The Aesthetician

UNDER CONSTRUCTION I am just a simple writer that tends to my writing crops.

[the-aesthetician-writes]

Current WIPs & Where To Read Them:

@bybyebitheway

Themes/Tropes:

ocean punk, LGBTQ main characters, POC main characters, BIPOC main characters, bisexual leads, women leads, Lovecraftian inspiration (minus the vile vile racism), monstrous betrayals, supportive family, found family, redeeming the monster, soft magic system, gore, violence, dark academia, rogues gallery, escape the lair, monster of the week.

Synopsis:

BI THE WAY is a text based adventure taking place in the distant future where humankind has colonized the moon and brought metropolis to its ocean floors. We follow our protagonists, the family crew of Bison's & Daughters, as they discover the abandoned underwater sea colony of CAPRICORNUS-25.10. Will they discover the secret of the colony before it manages to find them first? Read the tale to find out.

[ AO3 ] || [ NEOCITIES ]

@tobeaspected

[TO BE ASPEC-TED] [WIP INTERACTIVE FICTION] [REVAMPING DEMO] [FRIENDSHIP SIM] [LUNAR PUNK]

To Be ASPECted is a text-based adventure taking place in the distant future where humankind has colonized the moon and brought metropolis to its oceans floors.

We follow our protagonist, YOU - THE READER, as you stay in the lunar city of LA LALANDE. Stay in the QUEEN ANNE'S ACE tavern, own and operated by a squad of lovely Aros and Aces. Come talk to the many of the tavern's guests and patrons. You'll never know when you'll meet a new friend this side of the moon!

Inspired by Tumblr’s annual arowrimo, To Be ASPEC-Ted sought to be a friendship simulator similar to Homestuck’s FriendSim and PesterQuest with an obvious focus on Aro and Ace characters, lunar punk iconography, and more.

[ outdated demo ] || [ NEOCITIES ]

@thehuntersacethetic

[THE HUNTER"S ACE-THETIC] [WIP INTERACTIVE FICTION] [DEMO TBA] [MYSTERY] [ESCAPE] [CASSETTE FUTURISM]

A trio of strangers wake up in an abandoned underground bunker without any recollection of how they arrived there. While finding a way to escape, they come to find that maybe the three of them aren't the only ones inhabiting it. Could they be the only three humans to reside there?

Follow Lawrence, Vincent, and Abel in their struggle to break out of the mysterious bunker, survive against a supernatural bunkmate, and defy societal expectations!

[ no demo yet ]

@pocowebcomic

Poco A Poco is a webcomic based on Ryan Murphy's "Glee" & "The Glee Project" in the style of Andrew Hussie's "Homestuck". It follows the students of Valley Adjacent High as they navigate the high stakes of high school popularity, student body social politics, and inappropriate teen sarcasm.

Read the first few pages with the link below:

[ NEOCITIES ]

[girlnephew]

[thundercaya]

[bybyebitheway]

[ the magician -pt iii: Submerged Nocturne ]

In which our heroes continue to receive a bumpy start to their family vacation.

Wall of Links:

where to read: [ neocities] | [ ao3] | [ sideblog ]

[bybyebitheway]

[ the magician -pt iii: Submerged Nocturne ]

In which our heroes continue to receive a bumpy start to their family vacation.

Wall of Links:

where to read: [ neocities] | [ ao3] | [ sideblog ]

[pocowebcomic]

UPDATE!

New batch of pages live on the Poco A Poco Website! Next batch is planned to be posted next week.

[ 🎼 NEOCITIES ]

follow tags for updates: #poco a poco, pocowebcomic, pocoapocoUpdates,

[the-aesthetician-writes]

Current WIPs & Where To Read Them:

@bybyebitheway

Themes/Tropes:

ocean punk, LGBTQ main characters, POC main characters, BIPOC main characters, bisexual leads, women leads, Lovecraftian inspiration (minus the vile vile racism), monstrous betrayals, supportive family, found family, redeeming the monster, soft magic system, gore, violence, dark academia, rogues gallery, escape the lair, monster of the week.

Synopsis:

BI THE WAY is a text based adventure taking place in the distant future where humankind has colonized the moon and brought metropolis to its ocean floors. We follow our protagonists, the family crew of Bison's & Daughters, as they discover the abandoned underwater sea colony of CAPRICORNUS-25.10. Will they discover the secret of the colony before it manages to find them first? Read the tale to find out.

[ AO3 ] || [ NEOCITIES ]

@tobeaspected

[TO BE ASPEC-TED] [WIP INTERACTIVE FICTION] [REVAMPING DEMO] [FRIENDSHIP SIM] [LUNAR PUNK]

To Be ASPECted is a text-based adventure taking place in the distant future where humankind has colonized the moon and brought metropolis to its oceans floors.

We follow our protagonist, YOU - THE READER, as you stay in the lunar city of LA LALANDE. Stay in the QUEEN ANNE'S ACE tavern, own and operated by a squad of lovely Aros and Aces. Come talk to the many of the tavern's guests and patrons. You'll never know when you'll meet a new friend this side of the moon!

Inspired by Tumblr’s annual arowrimo, To Be ASPEC-Ted sought to be a friendship simulator similar to Homestuck’s FriendSim and PesterQuest with an obvious focus on Aro and Ace characters, lunar punk iconography, and more.

[ outdated demo ] || [ NEOCITIES ]

@thehuntersacethetic

[THE HUNTER"S ACE-THETIC] [WIP INTERACTIVE FICTION] [DEMO TBA] [MYSTERY] [ESCAPE] [CASSETTE FUTURISM]

A trio of strangers wake up in an abandoned underground bunker without any recollection of how they arrived there. While finding a way to escape, they come to find that maybe the three of them aren't the only ones inhabiting it. Could they be the only three humans to reside there?

Follow Lawrence, Vincent, and Abel in their struggle to break out of the mysterious bunker, survive against a supernatural bunkmate, and defy societal expectations!

[ no demo yet ]

@pocowebcomic

Poco A Poco is a webcomic based on Ryan Murphy's "Glee" & "The Glee Project" in the style of Andrew Hussie's "Homestuck". It follows the students of Valley Adjacent High as they navigate the high stakes of high school popularity, student body social politics, and inappropriate teen sarcasm.

Read the first few pages with the link below:

[ NEOCITIES ]

[the-aesthetician-writes]

Only wanted to add my Ko-fi link below.

I'll look into changing the minimum amount people can donate. I plan on posting things there and later bringing that over to Tumblr after sometime. As for what will be shared there, most likely will be behind the scenes stuff. What do people like sharing on these kinds of things? 😅

Support Mister Man on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/theaestheticianwrites

Support Mister Man On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations

[swordheld]

do the silly thing. if you do not do the silly thing time will pass and it will not be the same silly thing it could have been. it will still be silly, and it will still be yours, but it will not be the same. this is both a blessing and a curse, but so is living; and if you do not do it now when will you? who will? it has to be you, it was always meant for you, waiting for you.

[did-i-do-this-write]

How to Support Writers During the Scourge of A.I. Bullshit

Do

Interact with us. Talk to us. Reach out to us. Many writers physically write for themselves, but they share for others. To build a community and connect with someone, to learn from them, and to make a genuine connection through something they've created. Comments, questions, rambling tags, they all mean that our writing reached someone who genuinely enjoyed it.

Share our work. This does not mean repost, this means reblog and/or send the link to friends and other potential readers. Some writers may have negative experiences with their work being shared on other platforms (such as discord), but reblogging is almost always appreciated so we can reach a wider audience. Even if you don't have anything to say or comment, it will help.

Ask questions. Many writers are dying to talk about the creative choices they made, the word choice they fought with until they got it just right, the details they added just HOPING someone would notice it. If you wish you could get more context/detail about a piece, odds are all you have to do is ask!

Treat us like humans (because we are). Crazy concept, right? The thing that terrifies me the most about all this is the potential that we take humanity out of the arts. We replace it with A.I. until human creativity becomes irrelevant because it's more convenient and more profitable.

We are not robots making content for your entertainment, we are people sharing stories to make genuine human connections and share our passions. Stories that take hours, days, months, even years of our lives to properly craft. We practice and study and learn so that we can express ourselves skillfully. Even when done as a hobby for fun, there is heart and energy and time put into the final draft.

And finally, Don't

Use A.I. for anything. Because the more it's used, the more advanced it becomes. The more advanced it becomes, the harder it will be to discern a genuine human touch between an A.I. regurgitating what it's been taught.

In the end, this is a plea. I'm begging you. Do not give A.I. the ability to replace us.

[pocowebcomic]

Webcomic Re-Introduction

POCO-A-POCO WEBCOMIC

Hey everyone, I hope you all are having a warm and safe holiday season. I thought I would just make the rounds and promo my little webcomic "Poco-A-Poco". Originally based on Ryan Murphy's Glee & The Glee Project, as well as inspired by the MS Paint Comics style of Andrew Hussie, Poco-A-Poco is a webcomic about a couple of misfits in a high school glee club. While a totally original idea, Poco-A-Poco is a bit unconventional in terms of structure, performance, and understandability. While I did promise no part of the webcomic would focus on time travel, some timeskips and flashbacks will be frequent in this lighthearted high school comedy.

This is a project I decided to make during the pandemic and like many of the project made during this time, Poco-A-Poco took a lengthy pause. However, if anyone follows my writer account, @the-aesthetician-writes , I've mentioned starting work on Poco-A-Poco since the later half of September. This resulted in having well over a couple months work for Poco-A-Poco I plan on working on over the course of this week.

Parts of the webcomic are already live on the original website that will be linked below. I also plan on creating a Patreon, however, I have doubts as I am a very reserved person and find it hard to think of additional content for different tiers. However, I hope this doesn't discourage others in wanting to support my work, even if it's reading this blog post.

Thank you all for your support with my other projects and I hope y'all have a safe and warm holiday season.

Please read the first few pages here:

[smoqueen-deactivated20251108]

Season 2 Episode 9 -- The Dinner Machine

[cryptotheism]

The King of Cups - Tranquility from mastery. Control over the emotions. Balance between emotion, desire, and creativity.

[ao3commentoftheday]

would you?

[jess-total-mess]

I absolutely would and he is suffering for it

[pteren]

@derinthescarletpescatarian

[the-aesthetician-writes]

[ 22.102023 ] || [ sunday ] || [ clear ]

mini update #1: I am very behind on goals.

mini update #2: I decided to take on an accountability buddy, so far, it's help.

mini update #3: I've already written up 1.5k of words for the next chapter of BTW and god, I feel tired but elated! I do have a bit of reservation with how I ended it, but I like what I've made so far. There is a bit of rambling in the beginning but I just need to start it somehow. There might also be funky pronouns around a certain sample stealer, but hopefully I've managed to catch them before publishing on AO3. n.n

mini update #4: Poco-A-Poco has been getting to me, but I'm attempting to figure out it's voice while still being able to work on it.

mini update #5: I will be trying to crank out 1.5k every day this week to catch up on BTW chapters. Like, I know I'm going to hate it, but a this point it needs to be done. I don't want to sit here and mourn characters and worlds when I know I'm capable of sticking it out and writing it. Especially now that I finished one chapter today.

mini update #6: I want to try and be move active on Tumblr. I'm thinking maybe I can put out a poll to see what you all would like to see from me?

[the-aesthetician-writes]

Alrighty, I'm in desperate need of an accountability buddy for my writing. I've been really slipping from my goals recently. Anyone interested or know where it even begin?

[mariowritesforyou]

Make your margins wider in your writing

Writing what feels like a dozen pages only to figure out after that you haven't even gotten through half a page is a universal experience across all writers.

What I'm about to tell you is one way I've found helps getting through that psychological toll.

One day I was writing my novel (a-luchador-detective-versus-a-lady-vampire sort of affair) when I got a certain idea. I picked up my copy of Authority by Jeff Vandermeer that I had on the desk and decided to make the line length in my work the same as that paperback edition. Margins were widened and line spacing was adjusted, leaving me with a sort of narrow manuscript.

You've no idea how much my productivity went up.

Logically, finishing a line became much faster, which lead to quicker finished pages, which produced a longer-looking manuscript. Of course, this doesn't mean that my writing was immediately faster per se,

but the feeling of being faster placebo-ed me in a way that increased my output.

Now I'm hitting my daily word-count much more consistently and I believe this was partly responsible.

Humans like numbers going up, if we wouldn't both videogames and billionares wouldn't exist. Seeing my page count increase is a reward to my brain which gives me a boost to get to the next page. By decreasing the length between rewards I'm put in a more constant progression loop, no longer feeling the slog of going up a hill and being met with a thousand more.

And at the end, if I want to check my actual progress, the real gauge will forever be the total word count, which we shouldn't obsess over, anyways.

The journey to create a novel or other piece of long-form media will always be more of a marathon than a race, and should be undertaken with the mindset of a marathon. All progress is incremental, and you should not be emotionally punishing yourself for not finishing a quarter of your book in the last week, as if that were somehow possible.

The length of a novel is such that any time-saving and efficiency-increasing life hacks we apply would only be reducing our-time-finish by weeks at the most, so why the rush?

I believe the key to writing faster is to write constantly first.

Can't be fast without stamina. So go ahead; write and make writing easier on you.

[the-aesthetician-writes]

-

[the-aesthetician-writes]

-

[the-aesthetician-writes]

September Writing Review

(Also a short update.)

Hey all! I've been gone for a while, I know. I've been trying to keep active in the midst of finding work and life being well... life. So the short and quick version of this is, I'm back-ish!

I have decided to really buckle down and have a try at building up my writing habits. With a couple of months filled with some horrendous experiences I won't detail here, I have realized what I want to do more than anything is writing. I have been attempting the process for the passed couple of weeks and the results have been more than I had expected.

Last month's goal is more or less having a decent amount of work done on all WIPs. And while that can seem overwhelming. I think the way I had set this up this time could hold results. So prior to my recent experiment, I've been writing with the goal of finishing one thing with no deadline (probably not the best method now that I'm thinking about it.) So what I decided to do now is to have a deadline along with tentative goals by the end of the year(NaNoWriMo) and some taking place during the first half of the new year (AroWriMo).

Some of these goals range from solid word counts to more abstract concepts in writing but for transparency (and accountability, really) I'll share them below.

Poco-A-Poco (Webcomic)

Poco-A-Poco is a web comic I set out to make at the beginning of the pandemic. Hoping to create something while in lockdown. It has been abandoned for a couple of years but I have decided to work on it to help build my discipline.

The goal for the last two weeks was to create a total of around 30 "pages" for the web comic. Thinking pages for web comics are often subjective and since I have a passion for graphic design. I felt it would at least work as a warm up when working on it.

The goal after September would be to work on a "page" daily for Poco-A-Poco. Just to build a rhythm and if I manage the time, some day update the comic with what I have worked on.

By the end of 2023, the total should amount to around 122 "pages".

By April 2024, the total should amount to around 243 "pages".

@bybyebitheway

Bi The Way is my ocean punk baby. Also started in 2020 and has had the unfortunate ratio of one chapter released per year it's been alive. With my new motivation with these goals, I decided BTW needed a concrete goal to hit. This was not only to build discipline, but also to build stamina in my writing sprints. I will be trying the Pomodo Method when writing BTW chapters along with the modified Kitchen Timer Method.

The goal of these past few weeks was to write around 4 chapters. I really attempted to give my all these passed few weeks, but haven't managed to work on Bi The Way. However, knowing I had planned beyond these two weeks made me feel better about the initial failure.

This October, I plan on playing catch up on BTW and other WIPs I fell behind on. By the end of this month, I plan on having written 5 chapters along with the four chapters that carry over last month. I feel like the carry over factor will help in building that stamina in terms of writing. After all, the only reason I had set 30 pages in two weeks for Poco-A-Poco was to build in routine. I'll talk more about that later on, but for now my goal with BTW is to have written 4/5 chapters each month. Each chapter having a minimum word count of 1,500 words. BTW will have a hiatus in November for NaNoWriMo.

By the end of the year, I would like to have around 14 chapters.

By the end of April 2024, I would like to have around 30 chapters.

@tobeaspected

To Be Aspectec is another product of the pandemic and also my first dive into AroWriMo. Having failed to achieve what I originally wanted for AroWriMo multiple years in a row, I plan to finish at least one character interaction just in time for next year's AroWriMo.

The goal for the last two weeks was to have two "scenes" written for TBA. With the goal being more subjective and similar to my goal with Poco-A-Poco pages, I opted to have a definition set for what counted as a scene (for my overthinking sanity's sake). A scene would mean any amount of writing needed before the player makes a choice. (Oh I forgot to mention TBA is an interactive fiction piece, didn't I?) Besides the quantity, anything else was up to me.

By the end of the year, I would like to have 6 "scenes" written for TBA.

By the end of February 2024, I would like to finish one "volume" of TBA. A volume would be a total of two characters and all their interactions, including endings.

By the end of April 2024, I would like to have 10 "scenes" written.

@thehuntersacethetic

The Hunter's Ace-Thetic is another interactive fiction project that started during the pandemic. It has been through many different mediums as a way to experiment and learn about different media, but I will focus on ChoiceScript for now.

My goal during the past two weeks was to write out one "episode". Again, with the goal being to build stamina, I added THAT work load into the two weeks as well. More so, the focus these past two weeks was to organize the "episode" structure, with the real priority being on an outline for it.

By the end of the year, I would like to have 4 episodes of THAT.

By the end of April 2024, I would like to have 8 Episodes of THAT.

NaNoWriMo 2023 Project (OMS)

For the month of November, I plan to take on NaNoWriMo and work on one of my abandoned attempts. I hope to write to full 60,000 words by the end of Novemember. If anything, I hope I learn how to be a better writer. The name of the book will be: "Oh My, Starsigns!"

"Oh My Starsigns!" is planned to be a sci-fi/ crime drama(?) taking place in the future where the space police have technology that can take over a suspect's body. Along with the police themselves, suspects also posses different abilities. The story will begin when a prison ship crash lands on a distant planet. Really trying hard to not give anything away just yet.

By the end of 2023, I would like to have Oh My, Starsigns! finished.

By the end of April 2024, I have no further plans for OMS other than maybe self publishing on Amazon or somewhere else if I'm able to find a better alternative.

What I've Written So Far (End of September, 2023):

Poco-A-Poco: 20/30 Pages

Bi The Way: 0/4 Chapters, 0/6k Words

To Be Aspected: 0/2 Scenes

The Hunter's Ace-thetic: 0/1 Episodes

What I Plan to Write (October 2023):

Poco-A-Poco: 40/30 Pages

Bi The Way: 8/4 Chapters, 12k/6k Words

To Be Aspected: 4/2 Scenes

The Hunter's Ace-thetic: 2/1 Episodes

Reflection:

I think these past two months have been a great experiment in knowing what to do different for the next couple of weeks. Hope to update you a month from now with good results.