Spreading Pen Ink Across the Universe

Fanfic and creative writing account for @daybreaksgaze. Ao3 account: twilightwrites.

[tweetsongs]

i agree so much about making your blorbos pathetic but i do fear that many take this to mean 'make them more traditionally feminine/submissive' which genuinely hurts my soul. make your blorbos pathetic in interesting character-oriented ways. understand their neuroses and turn the dials up to eleven. juxtapose the parts of life they handle extremely well with the parts of their lives that make them eat shit. make them angry. make them cold. make them pave their own way to hell while building walls preventing them from seeing any other way. please i'm begging you no more pathetic as an euphemism for bottoming im gonna mclose it.

[twilightscribbles]

Why I'd Pick Depth Over a Bigger Roster

Some platforms brag about thousands of premade characters. I'd trade all of them for one companion I actually built. SweetDream's depth of creation means the single character I made beats any menu.

Depth is quality you can feel in every chat, because she's truly mine, consistent and personal. If you'd rather have one real connection than endless shallow ones, sweetdream.ai is the right call.

[redstonedust]

funniest part of reviving ocs i made as a kid is being like "yeah i always imagined them as a mature member of the group who really has their shit together" [checks their info] "what the fuck do you mean they were supposed to be fifteen years old"

[moethh]

die die die

[lycosofscribes]

It's a pain in the ass, but it's my pain in the ass!

[frownyalfred]

me, quietly whispering to the ao3 page of an author who doesn’t even know I exist: I am obsessed with you

[newskyillusion]

me, whispering to the ao3 page of an author who hasn’t updated anything in four years: I think about you often and I hope you’re alright

[azrielgreen]

me, whispering to the ao3 page of an author who wrote one life altering banger and nothing else: I hope your pillow is cool and your skin is clear and you find money in a forgotten jeans pocket

[jezebelgoldstone]

me, whispering to every single person on this post: please leave one singular comment saying literally any of that

[writingdose]

[daysleftofsecondterm]

I think your fanfic is amazing.

“But Professor, the technical flaws!” “But Professor, the grammatical errors!” “But Professor, you’re not even in my fandom!” “But Professor, you’ve never even read my fanfic!”

I’ll say it again; I think your fanfic is amazing.

[writingdose]

this is a life saver 😭

[willgrahamscock]

why would you ever outsource fun to chatgpt? are you stupid? you can make mediocre shit by yourself too.

[willgrahamscock]

you're missing out on all the crazy euphoric moments where you execute an idea flawlessly, sending it to your friends and feeling the genuine happiness at their reactions to something you made authentically. you're robbing yourself of something beautiful.

and I get it, writers block, artists block, depression can really be terrible, but once you break out of it (and you will) it will feel like climbing Mount Everest.

[willgrahamscock]

peace and love on planet earth! you are saving the environment AND you’re cool!

[willgrahamscock]

WE ARE PROUD OF YOU!!!!

[thesneakyfox]

[Image description: Screenshots of two anonymous tumblr asks.

Image 1: Posts like yours I think are genuinely what got me out of using AI. I used [it] for like a year for entertainment even though I knew I shouldn’t and I have no fucking clue why I did it but posts like yours do actually help. Now I read fanfic and support writers like I used to, I don’t feel so shitty about myself and I’ve started writing. Thank you [heart]

Image 2: your stop using chatbots for entertainment post also got me. i get intermittently addicted to character ai and your post made me close all my tabs of it. the peace it brings me is always fleeting (i was using it as a very much not good coping mechanism for racing thoughts) and i get so much more driven when I don’t have it open. thanks mister willgrahamscock

/End ID]

[caprart1]

i DO believe that a good writer can make mischaracterization work. oh there's a character who doesn't normally cry? figure it out!! dissect the character. make the situation cryable for them. make that character cry ugly tears even if it goes against their very nature. YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK!!!

[chimaerakitten]

I’ve been kicking around a thought lately that when it comes to SFF we could probably bypass some of the perennial political vs. apolitical vs. everything-is-political-apolitical-storytelling-doesn’t-exist by instead formulating a spectrum from politically coherent to politically incoherent

Essentially, politically coherent works are works where the political message of the story is supported by all (or at least most) of the major story elements, and a politically incoherent work is a story where the political messages of different elements are seemingly all shooting off on different vectors.

The nice thing about this is it can bypass authorial intent (and the discussion of whether intent matters). This is about the text.

Like, politically incoherent works that had no authorial thought behind them are a dime a dozen of course, and politically coherent works that clearly had a lot of authorial thought are if not equally common than at least easy to spot. But there are also plenty of works that are politically coherent without the author intending them that way—like, whatever faults there are with Project Hail Mary, the overall opinion the book has about the nature of humanity & of science is consistent throughout. Likewise there are stories where the authors clearly meant a coherent political point and totally wiffed it. (The works @specialagentartemis has collectively termed “cozy colonialism” come to mind)

So there’s a utility in replacing the question “is this story political?” (Yes, always, but if the answer is always yes the question becomes kinda useless) with “Is this story politically coherent?” Because a yes or no there will tell a prospective reader something about what to expect.

[specialagentartemis]

my petty gripe about anachronism in historical/fantasy/spec-fic worlds is attraction language.

We’ve all heard the “should you use modern queer labels or not” argument but honestly even when people go “true, they wouldn’t use the labels ‘aromantic’ or ‘asexual,’” so often the characters describe their experiences as “I never felt romantic attraction” or “I don’t feel attracted to anyone” in ways that makes me go. You are stilllllll thinking about this in an extraordinarily modern online way. That 19th century steampunk detective man will NOT be angsting about having never felt romantic attraction, he would be angsting about being unable to feel moved by the beauty or charm of a woman, or something. And I do think that “attractiveness” language is different from the identity-level idea of experiencing attraction—Sherlock Holmes does not talk about not experiencing attraction, but when Watson says “What a very attractive woman!” Holmes responds “Is she? I did not observe.” (And then Watson calls him an inhuman automaton and calculating-machine and Holmes calls Watson’s judgement biased). Never swayed by the attractiveness of a man or woman, never desirous of marriage, never charmed by the delights of love, all of these feel like some of the variety of ways that someone in this milieu might describe an ace- or aro-spectrum identity more than “never felt attraction” does. Mostly because, like the terms for aromantic and asexual themselves, nailing down an exclusively attraction-based definition of a-spec identities is a relatively new and extremely post-AVEN thing. And yet in fiction everybody knows to articulate their experience as feeling sexual/romantic attraction. And I always want to go nooo how would THIS character think about it?? Not how you think this character SHOULD think about it, how would THIS person in THIS context articulate their feelings?

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[twilightscribbles]

[A screenshot of a tweet from @/oikawa_png that says, "sometimes you need an 8 month break to write 39 different oneshots before updating your ongoing fic, it happens".]

[fishing-princess]

I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory

[leftcosine]

I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know

[losingmymindtonight]

one day I’ll finally write that ridiculously elaborate fanfiction that I’ve been carefully constructing in my daydreams for months and then you’ll be sorry. you’ll all be sorry.

[luna-azzurra]

Real thing that changed how i write: I started asking "what does this character think is wrong with them" and separately "what is actually wrong with them." Those two things are almost never the same. She thinks she's too much. She's actually terrified of being too little. He thinks he's bad at commitment. He's actually just never met someone he trusted enough. The gap between their diagnosis of themselves and the real thing, that's your character arc right there. you don't have to explain it. just write both.

[fillianore-moved]

so metropolitan museum of art has a register of books they’ve published that are out of print and that you can download for free! they’re mostly books on art, archeology, architecture, fashion and history and i just think that’s super useful and interesting so i wanted to share! you can find all of the books available here!

[thatdarnyeti]

FREE BOOKS?!?

[theseventhcrow55]

i get so emotional every time i think about fanfic culture. it's just so beautiful that people are writing and anonymously posting these thousand-word stories about characters we all love and not even getting any money or public fame from it. it's literally just for the love of the game.

shout out to everyone who participates in fanfic culture, be it reading or writing fanfics. you are contributing to such a lovely thing <3

[failure-to-adult]

ALSO

Fanfic is as old as writing, if not older. A HUGE body of work in Ancient Greek was literally just Homeric fanfiction. And Homer himself may have been working off older stories, making it fic of fics.

The most primal human urge upon hearing any story is to write fic about it.

[headspace-hotel]

fanfiction is the original way of storytelling, it's intellectual property law that is the weird modern aberration

[doodlemancy]

hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)

✨ good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash 🌈

[zanthiakhalaplace]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have been despairing as it is so hard now to find references and photos of succulents and other things for my designs!! T_T