outnumbered by books

Design sketches of Justin Lazarus from KJ Charles's Sins of the Cities series because holy shit. Holy fucking shit. I was livereading these books on discord and as soon as this guy was described I had to draw him for the chat immediately because he enchants me. I adore every KJ Charles character and I have been learning how to draw them all lately but recently the art weakness has been for the reformed fake medium con artist, my beloved rat man. This guy has to be one of my favorite romance protags of all time he's such a weird little fucking tool. I truly have derangement syndrome for all of this author's books tbh, highly recommend them as always they're great if you like neurodivergent queer men in historical settings experiencing disasters and kissing each other on the lips. Please more people talk to me about them for the love of god

Pear Blossoms in the Spring

You are loved.

By request of the discord! Here’s the smut thesaurus I’ve been building to help me write. It’s even longer now because I included some extra words from The Ultimate Guide to Writing Smut Fic by  QuinnAnderson on AO3. 

How many words are there for “penis” and “thrust” (that aren’t completely cringey)? Here are all the ones I’ve gathered so far 😂

It’s going under the read-more cut because it’s over 1,000 words in bullet-point form so it is loooong. 

EDIT: Here are some additional pointers!

Then he's teaching Ilya and Shane.

And then the Centaurs are all crocheting little plushies and bag charms and shit for their hospital visits.

Harris takes a photo to post abt how the Centaurs are dealing with a plane delay for a stressful game and it's just all the guys in an airport terminal crocheting things.

Shane is being used as a stand-in for the hat Ilya is crocheting for David. Shane's making a little hockey puck keychain for Rose. Luca's making a cover for his sketchbook. Bood's making Cassie a sweater with some really fancy yarn. Wyatt's making a life sized bulbasaur and his hand is all the way up his bulbasaur's ass shoving stuffing into it.

Troy isn't in the picture.

People panic Troy's injured.

like in this scene, the acting choices they made, so subtle but so realistic.

shane's hands and jaws shaking as he's freaking out about something he deems his nightmare, v/s ilya's casual hand scratch but attentive eyes because even though it isn't a very big deal to him, he knows it's really a crucial moment for shane.

This time it’s not my fault! The author lady herself put the idea in my head! ⬇

Only, those bright, wispy colours just don’t work for most KJ Charles books. And the butterflies in the original meant I pretty much had to pick The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal to do up romance cover style. It even had enough animals to replace the ones in the original…though they’re much less friendly animals. So I sacrificed the colour scheme in favour of keeping it closer to the tone of the book, but kept the very stereotypical romance novel composition. 

Here’s the full original cover, for comparison:

yuna: ah I see, hmm, one moment please, let me bring up an alphabetical list of all 700+ current MLH players. is it aaron a. aaronson???

shane: of course not!! mom!!!

Ilya points out Shane doesn’t need to provide his parents with a list of the guys he’s fucking, which only goes to show he doesn’t know Asian parents, especially mothers.

Like. If Shane were half-Chinese with supportive parents, this is absolutely how the coming-out conversation would've gone:

"Okay okay, so you have boyfriend yet? You do?? How come we don't meet him yet? I know why you keep him secret, but no need to hide him from mummy and daddy, right? What, is he drug dealer or what? Aiyah, don't look at me like that, only joking lah. Okay but who is he? Is he doctor? Mmm okay okay. Engineer? Lawyer? Is he kwai lo? Oh interesting interesting he's kwai lo, you're just like mummy haha. Shane, Shane, are you dating movie star?? Not Rose Landry lah, now I know that one pretend only. Or famous singer? Is he Harry Styles ah?"