I Will Close Commissions Soon! :) Giving The Post A Few More Rounds And Closing Until Next Month Or So

I'm so excited for the Tomb Raider Remasters!

I played Tomb Raider 2 and 3 a lot when I was a kid and I still play them regularly. It has become kind of a tradition for me to play them at the start of the year and draw some fanart too.

I also played the first one few years ago and absolutely loved it!

started doodling my Hero of Kvatch and made her look a lil evil in the process

Fanfiction is great because you can see so clearly how people learn to write.

Some people, it's clear, learned almost entirely through absorbing the world around them. Grammar and punctuation will be all over the place, spellings are approximate, but the voice of the narration will come through so clearly. You can hear the dialect of the people around them as of they're telling the story. It's not a written story, it's a transcription of how they talk in their day to day life.

Some people learned through reading a gazillion books as a kid. Grammer and spelling will be rock solid, formatting occasionally based on the single tab of physical books rather than the double tab of online scrolling, but dialogue is often stilted and overly formal. You might notice a lack of contractions and very rigid rules they made for consistency that actually have a lot more flexibility than they think. They tend to have a fantastic grasp of sentence flow, though.

And other people formally learned how to write. This could be anywhere from taking school classes seriously because they enjoyed writing stories as a kid to literal certifications and jobs in the field. Grammer is flawless. Punctuation is triple checked. Foreign words are in italics. Characters have distinct voices. But their self indulgence is tempered by perfectionism. They know precisely what they want from a fic. Authors notes often feature mutterings about their happiness with the chapter. Kaomojis often appear! They seek a style to their writing, and it makes for some wonderfully clever plots! These are the ones most likely to get fun with formatting!

And some people.... Some people examined it all. They dissect dialogue, people watch, cross reference behaviours and compare characters to people irl. You can tell almost immediately who had formative experiences with Terry pratchett and/or ghibli, because it's these people. While others see writing as fun, expression, craft, they see it as art. Plain and simple. Sure, the grammar is occasionally sacrificed on the altar of creative freedom, and the occasional sentence might miss a full stop, but these people seem to self reflect on themselves as part of the art making process. On occasion, these people have the most masterful grasp of dialogue and invocation and hand sewn characterisations. Formatting is pretty standard because all the focus is on the actual words. These fics can be edited to the moon and back!

All of these can vary wildly in forethought and quality, and betas can often catch individual problems before they hit post, but just. Isn't it so cool? What's that one Oscar Wilde quote about every mask just being another fragment of yourself?

Did you recognise yourself?

Writing is wild because you’ll plan a perfectly structured scene and then your character is like

“actually I’m gonna kiss this person now” or “what if I had a traumatic backstory I’ve never mentioned before”

and suddenly you’re spiraling because THEY’RE MAKING CHOICES and you’re just the poor little author with no control

like sir. ma’am. i gave you life. and now you’re rewriting your own plot??

Reblog this and tell me the most unhinged thing a character of yours did without permission.

I need solidarity. i need chaos. i need to know i’m not the only one getting bullied by their own cast.

“I can’t write without chatGPT” actually I believe you can. every writer writes by their own hands and brain before AI becomes a thing in our daily lives. and many, many writers continue to write by their own hands and brains even in the AI era. I mean sure, I get that AI can make things more convenient for us; we don’t have to do the works ourselves, we just give AI our prompts and sit back. but is some convenience really worth it when the art we get is robotmade with no soul in it? is some convenience really worth sacrificing the joy of writing and creating for? yes, writing can be extremely hard, but as a writer who never uses AI to write for her and has no interest in using AI to write for her, the joy of getting to write and create is worth the effort and difficulty of writing.

I believe you actually can write without chatGPT. you are either just used to the convenience of having robots create soulless works for you or are too scared to start writing by yourself. but as hard and scary as writing can be, trading the joy of getting to write and create for soulless robotmade works will always be such a shame.

remember; writing is art, and it takes practice to master your craft.

no you have to contribute to your fandom if you don't want it to die. most fandoms die because people say 'it's so sad watching the fandom die when the hype dies' without doing anything about it. I'm not saying you have to push out 100k word slow-burn fic, I'm not saying you have to make fan art or gif sets or edits or anything. I'm just saying we as a community should contribute to our fandom if we don't want it to die, and by contributing, I'm talking about giving kudos, commenting on your favorite fics, reblogging your favorite art and just talking about your favorite characters. that's enough to keep a fandom alive. that's the most effective way to keep a fandom alive in my humble opinion.

fandoms die because people stop talking about it, fandoms die because people stop engaging with fan content once the hype is gone. what I'm saying is, mainstream media's hype may be gone, but our fandom can stay alive and thriving if us as a community don't let it die.

Those mummies were slow AF but they still scared TF outta me.

You’re not just a writer.

You’re a goddamn survivor of your own imagination.

You live with noise in your head that never shuts up until you bleed it onto the page, and even then, it whispers, “Make it better.”

Dont know if this actually works still, haven’t tried it but ya know…if it does then you're welcome 😂

First time public speaking!

I did a thing 👋 Check it out if you're interested in writing, videogames, novels, stories, or just want to see me doing public speaking for the first time 😆