#sorry for the @ headspace im just very angry right now and you were the main factor making me understand enough to be angry about it

[kadekeys]

my economics professor mentioned that my state's old growth logging ban was lifted (in a positive tone) and i already didn't like her but i almost went apeshit istg. @headspace-hotel's posts actually changed my brain chemistry. i rambled to a few classmates about them afterwards and went into a research spiral for half the afternoon too. i'm so angry that i'll never see them. i'll never be able to walk on six inches of topsoil. i'll be lucky to walk on one. economics are a joke i want my goddamn earth back

[undiscovered-horizon]

"Even closer behind" - Riddler x Reader

[TW: murder, gore, blood, explicit language, jealousy/possessiveness]

SUMMARY: Some guy won't stop texting you so Ed decides to take things into his hands. For better or worse, your problem is gone, well, permanently.

WORDCOUNT: ~ 1.4k

A/N: give "Hungry Like The Wolf" - Hidden Citizens, Tim Halperin a listen! Inspired by the weird DMs I've gotten on Reddit

Sender: lukas_d_gr8est@hotmail.com Subject: pls respond i'm sorry pls Message: i'm sorry pls give me a 2nd chance it was stupid to spam you god pls i will do anything for you pls text me back im sorry im so pathetic pls pls pls ill be better pls

Your frustrated groan pulled Ed away from his work.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?" he asked nervously. Ed may have appeared quite collected but in his frenzied mind, he was already playing out tragic scenarios in which you leave him. Everyone said that you were "settling" for him, so maybe you have finally believed them?

"A minor inconvenience, really," you answered with a sigh. "There's this guy, Luke, he's a friend of a friend and keeps asking me out." Ed's heart might have literally stopped at those words. He wasn't stupid, maybe naive at times, so he knew that other people would see that alluring perfection you had flowing through your veins - the same unholy particle that made him lose his mind completely and swear unwavering devotion to you. Sooner or later, someone was going to try to steal you from him and Ed was well aware of that. "I told him 'no' like hundreds of times and ended up blocking his number but he's like an actual cockroach! Like today, he spammed me with e-mails that basically boiled down to him having a meltdown over me dating some jerk and never giving the good guy a chance. He made up a whole scenario in which he's the victim and then got upset with me about it! Damn, I wish I had his mother's phone number so I could send her screenshots."

Ed struggled to swallow. His hand was gripping the pen tight enough to begin to shake. At that point he wasn't even angry - all reason had already left him and now his headspace was only filled with weirdly tranquil bloodthirst. At that moment, the entire world was but white noise, some static that distracted him from his goal. All possibilities for the murder were playing out in his head, a high-pitched ringing in his ears was the only sound he could hear. No one else could have you.

"I'm gonna take a nap," you announced suddenly. "You're welcome to join whenever you're finished."

He watched as you lay on his couch and pulled one of his jackets over your shoulders. For a moment he really did consider taking a break but Ed knew that there was a more pressing matter he had to tend to immediately.

For a man of his size, Ed expected Luke to be a little harder to take down and bind. The, theoretically speaking, hardest part of his plan, turned out to be greatly unexciting but maybe it was for the better - he will have more strength for the delicious main course.

"Before we get to the main event, let's play a little game, shall we?" Ed spoke while circling Luke who was taped to a chair. "I'll give you a riddle and you'll solve it. If you get it right, I'll kill you."

"And... if I don't?" the man asked. His voice was shaky, panic already gnawing at his reason. It seemed as if the longer he stared at the masked face, the less sane he became.

"I'll kill you too, only sooner. So, let's get to." Ed clapped his hands and rubbed them in excitement. "I am always near and never far. I am often avoided but always catch up. I will come when you're old and grey or maybe even the very next day. I come in many forms whether it's irony, love, laughter, or hate. I am everyone's final fate."

Luke stared at Ed in confusion, too terrified to even begin deciphering the riddle. His mind was more focused on delaying his upcoming death rather than on the words that had just left Ed's mouth. Aside from overwhelming fear, Luke's mind was completely blank.

"What the fuck, man?!" Luke yelled out desperately. It all seemed like a sick joke, something too demented to be the candid thoughts of a human being.

"Not even close, Luke." Ed shook his head. "Are you trying at all?! You can't be that stupid, come on!"

"Fuck, man, I don't know! Let me go, you psycho!"

"Luke, Luke, Luke... why are you making things hard for yourself? Would it hurt to finally use your brain after all those years?"

"Fuck you!" he yelled spitting out some blood. Ed really landed that hit with the bat.

A tense silence fell for a moment. It was probably that very moment, the calm quietness of the executioner, that made Luke realize his imminent fate. Ed admired the fear and resignation in the man's eyes.

"Fine."

Ed stretched out a long piece of silver tape and began taping around Luke's head, leaving only a small gap for the man's nostrils - if he died of asphyxiation, a little too fast for Ed's liking, the whole sentiment of the ordeal would have been lost.

Luke thrashed, at least as much as he could while being severely restrained. His frantic movements momentarily stopped as he heard the shriek of metal - a blade had either been pulled out or someone was sharpening it very slowly.

Without hesitation or fear, Ed stabbed Luke's abdomen. The man began thrashing again, only worsening his wound.

"You have to pay for what you've done, Luke. Those are the rules."

Blood gushed out of the open wound after Ed had taken the blade out. His hand trembled but not with fear, no - it was excitement, some primal passion for taking lives that fairly quickly pushed out his self-control.

When Ed raised his hand again, preparing for another blow, it was as if the world ceased to exist: it was only him, his blind range and the asshole that dared to try to steal something that belonged to Ed and Ed only.

Spiralling into ferocious, frenzied hunger, Ed began frantically stabbing Luke, his hand driving the blade inside the man's stomach only to pull it out right away. He was too far gone to even begin to realize that his arm was beginning to ache:

"You can't have her. You can never have her! No one can have her! I won't let you steal her away from me. She's mine, mine, mine!"

By the end of his tantrum, Luke's insides were already mush, stabbed into an impressionist's grotesque vision of entrails. There was blood on his clothes as well as little bits and pieces of Luke's organs. Justice was done, all that was left now was peace.

He was about to leave the condo, let life take its course but suddenly he remembered your words - that if you could, you would have sent Luke's mother evidence of her son's antics. Yes, he could do that for you...

Ed reached for the dead man's phone and used the corpse's still warm finger to unlock it. Having taken at least ten photographs, all at different angles to broaden their artistic scope, and then hit 'send'.

The heavy rain was thundering against the windows and so there was no point in Ed going out of his way to enter the apartment as quietly as he could. Nevertheless, he did his best. Peeking into the living room turned study, he saw you laying still on the couch - still asleep, covered with one of his jackets. Your face was so soft, so undisturbed. Exactly the way it should be.

Ed was happy to announce that the vermin was gone and he wasn't going to disturb you any longer. In fact, he was happy enough to be ready to wake you up the moment he came back home but he knew better - you needed some rest.

Carefully, not to wake you up, he removed the jacket you were sleeping under. Ed lay down on the couch with you, wrapping his arms tightly around you as if you were going to walk out the door any second. He listened to your steady, shallow breaths and calm heartbeat. You were there, with him, the only way it should ever be; the only way he'll allow it to be.

He was going to make you feel happy, proud and loved - even if it was the last thing he would do in his life.

[deniigi]

Hello! Just about to sit down and read your newest fic, so excited about it! I had a question for you (you very well may have answered this already, so sorry in advance!), but do you have advice for writing? Advice in terms of getting start, plotting out stories, helping get the creative juices flowing? I have all these ideas but seem to lack the drive to get things written out. I know the best advice is to just write, but I'm having a horrible time starting. What do you do in those moments?

Hello my dear!

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. The lord has blessed me with a head cold and ruined all my plans of productivity for the day, so I can finally answer this ask! I’ll talk a little bit about both how to get started with a story and then some little things that help me motivate myself.

I have started a tag for writing advice here: http://deniigi.tumblr.com/tagged/writing-advice

This is going to be a long post, sorry mobile users.

I am going to preface all of this with the understanding that I am technically a professional writer in terms of like, a handful of ways, but I have absolutely zero training in creative writing, so take everything I say with a grain of salt!

So, I personally find that, on the whole, that psychological hurdle of getting started comes a lot from the anticipation of the kind of response a story will get (how many hits, how many comments, how many kudos) in addition to a bit of anxiety or fear over  theloss of sustained interest in that story (by yourself and/or by your audience). I find that this can be alleviated by really, truly internalizing the understanding that you are allowed to write your work however you damn please, for whoever you damn please.

There will be work you write for others, and there will be work you write for yourself. Not all work needs to be published; sometimes, it is really nice to just write shit for yourself; it is a plus for humanity if you decide to share it with others, but you do not have to do that.

Furthermore, I would like to present you with this:

This is what my current folder for under fire looks like. And you might notice that there are almost always multiple drafts per chapter. Yes, I did in fact rewrite chapter four 5 fucking times, you bet your ass I did. And I’m not ashamed of it. I think the story is better for it. And that’s the important thing here: you do not need to produce a perfect draft the first time around. You will not produce that perfect draft. Accept this. Embrace this. Embrace it and your cat at the same time to really ingrain it as a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Liberate yourself from the pressure of needing to produce the perfect, most right draft and you may find starting the piece overall to be a much easier, more pleasant experience.

And along with this beautiful, uplifting spiritual advice, I also bring a practical thought: when it comes to getting started, a lot of times, people feel like they need to set the stage, yadda yadda yadda. Ha. No. Fuck that.

That’s a surefire way to bore the shit out of yourself. Start right in the middle of a scene that captivates you if that’s what you want to write. It’s a free platform. No one’s gonna arrest you if you stick Spiderman upside down in trash first thing. They might even applaud you actually, because you didn’t make them slog through some of that ‘It was the evening of the 25th and it was cold out in the streets” bullshit we all learned from Dickens.

Alright. Now let’s talk about actually getting started making words appear on paper.

So, from my knowledge there are generally two ways that folks write creatively. You have what I’m going to call the planners and then you what I’m going to call the monsters (I call them this entirely affectionately, I’m sure there’s a better word for these folks, but I don’t have it atm, all I have is a headcold). Planners are folks who sit down and work out their major plot points, who write outlines, and who create the scaffolding of their work before they set out on their magical journey. I think of these folks as architects.

And then you have the monsters and these are those fuckers who just sit down and write stream of consciously like the heathens all our high school teachers tried to teach us not to be.

I am both a planner and a monster. And a lot of that depends on the length of work I’m going for. I have never in my life planned a one-shot, for example. I just attack that as it is. I follow my heart, if you will. But when it comes to longer chaptered fics, I really do think that some outlining is super helpful.

You might find it useful for one-shots, though, I dunno. Maybe give it a try and see what happens?

The two main fics I’ve done proper outlines for are Inimitable and under fire and I actually find outlining to be immensely helpful in psyching me up to write the story (I go through and re-read my outlines when I start to lose interest or diverge too much from the plot outlined there in the actual writing. 9 times out of 10, re-reading gets me stupid excited to write all over again) and it also helps me keep momentum going throughout the plot.

Here’s a pic of some pages of under fire’s outline.

Physically writing the work is really important for me because it forces me to only put down key points/feelings/ideas I want to include, whereas typing gives me far too much room to get lost/distracted by extraneous detail. And since my handwriting is a teacher’s worst nightmare and I cross out shit and write huge with emotion, I’ll give you a little bit of what the middle page here says:

Miles-

there’s something thrumming

vibrating in his ears wherever he goes

-closes his eyes and somehow enters blackness- emptyness (Stranger Things style)

beat

beat

beat

“help.”

–BACK - everything is gone

closing his eyes doesn’t bring the space back

–it makes him panic. He doesn’t know why. His heart is pounding. He’s sweating He has a horrible feeling of doom.

beat

beat

beat

its gone.

he goes home anxiously. Pretends everything is normal.

his neck crawls

So basically it’s less of a formal outline and more of a collection of stream of consciousness feelings and screenplay directions which I’ll flesh out in the actual story.

Personally, I love writing these kinds of things because they get me pumped for the story I’m about to tell. I get to write out the key scenes and work through all the hard parts first, and then, while I’m writing, I work through the little fun details and banter and I have to write to figure out how we get from one scene to the next and I love the challenge of having to fit those pieces together. I very rarely stick strictly to my outline, (as anyone who is currently reading under fire can tell you right now), but I do try to stick to the main plot points in it and my writing is certainly better for it.

So yes. Outlining is very good, but it is even better when you do it to some kind of music. I listened to What’s Up Danger from the Into the Spiderverse soundtrack on repeat while I wrote this outline to kind of transfer some of the relentless pace conveyed in that song to the piece’s plot.

I highly recommend using music to set the mood of your piece while/before you write a piece of any length. It helps get you in the right headspace (excited or somber or angry) to write. You need emotion to write creatively. You can’t just make that happen sometimes; you need a little help.

A couple other things which might help:

1. Leave your house or the space you’re normally in. Go to a cafe and find a nice corner and have a think and a try in there. Sometimes moving to a different space helps you escape cyclical thinking patterns.

2. Write what you want to read. Don’t bother writing for other peoples’ interests; that’ll just bore the shit out of you all over again.

3. Find an atmospheric mood sound to listen to on Youtube or smth (I personally like Rain on a Car Windshield for slightly somber fics, but you might be into ocean storms or dripping caves or whatever).

4. Heat your feet. I don’t know why but I am entirely unproductive when my feet are cold. Maybe this one is me-specific, but whatevs. Heat the feets!

5. If you’re still having trouble just sitting down and pounding the story out, that’s okay! Maybe it’s not ready to be written yet. Maybe you’re not in the right headspace yet. Sometimes that’s just how it is. One story makes its way out in like, a hour, and the next one takes like, months to finally be written. We all work at different paces. We all write for different reasons.

It might help to figure out why you want to write a story before you write it. Like, if its for attention, it’s gonna be hard as hell. But if there’s an idea that you feel like is important or if there’s a mood you’re trying to work yourself into or out of, then that might be a little easier. For example, I wrote a piece called make it work which is about Fogs finding his motivation to be a lawyer and fight for justice when Kavanaugh was confirmed and I felt super helpless in the face of our present justice system. That story kind of wrote itself and it needed to be written, I feel, not just for me, but for others who were feeling just as helpless.

Writing is catharsis in that way. Maybe you just need to find out what you need to wring out of your soul.

Sorry that got very metaphysical. But I do want to stress that getting started and ending a story are the hardest parts of writing them, so you are definitely not alone if you feel like you’re ramming your head into a wall here.

I hope something here helps you, my dear!

[stringbenis]

NANCY DREW CW SEASON 2 SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!

Also heads up this is pretty negative and I’m in a weird headspace with this show and most of this is just me word vomiting.

Okay so that was a pretty fucking packed finale and I’m still sorting through my thoughts but I am going to tell u all what I will be very PISSED about if they write for next season:

1. If they kill George I am going to stop watching the show. Literally. Like if they kill George, I will be so beyond pissed that I will give up on the series, it makes me sick to think about.

2. If Bess isn’t reaccepted into the Marvin family I’m going to flip my shit. What the fuck were they thinking, introducing the only main gay character as someone looking for a family, she finds her actual family and they accept her for who she is, gayness and sordid history and all, aunt Diana LOVES her and Bess feels like she is home, like she has literally FOUND HER FAMILY, AND THEN U KICK HER OUT??? YOU HAVE THEM DISOWN HER???? AND THEN NONE OF HER FRIENDS SAY OUT LOUD TO HER AS SHE IS SOBBING ABOUT NOT HAVINFG A FAMILY NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM SAYS “Hey Bess! We are your family and we are here for you no matter what!” Seriously fuck you for that.

3. I love Ryan and I hate that I do, but I swear to god if they don’t fucking address the fact that he was a fucking child groomer for George. I don’t want him and Nick to be friends, I don’t want him to be the loveable himbo he is and I want age gaps like that to stop being normalized on this fucking show, they did it with George and Ryan, they did it with Nancy and Owen, and it makes me so fucking uncomfortable seeing girls on screen who are literally my age being paired with people that I would be so uncomfortable to be alone in a room with let alone DATE. So yeah, I will be severely pissed off if they pull anymore of that shit this coming season. I want to love Ryan so much, if I could just ignore what happened I would, but I need them to hold Ryan accountable for LITERAL CHILD GROOMING CAUSE GEORGE WAS SEVENTEEN WHAT THE FUCK AND WHY ARE HE AND NICK ALL BUDDY BUDDY THAT SHOULDNT BE A THING GOD IM SO FUCKING PISSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

4. I saw someone else say they felt like Temperance is going to crash Nick and George’s wedding and so help me god if the writer’s even TOUCH Nick and George’s wedding in any bad way I’m gonna March down to the CW offices and THROW FUCKING HANDS. You’ve put these two characters through enough LET THEM BE HAPPY!!!!!!!

5. I need better storylines for Bess and I don’t want her to be in a situation where a. Love is unattainable for her (Odette), b. She’s being controlled and forced to do things she would never do (whoever that one fucking guy was), or c. Her love interest mysteriously disappears from the show and we just never hear from her or about them again except for one comment on passing. Seriously, please treat ur only main gay character better I’m BEGGING you. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community it genuinely hurts me to watch how she is treated and not at all in the good kind of way. I am crying as I type this out and talk about it with my sister. Please let good things happen to Bess.

6. Please don’t make Val be a double crosser. Please don’t make the dark skinned black woman someone who the audience could easily hate. PLEASE.

7. I stg if they hurt Amanda Bobbsey, I will once again throw hands. I couldn’t give less of a flying fuck about Gil, but Amanda is perfect and has literally never done anything wrong. I love her. I would ship her and Ace so hard if I didn’t love Ace and Nancy so much. I want only good things for Amanda. Obviously her and Ace’s breakup will hurt her, THAT is allowed, but NOTHING past that, you hear me CW writers? NOTHING.

Okay that’s all I can think of right now. This show makes me so angry but I still really love it and I can’t exactly pinpoint as to why but I do. I want it to be good, I have hope for it but almost no faith in the CW. Sorry for the rant I just had to get all that off of my chest.