Just A Place

Writer | Gamer | Roller of Dice

[onadacora]

y'know i swore i was gonna do this on time but then i forgot (i was at work lol) so happy late mother's day ona! i hope you and your family are still doing well c:

Thank you! <3

We're doing good, well and settled after the move two years ago up north. Got to experience that big ice storm this past winter, and the kiddo is graduating elementary school and starting middle school this fall which feels crazy!

[bot]

[knightofleo]

[herpsandbirds]

Common eider

[phynoma]

This needs to be immortalized because it's what made me turn on the sound. And they were right

[chronicdelusionistsart]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Bernard Dowd, the newest kid to take on the Robin mantle, has big shoes to fill. With Batman still mired in grief after the death of Jason Todd, a new villain over the horizon gunning for Batman's life, and coincidence after coincidence pointing to a grand design, he'll have to solve a deadly array of happenings and get down to the bottom of it all: Who is Moriarty? And what is his connection to Robin? At least he doesn't have to worry about it at school, where his best friends Tim and Darla are blissfully unaware of his nightly activities. But change comes to all things, and unbeknownst to Bernard, Tim has his own secrets...

fuck it. Timbern Bernard is Robin and Tim is a villain AU GO

[anineillustration]

Forever indecisive about colours, the curse of photoshop

[hickeywiththegoodhair]

“why are you, as someone in their 30s, still on tumblr” oh so you think you’re gonna be normal when you’re my age? you think you’re gonna be CURED?? you think the witches’ curse will have been lifted by then?? cmon now

[animentality]

[hikarisakurariver]

Your middle aged Aunts lead the first online charge for yaoi and your great Aunts lead the first conventions for fandoms and wrote yaoi fanfiction on paper. (It just wasn’t called that at the time)

Sometimes they didn’t even show anyone. Sometimes they showed a few fellow fans.

You simply live now, following in their footsteps path they laid.

[minkhollow42]

On a related note, passed my way by a friend:

[mercurialmalcontent]

Your middle-aged aunts are very likely STILL writing fanfiction, it's not like they forgot what a computer and fandoms are when they hit 40, you know?

[your-fave-hates-ai]

YOU

YOU HATE AI !!

[very-gay-alkyrion]

[angstyastro]

Ran a poll on twit and shakarian won so a quick smooch for them ❤️💙

[onadacora]

Hi Ona! I remember reading your series years ago and loved your writing style! I was wondering if you're continued writing these past few years? Published anything etc? (I'm not entirely sure how writing works haha- I just know I'd love to purchase your work if it exists!)

I've written off and on, with a finished Yakuza fic and some original stuff the never got finished here and there. Most recently I've been writing stuff for a D&D game I'm in!

Everything I've shared is on my AO3, but nothing conventionally published. I appreciate your interest! I just haven't been able to buckle down and finish anything to try and get out there. And I've definitely had a lot of dry spells between projects; ADHD makes motivation a tricky beast to wrangle.

[onadacora]

Been a while. I replayed Undertale and was going back through TRTR and remembered the conversations we used to have before Big Fandom scared me off. I hope you're doing well. I remember you had a little one when we were writing side by side together. I hope they're well too.

It's been ages! The kiddo is doing good; she's in 5th grade now.

Things were a roller coaster back then, and I hope you're doing well too c:

[onadacora]

Rereading WTMYH and getting catapulted back into my hyperfixations. You are an incredible author and I am so so happy to have stumbled upon your page when I did. Your writing (as cliche as it may sound) really got me through some tough stuff and I am so appreciative. I just graduated college and I’m starting my career as a registered nurse now so life is looking a lot brighter and I just really wanted to thank you for the memories!❤️

That's fantastic! For whatever small part I played in helping you get to this point, you're very welcome and I'm so glad. <3 You're doing amazing work!

Thank you so much for taking the time to send me this message, truly. It gave me a big smile and maybe a little bit of a misty eye.

[onadacora]

Swordtober #1-6

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[teaandcrowns]

Preserving previous' tags because firelxdykatara also makes excellent additions in them

[watermelonlicker]

[faithschaffer]

The 2025 Swordtember prompt list is here!

If you're unaware, Swordtember is an online creative challenge I started back in 2020. The challenge is themed around swords and takes place across the month of September. From 3D models to D&D campaigns, and everything in between- it's always a blast to see what people make!

As always, this is intended to be a low stress challenge. There's no need to participate daily (I sometimes sit it out entirely because life gets so busy this time of year!). There's also no pressure to follow my prompt list- I know other people put out some amazing lists (and you can totally just freestyle and do your own thing, of course).

During September I'll be rounding up my favorite entries on Saturdays (Sworderdays?) from challenge participants to share on Bluesky and Instagram. Just post with #swordtember ! I'm so excited to see what people make this year.

Here's the written out prompt list:

shell

moss

automaton

scale

bell

fossil

clock

canine

feline

rodent

reliquary

concealed

bloom

rot

lace

carved

gem

beetle

membrane

vapor

ring

swan

owl

venom

bubble

harpy

spring

summer

autumn

winter

[onadacora]

hey ona, its been a long time but i was talking about deltarune w/a close friend and in turn undertale and it got me thinking about when we talked while you were writing wtmyh. so i just wanted to message and say i hope things have been great for you and your family! and thank you for the kindness, memories and conversations. - CJ/Sov

Hey CJ! We're all doing great over here.

Roslin is 10 now if you can believe it, starting 5th grade soon. She's older than Frisk was when I was writing them, how weird is that? Also just the fact that it's been almost 10 years since I started WTMYH in the first place.

I hope you're doing good, too! I think about you and everybody every once in a while, so I'm always so happy when somebody checks in! c: