#razzart

[razzek]

The anthology I did a piece for last summer is funding on KS now! It's all queer takes on fairy tales and everything in it is fantastic! I did a lesbian take on a version of The Three Little Pigs that my grandma used to tell us kids. :) Definitely check it out! The more we raise, the more the people who made it get paid because Duck Prints Press is very cool like that. :)

Wild and Full of Marvels: Queer Works Inspired by Folklore

An anthology of 40+ artworks and short stories inspired by mythology, folklore, legends, and fairy tales.

[razzberry6]

First art fight attack of the season for lily.w.moonflower on instagram!! 💜

[razzberry6]

♪ And you loved me all the same ♪

⚓️🪽

[razzberry6]

Doodles of my evil french girl. She’s a kpop stan and i decided to make her a diehard blink cuz why not.

(Idk much about kpop so don’t come at me 💀)

🖤🩷

Translation: “SHE LOOKED AT ME!! JENNIE I LOVE YOU!!!!”

Character: Cordelia, she/her.

[razzek]

For the fic-writing ask meme:

3. What is your absolute favorite kind of fic to write?

20. 4 sentences from your work that you’re proud of

Finally answering! XD

3. What is your absolute favorite kind of fic to write? With as much as I write it, you would think smut. But it's actually introspective stuff! Smut is just a shortcut to introspection. You get to write what a character thinks about themself at base level in a situation that is incredibly vulnerable, even dangerous in ways (metaphorical or literal, cuz I am Like That :D). Even my not-smut work is very introspective. It's just my favorite thing. I like it. :)

20. 4 sentences from your work that you’re proud of Ooooohhh time to dig in my wips! It's 5 sentences but it needs them all for why I like them:

Ghost light reflects off his wet face. Three more stars go out while his neck burns and a little dying animal noise sticks in his throat. The pain is awful but it's not why he cries now. When the fire first touched his skin he understood fully the thing he had been hiding from since those damned wires crossed in his hands:

His brothers have left him to this fate. They are never coming back.

[razzberry6]

Howl fan art request from @asterisadisaster

🐦‍⬛💫

[razzberry6]

Fan art request from @asterisadisaster 🐈🐝

[razzek]

I know it's not fanfiction, but my favorite story by you is The Helm and I'd love to hear more about it!

Hell yes! 8D This is actually one of my fave things I've ever written, too. For anyone who hasn't read it yet, it's short:

The Helm (1744 words) by TheBraillebarian Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work, Homestuck Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Original Characters Additional Tags: Body Horror, Helmsman Summary: It's a beautiful ship, really. Years of training has taught you much about the classes of space faring vessels to which you might be assigned, enough that you can tell quality on sight. You watch it loom closer through the shuttle window and swallow your nerves. Tomorrow it will be more than a ship.

Time for long winded rambling!

I've been thinking about the idea of space ships as being based in biology since I was in high school. I have a vivid memory of walking between buildings at the blind school and it was cold as hell and I thought "what if a spaceship could shiver?" Which started this chain reaction in my head that's never stopped. Why would it do that? What would the mechanisms be? Who would design these things like this and what's the benefit? And, of course, going hand in hand with that, was the concept of choosing disability and that being seen culturally as a good thing.

So that kind of thing has been in my head for a very long time. Smash cut to...uh, whatever year I wrote The Helm in. I was living in Cowtown in the meth basement and this was before getting treated for sleep apnea, so every nap was like playing Russian roulette with nightmares and I was guaranteed to see some weird shit. Homestuck was coming to a close or I was thinking about it a lot and I was drifting around in that fandom and it, too, has biology spaceships, albeit a lot more informed by the able bodied.

I legit dreamed most of what happens in The Helm. It was inspired by the Homestuck concept of the helmsman, who is basically a living person with psionic powers who gets plugged into a spaceship to make it go. In HS that's always treated as horror and a lack of autonomy, the usual that you'd expect in sci-fi at this point. But in the dream everyone was human and I think that makes the concept resonate a lot more than it does when they're trolls, who are a really violent species by default.

Most people don't have cannibalism rituals and that was one of the first things that I wanted to include. You're someone who feels insignificant with this weight on your shoulders that isn't fully disclosed but I wanted the reader to feel it and to be put in this weird, ostensibly kind of horrible situation but there's something grand about it all at the edges.

A lot of what happens is also informed by the many times I've had surgery. I thiiiiink this was written before I had the big one, but I've still had a few before then that were, if not transformative, necessary. When you go in for something that you need to do, it's dreadful but hopeful at the same time. I feel like I captured that "night before" feeling pretty well.

And of course I wouldn't be me without writing whole ass body horror at least a little. :D Transformation is painful even for the beautiful things, at least in my experience. Disability is transformation that need not be destructive, but there's not really a way it isn't painful at least physically. Change always hurts. You got used to things being one way and even though in this story this is your choice, you knew it was going to be like this, it's still got to hurt. And I just like being gross. XD We're ambulatory bags of water and meat, it's very cool but also pretty nasty. :D

And then, finally, all this dread and weirdness and horror gets revealed for what it is: you get to be bigger than you ever were before and you're something transcendent! You didn't martyr yourself, you're still part of humanity, you're still surrounded by people who respect and care about you, and now you're everything you spent your life striving to be.

I was born blind. Not once in my life have I ever felt bad about it or that my being blind was a hindrance or problem in itself to be solved. The way people treat me and behave around my blindness is a huge problem, but being blind itself is fine and I wouldn't want to be any other way. This is how I live. Not only can I not imagine what it's like to be sighted, why would I want to? The whole world already knows what that's like; I'm the only one who can tell you what this is like. I would not be the artist or person I am without my blindness, the same as you wouldn't be who you are without your arms. It has given me a perspective and understanding about life I don't think many people get to have. I understand that bodies have limits and "overcoming" is not the default setting when you're disabled, it's the community and people around you that make things work. We have been caring for our disabled and the disabled have been part of humanity for longer than we have been a species. 40% of all people are disabled right now. If you live long enough, you will be disabled.

So here is a little story about how disability shapes us, is us, and is not a tragedy. I would love to get it out to a wider audience someday, but even if I never do, I'm still glad that people keep reading it. Rarely do I manage to get something out of my head that's so personal and important to me.