#aka this stuff never happened

[crusaderce]

eh yo when the fuck were vampires able to UNHINGE THEIR JAWS TO CHOMP HALF A BODY OF A 6'6 HIMBO????

[benveydraws]

i can't love you in this skin

[kyouka-supremacy]

[bunnihearted]

🗣️

[rawliverandgoronspice]

I have many goals with Thralls, but my main two are :

Make a convincing case for Ganondorf as the unhinged but incredibly charismatic leader of a rebellion movement whose best and worst quality is to be absolutely brutal as a war strategist --which secures short-term wins and reputation by pulling off crazy gambles and doing the warlord shtick of sending messages through spectacle, but cannot keep a movement together to save his life (literally rip) because he absolutely fails to identify and compensate for the emotional toll that kind of strategy takes on his troops, and the fact that not everybody agrees with neither the ends nor the means used to justify them. He runs his army with hyperfocus on short-term goals and handwaves the rest with hype factor, basically. That may win a battle, even a war! But if you can't convincingly sell what peace will look like under you, then the cost paid to get there may start to look a little steep for some.

Make a convincing case for Impa as simultaneously the worst and the best person in Hyrule; someone who has SO MUCH blood on her hands she barely manages to understand herself as a living person anymore, and her moral compass has been so completely shattered that she has forgotten she has not only the duty, but the right to draw moral limits for herself and to have beliefs about herself and others instead of being that stone-cold pillar to support every hylian that flail with guilt and self-righteousness around her, but also: her love and attachement for Zelda does remain her path to some form of redemption in spite of the many ways it chains her down --partially because she loves Zelda too much to let her become the worst version of herself, and Zelda loves Impa too genuinely not to question her role in her life, and the many perspectives she does not have on the events that shaped her.

I am. Excited about this story. In spite of the Horrors. ;;

[confused-spood]

Where else am I gonna rant if not to a group of random strangers that barely know me, right? So ofc I'm gonna rant here cuz these people have no idea who tf I am.

....turns out I have no words to explain how I'm feeling right now so I offer this emoji instead: 😔

[kitkatt0430]

So in deciding to bring over my fics from FFnet, I realized I finally had to face the problem (not really a problem, to be fair) of what to do about this other account I technically have on FFnet.

Why do I have a second account on FFnet? Well, originally it was not mine and I still don't really think of it as mine. Originally it belonged to a friend I had in late high school/most of college. She was my age? Maybe a year or so older, maybe a year or so younger, it was never clear. But we clicked online and wrote a fic together, attempted to write a few other fics together that did not get written, and I proofread a few things for her here and there. I think she did the same for me, but I dunno that I'd call any of it beta reading.

We had a lot of fun. I definitely don't regret co-writing the one fic we did manage to complete together and our writing styles were really similar so it all meshed really well, but all the things that went wrong behind the scenes - mostly coordination issues, though in retrospect she was clearly getting less and less interested in writing fic towards the end - made me realize I prefer writing fic solo. Thanks to how FFnet is set up, co-authors have to choose who publishes a fic and thus who gets the real ownership of the fic. And at the time, I let her have that control. I also contributed a few fics to her oneshot collection fics. But when she decided to leave writing fanfic behind...

Well, that could have turned out bad for me in that I could have lost control of my own writing entirely because she basically dropped off the face of the earth from my point of view. But she did something before that which I greatly appreciate - she handed off control of her account to me. Including the email account she'd created solely for fanfic purposes. Which... I had not realized was not her main email account so while on the one hand, I had access to all our shared writing (and a few stray emails from other people she'd bounced ideas off of)... it meant that I no longer had any way of contacting her because that email was how I contacted her.

But she wanted me to have control of our shared fics and while she requested I leave her fics alone beyond fixing any stray spelling errors... she also basically gave me cart blanche to take them down or move them should FFnet become inhospitable in the way we had seen other fanfic havens become.

Honestly, I got really lucky that she chose to do this. I'm really not sure how much was her looking ahead and how much was her just wanting to be done with fanfic writing. I'm just glad she did it.

But obviously with FFnet steadily declining and having decided to finally move all my old fics to Ao3/SquidgeWorld... that left me with the question of what to do with her account. I wanted to move over my fics that I either co-wrote with her or contributed to her collection fics, but I didn't want to leave her fics behind or lose that co-author credit for her.

I think I'd hoped at some point she'd reappear but... *shrug* she hasn't. Adding her works to my Ao3 account under a pseud didn't feel right since, ya know, she's not me and her works that I didn't cowrite aren't mine. So I've spun up an account to move her stuff to and moved almost all her solo written fics there already.

It's been bittersweet going through all her old fics because it brings back half-forgotten memories of messaging on gmail and remembering which of these fics I did spelling/grammar edits for her on and going back and forth on shared gdocs over the plot for our FF8 fic and the fun we had trying to put Nathan Stark back into Eureka after he was killed off. But it also brings back how sad I felt when our friendship ended - it felt very abrupt to me but in hindsight there was a lot going on for her that she just wasn't sharing with me. Which was fair, we never met in the real world or knew each others real names. I hope she's okay and happy. And i do wonder sometimes if she ever returned to writing fanfic under a different name. If she has, she hasn't reached out to me about it.

Overall I'm glad I can preserve her fics and the reminder they are of a friendship that was, at the time, very important to me. But it was definitely something I had to think long and hard about how to handle.

[acaciapines]

i need to talk about the dess raises kris au. or im gonna explode.

[upsidedowngrass]

playing video game but rest asured. imt thinking about liam the whole time....... he is in my thoughts always . i think about him

[todayisafridaynight]

daigo lurking in the hot topic until finally someone asks him if he works there and he just has to awkwardly be like no...... sorry......

[fingertipsmp3]

I really think I only get by at work because I look a bit pathetic all the time and people take pity on me

[astrxealis]

THE ZERO THEME OMG DARLING HFJSBFJD ITS SO PRETYYY >//<

THANK YOU SO MUCH BAE

[butchyena]

thinking abt a zombie story i was writing w some friends years ago and i might just steal all the ideas and do something w it cause i dont think they ever will

[orcelito]

genuinely tho me jumping right into reading volume 9 of trimax and then volume 10 (and then most of the rest of the manga) on the night before i had a presentation at 9:30 am (that was entirely not prepared) was literally one of the most unhinged decisions ive ever made

this is what a hyperfixation does to a person

[angeltrapz]

it doesn't matter how many times I play strange neighbours, whenever I first see lisa its like "thats my mom!!!!!! hi mom :)"

[archaeren]

How I learned to write smarter, not harder

(aka, how to write when you're hella ADHD lol)

A reader commented on my current long fic asking how I write so well. I replied with an essay of my honestly pretty non-standard writing advice (that they probably didn't actually want lol) Now I'm gonna share it with you guys and hopefully there's a few of you out there who will benefit from my past mistakes and find some useful advice in here. XD Since I started doing this stuff, which are all pretty easy changes to absorb into your process if you want to try them, I now almost never get writer's block.

The text of the original reply is indented, and I've added some additional commentary to expand upon and clarify some of the concepts.

As for writing well, I usually attribute it to the fact that I spent roughly four years in my late teens/early 20s writing text roleplay with a friend for hours every single day. Aside from the constant practice that provided, having a live audience immediately reacting to everything I wrote made me think a lot about how to make as many sentences as possible have maximum impact so that I could get that kind of fun reaction. (Which is another reason why comments like yours are so valuable to fanfic writers! <3) The other factors that have improved my writing are thus: 1. Writing nonlinearly. I used to write a whole story in order, from the first sentence onward. If there was a part I was excited to write, I slogged through everything to get there, thinking that it would be my reward once I finished everything that led up to that. It never worked. XD It was miserable. By the time I got to the part I wanted to write, I had beaten the scene to death in my head imagining all the ways I could write it, and it a) no longer interested me and b) could not live up to my expectations because I couldn't remember all my ideas I'd had for writing it. The scene came out mediocre and so did everything leading up to it. Since then, I learned through working on VN writing (I co-own a game studio and we have some visual novels that I write for) that I don't have to write linearly. If I'm inspired to write a scene, I just write it immediately. It usually comes out pretty good even in a first draft! But then I also have it for if I get more ideas for that scene later, and I can just edit them in. The scenes come out MUCH stronger because of this. And you know what else I discovered? Those scenes I slogged through before weren't scenes I had no inspiration for, I just didn't have any inspiration for them in that moment! I can't tell you how many times there was a scene I had no interest in writing, and then a week later I'd get struck by the perfect inspiration for it! Those are scenes I would have done a very mediocre job on, and now they can be some of the most powerful scenes because I gave them time to marinate. Inspiration isn't always linear, so writing doesn't have to be either!

Some people are the type that joyfully write linearly. I have a friend like this--she picks up the characters and just continues playing out the next scene. Her story progresses through the entire day-by-day lives of the characters; it never timeskips more than a few hours. She started writing and posting just eight months ago, she's about an eighth of the way through her planned fic timeline, and the content she has so far posted to AO3 for it is already 450,000 words long. But most of us are normal humans. We're not, for the most part, wired to create linearly. We consume linearly, we experience linearly, so we assume we must also create linearly. But actually, a lot of us really suffer from trying to force ourselves to create this way, and we might not even realize it. If you're the kind of person who thinks you need to carrot-on-a-stick yourself into writing by saving the fun part for when you finally write everything that happens before it: Stop. You're probably not a linear writer. You're making yourself suffer for no reason and your writing is probably suffering for it. At least give nonlinear writing a try before you assume you can't write if you're not baiting or forcing yourself into it!! Remember: Writing is fun. You do this because it's fun, because it's your hobby. If you're miserable 80% of the time you're doing it, you're probably doing it wrong!

2. Rereading my own work. I used to hate reading my own work. I wouldn't even edit it usually. I would write it and slap it online and try not to look at it again. XD Writing nonlinearly forced me to start rereading because I needed to make sure scenes connected together naturally and it also made it easier to get into the headspace of the story to keep writing and fill in the blanks and get new inspiration. Doing this built the editing process into my writing process--I would read a scene to get back in the headspace, dislike what I had written, and just clean it up on the fly. I still never ever sit down to 'edit' my work. I just reread it to prep for writing and it ends up editing itself. Many many scenes in this fic I have read probably a dozen times or more! (And now, I can actually reread my own work for enjoyment!) Another thing I found from doing this that it became easy to see patterns and themes in my work and strengthen them. Foreshadowing became easy. Setting up for jokes or plot points became easy. I didn't have to plan out my story in advance or write an outline, because the scenes themselves because a sort of living outline on their own. (Yes, despite all the foreshadowing and recurring thematic elements and secret hidden meanings sprinkled throughout this story, it actually never had an outline or a plan for any of that. It's all a natural byproduct of writing nonlinearly and rereading.)

Unpopular writing opinion time: You don't need to make a detailed outline.

Some people thrive on having an outline and planning out every detail before they sit down to write. But I know for a lot of us, we don't know how to write an outline or how to use it once we've written it. The idea of making one is daunting, and the advice that it's the only way to write or beat writer's block is demoralizing. So let me explain how I approach "outlining" which isn't really outlining at all.

I write in a Notion table, where every scene is a separate table entry and the scene is written in the page inside that entry. I do this because it makes writing nonlinearly VASTLY more intuitive and straightforward than writing in a single document. (If you're familiar with Notion, this probably makes perfect sense to you. If you're not, imagine something a little like a more contained Google Sheets, but every row has a title cell that opens into a unique Google Doc when you click on it. And it's not as slow and clunky as the Google suite lol) (Edit from the future: I answered an ask with more explanation on how I use Notion for non-linear writing here.) When I sit down to begin a new fic idea, I make a quick entry in the table for every scene I already know I'll want or need, with the entries titled with a couple words or a sentence that describes what will be in that scene so I'll remember it later. Basically, it's the most absolute bare-bones skeleton of what I vaguely know will probably happen in the story.

Then I start writing, wherever I want in the list. As I write, ideas for new scenes and new connections and themes will emerge over time, and I'll just slot them in between the original entries wherever they naturally fit, rearranging as necessary, so that I won't forget about them later when I'm ready to write them. As an example, my current long fic started with a list of roughly 35 scenes that I knew I wanted or needed, for a fic that will probably be around 100k words (which I didn't know at the time haha). As of this writing, it has expanded to 129 scenes. And since I write them directly in the page entries for the table, the fic is actually its own outline, without any additional effort on my part. As I said in the comment reply--a living outline!

This also made it easier to let go of the notion that I had to write something exactly right the first time. (People always say you should do this, but how many of us do? It's harder than it sounds! I didn't want to commit to editing later! I didn't want to reread my work! XD) I know I'm going to edit it naturally anyway, so I can feel okay giving myself permission to just write it approximately right and I can fix it later. And what I found from that was that sometimes what I believed was kind of meh when I wrote it was actually totally fine when I read it later! Sometimes the internal critic is actually wrong. 3. Marinating in the headspace of the story. For the first two months I worked on [fic], I did not consume any media other than [fandom the fic is in]. I didn't watch, read, or play anything else. Not even mobile games. (And there wasn't really much fan content for [fandom] to consume either. Still isn't, really. XD) This basically forced me to treat writing my story as my only source of entertainment, and kept me from getting distracted or inspired to write other ideas and abandon this one.

As an aside, I don't think this is a necessary step for writing, but if you really want to be productive in a short burst, I do highly recommend going on a media consumption hiatus. Not forever, obviously! Consuming media is a valuable tool for new inspiration, and reading other's work (both good and bad, as long as you think critically to identify the differences!) is an invaluable resource for improving your writing.

When I write, I usually lay down, close my eyes, and play the scene I'm interested in writing in my head. I even take a ten-minute nap now and then during this process. (I find being in a state of partial drowsiness, but not outright sleepiness, makes writing easier and better. Sleep helps the brain process and make connections!) Then I roll over to the laptop next to me and type up whatever I felt like worked for the scene. This may mean I write half a sentence at a time between intervals of closed-eye-time XD

People always say if you're stuck, you need to outline.

What they actually mean by that (whether they realize it or not) is that if you're stuck, you need to brainstorm. You need to marinate. You don't need to plan what you're doing, you just need to give yourself time to think about it!

What's another framing for brainstorming for your fic? Fantasizing about it! Planning is work, but fantasizing isn't.

You're already fantasizing about it, right? That's why you're writing it. Just direct that effort toward the scenes you're trying to write next! Close your eyes, lay back, and fantasize what the characters do and how they react.

And then quickly note down your inspirations so you don't forget, haha.

And if a scene is so boring to you that even fantasizing about it sucks--it's probably a bad scene.

If it's boring to write, it's going to be boring to read. Ask yourself why you wanted that scene. Is it even necessary? Can you cut it? Can you replace it with a different scene that serves the same purpose but approaches the problem from a different angle? If you can't remove the troublesome scene, what can you change about it that would make it interesting or exciting for you to write?

And I can't write sitting up to save my damn life. It's like my brain just stops working if I have to sit in a chair and stare at a computer screen. I need to be able to lie down, even if I don't use it! Talking walks and swinging in a hammock are also fantastic places to get scene ideas worked out, because the rhythmic motion also helps our brain process. It's just a little harder to work on a laptop in those scenarios. XD

In conclusion: Writing nonlinearly is an amazing tool for kicking writer's block to the curb. There's almost always some scene you'll want to write. If there isn't, you need to re-read or marinate.

Or you need to use the bathroom, eat something, or sleep. XD Seriously, if you're that stuck, assess your current physical condition. You might just be unable to focus because you're uncomfortable and you haven't realized it yet.

Anyway! I hope that was helpful, or at least interesting! XD Sorry again for the text wall. (I think this is the longest comment reply I've ever written!)

And same to you guys on tumblr--I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. XD Reblogs appreciated if so! (Maybe it'll help someone else!)