Banning tags doesn’t ban content — it just makes it harder to avoid triggers and content you don’t like. This mindset is ridiculous.

I myself am very happy that non consensual fics are tagged explicitly on ao3. I stay far away from them. I wouldn’t be able to do that if there wasn’t a “noncon” tag.

That goes for any tag — no matter how gross, immoral, etc.

Working on the gojo A through Z

I wanna keep this writing train going. Who should I write for after?

Actual fuck you to all the English teachers who told me that I couldn't ever start a sentence with "and".

Sometimes I think about how being a self-published author means there’s a disturbingly high chance my books will become super, super rare or even a form of lost media one day…

But hey, nothing lasts forever, and I can’t let it get me down. Even if my work gets forgotten, it will still have touched people in the meantime

I really don't get how other artists/writers justify using AI.

There is no greater thrill than looking in your inbox and realizing the cover/voice/commissioned artist you're collaborating with has sent you a melding of your work and theirs.

That blending of creativity will never not set me alight.

Technoblade???

XDXD Yeah... pretty much.

Just thought of another IF pet peeve:

A lot of writers really don't know how to flirt, do they? Like, half the time the flirting options in some stories would make me cringe myself inside out. That's not even mentioning the ones that come off as straight up harassment.

I'm not trying to say I'm some flirting genius, but yeesh...

And just a romance trope in particular that I freaking hate and searching for prompts earlier made me think of it: Any time your character gives an emphatic "no" and that's read by the other party as "try harder".

Because frankly I only write douchebags and rapists as the ones incapable of accepting "No". But that's me.

Summoning the Will to Write when you're Stuck

(this is a repost from instagram :D)

So I've been stuck in a writing slump the last few weeks and now I'm re-visiting my own advice lol. Slumps suck—especially the writing ones.

Not actually stopping with writing

So yeah, this is probably some weird advice for someone in a writing slump, but from all the tidbits and advice posts I've seen, this one is most prominent! I tried it, and at first, it didn't help at all. Even just 5 sentences were difficult, so I thought to just move on from this technique because it wasn't for me. Then I realized, after spending the last few weeks world-building (thank you nanowrimo 2022 for the scrivener subscription <3) instead of continuing my draft, that I WAS still writing, which is where I'm trying to go with this point. If you can't continue writing on your draft, for now, work on your world-building or jot down scenes you want to explore way later. It's still writing, even if it's just notes.

Finding Inspiration (however that process works for you)

For me, that means listening to the songs I saved that remind me of my characters or scenes in my WIP or re-reading books that inspired me to want to become a better writer, or even browsing my WIP's pinterest folders or reviewing my world-building document to get back in the mood of my world. If I'm not too deep in a slump, doing this helps me tremendously!

Acting out your scenes

This might be a little strange to those who haven't tried it, but with an active imagination on your side, this might help a lot to get excited in your writing again. Sometimes, the cause of getting into a slump happens when I don't know how to continue a scene, and I just fixate on it with no answer in sight. Instead of staring at my screen for hours, though, what I usually do to hash out those details is by getting up, putting on my headphones, finding a song that fits the mood of the scene, and just start moving back and forth in my room and pretend I'm there as one of the characters or just the 'cameraman.' Again, a little weird but if it helps, it helps! (I've come to learn this is called Maladaptive Daydreaming LMAO)

Re-reading what you have so far

Re-reading what you've written already with no distractions or music or any will behind it can give you the will you need to get back into continuing where you had left off. Perhaps it's because you can be sent back into that brain setting of 'Creating! Writing! Words!' or just becoming more motivated again to finish what you had started when you read what you had first started with. I hope that makes sense... (this was the method I used back then to get out of a slump... i'll try it again and see if it works)

It's good to feel things, and it's good to care about people and things, even if they don't exist, and it's good to want to know what happens next.

—Neil Gaiman, tumblr reply 31 August 2023

Dying at the idea of a fairy au for any of the idiot brigade and extended cast 😭

I'm not sure if you mean the Idiot Brigade finding a fairy, or the Idiot Brigade being fairies but oh my god the chaos of either of those things delights me to no end hahaha

Also I just got a very strong image of a sour, sharp-tongued Devon-fairy and giggled like a dingbat.

Working on the sequel to this beauty today, and I have some news! ✍️📚

The cover for Matsdotter and Adrastus is ready for lettering and I'm hoping to reveal it in the next couple weeks ! It is GORGEOUS, and I am so grateful to @foxglovefaun for bringing it to life. If you aren't following her yet, you really should be, her OC Ross is my beloved, that's all there is to it. ✨❤️🎨

Also, we have a full title, but I'll be saving that for the cover reveal. 😉

I do have some unfortunate news, but I've been doing a lot of thinking and decided to be kind to myself. I'm pushing the release date back one month, to January 2nd 2024. With that being said, I will be still using the original date of December 5th to send out ARCS.

In the past few months I've suffered a few bouts with depression along with other things, and it really set me back. I don't want to rush through this story, as I've done that before and regretted it. I always felt like I was falling behind, losing in a competition that doesn't really exist. But the indie author community, and the readers who read indie, are nothing but supportive, and understanding. We hold each other up, and recognize that we are in fact humans.

I want to provide the best story as possible, and I'm so excited. This is really a deep dive into Levena, and we're going to see different sides of the characters we know and love, meet new ones, and answer questions from the first book.

Thank you for being here, and for listening.

Enjoy your Sunday!

Phantom and Rook cover art by @crossroadart-seabear

see, here's the thing i've kind of realized: there is a really, really, really interesting character out there and her name is tessa gray. but tessa in canon edits her own narrative so heavily in the service of making herself seem far more well-adjusted to and okay with her situation than anybody should be that she locks all of the interesting stuff about her in a cabinet where it's inaccessible to me as an author and as a reader and it makes her look really uncompelling because i can't actually interact with the interesting things about her.

she should be grieving her aunt, but that gets shut down immediately, I don't have any real recollection of her going through a grieving process either for her late aunt or for the illusion of nate she had when it's shattered.

she was kidnapped and tortured and throughout the entire series she's facing down a really creepy kidnappy-with-a-panel-van stalker guy who has an entire army at his back, but I don't recall the trauma from that really getting explored in the series either, I don't really remember getting a good look at how that affects her mental health.

we know she's a bookworm but I don't remember her interacting too deeply or analytically with the stuff she reads, save for maybe one conversation.

personally I think the narrative of being thrust into the Institute, which is huge and has a carriage and servants, when she's described as having been not just poor but basically bankrupt when she arrives in London, would be really interesting, but that doesn't really get a lot of addressing.

hell, she's an incredible meditator, negotiator, she brings people to the table like nobody else in any book or show I know (side note: international diplomat/war treaty mediator/hostage negotiator tessa are aus I would foam at the mouth for if anyone wants to write them) but I barely remember her using that skill outside of the love triangle.

tessa should be really interesting, but her narration edits all of that out, in a way where if I were talking about a real person I'd say she's trying to make sure people look at her a certain way. trying, I would say, to make them see both what she thinks they want her to be and at the same time also the version of her that she, with her own self-consciousness, sees when she looks in the mirror. and it's making her so hard to figure out how to write.

an Author update

07-16-23

I need to change my laptop password.

I woke up this morning to see this as my wallpaper

Thanks Mom 😂

Author Thoughts

I'm approaching the end of my third full novel I've written in my life.

One was supposed to be a licensed work but then that license holder got bought by another company that cancelled the IP that book was based on, so now sits on my hard drive. I go back and read it every few years or so, mostly to see how far I've progressed as an author since my early twenties.

The second was pure catharsis, a fanfic about trauma and homelessness and found family and dealing with pain and loss. You can find it on FiMFiction.net and AO3 if you're interested.

My most recent will not be appearing here due to the Dead Dove content (Explanation for those who needed this defined like I did: "Dead Dove" fics are those that have clear tagging, especially on AO3, that there's "problematic" content in the work but people who are triggered by the clearly tagged problematic stuff read it anyway and get upset. Based on the "Dead Dove" meme where the guy looks in the bag clearly marked, "Dead Dove, do not eat" and looks inside and finds, sure enough, a dead dove), but has been some of the most interesting, challenging writing I've ever done where I'm allowing my creative brain to intentionally think, "What's the bad ending and how do I make it interesting?"

When I was writing my first novel, I got to a point about 3/4's through and my writing slowed down significantly. It took two years for me to write it, nine months of that was just on the last 1/4 of the book. It wasn't any more lengthy or challenging than the rest, just I suddenly felt like I was running out of steam and couldn't keep going, even though I'd plotted out pretty much ever plot point and story beat down to specific timing for the climax chapter.

When I was working on my second (completed, I've started a few dozen since my first) work, I got to about 3/4's through...and slowed down. It took over a year to write and, just like my first book, the last 1/4 took the lion's share of that time.

My current book I've been hammering on since early December 2023 (if you're reading this later than the posting date, the first chapter is currently only about a month old by this point), and I actually wrote a full outline complete with copious notes so I wouldn't forget anything I wanted to do with the fic. I'm on Chapter 9 of 11 chapters and an epilogia (Epilogia - n. - collection of epliogues. See also, "Prologia" and "Blame Brandon Sanderson") and sure enough, as I put some paragraph marks between "Chapter 9" and my notes, suddenly I started slowing down. I took an entire day off, thinking I was just burning out, but no, I only didn't want to write as I sat down to actually do the writing.

I've been pondering this for the last week-ish, and I believe it has to do with the project being just about done. This has taken pretty much my entire free time since I started and is a tremendous source of dopamine, and now that I'm getting closer to the end, my idiot monkey brain is seeing the end of the dopamine and is trying to delay the end, hoping that'll keep the dopamine rolling in.

Something that I've been working on may be a solution. I've been dropping little Easter Eggs into my fics so fans of one body of work can be pleasantly surprised when they see something from that work turn up in an apparently unrelated project. A character from My Empire of Dirt might appear in Deviation, an epilog on another project will be a big reveal about a character based on the sudden and unexpected intersection with Lost in the Dark. Sunset Shimmer from Redhead/Redhead winds up meeting with Ranma "Sailor Moon" Saotome from Fission. That sort of thing.

Basically, I'm going to convince my monkey brain that it's ALL just one, massive, ongoing "novel" and the dopamine will flow forever so long as the writing does, too.

Will it work? We'll see if it did based on how quickly I can get Ch. 9 out. 😋

When you're trying to write a very serious toned fic and yet you can't figure out how to describe something without the words "absolute audacity"

This is supposed to be very serious and very angsty.

I can't have fucking comedic relief, that would ruin my whole vibe.