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where were you when one last drink by enter the haggis

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on the bright side i read back a scene i thought was awful and it wasn’t !!

u reach a certain place writingally where you have all the desire for the thing to be written but none of the ability to write it

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u reach a certain place writingally where you have all the desire for the thing to be written but none of the ability to write it

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Current snippet that made me snort out loud

Though they’d been matching one another in solemnity, one glance at him told her he was terribly pleased by the back-and-forth. But it wasn’t just any sort of back-and-forth, was it? With faint horror, she thought, my God, why didn’t anyone tell us that we flirt?

justice for lily!

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snip snip

“What?” said James. “What?” said Lily. “You were smiling,” said Sirius, peering past James at her. “That’s a crime now?” “Depends on whether or not you were being sentimental.” “I was only,” Lily said with dignity, “being reflective. Which is my right, before my birthday.”

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I’ve been reading CT for the second time as the last time (first time) I read it was before C53 was out and then when I went to read the update I was like damn I’ve forgotten everything! And I’m having The Best time ever. Man. You do such an excellent job with it! I love the way you write Sirius so much and I find myself laughing so loudly at some parts. Plus the way you do magical politics is so well thought out and rather more thoughtful than the original book series imo

thank you soooo much and i’m so glad you enjoyed enough to reread :””””)

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do you have any writing tips/books & resources to point to for writing ? i'm trying to get back into it (for my own enjoyment more than anything) so i thought i'd ask

this is so belated im so sorry!!!! but yes, i do have some fav resources, they're a little specific but hopefully useful...

susan dennard's resources changed the way i thought about writing and i can't recommend them enough. a lot of them are about novels, but this "magical cookie" post is a must-read imo. i am a firm believer in the idea that if you're not excited to write a scene other people won't be excited to read it (and even if you're not sharing your writing with anyone else, it's a great way to teach yourself)

again a novel-centric post, but something that dovetails well with dennard's resources is rachel aaron's post about how she wrote 10k words a day. most people don't have deadlines to hit when they write, which is what drove aaron's "optimising," but again i do think there is something to be said for understanding how you write and what fuels your creativity. as aaron points out, the biggest takeaway for her wasnt that she needed to be writing 10k words a day every day, but that she figured out what she needed in order to do it.

read good books. this is like THE RECOMMENDATION and unfortunately/fortunately there is no getting around it. the single best way to get excited about writing and to learn how to do it is to observe others, and that means reading widely, outside of what you write. i would never throw stones at commercial fiction or fanfiction, but you are pigeonholing yourself if you're not reading interesting chewy books outside of those spaces. read some weird shit by authors who are Trying To Do Something Stylistically, and it will teach you something—perhaps even "wow that was a bad stylistic choice"!

relatedly read short fiction—there's a ton of places to do it for free online, and you don't have to be limited to like, the new yorker!

some craft recs: stephen king's on writing george saunders's a swim in a pond in the rain ursula leguin's steering the craft elena ferrante's in the margins anne lamott's bird by bird philip pullman's daemon voices

most importantly have fun :~)

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day three of too much going on to write the silly little words… but on the bright side, took a peek at my assorted come together snippets and its time i think to share with the class a glimpse at the future

Keep reading

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TELL ME WHERE YOUR SECRETS LIE, a slytherin!lily AU—

She’s Lily Evans. She’s Muggle-born. She’s a witch. She’s a Slytherin. You already know how this story goes.

READ | PLAYLIST

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Which of the main characters interactions are the most fun to write?

in no particular order:

james and most people, but esp with sirius, lily, germaine

lily and sirius probably doesn't surprise anyone. but love to do lily and petunia (ik she's not a main character but just wanted to shout that out)

sirius and peter is a really fun push and pull and surprised me

mary and most people but esp germaine and sirius

interestingly i like writing doe and remus best with secondary characters...

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please no need to apologize especially after that answer! im so intrigued by your thought processes and all of the developments of these characters! i dont think it came across at all that you were unsure about michael! i don't kow i just think your character development in general is so well done it makes me like all of them and become invested in even the smallest side character. thank you so much for sharing as always! can't wait to learn more

aw you're too kind! and hahaha i'm glad :") i do firmly believe that when the author is excited to write something it shows, and it really does make me so happy when a random side character i got attached to while planning actually seems to resonate with readers too.

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oh dear sorry i sent that ask about you coming up with a question! i thought about it and not sure about this one but.. you have said there were ocs that you ended up writing more than you thought and becoming more of the story. has that changed the trajectory for any of the story/plot lines you had laid out for the characters you knew from the beginning we were going to be following?

oh no you have nothing to apologise for!!! i am sorry to have compelled you to come back with a question, ha. but thank you, this is a good one i think!!!

i will say i really only had a sense of the main 8 characters' "stories" — loose as their arcs really are in what's probably going to wind up like a million words — when i started, so even with one half of couples eg michael i really didn't know some key plot beats until i had to start setting up for them. so in a way most ocs have surprised me significantly...and will hopefully surprise you still >:)

but yes, doe's trajectory changed pretty significantly — in that her big character "story" is still the same, but the beats evolved because of how her relationship with michael has felt to me on the page. without giving the game away i started with a certain dynamic in mind and then found i didn't really like it and neither did they, so it necessarily started to readjust from there on. a story for another day (after the fic is finished) is how in certain tropey ways their relationship started to follow some of the beats i had in mind for mary's...! i do think it came from not really understanding michael when i started the fic (in a way that hopefully doesnt show too blatantly lol) and then realising i had to rethink a lot of what i had assumed about him. so definitely diving more into who he was changed a lot for doe.

mary is probably the character most affected by my suddenly enjoying certain ocs, perhaps because it's easy to play a great variety of character types off her. i think i've mentioned that i never expected to like writing david and gillian so much, and those are probably the top line biggest influences on mary's arc, but the same applies to chris and shannon imo. in a weird way mary's surprise holiday was a surprise to me and her plotted out future lol.

some characters definitely stayed in the story longer than i expected them to — i'm thinking of marissa, mostly, though i'm sure there are others like her. that defs affected both james and lily's storylines. and there are characters that are right now, as we speak, already altering more...people you've met AND people you haven't! which makes me very excited :)

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Last Line Tag Game

Thank you for the tag @malfoyesque, you're so sweet!

Post the last sentence you wrote and tag as many people as there are words in the sentence.

For some self more salient than I am

(this is technically a line of poetry but don't come for me 🙈)

Tagging my eight: @mightbewriting @lunalive-at @firefeufuego @accio-lo-ki @gigglesandfreckles-hp @16tinyfrogs @nerdylizj @thequibblah

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Last Line Tag Game

Tagged by the lovely @havelanca, you caught me just as I was starting a writing session and it was such good motivation, thank you xx

Here is my last line:

The flush on her cheeks is all the salve his ego needs.

For my twelve, I'll tag @thequibblah, @theesteemedladydebourgh, @sunshinemarauder, @stonecoldhedwig, @possessingtheproperspirit, @nought-shall-go-ill, @nodirectionhome--ao3, @kay-elle-cee, @isahorcrux, @ghostofbambifanfiction, @clare-with-no-i, and @alittlebitofeverything23

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last line tag game

thanks for the tags @firefeufuego and @havelanca!

“I beg your pardon?” said Lily.

i can never tag as many people as there are words... but let me try. @kay-elle-cee @sunshinemarauder @theesteemedladydebourgh @ghostofbambifanfiction @isahorcrux @alittlebitofeverything23

woohoo! win!

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17 and 27 and 28 please!

17. What highly specific AU do you want to read or write even though you might be the only person to appreciate it?

i think i have a pretty good track record of saying fuck it and writing the things i specifically will enjoy hahaha. i love self indulgence! probably the most self indulgent is the sort-of-a-joke code of the woosters au mostly because i think it would be so funny to put james in any situation bertie has been in

27. How long did it take to write [insert fic]? Describe the process.

ive definitely sat on this ask for too damn long so i wont ask you to tell me which fic you wanted to know this about... im just going to pick one! i waded years back in my DMs to confirm that i sent myself the idea that became tell me where your secrets lie on jan 19, 2022, and i posted the fic on jan 30, i think? which is a crazy turnaround and i very rarely experience it! but i think it helped that i wrote non-chronologically, which i dont usually do, so i was putting things down as they came to me rather than sitting on future scenes. i think that gave it its atmosphere, and also its structure, i was pretty organically dividing it into parts.

28. Does anyone read your fics before you post them? If so, who?

nobody! sometimes not even me, based on some of the typos that escape my notice!

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What do you wish someone would ask you about come together? Answer it now!

gosh!!! golly. ive been sitting on this because i truly don’t know 😭 i feel as though people have asked me most questions, serious and silly, that i would want to answer. but if anyone has a silly or serious question they want to ask me… now is the moment