#WIP ramble

[solibriewrites]

wippet (wip snippet)

happy wip wfriday everybody... was tagged by @60sec400; ty :)

i'm of two minds and want to post two snippets for two different unposted works; one of them is from jatp and the one under the cut is for omgcp because i can't get either one out of my head.

here's a piece of a time loop fic i've been working on-

It should be so easy. It’s a single motion. The twitch of a finger, really. The same motion she’s done ever since she was an infant on her mom’s lap, plunking away without a care in the world and letting discordant melodies run wild in her childhood home. But it isn’t. Julie can’t sit in her mom’s lap anymore. She never will again. The hole that’s sat in Julie’s chest every single day for ten months grows and grows until it’s all she is. Everyone’s gaze feels heavy like she’s trapped under the weight of the entire ocean. Their eyes burn into her back, watching, waiting for her to just start fucking playing. But there’s nothing to watch.

i'll tag @rozecrest and @cloudslooklikemountains!!! you should post a lil something. if you want. no pressure though :D

and here's the snippet for the jack therapy fic. yes my two [unposted] wips are about characters going to therapy (literally and metaphorically).

A boy comes in. And he is a boy—just a month shy of turning nineteen. Jack’s hair is dark brown, almost black. The pictures of him before all show him with longer, fluffier hair, but right now his hair is cut short and practical. His eyes are scarily blue. While not especially vivid, they’re piercing. But baby fat still clings to his cheeks and it’s heartbreaking, because she knows this boy was medically dead for fifteen minutes three weeks ago. He looks startlingly small for someone so tall and muscular. He’s nine years younger than her but towers over her, even when he sits down in the plush gray chair across from her, yet he carries himself like he’s a child. Almost-nineteen years old and he thinks he’s ruined his life forever. Angie hopes she can help him fix this.

i have a lot of Feelings about jack being barely 19 y/o when everything went down. can you tell. anyways if you read this wip too know that i'm mentally giving you a cookie

[foxfireink]

Hi! I found your blog when you reblogged my "how to writeblr" post but your WIPs all look super fascinating! If you have taglists, can you please add me to the ones for "Songs of Decay" and "Bards, Courts, and Changelings?"

Also please feel free to ramble about either of these WIPs, I'd love to hear more about them.

Wow, thank you for the ask! We have added you to our taglists! :D And we are soooo happy to ramble about Songs of Decay and Bards, Courts, and Changelings. This is Inkwell. I am gonna cover Songs of Decay, and Crooked Writer will cover BC&C in a part two post.

Be warned. This is a very long post. I had waay too much fun writing it, hahaha. Bards, Courts, and Changelings will be a much shorter post, as it is in an earlier stage of development.

Part One: Songs of Decay

A HISTORY OF THE PROJECT

This is definitely a 2020 project, hahaha. We wrote draft 1 in script format because it was an easy way to write intermittently. We pulled out board games like Arkham Horror (2nd Edition) and Betrayal at House on the Hill to help us add the eldritch elements and throw in some chaos. We tracked the insanity level of different characters through some of our scenes. Then, when we were done, we were so happy with the story that we wanted to DO something with it rather than it just being a hobby project… and we were like, "What if we actually turned it into an audio drama?"

Crooked Writer does voice acting, but neither of us had ANY experience with writing audio dramas. It was our lazy way of not converting to prose, but also trying something new!

We created draft 2 by having friends come read what we'd gotten done out loud. We would edit and write for two weeks, then gather online, divvy out parts for the night, and read through it. It gave us a lot of motivation to get through the draft! I personally am not the kind of person to sit in on someone's early writing project and read it out loud for an extended period of time on a consistent basis, and it still blows my mind that our friends wanted to do that with us. It was so much fun.

Now, a great deal of research and worldbuilding later, we have four seasons planned and are midway through writing draft 3 of season 1. :D

WORLDBUILDING

The story isn't straight cosmic horror, it's more flavored by the eldritch, and much more inspired by the board game Arkham Horror than Lovecraft. We have our own pantheon of Horrors who have different thematic elements and warp and corrupt in different ways. Technology is roughly equivalent to the 1910s, and eldritch Horrors have been threatening to end the world as we know it for centuries. We have four countries who approach the long-standing eldritch problem VERY differently:

Our setting country, Malgrave, has a "kill it with fire" approach. They have a specially trained corps of Stewards and an Eldritch Anomalies Department (the EAD) to handle things using mostly weaponry. Malgrave views eldritch corruption as an individual's choice to bring Horrors and Fiends (Horrors = world-ends-upon-arrival monsters, Fiends = smaller monsters) into the world and destroy/remake it, so laws tend to treat cults and such in a similar way to how you'd treat the mafia. The temptations are overpowering to many. You can't trust anyone completely.

Side note, because I love the Stewards: The Stewards have really fun political power dynamics, as they are supposed to keep the king's family from turning on him/protect the family, but also can't really contradict a royal, sooo it gets messy sometimes. They technically have the power to report or stop a royal that's corrupted, but just try doing that in practice and see how it goes. Stewards tend to be more subtle. They also die, a lot. The MC's father, Sam, is one of the few Stewards in living memory to retire from active duty. Pays well, though!

Eastcairn, Malgrave's other neighbor, uses augury - magical engineering - to create wards and automatons that are powered by protective patterns. These patterns slowly corrupt over time and must be maintained regularly, or they will amplify corruption rather than negate it. Eastcairn views corruption as a contagious miasma in the air and isolates eldritch outbreaks in sanatoria and asylums. There are many strains of corruptive virus, and most if not all are incurable by current science.

Logoria is Malgrave's neighbor to the left and uses patterns just like Eastcairn, but rather than using physical augury patterns they use mathematical patterns in music and dance to ward off corruption. They have trained singers and musicians and dancers, and choirs are common.

Not a ton of development on the fourth country, because it's farther away (only worldbuild the top of the iceberg, right?) but it has a protective martial art, a caste system based around the concept that corruption runs in family lines, and people there know what different kinds of corruptive influences/objects/presences smell like.

These varying perceptions pool together in our story, as Sam is from Eastcairn but worked in the Stewards in Malgrave and has a medley of views about the nature of eldritch corruption that often conflict with prevalent theories. Augury isn't well thought of in Malgrave, but both he and Tom practice it. The conflict of "eldritch corruption: illness or choice?" is central to the first two seasons of Songs of Decay (particularly the second).

CHARACTERS AND STORY (Season 1)

Tom moves into the very rural Malbury county because living too close to his far wealthier ex-wife will end with him losing custody of their daughter, Sara. His dad lives in Malbury county and is supposed to be living far away from all eldritch influence. However, Tom is appalled to see how rife the county is with cultists, corruption, and eldritch Fiends - such as the Moose that he and Sara run afoul of on the first day of school. Tom also has a past record that requires him to report to the EAD and means that the EAD could refuse to grant him an augury license, which is literally Tom's livelihood right now, SO Tom offers to help with local problems. In doing so, he trips into the plot of a local cult that centers on the estate of one Lady Esther Lambert, a widow with a grudge against the EAD. Esther married into one of the local noble families and is used to fighting for herself because no one else will. She throws an annual party at her house at the end of summer, but this time things go very poorly very quickly. Tom and Esther have to band together with other guests to stay alive and prevent the summoning of a greater Horror, but they don't know who to trust when you can't even rule yourself out as an enemy.

So, throughout Season 1 you've got Tom trying to be a good single parent, learning how to prep and cook three consistent meals a day while also getting drawn into fighting eldritch monsters and cultists. You have Sara, his daughter, who is trying to adjust to a lower class lifestyle, meeting a grandparent for the first time, and stressing about her dad putting himself in danger. You have Sam, who convinced his son to move to Belleview because he was worried about him, but also has so much corruption from his time in the Stewards that he is one poor decision away from snapping entirely. You have Chief Compton, a former city policeman and current head of the local EAD bullied into the role after the last chief died trying to contain an eldritch summoning. And you have Lady Esther, whose late husband's family literally built her house around the idea of summoning eldritch Horrors, and whose perception of the local EAD is so poor that she would rather fight off monsters with a shovel than call them in to help.

We are having a great time writing this story. :D The hope is to ultimately put it on YouTube, but we want to get the first two seasons ready before we get to that, as they contain the first major arc.

Okay, I am done now. If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! Again, really appreciate the ask, and absolutely delighted to be able to ramble away like this.

Cheers!

-Inkwell

Songs of Decay tag list: @hd-literature @pure-solomon @blind-the-winds @sarah-sandwich-writes @lucianinsanity @coffeewritesfiction @surroundedbypearls @tate-lin @ettawritesnstudies

[perasperaadastrawriting]

Oh and what if the next dress description in Ballad of Empires is going to be so beautiful complex but at the same time my favourite creation yet? The imperial gown with high neck collar or a deep plunging neckline without being sexualised or more but beautiful because it does not reveal much? The simple and yet flared and gentle embroidered sleeves and flared skirt?

Or the imperial gown which screams royalty? Beads and sash and soutache amidst rich embroidery and a headpiece. A gown with layers of tulle and yet elegant. Pearls and flowers of agate. A cape with broad shoulders made of several faint coloured layers of veils.

[len-the-neverending]

My current WIP

Time to ramble about my WIP for a bit to my three followers and whoever else stumbles upon this before I go back to my trigonometry homework.

It currently consists of three chapters on Wattpad and an outline, but hopefully I can get it to a more finished state by the end of this year. The basic premise is: it's a dystopian future in which anything, even murder, is acceptable for the sake of entertainment, and 24 teenagers have been signed up by their (shitty) parents for a reality show called Fight For Your Life (also the title of the work). The show is basically Survivor, but when you're eliminated, you die-- in the second draft I might make the structure of the game itself a little more original, but the borrowed structure works for now while I'm trying to get my plot out. Out of the 24, about 11 or 12 have major character focus, most of which make it past the merge: I'm experimenting with an omniscient 3rd-person POV structure so I can give all of them some time in the limelight and not make it super-obvious who's going to win. There is some commentary on the public's tendency to see real people as fictional characters: I have a scene planned for the end where the winner is being decided on by audience voting, and the final three is all like, "Yeah, no way that many people are willing to vote for someone to die: we didn't even like doing it and we didn't have a choice", and then they look at the vote counter and there are millions of votes. There is also commentary on parents basically owning their children in the eyes of the law: a lot of these parents only want fame or money, and they essentially sell their children to a corrupt reality TV network for it. There's 2 queer romantic pairings, 1 straight romantic pairing, and 1 major opposite-gender platonic pairing, the dynamics of which are basically (respectively): strong protective guy/smaller, less strong, very sweet guy, lovable annoying guy/person patient enough not to find him annoying, strategic smart girl/rather stupid guy who thinks she's a little intense but goes along with pretty much everything she says anyway, and kindhearted sensitive guy/devious manipulative girl who only cares about herself and also him. I'm really excited about it: hopefully I manage to keep my motivation.

[nikkywrites]

happy STS! (I've never done this before)

tell us about the WIP you're currently obsessing over..

Happy STS!! Welcome :D Thanks for stopping by. This ended up being a ramble about Celeste’s obsession entirely by accident. Still counts, though?

Technically it’s Masks and Trust at the moment, but I think my obsession is about to shift. Let’s ramble a little about Celeste and Vega, though. They are my babies and they pair together so well and I love them.

Something I noticed when gathering up picrews to give people an idea of how they look (because I’ve yet to share anything really, aside from a single photo in their character intros) — is what they both did with their hair post-quitting being a hero/villain and how their definition of freedom with it is not the same. Because they both change it because they finally have the time/freedom/energy to do so. Celeste always has longer hair and she never considers cutting it short until she quits and chops it off on impulse and likes it. Vega keeps hers… mid-length? Like, shoulder-ish length, give or take (maybe?), and after quitting, she grows it out.

She has a lot of hair and Celeste is obsessed with it (need to write something with that actually because it’s a Thing) and they get into a groove of Celeste brushing/braiding/whatever Vega’s hair if she’s stressed or nervous. It’s just super calming for her and Vega is not at all opposed to it (aka she loves it. Why manage her own hair when she has a girlfriend to do it for her?). She’s actually really good at it and Vega doesn’t understand how she can do a nice bun because hers always come out super messy (I’m not projecting there at all, why would you think that). And if they’re going on a fancy date, unless it’s a surprise, she’s 100% doing Vega’s hair because she’s better with it.

She definitely forces Vega into better hair care, though it takes Vega a while to notice it. Pre-Celeste she just does the minimum. Keeps it brushed, uses a random shampoo/conditioner she chose based on scent, doesn’t think about it too much. But post-Celeste, she has a handful of products and a schedule and fancy shampoo and conditioner (god, I’m going to need to do hair care research because it’s a thing that Celeste will have done research about. Celeste, why are you like this? I didn’t write you to be obsessed with your girlfriend’s hair. It’s not a personality trait). Like. She gives Vega a whole Routine and I should probably write when she realizes because she’ll just be… idk putting in oil or gel or whatever and just. Have an epiphany about the effort she’s putting in that she never has before and never would have started doing on her own. She’ll call Celeste out for tricking her into it but Celeste won’t know what she’s talking about because she wasn’t trying to be sneaky. It was obvious. She laughs at Vega for not noticing. Vega’s hair becomes shinier and softer thanks to Celeste, which worsens the obsession with it. It’s a cycle.

And Vega regarding Celeste’s hair — she loves it too, and if Celeste’s hands are shaking too much or she’s not… present/focused enough (she’s got Trauma, poor baby), she’ll do tiny little braids in her hair but that’s about all that can be done. She might play with it, twist it in her fingers when they’re cuddling, to define the loose curls she already has. Actually scratch that, no might about it, she will play with her hair. It’s soothing for both of them.

Did not mean to ramble about their hair (mostly Vega’s. Curse you, Celeste. Have a hobby that isn’t your girlfriend’s hair challenge) ((She’ll fail)).

[somanywips]

I hate that planned obsolescence is starting to reach fandoms. I hate that fandoms are starting to die after two, three years, I hate that whenever you stop getting content that means the fandom will die and be gone.

I need people to stop trying to brush off old interests as being 'cringe' as soon as you lose interest, or worse: make it seem like it's imoral to like something that they themselves held so dear before.

Fandoms are meant to last for years and years, the moment content stops being created is the moment we truly thrive because we keep creating the content ourselves the way we love it and expand on the things that are already there for us.

I don't care if you lost interest on something, it's fine and normal even, but stop trying to blame and make fun of people who still do love the fandom and the content and the things we can create.

I need people to enjoy fandom again

[ilovedthestars]

there really are few emotions i find more compelling in a story than "you should be afraid of me. please don't be afraid of me"

[salamispots]

dream wip

[dramamines]

If this post gets 10k notes I'll finish writing my entire comic

[unit-ssn0va]

[gloriousfckingpurpose]

i know they underutilized the frankenstein aspect in the movie but it really does feel like the creature was perfectly created for lisa regardless. from what we saw, he spent his whole life lonely; dead parents, isolating social life, failed romantic prospects, the whole shebang, but he never gets to do anything about it because he dies, suddenly and unstoppably. until he’s suddenly alive again and the whole world is different but there’s this girl who tended to his grave when nobody else would have given him that respect, who’s experiencing the same things he did who actually has the chance to get back at the people who didn’t care for her, one tiny bit of familiarity to him… of course he’s going to kill for her just to see her happy.

[solibriewrites]

WRITING DOWN BEFORE I FORGET! HOO AU WHERE INSTEAD OF GAEA THE CONFLICT IS THAT THE MIST IS FADING. not a war just a thing where mortals are in danger of learning that gods are real.

like…greek myth monsters loved harming normal humans. maybe the mist also has the effect of keeping monsters focused on mortals; when it starts fading, mortals start getting injured, so they NEED to fix it ASAP.

the cj/chb conflict is less blatant. they have to work together at least on a communicative level (the swap does still happen i think).

i was thinking about this as i passed out last night so 🫶🏼

[acadieum]

up to no good.. 🤫

[agent-gladhand]

Currently being sent every plague imaginable (I've been sick for a week which is longer than I've been sick in years, so I am in fact dying a slow death), but still working on some goods! Preview mockup for the submas acrylic standee featuring my good friend angst.

[len-the-neverending]

I feel like rambling about my WIPs today, possibly because I'm overflowing with creativity but cannot fucking write, so here goes.

So there's 2. The first one is called I Didn't Sign Up for This, and it's currently in the editing phases-- hopefully soon I can start a second draft of it. It's a realistic YA-type thing about Sasha, my main protagonist, accidentally replacing a boy at her new school who died three weeks before she got there and leading the sustainability club that he started. It's definitely still got a lot of kinks to work out, but I'm getting there. There's a lesbian love triangle at the center of it, featuring Sasha, Julia the eccentric and angsty sister of the dead boy, and Zoe, who is an outwardly confident and carefree outcast with a ton of secrets who is to this date my favorite character I have ever written. I'm not totally in love with it right now because it's a first draft that I've been working on for three years and there's a lot wrong with it, but I definitely could be someday.

The second is called The First, which I'd define as magical realism, centered around five high school seniors, once best friends, who are stuck in a time-loop-limbo sort of thing until they can find out how the sixth member of their group died. I'm only six chapters in and I'm still figuring out what the plot's going to look like, but the characters are everything to me already. There's my main narrator Arlo, who's a burned-out gifted kid with unresolved trauma surrounding the other members of the group and unresolved bisexuality that she definitely has not figured out yet, her ex-best friend Kimber, who's kind of the leader of the group and also the one who Arlo has a totally-not-sapphic-at-all-really-why-would-you-ever-call-it-that dynamic with, and who may or may not have committed some class B felonies, Kimber's new best friend Lev, my anxious gay disaster boy who I absolutely do not project on at all, Phoenix the nice-enough hippie kid with dark secrets and a mysterious feud with Arlo, and his girlfriend Thea, who I've spent countless nights trying to psychoanalyze because there is *a lot* wrong with her. I want to finish it so badly so I can write about these five some more, but alas, I can't.

There's also a few other ideas that I desperately want to write but probably shouldn't because I have too many projects, but that's a post for another day.

[blackkatmagic]

No more fics where the villain was "framed" or "good all along and just misunderstood". This year I want terrible villains who are forced by circumstances to be good guys, and they go kicking and screaming and wailing the whole way but by god if they have to pull for the heroes they are going to look at least six times as stylish while doing so.