#my writing journey

[wolfjackle-creates]

Since this week marks my 1 year anniversary of joining the DPxDC fandom as a writer, I've been going through some of my old prompt fills and one shots.

Apparently I've published something over 80k words this year to either AO3 or Tumblr (If a fic was crossposted, I only counted it once).

And that doesn't include everything I haven't been able to post.

I'll probably reblog some of my stuff over the course of the day. There's a lot I'm still super proud of.

[rexxles]

Hello everyone. My pen name is Leslie Recks. I'm from Germany and started my writing journey here in November 2022. So, I'm still kinda new to Writeblr (and tumblr in general) and how things work around here. But I'm excited about the experiences I made so far and hope to meet some mutuals.

I love writing fantasy, a little bit romance and dystopian themes (sometimes stuff gets a bit darker than intended though - I enjoy writing angsty scenes) as well as fanfiction. I recently moved my fanfics to my sideblog @rexxles-writes-fanfiction, so this blog will from now on focus on my original writing.

So far, I have mostly posted short stories and flash fiction here. But we'll see, maybe I gain the courage to post about my longer WIPs and OCs too.

And here's my Masterlist that I'll try to keep up to date. Enjoy!

[heroes-villains-side-blog]

Found my notes for when I was trying to make sense of alignments

No, you don't need to box your character into a single alignment, and yes, they're silly

But it's always nice to just have a starting point. Like, "you need to know the rules first so you can know how to break them" type of thing (that's paraphrased writing advice I've come across and really love)

Without further ado, H / V = Hero or Villain respectively, but they're just stereotypical hero or villain here. Please feel free to break the norm and mess around :)

LG, H "I do the right thing coz it's the right thing to do"

LN, HV "I'm just following the rules." could be good or bad rules

LE, V "I'm evil but I have a code / standards."

NG, HV "Good =/= Law." sometimes you might have to break the law to do good

TN, V "Eh. I do what I want, but calmly."

NE, V "I'm evil how I want to be."

CG, HV "I'm trying to do good, sometimes it has costs. Or sometimes I go over what's socially acceptable and seem silly but am appreciated."

CN, V "I have fun doing what I want."

CE, V "I enjoy destruction."

[writernopal]

Writing Questions Tag

Tagged by @crowandmoonwriting for this one, see their post here! Thank you so much! I've been looking forward to it :D

Tagging (gently): @captain-kraken @mariahwritesstuff @elshells @outpost51 @tabswrites @sam-glade @moonluringfrost

What is your absolute all-time favorite idea you’ve ever had?

Starting with the hard questions already! This is hard to pin down, but I'd say the idea behind the worldbuilding between the Faefolk and Dragon races/species in AASOAF. There is a lot I'm proud of there, and every time I think about it, I get shivers! I just wish it was less spoiler heavy so I could talk about it, but I CANT T_T (i cry). A close second would have to be The Realm of Dreams!

Is there a question you’ve been asked in the past that really stands out to you, and you still think about sometimes?

About my writing, not really! To be fair, this is because I didn't start sharing my writing with a wider audience until very recently (read: the start of this year), and a lot of people IRL still don't know I write, so I don't think there's been a lot of opportunity for that.

What is your favorite part of being a writer? What parts could you take or leave?

My favorite part is definitely coming up with new ideas and writing pretty/poetic prose! I feel like that is where I get to flex my creative muscles the most, and it's really satisfying to come across something that fits into that part of the story just right. The part that I could leave is COPY EDITING, specifically punctuation. Commas are my great burden because sometimes they seem like they go in a spot, and then I come back to read it, and they make no sense there. Line editing, however, gets a happy little kiss on the head because I LOVE that.

What is your greatest motivation to write/create?

The freedom of play. It is one of the creative outlets that really feels accessible and safe to me, not to mention the possibilities of what I can create aren't bound to ANYTHING. It's a place where I have full agency. I can make or unmake it as many times as I want, twist it, turn it, bop it, you name it, I can do it! Conversely, I can also choose NOT to do it.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever read or been given as a writer?

"Write." It sounds largely unhelpful, but to me, this is the permission/encouragement/onus to take that thing in your hands and just do it. Leave your notions of what it should or has to be at the door and create. Make mistakes because there will be many, and when they come, reach out for help, give yourself grace, learn, be patient, and try again. Write, write, write!

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting out writing?

It's okay to write for fun. This sounds silly to say now, but when I first started out, I met a few people (IRL and online) who seemed unimpressed (putting it nicely) that this was my big "Why?" It was alienating and really made me question why I was putting so much effort into my works and made me wonder if I'd made a mistake by not monetizing it, etc. Every now and then, I still interact with people who are baffled/less than kind about that concept, but it doesn't bother me as much as it used to. I just wish that I could go back and give previous me a hug about it, though, because I remember it really negatively affected my confidence.

What is your favorite story you’ve written to completion? Link it if you’d like and can!

Out of the publicly available completed pieces, I'd say Pare (horror/gore, 18+, tumblr link) is my favorite! I wish I could say AASOAF, but it's not done yet T_T

What is your favorite out-of-the-box quote?

"Sit down and stay a while." I don't know if it can be attributed to anyone or where I first heard it, but there is something warm about it. It's a nice way to remember that it's okay to just be. You always have a seat at your own table type beat.

Which of your characters would you say has the most controversial mindset? Why do you say so, and how do you personally feel about their ideals?

OH MAN. This is really difficult for me, but if I had to choose one, it would be Wilkes. His circumstances are unique and pretty spoiler-heavy, so I won't really get into them, but the best way to put it is that he has seen so much of the forest that all he wants to do is look at the trees, no matter the cost. His type of fixation is quite volatile because while it can demonstrate care and love, it can very easily cross the boundary into smothering and the willing abandonment of the self. To me, that is what makes him so dangerous despite looking rather noble compared to someone like Fay, who is openly cruel, because this is someone who is voraciously hungry for something. But they don't know what that thing is.

If you, when you first started writing, met you now, what would younger you think?

I think she'd cry! I think she would have a hard time believing that someday she'll write her very own novels. And that people will read them. And people will make a special little place for her characters in their minds. Frankly, I think she'd be awestruck, touched, and saddened that we abandoned writing for a long time but then came back to it. It would be a very sentimental encounter, for sure!

[writingisartdarling]

"I never would have chosen her if I for a even a short moment doubted her capability to be a duchess worthy of both this house and this family. But even with my certainty of her capability on that front, most importantly I needed to know she would be capable of being your duchess. And I thought she would. I still do."

A little sneak peak of what my book is, well, what it will be about when I actually start writing it. This line, which probably will change to one direction or other at some point, came to me last night as I was about to shut my eyes and go to bed. I love it.

[magnus-sm-writes]

My Writing Journey: Early Adulthood!

I could title spring of 2020 “A Spring and a Miss”, because it was. My only high school class, band, was online, and it was honestly a disaster. I ended up skipping most of it to work at Subway (because I am a responsible adult like that). I was used to the online college classes; that was what I started out on.

What I did not expect was how this would impact my writing.

In February, I had rewritten Hamish and gotten some of the “dark academic” vibes I was shooting for. (In reality, it was always meant to be a gothic horror, but I did not know that yet.) I was so excited to write something else in my Shakespeare universe. My choice was Midway Through Summer’s Bullshit, a rewriting of the beloved A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

However, when the world shut down in March, I realized that I was too incredibly lonely writing a book with so much socialization in it. It depressed me. So I switched things up, for my own health. I rewrote Lessons in Humanity as a way to mentally prepare myself for university. It really felt like I was going places with it. I even had my wonderful, amazing friend Alex beta read it for me. (And even drew fan art for me like how fucking sweet are they?)

I was tired of rewrites, though, and I wanted to write something new. Something fresh. So I decided to write something that has both haunted and intrigued me since: Stuck Together.

Stuck Together is my historical fiction crackfic where William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe a.) live in modern times, b.) are writeblr/writetube/writestagram famous authors, and c.) get stuck together in Edgar’s apartment during the COVID pandemic. 

It is a ridiculous novel, which I wholeheartedly acknowledge. I have never rewritten it, and I reread it once a year. I am not kidding when I say I love and hate this stupid novel in equal parts. It is so ridiculous, so utterly stupid, that I am unable to form a coherent thought on it. I cringe when I think of it; I adore it; I want to burn all traces of it from the internet; I want to fix it. 

(Someone please give me your thoughts on this because this shit is ridiculous and I love it.)

Then I went to my dream university for Creative Writing. It really was a dream come true; Ohio Northern’s campus is a magical place in the autumn. My professors were all incredible, and I have nothing but praise for ONU’s English department. I’m still in contact with several of my professors four years later!

I was at a weird place, creatively. I wanted to rewrite Jeez Take the Wheel, but things just… weren’t meshing. Nothing was working for me. I wondered if something was wrong. (I also broke my foot, but honestly, that should have given me more time to write.)

This was also the time I discovered I’m trans! It was October of 2020 when Morgan was no more, and Magnus came into being. I’d never felt more like myself than then, even though my writing was still not where I wanted it to be. As I settled into my identity, though, I became more confident in myself, and my writing also began to come easier.

There was also the matter of my senior capstone. You see, with all my community college credits, I was actually in my junior year of university. I had to come up with something to write next year for my Advanced Fiction Writing class (which would be the class I would do my capstone for). It had to be around 20,000 words at most, and a finished story. None of my projects could fit that. 

I decided to try a resurrection story. Something about my own transness, identity, and disconnection from the world. I began to brainstorm a story about a man who came back from the dead without his memories and was expected to pick back up where he left off.

This story became Body, my novelette. Body is to me now what Lessons in Humanity was in my teenage years. It is a marker of a huge shift in my writing. I went from someone who turned my nose up at fantasy to someone who was now writing within the realms of fantasy. Technically, Body falls beneath the speculative fiction umbrella. I’d place it in the Weird genre, personally, but it doesn’t really matter. It is more speculative than literary fiction, which was huge for me. 

With Body, I was taking a chance to really write something my own. I wrote in second person (my favorite tense ever). It was a braided narrative, weaving past and present together. It was a story about grief, and love, and hope, all at once. It was what I needed. When I think of Body, I think of how much of my soul I poured into it. Body is an incredibly special work to me because of that. It helped me understand myself in a time where I was just starting to be me.

This is going to sound like a sidebar, but it’s not. I promise.

My professor Dr. Pullen kept telling me in her critiques of my stories that it seemed like I was meant to be a fantasy writer, but was holding back. I, being the snob I was, refused to do anything more than give the barest hint of fantasy in anything I wrote. There was no way I was a fantasy writer; I was a man of literary fiction and contemporary settings.

That is, until Dungeons & Dragons changed everything.

My D&D group would meet anywhere from twice to four times a week. I am not kidding; that is how obsessed we were. I was obsessed. My best friend Jenny, our DM, was also obsessed. I joined another D&D group, as well, where I met some really amazing frat guys who accepted me as a man (!!!). I kept making backup characters just in case. Eventually, all these backup characters began to pile up. I needed something to do with them.

I’m stubborn. I can admit this. But I finally, finally decided to start writing fantasy once I finished Body, in part so I could get my character Hiprax’s character arc out of my head.

It quickly snowballed from there.

I also began to get a lot more serious about poetry. I read every single online copy of Warsan Shire’s poems I could get my hands on, consuming her words like I was starving. Poetry was how I dealt with my trauma, and dare I say, I dealt with it well. So well that I actually ended up in Polaris, my university’s literary magazine, with my poem “Mince Meat Pie”. I was elated. I was finally a published author!

Not only that, but Dr. Pullen made us submit work to literary magazines for class. (Other than Polaris, of course, but she encouraged us to submit to it as well.) I was rejected from all others. It wasn’t really the point for me, though; the point was that I did the damn thing. I did what scared me so badly I almost got sick the first time I submitted something. And I was accepted. 

I couldn’t even dream of doing this in 2020. It was nuts!

I also took a class on witches (taught by Dr. Pullen, duh), wherein my final project was actually a snippet of a vampire novel involving blood magic that I call Night Bite. The worldbuilding I began in that novel was actually the basis for my fantasy world Uuve. 

Once I left university, my writing just kept getting weirder and weirder.

[the-tzarina-alexandra-paracosm]

Hi there, my name is Alexandra and this is where I keep all of my stories, and art for each project! You can find the detailed summaries and analyses below:

The entire project timeline (zoom in)

Abbreviated list:

The amazing life of Vasile Moldovenescu

The Immortals series

The Image Through the Thick Glass

The 5 Books of the Immortals

The Hacker: Death of the Internet

Train of Thought

01&02 (fanfic)

Fairy worldbuilding project

The Choice to Love

Do you know what it feels like (fanfic)

The Land of Eternal Winter

Red Shadows/ In Memoriam

The Keeper of the Underwater Graveyard

Fireworks in the Fog

Mission: LUNA

And more

[wandering-artbird]

“Was I wrong_ to act like a child_which I am???”

_Mama, please love me too.

[inkskinned]

because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

[wolfjackle-creates]

Over the last, like, 3 days, I changed my mind about one of my Good Omens fics and decided to cut a 10k chapter I'd already finished.

Which means the preceeding chapter can be posted as a standalone two shot. So I was gonna just do that until I took a look-see at it.

Guys, I've improved so much. Holy hell, I had no idea. I knew I was getting better. My first drafts have needed less and less editing. But I thought I was getting better at writing at my final quality without all the editing. No. That's not what's happening. I'm just getting better overall.

Downside: I probably won't be able to post this Good Omens work today. It'll take a bit more work to get it up to my current standards. (Though I think it's mostly the beginning that was lacking. I think once I get into the meat of the story, it'll need fewer adjustments.)

Upside: holy shit, I've gotten so much better!

[elodieunderglass]

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

[heroes-villains-side-blog]

:)))))

I downloaded yWriter and have been using it for this proper book idea I have.

It's desktop only. I started using it because I'm too addicted to my phone and want something structured and Google Docs keeps crashing.

And I found a solution for one of the problems I had!

The 2 problems I had were:

#1

It's desktop only. Which I keep feeling sad about but then that just shows my addiction.

And I'm listening to Brandon Sanderson's creative writing playlist and he emphasizes consistency and setting a time to write. And yWriter will help me with that, I hope, because I need to utilize the time I'm on desktop because now.

So, that's not really a problem for me, per se because I'm looking forward to this (feature not a bug lol).

#2

Spellchecker.

It has a spellchecker which turns all my incorrect spellings red, that's fine. The problem is: it doesn't show me the right spelling that I can just click and be done with — I have to manually retype it (like olden times).

But I found a solution! :D

I've moved to Firefox and absolutely enjoying all the extensions 🤗 (and the ad-less YouTube I get from one of them is fire 🔥💅)

And I downloaded a spellchecker extension because it had the "recommended" badge, instead of going for generic Grammarly

It's called LanguageTool

Edit: As per last week (today's 10th July 2023) LanguageTool introduced a new feature call rephrasing that uses OpenAI which, according to LanguageTool's privacy policy, reserves the right to store your data. and I couldn't find out how to opt out. I have deleted it and contacted LanguageTool and Firefox.

Made a post about it here.

I checked it out on Google Docs while proofreading a doc for work, and I liked “picky reader” option.

I went to their website and they had a desktop version! AND, while it doesn't work with yWriter directly, I can still use it for it! I just need to:

Select my text in yWriter (Ctrl+A)

Use the shortcut that opens that text in LanguageTool (I set it to Ctrl+Q)

Use the tool

And then copy-paste back in yWriter!

This is awesome! And LanguageTool is private and doesn't track (it was recommended by Firefox/Mozilla so it better be lol) which is a plus because I'm big on internet privacy now :)

[writernopal]

Happy STS! Hope you have had a good week 😁 What do you feel is an aspect of your writing/storytelling that has improved the most since you started writing? Alternatively, what's a piece of writing advice that has served you the most?

Happy STS, Sarah! I hope you had a good week as well! 💙

What do you feel is an aspect of your writing/storytelling that has improved the most since you started writing?

Hmm, it's hard to name it mostly because I'm not sure if there is an official term for it, but I'd say my willingness to commit to the bit LOL. When I go back and re-read some of my earlier works, including my beloved AASOAF 1, I can see how afraid of my own story I was and also how much I was holding back. Part of what helped me overcome that was sharing my work with others!

For the uninitiated, AASOAF 1 (or any of my writing, for that matter) was never supposed to be shared with anyone. I was doing it for fun and for myself. I slowly started sharing snippets with my sisters and a few friends, and they really liked them, so they were like, "Can you share the whole thing? 🥺" I remember being so terrified (and I still kind of am tbh) when they started reading it, but they were so kind and encouraging that by the time I started working on AASOAF 2, I was completely unhinged, and I wouldn't want it any other way!

Alternatively, what's a piece of writing advice that has served you the most?

Barbossa said it best! 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

Seriously, do whatever you want. You'll learn over time and with experience what you actually need advice/help with to serve your writing and story better!

[counselorssoapbox]

Getting back up on the proverbial writing horse.

David Joel Miller, Writer Getting back up on the proverbial writing horse. By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional. Time to try to restart my writer’s blog. I hope you recognize the expression. Getting back up on the horse was a saying that comes from our country’s early days, the colonies, and the westward expansion. In those days, 93% of the US population, give or…

[magnus-sm-writes]

My Writing Journey: Currently

After university, I took a really shitty office job I hated and wrote a lot of angsty poetry. Some of it got accepted. I wrote a short story, “The Ghost You Left Behind”, and it was published in the graveyard zine. I got a lot of tattoos. Like, a lot of tattoos. I got really depressed. I did a lot of worldbuilding for Uuve and began transplanting my D&D characters into it. I visited my partner’s family in Las Vegas. Your typical postgrad shuffle.

2022 was the best year for me in terms of publishing. I actually have not been published in a long time, due to hitting a wall when it came to motivation to seek out publishers. That does not mean that I have not been producing work, though.

Dare I say that 2023 was one of my best writing years yet. I was writing for multiple fantasy projects at once. This was when a lot of them began to take shape. Tsarevna of the Horned Crown, Greenest, Double-Trickery, Of Valor & Honor, and the entirety of my Dragonworld stories began to really bloom. My characters became far more vibrant than I first wrote them as. They seemed to breathe on the page. The bonds they formed with each other felt organic and real. They made problems and solved them. 

I worked at Starbucks and let my characters do their thing on the page. Writing fantasy was getting easier every day. 

And I was beginning to get really weird with my poetry. 

I love a weird poem. Love them. Solar Trauma is one of my favorite chapbooks ever written. Based on one of my favorite movies, The Thing, Solar Trauma actually inspired me to begin writing my own hivemind poetry. And it has been a love affair since then. I have actually submitted a few pieces for publication, which I am still waiting on answers for.

The most wild thing I did in 2023 was submit Body to a publisher for consideration.

Literally all year afterwards, I was checking my personal email non-stop. Every single day. I eagerly awaited a response.

That response was a rejection that came last month, but I am still amazed that I submitted Body at all. Yes, it gave me anxiety the entire time. So what? I still did it. I’m becoming more confident in sending my works to publishers, and that’s a huge accomplishment for the neurotic mess that is me.

My partner and I left our city life to move in with my parents for financial reasons, and shockingly, I have become even more productive with my writing since then. It might be that I finally have set hours (my 40 hour work week is a blessing), or it might be that I’m not constantly stressed about money, but I have finally been able to write the weird shit I’ve been needing to get out of my system. 

I wrote several short stories in the tail end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, as well as beginning to casually rewrite Hamish in February and even write a couple scenes of my Measure for Measure reimagining. 

Something I didn’t expect was that I began to keep a writing journal! I’ve always loved the thought of journaling, but never stuck with it. Something about it was difficult for me. Especially bullet journaling the way people online do it. I couldn’t keep up with all the pretty pages and keep it practical. Little did I know that, if I just changed the format to value function over form, I could be incredibly productive with one.

I’ve been tracking my word counts, the books I’ve read, the books I want to read, the poems and short stories I’ve written, poems that inspire me, my habits, and general goals for each month. It has been so incredibly helpful for keeping me on track. I made a post about it, and holy shit, if you’ve ever wanted to keep a writing journal, please let this be your sign. It’s been one of the best impulse decisions I’ve made in a while.

Currently, I’m going with the flow when it comes to my writing. Doing what comes to me. I’ve taken a marked interest in the Donner party (to the point where I got the year they were rescued tattooed on me), so I’m considering doing something with that. I also want to write some more about zombies, and to continue my casual Hamish rewrite. 

I think there are some fantastic things on the horizon for me. Not only has my writing grown in ten years; I have grown. I have become such a different person in all that time (thank fuck!), and I am so incredibly proud of how I’ve gotten better as a human being. I’m surrounding myself with people I love, doing things that make me happy (or at the very least improve my health/mental wellbeing). It’s been a fucking slog, and I’ve come out stronger.

Thank you everyone for coming along with me on my writing journey. If you have any questions you’d like me to answer, feel free to ask! This was a lot to get off my chest, and I’m feeling very nostalgic.

[hallowgracie]

Crystal Magic

So some of you who have been following this story might remember that there were originally four Marchand sisters as the main characters of the story.

It's funny how things change. The story started as a screenplay for an assignment in my high school creative writing class, when there were only two sisters, the characters that would become Gwynn and Sorrel.

Sometimes, when you're writing, you have to try some different things out. And I realized when I was working on this story that the House of Ondrina and their related mysteries were more important to me--so I've decided to reduce the story back down to a tale of two sisters, the fraternal twins Sorrel and Gwynn, and to focus on the story I want to tell.

As for some beloved characters like Talia, Prince Lin, and others? We'll have to see. Sometimes characters have a way of coming back to us in the end, or going into a later project.

We'll have to see where it goes.

This year has been an important year in my non-writing career development and personal growth. But I'm still intending to do more and I still have plenty of stories to tell.