#So I'm just gonna write out a different scene in a different doc

[mydnite-the-space-wolpertinger]

I kinda wanted to make webcomics originally but I think that even though I can write and I can draw I don't really have the motivation to make a comic(or even an idea on where the fuck to begin)

But you know what I do have the motivation for? Writing. Aparently. Just open a word document and type. Make a little narrative.

[pyrotechnicarus]

What program do you write your scripts in?

Google Docs, haha. It's definitely not the preferred or industry-standard way of doing it; it gives older writers at my program hives when I drop a Docs link in the homework folder. But I was raised on it and it's a great collaboration tool, so I haven't made the switch yet (and maybe never will? Actually probably will once Google inevitably starts charging money for it. But not quite yet!).

Through my school I have a free Final Draft license, so I use that for screenwriting (which has a lot more pesky formatting rules and things), but I'm not planning on buying it once my license expires because A. I don't write films that much and B. I can probably hard-code it into Google Docs for free.

If you're insane like I am and wanna use Google Docs for scriptwriting, here's some formatting tips under the cut:

We're gonna be using a page of the Ghost Story script to demonstrate!

I use Times New Roman because Deborah Brevoort recommended it as a more readable (and slightly more condensed) font than Courier. Your font should adapt to your style; I tend to write short, snappy lines with a lot of back-and-forth, so I use Times which is a common font style for comedy writers (despite not writing comedies.) If you write a lot of long monologues, Courier New might give you a better sense of how your script flows on the page. Basically, you want to space your writing so it comes out to 1 minute of performance time = 1 page of writing.

Scene headings are centered and in bold.

Stage directions that start a scene are left-aligned and in italics; in NAMT-standard style, these are center-margin aligned, like this:

But it's kind of your personal preference.

4. All names are centered and underlined

5. Any stage directions that take place during a scene and cue a line of dialogue are centered, in italics, and in parenthesis. If they can start eating whenever while they're talking, I'd put They start eating left-aligned between two lines of dialogue. However, it is important to me that Hao and Józef start eating before Hao says his next line, so I put it center-aligned.

6. When you get to a song it looks like this:

Basically, songs should be numbered and come after a stage direction (even something basic, like "He stands up.") The enter after the stage directions isn't kosher, it's a Google Docs thing I'll get into later. Then you close the parenthesis on the stage direction and put a page break. Songs should always start on a new page. This is because when you integrate the book and score, you can just take those lyric sheets out and put sheets of music in. Nifty!

7. Lyrics are always capitalized. When two people sing the same thing at the same time, you can put both their names over it:

But if they're singing something different, I usually put it in two columns (there is some debate among musical theater writers on what the proper notation for this kind of thing is. But columns are easy on Google Docs, so I use those. When I have four or more people singing different things on top of one another, I use a 1x4 table and make the lines between the cells invisible, haha.)

Google Docs Specific Formatting Stuff

Ok, so, if you're lazy like me and don't want to be hitting 800 buttons while you're writing to format everything correctly (and please, god, format while you're writing -- going back and doing it later sucks) you can use the Google Docs headings to format your writing! And it will even make a nice little outline for you!

So, the default of these settings (on the left) is useless and ugly. But mine looks like this (on the right!)

If you want yours to look beautiful and be useful like mine, you can format some kind of text the way you want it to (for example, I want all my names in 12 pt Times New Roman, centered and underlined.)

Then I go to some random heading and I hit "Update heading to match"

Now, anytime I type a name, I can go back to this menu and hit "Apply Heading 5"... and it will automatically make it centered, underlined, and 12 pt Times New Roman! I make one of these for all my categories of text: stage directions, song titles, scene headers, etc.

But, ok, you still have to open all those menus while you're writing. Well! See this thing?

All of these have keyboard shortcuts (the Windows ones will show up on a Windows computer). You can really easily hit them after each name/stage direction you type instead of fiddling around with font settings. You're a formatting machine!

And here's the bonus: If you do all this correctly, you can get a really nice outline like this one embedded in your document on the left (this is where the song titles on a new line come in; I make a heading style for them so they show up on the outline, but headings only show the start of the phrase that they are part of in the outline. Ignore the numbers being wrong, lol. There's a secret song 3 that we haven't released yet.)

And it's clickable, too-- like I can jump right to Your Face from the outline without having to scroll down 20 pages.

Is this all needlessly complicated and doing manually something Final Draft will do for you? Yes. But I'm set in my ways, and it's free, so maybe it'll be helpful to another Musical Theater writer out there working with someone else on Google Docs.

That's it! Thanks for the question.

[openphrase123]

i just finished this fic! it's good!

and because it's all done i want to like... be a LITTLE self indulgent and talk under the cut about some miscellaneous things that i ran into while writing it. don't click the readmore if you're interested in the fic and haven't read it yet i'm about to spoil the Whole thing.

also there is an epilogue to this fic now - go read that before this post if you're getting to this before the update!!

so!! i haven't written fanfiction in like FIVE YEARS. it's been a while! part of that is because i was doing original stuff and part of it was i was in a creative slump. so isat kind of dug me out of that and i owe it my thanks. i've been able to do a crazy amount of original work since starting this fic, it's brought back my creative discipline. in like seven years when my video game comes out you can thank isat for that probably

i originally set out thinking this was the only fic for isat i was going to write. and then as i was writing this i fell deeper into it. i kind of got out of isat a little disappointed in how it ended?? but now that i'm here i'm like ah it's fine. just cause i would have done something different in dev's position doesn't mean it's bad. it does mean i can write a bunch of fanfiction exploring things i wish had been tackled more in the game though LOL

i said this in one of the chapter authors notes but i DID start out curtain call hating loop with every fiber of my being. (as in i liked them as a character UNTIL the act 6 reveal which i thought was lame) and then i played through the game a second time knowing the loop twist and went "oh nvm this makes sense" so a lot of the loop stuff in this fic was actually written twice. originally i was just gonna have them soulmerge with siffrin and not be present at all but then i was like. no. i do want to keep this lighthearted and that's too depressing of an end for loop. i do have a loop postcanon doc so i'll go repay them for their slapdashed involvement in curtain call someday

i'm in a weird position with curtain call in that i wrote the themes and major conflicts Directly After playing through isat the first time. before i could really marinate and analyze the characters fully. so there are a lot of scenes and points where i think i wouldn't characterize certain people like that if i were to rewrite this from scratch? however i don't disagree with what i've written either - it's just an interpretation that i don't necessarily think is my favorite anymore.

neither is any of the worldbuilding i did for any of this - it works for curtain call and i think it was nice but i don't necessarily think it's my current interpretation of what the culture and people were like? i like the wishes being permanent thing, i like the language stuff, but i'd probably go in a different direction if i went through this again

i do actually still think "the forgotten island was destroyed by a volcano" is my solid headcanon explanation of what happened to it. in my heart. i think like - with siffrin as a character especially it's very important that he's always missing something, that it's not idyllically happy for them at the end of everything. so even if he can remember more from their own past, it's - you know - there's no way to go back. only forward.

in the vein of this i probably could have killed siffrin/loop's entire childhood family but i did not. mostly because i did think it was fun for him to have to explain all of those cultural taboos they broke to survive. which, of course, was not a big deal - any good parent would rather their kid be alive than lawful - but what is isat other than a vehicle to make siffrin work through every moral compulsion and spiral they experience

i had a thought halfway through writing the fic that i was stepping on the very good and beautiful odile friendquest by making the island real and having a lot of siffrin's personality dictate how it went. but i ultimately decided on keeping siffrin very close to their country, more than odile is to vaugarde, because siffrin actually DID live on the island when he was a kid and that i think is a Different type of "longing for your country" trauma than odile's. i think they can still drink over the feelings together though

writing bonnie is very fun but very emotional for me. the bonnie&siffrin age gap (preteen to late-20s) is the exact age gap between me and my niece so every time i need to sit down and write something for them i think about her and how much she's a little baby growing up. this has nothing to do with bonnie it just makes writing bonnie really hard for me

if the entire history of my ao3 account was not an indicator, i'm a very big fan of writing romance, but i did not want it to take over curtain call at all. i also could have left out sloopis entirely and almost did, but thought "you know. with the way loop functions in this fic. i should at least let that be open ended" cause sharing a body with a version of you who is dating some other guy is gonna get messy no matter what. it's just not necessarily something i had time to or the urge to explore here. think of it as a fun spiritual nod to the fact that isafrin is technically open ended in isat (<- cop out answer)

i think i'm pretty vocal in how much i am absolutely insane for the flashback "happiest i can remember being" conversation. who let them do that. i think a lot of how i worked with mirabelle and siffrin's relationship in this fic kind of revolved around that. important to me that it ends with mira checking in on him and getting the answer she was looking for all along <3

overall i'm happy with curtain call. glad i am done with it though. there's so much that's running in with it at once. i'll probably wait a month and reread the whole thing to myself front to back before i start having fond memories of this. i mean it's always gonna be the fic my nephew was born during and i'll always remember having a panic attack in the airport right after posting chapter 7 but it's gonna be weird letting this one sail off into the ocean of the internet. however feel free to ask anything about the fic, i wrote this in a lil hurry on a bad day and probably didn't cover everything

goodbye, curtain call!! i love you!!!!! i'll miss you!!!!

[looks both ways, waiting for most people to leave]

also. if you've read this far. i hope it's not too gauche of me to link my personal project. if you've read over 100k words of this you might enjoy the game i'm developing? i've been working on it for almost a year but i just started the devlog last month. it's still in early baby stages as far as a full video game goes but if you liked this you'll like the game when it comes out (similar nickname culture, timeloop trauma, petty interpersonal drama, very stupid jokes, natural disaster angst)

also there isn't a lot on the devblog yet, i've mostly been doing programming on it, i JUST started visdev i'm sorry if it's uglyyyyy (FOR NOW)

anyway i'm trusting you with that link. i'm going to use my professional name on that project when it airs don't cross the wires pretty please just pretend that's a butch-y cis woman's game <3 guard the closet door babeyyyyy

[amelias-zelda-calamity-quintet]

Feeling like I should write these down cause eventually I'm gonna post a screenshot of my Word docs and y'all are gonna see all my weird formatting, so let's get ahead of it! Writing tips with me! I hope some of these help folks, this is just what helps me. I've produced like 500k words of relatively edited work in two months using these, so. I shouldn't horde them in case they can help more folks. There aren't a lot, but I hope they help.

Reformat your doc to the page size you'd want to print the work in if you're working in a word processor that can do that. Even if it's fanfic! Figure out the size you'd want to hold the book at and work from there. I promise you, it feels way more motivating to get work done on a 6x9 doc than 8.5x11.

Another format tip, reformat your work in a font and font size that makes it easy to read. I write in Comic Sans myself! Writing already takes up a huge amount of brain power thinking of words, don't add to the challenge by adding hoops to rereading them for edits. You can always reformat after.

Get some kind of notes app. World Anvil, Campfire, I recommend Obsidian, which is free! World bible docs are great, but nested wikis are way easier to sift through.

If you prefer writing linearly, like I do, make sure you have a doc to write down other scenes when you think of them. This has saved me so much heartbreak, even just having an outline of ideas and quote ideas.

If you're going to write a series, pick how many books are in it by overcount, not undercount. It is typically more noticeable that a series has been stretched than it has been shortened.

Try the other side of plotter/pantser just a little. I used to be a hardcore pantser, but my writing improved scores when I started doing even just a little more plotter work. I still do mostly outlines, and I have presaved templates in Obsidian to help make notetaking easier on thin notes, but I promise it helps.

Don't compare yourself to others! I know I led with the 500k figure (because it is impressive) but everyone writes at different paces. Mine is influenced in no small part by autistic hyperfocus on my story at the moment. In amount of writing is still creating and still holds value.

Make a habit, and set it low. I tell myself I need to get a sentence done in a day. Convincing myself that getting something, even low, has pushed me more to get back to work than setting incredibly high word counts ever did. It's ok to have low inspiration days.

[redhoodinternaldialectical]

Finding character motivations for everything Talia Al Ghul does and says in Lost Days

People say she was manipulating Jason to be more violent but like... was she?? Why would she be doing that??? She spends years trying to heal him for Bruce and then tries to make him more violent towards Bruce because... ????????

I've read Lost Days a fair few times and it never felt like she was being cruel or manipulative and this has confused the fuck out of me for a long time. Since I'm going to be writing her into my Jason centric fic pretty soon, I figured it would be good to go back to Lost Days and really focus in on her and her character motivations.

This is a post because I do my best thinking through the act of writing essays, and figured someone out there might also be interested.

tl;dr In the text as written Talia does her level best to guide Jason to become a Hero again out of genuine compassion. It is her explicit goal to make Jason less vengeful, less violent, and more like the hero he was before he died. She is not predatory towards him, and the only times she works in ways that could be damaging to him are when she feels her own safety is threatened by him. Talia is depicted as a good but flawed person shaped by the trauma Ra's and the League has put her through.

So yeah, wildly over detailed analysis of everything Talia does and says during Lost Days under the cut:

Scene one: Ra's and Talia yelling dramatically on a lawn right after Talia uses a Lazarus Pit on Jason.

Her stated justification for doing so is "I did--what--needed to be done" (em dashes for choking). Considering she risked a LOT to do this, I figure she's probably telling the truth. She believed this was necessary.

Then we flash back to her first learning about Jason's death. She posits that his death will essentially break Bruce.

In the panels directly after this she's shown looking at a picture of Jason and Bruce, face in hands, clearly upset. Probably primarily for Bruce, but like idk she's an empathic human I feel like it's safe to say she's upset for the kid who died too, especially since the picture centers Jason prominently, with focus/close-up panels on both Bruce and Jason, with Jason's scanning first.

Then we have the sequence of her learning that Jason is still alive, through her agents who have been instructed to keep a very close eye on Bruce.

Her first big decision is to bring him to her Father. She doesn't make any attempt to hide him, so it's either a good idea to her or a necessary one. Ra's obviously wants to figure out how he managed to cheat death, and it seems likely to me, given that she's loyal to him, that she'd also want to do so. She doesn't seem to want him dead, even if she's at odds with him pretty much the whole time to one degree or another.

Then we get her investigating Jason's ressurection and the doctor she's got telling her about his brain damage and the Doc claims he's not getting better

We're just gonna breeze on passed that autistic affect weirdness...

She disagrees.

This is the third time now that Talia has had faith in the humanity and emotional capacity of people the rest of the League write off as being capable of nothing but violence. Considering she's been right the other times it stands to reason that she's right about this too. It also says a lot about her character that this is something she's repeatedly done.

She attempts to prove he's getting better by slapping Jason across the face, declaring, "He never fights back when it's me! Explain that! Never when it's me!"

This strongly suggests that she must treat him differently than the rest of the league, specifically that she treats him with more kindness and more attention. He recognizes her as someone safe, who he doesn't need to fight.

This is further backed up by the next page

Ra's then decides that all this has been a complete waste of time and demands that Jason be put out to pasture so he can't distract Talia from her work for the League.

During this argument Ra's posits that she thinks handing over a healed Jason would make Bruce love her, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I think Ra's is misreading her, in exactly the same way all of the League has been misreading everyone all issue: he's failing to understand that people are capable of actual love and compassion. He's interpreting her acts of kindness and love as something manipulative and selfish. Maybe that's something she believes or hopes for on some level, but it's obviously not her "real" motive here like Ra's thinks.

This is what makes her decide that it's necessary to make one last attempt to heal him, and get him out somewhere safer than with the League. It's a desperate last ditch attempt, but she's a competent motherfucker.

The rest of the issue is narrated as a letter Talia sends off with him in the bag of supplies she gives him. In it she says that she had other reasons for attempting to save him.

So, at the end of issue #1 we have three clear motives for why she healed Jason:

To heal Jason is to heal Bruce.

She has a basic sense of decency and wants to help a murdered kid recover. Jason healing is its own reward.

She wants to find out how Jason "survived" so that her Father might be able to replicate that for himself.

Healing Jason might bring her emotionally closer to Bruce.

ALL of these are based in love, and thus could qualify for what she meant in those last few lines of her letter. However, I think I want to emphasis that she almost certainly has to be including love for Jason himself, not just for what Jason represents to Bruce, though Bruce is still a huge focus for her.

And she didn't tell Bruce because Ra's might kill Jason. He doesn't want Batman to know he's alive, ever, and may very well kill Jason to keep that secret.

ON TO ISSUE #2

This is where it gets a lot harder to figure out why she's doing things.

Talia's first act is to refuse to tell Ra's where Jason is. Her second revealed act is that while tossing Jason into the ocean to help him escape she says this:

"Do not seek him out. You remain unavenged."

Third thing she does is check up on her loyal agents who tell her "We know where he's going You're not going to like it." This is immediately followed by the reveal that Jason is going to Gotham.

So uhhhh... Why doesn't Talia want him to go to Bruce now? Also, why does Talia think that being unavenged would mean Jason going to Bruce was a bad idea? Like how is the unavenged bit not a complete nonsequitor?

Cause the thing is, we the audience know what Jason is like in the future, Lost Days was written after UtRH, but Talia doesn't know Jason's personality, she's only met him while he was incapable of communication, so what reason does she have to assume this would impact him like this?

Hypothesis one: She knew about Felipe, thinks he killed him, and thus counts him as a killer of abusers, someone who would want revenge.

Seems pretty unlikely. There's absolutely nothing in the text to support this, it's completely made up conjecture. Also, she doesn't seem to think Jason is the type of person to do revenge all that harshly in later panels.

Hypothesis two: She's counting on the temporary adrenaline-rage-pain boost from the Pit to convince him to be mad about the whole unavenged thing.

Why tho? Like, for realsies, there's no reason for her to try to do this? If this is a plan to keep him away from Bruce, it's a dumb one, like why would that be her choice of strategy?? Also the letter contradicts this.

Hypothesis three: She believes it was wrong of Bruce not to avenge him, or at least thinks that most people would be incredibly angry to find they weren't avenged

Baring her just being fucking precognitive and knowing the future for no good reason, this seems like the most likely cause. Growing up in the League hasn't exactly given her a view of how healthy people handle their anger, and violent retaliation is a nigh daily obstacle for her to navigate. It means she told him that because she thought it was important and she probably always intended to tell him whenever he healed enough to understand it.

Hypothesis four: She assumed him finding out was inevitable, and wanted to do that in a controlled manner... uhhh... and the best controlled manner avaliable was... while flinging him off a cliff??? Instead of in the letter?????

Not buying this one.

We see Jason try to kill Bruce and then get him explaining himself to Talia.

That's... that's not how sociopathic works I'm pretty sure... whateves...

Talia seems to have believed there would have been a fight about the Joker, but not that Jason would have actually tried to kill him. Or at least not that Jason would have tried to really, truly kill him in such a cold, calculated way once all forms of Laz juice were out of his system.

So again, why the fuck was she preventing him and Bruce from meeting?! Would the Dark Knight not have survived a fist fight with an angry sixteen year old??

I don't get it. That's uhhhh- that doesn't make any sense to me. I guess she was just wary of how bad the confrontation might get, but not fully expecting this kind of rage? Maybe she was acting much more confident of her decisions in front of her father and was really worried about this outcome? I dunno, and that's all the evidence we've got!

And now we have a new problem! Why does Talia agree to help him?

She believes she's released a curse into this world. She believes that she has kickstarted a nasty cycle of violence spiral. She doesn't want to see Bruce hurt or killed by his kid.

So the only conclusion left is that she thinks she can better mitigate the damage by helping and misdirecting than she can by actually confronting Jason. Considering who she interacts with, that seems perfectly reasonable.

ON TO ISSUE #3

We get some proper answers here hopefully

Our previous idea about why she was helping him was correct, this is an attempt to keep him less violent, steer him towards other things, and let his desire for revenge fizzle or find a different target.

She's not giving him over to Bruce because Bruce would never forgive her for having kept Jason from him... And also Jason will fucking kill Bruce.

Make special note here of the idea that sex is why she isn't beating the crap out of this guy. Put a pin in that. It'll be important later.

Back down at the murder ranch, Jason finishes killing his teacher and then explains himself

I believe she's genuinely happy about this, because it is actually a step in the direction she wants him to take. He went from being completely obsessed with just killing the father who didn't avenge him, to saving a bunch of kids and delaying his own revenge goals to do it. The tin man IS growing a heart. Her plan is, miraculously, kinda working!

ON TO ISSUE #4

Further proof that her plan is working: Jason leaves Rip, the mercenary driver, alive. He's developing standards for who he is and isn't willing to kill, and those standards are evolving because he is being pushed outside his conflict with Bruce.

His treatment of the bomber's connection with the mob is further proof of this.

That little smile and her gently nudging him towards the idea that he's picking "old habits" back up is very telling. She's guiding him back to the path of actually being a Hero. I think this is meant to imply that Talia is deliberately throwing scumbags towards him to not only distract him, but also to remind him of the heroism he did before he died and give him new purpose beyond mere violence towards Bruce.

And again, her plan is working! He's doing hero stuff!

Aaaaand now we have another curveball. Why show him Tim?

Again, him finding out about this was probably inevitable. He seems more chill, the dark circles under his eyes are gone, I think she's hoping that while in the middle of a new investigation Jason will be in as good a place as she can find to tell him about this.

It's better than mid cliff dive, if nothing else.

Now, to head this off at the pass, because I've seen people assert this in other posts before: this is definitively, absolutely, 100% guaranteed, NOT WHEN TITANS TOWER HAPPENS. He hasn't even come up with using the red hood as a persona when she shows him this picture, so even if he let the extremely time sensitive bombing plot go for a day or two worth of private jetting to beat up the new guy, there's no way in HELL Tim would be able to recognize the Red Hood as Jason. Heck, Tim wouldn't even be with that set of Titans yet, the fucking HUSH plotline hasn't even happened yet!! Okay moving on...

ON TO ISSUE #5

Talia isn't in this one

Jason acts as a Hero. Tim man definitely has a heart.

I really like this plotline tbh, it's just great.

He kills all but one of the Russian mobsters that come to kill him and then he runs out of ammo on the last, and that guy offers up the Joker's location in exchange for his life.

This is when the Tin Man relapses.

ON TO ISSUE #6

CONTENT WARNING FOR DISCUSSION OF CONSENT ISSUES

He hunts the Joker down and fails to kill him. I want to emphasis here, that failing to kill the Joker is a failure to adhere to the morals that Jason has established for himself, and a failure to keep being an anti-hero the way Talia was encouraging him to be.

This is not him being a good guy. This is him getting worse again. This is him failing to care about the world and things other than his own revenge.

Once again he explains himself to Talia, and reveals that he's known for a while now that she's been stalling him.

And then they fuck, and Jason wakes up alone.

So what just happened and why?

First of all I think the fact he KNEW he was being stalled combined with his heroism prior to the Joker being brought up strongly implies that Talia's plan would have kept working and that Jason would have kept letting it work, drawing him more and more into just being an anti-hero. He has a heart, he has morals, but his rage for Bruce and the Joker eclipses those morals pretty completely. Talia's plan was always to guide him away from revenge and it might have worked if he hadn't run out of ammo at the wrong time.

Secondly, Talia has just been given a bunch of reasons to feel threatened. Her plot was revealed, and Jason no longer has reason to believe that she isn't an obstacle to his goals.

Considering the sheer amount of violence that Talia regularly narrowly escapes only through manipulation and leveraging men's emotions, it seems pretty reasonable to me that she'd assume she needed to do both those things in order to protect herself.

She tells Jason about Ra's death, claiming that she's angry with Bruce for that. I don't know if this is the truth, but it would serve this purpose either way. She's giving him reasons to believe she's still on his side. Then she gets emotional leverage on him by sleeping with him. Take that pin out of the fact that she didn't beat that other guy for talking out of turn to her because she was fucking him. Then she escapes while he's asleep and only contacts him again from afar.

She does both of these things because she is afraid that a freshly refocused on vengeance Jason will hurt or kill her if she doesn't. After all, she herself is a killer. Jason might just decide it's her turn to join his other teachers.

The scene of them sleeping together isn't framed as traumatic for Jason; he seems to be perfectly willing.

There two very important questions that need answered before we cast judgments though: Is Jason still a minor when this happens? How old is Talia in comparison to Jason?

The only indication of timeline that we have is that it takes place JUST prior to Hush, as the story ends with Jason meeting Tomas Elliot. According to the Batman Chronology Project, Tim should be 16 during the events of Hush. We know Jason is about two years older than Tim, making him 18 during this scene.

According to Dennis O'Neil "I’m pretty sure that Talia is still a young woman – young by our standards, not just her father’s." According to some random fucker on an ancient comicvine forum going by the handle "brock4618", O'Neil said in a different interview that she was 18 when Bruce kissed her and is about Dick's age, not Bruce's age. I can't find O'Neil saying that, but it does line up with the quote we know is real.

So this was a case of an extremely traumatized 18 year old boy agreeing to sleep with a woman in her twenties after he accidentally made her feel that she needed to use sex and emotional manipulation to protect herself from his possible violent retaliation.

This is still a deeply unpleasant situation, but it's so much better than the initial impression that I got!

CONCLUSIONS TIME

Talia healed Jason because

She's a kind and loving person, and was especially kind and loving when she was younger. She wants to help Bruce, she wants to help Jason, and she wants to help her father. She did it for love.

Talia kept Jason's existence a secret from Bruce because

Her father demanded she keep it a secret, then she was afraid Bruce would hate her for it, and by the time she ought to be warning Bruce about Jason, well he was a scary motherfucker and she was in too deep.

Is Talia portrayed as a sexually predatory monster?

No. A woman using sex to escape violence is not predatory; I will fucking fight you. That whole scenario was bad, but acting like she's evil for this doesn't pan out unless you disagree with some of the facts of the case. It also really doesn't feel like Winick intended for the audience to assume this was predatory. Jason never seems uncomfortable with the fact it happened, and he even gives Jason a bit of beard scruff to help convey that he's older now. (it uh... it didn't work. Because I thought Talia was like 52 at minimum. Also just the timeline. But that was the intent I feel)

Is Talia attempting to make Jason more vengeful?

No. Exact opposite actually, every lie and manipulation is in service of preventing him from going on his vengeance quest, guiding him to be a better person, and protecting herself and others.

As a side note: I haven't touched the potential misogyny or racism angles, because that's simply beyond the scope of this analysis. I don't have the time, energy, or resources to dig into this myself, you'll have to find a different post for that angle, sorry.

So... yeah. That's my findings, I hope at least one other person finds this useful!

[rileyclaw]

Hii! First off i just want to I'm such a big fan of your art and animatics! Your art is just so expressive and unique its addicting to look at 💞💞

I was wondering if you could go over how your process or tutorial in making an animatic? Whenever I try to start to make one, I get jumbled up and end up ditching it lol

I'm sorry if you get this question a lot 😭

So sorry it took me so long to answer this- I was in a Busy time (diseaseridden with covid and being punched by finals) when I got the ask and wanted to answer it with some stuff Im using for my next TOH animatic!!

I'll say one thing first: I get jumbled up and ditch so many animatics. For every one animatic I release, there are three to five more I have that have NEVER seen the light of day (yet). And that's okay!! It's fun just to make them for me, and I hope it is for you too!! Animatics are scary because if you're working on it alone, it can be really hard to be your own cheerleader to keep up the mojo to keep going. So that makes it really special when there is that project that makes it to the finish line- cuz you can look at it and go "holy crap I made this. holy crap i MADE that look how SICK that is dude!! all that work and look at the turnout!!"

The following stuffh is just my personal process and is by no means representative of a professional animation pipeline, but this works for me as a Lonely Artist! It all begins with the idea - whether it's a song, or just a story you wanna tell. In the case of the one I'm gonna demo here with , I wanted to animate Hunter's first day as Del's apprentice!

The first thing I did was write a script. Not fancy or AO3-quality, but enough that I understand the pacing and the visuals of each shot. I usually just put this in a doc or put it in a script format, if I feel fancy.

Then, I take that script and find music that I think would fit for it- and remix it (if needed) to fit the pacing/mood/etc! This is what this new animatic looked like before I began ANY artwork- this is a me thing because I'm super inspired by audio as opposed to visuals first. But you might be different- this is just how I like working personally!

Then begins the research! I find references for characters, background layouts, and create a style guide for the animatic that tells me how thick lines will be for characters, backgrounds, if there'll be tons of value or no. I make a turnaround for each character so I can refer to them because Im gonna be drawing them over and over a LOT and want to be consistent! Luckily TOH has no shortage of references, so I based my work off them.

THEN, I can begin drawing. I'm a little,,, (a lot) ADHD and may not always do this process, but if you're new to animatics or daunted by the task at hand, make beat boards of the entire project.

This is just a page of rough thumbnails that get your visual idea down - look how rough and quick these are!! I try not to spend over a minute on each beat board if I dont have to, unless it's a particularly complex shot.

When it gets to the stage where you're ready to begin the actual scenes, I personally tend to do backgrounds first because I like to set characters into backgrounds - and for every animatic, I have the Awkward Blue Sketch Stage which is basically my beat boards timed out as an animatic.

I used Storyboard Pro for this (Toonboom, not free ): icky), but the process can be replicated across most art platforms in whichever way you feel most comfy with! This is so I can time the drawings before I devote time cleaning them up-- which can make for some Pretty Funny looking little guys but theyre important!! trust!!

Once a big sequence of shots is cleaned up (I usually do 40-60 second chunks at a time), I export the .mov and send it to my editing program (which in this case is still Premiere Pro) - and then repeat this process again and again until.. it's done??

Here's like a TL;DR list of basically everything I said summed up:

• Make a loose script or bulletin of the idea! Do your research!

• Depending on what kind of animatic you're making, time it to music!

• Make a beat board of very loose gestures for your shots, and time them - then move on to refinement & cleanup!

• Combine all shots, refine music cues and timings, add any last needed VFX, and export!

There's no secret recipe or anything, it's just learning a pipeline that best suits you, whether it is for something professional or something you want to make for fun because you just love to make!!

[daryfromthefuture]

i'm on the train and bored and still have an hour to go, so TIME TO RANT ✨️

and i'm choosing to make a list of bttf scenes i would have done differently/things i would have added because i like disagreeing with bob gale as if i owned this franchise

this is maybe an unnecessary change, but personally, i would have preferred if there were more instances of marty trying to warn doc about his death in part 1. we see it when doc demonstrates the model and then later twice on november 12 (before he writes the letter and then before marty has to leave), but i feel like it would have been more emotionally impactful if he had tried it more than that and only at the very end given up and written that letter.

SHOW DOC PLAY SAX. LIKE BRO. they could have had a concert 😭 imagine doc crashing the dance and playing sax with marty on stage (take this bullet point with a grain of salt, i'm only half serious. but still seeing doc play sax would have been badass)

the most obvious point of all obvious points, add the goddamn lone pine mall hug. the entire fandom agrees it's canon, and i remember a post going around speculating that they did indeed record a hug and keep the secret footage somewhere at universal lmao. but all jokes aside, this hug was SO necessary. every sane person would be waiting for it when watching the movie. marty is literally on the ground, bawling his eyes out, thinking his friend is gone, and us heartbroken audience members don't even get a hug to soothe our souls. i haven't paid much mind to doc and marty's relationship when i first watched bttf, but even past me was expecting a hug. good thing bobby fixed it in the musical

MORE JENNIFER. don't knock that girl out for 75% of the movie, please. she deserved better, and i wish bttf 2 would have put more emphasis on her as a character and how she's like and stuff. i hate to see it, but she's such a surface character that we barely know anything about (in my opinion), and that's just sad. she could very well have gone to the cafe 80s with marty and kept him grounded and stuff.

honestly, i maybe even would have kept that deleted 1985a scene with dave. we don't get to see marty's siblings at all in that timeline aside from a mention from biff, and it would have been interesting to see.

this is quite a jump in time, but i wish bob gale would have expanded on the scene in bttf 3 in which doc tells marty that he wants to stay behind in 1885 because of clara. this might be my fanfic brain speaking, but i see so much conflict potential. it would have been wild to see doc and marty argue, maybe even fight for the first time in the trilogy, and picture the emotional turmoil both of them were going through. if i had been marty, i would have snapped, not gonna lie. like, yeah, i get that doc found the love of his life but after all the lectures he'd given marty and after all those times marty was willing to rip apart the fabric of time just to keep doc alive, that man just goes "sorry marty, i met a woman i fell in love with, thanks for saving my life so i can live it out HERE. you go back home and idk clean my lab" >:(. this will forever be a pet peeve hahahaha

WHY does doc just FLY OFF on that DAMN TRAIN? i have to admit, it is an epic ending and feels sort of celebratory, but how can he say that he had to get his dog BEFORE even MENTIONING marty, giving him a photo, shake his hand as if they were work colleagues and nothing more, and then LEAVE? WHAT??? at least talk to him for a bit longer, tell your best friend where you've been, whether he will see you again and that you cherish him for god's sake. if you already had to give him false hopes by getting on the train only to fly off on the hoverboard later 🙄

[borealopelta]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

thanks for the tag, @seasidesandstarscapes !! 💖

How many works do you have on AO3? 40 :)

What's your total AO3 word count? 137,805

What fandoms do you write for? my active ones right now are the boys in the boat and gloryhammer, but i consider myself a terror/the north water writer despite barely touching any of my fics in yearsssss. i love boat media what can i say !

Top five fics by kudos? i was something made for god to label fragile (now i'm stuck) - 1149 (OFMD) out of time, eternal heatstroke - 641 (OFMD) sure as the sun come up from the south - 380 (OFMD) steppin' around in a desert of joy - 311 (Ted Lasso) I'm a stitch away from making it (and a scar away from falling apart) - 279 (IT Chapter 2)

Do you respond to comments? yes!!! sometimes uhhh years late but that's only because i forget that i only replied in my head. i think even the smallest comment deserves a thank you :) <- tiny fandom rarepair enjoyer mindset

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? amazing question i could list like 6 immediately with vastly different vibes but i'm gonna pick it always leads to you in my hometown (The Boys in the Boat) because i looove the ending. those men are not having a good time with their emotions and marital status.

What is the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? i HAVE to go with hustling for the good life (never thought i'd meet you here) (Bullet Train) it's one of my fave fics ever and i love the ending so much 🥺🥺 need those guys to be happy (AND ALIVE!) forever and ever

Do you get hate on fics? oh i used to get death threats yeah!! deeply whatever 2 me though i'm writing for me and the 5 freaks who live in my pocket

Do you write smut? less and less lately but yeah :)

Craziest crossover? i don't write crossovers :)

Have you ever had a fic stolen? not that i know of, thankfully!

Have you ever had a fic translated? no, and i'm not sure i'd be into it!! i wouldn't want a translation in a language i don't know because i wouldn't be able to ensure that things are worded the way i want them to be. i've translated my own writing before and i know that's a struggle even when i'm the original writer so you know.

Have you ever co-written a fic before? also no, once again i'm very very controlling about how i want my writing to look and feel and taste. i couldn't write together with someone else without ruining our relationship i think

All time favorite ship i will always always always come back to eddie carr/doc thorne from the second jurassic park novel. they're so crazymaking i'm forever obsessed with them.

What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? a so far unnamed continuation of call to rise (Gloryhammer) that lives as a long ass outline and several disjointed scenes in my wip folder. i haven't forgotten about her but i have also not made any progress :(

What are your writing strengths? NOT narration/dialogue balance that's for sure!! i'll get so carried away with my beloved descriptions and fun narration that i'll forget to write a single line of dialogue until i'm 600 words in

Thoughts on dialogue in another language? it's one of my big fic icks to be frank 😭 i simply don't think switching back and forth between two different languages does either one justice. the rhythm is different! the vibe is different! it's always always jarring and a lot of times not done well at all. i avoid it when i'm reading and i don't write it

First fandom you wrote in? everyone can judge me for this. it was hollywood undead rpf

Favorite fic you've written? posssssibly let me under your skin (The Terror) i just like the vibe so so much. absolutely miserable depressing yet tender small town armitozer. beloved!!!! but i have so many unpublished ones i absolutely adore, it would be hard to pick. also i didn't feel like linking my other fav fic which is the dead doviest dead dove i've ever written. it fucks though

If you were forced to write only one genre for the rest of your life (like James Patterson lol) what would you want it to be? keeping this makeshift 20th question by seasides because i like it :) my preferred genres would be either period fiction (not specifying when because i want the wiggle room) or nonfiction. i would LOVE to write nonfiction. who's got the time though

i'm gonna tag @duesternis @derry-rain @smolsleepyfox and @zonkutonshorrifyingpeenie if you guys feel like it :))

[sickness-health-all-that-shit]

thank you @callivich for sharing the idea of making fic dvd commentaries! I thought I'd give it a go 🥰 @shamelessdvdcommentary

Broken things

summary: When Lip brings home an advanced android in order to test it for the company he works for, Ian doesn't know what to make of him. MIK-940810, or Mickey, seems virtually indistinguishable from a human being, throwing Ian for a loop as he feels an undeniable connection to the android. Their relationship deepens when Ian finds out about something that Mickey has been keeping from Lip and the people who built him.

There’s a faint blue light shining from the place where Lip’s thumb rests for about two seconds. Ian’s expecting some kind of whirring noise, like when you turn a computer on, but there’s just silence.

And then suddenly the blue eyes come alive.

some stats: I started writing this about a year ago, as part of the latest shameless big bang and finished it around january this year. it's a multichapter of about 28k words divided into 8 chapters

What was the initial inspiration for your story?

probably something I was watching at the time. I love sci-fi! I think I would've had the initial idea in the spring of 2023 and then let it marinate for a while, until the big bang came a-knocking lol. I'm pretty sure it was always gonna be android!Mickey and human Ian, and when I remembered Lip's canon interest in robotics it all started slotting into place for me

If the story is written from a character’s POV, why did you choose this character?

like I said it was always gonna be android!Mickey and I really wanted to explore Ian trying to figure out what made him tick and questioning what makes us human in the first place

What was your favourite scene to write?

probably their initial conversation when Ian asks all sorts of questions that make his brain explode more and more, while Mickey sort of watches him spiral and just seems to have an obvious answer for everything lol. that and the scene where Mickey heavily flirts with an increasingly flustered Ian, that was a lot of fun

How did you come up with the title?

one of the main themes of the fic is the coming together of these two individuals who meet at a time when they both needed it because they were feeling broken, for different reasons. there's a parallel especially between Ian's relationship with his bipolar disorder and Mickey's feeling that he's malfuctioning as an android and that he'll be seen as a broken toy. in both cases it's because of heightened emotions compared to what's considered 'normal', but they heal each other throughout the fic and overcome that sense of brokenness together

Are there any little moments or references you hope readers will notice?

hopefully all the little references and parallels to canon! (things like Mickey's serial number for instance) I had a lot of fun with those, it was like winking at my fellow fans like 'get it? it's like in the show!' lol

Was there anything you struggled to write? If so, how did you overcome this?

I struggled a bit with the resolution of the main conflict/angst, especially explaining how Lip suddenly decides to help them in the end, after being a dick for most of the story lmao. hopefully it doesn't feel that sudden or rushed, but yeah. I still think about it at times lol

Favourite line in the story?

“Well, ask away, doc. You studyin’ human anatomy all day, right? Bet you’re curious as fuck to know all the ways they replicated that shit in this hot little android body o’ mine.” - like I said, I really enjoyed Mickey shamelessly flirting xD

Did the storyline change in any way as you wrote the story?

I just checked my original (handwritten) outline, and I think I had meant to make Ian catch on more to the fact that Mickey is a different type of android, even with Lip's reassurances, but I think in that version he ended up being suspicious in a way that didn't gel with his blossoming feelings for Mickey, and maybe as a result I made Ian a little bit more unsure of himself, which goes back to him feeling broken because he feels like he can't trust his brain too much. also when I was still gathering my ideas for the story I initially thought Mickey might turn out to have memories of a human Mickey Milkovich who had died, but I scrapped that because I wanted this Mickey to be the real Mickey, android or no

If you are writing a particular trope or genre, was it your first time writing this?

I'd definitely never written sci-fi or an android fic before! I might delve more into science fiction in the future though, who knows 😌

What are you most proud about in the story? (plot, characterisation, dialogue, twist/cliffhanger, etc)

overall plot and dialogue, probably. I'm really proud of how I developed my original idea, and some of the lines still make me laugh (or cry)

Are there any deleted scenes that didn’t make it to the final story?

going back to my original outline, I apparently had a whole chapter that never came to be? here's what I'd written down: "Lip's boss shows up at the house. Mickey needs to pretend to be a regular android despite his anger. Ian defends Mickey. The police gets called. They have to make a run for it." maybe this would have helped the resolution feel less rushed/anti-climactic but it also seemed to complicate things a bit too much for my taste, so it got scrapped

Would you ever write a sequel to this story?

I think the epilogue leaves things in a good enough place!

Were you nervous or excited to post this story?

both!! but more excited overall, I think. it's probably my favourite story I've written

Ask your followers to pick a snippet (no more than 500 words) and share your thoughts about it.

please!!!! I will love you forever <3

this was great, I highly recommend it to all writers 🥰

[summery-captain]

AuDHD traits Dirk Gently Displays - S1E5: Very Erectus

- You may follow the google docs file I'm writing everything down in, also! If you haven't read them yet, links to the first four episodes:

S1E1 - Horizons / S1E2 - Lost and Found / S1E3 - Rogue Wall Enthusiasts / S1E4 - Watkin

Click read more to read the analysis of the fifth episode! Tagging: @clockworkcheetah @urlocallesbiab @generalized-incompetence @amber-angel @goatygoat @frenchfriedgiraffe

> In the scene in the dinner, after they start driving to go look for the 'treasure' based on the map, Todd starts insisting that Dirk has a power and he immediately deflects and shuts down, avoiding eye contact completely, looking around. > The second Todd says "It's you. It's something about you", he goes "I'm not psychic, drop it." - of course this enters the parallel of the whole show being about the holistics having their ties to the universe in different ways, but I've had moments where people know I'm autistic and they start insisting on either me being actually "normal" and it being a superpower, trying to single me or sus me out, and I react similarly to Dirk in this scene > "No!! We are having this conversation", discomfort, "Here, let's do an experiment" EXTREME discomfort - sometimes you're just existing and people want a) an explanation of your whole life and b) for you to prove to be what you say you are > "Look, I can't explain it, ok? I learned a long time ago things don't always make sense the way people want them to" - AuDhd to its barest components– > "You're going to have to accept that too. To. Too. To. Too? Two?" - very common to lose a bit of sense of words both in autism (overwhelmed) and plus ADHD having the common comorbidity of dyslexia 

> Trading the Corvette for the beat down jeep, and when Todd goes "???" he says "It's just a rental!" - he makes decisions and when people express concern assumes it's based on something else, even if it doesn't make sense. So he just says it. I usually know for a fact I won't figure out what they're ACTUALLY judging me for - general inaptitude to read between the lines or figure out social situations 

> Martin tells Amanda, about Dirk, "He's got gourmet panic!" - he just like us, he just like us fr 

> "Don't start with the zen master thing, ok? It worked out a lot better before I figured out you were a mess, too" - people tend to assume we're more put together than they are because we showcase emotions differently 

> When Todd says he's gonna give up on digging, he just goes "Wouldn't this be just one more thing you walked away from, though" - not the sincerautistic murder-- Sometimes I also blurt out things and accidentally read people to filth without fully realizing. 

> He puts clues together and recognizes patterns then blurts it out, classic AuDHD style

 > "(...) I think life is like that too, just an endless series of room with puzzles and eventually one of them kills you" / "That's dark and depressing" - my fellow AuDHD ambassador just drops bombs and doesn't even realize 

> "What is it?" / "A thing" - stating the obvious shouldn't be as funny as it is but it never gets old 

> "You brought the cat?" / "Of course I did" - just. Very cute honestly but also, I too make decisions without fully realizing what it would entail, like bringing a kitten around with you while digging shit up 

> Todd starts venting to him and he's like. Confused - but yet again he tries his very best to support him, saying "When I look behind me, I can't see ahead of me" / "Are you saying dwelling on my past is holding me back?" / "No. I mean I literally can't see what's back there when I'm looking forward" - general literal thinking

> "You know what I was thinking about? When I was staring down at the barrel of that gun?" "...bullets?" - literal thinking part 321 electric boogaloo

> “Everything is connected. But only I can see it… I’m not.. Psychic. But I am something” yeah. Autistic-

> “The hunches don’t help me, ever” - we tend to figure stuff out based on our general understanding of them, trying to consciously clock things others don’t have to think twice about, but the same is true in reverse, where things that may seem impossible for neurotypicals to figure out, we see immediately. Although we may know these things, we’re usually not taken seriously enough or don’t have the bandwidth to actually prevent some things from happening to us or around us.

> “I don’t have any friends, I am always surrounded by bizarre and frightening states of disaster, and I am always alone” - sad part hours, but it’s unfortunately true: we’re always overwhelmed, surrounded by input we can’t filter out, and it is extremely hard to make and maintain friends. But Dirk has found his people and so will all of us, eventually!!

> When Todd says “And Dirk? I am your friend.” - immediate hope, bright red eyes, furrowed eyebrows, then IMMEDIATELY he schools his expression out to nonchalant, so yet again his big reactions don’t push people around him away (both true for Dirk and in our general experience, having had to tone yourself down your whole life does NUMBERS on you)

[justhere4thevibez]

annual writing self-evaluation

thank you @pipergirl17 and @erythromanc3r for tagging me!

1. List of works published this year (in no particular order):

oh gosh, I've been busy-busy this year with fanfic, so here goes!

Complete works:

... And a Hellcheer New Year 

Galentines and Valentines

Hold Onto Me

Devil in the Woods

Every Time I Run, I Run to You

Eddie and Chrissy Go to a Wedding 

Knocking Me Out With Those American Thighs

Cooking Up Something Sweet

Please Don't Say You Love Me

Let Me Start Over Again

You Got Me Good

Be My Breath (Through the Deep, Deep Water)

This Old Man

Do You Wanna Touch Me

My Words Will Be Your Light

She'll See I'm Not So Tough 

She Knows What She Wants

Give Me a Taste

The Right Kind of Sinner

Release My Inner Fantasy

Hooked on a Feeling

Whiskey & Wine

The Graveyard Smash

Long Is the Road Out of Hell 

In a Sentimental Mood

Set My Soul On Fire

Burnin' Out of Control

WIPs:

Looking For Something Dumb To Do

I Can't Get Rid of You 

If You Fall, I Will Catch You 

2. Work you are most proud of (and why):

hmmmmm, that's a tough one! I love them all for different reasons, but I will say I'm very proud of Long Is the Road Out of Hell because it's my longest fanfic to date (almost 60k!) and at one point I really wasn't sure if I'd be able to finish it. but I did!

3. Work you are least proud of (and why):

tbh if I'm not proud of something, I won't publish it. but I think the work that frustrated me the most was Whiskey & Wine, my kinktober fic. I pushed myself too hard with too big of a goal and burnt myself out halfway through. but I did learn the importance of setting boundaries for myself (and why I need to be careful committing to challenges 😅)

4. A favorite excerpt of your writing:

not gonna lie, once I publish something, the words tend to leave my brain, so I don't always remember what I write lol. I should probably keep a doc of good lines from my fics so I have something to present when people ask me 😂 but here are two excerpts that I'm pretty proud of.

Devil in the Woods: He had loved her since the first time he opened his eyes to find her snuggled up on his chest. He had loved her longer, since the moment he’d held her in his arms on that endlessly rainy night. And longer still, he’d loved the little girl who played jacks with him on May Day and laughed at his wild antics.

Hooked on a Feeling: He knew he could be… a lot, as kinder people said. A goddamn nuisance, according to everyone else. He didn’t mean to be, he just tended to… latch on to things. Kind of like a bulldog (but in a nice and lovable way, thank you, Jeff). And right now he had ChrissyChrissyChrissy clamped tight between his jaws, and he hoped to god she didn’t ask him to let go.

5. Share or describe a favorite comment you received:

I have a few regular commenters who give me the longest, loveliest comments where they literally analyze each chapter section by section 😭 it makes me feel so loved. but as for one individual comment, I distinctly remember a commenter from one of my early fics commenting on a really tough scene I did re: chrissy's eating disorder. they said that they also had an eating disorder, and that chapter was very healing for them. I don't think I'll ever get another comment as powerful as that.

6. A time when writing was really, really hard:

I go in and out of mild anxious/depressive episodes, mostly due to outside stressors, and that makes it really hard to write. writing is the one constant joy in my life, and when I don't even feel like doing that, I know something is very, very wrong. but luckily, they don't usually last too long!

7. A scene or character that you wrote that surprised you:

mike's redemption arc in Long Is the Road! that one was a total curveball to me, and it only came about because it was the closest place I could think of to have Chrissy walk to after her mom kicked her out. total accident, but it spawned on of my favorite sibling-ships for chrissy that I've ever written!

also writing wayne's pov! i never intended to do that, but once I started, his voice just kind of stuck in my head 😂

8. How did you grow as a writer this year:

I wrote a lot. like over 300k of fanfic. and i even got back into writing some original fiction, which I'm so excited about!

I also started writing smut for the first time in 2023, which was something I never anticipated doing, let alone enjoying! but it's been super fun

9. How do you hope to grow next year:

I'd like to work more on my original fiction, maybe get a short story published. I'd also like to get better at world-building! I tend to get so focused on the characters that I forget they exist in a place I should spend some time creating lol

10. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc):

@slumped-in-the-arms-of-fiction all the way! she's been such a wonderful beta reader, cheerleader, and overall positive influence on my writing. I Can't Get Rid of You wouldn't ever have happened without her support and feedback!

11. Anything in your real life show up in your writing this year:

ooh, buddy! pieces of myself get sprinkled all over the damn place 😂 but as for specifics...

Galentines and Valentines opening scene was reminiscent of the girls' nights me and my college friends used to have (and still have sometimes)

Hooked on a Feeling had elements of my own past experiences of being laid up in a hospital (and being very annoyed about it)

This Old Man was absolutely inspired by my love of Columbo

You Got Me Good definitely included some of my own thoughts and feelings about when I get a little too high 😂

12. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers:

give your writing time.

it's so tempting when you have a new idea to jump on it and then get frustrated when it doesn't immediately turn out the way you want, but I've found that if I give myself time to think over a piece before I write it, and let it sit for a little while after I write it, I'm much happier with the end results!

13. Any new projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year:

finishing my three WIPs! and hopefully a little christmas fic 😂 I don't have anything else immediately in the works, thank god!

14. Tag three writers/artists whose answers you’d like to read:

@1lostsoul0fishbowl @pearlypairings @rose-n-gunses and anybody else!!!

[eccentric-nucleus]

i'm gonna be talking about the weird porn game stuff i'm working on now, so you know, watch out

so as you may have gathered from my various posts, i've been working on the hell game 2 engine. currently i have events running mostly-correctly from data files, but i don't currently have state & pc data hooked up correctly so i can't actually e.g., test out various different sex scene variations based on the pc's bodytype. given one of the big failures of hell game (the first) was that i never really got complex event interactions working, i should probably think up some multi-stage demo events and get them working early on, so i don't end up repeating the same mistake

anyway as i have been putting this together i've been reflecting on the stuff i was dissatisfied with with hell game. unfortunately for me one of those things was "the sex scenes weren't as parametric as i wanted". hell game tended to break sex scenes down based on fundamental body plan (what i usually call 'bodytype' b/c that's the variable name for it in the code). that was stuff like: biped, centaur, quadruped, naga, snake, and 'other'. that's already a lot of totally-different variations but given i also let people change size there did kind of also need to be at least some size-based changes. but that's even more stuff to write for a single sex scene to have full coverage.

(this kinda thing is why i love to bring up the whole thing about nagas having a thigh gap in TiTS. they didn't want to change the scene blocking for all the doggystyle sex scenes! you can just say "between your thighs" either way!! i mean i get it, just, lol.)

but the other thing with hell game is that it was always uhhh a very early demo. it was basically a collection of contextless sex scenes with demons, and while there are worse things for a game to be, i did kinda have aspirations of, you know, plot, story, named characters that weren't just procgen demons, etc. so one of the things i've been working on currently is a ~design doc~ that covers setting & story details in a concrete enough way that i can reference off it and not end up writing myself into a corner.

and that gets us to the weird porn part of the post. i haven't fully committed to the current setting concept (scifi space station sucked through an interdimensional portal so it's now orbiting around hell, a la your dooms and hellpoints and the like; i feel like i'm maybe being a little too derivative here) so i won't go into too much detail but on the whole there is probably gonna be a more pronounced, you know, horror/grotesque influence. we'll... see how that works given that it is also a porn game

like yeah yeah plenty of porn games are kind of libidinal nightmare realms. coc had the parasitic dick worms. people love gross sex stuff. i feel like i kinda lost touch with a lot of my audience and now i spend more time around, uh, normal people who don't have deeply-rooted fixations. currently the first encounter i have outlined for this is uhhh a reanimated zombie who... lemme just paste the description in

A thing that was once a dead body, overtaken by something new. Its skin is a faded grey and its muscles are overgrown, proportions inhuman: shoulders impossibly wide, arms and legs slabs of striated muscle. It moves with an inhuman gait, as if the thing inhabiting it is still getting adjusted to human articulation.

There's a squirming thing wrapped around its head, all leathery purple-black flesh. A central mass covers the corpse's head: face smooth, back of the head a mess of overlapping tentacles. It has many long octopus-like tentacles that fan out across its shoulders and back. The tentacles trail down its body, clamped tight to the skin, before they sink into its body across its shoulders, chest, and back, squirming under the skin like gigantic veins. The skin around the punctures is painted with purple-black bruises. Glowing green ichor pulses through its body, pumped into it from its penetrating tentacles, feeding its muscles with unnatural energy. Its skin is a faded grey, streaked with ash, save for where its glowing-green blood flows, forming branching lines of bulging veins that cover its shoulders and chest.

A single loose tentacle extends from its face like an enormous proboscis, tapering in wormlike rings to a squirming tip, slavering shed ichor in gummy lines down its bare chest.

Its cock hangs heavily between its thighs, perpetually bloated and half-hard, with its glowing green ichor visibly pumping through its altered flesh. Its massive, oversized balls churn and lurch behind the fat stalk of its dick, pulsing with burgeoning larvae. Thick, translucent grey pre perpetually spills from its bloated glowing-green cocktip, painting wet smears of fluid down its monstrously-muscular legs.

it talks to you and asks if you wanna get pumped full of squirming zombie larvae so it can reproduce and reanimate more corpses. a lot of the encounter design is very much "what if you could fuck this DOOM monster"

anyway, that's like, normal. that's completely usual actually. having a cop fetish is what's weird and disturbing. okay okay that's just dumb glib moralizing i don't actually think that. but i mean, it is super weird to write stuff like that and then go back into the normal realm where people keep talking about college jocks or w/e.

but before i do much more writing i gotta hammer out the rest of the engine. next up: a lot of variable storage & thinking about how to separate npc data from the events they take part in. that's all stuff that needs to get coded regardless of which setting i go with

[thedemonscrawler]

gonna procrastinate on writing by talking about writing woo

So, fun fact! Permission Slip is usually being written on two different documents at once, which should be but are not actually identical? And neither of them match the actual AO3 version you guys read?

1st Draft

The first draft is written with a combination of OpenOffice and Google Docs.

(I'll get to why that says Mobile Copy in a sec)

The OpenOffice document is meant to be the Master Draft of the fic. It's the entire story so far-- outline, notes, all the chapters written and the bits of chapters we haven't gotten to yet.

Yeah, it's lengthy. The reason it says 'Active Version' is starting around Chapter 5, I began saving a copy of the document up to the most recent chapter finished.

This is because of how I write scenes out of order, and having an older draft lets me go back for things that got rewritten. It's also really neat to see how various ideas evolved over the story, or how old some of the scenes are.

OpenOffice has the Master Draft, not just because it can handle it, but so I can put my laptop into airplane mode and write offline if I really need to focus. But the story doesn't stay there!

If you've seen the snippets I've shared, you know that sometimes they're highlighted in grey, like this:

(yeah you enjoy that snippet from Chapter 15)

The grey highlights are a system to tell myself 'this is a section that needs to be copied over to the other document', almost always a section I have just written that session. Feels good to have a whole page in grey.

So from OpenOffice, the grey sections are copied over to GoogleDocs, and become the 2nd Draft.

2nd Draft

..okay, so there are actually TWO GoogleDoc copies of Permission Slip. One of them is a 'master' version, just like the Open Office file. The other is the Mobile version. The master version has all of the chapters and outline and stuff, while the Mobile copy only goes back one or two chapters prior to the current one. Why?

Cos it turns out that when a document gets to be around 110 pages long, Docs starts being a little bitch and lags real bad on mobile, or starts crashing. So the mobile version was made so I could type on my phone. Same deal, new sections are highlighted in grey and copied back to the OpenOffice version when I'm on the laptop again.

Since the GoogleDocs version can be worked on from multiple locations, it's the one that gets the most edits. If there are substantial changes made they'll be copied back to the OpenOffice document, but minor edits aren't as crucial, and there are some sections that are pretty different between the two now.

From the GoogleDocs version on to the final(ish) version:

3rd Draft

The AO3 version should match the GoogleDocs version, and for the most part it does-- but not always. That last minute readthrough to catch all the spaces added after italics is also a time for minor edits. Missing words, dialogue rewrites, etc. There's one chapter that had a chunk written in the editor, but unfortunately I can't remember which one it is now 8'D only that it's between chapters 9 and 12. Naturally the AO3 version is the one you guys get to see.

Uuuuh yeah so. Overcomplicated system, go!

Also if you want a word processor for free, I recommend LibreOffice! Its based on the same open source software as OpenOffice, only it's actually still being updated and stuff (I still use OO just cos it's what I have 8'D).

Unfortunately I have yet to find a word processing app with cloud-based storage that can be edited from multiple devices, so I can't replace GoogleDocs with something better.

[sipsteainanxiety]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love ❤

i was tagged by @coopigeoncoo @andypantsx3 @willowser and @namodawrites to do this lil self fic rec game and after finally sitting down to think about it for a very... long... time... i have done it! thank you all for the tag i kiss you each on the forehead and give you a bowl of sliced fruit<3

after looking at all the wips i have in docs right now, i can definitely say that this list would be completely different if i had finished a few of them, but for now this is my ranked list for things i've published already lol

devil's glare — demon!bkg x reader

bakugou katsuki is a powerful demon that you have the pleasure of dating. but when he pisses you off one day, you decide to get back at him in a pretty petty way: drawing a salt circle around you to force him to apologize 

i had THEE most fun writing this one shot LMAO. it was based on a tiktok of all things that i'd found back when i was still on the app pfft. i just loved the idea of bkg being all surly and aggravated that his little human had purposely drawn a salt circle to prevent him from encroaching on their space. and like... him dealing with wanting to idk kiss you so bad but you're trying to teach him a lesson and he's sooooo mad and fuck, he's gonna do whatever he can to get you to comply to him lmao. if i could draw, there's this one scene where you're wearing this like. cute little set of pjs staring up at this big ass demon, wings unfurled threateningly, snarl on his face, arms crossed with a line of salt in between the two of you. like i have a vision. too bad i can't draw it LMFAOO. maybe one day

2. holding out (just for you) — dragon!bkg x reader

in which you find a horrendously injured dragon in a cave and make it your duty to heal him, not knowing that he’s the infamous dragonshifter, bakugo katsuki, who has been cursed to remain trapped in his dragon form forever—unless the spell is broken

this fic... oh boy. i've been working on this fic since mmm 2021 i think? i can't believe it's been a year since the big bang LMFAOO. i also can't blv this shit evolved from being a standalone to having 3 spinoffs and a sequel but well. here we are. complaints aside i really do have fun writing this fic!! i dunno!! i dont think i'd ever read a dragon bkg fic before and i was like fine i'll do it myself and this happened. i added way too much plot and you guys don't even know about half the worldbuilding and shit i have planned for the sequel HAHA. i can't even talk about it bc it would be major spoilers rn rhrsfjhrjfrjrhjg. it's also been giving me such a rough time lately pfft, especially with having to make sure everything lines up for the spinoffs n stuff. im so afraid of publishing ch4 and having to go back and tweak things bc i havent planned out far enough sdkjfsjkdf. i think it just means i'm gonna have to go on a hiatus or smthn and write out all the spinoffs + ch4 at once idk

3. and i give my all (to you) — merman!bkg x reader

you think you bit off more than you could chew when you decided to do your dissertation on ocean acidification, leaving you stranded out in the open ocean. alone. for months. well… maybe you weren’t so alone after all

this is another fic that i've been working on way longer than it's been posted for pfft. i can't blv the first chapter was released over a year ago LMAOOO i am so sorry. i do like this fic tho bc it's one of the easier ones to write and i go back to it sometimes between writing for dragon bkg lol. like i have the chapters all mapped out, all i have to do is sit down and write em. ch2's at abt 3k rn tho and i hit a spot where i'm like oof i dont wanna write these descriptions dfhdkfg it's just a silly goofy story with merbaku and dealing with some of the subtle intricacies of getting to know a mermaid. actually, fun fact, this originally started off as a fic for jotaro from jjba, back when i was in my jjba era. but then i went back to my bkg era and switched it over. i didn't even have to change much LMFAOO jotaro and bkg act the same sometimes. also!! this is the first fic where i'm like... drawing little doodles for each chapter!! and it's so nice but also i'm like damn wtf do i draw for the rest of these chapters.... i'll figure it out ig

4. loving all the parts of you — pro hero!bkg x reader

in which you learn to love all the prickly parts that make up bakugou katsuki

i.. don't think i've thought about this fic for a very, very long time. but i just scrolled thru the masterlist and stuff and i... really liked writing it (when i was focused on it anyways). it's one of my gentler fics tbh. it's more of a character study of bkg, exploring a different aspect of him in each chapter. tbh i need to go through and reread it and make edits so it can better match the writing style i have now, but i rly liked thinking abt what would make bkg tick as a pro and as a person. and tbh, with what i know now of the manga and anime i think i could go very deep with it pfft. also the banner i made for this fic is so cute LOL. it's not high on my priority list rn bc i have other things i wanna work on, but i do hope to return to it one day.

5. forget me not — pro hero!bkg x reader

When you first woke up, you found yourself in a white room, lights blinding you from all directions. A bit disoriented, you squinted and looked around, realizing you were chained to a chair, your arms locked behind you. In front of you was a poster of a man, muscles rippling throughout his body, a spiky mess of ash blond hair nestled on his head, and striking crimson eyes glaring right at you from behind a black mask. In the upper right corner was the name “DYNAMIGHT” in black and orange letters. As you observed the poster, the sound of a P.A. system suddenly rang into existence, the deep, hoarse voice of an unknown person echoing around you. “Your name is [Name] [Surname],” the voice said without emotion, “and you hate the man named Bakugou Katsuki.”

THIS FIC... THIS FCKIN FIC. i have so much i can say about this fic and i am so sorry for the oncoming ramble pfft. firstly, it's both my baby and my number one fucking enemy. like, holy shit i think it gave me the most paralyzing anxiety and bc of this it took me like 3-4 years to finish (apart from being generally busy of course). i started it literally while i was in high school n applying to college, so of course there are aspects of it that i look at now and i'm like mmm don't like that. not to mention there have been so many things that happened in the anime/manga that i wasn't able to add or delve deeper into!! like the war!! bkg's fcking trauma!! midoriya's quirks!! i was an anime only when i first started releasing chapters (and i still am), so i didnt know about the endeavor agency arc or anything so i defaulted to shit with best jeanist and idkidk.

if i could rewrite all of fmn, i think i would. or maybe not all, but a good chunk of it. like i'd condense the first few chapters probably. i also have a different grasp of bkg's characterization now compared to when i was younger lmao. putting bkg in that specific circumstance (iykyk, i wont spoil it) only happened bc of certain outside factors that forced him into that position. which was how i was able to justify it. but... idk. IDK!! this fic had so many things to it that i was not knowledgeable about so i winged a lot of things without doing proper research (i.e. hospitals, police investigations, general bureaucracy and whatnot) and i feel like this has caused certain plot holes that i am not able to detect, but like.... it's been so long already that i'm too lazy to fix it.

i just really wanted to write about having amnesia but... still having this muscle memory and ache of the person you were in love with. that you can fall in love with them all over again. but, jeez, i put the reader through so much that there's so much... trauma and brainwashing and just rhhrhjrkhrhgrkjg. she's a mess and a half!! and this makes it so difficult to read fmn bc she's so frustrating!! but! at the same time idk it was interesting exploring that kind of ptsd and recovery. i think at my core i love writing about truly heartwrenching topics and horror. i rmb i had the most fun writing about reader's nightmares or that one chapter where she was messing around with illusions. actually- one of the things i would change is the reader's fckin quirk and hero name LMAOOOOO what the fuck i made her so op i basically just smashed together dr strange's and wanda's powers for her pfft. i'd also tweak her personality a little, i think.

i digress. anyways. im in the process of editing all of fmn (just like. writing tweaks. changing the phrasing of certain sentences. adding more fluff to descriptions) and i can really see how much my style has evolved lol. like, i am the most happy and proud of the later chapters, where you can really feel certain emotions with bkg and reader. like... the beach scene, or the stakeout scene, or the party scene!! i think i would also add more substance to the investigation and how being a hero is like post-war. the antagonists as well!! there's just so much that could've been built on, but at the same time... i didn't want to go too deep into it bc i was writing an amnesia recovery story.

flaming aside, i am very glad i was able to pull those plot twists successfully LOL. i loved reading people's theories back when i was still updating it, seeing them question things and being like wait a minute... no way... it can't be... it was an era i will never forget pfft. but... because of that expectation i think i was very nervous to reveal specific things or even write the ending bc i didn't know if people would be satisfied lol. fmn was so complicated and for what sdfkjhs. fanfic shouldnt make you this anxious fr and yet there i was. i'm glad im done with it, but at the same time.. i do miss it.

tldr: fmn is the fic that i am the most proud of but also the most insecure LMFAOO. i do eventually want to get to the extra chapters from bkg's pov for it but... idk. i don't wanna even look at it right now sdhfskdfjsf

thank u all for coming to my ted talk B) i'm sorry if u've been tagged alr in this but here we go anyways!! no pressure tags: @earthtooz @call-me-ko @thecatduet422 @boo-kugo @theloveinc <3

[siriuslysatorusimping]

Your writing is always so well thought out and cohesive from start to finish and so I was wondering, how do you plot your stories? Especially how do you plot your storylines across an entire series? Do you have a routine or system in place for planning all the scenes and lines and whatnot for your fics?

How do I plot my stories??? UHHHHHHHHHH, BUCKLE UP. THIS IS GONNA BE A BUMPY RIDE. It's scattered as fuck. 😭😭😭 I've been drafting this response for two days 🫠🫠

It's a bit different each time. I'm literally just a ball of chaos, so it's difficult to get my thoughts in the right place.

There's a lot of drafting and rewriting, honestly. I'll try to get an initial draft down, and then I typically end up rewriting most of it. But the core elements will usually stay the same. Sometimes I'll keep dialogue or something I think is funny or clever. I have so many drafts and little blurbs. And I literally have a doc I titled 'dump doc' for every story, and I paste things into it as I rewrite portions so my ideas aren't gone forever, just in case lol.

For Another Level, I had a goal: get to canon. I knew my ending, I just needed to get there. Then, I knew certain milestones or touchpoints I wanted to cover: the first time they met, the beginning of their FWB, the first time she uses her double, her mother dying, training, her grade 1 exam, her first birthday without her mother, their first fight, meeting Megumi, Maki moving in with Rinko... Things like that. As the story progressed, other pieces began falling into place over time!

Establishing the big plot points and then figuring the small ones out as you go along is kinda of my vibe, I think.

Take the cookies for example: I threw those in as a random detail in Winter Lullaby, and then it just worked to include them as the story continued, and now I've fucking made the cookies IRL.

Physical Paradox is both easy and difficult because the end goal is obviously that they're gonna get married, right? But it's writing the little snapshots that I want to cover and deciding how things will work 🙃🙃

Essentially, what I've been doing lately is writing down an idea or two for a milestone or moment in their lives I want to cover and then trying to see where it flows from there. Like, the next installment is planned, I just need to write it. It's similar to Another Level because it's snapshots of important moments, not a seamless timeline of events, so that helps to plan things as well!

Gokudō is LITERAL FUCKING CHAOS, AND IT'S WHY I'M STRUGGLING AND HAVEN'T UPDATED IT IN SO LONG.

I have an end goal in mind now, but I haven't quite figured out how to get there yet. I'm still trying to determine the other big, important plot points that I want to establish and cover. The pacing is difficult with this too. I'm worried about it being too slow in some places and quick in others, so we'll see how this all turns out. 🫠 Especially since this is a story that's not supposed to have massive time skips, so I'm trying to make things cohesive so it's not too jarring!

I literally started the story with the idea of the first line: "What's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?" and just kinda ran with it as best as I could. But the setting changed multiple times.

TLDR: I start by determining the end goal and major plot points, and then I work on the little details from there!

DID THIS MAKE SENSE? OR DID I JUST RANT LIKE THE LIL RAMBLER I AM?

I HOPE THIS ANSWERS YOUR QUESTION! 😭💕😭

[lover-of-mine]

Hi Anna!!! 🥰

I wish I could pinpoint one set of lines from "we didn't happen the way we were supposed to (where do we go now?)" Honestly I loved every single word. It made me think about events a different way (from bucks pov for once) and damn.

Anyhoo I'd love the Director's Commentary on your favorite section of that fic pretty please? 🥰

Hi baby, I love that you asked about this fic oaksokasokas

Yk, my thing with that fic in particular is that I hit an "I need to think about how the cemetery felt for Buck", cuz you know me, I'm obsessed with that scene, but I always look at it from Eddie's side, and Eddie makes the decision that Buck is breaking up with him, and doesn't give him the choice, and when you look at the scene, Buck is begging for some sort of reaction from Eddie, but Eddie checked out because Eddie is a runner, so I really wanted to make Eddie confess on that and making Buck call him out on it. And also, I was having a "we give them too much credit when it comes to each other" moment because they misunderstand each other with important things, but since they are so in sync, it won't feel like they aren't in the same wavelength and that creates problems. The cemetery is very easy to use for that, but everything I chose to use on the fic really, the will reveal, Eddie leaving the 118, the grocery store, they are seeing the conversations in different ways. So I wanted those things they don't mention to be addressed while they are angry and hurting and, like, "but you did this" "yeah, because you said that" "i didn't mean it that way" and work up from there. I didn't fully have a goal when I started writing, I actually opened docs to work on the elevator fic that night lol, but then I saw this vision of them fighting, so I just wrote the beginning while trying to contextualize the feeling I wanted from it and then I wrote all of the dialogue up until when Buck kissed Eddie, all in one sitting, no descriptors, just the conversation.

My favorite bit there is actually when Eddie runs away from the kitchen after confessing (because I was already having the huh maybe move them from the kitchen for the getting together feelings lol, and the kitchen is a safe space for Eddie, so getting him out of there makes that tension more clear imo) and Buck is "if you do love me, just stop" because I felt like being called out like that was the only thing that was gonna make this Eddie stop, and that's such a raw thing to ask of somebody, like "please do something you don't want to just because I mean more to you than that" and the way Eddie is all "I'm not making the choice for you" and Buck is all "that's still making the choice for me dumbass" because they are in this place where it feels like Buck thinks he can't ask for more and Eddie thinks he's not enough, and they are taking the choice away from the other because of it, so that was a fun tension to play with while they were fighting. Also, I make it a rule pretty much when writing, to make Buck make the first move, be the first one to address it, to actually say the words, or just the make decision to kiss Eddie, because he never does start things, and I think he needs to, but I tried this with this story for like 5 minutes before deleting it all and making Eddie just say it in the middle of more stuff and Buck having to scramble to deal with it while they were still fighting was the way to go, because I wanted them both to be in a headspace where they think they'll have to take the fact that they love each other to the grave to not lose the friendship. I'm particularly obsessed with the “I can't ask for more of you.” “Everything is already yours!” exchange, because I feel like I really hit something there, Buck things he needs to settle for what he can get and Eddie thinks what he has is not enough, so. if they just said the words, things would move for them, but they just won't ask for what they want.

But I think there I was really thinking to myself "Do I write Eddie as too understanding? Am I making Buck a villain in the cemetery without considering how he's feeling? And do they really understand each other as well as we make it seem like?" It's why it starts right off the bat with the "you're exhausting" comment and escalates from there because things between them would be easier if they just said what they mean every once in a while.

Ask me for the “director’s commentary” on one of my fics?