#just because I'd feel like an imposter if anyone commented on this wishing me happy pride back ajsjsjsjssjwjsj

[sindar-princeling]

queer love is BEAUTIFUL, queer bodies are BEAUTIFUL, queer sex and attraction are GOOD, queer gender identity is VALID. fuck bigots in the tolkien fandom and happy pride 🏳️‍🌈

[shameaboutthedilettantism]

2022 Writing Year in Review

1. Number of stories posted to Ao3: 1, plus 2 chapters of a story I started in 2020...ugh, can I even call myself a writer?

2. Word count this year: 15,807 not counting all the ones written for stories that were never published

3. Fandoms I wrote for: Avatar: The Last Airbender

4. Pairings: Aang/Katara, Zuko/Mai

5. Stories with the most:

Kudos:

Bookmarks:

Comment threads: 

Word count:

Since I only published one story this year, it's obviously So I Wait for You with 50 kudos, 28 comments (oh wait, that said 'threads'..let's just say half that because I responded to most of the comments before I just ran out of steam for everything), 6 bookmarks, and 10,860 words.

6. Work I’m most proud of (and why): 

Well, I am a bit proud of the completed fic I published because now I believe I can complete a multichapter story. Some day I will finish The Only Way to Hold On!

7.   Work I’m least proud of (and why):

Umm, same I guess, since I only published one story. I find typos and stuff I hate every time I look at it. The last chapter was so bad the first time I posted it that I took it down and reworked large swathes of it before posting it again.

8.   Share or describe a favorite review you received:

Y'all, @coyotelemon is the kind of friend I wish everyone had. She is so kind and encouraging and every time I feel down on myself, I go back and read the final comment she left on my story

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

FUCK I LOVE THIS SO MUCH

Dilly!!!!!! DILLY?!?!?!???!!!!

This was— and I mean this with my whole everything— a perfect story from start to finish. It’s amazing, it’s hot, it’s hilarious!!!

She says a bit more, but it's maybe spoilery, so I'll leave it out. It's so comforting and serotonin-boosting to get a review like that, ya know? Get you a friend like Coyote, folks.

9.   A time when writing was really, really hard:

2022? Okay, mostly post July. I got a promotion at work then and the imposter syndrome and drowning sensation have been intense. Between work and some family stuff, I haven't had the focus or mental energy to write much.

10. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you:

The fight scene in chapter 17 of OWTHO. I hadn't planned for anyone to get really hurt, but I started writing and suddenly Mai's dress was on fire and Li was lying in a pool of blood.

11. A favorite excerpt of your writing:  

I was really happy with my introduction of Meng in So I Wait for You

“Hey, Katara, why are you still asleep?” came the annoyingly perky voice of her roommate, Meng.

Katara surfaced slowly from sleep, where she'd been dreaming something warm and pleasant that dissipated so quickly it was gone by the time her eyes squinted blearily open. “Huh?” she queried, voice slumber-roughened.

Then she bolted upright. Her room was bright with morning, each corner illuminated by sunshine. A golden glow surrounded Meng's darkened silhouette and slashed bars of light across the wall behind her. What time was it? Why hadn't her alarm gone off? She patted her nightstand desperately, trying to find her phone so she could figure out how late she was.

Meng's snort of laughter stilled her hand. Katara growled, low and long, the sound rumbling in her throat and soothing her irritation. When would she learn?

After heaving a disgusted sigh, Katara asked “It's Saturday, isn't it?”

12. How did you grow as a writer this year:

Ugh. I don't think I did. My growth this year was professional.

13. How do you hope to grow next year:

I'd like to try to write some every day. Though I wish I could say something more profound like Choco and Northern did, but dang I really need to get more words out before I can focus on using metaphor and foreshadowing. Baby steps.

14. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc):

I have to pick one? @coyotelemon, then. She helped me come up with so many ideas for So I Wait for You and cheered me on when I did writing sprints and left amazing comments. (but @flameohotwife, @princessofnewcorona, and Nettie Sprinkle helped so much, too, with joining me in sprints as well as cheering me on while I sprinted and having unhinged reactions to the bits I shared. I have such incredible friends!)

15. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year: 

Soju. That's all I will say on the matter. I plead the fifth.

16. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers: 

Make fandom friends who will encourage and advise you, maybe even beta read for you.

17. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year: 

An' it please the Lord, finishing OWTHO.

Thanks for the tags, @chocomd @flameohotwife and @northerngoshawk

[issylra]

I love your work and really appreciate you sharing them. I wish I could comment on all your works but I have health issues.Whenever I physically can I always go back to your stories bc they just make me feel so warm and happy. Your work is important to me bc I deal with chronic pain every single day and your stories never fail to bring me joy and to make me forget about the pain for a lil while. you’re amazing and very much appreciated 🥰

Going to try to sneak in a reply to this at work. First, re: the second ask, not too much at all!

Getting your message this morning made me so happy. I don't want to make this about me, except to say that I know what it's like to have chronic pain, and to get to a place where you feel kind of hopeless about it. I've had bouts of time where I didn't know how I'd physically be able to work in the morning, but still had to if I wanted to make rent or afford groceries. I know I'm privileged even, that I can work through my pain. To know that there's other people out there with similar struggles, getting a few minutes of peace from my silly stories is truly the greatest compliment.

It's funny, because sometimes I look at my writing and I'm like, "what is this adding to the conversation?" Nothing I've written is particularly deep or life-changing. Some of the stories I've read in this fandom are rich with references to history, literature, and beautiful prose. I've never felt so consistently enthralled, but simultaneously painfully aware of the choice I made to not pursue higher education. I'm better off for a thousand reasons, escaped a pretty terrible family situation and was able to grow into the person I am today, but it's still one of the things at the back of my mind whenever I work on a new story.

If all I'm offering is a couple thousand words a week of pining and fluff in comparison to actual masterpieces, then why should anyone care? (Sidenote -- this kind of comparison is unhealthy, but shout out to poor self-esteem and imposter syndrome!) All of this rambling to say, I'll get a message like this, someone telling me that my writing made them smile or cheered them up on a particularly shitty day, and then it feels like I am contributing something.

So thank you for taking the time out of your day, with what little energy you might have had, to let me know. I'm sorry that you have any amount of pain to deal with, but I hope I can continue to give you little pockets of joy where I can. 🖤

[angelsnuffbox]

Writers blues under the cut

Recently I've been thinking I may be on my last days of writing/posting fan fiction. It's been getting really hard to be motivated, and I've never had a writing funk that's been this bad/lasted this long before.

It's funny, cause I'm still writing a lot. In fact I just finished a 26k GO fic that I worked on in 10 days. I do enjoy writing, I still have so many ideas, and I still often get inspired by imagining my loves Aziraphale and Crowley in so many different situations and building stories out of them. It's just when I finish them that's the problem. I haven't been posting most of my stuff on ao3 lately because of it. "It" being a mixture of so many things: 1) a major case of imposter syndrome (they're bound to figure out im a terrible writer eventually), 2) general anxiety that people won't like it, 3) more specific anxiety that i've done something wrong (again), etc.

I won't pretend that the incident from last August didn't have anything to do with this. And while I'm super super glad to have received a lot of support during that time, I just haven't been the same since then. I haven't recovered, even tho I really really tried. Because people encouraged me to keep writing. Because I wanted to keep writing. Because people said I still have great stories to tell. I'd published Glassblowing since then, but I wrote that even way before I'd written Perpetual Estrangement, so the fun sexy vibes you saw in Glassblowing is just a ghost presence of how I was before when I still knew how to have fun with my writing. I can't imagine being able to ever write something like that again. I haven't even tried writing any smut in 2 months now, even for my private projects.

Now every time I post something I don't have the heart to look at the comments anymore. To be honest it's been super super stressful. Even though people are so nice to me. And people are still reading. I'm still fucking terrified every time I receive an ao3 notif that it's gonna be another round of people screaming at me for having done something wrong. Even if people have been very sweet and nice to me in the comments, sometimes my brain catches on something and immediately twists their words into something bad. I've had SEVERAL cases where I got upset over a comment that I thought was critiquing my fic only to be told by other writer friends that I misunderstood it cause it was actually something nice. And I hate myself for assuming ill intent on people who just wanted to leave a comment.

I was never that good at replying to comments, but I usually was able to reply to most of them. Now I can't even do that anymore. I can't even express myself in author's notes anymore because I just don't absolutely do NOT want to be perceived by anyone anymore. And it SUCKS because my wish to be invisible and to just disappear from the face of this fandom is directly in conflict with how inspired I still am by Crowley and Aziraphale and my want to get my stories out there.

All I ever wanted is to just make people happy with my fics, idk why Im making it so hard on myself. Even just writing this post on a public tumblr blog is making me feel pompous because who even cares, yknow? It's not like I was ever a BNF or anything. And while I do appreciate my consistent readers who are all so very nice to me, I know I'm definitely more of a "the author who writes a lot of okayish-to-good quality fics" as opposed to "the author who's BRILLIANT and is MY FAVORITE", and this is really just me drawing attention on myself when I really shouldn't, since people care less about that anyway.

I wish I can be like other authors who just brush off the stuff they don't want to see. I'm lucky enough to be friends with so many talented GO fic writers and my problems are so petty compared to theirs, but the way they deal with all the toughness of writing for such a big and varied fandom is just so admirable. I tried to do it. I tried to not care and keep writing/posting anyway. But it hasn't been getting any better. The only thing that makes me happy right now are the fics themselves, because I try to write uplifting stories that mean a lot to me, that call back to a certain period in my life (Half of Me being the most personal story to me so far), but sharing my work just isn't fun for me anymore. It's distorting my head and ruining my relationship with my writing, as well as turning me into this paranoid monster who assumes the worst in some readers. And I'm just really sorry because I feel like an absolute failure.

So that's the gist of where i kinda am right now. My ao3 will probably still be active for a few more weeks, mostly cause I already made commitments for christmas-themed gift exchanges and I don't want to turn my back on my giftees. Beyond that, though, I don't really know. And anyway, GO is so fortunate to have such a wide breadth of talented writers and I know I definitely enjoy being a fic reader much more than being a writer. I won't really be much of a loss.

[stevviefox]

Exactly! Thank you for posting this.

Happy bagginshield, orwal, darlin, stolen hats, gigolas, barduil and all the others and all the ocs.

The Valar are very busy with their universe and do not have time listen to whiny-ass bigots.

queer love is BEAUTIFUL, queer bodies are BEAUTIFUL, queer sex and attraction are GOOD, queer gender identity is VALID. fuck bigots in the tolkien fandom and happy pride 🏳️‍🌈