It’s been two years since my accident, and not much has changed! I nanny for a new family now, which has been amazing. I hope the rest of you fall in love with being alive (and that it doesn’t take a near death experience to do so)!

The Need to Stay

(Thought I’d upload my recent comics to Tumblr! I totally forgot it only lets you upload 10 pics at a time, and this is 11, but fingers crossed it works!)

the fight is harder each year.

this august has been dyed in pomegranates. i am plagued by angels. i bake perfect cookies, and the world is ending. i feel lovely, and i am surviving, between sorrow and begging others to vote wisely. i watch good movies on zoom. i am the closest i’ve ever been to learning a new gymnastics trick, and i am aggressively kind. i want to swallow the whole world’s ugly in a reverse pandora’s box; collect all the evil in my vocal chords so when i open my mouth to speak, only hope comes out. i want to be a blueberry in maine. i spread jam and eat ripe fruit and say - if i am here, and alive, let it be in the name of crows. raucous, and unloved, and an omen of death - i spread open my fingers and count all the places you have made me grow callouses.  

Truly amazing work. If you sell prints or anything else I'd love to know. I feel you deserve payment for this work and would be more than happy to provide it.

habitual sorry

mirror resurrected

runoff 

some sort of love poem

I really did not think such an intensely personal vent piece would become so popular but I guess that’s how some things pan out.

To clarify, this work is not about cannibalism or kink. It is a response to a poem someone I was in a very bad relationship with wrote me, which is why it might seem confusing.

Also you can feel free to interpret it how you like, but the hunger is not a reference to sex but transubstantiation, and the idea of holiness and the consumption of another person in an abusive relationship. 

the inherent fear that people won’t get the foreshadowing you build into your work

corresponding fear that people will see the foreshadowing and immediately guess where you’re going, ruining the surprise

As a reader, I feel the need to point out I’ve RARELY been disappointed by guessing the story early on! (And let’s face it, we’ve all been backstabbed by so-called “plot twists” that we would never have guessed in the first place because it makes no sense for the characters and was clearly pulled out of someone’s ass for Shock Value)

So if your story has a twist, don’t worry about whether or not people guess it! Just make sure it’s the sort of twist that would make the average reader:

A) feel very galaxy-brained for connecting the dots

B) shriek with joy and shout “I knew it! I was right! I knew it!” when the time comes for the Reveal

Also, keep in mind that you can have more than one twist! I can’t count the number of things I’ve completely missed because I was so focused on one thing and completely ignored the signs of the second thing.

As a writer there is nothing more satisfying to me when some readers can guess what I’m doing. That means I’m doing it right! That means I’ve laid the breadcrumbs where they can be found, and that my readers will not be baffled by the twist. They will feel it was earned along the way!

And the above point about more than one twist is extremely valid. I often will have multiple things going on and I will make one thing more obvious than the others, while still “hiding” it and there’s a certain amount of delight in watching readers catch on to that thing so hard that they don’t see the other thing coming until they look back. And the few readers who do catch all the things? Well. Those readers are the ones I am most gleeful about. Clever little buggers. I’d take everyone guessing my ending over having no one guess it because it makes no sense because I didn’t leave the right clues.

In my experience when I guess the twist correctly my desire to read the story increases tenfold because i HAVE to know if i was right!

Mood.

Disabled people being killed off or cured in stories tells us very clearly that we are not wanted and it fucking hurts

Do you not want to be cured, though? Say, if you had the chance to live without your disability, would you not take it?

And even for disabilities that are solely or almost solely negative, like illnesses, curing a character that has a disease that cannot be cured in real life removes the representation to those people still living with the disease. I’d love to see representation of people with joint pain, and i’d fucking love a cure for my pain. But I wont get one. And curing a character when the people their representing can not be cured only serves to tell us “you can not be happy until you’re cured.” and we can’t be cured, ie we can’t be happy. Don’t even get me started on disabilities that aren’t bad like autism or deafness.

Curing characters does nothing for them except remove representation

FOLLOWER GIVEAWAY!!!

Prizes:

There are two sets of prizes!

Set one:

A mini dice tray in a brown wood stain, with your choice of felt color!

(This tray has minor aesthetic flaws in the stain, because sometimes the wood doesn't take the color well. 🤷‍♀️)

You will also recieve three randomly choosen sets of dice from these sets!

Set two:

Set two will also include three randomly chosen sets from the above picture, as well as an 11 piece set of bubblegum dice!

Rules:

This giveaway ends at midnight on Halloween! 🧡💜💚💜🧡

how to draw arms ? ? 

holy fuck

holy fuck is right… but… does it work with legs???

yes !!

but how much extend

^^^^^^^^^^

I NEARLY CHOKED

ENJFDFNFATFVFDF

finally. i can be accurate

This is too fucking great to not reblog

I give it MASCLES

BIG MACHO

LMAOOOOOO

Okay but for anyone who legit wants to know how to calculate it correctly:

The elbow joint on average rests a couple inches higher than the navel, so if you measure how long the distance is from the middle of the shoulder to that point then you have the length of the upper and fore arms!

So if anyone’s wondering about legs too, the simplest rule of thumb is that the length from the top of the leg to the knee is equal to the distance between the top of the leg and the bottom of the pectorals:

And I wanna stress that when i say “top of the leg” i’m not talking about the crotch (please don’t flag me tumblr it’s an anatomical term) i’m talking about the point where the femur connects to the pelvis, which is higher up on the hips:

It’s easier to see what I’m talking about in this photo of a man squatting: 

So yeah if you use that measurement when using this technique you should get fairly realistically proportioned legs:

But remember! messing with proportions is an important and fun part of character design! Know the rules first so you can then break them however you please!

HOW THE HELL DID I FIND THIS POST OMG

its been found

Using the appropriate vocabulary in your novel

It is very important that the language in your novel reflects the time and place in which the story is set.

For example, my story is set in Italy. My characters would never “ride shotgun”, a term coined in US in the early 1900s referring to riding alongside the driver with a shotgun to gun bandits. 

Do your research! A free tool that I found to be very useful is Ngram Viewer. 

You can type any word and see when it started appearing in books. For example…one of my characters was going to say “gazillion” (I write YA) in 1994. Was “gazillion” used back then?

And the answer is…YES! It started trending in 1988 and was quite popular in 1994.

Enjoy ^_^

This is really important, especially because language can change in very unexpected ways. 

For example, did you know that before 1986 people never said “I need to”?Instead, they were far more likely to say “I ought to”, “I have to”, “I must”, or “I should”.

Don’t believe me?

Anyway, most people won’t notice subtle changes like that. But your reader will notice and be confused when characters in your medieval world use metaphors involving railroads and rockets.

One of the things you can do besides use Google Ngrams is to read books or watch movies written in the time period you want to set your story. The key here is that they can’t just be set in that time period, they have to have been made in that time period.

Also, there’s a Lexicon Valley episode on this very topic which I highly recommend. It’s called Capturing the Past. 

SEE ALSO Etymonline.  Word origins and when they’re first recorded. So, say I wanted to find out when a “coffee break” became a thing – around the 1950s, as seen in magazine adverts – or characters might talk about more genrallly “taking a break” from the 1860s…

NO 😂

I’m George RR Martin 

growing up in maine us writers were of course always comparing ourselves to stephen king.  TURNS OUT HE’S FUCKING WRITER GEORG

“average writer writes 3 books a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person writes 1 book per year. Steven King, who lives in cave & writes over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

My favourite quote from Steven King was something like “I am a salami writer. I try to make good salami, but salami is salami.”

Hi y'all! Folks wanted me to explain how I draw mouths, so here it is! Nothing super complicated, just a really quick and simple demonstration. Another quick note I’d like to add- I’ve always been taught that you should never learn to draw features outside of the face. For example - A lot of young artists will recognize that they need to practice drawing eyes, but then after hours/days/weeks of practicing they find themselves unable to work all this new drawing ability into an actual face. Same thing goes for mouths/noses/brows etc. Get the bulk of the work out of the way on the first attempt! Draw the whole lower half of the face!

quick proportion tips

- eyeballs are an eyeball width apart - ears align with the top of your brows to the bottom of your nose, and are the center-point of a profile view - lip corners line up to the center of each eye - hands are roughly the size of your face - feet are the same size as your forearm - elbows are aligned with your belly-button - your hands reach down mid-length of your thighs - both upper and lower legs (individually) are roughly the same size as your torso  (this is all rough estimates for proportion! feel free to add more to help others)

I made a thing! I was thinking about this for a few days - because I realized that when I was young, I was also frustrated about being given the same advice over and over - without really knowing what it meant!!

Here’s 5 techniques which I have done before which have helped me grow as an artist, which are good for 5-minute warmups or just straight up challenges for your sketchbook! 

Obviously, these are not the ONLY techniques - they’re just the ones I find most fun! And maybe they’re not the most ‘correct’ ones out there, but it’s better than another comic about practicing more, right? 

Good luck to everyone on their drawings!