glamorous-gryphon

[glamorous-gryphon]

Writer Goal Ask List for a New Year 🎉

These writer asks are always so fun to both ask and answer. Fanfic or original fiction writers, reblog away! These are asks based in new goals for a new year.

💖 What is your primary writing goal for this year?

🛳 Are there any new ships you want to write for? (Platonic, romantic, or anything in between.)

🤔 Are there any new characters you want to write about?

🥸 Does anyone in IRL know you write fanfic or original fiction? If not, do you plan on telling anyone this year?

🥵 Any plans to write steamy or spicy content this year?

👻 Is there a new genre you'd like to write?

🦄 Is there a new POV you'd like to try writing?

🐌 What is one of your smallest writing goals?

🦖 Are there any fandoms you wrote for in the past that you'd like to return to?

🍄 Are there any fandoms you've never written for but want to try?

🌈 What research do you plan on doing for your writing?

✨What's one area of your writing that you think needs the least amount of improvement?

🥕 What's one area of your writing that you think needs the most amount of improvement?

🫘 Spill the beans. What's a new project you're doing this year?

🥳 How are you going to celebrate when you achieve one of your writing goals?

🎃 Do you plan on writing any seasonal fics?

🐾 Do you plan on writing for any fests or competitions?

✍️ Which stat matters most to you (if at all!): subscriptions, kudos/favorites, comments, bookmarks, word count, or hits?

👾 Do you have any "bad" writing habits you want to break?

🤖 Are you looking to change your current writing setup? (Or establish one, if you don't have one?)

🦷 Is there a chapter, scene, or WIP you're dreading to write (but is necessary to your plot)? Share a snippet or tell us about it!

💥Is there a chapter, scene, or WIP you're most excited to write? Share a snippet or tell us about it!

🍕Will you be making any changes to your posting schedule (if you have one)? (Or do you want to establish a posting schedule?)

🛏 Is there a new trope you'd like to write this year?

🪩 Do you have any "good" writing habits you want to cultivate?

🎉 How are you going to be kind to yourself if you don't meet your goals?

💌 Are you willing to take requests or prompts for writing?

[glamorous-gryphon]

Rating: M

Characters/Pairings: The Dark Urge/Astarion, Gale/Shadowheart, Minthara/Leon, Petras/Sebastian, Kagha/Dalyria. Yes, you read those right.

Current Word Count: 6633

Summary:

When Astarion receives news that his siblings have found the Underdark myconids, he is forced to confront himself, his past, and the family he left behind. Meanwhile, certain people won’t let the Dark Urge forget who she used to be, and Gale and Shadowheart struggle to pick up the pieces in the wake of their deities’ abandonment. Longfic.

Aaaah!! So the first chapter of my favourite WIP has just been posted, and I’m bouncing off the walls with excitement/nervousness/anticipation. I’ve been working on this for just over a year and half now (and you’d think I’d have more than six and a bit chapters done by now, but what can you do). I’m so, so, so excited to get into angsty vampire family shenanigans guys, you don’t even know.

[glamorous-gryphon]

3, 12 for the oc asks!!!!!

Ooh thank you lovely! OC asks here

3. What was the first thing you decided on, the character's name, appearance, personality or their role in the story?

The Dark Urge AKA Dark’s name was already chosen for me, so funnily enough it was actually the appearance - I got the inspiration for gold eyes and dark hair from Daemon Sadi of Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series (who incidentally I’m convinced the writers drew a teeny bit of inspiration for Astarion from, they’re very similar). I liked the idea of a very striking figure who’s suave but also terrifyingly dangerous - by the time I’d worked out that her personality and backstory were very different, the description had stuck ahaha. I also wanted to emphasise the Frankenstein nature of her “birth”, so I deliberately gave her odd or contradictory characteristics - glowing infernal eyes, undead pallor and disjointed heartbeat, claws, drow-like grey-ish skintone and ears, orc-ish muscle. It’s been good fun haha.

12. Do you have a playlist for the character? What songs do you associate with them and why?

DO I! :D It has a heap of songs, but for some reason the song I tend to associate with her the most is “Natural Born Thriller” by Des Rocs. I think because the build-up of tension immediately followed by a pun is very “her” to me, idk. Also the mentions of a “blood-red sun” and “half a man and half apocalypse”.

There’s far too many to list here, but some of my other top ones include:

“I Am the Lightning”, by Des Rocs – I chose this because she was originally going to be a storm sorcerer. I eventually discarded the storm sorcery and settled on eldritch knight shenanigans, but the song is still so great. It captures her ominous arrogance.

“Scarlet Cross” by Black Veil Brides - I just. The guitars man. So cool. Also the generous helpings of religious motifs and implied ostracisation. I feel like this really captures her sense of isolation and fatalistic “I’m doomed from birth, but I’ll keep fighting anyway” mindset.

“Itch” by Nothing But Thieves - This fits the urge so well, that sense of it lying beneath the skin like blood, and also the line “I just want to feel something real” dovetails very nicely with my Durgestarion nonsense. It’s great.

“Mad Visions”, by Royal Blood - The line “It feels so good to be letting go” also evokes the urge to me. I like the frenzied grin-and-bear-it mood of this song too, it feels fitting.

“Judgement Day”, by Stealth - This was a wild one! I didn’t expect to include it until Dark tapped me on the shoulder one day and went 🥺 It’s a beautiful ballad about owning up to your mistakes and facing the consequences of your actions, which feels apt.

[glamorous-gryphon]

what the whole "please comment on fic you like, it will encourage more writing" vs. "fic writers shouldn't be writing for engagement and validation" debate fails to really grasp, for me, is that comments shouldn't be boiled down to "engagement and validation" in the first place. by which i mean: comments aren't payment for a service, they are communication and connection. they represent the audience reaching back.

i don't write just for myself. are you kidding me? the point of storytelling, to me, is to present certain narrative arguments and produce or encourage an emotional response to them. That communication is essentially useless if there's no endpoint, no listener. To me, there is no point if I'm not communicating with someone. When I write, I am talking to a reader. If you've read anything I've written, then I was talking TO YOU.

you are well within your right to consume fic as ~content~ and withhold your "payment" out of a sense that the writer should be satisfied at having created anything at all in an unresponsive void. but please be aware that it feels really good when you talk back.

[glamorous-gryphon]

anonymously tell me what my specialty as a fanfiction writer is

[glamorous-gryphon]

for every "🌹" received in my inbox i'll post one random sentence of a random WIP i'm currently writing

[glamorous-gryphon]

Fic Recs (Ask Meme)

Send me a number or emoji (+ optionally, a ship) for a fic rec!

👍🏽 A fic you bookmarked recently

🔁 A fic you’ve re-read several times

😂 A fic that made you laugh out loud

👀 A fic that you love a normal amount

📆 A fic you’d re-read 10 years from now

😊 A fic that made you smile on a bad day

💯 A fic that makes you think #writergoals

🥰 A fic that gives you warm fuzzy feelings

👌🏼 A fic someone else recommended to you

👽 A fic that isn’t prose (poetry, text fic, etc.)

🛳️ A fic that brought you aboard a new ship

💘 A fic you couldn't stop reading once you started

💌 A fic that inspired you to create something for it

🤩 A fic that made you SLAM that “subscribe” button

📚 A fic you wish you could display on your bookshelf

💞 A fic that led to you making friends with the author

✨ A fic you wish you could read again for the first time

😭 A fic that ripped your heart out (but it hurt so good)

🤔 The first fic you think of when I say [insert word here]

💖 A drabble that made you want 100K more words

[glamorous-gryphon]

shit i remember from my 2007 - 2013 fanfiction.net experiences (before i finally jumped ship for ao3 like everyone else)

“don’t like don’t read”

uses of the terms “lemon” and “lime” (apparently there was a difference. lemons were porn but i’m STILL not sure what a lime is. i also have NO idea how “lemon” came to mean “porn”. not sure i want to, tbh.)

soooo many “i do not own please don’t sue me” disclaimers

fics where the whole premise that the whole cast was trapped someplace together and the reviewers would leave questions in their comments and then the characters would answer them in-story. like “ask that guy with the glasses” except shitty and usually self-indulgent towards the author’s preferred ships. (i may have written one of these when i was 12.)

authors who legit updated on a schedule (and stuck to it). some every fucking day. (you still see this on ao3, but not NEARLY as much.)

fanfic authors who basically had a following and fandom of their own. (again, this still happens, but not as much. not sure if that’s a good thing or not.) not bad considering most of them were 13.

“yaoi!!! that means boy kisses!!! don’t like don’t read!!!”

putting “————-” or “xxxxxxx” bc ff.net wouldn’t let you insert a horizontal line to show the end of a section

very long, very rambley author’s notes

some of which had the authors interacting with/talking to the characters in the fic.

fics that weren’t so much stories as they were a chapter-by-chapter detailing of all the cliche plots and tropes used in that fandom’s shitty fanfics. (i actually sorta miss these, tbh)

songfics. no, not fics inspired by songs. fics where the lyrics were put in between every paragraph, with some lyrics altered to fit the characters. it was horrific.

fics that were up-front about the oc being a stand-in for the reader so they can read about themselves getting with their fave character. as in, it was written in second person and the summary outright said the pov character was meant to be the reader.

the forums being used for roleplay before tumblr rp was a “thing”

long, LONG author profiles, filled with things like “copy/paste if you’re a [whatever] shipper!” or obviously fake sickly sweet anecdotes (think chain email levels of bad), or worst of all (in my opinion), a pro-life anti-abortion story from the point of view of a fetus. it was as bad as it sounds, if not worse.

listing all your ships on your author profile page

seeing a title that was all lowercase letters and thinking “lazy” rather than “aesthetic”

“101 one ways to annoy [insert character here]” (voldemort was popular for these things)

it being fucking impossible to find f/f fic that wasn’t porn

writing ships as “characterxcharacter” instead of “character/character”

author’s notes in the middle of the story. literally you would be reading a fanfic and all of a sudden, in between paragraphs… “A/N: awwww isn’t it cute how they’re thinking the same thing!!! XD”

for that matter, author’s notes using the XD emoticon

people FLIPPING THEIR SHIT whenever their fave author (or just a well-established author in the fandom) changed their username. ESPECIALLY if they changed it from something fandom-specific to something more neutral.

“character x/character y. NO CHARACTER X/CHARACTER Z.” bc apparently you think i’d think your fic clearly marked character x/character y would be nothing but character x and character z making out.

trollfics trying to capitalize on my immortal’s infamy. there are still trollfics, of course, but they tend to be more subtle. 

for that matter, trying to pass a trollfic off as a legitimate fic rather than just admitting it’s a parody

specifically reading fics for your notp just to bash it in the reviews

people putting replies to reviews for the previous chapter in the author’s notes (this died down a LITTLE once ff.net finally added a reply function, but not much)

the great fanfiction.net purge (ahh yes. history lesson time. basically, back in the olden days of fanfiction, when everyone actually used ff.net, one fateful day, back in biblical times – 2011 – ff.net decided to make MA rated stuff – basically porn – not be allowed on the site anymore. ofc people kept posting it anyway, but then ff.net started deleting stories from the website with no notice to the authors. just poof! gone. the aftermath was HORRIFIC. people were FURIOUS, as a lot of people had no backup and just lost their stories. so ff.net stopped enforcing the rule, but the damage was done. this was when people began to officially leave for ao3, i think.)

lots of harry potter fanfics about the my immortal versions of the characters interacting with the canon characters. some of these were actually quite funny – i think they’re still around, but i don’t see them as much. (i actually wrote one of these stories. it is still, to this day, the most popular story i ever wrote.)

drabbles that were ACTUALLY 100 words long.

fictionpress (a sister site for original fiction. it was like wattpad before wattpad was wattpad. it never really took off. come to think of it, i may still have some stuff on there from when i was 12 i need to take down)

“crackfics” that consisted mainly of “lulz iM SO RanDOm!!!111!!!!!oneone XD cheeeeeeeese!!!!!!” humor

“i suck at summaries”

“this is my first story so please be nice”

“i’ll only update if i get 10 good reviews”

AUs before “AU” was a really widely used term, so the author’s note would have a length explanation for why they had to change things for the story and apologizing over and over instead of just noting the AU in the summary

AUs out of laziness rather than for creative/plot reasons (ie, “luna’s a gryffindor in this fic because i couldn’t find another reason for her to be here”)

authors notes apologizing for late updates

being genuinely shocked when you found a GOOD fanfic

[glamorous-gryphon]

i don’t think people really get how little feedback fanfic authors actually get? like the effort to reaction ratio is so abysmally skewed here that a fic nearly 50,000 words long takes an entire year to amass like. 16 comments. someone reblogged a fic i wrote at 4 am and tagged it with a 5-word compliment and i can’t stop thinking about it, not because it was so nice but because half the time you post a fic you’re going to hear nothing and anything feels like so much

fandom culture is so, so good about giving artists the credit they’re due, but we gotta start doing that for writers too. you’ve got no idea how much people put into their stories and get maybe a handful of reblogs and a dozen-odd kudos. that’s not enough. writing is an endurance sport and y’all need to start giving fic writers a reason to endure it and improve their craft. encourage writers like you encourage artists. reblog fics, leave tags, leave comments, acknowledge that these stories do not just spring into being for your entertainment. 

every single damn writer i know feels like half of their readers see them as a machine. that’s gotta change. 

[glamorous-gryphon]

No seriously guys, comment on peoples fic.

Writers as desperate for comments. Desperate. 

I’m in a writing group with around 40 people and one of the common reasons people don’t post their work is because “no one ever comments on it, so no one is reading it” which blows because their work is amazing and instead it’s sitting in storage.

Comments lead to posting more fic. Trust me. 

[glamorous-gryphon]

I wish you would write a fic where...

Send me an anymous (or not) summary of the fic you wish I would write. (maybe I will write a tidbit)

[glamorous-gryphon]

current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.

[glamorous-gryphon]

A persons fanfic tells you a lot about them, i , a fanfic writer, realize in terror

[glamorous-gryphon]

Isobel x Aylin: I thought you were dead, I could only see you, touch you in my dreams. I feared you would never be in my arms again.

[glamorous-gryphon]

"Feed me and tell me I'm pretty" except it's "reblog something and tell me I'm not a fraud"

[glamorous-gryphon]

*blinks at story* Well that was certainly very fucking weird

I thought I knew what was happening, but then two of the characters informed me that they would very much like to do morally dubious assassination shenanigans soon please and thank you, could you please move us up from chapter five to chapter two.

*scowls and goes to re-outline. Again.*

[glamorous-gryphon]

Alternatives to google docs

For various reasons, this is now a hot topic. I'm putting my favorites here, please add more in your reblogs. I'm not pointing to Microsoft Word because I hate it.

Local on your computer:

1.

LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/), Win, Linux, Mac.

Looks like early 2000 Word, works great, imports all formats. Saves in OpenDocumentFormat. Combine with something like Dropbox for Cloud Backup.

2.

FocusWriter (https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/) Win, Linux.

Super customizable to make it look pretty, all toolbars hide to be as non-distracting as possible. Can make typewriter sounds as you type, and you can set daily wordcount goals. Saves in OpenDocumentFormat. Combine with something like Dropbox for Cloud Backup.

3.

Scrivener (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview) Win, Mac, iOS

The lovechild of so many writers. Too many things to fiddle with for me, but I'm sure someone else can sing its praises. You can put the database folder into a Dropbox folder for cloud saving (but make sure to always close the program before shutting down).

Web-based:

4.

Reedsy bookeditor (https://reedsy.com/write-a-book) Browser based, works on Firefox on Android. Be aware that they also have a TOS that forbids pornography on publicly shared documents.

My current writing program. Just enough features to be helpful, not so many that I start fiddling. Writing is chapter based, exports to docx, epub, pdf. You can share chapters (for beta reading) with other people registered at Reedsy.

5.

Novelpad (https://novelpad.co/) Browser based.

Looks very promising, there's a youtuber with really informative videos about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHN8TnwjG1g). I wanted to love it, but the editor didn't work on Firefox on my phone. It might now, but I'm reluctant to switch again.

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So, this is my list. Please add more suggestions in reblogs.