#(spongebob rainbow meme) autism

[nattikay]

the constant inner struggle of a Na'vi speaker/teacher browsing Na'vi OCs

[imsociallyanxiousgetoverit]

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Fic Writer Question Meme

Thank you to @missroserose :) their post is the one I saw first

TW for all my fics! Any fic I link probably has at least one common trigger in it and at the time of writing it I may not have properly labeled it.

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How many works do you have on Ao3?

63 are published on Ao3, I believe 38 on FF, and maybe 5 on Tumblr? I have over ~1800 WIPs unpublished as some of my WIPs are published amid those websites/apps

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What’s your total Ao3 word count?

200k, uh 206,726 to be exact

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How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

uh, lemme count my folders in Notes…. a minimum of 63… Holy Crow 63 again. I’m still gonna go count the specifics too cuz some of these are huge groupings like MCU or Disney. Okay so 63 + 53 is 116 I think? So 116 fandoms? oh god wait what are they? ill make a list,,,

Fandoms I’ve Written For:

A Quiet Place, Aladdin, Alice in Wonderland, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Barbie, Beauty and the Beast, Big Hero Six, Jump, Brave,

Cinderella (all), Encanto, Ever After High, Frozen, HTTYD, The Little Mermaid (all), Luca, Moana, RotG, Robots (2005), Sing, Tangled, The Incredibles,

Toy Story (3-4), Winx, Zootopia, The Umbrella Academy, Castle, The Flash, BTS, The Nutcracker, Subnautica, FNAF:SB, Spiritfarer, ATLA, Gravity Falls, I Am Mother,

Corpse, Cartoonz, Delirious, Irish/Spooky!Lads, Gab Smolders, LilyPichu, Micheal Reeves, Markiplier, Amy Nelson,

The Last of Us, CrankGamePlays, GassyMexican, Smii7y, Kryoz, Thomas Sanders, Julie & the Phantoms, Other Kpop, The Three Female Runaways,

Squid Game, Train to Busan, Switchcraft, Professor Layton, Undertale, Dimension 20, Power Rangers, BBC Merlin, Sanders Sides, PJO/HOO, Slugterra,

Minecraft (not mcyt), Stardew, Animal Crossing, Terraria, Ouran Highschool Host Club, Criminal Minds, Supernatural, Legend of Zelda/Linked Universe,

Danny Phantom, Doctor Who, Maze Runner, Teen Wolf, Limitless (TV), Steven Universe, Princess Debut, Sense 8, City of Ember, Bomberman R+, Arcane,

League of Legends, Overwatch, A Little Princess, Whale Rider, SCP, Edith Finch, GTFO, Scott Pilgrim, Emily the Strange,

Pitch Perfect, Spongebob, Stranger Things, The Old Guard, Tinkerbell, True and the Rainbow Kingdom, Seed, Almost Human, Aerial Magic, Fatal Frame,

The OA, The Runaways, She-Ra, Secret Society of Second Born Royals, Divergent, Voltron, MLP, Hogwarts, Firefly/Serenity,

Drake Hollow, Resident Evil, Humans are Weird, Pokemon, Good Omens, Monsters Inc/Uni, Beyond: Two Souls, Young Justice, Slime Rancher, Avengers (all), Iron Man (all), Spider-Man (all), Loki, WandaVision, Eternals,

Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange, Dead by Daylight, Don’t Starve, & more I couldnt find cuz theyre only in Crossovers lol

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What are your top 5 fics by Kudos?

1. [All Inclusive Twitter Memes]

2. [Autistic!Character Ideas & Stories]

3. [☂️👶🏻👶🏼]

4. [Standing Up Again]

5. [Night Valen in New York]

These are still pretty surprising to me. The Twitter fic is expected, so is the Autism fic, but the last three really are out of left field

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Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yes! Absolutely. I don’t fully know how to explain both my feelings and the psychology behind why I respond to comments; but know I’m very passionate about doing so!

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What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Phew, uh, lemme look actually cuz most Angst fics are triggering for me so I never finish them- okay so TW obviously. The angstiest ending I think I’ve ever written (I THINK) is the character revealing their c/s/a to family members

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Do you write Crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I write almost exclusively in Crossovers lmfao. I have a folder literally named Pandora’s Box where I put my fics that need multiple notes just to keep track. Lemme go find the most complex one,,,

okay so my bestie and I are working on a fic with tens of characters from VERY different places who are all villians and are attending a mental hospital (its legitimate, not a horror fic. I’ve been in one so we’re making it as realistic as we can without it being too triggering or unfun)

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Have you ever recieved hate on a fic?

I don’t know… I take a lot of criticism as hate even though it’s not so I don’t really remember the bad ones anymore. I keep comments that make me happy in my inbox for bad days.

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Do you write Smut? If so, what kind?

Yes, although I rarely post it. I’m not very good at it so it’s mostly fics about very specific kinks I’ve fantisized about and are having the characters act out in my place.

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Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t think so. I may have blocked it out if it did occur.

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Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, though I’m fully welcome to that.

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Have you ever co-written a fic before?

The fic I mentioned previously is my first project with someone else. I don’t write well with many people so, my bestie is really my only option.

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What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Probably “Ineffable Husbands”. I’ve felt so much comfort from canon, fanfiction, and the fandom. I learned to love my body because of fanart of Aziraphale.

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What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

It’s a fic from like 2015. I’m partially ashamed of it and partially obsessed still. I won’t describe it due to being embarrassed by it’s current state.

I do plan to try rewriting it though. Just recently I discovered it again and considered posting it as it was just to free myself from it.

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What are your writing strengths?

I really don’t know? I like to think I’m good at Titles and Summaries, but I have evidence against that. Sometimes, I feel like my crossover ideas, the links and connections I find, are very unique. I don’t even know what you’d call that besides Creativity though.

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What are your writing weaknesses?

I was gonna say the genres Angst and Smut. Then, I was gonna mention my grammar. In the end though, I think I struggle to characterize and choose one rule of logic to follow.

I’m far too logical one moment and competely uncaring of logic the next. I also project onto characters far too much sometimes. In my opinion, anyway.

If you’ve read my fics I welcome you to express what my weakness (and strength) is because I’m biased.

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What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Yes. Just, Yes. I’m currently working on a fic where the characters speak a mix of 3 dialects of Spanish and Quechua.

The fic is in English of course because I’m not fluent in any of those languages, but I’m writing songs for the fic in those languages and interspersing famous proverbs people tend to use (like “dont judge a book by its cover” but the spanish equivalent) throughout the fic

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What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Young Justice probably. I don’t remember if I wrote fanfics before I learned what it was. I imagine I may have written for Winx when I was in Elementary, but I didn’t know it was fic so i can’t recall it now

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What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Oh this is difficult. On FF my favorite has always been [One Death, Two Scars].

On Ao3…. godex I love these a lot: [Loss of the Wild], [Indulgence], [Secrets….Shhh], [An Unknown Chance], [Love Like You], [Father], [Atlantis: The Lost Wilds], [A Beauty, A Beast, and Some Princes], [Pidge]…. but if I have to pick One???

I really don’t know ahhh. I didn’t even include any of the WIPs… I adore [Modern Medicine], oh and [Secret Memories] oh I truly love this one, I like [What’s Left of Us] and [A Seer’s Trance] a lot… [Changed Fate] is good. I haven’t mentioned a lot of the fics I’m proud of because I’m similtaneously a little embarrassed by the current state of writing,,, but

I just love a lot of my work. I learned a time ago that every piece of work you make is valuable in your progression as a writer. To love myself, I have to love what I create, too. Well, not all of it, but I have to appreciate what the fic has done for me to grow from it.

I like [Confident In Love], [“Crossovers”] is great, [Accidental Burn] is so good, and [Brick by Brick a Family is] is definitely absolutely one of my favorites.

I have a fic just called [🌲💫🗯] that I love (actually any of my Gravity Falls fics I love probably). [Good Parenting 101] is sweet, [Subversions] is like [Indulgence] lol very self indulgent- OH and I havent even mention how many of my Stardew Valley fics for my OC Aluna are so good! Though I don’t know if I’ve ever posted them,,,, oh I also have a completely different fic called [Subversions] thats very different lmao

[Shaking] makes me happy, [Captain America: Falcon’s Call] is definitely a fic I want to finish someday, [The True Iron Legion] is ahhh I love it- okay I need to stop lol I love too many of my fics to keep listing them! I really hope you’ll check them out though,,, I love them a lot.

Nevermind, One more!!! I forgot about [정말 너무 혼란스러 (Never leave me alone)]. Oh screw it. I’m gonna keep recommending my favorites. [Heroes Endgame] is a bit dramatic but It took a lot of work to think about lol. Honestly any of my Luca fics I think are pretty good. I think [‘Ohahu Anu] is really creative. Most my Encanto fics are decent or great.

[werevampiwolf]

I made this mostly for myself, but I feel like @spongebob-autisticquestions would appreciate this. It’s for any autistic person to use. There’s a gif and a still image.

[Image description: A meme from Spongebob where he creates a rainbow between his hands, except this version has AUTISM on the rainbow]

Suggested uses:

“Why do you always eat the same thing?“

“Why are you chewing on that thing?“

And so on.

[amorremanet]

2, 10, 42, 47

asks for fanfic writers

well, no. 10 and no. 42 are over here, but!

2. things that motivate you

* The stereotype that autistic spectrum people are only good for STEM-related things. Like, for all of the folks on the spectrum who are good at STEM things, that’s great and I wish them all the best — but I suck at math and I can’t do anything science-related without turning it into, “how can I make a sociopolitical sci-fi critique out of this” or, “but do gay aliens believe in me,” so nah, I’m gonna pass on doing anything STEM-y.

I’d much rather give a big middle finger to everyone who has this ridiculous notion that autistic spectrum people are completely and utterly uncreative, and that we are only ever good for STEM things, and I’d like to do it by being successful in my chosen creative pursuits, please and thank you.

* Tangentially? Temple fucking Grandin. I don’t actually have any problems with her, herself — but I have a lot of problems with how allistic people hold her up as The One True Way To Be A Successful Person Who “Suffers From” Autism™ and how about fuck that, no. I want to be a successful autistic writer who is nothing like Temple Grandin, apart from both of us being white autistic women/dfab people who are going to be identified and treated as women by other people irl regardless of any wibbly wobbly messy gender feels on our part.

* Talking with people about my projects. On one hand, it’s a way of getting feelings kind of like validation. On the other, and way more importantly for me? I love getting feedback from people, or hearing the questions they come up with — like, on NYE, my aunt and I chatted back and forth about my novel while playing a weird card game with one of my cousins, and Aunt Kelly asked some questions that got me to put a few ideas I’ve been playing with into words more concretely, which was super-helpful — and I get a lot of motivation to work from getting jazzed up about things through talking with people.

* Totally a petty thing, but? Getting cranky with JK Rowling over all of the Good Ally Cookies she doesn’t actually deserve to claim, or all of the characters of hers who Deserved Better (lol, uh. today, my therapist learned that I get Upset about Percy Weasley very easily and about my longstanding hate-on for his parents, and bless her heart, when I went, “uh, I just over-identify with Percy Weasley a lot and there’s a good deal of projection going on here but I also don’t think I’m wrong,” she kinda smiled and nodded and went, “I can tell :)” — she’s great, I love her)

or how, even ignoring all of the #Problematic things about her body of work in the Potterverse, there’s SO MUCH GOOD SHIT in the HP series but she’s so clearly invested in the plot as she envisions it and the story she wants to tell for Harry, to the exclusion of all else, that she ends up completely short-changing basically every other character who is not named Severus Snape or Hermione Granger (most of the time, but not 100% of the time)

Like, I’ve said it before and I will say it until everyone is completely sick of me saying it, then I will continue saying it anyway: JKR views all of her characters — barring Harry, and sometimes Snape and Hermione — as plot devices more than she views them as characters.

She’s a bit better about some of them (Remus, Sirius but not as much as Remus, Ron and Luna but not as much as they deserve, Neville and Draco but not in the ways that they deserve)

but she’s really bullshit about most of them (this is not a complete list, but: Cho; Ginny; Cedric; Tonks; Fleur; Albus, Aberforth, and Ariana; Voldemort — not in that I need her to be sympathetic toward him but ffs, some 101-level consistency in his characterization would be nice; Kingsley; Percy; Wormtail; James; Lily;

Lockhart — “I’m not bitter about JKR’s ableism and victim-blaming with regard to Gildylocks,” I say bitterly, with a bitter expression, while hanging up informational posters about how bitter I am; Andromeda and Ted — deserved better, this is not a question or a debate, I want to say that it’s not even an opinion, but tbh, I know that it is, so hmph; Regulus; Barty Crouch Jr. because he is my Favorite and I can’t make this list without mentioning him;

Bellatrix — again, I don’t need her to sympathize with Bellatrix because how about no? but Bellatrix Black Lestrange is one of the shittiest villains I’ve ever read, in terms of HOW she was written, and I think a lot of the flaws in how JKR wrote her could have been remedied if she actually did anything to make Bellatrix a fully realized character, which would’ve made her a more effective and meaningful villain, and not a shrieking Saturday morning cartoon caricature;

Molly and Arthur — I’m not going into full detail about why I hate them today, you lot can just go read my tag on the subject if you want to know, and I don’t think that JKR’s “plot device first, people second” method of characterization is the only problem? But I think it’s a major contributing factor to The Problem Of Molly And Arthur, because she presents them as this image of Idyllic Domestic Perfection even when their actions and the internal fabric of the Weasley Family, don’t support that claim, and it sucks)

—basically, JK Rowling motivates me by fucking up a lot, because she was one of my idols as a kid and as a teenager, and she was a relevant and immediate source of inspiration because Oh My God You Can So Too Write Novels For A Living And Make A Difference In People’s Lives, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that she saved my life a few times, albeit mostly in indirect fashions…… but she fucks up a lot, and this is motivating for me because it makes me want to do better than her.

It’s not even exclusive to HP fic, either. Like, she’s one of my biggest sources of motivation to work on my novel and put thought and love and heart into making it the best that it can be — because I want to do better than her and even if I never have her kind of money (which lol, never gonna happen), I still want to beat her at something. Once I earn it, I will happily accept beating her at artistic integrity and commitment.

Is it petty? Yes, definitely. But hey, man, fish gotta swim, dogs gotta eat, and sometimes, I gotta think about my issues with JK Rowling to remember that I need to do better than her and motivate myself to do the work

* You know those, “do it for her/him” memes based on that one thing from The Simpsons that people make with their fave characters and/or celebs? Yeah, I kind of want to make one for myself with Oscar Wilde. Because there’s a lot about him that wasn’t ever perfect (he was a white guy in Victorian England, even accounting for his Anglo-Irishness, so…… yeah), and there are several points on which I don’t agree with him (like, for example: if you are such a shit to your wife that your boyfriend, who is so completely up his own ass that it’s a miracle he hasn’t found a way to Narnia, notices and calls you out on it? I’m kinda thinking that you might want to reassess how you treat people and stop being like that, bub)

—but I also want to be a fabulous gay Slytherclaw social satirist who uses that #aesthetic and the popular tropes of the day to do my own thing and redefine outside the box, and hey, if I ever get a, “wit and wisdom of…” book published with some of my coolest quotables in it? That would be an awesome bonus.

* “Okay, but seriously: how obvious can I be that Yael and Elizabeth are a big, ‘fuck you’ to Marvel about all of their queerbaiting with Charles and Erik before I can get sued for it? Because while Yael and Elizabeth are still characters in their own right, their original inspiration was, ‘hey, what if I flipped the bird to Marvel about all of their fucking queerbaiting with Charles and Erik, and did it with extra lesbians? that’s be pretty fucking cool,’ and I don’t want to be sued, but I also don’t want for my point to be missed here”

—or more generally, “I can’t die before I finish my novel, I have a lot of people to piss off and call on their crap through the magic of the written word *makes a sparkly rainbow with my hands like Spongebob going, ‘imaginaaaaaaaation!!! :D’*”

* So, there’s this one bit in Dry, Augusten Burroughs’ memoir about the early parts of his struggle with alcoholism and addiction. In his rehab, one of their assignments for group therapy is to write letters to people in their lives and feel their feelings about these relationships. He writes to Pighead, his best friend/“it’s complicated,” who is HIV-positive.

Reading the letter at group, Augusten finds himself crying, then shares the whole tangled-up backstory that he and Pighead have together, from how they first met on a phone-sex line, to how Augusten fell hard in love with him, to how they were friends with benefits and then he told Pighead that he was in love with him and Pighead plays the, “I love you but I’m not in love with you” card (that is verbatim what he says in the book, and the way Burroughs reads it in the audiobook kills me every single time), so Augusten dates other guys and tries to fall out of love with Pighead, only for Pighead to come see him first when his HIV test comes back positive and realize that he’s In Love with Augusten only, “after he became diagnosed with a fatal disease”

—which gives us the great line, “Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker.”

(Which is seriously one of my top ten lines in all literature, ever. tbh, it’s probably top five, but the top ten list would be hard enough to come up with to begin with, and I’d have to parcel things out into Poetry, Prose [possibly split into Fiction and Nonfiction, at that], and Dramatic Writing just to get it down to ten things on each list, and? It’s just a perfect line, oh my god)

At the end of it, Augusten has a moment with Kavi, another one of the patients at his rehab, who is addicted to cocaine and sex. Kavi tells him about how he left his lover who was HIV-positive after his diagnosis, so that he wouldn’t be the person getting left for once, and about how he feels like cocaine never leaves him. And we get: “Suddenly, I want to drink.… I don’t want to drink in a jovial ‘Highballs for everybody!’ way. I want to drink to the point where I could undergo major knee surgery and not feel so much as a pinch.”

I just.

There is so much about this section of the book that fucks me up so hard, but in ways that I love so much — and there’s a lot that I love about it for a lot of reasons, but like?

Speaking entirely with my writer hat on right now?

That part is just immaculately written. Every word is perfectly chosen, and they are strung together just right. Burroughs chooses the exact right images and scenes to characterize his and Pighead’s developing relationship, and his moment with Kavi, and it’s just

This part of the book makes me remember why I write. Because I have been reading and rereading this book since high school — I have had my battered up and taped together paperback copy with the yellowing pages since Easter 2005 — and this part STILL fucks me up, every. single. time. The audiobook version of it still fucks me up every. single. time.

Back in high school when I first read it, it hit me so hard because I had a habit of falling in love with girls who were straight and/or just did not like me back (and it would get worse, because the girl I was in love with who dared me to write D*rarry just to see if I could? Would go on to put me in the position of being her Girl Friday while I got to watch her love everybody but me, and praise the creative work of everybody but me, and go on about how two of her other friends were totally brilliant and misunderstood creative geniuses because they were incomprehensible and it was totally bourgeois for me to want to write to be understood but it was okay she knows I’m ~mainstream like that, but then still call on me — which made the whole Augusten/Pighead thing hurt so much more for me because I was kind of her, “I love you, but I’m not In Love with you”)

(I will say this about that relationship: I didn’t handle it well, either. I was petty and jealous, and waaaay more damagingly? I hadn’t yet grasped the idea that you sometimes have to just let people be messed up at you about the shit they’re going though without trying to fix everything for them, especially when there’s nothing that you can actually do to fix it. In retrospect, it’s kind of hilarious that I loaned her a copy of Perks of Being A Wallflower that I never saw again, because the whole idea that you can’t just constantly put someone else’s needs before your own and call it love, and the related concept that doing this is actually kind of a form of selfishness, in a way?

………yeah, that was VERY relevant to how I handled that relationship, and she rightfully called me on a lot of shit related to those ideas, and I spent a lot of time having an unfair chip on my shoulder because I was jealous on one hand, and indignant about how her other friends got to be Real Artists™ because their shit was incomprehensible but I got to be a Poser Artist™ because I wanted to be understood and not just fap around with some neo-Dadaist nonsense — and as seen here, I still do have a chip on my shoulder about Dadaist anything, but in fairness, I’d have that with or without any of this story because Dada is the worst — and I’m not saying that I was totally pure or innocent in anything here.

But at the time, I cried a lot over Augusten/Pighead feels because I felt that whole, “I love you but I’m not in love with you” situation and trying to fall out of love with someone only to crumble when they needed you and resent them for needing you but hate yourself for resenting them — I felt all of that so hard.)

My appreciation for this part of the book has evolved and changed over time, and it’s deepened — as I’ve learned more about LGBTIQ history, I’ve come to appreciate the context of the story more and gain more of a sense of reverence for the LGBTIQ people who came before me and actually fought through the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and it has changed how I read this part of the book more than anything else (c.f., my passive-aggressive addition of the REST of the quote to one post of the, ‘deep compassion vs. you fucker’ part because I was really annoyed with a bunch of straight people who were reblogging it without the full context and acting like they actually had any idea what it’s like to be gay and in a situation like Augusten is with Pighead here) — and I just

The biggest thing about this part of the book that’s made it stick around for me? is that no matter how I’ve appreciated it at any point, and no matter which parts of it have been the most important to me at any given moment, and no matter WHY it’s fucked me up — it’s still fucked me up so hard every. singled. fucking. time…… but in a way that has always made me feel a lot less alone in the world

It’s sort of similar to something that one of my fiction profs in undergrad once said about creating characters: we were talking, in one of our biweekly one-on-ones, about a story I’d brought in with one of my more off-putting characters (his name is Emerson, he’s an abrasive little shit who does a lot of very fucked up things and was kind of influenced by the Kurt/Karofsky plot back in season two of Glee because that was happening on TV at the time and I had a lot of feelings about it that I didn’t have any other way to deal with because I didn’t want to write Glee fic about all of it. He was more similar to Karofsky than Kurt)

I was convinced that everyone would hate him (not least because he an asshole to basically all of the other characters and assaulted the guy he had a crush on while he was high). Instead, he was actually really popular and one of my classmates, who I admired because her writing was so lyrical and confident and she was a great person, said that she found herself identifying with him, especially during some of his worst moments in that draft. While I was boggling about this, Professor Lucy said that one of the reasons why Emerson went over so gangbusters in workshop was that, instead of going the route of creating a tabula rasa character like Stephenie Meyer wrote Bella Swan to be, I’d given him so many clearly defined character traits and behaviors

According to Professor Lucy, the specificity is what makes it easier for people to identify with characters and feel for them, because it makes them more fully realized. (The, “according to” is just for the sake of attribution because this is a point that I’ve taken to heart and that I do totally agree with Professor Lucy about.) And I feel that a lot with the Augusten/Pighead part of the book because it’s so specific and it’s so grounded and it’s so REAL

And that’s a huge part of why it’s always gotten to me emotionally, and why it’s stuck with me after all this time, and why it’s consistently made me feel less alone and irreparably freakishly weird

Anyway, this got way longer than I intended to get, but the ability to affect someone so deeply with your work — that’s a responsibility that I take very seriously when it comes to writing, with regard to all different aspects of how you can possibly do this with the written word — and this part of Dry is such a source of motivation for me because it’s such a great example, for me, of How To Do An Emotionally Affecting Writer Thingy Well

I use technical language like this because I am such a Serious Business Writer, oh yes I am

47. how many unfinished ideas/stories are you working on at the same time?

I usually don’t count, because it’s usually a lot and not all of them are really guaranteed to ever be properly finished, oops.