#A WHOLE NANOWRIMO. IN A FUCKING WEEK.

[rubberduckyrye]

I need you all to understand that:

WaveMaker is an awesome program and it actually shows you how many words you've written in a day! Please check it out I'm in love with it. Also here is my Tutorial on how to manually sync up your files so you can write your projects on any device. It also copies and pastes well into Gdocs and LibreOffice. No I will not shut up about how cool this online program thing is.

It has only been March 30th for about 5 hours and I've already written almost 3k words.

Have I--Have I found the insanity again? Can I write 12k words in a single day???? I'm almost a 4th of the way there--

[suzukiblu]

Day fifteen of fic NaNoWriMo; obligatory sugar daddy Tim/sugar baby Kon AU.

Kon grins wider, then holds his cup out to him. Specifically, he tilts it so Tim can take a sip instead of just giving it to him. 

Bastard. Bastard-coated bastard with bastard-flavored nougat-y filling and a bastardly ganache coating and bastard sprinkles on top. 

Bastard. 

Tim thinks several more accusing things, then leans over and tries the smoothie. It does taste pretty good, though it’s a little too sweet for him to want to drink the whole cup. Blackberry is definitely more his thing. 

“Not bad,” he says anyway, because it’s not and also goddammit, Kon is still grinning at him. Because again: bastard. Absolute full and complete and entire bastard. 

“Yeah, for the East Coast, at least,” Kon replies with an easy shrug, reclaiming his cup for another sip. Tim does not think about indirect kissing or anything that ridiculously juvenile and middle-school. Not at all. Not even slightly, in fact. “I dunno, the whole thing just reminds me, um . . . like, I didn’t really do the whole ‘childhood’ thing, obviously, but you know that thing where people talk about extra-liking stuff they used to eat when they were kids? Tropical flavors kinda make me feel like that. Comfort food or whatever. I mean, it’s not Loco Moco or musubi, obviously, but . . .” 

Tim blinks, makes a few mental notes, and wonders if there’s a single actually authentic Hawaiian restaurant in Gotham. Maybe? There’s got to be at least a decent food truck or two around, if nothing else. There’s always a food truck. 

He could probably bribe one to come into the city for a day or two, if it comes to it. 

“That makes sense,” he says, since technically Kon’s childhood pretty much was in Hawaii. He refuses to count the stupid fucking cloning tube, because counting the stupid fucking cloning tube is literally too depressing a thought to even contemplate. Fuck the stupid fucking cloning tube. Fuck it sideways. 

Maybe Tim can just bribe a Hawaiian food truck to set up in Kon’s future cul-de-sac once a week or something, once he's conned him into moving into it. Just include it in their usual schedule or something, he doesn’t know. Or at least drop off a regular lunch order for him, maybe. 

Whatever, he’ll work something out. He’s going to be working a lot of things out, at this point; hooking Kon up with a regular supply of his childhood comfort foods is not even an imposition. He doesn’t even know what either Loco Moco or musubi is, but he’ll put them on the list and do his damn research. He'll go to Hawaii and hire a personal chef straight from the source if he has to, at this point. 

“Can I try yours?” Kon asks, grin going sly again. Tim’s head immediately empties out all over again, and he mutely holds his cup out. Kon’s grin widens. 

He leans in and ducks his head and Tim has to deal with how long his eyelashes are and just how pretty his stupid face is and, worse, how pretty his stupid mouth is. 

Fuck’s sake, this is just not fair at all. He knows Kon’s a flirt, obviously, but does he have to actually be good at it? Because Tim is not used to him being good at it, actually! Usually he’s being overbearing and too-eager and weird about it, in fact! 

Tim has the unfortunate thought that maybe Kon always flirts like this and he’s just not seeing it as overbearing or too-eager or weird because it’s focused on him for once, then immediately dismisses said thought as a thought he absolutely cannot allow himself to ever have again. Just–ever. Not for anything. 

Jesus, what is his fucking life right now? 

Kon leans back; licks his lips. Tim dies, kind of. Like, just a little bit. 

Alright, maybe more than a little bit. 

“I like it,” Kon says, grinning at him. Tim tries not to think about how intimately he now knows how Kon’s mouth would taste right now, sharply sweet-sour with blackberry and tropical fruit and all warm and soft and wet and–never mind.

“Want a pretzel too?” he offers in a hopefully normal voice, tipping his head towards the stand. 

“Sure,” Kon says, glancing towards it. “Sounds good, man.” 

“Cool,” Tim says, incredibly awkwardly, and they head over. He orders a regular pretzel because he doesn't know Caroline Hill's pretzel order anymore than he knows her smoothie order, but “regular” isn't going to be interesting enough for Kon to make a note of either way. Possibly he should just be ordering things Tim Drake would, but the flaw in that plan is that Tim Drake isn't thinking very clearly right now and it is currently much, much easier to be in mission-mode than anything else. 

Kon orders a cinnamon-sugar pretzel. Tim wishes the bastard would stop eating things that taste good, but also recognizes that it’s his fault that the bastard's been eating things that taste good. He’s literally the one both suggesting and buying said things for him. 

So Kon’s mouth is about to taste like cinnamon sugar right now because of Tim, which is actually making the fact that Kon’s mouth is about to taste like cinnamon sugar right now infinitely worse. 

Tim pays. They get the pretzels. Kon immediately tears off a bite of his and Tim wishes he had a cover identity that didn't like cinnamon, or at least was allergic to it or diabetic or gluten-intolerant or something. He could use a cover identity like that to fall back on right now. 

“Wanna bite?” Kon offers. 

“I'm good,” Tim says, because he will literally die if he takes him up on that offer right now. Or possibly go criminally insane like fifteen years ahead of schedule, which would be its own problem. He doesn't have enough kryptonite for that yet. “You like it?” 

He doesn’t know why he asked that. Apparently he’s just a glutton for punishment. 

“Yeah,” Kon says, licking sugar off his lips. “It’s good.” 

“Good,” Tim says, then desperately flails for a subject that doesn’t involve the way anything currently in Kon’s mouth tastes. “Do you have a personal phone or just a work one?” 

“Just work, technically. And then, like, I get issued communicators when I need them,” Kon replies, looking puzzled. “Why?” 

Because Cadmus could very easily track and tap and block whatever numbers they wanted on that, Tim doesn’t say. 

“I’m trying to get your number and I don’t want to call you on your work phone,” he says. “That seems weird.” 

“You a little on the shy side, pretty boy?” Kon asks teasingly, flashing him a smirk. Tim does not examine anything about that statement or his own feelings about it. He also does not think about what Kon’s mouth tastes like, though Kon makes that incredibly difficult by immediately taking another bite of pretzel. 

Has Tim mentioned what a bastard he is yet? Because he is a bastard.

“I’m buying you a phone,” he says, deciding if he just acts like it’s a foregone conclusion and some small little thing, Kon’s likelier to not reject the offer. “I cannot mentally deal with the idea of your boss seeing what I text you about on some random weekly report.” 

“You can’t, huh,” Kon says, biting his lip around a grin and shifting in a little bit closer. “Why, Tim? What are you gonna text me about?” 

Tim realizes how that might’ve sounded much too late, but by then it’s too late to rephrase or backtrack, so fuck it: time to commit. 

“Depends on what you text back, I guess,” he says. Kon laughs, then grins at him again. His face is a little red again too. Tim is resigned to having to survive the experience. 

“Well, I guess you’d have my number if you got me a phone, huh,” Kon says. 

“I would, yes,” Tim says. He’s going to have to resist asking Kon to turn on “find my phone”, probably. Or adding any trackers or bugs to it. It’s the Bat instinct, but it’d probably creep Kon out if he caught a “civilian” doing anything like that. And also definitely concern him, what with the “supervillain creep” concerns he was already having. And Tim would have a really hard time paying for Kon’s entire life if Kon decided he was a supervillain before he’s even become a supervillain, so he’d prefer to avoid that outcome. 

He guesses Caroline Hill could give it a shot if Tim Drake can’t pull it off, though. She’d still probably have better chances than him anyway, given Kon’s usual taste in people. 

They eat their pretzels on the way to the electronics store and Tim tries to plot how to convince Kon to let him get him the best possible phone but is incredibly, incredibly distracted by watching him lick cinnamon sugar off his fingers. Tim actually hasn’t seen Kon with his gloves off too many times, come to think of it. Or possibly, like . . . ever. Like, he might’ve actually never seen him with his gloves off before. 

Alright, well, that’s a thing that he hadn’t yet realized and is now going to be completely normal about. 

Definitely normal. Very, very normal. So normal. 

They toss out their empty pretzel wrappers outside the store and Kon licks a little more sugar off the pad of his thumb. Tim wonders if he has any callouses. Probably not, considering the TTK, but who knows. Maybe he trains with it down? Or maybe TTK just doesn’t protect his skin quite that thoroughly. Tim’s never actually seen him get cut or scratched or even bruised, though, so . . . maybe? 

He really has no idea, at this point. 

He supposes he could ask. Tim Drake’s already said he knew about tactile telekinesis and that he did some research, so . . . 

“Does TTK protect you from callouses?” he asks, gesturing at Kon’s hands with his smoothie and a little too curious to repress the question. Kon tilts his head and smirks at him again. 

“You tell me,” he says, then casually reaches over and catches Tim’s free hand in his own. 

Tim had thoughts in his head at some point today, he’s pretty sure, but hell if he knows what any of them were.

[electrospherevaults]

'ello everyone, today's a special day!

Back one year ago, and merely two weeks after I was done with the mandatory army conscription, I kept thinking about Defiler. This thinking led to some ideas on how to expand the world, especially coming off the heels of whatever the fuck being in the greek army was, and with friends explaining how much they loved the world and especially the faction of the Maidens of Wrethella, a warrior army in service of the King, I soon had a concept I wanted to explore.

Thusly, on August 26, 2023, at exactly four minutes past midnight, Maiden, the sequel novel to Defiler, was born.

HAPPY MAIDENVERSARY

Fair Lady Analussa of the Maidens of Wrethella, protagonist of MAIDEN Artwork courtesy @meer-draws

It's been a wild time since then, exactly one year ago now! Lots of things changed, lots of things improved; I know my characters better than ever before and the world they inhibit. Analussa grew from a simple character meant to inform the reader about Lionelli and her goals into her own fully realized character; her squad grew to include six more wonderful and superb lady maidens that are as badass as they are sweet. And at a current 97.5k words and 258 pages, I am inching closer to achieving the goal of finishing the sequel! It is still quite a long way to go - there are 41 planned chapters for it after all, and it would not be a Defiler sequel had it not posses some ambition of its own in what it is trying to do - but writing the story of Analussa and her squad as they survive the war-torn world of Tessereich has been a cathartic and healing experience for me; one that I hope I will get to share with you all soon enough)

Alongside the sequel, I have been continuously building the world of Defiler; its past, its present, its future, and how the cast of characters fit in the whole thing. Several of the short stories I have been writing earlier this year take place in the Tomorrow Galaxy where Defiler and Maiden takes place. Each one has been instrumental in figuring the world out, how it ticks, how it works, what it has to say. Most of all, this whole endeavour has helped me figure out Mallik the most, the protagonist of the first novel. She is especially dear to me - I wouldn't have so many artworks of her commissioned had she not been so instrumental in my growth as a writer and as a person - and it would be a severe understatement to say that her perseverance aided me to keep my chin up and continue unabated by difficulties and plights life threw my way. One day, I hope I can tell her story properly.

So what is next for the denizens of Tomorrow? Well, for now, my goal is to finish Maiden. Next goal is the to fix the draft of Defiler; that one will remain private unfortunately as I seek to get it published. I hope it will be fun to come back here and contrast the finished product with the first public draft made during its NaNoWriMo challenge phase. I also want to see if I can depict Defiler and the rest of the stories taking place in the Tomorrow galaxy in other mediums, such as animation and videogames - but that's a plan for later in the year, depending on how things pan out.

In any case, I want to thank y'all for reading, and I especially want to thank my friends, (like Babka, Beth, Gree, September, Sapphire, Chloe, Balkon, Aenore, Steph and Mirnos), for being instrumental in guiding me and believing in me throughout the way; from finishing Defiler, to reading it and critiquing it, and now traversing alongside me this wild new wider galaxy!

Thank you all kindly, and I promise you more news about Maiden in the coming months :D

In the meantime, you can read the first draft of the first novel, available for free, on here. (Analussa does appear in it, and her role, whilst small, is still quite important!)

[topazadine]

How to Build a Sustainable Writing Habit Through SCIENCE (Fuck Off, NaNoWriMo)

This is a lightly edited repost from a previous post on my mostly-defunct blog, topazadine.com. I feel like it's an excellent thing to highlight now that everyone's wondering what the hell do to after NaNoWriMo showed their ass as anti-creative idiots.

I have never liked NaNoWriMo and think, frankly, that it is a garbage tool for new writers. If you've done it and enjoyed it, that's great, but overall, it is not the best way to build motivation. At all.

But why is NaNoWriMo so bad? (Other than the current controversy.)

It encourages younger writers to think of writing as something they do during the months of October through November. Not something they do all year round, day in and day out. People will prep for weeks to do a whole novel in one month and hinge all their writerly hopes on that one singular month.

We won't even get into the fact that November is the absolute shittiest month to try to get a novel done because the holidays are coming up, and many working-class people are busting their asses off to get extra hours in before Christmas.

Writing is something you do all. the. time. It is not bound by a singular month. It is not limited to a certain time of year. And when you are working to complete a draft, it doesn't matter season it is. What matters is that you get it done.

So let me show you something better. But first, why should you listen to me? And why is my method an improvement over a shitty organization's AI-riddled contest?

I wrote the first draft of my novel, Poesy (104,323 words) in 39 days.

That’s an average of 2,647 words per day. It is also about twice as much as the typical person aims for during NaNoWriMo. I did not set out to get it done in any given time period, but I still completed way, way more than NaNoWriMo would require in just about the same amount of time (plus 9 days).

I didn't have a buddy group. I didn't have checkins. I just had me and my keyboard and my secret weapon, which I'll show you in a bit.

How is it possible to get so much more done without that external motivator?

Simple: I compete with myself.

You Need to Develop Intrinsic Motivation

What in the world is intrinsic motivation?

Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. When intrinsically motivated, a person is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather than because of external products, pressures, or rewards. Frontiers in Neurobiotics

That is, in essence, what we do when we’re writing for fun; or, rather, it should be what we’re doing when we write for fun.

A lack of intrinsic motivation is why people who see novels as a get-rich-quick scheme tend to burn out when they realize that most writers make less than minimum wage. That's called extrinsic motivation, and it doesn't work well for things like writing, where there may not be any easily-defined goals or motivators. Most of us are not going to become rich from our writing.

Here's why extrinsic motivation is unhelpful:

Extrinsic motivation does not always work best; sometimes it can make us perform poorly at certain tasks. For instance, studies reveal that high stake rewards, like cash bonuses, can hinder cognitive capacity. This happens because they shift our focus away from the task and onto the outcome. We can become preoccupied with rewards and all the things that come with them, such as our social status, instead of just doing the work. Extrinsic rewards also tend to narrow our focus on a defined goal and reduce our ability to see other possibilities, hindering creativity. Studies find people perform worse on tasks requiring imagination and ingenuity when they are offered extrinsic rewards, such as higher pay. Nir and Far

And, well, note that "performing worse on tasks requiring imagination and ingenuity." Extrinsic motivation is literally the WORST motivator for writing specifically.

NaNoWriMo is extrinsic motivation, which is not anywhere near as powerful or sustaining as intrinsic motivation. You want to get the shiny achievement award, so you just bang out 50,000 words of slop because you want to say you did it.

You're not motivated by anything but the outcome. That does not a sustainable writing practice make.

But there’s something about intrinsic motivation I want to highlight, because it’s crucial to what I am about to show you: the challenge.

Sometimes writing is a total slog because we’re worrying about all the other things and not on the words themselves. We’re fussing about whether we will ever get published, if we’ve added enough tension in a certain part, if our mom is going to read our porn and realize what a freak they raised.

You cannot think about those things while actively writing.

Instead, you need to focus on the writing process itself. John Schinnerer, a psychologist and life coach, explains further:

Remember as you are in the process of achieving your goals that the enjoyment comes from the doing not the attaining. It is important to find contentment in the act of pursuing the goal while placing less weight on the actual fulfillment of the goal itself.  PsychCentral

So we know you need to find the challenge fun, and you need to focus on the act of putting the words on the page.

In other words, you need to make it a contest with yourself. Here’s how.

Use a Word Count Spreadsheet

Finally! We get to why I’m telling you this! It's free, it's easy, it can be done all year round.

A daily word count spreadsheet is an amazing way to stay motivated and to keep pushing yourself to write because you can literally see the wins rack up. Every day, the word count jumps significantly, which can be much more motivating than just “oh, I’m at 8,453 words.”

More importantly, you’ll start to want to beat your “high score” from the day before.

I’ve highlighted one of the cells so that you can see the simple formula that you need to set up: it’s just yesterday’s count minus today’s count.

Put that in one cell, then click and drag the bottom righthand corner of the cell, and it will populate the rest of the cells in that column with the adjusted formula (B4-B3, and so on).

This is very easy to create. All you have to do is copy-paste the wordcount from your document into your spreadsheet, make sure you have that super-simple formula, and you're done. I have severe dyscalculia and can still use it.

But you can see how much this really helped me:

Things started to really ramp up right at the end because I was getting so motivated by the word counts of the day previous. I wanted to beat yesterday’s high score and keep going.

At the beginning, I was writing maybe 1.9k words; by the end, I was an absolute demon, regularly breaking over 2.8k and then some. On the last day, when the rest of the family was in a post-Christmas hangover, my butt was glued to my chair, banging out those last few thousand words.

Psychologists and life coaches agree that self-competition, a type of intrinsic motivation, is one of the best ways to improve.

Michelle Gibbings, a workplace expert, explains:

When you compete with yourself, you don’t become fixated on what other people are doing; you set the direction and speed. You put yourself in the driver’s seat and control your progress, setting meaningful goals rather than focusing on the progress of others. Michelle Gibbings

Making a word count spreadsheet like this is the definition of setting your own speed and controlling your progress. You can decide on a threshold you always want to hit and then feel very satisfied when you go beyond that.

I set my threshold at 1.5k words every day so that I didn’t feel bummed out when I had an off day and couldn’t get a lot done, but I really wanted my average to be around 2k, so I’d periodically check how close I was to that. If I had a terrible day or was busy, then I’d want to make up for lost time and write more the next day so I kept my average.

Now, I live a life that is quite advantageous to consistent writing: I’m single, I’m childless, I work from home, and most of my hobbies are pretty low-key.

Your life doesn’t look like mine, and that’s totally okay.

There’s no need to match the speed I showed here.

What matters is that your schedule works for you, and that you are consistent.

If you’re a caretaker or have a strenuous job, then set your threshold at just 100 words and aim for an average of 500. However, you’ll be sad if your spreadsheet has a blank cell, so you’ll want to get down at least something, even if you only have 15 minutes to write.

Plus, it’s so encouraging to see the word count go up day by day: much more satisfying than just seeing it in tiny font at the bottom of a Word document or Google Doc.

Or getting some dumb t-shirt from an organization that is actively trying to murder creativity for commercial gain. (Oh, and they protected an actual pedophile from consequences for months on end while he continued to groom children. But that was last year's controversy.)

There’s another reason why this particular method works so well for writers, though.

Word Counts Banish the Urge to Edit

You know you shouldn’t, but you do it anyway. A single word here. A removed sentence there.

The first draft is just about getting everything out, not fixing everything that needs fixing. That part comes later during your five billion revisions where you tweak every single word.

Revising means you have less to work with, which means you have less development. You can get rid of anything that shouldn’t be there when you’ve gotten to that very satisfying “The End” page.

If you are motivated by the spreadsheet method, then you are screwing yourself over if you edit.

Your word count went down! It looks like you did less than you did! You’re losing! Best add more, and fast!

(I had to include my placeholder chapter names; it was obligatory.)

Use strikethrough! Now you know exactly what you’ll be getting rid of when you get to the end of your draft, but you’re not decimating your word count. I removed the entire beginning of the book; that scene is super cute, though, so I later turned it into its own one-shot on my AO3 page.

I prefer doing that because then, if you find that you actually wanted to keep that scene or move it elsewhere, all you have to do is copy-paste from the old version, remove the strikethrough, and you’re all good.

So that’s my tool. It’s really that simple.

But even though it’s so simple, it works wonders for your motivation and consistency, which are crucial for a good writer.

Are you going to give it a whirl? You may find it nervewracking at first, but I encourage you to sample this method, especially if you have a hard time getting motivated.

And if you enjoyed this article, maybe you'll consider purchasing my debut novel, 9 Years Yearning.

This is not the book I drafted last year; it is in fact a prequel of sorts to that first novel. However, it helps set the scene for Poesy (the sixth book in the Eirenic Verses) so that you'll be all prepped for the masterpiece.

9 Years Yearning is a coming of age romance that follows the life of two young soldiers as they go from sorta-enemies, to frenemies, to friends, and then finally to lovers. It is a short read; you can probably finish it in about 2 hours all the way through. Perfect for a weekend romp.

If you do read my book, please don't forget to leave a review!

Reviews are essential to success on Amazon as they boost visibility. (Yes, even bad ones.) Always leave reviews, no matter how short, to support indie authors!

[sheliesshattered]

I'm probably really late to the party, but it's only just occurred to me that NaNoWriMo trying to defend the use of AI in writing because 'anti-AI stances are ableist' is just.

honestly.

the most ironic thing ever.

NaNoWriMo is and has always been ableist, just as a baseline concept. as a disabled person I have never been able to participate in NaNoWriMo and I will never be able to participate in NaNoWriMo.

my multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses prevent me from writing a novel in a month. it is just literally not physically possible for me. the one time I really tried, complete with multiple disability aids and a plan for pacing myself through the month and six weeks of prepping my physical health before November 1st, do you know what happened?

I had a chronic illness crash on November 3rd. literally three days into my plan to pace myself through NaNoWriMo. I didn't recover until roughly Christmas or New Years. I've never bothered to try again because of how badly I crashed. but it did teach me that I should never try to stick to schedules and deadlines made with able-bodied people in mind. a harsh lesson but one I needed to learn.

and asking ChatGPT to write my novel idea for me would not solve that problem. it would not result in a novel that I had written. it would not result in prose that sounds like me, that communicates the emotion behind the novel idea in a way that allows someone else to slip into my (chronically ill) shoes. it might be enough words to technically qualify as a novel, but it would not be my novel.

and to imply otherwise is to erase the lived experience of actual disabled people, while trying to cover up the inherent ableism of your 'write a whole-ass fucking novel in a single fucking month' event by calling people who value the art of writing ableist for opposing AI.

[nightimedreamersworld]

Wip Wednesday

Thank you for the tags today, lovelies @aroace-genderfluid-sheep and @forabeatofadrum your wips are so good ❤️

I've been a bit out of the loop for the past couple weeks, so still looking through past WIP posts I've missed, but everything rn is so good. I'm so excited to see what yall have come up with for podfest!

Right now, I'm still focused on my two wips for CORB (which starts in two weeks 😳). I admit I'm not as far along as I'd like on either fic, so I'm doing NaNoWriMo as a way to try and write as much as possible this month.

Here's a snippet of each, both Simon POV

Wip#1 (as of yet untitled, help):

“Do you believe in prophetic dreams?” I ask over a mouthful of scone.  This time, I ambush Penny during breakfast, no need to wait too long.  Her eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, I think so? Like, divination—”  “Is a whole science, as well as Oneiromancy, yeah, yeah.” Her frown deepens even more, and I push on. “But can you, like, predict the future through dreams?”  Penny chews, pensively. “It’s possible,” she finally says. “But it isn’t simple. Our dreams—”  “Can’t show us the whole truth, yeah, I know.” I pull at my hair; we’ve had this exact conversation before, haven’t we?  Penny crosses her arms. “Well, if you already know everything, then why are you asking me?”  “Forget it,” I mutter. “It’s just…”  Across the dining hall, I catch Baz looking at me, head cocked to the side. His hair is perfectly slicked back. It wasn’t like that before.  I look back at Penny. “I had a dream. About Baz.”  She rolls her eyes. “Don’t tell me about it. You know erotic dreams don’t necessarily reflect on people’s inner desire—”  “What?” I sputter. Erotic? Baz?

For wip#2, have a bit of Simon thirst:

I have no problem admitting Baz is fit as fuck; anyone with eyes can see that. Thing is, that just makes working with him even worse.  It should be a redeeming quality, but somehow Baz manages to weaponize his looks as well. He’s just better than everyone else, in every aspect, and he knows it. I can’t wait to find out all the ways he’ll rub his hotness in my face when we’re pressed up together, hanging by a strap God-knows-how-many feet above the ground.  I drag myself to the gym, already knowing he’ll be there. Silently taunting me.  He’s already up on his canes, one arm outstretched, the other one holding up the weight of his whole body. Both his legs are pointing to the right. His shirt is a light pink, almost sheer, dotted with a pattern of delicate flowers. It shows off the dark hair on his chest, and I have to make myself look away.  Most performers shave off—I don’t even need to, my body hair is just naturally sparse—but Baz never does. Maybe he thinks he’s better than the rest of us in that regard, too.  Like this, I can count all his ribs. His arse looks criminal. His movements look graceful and fucking ruthless at the same time.

Tagging a few friends: @artsyunderstudy @rimeswithpurple @cutestkilla @bookish-bogwitch @facewithoutheart @alexalexinii @j-nipper-95 (see above: the fruits of our sprints lol) @valeffelees @prettygoododds @captain-aralias @letraspal @hushed-chorus @you-remind-me-of-the-babe @confused-bi-queer @whogaveyoupermission @larkral @iamamythologicalcreature @whatevertheweather @stitchyqueer @martsonmars @aristocratic-otter @blackberrysummerblog and anyone else who'd like to join!

[thisapplepielife]

NaNoWriMo 2023 - Week #1

So far so good! I'm 27.86% finished, and I've hit my 1,667 word goal each day. Though, some of those have been much harder to do that for than others, that's for damn sure. Today was fine, yesterday was great, but Saturday and Sunday were both slogs. (I think I was just in Wildflowers mode and couldn't switch directions easily.)

But it's coming along and I hope this month helps me get this Steddie fic into something that I think is worth sharing.

And for a little (unedited) Steddie snippet:

It's sprinkling when they leave the bar, but it's a warm rain, so it's not all that uncomfortable. "You just want to walk back?" Eddie asks, and Steve nods. Walking is fine with him, it's not that far back to the house, and a little rain won't kill them. So, they walk a few blocks, talking, laughing, just a little bit tipsy, until the sky suddenly opens. They start running, giggling the whole way, and as soon as he sees the opportunity, Steve pulls Eddie into an alleyway. He crowds him under an awning, trying to help get him out of the pouring rain. Eddie laughs, tossing his wet hair back, and Steve thinks he's beautiful. So, he reaches forward and tucks a strand of Eddie's wet hair behind his ear. Brushing his thumb against Eddie's cheek, and it makes Eddie smile at him, shyly. It's endearing, and fucking sweet, and Steve wants more.  So much more.

That's all I've got, since I'm not quite ready to give away any of the actual plot. Secretive writers be secretive. We don't know any other way. 🤣

Now, I'll see what the next week brings, but as of right now, I'm on track! ❤️

[diggingupgrave]

Magnificently Cursed... the blog post ✨

🕰🍂🕯🌿📔🧣🌙

My writing log says it’s been exactly a year since I started writing Magnificently Cursed, my Dark Academia Inuokko Magic School AU! I find summer to be insufferable (my apologies to the sun) so I took an escape hatch to an early fall last year and immediately fell down this massive rabbit hole. Not only did I write the whole fic and make overly-intricate graphics for each chapter… I also made a ton of other content that I simply didn’t have enough time to post! (Fall is but one season… unless you’re me, and it’s two, because fuck summer) So as a little anniversary gift to me, I’m going back through the archives and finally putting everything in one place. 

Let’s start with the character mood boards, shall we? 

Toge Inumaki: 

I wanted Toge to have an earthy/natural, vintage-y feel, while Yuuta was all sleek and new. I’m still completely obsessed with this library-lizard aesthetic for Toge.

I low-key wound up buying a brown sweater after searching online for literal hours just like the one in the upper left so we could twin. That duffle coat still has my whole heart. Lavender mug inspired by Neara 🥺

Yuuta Okkotsu:

The lil ghostie patch 😭 I still think Yuuta would look hot as hell in all these clothes- especially the speckle-y fisherman sweater. Coat game is strong here as well. 

... so is it obvious that I spend too much time on Canva yet? 😅

The Timeline: 

My outline wasn’t outlining and I resorted to making an in-world calendar to make sure the dates were realistic. Each chapter is a different color, and the lines represent what days the chapters covered in-world. The corresponding stars represented each chapter’s posting dates… except the real life dates didn’t line up with the fictional dates (rude), so those thursdays were actually saturdays? I think? I'm actually not 100% sure what past me was up to here, to be totally honest 😅

(also, politely ignore that bit that says “epilogue - december” 💀i’ll get to it when i get to it. I don’t really like the idea of it being *over* so maybe i'll just gatekeep that bit forever)

⬆️ Example of aforementioned “outlining,” which, yes, is unfortunately littered with as many potential tweets as actual organization 💀

Not pictured: the outline for the first three chapters… when i thought this fic… would only *be* three chapters. 🪦

Writing Log:

I wrote all 92k between July 13th and September 13th (including 60k in August, nanowrimo style)!

Honestly would love to know what her regimen was because i immediately went back to being slow and undisciplined. I don’t foresee this coming august looking anything like this, lol.

Also, sidenote, hilarious that I took a break to work on it would make a whole in the middle of this? Because I literally just finished that piece this week and posted it today 😅

The Playlist:

Spotify proving that July 13th commitment! If you start a wip without procrastinating and making a playlist for two hours first... did you really start a new wip?

The playlist was three and a half hours and i would listen to it nearly every day, sometimes multiple times in a day 💀. Listen during a rainstorm for peak vibes.

(other favs not pictured: The Butterflly Effect’s cover of “Lay All Your Love on Me,” Sabrina Carpenter’s “Decode,” Liz Longley’s “Rescue My Heart,” and "Nothing's Gonna Happen" by The Staves) 

Bonus:

(fall baking... toge's fav pumpkin muffins of course)

(my toge sweater knockoff)

(editing buddy... clearly working very hard)

(cider donut cider... for the ✨vibes✨)

(obsessively drinking massive pots of harney and son’s victorian london fog tea as i tried to interpret my own bullshit)

(me celebrating actual halloween like i didn't start in july)

.... ANYWAY (if you made it this far 😅) many thanks to anyone who read/kudos/commented/supported this fic, because (if you can't tell already) i had so much fun writing it.

Currently, working on another longfic rn that's also promising to destroy my life... but you never forget your first 😘

[trashquisitor-shirozora]

Post I wanted to make, several days late because living is fucking exhausting:

Finally finished the 2nd of the 2 chapters I was rewriting for this year's NaNoWriMo. I thought I would make it 3 chapters? But these 2 chapters required a LOT of reworking and also there were days where I was spitting out less than 200 words while falling asleep on the keyboard, so it's just 2 chapters at 46k words that need a LOT of cutting up and reorganizing because these are extremely ugly rambly chapters and also I am not posting 23k chapter updates omigod I'm not insane enough for that.

But the goal is to finish the 2nd revision/3rd version of the next chapter of The Stars by the 17th so that I have a whole week to juggle work, holiday shopping and gifting, and doing the two illustrations so that i can maybe hopefully post the next chapter on the 25th. Or the 26th? Either day should be a good day to post as long as I stay on task and not get horribly derailed. Worst comes to worst, I post on New Year's Eve.

AND THEN.

I redraw the Grogu baby crimes charm because I've decided to go with a more animated/chibi art style for the merch. This shit is so different from prints and sketchadoodles and I want my stuff to read well in different mediums. I also want to add more merch. I got so fucking inspired by the Artists' Alley at LA Comic Con and want to design more dinluke stickers. We need more dinluke stickers. I will make more dinluke stickers. This could be a monthlong thing.

Then, I guess we look into getting the pop-up shop up and running for preorders. And also look into creating some dinluke-y embroidered patches maybe? This is for selfish reasons - I want to make a modified Mando cosplay where I dress up as Sweater Weather Din Djarin for 2024's LA Comic Con, and this involves getting a jacket and slapping a bunch of Mando/Star Wars patches on it. Would be cool if I could stick on a dinluke patch maybe. And if it all goes well? I could make it a merch option for the pop-up shop.

That's some ambitious shit. Now let's see if this undiagnosed adhd brain can actually stick to the plan.

[the-wip-project]

The WIP Project - mindset

Hello writerly friends!

Have you ever heard about how everything you're trying to accomplish is a matter of your mindset? Does that expression piss you off just like me? You know what's worse? It's actually true. 

For the last week, I worked on my fucking mindset in regards to writing. Frankly, if I treat something as the occasional hobby, that's what it's going to be. If I want to be serious about writing, I have to make the time for it. Because that's what it all comes down to, right?

Time.

It takes time to put the words on the page, there is just no way around that.

I know, some people make schedules. That's some kind of ancient magic which requires discipline. Not my kind of magic. But I can make myself promise to write at least 400 words every day, possibly increasing that up to the illustrious 960 words per day that I started a whole blog for, back in the day. I can't say that I'll write at 18:00 every day, but I can say that I'll write after work for an hour, no matter what time it is. Or half an hour before I go to bed. Just at some point. 

As the numbers show, I have not been entirely successful with this approach for the first two weeks. Establishing this needs time, again.

How do you all fit writing into your life? Do you have schedules? Goals you set? Does something like Camp NaNoWriMo help with that? Did you work on your mindset?

--

@quilleth, @theoriginalladya, @kmlaney, @coffeewritesfiction, @mareebrittenford, @lilliebellfanfics, @keyboardandquill, @fontainebleau22, @kinetic-elaboration, @wildswrites, @rhikasa, @inkvulture, @heroofshield, @bad-at-names-and-faces, @sabels-small-sphere, @annaofthenorthernlights, @sarahawke

[sarandipitywrites]

saran's year of writing (2023)

hey y'all! saw a couple posts like this floating around and thought i'd hop on the train, because this year has been WILD for my writing (in a really good way). let's start with the bullet points version and i'll put the details under the cut. here we go:

I JOINED WRITEBLR

shared snippets of my work with other, actual humans!

made friends?!

started (and finished!) draft 2 of Dead Roots, Dark Water

wrote 1 short story for every week in october (that's 5 stories in a month! that's great for me!)

first NaNoWriMo in 10 years (and i finished it!)

drafted and re-drafted The Art of Empty Space

started draft 3 of Dead Roots, Dark Water

details, links to projects, me getting maybe a tad too personal, and those all-important wordcounts under the cut:

I JOINED WRITEBLR

i just realized i only started participating at the beginning of october, but it feels like i've been hanging out with you all the whole year 😅 maybe that means i should cut back a bit? nah...

really though, this year was the year i started taking my writing more seriously (not in a 'gotta get published' kind of way, but in a 'writing makes me happier than anything else and that's enough reason to set aside time and energy for it without feeling hella guilty' kind of way) and seeing you all posting your work and being so positive and encouraging to each other was what helped me get up the nerve to join in. and i can say without a doubt that it's the best choice i've made all year. y'all are such a supportive community and i've never once felt like i was encroaching or didn't belong here (and for me, that's really saying something)

so i guess what i'm getting at is: THANK YOU! i've loved reading your snippets and projects this year, and i'm way more confident in my own than i've ever been 💜 y'all are good peeps

Dead Roots, Dark Water

word count (edited and written): 187,789

that's a lotta words! DRDW is both my longest work wordcount-wise, and the work i've dedicated the most time to... probably ever. and i'm SO happy with it, it's a little concerning (/positive)

DRDW is now on its THIRD draft, and (assuming i don't do a massive re-edit) should be ready to start posting in 2024! *excited screaming* i've never released anything i've written in its entirety (the snippets i've been posting are actually a lot more than i've ever shared before), so this is MASSIVE for me and i'm both excited and terrified! overall, though, it's a very, very good thing

Short Stories

this october, i decided to challenge myself to do several things i don't ever do: write short stories; write them on a timeline; and share them. and i did! i wrote one short story for each week in october, and posted them here. they're far from my best work, and due to the timeline, they never could have been my best, which oddly i think helped make it easier to post them? they were also the first pieces i shared here (or anywhere)! they're not awesome, but i'm proud of them and i'm proud of myself for sharing them

NaNoWriMo and The Art of Empty Space

i've done nano once before, ten years ago. i was in college and had a lot more time then (and a job where i could spend the entire day just writing - i didn't know how good i had it), and even so i remember struggling to reach my word goal. but by the power of writing everything in wingdings so i can't second-guess my word choices, i made it this year! and even though i decided to challenge myself by writing a romance-heavy project (something i've historically avoided because IT'S HARD FOR ME, DAMNIT), i love AES and its characters and that feels fucking awesome.

even though my brain decided to spring a surprise plot restructure on me and now i have to rewrite like half of it. it'll be better for it, though, so it's all good 🥲

What's Next?

my plan for early 2024 is, of course, going to be to work on draft 3 of DRDW with the hope of getting some chapters posted (they are LONG, so i'll probably post to tumblr in chunks and the full, unbroken chapters on Ao3 due to formatting). once that's ready, i'll be able to return my attention to AES and getting draft 1.5 all written up. i've mostly figured out where the plot's going there, so it'll just be writing it up to figure out the gaps. if i'm able to write something for november again next year (which i really hope i will; nano did some great things for AES), it'll probably be one of the other Jak & Daxter fics i have kicking around in my head, because i am Obsessed (and switching it up between working on fanfic and original fic seems to work well for my brain).

i've been not super active here for the last month or so because Real Life Work is kicking my ass, but hopefully that will calm down and i'll be able to do more of what i want: writing wild shit, reading your wild shit, and screaming about it together 💜

good vibes and best wishes to everybody in the new year 🥂

[tokkiasnanowrimo]

nano | day 16

words: 1,779/1,667

notes: if i started a habit of writing early yesterday, i immediately broke it today. i stayed up so late writing to make up which i hope is understandable in the light of finding out my mum has cancer. again. the writers curse strikes me again, i cannot catch a fucking break. alas if i could write through her having cancer the first time and i could write through my dad having cancer last year, i can do it a third time. i very much considered just not writing today but emma reminded me that if i didn't get all the badges on the nanowrimo website by the end of this i would be annoyed with myself and she's right so i kept writing all the way up until 11:45pm to prevent this from becoming my super lame bummer personal diary i'm going to actually talk about what i worked on today. it was a lot of jumping between stuff (as it always is with me) but i decided i sorta needed to hunker down and write the wedding part of the fic because that's like chapter 2 and the whole set up to the rest of the fake dating. the reason i haven't been working on it is just because i've been dreading it honestly. so far it feels kind of boring but i managed to put together a really cute little dance scene that i'm pretty happy with and i hope you guys will like it just as much as i do aside from that, today was a lot of just sort of adding more substance to stuff that i already had. i've been feeling like i'm not making a lot of progress lately but i'm reminding myself that even if i only write 50 words on one scene, that is still 50 words i won't have to write later anyway. thank you everyone for your support on this project. it's been really hard on me and considering everything that's going on, quitting has been veeeerrrryyy tempting but right now i'm determined to see it through, if not for everyone who has said they're looking forward to reading it, then to prove to myself that i can. we were talking in the aan server about binding fics and i think getting this finishing and binding it into a physical copy would be a really good motivator for me. maybe i'll even do a giveaway or something with it. hopefully the only thing that will keep me from finishing nanowrimo is breaking all the bones in my hands, or dying, both of which i have gone 21 years without doing so i think i can go another 2 weeks

quote: as an apology for my long ass rant and for forgetting to put in a quote yesterday, take this whole ass except for today Couples filled the dance floor and Lucy simply sat and watched, her finger running around the rim of her champagne flute as she quietly yearned to be one of those happy couples. She glanced up at Natsu and realised that maybe for once she wasn’t just relegated to yearning. “We should dance,” she said suddenly. “Don’t wanna,” he drawled. “Why not?” “I don’t know how to dance,” Natsu simply shrugged. “You said you wanted me to be your girlfriend, the least you can do is dance with me,” she scolded, but Natsu seemed to remain unphased. “Fine, I’ll go find someone else,” she huffed. “I’m sure there’s a nice man here who will want to dance with me.” “No, no, don’t do that,” Natsu immediately backtracked. “I’ll dance with you.” It had been an empty threat—she had no real intention of finding someone else, but it seemed that Natsu had not quite seen through that and her plan had worked a charm. Grabbing his hand, Lucy led him into the fray of things.

total word count: 30,056/50,000

[cee-grice]

nanowrimo week 3 update~

ok good week!! finished it with just over 45k, so I'm gonna reach 50k in a couple of days:D that won't be the end for me, though, as I still have 4 chapters to get through. but I do think I definitely will before november ends, so that's niceee

anyway, I've been feeling good about this whole thing, which is relieving lol. very, very excited to get this done by january and send it off to betas. fingers crossed that'll go well!! I need someone else to Understand. you know

anyway snippet from this week:

Glass, glass, glass. Quil loved to play around with it. He’d told Endra how to manipulate it countless of times. He could almost hear him, in lecture-mode, going on about molecules and atomic numbers and whatever else. Now, he wished he’d spent less time swooning and more time listening. Glass. Oxygen was definitely involved. Silicon, too. Quartz? Maybe. Carbon? Nitrogen? No, fuck. Like that, he trickled magic into it, trying out whatever combinations he could think of one by one. The process was frustration and made him want to curse out this branch of magic all over again. How was Quil able to do this with a million different things without even thinking about it?

[freesidexjunkie]

I want to know more about First Light and the Nathaniel Howe x Cousland fics please!

!!! Bestie you've made my whole morning asking about Nathaniel Howe. I love him dearly and I never get to be feral about him enough 🥺

I'm gonna start with First Light to be in order. First of all, I never looked twice at Rolan til adorabLE fics and characters for him like JUNIPER(!!) started popping up on my dash so thank you for helping indoctrinate me, 10/10 having a great time 💕 I originally wanted to write a scattered Rolanmance story of disconnected chronological scenes to build their story for Nanowrimo, and I had the whole fic plotted out and worked on by late October before school spiraled out of control and the burnout made me think all my words were garbage. The bulk of the story is slotted for act 3 scenes, but I've got a few scenes for act 2 that may or may not have varying levels of spice (we'll see what the characters feel up to ig). I see act 2 as them being relieved to find the other alive and very much getting closer to each other, but terrified to put a name on it in case the worst happens. "Yeah we are inseparable and glued together and if anything happened to him I'd probably lose every last strand of my mind but it's like. lol probably nothing serious right?" Act 3 feels more like finally being able to settle into each other without as much constantly worrying about if they'll even survive this. It's the end of the road for Rolan and it's the most stability Rhiannon has had for weeks, so now's as good a time as any to pursue a real relationship rather than stolen moments. I have plans for them to both awkwardly dance around the topic and hope the other will bring it up first; also for lots of cute teasing, some sibling antics etc. I'm super excited to get into it, but I feel like the Veilguard announcements are making me give myself a deadline for the Solavellan fic first. It's already got a whole notebook dedicated to it tho and plenty written down, so it won't get lost in the shuffle, I promise!!

And for Nathaniel....my sweet precious baby boy who I fell in love with at first sight.... my first DAO playthru ever was human noble, and I was faithfully married to the king of Fereldan but enemies to lovers has been my kryptonite since Jane Austen first got her hooks into me with P&P. I've put a lot of thought into the Cousland I would pair with him. I think the age gap between them in canon is about ~10 years, but fuck it we snip and shape canon to our own whims. Elissa Cousland (I really like the default name and I won't apologize) ~21 and Nathaniel around ~28. The Howes and the Couslands were already very familiar with each other, so Elissa and Delilah (Nate's sister) were inseparable best friends growing up. Elissa very much had a childhood crush on Nathaniel, in the "younger sister's annoying friend" kind of way that was absolutely not reciprocated. When Arl Howe says in the intro "my son was asking about you" she definitely gets major butterflies until she realizes he means Thomas. She definitely asks about Nathaniel but Bryce diplomatically shoos her away since the whole uh. Disowned and cast out thing. Not knowing how much the rest of the family is involved in Howe's betrayal and not being able to reach out to them at all really hurts her. In Awakening she's definitely intimately familiar with the castle as she grew up as a semi permanent fixture there. She doesn't hear much about the rest of the family other than that Thomas died in the blight; she's holding out hope for Delilah and Nathaniel tho. When he shows up spitting venom and letting her know in no uncertain terms that he blames her for everything.....it hurts ngl. But she conscripts him because she cannot be the person to condemn him to death. She absolutely cannot.

From there, finding Delilah alive is kinda the turning point in his anger and hatred. "You better be nice to my best friend" and "so. She's still making puppy dog eyes at you huh." Kinda thing. I have a plan for going to visit Castle Highever to fix a problem and Elissa standing up for him to Fergus, etc etc. I have so many scenes planned that are heavily enemies to lovers and heavily comfort/angst kinda stuff. I swear I'll write it one day. Thank you for letting me ramble about him tho, I owe you a life debt 🥺🥺

[lawtism]

tag game: 9 people you'd like to get to know better

hehe thank you @dykelawlight for tagging me!!

Last Song: wonderful life - two door cinema club

2. Currently Watching: scott pilgrim takes off (SO FUCKING GOOD I WANNA CHEW ON IT)

3. Three Ships: lawlight / mikalight / nearlymellodramattic (ive been really loving this as a poly ship)

4. Favorite Color: forest green

5. Currently Consuming: pizza rolls with ranch prepared by my darling culinary genius wife

6. First Ship: hmm it’s hard to say whether i remember my very first ship!! i think the earliest ship i remember seeking out fanworks for was tadase/amu from shugo chara. i was team tadamu all the way babey.

7. Relationship Status: i’m married!!

8. Last Movie: i saw the five nights at freddy’s movie and it rekindled my hyperfixation on the whole franchise…

9. Currently working on: nothing atm! i’m taking a 2-week break from all creative work since writing for nanowrimo while editing/publishing the chapters i’ve finished that month had taken a bit of a toll of me (no regrets though). although i guess i am technically working on prepping for an audition for a heathers musical production at a community theatre nearby

tagging @dogboy-touta-matsuda @garfunklefield @muttyagami @brothercrush @dominote @iknowwhereyousleepatnight @natkinslight @diabolicdetective @frootloopsl

[sleepydrabbles]

My frustration with most criticism leveled at manga artists and authors is that people end up addressing symptoms and not causes.

When I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a manga artist. Part of this particular fixation meant reading a lot of manga and trying to imitate the styles— something you can still see in my art. I came across a manga called Bakuman that I would really recommend, because it gave me a better understanding of why manga has a bigger tendency to have huge plot holes, fucked up character development, and flat characters when compared to, say… published novels. I’ll need to dig it up sometime so I can show y’all specific stuff but for now I’ll work from memory… I need to get these thoughts down.

Most manga are published through weekly magazines, and the artists are expected to come up with a chapter a week. I’ve seen some shifts lately due to the work-related stress and injuries that have abounded as a consequence but that is where things started, and that meant manga artists had to come up with SOMETHING on a schedule, no matter how good or bad it was. (So yeah, that terrible pandering filler chapter/arc was probably a mangaka with a hell of a block.)

Then, within the magazine, there are frequent checks and polls to measure popularity— if a manga isn’t popular enough, it gets cut, whether or not it was finished. (Yeah, that manga you loved that had a really sudden and terrible ending? Probably more niche than you realized.)

Contrast this with traditional publishing (as I saw someone here doing, comparing Harry Potter to My Hero Academia): authors take years to write, and then they have to find an editor, and even if the whole story is published in segments they have at least a year between those segments to plan, write, and edit. NaNoWriMo winners have demonstrated that the writing phase can be finished in a month or two— the rest of the effort goes to editing.

Manga artists have an editor, sure, but that editor is on the same deadline. Worst-case scenario they get a day or two to read over the chapter.

Novels also tend to remain popular enough not to have to deal with getting cut— and most novelists will just finish in self-publishing if their publisher decides to terminate their contract. Manga artists simply move to the next idea, from what I’ve seen.

This leads to a system where, I kid you not, most artists are just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. They get an idea, it gets dashed out, and then they see what happens. I can’t tell you how many artists I’ve seen express genuine surprise at the popularity of their ideas, and I think it’s just because that idea was one in maybe five or six that got submitted to the magazine that round. They have to figure it out as they go, and what does that mean? Plot holes.

And if a manga is popular enough, the expectation is that the manga artist will continue to make it… and make it… and make it. My dad joked once that you’ll always find another villain behind the latest big bad with these types of series, because the goal is not to create a cohesive story but to maintain audience attention as long as possible. My Hero may be in the middle of a final battle, but who knows whether AFO will actually turn out to be the ultimate villain— while Voldemort was clearly the problem and remained the problem for the entire Harry Potter series. (I’m working with the comparison I saw— I have some personal issues with JKR as an artist and a person that I won’t get into here.)

You see where I’m going with this, right? I sure hope so.

Learning that, as a manga artist, I would be expected to continue creating what gets popular no matter how I felt about it— that was what tanked my desire to become a manga artist. And I love manga to death, but I’ve also learned not to expect much of it because the system itself is designed in such a way that only the most batshit insane series with wild twists and turns and crazy unrealistic characters will succeed. Think about Naruto, Bleach, My Hero, ONE PIECE, etc. it’s a miracle there’s a plot line there at all.

Unfortunately, some people hold these manga to the same standard as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Steelheart, Mistborn, etc. And as long as they do so, they’re going to be disappointed, because the manga publishing world is basically a reflection of the internet influencer world— “create till you drop and everyone forgets your name” is the goal of the game. Until we see some kickback against that system, you’re not going to see well-developed manga that are also popular.

If you do find one, congratulations! Cherish it. The mangaka probably had to kick a few shins to keep it true to their vision.