#anyways this is me telling you all to read my trans Max fic

[dr-lizortecho]

for the fic asks 3, 8, 9, 16, 21, 23, 28, 30

What’s something you learned about yourself as a writer?

I don’t know that I did 😂 maybe that I can be even slower with updating than before?

Did you write for a new fandom or ship this year?

I tried my hand out at Liz Ortecho/Anatsa Mufaro as well as dekvecho (as you know, lol) and of course I wrote my first ever Max Evans/Alex Manes fic (so tapping into even rarer pairs in the world I already stan so many rarepairs in)

What fic meant the most to you to write?

Easily, without a question it was and the winter passed and the sun shine upon her, my trans Max fic (though Treading Water is my baby and therefore an honorable mention)

What were you go-to writing songs?

I don’t use writing songs, that’s too much noise

Share your favorite piece of dialogue

From as long as the sea is bound to wash upon the sand, cause the kyliz banter was such fun to write

And Kyle grins wickedly, “oh, wow. Of course you’re all flustered by a half fish guy. It’s the science isn’t it.”

“No,” Liz rolls her eyes.

“Is it cause he’s tall?” Kyle teases. “Or cause you watched him flop around like a fish out water while butt naked.”

Liz swats his arm, “stop.”

Share the final version of a sentence or paragraph you struggled with. What about it was challenging? Are you happy with how it turned out?

From cause this is my game and you better come to play

She leans all of her weight onto one arm, muscle bulging from the effort, so she can cup his chin with her left hand. Nails indenting his skin as she captures his mouth in a searing kiss, the scrape of his stubble against her palm creating enough sensation he’s floating. Hips bucking up into her thigh, chasing pleasure as she slides her tongue into his mouth. The kiss is slow and dirty. Her tongue seems to pull the air out of his lungs, before abandoning him completely, leaving him gasping as she pulls his lip between her teeth.

Transitions! What can I tell you- also, just the action scenes required to make a smut scene work, without letting Max’s pov get overly poetic and long winded? Difficult at best. But mostly this was the result of cutting down my blatant Liz thirst in this fic

How did you recharge between fics?

I read other fic! Also, just watch brainless television

What’s something that you want to write in 2024?

I’m hoping to get a slowburn kaliz fic under my belt soon (also… messing around with the idea of a Machelle multi-chapter fic where I’m the only reader, lmao)

2023 in review (fic asks)

[ladykailitha]

WIP Wednesday Game

It’s WIP Wednesday, time for a little accountability, sharing your work, and getting a kick in the pants.

Here’s how it works:

In a reblog (or new post w/ rules attached), post up to five (5) filenames or specific AUs your WIPs; not titles, filenames (eg werewolf AU, unnamed mafia omegaverse, or Steve's Rizz vs Eddie's Zero Filter.)

Post a snippet from one of them. Snippet must be words you wrote in the last 7 days. We’re posting progress here. If you haven’t made any, go make some and come back to post!

After you’ve posted, people can send you an ask with one of your file names. You must then write at least 3 sentences in that file. If the filename is one you can't share from (for example, an event fic), write 3 sentences on it anyway, and then 3 more on another to share.

That’s it! You can invite others to join in, or just post. If you tag me in your post, I will send you an ask request!

If you’re reading this, you’re invited!

If you see someone posting a WIP Wednesday Game snippet, send them an ask! Make them write.

My only problem is that I tend to file name what the title is so I can find it easier, so...here’s what they were called before I titled them.

“File” Names

Nanny AU

Stripper AU

Sugar!Baby AU

Game Show AU

Olympic Swimmer AU

Snippet

From the game show AU! Can you tell this is on a streaming service like Max or Netflix lol?!

“Hey, everyone!” Bob said. “Welcome to a brand new season of ‘Love Connection’ where we help lonely people make that special connection. This season we will be focusing on getting all those fancy letters LGBTQ+ a chance at love. We have your gays, your lesbians, your non-binary folks, your trans people, and one very special ace lady just looking for love.”

The audience politely clapped.

“I’m your host Bob Newby and today we have one very lucky catch. Steve Harrington from Hawkins, IN. He’s a middle school teacher who recently became a cat dad, to the adorable Odie.” A picture of Odie sleeping on Steve’s chest under his chin is shown on the screen behind them. “He coaches basketball and the swim team. And yes he does look hot in a Speedo!” A picture of Steve in a blue Speedo and wearing a white jacket and his whistle.

Steve decided he was going to murder Robin and/or Chrissy for that photo alone. Especially when the crowd goes wild, complete with wolf whistles.

“He enjoys watching sports, swimming, and reading in his spare time,” Bob continued. “He has tried everything to get a partner in this hellscape we call modern life, apps, bars, clubs and not just the ones with a dance floor and sick beats. So he came to us, so let’s see if we can match him to any of our suitors.”

It's that great and wonderful time of the week again! WIP Wednesday!

The game runs from 8am-11pm EST.

Send in as many asks as you want as often as you want.

@mira-jadeamethyst @zerokrox-blog @forgottenkanji @w1ll0wtr33 @thesecondfate

@acingthecounts @beelze-the-bubkiss @just-a-tiny-void @kultiras @niniel-karenine

@dreamercec

[scenetocause]

Twenty Questions for Fic Writers 💫

i got tagged by @verycoolwearsleather and now i have to pretend i have a writing process haha

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

it says 52 but there's actually a lot more due to orphaning/anon-ing things.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

345,519 but again i'm not sure how much tha's counting

3. What fandoms do you write for?

gross f1 twinks

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

just telling it like it is (lando/maxv)

pretty sure this is just cus it's the oldest fic i have since the account reboot because it absolutely does not merit being anywhere near the top 10 lol it's just a 5+1 about other mando being obvious (it's anon'd cus i got bored of a load of my fics and didn't want them as part of the emptyhalf canon anymore)

every colour illuminates (george/lando)

for something i started writing offhand cus some of my friends were saying there should be more trans men in f1 fic, this one sure grew legs. i'm still insanely moved by the comments it gets and the way it seemed to resonate with people. i'm not sure i can really convey how dumb i actually am in a way that'd make people believe me but i really did just write this on vibes and it's one of the things i can say i'm genuinely glad i did. idk, it's just queer porn really but maybe we need more of that.

(i) just wanna get a little bit closer (mando)

you know i don't even think this is close to my best mando fic (personal choice is no plans of staying on) so there's no accounting for taste and you absolutely should practice death of the author or whatever. anyway, it's mando cohabitation era boundary breakdown stuff where they fuck and then go on a date about it.

shoreline i see when i'm off course (loscar, mando)

people rly are thirsty for a/b/o huh. how'd this little fic get into the top five so quickly?

the usual, upside down (alex/george/lando)

literally THEE most head empty omegaverse threesome fic in history y'all are horny as fuck. it literally only got written bc george did some dumb insta post where he called lando and alex his mates and also then was walking around looking horny af in the black fireproofs and mask when he stood in for lewis. there is NO nutritional content here even by the fast food standards of emptyhalf fic.

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

i uh. i should. i would like to but my brain is quite severely broken. i do read them all and i bookmark a lot in open tabs to come back to and reply to because they mean a lot but then i have 6000 tabs open and no executive function.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

we don't do that here. i guess maybe if you dig into the far distant past then it was probably i'm not just a fuck up, i'm the fuck up you love which is 18k words of jev not really getting over daniel that ends on a sort of optimistically blasted-open note.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

most of them are happy but probably actually pick me up, no headlights where george and max end up with their weird little family worked out and the kids are doing well, y'know

8. Do you get hate on fics?

no i don't think enough people read them to beef me lol

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

hahahaha oh yea. i like to think i write something along the lines of realistic queer sex, with the way that means it's mostly kind of funny and sometimes awakward and isn't elegant or arch or even particularly romantic except that you're getting to do it with the person you do it with. writing lando and oscar being straight with each other, even if it's in a cringe fail way, made me realise i really do not write straight people and i feel a bit like one of those painfully hetero actors who does a gay kissing scene and talks about how they had to get themselves in the mindset by watching the l word or whatever haha. what do straight people do? who are they?

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

i was gonna say no but then i remembered i wrote logan and oscar going ghosthunting and being kinda pass-agg horny about it because. idk? logan gave me ryan bergara vibes.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

i think someone reposted some of mine awhile ago and it got dealt with before i really knew anything about it idk

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

i don't know tbh. someone made a podfic of one of my fics a way back.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

yeah i used to do that quite a lot but now. i am a lone wolf. (too perverse for other people's minds)

14. What’s your all-time favourite ship?

jenson/lewis but society has never been ready for this

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

i don't. i don't wanna let doubt enter into it but my daniel goes to fe fic is up against a number of the dark souls boss level demons in my own brain 😔

16. What are your writing strengths?

uh. i uh. i can write on my phone? i have a relaxed attitude to whether what i write is any good at all? i don't actually think i really have any.

people quite often say i have a lot of emotional intelligence in my fics which is very funny to me because i am a deeply unemotionally intelligent person so idk how that's happened really.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

look we could be here all day.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

i guess it has never bothered me so long as the reader could be reasonably expected to work out the meaning from the context.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

cardcaptor sakura (i was 14)

20. Favourite fic you’ve written?

hmmm. in terms of thinking it's like, good or whatever it's probably don't say no or you'll have to go, the fucked up valtteri/george mutual seat envy/horror of being compared to lewis hamilton thing. or really, it's an old spy au fic called ten seconds before sunrise that i deleted ages ago so: sorry about that.

but favourite is probably some dumb mando shit or i have extreme recency bias so maybe logan and oscar go ghosthunting or whatever. oh wait, no, it's genders maxy the how-to-find-your-identity-post-racing-in-your-pussy treatise that was born of crack but ended up. no, it's still crack. anyway, classic emptyhalf shit tbh.

[pochapal]

rank every year of the 2010s from best to worst i want some pochapal lore

[warning for discussion of my fucked up mental health and my myriad traumas. we’re really opening the pandora’s box here gang]

ok time for me to overshare on the internet again! super long post because i can’t shut up and you asked for it. anyway, by objective ranking: 

#1: 2012 - halcyon era, my personal peak. spent the whole year writing hunger games oc fics with my deviantart fanfiction besties whom i still think about all the time and always hope are having the best possible day. if you were here for this era understand i still hold you so closely and dearly in my heart <3. 

#2: 2013 - god i was such a good example of a human being back then. was the year my writing like actually took off and i had a healthy balance between creative stuff and a social life (said social life consisting of spending lunchtimes at school breaking into classrooms and discussing fandom shit with five other people. reading homestuck updates in the music room on one person’s really shaky mobile data...legendary). highlight of the year and maybe my life was in the april of 2013 when i got out of failing to submit a hard deadline essay by telling my english teacher i wrote a whole novel over the two week break and then producing said novel. god i wish i had that level of like. fucking confidence back me back then knew what i wanted and how to get it. 

#3: 2010 - the last year of childhood. i was 12 and played pokemon all the time with my friends and went places and had a moderately successful youtube channel and it didn’t matter that i was bullied so badly at school because i was basically high off life. summer of 2010 was so good specifically. i’d used to get the bus with a friend and go see movies and break into historical sites and get into normal childhood mayhem and maxed out my pokewalkers twice a month and i was buzzed because i had two (2) whole friendship groups to choose from and that was such a huge deal to me the terminal social outcast. it was so simple and carefree and even though everything and everyone involved in this era grew up to suck except for one specific person i kinda really miss it.

#4: 2018 - this was the first year i wasn’t depressed to the point of nonfunctioning. it was 20gayteen, i was on antidepressants, i was as close to thriving as i got at uni (going into town with people once a week, attending art and culture events, getting good grades across the board), i started to write for fun again, i got my cat whom i love dearly, i was exhibited in my uni’s city’s literature festival, GOD i actually nearly attended a pride event that year can you imagine. this year was basically my life’s second peak. miss getting the 8am train and daintily sipping on a cherry coke to keep me from passing out. wish this time could have lasted longer.

#5: 2019 - kinda absolute middle of the road year not for lack of anything happening but because the overwhelming amount of good and bad things cancelled each other out. so like there’s the fact that i was at the top of my uni game this year, was basically making the first steps into a professional writing career (covid i will never forgive you for killing all that dead </3), finally saved up enough to buy myself a gaming pc, and the summer after the homestuck epilogues, but equally 2019 was the start of the Pochapal Gender Fiasco which is by far the most horrible thing i am still currently undergoing and i burnt myself out mentally about halfway through the year (being stuck overnight in a hospital for a panic attack absolutely horrible horrible irredeemable) and then got like super death plague flu that i was sick with for three months (literally recovered less than a month before rona hit. god’s cruel karma.). so like...it kind of averaged out? the good shit was good but not as great as other years and the bad shit was awful but nowhere near as terrible as it could have been. gotta give a shoutout to 90% of my current mutual cohort for following me in 2019...omelette route gang make some noise !!

#6: 2014 - oof. this year essentially marked the start of a four year long downward mental health spiral because everything fell into awful alignment. i’d just turned 16, finished secondary school, had all my friends up and ditch me at once, was home alone for a whole summer, and was hit with Sudden Intense Body Image Issues that i couldn’t explain until uh. after very recent developments lmao. this one goes out to the me of july 2014 who did nothing but lay in bed and listen to the same two marina albums on a loop because fuck i’m attracted to men and also my facial and body hair are really starting to come in and if i think about this for too long i will literally kill myself because oh god i can’t handle getting older which is clearly and definitely the issue going on here. my brain fucking broke super hardcore and it’s a miracle that an overeating disorder was like the worst thing i walked away with. 

#7: 2015 - downward spiral year two!! i was so volatile this year it was such a mess. i was totally socially isolated after a brief stint of falling in with a group of people at the start of my first year of sixth form until january where in quick succession a) it turned out every single one of these people was friends with the person who sexually assaulted me whom i obviously had a lot of complicated feelings towards and b) baby’s first crush came out as bisexual but in the “women and also trans women” kind of way which tore me up so terribly in ways i couldn’t begin to understand. no words for the experience of seeing a girl kiss a boy and crying so hard at night you threw up because you could never be her no matter how much you wanted it. actually kinda get the sense what was going on there was bigger than just some crush lmao. then after that i was so mentally ill i basically attended school less than half the time and it was the only year in my life i failed my exams. i ended up having to resit my entire set of first year a level exams because jesus christ was i in such a bad way it was a miracle i even showed up to them. all i did was either have anxiety attacks or enter bedbound depressive slumps for weeks at a time. but it’s okay because it gets worse.

#8: 2016 - downward spiral act iii: the spiralling. prefacing this by saying that i actually had two whole good months (april - may) in that i was functioning enough to do my exams and finish school with decent grades. the rest was super extra mega terrible. my school attendance for year 13 dipped below 65% and literally the only thing that kept me from being kicked out was the fact that i was naturally smart at the subjects i took and also because the school would have a lot to answer for after letting me get to that state despite having a hefty file on how damaged i was. keep in mind every single part of this was fully untreated btw - i was just floundering around and letting it all fester. i spent three solid weeks going to school but locking myself in the bathroom all day every day and having mental health episodes then going home like nothing else happened only to continue the breakdown that night. then things got kicked into fucked up overdrive when i moved out to uni and was cut off from what little support structures i did have. it was so bad all i did was cry all the time and never went anywhere to the point where three separate sources recommended me to the wellbeing and crisis counselling service that i stopped going to after two sessions because i was fucked up in ways cbt techniques could not even touch. at least i tried to make an effort for the first two months of uni which like. good for me?

#9: 2017 - what lieth at the base of the spiral. helltrench year. i was at literal rock bottom. i stopped going to class, i didn’t hand in a single piece of work. i lied to my parents and would book trains each day only to go back to my student flat and sit there and contemplate suicide. like i would just slump on the floor in a catatonic state and vividly contemplate one of four or so ways i could end my own life. i only didn’t because i wanted to wait until the summer to collect my last student loan and transfer it to my parents as an apology for my death which obviously didn’t end up happening. honestly i can’t remember much of the first half of 2017 that’s how bad it was. i remember taking a gender studies class and the teacher made it Weird that i was the Only Male Student in the room and then she sent me a scolding email after i walked out halfway through a class and never returned. apparently i got into a lot of online discourse in this year but i don’t remember anything other than being put on a blocklist by the milkfic author over ace discourse which is funny if you have the context. mostly i just baited terfs and weirdo freaks to get them to say horrible things to me as what i guess amounts to some kind of digital self harm. anyway breaking point came in late august when i got kicked out of university and then nobody could ignore it any more so there was no choice left but for me to seek out help and recover enough to function which luckily i did. i really Do Not remember 2017. you could tell me anything about that year and i’d probably believe you.

#10: 2011 - extra circle of hell for this little fucked up gem of a year. on the surface it wasn’t actually that terrible, until the Summer 2011 Domino Effect Of Bad Shit. up until like may/june it was a pretty all right year! i was 13 and had a surprisingly successful youtube channel uploading pokemon soundfont remixes to an audience of i think ~350-400 subscribers at my peak? anyway then i got hit with the early summer triple combo of childhood friends moving away, cute and quirky sexual assault at the hands of a person in my friend group, and then having some Really Great and Super Appropriate interactions with adults on deviantart. like obviously there’s the actual ptsd-inducing event which totally disrupted and killed the person i was right up until that moment and reshaped every facet of my life for better or worse (there’s an alternate timeline where that didn’t happen and i got into electronic music and/or coding instead) but really it’s the events that followed in its wake which were kind of more fucked up. so like all of a sudden i was super aware of my body and me growing my hair out and being mistaken for a girl in class suddenly became this Less Innocent thing and i ended up spending hours overnight going to transgender questioning forums and looking up hrt timeline videos and having the wikipedia article on tracheal shaving saved because it was a life raft to me whose voice was imminently gonna deepen and i was simultaneously reeling with constant trauma flashbacks and the whole thing was so so fucked up. then i was on deviantart and i don’t remember exactly how but a small group of furry guys ten to fifteen years older than me started messaging me and encouraging and requesting me to produce nonsexual fetish stuff for them and talking to me about stuff like if i’d ever thought about growing up to be gay and i didn’t think anything of it for a long while because they called me a very talented writer and it felt so good to have someone be nice to me after being so alone and isolated for months on end. anyway the only reason i got out of that before it got bad was because they invited me to one of the big furry sites and i was weirded out because i thought it was a porn site and thinking about sexual stuff was a huge trauma trigger so i just ended up blocking them all and pretending like it didn’t happen. at the time half this shit didn’t bother me but in retrospect holy fuck 2011 was such a damaging year. to think if like three events didn’t happen i wouldn’t be the fucked up mess you see before you today.

god fuck this turned out super long but i’m not apologising because this was a therapeutic exercise for me and also constitutes as one of the biggest pochapal lore dumps of all time. come get your food or whatever.