hi i'm simon shadows! i'm a queer and trans author and illustrator making gay fantasy books mostly.

this page is extremely under development!!

in the mean time, you can find my more boring website here: simonshado.ws

mood: grumbly
weather: wet hot
aura: swift-footed
debuffs: tummy feel weird

hello my dear shadowlings,

happy august! 🌻🌻 well, happy almost august! this month will be a quick update because i’ve been mostly busy with non-art things, but i’ve got a couple little things to share.

first, unsurprisingly, i’ve burnt myself out on snowlight again! but this time i think i see the pattern clearly: i keep getting excited to write a romance novel, but then for some reason when i sit down to write, i start to outline an adventure novel.

there is some sense in this: i do want the romance to take place in a fantasy adventure context. the problem is, since i’m not actually emotionally connected to the thing that drives me to write (the smutty parts), i get trapped in these impossible worldbuilding questions about how the adventure they go on will somehow ~fix all the world’s problems~. and naturally i get burnt out because then the book feels like a chore to write.

as i am coming back to this project yet again after a few weeks of down time, i need to structure the entire story around the romance and let the larger fantasy adventure plot and worldbuilding exist to support that narrative that i actually care about. in service of that goal, i am working on falling back in love with my characters again, so here is the hunk ryn is seemingly morphing into. 🥵🥵🥵

the most salient images i have right now for where this book is headed is that ryn is gonna tie perris up and do nasty things to him. and you know what? my desire to see perris’s shit wrecked is more than enough of a reason to write a book. 😈

next, more malazan fanart because i’m in deep and i doubt i’m coming back any time soon.

first, a character who was possessed by the god of assassins while she was a kid and she basically becomes an assassin god herself in the bargain. i loooooove the relationship between these characters because it’s so weirdly intimate in that she can remember his memories and stuff like that.

next, doomed immortal monster boyfriends wander forever together. also not written as a romantic relationship in the books, but dear god, the foreground character is constantly pining after the dude in the background in a totally tragic way.

see also: the reference image i am color-picking the palette from. obviously that gets removed in the final one, but i thought i’d leave it so you can see i steal my colors a lot of the time rather than just like having some great sense of color theory or anything like that.

these sorts of relationships are the things that inspire me to write my own books. i feel uncertain about calling myself a romance/romantasy author because, even though i want to write stories about relationships, i feel like the actual genre of romance does not (in my experience with it, at least) interest me in the least. even specifically in the gay fantasy romance subgenre, my only experiences have been books which are way more focused on the romance, and the fantasy setting is more window-dressing than anything else.

what i really crave are stupidly long and intricate fantasy novels that are like 1000 pages long each, but in which the romance and erotica elements are just as important as the worldbuilding. i’m still working out the balance in my own writing, but i’m feeling increasingly confident in where i’m heading the more i just allow for the idea that what i want to make does not have to look like anything else.

okay that's all for now!

♡ simon

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