My Favourite, Ever. BRIAR BEAUTY EVERYONE!!!

jackie frost and northwind are the only thing i like about epic winter 😋👍

Final Battle - Teamwork

I re-read Agit recently and it's still amazing! Excited for the sequel (hopefully) this year!

part one of the six fanarts!! I got enough requests that I'm gonna do two hehe

I return from my bg3 stupor with a fresh 2 am question:

was the TAU story and world a concept you were baking for a long time until you had a chance to write it, or was it a more recent creation?

Do you find it easy or hard to build out new story concepts? Like, do you need to sit on them a while until they feel right, or does it just come pouring out of you from the start? Or a secret, third thing?

Just anything about your personal creation process!

lol hi it might not surprise you to learn that i am also steeping in bg3 (i am still stumbling around act 1! i'm not allowed to play until i hit daily sequel writing quota, which is healthy, i'm sure, but does mean i am somewhat behind just about everyone i know who is also playing :P)

(my first Tav is an enormous nb tiefling bard named Faretheewell who is, imo, perfect. very beautiful. very kind. definitely does drag. lying a lot, but mostly just for funsies. has turned astarion into their little purse dog.)

ANYWAY, TO THE ACTUAL QUESTION:

TAU's an interesting case because it was cannibalized from a couple different ongoing projects into something entirely new.

The characters had been floating around in different iterations since about 2013, and their final forms in Archive are quite distinct from the original seed! Imagine Sunai as an exiled diplomat who got involuntarily apprenticed to a cursed king/the last magician in the world; imagine Veyadi as a disowned god-child tasked with murdering the last magician! I'm still probably going to use that world somewhere so I'll mum about it now (it's the one I call "grandma heist.")

((imo that's why you should always yoink characters you like from whatever source you enjoy, be it your own or something else -- they will inevitably change in their new context, often so substantially that they are nigh unrecognizable.))

The story concept also originated in 2013: "Pacific Rim, but the mechs are built out of the kaiju, and pilots must have survived being poisoned by those kaiju." The addition of strange and upsetting AIs of divine power was somewhat inherited from the story Sunai and Adi came from, where divinity was fraught, fractured, and hungry.

Here's a funny. In 2017 I thought TAU would be a nice, simple, clean project. However. I know some folks who turn out gloriously clean first drafts. I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. My brain is a hazardous work environment, very non-OSHA compliant. Basically I do a lot of thought work in the drafting, so the drafts are consequently messy, and there are a LOT of changes from concept to actual workable manuscript.

Which I suppose is to say that story concepts nest in my brain quite often when it is healthy. The frequency with which I land on new and interesting story thoughts is actually a pretty good indicator of how well I am doing ambiently! Right now I'm storing up a lot of them, some of which I am fairly rabid about -- nearly as rabid as I am about Archive, which is the real indicator of a project that is ready to transition from Thought to Work. They are described here as "apocalypse magicians" and other such things. There's one that's going to be kind of an argument with Lovecraftian unknowability via desconstruction of Enlightenment epistemologies + queer identity destruction, and another that's going to be the Le Carré approach to espionage + magic as divinity meets public service + interplanetary empires intruding on your bumfuck planet offering the solution to climate change might still be bad actually. (I want to write that last with my wife and we are making SUCH GOOD FUCKING SHIPS FOR IT.)

How to summarize this? 1) find a story notion/concept about which i can obsess, 2) actually start writing it, 3) mess up spectacularly for a few drafts, 4) finally whittle together something more or less correct, 5) that's my editor's problem now!!

Perhaps you will appreciate this: I dreamed about reading the sequel to TAU and in it they encountered the grave of someone who had been in a romantic relationship with an AI god. The AI god was unnamed; the person was only known as the Spinmaster. I will not ask you to confirm/deny the trend of naming oneself after a laundry machine in order to court a giant robot.

oh my god i'm THRILLED

i will neither confirm nor deny the details but i WILL say book 2 is replete with fun new characters (and their fun new identity problems) who have fun new relationships with AIs (as well as fun new AI/AI relationships -- it's extremely yuri up in here rn, which i mean in the star-on-star-to-black-hole sense of the word)

My contribution to this topic for the moment

Pinterest, my savior. The brainrot for The Archive Undying is so severe, but there is so little fanart I've taken extreme measures.

[the archive undying spoilers]

do you think sunai effectively utilized girl power by eating his evil ex boyfriend who killed him and trapping him in an eternal cycle of agony?

WHEN I DIE I MAY NOT GO TO HEAVEN I DON'T KNOW IF THEY LET COWBOYS IN

something quite yuriful happening here

anyways for people who didn't see the last post, this is my hc for alistair's mother: an alice who got caught in wonderland once the portal closed and has to contend with being stuck there forever and raising her young child there... so she's complicated with it 😌 and since I'm playing by eah rules where we're generations deep she and the cheshire cat (kitty's mom ver.) Are at this point similar aged so they're best friends in a way...😊