Where is my mind?

Athanatos, The Undying

Faceup created using dry pastels and a black watercolour pencil.

Do an outline, whatever way works best. Get yourself out of the word soup and know where the story is headed.

Conflicts and obstacles. Hurt the protagonist, put things in their way, this keeps the story interesting. An easy journey makes the story boring and boring is hard to write.

Change the POV. Sometimes all it takes to untangle a knotted story is to look at it through different eyes, be it through the sidekick, the antagonist, a minor character, whatever.

Know the characters. You can’t write a story if the characters are strangers to you. Know their likes, dislikes, fears, and most importantly, their motivation. This makes the path clearer.

Fill in holes. Writing doesn’t have to be linear; you can always go back and fill in plotholes, and add content and context.

Have flashbacks, hallucinations, dream sequences or foreshadowing events. These stir the story up, deviations from the expected course add a feeling of urgency and uncertainty to the narrative.

Introduce a new mystery. If there’s something that just doesn’t add up, a big question mark, the story becomes more compelling. Beware: this can also cause you to sink further into the mire.

Take something from your protagonist. A weapon, asset, ally or loved one. Force him to operate without it, it can reinvigorate a stale story.

Twists and betrayal. Maybe someone isn’t who they say they are or the protagonist is betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. This can shake the story up and get it rolling again.

Secrets. If someone has a deep, dark secret that they’re forced to lie about, it’s a good way to stir up some fresh conflict. New lies to cover up the old ones, the secret being revealed, and all the resulting chaos.

Kill someone. Make a character death that is productive to the plot, but not “just because”. If done well, it affects all the characters, stirs up the story and gets it moving.

Ill-advised character actions. Tension is created when a character we love does something we hate. Identify the thing the readers don’t want to happen, then engineer it so it happens worse than they imagined.

Create cliff-hangers. Keep the readers’ attention by putting the characters into new problems and make them wait for you to write your way out of it. This challenge can really bring out your creativity.

Raise the stakes. Make the consequences of failure worse, make the journey harder. Suddenly the protagonist’s goal is more than he expected, or he has to make an important choice.

Make the hero active. You can’t always wait for external influences on the characters, sometimes you have to make the hero take actions himself. Not necessarily to be successful, but active and complicit in the narrative.

Different threat levels. Make the conflicts on a physical level (“I’m about to be killed by a demon”), an emotional level (“But that demon was my true love”) and a philosophical level (“If I’m forced to kill my true love before they kill me, how can love ever succeed in the face of evil?”).

Figure out an ending. If you know where the story is going to end, it helps get the ball rolling towards that end, even if it’s not the same ending that you actually end up writing.

What if? What if the hero kills the antagonist now, gets captured, or goes insane? When you write down different questions like these, the answer to how to continue the story will present itself.

Say hello to Batya /＼ ^._.^ ／\!

Some of you may recognize my dyed Amanda Beauty, but her faceup and look changed because I messed up her old one and couldn’t redo it after multiple tries T_T so she got an image change!

I’ve had an… interesting history with bats. I’m not afraid of them, but they seem to looooove me. So I decided to make a BJD ode to the bats in my life. Her wings are retractable! You can’t tell the back but they’re human costume wings.

“kuda” horns with skulls and crystals. Mag on, mnf/MSD size (or really big YoSD!) 3D printed on a @mypeopoly Moai SLA printer then hand painted. These will be for sale @resinrosebjdexpo and are ooak due to hand painting.

Here’s my Aileen Doll Pico Pla Violet doll with one of my most intensive pastel blush work I’ve done in my life. Usually I stick to a limited colour palette and focus on the face but I definitely didn’t want that for this doll.

I used reds, pinks, blues, purple, and white pastel for this and it was a big learning curve to learning how things react when blended together and what happens when you spray MSC onto it. It was also my first try making pastel work look opaque cuz usually when I blush I try to make it as subtle as possible.