#I'm out of marketing ideas

[uncanny-tranny]

Good news! You aren't required to make your hobbies and passions "marketable." In fact, your crafts, hobbies, and passions don't even need to be public if you so choose. You don't have to spend all of your energy becoming perfect if you aren't enjoying the process. You are not a product, you are a person, a creative, and your work also does not need to be a product.

[sugarpasteltmnt]

I know you did chapter one of paradise and it is amazing, absolutely adorable

But i was curious

Is there going to be more?

No pressure or rush but I was wondering because the Ao3 description leaves room for more, but chapter count is 1/1

HELLO i'm still alive i promise omg

and no worries!!! Purgatory Paradise is actually a series rather than a single fic, since i have have a collection of one-shots rattling in my brain that will most likely be written in random order. But right now it only has two-- "Paradise" and "Ice Cream Pizza Rolls Cookie Dough Potato Chips Candy Bars… and Mandarin Oranges"

i really hope to bust out a few more in the future! though right now i'm taking it a bit easy after finishing TNV-- but don't worry, I still have a lot of fluff i want to write for Leo 🩵

[aithne]

Y'all, buying a house is stressful.

[baelonthebrave]

dragon age origins and inquisition: yes its a scary world out there and bad things happen to good people but if we just stick together and believe in the power of love and keep doing the right thing we can get through this :)

dragon age 2: honestly it would have been better if you just died in lothering

[autisticaradiamegido]

day 26

someday if i can figure out how the hell people get these things made i would like to do some little destiny & malice acrylic charms. i think those are so fun. and while i mostly want them for Myself i figure that if i DID figure out the process, i should maybe open up the option to anyone else that might want them, soooo...

informal poll: if i figure out how all that works, would any of y'all be into that, and approximately how many of you?

[cozylittleartblog]

playing neopets again. finally used my last pet slot to make a faerie ixi, which was one of my dream pets as a kid 💜 she ended up with a big flower theme

look at my deer

[birlwrites]

one of the things that i've accomplished due to the low barrier to entry in writing fanfiction is writing novel-length stories as a matter of course. like, i used to think of writing a book as this massive, monumental task - and in some ways, it is! but in other ways, it's still just a story. and it feels much more approachable to me now that i've done it multiple times, posting chapter by chapter because that's something you can do really easily with fanfiction. i didn't go into it believing i could do it - i found out that i could by just giving it a try and seeing what resulted.

there's also a certain wild creativity you can find on ao3, the result of people just doing whatever they feel like doing - sometimes it results in incoherence, sometimes in incomprehensibility, sometimes it falls flat, but there's so much variety in storytelling forms, if you look for it. people will deep-dive into anything. 'marketability' is laughably far from being a concern. what is a story, anyway? people will strip the idea down to its bare bones and rebuild it in infinite ways if they have the space. that space doesn't exist in barnes & noble.

i'm a firm believer that you should read the types of stories you want to write, and that you should also read broadly, because that's how you avoid getting stuck recycling the same handful of ideas over and over. i think the same thing applies to writing. write what you want to write - but also, experiment. try other things, even if they seem silly or impractical or irrelevant, even if you don't think they will work. even if you don't think you can make them work.

if you don't feel like you have creative freedom, then you'll fall back on the tried-and-true. you'll recycle. it won't feel like your voice, because it's been filtered through layers upon layers of 'acceptable' and 'marketable' and 'reasonable' and 'broadly appealing.' the only way to understand your own creative limits is by testing them, constantly. you can't truly believe that you can write whatever you want until you prove it to yourself.

and even if your voice turns out to be acceptable and marketable and reasonable and broadly appealing after all - if you try all sorts of things and find out that's where your creativity flows best - you still know it's yours. you still know you're writing the truest possible expression of your own creative abilities. you owe it to yourself to find out what it feels like to write unfettered.

write something weird.

[moonshine-nightlight]

Would you ever release signed copies of Don't Shoot the Messenger?

the short answer is: yes, i'd love to do signed copies of 'Don't Shoot the Messenger'!

the long answer is: logistics are hard lol. in order for me to hav copies to sign, i'd hav to order author copies from amazon (paying for them in advance personally), sign them, and then mail them to ppl myself. this is definitely doable, but the mechanism for selling since it wouldn't b through amazon itself and actually collecting payment/mailing info would hav to be worked out.

a vague plan that i hav in mind now would be either to just do a limited run where people can essentially pre-order paperbacks via not amazon for lik a month that they were available and then i'd know how much to get and sign etc. i dont hav a patreon so i think i would try to do it through kofi where if u pay a set amount and say its for a signed copy i would then be able to send a signed book to u, after i messaged back for your address to mail it. this would obviously only work small scale but would likely more than suffice for now.

or if i decide to add a hardcover version, i could offer signed hardcovers as a promotion for a similar limited time and via a similar process as above. i'll probably do a poll at some point to see if anyone would even want a hardcover. same for dale

when will i hav the time to look deeper into all this and put it in action? no idea. life's been extremely busy, but its definitely been on my radar and i will try to make it happen in the next coming years.

i suppose if i ever did some sort of in-person book/author event after Dale is out, i might be able to offer signed books in person, but that'd likely b hard to reach for most ppl lol

until then, only one person has a signed copy - one of my beta readers who i thanked in my acknowledgements for being so wonderfully supportive!

[the-tenth-arcanum]

I calculated my days of absence from the UK and if I were to submit my citizenship application next may I would exceed the limit due to having fucked off to Italy for 5 months during the covid lockdowns in 2020. which means I could apply in january 2026, provided I only spend 12 weeks out of the UK between now and then. which sounds like a lot but it isn't to me because I work from home and spending a few weeks with my family every now and then has been the only thing keeping me sane

[fvckw4d]

The concept of queerbaiting annoys me. I was told that it refers to a work of fiction pretending to cater to a queer audience but then pulling back from it to avoid alienating homophobes, which is an incredibly specific thing. But a lot of people seem to think that it instead means "any time there's any gay subtex, metaphor, or ambiguity" or "whenever something from 1995-2012 was being a normal amount of homophobic for the era."

[thedreadvampy]

I GENUINELY wish I understood the appeal of Taylor Swift I really really do. many of my friends do. but it's just. I don't think a single one of her songs has ever landed above 'ok' or 'nostalgically cheesy' for me and every time I think that I feel so incredibly like I'm trying to be snobby but I'm not? it's not about not liking pop or not liking the cool thing I love pop I love cheese I just also like music that has some...I guess energy and danceability or specific and meaningful rage and I have found nothing to hook into in anything she's made. Antihero nearly works for me. Blank Space works conceptually but not in practise. but other than that the last thing she made that did anything for me even as a throwaway pop song was. god it actually might be We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together or 22 which at least are catchy but I can't say ever made it to my playlists.

I want to get it, I genuinely do. I have listened to most of her releases at least once because I keep thinking if I try hard enough something will open up for me but nah however hard I try it's just extremely mid. like yes that certainly is music. I can immediately recognise it as Taylor Swift, it's not like it's utterly generic, but it absolutely just registers to me as background music. I want so much to understand what it is about her that makes her the biggest person in music for like 15 years now.

(I could say the same about Beyoncé who if anything lands worse for me. Break My Soul owns, but other than that I have landed everything I've heard of hers since like 2008 firmly in the Do Not Relisten pile it just lands like a ton of loose sand for me. and this is not mentioning the actual crime against music that was Jolene bc I don't think that worked for most people tbf. and again it's not that I don't like pop or r&b or rap cause that's like. between those genres about a third of the music I listen to. but her work is just so unengaging to me personally and I don't know why and I wish I got it)

[drop-the-curtain-123]

YOSHIDA Sokhna (吉田 ソクナ)

Here's my design of Taisei Yoshida's mother :) She is an accountant at Yoshida Motors, married to Shigeo. Her daughter is college aged, named Tomoko.

In my headcanon, she is from Senegal 🇸🇳 , and met her husband during a Paris-Dakar event during the 1980s.

She learnt japanese on a whim, in addition to her native wolof, french and arabic, and moved to Kunugigaoka after her marriage.

[aowna]

Just -- the sheer pain of hearing "I'm sure another agent will feel differently!" over and over and over and over and over and over again.

When my last requests and queries come back, I'm going to take a break (from querying, not from writing. Writing is actually fun.). Querying is awful and feels awful and four years of "I hope you find the right champion for your project!" is really starting to weigh on me.

I hate feeling like this but the industry currently seems impossible to break into unless you fit the trends.

[kulliare]

.

[temperate-rainforest]

I always forget how people back in the olde days used to just die so easily from the flu, until I get the flu myself dhhdhdhf because on one hand I know our medicine is just soo much better now a days but on the other hand I have the immune system of a dead man and once I get sick I'm like the ye olde victorian child on a death bed dhdhdhhd it's been 4 days and I just NOW can get on my phone to watch videos and text, and eat and drink water, and coherently string words together and do more than just lay in bed and moan in pain, and sweat and cough in sick delirium 😭

[sannyo-appreciation-posts]

Sannyo MMD models

[Here's her doing a cute pose. Interesting Lore, the amazing Touhou MMD creator "Vegemite-Flavored Indomie" posted this image to congratulate the silly amount of effort required for whoever cheated the 200 votes for Sannyo in the 2023 popularity poll.] (Check out their YouTube channel, they especially love Maribel and Renko)

Here's another image.

Here's one where the absolute touhou MMD legend MTB is using her.

She's absolutely adorable, very gap moe. Though it's hard to deny it's got some really strange choices with her coat and outfit. Mostly it's got her undershirt missing and her coat is tucked into her skirt like it's her main shirt.

Though it's a very cute model all the same, I'm wondering how it appears to be the only one I've seen since it gives me some "alternate outfit" energy. But it's really the only one I see.

But there have to be more out there. So, when taking into account my complete lack of knowledge on searching for MMD assets, I am performing the laziest Google image search I can manage. The reason being, that if my search is sufficiently lazy, it will be sufficiently clear I have very little idea what I'm even looking for.

Firstly, behold

They are seemingly holding a Sannyo presentation hostage on nicovideo. (This is of course, impossible. No one can truly hold Sannyo hostage, her awesomeness is uncontainable, shes just waiting because she's perfectly content where she is)

here's one on Bowlroll, (do they post models there, idk?)

Anyway, I guess in conclusion, there's a lot of cute Sannyo MMD resources out there. Maybe? Probably? I have no idea what I'm even looking for. I'm just aimlessly clicking on cute Sannyos.

Though none of them seem like an original version of the cute gap-moe one that I thought had a bit of "alternate outfit" energy, so maybe it actually was the main outfit. It definitely makes sense people would want to tuck in her coat so it doesn't clip through things