#so i just wrote it out point form and meant to publish it

[agerefandom]

Caregiver!Loki and Regressor!Reader

Somewhere between headcanons and a fanfiction, written in 2022 

Content warnings: reader regresses to baby age and uses bottles: suggestion of abuse or a bad home situation that reader is escaping: reader does not give consent for Loki to help them at first, but he does anyways: anxiety attack

part of Stark Tower is set aside as subsidized housing under the Martha Charity Foundation, and you’ve been chosen to live there 

some people would be excited to live in the same building as the Avengers, but they’re twenty floors away and never pass through, so it’s a novelty that quickly wears off 

the apartment is nice, and safe, and yours, but it’s also a bit lonely 

you usually regress in the bedroom, curled up with a bottle, a stuffie, and your laptop 

one evening you’re tiny and you run out of milk! 

you reluctantly waddle to the kitchen to get more, and are very surprised to see a black cat in your living room, which freezes when it sees you 

the cat doesn’t come closer, but it lets you approach: it seems almost offended when you offer your hand to sniff, but leans into your hands when you pet its head and ears 

you spend the rest of the evening with the cat, happily babbling and learning which parts the cat doesn’t want you to touch (paws and belly are off-limits but everything else seems okay) 

eventually you fall asleep, and when you wake up the cat is gone... 

-(continued under ‘keep reading’) 

the cat returns a few days later, showing up without warning in your kitchen

it mostly visits when you’re regressing, but sometimes comes to sit on the couch while you’re watching TV 

it’s a very strange cat: aside from its mysterious comings-and-goings, it never purrs, although it seems to enjoy the pets

it also refuses to sit on your lap or eat any of the treats you bought for it, simply sitting or lying beside you and biting your hand if you stop petting it 

you simply call your new friend kitty, unsure if the cat belongs to another inhabitant 

one day, you catch it jumping and hooking the door handle to let itself out of your apartment, which assuages your secret fear that the cat was a hallucination 

-

it all comes to a head when a person from your past comes knocking on your door when you’re regressing with kitty 

you don’t know how they found you, but you curl up and wait for them to leave, but they start yelling through the door and you can’t block them out 

suddenly, your cat runs into the hallway and you hear a stranger with an accent firmly telling the person to leave now before things escalate 

it seems to work, because the banging and yelling stops, but you’re still lost and confused and where is your cat? 

you crawl into the hallway and stop, shocked: there’s a man standing in your apartment, a familiar man, you saw him on the news, isn’t he the one who was fighting the Avengers last year? 

he turns and sees you and his eyes widen: a second later, there’s a familiar cat in his place, with bright green eyes and they’re the same eyes- 

a moment later, the man is back, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a rueful smile

“that was a bit too late, wasn’t it? I don’t suppose I could convince you not to tell the Avengers?” 

-

and that’s how you learn that Loki has been sneaking out of his prison cell in Stark Tower to wander the city in feline form, and that means that your cat is actually a god and you are too tired to process this 

“there are worse enemies than the Avengers,” Loki says, when you ask why he doesn’t just escape properly

when you’ve calmed down a bit, Loki asks if he can keep visiting you, especially when you’re regressed 

the reminder that a stranger has been there for something so embarrassing has you panicking again, but Loki assures you that it’s charming, and not unusual in Asgard 

finally you give in, and Loki becomes your caregiver 

he’s still more comfortable with physical affection in his feline form, but he’ll stretch back to human to refill your bottles and fetch snacks 

sometimes he even becomes a panther, curling around you and forming a warm nest of fur for you to sleep in 

[transmutationisms]

do you have further thoughts on darwin as a lamarckian?

what's defined as 'Darwinian' versus 'Lamarckian' in the Anglo and Francophone literature has very little to do with anything Darwin or Lamarck themselves wrote or thought. Lamarck's name and evolutionary intellectual milieu were already associated with various strains of republican, materialist, and atheist sentiment throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and under the Third Republic, many French liberals took up an overtly nationalist 'neo-Lamarckian' party line for this very reason, seeking to contrast an invented French priority claim to the evolutionary treatises Darwin published in 1859 and 1871. additionally, the legacies of Kammerer and Lysenko have really altered public perception of Lamarck and 'Lamarckian' mechanisms of heredity. meanwhile Darwin took great care to claim he was NOT engaging in "Lamarck nonsense" when he finally published On the Origin of Species, and generally his proponents and popularisers, especially in the London set, also quite liked this narrative. then in the 1960s with the birth of the 'Darwin Industry' in historical scholarship, the then-dominant theory of genetics combined with the English nationalist interest in Darwiniana made it popular and even profitable to claim a sharp distinction between 'Darwinism' (non-teleological, mechanistic, natural selection) versus 'Lamarckism' (purposive, inheritance of acquired characters). interestingly, these days there is a vogue for claiming that research into epigenetics is 'redeeming' Lamarck over Darwin, though I wouldn't put much stock into it; it's still based on a poor reading of both men's actual ideas and anyway, analogous claims were also fashionable during the early 20th century, particularly among certain American biologists but even in the English set as well.

anyway since arguably the main point of contention here concerns the 'inheritance of acquired characters': Darwin also believed in this, as did virtually anyone advocating for evolutionary ideas from the mid-18th century onward. it was not controversial and is still not controversial, except in its cartoonishly extreme forms like Cuvier's line (propagated by Lyell and then to Darwin) about Lamarck thinking that a giraffe could just magically wish itself to have a longer neck and then pass that along to its offspring. this is not what he thought (he conceived of biological change on a massive, multigenerational timescale and considered it mediated by habitual actions).

more to the point it decontextualises evolutionary theory from its home base in discourses on animal and plant breeding, which matters because the idea that humans could alter the forms, behaviours, and temperaments of living beings was from the get-go also applied to ideas about the alteration of the human species. these proto-eugenic Enlightenment ideas make clear the political stakes of the nineteenth century debates over evolution, which gradually coalesced into what we now recognise as the overtly eugenic positions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (where French positions tended to lean more toward natalist, associationist, 'positive' eugenics and English positions in a more Malthusian, 'negative' direction). so yes Lamarck was a 'Darwinist' and Darwin was a 'Lamarckian' but what's more critical here imo is that this simple nationalist narrative of precursors and priority claims greatly distorts our ideas of what it even meant to be an 'evolutionist' (transformiste) and how these biological ideas were ideological, eugenic, and racial from day 1. as Emma Spary points out, we would really be better off understanding 19th century 'evolution' as situated in a broader matrix of concerns about how to engineer a 'better' society, and how the ideal citizen and indeed human was defined and justified in biological terms.

[quasitsqueeries]

The Emperor wasn't 12 feet tall

I see this meme a lot in my Instagram feed and it really grinds my gears:

Not because it seems to be trying to shame a fictional antagonist for being "wrong" (although that really doesn't help), but because whoever made it seems to have missed that depictions of the Emperor as superhuman are meant to be Imperial Propaganda.

Now, I realise I'm going to be fighting an uphill battle here because there seem to be people working for Games Workshop and producing their media who also missed that memo, and for a while now the studio has started producing actual depictions of the Emperor, and some of those depections show him as 12 feet tall and immortal. This might be controversial but I think what this shows is that Games Workshop don't understand Games Workshop's source material.

Here's a picture of the Emperor from the original Rogue Trader rulebook.

Even this is obviously meant to be a propaganda image, but here he looks like just a regular guy in armour, he's about the same size as the people around him. Not a superhuman, just a guy with an excess of hubris.

There's this literary construct called the unreliable narrator. When I studied literature we were given this short story to read called Bartleby the Scrivener. It's told from the point of view of an employer about a clerk who was apparently really difficult to manage. The subtext is that the narrator is trying to manipulate the reader to make themself look good.

For a long time, that's what Warhammer 40,000 did, the Imperium was made out to be an unreliable narrator. Stories about the Imperium's "glorious past" were told through the haze of ten thousand years of unending war, by an ecclesiastical class with a vested interest in keeping Imperial citizens committed to feeding the war machine. To the Imperium, the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy serve the function of myths, more than history. I've gone on before about how important heroic figures like Siegfried and Perseus and Prometheus were to the Nazis. The Imperium, being a fictional state that draws on the aesthetics and ideology of Fascism, uses the figures of the Emperor and Primarchs the same way.

Basically what I'm saying is that when Imperial sources state that these people were twelve feet tall and immortal and could, um, turn a giant ork into a lightbulb on a whim, it's not because they had these powers, but because they've been ascribed these powers by their priesthood, who have total control over the flow of information in this setting.

And I get that this is hard, because most people don't get taught this stuff, and often people are probably looking for escapism from their fiction and why would the book I'm reading lie to me? But I think it really makes the setting more interesting if you look at it this way.

Also, I realise that since 2006 there have been books around that describe the Emperor, and they do show him as superhuman, and I think those depictions are based on the writers misunderstanding the material they're working from. I guess Tolkien wrote the existence of The Hobbit into Middle Earth as the Red Book of Westmarch so I can tell myself that the Horus Heresy novels are meant to be in-universe Imperial propaganda.

ADDENDUM: I need to add this because I've been reading about Perpetuals, which is apparently what the Emperor is since the Horus Heresy series was published. Apparently these individuals are human mutants that are both immortal and invincible. I remember Mechanicum heavily implying that the Emperor and St. George are the same person. Here's the problem with that. There are two themes that I think are really important in Warhammer 40,000. One is the Emperor's hubris, the idea was that he was playing god, genetically engineering monstrosities in the form of the primarchs. In the Greek tragic mould, it's this hubris that leads to his downfall. This kind of loses its sting if he's just trying to recreate what what he already is.

The other theme is the Imperium's superstition. This one is really the core of 40K. The Imperium has taken the corpse of a man who tried to rule the galaxy, told themselves he's not dead, plugged the corpse into a machine that "regenerates" him, and founded an intolerant, violent and expansionist religion around this husk. This theme changes significantly if the Emperor actually was as powerful as the Ecclesiarchy makes him out to be, and actually isn't dead, and has somehow been regenerating for the last 10,000 years. There's a question here about what would make an entity worthy of worship, or being called a god, and I probably shouldn't get into it but this is my blog so I'm going to. It seems like there's an assumption among some writers that if something can be rationally explained then it's not a god, because gods ipso facto don't exist. They've incorporated nonexistence into their definition of gods. This is where you get the idea that the Chaos gods aren't gods, because the setting explains their existince "rationally" with its internal logic (nevermind that there's nothing rational about the warp). If there were gods in a rational sense, then our model of the universe would have to change to accomodate them. I think the upshot of this is basically that if what the Horus Heresy novels claim about the Emperor is true, then the Ecclesiarchy are right and he is a god within the logic of the setting. That doesn't justify the genocide and expansionism, but maybe it does justify the worship, and that's something that I think takes away from the setting.

[unioncolours]

The 5th Majsasaurus Year

Today is the 22nd of September, 2024. As per tradition, I have written a reflection of the year that has passed since September 22nd 2023, a public diary entry of sorts. Not only is Sept 22nd Shikamaru’s birthday, but also Majsasaurus as a member of the Naruto fandom’s birthday as well. This date marks five years since I posted my first fic in the Naruto fandom. You can read my first reflection from 2020 here, the second from 2021 here, the third from 2022 here, and the fourth from 2023 here.

It's been five years guys! Half a decade of making a fool out of myself online!

I have to be honest, this year has not been the best when it comes to fandom. While not as depressing as the worst year of 2021, it’s been challenging for sure. Before I go into this year and personally reflects all its quirks and events, I’ll start by introducing my nickname that’s been used on me online; Bex.

When I got social in the Shikatema fandom spheres back in late 2019 I asked people to call me a different name, a name I chose. My back then friends said the name I chose was too long and didn’t want to call me that, so they gave me the name Bex. I accepted the nickname without whining, because there I was, new in a server, and I just followed their lead. So I became Bex online. This is important for later, hence why I told this backstory.

And now onto the fifth year of being this persona online. Keep reading if you’re interested in my year.

I finished my last review of my year by announcing to you, my followers and friends, that I was expecting a child, a theme which was very visible in the fic I published 23rd of September 2023, we hold galaxies.

Since I knew that I’d obviously would have to cut down my time spent online very drastically after my baby would be born, I planned to write one more Shikajin fic with the aim of it being around 30k long, hoped to publish it in December and then be on a longer break. However, it’s… not always that easy being pregnant haha! What I didn’t realise then but realised later was that I suffered from brain fog and that made writing challenging.

What did cherish my days was that dear SpicedGold, who I for a longer while have been close to, sent me a giftbox literally from across the globe. In that giftbox she included two homemade plushies, one of Inojin and one of Shikadai and I had never been so surprised in my life. Now two plushies of them is decorating my shelf above my computer by which I write fics! My friend @clumsydragon28sent me from another corner across the globe another gift box to me as a Christmas gift, where I got even more plushies! Those were of Rowlet from Pokémon and Fyodor from BSD and both plushies decorate my living room. The gifts were truly cherished.

However, because I had rather forcefully decided that I WILL write a final pre-motherhood fic and had a deadline if I wanted it published before my baby was born, it meant I stuck with the first idea I had that sounded mediocrely interesting. Yeah, I should not have forced myself at that point, but wanted to go on a break with a bang and wanted to give my readers something to chew on before giving birth.

And I had very strong faith in myself that I could make it.

For months I battled through writing a plotline my heart didn’t love and my due date got closer and closer and all I could see was plot holes and words that refused to form. I realised 30k would not be enough for whatever I was cooking, and I had now strayed very far from my original plan.

I started to procrastinate and, because I had gained 60 user subscribers on AO3 (if you’re one of them, thank you so much), I decided to host a silly bingo with prompts. I received a few prompt-asks and wrote mini fics for them, all around 600-800 words. It was a wonderful way of procrastinating. You can read my mini fics here: Jinchuuriki Temari part one and two, TemaTen modern au, a fluffy Shikatema, and a Witcher AU.

Not even when my maternity leave had begun before the due date had I made any significant dent in my primary fic and I failed my quest to publish it, even if I by then had a good idea of what to do of the story.

After my child was born and when I had healed form the birth the brain fog vanished immediately. With zero sleep and a tired body I once more had a vision for my fic, and I banged through the rest of it like a madwoman. I had inspiration once more!

TERRORISE, the Shikajin fic, was published at the end of March 2024 and ended being 56k long. It is definitely not my best fic by any means, and there are at least two or even three places where I know I could have added a subplot to up the word count to my trustworthy 90-something thousand words to make a deeper and more profound story, but at that season of my life I could not write a better story than what TERRORISE ended up being. The missing subplots were the lie Inojin told, and Chocho and Sarada’s common backstory, which were only mentioned and alluded to, but not explored like they could to have made a better story. The final chapter was published by the beginning of May, and I have not re-read anything of it.

I had already decided before my baby was born that my project when they were here would be to re-edit To go down with the Sun, my first long fic from 2019. I had often thought about re-editing it finally, since before 2019 I had never written something vast that in English before. That meant my fics at the beginning of my career had language errors that I couldn’t see then, but now was aware of. I started re-editing in May, thinking I would change and add to a good amount of scenes, but in the end, I only added a little bit to one scene aside from correcting and re-editing the rest, which honestly surprised me, even if I so boldly stated in my previous official diary post that there would not be anything to correct. That my bold claims were true did surprise me after all.

Beside that I also added more scenes to three chapters from no one cries for unknown soldiers, my Shikatema WWII fic from 2022, just because I could and I had wanted to do it for a longer while, since that fic would have benefited from having a longer editing period than what I allowed it to have two years ago. So I did! It was fun and lovely to dive back into one of my favourite projects of all of my time in fandom.

In the middle of re-editing Sun I was struck by very sudden and intense inspiration to write about Saiino. In my ‘giving birth’-projection fic with Temari I waxed poetics about the wonders (and horrors) of biology when it comes to childbirth and ended the fic on a very powerful and positive note, but now felt inclined to write a fic which featured a mother who did not have a wonderful start of her motherhood and who fell ill to postpartum depression instead of having a lovely baby bubble.

As if possessed I smashed on my keyboard and crunched to get the fic done in time for Mother’s Day 2024. I made it, and the Ino-centric fic to grow a bed of flowers was published late that evening. I even rushed my ending a bit to make it but even with a rushed ending the entire atmosphere of the piece of so bittersweet and lovely! Postpartum depression is also such a hidden or even taboo topic that I think it was very needed in our fandom to have a description of that.

I could then go back to To go down with the Sun, and I had even commissioned the skilled and wonderful @keijidraws to make a poster for the fic, which I felt like that fic deserved. Over these five years that has passed since I wrote the first words of this fic (if my memory isn’t failing me, I think it was 10th of October 2019 I started writing Sun), To go down with the Sun has given me so, so much. My most kudos and hits, many friends, online crushes, *fans* even if I dare to call them that, soulmates, it all, all started from that fic. It deserved getting reborn and loved again. It was a rather easy job banging through published chapters and just edit them. I had finished everything the final week of May and was really proud.

By the beginning of June I was planning to write an InoTema fic, and was musing between two different settings and plots when I learned that the way I was perceived in what was part of my fandom circle was not a positive one and, being my own fault for how I behaved or was, or not, it affected me badly. Being online caused me panic attacks, I got problems with my sleep, and I had nightmares. And because of that I started to hate the person I was online. I hated Bex and I hated Majsasaurus. I hated the way I was that had led to me being perceived that way and if I hadn’t known better and counted down from ten, I would have nuked myself off the internet out of shame and hatred.

I would have deleted this tumblr you are reading this post from. I would even have deleted my discord server I have loved and nurtured since 2021 without the blessings of the other mods, just nuked it, leaving them shocked and detached from the group of friends we had. I would have ruined it all. I would have deleted everything but my fics on AO3. No, deleted wouldn’t have been enough, in my hatred for my own persona, for Bex, this person that was given to me all those years ago, I wanted to kill her.

I constantly planned suicide letters in my head to post here online. Not killing myself in real life of course, but online. And killing Bex would mean to kill my love for Naruto the series and ShikaTema and Shikajin. How does one kill a hyperfixation?

I started working on it, on killing her. I created a new tumblr and a new nickname and logged out of this one. I hid my twitter account. I decided to never write a Naruto fic again. As you can see, it got very bad very fast. Some of you might think I overreacted at words on a screen and that it all was my own damn fault and I should have reacted or gone about it differently, but it just got like this.

The entire month of June and July I spent in darkness when it came to fandom. It felt like Shikajin would be the only thing keeping me tied to Naruto again and in a desperate attempt to cheer myself up I began editing To dance above the Stars, the sequel to To go down with the Sun, and my true favourite out of the trilogy it belongs to. To try to force myself to not give up, I asked my dear friend Soverel6 if she wanted to make me a poster and she happily agreed, without knowing I was one click away from deleting myself away from her.

Then I began editing sometimes in June. I thought the fic sucked when I re-read it this time around and rather than adding, deleted a lot of the content. Most of the content I deleted was unnecessary preaching for a cause I ran in the fic, and I toned down that theme a lot. After 4 chapters I was ready to give up, to just not bother anymore with this fandom crap and leave for good, when Soverel6 surprised me with an almost finished poster. For her sake, I could not give up. I could not fail the trust she had in me, and I kept fighting for my joy within the little world of the fic.

After a month of sulking and feeling awful I managed to once more spew fun ideas for @notquitejiraiya's sequel fic to her masterpiece Grandmaster, which we jokingly call GMJ (the real name is Piano Man haha). SpicedGold also got to know I was feeling bad and to cheer me up started writing the sequel, When Waterlilies Waken, to the fic that originally made us friends, Let Wildflowers Grow Free. I felt so honoured she got around to do this, after me talking (pestering her) about a potential sequel for a long time. During this time I had reached my favourite parts of the fic, To dance above the Stars, I was editing, and thanks to the support I received from friends when talking about it I finally managed to find it fun to work with a fic again. I was still greatly offline from Naruto spheres, and when I sometimes logged into this tumblr just to check I was very careful to never reblog anything and often logged out again with a pending panic attack.

I uploaded the edited chapter of To dance above the Stars onto AO3 when it was finished in August along with Soverel6’s poster and finally dared to show my face on twitter again. Twitter felt safer than tumblr for some reason.

By this time, two months since I began hating being part of this fandom, I finally started feeling hope again. I decided that, before taking the ultimate decision to actually leave, I must write one final long fic of ShikaTema. I mused different prompts, all of them long and angsty and bloody of course per my brand and what I love to write the most. I mused different plots and it was between yet another historical au which would take place during WWI, another historical au which would take place during the 1700s and focus on witch-hunting, or a fantasy au which would be my Witcher AU, which I have mused for a bit and am really fond of.

I decided in the end to attempt at the Witcher AU.

However, I didn’t start writing it, and started writing this text instead already in late August. Then, after knowing I had received so much love on the WWII-au from 2022, one of my best fics to be honest, in the spur of the moment I decided that I will record the entire fic as a podfic. I begged my dear friend Becks to make me a new poster for the fic’s re-launching as a podfic and since she luckily agreed, I promised myself to do it. I, Bex, would try something completely new! And dauting. And tough. Recording wasn’t a problem in itself, I love reading things out loud, but the chapters were longer than I thought when reading out loud, and the software I downloaded for the editing was not as easy to manoeuvre as I predicted.

Then the fatigue hit again. I got stuck. I have not given up and I will finish it, but the deadline is maybe by 2025, haha.

When I got stuck with recording myself, I managed to scrape together a will to finally, after three months of practically deciding to never write any fic ever again, write a one shot. That one shot ended up being a second chapter to we hold galaxies, my projection fic I published exactly a year ago on Shikadai’s birthday 2023. I first thought of making it a one shot, but ultimately decided to add it as a chapter instead, and I was pretty satisfied with how it ended up being.

Now I am facing what to do next. I still had that promise of a long ShikaTema fic, but the Witcher AU didn’t feel as good as it once did. The hype inside me waned at the same time as new ideas spurred. New ideas. Did you hear that, “new ideas”? That is the sound of me almost being healed from the intense hatred I felt towards my Naruto online persona during the summer.

One of the new ideas is for example connected to Inojin’s canon fate in Boruto the manga, during which chapter he ‘died’ I was not feeling good. I was already trying to strangle my love for him and then he DIED on me. I cried. Yeah, no, judge all you want, but I was not exactly mentally stable enough to witness that. Now, however, I am luckily having fun with engaging with canon once more, since Inojin survived, and we got some good food from the chapters. I had fun in my safe space with other people who were engaged with his fate.

I am now brooding an intense and angsty Shikatema canonverse long fic. Canonverse! It’s almost like going back in time to when I thought I only could (and wanted) to write canonverse, back in 2020 and 2021. I also have a wlw idea again, after deciding to trash all the InoTema ideas that were ruined due to my anxiety in June, so it feels… normal again. It feels like I normally feel like in fandom, in a place where my imagination can run free and I can be the antithesis of a dude bro: the silly bean sister.

I find it ironic how I every year say I have learned to deal with fandom grief, but this year proved once more that I will never learn. But I think I will have to learn to accept that I won't learn.

Now we are here again, at the 22nd of September. Five years has passed since I uploaded the first chapter to my first fic, and I have 950 000 words uploaded on AO3. Earlier this year I promised myself to beat the delicious one million word count before 2025, and I know I realistically still can do it if I start writing tomorrow and stick to it.

But I will not retire until I have that sweet one million words on AO3. It would be too much of a failure to do so. So, dear sixty something subscribers, followers and other lurkers, expect at least 50k more of Majsasaurus fic in the future.

And yes, you can call me Bex. I don’t want to kill her anymore. I asked her forgiveness for being so angry, especially when I proudly bought a Temari Funko figurine in September. I don’t think I can kill this hyperfixation just yet. I don’t think I even want to kill it.

I can, with confidence, say, that there will be a 6th Majsasaurus Year in 2025, at least in some capacity.

Thank you to those who stopped me from deleting everything.

Majsasaurus Bex

[thedrarrylibrarian]

Several people have been kind enough to let me publish their thoughts on fandom, community, and queerness to celebrate Pride in the Library. Today's piece comes from @lqtraintracks.

I got into fandom a long, long time ago, way back before I found HP in 2012. My early days in another fandom (days meaning years) are not a time I want to revisit, even though it started out really good. I got to explore my sexuality for the very first time there. I met my first gf there. And those things were beautiful, for sure; they were just short-lived. After a couple of years, I met an abuser, and from then on my fandom life was predetermined by them—what I could and couldn’t read, could and couldn’t write, who I could and couldn’t form friendships with, etc. And even in the midst of that, there were those friendships that bolstered me. @elrhiarhodan, I’m looking at you.

But after 13 ½ years of that… I found HP. And I found a wonderful person who would change my life. I met Shelly / @unmistakablyoatmeal. For the first time in a very long time, I saw someone writing queerly and freely, who, far from being limited to one pairing for life, was writing all kinds of pairings (and threesomes), dynamics, and stories! I was so powerfully drawn to that freedom, and to her, and in no small way, she and this fandom are why I survived, and how I escaped and started to change my life and reclaim it as my own. 

I’ve met so many wonderful people here, many of whom have become close friends, my best friends. I’ve been writing all the queer smut my little queer heart has desired for many years now, and it’s been beyond amazing.

But something changed for us a few years ago, and our community hasn’t been the same since. The person who wrote the canon turned on us. She revealed herself to be all kinds of monstrous. 

There were clues, of course—the antisemitism inherent in her Goblins, the fat phobia, the queer baiting without any actual rep, the racism and ignorance shown in naming Cho Chang, etc. We knew but maybe we didn’t want to know. And being white and not Jewish, I lived under an umbrella of privilege that meant I didn’t have to see it until other people began pointing these things out to me.

But then the transphobia started. And kept going. And it became her platform. And it got worse, and worse, and fucking worse

As painful and horrific as that has been, it seems to have done what that sort of vile bigotry has always done though: It’s shown us that we are and will always be stronger, wiser, more loving, and ultimately undefeatable. I’ll speak for myself: I wasn’t writing trans characters before. I was afraid I’d get it wrong. JKR’s evil bullshit is what pushed me to get over myself. 

This fandom is where I have learned the most about the queer community I love. It’s where I’ve truly learned to write. And it’s where I’ve learned about facets of queer life I’d never connected to properly before out of the fear of trying. 

Here’s what I’ve learned: Bloody no one comes together like we do! No one supports one another like we do! We’ve forged a stronger bond because of some terf’s hate, and I feel closer to my fellow queer creators than ever.

This fandom, you beautiful people, have taught me so much, continue to teach me so much. I’m honored to share this space with you. Happy Pride to all you gorgeous people being your trans, nb, fluid, ace, bi, pan, poly, intersex, queer, powerful selves.  Thank you from the bottom of my little queer heart. I love you.

Thank you, LQ, for joining me in the Library. I love your declaration of fandom as ours, and the recognition that we are a stronger community because of what we've overcome. Thank you for celebrating Pride in the Library with me.

If you want more @lqtraintracks be sure to check out their work on AO3! I just finished reading her Phoenix in the Fire and I was hooked the whole time! I couldn't stop until I'd devoured the whole thing. I think you'll be just as hooked as I was. I also want to throw in how much I loved A Strapping Young Man - I loved reading about Harry's desire for Draco, and how Harry's desire is bolstered by Draco's confidence.

🏳️‍🌈 Lots of Love and Happy Pride! 🏳️‍🌈

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

🌟

I reblogged this ask game and then failed to finish the answers to any of the asks i got. whoopsie. better late than never.

Anyway let's try the director's commentary of the train king scene from pez dispenser debris.

I love the train king intro. it's so fun and goofy. it's just got some really fun humor to it in my mind. I had so much fun writing it.

it is a completely pointless scene.

It has no plot relevance. Train king is not the chekov's gun hanging bravely on the wall of that fic. It will have no overarching effect on the plot. So why the fuck is it there?

Well, because it was fun.

Pez dispenser debris has lived in my head for at least two or three years now. Not in the exact form it is now, but it's a very old and much-adored story of mine. I was incredibly fond of it. I tried to write it years ago, and got as far as the first scene, which was originally Izuku and Mirio walking along the street and running into the bus hijacking, which led to the rogue quirk.

It was a good starting point. It's where the action actually started. But it just didn't feel right to me.

So it sat in my drafts for a long time, collected dust, and I spun my wheels on other projects for a while. I went back to it, and tried again, and the new first scene was Izuku rushing in late for the meeting with the realtor. It still didn't feel right. it gave more development to Izuku and Mirio's relationship before we hit action, but something just wasn't right.

Train King was just a silly reason i made up for why he was late. The scene originally wasn't shown, only mentioned in a single sentence. And then I decided--fuck it, it would make for a fun scene. just do it for shits and giggles.

And I had fun writing it. Which means it's probably the only reason why i hit publish on pez dispenser debris to begin with instead of leaving it in my drafts. Because I was in a state of extreme burn out when i started writing that fic, and the train king scene led me to realize what that fic needed to be for me: just something fun and silly to write.

Technically speaking, pez dispenser debris is very sloppy. There's a huge amount of pointless asides and flashbacks that don't contribute to the plot in any way. the entirety of chapter four could be deleted and it would be the exact same fic if i just slightly edited the conversation between aizawa and izuku in chapter six. I legitmately wrote chapter four, said "wow, that was pointless," and hit publish

because I liked it anyway. Like, what the fuck is the point of the backflip treaty? Dabi's extremely reluctant semi-redemption? Absolutely nothing. I just had a good time writing it and thought other people would have a good time reading it.

it wasn't meant to be """"good"""" art. it was meant to be fun, and that's what it was. I had so much fun writing my silly little flashbacks and asides. All of my fics have those kinds of background stories and scenes that exist in their "universe," and most of them never make it into the fics because it wouldn't be plot relevant and it wouldn't make for """"good""" art. With pez dispenser debris, I wanted to just give myself permission to write something fun and silly with as many pointless scenes as i wanted. And train king started that.

[wolfiepyxie]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

How many works do you have on AO3? 14

What's your total word count? 613,957

What fandoms do you write for? Mainly Supernatural but I want to branch back out into some of the other fandoms I love

Top 5 fics by kudos: Necessities for Survival (WIP): 428 kudos, Winter's Spider (WIP/on Hiatus): 265 kudos, A Supernatural Adventure (WIP): 152 kudos, A New Way (WIP): 121 kudos, and Skin Deep (WIP): 57 kudos. Notice the pattern yet folks?

Do you respond to comments? I try to but I know that I don't get around to answering them all

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? I don't have very many fics that are completed, so at the time of making this I can't really answer this question.

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Again I don't have many completed fics, and the ones that I do have completed have kind of happy endings but I wouldn't call them the happiest.

Do you get hate on fics? Not that I have seen, but I do have the comment moderation on for if that should ever happen as I do not check my AO3 inbox all that frequently

Do you write smut? I've only recently started, so there are only two of my fics that have some form of smut in them

Craziest crossover? None that I would necessarily call the craziest but I have some that cross over with Marvel and one that is a crossover with the TV show Lucifer

Have you ever had a fic stolen? I did have one stolen back in my publishing on Wattpad days, but I have yet to see any evidence of my AO3 fics being stolen (pls don't let be the thing that jinx's me)

Have you ever had a fic translated? Haven't had the opportunity or the pleasure yet

Have you ever co-written a fic before? I'mma pull a Doctor Who and say spoilers 😏

All time favorite ship? That is a tie between Destiel and Drarry

What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? Uh I'd have to say maybe Winter's Spider. Mainly because at one point I wanted to give it a complete rewrite in order to flush certain things out but I've just never had the energy to do it

What are your writing strengths? I'd have to say world building and fight scenes, I do pretty good at those

What are your writing weaknesses? Staying in the same tense while writing, I'm all over the place with that (sorry to my beta reader for that)

Thoughts on dialogue in another language? I think it's cool, but translations at the bottom would be appreciated (this is not meant to be hateful it's just that google translate is kinda unreliable 😅)

First fandom you ever wrote in? I can barely remember half of the things I've written in a current fic after I've written and published them, I have no idea what was the first fandom I ever wrote in. Cause again, I started on Wattpad and ended up deleting most of my old, sucky works

Favorite fic you've written? That's like asking me to pick my favorite movie, there are too many

To pass on the fun I tag @anyreiart, @celestialstarlight27, @avonlady42, @friendofcarlotta, and @thefastestqueeralive. Sorry to those of you who didn't want to be tagged! I am only following so many authors on here (which is not many, sadly)

[aranarumei]

12 an 29 for the wip asks!!

ask me something from this list?

12: a trope you’re really into right now

hm… nothing? I don’t think of fic ideas in terms of tropes, more just that I wanna express some specific feeling I have

29: how easy is it for you to come up with titles?

the short answer is “it depends” but I think the long answer of how I approach titling is way more interesting, so… here’s an impromptu “kiri’s personal guide to titling fics!” I know my tendency to ramble, so I’ll let this spiel live under the cut.

the first thing to note is that titling got a bit easier for me when I realized that it just so does not matter on ao3. without pointing fingers at any specific fic, I tend to recognize a fic I’ve read and liked by the summary, tags, kr author… usually I remember the title only bc I’ve seen it a bunch, not because it actually connects to anything. this applies to browsing, too: I tend to judge whether I want to read a fic based on the summary and the tags. other people I’ve talked to have agreed that fic titles don’t seem to really… Matter? to them as much as other stuff. so if you’re someone who gets really anxious about titling stuff, hopefully that lets you take it a little less seriously?

with that said, I do like to think about titles, because it is part of the package of the fic and I’d like it to be good.

also on a practical level it’s just helpful for me to distinguish fics. if every one of my fics was titled smthing vague but pretty, like, I dunno, “fuschia birdsong”… I don’t know think they’d be so easy to identify.

this was actually a real problem when I went through my archives… I remember my published ao3 fics well enough, but I’d also archived pieces of unpublished wips, and just had no idea what any of them were based on title alone. like why is “eyes are the window to the soul” my title for this fic I wrote like. 8 years ago where kageyama’s a demon. I probably just thought it was a phrase that correlated with soul or something…? but it’s un-parseable. for wips that I shelve, these days I tend to pick out really obvious labels instead, so above would just be titled as “demon!kageyama” for my archives or something (yes I know the ! is not in common use these days. let me indulge.)

my rambling coincidentally highlights what I think is important about a title: conveying a core part of the piece. I want to look at a title and at least somewhat be like “yeah, I remember what that fic is about” so my title has to touch on something major about the fic.

as for how I do that, I tend to go to two sources for titles: the fic’s “concept” and the fic’s “point.”

the fic’s “concept” is like… is there a certain situation that this fic is about? some examples: “the stranger in the hall” (it’s literally about shirahama meeting ichinose—a stranger—in the hallway) or “day negative fourteen” (a fic set fourteen days before the beginning of a dating sim isekai), or, in its most obvious form, “help! my classmate’s asking for relationship advice, but I’m aromantic!?” (this fic is exactly what it says on the tin)

the fic’s “point,”on the other hand, is like… what themes or ideas are being discussed in this fic? examples include: “something there” (revolves around the underlying tension of shirahama’s yet-unrealized crush on miyano, which is a Something There that he’s trying to not really think about) or “see the light” (fic deals with vision and perception in various ways, and tashiro gets compared to light in a couple of ways, so it’s like… seeing tashiro in a new way, which is what the final scene of the fic is all about)

so that’s a good base for how i wanna start building a title. but then getting the words into something that “feels right” is a lot harder. how do you condense your “point” or “concept” into something that’s concise enough? sometimes it’s really easy: “the anomalous agate” is meant to copy the style of a chapter of one of the first two volumes of the case files of jeweler richard, and I literally can’t write the fic without knowing what the central gem (agate) and idea (anomaly) is going to be. when it’s not, I tend to have two ways I go about it.

the first is pretty classically ao3: song lyrics! if I happen to have some songs that I’ve been listening to for the fic mood, it’s probably bc it matches something in the fic, so I’ll just borrow from there. apart from that, song lyrics in general just tend to have… nice phrases? so they can be fun to take out of context or use. both “something there” and “see the light” reference disney songs, which is kind of the reason for why I named “see the light” that way… I was like “oh shirahama’s narrating this fic again, it’d be hilarious if another disney song title fit—oh wait I can work with this one.” this cloud & tifa fic I’d written is just very vaguely like “wow… Life Goes On even when things suck” which. ig “life goes on” is a title but I went with “symptom of life” bc I’d been listening to that song by willow recently.

my other technique is one I used to do for personal essays to apply to college, actually… which is basically just “if one idea isn’t good enough, go with two!” the reasoning is basically like… if you pick one topic to talk abt, it feels like it’s been skewered to death, but if you pick two and manage to synthesize them somehow, it’s got way more of a chance of being unique, and you also get to sound clever and thoughtful by how you tie things together.

examples: “the peridot of favor” borrows from the same structured title as “the anomalous agate”, but here favor has two meanings: hanzawa’s doing a favor for tashiro by helping him out with their crossdressing contest, but he’s also showing him favor, because they liiiike each other. or something. “dialed in” refers to the point of the fic (tenma’s paying attention to yuki and reaffirming his connection with summer troupe) as well as the concept (the fic is built off a moment in canon where they’re literally on a phone call), and “ill at ease” also blends point and concept, because seigi is literally “ill” (it’s a sickfic) but the fic is also about him feeling “ill at ease” (his discomfort with the hotel room he’s staying in)

while I’m writing wips my titles are almost never the actual ao3 title. I like putting either a very plain title like “kagihira wip” or something that makes me laugh. the latter can definitely seep into my published fic titles… song lyrics and double meanings are fun to me, and so is titling something “help! my classmate’s asking for relationship advice, but I’m aromantic!?” (this was the wip title as well. it was too perfect to change)

and as a final, super personal rule, i try to avoid using the word “dream” because i used it way too much for earlier titles when frankly. they didn’t need it. I just think i like the word a lot… it’s pretty and represents a fun concept, and it has vague sentiments of yearning so it can apply to a lot of stuff. it’s definitely way too easy to get to vaguely pretty titles with it. therefore I really try to make sure i have a good justification when i use that word. after this ban I’ve only used it in one title: “dream; reality” which is literally a fic where these two characters keep dreaming about a tragic alternative universe version of themselves, and differentiating that from their much happier reality, so… yeah, I’ll allow that.

[summerwritesfics]

🌾Earthrealm Valley, Chapter 2 - First Impressions

Pairing: Hanzo Hasashi/Kuai Liang Length: 1590 Words Rating: Mature Warnings: Stardew Valley AU, Fluff, Angst, Slice of life, Slow Burn, This fic runs on Stardew Valley logic so please don’t expect realism in any form

Earthrealm Valley Masterlist

Notes: I have something to admit to you… I actually wrote this and chapter 3 right after I wrote chapter 1… I just… Never posted them for some reason 🫣 So, uh… here take this, about 2 years late but… better than never, right? Haha. Right? 😭 So, uh, finally enjoy Hanzo & Kuai’s first meeting, and the beginning of Kuai Liang’s decent into being a feral little goblin man.

It was rare that the citizens of Dragon Town came to any sort of mutual agreement.

The only thing anyone really agreed on was that Raiden was a good mayor. That was, until the new farmer moved into town. It was at this point, everyone in town had banded together to come to one shared opinion.

The new farmer was weird.

Hanzo didn’t know what that meant. He hadn’t met the guy yet, and didn’t really intend to. All he really knew was the farmer’s name was Kuai Liang, and when he tried to enquire just why he was apparently so weird, no one seemed to be able to pinpoint what it was about him that made him so weird. He just was.

And according to Takeda, Cassie had a very in depth description of him.

“She says he has this massive scar on his face! And she says he only has one eye, and the other is just a socket!”

“I think Cassandra may be telling you a few tall tales there,” he tried to reply diplomatically. As cute as it was that Takeda was so taken by this embellished description of the man, he didn’t want the boy to be disappointed when he finally met him.

They stepped off the pathway and into the forest. It was a bit of a daily ritual for Hanzo, coming here and searching for the inspiration he needed. It wasn’t coming easily however. He had all but hit a complete block in terms of his writing. It had been 7 years since his last published work, 6 since the death of his family, 5 since he moved to the valley, and 2 since he began working on his latest book. In those 2 years, he’d barely written a quarter of the book.

He knew he had to get back into writing. While Harumi and Satoshi’s deaths would always haunt him, things had gotten easier to cope with, and he hoped with that lighter burden, writing would come back to him. But it had been slow. Despite the breathtaking beauty of the valley, that spark he once had was hard to find. So he went out every day, hoping to find something to ignite the fire inside him once more.

“Who’s that?” Takeda quietly questioned, snapping Hanzo back to reality. Hanzo followed the boy's gaze, to find a man crouched down staring at what looked like a spring onion growing in the ground.

He didn’t recognise the man, but the large scar over his one eye did rather line up with Cassandra’s description of Kuai Liang. He did still appear to have both eyes however, so it seemed the young girl was definitely exaggerating her story of him.

Kuai didn’t look like he’d noticed either of them. He began to dig around the spring onion, taking the stork and slowly pulling it up. He observed it for a few seconds, wiping off the remaining dirt. He stood up, smiling to himself and looking a little triumphant.

And then he took a huge bite of it.

Oh… That’s what everyone means…

Despite his shock, Hanzo coughed to get Kuai’s attention. Kuai jumped a mile as his head snapped toward Hanzo and Takeda. He looked like a deer in headlights, entire body frozen in spot and surprised that someone caught him out. He glanced between Hanzo and the spring onion. He swallowed, wiping his mouth with his hand and approaching them.

“I- Uh… I swear this isn’t as strange as it looks.” He hesitated, face starting to go red with embarrassment. Hanzo couldn’t blame him, he hadn’t exactly made the best first impression. “Sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Kuai Liang.”

“You’re Kuai Liang?” Takeda loudly questioned, squinting at the man in front of him. “But you have two eyes!”

“Yes?” Kuai blinked in confusion, before frowning. “How many am I meant to have?”

“Cassie said you only had one!” Takeda crossed his arms over his chest. “Is one of them fake?”

“No. No, they’re both real and I definitely had both of them when I met Cassandra,” Kuai clarified, rubbing the back of his head. He brought the spring onion to his mouth again and took another bite. Oh my god, what is wrong with this man?

“I… Did warn you that Cassandra was likely lying to you,” Hanzo chose to tell Takeda instead of questioning the fact the man in front of them was quite happily just chowing down on a raw spring onion he found in the forest. “My apologies, my name is Hanzo Hasashi, and this is Takeda.”

“Oh, you live with Kenshi right?” Kuai asked, before looking at Takeda, “and you’re Kenshi’s son?” Hanzo nodded in response. “It’s nice to meet you both.”

“It’s nice to meet you too.” Hanzo gave an uneasy smile, watching as Kuai finished off the onion. That’s weird, that’s so weird. “So, you picked up that old abandoned farm?”

“Yeah, it’s a lot more run down than I initially thought, but I think I’ll get somewhere with it.” He smiled widely, and Hanzo had to admit, he looked adorable when he was smiling. It almost took away from the fact he just ate something he found on the floor. “I have a few vegetables and fruits growing so far.”

“Do you have cows?” Takeda asked, wide eyed, forgetting his previous disappointment.

“Ah, not yet. I would like some though,” Kuai claimed.

“When you get some, can I pet one?” Takeda was bouncing in place.

“Sure,” Kuai said with a crooked smile. “It might be a while, but you have my word, as soon as I get a cow, you may be the first to pet them.”

Takeda made an excited sounding squeal and Hanzo couldn’t help but smile. He had been here, when Takeda’s mother had died, and seen how it had affected the kid. Some days he didn’t even talk to his father, let alone anyone else. Seeing him excited about anything was a sign of healing.

And Kuai Liang may be the strangest man he’s ever met, but at least he seemed to be kind.

“Kenshi told me you’re an author,” Kuai enquired, turning his attention back to Hanzo while Takeda continued to bounce with joy and babble about cows.

“I am.” Hanzo didn’t really want to talk about that with anyone. Not that he wasn’t proud of his work, more that he was upset about his current progress. “I’ve hit a bit of a block lately, however.”

“I know how that feels,” Kuai muttered, barely loud enough to be heard. Hanzo didn’t have a chance to question what he meant because Kuai continued with, “well, the valley is absolutely beautiful, I imagine there must be some inspiration hiding around here somewhere.”

“I imagine so too, just a case of looking for it.” He’d been looking for it for two years. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep looking for something so elusive. “Still, we should probably leave you to uh… whatever it was you were actually doing.”

“I was just foraging for things,” Kuai admitted, looking over to where he’d dug up the spring onion. “I don’t know why I ate it… It tasted nice though, so at least the wild vegetables are good quality.”

“Sure,” Hanzo reluctantly agreed. Whatever helps you sleep at night. “I wish you luck with your foraging. Try not to eat anything else you find on the floor.”

Kuai gave a sheepish smile, “I will do my best not to.” He paused for a moment, before adding “please feel free to stop by the farm, if you like. It’s not much at the moment, but I wouldn’t mind visitors.”

“I’ll consider it,” Hanzo replied. He knew Takeda would definitely love to go see the farm even without the cows. Hanzo should probably accompany him, just so he didn’t risk outstaying his welcome.

Kuai gave them both a small wave, before turning back to the forest, and disappearing between the trees. Hanzo wondered if the spring onion incident really was just a spur of the moment thing, or if he was trying to save face at being caught.

Still he supposed that didn’t really matter. He turned to Takeda who was still looking extremely excited.

“So? Was he what you imagined?” Hanzo questioned as he started back on the trail, Takeda practically skipping by his side.

“Nope!” The bluntness of the statement caught Hanzo off guard and he couldn’t help but snort. “But he’s still cool, in a different way. I can’t wait until he gets a cow!”

Hanzo laughed, “I’m sure he’s excited for it too.”

He glanced over in the direction Kuai had gone off in. He could just about make the man out, bending down to pick something up. This time however, he slipped his backpack onto his shoulder and put it inside. Least he’s not just eating everything he finds, I guess.

He could see what the others meant. He was strange, but it wasn’t threatening in any way. Almost endearing, if he was honest. Hanzo still had no real intent to be anything more than passing acquaintances, but he could imagine sitting down and having a few pints with him. Anything more could distract him further from his goal of writing, and he couldn’t risk that. He needed to stay focused, and he wasn’t going to let himself be pulled away by the admittedly intriguing new farmer.

He took a breath, and turned away to continue his quest for inspiration.

[there-must-be-a-lock]

@luredin tagged me in this fun lil game!

Rules: Go to your published works on AO3 and list the first fic you ever published there, the last fic you published, any fic that you wrote for a fandom/ship only once, your favorite fic you wrote in the fandom/ship that has the most works, the fic you wish more people read, the fic you agonized over the most, the fic that sprang fully formed from your mind without any effort, and a work you are proud of—for whatever reason. <3

First fic published on Ao3: Marked, which I started in September 2017!!!!

Last fic published: Last *completed* one was A Brat By Any Other Name, which was the closest thing to PWP I've written in a long time, but I literally just posted Ch. 7 of i've got a bulletproof heart, you've got a hollow-point smile.

Fandom/ship I only wrote once: There are a number of ships I've only written once because I tend to mess around with rare-pair/crossover ficlet experiments pretty often, but considering that three of the four pairings in The Lake House were ones I only tried once within a fandom I've written a LOT (Nat/Steve, Clint/Darcy, Sam/Bucky), I'm going to go with that.

Favorite fic in most popular fandom/ship: That'd be Steve/Bucky, so - Not That Kind Of Movie.

Fic I wish more people read: A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist. I know it's a very specific genre of AU that might not be your thing. I know. Just trust me? It's my favorite thing I've ever written.

Fic I agonized over: See above! I put SO much work into that one. Also, though, Sweet Home Was Home. It started as a sort of experiment where I was rewriting the Hawkeye series as it came out, basically, to be more in line with comics!Clint, but then it grew into a lot more; I spent a solid month on the last chapter, I think, because it had turned into something that meant so much to me, and I wanted to give the characters the ending they deserved. I still want to go back and re-write parts of it, the middle is a bit rushed, but I do love how it turned out.

Fic that popped out fully-formed: The One With The Pottery Barn Couch - aka the first Marshmallow Crime Lords fic. @noxnthea and I wrote like 7k of that 'verse within a day, I think? It was so much fun, and so much easier than I expected to write collaboratively with someone.

Fic I'm proud of: The Coffee & Psychopaths series. The first fic in that was when I stopped giving a fuck about whether people would read what I was writing, I think; I didn't expect anybody to read it, because it's a gen crossover, but also, it's super thinky, lots of psychology and science talk, and I got really into tying the two canons together, and... yeah. It was a JOY to write and I am super proud of it.

No-pressure tags: @noxnthea @bittercape @notherdeadrobin @claraxbarton @kangofu-cb @drgrlfriend @katzynia @skalidra

[exhuastedpigeon]

hi! kind of a random ask.

i'm really impressed with your writing and fics and i wondered if you had any other writing experience before you wrote in fandoms?(like working/studying in a field that has to do with writing for example) you're very talented!

i'm kind of an aspiring fanfic writer myself and i'm curious about what experience other authors have

i hope you have a great day!

Hi Anon! Wow this is such a nice ask to get! Thank you <3

There isn't really a clean answer to your question because I've been writing my entire life. Like my 'diary' as a kid was mostly just me making up stories.

I was a newspaper and school radio kid in junior high and high school, so I wrote articles and scripts for the radio show, which was my first experience writing for an audience. I also wrote short stories and poetry that were submitted for publication in high school and won some awards (idk honestly, I've kind of forgotten since they didn't really matter to me at the time).

I went to university for political science and communication (both require a ton of writing, but none of that was creative writing. I often got feedback from professors that my research papers were engaging and in retrospect I think that meant they weren't just a report out of facts - I always added some flair because I was trying to reach a word count).

In my career I've almost always had to do a lot of writing, I was in marketing for a bit, then grant writing, then I worked for a few tech start ups that lived and died by written plans. Now I'm in sales and project management - neither require the kind of writing I've had to do in the past for jobs but I think that's actually been helpful for my creative writing work because now I have more brain power to write the creative things I'm actually interested in.

I also got my master's in communication somewhere in there and I focused a lot on interpersonal communication (though mostly through the lens of workplace interpersonal communication). That required a ton of writing, but none of it was fiction or creative.

I guess at one point in my early 20s I also wrote a 120,000 word original story that has been lost to time and destroyed laptops (always back up your work folks!!!!). I'd love to get back to writing original stories again and I'm in the process of trying to.

A word of advice for you as an aspiring fic writer - Write. Write it even if you think something like it has been written before. Write it even if you think it's bad. Write it because you want to. You will get better with every thing you write. Try to find a few friends to read your work and give you honest feedback (if you want it).

When I look back at my earliest published fics (published in places like ff. net and *shudders* myspace) those weren't great, but I wrote them and I got better with each one. My stories got more nuanced, my characters had more depth. I liked writing more and more. And when I look back at my earlier fics on Ao3 I'm really proud of how much better I've gotten at writing over the years.

Like any art form, you probably won't be great the first time you do it, but that's okay! All you have to do is start.

[womaninwinter]

For From the Cutting Room Floor and In My Father’s Words: 6, 11, 12, 19, 26 🥰

yay thank you for enabling me in my hour of need!!

6. What do you need to write? Is there anything special you need to do/have to help your creative flow?

Uh, a community it turns out. I got the idea for Cutting Room Floor because there was this fan theory floating around about "what if Lucy and Lockwood were secretly actually in a relationship and Lucy just doesn't mention it because she's being private" and I went to sleep with the idea revolving in my head and woke up with the fic more or less fully formed. Then I spent about a whole day vomiting it onto a page when I should have been working. Oops? In My Father's Words came about because @synestheticwanderings came into the Cutting Room Floor comments and said she wanted Lockwood's side of the story, so yeah, it seems I really need input from others to write.

11. Was there a scene that you hadn't originally planned to include? Why did you decide to fit it in?

Listen I planned nothing with either of these fics. Cutting Room Floor wrote itself and possessed me, Father's Words has been entirely seat-of-my-pants writing. One scene that did come as a surprise to me was the confession scene of Father's Words. It was never meant to be a Catholic Lockwood™ fic, but it ended up being the only way I could write myself out of the hole I'd dug in previous chapters.

12. Was there a scene you wished you could have included? Why didn't it fit in?

I do occasionally think about what might have happened if Lucy had expressed some definite sign of interest in Lockwood beyond the physical in Cutting Room Floor. That fic is very much based around a silly miscommunication trope, and if she'd had the nerve to initiate at any point, the fic would have gone differently. So I do sometimes think about doing a Cutting Room Floor alternate ending where they actually communicate, but I have too many WIPs to take that on.

19. Is this one of your personal favorite fics? Why or why not?

It used to be, but looking back, I kinda wince at how clumsy some of the writing is. I do however think that Cutting Room Floor has one of the best openings I've ever written, and I will quote it here for reasons of vanity:

Reader, there is a part I didn’t tell you – you’ll see why. It goes like this: picture me, about a week after the Bickerstaff case, lying in my attic room, listening to the rain on the roof. My expression was somewhat shell-shocked, my fingers pressed to my lips. No, that’s a bit too late. Let’s go back another twenty minutes or so. I was just waking up, feeling stiff and achy still from all our exertions, when Lockwood knocked on my door.

I absolutely adore when the narrator addresses the reader directly so I will always be terribly proud of this.

26. Wild Card! I'll tell you a fun fact about this fic!

I don't know if it counts as fun exactly, but the day I wrote and published From the Cutting Room Floor (July 28th) was my longest Spotify listening day of 2023. As a result, I know almost exactly how long it took me to write it (~8 hours). Another fun fact that probably only I think is fun is that the fic was originally sexier, but I didn't like it, so I cut the "steamier" descriptions (and I think the fic is stronger for it. I think romantic scenes are way stronger when you focus on the characters' reactions and emotional experiences rather than physical mechanics).

Behind-the-scenes fic asks.

[kidflashimpulse]

Hiiiiiii. I saw other anon's post about any recs of a fanfic that explores into Bart's post-apocalyptic history

I can't promise it will be published, but I wrote a fanfic that sorta explores his post-apocalyptic history two-ish (maybe 3) years ago. I wanted to flesh out Bart's history for this creative writing project I was doing with a couple friends. The writing of the fic itself is unconventional as I originally meant it to briefly cover his history.

At first it was just going to be me jotting down a few key points of what I HC his past to look like. But then what I meant to be an "Abridged history" turned out to be 21 pages on a google doc. I remember basically "word vomitting" it until like 4am. It's a bit of an AU, I lengthened the timespan of when the Reach first arrived to when they finally took over and Jaime went "on mode". Also took a few liberties with Bart's family history (because I love playing around with his Thawne-Allen schmitck)

In case I never publish it, here's a small snippet:

As far back as Bart Allen could remember, his home was the Resistance. He knew only of a world where the Reach controlled and owned everything and everyone - or at least that’s what they thought he liked to believe. A ruined Earth where the skies were forever darkened with clouds and the gross mix of falling snow and ash, all terribly polluted and lifeless. Occasionally, he’d dream of vivid blue skies and the green trees.

The enemy Reach were scary patient, biding their time for decades, sinking their claws into the Earth while posing as peacekeepers and explorers of the galaxy. Their rise to fame was quick and seemless. The alien invaders must have heard of the phrase “all good things come to those who wait”. 

The Reach were also deadly accurate, clearing the chest board in one fell swoop. Superman and Lex Luthor. Batman and the Joker. Metropolis, Gotham, and Happy Habour. Atlantis. Ra’s Al Ghul and his assassins. 

There were rumours that the League of Assassins prompted the Reach’s initial attack, that they had somehow found out what the Reach truly wanted with Earth. It wouldn’t be too surprising given their worldwide intel and perfectly coordinated attacks. After the death of Ra’s Al Ghul, what remained fractured and withered away like the dust of the ruined Earth under the heel of the Reach. 

From both heroic and villainous factions, a few escaped their Reach fates and formed the initial Resistance.

It's kinda ridiculous how I wrote it. Apparently I had written a small summary too so might as well share the summary:

“I did it.”

“Wish you were here, mom.” He lets a wistful moment pass, a note of mournful silence. “Wish you were here, dad.”

He lifts his gaze to the twinkling stars. Fresh air fills his lungs. 

“But I promise you’ll have a better future now, even if it’s one without your son.”

wow !! its incredible u did something like this and thank u sm for sharing it with us <33 i will link it to the previous ask u mentioned

love it when personal projects take a life of their own like this, that’s exactly what happened to me too and i feel like just from the whole experience i definitely learnt a lot from it !

p.s i can’t lie i’m curious what direction u were gonna take with it 👀 ultimately it’s always up to the author i understand if u would or wouldn’t want to share, whatever feels right for u is the correct choice !

[penny-anna]

20 questions for fic writers

tagged by @evilwickedme, thank you!

How many works do you have on ao3?

uhh okay let's see!! *pulls up statistics page* I have 419 works on ao3!

what’s your total ao3 word count?

as of right now: 1,429,463. shut up.

What fandoms do you write for?

i'm usually a 1 fandom at a time gal but currently i'm writing for BTTF and Shazam and less frequently for the Witcher and Lord of the Rings!

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

in descendign order:

New Monster Stories (6803 kudos)

the world won't wait until you're older (4700 kudos)

The Price of a Touch (4245 kudos)

Somebody to Love (3629 kudos)

Tender, like a soft new sapling (3277 kudos)

at this point i've accepted that i will never experience the highs of the 2020 witcher fandom ever again

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

SO i used to respond pretty frequently but then i spent a while writing in a very very tiny fandom where every single comment was cherished & i got out of the habit of replying bcos in my mind once i've replied to a comment it's 'finished' so living them unreplied to meant i could enjoy them for longer. and then i got out of the habit!! these days i tend to only reply if i have something to say but i am grateful for all of them <3

What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending

im not gonna link any of them but in my Merlin days i did write multiple fics about my OT3 killing each other. im fine thank you for asking.

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

huh i feel like this is harder to measure than the above?? hmmm. scrolling back through my recent-ish works, it isn't kind is pretty unabashedly fluffy.

Do you get hate on fics?

ehhh i've had some rude comments but i wouldn't say hate

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

these days not so often!! have ended up in a string of found family type fandoms. but yeah i got uhh 65 fics rated E on the ao3. most of them are m/m occasional f/f or f/m.

Do you write crossovers?

im more into fusions which is a different thing! but have on occasion written crossovers.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

yeah actually, had a fic taken once by someone who was habitually translating fics into a different language & posting them without acknowledging the original. i think they got reported but i don't really remember who it shook out!

Have you ever had a fic translated?

yeah quite a lot of times! u can see translations of my fics on ao3 here. disproportionately russian? i assume there's just a lot of russian fic translators out there!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

NOT for 1 million years but yes i have

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

hmmm my go to answer for this is usually two/jamie so that's what im going with

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

i'm actually still sitting on a second doctor wip that at this point i think is a lost cause. i sent the opening scene (fake out character death lol) to some people on discord a while ago just to torment them.

What are your writing strengths?

i'd like to think dialogue!!

What are your writing weaknesses?

basically all forms of description tbph

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

im monolingual so i don't think i'd do this without assistance from a native speaker. i've actually published (like, professionally) a piece of fiction w some dialogue in another language and to my eternal gratitude some of my tumblr followers assisted me with the translation <3

First fandom you wrote for?

lord of the rings, when i was about 12

Favorite fic you’ve written?

of all time??? GOD. okay. first thought best thought the world won't wait until you're older.

ok uhh i will tag @uighean @limerental @a-kind-of-merry-war @megamindsupremacy

✌️

[orifu]

russell t davies has written another episode. lets talk about that

i dont really get what the dots intentions are beyond i don like you >:( or why they would like go around killing everyone one by one in alphabetical order for some reason? is it meant to be some form of torture for them? because they hate them? if they just want to kill them, why dont they do that? if theyre killing them because theyre rich pricks, was everyone on homeland also a rich prick?

UPDATE

now that it isnt 1am im getting new opinions. i still think it is kinda mediocre. i might think about it more idk. anyway. this is what i wrote then:

well. this episode is a metaphor for something. i mean besides the obvious ermmm screen bad. so these rich folks love their screens and cant walk like its wall-e but doctor who. and theyre getting eaten by these giant slugs... who are controlled by an army of sentient marbles?

i think this episode is like a metaphor for how rich pricks work. when they have problems they need help. but as soon as theyre slightly out of the woods, youre a weird outsider who needs to disappear forever. its why ricky got killed and why the doctor and ruby were ignored. they arent "like them" (i think they literally say that) so they get tossed to the side, even if it means certain death.

i think this episode kinda wastes its time. i knew this episode was gonna be the stinker of the season and it was about what i expected. i think it was really trying to build sympathy for the rich twats until showing you, yep theyre twats. if you sympathised with them, youre a fool, because the rich arent your friends. the episode feels like it has good ideas but it drags out the boring bits and rushes the interesting parts.

anyway. i really dont hate this episode but it has that chibnall era esque mediocrity that just makes me feel like the episode is not one ill be watching again any time soon. its like a 4/10.

anyway. i drafted some stuff explaining how i think 73 yards whole thing worked and what it means for the future and ill publish that at some point maybe probably. until then (or rogue), goodbye from orifu!!!!

[foxymoxynoona]

Hi Foxy, I hope your day is going well! I saw a precious recent ask where you spoke about your story planning process. I'm so so curious about what other direction did you try to figure out for Meadow? Only if you're comfortable with sharing of course.

I also wanted to ask about the Secret Song Series. From your previous asks, am I right to assume you have had that story planned/pre-written for a long time? If so, was it from before you got into BTS meaning it started out with different characters? Are any of your other stories that heavily pre-planned/written as well? Or any other stories you have pre-planned/written that you haven't shared or published?

Sorry for all the questions, I just truly find your writing, work, and dedication to your stories so inspiring and fascinating. I hope you'll be able to continue doing what you love forever! We'll all be here reading. Thank you for sharing your amazing stories with us. 💝

You're humoring me asking all these questions about writing, I really enjoy the topic!

Regarding Meadow: I really wanted it to just be a sweet Korean location drama at first, but Bronwen's history blew up in my face. And then I really wanted them to just settle in Europe together, but they couldn't quite make their peace there (fwiw, JK was supposed to go find her, not go with her in the original plan) and needed the fresh start together in Thailand and by that point I realized I was heading for the big bad ending I kept trying to avoid but I did still cling to hope that actually they would just stay in Thailand and their family would all move there. I just didn't think I could pull off all the political intricacies of the story and also make it make sense when they took over the pack... I'm pretty happy with how it ultimately turned out though and any other ending, I would have known I chickened out because i was scared of the writing.

Regarding Secret Song Series: it was always and only BTS, I started writing in January of 2020 and wrote furiously FOR MY EYES ONLY lmfao until I impulsively decided to start posting it in November 2020. Since I didn't ever plan to share, I just jumped around and wrote whatever I wanted. To be honest though I actually haven't really needed to "fix" things as we go despite it being written out of chronological order. Maybe a few minor things here and there but the story and Sasha and all the people in her life just really formed in my mind pretty clearly. I think I once added up how much I had written before I began posting and it was something insane like 2,000,000+ words... maybe it was even more? I'm sure it's somewhere on this blog lol but it's harder to calculate now that I've filled in so much more as we go. I kind of think of this story as the chronology of me falling in love with BTS though, because I knew even less about them when I started writing it and then as I would learn things in Run BTS or the On comeback happened or things like that, I could jump around in time in the story and weave it in. It's also why sometimes things are "wrong" in the story, it was never meant to be like... real true to life, it was me making up the future, but some meaningful things I've been able to add in as we go as they don't really change anything or even fit the themes really well!

In the beginning a lot of my stories were heavily written before I started posting (Sugar Fairy, Sea of Indigo, I think Lowlander was like 60% done by the time I started post) which helped me post a lot faster. Amended had a lot done too by the time I started posting, maybe like 40%. In contrast, stories like Lone Blue Egg, Tell Me What Changed, To Kill A King, After the Applause --my more recent stories-- are being posted as I write them. That doesn't mean I've posted all my "old" stuff though, even just BTS fics I wrote since 2020... there are a lot LOL. Some of them were 200 pages before I abandoned them. Sometimes I've cannibalized pieces of them for other stories, or they just kind of stalled out, or I just don't think they were unique/different enough from my current stories to bother finishing up.

I genuinely wish I didn't need to make a living and could just write these free little stories for pleasure and sharing for the rest of time. I'm well aware of how rare and crazy it is to have found such an open and supportive group of people who will let me experiment and try new things and be so thoughtful with their feedback. I'm a better writer thanks to all of you, so thank you for your support and interest! <3