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[barbswo]

Good evening!!! Sorry if all this doesn't make sense, but English is not my language and all this is from Google Translate!

I started reading Tides right after finishing Hotd last year!!! At first I was impressed that there was a ship between Luke and Aemond, but then I understood why, lol. Anyway, I understand how difficult it is for you to reconcile adult life and college, I go through the same thing, studying and working, and (cliché alert) I find a moment of "peace and calm" from this sad capitalist routine by reading, and Tides is one of those stories that make me freak out!!! I don't know how to express how incredible your writing is, how each chapter is tense, intoxicating and intense, and how it makes me excited to see how the story will unfold! I read this last chapter and realized that I had forgotten the story and had to reread it all over again, and gods, it felt like the first time, Aemond is my favorite character in the show, I love how everything about him overflows with imperfection and most importantly, how he is needy in everything, and you have a great reading of this baby who, honestly, is just a babygirl. Lucerys has been captivating since the first episode of the show, and in your view he is even more incredible, everything about them revolves around guilt, love, hate, desire and most importantly, failures, how they fail themselves and how they fail others. This last chapter was one of those that took my breath away, and I wondered if they couldn't take your story and put it in the series' place (a woman can dream), but seriously, as much as the delay drives me crazy, I love following their development (all the characters), that's it!!! Anxiously awaiting, thank you for gracing us with your brilliant mind, being intelligent is painful! If you release a book about tides I will buy it!!!! A big kiss from a ghost follower!

Ahh it’s so nice to open my inbox these days... thank you so much for this message!

Honestly, I feel like the entire plot of Tides revolves around, as you’ve so eloquently put it, about how characters “fail themselves and fail others”. And I might publish a book one day, once Tides is done, but it definitely won’t be fanfic-based, as I don’t believe that could ever be done well without damaging a story with all the necessary changes or plagiarizing the primary source material.

P.S As you guys are anxiously waiting for updates on Tides, I am anxiously waiting for my tutor’s updates on my dissertation, which she is dragging on and on and on and driving me crazyyyy. I had some time to scribble this month, but the next chapter is still very raw and not nearly done, but I’m on it, I promise.

Sending hugs and iced coffees,

Literally my mood right about now:

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Aemond and Lucerys

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Steve: “Will you be my Valentine?”

Bucky: “I spent hell knows how long getting used to the name ‘Bucky’, and you want to give me a new one already?”

Steve: “…”

Bucky, sighing: “Yes, I will.”

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(The one in which Yelena and Bucky talk)

❧ “I can’t imagine what it must’ve felt like when he told you he wasn’t coming back.”

Bucky blinked, regaining his sense of reality, and caught Yelena’s eyes: very green and very serious. It took him a moment to swallow her question—except that it got stuck in his throat, sharp and painful. Asked out of nowhere, out of some genuine concern, that question hurt him so much Bucky wanted to crawl back into Zola’s chair. At least there his pain made sense.

It was the wildest truth he had ever admitted, the most honest he had been with the world, with himself—something he couldn’t control as it slipped past the cage of his teeth before Bucky got a chance to bite it down, to contain in, because it was his, like the air in his lungs, useless for anyone but him.

“He never told me.”

Excerpt from ‘Same Vine’ on ao3

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⚡️So. I’m in my Thunderbolts phase. Mightttt be starting a mini-series about Avengers Tower!Thunderbolts, first (?) part (?) published here, because I need some fun in my life rn.

Which means that I might be open for prompts. Even insane ones. So… gimme gimme gimme (a Buck after midnight) ⚡️

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➴ BUCKY

It was easy to forget that this was the same man whose name was used to scare girls in the Red Room. In the privacy of Stark Tower, this was Bucky: grumpy, sarcastic, mostly silent Bucky, with his wet-cat personality and a Brooklyn accent and vintage paper books.

But it was also the Winter Soldier. The ever-elusive horror of the criminal world. A nightmare to thousands, a certain death to hundreds. A creature of devastating power—power that Bucky struggled to contain even when wearing the skin of a civilian.

Yelena watched as he disappeared halfway to Narnia in search of some snack, pulling out a box of Pop-Tarts, and nodded in gratitude, knowing all too well that Bucky didn’t like them, just like he didn’t like any artificial foods.

And this… this was a whole another layer.

Bucky cared. While Yelena was the one who did her fair share of talking, Bucky barely ever opened his mouth, but he cared. He knew what pizza they all liked (veg for Ava, everything for Alexei, pepperoni for John, mushroom for Bob and prosciutto for Yelena), he threw a blanket over Bob’s frame whenever he fell asleep on the couch instead of waking him up, because Bucky knew that sleeping came hard sometimes, he watered Yelena’s cactus and pretended to forget how to spell words when they played Scrabble to help Alexei win at least on occasion.

This was just another one of the pieces that made Bucky Barnes whole. A sacred, intimate one.

The man in front of her wasn’t James Buchanan Barnes, the veteran of the Second World War. It wasn’t the Winter Soldier. Or the White Wolf.

It was Bucky.

Excerpt from ‘Same Vine’

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*Not 50, but here’s a start:

i want 50 avengers tower fanfics of the thunderbolts on my desk by morning do you hear me

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Avengers Tower!Thunderbots

Same Vine

“Can I ask you a question?”

Bucky looked up from the book he was reading, fingers of his real arm teasing the corner of the page he was on, unsure whether to dog-ear it or leave it be. With Yelena, the question could very well be about Pop-Tarts and where those were stored (she had an inexplicable obsession over American snacks), but judging by the tone of her voice, it was something more meaningful.

Bucky closed the book. Everyone kept telling him that it was worth it, and it was on Steve’s list as well, so he decided to give it go. After all, it was now considered a classic. The book was about a boy who got kicked out of school and couldn’t get it together to confess about it to his parents, so he wandered around New York, lost and miserable. For some reason, Bucky really felt for him.

“Ask away,” he said, sitting up on the sofa and leaning in to put his book on a coffee table among other things: two bowl-sized mugs, only one of which was empty, Yelena’s tiny cactus that wasn’t dead only because Bucky kept feeding it the rests of his morning coffee, three Scrabble letters, likely left behind after Alexei threw a fit over the fact that his ‘mimsy’ wasn’t considered a real word by any English dictionary (“But it was in that Alice book!” “Still not a real word, Alexei”), a sickeningly-pink post-it note with ‘stuff for BROWNIES!’ written on it in Bob’s curvy penmanship and, at last, Walker’s stack of cards. Bucky made space for his book by mercilessly sweeping the latter off the table.

Excerpt from “Same Vine” by l_t_m on ao3

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i want 50 avengers tower fanfics of the thunderbolts on my desk by morning do you hear me

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a single typo literally has the explosive power of a nuclear bomb like i just read back possibly the most beautiful scene ive ever created feeling so proud of myself ready to start thinking about the nobel prize in literature etc. etc. and then suddenly

“It’s oaky,” he whispered.

it’s oaky. what is this. a wine tasting

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idk why yu are angry about ai i use it to write tides chapters because yours take so long and its not that bad ;(

What a disgusting creature you are, anon.

I kind of hope this is just an attempt to rile me up, because it’s so much worse if you are actually serious and this is true. As a fanfiction writer I cannot really protect my works as they aren’t my intellectual property, but I thought that I made my opinion on AI and those who use it for art purposes known many many times.

I don’t hate many things in this world but I hate you. You are the problem.

So don’t be surprised when the only notifications you receive are sent by your dear AI. Don’t be surprised when you get bored of useless, repetitive, stupid stuff it ‘creates’ but find that there is nothing real left to entertain you. At least you’ll be getting your weekly/daily/hourly updates.

That’s the most important thing, right?

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If you're using gen AI because "you want to make art but don't know how/can't learn/it's easier/whatever"

You don't want to make art.

You want someone to make art for you, but you don't want to pay or exchange anything of equal value for it, and also you want it right now, in whatever style you fancy that moment, and in whatever quantity you want. You're greedy and entitled and it is just that simple. You don't want to make anything.

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hi so just a question about the latest chapter, I might have misunderstood as English is not by first language but Lucerys talked about be faithful to his bride but he already slept with Aemond? Or he’s say it to get rid of dalton?

He said what he was expected to say, cause technically they are still betrothed, and Lucerys didn’t grow up in a cave—but yeah, he was obviously using the excuse to put a pause on Dalton’s advances. Every character in Tides is a liar: they are either lying to their own selves, to those around them or to the reader. If they manage to lie to all three, they are my favorite.

P.S I actually have like a 3k words long Lucerys/Dalton/OC scene stashed in my drafts. Might release it with the whole package made of every other scene I scraped for the sake of the plot so yall might have Tides! (Unedited Insane Version) to read, too.

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#HotD fix-it

Chapter 39: Family Line

Out now.

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Impossible, but I might’ve finished the next chapter. For some reason it feels like I wrote it with my own blood and sweat, cause jeez it was a hard one and for no apparent reason. Grrrr.

Anyway. I will start editing today and hopefully deliver next week.

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Amen

NOTICE: As more and more fanfic writers are using generative AI for their works (you uncreative dweebs), I hereby swear on everything I hold dear that I have not and will NEVER use generative AI in ANY of my written work. Everything I post will be organically and creatively my own.

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Reading Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ — and I want to share this here:

“It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life and treatment of literature are concerned, are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind.

It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him.”

Kudos to Oscar, really. Still true 134 years after. Painfully true.