#THANKS CALLOWYN

[thegeminisage]

oooh envesseled, please!!

HI wow thank you for asking, because i love talking about this, and i promise no one is obligated to read the whole answer lol. envesseled (partially, but only partially, up on ao3...) is part of cambionverse, which is a sort of spin-off about some EXTREMELY minor characters in s*pernatural that my buddy @callowyn and i have been chipping away at since 2011 or so.

for anyone with a passing familiarity with the show: we were so sure they were going to kill lisa braeden at the end of season 6 (can you blame us?), we whipped up a little scenario where her son ben was partially raised by sam, dean, and bobby instead...until sam and dean go mysteriously missing, a la john winchester, and now ben has to go and look for them the same way they once searched for their own dad.

but since supernatural has those big 3 characters (sam dean cas) and ben is our dean-character (he is sort of like a dean who broke the cycle of abuse and is also a huge lovable dork), we also needed a sam-character and a cas-character. for our sam we picked jesse (a one-episode wonder, the antichrist kid who turned cas into an action figure), and claire novak, the daughter of acstiel's vessel, who at that point was also a one-episode wonder and also had a collective total of less than 50 words of dialogue. we made her up on our own, essentially. jesse struggles with anxiety and controlling his demonic half and trusting hunters/himself after doing so has burned him in the past (or...gotten other people burned, i guess), and claire struggles with trusting anyone at all and the total emotional unavailability/other after-effects that come from being possessed by something with a thousand eyes at age 11.

in the first two "big" stories (one for jesse, one for ben, though there's a shit ton of additional content) they battle meg (my beloved, don't worry, she'll NEVER die), find the missing sam and dean, resolve various other personal traumas, be mentally ill together, and flirt ever closer to a three-person situationship that would make dean actively long for death if he ever found out about it. meanwhile cally and i kind of throw tomatoes at various things in the show proper that annoyed us, such as how much they hate women, how often they forget their own canon, or the double standard of sometimes letting monsters live when they're dangerous and sometimes killing them when they've done nothing wrong.

envesseled is the third "big" story, for claire, and it takes a significant turn because at the very beginning of it, while she and ben are in the middle of a huge argument, he dies (fridged a la MARY winchester), debatably because of something claire did, and the only way to resurrect him is to ask castiel for help. except he can't help because his various misadventures have left him broken into a thousand pieces and his current jimmy-vessel has no soul to put them back together. and so she's still dealing with this castiel trauma, and the grief/guilt over ben, and the grief /guilt over her dad she never processed, while going around collecting all the broken pieces of castiel in her own body so he can envessel HER (hence the title), bring ben back to life--except the catch is the more grace she takes into her body, the sicker she gets, so it's a question of whether or not she has enough time to finish collecting the pieces, and whether or not she can actually bear to be in castiel's presence and also say yes to him in order to allow him to do this.

as one might guess from the summary it is. an INCREDIBLY niche fanfic series with like a dozen fans worldwide, though i am proud to say pretty much everyone who's tried it has liked it, probably because it's diverged so heavily at this point it aaalmost reads like original fiction. like, i wish there were words to convey how deeply you do not need to have seen the show to read it. we are still writing "envesseled" which is why it's on the wip list (it is fighting with us SO MUCH) but we really really really hope we get it finished in time for "cambion day," which is march 29 (jesse's birthday). i tried very, very hard to find an excerpt from what we haven't posted that isn't full of giant spoilers, but i can't, so i'll post an excerpt from what we have on ao3 instead that i really like. this happens right after claire absorbs the first of many of castiel's broken pieces and is kind of a microcosm of the dynamic in general:

Castiel stands, not far enough away, watching her like a crow inspecting carrion. "How do you feel?" Claire takes a deep breath, assessing. There's no apparent difference between the new grace and the old—after all, both are pieces of the same angel—but she feels their presence more keenly, a stronger heat than the one she's been accustomed to for so many years. Apparently she's more sensitive to the powers of the Antichrist, too. "I've stopped feeling like there's a stab wound in my side, if that's what you mean." "Hm." Two fingers brush across her forehead. Claire's entire body thrums, and then she's grabbing Castiel's wrist, crushing it in her grip as she pulls his hand away. "Don't touch me." Her heartbeat is wild, squeezing the bones under her hand with all her strength, knowing she can't damage him but too angry to care. "Don't you ever touch me." Castiel holds motionless in a way no human could ever achieve, lights flickering over his head. "Let go of me, then." He could break free of her grasp with a fraction of effort, but it's still satisfying to throw his hand aside. Claire catches Jesse's eyes, and sees just a moment of ink-black there before he blinks and the light fixtures stop shaking. "Very well," says Castiel, after a long tense silence. He leaves the kitchen, giving Claire a wide berth, and moves to stand in the center of the dusty library. "Try this one."

let people send you an ask with the WIP title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it!

[thewholedamnboulangerie]

Tag 9 people you want to get to know better! Thanks for tagging me @kinnbig 🥰

Three Ships

KimChay (my lil beans), ArmTankhun (the icons), and Hualian (the eternal loves)

First Ever Ship

it was definitely some permutation of jack/will/elizabeth from POTC (sadly not the full OT3, i was simply not that cultured yet) but i’m not entirely sure which pairing i fixated on first tbh

Last Song

Falene by Michele Bravi (a bop for the ages)

Last Movie

unfortunately I have not watched another movie since answering Glass Onion the last time I did one of these so Alina is REALLY gonna murder me on the spot for not saying Puss In Boots this time 🫥

Currently Reading

i’ve been reading The Dragon Reborn from the Wheel of Time series for 500 years but i AM gonna finish it before s2 of the show comes out!!! i’m determined!!!

Currently Watching

i’m watching practically every currently airing show in Thailand atm RIP. in other words: The Warp Effect, Never Let Me Go, Midnight Motel, My School President, and GAP the Series ✨

Currently Consuming

BIG OL CUPPA TEA

Currently Craving

a sunset later than 4pm please for the love of fuck why is it SO DARK

Tagging

hmmmm since it’s a get to know people better meme i’m going to try and stick to mutuals i’ve rarely/never spoken to for this one! so tagging: @lesbianiconsteveharrington, @pranparakul, @axiomofequality, @callowyn​, @merrigold​, @snickerdoodlles, @bisexualbard, @thetrojeans​, @cardamonns

[architeuthism]

I just want to point out that I always misread your "squamates" tag as "squadmates." snakes and squid, kickin ass, takin names, together in harmony

I usually respond to asks privately, but this one was so beautiful that I needed everyone to see it.

[machidielontheway]

slow burn/fake date/enemies to lovers: is it self-serving of me to ask for cambionverse. I think of my children whenever there are three options

HI !! :D it is not self serving at all ! or if it is, it is only a good thing. and also actually it’s super hard to choose somehow with those three ??

slow burn : jesse, poor boy needs time to trust and also just. he’s my favourite no need more explanation

fake date : ben. the most fun to hang out with probably so this would be nice

enemies to lovers : claire. would have fake dated her cause as with derek we’re not very much compatible, but it’s the only one i can see beginning as “””enemies”” (so translated just wary of each other) which is actually just that she’s... i mean she’s claire. but then with time~

(hey also slow burn and enemies to lovers are in cambion already between those threes. where is the fake date bit, we need it too)(and now i just imagined ben fake dating ian)

[cambionverse]

Envesseled (Chapter 1, 16k) by @thegeminisage & @callowyn

Ten years ago, when Castiel took Claire Novak as his vessel, he unknowingly left a little piece of his grace behind. Now, that grace is killing Claire little by little. Ben and Jesse aren't ready to let her go, but with their desperate search for a cure leading to nothing but dead ends, it seems her time is finally running out. 

Then unexpected tragedy strikes, and Claire must race against her own failing body and use her stolen grace one last time to set things right. As it turns out, Castiel may be the answer to all her prayers—but only if Claire find the resolve to set aside her long-dreamed-of revenge against the angel who killed her father, and let him in one last time.

It's here at last! Sort of. Due to various life events, all the chapters of this story are not ready yet. But we've been waiting nearly a decade (!?!?) to publish this fic, and we have a great deal of it written, and we wanted to post something for March 29th, so...we decided to post the first chapter! We don't know when the rest are coming (worst case scenario, they'll start going up March 29th of next year, similarly to how we posted Antichrist Problems), but they are definitely on the way. 

Until then, we hope you enjoy this first chapter of a fic ten long years in the making. And, of course, we want to say thank you so, so, SO much to everyone who's been waiting for it as long as we have.

[bradycore]

1, 10, & 11?

a fic you bookmarked recently: sometimes a kind of singing by adi_rotynd. sam and jack and dean and trauma

a fic that isn’t prose (poetry, text fic, etc): What Dreams May Come by callowyn. very short, very intriguing

a fic that brought you aboard a new ship: tell me about the dream by playedwright. fandom destiel usually really puts me off, but this fic was so gentle and human that i got lost in their story. i mostly enjoy destiel in the rawness of s4/5, but this brought me aboard the potential domestic side of their dynamic

thanks for the ask! [fic recs ask game]

[klaineharmony]

Movie Tag Game

Choose nine movies and explain why.

I was tagged by @theredandwhitequeen - thank you! :)

I feel like some of these are the films that always come up for me, but there are a few surprises. Also, I was a 90s teen, can you tell? That is mostly my point of coherence for these films.

Newsies (1992)

Oh, this movie. It’s hard to talk about why this movie means so much to me, in a short space. But it is, in a nutshell, almost everything that fascinates me in history - the Progressive Era, the labor movement, children’s history, women’s history - just so many things. And it is also gritty and scruffy and poignant and much closer to actual life than Disney usually is, but with enough joy to make it bearable. And it’s a musical, which makes it wonderful in my book anyway.

Pride and Prejudice (1995)

This is another one where I have a hard time quantifying how important it is. I watched it for the first time in college (after having read P&P numerous times before then, of course) and was just enthralled. It’s my comfort film. I’ve watched it so many times I can almost quote it. The characterization is perfect, the costumes are glorious, the wit is spot-on. I love it.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

Kat Stratford is my internal monologue from high school. I was never nearly as brave or as cool or as pretty as she is, but I identify with every feminist word that comes out of her mouth. (And her English teacher and Ms. Perky are also just strokes of brilliance.) 

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)

This film is - I never thought, growing up, that there would be a film that could actually capture the magic of Narnia, but this film did, in a way its two sequels utterly failed to do because Disney decided they had to butcher the plot. But this film is jut about pitch perfect. Tilda Swinton is utterly terrifying as the Witch.

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Another film that had me enthralled. I grew up loving Shakespeare, and this film is brilliant by pretty much every measure. They casting, the script, the comic timing, the kind of casual and pervasive cruelty of poverty and plagues and women as property. But mostly the comedy and passion and tragedy, juxtaposed all together, in a way that is pretty much impossible to equal.

Empire Records (1995)

One of my friends tagged me in a post about this film recently, and reminded me how much I love it. There is pretty much no film in my generation (except perhaps 10 Things) that better expresses what it was like to be in high school, with all of the stressful mess that implies, trying to figure out the world, and just wanting one place (in this case, a record store) where you felt like you could be yourself.

The Hours (2002)

I can’t watch this film very often because it just emotionally guts me, and that’s the truth of it. But everything about this film is masterful - the acting, the cinematography, the absolutely torturous lives of women who can’t, who aren’t allowed, to have rooms of their own - or even when they do, can’t find the space and peace to love themselves or others enough.

A League of Their Own (1992)

This is another film that I adore, and that I can’t watch very much because I find it very sad, in the end. These women did something so incredible, and it was taken from them in the name of “normal,” because “when the men are here, no one wants to watch women play.” Given how angry I’ve been over the USWNT and the NCAA tournament in recent days, it’s just another reminder that we haven’t made enough progress. Not nearly enough.

Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

All right, we’ll end on a happy note! This Much Ado is everything. Everything. Everything I ever thought a film of it should be - big and bold and sunny and sexual and ruthlessly skewering men’s cruelty all the way through. Utter perfection.

I’m tagging: @wingedflight, @thatgirlnevershutsup​, @callowyn, @syrena-of-the-lake, @whatstheproblembaby​, @queenofbrooklyn, @rum-on-fire, @radioactivepigeons, @elozable​, @rthstewart​

[callowyn]

So here I am, innocently browsing ao3 when lo I stumble upon a Sam Winchester/Sam Winchester fic circa 2012 beta'd by none other than callowyn. Just wanted to pop by and thank you for your many, many years of service

oh my god THANK YOU FOR APPRECIATING THAT I HAVE BEEN ENABLING SELFCEST SINCE AT LEAST THE DAWN OF TIME

I assume you mean this fic by the illustrious @moragmacpherson?

[anneretic]

...i am still floundering around.

[thegeminisage]

tagged by @jerseygrrl, thank you!! sorry this response took so long

favorite color: guess.

last song: moments by ayumi hamasaki. it's the song used for the fullmetla alchemist fangame bluebird's illusion, which i know because i was in the fandom twenty actual years ago. jesus fucking christ that is the DEEP deep lore

last movie: i watched the original men in black for the very first time today, and learned why i had not watched it in 1997 (debilitating phobia of bugs). it was pretty good other than that though and i have the whole trilogy downloaded so i'm gonna try mib2 tomorrow

currently working on: failing to get anything done currently bc of the horrors, but in an ideal world i'd be trying to finish envesseled and 100% minish cap

aaaand im tagging @maulthots @slaygentford @brownbicon @ozymandiasdirge @paty-ofarrell @callowyn @machidielontheway @starsandatoms @defira85 @runawaymarbles @smellslikebot @marcelgerard @paranormal-potatoes @starlitskvader @youngbenkenobi @idontwikeit @kingsglaivus and anyone else who wants to!!! do it and say i atgged you <3

[thegeminisage]

@callowyn replied to your post: i’m trying to write fanfiction but i’m too busy...

sword asexual opinions

[thegeminisage]

@callowyn replied to your post: i finally found a country song i like

aren’t you forgetting…. TRUCK YEAH

BLOCKED, RIP FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH MY TRAITOR FRIEND CALLOWYN

[thegeminisage]

hey! i checked your writing masterpost and didn't see anything about this, so i thought i'd ask-a friend of mine and i are interested in writing a fic together, but both of us have previously only wrote stuff by ourselves. do you have any tips on writing collaborative work?

HIIII this is such a good question wow <3 i hope u don’t mind if i just throw out a bullet-point list as stuff comes to me instead of putting it in a more organized order!! obviously everyone is different especially wrt creative stuff so take it with a grain of salt but cowriting @cambionverse 11 yrs (holy shit) with my beloved @callowyn leads me to give u the following advice:

USE GOOGLE DOCS. like yeah fuck google or whatever always keep personal backups yadda yadda but i cannot stress enough how helpful it is to literally be able to see each other cursor’s in real time when you’re speaking about a particular section. it’s also fun to watch each other work, sometimes lovingly, sometimes lovingly but also with loving antagonism. there have been times when i’ve written faster bc i knew cally was watching and if i stopped typing she’d get bored or type dick emojis into the paragraph or something because she is <3 a menace

write down everything. the older and busier you get the truer this is. i can’t tell you how many times cally and i have decided on a plan of action only to forget it by next week’s writing meetup, and then be RELIEVED to discover a set of notes (or baffled when it turns out the notes were too vague to be useful). google helps with this bc you can leave notes all over the place. make as many notes as you can. no much thing as too many. make outlines. make an entirely new doc to take notes on what you talked about. save chat logs, if you’re not using something that saves them automatically. you will thank yourselves later.

the triangle my beloved. if you’ve been through the writing masterpost you may have seen this bad boy. i did not invent this, but i do live by it! idk it seems like really great advice. the nice thing about cowriting is that sometimes you can shore each other up on the “knowledge” point (knowing what you’re doing) because you can brainstorm together, but your projects can stall if you’re not matching each other in “enthusiasm” (commonly misinterpreted as “inspiration,” blegh, don’t get me started) and “time” (time to work separately AND TOGETHER, which busy adults sadly do not often have ASK HOW I KNOW or maybe don’t actually it’s so tragic that we’re always so busy). (”time” can sometimes also mean “spoons” or “energy” for people who are mentally ill or work demanding jobs.) some people write better solo and trading things back and forth some people write better when they hang out in the doc together so they can’t goof off but if one of you doesn’t want to work on it because they aren’t excited or can’t work on it due to time constraints the other one of you can’t pick up all the slack by themself. like with any collaboration you will sometimes need to be very patient with each other and very honest with each other (in a nice way!) so nobody is stringing anybody else along. if you can’t or don’t feel like doing something, just say so, and be nice about it when your friend can’t or doesn’t feel like doing something either. remember, you’re friends before you’re cowriters.

decide on who gets what workload. cally and i are very lucky to have complementing skillsets - i’m pretty good at laying down a first draft quickly, but i absolutely despise editing. she’s slower on the first draft, but she edits wonderfully and likes doing it much better. everyone will be different. sometimes she drafts scenes i’m not really excited about and i edit scenes she’s tired of looking at. maybe you’re better at porn but your friend is better at angst. maybe you’re good at dialogue but your friend likes to write action scenes. it’s good at have a rough plan going in, but don’t feel weird or bad about altering it as you see fit. especially if there’s like, only stuff left that one of you is “supposed” to do - the other can jump in and help finish up. on that note...

keep a checklist? this sounds weird but it’s been very helpful for cally and i when we unfortunately go a long time between writing sessions. at the top of the doc is just a little bullet pointed list like this one full of things like “fix the plothole in this particular scene” or “take a character out of that scene” or “rewrite this part” or “make that part sexier” or whatever. it helps keep track of where you are and what you’re doing because it can get chaotic with even just two people in the doc.

WRITE IN ORDER (or something). speaking of chaos!! so, a fun story that will haunt me until the end of my days is how in envesseled there’s this guy aaron birch who we introduced in i think the second chapter. but because we wrote some of the scenes before we actually GOT to the second chapter and because both of us were doing things separately, we wrote every time he came up in the narrative like it was the first one. “aaron birch, who claire and ben had met in the grand canyon on an angel hunt” was an explanation that showed up not once, not twice, but SIX TIMES. ironing out those mentions to make them consistent was a nightmare, because we had to read through like 50k to find them all, highlight them, and then edit the scenes around them to make sure what we got was the mostly-final product. i know not everybody CAN write in order, not everybody likes to, but when you’re cowriting, ESPECIALLY for longer fics, you need to do SOMETHING to check for consistency and make sure you don’t have two totally separate ideas about where the exposition’s supposed to go, even if it’s just a chronological readthru now & then. the sooner you catch errors such at plotholes and exposition snafus the less horrific they will be to fix.

decide on a process. so, this is my process, which you don’t need to read, but in general it goes brainstorming, outlining, reoutlining, blocking, drafting, editing. some people start with writing, some people start with inspiration boards, whatever. if you two have a different process from each other, deciding which order to do things in might be tricky - maybe you can get on voice chat and work on the inspiration board while your more outline-loving friend takes down notes for the brainstorming file or something. but you won’t start without a plan. if you’re like me you may even find satisfaction in writing it down step by step so you can cross it off. first inspiration pictures. then an outline. then doing this bit, while my friend does that one. you get the idea. don’t go overboard or anything, though - the point is to help you get started, not just put it off with productive procrastination forever because you aren’t sure how to do it. 

just fuckin go for it & have fun!! as with anything, the more you cowrite with your friend the better you will get at it. there may be kinks (hah) at first and mistakes will be made but eventually you will settle into a pattern. (the longer the fic is, the more time you have to get this down pat.) and of course, fic writing is done for free, for fun, and so is hanging out with friends. so make sure you’re having a blast doing both cuz that’s the entire point!!!!!

this is pretty unorganized but i HOPE IT HELPED. good luck to both of you, i bet you’re gonna ace it <3

[fic advice masterpost]

[cambionverse]

A House In Nebraska (Gen, 11k) by @thegeminisage & @callowyn

Jesse Turner left Alliance to protect his parents from the ugly truth that their son is a half-demon. But this story is about what happened before that—and how Bill and Beth Turner were hiding a few ugly truths of their own.

Happy March 29th! To celebrate Jesse’s birthday, here is a little short & sweet story about his parents. We actually wrote the first draft of this story in January of 2013, but since it references parts of Antichrist Problems, we had to finish and post that first, and things got out of hand... but it’s finally here, and we hope you enjoy it! (You will understand this fic best if you have read Cambion and/or recently watched 5.06 I Believe The Children Are Our Future, as this fic runs concurrent to that particular bit of canon.)

Thank you so, so much for being interested in our little ‘verse every year, thank you for being patient, and as always, THANK YOU FOR READING. <3

[thegeminisage]

thank you for loving lisa and ben cause i love them so much...like obviously deancas are true love but ben is adorable and i love him and lisa is a milf i adore. i just don’t get why people say dean didn’t love lisa and ben?? like of course he had this idealized image of lisa in his head (and she did of him too) and he couldn’t truly love her or have been in a relationship with her that would have lasted long-term. but he was attracted to her and he did genuinely want to love her so idk. it just bothers me when people say that and when they pay ben dirt he’s just a cute little kid.

LISTENNNN u get me and like

i think it’s in really poor taste too to discount other people dean has been in love with (or even just people he loves period) just because they aren’t cas or aren’t THE person he should end up with forever. like discounting sam in destiel fics. it’s ok that dean loved lisa! it’s ok that there are/were people in his life besides cas! that’s how a healthy person functions!

i also, personally, am a ben-as-dean’s-biological-kid truther. i know what lisa said but i feel like there’s no way she’d LET DEAN INTO HER HOUSE and then keep him around when he was putting up that many red flags unless there was something else going on. and then her talking later about how happy she was for ben to have a dad...she meant how happy she was for ben to have HIS dad. not to mention ben looks way more like dean than lisa. FURTHERMOREEEE it’s so weird for everyone to be like dean go be with lisa...u don’t know if lisa’s already dating someone dude! you haven’t talked to her in two years! like what if she WAS dating someone and broke it off to give it a shot with dean cause that’s her baby daddy. LIKE.......i really do think ben is his kid

which makes it interesting because dean becomes john to this kid - at first overprotective, but than as soon as his s/o is dying he SLAPS ben and then also uses him as a blunt little instrument - ben straight up carried the shot gun and carried out violence on dean’s order. i’ve yelled before about dean doing to jack what john did to sam (this is one of my favorite metas i ever wrote) but with ben dean did to ben what john did to dean. it’s just fascinating how that plays out - his differing relationships with them and how john’s abuse re-manifests so long after he’s gone. even if you find ben and lisa a little dry in canon, the concept and what happens to dean because of them is bonkers!! it’s worth over-analyzing!!!

anyway, not to be obnoxious, but have u read @cambionverse bc u might really like it...my buddy @callowyn and me started writing fanfic about ben and claire novak and that little antichrist kid jesse turner from 5.06 in, like, 2011, back when season 6 was still airing. so it doesn’t involve late season spn stuff but it IS a labor of love...frankly i’m more proud of that niche little ficverse than anything else i’ve ever written

[spn masterpost]

[thegeminisage]

HELLOOO I am LOVING your fic excerpts and I was just wondering if you had any general writing advice? For supernatural specifically or just fic writing in general?

omg THANK YOU <3 i am by no means An Expert, i am intermediate at best, so here’s a medium amount of advice:

for dean’s speech specifically, write a normal sentence and then swap at least one word or phrase out for a winchesterism

outline, outline, outline. not everybody can work this way but knowing what you’re doing next in your story will prevent a good 75% of writer’s block* and then you will write more stuff faster. i like to go one step further and block out my scenes post-outlining, so that my ACTUAL first draft is some weird outline/draft hybrid. cuts down on post-writing editing needed, too

*the trick is, i don’t actually believe in writer’s block. i believe every time you’ve stopped working on a project it can be solved with one of the three parts of the triangle method. (either that you don’t know what happens next, you’re not excited about what happens next, or you don’t have the right time/space/energy to write. the excitement factor is why i talk about what i’m working on and even post excerpts sometimes! it’s actually part of the entire process!)

every plot hole is fixable. ALL OF THEM. no logistics issue is as bad as it seems. it just takes a little problem-solving and a can-do attitude. remember that unless you pulled a cw and wrote death of the author a little TOO well, you are without exception the omnipotent god of your story. your characters are not sentient and your plot is nothing more than a series of moving parts. 

use pomodoro!!! i write in my browser in gdocs so an extension that prevents you from switching to the tumblr tab when u get bored will go a long way. set an actual egg timer if you have to - work 20 minutes, break five minutes, do that over and over. you’ll fly

no zero days. this is rich coming from me who just had two weeks of zero days in a row, but most of the time, when i’m working on a project, i like to open it up every single day. even if all you do is reread a bit of it or write one sentence or EDIT one sentence, it keeps it fresh in your brain. it’s like going home for summer vacation and then it being REEEEALY hard to get back in the grind of school. out of sight, out of mind, so if you really want to finish something, don’t keep it out of either. (extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, obviously - if shit sucks there’s no need to beat yourself up for not opening up your fanfic.)

if you like charts and etc, color-coded organization tables+keeping track of your wordcount can be a nice thing to do some productive procrastination on.

just write as much as humanly possible. i read somewhere once that it takes ten million words to make a master, and i myself have been writing for about 17 years and change and i’m still only at 4 million for my lifetime total, so, you know, you’re never gonna be finished getting better, practice makes perfect, etc

and finally, accept from the get-go that whatever you’re writing probably won’t get the kind of attention you were hoping for. comment culture is a whole big beehive of a debate i don’t feel like swinging a baseball bat at right now, but like for your own sanity you can’t hinge your enjoyment of writing a project on how much attention it gets. my 15.18 fixit that i spent three days on got hundreds of kudos/comments/etc, but @callowyn​ and i wrote on @cambionverse​ (spn next gen fic) for YEARS before it got its first longtime fans, and even now our total audience is, like, 12 people - despite it having shown up in an actual academic textbook a couple of years ago. i personally think a lot more love, time, and attention went into the latter project, and that it’s miles better than any other spn fic i’ll ever write, but the audience is so tiny that it will NEVER never get the same engagement as the deancas stuff. and that’s fine! i’m writing it because i love it, not because it’s popular. it’s always sad not to get as much attention as you wanted, but if it’s so sad that it makes you not want to write anymore, you have a problem. either you don’t actually like writing or you’re putting all your emotional eggs in the wrong basket. so don’t do that!

[fic advice masterpost]