#and now i have a bunch of drafts

[snarkspawn]

Oh look, it's that time of the year again :'D (how tf did that happen??) Anyway, hm. Mental health-wise this year was the worst in quite some time for me, so for some months I literally only had one, maybe two finished pieces to choose from. BUT on the plus side I'm fairly happy with most of the drawings I did finish, so that's good! I'll just focus on that, and on all the things I still want to improve on in the future. Here's to hoping 2025 will be less rough, and a little kinder, to all of us :)

On that note I wish all of you a wonderful end of the year and a great start into 2025! Thank you so, so much for coming with me on my art journey, for liking and reblogging, and for leaving nice comments and messages! You make it all worth it and I appreciate the hell out of you, whether you've been following me for ages or only just got here 💜 mwah!

[miwtual]

SCREAM (2022) dir. Tyler Gillett & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin

[navyinks]

I'm in the process of putting together a character design portfolio and a friend suggested that I can recycle some old work. So aside from the obvious Dandelion Children project, I suddenly remembered some Silmarillion character designs I did over the years. At the time I felt they were kinda meh but looking back now they would really slap with a teeny bit more work.

Beleriand Feanorians

Nolofinweans

Pirate AU (commission)

Unnamed wives of Maglor, Caranthir, and Curufin

Valar designs inspired by Okami

[icewindandboringhorror]

Little bright colored outfit with a fun vest ~

(shoes from ebay like 10 years ago. everything else is thrifted)

[pokemon-radical-red]

I hate it when I headcanon a character who’s canonically a girl as a trans man and make ships of him and a character who’s canonically a guy and I refer to it as a gay/mlm/guyxguy/whatever ship and someone gets mad. Like omg let trans people have FUNNNNN. Why are queer headcanons and genderbends cool until they’re saying that the character is trans???

“OMGGG you’re so misogynistic I can’t believe you would erase FEMALE representation!!!”

and like half of the characters in the franchise are women, and a total of… NONE of the characters are trans men. Also, my headcanon doesn’t change the source material. If my stuff upsets you, you can block me and go engage with the source or maybe every single other fanwork, since mine is the only trans man hc for this character that I’ve ever seen.

or when people are like “WTF??? this is so transphobic!!! how dare you imply that a character who looks like that could be a trans man?!?! do you think that trans men are women or something??? she uses she/her, and you’re misgendering her!”

No, I don’t think that being a trans man makes you a woman or vice versa. That’s why it’s a headcanon, and the headcanon is that this character is actually a trans man and not a woman at all! You’ll never guess what pronouns most trans men had to use at some point in their lives, and you really won’t like it when you find out about pre-(or no-)transition trans men… or trans men who are in the closet… or trans men who don’t know that they’re trans yet.

“But the character is a kid!!! Saying they’re trans is sexualizing them.”

I’ve seen this one from other queer people. Like did you miss when all of the homophobes said this about your identity, or do you think that bigotry is only bad when it’s directed at you?

“Why would you say ‘testosterone could fix her’??? Are you trying to call her a delusional woman?”

Why would your brain even go to that first? This literally has to be a bad faith reading, because there’s no way that someone could see what I said and get this unless they were specifically looking for something to be mad at me for.

(Note for anyone unaware: “Estrogen would’ve fixed him!” was a meme going around at the time I said this. I’m not sure if it’s still super big, but this was a joke to the effect of that.)

“So girls can’t be tomboys anymore? You just wanna trans everyone?”

This is like actual real life transphobic rhetoric. This isn’t even just shitting on my headcanon, but in fact, sending transphobic hate to a trans man. Thanks 👍. Maybe you should go send JK Rowling another message about how much you loved her essay instead of bothering me.

[fellamarsh]

another thing i've been trying to do recently is read more self-published stuff. "but fell," you say, "you're a self-published author. surely you've been reading self-published stuff all along" and then i laugh for so long in response we both become uncomfortable.

see, the fear (which has for a long time been killing my mind) that i'll read other self-published stuff and find out that it's so much better than mine that i might as well stop writing forever kept me from doing that basically ever. i have a hard time not unfavorably comparing my work to others and had convinced myself i was being smart by withholding an avenue of de-motivation (reader: i was not being smart). it also doesn't help that i'm pretty low income and have a hard time spending money on books i haven't already read, and that self-published stuff isn't always available at the library---but really a lot of it was just me being a coward. which i'm working on. i could talk about how this particular cowardice is Very Silly, but i think enough has been said about it on writeblr and in the Writing Space in general that i don't feel the need to (though i will if anyone wants me to).

instead, i wanna talk about the self-published things i have read in the past few months and ask about the self-published things you love!

so: what happened was i got real sick, and while i was real sick i (naturally) read over 200,000 words of ace attorney fan fiction in the span of a few days. eventually i got bored of it (and also maybe annoyed at how people were characterizing some of my guys), but i still wanted to read something gay and romantic and nice, something i knew was gonna end happily, which isn't my typical fare.

now you may be saying (having gotten over all the uncomfortable laughter from earlier) "fell, you write gay romance. what do you mean that's not your typical fare?" listen. until a couple months ago i hadn't read a cut and dry romance novel since before i finished college. for context: i graduated in 2015. i know it doesn't make sense. i'm a guy who doesn't make sense.

but in this case it worked to my advantage. not the not making sense thing, but the not having read Published Romance in 1000 years thing. I didn't know where to start. I was very skeptical of everything the library had Available Now in the Gay Fantasy Romance category. what if it was all bad and also not good?

and then i scrolled past the familiar cover of our very own @ashen-crest's A Rival Most Vial.

now this was comfortable territory! this was a novel by a very nice writeblr person whose posts i enjoy! i already loosely knew the plot, i was familiar with the characters, i knew the names of things like rosemond street and the griffin's claw and that ambrose had blue hair and that at the end of it all there would definitely be Boyfriends. i didn't have to worry that this would be bad! i only had to worry that it would be really good!

but i wasn't worried about that, because i was officially Not Writing at the time, and because why the hell hadn't i read this book yet Ash literally emailed me some very kind words last year when my cat died??

Y'all, I devoured ARMV. If you haven't read it yet---especially if cozy fantasy is more your thing than it is mine---you should check it out Immediately. It was fun! It was heartwarming! It was sweet and earnest and confident! I was delighted to find it was occasionally hot! Ambrose and Eli snuggled up into my sick exhausted heart and found a permanent little place there. (Especially Ambrose. I have such a thing for Stiff Guys who Kind of Suck for Tragic Backstory Reasons and are So So Lonely They Don't Even Realize It. gawd)

(And a very small part of my brain spent the whole time wondering why I had been so afraid to really engage with the work my community is doing. The community that I'm in. The one I'm a part of. Why?! Maybe more on that later.)

But from there the curse was broken! I immediately devoured @stjohnstarling's What Manner of Man in a similar sort of frenzy (and hooooly shit guys am I excited for the expanded, finalized version to come out at the end of next month!) and started digging into @lurinatftbn's The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere (which I can already tell is going to be an All Time Favorite).

And now I want to ask you what your favorite self-published books are so that I can read them, too, but I think I will in another post that doesn't dedicate so much space to talking about my various and sundry Issues and isn't Terminally Long

[opera-ghost]

— richard siken, war of the foxes ft. panaro/patterson, crawford/d'arcy, & keegan/kouatchou

[wishchip106]

hmmm

telephones by vacations as cherik

i used to correlate this song with another ship but i’ve moved on now 😿

they were put in the basement of my mind where all my other old fandoms live together (they get fed and watered twice a day)

[melonkittii]

heading off to do the great transgenderence or whatever

[crystalpallette]

get you a girl who can give you everything

this started a long long time ago when I made a joke about how sega should put ringo in more dresses, and then my friend reminded me that oh yeah!! I can do that instead!!! and then one thing led to another and we joked about punk ringo and I drew that too. using ringo like a dressup doll is so cathartic it's kinda crazy

some bonuses (original designs, timelapse) under the cut bc I like these designs!! I might do some more with them!! please disregard the band poster in the first second of the timelapse that's something else!!!

[byanyan]

i've changed my mind again!! i am, in fact, going to delete a fuckload of my drafts bc i am!!! not vibing with having all this old stuff & having it stopping me from starting new stuff!!!! this is the year where i finally say fuck it!!! i'm gonna run this blog the way i wanna and i'm gonna do what's the most fun for me!!!! ...not that i didn't enjoy any of the threads i have in my drafts bc i did, i just. i have to do something to get myself energized again and clean slate (mostly) is all i got rn askjfhds

i'm not deleting everything — i've got some specific verse stuff, some plotted and/or specific character moment things, and some starters that i'm holding on to, but. yeah. everything else has to go, i'm so sorry

[rainyrambles-overcod]

Posted something like this on the last blog but,,

maybe a reader who works as an analyst or some kind of intelligence/surveillance for the cia under one Kate Laswell, who gets assigned to the 141 to go and work under her once more.

Whom, HOWEVER, despite being a bit of a computer geek/one smart individual,

is very much not afraid to absolutely fuck a bitch up you do work for Laswell for a reason, y’know-

We need more feral/fuck a bitch up readers out there, y’all ✊😪

[linkedin-offficial]

ive stoked the fire, seen more pain than you can know the tears of the broken have washed away my soul

[somegrumpynerd]

Oh also I drew a really dumb kross thing like 2 weeks ago and keep forgetting it exists so somebody remind me to post that at some point

[jiminy-crickets]

happy draft day my darlings, a good number of the hockeys in the meat market are coming from the USNTDP, so it’s time for…………

¹ its MY silly poll, and i get to decide whats gay!!! ² its MY silly poll, and i get to decide whats a meme!!! ³ its MY silly poll, and i get to make it have my relatively niche media faves in it!!! ⁴ US National Development Program (where they put the teenage hockeys together, the developer of many many top draft picks, and the starting place of many hrpf ships)

images, videos and explanations for each option under the cut.

^ Smith College Girls for i-D magazine 2004

^ wake up sleepyhead vine

^ jedediah and octavius from night at the museum

^ but im a cheerleader full movie (this might not be available in your country on youtube, still i highly recommend watching it, such an amazing movie)

^ Olive and Brendon pretended to have sex in Easy A (2010)

^ P!nk opening a speech for the human rights campaign national dinner with "hi I'm Alicia hi I'm a Virgo I'm 31, I'm gay.......... actually I'm not"

^ Pool Boy SNL sketch

^ Lauren Phillips Lifting Alice Merchesi

^ The summer of like, warped tour 2005 when pete wentz and mikey way got into situationship so messy and life changing it gave us the majority of at at least three fall out boy albums.

^ ur so gay by Katy Perry

do I really need to explain taking an am I gay quiz?

[queer-ragnelle]

Me: Bedtime!

My brain: