#curlicue writes

[curlicuecal]

I love your Shadowbound series!! Yesterday I spent the majority of the day inhaling the whole dang thing, it’s so good! I especially love how delightfully scary Kurloz can be. I’ve been wondering about the extent of his abilities - he can project terror, possess Gamzee, move them through planes, and possibly tear up other shadows in a much more violent way than how he unpicks Hal’s seams? Would it be more difficult for him to overpower people who had not bound a shadow? Or actually, considering how Hal reacted when Kurloz overshadowed Dirk, maybe he can rip up souls in the same way, no shade required?

yayyy, i'm glad you liked our fic. :33

we've had a lot of fun world-building for that one--definitely way more information exists in our notes than will ever be relevant enough to make it into the actual fics.

I like to think that while some of kurloz & gamzee's abilities are unique, a lot of it is just them being not very checked into social norms for acceptable and/or safe behavior. Let's see....

projecting terror-- aura manipulation IS a kurloz specialty based on his rage aspect. otoh fear is a kurloz specialty based on his personal preferences ;)

moving through planes-- technically any shadow-host pair could do this, but sort of in the same way as anyone could do a triple backflip into a tank full of sharks

possession-- also something any shadow could do, although not normally delicately enough not to break something--so it would usually be an unbonded shadow entity going after a vulnerable mind. a bonded shadow MIGHT try to get past someone else's shadow to grab their host. possessing your OWN host is such bizarre behavior it's not even really a taboo. gamzee and kurloz just kind of made up their own rules while wildly under-supervised.

tear up other shadows (or souls)-- yeah, that's just violence. most people don't threaten to fistfight you quite as often as kurloz reaches for that option. carefully unpicking & putting a shadow back together is again a kurloz specialty based on his aspect. more normal applications for that type of aura manipulation would be things like psychiatry or therapy that you go to school and get a license for.

people are actually way LESS vulnerable to other bonded shadows & to unbonded shadow entities when they're hosting their own shadow--that's actually why the relationship is a mutualism! lend part of your brain to an extraplanar shadow being and in return they will keep other things out of your brain. kids don't have shadows and are the most vulnerable-- they're meant to be carefully protected and warded by the adults in their lives, but sometimes a kid like gamzee falls through the cracks

[curlicuecal]

Just wanted to say that nothing has ever stuck with me for years and years quite like your cyber bunny apocalypse 'verse has. To this very day I still think about it as least once every month or so. Unmatched, beautiful writing and I enjoy it very much. You set the standard for brilliant writing for me back in middle school, and I am now graduating college for english/creative writing. Hope you are doing well and I hope you know that your writing lives in my life forever. <3

I've been sitting on this for days because it made me so happy I'm speechless <333

Thank you so much, it means a lot to me to hear my story was meaningful to you. And congratulations on the degree!!!

[curlicuecal]

holy fuck you're still active. i am reading thru the shadowbound series on ao3 and saw your tumblr was linked. i was Absolutely PRAYING you were still active bc i know they were written in like 2016 and shit. anyway. all this to say, hell yeah, cheers to you

Haha, hi! *waves*

It's funny you bring up shadowbound, because I was just working on the next fic with Skates today. We're up to 9 pages. It's gonna be fun. :33

[curlicuecal]

my coauthor won’t let me give our dragon character a star-nosed mole face

i’m being creatively stifled

[curlicuecal]

“Hey, Dirk, do you think a kitten could get swole?”

anyways, here’s a buff dirk-kitten and hal-kitty-shadow 

i could explain it but why would i

new shadowbound fic here, cause this verse needed more Roxy and more kitties

[curlicuecal]

@moth-time​ ask and receive!!!  also I’m gonna write this like it’s some kind of meta speculation which is possibly the least lucid way to talk about my own book but

we know that fae woods are reactive, have some kind of consciousness and implied opinions, and pass magic back and forth with the fae

fae senses are tied into the woods, and a wood’s consciousness is influenced locally by the fae--the forest changes around a fae in reflection of them

unlike other living things, which get bound into the woods and changed (for example, by eating food within a wood), Red says fae are actually created by the woods and the woods by the fae

essentially they’re some sort of cross between being two obligate mutualists, and being a giant eusocial superorganism with multiple life stages/phenotypes and a distributed consciousness

(fae are not a hive mind, but they could be a hive mind, which is one of several reasons they are extremely careful of their sense of self)

(the wood is basically a hive mind, but a really weird one)

(because it’s a forest)

how are they symbiotic? a fae wood is a passive magic collector, which can gather and pool magic from the environment way faster than any individual fae could.  (photosynthesis is basically magic-making, right? right.)

and the fae are... well, a lot of things, including mobile, and with hands, but also they are a bunch of minds that the wood can piggy-back into the back of and borrow processing power from, and they are magic concentrators. pieces of the wood--plants and trees and seeds, removed from the wood don’t grow the same because they don’t have access to the other half of their consciousness

where do fae come from? well as magic accrues in a fae wood, fae happen. sometimes they are born and grown. sometimes they evolve through a series of lesser forms. maybe occasionally they manifest overnight like a weird mushroom.

where do fae woods come from? well, as magic concentrates in a fae, it imprints onto the landscape around them....

new fae woods typically form by colony budding-- a group of fae wander off, bringing some plants with them, and after a while they just might be a new wood if they don’t wander back again

ps: has mack noticed that between his seeds and Red he has just engaged in the world’s tiniest experiment in budding off a new fae wood? no

no he has not

[curlicuecal]

Dude every time I open your blog I see the pinned post about that dragon dude, and I always end up scrolling down to “red has no friends” like poor guy

Aww, haha. Well, I do love a found family. Also, he's fae; if we didn't throw him into the deep end, he'd never do any emotional processing at all. >:p

Red, 10 years into being shunned, trying to understand the unfamiliar concept of social needs: "This feels weird. I think it must be... boredom?"

Mack: "Have you considered that you're lonely?"

Red: "Right, boredom. Entertain me."

Mack: "Yeah, okay." :)

[curlicuecal]

3. Which part of Cyberbunny of the Apocalypse series was hardest to write?

I’m torn so I’m gonna give 2 answers

-Every time I write a new character it takes me a while to get comfortable with how to do their dialogue, but Kankri is the most consistently challenging.  If only because it’s hard to write ‘wordy’ but avoid ‘tedious.’  And also because he doesn’t do sarcasm?  How the heck am I meant to write a character that doesn’t snark and backwards speak constantly.  What is this.

-I’m a pantser not a planner.  I know where I’m going but I have to actually be in the scene with a character to see exactly how its gonna work and sometimes things shift around. I wrote all of Stay Lost before I published it so I could go back through and update/tweak things, but with Outcasts I’ve only been working a chapter or two ahead and shuffling more plot threads so it’s been trickier to keep all the timelines and plotlines playing together nicely.