#(well uh fanart for the show not fanart for the fic trilogy because I uh am the creator of it so I don't think that counts?)

[pokimoko]

I was reminded recently of how much I loved the Moon Knight SG Poster series and so I thought I’d take a crack at the style and make some posters for my own MK fanfic series, Eternal Sunshine of the Absent Mind. Consider these the official posters of my very official fic series ;). 

[Image ID:  First Image: A silhouette-style monochrome minimalistic style poster inspired by Pokimoko's Moon Knight fanfic 'The Absence Of Fear', the first fic in the ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Absent Mind’ series. The poster depicts a black background with white at the bottom; at the centre nearing the top there is a circle which has been made to represent a simple shield; the shield is cracked in the top right corner, and at its centre are two silhouettes, one of Steven who is facing us and is dark grey, and one of Marc, who is facing away but looking back over his shoulder, and is a lighter grey. Steven has a black line over his eyes, and there are more black lines across the shield, imitating black out poetry. Above the shield are stars and constellations (Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Ursa Minor, Pisces and Cygnus). Under the shield is a white pigeon to the left and a pile of books to the right. At the bottom of the poster, the title of the fic is written.  Second Image: A silhouette-style monochrome minimalistic style poster inspired by Pokimoko's Moon Knight fanfic 'In the Absent Place' , the second fic in the ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Absent Mind’ series . The poster depicts a black background with white at the bottom; at the centre there is a white house that merges with the white at the bottom of the poster. Inside the house sits the black silhouette Steven at his computer, the light of which beams out behind him and lights up the edges of Jake's white silhouette which merges into the house. He is reaching out to Steven, and behind him Khonshu—who is a black silhouette and merges with the black background—has a hand on Jake's shoulder, with the tendrils of his costumes also reaching out to Steven. Above all of them is the dial and display of a old time radio. Above the house is a grey circle that has rain cometing through it. The roof of the house is shaped like a pyramid, and there is a sword going into it, which has a handle that is in the shape of Khonshu's ushabti. Around the circle is a scattering of Scrabble letter which spell out 'DON'T GO INTO THE BASEMENT STEVEN'. At the bottom of the poster, the title of the fic is written.  Third image:  A silhouette-style monochrome minimalistic style poster inspired by Pokimoko's Moon Knight fanfic 'In Your Absence', the third fic in the ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Absent Mind’ series. The poster depicts a black background with white at the bottom; at the centre of the poster there is a white round fishbowl that merges with the white at the bottom of the poster. Inside the fishbowl is a layer of sand, upon which is a black sarcophagus; a poppy grows out from its stomach. Standing to the right of the sarcophagus is Steven, who is looking over to the distant silhouette of the house, which is the same shape as the one shown in the Absent Place poster. Inside the house are four doors at different heights, one of which is open. Above the fishbowl are two white goldfish swimming through a scattering of forget-me-not flowers. Below the poster is a black goldfish swimming in the opposite direction of the other fish and who is followed by a trail of black shards. At the bottom of the poster, the title of the fic is written. Note: The white at the bottom of all these images flow together to create a seamless flow between the posters. /. End ID]

[lil-creatorwritings]

Author Interview

I got tagged by @alloveroliver ! Not sure how this will go but let’s do it~

Name: Well you can call me Becky! Trust me, my surname is a tongue twister and you don’t need to know that.

Fandoms: Er dear lord, that’s a lot if I count the ones outside of otome. If we’re talking just that, then it’s mainly Cybird titles (MidCin, IkeSen, IkeRev and IkeVamp). I have anime and video games fandoms too and you can ask me about that here or on my personal blog! Want to do in the future: Write more, I guess. And get a new phone for more otome games!

Where You Post: Tumblr and AO3 for my fics. Twitter is mostly for my ranting about routes or something about the otome and my main place for finding fanart (and retweeting them, BECAUSE WE DON’T STEAL OTHER PEOPLE’S FANARTS).

Most Popular One-Shot:  It’s apparently my Day 2 Kinktober. A lot of y’all are thirsty for some Leonardo smut eh?

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: The MitsuhidexOC smut trilogy (which I am now calling the Phone Call trilogy lol). It’s hilarious because whenever I think of this story, I remember that it wasn’t suppose to be a trilogy in the first place (it was a one-shot but then someone aggressively persuaded me into writing more of it). I honestly didn’t expect it to blow up like that (and I underestimated the Mitsuhide stans hahaha). Here is part 1, 2 and 3.

Favorite Story You Wrote: Probably my Day 21 of a 31 Day Writing Challenge I did in 2018. I also had an original work, but it’s been put on the back burner for awhile now.

Story You Were Nervous to Post: Five, which was my first IkeSen fic. I was nervous because I wasn’t sure if I got Masamune’s character right and for a personal reason (that I’m just gonna leave at that hahah).

How You Choose Your Titles: Most of the time, I either have a pending title for it or the title comes to me first as I’m writing it. The general theme of the story also has weight on its title. 

Completed: 70-ish fics. Which reminds me that I need to fix and update my Masterlist lol.

Incomplete: *tucks away my wips and google docs of future fic ideas* What incomplete works? Who is she? (lol but seriously maybe..2 or 3. I don’t usually write something and then start another one without completing the previous one, which is probably why I have few incomplete WIPs--because if I didn’t start on it, it’s technically not incomplete lol.)

Do You Outline?: When I first started writing, not so much in the way that I would write them in bullets or a flow chart. I would imagine the scene in my head then write it out, which works for me most of the time. I suppose you could argue that it’s a form of outlining too.. But I mostly type or write the general flow of my fic when my thoughts start to wander and branch out of my original idea to keep me in check.

Coming Soon/Not Yet Started: An IkeRev Ray fic that... I’ll be honest it’s a little diamond in the rough, and the theme isn’t really a pleasant thing to talk about. But this is a fic that I feel compelled to write for personal reasons. I don’t want to say much now because I’m not even sure how to start it as of right now. But I do want to write it. There’s also a soulmate AU I want to do for IkeVamp (and for some reason I wanted to do it with Arthur but I haven’t done his route yet), an IkeRev mafia AU (trying to steer away from the ‘crystals are drugs’ and think up of another idea), an IkeSen detective with that femme fatale thing (look idk what the genre is called but think Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea), an Edgar Bright art student AU, and just... more stuff lol. But more smut!

Do You Accept Prompts?: I do, but I rarely get them. Maybe because I don’t get to them on time and my followers don’t bother to ask me for stuff lol :( . I don’t really mind that I don’t get them, since I often write my own ideas. But I mean, feel free to drop one if you want to!

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: Uh, I guess to finish my Kinktober..?? yes shut up i know its 2020

(Apparently the next questions were added by Ash, so I’ll go ahead and answer them too~)

What do you use to edit?: Currently, I’m not using any third party writing editor. That’s just my personal preference though.

Writing setup: My main set up is in my room, sitting in front of my desk with my laptop and bluetooth keyboard (some of the letters on the laptop aren’t working, so I use an external one. I always have a water bottle with me (because I could sit for hours) and Spotify playing on my phone on speaker. I use Google Docs for all of my fics. Sometimes I’ll go mobile and hook my bluetooth keyboard to my phone and type from there, especially if I can’t stay in my room.

Do you use a beta reader? Nope. For some reason, it’s not a habit of mine to ask someone to beta read my work, though I have done it a few times before. I write, walk away from it, come back to proofread, post, then try to stop obsessing over if it will get notes or not.

Where do you get your writing inspo?: A lot of places--books, songs, anime, tv shows, the internet, other people, prompt lists.. As to the motivation to write, well, that’s something that I’m also struggling with right now hahaha. 

Can we get a quote from an upcoming WIP?:

It wasn’t much of a surprise. This amount of workload always comes with the highest ranking officer in the army, and you’ve always understood that. There are some things that can’t be delegated or that specifically need his approval. Yet it didn’t stop you from feeling a little left out and wanting some of his attention.

Feeling restless, you push off the table and head towards the door. If he was still working, there was only one other person you could think of to keep you company. Skipping down the hallway, you stop in front of one of the doors before knocking on it enthusiastically. “Hm? Little lady?”

Sirius’ room was pristine as always. You step in and plop down on his bed, not caring if your skirts ride up your thighs. “Ray’s still working.”

He smiles and sits down next to you. “And I suppose you came to me to keep you entertained?”

This time, you pout at him. “So what if I did?”

Idk who to tag so if any of my followers (who haven’t done this) see this, go do it!

[ask-the-guiding-light-cast]

Guiding Light turns two years old today!

It’s crazy to think this all began only a couple of years back... and also hilarious it falls on the same day as “International Mystery Dungeon Day” over on Twitter. More after the cut. This is gonna be a long one, so I appreciate anyone willing to read this. ^^

For a long time, I had been a casual consumer of fan fics. It started in the late 2000s when I was in a Spyro craze thanks to the more story-driven Legend of Spyro trilogy. I had an itch that I needed scratched and FFN fulfilled that to some extent. I also looked at some Mario fics, including Paper Mario: The Temple of the Sun, which I greatly enjoyed and thought did a good job adapting the formula that made Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door so beloved and putting a unique spin on things.

But it was until the early 2010s that I actually started getting back into Pokémon games with Gen V. After Emerald, I fell out of touch with Pokémon for a time. When Gen VI came around, I dipped my toe into the fandom through Twitch livestreams, but also through reading a few anime-based fics that are very long and still going, even now. 

At the same time, I ended up buying PMD: Explorers of Sky... and damaged my cartridge before I could properly finish the game with my Vulpix/Riolu team. So, I watched cutscenes for what I missed on YouTube, then got Gates to Infinity and, later, Super Mystery Dungeon and had fun with both of them... though more for the stories and characters than the actual gameplay. Truth be told, I don’t care much for roguelikes at all.

It was during the gap in time between Super’s release and the first official footage of Sun & Moon in mid-2016 that I found myself hit with a recurring thought: “What if someone made a PMD story where the hero and the partner are forced to fight one another with the fate of the world at stake?” I wound up (loosely) brainstorming an idea for a PMD story revolving around an antagonistic Hoopa character who would use its ring portals to collect entire communities, including the Pokémon living in them... all so that he would never be bored. This would lead him to “collect” the partner to add to his “toys,” so when the hero shows up, he’d sic the partner on them.

But that was as far as I got with the idea. I ended up graduating college and took a job with late evening hours. It left me pretty tired and exhausted and unmotivated to do much of anything. I withdrew from the parts of the Pokémon community I was involved in.

Then the Generation VII games came out and, while divisive in the fandom, I found myself really liking some of the concepts. There were so many times when I thought, “Gee, I wonder what this would be like if it were in a PMD game?” For example, one of the ideas I had was a sort of edgy rival rescue team akin to Gladion, which would have a Midnight Lycanroc, a Zoroark, and a Type: Null character in it.

So, toward the end of 2016 and early 2017, I started creating an idea for a Choose Your Own Adventure story with the intent of putting it on this really small forum I was a part of. It would be a Gen VII-themed PMD story, but because I didn’t think that sounded interesting enough, I decided that, not only would the human keep their memories, but they would be from the real world and be a major Pokémon nerd. The idea was that the choices the readers made would affect the relationship between the human and partner. I even came up with a point system. The more points the readers earned for their choices, the “closer” the relationship the hero and partner would have and the happier an ending the story would get. If the hero and partner couldn’t stand each other, one of them would likely end up working with the bad guy and winning. If they became steadfast friends, they’d work together to save the world.

Unfortunately, the forum shut down before I got too far into planning it, so I shelved the idea and continued focusing on my job. And things stayed that way for several months, until I ended up getting into med school and scrambling to move.

During the downtime I had when I wasn’t doing moving related stuff, I decided to look at FFN again and found Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Defenders of Warmth. I wound up reading through the entirety of the story quite quickly. I guess you could say it sparked something in my head. The fic itself focuses on what, at the time, was the newest Gen (Gen V). It also has multiple humans and is set on a continent separate from the canon locations (which were just the Air and Grass Continents, since Gates and Super didn’t exist when the fic was written). In short, it renewed my desire to pursue my idea of a Gen VII-flavored PMD story.

So, I set about creating my story outline. It is so... so much different from the actual story, though I’ve gone into that in previous posts (search for #amby answers). Originally, I used Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time as the framework for the fic: an alien invasion in a colorful, comedic world. I took more specific cues, too. Zero was meant to be a (mostly) silent antagonist a la Princess Shroob, for example.

The problem was, I really didn’t have much confidence in myself or my abilities. I’d like to say I was writing for myself, but I really did want validation, too. I think any author is lying to themselves if they say they don’t feel this way at some point. Because of this, I figured if I put the fic on FFN, it would get ignored. The site’s huge! There were, at the time, around 85k fics in the Pokémon section alone. (That number’s since gone up to over 90k!)

Given I had experience with forums, I decided to post it to Serebii, because the fic community seemed much smaller and more open to giving feedback to one another. In an effort to try and, y’know, establish some connections, I actually read other pieces and reviewed them before posting any stories. This also helped me build up a backlog of chapters and prove to myself I enjoyed writing this enough to keep going.

When I finally did post the fic, it was a bumpy start, for sure. I do think I made a lot of mistakes out of the gate, including uploading chapters way too quickly for readers on Serebii to (reasonably) try to keep pace. That probably cost me a few potential readers... or made them silent readers who I never ended up hearing from. Which is why I’m especially thankful to @girl-like-substance (who I can seem to tag, drat) for all of the well-thought-out feedback given throughout the fic’s run. I don’t think I would’ve made such significant strides in my writing otherwise... and there are plenty of long-running fics where the quality tends to stagnate.

In any case... it was thanks to a request from @deliriousabsol to put the fic somewhere more mobile-friendly that I chose to mirror Guiding Light on FFN starting in October 2017. I would’ve kept going on Serebii had she not asked so nicely, so she’s the one you can thank for it showing up there! (She’s a fellow author who does cyberpunk-themed fics and art and her characters have cameoed in the fic.)

And, honestly, I’m just... beyond shocked at what wound up happening to the fic once it hit FFN. Well, actually, for the first several months I was lucky if I even got a comment when I put up a chapter. I’m not sure any of the people who first commented on FFN still follow the fic anymore. I haven’t seen/heard from them at all, so I assumed they moved on with their lives.

In any case, around March of 2018, the word count on FFN passed 300k and... somehow, the fic starting getting more attention. Like, a lot more attention. This was... not really something I was even remotely prepared for.

(Yes, this means there’s gonna be a giveaway. More on that later.) I never would’ve thought I’d reach a number like this. I never imagined I’d meet another PMD author who’d be willing to do a fun collab (thanks @virgil134, Spiteful Murkrow, and Namohysip). I really did not imagine that I’d ever get fanart of characters that I wrote (huge thanks @thebreak-ofdawn, @ask-nicky-and-others, and @cresselia92). I mean, above everything, I not expect the fic or characters to resonate with anybody the way it wound up.

A part of me feels like I don’t really deserve it. I’ve made a lot of serious gaffes with writing this. When initial Serebii feedback had people intrigued by Shane’s jerkass attitude (when I didn’t actually intend for him to come off as a jerk), I dialed things up in the hopes I’d keep their attention. It probably cost me readers. Then there’s the slow pacing of the early episodes and the mistake of making Special Episode 3 as long as it was... which my speaks to my (bad) tendency to give into some of my strongest impulses even though I had an outline I was trying to stick to.

And, I mean, there’s also some of the “shamlessly shameful” stuff I’ve done with the fic. I’m not fooling myself. Guiding Light has grown progressively more furry and, uh, probably fanservicey, too. All the big furbait (and some scalebait) ‘mons are accounted for. There’s a lot more sexual humor when I initially promised myself I would stay away from romance and keep everything platonic. I practically turned Xerneas into waifu bait, if some of these asks are anything to go by. This blog certainly didn’t help in that regard. Maybe I’m just being my usual nervous self? 

I am worried that this fic’s performance has, somehow, affected my thoughts and behavior. There are very popular fic authors who let their popularity get to their head... or chose to open up Patreons (something that makes me uncomfortable) or start doing things like taking commissions for written pieces, which is understandable... though I think it’s an easy way to lose your passion for writing. I guess some of that worry stems from a debacle I learned about on a Discord server I’m in, but that’s not something I’m comfortable discussing publicly. 

And I haven’t even talked much about the blog itself. Like, it somehow passed 100 followers? Where? When? How? I don’t actually draw stuff like many other Pokéasks. And, like, for a lot of folks, I have no idea if they’ve actually read the fic or just check in on the blog. It’s the same with the fic, I suppose. If you’re a silent reader/follower, I would really love to hear from you! I promise... I don’t bite or anything. I’d love to know what (if anything) you’re thinking. And if you’re a blog that’s following this one and we haven’t interacted, please feel free to reach out! It’s honestly hard to tell if people like what I’m doing, so any feedback is always appreciated.

In any case, if I haven’t lost you by now, I guess all I can say is... thank you. Thank you all so much for all of the support... whether it’s on the fic, the blog, or both of them. I really do hope this final episode can meet your expectations. I’ll try my very best to make this an ending to remember. Nothing would make me happier than to hear you guys enjoy it and feel it does justice to the PMD series.

Sorry for all the rambling. The inbox is open again if you’d like to send any messages for the ficaversary. Again, thank you all so much! You’re the best!