#my good omens shaped brain was trying to process

[paperclipninja]

Ngl, seeing David Tennant's face in the middle of Heartstopper tripped my brain for a hot minute

[familiarscars]

Lost In Control | Bad Omens | CHAPTER 04

adult content | minors do NOT interact.

⋆ 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆. Bad Omens X ex-girlfriend and singer!Reader.

⋆ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒. You and Noah had a difficult ending but you still need to support each other for the band.

⋆ 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆(𝐒). melancholy, ex-boyfriends, difficult relationships, alcohol abuse, bad words, drug addiction, betrayal, mentions of abuse.

It's okay to not agree with the characters' attitudes during the fic. It's good to remember that the story is fiction from the author's sick mind and of course they will make dubious decisions according to my fantasies. Nothing is done to be compared to reality.

Richmond, Virginia, February 12, 2015.

In dreams, life shaped itself at your will; that was the privilege of staying asleep. In them, you didn’t have to think about how you’d get by alone the next day. Problems didn’t exist when you could idealize a world where they couldn’t touch you. In your room, you were just you, and the demons were nothing more than tenants under your bed.

Demons you weren’t afraid of because you knew that the people in the real world could be worse than anything imaginary trying to haunt you.

Gradually, the river you swam in descended as if being sucked into a whirlpool, and the forest trees around you lost their leaves, which vanished into the air. The echoes of birds and the sound of the current faded when the water no longer touched your skin.

But something still weighed down on your body.

Your airway grew increasingly restricted by the pressure around your neck, and your eyes bulged in desperation as you suddenly opened them, jerking your body upright. It took exactly two seconds to process what was happening as you slept, pushing him away and curling up in your sheets, your nails clawing at the fabric in panic.

Seth, your mother’s boyfriend, erased the dreamscape the moment he forced himself upon you. In your chest, turbulence rocked your heart as you watched the man rise from the floor like a shadow.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t like it?” he sneered, stepping toward you with deliberate slowness, his belt buckle making noise each time it clinked against itself. “If it was that bad, you would’ve woken up a little sooner.”

The air in the room was so dense you could almost touch it, and you curled up tighter in a futile attempt to form a protective cocoon. Your movements were frozen, your joints stiff with shock. At that moment, one thought echoed in your mind: What if this wasn’t the first time? How many other times had he carefully invaded your dreams without disturbing the scenery?

A scream burst from your throat as Seth dragged you by the leg to the edge of the bed. He positioned himself between your legs, and your screams became muffled until your voice dwindled to a rasp. You had never felt so powerless before, reduced to something as fragile as paper in the face of your vulnerability, tears burning your cheeks.

Between his pauses, you tried to struggle, only to realize that wasn’t the wisest choice. Seth had twice your strength, and even though the smell of alcohol lingered in his breath, he remained in control.

When a spark of lucidity seemed to ignite in your brain, it reminded you that you’d always been a damned survivor since the world spat you out and forced you to live in it. Giving up was never an option.

“Keep breathing,” you told yourself in your mind.

You allowed Seth to get distracted while he adjusted himself, slowly reaching your free hand toward the nightstand. Your eyes glared at him with fury—the same fury that propelled you to grab hold of the lamp and smash it against his head, releasing all your pent-up rage.

As Seth lay on the floor, dazed and clutching his bleeding head, you wrapped yourself in the sheet and bolted for the bedroom door. The frantic pace of your heartbeat, as fast as a Formula 1 car, froze instantly when you met your mother in the hallway.

“Mom!” you exhaled, running into her arms. Her embrace didn’t come. She remained stiff, and you felt only her cold touch as she raised her hand.

The sheet had a bloodstain, and as you looked down, you saw that the same stain came from your star-patterned shorts. Tears choking your throat, you turned your attention to her, meeting her apathetic expression.

“Mom, Seth…” you began, your voice trembling. Something about saying it out loud felt shameful, making your body overheat. “Seth hurt me, and…”

Your words were cut off by the sharp sting of a slap across your face, the impact knocking you back. As your hand touched your cheek, you felt something warm mingling with your tears—it was blood. The ring your mother wore on her middle finger had split the skin.

“Cursed be the bearer of sin,” she growled, advancing toward you as you stumbled backward. “Damned for all your life!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Get out of my house!” your mother shouted, pointing toward the stairs. “I won’t raise a filthy creature like you in this holy home!”

“Mom, you need to listen to what I’m trying to tell you!” Your throat might have torn with the force you used to plead your case, but it was useless to her. “This isn’t the first time Seth’s done this, damn it! LISTEN TO ME!”

In a sudden burst of rage, she turned and stormed into her room, ignoring Seth, who groaned in pain beside the bed. Grabbing the first bag she saw, she stuffed it with random clothes in a rush. After zipping it shut, she threw it at you, yanked you by the arm, and ignored your cries of pain as you stumbled along.

“Never again do I want to see you cross this house’s path! Disappear with your profane body from our lives!”

“Mom!”

Accompanied by the shame she always mentioned sinners carried, as she liked to put it, you stood alone in disgrace outside the place you once called home.

At the back of the house, you managed to find a way to change clothes without being seen.

Jeans, a tank top, and boots.

Your stomach was growling with hunger, and it wouldn’t take long before the consequences of speaking too much caught up with you. Perhaps, if you had stayed silent like you always did when you felt his hands linger too long during his so-called affection, or when he insisted you sit on his lap, or all those disgusting looks he threw your way, you might still have a home—a place to sleep and take shelter from the rain.

That was the song half of your brain tried to convince the other was the right choice.

But it never would be.

When you found a warm place to sleep, maybe you’d allow yourself the opportunity to cry, but for now, during the day, you wouldn’t grant yourself such a display of weakness.

At Pearl’s bar, the atmosphere was mellow so early in the day. A few guys were drinking, others chatting with some girls leaning against the counter. When you sat down, you ordered a shot.

Two. Three. Four shots.

Pearl knew you well; you had some familiarity, having lived in the same neighborhood for many years, and she didn’t seem to care that you didn’t have a way to pay for it.

“Looks like someone needs a break, huh?” she joked, pulling the glass from your hand. “You’re not one to drink like this. Would it be too bold of me to ask what happened?”

“Would it be rude of me not to want to talk about it?” you replied, and she nodded empathetically.

“Fair enough. Then I’ll keep you company; it’s slow here anyway,” she shrugged, pouring two glasses of booze. “Can you believe the guy who used to sing here every night just vanished? My dad is freaking out. Our business is already awful, and now we’ve got no live music.”

After finishing your shot, you stared at her for a few seconds. Pearl raised her thick, red eyebrows, unsure of why you had paused. If your voice was good enough was a curious question; you hadn’t sung in a while, and your mom always said your singing style attracted bad things and that it was best to keep quiet.

But you really needed the $60 they paid per night.

It was simple—you’d sing for two nights, save up enough for a ticket, disappear from this place, and never set foot there again.

“Pearl…” you began, tracing the rim of the glass with your finger. “I think I have an idea.”

Six songs. You still couldn’t believe people might actually enjoy the sound of your voice, much less clap for it. Pearl was beaming, saying twice during the breaks that business had picked up, and the bar was abuzz about the new singer.

It created a strange sensation at the pit of your stomach.

“Thank you so much!” you said, trying to hold back a silly smile as you adjusted the old, out-of-tune guitar on your lap. It was from the bar’s storage, and you couldn’t expect much from the dusty instruments they kept there.

“Do you take song requests?” a voice called out from the back of the bar, loud enough for you to hear. From afar, all you could see was a male silhouette, playing with the ends of his long hair.

“Sure,” you said hesitantly into the mic.

“I want to hear Black by Pearl Jam, but there’s one condition,” he said, lifting his head. Meeting his eyes, even from a distance, made your skin burn.

“And what’s the condition?” you asked, the challenge evident in your tone.

“You have to let me sing it with you.”

The bar went wild with the supposed challenge from the mysterious customer who, not getting a response from you, rose from his seat. Tall, with a few tattoos visible beneath his long-sleeved shirt, and a disturbingly defiant smile that grew as he stepped closer.

Once he took a spot beside you, he let you keep the guitar, took another microphone, and when the music started, he locked his eyes on you. It was impossible not to mirror him. Your fingers stayed on the guitar, your voice never strayed from the lyrics, even though you were mesmerized by what was unfolding in front of you.

He didn’t sing with force; his voice was soft and acoustic, easy on the ears. When combined with yours, it felt almost surreal, like the union of two pieces lost until that moment.

It was as if embers were dancing across your skin. A smile escaped both your lips after the chorus, and he seemed to feel it too — as though his voice had finally been completed. No deity, no matter how powerful, could explain such a peculiar twist of fate.

Applause and whistles filled the room as the final note faded. You thanked the audience with a nod and noticed from the corner of your eye that he was still there, standing in the same spot, looking awestruck like a foolish creature.

“You don’t sing half bad…” you teased, putting the guitar back in its place. Around you, the crowd returned to their drinks and conversations after the performance.

“You’re really good,” he murmured, spinning his chair to face you. “How have I never heard your voice here before?”

“Well, I wasn’t desperate for money before,” you replied with a shrug, earning a laugh and a nod from him.

Something shifted in his gaze, and the smile vanished almost instantly when he noticed the bruise on your face. Pearl had cleaned the area, but the mark left by the ring was still visible. He stood up slowly, narrowing his eyes as if to confirm what he was seeing. “Who did this to you?”

His long fingers were determined to touch your face, but in a reflex of self-preservation, you slapped his hand away. Another smile appeared on his perfectly shaped lips, his teeth aligned and gleaming white.

He understood in a snap, without you needing to say a word.

“Hey, calm down, little storm! I didn’t mean to touch you without your permission,” he said, raising his hands in the air as a gesture of surrender. “Let’s start over, okay?”

Still wary, like a cat recently threatened with a bucket of water, you nodded. Slowly, he took a step forward, keeping a safe distance. With care, he extended his hand toward you.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Noah.”

[shadesofdeviant]

For the fanfic asks … all of them? 😁

HAHAHA Ginger! I mean...you said you'd ask for all of them XD So...I guess I'll answer them all XD.

🍄How do you come up with ideas for your stories?

A variety of ways, sometimes I get inspired to write an AU based on an episode of a show, or a novel etc. Or sometimes my brain just pops ideas into my head.

🍉Are you a pantser or a plotter?

I am very much a plotter. It's also why I don't often get much written because I need SO much to be planned before I can write.

🍒What genres/tropes do you find yourself using most often?

Fluff, 5+1, Domestic Slice of Life, AU's - I am an absolute sucker for AU's.

🥝Who are your literary influences, and have they shaped your own writing?

As much of a problematic person as they were, Anne Rice's first 3 vampire chronicles books were the books that got me thinking...oh I really wanna do this kind of thing. J R R Tolkien's descriptions very much shaped my own (i used to write horrifically long paragraphs). Neil Gaiman inspired my shorter style, quirky dialogue with inside jokes aimed at the reader.

🥕What's your favorite fic you've written, and why?

My favourite fic is a toss up between "Your Arms Are Like Corset Strings" (9-1-1, Buddie) and "Rainbow Coloured Monstrosity" (9-1-1: Lone Star, Tarlos).

The rest I'm gonna put under a cut haha or this post is gonna get SUPER long.

🥨How do you overcome writer's block?

When I work it out I'll tell you haha. I don't think I've ever managed beyond just pushing through and hate-smashing at the keyboard, or just waiting for the inspiration to come back by itself.

🍕What's your favorite comment you've received on a fic?

Honestly as cliche as it might sound, all comments I get are my favourites. I couldn't pick any specific ones, I enjoy comments so much.

🌭Do you have any writing rituals to help 'get in the zone'?

I use a lot of notebooks, I also get really sad and make powerpoint presentations of planning. Then I either listen to music, or put on some series that Ive seen enough times that it can be background noise.

🍔What's a headcanon that hasn't made it into a published fic yet?

I HC a few things for different people but they're not exactly huge things, but have a few examples. I headcanon that Alec Hardy is a huge fantasy novel fan. I headcanon that Eddie Diaz has chronic pain in his shoulders. I headcanon that Aziraphale hates the scent of pine.

🍭What's been your most challenging story to write, and why?

I'm writing a huge multi-part reincarnated soulmates AU, in which the soulmates meet each other throughout history and have different names etc. and it's...taking me soooo long. And honestly it's just because it so long and has so many historical points I need to research hahaha.

🍬What's a genre/trope you've never written, but might in future?

I'm...not sure tbh. Theres a lot of genre's/tropes I don't like or I'm not comfortable with so won't ever touch. But the ones I do like, I've attempted or I am in the process of attempting.

🍩What advice would you give to aspiring fic writers?

Just go for it. Find something you really, really want to see written and write it, because at the end of the day you write for yourself first and foremost. If you try to write to please everyone you'll stress yourself out too much.

🌶How dependent are you on feedback, good or bad?

Bad feedback is never warranted. I do not write for profit so therefore do not need amazon style reviews. Nor do I ask for constructive criticism. I appreciate if someone wants to tell me they like what I wrote though.

🥑What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a bunch of things: Doctor Who x Good Omens crossover - The events of "The Giggle" with Crowley tagging along. Broadchurch Whump - 2 entries, poor Alec is getting tormented. Broadchurch x Good Omens x Rab C Nesbitt crossover - Alec, Crowley and Davina are identical triplets. Shenanigans ensue. Buddie birthday gift for someone dear to me. Buddie soulmates AU.

🍹How do you decide a story is ready to post?

I finish writing it haha. I let it come to a natural stopping point and then try not to over think it.

🍊What's a story that changed significantly from its initial idea to the final draft?

My reincarnated soulmates AU. I've changed so many historical points and condensed some and completely scrapped a whole half of it haha.

🥠What's your approach to world-building?

Powerpoints. Powerpoints and mind maps haha. If I'm going AU I will plan it like I'm Tolkien creating middle earth haha XD.

🍎How do you prioritize which stories to work on when you have multiple ideas?

I don't. My brain goes brrr and tries to plan all of them at once to the point I can't work on ANY of them haha.

🌮How do you balance the desire to write for yourself versus the desire to write for an audience?

I have been writing on and off since I was 13, and I used to write entirely for the audience and it stressed me out. Whilst I enjoy audience responses and like to receive comments confirming that they enjoyed what I wrote, if I don't like it, I won't post it, but if I enjoyed what I wrote I will love it regardless.

[feiandart]

This is something people asked me more than a couple times until now in the comments, both in the Italian version of Sugar and in the English one. I often answer this with a couple paragraphs of light explanations, but you know what? Have a seat, I'll actually talk about this in a proper way and this may be a very long ride.

I warn you: I'm writing this from my mobile in my free time. This means early in the morning or late at night after a whole day doing things. My brain is shit in those moments so you could find a lot of errors. I'm sorry if my English will be poor, I'm not really able to correct anything. (Also, I prefer to give you my honest flow without corrections. That may actually help getting the right vibe from all of this? I hope so).

But let's go to the proper answer.

I've been asked: "how much of your life do you process through words?"

There is no easy way to say this, no way to avoid being honest here. The reality is that I put all of my life into this story. There might be a lot of differences in the events, but the feelings, all the traumas I talk about, things the characters say, think or do, all of that is mine. I could literally take pieces from all the chapters and give all of them deep explanations on how those are not just mine, but me. I am between the lines, hidden inside all the metaphors, stuck under the weight of the baddest chapters, trying to breathe after writing the most emotional ones.

I know it's a fanfiction. I know the story is not perfect, that there may be holes in the plot and the characters may seem badly shaped, rough, not real. I know, I am not a professional writer, I might make mistakes. This is no excuse, mind me, but not everything in life is coherent or logical as we often see in the media. We can spend hours or a lifetime creating the perfect story with everything perfectly crafted but that doesn't make it real, because incoherence is a huge part of the human experience. And that is what I want Sugar to be: human, not perfect. Realistic when it comes to emotions and relationships, not necessarily in its plot or events. I want it to be a trip into the deep abyss of an injured mind, trying to hold on with a broken heart, not three unicorns running to Candy Mountain. I want to break you into pieces and slowly help to put everything back together.

Look guys, I get it as much as I get that is not actually a story for everyone. You open it expecting another plot and I give you a bad time instead. You think it's something about a sugar babe and his daddy and I give you traumas and none of that. You come for the smut and I put old wounds and control needs over that too, also denying it for a whole half of the story. Truth is, I am a scammer. You come for a Good Omens fanfiction and I break the characters apart, twisting them to the point they might be the same to the very core, but nothing like it on the outside. You have to dive deep to find them.

My God, what am I even doing?

They asked me, "do you choose your words with care, don't you?"

Oh, dear Lord, I am so sorry because maybe people really think I plot all the metaphors, I think properly of all the dialogues, but what if I don't? Most of the time I don't, really. I just put my hands on the keyboard and let them free to go wherever they want. I type whole pages and emerge right after without having the faintest clue of what I wrote. I need to come back multiple times to check if I got what I wanted in the correct way. Hopefully, it does almost all the time. I know where I start and I know where I want to be in the end, the middle of it is pure instinct and emotions. I know how my characters would behave and play them like a TV show in my mind, while describing scenes on the screen.

( There might be some kind of light spoilers from now on. Mind how you go! )

I know I am using Crowley as the raw essence of a damaged mind and heart. He uses crude metaphors, always talks with anger and uses blood and storms in his speech, because he is instinct, he's a tide, he's greed personified and wants everything he could get cause he truly got nothing in his life. He is the passion who can't be contained, he uses art to process his emotions, he uses music to lose himself in something familiar, hoping someone else could help him find his way back home. He uses gardening to grow things because in his life nothing seems to last long. He can't look at tomorrow without fear, but grows things he hopes will last more than him. Life was not good with him, but he wasn't good with his life either. He did nothing, letting time pass without actually building anything, living the days as they come, drowning his pain in wine or between someone else's legs. He knows most of what he is, most of what he's done, is not healthy. But he never really cared before.

And then there is Aziraphale, which apparently is a walking red flag, traumas personified on two working legs, scared of everything hiding outside his door. He got everything. He has money, a big house, books, some people working with him, and is content. So content his heart yells and cries because he's lonely. So content he can't really control his whole life because he is his own antagonist. So content he's not really scared of what hides outside the door, because what's inside is worst. He uses the softest metaphors, he uses his books to tell stories and talk about himself, he can't really speak is mind and talks, talks, talks so much! He wins arguments because he drags his opponents into exhaustion. He talks them to death, using whole paragraphs of elegant, perfectly crafted phrases and quotes he can shield himself with. He's not like Crowley, just getting started on this new channel of communication, no, Aziraphale is well trained. He has thousands of books he can use to get where he wants and still use his experience poorly because he thinks people are just like the books and guess what? That's not true. People are something else.

It's actually funny how I just condensate two parts of me into two different characters.

Crowley holds my outside, and this is why you have his POV for the entire story. You see the world with his distorted, unreliable vision, you see raw desire to be accepted, the need to be truly seen by someone, big pieces of his mind, his dissociations, his fear, his low self esteem, the thousands of radios turned on in his mind, his incapability to let things truly go, is head full of canvases he never finish. And then you see his rage and you're not sure how much that will last. Yeah, that is me. Welcome to myself.

Aziraphale holds my inside. This is why we never get his POV. Too easy, too deep, too much. He is scared. He needs control. He wants and can't get. He hopes and does nothing. He's stuck in his home, with his books, and finds himself at ease there. He thinks he's safe but he's not. He's a living contradiction and at the same time he's not.

God, what was the question again?

Maybe I wrote too much. Maybe this is not enough. All I can say is that there's something really important in this story, and that is Crowley asking Aziraphale to "look at him", 'cause all he wants is to bee seen.

But in the end, what is happening here is you looking at me. And it's strange to get so naked in front of so many strangers. But it's also good and positive to me to be seen, for once.

So, thank you. Really, thank you. 'cause with every chapter you allow me to express myself in a way I never did in 30 years. Thank you so much.

[meltedfuckingmarshmallow]

you get it!!

my other thought process here was me putting both hands on my freshly baked carrot cake because warmth appeases the lizard brain and thinking

“huh. this kind of feels alive”

and immediately thinking about the first bakers being filled with a sense of frankenstein-esque horror at their creation and being even more disturbed when they cut open their little sugary monstrosity

(now, note that this would not happen at all because just because white people are historically fucking stupid it does not mean no one else figured out baking like 1000 years earlier than the vague time period this is set in) but like imagine living in this isolated village. timothy leatherworker from down the road just figured out flour and you’ve figured out stillborn chicken capsules taste alright and you decide to toss some shit in a round plate and see if you make a new kind of disgusting church food like communion bread

and you remembered the white shit your neighbour bartholomew colonizer brought back from wherever he goes for half the year tastes alright and toss some of that in there along with the liquid ol’ alexander pervert got from his cow somehow. and it’s not like you’ve eaten much bread before let alone good bread so you’re expecting a lovely plate of tasteless mush and you’re pleasantly surprised (and horrified)when the blob you tossed on the Hot Rock comes out with some shape!

and you touch it and it’s, y’know, warm with the texture of human skin. but like the yellow devil overhead does that to things and also who’s to say that’s not just the natural texture of things that might be sacrilegious so you take it out and cut it

and the inside is not solid through like the body of christ you’re used to, and while you had communion in mind you appear to have baked some sort of fleshy omen

but it smells good when the catholic dread wears off!!! and when you try to convince your village no one believes that you’ve birthed a sweetened caloric antichrist so you try a slice to convince yourself you’re not crazy. and it’s GOOD. it’s fuckin excellent. literally what do you do from there???

i wonder what the first people who baked thought they’d done

[damselofblueroses]

The Name of the Rose

Summary: Your study-buddy Doh Kyungsoo comes with you for a long-awaited trip to Tokyo, Japan. There is a tension between you, however both of you decided to build a friendship instead of a relationship.

Content: Unestablished relationship, AU, Hurt/Comfort, Anger, Slight Violence, Emotional Complications and Healing.

Warnings: Well, the story contains NSFW/Smut, please minors do not continue.

Note: This story was inspired by D.O.’s album, Empathy, the album of 2021 in my opinion. It is an ongoing mini project, I planned to write it as a one-shot when I started, however I realized there are a lot to say about Empathy Era and I cannot stop shut my mouth, or prevent myself from writing… So, here we go.

Second chapter, the Hunter and the Goddess is out :)

Word Count: 3.6k

Chapter 1: The Hunter and the Gazelle

Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

You were excited.

No, it was not the correct word to be used. You were hyperactive, more than your usual self, and God knows that everyone could testify on how hectic your personality was. According to your family and very close friends, you were a walking catastrophe, funny but a fucking tease and potentially dangerous for environment.

And now, as you had been waiting for your flight, you could not manage to even stay still. Your hands were everywhere, you proved yourself again by dismantling your tote bag as poor thing was on your lap and you were playing with it unconsciously.

“Enough.” you heard your companion’s baritone voice tone. “If you will continue like this, you have to buy your belongings again in Japan. Do you have that much money?”

He reached to you and took the bag from your lap. For a second, his fingers brushed your thighs, and you lost your concentration during that fucking second.

Focus! you told yourself.

“I can always lend some money from you.” you cocked one of your eyebrows. “What? Will you bare me from some bucks?”

“Yes.” he was always plain and simple. On the contrary of you. “Unless if it is not a necessary. I am not a guy of sharing.”

What type of guy you are, can you give me a demonstration?

Your trip to Japan made you very excited, but you had to confess at least to yourself in the depts of your mind. What made you frenzied was the presence of your companion.

Doh Kyungsoo.

Your long-term study-buddy. Actually, he was more than a study-buddy, he was a kind of your comfort zone, even though you never express your opinions about him. You have known each other for almost 7 years since the last year of bachelor. Both of you continued your ways in academic world and you were currently being Ph.D. candidates.

To be honest, he never lose his impacts on you. You had a sweet spot for him since almost the beginning of your friendship which made him more than a study-buddy. It did not mean that you were restraining yourself from having dates time to time, but all of them were ended up with the same result.

They were clever and handsome guys, but they were not Doh Kyungsoo.

Sometimes you could not help but wonder, how it would be if you did not meet him as a friend? Could you two manage having a relationship as your best friend, Baekhyun, supported like a bloody zealot? Or one of you would give up as your brother, Jongdae, always believed?

“Hey!” you heard Kyungsoo’s voice and jumped off from the bench. “Come back to your senses or we are going to miss the plane.”

“And you are going to take its money from me.” your murmured inside of your mouth but obliged to what he said by starting to walk. He was generally quiet during flights, but you knew his mouth will not be shut when you will visit the restaurants he wanted to try.

He does not come for Tokyo, he comes for fucking eels, octopuses, or crabs. Kyungsoo and his appetite.

“Naturally.” he approved your words on money, but there was a ghost of smile on his lips. “Since you are the one who became a sleeping beauty.”

Do you think I am beautiful?

This was another problem you had. With Kyungsoo, you were so relaxed, and you felt extremely safe, so you did not need to control yourself as you generally did. Of course, it was a good omen for your friendship, as much as you were sure Kyungsoo never lied to you, it was also a disadvantage on your part, because sometimes you wanted to ask some questions that should be remained in silence.

“If we would be fairy tales,” you smirked. “I would be Belle while you are the Beast.”

“Fine by me.” he shrugged his shoulder. “He is a very good guy. I am happy for Belle; she understands the assignment. You would not most probably.”

“Sweetheart, you are slow to catch the signs.” you playfully smacked his shoulder when you reached to the control point. You thought he would be annoyed, but he stopped and seriously gazed at you. You shivered and wondered why he was looking at you like he wanted to say something.

“What?” you inhaled.

“Since when I am slow to catch the signs?” he pressed on every word of his sentence, and to your dismay he used that voice tone, almost a whisper but goddamn strong. “Give me an example.”

You shuttered down, and this was the last problem you had with Kyungsoo, he was the only one who could make your brain stop working especially in times when the occasion calls for full-speed devilish progress. You just stared at him and shrugged your shoulder.

“Eh Soo,” you murmured. “You missed a lot of beautiful girls, right?”

Your response was so weak even to your ears. If Chanyeol, number two best friend of you, could hear your words, he would burst into laughs by hitting everyone beside him. You could imagine Junmyeon’s disgusted face as a plus.

“I did not miss anyone, my dear.” he chuckled. “Let me rephrase, anyone I want just one exception, but exceptions do not ruin the calculation in your famous mindset.”

When he chuckles, you can feel your blood tension rocks your body. His heart shaped lips does something to you, and you do not want to name it.

“Exceptions run the world, Doh.” you tried to push him to elaborate his words a little bit more. “Who is that lucky girl who run away from you?”

“That’s my secret.” he smirked and put his hand onto your waist in order to led you the controller lady. “Show your passport, I do not want to wait here forever.”

Who was the girl he mentioned? You could not help but started to feel anxious, how much you tried to press your instincts and feelings, whenever he mentioned a girl, there would be a dire need of crying in the pit of your stomach. You took a deep breathe and followed his instruction. While you were walking into the inside of plane, you struggled with the sudden sadness. You wanted to tear that off yourself, so you reminded yourself the splendid trip ahead you. You found your place and processed to sit down.

“May I help?” Kyungsoo asked you but he already fetched your belongings and placed them correctly. You smiled to him and sat down.

How could you meet someone like him? He was a little bit grumpy sometimes, a person who could give unexpected reactions, but he was reliable, kind, lovely and always thoughtful of his environment. You did not want to lose him. You never want to lose him, on the contrary, you want to keep him in your life until the very end. You could not think a life without Kyungsoo, you always desire him to stay your side.

You were pretty sad, you had to admit, and there was regret. You were regretful on your decision to not go further with him, you wished you could be braver and tell him about your feelings for him. How much you were confused because of him, how many days and nights you spent sleepless because of him. To make the things more complicated, you had zero idea about how he would be responded your confession if you pull yourself together and manage to do. For once, you heard his cousin Minseok talked about you by saying you were very important for Kyungsoo, however you did not know in which extent you were important for him.

You two were always closed to each other, you spent almost 3 or 4 days together, you were living in the same campus, your departments were close to each other. He was a huge part of your life, that’s one of the reasons why you were hopelessly trying to conceal your inappropriate feelings for Kyungsoo. The idea of losing his extremely valuable presence was the only scenario could make you sob.

“Am I the only one who is very uncomfortable?” he whispered to your ear and made your stomach twisted. You could kill him for this, but he was not aware of how he affected you. “You are deadly silent.”

“No, I am just thinking.” you run away from him like an Olympic athlete. “About the trip. I am very excited.”

“If you are,” he flinched your forehead. “You have to talk non-stop. You are silent when something bothers you, what are you hiding from me?”

“Nothing, Soo.” you found a smile from somewhere and presented to him. “You know I never find the chance of visiting Japan; I am really overwhelmed.”

“So, speak to me.” he grunted. “Do not act like I am not here.”

“Okey, okey.” you raised your hands to air. “Sorry for that.”

“I start to feel like I am disturbing you.” he turned his head to the Name of the Rosethat he was reading. Umberto Eco, he had a taste for everything of course. “I asked you twice if you are okey with going to Japan with me.”

You could laugh if you were not so tense since he mentioned girls.

“And I told you this is okey, Soo.” you pinched his upper arm. “You are a good companion for trips.”

“Only for trips?” he asked. What the fuck was wrong with Kyungsoo today? He was behaving weird, and his questions made you more baffled. “I thought I am good companion for everything.”

You bit your lips in order to send back the sudden answer you wanted to give. Instead of declaring your ignorance about his performance on everything, you refined your words.

“You are a good friend, Soo and sorry for making you feel unwanted. I am happy you are coming with me.”

“Hm.” he hummed but he did not look like he was satisfied with your answer. You decided to not think about what the heck he wanted to hear, you also turned to your book that you were supposed to read since the departure. At least Pavese helped you to collect your mind till the plane landed in Narita Airport. He helped you while you two took a cab for the way, he was acting like his usual self, so you accused yourself because of searching hidden messages in his questions. You were such an idiot.

“I will be seeing you at dinner.” he waved his hand when you finished the registration process of the hotel you would be staying for the week. You were in front of the elevator. Both of you already decided to take a nap before dinner when you were planning the trip, so you approved his words and took your keys.

“See you.” you smiled and walked to your room. When you opened the door, your smile widened, the room is so light and minimalistic as you really liked. There was no crowded furniture, crazy designs, or unnecessary modifications. The walls were light blue, the furniture was white, and all looked very harmonious. There were plants and flowers, you immediately run to the flowers as you loved them more than anything else. The hotel staff managed to place even Sakura blossoms into the room that made your heart flattered and smoothed your nerves.

And there was only one blue rose, which was your favourite flower in the world. Just one, between a bouquet of daisies and it looked magnificent. You leaned to smell it while smiling as a little freak. You did not have to see your face; you knew how you looked like. Chanyeol always said that when you see a blue rose, you lost your shit. Another creature made you drunk in happiness was white butterflies. You had a sweet spot for blue roses and white butterflies.

And for Kyungsoo.

You grunted to yourself in your mind, and you headed to the bathroom by tapping your feet to the ground harshly. You were done with your obsession with Kyungsoo, it became something out of control, and you were tired of yourself at this point.

You had to live your goddamn life, you had to stop fucking fantasizing about your study-buddy.

You stripped out from your clothes and jumped into the shower. Cold water helped you to take the control of yourself, both as physical and emotional. You were okey, you were in bloody Japan as you always wanted, and you were going to fucking enjoy it. After shower, you threw yourself into the bed, tucked yourself inside the blanket and set the alarm for one hour later.

After one hour, you were swearing at yourself with your very glorious vocabulary because the only thing you did was fantasizing about Doh Kyungsoo.

“Did you rest?” he asked to you while you were leaving the hotel. You held your growl inside. “Did you take a nap?”

“I did not sleep but I leaned down for a while, so it was good. You?”

“I slept like a baby. It was very interesting when you think I am more like an insomniac.”

“I guess, your insomnia is rubbing on me.” you grumbled. “Where are we going now?”

“Eh, at least something about me can rub on you.” he rolled his eyes, your chin was dropped due to his response. “There is a tiny noodle restaurant in Ebisu, but they are very famous. We are going to there.”

“Okey.” you nod and walked beside of him.

“You look very pretty.” he turned to you. “That dress looked very good on you.”

You instantly took a look on your navy, long dress. It was very comfortable, but also elegant and your fashion freak cousin persuaded you the colour and style gave you a

“Thank you.” you replied. “Sehun chose this for me, you know he is the chef kiss when it comes to fashion.”

“He did well.” he smiled. “How is Sehun by the way, I did not see him since ages. Did he come back from France?”

“No.” you pouted. You really missed your noisy cousin. “He just came to visit for a week, then came back to school. I am not sure if he will come back to be honest, he got some important invitations from European universities.”

“Very good.” Kyungsoo’s face was lit up. He was proud of Sehun. “I know you miss him, but he has a bright career ahead of him.”

“Yes, I know.” you also smiled. Thinking about your successful but extremely playful cousin made you happy. “I just worry about him.”

“Stop babying him.” Kyungsoo punched your arm as half serious half joke. “How old is he, 27?”

“Yeah.” you laughed. “I know I baby him very much, but we all do, Kyungsoo.”

“You are just one year older than Sehun.” he smirked. “Who is going to baby you?”

“Chanyeol.” you exhaled. Kyungsoo looked at you for a second, then both of you burst into laughs because it was well known that you also took care of Chanyeol and Baekhyun as well as Sehun. “Jokes aside, I am a strong and big girl, Kyungsoo, I do not need someone babying me.”

“Maybe you can start looking for a sugar daddy to baby you?” he cocked his eyebrows to you. “Before it is going to be too late?”

“Actually, I had some candidates in my pocket.” you devilishly beamed to him. “You have no idea.”

“Beg your pardon?” his face suddenly transformed from joy to deadpanned seriousness, and his smile was disappeared immediately. “I was joking.”

“I was not.” you blinked your eye. “Some people really proposed to me.”

“For being your sugar daddy?”

“I know I am very little in your eyes, Kyungsoo” you took a deep breathe before continuing. “But here the breaking news: some people could find me attractive.”

“We are not talk about usual dates or men.” he held your arm and turned you to himself. “If you receive this kind of proposes, you have to tell me.”

“Next time, I will report you so we can decide who is going to be my sugar daddy.” you poked his ribs while he burrowed his eyebrows and radiated a strong sense of discontent. “Come on Kyungsoo, I am not going to say yes to this type of proposes, what do you think about me?”

“We are always joking about this issue,” he looked like he was cursing beneath his breath. “But when it comes to you and Baekhyun, I always suspect if you are serious or not.”

“Sugar daddy is a joke.” you hissed. “Of course, it is a joke, I have no interest in having a sugar daddy.”

“What about the proposes? Are they real?”

“Well, they are.” you murmured. Suddenly, you felt like the table was turned and you just played your ace card too early. You felt like Kyungsoo’s eyes investigated your soul to the bits.

“How many?”

“Three.” you gave up. “One from faculty, two from outside.”

“Unethical son of bitches.” he lowly cursed and caught you off guard because he generally preferred to use more polite words, even if he was cursing. “Keep them away from yourself.”

“Oh really?” you teased him by hoping to break the strange tension between you and managed to put a little smile on his face.

“Stop mocking me.” he warned you but now he was smiling widely. His mouth became a heart again, this time you averted your eyes from his face.

“Who I am to dare mocking you?” you squeaked but it was fake.

“Oh, you mock me more than even that walking noisy machine Baekhyun.” he flicked his hand. “We have to stop at this station, Ebisu Garden Place is on the way.”

He put his hand onto your waist again, and you felt like electrocuted again. Every time he touched you, and unfortunately, he sporadically did, you felt like you are dying for more. More what? You were not sure what you really wanted from Kyungsoo, but you were certain on you were desperate for more of him.

More of him.

The bus was crowded, Kyungsoo led you to a little corner, and stayed in front of you. He could be a little bit protective when it came to crowded places since you were clumsy, he generally insisted to keep you close to himself in order to catch you, if you would lose your balance, so you did not surprise when he held your wrist.

What made your heart to do a perfect all kill type of somersault was his next move, his fingers did not stop on your wrist, on the contrary they moved into your palm and grasped your hand tightly. You raised your eyes to him, he never hold your hand, never ever.

“I want to be sure.” he whispered by catching your question before you ask. “Since both of us do not know the way, and the bus is full of passengers, this is more secure.”

“Ah.” This was the best of you at the moment. You quickly realized what the heck you said but Kyungsoo sometimes can be quicker than you.

“Why? Are you unsatisfied with the reason?” His dark brown eyes were shining, his perfume smelled fucking good and the proximity between your faces did not help you.

“Why should I be?” you had to be back to play as soon as possible. “I grant you the chance of holding my hand, that’s count as charity.”

He looked at your hand for a moment, and you saw a smile formed on his lips and instead of a sarcastic reply as you expected, his eyes shaped like a crescent and shined as the fucking moon itself during a cloudless, navy night.

“Thank you, your highness.” he genuinely smiled. “May I continue to hold your hand?”

“Why?” the tone of your question was full of surprise, sounded exceptionally strange.

“Because I want to feel you.” he simply answered, and he squeezed your hand a little bit more. “For once let me feel you by my side.”

You knew that your eyes blown up, your mind was playing some tricky and dangerous games with you, you lost your shit, and you were sure about you finally made yourself mad because of your platonic interest in Kyungsoo, but even if God himself would appear in the bus in order to stop you, that would be a fruitless attempt.

You held Kyungsoo’s hand.

If he wanted to feel you by his side, you could not refuse.

You never refuse Kyungsoo.

How could you?

He was the protagonist of your secret dreams, fantasies and your goddam powerful imagination.

He was your gazelle and you were chasing him since the first day you met.

[aegialia]

self-indulgent reflection on being on tumblr

so i recently hit 1000 followers on here and this blog has existed for almost exactly 8 years, so i wanted to ramble about tumblr and my experience of it for awhile. under the cut so definitely feel free to ignore this.

i started this blog right around when i was fourteen and had just started high school. at that point, i was out to my parents (and no one else) as bi, i had an inkling i was Struggling with something but i had no idea what and felt like i couldnt actually acknowledge it, and i had left leaning but very vague politics. tumblr definitely has shaped my journey around sexuality/gender/mental health/politics, both for good and for ill. 

for good: 

seeing other ppl talk about being lesbians helped me realize i could be a lesbian w/o being a traitor to the concept of bisexuality. hearing trans ppl talk about their experiences and explaining non-binary stuff and dysphoria helped me understand what i was going through 

i don’t like talking about my mental health stuff in detail on here, but suffice to say, i was Going Through it in high school. i’m still going through it now, but i am in a much better place (thank you medication and 7 years of therapy!). seeing ppl talk about the weird, dumb, awful parts of mental illness let me acknowledge that i was going through those things too, that i wasnt like evil for feeling like that, that i could change. people talking about adhd/autism was particularly helpful---being able to identify why i’d always felt like my brain just didn’t work right is the first step in the (ongoing) process of not hating myself for the way my brain works

politics is definitely the area where i think tumblr was the best for me. i got exposed to so many opinions i definitely wasn’t hearing in school, from intelligent, well-read people who could articulate theory in ways i could understand. tumblr didn’t give me my politics and i didn’t learn everything i know about theory from it, but the communities of people i was around pointed me in the right directions. tumblr was also a good place to learn how to react to criticism. this doesn’t seem to be most people’s experience, but getting called out over minor things on tumblr genuinely helped me learn how to take a step back, look at my behavior, apologize, and try to change, which, as it turns out, is a helpful skill irl as well

for ill:

wrt sexuality and gender, it’s probably pretty obvious someone who’s journey is ‘cis bi girl -> cis with a million different microlabels -> nb w a million different microlabels for both sexuality and gender -> nb butch lesbian who’s not super into romance’ would have some bad times on tumblr. the bi circles i was in made being a lesbian seem like an immoral choice, the ‘’’mogai’’’ (or whatever u wanna call them) circles made me feel like i had to divy up and perfectly label every aspect of myself in a way that really wasn’t helpful for me, the lesbian circles i was in made me feel like being a lesbian was about ending up in a monogamous butch/femme cottagecore relationship and that there was something wrong with me for not really wanting that. to be clear i think microlabels can be very helpful for people/a monogamous butch/femme relationship is a perfectly fine thing to want, they just didn’t work for me. im very very glad ive reached a point in my life where i dont feel the need to stay up to date on the latest discourse and am more focused on finding a way to exist that is comfortable for me and supporting my community irl. 10/10 would recommend to everyone

not going to get deep into it, but social media is. not good for my brain in general. i still enjoy using tumblr, but these days im pretty careful to step back from it frequently and treat it as an occasional hobby. 

the cons of political stuff on tumblr are probably also very obvious. there are some just awful discussions on here and the culture surrounding the way we handle bad behavior and justice and accountability and working to become a better person and make up for the harm you’ve caused has historically been fucking awful and trying to unlearn it and find new ways to engage with this stuff is exhausting. 

for all that i’ve changed over the course of having this blog, this blog has stayed pretty fucking static. i started out being super into diana wynne jones and the iliad and those are still two of my biggest interests and things i talk about the most on here. there are definitely specific things that have petered away (i started this blog almost entirely to keep up with good omens fan stuff and i pretty much haven’t touched it since the miniseries came out, i haven’t sought out pacific rim/supernatural/elementary/mcu content in years), but im still pretty much interested in the same things. i like relatively small fandoms, i like weird side characters, i like to be a grumpy child playing with my toys in the corner. when a fandom im in gets popular, i tend to stop engaging with it entirely (hello rqg/tma/good omens/enola holmes!). i dont think its a pretentious ‘i liked it before it was cool’ thing so much as a ‘people get Weird and awful when a fandom hits a certain level of popularity and there’s too much content and i really, really hate the bad faith arguments larger fandoms tend to spawn’ thing. i’ll consume content from big fandoms, but i pretty much refuse to actually engage with them at this point.

one of the stranger parts of my experience of tumblr is the social side. i’ve never really known how people make friends online---how do you go from liking each other’s posts and occasionally replying to them to actually being friends who communicate off social media? i’ve had conversations with ppl on tumblr and i’ve had sort-of friendships that are contained to tumblr where i’d like to get to know them better, but i’ve never figured out how to do that. my best friend’s job is pretty much to make friends/connections on the internet (she’s an activist and artist), my dad knows people everywhere in the world from twitter, and i’m just sitting here like a little old grandpa who doesn’t understand how you can have internet friends. 

at this point in my life, i’m fine with this, but this has made me feel real fucking bad in the past---like, if everyone online, even the ppl who say they’re weird and brainbad in a similar way to me, can make friends on the internet, what’s wrong with me? particularly in high school and my first year of college, when i was just horribly lonely all the time, it made me feel super disconnected and like there was something fundamentally bad about me. these days, i’m a lot chiller about it. i use social media to engage with stuff i enjoy and share my thoughts about it. it’s okay that my social difficulties extend to me not knowing how to use the internet to socialize.

on a somewhat related topic, it’s wild that i have 1000 followers. obviously, that’s not an actually super large number and a huge number of them are probably bots or inactive. if you post consistently for eight years and follow lots of people, like i do, it’s not a surprise to end up with this many followers. it is also, thankfully, the sort of followers that are not fans. probably most ppl following this blog dont remember why they followed and dont know anything about me or my interests. this sounds like its meant to be depressing but it’s not. i like that my way of engaging w the internet lets me do pretty much whatever i want and no one will care. the mere concept of being. like. tumblr famous in any capacity, even just in one community/fandom, is viscerally horrifying to me. 

i really enjoy the space i’ve created for myself on here. on one hand, going back through my blog is obviously embarrassing and full of hating my past self. on the other hand, i now have a very nice collection of things i enjoy in this blog. i like seeing what i’ve been interested in and (when i’m in a good mental health place) i like to be able to remember how i thought and talked about the things i loved when i was younger. im not at the place in my life where i can love a younger version of myself, but sometimes i can laugh at zir with a level of fondness. 

i’ve always been paranoid about sharing details about my life on here (and the fact that my parents have always been able to see it certainly contributed), so the version of jack on here is a carefully curated version, who’s super enthusiastic about the things they love, was very conscientious about apologizing and trying to do better when ze messed up, and tried to be polite to others. that’s a younger version of myself that i’m closer to being able to have compassion for than the version i find in essays and poems and memories. 

i’m starting grad school in ten days and i’m still using the blog i started when i began high school. tumblr has helped me in a lot of ways and hurt me in a lot of ways, but i still have to admit that it’s been a significant factor in shaping me. i’d be incredibly embarrassed to admit that irl, but it’s true. other than my family and like one friend, this blog is one of the only things that’s ‘known’ me since i started high school. i’ve changed so much in that time and im glad to have this weird little record of myself throughout those changes, even if i’d probably warn my younger self away from tumblr if i could go back in time.

tl;dr i have had a mixed experience on tumblr and i have mixed feelings about that experience. no idea if anyone read any of this very long, very rambling internet memoir

p.s. fun facts about this blog:

i’ve never changed my icon or blog title

i recently got a second version of the poster i got my blog title from. i chose my blog title by looking at what was hanging on the wall directly in front of me. 

my original url was gloomthkin. this was not, as you’d probably assume, an otherkin thing. i had literally no idea what otherkin was at that point. i’d just learned the word gloomth from a bill bryson book and thought it would be cool n edgy to be the child of the quality of gloom. i changed my url after i learned what otherkin was and realized everyone probably assumed something about me that wasn’t true which i hated (not bc i had an issue w otherkin, just bc i don’t like ppl thinking untrue things about me)

during my good omens days, i once sent a tumblr ask to nail guyman which, in retrospect, was kinda rude. i stand by the content but id never send an ask like that now. he replied to it privately in a way that so deeply embarrassed and shamed 15 year old me that i’ve never gotten over it. i still get nervous and embarrassed when i see anything about him or his books

[highladyluck]

Here, have 4.5 pages of rambly Tuon meta. I wrote this to try to get a handle on Tuon’s character, and to develop the theoretical framework for a redemption arc for her. I’m hoping posting this doesn’t cut my motivation to actually write it...

Who is Tuon? Tuon Athaem Kore Paendrag, High Lady, Daughter of the Nine Moons; now the Empress of Seanchan (at least on the westlands side), Fortuona Athaem Kore Paendrag. To borrow some phrasing and framing from @websandwhiskers: She’s the pinnacle of Seanchan culture and an extremely functional tool of the state; responsible (both personally and institutionally) for psychologically and physically torturing people and enslaving them; she also has some compelling moral and personal qualities that she and the state have not yet managed to quash, which kind of makes it all worse, ethically speaking. She’s a villain whom the original narrative neither sufficiently condemns nor sufficiently redeems, married to one of the Big Damn Heroes in a match that’s both very odd couple and very complementary.

She respects people who stand up to her, as long as they aren't 'disrespectful' in the process- and the 'disrespect' is very situational, she'll accept things in private or in non-court settings that she can't let slide in court without losing face and therefore power. She cares very much about the legitimacy of authority, because it correlates positively with stability and is ingrained in her self-image, but she has an autocrat’s idea of what is legitimate. She assumes you know your own self-worth in relation to hers and are prepared to both display it and back it up. She has also internalized that other people's challenges of her are opportunities for her to prove her strength and fitness to rule, and she probably low-key seeks to provoke reactions now as validation/training, for herself and others.

She has rigid moral standards within the context she was raised in, and punishes herself first for perceived failure because if she does it first, perhaps she can avoid someone else doing it, with deadlier results. She has never been allowed to be less than perfect by her culture's standards- she can be (and has been) odd, but she cannot be flawed- and possibly expends all of her natural empathy on others instead of herself, because she can't afford that kind of indulgence herself, but she knows she owes it to lesser beings?

And as @websandwhiskers pointed out, she does have a lot of empathy within allowable contexts, and I think she is willing to push the envelope compared to her peers as long as she/the empire isn't directly threatened. That's what the kiss after Mat let the poisonous snake go was about. The snake was poisonous but not attacking, and not likely to attack unless someone escalated the situation, and Mat deescalated it. No harm, no foul. Mat responded to a fraught situation both logically and mercifully, in the way she imagined she would have if she had been in his shoes and known he same facts he did, and she rewarded him.

She’s competent and charismatic; I hesitate to say that she inspires loyalty in underlings because honestly with the damane it’s brainwashing (eurgh). But Selucia and Karede are both really into her, personally, even when there are societal inducements not to play favorites. Mat is loyal to her, though honestly Mat is loyal to like... anyone he’s responsible for, so maybe it’s more relevant to say that Mat genuinely likes her; at least, he likes the person he thinks he can coax out of her, and in terms of the persona she has more typically, I think he responds well to her competency and self-possession. The ability to project those things is probably a big part of what goes into charisma.

She thinks that the people who oppose her just don't have all the facts. She doesn't like to admit she's changed her mind; it looks like weakness; she's fine identifying it in others but not herself. Ideally she would pretend things have always been the way she now knows they are, and if she can't, she goes for the "Yes [fact], but [here's what I've decided is now germane to the argument at hand]." redefinition of the problem. She always thinks she’s right, though she does tend to leave some space between when she’s decided something and when she promulgates the decision, to allow for opposing arguments.

I think the original relationship Tuon has with omens is that she uses them to look for external justification from the universe for decisions she's already made. (I mostly like Sanderson's Tuon POVs, but I also I think Sanderson sometimes used omens as a 'make Tuon do OOC things for the plot' card.) Tuon's running dialogue with omens also shows that she's always observing the world and interpreting her effect on it and its effect on her. She loses her composure with omens when they are more concrete and less subject to her control (via interpretation), as with Lidya's fortune.

It makes sense that she's super controlling. It was how she was raised, and aside from having loyal/brainwashed companions (who are, themselves, a form of distributed control), being controlling is obviously the only thing that makes her feel safe. It's still interesting how it extends into a dialogue with the Pattern itself. Like Mat, she wants to survive and she wants to go her own way, and also like Mat she's caught up in the Pattern a little more tightly than others. I think she and Mat have both subconsciously decided that the only way to deal with what the universe wants you to do, when the universe is that powerful, is to say "Fine, I didn't really want to do that other thing anyway, let's learn how this path works and play to win."

She knows she makes bad decisions when angry, and I think in general she distrusts strong emotions, or at least tries to hold them at arms' length so they don't form part of her judgment. She's very very good at compartmentalizing, but as a result sometimes emotional stuff will come up and blindside her a little because she doesn't prioritize it or see it as a natural part of her decision-making. I think her emotions do influence her, usually subconsciously, but she's obviously a Thinking type. (Mat is also a compartmentalizer, but more somatic/emotionally focused; he's got his feelings directly wired into his body and together they make decisions that his brain then evaluates a second later, with running commentary that he never expresses to anyone else. They are both comedically un-self-aware, although Tuon is even less self-aware than Mat is, since at least on some level Mat knows he's been repeatedly traumatized even if he tries to pretend he isn't, while Tuon still thinks that her childhood was completely fine.)

Within the original narrative, I think her POVs are always a bit mysterious and her actions are always a little surprising. What’s impressive about that is that this is basically *always* true no matter what setting she’s in and what she’s doing. When you’re in her head you see her thought process ticking away, but RJ and Sanderson both have her constantly withholding important contextual details in her POVs, like Lidya’s prophecy (the hints are there and come out in bits and pieces, but she doesn’t reveal everything and slot it into context until 2 books later). Like with reading Mat, you’re aware that she obviously has reasons for what she’s doing and you even see her decision-making process, but because you’re missing the details, she remains opaque even though you’re in her head. (Mat’s decision-making process is more clear to the reader, but somewhat opaque to himself and definitely opaque to those around him.)

Meanwhile the things Tuon does share via narration or via action are always kind of buck-wild for the reader because her entire deal is such a culture shock. She’s obviously surprising Mat & co, but what’s weird is that she also seems to be constantly surprising her fellow Seanchan. Her scenes with her peers are usually punctuated with shocked murmuring in the background. They have trouble anticipating her, both because she keeps her cards close to her chest, and I also think because she’s a slightly different person from the one who lived her entire life in a cloistered murdersphere in Seanchan, and if she wasn’t a different person after leaving home, she’s definitely one after her kidnapping. But I think she is a fundamentally different person after leaving home, because of the structural parallels she has with Mat.

In Mat’s first POV chapter, he wakes up in Tar Valon with partial amnesia and a much stronger sense of self-preservation than he had before. As everybodyhatesrand points out (crediting but not tagging them since I feel like they wouldn’t appreciate being tagged in Tuon apologia), we have never been in pre-dagger!Mat’s head. We have never been in dagger!Mat’s head. Everyone in the books, throughout the books, is like “At least Mat’s still the same!” and yeah, he does do and say more or less the same things before and after the dagger. But we had to take it on faith that his personality is more or less intact pre- and post-dagger because we, the readers, only know post-dagger!Mat’s inner monologues. The Mat we inhabit in book 3? He’s been broken. The continuity between his old life and his new life has been disrupted (and will continue to be disrupted, including with an actual literal timeline reboot!) He immediately starts off to fix himself, others, and then eventually the world, so it’s motivating, but the hits really just keep coming...

Like Mat, Tuon’s first POV only appears after she’s left the traumatic environment that shaped her. We don’t know what travelling across the sea did to her sense of self (and we can’t really know since we don’t have that in-Seanchan-baseline), though we do know she’s changed after travelling with Mat (aside from catching feelings, I think she learned that the Seanchan are not always in possession of all the facts), and we know what becoming Empress did to her (she doubled down on duty and lost a lot of personal flexibility). I think there are major structural parallels between Mat and Tuon’s POVs because they’re both broken people who try their very best to act as if they are not broken. In Tuon’s case I think she just doesn’t know how broken she is. In Mat’s case, he knows, but he’s doing a weird balancing act of integrating lessons learned (healing!) while also, like, frantically trying to ignore or drown out the emotional cost of trauma (not healing!)

By the end of the series I think Tuon knows, but is not letting herself actually think, that being made damane is a) a real possibility for her, specifically, and b) that it is not, in fact, something she would willingly choose for herself even to serve the empire. I think this is different from the more intellectual disgust of the idea of herself channeling; that's abstract, and she imagines there's an actual choice for the person with the spark between channeling and not channeling, or possibly that there's an actual choice between learning to channel vs not learning to channel if you have the spark inborn. (We know that the actual choice if you have the spark is 'learn to channel properly or die'.) Tuon's out there like "If I were a marath'damane I would simply choose not to channel. RIP to marath'damane but I'm different".

She's never been a marath'damane in the sense of someone who started channeling involuntarily, and isn't interested in imagining herself as one, at least not when confronted by someone who is succeeding in making her angry. So even if you made her choose, as a theoretical marath'damane, between dying and learning to channel properly, I think she'd consider 'learning to channel properly' as 'becoming a murderer' and therefore the choice would be between dying and becoming a murderer. There's a clear argument to be made in that idiom that the marath'damane is 'becoming a murderer' in self-defense, which would have a different moral tenor (manslaughter vs murder). But Tuon strikes me as the type to say in an argument (and probably believe) that "The end result is the same & I would die before compromising my principles.”

I think in the confrontation with Egwene she probably internally justified not putting the collar on because there was a Seanchan audience and because the taunt came from an escaped damane, even though the actual reason was fear that it would work. She’s letting the circumstances invalidate the argument so she doesn’t have to think about it. I think if she were to let herself think about the authentic emotional response- and she probably has, I feel like she does a postmortem on all of her public discomposure- she would consciously know that her instinct was that it would work on her, and furthermore she would know that she does not want to be damane, even if the Empire would require her to be.

If she followed out the chain of reasoning, she’d know that if she were a damane, if she were actually leashed, she would be forced to channel. She’d know because she’s taken great pleasure in training and breaking damane, and she knows how to get damane to channel and how to break them. Therefore, if she were damane, she would know that she would need to be broken, and she knows how she would go about breaking herself. She probably thinks that her last act of free will would be to suicide if she possibly could. But I think that what she’s AFRAID OF is that she would actually convince herself that being the very best damane is all she wants out of life. And that's the scary, universe-ending thought she's avoiding the consequences of, because a) it’s about breaking herself (as Cadsuane points out, no one can easily think about breaking themselves) and b) the fact that she would need to be broken and that she doesn’t like the idea is a sign that she’s not the perfect avatar of the Empire that she thinks she should be.

I think becoming damane has been added- in the bare abstract- to her mental list of the price of failure. It's a very fundamental loss of control and identity, where all she has is resignation and brainwashing that- best case scenario- she does to herself. She's scared of it in a way she was not before, now that it's been made personal. Like Mat, she's going to shove that down deep and ignore the bad scary implications as long as she can, up until the point that they actually disable her or otherwise bleed out into her intellectual or physical world in ways that aren't as ignorable.

But while Tuon thinks she would die before compromising her principles, and even more secretly is extremely afraid that she *wouldn't*, I also think that like Mat, if it came down to it she would transform herself radically to survive *as herself*.

She’d realize that she has other principles, more human ones, underlying her socially acceptable and externally imposed principles of enforcing hierarchy and maintaining personal integrity. (Parallels to dagger!Mat being exorcised?) I think her basic motivations are that she should survive, that she should retain as much control/power over her own fate as possible, and that she should make decisions from a place of empathy rather than anger or fear. I think she would also realize that she does in fact value some principles over others. She would redefine the meaning of ‘personal integrity’ to separate it from what the state wants.

If she knew what was really driving her socially acceptable principles, and that there was a difference between what she really, fundamentally wanted & what she had been told to want, with encouragement she could prioritize the organic, primal ones and apply those to the external world. If she is a person, then everyone else is a person, and she should want for them what she wants for herself. I think she might get to the point of realizing there is an alternative path (of what looks like selfishness) but I don't think she's going to let herself be selfish (in this healing, positive way) without external prompting/confirmation, so this is probably where friends, positive role models, and finally omens come in.

[aion-rsa]

Neil Gaiman: How The Sandman Reinvents the Audiobook Format

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

“For years, I’ve said that I would rather have no adaptation of Sandman than a bad adaptation,” says Neil Gaiman – and for years we’ve had no Sandman adaptation. But perhaps surprisingly, given the very visual nature of a graphic novel, the first one to make it past the finish line is an audiobook – more than an audiobook, a scripted audio drama, something akin to a radio play or perhaps an ‘audio movie’ of the first three volumes of Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series. It might not be the adaptation audiences were clamoring for but it works surprisingly well and might just set a path for a whole new way of consuming classic storytelling during a time when traditional screen productions are stymied.

Directed by Dirk Maggs who is well known in radio for producing complex, immersive and cinematic audio productions, the new Sandman adaptation has a Hollywood cast and an epic feel, spanning almost eleven hours in total. It’s a project which almost certainly couldn’t have worked as anything other than an audio production and retained the scope and scale, especially right in the middle of lockdown.

“When we made Coraline, on a good day, you would get seven usable seconds,” Gaiman explains. “Shooting a movie, on a good day, you get four minutes. Shooting Good Omens, on a really good day, we would get six minutes done. The amazing thing about audio is because we are just using voice and sound and because you’re relying on the listener to work with you as a co-creator and to imagine and to build, themselves, things are relatively – and I’m using the word ‘relatively’ here just because I do not, in any way, want to diminish the magnitude of what Dirk Maggs and his collaborators have done here – but it’s ‘relatively’ simple.”

Simple compared to a full on 11 hour screen version but, still with a ferocious number of moving parts and a massive cast spread across different countries, there were still major factors to take into consideration. Talking separately to Maggs we start to get a sense of the magnitude of the production. Sound was, unsurprisingly, the key to making the series work.

Maggs explains that they first recorded the ensemble cast, a group of around 60 actors who between them formed all the smaller supporting roles – some who are A-listers in their own right. These parts were recorded in London.

Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs

“I shoot on shotgun microphones, the same mics that you use on film sets to pick up actors’ voices, because I’m trying to carry this cinematic feel through everything,” he says. “So my first question to the other studios we were using is ‘what mic have you got?’ and then we work from that. Then it’s just a case of me carrying in my head how the recording is shaping up now. The director’s job for me is to make sure that as an audience, the listener isn’t suddenly thinking ‘hang on a minute, that sounds like it was recorded 3000 miles away, a month later.’” 

The layering of sounds effects is a complicated business too and something that Maggs has been perfecting for much of his career. From directing Superman radio plays back in the ’90s he’s no stranger to translating comic books to audio.

“The movie feel we strive for is a case of taking the voices and then basically mixing it as if it were a movie and not a radio play. It’s not the sort of polite teacups rattling, ‘more tea, vicar?’ BBC thing. This is where we add pretty much everything to the audio mix down to footsteps, clothing, rustles. If you listen to episode eight where Dream is feeding the pigeons and chatting to Death you can hear their movements as they turn to each other and throw and catch basketballs and so on. So it’s a very complex business and it’s very labor intensive, but the end result is something where if you close your eyes, you’ll see it play out on a screen in your head.”

It helps that the production managed to round up a cast that any blockbuster movie would be proud of. Front and center is James McAvoy as Morpheus – he was easy casting as far as Maggs was concerned.

“I knew that James had everything we needed to deliver Morpheus,” Maggs says. “We’d worked with him on Neil’s Neverwhere for the BBC. The thing about James is that he brings an energy. The tricky part with Morpheus is that he’s not a passive character, but he doesn’t actually do a lot of decisive action. A lot of the time he is reflective. I needed an actor who even in the reflective moments would get the sense of action and that’s what James brings.”

McAvoy was set to record his part last of all. “What none of us then knew was the day that he was due to go into the studio was the day that we went into lockdown…” Gaiman says, telling us that in the end they had to ship McAvoy “a studio” and he had to learn to work it. “He had to become his own sound engineer while Dirk Maggs directed him and talked him through, at the other end of a screen,” he explains. Gaiman says he’s started to do the same from his place in Scotland and shows us the very professional looking microphone he’s using for this Zoom call.

The result is surprisingly seamless. McAvoy and Gaiman himself are the two main constants throughout the series. Morpheus’ arcs in Preludes and Nocturnes sees the lord of the Dreaming captured by mortals and held prisoner for decades until he is able to free himself and go on a mission to win back his three stolen tools. The Doll’s House which is the second Sandman book adapted sees him on the hunt for errant dreams who have escaped from The Dreaming. While the third book, Dream Country tells standalone stories, not always featuring Morpheus at all, like the Element Girl tale, which stars Samantha Morton as a faded and long forgotten DC superhero who is severely depressed and longs for the freedom of death she is unable to attain. Morton is brilliant and the whole episode is just terribly sad.

“Dirk mentioned that, when he taped her performance, she wanted the lights down,” Gaiman explains. “He recorded her in the half dark. And then he had to go and find Kat Dennings in Atlanta. She’d been doing an all-night shoot, and she was exhausted. She still gave us her all, which is so wonderful.” The episode includes Kat Dennings as Death gently handing a tissue to Morton’s Element Girl in reality from across the Atlantic as if the two were sat together talking quietly in a dark room.

Kat Dennings voices Death

One element of the series that may provide an extra thrill to fans of the book is Gaiman’s appearance as the Narrator. By necessity, the adaptation adds extra levels of description to make up for the lack of panels to really paint pictures of The Endless and more in listeners’ heads. 

“The entire experience was very strange. I would very happily not have been the narrator,” Gaiman smiles. “Dirk wanted me, and this was Dirk’s project. My attitude was that I wanted whoever played Morpheus to be the focus and the voice that you were going to hear the most of.”

It’s a lovely bit of meta-casting which sees the creator of Dream of The Endless as the overlord, weaver of his own stories. And the extra description needed added no problems for Maggs or Gaiman since the original directions Gaiman gave to the artists on the series still existed.

“If you go into my hard disk, and you go into ancient photocopies of ancient drives on computers that have long since been forgotten and junked and abandoned…,” Gaiman says, taking us on another journey of undiscovered hidden treasures, “and you follow down ancient, DOS branchings, you eventually get to files with names like Sandman and Sandman Archives, in which all of the files are in WordPerfect 4.1 format. And they are the original Sandman scripts.”

Gaiman dug out the scripts of old and sent them to Maggs to work from.

“Everything in Sandman has been described by me at some point or another,” Gaiman says. “So Dirk would then go and find the lines that he wanted to use, which were my original descriptions to an artist of what a place looked like, what a person looked like, and slide that in and give me, as the Narrator, that line that I’d already written long, long ago, as a line of description. So, that was kind of weird. It’s almost like asking everybody who’s listening to this to become the artist for their own comic.”

It’s a rather lovely element to the adaptation which means it works just as well for people completely new to the comic as those who have images of the Endless already burned into their subconscious minds.

There’s another advantage to this approach too.

“I love the idea that blind and partially sighted people, people whose brains do not process comics, people who just can’t pick up the comics for whatever reason, now have a way of accessing those stories. That, for me, is huge,” Gaiman explains.

The Sandman brings in other well loved DC characters too with similar quality casting. Taron Egerton plays John Constantine in an arc from Preludes and Nocturnes which sees the occult detective visiting an old girlfriend to help Morpheus in his quest for his lost artefacts. Egerton plays Constantine as a convincing Scouser (Egerton’s parents are both from Liverpool) and Maggs says the Golden Globe winning actor gave him the most trouble in the edit. 

“Taron’s was the hardest because he gave me so many great choices on each line that it actually made it quite quite a challenge to make any set of decisions,” he says. “He’s like James, he comes in with ideas.”

Michael Sheen who played an angel in Good Omens, which Gaiman scripted, plays Lucifer Morningstar, “I’m not sure if it’s a promotion or a demotion,” laughs Maggs. He’s something of a favourite in the world of The Sandman who we are likely to see more from if the show gets a second series. “Michael came in and he ran with the idea of Lucifer being based slightly on David Bowie which was really nice,” says Maggs. “It worked really well with James’s Morpheus.”

With Miriam Margolyes as Despair, Riz Ahmed as The Corinithian, Arthur Darvill as Shakespeare, and Matthew Horne as Hob Gadling, among many favourites rounding out the cast, this is an all-star production that transports listeners to hell and back via the world of The Dreaming in a beautiful, sleepy way. 

There’s also the chance that this adaptation might reinvent people’s expectations and perceptions of what an audiobook can do, at the very time when many on screen productions have had to be shut down due to Covid.

“This was the chance to take a modern classic like The Sandman and realise it so convincingly in audio that people who think audiobooks consist exclusively of single voices reading against a silent background will have their expectations massively opened up by the breadth and power of the acting of our superb cast, the cinematic atmospheres, settings and sound effects, and the beautiful full score especially composed for The Sandman by James Hannigan,” explains Maggs.

“I’d love this production to open some doors for people who feel the only epic entertainment worth their attention has pictures already attached. Hopefully they’ll find the pictures in their head can match anything Hollywood can produce!”

There’s still so much material to adapt, too, with the rest of the series of graphic novels as well as The Sandman: Overture, the prequel, to work with. Gaiman is hopeful for more.  “Put it this way. This is currently number one in all categories in the UK and around much of the world on Audible and only number two in the US, because the thing about President Trump from Trump’s niece, about how awful he is, is just sitting there at number one,” says Gaiman. “Everybody’s very happy at Audible with how well this has done in terms of reach and listening and people enjoying it and everybody’s loving it. So, I cannot imagine a world in which we don’t now go on and do Season of Mists and keep going. I want the whole thing.”

The post Neil Gaiman: How The Sandman Reinvents the Audiobook Format appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3jr8iiw

[ivory-line]

I thought @drawlight‘s Good Omens Advent Fic challenge sounded fun so here’s (a belated) day 1!

Mistletoe

Crowley wasn’t sure how he ended up at Anathema’s Christmas party wearing a gaudy red sweater and sipping on spiked punch. That was a lie, he knew exactly how he ended up there.

Aziraphale had asked him to accompany him to the party and Crowley had said no. Aziraphale had asked him again peppering in things that were meant to entice him like “you haven’t seen them since You Know What wouldn’t it be nice to visit?” and “there’s going to be a gift exchange” and even “there will be alcohol” and Crowley had firmly, confidently said no, demons don’t do Christmas. Then Aziraphale had put on an expression that on someone less angelic would’ve been called a pout and really what could Crowley do but pick the angel up promptly at seven.

Crowley had shown up in his usual attire and when Aziraphale opened the door wearing what he proudly called an “ugly sweater” (though Crowley would be hard pressed to describe any of his usual sweaters as anything besides ugly) he took in Crowley’s clothing choices with a frown. So Crowley had sighed and snapped his fingers and impatiently bustled Aziraphale into the Bentley before he could get conned into anything else.

Crowley was currently sitting on Anathema’s squashy beige couch studiously ignoring the angel on his right who was talking animatedly with Madame Tracy. He’d already had to use three demonic miracles to keep his drink from spilling when Aziraphale knocked into him. Crowley was finding it hard to fault him for it, though, the punch packed quite a...well, punch.

Jasmine Cottage was really quite nice in Crowley’s opinion. Something about the clutter seemed very Aziraphale-ish to him. It wasn’t as cozy as the bookshop tended to be but then again very few places were as fiercely loved as that bookshop was. Anathema had gone all out with the decorations so that nearly every surface sparkled or glinted in the light which Crowley was pretending to be irritated about. The witch had even hung a mistletoe in the archway leading to the kitchen.

Crowley’s eyes snapped back to the mistletoe with an evil plan already formulating in his brain. He would teach his angel a lesson so he would never get dragged to another Christmas party.

He allowed himself one small smile before getting into character. He downed the rest of his punch in one swallow, dodging a stray flourish from Aziraphale in the process, and stood up. When Aziraphale glanced in his direction Crowley brandished his empty cup.

“Just taking advantage of the free booze,” Crowley told him, “might also take advantage of whatever it is Book Girl baked in there that smells so good.” Ah, now he had Aziraphale’s full attention. Anathema, upon hearing what she chose to believe was a nickname and not just Crowley not knowing her name, added herself into the conversation.

“They’re cookies shaped like snowmen. According to Newt they taste as good as they smell but he’s biased,” she said with a shrug.

“Right. I’m going to try some of her cookies,” Crowley said with just enough mockery around the word to make both Anathema and Aziraphale roll their eyes. Aziraphale stood up and gestured toward the kitchen.

“Lead on, dear boy. I would be happy to give an unbiased opinion on Miss Device’s baking skills.” Crowley fought the urge to rub his hands together like an old-timey villain.

Once in the kitchen he prioritized lulling Aziraphale into a false sense of security. He refilled their cups and watched as Aziraphale took a delicate bite of a cookie and sighed. Crowley waited patiently while he savored the confection and assured him that no, two certainly wouldn’t hurt. At last, the time had come for Crowley’s plan to come to fruition.

Aziraphale started to make his way back into the sitting room, but Crowley held out his arm to stop him.

“Hang on, angel, you’ve got something on your sweater,” Crowley said innocently. Aziraphale came to a halt directly under the archway and looked down at himself. Crowley began to grin.

Madame Tracy called out almost as if on cue, “ooh, love, look up!” Aziraphale directed his attention in the opposite direction and spotted his danger too late. Anathema and Newt turned in their seats to watch the scene unfold.

“Rules are rules, angel,” Crowley said with a shrug, “you know what comes next.” He was exceedingly pleased when he saw a faint blush paint Aziraphale’s cheeks. Crowley’s grin widened and he was prepared to declare the lesson learned when Aziraphale turned his gaze on Crowley and spoke.

“Quite right, my dear. Wouldn’t want anymore bad luck than we’ve already had,” Aziraphale informed him, straightening his sweater. Crowley’s brain screeched to a halt. Maybe Aziraphale was onto something when he said evil contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Not one to back down from a challenge, Crowley gripped his drink tighter in one hand and raised the other to cup Aziraphale’s cheek. He wasn’t sure if the trembling of his hand was in his imagination or if it was real. He wished Aziraphale would stop looking at him like that and he could almost feel the force of Anathema’s savage grin and now he was leaning forward and his heart was beating in a way that surely wouldn’t be healthy for a human and would Aziraphale please stop looking at him like that? He was close enough to feel the angel’s breath on his face and it wouldn’t be anything to eliminate the gap and press his lips to Aziraphale’s. It would be nothing at all so why did it feel like his heart had suddenly stopped beating entirely?

He closed the distance and in a last minute fit of cowardice kissed Aziraphale on the corner of his mouth. He pulled back and dropped his hand as if it had been burned. As far as Crowley was concerned it had been and he was certain he would never stop feeling the heat where their skin had met. Aziraphale looked disgustingly pleased for reasons Crowley couldn’t fathom and left Crowley standing in the archway desperately trying to regain even an ounce of his cool.

[ghostsbabey]

Max jr. (part 2)

Here’s the continuation and final piece for my friend @hillbilly-wifey  Enjoy!!

    Your legs twitched in anticipation, waiting for him to spring into action and grab you with his twisted and crooked hands to make you relive the same torturous death trial after trial. When it didn’t happen you released a breath you didn’t realize you were holding, your stare focused on the man in front of you. He wasn’t moving. He hadn’t done anything to warrant your fear, yet you still felt the icy chill down your spine the longer he looked at you. You watched him as his head lowered, almost like he was upset that you were there but you didn’t understand. He was a killer, why would he be upset about a survivor all alone? You were easy prey. Your feet moved slightly as if they had a mind of their own, stepping on some of the dandelions you were once sitting peacefully near. You didn’t have time to react before he reacted for you. 

    He heard the movement, he didn’t realize what you had initially done though. When he raised his head again, his face contorted into one of worry and almost panic- you had stepped on some of his flowers. They would be crushed, ruined, crooked. Just like him. He found himself almost sprinting towards you and the flowers with as much balance as he could muster without the saw to help balance his uneven body. The ground wasn’t forgiving though, as he noticed the tree roots growing up out of the ground too late. 

    You were just about to start running as soon as your brain processed that he was in fact charging at you. However, his sudden falter in his step sent him sprawling onto the dirt, crushing most of the dandelions in the area. You had half expected him to immediately get back up and grab at you to mangle your body until it resembled the corpses of your fellow survivors after meeting his saw. You were surprised when instead he sat up and let out almost a pained whine, his hands moving to cup the tops of the dandelions with more care than a mother to their child. You couldn’t believe you were witnessing it- a killer being upset over something so trivial as flowers. It only just dawned on you that you didn’t know anything about him, why he looked the way he did, why he did the things he did in trials as well. You knew he saw you on multiple occasions, the linger of his stare much too long for your liking, but he didn’t chase you. You wanted answers, but his distraught was making things much too hard to ignore. You felt bad for him- a killer- someone that had killed you on multiple occasions. You sighed before slowly approaching him, crouching down next to him while tentatively putting a hand on his shoulder. You did the only thing you thought that might cheer him up, you had picked a few earlier while lost in thought, so you picked them up before presenting them to him with a slightly awkward smile. 

    He couldn’t believe he had been so careless. He had ruined everything he had made, he was just trying to take care of his plants, the only thing that didn’t mind being around him, and he ruined it. It was like the entity planned for this entire ordeal to happen from the start. He couldn’t help the distraught whine that escaped his throat, but he was so caught up in looking after the flowers he just crushed that he paid it no mind. It wasn’t until he felt a hand on him that he was drawn out of his worryful coddling. It was her. He almost recoiled from her touch until he noticed the flowers in her hand, outstretched to him. He looked up at her, his gaze holding uncertainty and confusion. He didn’t understand, why was she being nice to him? Why was she touching him? She shouldn’t have to be near someone as disgusting as him. She deserved so much better, he couldn’t even keep the one thing he adored alive. He ruined it, just like before the entity took him. He killed innocent animals, he hurt them. He knew he was nothing but a bad omen and he didn’t deserve anything good, but he still wanted good things. It only made him more confused and upset at himself.

    You slowly stopped smiling when he didn’t respond to your outstretched hand, tilting your head slightly before saying “well… I know things are kind of awkward, I mean, you could easily kill me. It’s um, endearing. Watching how you take care of them.. I can tell you care about them, I didn’t mean to intrude on your little uh… Dandelion patch. Here. I didn’t mean to pick some of them, it just kind of happened but you can keep them. They seem to matter more to you.” You moved to put some of the dandelions behind his more normal shaped ear, smiling at him awkwardly again before setting the rest of them down in his hand, closing his fingers around the stems for him. You didn’t know why but your hand lingered over his, his warmth undeniably inviting compared to the cold the woods offered. You were just a survivor though, you shouldn’t feel comfortable around a killer, nor should you try to get close to them. After all, the others have only told you that it ends in more heartbreak and melancholic moments than anything else. Still, you couldn’t deny you felt drawn to him, he seemed so lost and confused- but caring. It was endearing watching how much he cared for something that most people would just rip out of the ground. Which you had done. His lack of response was making you uneasy though, as he was still unpredictable. You slowly moved away from him, already missing the contact you had made earlier. You turned on your heel to leave so he could have time to fix what had happened, although you knew it was most likely a lost cause. You didn’t want to be there when he snapped though, if he did.

    He froze again once you spoke to him, your voice was perfect, just as he imagined it. It only made him think of how he sounded, how hard it was for him to form syllables and words with his malformed tongue and mouth. His skin pulled taut around his mouth and leathery, it was already hard enough to sound intelligible, so he didn’t respond. She deserved better and he knew it. However, his resolve almost broke when you put the flower behind his ear, your touch was almost featherlight, like there was still fear behind your brave facade. He knew you felt fear, but so did everyone else, he expected it by now. It was okay, even if it stung. Your hand closing around his pulled him out of his thoughts, the rest of the flowers now in his grasp, which he held almost tenderly. He didn’t understand why your hand lingered on his, but when your touch retracted from him, he wanted to grab at you and pull you against him. He wanted to feel like the very flowers he held, he wanted to feel like someone wanted him, like someone cared for him. But it was all so unfamiliar, he wasn’t good enough for her and he never would be. It wasn’t until she started walking away that he panicked, his voice very faint compared to the way she spoke, “Max.” 

    You froze once you heard him speak, you thought you brain was playing tricks on you at first until you turned to meet his gaze. Your expression softened for a second before saying “max.. That’s your name? I’m (Y/N).” Your heart was beating slightly faster but there was no adrenaline left in your body. You were just as confused as he was, you didn’t understand why you felt so comfortable around someone that’s sawed you down more times than you could count. “You’ll be back here, right? I’d like to see you again, in this spot. Maybe I could help you tend to your flowers, they’re very pretty. You took care of them well.” You turned away slightly, starting to walk away again once he showed no sign of responding verbally before saying “I’d also like to get to know you, max. You seem sweeter than you let on. I’m sure it’s lonely being a killer, it’s lonely for us too. We may have a lot more in common than you think..” You didn’t know why but you found yourself running back towards the camp, your thoughts and heart racing. You didn’t know why you felt the way you did or why you even said what you said, but you didn’t regret it. You could only feel a slight warmth in your chest and a shadow of a smile on your face before you returned back to the other survivors. 

    Your words replayed over and over in his head. He wanted to see you again too, but why would you want to see him? Isn’t he hideous? He’s called crooked for a reason. The botanist, she even said he was a monster. Isn’t that what she sees? He was beyond puzzled, but he felt happier. He looked down at the dandelions in his hand, just barely brushing over the tops of them with his fingers. “(Y/N)” he muttered on repeat, almost like a broken record, before he stood up to start limping back to his home, the flowers clutched to his mangled chest. 

[ethereal-not-occult]

hhh okay I need a few moments to yell about This Scene:

What strikes me the most about this particular exchange is just how much Aziraphale’s response reads like my own dysfunctional, OCD-driven thoughts when I’m having an episode. It’s actually so scarily similar to how my OCD manifests that the first time I read Good Omens -- several months before I was diagnosed and in therapy -- I nearly put it down again because that particular description was so triggering.

I’ll elaborate. Obviously OCD appears in a variety of different forms and symptoms, and it’s not the same for everyone. But one symptom that can appear in OCD is all-or-nothing thinking. Basically it becomes impossible to look at the “in-betweens” of a subject -- there are Only Two Sides of Right and Wrong and Nothing Else (sound familiar?) Maybe the one logical part of you can recognize that this kind of thinking is not quite right, but that part is drowned out by the brain gremlins yelling that it can only be one or the other and you’re evil and wrong for ever daring to think outside that box.

Now, as to how this applies to Good Omens, and this scene in particular. Aziraphale has his world divided neatly into Good and Evil. If something is said to be Good, then it is Good, and anything that is not considered Good must therefore be Evil, with no room for exceptions or error.

Crowley here is the voice of logic, the one that some part of Aziraphale secretly knows has a solid point. But Aziraphale is unable to accept it. One part of him wishes to, but another part of him so deathly fears that he would be sympathizing with “Evil” if he agrees that he immediately retreats into denial as a safety net. It must be bad. Even if he doesn’t understand why it’s bad precisely, this is what he knows to be true, so he shouldn’t argue against it because otherwise that means he’s Evil too, and God knows he doesn’t want to be Evil.

When it comes to OCD subtypes like scrupulosity (c’est moi), this kind of thinking can be so overwhelming that you basically get caught up in a perpetual moral argument with yourself, trying to find one “right” answer or condition that doesn’t exist. Eventually you retreat to the “safety” of extremes; if you just stick to the Good side, then you won’t be Evil. Of course, that also means that any questioning of the Good side whatsoever automatically = evil, and the fear that that causes makes it difficult to break out of these harmful patterns of thinking (and that fear is very strong, and the guilt of thinking you have done “evil” is even stronger). 

I always felt that Aziraphale’s struggles with Heaven and the ineffable plan throughout the book mirrored OCD’s distorted lines of thinking in a way that was painfully familiar. He makes mistakes based off these thoughts -- making excuses for Heaven’s conduct (because questioning it otherwise must mean he is allowing Evil to happen, or else committing Evil himself), retreating behind the safety net of extremes when his firmly drawn lines are threatened.

But at the same time, let’s consider incidents like the flaming sword. For all of Aziraphale’s internal debate over whether the banishment of Adam and Eve was the right thing to do, he still gives them the sword to keep them safe, then lies to God about it afterwards. Then, of course, we come to the Apocalypse-that-wasn’t, in which Aziraphale finally shakes himself free of the tangled web of all-or-nothing, good-or-unforgiveable ‘logic’ that has kept him trapped for millennia, steps forward, and dares to say, “This Great Plan... this would be the ineffable plan, would it?” 

There’s a lot more I can say here, and I’m not even sure if what I wrote makes sense or not. I’m just... emotional at how he manages to break himself free of that futile cyclical way of thinking and forge his own path. At a time when so much seemed hopeless with my own mental health and no help was forthcoming, and I was breaking down over believing I was a fundamentally unforgivable person, Good Omens was such an anchoring story.

Many thanks to @goodm-omen-ts for their wonderful post here that finally motivated me to write this meta. 

Now for some miscellaneous Aziraphale with OCD headcanons:

Intrusive thoughts. Just lots of images and urges and thoughts that are so horrifying and contrary to Aziraphale’s morals pop into his head all the time and no amount of trying will make them go away. When it gets really bad, anything that reminds him even distantly of these thoughts can be a trigger, and if he isn’t careful he can get lost in his head struggling to get rid of these thoughts for hours at a time. But what helps with this are mindful activities that keep his hands occupied and his mind focused on the present, which I feel is how he got into doing stage magic. He gets so focused on executing the tricks and being in the moment that it allows him to forget (or at least sufficiently ignore) the intrusive thoughts until they subside on their own.

Also consider Aziraphale getting involved with other mindful crafts, like knitting.

I feel like at some point Aziraphale would also have distressing intrusive thoughts about Crowley. Cruel whispering thoughts and urges implanted into his mind, saying this is a demon, you must smite harm hurt, along with old prejudices popping into his head that he knows are untrue but somehow he’s thinking them anyway -- the thought of harming Crowley in any way shape or form is simply sickening, and Aziraphale argues against the thoughts constantly, presents all the evidence he has at his disposal (over six thousand years of it) that Crowley isn’t evil, that those are all lies, but of course OCD refuses to listen to logic. The guilt of thinking such terrible things about his friend is crushing, so Aziraphale starts avoiding Crowley out of fear that he will succumb to those awful thoughts and hurt him. Of course that just makes him even more miserable, but the shame prevents him from telling Crowley what’s wrong. Eventually Crowley knocks on the bookshop door himself, and when Aziraphale, teary-eyed and shaking, finally confesses, Crowley holds him and says I’m not angry, angel. I know you never actually believed those things, and I know that you would never hurt me or anyone. Those thoughts don’t represent who you are or what you believe. 

Compulsions. okay but also Aziraphale fearing that his relationship with Crowley will get Crowley punished by either Hell or Heaven and dealing with the crushing guilt that comes with that, and the rituals he sets up in an attempt to avoid such a thing from ever happening. Spending hours brooding over short notes from Gabriel trying to determine if the wording of that particular sentence means Gabriel knows something he shouldn’t, or combing repeatedly through his memories of the Arrangement to see if he’d ever somehow accidentally betrayed to the Powers That Be that it was he, Aziraphale, who had carried out that particular temptation in France instead of Crowley who was in China at the time... just lots of questions of what if, what if, what if. Through this, he also tends to blame and beat himself up over any small thing that goes wrong. 

When Aziraphale is overworked or overtired it gets worse, and he finds himself slipping into his head more and more often. That relaxing sit-down with a book becomes three fraught hours of second-guessing his actions from an event that happened two centuries ago, or he’s at the Ritz with Crowley but can’t focus on the conversation because every time he blinks he sees horrifying images behind his eyelids, and the crowds of people at the tables around them aren’t helping to clear his muddled mind. But then he’ll be roused by a touch to the shoulder, worried yellow eyes beneath dark sunglasses and a questioning “Angel?”, and they’ll pay the bill, drive back to the bookshop in the Bentley while Aziraphale presses his flushed face into the cool window and tries to focus on Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy playing softly on the radio instead of the frantic nest of bees in his brain. He can’t stomach any more food that night, but Crowley miracles up a pair of pyjamas for him (tartan, though Crowley would deny it if you asked) and grooms the tension out of Aziraphale’s wings until the angel manages to fall into a sound sleep.

Just... Aziraphale with OCD. It traps him in a snarled web of indecision, terror, and guilt, and the abuse he receives from Heaven only worsens it. And later, when he realizes his past mistakes, the crushing remorse that that causes makes it difficult for him to forgive himself and move forward. But he works at it, and learns to break out of those lines of thinking, and it’s never a quick nor easy process, but he’s getting there. He’s staying afloat.

(I also have lots of thoughts about Crowley dealing with similar symptoms, especially after his Fall. In my mind he’s more accustomed to dealing with it by now than Aziraphale, and has developed good coping mechanisms, but it still gets hard at times. They help each other.)

[eligrantbooks]

gotta vent about my day real quick

highlights of the day

> be professional ghostwriter.

Agreed to edit a 25000 word segment of a finished manuscript for a much loved regular client, who said the MC’s dialogue needed to be punched up. Easy enough. I figured it would take a few hours.

Was briefly excited to discover the manuscript was for a concept I had outlined and written several chapters for a few months ago.

Excitement rapidly dwindles as I realize that beloved client has hired another ghostwriter to write the majority of the book. Which would be fine, except this other ghostwriter has no fucking idea what they are doing.

Formatting is a god damn disaster and I spend several hours just getting the document into a workable condition.

You ever open a word doc, look at the navigation pane, and just see a wall of blank links, because someone applied the header formatting somewhere and then just hit enter a million times instead of using a page break like a civilized god damn human being?

in the middle of this forest of blank headers, actual chapter titles are scattered at random, and also they only applied the header to roughly one out of every five chapters or so, you know, just, when they felt like it. when the spirit took them. when the stars aligned. when the feng shui was right.

Also, apparently they like the way first line indenting looks but don’t know how to make word do that (spoiler: its easy as shit and takes like two clicks) so every once in a while they start manually hitting tab before every line, until they get distracted and stop for a while, luring you into a false sense of security before they remember and start doing it again.

Sometimes, when a scene transitions but they dont want to just end the chapter for some reason, they break it up with spaces. Other times, they like to use asterisks. Once or twice, just for flavor, they throw in one of those page width lines that word makes when you type a line of hyphens.

There is random highlighting in places, for no discernible reason.

Once I have the document formatted in a way I can bear to work with, I start actually reading through it. About the first seven chapters were written by the client. They’re cheesy but solid.

Then I get to chapter eight, and the suspicions i had begun to form while putting the formatting through traction (namely that whoever did this was a fuckwit) quickly crystallized into a shining certainty that my beloved client had mistakenly hired An Ass Clown.

Not just An Ass Clown, but An Ass Clown who thought 50 Shades was a beautiful love story, actually.

And they gave This Ass Clown, this literary reprobate, this paste eating remedial english mother fucker, my outline.

let me clarify that i did not expect to have sole control of this story when i produced the outline for beloved client, and I was okay with that. That’s how it works. If I’d been dead set on writing this myself, i wouldn’t have sold the outilne to beloved client. but it really rubs salt in the wound to have spent hours of my life crafting the bones of this story, which i really liked and was excited to see take shape

and then find out it has been put into the pie fondling hands

of An Ass Clown.

first hint that something has gone drastically wrong: the arrival of completely unnecessary and ridiculous fantasy names for things.

“oh we dont drink coffee in this book. it’s kofee. at least until three chapters from now when i forget and it becomes kofe. Oh, and watch out for those thornaby bushes! I’m going to misspell that one literally every time I use it! It’s entirely possible that this isn’t a fantasy name at all and I just have a small seizure whenever I try to type the word thorn bush!”

second omen of my impending anuerism: phonetically written accents which are so comically stereotypical and inaccurate that native speakers of that accent should be entitled to financial compensation, except they can’t even stick to the stereotype accurately, producing gems such as  “It’s not safe in that there pen with ‘em swine, young miss.” I don’t even know what accent that’s supposed to represent. To top it off these accent abominations are sprinkled in with all the consistency and reliability of a lactose intolerant cheese enthusiast’s bowel movements.

But this, I tell myself, moving on, is not my problem. I just need to punch up the mcs dialogue. It’ll be fine. I can do this. I just need to take this shit: “A fond idea, but I doubt I have that ability.” I joked. “I can’t imagine living without true sunshine. Even the triplet moons must shine less brightly without their sister sun.” and make it… not like that.

Except, and here’s where I start hitting the real roadblock guys

this book is in first person.

essentially, the entire novel is the MC talking.

So sure I can change the spoken lines, but her internal monologue

which is, i remind you, the entire narrative

her internal monologue is going to keep being maggie gyllenhal’s character from The Secretary if her copy of the script had been swapped with just a binder full of sonnets written by a middle school english class during the Shakespeare unit.

I get to chapter ten around three in the afternoon. I have been working steadily, with an unusual degree of focus thanks to my recent adderal prescription, since ten in the morning.

this is where shit begins to go truly bananas.

this is a YA beauty and the beast type fantasy

that good fun indulgent shit that’s almost as enjoyable to write as it is to read

usually. previously. before i had to endure this traumatic twelve hour experience.

Chapter ten is the first big “dinner” scene. this book isn’t being shy about pulling from the source material, but that’s fine. the beast “apologizes” (heavy quotes there) for having earlier used magic to force the heroine to answer his questions truthfully. They talk and almost seem to making progress for a bit, and then have a fight and storm off. Standard stuff.

Except, uh, the beast’s apology is, essentially “Yeah I shouldn’t have done that.” “so you’re apologizing?” “no but it’s the best you’re going to get so deal with it.”

and the headstrong, independent heroine who wears pants and wrestles pigs and dont need no man

just kinda rolls with this. There’s giggling.

They have their big dramatic fight, exit stage left, much angst and todo.

The next morning heroine wakes up to find the beast has (presumably) snuck into her room while she was sleeping and dumped a bunch of new dresses on her. he has also (apparently) replaced her brain with Bella Swan’s more vapid cousin.

She forgives him instantly. Because pretty dresses. She also starts calling him master, because why not. She has, over night, become the darling submissive Tumblr doms dream of.

This is not a bdsm book. I am eighty percent certain it doesn’t even include soft core smut. I’m telling you this so that you understand this transformation was not a contrivance in order to facilitate kinky sex. I have written a contrived set up to a sex scene or two in my day. This is not that. This is Not what is in the outline. I know, because i wrote the outline. It is My Outline.

No, The Ass Clown just… decided to do this. Apropos of nothing. I’m beginning to think the Ass Clown’s decision making process involves whipping pies at a comically large dartboard. And all the options on the dartboard are just “lol whatever”

By the time I get to chapter eleven, wherein our newly lobotomized heroine is “excited to wear a new frock and please the master!” - direct quote I have given up any pretense of editing dialogue and I am just straight up rewriting shit using the previous garbage as a loose outline.

I have eaten, maybe, three bites of a bowl of oatmeal all day. I have not taken a bathroom break since before noon. I have missed my deadline. Beloved client is concerned. I’m sure I can still do this, I just need a few more hours.

the words sound like truth but my soul knows i am a liar

I frantically restructure scene after scene, deceiving myself each time that it will be the last, and I will be able to get this crazy train back on the rails. But this crazy train has no interest in being on the rails. It’s a direct line no stops right off the edge of the cliffs of insanity.

The beast jumps unpredictably from homicidal rage and threats of violence to jokes and flirting as though he did not just declare her his property and threaten to rip her tongue out a few paragraphs ago. Heroine swoons and sighs and giggles regardless of whether she is dealing with Dr.Jekyll or Christian Gray on PCP.

But I’m still sure I can do this. I’ll just adjust these two full chapters to make her appropriately scared and angry, and then replace this weird conversation here with a heartfelt apology from him and an effort to do better. That will totally work. Unless, you know, it turns out that conversation I want to replace only starts out with them joking and laughing together, and turns into him berating and abusing her mid paragraph of a fuckin montage a page later! But, haha! Why would The Ass Clown ever do that? It would be completely irrational, tonally jarring and out of character! Only a seltzer slinging rainbow suspender-ed peanut butter fumbling son of six fucks would do that.

so of course The Ass Clown did that.

It’s eleven at night. I know when I’m beaten.

I inform beloved client that the Ass Clown has bested me and I can do no more.

She is very understanding.

I send her what I managed and I check the added word count while im at it

i added a full 6,000 words to that manuscript just trying to patch up this sloppy motherfucker’s lopsided prose and gossamer thin understanding of narrative structure

son of a bitch had about as firm a grasp of romance as i currently have on the trembling shreds of my sanity.

their grip on character writing could not be more tenuous if they had first dipped the target brand Hulk Hands which I assume they always have on their person into a barrel of adult-film-grade silicon lubricant and then taken their Leapfrog 2-in-1 Leaptop Touch down a waterslide.

Do you know how much I usually make for 6000 words?

$180.

Do you know how much I made for enduring this ass blasting, which I naively believed I could tackle in a matter of hours?

$100.

You owe me $80 Ass Clown. And I aim to collect.

Also I lost my damn mind for a minute and said the words "i dont know shit about fuck my guy” to my actual father on facebook

so there’s that.

[ailuronymy]

hi Grey~ i've been hit with some inspiration recently, and i'm working on some folk-lore/myths stuff for my clans. however, i really have no idea where to start! i've started a bit on a creation story, but then i jump around to some mythical figures and then i'll move to some omens/general folk-lore stuff. do you have any suggestions or maybe a word of advice?

Hello there! This is a difficult one to answer, because I can’t really tell you your process for creating and in trying to answer, I can really only draw on what I personally know to be useful (for me). So, I guess that’s my preface to this answer: some or none of this might be useful to you! Take whatever feels relevant and good and ignore the rest. Hopefully that’ll be enough to get you started. 

First of all, I think it’s always worthwhile to take stock of your cauldron and see if you’ve been giving yourself enough fuel to work with. If you haven’t, the best thing for you to do isn’t write–it’s read, and watch, and talk to people, and look at art, and walk in parks, and overall replenish your soul with inspiration and curiosity and things you want to talk about. You sound like you’re topped up on inspiration, but it’s possible that some of your trouble is coming from not having any motivation to write or anything to bounce off from. For example, a decent amount of my motivation for writing fiction tends to come purely from exasperation and dissatisfaction: I have a selection of books on my shelf I read specifically to piss myself off enough to get to work. (Shout-out to Anne McCaffrey and friends). When I’m mad like that, I usually know exactly what I want to write–usually, a literary version of the academic In Response To, in which I do the damn thing right.

With that in mind, something that might help you know where to start and find what you want to say is seeking out things (not necessarily fiction) that make you really feel something. It might be anger, or disappointment, or curiosity to know more and understand or experience something outside of what you personally know, and whatever your feelings are, that’s your motivation. Writing solely for the sake of writing is hard, even when you desperately want to write something, whereas writing because you want to do something with what you’re writing is much easier, I find. 

Additionally, I think there’s a difference between writing “just for fun” and writing with purpose–i.e., writing because you’re curious or excited about an idea and want to explore it more, and writing to tell a holistic story. Both of them are good, and occasionally they overlap! But the goals and processes are different, and the mindset you bring to them is different. If you’re frustrated with your writing, sometimes it can be useful to sit back and figure out what it is you actually want to achieve.

So, my next word of advice is: figure out what you want to do. I know that doesn’t sound like helpful advice, but if you’re trying to create a completed story, you’re going to want to focus on different things than if you’re only looking to have fun frolicking in the rich landscape of your imagination. I believe that sometimes we use world-building as procrastination: it’s often easier (and more fun) to think up a million ideas about a world than it is to physically write the world into being in a story, sentence by sentence. 

It sounds to me you’re stuck in the mire of being overwhelmed by world-building and not knowing what you need to know about your world, so I’d say the fastest way to get through that is to simply not play ball with that whole trouble. Instead, I recommend sitting down with the skeleton of the story you want to use this world-building to decorate, and start writing it out. Let it be rough and messy, because the idea is to get your story–not the world-building–onto the page. Beautiful world-building is the wonderful skin and bones of your work, but the story you’re chasing should be the heart of what you’re working on. 

As you scribble out this story idea, my trick is to put TK every time I don’t know something about it–whether it’s a name, a concept, a piece of world-building, whatever. (TK because it’s the easiest letter combination to search for later). Block out chunks of how you think your story should go. Put TK in every gap and just keep going. Then when you’ve got some idea of the shape of your story, that’s the time to look back and go, “Okay, where does a creation story fit in? When would telling that tale that add something to the narrative?” and “Where does it feel right to experience an omen?” and “Which characters would talk about/care about/be influenced by mystical and/or historical figures?” and so on. Knowing where the gaps are in your story re: myth stuff is going to help you know which elements of world-building need to be thought about first, and it’ll also help you think critically about the structure of your narrative. From there, you can build outwards, but it might be useful to know upfront what bits are crucial to telling your story. 

Which brings me to my last bit of “advice”–or, rather, a previous observation, perhaps a warning. In a good book, most world-building isn’t shared with the reader. Less is often more when it comes to making a delicious world that is just unsatisfying enough, withholds just enough, to make the reader think about it for years afterwards. I know that the books I love best always leave me slightly–or sometimes very–hungry for more, but I’m always grateful to have that hunger, because there’s not much worse than a world that gives you far too much, plus all the answers, and nothing to snack your brain on for later. 

So I suppose what I’m saying is experiment now knowing that you’ll hold back later. In the end, you’ll only put the best pieces into your work. For now, feel free to jump around and try a dozen different things! I don’t believe any writing is ever wasted. These explorations with ideas will contribute to how you conceptualise your story in your own mind, and even the ones you decide to cast aside will help you learn what your story isn’t about. 

I can’t tell you what you care about or what you’re interested in or what you have fun writing about, but in my experience, you should write the things you can’t leave alone. If you expose yourself to enough of the world (fiction, non-fiction, real life experiences), some things are going to stick to you whether you like it or not and you’re going to find it hard to get them out of your head until you write them out of there. If you don’t have those things, it’s only because you haven’t come across those sticky moments yet–every writer has them. 

The other thing my experience has taught me to value is patience, I’m afraid. Some days the writing just doesn’t work. Sometimes you need to stew ideas for years before it’s their time to come to life. I try to enjoy it as a journey, because it’s not worth stressing over. I hope some of these thoughts have been useful to you. Good luck with your writing!

[huntertales]

Part Three: This Means War. (Good God, Y’all! S05E02)

Useful Links: Last Part | All Episodes Word Count: 5,213. A/N: One more part until we're done!  I had a bit of fun writing this one in particular for certain reasons and I hope you like it, too. The very last part should (hopefully) be out in the next few days. Enjoy!

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“One of them is in Jo. We got to get out of her without hurting her.” Ellen tried explaining the best she could of what she saw out there to you and Dean. The three of you crowded around the far end of the table, away from the others for some privacy. You could see she was still shaken up ever the slightest from what she had witnessed. But it seemed from the scoff that came out a moment later, something caught her off guard when she reminisced, almost as if she found the demon's foul mouth hurtful. "It called me a bitch."

"Bruise a little easy, don't you think?" Dean made a slight remark, thinking the woman had thicker skin than to actually listen to a few insults a demon threw at her way.

"No, that's not what I meant. It called me a black-eyed bitch." Ellen corrected herself, you looked at her with a funny expression, thrown off yourself from why a demon would say that. "What kind of demons are these? Holy water and salt roll right off. My daughter may be an idiot, but she's not stupid. She wears an anti-possession charm. It's all kind of weird, right?"

You leaned back in your seat and shook your head, knowing that was an understatement of its own. You had met a few demons who weren’t affected to holy water, Lilith and Azazel, but they were higher up on the food chain. These demons were more lower ranking nobodies, probably nothing more than the bottom of the barrel. “The whole thing’s off.” You admitted with a sigh. You found yourself subconsciously playing with the hole in your shirt, your fingertips ever so lightly touched the gauze covering your wound.

"What's your instincts?" Ellen asked the both of you.

"My instinct?" Dean repeated after the woman. You glanced down to see that he absentmindedly began playing with the ring he always wore on his right hand. "My instinct is to call Bobby and ask for help. Or Sam."

"Well, tough. All you got's me and Y/N, and all we got's you." Ellen said with a serious tone.  She was right about one thing, it was just the three of you now. It would have to be enough to save the day. "So let's figure it out."

Ellen stared at the both of you for a moment with the kind of expression that would whip anyone back into shape. But when the slightest smile began to form at the end of her lips, you could feel the same happening to you. “All right.” You said, nodding your head in agreement. “Do you know why Rufus came to town? Was there a specific omen?”

“He said something about water.” Ellen admitted. “That’s all I know.”

"Padre," Dean glanced over at Father Matthews when he happened to be walking down at the far end of the table. The pastor stopped in his tracks and looked over at Dean, caught off guard after being pulled away from his task. "You know what she's talking about—the water?"

"Uh, the..." Father Matthews thought to himself for a moment, before the memory came back to him. "The river—ran polluted all of a sudden."

"When?" You asked.

“Last Wednesday.” Brett answered, heading over to the table himself after overhearing the conversation. “And the demon thing started up the next day.”

"Anything else?" Dean asked the two men. You could see the both of them give each other a look, as if there was something they wanted to say. "Anything."

"Maybe. But it's pretty random."

"Good. Random's good."

"Shooting star—does that count? Real big. Same night—Wednesday." Brett said. Nodding your head in agreement from what you heard, you wondered for a moment of why this sounded familiar to you. You slowly pushed yourself to your feet, making sure you didn't tear at the gauze keeping your wound covered best as it could. Wincing slightly, you forced yourself to the bookshelf you spotted right across from the double doors. It only took a second of searching before you found the bible, a small copy amongst a few others you had spotted. You headed back to the table and took a seat once more. "So, uh, you think that all this comes from outer space?"

"This isn't 'X-Files,' pal." Dean remarked to the man with an eyeroll from the assumption.

You propped the book up to its spine and cracked it open to the middle, you began flipping through several pages and skimming through a few passages, until you found the exact one which you were looking for. "'And there fell a great star from Heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell upon the river, and the name of the star was wormwood and many men died.'"

"Revelation 8:10." Father Matthews mumbled ever so quietly underneath his breath, realizing what passage you were speaking from. You glanced up from the book as you softly placed it onto the table when you heard him speak up, this time, with a tremble of fear in his voice. "Are you saying that this is about the...apocalypse?"

Dean looked over at the pastor, “You could say.”

"And these specific omens," You asked Father Matthews. "They're prelude to what?

“The four horsemen.” He managed to croak out an answer.

"And which one rides the red horse?"

“War.”

"That could explain the cherry mustang parked on Main." You noted, thinking it could be a possibility for something else. It was conspicuous enough where it could blend into everyday life without drawing attention if the creator of the madness wanted a front row seat to seeing his disaster unfold. But Father Matthews seemed hesitant at believing your theory. “Think about it for a second. What if War is a man? He’s got to get here on his blood red horse. But that might draw some unwanted attention. I have a feeling he’s here...messing with our heads.”

"Turning us on each other." Ellen added, getting at your possible theory.

"You said Jo called you a black-eyed bitch." You said, the woman nodded her head as the slightest somber expression settled on her face, You thought about it for a moment or so. And then it made sense of what was going on, Using other people's fears against them, making everyone use their survival skills to weed out the competition, until there was nobody left. This wasn't the Croatoan virus. This was just about senseless actions of violence. "They think we're demons. We think they're demons. What if there is no demons at all and we're all just killing each other?"

"Wait—just back up." Father Matthews said. You looked over at him to see that he was hooked on another piece of information that he was still trying to process. "It's the apocalypse?"

"Sorry, padare." Dean said with a grim expression.

+ + +

You wondered what was going on with Sam after you realized the truth of what was really  happening. It was a slight comforting thought to know it was really Jo and Rufus who was keeping the younger Winchester captive, not some demons who hitched a free ride to raise a bit of Hell. But they were still hunters and they probably viewed Sam as a demon, despite all the protest he gave. You were fearful to think of what they were doing to him after being gone for a few hours now after dark had settled, making it too dangerous to venture out tonight. Just because you knew everyone out there were humans, it didn't mean they were going to think of you as anything less than a monster. You let out a sigh as you began worrying if Sam was all right, and if that big brain of his had figured for himself that something wasn’t right. The younger Winchester had gotten the feeling after seeing Rufus and Jo weren't possessed after seeing the both of them step step out of the devil's trap without a problem. Not to mention the little detail when they handled holy water and salt, nothing happened to them. Their black eyes he once saw them with vanished when they were pouring salt down his throat and conducting an exorcism on him after they kept thinking he was a demon himself. But Jo and Rufus were perplexed themselves when Sam wasn't screaming in pain when being tortured with all the things that were a demon's known weakness. After trying for the past hour, both admitted defeat, leaving Sam tied to a chair underneath the devil's trap, showing no signs of getting out of here. He was forced to be with his own thoughts and watched as the sun settled down for the night, leaving the room into almost darkness, the array of lit candles around the room along with a burning fireplace help give a little bit of light in the room, but it wasn't like he had a chance of getting out of here.

Sam had been left alone for the past hour by himself, he spent the time by contemplating of how he could get either Rufus or Jo to listen to figure out he wasn't a demon. But he was pulled away from his thoughts when the silence was pierced by a rattling door handle. Sam's eyes were drawn away from the design in the carpet he could barely make out in the shadowy light and to the rusty golden handle, he watched as it twisted and turned, shaking out of place from a few loose screws. The door swung open just the slightest a moment later, all though the person standing in the doorway wasn't a hunter, but a survivor that should have been in the church basement with you and his older brother.

"Who the hell are you?" Sam asked the man standing in the doorway. If his mind remembered correctly, the stranger's name was Roger, he confessed to killing his wife after she came after him with a brick. But seeming him here, after getting past two hunters without making a sound, Sam had a feeling Roger wasn't exactly who he said he was. Roger stood in the doorway and took off his glasses, deciding the charade was over. "What are you?"

"You caught me. Popped in to watch." Roger said with a little too casual of an attitude for Sam's personal liking. He thought it would be funny to throw in a bit of an improvised move to make his point further. Sam narrowed his eyes on the man with caution."I can hustle like that."

"So, the Roger everyone here knows,” Sam asked with curiosity to see what he was dealing with here. “The real Roger?"

"Buried in a ditch." The man replied with a shrug as he closed the door behind him.

"Mm-hm." Sam hummed ever so quietly, watching as the stranger closed the door behind him to give the both of them a bit of privacy. The creature posing as Roger walked across the room and decided to get himself comfortable for a little chat, Sam presumed that's what he wanted when he pulled up a chair to sit right across from the younger man. Sam stared at him for a moment, deciding to be a bit repetitious for the sake of figuring out the right answer. "So, who are you?"

"Here's a hint. I was in Germany. Than in Germany. Than in the Middle East. I was in Darfur when my beeper went off." Roger decided to play a little game, thinking if he rounded off a few current events mixed with some old history lessons, the younger Winchester would finally understand what he was dealing with. "I'm waiting to hook up with my siblings. I've got three. We're gonna have so much fun together."

"I know who you are." Sam scoffed, realizing who he was sitting across from after listening to all the little hints. It wasn't hard to figure out Roger wasn't some townsfolk, he was War. Lucifer wasn't the only thing that was freed after breaking the last seal, there was much more to the rapture than taking down the Devil. There was the four horsemen to consider, too. And War was one nasty son of a bitch that craved chaos. "There aren't any demons in town, are there?"

"Nope. Just frightened people ripping each other's throats out. I really haven't had to do much. Take out a bridge here, lay in a little hallucination there—sit back, pop some corn, watch the show." War said. A smug smirk began to creep across the man's face from what he was able to accomplish without lifting much as his finger. "Frankly, you're really vicious little animals, Sam."

Sam thought back to what he'd done, a heavy burden began to sit in the pit of his stomach when he figured out the two teens—the ones he thought were demons—had been nothing more than innocent bystanders, just trying to survive like you and him. "No. You're doing this."

War rolled his eyes from the accusation, "Please. Last week, this was Mayberry. Now these people are stabbing each other's children."

"Cause you made them see demons!" Sam argued with the man.

"Honestly, people don't need a reason to kill each other. I mean, you seen the Irish? They're all Irish." War tried reasoning with the younger Winchester, blaming this entire situation on nature of how man used to be. But Sam wouldn't stop staring at him with that judgemental little glare. "You think I'm a monster. I'm jello shots at a party. I just remove inhibitions."

“I’m gonna kill you myself.” The younger man threatened with a low and dark tone.

War replied with a throaty laugh, "Oh, that's adorable, considering you're my poster boy.

Sam looked at the man with a perplexed expression, "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You can't stop thinking about it—ever since you saw it dripping off the blade of that knife. And I'm not talking about those poor bastards you wasted." War said. Sam's face slowly fell when he thought back to the store, and to the knife that he was holding. It wasn't the demon knife, but the one you had been attacked with, your blood was the smell he was infatuated with. Sam shook his head, denying the accusation. "Save your protests for your brother. I can see inside your head. And, man, it is one-track city in there. Blood, blood, blood." War leaned forward in his seat, ever so slightly amused as how the hunter began to squirm in his seat, shifting around his gaze, but he hadn't even gotten to the real desire he'd been craving. Sam's eyes darted back at him from what he said next. "Lust."

"What? No." Sam denied the truth. "You're wrong."

"For power, for her. I can't really tell. You just want it all, Sammy. You want another swing to kick that big ego up again. You want to be strong again. But not just strong. Stronger than everybody. And you know she can bring you to the top.” War said, planting an idea in side the young man’s mind. “She's got a new strain of your favorite drug, and it's better than that hell bitch could ever give you. I mean, of course she's your better half, but you probably wondered...what if? I mean, I'm a firm believer in that stupid little saying—'everything happens for a reason.' That's why I needed to spill just a bit of Y/N’s blood. She's no good dead to me, neither are you sober. See what I mean? I did you a favor.”

"You think I'd feed off of her? Never." Sam hissed at the man. "You're a sick, son of a bitch."

"Please. I'm just saying what's been up in that head of yours. You're human, Sam, it's normal to want companionship. And maybe...a little bit more. You think about it with the best of intentions and bury it away because you think it's never gonna happen. But that's where I come in. I take all those barriers away and give you the leverage you want—you need." War gave an opposition that any fool would take up for grabs, but Sam's will power wouldn't crack. He stared at the man with a cold glare. "You and those good intentions—quick slide to Hell, buddy boy. It's not gonna last very long. Because you got a taste and you're always gonna want more. It's going to be in your head. Nagging and nagging until you break down and finally sink your teeth for that sinful taste."

Sam was backed into a corner when his eyes began to jump around the room, he swallowed, admitting guilt for what he found himself thinking over the past several hours. He didn't know where this came from, but for some reason, he agreed with everything that was being spoken without a word of protest. "You feel bad now? Wait until you're thigh-deep in warm corpses. Because, my friend, I'm just getting started." Sam watched as the man got up from his chair and decided their little chat was finally over. War put a hand into the inside of his suit jacket pocket to fetch out his glasses. Making sure everything was in place, he glanced down at the hunter with a smirk. "Showtime for the meatsuits."

+ + +

"So, now you're saying that there are no demons and that war is a guy."

"You believed crazy before."

Admitting a different theory from what you first began with was sure to draw up some skepticism. You gotten an earful of it from Brett, who seemed to find the idea of the apocalypse happening around you nothing more than a comical joke. You watched as he paced around the room, trying to make sense of the situation as Dean stood up, his palms pressed against the table. He glanced over at Ellen to see if she could offer any advice that might help make this situation go a little better than what it wasn’t. But before anyone could help smooth this situation along, your attention was dragged to the double doors that lead to the staircase outside, your brow furrowed tightly together when you heard pounding erupt from the outside, pleading for someone to open up followed just seconds after. Brett headed straight for the doors and opened them up to reveal a very frantic Roger.

"I saw them—the demons." Roger managed to say between deep pants for breath. You watched as he headed over to the table and leaned over to get his breathing in order. "They know we're trying to leave. They said they're gonna pick us off one by one."

“Wait, wait, wait. What?” You asked the man with all sorts of confusion.

“I thought you said there were no demons.” Brett said with a suspicious tone.

"There's not." You answered for him before anyone else could. You silenced him for a moment as you glanced over at Roger, wondering how he managed to slip under the radar without anyone knowing. "Where did you go?"

"I thought someone should go out and see what's going on!" Roger said, acting as if he was playing the hero.

“Where did you see the demons, and what did they say exactly?”

“We just sit here, we’re gonna be dead.”

“No, we’re not!”

“They’re gonna kill us—unless we kill them first.”

“Okay, hold on. Hold on.”

“No, man, we got people to protect.”

"Everyone, calm down!" You shouted on the top of your lungs. You managed to bring the room to a complete silence and stopped Brett from handing off a gun to someone. "Can't you see this is what he wants? This is not a demon thing. It's all about fear and he's using it against you. Now, we just have to..."

You found yourself trailing off in thought as you mindlessly glanced over at Roger, you noticed he lifted up his right hand, the one where he wore his gold ring. You thought it was just his wedding band, but it was about to become more deadlier than you once presumed. He gave you a sly wink and twisted the band with his index finger. "Look at their eyes!" A split second later, he was pointing the finger at you, his demeanour changing into panic as he began backing away like you were the monsters here. "They're demons!"

Your eyes widened from the accusation that was being pointed against you. You turned your head to look at Dean and Ellen, while everyone else saw inky black eyes, you saw them as normal. Before you could tell them it was a hallucination, you were nearly jumping a foot in the air when Father Matthews decided to be a bit trigger happy and shot directly at Dean. The three of you wasted no time in scurrying for the front door, realizing you were now the predators you warned the prey about.

+ + +

When the morning came, the streets might have been deserted, but you knew soon it would be filled with dead bodies and blood if you weren't fast enough to stop this. The three of you managed to find refuge in some abandoned house not too far from the church. Ellen had remembered where Jo and Rufus were staying, but without a single scratch of a weapon to defend yourselves with, it would be a bit of a tough break to knock on the front door without getting a bullet to the chest. Everyone thought you were demons, you doubt both the hunters weren't affected from whatever War was doing. But you knew Sam was still in their care, and if you wanted to save the day, you needed all the help you could get.

Dean and Ellen comprised on the deal of working together to take down each hunter. They couldn't just sneak in the back door or through a window, Ellen warned you about Rufus and his special tactics to keep himself extra careful. That's where you would come in. You had a pretty rusty swinging arm, but you had a feeling from the distance you put yourself at, it would be enough to do exactly what you had figured. You kept yourself hidden behind an abandoned car that was exactly across from the house both of the hunters had been staying in. Ellen had said Rufus liked to wire up windows with pipe bombs to make sure whoever was stupid enough to trip the wire might lose an arm or two. To keep that from happening, you carefully tossed a decent rock up in the air, waiting as Ellen and Dean cautiously trailed themselves over to the house. When they were at a safe distance, you stood up and got yourself at the perfect position with the window on the front porch. You swung back an arm, and with all your might, you landed a bulls eye in the glass, shattering it completely.

You quickly dropped yourself to your knees and covered your ears when you heard the explosion go off, sending a decent amount of debris to the ground. The plan had worked out like you hoped. It was exactly the perfect distraction to give Ellen and Dean a few moments to sneak while Rufus looked for bloody limbs as the smoke cleared. You leaned yourself against the car and winced in pain from the exertion you weren't exactly ready for. Inhaling a few deep breaths, you tried to give yourself a bit of time to try and gain some energy back before heading in to cover as back up. Yet you had a feeling it wasn't going to be all that easy when you heard the sound of loud voices coming from the front porch, you recognized one of them as Dean's.

Peeking out from the car, you slowly looked up to see a man you've never seen struggling to keep down the older Winchester as they argued about something. If you guessed from the age, this was the infamous Rufus you had heard about from Bobby. You let out a frustrated sigh as your hand placed itself against your stomach for a brief moment, knowing that Dean was going to need some backup if he wanted to take down a man like Rufus. You pushed yourself to your feet once more and headed for the porch, adding yourself to this fight.

You came in just at the right moment when Rufus was slammed down to the ground by Dean, but he was struggling to keep the hunter pinned down long enough to explain what's was going on. Dean tried to tell him about the cautious signs of War, but the way it was coming out, it wasn't exactly translating well between them.

"He means the horsemen!" You quickly bent down and snatched Rufus by his arm, managing to block before it could come. Rufus was caught off guard from seeing you, a stranger that he never met before, but from seeing you without demon eyes, it seemed he was a bit more trustful to see what you had to say. "He's turning us against each other. You're hallucinating.”

Rufus stopped struggling a moment later when he began to process what you admitted. He slowly looked over at Dean to see that there were no more inky black eyes staring at him. "Horsemen." He muttered underneath his breath. "War."

"Oh my, God. Yes." You gritted your teeth. "Want me to spell it out for you?"

"Did you figure this out all by yourself, genius?" Rufus asked the older Winchester. "Or did your smart ass mouth of a partner help?"

You couldn't help yourself but grow the slightest smirk from Rufus' comment as you got off of him, letting Dean help the man to his feet. The three of you might have been caught up, but you realized you had left the Harvelles along to fight their own battle. You headed for the front door and opened it open without a moment of caution. But you found yourself stopping dead in your tracks when you saw Ellen swinging a loaded shotgun in your direction with Jo cautiously by her side.

"We all on the same page?" Ellen asked the three of you. All of you nodded your heads.  "Good."

"Good." You breathed out, feeling a bit confident to put your hands down as Ellen lowered her gun away from you. You looked over just slightly to see her daughter staring at you and Dean back and forth. You gave her a smile, knowing it wasn't always the best circumstances you were seeing her again in. "Hi, Jo."

"Hey, Y/N." Jo said, seeming happy herself to see the both of you.

"Welcomes aside, we got to find War before everybody in town kills each other." Dean said. But it seemed he was already too late from the first gunshot just a second later. You quickly dropped to your knees for cover when gunfire from outside erupted without warning. “Where’s Sam?”

Rufus pointed upstairs, not waiting to hear the vocal answer when you heard the gunshots die for just a split second. You and Dean raced up the steps as the rest went their separate ways. You checked the first door on the left and swung it open, thinking it wasn't going to be that easy, but when you stepped inside, you were greeted with Sam. You let out a sigh of relief to see him in one piece.

"Guys," Sam warned the both of you. "It's not demons."

"It's war."

"It's war."

Both of the brothers repeated after themselves when they came to the same conclusion. You couldn't help yourself but let out the tiniest laugh at their impeccable timing as you pulled out a knife from your back pocket. You and Dean worked quickly at cutting Sam free from his bonds. "I just can't figure out how he's doing it." You admitted, the blade of your knife slicing through the rope keeping down his right arm. When Sam mentioned a ring, you looked up at him, suddenly remembering what you witnessed. "The ring. The ring—that's right. He turned it right before he made everybody hallucinate and go hellbitch."

Helping Sam out of the chair, you had a feeling War wasn't going to stick around to see his final work play through. He gotten what he wanted from the distant sound of gunshots coming from outside, everyone was on the very last nerve, and it was only a matter of time until he got in his red horse and walked away.

+ + +

One week ago this small little town of Mayberry had nothing more to offer than family owned business and people giving so much trust in one another by keeping their doors unlocked at night. Today it was a deserted wasteland with bodies lying to bleed in the streets and scurries of small groups of survivors clinging together to get out of town before they were picked off. Everything went as exactly how he wanted it. Roger was a suitable choice after all, an older gentlemen nobody would think could cause any harm if they passed him by the street. War examined his little project with a growing victorious little smile. Wait until his brothers hear about this, it would be a tough act to follow. Heading forward to his red horse, a vintage two door cherry red mustang, it felt like a day of a victorious win. Chuckling to himself, he was about to shove his hand into the pocket of his dress pants, but they slipped out of his hands when he felt something grab ahold of his arms.

“Leaving so soon?” You asked with a too sweet of a voice. You stared at the man with an arched brow, knowing with the boys pinning War into place, you slowly pulled out the demon knife from your back pocket. "And here I thought we were having so much fun."

"That's a sweet little knife." He commented with a smirk. Even though he didn't have much leverage here with no chance to getting towards the ring he wore on his finger, there was a little piece of information that might have slipped your mind. "But, come on. You can't kill war."

"Oh, I know."

Without a warning, the brothers shoved the man forward and pinned him against the hood of the car, giving you access to his right hand after Dean forced his palm against the cold metal, giving you access to what gruesome act of violence you were about to do next. You pressed the blade of the demon knife to Roger’s index finger and cut it right off. You grimaced in discomfort when you felt the blood spatter accidentally land on your face, but the distant sound of the ring dropping to the pavement was worth it.

Disregarding the index finger, you reached for the gold band abandoned on the ground and picked it up to examine the detail for a moment's time. But when you glanced over to see his reaction, you were taken back to see that War disappeared, there wasn't a trace of the red car or the man he once possessed. It was as if nothing happened

[muggle-writes]

10 Questions Tag

I genuinely don’t recall seeing this tag game come in, but either I missed it or I didn’t tag my responses. Either way, I found it again today, so @elizabethsyson thanks for the tag, here’s my answers

1. What book/s made you want to write?

I don’t think it was a book necessarily. Fanfiction inspired me to write and publish fanfiction of my own, but previously, I would just concoct something equivalent to fanfiction even though I didn’t know it had a name, entertain myself with it without ever writing it down, and then eventually forget and move on to something else. But I’ve always used those same unwritten (though still primarily verbal) creative endeavors as a way to process emotions. Later, writing (original fiction that was more individual scenes with no plot resolution) served the same purpose, and now fanfiction serves the dual purpose of being an emotional outlet (those don’t necessarily ever get published) and being a fun and social thing to share with other fans.

On the other hand, I’ve got so many memories of having written stories above and beyond what a school assignment would call for, going at least as far back as second or third grade, so who knows, maybe one book in particular did inspire me to write. But if so, I don’t remember what that original inspiration was.

Also there’s one book in particular that’s just... Awful. I bought it at a dollar store and honestly no wonder it was only selling there. Worst book I’ve ever read. And sometimes I’m writing out of spite because if something with that many plot holes and “plot twists” that ignore any foreshadowing the author set up and come out of literally nowhere can get published, then I’m also definitely good enough to get published if I ever wanted to.

2. What is your favourite genre to write in?

Fanfiction is totally its own genre, right? Besides that, the gray area where fantasy, urban fantasy, and realistic contemporary fiction all meet. I tend towards realism, even when I write magic, but I love to write in universes where mythical creatures can be real, too. It’s my favorite genre to write in because it’s where I’m comfortable writing, and also because those tend to be the stories I enjoy reading and therefore know how my own contributions compare. Also because I love worldbuilding, and being in a fantasy universe not so different from our own gives me plenty of space to explore exactly what’s the same or different and why.

3. What is your favourite genre to read?

Fanfiction again, because I can explore an arbitrary character through hundreds of different lenses and poke at all the facets of their identity almost indefinitely, and it’s not restricted to what happens to be plot relevant, or even to scenarios that are all compatible with a single timeline, and it’s so character driven. It’s by far my favorite thing. Fantasy, primarily in two different flavors. On one hand, fuzzy rules of magic where everything goes as long as the magic user is powerful or creative enough, as a backdrop to an allegorical, easily divided black and white morality story is a category I almost always love. Magic can do basically anything, and it’s easy to know what’s right and wrong, and who to root for. On the other hand, I love what Brandon Sanderson would call “hard magic” fantasy, where magic is just as structured, and nearly as understood, as science, which I enjoy combined with a plot in which the characters have as much nuance and shades of gray as in the real world. I tend to prefer things at one of those extremes, but I’ll read almost any fantasy story.

4. How do you think your reading habits have influenced your writing style?

I mean it's just like verbal language: whatever I surround myself is going to shape the ideas and phrases and slang that come back out of my brain. Likewise, if I’m creating a magic system “from scratch” it’s inevitably shaped by things I read or watched young(ish), including but not limited to the Belgariad, and Star Wars and Pern (so basically, strongly connected to the mind and limited mainly by what you can imagine) (the Dresden Files and Good Omens seem to have pretty similar ideas about magic, but I ingested those much later)

on the other hand I think that my habit of primarily reading, even over watching shows or movies, has contributed to how little I ever actually think about what a character looks like, except occasionally when introductions get delayed for some reason and I can't use names in narration. So characters I only know from reading, I have zero idea what they look like. For example, I only remember that Sabriel is deathly pale as her default state because I reread the beginning of the book recently on Libby (a library app) while debating whether to check it out and reread the whole series in order to potentially write a crossover fanfiction. Her appearance was mentioned once or twice in the first few chapters and then never again, and it wasn’t something other characters often remarked upon, so I promptly forgot. Even though it’s absolutely fitting. Idk I’m just really not a visual thinker apparently, and always having character names to reference only reinforces that because why do I need to know what someone looks like if I know who they are?

5. What is your go-to cure when you get writer’s block or can’t focus?

Focus is easier. I make sure I’ve eaten, and I put on music so I’m not distracted by the silence or by the sound of my own typing. Plus I'll keep something cold and caffeinated in arms reach to sip on when I'm tempted to relinquish focus.

Writer’s block is harder to overcome and usually ties in with depression, so I’ll sometimes go months without writing and come back when I have energy for anything again... But in terms of actual strategies, sometimes rereading what I’ve already written will kickstart my unblocked writing, which is why I try very hard to only stop writing at “stopping points” if it’s genuinely the end of the story. Because when I come back later, it’s so much easier to read a partial chapter, get into the swing of it, and remember where it was going, than to start carving a new chapter out of nothing. Another thing that helps chip away at writer’s block is to talk to someone who is enthusiastic about my stories, or who is willing to let me infodump. Those are the only two things I can really control that have helped. Occasionally other things will help, like getting the book review style comments on fics (when I also have time to sit down and write while the comment is still new enough to make me surprised-and-happy over it), or if I can find the right balance of “obligation to someone else” and “not so much pressure I implode” (like, for example, I submitted a half-baked WIP to the recent WIP Blind Date event, and the afternoon after we got our assignments I started getting motivated to add to what I’ve posted about it to have something “worth” sharing for the event, and even though I didn’t get the momentum going enough to make progress until after I’d already been reviewed, I made a large amount of progress on that fic just because there was some amount of external pressure.... But that only works if I only do it to myself occasionally. Too often and I’m just annoying everyone by asking them to expect something from me and never following through.)

6. Why did you decide to start writing?

I think I got the right amount of compliments and encouragement when I was in elementary school, on writing assignments and challenges, then I was proud of the original stories I was writing in middle school, and then in high school I figured out that I could create barely-not-me characters and put them through things I wished (or feared) would happen to me and explore the consequences... My depression started getting bad around then, and with it came executive dysfunction and I started having to focus only on schoolwork and still barely finished everything I needed to. I might have stopped writing for longer but then I started publishing fanfiction. initially because my brain was generating it anyway, and I was in a shitty living situation with nothing else to do with my free time that I spent hidden away in my room besides actually type it up, but I kept at it because I was proud of my stories again, and because of the social aspect. And now I continue writing because I love the excuse to explore characters, or just because I can put characters I already love into new and interesting situations.

I might eventually write my own original novel, just because being on writeblr and seeing everyone else writing original works is super motivating, but that requires I have ideas for a setting and a plot and for characters all at once and I’m trying not to force it.

7. Pick a character you’ve written/are writing. What personality trait of theirs defines them most?

I’m going to cheat and peek a bit in the future to when I’m actually writing that fic featuring Julie Kwan, because I ought to have a better handle on her before I get too much further. She’s got a very sharp mind, very good at logical deductions (even if they involve magic before she really knows magic is real) and she’s also fairly good at reading other people. She’s also not afraid to confront people, whether they’re people who are literally threatening her and her friends, or whether they’re her friends and they’re not taking care of themselves sufficiently, or anything in between.

8. What is their primary language? Do they speak it natively? Do they speak any other languages?

...I'm not actually sure. English is her primary language, as she has grown up in the USA. If Julie speaks other languages, Mandarin would be fitting (because that’s Wei’s primary language, and I know Kate also speaks it, so that could add to team unity if over half of them all speak the same non-English language), or maybe Korean depending on her family (since Kwan is usually a Korean name.) Regardless, if she speaks any other languages, then I suspect she also speaks Klingon. @davetheshady can you confirm?

9. What does the character value the most in their life?

Julie is very focused on academia, she’s accomplished and rightfully proud of herself. She wants to be respected, (she’s so tired of being disrespected in academic circles just because she’s neither white nor a man), but she also very much values her friends.

10. If they met you, what would they have to say to you?

I think she would make fun of me for quoting her so often but she makes so many pop culture references, I don’t think she has room to complain. She would probably also encourage me to pursue graduate degrees no matter how “impractical” other people find the subject.