#actually really curious to see where I'm at because I did lose a shit ton of weight without trying when i moved out

[thinboy]

*game-ifies my ed by creating a bunch of cute little spreadsheets and moodboards and daily logbooks to make it seem like it's not that big of a deal*

[vivaciouscynner]

Twitter has so quickly turned to a bigger pile of crap. And yet, people are still resistant to leave.

On one hand, I can understand the whole, "don't want to lose the huge following," but it's not like you have to deactivate once you go on a different platform. Just direct people to the new one you're going on and just take the attrition.

Twitter has NO:

support

security -> it's actually a HUGE security risk right now

structure

development team

content moderation

privacy -> apparently devs have a god mode where they can actually sign in AS you and do whatever they want

I'm sure i'm still missing a handful of bullet points, but the above should be enough.

I'm really curious what will make people leave that site. Because even engagement has degraded. And that's on purpose. If you want more views/hits, you need to pay the $8/month. I read an article on Wired (i think it was Wired) that was saying that the numbers you see on your post aren't even real. It's faked to make you believe a lot of people are engaging with you. I'm looking at some old tweets traffic and each one has "Something went wrong" on them.

Can you guys reblog and recommend to your friends alternatives to the bird site? Here's a handful of my opinions here about sites that people have gravitated to:

Mastodon - THIS is honestly the best TWITTER alternative. It's content moderated by a human TEAM. Like System Admins literally have a team. They comply with international laws, which Twitter is currently NOT doing. They are NOT centralized and if you sign up to be on one instance and realize it's not for you, you can MIGRATE to another one whilst carrying your followers over, because it's part of the fediverse.

Instagram - A lot of artists gravitate to this platform. I've heard that it is work to fight the algorithm unless you already have a massive following. Wouldn't want to start from scratch here - again, from what I've heard.

Tumblr - Tumblr is so friggin hard to describe. It's an absolute place to goof off, but will have these epiphany type posts or even stuff you learn about. It's absolutely a place where you learn new things that's too unbelievable to take as truth, then you go look it up and there it is... science. Tumblr has a ton of catradora content and that's generally why I'm here. It's a fandom site, it's a shitpost site (let's be honest, it's mostly a shitpost site), but it HAS this serious side to it. Tumblr is the annoying friend you hang out with because while they can be fucking bat shit crazy sometimes, they'll actually sit down and have a real talk with you if you need it.

facebook - pfffffffffff you kidding? facebook is your racist alcoholic-by-choice abusive uncle. FUCK THAT GUY

Hive - an absolute flop of an alternative. It's essentially in the same state as Twitter is in right now regarding, privacy, support, and security.

BlueSky - for those unfamiliar, this is Jack Dorsey's (original creator of twitter) next "big thing". Thing is, Jack has lost the trust of his original audience. I know I certainly don't want to touch this site/app. The big idea is that he's creating the social media as a protocol which can be built upon from third party companies. But you wanna know who already did that? Mastodon!

You know, mastodon is new, so it still has some issues to iron out, but it's in SUCH a better state than what original twitter guy can do. It's open source and ad free. Which means you actually have privacy instead of your data getting sold left and right.

ANYWAY - Long post - woops - hopefully you can help me convince people to leave the trash site. There's still a small handful of catradorians left that I follow closely that's "keeping" me there.

[recurring-polynya]

You actually reblogged it! Yay! Thank you so much, I'm glad you did. I keep thinking about 'Brothers in Arms' because it's one of my favorite fics ever and i love everything about it, and just how well you nailed the ChadIshi dynamic down to a T. I think a lot about the dialogue right before this too, because it's my favorite part, but I mainly would love to see a breakdown of this bit: “Do you think he’s in Soul Society?” Uryuu asked. Chad must have been tempted to look. Uryuu knew he would have been, if he didn’t know for a fact that Souken had already moved on.

“I asked Abarai about that, actually,” Chad replied. “Abarai says it’s complicated, exactly how it gets decided where you go, but Oscar had a strong connection to his home and his friends, so he is most likely in the Mexican Land of the Dead.” A small smile crept onto Chad’s face. “My dream is to one day take a trip back to Mexico for el Día de los Muertos, and see him again.”

brothers in arms

Wowwww this bit is really rich! You would not think I would have so much to say about two paragraphs AND YET.

So for starters, you ever read a fic and it’s not even that big of a fic, but it just sticks in your head forever? Anyway, I am never not thinking about Not a Good Idea, a drabble about Oscar and Souken and Sora meeting up in Soul Society. It’s funny that each of the Karakura kids has some really important person that died on them, and even though the whole series is about life after death, aside from Sora’s short storyline, we never get to see any of them again.

I thoroughly admit that I may be wrong, but my reading of the dialogue in Uryuu’s fight with Kurotsuchi is that Souken went to Soul Society after dying, was immediately captured, and experimented on until he died again. I’ve posited this before-- that when the shinigami “exterminated” the Quincy, they killed them as living humans, and then hunted down and killed them as souls again so that they would get chucked back into the resurrection cycle and lose their Quincy powers. I think that the Wandenreich Quincy are actually either dead, and escaped this second killing, or born-as-souls (like shinigami nobles), descended from dead Quincy. I have absolutely no basis for this, it’s just what I think. That’s what I meant about Uryuu knowing that Souken had moved on.

I really, really love writing Renji knowing things. Something that you don’t really pick up the first time you read/watch Bleach is that Rukia seems like she knows a lot about how the afterlife works, but honestly, she is constantly just spitballin���. This makes sense! She never finished school! She’s a con artist! And if she’s learned anything as a noble, it’s that you can just say stuff with authority, and people will believe you! She’s a liar and a mansplainer and I love this for her. Conversely, Renji did finish school and he works for Byakuya and some of his best friends are nerds. I always like to write him as a guy who is very curious how things work, cities and squads and bureaucracies, and even though he pretends to be a cool himbo jock, he actually knows a shit-ton about the practicalities of being a grim reaper, beyond just killing monsters. I am also enamored with the idea of Soul Society, Hueco Mundo, and Hell being just a few of an infinite set of spiritual/magical planes (this may have come out of another fanfic that lives in my head rent-free, The Roots of Heaven). Afterlives are one of my very favorite bits of folklore, they are so varied and cool! I wrote a fic once that mentioned Renji corresponding with the Russian Afterlife, I have precedent. I also like to think about Renji and Chad spending a ton of time together during the Advance Team Arc, just hanging out and talking about little things, and I love to drop in little references to that whenever possible.

As soon as I put in that bit about going to Mexico for Day of the Dead, I wanted it as a fic more than I could say. The Karakura Kids would all be young adults, maybe shortly after Uryuu and Chad get married. (What if Ryuuken paid for it? As a wedding gift??? I would die) I feel like Chad would have this deep yearning to know if Oscar approved of him. People tend to get really hung up on the wording for Chad’s vow not to use his fists for Bad, but these things are rarely so clear-cut in real life. I mean, Oscar wanted Chad to not get in fights with neighborhood kids, he certainly did not foresee his grandson developing supernatural powers and traveling to other realms to save the nature of existence. Not to mention the gay thing. Astute readers may note that everytime I write a post-canon fic, I make Chad a social worker who boxes as a hobby. I feel strongly that this is perfectly canon compliant (just like Chad and Uryuu getting married, of course)

This is one of those fics that I would love to read but do not feel qualified to write (to be perfectly honest, in my heart, I want you to write it 😂)-- I would probably crib a bunch of the worldbuilding from Coco, because that movie slapped. I actually think that Oscar was probably a pretty fun-loving guy, I mean, look at this dude, he clearly fucks:

and I like to believe that in any Afterlife, you shed some of effects of age, and also, he’s not responsible for an angry kid who just lost his parents. I think he would be way more Fun than Chad was expecting, and by Fun, I mean, he and Ichigo would definitely cause an International Afterlife Incident, like they would release some ancient spirit or something that would then run around Starting Shit. The Mexican Afterlife calls up Soul Society and is like “come get your boy” and they send Rukia and Renji because who else wants to deal with Ichigo, and Renji has to spend the entire time negotiating extradition treaties at the embassy, except he can’t sit down because he’s got Ichika strapped to his chest. Rukia would run off to help the Karakura Kids and be like “I am off maternity leave and am down to clown” and she and Oscar would get along great.

Anyway, OF COURSE Oscar would approve of Chad, who would not approve of Chad? and he would be like "Uryuu is not a person I ever would have imagined for you, but he clearly really loves you, what else matters?” Again, look at him, I think he had some boyfriends in the 70′s and also I do not care to write homophobia in my fics, I prefer to make everyone at least a little gay instead. Also, Uryuu deserves someone to take a look at him and say, “hi there, you’re my family now,” with no caveats or expectations, which is basically how I imagined it going down in Tell You My Sins.

[tricktster]

I feel your pain. My brother has lifelong health problems that are rapidly getting worse. Every appliance that uses water has broken at some point over the last month. Also, I have bought snd exchanged three fish tanks, because each fish tank had a leak. My dental cap ollied out. To be fair I DID do some black magic adjacent shit. So like. I'm bearing it as gracefully as I can :p

Hoo boy, you and I should grab an age appropriate beverage sometime because i also have a loose filling and an unexpected aquarium shrimp tragedy on my list of grievances...

okay well it’s not that huge, it’s just that I was getting anxious because Baja Blast, my recently acquired and spectacularly beautiful blue pearl neocardinia, was acting sluggish and her gills, which had been tinged a distinctive looking neon green a few weeks ago, now looked impacted and weirdly frilly.

So I did some googling and discovered that Baja Blast had ellibiopsidae.

Ellibiopsidae is a fungal parasite that looks kind of like a lichen and essentially eats a shrimp alive from the inside. There is literally no cure recognized by the scientific community, though there are some businesses that will really try to sell you otherwise. I am at my fucking limit for snake-oil miracle cures rn, so I did the same thing I do with regard to my parent’s condition, i.e. skipped the bullshit and went right to the peer reviewed journal articles... and yeah.

Not only is there no cure, but if the infected shrimp molts or dies and the other shrimp eat the infected shell or body (which happens all the time because shrimp are grade a nastyboys), it’ll spread through the tank. So, I had to do the right thing for the good of all my animals, which is the worst thing, and euthanize this little tiny beautiful little being.

I am soft about being the cause of animal death, and getting softer. It’s been years since I ate any mammal (or ridiculously, octopus) meat, which I originally claimed was for environmental reasons, but is in practice because if I can look into the soft, vacant eyes of my idiot axolotls and see that there is some sort of inner life therein worth respecting and protecting, well, shit, have y’all met a pig or a cow?

(If anyone is curious, I still eat chicken and fish; fish, because it is incredibly hard to avoid and because I can vote with my dollar to support sustainable and ethical fishing practices, and chicken mostly because I have spent enough time with chickens to know that if they had any say in the matter, they would eat me first)

Anyway, even though I’m soft about animal death, I will absolutely push myself past any amount of squeamishness when it comes to an animal in my care that is suffering. So, I made the call not to subject her to weeks of untested and possibly painful treatment with little chance of success, and I euthanized a being, even though it really bummed me out, because it was the right thing to do for the greater health of my colony.

I’m getting introspective here, because the analysis I had to engage with there is, on a much larger scale, what my parent is dealing with. I’m trying to respect their confidentiality and not put their personal struggles on blast, but I think maybe an analogy is useful: what is going on is akin to contemplating the amputation of a dominant hand.

Sticking with the metaphor: My parent has a congenital condition that, unmedicated, would lead to the total loss of function in both hands. This is a nightmare for them, as it would be for anyone who has gone 65+ years enjoying full use of their hands, only for that ability to suddenly falter. Due to recent medical advances, they have been recieving regular medical treatments to retain function in their hands, which is extremely unpleasant to go through, but has been worth it because the treatments have not only stopped the progress of the disease, but actually produced some improvement in function.

As with any medical procedure, though, the treatments my parent recieves have some wildly unlikely possible complications. Two weeks ago, my parent received their treatment and it quickly became evident that one of those incredibly unlikely complications had occurred in the most severe way possible. Since that day, it has been a constant, round the clock battle trying different approaches (all extremely painful!) to combat this complication. My parent lost all function in their “hand” on the day this all manifested, and has not had any restoration of function since.

At first, the goal of the medical approach was to restore function to their “hand”, but we are pretty far past that now; the goal is now to not lose the “hand” entirely, forget function. Things have somewhat stabilized, but the prognosis is incredibly foggy and unclear at this point, and all the while my parent has required constant care and has been in incredible pain. Emotionally, they are at the point where it is a question of how much more of this it is fair and reasonable to subject themselves to. The prospect of amputation and prosthesis is extremely upsetting, and the thought of going forward like this indefinitely is ... also extremely upsetting.

My brother is an incredibly smart man with a ton of knowledge on the issue of maintaining quality of life in elderly populations - that’s his life’s work, in fact. He is very concerned about the prospect of amputation and prosthesis because he fears that it will have a potentially huge impact on my parent’s quality of life going forward, and because he is optimistic that we are on the right track to have further medical breakthroughs that would allow my parent to regain function down the road if their “hand” is not surgically removed now.

And me? I’m soft, and my parent is in excruciating pain, and I cannot help but think of the calculus I always have to run for the beings in my care - is the possibility of a cure sufficient to ask them to endure an indeterminate period of suffering? Is it fair and ethical to ask them to endure this, on the offchance that whatever’s wrong can be fixed?

There was a simple answer for me in the case of the shrimp. There’s not one when it comes to this, to the big thing looming over my life and thoughts that actually really matters. And, of course, my family isn’t alone in struggling with something like this, particularly now, with a pandemic boiling through my country that is forcing so many of us to face similar dilemmas; what is kind, what is fair, what is medically possible, what nightmare will develop next that we are powerless to prevent? How do you do the right thing here, when the worst and most unlikely scenario has manifested?

So, with ALL that said, I just want to express how profoundly furious, how absolutely enraged and impotent and wounded I am today, to witness a political party of bigots and sociopaths cluster together this afternoon to ensure that a judicial nominee is seated on the supreme court specifically because she will actively work to make these intimate and painful medical decisions harder and more scarring and with greater risks to consider.

This post is ALL over the place but needless to say I am in a mood.

[bipolyjack]

Please tell me more about why you like sheith, I'm very curious to hear the rest of it.

(alright luckily i had the beginning of this saved elsewhere when tumblr just randomly sent it early so imma just begin by pasting. also spoilers for voltron s4 obv) 

the original ask was something like “curious why u like sheith? ive thought abt it and i think i prefer klance”

rubs hands 2gether Thank U for Asking

first of all, thats chill! if klance is ur thing, fuckin go for itmy dude, have a great time with that shit. the fandom’s huge andtheres tons of content. im all for ppl shippin what they want and imnot here to tell someone to ship or not ship something. if u do trulywant to know why im a sheith tho, buckle the fuck up cause im awashin sheith feelings at every moment and i got Things 2 say

alright so the main thing with sheith is that it feels realhealthy and good. (well it did. things are weird this season bc shiromay or may not be a clone but up until his disappearance at least.)they’re rly good abt checking in with each other to see how theother one’s doing and feeling, and they lean on each other a lotfor support. they also treat each other as equals and respect each other’s choices (again, with minor exceptions in the current season). they got that good good hidden backstory together. they got that good good star crossed lovers thing goin on where the universe keeps ripping them apart, fucking them over and tossing them back together more fucked up than before and my dude i Eat That Shit UP. also that good good height difference.the show gives them lots of moments where they’re either alone in a room together havin a private moment or havin an equally private moment in front of the whole fuckin team where fuckin everybody can see them (like the first Hug tm). they’re openly physically intimate with each other (which keith is not with anyone else) and they’re not like. ashamed of that. there’s so much canon content i cry daily. 

here lemme break it down

we know they knew each other in the garrison, and not just like in passing, like acquaintances, but enough that keith was the only person there to see shiro off when the kerberos mission launched. in s1ep1 lance says of shiro “omg that guys my hero” and of keith “you’re my rival” but neither shiro nor keith know who lance even fuckin is. bc presumably they didnt hang out. everyone in the garrison knows who keith and shiro are but they - keith especially it seems like - dont keep track of the other students. also theres this whole fanon thing where shiro and matt were best friends in the garrison and hung out all the time before kerberos, but in s4 when matt greets shiro hes incredibly stiff and awkward and calls him sir and shiro just goes “pidge never gave up on u buddy” which i guess could be a clone thing but could also be him bein like “i totally did give up on u tho, whatever” (and i can totally buy that considering how pidge’s whole personal arc this whole time has been looking for matt and their dad, and while shiro has been supportive of that, he’s also been like hey dude that’s not our top priority as a team). so from that i infer that matt and shiro werent best buds in the garrison, and that he must have spent a lot more of his time with keith bc in s2ep1 keith makes it clear that shiro made a significant impact on his life and that he still thinks about things shiro said to him before kerberos. which we havent seen. bc theyre hiding the pre-kerberos backstory from us and i cry. also their flashbacks in s1ep2 (i think, i dont exactly remember which ep but i think its that one) when they all put on the headsets and we see their fondest memories, shiro’s is the day they were separated and keith’s is the day they found each other again like jesus.

then there’s keith’s first scene in the show. the first thing we see him doing is kicking the shit out of like three garrison guys to rescue shiro. we get that close up of him touching shiro’s unconscious fuckin face and his first line in the whole show is him saying shiro’s name. like shit dude how am i supposed 2 not ship that. the first time keith and lance interact, its lance butting in on that moment and keith being like “who the fuck are u” and its. uncomfortable. we also know that keith has been livin alone in the desert and obsessing over these lion carvings bc he got kicked out of the garrison for basically insubordination sometime after shiro went missing. we get that scene in the shack where keith talks abt feeling lost until shiro showed up and everyone else in the room looking all confused and uncomfortable as these two dudes who clearly already know each other well and have been separated for like a year just stare into each other’s eyes or what the fuck ever. also the scene outside the shack where keith comes and finds shiro and puts a hand on his shoulder and asks him how hes doing - theyre alone for that part. also worth mentioning is that keith has no hesitation touching shiro’s galra tech arm, whereas lance hesitates before shaking his hand. we see a bunch of times that keith is touch averse with almost everyone except shiro, in a way that indicates a degree of prior familiarity and a good understanding of boundaries that keith hasnt had the time or inclination to set up with lance, hunk, pidge, allura, coran etc. also the one time he holds lance when sendack attacks the castle and lance is unconscious, lance sort of blows it off later and basically goes “no homo” when keith brings it up so that was a bummer

i also love some of the Pauses they put into shiro and keith’s dialogue, some of them are just. so choice. like when keith proposes a crazy plan that puts him in danger and shiro just takes a sec, closes his eyes, then goes “alright i’ll back u up, do what u gotta do” like!!!! boi!!!!!! thats good shit. also in s2ep9 during the blade of marmora trial when keith is basically having this nightmare about shiro rejecting him because of his connection to the galra, (which real actual shiro can see because this whole ep was a fuckin fanfiction) and he does that same thing where hes like “shiro... *pause, close eyes for Just a sec* you’re like a brother to me” which! by the way!! i have said the same thing!! to a friend i had a crush on!!! who was straight!!!! and i was a little baby who didnt know i was into girls yet and we used to say we were like sisters bc i? didnt know i?? was gay???? we shared her bed whenever i stayed over and she really did see me as a sister and i would just lie next to her and daydream about touching her boobs,, anyway keith is so relatable there i could yell forever but continuing on,

can we, real quick, talk abt the first time keith flies the black lion? bc in s2ep1 hes not the black paladin yet. real shiro is still around. and keith legit goes up to black, puts a hand on her big ole nose and goes “ur boi is in trouble, we gotta help him” and she goes “yeah dude hop in” like?????????????? thats some fanfic shit again! black Knows! also dont even talk to me abt how many times keith and shiro yell each others names in that ep its unreal. also the trope (that i eat the fuck up every time) of one member of the otp lying trapped and injured somewhere and talking to the other member of the otp thru a helmet comm or whatever and they cant see each other but they can hear each others voices, so they have to keep talking to like reassure each other they’re both still alive and okay?!!! im such a sucker for that shit!!!! ummmmm the fact that shiro keeps reassuring keith that hes fine when theres a gaping glowing wound in his side and hes like visibly in pain, clenching his teeth, eyes closed, groaning, sweat beading on his forehead, the whole fuckin thing?? and josh knocked it outta the park with shiro’s voice in that ep making him sound like he was trying not to sound hurt and exhausted so that keith wouldn’t worry too much like Fuck me up!! smiling thru the pain when keith talks abt how much shiro changed his life and made him a better person??? boi!!!!!

then there are the times when shiro talks abt something happening to him and keith taking over as voltron’s leader, and keith gets all panicked about it like he cant stand the thought of losing shiro again (this happens a bunch of times but the ones that are coming to mind are s2ep1 and s2ep9 bc. again. those are the fanfic episodes). and then he Does lose him again and he’s so clearly grieving, lashing out at the rest of the team, super obviously feeling shiro’s loss more than the others (and lance is a real dick about it a bunch of times which really rubbed me wrong), going out to look for him over and over bc he wants to believe so bad that shiro’s out there somewhere. omg the “please no” when the black lion accepts him that shit Fucked me right up!! he wants to honor shiro’s wishes!! but some part of him knows that’s like admitting that shiro’s gone and isn’t coming back. and then!!!!!! when they find kuron and its just the red lion and the galra ship floating alone in space just like. gently drifting toward each other. keith’s little tired smile there. fuck me up. and then we find out in the next scene that keith has been the only one in shiro (kuron)’s room while he’s recovering and shiro (kuron) hasnt bothered to shave or cut his hair or get dressed yet and he lets keith see him like that and not the rest of the team. fuck. keith looks Exhausted in that scene. hes got bags under his eyes, hes kinda hunched in on himself, arms crossed, like something in him Knows this isnt his boi but he wants to believe it’s him so bad and its. god. its a lot. and Then when hes turning to leave and kuron is like “how many times will u have to save me before this is over” and keith’s face just relaxes into this legitimately genuine smile when he says “as many times as it takes” like!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! fuck me

this is where it starts gettin awkward with them bc kuron isnt shiro and he doesnt treat keith the way shiro would but he Tries, like after keith fucks up that one mission and kuron comes and finds him (again, in private) to touch his shoulder and be like “im proud of u boi” when keith clearly Did Not Do A Good Job and keith just looks bummed like “thats. thats not tru” and it Hurts me bc we know real shiro doesnt do fake praise. also kuron orders keith to put himself in danger more than once and doesnt give a shit that keith and the others get hurt because of it which also real shiro would never do - we’ve seen him react when his teammates take hits before, but especially keith, like during the bom trial. then theres s4ep1 where keith sort of drifts away from team voltron in order to do more stuff with the blade of marmora and everyone’s pissed at him but then as hes walking out kuron’s like “you know we’re here for you if you need us” and keith gets that soft smile again like “i know and i cant tell you how much that means to me” and then they do that good good hand clasp that turns into a hug which by the way is a stark contrast to when other people hug keith and they just kinda grab him and he goes all stiff and it takes him a sec or three to put his arms around them if he even does that at all - with shiro they do the hand clasp first and then walk into the hug together and keith buries his face in shiro’s fuckin shoulder and smiles and closes his eyes and i wanna die. and theyve done this twice now which makes me think they probs did it before kerberos too and that also hurts me. 

then theres s4ep6 where keith has gone the whole season feeling like he was a bad leader. it seems like voltron doesnt rly need him and his friends dont need him and shiro doesnt need him and hes been hanging with the bom who have their whole philosophy of not going back to rescue their own guys if it means putting the mission or the rest of the team in danger (which keith already was saying when allura was captured - how very galra of him) and now keith’s having to readjust to that mindset after being part of such a close knit team. so when he sees a way to take that shield down, he just fuckin goes for it. hes started to see himself as expendable. when shiro thinks hes about to die, we get all kinds of flashbacks, the first of which is him and keith alone outside the shack. there are no flashbacks with keith. he just closes his eyes. and shiro (kuron) congratulates him. like obv its before he knows what keith was about to do, but still, thats some fucked up shit. 

now this wasnt rly part of ur question, ie u didnt ask me how i felt abt klance, but i feel like i gotta say: lance just grates on me. im sorry i know lots of people who love him but he just. isnt my cup of tea. and i do think the relationship shown in the show between keith and shiro is a lot more mature and healthy than the one shown between lance and keith. lance has some good moments! but canon lance and fanon lance seem like two entirely different people to me a lot of the time and thats all cool and fine if ur lookin for that, again im not here to stop ppl from having fun, but there are so many good sheith moments in the show and im just glad to see the relationship between two dudes depicted that way regardless of whether it becomes canon or not. also lance in the show is only shown being attracted to girls, and in kinda a skeevy way - like ive met guys who treat me like that and been Very off-put by that kind of behavior. and it would put me off if after all that they got him together with keith. like hes just superficially interested in all these hot girls but keith, who he has very few heartfelt intimate moments with onscreen, is his True Love? like thats,, not good bi rep. i Do rly like the bond hes been building with allura since they switched lions, that seems like its going in a direction that could turn out to be very wholesome and sweet. but again, if klance is ur thing, by all means have a ball.

k that was a lot but tl:dr i like 2 cry and sheith provides me with lots of opportunities to do that,, if u read it all then thank u deeply and truly for ur attention, u probs Understand me as a person a bit better than before lol

[anghraine]

Having been wowed by your fanfic ("wandering inside this night" holds a special place in my RO heart), I'm curious: what is your writing/editing process like?

Oh, thank you!

My writing process really varies depending on what I’m doing, but I can explain it in terms of wandering inside this night.

It’s long and rambly, so you can scroll down for a very concise tl;dr version of The Process.

1. Eureka!

I pretty much always start out with 1) a vague sense of something I want to write about, and I sort of mentally fish around until I land on an idea, or 2) an idea pops into my head, or 3) some combination of both.

The last two are the most common for me—I have more ideas than I could ever write. With wandering, it was definitely that way. 

I was hollering into my tags about the Cassian-Leia parallels pretty early, which … Jyn-Han is obvious, but I felt like the Cassian-Leia ones went relatively unnoticed but were probably more profound. And as spies in the ragtag ANH-era Rebellion, it’s more than possible that they’d know each other; I’d made babbling posts, but I really wanted to do something with it. So I sketched out a backstory in until the last chance is spent, but I still wanted more, and also to get into Han-Jyn at the same time, and also just—have something fun! And suddenly (I was actually at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert, lol) the idea popped into my head of jumping to the Han/Leia meltdown of 1980 with established relationship Jyn/Cassian.

2. Percolation

This is particularly important for longer fic (or any long-form writing, really), but it helps with shorter things, too. It’s where you’re not actively working to figure out details or more ideas, much less writing, just passively letting your mind wander. It’s best if you’re actually doing something else—something that doesn’t take much attention, but enough that you can’t completely focus on your thoughts, like showering or washing dishes or something.

When something does come to mind, I scribble it down (or stick it in a doc in some form that will hopefully make sense to me later). Sometimes it’ll be scraps of dialogue, or a phrase I want to make sure gets in somewhere, or a plot-point, just anything that pops up. Ideally, though, I don’t write anything beyond that—just note down anything I might forget and let my ideas develop freely. 

Normally, I’d only do so much of that with something like wandering (fairly short, fairly light). But I ended up snowed in with my extended family, where I was both bored and unable to sit down and write. So I’m sitting there entertaining myself by imagining Jyn and Han, drinking buddies, and how that’d work with the Cassian-Leia brotp of ruthless idealism (Han would be jealous!), and just having that percolating in my head while I read fic and let stray thoughts pass through my mind. (‘Okay but Cassian would fucking hate Han’ being uppermost among them, lol)

3. Brainstorming/Outline

At this point, I try to pin down the free-floating ideas and/or organize what scraps I have into something coherent. With something longer, like ad astra, I generally do a pretty traditional outline—decide what the story is specifically going to cover, and where the things I’ve actually written fit with that, and what’s going to go in the spaces between.

It’s not classroom-style brainstorming; I usually brainstorm ideas by trying to put together an outline. I’ll be “okay, I want to start with something like that shot of Jyn on the platform with an Imperial ship at the end, but it’s Bodhi” and “they get sucked into the Death Star and Jyn exploits Cassian’s injuries to get in” and then I sit down and figure out how I’m going to get from one to the other. “Okay, so—there’s no way they can actually get Kaytoo, but maybe something—yeah, she just up and grabs his dismembered head l o l, okay, and there’s the jump into the ship which rattles Cassian further, and she’d try to treat him with whatever supplies are available, and we’d have Bodhi trying to get out without being shot down, and maybe I can work in the your father would have been proud of you line, and Jyn goes to check on Bodhi and they see the Death Star and…”

Also, it helps a ton to actually talk ideas over with someone else. With me, it’s generally @steinbecks​—not some strict ‘this, then this, then this, tell me what you think’, but ‘I had this idea’ and ‘OK BUT IMAGINE IF’ and ‘haha yeah exactly’ and ‘shit you’re right they do change outfits’ etc. 

4) Drafting (The Big One)

Ideally, I only get to this after nailing down an outline or at least getting a lot figured out in chats/notes to myself. That’s what I did for pretty much all my most successful longfics—First Impressions (f!Darcy/m!Elizabeth), Season of Courtship (Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement), we get dark, only to shine (AU of The Borgias that moves the canon pairing getting together from S3 to S1), and now ad astra. It helps a TON if you have trouble with discipline and direction, as I do, because you can always go back to it and figure out where you need to be headed when you’re muddled/uninspired, even if some details change along the way. (They always do, for me.)

I did some of that with wandering, but … I was snowed-in, lol, and finally everyone had gone to sleep and my head was full of ideas. So I laid down with my laptop and just dove right in with the only clear line I had in mind: 

Han Solo once had apleasant conversation with Cassian Andor.

Just once.

That was where I planned it to begin! The actual beginning came later, because I very quickly ran into a problem—the sentence worked to jump into exposition, not an actual scene. And with the exposition, I needed to introduce 1) Cassian’s hatred of Han, 2) Han’s lesser but firm dislike, 3) Cassian and Leia’s history together as spies, 4) Han’s brief and half-hearted attempt to suck up, 5) Jyn and Cassian being married, 6) Han’s friendship with Jyn, 7) Han’s jealousy as contrasted to Cassian and Jyn’s mutual trust, etc. Yikes.

So I kept getting mired down in explanations and flashbacks (I actually wrote the scene where Jyn drunkenly complains about finding something for Cassian’s birthday, lol) that slowed it down. And I wasn’t really happy with anything—I constantly niggled at sentences and moved things around and rephrased and it just didn’t work right. I actually have the document I worked in (I didn’t have Internet at the time), so you can see this sort of intermediate stage:

I niggled with it for the rest of the vacation, then it hit me that the issue was that starting a fic with exposition was the real problem. Starting with ESB-era Han just being ESB-era Han could let me work the exposition section in, and without the pressure of it being the opening section I could keep it to a tangential aside and move the jealousy around and so forth. And from there I could just leap to the canon scene with bonus Cassian-Leia shared indignation, and impulsively I added Kaytoo at the end. 

Moral of the story: if you keep trying to make something work and it just won’t, there’s probably something deeper going on. Take a step back and figure out why it’s not working, and often you’ll be able to correct course. Once I tacked in that little ‘Han sulks’ section at the beginning, it all fell together easily. 

5) Revising!

You can probably guess from #4 that I do a lot of this as I write rather than after I write. That’s true, to an extent.

It can be a very … I wouldn’t say discouraging, but sluggish way to write, because you end up struggling over phrases you might not even keep in the end. I genuinely think it’s best to at least try to restrain the impulse to polish everything, but at the same time, there are some of us who genuinely can’t keep going if the current section isn’t working (again, see #4!). So I allow myself a certain amount of freedom in polishing-as-I-go, while restraining the impulse to do anything more substantial. The single best way of doing this is sprinting—writing in short, timed bursts with little to no editing, ideally with a partner that you check in with. (Again, I generally do this with @steinbecks​.)

However, even if you edit as you go and turn out pretty clean drafts, you should still revise at the end. What I generally do is, first of all, just quickly re-read. The writing process is a lot slower than the reading one, and it’s easy to get so focused on particular passages or sections that you lose sight of how it’s working as a whole. So that quick read-through is a way to back up and see how it’s holding together. It’s best if you give yourself a break before you do this—a day or two at least, to get your mind out of the writing mode and look at it with relatively fresh eyes. 

(I will say that I almost never wait. But I do pretty much always end up editing chapters yet again in the first couple of days after I’ve posted them. Sometimes it’s contuinity, sometimes a passage that isn’t working quite the way I thought, whatever. There’s always something. It’s why the chapters I post at Dreamwidth are generally cleaner than the ones at Tumblr, which are cleaner than the first versions posted at AO3.)

However you do that read-through, the most important for me is the next one. At this point, I read the whole fic/chapter/essay/whatever from start to finish—out loud. In fact, if it’s possible, I’ll do a full-on dramatic reading. By reading aloud, you can catch things like typos that your mind silently corrects for your eyes, but also it’s easier to notice sentence-level problems like repeated words/phrases and unvaried sentence structure. If something makes me cringe when I read it aloud, I cut it or rewrite. If saying it aloud makes it sound wrong for the character, it probably is wrong for the character. Sometimes I do the dramatic reading revision two or three times.

And then I either post or print!

The short version:

1) I get an idea, 2) I let the ideas develop without thinking too hard about them, 3) I nail down and think up specific ideas, mostly through chat and/or outlines, 4) I plow through a draft, rearranging/adding material if things just aren’t working, and 5) I revise, once with a quick re-read of the whole thing, and then again by slowly reading it aloud to myself to catch problems with (primarily) mechanics, voice, and word choice.