Chronicle MV

[phenomenal-savage]

Artwork I commissioned from @n3rdx featuring Hiro Hamada, Hogarth Hughes and his twin brother, Heath Hughes (my OC)!

If you want to know more about Heath and the stuff he gets into with his brother, please check his debut in my fanfic: "the dark after dusk, the wolf comes howlin'". You can find the first chapter here: TDADTWCH (I'm currently adapting the story into a six-part full cast audio production).

You can also follow the story on its very own Tumblr blog here: @tdadtwch 🐺🌕✨

[bidulgie]

A goth and her ghost boyyy

Close ups! <3

[bidulgie]

"Enjoy it all while you still can. You only get one try. Don't look back one day and regret how you did it."

Badger cereal fic art for the Graveyards series

[name-less-666]

THIS PISS ME OFF SO MUCH HOLY FUCK

"I refuse to use y/n so I give her oc name"???? SO IS NOT A READERINSERT ISN'T, WHY DONT YOU DO (F/O)/OC IS NOT THAT HARD OMG I HOPE THE A03 CURSE GET TO YOU

[messvoid]

The Devil has minioned too close to the sun

[bbybluemochi]

[oc] redraw of an old vampire oc from 2021 🦇🩸

[bbybluemochi]

i draw her once every two years 🦇🩸

[bbybluemochi]

btw i did end up getting the same tattoo as her. you should never design cool tattoos for your ocs bc there is a high chance you'll end up getting them yourself...

[luna-azzurra]

How to Make Fictional Settings Real (Even If You’re Faking the Whole Thing)

➤ Real Estate Listings (Yes, Seriously)

Looking up local listings in a place similar to your fictional town or city gives you surprising insight—average home styles, neighborhood layouts, what “affordable” means in that region, even local slang in the listings. + Great for,  grounding your setting in subtle realism without hitting readers over the head with exposition.

➤  Google Street View (Time to Creep Around Like a Setting Spy)

Drop into a random street in a town that resembles your fictional setting. Walk around virtually. Notice what's boring.Trash cans, streetlights, sidewalk cracks, old ads. + Great for: figuring out what makes a setting feel “normal” instead of movie-set polished.

➤  Local Newspapers or Small Town Reddit Threads

Want voice? Culture? Weird local drama? This is where it lives. What’s in the classifieds? What’s pissing people off at town hall? + Great for: authentic small-town flavor, conflict inspiration, and the kind of gossip that fuels subplot gold.

➤ Fantasy Map Generator Sites (Even for Contemporary Settings!)

Not just for epic quests. Generating a map, even a basic one, can help you stop mentally teleporting your characters between places without any sense of space or distance.+ Great for: figuring out how long it takes to get from the protagonist’s house to that cursed gas station.

➤  Music from or Inspired by the Region/Culture

Even fictional cities deserve a soundtrack. Listen to regional or cultural playlists and let the vibe soak into your setting. What kind of music would be playing in your character’s world? + Great for: writing atmospherically and getting in the right emotional headspace.

➤  Online Menus from Local Diners, Restaurants, or Cafés

You want a setting that tastes real? Look at what people are actually eating. + Great for: writing scenes with meals that aren’t just “some soup” or “generic coffee.” (Also, bonus points for fictionalizing weird specials: “Tuesday Fish Waffle Night” is canon now.)

➤  Yelp Reviews (Especially the One-Star Ones)

Looking for a spark of chaos? One-star Yelp reviews will tell you what your characters complain about and where the best petty drama lives. + Great for: worldbuilding quirks, local tensions, and giving your town character.

➤  Real Estate “Before/After” Renovation Blogs

You’ll find the bones of houses, historical details, and how people preserve or erase the past. + Great for: backstory-laced settings, haunted houses, or any structure that’s more than just a place, it’s a story.

➤  Old Travel Books or Tourism Brochures

Especially the outdated ones. What used to be considered “the pride of the town”? What’s still standing? What was erased? + Great for: layering a setting with history, especially for second-generation characters or stories rooted in change.

[luna-azzurra]

Tips for Writing Small Towns!!

⋆˙⟡ Everyone knows everyone and they have for forty years. The history is load-bearing. In a small town, the guy who runs the hardware store and the woman who teaches third grade went to prom together in 1987 and had a falling out over something no one talks about directly. The person behind the diner counter is the cousin of the person who sold you your house. Nothing is without CONTEXT. Every interaction carries a decade of subtext. Writers often write small-town characters like they just met each other. BUT Real small-town social life happens almost entirely in implication, in what you don't say, in who you happen to be standing next to when you say it.

⋆˙⟡ The gossip network is fast, imprecise, and almost impossible to correct. Information in small communities travels faster than in cities because the network is dense, EVERYONE has direct ties to almost everyone else. But it also distorts rapidly. By the time something gets around, it may be only vaguely related to what actually happened. And correcting a rumor is exponentially harder than spreading one, because corrections aren't interesting. If your character does something embarrassing on a Monday, by Thursday half the town has a version of it, and no version is quite right. The original fact may be less damaging than what it became. This is just how information behaves in a closed system.

⋆˙⟡ People who grew up there and people who moved there live in parallel versions of the same town. Longtime residents navigate the town through memory, that means every building has a history and every corner has a former version. The old pharmacy that's now a coffee shop is still "the old pharmacy" to someone who grew up there. New arrivals navigate the town as it exists now, without the palimpsest. These two groups see each other and don't quite connect, and there's a specific low-grade tension in it that isn't unfriendliness exactly, it's more like speaking slightly different dialects. The newcomer who thinks they've been accepted into the community is usually still a newcomer in the eyes of people who've been there for three generations.

⋆˙⟡ There is no anonymity, and some people are destroyed by that. Others thrive. Being known everywhere you go is experienced radically differently depending on who you are and what your history is. For someone who is liked, trusted, in good social standing, it's warm and a safety net. For someone who made a mistake, has a stigmatized identity, or just doesn't fit, it's a trap you cannot escape without physically leaving. The family with the father who was arrested. The person who had a public breakdown. They are permanently known as that thing. The smallness is indifferent to whether it's kind or cruel to you specifically.

⋆˙⟡ People who live rurally organize their lives around weather, seasons, and land in ways that urban writers often don't account for. A bad winter IS A FINANCIAL THREAT. The soil condition matters. What the river is doing matters. Whether the deer are bad this year matters. There's a literacy to the natural environment that rural people have and that outsiders don't (reading the sky, reading the fields, knowing what certain sounds mean, knowing when something is wrong with the land before you can articulate why.) Writing a rural character who doesn't have this relationship to their physical environment makes them feel like a city person who happened to move somewhere with a longer driveway.

⋆˙⟡ There are almost no strangers, which means crime and conflict work differently. When something bad happens in a small town (theft, assault, betrayal etc.) the suspect pool is tiny and largely known. Everyone is someone's cousin or former coworker or neighbor. The person who did the thing is someone whose name you know, whose mother you know, who you've been at the same table with. This is much more psychologically complicated than anonymous crime. It's not just WHO did it, it's the rearrangement of every relationship once you know. And there's immense social pressure to not pursue it, to not break the fabric, to let it go for the sake of everyone having to continue living next to each other.

[luna-azzurra]

Nervous System & Anxiety Tells 

˙⋆✮ The involuntary breath held during an awkward silence

˙⋆✮ Laughing at the wrong moment because the body needs an exit

˙⋆✮ Picking at the skin around fingernails without noticing

˙⋆✮ That specific swallow before saying something difficult

˙⋆✮ Nodding too much to overcompensate for not listening

˙⋆✮ The way legs bounce under tables when sitting still feels impossible

˙⋆✮ Counting things on the ceiling to avoid eye contact

˙⋆✮ Rubbing the same spot on the palm over and over

˙⋆✮ Clearing the throat before speaking even when nothing's there

˙⋆✮ The micro-flinch when someone gets too close unexpectedly ˙

⋆✮ Smiling through something that genuinely hurts

˙⋆✮ Blinking more rapidly when caught off guard

˙⋆✮ The sharp exhale that's almost but not quite a laugh

˙⋆✮ Gripping a cup or glass tighter than necessary

˙⋆✮ That quick look toward the nearest exit in overwhelming rooms

˙⋆✮ Talking faster when the topic gets too personal

˙⋆✮ The pause before answering that gives everything away

˙⋆✮ Pressing lips together in a thin line instead of responding

˙⋆✮ Scratching the back of the neck when put on the spot

[luna-azzurra]

How People Occupy Space (Body Language) 

˙⋆✮ Leaning in slightly when genuinely interested without realizing it

˙⋆✮ The way someone physically turns their body away mid-conversation

˙⋆✮ Crossing arms not out of coldness but because it feels safer

˙⋆✮ That one person who always finds the wall to stand against at parties

˙⋆✮ Mirroring someone's posture when comfortable with them

˙⋆✮ The slow backward step when a conversation goes on too long

˙⋆✮ Tilting the head when something doesn't add up

˙⋆✮ Sitting on the very edge of a chair when ready to leave

˙⋆✮ The way someone's feet point toward whoever they actually like in a group

˙⋆✮ Leaning back and crossing ankles to signal comfort and ownership of space

˙⋆✮ The unconscious open-palm gesture when telling the truth

˙⋆✮ Standing slightly outside the circle and never fully entering it

˙⋆✮ The way someone physically shrinks in a loud argument

˙⋆✮ Turning the whole body to listen rather than just the head

˙⋆✮ That very specific stillness that means someone is about to cry

˙⋆✮ Raising shoulders toward ears when stressed without knowing it

˙⋆✮ The way laughter changes someone's whole skeleton

˙⋆✮ Touching the face when lying or searching for an answer

˙⋆✮ The shift in weight from foot to foot when bored

[luna-azzurra]

Depression in fiction is almost always written as sadness. Crying, staring out windows, saying bleak things. And sometimes it is that. But a lot of the time it's nothing. It's your character doing the dishes and feeling nothing about the dishes or anything else. It's getting through a day that should have feeling in it and finding only flatness. It's laughing at a joke and noticing you laughed and feeling separate from the laugh. That grey numb version is harder to write and so much more true. Try that one.

[luna-azzurra]

[luna-azzurra]

Tips for Writing Small Towns!! PART TWO

⋆˙⟡ The economy of small towns is not quaint. It is precarious and everyone knows exactly how precarious. When the plant closed, or the mill shut down, or the highway got rerouted fifteen miles east, the whole town felt it in a specific and lasting way. There are towns that have been dying for forty years and the people in them know it and don't talk about it directly but it's in everything. The storefronts with plywood where glass used to be, the school that consolidated with the next town over, the young people who leave and the question of whether they're coming back that nobody asks out loud because everybody already knows the answer. Writing a small town without writing its economic reality is writing a set, not a place.

⋆˙⟡ There is a specific kind of person who runs everything and they are not elected. Every small town has someone. Sometimes a family, sometimes just an individual, who is not officially in charge of anything but whose opinion determines outcomes. The woman who's been on every committee for thirty years. The family that's owned the land since before living memory. They don't have to make demands. Everyone already knows where the edges are. A newcomer or outsider won't see this power structure at first because it isn't written down anywhere. It lives in who gets called first, who's consulted before decisions are made, whose silence means disapproval. Writing this type of character correctly means never letting them explain themselves. They don't need to.

⋆˙⟡ Leaving is a complicated moral act and coming back is even more complicated. The person who got out, who went to college, who moved to the city, who built a life somewhere else, occupies a strange position. There's pride in them, genuine pride, and also a kind of low resentment that nobody names. They think they're better than this. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but the suspicion is there. And when they come back, for a funeral, because things fell apart, because they got sick, the town doesn't quite absorb them back in the way they expect. They're not who they were. But they're also not from away. They're in a third category that doesn't have a comfortable name and everyone, including them, is a little awkward about it.

⋆˙⟡ People maintain relationships for decades past the point where they would have ended anywhere else. Because the pool is small and leaving is a whole thing, people stay in friendships, in dynamics, in proximity to people they would have simply stopped seeing in a city. The woman who is still friends with her ex-husband's sister because their kids go to the same school and their mothers are in the same Bible study and it would be more work to be enemies than to just keep showing up. These relationships have layers and scar tissue. They are not warm exactly, but they are not cold either. They are maintained. Writers often write relationships as chosen. In small towns, a lot of relationships are simply continued.

⋆˙⟡ Local history is oral and it is everywhere and it is not neutral. The story of what happened to the Henderson property, why the Murphys and the Dales don't speak, what exactly went on the summer of the flood; this history lives in people, not in records. And it gets told selectively, with emphasis and with meaning. The version your family tells is not the version their family tells. History in a small town is a living argument. A character who grew up there absorbed a version of local history that shaped their understanding of who deserves what and why, and that version has gaps and biases they cannot fully see. A newcomer doesn't have access to this history at all and will keep misreading things because of it.

⋆˙⟡ The relationship between small towns and their nearest city is specific and loaded. It's not simply rural versus urban. It's a relationship of dependency and resentment. People drive to the city for the hospital, for the court, for the things the town can't support anymore. And they come back with the feeling that the city doesn't know they exist, doesn't factor them in, makes decisions that affect them without consulting them. This is not paranoia. It's largely accurate. A small town character's relationship to the nearest city (whether they go often or rarely, what they feel when they're there, what they feel when they come back) says a lot about who theey are and where they stand in their own community.

[luna-azzurra]

Writer confidence is not a thing you build and then have. It's a thing you have for about eleven minutes after writing something good and then it evaporates and you have to make more. There is no reservoir. There is no saving it up. You produce it fresh each time from scratch like some kind of emotional artisan bread and if you don't write for a few days you run out and have to start the whole process over again from flour.

[luna-azzurra]

"Normal people" wrecked me as a writer because sally rooney never tells you what her characters are feeling. She just tells you what they do with their hands. What they look at. What they don't say. And you feel everything anyway. Actually you feel more because you're doing the work yourself. The reader's participation is the emotion. She just sets the conditions and steps back. I reread certain scenes three times trying to find where the feeling was and it was never in the words. It was in the gaps between them.

[luna-azzurra]

Tired & Exhausted Character Traits

 ˙⋆✮ Reading the same sentence four times and still not absorbing it

 ˙⋆✮ Losing track of a word mid-sentence and just trailing off

 ˙⋆✮ The specific clumsiness of bumping into furniture that's always been there

˙⋆✮ Forgetting why they walked into a room and standing there deciding whether to care

 ˙⋆✮ The way emotions become unreasonably huge when exhausted

 ˙⋆✮ Staring at a text for minutes and then forgetting to reply

 ˙⋆✮ Laughing at things that aren't funny just because the filter is gone

 ˙⋆✮ The way sarcasm sharpens when someone is running on nothing

 ˙⋆✮ Falling asleep in any position that isn't fully horizontal

 ˙⋆✮ Asking a question and immediately forgetting the answer given

 ˙⋆✮ The squint at a screen that's been at the same brightness all day

 ˙⋆✮ Rubbing eyes until colors appear behind eyelids

 ˙⋆✮ That slight delay before responding like the signal is lagging

 ˙⋆✮ Eating whatever requires the least effort regardless of hunger

 ˙⋆✮ The way a tired person's handwriting changes completely

 ˙⋆✮ Nodding along to a conversation they've fully checked out of

 ˙⋆✮ The misdirected irritability that lands on whoever's closest

 ˙⋆✮ Forgetting whether they locked the door and being too tired to go back

 ˙⋆✮ Phrases becoming shorter and shorter until it's just sounds

[warrumbungle-0]

😔☀️