#wrote this fic 5 years ago when I was in college like the one described in this fic

[simpforboywonder]

Quick question to my fellow fanfic writers. Do you write y/n, reader and picture yourself or do you write a “loose” (for lack of a better word) version that can be applied to most other people. This isn’t a critique question, I just genuinely don’t remember fanfics 5 years ago being so personal. Like I get it, we all wanna write a good, long book butttttt we have lost direction of the definition of a self-insert. Bc I feel like whether reader is a good cook, doesn’t like coffee, or is described as a size somewhere between 10 and 16 is very much something that is notttt in works of fanfics. What happened to just putting OC in the tags. Because a lot of authors as of late put so much specific things about the reader that it takes so much out. Idk if it’s just because I think too much but I feel that if you are writing this book and reader is more of a character why not just switch up the names and publish the book and make some good money off of it. Also AUs with RPF is very scary to me because this is a literal real life person and you have changed them and who they are completely how does that work. This makes no sense but I just wonder how you compartmentalize the fact that you’re literally fiction about a REAL person who could stumble upon it at any point in time. That’s literally like your crush seeing you wrote your name and their last name on your notebook THATS EMBARRASSING. Why does the embarrassment not translate just because the person is famous if anything I would be scared if my work became popular because then there’s an even greater likelihood that they could find it and just sit back like “😀🫣”. Idk maybe I should just sit quietly and enjoy the literature. Another thing that’s completely random but why are there so many !ncest fics out there on the internet. I know the Winchesters are fictional characters BUT WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO SEE TWO SIBLINGS TOGETHER AT ALLL. I’m so thankful I can exclude tags on AO3 bc WTFFFFFF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. WHY DOES THERE HAVE TO BE !NCEST THERE IS NOOOO REASON FOR THAT. Could all that says to the rest of us is that you get down like that 🤨. Also non-con works… how do you write that? Coming from a person with GREATTTT compartmentalization skills, how on earth can you write 150 THOUSAND words of grape scenes back to back to back to back. What is going on at home and in your MINDDDDD😟. Like there’s one author I alwayssss stumble upon and everytime I see her user I just get scared BECAUSE EVERYTHING SHE WRITES IS NON-CON. But also this author gave me the hardest ick after they made reader SLAVE AROUND FOR A MAN WHO LITERALLY HAS A GIRL. Like reader was doing his homework and shit and neglecting her own work and HERSELFFR for him. That level of people pleasing is crazyyyy and I’m underplaying how bad all the things were in only the first 5 chapters. And now I can’t resd Vampire fics ever again because that author ruined it and I can’t even comment anything because the author already replied to someone who was of course petrified by the level of disrespect reader was allowing and the author literally said when she was in college she used to do that for a guy who had a gf and I was just like 🙈🚶🏿‍♀️ because whaaaaaaaat gurllllll. YOU COULD NEVERRR GET THAT INFO OUT OF MEEE. Also whyyyyy?!?!?! How fine was that man🤨 like I genuinely need to see. Suguru I understand. A REGULAR- DEGULAR HUMAN MAN WHO IS IN A RELATIONSHIP (with someone else) IS DEFINITELY NOT GONNA BE THE REASON IM STRESSING MYSELF OUT AND SLACKING. I’m sorry to all who stumble across this rant in advance. 👨‍🌾🤞🏽

[wolfjackle-creates]

Ooh, wait, I have thought about this a lot.

I've been off and on writing since I was in highschool. Back then it was with paper and pencil during class. And I never finished anything. Nor was what I wrote that good. But I enjoyed it and it kept me from getting bored in class.

Then I went to college where I had an intense major (18 credits a semester for 2 semesters a year for 5 years then a year of school-sponsored, unpaid internships). I started working part time in my 2nd year, too, so yeah. I managed nano twice during that, but it was literally just word vomit and not that great.

In fact, it took until 2018 for me to really start trying to write again. And I got nowhere until 2020 when I joined a new fandom and made a writer friend and got an idea and forced myself to put it down.

But I wasn't very good. I didn't have the discipline to sit down and write. I needed to really force myself to learn how to craft a story. I had the plot and the characters all figured out, but getting it written? That was hard.

So I wrote something and it wasn't that good. But then I rewrote it and focused on *how* I was telling the story and it got better. It took me so many rounds of editing to get that 24k fic to something I could be proud of. And I am proud of it. After all of that, it turned out pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

And I did that a few more times over the next 2 years.

And then, not quite a year ago, in Nov 2022, I did something new. I'd gotten invested in a new fandom about a year ago (Aug 2022) and this fandom shares prompts like you wouldn't believe. So in November, I saw one that burrowed into my head (hi @gremlin-bot!!!). And I went with it. I went into a haze and wrote 3k in a single night. Only spent 2 days on editing before I posted.

Since then? I've done that a dozen times. If you go to my blog, you can see a masterpost of quite a few stories, the majority of them have been written in the last 10 months.

And what have I realized? My first drafts are getting better. I don't need to do full rewrites and 2 rounds of heavy edits and 4 rounds of line edits to get something that I'm okay with sharing anymore.

If I hadn't started by learning how to edit, I don't think I would've gotten to the point I'm at now. I needed to learn how to fix bad prose before I could learn to write good prose on the first go around. But at the same time, it wasn't until I started writing prolifically that I was really able to improve in leaps and bounds. My improvement before was slow and tedious. Now it's beyond obvious to me. And that's happened in the last 10 months because of how much of it I've done.

But I did need to be an editor first. That is what helped me figure out word choice and sentence structure and how to make a story flow.

I'm not a perfect writer, of course. And there are definitely things I still need to improve (descriptions. I'm not a visual person and I hate trying to describe things). But I'm so much better than I was 3 years ago when I really sat down and wrote my first story to completion.

I’m curious when it comes to getting better at writing, do you genuinely try to fix your mistakes, is it editing or just plain keep writing and writing even if it’s published after the first draft to get better? Like write story after story to get better at writing?

Improving your writing

This is a very interesting question. And I think my answer would be kinda... both? I think the best way to improve your writing is through editing, because it forces you to really think about the writing, the style, the words with intention. BUT creativity is also kinda like a muscle, you need to exercise it. Thus, writing a lot can also be important, it's practice. The more you write and the more you edit, the easier it is to apply the intention you learned by editing while writing. So it kinda goes hand in hand!

What do you guys think?

[winxsource]

Under the cut @faytalepsy​ tells us everything about how artistic process, juggling writing and drawing and her predictions for season 2! 

If you’ve had the pleasure of meeting Fay, then you may already be familiar with the term “polymath”, even if you don’t know it. This term, coined in 1603 by Johann von Wowern, describes a person who is talented in many manners and fields of study. /*

I, for one, think that Faytalepsy - who’s a fanfic writer, digital artist, traditional artist, singer, actress and a biology major, among many other things - definitely qualifies for the title. 

We have our interview on Thursday morning, after trying and failing to set up a meeting twice before because her schedule is beyond filled. Nevertheless, despite the hectic procedure that is setting up this meeting, Fay’s the type of person to put everyone at ease. So, despite our lack of familiarity, I feel myself slumping on my chair and relaxing as I hear her narrate the shenanigans happening in her current play - which is a romantic comedy that would be opening that weekend.

It’s listening to her mellow voice and calm personality that I ask her how long she’s been in fandom overall and, to my surprise, I come to learn she’s much younger than the way she sounds. She’s just starting college after a gap year and she’s been in fandom, actively, for something like seven or nine years, qualifying her as a creator who grew up in the internet, submitted to its critical eye from a young age. 

Anyone who has put forward work to be reviewed by strangers online will know how nerve wrecking it is and yet, she tells me she’s entirely self-taught. Never took a single drawing course, definitely not one for writing either. No, Fay’s unbothered by the external criticism, because she’s a perfectionist and an overachiever. Art classes used to piss her off, because all they did were collages and she wanted to do more.

It’s this desire to see more and beyond that got her started into fanarts in the first place, she tells me. “I’ve always loved to draw, but I wasn’t really good at it, since I only did it in my free time. Being engaged with fandom forced me to practice more, because I wanted to draw the scenes I envisioned, but didn’t have the skillset for it yet. So I practiced and I practiced.” 

I tease her about her type A personality and she doesn’t seem bashful or even shies away. Instead, Fay owns it up with pride, a true overachiever who tells me, “I’m definitely a perfectionist, but I don’t want to hold myself to ‘perfection' standards anymore, I want to have fun. A few years ago I was nearly mortified whenever I started something new, because I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it and then would become discouraged, but now I’ve grown and I've embraced having it be just ‘fun’ and not as perfect. I try loads of things and I will continue to do that, because you find a lot of things you enjoy and are good at, if you try a lot of things.” 

Of course, this isn’t always easy and perfectionism still creeps up here and there. Her writing being the biggest point of contention. 

“I have lots of unfinished works, such as the next chapter of “Sweet Nectar Of Life”, because I can’t post it like this. It isn’t perfect!”

This brings me to our next topic, a question sent in by not only @septemberrie​, but also @lizzabet​. With so many WIPs and different endeavors, how does she manage her time? How does she juggle so many works in progress?

She pauses, weighing the question carefully before explaining, “a year back I didn’t have a good balance. I wrote whenever I wanted to write, only drew when inspiration hit and then I’d go weeks without one or the other. Now I try to actively change that by sketching everyday for 5 or 20 minutes. I don’t want to have too much time pass between publishing new fic and releasing new art, I want to keep a steady progress. If you let weeks pass before you look at your art again, then it’s easy to feel demotivated, because when you come back, you’ll find a bunch of mistakes. So now I really don’t allow myself so much time in between those.”

With such discipline and so many projects, I ask her how she decides to make the leap and upgrade a concept from mere “idea” to “work in progress”?

“Oh, I just write whatever I want to write,” it's her easy answer, “Sometimes one gets neglected for the other, but that's alright. I have a folder for all my works and every once in a while, I switch the documents around, so I can visually see what I have to work on next. Still, even then, it depends on inspiration. For example, some of my multi chapters were never meant to be multi chapters, they just spiraled into it.”

And how’s your writing process?  

“It depends. Usually I have an idea, in Yield I just knew I wanted to write something about them sparring. Then when I have some down time I try to think about how to link the scenes and how they develop. Sometimes I write down the first scene that popped to mind and then later I come back and link the scenes together. Sometimes I have a plan, for example in my multi chapter fics, I always knew what I wanted to happen. I’d write down the topics, like “nightmare”, and then write the scene from that. The writing process itself is a little chaotic. I do always try to have one chapter be at least 1,5k words, because I think it’s the necessary amount to develop the plot. My optimal word count per chapter is between 2k and 3k.”

Her writing process is very clear cut, incredibly methodical. I ask her if her approach to the characters is equally ruled, if she tries to write them to follow canon or if she allows herself to steer away from canon, in the name of fanon and entertainment. 

I can almost hear her shrugging, as she answers, “I don’t think anyone has the 100% true to canon grasp of the characters. I try to do my take of them, which while close to canon, can move away if the situation asks for it. For example in Checking The Inventory, where Farah and Saul make out in the closet, I don’t think it would happen in canon, but I was willing to do it in my own writing. Regardless, one thing I enjoy about Fate’s loose writing is that it gives us a lot of freedom to play with.”

And how does Faytalepsy interpret Farah and Saul in canon, how does she envision their relationship? 

“I don’t think that in canon they’re romantically involved, they wouldn’t dare to take that step. However, they clearly both care about each other, because they went through so much, and both have this desire to be more than a friendship. They have roles to fulfill and responsibilities, so they’d be waiting for the right moment and this moment never comes,” she pauses then and I ask about inspirations, which seems to tip Fay to continue on her previous answer as she stitches the ending, “I’m not sure how my interpretation of their personalities came to be, but probably through reading other people’s fanfics and chatting about it.” 

Because all art is referential, a constant taking and picking from other, never ending telephone game. Nevertheless, even in this eternal game of telephone that is producing content, especially transformative works such as fanfic and fanarts, you can see a person’s personality shine through. In Fay’s case, her fanfics are lyrical, emotionally loaded and incredibly immersive. Fay’s works will suck you in a character’s head space and you’ll come out dizzy with her beautiful descriptions and her ability to put a character under the microscope. Her fanarts are filled with color, dramatic lighting – look no further than this drawing of silrah in a dramatic sunset – and very sensual, showcased by the many many drawings of Saul almost worshiping at Farah’s altar — such as here.

Her drawing and painting inspirations are diverse, a mismatch between indie instagram artists and the grand masters, because she really loves walking through museums. Nevertheless, if she had to pick one piece, it would be Van Gogh’s Starry Night. 

Always the overachiever, though, she has projects still waiting for the perfect moment to happen, the perfect “skill set” as Fay herself puts it. One example being a painting of Saul in his cell after he’s captured, with Farah’s ghost appearing in the cut outs of the moonlight, which leaks in through the bars before him. 

What about her expectations for season 2? Or even, the hanging conflict between Andreas and Saul? 

Her answer, very much as her art, is dramatic: 

“I want to see Sky kill Andreas and ultimately choose Saul as his father. In fact, I want to see Sky killing Andreas more than Saul killing Andreas. I wonder if all those years in isolation made Andreas a little crazy… I want to see Saul struggle with what Sky did, but eventually for him to realize he did the right thing by killing Andreas.  In regards to season two… First of all I’m really afraid. I love Farah and I’ll spend all my wishes on her coming back. I’m really excited to see in what direction the show goes and to learn more about Rosalind and what her goals are. I’m not as interested in the teenagers, shocking I know, but because I’m not as emotionally invested, I’m open to a lot more things. I really want to see what’s going to happen with Beatrix. She has the potential to become Rosalind’s henchwoman or to turn against Roz and I like either option.”

We then move onto the quick fire questions, the one she doesn’t have as much time to ponder over and definitely my favorite part of the interview, seeing as sometimes you can see a person shocked by their own answer. 

What is she expecting from Saul’s character development in season two? (It’s important to note, this interview happened before the trailer had been dropped).

She hesitates, “expecting or wishing for? Wishfully expecting, given that he shows up at all, I want him to face his demons. He’s been suffering from it, but he just projected it all onto Sky. He hasn’t really worked through his trauma and now he’ll be forced to do it. I really really want to see him grow more into the role of a father to Sky, accepting that over the years he has raised Sky. Of course, I want to see how he deals with Farah’s death, I don’t want this swept under the rug. I can’t say what I expect there, because we’re all in the dark when it comes to Farah… Oh and I want him to survive!” 

Talking about Farah, does she believe they’ll manage to bring her back? 

Now there’s no hesitation, seeing as it is the number one question on this side of the fandom, the most pressing question in almost any social media when it comes to Fate. 

“I really want to believe it. Because I love Farah and she’s basically the whole reason I watch the show, but I really don’t want to hope as much, because then I’ll be disappointed. Silrah and Farah have been really popular, so it could be that they saw that and worked her in. I don't think they had it planned from the beginning though,” the ever realistic Fay's got her hopes down and her feet firmly planted on the ground, “I hope there will be at least an attempt to bring her back. What about the ethics of bringing a person back from the dead? I don’t care. Personally my headcanon is that she hasn’t really died, as in the cartoons where she’s transformed into a tree. In case she really is dead, though, and they bring her back, then I think the repercussions must be more severe. I don’t want a zombie, but I do want to see some consequences from that act alone.” 

What is it that she enjoys writing about silrah the most?

“I think the thing I love about silrah most is the chance to portray the pining… The longing. The scene that inspired me the most in the canon is the scene at the end of episode 2, when they’re alone in the office. Having trauma but still going out of your way to care for those you love. The aspect I like writing most is angst, in one of my first fics, “Fighting For You” - there’s a scene where he realizes she’s in danger and Farah is fighting for her life, Saul thinks she’s going to die, and all this despair and suspense melts away as he finds her. That uncertainty, the pain and then the subsequent melting off… That’s what I enjoy writing.”

I hit her with the dreaded question among creators, but Fay isn’t daunted by it - she embraces it, with a vivacity that’s present in all of her creations, including in this interview. Fay is just one of those people whose confidence, or rather, bravery, is inspiring. 

Which work is she most proud of? 

“I really liked one of the earlier paintings I did of them dancing, because it was there I realized my art had come a long way from when I started. Also the one I did for the winxsource prompt of Farah and Rosalind. For fanfic this is much harder. I’m really proud of The Seventh Grave. I enjoyed writing Yield and Sweet Nectar of Life, but especially Fighting for You, because it’s been my longest fanfic and, since it is still ongoing, it’s my companion.”

What about her three favorite fic tropes? 

“Slowburn, enemies to lovers… There’s only one bed”

And three tropes she despises? 

“I don't like forced marriages… Sometimes they’re written really well and I do enjoy it, but it’s hard to come by. I don’t understand the hype with coffee shop AUs and I really don’t care about pregnancy fic.” 

When it comes to writing, any specific inspirations? 

“Oh anything by @septemberrie​ - Skye - and specifically “The Grief That Does Not Speak”, written by Sae_G. All of their works are amazing. I do have to say that I’ve read every single silrah fic that is out there, so all these crumbs, they’re a big part of what inspires me when writing these characters.” 

And finally, does she want to shout out to anyone? 

Her answer is heartwarming, but Fay drives home how incredibly wise she is too as she says, 

“A general shout out to everyone who reads my stuff.  I do primarily write for myself, but I love reading through all these comments. Reading through them makes me happy and validates, all over again, what I do. A big shout out to everyone who’s in the discord server, this amazing community we’ve built, and for everyone who talks about silrah,” then with a chuckle, “and for my sister who’s always very rude when I’m drawing.”

- Interview written by @skloomdumpster​ | Jo

[anguisette90]

2021 AO3 Year In Writing

tagged by: @laurabeatrix

I definitely didn't start this weeks ago when I was tagged and then not get a chance to finish it and completely forget about it until I went to check my drafts for something else. *cough* I'm also incapable of giving short answers, so I decided to do a "read more" and save any mobile users from a ridiculous amount of scrolling to get past my nonsense.

1. Number of stories posted to AO3:

7

2. Word count posted for the year:

260,927 words (though really only around 190K of that was written in 2021, a lot of it was written in 2019 or 2020 and I only got the courage to share in 2021, haha.)

3. Fandoms I wrote for:

The Dresden Files

4. Pairings:

Harry/Murphy, Harry/Lara, & (sigh) Harry/Marcone

5. Story with the most:

Kudos: 80 Floors Up (122)

Bookmarks: 80 Floors Up (21)

Comments: All's Fair(59)

6. Work I’m most proud of (and why):

Mm. I’m really pleased with how All’s Fair turned out. It’s the first story I’ve ever fully planned out and written methodically, with the knowledge that I’d be sharing it with people and so it needed to do story-y things. This is the first thing I’ve ever written that felt like I really had to work at it, but the end result is something that I feel is actually pretty well polished.

Runner-up shout out to The Detective & Miss Murphy though. I went into it with only the vaguest idea of when the Regency era even was and having precisely zero experience with either consuming or creating Regency romance books/shows/movies. I expected it to be a total disaster, and while it definitely is not the best thing ever written or even the best thing I’ve ever written, I think it’s turned out pretty well so far. Jane Austen I am not, but since @LauraBeatrix’s original inspiration for the conversation was Bridgerton, and Julia Quinn is also definitely no Jane Austen (which I know now, because I’ve read like four or five of those books at least, so thanks for that LauraB :P) I’ll take it. I also genuinely put more time and effort into research for this fic than I did for all of my college classes combined last year (8 of them? 9? A bunch) and while I’m not exactly proud of that fact, I’m not not-proud either.

7. Work I’m least proud of (and why):

I’m tempted to say 80 Floors Up because it is the fic I have put the absolute least amount of thought or effort into – it was a silly premise that I wrote in a single weekend including editing time. But it did turn out pretty good despite being somewhat ridiculous?

I guess I Caught Fire. Every time I look at it I feel like it’s missing something, like something’s off about it, but no matter how I poke at it I’m not satisfied.

8. Share or describe a favourite review you received:

It’s been a good year for reviews. Honestly, everybody is so sweet and supportive. I started 2021 kind of on the fence about whether to continue posting things and very insecure in my own writing but people have been so nice. I have genuinely cried from comments received several times this past year.

(Not that I have a folder on my phone with screenshots of comments that I flip through when imposter syndrome gets bad or anything. I’m not desperate for validation. It’s cool.)

But my absolute favorite review? Gotta be this lovely gem from @LauraBeatrix:

9. A time when writing was really, really hard:

I hit a snag in The Detective & Miss Murphy for a bit there where I had waaaaay too much planned content to fit into waaaay too few chapters, which was super difficult to work through.

I also have had a few instances (once for All’s Fair, twice for yet-unposted WIPs) where I’ve had to dwell on That Scene from midway through Battle Ground and that’s been a very different kind of difficult.

10. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you:

Harry and Murphy are constantly surprising me in The Detective & Miss Murphy because they never do quite what I expect them to do. I have whole scenes planned out and then one of them just says something out of nowhere, or does something crazy. You know what I didn’t expect at the start of writing a regency romance? That my hero and heroine would have a woman tied up in the heroine’s bedroom to get information out of her. Didn’t expect that to happen. Absolutely insane. I have no control over them.

11. A favorite excerpt of your writing:

This bit for All’s Fair keeps sticking with me and I’m fond of it: “I remembered when she’d been mine and I’d been hers. When we’d professed our love and when we'd acted on it. I remembered when I knew with all of my heart, mind, and soul that I belonged wholly and completely to her, that I would never love anyone the way I loved her. We were made for each other, in the sense that years of shared experiences and friendship had forged us into complementary shapes, worn and scarred but familiar and comfortable, fitting perfectly together.”

12. How did you grow as a writer this year:

I have definitely gained a lot more confidence in myself. Two years ago, getting an even vaguely critical comment on something would haunt me for weeks and make me question whether or not I should continue posting. Even at the beginning of last year, I frequently questioned whether or not I should bother sharing what I wrote, if I was just being stupid and arrogant to believe that other people would want to read it, etc. I'm not saying I've magically become immune to criticism or anything, but I'm at a place where I can get a negative comment, process the feedback (if there actually is any), and move on with my life without losing sleep over it. Which is progress.

13. How do you hope to grow next year:

I want to put more of a focus on original work in 2022 than I did last year. I still expect most of what I write to be fic, but I'm starting to entertain the idea that 15 year old me might have been right after all and I should try to become a published author.

I also want to invest more time in actually learning how to be a better writer. I've listened to TED talks and interviews and things like that here and there with authors I respect, and sometimes I pick up good advice, and sometimes I think the advice isn't for me, but I want to spend more time doing that this year. Writing, like any art imo, has a large instinctive component, but that doesn't mean you can't better hone your instincts with training.

14. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc):

Last spring I stumbled across a post where some total strangers were discussing wanting to see fluff of Harry/Murphy. One person in particular had a specific request, I think she said she wanted to see Harry at another Murphy family reunion? I don't remember now. Whatever it was, I had this fic that had been sitting in my drafts since 2019ish and it sounded like just what she was looking for. So even though I thought it was kind of a poorly-written fic, I posted it on AO3 and shared it here, hoping maybe one or more of these people would see it. Even if it wasn't very good, I figured not-great content is still better than no content, right?

That very particular stranger was @laurabeatrix, who did see my fic, and had a ton of kind things to say about it, and has basically not stopped saying nice things about my fics since. She is my biggest cheerleader/muse/emotional support beta reader/tinfoil hat co-conspirator/3 AM rambling thought sounding board/all-around wonderful person. I can honestly say without exaggeration that at least half of what I've written this year wouldn't have happened without her, or at least wouldn't have been posted. Also, she made art for a fic that I wrote. Art. Like for real fanart. It's been months and I'm still kind of freaking out about that because seriously how cool is that?

15. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year:

No current events from my life, though I've definitely drawn from my life experiences. There's a scene in Paper & Jewelry where Harry's watching Murphy use a step ladder to try to put baubles on the Christmas tree, which was directly inspired by my wife watching me nearly break my neck several times trying to string the lights on our tree a few years back.

Also, not sure if it counts but most of the time when I choose to set a scene in a specific place in Chicago it's because it's a place I've been and often have pictures I can reference. Several of Lara and Harry's dates in All's Fair are locations the wife and I have also visited together. Really wish we weren't living in plague times, because it's been way too long since we had a chance to get out there and I'm itching for it.

16. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers:

Share what you've written! I don't care what you've written. I don't care if its an obscure ship from an obscure fandom with a weirdly specific set of tags that you think only you could possibly care about. Someone wants to read it. You think it's bad? It's probably amazing, but even if it isn't, to be honest, who cares? If you liked the idea, or the dialogue, or the setting, or whatever enough to write it, someone else will like it too. It's easy to get caught up in the number of kudos, or the number of comments, but honestly, even if there's just one other person out there who reads it any enjoys it, you've still made an impact on the world, you've made that one person's day better for a few minutes (or hours, or if you write as much as I do maybe days) just by sharing your ideas, your art. Don't second-guess yourself.

And if you're writing for one of my fandoms, this goes doubly for you. Odds are if there's only one weirdo who is going to like your fic, I'm that weirdo, and I want to read it, lol (But seriously, you're better than you think. How do I know? Because I've never in my life met a writer who was as bad or worse than they thought. We all think that. It's okay. Just share anyway.)

17. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year:

Very close to finishing Detective and Miss Murphy which is both exciting and sad. I'll miss it but I'll be glad to have it wrapped up too.

After that, I've got a kind of dark post-BG longfic I'm working on, which will let me play with myths and deities, some of which we haven't had a chance to see yet in canon, and I'm both nervous and excited for that prospect. We'll see how it works out.

As always, I've got about two dozen other misc WIPs too, most of which aren't ready for me to talk about them yet, but I'm sure there' will be plenty of forthcoming fic for 2022.

18. Tag some writers whose answers you’d like to read:

As usual I'm not directly tagging anyone because I don't do that, but if you're reading this and you would like to provide your answers, consider this me, tagging you. I'd love to read your thoughts!!

[behindthesefangirleyes]

2021 Annual Writing Evaluation

1. Number of stories posted to AO3: 19

2. Word count posted for the year: 200,473 (slightly lower in reality because I’ve updated a WIP this year that I started in 2021)

3. Fandoms I wrote for: A lot of random ones; I actually find it pretty funny. It basically shows where my hyper-fixations laid at different points in the year. Harry Potter / Gossip Girl / Doctor Who / General Hospital / Queer As Folk / High School Musical / Blue Bloods.

4. Pairings: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, Chuck Bass/Eric van der Woodsen, Eric van der Woodsen/Jonathan Whitney, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, Brian Kinney/Justin Taylor, Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Chad Danforth/Ryan Evans

5. Story with the most:

Kudos: But you once told me, “Don’t give up. You can do it day by day.”

Bookmarks: And if you, you want me too, let’s make a move - This was pretty surprising to me since I didn’t think the HSM fandom was so active.

Comments: But you once told me, “Don’t give up. You can do it day by day.”

6. Work I’m most proud of (and why): I would say it’s probably “If the truth tell, darling, you fell, like there ain’t enough dying stars in your sky.” The reason I’m proud of it is because I started writing an abridged version of it in 2017 on my Twitter QAF fan page. Then I didn’t touch it for four years until finally sitting down to flush it out further. Completing it after all that time felt really good, especially seeing how my writing had developed over the years.

7. Work I’m least proud of (and why): “I know you think there’s no way out, like you’ve been living in the dark, but you don’t have to feel alone�� is the one I’d choose. I wouldn’t say I’m not proud of it, but it wasn’t a real bells-and-whistles type of story. It just felt like something that I needed to write. Mostly because the show’s writers abandoned Michael and Kristina’s closeness years ago and that felt wrong.

8. Share or describe a favorite review you received: This meant the world to me, especially because I wrote the story “What hurts you is gonna pass, and you’ll have learnt from it when it comes back” based on (loose) personal experience. The fact that it resonated with someone else meant the world. The comment was: I loved this. You really described both my college experience and struggling to fit in, and my coming out to my mom. I feel like people tend to focus on both extreme ends of the coming out experience (going swimmingly well or disastrously wrong) but the whole 'well meaning but not fully accepting' can be it's own particular type of gut wrenching too, except that you feel like you aren't allowed to feel in any way negatively about it because it's not 'bad' enough, especially if you're still insecure about it yourself. In my case, my mom accepted me but told me I shouldn't come out to everyone because it could cause me struggles with my job in the future (I wasn't old enough to work at the time). It doesn't seem like much but a decade later it's still one of the few dark clouds of my relationship with my mom. Coming out (especially for the first few times when you're not owning it yet) is already hard enough and it takes all your courage, the last thing you need is to be reminded of all the things that can go wrong. Anyway, sorry for the personal unloading, I just wanted to let you know that your story really resonated with me. I got a bit teary eyed because that's the most seen I've ever felt. Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful story!!! (And any continuation would be accepted with open arms!)

9. A time when writing was really, really hard: From a content POV, I found it harder than I expected to write my GH fic “I know you think there’s no way out, like you’ve been living in the dark, but you don’t have to feel alone” and my HP fic “These bruises make for better conversation, loses the vibe that separates.” They were both stories that I really wanted to write, but when I finished them, I didn’t get the satisfaction that I expected. Generally speaking, I took breaks from certain stories throughout the year when I had blocks. But largely, writing helped me cope most of the time.

10. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you: I would say the scene that showed the current situation/flashback with Brian and Daphne from Daphne’s POV in “If the truth tell, darling, you fell, like there ain’t enough dying stars in your sky.” Her POV was never planned, but when it occurred to me, it felt right to include it. I never expected that I would like it the most, but their camaraderie is something that I always wanted to see more of in the actual show.

11. A favorite excerpt of your writing: The excerpt is from Chapter 4 of “If you need, you can call on me, I’ll be the friend you need.”

“Mister Black.” He turned to see Professor McGonagall beside their bench. She looked as weary as he felt, though he was doing a better job of hiding it. “Must we hear from your mother again? If you would … take her message elsewhere.”

Sirius arched an eyebrow.

“Forgive me, Minnie.” Her vein twitched at the nickname. “Is my mother’s intended public, and typically unprovoked, dressing down making you uncomfortable?”

“Mister Black, her language —”

“Is no fault of Sirius’,” interrupted James, standing up and crossing his arms. Sirius looked up at his best mate with gratitude. Even Evans looked mildly moved. “Surely you’re not blaming him for his mother’s bigotry when the simple solution would be writing to inform her that she can no longer send verbal accosts through the post.”

“That’s not within my —”

But she was cut off by the Howler, which was left unattended. It let out a shrill shriek due to its initial abandonment. Then, the voice of Walburga Black filled the hall yet again:

YOU FILTHY EXCUSE FOR A SON!

“Well, that could be either one of us, really,” said Sirius, loudly, looking at his brother from across the hall. Regulus merely rolled his eyes and averted his gaze, and a couple of Gryffindors let out nervous laughs.

HOW DARE YOU HANG THOSE VILE MUGGLE POSTERS ON YOUR BEDROOM WALL.

“Brilliant — I was wondering when she’d find those,” said Sirius, airily. “Thanks again for posting them last summer, Moony.”

“Yeah, don’t mention it,” said Remus, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

IF YOU EVEN THINK OF ENGAGING IN ANY LEWD BEHAVIOR WITH THOSE OF A LESSER SPECIES, YOU WILL BE OUT OF THIS FAMILY BEFORE YOU CAN SAY TRAITOR!

For once, the Howler ended almost as quickly as it began. At that point, McGonagall was already on the other side of the hall with the other staff. Not one of them was making eye contact in their general direction. Sirius merely laughed.

“What’s so funny?” asked Peter, baffled.

“Honestly,” said Sirius, lifting his goblet, “I think she’s losing her touch. No slurs? Such mild epithets? I ought to give her actual material because she’s grasping at straws at this point.”

“Why feed into it?” asked Macdonald, having arrived at the tail end of the Howler.

Sirius fixed her with a piercing gaze.

“And let her think I’m okay with anything she and her family stand for?” said Sirius. “In case you haven’t noticed over the past three years, I’m not one to sit back and accept things.”

12. How did you grow as a writer this year: I would say simply leaning into writing what I want to write and letting it happen when it does. Forcing it never works, so when I felt a spark of inspiration, I let it take me from there.

13. How do you hope to grow next year: I hope that I can focus less on receiving kudos and comments (or the lack thereof). At my core, I know that’s all arbitrary, but it does feel good to know that I’m writing for more than just myself or my own self-indulgence.

14. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc): I can’t determine anyone in particular, but that’s because I keep to myself on here and AO3.

15. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year: Tremendous amounts. If I’m writing about sexuality, I put a lot of that inner turmoil into whichever character is the most appropriate to carry it. Just in general, I’ve had a lot of angst over the past year also, which undoubtedly spilled into my more intense story plots.

16. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers: Write for yourself. Allow yourself to be self-indulgent. Rather than spending time waiting around hoping for someone else to write it, do it yourself and love every minute of it.

17. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year: I’ve got a few things in progress. My Marauders fic of one-shots is ongoing and I’m looking forward to writing more of it. I’ve also got a Nolan-centered fic for Revenge that I’m proof-reading. Another unfinished fic that I started, stopped, started, and then paused on again is for 1D + Queer Eye. Hopefully I’ll finish that one of these days.

18. Tag some writers whose answers you’d like to read: I don’t know any writers, so take this as an open invitation to fill out the evaluation. It was great fun!

[marigoldbaker]

my top ten calendiles fics (that i wrote)

this rec list took me a solid chunk of time to compile, because my fics are my babies and i honestly wanna throw quite a few of them up here. but EVENTUALLY i stopped being indecisive and finally managed to get this sorted, so here goes! if you wanna read some of my stuff, this is the stuff that i am the most proud of/in love with/would cry if someone asked me leading questions about it + drew me fanart of it. these are not ranked except for the top two, because the first one is my baby and the second one is still very beloved to me.

under the cut, because i have loving commentary!

1. as day follows night (multi-chapter)

Looking for a safe place to stay after her accidental murder of the Deputy Mayor, Faith Lehane allies herself with a mysteriously powerful witch—and stumbles into a fairytale mystery that's bigger than anything she could have anticipated.

(this fic is my goddamn baby. this fic is my C H I L D. this fic is the fic that i took extensive notes for and spent most of my freshman year of college thinking about and ended up as this terrifying love letter to fairy tales and jenny calendar and the complexity of the way she chooses to love people. i love this fic with every fiber of my being and always will.)

2. i still want to be your girl (multi-chapter)

Five years ago, Jenny Calendar ran from Sunnydale and didn't come back. Now, with the First threatening Sunnydale and the Slayer line, she's returned to help stop the apocalypse--but Rupert Giles isn't the man she remembers, and he isn't exactly delighted to have her back in his life again.

(i have a very persistent soft spot for later-seasons giles, but this was one of the few fics where i went “okay but what about battle-hardened jenny” and i’m very proud of the result. it was really fun to think about what might have changed about jenny over the course of five years, and now that i’m thinking about it, i might be really interested in writing a giles pov of this fic at some point? that’s totally a concept to come back to at some point. anyway.)

3. kind of like hydrogen peroxide

Here was the problem: Ripper had no idea how to talk to Jenny without somehow managing to make her want to kill him.

(i do NOT deserve rights if a fic from the ripper au doesn’t make its way onto this list, and this one is my very favorite. i love thinking about dumb teenage giles who pretends to be a rebel but is actually very very soft and very very in love with his equally dumb and genuinely rebellious girlfriend.)

4. spirit-touched

“Thank you, Buffy,” Giles said, “but I would prefer to conduct this research on my own. I’ll be looking into some rather…” He felt himself blushing, and resented it. “Some rather intimate details of ghost-human relations.”

“What does that—oh god, you want to figure out how to have sex with Ms. Calendar,” said Buffy.

(making this the first smutfic i posted was still the most cursed power move i have ever pulled off. anyway that influx of asks in 2016 about ghost jenny and human giles and their sex life inspired this and it ended up being SO funny and SO sweet and i am SO proud of it.)

5. very really married

Giles and Jenny's flights to Sunnydale both stop over in Las Vegas. On the same day. Naturally, a chance encounter leads to a drunken marriage, one that they mutually agree to keep up for appearances.

Which is to say: Giles is going to have to figure out how to hide his fake marriage from his new Slayer (and everyone else) while also hiding his new Slayer from his fake wife (and everyone else). And his complex feelings for Jenny aren't helping anything.

(EVEN NOW, THIS FIC MAKES ME GIGGLE TO THINK ABOUT. i am saving my reread of this particular gem for a rainy day, because it was my love letter to season one and my daydreamy fantasy re: what it would look like if giles and jenny had silly odd-couple energy that really just came from them being fake married and badly hiding it as they fall very deeply in love.)

6. days in goodness spent

This feeling—whatever Giles is feeling—this is bone-deep. He’s never felt it before. He’s been in love before, he’s admired someone before, he’s respected someone before, but this feels like all of those three things held together by something else he can’t quite name. He searches, desperately, for the words that will tell Jenny this, but nothing that has been written can describe the way it feels to be held by her right now.

(In which Rupert Giles gets the chance to fall in love all the way, and it changes him just a little.)

(this one didn’t immediately come to mind when i was drawing up the list, but my brief rereads led me to conclude that it is an underappreciated gem! i’ve written a lot of different takes on giles and jenny’s relationship, but i particularly love calling giles out for idealizing jenny. also i like that this is more abstract than some of my other older pieces, where i really get into the nuts and bolts of wanting to depict Every Single Part of giles and jenny’s relationship trajectory. this one has more fun with the flow of the story.)

7. no one else could heal my pain

“Friday,” Giles echoed.

“Yeah. As an overnight weekend trip to hunt down some books I need.” Ms. Calendar smiled playfully at him. “Isn’t that the kind of thing you’d do for fun anyway?”

(this one was SO recent and SO fun! it’s kind of my love letter to the standalone longfics i consumed voraciously when i was fourteen, because there are some really great older calendiles fics that are just long and winding adventure-y narratives about the two of them goofing off and falling in love. i wanted to echo that here a little bit and it was a delight to write.)

8. myosotis latifolia

Years and years ago, the truth would spill out, and Rupert—in his endless romanticism—would take her hands and tell her she only needed him by her side to feel welcome and loved. But it’s been over a decade since they’ve been that close, and those years have created a distance between them just as insurmountable as the distance between them, now, on the steps leading into his lavish gardens.

(Rupert Giles is an esteemed member of the Watchers' Council, as well as a happily married father. Jenny Calendar knows that that's never been what he wanted.)

(ahaha this one is a big ouch moment but i really love it regardless? i think that giles and jenny are kinda fundamentally incompatible in a lot of ways, and part of the intrigue of their relationship is watching them try and figure out how to compromise and adjust after years of being rigid and inflexible individuals -- giles intellectually, jenny emotionally. so this fic is a lot about that.)

9. the grieving process

After Buffy's death, Giles makes his way to Jenny in LA.

(i don’t know why this one still sticks with me! it just! does! it holds up and i love it and if you wanna read about giles and jenny falling in love in a way that is healthy and authentic without any secrets -- but also obviously very sad -- definitely pick this one up.)

10. decently clothed

“Jenny, are you selecting my wardrobe based solely on what is and isn’t easy to divest me of?”

“…no,” said Jenny.

“That’s not even remotely convincing.”

(i wrote this one during a particularly difficult time in my life, and it was a really special moment for me, because i’d just come out of a period where it had been difficult for me to find the time or emotional energy to write. whenever i return to it, this fic is suffused in that warm and hopeful joy i felt when i posted it and realized that i had not, in fact, lost my touch. so it’s always gonna mean the world to me.

plus it is very silly and sweet! my specialties.)

[clarionglass]

tagged by @dheiress to post the first line of my last 20 fics (thank you! <3)

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line. Then tag 10 other authors!

aight my lads here we go, there’s going to be a few unpublished wips and other piece of dubious writing in here bc i doubt i have 20 stories but anyway, here we go (this is very long! press j to skip or just get that dash scrollin bc this might take a while :// ) in very rough chronological order going backwards, starting with the published work:

1. so i ran to the river (tma grifters au, unpublished yet but will be soon!): The sunlight feels different on a face fresh out of prison, and it feels even better to Jonathan Sims now that he’s truly home.

2. crowned by an overture bold and beyond (tma pretentious college au, based loosely on the secret history):  It was a cool, rainy day in late March when I first approached the Magnus Institute--one of those days that served as a reminder that the London spring, that fragile creature, was still all too vulnerable to the occasional strike from the claws of winter.

3. we should ride this wave to shore (tma chatfic where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts): Friday, 3:14 P.M. “archives research & statement envestigation” Timothy Stoker renamed the group “drinks drinks drinks” Timothy Stoker changed Sasha James’s nickname to saucy sash Timothy Stoker changed Martin Blackwood’s nickname to martini kart Timothy Stoker changed his nickname to stonked stonked: so how bout it lads saucy sash: oh god.

4. i am the maker of rules (dealing with fools) (tma chatfic, an elias-and-peter-focused accompaniment to wsrtwts): Monday, 7:39 P.M. Elias Bouchard to Peter Lukas Elias Bouchard: Peter, I need to talk to you. Elias Bouchard: I’ve had the most infuriating day at work.

5. An Optimistic Tragedy (good omens orchestra au that i swear to god i’ll finish one day): Three years ago Eve shifted in her chair, her mind clearly on things other than Milhaud and the music in front of her.

6. The Spaces Between the Stars (the Beast of a dw fic that i can’t even begin to describe; a mate and i have been working on this since 2015 and it’s a sprawling mass of writing that encompasses Many google docs--what’s on ao3 atm is a very small percentage of it,,,,): The Doctor clutched the TARDIS railing as if somehow, it could take the pain away.

7. Carol of the Bells (a chrismas chatfic companion to aot! i’ve always been a sucker for a chatfic but oof looking back on this one my formatting style sure has changed): [Friday December 13, 1:31am] Anthony Crowley to Angelface: u up? ;)

8. An Exploration into The Nature of Human Beings, sub. Homo Sapiens: A Research Paper by Milton Jones (british comedy rpf. this is my oldest piece on ao3 and it shows, but there’s a special place in my heart for this dorky lil fic about an alien researcher making a place for himself in british comedy. fun fact! i actually added the final three sentences to this a couple of days ago, and will post it when i do my next fic update): <<I knew you’d be down here, as per usual. Do you never stop working?>>

and now for the stuff that i like but hasn’t yet/will never/one day, if i get my act together, might be posted to ao3... please ask me about these bc i love them, even though i’ll probably never post them :)

9. untitled mitchell spy comedy (a show that @monimolimnion​ and i want to pitch to the bbc in which david mitchell and victoria coren mitchell are married spies who work for MI5 and MI6 respectively, and most of britcom pops up in one place or another. it’s nothing more than a Lot of planning and a few snippets, but i love returning to this doc): [David is sitting at his desk, shaking his head at an open file.] David: They’re taking the piss. That’s what they’re doing, they’re taking the piss.

10. In the Demonic Style (a good omens au of @teashoesandhair’s glorious smooching contest piece, which is the first piece of fiction writing in the reblog chain. i’ve promised a chapter 2 to this, which i’m halfway through, and feel incredibly guilty for not finishing. still, my quarter-year’s resolution is to finish something old whenever i post something new, so maybe it’ll get done soon!): “It’s the end of the world” was not a good statement with which to start one’s morning in any circumstances, but the angel Bryndael was in the middle of cataloguing his newest shipment of tea samples when said statement reached his ears, and he didn’t much appreciate being disturbed.

11. magpie (good omens canon-mostly-compliant fic based around the song magpie by the unthanks/the magpie folk song/nursery rhyme): Wednesday (approximately 11 years before the end of the world) From a bird’s-eye view, St James’s Park was beautiful at this time of year.

12. untitled ficlet for tales of dwrwedd (a present for my writing buddy! the link is to her fic, i just wrote a bit of her two witcherverse ocs being soft as hell): The two women seated by the hearth didn't look old, either of them. But there was something about the pair--in their movements, or their mannerisms--that suggested an age far beyond what their unlined faces would suggest.

13: Tempo d’Attacco (an original bit of Light Crime a la midsomer murders, set in a university music department that is naturally a thinly-veiled copy of my own, hence why it will never ever be posted anywhere. i wrote this for my supervisor at the end of honours (her character is the sleuth) :P ) Dr Marisa Tan didn’t exactly start her morning well, on the day that everything seemed to upend itself.

patterns...... i’m not seeing that many, tbh? idk if i could call this in media res, but there’s certainly a good bit of plot starting without heaps of setup. 

my favourite? hmmmmmm i’d say my favourites would be crowned by an overture bold and beyond, and in the demonic style. i gotta say, going back to revisit a lot of my older writing has been nice! time and distance have been v kind :)

i’m hella bad at tagging things so if you see this and want to share your own writing please go ahead! i’m very shy when it comes to Fandom Interaction (tm) so i don’t feel comfortable launching myself into people’s notes (i loved this tho! i just need other people to make the first move lol), however i will give a specific shoutout to @monimolimnion whose writing i adore and who needs to do this!

[charliechick117]

Apparently there’s this AO3 tag game going around and I thought “Hey! I wanna do it!” so here I am.  I stole it from @smuttysmuttysmut so thanks!  I’ve been in fandom well before Ao3 so this will be super interesting.

How many works do you have on Ao3?

45!

What’s your total Ao3 word count?

444,138 (but going up!)

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Coffee Shops and Lawsuits

According to You

The Sight of a Scribe

It’s an Old Song

A Week of Dwalin/Ori

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

It depends honestly.  I try to respond to comments that make me happy or need like, a follow up, I guess?  For a while I didn’t reply to anyone and then I tried to reply to everyone and now I’m kind of in the middle.

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

Um... I don’t really write angsty endings?  I guess in “It’s and Old Song” there’s a sadness to the ending where Crowley and Aziraphale don’t remember their old lives together, but they start a new life and I really feel like that was a better story - to choose each other again even if you don’t remember.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Definitely “According to You”!  It’s the happiest ending because there was so much angst to get there.

Do you write crossovers? If so, what’s the craziest one you’ve ever written?

I don’t publish crossovers but when I was in college, like eight or so years ago, I wrote the biggest crossover in history based on an OC who was able to travel through every single piece of media I ever consumed.  I’m talking Merlin, Doctor Who, Supernatural, The Walking Dead, Torchwood, Good Omens, etc.

It ended up being almost 400 pages long and I still think about adding this OC into everything I write.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I don’t think it was hate so much as misunderstanding.  This was an old fic on FFN and I was young and made a choice in characters that didn’t sit well with a reader.  I don’t think they hated the fic so much as they hated that choice.  And, to be fair, it was a cop-out choice so I can’t even be mad about it.

Do you write smut?  If so, what kind?

Nope.  I write some more... suggestive things (but I’m an adult so there) but it’s never full on smut.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, but I did have someone do a podfic of one of my fics!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Kinda, sorta, not really?  My sister was writing this AH pirate fic and I helped her write some of the scenes, but it was her fic.

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

This question is unfair.  I’ve been around the fandom block for over a decade - how can I pick ONE favorite ship?  But, I guess, for the sake of this, if we wanna talk favorite ship to write about?  Probably Dwalin/Ori.  They’re the two I wrote the most fics for and their dynamic is endlessly entertaining for me.  It’s been, what, almost ten years since The Hobbit came out and I still wanna write fics about them?  So I guess that counts.

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

Oh, I have so many.  The one that I think fills me with the most regret is “Everything Is Permitted” which is an Assassin’s Creed AU fic for The Hobbit.  It’s so self-indulgent and I loved the story and the world I ended up building for it.  I really enjoyed adding different AC elements to the world of the Hobbit and I so want to finish telling that story - but I don’t think I ever will.

I also have this Good Omens fic that I’ve been trying to finish - I have the last two chapters but not the three before it so it’s been hanging there, unfinished, for months.  Again, the regret of not having it finished it is what really haunts me because it’s got SUCH a good ending once I get there.

What are your writing strengths?

I’m pretty good at characterization.  Before I even think about writing a fic, I spend so much time consuming media and taking notes about the characters.  I try to find their strengths and weaknesses, what drives them, what they love or hate, who they care for and why they care.  I studied psychology in college and nothing brings me more joy than to nail down characterization.

What are your writing weaknesses?

I am SO BAD at describing things.  I’ve never been good at describing locations or places or clothes or like... even my characters?  Like if someone asked me to describe what my OCs look like, all I can say is what kind of people they are.  Sooo yeah, definitely my weakest point.

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

I think unless you’re fluent in the other language, just stay away from it.  My parents both speak Korean and English and there are nuances in both languages, idioms and the like, that are difficult to translate if you don’t speak the language semi-fluently.  A direct translation is impossible so, unless you know the language, it’s not worth the risk.

The funny thing is that this also applies to sign language.  It’s so easy to just assign sentences to sign language and mark it as sign instead of spoken.  But sign language is also impossible to directly translate.  It’s something I didn’t realize until my sister took ASL in college.  And sure, I get that it’s hard to have a deaf character sign and stuff, but I think it’s important to know that sign language is also a foreign language.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Can I date myself with this?  I wrote Red vs Blue fic on Deviant Art.  How’s that for old?

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Probably “According to You”.  It was one of the first fics I wrote where I had a clear vision of what I wanted to execute and it actually went to plan?  I feel so proud of how the whole story turned out, how the pacing went and the dramatic ending.  It’s one that I’ve been seriously considering editing and publishing because I’m just that proud of it.

[btxtreads]

Halfway There || Choi Soobin

➳ When feelings you thought have changed do a complete 180 in the midst of a total disaster.

↳ Pairing: Choi Soobin x Reader

↳ word count: 4.2k

↳ genre: fluff, angst?, medical au

↳ trigger warnings: mass shooting (NOT DESCRIBED BUT MENTIONED A LOT), mentions of suicide, panic attacks, multiple gunshot casualties, minor character deaths

↳Trigger warning note: PLEASE BE CAREFUL IN READING THIS FIC. IF YOU ARE TRIGGERED BY THE THINGS LISTED ABOVE--PLEASE DO NOT PROCEED UNDER THE KEEP READING SIGN. this is in no way romanticizing a shooting or anything mentioned in the warnings above--but this is a medical fic that takes place in an emergency room in the midst of a disaster, and i found that this situation is usually dealt with in the medical field would be plausible for the emergencies they would be able to respond to but still be able to interact with. 

↳ a/n: With regards to the general plot between Soobin and Y/N,,,, i had no idea what i was writing man i did this on a spur at 3am. Please be careful in reading, and please tread lightly. otherwise, enjoy this weird soobin fic i wrote because there are no soobin fics for me to read anymore hAHA pls send me some.

Screams, wheels on linoleum floors, beeping.

All those noises are tuned out by Y/N as she panted, two defibrillators in her hands.

“Charge again. 600 this time. You, move.” Y/N commanded, pushing the patient’s brother away. “No one near the patient. We ready?”

Beomgyu, Y/N’s best friend and co-doctor, nodded firmly. 

“Alright. Three, two, one.” Y/N said, voice alert. “Charge.”

The patient’s body lurched.

Y/N’s head turned to the heart monitor, cursing at the unmoving flat line.

“Shit, again. 800. Ready?”

“Yep.”

“3, 2, 1. Charge.” Y/N commanded, defibrillators firmly planted on the patient’s chest.

The patient lurched once more, and a slow beeping started.

Y/N and Beomgyu looked up at the heart monitor which now projected varying sizes of spikes—the patient’s heart was beeping again.

“Alright, he’s stable for now. Wheel him in, OR-5.” Y/N sighed, handing the defibrillator to a nearby nurse.

“Dr. Jeon is in, we’ll page him.” Beomgyu smiled, already on his pager.

As soon as the patient was rolled out of the emergency room and into the operating room, Y/N crashed into the spare bed.

“When will this end?”

“When your shift ends 4 hours from now.” Beomgyu chuckled, ruffling Y/N’s hair.

Y/N raised her head, pouting at him. “I just wanna go get some sleep, babe.”

Beomgyu laughed and pulled her up. “I don’t think we could, but what we can do is get some coffee at the Starbucks across the street.”

“You’re treating me?”

“You’re such a freeloader, but fine.”

“You have got to be kidding me right now.” Y/N groaned as she pushed the cafe’s door open.

There sat Huening Kai, her cousin and resident doctor, happily sipping on an iced americano next to Taehyun, his best friend from college.

Across them sat Yeonjun, one of the senior doctors of the hospital and next to him is Yeonjun’s best friend, Soobin.

Soobin.

Choi Soobin—she dreaded his entire existence.

Soobin, peacefully munching on a donut, heard the loud complaint from his seat and his eyes immediately darted over to the girl at the door.

“Y/N-ie!” Yeonjun greeted.

“Hey, Junie.” Y/N smiled politely, frowning at Soobin as she approached their table.

“Hey, troublemakers.” Y/N greeted, her hand landing on Hueningkai and Taehyun’s heads. 

“Your mentor teaching you how to slack, huh?” Beomgyu teased, walking towards the line.

“Actually,” Yeonjun raised his finger. “I am not their mentor.”

“All the more. Besides, you’re still teaching them to slack.” Y/N chirped.

“You’re one to talk, you’re here too!” Yeonjun whined.

Soobin chuckled, causing Y/N to shoot him a glare. “Can I help you?”

Soobin stopped abruptly, shaking his head softly.

Yeonjun and Beomgyu exchanged glances as Y/N started doting on Hyuka.

Soobin quietly stood up, excusing himself for the comfort room.

Yeonjun turned to Y/N and whined. “What’s your problem?”

“My problem is that you’re a fully-grown adult, a medicine graduate and a practicing doctor and yet you still act like such a child.” Y/N shrugged.

“Boo.” Yeonjun huffed.

“Yeonjun,” Beomgyu sighed. “He meant what’s your problem with Soobin?”

“What do you mean?” Y/N asked.

“They used to date!” Hyuka chirped from his seat, causing Y/N to turn over to him.

“Oh, yeah. They got it on all the time at their house, Soobin was there almost everyday then.” Taehyun giggled, silencing immediately at Y/N’s sharped glare.

“You what?” Yeonjun asked, his eyes wide. “Oh my god.”

“Still finding out your name is Daniel was a bigger surprise, Daniel.”

“My name is also Yeonjun. Both are my names.” Yeonjun groaned.

“Bad break-up?”

“No, kind of?” Y/N sighed, eyes locking with Soobin who just sat down. “Soobin just gave me a good wake-up call.”

Soobin frowned. “Look, can you get over it? It was almost six years ago.”

“Seeing my ex make out with my best friend the day after we broke up was seems kind of like a hate-you-for-the-rest-of-my-life material, doesn’t it, Binnie?” Y/N said, voice emotionless and smile empty.

As Soobin opened his mouth to answer his defense, six simultaneous beeps sounded out.

The six doctors exchanged glances before checking their respective pagers.

Code brown. Shooter at Seoul Community College. First patients ETA 10 min.

Years ago...

Y/N’s eyes watered as Soobin bit his lip, his head bowed down low.

“No, no.” Y/N whispered, her eyes leaking tears—but she didn’t sob. 

She was quiet, and Soobin thought that hurt more than anything else.

“W-Why?” Y/N asked. “You told me you wouldn’t give up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Soobin, you said you loved me.” Y/N looked up, locking eyes with him. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t love me.”

Soobin gulped, looking at the side.

Of course, he loved her.

Soobin actually thinks he’s never loved anyone more than he loves Y/N.

But he can’t.

Soobin loved Y/N—a bit too much.

Too much that he was willing to throw everything away, that he was willing to just drop everything to be at Y/N’s beck and call.

Too much that he thought that he might suffer for it.

He might stop paying attention to class.

Too much that he thought of proposing, dropping is course and getting married, getting her pregnant and starting a family and a business.

That wasn’t in his plan.

When he said he wanted to be a doctor, his family made a lot of adjustments—budget cuts, his older brother going to a less prestigious college to save money, his parents taking on multiple jobs—just to give him his dream.

And now, he was here and thinking of dropping it all for a girl.

So, yes. 

He did love Y/N, but he had to choose.

“I can’t, because I do love you, Y/N.” Soobin smiled sadly. “I have to love myself and my family more.”

“Soobin, I don’t understand. I don’t—just—tell me.”

Soobin only shook his head, any explanation he would offer would be useless.

“I’m sorry. I love you.”

Y/N, red-eyed and face swollen, finally found the courage to haul herself out of bed to get some food from a nearby cafe.

After a few hours of crying, Y/N fell asleep.

Waking up the next morning to an empty bed when she usually woke up on Soobin’s bare chest made another fresh wave of tears flow out of her body until she was out and had to reload—eat and drink.

As soon as she turned to the corner, her eyes fixed on her best friend.

Seo Yeon sat on the lap of a tall, brown-haired man practically sucking his face off.

What made Y/N stop was when they pulled away, Soobin’s face becoming visible.

Seo Yeon giggled before pressing a few kisses to his neck as Y/N walked over to them slowly.

“I thought you were busy Seo Yeon.” Y/N said, causing Seo Yeon to fumble off of Soobin.

“I-I was, Y/N-ie.” Seo Yeon mumbled as she stood awkwardly next to Soobin in his chair.

Soobin only sighed.

“Busy sucking the face off of the love of my life?” Y/N growled, out of character from her usualy calm demeanor.

Soobin’s head shot up, gaze soft but shocked at Y/N.

Seo Yeon pursed her lips. “Didn’t you guys break up?”

“You didn’t know that,” Y/N smiled dangerously. “I would’ve told you if you picked up the phone, but you didn’t. Did Soobin tell you?”

“No.” Soobin hummed, his gaze set on Y/N.

“Fucking snake.” Y/N chuckled, picking up Soobin’s cold brew and pouring it over Seo Yeon’s head.

Seo Yeon’s high pitched-screech sounded out as the beverage spilled over her head and stained her clothes.

Y/N turned her head over to Soobin, a menacing glare on her face as she hissed. “I thought you fucking loved me.”

“I did,” Soobin said, settling in his chair. “I always will.”

“Bullshit.” Y/N hissed before turning, pulling her hair in a high ponytail as she angrily stepped over to the cafe counter to order.

Soobin only sighed as the cafe’s door closed. “This was the only way to make you believe I don’t anymore.”

On a totally random Wednesday, Y/N found herself breathing heavily as she rushed from patient to patient. 

She, Soobin, Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun and Hyuka all pulled on their coats as soon as they read the pager’s message and bolted back to the emergency room to prepare for the incoming patients.

The last she saw, a running Hyuka was fixing the IV of a patient being wheeled to the operating room, with Taehyun pushing the bed and rambling about Dr. Kim.

Yeonjun was screaming earlier about joules—probably using a defibrillator.

Beomgyu crashed in on her cot earlier as she was giving chest compressions to a gunshot victim, stealing gauzes before bolting to the neighboring cot.

Y/N panted as she opened the next cot, empty.

Soobin entered right after her, sighing as he collapsed on the empty bed.

“That’s for the patient.” Y/N panted, readying herself to stand and move to the next cot before Soobin groaned, pulling out his phone to narrate the situation.

“The shooter’s daughter was bullied and killed herself. So, he came to the university and killed everyone he thought was responsible.” Soobin narrated, sitting up and breathing slowly. “He’s still shooting.”

“Shit, so more patients incoming.” Y/N cursed. 

“Definitely.” Soobin sighed as he stood and pulled the curtain open, only to be greeted with another patient—a gunshot wound on his chest, abdomen and leg.

“Oh my god.” Y/N gasped, waving the responders in.

Soobin immediately set to action, pulling out IVs and preparing the heart monitor.

“Dr. Choi, get a nurse.”

“There’s no time, and they’re all busy.” Soobin refused. “I’ll be your nurse for now.”

Y/N cursed before springing into action, taking the cords for the heart monitor to help him set it up.

“He’s got a weak heart beat and were losing a lot of blood.” Y/N hissed.

“Fuck, what’s your blood type?” Soobin asked, looking up at the patient whose gaze was hazy. “Sir? Sir!”

The patient muttered incoherently, causing Y/N to face him as his eyes closed. “Hey, hey. Stay with us.”

The patient breathed heavily before forcing his eyes open to let out another incoherent murmur. “Sir! Wake up!”

“Fuck,” Soobin said, turning to pull out a fresh batch of gauzes to press to the wounds. “Sir!”

Y/N cursed. “Fuck this.”

Soobin’s eyes widened as Y/N grabbed the man and shook him away. “Hey, buddy! Don’t sleep!”

The man blinked before softly muttering out. “Blood…O…Blood…Type of… O…”

Soobin grinned, turning over to Y/N and smiling softly. “Thanks, sir.”

“You gotta stay awake with us. Okay, buddy? We’ll get you out.” Y/N faced him. “Get the blood, doofus. We need at least 3 pints.”

“Roger.”

After Soobin and Y/N wheeled their patient into an operating room, leaving him to the care of Dr. Moon before running back to the emergency room.

At least 10 more patients were rolled in while they were occupied.

Y/N immediately bolted over to Hyuka, who looked panicked as he straddled a victim.

“Kai, get off, I’ll do it!” 

Kai pulled himself off of the patient, and Y/N immediately plopped herself over the body.

“Count for me, a hundred a minute. Ready?”

Soobin’s eyes fixated on Y/N as he dashed to another cot with a ma and a stab wound.

She never looked more beautiful to him than she did a while ago, saving a life right in front of him.

Several cardiac arrests and chest compressions later, Y/N found herself at a loss in the middle of the emergency room as patients were wheeled in continuously.

“Is it still on-going?” Y/N asked as Beomgyu rushed past.

“It’s an open fire now,” Yeonjun answered for Beomgyu.

“Fuck,” Y/N cursed as a patient was pushed to a cot next to her, a black ribbon tied to the bed.

“Doc, we need someone to call it in so we can use the cot for other patients.” The head nurse rushed, causing Y/N to purse her lips and enter the cot.

The patient was a young woman, seemingly in her mid-20s, and her soft face  made her look like she was just asleep—but Y/N knew better, she knew what the ribbon meant.

Y/N raised her watch, glancing at the dark lines forming numbers that would ultimately mark the last minutes of this girl.

“Time of death, 6:53 P.M.”

The nurse thanked Y/N, setting a blanket over the patient’s face before a quick transfer from the bed to a gurney was done and the nurses started to change the bedsheets for the next patient.

Soobin’s groan and Hyuka’s voice sounded from the cot across Y/N causing her to peek over.

Hyuka panted as he fluttered around the patient’s bedside.

“Hey, Hey! Minho, stay with me!” Hyuka hissed as he shook the body.

“Min Ho?” Y/N asked, walking forward. “Son Min Ho?” 

Y/N looked down at her and Hyuka’s childhood best friend on the cot, Soobin working tirelessly as he tried to do chest compressions.

“Y/N, can you press on the wound?” 

Y/N’s gasped, her eyes watering once more as she grabbed gauze pads and started pressing down on the multiple gun shot wounds on Minho’s body.

At the back of her mind, she knew that there was nothing they could do—he was gone as soon as she heard the flatline.

She didn’t know why her body reacted when Soobin pulled a black ribbon out of his pocket.

“No, No!”

Hyuka was silent, sitting down with a blank expression as Y/N shook her head.

“Choi, no, stop.” Y/N shook her head. “I can save him—I can save him!”

“Y/N.” Hyuka said softly, looking up at Y/N. “It’s over.”

“No, no.” Y/N gasped. “Not until I say so.”

“Y/N!”

“We’re not losing Minho, okay!” Y/N muttered, pulling the black ribbon out of Soobin’s hands and throwing it to the side. “No.”

“Y/N.” Beomgyu said as he entered the cot.

“No!”

Y/N climbed the bed, straddling Minho. “I can do this, fuck the heart monitor. Beomgyu, a hundred compressions a minute.”

“Y/N, stop it.” Beomgyu said, trying to pull her off.

“No? Fine. I’ll do it myself. Fuck you.” Y/N cursed at Beomgyu, her chest heaving fast as he pressed her palms on her friend’s body.

He was cold, but she paid no attention to it.

No, he’ll be fine. 

“One, Two, Three—”

“Y/N!” Soobin’s deep voice boomed as he forcefully lifted Y/N off Minho’s body and plopped her on the floor where she unceremoniously dropped.

Yeonjun and Beomgyu helped several nurses transfer Minho to a gurney for the morgue as Taehyun consoled a silent Hyuka.

“I didn’t—I could’ve saved him—I could’ve…” Y/N muttered, rambling over and over.

“Y/N?” Beomgyu asked as he stepped forward.

“Panic attack.” Hyuka suddenly said.

“Y/N, Y/N,” Soobin said, his fingers snapping in front of her. “Look at me. Count with me.”

“I c-could’ve saved h-him.” Y/N continued, ignoring Soobin. “He c-can still live, b-bring him b-back. I can s-save h-him.”

“Think about family, think about friends. Your house in the country, your relatives there, your neighbors—“ Soobin abruptly stopped at Y/N’s glare.

“No, okay. Don’t think about it. Hold your breath.” Soobin said, causing Y/N to breathe heavier.

“I c-can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I r-really c-can’t, C-Choi!”

“Fine.” Soobin hissed before leaning in and pressing his lips on hers.

Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun and Hyuka all froze, eyes trained on Y/N and Soobin.

Y/N slowly responded to the kiss before pulling away.

Soobin breathed heavily, leaning his forehead on hers as he closed his eyes.

“Wait—what?” Yeonjun muttered.

“What was that for?” Y/N asked silently.

“You had to hold your breath, and you weren’t.” Soobin said softly as Beomgyu started to usher the others (mainly Yeonjun, who stillw anted to peek) out of the cot. “When I kissed you, you held your breath.”

“Y-You can’t do that.” Y/N breathed out.

Soobin only shook his head before leaning back in, swiftly pressing his lips on hers.

Y/N let out a soft breath, leaning back and running her hand through Soobin’s hair as their lips moved in sync.

Soobin raised his hands to grasp her waist, pushing deeper and angling his head.

Y/N groaned and wrapped her leg around his torso, pulling him closer.

Soobin moved his lips down, kissing from her lips, to her jaw and proceeding to suck a mark on her neck.

“Soobin,” Y/N grunted, sighing.

Soobin hummed, pressing his lips to hers once more.

It was then that Y/N suddenly opened her eyes and pushed him away.

“No, No. This can’t be happening again, not after I just got over this.” Y/N said, groaning as she scooted away.

“Y/N, wait—“

“You hurt me.” Y/N said, turning over to him. “You broke up with me.”

“I thought it was best at the time.” Soobin whispered.

“I loved you.”

“So did I,” Soobin said, taking her hand and pressing a soft kiss on it. “and I still do. I never stopped.”

“Bullshit,” Y/N hissed, ripping her hand away from Soobin’s grasp and running it through her hair. “Stop saying shit you don’t mean.”

“How do you know I don’t mean it?” Soobin challenged, irritated.

“Maybe because I saw you making out with my so-called best friend the day after you left.” Y/N hissed.

“It was the only way to get you to believe that I didn’t love you anymore!” Soobin argued, standing up. “All these years, I never stopped thinking about you.”

“Bullshit, why’d you break up with me?”

“Because I was ready to drop everything to marry you!” Soobin said, his hands flinging around in anger. 

Y/N froze, speechless.

“I loved you too much, I thought maybe that’s bad for me. I was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Soobin whispered.

“Then-Then, why?” Y/N asked as Soobin walked forward and pulled her in once more, leaning his forehead on hers.

Soobin sighed and pressed another kiss on her lips.

Y/N pulled away, breathing heavily. “Soobin, why?”

“Y/N, I never wanted to let you go, but the hardest decisions always seem like the good ones.” Soobin explained, tucking a stray lock of hair behind Y/N’s head.

“Oh,” Y/N replied, swallowing a lump on her throat. “Was i never a good decision to you?”

Soobin shook his head. “I don’t know. It was so easy to love you, maybe that’s why I thought you were bad for me.”

Y/N sighed and pushed him away gently. “No.”

“Y/N?”

Y/N stopped, opening the curtain to the cot and turning to face Soobin with pursed lips.

“You know, I wouldve done all that I could to hold on to you, but when I saw you with her, I thought you wanted me to go. It’s nice to know you didn’t.”

“I never wanted you to go, I still dont.” Soobin said, reaching out to grasp Y/N’s hand.

“I don’t believe you anymore.”

Y/N gave a sad smile, placing a soft kiss on Soobin’s hand before turning and leaving him alone.

Next to them was the distinct sound of a heart monitor flatlining.

Y/N heaved, inserting a tube in the patient’s chest after making a fast incision.

Y/N waited for a while until the patient stabilized.

“Keep him in observation. Once Dr. Seo clears up wheel him in and say he had tension pneumothorax.” Y/N yawned and patted the nurse at the back. “He’ll be alright for now.”

“Thank you, Y/N. I’ll take over now.” Taehyun says, ruffling Y/N’s hair as Hyuka enters the cot.

“Y/N, you look horrible.” Hyuka gasps, causing Taehyun to snort in laughter.

“Thanks, cousin. Nice to hear.” Y/N replied, voice laced heavily with sarcasm.

Hyuka held his hands up. “I’m just saying.”

“He’s not wrong,” Beomgyu sighed, entering the cots and leaning on the bed. “You should get some sleep.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No, I’m serious.” Beomgyu raised an eyebrow. “You look like you’ll drop dead any minute. I’d rather you get a nap before you become an extra patient here.”

Y/N pursed her lips as she peeked out the cot, running her eyes through the emergency room.

It was a little bit calmer now, a stark difference from the chaotic messy room it was earlier.

“You guys will be fine?”

“We got it,” Hyuka smiled.

“Go to the break room, get some sleep.” Beomgyu pushed Y/N lightly. “We’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Okay, sheesh. Will do.” Y/N shook her head and started to trek her way to the second floor.

It was now silent, the break room situated between patient’s private rooms for peace and quiet while doctors take their rests.

Y/N entered the room silently, her eyes locking over a lone figure laying down on one of the bunk beds—an arm covering his eyes.

As she closed the door, Soobin sat up slowly.

“I was waiting for you.”

“Did Beomgyu and the others put you up to this?” Y/N sighed.

“No,” Soobin shook his head. “But Yeonjun sent me up to get some rest, and I knew it was a matter of time before Beomgyu sent you up, too. So, I waited.”

“So, you waited.” Y/N hummed. “Soobin, what exactly do you want from me?”

Soobin stayed silent as he stood up and walked closer. “I want you.”

Y/N turned abruptly, lips pursed. “You had me, you let me go.”

“Yeah, well I’m not making the same mistake again.” Soobin said, pulling her closer. “Y/N, I know I still have you.”

“Soobin.”

“Down there, in the ER,” Soobin asked. “You kissed me back. Was that real?”

“That was real.” Y/N replied curtly.

“And you wanted to kiss me, right?”

“Right?”

“And you still love me, right?” Soobin asked desperately.

“I do,” Y/N closed her eyes, feeling Soobin lean closer. 

“Y/N, I want you back.”

Soobin swooped down to plant a kiss on Y/N’s lips, but she only sighed and turned her head.

She walked over to a nearby bunk, shrugging her coat off. “It’s not that easy to forget everything, Soobin.”

“I never stopped loving you. It was always you.” Soobin said, following her and laying a hand on her waist. “Please, let me prove it to you.”

Y/N turned in his arms and slowly wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m scared of you—I’m scared you’ll turn around and go once you realize I’m not something you want.”

“No, not anymore. I know it’s you.” Soobin shook his head and placed his hands on her cheeks. “The greatest mistake of my life taught me that sometimes, the best decisions are the easiest things to do—and it’s so easy for me to say I’m in love with you.”

Y/N smiled softly at Soobin before leaning up to kiss him.

Soobin laid Y/N down on the bed, not breaking the kiss as he crawled on top of her.

Y/N pulled away and ran a finger across his cheeks.

“I’m supposed to get some rest, Dr. Choi.”

“So was I,” Soobin smiled, satisfied and happy as he plopped his body down next to Y/N and pulling her close.

Y/N lifted her head to place it on his chest, laying her hand above his heart.

Y/N smiled at the rapid beat of Soobin’s heart as he tightened his grip on her waist, burying his face in her hair.

“Soobin, what happens tomorrow?” Y/N asked, starting to trace abstract lines on his chest.

“I don’t know, baby.” Soobin smiled in her hair. “All I know is that it’s still you and me.”

Y/N smiled burying her head in his chest. “I still don’t forgive you.”

Soobin smiled, the pout in Y/N’s voice and the way she snuggled in his chest was a clear indication that somehow—even just a little—she did.

“I know,” Soobin hummed. “but I’m halfway there.”

BONUS:

The morning after the emergency, Soobin drove Y/N home.

He absolutely refused to let her go without at least one goodbye kiss—or three—demanding that she free up her night for a date.

He won her over by more kisses.

After seeing Y/N practically make out with Dr. Choi Soobin, the tallest bachelor doctor you can find in Seoul Medical Center, her roommates were shocked.

To say the least, various questions was thrown left and right about Soobin.

(“Does he kiss nice?” “Yeah, his lips are soft.” “How tall is he?” “6”2, but you can literally just ask him this.” “I thought you were dating Choi Beomgyu?” “I never was, but I guess I’m dating Choi Soobin now.” “Is his dick big?” “if it’s just like I remember, then it’s huge, yes, but I don’t see why you have to ask me this.”)

At exactly 5 in the afternoon, Y/N shot awake from the alarm she set.

“7pm. See you, babe. ;)” was the short text waiting for her—sent at exactly 3:30 PM.

Immediately, she dashed into the shower.

Afterwards, she took the best outfit she could find.

At exactly 6:48, she settled into her couch and waited.

As 7:00 sharp rolled in, there were three knocks on the door.

When Y/N opened the door, she was greeted with a bouquet of roses and a smiling Soobin.

“Hi, baby.”

“Hi.” Y/N smiled brightly, leaning forward and kissing him gently. “These are beautiful.”

“I know, just like you.”

“Cheesy.” Y/N hummed with a smile, placing another kiss on his lips before setting it on a nearby coffee table.

“I know you love it,” Soobin grinned as he intertwined their hands. “Am I forgiven yet, baby?”

“I don’t know,” Y/N giggled, wrapping her arms around his neck and biting her lip. “but you’re halfway there.”

[the-final-sif]

interview about writing processes

Hey Lady Sif,

thank you for taking time for us and agreeing to answer our interview questions.

Since this was of short notice we decided to change the deadline to June 19.

We hope the time frame suits you.

Here are our questions:

Can you shortly describe us your writing history? How did you start off? How did you come across fanfiction?

Do you have a writing philosophy that helps you overcome challenges in writing?

Could you describe your writing environment? (workplace, prefered writing tools, fandom discourse, discourse with friends)

What inspires you to write and post in and for a fandom? What triggers your headcanons? Does your educational background influence your writing?

In how far does your fandom experience influence your writing?

In how far do you work with others to create fan content? And what ideas do you integrate in your writing?

Are there certain steps you take/decisions you make when/before responding to a post/prompt?

When and why did you decide to host writing events like your fake fics event? What was the purpose and how did you approach the title prompts?

How would you describe the difference between writing alone and writing spontaneously with others (first in creating fan theories and headcanons and second in creating fanfiction)?

Do you think knowing that others read and can comment on your texts subconsciously influences your writing?

What motivated you to create a story where your readers can decide for an ending (name)?

Is there anything else you consider important in your writing process that you would like to tell us?

Thanks again for your time and effort, we are very much looking forward to your answers!

If you’re interested we’ll keep you updated on our findings.

Kind regards, Dana and Helena

----

Can you shortly describe us your writing history? How did you start off? How did you come across fanfiction?

I started writing when I was very young! I was a huge reader, and even before I was writing stuff down I was a storyteller. It’s a really important part of my family & how we communicate with each others and others.

My first experience with fanfiction was when I was,, 7 or 8? That sounds about right. I hand wrote a fanfiction called “ShoppingCats” which something between warrior cats and Cats vs Dogs, but also made primarily of my OCs (+ a handful of warriors characters I liked). I still have most of it, it’s sitting in my desk drawer in it’s original binder, since my mother saved it.

I came across fandom spaces / online fanfiction in 2012 with fanfiction.net, and published my first fanfiction in 2013 (under Rosae-Sif on fanfiction.net). I’ve taken breaks as my interests changed & life got chaotic, but I’ve always enjoyed retelling stories that I hear and changing them to suit me more / explore new themes, so I’ve stuck with it after all this time.

Do you have a writing philosophy that helps you overcome challenges in writing?

Yes! I write for myself above all else. It’s fun to write stuff for other people sometimes, and I like getting feedback and what not, but I never let that be the focus of my writing. I always try to write what I want to be reading, so when I go back and reread what I’ve written, more often than not I find I’ve produced something that makes me happy, and that helps keep me going when a lot of other things couldn’t.

Could you describe your writing environment? (workplace, prefered writing tools, fandom discourse, discourse with friends)

Uhhh, I don’t really have any one set thing. I mostly write on my laptop, sometimes I use a notebook + pen. I have 5$ fountain pen that I got that I really love when I have writer’s block.

I think the most consistent “workplace” for me is actually discord/my friends. Almost all of my AUs/fics/ideas start as me storytelling (either typing things out or out loud) to someone else. That’s where the spark comes from, and then that slowly is refined through several iterations until I have something I like. 

I really like taking long walks with headphones & nobody else around. That’s when a lot of the very early forms of my favorite ideas come to me. It’s a key part of my writing process the few times I get stuck on stuff too. I just go walk till I figure it out.

I don’t really get involved in discourse much. I like debating people, but I try to stay away from destructive stuff and just have my own fun corner where I create things. I’m in fandom for fun, and I refuse to let me experience be tainted by people who try to turn it into Discourse Central.

What inspires you to write and post in and for a fandom? What triggers your headcanons? Does your educational background influence your writing?

As I mentioned before, I write and post primarily for myself! I have a lot of ideas in my head all the time, and things I want to see, so I create those things and then put them here. It’s fun when other people interact with me + add onto my ideas + create things in response!

My headcanons are usually just kinda,,,, coming out of my brain. I think it’s just how I am. I have a question or a thought and I start looking into it and before I know it, a whole new thing has come out of it.

I think my family actually influenced a lot of my writing style more than anything else. I mean, I was homeschooled for a long time, and my parents were very encouraging of whatever weird projects I was creating (my dad once even let me cut down and drag actual brambles into the basement to create a warriors style fort). I was allowed to dress however I wanted (during high school I worn nothing but PJ pants b/c they were most comfy for me, and also I had/have several capes that I would rotate through), I was allowed to dye my hair (still do! it’s current a side shave in red + purple + blue!), and I was encouraged to just,,, be weird and happy. I think that shows in how I write. I pursue the ideas I want to go after, I indulge myself, I commit to thinks and I focus more on what I want to write rather than what I feel I should write.

That being said, a lot of science nerding that comes out in my writing is def from my educational background. I’ve got a bachelors and stuff. I did take some writing classes, but to be honest, I think my fanfiction experience influenced those a lot more than they influenced my fanfiction (years and years of writing constantly and quickly paid off in college where I would BS papers the night before and get top marks on it).

In how far does your fandom experience influence your writing?

Hmm, I don’t think it does that much? I mean, for the BNHA fandom in particular, I think that seeing all the cool content + ideas other people create really keeps my brain chugging along and creating new things, and god, having seen people make fanart and fanfiction for my stories has been one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced, but I don’t think that’s really changed how I’m writing.

At my core, I’m still doing the same thing my 8 year old self was doing with her pencil and that binder full of paper. I take the strange thoughts out of my head, and I follow them onto the paper until I create something that makes me happy.

I’ve had some negative experiences of course. I mean, everyone does. They’ve all been fairly minor, mostly just people trying to tell me I’m wrong about stuff that’s either in an AU that’s already not supposed to be canon, or stuff I’m right about. Most of the time it’s just annoying. Sometimes it’s concerning. I ignore or delete the annoying stuff, I don’t want to give it any of my time or attention. 

The concerning stuff I try to reply to. It’s been rare, but sometimes I get comments on certain fics trying to tell me what’s being depicted in my fic isn’t abusive when it absolutely is. I try to correct that and link to resources when I do get that. I usually don’t get a reply, but a few times I’ve had people realize that what they thought was normal was actually abusive behavior. I’m happy that I’m able to help people come to that realization.

In how far do you work with others to create fan content? And what ideas do you integrate in your writing?

Hmmm, I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure how to answer this one. I don’t exactly work with others when creating my fan content? All of my writing (save one RP collab homestuck fic from ages ago) is done by me exclusively, and most my ideas are also mostly from my own brain. Although I will say one exception to that is @windschildfanfictionwriter​ whose an amazing bnha writer I chat with fairly frequently when I need help figuring something out.

It’s less of “working” with people, and more discussing things/ideas, and being excited about stuff. Sometimes literally all I need is someone to be my rubber duck while I talk about an idea for 2-3 hours to get it solidified. People in my discord server often help me by betaing (editing/reviewing) my wips. My adhd means I often make weird mistakes, and they’re wonderful at helping me catch that.

As for ideas I pull into my writing, it’s hard to pick out specific ones. I think I kinda create + absorb + integrate lots of stuff at once. A lot of the times my ideas don’t come from things other authors write, but instead come from things other authors didn’t write. When I see an thought/idea/thread in a story that isn’t followed up on, or isn’t handled how I think it should be handled, that often inspires me to either use a similar base concept or similar thought but in the way I wish it had been done.

Are there certain steps you take/decisions you make when/before responding to a post/prompt?

Not really? I tend to just go with whatever comes to me or what I already had prepared. I’m rather impulsive, so unless it’s a delicate subject matter, I roll with whatever’s going on.

I do always make myself take a step back before responding to stuff that annoys me/any sort of anon hate. I have to remind myself it’s not worth the effort and I should focus on positive/fun stuff. I’ll admit though, I have a very combative nature that can get the better of me sometimes. I’ve gotten better at that though! Hooray for proper adhd medication to help prevent destructive stimulus seeking behavior and therapy! Although I do still like to debate stuff for fun, I just don’t let myself get hostile about it.

When and why did you decide to host writing events like your fake fics event? What was the purpose and how did you approach the title prompts?

Oh, I just saw the post and thought it looked fun so I reblogged it. Stuff like that is mostly an impulse more than anything else.

I just kinda went with the flow for the titles. God, I got so many of those, I still have a lot of them sitting in my inbox, most of which I probably won’t ever post. For the ones I did do though, I picked ones that sounded like fic titles I would actually use, and then asked myself what sort of story I would use that title for. Then I just kinda wrote whatever came to me.

How would you describe the difference between writing alone and writing spontaneously with others (first in creating fan theories and headcanons and second in creating fanfiction)?

Hmmm. This one is also a bit hard. It’s rare I truly “write alone”, most of my stories start as a form of oral storytelling and then are adapted to “proper” writing. Most of my theories/headcanons start the same way.

You’ll notice a lot of my posts start with “Also” “Okay” or “I’ve been thinking” or “You know”. When I’m writing my headcanon/theory posts, it’s all written very conversationally because I’m still following my family’s storytelling in a way. It’s a public post, but I’m not just making statements to a void. I’m still talking to people, addressing them, leading them through stuff. It’s just how I communicate on a very fundamental leave.

I’m still writing for myself, I’m creating for myself, but I’m doing it with others. I’m telling a story constantly, and sometimes I’m telling that story to myself, but I’m still telling it to someone.

I think you can read that in my fics, with the perspective I tend to use. I use limited third person POV, but when I’m writing, I try to write it how the character I’m writing from the POV of would tell their own story. I’m not just describing what’s happening, I’m letting this character tell their story through their own voice, to others, to me. It’s a core part of my writing, and that makes it hard to say that it was ever really written alone.

Do you think knowing that others read and can comment on your texts subconsciously influences your writing?

I mean, it’d be impossible for it not to. But I don’t think it influences me that much. I’m still writing for myself most of the time, and I hold onto my bullshit tightly. I don’t change my writing based on what I think other people want to see from me.

That being said, it’s still something I think about. It’s more of a conscious choice, but specifically regarding my stories that have abuse in them, I try to connect in elements of realism and common underrepresented traits/habits of abuse (which I do try to check via research when I can) and ensure that they are then called out as what they are. I’ve gotten a number of comments/asks/discord messages from people telling me that my works helped them realize they were in a crappy situation / understand what they were going through, and that’s something that’s important for me.

I think The Green Eyed Monster is an example of that, where I explore platonic stalking/obsession/pressuring. It’s something I don’t see taken seriously often enough, so I wanted to frame it in a serious but realistic light and make it clear that what was happening was wrong and harmful. I wanted to explore this concept, but I purposefully did it in a way that I hoped would help others who might’ve dealt with it on some level understand it for what it was, and I think it really shows. In the comments of that fic, there’s a lot of very personal responses/stories from people who went through similar experiences. I think that’s important, so it’s something I try to do when I can.

The other thing is I do 100% put references/lines in certain stories with an evil grin on my face knowing that a certain handful of my commenters are going to rip their hair out over it, either because they have no idea what I mean by it, or they know exactly what I mean by it. But hey, I’m a hurt/comfort writer at heart, so you can hardly blame me.

What motivated you to create a story where your readers can decide for an ending (name)?

Oh, uh, “Seven Year Old Katsuki Has The Ability To Kill A Grown Man And No Concept Of Legality”.

I actually can’t remember the exact inspiration for this one? I think I saw uhhh, Markiplier, playing a text adventure game, and I got curious about creating something similar.

I considered using a platform meant for text based games, but true to my family’s long history of needlessly complicating things and creating things where they aren’t meant to be created out of some mix of spite and creative hubris, I decided I wanted to make it on A03 instead. I looked up a style formatting guide, and went to work.

That whole project took like 1-2 months, around school work and everything else. It was created entirely using links that sent you to the next page. That’s it. That’s the only ‘code’ functionality I had to work with. So I made a whole paper map of the routes, separating them out into “steps” and then created unique text blocks for each step based on prior choices. I used a secret point system for one of the main routes, and ended up with 97 unique steps, and 155 different text blocks/variations.

Fun project. A03 was having some trouble/going down right after I released it, and to this day, certain members of the discord server still blame me for that as I was forcing the website into bullshit it was not meant to contain.

Is there anything else you consider important in your writing process that you would like to tell us?

Nothing I can think of off the top of my head. Other than maybe I have an African Gray named Cecil, and sometimes when I’m not ready to share an idea with humans, I’ll talk it out with him first. He’s an excellent listener sometimes, and by that I mean he’s usually ignoring me or I’m giving him scratches and he’s not paying my rambling any mind.

Though sometimes I get lucky and when I finish up a point and ask for his opinion, he’ll just look at me for a moment and say “I love you.” He does it because I’ll always cave and give him treats since I’m weak for him, but it still makes me smile.

[asphalt-cocktail]

Inside Out

A/N: Well in honor of Tony Stark’s birthday being today I wanted to upload this fic I wrote for a request I had in my inbox for a Tony Stark X plus size!Reader. I honestly cant think of anything else to say my brain is pretty dead haha.

Warnings: Body image issues, fat shaming, angst, fluff, awkward first date, supportive Pepper, no spoilers 

Word count: 2200ish

Pairing: Tony Stark x Plus size!Reader 

Summary: Tony Stark’s assistant hasn’t had much luck with dates.

Request for @lilacprincessofrecovery

Masterlist

Submit a request or ask me a question or want to be tagged

Being Tony Stark’s assistant had some perks, like living arrangements and pay, but it also had some down falls like having to deal with the man child’s temperament and the fact that Tony watched damn near your every move. This included every time you got stood up which recently, seemed often. Once a week you would get all dressed up, hair done, full face painted, and go out to wait for your date at some nameless restaurant and wait… and wait… for hours for no one to show. Each night Tony would be waiting for you to come back and stay up making sure you were okay.

Today though, you insisted it was going to be different. Pepper sat with you while you blow dried your hair and filled in your eyebrows “So, tell me about this boy?” Pepper pressed, hoping for as much detail as possible out of you.

“Well his name is Jake and he is a CFO for some bank around here.” You answered, “We’ve been talking all week, I’m really excited, he doesn’t seem like the other guys.”

Pepper nodded her head, she hoped you were right. Seeing you heartbroken at least once a week was starting to chip away at her own heart.

“We are meeting at this Italian restaurant at 12 for lunch.” You said and puckered your lips, observing your lip line and making sure it was even and clean. You looked at your phone for the time, 11:30, time for you to leave. You quickly grabbed your jacket and purse “By Pepper! By Mr. Stark!” You called from the door and with that you were gone without another word.

At the restaurant you waited for 15 minutes before Jake met you at the table, so far it was going better than your last 5 dates. “Y/N?” He asked pulling the chair out.

You nodded your head “Yes! You must be Jake.” You said smiling sweetly. The two of you ordered a glass of wine and made pointless conversation. The same pointless conversation everyone makes on dates; where are you from, what are your hobbies, favorite movies, etc.

“So, where do you work?” Jake asked.

“I work for Stark Industries.” You were proud of where you worked, Mr. Stark had done so many amazing things within the last several years.

“Oh wow, that is such a great company to work for” He added enthusiastically, you knew but retorted a humble answer, “You know I think I am going to quick use the bathroom before the waiter comes back for our food.” He said, “I’ll be right back.”

You checked your phone, and aimlessly scrolled through your social media feed, waiting for your date to come back from his bathroom break. After about 15 minutes you looked around, and sighed, you had no idea what was taking him so long and texted him asking him if he was okay. Another 15 minutes passed and there was still no response and no sign of him. You packed up your things and threw a fist full of money on the table to cover the glasses of wine you sucked down at an ungodly rate while waiting and left. Your drive back home was spent with you blasting music and trying to hold back your tears after yet another failed date.

You were greeted with Tony’s smiling face “How did it-” he started but was cut off by you pushing past him and throwing your jacket and purse on the floor and storming off into your room.

You unknowingly shut the door in Tony’s face and sat on your bed, wondering what was wrong with you. A ping on your phone knocked you out of your thoughts, it was Jake. You didn’t know why you opened it, you should have just ignored his message, but for some reason you opened it curious as to why he just up and left.

Maybe he had an emergency?

You should really post full body pictures on your dating profile.

Was all the message said.

You felt you stomach drop as your face scrunched in pain and you threw your phone to the side. You knew this was why he stood you up, your body, you had always been a bigger girl, ample hips, plush thighs that touched, a stomach, this was why you couldn’t get a boyfriend.

You hadn’t even noticed the knocking at the door until you could hear Tony asking to be let in. You got up and shuffled to the door, Tony sighed seeing your disheveled state, lipstick half gone, mascara running down your face, nose red, and pulled you into a hug. You backed up and shut the door before you accepted his hug and leaned into his shoulder crying and leaving tear stains on his tee shirt.

“What happened?” He asked sitting down at the edge of your bed.

“He showed up this time, but he left before we even could order food.” You answered hiccupping and rubbing your eyes. “Then he sent me a message a few minutes ago saying I should post full body pictures on my profile.”

Tony looked at you in disbelief “All right. I want you cleaned and ready to go in the next hour. Wear that dress you wear to galas.” He said standing up. You looked at him, confused at what he was telling you, “Well come on, hurry up.” He said and leaving you standing there in disbelief.

Within the hour you had fixed your hair and makeup as best you could and waited for your boss down in the foyer wearing your best dress. Soon Tony wandered downstairs clad in a grey suit and sunglasses and walked out to where his car was waiting. He sped up to walk ahead of you and opened the door “Come on,” He said and ushered you into the seat. You looked around still confused at what was happening.

“Where are we going?” You asked once he was in the car and already on the road.

“A date.” His tone was very matter of fact.

You looked at him shocked “A date?” You asked, “You are taking me on a date?” You let out a somewhat bitter laugh.

Tony glanced at you with a puzzled expression, “I’m serious.” He said, “It seems like these guys don’t know how much of catch you are.”

Your face flushed, and you looked down at your feet “I don’t know about that. Maybe they’re right maybe I’m too fa-”

“I don’t want to hear you finish that sentence.” He said putting a hand up “You really have no idea how beautiful you really are, you’re just too much for these guys to handle, they don’t know what to do with all this woman.” You smiled but kept our eyes averted.

You kept a watch out your window and gasped when a five-star restaurant pulled into view. You knew Tony didn’t have reservations, but that didn’t matter when you were Tony Stark. No wonder he had asked you to dress up so nicely. Once again, he walked around and opened the door for you and allowed you to hold the crook of his elbow as he tossed his keys to the valet driver and within minutes the two of you were seated at a table with an amazing view of the city. You looked at the menu and frowned, everything on here was so expensive, way more than you could afford “Don’t worry about the cost I’m buying.” He said, “It’s a date remember?”

You nodded your head, almost forgetting how these things worked after dealing with so many shitty dates. You didn’t know what to say “So, I scheduled the appointments for next week,” Naturally business was the first thing to leave your mouth.

Tony shook his head “This isn’t a lunch meeting, Y/N, I’m taking you on date.” He added putting his menu down and looking at you “What are your hobbies, where are you from? I want to know about you, you’ve worked with me for 5 years now and I don’t really know anything about you.”

You nodded your head, he was right, you knew almost everything about Tony down to what his favorite shampoo brand was “Well, I grew up just outside the city with my parents, I went to college for PR and I enjoy painting.” You continued, on and on, describing your family and college along with anything else that came to mind. The entire time he seemed genuinely interested, which was not something you were used to.

Tony nodded his head taking in all the information you told him and burying it in his vast mental bank “You like art?” He asked, “Have you ever been to the Metropolitan museum of Art?”

You sighed, out of all of your years living in New York, you had never once been to the Met “No… I haven’t.” You said sounding disappointed.

“Well then, we have our next date picked out then.” He said smiling.

You looked at him shocked “Our next date?” You asked, “I thought this was like a one-time thing…” you forced yourself to think of it as a one-time thing, a pity date for all the times you’ve been stood up, you didn’t want the disappointment of getting your hopes up for a second date.

Tony furrowed his brows “Y/n” He said, his gaze was intense “I am taking you on a date because I like you.” It was very much Tony’s style to bypass most formalities and get straight to the point “I see you come home ever week, one guy after another, breaking your heart and I can’t stand seeing it anymore.”

You sighed in relief as the waiter conveniently came to take your order before you could manage an answer, you looked at your menu and quickly scanned it as Tony made small talk with the young man taking your order. A grandiose picture of a steak with mashed potatoes and gravy, all the fixings caught your eyes, and you looked down at yourself and at Tony, back at the picture, then back at yourself and felt a surge of guilt push through you. Guilt for wanting to eat this glorious spread of food, you’ve eaten enough food today, you thought to yourself as you turned the page back to the salads and appetizers. You let out a puff of air “I’ll take a cobb salad.” You said smiling softly.

Tony arched his brow “What are you a rabbit?” He asked in a joking manor.

You shrugged your shoulders “I don’t know, I mean I had a big lunch…” you said trailing off

Tony handed back his menu to the waiter “Go on sweetheart, treat yourself today.” He said smiling slyly.

Your face flushed “Well…” You thought for a minute, thinking about what you had for lunch, oh right it was a nice big helping of tears and wine because you got stood up. “The steak dinner, rare?” You asked the waiter, he smiled and wrote down your order and refilled the two glasses of wine and went off.

The remainder of your dinner with Tony went very well, you two made small talk and were both surprised how little you knew about each other. Upon your arrival back to the compound Tony walked you back to his room, he sauntered by your side with his hands in his pockets, trying to act coy “When are you free next?” He asked.

You laughed “Well, I’m your assistant so I guess I should be asking you that…” You trailed off leaning against your door.

“Right…” Tony said trailing off “How about next weekend?” He asked “After the meeting with the marketing department?”

“So, Saturday at 11?” You asked, your mind was racing, you hadn’t been on a proper date in so long, how was he going to say good bye? Was he going to kiss you? Was he going to hug you? Give you a firm handshake?

“Yes, 11. Wear your walking shoes, we’re going to go to the Met.” He said and smiled, unsure on how to end things with you, he was never good at saying goodbye to people. So, he turned your head to the side and placed a lingering kiss on your cheek, it was sweet and simple and made your face flush. “Y/N,” Tony started, “As long as we are together, I don’t want you to ever feel less than, you are beautiful.”

You held his gaze, no man had ever complemented you so much in one night, let alone treated you this well, you didn’t know how to handle it “Thank you.” You said “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to handle complements.” You said looking down and playing with the ends of your hair.

A grin spread across Tony’s face as he looked at you, he loved the way your cheeks flushed and your eyes darted around nervously whenever he complemented you, it would take a while but Tony would make sure you would feel as beautiful on the inside as you did on the outside

[thestuckylibrary]

Group Ask 136

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Please send us an ask stating which group ask and which person you are replying to. Thank you so much in advance!

sadritsuka12 said:

Hi do you know a fic about two Steve one from the past and one from furture and both our trying to kiss past bucky. And i think they have sex?

Anon 1 said:

could you link me to a fic, in it bucky and steve are like rebuilding a house and i think there’s a farm on it? sorry i can’t remember many details

Adeepeningdig sent in Little Animal Lives* by adeepeningdig (complete | 25,149 | T) */others

peppermenttea said:

I have a Stucky fix I’ve been trying to find. It’s Winter Soldier Bucky but skinny Steve, and Bucky is protecting his very smol boyfriend at every turn. I think it was a “5 Times...” thank you so much!!

Anon 2 said:

I'm looking for a fic I read a while ago and I don't remember much specificaly... Steve was looking for a bodyguard/pretend boyfriend I think and Bucky got picked after filling out a long list of his preverences - there were also sexual preferences on the list, Bucky just ticked everything as a "yes" without knowing exactly what the meaning it, could have been A/b/o, but I'm not sure... I do think Bucky had his metal arm.. thanks for your help :)

Anon 3 said:

Hi. I had a fic open in my browser that closed somehow and now I can’t find it. The description ended with something like “captain America liberated a heap of men and among them was Bucky Barnes” it’s set in WWII but steve and Bucky don’t know each other beforehand

Anon 4 said:

I'm having a hard time finding a fic. Steve and buck were working on a building for tony and started sleeping with each other. some memorable highlights were "use those thighs for the power of good" and buck angly eating an eclair

Anon 5 said:

Searching for a fix, can't find it anywhere: Steve is a songwriter/musician and Bucky gets hired to protect him, in on e Scene steve's Stalker left roses all over his tourbus. If i remember corectly Bucky has some Kind of ptsd, Steve wrote him a Song, trigeres him with Another song, and i Think someone Breaks Int o steves house while Bucky lifes with him.. Hope someone can help;)

Anon 6 said:

hii i don't remember if i've asked this before, but i'm looking for a fic in which bucky and steve were like best friends since they were kids. and they end up going to different colleges, and bucky is sad because he feels like steve is forgetting about him or something. i specifically remember he is in his room sulking and listening to a lack of colour by death cab for cutie? i've been looking for it forever hahah. thank u :)))

Anon 7 said:

Hi do you know the fic where it’s modern Bucky and he’s like the pharmacist for the avengers? And Steve always finds excuses to go down and visit him or something? thank you so much!

miraishu and whitewolfwintersoldier sent in in my condition love's the best physician by aniloquent (complete | 9,177 | not rated)

Anon 8 said:

Trying to find a fic where Steve disappears during a battle with the Avengers (some sort of magic done by the villain) and reappears many years in the future. Bucky is older & jaded when he returns. Sound familiar?

thepurplewombat, dolphinqueen10, princessniitza, ysbrd and Anon sent in From Tralfamadore, With Love* by newsbypostcard (complete | 106,544 | E) *past /others

Anon 9 said:

im looking for a fic that has a scene where steve cries when he sees a vet with a tattoo that said something like “i love you brother wait for me”. i can’t remember which one was for the love of my life tysm!!!

thepurplewombat, evan0uir and princessniitza sent in Your Lack Of An Answer Is Kind Of An Answer: Four Questions Natasha Asked Steve Rogers, And One Time Bucky Barnes Answered by Speranza (oneshot | 4,491 | M)

Anon 10 said:

hi! i'm looking for a fic where bucky kind of rescues steve after tws but is so confused that he thinks steve needs to be wiped so puts him in the chair? does this ring any bells? thanks!!

orchidsrule sent in Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief* by OddityBoddity (complete| 43,065 | T) *graphic violence, rape/noncon

Anon 11 said:

I was looking for this fic where Bucky is still with Hydra and he's been good for a while so they decide to reward him by giving him pre-serum Steve as like a pet or something. I think they end up falling for each other and escaping eventually.

Anon sent in Blood by leveragehunters (Monkeygreen) (complete | 45,682 | T)

Anon and miraishu sent in Bucky's Sunshine* by tumtatumtum (complete | 21,789 | E) *dubcon, check the tags

Anon 12 said:

Hi there! Does anyone know the fic in which Steve becomes a guest appraiser on Antique Roadshow? It does involve Bucky somehow but I can’t remember what exactly happens with him. Thanks, guys!

Anon, orchidsrule and thepurplewombat sent in hold me until we crumble by queenklu (oneshot | 22,532 | not rated)

Anon 13 said:

Hi sorry for this but I’ve lost a fic and I can’t find it anywhere! I don’t really know how to describe it but it’s set in WW2 and Steve is like an abused sex worker for a nazi and Bucky finds him and at the end Bucky assassinates hitler?

orchidsrule sent in Bucky's Sunshine* by tumtatumtum (complete | 21,789 | E)  *dubcon, check the tags

[resbang-bookclub]

AMA Transcript: Marked in Constellation

For our final AMA of the season, @sojustifiable stopped in to answer questions about her Resbang, Marked in Constellation! Here’s some of what went down:

Q: What inspired this Resbang?

Amanda: Combination of going to Peru and living in a tent and my own experience camping, and then I think there was a movie that came out a while ago that was about someone doing a solo trip up the PCT [Pacific Crest Trail], which inspired the specific setting.

Q: Were any scenes or events within them directly inspired by your Peru or camping experience?

Amanda: I think mostly the little things about camping like hand washing clothes and having to deal with cleaning drinking water. I got a review saying that it felt well-researched which was definitely validating because of those pieces of personal experience.

Q: What kind of research went into the fic?

Amanda: Ohhh man. A lot of research on the trail specifically, marking off day by how far they could get and using elevation charts for and landmarks for describing what they were actually seeing. I used all real towns for when they would resupply and just basically wanted everything to be as true to the setting as possible.

Q: How much time would you say you spent in the planning/research phase of this versus the writing?

Amanda: I did the research mostly as I was writing, I had a window open that had like four or five tabs open, a couple for docs and outlines, and then a couple with maps and charts for the research so I could be constantly cross referencing as I was writing. I had an outline with basic check points but realized at a certain point I needed to adjust the literal pace to cover the distance needed. I did find a really useful tool actually that you could input different sections of trail and a relative pace and it would give recommendations for how many miles to put in each day.

Q: What were some things you added that you hadn't originally planned to write about?

Amanda: Butt mountain for sure. I think it was sig (@sigsegv) who saw that on the map and suggested it needed a place in the story. I think just the general focus on the little places they stopped and cameos of characters they would come across. Pretty much the only things initially planned were encountering a bear and some skinny dipping.

Q: What was your favorite scene to write? And if applicable, what was your favorite mood to write?

Amanda: I definitely enjoyed writing the ending the most, just getting the point of having emotional release/communication made it a lot more satisfying. There had been a little bit of smut earlier, but it wasn't nearly as fun to write because it still had so much emotional constipation, so it didn't end up being satisfying to write or for the characters, I think. Also writing the ending meant being done and that's always a good Resbang feel. [I liked writing] any emotionally charged bits where there's romantic tension and connection building between the characters.

Q: Did you find it hard or not bad at all to come back to Resbang after a writing break? Did you feel like things got smoother as you went along, or was it more or less fine from the get-go?

Amanda: It was definitely tough starting out getting motivated. I really wanted to get back into writing and write Resbang, but I hadn't really had a lot of writing inspiration the last couple years. It was definitely one of those stories that was 99% perspiration 1% inspiration, but I think once I got into a rhythm it was good to see that I could do good work just by internally motivating myself.

Q: Got any tips for internal motivation?

Amanda: Step 1 was setting pretty reasonable word count goals from early on so that I would never be forced to scramble right at the end. I gave myself designated days off or rewards for getting ahead of schedule. Step 2 was accepting that it didn't need to be perfect, especially not to begin with, and it was better to get words down and edit later. The last time I did Resbang, I ended up writing 10k in like 3 days right at the end and didn't want a repeat of that, so I imposed a schedule on myself early on and used the productivity channel to sprint A Lot. [Last Resbang] was horrible and that's when I was in college still too, so I had to do school stuff also and would go sit in this room with a bunch of taxidermy birds between classes to write as much as I could during the day. I think my usual goals [for this year] were 1k a day 5 days a week, and then if I got more then I could take 500 words off the goal for later on, like if I did 2k in one day then the next two days could be 500 words each. Definitely a slow and steady wins the race situation.

Q: Did you find that your word count estimates changed a lot as you went on, or was it pretty stable the whole time?

Amanda: Oh definitely, I expected I might have underestimated it, but I think I started out thinking it would be about 25k and then I want to say it ended up being like 40k. I really should know better at this point.

Q: Did the process of writing this get you in the mood to plan some hikes or camping trips?

Amanda: It did definitely make me want to go camping again. Not immediately, cuz Resbang season is bad weather season, but it did bring it to mind for sure.

Q: Was there any scene or part of it you struggled more to write?

Amanda: Uhh the first smut scene was definitely a struggle. Writing sex where there's emotion behind it but it isn't being expressed was a different challenge for me and I don't think it ended up being as good because of that. I wanted to project the insecurity and sense of performativity into that, but it was a lot of nuance to put into a smallish scene.

Q: Did you notice that your writing style changed at all after your break?

Amanda: Honestly, I haven't read anything old that I've written in a while so I'm not sure how it reads. It felt pretty similar, I just had to get over the feeling of it being less authentic because there wasn't as much pure inspiration behind it. I think it did give me a better sense of being able to write without needing as much inspiration, though, which would be a good skill to hold onto.

Q: Since you’re also an artist, did you do any sketches or paintings or anything to help you visualize stuff as you wrote?

Amanda: I didn't do any art for it. I've thought about doing some after the fact but I feel like the art that sig did really captured everything well. In general I don't think much about small visual details when I'm writing.

Q: What about music? Did you have a playlist you liked for it, or any songs that remind you of it?

Amanda: No, I actually have some problems with auditory processing so if there's certain kinds of music on I won't be able to focus or write. I pretty much listen to exclusively to some kind of white noise generator. If i listened to music that reminded me of anything while writing... I wouldn't get any writing done. Or I would end up typing out the lyrics or something because if there's music going on, that's all I'm going to pay attention to.

Q: Is there anything you'd do differently, or like... anything you regret not being able to get in?

Amanda: There isn't anything I wasn't able to get in. I think the main habit I would like to try to get out of is the compulsive need to write chronologically. I think it would've made the writing process easier if I had let myself do anything out of order. BUT because of the nature of the journey and research it would've been hard to do out of order, so idk. I think it would've been tough because partly I was keeping track of location in my outline like there was always a bolded Day: # and Location if I needed to reference any details about where they were.

Q: Do you have any other writing projects planned?

Amanda: I've been working a bit on some original stuff, but I have a couple thoughts for Resbang next year. One is a brand new idea I'm definitely excited about, tho I haven't done any planning and also it would be a bigger project so we'll see. I think I'm going to try to do a shorter thing this year, though... shorter is relative and doesn't tend to end up staying short. I think the one I'm thinking of could be around 15k tho, which realistically means 30k in Resbang conversion. … Or I could try doing the new idea, which I would start out estimating at 40k, which realistically means 70k.

---

Thanks to Amanda and to all of our authors for some great AMAs this season! You can see the archived transcripts on the GrigoriWings forum here!

[gisapot]

life check! (i got published.)

hello!

i haven't been updating this blog for a while because of writer's block my job i shifted to talking a lot more than writing when it comes to processing my thoughts because i find that it is faster to do that so you can find me on youtube absolute self-hatred all of the aforementioned reasons that i've lined out. hahaha. because this is the only free time i've ever found for myself in a while, i thought of coming back to fix up the themes on my main blog, this one, and this other project i'm working on for my friend's christmas gift that's super overdue. then i thought maybe i should post an update for posterity.

i've been meaning to come back for a while, but a lot happened to me externally (half of it out of my own doing, from what i understood in the aftermath. aly says it's not really. the other half aly and i agree are not of my own doing) that i had a lot of internal shame, remorse, and pent up rage for, so i buried myself in my work to forget about it, since the people i've wronged are no longer available to me so i can offer my apologies and the people who've wronged me i no longer speak to. there was a lot of learning how to mind my own business, isolating, and interacting only when i'm desperate to. yes, i do not have access to therapy so it's better this way. it's so high school, noh? i know that much about myself. self-awareness +5.

while i was looking at this blog to start cleaning it up, i realized there were things i wrote that were forced. so arty-farty. writing for the sake of writing, writing for a deadline i could never meet, posting things i am not proud of, just so i can keep this blog running. i am barely inspired anymore that i constantly reflect back on the past ten years of my life (wow, i've always imagined to myself how it would feel like to reach a point in your life where you say 'the past ten years'. feelsbadman) and wonder how i was so motivated to keep writing and how i was so quick to bounce back from writer's blocks. i had over 50 word files at a point, just ideas and plot bunnies and lines of poems i hear in my dreams saved in various folders, meticulously organized and labeled, 'FIC' 'POEMS' 'ONE-SHOTS' 'CHAPTERED'. while i appreciate the hard work younger me put in to become better and better that now i write the way i do, i wonder where the motivation and inspiration went.

maybe inspiration died when i got to college and i noticed that writing was not about putting your imagination into words and hope it sticks like my childhood led me to believe. in reality, literature is so tactical and precise that you have to make sure everything sticks. that there is reason for everything. there are editors that are your second eye and tell you to close holes you never even realized were there. everything is circular. i am so afraid to write now that even if i did it for myself i just stay in the planning stage and turn in for the night since i had my fun and now i have to do the grittier thing, which is to describe it with adjectives and verbs. milan kundera never did that and he wrote the dry-but-wonderful "the unbearable lightness of being", while if i do that i feel like i'm doing something wrong. something inherently lazy. and if i am too vivid, i am toeing the line of exposing myself as someone with roots in fanfiction writing and admitting that harry potter was pivotal to my adolescence, which is always looked down upon in mainstream literature communities as "kiddy" and "underdeveloped". there is shame wherever i go. i wonder if this is because of tiktok teens - the younger half of generation z - constantly expressing their disdain for everything and anything even when they professed their love for it not more than two months ago. i wonder if me feeling this way is my way of wanting to fit in. why do i always want to fit in? why is it such a shame for me to stick out?

i wonder how people like ursula le guin did it. she woke up early and sat down to write complex and critical tales the whole day with such precision, minded her own business without humans and shallow drama, then retired for the night at exactly eight and did it all again the next morning. i want to say it is a luxury; i have been made a slave of capitalism and i do not have the capabilities both mentally and financially to spend most of the day hating myself for not writing words onto paper or my computer screen.

speaking of computers, i am so easily distracted like a goldfish in a fishbowl. when i was 11 years old and so full of life, time, and inspiration, whenever i was on a computer the first instinct i had was to open up a word file to finish up whatever daydream i had that i decided was good to post on fanfiction.net (god bless that site, i hate it). now that i am 24 (and a month!) and those things seem so abstract, so out of reach, i turn to something easier to digest: videos. not brightly colored ones. i open a tab of youtube, find a video essay to watch, switch to a different tab to open twitter while someone talks my ear off about how the upward trajectory of lindsay lohan's career led to her mental breakdown. i don't even like lindsay lohan. (that's not to say that i am a hater. i just stand on the line of indifference because while i was aware of her and i've seen herbie and mean girls, i am not american so i've never held or cared enough about the monthly j-14 or people covering her breakdown of whether or not paris hilton was her best friend.

i've also turned to making my own videos, especially since it's much easier to make if you have a webcam and a microphone. what takes me days to write and edit is easily rambled in an hour of total silence in front of a camera. what's great about videos as well is i don't plan any of them. it's like an hour-long impromptu podcast that i just stitch together and upload for the culture.

this was not the future i imagined for myself.

while i always knew i wanted to write, to be alone with an occasional friend, i constantly fuck up by doing everything else but write and talk to people that aren't aly. i have two and a half different friend groups (because kim and i are only two people) that i am very dedicated to. i never thought i was a social person. i used to be an extrovert as a child but things happen during your upbringing that make you think your thoughts don't matter and inculcate this belief that people hate you and talk shit about you in secret. (never project your insecurities onto your kids, they will project it onto their friends who they will lose because they cannot believe the adults in their life were putting things in their mouths.) on top of being a strangely social person, i'm chatty. hence the channel.

i never realized my mouth was constantly open and i would talk someone's ear off if they were just willing to listen.

i fell in love, too. she's one of the people i constantly talk to about everything, even if she's never really considered those pieces of media before (the same way i never really considered her interests before). we've just hit a year together and all i do is talk to her about everything that's on my mind. and i think a lot and i get excited a lot about the things i read in books and articles online, so she's like, the net to catch all my thoughts. i told her the story of joseph and his colorful coat last night because it just popped into my head after i made a joke about selling my baby brother because of that meme on facebook.

i found a draft i wrote for this blog dated march 25, 2020. it's been a year and it will be another one older this coming march. i talked about wanting to write a book over the quarantine. i never finished this book, and i never wrote the book either. i had plans and people can attest to this if they're in my workspace server on discord (another place where i realized i was chatty as hell and i actually am social, just forced to isolate and into silence because of eldest asian daughter decorum). they see my notes. countless rows of them: original stories, poems, personal essays, character studies, fanfiction that i never finished. there's a parallel to be drawn here between unfinished stories and the unfulfilling lives we lead now that we are entering the third(? i'm weak at math) year of the pandemic. i don't know if i am good enough to write it.

sometimes there is an ego boost. in the early half of last year a call for contributions was posted on katitikan, an online literary journal for the southern philippines. it was for the pride month issue for the month of june. it was preferred that stories about queerness and coming into being and the concept of the closet were submitted. like a person with the impulse to get attention, i geared myself to submit a very vulgar piece about a gay (as in mlm) couple written in second person that i wrote years back when i was helping someone do their homework. of course it fit the theme, i didn't think of submitting that story just because it was gay. when you submit something to a literary journal, it's much more stringent, since literature is tactical and precise, not whims of fancy to bring on the kilig factor and gain likes and comments like how wattpad writers operate. and i know that for a fact, i was once one of these teeny-bopper writers. i still am, to be honest (well, not wattpad, but ao3 now).

the original work contained a lot of religious imagery in it. there was implicit discussion on the dichotomy of good and evil and how the way sex feels as well who does it puts the act in a grey area. it was below a thousand words. that kind of story with that kind of word count is already a feat for me, i'm generally stuck in establishing exposition within the first 1000 words and barely no plot in, especially if i'm writing something original. that story, despite being so crude, was full of everything a creative writing teacher would love, i think. they would cry reading it. (see. ego boost.)

i remember the experience of writing that story. the kid i was helping out was a senior high kid i met online who was taking a creative writing class. while helping her (both of us were close to tears at this point because she did not understand my point), i came to the realization that writing stories isn't easy. that creativity is not a cute skill to have. writing is deliberate, choices in names, items, places are not arbitrary. they always stack up to create this effect that doesn't topple down one way like a line of dominoes. it ripples outwards like a drop in stagnant water.

before i submitted the story, i sent it off to aly and asked her to comment on it. the first thing she said that was very pivotal for that story to morph into the body of work it is now was that while she understands that i'm used to writing fanfiction with mlm pairings, we don't have a lot of wlw stories to go around, certainly not cebuano ones (this was before i met doc jhoanna cruz, a professor from UPM and an author. shes a lesbian who writes short stories and personal essays about wlw experiences). it would have been better if i rewrote this entire thing to be about a wlw love story.

i was thrown for a loop, to be honest. i've never written a wlw story before. but then again, i genuinely thought writing for journals and calls for contributions were challenges to your writing capabilities because they had themes that you had to abide by (and there's a deadline to meet). they wouldn't even pick you if you didn't fit the theme, that's generally the first criteria. but i took aly's words to heart because she was my best friend, and started.

of course like a lazy piece of shit i ctrl+f'd that story and changed the names and pronouns of the original characters to names generally perceived as feminine. i know i wanted the "top" (good god) to have the same name as a saint, so immediately i thought of st. alexandria and st. cecilia. st. anna was also an option, and st. elizabeth. i chose cecilia in the end. you'll know why i chose cecilia later on.

i started building cecilia as a composite of my girlfriend, who used to be a beauty queen for minor pageants in her city, and the new money chinita girls from cafa i've gay-panicked over the years while at college. someone straight-passing. someone pretty and tall, with pin-straight black hair, pale, had nice hands... yes, i'm describing my type (who also happens to match very well with my girlfriend hahaha, di mo ana? standards = met). as they say, write what you know. write the world around you.

i tried rewriting the original piece to fit with the wlw idea that aly presented me and fitting cecilia in it, but in all honesty, it seemed pretty hard because in my opinion, while wlw can be promiscuous in their own ways, i had my own reservations and despite writing gay smut taking place outside surrounded by religious paraphernalia, i'm pretty conservative about sex. i'm guessing it's because i was raised catholic and educated in catholic institutions. i personally couldn't imagine a pair of lesbians going at it in a living room that looked very much like a pope's mausoleum.

it reminded me of a conversation i had with a co-teacher before the quarantine hit in 2020 and i was still teaching humss students. for some reason we got to the topic of him getting shamed for getting laid before marriage on his own personal facebook profile (we were in a faculty room and we were not surrounded by any students, i wouldn't have this conversation otherwise if i was in campus). he noticed that i flinched slightly, and he asked if i was conservative. i explained to him that it was a product of my upbringing, but i do know a lot about sex and... other sex-related things that start with the letter k. (just a disclaimer: while i am conservative, i've been aware of my bisexuality since i was three years old. i'm a prude, not a homophobe.)

this same co-teacher was also a bit of a somebody in the cebuano literary community. he had his own writing group, he had a book he co-wrote, he was sought after as a speaker and all that fancy jazz. he was way elevated compared to me who's stagnant and writes like, once a year, if i'm lucky to be hit by motivation. i had a personal essay i wrote. i don't remember which piece it was that i had, but i sent it to him to look it over because i couldn't bear for my personal essays to be rejected by literary journals again, taking them personally as if refusing publication was invalidating my pain (sidenote: why do people apply for universities that require admissions essays? don't you also feel as if rejection from those universities is also an invalidation of your childhood trauma? why do you wave your trauma around on paper and hope your story is painful and scarring enough to award you a spot in archaically ranked institutions?).

after he read it, he got back to me: "you really like the vignette style." "it's easy to write. i have a hard time writing continuously."

the conversation somehow shifted to the books he ordered from book depository taking forever to arrive, but my brain was still processing. vignettes. vignettes. individual scenes. is this a vestige of my past as a fanfic writer writing one scene per chapter, each chapter around 500-800 words? i don't know, i don't want to analyze that. vignettes.

play to your strengths. write in vignettes. write what you know.

if i were to write what i know about the girls i've crushed on as the basis for cecilia, i decided that the main character, who is still nameless at this point, was going to be based on me. teacher persona, conservatism, socio-political opinions, music taste, judgmental personality and all. if i was going to write what i know, i was not going to continue writing the architecture major that the original main character was. it was going to have to be more familiar. play to your strengths, and all.

if you've read the story prior to this blog post, you'd realize that the main character is annoyingly perceptive. she is quick to make judgments on the people around her and writes mental essays about how to dismantle the person she's talking to with all the knowledge she possesses of the world. i am the same way, to be honest. i don't know a lot about science and math, but i do know how to read and listen and i'm quick to judge based on what i hear. it's both a toxic flaw and yet a golden quality, i think. it's easy for me to know who is worth talking to. (but to be honest, wag tularan. or do. don't get into cars with tinder dates who genuinely stan the chainsmokers. i'm looking at you, sty.)

there is a scene in this story where the main character, cecilia, and MC's friends are gathered together to discuss the limited availability of lesbian films that do not sexualize women or lesbian films that depicted women in poverty or living an honest low middle-class life. i've always held this opinion after i watched the movies baka bukas, blue is the warmest color, and that one lesbian film where they just stayed in their hotel room and had sex for all two hours of the movie before they broke up at the end. i've resolved to write about my hatred for lesbian movies but i never really found the words, much too irritated to ever articulate myself in a clean fashion. more things i wanted to write in a more formal, academic manner is why queerness in media is only chalked up to coming out, having crushes on straight people, and just plain boring. there is no kilig factor like there is in het or mlm romances. i never cry during lesbian movies.

i decided to express these opinions in this story because my lack of eloquence and my self-perceived shallowness will make it difficult for me to express this distaste. i was always going to sound shallow and childish whenever i wrote academically. i wrote a rant as i would have said it myself, put it in quotation marks, surrounded it with more gossipy judgmental shit about how MC cared about how people perceived her when she's in her angry activist mode, and signed it off with MC's name.

to be honest, i was afraid of writing this part for many reasons, one of which is that ranting in fiction is kind of childish, especially if a writer doesn't know how to write dialogue. the message would be so ineffective. i remember ayn rand's john galt speech towards the end of atlas shrugged being the same way. i had that part read through by many people like aly, zai, aliyah, kuya toff, and my girlfriend, because i was so afraid of sounding preachy or, god forbid, like ayn rand herself. i have some fears.

this scene was also very important to me, as it introduced the people in MC's life, her queer friends. this part of the story was intended as a platonic love letter to my college friends. they were my first queers-only friend group. i personally do not have straight friends. that's a flex, i know. i just don't continue talking to straight people unless it's for work. i made it the same way for MC, and these characters were modelled after my friends that aly and i met in college. in that friend group i was the only linguistics major in a friend group of literature majors, and i built my socio-political opinions while listening to them discuss the philosophical theories they learned in their lit theories classes that they could anchor their literary analyses on. i don't know a lot of literary theories, only being able to read on them in full (as opposed to hearing about them in conversations) when i started teaching literature for senior high school students, but being friends with them gave me a headstart in that direction.

this scene also helped me paint a contrast between cecilia and MC. in a deleted scene from this story, MC asks cecilia where her friends are. they do not appear in the story until the very end (the ending was not deleted, it was the fuente crossing scene), but cecilia explains that she doesn't have many gay friends, and if she does, they're usually her pageant handlers or her makeup artists or stylists, and they're strangely lesbophobic or biphobic. i do not know much about the pageant community, but this is from stories from my girlfriend's own experience. they're catty in the backstage and make comments that they think do not hurt. while MC has a support system consisting of only queer people who challenge each other intellectually and personally, cecilia's circle of queer "peers" consist of other side of the coin, the stereotype of what queer people are as presented in reality and in media: mouthy and ruthless.

there is so much bitterness in cecilia's life, i don't know how a person like that manages to keep living. while expanding the world of this story to be more fitting to a wlw pairing and to include as much of my immediate world as i see it now, i thought of keeping the "prop" of religious paraphernalia in the household, and introducing cecilia's mother. if i was going to make cecilia the composite of my girlfriend, she had to be someone finishing up university while still living with her mom who was projecting her fears of a queer daughter and religious promises that go unfulfilled, only fulfilled for appearance's sake, or only because they were afraid of going to hell, not because they truly loved God and were thankful for their lives. i immediately modelled her after one of my friends' mothers who was also pretty conservative to the point where she would combine both religious and homophobic tirades in one breath in front of her closeted lesbian daughter (whose name i will not include in this post to protect her privacy). while her mother's cooking is lovely, not every human is perfect.

it made me think of my own parents while writing. they do not live in the country, and i rarely share to them about my love life. while they know of my sexuality, we treat it with a "don't ask don't tell" policy. my mother rolls her eyes whenever i bring up my sexuality. my father, i don't know what he feels about it, but he does care about his niece who is proudly out with a girlfriend who's butch. while i'd like to take that positively, there might be a possibility that he's only ok with queer people if it's not his own children. but in a way it works that they aren't present in the country, so i reflected that too in the story. in the story, the main character makes only few mentions of her parents (one being a reflection on where she thinks she inherited her judgmental personality from), but they never truly appear.

the title, and subsequently, the plot trajectory of this story with focus on its ending, came to me in two different ways. first, it came from a youtube video of a youtuber reviewing the books she read that month, one of them being "they both die at the end" by adam silvera. i haven't read the book, but the title did help me decide the ending. it was going to be tragic. of course, no death involved because i hate that kind of thing (from a writing standpoint i think it's a copout , and as a reader i try my best to filter it out of my ao3 results), but it was going to be a bittersweet ending. while formulating the story in jagged pieces, i was having a hard time picking out the music i wanted to write to. of course zayn's mind of mine album is a staple in my writing playlist, but there is only so much of the same songs on loop i could take before i got bored of myself, of zayn, and my own characters. i got distracted quickly, ending up looking up k-pop songs on youtube. even if they were difficult to write with because i just end up dancing to what little choreography i know from repeated watches of the live stages, at least it was something different. autoplay started from itzy's not shy, to ateez's wonderland, to loona's so what, butterfly, then vivid.

vivid is a song about putting color into the world, and it pushed me to write the first scene of the story in one sitting: the MC is at a bar that's very obviously basic in mango, behind the national bookstore, with her friends. strobe lights were described. i remember my own experience at basic. it was too loud to have a conversation, tall straight people were around, the lights were too bright, the bathroom was literally on the stage. i wondered in that moment, as i mulled over this idea much like a writer of speculative fiction, what if my friends brought me someone to meet? it flowed from there. part i. part ii (now a deleted scene). part iii... i decided then if i wanted to start with vivid, this story would have 12 parts, as 12 members of loona. each vignette will be vaguely inspired by their solo projects. if the first girl was heejin with vivid, the next vignette would be inspired by hyunjin's around you. the last vignette would be inspired by olivia's egoist. wouldn't it fit so well too, with the idea that the ending was going to be bittersweet? love myself today... let you go today...

i decided then the title would be "they don't end up together".

at the time i wrote this story i was exposing myself to new kinds of music as well, just to expand my library a little bit because i was kind of getting sick of the same brockhampton album on repeat even if my playlist was on shuffle: lil nas x, taylor swift's folklore and evermore albums, and a kpop girl band called dreamcatcher that specialized in rock metal type music (of all the genres a girl band could do). with that, i added more songs to my writing playlist.

during one of my writing sessions for this story, taylor swift's evermore played in the background. i wasn't too familiar with the music on that album quite yet, but the ambiance of it just felt right for the general idea of writing. in my periphery, i could hear her crooning, "my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i'm covered in you."

at the expense of sounding very zoomer, i was like, "f e l t, omg." so i opened my minimized spotify window and found out the title was ivy.

ivy, as in i literally have a bisexual character named ivy in my sims 4 game (that is also heavily based on zai and her personal aesthetic).

are you fucking kidding me? this is perfect. it's like, poetic justice or something. ivy is the name of the main character of a wlw story, perfectly encapsulating the way she is "haunted" (a bit of an overstatement on the impact of cecilia on her) by cecilia's coming and going in her life. and the song that shared her name was accurate in its lyrics to describe my character too.

it made me remember the name choices i had for cecilia. i initially wrote her as an alexandria around this time, but it honestly didn't stick for me because 1) i had a friend named alexandria, and 2) i found it a bit ostentatious, very twitter-roleplay-name. when i found ivy's name, it was also around the time my favorite ateez member hongjoong was talking about the filipino-american musician dominic fike, and he recommended the song "why". hongjoong and i have very similar tastes in music, save for the fact that i also listen to girl band music while his music taste is very curated to the theme of "i am a 2006 myspace emo" with linkin park and the vamps... whose meet the vamps album i used to listen to in high school. one of the lead singles of that album was a song called "oh cecilia (breaking my heart)" (whose chorus sampled/lifted from simon & garfunkel's "cecilia"). isn't that also a saint? by the end of it, i decided to go with cecilia not just for the purposes of religious imagery, but also because it sounded more "rich old money filipino" (see, i told you literature is deliberate and tactical). the moment i started using the name cecilia, her whole backstory for that character flashed through my eyes. her pageant experience, her mother, her opinions on coming out, her ignorance on queer politics, her very large xpander-like car that i just lazily called a "Jeep".

with the names finally established for both cecilia and ivy, i threw myself into writing this story with various songs sprinkled in references here and there; music is pivotal in this story. as i said in an earlier paragraph, ivy shared my music taste, so not only are my favorite songs reflected in the story or used as names, but they are also part of the symbolism that contributes to the building of the plot. there was a lot of k-pop included, mostly songs that were easily misunderstood as queer. we always see what we want to see, and if MC (and by extension, me) wanted to see queerness in the k-pop songs she listened to (despite south korea being a homophobic ass country for no valid or religious reason but are misogynist as fuck), then so be it. heart attack by loona's chuu, jazz bar by dreamcatcher, all night by f(x), and satellite by loona (as a group).

the deadline for the piece was nearing. i was nowhere near done, and i was way past the maximum word count of 4000 words. i was inching into 5000-word territory. i started crying to aly that i was unhappy with where i am at and i feel like the story isn't done. i had every intention of writing this story as something that would be kilig as hell like how fanfiction would be, palatable to young zoomer readers, something that, if they wanted, could be characters for fanfiction. i hated literature at this point. i hated that there was elitism in the community, that established writers shit on the young adult genre and we try to quash it out and invalidate it because it's "fanservice". we end up dissuading children from reading because we force them to read "the classics" whose, while their lessons are timeless, language is archaic and dry and difficult to digest or relate to if you are under the age of 17. we laud ayn rand's masturbatory speeches and her selfish objectivist perspective because it's literature as if our realities are not represented in the presumed "braindead" young adult fiction. and i wasn't able to do that, because i was running out of time and i was cramming for more words to fit.

i had to delete the haseul vignette. the vivi vignette. the jinsoul vignette. the yves vignette. the chuu vignette. the gowon vignette. i don't really feel bad about the gowon vignette because it wasn't my coming out story to tell but i did feel like it was important to add because something someone said to me was very important to help ivy move on from the travesty that was her not-relationship with cecilia.

in the end, fuck it. i submitted the work a day or two before the deadline, and i pissed myself not knowing if i got in or not. i don't know what impostor syndrome is and i like to believe i never got it ever in my life, but i did get bouts of insecurity where i was sure that what i sent in was trash, they hated it because it went past 4000 words and it was a crime and i was going to get in so much trouble because they didn't have the word space... i was so afraid. i've been rejected twice by two different journals and i never talked about it. those were the first two times i was ever rejected from a journal before. this was my third try over the pandemic. if i didn't get in i was completely done for. pandemic depression and losing my job wasn't enough. i was going to be doomed to be talentless for the rest of my life. why did i think writing was a good talent to keep practicing? why didn't i continue with singing?

Inbox (1) - s*****

oh my god. *i'm_gonna_fuckin_k*ll_myself_tiktok_sound.mp3*

open the damn email, you loon, what does it say!?

oh my god, i'm GAY FUCK AAAAAAAAAAAAAA- IM NOT A JOKE I CAN WRITE OH MY GODDDDDDDD

Here's the link if you want to read it in full!

anyway, we are nearing the end of my most stressful pride month of my life (and i snuck out in junior high to go to a pride parade!) working on a short story that could have been shorter if ivy just wasn't so much of a bitch like me. christ, i need water. this is my first ever fiction piece too. i always get by with poetry, and i also coast through with personal essays because not a lot of people do it here in cebu that i always manage to pass by just to put my name on a certificate printed on fancy glitter paper. i'm considering a shift in genre, to be honest! i didn't think this was possible for someone like me with roots in fanfiction, whose characters were pre-made and i never had to describe their physical attributes to help my reader imagine who they were. i didn't think i would get here.

the story of ivy doesn't end here despite getting published. the one up now is only the abridged version with many vignettes from their love story cut out. i still have the full unabridged version of their story that i want to finish and publish, and there are so many people in ivy's universe whose stories i want to explore, kind of like the novel let it snow by maureen johnson, lauren myracle, and john green. i want to write a short story collection about all these people, people like mia, valerie, simon, ate alex, kuya seb (and an unmentioned other friend who i'm not sure how to name yet) - the people in the queer friend group who have their own queer stories to tell. kind of like friend fanfiction. like i said, this was a platonic love letter to the friends i had in college. if only i can find my motivation to write; these characters are so vivid in my mind and i know the stories i want to tell.

today is january 15. it's been 6 months-ish since they don't end up together was published but i'm still riding the high of that publication because i am mindblown that the first time i deigned to write fiction professionally is also the first time that i get published. suddenly it no longer matters to me how many times i'm rejected and how far behind i am compared to my writer peers, but the one time that it mattered to me, i wasn't. i have such low self-esteem. but i know as i should that putting yourself out there is the only way for reward to return to you tenfold. the world is difficult to please. effort sometimes will go unrecognized. but trying. trying never fails. i'm reminded of something aly and i call "the goat essay", more professionally known as "i know what you think of me" by tim kreider and published on the new york times. the last paragraph, the way it ended, aptly put how i feel towards this entire situation. it went like this:

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

[profewriting]

Found this when scrolling then decided to give it a try <3

How many works do you have on AO3?

I have 88 works in AO3 ;) also have some fics in write(.)as and FFn tho, but I think I won’t publish it in AO3 lol

What’s your total AO3 fanfic words count?

318.730 ! Omg I’ve never thought I’ve written that much lololol XD

More under the cut!

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Those would be: 1. D-Kindergarten [Joker Game]. It’s actually a multichap I’ve written when I’ve just got into college. Just a cute fic where all the D-Agency’s agents become kindergarten children and Yuuki becomes their teacher. It actually was inspired by rio-san’s Joker Game fanart lol XD 2. Belanja? D-Online Aja! [Joker Game]. A parody fic that is set in the modern world. It has many pairings, but I remember I also include my Amari x OC ship here lol. I’ve never imagined people really like this? I’ve forgotten the ending thus it’s incomplete *sweating* 3. Auf Wiedersehen [Joker Game]. Sakuma/Miyoshi. Oh yeah, I’ll never forget this. This fanfiction became the second first Indonesian fic that had been posted in fandom Joker Game in AO3 lol XD I’ve made this right after eps 11 aired and got the feelings for angst then, bam! It’s here XD 4. Cerita (Sial) di Elevator (Sialan) [Joker Game]. Sakuma/Miyoshi. I got the idea from my own experience in my university. At that time, I was taking the elevator to reach my class, and these two guys came in AND ONE OF THEM SUDDENLY CORNERED HIS FRIEND AND MADE A SMUG SMILE. I was standing beside them and couldn’t process what the fck is happening LOLOLOLOL XD 5. Pernah Denger Nggak? - [Joker Game] OH YES!!!! MY HUMOR/PARODY FIC THAT GOT AWARD FOR BEST HUMOR/PARODY IN IFA 2019 <3 <3 actually it’s a flash fic I’ve made because I thought, wow it’s gonna be funny if D-Kikan’s agents adapted Indonesian spying method then, here it is XD

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yes!! I like to talk with my readers, especially with someone who left a comment in my fic. It makes my will stronger wwwwww XD

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

... actually I’ve forgotten which fic has the angst ending lol. I’m more into angst with happy ending since I mostly only write about my OTP ((c’mon my otp already suffering in canon, they deserve a happy ending in my fics /stop)).

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Hmmmmm since I adore angst with happy ending and most of them haven’t completed yet, I think the happiest ending gonna be “there’s gold inside a pile of old dust” :>

Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve ever written?

I’ve only written one this far. It’s about my three otps (I called it my crossover otps) from different series: Banana Fish, Joker Game, and D.Gray-man. So, the semes actually were voiced by Morikawa Toshiyuki and yes, I made three of them meet in some room (idk too why lol, I just wanna see them together and talk about themselves and realize how similar they are XD). But I’ve been thinking about another crossover au for these crossover otps in a more serious fanfic. I can’t wait to write them XD

Have you ever recieved hate on a fic?

I.... don’t have any memory about this. But, I think I received a very confusing review back then in FFn.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Hmmmmmm I write two kinds of smut: the pwp and the one with a complex plot HAHAHAHAHA XD it’s actually because I was pissed off since many people was “oh, you write smut? eeww. that must be horrible like w*ttp*d piece”. then I was just, “oh yeah? watch me.” then proceed to write 15k words smut with complex and detail plot lol XD But I also write short one like pwp. The last pwp I’ve written didn’t even reach 1k words. It’s Tyki and Lavi having sex in the corner of their classroom (yes, it’s based on Vocaloid song titled “Butterfly on Your Right Shoulder” lol).

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yes, I have. But it’s quite a long ago when I’m still active in FFn. The worst part? The one who stole my fic is actually someone I’ve recognized who’s often giving my fic fav + follow. They literally stole my 5k words fic, split it into some chapters, and published in different fandom lol :“)) I still save the screenshot of it. They deleted the fic tho, after my friend left their fic pretending she’s been in the fandom and left a review in the plagiarized fic. I bet they deleted it because they thought nobody knew it was a plagiarized fic, but after they received my friend’s review, they suddenly deleted it.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I almost said no, but then I remembered about my Lucky pairing fic about Valentine’s Day that I’ve translated from Indonesian to English akdhaidhaidhaidhai lord I’m still shaking whenever I remember that fic. I still want to delete it but still haven’t get a heart to click delete button orzzzzz

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I’ve tried collaborating with some of my friends in the past. But the piece that ended up successfully was the Katekyou Hitman Reborn! fic about cloning :D ((lol I really like to make a complex fic haha XD))

What’s your all-time favourite ship?

You don’t want to ask me that, I’m serious. I will give you a long answer like De Grote Postweg. Just, don’t. When I ship something, I ship hard. I’ll post about that ship for 24/7 and will last for years. Just that. But recently I’ve been shipping Lucky Pairing (Tyki x Lavi) from D.Gray-man and still attached to my Amari x OC ship (I call it AmaOC lol)

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

DON’T MAKE ME WRITE MORE AFTER YOU ASKED MY FAVOURITE SHIP AKHDAIDHIADHIAA- But, there’s two fic ideas for Lucky pairing that I’ve been dying to write about. One is about historical fanfic and will take time during Portuguese-Japanese trade. The last one is about smut fic lol.

What are your writing strengths?

Hmmmmm. I’m quite good at making dialogues. Many of my friends and readers mention it a lot. And, I think I’m quite good at describing/making allegory (something about abstract things).

What are your writing weaknesses?

Latar tempat, demi Gusti nu Agung gua tolol bat di latar aaaaaaaaakkkkkkk kok orang bisa sih bikin latar tempat rinci gua jeles aaaaaaaaakkkkkkkkkkkkkk orzzzzz

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

THE MOST ENJOYABLE PART!!!!!!!!!! <3 <3

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

*sigh* lord, it’s from 07-Ghost, reincarnation!AU, and the pairing is Frau x Teito x Ayanami HAHA XD

What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

OKAY THIS IS GONNA BE MY LAST CONFESSION I SWEAR ADHAIDHIAIDA. I have plenty of satisfying fics actually. 1) there’s gold inside a pile of old dust [D.Gray-man]. Tyki x Lavi. Historian!Lavi, Noble!Tyki, a bit heavy theme since it’s about the history of Portuguese nobles but also inaccurate. I could say it's my proudest work today. I’ve collected general information about Portugal’s history, and changed many aspects before posting it in AO3 :’DD it took me a year to finish that. No wonder it also became my longest oneshot work with 29k words. 2) agathokakological [Joker Game]. Many pairings. Psyco-Pass!AU. Like I’ve said, I like to make complex plot story lol, so this fic was complex and need a lot of brainstorming sessions XD

If someone wants to give it a try, please don’t hesitate/ask me. Just do it~! ;)

[magpiefngrl]

So tell us about writing dirtynumbangelboy!!!!!! It was so fantastic.

Thank you so much, anon! I’m very happy you liked the story! ❤️

I’ve waited some days to reply to this because I was travelling, but I’ve been thinking about your ask loads. Thing is, there’s so much to tell and idk if there’s something specific you want to hear about, but here are some behind-the-scenes trivia:

1. I always struggle with titles. I keep stealing them from lyrics or books. When I do find the right title, I get a little shiver; especially if it’s before I write the fic. That feels almost fated.

In this case, the title came first. It was one of those fics, the fated ones. I had the idea of writing a clubbing fic back in May, involving the song Born Slippy. I was listening to it, and looked at the lyrics and was immediately caught by the line ‘dirty numb angel boy’. Something about the way he sings it; something about the words, idk. I just knew that this lyric would be the title and it gave me a feel for the fic, a mood.

When I signed up for erised and got my assignment, I was delighted to see that my recipient loves clubbing fics and had included a fake relationship prompt, and so I decided to use the idea I had back in May. As for the title, I can’t remember if I’d initially decided to have them as four separate words; when I drafted Erised, I wrote them as one and that was it. 

It’s a title that people either hate or love. It was the first title I wrote that my beta commented on, saying how creative it was and that it would draw her attention if she was scrolling down AO3. But there have been people who hated it. It’s fine. I’d rather it’s something dramatic and hate/love than bland, you know?

2. I was trying to find a song to listen to for inspiration (Born Slippy was my inspiration mainly for the dancing scene and the sex scene), and out of the blue a friend sent me a link to Sia’s Chandelier. I gave it a listen and immediately thought, this is Draco. Chandelier ended up being my Fic Song that I listened to repeatedly before writing and while editing. It gave me major dnab Draco feels.

3. Some people have commented on the Incident. This was a HC idea I had more than a year ago when I was drafting TMODM but I never got around to including it. I think it would make ideal fodder for a play: one locked room, two former enemies and reluctant allies, twenty-hours of them working through their issues.

4. I had an idea that stalled me for a LONG time, and the fic only got going when I cut it. The idea, which I’d love to explore eventually, is the creation of the first magical university. I was thinking of getting the main players in the same environment as lecturers, Will about Healing, Harry Defense, Draco possibly Law. The idea resisted me loads; but I just couldn’t think of why Harry would need Draco to pretend to be his boyfriend unless he had to see his ex all the time. Then, Blaze happened and the story started taking shape.

5. I wrote a line in chapter one about Harry having to take part in the charity Quidditch match against his ex, managed to hang the entire plot on it, and only later realised that I’d have to write a freaking Quidditch scene, which was something I’d never tackled before. The idea filled me with a lot of trepidation. It’s not the best Quidditch scene, but it’s from the spectator’s POV rather than Harry’s, and not too terrible, I hope.

6. All the Muggle places mentioned are real. Roebuck pub is indeed a pub in Richmond that looks over the river. I haven’t been but googled it extensively. Trade and Love Muscle were nights/clubs active at the time the story takes place. As for Kent Uni, I adore the campus. Everything described is 100% real: the rose garden behind Darwin College, the labyrinth sketched on the grass, the views of Canterbury cathedral, the red canteen truck with the pad thai (though, it prob didn’t exist at the time the story takes place), and the shop Essentials. I know this campus almost inside out and love it. It’s one of my favourite places in the world – and I’ve travelled A LOT.

7. I’ve had all these ideas that I kept wanting to explore, but they’d detract from the story, so I didn’t. For instance, I wanted to write a small scene about Harry meeting one of the WWHPD people giving out flyers. I imagined them as a sort of weird cult, obsessed with being righteous, putting an idealised version of Harry on the pedestal. I also wanted to write more about the betrothal and early marriage thing. I’d developed quite a headcanon and tried to write about it in places, but it didn’t work. So that was cut, too. Finally, I wanted to end with a Christmas scene, where they’ve all met at Draco’s flat and are exchanging presents, and everyone is gifting hedgehog-inspired gifts to Draco (ceramic figurines, a keyring, a book on British Hedgehogs etc). Draco wanted his patronus to be kept a secret but Astoria had let it slip, and I had this image of Draco progressively getting redder and glaring at Astoria (who’s examining her nails) as he kept getting these hedgehog gifts. 

I also wish I wrote more smut lol

Thank you for the ask, anon! This was fun! Hope it was even a little interesting to you, too :)