#Legitimately going to actual creative writing things for things that are not fic and the way I feel… more focused in my understanding

[berlynn-wohl]

It's been a while since I've done a behind-the-scenes post. My hope when making posts like this is that they help illustrate for both readers and writers that fan fiction, even smutty fan fiction, is real writing, it is legitimate creativity that takes hard work.

And now more than ever, I hope that folks can take away from posts like this that fan fiction is not generated by content mills; it is crafted by humans who care about what they're doing, and who wish to create things through which they can make a connection with other humans.

Above, you can see the current notes (the ones I have not resolved yet -- this is not all the notes I've made or will make!) that I have for a slash fic I'm writing.

#1-4: This is the outline of the story. From this, I write the narrative. It's not finished yet, which is actually unusual for me -- I rarely start writing before I know what happens at the end. But that's just me; others do it differently. You can see that pages 1 and 2 are folded; that's because I have written that part already. I turned these first two outline pages into 10,000 words.

#5-7: These are some conversations and some narrative that goes ~somewhere~ in the story. I haven't figured out exactly where yet, but these words came to me clearly, so I put them down, and I'll know where they go when I get there.

#8: Same as above but these words and phrases are specifically for the part where it gets smutty (I haven't gotten there yet). I always jot things down when I hear or read something appealingly meaningful or titillating. Not everything I write down ends up in the next fic, because different ships need different kinds of prose, but everything I don't use on the current project goes into a notebook for a future project.

#9 and 10: These are notes I took when reading two different non-fiction books as research. Each book was written by a real person who shares their very specific profession with one of the characters in the fic. This kind of research helps me understand how to write that character's point of view, their interiority, beyond their exterior portrayal in the media from which they originated.

I've been very lucky to receive lots of positive feedback for the stories I've written so far for this pairing. Without the thoughtful enthusiasm and encouragement of my readers, I would not have had the motivation to pursue this project.

See more posts like this one here.

[ladyluscinia]

Well. My curiosity about the post-S2 state of the OFMD fandom has been piqued - though much later and not at all for the reasons I thought it would be before watching the season - so I'm finally going to do that fanfic statistics follow up I planned almost a year ago.

Links to my first fanfic statistics from January 2023 (first 10 months of the fandom) and hiatus check in September 2023 (8 months of "deep hiatus"). This follow up adds the month of S2 lead up + airing and the 8 months and change immediately following it, which should by all rights include the traditional fic boosts of Kinktober and NaNoWriMo. So.

My hiatus check fic count was 23,187. Today's is 32,998 total fics in the Our Flag Means Death tag.

Right off the bat, this is interesting. 9,811 fics have been added. Which doesn't sound bad except in the deep hiatus timeframe - slightly shorter window, much further away from new content - the fandom added 11,115 fics. There's definitely factors at play like fandoms naturally losing people and creative energy over time and the series cancellation news, but I said back last year that it felt like the fandom activity didn't really spike with new content, and this tracks with that.

Character Tagging:

Edward Teach - 24,411 fics, 74.0% of the total

Stede Bonnet - 22,696 fics, 68.8% of the total

Izzy Hands - 16,627 fics, 50.4% of the total

Lucius Spriggs - 8,228 fics, 25.0% of the total

Jim Jimenez - 5,193 fics, 15.7% of the total

Frenchie - 4,167 fics, 12.6% of the total

Oluwande - 4,165 fics, 12.6% of the total

Percentage deviation is following the same trend as last time, with Izzy appearing in a slightly higher percentage of fics and everyone else in a slightly lower, only the actual "interest" change is even smaller this time - everyone here including Izzy is within at least 2% of where they were last check except Edward who dropped a whole -2.7% overall when he was "only" tagged in 6,638 (67.7%) of the new fics. How will people cope. Jim dropped the least - only -0.3% overall. Anyway interesting news Frenchie has gained prominence and overtaken Oluwande for 6th place by a whole 2 fics, which I enjoy because he was my Revenge crew fave.

Shipping: The Main Couple Math

BlackBonnet is tagged on 20,282 OFMD fics, making it 61.5% of the fandom. Running the otp:true search says that now 13,597 fics and 41.2% of all OFMD content is BlackBonnet with no side pairings at all.

Taking SteddyHands into account - 1,240 of those fics are also tagged with SteddyHands, making it 6.1% of BlackBonnet and (if you exclude them) putting BlackBonnet at 19,042 fics and 57.7% of the fandom.

7,190 fics under the Izzy Hands character tag are tagged BlackBonnet - which is 43.2% of all his tagged fics, and 21.8% of all fics. SteddyHands is also tagged on 1,150 of those, so excluding it brings us to 36.3% of “Israel Hands” fics / 18.3% of OFMD fics are tagged with BlackBonnet + “Israel Hands” and NOT SteddyHands.

BlackBonnet continues to leave notably more of the pie than last time available for other ships and characters, which is still objectively a good thing even for most people who love the ship. It's not hurting for attention, but it's getting closer to the high end of reasonable dominance vs the level where authors writing side character ships are legitimately hard to find. A healthy fandom will often have the main pairing below 50%. SteddyHands is still super niche in comparison.

Shipping: Everyone Else

Edward/Izzy - 3,982 under "Israel Hands", 4,260 (12.9%) total

Edward/Izzy (SteddyHands excluded) - 2,826 under "Israel Hands", 3,017 (9.1%) total

Edward/Stede/Izzy - 2,567 under "Israel Hands", 2,806 (8.5%) total

Stede/Izzy - 2,229 under "Israel Hands", 2,404 (7.3%) total

Stede/Izzy (SteddyHands excluded) - 1,167 under "Israel Hands", 1,262 (3.8%) total

Lucius/Izzy - 1,535 under "Israel Hands", 1,705 (5.2%) total

And in non-Izzy ships, Stizzy did make notable gains post-S2 and has passed up Black Pete/Lucius and Oluwande/Jim in total fics for the first time (though only with SteddyHands tagged fics included in the count) - likely due to a combination of canon decisions made in S2.

Black Pete/Lucius - 2,302 (7.0%) fics. 72.7% of these are also tagged BlackBonnet. Excluding BlackBonnet leaves 628 (1.9%) fics.

Oluwande/Jim - 1,933 (5.9%) fics. 68.2% of these are also tagged BlackBonnet. Running otp:true leaves 360 (1.1%) fics.

BlackHands has actually gone down the slightest bit by overall percentage and brought SteddyHands down with it, though it is impossible to accurately track SteddyHands fics that are tagged as component pairings alone vs the throuple tag. This makes sense with how Izzy fans have branched further into negligible Izzy ships such as Izzy/Frenchie in the wake of S2. Both non-Izzy ships also went down, but this is probably related to both being more heavily featured in S1 and still mostly riding those numbers (especially Oluwande/Jim who canonically broke up in S2).

Honestly I think I'm both surprised it's not more active with the well timed new content and surprised that everything is still so consistent. It confirms some minor suspected trends, but mostly just looks like an even less dramatic deep hiatus update.

Oh and also slight disclaimer - I have exactly one person muted on AO3 and I think they've written for OFMD and it would have excluded their fics, so my sourced counts may be off by extremely small numbers contributed by one author? Idk exactly how AO3 handles that in the fic search interface.

[welcometothejianghu]

Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 心宅猎人/Psych-Hunter.

Psych-Hunter is a 2020 drama about a hot young amnesiac who, accompanied by a rich psychiatrist with major daddy issues and a rich girl who cosplays as a cop, uses his Inception-style psychic powers to solve crimes that are part of a shadowy conspiracy orchestrated by a mysterious figure.

True story: Once I couldn't remember the English name of the drama, so I called it "House Haunters," and now my brain insists that's the real English title. If only!

Do not, under any circumstances, labor under the impression that this show is good. It's not. It's incoherent. The writing is bad. The villain is absurd. The vibe is comically melodramatic. People make inexplicable and out-of-character decisions all the time. Countless complex mysteries get set up with no way to resolve them. There's a thin lampshade hanging over it that blurs the line between bad decisions made on accident and bad decisions made on purpose, but the net result is largely the same. This is the show that first inspired my wife to declare something dumb as a guinea pig in a roller skate.

But it's fun. It's a sea of colorful chaos with brilliant pieces that shine through like strange gems. It knows how to work an atmosphere and does so to create some legitimately creepy moments. It spins a wild yarn filled with bizarre and loveable characters. And it has some twists that truly have to be seen to be believed. In the mood for some beautiful nonsense? Here's five reasons that despite everything I warned you about in the previous paragraph, I think this one's worth watching.

1. Psychonauts for Jazz Age homosexuals

Honestly, that phrase alone should let you know if this is the thing for you. But just in case, let me explain the basic premise of the show:

Jiang Shuo, a man who has lost his memory and been adopted by circus folk, is capable of jingling his keys and diving full-body into someone else's subconscious, represented by lovely and thematic dreamscapes. He does this to solve crimes. Sometimes he takes along a handsome doctor who seems like he might know more than he's letting on, by literally tying their hands together with a red string.

Also, when they do this, they get gorgeous steampunk magical girl costume changes, complete with the cutest little pony nub you've ever seen.

This show can be stunningly beautiful. It knows how to manifest dream logic eerily well. Most of these cognitions are gorgeous, and many are done with primarily practical effects, like it's a stage play. ...And it's good it relies on that so much, because the CG it has is kinda cheap and terrible! So, yeah.

(Side note for the DMBJ fans: This is directed by the same guy who directed Sand Sea, which I assume is related to how this both is a visual treat and completely falls apart on the back end.)

The reason I'm a bit surprised that this hasn't taken off more among the creative set is what a great piece of worldbuilding this Psych-diving is. These boys (and, once, the girl) get to short-term manifest bodily in someone else's materialized mental state, where the person whose brain they’re in neither controls the experience nor remembers what happened after it’s done. Were you writing weird Arthur/Eames fic a decade ago? I got a new best thing for you. Can you say freaky dream sex? Because I can.

The base premise should be more than enough to get your gears going. Come ready to get weird with it. There's so much potential here, and so much of that potential is incredibly gay and wearing impeccably tailored suits.

2. Your friendly neighborhood circus family

As I mentioned before, Jiang Shuo lucks into the best possible fate that can befall an amnesiac: being picked up by carnies.

The troupe includes Ventriloquist Man, Really Big Dude, One-Eyed Acrobat, Other Acrobat, Cheerful Fat Girl, Boy Who Looks Like A Kid But Is Actually Played By An Adult So I'm Not Exactly Sure How Old The Character Himself Is Supposed To Be, and Silver Fox Circus Dad, who manages the whole crew. They're a ragtag bunch of performers who all live together in this cute little compound in some very nice slums, and sometimes they open the gates to their lavish compound and put on a circus show for all the common people!

Now: You know this is not going to be the wokest, most sensitive portrayal of body differences, because of course it isn't. But damn, it's pretty not-bad. The show treats all the circus members as valuable people worthy of affection, whose (occasionally exasperating) quirks are no more or less exhausting than those of the non-circus weirdos in the rest of the supporting cast.

I was half-expecting them to disappear after the first arc, but no! They’re a constant fixture through the show! They’re mostly there to support the show’s more comedic moments, but some of them get wrapped up in more emotional plotlines as well. And every now and then you get to see them actually do their circus shit, which is great.

I will admit that my fondness for them is related to how much I generally love fictional Freaks — you know, misfits who have banded together because society considers them unacceptably weird, but together their weirdnesses make them strong. When you find them, they’re usually the bad guys (e.g., the Gung-Ho Guns from Trigun, the Scorpion crew from Word of Honor) whose freak statuses make them formidable and occasionally sympathetic antagonists. But not so here! The Psych-Hunter Family Circus is good guy support all the way through to the final episode.

I know "found family" is a term that suffers from overuse, but that's the best way to describe what's happening here -- really, it's a family that's already found itself even before the show starts, and now they all live together as an unconventional collective of astonishingly flexible people. How did they find one another? Doesn't matter! What matters is that they all love and would do anything for their newest member, and they think it's great when he comes home with his attractive rich friends, who often arrive bringing snacks, which is really the best use for rich people, if you think about it.

3. Two hands, one ring

Now, if you've seen the series already, you know the moment I'm talking about. But if you haven't (and, statistically, you haven't), know that what I mean is the relationship between these two losers.

Together, Qin Yiheng and Jiang Shuo form the emotional core of the series. They're both drawn to one another because of mysterious circumstances that have started to align. Jiang Shuo's memory is missing, Qin Yiheng's dad has vanished, and all signs point to those absences as having something to do with one another.

Very early in the show, we see Qin Yiheng pull a "come with me if you want to live" on Jiang Shuo, giving the impression that he knows just what's going on in this crazy city. Except, no, he doesn't. Or does he? No, we're pretty sure he doesn't. Or he does, but he's forgotten what he knows, if he ever even knew it in the first place. Anyway, time to tie their hands together and jump into someone else's brain!

I'd say they're in love, but that's not quite it. Dr. Qin Yiheng, high-class homosexual, is in love with Jiang Shuo to the point where he's about to murder someone (possibly Jiang Shuo himself) out of frustration about it. Jiang Shuo, on the other hand, is much more sticking his fingers in his ears and going LA LA LA YOU CAN'T CATCH ME GAY THOUGHTS while trying get a girlfriend in an effort to pretend that all the shit they get up to together isn't tremendously romantic.

That is, until the scene that leads to the which-hand ring guessing game, at which point the burden of their relationship falls on Jiang Shuo (and the Inception parallels get unignorable) for exactly as long as the show will allow it to, before it freaks out and has to add another girl love interest just to make sure all the homos got no'd.

It's not textually gay, because seriously, have you met Chinese television? But it's pretty gay. Or, rather, I think Liu Dongqin (Qin Yiheng) is playing his character as a dedicated homosexual on purpose, and Hou Minghao (Jiang Shuo) is just ... kinda like that? I mean, everything I’ve seen him in, he gets real dreamy-eyed around strong men who pay close attention to him. Maybe it's just his thing as an actor. I'm not judging.

However, the main cast isn't just the two of them. One of the things that led me to this show was the promise of an OT3. And does it deliver on that promise?

Well ... sorta.

Qin Yiheng, Jiang Shuo, and Yuan Muqing are a pretty standard MFM not-love-triangle trio of Male Bestie, Main Guy, and Girlfriend (respectively). There's about five seconds at the beginning of the series where it looks like Yuan Muqing might be into Qin Yiheng, but no, that evaporates almost instantly and is never spoken of again -- and with it disappears most of their interactions with one another, period. So it's less an OT3, and more a case of bisexual cutiepie Jiang Shuo getting both a boyfriend and a girlfriend in a world where censorship will only let the latter relationship exist textually.

But damn if these boys aren't made for one another. Sure, there's a level of conscious comical queerbaiting to it -- I mean, there's straight-up an "only one bed" moment, so you know the show isn't stumbling into rainbow territory on accident. No matter how sexual or nonsexual or whatever you read it as, though, their dynamic is the spine that holds the story together. Really, it's almost sad how often the relationships are set parallel to one another, because when you do that, it becomes obvious how intense Jiang Shuo's bond with Qin Yiheng is, and how largely lackluster and comphet most of his canon romance with Yuan Muqing is by comparison.

Like so.

sidebar: The Girl

I am not going to go into a full-throated defense of The Girl this time, as I am wont to do, mostly because I think Yuan Muqing is full of potential in concept but so badly executed that there's really no hope for her. Her entire personality is whatever they need her to be in any particular scene. It's just that once in a while, what they need her to be is completely insane -- like, seeing-things-that-aren't-there insane -- and it's so great that it makes me mad! She could have been like this all the time! But noooooo

As it is, she has a perfunctory canonical romance with Jiang Shuo that's about as endgame as anything is capable of being (see point 5), and it actually gets pretty cute when it finally gets to the point where it's not just awkward obligation! But alas, it only does that so late in the series that it's not even worth it getting invested in it.

She is a creation of the show. She has no novel counterpart. Her entire function in the drama is to un-gay the dynamic between the boys. You can tell that she was initially supposed to have a different role -- to be the muscle of this trio -- but the narrative forgets pretty quickly that she's got that skill set, and she regresses to being The Girl. She makes dumb decisions that forward the plot. She gets put into danger whenever it's convenient. She demands Jiang Shuo do manly things for her because that’s what a girl is supposed to do, I guess? And then there are moments where she’s cool and crazy and it’s awesome! But they never last.

So if you are going to watch this, be prepared for the fact that the female lead is badly written to the point of frustration. I feel her actor is doing the absolutely best with what she's got; the problem is that what she's got is pretty crappy. Still, Muqing gets some pretty charming moments here and there, and I think it's worth hanging onto those and imagining the character she could have been, if the writers had cared just a little more, or even at all.

4. Powerfully surreal worldbuilding

I'm not even talking about the way people's psyches are structured according to dream logic -- the "normal" waking world is almost equally bizarre. The story takes place in sort of the real world c. 1930, except that a lot of things are off. For example, Japan and England are real locations, but China kinda isn't -- instead, the show takes place in a Shanghai-like city-state run by this moustachioed generalissimo with a faux Latin American dictator aesthetic. The place has its own flag and government and police force (where all the cops have coordinating surnames) and diplomatic relationships with other countries, so it’s clearly its own thing. But what that thing is? What it’s even called? Look, don’t worry about it. Nobody else is worried, so you shouldn’t be either.

You will, at every point in the series, be wondering if the show is trying to telegraph to you that Something's Not Quite Right Here, or if it's just making weird decisions for the sake of artsy weirdness. But don't worry -- there's absolutely no way to tell the difference between the two! Just roll with it.

There's a weird mix of universe rules happening throughout, where everything is mostly period-appropriate for a while, and then somebody builds a clock with levitating parts, or causes someone else to have very specific memory loss — or, again, swings some coins in front of a person’s face and gains the ability to treat their subconscious like a VR amusement park.

You can sort of reconstruct the evolution of this weirdness: The book has actual factual ghosts in it. Well, that’s fine for books, but TV isn’t allowed to have ghosts. But TV can have people who imagine ghosts, so long as it’s all in their heads. Okay, but you know jumping bodily into those imaginations isn’t actually a thing real people can do, right? Well, then let’s make it scientific. How can that be scientific? I don't know, it’s psychiatry. I don’t think that’s psychiatry. Look, it could be. Well, it’s definitely not psychiatry in 1930s Shanghai, and that’s the set we’re allowed to film on. Okay, what if it weren’t actually Shanghai? What if it weren’t actually 1930? What if all of this were at best a weird approximation of the period that adheres to no rules except the ones we want?

Once you’ve thought that, the sky’s the limit.

The show has a very inconsistent grasp on reality, and I am listing that as a pro instead of a con because I am choosing to embrace it as a deliberate choice rather than assume it’s the result of craven incompetence. There's something to be said, though, for how pervasively inconsistent it is. It'd be one thing if there were just a few plot holes here and there (and there are), but this is more along the lines of: We woke up in a mysterious boat and got taken to an island with a giant sea monster skeleton on the shore! What's that all about? Couldn't say! Was it real? Maybe! Moving on!

Let the number of "it's fine! who knows!" comments I've made throughout this rec indicate how much this is the kind of show you just have to roll with. If you are a nitpicker or someone who is troubled by unexplained nonsense, this is not the thing for you. If you love artistic magical realism and high strangeness, you will eat this up with a spoon.

And the lampshade that hangs over all of this worldbuilding is...

5. THE STUPIDEST POSSIBLE ENDING EVER

Okay, usually I am coy about when I think an ending has problems. I am going to drag this one out front and center: Psych-Hunter has an ending so jaw-droppingly, head-clutchingly stupid that I'm actually listing it as a selling point, because it has to be seen to be believed.

When I first watched it, I suspected the show ran out of time or money or something and just had to slap together the quickest possible ending ever. But no! This is the ending they meant! If you go back to the rest of the series, you can see that this is what they were (kinda) setting up the whole time! They just set it up so poorly and decided to make the twist hit at such a late point that not only is it complete nonsense, it actually renders moot the entire emotional stakes of the show! Absolutely incredible!

Now, as I've said before in other places, I don't begrudge the actual twist itself. I mean, it's stupid on its face, but I think they could have done something with it — if they'd had it happen halfway through the series, when the characters would have had time to adjust to the new knowledge. Instead, they slap it on at the last possible moment, when there's no time to have any reaction to it. It's just jarring and baffling, and then the whole thing's over.

I've seen lots of people say "season 2 when???" Season 2 never, friends. There was never going to be a season 2. The only reason you think this was an even remotely acceptable narrative move was that you were assuming that this would be the midpoint, not the end. You're having the same reaction I did, only I can tell this was always meant to be their spectacular dismount.

(To me, it's clear what happened: They J.J. Abramsed themselves into a cool premise for a mystery with no idea how to solve it, hoping they'd figure it out along the way. When they got to the end and still hadn't figured it out, they simply ... opted out of solving it.)

Now, if you want a normal viewing experience out of this show, watch to the end of the next-to-last episode, close your browser window, and have imagination adventures about how you think all the mysteries should resolve. But you're not going to. You are going to continue on to that last episode, and you are going to realize that nothing I could have said here could possibly have prepared you for this. And somewhere, I am going to feel the urge to cackle wickedly and not even know why. Except I'll know why. We'll both know why.

Want to watch this hot mess?

That baby's an iQiyi exclusive! But you can watch the first episode on YouTube, if you feel like getting a taste that way.

Look, I know I may have spoiled my pitch somewhat with that last selling point. After all, why would you bother watching a series if you know it has a shit ending?

I refute your objection thus: Knowing it has a shit ending changes the whole game, because it removes the feeling of betrayal that hits upon your discovering that the ending isn’t what you wanted. You know that already now, so there can be no betrayal. The ending goes from being an unpleasant surprise to being exactly the unexpected thing that you expected. With that in mind, you can dive right in (ha ha) knowing that you’ll never get the closure you crave, and therefore whatever you make up along the way is perfectly valid.

This is obviously a turnoff if you prefer shows that are like seeing someone start a magic trick, perform it without breaking a sweat, and walk off calmly, leaving you wondering how on earth they accomplished such an amazing thing. Think of this more as someone starting a magic trick, accidentally letting the rabbit fall out of their hat, saying “I meant to do that!” like thirty times, and suddenly vanishing through a trapdoor, leaving you wondering what the trick was even supposed to be in the first place — but they were really good-looking and well-dressed, so at least whatever they were doing was nice to look at while it was happening.

See? They're having fun.

[eddiediazismyhusband]

🩺 or 🙅🏻‍♀️

Otherwise, I’m gonna start sharing anti-Eddie, pro-Tevan screenshots on your posts 😤

(I would never actually do that but pretty pretty please, these both sound SO FCKN GOOD, I need them 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺) (also I’m not at all creative & obviously very bad at threats but I wanted to follow the rules 😇)

That is legitimately the most threatening thing anyone could ever say to me to get me to write, please don't play with me like that, I promise I will have my wips written and on your desk by 5 PM Friday.

🩺 - The Nurse!Eddie fic:

----------

Eddie looked up at him with a raised eyebrow.

“You were crying over a movie with Dolly Parton in it?” he asked.

“Hey, don’t trash on Dolly,” Buck admonished. “Besides, she wasn’t the focus of the scene, it was- Sally Field’s character is giving this really emotional monologue and I just… it gets me every time.”

“You’re telling me you’ve cried at this scene before?” Eddie gave him an amused look.

“It gets to me, man,” Buck defended. “It- it’s kind of a sentimental movie to me. Maddie and I used to watch it all the time, and… I don’t know, I just love it.”

Eddie frowned at the mention of Maddie’s name.

“Ah, and how is she?” he asked, changing the subject. “Maddie, I mean.”

“Oh she’s…” Buck trailed off. “Don’t tell Hen, she wants it to be a surprise, but she is pregnant.”

“Congratulations,” Eddie said, trying not to let the agitated edge show.

“Thanks,” Buck smiled. “I think I’m honestly more excited than she is about it. To have a little Buckley walking around.”

Eddie’s brow furrowed. Based on what Buck had said in the store a week ago, the baby wasn’t his, so technically it wasn’t a Buckley.

“I’m sure that it’s going to be a big adjustment for you both,” Eddie said.

Buck shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, not really for me- I’m planning on spoiling the kid, but Maddie and Chimney are the ones who are gonna have the brunt of it all. I’m just gonna be Uncle Buck.”

Eddie swore he heard a record scratch in his brain.

“Wait, what?” he asked.

“What?” Buck furrowed his own brows in confusion.

“What do you mean, Uncle Buck?” he clarified.

“I mean, my sister’s baby is going to be my niece or nephew,” Buck chuckled awkwardly, still looking at Eddie with a confused look.

“Sister?” Eddie asked, his eyes growing wide. “Maddie’s- She’s your sister?”

----------

🙅🏻‍♀️ - The Homophobic Marisol fic:

“She what?” she practically hissed.

“I-” Buck stammered. “I- she figured out I had feelings for Eddie and she… she told me I should stay away from him and Christopher. That she’s Eddie’s girlfriend and she doesn’t want me around to mess things up for her.”

Buck could swear he saw the faintest twitch of Pepa’s eyes before she took a deep breath, closing her eyes and bowing her head as if in prayer.

“Dios, por favor dame la fuerza para no retorcerle el cuello a esa perra la próxima vez que la vea-” she muttered quickly under her breath.

“Pepa!” Buck’s eyes went wide- picking up on the gist of what she was saying even though he didn’t understand it exactly. 

“I’m sorry, Evanito, but I never liked that puta for my Eddito,” Pepa told him. “I knew there was something off about her when I met her, but I never expected her to be so vile.”

“I’m really wondering if I should tell you the next part,” Buck chuckled as Pepa turned to face him.

“There’s more?” she asked.

“She told me she didn’t want me to ‘turn Eddie’ so that he would be with me,” Buck told her- feeling like a weight was being lifted by sharing this with someone other than Maddie or Chim. “And that if she found out that I told anyone what she said then she would tell Eddie how I feel about him.”

“Ay dios mio,” Pepa shook her head.

----------

[shadowmaat]

Artificial Incompetence

The conversations around "artificial intelligence" are getting a bit bonkers. Not that they're really conversations so much as screaming matches. And not that we're talking about true artificial intelligence so much as algorithm blending programs.

I don't like the recent fad of ABPs. It has a lot of the same earmarks and defenders as NFTs had, and boy howdy did that not work out well for folks. I don't think ABPs have been tied to the fake currency market, but their current implementation is still going to do more harm than good, in my opinion.

I'm not gonna say that writing or art should be "hard" or that people need to "struggle" in order to create things. I do, however, believe that they need to do the goddamn work themselves. Feeding prompts into a content generator doesn't make you a writer or artist. Well, scam artist, maybe. It's taking words/brush strokes from someone else and claiming credit for it. Even if you mention you used an ABP you still didn't create the art yourself, you just fed a program some prompts or the name of some artists you like and it spat out something you claimed as your own.

That's one of the big hangups I have with this fad: taking credit for someone else's work. Reaping all the perceived benefits (kudos, reblogs, etc) without actually doing anything to earn it.

If I give someone a prompt and they write a fic based on it, that story isn't mine. Sure, they might mention I gave them the prompt, but they were the one to write the actual story. Not me. My name doesn't go on the author line and I can't boast to others about the fic I wrote. Because I didn't.

I'm all for accessibility tools to help people complete tasks, and if ABPs were being widely used to help make creative efforts more accessible, I might have a different opinion. As it stands, however, the vast majority of people currently using ABPs aren't using them to help with their own creativity, they're using them as a substitute.

The arguments about data scraping and plagiarism are important, especially if we want to make sure that ABPs stop doing that, but from where I stand it still all boils down to people trying to loophole past responsibility and effort.

It gets worse when you switch gears from fic writing to essays and articles. At least in fiction stuff is supposed to be made up, so, all jokes aside, if some details are wrong it doesn't really matter.

When students start submitting essays to their teachers that they didn't write or sites try using an ABP to write articles, facts become a lot more important. And ABPs are infamous for making shit up whole cloth, even to the point of citing imaginary sources for their facts. That is, quite frankly, dangerous.

You think the past few years (decades, centuries) of misinformation have been bad? It can get a whole lot worse. These programs can seed in just enough "real" information to sell their bullshit as legitimate, and if even some experts have to double-check stuff to figure out what's false, where does that leave the rest of us? Especially all the ones who don't fact check at all before reblogging/believing something they read?

I think the future of artificial intelligence- real artificial intelligence- could be incredibly cool, and when the first AI submits a fic to AO3 I hope I'm around to read it. Right now, though, it's less about exploring potential and all about exploiting it.

[twisted-tales-told]

🔥 ??

This ask game

On a completely unrelated note

Anyone on marauders TikTok at this point I simply do not trust. I don’t like your vibe. Your existence irritates me and I can’t wait for life to knock u off your high horse a bit. Not like a lot, but enough to make you bearable to share the planet with.

People have taken the marauders fandom way too far and way too seriously and I think it should all just burn down.

Erase it all. Give it 5 years to cool off.

Also snape is not that bad?? Yall are fucking CRAZY in your hating him but hyping up Barty. Crazy. Insane. “He bullied children” well your guy tortured Frank and Alice longbottom and fucking killed people for the sake of blood purity. Therefore I challenge you to come up with a legitimate excuse and not some random fictional morale code?? Like why is that the line. Why is that your reason. “He bullied children” for gods sake do you hear yourself??

At least be creative jfc.

I think there’s a lot of nuance to Snapes story, especially with aspects of class, privilege, gender (being a white male vulnerable to extremist ideology due to upbringing and life experiences)

ALSO ITS FICTION

It’s fucking fiction. I say where the story is interesting because it’s MY blog.

Anyways this will probably be my last ever marauders post so I’m going out with a bang.

The reason there’s so many male fics is because creating characters from just a name is hard and not really in the nature of fanfiction and the only marauders era fleshed out characters are Sirius black and Remus Lupin because they’re the only ones in the Harry Potter books.

Like what yall have done creating depth in all these side characters is truly phenomenal but ohmygod the way you attack people so quickly for just writing m/m ships in this space where the only canon fleshed out characters are the men is INSANE. Thats literally what brought them here. You’re the weird one. And be weirder!’ Be weirder enough to write the W/W fanfiction with those little one fact character skeletons. I support you this is the place for that!! Stop being mean to other people and show some initiative or I will fucking fire you. With actual flames.

ALSO let people make fan films, don’t let people make fan films. Maybe it’s a scam, maybe it’s being written by criminals from their prison cells. Maybe it’s just people out here trying to do a group project like this is school. Stop. Caring. It’s none of your business.

I have never cared for cosplay, you do you boo but it’s not my thing. I do think it’s fucked up when you treat them like the character though and mess with their lives as human beings. Maybe try being normal, or pursuing a career in becoming a shitty therapist because you seem to care a whole lot about other peoples business.

Read fics because you like the summery or because you found it at 2 am in a comment section or ao3s page. Dont read fics because it’s “the it fic” right now. That’s bordering way too close to fast fashion trends and that is not allowed here. You are breaking the non-capitalist rules of our weird nerd hub.

You are not going to like the hyped up TikTok book.

Let that philosophy apply here.

Also This is not a book. It is a fanfic. Treat it like someone brought home made cookies to your doorstep. If you bite it and spit it in their face because you forgot to tell them you had a nut allergy or you wanted brownies instead it is your bad. You should have asked about the nuts, and you should say THANK YOU YOU MADE ME COOKIES.

Anyways goodbye forever marauders fandom it was fun I love all you silly little characters. I made lifelong friends, I laughed I cried I puked in my mouth a little (—meg from supernatural) but mostly you made me realize how fucking stupid it all is and fear for our future as a civilization.

[aristotels]

Thinking about art and fiction and concepts of ownership and honestly it's kinda fucked that collaborative and transformative storytelling is literally as old as time and one of the most basic human instincts that exists, but the only good word it we have right now is "fanfiction"

and when you tell people you write fanfiction they think you're some kind of cringe weirdo and possibly pervert and then the whole thing gets derailed by this bizarre side discussion into how "No it's not all porn, it's absolutely everything and anything imaginable, duh, but like, even if it were all porn, that would also be okay". Like I'm all for pointing out the double standards about how published authors who put sex into their stories don't lose any respectability (especially if they're men, and especially if the sex is cishet), but the second I, a fanfiction person, add a romantic arc into my plotty casefic suddenly I'm a fujoshi with shipper brainrot etc etc-

But it's tiring that this is even a focal point

My favourite funny and sad thing is watching people (usually dudes) who clearly either view themselves as above fanfiction or have simply never ever thought of themselves as "the type" to do creative writing discover The Fanfiction Urge, because the way they express it is like. An increasingly passionate and detailed video essay about how Movie should have gone instead, or, my favourite, a story about something cool that happened to them in XCOM or Darkest Dungeon or some other Difficult Game For Serious Gamers and by the end of the post they're legitimately just writing prose. Like look at this! LOOK! Damn if this person didn't speedrun the gamerbro-to-AO3 pipeline just for a sec. And not that there's anything wrong with those formats but it makes you wonder if that's something they'd be interested in exploring more if their wings got unclipped

Or DnD. Small wonder that TTRPGs are becoming so popular when they're one of the few increasingly non-cringe ways to do the extremely basic human urge of Tell Story Collaboratively

A friend of mine had this to say recently about his own struggles with this kind of internal bias:

i'd like to try out Thousand-Year-Old Vampire (a solo role-playing game with minimal rules to make you write your own narrative) and my toxic masculinity is getting in the way. discouraging thoughts include: i'm not creative enough; creative writing is for Floofy Humanities types and i am a Cold STEM type; it's not a real game unless it has Systems that you can Study and Master. would anyone like to say something encouraging?

and honestly that's incredibly illuminating innit isn't it. The splitting off of creative activity (not just fanfiction, either) into something only for Floofy Humanities Types but not Serious People and the way it's linked to whether or not you can make money off it... oof.

This became a long post thank you for your patience

ngl i just dont rly care that much for fandoms... i like fanfic, i read it and write it, but i dont rly see fandom as my identity or smth i particularly care about, to me all of it is just the same as me playing with barbie dolls.

i dont think its something special that can be compared to actual literature and i think there are certain problems w booktok people relying on tropes that come from fanfic mentality. its just not the same, and i do wish people who like fanfic would sometimes also read.......some actual books sometimes

i just generally dont see what youre describing as some huge thing or problem, i think anti-kink ppl doxxing artists is the major worrisome thing when it comes to fandoms, but i think the doxxers also take the whole fandom experience too seriously

and i say this as someone who also writes fanfic, so like, it rly isnt me going "fanfic authors/readers are stupid", i find fanfic super cool to explore yourself, fanart taught me sooo much as an artist, i even enjoy roleplaying; all of this serves a very real purpose of exploring things as a human in realms of fiction, and pre-existing characters make that easier. i think that can be very useful, we learn about ourselves through books and stories. i just think fandom should be treated the way it is - playtime with toys ✌️

[culpeppercheckers721]

Turn Week 2024– Day 6: Crossover

Ok I initially came up sort of empty on this prompt again, but I give you a few things now!:

I know this isn’t really a proper crossover since Hamilton was in the show, but something that would’ve been fun to see in Turn for me was Abe and Hamilton getting to interact (even if it was totally plot irrelevant)!

I feel like they actually have… a decent amount in common, if you know what I mean. (At the very least, they’re both small and angry 5”7 men 🤪)

Now for something slightly closer to a crossover with other pieces of media, though both of these examples are closer to just regular AUs than crossovers I think(???) I want to shout out a Turn/National Treasure style AU fanfiction that I will simply never get over, Of Treasure & Treachery; this fic is honestly one of the funniest and cleverest concepts I have seen in this fandom so far, and not only does it have me laughing my ASS off every time I read it and picture Abe doing dumb shit as always (though you may say stealing the Declaration of Independence is particularly wild even for him 😂), it also has me going feral over the Townhull dynamic (since sometimes, you just wanna see your ship in ridiculous scenarios from pop culture films), and living for all of the Abe & Anna friendship it contains because that is a dynamic I cherish so much! It’s like I didn’t even know what I was missing before reading this fic, but genuinely, I wish we could have canonically seen them just be friends more, since when they’re not committing adultery together every five minutes, I do truly believe that Anna and Abe had underrated and wonderful platonic chemistry, if that’s a phrase, and I just enjoy their childhood friends connection and banter so much.

Once again, I cannot stress enough how hilarious this fic was to me. Maybe that’s because my sense of humor is wildly specific and unhinged, but I thoroughly enjoyed this writing so much, and I totally recommend this rollercoaster ride of a story for anyone seeking a good time!

(And an edit since apparently today was national kissing day, as much as I don’t want to spoil specifics there will be kissing in that fic!! Just go check it out!)

And finally, I’d like to introduce another AU based on a piece of media, this my own concept that I will hopefully finish someday— a crack-treated-seriously type parody of The Afterparty (the Apple TV series). The idea of matching each character to a specific film genre was something so inexplicably fun and exhilarating to me, so I do have a HEAVY heavy work in progress of this AU in the making right now, featuring, similarly to the original, a high school reunion afterparty turned murder mystery when one John Andre “mysteriously” dies 👀 Once again, it’s a very loose story as of now (though I do have a pretty extensive murder timeline written out 😂), but I figured this a somewhat fitting occasion to mention it given all the other creative combinations of Turn and other series that I’ve seen so far! If anyone is interested, I may very well talk more about it haha. Until then, I wish you Turn folk good luck on your other (more legitimate crossovers than this lmao) pieces of crossover content! 💕

[actual-changeling]

hello :) first of all you really don't have to answer or acknowledge this since it'll maybe stir this whole thing up even more, but i guess i just wanted to talk about this with someone who feels as passionate about it as i do. there's this very famous writer in the TLOU fandom and the way they portray ellie's character and especially her trauma just IRKS me so bad. it's so obvious they have no idea how PSTD works. at first i was like, ok, don't like don't read, i truly get it and agree, but when you write about such a sensitive topic i feel like you have to take responsability? the don't like it don't read it rule doesn't apply here since A LOT of people are reading your works and there's a possibility that their knowledge of PSTD will be flawed bc of the way YOU wrote it. and ellie's character... like, how much can you change a character's personality before it's another whole person? i just don't understand the point. again, no need to reply! just wanted to talk about this w/ someone (a writer, no less) who gets it

Hi anon!

I'm glad you felt safe enough to send this ask, and I 100% understand where you are coming from. I won't go into the drama because Ellis made his post and I was only watching it from the sidelines because he is my friend; this is done for him so it's done for me.

I do wanna say something on the matter of "don't like don't read" and author responsibility because as everyone who follows me probably knows at this point, I care about accurately writing PTSD and trauma (and any other conditions for that matter), and I have made several posts about it before. This is not about one person, this is about a trend I have see both in this fandom and in other ones, so once again, as always, if you start feeling defensive ask yourself why and have a good look at that.

I want to make something very very clear: people critizing a person's portrayal of a character's trauma and PTSD is NOT about headcanons. It is not about creative freedom. It is not about character interpretation. It never has been and it never will be. It is about accurately portraying actual medical conditions in a way that is both respectful and does not contribute to ableism and stigma.

If your portrayal misses the mark, people critizicing it are not criticzing your headcanons. They are telling you that something you wrote is legitimately offensive and harms actual, real people with that condition. There is exactly one correct response to that and it's apologizing, correcting your mistakes and/or taking the work down if you cannot do so for some reason (too deeply enmeshed with the story, you cannot write it properly, etc.). Saying "don't like don't read" and ignoring it doesn't suddenly make your work not offensive, it just makes YOU a bigot who does not care that they are hurting people.

"Don't like don't read" is about fics that do not meet your personal taste or deal with topics you cannot handle. It does not apply to offensive, harmful content. Would you say the same if someone published an outright transphobic or racist fanfic? Would you say "don't like don't read" and allow them to continue to post outright bigotry without repercussions? And if your answer to this is no, as I hope it is, why is it different when it comes to ableism? Why do you think mental disorders and conditions are somehow less worthy of being portrayed correctly? Why is ableism "less bad" to you?

And anon, you bring up a great point, as an author you not only have a responsibility to make sure that your portrayal isn't hurting people who have it but that it also doesn't contribute to negative stereotypes and furthers the stigma. If a person who does not have PTSD reads it and comes out the other side with an even more flawed view of it, you failed. You failed as an author and as an ally to disabled people.

Write Ellie however you want, but once you get to a certain point at least tag it as "out of character" so people can avoid it. It's not a bad thing to write ooc characters, if you are having fun - go for it! Just tag it as such so people can avoid it. Wrongly portrayed PTSD does not fall under headcanons though, it's a problem and you need to fix it. You need to do more research than one google search. Having a friend with PTSD is also not enough, you need the full picture, you need to understand how PTSD works and why people's symptoms are the way they are.

I have CPTSD, I have enough trauma for several lifetimes, I have several other diagnosed conditions and I'm on heavy psych medications and I still do my research. I draw from my own experienced a lot but I also have years of research under my belt and I still do more. Because I care. I care about my writing and my stories, I care about the characters and the people who see themselves in them, I care about my readers and everyone else who will be (hopefully positively) affected by the education I can provide via my writing. I care and that means putting in the work isn't a chore, I do it willingly and with enthusiasm.

If someone tells me I fucked something up - thank you, I will change it, apologize, and learn from it. That is the only correct response and I hope people will start doing so instead of twisting words and hiding behind "don't like don't read" because it has never been about interpretation and never will be.

This got quite long, but once again anon, thank you for sending in the ask, I'm glad you felt comfortable sending it. Have a great day <3

[zerolostwalks]

🥑🪐❄️🍦🪲

🥑 ⇢ you accidentally killed somebody, which mutual(s) do you text for help?

😆 Well that's quite the conundrum, well one call is instantly going to be @goblinpaladinroselia and honestly the other one is probably going to be dependent on state of mind but as of this moment my brain is thinking @daintyduck99 would the next person I contacted. . .if I didn't just drop some sort of panic induced SOS in the group chat.

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

Oooooooooh. 1. I've got more scrap booking things arriving in the mail today. 2. Getting Physical Therapy for my shoulder! WOOO! 3. I discovered/started watching Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and I am loving it!

❄️ ⇢ what's your dream theme/plot for a fic, and who would write it best?

So, you'd think this would be straightforward but my brain has soooo many follow up questions, because I have so many ideals for so many different states of mind. So I am just gonna go with one of my AU ideas Specifically the Slayer Family AU. Which honestly I think @where-you-go or @innytoes would absolutely nail the angstier elements that fic would demand.

🍦 ⇢ name three good things about a character you hate

Does it have to be specifically for Julie and the Phantoms? Because I don't know if there is a character I legitimately hate in Julie and the Phantoms. Ok so the first character that came to mind is Hatta from Heartless (The first iteration to actually get me to loathe a Hatter character) BUT! 3 good things: 1. Seems to be incredibly loyal to his friends, and to some extent the duty placed upon him. 2. Still very creative and skilled at his craft. 3. Quite brave considering his selfish drive to not follow in the footsteps of his family.

🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

(I see what you're doing. Behold the snippet from the next We Run Together chapter.) “Is there–?” Bobby hesitates, staring at the open fridge in front of him, the tensing in his shoulders the only clue he’s bracing himself for what he’s about to ask. “Like, is there anything you might have missed or accidentally left behind we’d need to–” Oh, Reggie gets it now.

(Writers Truth or Dare Ask Game)

[a-big-apple]

wip title ask meme

tagged by @beyoncesfiancee <3 <3 <3

Prompt: Make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it! And then tag as many people as you have WIPs.

so i have one wip doc per fandom with all the wips in it with an outline to help me find stuff, because that's how i roll for some reason, and there are legitimately SO MANY. so this is a non-exhaustive list of SU and TLT wip headings that are substantial enough to have snippets or enough notes to come back to and actually write something, i'm skipping all the things that are just a few lines of an idea and nothing else

SU:

Pearl and steven talking about time

Bisvolleypearl space vacation

The House On the Beach

PEARL’S HEDONIST 20’S FOR JEEJ aka dubious Sapphic activities

Moribito AU prequel

Pearl and Onion

Greg's Junk

Finding the deed to Greg’s uncle’s mansion - Amethyst POV

Rose Is Back/Multiverse idea

Pearl is hot fic

Volley Tops

Vibrant Pussy Culture

VOLLEYPEARL Volley gets creative!

TLT:

Upon this rock 2 electric boogaloo

Handcuffs

Pubescing

Figure Skating AU Part 2? Part 1.5?

Ficcer au

Cam and Pal's Totally Normal 20s

Planned Parenthood AU

PWP

Aiglamene fucked Wake fic

Pyrrha babysnatch au

[insert FTH fills here i don't want to spoil]

Notes for Baby Trap II

and yet again i know i always do this but tagging people stresses me out so i'm tagging YOU yes YOU if you're reading this and you've got wips then consider yourself tagged and tag me back!! i'm serious!!! i know my blog is often a place memes go to die but singling people out makes me twitchy!!

[ceilidho]

So I am in the middle of writing a Ghost/Reader fic where he is killed in combat and is revived but comes back Wrong and decides to just go for the cutie nurse who assisted with bringing him back. But I've been reading so much fic I'm having a really hard time feeling like anything I'm writing is original and not just cribbing from the Ghost fic authors I love and admire (you for instance and several others!). I would never publish anything that is stealing from anyone, but wondered if you had any advice for making your own unique spin on a pre-existing character ? I ask because I think you do such a great job, with Ghost and the other characters you write about !

First of all, I think that premise sounds sooooo good and I would absolutely read it.

I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this btw. I think, to a certain degree, more common fic ideas don’t belong to anyone (like basic tropes like “snowed in with one bed” or “grumpy/sunshine” etc). If you find yourself writing something immediately after seeing a post or reading a story with a similar trope, then definitely add a link to the other work or credit the og writer (or ask permission if it’s actually a super unique idea), but don’t feel like? That should stop you from writing the fic? When it’s a super basic idea. That drives me a bit nuts tbh ESPECIALLY if it’s an idea that’s been floating around fandom space for years and years (off topic but like that freak who tried suing people for writing straight omegaverse like RELAX that’s been online since 2010)

Unfortunately a lot of people mistake possessiveness for originality. I’m guilty of this too! (Not all the time because people can legitimately steal ideas or not credit the author for a good solid story premise, but a good chunk of the time it’s just me feeling salty because I think I own an idea)

I don’t know if I have any cogent tips for writing super original creative fics like hell I just wrote a barista fic. That’s not original at all. But I definitely think reading a lot and learning about things that you normally wouldn’t necessarily care about definitely helps. And jot down notes for yourself whenever you think of something interesting (for instance, last night I started thinking about a gravedigger Ghost and Ghost as a captain on a ship that gets into a really bad storm).

And think about Ghost’s character and really think about how you see him. Sometimes trying to write down completely unrelated headcanons (of Ghost in different situations) can help you flesh out what you think he’d be like. And grounding him in your personal interpretation of what Ghost would be like can help lend your fic some extra spice, something indistinguishably you.

[neeseeart]

My BooRai WIP stats

So. As of right now, the number of written BooRai fan works I've published is...... zero. I recently announced my angst fic I Can Stop The World, with another reveal planned in a few weeks, but I've yet to actually publish anything 😭

Last night I was backing up all my WIPs, and I decided to go through and reorganize everything. I moved everything into new folders and checked their word counts. I was a little surprised by the numbers to be honest. Especially when compared to this word count update from 5 months ago: [link]

I thought it would be fun to post my stats so you can see how much I've been working on, even though I haven't started posting yet.

As of last night:

Total number of Google docs: 34 Outlined fics: 21 (mostly longfics) Comic WIPs: 7 Completed fics: 1 (a one-shot I'm not ready to post yet 😭) Ideas yet to be fleshed out: 12 Total BR fanfic word count: 517,362 Words this week: about 25,000

ICSTW (main angst fic, post-canon):

196,871 words 6 docs

SSATSF (Modern AU, upcoming reveal):

125,474 words 3 docs

Folklore AU (started recently):

23,289 words 2 docs

Comics (text only)

80,795 words 7 docs

Reference docs (OC masterlist, headcanons, language dictionary, etc.)

9149 words 5 docs

Okay, pause real quick. The first BooRai fic I started writing is a fluff comic (briefly mentioned here) that I started in late 2022. It was my only project until the day I started writing ICSTW in June 2023. Then I exploded in ideas and here we are. So, if I exclude that first comic's word count of 36,190...

...Then the total word count of BooRai fanfic I've written in the past 7 months is 481,172 words. That's about 2217 words per day, and 15,522 words per week.

Now. This all just a bunch of numbers. Numbers don't mean the fics are any good. I value quality over quantity, so you can see why I haven't published anything yet. The ideas are all there! Tons and tons of dialogue is written. Detailed lore is laid out. Languages have been constructed! But the chapters themselves are not written. I don't write chronologically, and my stories are very elaborate. So even my main two fics, at 196k and 125k, are nowhere near complete. I haven't even finished fleshing out the early chapters 😭

You might be looking at this and thinking like.... "yeah bro you're not gonna finish most of those fics. It's not happening. You're gonna burn out." Mayhaps! I have a tendency to overdo things, and sometimes I overwhelm myself by making things bigger and more complicated than they need to be. But all in all, I like the way I create and I like having a few big projects and lots of tiny ones. I'm deeply invested in my major projects and I really do want to dedicate myself to publishing chapters in the next few months. But if I never finish them, that's okay too! The important thing is to enjoy making the thing... and I enjoy it immensely. Enough to write half a million words in 7 months, apparently

I've talked about my fic content to some irl people and they always respond with: "When the hell do you do all this? I literally never see you writing." In reality, yes they do. if you see me typing on my phone, I'm most likely writing. I kind of high-key spend 100% of my free time drawing and writing now. Which is a miracle after years of art block and creative sterility.

Another reason I wanted to share my numbers is that there are a lot of fellow AuDHD creators on this site, so there are bound to be at least a few of you who work just like I do. If you're one of those people, you probably know that it's easy to feel like the projects will never come to fruition. Don't lose heart!!! You have the strength to finish your projects at your own pace!!! And if you simply lack the will to finish, that's also okay! If you enjoy just writing down ideas without committing to a fully fleshed out work, that's a perfectly legitimate form of art and recreation. Godspeed my friends.

And as for the people who have been supporting my BR art and keeping track of my fic updates... You are the world and I am but a humble bean in service of your fancies. Thank you for your support. Here's a picture of me rereading my WIPs for the billionth time while y'all stand there and wait for me to start posting chapters:

(P.S. I have about 80 fic-related art WIPs on my tablet.)

(P.P.S. stay tuned for my fictional language dictionary!!)

[txxfiles]

an introduction and some books

hi hotties! 

the idea for this blog came from the twisted fantasy of my three closest friends and i as a way of producing something collaborative and creative without submitting ourselves to the mortifying ordeal of being known. we all get a fun little code name (i'm ruminating on magnolia, which i like but also think is a bit wanky in a way that i can't reconcile myself with spiritually just yet) and a week of the month to post whatever we want. the idea was essentially to create a platform where we get to talk uninterrupted shit about anything we want to because it’s our fucking blog, goddamit, and you’re not going to come onto our blog and tell us how to post. 

and so, to kick things off, i am going to be talking about my favourite books of 2023 because i am cultured and sophisticated and definitely didn’t spend the first half of the year drowning in fae romantasy smut in an attempt to feel something. if you don’t like any of these books don’t tell me because i simply don’t care!! xoxo 

non-fiction favourite - the anthropocene reviewed, john green 

i spent 2023 working very hard to reprogramme my misanthropic brain, and this book was a huge part of what allowed me to do that. i’m still by no means cured of my hater tendencies, but this book was a beautifully tender examination of that little spark of humanity that connects us all, and the numerous ways in which it has manifested throughout human history and across the borders of nationality, age, and gender. green somehow manages to weave in his own life experiences in a way that avoids being preachy or self-aggrandising in a way that i think a lot of non-fiction writers really struggle with - i’d also highly recommend consuming this in audiobook form as his narration really made the experience for me. 

fantasy favourite - a court of silver flames, sarah j maas

if you read this and immediately want to start lecturing me on how booktok is ruining the fantasy genre please know that im manifesting your downfall as we speak. i have my own issues with the flattening of the fantasy genre that takes place on tiktok, but the acotar series is a sugary, pulpy delight and this spinoff novel is where, in my humble opinion, it really hits its peak. as you can probably tell just by reading this, i am what is affectionately known as ‘a prickly unfriendly bitch’ in my day-to-day life, and i love seeing characters who represent me in a way that doesn’t glamourise being an unkind person - and nesta in this book is someone whose tendency to push people away isn’t justified or apologised for, and whose growth i found legitimately inspiring. also i’m still waiting for sarah j maas to stop teasing a dp scene and actually write it, the coward. 

sci-fi favourite - the arc of a scythe trilogy, neal schusterman

this trilogy rocked me to my fucking core, bitch. this was another audiobook read from early 2023 and it’s one of the better pieces of speculative fiction i’ve ever encountered. schusterman pulls off some really complicated and in-depth worldbuilding in a way that doesn’t feel like i’m reading an instruction manual - something that’s genuinely hard to do in this genre - and the series only gets better as it goes. as someone who is profoundly afraid of artificial intelligence this offered a perspective on ai that i’ve not really seen in media before now - and i will also be thinking about my pookie scythe lucifer for ever and ever amen. 

lit fic favourite - all the names they used for god, anjali sachdeva 

i’m actually not going to talk about this one too much because it’s quite a difficult book to explain without giving away too much - not in a spoiler sense, but in a 'this is an experience that you need to go into with an open mind' sense. this is a collection of short stories that play with genre, setting, and character to tell a series of profound stories about the human struggle with fate and the pursuit of meaning. sachdeva manages to build such engrossing and vibrant worlds in the limited space she allows herself for each story - and she avoided the pitfall i find that a lot of short story anthologies fall into where you can very clearly tell that the writer had one story they desperately wanted to publish and wrote the rest as a way of filling up space for a full book.

well, those are some of my 2023 faves. i have a million honourable mentions but i’m not going to put them here because i’ve already written way too much. i’m not sure who’s taking over the reins for week 2 of this little blog experiment but be sure to give them a kiss on the forehead from me! 

yours, 

magnolia

[pinewoodpipit]

call it fate, call it karma - Fic Meta

So, my angst fic, aka call it fate, call it karma (sometimes also known as Nathan fic), is DONE! Here's some meta.

I'll leave it under a cut, since these posts are often quite long.

Chapter 1

General Thoughts

I really didn't expect this fic to turn out this long. I expected it to be a 4 chapter ~40k work, but it surprised me, added another chapter, and doubled the word count. Lovely! I should stop estimating word counts at this point because I am NEVER right.

I really enjoy fics that fuck with format a bit. I remember from my time in the Good Omens fandom that you can get some beautifully made ones, telling a story through forum posts, tweets, YouTube comments, etc. I love it and I think it's SO fun and creative to see what people come up with when they do things like this in their fics. This love of fucking with format inspired the theme of emails in the first two chapters of this fic, and it ended up being a pretty significant tool in the storytelling. I really enjoyed writing the emails in particular.

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The Breakup

Fade didn't go into her last night with Neon intending to sleep with her. She wanted to tell her she was going and hold her until she went to sleep, but she couldn't find the words to explain to her that she was leaving, and Neon started to push in her usual way which she did when she wanted more, and Fade couldn't say no. She couldn't go through with it while looking at Neon's face, though, which is why she had her turn over. It would have broken her heart to look at her when she was planning on leaving.

Omen's assessment is right, in the end. Fade didn't tell her because she loved her too much. She was terrified and couldn't find her words, and she was afraid that telling her she was going would only have broken her resolve, when Fade legitimately saw no other choice except to leave. She didn't want to go, but she felt it was her only choice.

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Chapter 2

General Thoughts

I pushed the fucking with format idea a little further in this chapter, and I'm REALLY pleased with how it came out. I really enjoy the structure of it, with soft gentleness from Neon as she watches her son grow juxtaposed with Fade pushing herself into an early grave.

I didn't go into the details of Aykut's death on purpose. I didn't think it was the point of the story. It happened like Fade breaking into Omega's base, at which point they dragged Aykut out in front of her and killed him where she could see, just to taunt her. They opened fire and she was forced to flee before she could grab his body. They let her get away - they were punishing her for her arrogance in coming alone and choosing to be cruel, not trying to kill her.

Nathaniel Valdez is the best. I love him dearly. This is a Nathaniel Valdez stan account.

Fade mentioned this slightly off-handed, but in this fic, she's lost the ability to discern between what are horrific nightmares and visions of the future. She could regain this ability, but she's tormented and traumatised by what happened to Aykut, and as of now, it's lost to her.

Nathan's eyes looking like Fade's is something I decided very early on, and it's part of what ties it so well to one of the fic's main theme songs, Youth by Glass Animal. I made a short comic about this song, and it shows Fade leaving, as well as first realising Nathan has her eyes (even if it's not exactly how it happened in the fic).

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Chapter 3

General Thoughts

Fade didn't mean to be as cruel as she was when she first found out about Nathan. Her words were harsh, but they came from a place of actual trauma and terror. She has significant trauma related to her childhood and child-rearing in particular from parents who were very abusive, to the point of abandoning her as a teenager, and she hadn't worked through it even a little bit at this point. She dehumanised Nathan because it helped her cope to pretend that he wasn't a real person she'd inevitably ruin, but she knew this was wrong and apologised as soon as she calmed down.

Neon had been on birth control before Fade left, which Fade assumed she'd kept up. As it was, though, Neon fell into depression after Fade left, and it meant she stopped taking care of herself, which included stopping her birth control. She was so distraught it was just simply not a thought in her mind at that time.

Cypher sees a lot of himself in Fade and took her in as a sort of daughter figure after they found her in Istanbul. He was fighting to execute her but then saw her, realised she's essentially a wet cat who was born in a cardboard box, and decided "yep, this one's mine, I'm taking care of this one, thanks". He knows she and Neon can make things right, so he went out of his way to encourage her to try, even if she was scared.

Nathan struggles to pronounce the "l" sound in Fade's name. It's not made a big deal of, but there's a point in this fic where he stops calling her Hazah, even if it takes him a little while to get there.

Some of my favourite scenes in the entire fic are present in this chapter. The conversation where Neon points out Fade is a victim to her Radiance, just like her, and the conversation where Fade talks about wishing they'd met as kids are two which stand out to me in particular, and I even made a comic about the childhood scene.

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Neon has a different hairstyle in this fic to show that she's older. It was designed by my friend Uni, and it looks something like this - a half-up style with a little bun or ponytail.

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Nathan started to trust Fade after she took care of him while Neon was out on the stakeout. He doesn't really know why. He just intrinsically knew she could be trusted, and chose her. There was no magical criteria to winning him over.

Fade kissing Neon after the conversation about their childhoods was something Neon really enjoyed, but just wasn't quite ready to reciprocate. She's confused because she knows logically it would be a bad idea to get back together with Fade, but she also know that she wants it desperately, despite the risk.

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Suicidal Thoughts

This chapter is probably where I was most explicit with the themes of suicidal thoughts and ideation. Fade is struggling with it hard in this fic, fuelled by her grief, and she eventually manages to start feeling better with the help of her grief counsellor, but it is a very present theme throughout her POV. This chapter was hard to write because it hit extremely close to home in places, but it honestly felt really good to explore these thoughts from the perspective of someone who loved the person going through it, and knew they could heal.

Her running into fights with Omega, knowing she'd lose, was basically Fade's own way of fucked up passive suicide. Self-harm was also a theme in this fic with how she kept her injuries and refused medical help as often as she could, but she got better with this over the course of the fic, and at the end of it, she's actively communicating these thoughts and habits with Neon, and accepting that she'll heal eventually.

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Chapter 4

General Thoughts

Chapters 4 and 5 were supposed to be a single chapter, but when I was writing it it looked like it was going to be extremely long (it would have been 33k if I left them together). So, I split it in half, and I think this works better.

Sova's a bit of a distracted babysitter. Neon handed him over because she had a migraine and desperately needed a break, and Sova was the only one around who was willing to take him. He did try - he's not neglectful and did try to keep an eye on him - but Nathan just managed to slip away from him while his back was turned. Sova was very apologetic later and probably baked them a cake with some of his babushka's jam to apologise for losing him, especially since losing him ended up with a big mess Fade and Neon had to clean.

Fade getting an idea when she saw Nathan enjoyed scrambled egg was her realising he'd probably enjoy menemen. Her making menemen for her loved ones is a bit of a running theme in my fics by now, but I really enjoy how it was used in this fic, personally.

Astra and Harbor 100% got the train set for themselves. They think it's really cool. They basically bought it with the excuse of it being for Nathan's birthday. Brimstone agreed to clear out a smaller break room for it but this was also 100% just because he thought it was cool and also wanted to play with it. It's a big and very fancy set, with a decorated diorama, hills, a looping track, etc. It looks something like this, and is really big.

Fade putting a nazar pin on Nathan is a way for her to feel like she's tying raising her kid a little with her culture, since he hasn't really got much from her, in that regard, since she wasn't around for so long.

Neon's pretty good at hiding that she's upset, but Fade knows her extremely well. Even without her abilities of being able to feel what other agents are feeling, she could tell she was upset. Her going over to comfort her meant a lot to Neon, even if she was reluctant to talk about it at first.

In my hc for her backstory, Neon was cooped up a lot just because it was so risky for her to be around other people. When a single sneeze could accidentally kill another kid, I imagine her parents wouldn't be overjoyed about the idea of letting her run wild around the place. She's choosing to send Nathan away to protect him from what she went through when she became an adult and realised she had piss-poor social skills, which have left her bitter, pessimistic, and oversensitive about the risk of her accidentally hurting people if they touch her, and affection-averse in general. This is shown in canon through multiple in-game voice lines (being reluctant to admit she's glad her teammates are there with her, telling people not to touch or hug her, saying she hates making new friends, etc).

Fade suffered heavily from frequent panic attacks when she was a young teenager. Her abilities were suffocating, and Nathan's going through something similar as his power grows along with him and he uses it more often. Fade knows what can help, but it's a source of self-loathing that she passed it on to her kid. She sees it as her hurting an innocent boy, even though she didn't choose to pass her Radiance down to him, and Neon is just as guilty of passing down her Radiance, too. Helping to figure out exactly what his Radiance is, is important to Fade as it feels like a way she can apologise for doing this to him and take a step towards helping him cope.

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Nathan's Radiance

I deliberated with some friends for quite a while over Nathan's abilities. I knew I wanted him to be a Radiant, especially considering his parents are both incredibly powerful Radiants, but I also wanted to combine their abilities somewhat to make something comparable to them both.

I toyed with a few ideas, including the idea of him being an empath who could alter emotions using the electrical frequencies in the brain - this would probably let him control people physically, too, almost like a cordyceps infection - but in the end, we went with him being similar to KAY/O in being able to sense Radiance.

He can tell most agents apart from the feeling of their radiance. He likes Yoru because his Radiance is related to rifts, just like Neon's, so they feel similarly. He likes Omen for a similar reason.

When he's older and can get some training done, he'll be able to do things like suppress Radiant abilities, and I'm tempted to also give him a stun ability where he absorbs the power from said suppressed abilities and throws them back at the user.

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Chapter 5

General Thoughts

At this point in the fic, they're very in love, even if they don't admit it yet. They're also horny, because there's quite a bit of sexual tension in sharing a bed with your ex long-term girlfriend who you have a kid with and never stopped loving.

Big thank you to Soya for helping me with the butchered Tagalog! Them speaking each other's languages badly is something so special and silly to me. You can expect to see this trope return in my gamer au, and I've made a silly sketched comic about it before, too, with Neon getting lied to and accidentally threatening to fuck Fade's entire family instead of saying something cute.

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Neon is slowly learning that she was traumatised by Fade leaving the way she did. Her panic attack when Fade was showering was brought on by a flashback, even if she couldn't recognise it for what it was.

I don't really have anywhere specific to put this, but here's a meme which got made very early in to the process of writing this.

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Their ages and fic timeline

I worked out their ages at various points in the storyline, since it's a little confusing from an outside perspective. I have a sequel fic planned showing Nathan growing up, and I've shown their ages during this time, here, too. Here's my guide:

Canon/current day ages: Neon 22, Fade 26

They break up after 5 years of dating: Neon 27, Fade 31

They reunite when Nathan is a little over 2: Neon 30, Fade 34

Nathan turns 5 and needs to be sent away to school: Neon 32, Fade 36

Nathan turns 16: Neon 43, Fade 47

Nathan turns 18: Neon 45, Fade 49

Nathan turns 21: Neon 48, Fade 52

In this fic, Neon has her birthday in April, Nathan in July, and Fade in September.

I should also note that in this fic, Neon found Kidlat (her dog) as a puppy when she was 15. When Nathan turns 5 and is sent away to live with her parents, Kidlat is still alive and kicking, but he's a whopping 17 years old. He's blind, mostly deaf, but he likes Nathan all the same. I won't say much more here, as I'd rather save it for the sequel fic.

[she-who-the-river-could-not-hold]

Rambling March Updates

A little bit of a fun update for this month and moving forward, since I’ve been feeling a shift in how I approach my creative work (and well, everything else too) and I feel like organizing my thoughts somewhere. It’s technically the 2nd of March, but after a mini vacation post half-marathon, I definitely feel like it’s a valid bookend to semi start at. I’m in my usual “time to overhaul my life and plans” mood so it’s fitting for that as well, like a spring cleaning for the mind!

Writing Updates:

I’m about halfway through my celebration oneshot, which is a Bellarke AU based on the winning tropes from my survey that I ran during my follower celebration. So in a sense it’s a collaborative fic which is pretty fun! I’m liking it so far, though I do feel a bit rusty writing the Bellarke again after taking a bit of a break.

If you somehow missed my excessive reblogs, I finished my longest fic ever last month (hence another writing break)! It was for Stranger Things/Hellcheer (Eddie x Chrissy) and ended up clocking in at just under 80k words. Pretty astounding and I haven’t really processed how long it is. I feel like I need to reread it just to bask in the accomplishment and to also remember what I wrote lol.

Organizing the new month means updating my word count calendar, and with it I’ll probably spend some time reworking some outlining and WIP plans. I still like most of my WIPs that are unfinished, though one or two might get axed and abandoned. But the ones I want to finish deserve a polishing up and fixed outlines so I feel more confident getting back into them! And of course, organizing some new fic ideas I have and seeing if I can prep myself into making them shorter, easier projects for the main reason I’m about to share!

The biggest reason I want to spend time narrowing down my approach and what I want to write in terms of fanfic is that I’ve finally confirmed to myself that I want to write my own original novel. The idea started bouncing around in my head and I tried to ignore. Thought about it a little longer, told my husband about it, and he enthusiastically insisted that I legitimately consider writing it. And now I can’t stop thinking about it, so I’m going to give it a go! I can’t let myself think about any goals beyond writing it, but I am excited to see how that goal can fit and how I can push myself with it and hopefully actually write it. 

Design/Visual Creative Updates:

I do want to eventually finish my Stranger Things episode gif sets. I find them incredibly relaxing to make and a nice little visual stimulation break! 

More episode posters such as this one are also something on the back burner. Mainly because I’m also considering expanding my efforts in an online shop and I think it would be cool to include them! A part of that is organizing the categories of work I want to do, as well as the very tedious element of figuring out a name for the shop so that I feel comfortable sharing it across platforms. Hopefully updates on that will come down the line by the summer!

In non-fandom thoughts, I desperately need to update my graphic design portfolio and take new headshots. It’s driving me bananas at how much I’ve stalled on that so that needs to be a priority 

I’m determined to learn how to book bind this year and turn my own fics into physical copies (also a nice tie in for my own potential novel). We’ll see how that goes––it’ll be added to my long list of physical creative projects I want to get into this year!

I’ve negotiated my current contract to being a four day work week, so I’m excited to see my schedule start to form in a way that I can maximize my time and work on more personal projects!

However all of this comes on the back of that my husband and I are officially looking to move to a new state and city! Which means there’s a buzzing amount of stress just consistently in my mind right now, which will most definitely multiple over time as we actually have to complete the process. That means I’ll probably put a lot of this all on pause later this month and into April, but I also think that moving to a bit of a slower paced lifestyle is also going to be really good for both of our goals moving forward. Very exciting and very scary at the same time as we look to start a new chapter in our lives!

Onward to updating Notion and hopefully getting some good work in today! Happy almost spring!