get gruntled

Rose ✿ he/they/ze/doll main @an-elegant-void

[void-botanist]

About

I'm Rose (he/him, they/them, ze/zir, doll/dolls, or it/its [more about my nouns and pronouns])! I'm a white, queer, neurodivergent adult and I do writing, traditional & digital art, and web design. My main genre is sci-fantasy but I go wherever my heart takes me. (My heart also took me to gay marriage and grad school, so those are a big part of my life too.) I follow from @an-elegant-void, but I prefer to be tagged in games/posts on this blog.

Want to join my taglists? Head to this form!

My commissions are closed until at least February 2026, but you can check out some past commission posts: $5 & $10 commissions, $30+ commissions

Writing tag: #rose writ // Art tag: #rose arts // Picrews I’ve used

What I'm working on in 2026

Another Ocean's Moon (my main focus)

Setting // locality space, a galaxy filled with inhabited planets and magic users

Synopsis // Sid, a young human man, teams up with his bitchy middle-aged friend Avis to escape his abusive parents and get back to their planet of origin. Finally, Avis is going to divorce her cheater husband Sorian and Sid is going to see his best friend, Sorian’s illegitimate son, and they’re both going to get on with their lives. Except that Sid's parents won't take no for an answer even when Sid is brave enough to tell them that, and Avis couldn't possibly have prepared for the storm of emotions that comes with leaving behind the once-love of her life. But they're both determined to see this through, to live their lives for themselves, even though they don't quite know who they'll be once they get there.

Tag // #wip: aom, also #c: Sid, etc. for the characters

Read the first draft on Ellipsus!

Soulseeker

Setting // dualverse, made up of planets inhabited by mortals (the Worlds) and the pocket dimension where immortals live (the Realms)

Synopsis // Immortal half-sisters Martina and Galira were raised by their mother and uncle and don't know who their birth fathers are. When Galira leaves on a work trip to the Worlds and doesn't come back, it seems like she was just so upset that Martina didn't want to find their dads that she decided to abandon the Realms, just like their mother and uncle did a billion years before. But their uncle has one more surprise for them: he finally told their fathers about them, and now Martina has to face an influx of frustrating, complicated, and overly enthusiastic family all by herself - at least until they can work together enough to find Galira.

Tag // #wip: soulseeker, also #c: Martina, etc. for the characters

Read the first draft on Ellipsus!

Fallen

Setting // dualverse, made up of planets inhabited by mortals (the Worlds) and the pocket dimension where immortals live (the Realms)

Synopsis // Jerry was an angel until he got exiled to Hell for being annoying killing several hundred mortals and became a Fallen. That meant losing all of his magic, but it also meant getting pleasantly tangled up with Tani, a demon who is an extremely powerful magic user and the daughter of the current leader of Hell. When she discovers why he was exiled, she fully walks away from him, and he scrambles to prove he's a good rule-abiding individual. When Tani is chosen as a Risen - which is the same as being a Fallen, just in the opposite, "good" direction - he has to decide whether it's worth it to keep following the rules if it means Tani's life will be destroyed, even though all she's done is chew him up and spit him out.

Tag // #wip: fallen, also #c: Jerry, etc. for the characters

Sharran AU (Baldur's Gate 3 longfic) (better title pending)

Setting // Faerûn

Synopsis // What if BG3 but the companions other than Lae'zel had full functional character arcs? What if Wyll wasn't disrespected at every turn of the narrative and actually mattered to the story? What if Shadowheart choosing Shar wasn't the bad ending? What if Astarion was a scrungkly raisin individual? What if Just Kill The Person In Your Way wasn't always the answer? What if the story didn't pivot on fantasy racism? This is a no-Tav, no-OC reimagining of BG3.

Tag // #sharran au

Last updated April 5, 2026

[scribblingface]

I think we need to start saying amateur art not bad art. the make bad art posts can come across so condescending and demoralizing sometimes which is the opposite of what's intended, like the whole point is that amateur art isn't 'bad', it's worthwhile. your art doesn't have to be professional grade to be worth making or to be appreciated by others

[teashoesandhair]

One hot and cool writing tip that I wish more people knew is... you don't have to write out people's accents phonetically. You just don't. You are not Dickens. You are (hopefully) not Rowling. There are so many other ways you can make someone's speech feel authentic to their background, or just make it clear that they're speaking in a certain accent, not limited to:

literally just saying 'he spoke with a Welsh accent'; sure, it's a bit blunt, but it gets the job done in a pinch. "He's completely drunk," he said, his southern drawl lingering on the final syllable as if to highlight the extent of the offence. Y'know, something of that ilk, but not as shit.

learning the specific vocabulary and syntax that someone with that accent might use. Sticking with the Welsh theme, because it's objectively the best accent*, there's a bunch of things that differentiate a colloquial South Walean accent, outside of our famed tendency to elongate a vowel to the point of death. The way we use prepositions (where to by is he?), the vocabulary borrowed from Welsh - saying that someone daft is twp, or something small is dwty - can easily signpost our speech as being from that specific area, without needing to type something like "'e's absolutely 'angin', man, pissed as a faaht 'e is!" Something less jarring, such as "He's absolutely hanging, he is." is just as clear. A character who says "Do you want a cuppa?" is coded or located very differently to one who says "You'll have a cup of tea, so you will."

ditto if there are specific ways that someone from a certain area might refer to a well-known concept. Regional words for mother and father, for example, or words that are class-specific; your character who calls his parents 'mater and pater' is likely inhabiting a different socioeconomic strata than your character who calls them 'mam and dad'. See if there's a colloquial way of saying 'yes' and 'no'; a lot can be signposted if your character says 'nah' rather than 'no', or 'aye' rather than 'yes'. A character saying 'couch' is inherently coded differently to one who says 'sofa'.

The reasons that writing accents phonetically is Generally Ill-Advised, In My Opinion are as follows:

quite simply, you're probably not being as clear in conveying the sounds of the accent as you think you are. Taking JK Rowling's work as the best possible example of this, her attempts at writing a Cockney accent phonetically come across like someone is chewing a mouthful of cheese curds and struggling to contain them. There's no consistency, no proper understanding of how to transcribe syllables into writing in a way that coherently conveys the accent she's trying to portray. I mean this so seriously, but what the flying fuck is: 'Well, 'e 'ad these 'ead pains and 'e was def'nitley nervous. Depressed maybe.' It's a crime, is what it is.

it's just plain hard to read. Trying to wade through sentences full of apostrophes and elision, parsing what's actually being said, gets tiresome. It asks the reader to do work that you're actively making harder for them. And that's not always a bad thing! Making readers Put Some Fucking Effort In can be very fruitful! But do you really want them to be struggling to understand every single thing that your Character B is saying for 350 pages?

which leads me onto the last point, and the most important in my mind: writing out accents like this always, always affects accents that are already in some way Othered. They're either racialised or working class, or associated with certain local regions that have negative stereotypes - think the deep South of the US, or the Welsh Valleys. They're never the 'default'. And this raises thorny questions about what the default is, what the standardised accent is, the accents that do and do not merit differentiation from the norm. You're relegating Character B to being hard to read because he's from, idk, Sunderland. You've decided that he isn't speaking 'properly', and therefore the reader needs to understand that other people think he's speaking weirdly. That, to me, is the principle issue. Because returning to JK Rowling (a sentence I hoped never to type), the only characters who speak like this in her work are working class, or they're from other countries. They're never from, you know, Surrey. Wonder why that is. And it's easy to be glib about it, but I do think it reifies class and regional boundaries in a way that's ultimately harmful.

This isn't to say that there's never a place for eye dialect in writing - Trainspotting (edit to respond to some legitimate comments in the reblogs: I bring up Trainspotting because it's written in Scots and Scottish English, not just Scots, but I agree that this isn't the best example as the Scots portions are not part of this conversation in the same way; consider Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston as a better example, and apologies for the confusion!) wouldn't be what it is without it, and there's definitely a different conversation to be had when it's your own accent and you're making a deliberate point about identity by differentiating through eye dialect - but I think that the blanket assumption of 'oh shit, my character is from Ireland, I'd better type that out phonetically!' can actually be both damaging to your writing and to your character representation, and I think that instead doing the work to really understand the vocabulary, speech patterns and unique aspects of a language or dialect always makes a work feel more authentic and lived-in.

To wit, less of this shite:

There’s mony a slip, an’ I’m no losin’ sight o’ any o’ my suspectit pairsons, juist yet awhile. (One of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by the very English Dorothy L. Sayers, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be a Scottish accent; I'd not be bringing it up if it were a Scottish author writing in Scots)

and more of this:

"Are we straight so?"

"Aye, we're straight," said Jim.

"Straight as a rush, so we are." (Jamie O'Neill, Irish, from At Swim, Two Boys)

*objective determination made via a sample size of one: me, in an elaborate hat.

[void-botanist]

I hope I'm not just that writeblr that never talks about writing to you all. I hope I'm also your favorite random art blog

[pxeachfuzz]

🏳️‍⚧️

[silurisanguine]

Linktree will be feeding your images with DALL-E, Open AI from 5th July 2026.

Warning to anyone using Linktree.

From the 5th July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

I deleted my account just now, because there was no way to turn this off or opt out.

[silurisanguine]

Update with some alternatives-

Carrd.co. Free alt with paid features.

Bento.app Currently free, integrated with bluesky

Everlink.tools Closest to Linktree, has some paid features.

Omg.lol Currently $20 a year. If paying for Linktree features this is a great upgrade.

[brarchives]

palomabarbiezinha

[newguineatribalart]

Aboriginal Dot Art by Tommy Mitchell

[softending]

knot talk

a prelude to all of this⁓

[itsmissing]

design comm for a "cambrian explosion wizard"

[itsmissing]

[layaart]

Here's the cover I designed/illustrated for Common Bonds 3! The crowdfund campaign for this starts soon ❄

[aroaessidhe]

The crowdfunding is on now! It's just passed 50%!

[aromanticsky]

[ID: the cover for Common Bonds 3: A Speculative Aromantic Anthology, edited by Claudie Arseneault, Em Ishii, and Ro Anna Sylver. The cover has a drawing of two characters with warm drinks in a winter forest. /end ID]

[vagrats]

wall hanging for my brother! naturally dyed with cute, osage, madder, and knotweed. first forray into naturally dyeing things in my kitchen, using a combination of dye techniques and modifiers. machine pieced, hand appliqued and quilted; roughly 15” square. excited to do way more of this kind of thing :')

[formerlyluckymanticore]

Writing may be hard, but the JOY of getting to expand the characters and worlds that you come up with can never be replaced. Keep going, even when it gets hard.

[albatris]

you! yes, you! make your main characters psychotic! do it now!

[albatris]

more giving psychotic characters happy endings!!!

more psychotic characters written as desirable friends and love interests!!

more psychotic characters as the life of the party or the zany extrovert or the mom friend or the goofball or the glue that holds the team together!!

more psychotic characters being as much a support system for their friends as their friends are for them!!

more psychotic characters written as loveable valuable important irreplaceable parts of their friendship groups and relationships!!

[vacantgodling]

i hate to be the guy always begging for money on the internet but such is life right now

if you don't know me, i'm ren/vacant/fish and i'm a 28 year old transmasculine black queer autistic person who's currently a full time student while trying to balance delivery apps to make money. last year i was let go from my job because they were trying to push me out anyway and since then i've been a financial wreck. between unemployment not being nearly enough, nearly 900 job applications and the only job i got was immediately so toxic i had to quit within the first four days, and trump fucking with student loans and education (which i'd been using to try and get by while i hopefully get a degree to get a better job) i'm just at my wits end. my partner currently has a disability hearing on 5/20 to see if they're eligible for aid but even that should we get approved wouldn't be enough to cover all of our expenses. if they get denied again then they're probably going to see about going to school and see if the school will accommodate their disabilities. we'll see.

to cut to the chase, we're on the verge of homelessness (again) and i can't make money delivering fast enough to try and make ends meet. the main thing that i can't lose is my car because without said car i can't make money at all so that's the most pressing issue.

my car payment is due 5/17 for $497 dollars. right now i have about $200 but between now and then i doubt i'll be able to make nearly $300 bucks so as per usual i'm turning to you all for help.

if you can spare anything at all, it would be meaningful. i'm trying to build up other sources of money (including embarrassing myself on the internet but that's probably not gonna go anywhere anytime soon if at all) including art commissions, substack subscriptions, and any other side hustle that i can find that actually works (because many Do Not). if you aren't able to, that's totally fine i know we're all suffering rn so rbs help.

links below, take care of yourselves.

Pay Ren Alexander using PayPal.Me

Go to paypal.me/pinkpurgatory and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.

Buy ren / vacant a Coffee

Become a supporter of ren / vacant today!

here is a link to my general pay what you want commissions guidelines. it's always pay what you want because we're all broke here.

here's my substack for my novel btaf (even if you can't pay you should still subscribe because i post funny bits of writing advice there)

thanks again 😔

[vacantgodling]

an update:

thank you to everyone who's donated, i really really appreciate it.

i was thankfully able to make my car payment <3

unfortunately we're still not out of the woods. we're waiting to hear back about my partner's disability claim. if things are favorable, yay. if not then we're kind of back at square one again and they may have to try and get a job though with the market it's like oof.

the cheaper accommodations we were hoping to secure fell through. we're still probably not able to get an apartment based on my income alone (due to rental requirements for income). we may try and finesse a place but that's up in the air and i'm wary of spending money on an app fee to just get rejected.

still no word about if or when i'll get financial aid. that's cool.

if we do end up getting trapped at our current apartment to stave off homelessness, the new rental rate is 1851 alone. that wouldn't include internet, electric, our phones, etc. like literally almost 1900 for a cockroach infested apartment. i've tried arguing with them about the rate but they don't care.

donations are still super appreciated. i haven't set up a gofundme because i need money Now and i don't want to wait and deal with the site's fees.

i'm still offering commissions, doordashing/instacarting, applying to jobs with no luck, applied for other government resources to little success (they may potentially take our food stamps too so that's cool), and have been trying to find a will to live. i don't really have one these days to be honest.

next month will be a year since this bullshit started and i just feel even more helpless than before.

thanks for your time.

[vacantgodling]

sorry to be back again but shit’s still in the gutter.

we may be looking at homelessness. my partner has applied for university and i have applied for a scholarship as well but information on money is still up in the air. we just need enough to squeak by this month and i’m hoping that we will be able to get some type of good news in june.

the new rental amount is $1851 for month to month. i wish i could move too. right now i have $1226 thanks to door dashing and all of you all’s generosity. this means i still need $625 to stay in the place we’re at for now and fingers crossed that financial aid for both of us drops in june and we can use that to move somewhere else cheaper.

unfortunately my current complex is shit and won’t let me pay online due to a miscommunication on their part in december and i’ve had to take out money orders instead. this adds a $10 whenever i withdraw money from the bank so overall looking at $635 that i still need to raise.

if you don’t have anything to spare i totally understand. i wish i wasn’t in this position and i hope no one else ever is. reblogs help. i also offer art commissions, and i have a substack where i write about my projects and writing. i’m also willing to beta read anything you have written and i leave lots of comments though i don’t have a specific pay structure for that. thank you again for your time.

paypal info in the first post.

0/635

[aphel1on]

top tier character when "what is wrong with them" requires an answer that begins with "How much time do you have"