#thank you so much for the meme love 🙏🏼����

[turtletaubwrites]

Poor Law. I wonder what his chemical of choice is, because he for sure needs to take a chill pill, and lay in the dark after dealing with those idiots all day 😅

[champagnepadre]

i loved your blog so much during peak 1d days. your blog brought me so much joy all the best memes came from you 🥲. i hope you’re doing okay during this 💕💕

Thank u so much these messages mean de world to me cuz sometime I question who I was and am now and to see people still remember de way I made them feel or just how I made them laugh or smile makes me realize my purpose in dis life is to be myself and spread de love in me… thank u stranger im glad I was able to bring some joy to u and your younger self 🥹🥲💙💕💖💘💞💓💗💞💝☯️💜

Im doing de best i can, one day at a time my kid 🙏🏼🤍

[spiced-wine-fic]

Fic Authors Self-rec meme

Thank you dear @edgeoflight for mentioning me 🙏🏼

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love ❤

I don’t really have ‘favourite’ fics because I think of the series as one very long story, but there are fics I’ve enjoyed writing more than others. The reason isn’t because of the content; I enjoyed writing all of them but when I think back there is generally a ‘mood’ surrounding them, sometimes it can simply be how my life was at the time, or sometimes it’s more complex.

In no particular order: A Shadow Over Genesis

This is an extremely dark fic, but I enjoyed writing it because it allowed me to tell the backstory of a character who had been in the series since Magnificat III: Edenel, who was Élernil, Finwë’s twin. He was captured and taken to Utumno. Definitely not, as they used to say, for the faint of heart.  Summerland

 wrote this pretty much off the back of finishing reading @naryaflame’s superb The Ways of Paradox.

I was so inspired, and the title fit with that summer which was long and very warm, week after week, just idyllic English summer weather. I also (then) felt there was some hope in the treatment my mother was having. I often wrote when I was visiting her. Anyway, it was one of those times when you really feel in the ‘zone’. It was also the beginning of our multiverse. 

A Far, Fierce Sky

 haven’t in fact finished this, though I have written 51 chapters and it is over 250,000 words (and I do know the ending!) At the time, I was also working on Magnificat and suddenly my life became too busy to write two big series in tandem so something had to give.  I was determined to finish the Dark Prince/Magnificat and had put much more work into it, so I chose that and sidelined this.

It’s the sequel to A Light in the East and so an AU or my AU’s. One of the things I tremendously enjoyed was writing Sauron and Vanimöré and their incredibly complicated relationship. Also it was mostly set in Mordor and Khand and I so much enjoyed the worldbuilding. I also loved creating OC’s from Khand.  (Who’ve gone on to be written by @annellspethraven in her and Sona’s megafic At The Edge of Lasg’len)

Magnificat of the Damned Book IV: Anvil.

While this seemed to be the most difficult fic to write, it was really because it was building toward Dagor Dagorath and an ending of the Magnificat series — not a complete slam-the-door ending but since I knew what would happen I almost didn’t want to finish it. Yet I did enjoy it; it sewed other seeds (It was the first time I had written Eru as a character rather than an idea). Some things were revealed that had their roots in far earlier stories and the comments I received for the last chapter were such a relief as I’d not been sure I could pull something that huge off. I wrote it anyway.

Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Summerland Again

Oddly enough I began this in a spirit of defiance and it encompassed my mother’s death and my walking away from a toxic online acquaintanceship. Writing this helped with both the grief of the first and the fury of the latter. 

In fact all the Stormbringers Trilogy, of which this is the first fic, were enormously helpful to my mental health at the time,

I was allowed to borrow some of Narya’s wonderful OC’s, and use some of my own, as it is modern-day multiverse (an AU of our main Summerland series) Far Right thugs getting satisfactorily killed, an avatar of Eru, Eru himself in the modern world as well as Sauron and Maglor, a haunted house, hitmen, MI6, other realities. I really enjoyed writing it :) 

Well, I don’t know who’s done this as I’ve seen this going around for a while, so I’ll tag @naryaflame, @pinksiamese, @nuredhel @noldorin-smith @jane-ways @lucifers-cuvette @awesome-bluehair-universe @swanfloatieknight @nocompromise-noregrets @gellalaer, @cuarthol, @antares0606 @auntieaugury @sedailanderekaden @minquelie @thisshadowprevails @thescrapwitch

That’s more than five I’m sorry. No pressure, and if anyone sees this who hasn’t done it, please feel free :)

[askisaacforgemaster]

I’m so sorry,I know it’s really late at night or morning for all of you.

A Post Like This… has been on my mind for a while now,

I am here to say I want to thank you all for such a great time here on tumblr.

For other blogs that I enjoy asks & roleplay if with:

@askvladdraculatepes —- Thank you for actually getting me started. Their /Your/ blogs are so so awesome. I love the way you answer questions and write. The Art for sprites//works on the side are gorgeous.🥹 Keep up the good work :)

@asklisafromlupu - I love your Lisa so so so much. Your artwork is adorable and good too.Seriously mine are soo bad. Leave me to memes and collages lol 😂. Back to you, thank you for finding time with Isaac and creek’s Hector. ☺️

@forgemastery —- Thank you for Bringing Isaac and Hector together. Seriously I am really grateful that we have them where they are now 🖤🩵💙❤️‍🔥❤️🧡🖤

@story-of-evil —- Thanks for enjoying my writing. I feel like I am a bit strange and odd for the way I write stuffs. 🙃 Isaac sure is my boy though.

@asksyphabelnades-belmont —- I apologize for not going anywhere further with what we started. Let me know if we can start something else again later on. Sypha is great 👍.

Good for Asking Questions:

@flame-bloom —- your questions are always unique and fun thank you 🙏🏼.

@theclairvoyantviolet —- your asks are always so respectful and thoughtful to the Sir Forgemaster. I love it 🥰

@blurree-face —- I want to thank you for your questions too.

Mun: -🦝💜chant_ari💜🐼

P.S. I still have @askcountsaintinsane & @viktorclaegcausey too

[okamirayne]

Hi Rayne!

I’m a longtime fan (I read BtB when you were releasing OtC).

I just wanted to pop by as I’m doing my regular reread of the series, which is a habit I reserve for my most favourite books, and say hi and check in on you.

How are you? And (no pressure at all) how are you getting on with your original works? I look forward to the day I can read more of your wonderful writing. I’ve seen your updates on burnout and I don’t think this will help much but I want you to know you have a loyal fan in me who would enjoy and applaud anything that you write. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the year and festive season if you celebrate!

Hello, my dear Anon!💜

I’m a longtime fan (I read BtB when you were releasing OtC).

Oh wow! That's just so awesome. Thank you so much for the love you've shown the series. I'm so ridiculously touched that you return to enjoy the BtB madness and that it ranks among the stories you revisit. So, so happy and insanely chuffed to hear this. 💜💜💜

[..] say hi and check in on you.

How are you? And (no pressure at all) how are you getting on with your original works?

...there is a picture somewhere (a meme) of what looks like a hedgehog losing it's shit...*searches for it*

This, presently, is me. I am this spiky little ball of hot ballistic head injury waiting to happen.

Slightly more realistic representation:

Not sure whether that answers your question, my luv. 😅

My idiocy aside, it's so very sweet of you to check in. Thank you 🙏🏼 💗💜 I'm sadly still muscling my way through the shitshow that is creative burnout and trying to put out a few personal dumpster fires. My recent return to the BtB series has been an attempt to reconnect myself to my creativity...

I've been eyeing HHU for a few weeks now...

I’m considering flexing the atrophied muscle of my writer's brain by working a little on this BtB instalment, just to see if it gets the vital life-giving creative blood flowing again...

My original works remain preserved in a freeze-frame -- not abandoned, just locked behind a bloody glass wall (hence 'holding the wall and screaming'). My poor OCs are a collective entity, sitting with their chins in hand, eyeing me from beneath heavy lids, eyebrows cocked, waiting for me to come alive again.

And messages like yours?

They're a life-giving shot. Hugely nourishing to that deeply sad and starved part of me.

Thank you. 💕💜💕

Seriously. My earlier humour aside, your message has found me grasping another life-line of hope, and another reminder why I will not give this up - Screaming Hedgehog will prevail.

I’ve seen your updates on burnout and I don’t think this will help much [...]

Oh my dear, sweet, humble, beautifully kind, Anon -- how profoundly wrong you are about that, my friend. 🥹 You could not be further from the truth.

[...] but I want you to know you have a loyal fan in me who would enjoy and applaud anything that you write.

*hears her own heart break -- in the best way* 💔💔❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

Anon...This message from you impacts me in ways that, as usual, I fail to be able to communicate in words. I might be able to choreograph it in some dynamic form of hug/glomp/undying-embrace, from which you might not be able to extricate yourself without a tasergun (or tea, I'll take the carrot over the stick). But please, PLEASE, know that by reaching out to leave me this message, what you've done does WAY more than help. It heals. It hits. Hard. Right in the heart. And I clearly need that.

🤔 I recognise that doesn't make much sense, but it helps to remember why it hurts so damned badly not to be writing, otherwise I numb out, and that's devastingly worse than feeling the bottomless sadness. Your message lets me access that, which then lets me access the deep joy, gratitude, and encouragement which comes from hearing that my particular strain of storytelling madness is still wanted, still desired, even after so much time has passed since I last wrote...

I never assume this.

Christ, it's a fear that haunts me at every turn, so to have some of that demonically painful terror exorcised by your beautiful message goes waaaaay WAAAAY beyond helpful. Please don't ever doubt the power your words have had or how deep they reach. I'm talking deep deep roots here. My appreciation is boundless.

Thank you. 💕💜💕

I wish you a generously blessed rest of the year, Anon, however you do your wintering, festive or not, I hope it's fun and fulfilling🌟. Thank you also for your warm wishes! Yes, I usually celebrate, though this year will be a more subdued time due to a personal loss; that said, I will embrace all good tidings for the season of giving -- starting with this beautiful message from you. 💕

[marypsue]

don’t let the sun go down on me continues to live in my head rent free so any DVD commentary of that you can spare would be much appreciated 🙏🏼

[from this meme]

Thank you very much!

don't let the sun go down on me

Before I start, I have to thank @trulyalpha / scoutshonour's we have the time, the inspiration, the blueprint, the OG Steve/Nancy/Jonathan vampire fic. Without it, this one wouldn't exist.

"Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" is an Elton John song, but the place I first encountered it (and what I was thinking of when I used it for this fic) was Roger Daltrey's cover for The Lost Boys. So. There's that.

The first chapter was written and posted in a feverish haze in June of 2021. It was meant to be a one-shot; I never had any plans to continue it. And then in 2022 Season 4 came out and while I'm generally not impressed with it, I got absolutely obsessed with the idea of vampire trueforms modelled off the Vecna design and things...escalated quickly.

Chapter One

One of the best pieces of advice that I ever received about writing was that the story starts so much later than you often think it does. Especially when I'm writing oneshots, I try to cut right to the the part where the story I actually want to tell starts. In this case, there's a whole leadup of Steve hearing or seeing something in the woods and going to investigate and discovering a monster and some kids seemingly being menaced by the monster and going to the rescue and a whole fight scene that I decided I didn't want to write, because the story was about Nancy and Jonathan being vampires and Steve falling in love with both of them. And honestly, I don't feel like the story is lacking for not having that monster fight in it. A few sprinklings of exposition in the narration and dialogue takes care of it quite nicely.

I love giving vampires eyeshine.

Sometimes, it takes Steve an eternity to understand how things fit together. And then, sometimes, his brain makes lightning-fast connections between random things without his even asking it to. 

Steve Harrington ADHD. I don't care what the show says. It just makes sense.

(On an unrelated note, OG Season 3 Robin Buckley also ADHD. I am getting off the soapbox now.)

“That’s my kid sister.”

There are two aspects of Jonathan Byers' character that felt indelibly important to me to preserve even in an AU: he is a big brother, and he is deeply protective of and materially supportive of Joyce. Turning her from his mom into his little sister kept both of those things intact even with the change in timelines. I felt particularly proud of this one.

...and wow, there is something about her saying his name with blood all over her face that Steve is going to just pack away in the back of his mind for later.

It was very important to me and to making this whole thing work that Steve is just wildly, unabashedly, maybe a little bit confusedly but totally wholeheartedly horny for the whole vampire deal. He's discovering so many new things about himself over the course of this fic, and a fetish for fangs is just part of the package deal.

He doesn’t want to be a vampire. There are probably a lot of very good reasons for that, and the fact that the only one coming to his stunned mind is that vampires probably don’t get basketball scholarships means nothing.

This just made me laugh when I thought of it.

“Oh shit, is it bad?” Steve turns to look at Jonathan. He sounds like he’s less likely to try to sugar-coat it. “It sounds like it’s bad. ..."

"Son of a bitch, Lucas, is it bad?!"

The whole idea of vampire thralls and Steve maybe becoming one was something that was on my mind throughout the rising action in we have the time, but never came up in that fic. I wanted to dig into the concept, and also, it seemed like a good excuse to force Nancy and Jonathan to have to pull Steve into their investigation of the events of Season 1.

Nancy and Jonathan basically forgetting Steve's there so they can rehash an old argument (and also drop some exposition because I'd never expected to continue this fic but I had backstory I wanted to sneak in) is so funny to me, one of the ways I wanted to show they were an established established (read: old married) couple, and also quite possibly the moment Steve fell helplessly head over heels for both of them.

His mom’s sleeping with Prince Valium tonight

Lifted this line from Beetlejuice because I think it's criminally underrated. Also because, as I mentioned in my other post, my go-to characterisation for Steve's mom is just Delia Deetz. Also, also, it unintentionally became good foreshadowing.

Just because he keeps deciding to do what he thinks will make the prettiest girl alive happy – Oh. Shit. She’s not alive, though. Is she.

When I first started writing this, I had Steve referring to Nancy as 'the prettiest girl in the world' before he knew her name. And then I realised I could do this if I made one little change.

Jesus. Steve hadn’t even asked if they kill people. 

Yeah, I don't think he ever actually does end up asking that.

Chapter Two

As mentioned above, in about September 2022 the bug bit me hard and I resurrected this fic from the dead, with 'vampires, but make it Vecna-inspired and explicitly Upside-Down-related' on my mind and a half-formed thought about a murder mystery. I thought this fic had maybe three chapters in it, total, counting the original oneshot. I thought it would be quick and easy to wrap up. Hahahahahaha.

I did actually start writing this chapter back when I wrote the original oneshot - the scene where Steve finds the obits at the library, specifically up to the part where he's looking at Nancy and Jonathan's yearbook photos, was written in 2021. I decided to cut off the fic the night of Nancy and Jonathan's visit because I didn't have a direction to go in to continue it, and it felt like a complete thought. Also, I was only adding onto it because I wanted the mental image of Nancy and Jonathan in fifties styles.

And then, in 2022, I stumbled upon a direction to go in to continue it.

"...Why am I out in the woods at night with a bobby soxer who wears a virgin pin?”

Shoutout to @marzipanandminutiae who was talking about fashion history and popular fashion myths, and brought to my attention both the fad of circle pins for girls in the fifties and the myth that wearing them on one or the other side of your cardigan meant that you had or hadn't had sex / whether you would have sex. Fearmongering about silly teenage accessory trends having to do with secret sex signals didn't start in my youth, apparently. (Anybody remember jelly bracelets? I was a full adult before I found out those were supposed to be a kind of playground handkerchief code.)

I looooove writing ominous horror scenes where Something Bad Is Lurking and the characters are starting to realise it too but they will not know until it's too late. New favourite thing. Love tension. Love when everybody's thinking the same thing but nobody dares to come right out and say it.

You heard Chief Keller.

Yes, I have been watching Riverdale in fascinated horror. It's just...it's so audaciously bonkers. And so fully committed - at least for the episode or two each of them lasts - to its bits. I have to respect that. And it makes me feel sooooooo good about my plotting and pacing capabilities.

(Also, Chad Michael Murray giving an actually pretty thoughtful and nuanced performance as a charismatic high-control group leader, only to throw it all out the window when he got told 'oh btw your character dies next episode' and start gnawing through backdrops like the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar while doing three costume changes in two scenes and then trying to Evel Knievel his way off a building in a homemade rocket only to get unceremoniously and undramatically shot dead offscreen, not even by a main character, is something I never knew I needed in my life. This show makes so many choices and all of them make me want to take the tops off the writers' heads and dissect their brains.

But I digress.)

Usually when he’s on the receiving end of that stare, Hopper’s digging for something to tie him to anything from the giant GO TIGERS spraypainted across the courthouse to the beer cans and partygoers hastily hidden all over the house behind him to the rotten eggs splattered all over the side of a police cruiser, and the best course of action is to look wide-eyed and innocent and only say ‘No, chief, I have no idea about that’.

Just given who they are and what their respective roles in the community have been up until this point, there is a deep, rich vein of hilarity in Hopper and Steve both ending up in the Upside Down crew (I'm still pushing for 'fellowship' to refer to everyone who Knows, it's thematically and textually appropriate!) that has yet to be mined.

Happened the same year they opened up that lab south of town.

I'll be honest, I avoided saying much about how the events of canon went down in this 'verse on purpose. Partly because it's Season 1 and our POV character is Steve, who never gets told anything until it's much, much too late, but also partly because I didn't finish Season 4 and don't care enough to seek out spoilers to know what happened. And I think that what Season 4 tries to establish as Lore could have some serious bearing on what would make sense for the backstory to the canon events in this story. So. Please fill in the gaps as appropriate.

Steve drums both hands against the desk, and the librarian gives him a flat, unimpressed look that’s almost the twin of the one Hopper gave him in the reading room. Apparently he just has this effect on adults.

Steve Harrington ADHD.

Jonathan’s so busy sawing at the last of the vines still wrapped around Nancy’s ankle that he doesn’t notice the thick central stalk of the plant…thing pushing back up through the crumbling ground behind him.

I wrote a post about this and now tumblr won't let me find in search on my blog, because it won't show me basically any original posts I made between about June of last year and now in search on my blog, for some fucking reason. But. The way I conceptualised it is that this thing Nancy and Jonathan fought is the most stripped-down, basic trueform of a vampire in this 'verse. The two of them got infected while they were fighting it. Basically it planted seeds or spores or whatever it uses to reproduce into their bodies, and then grew throughout those bodies, intertwining its central stalk with their spines and its vines with their nervous systems so it could animate the bodies even after its intrusion killed them. Jonathan and Nancy both still have intact (or mostly-intact) brains, intact senses of self and memories. But they've also got new biological needs and new, compelling instincts that can overtake their higher brain functions in the right circumstances. And if you stripped away all the meat and muscle, you'd find something that looks an awful lot like this evil plant that tried to eat them growing on a trellis made out of their bones.

Vampires in this 'verse are a kind of parasitic fungus. (Which is also why ingesting their blood can affect the behaviours and brain functions of other people, and even make others like them.) I think this is the coolest shit and I will not stop talking about it. That is all.

(Also. Steve's still hot and bothered about it. That's important too.)

Nancy’s not sure how long they sit there, together, clutching each other and just trying to breathe.

Neither Nancy or Jonathan can see much of what's going on around them at this point, so I'm pretty sure this is where Brad found them. And how Brad found them.

Nicole’s not bad-looking, and she’s a fun time at parties even if she is kind of a nerd. And they’re both single right now. Steve’s not sure why he suddenly wants to pull away.

It's because you're already hopelessly in love with two other people. Hope that helps.

I can kind of understand how and why the fandom sort of collectively forgets Fred existed. I wouldn't say he was the biggest standout of Season 4's crop of cannon fodder for me, either. But you show me a weedy little nerd of a character who's using a prickly sarcastic sense of humour to deflect from a truly monstrous baggage of survivor's guilt and blame around unintentionally hurting someone he cared about in a way that can't ever be ameliorated or forgiven, and then be like 'yeah everybody in-canon and in the fandom kinda forgot about him lmao', and. Well. Now I gotta do something meaningful with him. I gotta.

Also, he made a good red herring suspect.

He thinks about Nancy’s apologetic smile as she said she thought she’d enthralled him, about how Jonathan had said or you’d lose your mind, and wonders, for the first time, how they know.

I also got to this plot point by writing Nancy and Jonathan's turning, stopping, realising they would not know any other vampires, and wondering, myself, how they heck they'd know all that stuff about blood and thralls. The answer that presented itself was: firsthand.

When she tries to raise her arms, to pull away the covers that have somehow gotten wrapped over her face, she bumps into something flat and cold and solid barely a few inches above her.

I learned after writing this that apparently the fridges in a morgue are like one big open space with all the rolling trays sliding back into it, not like a narrow slot for each tray with top, bottom, and sides. Oh well.

Nancy pulls the letterman jacket she’d been wearing from the plastic bag full of her clothes that they’d found in the trash. Her expression is mournful, almost stricken, as she takes in the ragged slashes torn through the leather of the sleeves, the frankly astonishing size of the rusty red-brown stain surrounding a single puncture in the back. It makes the tiger applique look like its snarling mouth has just taken a bite out of some fresh prey.

Have I mentioned lately that I love heavy-handed visual symbolism?

...the dingy little trailer he calls home.

Okay, so in the fifties, as I found out after I'd finished writing this, the mobile home park was still more in the 'new and exciting' category than what it would have been in the eighties. Think less Trailer Park Boys and more tiny home. However. I did not do extensive research before writing this, because I was most interested in the vampire part. And it seems to me that the kinds of people buying or renting holiday trailers to live in year-round would still have been people who thought it made more financial sense than buying a permanent building. It's also possible that Jonathan and Joyce's family were in a better position at the time they moved in than the one they're in as of this fic.

It’s been made clear to Steve on multiple occasions that one of the few rules he actually has to follow in this house is don’t bother your father when he’s in his office. 

I talked a lot about what I think of Steve and his parents and their relationship and how a lot of it boils down to 'they're rich and self-centred and they're raising him the same way'. This is part of that - Steve's internalised that there are some rules that apply to him, and some that don't, and that that's just how things work, some rules apply to some people and not to others, some rules don't matter and some rules do, and it's all a matter of whether someone more powerful than you will punish you if you get caught breaking them. It seems consistent with his Season 1 characterisation, and also, it's some foreshadowing, in that it shows how the person who taught him this thinks.

Everybody knew old Gower drank like a fish.

Yeah, this name was lifted from It's A Wonderful Life. It's not actually relevant to the story, just a fun fact.

She can feel the tension in Jonathan’s arms, before she lets go. But he doesn’t raise them again. Trusting her completely.

...

Nancy doesn’t resist. She doesn’t protest. She just lets Jonathan pull her away from civilisation and deeper into the woods. Trusting him completely.

Parallel presented without comment.

“You didn’t tell me you dated my dad.”

...

“In Dracula. The vampire’s servant is named -”

...

"And from how you both apparently think humans are just here for you both to mess around with ..."

So, in case it's not clear (because Steve hasn't realised it yet, so it's deliberately oblique), this whole fight is actually about him feeling envious over Nancy and Jonathan's relationship, and between the two of them together and finding out about Fred and about Nancy dating his dad, feeling like he's not actually important to them in the way he'd kind of let himself think he was, but only one in a string of people they've used and abandoned. Steve's feeling like he cares way more about them than they do about him, and also maybe he's a little scared by how much he already cares about them. And also he doesn't have the emotional intelligence to identify correctly how he's feeling and why, so he takes it out on them both.

This is not a recommended course of action for dealing with monsters than can tear you open as soon as look at you, by the way.

“Steve,” Nancy says, like Steve’s a dog who’s just pissed on the rug.

He is really not feeling valued in this relationship, folks.

Also, like in canon, Jonathan will take anything mean anybody says about or to him. But the instant you drag his family into it, it's game over.

She only lives – her family’s house is ...

I made the same mistake Nancy does, went to correct it, and then went, 'ohhhHHHHHHHH'.

Chapter Three

I really, honestly did think this was going to be the final chapter of this fic when I started writing it.

I like Tommy and Carol because like. They're not evil, they're just high school evil. I like them best as people who genuinely like and care about each other (and Steve), who just have absolutely no idea how to express that in a positive way without the forces of high school social politics dictating how they interact with each other. Likewise, I think Tommy both looks up to Steve and resents the fact that he's second to Steve, and is always looking for little opportunities to both impress and one-up Steve. (Which is part of why he's second to Steve - because he's too obvious about how much he cares. High school, man.)

Except. He’d been so angry when he’d thought Jonathan was a murderer. Like Jonathan had personally betrayed him. Steve’s not sure what that means. If it means anything. He’s not sure he wants to think too much about it.

Some fics I write are about the slow development of feelings between characters. Not this one. Steve caught feelings before the story even started, and the rest is just him slowly realising that that's happened.

Trying to lay seeds of evidence for the solution to the murder plot while misdirecting readers away from where they're actually supposed to point is hard, but also so much fun. I tried to make each of my clues, independently, be something that could point in two or more directions. So, for example, Fred's notebook with his evidence that there was foul play in Nancy's death being missing after the crash points toward his accident being intentional, and the actual murderer trying to suppress the evidence, but it doesn't point to one specific suspect. Personally, I thought it suggested the lab most strongly. But when you put it all of the evidence together, you start to see that some of those alternate options cancel each other out, which leaves only the one, true murderer right in the crosshairs.

It's a technique I'm going to be carrying forward in my plotting in the future. After all, when you boil them down, most stories are, at heart, either a mystery or a romance. And romances are a kind of mystery, because you need to be leaving and developing clues about why these people like each other, and -

Anyway.

“Nance. It’s okay. It’s been thirty years. I’ve made my peace with it. I’m dead.”

I love Jonathan 'resigning myself to it so I don't have to hope for anything because hoping for something and (inevitably) not getting it would break me in half and somebody in this family(/relationship) has to be The Strong Reliable Okay One' Byers and love and consideration breaking down his shitty coping mechanisms so much. I also love undead characters being matter-of-fact about not being human when it clearly bothers them more than they want anyone to know. Two great tastes that taste great together.

And tried not to think too hard about the last time he’d had a girl who wasn’t Carol up here.

Steve: it's not weird that I'm thinking about sex while I'm inviting Jonathan and Nancy into my bedroom. Nancy's here and I'm in love with her. So it's not weird.

Steve straightened up and turned around with it in hand, only to catch both Nancy and Jonathan watching him intently. “What?”

They were both staring at his ass while he was bent over with his back to them, here.

(That's not a joke, that's actually what I was going for.)

"... You, obviously, and Brad, and Chief Keller, and anybody they might’ve told about it, I guess…”

Another thing about laying clues - it's good if they can have more than one logical interpretation, because then you can have your characters put the pieces together and move forward based on entirely the wrong logical interpretation, and then your characters don't look stupid or oblivious. (Unless, of course, that's what you want.) But, it's also good to keep bringing up the actual right answer to the mystery in conjunction with those clues. Not so much that it's obvious. Just enough so that the actual solution is kept in the reader's mind, so when the big reveal comes they're not going 'wait, who? What? Why? Where did he come from?', but 'OOOOOOHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhh.'

Did I get this in this fic? That is for you to tell me. But that's what I was going for.

He was interrupted by a choked noise from Jonathan, and a disbelieving, “Chief Hopper? Chief Jim Hopper?” from Nancy.

I just think that characters having different perspectives on each other is a rich vein to be mined for characterisation and also for hilarity. And also the idea of these two being older teenagers when Hopper was in middle school just demanded to be brought up.

And since when does Steve care so much about what Jonathan thinks of him, anyway?

He is so stupid (affectionate).

“- said they lost the bodies, Joyce! Lost them! ..."

This fic was specifically about Steve and Nancy and Jonathan, and in Steve's POV, so I didn't really get to get into the other two parallel storylines. But I did want to give a sense that they were going on, and also a glimpse at what was going on in them. It's one of my favourite things about Season 1.

“This isn’t funny, kid. What, is Bill Hagan’s boy in the bushes with a video camera? ..."

Every interaction Hopper and Steve have ever had before today makes it absolutely reasonable for Hopper to come to the conclusion that Steve is playing a cruel practical joke! He's wrong, we as readers know he's wrong, but he doesn't have the luxury of our perspective on Steve and it makes sense for him to think it! I just love it when characters have impressions and perspectives of each other that are shaped by their experiences with each other, and are necessarily incomplete, biased, influenced by their own prior experiences, and not the same as the impression or perspective the reader has! It makes characters feel whole and distinct from each other and human, to me!

"... I mean, you are vampires. I still don’t even know what you eat.”

Oh, he did ask! I'd forgotten. Would've been in character for him to just conveniently forget, though.

... Steve’s sure would have had the neighbours calling in yet another noise complaint if they weren’t in Bermuda...

I love a good foreshadowing, don't you?

“You can’t be Mike,” she’s insisting, in the face of all the evidence. “Last time I saw Mike, he was just two years old.” “So was Will, Nancy,” Jonathan says, so gently. It’s sweet how hard he’s trying not to laugh. “No. It has not been ten years since the last time we were here. That can’t possibly be right.”

This, unfortunately, is just what being an adult is like.

He doesn’t even really understand what’s going on. Something about making a sensory deprivation tank, or maybe a battery? The kids had all kind of been talking over each other when they tried to explain. But apparently, this pool full of body temperature water and road salt is supposed to help them find Will Byers. Somehow.

Is it really even the season's big group DIY project if Steve Harrington doesn't not fully understand what's going on?

“The way I lost it on Steve, the other night,” Jonathan says, flatly. “That’s not – he’s a complete stranger, he shouldn’t have been able to get to me like that. I shouldn’t have let him get to me like that. And you, nearly turning him -”

Jonathan Byers: The only possible explanation for how crazy we've both been acting over Steve is interdimensional interference. The only possible explanation.

If these three could communicate with each other for five minutes and all get on the same page, there would have been no story.

Steve is so hot for everything inhuman about Nancy and Jonathan that it's almost embarrassing and I love that for him.

Were Nancy and Jonathan not sure about how to get into the lab because I wasn't sure how to get them into the lab? I'll never tell, and I'm sure you'll never guess.

Nancy and Steve calling each other 'Nicole' and 'Brad' in their fake fight was unreasonably funny to me. Actually, the whole fake fight was so much fun to write. I considered cutting it, because I'm not sure it adds anything to the story as a whole, but...well, this is fan fiction. Also, I wanted to give Steve a chance for his strengths to shine and to save the day in front of the two people he most wants to impress. He was angling hard to get himself and Nancy taken inside so he could 'call his dad'. And it almost worked, too.

That warm, wet something trickling down Steve’s forehead chooses that moment to drip into his eyelashes, sticking them together for a moment.

We all got that Steve realised he was bleeding and that Jonathan was injured and likely to attack him over it, and then went over to try to help Jonathan anyway, yes?

Something moves under Steve’s fingers, those black veins shifting in Jonathan’s throat like living things, and Steve has to swallow down bile. 

Parasitic fungus!

There’s no emotion Steve can discern in Jonathan’s voice at all as he says, “I’ll kill you.” Steve has maybe never thought so fast before in his life. “Like Nancy with the dog,” he says, and Jonathan lets out a shuddering exhale.

Jonathan's trying his hardest to scare Steve off for his own safety, make Steve think he's threatening him, but Steve stops and thinks about it first, unlike when he jumped to the conclusion that Jonathan was a murderer, and - correctly - identifies it as a statement of fact. That Jonathan won't be able to help himself, because he's injured badly and needs blood. I figured this whole interaction was the moment Jonathan finally mentally went aw, shit, I'm in love with this stupid stubborn asshole.

“You’re not really much of a killer, man.”

Specifically, this exact moment, when Steve completely backtracks on everything he'd said the previous night about Jonathan being a murderer and places his life entirely into Jonathan's hands.

It's not really all that much like what he’d imagined, the other night, with his hand down his boxers. But fuck if it isn’t still lighting up those crossed wires in Steve’s head like the Fourth of fucking July.

The older I get, the less I'm interested in vampire bites ~not really hurting at all~ and ~inducing euphoric bliss~ and the more I'm interested in the people on the receiving end of vampire bites just being huge fucking masochists.

And he knows he’s never seen her with that dead-eyed, monstrous face on before. Steve’s dick does its level best to give an interested twitch about it.

In The Lost Boys, the only vampire/half-vampire who we don't get to see with monstrous, freaky vampface on is the female love interest. I think this rather denotes a lack of courage.

Chapter Four

I wrote pretty much all of chapters four and five as one piece, and then waffled over whether to split them into two. I even polled he studio audience here on tumblr (though not actually with a poll because I was late to get polls). I'm pretty sure the result was 'one big-ass long chapter please'. And then I went ahead and split it into two anyway.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling, having somebody else, somebody he’s made a practical career out of lying to, invent him such a plausible alibi without any input from him.

The thing is, while the perception of Steve that Hopper has from seventeenish years of shenanigans is incomplete, it's also not wrong. It is a spooky feeling to know you've been perceived, and with more recognition and understanding than you'd realised, but the person doing the perceiving still doesn't like you.

They’re both making their arguments like they’re concerned for Steve. But Steve, slumped in the backseat, resting his aching head against the cool glass of the rattling window, knows them both well enough to know that what they’re really fighting about is his dad’s fucking around. He’s heard them make the exact same arguments, in almost the exact same words, about who’s going to stay home and take care of his dad’s tropical fish.

Tell me you had a kid when you should have gotten a dog (okay, well, maybe you also shouldn't have gotten a dog) without telling me...

"...The things we do for our ungrateful kids, huh?” Hopper’s eyes narrow, a little.

If you can't tell that Jim Hopper would cheerfully strangle this man in cold blood and broad daylight just to have a chance to get stuck staying home with his concussed kid, then I haven't done my job.

“You’re lucky to be alive, asshole,” Carol agrees. Steve can’t explain why his chest suddenly feels so hollow.

...

“And thanks for saving my life or whatever, I guess.”

...

It hurts more if Steve presses his fingers against the bandage just over where the bite mark’s trying to scab closed.

I spent a lot of time wallowing in the sense of missed opportunities and squandered chances that leads Steve to take some stupid, risky chances - like, for example, confronting somebody he thinks is a murderer to his face. He's clearly missing Nancy and Jonathan, and feeling like he's missed his one chance with the both of them even though he'd never put it into words like that at this point, but also - he's trapped in the house with people who genuinely don't care enough whether he lives or dies to worry about him for his own sake, and feeling like maybe he doesn't, either. He was ready and willing to die happy in the woods that night, and now he's been denied that, and he's staring down the barrel of up to eighty more years of just the same mundane tedium and catty, shallow relationships and bullshit.

I had to raise the temperature slowly to a boil, to get this boy ready to do something drastic, and it's one of my favourite parts of this fic.

The lady at the ticket window tells him that with the Greyhound drivers’ strike, she can’t guarantee he’ll get to wherever he’s going when he wants to be there.

I found out about the Greyhound strike in the 80s when I was doing a little googling to figure out how likely it'd be for them to have a route that'd take Steve out to Pennhurst, and absolutely had to toss it in. For historical flavour, and to hammer home the sense of isolation and futility. It just dovetailed so nicely.

She looks over Steve’s shoulder, at the woman who’d reached for him, and smiles warmly, though there’s still steel in her voice as she says, “And you’d do well to remember you’re a guest in his house. Evelyn, stop trying to mooch cigarettes off the visitors, you and I both know the doctor doesn’t want you to have them.”

'Spooky scary asylum inmates' is a shitty trope that sucks. Steve absolutely 100% would have no other schema for mental illness, though. I tried to thread that needle by having him react initially with horror to the weird, strange, freaky behaviour of the inmates, and then recontextualise that behaviour as like. yeah she just wants to bum a cigarette. what's your problem. Also to keep reminding Steve that hey, you were like three drops of blood away from being in that exact same position, and your future health and sanity is Not Guaranteed. Not sure how much any of that succeeded but. There was only so much lipstick I was gonna be able to put on that pig.

Why Steve can’t just leave it alone. His life is better, they chorus in the theatre of his imagination, if he just shuts up and keeps his head down and pretends not to notice or care like the coward he is.

There is a question that the show raises and that I think this fic is asking, which is, was Steve always the kind of guy who'd go running to the rescue with a bat when it came down to the wire and people's lives were on the line, no questions asked, or did he need Nancy's influence to let him become that? And the answer is yes. I do like how in canon it's Tommy's goading about how Steve always runs away that ends up getting him to go face his fuckups and his fears. How it's his old friends, being their shitty selves, who help move him toward becoming a better version of himself. I have several emotions and none of them are coherent.

“Hey, I’ve got to get going, I was really just passing by – but when Jonathan comes back, let him know I was looking for him? That I wanna talk to him? Or Nancy, if you see her.”

In my original draft, Steve came straight home from Pennhurst and went and confronted his dad. (Well, okay, he had dinner first.) And then I realised there was no reason for Nancy and Jonathan to break their 'we're going to stay away from Steve so maybe we don't accidentally murder him for real this time' streak, and they probably wouldn't be coming to the rescue. Which is why this scene's here. However. I like it a lot and I'm glad it's here. Steve very awkwardly trying to interact with anyone other than Nancy and Jonathan immediately post-Season 1 gives me life.

... or some kind of strategy to stop Logansport’s freakishly fast point guard from kicking all their asses.

I did Actual Research for this line (read: I looked on Google Maps and compared the positioning of Hawkins within Indiana on the Season 2-3 geological survey map to small-ish cities in the area who could believably be high school rivals to their sports teams, and also looked at the Wikipedia page for 'basketball'). I will have it appreciated.

Of life before it all turned upside down on him.

I will not stop making stupid jokes and that is a threat.

His mom jokes over dinner that maybe Steve should be concussed more often, it’s been so quiet and peaceful around the house. 

A+ Parenting

I talked at length about the confrontation between Steve and his dad, so I won't rehash it.

“You should know,” she says, taking a single step toward them, as slow and deliberate as her nod. “After all, you were the one who killed me.”

Nancy Absolutely Did Not know this until approximately ten minutes ago. She is doing a fantastic job of bluffing.

“I didn’t,” Jonathan says, low enough that at first Steve isn’t sure if he really heard it at all. “You believe me, right? I didn’t.” “What? Barbara? I know that, he has no idea what he’s talking about, can we just go?”

Jonathan still can't quite believe that Steve doesn't actually think he's a heartless, remorseless killer without anything human left in him. Mostly because that's sort of how Jonathan's been thinking about himself for the last thirty years. (Remorseless killers usually do not have this much angst about their lack of remorse, Jonathan. Protip.)

Chapter Five

After what he’s heard, tonight, he doesn’t want to give his dad the chance to say that Steve went after him, that the knife was self-defense. That a combination of the concussion and some local history project just deluded Steve into thinking his dad was a killer.

I got a lot of comments on chapter four about how Steve's dad wasn't thinking and how was he planning to get away with murder after he killed his own son in his own office in cold blood. I let myself go down the rabbit hole a little thinking about how, exactly, he would try to get away with it. And I think Steve knows his dad well enough by now to have a pretty good idea.

It turns out that limping into a police station covered in your own blood is a great way to get a lot of attention very quickly.

I'm just very proud of this line.

“Jesus, Harrington, they’re gonna have to start giving you frequent flyer miles.”

I promise I didn't set out writing this fic planning to nearly kill Steve three separate times. It just...happened.

... Hopper shoots an awkward, try-hard grin in Steve’s direction and drops into the chair beside his hospital bed. “Heyyyy, kid. How you feeling.”

I just think Hopper's absolutely abysmal bedside manner in Season 2 is the funniest thing. And. Well. Just made myself sad thinking about the possible reasons why he's so bad at being normal beside a hospital bed with a kid in it. Okay!

It seems to me to be a very popular trope for Steve to end up getting kind of pseudo-adopted by Hopper and Joyce. I see why it appeals, but it's never clicked for me. And yet. The logical progression of this fic led me here. Never say 'I'll never write...'.

At least Will sounds slightly less accusing than Mike Wheeler had when he says, “What’re you doing here?”

We collectively as a fandom do not honour Will Byers' sassmaster energy enough.

“Yeah, no shit I’m upset. What was that? Just drop me and run like an unwanted baby at a firehouse?”

Steve is...kind of a fascinating contradiction in terms, in some ways, to me. I see a lot of fanon where he's very much a sick cat about things that bother him, that he'll shut down and try to hide what he's feeling for the sake of other people, and I don't think that's wrong necessarily but I do think it's...incomplete. Like, maybe he would downplay the seriousness of his own hurts and how much they're affecting him if being honest about them would hurt other people...but that absolutely doesn't mean he's not going to bitch about them. Loudly.

“Witless protection program,” Jonathan says.

We also as a fandom collectively need to appreciate how funny Jonathan is more often.

This whole confrontation was a bit of a balancing act. I didn't want it to turn into an angstfest. There was a certain degree of 'avoiding you for your own good'/'denying my feelings for your sake' mutual pining going on in this story, and I really needed there to be a good reason why these characters didn't just communicate with each other (or, at least, for the characters themselves to feel like they had a good reason). I also didn't want to wallow in that misunderstanding, because quite frankly it drives me batty when characters who are mutually into each other end up in a situation where it's almost unavoidable that their true feelings must come out and they must communicate, but they squander it on doing everything in their power to deliberately interpret everything the character they're into does or says as rejection, and deliberately hiding all of their actual thoughts and feelings to try to drive off the character they're into. Like, at a certain point you step past obliviousness and into 'yeah maybe you guys shouldn't be together, actually, if this is how you're gonna be'. These guys aren't communicating well, but god dammit, they're communicating.

It’s so – direct. No hesitation. None of Jonathan’s usual holding back. Just confidence, certainty.

Jonathan Byers has never been hotter than that moment in the hallway in Season 1 where he's throwing that lighter and that's just facts. It's the purpose, clarity, and confidence.

Jonathan devours his mouth like – like he’s starving to death and Steve’s an open wound.

I was proud of this line, too.

... and turns on the smile that’s made half the female population of Hawkins High turn cherry-red and suddenly become very amused by the floor.

This is totally the face he gave Nancy when he was trying to convince her to play 'strip flashcards' in s1e1.

...Jonathan’s got an arm around her waist and his face pressed into the crook of her neck, pressing kisses to the pale skin exposed by the slip of her robe. She raises an arm to cradle his head...

And this is absolutely the Dirty Dancing pose. Minus the side-skimming hand gesture that tickled Jennifer Grey badly enough to bust out laughing.

“I don’t have any blood flow,” he says, sounding defensive. “It’s got to be within a couple hours after I’ve eaten if you want me to, uh.”

I went back and forth on whether to include this, and finally decided I was leaving it in because it made my friends laugh. And because I love speculative fantasy xenobiology in action. 'But Mary, drinking blood won't introduce it to the circulatory -' I already told you these vampires are a parasitic fungus animating dead flesh, right? The fungus uses fine tentacle-vine-root-things woven through the flesh to puppeteer it? And the fungus feeds on blood, which means it uses blood for energy to, for example, move its limbs? I can bullshit this one if I want to. (Which I do.)

He remembers thinking the snake was beautiful, even as he was nearly pissing his pants in terror that it’d bite him. And now that he’s thinking about it, that comparison feels a little on the nose.

I got halfway through writing that first sentence and realised it needed a lampshade, badly.

Carol even styles Steve’s hair how he likes it, when she’s done. And there’s no way she could’ve known how looking in the mirror and seeing the hair that earned him his nickname perched on top of the haunted, battered face of a boy Steve barely recognises would make him suddenly and unexpectedly feel like throwing up.

The metaphor here may be a little unsubtle. Carol and Tommy are actually trying to be good friends to Steve, in their own, selfish, high-school-politics-influenced way. And it's got to hurt when he rejects that. But they're trying to make him feel better by getting him back to his old self. And that's only making it worse.

... some four-eyed fairy who took Nicole out to the movies last weekend in this classic car he’d restored. For this cardinal sin, one of Tommy’s buddies tracked down the auto wrecker’s where the kid’s been keeping the car while he works on it, so tonight –

I stand by my theory that Chrissy Cunningham's name is a reference to Stephen King's Christine. And so is this.

... Steve’s dating two people at once. (He tried that, once before, with Laurie and Becky. It did not end well. With the benefit of hindsight, knowing what he knows now, maybe he should’ve just asked them both if they’d be cool with it. Although he thinks the answer probably still would’ve been no.)

It is very important to me that, even when he is Having Self-Affirming Realisations and Growing As A Person, Steve is still a teenage boy.

Nancy, it turns out, likes gritty courtroom dramas.

It took me a while to figure out what kind of movies I think Nancy would like. John Grisham adaptations and Twelve Angry Men seem up her alley, though.

Jonathan’s shoulders are starting to hunch forward, turtling in on himself. He still hasn’t even moved to touch the glass Steve put in front of him.

As far as I know it's never explicitly stated in canon that Lonnie Byers is an alcoholic, and he's not even Jonathan's dad in this fic anyway, but it just makes sense to me that Jonathan does not enjoy drinking or being drunk or being around drunk people and I'm going to carry that through in everything I write.

The guy who helps Steve find what he’s looking for really knows his stuff, even if he can’t seem to resist a cheesy pun.

I love Bob Newby and I'm going to shoehorn him in everywhere I possibly can. That is all.

The scene with the kids and the D&D game was pure self-indulgence. If I were a better writer or this were a more professional piece, I might have cut it. However, this is fanfiction, and driver picks the music.

I moved Steve out to California one part so that I could do this whole thematic bit about Nancy and Jonathan choosing him, choosing to stay with him, one part because I realised I really had burned his life in Hawkins down to the ground and the most hopeful thing would be for him to be able to start over, and one part because I just thought it would be fun.

“We’ve got nothing but time.”

This was a little bit a nod to we have the time.

There was no way this fic was ever going to be complete without Steve getting to at least meet Robin. They have a beautiful friendship ahead of them.

(I've got to be honest, I've never vibed with Argyle. He annoys me on a fundamental level. But there was something about including him in this scene and in the nascent relationship between these versions of Robin and Steve that just...worked. As with Murray and Owens, whether or not a character is unbearably irritating can be a matter of which other characters they get to bounce off of and what they bring out of each other as much as that character in a vacuum.)

And that's all she wrote! I still have a vague, half-formed idea in my mind about a sequel (Barbara Holland wasn't as dead - or perhaps quite the kind of dead - that everybody thought, and El opening the Gate got her brought back as a specimen for experimentation, and something something something the US government is trying to weaponise vampirism and something something) but it never congealed into an actual plot so it's unlikely to ever materialise.

(I will tell you, because I'm not planning to write it anymore, that I had an idea for a scene where Steve, in thrall to the military's vampiric supersoldier, is forced to lure Nancy and Jonathan into a trap, and then successfully rules-lawyers his instructions into letting him cut himself so that his blood can distract the less-experienced vamp and Nancy and Jonathan can tear the bitch apart. Which would have left Steve mentally fine but physically more durable and slower to age. Felt it was a rather clever way to thread that needle. No I didn't steal this wholesale from Stephenie Meyer's Eclipse shut up.)

[heartpascal]

i made memes. the tunnel is heartbreaking, HEARTBREAKING. idek what to do with myself after reading the tunnel, i am at a loss for words IT WAS AMAZING, genuinely my top of ur works i love it sm. literally from the bottom of my heart, ur an incredibly talented writer and seeing you get traction on ur fics is so lovely to see bc you genuinely deserve the all love for your works !!!!! u never cease to grace tumblr with ur words 🙏🏼🙏🏼

STOP IT RN AHAHAHAHA omfg the memes 😭😭😭 i’m so sorry!!!! i will try to break less hearts in future (no i won’t), there will not be more angst (yes there will it’s all i know)

you’re the sweetest ever thank you so so much 😭 your support means THE LITERAL WORLD!!!! the MEMES??? made my entire day. sobbing and crying. I LITCH RALLY LUV YOU SM!!!

[petit-papillion]

can i just say how much i adore your tagging system and how much i appreciate the work you do here 🙏🏼 it really doesn't go unnoticed, thank u 4 everythingg

Oh, this is so sweet! Thank you so much, love. 💕

There are definitely times I just want to get posts out and don't feel like tagging properly, but man, I so hate Tumblr's awful search algorithms. And I love being able to find stuff. Yesterday someone was looking for a meme about Charles, and I was able to locate it on my blog, because yay, the tags worked! So I really force myself to tag every post, thinking future me will be so grateful. 😁

I don't understand why it has to be so hard to find things on Tumblr. Something I really miss about no longer having access to Twitter (yeah, not calling it x, Elon). I really enjoyed just finding cute or interesting content on there, and sharing it on my blog. Videos of tifosi at the Fiorano track patiently waiting for Charles. Local fans sharing a short video of them being in the fanzone. Random people filming Charles jogging around Monaco. Fans losing their shit after getting an autograph from Charles.

It feels like a lot of people have left Tumblr for Twitter lately. I hope we can keep F1blr alive though. Ironically, I think I could make my blog so much better, if I joined Twitter (& Insta) to locate those posts that go largely unnoticed on those platforms, but would get a lot of love here. That is, if people could find them... Do better with your search engine, Tumblr!

[onlyjaeyun]

greetings my dear zadie 😁 i missed u sm (sorry for the disappearance- i really missed filling ur inbox like this pls don’t mind me💔) & i genuinely have no idea where to begin from because i just got caught up with like 30 chapters of strictly business and i haVENT BEEN SLEEPING SINCE YESTERDAY BECAUSE I CANT CLOSE MY PHONE 🧍‍♀️ first of all what the FUCKKKKK IS GOING AWNNNNN😨 like what the hell what the fuck the whole family situation is so heartbreaking then we have the fucking mind blowing jaw dropping earth shattering identity crisis inducing universe colliding inducing smut to have ever grazed tumblr idk if it’s the severe daddy issues but my GOD thewayjongseongisaservicedommakesmegentearup also can i just say as someone who’s been reading your masterpieces since hype boy i absolutely adore. like ADORE 🧎‍♀️ the way you write your smuts they always like ooze out love and i adore it sm like it’s like that one meme where u know it’s not a quick nut but smth made with love & care and that’s exactly how you be writing your shit dawg like you’re so talented?? out here making me close my phone every 5 mins just to giggle and calm myself down. now when i tell you my legs r aching bcs of the amount of hours i just spent swinging them while giggling because of the shit i was reading for HOURS BRO. 😀 like i’m so obsessed with how you write i want to kiss & appreciate each every single one of your neuron cells and axons for connecting to eachother to form such beautiful ideas mamas. anywho back to the story FUCK YOU SHIAH UGLY ASS PREHISTORIC ASS BITCH THE FUCK IS YOUR GODDAMN PROBLEM DAMN. like you’re genuinely a miserable grandma if you’re out here in your 30s or smth pushing 89 and you’re bullying & talking shit about a girl who’s 21 💀 like girl go teach at unis what u learned about dinosaurs since you’ll be talking straight up from experience. i bet yo ass she was there at the last supper arriving with her horse and all that like GIR- sorry excuse me for the disrespect fr 🙏🏼GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMA. GET YOUR GODDAMN SHIT TOGETHER AND BACK THE FUCK AWF 🤺 anywho now that we talked about the literal cause of the big bang theory let’s go talk about jongseong 🤭 no because i love this man with my whole entire heart i just- i <3 mature men <333 he’s so cool & mature & understanding & it’s making him so much more sexier than he already is it’s actually driving me crazy because wHERE do i find a replica of the man i just read about. like sir. SIR im losing my mINDDDD 🤸‍♀️🕳️ and then going to yn i love her sm :( she’s so smart & kind and she did not deserve anything that happened to her she’s such a sweet girl i can’t do this i can’t stand kind hearted people getting their souls hurt like this like pls she deserves sm better (i’m literally coming for you shiah. sleep with one eye fucking OPEN.) i’m so glad she has jimin & aeri w her i love them all so much and nayeon (btw making nayeon jongseong’s older sister single-handedly saved approximately 26392 lives and prevented 6 million deaths im telling u, ur mind? legendary.) and then we have seoul’s fav four oh mY GOD i love jaeyun sm. he’s so hilarious like bros always speaking & asking the ACTUAL questions he’s so funny i love him sm & hoon is just hooning he’s a bad bitch & a serious mf i love him sm for that fr always serving shit and all that a fucking icon he’s so real 💯 and oh lord 30 year old hee? is going down in the history books i fear 🚨 u making hee this attractive right after poison is just so ooooooo i wanna fight you so bad (w kisses & hugs duh!) but like gen. easily one of the best stories i’ve ever came across, easily one of the best authors/writers i’ve had the chance to read the works of and witness with my own eyes 🙏🏼 like thank u so much for your service fr i love u sm pls take care of urself & don’t tire yourself out (i’m ignoring all events that took place in the most recent chapter because no.) sending u sm love & kisses zadie ! <33

actually no fuck that what the fuck do you mean the engagement is ACTUALLY GONNA HAPPEN. didn’t jongseong already put that bitch in her place like GRANDMA???? R U NOT EMBARRASSED THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING. chasing after a dude when he literally told u all ur shitty fantasies AINT GONNA HAPPEN and someone who put u in ur goddamn place and SO OBVIOUSLY HAS SOMEONE ELSE HES INTERESTED IN (WHICH TALK YOUR FUCKING SHIT JONGSEONG 🗣️💯 SPEAK UR TRUTH DONT LET THEM SILENCE YOU!!) IS SO LIKE ??? girl stand up fr you’re famous ig & hella rich u can find someone else leave my babies alone i beg. and oooo girl jongseong’s dad fr about to make me become a lawyer to jail his stupid ahh alongside yn’s father (and her brothers) 👩‍⚖️ now one thing shitty men will always excel at is being a fucking asshole to everyone including your family yet excluding your side chicks! like at your prehistoric grown goddamn age you’re gonna force your son to marry someone he doesn’t even like 😧? shit’s wild fr. anyways fuck you shiah fuck every single dad in the story and fuck you shiah (pt2) cuz u ain’t SHIT. you will never be SHIT with your horrendous pick me attitude and with your personality that’s literally revolved around being a trophy wife (and being in a marriage with a man who doesn’t even want you??? like do u have no shame. no self respect. like idgaf if this is about business and allat the man DOESNT WANT YOU 🫤 get that shit in your thick ass head grandma) like that shit’s crazy and fuck that account that posted that shit i hope yn’s okay and jay makes shit up for her cuz come on now 😐

-⁉️ <3

MY BABY IS BACKKKKKK HI BABY 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 you have no idea how much i giggled and smiled seeing you in my inbox imagain i MISSED YOUUUUU and hope life has been treating you well baby 🥺💞 pls tell me you havent been overworking yourself or i will have to fight you 💔

and please the way i couldn't even hold back my ugly laughs while reading bc you expressed my thoughts and feelings about yoo shiah in strictly business too spot on 😭😭😭😭

when i tell you the part where you started complimenting me, the smau and my writing made me tear up like i dont think you guys know how much your words mean to me and i will forever keep them super close to my heart so thank you so, so much baby. sending you the fattest kiss right now pls accept 🥺💞🩷💞🩷💞🩷

[turtletaubwrites]

Smoker is finally learning about the dangers of smoking 😅

[whotaughtyougrammar]

For the writer asks! 1, 3, 18, 20

I’m sending good vibes for 1, that it flows smoothly soon based on the writer memes.

Thank you for the good vibes 🙏🏼🙏🏼 And thank you so much for the ask!

1) Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

OH BOY WHERE TO START LMAO

I’m working on a few things right now, which is funny because I used to be a one project at a time sort of person, back when I didn’t write as often but putting pen to paper was paradoxically easier.

The “first” (technically second, you’ll see what I mean) big thing is:

A “multiverse” story. This sounds like something that I came up with after watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I’ve been working in this since before the movie came out 🤣 Of course, Daniels had thought of the concept for this movie long before this was even a blip in my mind, but I digress.

I think I mentioned this before, but I kind of like the idea that out of all the families, the Close/Streeps/Freemans are just… utterly mundane and non-magical (not really the case anymore eyeroll ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but I still wrote a ficlet where Morgan basically implies she knows the gender of her child through a dream. I took that and spun it off into, “Morgan visits her alternate selves through her dreams and is comforted and finds closure in the choices she’s made in her life,” (or something like that, I don’t usually like to deal too seriously in themes and prefer writing vignettes or scenes) I mostly just wanted to write down some of the AU ideas I’ve come up with without committing to several fics at a time because as much as I love my AUs, and as much as I like writing fics, there’s only so much time and energy I can put into them without ignoring basic necessities 😅

I have a basic “prologue” done but not much else. What I want to do next is figure out which AU I want “featured.” As big as this idea sounds, I really do want this to on the shorter side (if it exceeds Heart’s wordcount and is not considered done by then I may cry lol) and I’m not including the completely outlandish universes like the bodyguard AU or the figure skating AU. I definitely want to include Morgan Foster-Freeman, and mercenary Morgan from my Monsters and Mommies AU, but other than those two I’m still in the planning stages.

The “second” big thing I’m working on is:

A Glenn and Morgan love/origin story that I’ve been working on on-and-off since fucking 2020 (!!) I have a few scenes fully written out and even an old outline of what I wanted to happen (it’s so old I was still calling Morgan “Michel” or “Mysterious Significant Other”).

I have a lot of problems with this one lmao.

One is it takes place over a pretty long period of time—I specified they’ve been dating around 5, almost six years in “Everyday Words Seem to Turn into Love Songs”, and they didn’t immediately like each other when they first met (I’ve always been pretty firm with this bit of headcanon), so the timeline for this one, tentatively titled “You’ve Got a Pulse and You Are Breathing” would have to span at least 7 years, and maybe even longer.

Another problem I had was formatting. I was having trouble deciding if I wanted this to be one long document/short story (my preferred format) or if it should be split up into chapters. As I went on, I was even starting to doubt whether I even wanted to do such a comprehensive “origin” story that went from point A to point Married to point Canon, and considered doing it in semi-related short ficlets like “In A Sentimental Mood,” or as a 5+1 format, specifically something like “5 times Glenn had a shitty date, and 1 time Glenn still had a shitty date but it led to something infinitely better” (a lot of “Pulse” involves Glenn’s dating troubles, not only from being a pan/bi Asian man in the 90s and 00s having to deal with biphobia and racism, but also being aspec and not being able to put into words why certain parts of dating don’t appeal to him without sounding like he’s stuck-up or a “freak” or like there’s something wrong with him.)

But I think the biggest problem I am having right now is simply the fact that I think I psyched myself out 🤣 I wrote “Everyday Words” in… a day? Maybe two days? It was simple and cute and so easy to do, one of the few times I just wrote first and edited later, that I figured I could write up a “But how did they meet,” story in maybe a week, and now it’s two years later, the campaign is over and it’s on to the next one for a majority of people, so many scenes written that may not even make it into the final product and the only thing I’m sure on is the title, and even that might be changed for the final product 🤣

I still have so much love for this fic, it feels like my baby basically lmao, that I feel nothing less than perfection will do it justice. It would be very funny but also poetic if the first meeting of Glenn and Morgan ends up being my last fic written for the fandom, but I don’t see that happening—I still have plenty of ideas left to write!

Smaller things I am also working on (that I have actually started and are not just ideas I want to write eventually) are: A Carol and Morgan bonding thing that will hopefully segue into some sort of Carol/Mercedes thing, and a social media fic of fans speculating on Glenn’s love life (Single? Straight? Dating? Bi?? Secretly married??? Something else?????), Morgan’s general cryptidness (Dancer? Actor? Pianist? All of the above? None of the above? No really, how does one woman hold so many jobs at one single time?), and generally being weird and parasocial. So you know, just your average day on social media.

3) What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

There is a scene that I’ve never written but has always stuck out in my head in my abandoned Glenn in mourning fic, where after the funeral, Glenn is accosted not only by Bill, (obviously thinking that now that the ol’ ball and chain is in the ground Glenn is suddenly OK with having his father around again), but also by Morgan’s side of the family, either by her sibling (who I think was her sister and not her brother at the time I was thinking of writing this) or her actual parents, who are basically threatening to take Nick away from him.

Bill is handled fairly quickly and easily, but a legal matter is something else entirely, and in a panic, Glenn goes to see his mother and basically starts verbally whaling on her once the shock of what happened wears off and lets her have it, demanding/screaming that she help him because, according to Glenn, she owes him for never being an adequate mother and treating him like an inconvenience until it was too late, but eventually his rage subsides and his grief takes over and he begs her, much more plaintively, to help make the problem go away, swearing that he’ll forgive her for all her past transgressions and never bring them up again if she helps him with the custody problem. She agrees, and he never hears from Morgan’s side of the family again. (which sounds ominous written like that, but everything was dealt with legally I swear lmao)

18) Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

I recently reread “Everyday Words” and though I consider is part of Musicverse canon, a part of me feels like it’s a completely different ‘verse, simply from the amount of (implied) boning that happens 😂 I came up with the idea of Ace Glenn very early in the series run (my series and canon series) but it wasn’t in my head when I wrote this evidently (it was probably while I was writing “Pulse” did the idea firmly plant itself in my head, which was basically immediately after I finished this). Chalk it up to being away from each other for extended periods of time, Glenn being (generally) sex-favorable and sex being an easy way of establishing intimacy.

A lot of the story beats in “Heart” were originally going to be part of other things (Glenn mentioning that his mother taught him guitar was originally going to be part of “Pulse”) or were going to be smaller ficlets. The bit where Morgan gets sick in Heart was originally going to be its own short ficlet, and so was the scene of Glenn talking about his failed “date”/realizing something was “up” with him irt sexual attraction (it was originally a morning after scene), so I’d consider all those plotlines I’ve abandoned, or more accurately, merged into one.

My friend also made a throwaway joke about an AU where the meet-cute is both of them dumping bodies into the Gowanus and their eyes meet, which isn’t an AU of my adult store AU per se but it is a joke I can see Morgan making as she’s trying to puzzle out how much she wants to say about her occupation .(“So how are you going to introduce me to your friend’s kids?” “I don’t know, I’ll just tell ‘em we met when we were dumping bodies into the Canal. They’ll get a kick out of that.”)

20) Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

I have a few, but the one that sticks out for me is probably the headbutt. The scene of Glenn headbutting Bill in “You Send it All Back to Me” is a call-back (call-forward?) to a scene in “Pulse,” where Glenn attempts to punch somebody and gets punched back for his troubles. Morgan fixes him up while criticizing his technique and advises him to go for a headbutt next time instead for a variety of sensible reasons. Glenn is skeptical and is in the process of “Well, Actually”-ing her when she surprises him with a headbutt to demonstrate—not hard, just a sudden forehead touch that stops him in his tracks and forces him to reconsider his talking points and also realize that Morgan’s eyes are not black like he originally thought but brown, and that this close he can see how they sparkle when she’s amused and how deep and dark and mesmerizing and beautiful they actually are and—oh no.

[btsgotjams27]

This is Us is so good🥹❤️ Ughh Jungkook, I was rooting for you! We were ALL rooting for you! (Insert Tyra Banks meme😂) I’m still rooting for their happy ending 🙏🏼 but he needs to work hard to get her back, I feel so bad for Oc, she is so sweet and loves him unconditionally, how could he ruin all of that for a woman that doesn’t genuinely have feelings for him and just wants him for her benefit😔 Oc trusted him with her whole heart, she had been cheated on before and she trusted him with her heart for him to just crush it for a chick that gave him a std & was messing with other people when she was with him and when he was getting turned on, OMG that broke my heart like what is his problem jeez, you have a wonderful significant other next to you, after all they went through to be together he just threw it all away just like that😭 I hope he learns from his huge mistake, wakes tf up & grows a backbone and tells Alex to F*** off & stand his ground after he loses Oc.. I feel like everyone is gonna be so disappointed in him & ALSO will we possibly see him get jealous? I want this man to grovel and hurt a little to win Oc back hehe🤭 thank you for writing this awesome series ❤️

Hi anon,

Omg reading this made me cry T_T in a good way though! I appreciate you rooting for this couple bc I am too.

And boys :( stupid boys!! I apologize in advance bc...erm, although he will be groveling for the next few chapters, he will make a decision later on that will make you want to throw your phone - you'll understand what I mean when it comes.

Oh, definitely! You'll see Yuna and Namjoon's reaction to the news in the next update.

As for Jungkook being jealous, we will get to see someone from OC's past for a split second, and that may cause some jealousy - oops.

No, but seriously, this ask made me so happy, you don't understand!! I love you and thank you so much for reading this silly little series.

[elenacarey]

you've been visited by wholesome cat meme, it uses its secret move 'julies love and support' on you, i hope it works 🙏🏼💖

Awww, Julie!!! Thank you so much ❤️

[sopebubbles]

Hello, congrats on the followers!

I am a "nosy binch" (cit), so I am always ready to ask 👀 skip those that you don't feel like answering!

1. Fave food

2. Fave dessert/sweet

3. Fave food to prepare/a special recipe that you execute particularly well/that people ask you to cook

4. How did you get into fanwriting? Have you always written for fun or was there something else?

5. Do your parents know about this blog 👀

6. Do you have a face BTS member regarding their style/their clothes?

7. Do you like to dance? Choreos, perhaps? 🌚

8. If you have saved a cute picture or meme or whatevs please now it's the moment to share it 👀👀

Bye🐼

Thank you for so many questions!!! I'm bad at choosing favorites in general but I will do my best!

1. Favorite food: if I'm being totally honest my favorite foods are the kind of unhealthy things you can get at a snack bar, hotdogs/corndogs, chicken tenders, that kind of thinggg

2. I like cake a lot. Pretty much any kind of cake.

3. Making pancakes is my love language

4. I started writing fan fiction in middle school with my chemical romance (like when they first debuted) and I wrote throughout high school. I wanted to be a screenwriter for a while but that takes like...a lot of effort and the ability to accept criticism. I didn't write again until the pandemic, so that was a break of....many years.

5. My family knows I have a fanfic blog and that I write about bts but they wouldn't know how to find me. 🙏🏼

6. I don't really have a favorite. I generally wish they would wear less clothing if ya know what I mean.

7. I like to dance. But I have plenty of rhythm and very little coordination, so not really in a choreographed way. I don't know any bts choreos, not even ptd

8. Catboy yoongi agenda

[gawin]

hi mj! it's been a while since i last messaged you but i was just wondering how you're doing?! i actually started watching word of honor because of you and i'm enjoying it a lot!! (sadly, i haven't been able to finish it yet because i have exams this week but i'm on episode 25!) I hope you have a lovely week 💕✨

hiiii vienne!!! it sure has been a while!!! 🥺🥺🥺

i’m okay??? not much happening anyways, just focusing on my super important job of making memes. so it’s good! how are you tho???

oh my, have i sucked you into the word of clown show too?? i’m glad you’re enjoying it!!! and you’re on ep 25 that is quite a lot already!!!! 🥳 🥳🥳🥳 but do focus on your exams first!! no worries, take your time!!! ❤️💙

thank you so much for still remembering me and for sending nice messages!!! you’re amazing!! have a lovely week yourself!!!!! and good luck on your exams!!!! 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

[laoathlete]

🎉Thank you for the great 2021!!! In case you didn’t know, I do all of my shots/edits by myself (w/ a few exceptions). I still have a lot to learn, but this past year I was able to test different techniques and learn a lot. Your support of my crazy projects went a long way with motivating me when my tank was empty, so I can’t thank you enough for all of the continued support 😊 I have a lot of ideas planned for 2022 that I’m excited for, and I hope you’re all looking forward to as well!! Here are some of my top posts from last year and below is some additional commentary on each 😝 🐘 1️⃣-Not my best photo and the lighting is horrible, but I’m glad to say I’ve learned some better techniques since taking this pic. 2️⃣-Still a lot of incredible lessons I’ve learned from my football days that I’m hoping to share 😊 I enjoyed reflecting on my journey in this post and was glad you guys did too. 3️⃣-One of the best memes I made 😁 The Stitch one with my voiceover might be a close second! What did you think of my Stitch impression? 😝 4️⃣-Ray and the Last Dragon! Again, I wish I knew then what I know now about lighting. The photos would have turned out so much better! Nonetheless, I’m pretty happy about how this first pic turned out. 5️⃣-😝 Love you bruda! lol 6️⃣-I really liked the informational pics I put together on this post. Food-only athletes LEGGO!! 7️⃣-Me looking a mess after the flash flood situation. Never got to make a video on it, but I can’t tell you enough how scary this situation was. Definitely pack an emergency kit in the car everyone! 8️⃣-2 videos are in this clip back to back. I still think the first freestyle was better 😝 Any music suggestions for future freestyles? 9️⃣-Tried a different style of video here with different angles. Took a lot of time to edit, but had fun mixing popping with some traditional moves. 🇱🇦 Excellence is a Habit 🙏🏼 Sah tu! 🇱🇦 #fitness #quotesoflife #life #personaltrainer #laos #lao #inspiration #newyear #2022 #top9 #positive #positivevibes #quoteoftheday #motivation #positivity #goals #inspire #workout #gym #fit #physique #trainer #mindset #bodybuilder #model #wisdom #knowledge #strength #lifestyle #coaching (at Memory Lane) https://www.instagram.com/p/CYkoY-PguFG/?utm_medium=tumblr