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fox-bright · 3 years

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A note for all the people who started writing in 2020, and are submitting stories now:

I’m a submissions editor (that is, I read slush) for a fairly well-known SF magazine, and in this read period I am noticing a considerably higher-than-usual percentage of manuscripts that are rejected for severe grammatical errors. When I mentioned this on a writing forum, I received a number of comments and PMs from writers who were surprised that I don’t “just fix the errors.” I’ve realized that it’s likely a lot of people don’t really know what a submissions editor does, or what happens to their short story after it’s submitted.

I’m not the magazine editor. I don’t get to send you the fun email that says “We’d like to buy your story!” and at no point do I have any place tinkering with your story at all. It’s not my place to correct errors.

I’m a filter. It is my job to take twenty stories and find one good one out of them to send on to the magazine editors. The other nineteen get rejected. I take stories, one after the other, from the submissions pile and I read through them until I hit a place where I say “No, this one doesn’t work” and I send a rejection letter. If the writer is skilled, I get to the end of the story without hitting that point, and I go “Huh!” and I set it aside for a day. I sleep on it. I go back and read it again, and if I get to the end and go “This is pretty great!” I send it on to the magazine editors, who do the next round of the process. If I am myself very lucky, I start reading a story and immediately forget that I’m looking for reasons to reject it. I am consumed by the drive to finish it, and I immediately send it on.

The second-to-last category is, as I said, composed of about one in twenty stories. The last category? That’s rare. One in a hundred, maybe. Maybe one in twice that many.

It is a lot more likely that I pull a story, open it up, get two or three double-spaced pages in, sigh, tab back to the submissions page and hit the “send rejection” button.

There are a lot of reasons that a story might not make it past me. There’s the basic stuff (does it meet submission guidelines? Is the format correct? Is there a cover letter with the necessary information about the writer? Is it in English? Is it a short story, not a novella, a novel, song lyrics, poetry, or a picture book?) and then we move on through grammar, readability, originality of concept (is it a fiftieth story about sex robots?), genre fit (we don’t publish non-fantastic westerns, or noir, or gonzo horror slasher stories, for instance, even if they’re very well-written), and increasingly arcane, specific things that any particular magazine is looking for. Those specific things differ, from publication to publication; there are good markets that want that gonzo horror robot porn western, for instance.

But the thing is, I can’t even get to looking at all of that top-level stuff if trying to get through your grammar and spelling is like stubbing my toe on concrete every other step.

There’s a tag on Archive Of Our Own that sees pretty common use, variations of “No Beta, We Die Like Men!” meaning that the chapter went up without ever getting a second set of eyes on it. Nobody checked it over for grammar, spelling, cultural accuracy, et cetera. And for fanfic, that’s often fine. You are (by law) not trying to sell your fic, and you’re giving it to readers who generally already know the setting, the characters, the premise of the original work that the fic is based on. Other writers have done all of that trailblazing for the fic author. So if a fic has bad grammar, or weak characterization, or any of the other flaws common to new, casual writers, it’s not such a big deal; we already have a strong construct in our heads that we’re projecting the fic onto. We want to read good fic, but even mediocre fic can have something satisfying about it.

With original fiction, all the work is being done by the writer right then. There aren’t thirty TV episodes, a hundred hours of video games, forty volumes of manga sitting in the reader’s head already waiting for your story to join them. This means that every little thing, every word, is important. Every piece of grammar. Every clue about characterization. You’re building it all in front of us and if it’s nothing but dialogue then we can’t understand your setting, and if it’s nothing but ponderous worldbuilding, we’ll never come to be interested in your characters. And if there are fifteen grammatical errors on a page, it’s too distracting to immerse ourselves in any of it.

I don’t think that most submissions editors like rejecting stories. I think that all of us, who love reading and the craft of storytelling, would much prefer that when we pull your story from the submission pile, it grabs us by the throat. But we have to reject the ones that still need work.

You don’t want to submit a story that needs more work. You want to submit the absolute best thing that you can write.

So if you’re new to submitting stories, particularly to professional markets, I highly recommend that you get a second set of eyes on it before sending it on to me or any other slush reader who will have to bounce it for the sixth dangling participle in two pages. Have a hyperfluent, passionate reader friend go over it for you in exchange for a pizza. Get in with a writing group (there are a lot online!).

And if you don’t have access to anyone else who can help, I suggest that you take the story and you put it in a box for a month or three. Come back to it with fresh eyes after leaving it entirely alone for a few weeks, and read it out loud. Record what you read, and then listen to it! A lot of the mistakes should pop out into sharp visibility.

#writing #fiction #publishing #my actual life

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esselley · 3 years

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I love your Kagehina fics. Thanks for sorting them out in your carrd. I'm eagerly waiting every Saturday for the Job update!:))

You replied to a similar ask like this on how the Haikyuu manga ending felt for you about Kagehina but what do you think about 387 ? I just want to know from a fic writer like you who thinks of different scenarios did that chapter surprise you or did you see it coming?

ahhhh gosh even thinking of that chapter puts tears in my eyes 😭

It DID surprise me, but hmmm its hard to explain - it’s almost like, even in my wildest dreams I didn’t expect to have something so profound occur to solidify their dynamic and relationship in that way? That the one who defined Kageyama’s childhood the most basically told him to be strong, and the person he was waiting for would find him, and then that person wound up being Hinata just felt too good to be true T_T I love the official translation, that this person would find Kageyama.

I felt it on several levels too, both as a shipper of course, but also as someone who loves character dynamics and found family in stories, that it would be this explicitly stated was such a beautiful and wonderful message, I thought. Of finding and cherishing those people closest to you, the people who stand by you (or in this case, on the court with you) to make you the strongest version of yourself. After everything they have been through, separately and together, it just makes me so happy that they found each other.

I didn’t see it coming, but it was something I think Furudate meant to reorient our understand of the entire series, painting it in a wholly different light, so it was surprising, but in the most welcome way possible. We were missing a key piece of information all along, and it was that Kageyama has been searching, he wasn’t content with sitting around waiting to be found. And then you get the sense that the instant he saw Hinata in middle school, Kageyama sensed that this was the person who was meant to find him. I’m not even sure if he fully realized it when they first met, but I definitely think he must have had it in the back of his mind, whether subconsciously or not. He was just coming off so much loneliness but he is continuing to work so hard (pushing too hard - because soon after his grandpa’s death is when it seems like the kitagawa incident happened) and then suddenly there Hinata is, right in front of him, just like his grandpa said. Right when Kageyama needed him most. And then again, after he fails to get into Shiratorizawa, but finds Hinata at Karasuno. He had to have sensed something... and maybe that’s why he was so pissed to realize Hinata had such a long way to go lol. I think he was mainly mad about Hinata not being very good because he needed Hinata to hurry the fuck up and get on his level XD

And the beauty of their kinship is that because Hinata is His Person, he just like... does that. Hinata gets there because he wants to be on Kageyama’s level, surpass him even. He promised they would meet on the world stage. To have someone who understands you like that, who would do that for you, who would keep you in mind all those years... and to be someone’s drive and their goal and their challenge the way they are for each other... I mean, much of it is that they both just have simple volleyball brains and are idiots, but it’s also so gut-wrenchingly special that words fail me. I simply, as they say, cannot

So yes! I was very happy and surprised, but I think a lot of my surprise came from being just so... fulfilled, by the depth of their connection and the history behind it, and that Furudate would define it to such a degree. It felt like such an amazing culmination of Haikyuu and the characters’ journeys as a whole, and I just was knocked flat on my ass by my gratitude that it was something we got to see happen ^^

(also I got so emotional about 387 immediately that i forgot to say - THANK YOU for the kind words on my fics!!! So happy you are enjoying the job, and also, that my carrd was useful :3)

#kagehina #haikyuu #spoilers #hq spoilers #hq 387 #although i assume most people following me have finished the manga #haikyuu ask #anonymous #esselle replies

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radbutsafe · 3 years

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ALL FUCKIN 35 OF THEM SKLNWESDJFPXO

I SHOULDVE EXPECTED THIS FROM YOU

1. From one to five stars, how would you rate your writing? (No downplaying yourself!)

A three! I think I’m mid range cause I ain’t terrible but there is still shit I gotta improve and grow in my writing

2. Why do you write fanfiction?

to manifest what canon won’t give me and to write more! (though yes it is mainly about the smooching and the— I’ll stop there LOL)

3. What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

Hm! My weird research details? I’m that “fun fact, did you know...” in my fics sometimes LOL! I plan on giving a penthouse for erina in a fic and I went through penthouse listings in Japan for floor layouts and locations💀 my research gives me inspo and depth to stuff I think I lack in comparison to others sometimes.

4. Are there any writers that inspire you?

In terms of fellow fic writers, one of them I can’t name here but she’s an inspiration with her exceptional gift for prose period and her lovely skill at comedy! I want to be as funny as her when I write, I love her ironic situational humor. Other fic writers are @takoyakitenchou, @royaldragonsevgisi15 who I always love sharing ideas with and motivate me to create more! For non-fic writers it would be V.E. Schwab, Leigh Bardugo, Oda, and Horikoshi! The last two may be mangaka, however they are writers as well to create their stories! The depth these creators have given their worlds and interesting characters theyve given life to are all what I aspire to be like!

5. What’s the fic you’re most proud of?

so far uh?? hm everything I’m currently writing are wips lol!! im proud of my wip that has been nicknamed ‘soma panics’ that is a multi-chapter fic that spans like probs 20 plus chapters maybe

6. What element of writing do you find comes easily?

dialogue! it’s so much fun! and character thoughts. I’ve said to people I may be better suited for script writing

7. What element of writing do you struggle with most?

I think it’s description, of like setting and showing action. also an expansion of my vocabulary LOL

8. Which character(s) do you find easiest to write?

erina! I think it’s because canon has shown us many of her different faces and range of emotion.

9. Which character(s) do you find most difficult to write?

SOMA!! chill ass mofo whos more carefree compared to the common shonen protagonist! for other shokugeki characters I’m not sure just yet because I haven’t flexed my fingers enough for the rest of them.

10. What’s your favorite genre to write for?

I guess I should say romance cause that’s what I mostly write LOL!

11. Who or what do you find yourself writing about most?

sorina and I try to get them to smooch eventually KEK and yeah it’s..usually romantic fluff lmao

12. Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about.

HONESTLY ALL OF THEM but “soma panics” is my brain child

13. First fandom you ever wrote for?

pretty sure it’s digimon....

14. What’s your favorite fandom to write for?

currently shokugeki no soma!!!!

15. What’s the weirdest fandom you’ve ever written for?

uhhhh I guess SNS? LMAO fandoms...all have their quirks to them.

16. Any guilty pleasure trope(s)?

characters cuddling!!!! or getting the urge to smooch!!!!

17. A trope you’ll never, ever write for.

unrequited love GOOD FUCKIN BYEEEEEE

18. Wildest fic you’ve ever written?

I have plot ideas thst can be wild potentially but so far nothing fits this criteria so far that I actually have written.

19. Do you prefer canon-compliant, AUs, or something in-between?

depends on the fandom, but if written well, all of it!

20. Gen fic or shippy stuff?

shippy 100% like I said I like smoochin

21. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

romantic is...*drumroll* SORINA! platonic, soutaku and erina and alice!

22. Do you listen to anything while you write?

Sometimes! There are times songs will be on loop and times I just shuffle a playlist. and if I’m writing in random bursts it’ll be with no music but it really does depend lmao I think music is when I’m forcing myself to write?

23. Do you prefer prompts and challenges, or completely independent ideas?

completely independent ideas, I’ve realized in the past prompts shoot me in the foot often unless I luckily figure something out. but I’m often driven by my own sporadic self interest with shitty ping ponging attention

24. One-shots or multi-chaptered works?

multi-chap I guess cause I can post without being finished LOLLL but tbh can I really answer? I haven’t finished anything.....

25. Have you ever daydreamed about side adventures/spin-offs from your fic? Tell us about them!

I can’t answer this question imo because I haven’t finished a fic yet so technically stuff could all fit in the one fic?

26. Is there anything you’ve wanted to write, but you’ve been too scared to try?

MYSTERY AND CRIME! I love the genre and I have plot ideas once a blue moon but I can’t dive in because I want to make details that work and reduce plot holes where suspension of disbelief isn’t as needed. I need to study it more (I need to study all the details for any of my fics imo to be confident sometimes LOL)

27. What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received?

I don’t think I can say one comment was the nicest because I’ve gotten comments that have given me quite the smiles to my face many times! I know this is a cop out but it’s true!

IS WHAT I WAS GONNA SAY UNTIL REINA SENT ME THE FOLLOWING ON DISCORD LIKE TWENTY MINS AGO:

and also rad. i am never this vocal about my emotions like EVER but this needs to be said your fics are obviously far from perfect, as are mine and everyone else's. but the thing about your works is that they're so well-sanded that it's impossible to find any rough edges or faults in them in terms of cohesion to a plot. your cast is never OOC and the amount of effort you devote to developing your takes on the characters as accurately as possible is unimaginably awe-inspiring.

BITCH I WANNA CRY 😭

28. How well do you handle criticism when it comes to your writing?

I’d like to believe I take it often well to try and improve because that’s always my goal. if someone is rude lol that’s not constructive snd is unhelpful. If I disagree with criticism I’ll explain why !

29. Have you ever gone outside of your comfort zone for a fic? How did it turn out?

Not yet, but I have some plot ideas I think will let me test this.

30. Tooth-rotting fluff or merciless angst?

F L U F F.

31. Do you have any OCs? Tell us about them!

elliott fuji, a japanese-american award winning photographer who is erina’s boyfriend in ‘soma panics’ which..causes soma’s panic LOL he’s 30 with slightly wavy black hair. I still haven’t pinpointed his personality just yet...he kind of humble brags for sure an artsy fucker and flirts maybe I’ll make him a lil shy though. he teaches sometimes, and becomes an adjunct photography professor in Tokyo so he can be with erina.

32. Summarize a random fic of yours in 10 words or less.

a cook is unfashionably late in realizing his feelings.

33. Is there anything you wish your audience knew about your writing or writing process?

I am a slow. so slow. motivation who is she? I also write out of order, unfortunately a bit too often.

34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

this should be for the fic ‘soma panics’ it’s either megumi or satoshi talkin to him rn, I’m leaning towards satoshi

“You thought she would always wait for you, didn’t you Soma-kun? To always welcome you home.”

Soma drags his palms down his face and groans. He doesn’t like this at all. He doesn’t shy from confrontation but this is a whole different ballgame. Soma doesn’t play any ball.

“I guess..?” Is his reply, because he thinks he isn’t sure how to answer that.

“You guess?”

Just being questioned again is enough to crack Soma’s pathetic facade as if it was dropped chinaware and he lets out the longest sigh.

“No.”

Coming home means coming home to Nakiri Erina too.

Nakiri Erina is his forever.

this is @takoyakitenchou’s excerpt she’s most proud of that I’ve written, which is also from you guessed it, the long fic soma panics

SOMA: I am, I mean I will be, I swear I will always come home to you, not spend as much time abroad, once I’m done with work I’ll come right back. I’ll make sure to message you. Nakiri, I’m in love you with you. Maybe for a really long time. You know how I say I dedicate my food to you? My dad—my dad said that the key to become a good chef is to find someone to dedicate your cooking to. A special someone. For my dad it was my mom, you know? For me it’s...

(this is a good piece of dialogue tbh so I am also proud of this)

35. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

I’ve mentioned it throughout this but the WIP I’ve nicknamed ‘soma panics’ is something I’m super excited to write, but it’s going on slowly...and almost completely out of order. out of all of my writing it showed off that particular habit of mine, along with “what is this, a shoujo manga?!” though the latter is currently being written chronologically now that I’ve posted chapter one and is pretty solid in direction. it was originally supposed to be a one shot but I got impatient and wanted to post at least something for the sorina / soueri fandom.

however, because ‘soma panics’ (I won’t call it that LOL) is my baby I want to keep true to my rule of refusing to post it until I have a draft of the entire fic finished and I’m satisfied with the main points pretty much. due to my writing out of order, I’m worried I’ll change my mind about scenes or want to reflect things in earlier chapters for later ones etc etc

I joined the SnS fandom extremely late, as season five was airing. I was a fan of the manga five years ago and dropped it because I forgot to check for updates when I caught up 😔 I really want to bang out the different fics and aus for sorina that I have before the fandom fizzles out entirely but tbh I’m writing for myself, I’m manifesting what I want to see and I’ll just share it with all my friends to read if no one else will. cause I’m slow broski I dunno what writing fast even is like LMAO I do really want to write faster though, so I can contribute more and let the words free from the discord dms....

#ask meme #ask rad shit #writing #writing by rad #fanfic #reina girl u put me thru it I swear lol #thank u for sending!!#ur amazing!!!!

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alternatefandom · 3 years

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2020 CREATOR WRAP: FAVOURITE WORKS

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome work

Tagged by @hawopro. Thanks, Mii!

In 2020, I participated in fandom for the first time in nine years (for all of two months! here’s hoping that that’s not the last of it!). Funnily enough, it was Tezuka Kunimitsu who made me stop actively fandom-ing, and it was Tezuka Kunimitsu who brought me back. I am a simple, simple girl.

Anyway! Onto my five favorite works!

courage of stars (this is where i go my own way), a TezuFuji-oriented genfic, set just after Tezuka left for Germany. I wrote this in a fit of inspiration and surprisingly I... like it? I enjoyed exploring the challenges that Fuji faced after Tezuka left, trying to find a new meaning in tennis and finding that he’s been looking at it the wrong way all along.

Mu Siyang’s Frostbite-inspired gifset, made for his birthday. Frostbite is a tenipuri fanfic written by two_if_by_sea in 2004, and it's unforgettable. It’s the definitive Tezuka character piece for me, so it’s only fitting that I included it in my tribute for Tezuka’s birthday! Also, XBB looks so gorgeous in this set TT_TT

in a single touch, a Muzhuo soulmate AU. What can I say? There’s something really comforting about soulmate AUs. Uh, my first venture into romance, too, I think. I tried to make the soulmate thing happen gradually, with them actually having to learn to read each other before the soulmate connection quite forms (my ‘love takes effort’ agenda is showing haha) but it’s kind of hard to do in five scenes. Hopefully, next year my romance-writing ability will improve!

Tezuka Kunimitsu’s Golden Age 314 gifset, again made for his birthday. This one took some css coding ahem, unconventional techniques. But I like the effect! Also, I adore the Golden Age 314-Genius 151 parallel--Tezuka failed to keep his promise back then, but now he’s not gonna fail again. After all, he has no regrets left--he’s already completed everything he’s set out to do.

Thank you for supporting us, and Seigaku, or, why Tezuka put Fuji after him in their singles lineup for the first (and last) time in the entire manga: a meta. In which I rambled about protective!Fuji, about trust, and about choosing to grow as a person, because someone else needs you to.

And that’s a wrap! I also worked on quite a few Chinapuri AU ideas that I liked (the Cabin Fic! CEO AU! Kingdom AU!) but since they’re unpublished and unfinished... well. Maybe they’ll make the list next year?

I hope you enjoyed my works this year! Tagging @zaskiaz as a fellow returnee-from-fandom-hiatus, if you want to, haha.

#prince of tennis #tenipuri #chinapuri #chinapuri 2019 #fen dou ba shao nian #tezuka kunimitsu #fuji shuusuke #tezufuji #mu siyang #zhuo zhi #muzhuo #mine

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snowwhite-andtheknight · 3 years

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I’m going to preface this off with the fact that I’m a multishipper, and ship quite a variety of pairings, so this list might go all over the place. (Also, I’ve never written a fic rec before, though I have recommended fics and gushed about several often enough.) First of all, Above and Below Surface by Whitehorse102 immediately comes to mind. It’s probably my favorite AU fic that I’ve ever read for ZenYuki and possibly, my favorite I’ve ever read in general. It’s a Mer!AU; a type of AU that I’m always reading, but Whitehorse102 writes it so differently than any other Mer!AU, I’ve seen. The world building is insanely good, and the story reads a lot more like a published novel than a multichapter fanfic; there’s world building that even takes in parts of canon and plays around with them a bit. The ZenYuki is built up slowly. It’s a work in progress of the writer’s, and such a lovely read, that you absolutely would not regret reading it or rereading it. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12201172/1/Above-and-Below-Surface Apparently, the first fic I read was Of Assassins and Apples by Realm-Leaper, though since I sometimes accidentally refavorite stuff, changing the date that I favorited it or may have read stuff I didn’t favorite, I might not be accurate with this. It’s an Obi-centric oneshot collection with two oneshots, that I vaguely remember reading. (Eventually, I’ll share stuff that aren’t on Fanfiction.net, because I read all over the place.) I started rereading it, and it has almostly amazing Obi headcanons. The first oneshot is an Obi and Zen friendship piece, and honestly, maybe this is where most of my Obi headcanons came from as far as backstory. This oneshot collection of two oneshots is well worth your time! I’d wondered if the Mukaze and Obi scene was canon, had convinced myself that the talk they had was canon and took place during the Tanbarun Arc, but it was this fanfic, the second oneshot has an absolutely incredible and in character scene where Obi and Mukaze talk a few things out. (Honestly, it’s on my mind whenever I read a story where the two of them talk or interact in any way, and it a hundred percent affects the way I remember canon.) So do check it out! It’s a lovely two oneshot collection centering on Obi. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12933248/1/Of-Assassins-and-Apples

My favorite ANS OC right now is Setsuko/Vixen/fox, from Nostalgic Family by your1ocalpotato. I decided to read some of Potato’s work on a whim a few months back, once I realized that Potato wrote stories, and I absolutely adore Setsuko, especially within Nostalgic Family; I just love that universe, the added backstory for Obi, the found family dynamics, the way that Setsuko may be rough around the edges from the life she lived, but she cares deeply for her family, especially Obi. Just the sibling bond that Setsuko and Obi have in it is absolutely incredible, and in that particular universe, Setsuko has barely met Izana, so there’s a chance that that slow burn will eventually pick up, and Izana/Setsuko is such a lovely pair; they contrast very beautifully together, and it’s got to be my favorite Izana/OC pairing. Honestly, Potato’s stories are really good and more people need to read them. https://archiveofourown.org/works/22926751/chapters/54800950 (The Den Series is the name of the particular series I’m talking about, though there is a different story with Setsuko, where she has a different backstory, and it’s pretty much all slowburn Izana/Setsuko. Both are worth a read, though I haven’t finished the longer, slow burn fic yet.) As for An AU I Took A Chance On (And Now Love), it would be the Quarantine AU, that Muselover1901 wrote: Here With(out) You. I figured I’d read a Quarantine AU, and that one was really beautifully written. It’s one of my favorites by Muse. (I may throw in a few other stories that I recommend by Muse, because she’s a super talented ZenYuki writer.) I usually avoid writing any Quarantine AUs or Pandemic AUs unless I really feel like I need to. The same usually goes with reading them; I’ve found at least one good Quarantine AU in about four or so fandoms now. (I usually only read one per fandom, if it seems interesting.) Honestly, this is probably my favorite Quarantine AU ever. It’s longer, and the world is pretty well established. (And it’s a really lovely domestic ZenYuki oneshot.) https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13668279/1/Here-With-out-You I’m going to cheat a little on the next two, because I actually reviewed them (and reviewed them around the same time). First, I want to mention a fic that Made Me Laugh Out Loud; the first one that comes to mind is A Snowy Surprise by MuseLover1901. It’s the first one that pops into my head, though I know that I’ve laughed out loud at probably plenty of other stories. I actually was unsure before I read it whether it was a romantic story or not, and had been a bit nervous about jumping in and reading it, but once I started to read it, it was love at first sight. There’s a snowball fight in it, and I’ll have to say one particular hit made me laugh out loud. The story is mostly a friendship story. (The kind of story that I always long for more of in any fandom, because I love friendship stories as much as I love romance stories, and I also love family stories just as much.) But it’s lighthearted and doesn’t contain too many manga spoilers for me, since I’m terribly behind in the manga right now. (I haven’t read all of Muse’s work yet, because some of them have more manga spoilers than I’m ready to read. I’m biding my time for the day that I can just binge read them obsessively. It will happen.) https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13668260/1/A-Snowy-Surprise So, here’s the story, I’m cheating by mentioning instead of the above one. (I reviewed them around the same time, so it works, I think.) For A Fic That Made Me Friends With The Author, I’d have to say A Quick Library Visit; it’s a short, sweet read, and if you want quick ZenYuki fluff, it’s a go to. I read it around the same time as the above two Muse fics, and for some reason, some of Muse’s newest stories didn’t have reviews, so I figured I’d review. Shortly after, I reviewed A Quick Library Visit and A Snowy Surprise, Muse messaged me to thank me. (She’s really cool by the way.) And then, a little while later, I joined the old ZenYuki Week Server, and Muse invited me over to a ZenYuki Writing Collab Server, and we became fast friends after that. (She remembered me based off of the two reviews I’d left on her stories, which was pretty cool and definitely humbling.) (Also, heads up, I’ll post the fanfiction links to Muse’s stories, but she also posts them on AO3, so they’re there as well.) (I wish there was a reverse for this panel, because through the ZenYuki Writing Server; I met phenomenal writers and began reading their work as well!) https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13668268/1/A-Quick-Library-Visit As for A Fic That Got Me Involved In The Fandom, I may be cheating by mentioning this too, since I starting writing fanfics for ANS practically right after I finished watching Season Two. The Mistress, the Plan, and the Secret by MisusedEllipses really made me long to write for Prince Raji/Shirayuki, and really kicked me off in that little rarepair haven, that Season Two won me over towards. This is an incredible fanfic, has absolutely amazing characterization throughout, and is incomplete on Fanfiction. (I’m hoping that somewhere online, it sits pretty and finished, waiting for me to rediscover it. I may be overly hopeful.) Okay, it ties in onesided!ObiYuki feelings, onesided!PrinceRajiYuki feelings, and wonderful characterization and sibling banter between Eugena and Rona! Honestly, Raji is written so well that it practically reads like canon: a very hard feat indeed for any writer to accomplish. Just, wow! I don’t know who to root for: Raji, Zen, or Obi! It diverges from canon right before the kidnapping, so Shirayuki never gets kidnapped, and eventually a rather interesting Raji and Obi friendship forms, though that’s right where the last current chapter is. It hasn’t been updated in four or five, I guess now or soon, years, but it’s well worth a read. I will recommend this to anyone if given a chance, regardless of whether the person is a multishipper or not. I love the friendship, the romance, the family, and humor that comes along with Raji’s siblings’ banter. It’s just a phenomenal canon divergent fic, and it’s what really made me realize there was a need for more Raji X Shirayuki fanfics, and it left me crazy about filling that gap. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12156186/1/The-Mistress-the-Plan-and-the-Secret I’m going to make a rather honest claim here, even though I’m not sure how often this writer will come up in what I gush about here, but this writer should: genee is one of my favorite writers in the fandom. (I’m not sure if genee is still active.) When I eventually thought of a fic with A Favorite Minor Character of mine, this particular story came up. history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes is an absolutely amazing precanon story where it focuses entirely on Ryuu, gives him some backstory! (It’s an amazing read, and it follows his journey to becoming a Court Herbalist.) Honestly, the fandom needs a lot more Ryuu fics. (On a side note, a fic by a different writer also came to mind with this, but since that’s more romantic than this gen fic, I figured I’d stick with this one. The other one that comes to mind is the only fic where I could find Kai as a main character. It’s by a different writer, but if I can stick it into this recommendation, I will tell you more about it.) Genee writes really good fics. I know genee has a fanfiction account, but I think genee might have an AO3 as well. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12687531/1/history-doesn-t-repeat-itself-but-it-often-rhymes For Pre-Canon, I want to mention a lovely story by an incredible (mostly?) MitsuKiki writer that may not actually be active anymore. (Unless the writer uses a different site now.) (This story is actually not a MitsuKiki fanfic, though it is still one of my all time favorite stories by fiesa.) Roses, Violets by fiesa. It’s a beautiful story that focuses on Zen, Mitsuhide, and Kiki during the years since Kiki came there. Zen develops a crush on an OC, who doesn’t like him like that, who actually likes Mitsuhide, interestingly enough. It’s not really a romance story, as it focuses on the way time passes and uses summer and flowers to express that. The perspectives shift, so some parts may need to be reread to understand who is feeling that way, but it’s all written so beautifully. You get to see Zen develop a crush and get heartbroken, Mitsuhide trying to be really nice, knowing Zen likes the woman and sort of trying to let something happen between Zen and the OC. Though, Zen feels that that’s hopeless, since she likes Mitsuhide. It’s more a story of the friendship between Zen, Mitsuhide, and Kiki, and what growing up entails. It’s Zen before Shirayuki, and it makes for a rather lovely, read. (It’s a multichapter, though it’s not a super lengthy one as far as chapter count goes. It’s well worth a read though.) (fiesa and geneee I discovered around the same time, and I love what both of them write so much.) (So, if you like it, it’s always worth checking out the rest of fiesa’s work.) https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12864975/1/Roses-Violets I was just thinking over how to mention an incredible writer, that wrote two ZenYuki oneshot that I’ve read and fell in love with. (Spotted the oneshot section. If I have to refill part of the Bingo Board later, so be it.) The Art Of Watching Stars Fall by Zen Wisteria on Tumblr. The metaphors and images are just so pretty and beautiful and with gorgeous meanings. (The writer feels a bit like a poet, and since I love poetry, that’s a definite plus in my book.) It’s really fluffy and sweet and contains pretty much all of the wonderful reasons to ship ZenYuki. It’s a delight to read and to reread. It’s highly recommended by me. https://zen-wistaria.tumblr.com/post/117283326416/it-feels-like-years-since-shes-seen-his-face AU That Made Me Find The Source Material: Lyrias Station by Eclectic80. I’m cheating here too. Shh… I’ve been slowly getting into Star Trek over the years very deliberately, and I just loved this fic so much! I found it first on the ObiYuki Community, going through a lot older fics, and then fell in love with just the way that Eclectic80 wrote it! It’s an absolutely incredible Star Trek AU, and a lovely ObiYuki story. (I think I did start with reading Historical Fiction, and it surprised me by being a Star Trek AU.) (On the note of really great AUs, there’s a Star Wars AU for ObiYuki that’s incredible, that I’ll have to refind at some point, and an incredible Harry Potter AU. I actually asked a lot of questions to people who know Star Wars lore far better than I do, in order to work through how much of the Star Wars AU for ObiYuki could plausibly happen in canon. (I think it was all of it. It was a great and engaging read too!) The Harry Potter AU left me obsessed with it, and the accidental soul bonding spell, whoops. But, since I don’t remember their titles or who wrote them, I’ll have to recommend them some other day. (I think they are also far back on the community page. I haven’t finished exploring it, since I took a break a while ago.) Back to Lyrias Station, it’s an absolutely incredible read whether you know very little about Star Trek, nothing at all, or a lot. I fall somewhere in the middle, and honestly, it’s a fantastic read, whenever you want to dig in and explore. (I may have reread certain oneshots in it way too much for my own good, practically back to back. It’s a really wonderful reread as well.) https://archiveofourown.org/works/14414148/chapters/34487988 For A Fic That Gave Me A New OTP, though my OTP is hard to define, so I’m technically cheating here, but Let Me Be Bold by Kaedix. It’s an IzanaYuki story, and that is a pairing that I was curious about, but hadn’t really shipped until I read this oneshot collection. I absolutely need to read the third oneshot; it’s new, and bound to be incredible. But, the first oneshot had me sort of falling in love with Izana right alongside Shirayuki, and the second oneshot had me cheering for Shirayuki, and all in all, it’s an incredible read that is well worth your time, whether just to read something new or different or whether you are on the fence about this fabulous rarepair. (Since it did win me over to the ship, I’m including it here.) It’s incredible! Go read it! https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982494/chapters/49894448 I was trying to figure out a fic that I loved that was under a thousand words, and since I haven’t paid a huge amount of attention to the word count, I couldn’t think of one at first. So, I was going through one of the writers that I really like the writing of, and stumbled upon one that I immediately remembered. Importance by bountifulnuggets. I remembered it strictly as the wedding story where Zen and Shirayuki hugged Obi, who desperately needed a hug. I’ve never read anything like it before, and it’s saturated with friendship. (Nugget is a phenomenal writer, so basically anything by her is really good, so if you haven’t heard of her, go check out her writing. You won’t be disappointed.) (I got temporarily sidetracked before going through Nugget’s stories, by a story I hadn’t read by Eclectic80, a ZenYuki(!) story, that if for some reason, I extend and do more than a Bingo Board (or find another way to include), I’ll tell you the title of. Either way, the story by Nugget is a lovely hurt/comfort fic that is more comfort than hurt, and it’s definitely a beautiful read. https://archiveofourown.org/works/26433481 I’m going to pause here for now, even though I haven’t gotten a Bingo yet, because I’ve spent way too long today, compiling this list, and kind of want to share how far along it’s come so far. I recommend every single last one of these fics and several more, honestly they’re all so amazing!

#ansficbingo #fic re #sctwilightvampwolfgal #submission

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maybeeatspaghetti · 3 years

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1) I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but do you have fics that you haven't posted, or don't plan on posting? If so, and if comfortable with sharing, are there any particular reasons, be it the content, how it's written, etc?

2) Somewhat generic question, but as someone who is interested in writing, be it fanfiction/smut (possibly?) or otherwise, do you have any tips? I know that reading more is the big one, but y'know.. still.

Have a great day/night! ♡

1) I have three fics that I haven’t posted and don’t plan to post. Two are short fics that are so similar to fics I’ve already posted that it would be redundant if I did post them. The third one is a 150k novel that was a Whizzvin fic, but the characters changed so drastically as I wrote the book that I changed the names and developed them into different characters. Maybe it’s a little bit selfish, but I wanted to keep that one for myself and not share it. And I actually cut down the sex scenes, to make it less about sex and more about the story—so instead of four or five sex scenes, I cut it down to two and rewrote it to sound more like Warm Baths, where there are no typical erotica words (like “cock” or “thrust” or “hard”) it’s more about feelings than anything else.

2) Write, write, write. That’s the biggest tip, and I know it gets thrown around a lot to the point of “I’ve heard this so many times already,” but it’s because it’s true. If you’re starting out writing and you look at it and think, “this is terrible” and you stop writing forever, then you’ve prevented yourself from ever getting better. The more you write, the better you’ll be. I’ve been writing for 15 years, and I can tell you, the writing I did when I was in middle school is horrific. It’s really bad. And I got marginally better in high school, and a lot better in college, and even better now, beyond college, when I’ve really been able to develop my voice without being encouraged to write a specific way by my teachers and professors. So allow yourself to write badly.

Write and get feedback. It’s not as easy to improve if you’re writing into a vacuum and you’re the only one seeing your work. As hard as it may be, share your work with other people; let them tell you what works and what doesn’t. If you’re uncomfortable sharing your writing with people you know, look for beta readers on the Internet. Feedback is key to helping you grow as a writer.

Yes, reading is important, but I’d rank it lower than writing. Reading helps get a sense for how authors structure their sentences, pace their stories, weave in subplots, and split their chapters, but ultimately, I personally lean much more heavily on the writing than I do on the reading, though I do read, just not as much as some authors. Some authors say to be a good writer you must 1) read x number of books a year, 2) read with a pen in your hand, and 3) read “good” works of literature only. I disagree with all of those: 1) There’s no certain number of books you have to read a year that makes you a reader or a writer. Go at your own pace and read how much you want to. I know some people good-naturedly compete to see who can read more books, but if that’s not the way you work, then don’t feel bad about not reading as much as other people. 2) Taking notes while you read doesn’t necessarily make you a better writer. If you like marking up texts and it works for you, go for it! And I do it sometimes (my Falsettos script... there’s hardly any white space left), but it can make you feel like you’re at school when you do mark in the books or take notes, and that might kill your interest in reading it. Just by reading (without taking notes or writing in the text), you’ll unconsciously absorb a lot of information about what makes a story work. 3) “Good” is subjective. What’s considered “good” by the people who say things like this is usually confined to the literary canon. And while I agree that some knowledge of the literary canon is valuable, there are so many wonderful works beyond it that are just as good. So when people talk about “good literature,” they’re usually deliberately denigrating and stepping on everything beyond the literary canon (which excludes a huge range of diverse works/voices). So don’t listen to them. There’s plenty of good literature outside the literary canon, and who’s to say something they personally didn’t like isn’t good? It’s all about personal taste. So read what you want, be it novels or nonfiction or comics or manga or fanfiction—whatever it is, it can be valuable to you as a writer.

Going back to writing—sometimes, you just have to write something bad to get it out and then take it out and start afresh, and I know that takes extra time and effort, but sometimes you need to do it. For example, I was writing a serious story about depression and I just couldn’t keep from writing a specific scene in a humorous way. So I wrote the scene that way, with a completely different feel and tone and pacing to the rest of the story, and then copied and pasted it somewhere else and went back to the beginning of the scene. Once I had gotten that awkward funny stuff out of the way, I could write it seriously.

I’ve never been particularly good at plot, as I’m a much more character-driven writer, so I’m afraid I can’t offer too many tips about that. I usually let my characters lead the story, no matter whether it’s a short piece like what I mostly post on AO3 or it’s a longer, more involved piece like What a Wonder You Are.

In terms of writing smut... let me tell you—my first attempts at writing smut about five years ago were dreadful, and I actually gave up until this summer, when I jumped right off the deep end into my Shameless Whizzvin Smut series. And I’d grown a lot since the last time I tried to write it, and I did my research and tried to focus on the language and the emotions over the actual acts themselves (though some fics require a level of detachment, like Pretty Little Thing, where the fic is about the acts rather than the emotions), and I thought I did alright. And in the last four months, I’ve gotten better.

If you want to learn how to write good smut, turn to fanfiction authors. I have rarely read a good sex scene in a published, literary, mainstream novel (but for god’s sake, don’t read Fifty Shades of Grey; I know that was fanfiction, but it really doesn’t depict healthy or safe sex in any way—The Atlantic article “Consent Isn’t Enough” is great at explaining why). A lot of novels do the “fade to black” type scene where they cut away just as the characters are falling into bed together (Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a “fade to black,” but it’s done really masterfully). But if you want to learn how to write good smut, read fanfiction and remember that you can write smut that’s sexy without foregoing safety, communication, and consent.

There’s kind of a fine line between what’s sexy and what’s absurd, and it’s all too easy to step over the line into the absurd, and this is sometimes as basic as word choice—if you say “his cock was flushed and quivering,” it sounds much better than “his flushed and quivering manhood” or “his flushed member was quivering.” If you’re going for the absurd, then use all the ridiculous words you want (manhood, member, manmeat, prick, rod, love muscle, meat stick, loins, etc. etc. etc.)! Just know it’ll be more amusing than sexy and people will probably make fun of it. But if that’s what you’re going for, then go all out!

If you’re wanting some more specific advice about writing in general or smut writing, you’re welcome to send an ask or message; this response would get entirely too long if I were to go into more detail here. 💕

#asks #anon #writing tips #writing advice #smut writing #writing smut #ao3 #fanfiction

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mannatea · 3 years

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Hi. I used to follow your old blog on a different account. Hope you're doing well. Do you have any tips on thinking up stories that are *not* dark and depressing due to subject material? The last story I was working on I had to quit because the backstory I was developing for my passive male character was super depressing. At times I enjoyed researching it, though what won out was the thought I was wasting my time looking into angsty things for something I wasn't even planning to publish. Now I want to write something a little happier. But I have the most experience in writing angst and cringe comedy 😅 thanks for any help you can give. Stay safe out there!

By the way, good on you for dropping that manga you used to follow. I was happy most of the characters lived, but other than that, it felt "meh" to me (granted, I didn't read all the way from the beginning). The author was probably going for a "people will always be fighting each other" theme, but some of the imagery of what happened after a time skip could definitely be taken as pro-fascist. And I was disappointed the protagonist basically said he wanted to bring about destruction! I'm glad I didn't spend any money to read it.

Wow, hi! I’m doing all right, thanks for asking. I hope you’re doing all right, too. :)

As far as “that manga” goes, I’ve kept tabs on it. I’ve been on the fringes for the last two-ish years; I dedicated something like four real life years to that fandom and mostly had a good time while I was there (made some friends I hope to keep for life), so it was one of those situations where I just had to find out how it ended. I realized at some point that I was in a very negative space in the fandom, and felt it was better to publicly drop the series and the blog associated with all of my meta/discussion than to play in what had become a toxic pool for me. I didn’t really want to drop the account after my time there, but I couldn’t have dealt with the nonstop questions/messages/etc that would have piled in over the years, and eh, when you’re done you’re done. I criticize Hallmark television for fun, now, instead. It’s a lot less stressful! And literally nothing is That Deep so there’s very few delusions, at least on the Tumblr side of things. (Reddit, however, is insane, but I don’t post in the fandom there.)

As far as writing advice goes, I am going to apologize in advance for muddled thoughts. I just got out of work and have been staring at numbers all day, so it’s hard for me to think lmaoo.

In my opinion, any sort of character or personality type/flaw/whatever could have developed via a negative OR positive influence/catalyst, so that’s something to consider. I also think people tend to reach for “sad” or “traumatic” pasts either as a way to cope with their own issues/pasts/whatevers, or because it’s the “easy explanation” for why a character is the way they are.

If you WANT to write things a certain way, it’s sometimes a matter of changing the lens through which you’re viewing life, the story, the characters, or character writing in general. This is never easy, especially when you find a genre you feel comfortable in, but it’s always possible. When I was in college and submitted an autobiographical piece (Rot Tooth) for a creative writing final, I received multiple comments from classmates and even the professor that my talent/skill was in writing comedy. COMEDY!!!! I don’t think anyone who has read my writing from the last decade would say that I was a comedy writer. I stopped labeling ‘fics as humor/romance so long ago I can’t even remember when it was. But boom. I had written a comedy piece.

I don’t think I can ignore that most of the comedic elements in Rot Tooth were brought about because humor is one of the ways in which I cope with things, but it was also a very conscious choice I made. I wanted people to be able to engage with the story without being grossed out, without getting bored, without feeling that it was a poor-pathetic-me story, and humor was the classiest way to do it. Here, read this long story that includes journal entries from Ye Olde Livejournal days, but it will make you laugh often enough that the depressing aspects of the story don’t weigh it down too much! It was probably the only way to make the subject matter widely palatable.

As often as I joke about characters or scenes or moments that “just write themselves” the author does have control. I mostly write fanfiction, so let’s go with examples from that.

I’m (very slowly) working on a ‘fic called Three Years which features a character who, when last seen, was headed off to serve a prison sentence. They haven’t been on the show for three years and thus I assume they have been serving that sentence for the last three years. The story starts when this character is released from prison. They are a woman. This is a historical piece of fiction. Prisons were vile to women and yet...this is fiction. I have a choice. I get to choose. Does she get to start her life off carrying 25 bags of trauma or just 2? It would be unreasonable to expect that someone, especially a woman, who was imprisoned for 3 years in the early 1900s wouldn’t have some issues (at the very least, the isolation would have been awful), but it doesn’t really have to be much worse than that. It doesn’t.

I have the power to choose.

A character has anger issues. Sure, he could have had a traumatic past with an abusive parent who took his anger out on him or his mom or whatever...or maybe it is an inherited personality trait and the parent figure with the problem was never really That Bad about it, but seeing it normalized makes it harder for the character in question to realize it’s a huge problem and part of their character arc is realizing they need to get help, not because they don’t want to be like their dad, and not because they hate their dad, but because they just want to be a better person/they don’t want to let that struggle consume them.

Someone’s sweetheart goes off to war. Guess what? They don’t have to die there to force a traumatic past. They don’t have to come back a raging alcoholic either. Maybe the time apart, and the time fighting a war just puts a natural sort of crack in the relationship by making it clearer to each character what they want in life/what matters to them in their life.

A character is super passionate about their work/hobby. Maybe they have ADHD and it’s a hyperfixation. Maybe they’re autistic and it’s a Special Interest. It doesn’t have to be “their parents ignored them and forced them to be alone all the time and they used this thing to cope so it means everything to them because it’s always been there.”

Maybe you have a character whose greatest fear is losing the people they love. It doesn’t have to be because a pet died in their arms when they were four and it traumatized them. It doesn’t have to be because they only have one person they love in the whole world. It can just be a thing because that’s a valid fear literally anyone can reasonably have, and maybe it’s a bigger deal because they don’t have siblings or aren’t close to many people! (And the “aren’t close to many people” thing doesn’t have to stem from trauma, either. Most busy adults for example who get to choose their friends, are just like that.)

A perfectionist might just have the personality type; it doesn’t mean their parents criticized everything they ever did. A person with three failed marriages might hesitate to fall in love and try again but it doesn’t have to be because those three failed marriages were abusive. A quiet character may just be shy or introverted by nature.

I think everyone carries some kind of trauma with them, so it’s never unreasonable to have some in a person’s past (you can’t write an ugly character without having to think about the fact that they carry some trauma from what it’s like to grow up ugly), but it doesn’t have to define them. It doesn’t have to overshadow everything else in their past.

You can always ask yourself, “Why am I reaching for angst every time I create a backstory?” Literally everyone has some kind of angst. Most kids were hurt by things said to them in school, for example, or made fun of for some reason. Most people did something extremely embarrassing as a kid and never got over it. There are a thousand little moments in our adult lives that go back to these little points—you might call them the tiny traumas. But they’re not defining. They’re not so heavy they also live in the present. Not all of them.

Why do you reach for the darkest corner? Why not for the light? Or a middle ground?

I encourage people to write basically whatever floats their boat, but it sounds like you’re at a point where you just feel weighed down by that sort of stuff, and that’s not a great way to feel, especially when it discourages you from working on a project entirely.

My final suggestion: look at some of your favorite characters from various types of media. Are they all traumatized? What are their defining characteristics? Black Beauty has some depressing stuff in it, but is ultimately a story with a happy ending. Pride and Prejudice has drama, but nobody’s past is filled with the darkest stuff imaginable. North and South has awful things to consider in it (cotton mills were sooo awful) but the characters are not wildly traumatized people.

What kind of story are you trying to tell? Do the characters need to be traumatized to tell it? Does the story have to be dark to get across the message you want to send?

Way back in the day, when I was into “that manga” I made an RP blog for a one-off character that nobody gave a damn about. Like, he was so one-off that even back in those days nobody even remembered him having existed. It was sort of a joke RP blog that wasn’t supposed to be serious. The only canon information we had about this character was that he enjoyed drinking. I decided to make him a lighthearted character because the series was pretty dark and I wanted to send people hilarious starters instead of wading through the muck of depression with everyone else’s sad, abused characters. I decided his family was old money and he had a brother. Nothing super traumatizing in his past. Some family issues but not the sort of thing that would haunt anyone. He was not traumatized in his recent past any more than other characters were. Mostly just “a regular guy.” I really loved RPing him. He was fun! The story could get heavy but he didn’t have to be.

Anyway, dive head-first into the dark angst if you want, but if it’s not necessary to tell the story you want to tell, just remember you don’t have to go there. You have the choice.

#long post #thoughts about writing #nacrene-archaeologist #answered mail

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soultronica · 3 years

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For your fandom asks... why not KID and LAW?

Oooh good one! Took me a while lmao

K -Say something nice about someone in any of your fandoms

Ok starting off strong ahah time to embarrass myself. Well what comes to mind immediately like I mentioned on ao3 is all the kind people who left comments on my stuff, you included especially!, but also @chromatic-lamina is probably the most supportive person I’ve met here. And @chokefriends is the best active kidlaw writer but we all know that lol

I - Has tumblr caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why

Oh man I guess lol? I got into a big anime fandom (Free!) right at the beginning of its tumblr hype and despite my efforts to find a relatively quiet fandom space via a sideship I got into so much drama lol, partly from my own personality defects and depression, partly from associating with the wrong people, partly from living in Japan at the time meaning you kind of end up getting introduced to all the ultra fans. Should point out that this was around the general move from tumblr to twitter (2014) so it’s both tumblr and twitter, really, but I ended up nuking my entire internet presence for a while. Now I’m older and more reasonable so I know how not to participate in anything that promises discourse, though I do miss the activity sometimes -- an active fandom really is a daily hobby, you can spend all day talking to people. On the other hand I still have the friends I made from that time, most of whom I’ve met irl and even one I’ve lived with in a one-room apartment back when we were living on 30k yen a month. So it’s not all bad and there’s no denying it was a big part of that period of my life but I’m never rewatching that show or getting in a similar fandom ever again ahah

D - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t (again: be nice)

Hmm hard to answer that one, I either like or dislike ships without real strong feelings either way. I suppose a lot of kidlaw people are into z/s as well so maybe that, and it’d mean more content as well, though I feel like I can get a similar dynamic from kidlaw anyways so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. A good friend is into shanks/mihawk so maybe that one as well so we could swap fics, I totally get the appeal intellectually too but somehow shanks/buggy feels cuter to me despite being a literal clown ship lol.

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves (chars you’re neutral on are fair game, as are chars you dislike)

Uhhhh I don’t have strong feelings about 80% of one piece characters so I don’t even know who to pick ahah. Characters that sometimes annoy me I still generally find have good concepts or fit well in the story/among the strawhats, etc. Like akainu is a bitch but he’s still a good antagonist archetype that fits in well among the cast of antagonists, know what I mean? Does that count?

A - Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s)

Well kidlaw lol. To be very honest despite generally being someone who loves exploring characters and relationships (I’m a multi-multi-multishipper in most fandoms I get into), One Piece just isn’t really that kind of manga for me, I’m just not invested all that much in most of the characters, which makes the ship pool pretty reduced -- I mostly like the story and the adventure, and like 5-10 charas I’m invested into. But I’m used to approaching fandom as a shipper, and honestly most people on tumblr/twitter are as well so that’s the way to go if you want a decent volume of content/interaction, so that’s how i went into it. I got into kidlaw because I wanted Law content and it was the type of dynamic I liked, started liking Kid through fic and ended up writing my own, and here we are. But at the end of the day I don’t overly care about them interacting in canon or anything ahah. I guess canon and fandom are separate matters for me, one I talk about with my bros and one I talk about on social media.

Should mention that the next fic I wanna write is Robin/Crocodile so that’s another ship (that I don’t overly care about but like exploring)

W - 5 favorite ships and 5 kinks you like best for said ships

All this to say imma skip this question ahah can’t think of 5 ships that would qualify as “favourite” and I don’t really do kinks either

#hergan416 #ask meme #thanks!!

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philologer-mosaic · 3 years

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Hey! Fellow writer here! I was curious as to how you learn to write characters and /keep/ them in character without it being overly stereotypical or stiff? I've read your work and I'd love to learn from you ;^;

Hi! Glad to meet you, and wow, I am so flattered to be asked this. Happy to help out a fellow writer, and I’m always down for rambling about writing-related stuff! I’m not sure how helpful some of this will turn out to be, but here goes.

I’m not sure if you’re asking about characterisation in general including crafting OCs or specifically about writing canon characters, and a lot of this advice will be relevant to both, but I will say this straight off: I’ve seen a fair amount of quibbling about how fanfiction won’t teach you how to worldbuild and maybe that’s true, but there is nothing like writing fanfiction for teaching yourself how to craft character voices. Especially when your source material is a movie/ TV show/ whatever definition RWBY falls under. So: rewatch! Pay attention to all the little details. What turns of phrase do they use? How do they stand, how do they move? What’s their usual emotional range? Pick a line they speak, think about what descriptors you’d use to get across their tone of voice or their emotional state if you were writing the scene in a fic. When you’re writing new dialogue for them, try to hear it in the actor’s voice (if that’s a way your imagination works; some people don’t have great auditory imaginations. Mine can be kind of hit and miss!).

Rest of this advice is going under a cut, because this got looong!

With canon characters: start from what you know, then extrapolate. Especially with characters we don’t see all that much of, boil them down to a handful of personality traits/ ways-they-present-themself first, then consider what might underly them. And in reverse: take the things we know about their status and backstory, consider what that implies about them as a person.

So, Clover: I think I boiled him down to ‘confident, friendly, professional’, and what’s underlying ‘confidence’ is really obviously his semblance: he’s never had to hesitate about anything, he always knows he can rely on himself. So in his internal monologue, he’s not going to second-guess his decisions. He calls Qrow out on deflecting compliments, so he’s good at reading people and also wants to help them; I assume that applies more broadly than just to Qrow. He’s leader of Ironwood’s flagship team of Specialists, and semblance or not I made the assumption he didn’t get there without working for it [that is an assumption, though! People less inclined to think well of Clover will make a different assumption, in-universe as well as out, and how he responds to that is also something to consider], so he’s got to be smart, dedicated, a good tactician, a good leader. And building from that: he’s smart and perceptive but we know he’s also loyal to the bitter end (very bitter); what sort of personality can we project that reconciles those two, what sort of person would respond like that? What I went with is that he trusts the system because he understands enough pieces of how/why it works that he trusts the bits he doesn’t understand are also created with the best interests of the people at heart. (Even when that’s really not true.) So then that’s a consistent philosophy-like thing that underlies a lot of how I write him: he understands the reasons for a lot of why things are how they are and then assumes the best of all the rest.

– This looks like a lot, now I’ve written it out. I thought all this out while working on the early chapters but I never put it some of it into words really. In coming up with the plot or story idea you’ll have made plenty of these assumptions and extrapolations already. Take a second look at them; take them further, find places to link them together or pit them against each other.

And remember, these are your interpretations. There’s not a right or wrong way to flesh these out. Work with semi-canon stuff like the mangas or discard it as you wish; follow fanon or argue with it or throw it out entirely. I interpreted Yang as ‘normal outgoing teenage girl in a non-homophobic world’ and wrote her as having dated people from Signal before she got to Beacon; the other day I came across a tumblr post interpreting her as “a rural lesbian”, by which standard she definitely didn’t have any romantic experience before canon; they’re both entirely plausible takes! Where we don’t know stuff for sure, slot in whatever your story needs, or whatever you think seems interesting. I settled on Clover’s backstory for Soldier, Spy mostly by going ‘ok, what’s an interesting way to contrast him with Qrow?’ And in some of my other fic ideas, he’s different.

Limited third person perspective (or first person, if you can pull if off) is the best for dropping in characterisation smoothly. Though I’m probably biased because I love it so much. Omniscient third person POV is when the narration’s impartial and uninvolved, and skips between person A’s thoughts and person B’s thoughts and pure description of what’s happening, objectively speaking; limited third person is – when the camera’s always over one person’s shoulder in a given scene. It’s less close in than first person, but we get the POV character’s thoughts and no others, we only see/notice what they notice and pay attention to, descriptions are coloured by the way the POV character thinks about the world. I don’t want to be setting you homework, but, a neat writing exercise, if you want it: pick an object, place or person, and consider how two different characters would see it differently. Write those two descriptions. For fun, pick something that at least one of the characters is going to really look down on or dislike parts of! (Qrow’s snark is so much fun.)

This is cynical, but: people lie to themselves a lot. When you put yourself into a character’s head, they’re going to be telling themself a narrative in which what they’re doing is the best thing to do and makes them a good person. (With a few exceptions, the big ones being depression- and anxiety-brain, which instead do their best to convince you you’re the worst.) Get your characters to justify themselves to you.

Goals, motivations, priorities. It feels like a massive oversight to write about how to characters and leave that one out, but honestly I can’t think of anything I can say here that hasn’t been covered better by tons of other writing advice. [Incidentally: https://www.writersdigest.com/ . Subscribe to their email newsletter, it’s free, they will try to get you to buy their how-to courses but there’s no need to, the website has all kinds of articles about the craft and details of writing and the newsletter will send you all the new ones plus curated picks of what’s already there. And also: https://springhole.net/writing/index.html . There’s some stuff specific to fanfic in there, and also general writing advice.] Just: keep it in mind.

Related to that, but a separate thing and one that I haven’t seen other writing advice talk about so much: how does the character try to achieve their goals? What are their skills and resources? And more than that, what’s their preferred approach? In the simplest terms. It’s a matter of mindset, and what options they see as available to them. So the things I would keep in mind for this are: Who’s got social skills/ is good at thinking in social terms, and who isn’t/doesn’t? (Not just interpersonally speaking. James “not really concerned about my reputation” Ironwood is a good example of a character who always thinks in terms of hard power over soft power; even when public opinion is an important strategic consideration he only thinks about it in the broadest and most simplified strokes.) Who would rather work within the system, and who prefers to do an end-run around it? (That doesn’t have to correlate with who’s actually got power, though obviously there are trends. I’m writing Clover as tending to take charge even when he officially shouldn’t because he’s more concerned with solving the problem than with rank, and that’s a case of circumventing the system, it’s one of the things he’s got in common with Qrow.) Who’s more analytical about their approach and what they’re trying to do (which means their failure mode is overthinking and decision paralysis) and who reacts with their gut instinct (which means their failure mode is getting in over their head)?

… I could talk about this one at length. There’s a whole framework I use to categorise characters in this way (I came across it in, of all things, the flavourtext of a supplement to an RPG no one’s ever heard of and it just stuck with me, and I’ve made it my own in the years since) and I could go into all sorts of detail about how it works/ what it means. But I think this is enough to be getting on with, on that topic. If you want to know more, send me another ask? But no one else talks about this thing in writing advice, it might be completely orthogonal to the writing process of anyone but me.

So! Related to the topic of characters’ skillsets, a really great tip I can’t remember where I picked up: how do you write someone who’s smarter/wittier/better at tactics than you? Spend minutes or hours turning something over in your head that the character is going to come up with in seconds. The great advantage of writing: it’s so much easier to be eloquent when you’ve got time to think. [If you had asked me this question in person you would have got ‘i don’t know?’ and then half an hour later I would have thought of half of this stuff and kicked myself. A week and change later, you’re getting the other half too :p ]

And lastly: you said you were worried about your writing getting “overly stereotypical”. And my immediate response to that was stereotypes bad, yes, but archetypes great. The difference being: stereotypes are lazy and offensive writing that let ‘membership of a social category’ stand in for ‘actual characterisation’ and if you’re asking for advice on characterisation you’re obviously too thoughtful to commit them; archetypes are pre-made sketched-out personalities that you can take as your own and flesh out into your own thing. Tropes are tools. No one ever said ‘They were roommates? Ugh, how unoriginal’. By the same token, ‘lone wolf who pretends he’s fine and doesn’t dare trust anyone no matter how much he secretly wants to’ is a fantastic trope that exists for good reason, the CRWBY used it for good reason, and when we found out Qrow’s semblance I went yes please I will have some of all that angst and then laughed at myself because when it comes to fictional characters I have A Type. I’m pretty sure I’ve never written the exact scenario ‘pushes themself way too hard and passes out, wakes up in unexpected safety and immediately condemns themself for not sticking it out longer’ before the opening of Soldier, Spy, but I know I’ve come up with plenty of things that were like it, and if they’d made it to a state of publication you’d be able to see that.

It’s like artists using references. Just because they looked up how to draw that hand and that pose doesn’t mean the final product’s not their own. There’s no reason not to start with your ideas of the character (no matter how ‘stereotypical’ they feel) or a collection of traits you’ve grabbed from other characters that seem like they’d fit – or, for OCs, an MBTI type or a roleplaying class/background combo or one of these or some other personality type you feel like you can find your way around the basics of – and just take it from there. When you start writing/outlining/daydreaming-about-ideas you’ll run into scenarios/setups you can’t copy across from but you can see what responses might come up, and that’s how the template becomes your own unique iteration of it.

… Because really all writing advice does come down to: just write. In your head or on the page, try things out, see what works, see how it goes. I’ve been doing this a long time; most of it never made it to words on a page, let alone to the internet at large. Read across genres, read things people write about themselves and how they live and think and feel, and just – go for it.

I hope this helps! Once again, I was really glad to be asked; feel free to ask me to elaborate on any of this, or about anything else you want advice about. I wish you all the best in your future writing!

#writing #my thoughts #posting into a void

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flamingo-queen-writes · 4 years

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not a question from the fanfic writer ask list, but can you tell us a bit about your initial process of starting a brand new fic? where does the idea come from? do you have to develop it a bit in your head or do you flesh it out while writing? do you write it in order or in jumbled up scenes? how different is the final piece from the first draft? etc etc...i am feeling like writing fanfic again for the first time in 6 years and have immense blank page, how to start panic

I welcome questions of every kind, whether on a list or off it! And this is a fantastic question!

It's great that you're thinking about getting into writing fanfic again, and I look forward to it, but in a completely non-pressure kind of way. ^_^

It'll probably make the most sense if I use examples of various things instead of gesturing vaguely toward theoretical situations. And that means an essay instead of organized answers to each part of the question. So here goes. (Be prepared, this is a novel.)

My totally brand new fic ideas almost always start with "what if" from some point in canon. Hazy is not where my head started on the trail. Hazy was only ever supposed to be snippets of found footage, HYDRA and KGB records, flashbacks/nightmares, and similar. Little pieces and clues sprinkled in a recovery story set right after Bucky drags Steve out of the Potomac--but stays put instead of leaving. (What if Bucky stays instead of taking off?)

It got complicated enough to become a prequel series, but the original seed was just a "what if." I don't actually consider Hazy to be a brand new fic idea, because it was always background material for the actual new fic idea.

That said, let's take Partridge for our first example as though it were a new fic idea. By that point, there was a General, a Lieutenant, a little girl, and so on. I did have several points on a timeline, and I did have multiple generations of Karpovs and the notion that Bucky was some kind of heirloom being passed down. (Inspiration for that point comes from Hellsing, actually, and the way Alucard is passed down to Integra. If gory manga involving Nazi vampires and the enslaved vampire who hunts them appeals to you, you might enjoy Hellsing.)

Regardless, Partridge itself wasn't a thing until the office put up the Christmas decorations. There was (and presumably still is) a railing that's right in front of the all the elevators in that building all the way to the top floor, and there was so much ridiculous froo-froo fake garland strung everywhere that you couldn't help but stare at it while waiting for an elevator. The glitter got on you even if you didn't brush up against it.

Enter Soldat, and part two of how an idea becomes a fic.

I'm a method writer in some ways. I might compose the plotline at a distance and verify that the actions are things the characters would likely do, but when writing the story, I put myself in my characters' shoes and try to see the world the way they might see it. (This is why Lukin, for instance, will get very few POV chapters in the entire Hazy series--dude is frightening and I don't wanna get in his head any more than I have to.)

So if I'm enjoying a stroll at lunch, I might play around with a pair of characters having a conversation, try to see how they think and feel about things, etc. If I'm driving, I might try to see if a character has anything to remark on. And if I'm waiting for an elevator for the eighth time in one day and lamenting the glitter getting on my pants just from standing there, maybe a character has something to say... or something to stare at... or something to try to touch before the elevator comes and it's too late.

At that point, the fic is born. If it's a conversation and that thing fits into an interaction that's been plotted, I can dig into the dialogue and get the characters to spill their introspective guts out onto a page for me. If it's an opinion about metal rooster wind-vanes, that detail is getting added to a fic somewhere (I happen to think they are charming--Soldat does not agree). And if it's an obsession with some element of a setting, that setting can become the main thrust of a fic.

Partridge, when boiled down, is the story of a man being tortured who latches onto the one beautiful element in his world as a form of escape, and who, in doing so, guarantees that the beautiful element is destroyed as a lesson in why he is not worthy of escape, has no right to beauty, and destroys everything he touches--or nearly touches.

And you can all thank the building management for that story because of those stupid, stupid glitter-bomb decorations. (Okay, the birds were adorable, and I may or may not have taken several pictures of them trying to capture how lovely they were. The point remains that glitter lasts forever and if I wanted my pants to sparkle, I'd bedazzle them.)

There are actually about four other fics set in that chunk of holiday season that all showed up as a result of decorations, music playing, the weather, and all that. I'm not even counting Mouse Song--there's one with lemon drops and an exploded head, two with Soldat on a roof/porch in the snow, and one with Soldat being very upset on behalf of poor murdered pine trees everywhere.

So for this one, the "where does the idea come from" answer is "my surroundings." Things I see and hear, the places I go, the things I do, all of that. I keep an eye out for things the characters I'm working on would possibly encounter, and I build from there. Sometimes it's a little detail in a bigger fic, and sometimes it becomes a huge part of the story.

Next there's the question of whether I let it sit and age in my head or if I dump it on a page and start poking it right away. The answer: both, often at the same time. From holiday decorations going up to Partridge posting took 5 weeks, and a good chunk of that time was actually spent writing Mouse Song, which I had intended to post first.

(I worried that starting off with an OC, and a child at that, would ensure that no one bothered to read a damn thing, and I knew I wanted that fic to start with Maria and not Soldat being tortured, so I hurriedly put Partridge together in about a week so it could go up first.)

Partridge, therefore, did percolate a bit before coming out onto the page. But once I started writing it, it just sort of dumped itself on the page and spread itself out. It was originally about 1200 words. The finished thing is about 16k. It just did that, because it had already had a few weeks of garland stewing in my head, maybe, and Soldat... really loved and really loathed those garland birds. The mewp on the rifle was added partway in, and was meant to be about 200 words in the middle of a chapter, just something to get us out of the base and show the Soldier some actual birds.

(And the story was almost called "Gone away is the bluebird" because I was on a "they have to be Christmas carol titles" kick, and since there wasn't a tree anywhere, Winter Wonderland was the only other song I could think of that had a lot of birds and wasn't totally obscure. I couldn't find a bird for the rifle scene that was pretty enough to the squishy mewp that was also likely to show up in late December in Moscow and that was blue, and I saw the Eurasian Bullfinch and fell in love with him. So obviously, the title had to change because the bird wasn't blue anymore. Other working title was "A bird in the hand" but that seemed cruel because he never does touch a single bird.)

Mouse Song comes from two scenes with a little girl who was merely some handler's daughter when the scenes first showed up. The first of the scenes didn't actually make it into Mouse Song, so maybe it'll be somewhere else. The other scene was Soldat sneering at the idea that flavors mingled, dumping in some creamer, and then gently waking up the little girl who was slumped against a window sleeping after being rescued so that she could have her dinner.

The next scene to appear for the story was Blond Bro on the roof getting his ribs broken. After that, I started writing Soldat's first POV chapter. Then I did Maria's chapters in full, picked up Soldat's next chapter, wrote the Coda, and then filled things in so that all the things alluded to in the Coda make sense, and all the things happening in Maria's POV can be seen from Soldat's POV. The hardest part of that was the first bit at the dacha where he's breaking the bros, because I'd only lightly choreographed the fight in Maria's POV because she was stuck in a closet and had to guess at what was happening. But then I had to adhere to that rough sketch because I'd already posted her chapters before deciding that I did want to include that from Soldat's POV.

Red Fish was supposed to be... sigh. It was going to be one of those 5 + 1 stories, kind of. Like, 5 scenes that were just vignette-style snapshots of Soldat and Vasily over the years, starting with an introduction that's maybe 2 chapters away in the current fic, followed by something a few years later that I've moved up to the end of this current fic, etc. And the + 1 vignette was supposed to be Vasily actually commanding Soldat for the first time, during a very tense situation where Vasily has to step up in order to derail a rampage.

It was going to be a one-shot. 🙃🙃🙃

Yeah, yeah. Get all that laughter out now. ^_^

Red Fish is also an example of how I actually write the fics. I have a doc that's just the finished chapters, a doc that's just the notes, a doc that's just the outlines (yes, plural), a doc that's research, and a doc that's "all the crap being written right now." That last doc is about 150 pages.

Why are there multiple outlines? When I realized it wasn't going to be a one-shot, I thought it could be a fic in about 15 chapters, maybe 20. There's an outline of how that would have gone. Then I thought it could be five sections, and each section could have however many chapters it needed and a codetta at the end, with the whole fic capped by a meaty Coda.

Then I realized that part of the purpose of the fic is to really set things up going forward and getting to know not just what happens but why and how. I couldn't just set up day one, skip to day five, and allude to what had happened in between. It's not enough to know that Vera's a jerk. We have to see her being a jerk so we can see Polina's reaction, Vladimir's reaction, the General's reaction, Soldat's reaction. It's not enough to know that Soldat's starting to remember flashes of Winifred, we have to see some of that. It's not enough to see that there are lots of people around, we need to at least kind of know who they all are.

So there are loads of outlines of how that intermediate span of days plays out. When does Vera get there, how detailed are the arguments between Vera and the General, when do others get there and how much do we need to know about them? Exactly when is Ana born, and how does that play out? (Also, how many cars are there? That’s so important to the shenanigans and I have page after page of possible rundowns about who is doing what with which car that all read like horrible story problems in a math textbook.)

See, there are a handful of key plot points that happen in a specific order. But there are also a ton of scenes and incidents that happen in an order that's less fixed in stone. After pie, Soldat goes on his little patrol. That's a given. That was set in stone. Pie was supposed to be about 5 paragraphs of recollection, though, and not actually on the page. But Polina's perceptive, Soldat is really off-balance, Vladimir needed to show himself as a handler, and the General needed to reveal a bit more of his insight. So pie expanded considerably to allow me to show and not merely tell.

So I have a lot of scenes from further into the fic already written. Some of them were written before the pastry even came together for that pie. I skip around and flesh out what is currently demanding my attention. That's actually why updates on Red Fish are currently so slow. I had a glorious buffer of chapters already written out, and then pie expanded so much that it changed a few chapters, and now I have a little gap between what's written and what's posted, and I have to fill in that gap before I can move on.

All of this goes to answer another of the parts of this question, too: how much does the final piece change compared to the first draft? So much. The main thrust of a story stays the same. The overall plot arc, the key points along the path, the atmosphere of the fic. But the getting from A to B can often loop around D real quick before getting on with it.

I'll switch over now to Fossilized yapping. This one is a series of one-shots, but the same general thing is going on here.

I have a beginning point (actually a prequel fic set in the "future" in which Steve and Bucky spend the day at that hot spring), and I have a concluding point (not really a spoiler: they get home). In between that, I have a grid of bingo squares to hit, and a rough order of when these things happen. At some point, they adopt a nest of dinosaurs. At some point, they go sailing and it sucks. At some point, they go sailing and it doesn't suck. At some point, they deal with some Arm-related trauma. At some point, there is hair-braiding and a marriage kind of thing. At some point, they make tacos.

All these little points show up along a timeline, and because of the nature of the bingo, each one has to be its own fill, so I can't combine them. But the order they happen in varies. Does the Arm stuff happen before they make tacos or after? Before they raise a family of dinosaurs or after? I've got a lot of these points fully written in fics that I can't post until I get there in the timeline, because I really do want to post this series chronologically. They have to build the boat before they can sail it.

So again, I'm writing out of order--massively so. And that means that what I've written often will need to be rewritten (sometimes just tweaking a few details, sometimes scrapping the whole concept) based on what I write later that takes place earlier. It's one of the risks of writing what your brain wants when it wants to. That's also one of the reasons I am not posting the recovery series until I have a significant chunk of Hazy out there, even though I have a ton of it written.

One of the pitfalls of writing totally out of order for Hazy, actually, is spoilers. You already know more or less what happens in Brick because it's been alluded to in fics already posted. You already know that Maria is a darling and very familiar with Soldat, so you can guess that Vladimir is wrong about how horrible it will be to introduce Soldat to Vasily--Soldat is great with kids, eventually. If I post too much of the Mouse Song sequel before getting to the Red Fish sequel, certain things will be utterly spoiled, and I have to decide how much that matters to me.

For Hazy, I'm posting out of order like this in part because I want it out there in the world and in part because the chaotic jumble of the timeline vs series order is a nice mirror for how fragmented and jumbled up Soldat's perception of his own timeline is. Everyone is an unreliable narrator, so when details are slightly off in different POVs from different stories, it's like when Soldat just has to take for truth whatever he's being told at any given point, even if he kind of recalls that it might have been different.

And to try to wrap this up because I swear I do value your time: Here's a possibly more reassuring note. Blue-eyed matador is a completely different process of creation altogether that still has some ties to the other processes. (There is no one true way to create stories, write stories, edit stories or post stories, even where just one person is concerned.)

Listen to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmvu8yTCLQA

Now listen to it again, because it was dark and catchy.

Now listen to it a third time because, damn, so dark and catchy.

Keep listening to it on loop, and let the mood sink into your head. There's this guy, and they call him the matador. The killer, literally, in Spanish. And he grins at people and slices them up. Sometimes in broad daylight while the people around him cry out in outrage. He gleefully lifts up a bloody knife to show the world that he's killed that one guy.

"What if" comes back into play. What if the Soldier was like that? What if the Asset was like that? We see some stunning knife shenanigans in Winter Soldier, and dude has a ton of knives on him, not just a ton of guns. We see some rage eyes over that mask. We see some deeply emotional eyes in the night on the roof when he looks like he's about to cry.

So, what if the Asset was this matador dude, this killer who goes after people with a blade and a smile? At what point along the MCU timeline do we need to hop off the ride and take off in a new direction to make that happen? When would be convenient?

2012. Post-Chitauri. Steve's still freshly thawed and getting over his losses. Clint's freshly un-brainwashed and dealing with his own trauma. Natasha is learning to exist as part of a team again. Tony's nearly died and has made a heroic self-sacrifice he probably didn't know he had in him. Bruce has seen again that he can be too destructive for crowds, but that he is still valuable despite that. Thor has had another brief "am I truly worthy?" struggle with his self-doubt.

The starting point of so many Avengers found family fics from back in the day. Now throw Asset!Bucky in there. Now play around with that silly Endgame time heist crap, but only the bits that are useful. Now see how everyone reacts once they are put on the page together. Does Coulson survive? Sure. Is Fury apologetic about doing what he had to do in order to bring the team together, even if that meant lying about Coulson's death? Of course not. Where's Sam? In D.C. Where's the Asset? In D.C. What is our matadorized Asset getting up to? Slaughtering the ones who deserve it, of course.

Go play, characters. Have fun.

That is literally the whole setup and starting point for that series. Hear a kick-ass song, listen to it too many times, put some characters on the board, and set them loose.

There is a very detailed scene-by-scene outline that I slammed out onto the page in one afternoon while listening to that song on repeat. It wasn’t me planning shit. It was me following the characters around the board as they wandered around.

Since then, I've added three more Interludes, I've added Sam as a character in the first fic instead of waiting to bring him in for the sequel, I've rearranged certain killings to adjust the discovery of HYDRA in the timeline, I've embraced the time heist details and thus changed a few things up for character motivations, and I've generally had fun with it.

There's still a detailed outline. It's still scene-by-scene. I'm still only following it when it suits me. There are a few key plot points that must happen in a specific order, and specific things must be introduced in specific orders. And because I know those, I can write around them pretty well. My outline has a list of what information must be conveyed to the readers in each scene, what information must be conveyed (or withheld) from the characters in each scene, and so on.

I wrote the Coda for the first Matador fic before I wrote the Prologue. I know where it's going. I always know where things are going. I just keep my options open for how I get there, beyond a few key points along the way. Mostly those points have to do with information--who knows what, and when do they know it. That applies to readers and characters, both.

The very, very short tl;dr version of all that is this:

Find inspiration wherever it ambushes you. Canon is a good place to ask questions. Music, other stories, things you see or hear, and all manner of real-life events are great concepts to toss at a character and see how they stick--and nothing is too mundane to work for this point.

Develop things as much as you want, either in your head or on the page. Both is always an option. When in doubt, throw it at a sounding board (I'm happy to serve as one) and see what bounces back at you.

Write in the order that pleases you. If you know the end, write toward that goal. If you don't know the end, cool--write until you get to one. I do a cross between obsessively plotting and recklessly pantsing. There's no right answer there, but more importantly, there's no wrong answer.

Your final piece might be your first draft with a grammar check. It might a completely different story entirely. Neither one is a bad thing. In fact, if it changes enough, then one story idea can produce multiple stories, and that's always fun.

As for blank-page fear... That's kind of a whole different ramble, but I write in different mediums depending on my level of preparedness and my amount of blank-page fear.

I like the Q10 writing app because it's a full-screen black window with typewriter noises and super sparse features. There's nothing but you and the word-void and the black is somehow friendlier than the white. I also write a ton of stuff in Notepad and similar text-editors, or my phone's notes feature. Super light on the features, and sort of non-permanent in a way. Feels very loose and rough-drafty and there's lots less pressure. No spell-check, too, so I can't get dragged into that mess. And I'll recklessly write emails to myself in a hurry and risk a) sending them to the wrong person, b) losing them entirely or c) misplacing them in a huge pile of similar emails.

When it's time to really go to town, I move it over to google docs because it's easier to edit there. I also use Scrivener, though that's more for the recovery stuff. Scrivener and google docs have the same "oh no, it's an official-looking blank page and my ideas are afraid to emerge from my skull" vibe, so they are for later stages.

I'm hoping that's helpful, despite it being so very, very lengthy!

Thanks for asking @occulationary !!

Tagged in case you were interested: @glitter-cake20 @sunshineailin @eileenalone

#ask me ask me ask me #writing #meta

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resbang-bookclub · 5 years

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AMA Transcript: Unrequited

Next up, @infantbluee, @kallie-flower, @nori-wings and @thiefofblood (Souly on Discord) came to answer questions and spread the love for their Resbang, Unrequited! Here’s some of what went down:

Q: How did you guys come up with this idea? I remember you threw a ton of ideas around and settled on this one. Can you take us through the process? >:)

kallieflower: Oh god. We went through SO many different ideas. We wrote like what? 40k for our first idea before we scrapped that?

b l u e: Then like 30k for the next one that we also scrapped.

kallieflower: WE KEPT TRYING TO WRITE SHORT THINGS BUT IT DIDN’T WORK. Soma just does not work as shortfic.

b l u e: Even our final bang ended up being a 40k two-shot lmao.

Q: So what was it about this final idea that made u guys decide, YES, this is it???

kallieflower: The first idea was a Madoka Magica AU that exploded into a mess because magical girl worlds take a loooooottttt of work. The second fic also exploded into something big.

b l u e: We were going to stick with it though. We were. We had it all ready for check-in and everything. But then like two days before, kallie went, "okay so I love our fic idea and all but what about this." Me, on three hours of sleep: "I effing hate you." Then we stumbled through our first 3k and sent it to the mods like the gremlins we are.

kallieflower: We didn’t expect it to get so big either but c’est la vie. Chloe almost killed me like 48293783 times during the process but I think we managed alright.

b l u e: You're lucky I love you so much.

Q: Did you guys start writing straight from the beginning of the fic or did you write a specific scene first?

kallieflower: Actually we didn’t start from the beginning haha! Or well, our idea didn’t start from a plot. We just wanted to write Maka cursed. We wanted to write her with no inhibitions in love, like she might’ve been had she not been so hurt by her parents’ separation. And since there are witches in the SE universe, we had fun with that instead of making it an AU.

Q: Do you write linearly at all or did you jump around a lot?

b l u e: Surprisingly yes. Aside from my dream sequences.

kallieflower: Your dream sequences were our pit stops. We just had to actually do the writing to get there.

b l u e: Hahaha our writing process was.... Unique.

kallieflower: That’s one way to put it lmao.

nori-wings: It was a mess, but we love it.

b l u e: WE are a mess so it's just us in fic form.

kallieflower: God yeah. For one thing, this fic was like 90% chloe with me just making her do crazy things I wanted to happen.

nori-wings: And 5% of what the artists wanted to happen.

b l u e: YEAH hahaha that was kallie too tbh. She was like, "me as a witch would not understand anything about my magic at all and would curse people for kicks, so let's do that."

kallieflower: We would have a general plot of how we wanted to go and what points we wanted to hit. Chloe would start to write it, but then I would be like “WAIT WHAT ABOUT THIS.” And then she would pretend she thought I was a total nuisance but we all know she’s too soft and sweet to ever say no to anything. Also our artists were such a LOVELY help too.

b l u e: We wanted as much of their input as possible and we wanted to make this as much of a collab as we could. The train scene at the beginning of the third chapter was all nori because she was mad at us for only torturing Soul and wanted Maka to cry too.

Q: Nori/Souly did you have a favorite piece of art to make?

the monkey chain (soul): The skating scene was my fave. I also accidentally changed the part in the fic with the skating since I didn't ask what kind of skates they were supposed to be kfljgdf.

b l u e: LMAO it's our fault though!!!! We were Too Slow.

nori-wings: Black*Star dragging Soul and Maka is my favorite, it was super fun to draw.

b l u e: When you sent the first wip of that, I think I cried for days. It was better than my dreams. You were both so fast GOD, it takes me seventeen years just to sketch a pic.

kallieflower: For real tho. We don’t deserve artists.

nori-wings: They are exaggerating, it was a quick sketch that I made on a post it lol. It took me a week to draw it in digital.

the monkey chain (soul): I had free time since we moved and were without internet for a night so I had a ton of time to finish my pic.

Q: Did you have trouble meeting the deadline?

kallieflower: Trouble is putting it lightly lmao. We died. Many times.

b l u e: I don't trust fast writers. Clearly they are superhuman. It wouldn't have been hard if we didn't spend so much time drowning in memes and shitposts that we neglected to write.

kallieflower: I blame the internet.

Q: Were there any scenes that you guys really struggled with writing?

b l u e: The beginning, definitely. Everything else flowed out pretty quickly, but the beginning made us want to cry into our pillows and smash our keyboards.

kallieflower: I think there was a period of time where Chloe was like, “I will physically pay you money to write this scene so I don’t have to.” But yeah, the beginning scenes were definitely hardest to write. I think we rewrote them like a million times.

Q: Nori and Souly, was there a part of your art that was trickier to do?

nori-wings: I think painting Soul and Maka's kiss, because I wanted to use as few colors as possible and I played a lot with shading, or at least I tried haha.

the monkey chain (soul): Uhhhh not really for me? My pieces were relatively simple and probably the most issue I had was drawing Maka's skates and figuring out what Soul would be wearing.

b l u e: I cried when we got paired with souly.

kallieflower: Chloe literally fangirled to hell over getting souly as our second artist. And we were very lucky to get nori as our artist too because we already became really close friends through the zine and talked all the time. Our resbang just gave us an excuse to move all our blabber to a personal server lmao.

nori-wings: Yeah, they asked me to be something like a beta but I ended up being their artist.

kallieflower: We joked about it beforehand too and were SO happy it happened. We were so blessed with support and love this year. We never would’ve finished without the help of our artists and betas.

nori-wings: They are making it sound nice, but we wouldn't let them drop out.

kallieflower: LMFAOOOOOO. Nori likes to be sassy but she’s one of the softest of us all

b l u e: We legitimately would've dropped out if not for our artists.

kallieflower: “Do it for our artists” was our mantra through the whole process when we wanted to quit. Peer pressure makes diamonds, maybe.

b l u e: I mean, it didn't feel like that when we were bullshitting our way through our next 5k before each deadline, but it be like that sometimes.

Q: What was your favourite scene to write?

b l u e: My favorite to write was definitely the nightmare demon scene.

kallieflower: Because she’s a sadist and likes angst. Chloe likes to make people feel pain so her favorite scenes were definitely the angsty ones.

b l u e: FDSJFKDSF

Q: For errbody: what do you feel like you improved/grew in this resbang, writing and arting-wise??

kallieflower: For me, I definitely grew in writing skills even though I didn’t end up writing much of this bang (chloe, bless your soul for carrying me this year lmao) because chloe is SO GOOD at writing that it made me want to be better, learn better, do better.

b l u e: Kallie made me work harder than I ever have my entire life and it paid off SO MUCH. I very much only ever write ventfics.

the monkey chain (soul): I feel like I Peaked with Maka's outfit in the skating picture, like I don't pride myself in outfit design much these days but Maka's outfit came out so good. I didn't expect it.

Q: Were there any parts of Unrequited that really pushed you out of your comfort zone?

b l u e: Writing with someone else was such an experience.

kallieflower: We definitely had to compromise a lot in terms of writing. Like I wanted Soul to walk in on Kid touching Maka’s scar and Chloe immediately said “fine, but only if we make Kid a gardener” and if that isn’t a super fair trade off, idk what is. Chloe and I work so well together so that was easy. And we like a lot of the same things.

b l u e: There was a little adjustment [with adapting to different writing styles] but not much, because despite what kallie says, she's actually so freaking smart and talented it actually makes my eyes water.

Q: If you had the time to do something differently, what would you do and why?

b l u e: Everything. Jk no but really. There's just a lot I wish we could've elaborated on. And more suffering to be had of course. I just wish we had more time to elaborate on Spirit and Maka's mom.

kallieflower: Oh god yeah. Maka did not get enough of a backstory in the manga or anime and that makes me sad always.

Q: What made you both decide on the outcome of the curse? Did the witch know how it was going to affect Kid?

b l u e: We actually knew the outcome from the very beginning when we decided what kind of curse it was.

Q: Okay SO one last question for the crew. What is next!!!! >:)

nori-wings: Next collab is me writing and Chloe as my artist. (She just doesn't know it.)

b l u e: FDHDJFKSDDSF

kallieflower: OMG PLS HAHAHA. I’d be all over that collab. Chloe is working on a soma longfic she won’t let me beta because she’s Secretive. And I am trying to work up the energy to use my keyboard again after the hell that was finishing Resbang.

Thanks to the crew for stopping by! Stay tuned for more transcripts!

#resbang book club #rbbc #rbbc 2018 #resbang 2018 #unrequited

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sa-yo-u-na-ra · 5 years

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My thoughts on the ending of Banana Fish and why I don’t think it’s that bad

This is going to be really, really long. (it takes 10-15 minutes to read at least no joke)

I’ve seen a lot of fans writing essays on why they like or do not like the way Banana Fish ended, and I really feel like I have to get it off my chest myself, so get ready for a long, sappy, over-poeticized post written by a sappy, over-poeticized teenage girl (whose English knowledge could use some improvement so forgive her please). Also, I had enough of some people on twitter running around saying that everyone who didn’t hate the ending is homophobic.

Some important things:

I do not intend to convince anyone. Everybody has their own opinions.

I don’t really want to get into long, pointless comment fights either. We have different opinions, and even if you think any single thing I’ve wrote in this essay doesn’t make sense then alright. Your opinion is totally fine and valid. I just wrote this essay so you can understand why some people don’t hate the ending as much as most of you do. (I hardly doubt there’s anyone out there who doesn’t hate the ending at all though)

IS THE ENDING OF BANANA FISH PROBLEMATIC?

Yes. I think this question was in @http-eiji’s essay on the ending (you guys go read it, it really makes you think, plus the idea of writing a huge essay on the ending is kinda copied from her): ”Even if you don’t think anything I’ve said in this section makes the ending problematic, can you see why there are people who do?” And my answer is yes, I do. I remember when I was first informed how the story ends I’ve read a lot of posts ranting about why Banana Fish is Bury Your Gays and how it seems to tell CSA victims that they can’t be happy. Now, I’m not an LGBT member, neither am I a CSA victim, so I don’t think it’s my place to tell the fans who are if the ending should frustrate them or not, because there are a lot of them who are, obviously, frustrated by it. And I can see why. Banana Fish’s ending can be seen as Bury Your Gays and one can see that the vibe it gives off is that no matter how hard you try to come past your traumas, death is the only choice in the end. At first my thoughts were pretty much like this. I was really, really angry. But I slowly calmed down as I was giving it more thought, and I realized that I couldn’t hate the ending. Or, at least, not entirely.

I don’t know too much Bury Your Gays stories, but I know that it’s a pattern that was most likely used in early gay stories: the homosexual character(s) often died at the end of them. And this must be frustrating for the LGBT people. But still, just because there are a lot of stories like this, it doesn’t mean that Banana Fish had to have a happy ending, other way it’s a homophobic piece of crap. Banana Fish had the ending the mangaka planned for it. She didn’t have to write a happy ending to satisfy anyone. It’s her story. She wrote it as she wanted, just like any other writers. I think it definitely wasn’t written as a “just because gays die in other stories so I’ll just kill him as well”, because it’s in character and it fits the story as well and it’s well-written, too. And her message for sure wasn’t that gay people will die at the end no matter what.

I personally don’t think it’s Bury Your Gays or a message to CSA victims that they should die, although it’s definitely debatable. (The first one, I mean. The second one just kinda…doesn’t make sense.) But to me, the ending seems so heartfelt and clever…I just can’t bring myself to think it’s BRG or a bad message. I do believe that it was logical. I think it’s so much more, and I hope that some of the people frustrated with it can find peace with it eventually at least as much as I did. (I sound like some monk talking about finding peace. I told you it’s going to be sappy!)

WHY DOESN’T THE ENDING SEEM LOGICAL AT FIRST?

“There had been too much emotion, too much damage, too much of everything.”

-Ernest Hemingway: The Garden of Eden

I always thought it’s interesting how Lao was the technical killer of Ash, but still he doesn’t get the hate he would logically deserve. Because it wasn’t any kind of murder. It’s said in the manga that he missed Ash’s vital organs. So, in conclusion, it’s Ash who chooses death.

Normally, I wouldn’t blame him. With all the things he had to deal with since his childhood, I would probably choose death, too. Even if it wasn’t the right choice.

But Ash is different. He’s a fighter. He might not fear death, but he never wishes for it either, as it is told by him. To me, it always sounded like: I’m not seeking death, but if I have to die, then so be it. Remember how he acted when he was stabbed by Arthur? He was thinking about how peaceful and gentle it all is.

But. Still. He has Eiji. Fucking Eiji, and it’s clear from that god damned love letter that he doesn’t blame Ash for anything, and loves him more than anything, and that he’s ready to live his life with Ash by his side. He’s not just ready, he wants it, for God’s sake! Ash is Eiji’s soulmate. This must had been clear for him, too.

WHAT KILLED ASH?

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned

The things I’ve wrote in the upper paragraphs are the things that are usually said as reasons why the ending isn’t in character. But one thing, as I noticed, is always overlooked: the guilt. It’s clear to me that Akimi Yoshida had chosen to kill Ash because of the guilt he was bearing. She literally said that he died because he was a murderer burdened by his sense of guilt. (Although she said a lot of other contrary things in other topics, so I’m not sure if I should quote her. I still do it though. Just don’t take this as a fact.) And I can feel that.

We all love Ash so, so much we hardly ever think of him as a bad person. But try to look at things from his point of view. I don’t think he chose death because of his traumas. I mean, maybe that was a part of it, too. But the very reason he chose death was his guilt. He killed hundreds of people. People he liked, people he didn’t even know. Good and bad people. He killed them all for his own sake, and while he says he doesn’t feel anything because of it, it’s pretty clear how much he hates himself. He bears so much guilt that no one should. Especially not a 17-year-old child. But unfortunately, he does. Guilt might be the worst thing in the world. It crushes your soul and mind. It’s the thing that makes you hate yourself the most. It makes you do and think things that are not logical, no matter how other people try to convince you. It makes you think you don’t deserve anything, and when you’re finally starting to believe in yourself, the smallest, simplest thing can throw you back into your self-shaming and blaming and hating. And it just can’t disappear. And just try to imagine bearing the guilt of killing hundreds of people. How could Ash think that he deserves Eiji? Even with the letter. It made him feel loved, yes (which is, at least to me, is more important than anything anyway). But it didn’t quite made him believe in himself enough. That’s a whole another process.

When he was stabbed by Arthur, he already loved Eiji more than anything. Still, when he was in surgery, the only thing he could think of was how he hurt Shorter and how he would hurt Eiji too, eventually. How he doesn’t deserve him.

The issue here wasn’t that he couldn’t have a happy ending. He could have, possibly without Lao.

The issue here was that he never even believed he deserved one to begin with, and when he finally started to think he deserves it, Lao came, and his fragile belief in the possibility of happiness crumbled down again. That might just be my theory, but to me it’s very real.

“I...My body...it reacts like a machine and kills people like nothing. Without feeling, without thinking. I’ve never been so scared of myself or so ashamed.”

WHAT WAS ASH THINKING IN HIS FINAL MOMENTS?

“It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don't think I can handle it alone.”

-Ernest Hemingway: To Have and Have Not

I think when he was reading the letter, he forgot about his guilt. He suddenly got a peek of happiness, a better life with Eiji. This is why he started running. But then Lao happened, and he was reminded that he doesn’t deserve that. That he hurt and killed people, and that’s all he’s capable of. That no matter how hard he tries, fate won’t ever let him have a happy ending, because he doesn’t deserve that. But the letter…the letter was proof that he’s a human, after all. That he’s loved. And oh God, how much is he loved. This fact alone was already more than he thought he deserved. But for once, he let himself chose a selfish choice. He might not deserve happy ending with Eiji. But he doesn’t want to keep on living without him either. So he decided. He decided to change his leopard-like fate, and rather than keep on living in the cold world of loneliness which he thought was waiting for him thereafter, he chose to at least die with the most precious thing for him, the letter in his hands, which made him feel like he’s not alone at all. A choice he believed will make him the happiest. So he went to the most peaceful place he knew. He read the letter over and over, and died with the happiest feeling in the world, with the overwhelming knowledge that he’s not alone, and that he is loved, after all. Hiroko Utsumi said it herself: the ending may seem as a sad one at first, but the last expression of Ash makes it clear that he was happy in the end.

This might be just something that we tell ourselves to make it less painful, but hey. We have to hold on to something.

“Must be a nice dream.”

IS THE ENDING OF BANANA FISH THE BEST ENDING POSSIBLE?

“I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.”

-every fangirl ever before going on ao3 to read fix-it fics (just kidding. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned)

Without a doubt, hell fucking no. And this is the rage part. Ash’s one of the smartest people in the world. And the police are kinda on his side. He has a lot of connections as well. So if he wanted to disappear from New York, he could. And that is the very reason the title is not: ”About why I love the ending”. Because although I do think the ending was reasonable and in character and that it wasn’t Bury Your Gays and shit, it could have been a happy ending. Because there’s no doubt: Ash’s way of thinking was self-destructive, he absolutely deserved Eiji. His way of thinking was harmful and stupid. I just wish he had the time to realize this. And I wish for many other things that will never happen with the two of them, and this why I despise the ending even if I do think it’s a good one. Because while the ending is beautiful, it’s really sad, and who loves that? Nobody. Alright, maybe I do. But I still hate it. When I think about all the what-ifs…I can’t seem to bring myself to say I simply love the ending and that it’s good as it is. I don’t think the ending ruined the story, it just made it…sadder? If that’s even possible. I can’t hate the Banana Fish ending…but I can’t love it either.

WHAT IS THE MESSAGE OF BANANA FISH?

“Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”

-Ernest Hemingway: For Whom The Bell Tolls

To me, this quote is literally it. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I can’t hate this whole thing. And it’s because it might be stupid and sad all it is, it gives me a message, after all. I’m not sure if Akimi Yoshida intended to give this message, but here we are. I have it. I think I can’t hate the ending because it hits hard. It makes me appreciate the love and happiness of Ash and Eiji. It gives me the vibe that Ash’s fragile belief in the possibility of his happiness, to use my words from earlier, might had been easy to destroy because of his guilt. But not his love for Eiji, which shines brightly even after long years of his death in Garden of Light. Everything can be destroyed somehow, but the most beautiful, innocent kind of love. That kind of love that gives you everything and asks for nothing. No matter how fucked up your life may have been, no matter how fucked up you might be, you can still feel love. This is the meaning of Banana Fish to me. Just like Eiji, I am, of course sad and of course missing him, but most importantly: I am grateful that I got to spend at least a short amount of time with Ash. The message, to me at least, I think is that even when you have literally nothing left, you can find something. And that something is more important than anything, even if it lasts for just a little while. Even if you die tomorrow, the thing that matters is that something. (But that doesn’t mean you should die! You should live and enjoy it because you are not guilty at all and you deserve it. Ehm. I’m talking to you, Ash.)

that page of Garden of Light that never fails to make me cry at least a little bit, no matter how many times I’ve read it before

IN CONCLUSION

“I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”

J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye

This essay was never intended to in the and tell the readers: do I love the ending or do I hate it. I can’t bring myself to say either. I wouldn’t say I like the ending, because it’s such a neutral word for something that I have so complicated feelings about...But still, if I’d say I love it, that would just sound so stupid. How can you love something so depressing, even if it’s not necessarily bad? But I can’t hate it either. So I’m saying I have a love-hate relationship with it. It’s like with the mangaka herself: I love Akimi Yoshida, but she’s a bit cruel. But that’s not the point.

I think what gets me in the ending scene is how beautiful it is. It might be sad, but I can’t ignore how beautiful the words of Eiji are, and how peaceful and happy Ash looks. I really think that although this ending might make me angry and sad, it’s beautifully written, and although maybe it had other BRG works’ impact on it, I feel like it’s still really well-written and has a soul on its own.

So, is the ending of Banana Fish good? To use Blanca’s words, that’s something for you to decide yourself. Is it a boring, stupid trope played for shock factor and for the sake of tragedy? Is it a beautiful, unique, heartfelt scene with a positive meaning? Or something between the two? It all depends on you and your taste and perspective, as it does with every other form and act of art. Because, in the end, no fictional thing hurts real people, so from where should we know if our opinion is wrong or right? And I think this is why it’s pointless to fight over it. Maybe some of you still remember the thing that Literature teachers often tell us: there are always two people creating a story: the writer and the reader.

This essay was intended to make clear one single thing: to me, it’s clear from how Akimi Yoshida talks in her interviews that she doesn’t think the ending was that important. The same with Hiroko Utsumi.

In conclusion, I think we all give a little too much thought to the ending. Who gives a fuck about the ending? The love of Ash and Eiji was, is and always will be real, no matter what. No matter how fucked up the ending might be.

Because it’s the journey that matters rather than the end.

“They’re both enjoying their rest in a ski resort” -Akimi Yoshida herself, 1995 (See, guys? Don’t worry, they’re totally fine. The ending doesn’t even matter.)

#banana fish #anime #banana fish ending #banana fish discussion #banana fish 24

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botherkupo · 5 years

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For the writer asks: 9, 16, 46 for Zuko’s tiny dilemma? Also interested in 11, 13, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41, 43, 48, 49 lol that’s a lot though so whatever you feel like answering from those please? Thanks and love your writing!

9) In your xxx fic, what’s your favourite scene that you wrote?

This is quite tricky. I have a lot of scenes I really enjoyed writing. Hrmmm, maybe the scene where Zuko and Azula are on the beach. It was emotional but also really interesting for me to write.

16) How did you come up with the idea for xxx?

I don’t really remember the exact details now. I think it was partly inspired from the whole manga age regression trope (which always gives me a kick), but a lot of my stories have been started simply because I’d be at my friend’s house (usually writing crackfics on her couch). We’d start chatting abut AtLA, as you do, and I would be like “that would be a funny idea”, and she’d think so too, and then I’d start writing it. Pretty sure that’s what happened with ZTD.

46) I really loved your xxx fic. If you were ever to do a sequel, what do you think might happen in it?

In the sequel (which I kind of am writing in companion one-shots), I’d see the focus more on Zuko’s relationship with Azula and trying to help Aang and the others defeat Ozai. I wouldn’t have any new spirit curses happen.

11) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?Yep. I rewrote a chapter for one because readers pointed out stuff I hadn’t thought about previously, and I agreed it was problematic. I’ve also deleted really old stories that tended to get too much negative (my crappy old stories), as I got tired of saying I knew it sucked, lol. I also have added or changed stuff for The Undying Fire because readers have pointed something was a bit unrealistic or whatever. Basically, I’m open to changing stuff if I think the criticisms are valid.

13) Who is your least favourite character to write for? Why?I’ve only been writing The Undying Fire lately, so I’ll go with AtLA characters. I don’t really have a least favourite, but I guess Iroh is the toughest for me. I love him to pieces, but trying to channel a wise old man is hard work sometimes.

19) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?Not really. When I finish a story, I consider it finished. I sometimes expand on one-shots to make them a proper story, but that’s about it.

20) Are there any stories that you wished you’d ended differently?Not that I can think of.

22) Do you have a story that you look back on and cringe when you reread it?

So many. I think the biggest one is A Marriage of Convenience (the title says it all). I would have deleted it ages ago, but readers have requested I keep it on my profile, so I do. I really don’t like that story though lol.

24) How do you feel about writing smutty scenes?

This changes for me. I don’t actually care about smut (as in it does nothing for me), but sometimes it feels like it does fit for a story in terms of showing where the characters are at with each other (like in With Small Steps). I did once challenge myself to see if I could write a shameless smut scene (Working Off the Edge), but I don’t particularly like that story and may end up editing or just deleting it entirely. (It kind of niggles at me when I think about it).

25) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?

A lot. Like all the time. Any emotional scene makes me cry.

27) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow? A bit of both. I have a rough outline of where I want the story to go and major things I want to happen, and then I let the characters take me there, adjusting as needed to keep everything feeling organic. If I plan too much, I get bored and stop writing.

28) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fanfiction?

I don’t really have an answer to this, to be honest. I’m the kind of person who was never shy about sharing my stories. My old stuff sucked so hard, but that’s because I was still developing as a writer (and still am improving).

30) In contrast to 29 is there a story which gets lots of love which you kinda eye roll at?

Just Improvise. I know why people like it, and I know why I enjoyed writing it, but it’s really not that great, lol.

34) What’s the harshest criticism you’ve gotten?

Dunno if you’d consider it more of a flame, but I’ve had people tell me my story sucks and I should stop writing. Also get people who say a story has turned boring because of blah blah. To be honest, though, I mostly get weird criticisms. By that I mean they’re not a big deal and are super nitpicky things, and I can’t help feeling like the person was really hunting for something to fuss about.

37) What’s the funniest story you’ve written?

I write a lot of crack one-shots. I honestly can’t decide. If we’re talking multi-chapter, maybe Keep Your Enemies Closer.

40) Do people know you write fanfiction?

Yep. Some of my friends read my fics, other friends just know I write it, and my family think I used to write it but don’t anymore (because I’m supposed to be working on my original novels and editing, lol)

41) What’s you favourite minor character you’ve written?

Hrrrrrrm. I don’t know. I like my sassy spirits. Maybe the dragon moose, Bill, from The Labyrinth of Illusions.

43) Has anyone ever guessed the plot twist of one of your fics before you posted it?Sometimes. Most don’t tend to get it exactly (or else don’t tell me until later).

48) What’s your favourite trope to write?

Found family or body switch (or just body transformations in general).

49) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?

It was a Harry Potter fic. I didn’t know it was fanfiction at first and was so confused why the story was written in Hermione’s point of view lol. I think it was someone’s idea of sixth year.

#fic author asks #bother kupo responds #atla

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itsclowreedsfault · 6 years

Text

2017 Writing Round-Up

Total year-long word count: 87,840 (holy fuck)

Word count by fandom:

Mystic Messenger » 6,830 Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle » 2,022 Bungou Stray Dogs » 1,862 Yuri!!! On Ice » 169 Boku no Hero Academia » 76,957

Fics completed: >1k words

mosaic » yoi, viktuuri, angst Untitled Drabble » mysme, zen/mc, fluff Untitled Drabble #2 » mysme, v/mc, fluff something more » mysme, juminv, fluff all our colors » bnha, todobaku, soulmate au Kitchen Disaster » bnha, todobaku, fluff Heroes » bnha, todobaku, hurt/comfort Shooting Stars » bnha, todobaku, fluff Your Hand in Mine » bnha, todobaku, angst Untitled Drabble #3 » bnha, todobaku, angst Untitled Drabble #4 » bnha, todobaku, fluff Untitled Drabble #5 » bnha, todobaku affection » bnha, todobaku, fluff

1k-5k

Kingdom of Words » mysme, saeran/mc, soulmate au a secret among the flowers » mysme, juminv, fantasy au Never Enough » trc, kurofai, angst Shatter » bsd, soukoku, angst Operation: TodoBaku? » bnha, todobaku Unravel » bnha, todobaku, fantasy au Baby, It’s Cold Outside » bnha, todobaku, fluff It Started With a Game » bnha, todobaku Just Listen » bnha, todokiri, hurt/comfort and I know you’ll have my back » bnha, todobaku, fantasy au When It Snows » bnha, todobaku, fluff Of Movie Nights and Smashed Bowls » bnha, todobaku, roommates/childhood friends au

5k-10k what really matters » bnha, todobaku, soulmate au The One I Want » bnha, bakukami

10k+

Silver Lining » bnha, todobaku, modern fantasy au Wandering Wolf » bnha, todobaku, fantasy au

Works-in-progress:

everything we (never) planned » bnha, todobaku, urban fantasy/fake dating au

This year I wrote and posted:

31 fics, 13 of which are drabbles (under 1k),15 one-shots, 1 completed multichapter, 1 wip (ongoing), and 1 wip (abandoned)

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

I wrote so much more than I even thought I could write, no kidding. I’m still thinking about that word count and crying.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?

Considering that in January I hadn’t even watched the anime/read the manga, BNHA! I never thought I’d get this invested in the series and more especifically, in TodoBaku (but I’m glad I did!).

What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?

I will never stop being proud of Wandering Wolf. Writing it was a really comforting yet challenging experience, and it holds a special place in my heart.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

So many! Especially ever since I started writing TodoBaku, I started aiming for longer fics with a little more plot, instead of the moment-focused drabbles I was used to. It has helped me become more confident in going deeper into the character’s feelings, exploring how they react to different situations; it’s also been a challenge to figure out pacing and worldbuilding. Through many mistakes, I feel like I’m slowly learning to improve on those things.

I tried writing smut, something I had told myself I’d never attempt again lol And I feel like my attempts actually turned out half-decent, motivating me to keep trying to improve on that aspect of my writing.

I gave another try at multichapters, too, and managed to finish my first fic of that kind that was being posted as I wrote it, and not all chapters at once like I did for the AkaYona Big Bang last year. It was a journey that took months but I never felt more fulfilled than when I finally posted that last chapter.

Your best story of this year:

Wandering Wolf. I feel like my writing was at its best for this fic.

Your most popular story of this year:

what really matters (considering hits/kudos on AO3). I actually never expected this story to be so popular, especially because it was only my second try this year at writing something with an Explicit rating, but I’m glad people seem to enjoy it so much!

Story of yours most under-appreciated by the universe, in your opinion:

Huuh, I guess Shatter, my Soukoku fic. I’m really proud of that one but it barely got any attention (maybe because it’s the only story I’ve ever written for the BSD fandom lol).

Most fun story to write:

Operation: TodoBaku?. I had so much fun writing TodoBaku from the perspective of other Class 1-A students, as well as coming up with their shenanigans and trying to fit some humor into it :’)

Story with the single sexiest moment:

Silver Lining, when Bakugou is touching Todoroki’s wings for the first time. I just have a thing for characters with wings, okay.

Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:

I don’t... think there was anything like that? My stuff is pretty tame lol worst thing I wrote was MCD and there wasn’t even any detailed description of anything.

Story that shifted your own perceptions of the characters:

Hmm, Wandering Wolf, I think. I had to do a lot of thinking to fit the characters into the universe I created, and then make them develop as the story progressed - and that involved thinking a lot about Todoroki and Bakugou’s core traits and what makes them who they are regardless of canon.

Hardest story to write:

My current wip - everything we (never) planned. It’s hard to make my writing style work with the genre and it’s a more complicated plot than what I usually write, so that has been a challenge, too. I’m having fun with it though!

Biggest disappointment:

Your Hand in Mine. It wasn’t a disappointment as in I didn’t manage to convey what I wanted - the fic turned out exactly like I’d planned - but I just regretted ever writing it. I’ve even thought of deleting it multiple times, but decided not to.

Biggest surprise:

Silver Lining and Wandering Wolf! I was so excited with both AUs, and really afraid I wouldn’t be able to do them justice. But both stories developed so well and writing them was so much fun, I’m very proud of the finished works. And they were both extremely well received by my readers, which was the biggest surprise of all and made me incredibly happy.

Most unintentionally telling story:

Just Listen. The entire thing is me projecting myself onto Kirishima lmao

Favorite opening line(s):

“There's a myth about the forest that is hidden among the distant mountains.” - from Wandering Wolf

Favorite closing line(s):

“But the thing is - not everything about a myth is true, is it?” - from Wandering Wolf

Favorite 5 line(s) from anywhere:

This would get pretty long and coincidently I chose exactly 5 favorite lines for the favorite quotes prompt of Fic Writers Week so I’ll just link to that post here.

Top 5 scenes from anywhere you would choose to have illustrated:

» Bakugou holding Todoroki in the forest as he disappears, from Unravel. » Bakugou touching Todoroki’s wings for the first time, from Silver Lining. » Bakugou and Todoroki sitting side-by-side in the snow, from When It Snows. » Bakugou holding Todoroki’s hands to calm him down, from Chapter 4 of Wandering Wolf. » Chuuya playing the piano, from Shatter.

Fic-writing goals for next year:

Finish my current WIP and my ideas for BakuTodo Week. Do my best to write a great piece for a zine (!!) I got accepted into. I also have a rather ambitious project I want to work on that will involve mixing my writing with graphic design.

And this is more of a personal goal, though it’s still related to fic writing so I suppose it counts: stop obsessively comparing myself to others and hating myself and my writing whenever I don’t measure up to them. Stop depending on numbers so much. It’s something that’s been hindering me a lot these past few months to the point where I have to force myself to write because it’s almost like constant writer’s block.

Despite the ups and downs, I feel like this was an amazing writing year for me. I’m proud of what I achieved with my writing, and it has improved a lot even if I have a hard time believing that most of the time. I’m thankful for all the support I’ve gotten and for you lovely readers who always interact with me or my content in one way or another. Y’all are the real MVPs ❤

#long post #2017 writing round up #thais speaks

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