#i wrote this 1-2 lines at a time bc focus is awful but i don't think it came out too choppy

[practically-an-x-man]

fic writer asks 🫓🥘🍛🍠🍢🍥🍘

Thank you so much!! <3333

Answers under the cut as usual

Fic Writer Asks

🫓 What is your most popular fic?

By sheer stats, it's Catch and Release, though I think part of that is the fact that it's a large fandom (Spider-Man), a popular character (Andrew Garfield's Spidey), and I started posting it right after No Way Home came out

Proportionally (like total hits to kudos/comments), I think Heart in Your Hands is winning right now, it's my newest fic but it's gotten so many unexpected comments and kudos and I'm still reeling about it.

🥘 What category do most of your fics fall under?

Longfics with a lot of action, and a blend of angst and fluff. Even my oneshots have the same blend of angst and fluff, I think, it's most fun for me to include both.

🍛 Have any comments, tags or reactions to one of your fics every made you laugh or cry or both?

I mean, I've nearly cried from getting long, thorough comments on some of my fics, especially the fics that were low on interaction (I got so few comments on A Love Once New that I guarantee I teared up reading some of @can-of-pringles' comments when they read it, just bc I was so utterly starved for feedback and they touched on a lot of things I wanted people to notice)

I did find it funny, one time I got two comments on Catch and Release after I introduced Charybdis - one comment was along the lines of "Noooo don't hurt my girl I'm so scared!" and the other was like "Evil Ophelia's gonna be fun" and just the sheer dichotomy between those two takeaways made me laugh.

🍠 How long does it take you to write one of your fics or a chapter/part?

The actual writing is anywhere from a day to 2 weeks, but my fics end up going months without updating them because 1. I'm trying to balance updates between my different WIPs and I have a lot to get through before it rolls back over to the one I just updated and 2. I either get really busy or just cannot focus enough to write on that particular fic.

Basically I go through months of writing absolutely nothing, then whip out anywhere from 3-8k words in a matter of days and suddenly have a chapter to post.

🍢 Have you ever gotten hate on a fic?

Not that I can remember, thankfully. The closest I've gotten were a few of those spammy "AI detected" comments, or an impatient reader getting pissy about waiting for an update, but I don't think I've ever gotten actual hate on my fics.

🍥 What's your favorite fic you've written?

Aw man, you can't do this to me!! I love them all in different ways, and I bounce around between them based on what I'm feeling at the time. I legitimately can't pick a favorite, they all touch on different things I love

🍘 Is there a fic or idea for a fic that you've abandoned?

Hm... I abandoned a Wednesday fic after things came out about PHW and Tim Burton, I wrote two chapters but never posted them and recycled the OC into another fic idea. My first-ever fic also got scrapped, just because I couldn't look at it without cringing and I just couldn't bring myself to continue it. Eventually I'll rewrite it, I think.

Aside from that, I've got a lot of ideas that need to be revamped or adjusted bc they're pretty old, and sometimes I go so long without updating my fics that I'm sure it feels like I've abandoned them, but I do my best not to abandon what I write.

[othramblings]

Ok gonna share my response to the person who I recently replied to a post of. They responded to me and then blocked me so I am going to share a screenshot of what they wrote before I do because I can't reblog it. I honestly mean no hate. As I have made clear I have a hard time sitting silently as Nathan is put on a pedestal and Haley is criticized (which is what the original post did even if they didn't mean for it to be that way which triggers me more bc it's such a MS thing to get his audience to feel that way against a female). Before I do though, I wanna acknowledge that they they blocked me, which is their call, but it's kind of funny because 1) ppl blocking others for not blindly stanning Nathan Scott is 100% a common theme amongst OTH fans, and it's worth pointing out and 2) a post or two down from the original one the OP made says they want Haley haters to come at them lol. I don't want to come for anyone, but I can see how it seems that way. Probably inadvertently it is, but like I said I really can't stay silent when people criticize Haley and put the blinders on and excuse Nathan's actions.

ALSO I had to search for their original post, which is why I came across the other one they made. I then also saw a post they made right after about how weird it is that I responded to them, considering I never engaged with any of their other posts. This is my side blog girl! Come on now lol. I don't interact with anyone because it's hard to when it's your side blog.

Their response to me:

My response:

I don’t want to minimize your experience and it’s so uncomfortable to even be talking about real-life experiences in comparison to this show, so I really don’t want to say much further. I am sorry you had to endure that, and anyone who’s been in a similar situation to yours knows how awful and difficult it can be and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. This conversation is about the show and that’s what I’m going to focus on. I think it is worth saying though that it seems like there’s some projecting onto Nathan from your own experience. We all relate to characters differently and everyone’s entitled to do their own thing. But again this conversation is about Nathan and Haley, and how the fandom overlooks what she had to go through because of him.

Anyway, back to the point, that’s not the experience Nathan had; as he says on the show he knew Carrie was getting attached, and he liked it. Nathan is Carrie’s boss. We females know the power our male bosses hold over us. We have been arguing to legitimize this in the U.S. Why when it's Nathan does none of that seem to matter all of a sudden? Suddenly his being male and a boss is what makes him vulnerable according to Nathan stans. How?? I am not implying that men can’t be abused, or that men who are bosses can’t be abused. But by their nanny? Really? That’s been hitting on him and he’s been engaging with it? That is a reach at best. It's uncomfortable to have this conversation and I think that's why so many don't challenge it. But Nathan is antagonistic. He just also is passive when women hit on him. That doesn’t mean that Carrie didn’t assault him in the shower because she did. But SO much until that moment, Nathan was complicit in BECAUSE he liked it. We saw him like it. That doesn’t go away just because of what Carrie did. Again he knew what Carrie was doing. She was flirting with him and he flirted back. He watched her swim naked with Haley waiting for him in the bedroom, playfully calling him her hero! He told Carrie she looked good at the bar. I don’t know why this is all getting overlooked.

That’s the thing about a lot of Nathan story lines with other women, including Rachel. The show gives him some throwaway scenes where if you just look at those it does seem like he’s not interested—like when he tells Rachel ‘not for a second’ when she asks if she’d have a chance had it not been for Haley being pregnant. But he still entertained her. We as an audience were made to feel like there was something happening there. Back to the Carrie storyline, James did a good job of being confused, but he’s bad at giving nuanced expressions when it comes to his acting a lot of the time. He struggles with it. We should not be wondering if Nathan is confused…that’s not how a faithful loving husband would behave. Especially not when his wife just forgave him in the blink of an eye for being borderline abusive. How about delving into that for a change. Why doesn’t that bother people as much as Haley not firing Carrie sooner? Again, focusing on what Haley could’ve done to prevent Carrie from doing what she did is not OK. There’s an implication here that we can’t critique Nathan but we should be saying that everything Carrie did rested on Haley’s shoulders because she didn’t fire her sooner…. That’s a big no from me. Nathan is the one who led Carrie on. That doesn’t change because of anything else in your post. And I’m gonna call out all of these posts that I see that blame Haley because it doesn’t matter if you’re a Scott Stan. He messed up huge in his marriage in season 5. This is not the time or place to be critiquing Haley. His wife who stood by him and ran their home and took care of their child alone for months. Who had faith in him when the nanny started to act up. Deflecting the blame onto Haley is a copout so that Nathan doesn’t get as much of the blame. If people can’t see how dirty he did his wife here, regardless of how Carrie treated him, then they are essentially saying that Nathan’s suffering matters more than Haley’s. It doesn’t. Especially on a show made by Mark Schwan, who neglected Joy as an actor. I’m not gonna overlook what Haley had to endure like Nathan the character or Mark the showrunner did.

I also personally think people defend Nathan so much in season 5 because it is so hard to stomach all the nonverbal weirdness that goes on between Nathan and Carrie. To accept it is to come to terms with him not being the dreamboat people project him to be. It is also so gross to me that Mark Schwahn would create all this nonverbal weirdness between Carrie and Nathan so that we as an audience feel uncomfortable, question what's happening, and are afraid of what will happen between them but at the same time have the Male character toe the line of cheating but to some he *technically* didn't and that's all that matters.

[skin-slave]

*adjusts my lovely black wool touring hat, topped with hot pink marabou, electric blue glittered lace, penis beads and band patches*

Thanks to the recent anti podsnappery, I thought I'd try mafficking against censorship with some truth about rpf. If you've heard of rpf from the side of someone who wants to shake a flannin over the right to make it, there are some things you might not have considered, or aren't clear on.

"Real person fiction," rpf, is a bit of a misnomer. You see, no one you read about in rpf is a real person. They're caricatures, based on a celebrity's public persona and mein, the things they want us to think about them, which are more often overtures to the evening wheezes than any kind of truth. Writers fill in the characters with whatever they want and send the little namelings out nanty narking.

The "fiction" part, though, is absolutely true. Whether a sophisticated problem novel or some bow wow mutton, it's fiction. No one's selling a dog, here. Leave that to the yellow rags. We have the right to stock our mullock and our butter-on-bacon, our raspberry and our collie-shangles, starring whomever we please, regardless of pantry politics.

Look, I'm not saying you're a josser for being orf chump about a character, a ship, a theme, or anything else. We all have squicks. Just read the tags so you can guttle your fizz and don't have to get the hump every time you open AO3.