#ask 'me'mes

[synnifexgaunt]

🤲💖💞

🤲 Would you please share a snippet of a wip?

Been playing around with post-canon Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines things lately:

Betrayal. Jennifer feels it absolutely, the ultimate form, the kind it is only ever possible to feel once, and is now more utterly alone than she ever dreamed possible. No one can save her, no one will be coming for her, the only ones that know of this watery grave are her enemies. And thought she doesn't want to believe, she is unable to refute her internal whispers telling her that - while the eldritch manacles on her limbs will keep her from dying - nothing will preserve her from an even deeper madness. Already she craves blood; the want, the need, the Thirst a twisting burn in her throat, and no more will be ever be coming to her. The future is only darkness, and hunger. Jennifer screams with lungs full of water, again and again and again, raging against fate and her own foolishness as the sarcophagus settles onto the bay floor. This is the end. Her end. Betrayal has flooded her. She drowns in it.

💖 What made you start writing?

That is in one way very hard, and in another way, very easy to answer.

I began creating fiction long before I acknowledged it consciously; the first glimmers of something significantly beyond simple imagination showing up while I browsed a forum for the game Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura as a youth. There, people would write short little bits about characters and do roleplay in the universe, and that inspired me to try and create my own expansion module for the game - though I knew precisely nothing about game development at this time. Nevertheless, I started plotting things out; coming up with characters, struggling through dialog, and shaping a world in the crude level editor to the best of my amateur ability, but had really no awareness I had begun writing. I had always thought through the fiction I took in, and had done so for as long as I could remember, though priorly I'd mostly put my thoughts into pictures, or left them ephemeral.

This repeated for other things as the years passed, all while I kept reading books and playing games; thinking about alternative endings, tellings, or crossovers between everything I was pouring into my cerebellum. I identified as a "reader" before anything else, and wasn't it just natural to take some notes or put a scene down after you've read something? So I left a lengthy trail of paragraphs, concepts, pages, and OCs (mostly thinly veiled SIs in retrospect - what a phase) littered behind me in .doc and .txt files on various storage media as I moved through other people's stories. I was just trying to prolong my connection with whatever fiction I was experiencing. I still didn't think I was writing. It was just what anyone would do, right?

Eventually I went to college, and made some dear friends who introduced me to FF.NET and AO3, as well the fact that they'd written things themselves - they, my compatriots in humanity, could just choose to engage in this activity that was called "writing". And I finally realized there was more to what I was already doing than just saying "oh hey, I thought of something cool". So, my eyes were finally opened. And while I started recording my fiction more diligently afterwards, finally put a few of the more developed ideas online for others to see (le gasp!), and added "occasional writer" to my self-identifiers, writing was something that had snuck into my existence long previously without my realizing it.

What made me start? If anything can be pointed to, it's the simple fact that others had written before, their work was inspiring, and I couldn't separate experiencing their works from crafting my own out of them. My defining moment for writing was less about something making me start, and more a realization that I should continue writing. It just took about a decade to arrive.

💞 Who's your comfort character?

Kyoko Mogami from the Skip Beat! manga series.

She's a young woman who becomes a successful talento in show business, starting from nothing more than a grudge and a goal of outshining the boy who crushed her heart and childhood dreams. What I really like about her is how, despite numerous setbacks and failures, she always stands back up and improves where she's fallen short. She begins the story in place of extreme bitterness and hatred, more willpower and fury than anything else. Over the course of the series, she starts reclaiming her better aspects, building a deeper self-understanding, and taking pride in her work for its own sake rather than using it as a weapon or stepping-stone. Through it all she really shines at being creative under pressure and helping others out despite herself.

Kyoko's inner voices and reactions during moments of crisis are also super relatable.