#i've had this in my wips since early december and i just really wanted to get something posted

[blindmagdalena]

Guilty Pleasures

18+ 3.3k homelander x plus size f!reader. workplace harassment, stalking, voyeurism, masturbation, lite humiliation kink, sublander flavored. nebulously takes place post s1. part 1/4. AO3 link. | Chapter Directory

Homelander is on top of the world. He can say or do whatever the fuck he wants, and the sycophants around him will bend over backwards to make his word law, with few notable exceptions.

He never expected you to be one of them. When you put him in his place after a workplace incident, he becomes fixated on the promise of a firm hand alongside a soft body.

It’s Thursday, which means Homelander is currently bored to tears less than ten minutes into Vought’s weekly digital marketing meeting. These monotonous discussions of percentages and trending graphics gradually begin to feel like a drill pushing slowly into each of his ears, but they’re a necessary evil if he wants to have input when it comes to his image.

He taps his fingers impatiently on the armrest of his chair. The tapping pauses, however, at the appearance of a new presenter.

You.

You’re a far cry from the dime a dozen jackass in a suit that had been presenting before you. He’s sure he hasn’t seen you before, which means you’re new. His gaze drifts from your round face to the sensible cut of your blouse, the garment buttoned nearly to your throat. Anything less would be considered lewd given the size of your breasts. He wets his lips absently, adjusting himself to sit a little straighter.

He’s completely lost track of what you’re talking about in favor of watching the way your hips sway each time you walk from one end of the board to the other, tactfully engaging each observer. You have a resonant voice, commanding attention without sounding harsh. With a rack like that, you must have to fight to have a word you say heard by anyone with even a passing interest in a good pair of tits.

Not that the cheap fabric of your bra is doing them any favors. Silk would be better. He’s always liked the shine of it. Softer, too. It wouldn’t scrape against your shirt the way he can hear that cotton blend you’re wearing is doing. 

Curious, he focuses his vision to peer through your blouse. Your undergarments are plain and sensible. Boring. Still, it elicits a distinct pang between his legs. His mouth waters slightly. Even from where he is, he can smell you, fresh and clean, slightly sweet smelling–like vanilla. Your clothes may be pedestrian but at least your perfume is nice.

Letting his gaze slide lower, he admires how the curves of your body flow into one another. He can tell just by looking at you how soft you would feel against him, under him. How good you would feel to grip and hold in place, sink into and lose himself in. Your voice has a soothing quality to it that lets him easily imagine you’re breathlessly singing his praises instead of rattling off bullet points in a presentation.

Fuck, he’s getting hard, his cock throbbing lightly against the cup of his suit. It’s the only thing that allows him to fantasize as freely as he does. The best part of it is that he’s fairly certain he can sense something warm and wet throbbing between your thick thighs.

He suspects he’s not the only one fantasizing.

The room is quiet for a second too long, and Homelander abruptly tunes back in to realize you’re staring directly at him, expectancy in your gaze. He pulls a blank, realizing he hasn’t processed anything you’ve said. “Say again?”

There’s a flicker of irritation in your eyes before you tightly school your expression back into polite professionalism. His lips slowly split into a devious smile that he consciously fine-tunes to be more neutral. How close you came to some sort of heated response was kind of… cute. It makes him want to give your proverbial pigtails another tug just to see what else he can evoke.

The thought of pulling your hair is good. The thought of you pulling his hair is better, though.

“I asked if you have any feedback for our campaign leading up to the premiere,” you say, though Homelander finds himself more interested in the flash of your tongue he gets as you run it along your teeth afterwards. Your temperature is up a notch, too. You must not be used to such direct attention from someone like him.

“Nope,” he says glibly, turning on one of his patented knock-out smiles. “Looks good to me.” At that, he pointedly looks you up and down, meeting your gaze with a quick wink. 

Judging by the slight tic at the corner of your mouth, you aren’t charmed by his response. Still, he waits in preemptive satisfaction for you to appease him by returning his smile.

You don’t.

Instead, you say nothing more than a terse “Wonderful,” the singular word barely passing for civil, let alone professional. You move on, and Homelander finds himself taken aback. You don’t meet his eye for the remainder of the presentation, and while that gives him plenty of opportunity to ogle you, it bothers him.

Towards the end of your time, he clears his throat. Everyone looks at him.

Everyone but you.

“Thanks so much for your time,” you say to the committee, smiling, finishing your piece with a small incline of your head. You go sit, and there’s a slightly awkward pause before the next presenter takes center stage.

Homelander sits in stunned silence. The idea that you, some fresh faced nobody, think you’re in any position to blow him off is laughable at best. Who cares if he didn’t pay attention to your little presentation? That’s not his job. You’re lucky he’s even here, lucky that someone like him would think to give you time out of his day.

By the time the meeting concludes, you haven’t spared him so much as a glance. Indignation builds hotly in his chest. He’s had more than enough of being snubbed lately. He’s not going to tolerate it from the likes of you.

You should be on your hands and knees begging for his attention.

He watches a handful of your peers congratulate you on your first presentation, though plenty of others cast him wary glances and decide not to approach you. They know better. They know who’s really in charge around here. Naturally, they all skitter away like roaches when he strides towards you.

“Not bad for your first presentation,” he tells you, his smile toned down into a thin, lopsided smirk.

You look around yourself, no doubt taking note of how the other little insects around you have scattered. Maybe now you’ll realize your mistake.

“Thank you, sir,” you say, your body angled slightly away from him, as if you’re ready to bolt at any second.

“Got a lot on my mind, though, so I don’t think I absorbed as much as I could have,” he says, laying on that boyish charm a little thicker than usual. “Would really appreciate it if you could stick around and run that by me one more time.”

Your gaze flickers away from him–he wishes you would stop doing that–to the others who’re filtering out of the room, slowly leaving the two of you behind. “As I said during the presentation, all the documents will be available online,” you say, finally looking back at him. You actually have the audacity to look annoyed that he’s talking to you.

“I don’t have a computer,” he replies, his own voice beginning to flatten.

“I’m sure someone in IT can help you with that,” you say, undeterred by his attempts to corner you. 

His smile tightens minutely. “Do you have some kind of problem with me?”

Your heart jumps. He finds satisfaction in that, at least.

“No, sir,” you say sharply, a barely discernible hitch in your voice. “What I have are deadlines. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to meet them.” With that, you manage to squeeze by him. Despite the steady confident tap of your shoes against the floor, your heart races rabbit-like in his ears.

He contemplates you as you go, momentarily stupefied by your flagrant disregard for him. You weren’t entirely unaffected by his presence, though. If you’d had less of an avenue for escape, would you have been so flippant? He continues to focus on the beat of your heart as your steps carry you further from him. It doesn’t slow. You’re still full of adrenaline, the scent of it lingering alongside your perfume. He inhales a slow, deep breath, the leather of his gloves creaking as he curls and uncurls his fist.

Homelander finds himself wondering what your agenda is, what makes you so desperate to break from the norm and catch his attention. It’s clear to him that’s what you want. Why else would you be so stubborn where anyone else would yield? He scoffs to himself. 

God, it’s so obvious in hindsight.

He has no doubt that your brazen attitude would shatter if he pressed in closer, if you felt the heat of his breath on your lips. He could part your soft thighs and paint the face of God on the ceiling above you with his tongue inside you. You couldn’t dismiss him so easily then, could you?

You’re so determined to be noticed that it’s almost pathetic. He shouldn’t reward this kind of behavior, and yet he feels strangely inclined to commend it. What you’ve done is brave in a way. Insolence and sycophants he can’t abide, but a touch of bravery? Well… That can be rewarded.

Your heart thunders in your ears as you make a beeline for your office. You can feel a terrible burn crawling up your chest and into your cheeks, the reality of what just happened finally allowed to sink in. You had spent all morning preparing yourself for presenting your work in front of not only your new peers at Vought, but in front of the world’s most prolific superhero. You were solid, you were ready.

Until you felt the gravity of his gaze on you. The weight of it made you stutter where you shouldn’t have, lose your train of thought mid-sentence. Every time you dared to look at him, he was looking at you like he was going to swallow you whole. Never have you felt more acutely aware of yourself than you did beneath his stare, feeling the way he was picking you apart as keenly as you would feel his hands undressing you.

It left you as furious as you are flustered.

That arrogant bastard!

You close the door behind you with a rough breath, closing your eyes. You can’t even sit, you have to pace your office instead, shaking your hands out as you walk. You know you weren’t imagining it. He confirmed as much for you when it took a solid eight seconds of silence for him to tear his gaze up from your chest, smiling as wickedly as any devil and caught elbow-deep in the cookie jar.

You couldn’t look him in the eye after that. It was humiliating to be reduced so thoroughly and obviously in front of your peers. Worst of all, he seemed damn pleased by it. 

Though that isn’t the only reason your heart is still racing. You’re not quite ready to address that yet. You’re fairly certain if you’d been forced to speak to him any more than you had, you would have said something that would cause you to lose your job. You just need space to breathe, to collect yourself, to–

There’s a brisk knock at your door. Great. What now?

“Just a m–” You’re stopped dead in your tracks by a familiar flash of red, white and blue as Homelander lets himself into your office, closing the door securely behind him. 

“Howdy,” he greets. He looks cartoonishly wide and brightly colored against the neutral colors of your office, even more larger than life than he’d seemed in the conference room. He has a smile that looks like it belongs in the mouth of a shark about to take a bite of you. It sets you off kilter completely–not that you’d been much on it to begin with.

You gawk a moment before managing to close your mouth. “Homelander,” you say, your voice curt in your own ears. You have no idea how to address him, still frazzled from not only the presentation, but your interaction that followed it. You should ask him what he needs. 

“What’re you doing here?” That came out ruder than you meant it to. Not that he doesn’t deserve it. Still, you’re trying to keep this job.

“Are you always this pleasant?” He asks, cocking his head slightly as he comes to a stop in front of you, his arms held behind his back beneath his swaying cape. “Or did I catch you on a bad day?”

Is he serious?

“Your conduct today was inappropriate,” you say flatly, settling your hands on your hips.

Homelander scoffs lightly. “Oh, relax. You gonna ‘#Metoo’ me over a wink? Christ, you’re done up tighter than that blouse of yours,” he says, his gaze dipping. A chill rolls up your spine as you watch his tongue roll along his teeth. He’s like an animal anticipating a meal.

Your jaw drops, cold shock settling in your gut alongside that blistering heat. Of all the things you had prepared yourself for before coming to Vought, Homelander being a misogynistic sex-pest hadn’t been on your list.

Well. Not the sex-pest part, anyways.

You point to your office door. “Get out.”

He blinks, zero comprehension in those deceptively charming baby blues. His smile turns incredulous. “I’m starting to think you don’t understand what’s happening here,” he says, his tone taking on a precarious edge. He lets out a breathy, mirthless laugh. “You know, most people in your position would be begging for my attention.”

There it is.

You suck a noise through your teeth, nodding slowly. "Oh, I understand exactly what’s happening here,” you say, shifting your weight like you’re winding up for a pitch. “I know you think you're special because you're famous, or a supe, or both. I know you think I should be grateful that you’d even look at someone like me, but you’re not special, and I’m not grateful. The reality of the matter is I can get dick whenever I want it–good dick–and I can get it without being humiliated at my job.”

The silence in the room is deafening. Homelander looks stupefied, but you decide that you’re not done.

“You're not blessing me by making entitled passes and crude remarks while I'm trying to work. You’re being a nuisance,” you say, your heart beating in your throat. “So please, would you kindly leave?” You ask, voice firm despite the friendlier nature of your phrasing.

Finally, Homelander is the one left gawking. He looks like a fish with the way his mouth keeps opening and closing, but it’s the dismissive, aborted little scoffs he makes in between that really sell his wounded bewilderment. You can see tension lurking just beneath the surface, an anger that skulks in the creak of his leather gloves.

Fear begins to creep up the back of your throat, burning like bile, but you hold steady as he seems to be deciding what he’s going to do with you. The longer the quiet stretches on, your focus entirely on the subtle spasms in his expression, the more sweat begins to prickle at the back of your neck. You refuse to fill the space, you refuse to back down.

For all his power, he’s still just a man.

Eventually, he swallows. “Okie-dokie,” he says, his tone unlike anything you expected. He sounds confused–a little dazed, even. He walks to the door, and after one hesitant look back at you, he leaves.

The door closes with a soft click that still makes you flinch, the sound of it loud in the silence of the room. You blink several times, the abruptness of his departure making the whole encounter feel like some sort of fever dream. 

What the fuck just happened?

You’re not special.

The impact of those words struck Homelander’s ears like a loud, painful ringing that follows him as he walks out of your office. He feels off balance, each step leaning slightly to the right.

It’s a ludicrous statement. Objectively wrong. Who in the fucking world could be more special than him? He’s a literal god, and you’re no one. A faceless, nameless cog in Vought’s mechanism that hoists him to the top of it all. That’s your job. To elevate him. Worship him.

Instead you spoke to him as if he were nothing. He could have cut you down where you stood for that. He could have put your head through your office window, snapped your neck, held your skull and burned your eyes out of–

He shakes his head sharply, swaying. He all but stumbles into the bathroom, surprising one of the worker drones washing their hands. “Get out,” Homelander says gruffly.

“Uh, sir–”

“Get the fuck out!” He snaps, startling the man so badly he immediately rushes off, fumbling with the door on his way out. Homelander slams it shut and lets out a ragged breath, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes, then his temples as he paces the bathroom. His reflection taunts him from his peripheral vision.

He hasn’t been able to look himself in the eye since he snapped his Doppelganger’s neck while he knelt before him.

That’s what he wants from you, isn’t it? Mindless desperate praise and worship. Why, then, does the thought od it make his stomach churn so violently he can taste the burn of bile? He tugs compulsively at his suit collar, the press of it against his skin uncharacteristically hot and itchy.

“I can get dick whenever I want it–good dick.”

He shamefully palms himself through his suit, confusingly hard amidst a swirling turbulence of contradicting thoughts and feelings. He could be good for you, too, if you’d fucking let him. He knows he could make you crumble, take apart that carefully constructed demeanor of professionalism and make you see him for what he is. He can prove himself to you. He will prove that you’re wrong about him, and then you’ll show him the love respect he deserves.

Hurriedly, he unzips his pants. His eyelashes flutter as he shoves his hand into them, roughly grabbing hold of his cock. He braces his forearm against the bathroom door and lets his head drop forward, watching his crimson glove pump the leaking head of his dick. His mind bounces between scenarios. He imagines himself in your place, fully on display for you to ogle. He imagines you’re watching him even now, staring him down with that unaffected look of indifference, of irritation, of disgust.

He bites back a whine, gritting his teeth. He wants so badly to imagine his face buried in your soft tits while he fucks the plush space between your thighs, but he knows you won’t let him. Not right away. You’d make him earn it, wouldn’t you? You’d make him watch you please yourself before he ever got so much as a taste.

The glassiness in his eyes begins to sizzle, the moisture burning away as crimson light flares up in them. Would you laugh if you could see him now, or would you scold him for touching himself without your permission?

Homelander comes hard, tipping his head back with a loud moan as he paints the bathroom door with ribbon after ribbon of come. He barely manages not to blow a hole through the ceiling, the light of his eyes flaring and softening in time with each euphoric wave of release. He pants through it, head falling forward and thunking lightly against the door, resting there while he catches his breath.

“Fuck,” he exhales eventually, sighing. He wipes his hand on the wall and then carefully tucks himself back into his pants, his mind swirling hazily on the best high he’s had since…

Clearing his throat, he puts himself back together before leaving the bathroom. Clearly, the thing that he’s been missing is a challenge. 

Luckily for him, you’ve kindly volunteered yourself.

( chapter two )

[new-holocene]

ode to abandoned projects

normally i dedicate my public facing social media accounts solely to sharing my finished artwork, but I figure some reflection on the past few years of my development as an artist would be worthwhile. I was initially trying to find an old gmod map I made (I didn't find it), and in the process I found a number of screenshots of WIPs spanning the past 7 years. for many of these projects, they were abandoned because I got too busy with school/university.

from march 2017. made in unity. I don't remember the specifics of this project. I think I was trying to make a short narrative walking sim.

from december 2017. I wanted to make a short smw romhack. I remember drawing level designs on a spare piece of paper after finishing a secondary school exam early. one day I'll make a romhack, one day...

from may 2018. I had just replayed marble blast ultra after finding it had a PC port. shortly after I found all the textures were just in the game files and could be modified easily. myself and an old friend wanted to make a 'games repainted'-esque mod. I claim full credit for every marble game since that's included a 🤔marble skin.

from march 2020. a mockup of a piece I was calling 'alignment chart' for the first time I had ever applied for a bursary. this used a mixture of generative art pieces i made in processing and graphic design. this piece is interesting to look back on because it marked the development of my art style for the first time, and the psuedo-cuneiform generator ended up being a recurring feature of my art. my application was rejected because i did not read the terms and conditions to realise it wasn't open to university students - and I was still studying computer science at the time.

from may 2020. I was aiming to participate in the low res game jam but never got to finish due to university work taking up my time. I never fleshed out the mechanics of the game, but the goal was to take care of the tree in the center of the map. it doesn't look like much, but I really pushed myself (or rather, tortured myself) by not using a game engine and writing this in C++ with raylib instead.

from april 2020. this was going to be a browser based demake of five nights at freddy's (a game I've never played and have no interest in) titled "five years at yanderedev's". I figured that it felt too close to participating in lolcowing someone and that it was in bad spirits, so I scrapped it.

from september 2020. a mockup of my homepage sharpfourth.net. I kept the logo and general layout for whats on the site currently, but didn't include the scanner warped images.

from october 2020. I wanted to make a walking sim in the quake engine, but once again, university work got in the way. however, this got me familiar with the basics of using trenchbroom (a map editor for quake), which came in very, very handy for later projects.

from october 2021. myself and some close friends had planned to make a zine detailing how to do DIY feminising HRT in Ireland (and maybe the UK). we never got around to writing it (partly because we feared potential legal repercussions for disseminating medical advice lol), but this marked a further development of my art style.

from october 2021. I had hoped to make a first person RPG in godot. once again scrapped because I got too busy with uni. I spent ages trying to implement a wonky movement system that could be exploited, being inspired by bhopping from source or strafe jumping from quake. the dialogue system was the last thing I worked on. I used trenchbroom again - this time with qodot - for making the prototype map. while making this demo, I realised the potential use of godot and trenchbroom in visual art, something i would revisit during my first gallery residency.

from march 2022. this might be the most unassuming piece in this collection, but it marks a significant turning point in my life. I was tasked with making diagrams for a group project in uni, but given that I was facing extreme burnout and apathy towards the course, I instead "doodled" with the elements of the diagram. this spiraled into me writing my zine/short-story EATARTHU, which I then used to apply for a gallery residency. I was fortunate enough to get the residency, and I dropped out of college to pursue art.

as discouraging as it might be to constantly start and abandon projects, it's important to stop and remember that ever single abandoned game or drawing or album or whatever marked a chance for you to learn and develop as an artist. one day you might very well finish a project, and it'll reflect a bit of every single abandoned one of its precursors.

[onthewaytosomewhere]

20 questions for fic writers

alright i've been tagged on this a few times so guess it's time to do it....i mean i do luv tag games :)

thanks for the tags @taste-thewaste @agostobuwan @tailsbeth-writes

How many works do you have on ao3?

13- one of which is 25 fics i posted as chapters for a holiday/seasonal themed december thing - most my early work is elsewhere and i didn't do any writing for a good chunk of years lolz

What's your total ao3 word count?

76,771 (most of this was written since nov '23)

What fandoms do you write for?

RWRB currently may dip my toes into 911 at some point (my only non-rwrb fic on ao3 is marvel lol)

Top five fics by kudos:

Ring on His Finger, Putty in HIs Hands (firstprince)

Third Times a Charm? (Darcy Lewis/Clint Barton)

i've got you acting like you want more (firstprince)

- like the way you work it - (firstprince)

gotta sign 'em all (firstprince)

Do you respond to comments?

yes

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

the only thing i can think of that would be angsty towards the end would be Santa Tell Me from my Holiday Bits and Bobs - it was pretty much 1800 words of angst

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

probably the second hand unwinds - it was one of my hey sweetheart fics and is pretty much just shy of 3700 words of alex being a sap (and the boys being cute girl!dads)

Do you get hate on fics?

um not hate - but recently a weird 'that couldn't have happened cuz of yada yada' kind of comment

Do you write smut?

LOLZ - that's like most of what i write *gigglesnorts*

Craziest crossover:

don't have any of these

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

i don't think so

Have you ever had a fic translated?

nope

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

not yet! but i'm super excited to work on the one with @agostobuwan💚

All time favorite ship?

omg - i don't know that's too hard - i can tell you current fave is firstprince but my all time fave might actually be HP/CharlieW - maybe? or if we're going off amount i've read for it hp/dm or kirk/mccoy oh or bagginshield

What's a wip you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

i had always planned go back and do more for my darcy/clint fic and make it into a series, but those ideas that got written down lamented away in a doc and are gone now lol

What are your writing strengths?

um....i don't know do i have these - i can write smut fairly well

What are your writing weaknesses?

i usually hafta go back and make sure i didn't just get uber prose-y and included enough dialogue - unless i'm doing it on purpose

Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

cool if it works for the character - i really like when there's a translation somewhere - unless it's obvious what it means

First fandom you wrote in?

wrote in and posted somewhere - HP - followed closely by Idol RPF - i dabbled in other things that never got posted tho b4 that (the usuals for any 'lil geeky girl - star wars, star trek, angel, buffy

Favorite fic you've written?

idk - maybe something in your mouth cuz it just came togther so quickly and was fun to write (even if i intially thought it was gonna be smuttier lolz) or maybe my silly lil fairytale baby just say yes that topped out over 20k it's my first RWRB actual AU posted that wasn't just a small ficlet

alright so few quick tags to: @typicalopposite @adreamareads @inexplicablymine @stellarm

@sophie1973 @suseagull04 @hgejfmw-hgejhsf @itsmaybitheway

[aimmyarrowshigh]

Hello! Dropping into your inbox to ask you about your research for

"Lent From Tomorrow (today was too small for us)." You must have done a ton of historical research for it to get so many of those details. I think that sort of thing is a lot of fun, and I'm very curious to know if you came across anything especially cool/fascinating/weird during your writing research.

Ooh, thank you for the ask! How fun!

There's SO MUCH research in this fic, from the codebreaking to the science of how to defrost a supersoldier to what was on the radio on specific days in 1943. I've got a whole folder of just Lent From Tomorrow research, and the back half of my WIP document is just copy-pastes of quotes from soldiers, scientists, codebreakers, radio hosts, etc.

But, to be fair, I've been reading nonfiction about WWII codebreakers for like 20 years. It's one of my special interests~ and something that I just love learning about. WWII *battles*, I don't care about at all, but everything else about the time period is fascinating to me -- probably because of Molly McIntire, haha.

My FAVORITE little tidbit actually comes up in this coming week's chapter, so I'm not going to spoil it, but it's my favorite recollection in Code Girls by Liza Mundy. That was definitely the book that I used the most for this fic, since the main characters are basically all "code girls," or code omegas, whatever. I also used a lot from PBS Nova's The Mind of a Codebreaker, which I watched when it first came out in 1999 and it rewired my entire brain. I immediately did a report on the women of Bletchley Park in 7th grade (and another on the WASP/WAVE/WAC pilots, so I was really excited to be able to have Carol Danvers make a cameo in Lent!).

But I also looked up specifics for just about every scene -- the snippet of Quiz Kids that's on the wireless radio when Steve and the Asset are listening to the wireless is a quote and actually aired that day. The Torah portion that Steve hears when he goes to shul with the gals and Scott is the Torah portion from that particular Shabbat service in December 1942. The movie scene is the actual movie, newsreel, and cartoon that were shown together at a theater in Washington, DC, on that Friday in March 1943.

I leaned on a former-scientist friend of mine to point me in the right direction to find out how they would have frozen and defrosted the Asset, and also how The Arm might work in a way that isn't just "::shrug:: it's Superhero Science." Her husband is a mathematician, and she suggested some avenues that Steve might have written his big 1929 math paper about, too. And then I read a bunch of math papers from the 1920s and tried to understand them and it was. a lot.

I also did a lot of research into Steve's various disabilities and ailments and the treatments available by the early 1940s, particularly asthma and his childhood polio. (I'm forgetting whether the backstory of his polio experience has actually shown up in the fic yet or if it's coming up soon in a chapter? If it hasn't been posted yet, then spoiler, I guess, Steve had polio as a kid [although I *think* that's canon?]). Steve's experience of being disabled is really important to me, and I wanted it to matter and be a part of his life in this story (and any story I write about Steve).

There's a lot more specific stuff coming up in the back half of the fic, now that we've reached the midway point... Bucky's backstory requires a lot of research into things that I don't know as much about, just because I don't tend to look into actual battle/military histories, and because [redacted for spoilers].

[chayscribbles]

chayscribbles’ monthly writing update ☆ december 2022

posting this one a little early as i'll be posting my writing year in review post on the 31st!

☆ STATISTICS.

words written: 11 936

projects worked on: Andromeda Rogue; The Gemini Heist (or, The WIP Formerly Known As "Secret Space WIP")

proudest accomplishment: idk i feel like this has been one of my best writing months in a while. i just feel it in my heart of hearts

books read: Discordia by Kristyn Merbeth

☆ GENERAL COMMENTS.

so i've been pretty MIA these past few weeks :/ i just started a new full time job which is quite physical and while i am enjoying it immensely, i'm usually tired at the end of the day to come on writeblr.

BUT somehow i've still been finding time to write! lots of fun things are happening in the chaynematic universe.

i've also been drawing quite a bit too! i'm really challenging myself to draw out of my comfort zone (which really just means drawing backgrounds that are more than a shape or a gradient, welp). currently working on a piece for my new wip which is... taking way longer than i would like 😅

reading comments: Discordia (which is the final book in this space opera trilogy i've been reading over the last few months) was good, not great, and the ending felt a little anticlimatic, but i can understand why it ended the way it did. a solid 4/5 stars because i still had a good time. anyways if you like Chay Stories, i recommend this trilogy! it's far from perfect and a little rough around the edge but it's still fun and enjoyable and hits all the right elements i personally love! (sibling drama in space! funky alien tech! bisexuals, plural!!!!!)

more specific wip-related comments + featured excerpt below.

☆ COMMENTS: ANDROMEDA ROGUE (draft 2)

i tend to work on this one when i don't have the brainpower to think too much, as a lot of it is just polishing or expanding on things that are already written.

i did add some new scenes that i hope will add more meat to the story. one is a phone call Azami witnesses between her father and some other politician, which is meant to add some political backdrop to the conflict between the planets. the other is a scene where Azami tries to run away before being placed on the expedition, but gets caught by her brother Ansel, as i wanted Azami to be more active in trying to shape her fate from the very get-go, and also give her and Ansel more scenes together. i haven't quite finished the latter one yet though because i haven't had the braincells to write any completely new scenes for this wip lately.

i also really reworked an exposition-heavy chapter where Petra gets the rundown of the expedition, and the scene right before they leave when they're given a tour of the ship to make it less clunky, sprinkling description of the ship into the team's actions as they get settled in instead of throwing a big wall of description at you.

so as of now a good chunk of act 1 is already rewritten!

however i do think in the second half of the month the steam for AR (which was all momentum from finishing AR3) has cooled down a bit and my mind has shifted elsewhere. which brings me to my next section...

☆ COMMENTS: THE GEMINI HEIST (outlining / draft... 0.5?)

in case you missed it: i have a new wip !!! (technically it's not new because i've been secretly working on it sporadically since spring, but it's new to most of you.) i'm having a ball writing about these awful gay women doing crime in space!!! i really missed that New WIP High haha. i feel like a kid in a sandbox.

i realized partway through the first act that the way i was writing AR wouldn't work for GH. because it's a heist i'll have to plan thigns more than i did with AR... but having a too-detailed outline feels too restricting. so instead i'm attempting to fast draft this thing so i can get a fuller picture of where i'm going, but still be able to plants this draft which seems to be the way that works best for me. (probably because you can't spell plantsing without plants.)

except that i'm really bad at not getting caught up in details while drafting, especially when writing dialogue-- these guys always end up talking and talking way more than i intend lmao. so i'm calling this more of a draft 0.5, where some parts will be more detailed but others will... not. i've pretty much skipped all description or non-essential worldbuilding. that's a problem for Future Chay.

☆ FEATURED EXCERPT.

this is from gemini heist chapter 4, where Leo is trying to convince Illiana to help them, and Euna and Gabi are... not exactly helping.

Illiana’s chest tightened. She took a deep breath. “How do I even know I can trust you? You’re a criminal, aren’t you? Why wouldn’t you take the money and leave once I’ve given you what you want?”

Leo leaned back in her chair. “I’m an honest criminal, Heir,” she began.

The shorter, chubbier of the two minions spoke for the first time, muttering under her breath, “I’m pretty sure ‘honest criminal’ is an oxymoron, actually.”

The taller, muscular one reached over and gave the short one a little smack on the arm. “I don’t think the Captain appreciates you calling her a moron, Gabi,” she scolded.

Leo’s overall expression didn’t change, but Illiana didn’t miss the exasperation briefly flashing through her eyes.

Leo, to Euna and Gabi: i have total faith in you guys

Leo, to herself: there's like a 30% chance they both die

☆ TAGLISTS. let me know if you want to be added/removed to any of them.

general taglist:

@nicola-writes @dgwriteblr @the-orangeauthor @retrogayyde @quilloftheclouds @ashen-crest @writeblrfantasy @celestepens @stardustspiral @pepperdee @extra-magichours @avi-why @lefttigerobservation @chazzawrites @bardolatrycore @innocentlymacabre

andromeda taglist:

@bebewrites @nicola-writes @dgwriteblr @the-orangeauthor @retrogayyde @akindofmagictoo @quilloftheclouds @nora-theteawriter @ashen-crest @corpsepng @writeblrfantasy @chaylattes @toboldlywrite @celestepens @stardustspiral @pepperdee @cheerfulmelancholies @extra-magichours @writeouswriter @cilly-the-writer @lefttigerobservation @rose-bookblood @drowsy-quill @chazzawrites @cynic-and-chief @enchanted-lightning-aes @aesa

gemini heist taglist:

@florraisons @akindofmagictoo @cream-and-tea @nicola-writes @memento-morri-writes @antique-symbolism @rose-bookblood @afoolandathief @pepperdee @avi-why @zonnemaagd @chazzawrites @analogued @enchanted-lightning-aes @innocentlymacabre @kahvilahuhut @celestepens @cilly-the-writer

[coolbeansbuddyofmine]

Helurrrr

🌈is there a fic that you worked *really fucking hard on* that no one would ever know? maybe a scene/theme you struggled with?

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

💌share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

yasmeanie <3,

well, i'll get to it then. the rainbow is answered so i'll just do the other two! i will /try/ to be concise but again, no promises.

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

considering who's asked this question, i suppose the fun answer would be vibes. and i guess that encapsulates what is the most important part to me---the mood, the tone, the themes they just need to feel right to me. i personally enjoy writing more emotional, character study-esque, introspective fics which is partially from my literature background in literary analyses. don't get me wrong, plot and characters and world-building is fun and all, but i think the emotional crux of the fic is most important to me which is why my tags are less technical or setting-based, and more like 'angst' or 'hurt/comfort' which tends to deal with the emotional gravitas of the work.

i think part of this is done through figurative language, so language is important to me. i think, first and foremost, i'm a poet and that translates to my prose and my fics, which tend to be more poetic, metaphorical filled with grandeur; purple prose if you will.

so yay emotions!

💌share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

oh fun!

so i have adhd and ive been working on multiple projects at once (as per usual, typical coolbeans honestly)

and here are the final chapters of my two favorite unfinished multichaps currently (with blurbs!)

so this is chapter 8 of the office au i've been writing for f4! i'm pretty far through but im still sorting out some plot details and trying to find time to write it all!

so this is my uber-fave (and only) fiery priest fic that im hella obsessed with right now and i'm soooo close to finishing chapter 4 i just need to power through for a couple hours and i should be done.

as for my up and coming work(s), i have lots of fun things !

this is for my despised beloves strangers again the show i cant get enough and it ripped my heart out of my chest and stomped on it. i want to give my baby hara the justice she deserves bc everyone in that show did her dirty and i will redeem her myself so be it. i said fuck canon and redid the ending as i deserve to

this is lawschool fic bc i saw something on pinterest and was inspired. it's all fluff pointless romance really.

this one i've had in my reserves since december when i watched the show and i WAS obsessed bc my man yim siwan needs to portray more green flag cuties but i also wanted horny daebeom

these two are what i like to call my sister fics. they're the folklore and evermore if you will. the sidecouple angst in two different flavours. if you've read beware the villainess, the first is like where she finally manages to get him freed, a post canon work, and the second as the title states, is canon divergence and still angsty but more adultier flavoured. more hurt.

i love love yona and yohan from beware the villainess this is them in case u dont know they are my favorite grumpy saintess queen x sunshine wizard simp

i've been really into manhwas since early last year (honestly if u follow me dedicatedly anywhere on social media, you'd probably already know this) and i have some i want to write for!

love,

rosey posey <3 (coolbeans/ro)

link to the original post if anyone else wants to ask me more! i'm finally back (proper) for the better i think <3 ask me more things im currently accepting prompts <3 !!!

[joeys-piano]

Writer Ask Game: 4, 8, and 11

Thanks for the questions, peep!

4. When did you start writing? How?

December 2011. So I've been writing for about 12.5 years at this point. In the summer of 2017, I started writing more consistently. I believe in the summer of 2020, I had a personal challenge of completing a story from start to finish in one month so I could get used to sharing my works and how to finish things. In April 2022, I switched my posting schedule and made it a free-for-all; this gave me the opportunity to work on longer, more ambitious projects without me trying to kill myself to get so much done in one month. And well, I'm a slow writer - so this change was such a big help for my physical and mental well-being. Publicly, I've shared over 200 stories across fandoms in my writing life. There are some original poetry here and there, but all of that energy goes into fanworks because I feel more of a connection there. I started writing in December 2011 because when you're a young Asian who is not good at math and can barely draw and feel like you're a black sheep amongst the Asian kids, there's writing. Writing was the one endeavor I never heard any of the other Asians around me doing. Essentially, I pioneered this hobby in my early grade school life because I wanted to do something that I could do and know that no one else I knew did it, so that translates to being cool. (It doesn't work like that, but kid!me was convinced) I liked telling stories already, so I just had to put it down onto paper or something. And that's how I started. I basically felt like a failure Asian child for being so average, which I didn't have a name for at the time but it was something I could tell because of the people around me, so I went out to do a thing. And while the thing is hard and ugly and has tried to murder me, writing is stuck with me. It's just how it is.

8. What do you love about your writing style?

This sounds cliche, but my style is unique. I come from a literary fiction background. Or let me rephrase that: I'm inspired by the old-school classics and the pre-WWII British and American writing styles. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and the such. And I'm inspired by the Beat Poets of the 1940s and 50s. So that cheddar cheese potluck of queer and strange things did a doozy on my writing style. The best way I can describe my writing is that it's indulgent, in that I've been force fed writing rules from the internet and stopped giving a fuck in my 20s so I could tell the stories I wanted to tell. And my writing is a love letter to the things I love about writing - it's pretty much poetry disguised as a narrative: you have the meter, you have the rhythm, you have the techniques more commonly see in poetry than prose writing, but in the format of a story with characters and arcs and tragedy. Somewhere about that isn't typically seen in the fandom scene, unless you're in a fandom that pulls on that through the canon material. And that's what my writing style is. Granted, I didn't start with this style. It was one I started developing in 2020 and have matured it like a rich wine since then, and will continue still with every story I try. I've only ever found one other fanfic writer whose style was really similar to mine. So I guess that's a bonus.

11. Character/WIP Lore! (blabber about character/ WIP of choice)

I think I'm at the skill level I want to be to fulfill a writing bucket list item that I've had since 2020 or 2021. I've been wanting to write a story that features the critiques I have about the Christian religion and more openly, write about a story of why people are gravitated towards having a faith even if it makes them do things they don't normally do and how they grapple with that and eventually, if they choose, deconstruct from those ideals. And Black Polish, my current WIP, is a culmination of personal projects in the past that had to fail before I could get here. And in its own way, it is finding closure and closing a door on something I'd rather choose for myself than be nudged into just because I was a kid at the time. It's all about finding the right fandom for the project you want to do. I'd say I struck the land mine with Trigun.

Writer Ask Thingies

[theoriginalladya]

2022 Writing Wrap Up

I was tagged by @screwyouflightlieutenant - thank you!!!

2022 was a very weird writing year. Started off strong then sort of slowly petered out over the year due to real life stuff, but here's what I've got:

Total words published: 467,583

Additional words written: I...have no idea. I could probably count WIP Wednesdays and Sunday snippets and such, but I don't keep track of numbers for those. So... yes, there were words, probably most of the year for those kinds of things, but how many? God only knows! lol

Fandoms: Mass Effect, mostly. Some Dragon Age. Definitely some crossover stuff (ME/WWII). I think that's it?

Highest Everything (raw kudos, hits, comments): oh gosh... I don't even know! According to AO3, my top three are Destiny's Fate, Dribbles & Drabs (Caleb Shepard, mostly), and As Luck Would Have It.

Highest Kudos to Hits Ratio: oh cripes, you're wanting me to math and I have no idea... I'm going to guess Dribbles & Drabs.

New Things I Tried: Well, 2022 turned out to be the year of the COLLAB! @happychica allowed me into her Norman world and oh man, have we had fun! A few other collaborative fic ideas have moved onto my radar, too - some with her, some with others. It's turning out to be so much fun! I'm looking forward to all of it!

Fic I Spent The Most Time On: ummm... Probably As Luck Would Have It, with happychica. It hit right at a time where the writing muses were cranking ideas and plot out and it also helped me through a personal rough patch early in the year.

Fic I Spent The Least Time On: Hmm, if I had to guess, probably Run Away With Me.

Favorite Thing I Wrote: Going to have to go with As Luck Would Have It. I had so much FUN writing it and I love how it turned out.

Writing Goals for 2023: Well, outside of getting back to writing on a regular basis, maybe finally FINISH Destiny's Fate. Working more on the ME/WWII crossover fic worlds I have (now up to three). Working on Caleb's post-war stories since his early stuff is staying silent for now. Also, maybe, finally starting to finalize and publish some of Rhys Shepard's stories and a few more writing prompts for him.

New Works: Oh gosh, I have so much stuff out there, many of which are writing prompts in collections, I can't even begin to sort out what's new and what isn't. As Luck Would Have it, Dal Segno, Run Away With Me, Bait & Switch, Luz de mis Ojos, Brain Freeze, Under Covers, Earthbounders, Must You?, etc. Those are ones I recognize immediately as being new.

Writing got me through a really rough year this past year and I think the muses sort of took off for an extended leave for the holidays. Barely any writing in November and December. Still, shortly before I came over here today, I had Rhys Shepard talking in my ear, so maybe, just maybe, they're starting to trickle back now that the year has turned? Fingers crossed! Because I certainly could use their help to work on some of these ideas I have!

Tagging anyone who would like to share their past year's writing adventures! I'm not going to name anyone specific, but if you want to share, feel free to consider yourself tagged!

[flame-shadow]

Curious how things got from first sketch to final piece? I discuss my process and share WIPs of the Kingdom's Edge illustration under the cut! (warning- I get wordy!)

I started with some thumbnails to brainstorm scenes in Kingdom's Edge that I might want to depict:

I thought the canyon would give me a nice opportunity to work with perspective and challenge my ability to depict the depth. The one below is of the abandoned camp, and I still really want to paint that one, so you might see it later as a finished piece separate from a zine~

In the upper right is the entrance to the Colosseum of Fools - the maw of the beast carcass framing the lobby within. This one is the weakest thumbnail, and as much as I like the idea of this scene in my head, I haven't yet been able to get it onto canvas in a readable way.

And then finally, I started thinking about the Wyrm and recalled Mebi's analysis of wyrm sign in many of the tunnels. So I thought, what if I drew the Wyrm and the tunnels it made through the earth? And then, following that, I figured, what if the Wyrm's foresight lets it see what will become of its tunnels later? What features will there be? What bugs might move through them?

And while I think that the element of the Wyrm's foresight doesn't come across, it is what gave me the excuse to depict many of the locations in the Kingdom's Edge. Because of course I wouldn't just pick one location after coming up with a way to do more!

I spent at least an hour drawing tunnels, figuring out what I might want to draw in each, testing how to make them overlap effectively, and working through how to make the viewer's eye flow comfortably around the image. I wanted there to be enough negative space (the black backdrop, in this case), but I had to be careful with the values so that I didn't make a 'negative tunnel' that shoots the eye out of the image like so:

The goal was to have the Wyrm be the initial focal point as the brightest object, positioned in a good place to draw attention, given more detail, and made of a sharp silhouette compared to the tunnels. This means that wherever the Wyrm is "looking" (pointing with its crown, in this case, since that is the direction of flow) is likely where the viewer's eye will go next. So I wanted to make sure tunnels crossed this 'negative tunnel' in order to disrupt that direction and bring the eye around.

After scaling up the colored sketch and working through the tunnel issue, we arrive at a more detailed sketch where I've worked out what and where to put most of the elements I want to include in the tunnels.

You can see that I broke up the 'negative tunnel' by extending the Hornet tunnel and breaking up that negative space. It's not the final layout of the tunnels, as I make adjustments multiple times throughout the process both to accommodate for details and composition of the scenes within the tunnels and to make sure the composition of the whole piece still works.

I have just realized that I put the wrong date on my name overlay in some of the images above. I did all that in late October and early November. Then I took a break from it to work on other art such as secret santas and xmas gifts for family.

In December, I started to block in elements and added more to the sketch

Now, there's a boofly, a sturdy fool corpse, and Oro! And I made an attempt at defining the Wyrm based off how I'd drawn it in my Xero comic (relevant panel below), but the design wasn't clicking for this piece, so I left it for later.

Then life got busy, so I didn't do anything else on it until January where I made another pass at blocking in some areas and I started to define the shapes of features.

I made another attempt at the Wyrm, but again, it was fighting me.

This was also the point where I decided on which rendering style I wanted to go with for this illustration. Because I didn't want to do lineart, I was going to paint it. But would I use my beloved "perfect oil paint 2" brush? Or perhaps the flat brush that gives streaky textures? Or how about that square brush that I used for multiple of the Bug Fables NPC Collab backdrops?

The square brush is what I ended up going with, but for whatever reason, I didn't like how it looked when I used the blending version of it. See the boofly-above-acid tunnel in the above image for how that looks when loosely applied. So, I swapped to the same square brush but fully opaque and without blending properties. Basically, a hard square brush. For a while, I toyed with starting with the hard square and then blending the edges afterwards, but then I found I rather liked how things looked with just the hard brush!

So, with a couple minor exceptions, everything going forward is done with a hard brush, no blending, and no layer modes. Just pick a color and draw with it. It simplified the process, and outside of the tedium, I found it generally engaging.

At the end of some art sessions, I would give myself notes of what I wanted to focus on next time, and I'd mark some areas that I needed to return to and make better.

I also FINALLY figured out a Wyrm design that worked well enough to roll with. Amusingly, I'd been listening to a podcast of some guys reading and discussing Dune while I worked on this.

In one of my notes above, I wrote "pearlescent?" on the Wyrm, since I thought giving it some color shifts would be more interesting than shading with blue-grey or grey-grey. In the image below, I tested an idea for pearlescence using an overlay layer. However, I went back afterwards to draw in the colors manually so it matched my method for the rest of the piece.

Rendering, rendering, rendering........

And that's it! I hope you enjoyed following my process! This thing took a long time and a lot of effort, but I am pleased with the results, and I hope I can be proud of it for a long time going forward.

my pieces for @hkhallowzine

the Kingdom's Edge illustration was so much work, but it was very rewarding. and the Stag drawing is spot art that accompanies @vulturereyy's writing

[wipethetape]

Say Yes

Carla Dunkler x Reader

can be read as a sequel for this or stand-alone

A/N: this user is currently suffering in carla brainrot. i have not proofread this and definitely abandoned all my wip for this

You've decided to spend the whole December at Carla's, together with her family. You've gotten so close to Jackson ever since you reconciled with her mom. He immediately liked you when Carla introduced you to the family, with the way you easily fit yourself as if you've been there ever since. 

He's more ecstatic that you always manage to convince Carla to go watch his games when she finds it tiresome. The deal is she spends the day on the field for Jackson, she spends the night in bed being in charge with you. A win-win situation, honestly. Sometimes, you were also playing baseball with him, and they were both surprised to learn that you were athletic and part of the varsity team back in university.

Carla doesn't want to go upstairs to your shared room without you, so she stayed on the couch for a while, waiting for you to finish tidying the kitchen.

"Hey, sweetheart," you whispered in Carla's ear after slowly approaching her from the back. She flinched, almost hitting your face with her elbow. She turned her head in your direction and you gave her a peck on the lips before joining her on the couch.

"So, I need to tell you something," you nervously said. She hums in response, telling you that she's all ears.

You began, holding her hand then placing it on your thigh. "I really wanted to get this thing from someone,"

"But?"

"But I realized that I wouldn't get it because I have to be the one working on it," you continued.

You slowly reached out for something from the pocket of your sweater, showing her a small box. She exchanged her glances between you and the box. She gulped, looking confused but she had a hunch on where this was going.

"Having you and your family are the best things that happened to me, especially the wonderful young man named Jackson who came from you and who's growing so well. I love to make him and Isis happy as much as I want you to be, because all of you deserve it."

She smiles with the way your eyes sparkle when you talk about Jackson, and she is happy that you also care about her son that much. She's thankful that you still accepted how flawed her family is, especially with what happened between her and Isis.

"It's already been a year since we've been together, and I've been thinking about this for a long time now. I do feel that doing this is a little bit early for you, but what I'm thinking of right now is that there will be no time that I would not express to you how much I love you and how much I want to spend my whole life with you," you say, opening the box you're holding, with a diamond ring inside.

"Carla, will you marry me?" you asked, almost choking on your own words. You can't believe you managed to do the speech in front of her that you've rehearsed for more than a week.

Carla was just staring blankly, and embarrassment is starting to crawl in your body. You wanted the land to crack open and eat you alive. All the nervousness was replaced with joy when she nodded aggressively. She straddled on your lap after sliding the ring on her finger.

"I hate you," she commented. Carla can't stop the joyful tears flowing down her face. You wipe them off while grinning, and you pull her closer to give her a tight hug.

She wrapped her arms around you and rested her head on your neck. "This might be the best Christmas gift I have ever received," she mumbles.

"You think so? More has yet to come, my love."

[winterandwords]

WIP (and other stuff) update

It's been a while since I did one of these. My unofficial NaNoWriMo mission is complete and Project Storm has had the last major editing pass it's getting before it leaves my hands, or at least before it starts the process of being held by other hands too.

I still have a few minor bits to fiddle with - adding specific dates, deciding a chapter naming/numbering convention and implementing that - and then I'm going to do one final read through in December before editing-involving-other-people begins in January.

I'm excited! This whole book has been one new experience after another for me. I'm usually a compulsive planner, but I discovery wrote this book. I usually created detailed schedules filled with deadlines for anything I'm doing, but I let this book tell me how long to take over each part of the process.

It's also the first time I've ever written something that is purely what I wanted to write, with zero fucks to give about whether other people will like it, if it'll be marketable, who my audience will be etc. And this is the greatest feeling. This experience has inspired me to approach future projects differently and it feels like something has fallen into place that I've been reaching for over the last few years that I've been writing books but hadn't been able to grasp.

Taking all my writing offline in early 2021, dumping all my old plans and processes, and doing what I actually fucking wanted to do was the best thing I ever did in terms of creativity. I no longer had to give a shit (I mean, I never had to, but it was hard not to) whether something I wanted to write would fit with what I'd written before and I had the freedom to let go of all the shoulds that had built up in my head and become the way I had to do things.

As cheesy as it sounds, I found my voice this year. I let go of a lot of fear and a lot of pressure. Kind of related to writing but not just, I did a lot of deprogramming from the intensely toxic, morally judgmental, shame factories that were the online and offline communities I'd been part of before and started to fully peel myself away from over the last couple of years. That was a weird one. I never intentionally aligned myself with movements or philosophies I didn't agree with, but they existed in parallel to communities I was part of to the point where it was impossible to avoid.

I don't want to get into a big life story thing here, but the combination of past trauma (which I'm not going to talk about because part of recovering from the bullshit is remembering that I do not owe anyone those details) and extremely judgy and, honestly, cult-like social environments left me at mental health rock bottom and totally creatively paralysed. This last year and this book have helped me to work through those experiences.

I'll do some kind of WIP intro thing when I have something more solid to introduce, but my next project is going to be a total rewrite of a trilogy of novels I wrote between 2019 and early 2021. I don't hate the books as they are. They started life as a challenge to write a series, to write genre fiction and to write in third person past tense (first person present is my ride or die, but I like to push myself to try new things). The mood of those books was very much impacted by the pandemic and the story itself became, unintentionally, impacted by the social and creative environments I was part of at the time.

I did not write the story I wanted to write. I'm now going to do that. I'll probably rewrite the three short novels into one longer novel, keeping some parts, changing others and dumping a few. As soon as I decided to do that, the story as it was meant to be, the characters as I originally wanted them to be, started to appear in my head in beautiful detail and I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into this. I'll share more as I have more to share.

So, this is long. I'm going to shut up in a minute. If you've read this far, thank you and I love you. Hopefully, this provides a little more insight into why I reblog posts about not owing anyone details of your trauma, demographic info, medical history, background etc in order to have permission to write the stories you want to write, and posts about the value of dark, transgressive, subversive fiction for adults with morally grey or straight-up 'bad' characters.

Dump the bullshit. Write what the fuck you want. If people don't like it, they don't have to read it. Big love, friends <3

[pipermca]

Writing Year in Review - 2021

Look, 2021, you had one job. Your one job was not to suck. And although you started to really shape up in the fall, you completely fumbled it at the end. Way to go.

Ugh. Seriously.

On the personal and writing front, it was a bit of a mixed bag. Our summer weather sucked, and that seriously affected my mental health. I don't do well in heat, and the heat waves were terrible. Then when the heat abated a bit, the air outside was filled with smoke from fires, so I couldn't even enjoy being outside. Living in a place where we basically only get three or four months of comfortable outdoor weather, I desperately needed to be outside... And that couldn't happen.

On the other hand, I did manage to finish Mind, Body, and Soul – by far the longest story I've ever written. I've mentioned that I think that story really ought to have been split into three "books": pre-war, war-time up until the Autobots leave Cybertron, and then landing on Earth to the end of the story. (Each one would have been about 100,000 words.) Those are the three main arcs of the story, but when I was writing they gelled so well as cohesive bits (and my brain was thinking of it as one long, continuous story) it didn't even occur to me to separate them into individual stories.

Ah well. It's just a big epic, I guess. One of my "to dos" is to explain the original plan for the story, which was much shorter but had a much more melancholy ending. After getting to know Barricade and Prowl and Bluestreak better, I decided I wanted to do better by them, and completely rethought the plot.

I finished posting Mind, Body, and Soul in March, and followed that up with a few "extras" stories to cap off the series. Then I let my muse work on other things that amused it and... overall, I think I had a pretty productive writing year! It wasn't quite as productive as 2020 (mostly because I took my foot off the gas after finishing MBS) but in some ways it was more fruitful.

In 2021 I posted 15 works to AO3, which includes the last 9 chapters of MBS. (That total also includes one short fic I wrote years ago that I transferred from Tumblr to AO3). In total I posted 123,108 words to AO3 across those 15 works. I also wrote 107,222 words, but that includes zine pieces that are not yet available, and my IDW2 reviews that I've been posting.

I'm content with those numbers. Previously I was setting a goal of about 10,000 words per month, but considering how atrocious this year's been I think I did pretty good. Interestingly, when I look at my writing tracker, there wasn't a big dip in productivity over the summer like I was expecting. You can tell that I basically went "whew, bleah!" and basically stopped writing for a few weeks after finishing the draft of MBS in early February. XD

My average words per hour is pretty consistent, especially when I set aside an hour or so to write, sometimes doing sprints. With the exception of September (hmm, no idea what happened there!) I averaged around 600-700 words per hour.

I think this is the graph that irritates me the most though. XD It's obvious that I get most of my writing done in the evening, since that's when I've got the time to write. But I know that I'm actually at my most productive in mid-morning... while I'm at work. Argh.

In December 2021 I wrote 8,113 words. I've got a new WIP I'm working on that is very intriguing to my muse, although it's slow going because I'm having to figure out new lore and new relationships on the fly. I can't wait to share that with people.

As for the goals I set for myself for 2021, I actually did pretty well, better than I thought I did!

Finish Mind, Body, and Soul YES! I DID IT!

Finish Must Like Cats and One More Night I got one of these done, finally. 50% isn't bad.

Start on The King and the Bounty Hunter Yes! I've got two chapters drafted and I've been doodling around with the third.

Start the sequel to Peer Review Nope

Apply for two zines Yes! And got in! And pieces are completed! And one of them is for sale now!

Write two comic scripts for practice Nope

So, my goals for 2022, in order of priority:

Finish Must Like Cats

Finish Sun and Moon (working title)

Apply for two zines (if something catches my eye)

Write two comic scripts for practice

Finish The King and the Bounty Hunter

Start By Fire and Flame (working title)

I am quite pleased at the number of stories I've finished, too. Like last year, behind the cut is the first sentence of each of my stories I posted, and the month is it was posted in.

January: Mind, Body, and Soul. (The first chapter posted in 2021 was chapter 64.) While the Autobots struggled to recover from their losses, the Decepticons wasted no time in pressing their advantage.

March: Knell. Barricade's spark thudded against its casing with every frantic spin.

March: War's End. Prowl scanned the dusty horizon, searching for any sign of the shuttles that he knew were inbound.

March: They Grow Up So Fast. Bluestreak stretched as he made his way down the hallway from his room, lifting his arms over his helm and extending his wings until the cables sang with tension.

April: Turn, Turn, Turn. Smokescreen was so focused on trying to get the tiny crystal cleaving to sit just right in the growth medium that he didn't hear the door to the flat open and close.

June. In Your Dreams. Hound woke from recharge to the sensation of falling through the air.

June: What Happens on a Mission... As the smoke in the cutter's cockpit cleared, Smokescreen scanned the control board in front of him.

July: Core Override. Prowl hated prison transfer detail.

September: One More Night. There was so much to do.

October: Going Against Tradition. "Chosen Wind Walker Thundercracker, the Emperor will see you now."

October: Just the Three of Us. To anyone casually walking by, the scene wouldn't have looked too odd: just a man enjoying the sun and the sand, kicked back on the hood of his sports car and listening to some tunes.

October: Claim Rejected. “While I appreciate all of your efforts to keep me safe,” Optimus Prime said, glaring – glaring!– around the meeting room at his command staff, “I cannot condone sending other Autobots in to fight Megatron for me.”

November: Debts. Just like usual, Smokescreen was waiting for Prowl outside of their usual diner.

November: A Gift from Morpheus. The crack of the rifle seemed to stop Smokescreen's spark.

December: Deck the Halls. Hound had not been prepared for what greeted him when he got home from the office on Saturday evening.

And that's a wrap! I hope everyone has a very safe, calm, and uneventful 2022. (Key point: uneventful, as in not exciting, as in completely precedented.)

[lorrainestea]

Thanks @hydr0phius for tagging me <33

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

Currently 22, working on 23rd :3

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

65 686

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Ahsoka

The Witcher

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

A Lonely Heart In An Endless Line (126)

Ruins of Mandalore (100)

Aspiration and tears, headache and fears (71)

The Story Ain't Over (69)

Feasting On a Blind Desire (30)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I mostly do, I'm trying to always respond

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Farewell. Definitely Farewell. Poor dude loses his beloved fiancée, mourns her, imagines the life they could have if things were different, her step brother hates him that much he kills him in an unfair duel right on her grave...

Anyways we love angst <3

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Most of my fics have a happy end, I mean, there's already a canon to fuck up my beloved characters' lives✨

8. Do you get hate on fic?

Luckily it hasn't happened yet

9. Do you write smut?

Well... I'm trying, but it goes slowly and I have no idea if I ever publish it

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

At some point in my life I for sure must've written at least one, but I can really remember it now

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not if I am aware? Honestly I don't consider my fics so interesting someone would stole them :D

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes - I translate some of my own fics from my first language to English (all The Witcher fics were originally written in Czech)

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

One time - it was fun and I would definitely do it again <3

14. What’s your all-time favourite ship?

This one is so hard, because ever since I can remember I shipped so many characters, but if I must choose one, I will go with Hawkeye Pierce and Margaret Houlihan - I spent my early teens watching MASH and these two did some chemistry in my brain and I'll love them forever

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but probably won’t?

My Geralt x Tissaia fic "May It Be". I work on it since December 2021 where I've written 5 chapters, then I had a long break and touched it again last summer when the 3rd season of The Witcher came out. But with Henry leaving and Tissaia's death, there's no way I'll get the spark with S04 again, so...

16. What are your writing strengths?

For sure experiences, starting at a young age with the whole learning process where K discover what is not my cup of tea and what exactly is my style. Also what helps me the most if the mind set that cliches are not a bad thing and I can enjoy them.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

When the ADHD enters the chat - I write a sentence, then I think about next sentence, I open my Instagram, I scroll as I think about the sentence, I feel anxious as I don't really write, something else catches my attention, I open Pinterest, then I change the music, I google lyrics to the song and maybe after that I finally write again

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

I'm not a fan of it, but if it fits and there is a translation, I guess I can tolerate it

19. First fandom you wrote for?

MASH

20. Favourite fic you’ve written?

I've only pretended my pride - Morgan Elsbeth x Baylan Skoll fic, I just love writing from Morgan's POV, challenging to understand her character and act like her character, but make her more... Soft? Human? and still be the same baddie she is 💪

Tagging @avantasia-protag-au @sour-cr3am @arthdoesart <3

Writer Asks

I love doing these! They hardly ever come around anymore and I miss these. Thank you @bitchbrisket for sending this my way.

How many works do you have on AO3?

36

What’s your total AO3 word count?

664,309

What fandoms do you write for?

Mostly The Worst Witch 2017, but there’s also a couple of Bletchley Circle fics on there, as well as an unpublished Xena and a Rosemary and Thyme wip.

What are your top five fics by kudos?

Divine

Into the Great Wide Open

One Thing Leads to Another

Ghost

Winter Song

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try to always comment. Comments are a gift and I want to recognize the time someone took tell me they liked my work. Plus, I love talking about writing and stories and all that.

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Life has enough angst already, I don’t need to add to it with my fics. I much prefer a happy ending. That said, since I’ve left everyone hanging on Stella Caeli for 6 months (I’m so sorry!) and it’s at a disaster cliffhanger, it would be that. I am almost done with the next installment, though, so hopefully soon it won’t be angsty either.

What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Maybe Divine? That’s the last part of Hecate’s Summer Playlist. Either that or An Uncertain Spring

Do you get hate on fic?

I haven’t yet.

Do you write smut?

It probably comes as a surprise to most of my readers, but yes. Just not in any of the stuff I’ve written for TWW or posted on AO3

Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

Not really, though I do enjoy letting Rosemary and Thyme make a cameo every now and then. I’m not against them, just haven’t done it.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t think so.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not that I’m aware.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, but Sparky probably deserves a co-writing credit for all of the work she’s put in to my fics.

What’s your all-time favourite ship?

This is a toughie. Certainly, Hecate Hardbroom and Pippa Pentangle – or Hecate and Ada Cackle – or Hecate and Julie Hubble. Honorable mentions include Jean McBride and Millie Harcourt, Xena and Gabrielle, Jenny Flint and Madame Vastra, Rosemary and Thyme, Lady Hardcastle and Flo, SuperCorp, Laventon and Cyllene… The list really could go on.

What’s a WIP you want to finish but probably won’t?

Probably my first fic – a massive crossover with characters from everywhere, a healthy dose of Mary Sue-manship, a bizarre premise that turned out to be not so bizarre when six months or a year after I started it, Galaxy Quest sort of had the main plot point.

What are your writing strengths?

I feel like dialogue is what I do best, followed by plotting.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Action sequences. They feel very stilted to me.

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

Sure, write it. I've had bilingual characters.

First fandom you wrote for?

Not counting that first atrocity, Xena and Gabrielle – though technically it’s a Mel & Janice one.

Favourite fic you’ve written?

That is like picking a favorite child, isn’t it? Well, I shan’t be in denial about it. Hecate’s Summer Playlist holds a special place in my heart, closely followed by An Uncertain Spring and All Roads Lead to Home.

If you'd like to play, I'll tag @emiline-northeto @curlywitch14 @hydr0phius @cassiopeiasara and anyone else who'd like to join in.

Questions to respond to:

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

3. What fandoms do you write for?

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

8. Do you get hate on fic?

9. Do you write smut?

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

14. What’s your all-time favourite ship?

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but probably won’t?

16. What are your writing strengths?

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

19. First fandom you wrote for?

20. Favourite fic you’ve written?