Thank U So Much - Blog Posts

my first commision! For @11strawberry

thank you for being my first commission! I had so much fun on it :3

every high and every low

i wrote a tiny little something for @mangogreent, it isnt much but i hope you like ! happy birthday lake ! title borrowed from glad you exist by dan + shay (listen with your platonic nakamaship hat on and dissolve into seafoam with me)

read on ao3

x

Luffy’s body doesn’t scar easily. It’s one of the many facets of a frankly unhinged healing factor; his body shuffles micronutrients and vitamins around like a circus clown juggling pins, wounds healing so quickly and completely that there is rarely a trace left behind.

There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. The smiling pencil-mark curve beneath his eye is one of them. The cruel, gaping burn across his chest is another.

Sanji and Chopper have spent hours going over dietary needs and goals for everyone aboard Sunny, not just their captain. But it’s their captain whose food works like a miracle in his stomach.

If Sanji thinks too long and too hard about Totto Land—about Luffy’s trembling, emaciated limbs when he handed over a disgusting, ruined bento, the way his skin plumped up and shone with good health within minutes of a meal—there are very good odds that he’ll spiral into a fit of grief or guilt or panic no matter where he is or what he’s doing at the time. So he tries not to think about it, and instead loads his captain with carbs and protein and fiber at every opportunity instead.

Suffice to say, Luffy’s skin is largely whole and undamaged, only a few faint scars scattered here and there that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t really looking. His rubber body is a marvel, but it burns like a starving furnace, and sometimes it does him a disservice no one could have possibly seen coming.

“You don’t feel that?” Usopp says with a frown.

“Nuh-uh,” Luffy confirms blithely, watching the feather move back and forth across his arm. “If you pinch me or poke me with something sharp I will, but if it’s soft it’s like it’s not there at all.”

For a moment, everyone sits there and absorbs that information. Sanji can feel it settling over his nakama like a blanket of snow; cold and promising to pack in and be a pain in the ass to shovel through. Sanji has to readjust his understanding of the world, too. It takes him a minute.

The only touches that Luffy feels easily are the ones that hurt. That’s true for everyone, in a sense—but just because a slap might register louder and faster than a gentle touch doesn’t mean the latter doesn’t carry a weight of its own.

Sanji wonders, abruptly, if the last thing Luffy felt from him was the fight they had on Whole Cake when Sanji was desperate to free his captain of his obligations to a pathetic, useless cook—when he did everything in his power to drive him away.

Nami and Brook have joined Usopp in the game of poking Luffy’s arms and legs and squishy sides in the name of proving him wrong, finding a spot where he isn’t so thick-skinned. Brook’s phalanges drumming against his ribs make him giggle a bit, but how much of that is real feeling and how much is simply delight at all the attention and affection pointed his way?

It should be cute, but Sanji can see—and feel—it cutting everyone to the quick. Robin has closed her book, watching the scene without a smile on her face. Franky’s hands are unmoving around the great feathered monstrosity he and Usopp have been building at the table together up until this point, as if he’s forgotten he’s holding tools in the first place.

Enough is enough, Sanji decides, and sets aside his pride along with his bowl of red velvet cupcake batter and maryse spatula, moving around the counter with purpose.

“Got an idea,” he says at length and Nami scoots gamely to the side. Sanji keeps moving before he can get in his own way and takes Luffy’s round face in one work-hardened hand.

Luffy, who has been known to use his actual skull as a battering ram, usually fights with his whole chest and carries most of his injuries there, too. His face, aside from an unfortunate unsupervised incident with a knife when he was little more than a toddler with a highly questionable and often day-drunk role model, is unscarred.

Sanji brushes his thumb against Luffy’s cheek, where the skin lays very thin over sensitive nerve endings. His captain blinks up at him, brown eyes wide and trusting, every bit as if he’s looking at someone who has never hurt him before.

The crew present is watching raptly, their disquiet transforming into absurd, single-minded scrutiny. There’s a reason they’re not only living in the New World but thriving there—they’re good at adapting, at assimilating new information, at smacking the curveballs right out of the park on their second swing.

“Feel that?” Sanji asks.

Luffy tips his head curiously, just enough not to dislodge Sanji’s hand. Perfectly willing to sit still and be held when it’s his cook doing the holding.

“Kinda,” the boy says, the barest hint of a furrow forming between his brows. It’s the beginning of an epic spoiled sulk that everyone who loves him is intimately familiar with—because his nakama belong to him, and so Sanji does, and so his hand on Luffy’s face does, and it is rapidly occurring to Luffy that it’s not fair for all of those things to be true and for him not to be able to feel it.

Sanji can’t help but smile, always equal parts charmed and exasperated by the future king in a pout. He leans in and presses his mouth to the same place his thumb was, kissing the soft cheek firmly. He can almost see it when Luffy zings to attention, his overwhelming focus zeroed into that singular point of contact.

By the time Sanji straightens, Luffy is already beaming ear-to-ear.

“I felt that!”

Sanji returns to his dessert prep, perfectly satisfied with the changed world he leaves in his wake. Chopper is already clambering over the top of the table, scattering the bits and bobs of the engineers' project into an irremediable mess in his haste to bury his favorite human in fuzzy reindeer kisses, and similarly everyone else’s eyes are gleaming with promise.

Luffy’s rubber body is both a wonder and a menace, much like the golden soul it houses. But where it falls short and fails him, his friends will pick up the slack. Luffy is probably going to get his cheeks and forehead pinched and poked a lot more when he’s whining or complaining or elsewise being his annoying, incorrigible self.

But he’s also going to get kissed a lot more there, too.

HI!! i am SUCH a massive fan of your work and your writing style and the way you write javid ... do you have any tips on making description and dialogue/switching between the two not sound clunky?? im having trouble 😭 im eating all your fics rn btw ... gnawing on em

oh!! goodness that is high praise - well first of all thank you, that is so sweet of you to say, and i'm so flattered you felt like you could ask me for help on that. but i gotta be honest, i'm very much an amateur and i really don't feel like i have much right to give 'advice' as it were - i'm still figuring out a lot of stuff myself tbh. but something i can definitely do is tell you what i do, why i do it and how i try to improve my own writing, as it's something i think about a lot and therefore something i feel very comfortable telling people about - but again, disclaimer, this is just what works for ME. i used to be really hard on my writing because compared to the work of other people i've seen, i felt like i was being way too flowery, overstaying my welcome on a lot of passages, being overly preachy, etc etc - but trying to emulate other people's writing entirely just doesn't work and completely sucks the fun out of it. so this is just what works for me. anywhore lets get to it

so i focus on a few things when i'm writing dialogue, the biggest one being 'Do People Talk Like This?'. now that's not always the most helpful question to ask yourself since everyone talks differently and there's really no point trying to categorize it, but where i find questions like that help the most for ME is when i'm thinking about what the character's thought process would be in saying this. for example if i'm writing oscar and morris, it just doesn't feel right to have them say shitty things for the sake of being cartoonishly shitty, because what's the thought process there? 'haha i'm gonna humiliate this kid because i'm just evil!!' no one. no one does that. they have their own reasons for wanting the newsies to feel beneath them, and even if i'm only writing them for a line or two, i want that to be the thing i get across, rather than just 'the delanceys are assholes' (even if their purpose in my fics is usually to be assholes).

i also try to draw from reality a lot, conversations i've had, things i notice when people speak to me. it's difficult since i'm autistic and therefore misread things or miss things entirely, but i try to do my best from my own experiences. a lot of my scribbles so far have just been casual little snippets of javid conversations 'cause that's a really fun way for me to get to know the characters and how they'd behave in casual conversation. i really like looking into davey's weirdness and so i draw from a lot of the weird things i do, the weird jokes i see other people make that i find so damn funny, weird body language that i love, etc etc. and it's fun to see how the characters react off one another when they're just being silly. sometimes i just need to lock two characters in a room together in your mind and see what they do - it doesn't really accomplish anything in terms of fic, but it helps me get to know them and how they interact with each other.

as far as descriptions go, the thing that helped me the most was (and you're going to laugh here) going outside. i know, touching grass actually did improve my writing, it's shocking. i'm pretty lucky since i live in a seaside town with a lot of forest areas so i spent a lot of time last spring/summer just walking around with my head fully empty, and if i had any thoughts come to me that i liked, i put them straight in my notes app the moment i got them. it felt pretentious as hell at first, and yeah, some of them aren't GREAT, but it's better to have my thoughts written down somewhere i can access them again rather than just not have anything to work off of at all. i've started just carrying a notebook around with me so that if i ever have a thought that feels worth keeping i can just jot it down right away. it can literally be any thought, i think i have a line in there about a can of redbull. anything that keeps the thoughts coming. i also keep a little list of quotes my friends have said as well - it's mostly funny stuff like "adren says: FUCK CHARITY!!!" and "i love his seven year old boy swag" but every so often i get something like "time is irrelevent, the sun will still be up in the afternoon", which i think of every time i feel like shit for needing more rest.

also something that people told me to do a lot which i HATED hearing but fuck if it's not true, is to just read. like when i was in my contemporary lit class and i could just chew over alys conran for a week or two it was like a factory reset in my brain. holy fuck i love alys conran she is a goddess she IS the blueprint. she completely redefined how i look at and interpret my surroundings. and ali smith - i wouldn't say i'm a huge fan of her stuff but the way she does dialogue and character voice is SOOO special to me. i hated being told 'just read!!' because i KNOW i should be reading but unfortunately my energy is dogshit and taking in new informaton is hard, but honestly it doesn't even need to be a whole book. it can be anything. i've had my shit rocked by tumblr posts and fanfic drabbles. anything that can make me go 'huh i like how they did that' or 'hm no i don't think i like how they phrased that' is helping my understanding of how i want to write.

(and in a similar vein to that - having character tags is so helpful for me!! like i'll see the vaguest thing and be like 'yeah davey would say that' or 'oh that's jack energy' and even though it's small it still improves my understanding of the characters and how they interact/think/speak)

in terms of switching between the two, i think i have a pretty obvious pattern when i write dialogue; "the first part of dialogue", then we look at the character again, how they're saying the words, what their body language is like, what they're thinking, "and then we finish what they're saying." that works for me because i'm a chronic overthinker and i like being able to focus on the little things the characters might be trying to say without saying them outright, like if davey's stimming for a specific reason or if jack's body language is more stilted than it should be because he's hiding something, or if the narrating character is focusing on something specific that the speaking character is doing for whatever reason. but i've also been trying to notice when i'm overdoing that pattern and when it feels right to change it up a bit. i want to try and improve my pacing, since sometimes i'm spending waaay too long slogging over prose when i want a scene to feel fast-paced and intense, and sometimes i feel like i'm glossing over something that would be important to the character. so sometimes (like when jack first appears in run boy run) i want the character to go into bullet-time to emphasise the weight of what's happening and what they're experiencing, and how the character FEELS about things when they're given time to properly experience it, but other times (like in their argument at the end of the chapter 4) i want things to snap and crash into each other very quickly to emphasise a character's fight-or-flight response, how they react to conflict, what they do when they don't have time to properly think about what they're doing.

and,,, yeah i think that's everything i can think of. again i'm not gonna act like any of this is gospel, i don't even know if this is even helpful to anyone besides me, i just know that this is what goes through my head when i'm trying to write effectively. whether or not it works is up for debate - i'm still in uni and i'm still trying to explore what works for me and what doesn't. but honestly i'm very proud of the progress i've been making and it was really fun to just talk about that for a second, so thank you roman, this was very lovely! have a wonderful day :)

reblogging bc idk if I have before and I don't wanna lose this for when I need it

So, let me guess– you just started a new book, right? And you’re stumped. You have no idea how much an AK47 goes for nowadays. I get ya, cousin. Tough world we live in. A writer’s gotta know, but them NSA hounds are after ya 24/7. I know, cousin, I know. If there was only a way to find out all of this rather edgy information without getting yourself in trouble…

You’re in luck, cousin. I have just the thing for ya.

It’s called Havocscope. It’s got information and prices for all sorts of edgy information. Ever wondered how much cocaine costs by the gram, or how much a kidney sells for, or (worst of all) how much it costs to hire an assassin?

I got your back, cousin. Just head over to Havocscope.

((PS: In case you’re wondering, Havocscope is a database full of information regarding the criminal underworld. The information you will find there has been taken from newspapers and police reports. It’s perfectly legal, no need to worry about the NSA hounds, cousin ;p))

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OMGGG, THANK U SO MUCH 🥰🥰❤❤❤❤, I APPRECIATE YOUR SUPPORT WITH ALL MY HEART

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Thank u so muuch guysss!!!!!! And sorry for the absence lately, Im really busyy

But if u have requests tell me!!!!!!