#i don't think we finished the episode

[naturalblue22]

while i am happy heidi klum's worm costume is making people smile i can't forgive her for putting a group of young women through hell on live tv each year

[b-plus]

i keep going like oh i'll watch haikyuu one day but i never do. the closest i've gotten was watching a dub that my friends cousin made of the first episode

[pumpkinrootbeer]

Eugene was truly the best boyfriend. saw his girlfriend get broken up with, and immediately had a revenge glow up. Imagine being Cassandra seeing your ex girlfriend's boyfriend and he's wearing a golden choker with the just deepest v neck known to man, the world's sluttiest gloves, and a thigh garter. I'd have to give up then and there.

[bittersweetresilience]

say hi to me i don't know, i just remembered being so much brighter, i guess

cigarette ash like wildfire burning holes in the nighttime open scars feel like barbed wire white lies flying high like a ceasefire dropping flags on the shoreline this is as far as i can feel right 'cause what you don't know can haunt you

and all we ever wanted was sunlight and honesty highlights to want to repeat let's get away from here and live like the movies do i won't mind when it's over at least i didn't think for a while

don't drag it out living like that doesn't mean a thing

so let's, make a great escape and i'll be waiting outside for the getaway it doesn't matter who we are we'll keep running through the dark and all we'll ever need is another day we can slow down 'cause tomorrow is a mile away and live like shooting stars 'cause happy endings hardest to fake

and i wanna let you know i wanna let you go but i just can't bring myself to speak but this is how it goes the end credits, they roll this bridge was built over kerosene but we can watch it and all i ever wanted was sunlight and honesty highlights to want to repeat let's get away from here and live like the movies do i won't mind when it's over at least i didn't think

so let's run, make a great escape and i'll be waiting outside for the getaway it doesn't matter who we are we'll keep running through the dark and all we'll ever need is another day we can slow down 'cause tomorrow is a mile away and live like shooting stars you can wish away forever but you'll never find a thing like today

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

The Girls Are Never Gone

a girl does a summer internship with the historical society cleaning up an old estate where a girl died 30 years ago, so she can investigate it for her ghost-hunting podcast

she’s a skeptic who privately thinks she’ll be able to find evidence of non-supernatural, but weird things start happening to her and the other two girls in the house

spooky lake & creepy dolls

bisexual diabetic MC with a service dog, f/f

[humanmorph]

they need to assassinate future btw. I've thought about this and I'm sure there would be consequences & I also know you can't truly kill a divine anymore but idgaf. find a way

[hauntingblue]

I have connected two dots... yamato kaido and momo (and kinda shirahoshi with her top) have clouds above their shoulders... and luffy in gear fourth has them also.... I can see the signs

[r2y9s]

My Dear Bunny - Chapter 1

Fandom: Raffles - E.W. Hornung

Rating: M

Relationships: A.J. Raffles/Bunny Manders

Additional Tags: Sugar Baby AU, POV Bunny, POV First Person, I always have this urge to write Sugar Baby AUs and Bunny is my newest victim, WIP

"My dear Bunny! Is that really you?" Hearing my old school nickname in this familiar voice stirred something long locked away in the pit of my stomach. I ignored it. Pulling myself together, I shifted slightly on my client's lap to get a more comfortable look at my old schoolmate.

"Why, Mr. Raffles!" I said with as coy an air as I could muster. "What a strange surprise."

[emile-hides]

Romantic Killer AU where everyone is being held hostage by Riri like Anzu so they all can yell and beat the shit out of them every time they come on screen

[torgawl]

this week's episode was pretty set on confirming a few of our suspections were true like tianchen impersonating his sister and cheng xiaoshi being in lu guang's body at the end of the last episode. to me the thing i'm most curious about is tianchen's ability. is he actually red eyes? red eyes from last season could use their ability though photos but the tianchen we personally know controlls people through touch. having the ability to control multiple people (or two, specifically) simultaneously, which is something quite interesting. unless he can use his technique in two different ways, which we haven't seen any ability user do so far, this feels really odd and i'm starting to think the siblings having red eyes was simply a detail to throw us off?! maybe this doesn't make sense but you know how cxs has brown eyes but his eyes change colour while using his ability? why wouldn't tianchen's eyes change colour if he was the one possessing other people's bodies? and the way his eyes glow in the final scene with lu-guang... is that to show he's evil or is that a sign he's using his ability? but then how? because he was just talking to lu guang in his own body and lu guang wasn't under his influence, right? i'm very confused about him and his relationship with qian jin

[keeps-ache]

found a scorpion walking down my arm the other day like nobody's business and now i'm scared of every brush of air on my neck fhvshfvh

[not-poignant]

11 & 15 :)

11. Do you believe in the old advice to “kill your darlings?” Are you a ruthless darling assassin? What happens to the darlings you murder? Do you have a darling graveyard? Do you grieve?

(Note: This one has several unpopular opinions re: authors rewriting fics in particular, so please just...do not keep reading if you've ever rewritten a story you've released on AO3 or rewritten a serial or something, because like, slakdfjas how I feel about what I do has nothing to do with how other people do their stuff, lol).

Hmm.

Okay, yes, I do have a darling graveyard. In total, since I started writing as a kid, I've shelved about 5-6 completed novels. Maybe more. I didn't do it while actively writing them, I finished them, really believed in them, and one day reread them and realised they would stay on my hard-drive. That's fine. I don't really grieve them. Some I feel nothing for. In fact not having many feelings about the story was one of the reasons I shelved it.

I am not, otherwise, a very brutal 'kill your darlings' person. I'm a big believer in restorative methods and problem solving. For anyone who is familiar with Clifton Strengths, Restorative is in my top 10. I would rather fix or mend something, than shelve it or give up on it, and that part of my personality is a perfect match with writing an ongoing serial.

Here's the thing, I write most of my serials in an ongoing way with no plan. If I abandon the serial, I abandon my readers who are invested in the serial. That's a very different process to writing a novel that no one else except maybe an editor or beta is seeing.

I have to be - imho - from an integrity perspective, accountable to the process. And the process demands that I not pull a serial halfway through and then replace it with something new or not replace it at all. Firstly, there will be readers who always prefer the first version, and that shafts them. And secondly, it is almost always possible to mend a story, or write yourself out of a cul de sac. I enjoy the problem solving, I enjoy thinking on my feet, and the moments of being blocked because I broke something in the story are vastly outweighed by the times I unblocked and let the river flow again.

This is also why when I edit Game Theory, I'll always leave the original on AO3. It's also why I haven't deleted fanfic I'm actually pretty ashamed of and couldn't reread again. Like I have het Glee fanfiction on my not_poignant account and I never want to read it again. I'm not deleting it. I'm not going to shelve it. People gave it kudos, they bookmarked it, and I don't know those people and I know they can read something better, but once it's up, I am accountable to that visibility. I know what it feels like to go back and read that one special fic that for some reason you just really love, only to find out it's been deleted. And yes, we can always download stories, but I can also just choose not to be a dickhead to my readers in that fashion, so I won't.

Putting the rest under a cut because well there's more but also I might be very Unpopular Opinion about this and I feel pretty strongly about it.

(There are of course valid reasons people delete their stories, like, 'this username is connected to my legal name and I'll get fired if these stories are found' (though they can always be orphaned / made anonymous), but 'I hate this story' to me is just... /thinks/ I don't really want to let my mental illness win or be more important than the folks who might really love that one story and find something important in it. That's just.... how I think about it - if I can make sure another reader never feels that kneejerk broken-hearted feeling of having a favourite fic deleted, even just a dumb little Glee fic that's terrible, then like, yeah I won't make them feel that way just because I feel something like shame or disappointment in something. Because I have the power to also not think about those stories and then it doesn't affect me lmao).

I always have very mixed feelings when authors remove or completely rewrite a fanfic for example on AO3 - it is obviously completely their right, I feel really sad on behalf of every reader who will forever miss that original version. And as a reader, I've had this happen to me. An author has removed or rewritten a story, and I just loved the original more. I've never loved a rewritten version of a fic more than the original version. Not once. Not ever. Some of us preferred the more raw and ugly version, that was less like a generic novel and felt less like 'I've learned how to publish books now so I'm going to polish this up even though that's not why almost any of my readers are here.' And I'm painfully conscious of that re: Game Theory lol.

I guess I have really strong opinions about this. I don't know how to explain it. I feel like once I put something in public, I have pledged a certain amount of loyalty to a story, and a certain amount of respect and dignity to the reader. My loyalty to the story is that I will make it the best it can be in my capacity at the time. My respect and dignity re: the reader is that I will respect their love of the thing, even at the expense of indulging the intrusive thoughts of a mental illness, even if I don't understand how anyone could love the thing.

Shelving a serial isn't really something I want to do, and that's the closest I think I come to 'killing your darlings.' These days, therefore, I'm just a lot more discerning about what long-term projects I commit to before I commit to them. Because once I'm in, I'm all in. I'd rather quit writing entirely than leave a big serial unfinished, delete it, and start something else instead. Like, how bad am I at writing if I can't mend what I broke?

(Again, this isn't how I feel about other people's writing, it's just very important to my process that I be accountable to the story and the characters once I get started. I suspect other authors instead are more accountable to the quality of the writing and in giving their readers the most 'perfect' version of a story ever, or maybe they're just more accountable to that niggling 'I could have done that better' feeling. It manifests in many different ways! My method works best for me, but it is very much tied in with my personal sense of ethics and values that I impose on myself and try and live by.)

As to grieving... There's one novel I really regret shelving the most, but that's because I shelved it for reasons partially outside of my control - it needs an Australian Aboriginal sensitivity reader who is comfortable reading m/m romance with explicit sex. After months and months of searching, I found someone, gave them an upfront $150 USD deposit (about 6 years ago now), with the rest to come later, and they disappeared with my money and never spoke to me again. Ever since then, I have looked occasionally for a sensitivity reader in that area, but I've kind of suspected it's too niche of a thing to need, and I also can't lose that much money again. I've never spent that much on a single marketing budget for Perth Shifters, for example.

That's a standalone Fae Tales novel set in the southern hemisphere, with an entirely new cast, called Tradewinds and I'd really love for y'all to read it, but I sadly don't see it ever happening.

That one I'm really sad about. And I guess I could rewrite it to have zero Aboriginal Australian representation even though it's set in Australia, but like... :/ Y'know? Not ideal. But maybe that's the only way this story can exist, or maybe it just shouldn't exist in the first place. So it's shelved. A very few select people have read it, and everyone who's read it has enjoyed it, but none of those people have been Aboriginal Australian, and you know, I don't want to make some kind of horrendously awful fuck-up so we just... quietly leave that one in its folder and forget it exists most of the time.

15. Do you write in the margins of your books? Dog-ear your pages? Read in the bath? Why or why not? Do you judge people who do these things? Can we still be friends?

Mmm, I only write in the margins of some books, and only if they're mine.

I dog-ear my pages, I don't care how expensive or special edition the book is. If it's mine, I can do what I want with it. I see no point in being precious about physical objects, when what matters are the words inside, and not whether the page has a crease in it.

I don't read in the bath because I don't have baths. But also because I want to empty my head in the bath, so I just want to not think about anything at all.

I don't judge people who do any of these things to their own property. I get mad if they do it to my property (basic respect bruh), and I do judge the people who judge me for what I do with my own property. They're in the same category as grammar pedants, imho.

--

From the Weird Writer Asks meme!

[waterloggedtomorrow]

It is Staggering how quickly I have gone from always being mildly paralyzed by fatigue + overwhelm to always being mildly paralyzed from listlessness + lack of sun.

[fruitsyrups]

do you just watch random adventure time episodes at your whim or only chronological rewatches?

[pokeficdaily]

Hey, sorry if constantly getting asks like this is annoying, but what's the source of the "it's all red and scary my boy" one?

no worries! we don't mind! here's the link!

[weakzen]

i haven't seen ep07 of yellowjackets yet (no spoily pls, will watch later today), but i noticed some fuckin weird blocking in ep06, things like characters perfectly centered in-frame with an unflinching focus that goes on a little too long, or characters surrounded by a little too much empty space, characters off-kilter and pressed uncomfortably close to the edge of the screen (the scene where misty & lottie finally speak face-to-face in the compound is a great example--it doesn't feel like they're looking at each other or even having a shared conversation or a shared scene at all in the shot-reverse-shot dialogue bc they're both skewed that far to the edge of the frame) and then, at the end of the episode, shauna breaks the fourth wall entirely, stares directly into the camera sobbing and repeatedly asks us why we can't we hear her baby crying.

it ain't accidental, and considering they've already been cheeky as fuck with their episode naming this season ('friends romans countrymen' PLEASE!!), and considering the (alleged) final episode of this season is titled 'storytelling', and considering they've been hinting at and playing with metatext and diegesis for a while now (the wilderness itself, play-acting, characters repeatedly hearing things we as the audience just can't perceive for some reason, ben & misty reading the motherfucking magus!!), i reeallllly hope we're in store for some truly wild meta-fuckery bc i fucking love that shit, especially in horror, where you can use it to turn audience into character and terrify well beyond the boundary of narrative medium.