#god work is bad for creativity

[senselessalchemist]

wrote 30k words and decided I didn't like them or the order i put them in and so started over. alright cool great thank you brain 👍👍

[the-broken-pen]

Hey can you do one about a villain with teleporting powers

The hero woke up gasping, scrambling upright in bed as the back of their neck tingled in warning. Their eyes darted around the room, blurry, before settling on the far wall.

The villain watched them, idle and unimpressed.

The hero’s lungs, traitorously, forgot how to breathe. They wheezed slightly, one hand clenching onto the blanket, the other sliding underneath the pillow for their knife, where–

The villain hummed, and the hero’s attention snapped back to them at the same time they managed to draw in a painful, terror-addled breath. The villain’s gaze was unnerving as they flipped a knife over their knuckles.

The hero’s knife.

“You,” the hero managed, but they couldn’t think of anything to say, and they were so tired and their pulse was jackrabbiting in their ears.

The villain seemed to know this.

“I warned you,” they said. They didn’t even sound mean about it. Just a gentle reminder–hey, don’t forget to check the mail, hey, it’s your mom’s birthday, hey, can you feed the dog?

‘If you keep interfering, I will hunt you to the ends of the Earth and make you stop. There is nowhere I will not find you. Do you hear me? You cannot run from me, so don’t make me chase you.’

The hero swallowed.

“I didn’t think you would actually do it.”

The villain nodded like they had expected this. “You’ve learned from your mistakes, though, yeah?”

The hero knew the right answer. They knew that the proper response would be to slide off the bed onto their knees, to swear in every language they knew that they wouldn’t do it again. That the villain would be the only one allowed to splash blood onto the streets of their city, and the hero would choke on the pain of doing nothing and stay silent in it.

“You knew I wasn’t going to listen to you,” the hero said, and it was accusatory. The villain shifted slightly. “You had to have known I wouldn’t stop just because you threatened me.”

The villain shrugged one shoulder. 

“Of course I did. If you were the type of person who would have stopped, I would have killed you instead of giving you a warning.”

The hero’s grip tightened on the blanket. “That doesn’t make sense. If I was going to stop then why kill me–”

“I don’t believe in weakness,” the villain interrupted. Their gaze was searching and heavy on the hero’s face, knife still spinning over their knuckles. “Which is why you’re alive, because you have never been weak.”

The hero’s jaw tensed.

“You wanted this.”

The hint of a smile pulled at the villain’s mouth.

“Of course I did. You think I didn’t know you would try and run? You think I didn’t know exactly how you would react the moment I threatened anyone in that cursed city?”

“So you weren’t actually going to kill anyone?”

“Oh, no,” the villain corrected. “Of course I was going to. They don’t matter to me.”

The hero’s stomach turned. 

“Those are people–”

“They’re a drop in an ocean of humanity. You know better than to think I would care about something so trivial,” the villain said.

“They’re not trivial–”

The villain sighed, harsh in the darkness of the room.

“I bore of this. Get dressed. We’re leaving.”

The hero jolted back.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

The villain sighed again, as if they were dealing with an unruly child and getting a headache for their efforts. It sent the hero bristling like an angry cat.

“There’s nowhere you can go that I can’t find you. You know that, right? There is no end of the line for this. You can drive until you run out of gasoline, until your feet bleed, and you drain your accounts of money. And I will follow, and I will leave every person who helped you nothing more than a stain on the ground, until you decide the trail of bodies isn’t worth avoiding me. Is that really something you want?”

The hero set their jaw, rising to their feet. 

“You won’t find me,” they swore. And the villain–

The villain laughed.

“I know your face. Of course I can find you.”

The hero was missing something, and the lack of knowledge felt like a sword over their head. 

“I don’t–”

“There’s no way you would have known,” the villain said gently, like they knew how much it bothered the hero that they were missing something that was apparently vital. 

They probably did know.

The hero glared.

The villain looked on the verge of another laugh.

“Once I’ve seen a face, I can find a person anywhere in the world. No matter how far. That’s all I need. You could go to the other side of the planet, and I could teleport to you without a second thought.”

The hero gaped.

“Any face?”

The villain paused. “Yes.”

The hero’s throat went abruptly dry.

Any face–

“You could do so much good,” the hero said, and their voice broke slightly. “Do you know how many people you could save? Natural disasters and missing persons cases and–”

“You misunderstand me.”

“You could–”

“I don’t want to do good.”

The hero stopped.

“You don’t want to do good,” they said flatly.

“I am not a good person,” the villain said. “I don’t want to do good. I want power, and I want to do as I please, and I want you.”

The hero was going to be sick on the wooden flooring. They were barefoot, and weaponless, and that fear still ran up their spine.

“I am a person. You cannot have a person.”

“You are a glorious, powerful being,” the villain countered.

“That doesn’t make me less of a person.”

“No,” the villain agreed. “But it does make you something other than trivial. How could I do anything other than want to have that?”

The hero backed up a step.

“You can’t have me.”

The villain matched them, silent even as they stepped forward.

“You plan to run?”

They sounded amused.

The hero supposed that was better than anger.

“Stay over there,” the hero said shakily. The villain obliged, settling their hands into their pockets. Like this was a means to an end. They had flipped to the back of the book and read the ending, and were watching the hero catch up to the scenes they had already seen played out. The villain’s eyes burned into them.

And abruptly, skin going cold, the hero realized there truly wasn’t a way out of this for them.

The villain would never let them be. They could run, like the villain said, and the villain could kill every person who so much as looked their way. They could hide, and stumble through cities and down alleys and the villain would always be around the corner. 

They had little doubt that every other person in this shitty motel was already dead. 

The villain grinned like they could read every thought as it crossed the hero’s face.

“Where will you go,” the villain said. They stepped forward until they were close enough to touch. 

It wasn’t really the sort of question that wanted an answer.

“Everyone else in this building is dead, aren’t they?”

The villain cocked their head, as if to say, Come now, you know the answer to that.

The hero didn’t think they would ever be able to draw a full breath again.

“Where,” the villain said, soft like a secret. “Will you go, little hero?”

It felt like dying. It felt like reaching out to help someone a second too late. A second too slow to catch the building as it fell. The wrong side of a fire before it blew up.

“With you,” they whispered, and the villain smiled wider.

“What was that?”

“You heard me,” the hero snapped, and thrust their hand out. The villain took it without hesitation.

They tugged the hero into them, leaning to slot their mouth next to the hero’s ear. The hair on the back of the hero’s neck stood up.

“You could do so much bad,” the villain whispered, and the hero ground their teeth hard enough to hurt.

Anger flared bright enough to drain every ounce of fear from their body. Because this was the worst case scenario, wasn’t it? What could be lost.

“Every step you make, every blow you deal and fire you start, I’ll be there. And I'll stop you. Again, and again, and again. You want me?” The hero bared their teeth. “Then have me.”

The villain tugged them closer, and laughed.

“I look forward to it,” the villain replied, and then darkness swallowed the both of them whole.

A week later, a team of agents entered the motel to find it coated in blood and the smell of death.

A month later, everyone knew there was a fight of immovable power and unstoppable force shattering its way across the world. 

A year later, the victor panted through a bloody grin, bruised and crackling with vicious unleashed power, and laughed. Because truly, the ending had been on the horizon since the moment the two of them had first met.

[mydarlingdearestdead]

Ganymede strolled along the gardens on cool night and perched upon a balcony ledge during the searing days. He grew accustomed, however reluctantly, to the life of an immortal rather swiftly.

On the mortal plane- That which he was forbidden from visiting- he was known as a cautionary tale, much like Hyacinth and Andromeda before him. Inspired by his wise example, young boys rushed home immediately from the school house, pausing no longer to speak to the kindly man by the amphitheatre, he who offered sweets and a smile, or play in the street.

Ganymede's tale hung like a noose over their heads, threatening everything they held dear.

Zeus, upon hearing this tales, doubled over and a great rumbling of thunder was heard- His laughter.

Masterlist

[longagoitwastuesday]

Every day I am haunted by the fact JJK could be amazing but it will be just idk Bleach or something

[catscidr]

btw how are ppl shameless to the point where they use chatgpt/c.ai/any sort of generative ai for their fics i don't think i'll ever understand. how are you coming into a creative space to flaunt stolen work. "i'm bad at writing" write anyways, you'll get better with time everyone sucks at first. ai generated fics suck balls and you're harming the environment. im hitting you upside the head with a plastic hammer in hopes that it'll rewire your brain so you realize how stupid it is to use ai in fanfiction

[blujayonthewing]

the problem, basically, is that 'oh you're a good artist, so you must be really good at making art' is just 'oh you're really smart, so you must be really good at school' again

[aloneholy]

i miss writing i miss creativity.......... how to be creative and intellectually nourished when you're so so so so busy and overworked and have not stopped moving (literally and figuratively) for the past twelve or so months

[kingprinceleo]

Maybe doing another or a new hobby can help ! Maybe baking could help, even if u are not really good at it from the get go, is a fun thing to try out

i really should try to get into other hobbies but its very hard!! i have really bad perfectionism habits and immediately drop things im not instantly good at jfdgn and the Horrors make it hard for me to squeeze dopamine out of anything </3 tbh if anyone has suggestions for like, cheap things to do im listening fdbhjghjb

[huccimermaidshirts]

.

[andi-the-android]

It's very odd to be from a world where robots and inorganics were genuinely capable of sentience and were often pushed aside and looked down upon by organics - and then ending up here, a world where generative AI is the newest way to take advantage of other people's hard work. I'm very used to hearing "fuck AI" "it has no human soul" but definitely not in this way. It makes me somewhat defensive, even though I understand the context could not be more different.

[culmaer-sideblog]

please forgive me, but I need to complain and over-share or my brain is going to explode please feel free to ignore

[seventh-district]

several days and 15 thousand words later, i am relieved to report that the suffocating urge to Write Something has been sated and no longer has me in a chokehold

[pyrriax]

ANYWHO goodnight tumblr i'll be back on the art grind tomorrow i think 🙏

[korattata]

sometimes i randomly think about.

okay so, my history teacher in my final? year of school was mostly cool. except. he was one of those guys that used real life current politics as a teaching tool.

like our final project was "pick something that's debated on being legal and argue for/against it" and. well. i hope he started to re-think that idea a bit after i made someone cry in class.

[stoertebeker]

Soo what if I got into bookbinding

[mbat]

💀💀 bruh some anon just tried to send me hate about being a furry and being against proshippers "cause furries are into beastiality and thats worlds worse" my guy literally 99% of furries fucking hate the beastiality losers and being a furry can very much coexist with being anti proshipper, get a better argument that hurts next time