in my experience writing @ three am is just as productive as writing while drunk/high. i recommend it as an alternative. getting yourself into a place juuust past the line where the inhibitions can’t touch you can be incredibly productive and freeing, but don’t destroy your health for it.
so to rephrase an old quote: write sleepy, edit rested
This drawing was never going to make it to the internet but here it is dirk’s bday and I haven’t anything better to post than this lecture draw from last week so;;
Woo. All done. I think that’s enough heavy stylization for quite a while.
And since I don’t have much else to say, I guess just a general reminder that any kind of critique or feedback is welcome on anything I draw! I made this blog with improvement in mind, so seriously the harder you can be on me the better.
Anyway I’m just bitter bc mspaintadventures.com is gone and yeah Homestuck has been over for a while but now it’s just, like, hammer a last nail into my childhood why don’t you
@twizzlerstriders asked for an old voltron au that I only vaguely remember writing. :’) ….Fuck. Let’s take this from the top.
✨🌙
“I want to show you something,” Dirk says, low and even.
You’re in the desert and you’re not supposed to be, you’re out past curfew and you’re not supposed to be, you’re with a Garrison dropout and you’re definitely, certainly, absolutely not supposed to be—
“Hey,” he says. Too low, too even. A wisp of lips brushing against your jaw. A thumb across the back of your hand. “English.”
That’s you, he’s talking to, but it doesn’t feel like you. You’re fifty feet away in your thoughts, looking at the bright desert stars. Feet tapping against the red-rock boulder you’ve settled on.
He’s taking your hand and you follow. “You’re a follower, English,” as you were once admonished after a failed attempt at captaining a test flight when Jane’s headset short circuited and she knocked herself out cold—
Dirk is taking you into a cave. You’re fairly sure you’re not supposed to be in caves, either. Certainly not with Garrison dropouts. Definitely not past curfew.
There’s paintings, in the cave. Ancient, faded paintings dragging along the surface of the rock when Dirk shines his flashlight over them. He’s looking at you, waiting for a reaction, waiting for you to broadcast an emotion, if only he knew how many you had—
You tip forward, almost as if you’re going to fall, and his eyes widen and he drops the flashlight and moves to catch you and you kiss him, right there in the chilly desert cave, hands fumbling up to find his cheeks, and he makes a sound of surprise and realizes he’s clutching you too hard for someone who’s not truly in the process of falling and you—you laugh—
It comes out of you, bright and bubbly and blue. Blue, blue. An electric blue. Too bright, all around you.
Dirk’s noise of surprise is louder, now, as he pulls back from you. He looks up, calls you “English,” says “what the fuck—”
!!!!!!! prompts prompts!! i love prompts!! uhh ok! how about.... dirk and jake taking a hike on earth C for the first time! jake is excited to explore this new world and introduce dirk to a WHOLE BUNCH of new things! feel free to go literally anywhere with this, FOR FUN!! hopefully thats a loose enough idea but still enough to kinda.. get the gears turning?? :DD oh and thanks in advance! if you do write it that is, IF YOU DONT THATS OK TOO, ok im running out of space LIKE YOUR STUFF, BYE THANKS!
“One step,” Jake says. “You’ve got this.”
“One step,” Dirk repeats, steadfast, but with a hint of apprehension. A crease dips into his brow as he stands awkwardly on top of his sneakers. His heels dig into the canvas, squashing them down.
Jake is barefoot in shin-high grass. His smile is as bright as the new sun they each helped hang in the sky. Warm and stunning and far-reaching. Live-giving. Dirk swallows, when it’s cast at him. He closes his eyes, prefers the shadows still lit orange through his eyelids, as he steps off of his Converse perch and into the sea of unknown plant life.
It’s not as soft, as expected. Not like the movies he watched as a child. Where young impossibly attractive couples rolled around in what looked like sugargreen non-slimy kelp that whistled Mozart symphonies in the wind.
“Well?” Jake questions.
Dirk cranks open a single eye, takes another uneven step on the foliage.
“Um,” he notes.
Jake nods. “Yes? What do you think?”
“Hm,” he says.
Jake frowns. “Come now. Tell me. Not what that right n’ ready racetrack of a mind calculated?”
“’S alright,” Dirk says, finally. “I don’t know. Kind of scratchy? I thought it was supposed to be, like, prime makeout plant. Fornication foliage. Canoodle cannabis—”
“Well that can certainly be arranged,” Jake scoffs. “Honestly, Strider. You’re at literal step one, here. We can work up to sloppy field facesucking.”
“Right,” Dirk replies. “Right. Yeah. I think I can work with this.”
@pechassberry asked for an Othello AU which is a callout bc it’s my favorite play (Othello AU in……… Prospit/Derse?)
✨🌙
He’s a prince, they say. A prince from a far away land where the sun shines long and gold washes up along the riverbanks like broken shells. A leader, military captain, a prince, they say. The girls in the court. Whispered behind you as he looks in their direction—your direction, too.
He’s won wars, conquered lands, lived on a fat, savory diet of adventure and victory. In Derse, however, he is so far out of his element he might as well be back in Prospit. A lost foreigner slipping over polished marble floors, chilling his fingers on the iron banister of a balcony, framed by the great gothic pillars supporting the cathedral, like a cage—
You stride forward.
“You’re a blossom striking through a dulled city wall,” you work up the steeled nerve to tell him, immediately glancing away, towards the gardens beneath both of you with their bright moonlit flowers. You hope the festival lanternlight catches on your best features and the nightly shadows mute your worst.
“I’m sorry?” he replies, sounding a little lost, and oh, you know he’s lost, he’s not supposed to be here, but he’s wandered here anyway, and that’s incredibly convenient for you.
“Fresh air,” you say.
“It is nice tonight,” he agrees.
“No,” you say, glancing back at him. Then again to coy distance and moonlit flowers. “You, prince, are the fresh air. It might look like a damn spectacle, but you’d be surprised how Derse can grow stagnant.”
“I find it quite lovely.”
You sigh and turn towards him fully. He has his gaze pinned on you. As he had before, as he will continue to do.
“I’ve heard you’re looking for a wife,” you say, more straightforward, now. He seems like a straightforward man. “Can I offer an alternative?”
There’s an episode of Touched where a stressed business lady is about to get on a flight and the cute guy sitting next to her is on standby and something fucks up with her ticket so he gets her seat instead and he’s like “sorry, I owe you one,” but then later the plane crashes as the business lady is so shook by the close call she goes home to her wife who really, really wants to have a child and tells her “okay, I’m ready,” and the wife pulls out the book of sperm donors and lo & behold, dead airplane standby guy is one of the options, and the wife thinks he’d be a perfect choice. Which was super oh shit at the time but in retrospect the implication here is that the universe wanted to correct an IOU and its first instinct was “fuck. gotta get this lady some splooge.”
You're taking prompts!! How about that good ol' Google brain Dirk???
(Oh jeez tbh I’ve skipped around this AU so much I really need to sit down and just write it.)
( #throat trauma )
“I know you’re angry,” you say into a room torn to shreds. It’s his bedroom, nicer quarters than have ever been provided to you, and it lies in total disarray. There’s a dent in the wall, books strewn everywhere, every cabinet in the kitchenette is open—some pulled off completely. His mattress is on the other side of the room from its sleek, metallic bedframe. His knuckles are bloody.
“Dirk,” you repeat. His hand twitches and he flinches and oh, oh he’s hurt himself. He makes a breathy gasp of frustration and flinches again and you see a faint line of red seeping through the bandages wrapped tight around his neck.
“Fuck, Strider,” you can’t help but say, this time. You set down the lunch you brought for him on top of the dresser, as the kitchenette’s little table has been overturned. You’d only been gone fifteen minutes. You’d thought he could handle it—
I can handle this.
He’s scratched it out on the top half of a little notepad he’s ripped in half. He shoves the paper in your direction. Then pulls it back.
Adds: Really, English, I can.
“Let’s get you patched up, hm?” you say instead of a proper response, and set the notepad down. You’re remarkably good at dodging him. Maybe that’s why General Strider put you in charge of him in the first place.
The scar across his neck is jagged and harsh, bright pink where it attempts to knit his skin back together. You sit on a properly returned and righted mattress, change out the bandages, and press a fresh butterfly stitch to the thin slice of neck that had slit open in his hurricane of a tirade.
Every so often he opens his mouth and the whole mess of an injury constricts beneath your fingertips and you watch the air in his throat strain against nothing but determination and pink scar tissue.
“Djya,” he attempts, mouth flexing, the meat of the syllables no louder than a whisper, “—ck.”
Your name. You shoosh him, heart aching. “Yes,” you say, “I’m here.”
You reach over his lap to pick up more bandages for his hand. When your head bobs back up, he’s there, closer than you expect. He stares at you. He places a short kiss on your lips.
There’s words behind his eyes, words he can no longer express. Words and facts and databases and Wikipedia articles and an endless stream of information he can no longer let bubble out of him in mumbled, desperate streams while having a fit beside you in bed.
The Empress knew a human couldn’t handle all that information unfairly stuffed inside of him, and she put a cork in it.
“I’ve been thinking,” you say, “there’s an Old Earth language, using only one’s hands, you probably already have all of it in that noggin of yours but you can teach me—We can practice—”
There’s tears in his eyes, too. They blur the thoughts you thought you could see.
“I’ve also been thinking,” you start again, softer, this time. “…that you and me might want to call it quits on this war.”
dirkjake but like,,,,strangers next to each other on an airplane? meetcute lmao
“So what brings you to Japan?” you ask him, once the two of you are settled in your seats and your post-takeoff knuckles are starting to flush back to their natural color. “Y'know, in, like, 13 hours.”
He laughs. It’s bright, charming.
“Old friends,” he says.
“Old,” you echo. “You look too good to have ‘old’ anything. Japanese beauty products must really be worth their salt.”
He laughs again. It’s open-mouthed, a little too loud, accented with a smile.
His lips look soft from the chapstick he put on right before the two of you took off. Gets awful dry up there, he had told you, then, popping his lips at you. You hadn’t responded. You were too deep in social cue hell. Was that intentional? Do straight guys even wear chapstick?
“You?” he asks, now.
“Me?” you say.
“What are you waltzing off to Japan for,” he clarifies.
You gaze back at him. Tilt your head until it bumps against the seat. “Nothing in particular,” you say. “Just somethin’ different. You sound like you’ve got the lay of the sunrise land—any suggestions?”
factoid actualy just statistical error. average midwesterner displays 0 distinguishing traits. Chicago, who has -3 cornfields and stands as the only midwestern source of recognizable culture, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
4 signs you were born in the Midwest (by someone who actually was). 1. Saying "ope" when you accidentally bump into someone. 2. Saying "y'all" unironically. 3. Having nursed baby livestock (cows, horses, goats, etc) that you/family owned. 4. Doing the "my balls hurt" cowboy walk after having fun riding a horse fast (or not fast but still) and your thighs are sore.
I was making a joke about how midwesterners aren’t super distinct but FUCK, I totally say “Ope,” all the time, what the fuck,
