#once again i have this idea on a draft but my brain quit after two sentences

[kenmakodz]

CANDID LOVE ˙✧˖📷

06. brain food ☆

writing in-between cuts!

a quiet knock on the door catches your attention, which was previously focused on scrolling through random shows on Netflix. a weird feeling, you get. an emotion that seems to be the love-child of excitement and nervousness. there's no time to run away from these feelings, though, so you get up and open the door for the poor boy who's been hauling 3 bags of food.

"my god" he sighs, setting the bags down on the coffee table. "i think my stomach has eyes. there's no way we're finishing all this in one night." you laugh, noticing how he's holding his arm out of pain. "i've definitely done the same, more times than i'd like to admit-- here, sit down for a bit." gesturing to the couch, you sit down and pat a spot relatively close to you. he takes this offer with open arms, considering he'd walked pretty far. "sorry i took a while, hopefully i didn't keep you waiting too long?" his hands fidget together as he takes in your room. it's the size of a triple, but you have it to yourself. it's quite surprising how nice the school treats transfer students, considering how main students are usually shoved into a tiny room with 2-3 other people. you place your hand upon his; a ballsy move, but you know how it feels to be anxious about things. you don't want him to be anxious with you. "it's fine, really. i don't mind waiting for you." you smile, moving your hand back to it's previous position. embarrassment clearly runs through his body, but to you he just looked starstruck. after a moment of pushing these feelings back, he returns your smile. "i'm glad, then. um, can we eat? i fear my stomach is going to wrinkle up if we don't." "yes yuuta, we can eat."

"okay, okay. this seems good for now, i think?" he sits back from the laptop you two have been sharing, taking a second to re-read the outline. your eyes scan the page as well; it's a very.. rough outline. you start laughing at the last few lines, where he'd begun to give up on being professional. after all, only you two will see this draft. "why are you laughing?" he pouts, thinking you're making fun of the ideas laid out. "oh relax," you lean back with him, realizing he's gotten much closer than before. "i can just tell that you were rushing writing the final scene." his head whips to you and a hand clutches his chest, feigning shock; a sarcastic gasp falls from his lips. "how could you! we worked very hard on this!" your hand pushes his away from his chest, the both of them landing on his lap. "oh, shut up. i'm just teasing." he huffs anyways, a facade you've become accustomed to. after all, one of your best friends is nobara kugisaki.

reaching to a stuffed dog to your side, you hand it to him. "here, will an emotional support dog help?" he sighs, wrapping it in his arms. "i suppose." laughing again, you sit up and grab the laptop once more. "you're so dumb." he grips the toy more, you don't realize it, but he likes the way it smells of lavender just like you do. "what are you doing now, don't you think its enough for tonight?" you stop to think, after sending the draft to your phone. "well, we'll need to send casting calls to the neighboring schools sometime soon.. but i guess we can be done for now." he closes the laptop for you and places it on the table once again, looking back. "good, we can do that another time-" his sentence is cut off due to his phone practically blowing up in the room over. "sorry," he starts, getting up and handing the stuffed dog back to you. "let me go check on that."

"hey, sorry again. my friends were blowing up my phone for some reason." he comes back into the room where you two were sitting before, unsure if he should sit back down. he can't read your face, and you can't read his either, despite you both feeling the same way. "it's okay. you can sit back down if you want to stay a bit longer..?" you look down for a split second, anticipating the rejection he was about to give you. "i was looking for shows before you got here, but i couldn't find a good one." you try to convey what you say as a question, but it almost comes out as a plea. he doesn't say anything immediately, and you almost get upset? looking back up, you realize he's already getting ready to sit back down with you. "i'd love to stay. i also have an amazing suggestion for a show." your eyes light up, and it feels like the room filled with more air the way you both sighed with relief. "oh really?" you tease him, as he takes back the toy he'd left with you. "lay it on me then."

fun facts -> TWO PEOPLE PINING FOR EACHOTHER BUT NEITHER KNOW IT!!!! a classic trope. chefs kiss. yuuta offered to go get snacks not only because he was starving, but he also needed time to calm himself down before going to y/n's dorm. he was scared. scared that he'd say something stupid, give her the ick, embarrass himself. you know, the works. once he got there though, it felt like he never wanted to go home again.

-> GOD I LOVE THEM SO MUCh. screams. kicking my feet like a little girl writing this chapter.

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⤷ © kenmakodz

[dduane]

Hi there! I'm not sure if this is something you've talked about before in another post, but I just finished the first draft of my first novel, and I was wondering if you could talk about what your experience was like getting your first novel edited and published. I have this story that I'm excited about but no idea what to do with it now that I've reached "The End," do you have any advice on what my next step ought to be towards eventually getting it published? Thanks in advance!

First of all: thanks for asking. ...And now I have to warn you that I am possibly one of the worst possible people to ask about what their first novel's publication looked like... as it was completely atypical.

Not that that's going to stop me, mind you. (And you know what? I'm inserting a cut here, because this goes on a bit. Warning: contains [calculated] dissing by old friends, pulp non-fiction, unexpurgated language, unexpected awards nominations, and advice that's worth just what you're paying for it.)

What happened with me and my first book goes like this:...

In the late 1970s I was starting to burn out on psychiatric nursing, and was offered a job as assistant to the novelist and Star Trek ["The Trouble with Tribbles"] writer David Gerrold. I took it happily, as I was in a place in my life where I really needed some kind of change. The work with David was part-time; I also occasionally did special duty nursing shifts to help make ends meet.

Now during this period, I was writing for my own amusement (as I'd been doing all my life from about age eight onward). Right then I was working on a project I'd been tinkering with from my late high school years right through college, nursing school, and my first couple/few years of practice as an RN. This was the background worldbuilding for a vaguely Tolkienesque, somewhere-between-late-Medieval-and-early Renaissance fantasy scenario featuring a couple of moderately unusual magic systems, a sexually diverse culture, and a pair of "These Two Idiots"-style protagonists with complex interleaving problems.

While I was working for David, I had a lot of opportunity to observe, close up, what the life and workflow of a career writer looked like. Slowly, over a year or so, the realization crept up on me that what David was doing, I could do too. And it was at this point that I finally admitted to him that I thought I might want to write as well.

David's (as I later discovered, extremely calculated) eyeroll could probably have been seen from space. "Oy, not another one," he moaned. After which I went away from the abortive conversation pretty much resolved never to speak to him about this again... but also with a single thought filling my brain: You fucking supercilious sonofabitch, I'm going to show you that I'm not just another one.

...I'll never be able to thank him enough for that. Fury can be so motivating. :)

In the aftermath I got busy pulling together my background material with much more focused intent, and beating the most significant parts of it into something that started looking like a plot. It came together with surprising speed and unnerving insistence—one of the very few times in my career when a project, once begun, has simply flung me into the writing chair and insisted that it was the most important thing in my life and needed handling now. And when in the fullness of time David went on vacation, leaving me to house-sit at his place in LA, I immediately started using his very early computer to transcribe my novel's so-far-only-handwritten draft material.

I took what I thought was considerable care to cover my tracks... but not quite enough. On his return from vacation, when he was putting out the trash, David found some of my discarded draft pages, read them, and confronted me (with a certain amount of friendly teasing) about what had been going on. Then he said to me, "What I've seen of this thing doesn't look too bad. Let me see it when you're finished, and if it looks good enough, I'll ask one of my publishers if they want to take a look at it."

So that's what happened. I finished my first draft and a polish of it in about six weeks, and passed it to David. He read it and immediately handed it on to his editors at Dell, who were just starting a fantasy line for which they needed product. Two weeks later, they said they liked the novel and made an offer, which I accepted. Not a vast amount, but respectable enough. So there it was, my first sale: this book. Which then got me nominated two years running for the Astounding Award, and opened the door for the sale and publication of So You Want To Be A Wizard, as well as my earliest Star Trek work and my entry into the animation world.

I remember very little about the editing process, except that it was painless. What was not exactly painless was the book's cover, about which...well, the less said here the better. But the book came out to generally good reviews. So, with this series of events behind it, you can see why as regards first-publication stories, I'm a first-class outlier and should definitely not be counted. (Also to be avoided by new writers if at all possible: the experience of having half their strongly-selling first novel's initial print run pulped in the warehouse* because it was taking up room needed by a new book by a world-famous novelist.) (Whom I have long since forgiven, since it wasn't his fault, and...well, what can you do? Shit happens.)

...Anyway, that's more than enough about me. Now let's talk about you.

My first advice about what to do with the novel you've just finished? Stick it in a drawer (literally or figuratively speaking, whichever suits your case better) and don't look at it for at least a month. Two would be better. You can spend those two months thinking about your next moves... because you need to give those some consideration before you do anything else.

The question that you first need to answer is going to at least partially shape what you do next. And it's this:

Are you seriously considering making a career out of writing?

It's not that it can't be done! Of course it can. But it won't be easy... not at all. Anyone who tells you it will is either just outright lying through their teeth, or trying to sell you something. ...Or both.

Be honest with yourself as you consider this. If you aren't, you may be letting yourself in for considerable pain over a prolonged period... and I'd sooner you were spared that, if you can be. In particular, be clear about the difference between the statements "I want to write" and "I want to be a writer." Often enough people like the sound of the lifestyle and what they see as going with it—the signings, the book tours (physical or virtual), the interviews, the best-seller lists—without any real concept of the grueling, day-to-day, weekends-are-for-other-people, why-am-I-making-less-than-minimum-wage-most-of-the-time labor that underpins it.

If you simply want to write and be published—without the concept of a career necessarily being involved, or the lovely shimmering dreamlike vision of Giving Up The Day Job—you now have work pathways available to you that would've been unimaginable in the previous century. Self-publishing makes it possible for you to get your work in front of many, many eyes without necessarily having to submit yourself to the specific set of trials that go with achieving the initial stages of an intended career. Selfpubbing still has significant unique challenges of its own, of course, which have to be evaluated so that you can tell (as the commercials say) if they're right for you.

But if you're thinking of a career in what's usually being referred to these days as "traditional publishing", then you face a number of challenges that don't necessarily come with the self-publishing end of things. In particular: many publishing houses no longer consider manuscripts that come to them un-agented. So you're going to need to find an agent who's willing to represent your work... and this is a task that no longer looks anything like what it did when I found mine. (Or rather, when he found me, having been recommended to me by one of my editors. I've been with him for even longer than I've been with @petermorwood... and that's saying something. But this is yet another way in which my career's been wildly atypical.)

There is so much that could be said about this subject alone—the business of researching agencies to see which one seems like a good fit for you, the art of writing the perfect query letter to get their attention focused on a given book, and so much more—that I could hardly begin to even skim the surface of it here. There are whole websites devoted to shopping for agents, not to mention how to pitch yourself and your work to a given literary agency.

Let me leave this whole subject here for the moment. We can come back to it another time, because right now you need to be thinking this through. ...This I'll say, however. For the past six to nine months I've been pulling together links to various online resources that can be beneficial to new writers just getting started. These will be available as posts over at the FicFoundry.com site that I'm going to be bringing online before summer. I'm hoping to build that into kind of a compendium site or clearing house for online resources on this subject. We'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, thanks for inquiring about this. You're standing at the first branching of what I'm hoping will be, for you at least, a fascinating variant of the Choose Your Own Adventure genre. :)

More on this later.

("Wait. Did she just call us idiots??")

*Now that we live in the era of just-in-time warehousing, this is something that fortunately doesn't happen much any more... as far as I know. But once upon a time, if somebody's new best-seller was going to the warehouse in its many thousands of copies, and your relatively-less-well-selling book was taking up space that could be used by the other author's "more valuable"/higher-priced titles, your books (5-10K of them, in my case) were simply thrown into a machine and turned into papery mush. And these go on your sales record as "unsold copies". (sigh) Some discussion of this phenomenon can be found over here.

[rallamajoop]

I love your Wintersberg smut fics 😭😭😭 Do you have any more fic drafts/ ideas that are bouncing around in your brain? I'd love to hear... Ethan getting his smart mouth shut up for once and getting fucked stupid is my favorite trope.

Aha, I take it you enjoyed Atypical Side-Effects? Does Medical Log count too? Either way, now I'm very amused that the last ask I got like this one was from someone who was into Ethan bantering his way through sex ‒ I mean, nice to know I'm appealing to multiple markets here! XD

I did post a list of stuff I had in the works back in September, but a lot of those have been checked off and posted since then, so maybe we're due for an update. There's not as much wintersberg on the current list as there was, but we'll see where it goes.

So, fic I have actually made progress on in the last month or two:

The second chapter of Atypical Side-Effects I've been promising everyone is with my beta now, though I cannot tell you there's much smut in this one, and it's currently second in the queue behind...

That post-RE7 Mithan fic where Mia actually gets to come clean that I mentioned in my last WIP post, which has somehow grown into a veritable monster (how tf did this thing break 15k I do not know), and is responsible for stalling progress on most everything else around it while it ate writing time. But it is at last (hopefully) done, and my beta is trying to sort out if it's ready to be unleashed on the world now.

As mentioned in a comment or two, I've also been working on a sequel to my Yuletide Lost Boys fic Pater Unfamilias. It's about halfway done now, I think?

In other misc fandom news, I've still got a couple of semi-cast-off bits of Deus Ex fic that came out of my Spare Parts anthology not-quite-finished (and which I've been promising myself I will totally get back to and finish sometime after that big one above was done). Whether they end up getting added to that story or whether I wind up posting them as their own things remains to be decided.

But back in Resi-land, I may have mentioned in that last post that I had part of a continuation of That One Where Heisenberg Follows Him Home, and that's one I'm still picking away at between other projects. Eventual Ethan/Mia/Heisenberg, just for a little variety, but it's got its teeth in me and definitely wants to go somewhere.

So overall, possibly not quite as much wintersberg as you might have hoped? Though I may have kind of promised someone there was still more of that one Beauty and the Beast wintersberg AU still very much in my plans. And one or two other things from that older list are still in the 'may get back to' pile too.

But if you’re asking about ideas that haven’t necessarily made the draft stage, well, I could always list you a few…

I have forever been toying with the idea of a post-canon Heisenberg-lives idea, where he ends up working for Chris’ outfit as a medical examiner who specialises in cutting apart whatever horrific BOWs have been brought back for study, and also in terrifying any hapless intern who so much as wanders into his lab. I mean, he’d be perfect for the job: plenty experienced in studying bioweapons, utterly un-squeamish about cutting up dead things, and as a bonus, completely qualified to defend himself whenever some ambitious specimen decides to get up again unexpectedly. Speaking of which, mundane AUs where Heisenberg’s some kind of medical examiner should really be more of a thing too (sure, mechanic works too, but is it really gross enough for him?)

Speaking of Heisenberg-lives possibilities, the idea of a universe where he survives (unbeknownst to our heroes) thanks to having bought a ‘life insurance policy’ from the Duke which involves him being resurrected via mould trickery is another one I’ve had forever. Did actually mention it in my last in-progress post (it’s the fairy tale idea titled simply ‘Koschei’), but haven’t really made any progress on it since.

Alternately, in a hypothetical Ethan-lives-Heisenberg-doesn’t AU, the idea of a Heisenberg who continues to haunt Ethan as a mould-ghost ala virtual-Eveline has to rank pretty high on the “has no-one does this? Because someone should totally do this”-scale. No really concrete ideas for this one though, so consider it very much free to a good home.

In more recent ideas, someone pointed out to me a little while ago the possibility that Heisenberg might be able to feel it when Ethan touches anything metal (which sure does cast Ethan’s own arsenal in an interesting light!) Don’t know if I’ll ever actually get around to doing something with this one, but I’ve definitely given this one some thought.

On a related note, look, I still say the idea of Heisenberg deciding to make Ethan appreciate his genius by trapping him in a massive soldat-orgy is one I want someone else to write for me, but I’ve definitely now spent enough time explaining it to certain people that I can’t deny having given it some real thought.

In other free-to-a-good-home ideas, has anyone ever written a decent little Eveline-wins-AU horror story, with Mia and Ethan stuck playing ‘families’ with her, and only conditionally conscious of what’s really going on? Because there just is not enough real horror or fic willing to treat Eveline as the horrific little monster she canonically is around this place.

And just for something completely different, some kind of surreal Mia/Zoe thing set during RE7, with Mia constantly shifting between different levels of awareness of what’s going on, how much she can remember, and what she thinks her relationship to Eveline really is preferably with some at least R-rated Mia/Zoe smut is another of those ideas I’ve been sitting on forever now.

...and I hope that about answers your question, because that's me about out. *g*

[ellievickstar]

Only You (Xavier Thorpe x Fem!Reader)

A/N: I drafted this whole thing in English class. In my notebook. On the spot. I was like: Oh this is cool and I started writing the basic details so this is a more defined version of what I wrote in that notebook. I think this was a super cool idea and definitely one of my better ones. 

Summary: The Addams twins are the newest addition to Nevermore Academy, a school for outcast. Y/N Addams soon learns that nothing is as it seems. 

Inspiration: I didn’t have one this time. 

Request: Not requested, unless I count my brain.

Parts: Part 2 /…

Warnings: Near-death, music-loving reader, thoughts of torture, mentions of pain, magic, mystical creatures. 

(Not my gif) 

~*~*~*~*~

As Wednesday’s twin sister you were supposed to keep her out of trouble. Despite that, you had to admit that you were almost as bad at Wednesday. You were different where you preferred archery to fencing and you preferred music to writing. Socialising was also something that you could do if need be while Wednesday liked to do things with you or on her own. 

This time, however, it was definitely your idea to put piranhas in the pool. It wouldn’t be your first time getting expelled but the disappointment in your Mother’s eyes were palpable. You focused your gaze on the principal as she began to speak. 

“Well, we don’t usually accept students mid-term, but given that they both have perfect grades, I managed to convince the school board to give you both a shot,” She smiled but it slowly faded as you and Wednesday stared at her with no reaction. She soon led us to the dormitories where me and Wednesday would be sharing a room with someone else. Usually, it was two girls to a room, however, it was requested that the two off you share a room with someone else, just to keep an eye on both of you at the same time. 

The girl was Enid, and she was interesting, to say the least. Trying to hug the both of you, and rainbow every where. You scoffed at the thought as you stepped out from the bathroom after changing into your black school uniform, another thing that had been specially requested. 

“Eek you look so cute,” She said as she looked up and down, she leaned forward for a hug but you stepped out of her reach. “I’m sorry, Wednesday and I aren’t that used to touching others,” you apologised and she nodded with understanding. Once Wednesday stepped out, Enid begun to show the both of you around. 

It was all quite pleasant, until an ignorant boy named Ajax came your way. 

“Enid, you’d never guess what I heard about your roommates, they said that she eats the people that she kills,” Enid tried to smile awkwardly before side-stepping to show you and Wednesday behind her. You frowned as Wednesday gave a clipped answer about how she fed the body parts to your pet spiders. The boy paled and quickly walked away, coward. 

~*~*~*~*~

You and Wednesday finally finished the tour and began to walk together to the front of the school to bid your family goodbye. Without turning your head, you spoke to your sister, “What do you think?” Her scowl deepened, clearly unhappy with the question. That’s when you heard it. 

I think I better start plotting our escape. You stopped, as you gaped at your sisters unopened mouth. “Did you say anything?” You asked, convinced that you were going insane. “No, did it happen again?” She asked, as she paused and turned to you. You nodded before readjusting your posture and continuing down the hall with your sister. 

You had been plagued by these voices, other peoples thoughts, you realised. You didn’t know how, but you could hear certain thoughts of people. It came randomly and you couldn’t control it. When you told your sister she had confessed that she too, had been confronted with visions. Different, yet they both started to occur a few months ago.

Soon, you were in front of your mother as she smiled sweetly at you and Wednesday. “I hope you will find to love Nevermore, as I did,” She sighed as she looked at teh school with so much nostalgia it made you sick. “I will never be like you, mother,” Wednesday said, “I will never grow up, find love, or have a family,” Mother sighed at Wednesday’s harsh words. Though I agreed with Wednesday, she could have been gentler with her words. 

“I was told that girls your age say harsh things and that I shouldn’t take it to heart,” Mother swallowed. You shot her an apologetic look. That’s when she bent down and whispered, “If you try running away, I have already told all family members to call me the second you show up on their doorstep, don’t test me, the both of you,” You blinked once without any indication of a reaction, “You are cruel mother,” You said. And she smiled, turning to leave. 

It soon began to rain and your lips twitched a little. What wonderful weather to go with your less then pleasant day. Wednesday nodded to you as she left for fencing and you nodded back as you turned to leave for the music room. 

While Wednesday played the cello, you played violin from a young age. You dreamed to be as good and make music as well known in the future as Niccolò Paganini’s caprice 24, or his La Campanella.  You grabbed your violin which you had left on the floor before tuning and playing your favourite pieces. 

When you had finished Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, movement 4, you heard slow clapping from the door. You turned to see the school’s artist, Xavier. You remembered him from his grandmother’s funeral a few years back when he had somehow gotten himself stuck in her casket and was nearly burnt alive. Wednesday thought it would have been funny, however, you slammed the button at hot prevented the casket from being any nearer to the incinerator. 

Last you recalled, Xavier had been in your debt ever since. 

“You’ve grown a lot taller since we last met,” You pointed out as you bent to keep your violin. He chuckled and the sound made your heart flutter. Strange. Maybe you should go visit the nurse later to see if something was perhaps wrong. He began to talk but you tuned him out as you walked towards Wednesday’s fencing class.

It was only when you saw your sister swiftly exiting her class did you finally pay attention to you surroundings. You walked towards her before you heard crumbling above you and saw a stone gargoyle tumbling towards you, broken off from the roof. 

At least you’d have an imaginative death, you thought before you closed your eyes, the last thing you remember was being pushed and you name being called as you gave into the darkness. 

~*~*~*~*~

Your eyes flung open and you sat up instantaneously, scanning your surroundings. You’re sister sat on your left as she placed a hand on yours, showing that she was here for you. You looked to your right and saw Xavier, gaping at the small amount of physical contact given by my sister. 

You glared at him and he quickly shut his mouth. You looked back at my sister as I asked her what happened. 

“I was exiting the fencing class feeling self-pity when I saw you walking towards me and noticed that a gorgon was going to fall onto you, that’s when Xavier pushed you out of the way,” You looked at Xavier and back at my sister. “Please tell him that if he’s looking for some kind of damsel to fall for his heroic acts, then he’s saved the wrong person,” You deadpanned. Wednesday nodded and stared at Xavier, awaiting for his response. He just rolled his eyes as he mumbled about how someone usually just said ‘thank you’. 

You ignored him as you were helped up by your sister, you shifted you head slightly, showing your thanks, she blinked back her answer. You both exited but you paused a few steps from the door, poking back, you could have sworn that you heard that familiar tapping of fingers. 

You turned to your sister and saw her doing the same as she eyed the same spot you were just looking at. She glanced at you and you shrugged before following your sister back to Ophelia hall where you would be making some adjustments to your room. 

~*~*~*~*~

The rest of your day was interesting, to summarise, Enid and Wednesday argued like dogs and cats, Ms Thornhill interrupted and gifted you and Wednesday flowers, the you found Xavier again, spoke to each other — though it seemed that something was on his mind — before he rushed off and you returned to your room. 

Your sister was typing away at her type writer when you entered, the sound of ruffling sheets caught you attention, and Wednesday instantly stopped typing. You lifted the sheets of your own bed to see thing. You glared the hand and grabbed it while it seemed to shriek and try and grab the mattress. 

“You have two options,” You threatened, passing the hand to your sister while she opened a drawer. She calmly, slowly began to lower the hand as she continued your sentence, “We can lock you in this drawer for the rest of the year, you will try and crawl your way out as you are driven crazy, your nails slowly becoming bloody and battered at your failed attempts,” She blinked once at you and you smiled, thee smile was small like and adders as you approached like a wolf surveying it’s prey. “Or, you can pledge your undying loyalty to us and help us escape,” Thing frantically nodded. Wednesday closed the drawer and set thing down on the table, and so he began to pledge his loyalty. 

“Now,” You started again as you let your smile drop, “How an we escape this hell?” And for a second, you could have sworn that your sister’s lips twitched up in answer. 

~*~*~*~*~

You decided to go for a walk around the school campus, that was when you spotted a rundown shed. You entered slowly before you realised that Xavier was inside, painting… 

“What is that,” You asked as he jumped slightly at the sound of your voice. You approached the canvas gingerly. He looked back at you and to the canvas as he sighed. “I don’t know,” He admitted, “I get these visions, every night of his monster, and it’s s overwhelming, so I just…paint,” He gestured to the large canvas where the monster was staring menacingly, it’s large mouth was open, showing it’s menacing fangs. 

That’s when disaster struck. 

The second he waved his hand, the monster came alive as it reached out and scratched Xavier’s neck. You stepped back, shocked that Xavier would let the monster come to life. “I thought you had control of your power,” You said as you rushed to get a clean cloth near-by. He pointed to a medical kit he kept by a bed. You grabbed some bandages and cleaning solutions to clean the fresh wounds. You stood in front of him and peered up at his neck, that was when you realised he was too tall. 

“Sit down,” You ordered. He chuckled as you grabbed a stool for him to sit down. “You’re short,” “No you’re just tall, who the hell is 6 feet these days,” You snapped back. Since you were feeling annoyed, you didn’t warn him before pressing the alcohol covered cloth to the cut. He hissed and bit his cheek as he clutched the edge of the stool. A snort slipped out as you continued to clean the cut. 

“Was that a laugh, Ms Addams?” He tried to look back but you slapped the back of his head, making him laugh, again. “Tell anyone and they wouldn’t believe you, and I will bury you alive,” You threatened. 

And that’s how you spent the rest of the night, laughing and making jokes with Xavier. Well, he made jokes and you laughed, but only a little. 

~*~*~*~*~

A/N: They are SO CUTE!!!! What do you think? I think I’m in love. This is only the first part, but I plan to recreate the whole series with YN Addams inside. I think it would be a fun way to practice my writing and get a better understanding of every character before season 2. 

Tag list: @poppet05​ @cityofidek​ @write-from-the-heart​ (If you want to be tagged please specify if it is for all Xavier fics or just this series) 

[heyclickadee]

So I forgot that this was in my drafts and has just been sitting in there for a month and a half. Anyway, actual ramblings on “Replacements”:

1. I took notes while watching this one. My first note just says, “Sad whale noises,” underlined four times, with a little frowny face.

2. Hunter’s little lopsided grin as he says, “Well, that doesn’t look comfortable—for either of you,” to Omega and Gonky. He’s stressed and not sure what to do next, but he’s still kind of playful at this point. The depression hasn’t quite set in. And Omega’s little, “We’re fine.” That’s the “We’re fine,” of, “My legs are asleep and I can’t feel my spine but I’d rather die than take up space or admit I’m uncomfortable because I don’t know what I can get away with around you guys,” I swear….

3. Gonky’s little kicky feets!! Also, how did he get down there? Did he fall over while Tech was doing some unnecessary barrel rolls? Did Wrecker put him there? Did he flop over so Omega could use him as a backrest?

4. Again, Hunter’s deadpan shake of the head when Wrecker just *fyoom* inhales that ration bar. Also, can we talk about how much living on ration bars must suck? You probably get your caloric needs for the day, but it’d be like eating one single cliff bar for every meal. You wouldn’t starve or be malnourished, but you’d never feel full, hence why Wrecker, who is lärge and probably has the metabolism of a Bugatti, never has (I want to make him all the treats! He deserves all the cinnamon rolls and pie and plank grilled salmon and burgers and…).

5. I do kind of appreciate that they start introducing the idea that practical needs, like food and ship fuel, are a concern for these guys, and that they’re more or less flat broke. Other Star Wars shows have touched on people having to actually pay for things to survive—that’s part of the point of the Lando episode of Rebels—but’s a constant thread in this show. Clone Force 99 is always a few really bad days from being stranded, because they can’t afford to fuel the ship, and starving, because they’re out of food.

6. I do kind of appreciate that even though Hunter physically pushes Wrecker back to keep him from grabbing Omega’s ration bar (good for Omega for offering it but), he does so pretty gently, and he drops his voice because even though he wants Wrecker to understand that Omega will absolutely inconvenience herself to make other people comfortable, he doesn’t want to call Wrecker out in front of the whole ship. He’s trying to make it as private as he can…in the space RV…with limited space. Besides, it’s not as though Hunter could shove Wrecker out of the way unless Wrecker allowed himself to be pushed. “I’m gonna push you away from someone who doesn’t need to overhear us now, back up with me,” seems to just be the accepted language of private conversation between all of them. And I also appreciate that Wrecker, as fundamentally kind, gentle, and emotionally intelligent as he is, does have a little trouble switching to/considering other perspectives. He never needs reminding once it’s pointed out, but he does sometimes need it pointed out to begin with.

7. Tech says he’s building the brain scanner so that he can double check that their chips don’t work. Bullshit. BULL. SHIT. I mean, okay, not total bullshit—I do think he’s at least partially telling the truth. He’s definitely thinking that Crosshair was acting the way he was because his chip activated, and if Crosshair’s chip activated, then why wouldn’t theirs? It’d be good to check. But I think that’s a secondary reason. Based on how he’s the one who brings up the chip as an explanation for Crosshair’s behavior, the added context of season two, and the way he totally drops the scanner after this episode until Rex shows up in episode seven, I really think he’s building it because he’s under the impression that they’re going back for Crosshair sooner than later, and he thinks they’ll need it to locate his chip so they can figure out a way to deactivate or remove it. Tech just told Echo what he did so he could keep working on it.

8. “It’s not affecting life support. We’re fine.” “Are you kidding me?!” I love them. Also: Shout out to poor Gonky rattling around the back of the Marauder like the last tic-tac left in the pack. Get the poor droid a seatbelt.

9. I love that Wrecker tests his tie-down to make sure it’s locked. The Bad Batch isn’t a perfect show, but I adore little background gestures like these, and it’s full of them, even compared to the other animated shows. They help the characters feel a little more alive.

10. I feel like I need to have a, “That’s one hell of a pilot,” counter for every time Tech does some impressive piloting. The ship isn’t functioning correctly and goes from zero visibility and turbulent conditions to, “OH SHIT, THE GROUND,” and a very narrow window in which he can react, and he still manages to land the ship. Not crash, land. With the landing gear down. And, yes, I’m sure that there is some kind of ILS system on the ship for low visibility landings, since this is a universe where autopilot exists, but still—Tech kind of strikes me as the sort of person who would turn autopilot off. (Also, tell me that if the ship would be in one piece if it was Anakin flying it. I love Anakin, and he’s a phenomenal pilot, but I also think that both Tech and Hera could outfly him.)

11. There’s something endearing about the way that they all spring into doing different jobs to figure out how to get out of the mess they’re in once they’ve landed—Echo’s checking the weather, since it’s knocking out their commas and they can’t call for help; Tech’s checking which parts they need to fix the ship and if they have any on board; Hunter’s making sure everyone’s okay and getting Gonky on his feet; Wrecker…might actually just be recovering because he hit his head pretty hard (STOP DOING THAT, WRECKER. STOP IT)—and Omega doesn’t want to be left out or useless so she instantly starts trying to help out, too.

12. “That’s…Crosshair’s weapon kit.” Hello darkness my old friend….

13. Everything about this moment is a gut punch. The way Hunter just stares at the weapons kit for a moment, the way that Wrecker’s the first one to speak up, the anger on Echo’s face when he counters with, “He shot you!”; the way Tech looks between Wrecker, the kit, and Echo a couple times before speaking up and then looks right at Echo as he finishes saying that it could be Crosshair’s chip that’s making him act the way he is, as though he’s trying to convince Echo specifically; Echo’s disbelief and the awfulness of, “That’s what they were designed to do.” Hunter shutting the conversation down before the debate really gets underway, and turning away from everyone (and us), probably so they (and we) can’t see his face. The way that each of them expresses one aspect of what they’re probably all feeling: the loss (Wrecker); the betrayal (Echo); the need for an explanation or a justification (Tech); and the way it’s all too painful to deal with (Hunter).

Speaking of Hunter, the way he reacts by shutting the conversation down and shifting the focus to the task at hand is a pretty well done depiction of the way some people deal with loss. Finding something to do, something to fix, something to keep your mind and hands busy, having a problem to solve; that’s just how some people are. Hunter isn’t taking Crosshair’s absence well, even at this point, and it’s important to remember that he only really found out about the chips and clone programming a few days ago. He’s probably still trying to reconcile that with the emotional betrayal of seeing Crosshair walk out into that hangar wearing black armor and ordering him to stand down.

Also, listen for a little four note motif in the music that plays under this scene. Then go listen to “Mayday.” I could be hearing wrong, but I could also be hearing right, and if I have to suffer, so do you.

14. Speaking of Crosshair, I really want to know why he needed another chip amplification procedure done. I mean, yes, it’s not definite that that’s what’s just happened to him when we cut to Kamino, but all the visual cues are there. My personal suspicion is that the first round took, as we saw at the end of “Aftermath,” but that it didn’t last the way it was supposed to after the batch left. My other personal suspicion is that this repeat procedure was potentially augmented, or more targeted, and that it wasn’t the only other time it happened to him. As much as a segment of the fandom was (and is) worried that Crosshair was or is going to be turned into another Clone X or proto-death trooper, I sort of think it works the other way around. Crosshair was already a test subject, we saw it happen in “Aftermath” and in this episode, and he might have already been patient zero for the early versions of what was later done to the poor guy who ended up as Clone X and the people who are going to end up death troopers, and his chip either being damaged or having to be removed after “Reunion” might be what saved him from being experimented on further, for a while, anyway. I don’t think being brainwashed again is in Crosshair’s future, just because that seems like the one way to screw up his character arc, but we’ll see.

15. God, the way Tarkin, Rampart, and the rest back up the literal chip-powered mind control poor Crosshair’s under with some good old fashioned regular brainwashing by making him a commander (in name only, apparently) of an elite squad of new recruits and talking about how important these new clone lead units are going to be for the transition into imperial power is just cruel. Crosshair’s brain is all kinds of messed up and they’re doing their best to make sure it stays that way. And Crosshair is so inexpressive through the episodes where his chip is at full strength compared to how he is in the rest of the show. He’s still in there, and it’s still him, but he’s being filtered through GoodSoldiersFollowOrders.exe and I just. What if I crawled into my screen and kicked Tarkin in the shins? What if I did that? (I would get shot, that’s what. But still.)

16. The Echo-Tech banter as they’re trying to fix the ship is fun, as is the Empire Strikes Back homage. Also, I love how Tech kind of downplays the situation by just saying that other systems are shutting down, and that Echo IMMEDIATELY jumps in and explains that SOMETHING IS ATTACKING THE SHIP.

17. So, we get Tech explaining that the creature is probably an ordo moon dragon, a creature that feeds on energy (we’ll get to that), and Echo saying that it would have been great if Tech had said that earlier. This isn’t the first of the last time someone will say something like this, and this next bit is kind of a silly thought based on almost nothing, but I sometimes wonder if Tech occasionally thinks he’s said something out loud or explained something when he hasn’t.

18. I don’t know what to do about the fact that the ordo moon dragon feeds on raw energy but lives on an apparently unsettled planet with no power generators or ships or whatevers, but it’s also not the only creature we meet that does this. The zillo beast also slurps down electricity like a breakfast smoothie. That kind of implies that there are natural sources of electricity around and that a number of creatures evolved to take advantage of is. But also it has teeth. Maybe it’s like the Zillo beast and can also eat other things. Maybe it grabs electric space eels, chews on electric charge for a while, and then eats the eel. Or something. I don’t know, it’s Star Wars, there are star whales that fly and jump through hyperspace, it doesn’t really have to make sense.

19. Omega says, “Then we’ll find a way to get him back—somehow,” and then Hunter looks back at her and smiles. And it kills me. And maybe it’s because we can only see half his face, but it’s the most unguarded smile I think we’ve seen from Hunter the entire show. He doesn’t think they can go back yet, but I think he still thinks it’s going to be possible someday, maybe even soon, and that when they do it’ll all work out and be fine and oh my sweet summer child…

20. That transition from Crosshair jumping down to Hunter and Omega walking though the mist is such a cool transition. You can’t even tell you’re in a new location until you see Hunter’s and Omega’s legs.

21. Crosshair opens fire on Saw’s camp, of course, but he misses. A lot. I think there’s one point where he fires four shots but only lands one. It’s not the batch, but he’s still pulling his shots here, as much as he can.

22. Along those lines, I do think it’s interesting that Crosshair doesn’t kill the civilians himself. They’re going to die, he can’t stop that, because those are the orders and he doesn’t have the capacity to say no to it at this point, but he passes the order along to his men. He doesn’t do it himself, and he doesn’t watch. Which is interesting.

23. Speaking of Crosshair’s men, you know what? Cowards. All except that one guy who had the backbone to say that murdering civilians is wrong. He’s a jackass about clones, but at least he’s not down for murder.

24. So the way Crosshair says, “dealt with,” when he reports to Tarkin and Rampart is brutal and it’s going to live rent free in my head.

25. *screams about the whole ending sequence with Wrecker and the room and the lights and Omega but also it’s the gunners chair and Crosshair sitting on his bunk and Echo patting Wrecker on the shoulder because he did a good thing and how the warmth of the one scene and the emptiness of the other enhance each other this show is going to kill me again*

[microsuedemouse]

In Eden

➤ In his final moments, Nicholas D. Wolfwood wished with everything he had for another chance. A different life. A better world.

➤ This is none of those things. Against all odds, though, he's still alive, and to squander that would be a disservice to the woman who saved him. So he'll try. He'll put his friends behind him and forge something new.

➤ After all, he can never go back.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood/Milly Thompson | 8 011 words | Rated T+ | Fix-It, Angst with a Happy Ending, Reunions, (Ambiguously) Catholic Guilt

“I did not wanna die this way!”

The last thing Nicholas D. Wolfwood expects is to wake up. So when he does, he assumes these are the final desperate attempts of his dying mind to grasp at something better. To claw its way out of this uncaring existence and into a kinder plane. He wished so hard for a second chance – a more loving reality – that the chemical misfires of his brain, steadily running out of blood, are now producing hallucinations of exactly that. Except that he isn’t waking up in the Eden he’d dreamed of.

Keep reading on AO3 →

hhhhokay so. this has been in my drafts since shortly after I finished watching the show, which was apparently... February? whoogh. I was never sure if I got the pacing/length just right, so I was never quite ready to call it finished. but recently @llamahearted posted another wonderful Millywood drawing and it reminded me that I still wanted to clean this up and post it!

listen, Vashwood is fantastic, but Millywood just hits alllll the right notes for me. I adore them so much, and I wish they could've had the happy ending they deserved. so I'm out here writing fix-it fic in which What If They Actually Didn't Die, once again. Nicholas's tragedy is really good, and its impact on Vash's story is really important, but also... what if.

also, I made up a bit of my own lore for the Chapel of the Gung-Ho-Guns, because the manga lore is so so silly. it's really only implied/mentioned in the fic itself, but I just wanted to pad out a few spots.

spoilery bit about the final lines of the fic below:

I was divided on revealing Goodwin's first name to be Eden, because I really liked the symbolism/symmetry of that, and of the idea of Nicholas never having learned that about her. but I'm also very in love with the idea of Nicholas and Milly having a daughter and naming her Eden. so I waffled a lot.

and then I remembered it's fanfic and I can do whatever I want. if I decide to write another fic where they do have a daughter named Eden, no one's gonna arrest me for using the same general idea two slightly different ways. also, you don't even actually meet the baby in this fic, so. who cares. it's FINE.

[gioiaalbanoart]

Hello my talented friend! Ashley is stealing my heart. When can I read about her adventures? Also: can you tell me more about her? Where did she come from (in your brain) and why is she so cool?

Hello @fortunatetragedy !!!

Tons of kudos are flying to you, catch them 💗💗💗

(catch something to drink too is gonna be long 🍻 🍻🍻...)

****

Right now Ashley is arching a brow at me , arms crossed and foot tapping (even more than usual) to hurry up and get to work at her story. She's actually being patient (yes, she can be!) .

Because she knows I HAVE to close another writing fanfic first, which hopefully I'll do in the next couple of days  🤞 🤞 

This is just how it has to be because I have to close a circle. We made a pact about it and I have no intention to piss her off more than I already did 😅

****

Right now I have approximately four draft/chapters and a lot of scattered material such as scene/dialogues/bits-of-plot-outlined-sort-of..... (big LOL on the last one , I might start to use post-it on the door too).

All of it basically on my computer or in snippets here on tumblr Which is why I was wondering on a section/post to keep updated until I'm ready to start sharing more....

Because (drums rattling) : The scarred angel is, in my brain for now, the first one of a trilogy.

It gives you an idea of how much urgent is for me to start working on it seriously and, most of all, continuously.

I'd like publish (on AO3, I suppose) once I complete and edit the first draft/book.....(I'm already sweating)

This while I'll work on the second book and so on (kind of like you're doing for DMLS).

This is the idea.....

NOW : We both know how wide is that fucking gap between an idea and real life, don't we?

****

Ashley Knox pointed her face in my brain exactly one year ago, just like that : that name, curly blonde hair, arctic eyes, scars, bad temper and all.

With a possible quest/investigation somehow linked to drug cartels (Thank you Ashley!)

I was just back to writing then, I already had others ideas but she just wouldn't leave me alone until my best on line friend pointed out she was so persistent because I HAD to write her story and there was no way around it.

I'm sure you're familiar with the situation....

So I started to write bits here and there while a kind of world/plot was taking his weird shape (the shape is still quite weird btw).

It includes violence because the story evolves mainly on the mexican border and will be somehow linked to drug cartels and, here too, there is no way around it.

But I want it also to be about healing and magic despite the plot/investigation and the background of the two MC (Ashley Knox and Amy Salinas, journalist, friend and...we'll see).

The magic part might be "subtle vibes, kind of, but consistent" and I know it will be a huge pain in the ass (More sweating here)

****

Ashley has been scarred when she was sixteen (in the story she's about 23), can't say who did it because it's part of the plot 😉

She has a raw temper and is a lone (red) wolf.

She always rubbed shoulders with taking care of herself, growing alone, dealing with random stray like her , cartels, violence, guns and so on. She also will seek for revenge.

I'm thinking at her revenge as parallel with the main investigation.

Despite the world she evolved in she has her own strict moral code, a lot of sarcasm and lot of strenght.

She could use some love too ....but she's really selective about it.

The "love" part would be ,idealistically, part of her healing path.

Of course it never goes from point A straight to point B.....

Amy is around same age, suffers from ptsd after being raped and "casually" meets Ashley and decides to stick around against ALL ODDS....

Part of it because she's thunderstruck /love first sight kind of 😂 , BUT nothing will be obvious about it. ...

Part is because she will be claiming her life back (healing again). Amy is strong too, in a different way, and that's not her world.....

I see Ashley/Amy relationship as a kind of love story/slooooooooooooooooow burn....I'll try to make it weird as possible and probably fail but we'll see 😉

The line relationship/love line will totally evolve with the flow.

****

I'll stop here because I' could probably go on and brag about Ashley even longer (You have my endless gratitude for giving me the opportunity btw 💗💗 )

****

Weird bonus facts

There is a "Jaime" in Ashley's background story that has been important to her, in a weird kind of way.... The guy is already dead but he' ha's been there with that exact name since the beginning. And now I know you 😉

Ashley has three scars : a long one on her right cheek, another on her forehead and a smaller like a sick joke of a smile on her left cheekbone....One year after she's born in my brain I have now a 25 stitches scar too (the recent surgery) . Lucky me on my smaller back not face but I can't help to think about some kind of parallel. For me casual/random don't exist. I just hope that it stops there....😅😅😅

Her favorite line is : "I don't care what you think" and goes around in my brain multiple times a day. Again, nothing casual.

"The end" for now 🙏💗💗🙏

[seeingteacupsindragons]

Brains are especially prone to bullying us in this darkest week of the year that also has the most pressure on it to be HaPPy and MaGiCAl. I'm sorry you're having a rough week!

Couple asks: do you do New Year's resolutions or set goals or anything like that? If so, any you're willing to share?

Second, we've talked a lot about pantsing vs outlining etc. This is semi-related I guess. I seem to have backed myself into a corner where I have a very specific scene I want to write, but that doesn't seem to be where the story wants to go, so everything I try to do to get there feels forced and dry. Do you think I need to drop the planned scene entirely to get my flow back? Is there some magic trick to get my brain to cooperate with me daring to plan something for once? 😅

Work has been a bear and hormones are currently out of whack, so it's not like it's surprising and honestly could be a lot worse, but I'm just so tired and grumpy and feeling underappreciated. I'm going to go take a nap soon.

One:

Yes, I do set New Year's Resolutions, sort of, but I haven't actually made most of them in a few years. They're typically writing-goal oriented, and I'm not generally very married to them. But they're goals. Things like getting back in querying (missed it again, thanks concussion), finishing drafts, starting new things. I think this year it's going to be finding a new CP, getting Tiadane's book out the door, and finishing at least one draft of Avel's.

Two:

I have a number of times had to drop plot lines I liked the idea of or scenes because they just never fit into the story or I never had time for them (in the story line). I suspect this will always happen, and it's a little sad, but sometimes it's just better for that particular story.

But there are ways around it:

Write it anyway, and if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. You still have that scene you love.

Plan the damn story around the things you want most to include, and therefore that scene you want to do (this can be hard because you can do that and then sometimes the story warps and it's weird anyway).

Write a new story to stick The Thing in. Very popular choice.

Sometimes also talking through the problem and articulating why the story is veering in a different direction from that scene can be helpful (even if only talking to yourself).

For example, that I'm just making up on the spot here:

The Scene: A very dramatic reunion between Protag and Love Interest set in Protag's home after a year apart, and one of them is wounded and dripping wet from the rain and there's a couple lines you really like about what they meant and why they left and why they couldn't return sooner and the other getting down on their knees to beg for forgiveness or whatever the hell.

Why would the story not want to go there? It's great, right?

Except maybe the dramatic confession words you imagined don't quite work with other ways you've described the feelings so it doesn't seem like a way to sum it up

Maybe the location is wrong, because Protag's home has become a source of too much safety and it seems wrong to have a dramatic confrontation there, or the layout you made for it doesn't match your Cinematic Daydream.

Wait, why are they going to someone they haven't seen in a year wounded they have other options and they're not actually the type of person to do that despite how cool it looked in your head.

And then once you kind of narrow down the specific sort of direction the story is building to and the specific location the Scene That Doesn't Fit is in, you can see if one or the other can shift towards the other so they can meet together, or if it's just irreconcilable, or you have to pick which elements are most important and how you can repurpose them.

I don't know if this is helpful. Maybe? Lemme know, I guess.

[sweetfirebird]

er. the process.

*weak jazz hands*

Someone asked, which then forced me to again think upon the mess that might be called "my process."

It is organized. It is not at all organized.

I did a Q&A on Patreon for patrons last year and some of them asked sort of similar questions, which I did my best to answer. I looked at those again, and I am going to post one of the questions and my answer here. But I'm not sure it's even what "my process" fully is.

(But also like, part of me feels like this is all pretty standard writing stuff. I mean, as I say, I don't write plot-based stories. I do character-based stories. So if you are a heavy plotter, this might be weird looking to you)

Anyway, the answer from that Q&A session. Question asked by KGA. <3

I'm curious which comes to you first, the characters or the story idea, and how much do you know/plan before you write the book.

--Sometimes, it starts with a notion. The notion can be small. “Dragon woos someone with garbage.” Which was a tumblr discussion that eventually, eventually, led to Zarrin. (It’s not quite garbage, in the end, but Joe was still confused.) Sometimes, it starts from a discussion about fun tropes from which we get “hyper space nerd has to be rescued repeatedly by giant space marine and at some point, has to think he’s been left behind only then giant space marine returns to save him.” And… you can tell what that ended up. Delf was because I just… originally wanted to do something with knights and a threatening vibe (what the threat was, I hadn’t decided yet). Knights alone in a dark, dark wood, that sort of thing, was the original notion. But why make the woods scary when the rest of the world is really what you should keep your eye on?

Occasionally, the character or part of the character comes first. I saw the name Potts on something and wanted to think about a gentle soul named Potts. (Or Jericho. Whatever).

Then I stew over the idea for a while. It rarely stays in its original raw form but the joy I took in that idea has to stay. That is the important thing. And then I start to consider what would get me to the point necessary for space nerd to always be in danger, to consider why the lonely witch in his lonely house is so lonely in the first place, or what on earth two knights would be doing in the woods if they aren’t after a dragon or a grail.

The steps are roughly the same after that. (Roughly.) Muse on it until it sparks into scenes or more ideas that please my brain. Extend a premise out of that. Then think about plot and characters. But characters first. Plotting is not my strong suit.

I make what I call ‘notes.’ Which is sort of an outline, or a map. I do it in linear order, because the characters grow over the course of a story so I can’t jump ahead too far or I will pay for it later when the characters that they become no longer want or need to do a thing I thought they might.

This process takes a while, and it basically… hmm I described it somewhere once as sort of like building a house. Sort of. The first part of the notes process is just me trying to get out all the ideas that have been forming in my head, including any specific scenes or lines I thought of.

Then I go to the start of the document and make little character sheets for their names and maybe some stuff about them. (There are a lot of question marks here.) Then once I have a better idea of my people, I go back to the outline part and I start to fill it in. This takes several passes and generally some time. A week or two or much longer than that, depending on the book or story. Each pass has more detail. Sometimes I will basically write a whole scene, including dialogue, but in messy note form.

When it actually gets written, though, sometimes that whole scene changes or gets cut. So what I call notes goes from true notes, to an outline, to a first draft of sorts, before I actually “write” it.

The notes for the ending scenes are always the most vague, deliberately. I usually have some sort of ending in mind (Confront emperor. Declare feelings in public. Realize your two boyfriends are your two boyfriends. And so on.) but, like I said, the characters will have been changed by the events of the story (some of which I don’t even know about yet) so the exact details cannot be known.

Little Wolf in my original notes ran away from Wolf’s Paw to protect it from Silas and also because he was used to running when he was scared. He goes back to Los Cerros, finds Ray (and Cal) and eventually Nathaniel came to get him. This was a terrible idea and because it was just notes, easy enough to delete and change. It would not have suited the Tim we actually get at the end of the book, because that Tim didn’t want to run anymore. Our baby grew up. Aw.

The notes I am working on now for a new thing have gone through… several versions omg. Over the past two years, I have considered and reconsidered what I wanted to do with this story and, in fact, at the time of answering this, I had only just figured out the end. And by that, I mean, it’s roughly there. It’s also finally more of what I want. My brain wantsto tell this story, so this is the one. Hopefully, it’s romantic enough for everyone. I think it is, or will be, with some more tweaking. (And you know, all the writing I have to do.)

(The new thing in question was Forget-Me-Not btw.)

[plethomacademia]

2, 9, 30, 42 and 49 for the fic asks?

Answering these! Thank youuuuuuuuu I answered 2 here

9. How do you find new fic to read?

I am so bad at reading :( I often have to pick between reading and writing and until the long fic is done, writing is winning a lot lately. I almost only read from recs right now and even then my read later pile is very very large. I will also click around in specific relationships, but only very rare ones, like Z'rell/Tav or Ketheric/Gortash or Alan Wake/Mr Scratch (leave me alone.

30. Have you ever written something that was out of your comfort zone? If so, what was it, and how did it affect your approach to writing fic thereafter?

My secret santa!!! For several reasons:

1) I don't normally write m/m because I love women and want to always be reading about women, thinking about women, etc.

2) It was my first time writing with someone else's OC.

3) It was my first time explicitly trying to write anything kink adjacent, even though I only did humiliation. I am usually very boring in my actual porn writing because I am rolling around in the emotions and other interactions.

I think writing this fic kind of cracked my brain open? I have been much more confident and just more open to trying stuff since I did this one. I think the good reception on it has resulted in me trusting myself more. Since then, I have started writing more origin characters and honestly I am already picking at ideas for someone else's OC, which is terrifying and exciting!

42. Have you ever received a comment that particularly stood out to you for whatever reason?

Two things here. One is that there are a few people who have commented on multiple chapters of my long fic and it's almost like they are my pen pals? I am always so happy to see them.

The other are the comments about the Maevetash dynamic, one that got me especially was:  I love how you write their dialogue. Witty, snappy, purposeful. It's all a dance and they're both trying to lead.

I practically screamed YES EXACTLY! when I read this one. To have someone write a comment that just hits dead on what you are trying to do is just such a great feeling.

49. What are you currently working on? Share a few lines if you’re up for it!

Technically answered here but hey after the jump y'all wanna see the first draft at a kinkmeme that I started today?

Gale X Lae'zel, extreme draft edition. To summarize the prompt, basically Gale is super horny from having his orb stabilized and Lae'zel has decided to fix it by, you know, giving him a handjob. In this context, he has come once and she has decided that he needs another one.

As he moved to tuck himself away, a green hand pushed his away and she was touching him again, wrapping his softening flesh in her palm.

“What are you —” he started to ask.

She cut him off with a squeeze and it was far too much far too soon. He couldn’t stifle the noise he made over it. It was likely loud enough to have carried out of the tent, but she paid it no mind. “It is insufficient,” she said.

“Lae’zel, it requires time to — Oh gods, can you please stop?”

She stilled her hand. “You are referring to the need to rest between orgasms. I am familiar with this trait. However, you require another release and it is more efficient if it is dealt with now.”

“I am afraid that the, ah, anatomy, as you put it earlier, does not quite work like that.”

“Do you presume to instruct me on the properties of a phallus, Gale?”

[toseeclearly]

i deleted everything by accident

I deleted everything by accident, and now I am grieving.

It's not that these things were important, technically. I deleted a tumblr I barely used or looked at; a place where I would start to write a post, get cold feet, and then leave it in the drafts until I no longer wanted to do anything with it. That's all it was, a graveyard to things I was never going to complete, ideas I'd given up on, plans I never followed through with.

But still, the day they rip the memorial down is still sad, and you'll forever walk by that lamp post and remember that, at one point, there were flowers here.

So I guess I just... use this how I used to use the internet: like a diary. I was once a dedicated blogger, back in the days when being a "blogger" had some sort of caché (I think if you said that now, someone would assume you were using some sort of throwback term, like asking aloud if anyone knew of a video store they could check out. Are there any video stores left? I don't know, and I don't feel like googling right now). I wanted to be a writer, a blogger, I wanted to be like all the cool teens I followed who had custom webpages with sections where they'd post about their thoughts and other sections for cool things they did with their friends. I wanted to be their friend and be posted on their cool blog! But this was the early 2000s, where the only way to contact these people was to either stalk a forum they might be on, or email them directly, and both of those always felt unappealing. So instead, I wrote about my life and my friends, read my friends blogs, hoped to be cool enough to be included. Hundreds of posts, stories and essays and quiz results and absolutely atrocious poetry, we wrote so much, I wrote so much. And all of it is gone, now. Blogs long deleted, websites no longer active, everything lost to digital decay. Or, if you're me, you delete your tumblr by accident while massively tired and only realise too late what you've done. More decay, more insignificant pieces of the web burned away. I'm the only one who cares, but that's fine. I can... rebuild. Or just use this space for my own terrible navel gazing.

I write a lot. I have a fair amount of published work, but I also write a lot that never sees the light of day (and probably never should, mostly for quality control issues). I spent a lot of nights writing Parkdale Haunt, a lot of very late evenings hammering out page after page after page until my eyes hurt and my brain was trying to escape my skull, but it felt good. It was a good time. There's several episodes where I wrote the first draft in a complete haze, like when you're running a marathon (NOTE: I have never run a marathon, but like, stick with me here, I'm just extrapolating from my time as a long distance runner) (SECOND NOTE: I hated long distance running and quit to focus on sprinting and hurdling, which I loved, because sprinting is designed for people who want all their endorphins RIGHT NOW and hurdling is designed for masochists, and the 400m hurdles is the perfect race if you just want to punish yourself for any feeling of hubris that you've ever had in your entire curséd life) and you're just zoning out and pushing through any thought you might have that says hey man, what if you just - oh, I don't know - lied down on that patch of grass over there? Yeah, that would be sick as fuck. Writing feels like that for me sometimes, like hey, wouldn't it be nice to just go to bed? Yeah, bed is good. But then I would look down and there'd be 15 pages in front of me, and I'd feel... great. And also exhausted and vaguely headachy, but great. Then I would just spam Emily and/or Ian with screenshots of scenes at random times. Being in my vicinity means you're getting unhinged screenshots at some point.

So I've been writing again. I've got two scripts going for a new show, here's to hoping it works out. And I guess I can write here when I need/want to procrastinate. I don't have much of a footprint left after I threw my fucking shoes in the ocean.

All this has done is made me miss hurdling.

[roseblushwrites]

ao3 wrapped [writer edition]

I know it's supposed to be an ask meme but I am not going to sit here and wait to be asked when I feel like just answering all of them right now! It has been like two decades since I last got to do a MySpace bulletin survey and frankly I miss infodumping about myself!!!

How many words have you written this year? 125,547. Which, quite honestly, does not seem like it could possibly be true.

How many works did you publish this year? 17

What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)? Probably Lovers in a Fable and Engraved Upon My Heart, they're my two longest one-shots and I managed to get some actual plot in with the smut for once.

What work of yours has the most hits? Lover, Be Good to Me

What work of yours got more feedback than you expected? Known in the Ache. It was the first fic I'd posted in 13 years and I was not expecting a single person to notice or care.

Favorite title you used? The Force of Forbidden Love by Jusjuli Doutgods makes me laugh every time I see it still.

If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most? Hozier.

Pairing you wrote the most for this year? Cal/Merrin

Favorite pairing you wrote for this year? This is mean. I'm going to say Cal/Merrin though because they have more content to be inspired by than Jyn/Cassian, and they didn't require me to do the work of making up an OC, like Gale/Tav. So they were just easier to write about.

What work was the quickest to write? I honestly don't remember! I feel like for the most part my one-shots take an average of the same amount of time to write.

What work took you the longest to write? Known in the Ache. I wrote all of it before I started posting, over about five months. The first draft was only from Jyn's POV and was about half as long as the final version - I rewrote almost every part of it for the second draft and added in all the Cassian POV sections at that point.

How many WIPs do you have in your docs for next year? Seven, lol. Though most likely at least one of those will get written and posted before this year is over.

What’s your longest work of the year? Known in the Ache, 41,632 words

What’s your shortest work of the year? Watch Me Unfold, 1,963 words

What WIP are you taking into next year with you? For sure Hope to the Edge, my Merrical cowboy AU... but I also accidentally wrote an outline for a smutty one-shot in the urban fantasy Merrical AU setting I thought would never exist anywhere other than my own brain, so also that one.

What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag? Aside from the obvious ones like "established relationship" and "shameless smut" and tags for various sexual acts that are basically on all of them, the answer to this is probably "consensual voyeurism"

Your favorite character to write this year? I have to say Cal. I have not loved a character the way I love him in yearrrrrssssss. He is just so earnest and I love his journey. And I just think he and Merrin deserve to fuck nasty 🤷‍♀️

The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year? Gale Dekarios. Good lord. I love this sweet man but his vocabulary and speech patterns can be so hard to get right. I think (hope?) I've mostly gotten the hang of it now, but every fic I still have to basically write the version a normal person would say in the initial draft and then "Gale-ify" it on the edit.

What’s one pairing you want to explore next year? Um... recent developments have me thinking a lot about a Karlach/Wyll/Dammon OT3. I've never written anything like that so it would be a challenge, but I am thinking about it 👀 kind of a lot 👀👀👀

Which work of yours have you reread the most? I actually have no idea. I usually reread everything I post several times in the first day it's up (and spot all the tiny edits I missed or new things I want to change 🙄) but after that I kind of... never look at it again lol.

How many kudos in total did you get this year? 2,433 😭♥️

Which work has the most comments? Known in the Ache, because it's the oldest and longest

Did you do any collaborative works this year? No 😞 maybe next year!

Did you write any gifts this year? Yes I wrote Lovers in a Fable for Sarah aka dangerwillrobinson aka @icapturedthecastle because it was her birthday and I wanted to do something nice for her 🥰 my love language is dedicating smut to my friends

Did you receive any gifts this year? Sarah dedicated free to a good home to me on my birthday because she's the best. clone club 4 lyfe

What’s your most common category? F/M

What do you listen to while writing? Most of the time it's Goodnight Moon ASMR videos because they're always so cozy and comforting but aren't the kind of ASMR that make me sleepy, but also aren't really distracting (which music tends to get for me).

Favorite work you wrote this year? My favorite is usually whichever one I just finished, so Engraved Upon My Heart at the moment.

Favorite line/passage you wrote this year? I'm going to be annoying and do lines from each character in my pairings. Favorite Cal line: “I know that first one was for you,” Cal panted into her mouth. “But this one’s gonna be for me, okay?” (Bedroom Hymns) Favorite Merrin line: “You bumbled too much for it to be lurking.” (The Force of Forbidden Love by Jusjuli Doutgods) Favorite Cassian line: “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll keep you warm.”(Known in the Ache ch. 10) Favorite Jyn line: “Can I at least get a knife or something?” (Known in the Ache ch. 9) Favorite Gale line: “Oh, but maybe we’ve already arrived at that point.” (Lover, Be Good to Me) Favorite Tav line: "You might be made of magic, but magic is not made of you." (Engraved Upon My Heart)

Biggest surprise while writing this year? Honestly, that I could still do it 🙏

[fallout-lou-begas]

How's the script project like for IKROAH? Is it difficult or quite easy? Did you learn how to write comic book scripts because of IKROAH, or had you done it before? What kind of format do you use? Did you have any advice for people in the writing process of creating a comic book? Sorry if this is a lot of questions at once, but I love getting an idea of an artist's creative process.

Whew! No worries anon, I'm also someone who loves to pick the brains of other peoples' creative processes.

The writing for IKROAH can be divided into two halves: the outline and the script. The outline is a big spreadsheet and it's exactly what it sounds like, and it looks like this, but for all one hundred issues. The outline is complete and I use it tp reference all of my scripting.

The point of this outline was so that I could write the comic before I had to actually write the comic, if that makes sense. It would be extremely foolish for me to try to write all one hundred scripts up-front, especially since so many changes to the outline and overall plot of IKROAH have been made during the writing process (though it seems totally settled now). This lets me strike the perfect balance between planning ahead and knowing what I'm writing toward, and still having some freedom with the direction of each individual script. As the outline goes deeper and deeper and I get to scripts that I haven't written yet, the "synopsis" gets much more detailed as I work in very specific ideas or visions that I have for that issue. They're not set in stone, but it's just stuff I don't want to forget to try by the time I get there.

The scripts, meanwhile, are all just on one big Google Doc that looks like this.

The format of each individual script can vary: sometimes, like for IKROAH #23, I very carefully plan for myself the distinction between text and action. Other times, it's basically all just dialogue, and I let myself figure out the action more so during the composition stage. But basically every comic follows this process:

First draft of the script and dialogue

Thumbnailing of the script as I figure out page composition and paneling

Revisions of the script and dialogue to account for page composition

Digital mock-up of the comic (drawing the panel borders to scale in a digital canvas)

Lettering of the comic (to ensure there's enough room)

Revising the script again because some lines won't fit in speech balloons right or something

Drawing the comic, then inking and scanning and coloring

Further revisions of the script as I letter it and realize some lines just aren't as good and ought to be punched up

The script for each issue is surprisingly fluid and the even though it's usually minor changes, dialogue can go through revisions very well up to the eleventh hour before publishing.

The script master document also contains a complete timelined biography of Agnes Sands' life, and a complete timelined chronology of the events of IKROAH where every single issue is given a date and a "Days Passed Since Issue #1" number for my own private reference. This very rarely manifests in the text of the comic itself but it lets me accurately make references or foreshadowing when I need to.

I would say that the process of writing a comic like this is not as hard as it is time-consuming. This took a lot of work up-front, especially amassing a library of midcentury song lyrics to peruse for stingers on each issue, but now the rest of IKROAH's production is basically on autopilot. It lets me just draw it when I want to without having to worry about writing or direction as much, at least for a while -- the outline is complete, but IKROAH's scripts are only written in full up to issue #50. After that, the're mostly written with a few missing ones up to #78, and then the rest is essentially unwritten except for #98. And of course, like I said, the scripts tend to undergo a lot of revision in the production process of each issue, but this is for the best.

The closest I've come to writing like this in the past is when I hatched an idea for a superhero comic in high school and made a similar outline for all of the issues I had planned, which villains would get introduced when, and so on, but that never came to fruition. The organizational skill remained though, clearly, lol.

And as for advice, my best advice is this:

Don't wait until you're "good enough" to make a comic. You don't need to earn permission from yourself or anyone else to just do it with the skills you already have.

The best way to improve your art and comic-making skills is to just start making a comic. Your art, writing, and process will get better over time.

You only need to be good enough at art to convey your subject matter and express your vision, not to replicate anything photorealistically or perfectly. This is why strong composition and paneling can work much better for a comic than very technically good art itself. Tails Gets Trolled is unironically a good example of this point, as is the art of One (pseudonym of the manga artist behind One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100).

For any kind of long-form work, I highly recommend this short vignette structure. It's more rewarding than making only one page at a time because each issue is still a complete story beat, but it also stops you from basically drowning in the total size of a long-form project. It used to be basically any webcomic on the internet started with totally shit art and you watched the artist get better and better over time, now the Webtoon Industrial Complex has already professional artists putting out extremely polished art from square one. That's bullshit. Reject it. Embrace your amateurism but also your ambition.

Fuck around and find out. Don't be "comic-core," just be on your comic book bullshit.

Read a lot of comics. See how great visual-sequential storytellers accomplish things with pages and panels, and adopt those tricks into your own toolkit. See how they draw things or color things and try to emulate that. One of my favorite ever art teams is the one on the 1980s The Question series, of penciler Denys Cowan, inker Rick Magyar, and colorist Tatjana Wood.

[pangzi]

THANK YOU for talking about pangzi in the tags of that post ur so right it makes me soooo happy to read fics where he's is fat and happy and hot and loved and it sucks when other people can't see that because of their bias

thanks again for bringing it up because i do think its something the fandom as a whole needs to look at more critically

<3

I'm glad it's not just me and a handful of people close to me seeing that it's an actual big issue in the fandom! ♥️

Especially because so many people will say they love him, he's their favourite but then never actually include him or just treat him awfully.

I get very fed up about it quite often because it's just so obvious to me. I see a lot of people asking "Why is this idea about Pangzi so common it makes no sense" or "Why is this Pangzi ship not as popular as this one while it makes way more sense" and then never actually thinking about it while the answer is so obvious... It's also extra frustrating because none of the actors playing Pangzi are actually fat. They're completely normal men who are just surrounded by extremely skinny boys. I don't even want to imagine how Pangzi would be treated if he were played by an actual fat man. (The closest we get is Liu Tianzuo in TLT1 and it's not surprising to me that he's fandom's least favourite and most criticized Pangzi)

Because this bias also becomes most obvious in headcanons like 'I can only imagine Pangzi as asexual/cishet/in a QPR' (because they're so so fucking common and casually thrown around) it's really hard to point it out to people without them getting really defensive about it.

I have three separate posts about it in my drafts/notes app that I wrote after spending weeks and weeks working on video lectures about diversity and inclusion, many focusing on bias but I couldn't get the tone right so I never posted them.

I just want people to understand that everyone is biased and it's not something that makes you a bad person. Nobody wants to be biased, you just are. You get taught things by the world around you and your brain learns it whether you want it or not. It's up to you to look at what you have learned and think about it at least twice and then unlearn the harmful untrue things like gender bias, fat bias, race bias. It's not easy to address your bias but it does get easier once you accept you are biased and (not to use the terms I learned in my diversity lectures) start overriding your fast brain and start listening to your slow brain. I was once told that your first thought is what you have been taught by the world around you (fast brain) and your second thought is what you, yourself, actually think (slow brain). It's hard and a bit exhausting, especially with something like fat bias that has been so deeply ingrained and normalised, but god when i tell you it makes your world so much more beautiful.

Fat people deserve to be fat and still be loved and happy and seen as sexy and a potential love interest. Pangzi is fat and hot and a wonderful lovely competent man who is strong and funny and kind. He is extremely loved by the people around him, especially Wu Xie and Xiaoge. He has so so so many good and wonderful traits but he also has his quirks and he says the wrong things sometimes and he's impulsive at moments but that's what makes him so interesting and beautiful and dynamic! He deserves to be portrayed like that more instead of just the mother hen who cooks and cleans while the rest has sex or as the wingman for his two besties or the annoying clumsy fat man who once again triggers a trap because of his greed or just the comic relief or the creepy straight man.

ANYWAY I'll shut up now! If you ever want to talk about how how beautiful Pangzi is and how beautiful other characters think he is and how sexy it is of him to be fat, my DMs are always open!

[opheliasweeps]

Blog Post #7

When it came to my list poem, I was kind of lost on where to begin, so I started my pre-writing phase by just doing what I did with the persona poem and jotting down ideas to center my poem on. With the way I do pre-writing and all of my poetry is that I physically write down my thoughts. I ironically can’t remember what spurred me to eventually decide to do my poem on memory, but I just felt that it would be a great chance for me to challenge myself. After all, trying to bring in concrete imagery of a conceptual idea can be difficult, especially if it’s an idea that many others have explored before. 

Before I began drafting the actual poem, I looked to the list poem by Danez Smith, “alternate names for black boys”, and I analyzed each individual line and saw what each meant in relation to black boys. Each line was impactful because of the title and the image that each line conveyed. When I read a line, I would go back to the title and sit on it, letting the heartbreak settle. When I later wrote my poem, I employed the same technique. After each line that I wrote, I’d go back to my title, “Memories are:” and essentially finish the sentence and make sure that my metaphor made sense and conveyed what I meant.

When deciding the way I wanted to format my poem, I once again looked to “alternate names for black boys” in addition to the other two list poems, “Things That Didn’t Work” and “Inventory Elegy 3: The Dirty Entry” (by Catie Rosemurgy and Ander Manson, respectively). I noticed that all three are organized quite differently:

“[A]lternate names for black boys'' chooses a numbered list

“Things That Didn’t Work” chose to split the lists into three stanzas of three lines

“Inventory Elegy 3: The Dirty Entry” chose a bullet list.

I decided to go with the bullet list as I didn’t notice the similarities of some of my lines at first; when I would compare all three I noticed how extremely connected the images of “alternate names for black boys” was (things of the natural environment & death). I noticed the same in “Inventory Elegy 3: The Dirty Entry” (items and occurrences that would happen in the home); however, “Things That Didn’t Work” had three sets of different images that did bleed a little bit into one another. I do wonder why Rosemurgy chose to separate them into three.

Once I had realized that the images I chose for my metaphors had many tied to one another, I chose to group the ones most similar to each other together and I even cut some out during my revision process. I liked the look of three sets of three (maybe that’s why Rosemurgy chose it, too?) and the look of the bullets. They looked permanent like that sharpie dot on your favorite white t-shirt that just won’t go away no matter how many times you bleach and wash it. I felt that way about memories, so I ultimately chose to do bullets set into categories (similar to the way our brains categorize things within our mind).

At the very end of my revision process, I checked for grammatical issues, checked for coherency, and made sure that my capitalization was deliberate (Google Docs kept trying to capitalize my first letters >:( ).  It was overall a really fun process, especially when trying to generate ideas for metaphors. I mean, how many ways can you really look at memory? (Turns out, about 14, but only 9 were decent enough to me).

[wildlinginkings]

Writeblr Introduction

This blog has been in existence for quite a while, but it’s recently turned into a store of queued posts that never actually became any kind of sensible chaos that a blog should be, due to Anxiety™. Not much has changed, but I've the sudden and overwhelming feeling that I really can't be bothered to be anxious anymore, and I’m hoping getting this place getting organised might help put my plot bunnies in a row, so…

I go by the names Autumn, or Wildling

I’m from England, she/her, and I'm a literature and history student, currently mulling over postgraduate options

I write across genres, but tend towards fantasy, crime and mystery, and historical and alternate history. There’s usually a healthy dose of all of them at once.

I also write poetry, but I’m thinking that probably won’t appear here.

My current focus is to work on the first draft of my first novel, which is the project known as 'Death Comes in Threes', and as a result will be featured here quite often.

Additionally, I'm simply trying to get back to enjoying the process of writing, and return to my previous voice and style, my studies having made my brain feel like it's liquified and fallen out of my ears. I love constructing characters and world building, and a continual feature of this blog will be expanding on the universe of my fantasy novel (Project : Dobro), which I hope to be my second or third novel.

I shift between various projects, with about three major WIPs, though occasionally I get distracted by new bunnies.

aesthetics : folklore and mythology, complex and morally grey characters, fantastical creatures, women with weapons, men in long black coats, apothecary boxes, botanical elixirs and poisons, crumbling sweet pastries, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, diversity, damp and dark forests, umbrella fights in the kitchen with your bff, renaissance tapestries, hope against hope, secret gardens, 1930s americana

On this blog you’ll find a lot of photographic inspiration for my projects, mood boards, positivity for writers (and in general), and writing guides.

Current WIPs

Project : Abide

Genre — crime/literary/humour

Premise — a Southern Gothic following a group of women hatching murder plots over Eggs Benedict in the local diner. 

Project : Dobro

Genre -- epic fantasy/alternate history

Premise -- Set in an alternate and fantastical Edwardian-inspired world, a disparate group of characters try to navigate and survive amidst large-scale revolutionary conflict, each of whom carry differing ideas of the future, dark secrets, and terrible power.

Project : Death Comes in Threes

Genre -- Wild West fantasy

Premise -- When Cate finds her father has been murdered, she settles with the idea that vengeance is now the only thing that can keep her company, but on the way, she encounters a gentleman conman who promises his aid, on one condition; she must explore the depths of her extraordinary powers, whatever the cost may be.

Project : VIII

Genre — urban fantasy

Premise —The Greene’s were always going to be murdered. They were the most prominent bounty hunting family in the dark disquiet of the Other World, after all. But Holliday Greene had been planning for this for a long time, and she’s prepared for a very busy week.

Project : Road

Genre — crime/mystery/literary

Premise — Three siblings, their lives irrevocably changed fourteen years earlier by the murder of a local schoolgirl, are again thrown into turmoil when a family friend goes missing in similar circumstances. To unravel the mystery, they must confront their personal demons, the complexities of grief, and a hidden darkness that has gripped the town for two decades.