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anyway using no commentary crafting videos as inspiration for writing from the perspective of my old lady has proven fruitful. i might finish something again. feels good

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sometimes i feel like i die on really petty hills but then i forgive myself because i see people get SO angry over the smallest things. i just saw a youtube comment calling americans useless, abnormal scum because we prefer fahrenheit over celsius. daddy chill it's gonna be ok

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no matter what your most embarrassing moment in life is, at least it’s not having fucking chat gpt write fanfic for you bc you’re too lazy to do it yourself

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kind of weird how parts of your soul are left in various locations without any warning… like yes i’m always at the top of that hill, sitting at the bus stop, in the cool light of the Japanese restaurant, standing at the pier etc etc

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i want this blog to be R rated not because it's horny but because i said the word fuck as an emphatic too many times

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i listened to a stranger on the internet talk about how someone else wrote about hope and wonder both being combinations of fear and happiness and i can't get it out of my head. the joy and the not knowing coming together to create this feeling that saves us from clocking out of life. i was skeptical at first because for a long while i thought that i'd rather cut Fear's legs off and watch her bleed to death for what she did to me than ever entertain being her fucking friend, but it's more bittersweet than that i guess. Fear made me stay in the worst situations of my life and she also got me out of them

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“[...] she gave a single, long, full-throated howl, as if she wanted to rid herself at once of all the cries that pain had stored up in her.”

— Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood

“I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode.”

— Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

“She’s going to scream, I thought. And it’ll be something real. Something we have to chain up in the backyard and feed with bloody steaks.”

— Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

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— James Baldwin, from If Beale Street Could Talk

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they were right btw. you have to dig yourself out of your grave over and over again

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middle of my d&d campaign update:

playing a sentient skeleton in search of my missing band T-shirt who is, in the meantime, working for an adventuring guild with an old man and two women who share a single braincell. we guided a caravan half way up a mountain just to lose all of the cargo thanks to one of the drivers who sold us out and almost got us killed. we wrangled him and made it the rest of the way, threw him in a dungeon, nursed him back to health because he was apparently poisoned the whole time???, and then the brat had the nerve to charm me into liking him by admitting "it's all about the money" with a smile on his face while on the edge of death. well what's an old bag of bones to do but bring him a hot meal and promise a hefty payout if he changes his tune and stops fucking us over

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"'I have led a toothless life,' he thought. 'A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on--and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What's to be done?'"

-Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason (1945)

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it just sucks, right? i want the engagement with my writing, i wanna learn how to become a better storyteller through community with other writers and frankly i always want a hit of that wild, addictive energy that comes about when you find your niche......... i love fanfiction. i love it so much. but there's also a big part of me that wants to stay nobody forever and stop talking about it. being unimportant and not noteworthy is really cool and safe and i like it here with no friends and <100 followers because you guys don't fucken badger me about the next chapter coming out or the latest drama with the current author we all hate for some reason or LORD ALIVE the fiction and the discourse and the moral sanctity of it all "good heavens!" i cry whilst clutching my pearls

the way things are is finally so good again and i have a hard time giving that up no matter how badly i wanna "stay true to myself" and dig my heels in a little by putting my work back out in public

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sorry for writing my own thoughts on my own blog page again but every time i get an ask about that damn fic my heart breaks into a thousand pieces and it's not because i'm scared that people who are angry with me are gonna rise from the dead and come for my fucking neck again. i just feel like a fucking loser for letting them beat me into submission and take all that joy away from me. i even found myself wondering *just this afternoon* if i should go ahead and repost the fucking thing already. i know i planned on a reskin because jfc i do not want that kind of attention from that fandom ever again but at the same time like

it was mine!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i wrote that!!!!!!!! all by my fucking self!!!!!!!!!! i had never been more enthusiastic or proud of myself for writing anything else before. and i let people who don't even care about me completely usurp the narrative and ruin my experience and chase me into pseudo-hiding for like what two years now? three? how long has it even been. i'm grabbing a broom and chasing you animals out of my goddamn house holy fuck

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BE MAD BE SAD BUT DONT U DARE GIVE UP

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How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

anyway after that i wrote a lot.

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they are just havin fun