#because i realized the post literally ended in the middle of a sentence

[kumezyzo]

streamer!gf is also a good idea i’d love to read

again, with this one, its mostly just for me [and this amazingly supportive anonymous] but i still felt like writing it. (although it took me three hours to come up with ideas that made sense lol) i also think this ones kinda ass in comparison to the others.... sorry.

but yea, this is streamer!gf that i tried to make gender neutral until the very end really.... enjoy! or dont.... :) m.list

bf!sapnap who most likely knew you from the SMP before you started dating. and only recently when he realized how much he liked you, did he start trying to pursue the relationship (which was maybe over a year and a half ago)

bf!sapnap who agreed with you to not say anything about the relationship for a few months just to let it sit and see where you guys lead

when you do finally announce it, its because you guys notice a genuince shift in the relationship where you can tell its getting more serious.

bf!sapnap who shyly brings up the idea of doing a relationship q&a on your channel after the announcement (that was also on your channel)

during the video, hes very clearly all over you, hugging you and leaning against you. your fans think its absolutely adorable how much of a simp he is.

in the middle of that video theres a moment when you two look at eachother after answering a question and it cuts to you two giggling and looking away from eachother. sapnap with a very clear blush and wide grin on his face mostly because you guys took a break to just kiss eachother which accidentally went on longer than expected

bf!sapnap who didnt realize how many people were already shipping you two when he called you the honourary dream team member once a few years ago

bf!sapnap that gets edits of you (sometimes you and him) during TNTL streams and just on his timelines and tries his hardest to not act flustered although he clearly has that glint in his eye

bf!sapnap who manages to come into your room during the most inconvenient times during your streams. ie. when youre actively and/or loudly simping over an actor in your fav movie or show.

you just freeze mid sentence, mid gesture, and stare at him as he steps into the room. he stares back and peeks his head into the frame and your chat proceeds to spam 'LMAOOOOO's

"can i help you....?"

".....so who were you yelling about-"

"Oh my- GET OUT😭!"

bf!sapnap who will very openly brag about dating you and just talk about dating you (he just wants people to know youre taken🤭)

"well im dating y/n"

"how does that have anything to do with vidcon-"

bf!sapnap who gets teased for not being as good of a gamer as you. and not having as many followers (because youre def. very popular) (i also imagine this next convo with george and dream laughing the entire time)

"sapnap, how does it feel having a girlfriend thats better at minecraft than you?"

"george, shut up."

"sapnap, hes not wrong. and doesnt she have more subscribers?"

"im literally never doing a manhunt again then."

"good, then we'll just have your girlfriend replace you"

bf!sapnap who jokingly suggests yout two starting an onlyfans where he posts videos of you two fucking (but he secretly really wants to). cause he has a whole album of pictures and videos of you two that he would be willing to post (if people pay for it obvi)

again, gimme suggestions and stuff. and show support for my sanity lol -Nony

[aquamarine021109]

so, I just watched tom's new music video thingy and there were some hidden messages that were hard to see so I screenshotted them.

this one says "I can't watch back my old videos because everyone in them wasn't who they said they were. Do you know how this makes me feel. Do you know how sad I have felt all year."

(Fellow wss that might see this. do you think tommy meant this because he doesn't support Wilbur anymore. or do you think he's just saying this, so he won't be canceled for some random shit)

now this one says "how could anyone possibly find out who they are when you are all immersed in this needless, self-indulgent spiral of instant gratification and distraction. this is not good for you."

idk why but this one kind of comes across as rude, but maybe that's just me.

now this one "the poor 12-year-old watching this sad ass video when he subscribed for funny Minecraft videos. poor guy lmao."

well, this one is just a joke, but it still matters because it's funny.

this one "I don't think I trust anyone here I don't think anyone trusts anyone here"

I mean.... he ain't wrong

this one "I used to feel like I was just doing everything wrong. that I just wasn't smart or good like anyone of my friends. I realize now I was the only one doing the right thing. I just wanted to have fun. What I'd do to get that back, my god. What I'd do to have things be simple again."

idk this one is weird. like the first few sentences and last sentences are relatable but the middle part where he says, "I realize now I was the only one doing the right thing." which is weird because most of his friends were also just trying to have fun just like him so idk what he means by that.

this one "I just don't want to slip back into who I was. A year ago, I needed you. A year ago, most of my self-esteem and worth and love came from you. A year ago, I wasn't happy unless you were. I don't think I can ever do that again. that was really wrong. How did I possibly end up there?"

idk man.... you probably ended up there because you were a teenager at the time and a lot of teenagers have felt like that before. (Including me even though I'm not famous or anything)

that's all the ones that were the clearest where I could actually make them out.

(Sorry for not posting I've been very burned out lately. also, I'm going to sleep now because it is literally 3:20 am as of writing this and my dad is going to kill me for staying up....)

[fan-cartoon]

STORM HAWKS: SHORT STORIES AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT. (¿¡but ​​it hasn't even been 5 minutes!?)

Piper: I'm going to pick up the new crystal generator, so it might take me some time.

the others: ok.

Piper about to leave the room but not before looking at a redhead and a certain goth before saying: I hope you two don't fight when I leave, I'm serious.

Junko looks at Cyclonis and Finn looks at Aerrow who are in the middle of the couch before answering.

Cyclonis reading his book: ok.

Aerrow: don't worry Piper, we're not little kids.

Piper who looks cautiously at the two before leaving to head to the aircraft carrier room.

take his vehicle and as they prepared to leave he realized that he did not have Stork's plans to confirm that everything was fine according to Stork's specifications so he returns to the living room

Piper: Excuse me, I forgot the plans

she finishes her sentence because the bridge was completely destroyed, the windows broken, the walls dented, the pipes misplaced, the circular table torn up, the sofa used as a shield by Finn and Junko who were frightened, all by the result of the fight between Aerrow and Cyclonis, one with her magic and the other with his energy backs, when the two turn around to grab them to see that Piper had returned earlier than expected.

Aerrow and Cyclonis: IT WAS HER/HIM!

Piper's expression of calm anger was making the two responsible people's hair stand on end until Piper sighs, takes out the communiqué and calmly calls Stork to bring her the plans for the new crystal generator.

Stork entering the bridge: Hi Piper, here are the plans for my baby's new generator-

I'll take him to see the destruction

Stork:… my… my… baby…

Piper: thanks for bringing me the plans Stork oh! by the way, thank Aerrow and Cyclonis for the recent decoration.

She leaves, leaving the two young people to their fate before the fury of the Merd, while the vehicle moved away from the Condor, she modestly hears the screams of her unfortunate companions

Piper sighs: literally not even 5 minutes passed.

"a few hours later"

Piper: Hi guys! He returns with the new generator among other things to improve the Condor.

Stork with a calm and happy face: Oh! What good news Piper! I can't wait to be installed in my baby.

Piper pretending to be surprised: Wow! He's cleaned and fixed it up! Good job.

Stork still with his calm and happy face: Oh Piper, don't thank me, thank Aerrow and Cyclonis.

The two are sitting on the couch with Finn and Junko looking at them with concern.

Piper with sarcasm: Wow, it seems that now they get along.

Stork: Oh, after our "little talk" they agreed to get along and try to get along and above all.

He turns to look at his companions while his expression becomes dark and sinister even with his calm smile.

Stork: They promised that they would not fight again… at least not in my Condor… Right friends?

Nobody on the couch said anything but everyone nodded.

While Piper and Stork head off to install the new generator Aerrow looks at Cyclonis as he whispers "we'll continue our little discussion another time" Finn and Junko "sigh" Cyclonis who actually didn't get to hear Aerrow because he's thinking that Stork was a student of his grandmother for his brutal lesson.

THE END.

Well, this is the end, I'll see if I'll post something again in a few days because this took me 3 hours but well, it's the first time I've written something this long, if anyone noticed spelling mistakes either in English or Spanish, point them out so I can learn.

I hope I heard your opinions. Good night.

[beshrew-my-very-heart]

A year in fic, 2024

So, I saw a few posts going around doing like a retrospective on all the fics that people had written this year, and I thought... it'd be a good thing to do myself, too, to take stock of everything I did. Looking at some of the things I'm proud of, and the big one that I'm not.

According to AO3, in terms of overall stats, there were....

Kudos: 1010 Bookmarks: 331 Subscriptions: 84 Word Count 945,003 Hits: 27868 But I do think that for some reason, the way they count it pulls some of the fics that were going on for more than a year from 2023 into 2024, so those might not be exactly right. A breakdown of the different fics and my thoughts on them are under the cut.

Not Myself Today - Glee - Kurt/Sam/Puck

January - May The fact that writing Soul Soul Revolution fell apart for me is one of the things I'm most ashamed about this year. For context, I've been writing the series since... 2021, and I had so much planned out ahead of me for the story. And then toward the middle of 2023, my mom got very ill. During that time, I forced myself to keep writing, trying to keep a sense of normality in my day to day life. That continued all the way through to the middle of 2024, when my mom passed a positive milestone in her treatment, I had to miss a posting date because of an emergency, and then missed the next one because of a smaller emergency, and... And then missed a few more, deciding I'd earned a chance to decompress.

When I finally opened the fic again to edit the next chapter, I realized that I just... couldn't seem to do it. It was like I was having an anxiety issue, and... then it spread to replying to comments on the story, or trying to write other Glee fics, or even read them. There have been readers leaving the sweetest comments, and I feel like the worst kind of person because I want to reply to them, but my chest gets tight and suddenly writing a sentence seems to take me an hour and I feel like I've run a marathon afterward. If you have left a comment on Soul Soul Revolution that I haven't replied to, just know that it means the world to me, and I cherish them deeply.

I keep telling myself I'm going to come back to this story. it's actually one of my goals for 2025, but... I need to work past this issue, and hope that the incredibly kind people who had been reading will have a little understanding for me with it.

Knockout - 9-1-1 (Explicit) - Eddie/Tommy

July

I posted my first 9-1-1 story with my best friend, and amazing co-writer @nubianamy in July. It was after a spate where I hadn't been able to write anything at all, and I wanted to try writing for a totally different fandom, and with something much simpler and lower stakes. This was the first story in the Five Alarm Fest. Although we both ship Buck/Eddie, I wanted to make it a personal mission to try and write something different for each story.

Knockout was out Eddie/Tommy Story, for the prompt: Coda or Missing Scene. There had been some discussions and interviews at the time about the idea that Tommy was supposed to be Eddie's boyfriend in the original story, and so we ran with the idea of a 'missing scene' where that could have become canon.

(Also, in terms of superlatives, second highest kudos, but definitely the highest amount of comments. It matches the amount of Bookmarks with Wholly Convinced, which we'll come to soon!)

Parched - 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - TK/Carlos

July

Another story with nubianamy for the Five Alarm Fest! This was for the prompt; After a Dry Spell. We took that literally, writing about TK longing for long showers in the middle of a drought, and using his wiles to 'trick' Carlos into shower sex so he could have it. Of course, Carlos wasn't so easily duped. XD

It was the shortest of the Five Alarm Fest fics, clocking in at less than 5K, but that was because it was a very narrowly focused fic. Established relationship, tight premise, the options were either that we'd be sucinct or we'd end up spawning a whole cinematic universe in our head. XD

Biggest Fan - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - Buck/Mateo

July

The third of the Five Alarm Fest fics with nubianamy, and one that kind of... changed my brain chemistry. XD Buck/Mateo is a rare pairing. In fact, of the six fics that are tagged as such, we've written five of them, so... Rare, rare pairing. This was for the prompt; Intercrural (No Penetration,)

Biggest Fan is set pre-canon, and explores the idea of Buck and Mateo getting together while Mateo visits family in LA and Buck is still in his Buck 1.0 era. It actually spawned a sequel for our rare pair, with some additional poly fun! And in general, I know I just really like the vibes. Two characters who are sometimes seen as pretty immature, but have so much good and love in their hearts that it practically explodes out of them. It's just very good and sweet in my mind. And, they're both very handsome men, so... that's that. XD

Wholly Convinced - 9-1-1 (Explicit) Buck/Eddie/Tommy

July

The fourth of the seven Five Alarm Fest fics with nubianamy, highest number of kudos, and matches the amount of Bookmarks with Knockout! Wholly Convinced is our Buck/Eddie/Tommy fic, and was one I know I had a lot of fun writing. Tommy engineering Eddie and Buck experimenting with each other without, perhaps, knowing who is on the other side of a gloryhole. And then a little twist ending. It was fun doing the POV shift back and forth, and getting to imply Tommy's POV within the other two.

Bonfire - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - Buck/TK/Carlos/???

July

Five of Seven Five Alarm Fest fics with nubianamy, and this was another fun one, where we played with time in the different scenes. The prompt was; At the Firehouse. We did established Buck/Carlos/TK, with a special someone joining them midway. I know I really liked playing with this idea of long distance relationships and love in different shapes and forms. Poly was definitely a theme I've started to drift into more and more, because I love writing everyone getting what they want. XD

Force of Nature - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - Buck/Mateo, Buck/Mateo/TK/Carlos, Big Buck/Eddie Vibes

July

Six of Seven Five Alarm Fest fics, with nubianamy. This was the first and only sequel of the bunch. We allowed ourselves one. This follows on from Biggest Fan several years later, and covers the events of the crossover episode. And it had everything. Buck and Mateo relationship reveal gone wrong. Eddie Diaz being spectacularly jealous and not knowing why. Surprise sex scene that was longer than the entire plotted aspect of the fic! Kink! (Okay, a lot of the previous fics had kink, but this had kink negotiation, of a kind!)

The prompt was; Rare Pair or Solo Play, and I think Buck/Mateo/TK/Carlos (with pre-relationship Buck/Eddie) was pretty rare. XD

Monday is Blue - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - Buck/Owen Strand, Owen Strand/Mateo Chavez

July

The final Five Alarm Fest fic with nubianamy. (Finally, I can stop typing five alarm fest... but I cannot stop writing about my co-writer, who I love fiercely and has been like my other arm this entire year, for which I cannot say how grateful I am.)

This was a Creator's Choice fic, and we originally tried something a fair bit darker and more intense, that had us pulling our hair out at one point over how to make it work. xD We really had a lot of conversations over what it could be, and then I think we eventually just made a list of the characters we hadn't used yet, and just started pitching ideas for each pairing we could think of. We wanted to do something 'Low Stakes.'

So of course, this is now the first story in a series that has posted 181. 884 words at time of writing, and had a bunch in the barrel ready to go next year. XD

Definitely the kinkiest story of the lot, but honestly, a lot of fun to write. This was the story that definitely got my enthusiasm back for writing multichapter, multistory series. Writing it with nubianamy is a dream, and I'm so glad we went with this rather than the original idea. XD

Bite My Style - 9-1-1 - Buck/Eddie/Tommy

July

On the upswing from not writing, and finding that writing for challenges was really helping me keep up my motivation, I signed up for the 911 Fanworks festival around the same time as the Five Alarm Fest. This was also my first time flying without a co-writer on a fic in a while, which was a little nervewracking.

I was assigned @911varietyposts for my giftee, and after having a look through their Tumblr, I saw a post (that I can't find now Has now been found thanks to Britt!!!) talking about Eddie and Step Up, which inspired this fic! This was a couple of months before Season 8, so I guess it's a nice bit of kismet that this fic and the series both explored the idea of Eddie choosing joy through dancing! Now, if I could only convince the show to put Eddie in teeny tiny little shorts, that'd be the whole game right there.

Tuesday is Grey - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - Buck/Owen, Owen/Mateo, Buck/Mateo, Buck/Carlos, Buck/Carlos/Mateo, Buck/Mateo/Owen, background Mateo/Nancy

September

Tuesday is Grey is the sequel to Monday is Blue, and it really starts to kick things into high gear with the kink, and the poly, and the world. I had a lot of fun writing this, I'm pretty sure we ran straight into it from Monday, but we took it at a slower pace writing it because things got busy. Nubianamy was amazing, as always, and we really set up a bunch of things for the future of the series that are still paying off now!

Ghosts and Mirrors - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star - Ravi/Marvin Chavez, Ravi/Mateo Chavez

September

Another challenge, another set of fics! I entered the AU weekend challenge, and although I didn't get as much written as I wanted to, I still got a couple of really exciting fics out in my opinion!

The prompt for Ghost and Mirrors was Soulmate AU, and I really wanted to try and play with the format a little, especially the idea of soulmarks. What does it mean when you lose someone that you're sure is your soulmate, before you even know them? What happens when you grieve someone for years, only to run into their doppleganger randomly?

Auditions - 9-1-1 - Buck/Eddie

September

Another fic for the AU weekend, this was for Different Settings. I dipped my toe back into the Glee pool ever so lightly with this one, thinking it was amusing to turn one Ryan Murphy show into another one. I don't have a lot to say with this one, other than mentioning how fun it was to try and bend things into the right shape, and being miraculously surprised when other things fit so perfectly. Eddie Diaz - Sam Evans parallels, anyone? (Season 2 introduction, should definitely end up with my favorite character, etc).

Of course, I discovered one of my least favorite things about trying to write younger 9-1-1, which is 'what to do about Chris.' In this one, he's used for even more drama, but it made me very sad to do what I had to do.

Waiting on Greens and Blues - Glee (Explicit) - Finn/Sam, Kurt/Puck

January - October

Another Glee Fic that has only been continuously updated thanks to the tireless work of nubianamy. We wrote it together, but I was already having a hard time finding time to edit it, and then when the anxiety thing happens I kind of took my hands off entirely. But it is such a great fic, and I love it so much.

Wednesday Too - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - Buck/Owen, Owen/Mateo, Buck/Mateo, Buck/Carlos, Buck/Carlos/Mateo, Buck/Mateo/Owen, background Mateo/Nancy

November - December

Sequel to Tuesday is Grey, and the story continues to move forward! It was really fun really locking Buck in a scene with one other person, and really exploring his relationship to kink from a different angle. And a surprise appearance from a character who... Well, has been guessed at a lot, and I can't wait to reveal! There was a lot of heavy world building that happened behind the scenes for this fic, which was just so fun to do. There's timelines, and calendars, and house layouts, and a whole document of pics of the actors looking hot that I would just throw at nubianamy so that they always had something fun to open the doc to. XD

Life Jacket - 9-1-1 / 9-1-1: Lone Star (Explicit) - Tommy/Buck/Owen/Mateo, Implied pre-Mateo/Eddie, Tommy/Buck/Eddie, Time-Off Polyshape as a ship.

November

Life Jacket is a future-future sequel to the 'Time Off' series. (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday stories.) I think by the time we catch up with the timeline, there's gonna be some stuff in there that doesn't work so well, but it was really fun writing it. It was actually written as part of a challenge again, Polyship Week, but we only got this fic done in time. It was fun playing with different combinations, and ending on this sense of family and poly that I love. If you do read this one, there are heavy spoilers for things that are going to happen, so be forewarned. XD

[memberment]

Genesis

12:06 oh my god I have once again woken up too early and this time it was not on purpose.

TRYING to speed run some of this pre-work. Updates later but GOOD MORNING

9:12 I am back and working on two chapters at the same time. BECAUSE I NEED TO CONCEPT A DAMN ANGEL FOR HEIDI AND KENNY TO FIGHT. I CONCEPTED ONE AT WORK BUT THEY CAN'T FIGHT THIS ONE LMFAO

Also I need a flashback for Kyle so I'm literally just playing procrastinator olympics as I pingpong between two chapters. I might work on Bound for a bit tonight though, ngl. Because I am 21 chapters completed deep and 71.9k words in on this and Bound has THREE CHAPTERS READY AND BOUND HAS INTERMISSION CHAPTERS SO TECHNICALLY TWO LIKE. I WANT THE OPTION TO NOT WRITE WHEN MY SEMESTER STARTS!!!! (It's not like I'd even follow that but STILL.)

Also next line up is prob not gonna have a fic for every day, much to my own disappointment. Because school literally starts in FOURTEEN DAYS. and I only have four things ready to go. And I am determined to finish Genesis before my semester starts. Like I'm definitely gonna take a solid break from this series before I start Revelation, because that is going to be A LOT. (I do not think I will be taking much of a break between Revelation and Karma though, ngl. Bc each part starts, like, immediately after the previous one, but I KNOW how Revelation ends and Karma starts already and it has me LOSING MY SHIT. LIKE THE ENDING OF FUCKING REVELATION IS INSANEEEEEEE. And I hope not a soul sees it coming despite it being RIGHT THERE.)

I am sad though because I did want to start on Princess of Fire and get to a point where regular posts can pull up on that because I genuinely really like the concept and like, fine, I'm getting better at writing (and it is SOT and I do not wanna post a shit SOT fic on Wintergrew's internet) as I go so maybe holding off isn't a huge deal BUT I WANT Y'ALL TO FUCKING SEE THE VISION‼️‼️‼️

I honestly wish I could livestream my brain does that make sense LMFAO

2:24: Tears just rolled down my cheeks at the realization that we have not had one goddamn (exclusively) Bebe centric chapter and I am trying to write chapter 24. OH MY GOD. I can't even give her a full filler chapter because I wan't my filler to be like LIGHT HEARTED AND FUN. I CAN'T JUST STRETCH OUT LIKE 3K WORDS OF HER JUST EXISTING IN THE MIDDLE OF ANY OF THIS. LIKE WE ARE TEN CHAPTERS DEEP INTO THE WORSE SHIT. OH MY GOD I HATE IT HERE. Like I actually was just scrolling through the chapter titles and was like 'oh we have Stan! We have Craig! We have duhduhduhduhduh.' AND I GOT TO THE BEGINNING AND THERE IS NO FUCKING BEBE CHAPTER?????? WHAT THE FUCK! (I literally did this with Butters in Dandelion and had the same reaction why is it that all of my favorite fucking characters I do this to???? HOW. Like, we get more of her in Revelations but WHAT! THE! FUCK!)

So yeah, 24 is gonna be Bebe, despite me kinda wanting it to be Tam or Wendy.

Also I'm reading 'You're Not Mine Anymore' AGAIN (because even though I said I hated it, that chapter has literally embedded itself in my brain. Like, it's so fucking disturbing and so sad and I actually wanna throw myself out my window every time I think about it LMFAO)

2:55 I changed one sentence in this chapter and now I'm actually gonna sob. I hate it here.

4:30 I got distracted and watched tik toks since my last update, specifically spending like an entire ten minutes absolutely geeking over the 1970's gymnastics olympics and I am now back at my keyboard. I got a very specific bit of inspiration and it is fucking TERRIFYING.

Anyways. RIP Craig. Like seriously, dude is going THROUGH IT. This is what I get for ignoring him for like a week and a half (two weeks? ish. I'm settling on ish, here. A VAGUE, BUT NOT VERY LONG AMOUNT OF TIME) of their time when he is actively losing his shit.

I think killing him and Tweek off at this point is more of a mercy killing than anything on my part why did I do this to them I am so sad. AND THE FACT THAT THEIR DEATHS IS WHAT THIS WHOLE FIC GOT CONCEPTED AROUND IS FUCKING INSANE. LIKE I WROTE THEIR DEATH SCENE AND WAS LIKE WELP GOTTA WRITE A MAGICAL GIRL FIC.

And now I'm slowly but surely on my way to that chapter and annotating and writing in bits and pieces of THAT chapter and I'm like wow. Wow oh wow. Might need a hallucinations tag. Hypothetically, of course. But also hypothetically, would the hallucinations tag apply to this if said hallucinations are questionably real? Hypothetically. Anyways, when Fall From Grace gets posted, y'all are gonna need like sixteen and a half TWs.

And now I'm off to go write this fucking MESS of a chapter that is the Bebe chapter because I STILL DIDN'T WRITE IT. AND I AM OFFICIALLY DOWN TO THIRTEEN DAYS.

Another hypothetical, while I'm still here before I leave again and don't update until god knows when. Do you guys think I can finish 20 chapters in 13 days? Like, that would be approximately 60-80k words. Do y'all think I got this? And I'm typing that and realizing I thought the wc for this was gonna be like 100k and am now realizing I'm at 74k and just wow. ANYWAYS. LATER. Hope y'all are enjoying my extra long screams into the void tonight.

4:55 Black Swan cries out violently in the background as I realize I have just made five out of six, the quintet is now a trio, and Red is just there not giving a fuck. My head is in my hands. My jaw is dropped. I fear I may be evil for writing this.

May the gods I don't believe in help us all.

(I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN THIS MANY MAJOR CHARACTER DEATHS. MY MAX HAS BEEN TWO SO FAR. THIS IS WHY DESOLATION ENDED THE WAY IT DID BECAUSE I FEARED THIS.)

Eh, fun fact while I'm here again. The original ending of Desolation, everyone was gonna die except for Kyle.

But wow OH WOW. Yeah, this is why I don't write major character death.

It is 6:26 am and I just posted An Answer chapter in attempts to procrastinate this horrible ending further and the realization has dawned on me that I am now involved in the mystery because I'm rereading and I have no idea WHAT THE FUCK is going on. I'm laughing so hard over this. God, how two months can really slip away is insane.

6:49: guys I'm rereading this and I am actually thrown off by my own writing like I fully forgot how off-putting this fic is supposed to be BECAUSE of what happened and why things are like this and I actually fell into my own fucking trap. I'm crying this is so funny HELP

7:02: not me happily reading and giggling over platonic twendy fluff and just getting smacked in the face by shit getting very real very fast. this is wild.

[cornus27florida]

Leland, the Chessmaster (CPC wiki)

I make this post to make sense over Leland, the main antagonist of the CPC story that cleverly written by LambCat to not make us not aware how horrendous bad he is until the end of season 4 part 1 (the gala fiasco 'not so nice' plan) and cuz... Ughhh I am not that good at chess game so...

basically calling out @cpcwiki for maybe intake 'bout him

I want to expand his personality section on his page, we're lacking informations but I feel a simple sentence from wiki could be expanded more (feel free to reblog, gives reply etc about this post! That'll immensely helpful to anyone espc to me as wiki editor - the one that bad at chess as always lose on simple early rounds to my friend hahahah)

Personality

Leland is a mercurial figure. With his sons, especially his youngest, he is generally harsh and overbearing, although he seems to genuinely consider this as "training for the harsh realities of life". This behavior extends from the relatively innocuous habit of forcing his sons to perform push-ups at the merest hint of failure to implied murder[2]. Much of Leland’s actions and behavior, especially towards his wife and sons, are abusive. -> S4 part 2 makes us learns how abusive it's actually is, it's very subtle yet frighteningly so scary - it could happened to anyone IRL and the worse thing is the victims not notice until too late. In nutshell, the mother (Isolde) ripped from her own sons since baby so the Plaid Princes trained as "the royal way" (implied to groomed them up so each prince matching personality of each princess) - this makes the princes to never realizes what's actually a motherly love is in their childhood that makes each of the son believes that their lives solely depends on what's their father (the Plaid King) wants [Lance mentioned that at, ep 156 iirc?] and that's make them suffers in their own respective way: Blaine soughts to perfection as the eldest golden child that constantly on the edge and believes to should climbing to the 'top of the mountain'. Lance as the middle child believes that the only way he could do is supporting his team which is do what Leland wants. Frederick the youngest as the effect of his accumulation of 'misfortunes' (born small, can't do like what Leland wants designing him to be, etc) deemed as the black sheep/scapegoat of the family. That's totally messed up and I could gladly to explain more but we're in summary

Lance canonical quote, uhh ep 156 likely! This the nail of the coffin that Leland truly abusing his own family and Lance know about it - but until invasion arc kinda brushed it off

"He controls everything about us. And everything always goes his way" -> if that quote isn't scary, idk what else

Despite this attitude, he seems affectionate of them, and wishes to see them happy. He is noticeably more lenient in terms of restrictions than his best friend, King Jack of the Pastel Kingdom, with whom Leland has an apparently close bond. -> this make entire of very confusing and ambiguous relationships between Leland - and literally everyone espc Jack (his BFF, but messed up in the fandom as becomes a ship 'JaLand' hahaha). I won't talk about it more as it should go on the relationship descriptions, something that me as someone that not as emphatetic will have hard time to relate

+ my biggest question on this paragraph, what's and who "them" refer? The previous paragraph where just writes the very concerning sentence about 'he abuses his family'? WTF. Who kind of abuser that wants the victim to be 'happy' where they are literally the reason of the victims to be unhappy?

That paragraph need to change but for now I am not sure, maybe starts with clear reference of which 'them' refers to. I blame whoever that writes that first sentence but if one thing that I hate is to checking this page to search someone to blame, because at the end it doesn't matter. The current wiki only has 3 active editors and whoever originally writes it prob gone inactive (?) - and I am waiting for a certain episode to be free so I could tell certain plot point to flesh out his personality as that particular episode is the main crusher and enforcer about a popular fandom question "Does Leland thinks Leelathae | Lilyth and by extension Gwen, beautiful?"

Once that ep free maybe the personality part of him could be added in following suit. Also maybe adding characters to be relate to him, priority is the Pastel Queen cuz they're meet

and uh the current relationship description need to changes espc from his own quotes throughout his interactions

-> Laverne (help me, in words what it means?)

"Nothing's too decadent for my queens. After all, we're going to be the most prosperous kingdom in the world soon."

-> Maria and Lorena (help me, in words what it means?)

"So I'll offer you once more, princesses.... Leave your treacherous and insufferable father. Join me and my sons peacefully, and you have all the freedom, privileges, and power you could ever imagine. ...What do you say?" 

"Fine, then you can rot in dungeons forever with your father after the wedding is done. "

-> the CPC, espc Whitney (the embodiment of abused victim)

"I think it's a compassionate solution. Any strong leader knows that a kingdom needs healthy, productive, citizens who can contribute safely to society. I mean, the people with curses hide themselves away because they know it too. They're of no value until they can be fixed." / the CPC

"Hm... I dunno, Blaine... I think he has a point. During dinner, I was keeping an eye on you boys. And while you were fumbling through your important gala speech and losing drinking games to school girls, Frederick stopped a rogue pet bird from crashing into a champagne glass tower by catching it one-handed. He saved the dinner. I was impressed. I think you might need to watch out for our little Frederick. He's on his way up." -> Whitney's that quickly follow up with the tiger/catboi realization that the whole ordeal is very similar with his family, the Monochrome

"This sort of reminds me of my own family before I left..."

/idk how to summarizes his personality in a words, but the hints there... Whoever in CPC BLR please help us at wiki

Leland has a fondness for chess, a passion he shares with King Jack. -> this the original main reason I make this post

So uhh I am not remember the exact episodes, but he clearly loves chess as: at the amusement park arc he played with Jack while pastel-plaid kids go to the town, when Fred didn't come back in time and his brothers wondering about his whereabouts - in his hand he has chess-related book, and at the gala basically he has round of chess game which he wins with the move of - the serpent's gambit

^ Leland explains his "Serpent's Gambit". The biggest foreshadowing imho that the Giant Serpent of Frederick's recurring dream is 99.99% likely to be Leland as his own father. The Plaid King that canonically at the episode 133 depict real people of his world as chess pieces by creepily crafting characteristics of them - the hair, the color motif, even the thread between Jack and the late Leelathae

Here more about the referenced move, Great Snake Variation as the one that likely refers to 'Serpent's Gambit' actually is

^ this an image that I upload long ago but not sure to put where at wiki, and I just FORGOR although I keep analyzing and referencing it intensely on various cpc posts that I made

In nutshell, this panel shown that Leland consider the people of his plan (Blaine, Maria, Lance, Lorena, Frederick, Gwen, Jack, Leelathae | Lilyth) as his chess pieces. For his years grand plan [explanation after this] - and in that chess game, he forgot/not aware to consider important variables that wrecks his plan somehow: Isolde (his 'wife' and the Plaid queen), Jamie (Gwen's twin brother as the first genuine shipper of gwenderick), and the CPC as the entirety. The first two, Jamie and Isolde + Leopold unexpectedly became important reason for the major 'chess piece' Frederick to breaks free from his plan which to make Fred stucks at the hole 'until the Plaid troops come back to bringing the kidnapped Pastel Princesses'. The 'chess piece' that warns the role of supporter in the CPC story, the CPC itself as entirety to hurry saves the princesses of the Pastel Kingdom

more about interpretation of messed up chess pieces

All of the 'pawns' involved not aware that they are merely pawn pieces in his plan. The quote on that panel in my own retake honestly tragic. Leland with his fickleness of his heart's sky not truly understand what love, what true love is actually... He thoughts that love is simply meeting someone on the opposite gender (if his HC being repressed gay is the truth, so he try to make heterosexual pairings as WARNING FOR MINOR FP EP 162 SPOILER When Jack happy for the incoming playdates of their future 'daughters', Leland instantly tells that he will get lots of sons) of three princes as his sons bethroted to marry Jack's daughters of the rule of three (somehow - that likely making the plaid-pastel pairings has bonding interest, the oldest is music-the middle is army and sports- the youngest books) fall in love and 'live happily ever after' but like Prez said, no one can't define what's own happiness is except oneself... Prez is happy to be aroace, Gwen is happy to could be with Frederick romantically - and that's totally valid source of happiness.. no one can't say otherwise, not even themself

"It's easy to forget once we step outside this forest, but we each define our own standards. And for me, I don't want to be a good princess and settle down with anyone. I never have...!!" -> that's my own interpretation of Prez quote, she's canonically aroace but know that the standard - of happiness.. it's defined by oneself

A character to me depicted by themself (espc from their actions and inner thoughts) and by others (as relationships to anyone they're interact, their family - friends - collagues etc). And Leland is truly a very complex character to cipher, to put his description on the wiki. I am afraid as I might be too subjective if writing about him... and I think I desperately need another's opinion + this an OPEN CHALLENGE to delegate the impossible wiki works, with writing about Leland from the canon hints that I spread on. Just rereading the CPC guys, you become horrified when knowing the context of Leland's abuse that actually clear since ep 16!

/ adios while leaving the scare bomb.. of the truths

[meikostan]

It is literally impossible for me to shut up about vocaloid songs i like so i'm going to list a couple of songs and talk about why I like them so much and why you should like them too (to be updated continuously because once again I'll never shut up)

HONORABLE MENTION: The 13 minute, 64-song My Favorite Vocaloid Medley. I have had the lyrics to this beast memorized since I was 12 years old. It warms my heart to know that people are still making covers with this specific medley. I'll link to some of my favorites. Original song version UTAU medley (the only part i dislike is homokure's part idk why but it enrages me) The funny version NEKSM cover Abandoned UTAU cover Bonus: my playlist of each song from the medley in order

Tokyo Teddy Bear - Neru

Literally the song that got me into vocaloid in 5th grade. I was already aware of vocaloid and generally had positive feelings towards it because i had seen the World is Mine concert years before (it had blown my little 7 year old brain btw) but this song is the game changer. If you're a vocaloid fan you have probably listened to this song before so I won't spend too much time trying to pitch the song and instead talk about its impact on me. This bad boy has been with me for at this point nearly half of my life. It's one of the few vocaloid songs I listened to before I ever started learning Japanese (side note remind me to make a post about this too so I can share my numerous resources). Also quick shoutout to JubyPhonic for the line "ends justify the seams" in their english cover, fucking amazing. Anyway, this was also the song that cemented Rin as my favorite vocaloid in middle school (1, she has the range, 2, she's just like me fr <---suffering).

Honorable mention: Alfakyun's cover

2. 3年C組14番窪園チヨコの入閣 (Year 3 Class C No. 14 Kubozono Chiyoko's Joining of the Cabinet)

I have mentioned this before. Books do not make me cry. Songs do not make me cry. Movies have made me cry exactly once when I was 6 years old, and after that never again. This song is one of the few things to have ever made me produce genuine tears. You can tell how much I like it cause both this blog and my main's pfps are from this song. It's the ending, it gets me every time. But it's also the buildup of the actual song that makes the moment. It's hard for me to word exactly why, I've retyped and reworded this sentence many times. There's something about the contrast between the goofy dancing cats and how quietly Rin is singing. But also how, save for the students and cats, there is a near total lack of color (with of couse the bright orange being exclusive to Chiyoko and the cats). And how the song still has a kind of energy to it. I almost don't want to 'spoil' the ending but it's such a big part of why this song has the impact it does on me. Go watch the MV if you haven't yet, I'll wait... 3... 2... 1... ...Now do you get it?

3. The Beast - Spectacle-P (original video, not on spectacle-p's channel; this 2021 remake is, however, on their official channel)

You already know i'm a certified beasthead. There was a time in my life (which went on for more than a few months) where I would spend hours listening to various covers of this song on repeat. She means everything to me. Brief overview of the story: Singer (the beast) isolates themself in a tower of their own loneliness, when a human comes along and breaks down those walls so to speak (and then dies, badly). But now the beast realizes they do actually need human connection, and the song ends with them returning to society, waiting for the day they'll meet their loved one again. I think on some level I relate to the beast. I don't know how much of my isolation is self inflicted and how much is just a natural part of who I am. Maybe even the "natural" part is something that I just incorporated into myself, like the beast (who was formerly human).

Aside from the emotional impact of the lyrics, another reason I love this song so much is because of the composition, even divorced from the lyrics. A not insignificant portion of the covers I repeatedly listen to are literally just piano covers. It's so captivating and well made. I don't know if this is just because I have the original lyrics engraved into my skull or what but somehow even without words the song imparts the same bittersweet feelings.

Honorable mentions: Hinami Mei's cover My The Beast playlist of every iteration of The Beast that I can find One time I remade The Beast with cat meows + oboe + piano

4. Monochrome Shangri-la - MASA Works DESIGN

Definitely not the first song you think of when Masa comes to mind. This song is less overtly dark as his other works, being based off of Kenji Miyazawa's 1934 novel Night on the Galactic Express (銀河鉄道の夜), a pretty widely known and loved novel. This isn't even the only vocaloid song to be based on it - sasakure.UK's "For Campanella" comes to mind. This is also the reason I actually read the book (well, read part of and then finished via audiobook for the daily listening challenge.) But yeah, no gore or necrophilia or anything, just fun times on the space train and then also Campanella dies.

To me the song at times feels intentionally overwhelming, veering from a fun bouncing energy to the sense that suddenly everything is happening at once. Or maybe just being overwhelmed by the "many colored sky", like through your journey in space you're just hit with sight after sparkling sight. It is, after all, "just you, our dreams, the stars, and me". The loss of Campanella (as implied through the lyrics, though he's never actually named) transforms this into a much more frantic feeling.

5. No One Likes a Wallflower - MonochroMenace

I need you to drop what you're doing and listen to this song right fucking now. I think it may be my favorite engloid song. Literally this rocks so hard, there was a point in time where I listened to it multiple times daily for a month straight. Which may be a little surprising considering it only came out like 4 months ago. It's catchy, has an awesome MV, and the lyrics are fun (and honestly kind of call me out x) ) Despite that it doesn't ever cross into being actually mean-spirited toward the people being described (ie, people who prefer to sit by the sidelines in a party, or people who feel forced into doing so). It hasn't been a long enough time for me to say that this is life changing like the other songs listed but genuinely I have been so obsessed with this song that if I don't recommend it here I'll explode. Badly.

[blackberrysummerblog]

hii <3

2, 21, 23, 29 and 78 for the ask game. sorry if they're too many ^^'

Thank you so much for the ask @imagineacoolerusername! I apologize for not responding sooner, because I’m really excited someone took me up on the ask game (and it’s never too many, I love thinking more about what/how I’m writing).

2) Where do you get your fic ideas?

I’m similar to a lot of people on this one—my ideas come from things that I see or hear around me. It goes hand in hand with the first question in the ask list, which is “do you daydream a lot before you write” and I am a *huge* daydreamer. I generally do get an idea of a full story realized quickly enough that I don’t spend a lot of time dreaming before I write (haha…she says after literal months of WIP posts from the same unpublished fic, lol). I daydream constantly about my hyperfixations though, and I just let my mind wander wherever it feels like. There are stories in my head I would never actually post because they’ve become OOC and self-indulgent to a comical degree, but I get pleasure out of thinking about them and so I let my thoughts drift there when they want to. I often get some good material that way for stories that I actually do want to share with people.

For my crucible marriage AU, the idea came from a throwaway line in Carry On about Watford having possibly started as a mages’ settlement: I started thinking about an AU where that was still the case, and there would still be the school but it would start for students at a younger age than in canon. Assuming the kids mostly went home in the evenings, the crucible wouldn’t need to assign roommates, and instead could do another job like…magickally determining one’s spouse. That was the thought process, and because I am *feral* for arranged marriage/married-at-first-sight stories, the fic has been living at the front, middle, and back of my brain ever since.

21) Do you prefer writing chaptered fics or one-shots?

I don’t have a strong preference; it just depends on what the story requires. I’ll know when I begin writing if a story is going to be long and plotty enough to require chapters; in this fandom I’ve done entirely one-shots because I’m leaning heavily on soft vibes without enough conflict to need more than one post to tell. The crucible marriage fic will definitely be chaptered, though

23) Is writing the beginning, middle, or end of the story easiest? Hardest?

It depends where it starts in my head, i.e. the part I’m trying to get to. If the idea starts off largely in middle of the story I want to tell, then I need to figure out a beginning that can segue into that. It’s usually not super hard, but then again, I mostly enjoy doing domestic-style fluff and cutesy flirting, so it’s not an enormous exercise to intro that. I’m having a harder time with the current AU’s beginning, especially since at this point I’ve dragged it all out so long that I want it to be just right. The hardest part for me is almost always the ending, by which I don’t mean how it all ends up, but the last sentence. I’m pretty weak with last lines, and the *absolute fucking worst* at titles. I think both feel like high-pressure, sum-your-precious-baby-up-in-very-few-words situations to me. I am flat out disgusted with myself for some of the titles I’ve gone with after throwing up my hands.

29) What’s something about your writing that you’re proud of?

I like my dialogue. I think it flows pretty well and is often cute or funny. And I think I do a decent job with shoehorning my contrived plot points in. The example I’m thinking of is the field trip fic I wrote (I can’t even bring myself to namecheck the title, did I mention how bad I am at them?) where the entire story basically hinged on getting Simon to have to sit on Baz’s lap on the bus. It was easy enough to assign them as seatmates, and spilling something on the seat is a good reason for Simon to not be able to use it, but because it’s a magickal universe there really shouldn’t have been any reason they couldn’t spell the seat dry. Magic had to have been disallowed on the bus, which let me write a nice little bit about how Simon had gotten it banned on an earlier trip (and also to reflect on how few field trips he’s even been on, awwww). Anyway, I thought it was funny and just about killed myself when Baz quipped “here comes the not-so-magic-school bus” to humiliate Simon in front of the class. Pretty much everything that happened after that was just as contrived, and I thought it was hilarious.

78) What motivates you during the writing process?

It’s a compulsion for the flesh to become word. I write even the stories that I would never post because they’re too dirty or too personal or too badly conceived to share, because once they’re described in words it provides a kind of release for me.

There’s a short story by William H. Gass called “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” and I really recommend it for achingly real and emotive lines, but the one I’m thinking of is this, said of the narrator’s neighbor: “Nevertheless, I keep wondering whether, given time, I might not someday find a figure in our language which would serve him faithfully, and furnish his poverty and loneliness richly out.”

I want that when I write, to find words that will mean something to myself and someone else, that will hold a moment or experience up in the light in such a way that it’s viewed tenderly and with generosity.

Thanks again for asking; I hope my answers weren’t too long winded! If anyone else wants to play you can reblog this post:

[b33srcoolff]

Mornings with you are my favorite mornings| spencer reid

a/n: so i always lose the motivation to write if you guys cant tell but im back and i really just wanted to write a little blurb so here ya go!

My eyes fluttered open and i that nerdy boy , I loved these morning when i woke up and saw his face, that same face that i had been crushing on since middle school before he moved and went to high school, ya know at first i hated it because out of all people they had to move my spencer the dorkie cute one that was always getting picked on, but then i realized i should be glad for him, glad that he's getting away from the horrible people at this awful school. When I finally made it out of my long train of thoughts, I realized he was awake. He spoke with his morning voice, the voice that I lived for “ whatcha thinking about '' . God, he sounded so adorable, “ nothing, nothing at all.” I knew he knew that that was a lie. “Well hate to break it to you but the female brain actually makes it impossible to not think, even when you are sleeping so that is one big fat lie” he smiled at the end of his sentence. He was so cute my swoon was all ruined when i realized that we both had work “ugh i don't wanna work i want to stay here all day and do absolutely nothing” i said while giving him a kiss and pulling me closer “sadly we have to or else we would not have a home”  i rolled my eyes “ugh whatever genius boy” as I rolled out of bed and l let out one big sigh as i made it to our closet and picked out a regular outfit because although spencer had finished school early i was still in college getting my MLIS degree and had to work after my classes.  After a while of being in my own thoughts i felt a kiss on my cheek “can you hand me my button up sweetheart” I reached for his button up and handed it to him “ thank you love” i replied in a small “welcome” once i had finished getting ready i realized i was gonna be late to my first class “i rushed to the door and went for my keys when i had seen that spencer already had them and was waiting for me. “Almost gave me a heart attack babe” I said, getting rid of the horror that i had on my face, “well that wouldn't be good, now come on we got places to baby”. God I wish we could spend all day together but we have lifes to attend to sadly. I said goodbye to Spencer and hopped out of the car. 

Ugh that was such a rushed ending but my computer is literally broken so we just have to deal with it. But should I do a part two and have one of them set up like a little date? Maybe even some angst???? Also you guys  are prob gonna get a double post so yippie!!!

[pollywiltse]

This was the post that was sitting in my drafts that talks at the end about the Andrés' making money in the West Indies.

I was going to make a post about Walter Ewer. So, Walter and John Ewer were friends of the Andrés' as kids, and one of them is mentioned in one of the letters to Anna Seward because he and André and André's sisters are all hanging out together while André is writing to her. Everyone assumes it was Walter, which is reasonable, but technically I'm not sure if we actually know because André just calls him "Mr. Ewer" and "my friend Ewer", unless it's like with girls where the oldest one is "Miss Lastname" and the younger ones are "Miss Firstname Lastname", so "Mr. Ewer" would have to be the older one, but then of course that would require knowing who the older brother is and I'm not 100% sure we know that either.

Anyway, the reason probably everyone assumes it's Walter is because in André's will, he leaves both Walter and John 100 pounds each, but he also leaves Walter his watch (which never happened; it went missing until 1923, at which point Walter was long dead, and then got stolen from the NY Historical Society in 1975) and he wants Walter to be the one to go through his papers and destroy his cringe teenage poetry and his amateur pornography. (Ok, he might not have phrased it exactly like that.) And there's at least one letter to his mother where he talks about getting a letter from Walter (after he's been exchanged and he's complaining about how he hasn't had any news about the family in a year and he says that Walter's letter is so terse he doesn't know how the family is). So he seems to have been better friends with Walter than with John.

So Sargent thinks Walter Ewer was the son of William Ewer who was a director of the Bank of England in the 1780s. So the time (William Ewer was born in 1720, so old enough to have kids who would be André's contemporaries) and social class (upper middle class international merchant) and I think location (my knowledge of London neighborhoods is minimal, unsurprisingly) check out, but I can't find anything about William Ewer's wife and kids on the open internet, and I don't particularly want to make an account on the genealogy website that might have that information. (This is a constant problem with wikipedia - "tHeIr fAmIlY dOeSn'T mAtTeR uNlEsS tHeY'rE fAmOuS iN tHeIr oWn rIgHt" thanks for writing like 80% if not more of the world's female population out of history, assholes, and also people's family members are important parts of their lives and you don't have the space constraints that a physical encyclopedia does. I've literally seen wikipedia pages for guys with multiple wives where as far as you can tell from wikipedia they never married.)

And also Sargent sent me on a (brief) wild goose chase looking for the list of directors of the London Assurance Company because he claimed that André's younger brother - in contradiction to everyone else - had married and had a legitimate son who predeceased him and was a director of the London Assurance Company (not in that order), until I realized that William André died at age 41 or 42, so his son would have had to have been very precocious to become a director of an insurance company and then predecease his father at such a young age. Unless he did do it the other way around and we've suddenly ended up in a novel where the Andrés are actually vampires and Our Hero has to figure out why so many people in Tappan have been dying of a strange kind of anemia. But I digress.

So I don't entirely trust Sargent. (I mean, there are a lot of reasons not to entirely trust Sargent, but this is definitely one of them.)

Ronald also thinks that William Ewer is Walter's father, but Ronald is a nightmare and I can't see the sources he cites in that sentence (the best option looks like a newspaper archive website that you have to pay for and I'm not sure I love you that much, John André). And the sentence itself is "William, the father, was cousin to Lord Shaftesbury, director of the Bank of England[32] and, since 1765, a Member of Parliament[33]." (32 is the General Evening Post on Nov. 16, 1780 and 33 is the Middlesex Journal on May 6, 1769.) And I just know how Ronald cites and I have a feeling that neither of those citations actually list William Ewer's kids - at worst the first citation may not even say that he's Shaftesbury's cousin, just that Shaftesbury was a director of the Bank of England. So I don't entirely trust Ronald either.

Anyway I have my own crackpot theory, which is that it's this Walter Ewer, since he's also the right age (there's other sources that give him a birth year of 1747) and the right social class and I think approximately the right part of London, and he has a brother named John (though I guess actually we're just assuming Walter and John are brothers), and there are older members of the family named Walter and John, which matters because in André's will they're referred to as Walter Ewer Jr and John Ewer Jr.

Ewer is a disgustingly common name though. Watch it be a completely different guy.

And yes, that is a database of British people who owned slaves. I couldn't find the Andrés in there, which surprised me at first because I know they were making a lot of their money from Grenada; there's a letter from André written in at the end of 1779 which is referenced in Hatch (who thinks it's to one of his uncles) and Flexner, where he's very worried about how the French capturing Grenada is going to affect his mother's and sisters' income and he's talking about sending some of his pay home to them. It also screwed over his ability to buy a major's commission. (Actually, he also mentions it in his last letter to Clinton - this is why he's asking him to sell his commission and give the money to his mother and sisters.) I'm not exactly clear on how the Andrés were making their money - whether it was owning land that they rented out, buying and selling land, or lending money or some combination of the above. Ronald honestly should be the best source because he spends a lot of time on the family business, and he makes it sound like it's a combination of the last two, so we'll go with that, though when I checked his book, he also sort of made it sound like the Andrés mostly pulled out of Grenada several years before John went to America and they can't have or the capture of Grenada wouldn't have affected his income that much. But anyway even if the Andrés didn't own slaves, they were almost certainly making money off people who did and Ronald claims that John worked on the Grenada accounts during the two-ish years that he was in the family business, which seems highly likely, unlike a lot of the other stuff Ronald claims (see p 27 and the 1772 letter from John to his uncle that Ronald is quoting fragments of). (Also I assume he mocked the Americans for going on about freedom when they owned slaves because it's low-hanging fruit and how could one not, but the one quote I know of where he talks about the British freeing slaves that escaped to them - in the middle of ch 22 in Flexner, p 300 in my copy - he just seems to think it's a good tactic to screw over the Americans economically. I don't think there's reason to believe he had strong feelings on the matter.)

If you want to argue that John would have become abolitionist-leaning if he had survived, since he was close friends with at least one person who was (and actually I need to see what Anna Seward's circle thought about slavery because Thomas Day, slimy as he was, was also an abolitionist, and André might have still been friends with Anna, so they would have influenced him too, though I don't know if he knew Day very well?), I feel like that's reasonable, but I also feel like it's reasonable to believe that he would have been like, "but abolishing slavery will screw over a bunch of my other friends. Why do you want to screw over my friends?" He doesn't strike me as someone who was really interested in thinking about politics - in fact one of the Anna letters has four lines of doggerel about how he doesn't care about current events, though to be fair he was nineteen and trying to impress girls - so I feel like his opinions would probably depend on his friends and family's opinions.

There's a lot of things where I think, "André would probably be smart enough to do that, but I don't think he was interested."

[voluptuarian]

I'm so fucking tired... not physically (for once) but just like Of everything. I feel like nothing I do accomplishes anything, like I'm going nowhere, like I'm constantly on the edge of some disaster, and like I have no control over any facet of my life.

I realized in the middle of my stats class, which is always a miserable experience, as I was being faced with algebra yet again, that I have been grappling helplessly and inescapably with math for probably longer than most my classmates have been alive. It's supposed to end someday, and yet here I am, 35 and almost graduated and here's fucking algebra once again.

I'm desperate for money, so I try and get more/alternative work, but either it's dependent on others and so will never happen, or I literally do not have time to do it in. I try and sell things, and nobody will take them. Even when I try to buy things I can't find them, or afford them, or people selling them just ignore me, for no reason, which is why I still don't have a goddamn sofa. I can't even rely on people close to me to help me do the most basic things I ask them to.

College has made the passage of time feel like the end of the fucking world anyway, but now that I have one term's length in which to accomplish everything I've ever needed to do in my life every day that passes feels like a death sentence. Like getting to the halfway point of February fills me with absolute dread. I'm working so hard to get ahead on as much as I can in all my classes so I can avoid a backlog with finals, because if I have to take an incomplete on anything that will put my graduation in jeopardy, so I live like a madwoman now. I still have an incomplete from last term that I need to finish, but I'm too busy with my other courses to deal with it now, so I'll have to spend my spring break doing that. Never mind I need to get my name changed beforehand, and figure out what I'm even going to do after graduation-- I'll be out of money forever then, so I have to either have an internship set up, or be going straight into graduate school (not that I have any idea what I'm doing in that regard) or have something else set up. And any of those things requires some other person to respond to me, answer my questions, choose or approve me, so they're all obviously doomed, because I'm a like a non-person passing through life-- I already know any situation whatsoever which requires the approval or involvement of anyone but myself (which is like 90% of life) is doomed from the start, because even if they're not actively working against me out of some innate hostility that I inspire in half the people I interact with, they just feel no need to do anything or make any effort or even respond because they just don't actually register that I exist I guess. How am I supposed to be even educationally or professionally successful in a situation like that, let alone like ever have friends or a significant other or any kind of rewarding relationship whatsoever? (Not that I would ever have the time to spend on those lol)

Meanwhile I have to choose between buying things I need for my still-mostly-unmoved-into apartment, or spend my widow's mite donating to some new crisis that none of the powers that be care to do anything about. And I do this hopelessly-- I keep seeing posts that are like "don't lose hope for Palestine!" "I know Palestine will be free in my lifetime!" I don't believe that; I don't have hope. Palestine hasn't been free in my lifetime, it hasn't been free in my parent's lifetime, why would I think anything would change now? Some of my earliest memories are hearing about suicide bombings on busses in the 90s-- I've always known this situation would never end well, and I don't have any hope for it now when it's gotten worse-- I give what I can and do what I can and try to make an impact for a few individuals for awhile, but I don't have any hope for the future. And meanwhile, anything I do for one cause takes away from what I can do for any other cause elsewhere. If I give to Palestine today, I can't give to Ukraine tomorrow, if I give to Ukraine today I can't donate to a go fund me in America tomorrow...

(Let's not even get into the stress of the election, and what the fuck I'm going to do if somehow Biden doesn't win... like I will need to be out of the country ASAP then and don't even know I'll manage that...)

And on top of all this I live with a landlord who's remodeling our entire building while we still live in it, BECAUSE WHY WOULD I EVER HAVE ONE NICE THING so waking up at 8 am to insanely loud construction sounds and endlessly yelling and cussing workers is just a normal part of my life now. I will come home after a night shift and hope and pray that I can sleep for 4 hours before something wakes me up. I have to put signs up on my door every day with "do not disturb" or "on zoom please be quiet" or "no entry before 10 am" just to try and have a normal life, and I will STILL get people pounding on my door trying to get in regardless. I had to email my landlord just today going "no, having your incapable workers try to fix the terrible paint job they already spent four days inconveniencing me with on Monday morning at 8 am will not work for me, since I will have just come home from a night shift-- they have to wait till at least the afternoon to barge into my house and intentionally bring the value of my apartment down." I have no autonomy, no control, no normalcy, no routine, and no privacy in my own home, even when I live alone. That's more than I deserve to have apparently.

Everything in my life is just pointless, and meaningless, and completely out of my control no matter what I do, and I spend every hour of the day in dread of one thing or another. I feel like somebody turned on a laugh track the day I was born and it won't turn off until I die. And it's always been like this! It's always going to be like this! The situations change but the outcome is always the same and nothing I do ever solves it and I'm so FUCKING SICK OF IT

[relaxandtakealoadoff]

Well a couple days before Christmas my Best Friend, and I don’t mean labeling her that if she wasn’t. She was the one friend in my life to no matter what was happening was there for me.

My dearest friend of 23 years. I would go to call her and I would hear her yelling as I dialed the phone because she was also calling me at the same time. We would finish each other sentences and call each other 2 or 3 times a day. We lived on opposite sides of the country; She in Seattle and I Virginia.

I would go visit her every few years. She recently moved to Phoenix and I had the pleasure of going to stay with her and her Hubby for 2 weeks. Anyway long story short……..

(((A few days before Christmas I talked to her like normal and we had some tears and some laughter as always and I said I love you, Gnite.)))

She went to bed and never woke up.

I am in a position now that I can’t get past the mourning and my heart hurts so bad. I have been in the grocery store or just talking to my family and randomly just bust out in tears. I feel my life is over.

We were Soul Mates.

We loved two movies that summed up our friendship,

Harold and Maude and,

What Dreams May come, with Robin Williams.

We always said when we both finally die we would be like the movie What Dreams May Come….at the end where the married couple who were soul mates, finally got to Heaven after going through Purgatory and Hell. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s a beautiful movie.)

Anyway the couple are in Heaven and decide to come back and be reborn and having the chance to live and meet each other all over again. They get their chance and are both at a pond playing with their sail boats when his hits hers and they sink.

Anyway they look at each other with a glare and realize …then she offers to share her PB&J sand which with him as they laugh.

I’m not sure what I’m going for while posting all this in the vast emptiness of the web but, maybe getting my thoughts out will help me not to literally burst out in tears when someone says hi to me or when I’m in the middle of doing something important.

Life just got really hard for me, those who I thought were my friends I have sat around the past few years and just watched their behavior or if they would call me or if I had a strong friendship with them. There will never be another Maude.

Anyone have any advice? I doubt I’ll get any because Very few would have read all the above. If you have read it, I want to thank you reader for taking the time out and read something that meant and took; a lot out of me.

[blackbackedjackal]

Since I've been accused of "cherry-picking," I'll go ahead post the full thread:

So this initially started in out in our #dev channel, which we were using for work conversations. The Monday prior (this incident took place on a Wednesday), we had a verbal meeting about a potential Kickstarter campaign. Dog asked, "Who's going to run the Kickstarter?" I responded, "me and Rex," which she agreed to. So, for the next day and a half, I did some research into first-time KS campaigns.

During that Monday meeting, DogBlud expressed that she wasn't comfortable with physical rewards due to us not meeting deadlines (which was her fault) but said she could be convinced otherwise. As I was researching first-time campaigns, I realized that we likely needed to offer physical rewards for the goal we had in mind. To try and meet her in the middle and prep her for the work conversation later that day, I wanted to suggest we plan for a physical reward as a stretch goal. That way, if we didn't make that amount, we weren't locked into making anything, but all of the first-time campaign suggestions I read, one of the main suggestions was to plan stretch goals ahead of time. I had talked about it with my other business partner, King, between Monday and Wednesday since he has been doing research for our own business, and he told me (with evidence) that we were likely to not reach our initial goal without offering a physical reward. I've done small orders of pins & stickers in the past, and figured so long as the order was limited to 50-100, I could do the fulfillment since I've been selling online for over a decade and felt comfortable doing the shipping myself or potentially working with a fulfillment center.

It's important to note that I brought this up as a suggestion because Dog expressly said that she was still open to the idea. I was just trying to prep for the evening meeting to give her a heads up so we could talk about it more in-depth. This is how she responded:

Later that evening, she didn't show up for our scheduled working hours. So me, Rex, and Ependa were sitting in the voice channel, and I was tasked by Rex (our project manager at the time) with drafting up a contract. I was referencing other contracts and reading over the legal jargon, and typing up a draft of the contract that we could review when Dog decided to show up for working hours.

This is what was said in the #no-mic chat while I was typing:

And then she went to bed.

The End.

So no, that was not a cherry-picked screenshot. That is the full context. She left for about 4 hours, came back into a different text channel than where the initial conversation started, dropped the r-slur, and left until about 1am which is where my next series of screenshots picks up. The only context that was missing was a conversation in a separate chat that had ended because she went to an appointment.

She had openly complained about, "How easy it was to cherry-pick screenshots to make someone look bad." So the first evidence I dropped was, in fact, the one screenshot that needed no additional context. She was gone for 4 hours, came back into the chat to say that, and then left again. It was out of pocket and completely uncalled for, not to mention how aggro she was being when I had yet to finish typing up my initial suggestion. Again, this started in a work channel. You don't interrupt the speaker at a business presentation after the first sentence. What started off as her being unprofessional turned into her digging her heels in on a project she asked me and Rex to work on independently, saying she wasn't being included when I brought this up in the chat to keep her updated with what Rex and I were planning. I was quite literally doing the thing she asked me to do, and she said a slur to demean herself because ????

Had a big talk today with my therapist about what was going on behind the scenes with the studio drama that validated my feelings and suspicions from the beginning.

I feel a lot more secure in myself in how I handled the situation and can confidently move forward.

[delphinidin4]

Somebody asked a question about valid readings of literature (I have a doctorate in literature and have taught it on the college level), and i had a migraine this morning, so i’m sorry if this comes out a little coherent, but i’mma post it anyway. here’s the thing i think people don’t always get about the study of literature:

1. there isn’t just one correct reading of anything in literature

2.the bar for something being a valid reading is significantly lower than you might think.

What constitutes a “valid reading” is ultimately a personal decision by the person reading the literary criticism: do you think the person do the criticism/analysis made their case? If so, their reading could be considered “valid”, even if you don’t personally agree with it. If not, their reading might not be considered “valid”, even if you think they have interesting points. The point in writing literary analysis/criticism is to make your case well enough that people have to concede that your argument is valid even if they don’t really believe it themselves.

For instance, there are elaborate analyses of books done in Freudian analysis: taking one of Freud’s psychological theories and applying it to the work of literature. You might think Freud’s psychological theories are bullshit, in which case you might hate/disbelieve those literary readings, but if they hold together well enough, they might be considered valid.

this is also where “death of the author” comes in. because you can never truly prove exactly what the author meant to do/say with their literature, even if they tell you so! Poe wrote an essay on his writing technique, in which he claimed that when writing The Raven he started out with the bird being a parrot and then decided a raven would be more metal and better in keeping with the tone of the poem. And a huge number of literary scholars (including myself) think Poe was probably talking out of his ass there, and just knew/learned that ravens could be taught to speak, and was like, “Hey, that gives me an idea for a HELLA gothic poem,” and went and wrote it. And then later folks were like, “prove to us that you’re a REAL writer? What’s your method?” and poe was like, “Oh yes, I think everything through very clearly and rationally” rather than tellign the truth and being like, “this sounded rad so i wrote it that way because of feels.”

Also, sometimes people will write something that, for instance, reveals their subconscious beliefs about race. They might not realize when they’re writing it that their writing does that, but other people can point it out later, and that can be a valid reading. Sometimes the author doesn’t recognize the ways in which their unconscious beliefs and prejudices manifest themselves in their work. And in those readings, it really doesn’t matter what the author meant: it just matters what the work SAYS. Or might be read to say.

There’s also the fact that we can never truly get inside the heads of the original audience of a work once enough time has passed. it’s great to learn something about, say, Elizabethan English culture and use that to make a reading of something Shakespeare said, and those can be totally valid (and very interesting!) readings. but at the same time, one of shakespeare’s plays is going to feel completely different to a modern audience than it did to an audience at the time. For instance, changing attitudes toward race and rape and sexual equality can really change the way we read a work that’s only a couple of decades old. A reading can explain the way the original audience might have read it, or the way we read it now, or both. All of those can be valid readings, as long as it takes things like changing audience into account (for instance, if there’s a concept that’s brand new in world thought, and you’re trying to apply it to a four-hundred-year-old piece of literature, you should probably mention somewhere in your analysis that people didn’t think this way at the time the work was written. Soemtimes you can get away with not saying these disclaimers directly; other times you need ot make them. No hard and fast rules.)

In order to make a valid reading, you should make sure that you have lots of evidence from a text to back up your reading. If possible, you can support your reading with outside sources (explanations of historical cultural beliefs, for instance). You can base your reading on a theoretical framework (eg Freudian literary theory, Marxist literary theory, feminist literary theory). If your argument holds together, doesn’t have huge holes in it, and satisfies your readers, they may declare it a valid reading.

an example:

on the surface, Romeo and Juliet can be read as a dramatic tragic piece, made to move the audience, who hopefully may be identifying with romeo and/or juliet. the story is sad, we’re sad for them, we enjoy having a good cry and the catharsis that comes with it. that’s a pretty basic interpretation.

i’ve seen another interpretation, from John Greene on Youtube, that argues that Shakespeare set the play in Italy because the English at the time considered Italians to be hot-headed and vengeful and they’d never believe a revenge plot of this kind if it were set in England. And also that Romeo and Juliet were made to be teenagers in the story because only teengers would do something this insane for love, because teenage emotions are extremely heightened, and that part of the reason this is a tragedy is because NONE of this had to happen if somebody who wasn’t a teenager (or apparently wasn’t Italian lol) had stepped in and managed to impart some reason to everybody.

Both of these reading are totally valid. Both of them can also co-exist: they can both be correct at once. I can be feeling bad for romeo and juliet and be sad for them, and at the same time, part of my brain can be like, “Holy Fuck, Friar Lawrence, what the fucking fuck made you think that was good advice??!! also, kids, stop what you’re doing for five seconds and remember that you’re fifteen and thirteen and the world isn’t ending i promise.” Not only are these both valid readings, they can both be valid at once. they are not mutually exclusive.

My post-migraine brain doesn’t know whether any of this made sense or not, and honestly, part of the problem is that there are no hard-and-fast rules about literary analysis. but i hope that helped? 

[bookshelfdreams]

the murder attempt though (about which Stede is nonchalant to a concerning degree, but that's another post)

-- WHERES THE POST OP

here <3 thank you for asking :)

cw for discussion of suicidal thoughts

Tell me, if someone were to confess to you they were planning to murder you, burn your face off and steal your identity, what would be your response?

Oh.

And, um. Is that still on the cards, or -

<- If it's this, you might be Stede Bonnet.

Throughout the show, whenever Stede learns his life is in danger he's surprisingly - chill about it. It happens twice in the very first episode. The first time when Buttons tells him about the mutiny and he takes it as a performance review ("What I'm hearing is, they could do with more structure."), even though mutiny definitey meand "Your crew wants to kill you". The second time is when Olu has to ask if he wants to live twice before Stede gives an answer that sort of approaches affirmative ("That's a tough question"? "I think so"???? What kind of answers are those Stede, please go to therapy).

Learning about the mutiny plot doesn't change the way he treats his crew. Ed tells him about the murder attempt, and it doesn't change Stede's feelings towards him at all. Mary tries to stab him with a skewer and it literally fixes their relationship.

And of course it's comedic but all of this is not how a normal, well-adjusted person should react, probably. It doesn't strike me as something a person who values their own life a lot would do. And Stede - doesn't. He's not actively suicidal; he's not attempting to take his own life nor is this something he thinks about. I don't even really know what to diagnose him with here, but maybe some sort of passive suicidal ideation? Because he really just seems careless. Not in a way were he's reckless, he's very conscious of his physical safety. But when someone actively tries to kill him he's prepared to just kinda let it happen, and he doesn't hold grudges about it.

Even in ep9, when he receives his death sentence, he's like "Yeah, that's fair, I've been a horrible person, I deserve this". It's so odd - he used to be haunted by Badminton's ghost but we resolved that in ep2. Yes, leaving your family in the middle of the night is a dick move, but he was really unhappy there and the death penalty seems a little extreme. There's not really anything leading up to this that would justify his immediate acceptance.

Except.

It has been there from the start, throughout the show. And the execution is where it ends.

Because as soon as things are getting serious - when he's blindfolded in front of a firing squad - he realizes something.

Oh God, I don't want to die!

The thing about being suicidal is that most people don't actually want to die. They just want a way out of a situation they find unbearable. The difference between a failed and a successful suicide attempt is whether or not the person attempting realizes this in time to save themselves.

This is an important moment for Stede, because this is when he realizes dying will not solve his problems. He has to "face the music"; but his death isn't the way to do it.

He's hurt people, but dying won't fix that. And life - even his! - is always worth living.

[recurring-polynya]

Do I mind if I ask how you approach writing longer fic? I've always struggled to write anything more than maybe two chapters long and I'm curious if you have a particular method to how you approach such stories.

Thank you so much for this ask! I absolutely love it when people ask me for writing advice because it makes me feel like a Smart Person Who Knows Things.

Before we start, here is one grain of salt to take all of this with: I have a naturally long-form brain. It is very hard for me to write something less than 1k. Short fiction is great, and there is nothing wrong with sticking to short things if that's what your brain likes to do.

So. You have decided to write a story. This is going to focus on "stories". Some people write fic that's more freeform or whatever, I am not going to cover that. What I mean by a story is this:

It starts

Some stuff happens

It ends

It is highly probable that your story contains a change of state, which could be that a villain is defeated, or a goal is reached, but it could also be that character falls in love with another, or someone learns to like broccoli.

I like to start out by completing the sentence, "This is a story where _______". This is basically like coming up with a summary for an ao3 post, except that it doesn't need to be catchy. Lots of different kinds of things could go in that blank! It could literally be what happens: This is a story where Ichigo goes back in time and punches young Aizen in the nose. It could be about what you want to explore: This is a story where Hitsugaya gets a better understanding of his zanpakutou. It could be about the vibe you want to achieve: This is an AU where everyone is in a punk rock band and has cool hair and outfits. The idea of this is to clearly define what you, the author, is interested in writing. Make sure it feels right! Maybe you pick the first one, but when you say it out loud, you say, "You know, I really just want Ichigo to go back in time so he can horse around with young Renji and Rukia and punching Aizen in the nose is just an excuse for that." That may sound dumb, but it's fine, actually! Most people don't read stories strictly for the plot, they read stories for the implications of those plots! Will my favorite two characters kiss? Will there be funny interactions between these two groups of characters? Will there be sick fights? Stories are excuses to have scenes. Sometimes, you will have a story where the interesting sequence of events is the draw, but the point is to know what you're about.

Once you feel happy with your "mission statement", you need to decide the bounds of your story: where it starts and where it ends. It may be easier to start with the end. In some cases, it may be obvious from your mission statement: everyone gets home, a villain is defeated, Kenpachi realizes the meaning of friendship. On the other hand, let's look at that punk rock AU. You've picked a vibe, but you don't really have a natural story arc. It has to have a destination, though, otherwise, it's not really a story, it's a recipe for 3 chapters of an abandoned fanfic. So brainstorm a little: Maybe they get a record deal? Maybe they win a Battle of the Bands? Maybe Byakuya accepts that the band is actually good and tells Rukia he is proud of her. Do not settle for a plot just because it works. Pick something that makes you excited! You're the one who is gonna have to write it!

I said that we needed to pick a beginning point, too, but I'm actually going to skip that for now. The next thing I do is think of all the Big Scenes I want to write, the ones you are hype to write, the ones that pop in your head as you think about the premise. Make a bullet list. They don't need to be in order. The descriptions don't need to be super detailed, but write down anything about it that is important to you. If there's a mood or a snippet of dialogue or a joke you want to make, go ahead and jot that down so you don't forget it later. What you're doing now is putting broad blotches of color on a canvas, filling in space and leaving the detail for later.

Once you are pretty happy with what you have down, try to arrange it in chronological order. Put your end at the end (if it wasn't one of your big scenes, add it now). The next task is figuring out how to traverse your scenes. You've already picked out where you want to spend the majority of your energy. The rest, I regret to tell you, is your slog writing. Now, it often happens that you will find joy in some of these scenes and your best writing may occur there, but that's serendipity. These are the scenes that you are gonna have to make yourself sit down and write, so you honestly want to limit them to just the ones you need.

So how do we do this? Look at the first thing on the list. Can you start there? If so, congrats, that's your beginning. If you can't, what needs to happen to get to there? Where can you start so that you can get to your first fun scene as soon as possible? There. That’s it. You’ve picked your beginning, good job! Now, go through the rest of your list, and add in things that must happen, even if you don’t particularly look forward to writing them. The characters need to travel from geographic point A to point B. Shuuhei needs to say something that Izuru hears and misinterprets. The Central 46 makes a new law. If you have a good idea of how these things happen, go ahead and write them down, but it’s okay if you don’t know yet. Fill in all the blanks so that if you think of each bullet list as a scene, you could read it as a story, start to end. Once you get writing, you might add more scenes, or move things around or whatever, but you should have a thing that functions as a story.

If you struggle with this, an alternative is a story with a very strong structure that is going to guide you though what you have to write.Here are two examples from my own stories Hold On, Hold On (which is only one chapter, but the principle is the same) is structured around the 5 stages of grief. Not Broken, Just Bent takes place over roughly a week, and I just decided what happened every day of the week. See You on the Other Side takes place in the middle of a bunch of canon events, which worked at mile markers.

Congratulations. You’ve just made a rough outline!

Special note for avoiding burnout!: I am a slogger. I will drag myself through the broken glass of an interminable plot to get to a single thirsty scene. That's why, at this stage, I try to look at the ratio of what I want to write to what I must write. It's gonna vary for everyone, but this is a hobby, and if looking at this proto-outline makes you feel deeply tired, maybe this isn't a good story to be devoting your time to! Can you carve it down? Can you chuck two scenes you really want to write and get rid of 80% of the slog? Or maybe you can't! In that case, just write that thirsty scene as a standalone drabble! Or just go work on something else! Maybe in the future, this one will come back to you and you’ll have a fresh idea or a renewed enthusiasm for it.

Another thing I sometimes like to do at this point is to write out some notes about my characters and their motivations and moods. Character A is homesick. Character B is so determined to defeat the enemy that they are having a hard time being sympathetic to Character A. Character C cares for both A and B and is trying to support them both. This is sort of background info that you want to keep in your head as you are writing. Depending on the type of story you are writing, this might actually be the main plot, or it might be happening subtly, but adding to the emotional impact of the story. It’s very easy for me to write these sorts of emotional arcs, but if you struggle with that, you may wish to go ahead and made a more detailed outline for that, too.

Now, it’s time to start writing! I am great at beginnings-- it is very often the case for me that the opening scene was one of my Big Tentpole Scenes. (Before you hate me too much, I make up for this by being double horrible at endings; just let me have this) Usually, I will start at the beginning and write linearly for as long as I can until I get stuck. Then, I will look forward on my outline and do the next chronological scene that I feel like writing. In general, if I sit down to write and there is something I have an urge to write, that trumps everything else. Inspiration is a precious commodity, and you should embrace it when it hits! You can slog any day. I will occasionally hold off writing a scene that I really want to, because I am saving it, like a prize for myself for getting that far. This is a very personal process of figuring out what motivates your brain and then giving your brain what it needs to be its most productive.

Eventually, you will run out of things you are excited to write, but the good news is, you’ve got a bunch of story now! Odds are that what’s left is going to be a lot of those connective tissue scenes, and you’re just going to have to do them, except that now, because you’re connecting two concrete points instead of two abstract points, it will be a lot easier. You can continue running jokes you’ve started. Maybe you invented a cafe in an earlier scene where your characters hang out and you can have them return there. Try to think of ways to make these scenes more fun, both for yourself to write and for your reader to read. 

Around this time, I like to start refining that rough strokes outline into what I will call an “as-built” outline. (This is an engineering term where you update your plans or models for something to reflect any changes that had to be made along the way). This is a great activity to do at times when you feel like you have writers block. I write down every scene I have written as a 2-3 word blurb, in order. I break the scenes into what I think makes logical chapters, and I will do a word count on those prospective chapters and write it down. As you do this, you will realize that maybe you can move a scene from here to there, which will make it 1000% easier to write. Things may be happening too much, or you’ve got the characters eating three times in the same chapter. If you have subplots and dangling threads, this is where you make sure they get closure. I know this sounds very headache-y, but you are so far along in the story at this point that it’s really not-- it’s a way to look at the problems you have left. Use some sort of formatting (I like to bold things I haven’t done and sometimes I put them in red) and it gives you a very visual to-do list.

You specifically mentioned multi-chapter fanfics and I admit that I don’t tend to think in chapters, I tend to think of the story as a whole and just break it up where it feels natural. The as-built outlining I described is very helpful in making sure that my chapters feel balanced. They don’t necessarily need to be the same length, but I like them to have the same amount of stuff in them. One chapter may basically contain one long scene, and other may contain many short ones. I don’t tend to, but you can certainly have a fanfic that varies between short and long chapters, that can actually be an interesting effect. But like I said, I always like to know what I am doing, and so having it mapped out, you can say “welp, this is what I’ve done, how do I feel about that?”

Polynya, you may be saying at this point, do you write the whole fanfic before you post any of it? and I regret to inform you, the answer is yes. A lot of people write as they go, and I have made one attempt at this and I didn’t like it. I don’t like locking myself in, I just need to be able write out of order and go back and change things. Here is the story of a little in love: someone gave me an AU prompt and I got mildly obsessed with it, and wrote 5 snapshots drabbles in that universe, ending with a slight cliffhanger ending. I probably should have stopped there, but I decided to keep going. I wrote out an outline of 5 acts where the first act was detailed to the degree of each chapter being specified. The chapters here were much smaller than I usually make chapters: 1-2k. I wrote act i and ii and it was actually great, and then I hit act iii which required a lot of set up for misunderstandings and a mini romance arc. I couldn’t wing it, but nor could I figure it all out with outlining. I write dialogue in almost sort of an improv “Yes, and...?” style, so until I do it, I don’t know what’s going to happen. So, what I did was treat the second half of act iii as a complete story in the process I describe above, wrote the entire rest of it, and then posted it. One might notice that the chapter lengths grew to 3-5k each. I have two more acts to go, and I haven’t decided how I am going to do them yet, but I suspect I will treat each of them as their own mini-stories.

(I will admit that in Heart is a Muscle, I tend toward chapters that are about 10k long, and this is honestly too long, someone should smack me. If you like punchy chapters, 1-2k is good. I think 3-6k is probably an ideal chapter length. Is this how long the chapters are in my latest fanfic? Absolutely not.)

Okay, so there’s one more step, which is quality control. I am habitual re-reader-- I read my fanfics-in-progress over and over and over while I am working on them. I understand that not everyone does this, but I am usually the primary audience for my own writing, and this is the actual fun part for me. Nevertheless, you should re-read your work at least once, to make sure it hangs together.

This is purely optional, but I recommend it: get a writing friend (if you don’t like re-reading your work, I recommend this even more strongly). If you can get a full-service beta reader, that’s great, but if you can’t find someone, or if receiving that level of critique stresses you out, it’s perfectly valid to just find a friend who will read your stuff and a) shower you with compliments, b) reassure you about parts you aren’t sure about (or suggest ways to help) and c) point out any huge problems you missed. When I am writing a long fanfic, it is a huge motivational factor for me to be able to send my beta chapters as I finish them. If you are already an established writer, and you have people who consistently comment on your fic, they might be overjoyed to get a sneak peak at your work.

And that’s it! That’s the way I do it, anyway! Some people are able to sit down and write a very detailed outline and the write it start-to-finish. Good for them, I say! I have tried this and it doesn’t work great for me. I will admit that some of my fics (especially my early ones) I just sat down and banged out whole-cloth like an insane person and they are generally better than the ones I actually plan out, but that’s not a reproducible process.

As one final mechanical note, I usually write in Google Docs, which I can access on multiple devices (I used to write a lot on my phone), has convenient sharing functionality, and I use the ao3 html formatting script add-in. I generally have two documents for a single story-- one is the outline, and any other notes I want to have handy. I’ll usually put a trashcan space at the bottom for scenes that got cut but I don’t want to lose. The other is the fanfic itself.

I hope this is helpful! Please feel free to follow up with other questions and good luck with your writing!