#does it still count as a wip if i haven't touched it in months

[2sidesofthesamesoul]

WIP GAME! thank you @dymis for the chapter preview LT is making me slowly lose it

At this point everyone's been tagged 😭 @xodahafez @soup-of-the-daisies @bubbleversity share some of your wips snip snip

Here's my unedited, wrote in a state of delusion time travel AU i may never post currently called "Ah, cunt."

[itwoodbeprefect]

5, 8, 13, 37!

5. Share one of your strengths.

i was trying to think of something i haven't answered to this type of question in similar ask games before, so i'll go with a slightly sideways take and say, hey, i like my own writing. which is great! it means i get to have fun writing it, and it's (mostly) not a chore to read it a dozen times, and then once it's posted i optionally get to sit down and read this story i like that checks off a whole bunch of specific things i want from fic. i would never ever have been able to write as much as i have, or learn to write as well, if i didn't enjoy reading my own writing.

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8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

this is from something that still hasn't been posted (though soon, hopefully. let's ignore that i've been thinking that about this fic for at least six months), but i think it's a fun exchange that fits the way steve and danny express their love through their bicker-banter dynamic, and i really enjoy how this flows with the bits of description too:

The door to the master bedroom doesn’t creak either, but the bed rustles when the dark shape of Steve’s head pops up. “What’s happening?” Steve asks, at a tone a touch too proud to be a whisper. He doesn’t sound like Danny just woke him up, but that might just be Steve’s Steveness.

Danny pauses at the foot of the bed regardless. He’s tired, so he figures it’s best to go hard on the offensive rather than prepare for a lengthy sparring session. A little too much truth usually does the trick. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here,” the Steve shape says, from right there.

Like Danny doesn’t know that. “I know that,” he says, because he does know that. He knew that even when he was in the other room, and it didn’t functionally change anything. “Did I say I was being rational about this?”

The Steve shape is quiet for a moment, like he’s waiting Danny out. “Well, what are you doing all the way over there?” he asks eventually, like that’s the part of what Danny is doing that’s insane.

Danny’s chest finally feels whole again, but he ignores it because he’s busy walking around the bed and getting in under the sheet and complaining. “You hadn’t invited me yet. I’m not in the habit of climbing into other guys’ beds uninvited.”

Steve flops down on his front, muttering right into his pillow, “Yeah, you are.”

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13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

show don't tell? which is tricky because like almost any writing advice, it's not a magical rule that always applies and can never be broken, and you do need to learn how to apply it well. but oooh. ohoho. if a newer writer starts figuring this out, it levels up their writing tenfold. i know mine got better when i started doing this more intentionally.

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37. Talk about your current wips.

oooh, i don't even know what counts as a current wip for me at the moment, so this will be very scattered. but i guess the things that have been on my mind the most are the last chapter of A flip-flop state of mind (it will happen! at some point!); the nearly finished h50 fic that the snippet above is from (which is superficially about junior moving out of the mcgarrett home, but that's just a cover for a very domestic getting together fic); another h50 fic that's, well, more domesticity (but established relationship), and is 95% dialogue so far, though it's not supposed to become a dialogue-only fic; somehow two different starsky/hutch fics of which both are in some way inspired by a song by dutch singer boudewijn de groot; another starsky/hutch fic based on a dutch song, only this time it's by someone else (and more actively relevant to the fic. i may end up translating the whole song if this fic ever gets posted, purely as optional context); a bad buddy fic in which pat and pran's respective best friends try to be annoying (affectionately) but get outclassed by patpran's competitive streak, and they all acknowledge (some with more dismay than others) that they've become friends; and finally another bad buddy fic which. i think it's done, probably. it's been done for weeks, i just can't decide if i like it the way it is or if i need to figure out a way to switch a certain part up before i hit post. i think at least in part it's that i'm running into the inherent difficulty in getting a character to Sound Right through a translation, which has made me go "oh my god how did i do that" a lot at the many many years i was constantly writing dutch fic for english media. but i'll figure it out! i hope.

[ufuckingpastry]

I've been feeling in a rough patch lately and most of it's manifested in insecurities and a general lack of motivation to work on any writing projects. I haven't touched PB since I put it on hiatus. I came up with a really fun writing series that just petered off into nothing. I've barely progressed and done anything, even though I'm having all these cool story ideas!

If you've been here for a while, you might've noticed that I stopped writing a couple years back, right around when Homestuck ended. Homestuck was the first major fandom I was in and the first one I posted fanfic for. My AO3 has 50 works just for Homestuck. And, when it ended, it felt like so did my desire to create.

Of course, this was right around my last year of college and ohhhhh fuck that was stressful. Plus I got really into WoW too. I didn’t really have much time to write in general.

I struggled for 3 years feeling like I could barely write anything at all. I was in such a depressive funk at the time, and the feeling like I couldn't create only worsened it. It took me 3 months to write 1000 words.

And then, one day, something amazing happened. I got into dsmp, I got into these characters, and on a whim, I sat down and wrote my first fic for it. In the span of 3 days, I wrote 3000 words! And I was happy! And I posted it and people seemed to love it!

My AO3 now has at least 30 fics just for dsmp, and I've got folders upon folders of other projects and ideas springing up every day for new fics for other smp series!

And yet, I'm starting to see myself falter. With the dsmp ending, and especially ending like it did, it reminds me so much of Homestuck. And I see myself doing the same things and behaving the same way I did 6 years ago. Struggling to write. A lack of focus and motivation to work on any of my projects. An external source of immense stress that makes me feel like I don’t have much time to write anymore.

And it's frustrating on a personal level to see that. Therapy opened my eyes to recognizing my patterns of behavior. I can prevent myself from spiraling. I can recognize when I need a break and I can take that break and barely feel guilty for it. And yet, here I am again. Will it soon take me a month to write 1000 words?

Have I even written 1000 words this very month?

... so I've written 5000.

In 2022, I decided that I wanted to track my yearly word count. I wrote so MUCH in 2021 that I broke 100k words posted on AO3 for that year. But that was just finished works! None of my wips, which I knew I had a lot more of! So I tracked my word count in 2022 and I think I hit around 150k? And that's impressive! That's cool!

So I did it again for 2023. But it's been harder to keep up with that over the last few months. I've been in a limbo of not knowing how many words I've written. Based on the fact that I haven't made any progress on my fics, that number must be very low, I thought.

And then I updated my word count yesterday. And I realized something:

I've written over 5000 words this month. Which isn't a lot, sure, but it's a lot for me. And, you know what? That's on track for January and February. March was fucking wild cuz I broke 14k words in March. And I know from tracking it last year, whenever I get a huge spike of words in one month, it takes maybe another month to recover. So my next month won't be as big or grand, but that's okay.

And that made me sit back and really look at what that means. I've been rping a lot, which is where the majority of those words come from. I wrote 1.5k words in a single DAY and I'm over here wondering why I don't have any words left in me! When I was in my last writing slump, I was still rping. All I did was rp.

I'm still writing, even when I don't think I am. I'm still expressing myself in these creative outlets even when I don't think it's "real writing". And why does it matter what's real writing anyways? Isn't it enough that I'm still doing it?

It is. It is enough. Therapy helped me recognize my patterns of behavior, and sometimes the answer really is to just. Take a break.

It'll still be here when you get back.

[nightclimes]

ao3 wrapped: 1, 3, 12, 18

This got STUPIDLY LONG woops

1. How many words have you written this year?

I honestly cannot tell you.

If we go by AO3 statistics, it's 147,999. This is incorrect because it includes all of Bloodstains - which I wrote in 2022/23 and posted the final 8 chapters of it this year. That removed, it's 27,999... which is still incorrect because three of the remaining five fics posted I didn't write this year (one I was holding for my January 1st ouihaw tradition, another I left for a few months and came back to later to touch up and post, another is a very dusty threeway I wrote as concept exploration that I am even now still uncertain about) and i have fic yet to post this year. What is it about wraps and not including December...

The next number problem is... i write a lot of words on my phone. Some of these are musings and dialogue and whole passages which have successfully been incorporated into fic. Others are editing thoughts for things I haven't begun touching up in earnest. A significant number of these are never-see-the-light-of-day words that I don't ever intend to share; I genuinely do not know how many of these there are. Somewhere between 50-100k if i had to guess. (I know one of them is 30k because i checked when the notes app got extremely slow in loading it, lmao :'))

The actual number of words written this year, in documents, that I can feasibly track, is 93,899. This includes nanowrimo. This does not include two websites worth of notes, one which is around 9k words and the other in excess of 23k. Guess which of those isn't finished.

3. What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?

almost crystal, almost ascian, an FF14 fic about a potential friendship and the parallels between Minfilia and the Crystal Exarch on The First.

Minfilia and her role in those 100 years before the wol arrives is not really explored in depth in game and the two of them are so similar and alone, pursuing the same end but with different means, and they didn't have to do what they did but they did. for the person that inspired, inspires them the most. Frankly I don't think she gets enough credit or consideration at all so this is me addressing the balance; and I still think about this fic often. I have inspired other people to think about this too and that's all I could ask for really. Forever feral about it.

I'm also really proud of lay your curses out to rest but for entirely differing reasons, because I really nailed the feeling and exploration of grief I was going for.

12. How many WIP's do you have in your docs for next year?

Let me answer this in a roundabout way: I want to post Midnight Hour (11k) - the final fic in the ongoing arc of Viper's Kiss - before the end of the month, so I can post the accompanying spice element (3k) on January 1st. See ouihaw fic tradition.

Then I have two more spicy fics to post at some point. I don't anticipate them needing much in the way of further edits, which is why they have escaped notes app purgatory and landed in their own shiny documents.

There is also. Zero spice. That I would like to free, I think. idk if I should change Ashe to be more generic, but it has some solid vibes. I just really like writing Ashe with women rediscovering their humanity, what can I say.

I guess Ashe site also counts for this question?? I wrote about half of it in October, took a break for Nano, didn't go back to it yet because I'm waiting for the new hero release next week, because Hazard effects a lot of what I previously wrote - she might have a whole person she knows in the roster that isn't the man who betrayed her - and I need to hear their interactions, as well as just, his in general. Because she's less out on a limb with her gang than she used to be. I also need to see if all the potential that could be given to her if she was utilised in lore has been transferred on to their new poster rebel and his found family instead. I'm not optimistic it hasn't because lol, she's a woman. Don't you dare forget about Ashe's familial relationship with an omnic, Blizzard. We'll see if I need to make angry grumblings.

I'm also going to start hopefully editing a 121k behemoth, Let's start some trouble, that I wrote in 2021, sometime next year. I read it back in September: my nonsense, she needs help. I have to rework a lot of motivations based on lore drops and me having written it way out of order. It's kind of daunting if I'm being honest; with my health I like to have at least a second round of edits done for the whole fic before dividing it into chunks of maybe four chapters at a time to fully focus on for final round to aid my poor memory and really get it right, but I might have to tackle this one chapter by chapter, which will make an upload schedule very erratic to say the least, and again, my memory is poor...

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?

Amélie. She isn't difficult for me to write at this point, but writing Amélie is always slow because she's very methodical and precise and kind of blunt - one word sentences, less is more, very felt. Ashe in comparison is very breezy? It's less a trouble thing and more just specifics. Sometimes writing Amélie going through the human experience requires me to be in an exact mood, or sit and painstakingly pick raw words to use, or to wait for the Amélie Hours to even try, which are usually in the middle of the night. She is simply a unique challenge.

Only the best for my love, though. She deserves it.

[cosmic--static]

thanks for the tag @watercubebee :D

current mood: tired :( very tired I havent slept very well the past few days (i say as I am still up past midnight. hm 🤔🤔 I wonder why you haven't slept well sosmo)

current activity: getting ready to sleep... hopefully I might wait to post this until morning tbh

current favorite song: that's such a hard one :(( I usually have a favorite song but I can't think of one rn so the song I've been listening to the most recently: Sweet Transvestite from Rocky Horror <3 I have been listening to this SOOO much the past few days

currently reading: Nemesis by Louise Cooper (does it count if I've only read the first page 🫣) but also I have sooooo many books that I am "currently" reading. by currently I mean I started them 2 years ago and have not touched the book since... yikes

currently watching: nothing really :^: mostly it's been youtube or a movie I've already seen

current favorite character: a few days ago I might've said dream or hob but they are slowly getting overcome by my own oc, Kirov, who I had to redesign today and I love her very much :3

current wips: oh boy... [holding closed a door that has fic wips threatening to burst out of it] oh y'know... just a few doodles for artfight and-- [the dam of fic wips bursts]. but yeah. I'm always working a little on my fun retired transfem dream fic (has not worked on it in months. but I am always thinking about working on it so... same thing right?)

tagging you @myvoideisstupid because why not <3 and anyone else who wants to do this, consider yourself tagged! I do not have the brain power to think of anyone else to tag so hahsjjabsjd I sleep 🛏️

[postwarlevi]

17, 19, 21 for the fanfic writer asks!💖

(Hoping today has been kind to you!💕)

Hiii!! I was having a DAY at the time but it's been better since then! How are you?

17 Post a line from a WIP that you’re working on.

Ah! I don't have a whole lot going on honestly and IDK when this one might be done cause there's a long way to go but I'm excited about knight Levi and princess reader!

"Teach me, to defend myself. For the next possible invasion." Because if there's anything you do know, it's that it could happen at any time. Especially since it's been years since the last one.

"With, a sword?" Levi asks, making sure he understands.

You nod. "And maybe, without one."

Levi sees your resolve, and is impressed.

"Okay princess, we can train."

"Okay then, Sir Levi. I'm counting on you." You hold your hand out to shake Levis hand.

While he does shake your hand, it is a very soft touch and lingers. "You always can, princess."

19 Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?

Yes! Santa Levi! Up to that point it was my longest fic and I love how it turned out and that other characters show up.

The thought of Levi and reader adopting or just helping kids in difficult situations make me so soft.

I want to continue it starting from a few months after it ends and showing how Levi and reader have bonded with Falco and Gabi and the talk of becoming more than just unofficial foster parents.

21 Tell me about another writer(s) who you admire? What is it about them that you admire?

SO so many but I'll keep it to one!

m-jelly ! Nothing to do with how open and thoughtful they are with their followers, but it's something I also appreciate!

Literally dedicates hours some (most?) days to writing and gets done what they say they're going to get done, which is something I'm still working on!

Does not limit themselves to one genre, does one shots and series, can write a few hundred words or many thousands and makes you want to read all of it.

Keeps an open mind to serious requests and turns them into something that blows my mind.

If you haven't been to their page, check it out!

Fanfic asks

[flameraven]

Thought this would be fun! 1) Total words: as of 12/4/21, I've written 48,018 words! Hoping to maybe hit a round 50k by end of year if my brain will cooperate. 2) fav fic: no truer love, for the Ace Omens zine. Probably the softest thing I've written, and a lot of very personal feelings about aromantic love. 4) Favorite ship: Still absolutely obsessed with Aziraphale/Crowley 5) Crowley. 6) “I know you, Crowley. And I love you, exactly as you are, exactly as you've always been. You have shown your devotion to me, over and over and over again, for six thousand years now. You don't have to prove yourself to me.” He smiles softly, carefully wiping away the demon's tears. “I can ask for no truer love than what you've already given me,” he whispers. 7) Paradigm Shift, aka "the first time Aziraphale heals Crowley", which took roughly six months to write. I had to throw out most of the last 3 chapters and rewrite them (twice, in one case). I'm proud of the end result, but it was very frustrating to work on. 8) "One Step Forward..." Part 2 of my fantasy AU, has been 90% finished since June, and I cannot get my brain to write the last scene. I literally just need a paragraph or two for the conclusion, and I can't get it right. Very frustrating. 9) Paradigm Shift, with about 2900 hits. Although hit count in general has gone way down this year, I've noticed. (In 2020, fics would average 1000-1500 hits the first few weeks, and now they're hovering around 300-400) 10) Longest fic: Also Paradigm Shift, at 11,052 words 11)Shortest fic: be not afraid (I am here tonight) at 1179 words 12) Favorite title: Nothing that I've published, but probably either "Reach Out (and Hold Back)" my touch-starved/touch averse fic, or "Got Your Goat," which is a WIP about Crowley attempting to destroy the Gavlebocken (Yule Goat) 14) Fav comment: I had someone tell me that one of my fics was their favorite of all time, and that they saved it even before making an Ao3 account, and it helped them come to terms with their own ace-ness. <3 <3 <3 Absolutely melted me, I am always so glad when something I wrote can help someone like that. 16) Total published: Just 5 fics this year, 4 one-shots and one longer fic (5 chapters). I've been struggling with burnout and haven't been able to focus enough to finish things. 17) Hoping to finish some more things next year; in particular I would really like to complete my fantasy AU series (3 parts total). Hoping that we don't get too many spoilers from Good Omens S2! Right now I'm enjoying the few bts pics but I do not like the wild speculation fandom does when we hear plot details.