#so i'm always happy to rewrite/rephrase things

[darktypehuman]

(( alright, I haven't gotten too much feedback on the navigation blog post but I figure that's more just because I don't have too many followers, so the post may not have circulated very far. regardless, I do think I'm going to start up the out of character navigation account, since I think it could be very helpful to getting new accounts seen!

lmk if ya'll have any thoughts on what is important to be added in a bio. i'm going with currently-revealed info about the blog's character/characters (one post per blog, with multiple character bio sections) like name, age, pronouns, occupation, pokemon team, what region they can be currently found in (If any), if they have a preferred type/s, if they have support pokemon, and appearance/distinguishing traits

for a mod section i figured things like if the mod is an adult/minor and if they're comfortable interacting with minors/adults (Ik some people aren't, and that's a valid boundary to set!)though this would be optional to share, what account they'll be following from, and their main if they're comfortable with that (Assuming it isn't the blog they follow from), how to refer to the mod, and possibly other things the mod wants known/to clarify.

finally an account navigation section, detailing if the account has any boundaries they want people to follow (eg, no sapient pokemon), and possibly some relevant links; maybe to specific tags, or their about section etc. This section would be for general housekeeping stuff, so if a mod wanted they could ask to have their rules/dni here.

I think a specification/clarification to if the account is just pokeblogging (fully in character as a blog), pokeblogging and rp (some interactions, so not just the character's blog), or a multifandom/general rp account (though I might set a limit on those so I don't get overwhelmed) would also be useful.

I've also seen a few introjects (I believe that's the term?) and systems posting pokeirl stuff on like, personal accounts (ish? they look like my main account at least), maybe a specification if you're cool with rp/interactions and not just vibing and remembering your source could be good? This one may just be because I have anxiety and dont want to overstep anyone's boundaries by accident lol. I'm a singlet so I don't know things.

any suggestions/advice would be very welcomed! i want to make this blog as useful, accessible and just generally handy as I can. if anyone has any themes they recommend too, i'd appreciate it! i've been using the same accessible themes a lot and variety is fun. oh! i also think the account would be useful for things like community discussion posts or information sharing, like on tags to use instead of "Unreality" (lmk if i need to remove the word itself so the post isn't filtered out for people) to make the community more accessible for people

i also want to share people's art! i adore seeing everyone's creations, and i think it would be wonderful to show them off!

tagging @realpokemon specifically bc i know a lot of people first start out by seeing your content ))

[tuiyla]

If you could rewrite Santana and Brittany’s wedding vows, what would you have them say.

Alright, god, getting to older asks before they get lost forever.

The wedding vows were only gonna be so good when intercut between two different couples and four people, you know. And that's clearly integral to what Glee was going for, even if the result is just sort of meh. I heard rumours about the original script and that rolling rock thing or whatever (someone will know lol) which admittedly would have been worse. IIRC only Naya could get through that one with a straight face.

I'm mostly happy with Brittany's part. By which I mean, the one sentence we get before all four have to say something that flows into one statement feels right for her. Brittany was very misunderstood before and was made to feel stupid because she saw things differently. One of, if not my singular favourite thing about Brittana is that they saw each beyond the stereotypes, beyond the bimbo and the bitch. So I would have liked Brittany to not only say how things used to be but highlight how things are now, with Santana by her side who's always believed in her. Say, "made me feel dumb ... but you knew I wasn't". Sure, the sentiment is there because then Kurt goes "and then you came along" but without giving Brittana any of that the impact is lost. And no wonder because the point of Klaine is not the point of Brittana or vice versa.

On Santana's part, honestly the proposal was a better speech and I don't think she was gonna top that. Which is part of why proposal haters can get fucked btw. I like that she mentions having been outed; oh, nice of Glee to notice 3 years too late. The "bullied" part feels a little tone deaf and I think I've touched on that like a year ago now. And it's random, too, because then everything else she says is just part of continuing others' thoughts or repeating the same line. Sure, she would have suffered it all just to be here with Britt and that's a nice sentiment, but what about something less generic? Come on Glee. You could have had a rephrased version of the Hurt Locker scene from Sexy. Where Santana says, "I've been hurt and hurt others, and I never thought anyone would see me for more than that. That I could see myself for more than that. But you always have." There you go, replace the bullied line for this and imo it makes much more sense.

I guess my answer is basically just that I would highlight them always having seen each other and believed in one another. That's their thing. When the world writes Santana off as a cold-hearted bitch and Brittany as a stupid airhead, they understand that they're more than that. Brittany sees Santana's heart, Santana sees Brittany's mind. That's what makes them special in face of a world so eager to put them down and make them seem like one dimensional sluts.

Damn watching them back the actual vows were very very short and apart from Kurt everyone only had a tiny nugget of a line that's actually tailored to their character. By making it an intercut scene it becomes nothing greater than the sum of its parts, if that, so it's a shame about the vows.

[gerrydelano]

hiii fellow Very Long Fic writer ron! assuming you may be familiar with the (arguable) dilemma of writing styles changing / getting more advanced over time, might i ask- the instinct to go back and edit Every Chapter so that they better match up with current skill. in your opinion, does it usually pan out to be worth it?

i've seen your occasional posts abt how you'll go back and edit your published works, which is v encouraging re: mistakes not being set in stone, yet writer brain operates in extremes i think 🙃

hello, very long fic writer (assumed) anon! i am Very familiar with that dilemma yep hkbjndf drives me Nuts!

TL;DR right off the bat: let yourself go back and make minor edits for sure, but don't get lost in the weeds trying to rewrite the whole thing directly from inside what's already done. in my experience, being able to track your own growth is far more rewarding.

usually, when i go back and edit a chapter after posting it's just to fix typos/clarify something when i'm hit with the OTHER dilemma of "my beta reader has known all of my plans forever and so things go over both our heads sometimes when we KNOW the answer and aren't seeing how it might not come across to a reader with no inside knowledge." which! also sucks! but it's fine, and i always want to go back and make sure it's understandable without giving away any mystery that'll be revealed later on.

when it comes to THIS kind of editing though, i don't really bother? when i go back to things to make changes, it's usually because i've changed a big internal element of the story/a character that will have new bearing on where it goes, not to like. change my writing style wholly. to do that, i'd be going line by line with the idea that i can improve a sentence at a time and i'd run into sentences i LOVED and then get into a war with myself about whether they're "good enough" and honestly end up with a result that is not as natural as it was when i just let myself write it the first time, even IF my newer stuff independent from this might feel like it's more "advanced."

ren said they'll add a sentence or rephrase something here or there, but wouldn't go back and change the entirety of something. if they wrote RTD today it'd be so different, but they're not going to undo what's already been done! especially when it's a metric for growth now, too, which i hugely agree with on the whole.

i definitely did some of this when i edited breathing like i never did, though. that was my first TMA fic and my georgie HC actively changed, which changed big elements of the whole story! and when i edited the earlier chapters of TSP, i came out a thousand times happier with the result, because i was adding things that carried more weight and tied into larger themes that i didn't have in mind when i started writing it. TSP was supposed to be a four chapter bittersweet tragedy! LIKE. no way, man. editing that was extremely rewarding, but again, it wasn't just my writing style that i was fixing.

but mistakes in writing do NOT have to be set in stone! if you're not happy with something, you can go back and rework it until you feel better about it, and recirculate it to say so, if that's what you really want to. i personally wouldn't go too far with full rewrites, like i said, but everyone's different! start with fixing little things that might've been bugging you for a while, and leave it. if there's still more you aren't satisfied with, you are free to look through it more and find the problem. at the end of the day, though, something you wrote in the past doesn't have to be up to date with your current skill level to still have been enjoyable to write, AND for someone to read!!!!

it's not just natural to look back at our old stuff and go "oh, g-d, who was i 🙈" and agonize a little over it, it's GOOD. it means you HAVE improved! and it's up to you whether you leave that little time capsule of past skill as it is, or change it to reflect who you are now.

but no one who loves your work will be looking at the older chapters going "this really sucked, wow, lol." if they notice a quality shift at all from beginning to end, they're a LOT more likely to be really impressed! my friends and i talk SO often about how great it is to watch each other's art and writing styles evolve over time. being ABLE to compare them contributes to that awe! it's one of the most beautiful things in the world to me, i honestly LOVE looking back at even other people's old art because i love to see where we all started and who we've become right next to each other. it's okay to leave that stuff up. you deserve to feel that joy looking at your own stuff, too!

my only advice is that if you change something you've published, you should still keep the old version somewhere!!!! it IS good to have tabs on who we used to be to track all this progress and growth. hell, sometimes? i've even found that some of my old stuff is BETTER, and i want to know how i managed to lose a particular skill along the way, and how i can get it back into my current stuff.

but if it's encouragement you're looking for, then here it is! follow your gut, keep your copies, and make (or don't make) whatever changes you feel are necessary to showcase what you're most proud of. at the end of the day, seek joy. good luck!

[venusoliver]

The Taste of Sweet Silk on Your Lips; Chapter 11 BTS

NOTE: This post will discuss plot points from Chapter 11 my Ao3 fanfiction, The Taste of Sweet Silk on Your Lips. Please refrain from reading further if you'd like to avoid spoilers!

This chapter, if I'm not mistaken, is my longest chapter yet. Woah.

I've almost completely strayed from my original outline. Almost. For the past couple of chapters my outline didn't reasonate with the final result at all, but I think I'm starting to get back on track.

The BDSM chapters are always the most difficult. There's a lot of terminology that can come into play rather quickly, not to mention the struggle to keep things consistent and clear. (Where are Mikasa's hands? How do I describe that? How do I phrase this differently than the last three paragraphs I wrote? Okay, hold on, what's a synonym for—)

Long story short, it's a handful. But when I'm done writing the chapter, when I can finally delete "DRAFT" from the title of my chapter page, it's a feeling I don't feel to often.

I feel proud of myself. And that's an amazing thing :D

But along with BDSM chapters comes references!

Now, my original plan was to actually watch live BDSM performances online. I watched a very solid handful before I started writing this fic, and I learned quite a lot, but in the end..

I'm a procrastinator, okay?

My schoolwork was starting to pile up. I was failing multiple classes (I'm only failing one now, yay for me!), and what does my brain do when there's actual work to be done? Not that. Anything but that.

Now, writing my fic isn't work. I LOVE writing this fic. But typing out extensive cartography notes and typing out prolonged sexual tension can start to get grouped together, and before I knew it—

A week had passed since my last update. That's always when I start to get anxious.

So, instead of taking this slow and watching low-quality footage of shibari clubs in russia, it was just me— my brain— and a very aggressive google searching session.

In the end, I'm still very happy with how things went.

The issue arose initially when I just.. couldn't find the right references. I had the picture in my head of what was going on, but I still needed a picture to look at so that my descriptions wouldn't become to vague and absurd.

Let's start off easy, Mikasa's lingerie.

I had a lot of options when deciding what Mikasa should wear. Something risque, of course, but nothing too revealing. It was a tough decision, but I think this picture does my vision justice! Aside from the shoes. Mikasa is a little too powerful in heels like that.

The next order of business was getting references for the bondage rigging.

The spreader bar was easy. Legs spread, bar in the middle, you're good to go!

Next up was the harness. I had a couple of other options I was debating when deciding on what type of harness I wanted on Mikasa. I originally went with something more dainty, with thinner rope and smaller knots— but once I decided on suspension-esqe rigging near the end of the performance, it only made sense for the harness to be more secure.

As for the arms.. that was the most difficult part of this chapter. Finding a reference, writing it out— when I go back to make minor revisions on the fic (grammatical errors)— it's going to be very hard to stop myself from rewriting that portion of the chapter.

The sheer joy that raced through me when I found this image is unmatched. I had scoured the internet looking for a clean, clear reference for what I wanted. After rephrasing my google search multiple times (shibari arm rigging, arms behind head, arms behind head shibari, etc.)— and praying I wouldn't have to use a p 0rn screenshot as reference, I found this image.

This is precisely what I was going for with her arms. Mikasa is a very fit woman, and I don't doubt that she wouldn't have a problem getting her arms behind herself like this.

In my mind when I pictured Mikasa bent at the hip, legs spread wide, arms lifted upwards behind her— this is precisely the position I envisioned her arms in. I used that reference when describing the actual rigging for the arms as well.

But enough about all the k!nky stuff! This chapter was a lot more sentimental than originally planned.

I'm consistently at odds with myself when writing these chapters, trying to give them the smut I intended while also making their relationship believable.

I ship these two insanely hard, but their dynamic is a really tough one to pinpoint and make work.

They're both very cold and shut off from people in day to day life, so for their relationship to work— they need to be forced together, and they have to be in a situation where their stubbornness pulls them closer rather than pries them apart.

With all of that to keep in mind, bringing in some fluffy aspects is crucial. It makes their connection make more sense. After all, neither one of this girl's is doing random hookups. Not often, anyway.

The fluff ended up coming organically. Even if their performance this chapter was still just a performance and not an actual BDSM scene, aftercare still comes into play.

Hitch and Annie had a far different dynamic because they were friends. They were friends, and experienced in the BDSM scene. They're able to perform without getting emotionally invested— because they don't love each other romantically. There's not this same intimate connection.

As for Mikasa and Annie, it's completely different. Annie loves Mikasa to the point that she's risking quite a lot to keep the girl in her life. Mikasa is new to the scene, but she's enthralled by the idea of letting down her guard and letting someone else pull the reigns for once.

They compliment each other in an intimate, romantic, and s3xual way. The performance itself and the aftermath should reflect that.

So, it does! I found myself smiling quite a bit at the end of the chapter. I really do love these two.

The next chapter will include full fledged smut, thank goodness. I'm both nervous and excited to start writing the chapter. But, for now, I'm probably gonna get some rest.

Thank you all so much for your support. I wouldn't still be writing this fic if I didn't know that there were people out there who enjoyed my work. It makes me smile even when I'm struggling :) I hope to see you all again when I post the next chapter. Thanks so much!!

[anghraine]

Having been wowed by your fanfic ("wandering inside this night" holds a special place in my RO heart), I'm curious: what is your writing/editing process like?

Oh, thank you!

My writing process really varies depending on what I’m doing, but I can explain it in terms of wandering inside this night.

It’s long and rambly, so you can scroll down for a very concise tl;dr version of The Process.

1. Eureka!

I pretty much always start out with 1) a vague sense of something I want to write about, and I sort of mentally fish around until I land on an idea, or 2) an idea pops into my head, or 3) some combination of both.

The last two are the most common for me—I have more ideas than I could ever write. With wandering, it was definitely that way. 

I was hollering into my tags about the Cassian-Leia parallels pretty early, which … Jyn-Han is obvious, but I felt like the Cassian-Leia ones went relatively unnoticed but were probably more profound. And as spies in the ragtag ANH-era Rebellion, it’s more than possible that they’d know each other; I’d made babbling posts, but I really wanted to do something with it. So I sketched out a backstory in until the last chance is spent, but I still wanted more, and also to get into Han-Jyn at the same time, and also just—have something fun! And suddenly (I was actually at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert, lol) the idea popped into my head of jumping to the Han/Leia meltdown of 1980 with established relationship Jyn/Cassian.

2. Percolation

This is particularly important for longer fic (or any long-form writing, really), but it helps with shorter things, too. It’s where you’re not actively working to figure out details or more ideas, much less writing, just passively letting your mind wander. It’s best if you’re actually doing something else—something that doesn’t take much attention, but enough that you can’t completely focus on your thoughts, like showering or washing dishes or something.

When something does come to mind, I scribble it down (or stick it in a doc in some form that will hopefully make sense to me later). Sometimes it’ll be scraps of dialogue, or a phrase I want to make sure gets in somewhere, or a plot-point, just anything that pops up. Ideally, though, I don’t write anything beyond that—just note down anything I might forget and let my ideas develop freely. 

Normally, I’d only do so much of that with something like wandering (fairly short, fairly light). But I ended up snowed in with my extended family, where I was both bored and unable to sit down and write. So I’m sitting there entertaining myself by imagining Jyn and Han, drinking buddies, and how that’d work with the Cassian-Leia brotp of ruthless idealism (Han would be jealous!), and just having that percolating in my head while I read fic and let stray thoughts pass through my mind. (‘Okay but Cassian would fucking hate Han’ being uppermost among them, lol)

3. Brainstorming/Outline

At this point, I try to pin down the free-floating ideas and/or organize what scraps I have into something coherent. With something longer, like ad astra, I generally do a pretty traditional outline—decide what the story is specifically going to cover, and where the things I’ve actually written fit with that, and what’s going to go in the spaces between.

It’s not classroom-style brainstorming; I usually brainstorm ideas by trying to put together an outline. I’ll be “okay, I want to start with something like that shot of Jyn on the platform with an Imperial ship at the end, but it’s Bodhi” and “they get sucked into the Death Star and Jyn exploits Cassian’s injuries to get in” and then I sit down and figure out how I’m going to get from one to the other. “Okay, so—there’s no way they can actually get Kaytoo, but maybe something—yeah, she just up and grabs his dismembered head l o l, okay, and there’s the jump into the ship which rattles Cassian further, and she’d try to treat him with whatever supplies are available, and we’d have Bodhi trying to get out without being shot down, and maybe I can work in the your father would have been proud of you line, and Jyn goes to check on Bodhi and they see the Death Star and…”

Also, it helps a ton to actually talk ideas over with someone else. With me, it’s generally @steinbecks​—not some strict ‘this, then this, then this, tell me what you think’, but ‘I had this idea’ and ‘OK BUT IMAGINE IF’ and ‘haha yeah exactly’ and ‘shit you’re right they do change outfits’ etc. 

4) Drafting (The Big One)

Ideally, I only get to this after nailing down an outline or at least getting a lot figured out in chats/notes to myself. That’s what I did for pretty much all my most successful longfics—First Impressions (f!Darcy/m!Elizabeth), Season of Courtship (Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement), we get dark, only to shine (AU of The Borgias that moves the canon pairing getting together from S3 to S1), and now ad astra. It helps a TON if you have trouble with discipline and direction, as I do, because you can always go back to it and figure out where you need to be headed when you’re muddled/uninspired, even if some details change along the way. (They always do, for me.)

I did some of that with wandering, but … I was snowed-in, lol, and finally everyone had gone to sleep and my head was full of ideas. So I laid down with my laptop and just dove right in with the only clear line I had in mind: 

Han Solo once had apleasant conversation with Cassian Andor.

Just once.

That was where I planned it to begin! The actual beginning came later, because I very quickly ran into a problem—the sentence worked to jump into exposition, not an actual scene. And with the exposition, I needed to introduce 1) Cassian’s hatred of Han, 2) Han’s lesser but firm dislike, 3) Cassian and Leia’s history together as spies, 4) Han’s brief and half-hearted attempt to suck up, 5) Jyn and Cassian being married, 6) Han’s friendship with Jyn, 7) Han’s jealousy as contrasted to Cassian and Jyn’s mutual trust, etc. Yikes.

So I kept getting mired down in explanations and flashbacks (I actually wrote the scene where Jyn drunkenly complains about finding something for Cassian’s birthday, lol) that slowed it down. And I wasn’t really happy with anything—I constantly niggled at sentences and moved things around and rephrased and it just didn’t work right. I actually have the document I worked in (I didn’t have Internet at the time), so you can see this sort of intermediate stage:

I niggled with it for the rest of the vacation, then it hit me that the issue was that starting a fic with exposition was the real problem. Starting with ESB-era Han just being ESB-era Han could let me work the exposition section in, and without the pressure of it being the opening section I could keep it to a tangential aside and move the jealousy around and so forth. And from there I could just leap to the canon scene with bonus Cassian-Leia shared indignation, and impulsively I added Kaytoo at the end. 

Moral of the story: if you keep trying to make something work and it just won’t, there’s probably something deeper going on. Take a step back and figure out why it’s not working, and often you’ll be able to correct course. Once I tacked in that little ‘Han sulks’ section at the beginning, it all fell together easily. 

5) Revising!

You can probably guess from #4 that I do a lot of this as I write rather than after I write. That’s true, to an extent.

It can be a very … I wouldn’t say discouraging, but sluggish way to write, because you end up struggling over phrases you might not even keep in the end. I genuinely think it’s best to at least try to restrain the impulse to polish everything, but at the same time, there are some of us who genuinely can’t keep going if the current section isn’t working (again, see #4!). So I allow myself a certain amount of freedom in polishing-as-I-go, while restraining the impulse to do anything more substantial. The single best way of doing this is sprinting—writing in short, timed bursts with little to no editing, ideally with a partner that you check in with. (Again, I generally do this with @steinbecks​.)

However, even if you edit as you go and turn out pretty clean drafts, you should still revise at the end. What I generally do is, first of all, just quickly re-read. The writing process is a lot slower than the reading one, and it’s easy to get so focused on particular passages or sections that you lose sight of how it’s working as a whole. So that quick read-through is a way to back up and see how it’s holding together. It’s best if you give yourself a break before you do this—a day or two at least, to get your mind out of the writing mode and look at it with relatively fresh eyes. 

(I will say that I almost never wait. But I do pretty much always end up editing chapters yet again in the first couple of days after I’ve posted them. Sometimes it’s contuinity, sometimes a passage that isn’t working quite the way I thought, whatever. There’s always something. It’s why the chapters I post at Dreamwidth are generally cleaner than the ones at Tumblr, which are cleaner than the first versions posted at AO3.)

However you do that read-through, the most important for me is the next one. At this point, I read the whole fic/chapter/essay/whatever from start to finish—out loud. In fact, if it’s possible, I’ll do a full-on dramatic reading. By reading aloud, you can catch things like typos that your mind silently corrects for your eyes, but also it’s easier to notice sentence-level problems like repeated words/phrases and unvaried sentence structure. If something makes me cringe when I read it aloud, I cut it or rewrite. If saying it aloud makes it sound wrong for the character, it probably is wrong for the character. Sometimes I do the dramatic reading revision two or three times.

And then I either post or print!

The short version:

1) I get an idea, 2) I let the ideas develop without thinking too hard about them, 3) I nail down and think up specific ideas, mostly through chat and/or outlines, 4) I plow through a draft, rearranging/adding material if things just aren’t working, and 5) I revise, once with a quick re-read of the whole thing, and then again by slowly reading it aloud to myself to catch problems with (primarily) mechanics, voice, and word choice.