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[“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.”]

kurt vonnegut

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Juansen Dizon, i am the architect of my own destruction

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I love characters who have not an iota of ethics, not a whisper of morals, not even a shade of scruples but is so whipped for their more idealistic love interest, that they begrudgingly, out of sheer exasperation and utter resignation born from love, allows them to be their moral compass.

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Joy Sullivan, from "Late Bloomer", Instructions for Traveling West

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Horrible math major cannot stop writing math metaphors into highly not mathy fanfiction

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thinking about how kaz’s hands are “long, graceful fingers made for prying open locks, hiding coins, making things vanish” and the way inej sees the menagerie and tante heleen and just wants to run away from the crowd, “eager to disappear” and that when inej first leaves the menagerie kaz calls her by her name for the first time and then lets her disappear, but how “it was as if once kaz had seen her, he’d understood how to keep seeing her” and how how nina knows that kaz’s breath “catches every time [he sees inej], like he’s never seen [her] before” because inej kept on losing herself at the menagerie and she built a persona out of being invisible, and kaz built one out of being seen, but kaz always sees her, always understands her, and he refuses to let her feel invisible even though that’s against everything ‘dirtyhands’ should be, because kaz isn’t dirtyhands and inej isn’t the wraith, they’re two broken kids who are unforgivably in love

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Inej thinks he has reasons.

He wonders what she would think if she knew of all the times he’s daydreamed of holding a gun to her own throat. He would never do that, he knows, but it’s a dream. Death is so ordinary to him, something in the cracks of his palm and patterned into the swirls of his fingertips. He walked out of the womb with those. She would be different, he knows. So would he.

He thinks that you do not know people until they’re begging for mercy under your feet, ready to give up belief of all of their gods so that he will let them breathe. He knows Inej would not beg.

He doesn’t want her to die but he dreams of seeing her eyes in that moment. Would he see himself, or will he never manage to make himself enough? Will he see the family she deserves instead? The one she left behind or the one he wants to make?

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Kaz and Inej

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My first Percy Jackson fanfic, written in December 2015. And here I am, May 2025, still writing Percy Jackson fanfic. I was eleven and now I am finishing up my junior year of college, and nothing went to plan. I'm happy, though.

I always think I've stopped writing forever and then I get a fandom reading itch and then I realize that nobody is going to write what I want to read but me and then here I am, twenty and a real adult and writing like I'm ten again

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I always think I've stopped writing forever and then I get a fandom reading itch and then I realize that nobody is going to write what I want to read but me and then here I am, twenty and a real adult and writing like I'm ten again

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The Hands the Gods Gave You

God!Percy, Percabeth AU Oneshot. Because there is a surprising lack of combination of those two things <3

“Your mother,” Poseidon says. “And that daughter of Athena. You love her.”

“How do you do it?” Percy asked, his fingers tracing lines in the sand, smoothing over the eternal grains. “You fall in love with mortals and then they leave.”

Poseidon’s eyes crinkled and he looked far away, like he was no longer on the Earth. “It never gets easier. I have Amphitrite to love too. Love is not a limited thing. You can search for it again and again. Eventually, the pain of death falls away too.”

“I will never fall in love again,” Percy said with his chest. He meant it, too. The time and experiences that forged his feelings for Annabeth were not replicable, especially now that he was no longer human. And besides that, there was only her. He simply couldn’t fathom beyond her.

Poseidon looked at him, sadly. “Perhaps you will not.”

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when i get back into reading and look for a fic to scratch a particular itch and think it seems familiar and then realize it's something i wrote on a burner account 8 years ago

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i miss how i interacted with fiction, especially romantic fiction and fandom and all of it, before i had actually been with men. i can't get into it any more. i'm stuck in real life dating which has higher highs and also lower lows and i just can't enjoy writing or reading fiction when there's a man in my life and i can't figure out why and i miss having dreams and being silly with my expectations. i never thought i would lose fandom when i grew up and i'm not even grown up! i'm 19 and i feel like i miss my childhood and the fun i had. i don't want to. i just want to enjoy escapism again

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The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) dir. Francis Lawrence

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I kind of like that love isn't enough for Coriolanus and Lucy Gray. It's a good juxtaposition to the "love conquers all, love always wins" message that we've been fed since birth. Suzanne Collins tells us that there are villains who exist who are not motivated by love, who give it up on their rise to power - and that love is not a one-size fits all thing that should be romanticized in the moment.

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One of my favorite character parallels between Coriolanus and Katniss and something I always feel when writing him is the obsession with food. I've never read another series where it's a real focus of narration and it adds a very real dimension to his villainous character. In real life food is a constant thought most of us spend at least an hour a day on. So much of his thought process can be expressed the way he thinks about this very basic need all the time. What a beautiful unreliable narrator, truly

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Wait, did Sejanus and Billy Taupe get themselves killed on their own?

I mean, that's not unbelievable, I was just thinking that Coriolanus shot Billy Taupe dead and hid the corpse. And Sejanus...poor boy.

👀

Let's just say in this AU that whole scene never happened... so Mayfair was abandoned by her new boyfriend but is still alive. Coriolanus doesn't know where Sejanus and Billy Taupe disappeared to, and hadn't known explicitly of Sejanus's treasonous plans... so he just assumes the two idiots got themselves killed.

Hopefully that makes sense :)