#but I hope this helps anyway

[more-better-words]

I'd like your advice as a writer, if you please:

What would you suggest for an completely n00b of a writer who has ideas and random scenes and/or chapters? Do they allow their writings to languish in WIP folder forever, do you just post and let come what may?

I have the ailment known as "lots'a ideas and randomness" when it comes to fan fic writing. Such symptoms include random idea/au with characters assigned spots/alignments (what-have-you), a scene for a greater fic but then no fic cometh, as well as "i just wrote a chapter of a fic, have edited it and now it will sit for years in loneliness." As such, I have at least 2 full-fledged chapters of different stories just twiddling their thumbs in wait.

As someone whose various fic folders are littered with projects that went nowhere, I feel your pain. So I've got a question, a suggestion, and a statement.

Question - What parts of your stories are you missing that keep them from being complete in your head? Not on paper, but just in your mind. If you can see the full scope of the story in your mind, but can't seem to make the words come, there are two options. One, you write around the problem parts until they're all that's left. By that point, you may find you have a solid enough grasp of the story that they're not actually problems anymore. Or two, you jettison the problem parts altogether. Gloss over, elide, time skip, whatever you need to do… just get past them.

Suggestion - Are any of your finished chapters anything that could be turned into a one-shot? If you really want to get your legs under you with regard to publishing some fic, short form is easier than long form. Believe me. My fic writing history is tons of little one offs, and a handful of long stories. And the majority of those one offs are under 2000 words. Don't let word count scare you. (Which is advice I still struggle with 😅)

Finally, statement - Writing fic is about sharing your weird/cool/fun idea with others. If what you want is to share your stories with other people because you want them to be enjoyed by more than just yourself, then do it! Hopefully this helps you figure out where your sticking points are. 😊

[bookishfeylin]

So I deleted an anon, mainly because I am NOT truly qualified enough to give out advice on a topic that sensitive. I truly do not know your full circumstances, and so any advice I could offer would be generic at best. That being said, I will offer you this resource:

Stay safe, loves.

[novelconcepts]

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.

And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.

[everchased]

can someone please get these hoes under control i'm BUSY

[applestruda]

Starry Sleepover

First ever dtiys! Celebrating 1 year here!

Rules below!

No deadline!

Feel free to use my designs or your own

You can change up the composition as you want, but keep the main vibes of sleepover, stars, and Boatem (don't remove folks)

You can use any form of art for this dtiys (writers included!!)

Use the #BeeBoatemDtiys tag, and if you want you can optionally @ me

If you have any questions ask away! Other than that have fun :]

[guinevereslancelot]

first base is wound tending second base is hand touching

[lotus-pear]

top 10 moments before disaster (dazai is about to step on his toes)

[triona-tribblescore]

I WANNA DRAAWW!! RAHHHGG!! Absolutely swamped with college work, im so tired TT (hence whatever tf this is lmao)

[abstractfrog]

Happy 1 year anniversary to Mr Sherlock Holmes! Here's a litttleee celebratory comic from me

[lilybug-02]

Pain is a great motivator…

Part 26 || First || Previous || Next

—Full Series—

Meanwhile Toriel:

(Loud noises don't wake her up usually.)

Artist note: I’m so proud of this :))) I know it’s a lot of dialogue and reading, but dialogue is grueling work for me. I’m glad with the art and for the amount of pages I made in such a relatively short time span -w- page 5 was super fun to work on. A lot of blood, sweat, and hours here... :) The backgrounds were a big bore tbh, but I finished them! Yippie!

[phosphorus-noodles]

a chimera oli for artfight, cheers :3 @10piecechickenmcnugget

[critterbitter]

Language divides and building bridges.

Elesa’s feeling homesick. Emmet, bless his heart, tries to help by infodumping while Ingo frantically runs off to find water (crying is a very dehydrating experience).

((Would you look at that! The kids are picking up kantonese and galarian from each other!))

BONUS:

Heh. Callback.

Want to see more? Here’s the masterpost for submas!

[mothgenes]

Part 3

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

[knifearo]

being aromantic is like. hey btw you're going to live a life that is the culmination of most of society's worst nightmares. sorry lol ✌️ but then you turn around and take a really good hard look at it and it turns out that living in that nightmare is fucking awesome and you get to wake up every day and take that fear that other people have and laugh and hold it close until it's a great joy for you instead. and being happy is a radical act that you define instead of someone else. and you're sexy as fuck that's just a fact of life i don't make the rules on that one

[yrdnzz]

and i got eyes on the back of my head, i got eyes everywhere so i know where you go

[deoidesign]

How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist

Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.

Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!

This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)

So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.

I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.

I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.

Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.

Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!

This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.

But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)

I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.

My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!

Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!

panels that look like this in scroll format...

can look like this in print!

because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.

Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!

Enjoy!

Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!