#i want to write for caleb too but i've only finished the main story and havent looked at his extra content yet

[mandalhoerian]

CELEBRATION POST! First of all, THANK YOU for sticking around to witness whatever chaos I’m putting out into the world. And welcome to the 200 new people who somehow decided to vibe with me after my love & deepspace posting streak! (Yes, I counted. I had 940 before I started lads-posting. That’s wild.)

Not to get too sappy, but seeing the love for my first rafayel fic literally within DAYS gave me the confidence to put more of my brainworms into the world. I used to just daydream about these ideas while blasting my playlists, but now I’m like,,,,, actually writing them down because YOU GUYS make me feel so valid LMFAO 😭💞

Anyway, here’s what I’m cooking up next because why not celebrate by oversharing:

1) You actually got sacrificed for Rafayel to ascend and Lemuria to prosper AU. I call this one "Ascended Rafayel" in honor of Astarion LMAO.

In which you randomly awaken on the shore, surrounded by people fussing about the Sea God's divine message to have his most devout and beloved follower be treated like a queen. You have no idea why any of this is happening, you don't even worship the sea god. Your last memory is getting thrown overboard. Yet here you are, in just a few days, living paradise on earth in an overwater bungalow system, revered because it's apparently you who's the source of the blessings. There's something terribly wrong with you, though. You don't feel the same. Too heartless, unfeeling, hollow, only left with a gut feeling that your entire life was taken away from you, and there's nothing but a dull, aching resentment left in you for the sea and the god you're being favored by -- and you want to escape this place.

Inspired by that one "get in the water" fanart of long-haired rafayel i've seen but can't find anymore (you can probably guess from this alone where this fic is going)😭

2) canon divergence of addictive pain anectode

in which i give rafayel stalking the mc to her college and starting to give lectures there as a guest professor the energy it deserves. still trying to figure out if i should have the reader just be a student or an undergraduate ta

3) sylus making a random appearance here. concept inspired by manhwas "villainess maker" and "a villainess for the tyrant"

in which sylus "trains" the very normal, timid, kindhearted reader with has a rare fear inducement evol to become his villainess (trophy) wife (to use her as an asset, yes, bc someone crazier than him won't be used as his weakness) who can bring people down to their knees with just a look.

the problem is, she's REALLY soft-hearted and makes herself small because of the isolation and the nasty treatment she's received her whole life. she has suffered from the sheer uncontrollable and debilitating nature of this evol since it's always constantly on, like even animals won't go near her, but sylus is literally the first person to not be affected by this. they're truly kindred spirits together and the cutest in my head. an empowerment fic lowkey

4) possibility of making other installments of nightly rendezvous cards bc ideas are rotting in my head. especially temperature play for zayne

Again, thank you for being here, for hyping me up, and for making this little corner of the internet feel like home !! I love you all sm, and I hope you’re as excited for what’s next as I am

Here’s to more fics and more brainrot <3

[pumpkin-spike18]

✨Weekly Progress #32-33✨

It's been an emotionally tough two weeks. Much (if not all) of what I've been planning hasn't been going well ^^;;

Weekly Progress #32

Posted devlogs

Worked on Outlines

Finished Punk BL Part 1 Outline

Finished SFB sprite lineart

Concepted + outlined VF project

Wrote 2.1k+ words for VF

Sketched VF sprite

Weekly Progress #33

Wrote 2k+ words for VF

Finished 1 VF sprite

Flat colored other VF sprite 4/5 outfits

Finished Punk BL Part 2-3 outline skeleton

Designed 1/4 LIs for Buggy BL

Wrote 6k+ words for Punk BL

Finished Buggy BL outline skeleton

When 2024 started, I had some goals and plans for my devwork this year. I hoped to start developing commercial games. I didn't expect all of my plans to work, but I also didn't expect none of it to work the way I planned.

So while I said to myself, "Welp, that just means I gotta replan and make a new schedule for 2025!" it was still difficult for me to hype myself up for that.

I planned to join Velox Fabula 2 to cheer myself up, but despite writing over 4k words and completing a sprite... my willpower simply disappeared and I gave up completing the project.

I might finish it in the future, but the stars misaligned this time.

It is a Quick Transmigration, multi-lifetime story between two people. The story was planned to be vignettes of moments between the two characters, but I realized I wanted something more and the scope was already too big for a small jam like VF2.

Punk BL Game

That's not the title, I have no idea what the title will be. I hope an epiphany will hit me soon because idk how to tag my posts otherwise. Or I'll have to go back and edit a lot of posts.

It's a rather big and ambitious idea. This will be a turn based battle/hybrid VN with some dating sim elements. I wish I had a single word to describe it. Perhaps I'll have to do some more researching for similar games.

The story is about Silver, whose been ordered to defeat the gangsters who run Lucidus City. If he falls in love with one of his rivals, well, that'll depend on you...

(did I post this image before? I feel like I have, but I can't find it on my own blog LOL...)

The story is split into four parts (currently); writing for ith as come so naturally that I did 4k on Friday night. These are sketches for the main characters of the first part. The MC, Silver. The "love interests" (once again, I hesitate to call them so because they won't get traditional romance routes. I'm still unsure if they'll get actual romantic endings) for part 1 are: Drayton, Gordan (Danny), Caleb, and Evan.

Any guesses to who the yandere in this story will be.

(Just some expressions I picture him making throughout the story)

Buggy BL Game

The other untitled BL game I've been daydreaming about. Thanks to discussion with some friends, the basic concept is: a bunch of bugs get stuck in a death game, similar to the idea of Kodoku.

I only have the base outline and one of the LIs designs finished. Meet Butterfly, one of the more uncooperative love interests you get to meet in the death game.

Actually, all of the love interests are quite uncooperative...

I haven't finished developing the rules and stakes of the death game yet, but I know for a fact that variable control will be essential to this game. I have a bad feeling future!Pumpkin will be ambitious and try a system where who you let die early in the game will affect later trials of the game...

Other than that, I'll be finishing a few owed artworks this week before I dive into rescheduling my long term gamedev goals for 2025 and beyond.

[encrucijada]

PÍA RAMBLES #6

nanowrimo is technically over and i barely made a dent on what was supposed to be my main wip during november. but one thought led to another and i made some changes that contradict the powerpoint i posted at the start of the month... so let me tell you about evergreen lung!

if you're new to my writing updates: because of how inconsistent i am with my progress i just label everything as a writing update and then theme them accordingly.

disclaimer: this is my original work, plagiarism of any kind won’t be tolerated.

[ all images ids in alt text! ]

i was having a lot of trouble making the relationships between characters work, which is a problem considering character relationships would make or break this book in particular. i've only written one and a half chapters which, i know is too soon to know if the dynamics were really as bleh as they seemed in my head (especially considering i've only barely introduced the character of raquel)... but things just weren't clicking in an appealing way.

so what did i do? i opened my phone's notes app and started typing naturally lmao. i laid out all my troubles and i think i've found it now! the version of evergreen lung i like.

these are the changes

august is now a completely different character! originally she was supposed to be ezra's "friendship interest" (like love interest but for friend) but i was having this problem about their relationship being too similar to that of ezra's mums xiomara and katalina. something that was bothering no one but if i didn't do something about it it was gonna bother me for all intended 70k words of this. i've aged august up and now she is running the radio station mentioned in the powerpoint (there's also something new and magical about her but [spoilers]).

it also allowed me to implement a dynamic i would have otherwise discarded with the changes i did to ezra's family, which makes me happy as i really liked it. see, since her inception august has been the someone new by hozier sorta character where she falls in love with pretty strangers on the bus. in the earlier versions of evergreen lung, ezra was supposed to live with her aunt who couldn't really hold down a partner and that was going to contrast with ezra who didn't want a partner. now that dynamic is the one shared between ezra and august! they have more of a "queer neurodivergent student who imprints on their cool teacher" vibe

juan diego figueroa! you may remember him as santiago figueroa from the powerpoint, i changed his name. the obligatory adam parrish-esque character because this is a book about a sentient forest. he's ezra's new platonic soulmate. a story about two aspec kids with lots of nature imagery surrounding them and whose relationship people are being extremely amatonormative about. after all, they're a boy and a girl so they should be falling in love

not only are they extremely cute, but their dynamic immediately puts me at ease with being Different(tm) from xiomara/katalina/caleb, which is what was bothering me if i had made a little trio out of ezra/august/santiago. as said in the powerpoint, his family runs the greenhouse where xiomara buys all her plant babies and it gives juan diego and ezra a fun thing going on. where they know each other but will grow to be each other's best friends much to their surprise

okay! let's talk chapters

i have named a few scattered chapters. these are the first five (at least for now some titles could be moved around later). as of rn i have only written chapters one and i'm working on finishing chapter two. yes, in my head that is more than enough to talk

I: CREATION ACT

so for the uninitiated: evergreen lung is about this girl named ezra who died and then undied. what felt like passing out overnight in the forest for her turned out to be a year of her being missing.

i'd written the opening scene of the book many moons ago, around the time when i first had the idea for this story. it remains one of my favourite openers. here's an excerpt!

I woke up again because I couldn’t breathe. It turned into crying. Blood smeared on my cheeks, my nose, my mouth. I think… I might have been having nightmares, but I couldn’t remember. The sun made nightmares go away.

Checked my phone again, mechanical. The dead screen spiderwebbed and mosaicked with the honeycomb light through the canopy of branches. I did that three more times, forgetting each time, until I sprung panicked because the weight of my own body made my arm fall asleep and I thought the fox was back and had taken it along this time. I pressed the power button on the phone like that might will it to work.

I also got bitten on the leg, the tender tissue on the back of my knee, and I kicked. A fox with shamrocks as way of ear tufts whined and sprang away. That made me sit up and I cried, whimpering apologies. Whimpering please forgive me’s to an animal that wasn’t there anymore.

i'm now gonna shout out @rxinbowbright and @chaoticdecember because it's thanks to them that i even conceived making any progress with this book at all. and it's all thanks to the characters of ezra's parents who are actually our ocs for a personal project we share. with katalina being teddy's and caleb being fluffy's, xio is mine. it makes sense for a story about the importance of queerplatonic relationships for our main character to be born into one imo.

a while back (a long while back) i decided to start using chapter titles. they add so much personality and i think they need to do a comeback in books. i'm especially fond of the two words structure which is what i'm gonna be doing with evergreen lung. it creates such vivid imagery with something as simple as creation act, especially considering the subject matter. ezra coming back home and all.

II: PRESSED FLOWERS

aka ezra takes a walk around town and reunites with raquel, they go to a concert. alternatively: sometimes the main conflict is the fact your best friend has a boyfriend.

the plot truly begins here: ezra realises there's a disconnect between her and the person who's her best friend, she missed graduation and we all know how much things change in not even a year of being done with high school. the people you saw 5 days a week aren't part of your routine anymore, friend groups don't survive, everyone's got their own goals and no one's worried about the same homework as you.

other stories might turn raquel into the villain but there are no villains here (except for amatonormativity). i love raquel, and i love the relationship with her boyfriend like i love any other ship in my wips. they've got this fun garage band aesthetic going on and damian is friends with ezra... sadly while she was gone they planned and agreed to move out of town together. and now instead of having time to process this, ezra's arriving a month (or so) before it happens.

the title of pressed flowers is supposed to be a metaphor about preserving things.

Raquel’s mum was a redhead like her two daughters. She was wearing an apron and a dress, hands clad with rubber gloves, she looked as if she’d stepped out of 50s USA nuclear family propaganda. Wendy was forced to stay outside and I stood in their kitchen on the verge of tears for an agonising ten minutes.

I kept asking them: Raquel? Raquel? Raquel?

And they put a glass of pink lemonade in my hands and hugged me until I spilled it on the floor anyways. You went missing, they said, as if I was a third-party stranger who hadn’t heard of the local tragedy. Instead of being the very subject of it. Yeah, I know, I said, objective, like speaking of the weather. Your parents— Raquel's mum started to say. They know, I said.

“She’s going to be so happy.” Marianela was holding the baby to her chest.

“Where’s Raquel?” I asked again.

“Not here,” her mum said. “She got this crazy idea in her head when she turned eighteen. Moved right out, said she was ready to be independent.”

“Where’s Raquel?” I asked again.

“She didn’t even have a job!” her mum said. “Now I think she’s working as a cashier.”

“Where’s Raquel?” I asked Marianela directly.

“The shopping centre downtown,” she said, patting the baby’s back as she became fuzzy. Warning of a wail. “They have these empty rooms serving no purpose at all.”

okay! i think that's gonna be it for now. i mainly wanted to talk about the changes i made (which also helps me it's the rubber duck method). and also hopefully this gave you a better idea of what the book's about, where it's headed.

the other chapters will tackle the following:

dead heading: the real weight of being gone

organic bodies: trying to reconnect

blink twice: ezra goes to a party with her old classmates

the sentient forest is coming, i promise.

cheers, pía