āFor me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, āOf course.ā When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.ā
i am still here, still alive, still doing fine, just very very burnt out from marketing and author social media and all the work that comes from being a self published author. i know it's what i signed up for, but with the state of the world, ai entering our spaces, and few people having the bandwidth to actually stay and engage with my content about my books, it's been hard for me to summon the motivation to promote them.
that said, i do have a new romantasy novel coming out next month, about a king who meets his soulmate who happens to be his war prisoner- probably the last book you'll hear about from me for a while. i still love writing as much as i always have, and i have switched mainly to writing fanfiction for the pitt everyday (you can find my sideblog @hawksredrobe for that!) but marketing is a bitch.
so if you enjoy queer indie novels and want to support them, give my books a try, or boost this post :)
Hey btw if you donāt know how to program, you should check out [novelty], which is a free Visual Novel creation software. Absolutely no programming required, and itās super easy to use, I played with it some when I was a teen but the only reason I didnāt do much with it is cuz I made my story complicated and had like 5000 different branching routes that kept spawning new routes and made myself confused LMAO
But yeah, itās a WYSIWYG with a really straight-forward GUI, if I remember correctly.
It even comes with some free backgrounds and characters and stuff, and this is what it looks like:
Did I mention itās super duper free? It hasnāt been updated since 2010, but it has basically all youād need to make a simple visual novel.
Just make sure your DirectX runtime is updated, cuz it can act buggy if itās outdated, but this program is so old that I doubt itād even be an issue lol
in other developments re german/anglo cultural exchange on breadstuffs, this image was posted to a facebook group yesterday
the following events ensued:
1. predictable lively discussion on the preparation of Wienerschnitzel, in which natives and wurstaboos are pro-puff and everybody else is like *confused dog head tilt* why wouldnāt you want the crust to stay ~attached to the thing you put it on? as with other fried foods?
2. thirty āBad Schnitzel is my band nameā jokes
3. thirty āBad Schnitzel is my stripper nameā jokes
4. one āah yes, Bad Schnitzel! a lovely spa townā joke
I made a guide for learning about native plants in my area! check it out!
Wanna see these images in higher quality? Click the link at the bottom. The other articles this was published with are in there too.
Do you want to make this guide more accessible by helping me make a plain text version? message me!!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1W5BNPPQ5jgOz3D_k9kwdf5M0BcEzcqKl?usp=sharing
A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something calledĀ āNorwegian Christmas butter squares.ā Iād never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies Iād eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic.Ā
Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that Iāve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - theyāre fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. Iām skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day.Ā
Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
Ā½ tsp salt
Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dusting
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13ā³ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.
Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Ā Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.Ā
Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and Ā¼ inch thick. Ā Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.
Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.
It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them theyāre sugar cookie bars.
I made these today for the equinox with sea salt caramel chips and they are simply amazing. Letās see how long they last with six people in the house!
The OP version of this has become my go-to cookie for basically all things and I have a whole cohort of friends and colleagues who would murder each other to get them. Havenāt tried any add ons yet, since the base recipe is SO GOOD.
As other platforms send refugees our way, I wanted to point out that thereās a pretty easy way to skirt the so-called āporn banā on tumblr, especially for fanart purposes. Check it out:
Make your smutty lil art. Then make a second version with a sticker or a blur or a text banner, or simply do a clever crop to eliminate the unsuitable bits and bobs. Tip: if the art is very flesh toned, maybe drop a purple or green filter on it, so the AI that detects nudity overlooks it.
(On a desktop comp) Save the Smutty Lil Version as a Draft post on your Tumblr. In your drafts, click on the images so that it isolates, then right click and Open Image in a New Tab. From that tab, copy the URL. Itāll look something like ā64.media.tumblr.com/letternumbersaladā
3. Make another separate post. Make your Modest Version the image, and then indicate that thereās a clickthrough to the Smutty Lil Version, and link in ā64.media.tumblr.com/letternumbersaladā
4. Ta da! Now your viewers can choose to click into the smut. Iām not saying its gonna work every time forever, YMMV, but as someone who posts like... 5% smut, itās always worked for me.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start draw comics?
Read comics. Try to absorb the layouts and lettering - thereās so many ways to tackle it! Also even in published comics youāll see that the art is messy and scrungly and you can take that as permission to be messy and scrungly too.
Comics are about efficiency and Good Enough. If you try to make each panel a masterpiece youāll be there forever. Reasons why I mostly do simple pencil comics.
Start small. Do a scene or gag comic at a time. Get a feel for the medium and all the steps you have. If thereās a step you hate, find a way to emphasize the steps you love. EG I hate laying down flat colours but love shading, so I make my page form comics painterly greyscale with a gradient map to spruce them up.
Thumbnail!!!!! Figure out your page or panel layout before you start pencils. It can just be chicken scratch and sticken figures but it will help make sure thereās a clean line of action carrying the viewer from panel to panel and that your lettering fits.
donāt skimp on lettering. you can have beautiful artwork but if your dialogue is time new roman on half transparent ellipses or somehow unreadable itās gonna drag everything else down. Blambot is a great source for free and affordable comic fonts and even has guides from an industry pro.
There are a huge bajillion elements to making comics but once youāve made like, literally 100 pages youāll start just intrinsically knowing things like the 180 rule, how to place a speech bubble when the first speaker is on the right, and that you can draw one nice background and then have gradient colour blocks carry you through most of the page/scene. And then youāll still keep learning. Always learning!
LOTS of example stuff under the cut, mostly for lettering and layouts:
thumbnails vs finished page. The detail is just enough to remind me who goes where. You can see I mostly played with the last part of the scene, going from three panels in one row to making each panel an entire row across three rows. Panels on the same row have less ātimeā between them as the eyes skips from one to the other faster, whereas thereās a little more gap skipping back to a new row (think resetting a line on a typewriter). Here, the first thumbnail may have fit the artwork more neatly, but I wanted to give Astarion more time to deliberate his decision.
You can also see that I changed the top panel from a close up on Aldiirn to a wider shot showing both. This sets the scene, and the rest of it uses simple/abstract backgrounds until the final panel, which makes a nice bookend while making the overall load easier. One good environment panel will carry you for a while, but don't leave your characters in the void for too long.
Make a script before you start layouts but donāt be shocked if you need to cut things out to have them fit a page. Less is more, generally. This also goes for visual elements - what's most important to the scene? What's just extraneous detail you find fun but is creating clutter?
For the 4-panel comics I donāt put time into thumbnails unless itās a difficult panel, but I always put the lettering and speech bubbles down first so they have enough room and nothing important gets covered. If you do this much youāre a step ahead imo.
This one Iām working on now and thereās a lot going on with four characters speaking to each other! Itās important to keep a clear line going for the dialogue. Astarionās first line has the top left corner and clearly starts the conversation. The tail of the bubble carries over to where he whispers to Aldiirn, and we pick up Aldiirnās lines. The rock wall on the right then draws the eye down to Shadowheart and Galeās bubble at the bottom. I donāt think the tails on the bottom bubbles are 100% ideal, but itās Good Enough.
Thereās also slightly different points in time going on in this panel, because the art is static but itās a long convo going on. Galeās signature finger isnāt in response to Astarion whispering, but to his answer to Aldiirn that comes after. Think of how time works in your panels, especially when you got a big one because size = time.
You can use all sorts of things to direct the eye across a comic page, but I find the strongest things are the bubbles & tails and where characters are looking. Here, Galeās āstop byā line breaks the panel line to help draw the viewer to him in the last panel, since otherwise the eye was likely to end up at Aldiirn.
I generally like bubbles to be tucked into their panels, either fully inside or up at the edges like āmy condolences.ā It looks neater than when bubbles are willy nilly over the edges which I see as a sign of poor planning. And! it means when you do break panel lines it can be more meaningful.
the 180 rule is a film/stage thing for composition to avoid confusing the audience, but the simplest way to put it is: if a character is on the left side of the scene, they should stay there until the action or whatever moves them. You can see here that Aldiirn is always on the right facing left, even when the camera is a bit behind him or a bit behind Gale. the 180 line is the front of Aldiirnās tent, and the camera never crosses it in a way that would put Gale on the right.
I find it distracting when a conversation is happening in comic and a character breaks the 180 for no particular reason, though are times Iāve done it because a panel worked much better that way. The book Framed Ink has some great guides on composition and how to change the 180 line.
You can also see in the above comic that itās arranged so that Galeās always the first speaker in the panels he appears so thereās no criss cross bubble tails. Buuuut what if the first speaker is unavoidably on the right?
Stack the speech bubbles. You want the first speech bubble CLEARLY and undeniably the closest to the top left corner and then other speakers can go below.
the middle example above also has some examples of playing with the speech bubbles. Wyllās āsquare-y round-yā bubble is the standard, the boxy ellipse. The tail has a slight, lanquid curve. He;s comfortable teasing the poor vampire. Aldiirnās bubble is pointy! the tail straight! with urgency! And Astarionās bubble and tail are burbling and grumbling through gritted teeth and pain. Varsh Koākuu, even though heās speaking with a standard shaped bubble, has a sharp point in the tail that speaks to his assertiveness in protecting the egg. And Shadowheart has some hesitation with that wiggly tail.
Either hand drawing or using vector shapes for bubbles is fine, but I recommend staying away from true ellipses because they look static. Square-y round-y is where itās at. Just make sure thereās enough space between text and edge of the bubble, usually enough to fit a capital H or W, but you can play with that spacing too.
The second panel here breaks the āfirst bubble goes top-left cornerā rule, so itās ambiguous if Gale or Aldiirn speaks first. However! In this case everyone is giving their responses in a jumble to Rath, so order matters less. Iām pretty sure every rule Iāve mentioned has a time and place to break it, but itās still important to learn the basics first.
Key thing about comics typefaces: the capital I will have bars and the lower case will not. The barred I is used for I, as in, āI am not inclined to shareā where the unbarred is used everywhere else.
When choosing a font, I recommend grabbing one that has Regular, Italic, and Bold/Bold Italic typefaces. I use Milk Moustache for my 4-panel comics because itās very casual and similar weight to my own handwriting, but it doesnāt have an italic typeface and that drives me nuts sometimes. For the most flexibility, choose a font that has lower case AND uppercase type faces. I stick to upper case 90% of the time but lower case adds more options, like Aldiirnās āreally?ā being so small due to his stressed state.
There are some official guides on what should be bold or italic in dialogues but they donāt matter as much unless youāre working for a big publisher with a style standard. Italics for thinking and whispering are common. I go with my gut, like Astarionās speech is so dramatic I use italics and bold liberally, whereas for most others I may or may not just choose a key word to bold.
I think some programs will let you make text to fit a bubble instead of a square box, but tbh I just spend a lot of time manually making the text fit nicely in that bubble shape.
