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thephantomofthe-internet · 4 years

Text

Chapter 6: A Room with a View

Steve Harrington x Reader

CATCH UP ON THE SERIES HERE

Words: 3,359

Warnings: Swearing, slut shaming, death mention, crying

Author’s Note: So, I already answered this, but just in case anyone missed it: I update this series weekly and I am still editing the vast majority of chapters! Sorry if it’s coming out slower than expected!

Tags: @divinity-deos @wolfish-willow @scoopsohboi @thecaptainsgingersnap @herre-gud-nej @clockworkballerina @maddie1504 @i-am-trash-so-much-its-scary @buckysarge @wildcvltre @stanleyyelnatsiii @n3wtscaseofniffler5 @peterparxour @linkispink1995 @a-big-ball-of-idk @used-avocado @mochminnie @sledgy14 @the-creative-lie @yall-wildin-like-siriusly @ggclarissa @voidnarnia @anonymousonion23

Steve had no idea what he’d done wrong. Not a clue. But you were ignoring him. You sat farther away from him in English the past two days, and you’d been blowing off plans with him. You’d say that you had other plans, but he’d see you sat on the bleachers after school, watching the girls soccer practise or drawing in that book again. He still didn’t know what you were doing in that book and he was irritated by the fact that he could see you sat in your room some days, caught in a lie without knowing it, your nose caught in the pages in front of you, pencil in between your teeth, focused but unaware of an audience. Steve could see right into your room from his when your curtains were open and you often sat at your desk, working in your pads.

On the day that Mr. Lawrence announced the start for the final essay, Steve had had enough. It had been a week of this behaviour and he felt as though he deserved an answer. And he was sick of watching through the window. Tommy and Carol were busy every damn day chasing Billy Hargrove, Vicki had gone back after him too after their awful date, and Tina wasn’t his friend. Sure, he could bug Dustin, but that made him feel like such a loser. His only friends were a rag tag group of preteens and a weird girl who wouldn’t even talk to him! This was getting pathetic.

The bell rang before Steve could make his move and you were out the door before he could even open his mouth. Tina rolled her eyes as she passed him by, grabbing Tina’s arm to whisper loudly “God, how tragic.” making Vicki cackle loudly.

Steve booked it out the door, scanning the halls for you, but you’d already disappeared from sight. He spotted Samantha, but she was on the retreat. He chose not to chase her down, they’d never even had a conversation before and using her to try to get her to spill on her friend felt a bit shitty. So he decided to just take a walk, no harm in a walk, it was a nice day anyway, out by the field. He wandered out the gym doors by the car park. He shoved his hands into his blue workman’s jacket. The weather was still a bit too chilly to go without a coat, but the sunshine made it easier.

He spotted you and Samantha at the top of the bleachers. You had your hair up that day and your lavender bomber jacket draped around your shoulders. Carol had something similar, or maybe it was Tina, he couldn’t remember which one the pair blurred into one being in his mind.

Samantha caught Steve’s eye before you did. She leaned over to you with a smirk “Lover boy’s watching.” She whispered cheekily, pointing slyly at him.

You turned immediately. Steve was standing in the car park, a few smattering of folks on car hoods, eating packed lunches and watching the scene go down. He waved, taking a step towards you. You turned your attention away.

Samantha was baffled. A week ago, you were telling her all about the weird fun you were having with him, all smiles and laughter, and now you wouldn’t even look at him for more than a second. You wouldn’t admit it, but Samantha knew that he was something more than a friend to you. Nobody was this upset when someone cancelled plans.

Steve turned away without a word. He wanted to scream at you, his mind demanding to know what he had done wrong. He made a plan that afternoon, one he was certain might ruin everything for him.

As soon as the three o’clock bell rang, Steve made a mad dash for his car. He didn’t leave immediately; instead he waited to see an expected sight. Once he saw you huddled and headed for the bleachers, he was sure that the girl’s team was practising. Then he drove off towards home, parking in his own driveway. His mother was home, a shock to him, but he still headed upstairs. The next part was tricky. He’d time out that practise ended at four thirty, but that you usually left at four since the walk was so long. At four twenty, he headed across the street. As always, the yellow Volkswagen sat in the driveway. He’d rarely ever seen it leave the driveway, but it gave him hope that someone was inside the house. You couldn’t be living alone as a senior. He bounded up the front steps, knocking on the door twice. He was nervous, switching his weight from his toes to his heels in a rocking motion forward and back, forward and back.

An older man opened the door. He had to be in his eighties, with age spots speckling him around his eyes like a second pair of wide frames behind his tortoise shell glasses. He seemed suspicious of Steve, although that was probably because he was staring.

“Hello,” he stuck out his hand for the man to shake “I’m Steve Harrington, I’m a friend of Y/N.” the man didn’t take his hand, staying silent as he looked him over.

Steve pressed on “I was wondering if she was home, we were supposed to study together today and she said that she’d call when she got home but I haven’t heard from her.” He chuckled awkwardly.

From behind the old man, a woman’s voice called “Harold, who’s there?”

“One of Y/N’s friends, she home yet?” he called back, opening the door wider. Steve could see the pale yellow walls, sun stained from the large three panel window at the front of their house.

Steve watched as an older woman hobbled into the scene, back hunched and skin thin. She looked frail, her hair dyed to what Steve assumed was its original shade, her grey roots visible from the top of her head. She greeted Steve with a warm smile. Steve was quick to offer his hand to shake, which she took carefully. “Hi, Steve Harrington, it’s nice to meet you both.” He said quickly, smiling brightly at the pair.

“Well hello there, I’m Maude and this is Y/N’s grandfather Harold, it��s lovely to meet you.” She said sweetly. “Why don’t you come inside, Y/N should be home any minute.”

Maude hit Harold’s arm roughly and he let go of the door, letting Steve into the house. He quickly kicked off his shoes, noting the pair’s socked feet. He looked around the house. Every house on the street was one of three standard box deals, with specified details. His parents hadn’t paid for the window seat like your family had, but you didn’t have the open kitchen that his did; an extra yellow wall separated the space. He looked to the fireplace, an exact copy of his family’s before their renovation last august. He missed the grey brick they used to have. You had a large family portrait on the mantle. You were sat in the centre in your Sunday best, your grandparents flanking the outside, two other adults stood closest to you. Steve assumed they were your parents. You looked like your father.

“You have a lovely home,” he said, turning his attention to the pair who were watching him intently.

“Thank you.” Maude smiled “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Sure.” Steve wasn’t much for tea, but he was taught not to refuse something offered by his host. Maude hurried off, leaving him and grumpy old Harold alone.

“Y/N doesn’t bring boys around.” Harold announced when his wife was out of the room. Steve didn’t really know what to say to that, luckily he continued “So what’re you trying to do with my girl?”

“Study,” Steve said with a shrug. The man scoffed, but Steve pressed on. “She’s my partner for our English final, we’re supposed to be working on it today, it’s due soon.”

Harold nodded gruffly “Alright…” he took a seat on the couch, turning the volume back on. The Love Boat was on, a rerun of the episode with guest stars the Captain and Tennille, and Steve was certain that they’d both seen it before.

Maude came in with a tray, handing her husband a mug. It was hand painted, thick script reading ‘Happy Father’s Day’ on the front, the year 1974 written in smaller script underneath in blue paint. She handed him a plain white mug.

“Well, Steve, you’re free to go and wait for Y/N upstairs, her room is two doors to the right of the stairs, you can’t miss it.” She said, gesturing to the stairwell. Steve bid his thanks and headed up the wide carpeted stairwell.

Harold mumbled something to his wife that Steve couldn’t hear, only catching her response. “He’s young, he doesn’t want to sit with us old folks.” She laughed at her own joke and Steve smiled at their friendly banter. They reminded him of his aunt and uncle, they always joked in that sort of way, laughing at themselves before anyone else. It made him feel as if he were at home in the house; he was comforted by the casualness of existence.

Maude was right that the room was impossible to miss. The door was covered in childlike butterflies painted in purple puffy paint. When he opened the bedroom door, he was transported into a small, private art gallery. The room was covered wall to wall in fabric canvases, canvas boards, and paper sketches. Your desk was covered in paint splotches and doodles carved into the wood, there were glow in the dark stars and moons on the blades of your ceiling fan. You’d painted your ceiling into a buttery sunset. It was as if for the first time, Steve was seeing all of you. And you were absolutely incandescent.

His hands went to roam your shelves, filled with sketchbooks and art books and worn copies of the classics. Greedily, he grabbed the first black sketchbook he found its pages heavy and curled. A piece of masking tape on the cover read ‘Still Life, 1980’ in black Sharpie. He flipped over the cover. Every page was the same bowl of fruit, some plain sketches, some painted in acrylics or water colours, but the fruit changed in shape and structure with every flip, rotting more with each sketch until the image switched to a vase of sunflowers, a prim and proper version of the Van Gogh he’d seen a print of in his freshman year art class. He wondered if you’d been there, silently making your own master pieces. He wondered how many masterpieces you had hidden away in your big black book.

The door opened behind him before he could put the sketch book away. “What the fuck are you doing in my house?” you snapped, bounding towards him. When your grandmother told you that your friend from school was upstairs waiting for you, you had a sinking feeling that you knew who it was. And seeing him rifling through your things made your blood boil.

Steve turned slowly, unsure what to say. You snatched the pad out of his hands “And who the fuck gave you permission to look at my stuff, you pervert!” You knew that he hadn’t done anything actually perverted, but you still felt violated.

“I can’t get you to talk to me, I figured coming here would at least make you see me.” Steve laughed a bit, unable to even process what was happening. In the back of his mind, he thought that this would be an effortlessly cool way to go about a solution. Like you’d see him in your room and think ‘wow…what an effort that was…’ Instead, you were furious.

“So, you thought that coming into my house without telling me, lying to my grandparents, and touching my stuff would make it better.” You raised an eyebrow, shoving your sketchbook onto the shelf.

“What was I supposed to do? You won’t answer my calls, you won’t talk to me, I can’t get you to look at me for more than a second and all I want to know is what I did wrong so I can fix it!” Steve cried, words tumbling out of his mouth. You both stared at each other for a moment, surprised by each other, your mouth hanging silently ajar.

You closed it fast, swallowing before speaking “You…you hurt my feelings.” You said softly, pushing past him to put distance between you, standing next to your desk and the window.

“How did I hurt your feelings?” Steve asked quietly, watching you carefully even as you stared defiantly out the window.

You crossed your arms tightly over your chest “You cancelled our plans. For Vicki.”

“So?” Steve asked.

“So, I don’t cancel on you. I never cancel on you, especially not the day of. It hurt my feelings.” You explained, picking at a bit of lint on your sweater.

“Yeah, but I…” he tried to catch himself before he said something terrible, but you already knew what filled in the blank.

“What? You have more friends than me? Is that it?” you snapped. It was Steve’s turn to look away, but you pressed on. “You’re right, you do have more friends than me. But don’t act like I don’t have a social life without you. I do. Do you know how many games of Samantha’s I’ve skipped out on to help you study? How many practises she’s asked me to come and watch that I’ve said no to because I already had plans with you?”

“I don’t know…” Steve muttered. Embarrassment crept up his face. He felt like such a dick. In truth he had forgotten about your plans that day in the excitement of a date with Vicki. With hindsight in full effect he could see that he would’ve had twice as much fun with you eating greasy burgers then he did with Vicki driving around Hawkins.

“Well, it’s been a lot. And it’s not the fact that you went out with Vicki that upset me, you are free to date whoever you want. But can you please at least tell me if you’re cancelling a little sooner than mere minutes before?” you asked, your voice cracking on the end.

“Sure, yeah of course. I should’ve been doing that before.” Steve stumbled over his words to apologize.

“Okay.” You nodded “Now, why are you going through my shit?”

“I wanted to see more. This whole room is incredible.” Steve breathed, plopping down on your mattress.

“You think?” you asked quietly. In truth, you didn’t think that you were that good of an artist. You loved art, but you didn’t think you were exactly talented.

“It’s so cool!” you couldn’t help but laugh, or else you’d cry. Nobody ever talked about your art with such enthusiasm. Teachers only criticized mistakes and your mother and grandparents saw it as clutter. Samantha liked some stuff but she didn’t talk about it much. Even a simple compliment from Steve made you want to cry. You covered your mouth to avoid the tears.

Steve didn’t seem to notice, wandering the room to point out pieces he thought were interesting. He pointed to a canvas depicting the quarry. You’d camped out there one night in the summer; drawing until the sun fades out of the sky and then painting it out once you had it exactly right. “This one is just insane I mean it looks like it’s going to eat you whole, like it has teeth or something.” He exclaimed.

“You can have it.” You replied quickly.

Steve shook his head “No, I couldn’t I mean don’t you want it? For college apps or something?” he couldn’t take it, he’d feel too guilty.

You shrugged “I have enough stuff for at least three portfolios, you should have that one if you like it so much. It’ll make your room cooler.”

“Hey, my room is cool.” Steve pouted, making you laugh harder. He liked your laugh, it split your whole face open into a smile. And your smile looked as if it sat on a bed of clouds. He wanted to float along with it forever.

“Oh yeah, your pee wee t-ball participation trophy is real slick, it gets you all the chicks.” You drawling, bouncing on your mattress.

“Hey, you didn’t run when you saw it.” Steve shrugged, sitting down next to you.

“Eh, your baby sports escapades don’t frighten me. It adds character to know that you suck at something.” You replied. Steve thought briefly of the bat in his trunk and the weight of it mid-swing, connecting with a heavy skull. Better with a bat now then he was as an elementary schooler.

You both lay back on the mattress, staring up at the slowly turning fan. Steve turned to you “What’d you think of Vicki anyway?” he asked.

“Honestly?” Steve nodded “I think she’s a bitch.” Steve laughed loudly but you pressed on “She is! She’s so mean for no reason!”

“Yeah, she’s not cool. She spent our whole date bitching about people, saying a lot of shit about you.” Steve murmured.

“What’d you…” you didn’t know if you could ask how he responded. You bit your tongue before finishing the sentence.

Steve understood anyway “I told her the truth. That you’re a really cool chick and that she shouldn’t be such a bitch about people she doesn’t know.” He said simply, turning his attention back to the slowly moving stars.

You didn’t necessarily believe that he actually defended you. Still, you didn’t feel like arguing. Steve continued on in your silence. “So, do you live with your grandparents’ full time? Or do your parents just work?” he asked.

“Both,” you sighed softly “My mom’s not home very much so they take care of me. She’s a fashion photographer, travels all over the world for different magazines.”

“What about your dad?” Steve asked. He’d seen a younger man in the photo; he assumed that it was some kind of father figure.

“He died.” You muttered.

“Oh…” Steve didn’t know how to react to that. He wasn’t sure if he should apologize.

“She killed him.” You couldn’t help yourself from saying that. Anger still stewed into your bones whenever you thought about your parents.

“What?” Steve to fully look at you, flabbergasted.

“She worked him to death. She always wanted more and farther away from us. Trips to Europe, designer things, this stupid house. She killed him.” You wiped hard at your face, trying to keep the hot tears from streaming down your face. Steve didn’t say anything, he simply pulled you into his chest, holding you tightly into him and letting you cry. He patted your hair gently, trying to soothe you as best he could. He didn’t think he was very good at helping people in their pain. But you grabbed onto his middle and clung to him like a life raft.

“My parents aren’t that great either.” He muttered, unsure if he was helping at all. “They ignore me.”

“I-I’m sorry they do that…” you muttered, looking up at him with wide, wet eyes. Steve melted. He absolutely melted. He was filled with the sudden urge to kiss you, which surprised him. He didn’t follow through with the urge; he didn’t know how you’d take it.

“I’m sorry he’s not here for you…” he replied, petting your hair softly. He stayed with you like that for what felt like hours, letting you cling to him and ruin his shirt with tears. He didn’t care. He needed to be there for you. He promised himself that he wouldn’t hurt you again. That he’d be more careful and pay more attention. He couldn’t bear to see you in this much pain again. He knew that you weren’t crying because of him, but if he could keep you from feeling even an ounce of this sort of pain again, he would.

He cared about you too much to ever let you suffer alone again.

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bettsfic · 5 years

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hey betts! can you give us any insight into your new drafting process (the one you mentioned on Twitter?) those results have me green with envy

sure! this is going to be a fairly quick run-down because i have to start planning my classes here soon.

(anon is referring to this tweet)

required reading

shitty first drafts by anne lamott, which is where i modified my process from

on fear by mary ruefle, which talks about procedure and i may have taken the wrong meaning from the essay but basically, my entire process is about mitigating the fear innate in writers’ block by having a procedure in place to counteract it

tools

google docs (or some other word processor)

google calendar (or some other calendar app; i wrote about my scheduling process here)

toggl (or some other timekeeping app)

airtable (i’ve also used trello, but i like airtable better. ps big thanks to @electricalice for introducing me to it! it’s a lifesaver)

pre-writing

so first you need an idea. whenever i have an idea, even if there’s 0 chance i’ll end up writing it, i add it to my airtable, plus any notes or details i come up with. i also copy and paste any text convos i have about the fic, like if i headcanon something with a friend. (i used trello for this until recently; it works just fine and is a bit easier to use. airtable also has a kanban function though, along with other formats, so it’s a bit more flexible)

airtable is a project management spreadsheet software. i’m sure there are others out there, but i started fiddling with this one and haven’t looked back. it takes a little while to figure out, and you might have to google some things you want it to do that aren’t terribly intuitive.

my fanfic table, filtered by ideas, looks like this:

(you may have to expand to look at it, also note that the pretty colors are a Pro feature of the app and i’m still on my trial)

the idea here is to have space to store my ideas. let’s say i hang out with a friend and we started talking about fic, and i bring up i have an idea for a endgame coda but i’m not really sure where to take it, so we start headcanoning back and forth, and now i have a few scene ideas. i made my endgame coda card already right after i saw the movie, so all i have to do is open the app and jot down the main points of my headcanoning. now when i go home and start working on it, i can easily pull up our brainstorming session.

narrative outlining

i have never been an outliner or a planner. i’ve always been a pantser. i have a premise and i run with it, and that worked for me for a long time. pantsing has a lot of benefits: your story always surprises you! you can get really immersed! it’s certainly the more whimsical writing process.

but what i found was that i would often write myself into a corner, or lose steam once i realized what should have been a 10k fic was actually going to be 80k and i didn’t like the story enough to sit with it for 80k. i also spent a long time thinking about future scenes and writing them down but losing them later, or forgetting about them.

so i started doing narrative outlines, which are just me going “and then THIS happens” repeatedly and sometimes inputting “and something causes this other thing” until eventually i have the whole story written out. the goal of the narrative outline is pacing. all you have to do is get the major beats down. it doesn’t have to be good. no one is going to see it (unless you want them to).

ideally my paragraphs will be all around the same size. those are going to become my chapters. if a paragraph is significantly shorter than another, it’s likely that i don’t have that beat fleshed out yet. i call chapters “beats” because to me, each one should have its own arc, and end at a high or low point in the story.

in my fanfic airtable, i have a table for chapters. all chapters of all multi-chap wips go here, and i can filter out ones that are complete later.

the beauty of the chapters table is that it can connect to your ideas/wip table and vice versa so everything is kept together. i had 7 paragraphs in my narrative outline so i made 7 rows.

notice i also gave myself a due date. i don’t really like due dates, but i’m trying them on for now and seeing how it goes.

i copy and paste the chapter paragraph as i go into the “summary” field. then, as scene or line ideas come to me, i toss them in the “scenes/lines” field. I was in a car for 8 hours and coming up with scenes all over the place, and i needed somewhere to put them. if i didn’t know where they went, i put them in my idea table instead, and filed them later.

you’re still idea-ing, you’re still outlining, but now it’s time to write.

gauge

i make a folder for the fic and open a doc and label it ch1. then i copy and paste the narrative outline paragraph into the doc and separate it out by scene with an asterisk between each one.

here’s where the timesheet and calendar come in. i have a reminder on my calendar to schedule the following day, and on that schedule i put my writing time. when it’s time to write, i start the toggl clock. at the end of each week, i put in my time in my personal timesheet.

the first chapter or 10% of anything i’m writing tends to take longer than the rest, because i need to get into the story, and choose the voice and tense and tone and things like that. so i take however long i take to make what i call a gauge. in knitting, a gauge is the thing that determines the size of the piece. if you’re knitting a sweater, you knit a little square to make sure the sweater comes out the size you need it to be.

so i write the gauge and it takes however long it takes. sometimes i rewrite it a few times, test out POVs and tenses and description and whatever else. what i like best, what seems the most sustainable, is what i choose. i wrote 3 chapters of a novel in present tense and a childish tone before i decided it needed to be first person reflective and i rewrote the whole thing.

don’t get frustrated with yourself if your gauge doesn’t work. that’s what the gauge is for. you’ll know you’ve chosen the right voice if, by the end of your gauge, you’re really eager to keep writing.

down draft & punch list

so now you’ve got a pretty gauge to follow, and the rest is going to be an absolute mess. the down draft is exactly what it sounds like – you get the idea down. i personally believe you need to tell the story to yourself a few times in order to get good at telling the story, or to know what the story is. you’ve told yourself the story once in outline form, and now you’re just breaking out the scenes a little bit more.

the key to the down draft is not to self-edit. i’m not talking about going back and tweaking typos and shit, that’s fine, whatever. i mean doubting yourself structurally. like, oh shit, you forgot to mention that they took off their clothes and now they’re naked.

here’s where the punch list comes in, which is yet another table. (i’ve also used google tasks for this, because it pops up in a side window. either works!) a punch list is a to do list. instead of fixing things, you put the thing on your punch list and save it for the next draft. a down draft is all about speed and figuring out where all the pieces go. revising during the down draft only slows you down.

the punch list is my solution to the contrived advice “you can fix it later!” to which i always say, “BUT I WON’T REMEMBER TO FIX IT LATER I HAVE TO FIX IT NOW.” as soon as you think of something to fix, put it on the table. it may seem like it’s faster to fix things as you go. it is not. i promise.

this is all my punch list notes for all fics, which i then connect to my other tables/filter as needed. put everything in your punch list. it’s better to make a punch list item that you don’t end up implementing than forget an important revision note. if you end up putting the project down for a while, you’ll want to know what you’d intended.

up draft

in the up draft, you clean up the down draft. here, i take each document in a new window, put it on the right half of the screen, and open a new document to put on the left.

then i rewrite the whole fucking thing. i pull up my punch list and fix all the things as i go, to the best of my ability. here’s where the writing gets pretty and fleshed out. but still, it doesn’t need to be perfect. you have more revisions to go. it’s important to remember during this entire process that everything can be changed. nothing is permanent. you’re not writing in stone. there’s no cost to words or documents, so you can revise as much as you want.

it’s also worth noting that the longer your project, the more sectioned out your story will be. sometimes you’ll have a chapter on a down draft and another chapter on an up draft. sometimes you might down draft out of order just to make sure you get your ideas down when they occur. whatever works for you. the idea is that you’re constantly building spaces in which to put your stuff that can be easily found and implemented. the creative process is messy, so you need to make clean spaces to put the mess in.

while you’re up-drafting, you’re still idea-ing and outlining and down-drafting and punch-listing. maybe you don’t have the answer to a problem yet, but you might later. decision fatigue in the creative process is real. this process is designed to mitigate decision fatigue. there are only ever so many decisions to make at once when you expand out your process like this one.

and sometimes, sadly, the solution to a problem never happen. that’s okay. what you write might be flawed. in fact it should be flawed. flaws are what make things beautiful. all you can do is the best you can do, and if it’s not good enough for your tastes, you can learn from your mistakes and try again.

beta

sometimes i have a beta and sometimes i don’t, depending on how confident i am about the work. when i have a beta, this is the stage i send them my stuff. sometimes i tell them specific things i’m looking for, like just line edits, or cheerleading, or whatever else. sometimes i have questions about whether or not something is working. i tell them what date i intend to post and when i would like edits to be done by, and if they don’t get around to it, that’s okay. i can just hustle a little harder in the next revision.

dental draft

here’s where, per anne lamott, you check every tooth. i implement my remaining punch list items and beta feedback, fix pacing issues, typos, unclear sentences, etc. sometimes i do the side-by-side window thing for chapters that are particularly messy, and sometimes i just fix the existing doc. by now your story should be looking pretty good, or the best you can get it.

final read-through :) or additional revisions :(

for fic, this is the point where i hit it and hope. i copy and paste the chapter/fic into an ao3 shell with the tags and summary i’ve kept in my airtable, and do a final readthrough. i don’t do it in the original doc because seeing it in a new font and format usually makes me notice things i’d missed before.

for ofic, here’s where you might need more feedback and more revising if your piece isn’t working yet, or if you’ve submitted it a couple dozen places and haven’t had it accepted. while this process is thorough, sometimes pieces still aren’t working for whatever reason. don’t throw anything away, though. keep it, file it, log it in your airtable, and maybe one day while you’re driving an idea will pop into your head and you’ll be able to come back to it.

this was a really really quick run-down of an extremely long and complicated process, but it works for me! i probably wouldn’t have been able to do this even a year ago. it’s taken me a long time to cultivate this kind of discipline, and i’m still a work in progress. so if it’s too much or too structured for you, that’s fine. maybe you can take one or two things for yourself and try them out.

#writing advice #process #Anonymous

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pikapeppa · 5 years

Text

Writer’s Interview

Tagged by @galadrieljones! Her interview was fascinating and really informative; I would recommend you all check it out.

Tagging forward to @iarollane @charlatron @wardsarefunctioning @aban-asaara @thevikingwoman @athenril-of-kirkwall @fourletterepithet @oops-gingermoment @thunderheadfred @loquaciousquark @obvidalous@barddoc1992 and anyone else who wants to respond!

Q: What is your coffee order?

I don’t drink coffee. Tea for me, please!

Q: What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done?

The first thing that comes to mind is going to Iceland in 2016. Driving all around the island and seeing the fucking glacier lagoon Jökulsárlón was just.... breathtaking. I’ve never seen a place like that in my life.

Maybe another cool thing I did was finally find the balls to do a cosplay (a casual, lazy one, but a cosplay nonetheless) last year when I went to DragonCon in Atlanta.

Q: Who has been your biggest mentor?

Uhh, I don’t have any? But in terms of people who encourage me and help me keep my chin up in those moments of self-doubt (YA’LL KNOW THOSE MOMENTS), I would have to give thanks to @schoute, @viktuuri-fluff-saved-my-life @emileoutofit and @lylypuceonarchive, either for listening to my whining, leaving the most lovely comments and encouraging words, or both!

Q: What has been your most memorable writing project?

Stormbirds and Stalkers, my Aloy/Nil Horizon Zero Dawn fic, was probably the most memorable. I was OBSESSED with writing that thing to the point of putting out a chapter almost every day for the month it took to write. When I hear songs from the playlist I was listening to at the time of writing that fic, it takes me straight back to the feeling of loving that ship so much and being so into the writing that I was ignoring almost everything else (INCLUDING MY EXTREMELY PATIENT FIANCE). To this day, it’s my most popular fic.

In more recent memory, Damned Spot (the Fenris/Rynne Hawke bartender modern AU) is memorable because it has been incredible and inspiring to build the world with @schoute and to collaborate together with the fic and art. I’ve never worked together with someone on a project this way and it’s been so much fun.

Note, also, that I have a Master’s thesis and two published scientific articles under my belt, and those don’t even get an honourable mention in terms of memorable-ness. Fanfic writing defines who I am as a writer.

Q: What does your writing path look like, from the earliest days until now?

Uhh... Well, I guess I wanted to be a storyteller in some sense since I was a kid. I really used to love drawing, and the first thing I ever wanted to be was a comic strip artist. I used to make comic strips for myself from as early as I can remember until I was in high school. They largely revolved around stuff I wanted to happen in my real life (vacations I was looking forward to, boys I had crushes on in high school, etc.). REAL SCINTILLATING STUFF.

In terms of writing specifically, I’ve always been comfortable with writing. It was always just something I could do pretty easily without thinking much about it, but it was never really a creative thing or a thing I saw as a special talent. Friends in high school would ask me to edit their work, and I wrote an essay in grade 11 that a teacher said was “university level”. (I wish I still had that essay, actually. The thesis was that Sigmund Freud was a feminist. He really wasn’t, but I quite successfully argued that he was HAHAHAH.)

In university (undergrad and Master’s degrees), academic writing was just part of the work, so I just did it - again, without thinking much about it. Then I started working full-time and didn’t write anything really except for clinical notes and healthcare stuff for a couple years.

It wasn’t until I started writing fanfic in 2017 that writing became an actual creative process for me and something I recognized as a talent. It became a way that I could actually use my imagination - something I don’t feel like I had done since I was a kid. Fanfic has been the best and only way to express myself creatively; I never considered myself a creative person until I started doing this. So, I mean, I guess I’ve written things to some degree or another throughout my life, but I didn’t see myself as a writer until I started writing fanfic, and now it’s one of the skills I cherish most.

Q: What is your favourite part about writing?

Getting that perfect turn of phrase or dialogue between characters that encapsulates what I’m feeling or imagining for the scene. And when people comment and pick out those things that I was so proud of writing, that is just the cherry on the sundae.

Q: What does a typical day look like for you?

Wake up at 6:50am, eat breakfast, go to work and spend the day wishing I was at home writing. Go home, do a quick yoga session in my living room, WRITE WRITE WRITE until dinnertime which is anywhere between 8-10pm because my fiance and I are both Creative™ and thus Not Adherent To Regular Mealtimes™. Cook (or order in), eat dinner and watch a movie/show with the fiance, WRITE some more depending on the time, shower and bed around 1:30am. Rinse and repeat.

On weekends: wake up around 9-9:30am, yoga, breakfast, WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE, with occasional irregular food breaks and poking around with the fiance to see what he’s up to (he’s a digital artist and filmmaker). Sometime around 8-10pm, cook (or order in), eat dinner and watch a movie/show with the fiance, WRITE some more depending on the time, shower and bed around 2-3am.

If we go out and do something during the day, or if I’m actively playing a video game, then obviously the writing time gets eaten into lol. Oh, I guess we clean sometimes too. Sometimes.

Q: What does your writing process look like?

I like to outline before I start a longfic; I like to know all the main points of the story and how it’s going to end before I get started. For individual chapters or oneshots, I also tend to outline the main points or main pieces of dialogue before getting into the meat of writing the chapter.

I listen to music CONSTANTLY. I actually can’t think unless there is music playing. I have playlists for all my ships. I often will pick one song that illustrates the feel of the chapter and listen to it on loop until the chapter is done.

Q: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten?

I’ve never really gotten any advice, so I’m going to paraphrase @galadrieljones‘ advice, since I naturally follow it and find it to be totally true: “Stay in the room. Once you’ve made the decision to write, don’t leave the room. If you leave the room, you’ll lose your momentum.” This is also the idea behind writing sprints - to force yourself to do nothing else but write for a set period of time, just to get those words out and stay in the moment of the writing. Yes, this might sometime mean I have spent 6 straight hours writing with only bathroom breaks, but those are often the days when I stop and feel like I’M THE MOST AMAZING HUMAN BEING IN THE WORLD because I got the damned chapter done.

Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

Similar to @galadrieljones‘ response, I would say that the most important thing for me has been to keep the writing for the pleasure of it and not to monetize it. I have been asked before if I would consider writing fiction professionally, and my answer is a resounding ‘no’. If I wrote professionally, I couldn’t write exactly what I want to write on my own timeline, and I wouldn’t be able to share it immediately and garner the kinds of interactions and socializing with my readers that I really enjoy. Fanfic is the perfect medium that lets me write exactly what I want and to hang out with fun like-minded people while doing so.

Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to start writing?

DO IT! DO IT DO IT DO IT!! I have so many friends who have said they want to write and don’t have the time or think they would be shitty at it - and I always say to JUST DO IT!! This also calls back also to some of the questions from earlier: if you really want to write, you may have to carve out time for it. MAKE time for it if it’s something you really want to do. Force yourself to find an hour or two and to fill it with writing instead of some other activity. If you really want to do it, you can and will find time for it.

#tag meme #tumblr game #fanfic writer's life #thank you for the tag!#this was a fun one to fill out!#pikapeppa reflects #ask me anything

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gwentoryfics · 5 years

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I'm feeling really unconfident about my writing at the moment, so I thought I could turn to you for help. you've probably dealt with similar feelings, so would you mind letting me know how you deal with it when you feel like you arent living up to your own expectations? I'm struggling with that to the point that its keeping me from writing altogether

okay i love this question and i have a million things to say about it. i’m gonna throw down a 'keep reading’ button since i have a feeling this may take up quite a bit of space lol

there are two things i want to talk about in regards to this topic: expectations (like you mentioned) and comparisons. i think a lot of stress, self-doubt, and lack of confidence stems from those two things - the expectations we have about our work, and the way we feel about our work compared to those we admire.

when i was in college, i took a class called spirituality & empowerment. it dealt mostly with the topic of finding peace through mastering your mindset. it felt pretty hokey at the time and i didn’t fully commit to the meditation practices and everything else we did, but in the years since taking the class i’ve had a lot of time to reflect on one of the main teachings: you cannot find peace and happiness as long as expectations exist.

to apply this directly to writing:

if you have high expectations for your quality of writing, you will inevitably be disappointed. you are your own worst critic and you will always find flaws with your writing. if perfection is your goal, you will never reach it, and you will forever be frustrated with your perceived inability to write “well.”

completely eliminating expectations from your life is incredibly difficult, if not practically impossible. i’m certainly guilty of still setting expectations for myself. but there are ways to lessen and change those expectations into something more manageable, to actually give yourself a chance at writing something you’ll be happy with.

1. expect that your first draft will be shitty. give yourself permission to write something terrible. don’t stress about sentence structure or word choice - just throw something onto the page and let it be god awful. letting yourself have that shitty first draft releases a lot of the burden to write well and instead lets you focus on just getting the main plot points down. when you stop yourself from analyzing each word choice you make, you open yourself up to more creative thinking - and more possibilities to enhance the plot.

2. expect that your second draft may not be much better. writing is a process and it takes time - much of which is spent rewriting, revising, and editing.

3. expect that your final product will not be perfect. expect that it will instead be “good enough.” because you could spend endless hours making changes to it and still never be satisfied. there is absolutely nothing wrong with “good enough.”

4. expect that even if you set all of these expectations, you still may not be happy with the end result. and that’s okay. i try to set these expectations for myself, and i still am not thrilled with hot for teacher. i think i still have a lot of areas to improve, and there are also some pretty glaring mistakes i’ve made that i might have caught if i had spent more time revising. (specifically issues with wooseok’s suspension - 1. there’s no real point to it, since there’s no plot benefit to him being kept from r&b ensemble. it would have made more sense with my original plot ideas, but i changed some things around and now it doesn’t really matter. and 2. i wrote that he was specifically suspended from extracurricular activities, and r&b ensemble isn’t even an extracurricular! it’s a class that he’s getting credit for!! lol that was just a huge thing that i missed, but now it’s part of the story and i just have to deal with it.)

5. expect that you may not get any response when you post. it’s impossible to control other peoples’ reactions to your writing and you’re only going to stress yourself out more by putting so much importance on something that is out of your control. trust me, i understand how encouraging it is to get a like, a reblog, or even an ask. ideally, if you don’t expect that response, you won’t be disappointed when you don’t get one (but that’s a really difficult expectation to have). to use myself as an example again - i didn’t expect any sort of response when i posted the first part of hft. i had just started up a new blog and had 0 followers (i think that probably helped lol) so i didn’t even think anyone would see it. but then i started getting asks about it, which was awesome! it was incredibly validating and encouraging. but now when i post updates, i expect those asks to come in. and if i don’t get any right away, i start to think it was a flop or people aren’t interested in my story anymore. i basically put all of my validation into receiving asks, which is super stressful. i haven’t totally figured out how to break free of that. just know that you’re not alone in wanting a positive outcome.

basically, the takeaway from those five points is that low/no expectations give you a higher chance of feeling satisfied. by expecting the least, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to 1. be satisfied with any outcome, and 2. be pleasantly surprised by a positive outcome. again, this is a really difficult thing to do, and i’m not sure that anyone is really capable of completely nixing their expectations lol but it’s something to think about at least. consider what expectations you’re setting for yourself specifically, and then try to think of a way that you can flip it into something more positive.

the next thing is comparisons. we’ve all heard time and time again that it is detrimental to compare yourself to others. it’s so easy to read other writers’ works and say to yourself, “my writing is not/will never be this beautiful/creative/intriguing/whatever adjective you prefer.”

honestly, yeah, you’re right. your writing will never be like theirs. because your writing is unique to you, just as that writer’s work is unique to them. so instead of comparing your work to someone else’s, compare it to your own.

how does this story compare to one you wrote a year ago? how does this draft compare to an earlier draft? are you seeing improvements? if not, where could you focus on growth? take time to analyze your own writing, because the most important thing is that you’re always growing as an artist.

and of course, it’s totally fine (encouraged, even!) to take inspiration from writers that you love! whenever i feel stuck, i re-read some of my favorite fics to see how other writers handle similar situations. but no matter what inspiration you take, remember to make it into something that is your own.

now when it comes to building confidence in your writing, approach writing like you would a performance (easy analogy for me to make since i’m a musician). you wouldn’t jump on stage unprepared - you would take time to practice your song/dance/performance. the more you practice, the more comfortable you’ll be, and the more confident you’ll feel going into the performance.

so think of each step of your writing process as practice. the more time you spend working on your work, the more comfortable and confident you’ll be with it, and the easier it’ll be for you to share.

but again, know when enough is enough. don’t spend the next two years working on a 5k fic. be comfortable with your “good enough” stopping point and move on to the next big thing!

lacking confidence in your writing is a really difficult thing to overcome. and i’m not even sure that it can totally be conquered. i’m always nervous to post new parts of hft, and i constantly question if i’m making the right choices regarding character decisions, word usage, and plot points.

i want to leave you with one last thing. i forget who wrote it, but i think i read somewhere about the idea that there is no such thing as bad writing - only unfinished writing. so don’t get stuck thinking that your writing is simply bad. it’s just a work in progress! the key is to recognize when something isn’t as good as it could be, and look at it as an opportunity for improvement instead of a failure.

you’re approaching your work with a critical eye, and that means you’re already headed in the right direction! you’re willing to acknowledge that your writing may be lacking in some areas. now you just need to have a little faith in your abilities.

if it counts for anything, i believe in you.

i know this is literally an essay and i apologize for such a lengthy response, but i really hope that this can be at least a little helpful. remember that i’m always here to give you a boost and/or advice when you need it. as a fellow writer, i want to encourage you to keep trying even when things get hard, and to recognize the strengths that you already have. 💕

#hhhongseok #writing tips #gwen answers #sorry for writing a book lmao

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taratheinfluencer-blog · 5 years

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I Tried Living Like a Social Media Influencer for a Week - Here’s What I Learned:

In a world full of Instagram and Youtube, a new elitism was born: Social Media Influencers.

What are social media influencers? According to the Digital Marketing Institue, social media influencers are, “users who have established credibility in a specific industry, have access to a huge audience and can persuade others to act based on their recommendations.”

After the death of app Vine, the top users couldn’t fathom losing their daily 6 seconds of fame and get a real job, so instead, they turned to good ol’Youtube. Youtube, which was once a platform for content creators to post actual formatted-scripted-creative videos, then became a playground for inFlueNcErs to post shallow videos of themselves vlogging their day-to-day life of doing $1,000 shopping hauls and Taco Bell mukbangs.

Though these vloggers claim their content is actual ~hard~ work, from a viewers standpoint it just looks like an extreme form of the narcissism of privileged people showing off how much money they have and how much fun they can have without having to maintain a real job.

In addition to their hard work of filming themselves eating fast food, there’s also the extremely hard and tiring work of them posting pictures of themselves onto Instagram. While I personally do not understand how this is real work, other sources would argue that it is. A recent survey showed that 75% of generation z and millennials consider online content creation to be a real job, and 34% of those people want to start a YouTube channel themselves.

Still, I can’t help but be irked when hearing about this lifestyle. But why? To figure out where this rooted irritation stems from, I decided to try to live like a social media influencer for a week. Vlogging. Instagramming. Eating like them and dressing like them. For a full week. Yeah. yeah. Here is what I learned:

1.) It Takes A lot of Confidence:

Is it confidence or is it narcissism? Depends on the vlogger. Either way, you’ll need one of the two to get started in the influencer world.

Let’s start off with vlogging. Talking to a camera while walking in a public space with people staring at you…..not an easy feeling. Every time I started filming and a person would notice, I instantly felt self-conscience.

Even when I was attempting to film alone, as soon as I would start talking to the camera as if it was an actual person, I couldn’t help but to laugh. Every. Time.

Maybe I should give more credit to vloggers who talk to their camera in public and make it look so easy and natural because it’s not.

Going along with the self embarrassment, posting consistently on Instagram added to the feeling.

I normally post on my Instagram one or two times a month, but posting pictures of myself WEEKLY felt like I hit the beyond cringe status.

Pressing the post button was dreadful, and I ended up deleting most pictures an hour after they were posted.

Posting my face onto my friend's timelines every single day and updating my Insta story every minute felt like a whole new level of narcissism. It’s so silly and weird to think influencers easily post these pictures and just ~expect~ people to like them and to care about what they’re up to that day

This goes along with the majority of influencers being narcissistic. In a 2016 study, researchers interviewed 239 influencers on their Instagram habits and found that they all ranked high on the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale.

The researchers also said, "narcissists can post and manipulate specific photos to make themselves and their lives appear to be a certain way. Instagram appeals to narcissists because many interactions on it are 'surfacy' or 'shallow.”

The vlogging side to being an influencer is one thing because at the very least you can try to make something fun out of it, but the Instagram part? Absolutely, absolutely, not the lifestyle for me.

2.) It’s Only Fun if You're Making Money:

If I knew it was guaranteed I could live this lifestyle and start making the same amount of money as the top influencers do, going through the cringe and embarrassment of it all would totally be worth it.

Influencers get paid through brand deals and sponsored ads. Companies will reach out to influencers and ask them to either post a picture of them using or wearing their product, or shout out their company in a video in exchange of receiving anywhere from $200-10,000+ per post.

Social media influencer Tana Mongeau announced on her Instagram story this past week that the clothing company Fashion Nova pays her up to six figures per photo that she posts onto her Instagram wearing their clothing and tagging them in it. SIX FIGURES to post a picture on Instagram.

Mongeau has also explained in her past videos that clothing companies send her and other influencers exclusive catalogs of clothing articles selected just for them. These items are worth anywhere from $500-5,000. She picks the clothes that she likes, they send them to her for free, she then films a Youtube video of her showing off the clothes and pretending as if she actually shops there, then she can either keep the clothes or send them back. Either way, she still receives a thicccc paycheck for giving the company an online promo.

Influencer David Dobrik stated on his vlog channel that he was able to buy 10 new cars for his friends, plus a new Ferrari for himself, within one year due to giving the company SeatGeek shoutouts on his vlog. 11 new high-end cars in one year...just for talking about a company for literally 45 seconds.

Without the paycheck and without knowing if I’ll ever get a paycheck, I just don’t see the point in being an influencer just for ~fun~ especially knowing other people are banking off of it.

It’s like people who casually drink. Alcohol doesn’t taste good. There are zero health benefits to it. So if you’re not drinking to get drunk, what’s the point?

Being an influencer is embarrassing. There are horrible mental health benefits to it. So if you’re not posting to get paid, what’s the point? Attention?? Fans?? Feeding into narcissism???? Probably, but I still want a paycheck at the end of the day.

3.) It Takes A lot of Time:

Finding the perfect picture to post on Instagram takes. a. lot. of. time. After doing a full photo shoot in my Insta-baddie outfit outside of a 711 (which ties back to the needing self-confidence part and trying to continue on even when customers are staring), I then had to go through 103 pictures and even then I had to take more to find the ~one.~

But it doesn’t stop there!

Trying to edit and FaceTune the pictures like the influencers do was even more time consuming than taking the pictures and picking out the Dolls Kills mixed with Fashion Nova outfit itself.

If it took me that much time trying to decide which picture to post, I can’t even imagine how long it takes influencers, given they have more pressure put on them to post the right one. I only have a little over 4,000 followers to impress online, but real social media influencers have a solid 500,000-1,000,000+ that’s a lot of pressure! Not to mention if they’re posting the picture through a brand deal and the brand doesn’t like the picture, they can take the paycheck back...so their post has to be perfect.

Trying to come up with vlog content also took up a lot of time.

When I wasn’t laughing or cringing at myself, I was vacantly staring into the camera lens trying to come up with something to say, annnnnd I had nothing.

Then there were times where I did think of something to say, but either the sound quality was off or the sentence was worded funny so I would have to do retakes of me talking while also trying to make it sound natural.

AND THEN, once you FINALLY got your footage, you have to edit it all. The current trend among vloggers is to do quick edits with lots of weird effects and added sounds which took me 8 whole hours to figure how to do, and even then, the outcome was still shitty! !!!

While I still do believe vlogging isn’t real work, I WILL give them credit for their editing skills, now that I consider hard work.

*side note: while I do credit editing film as hard work, it can also be noted that there are vloggers out there who pay someone else to edit their videos for them….SoOOoOo

*side side note: I was going to add the vlog here but after this experiment, I weirdly decided I want to actually try to make a vlog channel this summer since most of my friends already do and I learned a lot from this, so I’m holding onto that content until the birth of my channel.

4.) It Does Hurt Your Mental Health:

While doing my research on what the influencer lifestyle was like, I tried to take note of what they typically eat in a day and what they wore.

From the different “What I Eat in a Day” videos I watched, it mostly seemed to consist of ice coffee (which I already drink on a daily basis so that was easy) and avocados and other super healthy foods.

The common outfit choices I noticed from the wardrobe hauls I watched mainly consisted of crop tops, street fashion, and anything that reveals a lot of skin.

Going back to a previous statement I made, influencers have a lot of followers and a lot of eyes on them, so it’s easy to see that they do whatever they can to always look their best.

While I did enjoy their food choices and clothing choices the most out of this entire experience (because it tasted good and looked cute), I feel like it would eventually become mentally exhausting to always be sooooo aware and conscious of what you look like at all times.

I mentioned before that I used the FaceTune app like all the other influencer do when editing my pictures before posting them. While I could write a whole other 25-page-long-essay on the dangers of FaceTune itself, I’ll just summarize it by saying this: FaceTune is an absolute evil drug that can trigger body dysmorphia within the user and within people who see the final FaceTuned pictures.

The features on that app that allows for you to look as if you lost 50 lbs, makes you look taller, fixes your skin complexion, and even alters your jawline??? are so dangerous and triggering to people who already suffer from low-self esteem, dysmorphia, and eating disorders, and I strongly suggest not even downloading the app, ever.

I also caught myself checking my phone every second to see how many likes I was getting after posting something. When posting content on social media becomes your job, I can totally see how addicting numbers can become and why people obsess over them.

In a recent interview with influencer Alexandra Mondalek done by The Guardian, Mondalek said, “I was putting too much weight into who was viewing my Instagram, I would worry about how a post was performing instead of making important calls. I felt a certain pressure to make a brand of myself, and there was so much anxiety in that.”

I also caught myself comparing my posts to similar posts that got more likes and wondering why mine weren’t getting as many, but then would remember that the majority of the influencer’s pictures have been FaceTuned, and they don’t actually look like that in real life so I shouldn’t be comparing myself to them.

Mondalek also said in the same interview that, “I’d be lying if I said I could look at an explore page on Instagram and not compare myself to what I see on those pages. Someone is purchasing something you can’t purchase or making connections you haven’t yet made. It’s the rat-race lifestyle boiled down into the palm of your hand, and sometimes it feels inescapable.”

Final Thoughts:

After this experience, I will give influencers a bit more credit. This definitely isn't a lifestyle anyone could pull off so props to those who can.

However, I still do not fully see a purpose or meaning in their job. And I'm pretty sure they don’t either — they just like the perks of the lifestyle.

Mongeau has stated several times in her vlogs that she knows she’s talentless and that she just got lucky, and I respect her for owning up to that.

I guess my core issue with influencers lies within the ones who cannot be honest with themselves and admit their job is meaningless.

These people really aren’t contributing much to society or working that hard, but are still making more money than teachers and some doctor — people who actually work — and it bothers me! Nobody needs that much money!

But....I did read in a recent study that, “narcissists tend to follow other narcissists on Instagram,” and prior to doing this experiment, I was already following these influencers on my own free will. So, maybe, if we’re being honest here, my problem isn’t the influencers work ethic, but deep down inside I see myself in these people and am just jealous that they’re living a richer life than I am.

Sources:

https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-us/blog/9-of-the-biggest-social-media-influencers-on-instagram

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3617062/children-turn-backs-on-traditional-careers-in-favour-of-internet-fame-study-finds/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/08/instagram-influencers-psychology-social-media-anxiety

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/05/29/five-ways-to-beat-social-media-algorithms-with-influencer-marketing/#20f2d13f6db7

https://www.businessinsider.com/narcissists-habits-instagram-2018-1

https://blog.logograb.com/visuals-videos-what-happened-vine/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215303307

https://chatterblast.com/being-a-social-media-influencer-its-a-real-job/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563217306805

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bat-besties · 6 years

Text

On Impossibility - 3

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

impossible

ɪmˈpɒsɪb(ə)l

adjective

· not able to occur, exist, or be done.

Eg. It is impossible to fund both the sports and drama programmes with the school’s limited budget.

· very difficult to deal with.

Eg. The situation which Logan Sanders, Student Body President, is in after he convinced the school board to cut the unsuccessful drama programmes is impossible.

· (of a person) very unreasonable.

Eg. Roman Prince.

To Roman, nothing is impossible. Not following his older brother Patton to acting college, not being a loser taking on the school’s popular Student Body President and definitely not writing and performing an epic school play with no money and six cast and crew members.

A popular!Logan and loser!Roman high school AU based on @2pointomg ’s idea with eventual Prinxiety.

Edited by the wonderful @alpacasarethegreenestanimal

@barclays-sides, @romanasanders, @cashmeredragon , @entitydark, @jughead-is-canonically-aroace, @immacrazyfangirl , @narniasfinestavengingsociopath, @toolazytothinkofcreativename, @nyxwordsmith

Ask me if you want to be tagged and please tell me what you liked and anything I could improve!

Logan hurried backstage after the ordeal was over, needing his best friend. He felt awful – Roman had been out of line but it really was unfair to begin a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent. Unarmed was a little harsh, perhaps the actor’s wits could be compared to that blunt wooden sword of his…

Stopping that train of thought, he went over to Virgil, who was sitting in a corner with large purple headphones jammed on. He was the Student President and had acted like a bully, that was the long and short of it, and Roman deserved an apology.

Virgil stood up when he saw Logan and knocked the headphones off his head.

Logan paused, ‘Are you good, Virgil?’

‘What the hell, man.’

Logan frowned, ‘I assure you, I was not involved in giving you the T-shirt gun. I was wondering what happened actually –’

‘I was talking about what you did to Roman.’

‘I was going to apologise, I did feel bad – ‘

Virgil slammed his hands on his head, ‘You felt bad? You felt bad, huh?’ his voice went dangerously calm. ‘You acted like a fucking dick. No! No, don’t even try to deny it. I don’t want to hear your shitty debate team response. I told you, I told you that it wasn’t your decision to cut drama, that every other Student President restrained their decision-making to putting salad bars in the cafeteria and fund-raising for new laptops. But you didn’t listen. You’re always running ideas by me, and plans, and speeches, and the one time I said no to one of your student body enrichment schemes you didn’t even listen. I told you I knew the guy, that it would kill him. I told you that before I met you he was always my group project partner in English because his friends weren’t in that class, and I didn’t have any friends at all. I told you – you didn’t listen!’

Logan broke in, scared by the anger in his friend’s voice. ‘Look, I don’t know what that has got to do with this situation. It’s pure coincidence that it was Roman you hit, and if any other person in the school had spoken like that to you I would have done the same thing. Besides - you backed my decision when I explained the numbers to you. It was the –’

‘Logical decision?’ Virgil laughed humourlessly. ‘I didn’t back your position, I backed you. I trusted you. You’re my friend. We did all these great things together, taking on the man. You made people listen when I wanted to save energy in the school. We put together that anti-bullying project with Elise, made the school stop using sex ed for scaremongering, even this,’ he gestured at the rainbow flag still hung proudly on the podium, ‘would have been impossible before you came.’

Logan scanned Virgil’s face for clues desperately when he paused, trying to work out what exactly his friend was saying.

‘The point is,’ Virgil sighed, ‘now that’s changed. You stopped Roman from doing what he loved, and then made him a laughing stock from a position of power. Logan – you’re the man.’

Virgil quickly swiped at his eye makeup, smudging it. He took a deep breath before looking Logan in the eyes. ‘I don’t want to be your friend anymore. Me – I fight the man.’

Logan stood in silence as his only friend walked away.

He did what had needed to be done.

Virgil was just prejudiced against the athletes Logan had helped because – because what, Logan? Because they used to laugh at him in PE? Because half of them thought Chad was hilarious in the recycling bin incident?

He had worked tirelessly to improve the school for two years, and the one time he was saddled with a difficult decision his friend was blinded with – empathy?

Logan didn’t need Virgil. He had his debate team, and the people he worked with in Student Council, and everyone in the school thought he was great. Virgil didn’t understand the way that Roman didn’t understand – he didn’t understand that utilitarianism and democracy were the policies Logan had to follow, not whimsy and pandering to the individual. It had been his place to make the decision, because he had a school to run and did not shirk his duty.

Logan had lost his best friend, and he didn’t run after him and beg for forgiveness, or write passive-aggressive messages on social media, or hide in a bathroom crying. Instead, he aced his trig exam, learnt a new debate technique and finished two essays in the library at lunch.

4:00pm. Logan put on his backpack aggressively normally and kept his eyes on the linoleum as he walked through the hallways. Every time the tan squares began to blur together he would pinch the skin between his thumb and forefinger and they would come back into focus. He stopped outside the auditorium door, hearing the booming voice of Roman mid-soliloquy. He’d prepared a short but sincere apology after he finished his exam early. I don’t want to do this. He had to do this. Go home. He was the Student President. I want to go home. He placed a hand on the doorknob, wrapping his fingers securely around the metal. Fuck this. Fuck all of this. I want to go home. I want to go home. The back doors of the school swung open.

Logan struggled home as though through wet concrete, his view a modern art piece of suburbia underwater. His breaths scraped like sandpaper through his mouth as he picked up speed and the air in his nose felt acidic. As he collapsed in the door he tugged off his tie (a gift from Virgil) and ripped open his collar (are you hiding vampire bite marks there?). He ran his hands through the hallway carpet, trying to calm his breath (4,7,8, Virgil, 4,7,8, breathe with me). Head in hands, he screamed silently, shaking. No-one was home so he screamed aloud. ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!’ A shaky breath. ‘AAAAAAAHHHHHH!’ He pounded up the stairs. Pulling out his phone, he scanned the texts they had exchanged the previous night, all full of nothing: Maths homework, the assembly, Virgil’s Geography presentation, a flat earth meme, nothing to preclude the fight. How long? How long had his best friend been losing his trust in him?

The boy flopped onto his bed, knocking over a funfair black-and-purple bear. Recoiling as though it were a spider, he couldn’t look the stupid toy in the face as he hid it in his wardrobe behind a stack of identical black polo shirts.

#sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #virgil sanders #logan sanders #roman sanders #thomas sanders #ts fic #prinxiety

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myaekingheart · 6 years

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All of them for the writing asks 😁😁😁

HOLY CRAP HONESTLY THANK YOU xD

Writer Asks

Was being a writer a dream of yours when you were little? Or did it spring up when your older? Or is it just a hobby? I’ve always been a writer, regardless of whether I necessarily knew it at the time. I’ve shuffled through some other career ideas– when I was little, I wanted to be a veterinarian, and then in middle school I liked the idea of modeling– but at the end of the day, writing is what I always came back to. I used to come up with elaborate storylines when I played with my Barbies and hog the computer on Microsoft Word making shitty stories that I’d print out and staple together and draw covers for. I don’t think I really considered it a viable career at the time, but now I know that writing is what I’m meant to with my life above all else and that if I lose every other opportunity that comes my way, I’ll be fine so long as I can still write.

Overall, would you say you are more driven by plot or characters in writing? (What makes you more excited about an idea?) I think, truthfully, a little of both. I love thinking of cool ideas and ways that my characters will fit into them. It’s exciting to think of their lives and the things that can happen to them that will make or break them. I love seeing my characters happy and getting what they want, but I also love when things don’t go their way and when something completely breaks them. The torture is fun to see. I am sadistic.

Give an overview/description of some of your past stories. (Only if you are willing, of course!) Oh god, okay, so I have a couple. There was this one story when I was a little kid that I came up with, I forget the name of it, but the basic premise was that there was this disease and you turned every color of the rainbow ROYGBIV style and then when you reached violet, you died. I had another one I was working on fifth grade called “The War of Sacawragi” that I cannot for the life of me remember what it was about, but I remember rambling about it to my friends one day at lunch and being all hyped about it. Maybe it had to do with a refugee woman fleeing a war-torn country with her baby, or to protect her unborn baby, or something like that? I never finished it, and I lost what I did write when my computer at the time broke, but I don’t know. I don’t think I totally care that it’s gone? Maybe one day I’ll revisit the idea, but for now I don’t really care.

INSPIRATION. What inspires you the most?Images, music, movies. Sometimes history and mythology. A plethora of things.

Do you have an idea for a story you don’t feel you can write at this current time? (Whether it be because life is busy right now, you need to do more research, etc.) I have a couple ideas for stuff I want to write, but I just don’t feel the motivation to quite yet. It’s tough, because I’m deep into writing From Upon the Golden Thrones (my Narnia fanfic) and focusing so much on the following sequels of that that I feel like I don’t want to start anything original until I finish that. Which sucks because I know original work is what’s going to bring home the bacon and shit but I just care so much about this goddamn fucking fanfiction that I cannot get it out of my head. Plus, I feel like I’m at a spot in my life right now where pouring more energy into writing fanfiction is acceptable because I’m in college rather than out in the working world depending on churning out original stories to earn a living. Once I graduate college, I’m terrified I won’t be finished with these Narnia stories and will have to give them up for the sake of focusing on my career, which makes me incredibly sad because as stupid as it may sound, I have never cared about any of the other stories I’ve written (original or otherwise) as much as I care about this fucking fanfic.

Favorite POV to write in? (As in First, Third, or maybe a specific character?)I really like third person omniscient. I used to write almost exclusively in first person but I felt like that was really restrictive to me. I like the way third person omniscient feels like playing God– you know exactly what everyone is doing, where they are, how they are feeling, but the characters don’t know shit and it’s kind of fun to fuck them up like that. It’s fun to know stuff they don’t. Plus, I really like paying attention to everyone’s take on a situation. I like delving into their internal monologues when something happens, good or bad, and how they interpret those situations. I like my readers to know what’s going on in my character’s heads and how they view the world compared to one another.

Favorite writers? Have they influenced you at all? Obviously CS Lewis is a fave. I just love the way he was able to interpolate scripture into fantasy. I’m not a wildly religious person but Narnia is the closest thing I’ve felt I’ve come to religion in my adult life, like Narnia makes me feel a particular way that nothing has ever made me feel before. I think that is also in part to my Irish heritage, and knowing much of Lewis’s inspiration for the landscapes of his book was inspired by his homeland. I actually wrote an entire essay about this for one of my classes last semester. I’ve never really been as big a fanatic of any other writers as I am with CS Lewis, much in the same way as I approach my music tastes-- I more often than not like particular songs rather than whole bands. Much like Nirvana and Beartooth is to my music taste, CS Lewis is the one artist whose work I am a wild fan of (even if the only other work of his that I’ve read outside of Narnia is Out of the Silent Planet).

If one cliche could be eradicated from writing, which one would you pick?The idea that everything has to be romance, and that every romance has to be a certain way. I like the stereotypical chick flicks as much as the next woman but I like complicated love that waxes and wanes. I like love that has a purpose, that at it’s core is hopeful but that rips your insides apart and makes you realize things about your life you never knew before. I like love that is based on more than just the superficial things. Situational love, childish love, war-torn love, all of that good shit. I prefer love that is real and raw and it hurts because it pays no mind to caution in the literary sense. I’m tired of the love we always see in YA lit where everything is meant to be poetic and flowery. Give me blood and sweat and tears. Give me something that’s real. That’s the kind of love I enjoy reading.

Favorite cliche or trope? I like the comedic stuff a lot, like funny misunderstandings. I wrote one into the last posted chapter on my fanfic that I was pretty disgustingly pleased with. I’m really bad at writing comedy but I try. I don’t know if this is necessarily a cliche or a trope, either, but I adore bildungsromans. I live for character development.

Do you have to force yourself to write, or is it something you want to do? Half and half. I feel like my will to write exists on a spectrum. On one end, there is the idealistic mix of motivation and inspiration where I sit down and the words just flow out of my fingertips and when I look back at these chapters, I typically have to do very little editing because I was so deep in the zone and so focused on what I wanted to write and I did that. On the opposite end is the numbness of feeling zero motivation and zero inspiration. It’s like sex-- I’m just not turned on and not thinking about sex whatsoever. And that’s fine. You don’t need to write 24/7. The worst is when I fall somewhere in the middle, which is where I am most often. I either have all the inspiration and no motivation or all the motivation and no inspiration. Most frequently it’s the former. I think about my current story constantly and yet more often than not, I never have the strength to open up the word document and actually work on it. This has been especially true this past month, when I went on a three day writing binge and wrote eight chapters only to find on day four that the file got corrupted and I lost all of my work.

Share a passage from one of your works and tell us why you liked it so much. Oh god, this is dangerous. One of my favorites is a scene in Chapter 12 of From Upon the Golden Thrones, but it’s too long to copy and paste here so instead I’m going to use a passage from Chapter 9 instead: As night swept across Narnia, the bad dreams took hold once again. Eilonwy’s breath hitched, tossing and turning as fearful visions paraded through her head. Peter snapped awake the moment he heard so much as a whimper, climbing onto the edge of her bed to try and soothe her awake. Her eyes fluttered open, brimming with tears, hands trembling wildly. “It’s okay, Ellie, everything’s alright. It was just a bad dream” he whispered, petting her hair. She shook her head and burst into tears. “It never ends…” she whined, burying her face beneath a mountain of pillows. “I want to go home!” “Ellie, shh, you are home” Peter replied but the huntress shook her head in great protest. “This isn’t home, this is hell!” she screamed. With a sudden jolt, she sat upright and began throwing pillows left and right. “Eilonwy, stop! Please!” Peter begged but she refused. She launched pillow after pillow into the wall, toward the window, knocking things off her vanity and even cracking it’s glass. She kept going until the entire room was drenched in a blizzard of feathers. It wasn’t until the window creaked open and a soft breeze blew through that Eilonwy finally began to calm down. Exhausted, she collapsed onto the mattress and wept softly, tears staining her cheeks. Peter swatted at the downy rain, climbing into her bed and wrapping his arms around her tightly. She sighed and fell into him, far too tired to fight him off, and deeply inhaled the sweet smell of his skin. “It’s alright now…everything’s alright” he whispered, gently rocking her back and forth like an infant. “It never ends…” she repeated softly, her hot breath grazing Peter’s collarbone. Not knowing what else to say, he sat there in silence continuing to rock her and hug her tight in hopes that perhaps he could glue all of her broken pieces back together. As she slowly drifted back to sleep, however, a quiet murmur caught his attention and sent his heart soaring. In the softest tone imaginable, she breathed a quiet “I love you…” And finally, Peter received the confirmation he had been searching for. She officially loved him back just like he knew she did. I love this scene so much because it’s finally this breakthrough with the relationship between these two characters. In the entire first installment, they’re getting to know one another and learning about each other and experiencing these scary, foreign feelings and they’ve come so far since then at this point, and Peter wants nothing more than for her to reciprocate his feelings for her, and this is the scene where he finally gets it and he’s over the moon. As for Eilonwy, she really struggles with the whole concept of attachment and affection and so this is a really pivotal scene for her, as well, and one that affects both of them heavily long after it’s happened, both for better and for worse.

What is the worst writing advice in your opinion? I’m not sure this is even really advice but the worst, in my opinion, is the pressure to write literary fiction rather than genre fiction. Stick literary fiction up your ass and smoke it. I don’t give a shit. I’ve noticed more than anything that in my college writing classes thus far, there’s this desperation to drill literary fiction into our heads, to convince us that it is the only fiction of quality and that genre fiction is trash. I completely disagree. Genre fiction is so much more liberating. Shit actually happens in genre fiction. Yeah, some of it is cheesy and commercialized but to say genre fiction, especially genre fiction of today, is worthless is to completely disregard the amazing, accessible commentary it’s providing to people of all ages, socioeconomic statuses, races, genders, etc. Genre fiction is giving us characters we can relate to, characters that we see ourselves in whether they’re transgender or of color or struggle with the same mental illnesses we do. It can give us both an escape from reality and a comfort within it by showing us that we are not alone and that we can fight our demons just like the characters in these books do. So I say fuck your literary fiction. Genre fiction has given me far more than literary ever has.

What is the best writing advice? The best writing advice I can think of is to write what you feel. I’m a firm believer in the idea that our best writing comes from our emotions. We kind of have to keep them reigned in to a certain degree, I think, in order to keep control over the language and the emotion but if your words aren’t fueled with some sort of feeling, then to me it’s like staring at a plain piece of cardboard. There’s no meat in the message.

Character names. How do you come up with them? It depends. Sometimes I see a name or even a word somewhere and a character shows up in my head. Sometimes I just pin random names to people. Sometimes I go onto those baby name websites and look up something meaningful that fits the character both in sound and in definition. And sometimes things just come together, like with my original character in my Narnia fanfiction. Her name is Eilonwy like the character in The Chronicles of Prydain. I’ve never actually read the books, but I like the long-forgotten Disney movie inspired by them. The name was just really interesting and pretty to me, and I really wanted to use it. At first, that was all it was: just a superficial reason. I was fourteen when I first came up with the initial idea for the story, so of course I didn’t have any deeper reasoning behind “It sounds pretty!” Now that I’m older and more thoughtful about my writing and shit, though, I’ve come to find that the name holds much deeper meaning to the story than I ever could’ve imagined which feels great. I love when things just randomly work out like that.

Do you tell friends/family about your writing, or do you keep it a secret?They know I write and some know what I write about but I don’t make too big a fuss about it. If I’m deep in a writing binge, I’ll post my pride on facebook like “I’ve written such-and-such word count so far!” or whatever. For the most part, though, I keep pretty quiet. I’ll share when I have to, like in writing workshops, but in regards to my fanfiction, the only person I really ramble to about it is my best friend. She’s heard all the spoilers and given me feedback on paragraphs I was either proud or unsure of. I’m really grateful for her feedback, and that she lets me fangirl over my own work when I need to!

What are some of your favorite words to use in writing? I don’t know if I have any favorite words. I have overused words, but I don’t know if I have any favorites.

Opinions on smut? Good if done right. I’ve tried my hand at my fair share of smut and when I look back at the stuff I tried to write for my last finished fanfiction, a Jack Frost x Violet Parr American Horror Story AU, I cannot help but cringe. I had the hot and heavy shit down pat but situational appropriateness was not entirely grasped. But then again, I was sixteen and a virgin when I wrote that so of course I didn’t have any realistic handle on it. Looking back, I’m just proud of myself for even writing something of that length because as problematic and cringey as it is to me now, that was the story that really confirmed I had the stamina to write novels. Up until that point, I had never written a full-fleshed, novel-length work. Now I’ve written two more and am working on a fourth. But anyways, about smut, my approach has shifted since then. Nowadays, my guidelines are to do it only when it’s appropriate to and to do it tastefully. Less is more. I care more about the emotion in it now than I do the physical act.

Is there anything you have found that you cannot, under any circumstance, write about?I’m not sure. I can’t think of anything right now off the top of my head, because refusing to write about something and finding difficulty in writing about something are two completely different things. There’s lots of things that are difficult for me to write whether it’s because they’re not my strong points (like humor) or because I feel inexperienced, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try to do as much research as I can to write them. If I care about a situation or idea enough, I will go that distance. I don’t know if there’s anything I would shy away from writing, including triggering material. I’ve already done stuff regarding rape. I write a lot about anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, even some PTSD. I don’t think there’s anything I’d shy away from writing.

Creative nonfiction. Have you dabbled with it? Do you like writing about your own life?I honestly love writing about my own life. That makes me sound really narcissistic but I mean, I’m telling the truth. There’s this one quote from a movie called Stuck in Love that I absolutely adore, it says “A writer is the sum of their experiences.” So much of my writing is inspired by my own experiences, and while I certainly don’t think you have to have experience in something to successfully write about it, having that extra layer of knowledge on a subject really adds realism and meaning to something. I can fake it, sure. I did that a lot in stories I wrote for my community college creative writing class. I wrote one story called Princess about a girl auditioning to be a face character at Disney World. I’ve never done that, though I’ve done a lot of research because I desperately want to. People thought I had actually experienced it. I wrote another about a young woman in the hospital for an eating disorder who desperately wanted a baby. While I’ve never been hospitalized for an eating disorder, I do struggle with one and my greatest fear is losing the ability to have a baby because of it so even though it wasn’t something I directly experienced, I channeled my fears and feelings into it. At the end of the day, I think so long as you’re passionate about something, you can successfully write about it and make it believable. But back to the question, one of the experiences I look to for inspiration most often is my love life and what I’ve been through with that. I’ve never been abused or cheated on or any of that bullshit, but I’ve had a very interesting history with my boyfriend that hinges on not only romance and compatibility like in all relationships but also in self esteem, grief, family, and the past. I’ve written quite a handful of short stories based around it, and some of the not-so-lovely feelings that have come from it. (Disclaimer: This is not to say my boyfriend and I are unhappy or in an unhealthy relationship. We just haven’t always had it easy and early on, I had a really tough time coming to terms with some things that I’m not going to go into detail with right now).

Allusions and references to other works. Thoughts? Do you like to use them?As a fanfiction writer, I feel like I’m obligated to say yes since that writing mainly takes place in other people’s works. At it’s foundation, though, I love allusion. I’m a big fan of fairytales and I have some interest in Greek mythology, as well, so I like taking inspiration from those and alluding to them in my stories. It’s easy to do in my Narnia fanfiction, especially, because it already alludes mythology and also religion which can tie into fairytales. Eilonwy, my OC, is a very heavy reference to the story of Snow White, as well as to Adam and Eve and Joan of Arc. I think it’s fun to tie certain things into shit like that, and I love when everything connects and makes sense.

What do you think characterizes your writing?My style and approach. I command the language a certain way where I try to sound cohesive and intelligent but also pump those big words with emotion and meaning. I don’t really know how else to describe it; my best writing comes when I’m in that zone and the words are just flowing out of me. I like trying to express abstract concepts in ways that feel tangible, too. I think tangibility is a big aspect, too. As an adjective here it probably doesn’t make much sense, but there’s something about my writing that I feel gives it this kind of tangible quality, almost. I like being able to feel the emotions and words in the air around me like oxygen. I also think the fact that I don’t like to shy away from anything helps to characterize my writing, too. I like to pull out all the stops. I don’t like censoring myself for the sake of comfort or digestibility. Maybe that makes my work kind of hard to get through but still. I feel like you have to have a stronger stomach for my work because I will not resist uncomfortable topics or scenes. Rape, gore, anxiety, whatever. I don’t shy away from any of it.

Do you control your characters, or do they control you? For the most part, I have pretty decent control over my characters but sometimes they like to go their own way and screw up the plan. Sometimes it’s for the best, but I’m the kind of person who likes to strictly stay to the path I’ve mapped out so more often than not it’s a nuisance. That resistance can be a real struggle, too, because sometimes where my characters take me flows nicely but it would mean reworking everything so I have to go back and try and channel that flow into the right direction.

Are there any misconceptions people have about your writing? I don’t really know. I try to be as clear as possible about what is happening and what I mean when I say certain things. If anything, they’d probably mistake me for a psychopath.

Best compliment someone has given you about your writing.I think the best compliments are honestly the ones where people are just straight-up fangirling. I love reading people’s reactions to my works, especially when they love it and want more of it and are screaming at their computer screens because of choices the characters have made. I had one person even send me a message telling me that they love my story so much, it’s all they can think about and gives them motivation to live (in a non-suicidal manner) and implored me to keep writing. That’s the kind of feedback that really motivates me to keep doing what I do.

Five years from now, where do you see yourself as a writer? In five years, I hope to be a published author with at least a small repertoire of original work under my belt and out in the open. I know it might take longer than five years to get there but I’ve come so far already and I think if I have the passion and the will to do it, I can get there. The end goal is to just get my stories out there and accessible to the public in hopes that someone may find something in them that they relate to, that helps them feel less alone, or that they just enjoy reading. The day I find my name on a bookstore shelf is the day I will feel as if I’ve truly made it (which brings me to another point about my opinions on paper versus digital publishing but I think that’s a rant for another post-- I’ve already made this one long enough!)

#ugh honestly thank you so much for this hahaha #writing stuff #ask memes #answered asks #magnificent-north #ramblings

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katranga · 7 years

Text

Disclaimer: Fic is just for fun. Nobody on ao3, or tumblr, or wherever, is expecting perfection. Most of these tips are gonna take a little extra time and effort to implement, and if you don’t feel like doing that, because you just wanna post the darn thing? Go for it! I’m not here to tell you what to do, and I’m certainly not saying that your writing is bad if you don’t follow these tips. These are just suggestions that will hopefully help you improve your work, if that’s what you’re after.

Intro: Why Revise?

To kick things off, I’d like to go over the importance of revision!! This is more of a general writing tip, but it’s a great starting point, because I DON’T want you to be thinking about most of my future tips while you’re writing the first draft.

I want you to get. those. words. on. the. page! That’s all you should be worried about when you’ve got a blank page staring you in the face.

There’s so much pressure to get writing right the first time, but I’m here to tell you that’s pretty much impossible. So, pressure’s off! Just write the basics so you get to know your story first. I

I know it seems like writing it perfectly will save you editing/revising time later on, but you can’t revise—let alone post—what you don’t have written because you’re stuck on one line that doesn’t sound just right. You with me so far? Great!

Honestly, writing gets so much faster when you remind yourself that no one is going to see your first draft!

So I cannot overstate the importance of revision.

Because guess what? Everything you don’t like about your first draft can be fixed in revision!

Okay. What is it?

To clarify, when I say first draft, I don’t mean the stuff you do in high school, where you write out a shitty essay on paper first and then type it up basically the same, just to prove to the teacher you wrote a first draft?? Or whatever.

I mean you just write the absolute basics of your story down, and fill in the rest and perfect it later (I’ll go into detail about how exactly to do that in my motivation post).

Now, grammar, spelling, and overall readability, are all important things to fix before you post. But that’s little stuff, and your word processor will be able to pick up on some of that, and just rewording a few sentences to make them clearer probably won’t take too much effort on your end (though I am gonna have a post about filler words and clarity and stuff like that, so if that tends to be a problem for you, I gotchu).

Besides basic grammar/spelling, most of what I change as my first draft transforms into my second or third is:

Improving the flow of a scene (it can’t all be dialogue, unfortunately)

Pacing throughout the fic (are they falling love too fast? is this scene too long? etc)

Overall clarity (I know why the character did that, but will the reader?)

It may be different for you. Basically, you’re polishing up whatever you didn’t worry about writing the first draft.

My first drafts, for example? They’re 80% dialogue. Because that’s my favourite! And that’s what comes to me when I’m dreaming up fics. But then I go back later and beef up the rest—the characters’ movements in a scene, their inner dialogue, description etc.

Because as much as I love dialogue, scenes feel empty and too-fast with just characters talking. Similarly, scenes can feel bogged down and slow with just characters thinking about things.

But revision isn’t just about adding things! Sometimes you need to take stuff out. Inner dialogue that later gets covered by dialogue? Cut it. (Or vice versa—maybe the detail isn’t important enough for the characters to talk about, and just the mention of it within the narration is enough).

The point is, repetition needs to go. The reader rarely needs to be told the same thing twice.

Quick example from the top of my head:

Lance had lost his jacket. He’d looked over the whole castle for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. His brother gave him that jacket. One of his last ties to Earth, and it was missing in action.

Maybe Keith took it to spite him, that jerk.

“What’s up, Lance?” Hunk asked when he passed him in the hall.

“I lost my jacket!” Lance said. “My signature jacket, the one Marco gave me! I’ve looked everywhere, but it’s gone. Do you think Keith stole it?”

Same information twice: Lance can’t find his brother’s jacket despite a thorough search, and suspects Keith stole it. No reason to repeat that. Something’s gotta go.

I know cutting stuff isn’t fun. You worked hard on that! You spent hours/days/whatever perfecting a sentence until it gleamed like a diamond, and now just because you thought of a better way to get that information across you have to get rid of it? No way!

I’ve been there, trust me. But hanging on just slows down the whole writing process. Because, for me at least, I know when stuff needs to go, or needs a massive overhaul, or whatever. I’m just digging my heels in because I don’t wanna do any additional work.

Luckily, this is where your shitty first draft comes in handy! If all you did was spit words onto the page as soon as they entered your head, then you didn’t spend a lot of back-breaking effort on whatever you need to cut! And what you need to cut isn’t anything awe-inspiring, it’s just your rough notes, so tossing it aside isn’t nearly as stressful!

Remember, you can always save scenes/dialogue/etc in a separate document! Maybe you’ll be able to salvage some it later. Alternatively, create separate versions of the doc as you edit/revise. If you end up actually needing part of a deleted scene, you’ve still got it somewhere!

And please, never think of the stuff you cut (or fics you never finished) as “wasted time”. Writing time is never wasted! You’re practicing, you’re honing your craft, and even if some bits never see the light of day, you’re still benefitting from all that work you did!

Now, I know I know I know most people edit/revise as they write. Can’t think of the next scene? Reread the previous scene and fiddle with it until something comes to you. That’s great! Revising already written material is loads better than just staring at your screen!

BUT I’ve recently started writing the whole gosh darn diddly thing without looking back and that is so much faster! While I highly recommend it, that’s obviously difficult to do when you don’t know what’s going to happen next in the fic.

Or if you just don’t have the motivation. So! That’ll be our next topic: Getting words on the page!

But for now, I’ve got an example under the cut, as well as additional resources and links if you want to learn more about revision!

Here’s where I take an old embarrassing fic of mine and revise it, hopefully clarifying the points I’ve been making, as well as proving that only practice makes better!

Okay so this is an excerpt of one of my unpublished fics from 2011. I’m just gonna be honest with you here, it was a Twilight human!AU where Edward was a massive nerd.

For background, Bella has been at the new school like a week and is appalled at the bullying happening to Edward, who she barely knows. (It’s first person bc that’s how the books were written. Just deal with it.)

Here we go:

“They gave him a swirly yesterday,” I announced, appalled.

“Who?”

“Edward!”

Jessica shrugged, unaffected. “Nothing new.”

“Well what are they, twelve?” I demanded angrily.

“He kind of needed a hair wash,” Mike muttered.

Snorts of amusement followed.

“Stuffing his head into a toilet is not funny,” I argued.

“Yes it is, Bella,” Alice chuckled.

“Kay, next time we go to the bathroom, I’ll shove your head into a toilet,” I offered. “And we’ll all laugh about it.”

This was a whole scene, I kid you not. Now, this isn’t bad because it’s just dialogue. It’s ten lines. That’s a reasonable amount of space for a quick dialogue exchange. HOWEVER, there’s about four people in this scene, so the dialogue tags are a little sparse. ALSO, this is the first time Bella’s bringing her concerns about Edward to the group, so there should be more inner reflection on that.

Overall, it’s just way too minimalist lol. So this is a good example to beef up.

First of all: where the fuck are we? Notice how no setting was given? Not the greatest habit to get into. If it’s already been established in the fic where people are, and the setting’s not that important, I guess you can skip it, but a quick mention isn’t gonna hurt. You don’t want the reader confused!

Since this a Twilight fic, let’s say they’re in the caf. (In Voltron fics, you’re probably gonna be on the ship, but you can always mention what room they’re in. Or, if it’s a new planet, give a line or two of description).

Explanations for changes I made are in [square brackets]:

I tossed my lunch tray onto the table before throwing myself onto the chair next to Alice. “They gave him a swirly yesterday.”

[Indicated setting. Also implied she was feeling “appalled” using verbs instead of outright stating it. Showing not telling!]

Across from me, Angela looked up from the sandwich she was picking at. “Who?”

[Indicated who was speaking—always important—as well as gave brief description of speaker].

“Edward,” I said like it should be obvious. I scanned the cafeteria for him, but the corner he usually sat in alone was empty.

[Another mention of setting. Also backed up her concern for Edward with action and not just talking about him].

Jessica shrugged, unaffected. “So what?”

“So?” I repeated incredulously.

So I’d never heard of someone actually getting a swirly. In real life. Shitty teen dramas? Yeah. Actual high school? No. It was ridiculous, and gross, and… I hadn’t seen anything to indicate Edward deserved it. (Nobody who’d ever deserved a swirly had ever received one, I was sure).

[The almighty character motivation! Note that you don’t actually have to explicitly state why they’re doing something—obviously we as the reader know the deep-down motivation is because Bella cares for Edward. But characters are not always forthcoming with information, even to themselves. Right now she’s focusing on the unjustness of the situation, and partially trying to convince herself that’s all it is].

Mike slung an arm across the back of Jessica’s chair, snorting a laugh. “He needed to wash his hair, anyway.”

“A toilet’s not gonna do that, Mike!”

[Just a cleverer response. Also, a dialogue tag isn’t needed, because no other speaker at the table is gonna be defending Edward. We know it’s Bella.]

He ignored my glare, choosing instead to steal a fry off my plate. I smacked his hand away.

[Again—action. The characters aren’t just static in their seats.]

“Well, really,” Alice began. “What’s it matter?” She sat up sharply, an idea just now occurring to her. “You haven’t been making friends with him, have you? I told you, Bella, it’s social suicide!”

[Gives Alice a chance to respond to Bella’s outburst—in this AU Alice is very concerned with popularity and does not want Bella associating with Edward. She would definitely have a problem with Bella sympathizing with Edward.]

I rolled my eyes. “No, I just…”

The whole situation was ridiculous. This wasn’t how people should be treated. Was I the only one who realized that? Was I really the only one who cared?

“Whatever,” I grumbled, crunching down on a fry.

[This feels like a more natural resolution to the conversation. Alice directly asks why Bella cares, and Bella reiterates to herself it’s just because. And then decides it’s not worth the argument. This is 2k into an (unfinished) 30k fic. She’ll make a bigger deal out of stuff later.]

Now it looks more like a real scene!

So, to summarize, I added: Description—both setting and character! Character musing! Cleverer comebacks!

These are just some of the things that you can fix with a keen-eyed round of revision.

And that about wraps this up! I didn’t want this to get too long, but it did anyway. (I’m sorry about the graphics I’m a writer, not a graphic designer. But I had to split the post up so it wasn’t one big block of text)

Was any of that helpful? Was it too long? Did the example clarify things? Let me know, I wanna make sure these tips are helpful!

Additional Resources That I Highly Recommend:

DRAFTING: THE THEORY OF SHITTY FIRST DRAFTS -- This post probably explains shitty first drafts better than I ever could! If you still have concerns about it, definitely check it out.

Editing & Revision Answerathon -- Okay, this video is pretty long, but I looove Max Kirin for anything writing-related and especially revision!! They’ve got a tumblr and a Youtube account filled with writing tips! If you like getting your writing info through videos, definitely check out their stuff.

Top 5 Writing Tips: Revision -- Here’s an infographic by Max if you don’t want to watch a 44 minute video lol. Also, you can go through their /tagged/revision for more!

#writing advice #fic writing advice #revision #katranga writes #i mean a lot of these tips are gonna be just general writing tips #but i will focus on issues that commonly crop up in fics #revision was just really important to go over first #idk i hope this is helpful #katranga's fic tips #i guess will be the tag

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zzpopzz · 7 years

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Really long rant about how I made Vanilla Twilight, I typed it at 2am so it’s kinda crappy and boring, just skip through this post.

So I'd been thinking about it for a long time now, even before finishing Vanilla Twilight that I'd talk about it if someone asked, well that never happened so I was just thinking that I'd let it go but that post is so important to me so well fuck it I'll just talk about it anyway. I did it completely on a wimp like how cool would it be if I make a lyricstuck for Toumaki like I'd be the first (if anyone did this before me im sorry). The first song I intended to do wasn't VT, it was a much shorter and easier song. I saw the music video first time after a while and the lyrics gave me some scenes to draw right away, like the tones, the atmosphere, the lyrics all fit them very well, made me wanted to draw something happy but sad. The ending for it was a happy one instead of a sad one like other songs I did (I didn't post the ending for any of them, just let the viewers decide what it's gonna be) I was very scared like what if it won't turn out ok and people gonna hate me for it or no one even gonna look at it. Also what I visualized are mostly illustrations with backgrounds, what I never done before so high chance it won't go anywhere. I thought well let's just see how far will I get and won't talk about it at all until I post it so at least I won't be all barks no bite. I was very traumatized that someone might know about what I did so I locked all the files when I shut down my PC in case someone hack into it lmao. I started with making a storyboard(kinda) for it, this is where I first got trouble because there was some part I didn't think of when I visualized what I'd draw at first ( 'I don't feel so alone' part mostly and some in between) and it's only at this point that I realized how many I'd have to draw (over 40 images total) and it's mind blowing for someone who rarely finish a painting like me at that time, that number is more than what I'd draw in a year. VT doesn't have choruses that meant I can't do tricks like repeat some panels (I don't like this anyway). I usually painted on small canvas before that but I wanna make sure I can fix things later and some idea I had was pretty big so I used 3000x5000px canvas then trimmed them down ( I didn't know how big it was and it's huge). The idea was to make a tumblr scroll-post like a lyricstuck (my favorites are by paperseverywhere and toastyhat/emptyfeet , they made really cool tutorials about these) so I tried to drew out compositions that would look good scrolling down panel by panel and have some connections between them (this didn't turn out so good in the end because I wasn't good lol) Since I was scared that people might point out that I draw something wrong, it took me almost a week or something searching for references (check my pinterest board) like the streets, sky, houses, roads, outfits, poses,... I was going to draw. I got some knowledge about bikes by this too, like I can tell the differences between road bike, mtb, touring bikes,... I also see and captured bunches of screenshots and reread ywpd trivia countless time to make sure I won't get anything wrong. If you take notice, every outfit Toumaki wear in there are all canon, from anime or promos. The first few panels was really exciting because I had never painted so many with backgrounds before, I was really happy when I almost finished the first verse even compared to the full 3:50 of the song it was only 20 seconds and I thought maybe I can pull this after all. The last panel was intended to be Makichan standing infront of his house looking at the sky but I wanted to show the sky at the end of the panel and that wouldn't work on scroll-down post so I had to leave it for later, I repainted this panel for about 3 times and finished it just 30' before posting. The first panel of the second verse wasn't turning out alright too because that was my first time doing a 3 points perspective drawing and the colors didn't turn out as I wanted either (my intention was a green/gold dawn scene). Things kinda worked well despite that until the scene when Toudou sits in his ink, gdi I didn't know why I was so caught up in that and painted every piece of that wooden floor, it took me almost a week but turned out better than I expected so I was ok with it. I was going to make sketchy paintings for all of the panel but I did too much details on that one so it gave me the impression that I'll have to do just as much for every others. Now I still had school to go and that semester my uni got me pretty crappy schedule that made me have to wait for classes at school frequently, I was frustrated because I didn't get to paint during that time and I might finish it too late (even though I didn't set a deadline) and when I got home I just spent so much time checking twitter and just can't pick myself up to draw and ended up feeling shitty about it. *Side story* I was so mad because I didn't get anything done and there's still more than half of the whole thing to do and the worst part is that I had no one that I can talk to because I didn't have any friend who ship Toumaki and I also don't want to publicly talk about what I was doing, I wanted to surprise people when I'm done, I didn't wanna give people the expectation then screw it up (I literally thought I'd drop a bomb not a grenade lmao) I can't remember how long was that shitty phase but I felt like it was so long, I barely finished verse 2 at that point. I was so mad at myself and my progress so I spent a few days to look at time management threads and this helped a lot, I changed my habits completely by this and I still apply those methods now, like I used to stay up til 3am to read fics (bless you writers you fueled me with your writings bless you all) then I switch to bed before 12 and get up early for a good start or reduce working time while increasing quality* After that I kinda got things together,I just went ahead with painting tho it's still kinda tiring, I had to work on 5 essays during this time too. At this point I was like screw all, I give no shit about what everyone thinks I'm just gonna finish this and get some good nap (I practiced power nap to get more focus time for painting but dude everyone wants a good long nap) 10 days before uploading I found out that there's a Toumaki day (I'm so sorry), I was going to posted on the first sunday of June (I did researched on which was the best time to post on social medias so I randomly picked a sunday) and Toumaki day is the last sunday of May, that meant I had 10 days left and 15 panels to paint! I was going to ignore that but I already made it big I should make it right too so I shit my pants going through those last panels. I purposely hiding Toudou's face till the last verse to emphasize the feelz and got so relieved that I finally got to paint him (I read some tags that some viewers got emotional at this part so I'm so glad it worked). The whole things was put under Makichan's perspective so I was so sick of painting him at that point, he showed up in every panel and I can't paint him ugly because he's beautiful (especially his hair, I spent shitload of time painting them). I can talk lots about why I picked to do so but that's headcanon shit and it's embarrassing so let's just skip that. The last day I had only 3 panels left and I was hell confident that I've got this and somehow spent the whole evening rewatch Toumaki pingpong ep (end me). Of course that didn't end well, I managed to finish those by midnight but I still had like 3 panels that needed repaint completely and all 43 needed retouch and edits. My plan was to post at 9am sunday (thats 9pm saturday est) so I had to get up at 5am and finish all that, I ended up cutting down 2 panels and simplified the instrumental panel (some tags said that was nice so I was at least relieved). Unlike other songs I did, the length of every line's quite different and the original sizes I did would make viewers have to scroll slower or faster at different parts. I didn't plan this beforehand and had to trim down some panels even the parts that I really liked and spent lots of time on. I also found out that people outside the homestuck fandom might not familiar with this type of post so I made a video too (I’m sorry I have zero skill in editing). After posting I was terrified of people's reactions or worse, there won't be any reaction so I turned everything off and went to sleep and woke up with an unimaginable number of notes I'd got, I set the target of 500 notes and I really didn't think that I'd get past that number like maybe 2-300 (well my other songs didnt even get 200), at the end I got 5000. I spent the next week reading and screencap tags given in reblogs, I put them on desktop and they're still my motivation til now. Vanilla Twilight is the thing I'm proud of the most even until now, when I've done other songs and projects that look somewhat better. If I have to recommend one thing on my blog I'd recommend it despite its' unskilled paneling, poor composition and muddy colors. It was the first time in my life that I'd put so much effort into something and went through such emotional roller coaster, the feelings I put into it was raw and the idea was very original compared to other songs, I improved and changed a lot during the 2 months I spent on it and never once regret doing it. ***Anyway, you sure have much free time to read it this far, here's a little game for you: I put random things in VT and HF like some characters/stuff from other series, my ocs,... (there wasn't anything purposeless in there even the logo on their cups or the bags they wear) just send me anything you find and I'll draw you something in return**

#toumaki #tweetdump #rant #poopask

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franklyfunghoul · 7 years

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my thoughts while watching riverdale sEASON FINALE: (spoilers, probably) drugs and maple syrup same thing PESKY KIDS MADE ME THINK YOU SCOOBY DOO the way keller said "pushin the dope" is so white bless the lord for giving archie shirts that fit well ARCHIE SHUT UP YOU ARE ALL STILL IN DEEP SHIT AHAHHAHA HIS DAD JUST SAID THAT IM A PROPHET now i want pancakes thanks coopers WHY ARE YOU OK WITH YOUR FATHER HE IS A SHITTY HUMAN betty looks so guilty when she gets called to the principal and she didn't even do anything wow YEAH ARCHIES RIGHT WHAT ABOUT JUGHEAD THE BOY DESERVES IT oh wait jughead doesn't perfectly work with the way you want everyone to fit into society, sorry i forgot YES PLS CAMERA LET ME SEE THESE PEOPLE FROM ALL THESE ANGLES JUGHEAD HAS EYEBAGS TO RIVAL MY OWN why did ronnie stand up to say that i feel bad for cheryl even tho she was kinda the spawn of satan I GET THE BLOSSOMS MOM IS GRIEVING BUT WHY YOU GOTTA BE A BITCH archie just pick ONE girl and stay with her please if archie starts liking betty i will sue somebody (i don't think ive done one of these where i don't threaten to sue someone) YES JOSIE YOUR HAIR IS SO PRETTY YOU LOOK LIKE A MERMAID betty and her mom are matching wow cute AT LEAST WE KNOW JOAQUIN IS SAFE don't tell me cheryl is going to do something rash im always captivated by veronicas eyebrows POLLYYYYYSYSHEH ISNT IN THE BLOSSOM HOUSE YEYEYE really fred you are breaking jughead even more (i know you're trying to help but cmon) YES JUGGY EAT THAT BURGER im worried about cheryl WHY DO THEY ONLY USE KEVIN AS AN EXTRA TO GIVE NEWS THE MAIN GROUP HES THE SHERIFFS SON HE HAS SO MUCH POTENTIAL JUST LIKE MY BOI DESANTOS DID BUT NOOOOooOoOoooOo hermione stop i swear is polly going to have her baby during the off season YES BETTY WIN THAT ARGUMENT WITH YOUR MOTHER MAKE HER CRY YOU GO GIRL i have 68 absences yet cheryl can't stay home is the next season going to be a hunt for her brother THAT DUDE IN THR BACKGROUNDS HAIR WOW IM IMPRESSED "go to the dark side" is cheryl going to kill herself IM LAUGHING THEY ARE TOO PREPPY TO GO OVER THERE JUGGY HAS FRIENDS LEAVE HIM BE YOU ARENT HELPING YOU ARE LIKE EMBARRASSING FAMILY MEMBERS ARCHIE I S2G IS CHERYL GOING TO KILL HERSLEF CHERYL DONT ALL GO YOU IDIOTS RONNIE USE YOUR HEALS AND CRACK THE ICE archie why are you punching it ohmydjd didn't kj actually murder his hand doing this and have to go to the hospital hermione use your manners i laughed at the snort in the middle of bettys crying oops WHY DIDNT YOU JUST JUMP ON THE ICE "I WANT TO BE THAT FOR YOU" YES BOY YOU FINALLY PICKED A GIRL NOW YOU JUST GOTTA STAY WITH HER THE PUSSYCSTS ARE SOMCUTE I LOVE THEIR AESTHETIC MA BOI ARCHIE ANDREWS how does fp look good after being in a cell so long I SWEAR IF JUGHEAD CRIES ONE MORE TIME IM GOING TO LOSE MY SHIT (MORE THAN ALREADY HAVE) JUGHEAD YOURE HERE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH if i was giving that speech i would stutter so much go betty betty people are going to be more angry and you because people don't like hearing the truth unless it makes them sound good YES KEVIN archie's impaired clapping im dead hermione being personally offended things didn't go her way THE NAMES ON THE CAST ITS SO PERFECT I LOVE CHERYL SAID MOTHER INSTEAD OF MOMMY CHERYL WYD HE SIAIDNGHEE HAAID HE SIANDIT OHMH GOD HE TOOK OF HIS HAT HE SAID I LVOE YOU TWICE BETTY SAID I LOCE YOU BACK IHMU GOD THEYA RE KISSING THEY ARE KSSIITJNHE PPICKED HER UP THIS IS SPICY RONNIE AND ARCHIE HOT DAMN KICK OF THOSE SHOES DAMN how did his shirt not get stuck on his cast HOT HOT HOT WOW JUST KIDDING JUGHEAD AND BETTY ARW WINNING THE HOT HOT HOT who the fuck DOGODOGODOGODOGFOGDOG I LOVE HSINHAIR COLES HAIR MAN WHY IS THE JACKET SO ATTRACTIVE HELL YEAH BETTY LEAVE HIM HE LOOKS DAMN Archie sounds so pure but also like an old woman "I was trying not to wake you" WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING NO GOD DID ARCHIE ANDREWS JUST GRT SHOT NOPE IT WAS HIS DAD OH GOD FRED NO WHO WAS THAY OHKY GOD DIDNIT JSUT END THERE WHAY THE HELL THAYS NOT OKAU WHAY THE MCFUCKING FUCK UMMMMMMM well okay fuck me what the so many things need to happen next season, for example: -jughead not crying or almost crying every episode because i can't take it - the babies - brother??? - more of jughead in the jacket -explanation of what just happened to fred - joavin - joauin coming back - kevin and joaquin having character development -more things but i haven't written my essay thats due in the morning and it's 2 am EDIT: I SAVED THIS IN DRAFTS INSTEAD OF UPLOADING THIS I AM AN IDIOT IM SORRY

#I CANT PROCESS THIS #riverdale #jughead jones #cheryl blossom #archie andrews #betty cooper #veronica lodge #riverdale reaction

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thephantomofthe-internet · 4 years

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Read Into Me Chapter 3: The Scarlet Letter

Steve Harrington x Reader

CATCH UP ON THE SERIES HERE

Word Count: 4,420

Warnings: Bad grades, swearing, anxiety, bullying

Tag List: @divinity-deos @thecaptainsgingersnap @wolfish-willow @scoopsohboi @herre-gud-nej @clockworkballerina @maddie1504 @i-am-trash-so-much-its-scary @bajino-in-the-hole @buckysarge @wildcvltre @stanleyyelnatsiii @t0rmenta0 @10blurredsmoke10 @unusuallchildd @n3wtscaseofniffler5 @alwaysstressedout @peterparxour @linkispink1995 @asharpknife @a-big-ball-of-idk @used-avocado @mochminnie @sledgy14 @the-creative-lie

Steve arrived first to Mr. Lawrence’s homeroom, his paper shoved to the back of his notebook. He was happy to have the distraction of Vicki and Tina jabbering at him. He didn’t want to think about his paper. English wasn’t his best subject, but he could hide it from his peers when it was just the teacher and him going back and forth on essays, him writing and them marking. Now, somebody was going to know that he wasn’t good at this. Nancy knew, of course, and while she didn’t say it she always seemed a bit judgemental over his lack of essay writing skill. She was good at everything; it made him feel like he was in good hands when they were together, like they both had something to offer. Apart, it made him feel stupid and secondary, like he was awful at everything. Truth be told, he didn’t exactly know what he had even offered to that relationship, looking back he couldn’t understand why he thought he was worth anything in a relationship at all.

When he sat down, the desk next to him was empty. Steve wasn’t usually early to class, so he was a bit relieved to not see you there. Maybe he could avoid the eminent roasting of his work.

You got to school late. You were absolutely drenched from head to toe. You had walked to school that day, and a sudden rainstorm hit you halfway through, soaking you before you could make it to the building. To make it worse, you’d decided to wear white for the first time in forever. You rushed to your locker in the hopes to change and luckily you’d left a stained sweatshirt there from the previous semester. You’d pushed your wet hair up and away from your face and rubbed away the bits of black eyeliner that had flaked down you cheeks. You looked like shit and you knew it. It was turning into a less than successful morning. You hadn’t even had a chance to look in your locker mirror once you’d changed. You were already late enough for class and didn’t need the write up. You rushed to your English class.

Everyone turned their attention to the doorway when you opened it. You hurried to your desk, keeping your head down and ignoring as Vicki and Tina laughed. You heard Tina say “She looks like a drowned rat.” But you chose to pretend that you didn’t. You were freezing; Hawkins High turned off the heating system mid-March and left the school to stew in whatever weather the state was dealing with to save the county a few bucks a month.

Steve slid his paper onto your desk, keeping his eye on the front of the room as Mr. Lawrence took up attendance. He’d written on the board in chalk ‘how to peer edit’ in thick block letters. You weren’t exactly enthused by the topic, but you were glad to have the dull class to doodle instead of actually listening. You flipped the paper in front of you, looking over Steve’s chicken scratch without really taking in any of the information. You slid it into your trapper keeper, passing Steve your own typed copy of the assignment. You’d made sure to keep the original at home, edited just in case Steve didn’t give you any edits. You left in some mistakes so he could get a grade, but you didn’t want to have to rely solely on him.

You flipped open your sketchpad slowly, keeping your eye on Tracy Lords curly mess of hair piled high on the top of her head like Medusa’s snakes trapped in a golden laurel, or in this case a braided headband. You pulled your graphite pencil from the pink pencil bag you’d sewn in freshman year home-ec. You started with the shape, trying to capture the exact strangeness pile, making little tight curls in the centre of the oval and spiralling in all directions. You felt a pair of eyes on your neck and you turned to see Steve staring over your shoulder. You pulled yourself and the pad inward, trying not to blush. You didn’t like people looking at your art; you hardly showed your work to anyone, even Samantha. All of your drawings sat in their pads, which piled up as the years went by, untouched and forgotten. If Samantha wasn’t allowed to see the pictures of her, Steve Harrington was certainly not allowed a peak.

“Alright, today if you and your partner are ready to begin, we’ll start editing our papers. If you aren’t ready, that’s fine but today is the only day that we’re doing in class editing so I would spend today trying to finish up so you can at least pass your papers on.” Mr. Lawrence explained. You sighed, closing your pad and pulling Steve’s essay from your trapper keeper.

“Now, we want to look for not only spelling and grammar problems, but also sentences that don’t make sense and confusing details within the essay. It’s not about how many big words you can use, it’s if you can accurately and dynamically give your reader information.” Mr. Lawrence explained. He took to the board, writing key points for his marking, specifically to edit in pen and give a letter grade for the paper.

Tina’s hand shot up “You want us to grade the paper? Isn’t that your job?” she asked, smacking her gum violently. Vicki snickered into her palm, reddish brown hair away from her face.

Mr. Lawrence shook his head “No no, I’m not taking your grade on the papers into consideration for my grade, instead I want us to give each other grades to mark the progress of an essay, to give your partner an idea of what the paper might be worth. It’ll be up to them as to whether or not they are comfortable with the grade or if they want to improve.”

You didn’t like that. Who the hell wanted their classmate grading their paper? This was a recipe for disaster. You uncapped your red pen with your teeth, chewing on the lid nervously. You looked over the page. You had made up your mind that you’d be nice. You’d want Steve to be nice to you. It was the least you could do.

But it only took a few lines to understand that this was not a good paper. Spelling and grammar mistakes galore, run on, confusing sentences, no clear subject. It wasn’t even a good story, hell it wasn’t even an essay it came off more like a point form list. As you added more and more red ink to the black, white, and blue it started as. The paper started to become a Jackson Pollack more than a lame essay for an English class, it almost felt beautiful instead of shitty to destroy his essay. It was as though you were turning into art.

Out of curiosity, you looked over at your paper to see how it was fairing. Steve was, as expected, chatting up Vicki from across the aisle, and he’d made two corrections on your page, both small mistakes you’d left in. You rolled your eyes, a pit of annoyance making itself known in the centre of your stomach, as bitter as the cyanide in a peach pit. You made your last two corrects before scrawling a large ‘D’ at the top of the page and initialling next to it.

You flipped the paper over and pulled back out your sketchpad and brought it close to your chest, pulling your knee up to your chest and adding more curls to the back of Tracy Lords’ head, then focusing in on the braided headband until the bell rang. You flipped your pad closed and slid Steve’s essay back to him, quickly putting your stuff away.

“You mind if I take this home and give it to you tomorrow?” Steve asked, waving your essay in front of your face, nearly giving you a paper cut on the bridge of your nose.

You pushed the paper away, squinting up at him. “Yeah, whatever…” you replied, turning away from. You didn’t feel bad for giving him a bad grade now. He was still a dick head. “Don’t forget your paper.” You added, quickly making your way into the halls. You didn’t usually have the confidence to be snarky with anyone you didn’t trust, but something told you that you could handle Steve Harrington. Maybe it was just how awful his essay was, you felt like you could talk your way out of a fight.

Samantha grabbed your arm as you left the room, the pair of you thankful to have the same lunch period every other day. You hurried into the cafeteria. You knew well enough that she was on the prowl, eyes scanning the room for a certain figure.

“I think the band’s practising today, dude.” You said, taking an extra tray for Samantha and getting her serving of lumpy mashed potatoes and chicken surprise slopped on the plate. Samantha was looking for Robin Buckley, a junior on her soccer team who had drawn her attention as of late, and had been trying to get closer to her as of late, inviting her to join them for lunch every time she saw her and leaving you to third wheel.

“Yeah, probably.” She replied, taking the tray you held out for her and paid for her meal. “So, how’d talking sweet, sexy assignments with King Harrington?” Samantha crooned, batting her eyelashes up at you.

You rolled your eyes “Well, for one, we don’t talk period, and for another it’s fucking awful.” Taking your places at the table closest to the emergency exit, you settled into your routine of trying to choke down the awful cafeteria food. You grabbed your trays and had them filled with whatever horrific concoction the lunch ladies had come up with that day. You carried your grey and brown mushy mess to your table, a small four seater near the edge of the room, out of view from the popular assholes who liked the throw food.

“Oh? Is that what makes it awful? Not getting to enjoy the charming conversations he has to offer?” Samantha was trying hard not to laugh. Watching you squirm was hilarious.

“More like because I have to read his writing…” you replied. You jabbed your fork into what was supposed to be pot roast, but seemed to be ninety percent instant gravy and ten percent meat from an undetermined animal.

“Since when are you such a snob?” Samantha’s mouth was full of mashed potatoes, but the words rang clear.

“Since I spent my morning reading absolute dog shit about a vacation to Miami beach. It was pathetic! I mean, and I’m no critic, but if you’re going to write me an essay on your vacation, can you at least make it interesting?” you ranted. The more you talked about how awful it was the angrier you got about it. You spent so long on art and creating, you spent your time working hard and for someone to slide through life made your blood boil.

Steve didn’t usually spend his free time searching through the cafeteria for people, people usually found him. Tommy and Carol had already motioned him over, their new friend Billy already gone somewhere else, and Vicki and Tina had called for him to join them, but Steve had to handle something first. He didn’t really know what he was looking for, he wasn’t certain he’d find it in there, but there wasn’t any shame in searching. He would ask someone for directions, but it seemed that nobody knew or cared where you were at any time.

You gave him a ‘D’. A god damned ‘D’! He was flummoxed, he thought his essay was shit, he wouldn’t pretend that he didn’t, but he had expected you to be a bit kinder. That was like the unexpected rule of everyone in the class, to grade on the curve. But you went in hard. All he wanted was some answers.

He saw first a flash of pencil stained hands in the air, then the shine of your hair under the florescent lights. You were talking with your hands, making Samantha Cameron laugh hard. He’d never seen you that animated, it made him smile for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

He chuckled, coming up behind you in the hopes that your ease would stick around if he didn’t announce his presence. “You really gave me a D on my paper? What did I do to deserve that?” he asked.

Apparently, you really couldn’t smile when he was around. Both you and Samantha’s smiles dropped, your punky friend dropping her gaze as you were forced to turn around. “Oh…um…well I mean it…maybe I need to look it over again, I was probably being too harsh…” you stuttered, unable to keep yourself from burning up. You prayed that he hadn’t heard what you were saying. That would’ve been awful.

“Hey, it’s cool, the paper’s no good, it’s no big deal.” That was a lie of sorts, when Steve saw the big red ‘D’, his heart dropped. And he really didn’t believe that you were as innocent as you seemed. You seemed guilty over something.

“Well…I’m sorry anyway. I didn’t mean to bother you…” you apologized. You hoped he’d go away; you’d never been more uncomfortable around a person than Steve Harrington. You didn’t know why, but something about him made gave you more butterflies than other people did, he scared you for reasons you couldn’t quite understand.

“You didn’t bother me, don’t worry.” Steve chuckled awkwardly. You wouldn’t look him in the eye, it was throwing him off. “So, listen, I don’t want to fail this class,” he huffed out a sigh, rubbing the back of his neck “Could you maybe help me rewrite this thing?”

You looked to Samantha, unsure if you could even speak words anymore, but she was smirking into her pot roast. Absolutely no help at all. You tried to smile “Um…sure, I can’t promise I’ll be much help though…” your voice was hoarse and unsure of itself. You hated that you’d said yes, but you couldn’t bring yourself to refuse. What if he got mad? Or yelled at you? You couldn’t handle being ridiculed or yelled at, you’d die.

Steve chuckled “Any help I can get is good enough. I can meet you in the library after school, okay?” he said, turning his gaze to Tommy’s hollering from across the cafeteria. He waved him over with both hands, like a sailor on a sinking ship, trying to beckon Steve back to where he belonged. Steve nodded, holding up his index finger, he only needed one minute.

“Sure, yeah that’ll work.” You said, fiddling with a thread hanging from the edge of your grey sweatshirt. You’d painted a little pink flower on the inside of the sleeve. When Steve saw it, he couldn’t help but smile at it; it looked so sweet and earnest.

“Alright, I’ll see you then.” He left after that, heading over to Tommy, who was frustrated beyond belief. He took his seat easily, stealing the pudding cup off of Carol’s tray wordlessly.

“What did that freak want?” Tommy asked loudly, his eyes blown wide. Carol was painting her nails, not even bothering to look up from her work. Tommy made no attempts to hide his dislike of you. He’d expected his best friend since the second grade to feel the same.

“She’s nice, we’re doing an assignment together.” Steve replied with a shrug, pulling the plastic covering off the cup, sticking the plastic spoon into the vanilla pudding.

Across the room, Samantha grabbed onto your hands with a giddy grin. “Look at my little girl! She’s got plans, with a boy!” she squealed, swinging your arms back and forth over the table.

“Jesus, can you please stop acting so straight? You’re gonna scare Robin off.” You yanked your hands away, watching with a grin as she turned her attention back to looking around the room excitedly. You let your eyes find Steve in the cafeteria, the buzz of fear filling your ears. You couldn’t believe that you agreed to meet him anywhere. You wanted to disappear.

You couldn’t focus on anything for the rest of the day. Your mind had gone into a feral sort of panic mode, pumping fear through your veins and turning your palms cold. When the final bell rang, it took all your strength and courage to not run all the way home. You knew that if you didn’t show, the problem wouldn’t go away. You’d just have to deal with the results of ditching the next day, and if not done now, then you’d have to deal with it another day. You clutched your books tight to your chest, sitting on the bench outside the library, trying to keep the butterflies from bursting out of your mouth. Your hands kept coming to your hair, trying to fix it or keep it away from your ears, maybe just to comfort yourself. It had dried weird and you worried that it looked ridiculous.

You saw his shoes come up to yours before you saw his face, royal blue Adidas with white and red details and dirty laces. You noted your own dirty white Converse, marked with mud and lyrics to songs that Samantha wrote on the toes. “Hey, you ready to do this?” Steve asked. You looked up and nodded, swallowing hard.

You wouldn’t make eye contact with him again. It was really starting to freak him out. He didn’t know what he did wrong, but it seemed like you really didn’t like him. Still, you’d agreed to help him and he wouldn’t take that for granted. He’d read your essay twice and it was good. He didn’t know much about good writing, but he knew that Mr. Lawrence would like it, that it would get a good grade. And he wanted decent grades too, so he could get into college and get his dad off his back.

The Hawkins High library was fairly quiet after school, most students headed back home or to after school clubs. Only a few stragglers remained, mostly using electric typewriters and returning books to poor Mrs. Mueller, who always kept the library open till four, waiting for her husband, the head of custodial staff, to finish his work. She smiled at you when you walked in. Mrs. Mueller was a nice woman who let you sit in the library during lunch and always checked in on you when you seemed alone. She was your favourite teacher, despite never having a class taught by her.

Steve chose a table in the dead centre of the room, dropping his blue bag on the wooden chair next to him and pulling out his papers. You carefully followed suite, folding your hands in your lap, unsure what to do with them. Steve smiled at you, sliding the essay towards you “So, what am I doing wrong?” he asked.

You narrowed your eyes, unsure where to begin. You picked up the paper, and then open your notebook, writing down everything the story seemed to be about. Steve watched you, utterly confused. Once you had every down, you set down your pen. “Okay,” you didn’t look up from your paper, sliding the essay to the middle of the table. “Tell me what your paper is about.”

“What? You read it, you should know.” Steve laughed awkwardly.

“Humour me.” You replied, looking up slowly to meet his eye. Steve’s smiled dropped, looking at you for a second. You broke eye contact first, but he wished he had been able to hold it for a moment longer.

“Okay, well,” he took a deep breath “I wrote about my family’s trip to our cottage on Miami Beach, and I talked about what I did. Nothing much.”

“Okay, because what you actually wrote isn’t really about that. What you told me is that you went to Miami Beach, your parents own a dirty beach house that was your grandparent’s house and that they’re both dead, that your grandfather fought in World War Two and that the medals were framed in the house, that you met a girl on the beach but she didn’t like you, and that the flight was long.” You explained. You still couldn’t believe that he’d fit all of that into a page of work.

“So?” Steve asked. That was all true of his last trip. Mind you, that was way back in middle school and the details were hazy.

“So, that’s a lot of information that I don’t care about. You can cut all of the stuff about your grandparents, which takes up like half of it. And when you cut that, all I know is that the beach house is in Miami Beach and you met a girl and the flight was long. That’s not bad, but I’d like to know a bit more about it.” You said, taking back the essay from the middle of the page and crossed out every line about his grandparents.

“What do I say instead then?” Steve asked, watching as you crossed out half his page, trying not to sound defeated. You were basically saying that he had to start all over again.

“Well, tell me about the beach? Pretend like I’ve never been. What’s there to do, what’d you like about it?” you shrugged. You found yourself feeling a tad bit calmer; the butterflies had calmed their intense flapping and had let you breathe.

Steve sighed “I don’t know, I’m just bullshitting.”

“What’d you mean?” you asked.

“I mean, I didn’t go on there, I haven’t been to our beach house since I was a kid.” Steve looked away. He was embarrassed to have been caught in a lie, even more knowing that now he’d have to rewrite his whole paper.

“Oh…what’d you actually do on your break?” you hadn’t expected him to be lying about anything, a snow bird spring break trip sounded about right for his family, they were always bragging about their money.

Steve chuckled “Oh no, nothing worth writing an essay on.” You looked up at him again. He seemed a bit sad. You pulled another sheet of paper from your trapper keeper, setting it overtop the last one.

“Tell me about it.” You smiled at him despite yourself. He was bit easier to talk to than you’d imagined.

Steve swallowed, nodding despite himself. “Well, I mean my parents went to the beach house and I tried to throw a party, you probably heard about how that went.” He rubbed at the back of his neck.

“No…” you shook your head. Steve wasn’t expecting that. Everyone had heard about the failed party, he’d gotten shit about it for weeks.

“Well, I couldn’t get any supplies, so I cancelled and hung out with Tommy and Carol instead. We got drunk in my backyard and Carol fell in the pool. She was so pissed. Then, I pretty much just hung about town, helped my buddy Dustin beat Dragon’s Lair at the arcade.” Steve didn’t really like admitting how lame his life was, he purposefully left out how Tommy and Carol only hung out with him when he went to pick up some weed from his older brother and they wanted a hit off it. Admitting that his life wasn’t that great made him feel small and like it was out of his control, which was not exactly a good feeling.

“Okay, tell me about the little party you had with Tommy and Carol. What was the night like? Was it fun? Did you jump in the pool too or did you watch her fall and laugh?” You had written down the few details in a bubble tree and added more details as he explained his time more thoroughly. You managed to get a bit more information on both events, learning more about his friend Dustin and the game they played.

When he was finished, you slid the page over to him. He took it, eyebrow raised in confusion, but you spoke before he could ask any questions. “This is your blue print. I wrote down everything you told me; now just turn it into an essay. The whole trick about these assignments is that you’re telling a story, and to make it interesting you have to give us details, and not about your grandparents or other things that don’t add to the story at hand, about what actually was happening.” You explained, checking the plastic watch on your wrist. It was almost four and Mrs. Mueller had already passed your table twice, her silent warning to leave. Everyone else who had been there had long left and you became very aware of how alone you were with him. The butterflies started their flapping again, churning tides in your stomach.

Steve smiled “Okay, I promise it’ll be interesting though.” He chuckled.

You shrugged “I promise that it’s more interesting than what you had before.” You shoved your papers into your bag, standing quickly “If you want me to look at it again before you hand it in, just bring it to me in class, alright? The library’s closing so I should go.”

“You want a ride home?” you spun around to look at him, crossing your arms over your paint splattered sweatshirt. The rain storm of the morning was long forgotten and you didn’t know what the weather looked like now. A part of you wanted to take the ride, but a much bigger part of you told you to run away.

You shook your head “No, um my friend Samantha said she’d drive me after her soccer practise, she’s probably waiting for me.” You lied straight through your teeth, adjusting your backpack straps on your shoulders.

“Oh…sure, yeah, I’ll see you around.” Steve stood slowly, tucking in his chair. You waved politely and headed out. The rain had stopped, thank god, and you rushed to your locker, grabbing your wet clothes from your locker before making your way outside. The field was muddy, practise was probably cancelled. You took the long way home that afternoon, cutting through the woods and the muddy park to avoid being spotted by Harrington on the way and getting caught in a lie.

The afternoon had gone well. And that scared the shit out of you.

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starsnack · 7 years

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It’s 3:30am , my parents are crammed together on the good end of my raggedy bed (I’m downstairs chillin on the couch) and tomorrow or the day after I’m outta here for good

People keep asking me how it feels to have graduated, and like, I dunno, kind of how it feels to be half asleep on the morning of your 18th birthday. But instead of getting to post nudes on the internet you get to be an adult. Not that different, but something’s changed, according to everyone else in the world.

It feels slightly anti-climactic because I don’t feel like anything I’ve done in college has been as stressful as my shithole hell high school. I mean, that’s definitely an overinflated half-memory because last semester I slept 5 hours a night, did two hundred pages of reading a week, wrote 7 essays, took 6 classes, and volunteered and ran a club on top of that. And I spent large chunks of this semester making pro/con lists of tossing myself off the Granville Island bridge, but, god, remember AP classes?

My undergraduate degree has been weird. I mean, it’s probably weird for literally everyone. It’s in my nature to wanna put a little bow on the whole thing and turn it into an Aesop’s fable. Hey Kids Sit Down Lemme Tell You the Story of Why to Not be Nice to Shitty White Boys. That’s one of Aesop’s morals (if you’re reading this I’m probably not talking about you). Another one is me reaching into a pocket dimension Leorio Paradignight Warping Punch style so I can grab the back of my own head and bash my skull against a brick wall yelling “IT’S FINE TO HAVE FEELINGS.”

Here’s other stuff I learned: how to call people out in a way that’s productive, how to cook a beef Bolognese, how to study for an exam, how to do well in a subject you’re bad at, how to ask someone for help, how to politely decline an aggressive tinder message, how to weed out the people who are bad for you (actually extricating them from my life I achieve, but gracelessly), how to achieve clear, clean looking skin (mud, charcoal wrapped in soap, a good moisturizer, beeswax), how to find a flattering lipstick (any of them, bitch!!!), how to cook for fifteen people at once with two hands and six burners, how to host a party, how to sneakily slide vegetables into the bodies of your sweet malnourished friends, how to shit out a twelve page paper in one night (in this order: eat, jerk off, nap, research, write, nap, edit, print, get a 96%), how to slyly insert yourself into new, foreign friend groups, how to embroider, how to kind of get the hang of stuff with a little intuition and determination, how to play first and third person shooters, how to write compelling fiction in second person, how to compose a poem, how to maintain an aesthetic over different seasons and weather patterns, how to talk about capitalism over tea without sounding like a moron, how to fall asleep next to someone who snores, how to accept the two-steps-forward-one-step-back thing, how to find literally anything in the world interesting + worthy of learning (open mind big heart!!), how to differentiate a simple equation, how to work really really really really hard, and how to keep on living when it doesn’t work anyways.

Stuff I didn’t learn: I still spell “woll” instead of “wool” unless I think about it beforehand, I usually forget the word for “opposite of differentiation” and when I draw a supply and demand graph, I have to think really hard about where the P and the Q go (still!!). “Don’t be good to shitty white boys” is something I tell myself maybe every 45 minutes but I do it anyways. I’m still bad with money. I still don’t know how to pay my taxes, or fall asleep without my stuffed animals, or keep my room clean. I’m still bad at caring too much about people who don’t care about me back, or don’t care enough, or in the right way. I’m bad at managing stress, and not letting one bad thing drag me off a cliff. And I’m bad at coming up with fun, quirky, believable excuses for the excess of self-harm scars I got running down my sweet toned calves (last time I just said, “UH, YOU KNOW”). I’m bad at figuring out how to manage relationships that make me uncomfortable without just ghosting them. I’m bad at letting myself be proud or giving myself enough credit. BIame my Chinese Parents and my hell high school for never feeling satisfied. I never learned how to make a good peanut sauce (the trick is measuring? I think? Which is gay and won’t be done). Also, I can’t bake bread for shit. And honestly? Economics? Still not my best subject.

I guess I learned a lot, but I still have a long way to go. Which is good. I like learning. I came to college: wack hair, insecure, bad at school, pure virgin baby blank skin, lazy as shit, no boobs, wildly incompetent, NO EYEBROWS, only 2 lipsticks. I leave college: a cute bob, confidence falling out of my asscrack, tatt’d up, a seasonally hard worker, good at some things, mildly depressed, 2+ lipsticks, no boobs, better clothes, better shoes, better service.

I don’t know what’s coming next but I probably won’t die and it’ll hopefully be in a forward and upward trajectory on average in the long term

#boring life post #long and boring and ~~personal~~

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jonatdoeswritingprompts · 5 years

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WP 4: You’re at work and you print something personal (and sensitive). Unfortunately, you’ve sent it to the wrong printer and, by the time you realize it, somebody else has already scooped it up.

It was finally finished. Holy shit, it’s finished.

I don’t like my job. The job is probably fine and I should probably be grateful. But I don’t like it. It makes me feel shitty. I’m a marketing associate at a local accounting firm. I suppose I should be happy that I got a job after finishing my degree. I know a lot of people who weren’t even that lucky, and recognizing that makes me feel bad about complaining about it. And yet, there’s no honest way to evaluate how I feel about my situation without recognizing that I’m miserable. The work I do isn’t interesting. The work I do doesn’t matter. My job is bullshit. My job could disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow and human society would be no worse for it. I have about 8 hours worth of actual work in any given 40 hour week, and yet, I have to constantly pretend to be busy during all hours, because this charade is the only thing that keeps me employed. It’s soul draining and I’ve become so, so afraid that this is all there is.

A few months ago, I was at my lowest because of this. There was a day of work where I did nothing and it made me so miserable that my body ached. I felt so useless, down to my core, and I had to do something about it. Anything. I opened up a word document and started typing, just to get this feeling out of my body and onto a page. I ended up feeling 4 pages after about an hour. It was a rambling, disorganized mess, but I felt proud. I think it just felt good to create something. It felt like the first hour of labor I’d performed that had meant something.

So, I thought, maybe I should try writing.

I spent the next few months writing during my many hours of downtime at work. It started as these rambling, emotional essays like the first time. And then, I started playing with the idea of making something bigger. Something longer. A real project and a long-term goal, instead of whatever small idea I can find to fill the time. A website for writing prompts gave me the starting point, and I decided I’d try to write a novel. I had no plans to publish it; it’s not like I was a real writer or anything. But I was so focused on how good it would feel to be able to say “I wrote a novel this year” if anyone asked me what I was proud of. I felt like, without this, I’d have no answer to that question, and the fear of that situation kept me focused.

Which brings me to today. It’s finished. Edited and everything. I decided, after finishing the first draft, that I’d submit it for publication anyway. I loved the idea of holding the rejection letters, printed on official publishing company letterhead, to have as a testament to what I’d completed. Maybe I even get some feedback, I learn how to do this the right way, and eventually write my way out of this cubicle. I was careful to not let myself get my hopes up about that possibility in the name of realism, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind.

And what better way to put a bow on this achievement by having the company pay for my printing costs? Besides, I don’t own a printer, and this is 254 pages. They don’t pay me enough to cover such costs on my own. I took a breath, hit print, and let the tension flow out of my body. In a few minutes, I’d be holding a physical copy of a book, written by me. I’d weigh all 254 pages on the postage machine and feed it an envelope from the supply room. I’d put all 254 pages into the envelope, write the name and address of the publisher on the front (which one? I should research that), I’d write my return address in the upper left corner (oh wait, should I use a pen name? I should research that too), I’d put it in the mail, and eagerly await my prized rejection letter.

My desk was right by the printer. This was truly unfortunate when it was tax season, and every employee had 300 page tax returns to assemble. But now it was my turn, and this time, when I heard the printer, it’d be like music.

Except, I couldn’t hear the printer. Why couldn’t I hear the printer? I got up and checked the status screen. No pending jobs in the queue. Why the hell not?!

I speed-walked through the office. It had to be on another printer. As I turned the corner, I froze. I saw one of the firm’s partners, standing in front of the printer on the opposite side of the office. A stack of papers sat on the printer, and he held the first few pages in his hands as he read. The first page was a title page, with my real name, so there was no hiding that it was mine.

He looked up at me. “I was wondering who was printing tax returns in November...”

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I imagined just grabbing it from him and shoving it in the shred box, but I could only manage to imagine it.

“You wrote this?”

I nodded. My head was buzzing and I was grasping desperately for something to say. Fear of losing my job, the one I hated and wanted to escape from, was overwhelming.

“What are you printing this for?”

“To, um, send it to a publisher.”

The partner’s face didn’t move, he just nodded as he read the second page. The protagonist was an obvious surrogate for me, and the first moments of the novel set the scene of a young person in a job they hate. I was sure he would connect those dots.

“Well, I can’t say this is a good use of our resources. Paper and employee salaries are our biggest expenses, and this doesn’t seem like a good use of either.”

There was a pause that was longer than I could bear.

He sighed, placed my pages in the stack, and held it out for me to take. I took the pages and held them against my chest like a parent protecting their child. “Is this, um, alright?”

The partner sighed. “Honestly, not really.” His eyes were on the ground, like he was focused more on something in his internal world than this conversation. “I wrote stories in high school, can you believe it? I never took it further than just having the thought: ‘maybe I can be a writer someday’. And now I’ve got this new grad in my firm that’s written more in their lifetime than I have, as a grown-ass man.”

His face was hiding emotion to a degree that I found terrifying, but a small smile cracked. “I guess I’m a little jealous. And I’m happy for you. I wish I’d had the mind to something like this at some point in my career.”

He patted me on the shoulder. I was dumbstruck; my body was still wracked with fear, and I was struggling to keep up with what was happening. “Let me know what they say. And try to do this at home from now on.”

I could only manage to squeak out a pathetic-sounding “thanks” before he walked back to his office. I scurried back to my desk, feeling better about this office than I ever had.

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dancergurl3000 · 6 years

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My year in review! 12/31/17 (In books, the books that I have read in the year 2017). An essay.

In the year 2017, I have read 23 books in total. I will review some of them that I did like, and others, not so much.

1. Kathy Griffin’s second memoir, “Celebrity Run-Ins, A-Z.” Last year I had bought this specific book as a Christmas present to myself. 2017 has been a totally shitty year for Ms. Griffin. In May, she posted to Facebook.com a picture of a Halloween mask with ketchup smeared all over it, and once it spread, it spread like wildfire. She lost a lot of her coveted jobs: CNN fired her the following week from the New Year’s Eve broadcast that she would do with Anderson Cooper, literally the only thing fun about New Year’s Eve was watching her make Anderson Cooper do weird shit in the freezing cold. It was a bad call, but not one I would say is on the same level with Kramer yelling the “N-word” to an audience member for heckling him at a stand up show. She’s literally on the FBI terror watch list now, lost her sister due to a significant and long battle with cancer, and cut all of her hair off. She’s Janice Ian in Middle School, with Trump being Regina George. It’s ridiculous, but if anyone can come back from a tasteless joke, it’s Kathy. Like Jane Fonda, she’s had (in Kathy’s own words mind you): “ a wall of shit fall in on her, and she’s survived, I dig her!” My sentiments on exactly on how I feel about YOU Ms. Kathy Griffin. What I hope for Ms. Kathy Griffin in 2018 is that she gets her revenge. Whether it’s a revenge body, or a revenge stand up set that knocks it out of the park, I would hope honestly that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of her, and that in 2018 she makes fun of the truly dumb as shit New Year’s Eve broadcast with cross-eyed as fuck Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper tonight. And no I am not watching it.

2. Charles M. Blow’s Memoir “Fire Shut Up in my bones.” The first ten pages of this novel made me want to scream into the heavens: “HOW COULD YOU?!” to his cousin, who he tells in intimate detail mind you of how his cousin raped him when he was a kid, and for most of his life, he tries to figure out why, and how in the world did he let this happen, and what he did to bring this on. In the first 20 pages of the novel, we see him struggle with maybe trying to kill his cousin for his crimes, as his cousin was never charged with sexual abuse. But the main problem I have with that was: his cousin was much much older than Charlie. And it damaged this particular writer for LIFE. I’ve read a lot about sexual abuse, and sexual abuse victims/survivors all say a variation of the same thing: that basically it affected them for life. He then goes on to become the first Black Historical writer for The NY Times, and finds himself struggling to tell people his secret, mainly the women he has sex with. Wouldn’t you?

3. TA- Neishi Coates Memoir “Between the world and Me.” In 2017, I FINALLY was able to read this novel. It’s the love letter of our time. It also proves to me at least, that even with 8 years of a Black President, cops honestly have some work to do with how they treat young black men in this country. And body cams don’t change behaviors.

4. Trevor Noah’s Memoir “Born a Crime.” This novel I bought in February after nursing a bad heart-ache for someone who had rejected me, and I wanted to honestly dive into Trevor Noah’s world for a while. And while he’s unfortunately no Jon Stewart, what he is is very funny. His stand up sets are exactly like this novel, and his work on the daily show right now is so necessary. We all need to be laughing more and more right now, and I appreciate Trevor to let his audience know: that it’s totally OK to be laughing AT Trevor, and WITH him. Please read this book.

5. “A horse walks into a bar” by David Grossman. I didn’t get this one. I finished it, but I didn’t really understand it.

6. “Sick in the head” by Judd Apatow. As probably the only man in Hollywood who literally HASN’T* pinched a woman’s ass on set, I appreciated Judd’s candor here, and his ability to basically get in the mind of a comic. He’s like the journalist who followed around rock stars in the 1970′s. Totally reminds me of the dude in “Almost famous” who interviewed rock stars, instead this guy just followed and stalked Jerry Seinfeld before anyone knew who Jerry Seinfeld was. (Side-note: Jerry in the 80′s never had any furniture in his NYC apartment).

7. “Difficult Women” by Roxanne Gay. This was the first novel I read by Gay, and it was awesome, sad, depressing, understandable, & relatable. I read it in March when it was too cold to do anything else but read, and it really took me on a journey of fictional women who have very difficult lives. It’s a modern take on what women go through every single day.

8. “All grown up” by Jami Attenberg, my first E-book! I bought this book for my phone, and devoured it, bit by bit, page, by page. It’s really a great book. It follows the main character in her 30′s: aimless, a bit of an alcoholic, and totally removed from anyone in society or her family. She’s a journalist or a writer in NYC, and her older brother has a child who’s dying. She’s drinking herself to death, and her mother just wants to know where she is at all times, and she’s like meh. No. I really liked it. It shows you what’s going on in someone else’s mind when they are just too caught up in their own problems to do anything about anyone else’s.

9. “The Refugees” by Viet Than Nguyen, yeah I read this one, but I didn’t love it, I liked it fine, but it didn’t have a rhythm to it at all. Wasn’t really all that much of a page turner, it’s not riveting enough.

10. “Evicted, Poverty, and Profit in the American City”, by Matthew Desmond. Now this book! This book was a page turner, might be one of my favorites of the year! I read it in April-May of 2017 this past year, and it honestly tells the tales of poor people in this country and what they will have to go through to keep a roof over their heads. It’s riveting, depressing, sad, and honestly? A necessary read in Trump’s world.

11. Augusten* Burrough’s “Lust and Wonder.” This book made me LAUGH. I read it in June, June of 2017, and Burroughs is really not known for being funny. He is known for being depressing and sad. My mom has read “Dry” like a zillion times! But this book was both funny, and heartwarming! It warmed my heart! Honestly was confused as to who wrote this one, it honestly could be confused with a David Sedaris novel because it is just so funny. I was laughing out loud literally the whole way through!

12. “La Fayette in the somewhat United States” by Sarah Vowell. I have wanted to read this ever since she came on the daily show, and this year I did! Lay Fayette really had a lot of political aspirations, not only that, but he is the man who truly holds American ideals, and American Idealism in the palm of his hand. I enjoy Vowell’s work. And she wrote this during the 2010 Government shut down, which is impressive, to say the least!

13. “The Princess Diarist” by Carrie Fisher.

14. “A $500 House in Detroit, rebuilding an Abandoned Home and an American City” by Drew Phillip. Good read, depressing though!

15. “Sweet bitter.” By Stephanie Danler, this is a necessary read if you want to make it* as a 20 something bartender in NYC.

16. Neil Degrasse Tyson “Astrophysics for people in a hurry.” A delight, a true delight! Made me want to be in Astronomy class all over again! Read it in a week in May.

17. “Hunger” by Roxanne Gay. Signed first edition, this was a necessary read. I literally had no idea about Gay’s back story, and I’m sure her parents had no idea either. She was gang raped by a boy she loved at 12, and went on to eat and eat and eat to then later cope with the PTSD and depression that comes after a significant trauma. I encourage everyone to read this book, not for the fact that she gained so much weight, but for the fact that she didn’t think she could tell literally anyone that she was gang raped.

18. “The blood of Emmet Till” by Timothy Tyson. Ugh. This book. It takes you through the journey of what happened to Emmet Till, and the people’s lives it affected, and the author spends some time with either the real woman who said that Till raped her, or wolf whistled at her, or her grand child. The takeaway for her was this: “yes he whistled at me, or yes I cried rape, but honestly?” “That boy did not deserve what he got for that.”

19. “Letterman, the last Giant of Late Night” by Jason Zinoman. This book was fun, and it showed what those TV wars between Leno and Letterman were actually like. He may be an asshole that David Letterman, but he keeps you laughing, so it’s less dangerous!

20. “The Daily Show, an Oral History” by Chris Smith. I am so glad I own this book. It’s 407 pages long, but it takes you behind the scenes of the daily show. Watching Jon Stewart’s last show, I own it, but I honestly can’t watch it without sobbing. It just can’t happen. “BULLSHIT!” “Is everywhere!” “Are the kids still here?!” “OK, we’ll deal with that later!”

END OF READING GOAL. BONUS: Read 5 more books!

21. “Standard Deviation” by Katherine Heiny. SUCKED.

22. Al Franken’s “Giant of the Senate.” Too long haha.

23. “I am the messenger” by Markus Zusack*, (comfort reading, I’ve read this book before).

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