The Kind Of English Major I Am:

My entry for the Homestuck Design Contest over on welovefine! If you like the design, please go rate it here! Ratings/reblogs/spreading the word is all appreciated :] There are a ton of entries so check all of them out!

I had fun doing this. Thanks for having a look!

@azaraih and I are back on our bullshit, and by bullshit I mean having a good time making games together again. Been a while since we’ve posted about game making! 

Currently, we’re trying to make the smallest possible VN that still feels personally interesting for us to work on, and basically it’s turned into Awkward Lunch Conversations: The Game. Here are some sprites I’ve been making for one of the characters you can interact with in the game. Unnamed at the moment, but non-binary with they/them pronouns.

I’ll talk about the game more soon, but pretty much my thought process was “What are VNs great at? Character interactions like conversations. What’s a super small, limited character interaction you could do? Having lunch with one other person. How can I make this more interesting for me? What if you don’t actually remember who you’re meeting for lunch, and why.” And that’s pretty much how our game started. Current title is Lunch with J. 

Thanks for reading!

Back to sketches of @azaraih's characters! Instead of space rom, this time from a hella old fantasy horror story that's evolved a lot over time. Revenge gods drama, weird ghosts, estranged siblings, pilgrimages. Fun stuff. Not yet a comic you can read but I'm excited for whenever it becomes one.

Aisle 6 Remix

Fic summary:

I feel like….someone’s watching me. Eve looks up from the two flimsy boxes in her hands (microwave stroganoff and frozen gluten-free shepherd’s pie) to see that someone was indeed looking intensely her way. A woman stands a few feet away, cart halted, staring right at her. Young, sickly pale, hair in disarray, clung sweaty to her forehead.

Eve figures she should probably address this situation.

|| One overthinking gay’s remix of the best queer spy vs spy romance on film, if bits of Season 1 were smushed with bits of Season 2 and it all started with a meetcute in a grocery aisle.

Chapter 02: Carefully practiced vulnerability

|| Tips for making a new friend: try having a light conversation to get to know each other over a shared snack.

Click here or on the header above to give it a read!

Hello from me, the writer:

Hellooo who else is gay and horny for weird?? [Spoiler warning: come back here after you’ve read the chap, I’m gonna talk about it]

Eve Polastri understands you, because she’s thirsty for a stranger’s stab hole. And Villanelle also understands you because is thirsty for Eve being thirsty for stabs. Their brain cell truly is away on holiday.

I enjoyed writing this chapter a lot since these Eve, V, and all the rest of us get to chill for one second and a indulge in some conversation. Also I like switching around the POV between two unreliable narrators. I’m always interested in what characterization you can pick up on through someone’s narrative perspective. 

Lasagna-for-one man from the grocery aisle is Julian, yeah. Oksana and Eve’s ships in the night moment in Nice and Neat was a perfect beautiful gut-punch. I wouldn’t trade away that so-tired lingering stare at Eve striding savior-like, fucking near godly, fucking dream-esque slow-motion towards the hell house Oksana just escaped, just ONE moment too late for them to be together again. In that moment at least she knows clever, determined, mutually obsessed Eve came for her after all.

But yea I’m not beholden to writing what’s good for the show so fuck it! This one episode and this one moment are what I latched onto and what made me decide to explore “hey, what if it wasn’t Julian who Villanelle saw in that store, what if it was Eve? What if it was Eve, who she saw for the first time in that aisle?” I’m not even close to above daydreaming about Eve and V getting to hang out domestically in Eve’s house, not even a little. I’m so gay for domesticity and slice-of-life and my being yearns for it.

Had kind of a dickens of a time trying to problem solve the issue of V’s false backstory here. She told Eve she couldn’t involve authorities, she showed up with an obvious wound, she doesn’t have friends or anyone around to turn to. Maybe the lies she gives here still wouldn’t convince someone with a better sense of self-preservation, but we’ll see how Eve feels about it. Hopefully you all find her made up story acceptable for the fic at least.

Previous chapters:

Ch 01 | Knife me, rob me, creep up in my sleep

Back in May my partner and I went to a Julia Nunes living room concert here in Minneapolis and it was dopest most intimate and emotional show I’ve been to. I started following Julia’s music years ago and her album Some Feelings means a lot to me. K and I have jammed along to every song on that album countless times.

So! I decided to make this tiny zine to give Julia at the show. Did a lil page for each track of Some Feelings. Made of blank index cards, some pens and markers, and a little blue thread.

I’m enjoying aisle 6 remix.

Thank you so much anon! I'm enjoying writing it so far :]

Aisle 6 Remix

|| One overthinking gay’s remix of the best queer spy vs spy romance on film, if bits of Season 1 were smushed with bits of Season 2 and it all started with a meetcute in a grocery aisle.

Chapter 04: Shapeless butt jiggling

|| Villanelle is nosy, judgmental, and incapable of ever just catching a break.

Click here or on the header above to give it a read!

Hello from me, the writer:

[Spoiler warning: come back here after you’ve read the chap, I’m gonna talk about it]

This chapter ended up being my longest so far. I hope you enjoyed it! I don’t expect the word count to keep growing higher and higher every chapter. I kind of try to keep them on the shorter side really, so I know I’ve given the chapter a point, but I plan to just kind of feel out what seems right on a case by case basis. This chapter had a lot of beats, a lot of things I wanted to accomplish, and then they all expanded as I fleshed things out with the actual writing.

I don’t really know if I’d say the writing in this fic is ~my writing style~ because I’m comfortable writing so many different things - a million papers in college for my English degree, cover letters for jobs, internships, projects, instructional writing on a hundred completely different types of industries for work, editing anything other people write, working on my and my partner’s original stories. 

But this is my first time writing any fanfiction at all. And this is how it started out, and this is the cadence, tone, stacks on stacks of clauses, etc that I’m just rolling with I guess. I hope it’s working for you.

In this chapter, we’re back in Villanelle’s head. I’m still exploring what my characterization of her will be like, but I’m trying for some balance so far. It’s so strange to me writing an AU for Killing Eve. It’s done so much good in canon, there’s so much there, that it seems almost a waste, almost silly, to drag these two to an alternate universe. When I try to do it, I mean. I read and enjoy lots of Killing Eve AUs, but can get self conscious about mine.

It’s an interesting exercise trying to build the connection, the dynamic between these two up from scratch. I selectively work a lot from canon into A6R, but I shift it, stick it under a different lens, prod at it with “well, what if this time…” There’s not that excellent, incredibly rich established trajectory for me to build from. I have to earn it some other way, which I’m still figuring it out. 

It’s fun though, moving them along steps at a time. This chapter tries to move us several steps on several different tracts at once and hopefully future me will make good on it lol. There’s a lot at play. Villanelle is focused on herself still, but Eve sort of interests her. But this Eve doesn’t know her, isn’t heading a task force just to seek out her. She didn’t see Eve in a bathroom and ruin her life over it.

They’ve gone straight to co-habiting, without any of the obsession, pain, conviction, doubt, chase we love them for. So we’re along for their little adventure of learning each other, watching them each be surprisingly correct and incredibly wrong about the other. While also doing dumb domestic shit like eating bad eggs. If you want good scrambled eggs by the way, try Gordon Ramsey’s technique; it’s on Youtube.

If you read these behind-the-scenes rambles of mine, you’re the real star here. Thank you and Queer Jesus bless you. Please talk to me, love me some talkin bout stuff. And if you like the fic, share it with a buddy :]

Previous chapters:

Ch 01 | Knife me, rob me, creep up in my sleep

Ch 02 | Carefully practiced vulnerability

Ch 03 | More of a tectonic movement

270 Miles and More

Hey! I’m gay, it’s Christmas, I’m writing gay Christmas fic. Working on cranking out a fic for Happiest Season that was going to be a long oneshot, then a nice little 2 chapter, and has settled on becoming an 8 chapter fic.

If you enjoy a little slow burn, a lot of emotional processing, and were interested in the possibility of a story you thought was about a couple trying to survive one terrible Christmas actually being the story of how a different couple falls together well, perhaps I can interest you in my lil fic.  

Read the fic here on AO3!

Summary:

A: It really was maybe the only redeeming point, getting to kick it with you. Thanks for helping me out.

A: I would like to point out though that we are in fact...talking right now. Oh shit, the wonders of technology! We don’t actually have to miss talking to each other if we don't feel like it, do we?”

Right away, she gets a response message agreeing: No, we don’t.

//

Abby walks out on Christmas Eve and rides with John back to Pittsburgh, but the things that happened this wild past handful of days don't disappear. If anything, they stay with her weeks, months, a year and more later. But they soften, grow, change shape; they shift her life in more ways than she could have anticipated.

Texts from Riley are waiting on her phone when she and John walk back into her and Harper's apartment. She texts Riley back and then they just never stop texting.

Another round of characters from our in-progress Selkie game. Some of the island villagers you can interact with. They may not be the primary route/attainable characters but you'll certainly run into them. You could probably use their help.

Sorry about your hands, Shopkeeper, I'll fix those later.

We're very serious game makers. Look at our potato buttons. Look at our idk shell. 

Well, this is what my in progress games usually look like… It takes a while to make all the imagebuttons for the actual game, so I usually have placeholders that are textbuttons or… potatoes. The potatoes are actually the save/load/options/quit buttons, so it’s kind of hard to tell which is which right now haha.

Anyway, this is kind of what it’ll look like when you’re exploring the island. There’ll be actual arrow buttons to click on to go to different areas instead of the textbuttons in the top left, and the day/time info will probably be in the right corner I think? And the background will be different depending on the weather instead of just having text that tells you the weather.

But yeah, since this is the beach, I made a thing where you can pick up shells! Each time it’s a new day or night, it generates a few random shells for you to pick up.  You can take them to a shop in town and sell them. There’ll be about 10 different kinds and some are more rare than others.

I want to work on this game more! I’m trying to go through the parts of it I made in November and fix/improve some things.  I should get back into writing the fisherman route too…