#since I have a doc with snippets they may end up being a writing project

[silverystormwing]

lineup of some characters! of course the version I have saved to my computer doesn't have their names smh, got to do this myself do I. If you've got any questions about these guys, feel free to ask! :>

(long post due to img IDs, I like to write whoops)

note: these are rough concepts, details such as scars/outfits/tattoos are probably going to change. (and have changed in newer images)

this went up early on my Patreon / ko-fi! it's $1/mo for sneak peaks & WIPs & such :>

From left to right;

'Myrto' (xe/xer) 5'3 | villain, very done

Cat (he/they), 5'4 | general job, perpetually tired

Cemil (she/her) 5'4 | actress, over-the-top

Tanya (they/them) 5'5 | hero, somewhat dramatic

Rene (he/him) 5'6 | paper pusher, very nervous

Hendry (e/em) 6'3 | bodyguard/bouncer, cheerful

Tase (any) 6'10 | henchman, zero braincells

[ID: seven people of varying heights standing on a grey background with a grid overlaid behind them. Behind the figure on the far left, there is a silhouette of a 6ft tall person with the words "6Ft Human" beneath it. Characters are described left to right in increasing height order.

'Myrto' is a 5'3 thin black person wearing white robes that are shaded in pale pastel colors of the rainbow, with a black bodysuit, gloves, and boots underneath with the seams outlined in white. Xe's body is facing front, with xer head looking to the left with a neutral expression on xer face. Xer right hand is raised, white lightning outlined in the same rainbow pastels as xer robes arcing accross xer body to xer lowered right hand. Xer skin has horizontal streaks of pastel rainbow markings, xe's eyes have black sclera and white irises, and xer black hair is in a series of braids worn in a bun.

Cat is a 5'4 person with short brown hair, medium brown skin, green eyes, and looks decidedly unimpressed with everything. He's facing the right in a 3/4 view with his hands in his pockets of a dark blue hoodie, pale periwinkle sweatpants, and black shoes. They have a slightly heavier bodytype, and have a simple black stud in one ear.

Cemil is a 5'4 black plus-sized woman with dark blue eyeshadow, nail polish, and lipstick, and looks fairly amused. She's facing to the left in a 3/4 view, wearing a blue dress with wide sleeves that fades to a darker blue around her ankles. It has white trim, and faint sparkles on the inside of the sleeves, visible where she has her right hand slightly raised, while her left is relaxed at her side. She's wearing gold jewelry consisting of two ear piercings, a nose piercing, two bracelets, and a necklace with a red pendant. Her hair is in braids which are hanging loose around her shoulders.

Tanya is a 5'5 thin, very skeptical looking person with short brown, curly hair, orange-gold eyes, and lighter brown skin. They're wearing a dark green dress with longsleeves and dark teal trim that goes down to their knees, with a lighter green lace pattern bordering a pale green panel down the front of the dress. They have a brown wrap around their waist, dark leggings, and pale tan boots. They're facing front, leaning to the left with their right hand raised while their left rests on their hip. A few dark freckles are visible on their exposed skin, and they have an eyebrow piercing, and a choker with a green stone.

Rene is a 5'6 very nervous looking, scrawny man with dark skin, glasses, and patches of vitiligo around his eyes, temples, chin, hands, and poking up from underneath the collar of his shirt. He has square glasses with the wire of a hearing aid peeking out from under them, and is standing with one hand resting in the crook of his opposite elbow, while his right hand is up, as if waving uncertainly at the camera. He's wearing a dark purple collared shirt with a gold tie underneath a dark grey/black suit vest, black slacks, and dark grey dress shoes. He has brown eyes, short kinky black hair, and is smiling uncertainly.

Hendry is a 6'3 person with pale skin, medium length red hair and a short beard of the same color along eir chin and jawline, brown eyes, and has some black eyeliner. E is wearing a green T-shirt, dark blue pants, grey & teal sneakers, and pink socks. Eir right hand is a prostetic is resting on eir hip, colors matching eir shoes. E has a few scars on eir arms, and where eir prostetic starts, just below the elbow. Em has a half-hearted smile on eir face and is wearing a few silver studs in eir ear.

Tase is a 6'10 large, muscular person with dark skin, long straight brown hair held back in a pony tail, and is grinning to the right of the lineup. Her right hand is up, holding a lit cigarette between his fingers, with their left hand resting on their hip. E has a variety of scars, with a notable one cutting up the right side of xer face, notching xer lip. They are wearing a black dress shirt, with a dark red tie, a tan suit vest & pants, pale blue socks and black shoes. Ae has dark blue eyeshadow, a bar through their ear, and a dark red stud earing. They have gold-yellow eyes.

END ID]

Scar/back tatts ref/versions with only underwear below the cut! Images do have top nudity [variety of genders]

initial scar ref / ect.

[ID: The background is the same as in the first image, and the same seven figures stand, this time only wearing underwear.

Myrto's markings are revealed to run all over xer body, not just xer face. They run from xer back towards xer chest, and extend all over xer limbs. Xe has a few notable scars, including a few accros xer chest. Underneath the markings on xer right forearm and xer left upper arm, xe has some black tattoos in an abstract twisting vine pattern.

Cat only has a few small scars from mundane growing up, with a more noticeable slice on his side.

Cemil doesn't have any notable scars, though she has a tattoo in the shape of a black lineart butterfly on her left ankle.

Tanya's only notable scars are their inverted T top surgery scars.

Rene's vitiligo extends in symmetrical patches over his body, with larger patches around his feet, knees, groin, armpit and elbows, and smaller accents elsewhere. he has black tattoos around the lower part of his upper arm, in an abstract pattern. The edges of tattooed feathered wings in the same color extend from his back along his side.

Hendry has a a few more scars on eir legs, one on eir chest, and has red chest hair.

Tase has extensive scarring, surgery scars on their stomach & chest mixed in with more ragged cuts from fights along zer chest, arms, legs, and a burn scar on eir leg. Xe also has a few gunshot scars on xer arms & legs. She has chest hair, and body hair on her arms & legs. They have the tattoo of a small snake around their neck. (author's note: this was removed in other design versions.)

END ID]

Back views for the spoiled ones ones I I had notes for their backs I wanted to hammer out.

[ID: This time, only Myrto, Rene, and Tase are depicted. Each character has two views, one facing front as in the above image, and one facing away from the camera to show their back. The background has changed to a darker grey, no grid, and only two lines - one by the character's feet as the 'ground', and one at a height marked 6'.

Myrto's back view shows the white lines connecting along xer spine, back of xer legs, and forearms. Xe has a few slashing scars along xer back, and one along xer right leg.

Rene has two feathered wings tattoed along his spine, the upper pair accross his shoulders and upper back, the lower pair along his lower back with the flared primaries extending onto his front. Patches of vitiligo extend onto his back & legs. He is not depicted wearing a hearing aid in the back view image. (author's note: this is artist error, my bad)

Tase's back also has extensive scarring. Most notable are three large claw marks cutting through their tattoo, extending from his left shoulder down towards her right hip. The scar is black, of a snake with it's head resting on the back of xer neck, the body in a ribbon-shaped curve along their back, with the tail curled over her tailbone. A few of the scars on his front are mirrored on neir back, either by coincidence or as if they got impaled by something in the past. END ID]

[thepatchycat]

hellooo! 👋

i hope it as okay to tag you in the WIP game!!! 😅😅 you have so many cool projects underway!!

I would love to hear more about your Defiance series! Side stories and spin offs?! What a world you must be creating! 🤩

thanks and have a lovely day !!☀️

Certainly! :D I don't always respond to tag games, but I do always appreciate being tagged in them. This one especially makes for a nice excuse to ramble about projects, and I'm delighted to talk about Defiance~

I'm pretty sure Defiance (the main fic) is the second fanfiction I've ever worked on in earnest and also my first and only longfic (not counting some sort of journal thing for Pokemon X I think I started many years ago, as I quickly lost interest in that project; otherwise, I hadn't really tried my hand at writing fic until 2020, despite reading it for much longer). Back in early 2021, with far too much time on my hands and having recently finished binge-watching all of The Clone Wars TV show, I felt very strongly that Fives needed to live and everyone deserved a happier ending, so I started planning a fix-it (actually the idea may have begun cooking back even before I finished the show, but February 2021 is apparently when I created the first doc).

It, uh, spiraled a little.

The planning/notes document is currently sitting at 102 pages (~46k words) of loose outline, worldbuilding notes, character notes, media notes, etc. The fic document itself is at 127 pages (~49k words) of stuff ranging from rough outline to fully written chapters and outtakes. There is also a Sheets file with timelines so I can track who is where, and when. The Sidestories doc is for ideas that would probably take place during Defiance but not be part of the more central plot, like bonus side chapters, and the Spin-offs doc is for other fic ideas that would take place in the same universe—some of which have graduated to their own documents. Though I've not been making consistent progress in the actual writing and have a very long way to go, I am lost in this sauce.

Anyway, the general plot of Defiance is as follows: unbeknownst to Palpatine and the general public, a timely intervention saves Fives' life. This allows him to actually explain himself to the Jedi, who along with the clones investigate the chips further and work behind the scenes to prevent Order 66 from happening while trying to figure out how to take down who's behind it. Critically, despite their suspicions they do not have hard evidence of Palpatine's involvement, so most events parallel canon up through ROTS with the investigation/preparation taking place discreetly, until the train hops off the rails to avoid sailing off the cliff.

If you'd like a sneak peak snippet, here's the first page or so of the main fic below the cut!

Something is wrong. The Force is muddled with a constant and indistinct unease, as it has been for years now—moreso on Coruscant than anywhere else, to Shaak Ti's perceptions. Its warnings are difficult to discern with any specificity. Even so, it murmurs them now. And Shaak possesses her own instincts, enhanced by the Force but extant outside her connection to it; these, too, whisper to her that something is wrong, as she watches Knight Skywalker leave the Jedi Temple conference room to find Captain Rex and investigate the situation with Fives. They are the best fit to track him down and the most likely to confront the rogue clone without further violence. Shaak warned Skywalker that Fives has been acting differently without his chip, that he may not be the man they knew—though she herself is reluctant to believe it—and the Knight and Captain are plenty capable of handling themselves. They will be all right. Still, something is wrong in a way she cannot yet define, and so Shaak Ti decides to join the hunt. Since the Jedi have not been asked to search for Fives, she does not contact the Coruscant Guard when she leaves the Temple. Instead she steps out of the building, pulls up the hood of her cloak, and makes for one of the speeder bikes kept at the Temple for general use. It whirs to life under her hands, and she rides to the nearest transportation portal leading down into the undercity. As she descends, passing speeders of all makes and sizes, Shaak Ti considers what she knows. She is well aware of her own struggles in becoming emotionally attached to the clones; her role on Kamino requires her to balance her care for them as people with the need to defend the galaxy. But many of them, such as Domino Squad, inevitably leave an impression. She watched Echo and Fives grow from bickering cadets to determined protectors, some of the best of their brothers. Her belief in their character during their final tests had not been misplaced. And yet, over these past few days Fives repeatedly defied the Kaminoan doctors, removed his chip, claimed something about a conspiracy, then attacked the Chancellor and fled. Shaak cannot deny these facts, and she must not allow personal feelings to cloud the truth. Then there are the Kaminoans. Shaak clashes frequently with their attitudes toward the clones, the way they view them as products rather than sentients. Nala Se’s arguments for terminating Tup and assurance that the chips are not a problem fall in line with her position as a manufacturer. And Shaak is well aware that the Kaminoans have not shared all of their secrets with her, as she is not owed them. But the medical scientist's resistance had been… spirited. None of this paints a clear picture. As they concluded in the meeting back at the Temple, the Jedi need more information. The familiar sound of a military engine hums past, and Shaak turns her head to watch a pair of gunships heading down the portal through one of the military lanes. She swerves out of the civilian traffic and dives after them, further and further below the surface of the city.

[imonthemoonitsmadeofcheese]

RULES: post the names of all the files in your WIP list, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send an ask with the title that most intrigues them and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it. And then tag as many people as you have WIPs.

Ok so… this is where we get into just how utterly chaotic my creative process is, but not in a way that results in oodles of files that have creative interesting names - quite the opposite in fact.

You see… I have currently have 16 files and the titles are:

Moonrat Moonrat 2 Moonrat 3 Moonrat 4 … all the way up to the current Moonrat 16

The reason for this is that I don't actually separate different stories into individual files until they end up on Ao3. It's all just one long running thing all squished together with a few spaces between 'chunks' that sometimes, but not always, end up being separate stories and/or chapters. And I'm a packrat (pack-moonrat?) and never throw anything away so if something is cut out it's usually shoved in a free spot at the bottom of everything else to be used in something else later.

When Google docs starts taking too long to load and spazzes on me with lag, that's when I start a new file.

Because my first drafts end up looking more like free-verse poetry than stories, with usually only between 1 and 5 words on a line, either in bits of un-attributed dialogue or point form ideas, it often goes on for a ridiculous number of pages, so these tend to be large documents. I also am really really bad at titles. Except in very rare situations, everything comes out as untitled brain vomit and then is titled very close to the end (sometimes mid Ao3 post when I realize 'oh yes, titles are a thing - oops') long after I've turned it into actual sentences with real grammar and such.

Basic unfinished idea-chunks that are ongoing include, but are not limited to:

30-some pages of the first Dawning story that is still unfinished (I ended up realizing I would not finish the writing challenge in time if I continued the inordinately long Dawning story I had begun so I wrote "Dawning Oasis" instead and will finish this one some other time)

the Drifter on a special secret mission for Eris in the Sepulcher lost sector in the Throne World

Eris finding a renegade Hive chapel dedicated to her on the Moon

the last chapter(s) of "Dance with Vengeance" (this has since been posted)

several false starts based upon lyrics to other Crane Wives songs for that one writing challenge I did (as opposed to the completed one with sad Drifter having nightmares called "Ashes, Ashes")

oodles of random snippets of dialogue

Drifter teaching Eris to cook and/or cooking and/or Eris eating various dishes

various iterations of Eris exhibiting telepathy and/or non-normative vision that I have rejected from current projects for consistency reasons which may end up in other things later

more Immaru bullying like in "Visitation" and "Wind Chimes" (he knows what he did)

lots more nightmares because, when I'm not writing fanfiction, that's one of my narrative specialities

several false starts for the sequel/enactment of the private gambit match discussed in "Hide and Seek"

bits pertaining to and/or including/referencing that one bog slug

Per the rules above, you are invited to ask/message about any/all of these (or, quite frankly, anything else - I do not bite unless we both agree that I wish to bite you and you wish to be bitten).

I have never done a thing like this before, nor have I ever tagged anyone else on tumblr before, so here's hoping I did this correctly. I was tagged by: @flowers-of-io and I am tagging: @redbutterflies-blueeyes @synnthamonsugar @bbyfacedx and @annieruok94

I would love to tag more people but I actually have quite the serious disconnect between who people are on Ao3 and who people are on here and I am very easily confused. If you look at this and go "But why did you not tag me? Do you not love me?" The answer is: "No I just have no fucking clue what I'm doing. Please say hello and tell me who you are on Ao3 so I can include you if I ever do a thing like this again."

That is all.

[stones-and-birds]

Some Updates! July 16, 2024 🐦‍⬛💎

Howdy! Been a bit since an update, and while not a ton of folks are actively keeping up with this I figured an update was still worthwhile. Updates under the cut.

-Kieran

Development Updates:

This project is still actively being worked on! There's a ton left to do before I can even properly begin coding the VN and making assets - character designs, outfit, logo, and abnormality designs, not to mention continuing to flesh out the plot + properly write down the full summary. Things are slow due to life - we've got obligations outside of working on this, but it's still full steam ahead as this story is very important to us.

I had initially planned to release Chapter 1 on its own for the Children of the City Zine - I ended up switching to an illustration for my piece because I didn't want to work under a deadline for this. I am learning very quickly not to overestimate my abilities to get stuff done while dealing with multitudes of other stress.

The plot has, for the most part, been finalized - I'm still extending what I had written out and making tweaks here and there for better story flow, but we know what the overarching plot is as well as what the conclusion will be. Of course things could change, PM is still putting out new content and we don't have all the worldbuilding we could, but we're taking it in stride.

As of right now, the amount of chapters slated to be in the final product will be 9, and 7-8 of those will unlock optional story snippets at the end of each chapter (think the 'tips' feature in Higurashi, for example). It's very possible this will change!

I've switched to planning mostly on a Notion board which has helped productivity a lot more than having things scattered across various Google Docs files!

We've added @winterbunz to the dev team for proofreading and additional writing help!

Feedback needed?:

We're still deciding on whether or not to release the story in parts or wait until it's complete before releasing the whole thing - If we decide on releasing it in parts, It'll likely be a release similar to Limbus in that the primary release has 3 chapters and the rest will be released as completed. Still not sure though, feedback is appreciated. I may post a poll regarding this soon for easier engagement.

I would really like to add some minigames of some sort, as well as a functional Abnormality Codex for the fan abnormalities. I have some ideas on how to implement these, but it's going to take some studying and planning and such to figure it out - so nothing's set in stone on that front yet!

Some Adjustments/Fixes:

I had somehow mixed up Canto 1 LCB's L Corp branch, D-02, with Canto 2's, J-03, and ended up naming the branch J-02. This was an error on my part and I'm embarrassed to admit it took me so long to realize - The primary branch featured in this story will be J-03! I intended it to be the one from Canto 2 from the start, I just can't read.

I've also maybe been a bit too loose-lipped regarding plot beats, so I'll be avoiding that more in an effort to prevent spoilers for people who don't want them.

Misc Updates:

A good amount of the main cast of this project is uploaded on Art Fight for 2024's fight! Since a majority of the main characters are mine specifically, most of them will be located on my AF account, demonerium. I'm on Team Stardust this year!

Oracle also has some of his characters that are a part of the SaB cast on AF - you can find his profile as oracle_milkman, he's on Team Seafoam.

While you're at it, attack Michelle too! They don't have any SaB characters yet, but they have their own Lobcorp OCs as well as others.

TL;DR:

Development is still in progress! We're currently still working on finalizing the plot and chapter summaries, but it's getting closer!

Branch J-02 is now referred to as Branch J-03 to correct a mistake I made... and somehow only recently noticed...

Some discussion/feedback would be appreciated regarding release methods and minigame/extra feature additions!

[songsofadelaide]

20 writing questions

💛 Thank you so much for tagging me in this lovely game, @togenabi ! I've been taking a brain break from writing this week but these qs helped shake up some inspiration. 💛

1. Is it a spur of the moment thing, or do you need a specific environment/set up to get into it? - I think I can write anywhere anytime as long as the inspiration strikes. And as long as I at least have my phone with me lol!

2. Where do you write? - Back when smartphones weren't a thing yet, I used to write on filler notebooks! It was only when my parents gifted me my first laptop that I started writing on Word. Google Docs was a whole new discovery for me, tbh!

3. What apps/programs do you use? - Google Docs! I used to write on SomNote and Zoho Notebook, too, but Google Docs won me over just for being a universal program lol.

4. How long have you been writing? - If I remember right, I started writing in 2005, but the fics started coming out in 2007. FF.Net was still all the rage back then and I spent most, if not all of my high school summer breaks writing fics!

5. What fandoms do you write for? - When I was a teenager, I used to write a lot for Tekken! And Naruto, too, for some reason. Ever since my writing renaissance in 2019, I've been writing a lot of fics for newer anime like MHA, Haikyuu! and JJK - which has me in a pretty strong chokehold for some reason?! (jk we all know it's Gojo lol) I sometimes find myself writing for RPG games, too.

6. Music, or no music while writing? - I do actually listen to music when I write! I usually share playlists at the end of my fics. Genre-wise, I find listening to instrumentals helps me write. It helps with scenario projection lol.

7. What does a WIP look like to you? - For me, a WIP looks like... a doc with a lot of dividers. Very rarely do I write with a story timeline because I already have a general idea of the flow, though I think I should probably consider writing physical timelines because it may help me write more efficiently. My format is usually - Georgia 11 Justified lol.

8. Do you proofread? - I do! I have Grammarly installed on my PC, which I also use for work. I think I have a fairly good grasp of language and grammar, so I don't rely on it too much. It does help in detecting weirdly spelled words or missing punctuation marks.

9. What's something you googled recently for writing? - For my WIP Paraselene, I have been reading up about idol culture hehe.

10. How many words does a usual work from you have? - I find that my work increases in words the more invested I am in it. But if I look at my existing fics and pieces, the median would have to be around 8k to 10k.

11. Share a snippet from something you're working on! - Enjoy a little bit of the night scene from Paraselene.

12. How many drafts do you have currently? - I have around three, I think?! The final chapters of Asleep Among Endives, Paraselene, and maybe some bits and pieces of future fics I may or may not get back to, depending on the inspiration!

13. What's something someone said about your writing that stuck with you? - I've been told a lot that my writing flows very nicely! I tend to second-guess my writing at times, but reading comments like that reminds me that my pacing is fine. Also reading that your fic is someone's favourite?! The sheer delight I feel...

14. What's your safe zone? Is there a character or genre you're most confident writing for? - As a lover girl (lol), romance and fluff is definitely my thing. And as a real-life royalty buff, royalty AUs are totally up my alley as well. I feel very confident about writing Gojo given how I've already written so much about him.

15. Is there something you want to try in your work that you haven't done yet? - I want to try writing more intricate plots, tbh! Something with slow-burn and drama. But I feel like my brain isn't programmed to write that kind of stuff because I am a lover girl hehe!

16. Do you have a favorite work? - I think my most favourite one would have to be my In The Wind Collection! It's my JJK royalty AU and I am so tempted to write another one...

17. Do you have a least favorite work? - I... don't, actually! I put a lot of heart and soul into everything I write, so I really can't say I'm unhappy about something... until I start rereading them lol!

18. Genre of the very first thing you wrote? - Considering my first fic from 2019... Childhood friends to lovers lol.

19. Genre of the latest thing you wrote! - Also childhood friends to lovers, for some reason?!

20. Last but not least, where can readers find your stuff? - You can find my stuff here on Tumblr! And AO3. Here is a handy Linktree with my writing socials!

Thank you again for tagging me here, Belle! 💛 You're such a lovely friend to have! Let's both keep writing and making the world a happier place to be one fic at a time. ✨

20 writing questions !

give a preview into your mind! how does the genius flow? how do you write? (only answer questions you're comfortable with! feel free to tag other writers to share the love ♡)

1. Is it a spur of the moment thing, or do you need a specific environment/set up to get into it? 2. Where do you write? (phone/pc/typewriter/all of the above?) 3. What apps/programs do you use? 4. How long have you been writing? 5. What fandoms do you write for? 6. Music, or no music while writing? (if music, what kind?) 7. What does a WIP look like to you? (do you take notes? is anything color-coded? do you have a preferred font?) 8. Do you proofread? 9. What's something you googled recently for writing? 10. How many words does a usual work from you have? 11. Share a snippet from something you're working on! 12. How many drafts do you have currently? 13. What's something someone said about your writing that stuck with you? 14. What's your safe zone? Is there a character or genre you're most confident writing for? 15. Is there something you want to try in your work that you haven't done yet? 16. Do you have a favorite work? 17. Do you have a least favorite work? 18. Genre of the very first thing you wrote? 19. Genre of the latest thing you wrote! 20. Last but not least, where can readers find your stuff? (your masterlist/other sites you post on/etc.)

tags! @flowerjun/@boba-at-323 @songsofadelaide @ay0nha @wolfegoddess @seonghrtz @stephisokay @manumimiii @silverinkbottle @eclidse (love you all, and all that you do! thank you for sharing your creativity, every word you write is dearly appreciated. the world shines brighter with you in it ♡)

[theminecraftbee]

are. Are we allowed to ask questions because I am SO incredibly curious about doc, tango, and stress

especially stress. is iskall involved with the reasoning of her not being one anymore perhaps??

This is SO interesting I’m so excited!!!!!

okay to clarify a few things:

this is… probably a ways out I haven’t started writing it and it’ll be a lot of chapters guys. expect it, earliest, december-ish, but my actual projection is probably january, assuming i keep to a somewhat similar to stuffed bird pace. so like. i will talk about this and post snippets probably that i like but you can’t expect this particularly soon since i like posting things I’ve already finished more than posting them as I go. i may have. hyped too soon I just want the pressure of you all knowing I’m writing it to help motivate me,

since I am planning on actually writing this I will be very cagey about spoilers to the general public/people who don’t already know until it’s out (although if you’re a friend feel free to ask and when it’s closer and I have all the tags and warnings on it you can always ask for spoilers in private if you need them to read that offer is always open for all of my fics)

however it’s not a spoiler to say the following things, since they all should come up in like, the first two chapters:

doc is a mad scientist, arrested originally for creating illegal weapons, some of which he used, human experimentation, and some general murder and property damage. he’s even experimented on himself. it has been a bit more than a year since he was brought in.

tango was also arrested for illegal weaponry, along with property damage, theft, and a number of counts against assault on superheroes (particularly like, weird jigsaw-like puzzle traps with potentially-deadly outcomes, although since they largely targeted superheroes, the actual kill rate ended up being zero. still probably not great). he simultaneously claims he was framed and that absolutely no one else could have possibly designed traps like that. he is very obviously lying about at least one of these things.

stress largely actually stole jewelry, but got tried and arrested as though she was far more dangerous due to her control over the plants around her being stupidly powerful. ren helped her out when he started trying to prove rehabilitation is possible, so she agreed to help him run security and to be a more relatable-seeming ear for his larger-scale attempt happening now.

[birlcholtz]

Fic Questions

tagged by @the-lincyclopedia thank you!! (fun game: watch my writing get progressively less formal as the post continues. by the end it’s like what is capitalization)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

77!

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

434,378 as of this week but it does go up quite regularly

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Okay so in terms of what’s on my AO3, I have Check Please, All For the Game, Sharp Zero, HP, and Miraculous Ladybug. I also have The Forbidden LOTR and PJO Fanfiction (as in, I’ve written it, but it’s never seeing the light of day)

(technically there is a PJO fic out there that has seen the light of day but I orphaned it because I was tired of getting comments asking about when it would be updated)

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

and then i met you (and the whole world changed)

for the better

Knew It Was You

come home (to you, to us)

sin bin schematics

All of these are Check Please and all of them except Knew It Was You are part of my Zimbits Airport AU!

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

I do! It’s actually a very recent thing that I’ve started not responding to literally every single comment. Mainly I respond because I love talking about my writing so I am going to seize that opportunity when it comes up

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Oh, DEFINITELY Happy Birthday (HP). Check out that MCD tag ahah. (I say HP but what I really mean is that I write fic about Regulus Black. The Regulus Black-centric tag is my home in the HP fandom)

fun fact: this is a very short fic that I wrote when I was 15 and basically forgot about until recently, and then I reread it recently and went holy shit?? I pulled NO punches????

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the wildest one you’ve written?

Not a ton? I think a lot of the fandoms I write for don’t really mesh that well. That being said, the aforementioned orphaned PJO fic is actually a PJO/ML crossover, so there’s that

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Nope! Sometimes I get comments that are just.... really confusing? And a more common thing is that in my AFTG fic I’ll get comments from people who are so focused on Andreil (or the most common ships in general) to the point that like. they miss the point of what I actually wrote. Those are annoying but they’re not hate, they’re very enthusiastic, they’re just... enthusiastic about a story I’m not writing? So it’s a bit frustrating.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

No sjflskgjhgf I struggle enough to write kissing, I think if I ever tried to write smut my brain would just shut down. I’ve managed some fade-to-blacks (which are mostly in WIPs that haven’t been posted) but they rely HEAVILY on the powers of implication

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of!

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, although I have occasionally made a brief go of it, not to post, more as an exercise for myself in a language that I’m learning. Anyway I never finish them so I’m gonna say no

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

Not really? I’ve definitely group brainstormed fics and then written them (the best example of this being Q&A (AFTG), which was the product of a truly off-the-walls group chat), but I tend to do all the actual writing myself. I think the way I write would drive a co-writer up the wall since it’s very disorganized and I don’t write stuff down because ~I know what’s gonna happen I don’t need notes~ and it would infuriate me if I was co-writing with me lmao, so I won’t inflict that on someone else

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

I regularly move through ships I’m SUPER focused on, like it’s kind of a rotation. I will forever and always ship Percabeth though.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Okay so if you follow me at @birlwrites you may know this already, but i have this ‘warmups’ document that is just like, random ideas i get that i don’t necessarily want to finish but i just want to try out for a bit? and i have a rule that once a ‘warmup’ is more than 10 pages long (so 11+) then it has to be moved to its own document, just to make scrolling through the warmups doc easier. but usually, a warmup only passes 10 pages when i’m INTO it. so i have a bazillion wips i will probably never finish. i complain about this a lot. i have so many wips. i don’t need more.

here’s one: it’s titled ‘interrobang doesn’t know they’re dating’, it’s basically a full outline for a chowder/tango fic and it would be SO cool if i could ever like. get around to writing it. but i am constantly swamped with writing projects, so it’s probably not gonna happen. if anyone’s interested in adopting it though i’d be down for that!! i think it’s a fun idea i just almost def won’t write it myself

15. What are your writing strengths?

SNAPPY DIALOGUE AND SNARKY INTERNAL MONOLOGUE. my writing is COMEDIC, 90% of my ideas are based on a funny snippet that popped into my head, a lot of my worldbuilding is based on ‘hey you know what would be hilarious’ (whenever i explain how larai selects a chosen one in the rainfall universe i start laughing, which is a STARK contrast to how it plays out on the page), i love writing funny stuff!!

also i think my writing sounds nice, a lot of the time i pick words/syntax based on sound and flow so there’s that too. and i have lots of ideas! i don’t struggle much with writer’s block because a) i have a lot of strategies to deal with it and b) i have a lot of ideas to help get around it/work with it

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

PHYSICAL INTIMACY LMAO, sometimes in my end notes on shippy fics you can see me complaining ‘it took me literally 4 hours to write that very brief kiss’. also sometimes the humor in my writing gets in the way a bit, i have to very consciously put it away so characters can actually have serious, genuine emotions. also i don’t like outlining and i tend not to get betas for fanfiction so like..... i do my best continuity-wise but having really tightly plotted stories is just not my focus lol. (and i do put more effort into that for original stuff, it’s just fic where i kind of go wild)

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

If the reader’s supposed to know what it means, then writing it in another language is iffy for me. (stuff like terms of endearment which come up a lot in fic are fine imo, you can just put a note in to translate them and your reader will prob remember)

If the pov character isn’t supposed to understand it, and it doesn’t matter if the reader understands it, then ig it’s fine? but unless you already speak the other language (and i am NOT confident in my ability to translate english into literally any other language), then i think it’s way easier to just note that a character’s speaking x language and provide tone indicators, body language cues, etc. so the reader understands as much as the pov character.

That being said there are def times when it’s used super effectively--the dialogue in spanish in cemetery boys comes to mind! that’s not fanfic but it’s still creative writing so w/e

so i guess it comes down to: does actually writing out the dialogue in the other language serve a purpose? if it doesn’t, then you’re filling up the screen with words your reader isn’t likely to understand, which i try to avoid doing

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

so the first fandom i actually *wrote* for was PJO, but i distinctly remember creating warrior cats OCs when i was little. i never actually did anything w them but i had them and my favorite was a riverclan warrior named shellstream i remember this VIVIDLY

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve ever written?

oh boy. okay so this is hard because i feel like i’m continuously improving as a writer. like in the sense that my writing is getting closer and closer to really matching my own taste? my favorites tend to always be my current projects as a result. and i do really love set those ghosts alight (HP) but it feels a little like cheating to say a fic i haven’t even finished writing yet. even though it’s def not cheating, that’s just the direction my brain is taking it.

i’m gonna say and then what? (OMGCP) because i’m super proud of the prose (especially ch 2 aka the first actual prose chapter), survived by (HP) for SUCCESSFULLY WRITING AN EMOTION and making readers cry :), and Q&A (AFTG) because i’m literally the one who wrote it and yet it still makes me wheeze. those are all fics i reread occasionally, because i’m big enough to admit i enjoy rereading my old stuff! (just like. to a point. some of my old stuff i can’t look at anymore because all the mistakes stick out to me like they have spotlights shining directly on them)

this was fun!! i’m gonna do an open tag because i just started my fall semester and brain tired. i know sometimes people see open tags and assume the op didn’t really mean it but I MEAN IT, PLEASE DO THIS AND TAG ME!!!!! YES YOU READING THIS

[chaoticspacefam]

2020 In Review: Wordcount Tag

I was tagged for this by @actualanxiousswampwitch​ , thank you! I’m not sure who’s already done or been tagged for this cause I am, once again, late to the party LOL but I shall (no pressure and sorry if you’ve already done it!) tag: @rainofaugustsith​ , @darth-bagel​ , @thatmmolesbian​ , @thelastenvoyyy​ and anybody else who wants to do this. Yes, I promise I mean you!

Words: 45,314

Published: 0 (I’m not counting the couple of Six Sentence tags I’ve gotten, they’re snippets of an unfinished piece & are included below instead :), or roleplay replies, cause that feels like cheating lol.) I actually wrote a lot more than I thought I had, this is a rough guesstimate as well, as my oneshot WIPs tend to be all over the place across something like 6 different documents, some of which have existed since 2018, so I had to guess at how far up to count from the end for some of them, but I think it’s a fair guesstimate XD I also have included lore/worldbuilding docs in this because that was a 3-month long Lockdown 1.0 Boredom/”Canon is a trash fire so I’m ignoring that and making up my own lore” passion project and I’m goddamn proud of how much I wrote for that. It’s the most I’ve written in one stretch (think I finished it over a span of 3 nights or so, once I’d done all the research and made all the notes ofc ^^)

Not Published: 45,314

The Breakdown:

swtor - 45,314

for creeping shadows (my main longfic/part one of the subterfugeverse series) - 1,553  - Aria, stop being difficult! *shakes fists* XD

oneshots - 16,223

lore/worldbuilding (for subterfugeverse naturally) - 23,001 (is this ALL tomato alien lore? pretty much, yes, yes it is :’D ~400 words is “the WIP reworked timeline to correlate my worldbuilding with the canon timeline that was released”, but 98% is just...me thinking way too much about Purebloods and how they deserved way better goddamn lore. I blame @fluffynexu ‘s amazing tomato worldbuilding posts,  reading them when I went looking for “canon” lore one day for the rp is what got me started down that rabbithole (it’s awesome and if you haven’t already you should totally go check hers out too :DD), I had a “fuck you then canon I’ll do it myself too >:L” moment and once I started I couldn’t stop until I’d crapped out literally over 20k words on the subject *whispering* thank you LOL)

zephyrverse au bonus oneshots - 4,537 (stuff I wrote to fill in time gaps or “just cause I had a plot bunny”, relating to mine and k-christine’s zephyrverse au rp. None of these will likely be posted publicly, but they still deserve to be counted as words I wrote this year :’D

As you can see, most of my “muse” this year came from sporadic oneshots :’D The Ahaszaai twins also properly plot-bunnied their way into my brain in late 2019 and haven’t stopped making a nuisance of themselves the whole fucking year. Every time I tried to carry on with a chapter, one of the two of them would pop up like “Nooo write about ME! pay attention to ME!” - Yes, Ni’kasi, I will get to you this year, I promise XD

New Things I Tried:

Just Writing. Not worrying about whether “it wasn’t part of the next chapter” or “it comes from a part in the story that I’m nowhere near close to posting yet”. If I felt like writing something, or for a specific pairing/feeling/scene, whatever. I wrote until I ran outta muse juice. Yeah, it meant I didn’t technically “finish” anything this year BUT - the important thing is I wrote stuff. and that’s all that really matters, eh? :’D

Polyam ships! May not seem like a big deal but I spent a long time talking myself out of them because of internalised toxic monogamy and finally saying “you know what, fuck it! I can ship three or more people together and it can still be a perfectly wholesome, healthy and loving relationship and that’s okay” was a BIG thing for me this year.

Dialogue Scripts: which I didn’t count as wordcount because really it’s just word vomit of general tone/inflection and dialogue that I came up with right before falling asleep which I didn’t want to lose. Basically, if an exchange or a particularly punchy or moving line of dialogue popped into my brain but I wasn’t ready to write the whole scene that it fit into out, but didn’t want to forget the line(s). I wrote it out in movie script/script-style roleplay fashion e.g. Character’s Name: (emotion, hand gestures etc.) [Dialogue here] and so on. I know this is probably a well known trick of the trade, but I never took it seriously until this year. Seriously, do it. It’s great.

Favorite Thing I Wrote:

Hmmm, a snippet for Andronikos/Ni’kasi that I started this week which isn’t posted yet (saving it for this week’s Six Sentence Sunday so look out for it! :D) was pretty fun to work on, I love their dynamic and Kas is suprisingly fun to write for.

Also the Aria/Vano proposal scene that I posted a snippet for the week before last. I’m having great fun with that scene, and I really enjoy putting a non-serious spin on the classic “proposal scene” tropes. Can’t wait to finish it, though it may be a while before the full one goes up on AO3, as it depends whether it ends up fitting in as part of the mainfic or as an additional oneshot

And I have a D’leah/Kissai oneshot that I need to give another once-over before I finally yeet it onto AO3 and Tumblr for you guys to see :’D

Favorite Fic I Read:

@sleepswithvillains Eleanora/Quinn fic, Helplessly Hoping. I’m horribly behind on chapters and I gotta catch up and read the finale this week, but it’s been a helluva great ride and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the story! <3

Also The Invitation collab with @tishinada featuring Zas and Fiona had me squealing, I can’t wait to catch up on HH and see more of these two, they’re adorable ;-; @a-muirehen​ ‘s Relu/Merkara series of course! I’m a complete sucker for (friends to lovers to in Ariano’s case but yea pfpfpf) enemies to lovers ships and these two are just so good, I am on the edge of my seat every time we get a new snippet for them, ngl (grimace emoji) @darth-bagel ‘s Sylvas/Graz’zt and Sylvas/Liz/Rilfaen snippets which they’ve been spoiling me with on Discord @mercurypilgrim ‘s Ven’fir/Quinn AU oneshots, Cloudbank (Western was a particular favourite, but all are very good!) and of course @rainofaugustsith ‘s Lana/Viri updates are always fantastic, some personal favourites from this year were Almost There & Memory of Healing :3 (I totally still go back to read Commander & Advisor too sometimes, getting to see Viri be a little diabolical and messing with “MiNiSTeR LoRMaN!” was and still is my favourite thing XD)

If I’ve left you out I’m sorry!! These were the ones that stuck out in my memory, but I’ve loved everyone’s writing this year, it’s been great :3

Writing Goals:

to actually finish and post chapter 8 & 9 of Creeping Shadows. Then we’ll get to the meat and potatoes of the story and maybe Aria will stop being a brat and fighting me every time I try to stick to a semi-regular update schedule Get off my butt, finalise the name and get started on Ni’kasi’s part of the Subterfugeverse story. Maybe run the updates in-tandem with Creeping Shadows but idk if I want to wait till after CS is done before I start posting Kas’s side, or do them side-by-side yet, we’ll see ;) Keep writing! I know better than to pressure myself by setting a specific word count goal, that’s never worked well in the past

At least 2 chapters of each of the works mentioned above would be great though, more would be better! We’ll see how I go

Words of Thanks:

honestly, to everybody in the fandom I’ve met this year. Anybody that I follow, thank you for being there and engaging with me and/or posting amazing content for me to look at! I came over from deviantART where the SWTOR fandom is incredibly small and generally quite inactive and the contrast since moving over here has been incredibly uplifting. I very nearly cancelled Creeping Shadows and stopped posting fic for my SWTORverse altogether because I got next to no engagement on dA and it was very disheartening to the point where I felt I could enjoy the game and the rp partners I had, but the solo projects I’d put so much thought, time and love into already weren’t worth continuing. You guys took that spark and kept it going and I really don’t have enough words to say how grateful I am for that. Even if I haven’t published much this year, making posts on this tumblr, interacting with everyone and working on lore, plot points and so on for Subterfugeverse has kept me going through the Hellish Year of Nightmares that was 2020 <3

to the amazing new friends I’ve made in this past year, who have listened to me ramble about headcanons, character backstories, writing snippets (and rambled/sent some back), keep being awesome: @walk-ng-d-saster , @darth-bagel , @kyber-heart , @deepseacritter , @thedinalixlegacy to further friends and meme tag buddies, I get so excited every time I see a mention for a new meme or ask game in my inbox, so thank you!! : @mimabeann , @palepinkycat , @a-master-procrastinator , @raven-of-domain-kwaad , @actualanxiousswampwitch , @thatmmolesbian , @a-muirehen to my regular commentors/rebloggers/likers/askbox lurkers, I see every one of you and every time your users pop up I grin like a kid in a toy shop: @starlightjedi , @sparkles-and-rust , @wilvarin-chan , @sunsetofdoom , @ask-an-andalite , @thelastenvoyyy . @lyrishadow and more because Tumblr only goes so far back and I have the memory of Swiss Cheese. If you regularly comment, like, reblog, or anything, from me, know that I see you, and I love and appreciate you for it! <3

I couldn’t possibly remember to tag everyone and I promise if I missed you out it’s not because I hate you! Anxiety just sometimes be a bitch and I don’t wanna look like a clown calling someone a “friend” if I’m not explicitly sure we are, in fact, friends. I think you’re all awesome and I’m so glad to have moved over here and met you all <3

[faejilly]

I was tagged by @la-muerta​ & @facialteeth​ & @thedivinemissema​ for the WIP/Title Game

rules: post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. send me an ask with the title that most intrigues you and interests you and i’ll post a little snippet of it or tell you something about it!

AND THEN  by @shadoedseptmbr​ @msviolacea​ & @ravenclawnerd​ for the “stories you want to write... but for some reason haven’t yet”

so this will be a mish-mash of both? The WIPs will mostly have blurbs in this case (to fit the second meme) but you are still welcome to ask follow-up questions, if you’d like ;) Assuming you make it through the list, it is uh. Not Short.

Anyone who would like to play with their WIPs, please consider yourself tagged in either or both of these. :D

Misc Fic Folder:

“untitled document” - where I’m working on fictober fills so I have word-counts for my GYWO tracker. I am not working on these because Brains Are Dumb and also Going Back To Work Is Exhausting

I made a file called “YULETIDE!” which has nothing in it but I’m determined to finish this year so that is definitely technically a thing in the Unending WIP List of Doom worth mentioning. (Tho obviously that’s all I could say even if I had started, because anonymous.)

“coda-fics, rewatch!” -yes, that exclamation mark is important! it’s to keep me motivated! (it didn’t work). Much like untitled, this is for putting stuff so I can do word count tracking even if I don’t know what I’m doing. Currently I think it just says “MARYSE” because I was working on my SH 1x6 coda-fic and then got distracted and haven’t typed anything up yet. (Yay notebooks? Boo notebooks? Not even sure at this point.)

WNIP (works not in progress) Folder:

“TOG” - I had one vivid mental image of how Nicky & Joe met (blood-stained evil smiles?) but then no idea for a follow-up story and also the fandom is insane and I’m not sure I want to deal with all of *gestures vaguely* all that

“Shan Xia Notes” -for a TTRPG that never quite got off the ground; she was a semi-tragic selkie who was still in love with the evil queen/lady who stole her skin and I got to play her for like one session and she was surprisingly chaotic neutral, which wasn’t at all what I’d been expecting. But the game never really got off the ground, so I never had enough info to really delve into writing backstory fic

“post-Kruschev” -Kruschev’s List was the last episode of Scarecrow & Mrs King, and I was debating writing an epilogue in place of the s5 we never got, to try and tie up some loose ends, but the fandom’s three old-ladies in trench coats and I never quite worked up the gumption to get it anywhere

“Code Realize warm as silk sequel” -there is literally nothing in this file except “SEX! Only a little angst” because I wanted to write some “we can’t actually touch each other” smut but never actually did. 🤷‍♀️

BioWare (also all Not-In-Progress Anymore)

“seb/adelaide”, “Theia” & “DAI Erana” -these WIP folders were cannibalized for ficlets for the last few times I did fictober, and while originally I had ideas for longer epilogues for all three of them, at this point I don’t think any of the remaining bits could support a story any longer.

”whispers in the dark” -Maia Ryder never really got much fic at all; the cancellation of any further Andromeda stuff was really disheartening, and at this point I’d have to play the game again, and I don’t think I’m gonna manage that any time soon

”TSP” -a Mass Effect 3 Shepard AU collab project that kind of went off the rails, and our mutual brains/lives never quite seem to line up so we can try and rebuild it ”Ngaio & Tane” -my one truly ruthless Shepard (Alliance background, who romanced Traynor) whose father Tane Shepard was, I think, in PsyOps, and I wanted to figure out their complicated relationship but never really did know where I was going with it

”JE Zu & Yaling” -so I’ve rambled about my Tragic Sagacious Zu Romance Thoughts regarding Jade Empire more than once (#Icy Yaling should have most of it) but apparently I want to yell about it more than I want to actually write it? Whoops.

”CI sequel: 5 times fic?” -Cruel Intentions is a kinkmeme fill that I started and then it sat for like five years before I actually finished it, and I liked the ending, but it does leave a giant fucking question mark in terms of how those people got from there to where they are after the game, and I kind of wanted to write a proper h/c fic rather than just... leaving them wallowing in all that trauma?

But I didn’t. I don’t even remember for sure how I wanted to frame the 5/1 of it all, besides it being something sad about allowing people to see you or touch you in some way. (Prayers maybe, since I think there was definitely some Sebastian & Fenris & faith stuff going on in there.)

“candles” -Merribela prompt fill that I never was happy with? Not sure what I might do with it at this point, so it’s just sitting there all sad and lonely and neglected-like.

Shadowhunters

pt1: WIP LIST ONLY

“Persuasion” -so I keep trying to write Persuasion AUs in many fandoms because it’s my favorite Austen, but I think I like it too much, I have no real solid concept of how I’d transform it, and if I don’t have anything else to say about different characters within that framework, I have no push to actually write anything? Also this SH version of it suffered from MASSIVE scope creep when I started outlining and it got too big for me to handle so I like, killed it twice? Whoops. This one is really probably never gonna happen.

“oosdt sequel” -I wanted to write more about the Forest That Eats People and Magnus & Alec as Guardians Between Worlds, and also some background Magnus’ Found Family & Lightwood Family Feels (maybe some clizzy?) and I left a Madzie plot-thread dangling from the first one on purpose even but I think this one had too many ideas and not enough focus so it’s sort of sprawling all over a doc with a lot of “???” in it

“procedural-ish” -this was originally going to be a sex-farce. and then it turned more serious. and then maybe kind of copaganda which was uncomfortable in terms of the Everything That Is The News in 2020, and then maybe it was more a Mafia AU and at that point I had self-inflicted tone whiplash and I wished the voices in my head were a little more forthcoming about their plans so I stopped before I brained myself on my computer monitor in frustration.

“I had rather a rose than live forever” -I started a reverse!verse Malec (Shadowhunter!Magnus, High Warlock!Alec) for bingo last year, and I couldn’t quite get it together in time, so I made a moodboard inspired by the bits I’d started instead. I may see if one of my prompts from Bingo this year help me finish it?

“fall fright fest (practical magic  au)” -exactly what it says on the tin! almost exactly a year old & neglected! IDEK ANYMORE (I talked about this one with the WIP meme last time tho: here)

“priest!kink theology?” -I thought it was gonna be smut? I like priest!kink. I have made other people like it and yell at me even! But then I kept diverging into demon!Magnus thinking about Priest!Alec’s faith and as usual, IDEK ANYMORE *laughs*

(If they’re remotely canon-adjacent or divergent, a bunch of these are in here because I need to rewatch the show to get the pacing/timing/tone right and I haven’t, and I don’t know why, because I enjoy the show, but BRAINS! Are Dumb! So I guess that’s it?)

“I do” -I have tried to write this damnable Malec arranged marriage fic like six different times. I have signed up for fic exchanges and bangs with it, I have rewritten massive sections, trying to change tone or structure or POV or whatever, and it basically comes down to they like each other too fast and I keep not gutting it enough to get back to a useful pace, but by the time I realized that I was on take six and kind of sick of it. I may get back to it eventually

“wing!fic” -canon divergent in early s1, trying to deal with the consequences of Simon’s kidnapping as the Truly Serious Event that it should have been. It uh. Got heavier than I expected with those consequences (considering it was originally just supposed to be Alec’s wings flirting with Magnus) and also see above re: rewatching for pacing.

“2x20 aftermath/date night/pandemonium porn“ -yes that is the actual wip title. It used to be “spite fic” because I was originally inspired by fighting against a lot of fic!Alec characterization that was clearly based more on the books and ATG syndrome than the Alec in the show, which is the Alec I know and like and want to read about. BUT, pacing and etc. again, I think. Also I have somehow entirely lost my knack for writing porn, which makes it difficult to finish something originally intended to be smut!fic. Or even teasing almost!smut.

“rubbish heap” -so this is about three different fics that I realized complemented each other really well so they’re now all in the same file as I try to turn them into the sequel of “with an if in its soul”. It includes amnesia, parabatai lore shenanigans, a s3 rewrite, and some truly awful Owl adjustments that make me wince in horrified authorly delight and pain. BUT, as with the other ones in this file, the scope is large and I normally write short-fic and I kind of just threw up my hands in exasperation. I may have to break it back up into the three different fics instead, if I ever actually want to write it. Them? But also I need to take better notes on s3 to make sure I have what I need in here.

SH Pt 2: Started posting or not yet in hiatus because it’s actually almost ready to be a thing in the real world! maybe!?

“kisses (firsts)” -I actually started publishing this one, a “series of firsts” that was supposed to be kind of relationship milestones and kind of an excuse for smut, and then there wasn’t that much smut and I lost momentum and also dear lords & ladies the timeline is stupid, wtf. I may not ever add to this one, tbqh. It doesn’t stop in a terrible place, and they’re all ficlets so they stand alone all right.

“clizzy epilogue” -this is blank atm, it’s more a reminder for me to keep poking away at my “girls who can’t breathe air, only fire” collection BECAUSE I WOULD LIKE TO ACTUALLY GET TO THE CLIZZY AT SOME POINT

"mer!alec" -pts 2-4 of a series, but apparently having an actual plan gets in the way of me *writing* the thing, and I haven't managed to throw the half an outline far enough away from my brain to be able to write again. Or something like that.

"ibhww" -if broken hearts were whole is a soulmate fic I started a million years ago, and purposefully set aside to finish some other WIPs because I thought they'd be quick, and now it's just buried under two and a half years of regret and shame so it's hard to get back to it

"iafy" -i am for you is a delightful & frothy semi-epistolary fluff piece that also just lost momentum because Life & 2020 & etc. It's far and away the most popular thing I've ever posted on AO3, which also makes me feel weird sometimes, and I feel like the fact that there's no grand conclusion planned, just a bit more fluff and settling in, might end up being disappointing? Basically, it's the first time I think I've psyched myself out about reader expectations, and until I get over that I'm going to have trouble finishing the last couple chapters. (There really are probably only two more chapters though. IT’S SO CLOSE, I wish I could just... write it. And yet?)

“fake-hating” -I do not like fake dating as a trope that much, I just do not get it, but I love outside POVs and arranged marriages and there’s this delighful tumblr post about how they wished there was more fic about people who were together but had to pretend they werent’, and uh. This may be that? Eventually? I’m not exhausted by my failure to finish it yet, so it’s still in the regular folder rather than the hiatus folder, even though nothing’s been posted for it.

AND I THINK THAT’S IT?

Not as terrible as it could be, but still. MANY WORDS THAT MAY NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY. Posting the equivalent of one’s old ratty sketchbook is always a weird feeling. :D

[risthebrave]

okay so i was going to send in an ask for the director’s cut thing, but there were too many fics i wanted to ask about 😭 i’ll send them in but PLEASE keep in mind you don’t have to do them all i feel bad dmfjsjf

move so pretty (you’re all i see), sleeping on our problems, works like a charm, just a flicker in the dark, and sweet like honey

ahhh omg thank you for sending these in! i’m so sorry for how long it took to get out - i may have forgotten about it shjkskss also i don’t mind talking about all of them but i’m definitely going to keep each one short. you can find them under the cut:

move so pretty (you’re all i see) ~

this fic was started initially when i was doing word prompts using curiouscat! people would send me words and i’d write a quick little drabble/snippet... they’re typically around 300-ish words but i got the word “owns,” and maybe got a bit carried away? i think that prompt ended up being 1k words - too long to post using cc so i had to take screenshots and post as separate tweet. 

the idea that came to me was something i love to read in fics: one of them walking in on the other masturbating. i didn’t intend for it to become anything more than that snippet but i what can i say? i got intrigued. my brain helpfully provided a backstory: best friends, harry maybe having feelings for louis but not wanting to ruin their friendship... 

fast-forward three days and i posted an 11k fic shjssks

this was my first attempt at writing a pwp so that was an interesting experience!!! i’m too obsessed with giving backstories and arcs to ever write just pure smut but this is the closest i’ve gotten??? 5.5k/11k being smut, that is. and for once coming up with the title wasn’t too hard because there’s one song i always think of when it comes to best friends to lovers and that’s lucky!! 

i don’t really know what else to say for this one! i remember sarah and i both wrote and posted pwps in a short span of each other so that was fun... she’s actually the one who motivated me to finish and post this fic instead of just letting the idea go. and her dog ended up in the story: chica <3 my absolute favorite <3333

sleeping on our problems ~

welp. this fic was a struggle for a long time. idk if i’ve talked about it on this blog but this fic was initially an exes to lovers fic!!! where they spent harry’s rut together right before breaking up and then louis finds out he’s pregnant and angst ensues. 

changing it to a one-night stand (even though it wasn’t only one night shjksks) ended up being a really good decision in the way that this new version of the story required a lot less angst and reflection of their past relationship, choices, actions!! that first fic was going to be a lot heavier i think shjsks but i really love how it turned out!!

barring the main tropes, the progression of the story and the outline itself changed so. much. in the process of writing... i found an earlier saved version of my outline and the story is almost completely unrecognizable haha. and actually the most recent saved version of the outline is also not 100% accurate to the final story because for the last 10k of the story, i was flying completely free shjsksk. 

also, even after i finished the fic, i went back and added two scenes the next day so it’s safe to say i changed so much of this story -- it was never supposed to be that long either hsjsksk the goal was 48-50k and i thought i was being optimistic!

somewhat in the same vein but also really different: this fic was one of the first fics i ever wrote out of order! before this, i had switched around maybe a couple times when writing a fic but mostly stuck to chronological order. but in this one i kept getting stuck with certain scenes and decided that i’d never reach my goal of finishing unless i switched to parts of the story i had the inspiration to write in the moment instead of getting stuck on one single part i had no motivation for. it really helped the process and i’ve been switching around ever since. 

another thing that really helped me actually finish this fic was the motivation and encouragement of people on twitter and i’m still so appreciative of it now :’) there’s no way i could have finished this fic without the kind words and well wishes of my mutuals!!

(also - i included an easter egg in this fic from another one of my fics... i suppose that’s sort of the type of insight that fits for these things? the ballet louis and harry saw in new york was swan lake <3)

works like a charm ~

ooo i wrote this fic for my friend’s birthday!! she loves hp aus and slytherin hl so it was just a given that i write that for her. i was on a deadline - pretty sure i made the doc on september 4th, aka nine days before i posted - and i hadn’t had my full outline done when i started which is is... let’s just say very uncommon. 

this is another example of me going off outline and changing the story as i went because initially the estimation was about 12k and the basic plot was that after they’d fuck for the first time, they’d immediately talk about the past and resolve those misunderstandings. but when i got to that point, i realized it felt too rushed for how the story was progressing so i extended it a bit and added some more *tension* and *miscommunication* until they finally got their shit together!

also i feel like some would find louis’ blatant lies when interrogated about his feelings for harry to be unrealistic but as someone who has definitely done the exact same thing (lmao - without the happy ending), i find it a definite possibility. and i mean, we all say stuff we don’t mean under pressure - whether it’s to louis’ (and my) extent or not. 

another thing i remember about this fic was having to work out with sarah - who was also posting a fic for this friend’s birthday - posting times and dates. we eventually agreed that she’d post first and i’d post the day after (neither were the actual day of the birthday because we were both running late!) this is a conversation we proceeded to have many other times since we both have made habits of birthday fics and we pretty much have the same friends. 

all of this was also happening in sync with us writing a fic together for our other friend’s birthday which was on the 8th... yes it was exactly as chaotic and stressful as you’re thinking but also fun! and i love all three fics involved!! haha. 

just a flicker in the dark ~

okay this fic is definitely my favorite thing i’ve ever written and i’ve said that before many, many times but it’s true! but it too changed so much from the initial idea to the final end product. 

in fact, the original idea was a 20k somewhat-crack fic where harry was a ghost and louis was the paranormal investigator trying to get him to stop haunting this house. it was just supposed to be a quick and fun halloween fic to work on while finishing up my first blff and finally making head way on my abandoned second blff... obviously, that changed drastically. 

it initially started with me getting the idea of louis and harry being partners and enemies. and then i was thinking... why not throw exes on top of it while we’re there??? that was completely self-indulgent since exes to lovers is my favorite trope of all time. but the idea was still that they were paranormal investigators trying to work a case on a haunted house and though the estimated wc had raised to 35k, i was still hoping that it’d be quick and easy because i had two other projects that needed a lot of my attention. 

then came the first day of october. i woke up after having the craziest dream about louis and harry and the ghost that was not really a ghost. i ended up writing about 7k that thursday and the story really just took shape from there. the first sequence i wrote was actually the scene where louis goes into the backyard and ends up in the pocket dimension where the spirit imprints on him - i think it was a 3.5k scene and it just flew out of me sjksjsk. after that i took a small break to start my outline but it was more of a messy list of ideas and details and things i wanted to include than my usual organized format. the next scene i wrote that day was the scene where louis is in the bedroom and the demon is there but harry is not but then he is (i’m so good at describing things, right?) that’s actually one of my favorite scenes i’ve ever written and the funny thing is that i barely even knew all the details of the demon plot by this point but my hands just kept typing and my brain had the tendrils of the story forming and that amazing feeling that this is something good. 

i could ramble on forever about the process of writing this fic but i’ll just say that it’s the most fun i’ve ever had writing anything ever. word-building and supernatural elements are my favorite and getting to delve into those things here was so much fun! the entire process took twenty-five days (spanning from october 1st to october 28th - with a small three day break to focus on finishing miss wedding au!!) and though i did have some small struggles and moments of writer’s block, for the most part the story just came to me. and it’s so amazing to me because i didn’t even have all the details and facets of the plot until louis did too but it ended up working out??? if anything, it showed his process of figuring things out really well because it was the process of me figuring things out!

also this was the first time i heavily featured a fic pet in a fic and i fell as much in love with venus as everyone else did :’) she has my heart, truly <3 i love this world and these characters so so much and i hope to return to it sometime in the future!

sweet like honey ~

whooo, okay, this fic... yikes. this fic was a capital s Struggle. 

so basically this fic was written for the blff and though it came out first, it was the second prompt i signed up for, prompt 63: Friends to lovers AU where Harry and Louis are best friends and flatmates in Uni and they both need money, Harry for his gym membership and Louis for cute stuff like sanrio plushies, so they decide to film homemade porn videos together. Louis is shy and sweet and maybe inexperienced and Harry kinda doms him.

i remember the exact moment i saw the blff post on tumblr about it being allowed to sign up for another prompt from that point on - i was sitting at the counter at my friend’s ranch’s kitchen eating crepes and browsing on my phone. i saw the post and immediately signed up for this prompt because it had been my second choice and though i love love loved my first prompt so much, i was disappointed at not being able to write this one... but i did!

the idea and basic outline was actually completed way back in july/august but for some reason i just couldn’t make any actual progress on it for so long??? i’m pretty sure the document was stuck at 5k for over three months shsjksks to be fair, i did keep pushing it to the side in favor of other newer fics but i was just experiencing the biggest barrier when it came to this story and characters. 

in fact, i actually reached out to the mods in late october about a potential extension - they informed me that all writers could use a two week extension if needed and i figured that would be fine. however, i didn’t end up using it! within the first few days of november, i managed to pull the wc up to 8k by the skin of my teeth (was still majorly struggling) - i was still sure i’d need an extension but then something really awful but in this case, helpful, happened... 

election week. 

basically, i’m a big stress-writer. writing is what i do when i’m upset or anxious or stressed because it truly is my happy place. i wouldn’t say writing during that week made me feel much better about everything going on but it provided a distraction. so much though that i went from 8k to 24k in the span of a few days... and i have absolutely no recollection of writing any of it. 

not only did i not need any extension, i also somehow ended up finishing early by a few days. and i really liked what i had!! or what i remembered of it anyway shjskks.

one thing i remember really focusing on in terms of these characters and dynamic was having it actually just be them starting as friends and developing feelings later. i feel like a common trope in friends to lovers fics is having one or both of them with pre-existing feelings that they feel is unrequited. obviously there’s nothing wrong with that (i’ve written it myself lol) and it’s a common trope for a reason - because it’s good - but i wanted to try something a little different. them actually filming these videos is what acted as the catalyst to them beginning to view their relationship with new eyes and open the door to the eventual feelings that developed. 

i also had so much fun writing harry’s pov in this one haha. i feel like this version of him was really bold and shameless and super easy for me to develop. 

this is also the closest i’ve ever gotten to meeting my estimation word count... ever. my estimate was 32k and it ended up at 33k!!! and yes i’m more proud of that than i should be lol

-

anyways, i pretty much just rambled but if anyone sees this and gets some good insight out of it, then yay! feel free to send more director’s cut inquiries!! i love doing them (even if it takes me weeks - sorry again!)

[theassofwonder]

Oh!! 1, 2, 3 of the Fun meta asks for writers. I would love to know the answers to these questions

Fun meta asks for writers!

1. Tell us about your current project(s)

* ACOTS, obviously- I swear to fuck I’m almost done with part 6! I know I keep saying that but I really do mean it!! I broke 2k last night (this morning?) and I’m in the homestretch! I can see the end in sight (literally, since I wrote the end of the chapter before I wrote most of the middle)!! And then after part 6 there’s only like three more chapters. I started writing  ACOTS only a little over a year ago and I’m more than halfway through? Fuckin mindblowing.

* I started writing more of the we’re sick (like animals) verse because I love it and technically the beginning of what is published was supposed to be in the middle? But then it was going to be waaay too long so I cut the ‘beginning’ (but still have it in a google doc that I check in on)

(more under the cut bc I actually have a fair bit of wip babies)

* not hockey rpf but I started writing a Teen Wolf fanfic? Despite never watching the show? So my only reference for the fic has been other fanfics. lol. It’s called Scotty Doesn’t Know based on the song by the same name and it’s just a mess of half-written snippets that I’m going to have to glue together at some point

* I want to eventually get around to rewriting (and then finishing? maybe?) my two destiel fics Midnight Blue and Holy Ground. Fun fact- I started writing both of those on Wattpad before I found out about ao3 and every chapter title of HG is a taylor swift song. But they’re both currently up on ao3 if anyone wants to give em a look!

* I have several OG fiction novels I’m trying to write as well. the first one has the working title of Messier 30 (it’s a star cluster near the Capricorn constellation) and it’s supposed to be book 1 in a trilogy. The main character used to be named Charlene-call-me-Charlie Elizabeth Roman but I suddenly had a stroke of ACOTS-fueled need to make her half-russian and changed her name to Anastasyia Viktoriya. Her name/ethnicity change shouldn’t change the plotline itself but I guess we’ll see. the second work is set during a zombie apocalypse with flashbacks to the B.Z. (Before Zombies) era and the early days of the apocalypse. the main character’s mom accidentally created the virus and was Patient Zero so MC carries a fuckton of guilt and also she’s gay and her wife was one of the first ones to go since she was Mom’s second on the project

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing

ACOTS: copied straight from the outline :) {The Russian word for uncle is ‘дядя’. It sounds almost identical to ‘dada’. Nikita calls him ‘дядя Sid’ one day and Sid just starts bawling, and then Nikita’s bawling because Sid is bawling and there’s so much tears and snot it’s so gross. Nikita is two years old and therefore has no idea that Sid is crying because he doesn’t just want to be Nikita’s “uncle” he wants to be his dad. It’s a good thing both Geno and Anna are old enough to understand. And reassure him that of course he’s also going to be Nikita’s father, what’s the point of him being with Geno and Anna if he’s not?? Sid admits that while he and Kathy didn’t officially break up in 2010 like the rumors said, they did take a break. Because Sid told Kathy that he was starting to have feelings for Geno. Even though he said it didn’t mean anything because he was with Kathy and he loved her and would never do anything to hurt her} and then everyone basically confesses their love for each other and there’s still a lot of crying but this time it’s happy!!

ALSO APPARENTLY I HAVE NINE CHAPTERS OUTLINED?? NOT TEN?? SO AFTER PART 6 IS DONE I’LL BE TWO-THIRDS DONE

WSLA: Sid and Geno getting together and sneaking around and not being subtle at all but everyone humors them anyway

SDK: this scene where Stiles’ dad tells him he knows he and Derek have been dating, which i made up for the specific context for this line: {“Look,” his dad says. “Scott may not have the sense God gave an ant but I haven’t been Sheriff this long just because of my dashing good looks.”}

MB: there’s a scene near the end where a character from Cas’ past comes in and shoots Cas and Mary knocks the shooter out with a cast iron frying pan and John has mega heart eyes and that’s where the reveal that Dean and Cas are married was supposed to happen

HG: I was kinda into crackfic when i started writing this so that’s why it’s like that in the beginning, but the scene i can’t wait for is heartbreaking and not in the fun way. I joke a lot about being super emotional but seriously. i cried during the outline for this scene. I love it so much.

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need?

well I guess the good thing is I almost always write The Scene first and then I have to write the setup and context. which still kinda sucks, but at least it’s more motivation to write all the other nonsense- and then sometimes I write something in the middle of all the nonsense that almost rivals The Scene?? and that’s my favorite part about writing. 

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews - May 2020 - The Cape Stuff

I read a lot of comics in May. Here’s what I thought of some of the superhero and superhero-adjacent comics I read.

Arms of the Octopus

A nostalgia pick, the collection of several annual issues containing a crossover between Superior Spider-Man, The Invincible Hulk, and the All-New X-Men. It is an artifact of a very specific and bizarre time in Marvel Comics, when Doc Ock was Spider-Man, the Hulk worked for SHIELD, and the original five teen X-Men were stranded in their own future. For a pure, relatively straightforward crossover romp, it's quite enjoyable. Spider-Man is a jerk, the Hulk fights a robot, the X-Men are befuddled by the present, all of the major beats for that particular moment in the Marvel Universe are there, and it's got some really great art. Jake Wyatt, during his regrettably short-lived stint with Marvel and the great Kris Anka unfortunately overshadow the other contributors, but it's all very good, if not the most accessible comic.

Maxwell's Demons

I came to Maxwell's Demons having heard a lot of critical buzz and with my expectations set rather high. I did not care for this book at all. Ambitious is the best word for this series, and that's not a bad thing. It's got ideas, about the craft, about the genre, about philosophy in general. It never quite manages to carry things off though; it's not as smart as it wants to be, and the high-minded ideas are never incorporated in particularly elegant ways. Three of the story's five chapters are essentially extended monologues in which the main character rambles on about some glorified shower thought for 20-plus pages. The first and second chapters are the exceptions to this pattern, and are quite solid as far as pointedly derivative superhero riffs go, even if the second chapter's riff on "What if Miracleman #17 was significantly less intelligent" is more than a little shameless in its lack of originality. The fourth chapter, by contrast, is the nadir of the series, easily the most embarrassing Manic Pixie Dream Girl tripe I've seen played straight in literal years. I'm reminded a lot of Translucid, another superhero pastiche, which essentially sought to do for Batman what Maxwell's Demons seeks to do for Lex Luthor. I warmed to Translucid significantly on my second read and I wonder if the same will end up being true for Maxwell's Demons, but I find that Translucid simply did a better job of incorporating original ideas and stating its themes in ways less stupefyingly clunky than Maxwell's Demon's ever manages. I hate to call a book pretentious, especially an ambitious one, but at present that's how I feel about this book.

Twilight

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Howard Chaykin's Watchmen-for-mid-century-space-heroes epic. It's good. Fabulous art, some really interesting ideas and a great premise. It's also more than a little Chaykin-y, with most of the male characters having fraught but amiable relationships with their much-too-good-for-them-and-they-both-know-it ex-wives. It has this particular brand of low grade misogyny that idealizes women but in doing so denies them interiority and, ultimately, humanity. Leaving that aside, though it is a major point to leave aside, it’s story of humanity rotting over eons of immortality, mad space gods, and humanity’s proclivity towards colonialism and genocide, it's great. It’s not an altogether pleasant book, it can be nasty and strange, in ways both intentional and unintentional, but it’s original and engaging and decidedly well made. Something of an overlooked classic of that era’s DC output.    

Green Lantern: Earth One

Literally the only one of DC's Earth One graphic novels that's worth a damn. Where most of the other Earth One books choose to start things off in a world resembling our own, Green Lantern starts off in a scifi future resembling something along the lines of Ad Astra or The Expanse, with Earth controlled by an only alluded to totalitarian government, humanity colonizing and mining the solar system, and Hal Jordan as a spacefaring roughneck who dreads the prospect of returning to Earth. Earth One is the rare Green Lantern story that manages to make Earth as interesting as the rest of the universe. The bulk of the action leaves this behind to focus on unearth the lost legacy of the Green Lanterns and refits their mythology in a clean way which will be unsurprising for anyone with a passing familiarity with the original comics but is still satisfying ad fresh. Fabulous art, fun take on the mythology, I'm left both wanting more and being satisfied with what we got.

Spider-Man: Life Story

In a just world, Chip Zdarksy, one of Marvel’s best writers these days, would be writing both Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, instead of having been relegated to shortlived spinoffs. Because life just isn’t fair sometimes, instead he was given this admittedly ambitious project, his all-encompassing take on the Spider-Man story as played out in real time. In the end it’s bold and engaging, but more than a little clipped in execution. Each issue is a snippet of Peter Parker's life as we catch up to him in a new decade so readers only get a quick glimpse of the action and are left to fill in the substantial gaps by drawing on our knowledge of continuity. The obvious comparison is John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations, but where that story really only took the broad strokes of those characters' continuity into account in writing its decades spanning story, Spider-Man: Life Story is dedicated to the remixing of Spider-Man's publishing canon. So it can’t just take an archetypal view of Spider-Man and play that out to its logical conclusion, instead it’s stuck trying to incorporate version of prominent Spider-Man stories like Kraven's Last Hunt, Venom, and Civil War. The result means that there’s a ton of exposition in each issue, and frequent use of shorthand to gloss over things which have happened since the previous issue, and it never manages to explore the series’ original ideas in detail. Also, I'll die mad that Michel Fiffe, the genius behind COPRA and one of my favorite cartoonists, public pitched basically this exact story a year or so before this project was announced, and even if Marvel didn't actually steal the idea, I'll forever pine for Fiffe's take on this premise.

Star Wars: The Crimson Empire Saga

Long before the Disney's take on Star Wars, with their codified takes on the mythology and careful curation of the franchise, there was the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, where seemingly anyone could tell any story they wanted using the mythology of Star Wars. While it resulted in some good stuff, like Timothy Zahn's fondly remembered Thrawn books, the vast majority of it was workmanlike or even bad. Crimson Empire falls firmly into the category of bad, a dumber than dirt story about an extremely cool space guy and his code of honor. It's the kind of story where multiple characters say "He's just one man!" right before or right after seeing their legion of anonymous flunkies getting demolished by the hero. It's got an inexplicable and bad love story. In the three miniseries collected here it spends about two pages total dealing with the idea that maybe, just maybe, the fact that it's main character is dedicated to the lost honor of Emperor Palpatine, a space fascist, maybe his code of honor is completely fucked. Of those three miniseries, only the first story is anywhere near something that could be called good. I wouldn’t called Crimson Empire utterly abysmal, but it’s not unironically good. If the name Kyle Katarn means anything to you, you might get something out of this as a nostalgia trip, but otherwise it has no redeeming qualities.

Deathstroke: Legacy

The first of the New 52 Deathstroke stories, which was never well regarded until Christopher Priest took it over with Deathstroke: Rebirth, I was driven to read this by a conceptual fondness for this era's Deathstroke basically looking and acting like an action figure. Through that lens, it's quite enjoyable. It's not as obviously in on the joke in the way that the classic Taskmaster: Unthinkable is, but it's over the top, has fun designs and baddies, and Joe Bennett (years before his career best heights in Immortal Hulk) provides consistently good art. As a pure action comic, it's good.

Wolverine MAX: Permanent Rage

Here's the thing about Wolverine: There are very few good Wolverine solo stories. Wolverine is a genuinely good character, but most of his solo stories are dumb action affairs, and there's literally never been a Wolverine comic that's even halfway as good as the Logan movie. Permanent Rage, the first storyline from the Wolverine MAX series though, is actually pretty decent. It plays out a lot like you might imagine a Wolverine movie made around 2004, with no superheroes, a Japanese setting that allows for some distracting orientalism, unrelenting violence, and a noir-inspired storyline. The present day storyline is all well and good, not great, but solid and relatively low-key, but what makes the book is the presence of Sabretooth as the main villain. His relationship with Wolverine, fleshed out through flashbacks drawn by some really talented artists, is probably one of the best takes on that relationship that Marvel has ever put out. The casting of Wolverine and Sabretooth as two lonely immortals, bound together by hate and the knowledge that they are each other's only true companions, absolutely makes this book. Is it great? No, but it's got enough interesting things going on that fans of dark superheroes stories would probably find something to enjoy. Subsequent volumes of Wolverine MAX moved even further from the character’s superhero trappings and supporting characters, which is a pity, but this one remains readable and enjoyable on its own.

Marshal Law Omnibus

A collection all of the non-licensed and non-text-only Marshal Law stories. It's weird, it's punk, it's violent, it's sick of superheroes but self-aware about it own silliness in a way that Garth Ennis' work like The Boys has never been (Incidentally, the fifth story contained here, Super Babylon, is just every self-righteous complaint Ennis made about superheroes in The Boys but presented with a modicum of good humor). It's quite fun as a mean-spirited anti-superhero romp, but anyone who is particularly invested in the moral rectitude of, like, the Flash, might find it an unpleasant read so I would advise avoiding it if that's you. It's also not perfect, even for what it is: it's approach to sex work and kink is very dated, it relies on sexual violence a little too much, and by the time you get to the final story, Secret Tribunal, it's come to revel in its previously ironic fascist and misogynist imagery and characters just a little too much. The third installment, Kingdom of the Blind, is for my money, the strongest of the lot, featuring both the most straightforward premise and the most incisive satire the collection has to offer.

[alcego-writes]

Writing With ADHD

Writing is hard at the best of times, but when you have to add your brain to your list of obstacles, it gets exponentially more difficult. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it! Like most things, it just means you have to find a way to write that works for you.

I am notoriously ADHD. For the majority of my writing experience, I have done nothing but write short snippets of something and then disappear into obscurity because that was all I could manage to do. However, recently I’ve been able to spend time trouble-shooting my writing experience and that’s been a godsend. I’ve been writing consistently (at least four days a week) since mid-September of this year, something that was previously unthinkable. In that time, I’ve written roughly 82,000 words across several projects, which is more than I’ve written in my entire life, let alone over such a short span of time.

I’m not saying this to brag, although I am certainly proud of this, but to say that it is possible to write with ADHD. It is possible to write a lot with ADHD. And it is possible to write without being in agony with ADHD.

It’s not an easy process, as what works for writers without ADHD may not work for you, or may need to be tweaked considerably to work for you. So here I’ve broken down a few issues that I struggled with, as well as some ways to overcome those issues. (Note: These may not work for you, or may need to be changed to work for you. Don’t worry about that! All that matters is you’ve found a way to write that works for you.)

Inspiration Overload

You know what I’m talking about: when you’ve got one great idea, but before you can make any real headway on the project you get another great idea, but before you can get started on that you get yet another great idea, and so on and so forth. It happens to the best of us, and it doesn’t have to get in the way of progress!

Obviously there are a ton of ways to overcome this, but for this post I’m just going to focus on these three:

Idea Dumps

Multiple Projects

Work It In

1. Idea Dumps

It’s not exactly an attractive name, so apologies for that, but it does mean roughly what it says. Personally, I have two idea dumps: one is a Scrivener document where I jot down loose lines of inspiration or basic ideas. The other is a notebook where I loosely outline ideas so I can appease the side of my brain that demands I work on it right-now-immediately.

Obviously, there’s more options than just that. You may find that sticky notes or a legal pad or a Google Doc or the notes program on your phone works better. That’s fine! Just get the idea down, so you won’t have to worry about forgetting it and you get a little bit of satisfaction knowing you’ve gotten some work done on it.

2. Multiple Projects

If you can manage it, pull up several documents. Write down the idea and bounce between the docs as your inspiration shifts. This does require some self-control, namely knowing how many WIPs you can actively work on at the same time (and when you need to shift something onto the back-burner). 

This will look different for everyone. For me, I can work on two projects at a time when time and energy allows, but as soon as mid-terms/finals/holidays come into play, I have to shift my focus to one WIP or risk burning myself out.

Play with it! Look at your history of WIPs. When has it been the easiest for you to write? The hardest? Apply that to your writing routine and tweak it as needed until it works for you.

3. Work It In

This doesn’t work for all ideas, but finding ways to include a heist narrative in your vaporwave novel can be an incredibly rewarding feeling. To do this, consider your active WIP and the new idea you have. What does the new idea have that the other is lacking? Can the new idea be shaped to fit into the active WIP? 

For example, I developed the concept for my sci-fi novel from two different ideas. One was a young woman who doubled as a superhero trying to take down a corrupt government, and the other consisted of three clearly defined characters who lacked anything resembling a plot. By merging the two, I gave that WIP a well-rounded cast and ensured that those three characters didn’t waste away in my idea dump doc without ever getting a plot.

It’s trial and error, but it can work!

What the Fuck is a “Routine”

I don’t know about y’all, but I cannot function without a routine. I also struggle to establish anything resembling a routine without a lot of struggling. It’s hard! It’s difficult to do anything, let alone create a method of going about your day that leads to consistent productivity.

The biggest thing that helped me get a routine was to stop thinking about it as a rigid, immovable thing. Routines can be that, yes, but for me it was impossible to create a routine without trying to track my every task down to the minute. Which, if you’ve ever tried a routine like that and started falling behind, is a slippery slope.

Instead, make a list of the things you want to do every day, or every week, or every month. Look at the ones you want to do right now, and focus on doing those on a regular basis. Once you’ve worked that one thing into your day and can do it without struggling overmuch, you can start focusing on adding another.

For example, I wanted to write consistently. Not every day, but at least every week. And I wanted to have something to show for that, so I would be able to look back and say, “Hey, I’ve been doing good!” So I grabbed a sticky note, wrote the date on the top, and listed every day of the week on a different line. Each day I wrote something, I wrote the word count on the sticky note. At the end of the week, I totaled up what I wrote for the week and then stuck it in the front cover of my writing notebook.

I’ve spoken with people who take their planner/calendar and put one sticker per thousand words on the day they wrote (e.g. on November 28, I wrote 2,000 words, so I would put two stickers on November 28). You might grab a clear jar and some cotton balls/marbles/little rocks and put one in for every thousand words, or enter it into a writing program that tracks that for you. Whatever works!

The point of this is to give yourself a reward system. What I outlined above is a form of reward system, where you can see your efforts clearly and on paper. This is more effective for me than telling myself I can’t get on Tumblr/read/listen to a podcast until I’ve written x number of words, but there are different strokes for different folks. Play around with it, and find a way to reward yourself for your work! (Your brain will appreciate the dopamine boost, I guarantee it.)

Once you’ve added a few things to your daily/weekly/monthly tasks, you’ll have a routine! I like to break down my tasks as little bullet-points on a notepad so I can cross them out when I get done. (Right now my lists look like 1. Write, 2. Algebra HW, 3. Sociology HW, 4. Eat, if that gives you any idea of my priorities.

Burnout

This shit sucks!! You write 5k in one sitting and then nothing for the next eight months (I’m totally not speaking from experience... that would be.... ridiculous). It’s really disheartening, as it feels like you’ve lost all creative ability. You go to write but words Won’t Happen. The ideas don’t just turn stale; they disappear entirely.

It happens. Unfortunately, it does. Some people may call it writer’s block (which I could do an entire post about on its own, as it comes in so many different shapes and sizes) but in the end, all that matters is you Can’t Write.

Before you decide that writing just isn’t for you, take a moment to consider why you’ve burnt out. What external factors (school, work, social obligations) affected you? Were any internal factors (mental health, illness, bad break-up, etc.) getting in the way of your work? Is there anything you can do to ease those challenges?

You might be surprised to notice a few patterns. For example, I always struggled to write during a flare-up, or when my mental health got bad, or when school and work collided in disastrous ways. There isn’t always something you can do to fix those things, but just knowing that there’s a reason can be helpful.

Also, take note of when you start getting your mojo back. When do you notice the first ghostly shape of an idea taking form? When do you start itching to write? Music, relaxation, and days off can have a significant effect on your creative cycle.

In fact, your creative cycle will almost definitely insist you take days off. There’s a reason I don’t hold myself to more than 4 days of writing a week, and that’s because I know my limits. My idea-brain needs time to recharge, even if I can occasionally go weeks at a time without taking a break. (Which, for the record, usually results in burnout.)

Be kind to yourself. Take note of your patterns and play into them. Take time off, force yourself to write on the days when you know it’s just hell-brain throwing a tantrum, remember to eat and drink. You’d be surprised by how often burnout coincides with a decline in self-care.

Consistency

Routines aren’t all that matter. Consistency is key, and not for any of those bullshit “you’re not a real writer unless you write every day” reasons. Momentum is incredibly helpful, and you can’t build that unless you’re also developing good habits.

Routines can help build momentum, but the crux of it all lies in self-discipline. AKA ADHD hell.

Reward systems can help, as can accountability systems (like posting your writing progress every week...), but the biggest change for me was not any of that.

It was letting myself write badly, and celebrating those words anyway.

Sounds odd, right? Why would I celebrate what is objectively bad? It’s because a combination of ADHD-brain and my upbringing led me to develop a paralyzing case of perfectionism. What’s the point of writing it unless you do it perfect?

It’s better to write it badly and make sense of it later. As the saying goes, you can’t edit a blank page. Write badly. If you need to, turn the text the same color as the background so you can’t obsess over the quality. Write in Comic Sans (which is a very good font, but also incredibly difficult to take seriously) or something that you can’t read easily. Find a way to write garbage and then celebrate it. Celebrate the number, or the fact that you’ve gotten the dumbest version out and it can only get better from here.

By doing that, you allay fears of perfectionism. Practice makes perfect, and practice means several drafts, many of which will hurt to read. You’ll get better the more you write, and the more you write the easier it will be to push through the scenes that aren’t working. Hell, get into the practice of using brackets when you can’t think up the scene, or need a name, or need to do research, and just keep writing. No matter what, keep that momentum going.

If you need an outline to avoid getting lost, do that. If you need to feel free to explore the story without restraints, do that. Just write. Keep writing. It’s bad? Keep going. Your ideas will change; adapt to the new concept and make a note to yourself to fix the earlier aspects later. Keep going. 

And there’s obviously more I can go on about, but these are the main things that helped me. (Apologies if the text gets thick at times. Writing is one of those things I can talk about forever when the mood strikes.) Please let me know if there’s anything else you want to know! If you have any questions, feel free to pop into my ask box! I’m happy to chat.

[harrisongreeves-blog]

Laravel 6.0: What You Should Know

Since the inception of Laravel 5.0 around 4.5 years ago, the Laravel ecosystem has blossomed into something that leaves users nothing to complain about, to say the least. Laravel Nova, Laravel Horizon, Laravel Echo, Laravel Scout, and Laravel Passport are just some of the tools that have been introduced since then. At the time of this writing, we’re on Laravel 5.8 and Taylor Otwell has decided to skip past 5.9 on to 6.0 on the 3rd of September. Previously, Taylor has stressed that this won’t be a major paradigm shift for Laravel and the most significant change will be the transition to semantic versioning. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of new features worth talking about.

Let’s dive into some of the smaller changes first.

The Smaller Things

Authorization

Authorization messages can now be made easier for users to understand. Before Laravel 6.0, the infrastructure wasn’t in place to easily give a specific response to a user when they were given an authorization-related error. The status code could be given fairly easily, but giving a custom error message was more complicated back then. Giving a custom messaged required the developer to create a new file and write their own exceptions.

Now, to get a customizable authorization response, you can simply use the Gate::inspect method when linking to the function that enables you to receive the response. Delivery of the message to the front-end is also easy to organize. Simply add $this->authorize or Gate::authorize to a suitable route or controller.

No More Default Front-End

The typical front-end setup you are given when you first start a Laravel project is now gone. This means the Vue and Bootstrap code you would usually see, would have now been removed. What it’s been replaced with is unknown. Perhaps, it hasn’t been replaced. Strangely, the make:auth command, used to provide the login system scaffolding is now not a part of the original Laravel install either. To be honest, the rationale behind this change is unclear to me. However, given Laravel’s versioning adjustment, it makes sense that third-party technologies like Vue and Bootstrap that haven’t recently undergone the same changes could cause conflict. Though, this is merely speculation.

If you want access to the old UI, you can extract a composer package that contains it with the CLI: composer require laravel/ui and php artisan ui vue --auth.

Lazy Collections

This is one of the more interesting additions. If you’re new to Laravel, Collections are tools that make it easier for you to manipulate arrays. Eloquent, one of the two main tools in Laravel used to communicate with databases, returns its queries as Collection instances. Check out the docs for Collections if you think you’re gonna lack context in a moment. https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/collections

So, what are Lazy Collections? Traditional Collections are often used for working with large amounts of data. When they run into data-heavy files, they’ll try and store all of that data at once. This may sound quick and convenient but the downside is that this is very memory-taxing. Lazy Collections solve this problem by only storing the part of the file they need, and thus, save memory usage and boost performance.

If you understand how lazy loading works then you’ll be familiar with my previous explanation. Lazy loading works the same way. When you make a request to the server with lazy loading implemented, the browser will only return the part of the web page it knows you’re going to use immediately. Then, when the user scrolls down the page or clicks on an internal link, the server will provide you the necessary content it knows you need. This way, only memory that is needed at that particular moment is being used. This method increases speed. Lazy Collections is kind of like lazy loading but with arrays from a database and not content on a webpage.

The Bigger Things

Laravel Ignition

So yeah, the new error page for Laravel is called Ignition and it looks awesome. It’ll be the default error page for Laravel when 6.0 releases. However, if you don’t feel like making the switch to 6.0 just yet, that’s fine, you can still install Ignition on previous versions. Let’s talk about what Ignition brings to the table.

With Whoops (the current default Laravel error page), stack traces and relevant code snippets are shown in an error page, but this doesn’t always lead the developer to the solution. Worse, sometimes the stack traces just reference compiled paths. This can it make it difficult to find the necessary non-compiled files to fix because they aren’t listed anywhere on the error page. Thankfully, this isn’t a problem with Ignition, it can display to you the non-compiled file where the problem actually exists. By clicking on a pencil icon, you can go directly to the file in your chosen editor.

The second coolest feature of Ignition is that it can display potential solutions when displaying an error message. Most error pages just leave you with the error. For example, if the error is that you misspelled a property name, Ignition will tell you that the property has been misspelled and offer you the correct spelling. Solution suggestions can be way more sophisticated than this, I’ll link you to the source down below. Your suggestions are even customizable!

You wanna know the coolest feature? These solution suggestions are actually runnable!

Yes, really. Take a look at this short demo by one of the creators, Freek Van der Herten.

https://youtu.be/EZu0-CwTU9Q

Also, you can add your own runnable solutions too! This is great as Ignition is open source so people in the Laravel community will undoubtedly contribute their own solutions for everyone to use.

There’s a bunch of other cool features too such as creating your own tabs (yes Ignition has tabs) and sharing your error messages with other people. This is done using Flare, a tool that comes with Ignition.

For everything about Laravel Ignition and Flare, visit https://freek.dev/1441-ignition-a-new-error-page-for-laravel.

Laravel Vapor

Another big one. Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel. But wait, why do we need a deployment platform? We already have Laravel Forge, right? As beloved as Forge is amongst the Laravel community, it does have its limitations. It doesn’t have autoscaling to deal with large sudden increases in traffic that prevent your site from crashing. Also, configuration is required when OS or PHP updates occur. Vapor has autoscaling, so, you don’t have to worry about sudden spikes in your traffic causing website downtime. In addition, because of the serverless structure of Vapor, it also handles all the updates you may stress about when using Forge.

Vapor’s website is very clean looking and everything seems easy to find. When you deploy a project, you can see the different stages of the deployment process loading on the UI. I find this to be very reassuring and comforting. You can also rollback your application with a click of a button. Just click on “rollback” and it’ll do just that. Pretty neat. Same deal if you want your app to undergo maintenance. Just click on the “maintenance mode” button.

Another cool feature of Laravel Vapor is that you’re able to set alarms. What do I mean by that? For example, to know when your website traffic suddenly blows up, you can set a certain amount of HTTP requests per minute, and if your website hits that limit, the alarm will go off, informing you of the surge in traffic. Taylor Otwell showcases this and other conditionals in his Laravel Vapor demo which I’ll link to below.

There’s so much to cover with Laravel Vapor and the Laravel update itself. Because of this, I didn’t really want to dive into the complexities too much in this post. To learn more about the technical aspects of Laravel 6.0, you can take a look at the release notes here https://laravel.com/docs/6.0/releases. For more info on Laravel Vapor, visit this video by Taylor Otwell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsPeWjKAUt0&t=362s.

[hydrospanners]

a writing year in review: 2k18 edition

So I’m taking a minute to look back at all the writing I did this year and it has been a pretty spotty year for fanfic for me. Lots of long, blank spaces between weird surges of productivity. But! I did a lot of work on my original projects and also the boring adult responsibilities in my life (I changed jobs three times!!! I changed my name!!! I started going to therapy!!!!) and I pushed out some fic I really liked this year in spite of all that so, all things considered, I’m calling this one a win.

Without further ado, here is the breakdown of all the fic I’ve written this year plus a sad breakdown all of the geriatric WIPs looking at me with their big sad eyes, crossing their fingers for 2019. Hiding most of it under a cut because the rankings and WIP snippets got long.

2k18's Publication Stats for Fun & Profit:

This year I published 16 fanfics, all but one for SWTOR. 10 were brand new, started and finished in 2018, and 6 were old WIPS that have been marinating for Force only knows how long. That number is down from the 29 fics I published in 2017, but close to the 14 I published in 2016. 2015 was only 3 fics and 2014 was only 2. I have a total of 64 works published on AO3.

This year I published 34559 words for an average of about 2160 words per fic. This is extremely above my overall average of about 930 words per fic with a combined total of 59569 words published since I started posting fic publicly back in 2014.

So the number of fics may be lower this year but the number of words total and the average words in the fics I did publish went up! Please enjoy a review of the shit people liked most according to AO3 and then the stuff I personally liked most because I'm allowed to like my own writing, sue me.

2k18's Most Read Fics:

1. spoonful of sugar: Everyone gets sick sometimes; even big damn heroes. These are vignettes about the Jedi Knight's crew getting sick, getting treated, and getting better. (SWTOR)

I started writing this one when I got really sick during the summer of 2017 and I finally finished it this year! There's another part that I cut because it got way out of control that I'd like to one day add back in as a second chapter but I am okay with calling this one complete and maybe never doing that. This one is a nice combo of funny and a little bit sweet that I think is refreshing, like a cold, fruity drink on a hot summer's day. Here is my very favorite line from this whole fic because it is so delightfully dumb:

“Scourge,” Rhese tries and fails to sound as though he has some degree of command over his own voice right now. “Get off my dick.”

2. filling the table: They have a saying back on Corellia that the only way you can ever really know a man is by taking his credits. They also have a saying that you should never play cards with a Corellian because Corellians always cheat, but she's betting Doc never heard that one. (SWTOR)

I think I started this one all the way back in like 2014 or 2015. I can't remember now but it was a long time ago and this piece of shit has morphed a million times since then. I must have rewritten the ending about a million times.

I really wanted to capture the desperation of the Balmorran Resistance while I was doing the character work with this, the sense of limited resources and hard living, and I am pretty happy with the result. I'm also pretty happy with the characterization work here, the little snippets they are both revealing to each other and the bigger snippets they aren't. I'm still not entirely happy with the white spaces in this one. I feel like I was a little too sparse and there are lots of places that don't flow if you don't already know what isn't being said, but I am more or less happy with this one! Here is my favorite bit because of the doublespeak foreshadowing their future relationship that was definitely on purpose:

Four hands later, she’s fifty credits richer and Doc is rooting around in his pocket for something to scribble another IOU on. She knows he’ll never make good on it, but Rea’s happy to accept his empty promises if it keeps him playing the game. She’s overdue for a bit of fun.

3. take back what the kingdom stole:  Alliance Commander Nirea Velaran has always had a talent for burning bridges. When Theron comes to her after Nathema to pay for his sins, she finds herself wondering whether some bridges can't be repaired. (SWTOR)

Hey look! Something I started and finished in the same calendar year!! This one grew out of a very stupid joke that I ended up not even making until the end of the fic. At first I wanted to draw that bit, but I got frustrated with my lacking artistic talent so I wrote it instead and it turned into one of my fave things I've written. It has nice scenery and character growth and intimate friendships that have a real impact on their emotional lives! Hurt feelings aren't just for romance fam!! Anyway here's my favorite bit because it's one of the most Rea moments I've ever written:

He shoved her off his shoulder none-too-gently, scowling as he looked skyward, as if searching for another fleet of hostile ships to arrive and grant him the sweet release of death. When none came, he settled for another hearty gulp of whiskey. He had to be halfway to knackered by now. “You’re insufferable,” he grumbled.

“I know.” She smiled a smile that felt damn near genuine and collapsed back against the grass, swinging her legs out over the crevasse.

“I don’t even feel bad about all this anymore.” Theron complained. “You deserve it.”

Rea only laughed. A real laugh, all the way up from her belly, and it felt so fucking good.

Theron looked at her from the corners of his bloodshot eyes, suspicious and too clever by half. “Fuck,” he swore, shaking his head. “You just mindfucked me, didn’t you?”

2k18 Author’s Choice:

1. when the wicked play. After witnessing his first real lightsaber duel, Doc reflects on the contradictions of what the Jedi are supposed to be and the realities of fighting a war. (SWTOR)

This might be one of my very favorite things I've written ever. In case it wasn't clear by now, I am pretty preoccupied with making myself feel the weight of the violence and uncertainty and war that plagues you in this game. It all feels so clean and sanitary in the game because it's a game, but it's something I always want to explore and make visceral in the stories I tell about the game. I am also obsessed with Jedi and the mythos and conflicting ideas that must surround them inside the story's universe. This was a fun way to marry the two and do a bit of character work at the same time. I'm also pretty proud of this one structurally, with how contained and bookended it is. [high fives self] Anyway here's my favorite part because it's some of the only action I've written that feels like it captures the brutal urgency of how I imagine actual lightsaber combat and also says a little bit about my girl Rea via the way she fights:

Rea is little more than a blur of blue light as she collides with the Sith across the field, her sabers swinging too fast for Doc’s eyes to track. She’s hammering her enemy from every side, pushing him back and back and back. Her assault is savage and relentless and there is nothing like grace or elegance in any of it. It isn’t beautiful; it’s violence. Ugly, brutal violence.

The whole thing is over in less than a minute.

Blue meets red meets blue meets blue meets blue meets red and then the Sith’s head is hitting the floor with a muffled thump. It happens so abruptly Doc doesn’t even realize it’s ended until the rest of the body collapses a heartbeat later.

2. shadows settle on the place that you left. In the wake of her father’s death, Nyria Ryder tries to reconcile the man she knew with the shadow he left hanging over her. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Look! Something that isn't SWTOR! (The only thing I wrote this year that wasn't for SWTOR.) I have a whole bunch of feelings about Alec Ryder and had a really good time porting Rea over to this game and seeing the ways his presence in her life altered who she is and the ways that it didn't. Also I have a lot of feelings about SAM. This is probably peak self-indulgence but I still feel like this is some efficient sketching of Nyria's character and Alec's and their particular relationship and I'm pretty proud of it. Also I'm always a slut for complicated familial relationships. Here is my favorite bit because it's such a nice illustration of who Ria is and an important turning point for her character:

She decided to be kinder to SAM than the universe had been to her. He was her brother, just as much as Rhys, and she was all he had. She would have to make sure herself was enough.

“He believed in us both,” she told him what he needed to hear, even though it wasn’t true. Then she made a promise she could not keep, because she knew he needed that too: “You and me are going to figure this thing out. Just you watch. We’re gonna make Alec proud.”

3. take back what the kingdom stole:  Alliance Commander Nirea Velaran has always had a talent for burning bridges. When Theron comes to her after Nathema to pay for his sins, she finds herself wondering whether some bridges can't be repaired. (SWTOR)

All the same stuff I said above applies here still. Glad we can all agree this one was nice.

State of the WIPs

Just for fun I did a dive into my WIP folder to see what I'm setting myself up for in 2019! Only it wasn't very fun at all because there is so much really old stuff in here!!!!!! Good luck to future me because past me really left you with the bag girl! Good luck carrying the weight of hopes and dreams and stories unfulfilled!!

I have a total of 48 fics in progress right now. The fandom breakdown is as follows, ranked from the most to the least: Star Wars: The Old Republic (35), Dragon Age (8), Mass Effect: Andromeda (4), Fallout 4 (1). And because I'm a masochist, I looked at the dates on all this shit too. Here's the breakdown of what year all of these things were started:

2014: 4 fics

2015: 9 fics

2016: 15 fics

2017: 11 fics

2018: 9 fics

That sound you hear is me sobbing in the distance. 2014!!! What the fuck!!!!! I am gonna finish those four fics this year if it kills me. We aren't living like this anymore. Please enjoy some samples from the WIP folder with absolutely no context:

“You carry sleeping pills in your pocket?”

“For my wife. Maybe you’ve met her? About this high--” Doc raised his hand half a foot over his own head “--brown hair, blue eyes, great ass.”

Ignoring the commentary on his sister’s figure and the extreme overestimation of her height, Rhese nodded. “I may have seen her around.”

“Well if you see her again, you tell her to come home. Her family’s worried.”

Do you hear that Rea? Your family is worried. Rhese wondered if she could feel their concern, their anguish. Was she searching for them as they searched for her? She’d always been good at hiding, but she’d never vanished completely before. A hole in the Force where her warm, fervent energy should have been.

He felt cold. Really alone for the first time in his life. Careful what you wish for, Liss had always said. You might just get it.

Ossus is important.

Rea feels it when she falls out of hyperspace, that shift, that tug of something just behind her navel. The familiar weight of destiny, settling like a stone in the pit of her stomach. It leaves her breathless, white-knuckled and gripping the shuttle’s controls, her skin prickling under the cold caress of dread.

She wasn’t expecting this story to have a happy ending—a colony of Jedi on the eve of war? she’s danced that dance enough times to know the steps by now—but she wasn’t expecting anything so bad as the draw of destiny.

Fate has never been anything but cruel to her. Feeling it here, now? This is going to be worse than she imagined.

This is how you deal with failure.

You just do.

You get up in the morning and brush your teeth. You train until your legs wobble beneath you. You choke down your nutripaste and ask Simms about his niece. You congratulate Tarinik on her promotion. You laugh too loud at Vortena’s shit jokes. And when Beniko’s eyes follow a little too close, you blow her a kiss like it doesn’t matter at all.

You keep moving forward because standing still will kill you. Because life is a race and if you slow down for even a second, death will catch up.

Nirea Velaran is not ready to die.

She is not maleficarum, but she is changed. Something is awake inside her now, and the whispers are louder each time she touches the Fade. Sweet, coaxing whispers full of promises. Some of them sound like her mother.

Take care of your brother, Niria. You’re all he’s got.

In the morning, Qarric wakes with a pounding head and an empty sleeve. He never asks, but he watches her more sharply, reprimands her more often, demands more of her in training.

When she is fourteen, blade tucked into the top of her worn boot, he gives her a warning. “You aren’t as strong as you think,” he says. “No one is.”

“Is it much farther?” Ria jabbed the bladed end of her stave--a fancy enchanted thing Vivienne had insisted on--into the sodden ground and squinted through the trees, praying for a glimpse of the promised coast. The air smelled of salt and death and the sea, but she hadn’t seen a single crashing wave yet.

“A few more miles yet,” Blackwall answered irritably. Ria had elected to blame the weather for his foul mood. “Same as it was five minutes ago, Your Worship.”

“And five minutes before that,” Varric added.

“Conditions are much safer inside the ship, Nyria.”

“Didn’t come all the way out here to be safe, SAM.” Another rock plinked hollowly against the wall of the prefab. “We came to see new planets and shit. That’s what I’m doing.”

“There is not much to see at night.”

“Not much to see during the day either. Sure as hell nothing worth dying for.” She huffed a bitter not-quite-laugh.

She spoke before he could even open his mouth to ask the question. “You’re overthinking it, little brother.”

“We’re twins,” he said, mostly out of habit. “And I’m taller.”

“Your hair is taller.”

“This is serious, Nyria.”

“So is your hair.” She reached out almost absent-mindedly to ruffle it, eyes still fixed on her omni-tool, but he dodged out of the way.

[sol1056]

I think all yall choreograph the asks or something. I seem to get the same topic in batches. This time, two non-anon and one anon (not counting DMs even), so I’m just going to wrap it all up together since there was a lot of overlap. 

behind the cut: where I get ideas, beta readers, writing ahead, writing fast, editing fast, dealing with OCs, writing emotional scenes, and how I learned to write. questions about publishing and agents will be in the followup.

where do you get your ideas

the ‘what if’ questions. the source might vary -- a story if it’s fanfic, or history if it’s profic. by what-if, I mean a throwaway comment, implication, plot hole, gap, or missed chance. what if the characters end canon with this other dynamic, what if the protagonist goes left instead of right at a crucial moment, what if Lý Chiêu Hoàng hadn’t been deposed as queen regnant, what if Nobunaga had survived the attack at Honnō-ji, what if Nyi Roro Kidul had founded her own people, etc. 

from there, I stage that moment in my head like a fractal, seeking out the most interesting ways everything could go wrong. what I'm looking for is an image, a bit of dialogue, capturing that moment of sacrifice, betrayal, a twist in some way. this either ends up as the precipitating event, the midpoint, or the finale (basically one of the three pivotal emotional points). then I work backwards from there. for ffic, I need to figure out how characters get from canon to that point; for profic, I figure out what kind of characters would end up there. 

do you have a beta reader

uhm. not really? I’ve asked for help a few times, when I’m not sure of a particular characterization, but other than the first chapter of Bonds (for reasons I’ll explain in the followup), I don’t usually bother. after all, it’d be horribly rude to send off a chapter and then expect anyone to respond inside of a week. let alone a few days. I envy people who have the patience to wait on a beta reader ‘cause I feel like their stories are tighter as a result, but since there are small amazonian frogs with more patience than me, I figure what I write must stand or fall on its own.

however, I do tend to bestow snippets liberally on whomever’s talking to me online while I write, and I pay attention to their reactions. in fanfic, I’ll also sometimes run a scenario past a few people to see if their gut instinct on a characterization matches mine. that might be a kind of narrow-focus beta reading, maybe.

do you write some/all before you post

nope. I totally post-as-I-go (and yes that does mean at some point I was writing about 6K nightly, I’m not proud). if you said I had to write the entire thing, edit carefully, review, even let it sit for awhile before posting, I’d probably hurt something. or I’d just explode from the enforced waiting.

for profic first draft (or fanfic final draft, same thing), I plan 2-3 chapters in advance. then I write until the word count hits 6K or so, call it a chapter, post, and start on the next chapter. I do that until I run out of plan. then I assess again, figure out the next few chapters’ plan, and repeat until the story feels done.

how do you write so fast 

because a) I type fast, and b) you’re reading what’s effectively the first draft. writing that first go-round is always quick. I just sit down and spit out words. it’s polishing it into profic-levels, that editing phase, that can take weeks, even months. I’ve written pivotal scenes from scratch five, six, seven times if that’s what it takes. you’re just benefiting from my laziness with fanfic, basically.

how do you edit so fast

actually, I don’t. I tend to do it in fits and starts. even fanfic, if you compared first version posted with the current version, you’ll find changes here and there. mostly smoothing choppy parts, disambiguating, or just clarifying a muddy description. sometimes readers report a phrase felt wrong, or didn’t make sense, and I’ll tweak the offending line. 

there are tricks to make it easier, though. 

for profic, I write in scrivener, with a font of Open Sans, Lato, or Avenir, depending on my mood. a first pass of editing for the glaring issues, then I shift to full-screen display and change the font to Baskerville Old Face, Perpetua, or Oregon LDO. the radical font-change means sentences don’t end visually where they did before, and the serif element means I have to slow down slightly to read, a lot more will leap out at me. with fanfic, I write in google docs and post in AO3, but otherwise the font-changing process is similar.  

how do you keep OCs from taking over

an OC is just a character who was -- or might’ve been -- in canon but had no lines. they’re third person from the left, in that crowd scene in episode 17. they occupy the same world, and they have a story of their own -- it’s just not this story. they have a goal, but the core question is: does their goal support or conflict with the protagonist? there’s the tension those OCs can provide. 

on a more basic level, just don’t give them POV, and remember they exist to push the protagonist forward, or hold the protagonist back. if the reverse happens -- the protagonist pushes the OC forward, or holds the OC back -- then you’ve made the OC a major character and now the story’s warping to suit their goals. the focus must remain on the protagonist; it’s their story, after all.  

how do you write a character’s emotion so the reader feels it

use restraint. a scene’s strongest emotion lies in the gaps between what the characters are telling and what they’re showing. restraint is how you create those gaps.

avoid the impulse to ever say the character feels anger, feels joy. instead, have the character do something or say something that expresses the emotion. 

also, either we acknowledge an emotion, or we don’t. the first has no conflict, kiss of death for tension. the second, though, that’s basically a fight scene: the conflict is between the character and their own emotions. the key is choosing between word and deed to show the character’s purpose (narration or dialogue vs action). whatever’s left becomes the other half of the conflict. 

use scent, taste, sensation, sight, sound to project the emotion, distance it from the character. like, they can breathe fine but the air is stuffy. their hand isn’t shaking; the paper just won’t hold still. leave it to the reader to draw a line between the narrative’s tone and the character’s mental/emotional state.  

second, keep the sentences relatively short. think of the jump cuts in a filmed fight scene (or sex scene) -- you don’t need to see every move. that gets boring, fast. show only enough for the reader to connect the dots; what they put in the gaps will always be far more powerful for them than anything you'll achieve when spelling it all out. 

here’s the real challenge, and one of the hardest kinds of scenes to write (but so satisfying when you nail it) -- a character who acknowledges one emotion while denying the truth beneath. this is the character who’s furious but refuses to admit the hurt powering that anger. or the character who’s happy on the surface but jealous or broken-hearted beneath.  

my advice: overwrite the scene, take it to eleven... and then go back and cut one line in every four of dialogue, then do the same in the narrative. keep only the strongest lines. do another pass. keep going until the scene is down to a quarter the original length, and see what you’ve got. 

how do you write so well

err, okay, setting aside the discomfort of being asked that -- ‘cause I see flaws all over the place, starting with just plain overwriting, srsly, is that word count really necessary -- whatever skill I do have, I learned in one simple way.  

by critiquing other writers, and getting critiques in turn.

not beta-readers -- my experience with beta readers is that they don’t really tackle the story, though they may comment on characterization. mostly I’ve only ever gotten line edits (spelling, grammar, punctuation) and... that’s not really a critique, that’s a copy editor’s work. it’s valuable, but not what I mean.

a critique analyzes the work. they mark illogical or unrealistic dialogue, note missed opportunities for rising tension, point out potential plot holes or discrepancies. a good critique is sensitive to spikes and lulls in the pacing, and at a line-level it’s often attuned to repetition or ambiguity in word choice, muddy metaphors, even the ‘sound’ of the prose.

for every critique you do, you’re training your inner editor. I don’t catch everything (certainly never on the first pass), but having a stronger inner editor means being able to reflexively identify weaknesses. plus, exposure to other stories teaches you ways to fix those mistakes. to the point I sometimes edit as I write ‘cause I can already see what needs fixing.  

lastly

if you want to write better, read better. critique everything. 

this is not criticism, this is critique. this is why I post meta about whatever I’m reading/watching. by approaching a story through that analytical lens, I can peel apart what works (for me) and what fails (for me) and study my reaction. the goal is to duplicate what works and avoid what doesn’t.

you can’t learn to build a car engine just by looking at the outside of a car, after all. you gotta get in there, get the dirt and grease up to your elbows. take it down to the bolts, understand how it got put together. the same goes for writing. never be afraid to take apart anyone’s stories to see how they work. 

and then, go write.