#wrote this like. a year and a half ago? reworked it a bunch and now here it is. in your eyes

[devilmeows]

day 7: first meeting - ryden and ana

[prompt list]

It was strangely cold for the middle of June. The sky was bright blue without a single cloud to be seen, but the wind gave him goosebumps. Granted, the reason he was cold may have been because he was in a tunnel. The slightly humid stone walls surrounding him did not make the air any warmer. Maybe it was also because he’d forgotten to take his trusty coat with him and was wearing clothes that hardly kept him warm, even though he’d known he’d be sitting here for a while. Sometimes, he made stupid decisions.

But those weren’t the reasons why it was cold. Because for everyone else, it was a perfectly season-appropriate temperature. He was the only one who was cold. And he was cold because someone was coming.

I really should tweak that part of the spellwork, Ryden mused as he tapped the tip of his tail against the wall, the clicking echoing in the tunnel. Like, make me feel cold or hot but only when the person’s five minutes away from here. Hm. No, not five minutes, but like, an hour. An hour sounds good. It’s better than sitting here all day. He probably looked cool and all, sitting on this stone block in a dark tunnel, just far enough from the exit that he was cloaked in semi-darkness, but it got boring after a while. And he was still cold. He really should’ve taken his coat instead of rushing out of his room like an impatient idiot. 

His ears twitched. He picked up the very familiar sound of footsteps on the train tracks that led inside the tunnel, the same tracks that were only visible to a handful of people. Maybe he wouldn’t have to wait for much longer. Amazing, he thought, stretching himself then hopping off the block and unfolding his wings for bonus cool points. Sometimes, if you want something to happen, all you have to do is complain about it! 

Except his relief didn’t last for long, because he recognised the silhouette headed towards him. He hardly managed to stop himself from groaning.

“Nice to see you too, Ryden,” the man snorted. As he stepped into the shadows, Ryden noticed he’d already taken off his contacts: his eyes gleamed yellow and red in the shade of the tunnel. He eyed the demon as he took a small golden watch out of his pocket. “Someone coming?”

“Yep,” Ryden replied, letting himself dramatically fall back on the stone block, spreading his wings and bringing a hand to his forehead. “I am freezing, I am slightly hungry and most important of all, I was kicking Jade’s ass at Mario Kart before duty called. Truly, the universe hates me. Please tell me you saw someone walking around looking lost on your way here.” 

The man snorted. “I did not.” He unhooked a plastic bag from his shoulder with one hand, then extracted a packet of biscuits from it and tossed it at Ryden. “Here, that should solve at least one of your problems.”

“Oh, Dad, you are my saviour,” the demon said, enthusiastically tearing the packet open and flicking the strips of cardboard away. His father grunted, eyeing the trash pointedly. In response, Ryden simply shrugged and snapped his fingers, making it disappear in a puff of smoke. “So, how was work, Louvain Forna the completely normal human?”

Louvain set down his bag then leaned against the wall opposite of his child. “Uneventful, as per usual.” The werewolf worked a boring office job that Ryden knew little about. Partly because Louvain didn’t talk about it that much, partly because Ryden didn’t want to know about it. 

“Allow me to reiterate that I can just make the things we need appear,” he said, taking out the plastic container and tearing it with a newly-formed claw. “You don’t need to go out there and subject yourself to pointless human stuff when you could just…not.”

“It’s not as boring as I make it sound,” the werewolf replied. His tone was somewhat flat, in a way that had now become familiar, after having the same conversation so many times. “Watching humans bicker is actually quite entertaining.”

Ryden hummed noncommittally. He fished a biscuit out of the packet and took a bite out of it as he looked away. I’m worried about your safety, idiot. Louvain knew this. Ryden had told him exactly that when his father had told him he’d gotten a job in the city. He hadn’t believed it at first. It had been soon, far too soon after he had died. Louvain, of all people, should’ve been the one to want to stay away from the outside world after that. He knew how dangerous it was for people like them: after all, the Haven had been created for that exact reason. Having a werewolf running around, exposing himself to human as well as non-human threats was far from safe. 

Don’t worry about me, Ryden, Louvain had said. I can handle myself. I’ve survived worse than an office full of petty humans.

But I can’t lose you.

Ryden shook his head, snapping out of his thoughts before his brain went places he didn’t want to explore. Dad’s a big boy. He’ll be fine. The next sentence in his train of thought had a voice that was slightly different from his own. He shut it out.

“I bought some new fairy lights,” the werewolf said; changing the subject and taking out a mess of strings from his plastic bag. “Arwin said a few people wanted some.”

“Oh yeah, he did mention that. Ironically, I think it was one of the fairies who asked for them.”

Louvain snorted. “Of course. Well, I hope they-”

He cut himself off, frowning, and sniffed the air right as a violent shiver shook Ryden’s body. Oop, there we go, he thought, making the biscuits in his hand vanish. He pushed himself away from the wall, stretched his wings and straightened up. Didn’t even take that long, in the end. He didn’t even need to shift his ears to pick up the sounds of footsteps. This time, unlike Louvain’s, they were slightly hesitant and uncertain, despite how steady their thumping sounded. This person knew where they were going, but they weren’t entirely sure it was truly happening. Louvain and Ryden shared a look, and the demon nodded. Their gazes then turned to the train tracks, where an unfamiliar silhouette finally appeared. They looked tall and strong, certainly rivalling Louvain in terms of size. They had fiery red hair, and he couldn’t tell for sure from this distance, but their clothes looked worn and torn. 

And then he saw the wings.

Ryden instinctively took a step back, holding back a hiss. 

What the hell was an angel doing here?

His gaze darted to Louvain, who clearly didn’t look as alarmed as Ryden was feeling. He hadn’t even started to shift as he usually did when a threat appeared: instead, he simply stared at the angel with wide, surprised eyes. Neither of them moved as the newcomer stopped a few metres away from them, at the entrance of the tunnel, where the sunlight still touched them.

“Greetings,” their voice was husky, as if they hadn’t spoken in a long time. “My name is Anathema. I come seeking shelter.” 

The angel’s face was a perfect mask of neutrality. Their lilac eyes betrayed no emotion, and their wings only shivered with the breeze. They simply stood there, neither menacing nor scared. Ryden squinted. Under his breath, he muttered the same spell he always used to probe the intentions of anyone suspicious. Louvain’s ear twitched almost imperceptibly as he did so. He waited, waited for the sour taste in his mouth that would indicate ill intent, but nothing came. Instead, he only scented a spring breeze and felt as if he were wrapped in the warmth of thick blankets: a silent plea for help and comfort. Ryden didn't move. For a moment, he thought he'd cast the spell wrong, so he did it again. And he got the same results, except stronger. How could this angel look so unbothered, so bored and yet be in such need of their help?

But magic never lied. Magic had no sense of morality: it simply obeyed its wielder and brought them what it found, regardless of whether they'd like it or not. Even if one begged magic to not give them a certain answer, it would not be swayed. One could not corrupt magic, or make it take a side, no matter how much people could try to do that. Magic had no mind of its own, it simply existed when it was needed. Ryden knew that: his magic had been a part of him his entire life, and he'd worked harder than anyone to understand it in its entirety, and that lesson was the most important one he'd ever learnt. Magic could not lie.

Besides, for this angel to have found them, they would've had to meet the requirements of the Haven's protective spells: the need for shelter, for protection from a world that wanted you dead, with no will to harm those who also needed protection. If they hadn't fit that bill, they would not have felt the existence of this place, would not have seen the train tracks leading to where he'd been waiting, would not have been standing there in front of them right now.

Admittedly, that meant the spells Ryden had just cast had been unnecessary.

His magic had spoken, so Ryden had to yield. This angel needed the Haven.

"Well, hi there, Anathema," the demon said, breaking out one of his charming smiles to try and dissipate the tension. "Mind if I call you Ana?"

The angel blinked. "I suppose not."

"Great! Well, Ana, I'm happy to announce that you've come to the right place!" He twirled, spread his wings and dramatically gestured towards the shadows of the tunnel. "Welcome to the Haven, where every monster on this planet can live without fear."

Ana still didn't react. Ryden was used to seeing people slump in relief, or seeing their knees buckle, or even crying at the news that they'd finally made it here, but a complete lack of reaction was new to him. Strange. 

But what was even stranger was that he was intrigued by it. Drawn to it. He wasn't frustrated or bothered. He wanted to know more, to scratch the surface of that person who wasn't even supposed to be here due to the very nature of who they were. 

Incredible that in only a few minutes, he'd gone from feeling hostile to curious towards this angel. 

"Well, we're not going to stand here all day, are we?" Ryden said, clapping his hands and turning on his heel. "Follow me!" 

He started walking towards the shadows, his ears twitching when he heard two sets of footsteps follow him. He lifted one hand, the air humming with magic in its wake, and as he traced an oval shape in the space in front of him, a purple light flashed. The shadows distorted, then split into a portal. He turned to look at Ana, smiling, but there was still no change to their expression.

"After you."

They blinked at him, then looked at the portal. They stood there in silence for a moment, staring at it, before deciding to step through it. Ryden watched them disappear, but before he followed them, he turned to Louvain.

"They're a banished angel," the werewolf answered his question before he could even ask it. 

[sapphic-luthor]

fic writer review!

thank you for tagging me @hrwinter !

1. How many works do you have on ao3?

twelve which really doesn’t feel like enough because i have at least twice that many in progress in my google docs woops

2. What’s your total ao3 word count?

65,278 hahahaha

3. How many fandoms have you written for?

mmmm i think two ... point five. ish. there were some rough attempts when i was quite young but i didn’t get anything readable up until one or two for orphan black-- all of my actual work that i’m proud of is here in supergirl.

4. Top 5 fics by kudos?

a six-day exercise in denial 

lip drawn constellations and pen marked kisses

accidental kisses and ill-timed visits from the deo

kryptonian tradition, or something like it

musings from 504

5. Do you respond to comments? Why/why not?

very very rarely, and mostly that’s just because i never really know a way to provide a meaningful response that doesn't just boil down to “thank you!!!”

and tbh i feel weird about this all the time because receiving comments makes me smile like an idiot at my phone and i go all squiggly and happy and excited so i probably really should be answering them but i just . i never know what to say that doesn’t look very impersonal!

6. A fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending

in which a half-confession breaks them both by a mile

7. Do you write crossovers?

nope

8. Ever received hate on a fic?

nope!

9. Do you write smut?

god yeah but a lot of it never makes it to the publish stage and i should really change that because sex is what gets all the hits lads

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

not an entire fic, no, but i’ve had some scenes and paragraphs taken and hidden behind very thinly veiled reworks

11. Ever had a fic translated?

yes! a lovely person called R_H_Felidae_Athena actually translated a bunch of my little minifics into Mandarin which i think is the loveliest thing in the world

12. Have you ever co-written a fic?

i haven’t! i’m not sure i’d be any good at it because i’m shit at deadlines and i also have very very little structure to my writing process and it’s a lot of “idk it just feels this way in my head” lmao

13. All time fav ship?

every ship feels like your all time fav ship when you’re in it doesn’t it? so right now absolutely supercorp-- i’ll admit i’ve put more time and work into this ship than others but i’ve had some that really really touched me and that i’ve put a lot of my heart into in the past

14. WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

ah jesus i have so many. almost two years ago i started writing an au (based on one throwaway line in s5) where kara and lena meet because lena’s running through national city and has a security team following her at a distance and kara thinks she sees a woman being followed followed and steps in and beats the hell out of the security team and lena can’t stop laughing hard enough to tell her they’re hired and then kara takes her to lunch as an apology

15. Writing strengths?

girl honestly i don’t even know i’m winging it every single time

16. Writing weaknesses?

fucking TENSES. i tend to swap between them here and there and then it confuses the focus or the intimacy of the scene and sometimes it’s very difficult to tell how far of a lens the reader is supposed to be watching through and it’s just gggaghhhhhlgjddj one day i’ll learn to write in past tense i swear

17. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in a fic?

i’ve not really found myself needing that very much but if i did run across a scenario where it was unavoidable i’d probably try to find a native speaker before i wrote anything of substance so as not to be deeply embarrassing lol

18. First fandom you wrote for?

does the teen titans script i handwrote in a notebook when i was 9 count

19. What’s your fav fic you’ve written so far?

i have a soft spot for this one because i wrote it all in one manic go and it just poured out of me in a way that worked so well on the first try and it got really nice reception and it’s by far one of my proudest even though it’s but a short little thing :’)

tagging @itllsetyoufree @contagiousiridescence @littlemousejelly @gaydisasterdanvers

[incomprehensiblelentils]

@dollsome-does-tumblr​ does this and opened it up to anyone and I am feeling chatty today SO!

Because I co-write a lot with my lovely wife, I might answer some questions including those co-written stories, or I might not, depends on how I feel when I get there.

name:

Megan but I go by Lentils most places on the internet, Shadowcrawler over on AO3

fandoms:

at the moment: MCU, especially Agents of SHIELD and Daredevil; Terminator: Dark Fate; Halt and Catch Fire. Oh and I wrote Dollhouse fanfics a thousand years ago. Sometimes I will watch a movie/show and think “those two girls should be gay” and bang out 2k of fic about it and then never write for that fandom again. (I THOUGHT this was going to be HACF but as it turns out, no, it’s not done with me yet.)

where you post:

AO3, at Shadowcrawler. I also have a tumblr @lentils-writes​ where theoretically I post links to fics/advertise them in the tags, because I used to be real precious about not putting porn on this blog, but fuck it.

most popular multi-chapter fic:

Co-written, it’s definitely mallverse, which is I think the reason most writers definitely hate us because it’s very long and there are a lot of tags lmao. The problem is that every tagged character HAS shown up in a significant fashion at some point so we can’t just...untag them! It doesn’t update weekly anymore because we’re exhausted by life lmao so at least there’s that???

As for a multi-chapter fic that was just me, I don’t tend to do that so much, so actually it’s say you will, my 3-chapter Endgame fix-it where Clint dies instead of Natasha and Natasha and Laura have a past. It actually has over 1000 hits which is very exciting! I feel like it’s...niche in a way that is frustrating but understandable lol. I put a lot of my heart into it and some people really liked it, so that’s gratifying.

favorite story you’ve written so far:

Co-written, I think our SHIELD Dollhouse AU is very underrated for the amount of work we put into it. Author bias evident here because I love Dollhouse warts and all, and it’s a lot of fun translating episode plots as well as the general trajectory of the show into stuff that will work with SHIELD characters. We don’t just rewrite episodes, we really try and rework them as needed. Also it features both Skimmons and my beloved rarepair Bobbi/Kara, though of course they won’t get together until later.

Of my own stuff, I’m still really really proud of the AU where Kara Palamas didn’t die. I think that was a pretty severe misstep of the show and I think I did a good job of fixing it. (I haven’t forgotten Kara, promise!)

fic you were nervous to post:

lolololol I wrote some uh. Terminator pornography last year and. They are very porny! I had co-written a bunch of smut obviously, but that was the first time I’d posted like, PWP all by myself on purpose??? and that was TERRIFYING. Also I was very nervous to post the Engame fix-it because that was my own personal goodbye/tribute to Natasha.

how you choose your titles:

They are always either song lyrics or jokes (such as Three Lawyers and a Baby, my Daredevil Accidental Baby Acquisition fic). My WIP docs are always titled either obvious shit like “RoseJannah horse girls” or memes like “what if we belonged to a fire cult and we fucked haha just kidding unless...?” or “Morgan has two mommies.”

do you outline?:

B and I typically outline for the co-written fics, although it’s more often chapter-by-chapter outlines since that’s how we write them. On occasion we’ve fully planned multi-chapter stuff out in advance but that’s less common. Oh and the one-shots are nearly always outlined as well, just to keep ourselves organized.

When I have written planned multi-chapter fics in the past I have used outlines - particularly for the Kara one and I had to do that for the SHIELD Kill Bill AU because I was trying to follow the format of the movie. For things that are allegedly supposed to be one-shots I almost never outline, which turns out to be a terrible idea when they inevitably balloon beyond my control and become 45k like say you will. That one, I wrote out a list of scenes I thought needed to be in it and then I wrote about 75% of those scenes and then I wrote a bunch more scenes I hadn’t planned for. Don’t be like me, kids!

complete fics:

According to AO3, 89 as of right now. Uh, you do not want me to list all of them, here’s a link, I guess!

in progress:

I don’t understand what the difference is between this question and the WIP questions lmao help????

posted WIPs that I have active plans to continue at this time:

Cowritten: mallverse as I said, and its femslash smut oneshots spinoff and character flashbacks spinoff and older characters/teachers spinoff (these get updated, uh, irregularly), the first half of a Piper/Snowflake SHIELD s7 fic that we are planning on finishing the second half of soonish, SHIELD Dollhouse AU, SHIELD Teen Beach AU, SHIELD Buffy AU. You may notice a pattern!

By myself, I have: Have Your Elf a Merry Little Christmas, a Terminator Hallmark Christmas fic that I ambitiously posted the first chapter of in 2019 and then lost steam immediately (I am going to go back to it sooner or later bc I had some cute ideas for it); the SHIELD Fate of the Furious AU that has one chapter to go and which I do intend on finishing eventually; Three Lawyers and a Little Lady, the Daredevil Accidentally Baby Acquisition AU that is literally just cute kidfic and poly avocados and which I have a bunch of ideas for and just need to buckle down and finish some.

posted WIPs that I have given up on:

Lol so there’s a Dollhouse Caroline/Bennett Doctor Who AU that I wrote purely as idfic and which nobody ever cared about except me, and I think that ship has sailed! RIP darlings. I also had an ongoing Skimmons series waaaay back when where I posted oneshots that were like missing scenes or gay readings for each s1 episode, and I just feel like it would be inauthentic to even try and finish it at this point. (It does include the first ever Skimmons fic to be posted on AO3! Really truly, there’s one fic that shows up as older but it’s an ongoing fic and was updated with the tag way after I posted mine.)

exchange fics due soon/unrevealed:

I haven’t done an exchange since like 2015 lololol I am so bad at them. I am currently working on finishing up my MCU Femslash bingo card, very late, and I do have plans for almost all of the remaining squares!

WIPs that live in my fanfic folder and are incomplete and who knows when they’ll be finished:

“RoseJannah horse girls,” which has been put on hold temporarily but is literally just Rose and Jannah being gay while riding orbaks

half of a Daisy/Gwen fic from Marvel Rising because I know they’re not making any more of those but I stg those two were really gay

multiple fics about Elise Nelson-Page including: avocados Halloween with smol Elise, Aunt Elektra very reluctantly taking smol Elise shopping until she realizes smol Elise also likes weapons (she buys her a fake katana), Uncle Frank is a pushover and spoils the shit out of Elise, and baby Elise has a high fever and everyone freaks out but then she gets better and smile at them for the first time (inspired by baby me lol).

coming soon/not yet started:

“Morgan has two mommies,” yet another Endgame fix-it where Maya Hansen did not die in Iron Man 3 and she resurfaces and she and Pepper kiss and eventually she adopts Morgan

Claire and Colleen go on a nice date to get coffee/tea where Danny doesn’t interrupt them goddammit

Bobbi/Kara Warehouse 13 AU which is sort of like “For the Team” but gayer ft. grappling hook

X-Men: Evolution Tabby/Amara fluff

Cameron/Donna character study disguised as smut

Grace proposes to Dani with a ring made out of the metal from her power source and Carl officiates the wedding 

Dani gets horny watching Grace eat a peach and jerks off and Grace ends up hearing her and then they fuck (I have been calling this “the peach fic” in my head but I gotta stop being delicate about it lmfao it is just porn)

B and I have plans to do a Nico/Karolina Jasper in Deadland AU but we keep forgetting

I MUST WRITE FOGGY AND KAREN SADLY FUCKING IN A CHURCH WHILE THEY MOURN MATT THIS YEAR I STG

do you accept prompts:

uhhhhhh I have on occasion written a prompt for someone before but it’s pretty rare and I have enough trouble writing the shit I come up with in my own head lol. but never say never?

upcoming story you are most excited to write:

I’ve got a bit of the Bobbi/Kara Warehouse fic written and it’s nice to go back to that world. Also I’m weirdly excited about the Cam/Donna smutty character study I mentioned above, I have a lot of what I think are good ideas for it and it’ll be fun.

tagging @unwind-myself @swiftzeldas @swashbucklery @loved-the-stars-too-fondly and, if you want to, you!

[dredshirtroberts]

Tagged by @tumbleweedtech!!

What is your total word count on AO3?

Oh thank god you're asking me to look there where they calculate it for me so i don't have to try and figure it out across all eleventy-million of my fucking WIPs xD.

uhhhhh looks like...274,424 heh. that's lower than i thought but then again I post very little of what i actually write so...

How many fandoms have you written for?

On AO3? if I lump the related ones together (which i do) it's 4. If we're talking across the board in general? uh...f u c k. there's so much i haven't posted or thought about posting yet. just go ahead and like. add ten more on top of the four fandoms on AO3 i think that's about close if we're counting crossovers and inspired-bys

What were your top 5 fics by kudos?

Right Back to the Beginning

Constellations

Please, What?

Spearwort, Iris and Ash: Spearwort Yellow for Joy

Lia & Em's Adventure In Thedas Part I: The Wrath of Heaven

Do you respond to comments - why, why not?

I... want to? I try sometimes, if someone's comment touches me or came at a particularly bad time. It's overwhelming to respond to people - I'm a lurker by nature and never really grew out of the habit of teen-me knowing i wasn't supposed to be looking at the fics i was reading and so i wouldn't interact with them or the authors at all. So it can be hard to like. reconcile that I'm a fully grown adult person who is allowed to not only read and write what i enjoy but also that like. other adult people are reading and enjoying what i write? and that they'd want to tell me? I admit to also falling out of what little habit i'd started due to continued weirdly critical (yet not *negative*) comments that just. rub me the wrong way so I can't figure out how to respond? yeah.

What's your fic with the angsty-est ending?

Again I guess if we're going by what's actually posted, I'd probably have to say the Super Fucking Old fic I added from my FF.net days: A Late Summer Afternoon (hopefully that's the right link - sometimes copy and paste doesn't work the way i want). warnings for MCD. I...imagine you might be able to pick up on why that one's my angstiest ending xD I generally try to like. end my stories on a positive note? even if it's not all better yet - so the second angstiest would be Color of Your Eyes or Have This probably. Likely more Have This over Color of Your Eyes but they're both relatively tame as compared to my earliest writing xD

Do you write crossovers?

Uh...yes but i haven't posted any yet. Most of the reason nothing I write gets posted is because I am incapable of writing small projects and I get nervous about posting chapters before i know where i story is going yet because i feel like i can't edit if it's been posted? Anyway I'm going to try and get over that eventually. Not right now, though. I still have to edit some stuff.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Hate is a strong word. I...assume most people who have commented mean well, regardless of how their comments may come off to me on my end. Several have rubbed me the wrong way due to phrasing and an inability to read tone over text-based communication, but I refuse to believe they would have kept reading if they didn't like most of the story. Certainly it has been generally positive feedback across the board so I don't feel comfortable at all calling any negative comments i've received (intentional or not) "hate"

Have you ever had a story stolen?

As far as I'm aware, no. Thankfully I tend to write shit that people just don't care that much about so I'm pretty safe I think. Watch that come bite me in the ass xD

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nah. I hope one day to be proficient in my target language and will be able to translate my own fics myself but see aforementioned note about how no one really cares that much about what i write xD it won't happen unless i do it myself.

What is your all time favourite pairing?

You want me? to pick favorites? in THIS economy?

What is a fic you would like to finish but don't think you ever will?

currently none are looking like "never gonna finish"es which is good. RBttB sat unfinished for a long while and I probably won't polish the ending on that one, but it's technically done. I also don't want to finish that one either so. it wouldn't have fulfilled the requirements of the question.

Writing strengths?

You want me? to compliment myself? in THIS econo- alright alright i know, it's a terrible joke. Uh...I understand i'm pretty good at smut. and descriptions? i think? I feel like my humor is unparalleled but that's also because i'm pretty sure i'm the funniest person in my apartment (we'll just casually not mention i live alone...) Seamless integration of current and historical memes? Puns? i don't know. i am super confident about writing but i couldn't tell you for sure what i'm actually strong at.

Writing weaknesses?

uh. Getting anything finished. endings. d i a l o g u e. writing. flow. pacing. repetition. writing. see what i did there? i told you my humor was awesome. no but really i struggle with actually starting to write and then it ends up being a lot of me repeating myself a bunch until i find the sentence or four that work best. and like. my pacing is weird so it can be hard to...figure out what i'm trying to say? oh and commas. i use commas wrong.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages?

I enjoy the shit out of it. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea but I try really hard to get it right. if I'm not 100% positive it's correct I will change the whole sentence. mostly because i only know a handful of people who know languages other than English and I am bad at reaching out for help when I need it. mostly the second part though.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

YuYu Hakusho! A friend and I wrote this epic fucking self-insert not-quite-isekai style fanfic back and forth in notebooks back in the 6th grade (which was about...oh. nearly 20 years ago jesus i'm old). Only one of my notebooks survived when she decided anime was demons and the devil trying to tempt her away from Jesus so a lot of the story was lost. It was also in pencil so it's half worn out of the notebook as it is. then there was the phase i went through where i decided i could make my notebooks more interesting by cutting them into shapes which lost me a bit of text in the margins that i'd forgotten about... look we're mostly lucky i had it at all or that i've kept it all these years. Why do i still have it?...hm.

What's your favourite fic?

Of mine? So far it's probably a toss-up between Spearwort, Iris and Ash and Lia & Em's Adventure in Thedas. you know. My two biggest projects Oh...oh possibly also the Current-Reworking-The-Title fic I've started that I've not posted anything of yet in the Arcana fandom. Which is also a huge major project. I don't write small if I can help it, apparently.

of someone else's? You want me? to choose favorites? in THIS- yes i know that's the same joke three times. I think it changes based on what I need most out of my fic reading experience. I have an extensive bookmark collection on AO3. one of them in there's probably holding a spot as favorite, most likely.

Tagging: @concertconfetti, @daughterofdungeonbat, and anyone else who wants to do this! If you want a specific tag to do this, please LMK and i'll tag you <33

[a-charm-of-witches]

Andromeda, Aries and Lupus, please.

Andromeda - Describe your main characters

HMMMMMmmm well. I wanna save the big descriptions for the RO profiles, so let’s go with short descriptions this time.

RIVER: A punk rocker with a heart of gold who’s done a lot of work on their anger management issues.

VALENTINE: A cheerleader who tries really hard to pretend that nothing matters to make themselves feel better about the fact that they don’t matter. 

NATSUKI: A garden punk who learned a long time ago to stab first, question never, and always, always shield their heart.

HENRY: A older sibling (of way too damn many) who wears their heart on their sleeve because maybe then someone will acknowledge that there’s more to them than being their parents’ enforcer, or their siblings keeper. 

Aries - Share a line that you’re proud of!

This is already in the demo, but honestly, this moment:

"Werewolves?" I yelp, jerking backward and looking around immediately. "Don't worry, Kiddo," Alice says as she scoops up my bag and drags it inside for me. "They only bite if you ask real nice."

Lupus - Have you abandoned other WIPs? Tell us about some and why you abandoned them?

Oh lord. Well... that depends? Or maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better by pulling hairs. So here’s the thing. 

Do I have any abandoned IF WIPs? No. This is my first solo game attempt. I actually have a pretty decent track record for games, though part of that was writing for an actual game studio. Deadlines, producers, and paycheques make finishing a thing a lot easier. You aren’t allowed to “baby” the story as much as you might otherwise. 

That said... My WIP list is long when it comes to fanfiction, including more than a few abandoned WIPs, and I technically have two novels I keep pulling on and off the backburner. There was also one spectacularly failed web graphic novel from... holy crap, was that a decade ago? Maybe. So let’s talk about them.

(And I’m going to put everything past here under a cut because it’s long)

The graphic novel is probably the one I regret the most, and also the hardest to talk about so it’ll go first. It was called Wind Spirits, and if you google it (and actually manage to find it) be prepared for blood and nudity. While nothing in the comic itself was sexualized, it was a fantasy world based in a climate similar to African savannahs and the majority of the cast didn’t really do clothing. This turned out to be a mistake, to some degree. 

I briefly mentioned this in another ask, but along with the whole “I don’t know what attraction means to most people” thing, I also don’t and have never understood the concept of nudity as something that’s inherently sexual. People’s bodies don’t bother me one way or the other, and my training as an artist only emphasized this. So it never occurred to me that simply depicting characters in the nude, in a way that was clearly meant as naturalistic and non-sexualized, would garner a fair amount of “omg this is adult!!” reactions, as well as a LOT of unwanted sexual comments from viewers. Not until I started receiving intimate details of my viewers, uh, fantasy lives that I was in no way comfortable with. It wasn’t just comments, either, but seeing people sort the pages of my comic into “spank bank” folders on DeviantArt, submitting them to fetish groups, etc. 

Now, if I had been choosing to write something erotic, this wouldn’t have bothered me. I have since written soft core porn for a living, and have seen comments made about said writing without taking it in the same way. But context matters, right?

And for a little more context, it especially made me feel A Way because, well, the larger reason why I ultimately walked myself back from the project: 99.9% of the cast were black. Which isn’t a problem, in and of itself of course. It’s just that... 

I’m a white woman from the Southern USA. And while I deeply enjoy and love the world that I built for Wind Spirits (one that I’d been designing since I was about fourteen), well, mistakes were made. It wasn’t just the weird optics of being a white woman drawing a bunch of naked black characters, which I only really became aware of during the process, but also some deeply rooted racist beliefs I’d been holding onto that I hadn’t worked through, and hadn’t begun to even recognize as a problem until I was partway into the thing.

It was when I started learning about and unpacking these things that I realized I couldn’t keep moving forward with Wind Spirits as it was. Keep in mind, this was around ten years ago. I didn’t know about, and hadn’t worked through, even half as much as I have now, and couldn’t begin to fathom how to fix the problem. So while I don’t believe I publicly posted anything that was terribly racist on the face of things (at least, no one has ever called me out on it, if I did,) I knew the direction the project was heading at the time, and that it was a message I no longer agreed with, or felt comfortable putting out into the world. 

There’s a tiny possibility that I could salvage it one day, rework it into something better. In fact, I’ve toyed with quite a few outlines of story directions that would do that, but I’m not sure it’s actually going to happen. There’s just too much history there, for me.

... 

OK, so on a less heavy note, the other big issue with abandoned WIPs are fanfiction stuff. Those are my biggest downfall by far, but a lot of it has to do with... I tend to write really heavy AUs that don’t get a lot of traction in the fandoms they’re for, probably because they’re heavy AUs. (or just not that good.) I might hyperfixate on a fic for months, but ultimately drop the ball because life threw too much at me at once and, hell, it’s not like there was anyone engaging with the fic, anyway. 

Or, in the incredibly rare instance there were people commenting regularly, it just has to do with time and with the feeling that I’d rather be making this into something that’s mine, and mine alone. That I’m wasting really great original fic ideas by making them AUs of a property they don’t resemble in the least anymore (another reason why they don’t get much traction.) 

So yeah. If y’all’d like to hear more about the two original novels I have on the burner I can also go into that. This just seems like it’s really long already, and I kind of feel like I just wrote a callout post for myself, so. Yeah. 

[just-another-warsmith]

Saturnine, or I how I learned to stop holding onto old continuity with 40K

(Warning: this post pretty massively spoils the latest Siege of Terra novel, Saturnine by Dan Abnett. Still going under a cut, but you have been warned.)

So a few months ago, when the limited edition of Dan Abnett’s Saturnine came out, there was a bit of, shall we say, discourse over several elements of the plot.

Nah, that’s putting it mildly, there was a serious amount of genuine anger over two particular plot points; the story of Olly Piers and how that served as part of the origin of Ollanious Pious, patron saint of the Imperial Guard, and the revelations of Erda, a female Perpetual and former associate of the Emperor. The former was a minor shitshow, the latter one that was pretty damn colossal and I wound up unfollowing a few people, several of whom I can tell now hadn’t read the book or had read it poorly, just because they were blowing up my dash about it and they didn’t do the decent thing of spoiler tags. Abnett doesn’t care about continuity! Abnett is just making stuff up and Black Library lets him! I don’t care what that Erda lady says, the plot points she’s contradicting are fact!

Oh. Oh dear. 

So let’s address these, shall we?

Ollanious Pious, Patron Saint of the Imperial Guard, Astra Militarium Imperial Fist and Custodian of the Emperor.

Through the course of the book, we meet a normal human soldier, Olly Piers, who gradually a legend begins to build up about how he is some sort of defender of the Emperor for an action where he and others defend a banner of the Emperor. At the very end of that plot thread, Olly stands alone, in front of the same banner, facing down nothing less than Angron. He dies, of course, defending said banner. People went off on this because it seemed to be contradicting 40K lore, the lore of how Ollanious Pious stood in front of the Emperor when he was fighting Horus and defended him against the traitor, his death serving as the moment when the Emperor finally realized how far gone Horus was and moved to kill him. 

And yeah, you know, that’s indeed in the original short story that William King wrote back in the 90s depicting the battle between the Emperor and Horus. Ollanious Pious, defending the Emperor unto the death...

Except for a later version where it was an Imperial Fist who died defending the Emperor unto the death. But nah, it must have been Ollanious Pious...

Except for another later version of the same story where it was a Custodian who died defending the Emperor unto death. 

I own all three versions, by the way, through various books published over the past twenty years. That has never been a constant point in the lore, it’s just been reworked over the years as the background of the game has evolved and changed and some things have left or just don’t fit anymore. We’ll come back to this.

Erda, Buggering Up Yet More Articles From White Dwarf.

The thing that set off the discourse hardcore though was the appearance of Erda, a previously unseen female Perpetual who claims to be the “mother” of the Primarchs by being the female genetic source for all of them, and more importantly, being the person who scattered the Primarchs across the galaxy, taking them away from the Emperor. She also gives the name she knew the Emperor by several thousand years ago (she explicitly says that was just what he was calling himself, and it wasn’t his actual name) and gives some info dumps that try to patch over why the Emperor seems to be a non-stop fuck up. Humanity is supposed to evolve into Perpetuals, near-immortal psykers, over a long scale of time; the Emperor, though, does not want to wait, and he’s trying to get millions of years of evolution done in a few thousand.

Oh boy.

Now what interests me about this is that a lot of people did not go off so much on the revelation that there was a “mother” to the Primarchs (though yeah of course they did) but the fact that Erda says she scattered the Primarchs. “NO WAY. BULLSHIT. IT WAS CHAOS! NOT SOME CHARACTER WE’VE NEVER HEARD OF!”

Sigh.

Over the years in the old White Dwarf magazine, Games Workshop published articles about each of the major Space Marine chapters in a series called Index Astartes. They were collected in a series of books called, you guessed it, Index Astartes. I own several of them, and here’s a thing about them. When talking about the scattering of the Primarchs, there is always-always-a massive level of ambiguity about how it happened. If I had a dime for every time one of the articles said something like “whether by accident, the design of the Emperor, or the machinations of Chaos, the Primarchs were scattered across the Galaxy”..well, I’d have a dollar and eighty cents maximum, but you get the point. How the Primarchs were spread across the galaxy has always been ambiguous. Erda saying she did it does not contradict the lore, simply because that’s all she says. She could have been a willing or unwilling agent of Chaos. She could be an unreliable narrator. She could be lying. She could have been manipulated into doing it by the Emperor. We don’t know yet.

(I have zero problem with Erda being the “mother” of the Primarchs, by the way. The Primarchs were never said to be straight clones of the Emperor, so it stands to reason that there was, at some point, a female genetic donor. Abnett just wrote about her. She does not supplant any parental figure that the Primarchs had. Hilariously, I saw someone say that Erda did not replace Tarasha Euten as Guilliman’s mother. This is hilarious because Tarasha Euten was...created by Dan Abnett in the novel The Unremembered Empire. And is equally as unsupported by the previous lore as Erda is.)

See, here’s the problem, and I have to say this gently: a lot of people have latched onto particular versions of the lore without acknowledging or even knowing that there’s always a certain level of ambiguity built into the lore on purpose. That the lore has been built, piecemeal and without much regard to the previous versions, largely to serve as cool background to sell a tabletop game and a shit load of models. If you have latched onto one version of it as a headcanon, well, okay, I can’t fault you there, but you’re not acknowledging that (1) the lore has never been constant and (2) it’s Games Workshop’s IP, they can change it if they want to, and probably will. Hell the Forge World Black Books on the Horus Heresy contradict some of the earliest HH novels.

I have never understood why people will fight like cats and dogs over recent changes in continuity and aren’t fighting for the original, normal human General Horus, the original start of the rebellion against the Emperor, or for the half human, half Eldar Ultramarine. No, no, actually I do understand it. Most people don’t even know about it. They get into 40K at a particular time and that’s their golden lore, their fluff. They don’t know how often it’s changed, how many times the backstory has been tweaked and altered and reworked. They hear at one point that the Emperor was suggested to be a person born out of a bunch of shamans combining their power together, and that’s all he ever was. They hear the Primarchs were spread by Chaos in one story and that’s all that ever was.

Saturnine does nothing that Games Workshop hasn’t done themselves over and over again, and will probably do over and over again so long as the IP exists. 

Oh, the book itself? Is bloody brilliant. The slow build into the non stop action of the last third of the book is amazing, and that last third is just ridiculously good. 

[matt-eldritch]

Mortal Kombat Akademy

In between my work on the 31 Days of Original Characters challenge, I've begun to revisit my plans for the big Mortal Kombat story I'd wanted to do for awhile; Mortal Kombat Akademy. I've done a lot of character busts with backstory info and I did a sort of "season one" plots but this is something I'm not really satisfied with anymore. I'm gonna spend the new year trying to readjust and rework the overall story and characters to something more workable. Here's a few odds and ends of what I've planned so far;

Story Outline

Shaolin Monks, Lui Kang and Kung Lao, are recruited into the Mortal Kombat Akademy, the secret fighting school located on the island paradise of international crimelord, Shang Tsung. But those who step foot on the island are subjected to terrors beyond comprehension once they learn the true purpose of the school; a training ground for the soldiers of an interdimensional tyrant who conquers by use of a fighting tournaments ordained by the gods themselves. But one of the gods, Raiden, is willing to give Earth a fighting chance by training as many chosen Earthlings as he can so they may finally defeat the forces of evil in the Mortal Kombat tournament.

Kinda bare bones but for plot synopsis go, it helps me sort of make a launching pad for the ideas. Like my original idea, the story is still primarily about Lui Kang and Kung Lao going to the school and meeting/befriending the typical heroes of the Mortal Kombat world, Raiden being their mentor and Shang Tsung being the big bad to overcome.

But the story ideas I had just don’t really cut it for me now. I feel as though I was sort of putting the cart before the horse by putting so much time making elaborate details instead of snowballing one idea to make a big bright idea. I’ve made some titles for them;

Start the Semester!

Tour the Akademy!

Prepare for the First Exams!

Bond Like Your Lives Depend On It!

Learn the Fatalities!

Wills and Testaments!

Survive the Detetionrealm!

Survive the First Round of Exams!

Survive the Second Round of Exams!

Survive the Last Round of Exams!

Party Your Asses Off!

Mortal Kombat Akademy V. The DC Universe: Dawn of Pain!

To give some context to them, I had a storyarc planned; Early on, Raiden would want the Earthrealm class (the class would have Kang, Lao, Johnny, Sonya, Jax, Stryker and Nightwolf) to be friends and allies in order to survive the matches and save the world. Easier said than done when so many personalities were clashing together. And once they learn about fatalities, the class goes through some mental anguish over having to kill or be killed, Kang being the only one vowing to never kill anyone, to the disbelief of everyone else. Things start looking up once the class starts to trust and respect one another and become stronger fighters.

But Kano, on the behalf of Goro’s Class (Mileena, Kitana, Jade, Baraka, Sheeva, Skarlet, Reptile, Tanya and Kano himself) frames Sonya and Johnny for a crime, leading to Professor Quan Chi to exile them to the “Detention Realm” where his goons, Drahmin and Moloch, deal out the punishments. My idea for them that they’d be bumbling and dim so Johnny and Sonya could escape them, bonding while trying to make it to the final exams. Everyone but Kang and Lao have been defeated and since Sonya and Johnny were late, it’d all be up to them to beat Goro. Once Goro beast Lao half to death, Kang faces his fears and manages to defeat Goro without killing him, but not without making him suffer for all the pain he’s caused.

The class’ reward for passing the exams is an-all expense paid vacation to Edenia, which is basically a hellhole built to Shao Kahn’s pleasure. Here, Kang and Kitana get some alone time to romantically connect to one another during the celebratory feast hosted by Kitana and Mileena’s parents, Shao Kahn and Sindel. But really, the feast is for the Kahns to asses the threat that Raiden’s students hold to their long term plans. And finally, the DCU story is just a fun breather where I have the mid-1990s versions of their heroes (Superman with a mullet, Batman Forever styled Batman and the two Wonder Women, Artemis and Diana, for example).

And after rereading what I had for plots, I noticed how little the Lin Keui featured into the stories since I designed a lot of them for the series. Should try to fix that somehow.

Overall Art Style

As I stated in previous MKA concept art, I based the art style on the look of Steven Universe. I still intend for the project to be written fanfiction, but I do wish to have some elements of it to be drawn by myself. Not a full adaptation but maybe a full page illustration of each chapter, along with the general character/environment sketches, or like the ending credits of The Mandalorian series.

But back to the art style, I wish to change it. I can’t really go further on the style of Steven Universe if this story is going to be about such heavy violence and gore. It wouldn’t really look right, might cross over into unintentional hilarity or into the uncanny valley. I’m looking at something like the artist One, the man behind One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 whose style is really unique, fast, sketchy and frenetic, all attributes I think will work well. I also love the anime aesthetic of the 1990s so that’s definitely a goal to achieve since I’m setting the story in 1995.

Story Ideas To Keep

* Koins: My idea for an in-canon reason for the koins you win in matches (at least in Mks 9-11, IDK how far back they go) to unlock Krypt stuff will be used as a way for the students to buy things like food, clothing and resurrections due to being killed by another student’s fatalities since its primarily a learning facility instead of a battlefield. Though if you’re broke, you’re not gonna be saved. Koins, like in the games, will be given for performing a fatality and a moral choice comes up when you think “do I do good and be paid less, or do something terrible but get more chances of being resurrected if I die?”

*Profiles: I’ve got to do some rewrites for the characters. Nothing too too major since I do like a lot of what I wrote, but its more to streamline it to fit in the new direction I’m doing. Like, having Sonya, Jax and Stryker being Hall Monitors, I don’t think something like that is gonna be part of my story since I’m trying to take it a tad more seriously. The idea of Detention Realm and having Dharmin and Moloch as lovable henchmen is still canon, as far as I’m concerned. Think the two mice henchmen from the film “Flushed Away”. And on a final note, the newly retconned origin for Sindel...that shit isn’t gonna be part of my story.

Overall, whatever backstories that’ll be changed will likely be on a case by case basis. No telling who or what will be changed right now, but I’ve now thought of some parts to start with.

Diversity and Inclusion

This one is probably gonna be one of the hardest to accomplish since I really want to make the series really diverse with body types, genders and sexuality, race, neurodiversity, that type of subject matter. Inclusion is really important to me, and I’m scared how I might screw it up like how Disney, JK Rowling, SNL, Simpsons, Big Mouth, Voltron so many more screw it all up since they all serve the needs of the capitalist, neoliberal status quo over the voices of the marginalised.

And with that, brings up some more challenges. Will I make so many diverse original characters that they take time away from the canon characters? Should I make more canon MK characters differently diverse?

I'm also planning on having the characters display prejudices and bigotries but I'm scared I'll go in too much of "Bright" territory, if you know what I mean.

Tackling Mature Content

I mean, it goes without saying that the series is going to be full of violence and gore since that’s basically in the DNA of Mortal Kombat in the first place. But there’s much more serious topics I want to try to write. Like the effects of abuse, queer rights, the above themes about diversity and inclusion, the seemingly never ending war and the ideas of the long defeat. Of course, my chapters will be marked with as clear as possible content warnings, those are important.

A Shared Universe

A month ago, I watched a video about Midway trying to recreate the success of Mortal Kombat into other fighting games. The video, “Remember when Midway tried to copy Mortal Kombat?” talked about three would-be franchises of Midway fighting games; Mace: The Dark Age, War Gods and Bio FREAKS. After watching the video and reading about the games, I think it’d be good for lore if they were integrated into my story. Mace and War Gods could be used as part of the backstory of the series. Like the idea of the Earthrealm Kombatants being the descendants of the characters of Mace and War Gods, maybe Raiden was involved with the later, I’m not sure. Bio FREAKS could be latter used if I go into a time travel story. Maybe a mix of the game and the story/characters of Mortal Kombat X. As for Midway’s other successful but overlooked franchise, Killer Instinct, that is probably going to be the most recurring element in the shared universe. UltraTech, the main villains of the series would be the people behind such things as Kano’s cyborg eye, the Lin Keui’s Cyber Initiative and being the rulers of Neo-Amerika in the Bio FREAKS timeline. I also wrote in the profiles of Nightwolf and Sub-Zero that the Killer Instinct universe is linked to my story (one of his divorced parents is dating one of the parents of KI’s Black Eagle and Thunder while Glacius was an alien that helped give Cryomancers their powers).

And on a side note, there is another Midway MK clone called Primal Rage, which I swear I had one of the toys based on it and saw a parody of it on an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory. Its pretty gruesome, its a bunch of savage Kaiju in a post-apocalyptic earth that resembles the stone age. Probably an alternate timeline/dimension if I use it in my series. Who knows, maybe elements of the worlds of Street Fighter and or God of War could make an appearance...

Writing the Damned Thing

Probably the absolute hardest part of this entire thing. I struggle with actually keeping attention to writing since I’m primarily a visual artist and it feels terrible to not even follow through on any idea I have and it just kinda sits and collects dust in my brain. If its sketching and rendering, I can do it. If its writing shit down, I just have executive dysfunction when it comes to it. I never know where to start writing it, how to continue writing it, how to finish it or how to put it all together cohesively.

I can’t do this without at least writing the complete first season, if I do it on a semi-regular basis, nothing is going to be done. Even like, less than a week of non-recurring writing is like a poison to me. I don’t know how, but if I make room for an hour or two of writing a day every day might help me get more prepared for longer writing.

In Conclusion

When will the first chapter be done? I don’t know. When will I start writing? Hopefully as soon as I can. I can try to post updates or work in progresses, but that’s still a pipe dream, in my honest opinion. But I want to make progress in 2020, I need to make a difference and to actually make this coming year worthwhile.

[grimelords]

The hits just don’t stop coming!

My May playlist is finished and it’s only almost one month late! Everything you want and nothing you don’t from Nicki Minaj, the band that did the OC theme song and Italian Adele. What more could you ask for! 

Listen here!

Curious - Amerie: Amerie, who sang the world's greatest song 1 Thing and unfortunately never had any other good songs, surprise released a 22 minute album called 4AM Mulholland and a companion EP that was 20 minutes long called After 4AM last year. I don't know why she didn't just release one normal length album but anyway, because she's Amerie people weren't exactly eagerly awaiting a surprise release album from her so it came and went pretty quickly. This song though is really very good and sets a really nice midnight smoky tone that the whole rest of the album/EP unfortunately fails to really live up to. I also found out in my research that Amerie is also apparently a semi-influential book vlogger 'BookTuber' and last year edited a book of YA short stories where other BookTubers 'reimagined fairy tales from the oft-misunderstood villains' points of view. She's got heaps going on.

Vipers Follow You - Amon Tobin: Amon Tobin has lost his damn mind yet again. His last album was 8 years ago and it sounded like a hardware test for a new kind of million dollar sound system. Every single type of sound and frequency was crammed into it and it felt like a sound sculture that could physically attack you rather than an album that you listened to for fun. Now his new album sounds like the direct opposite. There's no drums on it at all and it's all stripped back thick and smooth acoustic-modelled textures and it's very nice. This song is a good example of the album feel overall: not exactly ambient or laid-back, but definite night music from a guy who has gone all the way from chillout trip-hop to walls of hydraulic noise over his career and it's always such a thrill to hear people pushing forward in their sound 9 albums in.

Do The Panic - Phantom Planet: Phantom Planet who famously did the theme song for The OC have reformed and released their first new song in ten years. This isn't that song but there was a bunch of people in the comments on the Stereogum article about it saying they were and underrated band and their 2008 album Raise The Dead has bangers and guess what: they were right!

Roman Holiday - Nicki Minaj: Roman Holiday reentered the billboard charts last month because it became relevant again via people putting it in memes where they would play a sped up version of the song over sped up videos of.. anything really. It's not a very good meme but I thank god for it because otherwise I would never have learned that it's a very good song. I also think there's a very interesting lesson to be learned here about Nicki Minaj because she premiered this song at the 2012 Grammys before Roman Reloaded came out with an elaborate Exorcist routine and everyone hated this extremely weird song and extremely weird performance so it was scrapped as the first single and they put out Starships instead. Nicki Minaj seem to me like an artist that has always struggled to ride the line between pop marketability and doing their own unique thing in much the same way as Eminem, and just like Eminem she's eventually settled in to a very safe and marketable version of herself. Roman Holiday is a glimpse of the Nicki That Could Have been that just starts singing Come All Ye Faithful in the middle of a song and does the chorus in an extremely dodgy British accent. There's a good bit on the wiki for this song that quotes Jessica Hooper's Spin review that says "the pop tracks are a paying of the piper and the too-perfect, Dr. Luke-produced songs are her penance for sneaking deranged yodeling ode 'Roman Holiday' in there." More deranged yodelling odes please Nicki!

Cousins - Vampire Weekend: I've never gotten into Vampire Weekend for an unknown reason. I like every song I've heard of theirs I've just never properly sat down and listened to an album and appreciated it until Father Of The Bride this year. I have however always loved Cousins. It’s got a completely deranged riff, the drums sound like their going to catch fire and it ends with chiming bells. It’s completely off the rails and I think the video is one of my favourites ever for just simply matching the tone of the song and the performance.

Lost Your Number - Nu Shooz: On the episode of R U Talkin' R.E.M Re: Me? with Ezra Koenig they were talking about grunge and the early 90s and how music that had 'authenticity' suddently became so popular. Scott's reasoning was that by the late 80s pop music had become so incredibly vaccuous and bad that people were yearning for anything with meaning. He said 'pop was so bad, stuff like Nu Shooz' and I immediately remembered how fucking good Nu Shooz are and paused the podcast to listen to them instead. This is an absolutely great song because the lyrics never rise above linear storytelling. 'I lost your number' is not a metaphor for lost contact or leaving someone or anything like that. This whole song is about trying to call someone but you've lost the piece of paper that you wrote their phone number on. She even describes the paper like maybe you the listener have seen it around somewhere, I absolutey love it.

Paper Trail$ - Joey Bada$$: Joey Bada$$ is a goon but he has good songs sometimes. If he wasn't a famous rapper he would be working full time in reddit arguments where people rank members of the Wu-Tang Clan. He's one of these 'real hip hop' 'lyrical miracle' guys and he even goes so far as to rework C.R.E.A.M in this song to say cash RUINS everything around me :O but this beat is nice as hell and I woke up with the bit where says 'shit is really real out here' repeating in my head.

Julien - Carly Rae Jepsen: I'm really loving this new Carly Rae album. It's not as heavy on hits as Emotion obviously but it's more even overall and has a lot more to dig into I think. I just keep listening to it. This song especially is so nice because it's a great example of how you only need two chords to get something extremely funky going.

Rock Non Stop - Cassius: Cassius finally have another great song! The nearly two minute choral intro is such genius because of how suddenly and forcefully it drops you into the middle of the most boneheaded dance song I've heard in a long time. Two different silly voices going back and forth with each other saying 'rock non stop' and 'gimme the good time', who could ask for anything more?

Just as I was about to publish this I saw the news that Phillipe Zdar died which is so sad! Just as they started releasing fantastic new music! So now this song is tinged with that sort of sadness which is unfair because it’s such a fun and silly piece of music, it doesn’t deserve to hold that kind of weight.

DOLO 5 - Dolo Percussion: This Dolo Percussion album absolutely astounded me. No melody! Just drums! For an hour and a half! It's a complete world of its own and you can get totally lost in the depths of it. Every song has a completely unique palette and it never ever feels boring like percussion focused music sometimes can, it's constantly evolving in every track and never settles into anything for too long. Things just come and go so naturally it feels like actually trying to figure out the structure of these songs would be impossible. There's a few moments where there's a hint of a bassline or melody in a some of the later songs and it completely shakes you up, like seeing sunlight again after years of absolutely thriving in the dark.

Song About An Angel - Sunny Day Real Estate: The way he sings 'running behind' in this is maybe one of my favourite pieces of vocal performance ever. He just shouted himself apart. Also the Genius description of this song is one of the best emo sentences I’ve ever seen: "The song is believed to be a conversation between a guy and an angel (possibly a girl)."

This Life - Vampire Weekend: The R U Talkin' R.E.M. Re: Me? episode with Ezra really put this album into a lot more context for me, because he's talking about being influenced by The Grateful Dead - not musically exactly but in the mindset and the idea of being in a guitar band and making guitar music in 2019 which is an interesting thing to think about. Anyway this has such a Dead feel to it and I'm really interested to see what they do live because as I've heard they're really mixing up their reputation of being a band that sounds exactly like the album and really going for it instead and doing absolutely anything which is a lot more fun.

The Past Is A Grotesque Animal - of Montreal: I've been getting heavily into Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer? this month and it's just so incredible. This song especially as the centrepiece of this whole album is amazing. The mindset is so intriguing to me: absolutely going though it in the worst way possible, getting divorced and everything like that but also somehow managing to keep it twee. The sorts of things that influenced this album would turn any normal person to heavier or stranger music but somehow he manages to believe so hard in the power of twee indie pop that he pushed it to the limit and create a masterpiece.

The Cascades - Janice Scroggins: You know that tweet about riding the bus and looking out the window and pretending the music you're listening to is the soundtrack to the movie about you riding the bus? That's me except with Scott Joplin rags and pretending i'm in a silent film where I embarrass myself in front of a society lady.

The Governor - Nicolas Jaar: I think i’ve probably already had this song on a playlist like three times so I’m going to stop talking about it but here’s my favourite thing this time: It could have just ended and been fine but instead it goes to saxophone hell and that’s what makes this a 10/10 song.

The Less I Know The Better - Tame Impala: My peabrain moment this month was suddenly developing a huge obsession with this song for some reason. Have you guys heard of this band ‘Tame Impala’? I really feel like they might blow up! One of my favourite things about this song is that the top youtube comment for a long time was ‘this is like the cuck anthem’. They’re right!

New Town - Life Without Buildings: Life Without Buildings feels like indie rock from another dimension. This came out in 2000 and for some reason I can't reconcile that fact with how it sounds. It sounds like it should have come out at least 5 years later. I cannot imagine this style of vocal ever working so effectively but somehow it just does. I'm hanging on absolutely every word and feeling it so intensely when in reality she sounds like something went wrong with the recording. I just love it.

Bang Bang Bang - Mark Ronson And The Business Intl: This is a hugely underrated song and this era of Mark Ronson seems to have been totally forgotten which is unfortunate. This song, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga and OMG by Usher all came out around the same time in my memory and I remember feeling very optimistic for the direction pop seemed to be heading in. Bombastic and unique and unafraid to be structurally different but then it turned out it wasn’t really a trend at all, it was just three great songs. So who knows.

Back To The Trees - Adele H: I suddenly remembered this song I completely fell in love with last year and remembered as a moderate hit only to find that it has <1000 listens on spotify and 300 on youtube. Simply not good enough, please listen to this song! Support my friend and yours Adele H: ‘The Italian Adelian’

Out There - Studio: What’s so good about Studio is it’s technically an electronic duo but it has the feeling of a jam jam band. Their wiki article is obviously written by their management but it also describes them as an ‘afrobeat-dub-disco-indie-pop adventure’ which is very true. It’s an adventure! It just keeps moving on and on through fifty flavours of groove!

Shut Up Kiss Me - Angel Olsen: This really is maybe the best love song ever written! Because it's about standing firm and not giving up on love! Stop pretending I'm not there when it's clear I'm not going anywhere / If I'm out of sight then take another look around!

Through This Town - Mia Dyson: If you ever need an optimistic song to lay down on the floor to then here's one.

Cry Flames - Rustie: I'm on my usual shit about how good Glass Swords was and how that it's a tragedy that this never coalesced into a major movement like it should have. This is such a good sound that just kind of disappeared because vaporwave and everything overlapped with the boring parts of it and the anime chillout version became popular instead. Sad!

Real Truth (feat. Tkay Maidza) - J-E-T-S, Machinedrum and Jimmy Edgar: I love this beat so much. The sort of beat that sounds like it's playing out of a droid that got shot with a lazer and is malfunctioning.

Aute Cuture - Rosalia: me putting these lyrics through google translate: oh my god she’s right this IS on fire

Self-Immolate - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard: King Gizz are a metal band now and they're writing the very best kind of metal songs - sci-fi about burning to death in the skies of Venus that's also a climate change parable.

Magic Arrow - Timber Timbre: Timber Timbre feel underrated to me. I never see anyone talking about them but they're one of the most consistently great bands around, I absolutely love them. There's so much space in this song, this whole style of minimal production is underutilised. It feels like if Wicked Game by Chris Isaak was about an 18th century cult leader instead which I think we can all agree is a much improved song.

Kim's Caravan - Courtney Barnett: I love this style of songwriting where you just sit on an extremely heavy bassline the whole time and have no chorus, which affords you the freedom to just get bigger and bigger and smaller as you wish. The Drones cover of River Of Tears works like this too and I think it's just masterful.

When The Movie's Over - Twin Shadow: My belief is Confess is front to back one of the greatest pop albums ever written. Please, please listen to it and be moved.

listen here

[siarven]

Dreams and Shadows - Beta Phase?!

I finally finished the (more or less) second draft of Dreams and Shadows!  

[WIP PAGE] [PINTEREST BOARD]

≽(^ ᗜ ^)≼  Still can’t believe it. Honestly I feel a little dead inside :’D This is the first version of it that I actually kinda like! Sure, there are many problems but... it’s getting there!!! ●.◉

THIS MEANS SEVERAL THINGS

One, I can finally work on Like Dragons of Old again! YAYYYY!!!!

Two, I’m searching for beta readers. Now, there are a few things to add at this point: About half a year ago, I finished the first half of Dreams. Some of you already read that and gave me great feedback. Since then I haven’t touched the first half, even though some things have changed slightly between the first and second half. Therefore, there might be some (additional?!) inconsistencies there :’D 

This is only a second draft, for the most part. I’ve reworked some parts of it more often than others, but some only once or twice (after rewriting scenes, for example). Therefore, I need to find out where pacing does (not) work, which plot points (and twists) and characters work, or not... If I need to include more worldbuilding or less, if there are info dumps anywhere, if the character voices work. Stuff like that. There’s a list of beta-questions after the main text. 

I’ve never actually *really* done this because this is the first story that ever got to this point. I have to say, I’m hella proud of having gotten here at all, and without you and some personal friends I probably would’ve never done it. I’ve been working on Dreams and Shadows on and off since November 2014, when I wrote Draft Zero during NaNoWriMo. I never really worked on it outside of NaNo season, until approximately March of 2018, when I suddenly started making writer friends! :’))) Honestly, I love you and your projects so much and you’re all so talented and it’s such a pleasure to see your projects grow, and to be motivated to finally get stuff done... 

As to any deadlines: I myself am currently head-deep in my bachelor’s thesis, and several of my friends are, too. Since they can only start reading in March and I won’t get anywhere before that (and have Like Dragons of Old if I get bored and want to write) you’d have until the beginning of August? The more feedback I get, the better; so the more time, the more feedback? Right? :’D 

Dreams and Shadows is 120K long, so about 300 pdf pages. (I’m still surprised that I managed to keep it there. There was a point where I thought it would end up being two books). 

A general warning: I love being very mean to my characters.

If you’re (still) interested in finding out more about my stupid brain-child of a novel, you can check out the info below the cut! (Also, taggs are below the cut, too)

Name: Dreams and Shadows [WIP PAGE] [PINTEREST BOARD] 

Genre/Setting: Fantasy with some steampunk elements set (for the most part) in another world called Aelaris. Technology is a combination of magic and steam-powered machinery.  Type: Standalone, with the possibility of a sequel set 10 years later.  Language: English POV: First person present. Two “main” POVs, two “less main” POVs (less often).   I usually write 3rd person past tense, it just didn’t work for this one... :’D

Synopsis

Two siblings and their guardian-cat get dragged into an ancient conflict when the older has a life-threatening “accident”. 

AVA’s whole life up until that point has been revolving around Ben so the fact that he's now so badly hurt that he's (more or less) in a coma comes as quite a shock. Incapable of coping with the situation, she sees everything falling apart around her since since Ben was always the one holding the more and more estranged members of his family together. BEN, meanwhile, “wakes up” as a sort of ghost days later and remembers nothing at all. Now he has to find a way to return before the living give up on him, and Ava has to help her parents reconnect and learn that pushing everyone away when they only want to help is probably not the best plan.  And maybe there’s a way for her to help Ben, even if she isn’t quite sure if he’s still there at all. At least there's still the family cat, Amber, who is a lot more than she seems. 

Ava is almost eight, Ben is eleven-and-a-half, in case that matters^^

Worldbuilding: 

It's been roughly 500 years since an apocalypse that basically killed off most of the human population. Society before that was really advanced and had almost wrecked the planet, until a powerful entity disagreed and unleashed chaos. So nowadays society remembers only a few things from before, mostly by word of mouth, or from the sealed-off ruins they excavated once they had recovered enough. That’s why technology is mostly a mix of steam-powered technology and magic.

There are also a bunch of tiny dragons, some ancient entities, a former pirate queen, several monsters, pigeons, and a demon who may have something to do with the accident. And a lot of mean magic. 

That’s the main aesthetic. I have one for Ava and Ben respectively on my wip page :)

If you’re interested or want to learn more about it, you could send me a private message on here or contact me via email xsiarven@gmail.com :) Anyways, thank you so much for your interest! <3

Taglist / some peeps who once professed interest in my stuff and might be maybe interested?? 

@romenna @asttralhell @prismalicht @authordai @madmoonink @lynnafred @fynniana​ @writin-maaagic​ @raiswanson​ @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword​ @warmbones @importance-of-being-crazy @thereisnothingwrongwithbeingmad @merigreenleaf  @sincerestaffect @zekethegm @hypnocutiegypsy @writin-maaagic @random-stuff-thrown-into-a-pot @kittensartsbooks @stephrawlingwrites @annelaurant-writing @lady-redshield-writes @wolfdancer333 @bmariewinter

hope it’s ok to tag you aaAAAHHHHH

[buffintruder]

for the fic asks: 1, because I'm always forgetting which stories you've got going, and 15!

1. If you’re an author, how many WIPs do you currently have? (Be honest!)

Ugh... way too many. Thinking about this is providing me with motivation to finish it though, so at least there’s that.

Right now, I have:

A Tale of Two Kravitzs, an 8th bird Kravitz au. This one is hopefully less than 15k words from being completed

Bartimaeus Reincarnation au, set in modern times where Bartimaeus is the only one to remember. This one is close to being finished, with a few scenes in the middle that I need to write or rewrite. The problem is I started it a while ago, and I don’t love some of the character decisions and writing style I used, so if I ever finish it, it will need a lot of reworking

Les Mis Merlin au. I’m pretty close to having the first part of this series and the prequel ready to be published, and I’ve written about a third of the second part. I want to start finishing this up as soon as I’m done with the Kravitz au.

The World Ain’t Sherwood Forest, a catch me if you can au of Les Mis plus civil rights. I’ve written all of this, but I keep feeling like this is a bad piece of writing from a social justice standpoint, so I haven’t gotten around to making final edits, though I hope to do that eventually.

Yamani Kel au, which Kel is half-Yamani. I’ve only written like 500 words of this so far, but I feel like I’ll be working on this one a lot in between other writing

This post-canon Bartimaeus au where Ptolemy’s cousin didn’t kill him, and instead he travels the world and goes back to the Other Place, only to accidentally be summoned in the start of the 21st century. I haven’t looked at this for a few months, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s worth finishing, but it is pretty close to being done, and I know roughly how this story ends, so I think I’ll try to finish it.

Then I have two Susan from Discworld in Hogwarts ideas that I started writing a bit of, though I think I’ll only actually write one of these. One takes place during the 5th year of Harry Potter where Death’s counterpart in that universe asks for some help in dealing with Voldemort, so Death sends Susan to teach at Hogwarts. The second idea is bunch of short stories in a hogwarts au, in which discworld characters and harry potter characters of the epilogue era get up to shenanigans. Susan is still the granddaughter of Death though.

15. Post the last line you wrote without context.

The last writing stuff I did was editing, but the last sentence I changed was:

And it’s not like he never feels that aching emptiness of a universe too vast and an existence too solitary.

[chibipika]

Oh my god, I’m digging through old files on my backup harddrive and I found this dream from 2011 in which me, @antialiasis, and a baby dragon are on the run from The King of Everything.  It is absolutely batshit and I love it:

Okay, so for some reason I was hanging out with Dragonfree.  What the hell, subconscious?  Why do you always stick my online acquaintances into my dreams?  (I think it’s a side effect of that time in my life where all I had were online friends and the fanfic forum was pretty much my entire life, even though that was like 6 years ago.)  But at least this time it sort of makes sense—I’ve been working on an off on the Ouen dragons piece a lot lately, adding little touches here and there when I’m bored, so people often ask me what it is, so I frequently launch into explanations of, “Oh hey there’s this writer with a cool fanfic, and I’m doing fanart of it.”  “Hey what’s it about?”  “Well, it’s kind of hard to explain the plot because it’s basically an awesome reworking of silly ideas from when she was 12.” “ROFL THAT SOUNDS LIKE YOU.” “Erm….yeah.  -_-“

Okay then, random tangent aside I was hanging out with Dragonfree I guess.  No explanation given.  At least my dream self wanted an explanation, though never actually got one.  I was at my home house instead of my school house which makes slightly more sense (If I were European I’d sooner visit the US East coast/NY area than the friggin Midwest.)

Kay, I swear the plot was awesomely detailed and amazing but now it is starting to sound really silly and I’m not sure why I’m writing it down. Dangit.  It started out like...pretty mediocre at my house (or what was supposed to be my house but looked nothing like it, what.)  I think there was some subplot involving something going wrong with her website (some of the layouts weren’t working which was apparently a sign of someone currently stealing things from it?  What??? Also one of the styles was really cool and best described as a matrix Articuno.  YES.)  I dunno. And then there was a hilarious part where my sister walked though the kitchen into the computer room and said something like “When did Beth get here?”  And I’m like “Wtf, that’s not Beth.”  But then I walked into the room and it was. (So now Beth was somehow at my house too?  How did all these people get here?)  Dragonfree was in fact back in the kitchen on the computer that was for some reason there (no, not my laptop…a random desktop in the kitchen), and Beth did not appear for the entire rest of the dream. *shrug*  Though amusingly at this point I wondered, “Hey since this isn’t the internet, should I call you Dragonfree or by your real name?”  but never actually asked it.  So I went the whole dream without addressing her by any name (not as weird as it sounds—I don’t use people’s names often.)

But all of this random crap quickly derailed into something involving DRAGONS HOLY CRAP.  Okay, so I actually can’t remember how the dragons plotline started dang.  I think there were like, different types of dragons (one for each element?  This was completely unrelated to Pokémon, however. In fact, I don’t think anything Pokémon ever came up, other than that random bit about her site.  I don’t have Pokémon dreams often.  What the hell, subconscious.)  I think we had the earth dragon or something except I guess it was a baby.  And then like, the queen of the world ordered the dragons (she had a lot of them I think) to kill people, except each dragon’s power was only effective on certain people, and the Earth dragon was supposed to kill us.  I think I ran and hid in a bush (yeah…because that would save me from the elemental dragon…) but since the Earth dragon was just a baby its power didn’t kill us (and I was confused about why the other dragons’ attacks didn’t hurt because I didn’t know about the whole only-effective-on-certain-people thing).  So then I emerged from my hiding place and I think a lot of time had gone by because I saw the events in a slow, limited-animation cutscene type thing (hey…sorta like that game concept art my group’s been planning.)  Well the earth dragon was now an adult.  I met up with Dragonfree at some sort of dessert table where a servant was putting together sweets for the king.  Things like chocolate covered pretzels and bananas. I guess I felt like trolling the king or something, so I stole one of the chocolate bananas, and then we ended up having the guards sent after us (yeah, way to go dream self.)  We hopped on a train (like an old style steam engine) except it was rather small, and intended for little kids.  Well lo and behold my youngest sister was there.  We rode on the train for a bit until my sister climbed on top to check something and was doing it all very not-carefully like someone who has totally climbed on top of a train and started opening hatches a hundred times in their life.  Well something went wrong and then she fell off and got tangled in some vines and then the train tried to go through an insanely small tunnel and started shrinking, so we had to get off.  And then we found the earth dragon!  Except he was a baby again OKAY THEN.

(Thus far there hasn’t been much dialogue only because I can’t remember it.  Everyone was actually talking a lot more than this implies. They weren’t all just standing there.) Also I think I spent most of the dream wondering when Dragonfree was going to go back home.  Because “oh yeah we’re on adventure and running for our lives, but hey please don’t leave in the middle of all this I wanna hang out some more.” Uh huh.  This makes even less sense when you consider that there are no countries and the king of everything is after us.

Well this time the queen was there with the guards so we ran away into this sort of maze of stairs vaguely like a kids’ play area except kind of more serious business.  Some of the stairs were in fact escalators that were broken down, and others were so small that we had to slide down then and we were doing pretty good at avoiding the guards.  We all regrouped and figured out a way onto the third floor, at which point we were feeling pretty clever, but then WE RAN INTO THE QUEEN OH SNAP.  But she was actually on our side the whole time! I think this made more sense in the dream (maybe she knew the earth dragon wouldn’t kill us with its attack? But what about all the people killed by the king’s fire dragon?)  Well she did something to the stair area to prevent the guards from getting through while she made a deal with us.  So then we had the queen with us, yay?

We were now heading up a mountain!  I have no idea what we were looking for at the top.  Except first we had to go though some sort of summer-camp type area, where they made us go though inspection (okay?)  This involved pushing us under streams of water which I thought were going to be freezing but were actually kind of warm.  Kay then.  During the next part we were all in a building (at the camp I guess) and a bunch of the campers were watching tv. At this point I thought to myself “Hey it’s weird how this dream is still continuing even though I’m awake.” WHAT?  So I thought this part was real, but I was still dreaming it…even though it was real?  Now, there have been times I’ve been able to continue a dream while awake and have it actually fit in the dream, as opposed to the lame crap you usually try to add to a dream shortly after awakening until you realize “wait my logic works now and this is stupid.”  But anyways…I think around this point was I finally going to ask Dragonfree, “Hey we’ve been running all over a crazy kingdom all day and I’m still not sure what to call you since this isn’t the internet and all.”  But at that point I woke up.  Well…damn.  I mean, it’s better than when you have a dream end at a super-suspenseful point (since we were kind of just wasting time at a camp and I don’t even think the earth dragon was with us anymore).  But still I felt the need to go run and grab my laptop and start writing all this down and highly confusing my roommates in the process.

And holy crap LOOK HOW MUCH I WROTE IN HALF AN HOUR.  Why can’t I write my fic this fast?

[delicatefury]

So, I’m working on my novel

Don’t worry I’m working on TDPL too, but this story has been consuming me.

In particular, I’m trying to rework the plot and, well...

This story is my NaNoWriMo novel from about three or four years ago (last one I didn’t finish, the one before was TDPL, but I can’t rememember if this or the music one was the most recent before that) and my only “complete” writing.

But rereading it, it felt... disjointed. Like, I could try rewriting from what was there, but the body of the novel and the climax just didn’t seem to fit. It was like they were written for two different books.

At first I thought the solution would be to split the novel into halves, along the line where the plot seems to get misalliangned. But then I was left wondering “what was the point of the first half?” Yeah, it’s a good story, but other than getting the characters in position for part two, how does it move the entire arc forward? Ok, yes, it’s important that the characters have their relationship established, but most of the story as it stands would just be filler and the second part would still feel disjointed.

Then it hit me. The reason that they feel disjointed is because they’re following two completely different storylines and narrative arcs in two completely different genres. What I wrote for NaNo was what came easily, the part that fascinated me and that I felt I needed to get right in order for the rest to work. I wrote a romantic slice of life with a set-up close to The Devil is a Part Timer (wonderful anime/manga/light novel series. Totally recommend). I wanted to write a story from the duteragonists’ POV about her feelings towards the protagonist, and how they change with a rivalry thrown in and a battle happening off in another world that neither could affect right in this moment (if you’ve seen The Devil is a Part-Timer, you also see the obvious rip-off going on here, intentional or not).

And it was great practice for getting the characters and their relationships down and exploring potential sources for a supporting cast and fleshing out internal conflicts but...

The second part, which starts after the false climax and goes to the end, written almost entirely after NaNo had finished and I wasn’t trying to reach a word count, reads completely differently. Because that’s about the protagonists growth and him throwing himself into a larger fight and shouldering the burden placed on his shoulders and a bunch of other stuff. It’s a much more straightforward fantasy-style novel and the stakes are a lot higher and a lot more personal for the protagonist than the duteragonist.

And while the characters are somehow consistent, (I’m not sure how, but they are), and the conflict makes sense... it’s not connected to the first part. Like, at all. I’m reading it and I’m thinking “yeah, I need to mention this, and that, and demonstrate this earlier in the novel” but rereading the first part I just sit back and go “but where would it go?” None of it has a place in the first part of the story. And I can’t think of a way to bridge them narratively, even though it works chronologically.

And then I realized that the first part... the first part was a subplot that got too much focus. An important subplot, and one that has a major impact on the storyline, but it shouldn’t be the main focus of the story. Ever. Or it should, but not here.

So now I get to gut the entire first part of the story and rewrite from scratch. I know what’s going on in the duteragonist’s head, and maybe the final story will go back to that style, but right now, I need to work on my protagonists arc before the final quarter of the book. I’ve got a lot of good ideas, I know what his arc is, I know what needs to be told for the climax to work (and how to change the climax so that it’s so much better than it was). I’ve retooled the antagonist, tweaked that far-off conflict a bit, and sat down and wrote several pages trying to articulate, what exactly it is that the protagonist is lacking that needs to be corrected.

Now I just need to work on getting there.

[lwbluedice]

Masterpost for my Stories and Ocs!!!

A spoilerfree list of most of my Ocs and stories (reuploaded here on my main blog)

Includes:

- Name of the story and state it’s in

- short summary/facts

- Character names

If you want more information abt any of them(like a description or a pic) or abt the stories, just message me/ ask me!  Also feel free to ask me to draw them ( for example in the color scheme thing or sth)!

Note: The stories are all written in german so if you don’t speak that language i can’t send you the original documents but i can try summing them up for you!

I bet this is not everything and i will add stuff but yeah!!!!

Hotaru (first draft is finished)

- Abt two men that are linked through a surgery called “synchronisation”, which basically connects their minds and bodies, so they are forced to work as a team. Ea is an ex-soldier and Cain was a hacker, but due to the fact that they can’t stand each other, they also didn’t share their pasts with each other. To pay someone to unlink them, they become bounty hunters and kidnap the girl Ai and her robot Subaru, which is one of the old military robots, called Hotarus (high technologised, operating, transforming, artificial intelligence, ranger units). They are connected to a human ranger and can transform into what the ranger wants them to transform into.

The Hotaru headquarters exploded 10 years ago and since then the Hotarus are super rare on the black market.

The two men plan on selling both the girl and her robot and let’s just say it all doesn’t work out that well.

Ai Hoshino

Ea

Cain Bishop

Subaru

Dr. Chandra Natarajan

10 A

10 B

and other synced pairs

George Watton

Asha Watton

Elaine Bishop

Christopher Bishop

Haruto Hoshino

Shiori Hoshino

The Pleiades. A Hotaru Unit.

Atlas/ Emmett Hunter

Maia/ Ilya Neverwinter

Elektra/ Hailey Gray

Taygete/ Daiyu Ghou

Alcyone/ Charlotte Gryffith)

Caelano/ Sora Aurora River

Merope/ Imogen Harrington

Sterope/ Elizabeth Bresley

Additional Characters for the (maybe Sequel) in which the grown up Ai will try to find out who attacked the Hotaru Headquarters

- Skya

The day the world turned white ( first draft is finished, working on it)

To stop global warming some scientists basically caused a new ice age. On the long run this might be very effective but the former countries, now sectors, are hit by strong ice storms, called snow white. To stay safe huge bunkers, the Safe Cities, were built and the local fauna and flora were stored in Arks, to preserve them.

Usually an alarm sounds before all citizens are brought into the SCs, but this time Reese and her best friend Yuki dont manage to get to the vehicles on time and are left behind. They seek shelter in a private bunker outside of town that Yuki found out about recently. Suddenly a group of boys their age knocks on the door, because they were also left behind and followed the girls.

Al, the brothers Eli and Isaac, Gil and Henry become the new bunker-mates and the group has to survive one year in the bunker, until the storm is over.

( I have a blog for this story, just search for The day the world turned white! There are pics and some posts for example abt which patronus/spirit animal the charas have!)

Reese/ Therese Wells

Al/ Alexander Glover

Yuki Sarah Brooke

Eli Green

Isaac Green

Gil de Santos

Henry Summers

The Sun will always rise (The sequel, probably forever unfinished)

About a group of rebels, the Sun Children, that are sworn enemies to the government and its ways to cope with Snow White.

Takes place abt one/two years after Tdtwtw.

Lucy and Aidan are kicked out of an underground organisation that stays in the cities underground system during the storm phases and the two wander around in the snow until Michael and Rin pick them up and bring them to the Sun Children. From looking into the snow directly to maneuver, Lucy has turned snowblind.

Yeah the plot is… not 100% existent.

Characters:

Lucy

Aidan

Michael

Kate

Gil

Bo

Finya

Rin

The XII Games ( First book is finished, i started the second one, unfinished)

A story abt spaceships that let slaves fight in games, if they win a certain number they are “free”. Cassidy makes it and is sold to a women, Trisha, that takes her home onto her home planet, where Cassidy lives a nice life and learns abt her heritage. One year later she meets Tobias again and she and Trisha are brought to a planet that is basically the universes capital. Cassidy has to take a more important role in the uproar of a war, than she ever imagined.( The cast members are mostly human looking but are other, non human, races)

Cass (Cassidy ) E’ Alandril

Tobias

On the slave ship:

Neala

Sam ( Samuel)

On Anterra:

Trisha  Willowrish

Max ( Maxwell)  E’ Alyndral

Lukas

Tori

Khorr

Keri

Wil

Quinna

On the Space sparrow:

Zach ( Zacharyas) Gryaan

Benj ( Benjamin) Bottledom

Rashka Hyrelian

Oreadh Urunna'ur

Butcher

Kagrim

Kyluur

Irian Ashcott

On Capital Estellar:

Galea ( Galeandrih Fiyur’ Ihal)

Iyal

Wren Fawell

Luasia  

Luminor the Shining

Fallen Angels ( A trilogy, one and a half books were finished, reconcepted)

We don’t talk abt this but it was one of my first stories i truly wrote.

Abt fallen angels saving the world or sth. It’s super clichee and just ugh.

The newer version would cancel some charas and make it abt rebalancing Darkness and Light in the worlds. With a more diverse cast and also different magical races. And a way less creepy Adam.

Eve/Evelyn White

Adam

Peregrine/Perry

Ray/Raven

Sera

Colin

Robin

Raphael

Ky/ Kyron

Gabe/Gabriel Frost

Bree/ Gabriella Frost

Indigo ( haven’t written it yet and i don’t know if i ever will, but have drawn stuff. I lowkey wanna see this as a comic)

A story abt a clan of shapeshifters, called Indigos. They are basically human that can shift into dolphins and their clan lives on an island near Australia. Its a modern story and the gang consisting of our local gay dolphin girl Keerie, her cousins Akash and Arjuun (younger brother, older sis), and Ky ( adopted as a child, japanese heritage, a different breed of dolphin idk) lives their “normal lives” with lots of shenenigans and drama.

Some day Keerie falls in love with Navy, the daughter of the owner of the local Aquapark (that the clan suspect also does illegal stuff like snatching wild animals).

Keerie

Arjuun

Akash

Ky

Navy

“Neo Alcatraz” ( reworks of a very old story)

To put it simply, there is a pack of scientists that bionically enhance children and send them off to different countries to basically be local superheroes. Our gang was kinda left behind bc the countries rather took the newer, better versions and here they are now, a bunch of supernatural teens facing the (not so) everyday struggles of life.

Atalanta

Chi

Callie

Lee

Victor/Konrad

Gemsona (just art)

Larimar

- has water powers and her backstory bases on my private/old Squads life story and a lot of me thinking of drawing music videos for her but never doing it

Anthea (art and headcanons)

- my Dnd Oc

The Bender Girls ( art and headcanons)

- basically some Avatar the last Airbender Ocs i made once

Daiyu

Hotaru

Yura

Sündenfall / Sinfall (short story)

A short story i wrote for a competition which is basically every crime series but magic.

Harvey is immortal, he dies and is revived, and solves crimes through it. Paige is basically his assistant and the case they are on is abt a person that kills magical beings and “arranges” the victims fitting to the seven sins.

Ilya Winter

Harvey

Paige

Delphi

Sphinx

The concept charas, that had a different storyline ( they were basically a team of magical beings that would solve cases… rather unconventional.) I considered reworking them into the new Fallen Angels concept:

Ilya

Harvey

Timothy

Worth mentioning:

Project Alpha (script, some art):

The script for a shortfilm i once made with my friends. A school class has a plane crash and only a few students survive, they all embody a different character archetype (the sunshine, the soziopath, the smart one etc.) They try to survive and are put through weird psychological mind experiments like the trolley problem.

To be honest, the concept had and still has a lot of potential and we just hadn’t the opportunities to rly set it the way we anticipated. The shooting day was super fun, though! Still laughing about the outtakes

Astral Chronicles (some art and a few chapters, unfinished)

A story Idea i still like but probably wont write like this because of copyright problems. Its basically a giant Crossover.

Its abt people who have an Astral( mostly a literature figure) they embody when they are dreaming. Their body stays in bed and is vulnerable but the Astral can basivally run around and has special powers. If the Astral dies, the person wakes up but i think when the body dies the person dies too? idk.

The Protagonist embodies Alice and there are also the White Rabbit, Peter Pan, Tinkerbell usw.

There was also some kind of conflict? I dont remember.

If i would ever rewrite it the Astrals would be embodiments of the Zodiac signs.

(does this even fit?)

The Fanfiction thing i wrote abt Peter Pan/ Jack Frost

- like i have tons of short drabbles and the start of a fanfiction and honestly i liked the ideas i had a lot

The ones we better not talk abt:

Part Hunter

Basically there was a being named eternity/aeterna that was shattered into oarts (like in TRC)

and chosen ones have to reclaim them.

The ones that basically die are turned into guardians, like Time and Space ( they had animal companions they were fused with i guess)

Melody is the current part hunter and has a tragic love story, her animal is a tiny horse thing??????

Idk

basically a long story in which i used my dreams as base for the episodes

The nameless story

Actually super interesting but too many charas and a too tiny will to draw action scenes or write them.

Like its based around a super popular game in huge spheres/buildings and the teams wear some anti gravity outfits and shoes and can walk on the walls and shit and can basically attack using elements/illusion/ conjure monsters idk.

And the main team had an opponent team that basically specialized in the 25272 other elements and some day they just fused teams idk.

There also was some prophecy shit abt the anchors, ppl that can control all elements the same???? Idk

Element guardians

- basically four teens that control the elements and do shit together

- at some point i gave all of them dragons

- still thinking abt this sometimes

- The originals:

Luna: the shameless self insert , earth, pony girl, bland blonde i think

Katy: Air, best friend, bubbly

Dan: The jock. Fire

Nick: The emo. Water

At some point Katy became Skye and Dan and Nick got other names but yeah-

Talent Academy

The story thats basically a ripoff of Alice academy. Like a school with hierachie between the students and ranks and shit and different houses and the students have powers IDK

If you read through all of this, bless you for showing interest in my stories ;) And hey, if you want me to rant about any of them, just send me an ask or a message!!!

[historic-homosexual]

Pls pls pls do all the oc questions!!

jokes on you I was already doing that and planned on just putting it out there but now I can use this as an excuse,,hah someone wants to know thisI’m sorry for how long some parts got, I noticed how much I wrote on Célestin and tried to keep it down from then but that didn’t completely work,,,And actually I dare/tag you to do these too. I know that ain’t normal proceedure w ask memes but I do a thing called what I want

1. Your first OC ever?

I think my first oc was your typical mary sue, named Angel, whom I used for basically every fandom I got in then. I’ve since reworked her because I couldn’t leave her the mess she was lmao

2. Do you have a personal favourite among your OCs?

Not really, tho I have to admit I have some that I’m especially fond of, but that’s still like half of my ocs

3. Have you ever adopted a character or gotten a character from someone else?

Not a full character but a friend of mine made the design for Charlie years ago

4. A character you rarely talk about?Sadly that’d also be a couple of em, for example Eleonore or Otávio or my monster ocs

5. If you could make only one of your OCs popular/known, who would it be?

That’s a difficult one…Brist is pretty worked out and good so maybe him, or Eligos bc I’m proud of their design

6. Two OCs of yours that look alike despite not being related?

I’d never noticed it before this but Seth and Elijah oh geez

7. Are your OCs part of any story or stories?I have a bunch of ocs that are part of my own work, which I refer to as ‘Golden Empire’

8. Do you RP as any of your OCs? If you do, introduce one of your RP OCs here!

I privately rp w @spokoystviye, namely our ocs Regulus and Adelais. We used to do Gregory and Jason too but ever since we worked on the time it plays in that’s stopped lmao.

So Regulus it is: Regulus Whitlock, living in France during the French Revolution. He’s originally from England, where he grew up the son of a Blacksmith. Regulus is exceptionally tall for the time he lived in, very soft hearted and believes in “dressing like a gentleman,behave like a bastard”. Most part of his life he works as a Blacksmith from his shop, that he took over from his father after the man died. Regulus took on a ‘side job’ as a hunter, smart, a good shot and with a great need to help people. But he’s of too good nature, ending up taking in a Vampire of all things, despite better judgement, not able to leave the woman to her death.

9. Would you ever be willing to give any of your OCs to someone else?

I don’t think I could give an oc to a random person, that is one that I’ve worked w a lot. Just making a design and such for the purpose of giving it away in the first place would be fine

10. Introduce an OC with a complicated design?

Gerwyn is relatively complicated to draw solely because his base design is full body armor lmao. Besides him maybe Susanna and Nathanael since their design is hard to make it look accurate especially without colouring it

11. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a “sunshine”?

Seth, definitely, he’s the most positive and sweet of all my Ocs

12. Name an OC that isn’t yours but who you like a lot

Both @bruhchantite and @spokoystviye have ocs I love, like Bruhs Arcana Oc Nien, whom I like a lot, and Leander has Adelais who’s a sweet baby deserving protection [also Adelean is hot shit]

13. Do you have any troublemaker OCs? There are quite a few I’d say lmao

But most of them I’d consider more violent than troublemaker, so Jonathan probably (whos still violent but who was a troublemaker even before that)

14. Tragic Backstory

Gregory and Annora have a tragic backstory as well but I’m gonna go w Célestin rnTw: Rape, Abuse, Homophobia

Célestin Villeneuve grew up in France to very religious parents with strict views.  Célestins mother had unhappily carried out Célestin, having gotten pregnant at a very young age. Both her and her husband being strong believers, they considered abortion a sin and kept the child. Her own parents threated it like a shameful secret, making their daughter and her boyfriend marry, despite them being 16 at the time. They moved to the next town, where they were unknown and had everyone belive that they were both adults, their child concieved properly, after marriage and willingly.

Not having finished their education properly, Célestins father lied in order to get a job, his wife mroe than willing to keep up his tales, in fear of being ridiculed by the community. Appearance and what others thought of them became the most important thing to Célestins mother early on, drilled into her by her own parents.Célestins father craved to be popular and keep his image in the town.

They were active in church and his father insisted on going to every sunday mass, prayers before lunch and his child confessing his sins to him.Punishment often consisted of simple bread and cheese and water for meals, a swat ont he back of his head if it was particularly bad in his parents eyes.

Célestin had always been a perfect child, smart and following his parents wishes, sitting in church, firm in prayer.He considered his parents treatment right, and, as he kept from sin, was confident it would never get any worse.However, he was gravely mistaken.As he got older, Célestins parents would get worse in their punishment, afraid their child would sully their image, as they themselves had, with the early pregnancy.

Things reached a peak when Célestin discovered he was gay. Knowing it to be a sin, he told his mother, asking her for help to free him of this condition, telling her he’d accept the punishiment if it’d only make him right in God’s eyes again.

His mother was shocked, less so because of her sons sexuality, but more so because she had seen the violence raging in her husband and was well aware that he would no longer keep the punishment to a few slaps.Talking to her husband that night, when Célestin was asleep, she attempted to sway her husband, who was as she had expected, beyong angered.

He however knew of her fear for being casdt out of the community and explained that not punishing and correcting such behaviour would result in Célestin believing it was normal and flaunting it around for everyone to see. Riddled by fear, Célestins mother accepted her husbands preposition as what would happen to her son.

While Célestin had expected punishment, nothing would have prepared him for what would come for him as his father would drag him out to the field each day anew, whipping him until his back was bleeding. His wife was fobidden to tend to her sons wounds and was often standing by staring into nothing while her son begged for forgiveness.

Célestin learned how to poorly tend to his own injuries, some getting infected at the lack of proper treatment. To his own shock no beating did help to cure him as he had desperately hoped to happen to stop the violent treatment. Unsure where to turn, and why God would have him suffer like this, despite all attempts and prayer, Célestin went to the church to confess and ask a pastor for help.The man was shocked and appalled at what he heard and even more so at the fact that Célestin was under the impression that this was right.

For the first time Célestin was told that he was treated terribly, and that he had done nothing to deserve this. He went away with odd feelings in his mind and the first seeds of doubt. Attempting to help, the pastor went to talk to Célestins parents a few days later, when Célestin himself was in school, trying to sway them in their ways, telling them that they surely had to know that he had to report such behaviour.

When Célestin returned from school, he found his mother crying adn his father angrier than hed ever been. They’d not taken the pastors warning to take their son away to their heart, seeing their fault in their actions but instead saw nothing but the ridicule they were about to face, as well as the authorities coming up. Célestins father feared to loose his job, and face, more than he feared for his sons life. He beat Célestin again before dragging him into his parents room, where a middle aged woman was waiting that was known throught the town for offering any kind of intercourse for the right money.

Saying that there was only one way to truly fix him, Célestins father forced his son to have sex with the prostitute, watching with a belt in hand to make sure the intercourse was actually carried out. During it he would often ask his son if he was still filthy, wanting to do this with ofther men and woulod generally insult and hummiliate him. Whenever his son would answer with crying or begging his father to stop this, he would simply pay the woman for yet another round.

When it was finally over, Célestin was left laying in his parents bed, listening as his parents were having dinner in the kitchen.Filled with shame he declined everything when the authorities came knocking at their door the next day, nodding of his fathers claim that he had made it all up.

The pastor attempted to speak to Célestin but when he asked to see the boy the evening, he and Célestins parents found his room empty.Célestin had ran away.

15. Do you like to talk about your OCs with other people?

Gosh I love it I wish I could do it more. I feel if u actually have some else to chat ocs with it leads to ur oc getting more and more fleshed out

16. Which one of your OCs would be the best at biology (school subject)?

I think Helva would take the cake on that one

17. Any OC OTPs?

Regulus/Adelais, Caspian/Nadia, Hunter/Piper and Araan/Dorian,,,,If I can be honest, I hardly have the amount of Oc ships as I would lmao,,,my ocs do function on their own but there are so I’d just love to ship lmao

18. Any OC crackships?

Not really any, I shortly thought about just taking a random oc from u/Leander and pairing them randomly w one of mine for the laughs of it.But then I felt it would maybe be inapropriate to do that lmaoo

19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)

While all my Ocs mean a lot to me I chose Brist for this because he’d the first Oc I made for a game, fallout new vegas, which I love a lot. He pretty much develpoed all by himself while I was playing, and is really fleshed out now. I’m super fond of him somehow.Here are a couple of things about him:

Brist was born 2225, the son of  caravaneers, somewhere on their travels and therefore does not know where exactly he was born. Deciding that raising a child at such young age while traveling would not work well, they settled near the ruins of Ashton and Hopeville, where a small community was build.Brist spend his childhood in the Divide and soon began traveling alongside his father, keeping the community flourishing as the only connection between it and the rest of the land. When the Divide and the road paved by Brist came to attention of the NCR, they cooperated to protect the supply line and keep it open for other traders. With that done and his home taken care of, Brist left the Divide to travel further, exploring New California as a drifter.  

Brist came to enjoy the life of a Drifter, occasionally taking small jobs and living from day to day up until returning to the divide a last time, making a delivery that would cause his home to be destructed.Not knowing of what had happened, Brist returned into the Mojave desert, further traveling New California before joining the Mojave Express.2281 he was hired to deliver another important package, once more without knowledge of what it would cause, and was shot in the head by Benny in Goodsprings.

He doesn’t sleep too much, and he’s not at all picky about where. He prefers having some sort of mattress but if he’s tired and there’s none he’ll sleep on the floor.

Brist is an Courier and Explorer at heart, determined to finish his jobs, power through them. Even if that might result in physical pain or poisoning. Brist has the constant need to be on his feet all the time, traveling, looking around or doing things for people and he often does not sleep, eat, shower or talk during these travels. Sometimes he’s so focused on the road ahead that he misses the explosive traps right in front of him.

He notices that he is doing this, and he can sometimes be heard muttering to himself how he’ll see a doctor in the next town and so on, but those good intentions always get lost along the way. Brist hates missing traps and such, but he doesn’t quite see that those thigns could easily be avoided if he’d be more careful.

He is suffering from Radiation Poisoning, he could easily be treated for it at the early stages but he literally does not care enough to see a doctor or get some RadAway. He keeps delaying it in favour of missions and traveling and stuff

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?

Charlie sings, more for herself actually, than for anyone else but she’s quite good at it. She’s constantly humming when she’d focusing on something and sometimes doesnt even notice when she starts singing along to songs. She simply loves music a lot and lets herself be taken along by the songs. Has no real preference for genre but she likes happy go lucky songs most

21. Your most artistic OC

Richard aka Dick. He’s at tattoo artist and leaves cool little doodles everywhere. Especially great with colours. The most colorful the better

22. Is there any OC of yours people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how?

There aren’t really any, since my ocs arent popular or anything. Someone did sometimes, but it was more forcing their ideas or their own thoughts w their own ocs on mine,,,

23. Introduce OC that has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like?

Gregory, as you see below has changed quite a bit. While the overall design is the same, now he looks  as nasty as I imagine him to be, a lot less soft.Character-wise my ocs didn’t change drastically

Only the fact, in Gregory’s case, that he got more fleshed out, and the time he lives in changed, to the 50sI’m trying to not write to many long things here lmao.Especially since just u and Leander will read this and Leander knows himst and Regulus already.

Dr Gregory Thomas Landon was born 1911 to Sybill and Raphael Landon. While the first world war almost went by without having any impact on the family, Raphael was pulled into war when America joined in 1917 and died in combat.

With her husband gone and her son just 6 years old, Sybill took a job as a secretary to make sure of her and her sons survival.Sybill had grown up the youngest child (of those who had survived) out of 5, always too smart and abitious for a woman in her time. Her father was Doctor and she would often sneak into his office room to look through notes and books on human anatomy and patient records.She had written down what she believed could be links between illnesses,behaviour and anatomy, finding the greatest interest in the still very new field of psychology. Of course her father wanted to hear nothing of it, Sybills oldest brother being the one ment to inherit their fathers office and place as a doctor.

But Sybill had never stopped being interested in psychology, following the work of Edward Titchner, whod brought psychological studies to America, as well as the rise of ‘structuralism’ ,as close as possible.Unlike Titchner, who excluded the study of children, Sybill wondered if it was the childs mind that should be studied to find the roots of all things. Perhaps it was bitterness above all that drove her to the treatment of her son in the following years. Sybill had lived her life knowing that she had no possibility whatsever to porperly study psychology and work on her theories. But hearing about Margaret Washburn, the woman that had been able to become a psychologist, Sbyill turned anger and disappointment to her son, whom she viewed as the reason she had to stay at home and be a mother isntead of trying to achieve what Ms Washburn had.

Quickly she realized however that she did not need a title or be thought by a Doctor to test her theories, deciding to conduct them on her son, who had kept her from fullfilling her dream. While Gregory was not the perfect research object, already six years and not a infant, who Sybill believed to be the ideal stage, she attempted to see if continous infliction of pain would change her sons behaviour.

She was especially curious if such pain inflicted on the brain would influence Gregorys personality, perhaps causing of curing misbehaviours and such. Gregory would grow up very intelligent but withdrawn, hardly finding kinship with people his age, spending his time reading. Like his mother before him he became interested in the human mind and, unlike Sybill, was able to study, earning him a Doctorate in both psychology and psychiatry

While he remained living with his mother he would sometimes roam the university campus, especially after long nights of studying, observing the people around.

It was there that he, at age 19, that he met a young woman that had been wandering around, lost and visibly pregnant. Seeing her caused a deep shock in Gregory as she resembled his mother in looks like no other woman he’d even seen before. Unbeknowns to his mother, Gregory had suffered great damage from her treatment of him, which had lead to violent thoughts and great apathy. Had the girl not approached him, she would have lived but she decided to ask him for help, ending in her death.

This remained the only unplanned murder commited by the Doctor, who hid her body, laying awake at night, working out what to do with her. He had carefully opened her up, not focused on her death as much as on causing her pain for as long as possible, but as he hadn’t been very ecperienced yet he had made quite a mess. The young woman would turn to the first in a row of women that caused Gregory to perfect his work and disposal of the bodies.

World War Two brought a sudden end to the Doctors murder streak. Age 30 when America entered the War he was pulled into it as a medic, despite not being properly trained as a Doctor 

However his talents that he had perfected during his murders had been of great use during the war that had only led to Gregory becoming even more cold to death and gore. Returning from the War he was offered a position at a instiution, as the need for Psychologists arose.

However Gregory saw no great interest in treating shell shocked patients for too long, he instead chose to focus on the psychiatric field, working in an asylum from then on. Gregory is, while extremely smart, speaking four languages and being a Doctor, unable to form any bonds with people.

He’s terribly arrogant and aware of his intelligence, viewing it as a superiority to other people. He suffers from antisocial personality disorder/ psychopathy and is addicted to nictotine.

He’s a very cleanly person, almost to a point of it being an obsession. He smells of Nicotine, Disinfectant and a neutral perfume.

24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be and why?

Oh geez, well I’d rather meet an oc of mine thats like, one of the chill ones. Maybe someone about my age.

Someone like Friedrich or Violet. It’d be easiest to talk to them, and I know they are super nice. Meeting Brist, Araan or Caspian would be cool too tho, so many stories and questions there

25. The OC that resembles you the most (same hobby, height, shared like/dislike for something etc?)

There used to be the joke that Friedrich is basically a tall, muscular version of me. Funnily enough I now have the chin beard as well, and I’ve discovered that I’m as much of a nerd and work focused person as he is. Still while we share some similarities, we’re p different still lmao

26. Have you ever had to change your OC’s design or something else about them against your will?

Not really, only changed things to be more accurate and stuff but that aint against my will or anything

27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song? Nope

28. Your most dangerous OC?

There are a couple, such as Cenric (being a crazy, megalomanic, narcisstic, manic Emperor), Gregory and Jonathan (literal serial killers), Crya (cannibalistic monster) and Eligos (p much does body disposal). 

29. Which one of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they’re going?

Eddy and Dick, they would tell each other because they’d go together lmao. Paula would want to and just before going there she’d chicken out of it

30. Which one of your OCs would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection? Quinn, he’s tall and grown up but he loves small and cute things

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)

Friedrich II:Would have a super cool layout that he coded himself, and would offer the theme for people to use, as well as giving people tips on how to easily do cool things w their themes.

His icon would’ve been fairytale themed for a while until he posts his first selfie for pride month, then it’s a picture of him with a pride flag. He’d reblog peoples art of fairytales, and he’d especially love peoples new interpretations of them

Would reblog thing about rats and post pictures of his own rats with cute captions. Reblogs peoples selfies during pride and other pride days ( like trans day of visibility n such), always adding super nice things in the tags.

He posts his first selfie during pride and it gets quite the reblogs and people asking to see more (half of them are thirsting after his body) Declines the request to post full topless pictures because he says that his blog is sfw and he doesnt want to mix fairtales, rats and codes with nudes.

He would have a nsfw blog tho,,,hes horny He’d give it to those over 18 that’d ask, reblogging gifs and stuff there and yeah thats where he posts topless pictures.

32. Which one of your OCs would be the most suitable horror game protagonist and why?

I’d like to say Brist because that would be funny as hell and he would actually explore everything, pretty unfazed by what is going on. But honestly Annora is already living a horror game pretty much, that is with loosing her parents, fighting for survival,being used by the revolution group as a ‘chosen one’, and especially because she has to encounter the wandering twins, which are creepy as heck. She’s a fighter against will but she pulls through and shes careful enough not to do something stupid.

33. Your shyest OC?

That’d be sweet, pure Charlie

34. Do you have any twin characters?

Oh yes, Eddy and Dick; Jae-Eun and Jae-Hyeok; Nathanael and Susanna

35. Any sibling characters?

There’s a lot coming your way

Cenric and his younger sister Annora

Sadira and her older brother Arshad

Gregory actually has a halfbrother that’s not really developed, named Maximilian 

Charlie and her younger sister Paula

Olivia and her older brother Bill

Arthur and his younger brother Jonathan

36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends etc)?

The above mentioned Adelais who belongs to Leander, is let’s say semi-paired w Regulus

Established girlfriends Sadira (who’s my oc) and Elizaveta (who is his)

Violet (mine) and Cole (his) sweet young love

And an AU Version of my oc Echo is the ex of Ninas OC Crem

Charlie used to be w the oc Amy of a friend but idk if that’s still a thing

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human

There are a few, like Myka, Viida, Amodis,Brist, Rovhen and Araan but I think I’ll go with Cyra

Cyra, or ‘Venus Cyra’ is not as developed as some others here so not to worry about too long of a text,,,,I hope

Cyra is meant to exist around the 50s funnily enough, just like Gregory, which I really didn’t intend lmaoShe is,a s the question suggests, not quite human, despite maintaining a relaticely human appearance for most of the time. Cyra lives in a house in the fictional Bloomstreet, which has been declared haunted decades ago because of a man living inside of it that took great joy in messing with his neighbours.

Crya believes herself to have lived in the house all of her life, with no memory as to how she got to come there and why she can’t leave it.In truth it’s told that she moved in with her grandmother when Cyra was just a baby, having lost her parents. If you were to believe the whispers and legends the old woman was very poor, hardly able to keep the small house for her and her granddaughter.

She would wear the same old clothes she had arrived in, the young girl wearing a worn out dress with a pale blue bow. Legends say that they were so poor that the grandmother couldn’t afford to buy much more than bread and water.

A police man came to their door one day because the old woman hadn’t been able to pay for her house anymore. Desperate, it’s said that she hit the man across the head as he had bend down to say hello to Cyra, who looked famished and sick at that point.

Not sure what to do with the body and knowing that her granddaughter needed more than bread to survive and grow, she went to butcher the man and cook him into stew for herself and her granddaughter to eat. As she saw that Cyra became more healthy and stronger at the meat consumption, the old woman, desperate and hopeful to keep her beloved granddaughter alive, fully turned to cannibalism.

It’s said that the grandmother died a couple of years later of old age but legends have it that she is still in the house as well, a half dead monster. Cyra, having eaten human flesh all her life is said to have turned into a wendigo like creature,fully turning into a gruesome beast during the nights, to feed on the flesh of people that dare to enter the haunted house.

She is called Venus in some tales because a man claimed to have seen her one day, watering the roses in the lawn of the house, more beautiful than anything he had seen all his life, calling her ‘a sight like the goddess Venus herself’

Cyra isn’t fully aware of these legends, but she is aware of her monsterous nature, that she is unable to control. She believes she was cursed to stay in this house, a monster taking her place during night, leaving her with the remains of peoiple and the ravaging craving for human flesh.

She loved taxidermy and moths, and tending to flowers.

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer?

Irina is a professional ballet dancer so I’d say she’s the best out of my Ocs

39. Introduce any character you want

Alright, because I’ve tought about them recently, I’ll cheat a bit and introduce two ocs: Susanna and Nathanael, whom I mentioned somewhere above briefly as ‘The Wandering Twins’

They are part of my Golden Empire universe and are the heads of one of the groups that build after the collapse of most of what we know of the Earth.

They play a part in Annoras journey to find her brother as both a danger to avoid/defeat, as well as potential allies. Susanna and Nathanael are twins that are both about 1,90m tall and are constantly veiled, having stapled veils to their faces and necks.

That adds to their ghostly,creepy appearance. You could describe their group as a cult,as it is religiously motivated and their followers are devoted to Susanna and Nathanael, who they call ‘Mother’ and ‘The Priest’

That could come fromt he fact that Susanna wears the traditional headwear of a nun, while Nathanael looks somewhat like a Priest and carries a bible around. Christianity is considered an old and outdated religion in the times that GE plays in, practiced by a very small amount of people before the collapse. It’s generally thought of as outdated and outlandish, with stories too wild to be real.

However some of the old text have been recovered or been carried on over generations by those that remain firm believers in the Christian God. Susanna and Nathanael were raised by such a family and spread their belief to vulnerble and scared people after the collapse that latch onto it as a form of explanation easily.

The Twins view the collapse as a sort of apocalypse brought by God to punish Humanity for their sins, they believe that they must attone and suffer now as Earth was made their purgatory. If one is firm in belief and enough suffering is done, so they say, Heaven will open up and they will be taken by God to heaven, forgiven and able to forget the horrors they went through on Earth.

They expect that suffering to be done by their followers, who all walk barefoot, some of them having blinded themself in order to see nothing but God in their lifes. Susanna and Nathanael as well as their group wander in order to spread their message, taking in new followers if they prove their faith by stripping themselves of their footwear and walking through the ruins of cities with them until their feet bleed.

Only if they are willing to shed blood for their sins will they be taken on and be bathed and baptized in a river and dressed in simple gowns.It is considered the highest honour to be veiled just like Susanna and Nathanael. They seem to be able to appear out of nowhere and have a settlement in the woods that they return to.

40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Feel free to share!

I love developing oc things w my friends, its always a lot of fun and I wish I could do that more. Especially nice was cosplaying Gregory and Jason w Leander,,,cosplaying ocs is rad af, would love to do that again

41. Has anyone drawn fanart of your OCs? If yes, maybe show a picture or two here (remember sources & permissions!)

Yeee, mostly you and Leander actually, but a couple of others too. Let me see if I can show u a favourite oc art from u and from Leander

@bruhchantite listen,,,this is so fucking cute, I love seeing our kids all together. All art of them is always so happy and positive. I love every piece u did of em but this one especially bc,,,bringing star wars into it??Power move

@spokoystviye okay listen you made soo many great pieces but this one,,,this one idk maybe its because I love Brist so much but,, this is simple yet amazing. I love the small light play u got in here and just how u drew Brist,,,thats me boy!!!

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods?

Cenric, I’d say. He thinks of himself as a god after all. I think he’d like the imagery of it all

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It’s time to confess

Oh geez well,, I generally make my ocs older than me, like most of them are in their late 30s/40s, I have more ocs heading 60s than I have heading 20 lmao. My ocs are more often male than any other gender and more likely to be lgbt than straight. I like nice and clean looks, Leander can tell a great deal about how much I care for a clean look lmao. Most of my ocs have their life in order, and most of them are on the taller side

44. Something you like about your OCs in general

I put thought into my characters,so I think that makes them interesting and fun. And I try very hard to havbe them make sense and be time/lore appropriate.

45. A character you no longer use?

I did drop some Ocs a bit ago that never got much work and that I didn’t think interesting enough to work on. Sadly enough I don’t do as much w my ocs as I’d like to generally.

46. Has anyone ever told you that you treat your OCs badly?

Nope, I’m generally kind to my characters lmao

47. Has anyone ever (friendly) claimed any of your OCs as their child?

both Nina and Leander did and I think it’s v sweet hell yeah

48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure

Charlie and Caspian, truly good and pure, and positive

49. Which one of your OCs would most likely enjoy memes

Seth would definitely love memes. So would Kylan but he’d like the really weird ones best. Eddy and Dick would constantly send memes to each other, effectively annoying everyone else. Paula would like memes when they are already outdated

50. Give me the good ol’ OC talk here. Talk about anything you want

Generally special universe oc seem to be more interesting than like,,basic universe ones but I wannt quickly talk abour my OC WilliamI love him okay? He’s from Russia, where he grew up in a tightly knit family. He’s a childrens Doctor and was married to Nahia, who’s an ER Doctor. They met in med school and got along super well, they both were used to the whole early marriage idea and marrying someone you like so they did just that. They both always wanted to have children and kid. It’s very important for them to be there for thgeir child despite their jobs. William is such a dad, he loves his child so much, he’d do anything for em. He and Nahia are best friends, even after the divorce, which happened after long talks because they had noticed that something was off. It led to William confessing that he thinks he might be gay and they ended up divorcing because it turns out yes he is. William probably would’ve stayed w Nahia, also for their childs sake but she wouldn’t hear anything of it. He’s a very kind man, calm and I love the thought of him being able to explore who he is even at his age. He’d be so new to everything,,sobs,,angel

[yumi-michiyo]

my lost was saying found [1/1] - the extended author’s notes and meta

Rating: T

Genre: Slice of Life/Romance/Angst/Friendship

Pairings: unrequited Quinn Fabray/Rachel Berry, Quinn Fabray/Marley Rose, background Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce

Summary: Quinn didn't ask for any of this to happen. Unrequited Quinn/Rachel, Quinn/Marley endgame. Rarepair. AUish. Oneshot.

Links: FF.net | AO3

On the origins:

A couple of months ago, my good friend Curionenene sent me a link to a Kpop song called Star by Heize. It's a nice but sad song, and I enjoyed it until she mentioned that it sounded like a slowburn romance.

Welp.

As it were, I was still working on For You I'd Burn the Length and Breadth of Sky and didn't take her up on the offer. Besides, I didn't have any other pairings that fitted the song.

Everything changed when the Fire nation attackedwhen I saw a bunch of Melissa Benoist publicity pics, as well as candids from Supergirl. Now, Melissa is a complete cinnamon roll, in Tumblr meme parlance, and far too good and pure for this world; the only reason I'm not in the Supergirl fandom is because I don't want to throw away my feels on yet another femslash pairing that is Not Canon.

Digression aside, I felt that Marley (who is more or less Melissa herself) would be an excellent partner for Quinn (or at least a version that is more Dianna). She has a lot of fandom!Rachel's strong points, but far more patient and down to earth. Apart from the dangling storyline Glee gave her, she's just a confused kid finding her place in the world – much like S3!Quinn. More importantly to my horndog self, they're both incredibly attractive women.

I remembered reading a lovely Marley/Quinn fic, and the headcanon that Marley was the freshman who told Quinn never to change in the famous bathroom Metro pass scene, and this fic got its start.

On the writing process:

Not gonna lie; writing this fic was a lot tougher than nearly all my other Glee fics. I didn't know where I wanted to go with the story (a first draft had Rachel and Quinn getting together, then Rachel died) or how I wanted to get Quinn and Marley together.

The sharp-eyed and fanatical reader will notice a lot of continuity and canon errors littered through the fic, where I couldn't be bothered to research the facts due to frustration with the pace of the fic, and being too busy with real life.

The turning point came, 3k words into killing Rachel off, when I realised that there were worse things than death I was also quite distraught while writing Quinn's suicide in FYIBtLaBoS and didn't want to kill off someone again. I reworked the fic to have Rachel and Quinn break up, before hitting yet another revelation; canon!Rachel is rather self-centred (especially in S4) so why not just have her be completely oblivious to Quinn's feelings? Why can't the girl raised by two gay men be absolutely, completely straight?

While talking to Curionenene about those things, I realised that the main dynamic of this relationship working (based on my understandings of their characters) is if Marley is the patient one who waits while Quinn stops running away.

Armed with those three pieces of information, the fic practically wrote itself, coming to a halt at a staggering 12k+ words.

On Quinn Fabray:

This has always been Quinn's story. I balked at it initially, because this is the first time I'm writing from Quinn's POV. I have never felt confident writing Quinn because her character feels a little too close to home – especially fandom!Quinn.

Over the course of the story, Quinn grows from being just Quinn Fabray, to reconciling the different Quinns, and Lucy. A lot of her emotional walls come down – some with her knowledge, some without – and she learns how to accept help, and accept herself. Most importantly, she learns that she can be stronger and not weaker by letting others take care of her.

Being from Quinn's point of view, she is a unreliable narrator half the time when she's not paralysed by her insecurities and her latent hang-ups about how a person should conduct themselves; whatever is not apparent in the story has to be inferred from her interactions with other people.

On Marley Rose:

Confession time: I watched S4 more than a year ago, in a single sitting, and do not remember much of Marley Rose's character apart from the plot. I do remember she was a good kid who, like many other kids her age, was pretty confused about everything, and made plenty of bad decisions. I decided that she got a pretty bad treatment by the writers (what else is new?) and tried to rebuild the character from the basic facts.

My interpretation of Marley's character was also largely influenced by the very talented and amazing ineedtoleavethissite's and her Santana/Marley fics, especially Maybe This Time. This writer made me pay attention to Marley as a leading woman, and made me go off on a Santana/everybody tangent for a while, but that's another story altogether.

On Rachel Berry:

I genuinely like canon!Rachel. I love fandom!Rachel. In S4, she became less Rachel and more Lea, and that was fine too. But for this fic, I simply stuck to the self-centred aspect of her character, and capitalised on the huge story gaps between S3 and 4.

Rachel is still recognisably our 110%, driven Rachel Berry, but she's the version that doesn't have a homosexual bone in her body (figuratively speaking) and doesn't seem to understand that the way she cares for Quinn is gay to the rest of the world. Being Rachel, she doesn't let it stop her.

[keyboardio]

May 2017 update

TL;DR: Initial FCC/CE pretesting results; Component sourcing craziness; We're guessing that we're about two weeks out from starting PVT

Hello from Oakland,

When we last wrote, we were pretty sure that April would see Jesse in Shenzhen overseeing manufacture of the first 100 Model 01 keyboards.

That didn't happen and we're pretty bummed out about it.

As of this writing, we believe Jesse will be getting on a plane to Shenzhen in two or three weeks. Below, we're going to lay out what's happened in the past month and what still needs to happen before we start manufacturing.

RJ45 connectors

When we wrote last month, we told you that the factory had enough RJ45 connectors for the first 1800 keyboards in their warehouse. While that is now true, it wasn't then. We only found this out about two and a half weeks ago, when the factory told us they hadn't yet sent keyboards to the test lab for FCC/CE pretesting.

As we dug into it, we found out that they hadn't sent the keyboards to the test lab because they couldn't finish building the circuit boards. They couldn't finish building the circuit boards because, while he factory's purchasing team thought they had received a large order of our RJ45 connectors, in fact the Chinese customs authorities had received them.

It took a while for the whole story to come out, but it sounds like what happened was that the customs declaration for the Taiwan-made RJ45 connectors wildly undervalued the product, so much so that Chinese customs took one look at the packages, said "Nope!", and impounded the goods.

We don't know why the customs declaration was so wrong, though we suspect that someone, somewhere was trying to be "helpful" to minimize taxes paid on the parts. We got somewhat cranky when we found all this out, and while we don't know exactly what went down, the factory reports that they have 3600 RJ45s sitting in their warehouse now.

FCC/CE pretesting

As we mentioned above, the first round of FCC/CE pretesting didn't happen when the factory said it would. Once we understood what was going on, the factory scrambled to buy a small number of RJ45 connectors to build test keyboards to submit for lab testing.

For reasons that still aren't entirely clear to us, the factory didn't send sample keyboards to the test lab until April 24.

On the 26th, the test lab told us that they were short some documentation: electronic schematics, an electronic block diagram, a copy of the Bill of Materials, a datasheet for the LEDs and an "Operational Description." We turned all of that around in a couple of hours, though we had to guess on the operational description and nobody had ever asked us for a block diagram for the keyboard before. The test lab promised to have results back in two business days, though this week's May Day holiday meant we didn't see the first round results until Tuesday.

We almost passed.

Results from our FCC test report. The red circles show electro-magnetic emissions we need to reduce.

Of course, in the realm of certification, "almost passed" means "failed." The Model 01 had just a little bit too much electromagnetic radiation in the 35-115Mhz range.

Because this sort of thing is pretty common, and a little bit of a dark art unless you have a lot of experience, we designed the Model 01's circuit board to let us add slew rate limiting capacitors on the USB data lines.

One of the services the test lab offers is engineering support to help resolve exactly this sort of issue. The next step is for them to evaluate our proposed solution and make their recommendations for a remediation. It sounds like we'll have their feedback by the end of this week.

If the next round of pretesting looks good, we can start building the electronics for the PVT units in a little over a week. We'll turn around and use some of those PVT keyboards for the official CE certification and FCC Declaration of Conformity.

Keyswitches

The factory currently has enough keyswitches in stock for the first 500 keyboards. (They've counted them twice.) Due to a mistake by their purchasing department, the rest of the switches didn't get ordered until February. Matias, our keyswitch manufacturer, initially thought they'd be delivering all of our switches sometime in March, but that didn't end up happening. They've committed to delivering us at least 1000 keyboards worth of keyswitches per month from here on in.

The delay is related to an improvement the they made to reduce the amount of "wobble" in the switches at the end of last year. The new switches feel a lot nicer, but due to the tighter tolerances, their manufacturing operation has taken some time to come up to speed. The team at Matias is bending over backwards to get us switches as quickly as possible and right now we believe that we'll have covered 90% of pre-orders with June's keyswitch delivery.

Keycap injection molding

When we last wrote, we told you that the keycap factory was reworking all of our keycap stems, so they didn’t grip the keyswitches so hard that they ripped the keyboard apart when you try to pull one out. That work was supposed to be completed by, roughly, the first week of April. It ended up stretching another two weeks. We got test keycaps in the mail at the two weeks ago and didn't get the factory's test report until the a few days later. By our measurements, 48 of the keycaps required somewhere between 1.3-1.5 kg of force to remove, with the rest at 0.9 kg to 1.2 kg. 0.9 kg is way, way too loose. 1.2 kg would be workable, but isn't what we'd expected.

The factory's measurements all come in a bit lower than ours, with 20 of the keycaps at less than 1 kg of force being required to remove them and no keycap requiring more than 1.2 kg of force to remove. We think the difference can be chalked up to us using a fancy digital force gauge and them using something a bit more analog.

After a bit of negotiation, the factory agreed to have the keycap factory fix the keycaps that they measured as taking less than 1 kg of force to remove. They'd promised us an estimate of the time required to to modify the tooling two weeks ago, but we're still waiting on it. Thankfully this kind of modification is relatively quick and easy. To get the keycaps to fit more tightly, the plastic key stems need to be a hair bigger. And to do that, the factory needs to shave a little bit of metal off the injection molds. (To reduce the force required to remove the keycaps, they had to cut big holes in the injection molds, weld in new steel and remachine the molds. That was the bit that took so long last time.)

Keycap laser engraving

In mid-April, the keycap engraving supplier sent updated samples back to our factory. They'd done a pretty good job of getting the legends and paint in the right place, but even from the photos, we could see that there were a few labels that were still misaligned. The factory promised to have the laser engraving supplier take another pass at it. That new version of the keycaps was due to be returned to the factory two weeks ago, but didn't show up until yesterday.

We're starting to suspect that the only way these issues are going to get ironed out is to have Jesse go sit at the laser engraving supplier's office and work with their engineers. If that happens, you can expect a bunch of photos in the next backer update.

Center bars

In the last update, we told you that the factory said they'd resolved the issues with the center bars deforming a bit as they came out of the injection molds. They sent us samples. They had, in fact, resolved the curvature issue. From there, we pointed out a few issues we saw with the finish on the samples and asked them to spend a bit of time cleaning up the surface of the injection molds. Two weeks ago, we got new samples in the mail. We're happy enough with the cleanup work they've done to declare the center bars "done"

Short RJ45 cables

One of the small, but important details we've been working through has been the RJ45 cables we use to connect the two halves of the keyboard.

The longer cables were pretty easy to sort out, but the shorter cables have been unexpectedly difficult. Most cable vendors didn't seem to get why we needed our short cables to be so short. (They have to fit inside the little cutouts between the two halves of the keyboard.)

We specced 12 or 13cm long cables, end to end. We got samples back that were half that length and a couple that were double that length. Some of the samples had connectors that were so long they couldn't fit inside the keyboard. One or two were so stiff that they put serious lateral pressure on the RJ45 jacks. That could lead to the jacks becoming less reliable over time. One sample had connectors so short that they got stuck inside the jacks. One sample had shrouds on the cable that were so long that the connectors wouldn't even fit into the jacks.

One vendor has made us a new set of sample cables that look like they're going to be just right. They match some samples that were made by a different vendor last year. Last year’s cables fit great and worked well, but weren't particularly well made. We expect to have the new vendor’s version in hand sometime next week.

USB Type C Cables

Last time around, we mentioned that we were looking at possibly forgoing the "right angle" Type C cables if we couldn't find a vendor who made something that seemed high enough quality. In the end, all the right-angle Type C cables we found that were well made had gigantic plastic housings around the connectors that prevented them from getting a solid connection to the Model 01. All of the good-looking right-angle cables were either mechanically or electrically wrong.

We've ended up deciding to go with a straight Type C cable from a vendor our factory has worked with before. It's still 1.5 meters long and our teardown shows it to be well made. It has a 56K pull-up resistor in the right place, which means it's not fraudulently claiming to support USB Power Delivery, so it shouldn't melt when you use it to charge your phone.

In the end, it's a pretty boring cable. We're ok with that.

Software

On the software front, there's lots of great stuff happening.

Algernon has been hard at work on Chrysalis, the cross-platform desktop interface for managing, programming and flashing the Model 01 (and other keyboards that run Kaleidoscope or have similar serial communications protocols.)

Over the past month, he's built functionality to autodetect a supported keyboard when you plug it in, flash new firmware on the keyboard over the USB line using @noopkat's avrgirl, the beginnings of a graphical LED theme editor, as well as a few more bits. He’s released a first “alpha” version which includes a mock keyboard, so you can try it out, even without a supported keyboard.

You can follow along with his progress on GitHub: https://github.com/algernon/Chrysalis, and can read a recent progress report on his blog.

Since Algernon has been focusing on the GUI, the firmware itself hasn't seen a ton of work over the past month. (It doesn't hurt that we have implementations of pretty much every keyboard feature we've reached for.)

The other exciting development on the firmware front isn't exactly Keyboardio related. About a week ago, Wez Furlong popped up with patches to Kaleidoscope that let him add support for keyboards with ARM microcontrollers and Bluetooth connections. One of his first targets is Adafruit's nRF52 Bluetooth board.

(Click here to see a demo)

There's still a fair amount of refactoring to go before it's clean and easy to use Kaleidoscope with ARM chips and Bluetooth connections, but we're really excited to see this happening. If more keyboards can run Kaleidoscope, more intrepid hackers will be building cool plugins to make your keyboard better.

Scheduling

Our current best guess is that Jesse will be in Shenzhen in about two weeks to oversee the PVT run.

Sometime right around then, Kickstarter backers should expect to get email asking them to confirm their shipping addresses and keycap preferences. While we already have shipping addresses for post-Kickstarter preorder customers, we’re planning on sending them surveys, too. We know it’s been awhile since folks ordered and we want to make sure your Model 01 doesn’t end up shipped to the wrong place.

PVT assembly should take one week. After that, most of the PVT units will be express-shipped to customers. We don’t have a firm methodology for who gets the PVT units. Our plan is still to send those units to early Kickstarter backers located in the United States who confirm on their surveys that they’re happy to get some of the earliest production keyboards, and to put them through their paces, but we’re going to play it a little bit by ear.

A few of the PVT units will be held back for reliability testing. The factory thinks that will take about a week and a half. If reliability testing of the PVT keyboards looks good, the factory will start producing your keyboards as fast as they can. <3 j+k