#and grow towards

[not-poignant]

19 and 20!

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... this will be long and it's 12.13am and I don't want to write long, so I'm going to shorthand it:

Started writing as a kid, liked it, pure escapism and needed that shit because real life sucked. Enjoyed reading and though 'I could do that' before anyone told me no. Wrote several novels as a 10 year old before I realised actually you're supposed to learn how to do it first. I still like those stories. Finished my first epic fantasy trilogy by the age of 12/13.

Lots of bumps, including some creative writing at university which killed all my passion to write. The long and short of it is that I could write award-winning short stories and poems, but I hated all of it and judged and edited everything I wrote to the point where I...stopped.

Stopped all writing. For many years. Became pro-artist. Occasionally write very short fanfics that only ever got posted on Livejournal or Schnoogle. Never liked any of it.

Quit art, had a mental breakdown, needed that good good pure escapism again. Read a lot of fanfiction. Made a fandom Tumblr. Watched Rise of the Guardians, went to town on AO3, wrote literally whatever the fuck I wanted even though I was sure people would hate it and hate me. Some folks said 'hey these OCs are alright' and I went 'sure okay.'

Here we are. :)

20. If a witch offered you the choice between eternal happiness with your one true love and the ability to finally finish, perfect, and publish your dearest, darlingest, most precious WIP in exactly the way you've always imagined it — which would you choose? You can’t have both sorry, life’s a bitch

I don't want both. I don't want either. Fuck monogamy, lmao. (For me! Not for anyone else reading this! I am a walking caveat!!!)

I don't want perfection. I don't have a 'most precious WIP.' Stories are easy to come by, and they're all fun. Characters are easy to come by, and you can hurt/comfort nearly all of them. There is no 'dearest, darlingest, most precious WIP' like damn.

I also...don't want eternal happiness. Like Arden, in FFS, I do not believe that the goal of life is eternal happiness. That's literally not the way our brains are built. Emotions are meant to transform. The good news is - that means all the ones that make you feel like shit. The bad news is - that means all the ones that make you feel good. That's why it's so important to learn how to tolerate and sit with all your emotions free from judgement, because the sooner you do that, the more often you'll feel happiness in general.

We're not made, as a species, to feel happy all the time. You ever see people shaking their indoor plants to mimic wind because otherwise they grow all weak and shit and die early because they had no challenges? Yeah.

And yes, I've had challenges, and I'm also not an indoor plant, I just don't believe eternal happiness is the goal here.

Also I'm polyamorous so this whole 'one true love' thing can fuck right off. This question just reads a little like 'u have one true love story and u have one true love person' and folks can live like that but a bitch could never (it's me, I'm bitch)

--

From the Weird Writing Asks meme!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

How much longer 'til your luck runs out?

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

finally at that age where i'm thinking i should get a tattoo. not bc i feel strongly about it, just seems like a waste not to. i've got so much skin i'm not using

[huariqueje]

Uprising - Lisa Benson

New Zealand , b. 1966 -

Collagraph and linocut print , 26.6 x 35 cm .

[vebokki]

what if uhhh mage shen qingqiu and earnest knight binghe whose devotion sqq ends up winning after saving his life? what then?

[marzinstarz]

TWINS IN TIME MY BELOVED

very much of the mindset that mullet stan would be fiercely protective of tiny ford, meanwhile old ford is too wrapped up in his own conflict and the portal to care for young stan [at first] they make me sad so thats why i didnt draw them :]

basically im telling you to go read @noodles-and-tea twins in time comic because THAT

[bacchuschucklefuck]

space sweepers but they're delivery people and are at no point on screen through the entire movie

[pop-squeak]

weekends on glass shard beach

[spac3d0lls]

“talia was a codename for noel!”

“noel was catfishing mischa!”

don't care. CURSE OF RA 𓀀 𓀁 𓀂 𓀃 𓀄 𓀅 𓀆 𓀇 𓀈 𓀉 𓀊 𓀋 𓀌 𓀍 𓀎 𓀏 𓀐 𓀑 𓀒 𓀓 𓀔 𓀕 𓀖 𓀗 𓀘 𓀙 𓀚 𓀛 𓀜 𓀝 𓀞 𓀟 𓀠 𓀡 𓀢 𓀣 𓀤 𓀥 𓀦 𓀧 𓀨 𓀩 𓀪 𓀫 𓀬 𓀭 𓀮 𓀯 𓀰 𓀱 𓀲 𓀳 𓀴 𓀵 𓀶 𓀷 𓀸 𓀹 𓀺 𓀻 𓀼 𓀽 𓀾 𓀿 𓁀 𓁁 𓁂 𓁃 𓁄 𓁅 𓁆 𓁇 𓁈 𓁉 𓁊 𓁋 𓁌 𓁍 𓁎 𓁏 𓁐 𓁑 𓀄 𓀅 𓀆

[otaku553]

I have an agenda.

Long hair teenage sabo.

[hooned]

riki when he saw a child engene in the crowd ⭐

[blue-mood-blue]

I’ve grown to appreciate the aus where Shen Yuan enters the story as “Shen Yuan” - same name, probably similar face, generally able to interact with PIDW as himself and change the story through his added presence. I like the sense of “if only you’d been here, things might have been better the first time around” of it all.

And I was thinking, it’s a funny coincidence in that scenario that someone named Shen Yuan gets put into… another Shen Yuan. What are the chances? What a weird twist of fate that Airplane would pick out the name that his most dedicated critic could slip into seamlessly.

What about a version where it’s not coincidence at all?

Airplane goes to school with a kid named Shen Yuan. He’s prickly and hard to approach and a little intense, but Airplane is persistent. In fairness, Airplane is relentless - and maybe it’s a good thing that they end up being friends, because they’re a little too much for anyone else to handle. They balance each other out. They’re the “weird kids” in class and they’re okay with that, because even when they don’t have any words for it, they know they’re not like their classmates, not really. That’s okay; they don’t want to be.

Recesses and breaks are consumed with the elaborate stories that Airplane wants to tell, and all the holes Shen Yuan pokes into them. It’s not mean-spirited, though, even though Shen Yuan isn’t the kind to temper his words. It’s passionate. He cares about those stories the way Airplane cares about them, and it can’t be mistaken for anything else when they lean together conspiratorially across the lunchroom table. They’ve both got notebooks filled with details and characters and monsters. Shen Yuan’s practically got a whole bestiary sketched out in wobbly childhood attempts at art, entries fervently scrawled beside them. Airplane prattles out plots nonstop, always with the promise of shining eyes and being asked “what happens next?”

They come up with a whole world together. Airplane’s going to write about it someday. Shen Yuan is going to read every word.

Shen Yuan misses school. Shen Yuan starts missing school a lot.

Airplane goes to the hospital room instead. He doesn’t think to worry, because Shen Yuan is okay - that’s what he says. He looks okay, and he’s a kid, and it doesn’t feel real that anything bad should happen to a kid. He doesn’t think to worry. He doesn’t think to say goodbye.

It’s one of the older Shen brothers who catches him on the way up to the room one day, in the hallway just outside - snaps at him to go the fuck home, and when Airplane hesitates, pushes him into the elevator and tells him not to come back. “Tells” is a generous way to describe the way the words come out - a growl, a hiss, the sound an animal would make when a hand got too close to a wound.

(It’s not fair to name a villain after him, even if the name never really comes up in the story. He wasn’t trying to be mean. He’d lost a brother minutes before, and he was getting his brother’s friend out of the way so he didn’t have to… see. It isn’t fair, but then, none of it is fair.)

Death feels very real after that.

The notebooks get shoved into a closet, and it’s not until Airplane’s moving out and one falls on him from a high shelf that he thinks about it again. He’s written things, lots of things, but nothing as ambitious as this - nothing as important. It could be good, he considers. He’d promised. Shen Yuan wanted to read it.

The problem was that no one else does, not for a long time, not until Airplane has whittled himself and his art into a corner and into such an unfamiliar shape that he has to wonder how it’s still his own face he sees in the mirror. He has to eat. He has to pay rent. Shen Yuan would yell at him, but Shen Yuan isn’t there to yell at him, and who cares. Who cares if it could have been better? The people who actually are here love it, and it’s paying his bills, and sometimes stories don’t go the way they’re supposed to and the world is fucking unfair. It doesn’t matter.

(It does. But he shoves that thought away along with styrofoam cups and soda bottles to the bottom of a garbage bag.)

Authors are not gods and their power is limited, but Airplane exercises just a sliver of what he’s been granted and gifts an inconsequential sort of immortality. He thinks about making him a rogue cultivator, maybe the kind that goes around documenting beasts and compiling his findings. He thinks about making him someone too powerful for death to touch, or too important to threaten, but when Airplane looks at the world he crafted and everything that’s become of it, it feels like the kindest thing he can do for Shen Yuan is a childhood where he’s loved, and a death that’s peaceful. What does it say about that world, that he’d kill off his best friend too early again instead of making him live there?

(The best writing he ever does is the only, shining moment of humanity that his scum villain ever displays: a lament about death that comes too early, about a brother gone too soon. The commenters praise him. The commenters flatter over how real the emotions feel. The commenters don’t get any response from Airplane on that chapter.)

Death is incredibly real when it comes for him too early, too, still hovering over his keyboard with the story technically finished and incredibly incomplete. Airplane could tell himself that’s because the written version can never be the version in the writer’s head, always shifting and with every possibility still on the table, but he knows better than that. The System knows better than that, with its condescending message about “improving” his writing and “closing plot holes” and “achieving his original vision”...

…and he’s a child again. He’s a child in his own story, he’s Shang Qinghua now without the benefit yet of a peak or cultivation or anything, and maybe he’s a little bitter, and a little scared, and…

And Shen Yuan - with longer hair, with robes, with a couple of older kids watching him from across the street, but undeniably the prickly little boy who used to sit down imperiously across from him and tell him everything that was wrong with the chuck of writing that had been handed to him last period, but with that smile that said he was only invested because he knew it could be better and they were going to make it better - marches up to him with a fire in his eyes and a frown that warns of a coming tirade.

“You told it wrong,” is the first thing he says.

Shang Qinghua wants to ask how him how he’s here, how this is possible, or maybe laugh because, yeah - yeah, Shen Yuan has no goddamn idea how wrong he got absolutely everything.

(Shang Qinghua wants to say “I missed you” and “why did you leave so soon” but he’s here now. He’s right here.)

“I know,” he says instead. “I’m sorry. It all kind of… spiraled out of control.”

Shen Yuan frowns, but then it dissipates the way it always does, and his eyes shine with ideas the way they always used to. “That’s okay,” he relents, grabbing for his hand. “We’ll fix it. We’ll make it what it was supposed to be.”

[sethdomain]

drawing my fav bimbo

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

putting my prediction on record now that the coming decade is going to see the rise of viral-marketed fancy at-home water filtration systems, driving and driven by a drastic reduction in the quality of U.S. tap water (given that we are in a 'replacement era' where our current infrastructure is reaching the end of its lifespan--but isn't being replaced). also guessing that by the 2030s access to drinkable tap water will be a mainstream class issue, with low-income & unstably housed people increasingly forced to rely on expensive bottled water when they can't afford the up-front cost of at-home filtration--and with this being portrayed in media as a "moral failing" and short-sighted "choice," rather than a basic failure of our political & economic systems. really hope i'm just being alarmist, but plenty of this already happens in other countries, and the U.S. is in a state of decline, so. here's praying this post ages into irrelevance. timestamped April 2023

[babylemonart]

Grandpa Baul and his newts

[fauvester]

little moshang fan kid <3

spoiled, aloof, a bit of a bitch, terminally 'weak constitution'-ed, lowkey lazy, prefers reading his dailies in the office and pretending to do paperwork to fighting