valeriehalla

[valeriehalla]

Read CURSEKISSCUTE last night and it has not left my mind for a moment (to the point my organic chemistry teacher assume i was nodding off because i kept zoning out thinking about it lol) its genuinely incredible and is already a huge motivator for how i want to be

I did have a question tho! Are plants and animals affected by the curse? Animals like pets im especially curious about

non-human animals are generally not affected by the Curse. indeed, you could say that the Curse exclusively operates on monsters: in the cosmology of the Middle Wood, humans are just another type of monster. the Curse can freely change the form of a monster into that of a human and vice-versa, so implicitly, they categorize together. meanwhile, one can assume that most animals do not have a strong sense of self, so there's not much there for the Curse to act upon.

there's actually a four-way categorization scheme for living things in CURSE/KISS/CUTE, and considering it generally doesn't count as "good writing" to insert a taxonomical diagram into your prose novel about gay monsters kissing, i suppose this is as good a place as any for it to go:

[valeriehalla]

Do the Woods mess with your memory?

Well, I know it does b/c Aster doesn’t remember what bits they were born with, but I was wondering if the Woods messes with more than that. More than just forgetting what your original form was.

this is what we in the business call "a lie". aster of course knows the answer to the question of what junk they had before they got on the train. they're simply enjoying the fact that nobody else does. they will continue enjoying it forever, because their curse renders that information strictly unknowable.

[valeriehalla]

The casual gender fuckery and trans-ness in CURSE/KISS/CUTE makes me so happy. I found myself crying halfway through episode 0. It wasn't even anything in particular. You just managed to send me on a very emotional journey. I have to hand it to you, now I'm longing for a place that isn't real but I feel like I can very tangibly miss. Fantastic work, stimulating synesthesia. Hope you're well <3

at some point in our world's future there will be a moment where everybody finally Gets Over It. it will happen at different times in different places. there are some places where it's already happened. i am interested in writing stories set in that "after". charmside as a setting represents an "after". queerness in charmside is the default state not because everyone in it is queer but because there is no one left who cares enough to reject the label. the concept of being straight or cis never took root here. the farther you get from the train station, the less monsters you'll find who could even comprehend what the word "cis" means without taking a college course on human sociology.

i think this is a real future and i believe with my whole ass that it will be manifest. however, it's also a little hot to think about? like, to scoop up some humans from the "before" world and plop them down into the "after" ... where there's not a soul in sight who can conceive of their self-repression as anything other than transparently maladaptive behavior ............ what do you mean you can't wear a skirt ............ who told you that ............................. huh?? i just don't get it ...................................... well i think you should try it on though ...................................... look how cute it is!

[valeriehalla]

just finished reading your novel, and OH MY GOD ITS SO GOOD!!!!

can i ask whats your biggest inspiration?

u fool... my novel has only just begun. episode 1 coming soon ™ ™ ™ ™ © ® ℠!!!!!!!!

it is so beyond possible to prise apart my inspirations... it's really a gestalt situation. where art is concerned the closest at hand are obviously my peers in the cartooning and comics space, like my wife vivi, joan chimeracauldron, ivy coquettedragoon and zack paranatural and gg soulsov and cripes if i try to make this list complete it'll be embarrassing for Everyone. taylor titmouse not in terms of art style necessarily but as a peer in the illustrated erotica space who is killing it and probably inspired the switch to the more prose-oriented format that CURSE/KISS/CUTE has now.

in terms of prose inspirations i'm sorry to be predictable but neal stephenson and terry pratchett obviously top the list. stephenson's electrifyingly stupid present-tense narration in "snow crash" rewired my brain as a teenager and while i only read a pratchett novel for the first time after finishing the draft for chapter 0 i don't think it will surprise anyone that my brain wears that man's immaculate conversational prose like a glove.

i also owe a life debt to the 40-foot shipping container of untranslated boys love visual novels i read as a young adult. the fact of the matter is that CURSE/KISS/CUTE is, spiritually and forever, Actually A Yaoi. even when the girls kiss it will be a yaoi. if you don't know what i mean by this it's fine. well bye

[valeriehalla]

Wasn't aster asks a series you started a few years ago?

it was! it only ever got the one entry. the ideas i had for that series eventually got rolled up into CURSE/KISS/CUTE, the first episode of which i named "Aster Asks!" in its honor, to the confusion of everyone.

[valeriehalla]

curse/kiss/cute episode 1 coming soon

[valeriehalla]

I have only known Sandy for about 3 hours but if anything happened to him I’d start leveling cities. That being said, “Leveled City” is about the magnitude that I need this twink obliterated. 😍

from a story engineering standpoint i originally slotted sandalphon into episode 0 as sort of a DEI hire to increase the hot boys quotient in an otherwise girls-heavy pilot episode, but he ended up being my absolute favorite character to write for. please mentally read all of his lines in a sort of james from team rocket type accent. he's vers by the way.

[valeriehalla]

I’ve just finished reading the Curse/Kiss/Cute pilot, and, oh my god, help! I’m having a lot of gender envy over Drippy and her drippy-ness!

Also, while I have this ask. Um, why doesn’t she wear pants or a skirt? Is it a confidence thing or does she not care?

some people become monsters and it takes them a long time—maybe a lifetime—to fully scrub the grout of human social mores from between their brain-folds. for others, it's like sloughing off a bad pair of jeans after a long day. it's not about confidence and it's not merely an ambivalence to the concept of pants. a new body is an opportunity to redefine the terms and conditions of how people think about and interact with that body. in other words, it's about control. but most importantly of all, it's about looking cute in cute underwear

[valeriehalla]

This afternoon, read CURSE/KISS/CUTE, my illustrated web novel for queers 18+. Features include:

hope

flirting

emotions

the inherent sexiness of change

vaguely scary deep lore (also sexy)

forcefem (woke)

jokes

It's literally free: www.dicot.moe/ckc

[valeriehalla]

NEW RELEASE: CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0: “Aster Asks!”

Read it for free in your web browser right now!

CURSE/KISS/CUTE is a new episodic erotic web novel about cute gay monsters hooking up in a cursèd wood, with full illustrations and an original soundtrack. 🔞 For adults only! 🔞

[valeriehalla]

so it turns out that while tumblr will let you make a post with the tag #CURSE/KISS/CUTE, it is impossible to actually search posts with that tag, as i have only just learned. i will have to start using #cursekisscute instead. whoops!!!! My Excellent Naming Conventions.............

[valeriehalla]

mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah I just found your VN and it's so cute and arresting and so full of nonbinary longing I'm absolutely in love already and it's kinda inspiring me to do the scary job of opening up a word doc and try writing some of my own stuff for the first time ever

also wrt aster i love love love love love the idea of being freed from agab. just... can't remember. who cares. no longer having to measure up to a gender metric or constantly minimizing your male shoulders or female hips and worrying about your ratios or presentation - and just relax and enjoy it instead of treating it like a constant chore of maintaining a dozen spinning plates to avoid being "found out". freed from presentation pressure. mwah.

also also as a fellow web developer I'd love to hear more about your stack for ssg - gatsby? svelte? vite? 93 nested imported html docs? one really really big div? I ask because while I don't know if I'll ever have the chops for music production, reading and discovering that inline music player absolutely tickled me, both narratively and as a developer, what a delight, so so so good

My “stack” ... hmmm. “Stack” .................

So, for the main website I just used “Lektor”, which I picked out of a hat on the basis that it was python-based and could do the one thing I cared about (HTML templating). But the CURSE/KISS/CUTE reader is coded from scratch. It is a single-page app, and it loads and displays story content by grabbing the HTML from a JSON file I call the “story file”. The JSON in turn is created by a parser that I wrote in python that parses a specially-formatted markdown file which I also confusingly call the “story file”. The script format for this latter file is slightly custom but is mostly just “normal markdown but I repurposed code ticks as a macro format”:

The music player is pretty rudimentary and just offloads all the complicated business to howler.js.

It’s a funny patchworked leaning tower of python but it gets it done and gets it done entirely client-side and that means I don’t have to dip even one of my toes into the haunted pool of server-side web development =w=

[valeriehalla]

By the way!!! Thank you very much to everyone who’s sent me kind asks just to say you’re enjoying CURSE/KISS/CUTE. I’m a bit bashful, so I don’t normally respond publicly to messages without questions attached, but I read them all and hold them close to my heart... it is the juice that makes the machine move...

[valeriehalla]

Hi! I juuust found your work, and I like it (namely through that formatting post, but now I'm actually reading through CURSE/KISS/CUTE and, hey! It is cute! Aster's growing on me)!

I'm actually in the process of writing another book—er, webnovel. Something free because I want people to have the chance to actually invest themselves in it—and I wanted to ask! Did you code the site all yourself, or did you use something as a framework? And, to someone who doesn't know much code, what would you reccomend?

Asters are always growing in odd places ...

I coded the whole entire thing myself. I even coded a ton of backend tools that live on my computer for automating tasks like formatting pages and converting images. I did all of this because I’m a freak...? And I wanted to optimize for fast, lightweight page loads with no server-side rendering. (The entire website is static HTML.)

For someone less inclined to hubris than me, depending on your skill level or interest in learning web code I would recommend either:

just using Wordpress (every web host in existance has a big glowing button labeled “install wordpress” for making a wordpress site and there are endless templates for formatting any kind of post you can imagine with no coding required), or

picking a static site generator and using that (for a fast and lightweight website but one that you might have to do a little coding to finish out the way you like it).

Notably, one thing I don’t recommend is using SquareSpace. For one thing, they have an adult content ban on the books; for another, if you ever do want to do something as basic with your website as “upload an HTML page you coded yourself”, you’ll find yourself locked out in the cold, because that’s grown-up stuff and they don’t like you doing that. (Learning this the hard way is the reason I ended up making my new website myself. A nice thing about a static site is that not only do you have complete control, but it’s fully portable, too: just paste the files into whatever web host you like and it’ll work just the same.*)

*except sometimes you gotta configure your .htaccess a bit etc

[valeriehalla]

I have gotten a lot of messages saying that they really love the presentation of CURSE/KISS/CUTE. Often the commenter in question can’t say what exactly it is about the formatting that they appreciate, but that it just reads well and looks good. Well!!! Allow me to bare my wealth of secret knowledge for you once and for all:

I sorta just did some research into book typography...?

Here’s something you should know about web development, alright: typography on the web is really, really bad. The tools we have at our disposal—HTML and CSS—are incredibly powerful, but they are set up to fight you every step of the way towards Good Typography. When you know what you’re looking for, you can fix all the common issues quickly and easily. But it’s not easy to know what to look for, because

problematic typography is overwhelmingly the norm on the web, and

good typography is invisible.

Here’s a screenshot from CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0:

Now, I don’t want this post to come across as prescriptive. It is not my intention to tell you, “This is what good typography looks like, so follow my lead exactly.” I made a lot of choices with the typography of my web novel: many of those choices would not make sense in other contexts. What I want to convey to you is what those choices are, so that you will know they’re available to be made.

I mentioned that the web “fights you” when it comes to good typography. What do I mean by that? Well, check this out:

This is how that passage of text renders “by default.” In other words, this is how a web browser would render that text without any input from me about what styles to apply. It kind of sucks ass! But it also looks pretty familiar, right? This is not that far off from how a lot of websites—even websites full of prose (looking at you, AO3)—render text.

I think the most illustrative thing to do here would be to walk you through my thought process and show you, step by step, what decisions I made to turn this unstyled text into the styled version you see in the novel.

So, first things first:

1. We have got to shrink that text column.

Computer monitors... are wide. They are wider than they are tall. They are so wide, and they have so many pixels. This means you can fit a lot of characters on them. If you wanted, you could just have a wall of characters from the left side of the screen all the way to the right side. Talk about efficient!!

You should never, ever, ever do this.

This is one choice that I actually will make a prescriptive statement about, because it’s supported by quite a lot of research: fairly narrow text columns are more legible. Specifically, research seems to support the idea that a width in the range of 50 to 70 characters per line is the most comfortable for people to read*. Every font is different, so it takes a little doing to turn that “characters” figure into a pixel measurement; I went with 512 CSS pixels for the maximum width of my text column:

Isn’t that just so much nicer to read already?

*A commenter reminds me that I’d be remiss not to point out that the research on column width legibility isn’t completely conclusive. You do want to limit the width of your text columns, but going over the 70 character-per-line recommendation isn’t necessarily the end of the world, and you might have good reasons to do so. I did not: as mentioned, one of my goals was to mimic book-style typography, and books by nature have fairly restrained column widths, on account of they’re books.

2. Picking a font.

I’m not going to give you the blow-by-blow on how I decided what font to use. The short story is that I asked some designers, and one of the recommendations I got was the free font Crimson Pro, which I took a liking to immediately:

It’s just an all-around attractive serif font, but one thing I really like about it for use in a novel is its highly-visible quotation marks. They’re just kinda jumbo! They’re real big! Easy to see! In a novel, those things aren’t just ornamentation. It makes a great deal of practical sense for them to stand out just a bit. It also has a fairly large x-height, unlike a lot of the more traditional options, which is good for legibility on a computer screen.

3. Adjusting the line-height

Web browsers default to a line-height of about 1.2em, which, as you can probably tell, is quite cramped. If you go and Google “optimal line height for legibility”, you’ll get a number of results right off the bat suggesting 1.5em. Sounds good! Let’s do that:

Well... hmm. That’s definitely an improvement, but between you and me, it actually looks a bit too spacey to my eyes. I wonder why?

I’ll cut to the chase: the 1.5em recommendation makes some assumptions about the font you’re using. In Arial, the letter “A” is about 0.6em tall; in Crimson Pro, it’s about 0.5em. That means that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to spacing your lines, because different fonts have different amounts of empty space baked in. How annoying!

Let me tell you something about the kind of nerd I am. When I had this realization, I grabbed some books off my shelf and pulled out a literal micrometer. I started measuring the line-heights against various font features to see if there were any patterns I could spot in professional typesetting. Here’s what I found:

Almost every book on my shelf spaces lines such that the distance between one baseline and the next is about three times the x-height. How cool is that? I clapped my hands like a seal when I put this together.

Adjusting the line-height to match what I observed in the wild gives us this:

It’s a subtle difference, but to my eyes it feels just right. It’s almost like magic!

4. Paragraph spacing...

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Probably the most controversial choice I made with CURSE/KISS/CUTE’s typography was to opt for book-style paragraph indentation rather than web-style paragraph spacing—like so:

I did this for a few reasons:

It’s what I’m used to. I’ve read a lot of books, and this is just the way that books are formatted. I think for something aspiring to the title of “novel”, there’s value in making it look the way a reader probably expects a novel to look.

A novel has a lot of paragraph breaks in it. A paragraph in, say, an encyclopedia entry might go on for half a page or more; whereas it is unusual for a paragraph in a modern work of narrative prose to run for more than a handful of sentences, especially in any scene with dialogue. Because paragraph breaks are so common, spacing between paragraphs in a novel results in a lot of wasted space. Also, subjectively speaking, the additional space seems to me to lend an undue amount of weight to paragraph breaks. I’m just starting a new thought; there’s no need for a 21-gun salute, you know?

Having said that, here are some good reasons you might decide not to do paragraph indentation anyway:

Doing it right requires a bit of extra legwork. Notice how the very first paragraph in the image above has no indentation. That’s because it’s the start of a new section, and the first paragraph in a section traditionally goes unindented. This is an easy detail to miss, and it can be difficult to wrangle CSS into doing it for you automatically.

Web users don’t expect it. For the first decade of the web’s existence, there was no good way to do paragraph indentation; by the time CSS rolled around and made it easy, paragraph spacing had already become the norm. And while CURSE/KISS/CUTE may be a novel, it is also, specifically, a web novel!

But it’s my house and I get to make the rules, so I went with indentation. Incidentally, there seems to be a dire lack of research into the question of whether indentation or spacing is more legible for readers—but the data that does exist appears inconclusive at best. So, the choice really does come down to vibes.

5. The tragedy of justification.

You’ll note that one way in which I did not make my web novel look like a paper novel is the text alignment. It’s un-justified: the right margin is ripsaw-ragged.

This is because it is not possible to justify text on the web.

Oh, you can try. Look right here: there’s a CSS property for it and everything. Just turn on “text-align: justify” and...

Nightmare! The interword spacing on that first line is almost as wide as the indentation!

Reader, I’m afraid that your web browser is simply too dumb. That’s not the browser’s fault: robust algorithms for justifying text without creating these distractingly huge gaps between words have existed for many decades, and modern computers are powerful enough to run them in real time with little performance impact. It’s just, uh—nobody has ever bothered to implement them into web browsers. It is the damnedest thing.

I tried, I really did. You can mitigate this problem a bit if you enable automatic hyphenation, but browsers are unfortunately also kind of dumb at hyphenating. Firefox, for example, will refuse to hyphenate any word containing a capital letter, so any sentence with a lot of proper nouns in it is a lost cause. I tried manually inserting soft hyphens with a text preprocessor I wrote myself, but still these overjustified lines plagued me: when the text column narrows, for example on a phone, even hyphens can’t save you. The line-breaking algorithm is simply too naïve to optimize for well-justified text, and that’s not something you can fix as a web developer.

As a result, my heavy-hearted recommendation is to never use text justification. It’s just too distracting.

6. And then some extra stuff just for me

I added drop-caps because it looks neat and I made the ellipses spacier because I think it looks good when it, uh, when they are spacier. I think that looks pretty good that’s just my opinion though.

That’s all! Hope you learned something bye!!!

[valeriehalla]

NEW RELEASE: CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0: “Aster Asks!”

Read it for free in your web browser right now!

CURSE/KISS/CUTE is a new episodic erotic web novel about cute gay monsters hooking up in a cursèd wood, with full illustrations and an original soundtrack. 🔞 For adults only! 🔞

[valeriehalla]

CURSE/KISS/CUTE - Episode 0, final scene is now up on Patreon!

in which Aster finally lets it all out.

❧ What’s CURSE/KISS/CUTE? It’s a horny queer monster-liker web novel with illustrations and an original soundtrack. It’s currently debuting scene-by-scene on my Patreon while I finish illustrating the monster of a prologue. You can subscribe to read it now, or wait until Chapter 0 is done, at which point it’ll be released to the public.

Episode 0 is now content-complete!! It’ll be a week or so until I can launch CURSE/KISS/CUTE to the public, as there’s still a handful of things left to do on the website end of things. But, well: get ready!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!