About the Author

 
Lux in tenebris lucet; vestra fandom flagrat.
A light in darkness shines; your fandom is on fire.

Greetings, readers!

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Ywain Penbrydd, nerdlord, salty archivist, and writer of pairs so rare they're kayaks not ships, but I totally answer to 'hey, asshole', because I'm not Pablo Picasso, who was never called an asshole. (not in new york) I'm also terrible at talking about myself, so I figure I'll hit the high points, and leave the rest to your collective imaginations. It's the legend that's important, in the end, isn't it?

I've been writing for what seems like an eternity — longer than many of my readers have been alive, I recently noticed. At some point after the last time I updated my bio, I traded in half a lifetime of shortfic for the beginnings of another half a lifetime of epics, which wasn't really what I meant to do at all, but as the manager of an opera house once said, 'These things do happen!' Somewhere in there, I also accidentally became a digital 3D artist — which is a great deal more like set design and photography than painting, for the record.

Speaking broadly and generally, my work is queer, in any way you want to take that. (just miss me with that 'q-slur' shit) It's probably gay. It's probably weird. And most, but not nearly all, of the time, it's in some way focused on the non-comedic desirability of cis male bodies. Men, cis or trans, are rarely presented in ways that inspire desire. Sure, there's beefcake, but that's only appealing if you want beef. Anything that's not beefcake tends to be anywhere from subtly to blatantly ridiculous; sometimes, it's even designed to be pitiable. So, I started doing cheesecake and playing it straight. I started writing erotic comedy-adventure, where the comedy wasn't ridicule. And it took me a long time to get it anything like right, really. There are a lot of things to unlearn.

Which isn't to say I don't cheerfully engage in blatant what-the-fuckery, from time to time, because what is life without things that make you go 'Uhh, u wot m8?'

And all that is an extremely lengthy way of telling you absolutely nothing you didn't already know, if you've seen my work. So, ah… go forth and enjoy some more of it.

— Ywain
2021.09.15 :: 12:59

Gifts

Sometimes people give me cool shit. I realised I didn't have anywhere I was listing all of it, and I tend to want to show that kind of thing off. You guys are fucking amazing. Seriously.

On AO3

On Tumblr

Theme Credits

Whenever I build something, I try to set aside some space to thank the people whose work I inevitably end up ganking and futzing with, to make things look like I want them to. This used to be in the footer, but the list keeps getting longer, so I've moved it to the about page.

Hosting

Nearly Free Speech, with their awesome uptime and non-shitty pricing.
groundLine's Thoth II for the subdomain. No link, by request.

Scripts

Collapsible tag list made with dtree, which is © Geir Landrö.

Fonts

Awesome icons are mostly Font Awesome, which is just as awesome as it sounds.
The header is Eagle Lake, from Google Fonts.
Everything else is extremely likely to be Verdana, Arial, or the default sans-serif font on your computer.

Theme

Theme started out as Suffusion by Sayontan Sinha, but I've done terrible things to it.