#Anyway I found an old copy of a fanfic I wrote ages ago

[tinkertechy]

Do you ever think about the pieces of You

Scattered across 8GB Flash drives, dropboxes, old school emails? Bits and fragments of school assignments, poetry, notes?

Dashed out phone numbers and recipes on scrap paper in the kitchen?

Doodles and smiley faces in the margins of your notebook?

Ideas and information that were once important, but no longer are?

Or may not have been important then, but are now?

And if you took all these pieces of you, little bits of colored glass,

And put them together,

What kind of beautiful suncatcher would they create?

[wetheepiphany]

blog #1: epiphany reminisces about their time in the Planes fandom as they dig through shitty old fanfics

so as part of our plan for this new year, we've decided that we're finally going to be posting fanfiction we wrote many years ago for the Planes fandom. those who have been following us since our DustyDoesArt days will know that we were part of the Planes fandom since we first made our art presence known on the internet. however, we'd actually been Planes fans much earlier than our internet debut in 2018- since the first Planes movie came out, actually- and our first Planes fanfic was written and completed in early 2014.

currently, we plan for 14 of our finished Planes fics to go up on Ao3 once we've made a few edits, though they'll be mostly untouched, allowing them to retain their 2014-2018 charm and cringe XD

although some of these works are literally going to be 10 years old soon, and the age of their writing definitely shows in places (such as naïvely overzealous christian signaling that we're going to be mostly editing out), they're actually still some of our proudest works. believe it or not, Planes of all things was how we felt we finally found our footing as a creative writer XD

from 2006-2013, we'd been part of the Sonic fandom, and the amount of Sonic fan works out there was overwhelming. we were a child from a heavily sheltered religious household, and the sonic fandom was the first thing we started regularly searching on the internet (and, as you might imagine, this was quite the volatile combination of factors x'D)

the Sonic fandom was why we started writing out stories in the first place, but we never really found our identity as a writer. instead, we found ourselves always copying the story ideas and writing styles of fanfics we'd seen on the internet, trying to scratch the itch of telling the newly stoked ideas in our mind without knowing how to go about doing so.

eventually, we found ourselves burnt out on Sonic as an interest- but we had never found any other fandom or character that had so clicked with our interests as Sonic had, so we had no idea where to go next. we kept trying to restoke the spark of imagination that Sonic had given us, but to no avail.

and then, in september of 2013, a certain movie named Planes came to a dollar theater near us, and our family was making plans to see it. we looked up the film's synopsis and critical ratings to decide if it was worth our while, and decided it probably wasn't. however, our family nudged us to consider going to the film anyway, just to get out of the house and have fun for a bit. the thought of having an hour or so break from homework was enough to convince us to go, even if it was begrudgingly.

if nothing else, Planes had Roger Craig Smith in it, and he was the current voice of Sonic (and still is, at the time of writing!). we decided we would at least enjoy hearing his voice in the film.

after the film had concluded and the credits began to roll, i remember us staring at the movie screen with a strongly conflicted feeling. the movie had been bad- absolutely terrible. there were many unfunny jokes, the plot flow was weird, and all the flaws made obvious to us in critic reviews and wikipedia's plot synopsis were present.

and yet...we had thoroughly enjoyed ourselves by the end of it. we couldn't stop thinking about the film in the car ride home. it lingered in our mind for days...weeks...

...and when the opportunity arose to see the film again, we did so eagerly. we watched Planes two more times before it left the dollar theater. the projector even temporarily broke during the third watch, and we remembered feeling a sense of dread that we might not be able to watch the movie.

after several months of confusion and denial...we realized that what we were feeling was a shifting of interest. our time as an avid sonic fan was over, and a brand new world of imagination and inspiration had come knocking.

but then...how to express this newfound interest, or all the new ideas buzzing about in our mind?

at this time, we had decided to take a sabbatical from the internet that lasted several years- we were aware by now that our naïve, sheltered little mind was (at the time) too sensitive to handle even glimpsing certain types of fan content, and so we barely saw anything from the Planes fandom for the first five years of its existence.

so, we just made Planes art for ourselves to enjoy, thinking up little stories and ideas for fun along the way,

and then, somewhere in early 2014, we decided to try writing out a story idea that we had.

and for the first time ever...the writing process just flowed.

we felt connected with the story we were writing in a way that we'd never experienced before. it felt like our minds could actually enter into the setting and the characters we were writing- that our hearts were truly being expressed through our words.

it felt like, for the first time, we had found our own voice.

we weren't parroting back the ideas or the words someone else had put into our head, or even following a formula placed before us (because we were disconnected from the rest of the Planes fandom- we had no formula or example to follow). for the first time, what we had made felt organically and truly like it was ours...and it was exhilarating. addicting, even.

and so, we started to write more.

14 is the finished number of Planes fics we currently plan on posting, but there was at least two or three more we finished. we also had several story ideas that never reached completion, and many that never made it past planning stages. we created original characters, developed backstories to fill the gaps left in Planes canon, and worldbuilt our stories' version of Planes over several years. we took to writing Planes fanfiction with a level of creativity and dedication we had never gone to before, even for our most original and developed Sonic fanworks.

we also tried writing several multi-chapter crossover stories during this time (two of which reached around 50k words in length). these were never completed, and will never be seeing the light of day, but they taught us that we were capable of writing so much more than we'd previously thought possible.

our accomplishments with Planes-related writings empowered us in a way we never knew we needed, and was a major stepping stone in shaping who we are today.

unfortunately, our time in the fandom had a rather unceremonious and sudden ending.

after starting an animation major, we felt building pressure to define ourselves more originally as an artist, as we were instructed on the realistic steps required to start forming an art-driven career. this led us to jump ship and try to remake all of our ideas into "original" content that we could copyright and potentially profit off of. we lost a lot of the soul and heart we had been putting into our work as a result, and while we're still proud of a lot of the things we ended up making during this time, we can't say we have the same fondness or personal connection with them as we did our Planes-oriented work: the stuff we made back when we didn't give a shit about profiting off our abilities, or our public "brand"/image.

toxic friendships we made during our time in the fandom gave Planes and Dusty a bad taste in our minds, and after ending those friendships, we couldn't find our old freedom or enjoyment in making content with Planes or Dusty anymore.

our own personal struggles with figuring out our gender identity and working through other issues left a lot of personal things dumped into our later work- too much personal things- and this further soiled and twisted both Planes and Dusty for us.

during our time of shifting to make Jotaro/JJBA-focused work, as JoJo cemented its place as a new major source of inspiration for us, we decided to stop developing anything tied to our Planes era. at the time, Planes and Dusty had grown into such a negative thing for us that it felt like a gross tumor that should be removed and never acknowledged again.

but looking back at our old work in recent times, remembering what that period of our life meant to us...we've come to realize that our Planes era deserves better than that, because it was so much more than the negative things that defined its ending for us.

our time making Planes content is probably over forever. unlike Sonic, who's gotten new content that has re-stoked our interest in his character, Planes as an official series is done, and we haven't had the slightest interest in (or idea for) writing new things for that world for years. we've moved on.

however, we also think our stories have been kept to ourselves for long enough. they served their purpose, and we got to enjoy having them as our personal treasures for as long as we've needed. now, we feel ready to share them with the world- in the hopes that, maybe, someone else will find something meaningful in them too.

anyway, that's our rambling completed. maybe someone who was an avid Planes fan and follower of our old work might find this interesting, but other than that, this was for us- to finally share the story of our Planes journey somewhere.

though our steps into the next part of our life and creative journey are still relatively unknown, and still mired in some of the sticky messes left to us at the end of our Planes journey, we ultimately hope to find that writing flow and innate passion in our works again-

to recover the heart and soul that Planes helped us get in touch with in the first place.

[wellbelesbian]

ao3 tag game

@sharing-a-room-with-an-open-fire thought i tagged them in this, but i actually haven’t done it yet. i will take this as an invitation to…

how many works do you have on ao3?

13, but some are really old marvel fics and a lot of them are unfinished.

what’s your total ao3 word count?

41303

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

technically it’s filtered as 5, but i’d say 3 because some fandom tags mean the same thing. Carry On Series/Simon Snow & Related Fandoms, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Ancient Greek Religion & Lore/The Iliad.

what are your top five fics by kudos?

nothing is sacred enough to escape gen z humour- this is one of my oldest and dumbest fics, hence why it’s the top one. it’s an mcu fic about Peter and Shuri beginning a vine reference war that gets way out of hand. i guess it is pretty funny.

Hugs Are The Best Type Of Team Building- another mcu fic. this one was mostly written by my co-writer and i just supplied some ideas and beta-ed it, but i was put down as co-writer and, as another old fic, it’s built up a lot of kudos over the years.

Happier Memories- now we’re onto the recent stuff! this was my fic for the Carry On Anon Fest, where Baz proposes to Simon and it goes horribly wrong, but still ends up happy in the end.

Lend Me Your Comb- this is a short little drabble i wrote about Baz cutting Simon’s hair during lockdown. this is a fairly recent fic so i’m surprised it’s so high!

long is the road that leads me home- this is my snowbaz highwayman fic for the Carry On Through The Ages event. i’m surprised this fic is so high when i’ve still only posted the prologue. i promise i will write the rest eventually!

do you respond to comments? why or why not?

i try to, because it’s so nice to receive the comments so they deserve a response. but sometimes i just don’t know what to say! if there’s anything in a comment i can latch onto i will, if not i’ll just try to leave a thank you.

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

i’ve barely started it, but the only one of my fics with an angsty ending will be long is the road. kind of. basically it’s going to have 2 endings, one happy, one very sad. it’s weird because i LOVE writing angst, but i haven’t really written any since my wattpad days. i need to pick it up again…

have you ever received hate on a fic?

no, thankfully! maybe some back when i wrote on wattpad, because i got a LOT of comments on those and i doubt they were all positive. but i don’t remember anything worse than some people joking about typos, so it can’t have been that bad.

do you write smut? if so, what kind?

nope. i sometimes like to read it, but it just feels incredibly stilted and formal when i write it. maybe it’s because i’m ace, or maybe it’s something else. at the end of the day it doesn’t really bother me, i can just do fade-to-black if the situation ever calls for it.

have you ever had a fic stolen?

sort of. okay, so i’m talking about my long-ago wattpad days more than i expected here, but back in like, 2016, one of my friends found that a lot of their fics had been posted to some random fanfic website, and when we checked a lot of mine and another friend’s were there too. i don’t know if the website just had some code that copied fics from wattpad or if this was a person posting them there as their own, but either way there was no way to report it and they weren’t getting much traffic anyway, so we just had to leave it.

have you ever had a fic translated?

a few people messaged me on wattpad to ask to translate some of my fics, and i always gave permission, but i don’t know how many were actually translated. none of my ao3 fics have ever been stolen or translated! am i somehow a worse writer now than i was back then??

what’s your all-time favourite ship?

that’s a big thing to commit to because i change my preferences all the time! if we’re going by fics it would be snowbaz, if by tumblr posts i would be jonmartin (the magnus archives), if we’re going by the longest it would be solangelo (percy jackson). i guess snowbaz or Charlie and Nick from Heasrtstopper in equal measures, for now. but that could change at any time.

have you ever co-written a fic before?

a have 2 fics on ao3 that i co-wrote with somebody who i no longer talk to. they were generally a pretty manipulative and shitty person and sometimes i want to delete those fics, but i also don’t want the memory of them to ruin things i like, so i haven’t. on a lighter note, another friend of mine and i have repeatedly tried to write together, but despite how much fun it is to argue in a google doc, after half a dozen chapters we always get distracted and it fizzles out. we’re still good friends, we just need someone with more focus to mediate and force us to commit more.

what’s a wip you want to finish, but don’t think you ever will?

not even a wip, because once i start those i don’t ever really stop, but the story i have planned for my OCs is probably never going to make it out of my head and onto a page. writing original fiction is so daunting, and i have a terrible habit of simply not doing things if i suspect they’ll fail.

what are your writing strengths?

dialogue and characters. also foreshadowing. it’s why i love d&d! i can create a bunch of interesting characters and interactions, and be super ominous about the big bad.

what are your writing weaknesses?

describing places and blocking scenes. my friend who i tried to co-write with is a master at beautiful, descriptive prose, which is why we tried to write together. also fight scenes, though i thankfully don’t write many of those.

what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in fics?

i’m only fluent in english and i don’t trust google translate, so i would need to consult someone who knows the language, or just put it in english in italics.

what was the first fandom you wrote for?

Percy Jackson and the Heroes Of Olympus.

what’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

basically all the ones that haven’t done as well as i expected are my under-appreciated faves. i can’t pick just one!

it’s so stupid, but Rats is one of them. it’s just a dumb little fic i wrote in one night and holds up surprisingly well. also, Simon referenced Baz farming rats in AWTWB, but i got to it first!

also All That She Wants, which was a very personal fic i wrote because i wanted Agatha to have female friends and balance her being gay and ace.

and finally we are slaves to the gods, whatever gods are, because i love ancient greece and trauma and that’s what this fic is a fusion of!

phew, some of this got personal 😂 i tag @otherpeoplesheartachept-2 @martsonmars @mostlymaudlin @bazzybelle @knitbelove and @nonbaznary if you haven’t done this already!