#I haven't re-read that in a while but it's been sitting in my drafts for too long

[sourcherryandsprinkles]

pleaseeeee do Stiles Stilinski to ‘’I won’t bite. unless you’re into that sort of thing” with First Time

THANK YOUU ❤️❤️❤️

This gives me Hale!Reader vibes

—

His mouth was on your neck, the movie on the television no longer the center of interest as you and Stiles made out on the couch. He was so gentle and soft with you — the perfect boyfriend, some would say —, but gentle and soft wasn’t always what you were in the mood for.

You slid your hands underneath Stiles’s shirt, feeling his soft milky skin and grazing your nails on his back just enough to leave red marks, shifting the mood immediately.

Stiles pulled back a little. ‘’Oh? We’re doing this? Okay. That’s…okay.’’ His mouth found yours and you were kissing again, his hands timidly following the curves of your body and touching you.

Your breaths grew heavier as your hands wandered more, the hormones in your teenage bodies waking. Stiles’s hand was adventuring under your shirt and his other on your thigh, pulling you closer against him only to suddenly stop.

‘’What is it?’’ you asked, cocking an eyebrow and looking at Stiles.

He hesitated, trying to form a sentence that wouldn’t come off as weird, but he was making out on Derek’s couch with his werewolf sister. How weirder could it get? ‘’When Scott was making out with Allison his claws came out and he— The hormones, you know.’’

A giggle left your lips. ‘’Don’t worry. I won’t bite.’’ You nibbled on the skin below his ear, your teasing going straight to his pants. ‘’Unless you’re into that sort of thing.’’

[comicaurora]

Hello! I wanted to send my appreciation to you as a longtime fan of OSP and Auroura! I am an English Major with ADHD and your content always makes me inspired and my English Lit. Brain very happy with how good your storytelling is.

My question is what stories inspire you to write or make you want to sit down and tell a story? Your content makes me want to work on my projects, but my Adhd only last as long as I am not disturbed (i.e. need to eat or get up and move). You have always been upfront about your Adhd so my second question is how do you keep focused on your story and not burn out? (Talking as someone who is writing a novel as their thesis)

You have been a great inspiration over the years and someone I look up to as a storyteller! I wish you focus and luck! => 💝

Woo! Interesting questions!

When it comes to inspiration, I haven't really found a pattern for what works and what doesn't. The majority of the time, only new experiences/stories I haven't seen or read before work for me - rewatches and re-reads, while much more comfortable for my brain, don't tend to translate into creative inspiration for me - but it's not like a specific genre, or even a specific kind of relaxation, consistently work for me.

The way my brain works is a bit "no take only throw", as it were. I want to just sit down and make solid, steady progress in a predictable environment with a routine, but what I need is to try new things, go outside, take risks - because all those things give me new material to work with and refill the creative gas tank. When I'm stuck, I can't just hit the gas and punch through the block - I need to back up and try a new angle.

The good part of all this is that whatever engine that's running my subconscious is actually pretty good at signaling what it needs. The ADHD brain will be repelled by activities that aren't working for it and drawn to the things it needs at the time, whether that's creative energy or exercise or cleaning or doodling or listening to music or suddenly binge-watching a show that's not even all that great, and once it's got what it needs out of it - whatever that is - it'll be repelled again, either spitting out a sudden burst of creative energy or retreating to its den to chew on whatever it got out of the experience for a more slow-building reward. Little bursts of motivation and creativity pop up all throughout the day, and if you can pivot to the activity in question - or at least note down the idea you just had - you'll be able to harness that pretty nicely.

This "system" really only works for me because I have an extremely unstructured schedule and nobody relying on me to be consistent moment-to-moment. If I'm following the creative needs of my inscrutable Better Writer In The Back Of My Head, I can't be worrying about things like a consistent lunchtime or classes or a 9-to-5. All of my observations are caveat'd by the fact that I am ridiculously lucky to have the kind of freedom of movement and schedule that I can focus entirely on getting to know my brain better.

When it comes to staying focused on any one project, I've reluctantly concluded that the only way to win is not to play. Creativity needs time and diversity to recharge, and when you stall out in any given work session, it's usually because you're out of gas. This is why I maintain several projects in varying stages of "for my eyes only"-ness - a sketchbook, private writing projects, patreon doodles, music practice; even in the large-scale projects like the channel and the comic I have multiple angles of attack at any given time, where I can as needed switch between scripting, research, drawing frames, storyboarding more plot onto the end of the comic's current draft and lining/coloring/background-ing the finalized pages of the comic chapters earlier. This lets me maintain semi-steady progress on average, even if any one facet of the process is left by the wayside for potentially even weeks at a time.

If you're working on one writing project, one novel, I'd recommend giving yourself some time to do small-scale side-hobbies. It won't feel like they're helping, but they are.

I've started to think of inspiration rather similarly to the way I think about nutrition and digestion. It's a somewhat arcane process that, despite being a part of me, I don't exactly understand what's going on under the hood. If you eat only one thing, no matter what that one thing is, you're going to end up sick because you're lacking all sorts of niche micronutrients. If you parcel out a specific space of the only things you're allowed to eat, you might not get sick (as quickly) but you're likely going to become increasingly miserable as you think of the things you're not allowing yourself to try, or slowly build up highly specific forms of malnourishment by avoiding certain things entirely. But if you start listening to your body and try eating what it says it needs at any given time - oh, I could go for a rice bowl right now, oh I don't think I'm feeling something sugary today, man I could really go for some grapes - you're likely to hit a broadly good balance of health because you're hitting a broad range of things your body needs, even if you don't know all of their names or calorie counts, and your body is putting those resources to good use without your conscious input. Between my brain and my stomach, I only trust one of those to actually understand what a stomach needs to do its thing - and between me and my creative brain, most of the time it feels like I just work here.

I hope there was something helpful in all this!

[another-lost-mc]

JES YOU UPDATED, the kids miss you/j

I've been busy doing a lot of nothing, if that makes sense. Well, maybe not nothing - a random assortment of rl and blog odds-and-ends that don't seem very productive but I'm going to call it self-care. lol

(read more cause this got longer than I thought it would.)

I don't usually take March Break off work, but my empty schedule this year surprised me and I didn't really know what to do with myself. I spent the first few days fending off a persistent headache, then I spent some time re-watching Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel while I worked on some crossover/fusion potential with OM. Today the headache is back and I'm dog-sitting which shouldn't be as distracting as it is. (She's only a little Boston Terrier but my cats get all worked up about it even though they're the ones stalking her around the house for no reason.)

I've also been playing Honkai Star Rail. I have no idea what I'm doing but it's kind of fun. I want to give Genshin Impact a try too, but I'm not sure I want to play both. (I know dailies are optional blah blah blah but if I'm going to spend time doing busywork like that, I might as well go back to playing WoW.)

Someone sent me another ask about my current WIPs so I think I'll just ramble about them here.

The canon cast and OC post for surgery!anon. I'm trying to balance fluff and angst and realism and make it comforting at the same time (aka what I would've wanted to read before mine). There's some overlap with a post about Solomon's humanity that's it's own separate WIP.

Naming conventions in the Devildom and CR. These are my worldbuilding ideas to explain how Solomon has an established pact with Bathin (my OC for Mephisto's younger brother) since he's part of the Ars Goetia. This also discusses how those same ideas apply to Luke.

Fleshing out the angel OC stuff with Gabriel and Uriel. They're situated in the AU where MC is sent to the CR for the exchange program and not the Devildom which is why I haven't talked about them much. I have the fem!angel OC as well but I don't know what to name her (I want her to be like Zee where she's an "ordinary" angel). To be fair, she's probably not going to show up much outside of the story I originally wrote for her.

Genderbending-the-OCs anon, you have no idea what this is doing to me. It changes their kinks and their dynamics and how they would approach MC and I am mentally screaming into a pillow right now.

I've been writing directly in my Tumblr drafts lately, but I found a holiday fic for Solomon in my google docs. I thought it was a WIP but then I re-read it and it turns out I actually finished it and somehow forgot about it? Like...how does someone even do that. Anyway, do we want a smutty Solomon Xmas-in-March fic? (It's only holiday-ish because of a corny mistletoe joke on his part.)

On a random note, part of me regrets not making separate blogs for AT and my OCs (for organizational purposes) and I'm lowkey tempted to do it anyway.

If you read all this, you get a prize! Enjoy some chibis that I've been collecting like they're for my OC Pokedex. These are by sempa and ocha respectively.

[imminentinertia]

In which I keep a promise to a bunch of people who read a fic five years ago and try to explain why I'm doing that now

In 2018, @vesperthine and I collaborated on run down till the rain delights you and when some people asked for more, we promised a sequel. That didn't happen.

Until now.

Now it's snaking its way to AO3 like an aging Toyota on cold Tromsø roads (I'm really sorry for this silliness but one of the inspo photos we used did this to me).

There's a bit of a backstory:

First of all, you have @nofeartina to blame for run down in the first place and @peacestew to blame for me sliding into the SKAM fandom in 2023 going "hiiii I haven't been in this fandom for years but here's a fic".

In 2018, Tina wanted fisherman!Isak in a knit woolen jumper* and somehow roped V into writing it, and then V somehow roped me into a collab (I'm still entirely unsure how I ended up saying yes), we brainstormed and looked for inspo and wrote some scenes** to see how it went. Fisherman!Isak turned into marine!biologist!Isak with an old fishing boat and a cabin, Even pretended to be suave, the Tromsø area piped up about wanting to be more of a character than a location and there we were:

Gif by @peacestew

It was so much fun writing with V, and we got along so well, so we wrote a short sequel quite soon after. It just needed a few final tweaks.

Then life happened.

Long story short, I haven't heard from Vesperthine since summer 2019. I hope she's happy and well, and I hope she's writing original fiction because she's seriously gifted, and I miss her because she's a very sweet and smart and lovely person. I was left with a nearly finished draft and a hope she'd turn up again. Since then I've turned down requests to translate and podfic run down, and disappointed a few people asking about the promised sequel, because it didn't feel at all right to make those decisions without V's input.

But it's been five years (!!!), I doubt I'll ever hear from her again, that draft is sitting there on my drive, and... so earlier this year I started thinking about just going ahead and posting it. I went through all our notes and figured out what remained to be done (not much, we even had the title ready), and decided to do those tweaks at some point.

Then Peace slid into my notes a while ago (it had been a few years since we were in touch, I love it when old mates show up), we chatted quite a bit and somehow mentioned run down, and I'm entirely unsure how this snowball started rolling but now we're doing an art + fic collab with that sequel. She's been terribly enabling, and dangling pretty gifs in front of me, how could I resist? She even made a gorgeous title gif for run down. V would have been just as happy with this, I'm sure.

Considering that the sequel was just about finished, and V and I never had any actual disagreements while writing (one tiny scuffle about adjectives, we compromised), I think she'd be okay having her name put on the sequel. And I am okay with making that decision, since it's been so long. I've done the final editing, Peace has added her lovely gifs and now I'm just going to work up the courage to post it.

As stupid as I feel giving directions for fic reading I recommend you read (or re-read, bless everyone who has read it) run down till the rain delights you first, I'm not sure the sequel will make much sense otherwise.

the roll of the harbour wake is coming soon to a fic archive near you. Peace and I hope you will enjoy it.

Gif by @peacestew

*the fic was almost immediately nicknamed The sweater fetish fic. Drooling over the guys in knit woolen jumpers kept happening for ages.

**the first scene we wrote didn't actually make it to run down, but we put it in harbour wake, and it goes to show that sometimes a fic takes a very different direction from where you start it.

[chen-chen-chen-again-chen]

WIP Wednesday & Countdown to EGF (6 days!)

Hi, hello, hola!! How are you lovelies doing today? Thank you for the Wednesday tags, @confused-bi-queer and @cutestkilla, and for the Sunday tags, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe, @larkral, @shrekgogurt, @raenestee, @fatalfangirl, @shemakesmeforget, @hushed-chorus, and @aristocratic-otter! I've been away from Le Tumbs for the last few days and I am still sloooowly catching up on all the delightful things you've all been making and reccing!! ❤️❤️❤️

My Good EGG / EGF fic continues apace.... Have one of the rare snippets from Ch. 4 of the draft that isn't just fucking: 😆

“Is it a dealbreaker if I’m a night owl?”

“I think you’d make a very handsome, very judgy owl,” Simon says. He sounds sleepy, and he arches a little whenever Baz’s thumb circles his skin. “If I was a bird, I’d be - dunno, one of those birds with the weird frog mouths.” 

“No,” Baz says. “You’d be a shrike. A butcher bird.”

A smile lifts up the corner of Simon’s mouth. “You really took it to heart when I said that killing things is my love language.”

If you haven't seen the tantalising glimpse of art that @shemakesmeforget shared for SSS, please CHECK IT OUT. I laughed manically when I saw it and it continues to bring me joy~

Tags and a slightly spicier snippet behind the cut!

So, one of the great joys of re-reading a draft that has been sitting for a while is finding bits and pieces that still tickle my funny bone:

"Tell me about things that you’ve killed.” 

Simon laughs, confused. “Are you - does that get you off?”

“No,” Baz says frankly. “But it’ll keep me from jumping on your dick before I’m ready.”

Smut peddling tag: @erotic-grope-fest

A buncha hello tags! I am sleepy so if I forgot anyone please consider yourself tagged (and loved) ❤️ @artsyunderstudy @captain-aralias @dohrnaira @facewithoutheart @ionlydrinkhotwater @ileadacharmedlife @imagineacoolusername @johnwgrey @martsonmars @moodandmist @nightimedreamersworld @onepintobean @sailorblossoms @tea-brigade @thewholelemon @theimpossibledemon @whogaveyoupermission @tectonicduck (I AM DOWN TO CLOWN AND READY TO CRAFT ON SAT 🪡📍🧵✂️)

[leafkingofbirds]

Hi again 💜 I wanted to ask, when writing fics of the cursed heart how do you come about when writing kieran? The way you write him matches the way he acts in game and as a writer myself I've been struggling to write fics of my own because of that. 😅 hope you have a blessed day 💜💜💜

Thanks for this!!! That's such a lovely compliment.

I really love character archetypes like Kieran and gravitate towards them and read stories with tragic, powerful, dark, romantic leads like this a lot. Like my favorite book as a kid was Jane Eyre, lol. The big thing is that I LOVE Kieran and spend too much time thinking about him and what more I would like to have seen of him.

I like reading the classics like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Bronte, Tolkien (especially), as well as current romantasy books, so that helps me fall into that type of speech - though I think I probably just write a generic "flowery old timey speech" for him haha. Also I spend way too much time re-reading and thinking about this story. It got its hooks into me! I haven't really hyper-fixated on another Choices book like that for a long, long time, and still nothing they've done recently has captured my interest.

But, I don't always copy everyone very well! If you notice, I play to my strengths! I don't think I portray people like Radiance or Lustre very well. in fact any characters that don't appear often in my fics, It's because I don't feel confident writing them 😅 If I don't like a character much, I spend less time thinking about them and the kinds of things they would say.

I think I am pretty good in general at just copying speech patterns after I immerse myself in them for a while. My internal monologue starts to mimic those speech patterns after I binge watch a season of Bridgerton, for example! It just so happens that some media lines up pretty well with what I already like writing and reading, so I copy it better. But like, I don't write Queen B fanfic because I can NOT write witty modern one liners like that 😅. I am a classics fan and don't read much modern day stuff. After writing fanfiction over the years to copy characters I have hyper fixations on, practice helps! I'm probably older than the targeted audience of Choices 😅 so keep that in mind too.

Don't forget, you're only seeing the stuff I think is good, haha! I have drafts sitting around that I haven't posted just yet because I can't make them sound right.

But my big advice would be, I guess, to just immerse yourself in the kind of writing you want to do! The more reading you do, the more you get used to the word choice and cadence typical of the genre, until it becomes natural to you. Binge watch shows like Outlander or Game of Thrones or The Witcher until the voice in your head has a British accent (if it doesn't already! 😂) that's what I do. I read love poetry especially for Kieran, too.

I get rusty when I take long breaks from writing, so I go back and play a few chapters to get back into the swing of things; usually after reading again for a while, it helps me "hear" Kieran's voice again. Still, sometimes things I write don't feel natural to me and I have to go back at a later time and edit and tweak. I tinker a lot, and I have others who read my drafts and give me their opinions too.

I hope this helps!

[carriagelamp]

A few really superb books this month and few very "meh" ones. Nothing truly appalling though so that's something. If you read nothing else though, consider reading This is How You Lose the Time War because man that book made me feel things, I knocked that one out in a day

(EDIT: I am feeling very self-satisfied, this has been sitting in my drafts for a few weeks waiting for me to stop being lazy and post it and suddenly I have the entire internet backing up my assessment that Time War kicks complete ass. Go read it if you haven't, bigolas dickolas said so)

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

After reading Legends & Lattes last month I was really craving some more “cosy fantasy”. This one is obviously scifi instead, but it came highly recommend and it was exactly what I needed. It’s a pandemic lockdown novel and you can feel it, and I mean this in a very affectionate way. Everything from the characters, the narrative, to the tone feels rather healing now that we’re three years out from the initial covid outbreak.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a look at a world, not ours but an analogy of it, that had hit its industrial climate crisis and has since come out the other side. There are multiple catalysts, but one catalyst was the sudden sentience gained by the robots that they used. Not knowing how it was done but determined to allow the robots to self-determine, they allowed the robots to retreat into nature to find themselves, and they were left with the need to completely restructure their society without robotic aid. Humans stepped away from factories and manufacturing, and managed to recreate society — smaller scale, self-sufficient, and entirely based around the idea of existing in harmony with the natural world. Most of their planet has been left to re-wild itself, and humans keep to their own areas and focus on caring for their own communities. 

The main character, Dex, is a travelling tea monk that feels a calling for something more, something different than what they’re doing. That calling leads them further into the wilderness than they have ever gone before and in doing so runs face to face with a robot who has come down from the mountains in an effort to see how humans are doing since the separation.

A Prayer For the Crown-Shy

A lovely sequel and conclusion for A Psalm for the Wild-Built. In this story, Dex and Mosscap descend from the mountains into human populated land so that Mosscap can continue its mission to learn “what humans need”. Along the way it learns how complex and varied that answer is, even for someone like Dex.

The Darkness Outside Us

I read this a little while ago but never got around to reviewing it. Honestly, I mostly found it disappointing and I couldn’t tell you why. I really enjoyed the other books I read by this author, but The Darkness Outside Us did not do it for me. I didn’t like the protagonist. I didn’t like the world it painted. I didn’t like Kodiac or the relationship it was trying to set up or how it was doing it. I don’t know, I can be picky with scifi though and I don't love amnesiac plots, so your mileage may vary, I have heard it highly recommended.

Two astronauts from opposite sides of a global cold war find themselves on an assignment together, travelling through space on a rescue mission. Ambrose wakes with no memory of the launch, and is surprised to find any sort of companion at all, never mind a surly, reclusive coworker who is determined to keep their countries’ animosity alive and well. He tries to ignore Kodiac and focus on the need to rescue his sister, but being completely alone with only an AI and a single companion on a dangerous mission makes that easier said than done.

Dear NOMAN v1

Sapphic manga with vaguely shonen adventure vibes. Don’t bother reading it, it’s mediocre at best and kinda squicky at worse. The main character is fourteen I think? And the romantic interest, a crow demon, very much is presented as an adult woman. I just can’t. The story itself isn’t very interesting either, as the girl gets recruited into a vaguely Bleach-rip-off style ghost hunting job, but the relationship is just. No. Untenable. Moving on.

Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark // Sunset of the Sabertooth

I found myself rereading this to kids and honestly they really are just excellent, fun little introductions to chapter books. No notes, still charming. Love Jack and Annie and their ability to use books to travel through time.

Doctor Who: Scratchman

EXCELLENT read. A novel spin off of a show can always be hit or miss (see the Torchwood book coming up) but this one really knocked it out of the park. Tom Baker, unsurprisingly, has a great handle on the Fourth Doctor’s character voice, and the way he wrote Sarah and Harry is completely delightful. I’ve only seen a bit of the Fourth Doctor so this is actually my first intro to Harry, and it made me fall completely in love with this dingus.

This book felt like it knew what it should be: a fun adventure — occasionally tense, often funny — that isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. It fit very naturally into the world as a good, solid, simple Doctor Who adventure. The Doctor, Sarah, and Harry are intending just to stop for a break and a picnic, but soon find themselves doing their best to protect a host of villagers against an invading force of evil, skeletal scarecrows that are attempting to infect the humans around them. A necessary plot point is understanding how phone party lines work and this delighted me more than I can say for a book published in 2019.

Torchwood: Something In The Water

Meh. In the spectrum of Torchwood novels this falls smack dab in the middle. Not atrocious but certainly not good. It had instances I really quite enjoyed, the beginning was pretty fun, and there was a lot of promise to it, but reading about a fatal and rapidly-spreading respiratory infection that requires a government response hits VERY differently post-pandemic. Maybe it would have felt more believable or enjoyable in 2008, but when you know what a global response actually does/should look like? It ends up taking a book that should have really been Owen’s time to shine and just made him look like an absolute fucking moron. It was disappointing. I would secretly love to see it rewritten because it had potential, it had so much potential. Tosh was the only character with half a brain in the whole novel, god help her.

The Sprite and the Gardener

I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, ever since I found out that original comic that circulated tumblr was being developed in a fully fledged story. And it’s so worth reading, the art is stunning. The story is sweet, and every page is just such a pleasure to look at, I can’t get over the colour palette.

Before, caring for plants was the task of sprites... but that was before humans appeared and begin to carefully and rigidly cultivate them. Now sprites have little to do... except Wisteria finds herself enamored by one young gardener who is trying so hard but continuously failing to bring life to her dead little garden.

This is How You Lose The Time War

I was skeptical about this one because, again, I’m picky about my scifi and often don’t love time travel stories (ignore all the Doctor Who…) But this was one of the best books I read this month, easily. It’s a very quick read, and it’s more poetic imagery than heavy duty scifi. It feels like a pure example of the truly romantic love letter genre blasted into the future.

If you read any book from this list, I would recommend this one. It was so delightfully different from anything else I’ve read in a while.

EDIT: to allow the much more influential voice have a say:

Doctor Who: Time Lord Fairytales

Pure fun. This book is composed of various twisted fairytales all set in the Doctor Who universe. Some involve the Doctor, others borrow species, characters, or props. I had the audiobook of this and my mother, who knows almost nothing about Doctor Who, ended up listening to it and enjoying it immensely just as scifi-flavoured fairytales. 

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp

I’ve been meaning to read this book for years and finally got around to it. It was a really fun middle grade read! If you liked Holes this hits a similar notes in the way it weaves a number of seemingly disconnected stories and histories together into a single narrative.

In part the story is about two raccoons who take over as the Sugar Man Swamp Scouts, who have the job of listening for Intelligence and to wake the Sugar Man in case of emergency. In another part, it’s about a boy who is trying to help his mom save their little cafe on the edge of the swamp. In part it’s about a conniving businessman and his alligator-wrestling colleague attempting to profit off the swamp. In part it’s about a grandfather who loved his grandson, his swamp, and wanted nothing more than to take a picture of a woodpecker.

The Underneath

I wanted to read another book by this author after reading True Blue Scouts (and Maybe a Fox, which a few years back) but this one didn’t do it for me. It was a fine book, and a fine animal adventure, but the pacing just felt like it dragged too much to really keep me interested. I could have finished it if I’d really wanted to, but there were other things I wanted to move on to more. If you feel like a rather melancholic, somewhat mythological middle grade animal story though you’d probably quite enjoy it.

Like True Blue Scouts, The Underneath weaves together a number of different stories, including one about a mythical snake and her daughter, a hateful isolated man, an old injured dog, and a mother cat. The dog, who stepped in front of his master’s gun at the wrong moment, is now kept chained in the yard and spends most of his time hiding beneath his master’s house. He was lonely and isolated… until a mother cat joins him and ends up giving birth to her kittens. They’re now both devoted to caring for the kittens, and trying to protect them from the horrible master in the house above.

[becomingkatie]

Do you have any advice for people who struggle with not criticizing their writing and deleting things in chunks? (Other people have told the people they are great writers but they don't believe them, though.)

Hm, this isn't something I've ever personally felt/struggled with. I mean, I have plenty of doubts over the quality of my work. But I haven't ever struggled with deleting it, even when I'm sure it sucks.

I would say to commit to hiring an editor. Give yourself permission to give that person mediocre pages, knowing that you have an opportunity to improve it on the next pass. If your editor comes back with suggestions to remove or completely re-work lots of things, you can do that, but it's more likely (especially since other people have affirmed the writing ability) that there will be targeted corrections and you can focus on those.

I also think just deciding to publish helped me not sit on stuff. And adopting a pen name helped ease some of the anxiety there. To be clear, I didn't adopt it for anonymity, but because I knew I would get married and change my legal name and didn't want to (a) have books under multiple names, or (b) keep publishing under my maiden name. But if everyone hated my books and they got a ton of 1-star reviews, I could also just walk away and not publish under that name anymore. It took the pressure off, and as it turned out, the feedback has been positive (and, in the instances where it wasn't positive, helpful).

Also, view drafting and editing/cutting/revising as two different stages of the project. Don't let yourself delete stuff while you're still drafting. I marked scenes as "[WILL NEED TO CUT/REWRITE]" and then kept going, and then later when I was reading the draft I decided they actually worked and I didn't need to cut them, or they only needed minor edits instead of complete re-writing.

[thecagedsong]

sorry for all the asks! But "Composition" caught my attention as a title. Does it involve Alan?

Oh my gosh, I forgot that one was sitting there myself. It was originally supposed to be about songs Katarina inspired Alan to write over the years, playing with bits of music Katarina remembered from her past life as the seed, but growing into being Sorerian with Alan's personal twist on it, ending with an Alan/Katarina pairing.

I didn't publish it because I only had one idea for a silly story of when they're kids and messing around in the music room while Luigi meets with the King and Geordo's stuck in a history lesson. It kinda falls apart because I've never been musically inclined. But re-reading it, it's actually an adorable, if unpolished, one shot filled with way too many head canons, but gets away with it because Katarina and Alan are like, 11, and both won't remember everything said here anyway and as a one-shot it's meant to be silly.

I think I convinced myself it was less completed than it was because the original idea was a series, so I haven't thought about it as more than a loose collection of dialog since June 2021 (when I absolutely should not have been working on fanfiction because I was one month away from my bar exam, lol, but that's when I last saved an edit in that draft).

Never apologize for sending an ask. I think I might post this one on AO3 tomorrow.

[juniperdugong]

can i ask why you don't feel worthy? do you feel like what you write when you're finished doesn't live up to what you had in your head?

that's a frustration that all artists and creatives experience. while it can be crushing, it also can give you the passion to continue to develop your skills.

i haven't had the chance to read your longer fics but your relationship quirks were such lovely glimpses of mundane intimacy. they were funny and tender. i really loved them (especially vernon's).

i hope you don't feel like you have to the entire write-edit-post process in a day, or like you have to do anything at all, really. is there a part of your process where you can give yourself a little space and give your brain a little break? it's easy to see flaws when you're too close to something, even if those flaws aren't real.

Thank you for the ask, allows me to delve a bit deeper into my own feelings <3 This is partially because I don't think the final work is as cleaned-up and polished or as well-written as I would like it to be. I've always been someone who bites off more than they can chew with projects and gets disappointed when they don't come out how I want them to. But more than that it almost feels like I'm letting down my readers when I don't produce well-written things, I feel like it's the least you guys deserve.

And I feel like I can produce well-written stuff but with time constraints and lack of motivation, my full potential isn't always there. Which is a sick mindset, I would never judge anyone the way I judge myself. I just always feel that I can do better and when I post and then re-read my work there are always things I'm willing to nitpick.

I do tend to rush my process to get you guys new material to read as often as I can but maybe I should work on slowing down? I don't know, I just want to be able to build a really healthy little community for my writing but perhaps I should put more effort into making sure my writing process is healthy to upkeep first. I could do with letting some things sit in drafts for a bit longer. First and foremost I should remember that I created this account to share my poetry and writing with you all.

Thank you so much for this lol, needed to talk myself down a bit. I hope that whoever reads this allows themself the same amount of patience and care that they would give others, learning to do this myself.

All the love ♡(੭˶•༝•˶)੭･:*ੈ♡‧₊˚:･

[confetti-cupcake]

Do you have any updates on your reality show AUs? I love your descriptions and the shows you chose. Patient waiting for when you drop updates or even the whole fics.

Hi there! 😊 First of all, it makes me so happy that you're interested and asking about my fics. It means more than you know to know that someone is actually interested in the reality TV premises and are excited to read something that I wrote.

To get a little personal, I haven't written much lately, or been very active on here for a while. We had a death in my family about a month ago, and then a friend of mine suddenly passed away at the beginning of October. So essentially I've spent this month in various states of grief, which as you can imagine, is not the best for fic writing, or engaging in 9-1-1 content in general. I have been slowly getting back into it though, trying to write a little at a time until I get my motivation back.

For more specific updates about each of the fics I'm working on:

🔪 Whodunnit — I'm taking a break from this one until death becomes a little less... topical in my life lol. I'm definitely going to come back to it at some point (I've actually been thinking up ways to change it so I don't have to make it include deaths of characters we all love), but I'm turning my focus toward other fics for now.

✈ Amazing Race — I don't want to promise anything since I don't know what my workload is going to be for the next few months, but I'm fairly certain that I will have this done by the end of the year, or end of January at the latest. This fic is either going to be a one-shot or a two-chapter fic, so much shorter than the others. I already have a lot of the meat drafted out, so most of what's left is writing up the last few legs and building out the connections between the "big" scenes. (I'm really, really excited about this one)

💖 Are You The One? — This one is a little tricky. I'm almost halfway done with this one (7 chapters written out of a projected 15). Problem is, I'm not super happy with chapter 7 and I've kind of been putting off editing it for that reason. I think I'll feel better once I just sit down and confront the issues I've been having with it head-on, but just finding the motivation to do it has been tough. I've been writing it in strict sequential order up until this point, but I have a really detailed outline for the rest, so I might just jump around to the scenes I've been wanting to write to get the creativity flowing and worry about the rest later.

🌴 Survivor — Ah, my beloved that also simultaneously makes me want to bang my head against the wall. I wrote about this in another ask, but there are a few reasons why this one has been taking a while and they pretty much just stem from the fact that I just want it to be really, really good. The first being that I've slowly kind of fallen out of love with Lone Star over time — I still plan on watching it and I don't think it's bad or anything, but it was getting really hard to find the motivation to write from the POV of those characters. So I changed the cast to all OG characters, which has been really exciting for me. It just feels better and it helps the story a LOT that not everyone in the cast is a character we're supposed to like. However, the downside to this change is I had 100k words worth of the fic with the old cast drafted out, so now I have to completely re-write a lot of the scenes and change storylines to get them to fit with the new cast.

Also, unlike my other fics, the Survivor one isn't completely focused on Buddie. It has scenes from everyone's POV, and each person in the cast has their own story arc throughout the game. Buddie will definitely be a big part of it, but there's also a fair amount that has nothing to do with them. I just love all the OG 9-1-1 characters and wanted to write something that gave everyone their time to shine — I also thought the actual Survivor game would be more fun and interesting if we hear what everyone's thinking along the way, rather than from just two people.

Full disclosure, I am in the middle of editing chapter 2 of this fic, so still a ways to go on that, but as the number of characters voted out increases, the chapters will become faster to write and edit. Also as I start finishing up stuff on my other fics, it'll open up more time for me to work on this 😄 I'm very committed to getting it done, regardless of how long it takes!

And now, off to work on some of these! 😉

[softcoreinukag]

IY Multi-shipping Appreciation Post

Hello Inuyasha fandom!! Coming in hot with my first tumblr post.

What are the fics that got you into your Inuyasha pairings? The ones that made you think, "oooOH? This pairing? I didn't consider this pairing before but now I'm Looking Respectfully."

Here's a rough draft, many from my own bookmarks:

InuKag: The Lucky Ones by Terri Botta is one that I see recommended a lot. I re-read this often. My personal favorite is Rebound by Kristine Batey. I read this years ago and still think about it weekly.

InuKik: ?

InuKagKik: Kokoro no Kakera by gribedli and kirrtash. This is my holy grail pairing, I am always searching for fics and praying to the fic gods to find more.

KagKik: ?

KagSan: ?

Kagome/Jinenji: A Little Kindness Goes A Long Way by Mayuna

InuSan: Mine Enemy by Ayrith. I'll add Closer by Opus the Penguin (abandoned) and Revelations by Priestess Skye.

InuMir: ?

InuSess: Poison by Hella. My personal favorites are Spiel Mit Mir by botticelliangel (abandoned), Suppression by lyiint (mind the trigger warnings), and Grave Robbers by WildEmpires.

InuSessKag: Menage Au Inu by Sunset Miko and A Sweet Eventuality by colorofakiss. A highly underrated trio, I need more fic for this pairing!

InuKog: ?

KogKag: ?

InuKogKag: ?

SessSan: The Youkai and the Exterminator by Wheezambu

SessRin: ?

SessKag: Tales From the House of the Moon by Resmiranda and Unspoiled by forthright

SessKik: The Rift Between Auras by Chio Saki. I haven't read this, but I see it recommended often for SessKik!

SessKagu: ?

MirSan: ?

MirKag: ?

Toga/Izayoi: ?

Toga/SessMom: ?

... I ran out of steam! IY fandom, I would love to hear from you! Please send in those fics!

And a parting note: I've been sitting on making this post for a while because I didn't want to ruffle any OTP feathers or upset anyone with controversial pairings. I hope people can take this post in the spirit in which it was intended - as a way to celebrate multiple IY ships and our immensely talented fandom.

[finitevariety]

sup this is me off anon (pirouettes) thank you so much for the reply!! and the snippets slash drafts especially were very yummy. its cool how seeing how like, rigorous the process is because it definitely feels super controlled while writing. and you want to talk more about your specific writing style that would be cool as fuck!! the two things that jump most at me when I read your fics were 1) dialogue and 2) the metaphors. how does all of that get formed?

hiiii

thank you! I feel like my writing process is less rigorous than the only way that I can get to a finished product. I have to sit and think for ages before things even begin to come together.

re: writing style, here are some rambling thoughts (and more screenshots lol):

It's so interesting to hear you pick out dialogue because I think particularly for fic I've been lucky--for example, I once got a comment that complimented me on using particularly Minnesotan phrasing for a Tom thing, when in fact it was a stray turn of phrase from my home country/area which happened to overlap with Minnesotan speech patterns.

Like I said earlier, dialogue is something that tends to come pretty quickly in the drafting process! Like, I just got through the first section of a chapter that was killing me because I wanted to show Tom thinking about shit without him really knowing what he was thinking about, so I had to meander around what he's doing, seeing, remembering, etc. instead of actually talking to anyone in the present. With dialogue scenes (including sex scenes, which for me are fairly dialogue-rich) it's so much easier to communicate someone's thoughts because they are also communicating.

For example, this is from a doc that is probably the next thing I want to write after bold and forth on (after a break for writing some original stuff for fun). I haven't touched it since I did my original 'stream of consciousness' plotting, but I bet when I write this in full the finished speech will be very similar to this:

Looking at it now, I can see some parts which are lazy--the 'paid a damn sight better' part is maybe something Tom would say, but there are things Tom could say here which feel more Tom--'you wouldn't be earning fucking Buffalo bucks, there'--and also reveal more about him and Greg--'maybe you could pay for your own fucking meal once in a while, you know? Stop gagging on gazpacho on my dime' (Greg: 'I thought it was a shot!').

I also, like I mentioned before, frequently read bits aloud. This is probably The Autism, but I like hearing words aloud and in a nice combination/rhythm, and creating something I enjoy is always the priority.

Sorry for the sidebar here, but it feels related: there's a lot in my writing that I'm surprised isn't offputting to more people, and as gratified as I am, I would keep writing it even if that weren't the case. Don't get me wrong, I'm a slut for external validation, but this is my sandbox and I'll piss in it if I want to.

Anyway, back to dialogue: I think for Succession I try to remember that whilst these people don't talk like real people there are a lot of hallmarks of real speech--lots of crosstalk and interruption, uhs and ums and uh-huhs, and certain specific fillers such as, for Tom, 'you know'. So, no matter what insane shit they're saying, I try to ground it in a little of that.

On insane shit, though: I have to chalk the imagery up to the way my brain works, which feels like a copout. I guess though the main questions I ask when writing/refining images are:

What would this scene look like if it were storyboarded? What do I want people to catch in the background? What do I want tight focus on? If the audience blurs their focus, what might the scene remind them of?

What would this character know about? What are they preoccupied with? It's important imo to make an image something that a character would conceivably think. So Tom is very fun to write because I feel like his brain follows the same grain as mine. This is not a compliment. Many of the images I use for him, especially for feelings shit, are rooted in flesh and violence because he is a character for whom self-knowledge is torture.

Can I push this further? Hey, what if I google around this to see if there's anything else I can fold in? For example, if I'm comparing something to a bug, I'm gonna find out about bugs first to see if there's a gross little detail I can shove in there. This connects back to the part above where I pointed out the 'damn sight better' opportunity. If I'm using an image, I want to avoid it feeling like boilerplate, you know?

Then, finally:

What can I get rid of? What does this image add? Are there explanatory phrases around the image that I can delete? If I'm asking you to come with me for 100k of nonsense, the least I can do is try to cut down on unnecessary bullshit.

Thank you so much for the ask and for the compliments. <3

[woodchoc-magnum]

What is your writing process like? I've been stuck in the planning phase for almost a year and I keep going back to the background I am creating for my characters, but haven't felt comfortable actually starting to write. Does that ever happen to you and how do you get through it?

So yeah, I realise that I do things differently to other people - my writing process is very, very loose 😅

Basically - I have an idea, and then I think about that idea for a few days and whether or not I can come up with a scene that fits, and then once I have the scene I know I want to write, I start writing the fic 😂

Some examples of the scene include:

The backyard Pictionary game in alone again tonight with you

Eddie flying back from El Paso to bail Buck out of jail in the smoke in your eyes

Eddie being held hostage in the convenience store in standing on the brink of emptiness

And like, I can't just write the scene first - I have to start from the beginning and build the fic up to it. Writing the big scene first is cheating!

So yeah, I don't know how I do it. I don't make notes. I literally just sit down and start writing - in my head, it's like I'm watching the show and listening to the characters talk.

And I realise this is not at all helpful for you! I just... I couldn't plot something out and then stick to it. I like to meander through, and come up with new ideas on the fly - try things out, see if they work and if they don't, try something else.

Once I have a fully finished first draft, I send it to Kat (@cinematicnomad ) and she'll read through and send me her notes. Sometimes there aren't that many notes (usually for Songs fics - I can write one of those pretty quickly and it won't need much editing), but for the most recent fic (you were never mine), the first draft completely changed after I went through Kat's notes. I basically rewrote the fic, added new scenes, cut stuff out and re-worked the whole thing.

So then I send it to her again, she gives me more notes and the fic starts to come together, but I won't post it until I'm completely happy with it. I've finished fics before, and then put them on ice for a while before coming back and re-working them again.

Kat's very good at helping me tone down my villains because I like to aim for high drama all the time 😅

There is a process but the actual crafting of the story happens completely in my brain - I might have some lines of dialogue that I'll make notes of to include, but no actual plot points. I just wing it.

I'm sorry - I know this is less than helpful. I hope you figure out your story!

[hecallsmehischild]

the last few chapters of laughter lines have been so interesting, and i love how you do shiromori...! ✨ i haven't seen you update the fic so quickly too, it's so impressive! you got any other cool msa fics coming after just legends or are you gonna break away for a bit? just curious! i feel we're at least halfway through the story and i LOVE your msa fics! no pressure!

Thank you very much!!! Yeah, I have issues with writing, heh. I love it, I really do, but it will up and vanish on me. Like, I sit down and there’s nothing I can write. And it’s like this sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. It gets to the point where I become utterly convinced, “That’s it. I’m done. I’m not a writer anymore, it left for good this time.” And usually within a few days of hitting that low, suddenly it’s back? I can’t find the brakes? Somebody help?!

You’d think that after years of this cycle, I wouldn’t actually believe it was gone, but it’s completely real to me every time it happens. I just kick myself a lot less than I used to about it. Hoping that one day I’ll progress to the point where I can not have to believe that’s-it-my-writing-is-done-for before I come back to it, but for now I shift heavily to crafts and reading aloud and other personal projects when the writing muse dries up, and that is okay with me.

So, much as I’m glad to give you as many chapters as this streak allows, don’t be surprised if I hit the end of it rather abruptly. We are definitely past the halfway mark of Laughter Lines, possibly entering the final third, but there’s still plenty to go. Still, there’s also some thanks due a writing friend of mine. We’ve been writing a little bit together each day, having “word wars” where we just keep writing for a set amount of time and compare amount of words written by the end. It’s been a very useful tactic in the past, and it still is.

As for your other question, I have a few thoughts I’m considering. My current options after the Just Legends saga:

A collection of MSA oneshots, unrelated to any saga I’ve written so far. They wouldn’t have an overarching plot, it would be daily shenanigans and such, but I feel like they’d take place with the gang always returning to a little house with a special tree in the backyard. A tree that Arthur often talks to, as if it can understand him.

I have had an Invader Zim fic, Elrohee, on hiatus so long because I’m afraid I can’t sustain an overarching plot for this, and I feel a lot more pressure about messing this one up. What’s on the table about this story is turning it also into a collection of oneshots within the Ayam/Elyon stories that this fic is a part of, with no absolute overarching plot, but loosely connected oneshots exploring various aspects of the story. Since it’s only one chapter long right now, I can still do that. And it would be a good place to process my own questions about belief, which was the impetus for writing Ayam and Elyon in the first place.

The Thicker Than Water Tales (MSA) is on the table for re-editing. I mean a full re-edit, where I do second draft writing, snip off the loose threads I set up that went nowhere, add proper foreshadowing for some things that took me by total surprise, and fix some of the plot reasoning that makes no sense. I’ve already done several chapters. This would be a good chance for me to sit down and really learn and appreciate the editing and second draft process, though it will be a lot harder because I’d have to hold back all edits until at least one fic at a time had been fixed so I have to throttle back my instant gratification issues. It is also a little bit of a dream for me to make it into a self published physical copy for myself, I thought about selling copies but I don’t know where the fandom morality lies on that it feels like it’s edging in on the Mystery Masters some.

The Resilience Saga (Invader Zim) is on the table for re-editing and second-drafting also. A long time ago I considered rewriting the whole thing so that no copyright characters were involved. The plan fizzled, but looking back at it, there’s still a good story there. While I don’t have the energy (or, frankly? the interest) to make it its own thing without my favorite screechy alien, this saga contains some of my much, much older writing that could seriously benefit from a total overhaul. There’s stuff that should take way longer to explore, there’s stuff I hand-waved that should be properly dealt with, there’s also plenty of loose ends I set up that I never got to and need to be snipped. So this would be another editing project, and I would plan to release it chapter by chapter on Tumblr, then replace all fic chapters on other sites (AO3, Wattpad, FF.net)

Those are my current thoughts about post Laughter Lines. I also have at least one more side chapter to add to Previously On Other Peoples’ Heartache, I have to remember this HEY CHILD, REMEMBER Arthur wants to do something really nice for Teles. Just can’t do it right now because there’s still some details about his future that are up in the air, that I won’t know until the confrontation scene happens.

Thank you again!!!