valeriehalla

[valeriehalla]

to my queer and trans friends

i don't want to be caught uttering something as trite as "you will make it through this." i mean, you will make it through this: you've made it through a lot of things.

what i want to say is that you will live a life through this.

you will wake up about once a day. you will see the moon. you will eat good food. you will hear the sound of trees shaking in the wind. you will smile at stupid jokes. even as some things undoubtedly become harder, you will experience countless moments of simple animal joy.

when a Big Thing goes Horribly Wrong, we feel washed away. our future hides from us just out of view. sometimes we worry it might not exist anymore. but the future comes around no matter how much or how little we worry about it. eventually we get there and we find: the future is just a day like any other day, containing exactly one day's worth of problems for us to solve, and one day's worth of animal joy with it. no matter what.

don't lose sight of that, okay?

[valeriehalla]

monster doodles

[valeriehalla]

CURSE/KISS/CUTE - chapter 0, scene 7 is now up on Patreon!

in which Aster finally notices the change.

❧ 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.

[valeriehalla]

i feel like i really pigeonhole myself by talking about cartoon boobs as often as i do. listen: does CURSE/KISS/CUTE have huge_breasts? yes. but it also has yaoi. and 10 foot tall mom. and uhhhhhh slerson (slime person). and fairy femboy? so actually, my hole is huge and all kinds of different pigeons live in it.

[valeriehalla]

Whenever a cartoon character has ginormous breasts and a shirt that fully contours to said breasts, there’s a contingent of people who talk about it as if it’s, like, a plot hole? “Shirts don’t work like that,” they’ll say.

Well, buddy, maybe you should have considered: boobs also don’t work like that. Why are we taking the boobs at face value, but the shirt is a line too far? You can’t just pick one or the other. They’re a package deal. If we accept the premise that the breasts are This Big, we must also admit the corollary that the breast-haver would, as a matter of practical necessity, be in possession of shirts with a topology sufficient for their containment. The “impossible shirt” is completely possible. In fact, it’s more than possible: it’s worldbuilding.

[valeriehalla]

at this point I just categorically have 90,000,000 times more fun on tumblr than the smoldering wreckage of twitter. like, twitter was already becoming kind of a drag for me before the hostile takeover, and now that cohost (hallowed be her name) is shutting down, it's like, well—i guess we doin’ tumbls again!! “it’s obviously the best one”

honestly, while the queer internet may never recover from the sucking wound that was and is tumblr’s NSFW ban—at least not as long as the united states of america continues to fail to take antitrust action against apple, google, and the payment processors collectively serving as the final boss of what’s allowed to be posted where on the internet—i’m starting to feel like tumblr is moving back into position as The Best Site For Artists regardless. my thoughts on this are half-formed, but it’s like this:

every other social media platform is either 1. tiktok, 2. hyper-obscure, or 3. slow-motion self-destructing to a degree way beyond even what tumblr inflicted upon itself in 2018. this is not a new sentiment i don’t think.

i think the fact that tumblr is unable to capture the literal billions of users every other platform is chasing makes it arguably a lot nicer for the users who are here. there is no way for an application to achieve a tiktok-sized install base that isn’t just naked manipulation and skinnerboxing. tumblr’s leadership seems either too incompetent to pull it off or too wise to try, and so we have what is effectively the last microblogging platform on the internet that’s actually still usable for microblogging.

also, a smaller-but-not-too-small audience is more engaged with what they’re seeing. simple as. a thousand notes on tumblr means more than a million views on tiktok and it always will.

of course, i am in fact making a living off of sexually-explicit art right now, and so tumblr cannot be my One Platform. i get away with it because the art is in service of a story hosted off-site, and so i never need to post The Whole Pussy on here; if i was exclusively an illustrator i’d be even less thrilled with the current state of things than i already ain’t. i guess this is just a testament to how truly bad The State Of Things has gotten, though. congratulations, tumblr: you really did win by doing absolutely nothing.

[valeriehalla]

listen, you know, like, look, okay? if you followed me because you thought i was dunking on that manga because i think it’s cringe to write a story about huge-boobed girls who aren’t wearing any pants......

[valeriehalla]

I see a lot of comments to the effect of “OP you can’t just not post screencaps”. All I can say to that is that I considered it, and then decided not to, because I think the experience of going out and looking it up yourself is way funnier than it would have been if I’d just given you some selected panels. It really is a gestalt thing. The effect is cumulative—it’s an atmosphere.

Having said that, I do want to point out maybe my favorite thing. A few times per volume, a chapter will begin with an image like this:

Is that not kind of gobsmacking? There are so many of these—these title cards of girls just ambiently cheesecaking in the middle of some of the most lovingly hand-inked countryside backgrounds you’ve ever seen in your life. Yet the foreground and background are not in conflict. It is as if you are being challenged to accept these things within the same frame. This image says: You are here right now. This is the world you live in. Feel the summer breeze on your infinitesimally-beskirted thighs, reader.

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[valeriehalla]

CURSE/KISS/CUTE - chapter 0, scene 6 is now up on Patreon!

in which Aster and the angel share a cute moment.

❧ 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.

[valeriehalla]

Not to put you on blast, but speaking as a comic artist, I can tell you that all that random emphasis isn’t actually as random as you might think!

I’m sure every comic letterer has their own criteria for when and how (and whether) to employ this technique, but the way I see it, there’s a couple of overlapping reasons why it’s done:

It makes the text a bit more legible. The bolded words act as visual landmarks that help guide the reader through the text. Comic text is pretty weird, typographically speaking: it has a very small line-height and it’s center-aligned, not to mention it’s usually printed in allcaps. This is all done in the interest of conserving space for the illustrations, but it makes for text that can be kind of fatiguing to read. The extra visual emphasis on key words and phrases can make it easier to quickly parse the text, especially in larger speech bubbles.

It also serves the usual purpose of indicating the natural word emphasis that people employ when speaking English. Usually you’d just use italics for that, but italics are hard to distinguish in handwriting, so letterers will use either bold or bold-italics for the job. Beyond that, the difference is mainly down to quantity: comic letterers traditionally go a bit ham with this technique, whereas it’d be gauche to do the same thing in prose. But that’s a matter of convention.

Emphasis on the word traditionally in that last point, by the way. In truth, this convention has been on its way out for a while. Lots of comics these days even have lowercase letters! It’s easier to pull off with the switch to digital lettering. But I still find the practice charming as heck.

[valeriehalla]

(a realization about dialogue formatting, from a comic artist turned novelist.)

One of the first things a novice writer learns about speech tags is that they’re part of the “scaffolding” of prose. They should be largely invisible to the reader: use them when necessary, omit them when not, and be sparing in the application of verbs other than “said”. They serve only the function of clarifying who is speaking when it is necessary to do so.

Except:

Sometimes you might want to use a speech tag in spite of the redundancy. The fact that the reader’s eyes slide right over them is an exploitable property. By slicing a line of dialogue in half with a speech tag, you can force the reader to perceive a meaningful pause between two utterances—and the effect is much stronger than you might get out of an ellipsis or an em dash. Developing an intuition for when and how to do this is a huge part of learning to write dialogue, I think.

(And yes: if you ever wondered, this is exactly same the reason why comic artists sometimes “double bubble” their speech bubbles. Same end, different means!)

[valeriehalla]

CURSE/KISS/CUTE - chapter 0, scene 5 is now up on Patreon!

in which in which the werewolf-shaped gun goes off, a mysterious phone call is made, and Aster is touched several times.

❧ 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.

[valeriehalla]

actual writing advice

1. Use the passive voice.

What? What are you talking about, “don’t use the passive voice”? Are you feeling okay? Who told you that? Come on, let’s you and me go to their house and beat them with golf clubs. It’s just grammar. English is full of grammar: you should go ahead and use all of it whenever you want, on account of English is the language you’re writing in.

2. Use adverbs.

Now hang on. What are you even saying to me? Don’t use adverbs? My guy, that is an entire part of speech. That’s, like—that’s gotta be at least 20% of the dictionary. I don’t know who told you not to use adverbs, but you should definitely throw them into the Columbia river.

3. There’s no such thing as “filler”.

Buddy, “filler” is what we called the episodes of Dragon Ball Z where Goku wasn’t blasting Frieza because the anime was in production before Akira Toriyama had written the part where Goku blasts Frieza. Outside of this extremely specific context, “filler” does not exist. Just because a scene wouldn’t make it into the Wikipedia synopsis of your story’s plot doesn’t mean it isn’t important to your story. This is why “plot” and “story” are different words!

4. okay, now that I’ve snared you in my trap—and I know you don’t want to hear this—but orthography actually does kind of matter

First of all, a lot of what you think of as “grammar” is actually orthography. Should I put a comma here? How do I spell this word in this context? These are questions of orthography (which is a fancy Greek word meaning “correct-writing”). In fact, most of the “grammar questions” you’ll see posted online pertain to orthography; this number probably doubles in spaces for writers specifically.

If you’re a native speaker of English, your grammar is probably flawless and unremarkable for the purposes of writing prose. Instead, orthography refers to the set rules governing spelling, punctuation, and whitespace. There are a few things you should know about orthography:

English has no single orthography. You already know spelling and punctuation differ from country to country, but did you know it can even differ from publisher to publisher? Some newspapers will set parenthetical statements apart with em dashes—like this, with no spaces—while others will use slightly shorter dashes – like this, with spaces – to name just one example.

Orthography is boring, and nobody cares about it or knows what it is. For most readers, orthography is “invisible”. Readers pay attention to the words on a page, not the paper itself; in much the same way, readers pay attention to the meaning of a text and not the orthography, which exists only to convey that meaning.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important. Actually, that means it’s of the utmost importance. Because orthography can only be invisible if it meets the reader’s expectations.

You need to learn how to format dialogue into paragraphs. You need to learn when to end a quote with a comma versus a period. You need to learn how to use apostrophes, colons and semicolons. You need to learn these things not so you can win meaningless brownie points from your English teacher for having “Good Grammar”, but so that your prose looks like other prose the reader has consumed.

If you printed a novel on purple paper, you’d have the reader wondering: why purple? Then they’d be focusing on the paper and not the words on it. And you probably don’t want that! So it goes with orthography: whenever you deviate from standard practices, you force the reader to work out in their head whether that deviation was intentional or a mistake. Too much of that can destroy the flow of reading and prevent the reader from getting immersed.

You may chafe at this idea. You may think these “rules” are confusing and arbitrary. You’re correct to think that. They’re made the fuck up! What matters is that they were made the fuck up collaboratively, by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. Whether you like it or not, you are part of that collaboration: you’re not the first person to write prose, and you can’t expect yours to be the first prose your readers have ever read.

That doesn’t mean “never break the rules”, mind you. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with English orthography, then you are free to break it as you please. Knowing what’s expected gives you the power to do unexpected things on purpose. And that’s the really cool shit.

5. You’re allowed to say the boobs were big if the story is about how big the boobs were

Nobody is saying this. Only I am brave enough to say it.

Well, bye!

[valeriehalla]

last month my bike got stolen. i managed to grab a new bike of the same model at a pretty steep discount, but the only color they had left in stock was pink. at the time i joked: “hehe. forcefemmed by fate…”

yesterday i’m wearing a pink lacy t-shirt you can see my bra straps through (on account of it’s hot out), riding my all-pink step-through beach cruiser to the grocery store, and i park it at the bike rack, and i look over: there’s this jet black cyclist-ass city bike with all the fixin’s chained to the same rack. i think, “what a funny tableau.”

i come back out of the store with my groceries and the owner of the bike is chilling there having a sip. she is cool and athletic-looking. she is dressed as black as her bike. she says nothing as i load my groceries onto my barbie-mobile.

finally, as i unlock my bike and begin taxiing, she says: “pretty bike.”

“th-thanks,” i mumble, looking at the ground for some reason; “uh, i had a blue one but it got stolen,”—now my voice is shrinking into inaudibility—“and they only had pink in stock…”

she laughs. i ride away.

forcefemmed by fate!!!

[valeriehalla]

a homecoming song for wayward monsters.

[valeriehalla]

nobody asked for this, but here’s the process i’ve developed for getting these nice pastel palettes, in case anyone finds it useful.