#I've had this art sitting on the backburner for soooo long

[iwasntsupposedtogetinvestedhelp]

“Huh? What do you mean I’m part of the operation?! But-But I’m not-wait a minute please!”

Much to Alvaro’s dismay, he has found himself a part of the Fairy Gala operation! What’s a guy to do...

I admit, I’m actually pleasantly surprised by how the art turned out! Considering my brain was lagging while I was doing it...I did want to draw a Fairy Gala Yuuto, but the idea I had for him, was uh....yeah I’m not up for SSRs just yet. So have Alvaro on his own :)

[onigiri-dorkk]

Goals + updates for 2023!

(plus sneak-talks into my future fics!)

ALRIGHT RIVAMIKA FRIENDS! This evening (now that I've finally come back from my short New Year's trip... as well as recovered from major car sickness on the way back home l o l), my birthday-week-and-writing-sabbatical (😂) officially begins!

If you've been following, I've been hustling since November with my IRL workload and it has taken time away from writing and fandom things, so I had planned that from January 1st for a whole entire week I will dedicate my time to rest in the form of writing. No work, no emails, no ads...

NOTHING except sitting in coffeeshops or beautiful places and writing stories from my heart again.

During the holidays I had a couple of technically free days, so I wanted to get a one-shot in to get myself ready and warm up for this week (and then produced last week's one-shot, The Perfect Brew, which might mark my all-time favorite one-shot I've written so far).

The hard part was deciding what the heck to focus on and commit to. I thought about keeping it free, but knew it would lead to more one-shots, which is fine too.

But after I came back home and rested, I sorted through my WIP's (which, at this point, I actually have 7! I just forgot about 4 of them omg) and I rediscovered a WIP in my Google Docs I loved and forgot about, and that is the orphanage fic.

I don't think I've shared much about it just yet, but it will be a multi-chapter fic set after Season 3, and both Historia's orphanage and castle will play a big role in the plot for Levi, Mikasa and the Scouts. Obviously I don't think I will complete the entire fic just in this week (sheesh... I can't even imagine?!) but I aim to make a good dent in it and hopefully publish something by my birthday weekend :) I believe this is the one I want to make the most progress in, and hopefully get something published from it, though I can't promise timely updates the way you got Microcosmos every week or two.

Also on the back burner that I might trudge through this week is the Ackerman (Kenny, Levi, Mikasa) short-fic, and a post-war reunion fic that will likely be a long-fic. Then deeeeeep in my backburner is also a post-war long-fic that will circle around Levi and Mikasa and gang as Paradis refugees; I foresee this as something that will be a lot darker and angstier.

I'm honestly just excited for starting 2023 dedicating passion-time to writing; it feels like me saying YES to dedicating this full year to growing as a writer. I only began writing in May so it's strange that I haven't even hit a full year of doing so... But knowing that 2023 is starting and ending with me in love with writing is just exciting. I'm PUMPED. I have other ideas (maybe starting a Rivamika-specific writers' accountability group, etc) but I'll save all of that for another time hehe.

All this to say, thank you to all of my fandom friends I've made here who have encouraged me and brought me soooo much joy and inspiration literally on the daily. You don't understand how much your presence here has helped me in my real daily life, and has sustained this newfound inspiration. It makes writing and creating art not feel like an echo-in-a-chamber. To have real people enjoying what we create together, encouraging each other in the process, and sharing their joys for it, it's just sooo important and meaningful. Thank you all!! I will continue to ~dedicate my heart~ to creating art in lots of forms for our lil community here. :)

Please look forward to another year of Onigiri's proud hyper-fixation on Rivamika ;)

(P.S. I can see my nighttimes being filled with reading all of y'alls fanfics that I haven't gotten to read yet!!! PLS!! I CANT WAIT!)

[prydon]

I had some questions about your writing, if you don’t mind me asking. Mostly just because I’m curious and I keep thinking about your recent fic and how the quality is SO GOOD lmao:

How long do you let an idea incubate in your brain before you sit down and start on it? Do you make an outline first or just kind of start and then get together an outline?

How many ideas do you have floating around right now, and how many of those do you think you’ll write?

How long does it take you to write a chapter (I know your chapter lengths change, but let’s say 7K words. Because honestly your quality in your chapters is soooo good and only improving so I wanted to know how long it takes, how many times you reread it/edit it, etc!)

What’s the thing you like beat about your writing style that you think you do really well?

Again I was just curious for a closer look into the way you write because I think it’s so fascinating!! Hope you’re doing well! :)

FIRST OF ALL you are so sweet, i'm really honored that you like my work enough to be interested in hearing about stuff like this!!!

second of all i'm so sorry for the ramble you are about to receive haha i am incapable of being concise

- OKAY, first question: often times i'll have some vague concepts in my head for several weeks or months, but either intentionally put them on the backburner bc i need to work on other stuff or have some roadblock preventing me from starting on them--for example, with constellations i'd always wanted to write a childhood friends au, but i hadn't been able to come up with an interesting explanation for how juno and nureyev could meet as kids and didn't want to start outlining a story for that idea until i did. which ended up being for the best, bc once i finally did figure out how they'd meet (aka nureyev coming to hyperion as an illegal stowaway with a group of brahman revolutionaries), that informed pretty much every other major plot point that happens in the fic.

i do always make an outline first--i'm usually pretty uncomfortable going into writing something without having at least a general idea of all of its story beats from beginning to end (with some exceptions.....). but i also almost never turn a concept into an outline until i'm actually ready/have time to write the fic that goes along with it, bc once i have an outline i become rabid and need to write the thing asiufhaus.

- how many ideas do i have floating around right now? uhh idk, i do have a document just called "fic/art ideas" that has base concepts for a bunch of different potential works, but i don't even remember half of them. i think in a way i have a sort of... idea holding area?? full of stuff that might be cool but i don't have serious intentions to write, and then every couple months some of those ideas might float up to surface and become more developed before eventually being written.

so right now i'd say i have about five things that i'm either actively writing, have outlined, or intend to write soon (constellations ch11, bang fic, short multichapter, one shot, sequel to [spoiler]), then ~three beyond that which have no clear plans but are Likely to be written someday, aand then a dozen miscellaneous ideas that may or may not ever go anywhere.

- how long does it take me to write a chapter? (thank you btw i'm so flattered ;u; and surprised you feel like they're getting better bc tbh i was worried they were getting worse lol) hmmm, that one's tough just bc i'm so often working on multiple things. like there was a little less than a month between the two chapters i wrote most recently, but that's because i also wrote a separate one shot during that time.

i'd say maybe two weeks? but it also depends on my motivation to write the thing. i've written 10k one shots in a matter of days in the past bc i was just that inspired. constellations tends to take a bit longer just bc having to write a fic in order is the bane of my existence and i'm always writing other stuff alongside it bc if i was stuck working on only one story for seven+ months straight i'd physically die asuifhsa

as for how many times i reread or edit them.... maybe three times? i tend to read over a chapter or one shot a couple times while writing it, then one last time as an ao3 draft so i can see it complete and in its final format before posting it. if i'm working with a beta, it could be like seven or eight times though lol.

- favorite thing about my writing style.... i guess one of my favorite things in stuff i've read is the use of understatement, and so i'm proud of how i've been able to incorporate that into my own style. like, deliberately underplaying an emotional moment or stating a Very Big thing very simply as a way to underscore just how big it is. i always think of this section from the poem "ten love letters", which i also once named a fic after: "Here is the truth: It is hard to be in love with someone who is in love with someone else. I don’t know how to turn that into poetry."

i adore the idea of an emotion or circumstance being so awful that you can't even put it into words--or you have to simplify it down into something smaller in order to swallow it. which uhhh i guess i should now relate to my own work since that was the question lol. i've probably written lines inspired by that idea countless times, but two examples from ch9 of constellations are "[annie] doesn't come back in thirty minutes" and juno's line about how there's no one left to water the flowers anymore. juno doesn't actually care about the flowers, but it's a way of turning his grief into something smaller, something that can be voiced and apologized for.

UHHHHH YEAH i guess that's it asiofjsif, sorry for how long it was. i was honestly feeling pretty down earlier but this ask really helped distract me and cheer me up, so thank you so much <3