#what do you MEAN youre being SELF indulgent thats CRINGE!!!!/silly

[delusional-mishaps]

day three: sharp

more writing mwahahah :3

"what're you doing?" horror asks. jet hums, glancing up before looking back down at their fingers.

"cuttin' my nails." they answer, followed by a sharp 'snip!' sound.

"why?" he asks. jet shrugs, holding out their left hand to show off their nails.

"look. gettin' sharp. then they get caught on stuff."

horror makes a soft sound of understanding, taking a seat beside jet. he watches them snip off the ends of their claws, head tilting curiously.

"'sides," jet continues after a moment. "now i don't gotta worry about scratchin' you when i grab your cute face."

they look up smugly at horror, earning a soft chuckle. he pats their head, causing their tail to sway.

"it wouldn't hurt," he snorts. "your claws are so small."

"oh yeah?" they taunt, brandishing the not-yet cut claws on the other hand. "wanna test that theory?"

horror chuckles again, grabbing jet's hand in his. he traces one of his phalanxes over the tip of their claw, where it's sharpest. their fingers looks so small compared to his.

"see? too small." he boasts. jet rolls their eyes, taking their hand back to cut those claws.

"psh, whatever. you're just lucky i like you and don't wanna scratch you." they grumble with a smile.

"whatever you say, tiny."

"wha—i'm not tiny!"

[firebuug]

for the weird questions for writers thing: obligatory 6 9 4 and 20 bc funny. but for like actual questions 17 and 18

do not test me i will answer them all. my answers r below the cut LOL

6. What is your darkest fear about writing?

tbh? that people read it and go “oh. uh. this is uh. cringe” or that they totally read it thru the wrong lens. like if someone looked at a piece where i poured my inner anxieties and feelings into and they went “wow so they just wanted this character to be whiny for a sec huh.” bc tbh in the end ya thats what it is its a silly character saying funny thing but also like i never ever do that. if i do that and SHOW U that writing then i am trusting you with my life and my cringe and my life essence a—

also just being obviously inexperienced lol. i dont write professionally and dont intend to its just for funzies but am still self conscious anywayz

9. Do you believe in ghosts? This isn’t about writing I just wanna know

yes ever since i was little i tried to let any ghost who may live in my house know i am its friend by sticking my foot out before bed and promising i wouldnt tell anyone if they could read my mind. my aunts had a haunted house and they went full investigator mode and somehow came to the conclusion it was their relative who wanted a last birthday party, so they threw a party for the ghost and all poltergeist activity stopped in their house

also related to writing but my friend’s WIP rn is literally titled He Doesn’t Believe In Ghosts

4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral?

ive been writing the word Prestidigitation a lot bcuz dnd and i fucking HATE THAT WORD i cant even pronounce it i hate it die die die. also medival or mideival or whateve rthe fuck its spelled i hate that word

20. If a witch offered you the choice between eternal happiness with your one true love and the ability to finally finish, perfect, and publish your dearest, darlingest, most precious WIP in exactly the way you've always imagined it — which would you choose? You can’t have both sorry, life’s a bitch

. ok so im not a big writer so the only wips ive got goin on are a self indulgent band au psychoanalysis piece, a hypothetical comic con murder mystery and the forever cancelled zombie apocalypse story i wrote from elementary to middle school w my ocs. and tbh i would kill to see the comic con murder mystery completed just to read it myself so i would take that offer. but also it isnt a WIP but if i could have that witch rewrite the juggernaut event for me as the epic cinematic arpg video and writing combination thing i pictured it as id give her my life

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

UM um well. i dont have any plot for murder mystery and my band au is just. oc story that i can ramble about whenever but . my zombie apocalypse was the funniest shit. i played this for serious and i love how apeshit my imagination was back then. the lore was that a zombie virus happened bc the ceo of an evil company’s fail brother locked himself underground on accident and in the period which he was stuck in there tried to make himself a friend. but it corrupted and became a zombie and killed him and escaped. and the world got so bad that the scientists found a planet and named it Earth 2 and everyone got on there except for a bunch of everyday average people including our cast. and now. they r forced to survive. i published it frequently on deviantart journals and still have it on my google drive, sometimes i used to read it to get inspired to make apeshit stories for fun, but i havent in a while

8. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end.

does. does this mean like a snippet from my own writing? UHH a lot of my writing is oc stuff that i work into their stories but let me try and pull up something old that actually has a chance of having backstory to it HAHAJK

ok all i found was this from a Splatoon writing which i thot was funny because of the context of Buggy seeing a totally abandoned, empty subway station and still INSISTING on not hopping the ticket scanner or whatever. help. like i dont have any commentary i just wanted u to see this. :

“Just hop over it,” he remembered Skuggy telling him, “nobody cares.” Buggy felt too bad about it, though, and got him to lend him his old card anyways. He reached into his pockets for the said card and stuck it into the slot. The little dusty screen on top of the gate showed a little spinny loading circle before a light shone green and he was let in.

whatever. anyways instead ill spit fun fax about the juggernaut story writing event arpg thing bc i um. i um. i . i. i . @im-hiding22 its bad compared to my writing now but it was sillyfun

- i did not actually intend for buggy to kill farrow i intended for it to be a fake-out and for farrow to scramble to life right when the juggernaut approached or whatevs. but when all my friends went insane like he did die i thought “wouldnt it be funny if he died fr”

- i was intending on mendel to be the first death under the jugg’s hands because itd be cool for the creation to get revenge in its creator and for the story to be everyone trying to fix mendel’s mistakes themselves and possibly bring him back. but i could not imagine anything thatd reverse his mistakes in a satisfying way so i scrapped and rewrote it

- literally only wrote the stupid loredump radio broadcast cuz i had finished reading the nightvale novel

- 80% of the most fun i had from that and the most story-impacting decisions came from my friends sending asks, and seeing my friends actively wanting to participate and speculate on something i was writing was literally the most touching thing i have ever felt in my life. im reliving that high by running a dnd campaign in which now i can focus on telling my friends’ stories and intertwining them with my own

ok bye. this was 3 years long, im giving you a brownie if you read this far because youre incredible! all of the old writing i posted here can be found under the ;writing hashtag which will be tagged here :D if u. ever wanna see cringe splatoon or town of salem oc fanfic LOLL

[fipindustries]

critical missive

dedicated to @cryptovexillologist

oh boy arent we in a fine pickle now?

usually i enjoy talking openly and bluntly about my opinions on whatever the last thing i read is, safe and secure in the knowledge that the author will most likely never stumble on my measily 700 followers tumblr blog, so i am free to express my opinion to my heart’s content knowing that no feelings will get hurt. 

mission critical would be no different except i talked with the author and read their acknoledgement and the AMA they did on discord after writing the story and they have endeared themselves thoroughly to me so my language will have to be neutered, at least for the first half of this excercise. afterwards things will get a bit harsher but i’ll try to rest at ease in the knowledge that we seem to be kindred spirits and i would be delighted in hearing any kind of criticism of my work either positive or negative. 

ok, enough coaching done, lets go on to what i thought of this novel.

it is a delightful romp, as i said before, the worldbuilding is understated and realistic with enough glimpses of depth and detail to suggest a much larger picture. this world feels inhabited, lived in, like it was well chewed on for long by the author before putting pen to paper. consequentially the characters that arose from this world feel like they belong, they feel like real people with real lifes. by far the strongest sections of the book were the flashbacks to their lives before the plot started. their voices, regretably, do sound very similar when interacting with each other but in their own sections the characters shine in their charm and cleverness. every time one of their flashbacks ended i was left with the intrigue and the desire to know how their particular story would continue.

the terra ignota influences are very noticeable, the world and its people carry the same kind of almost childlike positivity and innocence, the same kind of cheerful, happy go lucky trust in human progress and the great project of humanity for the future with the same sobering forlorn attitude towards the horrors of the past.

on top of that its silly, gosh in heaven it is silly. it has moments of cringe, in the best of ways. strange slapdash bits of flavor, immature non sequiturs, small indulgences from the author’s own weird interests and dumb meme humor. i do love me my awkward corners in a book, after all it is those that make something unique. there is a clear personality poking through and it is a delightful personality to meet.

i cant help but like this almost more for the context in which it was written than for the content itself, it was done during quarentine as a way to both stave off cavin fever and to process the author’s feelings regarding their gender identity. as someone who also wrote a story where i almost deliberatly tried to trick my self into breaking my own egg and who turned madly towards creative endeavors to survive the pandemic i can sympathize strongly with this. i am really happy that the author got to do this and kickstarted a project towards a big, possibly decades spanning trilogy.

so, yeah, those were the nice things i had to say, if you are content enough with that you can stop here but if you are curious to know more, well... you can

in short: it is a bit of a mess. again, im willing to be lenient, considering the way in which this was worked on, this is very much a really early first draft. the second half of this story was a very slow and very boring trudge towards a sudden end.

first, the fact that the flashbacks and the worldbuilding bits are the strongest part of this story means the actual plot itself suffers from being fairly boring and generic. “astronauts explore alien planet, find spooky stuff there” was already old hat by the 50′s. it is a plot so worn down and archetypical that it really cant survive if that is literally all you are going to do with it, and that is kind of all that this book does. i did mention moments of flavor and strange self indulgence. we needed way more of those. yes thats right, im saying that this story was not self indulgent enough. when you have such a well trodden plot such as this, worn down to the point that it becomes paint by the numbers, we need quirky, we need cringe, we need strange excess and personality. the author mentioned that they would love to see some of the weirder alexandria fan fics, well so do i! be the miracle you want to see in the world! the moments alexandria debated if wether identifying as a trilateral were amazing but they were not enough. we have a great structure here but lets put some proper meat on these bones, some proper fat and skin, some clown make up and a weird novelty hat and outrageous clown shoes. im getting carried away here, lets get back to the point.

the other problem is  there is not a clear trajectory for the story here, no well defined moment of climax and the emotional beats tend to fall a bit flat or to come out of nowhere. there are emotional crisis which i sort of missed or didnt get where they came from. the characters act in ways that are hard to relate to  that come off as stilted. the way they conduct themselves through the mission felt at times weirdly unprofessional and like it didnt follow much of a logical throughline, and when i say logical i dont meant “i wanted the characters to act hyperrational at all times” i mean i want the characters to act in ways that make human sense. ironically the one character that acted a bit too human for my tastes was the AI. alexandria is an interesting character but i feel that the place to explore that idea is not in the middle of an incredibly important mission where having your mainframe experience a crisis might not be the most practical thing in the world.

the ending was jarringly sudden, i didnt feel there was a proper resolution and finishing it off with flashbacks to the time the characters were training was... odd. i reached the last line and it felt like the story had just decided to stop without ever having reached anything that came even close to the third act. all of this can be easily fixed with some concientious editing and a complete rearrangement of the different sections of this story.

all in all a great first step in what i hope will be a long career as a writer.