#hawksaw

Hello everyone! I'm excited to announce that I have a brand new illustrated short story available for everyone to read for free!

It's about my oc, JW, who finds a mysterious ring in a pile of garbage and finds himself magically transformed into a sparrow!

This story is written so that you don't need to know anything about my characters or headworld to jump right in and start having fun. The Twisted Tales page does have a list of characters and a little info on the setting to help you out if you need it.

You can read the story on my new Tales from the House of Twisted webpage!

If you enjoyed the story and would like to leave me a tip, feel free to head on over to Ko-Fi to download the pay-what-you-want PDF version HERE.

If you wanna support me even further, consider ordering a bookmark!

You can find them in my Ko-Fi Shop!

(enjoy the old art aahahha)

Blurb from my website: Consisting mostly of various species of pine, the Hawksaw Woods are a sprawling labyrinth of overgrown ruins from the 1800's, dry creek beds, wetlands, and ankle-snapping mole holes. A fairly even mix of old and new growth make the woods feel timeless. They are shot through with narrow roads both dirt and asphalt, though they are in poor repair. A railroad track marks the edge of civilization. Beyond those tracks are mysteries yet to be discovered by the House of Twisted's residents. The Hawksaw woods are full of surprises, many of them with sharp teeth and unclear intentions.

THERE'S MORE BELOW THE CUT!!

(transcribed from bsky thread)

JW is my oldest fully developed OC and he's so so important and precious to me but I have a lot of anxiety about when it comes time to share his full story due to a few things. Big Spoilers for the Hawksaw books but they wont see the sun for years anyway.

So JW has a few FUN FEATURES that I invented when I was young and didn't understand the gravity of including them. They've been retooled over the years because they are important to his story. So one of them is that he has a mental illness that I myself do not. He has schizophrenia.

It's got one hell of a stigma and care was LACKING even in the 70's and in 2007 where JW's story starts. People treat him shitty and it affects him greatly. It fucking sucks. There's also the element of an alternate Horizon in my setting known as the Mindscape which is a veiled realm populated by billions of individual inner worlds that reflect the emotions and psyche of every individual person ever. Due to magic shit that happened, JW's has a crack in it and allows it to leak into Earth Prime. So his inner voices (not alters) are the ones we PRIMARILY see. So I run the risk of folks thinking I'm saying THAT is what schizophrenia is and ITS NOT I KNOW ITS NOT IVE WRITTEN SCHOOL PAPERS ON IT DAMMIT. A hurtle I have is explaining this in the prose without making it look like unreliable narrator stuff or ham-fisted or unnecessary or insulting or WHATEVER.

To make things worse, JW has a cursed eye that allows him to see spirits on top of EVERYTHING ELSE. He's got a lot going on but honestly he handles it better than most would considering everything. He's like that. He doesn't have all these traits because I wanna see him suffer. He came out of the box like this.

Another event in his story is the Dead Girlfriend. I didn't know dead spouse angst was a whole GENRE when I wrote this into his story. During an episode in 1974, his girlfriend startles him and he freaks out and pushes her away and she falls down.

Unfortunately, something bad happens because of this and she ends up dead. He mourns her and feels horrible because she was also his best friend and the last leg of a friendgroup that was dissolving. this is also the event that sets off a natural disaster within his Mindscape which is then followed by him falling into a dimensional rift--the thing that causes the split between dimensions. The rift was not a natural one, so Some Shit happened on his way through. He goes to an in-between world where he loses 30 years of time but does not age and has an adventure he doesn't remember.

this post is compiled from the rambly bluesky thread i made

SO

When I first made JW, he wasn't originally bi. That developed several years later after I got over my own homophobia as a teen (I was horrible to be around OTL) but Horas was actually my first gay OC! Horas and JW met when JW was 18 and homeless. He was instantly absorbed into Horas's family.

Their relationship was very much one of those 'oh, another gay person in rural TN in the 60s'. They assumed that they'd work as a couple just because they were both gay and while they grew and learned a lot together, they eventually ended it on civil terms.

Some art of JW and Horas when they were together:

Horas even acted as a wingman for JW when he had a crush on Gloria. They stayed best friends until Horas mysteriously moved away one day out of nowhere and left JW feeling very sad.

it is time to admit a terrible crime of mine. I have ZERO art of Gloria that is worthy of sharing because her design is still very fluid in my mind after all these years.

KNOWN FACTS ABOUT GLORIA: -red hair -freckles -plays guitar

I'm so sorry girl you deserve better. Gloria and JW's relationship grew more intense after Horas disappeared. JW's fault mostly. He was afraid of losing her after loosing so many people close to him. Also at this point JW hasn't told anybody he straight up hallucinates sometimes besides Horas.

His hallucinations were more intense when he was younger, made worse by doing LSD. He didn't do a LOT of LSD but enough to put him in Situations. Gloria was like 'please just smoke weed like a normal person' and JW is like 'BUT THE VISIONS' and Gloria is like :/

[[HAWKSAW SPOILER]] Sadly, their relationship ends in manslaughter. Gloria encounters JW when he's dealing with a particularly nasty hallucination of attacking dogs and he doesn't realize it's her when she grabs hold of him. He pushes her away and she ends up in front of a truck. ]

I came up with this plotpoint when I was very small and it became an important part of JW's devlopment and the story though I STILL feel guilty for killing off a female character just to make my male character angsty. but like. sometimes you fuck up and and an accident happens. gloria wasn't just

his girlfriend she was his best friend. I don't think Horas ever finds out what happens to Gloria. JW just tells him that there was a wreck when they meet up again later in the 2000s. [[/HAWKSAW SPOILER]

After JW and Horas meet back up, JW and Horas try to work as a couple again and it ends REAL fast because it seems to JW that in all their years apart, vampirism and time travel aside, Horas hasn't matured as a person.

So the next person he enters a relationship with is a lady named Noelle who runs a little antique booth in the flea market in town.

They initially meet in a dream because Noelle has the ability to dreamwalk. Way back when I was first developing Noelle, it was actually JW who was dreamwalking. And I had some shit going on with a character named Wystic and reincarnation but I threw that all out because it was stupid. I didn't

touch the idea for like ten years and then like last year I was listening to Man on the Moon by Zella Day on spotify in the car after looping the warrior cats AMV set to the same song for ages at home and of course you put your blorbos in the slots of the other characters in your brain when

listening to music. I remembered the old idea of them meeting in a dream and I imagined JW and Noelle frolicking around and then thought what if I gave NOelle a power! She could be special too! I thought it would also break up my pattern in my main series of 'supernatural guy with normal girlfriend'

so i am developing this now. Their initial dynamic is that Noelle thinks she knows a lot more about the supernatural world than she actually does and is very woo woo and it makes JW feel insane because he is always dealing with real supernatural shit. He does not like the supernatural shit and like at first when he starts flirting with her, he tries to keep the supernatural stuff HE deals with under wraps but eventually things come to a head when noelle sees the antlers he's been cursed with.

Like at first she thinks they're fake but something happens to reveal that they are real and she is like W A H T. and some other shit happens that shoves pretty much everything JW has been keeping under wraps to the forefront and she's like OMG I KNEW MAGIC WAS REAL I KNEW IT and this instantly puts JW who is kind of this mysterious figure who is kind of offputting into the center of ‬her attentions.

She wants to get close to him to get closer to the paranormal and she teases him about the crush he's had on her. She starts kind of getting in the way of JW's ghoul-busting job and it gets on his nerves and they fight a bit. They're an on again off again situation. the sex is great but they make each other crazy. They have a few fake breakups before they eventually go on a really long break.

she like moves away or goes on vacation or does something that takes her out of the picture for a little bit. It's during that time that JW meets Jeff.

I didn't choose to ship JW and Jeff, I imagined Jeff one day listening to music and JW popped up and was like I WANT THAT. You know how it is. Anyway Jeff is a rabbit shifter changeling from the fay realm with chronic pain and an interest in men's fashion and baking. I love their bambi/thumper thing

I dont know a ton ABOUT Jeff because I'm still figuring out what is happening in the story when he comes into JW's life. I dont' know how they meet yet but I do know they accidentally get married int he fae realm. Maybe Vidiya knows him. Vidiya is a witch character that lives in the woods behind

JW's house in a camper. ANYWAY THIS ISNT ABOUT HER. ummmmm also Jeff and JW become the support system for a Troubled Teen later in the stories so they're like her magic gay dads. I don't have a lot of art of Jeff on the internet because most of the art of him is drawn in a tiny sketchbook

where i very first started actively drawing horny art for myself and not instantly feel like i was going to hell. i dont know where it is now ahaha. it was mostly feederism :X ANYWAY!!!!!

So I had JW and Jeff in mind for a few years but it also started making me feel like i was doing it to make JW into 'good bi rep' because this was back during the GOOD AND BAD QUEER REP WARS on tumblr and it amde me so so afarid to do, like, anything wiht my characters that wasn't like THE most

forward-thinking norm-breaking queerest thing possible becaus like how DARE i make a bi cis man end up wiht a cis female and call him gay even though he used to take it in the ass crazy style in th e60s. so i felt a little weird about poor Jeff for a bit because I did miss JW and Noelle's dynamic but then one day i got high and God whispered to me 'JW has...two hands...' and then i was like YOU'RE RIGHT GOD!!!! and then I made JW and Jeff and Noelle a V.