#but all i can do is daydream about it

[the-ethereal-god]

i would be the happiest person if i lived in somewhere like this

[nedlittle]

genuinely i think it's important for adults, especially in the plague times, to play pretend in our day-to-day lives. when i rub my back down with tiger balm so i can sleep without pain, i imagine i am a valiant knight tending to an old injury i received from a dragon. when i go to the store to pick up eggs and milk, i am a lone cowboy riding into town on a mission. when i turn my collar up against the wind i am a femme fatale who's killed 4 husbands and is scoping out a 5th. when i stomp around in the snow i am a doomed polar explorer. if being a little bit silly about my walk to the pharmacy helps me remember that life can be full of joy and whimsy, then so be it.

[fishbloc]

death stranding au because ds2 trailer made me shameless and forced me to draw this idea i had in my head for months. sorry this won't make sense unless you've played the game...

[itspileofgoodthings]

my romantic self-esteem is just absolutely rock-solid. for whatever reason!

[lesbianfakir]

Y’all I’m so sad. I keep playing video games made by one or two people and now I want to make a video game soooooooo bad so I can design my perfect game and more importantly make the art. But!! Programming is my mortal enemy she and I do NOT get along. Maybe I could make something simple in terms of programming like a visual novel but I want more involved gameplay :,( I really want a fun video game project now

[purplepixel]

Sendin' one back at ya! (for some reason can't asks send from my normal blog?? Shakes fist at Tumblr)

Don't think you've answered it yet (?) but would love to hear you're thoughts on 28 for the tmnt ask! - Crow

Ohai crow! :] Ready for my extremely passionate long winded answer that's been in my mind for months now? Gonna respond with rise cuz that's all I read

28) What is one thing you'd like to see explored more in TMNT Art/Fics

CASEY JONES AND HER DYNAMIC WITH THE TURTLES

What is her relationship with each of the turtles, splinter, and April post seasons 2? Where is she in the aftermath of the movie? How did she redeem herself and earn the turtle's/april's trust? How does she feel escaping a cult? What is it like to experience FAMILY. DID SPLINTER ADOPT ANOTHER DAUGHTER?

I could go on. She is prob rises most underrated character, mainly bc she gets over shadowed by junior. Which is sad bc SHES GOT SUCH GREAT POTENTIAL FOR STORIES.

I am gonna call out fandom sexism here. With my full chest I fully believe that if she were a man, we as a fandom would have more works of her. Especially bc imo Junior is less of his own character outside being a fish out of water and his trauma of the apocalypse, yet he's got TONS of fan works. He's the bucky of rise if you will. Whereas with Casey, she is passionate, chaotic, loud, will choose FIGHT every time, overly eager, wants to prove herself etc etc. She is rise's version of Casey Jones to a T.

And yet for being a prominent character in the main series, I NEVER see her in fics. She is relegated to "extra character we needed cuz we're sending in the calvary" bg character with like one or two lines. The only time I see Casey focused stories is when she's attached to a ship pairing. Which isn't bad or anything, I just didn't bother to read those cuz I want THE FAMILY FOCUS.

I would love to see the classic Casey and raph dynamic more. We got a little in the show when they were enemies, but I want to see their friendship form. Enemies to friends. It literally writes itself. And Casey and Donnie would be SO CHAOTIC. Take the two most dramatic characters, put them in a room together, and watch the shenanigans occur. Eyse's fic is the only one I've seen do something crazy with them and it's THE BEST. A spar between Donnie and Casey where he ends up enlisting the wood animals to assist him and Casey is just having the time of her life getting to go all out fighting someone? Eats that scene

So ya. Casey and the turtles. I need more of them. If anyone has ANY good fics with Casey in them, let me know. Cuz I just have two so far. (I'm promised a third as of today but I haven't read ch 25 of Spiders web with strings attached yet)

Thank you for reading this long answer haha

[not-poignant]

Do you have any advice on how to write more words on a regular basis? I find it difficult to write regularly but am fed up of only being able to produce sporadically in small amounts. Whenever I sit down to write it feels like I'm feeding gravel into a blender (if that even makes sense). I've tried getting advice from others and am told to just "stop trying to write then". But I can't because I want to write. Writing is all I ever think about. It feels like oxygen to me and when I'm not doing it (or thinking about doing it) I feel like I'm dying inside. But damn, I just wish it wasn't so difficult.

I really want to finish my stories and I know I could if I just wrote regularly but I don't know why that's so hard for me to do.

Hi anon!

I might have some thoughts on this because I certainly never used to write as much as I do now!

Firstly, I'll get this one out of the way now, if you have money to spend, join 4thewords - ignore this if you don't have it. But this gamifies writing in a genuinely fun way. Each monster you kill gives you loot, and fulfills quests that give you more loot, that opens more worlds and more options that give you clothing / house furniture and more. This was - given how much more productive it made me - a game changer re: writing more.

If you don't have money to spend, let's ignore that and go to other methods.

If you want to write more, the answer isn't to stop writing, it's to write more. The best time to hear 'it's time to stop writing' is if you're burnt out, or you hate everything about it. It sounds like you don't hate everything about it, you just wish it was a bit easier.

Decide what you want regularly to mean. I don't have a daily writing habit - I don't write every day! I'm too sick to, so i have a monthly minimum wordcount instead of a daily minimum wordcount and try and hit it by about week 2/3. Regularly for you might be once a day. Once every two days. Or it might be 'I have to write this many words a month.'

Find a way to track the words you're writing. The only way you can accurately see how much you're writing is by tracking those word-counts! Because you will have days where you feel like you wrote nothing and actually wrote a fair bit, and days where you feel like you wrote a fair bit and sadly wrote...hardly anything, lol. But it's also the best way to see yourself achieve more as you increase your wordcount.

Let's also talk about flow. Sometimes you don't get to feel 'flow' - that feeling of the words coming out easily onto the page, and you have to kind of struggle for every sentence. Are you okay with writing more knowing that this is actually normal for many writers, and the gravel blender feeling might not go away? It will over time get easier to write more words, but it might mean more of that gravel blender feeling. Flow is not predictable, and is often story and scene dependent. Chances are you will have more times feeling writing flow, I just want you to be honest with yourself in case it doesn't happen the way you wish.

From there, it's a combination of developing the discipline (which is like exercising a muscle - start small and grade upwards, don't aim too high at first, consistency is better than bursts), and finding the tricks that help you.

Look at how many words you think you could write a week. Let's lowball and say about 100 words a week. When you assess this for yourself, always undershoot, don't round up! 100 words is like... a long paragraph worth of words.

The following week, depending on if you want a daily / once every two days etc. habit, you'd aim to write 150 words that week. A paragraph and a half.

The week after you'd aim for 200 words.

You might find in week 2 it was easy to write 1000 words, great! But the week after you're still only aiming for 200 words. Don't base scaling up on the bursts / writing sprints - they'll lie to you. If you want consistent discipline, base your increases on the low days. If you reach a week where 200 words feels impossible, aim for 200 words the following week, if it's still impossible, go back to 150.

Now for you it might be... 500 words in week one, 600 in week two, 700 in week 3 etc. It might not seem like much, but you'd be surprised how quickly you start scaling through those numbers with practice.

Increasing writing output is a numbers game. And it's a patience game. And it's a 'being forgiving and gentle with yourself while also being a little bit stern with yourself' game.

Here's the thing no one tells you (except for NaNoWriMo every single year) re: increasing your wordcount.

Those words don't have to be good. They don't have to be good in fact it's better if they're not.

You're just getting used to the feeling of writing more. Not writing more good words, that will come naturally with time. You're getting used to sitting in front of a document for longer, thinking of more sentences you don't necessarily love (it's better if you don't! Write the bad ones!) And this is what I mean by it's a numbers game. Getting better at writing happens the more you do it anyway, so you can just focus on 40 bad sentences.

The trick to letting yourself write badly? That one is just...gritting your teeth and screaming through them while you go 'AHHHHH' in your head and let those suckers loose. Or whatever version of this that you have.

Because here's the thing, it's actually pretty easy to write 1000 words of inconsequential terrible story that no one's going to read. I mean 'pretty easy' - it's easier than writing the stories and characters you love the most and are so invested in, it's hard to write the sentences because you want to do justice to it all. That's fucking stressful, friend, and increasing writing output is just better if you're not always a) doing it on those stories or b) invested in writing those stories well in those early draft/s.

But once you're used to writing more words of stuff you don't love, it becomes easier to write less words of stuff you do, and chances are that will still be more than you're writing now. <3 Some of my stories are really easy to write, and some are way way harder. A chapter of The Ice Plague took as much time as three chapters of Underline the Black. So story is important here too. But also the point is basically that... you don't have to scale up your writing output with the stories you're most invested in, but need to be at a certain standard of writing. You can scale it up any time, with any kind of story - anyone can do this. Increasing your wordcount is a matter of like... easy methods that are less easy to implement irl because of the psychology around letting yourself write badly, and letting yourself validate the time / put the time aside to do that.

And here's the other thing - find a ritual that helps you. Whether it's brewing some tea before writing. Setting up a little space. Putting on some music or a noise generator specifically for writing. Listening to Lo-Fi Girl or Synthwave Boy. Whether it's writing a few words on paper first, or changing the font. Eventually you will have a Pavlovian response to the ritual, and every little bit helps.

As for the psychology, this is why you lowball. You make it as easy as possible. 'God writing 1000 words seems really hard oh but I only have to write a sentence today, cool, I can do that.'

The thing about lowballing is that on the good days, you will write way, way more than your goal. Which means a) you're done for the week if that happens if you want to be done and b) when you're back to feeling exhausted and like GGHGHGHGHHHHH about writing, you're still back at that initial lowball wordcount.

On my worst days, I lowball to like, 5 words, 10 words, and just write 5 / 10 / 15 etc. down on a piece of paper and cross them off. 30 words can be a sentence. 10 words can be a sentence. It feels nice to cross off numbers on a sheet of paper and see the increasing words. I can almost always get to 500 words with that method, and I think you could definitely get to 100.

Anyway the TL;DR

Consistency is way more important than quality

Don't be surprised if you don't find 'flow'

ALWAYS lowball when you're developing an increase in words

Figure out what 'regular' means to you (daily / weekly / etc.)

Make a ritual

Focus less on the stories you love most when developing this habit

If you have a bad week, just go back to the previous wordcount goal. And keep doing that, this won't be a linear process!!!

...It didn't need to be this long I'm so sorry anon idk why I'm like this.

I wish you all the best! I 100% disagree with the folks telling you 'just stop writing then.' I'm like nope, embrace the gravel blender, eventually you'll end up with smooth sand in an hourglass, I promise. <3 You just might have to add more gravel sometimes. ;)

[sieglinde-freud]

i need more non three houses side characters winning cyl tbh bc the lord outfits are so predictable and boring and for three houses all they do is the normal timeskip shit. like, felix and bernadetta’s art looks great, but the designs… come on. weve all seen mortal savant felix. thats literally just bernadetta’s timeskip outfit with added shoulder stuff. bring back queen camilla of nohr. they did something fun with marianne that one time until everyone was like “boo wah i hate creativity and serving cunt” but they need to not listen to the haters. when tharja wins in three years (if we dont hit eos) i want her cosplaying as grima or something like the lizard version

[pynkhues]

1700s paris courtesan au.. i'm whimpering with need here.. please say more?

Hahaha, it's kind of circled through a few different iterations in my head, anon, but the plot I think I've loosely landed on in my daydreaming-while-at-pilates-or-in-the-pool-hours, haha, is like - -

Human!AU! Lestat's past is basically the same. He's a penniless countryside aristocrat who escapes his abusive household for Paris with Nicki to try and be an actor. He's just starting to break out, when Magnus, who's of the French noble class, doesn't so much abduct him as he does in canon, but he absolutely coerces him into sex in a public enough way that Lestat ends up garnering the reputation of a courtesan despite not having actually been one. The assault and offense is bad enough, but at the end of it all, the money is more than Lestat - who's still broke as a struggling actor - has the capacity to turn down, so he sort of ends up leaning into it much to Nicki's horror.

MEANWHILE, Louis' family were members of the bourgeouis class but descended to the middle after a scandal involving his now deceased father, and Louis has been slowly clawing the family's way back towards the bourgeois class through running a brothel that caters exclusively to the very wealthy and the noble classes. Louis' known for his discretion and the provision of highly trained courtesans, and rewarded not just financially, but with invitations to the upper social echelons which he's using for his own social elevation, but also to secure his sister, Grace's marriage to one of the new nobles, Levi Frenier.

Louis and Lestat meet through upper crust social events at court that neither of them really belong at, Louis as the provider of courtesans, and Lestat as effectively a free agent, and they instantly dislike / become obsessed with each other! Louis initially wants Lestat under his employ, realising his clear demand despite him being obviously loud, indiscreet and vulgar, but Lestat feels the only degree of control he has over the situation he's ended up in is because he's decided to navigate it himself / is self-employed, and also thinks Louis' arrogant, patronising and a mood-killer, and they're both dealing with so much shit on the side - between the shame of what Louis' father did and his brother's illness and subsequent suicide and the pressure placed upon him to provide for his mother and sister, to Lestat's crumbling relationship with Nicki, to his assault, to balancing courtesan life and theatre life - and they just keep colliding in these social circles, y'know? Until Louis realises he doesn't so much want Lestat under his employ as much as he just wants him under him, and Lestat realises the lengths Louis' going to for his family is a sort of love he's never known but maybe wants to see if he can get Louis to feel for him, and so they start competitively courting until Feelings become real and everything's a mess because this is 1700s France, y'know?

So - - ahem. Yes. Hahaha, that's kind of what it looks like in my head these days.

[0rchidm4ntis]

La la lu, la la lu

Oh, my little star sweeper

I'll sweep the stardust for you

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

im devastated. i got a microwaveable curry from costco and. its not good. Why

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

thinking about superheroes unfortunately

[zkretchy]

If there is one thing I enjoy doing it’s messing around with canon events :3c

[flowerakatsuka]

larry's tag about kurokara looking back on going around the summer festival together and realizing it was basically a date is making me chuckle bc it wouldn't be the only instance of kuroba inviting karamatsu out on what's essentially a date before they're a couple ( not even during that summer. )

[viridian-house]

Your prose is so unique and I just really want to know if there are any pairings you plan/want to ever write but have a hard time with (outside the naruto fandom as well)

🥺😭💕💕💕 thank you so much, you're always so kind!!

there's a ton of stuff I have ideas for (varying degrees of vague to decently thought-out plots). I've even written out decent chunks of a few, but am not happy with for reasons

ichigo/rukia: watched the first arc of bleach with my wife during initial quarantine and thought these 2 were so aesthetically complementary and CUTE with each other?? not confident writing them just because idk the source well enough (I know the canonical endgame couples though 🥲)

bakugo/uraraka: I can't nail bakugo's attitude, and my uraraka comes out bossy & outspoken. I have an easier time throwing eijirou in the mix and bc he suits them both very well (they're such a lil ot3 for me!!)

matrix/andraia: ummm kind of a deep cut with this one, no clue if any of my readers even know what they're from. a canonical power couple (and my pansexual awakening shhh) who honestly get done justice by the source, how can I compete with the hottest woman I've ever seen calling her absolutely jacked, emotionally stunted bf "lover" and him killing the big bad with HER WEAPON??? *chefs kiss*

ryoko/ayeka: another semi deep cut. I love the idea of them together but can never write enemies/rivals to lovers with any believability. had a dream once where ryoko was carrying ayeka bridal style.....they might be Fanart Only territory for me

ino/sakura: although I'm writing about them in one fic (and have a separate [smutty] one cooking), these 2 are hard for me. idk if you guys have seen that post that's like "came back from the codependent homoerotic friendship wrong" but that was a Real Thing I lived through lmao I didn't even ship inosaku until years after we'd stopped talking 😩

leon/ashley: they are simply Too Sexy for me to even think about attempting. I'll read other fics of them and have to put my phone down to take regular breaks like I'm doing manual labor they make me INSANE. but maybe someday I'll get there (I'm working on one that's just titled "sin" in my docs HELLO)

[theygender]

I've got too many games I want to play and not enough free time 😭 I still need to finish my BG3 playthrough but since Endless Ocean: Luminous came out I've been playing a lot of that instead. Also just got back into Wizard101 last night. Started playing House Flipper again last weekend. Still need to finish BOTW so I can start a TOTK playthrough and finish Pokemon Shield so I can start on Pokemon Violet. I've been fighting off the urge to start up a new Skyrim playthrough for weeks. My brother just told me that Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is getting ported to the Switch. And now I'm suddenly feeling inspired to replay DAI... And throughout all of this I'm also playing the hell out of DragonVale on my phone. Someone just pay me to play video games all day please