love always wakes the dragon

dee, she/her, twenty-two. i like to write & read & believe in love sometimes.

[southslates]

I wrote fanfiction consistently from ages twelve to seventeen. I would really love to get back into writing fanfiction just about now (in the month between graduating college and starting big girl job, I'm twenty-two) but I cannot find a passion for any sort of media.

I know it's not a universal issue, since most good writers whose work I voraciously consumed in high school were older than I am even now.

I don't find escapism in fiction anymore, maybe that's it.

Writing romance was fun before I dated people and got hurt and then hurt them in turn. I dated enough in college that I feel tired of it and it wasn't objectively that much. When I turn to cute romances that once filled me with joy, I think about how much number Four sucked or how boring Two was or how Five was an alcoholic liar. And yeah, romance was my primary reason for engaging in fandom. I used to write metas on fictional characters falling in love against the odds.

I still consume, and reading is my primary hobby, but it's not 'fanfiction' stuff. There's a copy of Wittgenstein's essays in front of me right now. I try to start shows and get into them but I get bored and turn back to my fuel for pondering.

Maybe I would be happier and less in the throes of existential crisis right now if I was engaging in more lighthearted, fun content, but it makes me uncomfortable the way the harder stuff used to. I can't sit with it.

Quarter-life crisis maybe? Haha. If anyone's reading this and has ever gone through a similar creative slump, how did you deal?

[southslates]

I know in my heart romance isn't the answer and never has been, but love is. Reflecting on the past four years, I didn't get out of romance what I wanted from it, and that was good for me. Now I do the work to get my emotions and heart where my brain already stands on that.

I've been wanting to pick up where I left off like I'm still even a semblance of that person. Maybe this is a great opportunity to come into writing and fandom anew with four years of more perspective on people, literature, philosophy, math, society, relationships - in other words, what holds most of my brain space now

[southslates]

I wrote fanfiction consistently from ages twelve to seventeen. I would really love to get back into writing fanfiction just about now (in the month between graduating college and starting big girl job, I'm twenty-two) but I cannot find a passion for any sort of media.

I know it's not a universal issue, since most good writers whose work I voraciously consumed in high school were older than I am even now.

I don't find escapism in fiction anymore, maybe that's it.

Writing romance was fun before I dated people and got hurt and then hurt them in turn. I dated enough in college that I feel tired of it and it wasn't objectively that much. When I turn to cute romances that once filled me with joy, I think about how much number Four sucked or how boring Two was or how Five was an alcoholic liar. And yeah, romance was my primary reason for engaging in fandom. I used to write metas on fictional characters falling in love against the odds.

I still consume, and reading is my primary hobby, but it's not 'fanfiction' stuff. There's a copy of Wittgenstein's essays in front of me right now. I try to start shows and get into them but I get bored and turn back to my fuel for pondering.

Maybe I would be happier and less in the throes of existential crisis right now if I was engaging in more lighthearted, fun content, but it makes me uncomfortable the way the harder stuff used to. I can't sit with it.

Quarter-life crisis maybe? Haha. If anyone's reading this and has ever gone through a similar creative slump, how did you deal?

[southslates]

shall I apply to jobs, read pride and prejudice for the 6th time this month, or write dramione fanfiction

[crymsyy]

Bloody, Slutty and Pathetic by WhatMurdah

My version of plant daddy Neville and the death eater b*tch, Pansy <3

ART POLICY

Please DO NOT re-post/re-share my art unless given explicit permission and appropriate credit is given.

No profit should be made from my art. DO NOT re-sell my art.

Please do not alter/remove my signature.

Use for PERSONAL binds is allowed, but only with permission and credit.

[southslates]

wow. everything was going to be fine. i was just sixteen

[gatheringbones]

[“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.”]

kurt vonnegut

[terrorignitis]

Juansen Dizon, i am the architect of my own destruction

[tom-riddle-conoisseur-deactivat]

I love characters who have not an iota of ethics, not a whisper of morals, not even a shade of scruples but is so whipped for their more idealistic love interest, that they begrudgingly, out of sheer exasperation and utter resignation born from love, allows them to be their moral compass.

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, from "Late Bloomer", Instructions for Traveling West

[southslates]

Horrible math major cannot stop writing math metaphors into highly not mathy fanfiction

[southslates]

thinking about how kaz’s hands are “long, graceful fingers made for prying open locks, hiding coins, making things vanish” and the way inej sees the menagerie and tante heleen and just wants to run away from the crowd, “eager to disappear” and that when inej first leaves the menagerie kaz calls her by her name for the first time and then lets her disappear, but how “it was as if once kaz had seen her, he’d understood how to keep seeing her” and how how nina knows that kaz’s breath “catches every time [he sees inej], like he’s never seen [her] before” because inej kept on losing herself at the menagerie and she built a persona out of being invisible, and kaz built one out of being seen, but kaz always sees her, always understands her, and he refuses to let her feel invisible even though that’s against everything ‘dirtyhands’ should be, because kaz isn’t dirtyhands and inej isn’t the wraith, they’re two broken kids who are unforgivably in love

[southslates]

Inej thinks he has reasons.

He wonders what she would think if she knew of all the times he’s daydreamed of holding a gun to her own throat. He would never do that, he knows, but it’s a dream. Death is so ordinary to him, something in the cracks of his palm and patterned into the swirls of his fingertips. He walked out of the womb with those. She would be different, he knows. So would he.

He thinks that you do not know people until they’re begging for mercy under your feet, ready to give up belief of all of their gods so that he will let them breathe. He knows Inej would not beg.

He doesn’t want her to die but he dreams of seeing her eyes in that moment. Would he see himself, or will he never manage to make himself enough? Will he see the family she deserves instead? The one she left behind or the one he wants to make?

[avendell]

Kaz and Inej

[southslates]

I always think I've stopped writing forever and then I get a fandom reading itch and then I realize that nobody is going to write what I want to read but me and then here I am, twenty and a real adult and writing like I'm ten again

[southslates]

My first Percy Jackson fanfic, written in December 2015. And here I am, May 2025, still writing Percy Jackson fanfic. I was eleven and now I am finishing up my junior year of college, and nothing went to plan. I'm happy, though.

[southslates]

I always think I've stopped writing forever and then I get a fandom reading itch and then I realize that nobody is going to write what I want to read but me and then here I am, twenty and a real adult and writing like I'm ten again

[southslates]

The Hands the Gods Gave You

God!Percy, Percabeth AU Oneshot. Because there is a surprising lack of combination of those two things <3

“Your mother,” Poseidon said. “And that daughter of Athena. You love her.”

“How do you do it?” Percy asked, his fingers tracing lines in the sand, smoothing over the eternal grains. “You fall in love with mortals and then they leave.”

Poseidon’s eyes crinkled and he looked far away, like he was no longer on the Earth. “It never gets easier. I have Amphitrite to love too. Love is not a limited thing. You can search for it again and again. Eventually, the pain of death falls away too.”

“I will never fall in love again,” Percy said with his chest. He meant it, too. The time and experiences that forged his feelings for Annabeth were not replicable, especially now that he was no longer human. And besides that, there was only her. He simply couldn’t fathom beyond her.

Poseidon looked at him, sadly. “Perhaps you will not.”

[southslates]

when i get back into reading and look for a fic to scratch a particular itch and think it seems familiar and then realize it's something i wrote on a burner account 8 years ago