A splash of magic...

Call me Druzy! (They/Them) Blog is currently under construction! Used to be known as @quilloftheclouds

[druzydabbles]

You may have known me as quilloftheclouds! I am now druzydabbles. Curious about the name change? Here's a bit more on that.

But without further ado! Hi hello hey howdy good day to all you delightful lovelies, call me Druzy (they/them)! This is the blog that suffers under the barrage of my chaotically on-fire-all-the-time brain children I call "My Ideas".

Watch out for the occasional deluge of overly enthusiastic rambling praise of the absolute splendour of my fellow creatives' work. Disregard the haphazard, makeshift mess of scaffolding that is the headache-inducing overhaul of my various original stories. I'm sure that lopsided, towering pile of queued up reblogs of creative resources (advice, references, inspiration, ask games, etc.!) is perfectly safe, it's just shaking and leaning towards you because it's so excited you're here!

I've got a lot of work to do to update my assorted project pages and introductions, and you can simply forget about any semblance of up-to-date-ed-ness when it comes to the pre-2026 posts on my main story's worldbuilding or character backgrounds. Only a few years later, and my old writing makes me cringe. >:0

Nonetheless! I have left up all those old snippets and elaborative rants to be perused if you feel so inclined, despite my fervent internal pleading for the contrary. Just don't trust anything you read to be accurate to the current plot line I have in my head.

Anyways. I'm a writeblr! Reblog this post if you are also a fellow living entity deranged enough (/affectionate) to depict brain-children with words! Introduce yourself and your stories! Help me find why fate hath cursed us thusly as we venture through the troublesome hardships of writing, together!

And read on for a brief look at my own current projects~!

Series Title: Anchored Souls (Main WIP)

Book Titles: One Siren's Soul, Two Witch's Woven, Three Star's Stolen

Brief: pirate fantasy with a focus on sirens/merfolk; quantum physics inspired, element-based magic system; souls, memories, and sense of self; everyone has grey morality; ironic identities; balancing the importance of one's past, present, and future.

Book Title: CIRCUIT (Novella - Secondary WIP)

Brief: modern sci-fi of secret agents vs. aliens; "high tech" when without electricity; light-based lifeforms; implications of electrokinesis in a technology-reliant world; the process of healing from grieving loss; adopting the enemy (because it turns out they're actually the equivalent of a five-year-old).

Book Title: The Dark's Treasured Glow (Concept stage)

Brief: solarpunk exoplanet colony floating above a perpetual cloud layer, the surface world cast in darkness; dragon-inspired secretly sapient extraterrestrial lifeforms; bioluminescent-based biology and evolution; experimental narrative without sight cues; fighting the corruption behind the utopian facade; a discussion of "owning" land and natural resources.

Ciao for now, you lovely gems~!

[ivy-michaels]

if you've never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into "the groove" to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.

[purlty23]

[writers-hq]

[emilievitnux]

[Image description : A tweet by user C.G. Drews @/PaperFury saying : "ways to fix writer's block

try turning the author on and off again

let them talk, they might talk themselves out of their own mess

if they're crying, put them in a bag of rice

say "give up then" in a comforting way and watch them get back to work out of sheer spite"

/end Image description]

[expressions-of-nature]

Kelp Forest by divindk

[punkitt-is-here]

quirky fourth wall breaking character but theyre just fucking. wrong about the medium theyre in. they keep making references to cinematic techniques and directorial styles and the other fourth wall breaking character is like "dumbass we're in a fucking comic book" and they are in a video game.

[totally-cis-offical]

Well currently they’re in a tumblr post but I see your point

[moon-of-curses]

we're actually in a youtube video if this turns out to be funny enough

[ressioo]

Cyan lizard for your enjoyment

Bonus tiny baby cyan on top of adult cyan

[an0neemouse]

If you think what you're writing is above your skill level, do it anyway. You might surprise yourself in what you are able to do, and even if you don't, the experience is worth it. Write, and write, and write some more. You can always re-write it when your skill increases. But your skill level will never increase if you don't challenge yourself and above all else-- write.

[feathernotes]

if you're writing your story and you think 'hm, this might be too weird' Wrong. Make it weirder

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

The best piece of writing advice I can give is that you should strive to be sincere rather than original.

You can't force originality. Originality will arise as a natural consequence of sincerity. Make the story completely and apologetically yours, and originality will come by virtue of it being your story.

[barkingandrotting]

hm yes i like this character. now shoot him 5 times in a parking lot.

[utilitycaster]

a brief guide to types of fantasy names

I put some syllables together and they sounded nice

I put some syllables together and I can't say they sounded nice per se but they do sound vaguely like they come from Arthuriana so close enough

reasonably common real-world name but a letter or two is changed or added

extremely apt real-world character descriptor but a letter is changed (you know who you are)

two reasonably common real-world names smashed together in some kind of fantasy name particle accelerator

this means something meaningful in a foreign language (real-world)

this means something meaningful in a foreign language (elaborate conlang, self-created)

this means something meaningful in a foreign language (hey Siri, how do you say Fateful in Quenya? Set alarm for D&D Session Zero for 45 minutes from now.)

real-world names, but exclusively ones that are no longer in common usage, frequently either from the ancient Mediterranean region or else medieval European names

"this is Linda and she fights dragons. fuck you."

referred to only by a series of complex and mysterious titles

rigid naming convention across the board, but within that any one of the above is possible

some kind of pun or overly long memeified joke

I don't know what data set the fantasy name generator runs off of and I'm too afraid to ask but not too afraid to reap the benefits

acronym that I never replaced

Literally just a noun

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Literally just a noun/accurate adjective BUT I picked a deliberately obscure one so it sounds more like a real name.

[spinabifidaoccultist-deactivate]

[comradevishya]

Pictures like this are so important! I wish I would have seen more of this when I was younger. I’d have been more receptive to my body’s need for mobility aids if I had seen it in a positive light like this.

[botaniqueer]

Mark Belan on Twitter made a really cool infographic on the different forms of fruit (or pseudofruits in the case of accessory fruits) that angiosperms have!

He has it for sale as a poster here!

Also!! Please do not share without crediting the original artist!

[sartorialadventure]

Regency Color Compendium

Beatrice Knight's Regency Color Compendium The evolving Regency fashion and textile industry did exactly what today's designers do; th

Names of shades and when in Regency England they were most popular.

[lordansketil]

REGENCY COLOUR COMPENDIUM, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE??

[kremlin]

uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

cheers

[andmaybegayer]

Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.

[ms-demeanor]

I've 100% replaced free acrobat with the firefox built-in and it works wonderfully for general office use and research/reading/viewing. It doesn't have robust redaction capabilities, but if you need to fill and sign and highlight a form it's actually much more intuitive than acrobat reader.

[just-shower-thoughts]

People who like rocks see cool rocks everywhere. People who like birds see interesting birds everywhere. The tree on your yard could be an exceptional specimen. The world around you could be amazing and magical, but you aren’t enough of a nerd to see it.

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

I gave my mum Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking: Eleven Walks Through Expert Eyes for her birthday this year, it’s a book that revolves around this idea: the author invites 11 specialists in different things to walk around a boring city block with her one after the other so they can point out to her the things they see, that she doesn’t notice. There’s an expert in typography talking about what the variety of fonts on urban signs can tell you about the city’s history, an entomologist pointing out all the urban insects no one pays attention to, a geologist, a sound engineer…

[thegreenpea]

See this is what I mean by “there are more wonders in this world than you can ever dream of and all you need to do is listen to its stories and see it’s magic. ”

[writingrosesonneptune]

BEGGING people to realize that when you give critique (ex: beta reads and feedback exchanges), you are supposed to focus on the things you thought were executed well *just as much* as the things you thought needed work. If you just focus on the negative, the person you are critiquing will likely assume nothing they did was good, and in subsequent adjustments to the work may throw out the baby with the bathwater and get rid of all the elements that worked fine. If they don't give up altogether.

Critiquing is its own skillset that we have to hone! It is so important to be able to recognize not just mistakes, but also things the creator pulls off fantastically. This seems like an easy thing to notice, but there are A LOT of pieces to a work that when done right become almost invisible. They don't leap out at you like something that interrupts your immersion. That immersion itself is a sign of solid work, and it can be hard to recognize if you're not used to looking for it.