a-mx-writer

[a-mx-writer]

Gods bless you, it's a real desert out there and comments are the raindrops 😭

My only new year's resolution is to leave more comments on AO3

[a-mx-writer]

Japanese Avatar!

If you ever wondered what a purely Japanese-inspired Avatar world would look like... Courtesy of my favorite Japanese ATLA artist: TKG

[a-mx-writer]

Oh and it's also on Fanfiction.net, if that's what you vibe with.

I'm trying to stay a couple chapters ahead of what I've posted so that I have enough unposted chapters in my pocket if I run out of writing juices.

Well, including those chapters, my current WIP has just surpassed my previously second-longest fic, at 22,100 words!

Damn.

Marked for Life – Avatar: The Last Airbender (currently posted: 15k words, 9/? chapters)

[a-mx-writer]

If anyone wants the sales pitch:

Aang vanquishes Ozai, but Azula wins the Agni Kai. With their mission failed, Zuko, Aang, and the others have no option but to flee – but Katara is captured. While the rest of the free world continues their war against the Fire Nation, Katara suffers brutal mistreatment at the hands of Azula, who in turn finds her dream of being Fire Lord is not all she wanted, and that Ozai's legacy might be too much for her to live up to. Both Katara and Azula compromise their ideals and goals as circumstances force them to get accustomed to each other. Heed the tags! The M rating isn't there for no reason. Also please read the opening author's note.

Azula x Katara, morally grey characters, canon divergence AU.

Little excerpt from the first chapter:

The blast hits Katara squarely in the chest. The last thing she sees is Zuko, dodging fireball after fireball, running, as more and more sages and guards flood into the courtyard. Then her world fades to black. Pain. That is all Katara can think about. Pain. She doesn't know what day it is. If it even is day. Her cell measures five by five steps, or it would measure as many if she had any strength left to stand up and measure it. The small, windowless room is all she has seen for the past days, or weeks, she doesn't know. She vaguely remembers having been dragged through a hallway and into a different room. Men asked her questions.

Content warnings are mostly on a per-chapter basis, though there's a blanket warning for graphic depictions of violence throughout. A few individual content warnings worth highlighting are suicide attempt and allusions to sexual assault.

I'm trying to stay a couple chapters ahead of what I've posted so that I have enough unposted chapters in my pocket if I run out of writing juices.

Well, including those chapters, my current WIP has just surpassed my previously second-longest fic, at 22,100 words!

Damn.

Marked for Life – Avatar: The Last Airbender (currently posted: 15k words, 9/? chapters)

[a-mx-writer]

15k posted, nearly 25k written. Not bad. I've got five chapters piled up ready to go live.

Good job, me.

I'm trying to stay a couple chapters ahead of what I've posted so that I have enough unposted chapters in my pocket if I run out of writing juices.

Well, including those chapters, my current WIP has just surpassed my previously second-longest fic, at 22,100 words!

Damn.

Marked for Life – Avatar: The Last Airbender (currently posted: 15k words, 9/? chapters)

[a-mx-writer]

Guilty as charged…

the ellipsis is really the pervert's punctuation

[a-mx-writer]

You know it's gonna be a good fic when ur betas are reacting to the ending like this

[a-mx-writer]

I'm trying to stay a couple chapters ahead of what I've posted so that I have enough unposted chapters in my pocket if I run out of writing juices.

Well, including those chapters, my current WIP has just surpassed my previously second-longest fic, at 22,100 words!

Damn.

Marked for Life – Avatar: The Last Airbender (currently posted: 15k words, 9/? chapters)

[a-mx-writer]

Is it me or does Hakoda ruin the first bit of the Day of Black Sun invasion?

They're almost up to the Gates of Azulon, covered by fog and undetected. Then, for some reason, he yells "keep it up! we're almost through!" and that tips off the guards and the gates are closed.

From the mechanist's comment that they'll have to resurface the submarines for air before they enter the harbour, I infer that the original plan wasn't to abandon the boats at the gates already. More likely that they only wanted to dive the final stretch, from the point where they now had to resurface until the harbour.

So what the hell compelled Hakoda to yell around when they were trying to be covert?

[a-mx-writer]

Sokka, dressed up in the uniform of a genocidal nation, approaching a teenage girl alone in her cell: "Maybe you'll remember this" *makes kissie mouth*

Buddy, what the hell were you thinking? I know it's a kids show, so they couldn't go anywhere with that and could only play it off as a joke, but realistically, Suki absolutely expected to be sexually assaulted in that moment.

And with how monstrous the Fire Nation is portrayed (as much as a PG rating permits), and with the clear parallels and allusions to Imperial Japan, you can't tell me that off-screen, the Fire Nation doesn't use rape as a weapon of war. Keyword "comfort women".

"The Boiling Rock": in which Sokka gets socked in the jaw twice because he keeps forgetting he's disguised as a Fire Nation soldier.

A true himbo as the kids say.

[a-mx-writer]

I love, love, LOVE it when I can tell a fic author has integrated their specialized knowledge in a fic. I was reading a fic that at some point included the character going to visit an art therapist, and it's so clear that the author is an art therapist themself, and the details included are just immaculate and I love it. I've previously read about a character doing fencing for no other reason than the author clearly wanting to write a sport they understood. A character being given a hyperfixation on bugs just so the author can infodump themselves.

I eat it up every time, it brings such a smile to my face

[a-mx-writer]

And this here is what we in the writing industry call "a display of hubris that may or may not have karmic consequences but is very, very fun".

[ID: a screenshot of white text on a black background reading "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The sole exception for the ocean, the ocean is The Pacific Ocean from real life. If it is unhappy with its portrayal it can settle the matter personally." /end ID]

[a-mx-writer]

"The Boiling Rock": in which Sokka gets socked in the jaw twice because he keeps forgetting he's disguised as a Fire Nation soldier.

A true himbo as the kids say.

(see next reblog, CW rape)

[a-mx-writer]

Fuck it. Fix-it time.

“Hold your fire!” – Avatar: The Last Airbender – 878 words

"Hello, Zuko here!" *record scratch* *freeze frame* Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got here. In which the author gets so frustrated with Zuko's inability to string together a single coherent sentence that I decided to write a proper apology speech for him.

Forever infuriating how bad Zuko's "hello, Zuko here" speech is. That man was supposed to grow up to become Fire Lord, when he can't even string a simple sentence together? So help me Agni.

Even more infuriating, his speech had to be this bad, because if it were better, that would 1) be a really underwhelming and anticlimactic end to two years of enmity, and 2) undermine the whole Combustion Man vs. the Gaang showdown.

[a-mx-writer]

Forever infuriating how bad Zuko's "hello, Zuko here" speech is. That man was supposed to grow up to become Fire Lord, when he can't even string a simple sentence together? So help me Agni.

Even more infuriating, his speech had to be this bad, because if it were better, that would 1) be a really underwhelming and anticlimactic end to two years of enmity, and 2) undermine the whole Combustion Man vs. the Gaang showdown.

[a-mx-writer]

This is how I find out?!

[insert tumblr breaking news meme]

The wrong former president died

[a-mx-writer]

My imagination is very cinematic, I think in terms of camera angles and framing, transitions, staging and blocking, and most of my writing process centers around trying to translate those pictures in my head into words that will convey the same idea to the reader. It can be pretty limiting when things that are only possible on celluloid don't translate well to paper.

Which is also why dialogue is so hard for me to write. When you've got audio, half the characterisation is taken off your hands. The actors make those lines their own with their voices, the delivery, emphasis, tone, et cetera. As a writer, all you and your readers have to go off are the words themselves, and those words have to be so precisely in character that they evoke the characters' voices when they're read.

If my words aren't carefully chosen, people won't hear Azula or Katara when they read them. They will fall flat and sound dead and dull. If Grey Griffin read them, I could write anything and it would still sound like Azula, but I don't have that benefit.

It's really damn hard.

I should've become a filmmaker. Sucks that fan films are so much harder to make than fanfiction.

The unstoppable urge to put every heavy-hitting sentence into its own, separate line to underscore its impact, much like a motion picture would stop the music and cut to a different shot.

The immovable problem of "it looks like shit if every other paragraph consists only of one line".