Castle of Roses

My name is Ray and this is my writeblr. I transferred from my old blog northern-rose. | I follow from @writerray | Artfight: Writerray

[northernrosewritings]

Let’s do this again! A Writeblr Re-Re (Re?) intro!

About me

Hi! If you’re new here or (or not?) I go by Ray, my main is @writerray, and I’m over the age of 20 (so if you have nsfw works or don’t feel comfortable following teens or minors, you’re fine to follow me). My pronouns are she/her, I’m ace and bi, and I primarily write fantasy with romantic subplots—typically within the YA genre, though I’m thinking about switching some of my works over to NA or just adult. My writing tag is “# ray writes”, although I haven’t shared much in quite some time. I’m hoping that will change soon.

I have an Associates degree in art. If you’re interested in seeing some of my art—well, it isn’t that impressive despite the degree lol, but all of my oc art is posted here with the tag “# ray’s sketchbook”, I have an art blog ( @writerrayart ) that desperately needs to be updated, but I currently occasionally post fanart to it, and I also sometimes make fanart for visual novels/interactive fiction games over at @rayplaysif.

The tags for my art and writing are tagged on this post for easy access, if you’re curious to see—hopefully the writing tag will be able to be used more often soon as I try to get back into writing.

Current wips

All of my wips are in a planning stage right now, so the only actually current intro I have is the one for Chronicles of Light and Shadow. However, a short description of each one:

•Chronicles of Light and Shadow: a comic I’m planning about a magic school, in which one main character is trying to regain the memories she’s lost; another is trying to learn to live with a powerful entity and its power inside of her while grieving her sister; and another is investigating the school for corruption that she believes is present. And of course, like most comics you might read, those aren’t the only povs—it alternates between various characters scene by scene. Those three are just the main players in the plot. Wip tag: “#wip: colas” Here is the wip intro for more info.

•Chosen One Story: A story about a Chosen One told from the perspective of his best friend. Wip tag: “# wip: co”

•Untitled wip: a story born because I had ocs that I wanted to squish into one world together. Currently has no plot, but currently we have a runaway princess, magic being outlawed and mages on the run, and a fae exiled from her homelands trying to blend in among humans while she works on creating technology to improve their lives. Wip tag: “# wip: nsi”

•G Project: In this world, some people are born with a special power—but the Crown sees them as dangerous, and so these people are hunted and killed. Still, the king can’t kill them all, and some of them escape, spending what remains of their lives running. Our main characters are a boy who wants revenge for his lover’s murder; a girl who can’t remember who she is—but knows that one of her new allies knows more about her than she’s letting on; and a noble girl who’s terrified of her fate now that it’s been discovered that she can read minds. Wip tag: “#wip: g project”

•Castle of Roses-A thief is just about to be executed when the news is brought to the queen: her daughter, the princess, has been poisoned, and there is no cure. The thief makes a desperate attempt at saving her own life by claiming she knows the cure—a lie. Now she must gather the materials for a cure that may not exist with the help of—or perhaps, more accurately, under the watchful eye of—the crown prince and the royal mage’s apprentice. But even if they succeed, there’s still the matter of who, exactly, would poison the princess in the first place. Wip tag: “# wip: cor”

•Other unnamed wip: very little is planned about this one, but basically a girl accidentally ends up in the world of supernaturals following the death of her parents. Her sister soon follows while searching for her. And now the two are caught up in a world they never knew existed—and in a plot to merge their world and the supernaturals’ forever. Wip tag: “# wip: ise”

Taglists

You can ask to be tagged for any of my wips that you find interesting—this will mean that you’ll be tagged in things like intros for the wip or characters, art that I make for it, and answers to various asks or writing prompts.

[jessepinwheel]

there’s a thing I think about sometimes when I’m writing that I call ‘the rabies condition’

by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.

every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like ‘don’t take this if you’re allergic to it’ or ‘if you’re pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor’ or ‘don’t give to children below age 6′ or something, but not the rabies vaccine. if you’ve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccine–you can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you don’t, you’re 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)

which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been ‘exposed to rabies’, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesn’t make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know you’re deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but it’s still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc

and then, after your character’s prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.

[haridraws]

Keep thinking about this Austin Walker post that now lives in my brain. It's a reply to people saying genAI can help creators 'develop concepts' and waste less time on research (x)

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Fuck off and give me the ball . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

[landmineblogging]

you're doomed regardless. might as well save someone else

[landmineblogging]

do it again. keep going. use everything you have left. burn brightly

[scythetypes]

pro tip! if you ever get stuck on your project just fucking cry man. get it out, it's okay

[nobody-nexus]

Here's my advice for both Color Theory and Horror Lighting cause I'm a sucker for both. Have fun with it :>

[cloudabserk]

WARNING do NOT start reading books and comics or watching movies or looking at art!!! you will start wanting to create art yourself. or god forbid. writing.

[cambriancrew]

[halfabouros]

No but actually LMAO

[jeeyonshim]

an editor's job is to keep you humble

[eulers-babe]

for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!

don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!

[libraryogre]

Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."

[damnfool-of-a-took]

Had jury duty, can confirm!

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

Being able to raise reasonable doubt among a jury of one's peers saves lives. If you get the chance, take it.

[unpretty]

How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

anyway after that i wrote a lot.

[unpretty]

i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.

and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.

the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?

read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.

[thegunlady]

#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)

[brehaaorgana]

Too many artists are held back by outdated and bad color theory rules, or even rules that are fine but have built in limitations that you should know and I want to set everyone free.

[brehaaorgana]

Tertiary Red and Secondary Blue could be in your color theory understanding and make paint mixing way easier but they played you

[brehaaorgana]

Also hot takes:

Learning color theory through oil painting is more difficult than learning it through gouache & watercolor, primarily because it takes way more time to find mass tone and mix everything and also it's much less obvious to easily and quickly discern if a paint pigment is highly staining or transparent.

Oil painters like to seem like they have the richest and most storied traditions in color theory to past down but also inevitably they are the most likely to retain an extremely limited chroma palette based on classical palettes for the sake of classicism and not always make that fact very apparent to a beginner aside from saying it's an "old masters palette" watercolor/gouache painters are bad at using paints that are not light-fast and clinging to them despite having better alternatives, but generally still understand chroma gamuts and pigment importance better or at least talk about them more.

When you're mixing paints, the earth colors (browns) don't need to handled and thought of as brown. Ask yourself if the brown is yellow, orange, red, or leaning towards a black (which would be treated as a violet or blue, depending on whether black is warmer or cooler).

Yes there are cool reds and warm blues

Any reference color wheel that places red on the very top hurts my feelings, stop doing this just because you learned "roygbiv". Yellow is at the top and the Indigo-Blue range is on the bottom because this also means the color with the lightest possible value is opposite the color with the darkest possible value, so you have the colors arranged with a value scale from top to bottom BUILT IN.

this is related to why ivory black is actually very dark blue.

[brehaaorgana]

@rizahawkeyesmuscles

This makes me think makeup artists have good color theory, having to understand undertones of skin, warm v neutral v cool toned red lipstick....

Yes!!! I mean first of all, makeup artists are artists.

and they are ALSO ultimately just blending pigments to produce certain colors and effects, so yeah professionally do study the basics of color theory and then necessarily have to adapt it to their medium. And they tend to generally add like, what you talked about with recognizing cool/warm/olive/neutral undertones and such as a big consideration to their canvas.

And that IS why people will say "this is a cooler red lipstick" (although even cooler than that would be magenta or fuschia!).

I think the only thing I've noticed wrt to honestly mostly beauty influencers and not actual professional MUAs is that too many people buy an eyeshadow palette of cool tones in the palette and then put it on and complain it pulls "too warm for their cool skin." And it "isn't actually a true cool tone palette."

I just want to grab all these people by the face and say:

"Shhhhhh. Color temperature is relative. Although you have cool skin undertones, you ALSO have blood under your skin which will inherently make your base skin-canvas slightly warm no matter your foundation shade. So when you put any kind of pigment that isn't fully opaque onto your skin, the transparency WILL be warmed by your skin because you're alive and have blood still. The eyeshadow palette IS a cool palette. You're just not a vampire, which is why that cool taupe shade suddenly looks different from the mass tone in the palette."

These influencers would understand this better if they did some watercolor painting on pre-tintedpaper and then compared it to painting on pure white.

But a MUA probably already figured this out yeah.

[brehaaorgana]

In case anyone is curious here are my top color recommendations

Handprint.com is hands down the most comprehensive scientific explanation of how different color wheels or palette choices work. It's big and dense and exceptionally thorough. I skim frequently and find myself always learning more. https://handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html everything is done using watercolors as a reference point but a LOT of this translates to other mediums. For the record his CIECAM color wheel is what I consider to be the best (not 3 dimensional) color wheel for artists. Period.

He uses pigment numbers for some of the most common watercolors rather than specific paint brands or color names to place the pigments. It's also a case study in why yellow being at the top is the best because it also means you have a value scale from top to bottom (since black paints are just dark violets or blues, ultimately.)

When you look at this, you can start realizing more and more why the earth colors can be used as if they were like, straight red, or yellow, or orange. Like if you wanted to make a limited palette, you could use "burnt sienna" as your dark yellow (which will make the whole palette lean orange!) Or it could be your orange or you could use burnt sienna as your red. (Look at gamut masking links below)

Seriously it's good to try and swatch your medium (even really quickly!) Within a CIECAM Artist's color wheel. Below are two of my attempts:

From loose memory and then mapping pigments roughly.

He also discusses the difference between visual complements and mixing complements!

Anyways absolutely try to read bits and pieces. The whole site is amazing. Handprint is amazing.

Also:

https://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com and James Gurney's book: Color and Light: a guide for the realist painter. James Gurney is the dinotopia guy. That book is also amazing for painting fantasy with lots of fantastical examples. Here are two short videos on gamut mapping and gamut masking. Accompanying blog posts.

No surprises here! His book also charts pigments:

Actually these are my four favorite books hands down:

Color and Light: a Guide for the realist painter - James Gurney

Color for Painters: a guide to traditions & practice - Al Gury

The oil painters color handbook - Todd m casey

Artist's master series: Color & light - 3d total publishing. This one emphasizes digital!

The first two have been out for awhile now and you can more easily find them cheaper/used online than the latter two which are relatively newer and hefty hardbacks.

Also, from personal experience: al gury is a sweetheart angel who is a huge crazy cat man. I adore him, he's so kind and helpful. I think it's a little late to join the current session (although they did only start Jan 28, so you can always ask! Class videos are recorded), BUT he frequently offers a class on color that is fully online through PAFA continuing education, as well as other classes. I haven't taken it yet, but I HAVE taken other classes online with Al and he's really great.

Oh also online gamut masking tools:

In krita: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/gamut_masks.html

https://claudiamatosa.com/resources/gamut-masking simple tool

https://mypaintingclub.com/blog/post/39-The-Gamut-Mask-Tool another tool with more complexity

The tl;Dr of a gamut mask is to show you the full range of possible colors you can mix within a given palette (choices of colors/pigments).

[factual-fantasy]

[danidarkarts]

@factual-fantasy

[fynori]

i'd like to add that the shadow color isnt necessarily dictated entirely by the primary light source, but the bounce light! so for the example of a sunny environment, the reason the shadows are blue are because of the light from the blue sky reflects across the environment; but, if the character were to be under tree cover, the bounce light would be coming from the leaves and thus the shadow would look greener.

[danidarkarts]

Yee yee!!! You got it right on the nose!

Bounce light is something I didn't cover but I adore it!

Gotta work on my bounce light 💪

[eskiworks]

Yay for local color and color relativity! I love seeing artists continuing to share and learn from each other!

[words-after-midnight]

me when the butterfly effect is trending on tiktok in 2025 and it's one of the main themes of the book I've been working on since 2008: wow i'm a butterfly effect hipster

[16tinyfrogs]

on watching a parent age

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

[theriu]

OP, this is genuinely a masterpiece, three poems in one, moving and well craft. Please tell me you have submitted it to at least some poetry contests, and if not, please do so.

[nondelphic]

everyone always asks “what’s your book about?” but they never ask “how’s your mental health after rewriting the same chapter 12 times?”

[noahhawthorneauthor]

Sometimes they fancy a shag, sometimes they don't, sometimes they never do or only for special moments or people. REGARDLESS THEY MATTER AND DESERVE TO TAKE UP SPACE.

Yesterday was International Asexuality Day, but ace books are good to read all year round. Asexual means a person doesn't feel sexual feelings or attraction to others, but this is a spectrum and can vary widely from person to person. Note that attraction does not equal romance, and asexual is not the same as aromantic. Some people are sex repulsed, some are not. Some people are sex positive, some are not.

Demisexuality falls under the asexual umbrella, and means a person doesn't feel attraction until developing a strong connection with a person. Two of my books, Phantom and Rook, and Matsdotter and Adrastus, have demisexual mains.

There are many different shades of Ace, and many different types of stories just waiting for you to read.

[leebrontide]

Fond reminder that Issac from my books is on-page-IDed as ace, with 0 angst about it, partly because he's busy with the bullshit political world of pro superheroing exploding all around him. He's a disaster and I love him so much.

Also- lot of real good books up there, please go check some out!!!

[winterstaryu]

"I did it for you" has gotta be my favorite form of betrayal. You gave me a gift I never asked for, and now I have to look around at the world you destroyed with the knowledge that it was gift wrapped and addressed to me.