#I’m sorry Kel. shoutouts make me nervous even when I’m receiving them. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

egregiousderp · 2 years

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4 12 16 27! 😘

4) Are there any writers that inspire you?

Kel, I know you probably want a shout-out of accessible big fandom names or to maybe hear your own here, but I also think you’ve fundamentally forgotten I majored in English. XDDDDDDD

There’s Pratchett and Palahniuk by the crate in my car for easy access, and LeGuin by my bed. And I think Garth Nix builds things that you can picture in cinematic detail and reconstructs from the brick up, and honestly I’d be hard pressed to find a modern writer that I think does a better job of that.

I own literal boxes full of short stories and novels I wanted to teach from to give people ideas about what’s possible with imagery, characterization, pacing, and detailing out parts of it…still hurt.

I used to have a stack of things to reread every summer, and those things are packed up in a box so I don’t have to try to process the grief. (I’m probably…going to try to go through parts of those boxes across my vacation in two weeks. I’ve been trying to go through some of those boxes for ten years.!

My background’s mostly classic sci fi and pulps. Both of which usually have safely dead or inaccessible authors. And the styles of those are greatly at odds with what you can produce in a fan setting. (You can pull An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge every time for forty thousand words if you like, and people will eat it up if it’s to their taste.)

Editors exist not just to catch your grammar mistakes but to market your work and make your work marketable. Market style changes. The definition of what makes a novel has changed even in just a handful of centuries.

I don’t write half as well as the things I admire. And the people I do admire in fandom usually know I admire them already.

You don’t have to curtail love letters for brevity, and the best fan works exist as love letters. Maybe not to the creator of the work, but to the others around us who make our ideas and happiness possible.

But I think the ones that probably don’t know they inspire me greatly are “my kids” starting out, just beginning to grapple with the enormous excitement of their ideas.

When that’s allowed to express itself freely, I think it’s the best thing in the world.

A lot of my work isn’t designed with accessibility for children (and for good reasons) but… seeing them writing freely (two of them in a language I can barely recognize words of, and one at something they’re alarmed by wanting to write) is really the biggest reason I wanted to make or engage with anything.

So I appreciate anything that lets me get glimpses of that without having to engage with the enormity of my grief at the loss of a constant source of that.

Fandom’s usually a good place for that.

12) Tell us about any WIPs you’re excited about?

Again, I know what you’re reaching for. XD

If I can get the Thanksgiving fic going, then great. If I can get Hole Time up in time to play a spectacular fandom joke, then great.

But really, I just would be very happy with myself if I could get chapter five (“I’m a vegetarian”) up for my Soulmates AU.

Thanksgiving/“TWO POTAT” is just me having to write another awkward dinner party after having struggled to finish a first awkward dinner party. Everyone seems excited about how in love the characters are when I send them roughs.

Descriptions of upcoming chapter for souls:

“So this retired living weapon is in a kitchen with his boyfriend’s anxious son, who’s maybe just begun to realize his dad’s dating said living weapon/the ex-president of a foreign country he has a trading card of. Said weird living weapon is trying to bond with him by offering him whitebait to eat. It’s not working.

Politics of a clan are hinted at through body piercing.

Naruto and Gaara have a crotchety old man bromance.

Gaara clapbacks a twenty-year-old and receives a pot.

Rock Lee keeps repotting every weed Gaara digs up in his garden, and Gaara is exasperatedly in love with him for it but also What About The Water Waste Lee.

Suna’s former Kazekage is coaxed into taking a nice bath.”

16) Guilty Pleasure tropes?

Yeah. So. I’m not burdened with an excess of guilt about what I like. I worry about offending people or triggering people and that’s about it. I mostly just struggle with how to tag safely.

I feel like maybe fewer people know I like Shibari, but as above, I just really like the idea of any kind of hand-tailored custom craft that may or may not take an element of trust. So I like it about the same amount as I’d probably like. I dunno, people sharing a hotpot together, or making bread, or pottery, or…you know. Whatever.

(“Any sort of attentive in-depth learning about something precious to a given person.”

“You have a bespoke kink.”

“I guess. Something like that. But general.”)

27) The nicest comment you ever received?

“Nicest” is hard. A lot of people write very nice comments.

@requirings recently went through my fics one by one and left comments. I get so few comments I think it took me a month to even realize what they’d done and it just made me so Warm inside because it was such a sweet and genuine gesture, and it’s one I can barely repay because of my crippling fear of. Being seen. Having my stuff be up there permanently and being kept like some kind of receipt for a future witch-hunt.

(Not because I’ve done anything like. Inherently or specifically wrong. But because I know very well that you don’t have to do anything “wrong” it can just be enough to be different and it’ll be someone else’s “wrong” if they can manufacture power out of it.)

I made friends with @marquiseoniongirl at all when she was an anonymous commenter on my personal livejournal, commenting sweetly on my crackfic. To call that “nice” is an understatement because I probably owe being able to be alive at all to her and maybe a handful of other friends I made for the first time in my life.

I can write anything remotely spicy at all because of the breakthrough that was @skinks showing up in my inbox talking about how HOT they found what I’d written, after months and months of grappling to try to make a different fic sound consensual—not because the material wasn’t consenting, but because my default state when dealing with…something other people find quite normal is disgust at worst and indifference-to-methodical-scientific-interest at best.

That my default state when writing spice at all has been a massive struggle, and even when I try to be up front about that, I’m not sure many people know it know it. Because I spent literal years learning how to mask it and retexture it so it comes off “right”.

Sometimes you get a comment that isn’t even intended to be particularly “nice” or worldshaking but it makes you want to cry, because it means something worked.

So.

Once I wrote a spiritassassin fic that someone found Hot.

And they told me as much.

And I owe all my future works that had that kind of content probably to them.

Because that was a breakthrough. A massive breakthrough.

I owe full creations of works to offhand comments made by people. I owe happiness, and strength to get through some of my days to people’s offhand comments.

But I also don’t get to decide which comments, or if they’re people I get to have lasting lingering talk everyday friendships with or not.

Sometimes I don’t get to repay the enormity of what’s given.

#Skuun answers #I tried to keep things vague so I won’t tag it with a Tag For That #I’m sorry Kel. shoutouts make me nervous even when I’m receiving them.

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