#I just added the paragraphs and deleted like two doubled words

[pb-dot]

Writer Q&A Tag

Full disclosure, this is my second attempt at writing this tag. After I was mentioned by @mthollowell-writes I started filling in the questions with the enthusiasm I usually show for these kinds of things. Then, I actually double-checked the post and discovered I was not tagged, but rather mentioned as an inspiration. This flustered me to the point where I plain forgot to read the next line encouraging those tagged in this way to participate as well, and so, not wanting to be gauche, I deleted the post-to-be. Now I know better, and found the whole thing humorous enough to share, so good on me, I say. Q&A below the cut

1)What motivates you to write?

Writing just makes me happy. I might hem and haw about the obscure pain of trying to nail my thoughts to the page, as well as the sheer nightmare that is editing the result, but the truth of the matter is that writing lets me be a happier person. Part of it is no doubt that it allows me to unload one of the several stories I've got rolling around in my head at any given time, and part of it is that I just enjoy the process of it, forming formless thoughts into linear sentences and linear sentences into more or less coherent paragraphs,and so on.

2) A line/short snippet of your writing that you are most proud/happy of. If not maybe share a line of someone else's work you love (just please credit them)

The description of Jake's first impressions of 13 sticks with me. I can't quite decide if I think it's good or if I just think it's good-shaped, but it'll do for this example.

There was something with the pensive look in the eyes of the strange young man that just drew out the similes. His eyes weren’t blue, they were like a perfect sky; His hair wasn’t blond and tightly cropped, it was like freshly harvested wheat; His cloak was not over-sized and ill-fitting, it was like an immaterial fog swathing his delicate form. Perhaps the young man could not be comprehended otherwise, at least Jake couldn’t.

3) Which OC makes you smile every time you think/talk about them and what are they like?

I am very fond of the main couple of my book, Jake and 13. There's just something about the slow but inexorable and unashamed way these two grow to rely on each other that really works for me. They both have good cause to be cynical about the world and everything in it, but despite this, there's something about how they are together that allows them to be vulnerable and gentle with each other, and that's the kind of thing that makes me smile.

4) What process of writing do you enjoy the most?

I love the drafting process. Getting words on the page in the form they're supposed to have just fills me with energy, and every time I add a detail that flourishes into a whole subplot or important worldbuilding detail I feel an incredible level of mastery that just fills me with energy. That's not an everyday occurrence, to be clear, but a couple of times per draft I'll get into the "wait, what does that bit I added on a whim imply exactly"-headspace, and often that leads to the discovery of something neat!

5) What part of writing do you think you are the best at? (Yes stroke your own ego it's okay)

Oh, now this is hard for me. Not because I don't know what to say, but because anything that might constitute bragging is just difficult for my brain to handle. That said, I think I'm really strong on structure and plot, thinking about characters and their struggles and development in terms of part of an overarching story just comes naturally to me and I enjoy working on that scale.

6) What is something in the writeblr community is most enjoyable?

I honestly just love the very specific kind of commiseration writers show to each other, and Writeblr captures it perfectly. There's just something refreshing about posting something like "got distracted from writing by worldbuilding, got distracted from worldbuilding by research about Parisian sewers through history" or whatever and have people popping up like "Oh if I had a dollar every time that happened."

7) A writing tool/device you use that helps you with writing? (It could be speech to text, a writing program etc)

I'm a Scrivener boy, and I must say a couple of features of that program help my writing a sizable amount. I enjoy how it's offline and not integrated or associated with any level of AI fuckery on any detectable level. The way it organizes your manuscript on a chapter-chapter level and the chapters on a scene-scene level has also been very useful for getting nitpicky with the structure, in addition to finally getting me to organize my writing into chapters which I had dragged my feet on for months at that point.

8) A piece of worldbuilding that you like in your own story? (It could be the magic system, a particular place in the story, a law etc)

I just got done writing up a lengthy summary of The Coal Wars that set the stage for my setting, so while I hatelove it on the level I hatelove most of my ideas, it'll be my pick for this. In short, the city the story takes place in isn't commonly referred to by name because the name it used to have, Imil, is so closely related to the name of the empire it used to be the capital of, Imelia. Imelia was an expansionist maritime empire that maintained colonies and suzerainties all over the world until its chief colony Pelia declared independence after a series of unpopular taxes were levied against them along with the kind of draconic control that an empire might employ against its subjects. This declaration led to a spreading wildfire of requests and demands for emancipation from Imelia's other colonies.

Long story short, Imelia declared war on all of them in an act of imperial hubris. Because control of coal production was such a big deal for the Imelian empire's steampunk technology, these wars were known as The Coal Wars. These wars ended up bankrupting Imelia, and with the hereditary line of emperors cut off with the last empress' death, the whole nation was at a perilous tipping point.

What ultimately decided the fate of the empire was a bunch of the government's debtors and creditors banding together and deciding to repossess the imperial palace, which led to a scuffle between the debtors' private security and the remaining government and their loyalists that saw the last government of Imelia fall in a rather ignoble way. Not wanting to get into the mess of inheriting Imelia's many problems by claiming the throne, the debtors declared the nation of Imelia defunct and went back to their business consolidating industrial and real estate holdings while their security and private military forces maintained a sort of peace in the city.

9) What piece of advice would you say to encourage others to write if they are having a rough patch?

If you are like me and writing in and of itself brings you joy, try to find little moments of calm or clarity to write a bit. Doesn't have to be much. Just fiddling with some sentences or correcting obvious mistakes in your text can be enough to keep your writing fresh in your mind until better days come along.

If you're less energized by the act of writing itself and it's an actual drain on you, I recommend you to not worry about it. Take a break. Rest. Maybe read or watch some fiction, go see some friends, and live whatever slice of life you can in your current state. It might not seem like it, but this is a vital part of writing as well, since you need a steady stream of impressions and thoughts and feelings to fuel your writing, in addition to needing them to live a fulfilling life of course.

10) Tag some people whose works you love/have been your biggest supporters

I should be way better at reading other writeblrs stuff honestly. There's some good stuff in here. That said, I do enjoy reading up on @stesierra multitude of projects and @dyrewrites' dark, wicked, and delightful Pale Blood. I also have a longer list of people I just like seeing pop up. In no particular order: @anxious-andconfused @starbuds-and-rosedust @words-after-midnight @holdmyteaplease @teacupsandstarlight @ettawritesnstudies @simonambroise @writingamongther0ses @leisoree @wrenofthewords @isabellebissonrouthier @rickie-the-storyteller @robin-writes-a-lot @scifimagpie and of course @mthollowell-writes

Everybody mentioned above can consider themselves tagged in this. I also wouldn't mind getting to know the following people a mite better: @maskedemerald @deadhunter-series @your-absent-father and @unspokenvastlywritten

[theinternetisfulloftrash]

Dylan Couch Drabble ? Thing? ?

Unedited and haven’t written in a couple months so it’s a bit rusty but had the inspo so, enjoy I hope? ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

OH MY GOSH! THANK YOU FOR THIS!

Anon is continuing what they submitted HERE, so I will add it on the beginning to keep it all together.

I am truly blessed that this lovely human would write something so yummy to appease my ridiculous interview kink ;) So for you? I made a GIF <3

Blessssss!

- Trashy xoxox

After a long day of press interviews Dylan slides his laptop back on the table and leans back on the couch, head tilted back and watches out from under his lashes as you walk out of your bedroom across the living space toward the kitchen.

He catches your eyes and just lifts his arms up in a silent request, holds them out until your settle yourself down into his lap, your head in the curve of his neck and your hands resting on the broad span of his chest

“Hi.” Your voice is a whisper in Dylan’s neck and you lower your body down until you’re seated in his lap. The soft loose fabric of his sweatpants drags against your bare thighs and you shiver at the warmth of him. You had been cosy under the covers of your bed just moments prior where you’d tucked away for the afternoon with your book.

With Dylan doing press most of the day you had made use of the day getting through your to-do list that would no doubt be full again by your next day off. With the evening approaching, the home clean and Dylan needing silence for his zoom calls, curling up with a book had been an easy choice.

The hours had slipped by and it wasn’t till you heard the break of the gentle lilt of Dylan’s low voice through the walls that you realised he must be done for the day. It had been hours since you’d seen him, well, had his attention and you were on your feet before you realised to go see him.

Dylan’s hands are quick to find the shape of you, palms resting flat on your bare thighs where you’d forgone pants hours earlier while doing laundry. His body is broad and hot against the line of your couch, and his touch is warm on your cool skin. You listen to his slow pattern of breathing, the fog of sirens sounding in the distance, and the low patter of rain that has been at the tall windows all day.

Your eyes dip closed and your fingers make lazy patterns on his chest against the light grey of his long sleeve. You can’t help but to touch.

Dylan’s smile presses into your hair after a few more breaths, and he pauses there before his mouth finds the shell of your ear. “Hey you,” he mutters, an intimate greeting more suited in a crowded room than the empty living space, with only Tony in attendance, happily asleep in the corner.

“All done, hotshot?” you asked and feel the gentle shake of Dylan’s chest in answering laughter.

“You’re stupid,” he huffs back and his fingers slip up under the edge of the jumper that’s sitting at your thighs.

“Don’t worry, kid, one of these days you’ll make it big and you won’t have to work all these long excruciating hours,” you tease back, your own fingers searching up to find the neckline of Dylan’s shirt and curling around it.

“Oh my god.” Dylan’s voice is a rasp and you push closer to hide your grin in the line of his throat. Your tilt your head to draw your lips over the vein that outlines his Adam’s apple, more pronounced now from his hours of talking and laughter.

You listen to his slow pattern of breathing, the fog of sirens sounding in the distance, and the low patter of rain that has been at the tall windows all day. Your eyes dip closed and your fingers make lazy patterns on his chest against the light grey of his long sleeve. You can’t help but to touch.

You tilt your head to draw your lips over the vein that outlines his Adam’s apple, more pronounced now from his hours of talking and laughter. You listen to his heart steady under your ear and sigh, push yourself up on your knees ever so slightly to sit your hips back and tuck your body in closer to him, knees pressed to the back of the couches, bodies pressed as close as possible.

Dylan lets out a happy grunt at the movement and one hand leaves one of your thighs to wrap around your waist, as if you could get closer. “Miss me?” he asks. You don’t need to look at him to know the smug smile on his face, the light in his eyes.

“You just make this place so cold,” you huff, your actions betray you as you wrap an arm around Dylan’s neck now, the other slinging over his shoulders to gently scratch your nails of the bulk of muscle of his shoulder.

“And you don’t wear pants,” he replies, his hand has finally found its way from your thigh to the curve of your ass, holding the weight of it in his palm.

“Might have to start if you keep it this cool.” It’s an empty threat but he lets out a noise of objection nonetheless, squeezes you closer still.

“You been like this all day?“ he asked and you know what he means by the way his fingers are drifting up from your ass to your lower back and down again, the fabric of your jumper gathering up with the motion of his wrist.

“Had to wash my jeans I had on, so yeah, after laundry,” you answer and press a few lazy kisses on the warm curve of his neck.

“Mmm...and all this time I was out here working hard and you were just in there looking like that,” Dylan sighs as though he’s undergone some great injustice, as though he didn’t wake up to you naked in his arms this morning before following you into the shower.

“That’s showbiz, baby,” you mumble, do some abstract display of jazz hands against his back, and laugh when his hand comes down against your ass in an open-palmed smack.

“Behave,” he huffs.

You giggle open and bright into his throat, and mumble, 'naughty' into his skin as his hand weaves through your hair to cradle your head.

“Your favourite thing to be,” he replies and eases you away from his neck so he can look at you properly in the low dimming light of the early evening.

When you pull back and look at him you can see the tiredness around his eyes, and as much as you tease him, he does exhaust himself doing these. Dylan is genuine to a fault, he engages in all interviews and conversations and gives them his energy and focus and you know he gets anxious at times about more private topics being bought up. You smile at him then, and reach your hand to cup his cheek, rub your fingers gently over his jaw and chin, soft touches that he leans into.

Dylan hums and his eyes fall shut and you love how he loves affection like this, how he always wants you right there close to him. He smells like hair product and your moisturiser he used this morning, and he’s looking down at you in slow blinks of dark eyes and long lashes before his hand gathers under your chin to tug you in.

Dylan kisses like he talks with intent focus and passion, licks into your mouth like his home is behind your teeth. You kiss hot and slow until you pull away with fluttery breaths, and he chases your mouth with a few small pecks, to the top and bottom lip, to your teeth when you let out a small laugh.

He groans and ducks his head for your neck, hand still petting at your ass and waist as he kisses at your throat, the other slid down from your chin to just below where his mouth is on you now.

Your hands smooth down Dylan’s back, the soft cotton under touch the shape of lines of his broad frame that taper to his waist, the way his body is strong under you with every breath. You feel Dylan pause and your hand goes to his hair, scratching through lazily as you decide to nudge your hips closer, a silent ask for him to keep going so you can both get what you want.

Dylan hums and the hand on your ass grips to keep the heat of you pressed to his lap, but the other reaches to your jaw and turns your head to look back at the computer that’s propped up on the table still. “Mm should do my interviews like this,” he breaths as your eyes focus on the picture you and Dylan make in the reflection of the screen.

It looks dirty and makes you pulse with want. The idea of anyone else seeing the way he’s got you now, bundled up like a wanting little present on his crotch, a hand slipped up under your jumper enough to lift it and show the curve of your bare ass where you can’t see the line of your thong, the other hand wrapped around your jaw, making you look.

“Mmm...that’s an exclusive Mr. O’Brien,” you whisper as you turn into his kiss.

[aohendo]

Death to Redundancies!

I don’t know about you all, but I vastly over-write. It’s great during NaNo, but when I was trying to fit Reverberate into a standard publishing length (ie. less than 120,000 words)? It sucked.

I managed to take it from 146,958 to 122,991 words, filled in some missing scenes, and squished it all back down to 133,268 words. I then decided Reverberate needed some larger plot overhauling, but I digress.

Say you’re in the “grah book too long no agent will look at this” boat. How do you edit down?

Kill the redundancies.

I like thinking of editing as making a manuscript into a TARDIS: it needs to be bigger on the inside. To me, that means more meaning per word. That means not writing what is implied.

The first thing to go were most of my stage directions. For example: “He picked up the mug and raised it to his lips, drinking” became “He drank.” That example is rather extreme, but within the context of the scene, modify these questions and ask yourself: 

Has the cup already been established as a mug? Has the fact that it’s a mug been implied by the presence of a hot liquid or this guy just not having any normal cups in his house? Does his picking up the mug have any special meaning or subtext, or is it an action to add words? Is the pacing of this scene meant to feel tedious, slow, middling, quick, or abrupt? Is this meant to be a dialogue beat? And so forth.

Be sure to also expand those questions to the paragraph level.

Note!!! I did things backwards, starting with the little sentence-level redundancies and then working my way to a macro level (scene, chapter, and act). The reason that second draft was only 122,991 words? I completely cut over 10k of unnecessary scenes. I did the micro first because it made my brain happy, but that also means I edited more than I had to. Consider going macro to micro.

What I looked for during the macro edit is… you guessed it! Redundancies: things which are unnecessary to the plot, don’t have any bearing on character development or worldbuilding, or which needlessly repeat things revealed earlier—or later. So that really cool scene with some Marines dropping from orbit a la Halo Helljumpers? Moved to the “Stuff I Deleted” doc. Why? Because I asked myself: 

Who is this scene about? How does this scene affect the pacing? What bearing does this scene have on the plot? What information (worldbuilding, characters, or setting) is revealed in this scene? Is that information already given elsewhere? Does this scene add nuance to that information, or just restate it? What changes to the manuscript would be needed if this scene were cut, and how large would those changes be?

Although those questions are framed for larger scenes, they’re essentially the same as the paragraph and sentence-level questions. Unlike on the micro level, when doing macro edits, I would strongly suggest, especially if you’re more of a panster/discovery writer (like me!) that you map out your plot. It will help you determine what plot points are actually necessary.

For what it’s worth, asking those questions as I was editing resulted in large swathes of Reverberate Draft Two looking like this:

[image ID: a double spaced printed page of writing in a three-ring binder, the text liberally crossed out and added to in pink ink /end]

Once you’ve done a few rounds of redundancies edits, hopefully your word count has shrunk. If not, or if you’re in the mood to really tear into it, hit it with Ken Rand’s The 10% Solution. The long and short of it is to ctrl-f for these words/syllables, one at a time, and then determine whether or not they’re actually needed: 

-ly, of, that, said, was/were (as in, passive voice—“he was killed by zombies”), by, his, her, very, about, -ing, And, But (starting sentences), like, -ion, felt, hear, smell, saw, taste, touch (notice: all head verbs/distancing verbs/filtering verbs/whatever you want to call them), aloud, and whatever your crutch words are (for me, just and barely) (page 57).

Below is an example of how I took all that into my own editing. Snippet from Attenuate/Reverberate. CW: language.

 Draft One: 132 words.

Stumbling into the armory, Madison barely wheeled around a trio of Marines putting on their gear for an exercise. Why the worship did her and Cal’s lockers have to be so far away from the entrance? Finally. Madison fell onto the bench more than sat, wriggled out of the straps more than set the bag of gear to her side. Her head lolled against the cool metal. It was the aftereffects of the vaccumshock. Had to be—or the emergency cryo. Or maybe whatever final painkilling cocktail Modise had pumped into her veins before he removed that IV. Madison ran her hands down her face, swollen fingers catching on the freeze-peeling skin of her face. She sighed and forced herself to sit up straight, unlock the bag, begin unloading into her locker.

Draft Three: 132 words.

Stumbling into the armory, Madison barely wheeled around a trio of Marines putting on their gear for an exercise.

“You see that, Jose?” the female Marine said. “That’s what happens if you don’t fuckin’ listen. You want the godfucked vacuumshock slippers?”

Madison staggered out of range of the Marines and collapsed on the bench in front of her locker and wriggled out from her case of gear. Her head lolled against the cool metal. It was the aftereffects of the vaccumshock. Had to be—or the emergency cryo, or maybe whatever final painkilling cocktail Modise had pumped into her. The general achiness and bruising was from the N-9’s sound gun. Swollen fingers caught on the freeze-peeling skin of her face. Madison sighed and willed herself upright to begin unloading into her locker.

Draft One and Three are the same length, but that is almost entirely due to the fact that I managed to sneak in a line of dialogue. Is it necessary? Not at all! Do I think it adds character to the scene? Yup.

The key edit between the Draft One and the Draft Three version is that I got rid of most of the first half of the Draft One paragraph. It added nothing that wasn’t already shown earlier in the manuscript, and I didn’t feel the repeated information well-timed.

You’ll probably notice that the Draft Three version can be further cut down. Say, for instance, by getting rid of that dialogue snippet. Something to watch for when you go full throttle on editing is that you open yourself to risks of stilted paragraphs, record scratches, and time jumps (characters teleporting, things which logically happen after something happening before, etc). Be sure to keep an eye out for those, and to find a buddy to call you out on them.

Hard Edit Just Now: 92 words.

Stumbling into the armory, Madison wheeled around a trio of Marines and collapsed before her locker. She wriggled out from her gear-kit, and her head lolled against the cool metal. It was the aftereffects of the vaccumshock. Had to be—or the emergency cryo, or maybe whatever final painkilling cocktail Modise had pumped into her. The achiness and bruising was from the N-9’s sound gun. Swollen fingers caught the freeze-peeling skin of her face. Madison sighed and willed herself upright to unload into her locker.

Which draft version do you prefer? Do you all have any go-to tricks for editing? Is there anything that would benefit from a different explanation or more examples? Let’s get that discussion rolling!

[image ID: a gif from the 12th Doctor’s last season. Bill Potts stands in the TARDIS door and exclaims, “It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!” And Nardole responds, “Hey, hey! We got there!” /end]

[2manyfandoms2count]

Sleepless in Paris

I ended up not posting anything Ladrien in June when I'd planned to do something, but then I saw the last prompt of @ladrienjune (Speechless), and since it tied in with an idea I had a couple of weeks ago... Here you go!

Established Ladrien, Adrien receives a text from his girlfriend and overthinks its meaning. Thankfully Ladybug comes and clears things up.

Loosely based on a quote from Le Discours, a novel by Fabrice Caro.

Read on AO3

---

Adrien, we need to talk.

Adrien read the message over and over again, like an overworked student stuck on a paragraph whose meaning just won’t register.

He tossed his phone aside and lied back down, rubbing his eyes as he did so.

Oh, how much he regretted ever getting Ladybug a private phone so they could communicate. It had seemed like a good idea after their third close call, when she had almost swung into his room like she owned the place (and maybe she did, she was his girlfriend, after all, anything was possible), in the middle of an impromptu piano recital his father had requested. Thankfully, the false notes he’d made upon seeing her almost crash into the window had covered any sound she’d made as she changed course, and made sure his father and Nathalie’s attention was on him, and not on the red blur just outside.

She’d laughed so prettily when she’d unwrapped the box and noticed that he’d painted little black dots on the back of the red phone case. She’d insisted on paying him back in kisses and sweet nothings. Even if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have been able to refuse; his girlfriend was convincing like that.

Yes. Those had been the good old days.

The ones when the messages he received from her didn’t come as a blow that made his stomach tie into knots and question if he was going to be okay (although that might not have been entirely true; the feeling he’d gotten when he’d read “I love you” on his screen, written down, not just whispered between two makeout sessions or before she left, a permanent trace of her feelings, could definitely have fit that description, but the difference was that he’d questioned if he was in heaven, then).

The timestamp of the message read Monday, 4:36pm. He’d managed to type a “when?” at 5:58pm, which she’d seen at 5:59pm. Nothing since. That was new, too. Even messages that didn’t require an answer always got at least a couple of emojis in reply.

It was now Tuesday, 6:12am, and he hadn’t slept a wink, dissecting the five words, twenty characters, like they were a long lost spell that could fix hunger on Earth.

The first thing he’d noticed was the full stop. That didn’t bode well - even he knew that nobody ended a text like that these days.

Then, the comma. A pause. Not great either, in the context of a relationship.

Especially when it came before a “we need to talk”. He didn’t need to have seen many romantic comedies to know that this was probably an end of the line warning.

Even his name was a sign.

Adrien.

Not “my prince”. Not “my love”. Not even “my Adrien”, like she’d taken to calling him recently. Just plain old boring Adrien . Until the message had arrived, he hadn’t realised they’d been on a downward slope, but maybe he’d been too busy burying his head in the sand to notice. Maybe deep down, he’d known that it wasn’t viable.

That Ladybug, basically a goddess among men, had no business being in a relationship with a commoner like him, however much she tried to fool herself by calling him her prince. Adrien. The more he read it, the more emphasis he put on the second syllable. Ad- rien . Ad rien. Towards nothing. Maybe she’d known they were doomed from the start, that they had no future, but she’d tried anyway.

Maybe he was reading too much into it and the lack of sleep was making him delirious.

Whatever the outcome, he supposed they’d had a good run. He’d cherish all of the moments they’d spent together.

Actually, he thought, sitting up again, maybe that was what she needed. Maybe he could change her mind if he reminded her of all their good memories. There was no way she couldn’t be convinced, or at least persuaded, by his plea. He hadn’t gone six months playing a double game of putting on a fake insensitivity mask over the one he wore with Chat Noir's to avoid her seeing through him, when she deserved to be showered in compliments at every moment of the day, for it to end this way.

He loved her.

He picked up his phone again and pressed the dial button.

One tone. Two tones. Three.

Adrien suddenly remembered the time, hastily hung up, and facepalmed audibly, making Plagg roll over in his sleep and hiss.

“Sorry,” he whispered, before turning his attention back to the phone.

If his call hadn’t woken her up, then his mistake would be the first thing she’d see when she did.

This was bad. It wasn’t like he could go delete the evidence. He didn’t know where she lived, and since he doubted that she slept while transformed, there was no way to track her. Which would also be bad, he reminded himself, but maybe this emergency would justify it.

Anyway,  he couldn't cry over spilt milk, but maybe he could escape. Just move somewhere, preferably on the other side of the world. He could change his life, his name (actually, could that alone change the outcome of their relationship? If he changed it before planning anything, could they pick up as if nothing happened, and would the timeline be fixed? He wished he’d thought about it before calling her), and raise hamsters in the mountains. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, right? And then he could live happily ever after in the sweet, sweet illusion that despite them being miles apart, he still lived in a world in which he was Ladybug’s boyfriend.

He didn’t know if he preferred the idea of her never coming after him, or her seeking him out, even if it was to deliver bad news, but it didn’t really matter. The plan sounded good. Foolproof.

He hopped off of his bed and pulled a suitcase out of his closet. He’d always wondered why his father stored them there when it really seemed like an unnecessary temptation, but at least it was useful now.

If he was to start over somewhere, he needed to leave Adrien behind. The guy was a train wreck anyway, but unfortunately for him, a train wreck people would want to find, when he just wanted to be left alone to mope.

No more white shirts, then. They were too recognisable. He found a collection of dark hoodies at the back of the closet and stuffed them in the bag, along with t-shirts (they’d be hidden under his hoodie so he could keep those), a pair of jeans and some shorts.

He came back into his room and put his suitcase on his bed, scanning his surroundings for other essentials. His eyes landed on the fencing cup he kept his Ladybug pictures in. He’d definitely need those. It would help maintain him in his illusion. He also needed his Ladybug pyjamas, which he kept hidden since he wasn’t sure his father would approve of them. They’d be perfect for his new life.

Plagg stirred on his pillow. Before Adrien could ask himself whether it was reasonable for the small god to come with him, there was a knock on the window, and he froze. He turned around slowly; Ladybug stood in the window frame, looking glorious in the soft dawn light. He noticed she was holding a small paper bag in her left hand. He was sure it could fit everything he’d ever gotten her.

“Going somewhere?” She frowned, hopping inside before he could even move.

Adrien stared at her, before guessing he’d better bite the bullet. “Well I just figured I’d rather not stick around if you’re going to break up with me.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

He watched her face fall and started to doubt his conclusion.

“Break up with…” she muttered slowly, as if tasting the words, before shaking her head. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Adrien, we need to talk.” He airquoted. “I get it, it’s fine. I’m-”

“Adrien, I’m not here to break up with you. At all.” She shook her head again and took a step forward. “What would make you think that?”

“Adrien, first of all,” he stated.

“Your name?...” She tilted her head inquisitively.

“You used to call me my Adrien. Or sweeter stuff.” He pointed out.

“Oh Kwami.” She shook her head, trying to repress a smile, although the blond didn’t notice.

“And then don’t think I didn’t notice you being less present lately.” He waved a finger at her, feeling himself blush. He knew his accusation was a tad hypocritical; sure, their date hangouts in the previous few weeks had been less frequent than they’d been at the beginning of their relationship, when she’d drop in practically every day, but they’d also been full of Akumas and photoshoots, what with his father’s new collection dropping. She’d managed to beat him to his room most days, hanging out around the windows as she waited, which had made it very difficult for him to sneak back in.

But on the occasions they had seen each other, she’d also seemed more lost in her thoughts than usual. Nervously wringing her hands together while they chilled in front of a movie, despite him soothingly raking his fingers through her hair. Being even more elusive about what was going on in her life, if that was possible. Looking at him with determination in her eyes, opening her mouth to speak, only to close it and shake her head with a sigh.

“I’m really sorry about that, my love .” She gave him a pointed look as she took his hand. “I’ve just been thinking a lot lately, about you, me, our relationship. How, you’re right, it might seem like we’re spending less time together to you , but…” she trailed off, biting her lip.

“How could that statement have a but ?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Well, um, I had this sort of crazy idea, because we’ve only been dating for six months and it’s totally not like I ever imagined us getting married and having three kids and a hamster or anything…” she mumbled nervously, and Adrien felt his heart flutter in his chest. “Anyway, I’ve been trying to get a hold of Chat Noir all night to check that he approves the idea, and also because I feel like it’s kind of an unspoken agreement that unless it’s an emergency and it really feels right, we’d do this together first, but he’s not replying and I was awake and you were awake and I thought…”

“Okay my… Lovebug, breathe.” Adrien’s caring boyfriend instinct kicked in as her rambling gave him confirmation that their relationship wasn’t in immediate danger, and he placed his hands on her shoulders, taking a deep breath to show the example. She mirrored him, and they breathed in sync for a couple of cycles, until he was satisfied that she’d stopped hyperventilating. He lead her to his couch and helped her sit down.

“Croissant?” she asked shyly, presenting him with the bag she’d brought. A pastry bag. Not a bag with his belongings. He really needed to stop jumping to conclusions.

“You know me so well.” He smiled brightly as he took one of the baked goods. They were still warm. The croissant didn’t last long in his hands. “Anyway,” he gulped down the last bite, “if you don’t mind me asking, what was your miraculous idea?” He smiled at himself, proud of his pun.

“Well, I was thinking that I could reveal my identity to you,” Ladybug replied, daintily wiping the corners of her mouth with a tissue.

It was a good thing Adrien was already sitting down, else more than his jaw would have ended up on the floor.

“Your… Your identity. Reveal. To me.” He asked seriously, hoping his words would make sense to her. It was better than remaining speechless.

“Yes, I am considering it,” she laughed. The sound made his brain tangle even more.

“Why?” He croaked.

“Well, as I said, it would enable us to spend more time together.” He raised his eyebrows, but she didn’t elaborate. “And I don’t know, I feel like it would be right. You’ve got something, Adrien.” She smiled tenderly.

“I… I do?” He felt himself blush.

“It’s just a croissant crumb, there, let me get it for you.” She leaned forwards and kissed the corner of his mouth. The contact jump started his brain.

“Ladybug, this is serious.” He backed away slightly. “Why me?”

“Fine.” She sighed. “Well, you're my boyfriend, but I know you a lot better than you might think. Before you say anything, no, I can’t tell you why yet, I need to speak to Chat Noir first. But there is something about you, Adrien. I feel like I can trust you. With this. Because of course I trust you otherwise.”

Adrien looked down at his hands and twiddled his thumbs, pouting as he thought.

“Adr- Sunshine? Is everything alright?” Ladybug placed a concerned hand on his thigh when his silence stretched to a slightly uncomfortable length.

“When you talk to Chat Noir, and he agrees to your plan…” He looked up and met her gaze.

“If,” she corrected him, but he waved her interruption away.

“...Will you guys reveal your identities to each other? Will you ask Chat Noir who he is under the mask?” He felt almost feverish as he searched her eyes for a hint of the answer before she could speak.

“Um, yes, I guess that’s how I saw the discussion going.” Ladybug frowned. “Are you concerned that it will change our relationship somehow? Because I promise it won’t, I-”

“Oh Bluebell, it definitely will, but not in the way that you think.” Adrien pecked her lips, a mischievous smile spreading on his as he pulled away.

“Oh?” Ladybug blinked a couple of times. Adrien tried to hide his smugness at her speechlessness.

“Yep. You see, I’m one hundred percent paw-sitive your dearest partner will agree to your plan.” He grinned, watching the realisation dawn on her face.

“How hard was refraining from making cat puns in the past six months?” Ladybug finally sighed, a small smile tugging at her lips.

“Very, my Lady.” He pouted. "But not as hard as refraining from kissing you on patrol."

“Maybe you can help him pay up all the Camembert he owes me for sitting through him ranting about all the missed opportunities,” Plagg called out, making her jump slightly. Adrien rolled his eyes.

“Anyway, you were right, your plan really will allow us to spend more time together!” His face lit up like a kid's on Christmas morning.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Ladybug shook her head, before looking back up at him, an indecipherable look on her face. “Need a lift for school?”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?” Adrien looked at his girlfriend with kitten eyes, disappointed that she hadn’t held up her side of the bargain.

“Well, it’s time to go if you don’t want to be caught by your bodyguard.” She shrugged, stood up, and extended a hand toward him, the twinkle in her eye the only tell in her poker face.

“Ladybug…” He whined, pouting.

“What, Chaton?” Her smile finally broke free. “It’s very literally on my way. I can drop you off at your seat, and then walk to mine… Right behind you.” She booped him on the nose.

Once again, Adrien was thankful he was already sitting down.

As she carried him to school, Adrien decided sleep was overrated. Sometimes reality was the best dream of all.

[bearseokie]

dear readers and writers

— a little advice i wish i would have heard before i started this blog and writing in general. sorry i’m that writer that makes post like these, i just want you to understand that things like this change everything. if this looks like a lot, just find the ones that pertain to you.

writers

➤ 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐝

there are so many good works that come from you focusing on the genres you are most comfortable with, and only writing those is not a bad thing. it’s not a “you’re not growing as a writer” situation, it’s a comfort zone situation. just because smuts do well doesn’t mean you have to force yourself to write them. just because angsts come in bulk because you can never ignore the emotional bits of writing doesn’t mean that has to be the main focus of every work. just because fluffs are the most reblogged content doesn’t mean it’s the only genre people will enjoy from you. focus on what you love, others will follow!

➤ 𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐛𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩𝐟𝐮𝐥, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐟𝐮𝐥

if you don’t consistently open your inbox, do it at least once. close it when you feel overwhelmed or at any time you feel necessary. don’t believe that you have to write them all in a short period of time. be statistical about it: only open it for a short game or blurbs. use the requests to fill in blanks or practice writing in different ways. play with the word counts. change up the tone. delete a few, you’re not obligated to actually write them, this is your free time and your work. but sometimes doing requests can change how you write, maybe even give you a breakthrough you wouldn’t have had with writing things from your own mind. and have fun.

➤ 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧’𝐭 𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬

filling the warnings up with silly little comments or parts from the story is important, too. even if it’s a paragraph’s worth of potential warnings or triggers, never skip adding them. even if you think it’s something not worth mentioning, it will be to someone. add as many as necessary.

➤ 𝟏𝟎𝟎 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝟏𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐦𝐞

word counts don’t determine how good of a writer you are. from brilliant blurbs with two paragraphs and one line of dialogue, drabbles with less than a thousand words, or full on double digits fics: what counts is that you enjoyed writing it. it made you excited. you paused just to mention to a friend how much you love writing it. you got chills piecing together that one line. that energy gets put through your work and into your reader, seriously.

➤ 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐥𝐥 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐮𝐭?

everyone reads. anything. everything. you name it, one person’s read it. whether your confidence in your writing ability is low or not, the process will only benefit you. and you get to spend time writing about some of your favorite people/characters, it’s a win-win. it’s no competition, only a fun time that you get to create and share with the world. try it.

➤ 𝐚 𝐟𝐞𝐰 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚 𝐭𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠

the more detail, the better the mental picture. if you read something and love visualizing every scene, hearing every line, then you should work for the same within your stories. close your eyes and put your scene into your surroundings, every little detail counts. and although i said word counts don’t mean anything, if your brain does focus on you having large word counts (it happens to every writer, big word counts make you feel cool for writing so much), then this is a sexy step to use because it heightens that number pretty quickly.

short sentences look weird, but are better than run-ons.

vocabulary is sexy and thesaurus dot com is your best friend. need a word but can only think of something similar, you’ll find it there. used the same word three times now and think you’re starting to look insane, you are, use your sources.

you don’t need a banner or aesthetics for everything you write. the writing does all of the work itself. don’t stress about the accessories.

burnt out on writing the same thing / can’t think of what else to put down? break time. take a tangent, write something else, cut it off there (maybe post it) and leave the rest for the future, the cliffhanger or abrupt ending will have everyone on the edge of their seats. you’re still doing well.

if you’re writing to gain a following or have extensive amounts of notes to brag about, you’re into writing fanfics for the wrong reasons. hoping for feedback is one thing, feasting for it as your only source of inspiration for writing is just hurting yourself and other writers in the long run. write for yourself and no one else.

writer’s block? hell if i know, i’ve had it since before i started writing.

readers

➤ 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐠𝐢𝐛𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤

a little feedback goes a mile. a simple emoji as a reaction, keyboard smashes, even tagging topical things can make a fanfic writer smile.

but long paragraphs also go a long way. imagine watching a movie you love to bits, so much so that you go online and read reviews of it. that commentary can shift the way you look at the movie forever, and stick with you during other films. it’s the same with receiving and reading feedback on fanfics. I’m not saying go crazy critical with your feedback, do not do that unless the writer says they want criticism, but maybe writing why you love one particular line so much could change the way the writer feels about the entire work or make a reader begin to love the same line so much that they quote it or recommend it. it makes a difference!

➤ 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬?

tell the writer. this isn’t an “i wrote this and it mentions all of these other things, so you should have expected this” game. if it bothered you, it will probably bother someone else, and that needs to be told to the writer. i don’t know what to tell you if a writer writes back being degrading or negative about your concern for that warning, but i promise you that most writers will not argue with whether it should be a warning or not and will just add it. do not be scared to mention something that triggered you if it was not mentioned in the warnings. also, please remember writers are humans and cannot think of everything all the time. we might miss one or two warnings within the work when writing the description, so please tell us.

➤ “𝐈 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬, 𝐢 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐠.”

pain. straight pain. your reblog shares that post with your followers. you like it, why wouldn’t they? that reblog stays on your page, it’ll be seen. the tags you put in could help others find more works on your blog, essentially helping more works be found. maybe they’re old and haven’t seen the light of the recent tags in months, but your reblog could help more people still see it, and that makes a difference. we all have those lazy moments where we don’t want to do all of the steps, but even doing them sometimes helps.

➤ 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐞𝐜 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞?

readers can scroll through the list for their preferences, find new writers that amaze them, maybe they gain the courage to put together their own fic recs list. all of those recommended fics are still floating around and being shared, they don’t get lost in the tags or the writer’s masterlists. you find/make a recs list: congratulations, you’re contributing to helping fanfics thrive (as they deserve). also, who doesn’t love an entire list right in front of them so they don’t have to go on a scavenger hunt to find new things to read? answer: no one.

➤ 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐬 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐥𝐞?

tags to organize, fics to go through/find/read, oh my. let me let you in on a little secret:

have you ever had that moment where you suddenly remember one line or scene from a fic you read months ago, and you have the vaguest details to go off of in order to search and find it? your fics recs blog would have you covered, just scroll through the feed or the tags and boom, it’s at your fingertips.

now imagine someone else looking for more fics to read stumbling upon your blog. might look a little strange and coded to them, but eventually they navigate and find a new fic they’ll be talking about for months. they reblog it, add their own feedback, their followers see it and join in, and that writer feels immensely appreciated all because you started a recs blog and just-so-happened to reblog their fic. tah dah.

➤ 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐥𝐨𝐩?

well, so did i. i asked my followers on this blog and my recs blog to send in their favorite fics with some extra details and feedback thinking i wouldn’t get anything, but i got an entire list! guess what’s even better? that list went straight into the tags (thanks to tumblr working properly for once) and now anyone that searches up ‘kpop fic recs’ can find it at any time. same goes for your own. there’s no specific way of organizing a recs list, just make sure the links work and the writers are credited! it helps.

read more! it’s a vast world in your hands, enjoy the words that go along with it.

sorry for this technical rant/advice post, this has just been in me for a while and i wanted to talk about it. I might add more to this as things come up, but for now i hope this helps! <3

[bubmyg]

not a date - jjk

pairing: jeongguk x reader

genre: enemies to lovers, college!au, fluff, very sparing illusions to smut, like jeongguk takes his shirt off for a few paragraphs

word count: 3,184

summary: he’s the infuriating kid in your literature class that has an answer to every single question and every time he raises his hand you kind of want to punch him because of that time you were in a group project together and he deleted and rewrote your entire portion at three in the morning or your voice is so infuriating please shut up and kiss me.

a/n: part 5 of to lovers :’-) the rest of the series is linked in my masterlist!!

In the scheme of wanting to take someone’s very specific and very annoying bright green pen from them and make them swallow it to prevent the incessant clicking that plagued your right ear the entirety of the power hour class, you wish you knew less about the owner of said pen.

You knew Jeon Jeongguk from freshman year composition, when he was one of eight people who’d filed into the tiny computer lab huddled in a giant black hoodie while you were still trying to gauge whether the sweat coating the back of your spine was visible through your shirt. The graduate student handling the class had split you into two groups immediately, prompting a question for you to discuss. That was the first time he’d taken something you’d said and added thirty unnecessary words to it without guilt and with a bunny smile you didn’t want to admit was attractive.

A liberal arts degree comes with the same general people in virtually all your classes. The girl who offered you a pencil the first time scantron attendance was taken. The boy who’d taken your seat the fourth week of class when you were both ten minutes early. And unfortunately for you, Jeongguk.

You knew he lived off campus in an apartment with his bio chemistry, doctor seeking roommate Namjoon after Yoongi had informed you the spindly man was terrible at pickup basketball and you’d scolded your friend for hanging out with someone who shared the same cereal bowls with the biggest prick in the literature department. You knew he wasn’t in a fraternity but his friend Jimin was and he spent the majority of his time holed up in the third floor of the house with a game controller in hand when he wasn’t correcting people or reminding homework due dates in group chats created for your various classes. You knew he could sing because Yoongi had dragged you to karaoke night on his off day at the cafe he worked at in which Jeongguk just so happened to be at and his friend, Taehyung and his charcoal stained fingers, had shoved him to the front and Yoongi had to pinch your hip to prevent you from burning a hole through Jeongguk’s melodious lips with your glare.

You knew he turned twenty-one in September when he showed up to your group presentation the next day, hungover, after deleting and changing your entire thesis to fit his.

Somehow his green pen still managed to be annoying even when he was half asleep and wearing his hood completely cinched under his chin. You resisted the urge to scold him when he took a seat (because there was no doubt he’d have done the same to you) but you nearly severed the tip of your tongue when an, endearing, rasp addressed you first.

“I’m sorry,” Jeongguk offered, gesturing vaguely at himself with a sliver of his teeth appearing, “Twenty-first was last night.”

You offered a tight lipped smile in return, “Happy belated birthday.”

It didn’t matter that he could barely keep his eyes open or the weight in his head above his spine because he knew the topic by heart, no need to glance backward at the slides or the bullet points or the visual aids like graphs and pictures and charts. He hadn’t even blinked in cutting you off when the slide color changed hue, showing where your ideas were supposed to be but were just instead a modified version of what you’d spent hours doing over the weekend.

They were your words but they weren’t and Jeongguk had the nerve to wink at you and say, “As my lovely partner starts to point out here, the chapter touches on—”

Your GPA mattered more than your pride when the professor kept you after class to commend your presentation, even though you hadn’t spoken a word outside of your name, and you took the A+ with a sour taste and a pointed vendetta to ignore Jeongguk.

The words groups for next project were enough to make your insides churn with distaste but the addition of the word reminder at the beginning was almost worse than the prospect of leaving your grade to someone else. Not only did your class stretch through two semesters with the same professor and the same general concept, but that particular class kept the same groups the entire year.

The reminder was seeing your name printed in bold, block letters directly above Jeon Jeongguk.

“Hey, partner,” He greeted when you dropped your backpack in front of your desk. He’d dropped his hood and traded black for one of color, a faded blue. You focused on counting the stripes on his joggers rather than meeting the sparkle in his stupidly pretty eyes.

You were silent in pulling out your laptop, notebook, non obnoxious pens. He continued to stare at the side of your face, desk creaking as he shifted more toward you, fingers gripping the edge of his desk in your peripheral.

“Don’t speak to me until you want to pick a time to meet.”

Jeongguk had the nerve to giggle this time, “We don’t even know what the topic is yet. Unless you want to come over, I won’t object.”

You knew where his apartment was, too, that Namjoon kept the place neatly decorated while Jeongguk’s door didn’t open entirely from the pile of laundry hidden between it and his desk, that he was a track star in high school from the medals dangling off a hook behind his bed frame, that he did, in fact, own more than five black hoodies and one grey one from the pile of pastels folded within his open closet door, that the green pens were stolen from Namjoon, ones that occupied a mug on their kitchen counter and came from the hospital that the med student had done residency at over the summer.

You hated that you knew all of that, too.

“Okay. When we learn the topic, don’t contact me until you want me to come to the cesspit that is your place of living.”

It was silent for a handful of your heartbeats roaring in your ears and then his voice was a half octave softer in your ear.

“Why do you keep responding to me if you don’t want me to speak to you?”

You were right, Jeongguk’s eyes were sparkling and they seemed to double over in all the reflections of a planetarium when he completed his goal of getting you to turn towards him. You tried averting your gaze to his smile but found a stray butterfly escaped from it’s locked prison in your stomach at the sight of the tiny freckle in the center of his bottom lip so you chose the tattered cover of his notebook in the end.

A notebook that he was flicking at the pages in, ring clad and vein ridden fingers and all.

“Fuck you,” You mumbled and you meant it in every connotation possible.

Jeongguk ignored you through the lecture notes, too busy interjecting his opinion at any point possible and you hated that you couldn’t find it within yourself to disagree with everything that left his lips. He ignored you when the project requirements appeared in place of the lecture slides, still scrawling looping notes on the margins of his notebook while the professor explained each bullet point in excruciating detail.

Upon further inspection did you notice the loops in his shorthand were drawings and you, again, hated that you agreed with his lack of attention paid to something that would be posted online later for your viewing anyway.

“Spend a few minutes speaking with your partner and then you’re free to go.”

Your bubble remained silent while the rest of the class erupted in a soft murmur, creaking desks and zipping backpacks and soft laughter all while the set of your shoulders remained rigid. They slumped only when Jeongguk’s tender murmur was back in your ear (and you’d admit, anything was better than his clicking pen).

“May I speak to you yet?”

The smack of your laptop on the metal spiral threaded through your notebook was embarrassingly loud. You corrected it while he snorted, nearly headbutting him where he was leaning towards your desk as you fished for your backpack.

“Are you wanting to set a time to meet?”

“Yeah. That’s...what we’re supposed to be doing.”

You tossed your hair back as you straightened, making direct eye contact with him, “Then yes. You may speak to me.”

Jeongguk was grinning again and you swallowed to keep the escaped butterfly in your throat at bay. You’d deal with her later.

“I’m free Thursday night, if you’d like to come over. Namjoon should be out of the apartment from five onward. He has a date with one of his extremely smart friends. Or I can come to yours, if you’d rather not fester in my filth like you insisted last time. Your dorm does have a pretty nice study room—”

“Thursday as in…” You blinked, “Valentine’s Day Thursday?”

You wanted to force feed him the feces to comply with the shit eating grin that encompassed his features. “My bad, I wasn’t aware you could display affection,” He rested his chin on his palm, “I assumed you’d spend the night throwing darts at heart shaped candies stuck to your ceiling if I didn’t make plans for you.”

“They’d be tiny pictures of your face. Why would I waste candy?” His grin only grew at your snarky indifference, “But no, I just assumed you had…”

“I don’t have a Tinder. I’ve never had one.”

“I wasn’t...going to ask that. I wouldn’t care even if you did.”

“Oh,” Jeongguk shrugged, “Well, I don’t. And I don’t have any plans Thursday. So if you’d like to work on our project before the weekend, I’m free and can stock up on discount candy from the drug store down the street. We can order one of those shitty heart shaped pizzas too, if you like.”

You scoffed, standing with your backpack in tow, “We’re just working on our project, not having a date underneath the radioactive glow from your hamper.”

He turned away and you shoved aside the seeming disappointment that saturated his monotone response, “Alright. I’ll see you, Thursday, then.”

You hated that you knew the best parking spaces around Jeongguk’s apartment complex and you hated that you’d visited the building more times than you could count on both your hands and feet in order to gather than information. Your backpack felt fifteen pounds heavier on your shoulders as you trekked through the maze of broken sidewalks and your knuckles felt numb for reasons other than the biting temperature when you lifted them to knock on his door.

You couldn’t imagine the scrutiny you’d face if you ever admitted coming over, no matter the obnoxious amount of times, to Jeongguk’s apartment made you nervous. A nagging voice on your shoulder told you it was because of the piano in the far corner of their living room that you knew he could play because he had for you before, or because his room smelled like him, vanilla and cinnamon and fresh flowers and laundry detergent, or because he always ordered and bought you food and insisted you couldn’t pay him back all while teasing you for mooching off of him, notes, food, and grades.

The grade comment settled like a forming cavity on your molars and you generally ended up leaving after he mentioned it. But it never stopped you from coming back.

The weight was heavier because of your textbook but also because of the tape that continued to replay in your conscious, the one of you watching with a bated breath as Jeongguk seemed to slouch at your denial of a date with him, of all things. You knew he wasn’t stupid, he was anything but, yet the devil on your opposite shoulder suggested that he just lacked any sort of critical thinking or social skills.

Or, the latter voice in your ear suggested, maybe you just didn’t want to admit you were slightly disappointed at the facade you tried to put on declining a date-like interaction with him too.

The smile plastered to his entire being when he tore open his apartment door fizzled your worries away and traded them for the grumble in your stomach when he thrust a white box in your direction.

“I went ahead and ordered the pizza for this not date,” Jeongguk’s fingers brushed your own when you took the box from him, “I got cheesy bread too. I didn’t know if you liked the breadsticks from Domino’s so…”

His words muffled like you were underwater, realization drowning you the second he teased you about the forbidden meeting between two individuals. A date. He didn’t want the date either. He hadn’t been disappointed.

He was playing some game that you didn’t want to be apart of but could master the same as he could, if not better.

“Can I eat in Namjoon’s room, seeing as this is a non date?” You mirrored his beaming smile, “The less I have to speak to you, the better.”

“No,” He answered your rhetorical question bluntly. You wanted to speak to him even if it was sarcastic insults about the single wrinkle in his duvet. “We have work to do—” You had to catch the door when he stalked into the depths of the apartment, voice echoing away, “—come inside. And take your shoes off!”

If you didn’t want the pizza promised with the cheesy bread, you would have bolted back to your car. “Anything else, your highness?”

“Yeah, bring the cheesy bread will you? And grab some plates from the kitchen.”

If you didn’t want the cheesy bread so bad, you would have turned and pelted the box into the disgusting snow drift plowed at the end of the sidewalk.

Jeongguk was three insults into teasing you for dropping tomato sauce on his partially clean duvet and a streaking blue highlighter into his notes when you decided you really wanted to kiss the garlic speck off the corner of his mouth.

No longer were you toning out his explanations because you had a predetermined bias to disagree with them but because you couldn’t shake the urge to grab his chin and determine how pepperoni tasted on someone else’s lips. If Namjoon were to arrive back anytime soon, the non date faux you each kept digging into each other’s conscience’s like daggered knives would crumble in an instant.

He’d switched the lighting in his room to a deep set purple, a setting you thankfully weren’t aware of and didn’t have to hate with your entire being when the first thought that entered your mind was that’s cool. There was a heart shaped pizza open between the two of you, enough pieces still prevalent to give off the illusion but the grease stains on the cardboard telling the full story. You were on his bed, crossed knees brushing his thigh where he’d scooted closer to show you something and hadn’t bothered to move back.

And you were unabashedly staring at him like he was better than any loaf of cheesy bread you could consume in one sitting.

“Hey,” Jeongguk’s voice was quiet in contrast to the snap of his fingers underneath your nose, “Did you hear me?”

You thought you were going to puke the crusts he’d given you all over his lap, “Y-yeah, I agree we could—”

“Wait, you agree with me? Either we’ve entered an alternate universe or you weren’t listening—”

There was probably pizza grease on his rug now from where your paper plate fluttered sadly from his bed, only to be melded into the floor by the smack of your textbook landing on top of it with the force in which you propelled yourself at Jeongguk’s figure. Surprise was barely an emotion with the speed that you pressed your mouth to his, messily squashing the tip of your nose against his cheek and nearly biting a chunk out of his bottom lip.

Your skin flamed momentarily in embarrassment and morphed into want when he kissed you back. His notebook followed the fate of the other obstacles when he moved onto his knees, the cool engravings on his rings pressing into your jaw when he cupped it to angle your lips, latter hand falling next to your thigh to loom over you.

His teeth snagged on your bottom lip as he settled his forehead against yours, still firmly holding onto your chin.

“I thought you’d never cave.”

You ground your teeth together with the same force as pale knuckles snagging on the collar of Jeongguk’s t-shirt to drag his mouth back to yours. He came with a chuckle against your lips, crawling closer to lodge a thigh between your legs while dragging his tongue across your molars. He craned over you, trailing opened mouthed kisses across your jaw while you hissed, “Like it better when you’re not speaking.”

He hummed into your skin, nudging your hair aside to nick his teeth into your neck, “Keep telling yourself that, baby.”

The noise that lulled lazily off your tongue was somewhere between a guttural groan and a mewled whine, scratching blunt fingernails across his shoulders, “You’re the smartest person I know and it’s fucking infuriating.”

“Mmm, talk dirty to me.”

“I’ll leave right this second—”

His hands gripped your hips and you were on your back, his dark fringe tickling at your forehead as he hovered over you. Brown irises grew black, dilated and twinkling under the ambient purple blanketing his room, “Want to know a secret?”

“No,” You pulled on the hem of his shirt, “Want this off.”

“Okay—” He tugged the white off his torso in one swift movement, leaning back over you with palms on either side of your head, “—now do you want to hear a secret?”

“If it’s the amount of months it’s been since you washed your sheets, I don’t want to hear it.”

Jeongguk’s mouth quieted you and he grumpily mumbled into the part of your lips, “I think I like it better when you’re not speaking either. I was going to feed your ego but…”

“Tell me the secret, Jeongguk.”

His lips traveled to your ear, “Always have thought you were incredibly fucking intelligent. Annoyingly so. Thought I needed to prove myself to you—” His teeth teased your earlobe, “—it was stupid and I’m an asshole.”

“Yeah, you are, but at least you’re self aware,” He kissed your cheek and your nose on the way back to meet your gaze and you grinned, “Thanks for that one A, though.”

You knew Jeon Jeongguk had glow in the dark, stick-on stars plastered all over his ceiling, ones that glowed an unnatural green in purple lighting and you hated that it was your new favorite view, just like you hated how good his lips felt on your skin and how comfortable his chest was to sleep on and how often he was right about nineteenth century literature.

[stoweboyd]

Building A Zettelkasten In Typora

I stumbled across a reference to a note-taking system I had not heard of: zettelkasten.

In Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive | David Clear writes about the notes box (zettelkasten) note system of Niklas Luhmann.

The Zettelkasten principles

A Zettelkasten is a phenomenal tool for storing and organizing your knowledge, extending your memory, generating new connections between ideas, and increasing your writing output. However, to make the most of a Zettelkasten, you should follow some key principles.

1 | The principle of atomicity: The term was coined by Christian Tietze. It means that each note should contain one idea and one idea only. This makes it possible to link ideas with a laser focus.

2 | The principle of autonomy: Each note should be autonomous, meaning it should be self-contained and comprehensible on its own. This allows notes to be moved, processed, separated, and concatenated independently of its neighbors. It also ensures that notes remain useful even if the original source of information disappears.

3 | Always link your notes: Whenever you add a note, make sure to link it to already existing notes. Avoid notes that are disconnected from other notes. As Luhmann himself put it, “each note is just an element that derives its quality from the network of links in the system. A note that is not connected to the network will be lost, will be forgotten by the Zettelkasten” (original in German).

4 | Explain why you’re linking notes: Whenever you are connecting two notes by a link, make sure to briefly explain why you are linking them. Otherwise, years down the road when you revisit your notes, you may have no idea why you connected them.

5 | Use your own words: Don’t copy and paste. If you come across an interesting idea and want to add it to your Zettelkasten, you must express that idea with your own words, in a way that you’ll be sure to understand years later. Don’t turn your Zettelkasten into a dump of copy-and-pasted information.

5 | Keep references: Always add references to your notes so that you know where you got an idea from. This prevents plagiarism and makes it easy for you to revisit the original source later on.

6 | Add your own thoughts to the Zettelkasten: If you have thoughts of your own, add them to the Zettelkasten as notes while keeping in mind the principle of atomicity, autonomy, and the need for linking.

7 | Don’t worry about structure: Don’t worry about putting notes in neat folders or into unique preconceived categories. As Schmidt put it, in a Zettelkasten “there are no privileged positions” and “there is no top and no bottom.” The organization develops organically.

8 | Add connection notes: As you begin to see connections among seemingly random notes, create connection notes, that is, specific notes whose purpose is to link together other notes and explain their relationship.

9 | Add outline notes: As ideas begin to coalesce into themes, create outline notes. An outline note is a note that simply contains a sequence of links to other notes, putting those other notes into a particular order to create a story, narrative, or argument.

10 | Never delete: Don’t delete old notes. Instead, link to new notes that explain what’s wrong with the old ones. In that way, your Zettelkasten will reflect how your thinking has evolved over time, which will prevent hindsight bias. Moreover, if you don’t delete, you might revisit old ideas that may turn out to be correct after all.

11 | Add notes without fear: You can never have too much information in your Zettelkasten. At worst, you’ll add notes that won’t be of immediate use. But adding more notes will never break your Zettelkasten or interfere with its proper operation. Remember, Luhmann had 90,000 notes in his Zettelkasten!

Clear goes on to show how he has implemented a digital note box (that what zettelcasten means in German) in markdown-formatted text files, like this:

# 201912161352 Zettelkasten is amazing

#notetaking #writing #productivity

The Zettelkasten notetaking system is the best notetaking system ever.

## Links

- [[201912070830-Zettelkasten-principles]] - [[201912080935-Niklas-Luhmann-short-biography]]

From the top: a title, a series of tags, the actual content which is a single sentence in this example, and a list of links to related notes.

The double-bracket notation is a feature for cross-file linking supported by 1Writer for iPad. The rest is plain vanilla markdown.

Dropbox Paper Fail

I tried to build a note box in Dropbox Paper, but tags don’t work as they should. Dropbox Paper supposedly supports tags, but the search functionality simply ignores the special characters. So a search on ‘#platform-capitalism’ finds all files that have either ‘platform’ or ‘capitalism’ in the contents. Not good.

I haven’t been using tags in Paper, and now I know why. They don’t work as they should.

Typora to the Rescue

But my favorite markdown tool — Typora — works pretty well for zettelkasten. Typora starts as a great markdown editor so that covers the note side of things.

Tags are not a core aspect of markdown, and not an extension built into Typora. However, the two sides of tags – marking and finding – can be pulled off.

I use markdown footnote, supported by Typora, to represent tags. For example, see this:

Each tag is formatted like this

[^#tag]: [optional text description]

Here’s the text of the file:

I opted to use footnote formatting in order to avoid Typora treating the ‘#’ as an indicator of a heading, at first. But it also means I can tag sentences in the contents with the tags, as in this example with ‘#auction’ in the second paragraph.

Typora’s search for ‘#auction’ leads to this:

Both the footnote indicator in the text and the footnote definition in the document footer are found and highlighted. Clicking on each opens the document and centers on the location where the tag is located. This works really well.

Creating links to other documents should build on search, but there’s a little snag. Searching for ‘platform-capitalism’ brings up the two docs that have that in their contents. With Typora I can simply drag a file reference from the file list into the Links section of a document, and it creates a link to that document.However, this can’t be done with files in the search results! So I have to search, then remember the files, and pull them from the file list in the folder view.  [It would be helpful if I could drag a file reference from the search results: I have suggested that to the Typora folks, and we’ll see.]

The Bottom Line

Typora can support creating a zettelcasten in markdown, clearly.

But this presents me with a larger question. I have been managing my daybook journal as a chronological series of files, one for each day, in which I paste all sorts of information related to each day: things I’ve read, things to do, things I’ve done. Perhaps I can continue with both techniques? A journal for one and a notes box for the other?

I’ve already learned that I can’t effectively search through my Dropbox Paper journal – at least until they fix the search functionality – so I will revert to journaling in Typora, since I need to remember things, not just capture them. I guess my zettelcasten and my journal coalesce into one giant folder, neatly time-stamped.

[fleetofshippyships-archive]

WIP Meme

Tagged by @belleslettres-love, thanks hun =D

Rules: post the first line of your wip and tag as many people as words.

And since they did a paragraph instead of a sentence...👀 y’all know how I love to overshare while working on stuff, and I’m working on multiple things at once, most of which are different parts of my mdzs mer!au series...

1. 

This is kind of...my current main wip is actually combining 4 finished oneshots/drabbles into one piece and adding transitions and filler scenes to make it flow as best I can and make it a more coherent multi-chapter piece (who am I kidding though, I’ll end up probably doubling the overall word count in new added scenes), here’s the first paragraph of that:

The sound of cricket song fills Wei Wuxian’s ears, the clear, starry sky is filling his vision, and Lan Zhan’s hair is like silk against his fingers. It’s probably the most peaceful and content he’s ever felt. A moment he wishes could go on and on, endlessly.

But, since that was already technically finished as a standalone piece before I started combining these pieces, then the more correct ‘first line/s’ of this wip would be the new scene (which I’m still working on) I wrote to connect that first piece to the second one.

In which case:

Wei Wuxian stared at the ceiling for some time, his reaching hand long fallen back onto the bed. Another dream of seeing Lan Zhan again. Like all the others, it had felt so real. He had stopped visiting that pier in the hopes of seeing Lan Zhan again, but his mind kept sending him back there, night after night.

Still driving myself nuts over the tense change and transitioning it, but...present works really well for that initial dream sequence and I don’t want to re-write it XD wouldn’t be an issue if the first moments of waking weren’t also in present tense, making the transition super awkward, but I refuse to change them because it’s so beautiful and sad, I can’t mess with that 🤷‍♂️ I’ll just probably smack a chapter break between the two and torment my poor readers by leaving it on those sad lines for a few days before uploading the next chapter 😅

Oh man, though, if this was a ‘last line’ of your wip meme, y’all readers of my mer!au would lose your shit, I still squeal and flail whenever I look at the last lines of the last part that’s going into this multi-chapter set XD 

2.

Lan Xichen turned his face into the breeze. It ruffled his hair a little, what few strands weren’t smoothly pressed back, at least. It was still an almost uncomfortable sight, how similar their features were.

👀👀

3.

Wei Wuxian waited until Jiang Cheng was out of sight, and then his shoulders slumped. He lifted his hands to cover his face and inhaled slowly. He could barely contain himself, remembering Jiang Cheng caring for him like a younger brother, or maybe even a son. After the suspicion had passed, at least, but even then, he had been kinder to Wei Wuxian than he would have expected.

I went and started a mini-follow up to my 27k de-aged wwx fic that I may or may not have finished and may or may not still end up deleting, which was itself an alternate of an unposted oneshot focusing on lwj and lxc’s part of this same story and which I may or may not end up deleteting since I didn’t like it and that’s why I went and wrote jc and wwx’s side...sometimes it just be like that 🤷‍♀️ and god i want to write jin ling’s pov of the whole fucking thing too but yikes NO i need to stop

4.

Kasen turned from the sheets he had just hung to dry, just for a moment, to see if Ookurikara’s distasteful state continued. He was resolved to say something if it did. There was only so much he could stand, and there was established etiquette for such things.

Whoops, also started a Kurikasen soulmate au cos I was throwing soulmate headcanons around with someone at like 2 in the morning and that’s a surefire recipe to get me writing (and in fact that’s how I started writing kurikasen in the first place, we were talking about them and I went onto ao3 and saw there 3 fics about them, went and was like OMG WHY to them, starting headcanoning with them and then hey next thing I knew I’d written 2 drabbles and it was 3am). But then while I started writing it we kept talking about it...so I sort of plotted the whole thing out and now my interest in writing it has plummeted so I’ll probably never finish it...but I’ve still been tinkering with it anyway...

5.

“Pick herbs?”

“Yes. Herbs, mushrooms, anything. Just send him out of the castle for a day or two. If he stays a moment longer he’s going to cause an incident and—” Arthur stopped speaking abruptly.

Gaius raised both his eyebrows. “You are the prince, your highness. If you wish him to be gone for a time, why not order him yourself?”

“Oh, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about my useless servant, it’s that the only person he will actually listen to is you, Gaius,” Arthur said, sounding uncharacteristically bitter.

Sooo, @april-thelightfury115 I haven’t forgotten I owe you a merthur fic, and this isn’t technically the start of it, but it’s the start of the doc it’s in, I’m sort of writing bits of it out of order as they come to me. I haven’t written Merthur for so long and I don’t usually write with such a clear idea outline in my head so...we’ll see XD but I’m trying =)

ANYWAY

There’s a couple more small things here and there, I’ve been having such a hard time maintaining focus so I’ve just been hopping around my wips doing a little here and there, but let’s leave it with those 5 main things =)

And, I dunno who to tag @rockmarina and @sarah-yyy come to mind...anyone who wants to be tagged in things like this leave a reply and I’ll note it down somewhere for future reference, I really can’t rely on my memory to recall who I know that writes, and the writers I’ve been talking to lately are all on discord or twitter...and I’m never sure if I should tag all the HP writers I know when I do these and they’re not about HP anymore 😅

[kg2hub]

Rules for mobile users

[[here’s a google doc for the updated list of rules, applicable for all my blogs]]

anything under this cut is from my outdated rules.

[rules updated: 08/15/2019]

–STUFF YOU SHOULD DO–

• No godmodding. No sending (implied or explicit) homophobic/transphobic/bigoted messages to me or my character either.

• Please don’t over-pester me for replies. I promise I’ll get to them. Feel free to drop me a reminder after at least a week of no replies, though. In return, I usually give you a week too, unless otherwise specified in your own rules, until I remind you if it’s your turn to reply (or more often, I chicken out and trust that you’ll eventually respond/want to drop it and end up never bringing up that particular thread ever again). You’re always free to start multiple threads with me, that is greatly encouraged because I love having lots of threads with people.

• If you start getting bored with the roleplay, feel free to drop it and/or end it. We can always start up another thread in the future.

• However, please let me know if you want to drop a roleplay thread! It can give me major anxiety when I’m waiting for a response that’s never going to come, and I wonder if I did something wrong and assume that’s why you’re not replying anymore :’) I’m not forcing you to let me know if you want to drop a thread, you can drop it without saying anything too. But I personally really appreciate being told about that sort of thing.

• Don’t reblog a thread you’re not part of. This should go without being said, of course. Personals will be hardblocked immediately, rp blogs will receive a warning.

• If you can trim your threads, please do! It’s fine if you can’t, though, because I will most likely trim the thread for you. If you don’t trim threads with other people, however, I’ll be less likely to follow you since I don’t like scrolling through long posts.

• Please don’t claim any of my art as your own. If you post it somewhere, the least you can do is credit me by at least including a link to my blog or something. Bonus points if you ask me first before reposting my art, but I understand if you’re anxious because so am I :’)

• If any of your art is featured on my blog, as an icon or something and you don’t want me to use your art, please tell me!!! Message me privately or contact me in some way and please let me know that you want your art taken down. As a fellow artist, I understand wanting other people to not use your art (although I am personally fine with it as long as proper credit is given,) but if you’re more strict about it than I am, that’s totally okay too! Just let me know, and I’ll stop using your art immediately, will delete all icons I have of your art, as well as delete every single instance of your art being used on this blog.

• That being said, if you’re following me, please let me know if I’m doing something that’s making you uncomfortable or is breaking one of your rules!! I do read the rules pages of everyone, but I’m human and forget things, and I’m not a mind reader either ;~; I care, so please tell me if I’m ever doing anything bad

• You can reply to any of my open starters at any time! Even if they’re a year old! Even if other people have already replied to it! My open starters are open for a reason, and we don’t have to be mutuals for you to reply to them either :’)

—

–STUFF YOU SHOULD KEEP IN MIND–

• I am of age to do smut, but Ted is literally in kindergarten so that is a no for this blog! There might be occasional references to adult stuff, given the mature nature of the canon game, but that’s about it. No explicit smut in this house.

• This blog is not a spoiler-free one. I will not tag roleplays with spoilers, but anything else will be tagged with Kindergarten Spoilers

• I’m alright with roleplaying nsfw in general, minus smut. Gore, violence, and generally dark roleplays are cool with me. It should be, considering the game this character is from. I love angsty things just as much as I love fluff ;w; Speaking of gore, you’re more than welcome to fight/harm/injure my muse to any extent! You don’t even have to ask! If you want to do a rp where he dies, however, please dm me first.

• I prefer not to roleplay with personals, unless you are someone I know from school or something like that. Personals in general are allowed to follow me too! However! Personals are not allowed to reblog roleplays, in character posts, or ooc posts especially if I say in the tags that I’m going to delete the post later. Only things that are tagged with my “musings” or “art tag” tags are okay to reblog. Headcanon posts are not okay to reblog unless I say otherwise.

• Like spamming is okay! I very occasionally lose roleplays, and getting lots of notes from likes are never a factor for that, for me personally. If I lose a roleplay, it’s mostly just because I forgot, so that’s really a “me” thing. I’m usually very good at keeping track of who I’m roleplaying with and how many ongoing threads I have, and I reply pretty consistently, so just remind me if I haven’t responded after a week or more days (as stated in one of the above rules)! And I like it when people like my posts! It lets me know that you like my blog and the stuff I post, and it makes me happy :’)

• If you are an OC, I will assume our muses have never met unless you plan ahead with me what their relationship is like.

• That being said, characters who have already interacted in canon will know each other. Unless the roleplay takes place in a different point of time and we are staging their first meeting, of course.

• Doubles are welcome to interact too! Although currently I don’t know of much other Ted roleplay blogs lmao. I’m also cool with interacting with and following duplicates of different characters than my own muse!

• This blog will not have mains. Ted will not have any specific version of a muse that he’ll talk about in threads, unless the thread is specifically about that one muse for some reason. For Kindergarten blogs, he will typically be the Ted in your muse’s timeline in serious roleplays, unless your muse is part of an AU/UA/canon-divergent universe, or there are things about your muse’s backstory that would contradict Ted being in your timeline naturally, or you talk about it with me beforehand.

• I’m pretty lenient with short replies. Don’t feel pressured to match the length if my reply gets long! Multi-para (usually 2-5 paragraphs) is my go-to for roleplays, so I usually do long replies by default.

• Adding onto that, I honestly don’t mind one-liners. Of course, in crack/online roleplays it’s fine but I’m okay with it in serious roleplays too. I prefer it if you don’t give me one-liners, but hey, as long as I’m still having fun with the roleplay anyway, it’s cool with me! I understand not being able to think of anything to write, so just as long as you don’t give me one or two words as your reply like ‘He smiled.’ or ’*laughs*’, I’ll be cool with it. Put at least some effort even if you’re only gonna give me one sentence, otherwise I’ll drop the rp once it becomes a repeat offense.

• I will not change the formatting of my roleplays to fit yours. I’m comfortable with sticking to only paragraph style roleplays, thank you very much. Feel free to keep formatting your own posts though, because I think formatting looks really cool! I just don’t want to format my posts, however. I will not go all out with formatting my own posts with all that cool ‘small text’, and indents, and bolding and all that. The most I ever do with my formatting is italics for emphasis on certain words, and using icons.

• I tend to move roleplays from asks onto its own post. If I send you an ask meme and you answer it, I’ll respond by making a new post, tagging you, and linking to your reply.

• I accept any sort of asks! If they aren’t answered after a while, either I don’t know how to answer it or I might be drawing it out and I am a very slow artist- Sorry-

• Feel free to tag me in any of those tagging memes! I don’t mind and I think they’re pretty fun to do! ^^

• Adding onto the above rule, you’re more than welcome to send me those chain asks like “send this to 10 roleplayers you think are really great!” because it’s super duper nice that you would think to send one to me! But don’t expect me to send them to other people, because I won’t :’) my anxiety won’t let me, so I’m sorry-

• If I follow you, that means I’ve already read all of your rules. I might not send the codephrase, though, because most of the time I get very anxious over having to send things like that. I’m very sorry–! But if I follow you then chances are that I have definitely read them before following- If you choose not to trust me on this, I understand.

• I generally follow every rp blog that follows me, but I might not follow some people back for a few reasons. Some might be for the type of content you post on your blog, but I am still non-selective! I will roleplay with anyone who asks (unless you wanna rp gross things or you’re a mean person,,,, like your muse can be as much of a dick as you want, that’s no problem but don’t be gross to other people as yourself) and if I do roleplay with you, I will be more likely to follow you as well.

• Adding onto the above rule, however, please respect that it’s nothing personal if I ever unfollow you either! It’s not that I hate you or anything, but if you haven’t followed me back and you’re a private rp blog, or if we’re mutuals but never really roleplay, our muses just don’t click, you spam stuff that I don’t want to see on my dash, or you’ve become inactive for years and/or don’t interact with me anymore, there’s nothing wrong with that! We can still be friends but I prefer to have all the people I follow be potential rp partners. Feel free to follow me on my personal, Briightskies, if you still wanna keep in touch but not rp :’)

—

–ABOUT THIS BLOG–

• This blog is OC, multiverse, and crossover friendly! I love OCs and have many of my own tbh, you’re all more than welcome to come rp with me!!

• I’ll also rp with fandoms I’m not into either, as long as you have a good about section for your character, which also indicates how you portray them (any headcanons or AUs you have that aren’t canon, or whether you portray them as canonly as possible, unless they’re OCs of course since a regular about page is a given) and I’ll probably look up other things about that fandom in its wiki if I don’t know what something is anyway.

• This blog is multiship and will only ship with other child muses! Kid crushes are adorable! I used to have many crushes as a child, and the game does depict children crushing on each other or outright ‘dating’. So any relationships my muse is involved in, are in different timelines unless specified. Poly relationships aren’t bad though, just saying. I ship pretty much anything unless it’s incest or if they’re children paired with someone a lot older. Because Ted is a child, he won’t really get intimate with his partners, but romantic stuff is okay.

• I also only ship with chemistry. My muses need to get to know yours first, so don’t get disappointed if he only sees you as a friend/acquaintance at first and has no intention of pursuing a romantic relationship with your muse. Give my muse reasons to care about your muse and let the feelings develop naturally, and don’t ever force your muse on mine. Unless it’s to mess with him, or whatever other reason. Unrequited stuff is absolutely okay with me too!

• I will tag common triggers and such, but don’t be afraid to tell me if you have something you want me to tag! I promise I’ll remember to tag it from then on. I do not have any known triggers myself. Any trigger warning tags will be written as “tw; ____” with a semi-colon, not a colon. If I feel like something should be tagged as a trigger but I’m not sure what to tag it exactly, I’ll just tag it as “tw” as a sort of catch-all tag.

     Requested tagged triggers:

none right now

• I will only talk through the IM system ooc. If you send me a message through there, I will not respond with ooc brackets ((these things)) because I will automatically assume you know that you’re talking to the mun. I do not do roleplays on there.

-

Thank you for reading this really long list of rules! It means a lot if you did!

There’s no password, because I’m also anxious with those for other people’s blogs as I said above. But if you would like to interact with me, you can shoot me an ask directed to my muse, or like one of my starter call posts at any time (also feel free to re-like those posts so I can make another starter for you at any time!) for me to write you a starter!

[thecreativeangel]

aut neca aut necare: VI

Peter Parker x Fem!Reader

*Please don’t plagiarize my work, thank you :3*

Summary: You try once more to apologize to Peter (not successfully) and Spiderman thinks it’s a good idea to bring up your family. 

Warnings: A hoe needs D E P R E S S O

Words: 3.1k wow i need a life

Previous Chapter                                                          Next Chapter

“Hi Peter. Sorry I got in a completely meaningless fight with you and brought up the death of your parents. We're cool, right?”

Yeah, that wasn't going to pass. You stared with half bleary eyes at the phone in your hand, a paragraph long text message highlighted in blue, about to be deleted. This was the fifth…sixth? Sixth attempt at an astounding apology that would make Peter so emotional he’d forgive you in an instant. So far, everything you wrote turned out to be shit. Every text was too long, too pathetic and clingy. And it became apparent to you that as of recently, your texts to Peter had to be perfect. Even before the fight you’d been double checking the spelling, triple checking to make sure there weren’t too many emojis.

Is adding a period too formal? Too strict? And yes, you knew very well why you were acting like this but refused to say it out loud.

After huffing through your nose, you pressed delete and half an hour’s worth of typing was gone. The sound of heavy boats cutting through water was really helping right then, to calm nerves and such. You closed your eyes and dangled your feet over the side of the warehouse. The tracker you'd put on one of Kim’s “henchmen” (could a high school student really have henchmen?) had been still for two hours now, and the video you could get on your phone was of the spider-tracker crawling up and down a man’s pant leg. The doors were locked. The live feed was silent, save for the man pacing; he was alone.

A boat horn rang through the night air, startling a cat that was sleeping on the fence down below. That reminds me, you thought. Haven't gone to Delmar’s in a while. Your phone screen’s light illuminated your face, the blank text box ever present. Okay, go simple. Don't be a dumbass. Straight to the point. I've got this. Your fingers moved nimbly by themselves, typing out the shortest thing you could think of.

“‘I'm sorry’ isn't enough right now, I know. See you at school.”

You hit send and watched the text until “delivered” appeared in small blue letters right below. Was that too up front? Probably. Was he going to forgive you because of one text, no matter how long? No. Never. You looked up at the stars and sighed, feeling a cold gust of wind flow past your cheeks. With the mask off, details about your surroundings were more clear. Everything was in high definition, but that made it hard to focus. Spidey was right; your senses were dialed up to 11, too much input and not enough capacity for storage.

Looking back down at your phone, you saw that “delivered” had changed to “read”.

Peter already saw what you wrote. He didn't bother to reply.

You made a high pitched scream at the back of your throat, frustration and shame warming your cold cheeks. I’m an idiot! Of course he still hates me- I brought up his fucking dead parents! I was the first person he opened up to after they died, and now I’ve gone and fucked up. You kicked your legs over the side of the warehouse and laid spread angled on the tin roof. This was the warehouse you’d been visiting for a few days now. Almost a week. It was only half a mile from where you saw the tall grey alien talk to Kimberly and her bosses. Sure, you should be more careful than texting while hunting down dangerous criminals, but after a few days of spending nightly hours on the roof, it had grown boring. Tame. The giant garage door was locked and from a tiny crack in the wall you only saw a giant, empty warehouse.

You were close to giving up when a car pulled into the alley on your side of the roof. A boy stepped out, loudly smacking on gum and locking the car equally loudly. Still laying down, you peeked over the side of the roof. He, a younger kid, by the sound of it, was with a girl. She talked quickly, nervously. A lazy grin slid across your face; Kimberly was never good at whispering.

“Spit that shit out before I make you,” she finally snapped. You heard a “whooey” sound and a wet splat, meaning he did as told.

“It calms me down,” he explained serenely, as if appeasing a toddler. “Maybe you should try it, since you’re so worked up. Maybe you’ll stop annoying dad all the time.”

The garage doors slid up, rumbling so badly you felt the tremors in your entire body. Their voices faded and before they did, you heard Kimberly retort: “Dad likes me better anyway.” So that’s Kim’s brother? The three menacing, scary hooded figures that talked to the grey alien were a...family? SERIOUSLY?

“Hey,” a voice hissed, poking your shoulder. On reflex, you blindly grabbed (an...arm?) and threw them away, fully prepared to then launch yourself at the target because if they wanted to fight then-

“Ow, what the fuck!” Spidey gasped, holding his bruised bicep.

“Shit- don’t sneak up on me like that!” you cried.

“Why-” he seemed to wince, rubbing the sore spot. “D’you always try an’ kill people when they do that?!”

“Well I was kind of in the middle of something!” you argued, glancing nervously over the ledge at the half dozen parked vans. “Friggin’ intense bad guy shit was happening and you just sneak up on me outta nowhere…”

“What’s intense is your grip,” Spidey murmured, rolling his shoulder. “Is that ‘cause of your powers or are you a gym rat?”

“Okay Mr. ‘I Can Stop A Moving Train’,” you said, putting a hand on your hip. "Not everyone knows how to control their strength.”

He snickered and plopped down on the ledge of the warehouse. “No seriously. Powers or its always been like that?”

“Uh…” you sat down next to him. “Powers I think. Dunno, I’ve always been able to slap a bitch who needs it.”

Spidey pouted under his mask. “Aww, am I your bitch?”

You had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from cackling. “Say that again, but slowly.”

“Am I y- oh,” he laughed awkwardly. “Whoops. Welp, guess this partnership is terminated. Nice knowing you, I’m going to go kill myself now.”

The boisterous laugh finally escaped your lips, all thoughts of Peter leaving your conscious. Spiderman made a gun with his hand, held it to the side of his head and jerked his thumb back as if pulling a trigger. “Now that my sidekick knows I’m an idiot, might as well drop being Spiderman, right?”

“Sidekick?” you managed to scoff between giggles. “Please. I’m the dominant one in this relationship.”

“Kinky.”

The tips of your ears suddenly felt hot. “S-shut up!”

Spidey laughed when you shoved his shoulder, rolling your eyes under your mask. “That’s not what I meant, dammit! I’m like the biggest virgin you’ll ever- Stop laughing!”

He kept doing so but somehow, you felt lighter than you’d been a few minutes ago. Free. Like a kid. Which was odd, because this was a nightly patrol and Kim was right below- “We need to get down there.”

The lighthearted aura was sucked from the air. “Huh?”

“I’m supposed to be down there! I was going to sneak in and- and now we’re talking about bullshit when we could be doing something!”

“Oh-kay crazy,” he dismissed you with a wave of his hand. “I called the police, they’ll be here in less than an hour. All we have to do is make sure they don’t leave the premises.”

You frowned inside your mask, thankful that it didn’t change to show facial expressions like his did. How could this superhero, especially one who was known to deviate from law enforcement, sit here and wait for people to do work for him? People who were defenseless unless they were armed with a weapon, no less. You impatiently tapped a gloved hand on your thigh, ears perking up to the muffled arguing that traveled up a nearby air vent.

“Go patrol the city,” Spidey suggested, tapping commands into the sensors on his wrist. “Better that than sitting here and doing nothing. I’ll call you if I need backu-”

“No way,” you said sternly. “I’m gonna kick their asses myself if they try to escape. Not leaving.”

“Don’t- you shouldn’t hurt them, they’re just doing their job,” he said finally, after at least five minutes of thick silence.

“They’re dangerous-”

“So are you,” he fired back. You drew away, fingers tightening around the ledge in surprise. He must have noticed the outburst was uncalled for because he released a shaky sigh. “So am I. We’re dangerous, you know that- right? Only difference between us and them is that we aren’t desperate enough to go into that line of work.”

You bristled at that. “That’s a damn big difference.”

“Not a hard line to cross, though,” Spidey noted, ceasing his tapping of instructions. “People do shit when they’re desperate. For money, for safety, for family…” he looked away from the skyline horizon and turned to you. “I’d do a lot for my family, more than I’d ever tell you about.”

“Well,” you said frankly. “That hurts a bit. Thanks, man.”

“You’ve been getting more...reckless,” he said, “The whole fiasco with the United Nations-”

“I told you that wasn’t me!”

Peter said the same thing, about the United Nations. About the little epic failure you achieved in one night. He was wrong, though; you were framed, it was synthetic smoke. Who was trying to make you Public Enemy #1? You didn’t know and it was killing you. Maybe I should tell Peter about this superhero gig. He could help me deal with it, I guess, you considered the notion. That’d be a huge chip off my shoulder. Too bad I was a complete dumbass and ruined the friendship with one stupid fucking offhand comment-

“Okay, say it wasn’t,” Spidey said patiently, drawing you out of the stream of furious thoughts. “But you stole from that jewelry store a while back.”

“I stopped a potential robbery!” you said defiantly. “He was an idiot for trying to steal at Fifth Avenue- who the hell does that? A-and I only took one little diamond-”

“‘One little diamond’?!”

“Whaaat?” you whined, looking down at your dangling legs guiltily.

“What would your parents think?” Spidey asked, probably expecting you to open up more. Probably raising an eyebrow under his stupid mask. Good luck with that, bud.

“Okay, okay,” you immediately dropped the playful tone. “I get it, that was bad. Let’s move on please.”

“No, c’mon,” he pressed. “Everyone thinks about their family when they do bad shit.”

Your lips were pursed in a thin line and you felt your head tilt in a small nod. He would get no other answer right away, but he sure did try. “Do you...not have a family?”

No response. “Shit, I’m sorry. I assumed-”

“I have a family,” you forced out, and it sounded so disgusting to say that you prayed you’d never have to say it again. Spiderman did this thing where he leaned forward and turned his upper body towards you, cocking his head down and waiting for a continuation. You huffed.

“It’s a complicated situation, webhead,” you lifted one leg onto the roof and pulled your knee to your chest, letting the other one dangle. “S’not a big family anyway, so at least it’s not completely out of hand.”

“Dead relative?”

You shook your head. “Single mom.”

“Oh,” his hand patted your shoulder, a surprisingly welcomed gesture. “My best friend’s got a single mom. They’re not very close, though.”

“Good for them,” you said flatly.

Spiderman shifted awkwardly. “So maybe don’t...steal jewelry? For your mom’s sake?”

He looked at you for a reaction, even a tiny nod, and got none. “You really hate talking about her, don’t you?”

“It’s not- ugh, I dunno,” you hung your head lower. “If I talk about my mum for another second I’d probably start on a whole rant ‘bout how she utterly failed as a parent and, despite technically being there my entire childhood, is constantly ignoring her responsibilities-”

You opened your mouth to continue but choked on the words, realizing that the conversation was 90% you oversharing. “Anyway she’s an okay mum or whatever. Hasn’t done anything that bad. Very average.”

How else were you to phrase it to someone you met so recently? “Very average” was giving her way too much credit but it wasn’t abuse...anymore. In the past two years she’d gone from hitting you for being a disappointment to not caring at all. She didn’t yell every week, she didn’t slap you upside the head or box your ears. She tried to do Mother/Daughter nights but they always ended with her screaming about kicking you out while you wiped away tears. Frankly it wasn’t “caring” as much as it was random fits of rage but- it wasn’t physical anymore. You didn’t have hand shaped bruises anymore, nor split lips. You still had to be careful around your mum ‘cause hell, who knew if she was having a bad day. Who knew what she’d do if she had a bad day. But despite the bad days...she was still your mum. She always apologized after a week or so, told you she hadn’t meant it.

Spiderman was nodded slowly. “You’ve...got a lot to say about your mom.”

“Trust me, that barely covered my opinion of her,” you grumbled. “But what the hell, right? Not like I know you,” your hands felt clammy and hot from frustration.

“Don’t look,” you warned him briskly.

“What?”

“I need some air, don’t look at me.” Your fingers grasped the bottom of your mask and began to tug up. Chilly night air tingled pleasantly wherever it touched, almost making you sigh out loud.

Spidey’s neck must have snapped with how quickly he looked away. “Are you crazy?! Why are you taking the mask o-”

“Relax, I’m just lifting it a little,” you bunched the mask up on the bridge of your nose, inhaling deeply for the cold, dry New York air. It rattled in your lungs yet you took another calming breath, glancing at Spiderman.

He was covering his eyes.

“You don’t have to-” your quiet laugh got his attention. “Don’t cover your eyes, dude. Jus’ don’t look at my face.”

“Uh, yeah,” he hesitantly took the hand from his face. “Gotta be cautious thought.”

“S’ just my mouth, Spiderboy,” you grinned at his awkward nature. “What- can’t handle seeing a girl’s lips?”

“Yes I have!”

You giggled at his voice crack. “Pretty sure you’ve a bigger virgin than I am.”

“I am not!”

“Oh yeah?” you quirked an eyebrow, knowing he couldn’t see it. “I’m making my ‘I-don’t-believe-you’ face, by the way. Seriously starting to doubt that you’re my age ‘cause…you act like a twelve year old. No offense.”

“I’m sixteen!” he defended and honestly, seeing him angrily wave his arms around without facing you was hilarious. And the suit sounded like it was frantically trying to adjust the voice modifier to his high pitched rambling. “I swear I’m sixteen, it’s fucking puberty-”

You put a hand up to silence him, smiling maniacally before pulling your mask over your chin again. “I kid, I kid. Mask is back down.”

If this were a cartoon there would have been steam shooting from his ears. Not like, angry steam. Flustered steam. Or maybe both. Either way, it was funny.

“I hate you,” he groused. “And my voice had to crack! God, that’s worse than when we met!”

A fresh bout of laughter erupted from thinking of that memory alone. Your cackles, once again muffled by the shitty mask, had to be stifled by biting down on the inside of your cheek.

“Pfft, ha! Oh-” you gagged on the words. “Oh that was fucking amazing! D’you- d’you remember when the kid was running-”

“Please no.”

“And you tried to grab him-”

“No, no you said you wouldn’t bring that up!”

“And he threw the bag of quarters at your dick! Ha!”

Spiderman groaned in agony. “Take the mask off so I can deck you.”

“Come at me scrub, I’m- shit,” your metal wristlet beeped, flashing the word “Urgent�� in neon blue block letters. “Ah, damn. There’s a robbery near my place, gotta check that out,” owners of a small Korean place near Delmar’s are being threatened at gunpoint. You’d been there with Peter and Ned few times, and that made thought you somber again. “That’ll be a few minutes to get to.”

“You’ve gotta stop bugging the cameras,” Spidey said disapprovingly.

“Well some of us don’t have fancy Super-Conducting 4.2 Tera whatever to help us,” you answered snidely, projecting a small image of the restaurant's security camera view. “Fuck, you’ve got patrol too. Who’s gonna guard this shit?”

“I can stay here,” Spidey offered quickly. He’s not asking to swing me there? That’s...weird. Last time I checked he was the biggest Mom Friend I’ve ever met.

You paused at the ledge of the warehouse, eyes moving from the him to Queens in the distance and back again. “Are you sure?”

“Go!” he urged, shooing you away. “I can handle one night without a partner. S’ your chance to prove that you’re not evil.” You scoffed, wheeled around and raised your middle finger, falling backwards off the ledge with your arms spread like wings. Your body dissolving into a column of smoke seconds before hitting the ground. Spiderman didn’t call for backup that night and the ordeal was stopped with a few “magic tricks” of yours. The robber was easy to take down as he was stupid high and though you disappeared before they could say anything, you saw the restaurant owners talking to a local reporter with relieved expressions. You doubted the old couple would say anything bad, but being tentative never hurt anyone. Hopefully Spidey’s call sent a few officers to the warehouse.

Funny thing was: you hadn’t seen any police cars heading to the warehouse as you flew Queens. Not a single one.

A/N: idk why i got carried away with this. like on one hand...character background. on the other...character background that will cause some depressing shit vv soon

Tags:  @everythingthatisrandom, @mcheung0314,@spiderdudeparker, @lou-la-lou, @4-a-m, @miss-glitch, @runs-with-sciss0rs, @lubrielx, @kaitlynthehuman, @b-lyn-k, @hotsocke, @therealwatermelon, @shipping-the-unsinkable-ship, @vivideley, @rosieredcheeks 

[fyrapartnersearch]

Harry Potter Originals; M// or F//

Back to the grindstone. My name is Jupiter, I'm 21, and I'm looking to roleplay original characters in the Harry Potter universe! I only write with people who are 18 or older, very preferably 20+ as well. I'm fine with side pairings of any gender combination, but I'd prefer the main pairing to either be M// or F//. I can shoot off replies a few times a week depending on my work schedule.

  My post length varies between novella or multiple paragraphs depending on what we agree on; if we don't write novella, my first few posts tend to be very lengthy as I ease into everything, and then it tapers into around 4-5 paragraphs or so. I won't write with anyone who writes less than three paragraphs; I'm not hyper stingy with length, I just value quantity and quality in relatively equal measure. It also kind of sucks when you write a huge post and only get a paragraph in response. Just tell me if you'd rather multi-p or novella. I write in third person, past tense but I can do present tense as well if that's what you prefer. Doubling tends to be my default (either two M// relationships, two F//, or one of each) but it's not required, so let me know off the bat if that's not what you usually stick with.

  OKAY! Christ, that's a lot to get off my chest right in the beginning. I'm not going to shove everything into little words to skirt under the 300 word limit because my thoughts are far too disjointed for that, but I'll list the ideas I've got as incentive to read on: modern wizarding world, Triwizard Tournament (but different), prophecies, mysteries, bigger things afoot? Wow! So interesting! More context under way if you're intrigued.

  AGAIN, THIS IS A HUGE AD. MY DEEPEST APOLOGIES.

  Other things to mention before getting into the meat of my ad and just dump all of my ideas in one spot. As a general rule I don't write anyone younger than 20, both because of the nature of my RPs and because it just feels weird to me to write about kids in school despite the fact that Hogwarts is pretty much the objectively best thing about the series' setting! So no students. I would, however, totally be down with writing professors in Hogwarts. I’m kind of itching for it, tbh? Could be fun. I’ve been mulling over a professor character, one from either Hogwarts or Beauxbaton.

  Smut is good, but like doubling, not required. It goes without saying that any and all characters will be adults, of course. My limits underage characters/pedophilia, incest, nonconsensual/dubious consent, bestiality, gore, mpreg, A/B/O, toilet kinks, sexual abuse, things of that ilk. I also only write vers characters in bed I've spent way too many years playing with partners who only play bottoms in smut scenes, so I'm all burnt out on that, man.

  I'm a very big pinterest user and extremely hooked on aesthetics, so moodboards are to be expected on my half. I think practically everyone who roleplays nowadays is a big fan of pinterest, at least from my experience haha. As for face claims, I do prefer to use them! It's strange, though — I was so fervently against them for so many years as a roleplayer since I've got such a clear idea of characters in my head that it's impossible to find an actor or model to fit the image, and it used to break my immersion in roleplays if I was writing against a particularly well-known actor or model (and it still does to a degree, I try to stay away from the main hollywood actors like Chris Evans haha), but now it helps ground me a little more for some reason? I feel more like it's a world of our own when I have a clear face to look on. In any case, as I said above, I prefer face claims, but I won't be upset if you'd prefer not to use them. Whatever you’re into is fine!

  Now! Onto the good stuff.

  I'd love to write a setting in modern times as opposed to the original late '90's, exploring how the wizarding world and wizarding laws have shifted with the advancement of muggle technology; I'd imagine it was much easier to keep magic under wraps before smartphones came into the equation. Maybe the wizarding world is under stress or extreme restriction due to this.

  A reinvented Triwzard Tournament would be extremely fun! Now, I know the tournament was banned after Harry's foray into it since Cedric was killed, but hear me out: maybe it's reconstructed due to the fact that the previous tournament went the way it did because of the whole Voldemort situation. I'd really prefer a tournament held between school alumni as opposed to students anyway, both because it just makes more sense with the nature of the game as well as the fact that it means we wouldn't have to be writing kids. Maybe even the professors to touch on the school pride while still keeping the heart of the games intact? Or something else completely, I'm just tossing out ideas. This is sort of the main thing I'm aiming for at the moment since I'd really love to write a tournament and it gives us a lot of freedom to work with different ideas/settings/situations.

  I like the idea of exploring lives post-Hogwarts since the main series doesn't really get into that (excluding Fantastic Beasts, which I can't stress enough how uninterested in I am. Similarly, I am VERY critical of the world-building JK's done with expanding the universe, particularly with how sloppily she handled other cultures and their relation with her lore and would rather adjust things for our own take, so keep that in mind before contacting me). The main series is mostly set in Hogwarts, so I'd love to do something to explore the Wizarding World as a whole.

  I do also like the idea of a muggle getting wrapped up in wizarding stuff for whatever reason. The main series establishes that there are at least SOME witches and wizards that coexist with muggles, at least enough to have kids that are half-bloods. And again, yeah, I guess the FBaWTFT series does touch on this, but I'd really love to have a regular muggle thrown into the main cast for whatever reason somehow. Maybe they've got a magical relative or something or wizards need a non-magical person for plot related reasons?

  Something to do with prophecies could be very interesting — after seeing all of those prophecies kept under lock in the Ministry (before they were destroyed, at least, lmao), it got me thinking of what the extent of prophecies were and if all of them were as severe as Harry's, or what another prophecy could be. It could be fun to explore something with our own characters in that vein?

  I enjoy serious/darker plots, so I'd like to have a bigger plot that our characters bleed into! I’m not looking for a more mundane or slice of life roleplay. We could throw all of these ideas in a bowl and see what comes from it. None of these thoughts of mine are a prerequisite for contacting me, however. If you've got an idea of your own, I would more than love to hear them.

  If you're the type to just message me saying "I saw your ad and am interested in roleplaying with you." or anything with something like 1-3 lines in your intro, don't bother messaging me at all. I delete any and all messages of the sort. Just introduce yourself to me, what you're interested in or if you have ideas of your own, what your limits are, if you want to do multi-p or novella, and if you've got any pre-established characters or would rather make one for the roleplay.

  Told you I had a giant ad! Kudos to making it this far. My email is pieronhand@gmail.com. Sorry if you prefer messengers for OOC chit-chat or initial plotting, I strictly use email for everything!

[daggcrisms]

Rules for mobile users

[[here’s a google doc for the updated list of rules, applicable for all my blogs]]

anything under this cut is from my outdated rules.

[rules updated: 07/28/2019]

–STUFF YOU SHOULD DO–

• No godmodding. No sending (implied or explicit) homophobic/transphobic/bigoted messages to me or my character either.

• Please don’t over-pester me for replies. I promise I’ll get to them. Feel free to drop me a reminder after at least a week of no replies, though. In return, I usually give you a week too, unless otherwise specified in your own rules, until I remind you if it’s your turn to reply (or more often, I chicken out and trust that you’ll eventually respond/want to drop it and end up never bringing up that particular thread ever again). You’re always free to start multiple threads with me, that is greatly encouraged because I love having lots of threads with people.

• If you start getting bored with the roleplay, feel free to drop it and/or end it. We can always start up another thread in the future.

• However, please let me know if you want to drop a roleplay thread! It can give me major anxiety when I’m waiting for a response that’s never going to come, and I wonder if I did something wrong and assume that’s why you’re not replying anymore :’) I’m not forcing you to let me know if you want to drop a thread, you can drop it without saying anything too. But I personally really appreciate being told about that sort of thing.

• Don’t reblog a thread you’re not part of. This should go without being said, of course. Personals will be hardblocked immediately, rp blogs will receive a warning.

• If you can trim your threads, please do! It’s fine if you can’t, though, because I will most likely trim the thread for you. If you don’t trim threads with other people, however, I’ll be less likely to follow you since I don’t like scrolling through long posts.

• Please don’t claim any of my art as your own. If you post it somewhere, the least you can do is credit me by at least including a link to my blog or something. Bonus points if you ask me first before reposting my art, but I understand if you’re anxious because so am I :’)

• If any of your art is featured on my blog, as an icon or something and you don’t want me to use your art, please tell me!!! Message me privately or contact me in some way and please let me know that you want your art taken down. As a fellow artist, I understand wanting other people to not use your art (although I am personally fine with it as long as proper credit is given,) but if you’re more strict about it than I am, that’s totally okay too! Just let me know, and I’ll stop using your art immediately, will delete all icons I have of your art, as well as delete every single instance of your art being used on this blog.

• That being said, if you’re following me, please let me know if I’m doing something that’s making you uncomfortable or is breaking one of your rules!! I do read the rules pages of everyone, but I’m human and forget things, and I’m not a mind reader either ;~; I care, so please tell me if I’m ever doing anything bad

• You can reply to any of my open starters at any time! Even if they’re a year old! Even if other people have already replied to it! My open starters are open for a reason, and we don’t have to be mutuals for you to reply to them either :’)

—

–STUFF YOU SHOULD KEEP IN MIND–

• I am of age to do smut, but Kris is a minor so that is a no for this blog! There will occasionally be sex jokes, but that’s about it. No explicit smut in this house.

• This blog is not a spoiler-free one. I will not tag roleplays with spoilers, but anything else will be tagged with Deltarune Spoilers

• I’m alright with roleplaying nsfw in general, minus smut. Gore, violence, and generally dark roleplays are cool with me. I love angsty things just as much as I love fluff ;w; Speaking of gore, you’re more than welcome to fight/harm/injure my muse to any extent! You don’t even have to ask! Come in and fight this gremlin tbh! If you want to do a rp where they die, however, please dm me first.

• I prefer not to roleplay with personals, unless you are someone I know from school or something like that. Personals in general are allowed to follow me too!  However! Personals are not allowed to reblog roleplays, in character posts, or ooc posts especially if I say in the tags that I’m going to delete the post later. Only things that are tagged with my “online reblogs” or “musings” or "art tag" tags are okay to reblog. Headcanon posts are not okay to reblog unless I say otherwise.

• Like spamming is okay! I very occasionally lose roleplays, and getting lots of notes from likes are never a factor for that, for me personally. If I lose a roleplay, it’s mostly just because I forgot, so that’s really a “me” thing. I’m usually very good at keeping track of who I’m roleplaying with and how many ongoing threads I have, and I reply pretty consistently, so just remind me if I haven’t responded after five or more days (as stated in one of the above rules)! And I like it when people like my posts! It lets me know that you like my blog and the stuff I post, and it makes me happy :’)

• If you are an OC, I will assume our muses have never met unless you plan ahead with me what their relationship is like.

• That being said, characters who have already interacted in canon will know each other. Unless the roleplay takes place in a different point of time and we are staging their first meeting, of course.

• Kris will be pretty meta sometimes. They are aware of who Players are (they're definitely not fond of them other than the few good players they've met), and they know they live in the game world, and are aware of alternate universes and things of that nature.

• Kris is nonbinary on this blog. Although, I don’t care if you refer to them as a boy or a girl (Kris personally will care if you refer to them as a girl though, because they usually Don’t like that). Their order of preference for pronouns is they/he/she, although they will definitely like you more if you use exclusively they/them pronouns. I respect all headcanons about Kris’ gender, and same goes for any Frisks and Charas. If you play a KFC kid, gendered or not, I will use the pronouns they want used, and I do hope that you use they/them pronouns for my Kris. I personally will default to using they/them for other Krises, Frisks, and Charas unless specified on your blog. No discourse about this, please. 

• Doubles are welcome to interact too! Of course they are, considering the Kris Squad. I’m also cool with interacting with and following multiple blogs who portray the same character other than Krises as well!

• This blog will not have mains. However, the only “main” they really have is the Berdly over at @berdbrainx. That Berdly originates in their timeline in the “main verse.” Other than him, they will not have any specific version of a muse that they’ll talk about in threads, unless the thread is specifically about that one muse for some reason. For Deltarune non-Kris blogs, they will typically be the Kris in your universe unless you already have a Kris main or you talk about it with me beforehand. Doubles of Kris will be treated as alternates. In their “main verse” in spontaneous roleplays/asks/replies to in-character posts (online roleplays), they reside in their own separate timeline. It’s a classic timeline that doesn’t have any other muses in it, so they don’t have a specific blog’s Susie, or Noelle, or other character that is from their own timeline. So they will treat your muse as if they are an alternate of their own timeline’s counterpart of them.

• I’m pretty lenient with short replies. Don’t feel pressured to match the length if my reply gets long! Multi-para (usually 2-5 paragraphs) is my go-to for roleplays, so I usually do long replies by default.

• Adding onto that, I honestly don’t mind one-liners. Of course, in crack/online roleplays it’s fine but I’m okay with it in serious roleplays too. I prefer it if you don’t give me one-liners, but hey, as long as I’m still having fun with the roleplay anyway, it’s cool with me! I understand not being able to think of anything to write, so just as long as you don’t give me one or two words as your reply like ‘He smiled.’ or ’*laughs*’, I’ll be cool with it. Put at least some effort even if you’re only gonna give me one sentence, otherwise I’ll drop the rp once it becomes a repeat offense.

• I will not change the formatting of my roleplays to fit yours. I’m comfortable with sticking to only paragraph style roleplays, thank you very much. Feel free to keep formatting your own posts though, because I think formatting looks really cool! I just don’t want to format my posts, however. I will not go all out with formatting my own posts with all that cool ‘small text’, and indents, and bolding and all that. The most I ever do with my formatting is italics for emphasis on certain words, and using icons.

• I tend to move roleplays from asks onto its own post. If I send you an ask meme and you answer it, I'll respond by making a new post, tagging you, and linking to your reply. Until formatting on asks are fixed, I will answer any asks sent to me in a new text post rather than asks.

• I accept any sort of asks! If they aren’t answered after a while, either I don’t know how to answer it or I might be drawing it out and I am a very slow artist- Sorry-

• Feel free to tag me in any of those tagging memes! I don’t mind and I think they’re pretty fun to do! ^^

• Adding onto the above rule, you’re more than welcome to send me those chain asks like “send this to 10 roleplayers you think are really great!” because it’s super duper nice that you would think to send one to me! But don’t expect me to send them to other people, because I won’t :’) my anxiety won’t let me, so I’m sorry-

• If I follow you, that means I’ve already read all of your rules. I might not send the codephrase, though, because most of the time I get very anxious over having to send things like that. I’m very sorry–! But if I follow you then chances are that I have definitely read them before following- If you choose not to trust me on this, I understand.

• I generally follow every rp blog that follows me, but I might not follow some people back for a few reasons. Some might be for the type of content you post on your blog, but I am still non-selective! I will roleplay with anyone who asks (unless you wanna rp gross things or you’re a mean person,,,, like your muse can be as much of a dick as you want, that’s no problem but don’t be gross to other people as yourself) and if I do roleplay with you, I will be more likely to follow you as well.

• Adding onto the above rule, however, please respect that it’s nothing personal if I ever unfollow you either! It’s not that I hate you or anything, but if you haven’t followed me back and you’re a private rp blog, or if we’re mutuals but never really roleplay, our muses just don’t click, you spam stuff that I don’t want to see on my dash, or you’ve become inactive for years and/or don’t interact with me anymore, there’s nothing wrong with that! We can still be friends but I prefer to have all the people I follow be potential rp partners. Feel free to follow me on my personal, @briightskies, if you still wanna keep in touch but not rp :’)

—

–ABOUT THIS BLOG–

• This blog is OC, multiverse, and crossover friendly! I love OCs and have many of my own tbh, you’re all more than welcome to come rp with me!!

• I’ll also rp with fandoms I’m not into either, as long as you have a good about section for your character, which also indicates how you portray them (any headcanons or AUs you have that aren’t canon, or whether you portray them as canonly as possible, unless they’re OCs of course since a regular about page is a given) and I’ll probably look up other things about that fandom in its wiki if I don’t know what something is anyway.

• This blog is multiship! So any relationships my muse is involved in, are in different timelines unless specified. Poly relationships aren’t bad though, just saying. I ship pretty much anything unless it’s incest or if they’re children paired with someone a lot older. Selfcest is fine too. Because Kris is a minor, they won’t really get intimate with their partners, but romantic stuff is a-okay.

• I also only ship with chemistry. My muses need to get to know yours first, so don’t get disappointed if they only see you as a friend/acquaintance at first and has no intention of pursuing a romantic relationship with your muse. Give my muse reasons to care about your muse and let the feelings develop naturally, and don’t ever force your muse on mine. Unless it’s to mess with them, or whatever other reason. Unrequited stuff is absolutely okay with me too!

• I will tag common triggers and such, but don’t be afraid to tell me if you have something you want me to tag! I promise I’ll remember to tag it from then on. I do not have any known triggers myself. Any trigger warning tags will be written as “tw; ____” with a semi-colon, not a colon. If I feel like something should be tagged as a trigger but I’m not sure what to tag it exactly, I’ll just tag it as “tw” as a sort of catch-all tag.

|     Requested tagged triggers:

tw; gore

tw; contagious diseases

tw; self harm

tw; child abuse

tw; spiders

tw; blood

tw; homestuck

tw; fnaf

tw; drugs

tw; smoking

tw; alcohol

tw; needles

• I will only talk through the IM system ooc. If you send me a message through there, I will not respond with ooc brackets ((these things)) because I will automatically assume you know that you’re talking to the mun. I do not do roleplays on there.

-

Thank you for reading this really long list of rules! It means a lot if you did!

There’s no password, because I’m also anxious with those for other people’s blogs as I said above. But if you would like to interact with me, you can shoot me an ask directed to my muse, or like one of my starter call posts at any time (also feel free to re-like those posts so I can make another starter for you at any time!) for me to write you a starter!

[berdbrainx]

Rules for mobile users

[[here’s a google doc for the updated list of rules, applicable for all my blogs]]

anything under this cut is from my outdated rules.

[rules updated: 08/14/2019]

–STUFF YOU SHOULD DO–

• No godmodding. No sending (implied or explicit) homophobic/transphobic/bigoted messages to me or my character either.

• Please don’t over-pester me for replies. I promise I’ll get to them. Feel free to drop me a reminder after at least a week of no replies, though. In return, I usually give you a week too, unless otherwise specified in your own rules, until I remind you if it’s your turn to reply (or more often, I chicken out and trust that you’ll eventually respond/want to drop it and end up never bringing up that particular thread ever again). You’re always free to start multiple threads with me, that is greatly encouraged because I love having lots of threads with people.

• If you start getting bored with the roleplay, feel free to drop it and/or end it. We can always start up another thread in the future.

• However, please let me know if you want to drop a roleplay thread! It can give me major anxiety when I’m waiting for a response that’s never going to come, and I wonder if I did something wrong and assume that’s why you’re not replying anymore :’) I’m not forcing you to let me know if you want to drop a thread, you can drop it without saying anything too. But I personally really appreciate being told about that sort of thing.

• Don’t reblog a thread you’re not part of. This should go without being said, of course. Personals will be hardblocked immediately, rp blogs will receive a warning.

• If you can trim your threads, please do! It's fine if you can't, though, because I will most likely trim the thread for you. If you don't trim threads with other people, however, I'll be less likely to follow you since I don't like scrolling through long posts.

• Please don’t claim any of my art as your own. If you post it somewhere, the least you can do is credit me by at least including a link to my blog or something. Bonus points if you ask me first before reposting my art, but I understand if you’re anxious because so am I :’)

• If any of your art is featured on my blog, as an icon or something and you don’t want me to use your art, please tell me!!! Message me privately or contact me in some way and please let me know that you want your art taken down. As a fellow artist, I understand wanting other people to not use your art (although I am personally fine with it as long as proper credit is given,) but if you’re more strict about it than I am, that’s totally okay too! Just let me know, and I’ll stop using your art immediately, will delete all icons I have of your art, as well as delete every single instance of your art being used on this blog.

• That being said, if you’re following me, please let me know if I’m doing something that’s making you uncomfortable or is breaking one of your rules!! I do read the rules pages of everyone, but I’m human and forget things, and I’m not a mind reader either ;~; I care, so please tell me if I’m ever doing anything bad

• You can reply to any of my open starters at any time! Even if they’re a year old! Even if other people have already replied to it! My open starters are open for a reason, and we don’t have to be mutuals for you to reply to them either :’)

—

–STUFF YOU SHOULD KEEP IN MIND–

• I am of age to do smut, but Berdly is a minor so that is a no for this blog! There will occasionally be sex jokes, but that’s about it. No explicit smut in this house.

• This blog is not a spoiler-free one. I will not tag roleplays with spoilers, but anything else will be tagged with Deltarune Spoilers

• I’m alright with roleplaying nsfw in general, minus smut. Gore, violence, and generally dark roleplays are cool with me. I love angsty things just as much as I love fluff ;w; Speaking of gore, you’re more than welcome to fight/harm/injure my muse to any extent! You don’t even have to ask! Come in and fuckin deck Berdly in the face, I approve greatly!! If you want to do a rp where he dies, however, please dm me first.

• I prefer not to roleplay with personals, unless you are someone I know from school or something like that. Personals in general are allowed to follow me too!  However! Personals are not allowed to reblog roleplays, in character posts, or ooc posts especially if I say in the tags that I'm going to delete the post later. Only things that are tagged with my "musings" or "art tag" tags are okay to reblog. Headcanon posts are not okay to reblog unless I say otherwise.

• Like spamming is okay! I very occasionally lose roleplays, and getting lots of notes from likes are never a factor for that, for me personally. If I lose a roleplay, it’s mostly just because I forgot, so that’s really a “me” thing. I’m usually very good at keeping track of who I’m roleplaying with and how many ongoing threads I have, and I reply pretty consistently, so just remind me if I haven’t responded after five or more days (as stated in one of the above rules)! And I like it when people like my posts! It lets me know that you like my blog and the stuff I post, and it makes me happy :’)

• If you are an OC, I will assume our muses have never met unless you plan ahead with me what their relationship is like.

• That being said, characters who have already interacted in canon will know each other. Unless the roleplay takes place in a different point of time and we are staging their first meeting, of course.

• Doubles are welcome to interact too! Although currently I don’t know of much other Berdly roleplay blogs lmao. I’m also cool with interacting with and following multiple blogs who portray the same character! Such as the Kris squad.

• This blog will not have mains. Other than the Kris at @daggcrisms. That Kris originates in his timeline in the "main verse". Excluding them, he will not have any specific version of a muse that he’ll talk about in threads, unless the thread is specifically about that one muse for some reason. For Deltarune blogs, he will typically be the Berdly in your muse’s timeline in serious roleplays, unless your muse is part of an AU/UA/canon-divergent universe, or there are things about your muse’s backstory that would contradict Berdly being in your timeline naturally (like Berdly being dead or something), or you talk about it with me beforehand. In his “main verse” in spontaneous roleplays/asks/replies to in-character posts, he resides in his own separate timeline. It’s a classic timeline that doesn’t have any other muses in it, so he doesn’t have a specific blog’s Susie, or Noelle, that is from his own timeline. Only Sponte/Kris from the blog mentioned above.

• I’m pretty lenient with short replies. Don’t feel pressured to match the length if my reply gets long! Multi-para (usually 2-5 paragraphs) is my go-to for roleplays, so I usually do long replies by default.

• Adding onto that, I honestly don’t mind one-liners. Of course, in crack/online roleplays it's fine but I'm okay with it in serious roleplays too. I prefer it if you don’t give me one-liners, but hey, as long as I’m still having fun with the roleplay anyway, it’s cool with me! I understand not being able to think of anything to write, so just as long as you don’t give me one or two words as your reply like ‘He smiled.’ or ’*laughs*’, I’ll be cool with it. Put at least some effort even if you’re only gonna give me one sentence, otherwise I’ll drop the rp once it becomes a repeat offense.

• I will not change the formatting of my roleplays to fit yours. I’m comfortable with sticking to only paragraph style roleplays, thank you very much. Feel free to keep formatting your own posts though, because I think formatting looks really cool! I just don’t want to format my posts, however. I will not go all out with formatting my own posts with all that cool ‘small text’, and indents, and bolding and all that. The most I ever do with my formatting is italics for emphasis on certain words, and using icons.

• I tend to move roleplays from asks onto its own post. If I send you an ask meme and you answer it, I'll respond by making a new post, tagging you, and linking to your reply. Until formatting on asks are fixed, I will answer any asks sent to me in a new text post rather than asks.

• I accept any sort of asks! If they aren’t answered after a while, either I don’t know how to answer it or I might be drawing it out and I am a very slow artist- Sorry-

• Feel free to tag me in any of those tagging memes! I don’t mind and I think they’re pretty fun to do! ^^

• Adding onto the above rule, you’re more than welcome to send me those chain asks like “send this to 10 roleplayers you think are really great!” because it’s super duper nice that you would think to send one to me! But don’t expect me to send them to other people, because I won’t :’) my anxiety won’t let me, so I’m sorry-

• If I follow you, that means I’ve already read all of your rules. I might not send the codephrase, though, because most of the time I get very anxious over having to send things like that. I’m very sorry–! But if I follow you then chances are that I have definitely read them before following- If you choose not to trust me on this, I understand.

• I generally follow every rp blog that follows me, but I might not follow some people back for a few reasons. Some might be for the type of content you post on your blog, but I am still non-selective! I will roleplay with anyone who asks (unless you wanna rp gross things or you’re a mean person,,,, like your muse can be as much of a dick as you want, that’s no problem but don’t be gross to other people as yourself) and if I do roleplay with you, I will be more likely to follow you as well.

• Adding onto the above rule, however, please respect that it’s nothing personal if I ever unfollow you either! It’s not that I hate you or anything, but if you haven’t followed me back and you’re a private rp blog, or if we’re mutuals but never really roleplay, our muses just don’t click, you spam stuff that I don’t want to see on my dash, or you’ve become inactive for years and/or don’t interact with me anymore, there’s nothing wrong with that! We can still be friends but I prefer to have all the people I follow be potential rp partners. Feel free to follow me on my personal, Briightskies, if you still wanna keep in touch but not rp :’)

—

–ABOUT THIS BLOG–

• This blog is OC, multiverse, and crossover friendly! I love OCs and have many of my own tbh, you’re all more than welcome to come rp with me!!

• I’ll also rp with fandoms I’m not into either, as long as you have a good about section for your character, which also indicates how you portray them (any headcanons or AUs you have that aren’t canon, or whether you portray them as canonly as possible, unless they’re OCs of course since a regular about page is a given) and I’ll probably look up other things about that fandom in its wiki if I don’t know what something is anyway.

• This blog is multiship! So any relationships my muse is involved in, are in different timelines unless specified. Poly relationships aren’t bad though, just saying. I ship pretty much anything unless it’s incest or if they’re children paired with someone a lot older. Selfcest is fine too (though I really don’t know how to feel about Berdly x Berdly,,,,,, I mean, if you want to try it with me, go for it lol!). Because Berdly is a minor, he won’t really get intimate with his partners, but romantic stuff is a-okay.

• I also only ship with chemistry. My muses need to get to know yours first, so don’t get disappointed if he only sees you as a friend/acquaintance at first and has no intention of pursuing a romantic relationship with your muse. Give my muse reasons to care about your muse and let the feelings develop naturally, and don’t ever force your muse on mine. Unless it’s to mess with him, or whatever other reason. Unrequited stuff is absolutely okay with me too!

• I will tag common triggers and such, but don’t be afraid to tell me if you have something you want me to tag! I promise I’ll remember to tag it from then on. I do not have any known triggers myself. Any trigger warning tags will be written as “tw; ____” with a semi-colon, not a colon.

|     Requested tagged triggers:

tw; gore

tw; spiders

tw; insects

tw; blood

tw; homestuck

tw; smoking

tw; drugs

tw; alcohol

tw; needles

tw; oceans

tw; cutting

duplicates // (if anyone else has a specific way they want something tagged that's different from my tagging style, please let me know)

tw; zombies

tw; bats

tw; maggots

tw; sibling death

tw; sibling peril

• I will only talk through the IM system ooc. If you send me a message through there, I will not respond with ooc brackets ((these things)) because I will automatically assume you know that you’re talking to the mun. I do not do roleplays on there.

-

Thank you for reading this really long list of rules! It means a lot if you did!

There’s no password, because I’m also anxious with those for other people’s blogs as I said above. But if you would like to interact with me, you can shoot me an ask directed to my muse, or like one of my starter call posts at any time (also feel free to re-like those posts so I can make another starter for you at any time!) for me to write you a starter!

[stillebesat]

Contained DVD Commentary Part 1

Alright!! Let’s do this crazy thing!!! :D 

Warning: Spoilers for the Fic Contained. 

Guide: Italicized words are used to show pieces of the story. Normal words are my thoughts. In later parts Bold Deleted Scenes can be found. 

Contained.

I actually got the idea for this story in the End of December of last year (2017) after I’d seen @brighter-side ‘s Secret Santa Fanart for @virgils-jacket.

I managed to write the first two and a half chapters of the story before I got...well stuck and distracted with other fic ideas and so ended up putting the fic on the back burner for the most part until June when I actively started working on it to post it. ^^;; When working on a fic, I usually have a temporary title for the fic, a generic thing that helps me to quickly refind the story if I have to take a break from it. Funnily enough...Contained never had another name. It’s what I called it from the very beginning and when it came to come up with a title and post it...I decided to keep it as so. It was rather fitting after all.

Chapter 1. 

Surprisingly enough, this chapter has remained mostly unchanged from what I wrote back in Dec 2017. I may have tweaked a couple of words here and there and added a line or two, but overall I wrote this chapter nearly as a stream of consciousness using the feelings that the image had invoked within and trying to describe the scene I saw in the fanart. Creativity. Cramped. Trying to Escape. Crying. Wanting to Get out. I also was trying to convey that he’s been stuck in the box for a while. So like the imagery I used like “worn nearly to the bone” was meant to convey that concept and show that Creativity isn’t one to give up right away. He’s been fighting. He’s trying to find the way out. He’s wanting to prove to the Masters that he’ll be good and that he can follow their rules. (He really can’t. He’s Creativity. Rules are hard for him, especially when they constrain him from expressing himself.)   “Please. His legs twitched, having gone numb long ago from being stuck in the same cramped position for ages. A relief really, because if his legs were numb, then they weren’t screaming at him to stretch them, to move, to run, to play.” This particular paragraph is actually a semi-call back to a memory I have back in Jr. High...I think I was in like 8th grade? (14ish years old) in a Geography Class I took. I wasn’t even actively participating in the conversation at the moment (I was distracted doing something else, probably reading, I read a lot when I was younger) but when I tuned into the conversation the Teacher was telling another student what would happen if they ended up getting locked in one of the cupboards that lined the walls.

-These were short ones, with counter space on top to put things on- and she (the teacher) was telling the boy what would happen if he was curled up in the same position for hours on end and how his legs would go numb, and would twitch and cry out in agony to switch position and yah… O.o It’s one of the odder conversations I’ve tuned into halfway through. I don’t even know what prompted the topic to come up, nor do I remember what happened afterwards. But that thought of being trapped in tight spaces and how your legs react to them has stuck to me through the years. ^^;;

Creativity winced, feeling the lashes across his back from his last attempt to ‘play.’ It had been too energetic, too ‘happy.’ Too...too creative.

I think out of all the lines in this fic...this is the one I would change. I used the idea that the Masters had whipped Creativity mostly to show that they weren’t nice. That they were cruel and willing to hurt him to get him to behave. It was probably also a callback to you know...Pioneer Little House on the Prairie times where Teachers could beat their students with a belt or a ruler for when students didn’t behave right and needed to be ‘corrected.’

I don’t know if that line fits quite right with the narrative I ended up with in the rest of the story, but the imagery was used to convey that the Masters were trying to Contain Creativity even when he wasn’t in the box. They wanted him to be still, to be quiet, to walk and not run, etc. They wanted a properly behaved well mannered child who would follow them without question and The Masters would take harsher means to see their vision of proper behavior sustained. (It wasn’t good for Creativities. They’re a wild bunch)

He’d struggled for so long to escape the boxes his masters had put him into. He’d done so in an effort to please, to show that he could do more, be more than the boundaries surrounding him.

This section was the play on the concept of “think outside the box.” Creativity thought the boxes were just a challenge. That the Masters wanted him to find ways to get out. That it was a ‘physical representation’ of the saying above, and if he could be creative and think his way outside of each box the masters would be pleased with how creative he’d been and they would allow him more freedom to express himself because he ‘did it right’ this time.

It took him far too long to realize that the Masters were putting him in smaller and smaller boxes because they wanted him to be contained and think inside the rules and structures they’d outlined and to not try and go beyond what the Masters had outlined. (this is a physical concept of the ideal that if there’s too many rules, Creativity won’t be able to find any loopholes and he’ll have to stick within the guidelines given to him) Creativity did end up realizing it. The chapter actually focuses on this moment of realization (after way too long fighting to come out without getting out of the box) that the Masters wanted him to be the exact opposite of who he is. Still and Quiet and Complacent. He’s still struggling with the concept “wanting out” but realizing he can’t get out. So maybe maybe if he’s good and still and quiet the box will be made bigger so he can at least ‘stretch out’ his limbs (exercise his creativity) without being ‘outside’ the box (the rules).

“Light.” He whimpered, his burning fingers rubbing once more against the walls. Just a little light. A break from the endless dark. Anything. A small pinprick would be more than enough.

This sentence is a double meaning. Creativity is craving actual light of the sun as he’s been stuck in darkness for ages, and being able to see helps his creativity to flourish.

Kinda like the concept that looking outside or stepping outside can help brighten one’s mood and spark ideas to come when you’ve been struggling with a project for a while. But it’s also bringing in the concepts of a “Spark of Creativity” or the “Magic” of the world. After all there are little sparks -ideas- that people can give to each other, and Creativities can use those sparks and create/bring to life the ideas contained within each spark. A small prinprick would be enough. Creativities thrive off of new ideas, they love playing with them and exploring multiple routes and the Masters have left Creativity without a spark to play with for so long that he’s willing to take anything. The smallest of grains of sand just so that he can...well be himself and build off of an idea no matter how bad it is.

Left with nothing to inspire him. Only nightmares to haunt him whenever sleep found him.

This line has the feeling of ‘more meaning’ to it when I read it. Like I know I had something in mind when I mentioned these nightmares. But do I have any idea currently what I was thinking when I wrote the line? Not anymore. ^^;; lol. But I suppose it’s telling that if Creativities are left far too long without creative stimulation that their ability to think positively diminishes and that they are more prone to nightmares as Creativities are Light. Their creations tend to create awe and hope and happiness in others and in themselves so Creativities often have more vivid dynamic dreams that can’t be considered nightmares. The nightmares the bad thoughts and fears and doubts come when there’s not enough inspiration, not enough praise to them, etc. I suppose the nightmares are a type of metaphor of the lack of praise/recognition. It’s their doubts coming to the surface when they’re asleep etc.

The masters hadn’t come to see him in fiveever.

Sometimes it’s little tidbits like this that can help the reader gauge when I was actually writing the story. Fiveever was used here because The Sanders Sides 12 Days of Christmas video had come out like...four days before I began this fic and I loved Roman’s use of “It has been like Fiveever” in the video and so incorporated the term in the story. ^^;; lol. The use of fiveever also shows that despite his best intentions Creativity is still rebelling against the rules against the Masters. If he was truly wanting to follow their guidelines he would have used forever, though since that’s not a ‘measurable amount of time’ the Masters would have been happier if he’d used a term like “a long time” (Since Creativity has no idea how long he’s actually been in the box) to express how long he’s been stuck inside the box. But nope. Despite his best intentions, Creativity is still trying to improve on the foundations of others. Using Fiveever because it’s bigger than FOURever and Five has to be better than Four right? (It also shows he’s still quite young, as you’re more likely to hear children making up words like that than older people)

After all, the masters didn’t need him. Didn’t need Creativity anymore.

This line here is mostly a comment on the school system. About the same time I’d been working on this fic I believe there was a bit of discourse on Tumblr, or at least I’d seen some tumblr posts about how much the Arts were being taken out of school in favor of the Sciences. (and it’s been something I’ve been aware of for years now. Shortening recess, less funding for theatre performances in comparison to sports ((High School Musical Reference There)) getting rid of all the ‘fun’ things to convince students that they need to focus on the maths and sciences and be productive in society’ etc. It’s a thing where people don’t realize that you need creative expression in order to balance out oneself. To be able to think creatively in those Sciences. You need both Creativity and Logic in order to have a good project perform well and be well received. And yah. Just a comment that people don’t think you need Creativity in order to succeed. When really it helps a ton.

Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5

[scriptstructure]

I see tons of advice for how to write first drafts, but what's your approach for writing second drafts (or third and fourth drafts, for that matter)? How do you turn a mess into something more structured and resembling a proper story? Also, how do you know when something's done and it's time to just stop and send it out? Thanks for your time.

Ok so you’ve done it! You’ve managed to get all the way through the first draft! Congratulations! But the work isn’t over, of course. Now you’ve got a whole pile of words and a whole ‘nother slog to turn it into something comprehensible.

Second drafts (my favourite part of the writing process) are a different type of work to the first draft. The first draft can be described as telling the story to yourself. You need the big strokes, the details of who does what and goes where, and to fumble through the plot arcs from beginning to end. The first draft has a lot of figuring out logistics so that in the second draft you can fill in detail, nuance and so that you can hone things to the best version of what they are.

Much like writing the first draft, everyone is going to approach the second draft slightly differently according to their personal preferences. But here’s how I do it.

Step one: Take a break!

Seriously. You’ve just spent a long time highly focussed on one thing, your brain needs the rest. The longer the piece the more of a break you need. For short stories I take a couple of days to a week, novellas a couple of weeks, novels, you could take a month or so. Give yourself time away.

Importantly, this is time to forget stuff about what you were working on – don’t panic when you read that by the way, you’ll still have all your notes, you’ll still have the broad strokes of what it is supposed to look like, but with any luck with some time away, you’ll have time to forget the stuff that isn’t important and that gives you trouble with the work. You’ll forget which parts you got stuck on thinking ‘I’m not good enough to write this’, or ‘that day I was writing badly, that chapter sucks!’ 

Take the time. Forget. Give yourself room to get excited about the project again.

Step two: Re-read!

Sit down and read the book through from start to finish. Approach it as though you’re reading a friend’s book. Take notes as you go, but only on the ‘big’ stuff. Does the plot hold together overall? Do characters make sense and ‘feel’ right? Are there plot lines, or characters that appear and then aren’t followed through? Are there obvious ‘mistakes’ that you should deal with?

Step three: Re-organise!

You might have noticed things in your read-through that seem out of order, or that if plot points were switched around or shifted on the timeline, they’d make more sense. If it’s a matter of picking up chapter seven and plunking it between chapters three and four, then do that now. 

If not, then you’ll need to do more intensive reworkings. Draw up a timeline of the story from start to finish, and plot out the story in the new timeline, so that you can have an organised plan on how to go in and change stuff around.

NOTE: Do not work over your original files! 

Keep a copy of the original draft. For each change that you make, create a new copy to work on. Keep track of the different versions that you’ve worked on, and BACK THEM ALL UP! You don’t want to set out reworking the whole story, realise you don’t like the new direction, and then have nothing to go back to.

Step four: Annotation! 

When I say the second draft is my favourite draft, this is the step I mean. Personally, I print out the manuscript (A4, double spacing, wide margins), I staple each chapter into a booklet, and I go to town with colour coded pens and markers.

I go through chapter by chapter, and I note down the key point of the chapter, and map out the emotional and character arcs, and I jot down my ideas of how I can refine the execution of those things.

Then I go through each chapter, paragraph by paragraph, and I do the same. 

What is the purpose of this paragraph? 

How can it be executed in a more effective way? 

What can be added to make this paragraph better? 

And what can I cut that is clogging up the story?

Step five: Rewriting!

Open a new blank word document, and retype the story from your annotated copy.

Yes. Rewrite the whole thing.

You’ll end up getting creative with your wording, you’ll make connections that you hadn’t consciously thought of before, you’ll cut stuff that really isn’t important enough to bother retyping but that you would have felt bad about deleting. The rewrite is key.

Step six: Re-re-work!

At this point, you could probably do with another break from the manuscript, you could say step 6.0 is take a break, step 6.5 is re-re-work.

Just like in step one, take a step back, and read your story as though it was given to you by a friend. Take notes on any issues you find, think about how the prose flows, and how the plot works and if the characters are doing the things they should be doing.

You can go back and repeat any of the above steps if you find more problems that you want to deal with, you can even just go through this whole process a number of times until you’ve got something coherent.

Step seven: Review!

Time to get an outside perspective: ask a few people whose opinions you trust to read the manuscript. If there are particular elements of the story that you feel you need to work on more, you could ask them more pointed questions (did you feel like the protagonist’s actions in the middle bit are justified by what they experienced in the beginning? Etc), or you could ask them for their general thoughts and feelings as they read it.

Make it clear that you’re not looking for corrections on spelling, or grammar. Take note on the feedback you get, but don’t take any of it as gospel. What this is, is giving you the opportunity to see what some other people get from your story, and whether what you think it says lines up with what other people think it says, and how you feel about the convergence or divergence of those opinions.

NOTE:

While I’ve written this out as an orderly list, you will probably find that many manuscripts need more of some steps than of others. Some will probably need no re-organising, but will need a whole lot of work on the prose. Some might need complete reorganisation but the prose is fantastic already. You might find that some works need a lot added to them, while some benefit by being cut back severely. Each manuscript is going to be a different beast to work on.

All of this is what would be called ‘substantive editing’, that is, edits that involve content, structure and narrative. While it is fairly important for legibility that you’re working in as correct grammar and spelling as possible, it will not be perfect. 

The second round of editing, once you have the work in pretty much the shape you want it, is line editing. Going through and giving your prose and word choices close attention, making sure that every sentence is pulling its weight.

The next round of editing, when the substantive and line edits are done, is the copy edit. You can attempt a copy edit yourself, but these are more usually done by professional editors either hired by the author, or as a part of the publishing process.

And that’s how I approach the second draft!

I hope that helps!

–

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How to Write a Basic Essay

Figure out your topic. This may already have been given to you, in which case you should just have the instructions in front of you to refer to. Otherwise, come up with something that fits the assignment (and you can always change it later, this is just a basic topic).

Use the five paragraph essay format if you know it. It’s not the best, but it’s a good start. If you don’t know it:

Write a thesis statement. This is a one sentence summary of the topic of your essay.

Your first paragraph is your introduction. Use it to explain what topic you’re going to write about, including any background information your intended audience needs to know. (If it’s not specified, your intended audience is you before you started taking this class.) End it with your thesis statement.

Your second, third, and fourth paragraphs are your body paragraphs. In each paragraph, you should use an example that supports your thesis statement. Come up with three examples. Your strongest example should be your fourth paragraph, and your weakest example should be your third paragraph. If your remaining example is also weak, you may need a new example or a new thesis statement.

A body paragraph should start with a miniature thesis statement, summarizing the example, along with any introduction to that statement that you need. The introduction should come first, and be no more than one sentence for a true five paragraph essay, although it can be longer if your essay is supposed to be more than 2-3 pages. Support this statement with quotes or paraphrases from the text/sources. Quotes are preferred, but if the quote would be very long (generally, more than three sentences), use a paraphrase. Remember to cite sources for either quotes or paraphrases. End each body paragraph with a short sentence that summarizes and reinforces what you’ve said.

The last paragraph is your conclusion. In it, you should summarize what you’ve said so far, and why it supports your thesis statement. You can also add any additional examples you thought of but didn’t want to fully flesh out. This is a good place to suggest further exploration, such as additional questions your thesis statement brings up, nuances you didn’t have space to address in your essay, or potential counterarguments.

Once you have your five paragraph essay, look for ways to flesh it out. A lot of this will just be writing more in-depth about your examples, adding additional quotes, and discussing more facets of it. You may also want to add in counterarguments you find likely (including, depending on the essay, common misconceptions), and refute them. These paragraphs will become quite long, and it’s perfectly fine to break them up wherever feels natural. If you don’t do that here, you can do it while editing.

Add more examples, as necessary. That fourth or fifth thing you thought of that would really add to your argument, but you didn’t have room for? Add it if your essay should be longer. You may also want to break up your current examples into more than one example, if the nuances are making it seem like several related things instead of one thing, or if the quotes you have seem to group together naturally into more than one group.

Editing begins. This is a good place to take a break, because some time away from your work will make editing easier. The first thing to do is to break your work into smaller sections. If you need to, you can mark them Section I: [topic], Section II: [topic], but most essays won’t require anything like that. Mostly, you’re looking to break up your paragraphs into bite-sized chunks, to make them easier to digest. Paragraphs should in general be at least two sentences (a single sentence that’s very long or impactful may stand on its own), and not more than ten. You should aim for the lower end. You can usually count quotes as a single sentence, even if you quote multiple sentences, but be aware of how this impacts length. If the paragraph looks too long, break it up.

Now that you’ve broken your essay into smaller pieces, look for those paragraphs that seem like they don’t add anything, or like you’re repeating yourself. Delete them. If something in the paragraph is important, but it seems too long, condense it into a single sentence, or leave only the important sentence(s). You can delete extraneous words or sentences in paragraphs with mostly good content, too, but that may be more helpful later in the process.

Edit for flow. This means making sure that each paragraph sounds like it’s on a single topic, and each paragraph sounds like it makes sense following the previous paragraph. You may have to move large sections around so the essay feels like it’s going in order. You’ll probably have to move some paragraphs earlier or later in the essay. If there are some you think add to the essay, but don’t seem to fit anywhere, save them at the end of the document or in a separate file; you may be able to find a place for them later, or you may not need them. You’ll probably also find yourself moving sentences from one paragraph to another, consolidating multiple paragraphs, or splitting a single paragraph into more than one (possibly requiring you to add content; you can mark [add content] to remind yourself to do it later). This is a good time to delete extraneous words or sentences, and work orphaned sentences back into other paragraphs.

Edit for content again. Are your examples fleshed out? Do any of them need more introduction, more explanation, or more quotes? Are any of them too confusing, or do they detract from the main topic of the essay? This may be a good time to replace unhelpful examples with any you put to the side. Fill out all the parts you marked for later. You should also double-check any dates, calculations, names, etc.

Edit for grammar and word choice. Unless it’s been specified otherwise, you shouldn’t use slang or dialectal speech. You should also ask whether or not to use contractions; some teachers strongly prefer that you use them, while others prefer that you not use them. If you don’t know, don’t use them; this is considered more correct in higher level academics. Some word choices or sentence constructions may read as casual; change them to read more formally. You should also check whether you’ve used long or uncommon words; it’s more communicative to use words most people know, and you should try to where possible. Try not to use words that you don’t normally use unless they’re technical terms. You may want to consult with ‘common grammatical errors’ charts. Remember to use the spelling, grammatical, and technical conventions that the assignment specified, or those common to your school or area.

Don’t forget citations! In your bibliography, you should include all the books, papers, and other sources you researched from, even if you didn’t quote them. Quotes should be in-line cited, footnoted, or endnoted. Paraphrases and references should be footnoted or endnoted.

Create a title page or header (as specified in the assignment; if not specified, use a title page) that includes the title of the paper, your name (including student ID, if applicable), the class name (including the course number), and the date (the due date of the assignment).

Format it according to the assignment guidelines and check the length. If it’s more than one third of the page, it counts towards the page count, unless the page count is under 5 pages. If you’re given a page count range, you must write more than the lower number, but you may write up to one page more than the upper number unless otherwise specified. For longer essays (20+ pages), you may be able to write one page less than the specified range, or up to three pages more. If you’re given a word count range, it isn’t meant to be exact, and you should attempt to get close to the number rather than hit it exactly (this will vary by word count), but it’s a stricter guideline than page count.