#but i have a lot of unfinished shit that i can get primos from | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stevethehairington · 4 years

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Tagged by: the lovely @scimitar-and-longsword 💕💕

Name(s): my name is Mack, and if this also includes like usernames too then my ao3 is macksdramaticshenanigans and obviously yall can see my tumblr url lol. i have a fandom twitter but i hate twitter so i barely go on it lmao.

Fandom(s): oh boy haha this is a loooong list. as of right now, the main fandoms i’m involved in are The Old Guard and Trust FX, but in the past i’ve written for Skam, Marvel, Good Omens, Love Simon/Simon vs., Shameless, and IT. and ofc there are some fandoms i have not written for that i casually enjoy as well.

Where you post: all my fics are posted on ao3! or are sitting in my wips folder lol. i’ve ocsasionally posted some snippets of writing here to tumblr, but none of those are like full on, proper fics, mostly just me rambling off some thoughts i had about whatever characters in whatever scenarios

Most Popular One Shot (by kudos): Imagine Being Loved By Me (918 kudos) ((so close to 1k holy shit!!!! if it got to 1k i think i’d actually die of happiness omg)) this is my Good Omens smut fic lmfao, crowley is fantasizing and aziraphale makes it a reality skgjsd. i’m actually pretty damn pleased with how this one turned out, and i never expected it to get that many kudos so that makes me ridiculously happy sfjgfg. (and also podfixx made a podfic of this fic which made me INSANELY happy like that is the coolest thing ever)

Most Popular Multi-Chapter (by kudos): I Have Hella Feelings For You (697 kudos) ahhh this one!! this one is actually my very first ever chaptered fic!! it’s a skam fic, and i have the most distinctive memory of me sititng in my dorm bed freshman year of college, furiously typing away at my laptop everyday for a week because i somehow managed to post a chapter every day until it was finished, which meant i was writing a new chapter everyday. like damn, i really peaked with that huh? lmao

Favorite story you’ve written so far: ahh okay not to like. toot my own horn kgfldg but this question is HARD bc i have a lot of favorites. i’m going to pick a favorite from each of my main fandoms i’ve written for because i’m an Indecisive Hoe okay fdjdf.

- From Marvel: Just Called To Say I Love You this one is my wrong number stucky fic and i actually adore this one so much, and also it actually ended up being WAY more popular than i expected it to? like i was lowkey shook by how many people liked it

- From Skam: If You Love Me, If You Hate Me so. about this one. it’s probably my favorite skam fic that i’ve written. but. it also is the utter bane of my existence bc this is the one and only fic i have ever written and posted that i haven’t fnished gskgjfdlfs. it’s going on soon to be a little over 2 years of sitting on my account as an unfinished wip, but i REFUSE to mark it as abandoned bc i really genuienly DO want to finish it, i just havent written for this fandom in a while and inspiration/motivation is tricky yknow? but anyways. this fic is my soccer au!! it was a gift for a secret santa exchange i believe to a dear friend of mine and i still feel awful that i never finished it but. one day!!

- From Love Simon/Simon vs.: Where I Like You Best i am actually obsessed with this one. is that weird to say about your own fic? i enjoy reading a good soulmate au, but writing them has always been SO daunting to me bc i never feel like my ideas are original enough or like things that havent been done a lot for that trope. but for this one!!! omg i found the BEST prompt for it and it fit these characters SO well and i wrote it and i ended up absolutely loving how it turned out, and i was so proud of myself for writing a pretty successful soulmate au.

- From Shameless: Wooden Floors, Walls, and Window Sills so this one was my second ever gallavich fic, and it’s probably my favorite because i think it’s the best characterization i got of them in all of my fics, and good characterization is one of the most important things to me when i write fic.

- From IT: To What We Might Do is my favorite reddie fic i’ve written! i definitely projected onto richie a teeny tiny bit in it for some parts lmfao, but yeah idk i just love how this one turned out a whole lot, and i enjoyed how i ended it too (esp since endings can be very difficult for me lol). ((BUT also a special shoutout to my fic Imagine Me and You, I Do bc that one is just pure fluff and i adore the concept of someone being just so absolutely in love with someone doing something so incredibly simple and it just rocks their world)

- From Good Omens: I Want To Know What Love Is (did i use the most cheesy title ever? absolutely. do i love it? absolutely.) anyways this fic is one where crowley the demon experiences love and promptly thinks he’s dying.

Fic you were nervous to post: ooh, i mean i’m always pretty anxious about any fic i post because i never know if it’s going to be recepted well or if people are going to like it or hate it or if anyone is even going to read it or repsond to it. especially if the fic is a gift for someone, because i just really want that person to like it yknow? but yeah idk if theres one in particular i was more nervous to post than any others... i guess maybe any smut fic? just bc i never know if the smut is even any good lol

How do you choose your titles?: eaaaaasy, i usually pick song lyrics lol, ocassionally i’ve used lines from a poem, and a few times i’ve gone with a pun, but mostly it’s song lyrics. i usually find a song with lyrics that i think will fit, or if there’s a particular song that vibes well with the fic or that i listened to repeatedly while writing the fic i’ll try to pick the best lyric from that one.

Do you outline?: yes and no lol. it honestly depends. sometimes i outline extensively, but other times i just sit in front of a doc and let whatever happens happen.

Complete: on my ao3 account i have 80 works completed (will be 81 once i finally finish that one single unfinished wip i have posted gahhh). but i know in my wips folder i have a at least one finished fic that i have not and probably will not post. there are also some other things in my wips folder that like technically could be conisdered finished too, but it’s not up to my posting standards so until i fix it so it is it’ll just sit there lol.

In-Progress: honestly there are too many to count lol. i have a shiiiiiit ton of wips (as yall will know if you saw that one ‘tell us about ALL your wips’ tag game post that was going around that i did lol).

Coming soon/not yet started: tbh see above answer bc it’s pretty much the same lol.

Prompts?: so the thing about prompts is that i would LOVE to take them, but it’s very very tricky bc i’m a super specific kind of gal and if i don’t vibe with the prompt it’s very difficult for me to write anything for it. but then there’s also the fact that inspiration/motivation are fickle bitches and they come and go as they please and so taking prompts is hard bc i never know if the stars will align and all that jazz for me to be in the ~ right mood ~ to work on a prompt. this is the exact reason why i have SO MANY sitting in my inbox right now, and i feel so bad for just letting them sit there but ughhh brain function?? how?? lol

Upcoming work you’re most excited about: sooooo i don’t necessarily have any specific works in progress right now (i’ve been so busy lately that writing has been the last thing on my mind and so i haven’t touched anything in weeks) but. i guess if i can ever get my shit together and finish the primo fic i’m close to finishing i’m pretty excited to post that! or honestly if i can actually get myself to finish any of the tog wips i have i’d be suuuper excited to post any of those bc i have not yet posted any tog fics!!

anways!! if you made it to this point thanks for sticking w me and reading through my long winded rambly answers lmao

Tagging: @peachykoya @wandering-scholar-lad @raynertodd @cluelessheroes @pinesboi @thewolvesrunwild @1derspark

#tag game #my wips #mack writes

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spectrogramblog · 8 years

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The Id of L.A.

“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West”…those are the first lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven. When the band would come into town, they would take over two entire floors of the Hyatt Sunset. It was coined, appropriately enough, the “riot house”. Its hallways and suites adorned by groupies and cocaine, sex and parties. What else is new in a town infamous for excess? Was this heaven? Not exactly a celestial kingdom, but, Los Angeles, the City of Angels, has had its share of both luminaries and would be stars among its population.

A continuous renewal and recycle of street corner prophets, backroom political dealmakers, and rock star poets. The city of Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Biddy Thompson, Kenneth Hahn, and even George Lopez. Shamans, poets, politicians, jokers. Their talent and fortitude have created legends. Heroes to some, nuisances to others, these Angelenos personify the City of Los Angeles. Bicultural before the term even existed. These Angelenos have had their feet in the sand, their heads in the clouds, their faces to the wind, their hands in the “masa”. Their hearts are the center of Los Angeles. That center being Hollywood Boulevard, Barney’s Beanery, Olvera Street, or Tommy’s Hamburgers stand all at once. It is both Olvera Street and Pershing Square, and the new Cathedral and L.A. Live. The heart of Los Angeles beats everywhere, it continues to mystify, and remains one of the great cities of the world.

Los Angeles excites the spirit, delights the palate, and bridges the worlds of imagination, illusion, and reality. This wondrous town both fixates and creates. Angelenos, be they real or fiction, have the unique ability of living in three worlds: the dream, the reality, and the in-between. Since the official founding in 1781, Los Angeles, like many great cities of the world: New York, Mexico City, or Tokyo, has, along with its citizens-Angelenos, forged itself this unique identity…the “sad flower in the sand”.

Identity and Los Angeles. The terms and subject matter complement each other so well. Carey McWilliams wrote of Los Angeles as an ethnic and cultural “archipelago”. A city where identity tends to vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Contrary to places like Mexico City or New York, which seem be virtually identical in their descriptions: subways and metros, overcrowded and rambunctious; Los Angeles and its enclaves do not have such easy identifiers. East L.A can be identified not just by the Chicano/Mexican immigrant culture of tamaleras, lowriders, and homeboys. What comes to mind are second and third generation Eastsiders that are college grads with real estate careers and ties to city politics. The Westside isn’t only falafel stands, liberals and money. We have Venice, Inglewood and Little Osaka on Sawtelle. Even Hollywood’s Walk of Fame doesn’t just tell the story of stardom and tourism. Walk a mile east in any Angeleno’s shoes. You’ll be either in Little Armenia or the Thai/Filipino district. Just a few steps away from any common city artery, the Sunset Boulevards and the Olympics; the real Los Angeles comes to life. One or two block away from these primary arteries of life, we find the blood and the sand.

Immigrants, foreigners, bankers, actors, writers, students, homemakers. Every single one of them-dreamers. They come to Hollywood for the movies, perhaps at a chance to work in television or the film industry. Some come for schooling; others think they will do the educating. One thing is for sure, all we be taught a lesson.

Many also come from Asia or Latin America to reunite with relatives and family. They reestablish and reinvent themselves: get some work as nannies or busboys, and make just enough money to send home every month. Some may even work two full time jobs to make ends meet. Aspiring to save, forging their nest eggs with sweat equity. Households brimming with tias and sobrinos, abuelos y primos. One day, they will have enough to buy a little plot back in their homeland. But then, reality hits. They ARE home now. This is it.

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans” (John Lennon). But when did this all occur? Did the smog in the L.A. Skyline dull their senses? If the afternoon sunlight on a recent December day has anything to do with it, time has now moved ahead. It waits for no one. Everyone’s kitchen overlooks a road now. Not many Angelenos yearn for the wondrous, blissful California days of Helen Hunt Jackson’s character, Senora Moreno. Since the earliest migrations of indigenous settlers, from the Tongva settlers near the L.A River, to the Spanish/Mexican missionaries establishing El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles y Porciuncula, up to the modern day, the modern day Angeleno, if not careful, looks out their kitchen window and can only hope to be cognizant of watching time, school, work, and many dreams come and go. Los Angeles, and its denizens, are not as suspended in time as they are captive to the city’s imagination.

Absorbed into the cries of the Santa Ana winds are the tears of Ruben Salazar, the prolific L.A. Times writer, killed by an LAPD tear gas container. Into the night sky, like the gaseous night’s view from Griffith Observatory go the frustrations of Armenian immigrants. They wait to commemorate their homeland’s tragic genocide on the streets of Hollywood, Burbank, and Glendale. And what of the people dying to get here? Where else in the world to customs and port officials, on various occasions, deal with international human trafficking on such a distinct level? From coyotes to cargo bins, from San Pedro to safe houses in El Monte, people feel the need to get here.

Los Angeles, what is the song you cry out? You are a siren dressed in coastal sage. Your phoenix chaparral burns bright among your anointed ones. The faithful, the faithless, the dreamers and the realists. The Tod Hacketts, Arturo Bandinis, Nathanael Wests, and the John Fantes: whose yearnings have been engulfed by the lachrymal Pacific; you sing the echoes of the millions that have cried their way home, to you. Your song is the Santa Ana wind, the foehn winds- howling through the canyons and passes. The Santa Monica Mountains and the Cahuenga corridor abound with the energy of your music. Echoing your own identity, you sing the song of your citizens’ past, present, and future. Los Angeles, the City of Quartz, is the anthropomorphic manifestation of its citizens. Citizens whose goals, wishes, and dreams attained or unattained, come in the form of a Bunker Hill view, a Santa Monica sunset, a carbon monoxide-stained palm tree, or an unfinished oil painting.

Fante’s Arturo Bandini had his dreams. Whether he envisioned himself a great author, the romancing playboy, or the keen observer, Bandini dreamt of his success and merit. Hopeful, not of the accomplishments, but of achieving them in Los Angeles. The reader doesn’t seem to doubt his talent. But his dreams of success, of merit, seem captive to his routine. A routine intrinsically raveled in the DNA of Los Angeles. A double helix of illusion and failure. “I went to the restaurant where I always went to the restaurant…I walked out of the restaurant, stood before an imaginary pitcher, and swatted a home run over the fence.” In this state, Bandini, the somnambulist, was captive to his imagination. The delirium of a child nestled in the bosom of Our Lady of the Angels. The city cradles and nurses its own. Each Angeleno feeds from the trough, suckles on the teat of the mother.”

The mother feeds her children. Hopes and prayers, the jungle leads to “la Calle de la Eternidad”…with thirty foot arms and hands stretched out to the heavens, reaching for the stars, muralist Johanna Poethig and her collaborators strove for the city to reach its people. The dreams of all its migrants, stretching out to their respective places of origin. The mural, on Broadway, not only reaches out sixty feet above, but stretches to the other “streets of eternity” across the globe, transcending time and space. It evokes the observer’s memory that, to be a citizen of Los Angeles-doesn’t imply having to give up one’s original roots. As any transplant or “native” Angeleno. “Where are you from? Oh, I’m from here, but, originally…”

“She had to leave Los Angeles. She found it hard to say goodbye to her own best friend. She bought a clock on Hollywood Boulevard the day she left. It felt sad.” (X-Los Angeles). These lyrics, taken from the title track of the seminal L.A. punk rock band X’s eponymous album, Los Angeles, tells the story of mid-western girl who just can’t handle her life in Los Angeles anymore. “All her toys wore out in black and her boys had too. She started to hate every nigger and Jew. Every Mexican that gave her a lot of shit. Every homosexual and the idle rich.” Can any other song tie together both the love/hate relationship with this city any better? Written more than thirty years ago, the band was young, nihilistic. Now, well into middle age, they perform the song to newer generations of fans. New and old fans alike, the listener can be a native Angeleno, a punk rock fan in Belgium, or anywhere across the globe. The track, Los Angeles, resonates pungently of urgency and regret. Stay or go. Love it or leave it. Regardless of where one stands, living in Los Angeles, the resident becomes a part of the city. You end up loving it. Even when one has to part ways with it.

Why do so many come here? An often asked question. “Why? Because if he or she can make it here, then I can definitely handle this place. I mean, it’s not New York!” Better to just say “the weather” or the “California Blonde” than to open a can of worms. The new transplant under estimates the ego and heart of this city. Travelers come to envy those that are “fortunate” enough to reside in L.A. Yes the smog and sun can get to you. Everything collides and contracts here. Illusion and disillusion meet where Broadway and Calle de la Eternidad become one.

A commercial airplane lands at LAX, upon arrival, the traveler gets in their car, begins their trek into Los Angeles. Once at their destination, the majority always tend to ask the same question…”Am I here yet? Is this L.A?” Almost as if a double take is necessary to confirm one’s bearings? Where is the Hollywood sign? What about Compton, In-N-Out, or Pinks? Where do the movie stars live? All commonplace questions. Run of the mill superficial questions for, what they believe to be, a superficial town. It is never, “When and where was the city founded?” or “take me to Olvera Street”.

In stark contrast, upon departure, the business traveler or vacationer seems to always be in a hurry to leave the city. Not knowing if what they just experienced was truly a visit to Los Angeles or just a tour of the Universal Studios backlot. One thing is certain of the visitor to Los Angeles, be their visit short term or tenured, everyone wants to come back. The question is if the City’s enchantments are what beckon the visitor of if it is the illusion and fabrication of many a celluloid dream, superseding even the imagination of a child, that call one back to Paradise City.

The Angeleno also never fully appreciates the solitude of the Hollywood Hills or the mountains that roll down to the ocean. It is, simply put, a given. Angelenos nod their heads in boisterous confidence that “it is what it is”.

On the contrary, one of the Hollywood Hills’ most creatively accomplished residents was an Angeleno by transplant. Aldous Huxley-the famed British author of “Brave New World” and “The Doors of Perception”, loved Los Angeles. Admiring such idiosyncrasies as its drive-in donut shaped diners, the winding desert roads near Palm Springs, or simply, Los Angeles’ Mediterranean climate-he came to call the City of Angels his home. Once in Los Angeles, much of his creativity flourished, be it due to his new surroundings, experiments with psychotropic hallucinogens, or reading Hindu texts such as the Veda. The Veda’s primary subject mature and theme are, appropriately enough, the belief that the physical world is but an illusion. Welcome to the identity of Los Angeles.

#LosAngeles LedZeppelin JohnFante Hollywood OlveraStreet AldousHuxley

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