#I’ve been on here since 2014 to 15

[kitnightowl]

I haven’t really checked my followers for a week cuz I was dealing with those stupid fake follower (seriously, you need something on ur blog to know if you are real) but last time I checked I was at 80 and I was really surprised when I finally checked. This is really cool and I’m glad everyone’s enjoying my stuff

[jimhines]

2022 Writing Income

It’s that time again – for fifteen years now I’ve been writing an annual blog post about my income as a writer. Money tends to be an uncomfortable, even taboo topic, but I think it’s important to help counter the myths that we’re all multimillionaires living in Glass Onion-style mansions. (Side note: If anyone wants to pay millions of dollars for my book, I’ll happily update this blog post from my private island mansion.)

Remember, every writer’s career is different, and I’m only one data point.

Prior Years: Here are the annual write-ups going back to 2007: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.

In 2016, instead of a personal income write-up, I did a survey of almost 400 novelists about their income.

My Background: I’m a primarily “traditionally published,” U.S.-based SF/F author with 15 books in print from major New York publishers. The first of those books came out from DAW in 2006. I have an agent, and have been with them since about 2004.

I’ve self-published a middle grade fantasy and a few short collections. I’ve also sold about 50 short stories to different magazines and anthologies.

I’ve never hit the NYT or USA Today bestseller lists.

I’m currently the sole parent of a teenager (at home) and a 22-year-old (at college). I have a day job that’s just over half-time, both for the paycheck and the benefits.

2022 in Summary: There’s no gentle way to say this. The last several years have kind of sucked. Losing my wife to cancer in 2019 completely derailed my writing. I was hoping 2022 would be a comeback year, but life had other plans…

I did write and sell two new short stories and one nonfiction piece, which was nice. I’ve got a finished middle grade book that’s been on submission for a while. I finished a standalone fantasy that’s been sitting with my publisher for a while.

Normally, my editor is pretty quick about responding, but last year wasn’t normal for DAW, either. DAW was acquired by Astra House. A lot of their time and energy went into that deal. I’m hoping for the best, but things still haven’t settled into the new “normal.”

Last year did see the release — finally — of Terminal Peace, the third book in the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series. I’m thrilled and relieved to see that book in print, but it came out right in the middle of the Astra House acquisition, which may have impacted things like promotion and publicity.

I also finished the first draft and started revising a new standalone middle grade fantasy with series potential.

2022 Income: The biggest check was the publication payment for Terminal Peace. All total, before taxes and various expenses, the writing brought in $13,957.16. While that’s absolutely nothing to sneer at, and I’m grateful for the success, it’s also a dropoff from the past couple of years. To be blunt, if you look at the cumulative graph, things have been slumping a bit.

Income Breakdown:

Patreon has been a small but steady and helpful source of income. My thanks to everyone for that!

As usual, my U.S. novels are the biggest piece of the pie. The short fiction category is a bit higher this year, thanks to those two new stories. I didn’t self-publish anything new in 2022, but if that middle grade book doesn’t sell, I’d like to publish that one later this year.

Novels (U.S. editions): $8,542.83

Novels (Non-U.S. editions): $473.25

Self-Published: $1158.24

Short fiction: $892.86

Audio: $521.04

Patreon: $1668.94

Other: $700

I mentioned earlier that things have been in a bit of a slump, and I need to focus on breaking out of that. Some things I can’t currently control. Tomorrow I could wake up to an offer from DAW on the book they’ve got, and maybe an email from my agent that the middle grade title he’s been shopping around went to auction and got a six-figure advance. But I can’t make these things happen.

Priority #1 is to keep writing. If I’m not doing that, other goals are pretty much moot.

Priority #2 is to figure out some alternate options. It may be time to put more time and effort into self-publishing as a complement to my traditionally published work.

The biggest thing making me anxious is that I’m pretty much out of contract. The paperback of Terminal Peace comes out this year, but for the first time in about 15 years, I don’t have the security, the luxury, or the deadlines of a signed contract. In some ways, this is freeing: I can write whatever I want. But there’s no guarantee as to when things will see print. Submitting to the traditional publishers is a long, slow process…

From talking to other writers who’ve been doing this a while, I’ve learned that pretty much every career has its ups and downs. Personal, pandemic, and publisher issues have been a bit of a perfect storm for me these past few years, but I’m not going anywhere. After 27 years as a writer, I’m excited to see what comes next.

Wrap Up:

I hope this has been helpful. As always, feel free to share the post and/or ask questions.

[taylor-on-your-dash]

Writing of 1989 Timeline

1989 changed Taylor's career forever. If Red had just sprinkles of pop sounds, 1989 was marketed as a pure pop album from the get-go.

While many fans and critics kind of expected that, it seems like:

Taylor didn't have a clear direction from the start (except for the cohesiveness): “I wanted it to be a sonically cohesive album, and it ended up really being the first I’ve done since Fearless. I also wanted the songs to sound exactly how the emotions felt. I know that’s pretty vague, so I really didn’t know where it was going to go, but I knew that I wanted to work with the collaborators I had such crazy electricity with on Red, like Max Martin. I wanted to do some things that sounded nothing like what we had done before.”

She knew that she didn't want another Red: “When people say that they like one of my albums, like when people told me that Red was their favorite album I'd done, I didn't take that as, 'So, I should make that again'. I took that as, 'Great, awsome, now I wanna make them like this new album just as much if not more than the last album.' But I want them to like it for different reasons.”

She was worried about the change of direction of her music: “I worry about everything. Some days I wake up in a mind-set of, like, ‘Okay, it’s been a good run.’ By afternoon, I could have a change of mood and feel like anything is possible and I can’t wait to make this kind of music I’ve never made before. And then by evening, I could be terrified of the whole thing again. And then at night, I’ll write a song before bed.”

October 17, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor writes This Love in LA. This will be the last song produced by Nathan Chapman and the only one recorded in Nashville.

“The last time I wrote a poem that ended up being a song, I was writing in my journal and I was writing about something that had happened in my life – it was about a year ago – and I just wrote this really really short poem. It said, 'This love is good /this love is bad / this love is alive back from the dead / these hands had to let it go free / and this love came back to me.' And I just wrote it down, closed the book and put it back on my night stand […] All of a sudden in my head I just started hearing this melody happen, and then I realized that it was going to be a song.”

Handwritten lyrics:

November 18, 2012: Taylor meets Jack Antonoff and his band, fun., for the first time in Frankfurt, Germany, while at the MTV Europe Music Awards. They bond over 80s music.

January 4, 2013: Taylor is seen in a boat without Harry Styles, ready to return to LA from the Virgin Islands.

She will wear the same dress in the Out Of The Woods music video (and also in Look What You Made Me Do)

January 10, 2013: Taylor tweets "Back in the studio. Uh oh...". She will confirm that the song was All You Had To Do Was Stay on October 27, 2014 on Tumblr.

Candids here;

“There’s a song on my album called 'All You Had To Do Was Stay.' I was having this dream, that was actually one of those embarrassing dreams, where you’re mortified in the dream, you’re like humiliated. In the dream, my ex had come to the door to beg for me to talk to him or whatever, and I opened up the door and I went to go say, 'Hi,' or 'What are you doing here?' or something — something normal — but all that came out was this high-pitched singing that said, 'Stay!' It was almost operatic. So I wrote this song, and I used that sound in the song. Weird, right? I woke up from the dream, saying the weird part into my phone, figuring I had to include it in something because it was just too strange not to. In pop, it’s fun to play around with little weird noises like that.”

January 11, 2013: Taylor is seen again at Conway Studios, likely to continue working on All You Had To Do Was Stay.

January 15, 2013: Taylor posts a picture of herself in the studio, with the caption "Somewhere in LA". She'll later reveal that she was writing How You Get The Girl.

“The song ‘How You Get The Girl’ is a song that I wrote about how you get the girl back if you ruined the relationship somehow and she won’t talk to you anymore. Like, if you broke up with her and left her on her own for six months and then you realize you miss her. All the steps you have to do to edge your way back into her life, because she’s probably pretty mad at you. So it’s kind of a tutorial. If you follow the directions in the song, chances are things will work out. Or you may get a restraining order.”

March 6, 2013: Taylor is seen going to a studio in LA.

March 23, 2013: Taylor posts a picture of herself playing guitar, which might mean that she was working on a new song: "Pre show. Columbia, South Carolina". This could be either Wonderland, New Romantics or a vault song.

May 27, 2013: While in Rhode Island for the Memorial Day weekend, Jack plays Taylor an instrumental track that will later become I Wish You Would.

“'I Wish You Would’ is a song that I wrote with Jack Antonoff and it was the first song we ever worked on together. I think, for this song, we wanted to create a sort of John Hughes movie visual with pining and, you know, one person’s over here and misses the other person but is too prideful and won’t say it. Meanwhile this other person is here and missing the same person; they’re missing each other but not saying it. And I had this happen in my life and so I wanted to kind of narrate it in a very cinematic way where it’s like you’re seeing two scenes play out and then in the bridge you’re seeing the final scene, where it resolves itself. So it says, 'It’s a crooked love in a straight line down, makes you wanna run and hide but it makes you turn right back around.’ It kind of is like that dramatic love that’s never really quite where it needs to be and that tension it creates.”

[Voice Memo Intro Transcript] “This is another way I’ve written songs recently. This is a song I did with Jack Antonoff, and Jack is one of my friends and so were hanging out and he pulled out his phone and goes ‘I made this amazing track the other day. It’s so cool, I love these guitar sounds.’ And he played it for me and immediately I could hear this finished song in my head, and I just said ‘Please, please let me have that. Let me play with it, send it to me.’ And so he sent it to me and I was on tour and this was me playing the track on my laptop recording me singing the vocal into my phone and it ended up being a song called 'I Wish You Would', because Jack wrote back and said ‘I love that’. So this is another way of writing, it’s writing to track.”

[Secret Sessions] “Taylor said that she wrote ‘I Wish You Would’ a couple of months after her and Harry Styles broke up, and they decided to become friends again and she said this was the first time she had become friends with an ex, to the point where they were comfortable enough to talk about why the relationship didn’t work out. She said he told her about how, after they broke up, he bought a house literally one road adjacent to hers. Every day he would drive home, and accidentally turn into her street, and he told her how he just wanted to stop at her house and see her, but he never did. She said this song is about while he was in the car making the decision to get out the car and see her, she was sitting in her bedroom, wishing he would make the move and go back to her and just pitch up at her house. She compared it to a classic John Hughes movie where both parties want the same thing but neither has the guts to say anything. Honestly, she spoke so fondly of that relationship.” [this is from a secret sessioner and therefore it should be taken with a grain of salt]

Between May 28 and June 2, 2013: Taylor writes I Wish You Would. She settled in Rhode Island basically all summer, so it's possible that she went to Jack's studio in New York by car without being seen and especially photographed, cause I couldn't find any pictures with the same outfit. Conway Studios are also credited but it's possible that she recorded background vocals there. Taylor was in LA in late August.

June 7, 2013: During an interview at the CMA Music Festival, Taylor confirms that she has started writing her next album.

[Transcript by me] “[The new album] is starting, all the anxiety is starting and when the anxiety starts, then the writing happens right afterward usually. I like to write for about two years before I'm finished with an album because at this point I kind of know that whenever I read in the first year is going to get away, because I'm going to like it but it's going to sound a little bit like the last project I had, and the second year usually ends up sounding like the next project. So I think at this point I feel like staying the same is the easy way to go but it's not the way that I want to go creatively. I think you need to challenge yourself, I think you need to change up your influences, I think you need to be inspired by different things that you've been inspired by before. It's harder to call people you don't know, it's harder to think of topics you haven't covered and think of new ways to say old emotions that everyone feels. I think one of the things that I'm happiest with in the last year is the acceptance level in country music for me experimenting and for me trying to evolve and challenge myself musically because I think it's never felt better to be on that stadium stage performing knowing that and so welcoming of change.”

July 13, 2013: After a show in New Jersey, Taylor has an interview with Rolling Stone, where she says that she has been writing a lot.

“The floodgates just opened the last couple weeks,” she says of the songwriting process. “I’m getting to that point where I’m irritating to be around because I’ll be with you for half the conversation and then the second half of the conversation I’m clearly editing the second verse of whatever I’m writing in my head. I really loved collaborating: you work with a lot of different people and you find the people you have this dream connection with in the studio. I know those people and I know the ones I want to go back to. But I also have a really long list of the people I admire and I would really love to go and contact. So that’s kind of where that is. I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point? It’s so overwhelming that when you’re starting a project there are such endless possibilities if you’re willing to evolve and experiment. If you’re willing to become a different version of yourself, you can really go anywhere with it. And that’s kind of where I am. The kind of the laboratory experimental stage of really catching onto a new thing that I’m liking.”

Somewhere around June and early September 2013: Taylor and Jack write Sweeter Than Fiction. No credits are available but we know that it's the second song on which Taylor and Jack worked, so that places it before I Wish You Would and Out Of The Woods.

In 2014, Lena Dunham (Jack's girlfriend at the time) posted this photo of Jack and Taylor working on the song at Jack's house.

September 15, 2013: Jack completes the instrumental track that will later become Out Of The Woods, after his show was cancelled.

[Jack Antonoff] “When I did the track for Out of the Woods, which is a Taylor song that I'm really proud of, there was some issue at a venue and our show was canceled that night and I didn't have my stuff, I had left it on the bus, so I only had these old samples on what was on my laptop, and caught up that 'oh oh'' thing, and I only had one drum kit on there, and these dumb little things sometimes turn into a great song.”

Somewhere around September and October 2013: Taylor writes Out Of The Woods.

Voice memo here;

[Jack Antonoff] Although Antonoff and Swift shared studio time for some of their other 1989 songs while working throughout 2014, “Out of the Woods” was completed as a long-distance collaboration. “She’s very natural -— when she gets an idea, it just happens very quickly. I would send her these tracks, and when an idea would happen, we’d be 5,000 miles apart or whatever, but she would start emailing me these voice notes like crazy and it would just be happening so quickly that there’d be this excitement. There’s a frantic feeling in the song,” he says. “What’s interesting about ‘Out of the Woods’ is that it doesn’t really let up. It starts with a pretty big anthemic vocal sample that’s me, and then there’s a drum sample that kicks in that’s kind of huge, and then you don’t really know how you’re going to get any bigger, but then the chorus hits and it just explodes even larger. And then the bridge hits, and it gets even more huge.“When I was working on the track, I was thinking a lot about My Morning Jacket,” Antonoff continues, “and how everything they do, every sound is louder than the last, and somehow it feels like everything is just f—ing massive. And that’s the feeling that I went for. It started out big, and then I think the obvious move would have been to do a down chorus, but the idea was to keep pushing.” Antonoff is excited to share the rest of his work with Swift on 1989, but he views “Out of the Woods” as a highlight on the project. “This song means a great deal to me. On a production level, on a writing level, Taylor’s lyrics and her melodies — there’s something very important about this song.”

[Jack Antonoff] “After 'I Wish You Would' and 'Sweeter Than Fiction', we did 'Out Of The Woods'. So it was the third thing we worked on together, and probably the easiest. I sent her the track for it, and she sent back a voice note with the verse and chorus in what felt like five seconds. And it was just perfect. It's eerie how similar it is to what the final product is.”

“It kind of conjured up all these feelings of anxiety I had in a relationship where everybody was watching, everybody was commenting on it. You’re constantly just feeling like, ‘Are we out of the woods yet? What’s the next thing gonna be? What’s the next hurdle we’re gonna have to jump over?’ It was interesting to write about a relationship where you’re just honestly like, ‘This is probably not gonna last, but how long is it gonna last?’ Those fragile relationships... It doesn’t mean they’re not supposed to happen. The whole time we were having happy memories, or crazy memories, or ridiculously anxious times, in my head it was just like, ‘Are we okay yet? Are we there yet? Are we out of this yet?’”

“That line is in there because it's not only the actual, literal narration of what happened in a particular relationship I was in, it's also a metaphor. 'Hit the brakes too soon' could mean the literal sense of, we got in an accident and we had to deal with the aftermath. But also, the relationship ended sooner than it should've because there was a lot of fear involved. And that song touches on a huge sense of anxiety that was, kind of, coursing through that particular relationship, because we really felt the heat of every single person in the media thinking they could draw up the narrative of what we were going through and debate and speculate. I don't think it's ever going to be easy for me to find love and block out all those screaming voices.”

October 21, 2013: Sweeter Than Fiction is released. Big Machine was originally not on board with the release since they wanted a dormant period between album releases.

Late 2013: Taylor writes Bad Blood, after Katy Perry announces her Prismatic World Tour.

“For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not. She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends,or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’ Then last year, the other star crossed a line. She did something so horrible. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies.’ And it wasn’t even about a guy! It had to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me. And I’m surprisingly non-confrontational – you would not believe how much I hate conflict. So now I have to avoid her. It’s awkward, and I don’t like it.”

“That was about losing a friend... But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.”

October 20 to 22, 2013: Taylor is in Cape Town (South Africa) shooting The Giver. One of the members of the cast is Alexsander Skarsgård. He is said to have inspired Wildest Dreams (or at least he's the most popular theory, as far as I know), because the music video is set in Africa and it features Clint Eastwood's son Scott as love interest, just like Alexsander is actor Stellan Skarsgård's son, but we don't actually know more about the song.

“I think the way I used to approach relationships was very idealistic. I used to go into them thinking, ‘Maybe this is the one – we’ll get married and have a family, this could be forever’. Whereas now I go in thinking, ‘How long do we have on the clock – before something comes along and puts a wrench in it, or your publicist calls and says this isn’t a good idea?’”

Note: Selena Gomez was present when Taylor wrote this song.

Handwritten lyrics:

November 19, 2013: Taylor records Blank Space. This is based on the wall behind her on an Instagram post from this day, the credits, and the behind the scenes clip.

Voice memo here;

Behind the Scenes here;

“Every few years, the media finds something they unanimously agree is annoying about me. 2012-2013 they thought I was dating too much, because I dated two people in a year and a half. ‘Oh, a serial dater. She only writes songs to get emotional revenge on guys. She’s a man-hater, don’t let her near your boyfriend.’ It was kind of excessive and at first it was hurtful, but then I found a little bit of comedy in it. This character is so interesting, though. If you read these gossip sites, they describe how I am so opposite to my actual life: I’m clingy, and I’m awful, and I throw fits, and there’s drama. An emotionally fragile, unpredictable mess. I painted a whole picture of this character. She lives in a mansion with marble floors, she wears Dolce & Gabbana around the house, and she wears animal print unironically. So I created this whole character and I had fun doing it.”

November 21, 2013: While at the American Music Awards, Taylor tells Billboard that she has around seven or eight songs ready.

[Transcript] “We got a lot already,” says Swift. “There are probably seven or eight songs that I know I want on the record. It’s really ahead of schedule for me. I’m just stoked because it’s already evolved into a new sound, and that’s all I wanted. And I would have taken two years to make that happen, but it just kind of happened naturally, so that’s all I could really ask for.”

December 2013: Taylor meets Diane Warren and they write Say, Don't Go.

[Diane Warren to Rolling Stone] Warren, who typically writes on her own, says the two of them “sat down and wrote the song,” which was released Friday as one of 1989 (Taylor’s Version)‘s vault tracks, “from scratch” during the last few days of 2013. She remembers being impressed with how specific Swift was with her lyricism and how considerate she was about how her fans might receive it. “She was very particular about how she said certain things. It was a really interesting experience. She gets her audience,” Warren says. “She’s deeply aware of how her fans want to hear something. I can’t explain it, but that’s probably why she’s the biggest fucking star in the world.”

2013: Taylor writes New Romantics and Wonderland. Not much is known about these songs, except that they were both written in 2013.

[About New Romantics] “People will say, 'Let me set you up with someone', and I’m just sitting there saying, ‘That’s not what I’m doing. I’m not lonely. I’m not looking.’ They just don’t get it. I’ve learned that just because someone is cute and wants to date you, that’s not a reason to sacrifice your independence and allow everyone to say whatever they want about you. I’m not doing that anymore. It’d take someone really special for me to undergo the circumstances I have to go through to experience a date. I don’t know how I would ever have another person in my world trying to have a relationship with me, or a family.”

New Romantics handwritten lyrics:

Wonderland Handwritten lyrics:

January 1, 2014: Taylor records Say, Don't Go.

[Diane Warren to Rolling Stone] Several days after writing the song together, they got into Warren’s office to record a demo, where Swift played it on her acoustic guitar. “We demoed it on New Year’s Day. And I’m a workaholic, and that’s fine for me,” she says. “But I remember being impressed that she did, too. Everybody’s on vacation, but she showed up.”

January 6, 2014: Taylor decides to look for a house in New York.

[Lover Journal] LA. So I've decided I want to look at places in New York. I know I went through this phase months ago, but it has to mean something that i've circled back to it, right? You know what they say, if you love something let it go and if it comes back... blah blah blah. so I'm leaving the day after tomorrow. Dating is awful. Love is fiction/ a myth. I'm over it all.

January 21, 2014: Taylor sends Ryan Tedder the I Know Places Voice Memo.

January 22, 2014: [From the 1989 Booklet] Taylor and Ryan finish and record I Know Places.

“I had this idea of like, when you’re in love, along the lines of 'Out of the Woods’, it’s very precious, it’s fragile. As soon as the world gets ahold of it, whether it’s your friends or people around town hear about it... it’s kind of like the first thing people want to do when they hear that people are in love is just kind of try to ruin it. I kind of was in a place where I was like, ‘No one is gonna sign up for this. There are just too many cameras pointed at me. There are too many ridiculous elaborations on my life. It’s just not ever gonna work.‘ But I decided to write a love song, just kind of like, ‘What would I say if I met someone really awesome and they were like, hey, I’m worried about all this attention you get?’ So I wrote this song called ‘I Know Places’ about, ‘Hey, I know places we can hide. We could outrun them.’ I’m so happy that it sounds like the urgency that it sings.”

January 23, 2014: Taylor and Ryan Tedder write Welcome To New York. Ryan produces a demo in three hours. This demo is the one included in the album.

“I wanted to start 1989 with this song because New York has been an important landscape and location for the story of my life in the last couple of years. I dreamt and obsessed over moving to New York, and then I did it. The inspiration that I found in that city is hard to describe and to compare to any other force of inspiration I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s an electric city.”

[Ryan Tedder] “I thought we were going to walk in and start something from scratch because that's what I was used to. Then she calls me and says, 'Is it cool if I already have an idea?' I said, 'Sure.' She said, 'I have this song, I'm obsessed with New York and I just moved there, I want to write an ode to New York because no one's done it in a long time.' And then she sent me a voice memo. She's like, 'I want it to sound like the 1980s.' So the next day I brought in a Juno-106, which is a very 1980s keyboard, and I literally programmed that entire song right in front of her. It was very much on the fly, and that song was done in about three hours. And I did the rest of the production I think later that week.”

Handwritten lyrics:

January 26, 2014: Night of the 56th Grammy Awards. Taylor delivers a legendary performance of All Too Well, but loses the Album Of The Year Award to Random Access Memory by Daft Punk. This will prompt Taylor to make a "sonically cohesive" pop album.

[Lover Journal] January 25th. LA. It's the middle of the night and I was at the Clive Davis Party tonight which means... the Grammys are tomorrow. Never have I felt so good about our chances. Never have I wanted something as badly as I want to hear them say 'Red' is the Album of the Year.

“It was the night of the Grammys this year. I remember going home and playing a lot of the new music I had recorded for some of my backup singers and one of my best friends. We were all sitting in the kitchen and I was playing them all this music, and they were just saying, ‘You know, this is very eighties. It’s very clear to us that this is so eighties.’ We were just talking and talking about how it’s kind of a rebirth in a new genre, how that’s a big, bold step. Kind of starting a part of your career over. When they left that night, I just had this very clear moment of, ‘It’s gotta be called 1989.’”

“I woke up one morning at 4 a.m. and I decided the album is called 1989. I’ve been making ‘80s synth pop, I’m just gonna do that. I’m calling it a pop record. I’m not listening to anyone at my label. I’m starting tomorrow. I liked the idea of collaborating. But with 1989 I decided to narrow down the list. It wasn’t going to be 10 producers, it was going to be a very small team of four or five people I always wanted to work with, or loved working with. And Max Martin and I were going to oversee it, and we were going to make a sonically cohesive record again.”

January 2014: Taylor writes You Are In Love. This is actually speculation but it's based on (1) Taylor going to NY in early January and (2) Jack Antonoff confirming that it was the fourth song they did and (3) it's the only Antonoff-produced song that is copyrighted in 2014. Based on the credits, I'm pretty sure that Taylor and Jack worked on the song separately, with Jack recording the instrumental at the Jungle City Studios in NY (which is a studio that Jack used in 2014 to record Bleachers' first album Strange Desire) and Taylor recording the vocals at Conway Studio in LA.

“I wrote it with my friend Jack Antonoff who’s dating my friend Lena. Jack sent me this song, it was just an instrumental track he was working on and immediately I knew the song it needed to be. And I wrote it as a kind of commentary on what their relationship has been like. So it’s actually me looking and going, ‘This happened and that happened, then that happened and that’s how you knew you are in love.’”

“I’ve never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena Dunham has told me about her and Jack Antonoff. That’s just basically stuff she’s told me. And I think that that kind of relationship — God, it sounds like it would just be so beautiful — would also be hard. It would also be mundane at times.”

“We first worked on that song together and realized we kind of have a good thing, and the next thing we did was ‘Sweeter Than Fiction,’ which was on the [One Chance] soundtrack, and after that we did ‘Out of the Woods’ and another song called ‘You Are in Love.’

January 26, 2014: At the Grammy's, Diane Warren reveals that she and Taylor wrote a song together (aka Say, Don't Go).

[Transcript] “I worked with Taylor Swift on a great song. I don't even know what she's done [for her next album], I'm excited about the one that we did, it's pretty cool.”

[Billboard 2016 Interview] “I know [Swift] likes it, so hopefully it will see the light of day. I know she really likes the song. She didn’t want me to give it away, so hopefully that means she wants it.”

February 9, 2014: [From the 1989 Booklet] While in London, during the European leg of the Red Tour, Taylor and Imogen Heap write Clean in just 9 hours at Imogen's home studio. Taylor will sing the song just two times.

Voice memo here;

“'Clean' I wrote as I was walking out of Liberty in London. Someone I used to date – it hit me that I’d been in the same city as him for two weeks and I hadn’t thought about it. When it did hit me, it was like, ‘Oh, I hope he’s doing well’. And nothing else. And you know how it is when you’re going through heartbreak. A heartbroken person is unlike any other person. Their time moves at a completely different pace than ours. It’s this mental, physical, emotional ache and feeling so conflicted. Nothing distracts you from it. Then time passes, and the more you live your life and create new habits, you get used to not having a text message every morning saying, ‘Hello, beautiful. Good morning.’ You get used to not calling someone at night to tell them how your day was. You replace these old habits with new habits, like texting your friends in a group chat all day, and planning fun dinner parties, and going out on adventures with your girlfriends, and then all of a sudden one day you’re in London and you realize you’ve been in the same place as your ex for two weeks and you’re fine. And you hope he’s fine. The first thought that came to my mind was – I’m finally clean.”

“'Clean' is the last song on the album for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it felt like the complication of this emotional process I’ve been going through for the last couple of years. You know, I feel like my personal life was really, really discussed, and criticized, and debated, and talked about to a point where it made me feel almost kind of tarnished, in a way. And the discussion wasn’t about music. It broke my heart that I had made an album that I was proud of, and I was touring the world, and playing sold-out stadiums, and still they managed to only want to talk about my personal life. At a certain point I felt a switch and it was at the end of recording this album that I began to feel like my life was mine again and my music was at the forefront again. I was living my life on my own terms and I really no longer cared what people were saying about me. That was when I started so see people talk less about the things that didn’t matter.”

“I had this metaphor in my head about being in this house, there’s been a drought but you feel like there’s a storm coming. Instead of trying to block out the storm you punch a hole in the roof and just let all the rain come in, and when you wake up in the morning, it’s washed away.”

[Imogen Heap] “We met at my studio in London. She had the bare bones of “Clean.” She had the lyric, the chorus and the chords. I thought it was brilliant.I was really writing the tiniest amount just to help her do what she does. I put some noises, played various instruments on it, including drums, and anytime she expressed she liked something I was doing, I did it more. It was a really fun day. She recorded all her vocals during that one session. She did two takes, and the second take was it. We always thought she would probably re-record it, because we thought it can’t possibly be that easy. But after we lived with it for a few months, we felt it was great. I knew she loved it. She said she loved it and her mum loved it. But I wasn’t sure it would be included on the album. But everyone felt it had something special. It came together really magically.”

Imogen's detailed blog entry about this songwriting session.

[Taylor about Imogen Heap] “The coolest thing about Imogen for me was that there was no one else in the studio. There was no assistant; there was no engineer. It was her doing everything.”

February 11, 2014: Taylor gets a haircut. (I'm including this for funsies)

February 15, 2014: Taylor, Max Martin and Shellback write Shake It Off.

Voice memo here;

[Lover Journal] LA. This week I've been in the studio with Max and Johan every day and it has been the most creatively successful and fulfilling time. The first day, Johan just made a really up tempo drum beat because we decided we needed something up and light. We worked at it for a few hours before i just started singing "shake it off, shake it off, shake it off" And then the best way i know how to describe it is that the chorus just fell out of the sky. It ended up being this song about doing your own thing even though haters are gonna hate, and you just have to dance to your own beat. We all went home and I wrote the first and second verses and brought them in the next day. We wrote this chanty cheer leader bridge that I absolutely LOVE. We spent all day doing vocals and the next day recording the background vocals. I think it'll end up being the first single and Max said it's his favorite song he's ever been a part of.

[Max Martin during the lawsuit] “Shellback started out with a drumbeat. Shellback, Taylor, and I then collaboratively developed the melody and other lines of ‘Shake It Off’ to Shellback’s drumbeat. I did not write or provide any input into any lyrics in ‘Shake It Off,’ which were written entirely by Taylor.”

“I've had every part of my life dissected – my choices, my actions, my words, my body, my style, my music. When you live your life under that kind of scrutiny, you can either let it break you, or you can get really good at dodging punches. And when one lands, you know how to deal with it. And I guess the way that I deal with it is to shake it off.”

“The message in the song is a problem I think we all deal with and an issue we deal with on a daily basis. We don’t live just in a celebrity takedown culture, we live in a takedown culture. People will find anything about you and twist it to where it’s weird or wrong or annoying or strange or bad. You have to not only live your life in spite of people who don’t understand you, you have to have more fun than they do.”

February 19, 2014: Taylor, Max Martin, Shellback and Ali Payami write Style. This is the last song made for the album.

“I loved comparing these timeless visuals with a feeling that never goes out of style. It's basically one of those relationships that's always a bit off. The two people are trying to forget each other. So, it's like, 'All right, I heard you went off with her, and well, I've done that, too.' My previous albums have also been sort of like, 'I was right, you were wrong, you did this, it made me feel like this' – a righteous sense of right and wrong in a relationship. What happens when you grow up is you realize the rules in a relationship are very blurred and that it gets very complicated very quickly, and there's not a case of who was right or who was wrong.”

“This song is about those relationships that are never really done. You always kind of have that person, that one person who you feel might interrupt your wedding and be like, ‘Don’t do it cause we’re not over yet.'”

[Guitarist Niklas Ljungfelt] “I played on “Style,” a song I started with Ali Payami for ourselves. He was playing it for Max Martin at his studio; Taylor overheard it and loved it. She and Max wrote new lyrics. But I recorded the guitar on it before it was a Taylor song. It was an instrumental. I didn’t have a clue that Taylor would sing on it. The inspiration came from Daft Punk and funky electronic music.”

1989 is officially done!

[Taylor On Ryan Seacrest] “I'm pretty sure after we finished this one I knew the record was done. Shake It Off and Style were the last two songs to be written for 1989.”

February 19, 2014: While on tour, Ryan Tedder produces another three versions of Welcome To New York.

[Ryan Tedder interview] “I was in Switzerland on a tour bus, and I did four versions of 'Welcome to New York,' one of which I liked personally more, but the thing about artists is they become very obsessed with the demo. She was in love with the demo so no matter how hard I fought, she brought it back to the demo, so really what you hear is what I did on the first day.”

March 22, 2014: Billboard reports that Taylor and Ryan Tedder have worked together in LA in January

March 24, 2014: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor moves to New York.

[Lover Journal] So in the last few weeks, I've completely moved into my apartment in Tribeca. That's right, I'm writing this from my new bed in my new place, watching Law and Order with Meredith. Strangely, I've never felt more busy.

May 1, 2014: 1989 Photoshoot.

Behind the scenes photo shared by the photographers Sarah Barlow and her husband Stephen Schofield.

May 29, 2014: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor chooses another photo for the cover, after having a nightmare of the previous one being not enough.

May 30, 2014: Taylor chooses the album cover.

[Lover Journal] Shanghai. So we got to China at around 2pm and I knew it would completely ruin me if I slept when i got to the hotel, so I decided to work out. WHY IS THIS PEN RUNNING OUT?! Just went to my purse and got my pen. So a crazy story unfolded in the last 24 hours. Last night, I had this vivid dream where the photo I'd chosen for the album cover wasn't good enough, intriguing enough, artful enough. it woke me up. I couldn't shake it and it stayed with me all day. Because that nagging feeling I'd been pushing back for weeks was now confirmed in my gut... it wasn't good enough. I went to the venue, mind racing, wandering if I'd have to do an entirely new photo shoot... I got to my dressing room with newer versions of the "cover" I looked at it and felt nothing. The team pulled up this new scanned file of the polaroids we had taken during the shoot. I saw it within 10 seconds. The shot. The cover. It's a polaroid of me sitting against a beige wall with a blue seagull sweatshirt on. You can see my red lips but the photo cuts off my eyes. For some reason unknown to me it's the most intriguing photo i've seen. I think it's the mystery of not seeing my eyes. Maybe it just looks effortlessly cool. The craziest moment came when something caught my eye. The cover photo is photo 13. I kid you not. I played a sold out show in Shanghai tonight and the crowd was amazing. Tomorrow we go to Tokyo, where they'll have the whole ticker tape parade at the airport. Smile and wave...

Mid To Late 2014: Taylor and Jack write Now That We Don't Talk.

[Tumblr Music] "Now That We Don't Talk is one of my favorite songs that was left behind. It was so hard to leave it behind, but I think we wrote it a little bit towards the end of the process, and we couldn't get the production right at the time. But we had tons of time to perfect the production this time, and figure out what we wanted the song to sound like, and I just think it's, I think it's the shortest song I've ever had. I think it packs a punch. I think it really goes in for the short amount of time we have, I think it makes its point."

Conclusive notes

What 1989 represented for Taylor:

“The 1980s was a very experimental time in pop music. People realized songs didn't have to be this standard drums-guitar-bass-whatever. We can make a song with synths and a drum pad. We can do group vocals for the entire song. We can do so many different things. And I think what you saw happening with music was also happening in our culture, where people were just wearing whatever crazy colors they wanted to, because why not? There just seemed to be this energy about endless opportunities, endless possibilities, endless ways you could live your life. And so with this record, I thought, 'There are no rules to this. I don't need to use the same musicians I've used, or the same band, or the same producers, or the same formula. I can make whatever record I want.'”

“In the past, I've written mostly about heartbreak or pain that was caused by someone else and felt by me. On this album, I'm writing about more complex relationships, where the blame is kind of split 50–50 ... even if you find the right situation relationship-wise, it's always going to be a daily struggle to make it work.”

Bonus: Secret Messages

Author's note: I wrote this timeline around 2 years ago. While I found some dates later on, this is 100% my research. If you use this timeline for your posts, research or whatever, PLEASE, credit me! I'd be very thankful. This is 2 years of work.

Links to my other Timelines:

Writing of Fearless Timeline

Writing of Speak Now Timeline

Writing of Red Timeline

My Spreadsheet with a timeline overview

Credits:

Most of the quotes have been copy-pasted from Taylor Swift Switzerland.

Taylor Swift Pictures for the candids.

Heather from Nerdy by Nature for the WTNY handwritten lyrics picture.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for ranting? Tw internalized transphobia

So. There’s the anonymous chat boards app that’s very popular at my school and it recently updated and has an LGBTQ chat board. I myself as trans (ftm) and in college, the thing is I hate being trans so fucking much. I try and shove it down to the bottom, I hate telling people, I cannot stress how much I just want to be a “regular” dude. It’s not that I don’t take pride in the fact that I am part of a community that has survived a lot, I just hate how people treat me differently, refuse to see me as a dude etc. I also suffer from horrific dysphoria on just about anything (which got so bad at one point I genuinely considered trying conversion therapy). I’ve been meandering through the paperwork to get on t and am about 2 weeks away from getting my first dose…. and have recently learned that my parents (who I love very much and who are paying for my education) don’t want me to start medically transitioning until I’m in my 20s, about 3 or 4 years from now. I’m distraught at this idea because I’ve wanted to medically transition since about 15 (currently 19). Here’s where my question comes up, because of this and because the chat boards are anonymous, I’ve taken to pouring out my heart about how much I hate being trans and want to be cis etc. and how I hate the assumption that when people find out I’m trans they immediately picture some 2014 tumblr user instead of just. A guy. People on this app have gotten mad at me for posting these things because they “dislike the negativity” and such, but they have and always will be free to block me, which will automatically never show them my posts ever again. For me it’s just a place where I can express my emotions about never being enough of a man (I don’t want to use the Trevor project for multiple reasons and the trans lifeline is almost always out of service and I don’t want to use up resources, plus my therapist is cis and I feel uncomfortable talking to him about this but he’s the only one in my area I get coverage for). I’ve gotten some harassment about how I need to stop thinking like this and well [redacted], but for me it’s just a form of screaming into a void. AITA for posting anonymous text about how much I hate being trans?

What are these acronyms?

[ginger-snap-talkin-nonsense]

Why the hell does "diversifying your media diet" mean hating basically fucking everything made within basically the past 15-20 goddamn YEARS to you Ginger?? I'm really fucking trying here, but pretty much EVERYTHING new that's been released within the past two DECADES gets thrown into your joyless goddamn cesspool of soul-sucking myopia. Kind of fucking hard to "find more things to like" (by your standards anyways), when basically ANYTHING that’s been made (seemingly) since you were a teenager and just REFUSED to goddamn grow up anymore. Is absolutely despised and TORN APART by you for (as far as I can tell) the most utterly arbitrary crap fucking EVER!!! 

From hating stories because they were made/written by LGBTQ+ artists, to because they obviously fucking fit into an EXTREMELY broad and overgeneralized genre type, to because they didn’t pander to whatever bizarre/media illiterate standards you claim to fucking have from DAY TO DAY. I find it utterly SHOCKING you’ve been able to more than FIVE fucking shows/movies over the course of your ENTIRE misery wallowing life up to this goddamn point. Let alone that you demand other people to do the POLAR fucking opposite of what you’ve done your entire life. And actually ENJOY media outside of painfully myopic, joyless goddamn standards, rather rejecting it based on the most fucking idiotic and hyper-specific standards that NO creator could possibly ever hope to fucking meet!!!

(Without just consulting you personally on every goddamn decision that they make. And essentially ending up just making an inherently repulsive/alienating story that would appeal to you and you ALONE, that is)

You know I normally just throw a random jpeg up and don’t bother paying this any more kind but for the sake of all of the people who haven’t gone through my letterboxd yet here’s a short list of some movies I gave 5 stars released from the years 2014-2024

Bear in mind this is only a fraction of what I’ve seen and I didn’t include any 4 star films or everything I’ve specifically “liked” from this era. Just the 5 star knock outs that go above and beyond the high standard.

[smoshsfavoritepizzaplace]

From anon with the long shipping answer (with another long text):

You talked about how special the 2022-2023 videos were in Shourtney context. The crazy thing (for me) is that one of the first - if not the first - Smosh videos I ever watched was the "double date" video, i.e., Guess Who? with Courtney, Shayne, Damien, and Saige. I didn't realize that it had two couples in it but I remember thinking that they seemed relaxed around each other and didn't aim for the typical "look at us, we're so hyped" energy that YT co-workers tend to have. Well, now I know why.

It was also an interesting introduction to Shourtney because in that video, they acted almost the opposite they act now (Courtney made edgy questions and didn't second-guess herself at all whereas Shayne had a more docile "just happy to be here" energy). It took me long time to realize that this video was more of an exception than a rule in the channel and general Smosh audience has a very different view of Shayne and Courtney. Admittedly, I sometimes miss this dynamic but having uncrazy Shayne and unsilly Courtney is probably not the best way to get views.

I feel that if I had started Smosh with videos from another year, my initial impression of Shourtney would be very different. For example, in Reacting to Courtney's Old Videos, they legitimately have more sibling energy than anything else. So in this sense, I'm not surprised that people used to have differing views of them. Their dynamic has def not stayed the same throughout the years, and once you make your first impression of someone, it's hard to shake it off.

PS. Talking about sibling energy: In general, I do agree that labelling close friends as siblings is equally bad - and sometimes worse - than shipping comments. I think in some specific cases it's ok (e.g., "Shayne messing up Courtney's answers was such an older brother move") but making comments like "they're literal siblings!" is a risky thing imo and not necessarily something cast members want to hear.

The twitch streams/videos was also kind of a weird era as well. I’ve seen SO many people say they hate those vids and didn’t like Saige. But from a Shourtney lover (me) those streams had so many incredible moments, especially the double dates between Shourtney and samien/daige(?) Idk their ship name lol. And it’s funny you say this bc I had a somewhat similar experience. I’ve been watching smosh since 2014/15 and I took a break sometime in 2021. When I came back in 2022, the twitch videos were I think one of the first content I watched as well. Watching it, I of course acknowledged the Shourtney moments but I took a bit of an interested to Damien and Saige. In my head I was like, “they would make a cute couple” and when I looked it the comments, people were confirming that they were indeed a couple. I also just enjoyed the dynamic between the 4 so I went on a binge of every vid with them in it lol.

And since I’ve been watching since around the time shourtney joined, I never realized that if you started with different eras, you’re view of them would be completely different. Each year I’d say their dynamic changed so much.

Now that you’ve explained the sibling energy thing, I guess it isn’t as bad as I thought. I think I just mainly found it weird since I would see on comments of videos where shourtney was actually dating and it weirded me out.

[likeadevils]

Do you know if the 150 vault tracks for 1989 was true? I’ve always assumed it to be false/exaggerated but it’s something I’ve seen being talked about on TikTok constantly so i’m doubting myself

as far as i've seen, that particular number comes from a secret sessioner. there probably some truth to it-- there's this aside from her New York Magazine article (which she gave on September 22, 2013) "While on the Red tour, she’d been writing songs and stockpiling ideas: reams of lyrics, thousands of voice memos in her iPhone," and she also mentioned in a video (i think in the grammy listening session when she's talking about ryan tedder?) that she tried to bring 3-5 ideas to a producer before they got in the studio so they could choose what they wanted to work on. which is like, an insane amount of backlogged song ideas when it comes to taylor, so it makes sense.

that being said, i don't think they were full songs (at least the vast majority of them). based on the voice memos and the interviews i've read, it seems like taylor would have a verse/verse melody and a chorus, and then once a producer chose a song she would flesh it out more. there are some exceptions, but by in large, most of the voice memos she brought to producers were varying degrees of unfinished. furthermore, the stuff that didn't get chosen by a producer was likely not recorded in any real way, and therefore not legitimately considered for the album.

here is a list of all the vault songs we know about

she was in the studio in early october 2012

jacknifee lee implied her and harry wrote a couple songs together that fall

she's tweets about being in the studio in february 2013

she's photographed entering one in early march

she posts on instagram implying she's writing a song in late march

in november of 2013 she says a couple times that she has seven or eight songs that she knows she wants on the album. by that, taylor had likely recorded 10 songs that went on to make 1989, 7 that had been made since taylor and jack had a big conversation about 80s music in may, and 5 of which that were likely recorded in the past two months. so, depending on how taylor was judging "songs she knew she wanted on the album", that leaves room for about two or three songs from late 2013 that almost made the album but didn't.

she writes one with diane warren in january 2014

she's photographed entering a recording studio in march 2014.

by may 2014, she had likely wrapped recording and done the album photoshoot. so being generous, that's roughly a dozen mostly complete, unreleased songs. there's always the possibility of more, but i would still say that would bring the total up to 15, tops. furthermore, only 5 of those songs that we know about were written after taylor and jack had had their conversation about 80s music (x, x, there's so much more pick like any piece of press jack does about 1989) and taylor starts building the album around it (x, x).

so like, despite having a lot of rough drafts, taylor likely had a fairly small amount of songs she legitimately considered for 1989 but cut. which is what the vault songs are-- not a complete record of every song she halfway made while writing for the album, but a collection of killed darlings.

[ferperss]

Loved reading your lore so thank you for the tag!! @sportsthoughts

I spent waaaay too much time writing this but once I started I felt like I couldn’t stop lmao, so I’m applauding anyone that gets through it!

The story of how I ended up where I am today is a long and winding road lmao. But I think I should start by prefacing with the fact that hockey has been a part of my life since I was born essentially. There are pictures of me on a pair of skates at around age 2 when my dad first tried to teach me! Then I played consistently from age 6 to 14 but quit when they wanted me to leave the “girls” team and play with the women because I was intimidated haha. Besides playing myself I’ve also spent many hours with my dad on the couch watching Sweden play in any and all kinds of tournaments, worlds, Olympics you name it, and since he never really rooted for any other team in Sweden or outside of it I just kind of slowly fell into that same thing. I knew there was a hockey league overseas that a lot of our own players were shipped off to but I never really had any interest in rooting for a team that wasn’t team Sweden at the time.

In the winter of 2014, I was at the ripe age of 15 and I did not play hockey anymore nor did I care about any teams really, but two of my best friends at the time became OBSESSED with this one junior player and kept talking about him. This man was none other than Thee Mr Willy Nylander himself. This led to the three of us obsessing over him and we watched him play in the world juniors over our winter break. It got to the point of us picking fights with people on twitter that said he was a bad player and really anyone that said anything negative about our Swedish players hahaha. We had a group chat named after him and everything. We eventually lost interest and forgot about him but this story is important because it comes back later.

Flash forward to May 2023! Before I entered my hockey era again I had an eight month long absolutely crushing obsession with the TV show 9-1-1 that was airing on Fox at the time (ABC now thank god, I still keep track) that came to a screeching halt when the season 6 finale aired and I hated it. I swore up and down that I was never ever going to watch that show again and now that the one thing I had been so fixated on for so long was gone I did not know what to do with myself. Which sounds so dramatic but honestly sometimes I don’t know who I am if I have nothing to obsess over. So naturally I needed entertainment and as I looked up through the haze of firefighters and network drama I found that the 2023 IIHF World Championship in Tampere and Riga was on! And I had no choice! There was hockey to be watched and I sure did watch it. Now, it did not go too well for the Swedish team last year, which is okay. But one thing that happened was the constant debate on wether Willy Nylander was going to join in. His brother was there and his teammate Timothy Liljegren also joined in. But there was no word on Willy himself. And it was all they talked about. He obviously did not end up joining but all the talk had made me nostalgic. And naturally I had to revisit the old object of obsession and see how he was doing over the Atlantic and turns out he was doing quite well indeed. And because I am a sucker for team dynamics and narratives (who could ever believe I studied film for five years) I desperately clung onto the Toronto Maple Leafs like my life depended on it. What I didn’t know was that these were also transformative times, and once I’d gotten into the team and the organization, I was bewildered when Kyle Dubas all of a sudden was going to another team??? How could that be?? The Penguins?? And that’s when I found my way to the Pittsburgh Penguins, the power of Dubas’ cardigans and Sidney Crosby’s fat ass gripped me and now I split my time between my equally cursed teams like they’re my divorced parents. And here we are.

Naturally there are a lot of nuances left out of here, I’ve covered the key points but I think that there are probably so many reasons that it was the perfect time for me to get into hockey again and here we are almost a year later and there’s no going back now!! I’m stuck here forever. And I would not have it any other way <3

This is the end of ramblings and I’ll say if there’s anything I love more than hockey, it’s being dramatic, and also I didn’t spell check this at all so if it’s not perfect I’m sorry (I’d love to blame it on English not being my first language but it’s the only subject I’ve always had straight A’s in so it’s not really applicable it’s just me being lazy)

[jonquilyst]

Sims get to know me tag!

I was indirectly tagged, but I love doing these tag games haha 😝 Anyway, it’s here in case anyone is curious about me lol

1. What’s your favourite sims death? Probably death by hysteria because it’s just so unhinged lol

2. Alpha CC or Maxis Match? Maxis Match

3. Do you cheat when your sims gain weight? I don’t want to admit it, but yes I do. I just hate how sims’ bodies change so easily when they have that one plate of pancakes or a slice of cake, but even when my sims do eat healthy they still gain weight... I have a set image on what I want my sims to look like and it irritates me when the game changes it (so please don’t take this the wrong way haha... I see my sims as characters with a specific design and I’d like for it to stay mostly the same unless I decide there’s gonna be a change).

I also edit the bodies of sims who are born in-game since sometimes their frames end up looking strange as they age up so I edit them so they look more natural.

4. Do you use move objects? All the time.

5. Favorite mod? MCCC for sure.

6. First expansion/game/stuff pack you got? Outdoor Retreat since it was the only DLC pack at the time! I got the base game a few months after it first came out (in November 2014 I think)

7. Do you pronounce “live mode” like aLIVE or LIVing? People are probably gonna hate me for this, but I tend to pronounce it as “aLIVE.” I’ve always thought of live mode as “we’re now live!” like on TV or nowadays like livestreaming. I’ve always found the other pronunciation strange because I don’t think it’s grammatically correct? If it was pronounced like “LIVing,” then wouldn’t it make more sense if it was called “Living Mode?” Idk, “live mode” just sounds incorrect to me.

8. Who’s your favorite sim that you’ve made? I haven’t shared her on here, but the sim I consider to be an all-time favorite would have to be Kira Benjamin, my cranky old lady who is basically my own Agnes Crumplebottom. She’s a very fierce, boomer attitude-esque elder (dark, scary-looking lipstick included) who is married to a materialistic, child-hating man named Tom. Kira is part of my Newcrest townies collection and she and Tom serve as the “cranky old neighbors” since literally every other family in the collection has children.

9. Have you made a simself? Nope. I’ve thought about it but my simself would never be truly accurate because female sims are so tall in TS4 and I’m definitely not model-height like they are, so... 🤷‍♀️

10. What sim traits do you give yourself? Creative, Cat Lover, and Loyal

11. Which is your favorite EA hair color? I really dig that newer platinum blonde swatch we got in the 2021 update. I like that it’s a warm off-white, since the actual white hair swatch is cooler-toned and looks more like the white hair that older people have, and it doesn’t have the strange green hint like the other platinum blonde swatch has.

12. Favorite EA hair? I don’t really have a favorite but an honorable mention would have to be that braided ponytail from Eco Living. I love it so much!

13. Favorite life stage? YA since that’s kinda like the fresh start/prime of a sim’s life, but toddlers definitely follow closely behind.

14. Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? I’m definitely in it for the gameplay. I’ve built things before but I’ve never been great at it. I prefer to download stuff off the gallery, adjust things to how I see fit, and play right away.

15. Are you a CC creator? Nope.

16. Do you have any simblr friends/a sim squad? I’m still a pretty small simblr with not a lot of friends, but I’ve got a fair number of mutuals on here that I enjoy interacting with 😊

17. What’s your favorite game? Sims 3 for nostalgia purposes, though it’s just as riddled with glitches (if not more) than the Sims 4. I’ve made a lot of memories with that game though 🥰

18. Do you have any sims merch? Nope.

19. Do you have a YouTube for sims? Nope, but I did watch the OG LifeSimmer back in the day and thought about starting one up 😝 Now I for sure don’t want to since I’m not very good at speaking or video editing, but I’ve thought about livestreaming to small groups though.

20. How has your “sim style” changed throughout your years of playing? My sim style hasn’t really changed much, but comparing my Newcrest townies (first made in around 2017) to my newer sims I’d say my sim style has gotten more realistic and natural-looking.

21. What’s your Origin ID? It’s NyhtHacker but I don’t have anything on there since my account is shared between me and my siblings. I did not choose that name, btw.

22. Who’s your favorite CC creator? I have a lot of favorites but here’s some I highly recommend: trillyke, Jius, ClumsyAlien, simstrouble, sheabuttyr, and AH00B.

23. How long have you had a simblr? Since March 2022, so a little over a year now.

24. How do you edit your pictures? I use Photoshop (previously Pixlr until they went the paywall route). I crop the pictures, use Camera Raw for brightening/filtering as necessary, and then add text if needed.

25. What expansion/game/stuff pack is your favorite so far? That’s a toughie but I’m gonna say Snowy Escape. Beautiful world with great CAS and build items; not to mention the Japanese culture. It feels a lot more alive than some of the other worlds/packs and I’m really happy about that.

26. What expansion/game/stuff pack do you want next? I’d really like a fairies-themed pack. Fairies were my favorite occult back in my Sims 3 days, and now that we have all the other occults in TS4 I am crossing my fingers that EA will give some love to my winged friends!

Tagging @glowbloom and @spurgees but feel free to ignore 💗

[dumplingsjinson]

How long have you been at tumblr? What are the best and worst things

I’ve been on here since 2014/15 (or maybe earlier, I don’t remember) with another tumblr account in which I deleted a while ago. Took a break and came back with this account in 2021, I think.

As for the best and worst things… I honestly haven’t really thought about that since I kinda just hop on here to do mindless scrolling and post prompts 💀💀 Best thing is being able to interact with the people on here lmao

[fantasycorrupted-a]

get to know the mun

name: Ani

pronouns: she/her

age: 21+

where are you from?: southeastern europe :p

preference of communication: Discord. tumblr IMs also works though!

experience / years of writing: been on tumblr since like 2014-15, been writing stories forever (I do not remember when I started tbh- must have been the beginning of school ig)

best experience: I remember a while ago someone on here had Ghostbuster OCs and a thread where they met Arvid. That warmed my heart. I have enjoyed many other threads over time of course (I still do!) but this randomly came to mind first.

rp pet peeves: icons smaller than I can see (this was a trend wasn’t it),

fluff, angst or smut: all of em

plots or memes: both work. I like to plot but memes can help explore a character outside a plot too.

current muse: ...there’s almost 20 on here - but let’s just say I have a family of angels and demons, one of their friends, two ghosthunter musicians, a vampire doctor, two detectives, a tattooist and a metal singer.

favorite faceclaim: I don’t play faves but I really like Ken Duken. I mean c’mon. I am not impervious to the blue eyes/blond hair combo.

long or short replies: I often go for long as I’ve grown used to it but I can also do short ones.

favorite time to write: right after I wake up

are you like your muse?: yes, certainly. each of them carries a bit of me too.

tagging: you

[themarydragon]

The Story So Far

A few days ago, I was tagged in a WIP game, which prompted me to go, you know, LOOK at my WIP folders. I found (an original!) world I’d written a story in, and it was way better than I remembered. I remembered it being straight cringe, but as I read through it I realized (a) it wasn’t bad at all, and (b) I knew how to fix it. I vaguely remembered how it ended.... but the file I had was only the first half! What the hell? Thus begins my descent into madness.

The file was noted as v1 which implies a second version, at the very least. Given what I remembered about the story, my assumption was that I’d merely chosen to import the wrong file when I’d changed computers. Before my current laptop, I’d been using a Surface Pro, so I went digging for it.

Found it AND the charger. Plugged it in. Let it get some juice. Turned it on.

The file was the same - v1 - so I must have imported it from the first-gen Surface (NT) I’d been using in nursing school. I hadn’t wanted anything I could game on and distract myself from school, so the tablet I had was bare bones AF. Also I hadn’t touched it since I’d upgraded in 2014.

I FOUND IT. I did not find the charger. My mom had used a slightly newer version NT with the same charger, so I asked if she still had hers.

We moved in August, so our random tech boxes are not in fantastic shape, but she pulled out all the random-ass cords and chargers she had. The old-version Surface charger was not amongst them.

SO, to the internet. I found a compatible charger and ordered it. I moved to the middle of nowhere, in the woods on the side of a damn mountain, so there is no such thing as next-day shipping out here. The best anybody could do was 5 days, so I waited.

In the meantime, I searched. Old google drives, google docs, flash drives, email archives. The document did not exist. Why would it? I thought it was bad. (Keep all your stuff, kiddos, that’s the lesson here; you never know when you’ll get the flash of inspiration to redeem your old bullshit).

TODAY, the charger was delivered!

IT WORKED. My old tablet took a charge! It was booting into “Automatic Repair” and not successfully repairing, so it took a LOT of convincing, but eventually I got a login screen AND remembered my 10-year-old login AND got in! IT WORKED.

In addition to TWO other worlds I had forgotten about, one with all the outlines I need to actually flesh out another original setting (and the other the most brutal DA:I concept I’ve ever attempted to write, holy shit its evil) I found three copies of the file I was actually looking for!

They were all the same! They were all v1 and they were all imported rather than created! Which means I moved them to that Surface from my ANCIENT laptop.

So where is my 15-year-old HP crapbox? My husband, over a year ago, had taken it upon himself (in preparation of our move) to remove all the hard drives from all our old PCs and laptops and clone them to a SSD he had. I watched him do it. I talked to him about which of my files to keep. 

Where is that SSD now? Who the hell knows. But it’s SOMEWHERE and I will find it. 

[seanharold]

Hi all,

I've finally released a music/art/eBook project that I've been working on since 2014 entitled Kinderstück. I've also launched a kickstarter to fund a physical release of the project.

Physical copies of the book will sell for $15 plus shipping (and all physical purchases via the kickstarter project come with a download link for the digital version). The kickstarter is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seanharold/kinderstuck-physical-copies

Or you can purchase the digital-only version now for $10 at this link (which includes the eBook, the musical recording, and a PDF of the book): https://seanharold.bandcamp.com/

Here is a description of the project: Kinderstück is a multidisciplinary children's book which combines visual art, text, and music. At the heart of Kinderstück is a children's story about loneliness and coping with loss. Presented as a six-part poem, the narrative follows a girl who hates noise but loves her mother's voice. When the girl loses her mother's song, she must find a new way forward.

The music of Kinderstück is written for ondes Martenot and electronics (as performed by ondist Suzanne Farrin). The release includes a recording of the work, as well as a download of the eBook. The eBook contains seven full illustrations (the cover, plus six more; illustrated by Yoko Furusho) as well as the full musical score (which is partially illustrated). Moreover, the eBook is enhanced so that the music will play while reading the book or while looking at the score. Advancing the page in the eBook will automatically trigger the corresponding music to play, allowing the reader to experience every aspect of Kinderstück at once. Likewise, the music will automatically trigger page turns as it plays, allowing the listener to follow along with the recording.

[monkeyjaw]

More of the 20 years of Books and Graphic Novels

So, it took a long time to transcribe and tabulate the totals as a number of the years were hidden on Facebook and/or there were mistakes in the numbers I had originally come up with. Here’s what I came up with.

2003 17 graphic novels, 69 books

2005 35 graphic novels, 49 books

2006 35 Graphic Novels, 44 books

2007 26 graphic novels, 32 books

2008 15 graphic novels and 34 books

2009 17 graphic novels, 34 books

2010 47 graphic novels, 27 books

2011 35 graphic novels, 25 books

2012 58 graphic novels, 22 books

2013 31 graphic novels, 19 books

2014 131 graphic novels and 14 books

2015 62 graphic novels, 30 books

2016 122 graphic novels, 29 books

2017 97 graphic novels, 41 books

2018 73 graphic novels, 43 books

2019 50 graphic novels, 47 book

2020 77 graphic novels, 25 books

2021 60 graphic novels, 32 books

2022 71 graphic novels, 33 books

Starting in 2003, I read 1059 graphic novels, 649 books (not including 2002, 2004 for which I do not have sufficient information); an average of 58.83 graphic novels and 36 books per year. Since we don’t have complete information for 2002 and 2004 (and obviously I have read books and comics before those years I just don’t have exact or even rough ideas of when I read what), I can say for the data I do have that I only read more than 50 books once and that in 2003. I’ve come close a few times but never over. And that’s okay. People may remember the book collection social media site Shelfari that was the predecessor to Goodreads. It started in 2006 and lasted 10 years. I don’t remember exactly when I started using it, but it couldn’t have been too long after it started because I used it for several years before abandoning it for Goodreads. Unfortunately, I didn’t do a great job at transferring my shelves over to Goodreads so there are far too many books that I have yet to add to my Goodreads shelves. That is going to be an ongoing project I’ll need to keep at for a while but will probably be less intense than the 20 years of reading project has been. 

[chornayadrakoshig]

20 questions for fic writers

Tagged by @1lostsoul0fishbowl <3

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 

156! (Technically, 158, but two of them are in a fandom fest and will be anonymous for 2 or 3 more weeks I think). Also I want to mention that I don’t use ao3 for fics exclusively – actually I plan to slowly archive all my visual fanworks there as well!

2. What’s your total AO3 word count? 

280,716

3. What fandoms do you write for? 

Code Lyoko is my main fandom and has been for about 12-13 years, though I wrote my first fic for it a bit later, in 2014. Harry Potter is still my second largest by the works posted, but besides a long-standing WIP and fandom exchanges/requests here and there, I don’t touch this fandom anymore. Current second favorite is Stranger Things :) 

In general I have about 18 unique fandoms (without counting sequels/adaptations and original works) on my ao3 profile, but most of them have just a handful of works each.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

God my stats after fully moving to ao3 are fucking depressing xD Let’s not talk about it.

5. Do you respond to comments? 

Yes! It’s usually not a long conversation but I love to share details about my works if anybody asks questions.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? 

Angst is my second name xD Almost a third of my works on ao3 is tagged angst, so it’s hard to pick one, but I’ll mention this (technically untitled) oneshot (Code Lyoko, Odd/Aelita)

Usually I love angst and open endings but with this one it bothered me so much that I actually have plans for a sequel to give these characters some happy ending for god’s sake.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? 

… okay that’s even harder question. Let’s say this one (also Code Lyoko, also Odd/Aelita). Disregard that it starts from another pairing’s breakup

8. Do you get hate on fics? 

Not really? Nowadays I don’t even get that many comments (I hate the spambot that I get on ao3 all the time with passion), but even prior to that the most heated thing I’d see in my comment section is “your OC is a Maru Sue”. And they’d list the characteristics that another commenter mentioned as the reason they think the same OC is well-developed and not MS at all! To each their own, I guess

9. Do you write smut? 

I’ve published… five fics that have sexual content in one way or the other, and only one of them is explicit. Truly, I’m not good with something above erotica level. I do have plans to write more smut (for petty reasons) but these won’t see the light of day for a few month because I’m saving them for a fandom event

10. Do you write crossovers? 

I rarely get good plot ideas for crossovers (I gravitate towards AUs mostly). I’ve posted 2 (a oneshot and one neverending WIP)

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? 

A few times, yeah. One of my HP fics almost reached 3k likes on the website that was my main posting platform prior to ao3, so as you can imagine, at some point shit hit the fan. Also had one microfic (or microoriginal, to be precise) stolen as a fancy text for social media post. Luckily in each instance they were deleted quickly.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? 

Nope (at least nothing I know of, I have blanket permission on my profile), but I do translate fics myself :)

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? 

Not really. I have a shared setting/universe idea with my best friend, but we mostly wrote and drew our own separate things in it, our characters not interacting. I worked on co-translating multiple fics however.

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? 

I guess Oddlita? I don’t usually have “OTPs” as in “the only ship I ship in a fandom”, but since it’s from my main fandom and they’ve been a favorite for over a decade, they kinda get this status. But I ship insane amount of other ships in this fandom (including the ones contradicting my favorite) xD

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

At one point I got a kick for a very specific poetry format and I decided to write parody/retelling of the original series in poems. I covered 3 episodes and never touched this thing again.

16. What are your writing strengths? 

I think I’m pretty good with making it sound poetic, playing with sentence length and structure (maybe that’s why I find writing fic in English so hard and limiting, idk).

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I’m so bad at plotting it’s not even funny xD For some reason my brain tends to create a single vague scene idea with no start and no end. I’m a chronic oneshot/vignette writer.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? 

It depends? If it’s a phrase or two – fine, great, no problem. Otherwise we are starting a footnotes hell (have you read fucking War and Peace? I did), unless you’re writing for an audience that for sure knows both languages well which is. Very specific. So for long dialogue I prefer to keep it in one language, maybe highlight in italics, and if it’s from a POV of a character who doesn’t speak the language, break up the dialogue with notes how POV character doesn’t understand what is going on.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Merlin BBC. Never finished that fic.

20. Favorite fics you’ve written? 

Why these questions are so hard xD I’d say this microfic (Code Lyoko, William/Yumi) because back when I originally posted it my readers thought it was smut from the first paragraph and just screamed at me in the comments xD idk I just remember that interaction so vividly it makes me cackle every time