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wip stuff i hope i can finish someday

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Before you on a table are three cups. They are labeled "Seotov," "Dandridge," and "Belmont." I am shuffling the cups. Under one of them is a pair of rusty pliers, which will be used to drag the truth out of our secretive little gambler.

Which cup are they under?

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I debated posting about this because I know it will be controversial and because I myself have complex feelings about it, but to quote an intrepid intergalactic explorer: we can talk about this.

A discord fic club recently advertised they would be reading one of my fics. I was actually really excited about this! Hopefully new people get to enjoy a thing I worked hard to make for them, and I was really looking forward to hearing what they thought about it.

Except the advertised date came and went with silence on the actual fic, so I assumed that it got canceled or something.

But, no, it didn’t - I heard later that the group had in fact read my fic and apparently loved it. Quietly. To themselves.

And, like, look — I’m trying to write this with a minimum amount of snark, because on one hand I’m a fic reader too and I firmly believe that people have a right to enjoy fic however they wish. As I writer, I also don’t think I’m entitled to comments, but like 90% of writing fic for me is to be part of a community, and being a part of a community means commenting on fics so that there are more fic and the community continues.

On the other hand, as a writer, I have to be honest — hearing that people specifically scheduled time to read a fic I wrote and then loved it while not sharing any of their thoughts with me? That doesn’t make me feel good. I feel like it should, but it doesn’t. It makes me feel like my fic is just content to be consumed without regard to the effort that went into making it.

The fic in question? I worked on it on and off for literal years. It had to be betaed. It had to be formatted to be posted to AO3 properly, I had to work on the meta bits to properly tag and warn people.

All of that is work, and the only thing I ask for (and any fic author, really) is engagement and encouragement from the people reading the fic.

This isn’t snark or bitterness to say that if the trend is going to be people talking amongst themselves about my fic in a group chat with total silence to me as the author, then I don’t see the point in going through all the effort to post fic publicly. I’ll just send it to my own group chat. If that’s the community now, then that’s where I’ll go. I’ll hate it, honestly, but like. If that’s the deal, that’s the deal.

Anyway, I’m clearly in my feelings about this. I really am truly glad people liked my work. But this really bummed me out.

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Can I just say something honestly and very seriously to all you writers?

With the Internet going down the "nothing adult, no death, no nothing. Make it kid friendly" route,

Please don't ever stop making art or writing wips that are gruesome, horror, other things like that. Don't let the Internet sanitize how you wanna tell a story. Channel your rage into your art and keep going and don't give up

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Aphroditus

An HSR smut fic

⚠️Rated E⚠️ ~1.4k words Aventurine/Dr. Ratio | Post-Penacony | Body Worship | Top Ratio/Bottom Aventurine | Porn with lots of feelings | Ratio is Down Bad

Who needs the gaze of Nous when you have the undivided attention of an angelic beauty like Aventurine?

Preview:

There is a certain compulsion to correlate Aventurine with the sun.

Looking up at him now, Veritas can understand the compulsion. With golden hair framing his face like glinting rays, his brilliant eyes, his normally bright demeanor. He is almost too much to look at directly.

Almost .

But now that Veritas has learned to look, has been granted the privilege of a glimpse beneath the gloss and veneer, now that he sees what others cannot, he knows better. This is not some untouchable entity, burning and scorching as much as giving light and warmth, but rather a dark mystery, a reflective surface that turns the assumptions and schemes of others back on themselves.

A slippery thing, sliding between fingers like an image on the water if held too tightly. Not a sun, but no less brilliant and illuminating. Not a constant, but constantly moving, coming and going and gravitating everything to him as he passes. A shimmering mirage of beauty, seeming so much larger than the stars themselves if one did not know the truth.

Not the sun, no. Kakavasha is the moon.

And Veritas Ratio has ever been the tide caught in his pull.

There is something to be said for being seen, Veritas would know better than most. It is something he has craved his entire life. To be noticed, perceived by that particular someone of importance. To be picked apart and known so intimately, his very molecular structure laid out on display before the gaze of the divine.

How little he knew, in all his chasing after the glance of Aeons, that all he need do was lay himself on the altar of a mortal man.

His god is looking at him now, perched upon his offering of pleasure. And better yet, unlike those cold, heedless deities he chased after in his youth, this god allows him to look and to perceive in return.

(His god would surely smite him where he lay, if he could hear the blasphemous thoughts in his head right now, and so he is careful not to give them voice.)

(Keep reading here!)

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if it's good enough for you, then it deserves to be made. don't let anyone else decide if your story is worth it or not.

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waiter

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Gift giving as a love language competition

Veritas just wanted to find a way for Aventurine to stop spoiling him with gifts and spend his money with more considerartion.

However, this ended up becoming a competition between them.

Aventurine added the gifts on birthday don't count to be able to spoil Veritas on his birthday. Veritas then made use of it to pamper Aventurine.

The practical gift rule helps limit the amount of gifts Aventurine buys. Meanwhile, Aventurine just thinks the handmade gift rule is kind of unfair.

The no cat cake rule was added after Aventurine discovered the good Doctor were in kahoots with the cat cakes to knock over his coffee mug.

I just like them being mutually down bad, and be unnecessarily competitive about it.

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POV Aventurine as the self-aware villain of a dating sim who dies in every route and has resigned himself to his fate when one day Ratio who has never played a dating sim in his life transmigrates into one of the love interests

You are the villain in a dating sim. How or why you came to know this became irrelevant after a few deaths. It's different every route: sometimes it's by blade, sometimes a gun--in one route, it's yourself, and maybe you're a bit too eager to get it over with those times.

You wake up at the start again. Somehow, your own disappointment still surprises you.

You are the villain. There is never any escape for the villain. You say your lines and then you die. This is your eternity, this same year in slightly different dressings all leading to the same outcome. No one has ever deviated, no one ever can deviate, no one even knows this is a game but you, powerless plaything of the developers. Be the villain. Play your role. Say your lines. Run the sce--

"Director, a Dr. Ratio is here to see you."

Pause. Respond, "Tell him I'm on a call, then send him up in five minutes."

Well now. This love interest, whose route leads you to your death at your own hands, has never come back after you scare him off with your gun at your own chest.

What are you to make of this?

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Just so you guys know, I have a chapter title list right next to my outline so I can keep track and make sure the titles are still lining up as I shuffle stuff around. I scribbled some vague notes for at least a little context, but I thought you'd like to see what the list looks like at present.

For the record, there's a little bit of wiggle room here. For example, there's a couple that can be split if I end up having to split a chapter again (pretty much just chapter 7, 11, and 12 really, but I also skipped a line between 13 and 14 that can get added back in). But the titles can't really be rearranged at all so some of these later chapters might get a bit long lmao

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Fun fact about names in Golden Regrets: "Forte," which is Alicia's second surname alias, is taken from Latin meaning "by chance." It shares a translation with the Italian "a ventura" which is where the aventurine stone gets its name from.

He named her after himself. 🙃

Also, "Pativalo," her first surname alias, is a heavily modified form of a Romani word that means "honor" or "trust".

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Sooooooo lazy sketches. I love Aventurine, but I draw him too rarely:(

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he got too caught up in keeping watch 👁️👁️

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sunglasses

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IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO END THIS OH MY LORD

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Regret