigami.”

He snickers and looks across the settlement, seeing if he can spot any of the others he has brought with him that have been more than happy to assist with anything you ask them to. You flash a smile, flutter your lashes if you have to, and shit seems to get done. It’s how you did things before you were petrified too.

“I overheard Hyoga arguing with Robert about being the one to escort you on the next foraging expedition.”

Thinking about the white haired man you feel a little uncertain of yourself and you look away. You find him extremely handsome despite his evasive nature and the two of you have only had a handful of conversations but he’s surprisingly helpful when necessary, you simply go out of your way trying to avoid asking for his help because he makes you nervous. Robert, on the other hand, is an issue that has followed you even thousands of years into the future (pro tip: don’t get petrified and then depetrified near a man harassing you in a club) but he insists on being your personal security whenever he can.

You make a note to genuinely contemplate trying your luck by asking Hyoga personally to accompany you but for now, you turn your attention back to your spiky haired companion.

“No you didn’t. Besides, we haven’t even planned a trip before winter even though we need to make one.”

Senku purses his lips and continues to look around the lands surrounding him.

“When have I ever lied to you?”

Considering his question for a moment, you hum and tilt your head. He hasn’t lied to you but this specific instance feels like a stretch.

“So you heard Big Mouth Bobby mention me and now I’m a princess? Seems like that criteria is a little unfair.”

Senku shifts where he sits and stretches his legs out in front of him to match your position. You shade your eyes from the sun with your palm and look up at him to find he’s glancing over his shoulder at you, shaking his head.

“You seem to think I’m telling you that it’s a bad thing people like and want to be liked by you.”

Shrugging, you settle back against the grass and kick your feet gently. He watches your every move and you feel observed and viewed rather than enjoyed, something about him that always makes you squirm despite yourself.

“Maybe you’re right.”

Senku smiles.

“I’m always right.”

You laugh and shake your head, shutting your eyes to keep from being further intimidated by his weighted glance. If he has any other assessments he’s clearly going to keep them to himself so you press forward, sun warming your face while you speak.

“I don’t get how that relates to me and Gen being similar though. Is he a princess too?”

A chuckle from your companion. At least you can always make him laugh even if you know your other charms won’t work on him. Looks have no effect on Senku nor do fluttering lashes or cute, coy smiles - he judges people off of their character only and you admire the depth it takes for him to do so.

“Oh yeah, that.” He picks his notebook back up and begins scribbling again. “You’re both very persuasive and understand people better than they think.”

Giggling, you sigh contentedly and even Senku finds himself a little bit drawn to the sound. You are charming and sweet and funny and perhaps a bit too honest beneath the slightly self deprecating humor you use to keep people from knowing who you really are. Even Senku can acknowledge all of these things - they’re true, after all. Proven and quantifiable.

“Well, thank you. The power of people skills can never be underestimated in a world where half of the people you meet want to kill you and the other half probably want to kill themselves because we don’t have social media to numb their brains.”

Again with that too honest humor. The scientist shakes his head and scribbles down a doodle for the vision he has for the tower he’s going to build in the coming weeks, halfway between your fields and the little cabin you call home. It’s the perfect position to see the entire settlement and he assumes the only reason you don’t have one yet is that you’ve lacked the people to assist with making it.

He may not be a muscle-brained knight, saving you while you sit forlornly in a tower, but he can be the genius that builds the tower you’ll help create the future society all of you will someday live in from. It’s a far more noble cause if you ask him.

“Keep it up.” He adds simply and you shield your eyes from the sun again, opening them to meet his. You offer a thumbs up and a grin and he shakes his head.

“I am going to tell Gen you called him a princess, though.”

Senku scoffs and leans back, still glancing down at you.

“Well then you’d be lying and it isn’t good to lie, now is it?”

You sit up, ready to argue back and forth but you’re interrupted by Ginro calling your name from a distance and approaching you, three carrots in his fist. Senku rises to standing and reassuringly pats your shoulder with the hand not holding his notebook.

“Looks like your savior is on his way, princess.”

You sigh, shaking your head and waving the scientist goodbye when he parts, watching him leave before plastering on your best persuasive smile and greeting Ginro exuberantly.

[chdarling]

Hii i love love your works they are truly inspiring! I had a few questions if you don’t mind sharing a bit :)

The way your characters „speak“ and what words they use seems so real and i always wondered how you pinpoint their „personalities“? I love you characterization of Lily especially, she always came across like a real person.

Another question i had how you think of these plots and subplots. Do you have a strategy or any inspiration?

Hi! Thank you so much!

Hmmmm. This is always a hard question for me to answer because most of the time it’s just “idk my brain just did the thing and now I have this imaginary person talking at me” lol.

But there are definitely strategies and techniques I’ve employed over the years to figure out voice and (hopefully) get it right. A big one is to give your characters a defining linguistic trait or habit. For Sirius, it’s cursing. None of the other characters curse as much as Sirius, and on the whole I try to use it somewhat sparingly with other characters so it’s more impactful when they do. Remus curses near the full moon when he’s exhausted and annoyed. James curses in serious scenarios, when he’s upset or scared or whatever. But Sirius curses fluently, happily, and with gusto haha.

For James, he’s a bit more lighthearted/frivolous in his language choices. Lots of play on words and always ending things sort of trailing off with “and all that.”

Lily I genuinely don’t have a good answer, I’m sure I did character work on her at some point but these days she just exists in my head as a fully-formed person so I have no idea how to tease that apart 🙈

Ummmm I’m drawing a blank on the others but i know they have specific tells, I’m just sleepy. 😂

Plots and subplots are I think just the result of my brain constantly playing a game of “yes and” with itself. (By which I am referring to the improv technique and not the Ariana grande song lmao.) Pretty much the entire plot of TLE was born from me having a handful of completely unrelated scenes/headcanons that had lived in my head since my teen years, then putting those random scenes in a timeline and trying to make sense of how one could lead to the other etc. And just like…allowing myself to go a little crazy and be like “ok I want a scene where Lily dresses in a Muggle mini-dress in front of James, why would this happen” and then extrapolating from there. Ok so the scene in which she’s wearing a mini-dress needs to be at least somewhat scandalous to warrant the kind of attention I want it to get from James and others? Why is it scandalous? Maybe it’s scandalous because wizards are super conservative. Ok if wizards are super conservative what does that means in terms of how they view Muggles, specifically Muggle girls? It means they’re constantly slut-shaming them. If they’re constantly slut-shaming Muggle girls, how does that show up in Lily’s plot? She gets accused of being a boyfriend stealer. Etc etc etc. So much of the plot so far has been me working backwards from ideas that won’t happen for many thousands of words yet to come 😂😂😂

I guess my biggest tip is just to make time to be very bored and let your brain roam free. Walking is great for this 😂

[yanverse]

Physically I am just chilling in bed, but in my mind I am peppering Kaito’s face with little kisses while holding his face in my hands. He is my little meow meow.

"Meow, meow!" You paw at the arm in your lap, the pink-haired boy it's attached to having been snuggled up beside you on the couch for a good while now.

Your neighbors probably think there's a few especially noisy cats living here. But they'd be wrong, because the only animals living in this apartment are you, and-

"Mrrow?" A crisp, perfect purr rumbles from Kaito's throat, his eyes still glued to the screen of his handheld. The console's been buzzing with flashy lights and the tinny sounds of explosions for the past half an hour, your boyfriend's game keeping his focus as he's working on beating his friend's high score. This whole meowing thing started as a joke, but now it's become a genuine mode of communication--when you're too lazy to even form words, your slowly-improving cat impressions say all that needs to be said.

"Maow!" Another pawing motion, and your fingers wrapped up in his hoodie strings to drag him closer, and Kaito's snort of laughter puts a sour scowl on your face. It's not destined to last, though, because it's merely a precursor for his game to settle in his lap and his head to turn to accept a well-deserved kiss on the mouth. For once he's remembered to put on chapstick, thank goodness. His lips feel so nice, so soft, and it feels like such a waste for them not to be taken care of--but at the very least, he's started doing it just for you.

"How many kisses?" He murmurs low under his breath, eyes half-lidded as he just barely manages to keep your lips at bay to answer. "You know I'm busy, babe. Name your price."

"Four hundred thousand." If he weren't so distracted, you know your answer would assuredly earn you a bout of laughter. He's got such a pretty laugh. He does smile at you, though, for better or for worse.

"That's a little unrealistic. Why not four, to start?"

"Four thousand? Meow?" Tacking on that pretty plea is a low blow, but the hiccup you can feel in Kaito's stomach as you rub your hand over it is exactly the reaction you wanted. He can just be so easy to work over. Hence why his fingers are coming up to clasp around yours, halting your gentle strokes with a hitch of breath in his throat. His legs shift position, moving about with uncomfortable weight before he settles one over the other--for once, sitting his console on his lap seems to benefit him this time, especially with those soft cheeks growing dark.

"Four, baby. I'll just be a little longer." Your ears twitch at the hint of strain in his voice, a sigh passing from your lips to his as you claim the first one. No tongue this time. He deserves to suffer a little bit for making you wait. But the other three make a perfect triforce over his face; left cheek, right cheek, and between the brows where he's got the faintest little freckle on the side. Kaito's eyes have shut while you work, only to flutter open once you're finished, the nibbling on his lower lip a clear tell that he wishes it wouldn't end so soon. But he's got a thing about finishing whatever he's focused on and he can't divert from it for long. That gleam in his eyes is a warning that he'll make it up to you once this task is finished, though.....which could be good or bad, considering you can still feel an ache from the other morning. Even with his lap as a buffer, that gaming chair of his is so uncomfortable.

In a flash, Kaito's tuned back in to the game like nothing ever happened. Yet, when you move your hand from his belly to go find something to entertain yourself with, his unusually strong grip tugs you back to settle against his shoulder. He presses it down firmly, fiddling about with only one hand--the other arm then circles around your shoulders, and he covertly slides you further into his lap for you to entwine yourselves together. From this angle you can watch him play, he can rest his weight on you, have a prop for his arm to sit up and quit getting sore....and Kai's desire to snuggle into you is returned tenfold, the two of you practically inseparable as you settle in for a long afternoon.

[pencap]

Hey your poetry is so pretty and evoking and I've gotten back into practicing fiction writing in recent years but in my own criticism I don't think my prose is very evocative. It gets the job done and I think my stories are readable and enjoyable, but I don't think my descriptive language is particularly striking and I would like to improve on that! Sometimes I read and the author has used such creative brilliant metaphors and descriptors etc and it comes across as artistic genius. So, if you have any tips and time to share them I would love to hear about how you select your descriptors, if there's any advice you've heard before on this, etc. <3 feel like my brain simply can't come up with creative language after my decade long break lol

Hello, darling! Thank you for the kind words. I don't exactly have a formal process, but I can share some of what works for me.

The simplest, truest, and least fun advice I have is just this: practice. Practice, practice, practice. The more descriptive writing you do, the better you'll become at it. It's much easier said than done, I know--it's been months since I've posted anything here myself--but it's unfortunately true.

But beyond that, in terms of strategies, I have a couple. I think "evocative" can mean a lot of things, but it sounds like you're specifically thinking about description (as opposed to, say, emotionally evocative) so I'll focus on that. I'm gonna reference january 2nd a bunch, just for concrete examples.

Having a clear image to start with always helps. So when I wrote january 2nd, for example, I had a vivid mental image of an empty beach at dawn, practically abandoned 24 hours after thousands of people crowded together to watch the first sunrise of the year. The stretched out horizon, the dark blue twilight overhead and pale hazy dawn on the eastern edge, the shy peek of the topmost edge of the sun, the soothing ceaseless rush of the waves, the clear expanse and white-foam edges of the water, all of it. The loneliness of it, sure, but also the freedom of it. The quiet and the peace.

It also helps ot have a why. What are you trying to achieve with your description? Often in poetry I'm going for a specific emotional or visual effect, so I try to focus as much as I can on the pieces that resonate for that. In january 2nd, it was the horizon in particular. Nothing in the poem actually mentions a beach, even though that's part of my mental image, because the beach wasn't as important or effective. The sky and the horizon is what worked for the emotional tone, for me. Specifically their openness. Not the light, not the darkness, not the water, but being open, so that's what the first stanza revolves around.

If you're going for "fresh" / "interesting" / "unexpected" / etc. I like to play around with one of three things. One is transferring descriptors from one target to another. (In january 2nd, I take crowded from jostling people on the beach and transfer it to the horizon.) I think these are most fun when you take human(-adjacent) descriptors and put it on inanimate objects / the environment, but that's just my taste. Another trick is to try for hyphenates, which didn't come up in january 2nd. But two of my recent favourites are in Precious: sleep-warm and heartbeat-quiet. sleep-warm is about evoking both the cozy comfort of sleep and the warmth of holding a living, breathing animal in your hands. heartbeat-quiet is about both the volume and the intimacy and the repetitive rhythm of it. The thrid trick is simple and boring and exhilarating when it works, and that's playing around with synonyms. I remember sacred weight of the untouched being difficult. Is it sacred or precious or treasured or holy? Is it untouched or new or young or innocent or unsullied or pure? Try them out and pick the one that feels right, or at least feels the best.

Sometimes I'll think about sound, though not in janary 2nd. soothing ceaseless rush a few paragraphs ago was a deliberate sound-based choice, though. That repeated s-sound feels and sounds like waves. Sometimes I'll think about rhythm, although that's a bit more important in poetry than prose. Sometimes I'll think about length--of the overall description, of the specific phrase or sentence, of the words themselves. Rule of three feels good to me and you'll very often see me write things in triplets (young and fresh and new), frankly a bit more often than I wish I did. Short words can bring emphasis, or abruptness, or simplicity. Long descriptions can be more flowing, fluid, relaxed.

Almost every and any element of language can be leveraged for descriptive power. You'll rarely if every use all of them at once, but it's fun to try many of them out. Maybe you'll figure out versions that feel easiest or best for you.

Alright, I think that's long enough! If you had a specific line or poem in mind, I'm happy to break it down further. Caveat that some of the pieces on this blog are quite old and I might not entirely remember what went through my mind years and years ago, of course.

[allthewriteplaces]

My Paradise

Author's Note: This isn't my best work, and it's been three years since I wrote it, but it would be a shame if I were to continue to let this little story sit in my USB drive collecting dust, only to never see the light of day when I was so proud of it when I finished it. Plus it's nice to look back and see how much I've improved over the years.

Story Summary: The day has come for Arkov Sosha to marry the man of her dreams, the Captain of the Hercules, himself, Yargwynn Salta and while it's been a long time coming, and their adventure hasn't all been smooth sailing, everything is finally falling into place.

Warning(s): None, only fluff

Word Count: 2478

From the moment we are born, it seems as though our fates are sealed and our destinies are written somewhere in the stars. Each step we take and each choice we make, alters our path, opens new doors, and leads to infinite possibilities, infinite realities exist within our universe, each one a branch in the ever growing tree of life.

Had I not made the choices I made, I wouldn’t have went on such incredible adventures and meet so many wonderful people who would ultimately become my family or be standing in my chambers on the Hercules, a place that was once foreign but had now become my home dressed in a gown woven from the dark cloths of the night sky and sparkled like a thousand stars.

Everyone dreams about their fairytale wedding, and I am no exception, it was the sort of thing that most girls, including most of my childhood friends, always seemed to like to talk about at sleepovers and even at school. To tell you the truth, however, I never thought much about it, in fact, it was the last thing on my mind. There were so many other things I wanted to do with my life first, like exploring far off places and making a life for myself, just like my mother did.

She is gone now. I wish that she could see how happy I am; I wish that she would be there to see me trying on my wedding dress - one that I am in the process of adding the finishing touches to - and I wish she could see me walking down the aisle on my wedding day.

Loss is not anything new to me, I’ve lost many friends and family over the years, and the pain and the sadness that come along with it, are like waves, trying to knock me down over and over again, and toss me onto the sand, never to drown, but no matter how many times I fall, I somehow manage to get back up and live another day.

Well, I suppose in a way, she is here in spirit, watching from somewhere far, far away from this place.

She always said that I had a gift for creating things, making something amazing out of what appeared to be nothing and that is exactly what I’m doing right now. I suppose it’s my way of having her with me, and for a split second, a smile makes its way onto my face.

Rubbing my tired eyes, I realize that it’s getting late. I hold up the dress and examine the stitching. It still needs a bit of touching up, but I have at least twenty-four hours before I get married. Goodness, even now, saying those two words, I still can’t believe it’s happening, it still doesn’t seem real yet.

Let me tell you, when I first met Captain Yargwynn Salta, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, though I couldn’t deny that there was something about him that drew me to him. Sure, he flirted with me here and there, and maybe I responded with a few witty remarks of my own, but it was only in playful banter, until it wasn’t, until our feelings for one another started to grow.

When I first realized that I was indeed falling in love, I was terrified; no, I wasn’t afraid of falling in love specifically, but I was afraid of the feelings that came with it and the pain that would ultimately come when they would not be returned. The whole sensation where I could barely get a word out when I was around him, or when his hand would accidentally brush against mine was similar to standing on the edge of a cliff and not knowing what waited for you at the bottom besides the possibility of imminent death.

But instead, when the both of us were at our very worst, and I had been teleported to the glistening clear waters and sandy shores of Cantahc when things seemed to be bleaker than they ever had been, he told me that he had grown to have said feelings for me as well, but after all that had happened, it was almost impossible for me to get my head around what was going on. I had been waiting to hear those words for so long.

And that was where we shared our first kiss, right there on that beach, I was being held tightly in Yargwynn’s strong arms, my own personal safety net that I could always depend on catching me when I fell, and comforted by his soft, almost rumbling voice, his heartbeat hammering against his chest, and his gentle hands resting on either side of my face.

Apparently, according to him, I am a terrible kisser; okay, I’ll admit, I’m not as good as he is, but I think I have a strong grasp of what to do and what not to do, and I will have tomorrow evening to prove him wrong.

There is something romantic about a beach wedding that makes it the perfect spot for our special day; we will be getting married by the ocean, in the company of our closest friends and family.

Making my way to the comfortable bed we both share, I climb in and glance over at my soon-to-be husband, whose purple locks are sprawled out on the pillow, and the top three buttons of his loose-fitting pirate shirt are undone. There is also a small grin on his face, which tells me that he’s not quite asleep yet.

“Finally, I was starting to think that I’d be spending the whole night alone,”

“You know that I would never deprive you of my company,” I reply, undoing my braid and letting my hair fall down my back in cascading waves. “It’s all done for now, I just have to add a bit more stitching along the bottom of it, but you’re not allowed to see what it looks like until I’m done.”

“Why not?” He pouts, but his tone remains lighthearted and playful, so I know he’s just teasing me.

“Well, don’t you know it’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding, especially in her dress? You wouldn’t want to disappoint Lady Luck now, would we?” I repeat the same words he said to me when he caught me sneaking aboard The Hercules.

“I suppose not.” He sighed and then rolled over onto his side so that he was facing me, brushing a piece of my hair behind my ear and then placing a kiss on the side of my neck. “I can’t believe I’m marrying you tomorrow.”

“Well, there’s no backing down now, is there?” I whispered, smiling at the gesture.

“Nope.” Even in the darkness, I can see his grin growing and he wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me closer toward him. “Not even if you beg me to let you go, I won’t. I nearly lost you and there’s no way I’m going to let that happen ever again.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere, even if you beg me to leave, I’m staying right here.” To prove that, I take his hand in mine, placing a kiss on each of his knuckles. He smiles and kisses the tip of my nose.

I can’t believe that tomorrow, I , Arkov Sosha, will become Mrs Arkov Salta. It has a nice ring to it.

Hours and hours pass by, the sun is setting and the air is warm, just like I imagined it would be; I cannot picture a more perfect day to get married. My husband-to-be is waiting for me outside and I can hear him laughing, no doubt trying to regale the guests with his epic tales, that’s the pirate in him, I’m sure.

I slip on the dress, careful not to damage anything by pulling or moving too quickly. It’s impossible for me to not be anxious right now; so many things could go wrong, and anything can happen, but I cannot let that distract me, I can’t let those superstitious and insecure feelings get in the way of what is going to be the best day of my entire life.

I let my hair down, then stand in the mirror. The girl staring back at me isn’t at all like the young girl who would have been there. Her hair was a lot messier, her clothes a bit more tattered, and her eyes a bit tired, and she was a lot thinner, less muscular. I almost don’t recognize her.

With a sigh, I step barefoot onto the sand, feeling it trying to get between my toes; it’s a strange feeling, I’ll admit, but I’m slowly becoming more and more used to it the longer I find myself living here. The closer I walk, the better I can hear the musicians playing softly in the background.

I am not paying attention to anything, other than the proud, adoring smile on Yargwynn’s face; he, too, has changed since I met him, his hair is a bit longer, he never, ever lets me cut it, unless it’s hanging in his face, then he will let me trim a little bit off. He does have it tied back, though, just enough for me to see those hypnotic blue eyes staring back at me.

“You look beautiful,” he says in a whisper as we stand together under a makeshift altar, his thumb gently strokes the back of my hand and already, I feel my nervousness slipping away. Loyal, a guardian angel from Queria, is the one to marry us. Their friends, a vampire, a fearless mouse, and a wizard are part of the small group of friends we’ve invited to join in the celebration.

The second the speech is finished, and we are finally allowed to kiss, as the music picks up to a more upbeat tune, it finally feels real, this whole thing. We’re now husband and wife. Everything we have faced together, every high and every low is worth this one moment, this small fraction of time.

Soon, as the sun has set completely and the stars unveil themselves, it’s as though it’s just the two of us, dancing on the water as the music continues to play. The moonlight reflects off the water, making it shimmer and shine.

“How does it feel to finally be married to me and be Mrs. Yargwynn Salta?” Yargwynn asks as we lay side by side on the sand, and the waves rush against our feet.

“It feels pretty good,” I reply, closing my eyes as a warm breeze blows by, and finding his hand, putting it into my own. “I just wish there was a way they could have been there and seen us, you know?”

He gently pulls his hand free, then shifts a little so that he’s sitting up on one elbow and his chin rests on my hand. “They were here. They did see us and they were happy. And they wouldn’t want to see you crying on your wedding day.”

I sniffed, then nodded my head slowly, standing up and then moving towards the water. It’s nice and cool, perfect for swimming in. I lie back, letting it hold me up. I glance up at the infinite number of stars peering down at me, once again reminding me that I am only a speck, just a dot on a gigantic canvas.

My eyes pop open when I feel two hands gripping my waist and pulling me up, grinning down at me.

“Leaving me already?” he frowns and clicks his tongue, “Arkov, my darling, how could you? And on our wedding day, too.”

“Leave you? I would never!” I struggle to catch enough breath to stop laughing and reply. “I am not as tricky as you think I am.”

He sighs dramatically and then puts me down, sulking. I roll my eyes and then with both of my hands, I splash him with as much energy as I have.

“Did you…just splash me?” He sputters; I nod and he grins, more madly now, and then splashes me back. “Yeah, you’re in trouble now!”

I manage to dodge out of the way and soon, we’re both laughing and splashing each other like the children we once were.

Later, as soon as we are both calm and dried off, we lay down on top of the soft sheets, lulled by the sound of the waves crashing outside.

“Have I ever told you how much I love you?” Yargwynn whispers in my ear, his deep voice husky and his accent a lot thicker.

“Not enough,” I tease and he pulls me on top of him, keeping his hands on my hips.

“Alright then, I will tell you every day until the day I die how much I love you. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“And you’re the best thing that’s happened to me.” I kiss his nose, “and I love you more, to the four corners of the universe and back again.”

He rolls over so that I am the one beneath him. He nuzzles my neck, making me laugh and the love in his eyes makes me melt completely. “And I love you, my beautiful wife, to infinity beyond infinity”

I lay my head down on his chest, allowing my hand to rest right above his heart as he makes his way further into mine.

The End!

Please consider checking out the inspiration behind the story created by @goodboyaudios

[niobefurens]

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art.

By Ted Chiang The New Yorker; August 31, 2024

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT  is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like dall-e enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of dall-e accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used dall-e 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed dall-e to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of dall-e. I suspect this might be because Miller was using dall-e for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

[dojae-huh]

About Seunghan. I wonder in what kind of pressure/scenario SM (or any company) will finally try to counter the complaining Kfans in the future. The scenario I'm talking about is, for example, what if SM got a "warning" from government for not being able to protect their artist, or if there is a law that SM has to follow no matter what. I mean if there is like, an institution higher than SM that can push SM to fight even more for their artist, even if that means to Not give in to what Kfans (K-antis) want. Kinda like law about taxes etc., something that company has to obey, that the consequence of this "thing" is heavier than the threats from K-antis + losing a considerable support (money) from Kfans. (Ofc already considering artist mental health). In other words, something that can intervene the way company has been handling this kind of situation (false rumors) all these years. Is such scenario possible?

Especially for future groups, what strategy SM has to plan to prevent similar situation from happening...

(SM also wrote "we plan to support his talent & dream in the future", we will see what they mean by this...) (Not a native english speaker, but I hope you understand what I wrote^^)

It was an unprecendented case for SM that was handled pretty badly (the timing mostly, "he is in!" and "he is out!" in a span of two days). I do think the reason was Seunghan's own mental state and decision to leave, but the company could have developed a better plan, a better psychological support, react not so soon, take a pause, release another kind of statement. They created a bad precedent, it will bite them in the future.

Usually SM is one of the companies who actually fight for its idols (because it has finances). Other companies kick out artists after a few rumours.

Riise is doing very well, its members are at the top of popularity lists, they sell out venues. Truthfully, there was no real ground for the company to want to return Seunghan from a business point of view. Just the company's policy of debuting all officially introduced artists (Lucas, Shohei cases, even Johnny) and listening to the wishes of the group members who wanted their friend back. SM still tried. Therefore, they must have discussed this decision at length in the past.

The government doesn't care about idols. Google any news about teachers, doctors protesting in thousands and achieving little. Work conditions are awful for everyone (delivery workers died during covid times).

The state could have started to help with forbidding parks being littered with funeral wreaths at least. Other people use the park for recreation, I can't even comprehend how placing a row of random objects en mass is OK just from the point of view of being in the way of the visitors.

Some things were improved. Like the length of idol contracts, award shows providing better conditions, idols getting the right to know what money their company owns with their help to keep an eye on finances. Very slowly and after big scandals.

Personally, I think only condemning coverage of such cases as Seunghan's in big international media can help. For general public to start to care and make noise after deciding that k-pop fans make Korea lose face, remember that idols are the country's representatives. An agency is a company, and a company can fire an employee, afterall.

As I undertand, fans and idols are "one group" of people (how Korean fans see it), thus an idol is not a separate individual, he is a part of a community, and his behaviour reflects on everyone (not just the idol group). As such, the majority inside this community (anti-fans) can decide whether the individual stays or not.

Idols perform sick and with broken legs, they get IV and go on stage. There is an immense pressure of responsibility before the group and the fans. As such, it is easy for fans to mentally break an idol. Even if a company wants to keep an artist, it can't make a human perform, come to the stage and smile at the audience who gives him a silent treatment. The artist himself must want to go against the fans, to endure the hate and appeal to those fans who don't dislike him, turn the tide. Mental problems are not a joke is SK, it's a leading country in suicides (article about the Han river bridges). Being ostracized by a group of people/society takes a huge toll on a Korean person. Maybe Seunghan is ready to fight for himself, but the other 6 people will be affected. And they were away in the other country to have a chance to persuade him to not change his mind and stay.

(A company can make an idol who wants to be an idol perform threatening to kick him out if he doesn't, not the other way around).

I posted about why companies can't protect their artists from defamation and rumours before. Read here.

To resume. It's not idol agencies that are at fault here (in most cases at least), it's the society and the fans.

[skeledude]

Today on Skeledude's Mind Palace

I saw the Distinction level students personal project and started worrying. I had the chance to see some of the previous students work. The teacher told us it was a distinction level project, and that already made me a bit worried. We went through the first week.

Are you sure this girl isn't writing a novel? That's more words than I type in a year!

These are some of the longest words and sentences combined together. This gave me a lot of stress, you know how bad it got. I was thinking about using an Ai to help me write, I was so desperate that I almost threw away my morals. But I didn't. 

This may not be the greatest, but it’s made by me, that's what matters the most. Maybe I won’t get a distinction, but that’s not like the end of the world, that's America.

Ai art is like a remix, these Ai artists (if you can even call them artists) use a pre-built tool to mash up a multitude of images and print out a new one, just like a DJ, except for the fact that DJ’s actually have talent. I’m not worried about Ai taking over my job, just like how painters never got replaced by cameras, art is forever worthy in the hands of a person. As intelligent creatures we have emotion that transcends from one to another. Art isn’t something you can say in a formula, it’s a complex feeling that humans understand, you experience art. I just hope others can understand. 

Kind of hard to take a machine seriously, then again, in the future who knows, maybe they’ll give the Ai feelings, and what I said would be wrong. 

(but we can still tell the difference between a set of hands better)

(I'm here from the future, I realize the next few parts aren't related to making comics, I was so worried about not filling the word count that I just let my mind loose, I'll just put it in the description of thinking process which happens to come out from comic)

I'm not a teacher, at least not yet.The difference between a teacher who knows an answer and a student who knows an answer is whether they could explain it. I could know how to do something without understanding the reasons behind it, just thinking and doing, a teacher is different in the fact that they really think and do, they know the cause and effect. Teachers can explain, teachers can teach.

Students learn, reading is learning. Here we are reading me teaching you the basics of making a comic, guess I'm finally the teacher then. I'm going to teach you my process.

“Everything is nothing but nothing is something”, this is a quote I just made up, it could mean something which is also nothing at all. The thing with art is everyone has their own interpretation, a quote is an art form, could mean anything, “All roads lead to Rome” could mean everything will sort out in the end, it could also mean that Rome is a structurally failed city because people can,t get out of there. 

I’ve been giving you kind of a lecture haven’t I.

I don’t want to sound like I’m better, that’s below me, so you’re saying you’re better than yourself, maybe, How can a person be better than before, improving.

I could sound like the most narcissistic person in this project, but at the same time this is my project. I keep using ‘’I’’, because what else am I supposed to use, “I’’ is the first person pronoun. Maybe I’ll use my name, But I don’t want to type “Jim” every time I need to refer to myself. Guess “I” is the way to go. Does calling yourself in the third person form make you more narcissistic? Possible. Maybe I got the word ”narcissist” wrong. Thinking of yourself as worthy of compassion is not being a narcissist.

Self-awareness is not a personality, It's more of an action that you take, I’m aware of the people around me. I’m aware that there are an infinite amount of thoughts and actions happening everyday thanks to these people. Being self aware is important. 

I could think of a thousand ideas, the problem is I wouldn’t have the place to store them, if only there was some kind of machine that could hook up my brain to printer or sorts, print out a thousand ideas a second, maybe it will read some inaccurate ideas, those inaccurate ideas are my thinking process. 

Perception is the existence of neurons in your head, every action you take is thought beforehand, then taken information from the database in your head to calculate a proper solution. You think, therefore you are. 

[sunriseverse]

Since you asked for questions...

7, 13, 17, 19, 21, 33, 39

thanks so much for the ask!!!

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

i love putting the images in my mind into words, and i love being able to construct a cogent narrative from what starts as only scraps of those images. i love my writing style, love the way it sounds and the way it paints pictures so vividly. i'm by no means the best writer in the world, but i like the way i write. also, hearing peoples' reactions to my writing! i love when people engage with me and tell me what part of something particularly hit them.

13. What is a subject matter that is incredibly difficult for you write about? What is easy?

hardest would probably be involuntary institutionalisation/psychiatric mistreatment/abuse. i've never written anything in this vein (to my memory, at least), and while i think i have a lot of interesting concepts in that vein, i..............don't think i'd probably ever be able to properly manage to write it. as for easiest..................basically everything else? if you're just talking about subject matter, i think i'm fairly skilled and can pull off most things. the easiest would probably be various types of mental health issues, internalised dehumanisation, and intense longing and pining, which is a little bit of a funny combination on its face.

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

okay i will not make you sit through my ramble about sunrise because it is literally thousands of words long, so i'll just link my sunrise crash course post. that said, a short thing i can say is the zhang sect's formative history is steeped in the tragedy of familial infighting and murder, and the later generations, especially after zhang ruitong's period as zhang qiling, really hold up the murder as a good, righteous action, when the murderer was devastated and horrified by what she had done and essentially became a recluse and a shadow of herself because of it, and zhang ruitong is maybe, possibly, heretically killed by a snake that's a reincarnated version of the murdered brother in question.

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

oh, this is a long one. so, i've been writing for..............a bit more than half my life, now. i started out writing fanfic by hand as a kid, and then migrated first to ffnet , where i spent a good few years mostly lurking until i finally got an email and was able to post my own writing (i did briefly use lj and quotev before ffnet, but i never had an account on them). i wrote a lot of warriors fanfic, since that's what i was mainly into, as well as a good deal of guardians of ga'hoole and inheritance cycle fanfic by hand (none of this was ever digitised and is probably lost to the ages). after this, in 2017, i finally made the shift to ao3, after having heard about it for years but never making the transition, because an author i read a lot of talked about migrating over there, and began posting my own writing. by that point, i'd been writing for a good portion of my life, and my writing skills weren't too shabby, so some of the stuff from that period is still intelligible, even if it's bad. then in 2018 i began taking prompts for a fandom i'd just gotten into, pacific rim, and i was a serial promptfic writer between 2018-2021, which is where i credit my rapid improvement of skill to—i was writing sometimes two or three prompts per month, and generally the reaction was positive. however, a combination of events almost led me to stop writing entirely in 2021—people had started calling me a big name fan, which made me incredibly uncomfortable, because i felt like i was being put up on a pedestal and people were treating me as an idol rather than just...............you know, another fan. i also had a falling out with another big name fan in the fandom over a "joke" they made. i actually never talked about this publicly, because i genuinely don't think it was like................something worth dragging into public, especially since as a so-called bnf myself, i was aware that if i were to talk about it, people would be very polarised about it. after i blocked this person, they went and left a massive ao3 comment on one of my fics, which freaked me out pretty badly, and for about a year afterwards i had really bad shutdowns and paranoia surrounding that event and fanfic generally that made writing really hard for me, because i found it really hard to extricate my writing from the harmful ways i was practising and thinking about my writing. but after a series of url changes, making new friends, and finally getting medicated for the plethora of mental health issues i apparently had had most of my life (shocking, who could have guessed), i was able to finally begin seeing writing as something for me and something i did for enjoyment. moving into cdramas and cnovels as my main types of fandom also helped a lot, because it took off the pressure i felt to write a certain way, since a lot of the english fandoms for them are much smaller, and i've purposely tried to ensure that i never wind up in another situation where i'm being called a bnf again. also, my writing now is probably the best it's ever been, and that makes me really happy and helps stave off any issues i might have with falling into a bad mental state again.

21. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud?

uh. not very. i have a notes app folder with jotted down fanfic ideas i'll sometimes go through, but most of the time i just start writing in a google doc with some stupid title, and i rarely use outlines—mostly my "planning" process consists of either 1. rambling to my friends to help solidify my ideas and copypasting that conversation into the docs for reference, or 2. a singular rambling line detailing the points i want to hit in the fic. once it's finished, i toss it into ao3 and call it a day. i'm an adult who's also been in university and college for years and i have a lot of things to do, and fanfic is something that i do for fun, so i don't really bother to be too meticulous about it—unless you count sunrise, which is just generally an outlier in my life overall.

33. Do you practice any other art besides writing? Does that art ever tie into your writing, or is it entirely separate?

yes! i draw and (very occasionally) make amvs. usually though my art isn't tied to any of my writing, and my amvs are separate too. i would love to illustrate my writing, but my art is..........not that good. mostly i just use my art for character design/redesign these days.

39. What keeps you writing when you feel like giving up?

spite, mostly. my life and other people have taken a lot of things from me, and writing is the one thing i've stubbornly held onto since i was a child. it's in my marrow by this point; i wouldn't be myself if i didn't write. also, there's something so satisfying about drawing together a concept over thousands of words—and i love trying to figure out how a concept would work while still keeping characters, well, in character.

[ehlnofay]

writer asks... 🥺🛒🤡✨🎶🎨👀

🥺 Is there a certain type of moment or common interaction between your characters that never fails to put you in your feels? I think that something that always gets me is when the interaction is nice and good and lovely, and it could continue to be nice and good and lovely, but there are underlying circumstances that will not let it be and even now the cracks are starting to show. I love it when you can see the painful dissolution of a relationship long before it actually comes to fruition. it's so hhhhh and I write it a fair bit with characters like arabella and j'zargo, torr and astrid, pax and martin, and so forth

🛒 What are some common things you incorporate in your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc. the thing that draws me most to writing is the characters; I think most of my writing is in some form a character study. I'm perpetually fascinated by how people react to difficulty, how they relate to one another, how their experiences inform their actions. so I think most of the themes that crop up often relate to that. I like using a lot of images and motifs, as well, but I can't think of any that are ubiquitous, though most of my characters have one or two specifically assigned to them that I like to reference

🤡 What's a line, scene, or exchange you've written that made you laugh? hmm... I'll be honest almost anything with efri has at least one thing in it that is extremely funny to me. she just says things. I'm looking through her document to give an example and there's just so much in here. in her first meeting with savos she asks him how old he is and then raps her stick on the ground and says "you're dead," before he can finish answering. she announces to the group of vampires she's sitting around a campfire with that she isn't sure how she feels about her choice to free them, you know, ethically speaking. she refers to the eye of magnus exclusively as "the ball" and when mirabelle informs her what they've been calling it she says "huh. that's a weird name" (she does not know who magnus is)

✨ Give you and your writing a compliment. Go on now. You know you deserve it. 😉 I'm genuinely really happy with where my writing is right now. I'm proud of how much improvement I can see over the last few years in how I portray scenes, atmosphere and dialogue, and I see a lot of potential for growth which I find really exciting! since I was a little kid I've wanted to be a published author and I feel like that's actually in the cards for me at some point in the not-too-distant future (assuming, you know, I actually write a book)

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately? I cannot play music or listen to literally anything when I'm writing. I close the door and the windows and ask my siblings to turn down their youtube videos or else I Cannot Focus An Inch. however I do love to listen to music to help me think through my stories and characters... it helps me get into a Mood and I've gotten a lot of ideas that way. most recent song I've begun to associate with a character is the amazing devil's the calling. it's pax (ish) at a very specific story beat

🎨 How do you feel about fan art of your stories? LOVE IT FOREVER. I still regularly look at art fight attacks and go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I want to give each of them a turn as my profile picture but I keep forgetting :(

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please! the Ludicrously Big Project.... if I keep the other sections to a similar length it will end up over a hundred thousand words, which is ABSURD. if I don't, the first bit will feel like such an insane outlier. I guess we'll see... I don't want to go into too much detail since I am only about a quarter of the way in (ridiculous) and I might trim the section I've written down a Bunch, so I don't want to like. jinx it. or say anything that ends up not being true. I will say that each main part focuses on the same story from the perspective of a different character and it is an exercise in not writing in little scenes pieced together (the reasons it is SO STUPID LONG methinks... if it was just the one character in vignettes it would have ten thousand words cut out and it would be done already) and that none of the characters in it are mine. unless you count the ones I made up expressly for this story. also it is pretty dark... which isn't super uncommon for my longer stuff it seems. I guess the more intense topics demand more space to resolve themselves. but there are parts that might be hard to read (definitely will be hard to write). whenever I post it in fifty years I will be sure to include comprehensive content warnings

[aresmarked]

kanamafu anon again! thank you for the lovely response! here’s an imo trickier niigo question: what do you think of ena’s dad?

i often see fans blow his shittiness out of proportion, like making him a physical abuser to the whole family or acting like he’s always been unsupportive when the text itself says he was supportive of ena’s art when she was a little kid. i agree that he’s shitty, but part of me thinks that… his relationship with ena can be salvaged, somehow? i know other fans wont forgive him even if he and ena get closure, which is fine, but i dont really feel that way? i keep trying to ask myself what sets him apart from, say, mafuyu’s mom in my mind, when they both say harsh things to their kids in an attempt to “protect” them. it’s like my brain’s really clinging to that part about how he wasn’t always like this, unlike mafuyu’s mom who has always used guilt tripping to control mafuyu. but maybe that’s silly of me, dunno. part of me thinks he’s just an emotionally stunted old man who is piss poor at phrasing things and that he just has some serious growing to do to salvage this, but then again maybe he shouldntve been a parent before that point and he still sucks because, again, he at least had the sense to not say “this art is shit” to, like, a seven year old so maybe it IS his fault? i do consider myself a fan of his character so i ponder this a lot. given your insight about mafuyu’s mom, though, i was just curious as to what you thought!

...Hfhfhf, almost right out of the gate with the essay questions. Hm.

I'd break my thoughts up about him into a few main points, but TL;DR if I knew a parent like this I'd go out of the way to make sure the kid gets some positive feedback from me, but he's a character/parent i could see improving in time.

He's one of those guys who's good at his craft but terrible at teaching. (You see these sorts a decent amount, for better or worse). While he had valid points, the way he chose to 'advise' isn't great. if a parent said something like that around me about one of their kids i'd have a Hard time reining it in.

As remarked upon in the game itself, he didn't talk to Ena as his daughter, but more as another artist, and moreover, I'd say, an adult artist. A few additional words would've made a huge difference in how Ena walked away from that conversation. like 'right now'. or advice on, y'know. what to actually work on. see point one again.

The major difference between him and Mafumom is that he does consider Ena's wishes, not hindering her from going into the arts, and not inserting himself where he's very much not wanted. He does respect what Ena wants to do.

Doesn't stop him having done a wrong and needing to repair that, to move forward. People are full of faults and strengths and I appreciate PSekai actually writing people with those. parents with those. it makes us feel even more strongly for ena cause yeah, a parent's mistake hurts a Lot! It makes a better tale cause it's real!

That said, while I think it's possible for Ena and her dad to potentially mend their relationship, as you say, such a mending will take time to believable and acceptable I think, not just to readers but to Ena. She's got no real interest in mending their familial relationship right now. and a 'forgive your parents' plotline when said parent hasn't taken real steps to actually mend the familial relationship would just be. so tired. that grounds been trod a thousand times. 'You'll understand when you're older'. i hate those plots where the kid forgives their parents without the parents really doing anything to reflect on their actions. the fact it's still a bit of a revolution when a parent does admit they've done wrong speaks mountains.

[amatres]

Okay, the first few collections of ascended astarion documentation while i observe the two under a microscope.

first, the day after turning

Astarion: You are so beautiful… And you will be beautiful forever. Thank you for trusting me. Balaerra: What exactly happened? Astarion: You were drained dry, and at the height of your delirium, I granted you one drop of my own blood. Things will be a touch different for you than they were for me when I was a spawn. I'm imbibed with unfathomable new talents. I am fairly certain I can extend Mephistopheles' blessings unto you. Balaerra: Does that mean I need not fear the sun? Astarion: You need not fear anything. You will be stronger, swifter, sharper, but you won't be different. You were already perfect before. It's hard to improve. Astarion: For me, well… You probably expect me to turn into a sea of mist, run wrongside-up on roofs, and to call on legions of wolves in battle. That will all happen in due time. But for now, patience is required. I hear the whispers of the night, but I can't yet speak it's language. It's going to take a while to become acquainted with my new self Balaerra: Are you bound to Mephistopheles? Astarion: Mephistopheles has made a new monster, not bound a creature to his will. The Rite was honoured, the sacrifice is over. Everything lies ahead. I can see my path to a waking dream. From the crimson palace, I will govern day and night. Create a city of spawn who bow before me, cast a fog over the world for me children. Astarion: I wish we could retreat into our palace already, and spend a decade in each other's arms. But first we must manage the trifling manner of the brain. Perhaps it will listen to us. Perhaps it, too, will serve. Balaerra: We can't trust the brain. Astarion: We shall see. Baldur's Gate is a city of opportunity like no other, and I don't intend to let one like this pass us by.

and the 'can we talk about us answers. I actually got two answers when I asked 'what are we, so I'll put them both here. I asked twice because the conversation ends so abruptly after he gives his answer I got confused lmao.

Don't mind him being so bloody, i only ever long rest after we get our asses beat

Astarion: Seven thousand souls have given me the power to carve out my own future, and I want you to be part of it .... Astarion: Little love, whatever could be the matter? Balaerra: Can we talk about the two of us? Astarion: Go on, then. I'll allow it. Balaerra: What are we, to you? Astarion: Aeterna amantes. Lovers forever, until the world falls down.

Afterwards, his response to 'can we talk about us' changes. I don't know if this is because I triggered it to change, or the response is random and I just got it twice, but interesting to note if it was intentional.

The game doesn't keep track of some things you've asked, or have or have no done, so I got to ask again about walking in the sun to see what he says. This is where the 'don't stray too far from me' line comes from, I'm surprised! For some reason I thought that would be from kicking him out of the party.

Another thing to note is Balaerra hadn't let him drink her blood since the initial reveal scene until he turned her, so I was surprised I also got that option here! Added her reaction to it in the screenshots bc it's funny to me.

As a final note for this convo, his 'sequester you in my palace' line when read sounded? like he was joking about it. Or at least being sarcastic, but you never know, he does get pretty possessive on this path.

Astarion: My consort, we are so close to our triumph, I can almost taste it. Balaerra: Can we talk about the two of us? Astarion: You want to talk? Oh, that's very cute. Balaerra: You made me your spawn… What is going to happen to me? Astarion: 'Spawn' is an ugly word. I really do prefer 'consort'. Balaerra: What do you mean to do with me, as your consort? Astarion: As much as I wish to sequester you in a deep chamber of my palace and keep you all to myself, there's much to be done. First we'll take Baldur's Gate. Then we'll take over the world. We'll dominate it until the sun itself melts, and then we'll give ourselves to the night. Balaerra: Cazador could compel you - can you compel me? Astarion: Why would I need to? You're going to be wonderfully obedient. Balaerra: Does this mean I won't be able to walk in the sun if my tadpole is removed? Astarion: Don't you worry. You have supped of my blood. It will be no trouble to extend a fragment of my protection to you. Just don't stray too far. But you'd never dream of doing that, would you? Balaerra: Will you still drink my blood? Astarion: Of course I will, and you will drink mine. I can't wait to taste your lips after you've tasted me.

And then just the asking to kiss. Not really that important, though I will say the audio bugged and I got what, I think, is his pre quest line where he says, paraphrasing 'you are better every time' or smthing like that. probably glitched bc i never chose the option before bc pda flusters me lol

Astarion: Little love, whatever could be the matter? Balaerra: Can we talk about the two of us? Astarion: You want to talk? Oh, that's very cute. Balaerra: Could I kiss you? Astarion: Can't get enough? I'm not surprised. Astarion: Delicious…

[dustdeepsea]

Tagged by @littleplasticrat (thank you!) -- this made me think about the fan work that's stayed with me throughout the years. Some of the stuff I tried to unearth is simply lost to the internet wilds and time, but here are the ones I managed to find.

Final Fantasy 8 stories by Bishounenink (Tenshi and llamajoy) Squall/Seifer; Squall/Zell; Seifer/Fuujin

"I walk in possibility, along the edge of coming night as if along a polished steel-fine blade. I hear you speak my name in the hushed resounding whisper of a thousand beating wings, and my world darkens around you-- stronger still than pain, or fear."

I mean, literally all of them, printed off in computer lab classes and read during lunch break. I also learnt what a sestina was from Sorceress Dreams and after that, I was insufferable in literature class for the rest of the year.

Go Not Gently by Guardian1 (Tami) Final Fantasy 9

"For my birthday, when I was ten, Papa gave me hair ribbons and chocolate and a new set of spanners and the chance to pilot an airship without Erin at the co-pilot's wheel. For Vivi's birthday, when he was twelve, he got a houseful of dead children and left us a very gentle little note and went off and Stopped."

This story. My god. It altered me in fundamental ways. There are lines from this story that sometimes still pop into my head while writing. I named an entire work based off a chapter title from it.

This is also the first time I drew fanart for fic! I didn't realise how huge it was at the time but last year I discovered it has its own TV Tropes page. 

P/s: The artwork of Eiko on TV Tropes was actually drawn by teenage me :) I've lost the original file and closed the DeviantArt account, but it's very nostalgic to see it still floating on the internet.

The Least of All Possible Mistakes by @rageprufrock BBC's Sherlock Mycroft/Lestrade

"The first time George meets Mycroft Holmes, she tases him."

The pairing might sound crazy, but this is actually the best written slowburn love story I've ever read.

I read it when I was on the cusp of my first adult relationship (where you seriously discuss the mundane things like bills, rent and moving to be with each other) and it felt completely different from anything that I'd read before that. It's also a heartfelt love letter to London, a city I was enamoured of for a long time.

Give it a shot. I re-read every couple of years and have a big, old cathartic cry.

Exile's Rose by prodigy Fallen London Reader/Once-Dashing Smuggler

"The man was distractible. Attracted to you, certainly, you were confident of that--though it factored less into his negotiations than you would have liked. And attractive, too. But also just distractible. Even as you presented another promising offer for his grave-gold like a debutante at a ball, he had his chin in his hand and was looking off to the side, out of the window of his London parlour.

And he had the most damnable green eyes. These were your very first impressions of him. When you were strangers."

Fallen London is an entire game world crafted with only a few pictures and mostly words. I fell for the Smuggler based on just a few lines of text. To this day, I wonder how myrrh-scented roses would look and smell like. 

This is an interactive fiction game. There is no win condition, only a gently unfolding mystery and recollection of a romance.

Bonus round; just trust me on this

howling dogs by Porpentine Charity Heartscape

"Every day you think of ways this photo could have been improved: better lighting, better surroundings, closer to see the subtleties in her expression, further back to see her form and better imagine embracing her…"

This isn't a fanfic and I hope they won't be annoyed with me if they see this, but I'm adding it to the list because it's a work of art, offered up for free. I love interactive fiction and you should definitely play/read it.

This story has been living rent free in my head for years. It lives in the marrow of my bones. The ending still gives me shivers each time I replay it. One day, perhaps, I'll write as economically and elegantly as Porpentine.

Occasionally, I'll remember I've read masterpieces written by fanfic authors that I will forever carry with me and that have shaped me into the writer I am today.

Not enough love is given to fanfic writers.

We do it all for free, and we get to touch so many hearts and make someone's day better with words.

So when people complain when we ask for engagement and feedback, try to remember that the written word carries a power that is seldom matched.

Ask yourself why you're reading fanfiction in the first place.

To feel.

To love a character through the words of someone else who is able to bring them to life in a way that allows them to take root in your heart and feel an immense sense of gratification and passion.

They live through you because someone out there decided to sit down, click their pen and put into words how much that character means to them.

And they will mean so much more to you because of that.

And that is fucking powerful and priceless.

[kazescharacters]

Day 2 - Bark

FFxivWrite2023

Barking… Loud barking. That was all he heard as he ran through the mud and the debris of the half collapsed trench as the pair of canis pugnax chased not far behind. He dared not look back, his heartbeat the only thing louder than those infernal beasts. He would need a miracle to outrun them, but there were no other options. Pushing himself to his limits he continued to run… To where? It didn't matter… As far away from his Garlean captors as he could manage. He was done fighting as one of their expendable cogs. Chained, and thrown into a war, with barely a weapon… 'Charge or die!' they would order them, whips cracking to keep them in line.. and if that wasn't enough… A bullet would be even more convincing. At times, he wondered if that would've been an easier option than escape.

His thoughts returning to the present. More vicious barking, that horrible horrible barking. Run. Don't look. You know they're there… Just go! He was starved, exhausted, bloody…. His body burned to the core as he tried to find energy that just wasn't there, gasping for air as he ran. Running so hard, his vision faded… Yet he still ran. He ran right till the end… But if this was his final day… He would die on his terms…. Finally.. Something he could call his own. If he could not life his life, he would take heart in knowing he at least chose his death. the xaela fell to his knees as the barking drew closer. Louder and louder it grew, as he finally turned to face the warbeasts. Sharp golden eyes locking on to the pair as they ran towards him. He would watch as long as he could stomach it. Thoughts racing through his mind in those last few seconds. No one would miss him. Just another runaway slave that didn't make it. Something new for the Garleans to laugh at. One less meal they would need to prepare for their dogs. A life wasted in chains. A shame he had to die tired…

Then the bang came. That loud, hope inspiring bang. He watched as one pugnax let out a horrid yelp and collapsed mid run, as a large figure ran out from behind the xaela and charged the second beast. He blinked, eyes focusing as he watched; A hrothgar in black and green armor… A Bozjan. He made it. He made it to the Bozjans. He couldn't watch as the hrothgar made quick work of the second pugnax… No he simply collapsed back into the mud, staring blankly towards the sky.

"MEDIC!" the hrothgar yelled as the figure blocked out the xaela's light, kneeling over him as he started to check on half alive xaela. "It's alright, you're safe, son."

Soon a second.. A woman, who started to heal his body with swirling green aether. He could instantly feel an improvement, but most of all it calmed him down. He tried to speak, but his throat was so raw, barely a groan escaped his lips. The tears in his eyes, however, spoke a thousand words. For nearly twenty years he had been pinned under Garlean rule. Forced day after day to march into the battlefield to wage war on the people who were now tending to his wounds. Who wasted no time in helping him… He was right to find them.

"He won't die but we have to get him back to camp. He's in rough shape. Some of these wounds are going to take a long time to heal. Twelve.. What did they do to him?" The woman speaking with a concerned tone to her voice, looking to the Hrothgar.

"They've done enough. Alright big fella, let's go." the Hrothgar dropping his gunblade as he threw the weakened xaela over his shoulders. "Geeze, Marsak… Be careful with him." "I am being careful! Now move it before more of those dogs show up… Or worse." he grunted as he quickly gathered their supplies and started to double-time back towards the camp the xaela passed out after barely a couple steps…

It was several hours later before he regained consciousness. Groggy and confused, he looked around to get his bearings. Nothing was familiar, which was the biggest relief as he laid back down. He was alive. He was free. No chains weighed him down… Several bandages and a splint on his leg leg sure did though. "You're awake." the deep voice called out, as he looked over to see his rescuer sitting on a chair nearby. "Wasn't sure if you were going to pull through. Honestly I'm impressed you made it as far as you did from the castrum. You're lucky."

He coughed a few times testing his voice, which had recovered enough finally speak, though it was if he had a mouth full of gravel as he did so. "Am… Are you the resistance?"

"We are. I'm Marsak. You got a name?"

"N-no… We weren't allowed… names… Just numbers… Brands… To keep track of us." lifting out his left arm, rolling it until it was wrist up, and mixed in with the scars from his chains, as well as many aged injuries was a faint brand, barely visible in the xaela's pale white skin courtesy of the IVth Legion. Though most of the brand was no longer visible, Marsak could read the following: IV-0… The following numbers illegible from the age of the brand and the many cuts and scars that now decorated his body.

"Fourth Legion… zero…. zero…. Gah I can't read the rest. Leaning back away from the xaela's arm. "Not that that matters anymore…." The hrothgar offered a warm smile, as he stood up moving towards the exit of the tent. "Get some rest, you're safe here. turning back to look at the bed ridden xaela one last time. "Actually… That's what I'll call you…"

"I'll call you Zero."