#I wrote my entire thesis in that app lol

[danikatze]

I've been using Evernote for 10 years and was really pleased with it all this time, but now they're forcing me to get a subscription and I don't use it often enough nowadays to justify paying like €100/year for that. If I could buy it i would, but I hate subscriptions. Does anyone know a good free app that synchs to multiple devices?

[lixenn]

Hello fren it's time to bother you again

🪐📚 and 🍬

OH MY GOD I FORGOT ABOUT THE ASK! (I mean it's just been a few hours but I wanted to post it before I send you the crossover thing... well no matter.)

Hello my friend! Have some answers:

🪐 ⇢ name three good things going on in your life right now

The fact that I write regulary, because it really brings me joy.

My new phone! Getting a new one was really overdue and I'm very happy with the one I have now, it makes life a bit less stressful (at least after getting used to it lol)

My bachelor thesis turned out to be not as horrible as I expected, which sounds really bad now that I see it typed out, but I seriously thought I would be burned out as soon as I start. This wasn't the case because while the commute might tire me out, the workload is managable for now which is great! (Actually writing the thing is entirely different can of worms that I will not be opening for a looong time)

📚 ⇢ what's the last thing you wrote down in your notes app? 

I have finished the first scene/chapter of the crossover, so here a bit of a sneak peak of the ending for everyone interested:

-----

Dave gives them his very own version of a Varia smile, tried and tested. “You made me wait for two hours, Yves. If you don’t want me to bill you five Red Queen Mega Mixes, then arrive on fucking time.”

With those parting words he turns on his heel and strides out of the café.

Now, what is the best way to get to Cesena?

-----

I only made Yves like two days ago but I already love them so much TT I will probably try to put them into my unnamed sequel too because I'm very attached. Might also post a character profile about them soonish.

🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character

...

Yeah, I have no clue how to answer that.

My head might just be super empty from all the writing I did in the last few days but seriously nothing comes to mind?

I'm sorry buddy, I can't cause fandom discourse because I'm drawing a complete blank 😅

[ladywaffles]

hello fellow enjoyer of things >:)

😈 Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?

🛒 What are some common things you incorporate in your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc.

🛠What tools/programs/apps do you use to write?

💖 What made you start writing?

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

💞 Who's your comfort character?

✅ What's something that appears in your fics over and over and over again, even if you don't mean to?

😈: i am so bad at writing smut scenes so i always fade to black, even when it feels like there should be a scene there and i've built up to it, and it just feels cruel. i would say like 60% of the time there was a sex scene there but i just couldn't get it right so i always end up cutting them out before posting. also i wrote a story once where the entire thesis was "what if the villain deliberately broke the rules on bioethics, as a character study and worldbuilding exercise" and well. readers did not seem to like that. conversely, i also have not updated either of my big WIPs in over a year, so like, that too.

🛒: music and sound are a very big part of my life, so they come up in my stories pretty often! i really enjoy writing to set the place of a scene/story, so i do a lot of touch/smell/hearing similes and metaphors. in terms of feelings, there's a lot of contemplating of loneliness, but not the kind that is, "i am alone in my room," rather the, "i am the only one who has this set of experiences and circumstances, and i cannot explain myself to this person who i care about so they can understand my actions/affections/choices fully, and that makes me feel isolated."

🛠: i primarily use scrivener to write fic, although if you catch me without my laptop, i'll sometimes use google docs or just a plain old fashioned pen and paper. if i'm plotting something out for a longer story, i might use a handwritten timeline on a blank sheet of paper and then just cover it in highlighter and sticky notes as i tack on addendums, if i'm not just screaming about it in a friend's DMs. thesaurus dot com is my best friend.

💖: i started writing fic when i was maybe 11 or 12, right around the time that i first learned that fic existed when i was looking up pictures to make my nook wallpaper, and you could do self-inserts and change the story around to suit your desires, like play-pretend but better. there were just so many permutations to explore, and i really liked that idea! i didn't start publishing fic until i was about 15. that first fic is still out there on ao3 somewhere, but i've since anonymized it so i don't have to look at it on my profile anymore lol. (not because i think the fandom is cringe, but rather because i've grown a lot as an author and it's not necessarily representative of my ability anymore!)

👀: so i know the answer you want me to tell you about is the comphet iceman accidental lovechild aaron tveit AU but sadly i have no more words on paper than that which i have already told you (iceman, very gay and upset over breakup # 3 with maverick, comphet rebounds with a woman who is also very gay and rebounding comphet style and whoops there's a baby now and here comes a bouncing baby aaron tveit). i'm still working on the timelines, because the top gun timeline in relation to the actual universe timeline of when everyone got married/how old aaron is versus when CMIYC was on broadway/aaron's nearly 10-year long absence from broadway is a hot mess and i'm trying to piece things together in the way that is the most true to form/makes the most sense.

💞: donald scripps from the history boys ("I have never particularly liked myself but the boy I was, kneeling in that cold and empty chapel that winter morning, fills me now with longing and pity," spoke wonders to my eighteen-year-old self who was also off to university and questioning reality) and obi-wan kenobi from star wars ("until this very moment, he had never realized he’d always expected, for no discernible reason—that when he died, anakin would be with him." his place in the series as a man who fights for good because it is the right thing to do, because he believes in goodwill, even as the world crumbles around him because it is inevitable that he fail in his mission and ultimately lose everything and everyone he loves, and we all know that he must fail so that others will succeed where he did not... i eat that shit RIGHT up.)

✅: there are at least three separate instances where i have used the righteous brothers' unchained melody in my writing, and two of them are because the song plays on a jukebox in a greasy spoon diner. it was completely unintentional, that's just a song that keeps popping up lol.

fanfic writer emoji ask

[shepherds-of-haven]

You’ve probably answered this before, but what’s the history with the ShoH book that now IF? How long was it before you decided to “nope,” why’d you decide to do IF? That kind of thing?

Hi there, thanks for the great question! I probably have answered this before, but if I have, I forgot lol!

So I started writing what became the ShoH series in 2002 (when I was 10). It started out as one really awful book but graduated to 3 pretty okay books and a bunch of short stories by the time I graduated high school in 2010 (one such story was published in the Harvard Review!). 

In college these 3 pretty okay books became 10 fairly good (in my opinion) novels, which were separated into 4 series. I had to write a thesis novel during my senior year of college, but chickened out of using ShoH for that (I thought they were just dumb fantasy stories and I wasn’t ready to share them with anyone in a serious context), so I ended up writing my first science fiction novel instead. During that year I stopped writing ShoH entirely and turned my focus to getting more ‘serious’ short stories and projects published and building a more professional brand.

In the years after that (grad school and then teaching), I didn’t touch any ShoH novel and wrote maybe 2 or 3 ShoH short stories that never got finished. During that time I was working on my second sci-fi novel, We Have Always Been Here, and my writing/teaching/editing career, so I just didn’t have the urge to write anything to do with ShoH. (It didn’t help that the writing programs I’d been in had sort of sneered at the fantasy genre as being juvenile and un-impactful.) In a way I had convinced myself that no one would want to read 10 freaking novels about these characters, the massive world I had built for them, or their many quirks and mannerisms–so they sat in the dark for a long time. 

But by chance one day I stumbled across the Episode app on the iOS app store. I gave it a spin and was intrigued to find that Episode allowed anyone to publish a story through their platform. I fiddled around with it for fun and converted some ShoH material just for kicks to see how the program ran. It was in this way that I learned how to write branching narratives and stories with choices (though I had always been really interested in that medium, being a huge fan of Bioware, Telltale, etc). And to my surprise, I found that lots of people were indeed interested in interacting with the characters in this new way!

So I took the Episode story and ran with it for a few months, learning how to convert my characters and world in a way that encouraged active exploration of them. Instead of being passively handed information about the story’s culture and cast, players could read a codex on their own time or just ‘hang out’ with a friend or a romance option in a way they could never do in a novel, where every word counts and every scene has to contribute to the greater plot. You could just sit with Chase and have him teach you lockpicking and in that way get to know him in a sense you never could just reading about him in a conventional novel. I loved that and ran with it!

Ultimately I had to end up deleting the whole thing because the Episode fanbase/readership was really, really toxic, at least at the time (their demographic skews quite younger, so this wasn’t that much of a surprise). Episode also didn’t pay you for the hard work you put into your content until you reached something like 1 million reads, and what they did pay after that was a pittance. So I deleted that project and left the app.  

But by then the IF bug had bit me, so I spent some time poking around other avenues like Twine, Ren’Py, and Visual Novel/RPG Maker (yeah, there is a Nintendo 3DS version of the ShoH prologue somewhere out there: it’s legit kind of impressive). Eventually I rediscovered COG (which, to my surprise, I had stumbled across years before: I’d read their whole website, which at the time stopped at Heroes Rise)… and the rest is history!

When I found my agent, I did consider sending him my fantasy novels (ShoH) and seeing what he thought about their prospects. However, I’m still firm in my belief that the format of IF fits the story and characters of ShoH so much better than traditional fiction does, and I’m sticking with that. I’d much rather a reader be able to spend 40 hours following Shery’s character arc or getting a peep at Croelle in secret routes rather than reading through their entire ephemeral lifespan in a single day, flat, leaving the minor characters as just ink on a page rather than as living, breathing, reactive people you can interact with and actually get to know. And I think the story of ShoH is so much more interesting when there are 50 different nuanced possibilities of how it could end depending on player choice, rather than just a single fixed route.

So that’s the long, arduous story of how I decided ShoH should be IF! To answer your question, it took about 18 years to get it from traditional fiction to interactive fiction–but once I found that option, I never looked back!

Thanks for your great question, and I hope the answer wasn’t too long!

[fallingfromdepression]

4/8/21

ok so ... i ended up dropping the course that required basically a thesis. i think in the long-term it’s better, i know my work habits in zoom university and i’d be less inclined to do well on this paper than i would’ve if it was a requirement for my DEGREE but i also feel bad like cheating my way out of not having to write a thesis for school.

my sibling (who wrote a thesis) is like lol a thesis isn’t really something you’d WANT to do but also i feel like i’m cheating myself and my ability. it’s not like i haven’t done research or written long papers before (i think the longest i’ve written was 17 pages) but that was also a while ago and i’ve never done something that took like an extraordinary amount of time and research. i mean this course paper would be an entire quarter’s worth of work so it’s not like i have no time, but idk i’m not particularly inclined to really do anything virtually/online which is bad esp since i really should be doing job apps rn. anyway a lot of my recent academic performance has been me procrastinating HARD even if there would be checkpoints throughout the quarter and i know in the end if i had done this course paper i would’ve been dissatisfied with it.

also i’m not planning to pursue academia as a career, and big write-ups in the workplace (i imagine, i’m looking at policy) usually include a bunch of people working together rather than a single person doing basically all of the research and writing. and also 25-pages is pretty intense research when you’re also juggling other courses and coursework with it (rip to the graduating college seniors who have to work on theses. i remember ppl in my year being like ‘yeah lol i was working on my thesis in the middle of class most of the time which is why i was sitting in the back’). i think in the long-term it’s the better decision both in terms of stress levels and knowing my motivation levels to swap to a course with a much less intense final project but i really do be feeling bad about not needing to do work huh. despite my major procrastination and depression, it looks like there’s still a part of me that enjoys and wants to do work huh ........

[cowboyjimkirk]

I was tagged by @nerdalay (thank you so much!!!).

Rules: Answer the questions in a new post and tag 20 blogs you would like to get to know better.

A - Age: 23

B - Birthplace: Colorado, same place I live now

C - Current Time: 4:17pm

D - Drink You Last Had: Brigadoon tea

E - Easiest Person To Talk To: My twin sister

F - Favourite Song: There was an entire year of school where I listened to nothing but Sufjan Steven’s Age of Adz, and I still listen to it a lot, so I’m just going to say that entire album.

G - Grossest Memory: I can’t really think of anything? I saw some pretty weird stuff when cleaning movie theatres.

H - Horror Yes or Horror No: YES, I freaking love horror. I wrote my thesis in college on a horror trilogy.

I - In Love?: Nope.

J - Jealous of People?: I try not to be, but yeah.

K - Killed Someone?: ....No?

L - Love At First Sight Or Should I Walk By Again: I certainly get a lot of crushes at first sight, but love is a whole lot more complicated than that.

M - Middle Name: Anne

N - Number of Siblings: An older brother, older sister, and a twin sister.

O - One Wish: Oh gosh... enough energy and confidence to finish the thing I’m writing right now.

P - Person You Called Last: My mom maybe?

Q - Question You Are Always Asked: lol, “Why are you so quiet?”

R - Reason to Smile: My cat, my rabbit, flowers, this tea I’m drinking, I saw Wonder Woman again last night, all the Babadook memes...idk, there’s a lot!

S - Song You Sang Last: Twin Peaks theme song. Which doesn’t actually have words, but that didn’t stop me.

T - Time You Woke Up: Ugh, 2pm. It’s the insomnia, friends.

U - Underwear Colour: Teal!

V - Vacation Destination: Space!

W - Worst Habit: Probably opening the Tumblr app every ten seconds when I’m bored. Or maybe just my sleep habits.

X - X-rays: Yes, but I can’t remember why. It might have had to do with my GERD.

Y - Your favourite food: Pretty much any pasta.

Z - Zodiac Sign: Gemini!

I’m lazy so I’m just gonna tag all my followers. Seriously, if you want to do it, just go ahead and say I tagged you. <3