Vaughn Thaddeus-Hawthorne


This is my personal world-building site.


Pages of Interest


About Vaughn

Hi, I'm Vaughn. I like writing and reading weird things. You can call me Vaughn, or Vanya, or Thaddeus, or Thad, or Hawthorne. Or something else. I have a lot of names. I prefer they/them but will accept any pronouns as long as cruelty isn't intended.

I think that there's a lot of value in commonly overlooked aspects of worldbuilding, but I also think that there's a lot of value in commonly retread ground. This comes up a lot in my work, which tends to include both very common tropes being played straight and more uncommon or subverted ones.

One of the most commonly overlooked aspects of fiction is the human nature of kindness and compassion. If scary shapeshifting alien monsters came to Earth, I think it not unlikely that they'd arrive to find new friends. If a portal to Hell opened up in the north of England, I think Lucifer would come through to find Geordies complimenting his portal design and offering tea. In any situation in which the scary and the unknown appear, it's human nature to fight back and run for cover, but it's just as much human nature to approach the scary and the unknown and offer them each a scone and a complementary ornamental salt shaker.

I've lived in the same smallish American town basically all my life. I have a small, close-knit family of small, close-knit people.

I've been told that I can come off as standoffish or rude. I prefer the term "deadpan", but I don't control how others see me. I'm not very good at talking to people, but I write a lot — although, well, I don't write about myself much, so this is unusual. Most of what I write is nonlinear world-building. This is largely due to the fact that concepts like "character development" and "plot progression" tend to evade me more often than not.

If you want to picture me, you can, if you want, imagine a bony, pale-skinned human of average-ish height, in their late 20s to early 30s, with dark shoulder-length hair, dark deep-set eyes, a long nose, and a nasty case of "resting bitch face". They're probably wearing a grey beanie and a worn-out too-big black jacket and jeans.

You could also picture a six-foot supermodel with a tan and an hourglass figure, or a delicately-featured twink with big blue eyes, or a 400-pound weightlifter. It's not really important. Who knows, you might picture my actual appearance by accident.


Credits

Site is by me. I'll add more credits if I need them.