Hi!! I was reading your fic Bastards and Broken thing and wanted to know if you were going to update! It’s literally amazing and I can’t wait for the next part. The plot is so engaging and I’ve been in the edge of my seat! Ty

Hi there,

Thanks for checking in and thank you for saying you enjoy it! The good news is, I want to update it too! (TLDR: After the 22nd of August, I’m done with my thesis and can finally start tackling the difficulties that have arisen in bastards and broken things! :D )

Long version:

The bad news is that I ran into a big reef of a writing block when writing the ship journey North. I struggle to capture Aegon’s and Dany’s characters as I want them to be very true to their book counterparts, but also have to calculate that they have changed since their final chapters. Aegon has since gone on to conquer everything he planned to, has lost his mentor and father figure, seen his ancestral hometown burn down, and realized he’s inherited a mess of a realm. And Dany has experienced the end of her Meereen plotline and discovered that the realm she dreamt of ruling has just been taken by another Targaryen. It’s a bittersweet turn for both of them and they don’t know how to handle their situations or each other. Dany has the ruling experience, but she’s not used to being second. She also has trauma in regards to people potentially hurting her dragons, and her dragons run a serious risk in westeros atm. Meanwhile Aegon has no experience ruling and must be panicking about saving the continent he wants to rule. Throw on top of this that I have to write their interactions from the pov of Sansa who is not in their heads, and is occupied with the Others, her pregnancy, and Willas the lowkey autistic family man who just had all his plans blown up in his face and cannot cope with the change in his family, the change in his plans, nor his grief. She has her hands full. And somewhere between all that personal drama, there’s other people on the boat like Amaryllis, the guards and Leo’s new husband, all of which I’ve given a criminally low amount of attention the past few chapters.

As I was figuring out how I had to solve the ship scenes, a lot of things happened in my personal life (as you can read in my last chapter), then more stuff happened. The past few months I’ve been struggling to write my second master’s thesis while working fulltime and it has just been incredibly crazy. So I only wrote very short and easy chapters for other fics, but there too I am running behind (I’m really feeling like GRRM, busy with everything except finishing my aSoIaF fic). I am not like some writers that write a lot in advance. I write when I have time to write and then I publish the same day I finish a chapter. So I did not have already written chapters I could have published to bridge the gap. But after the 22nd I have time to tackle the writing block and the plot block. I think by the end of August I’ll start publishing regularly again.

200 DAYS OF HOUSE TARGARYEN ↳ day 51: daenerys targaryen in cripples, bastards and broken things

love that the first lesson jon had to learn at the wall from donal noye and the first lesson that tyrion had to learn in exile from penny were that they might be outcasts, yes, but that they were afforded luxuries due to the privilege of being highborn that they should never forget. that they are mistreated by their world but that they lived lives of comfort that the people around them could only imagine, and that two things may be true at once.

A Game of Thrones, Tyrion I

“There is nothing Lord Eddard can do for the boy in any case.”

“He could end his torment,” Jaime said. “I would, if it were my son. It would be a mercy.”

“I advise against putting that suggestion to Lord Eddard, sweet brother,” Tyrion said. “He would not take it kindly.”

“Even if the boy does live, he will be a cripple. Worse than a cripple. A grotesque. Give me a good clean death.”

Tyrion replied with a shrug that accentuated the twist of his shoulders.

“Speaking for the grotesques,” he said, “I beg to differ. Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”

just thinking about cripples, bastards, and broken things. these kids that, by all rights and logic, should've died long ago. bran crawling to his destiny with the weight of House Stark on his shoulders. dany dragging herself through the red waste, holding doreah and loving her til she's gone, and carrying a dynasty with her. jon climbing the wall and climbing his way up the ranks of the nights watch, climbing his way into friendships and family and not letting himself look back at the ones he left behind until he has to because it's arya.

bran looking back because looking forward is terrifying, so he looks for his family in anyway he can (through trees and dreams and wolves). he cries out for them, others answer. bran moving forward by any means necessary, 'our road is north,' because what else is there to do as a prince without a kingdom, a boy without a home. dany, 'if I look back I am lost', looking back at the trail of cripples, bastards, and broken things that have left everything they know to follow her, looking back at herself and hating what she sees, looking back and seeing herself in rhaegar's armor. dany looking forward and seeing chains and collars and saying 'I can do something about this, I will do something about this.'

jon 'kill the boy, let the man be born,' he kills the boy and is killed at 16. and dany never getting to be a girl, never had a choice between girlhood and whatever was needed/desired by others. she is sold at 13, mother at 14, widowed at 14, the last the last of her house at 14, conquerer at 15. bran falls, breaks, and flies at 7.

obsessed by olivia rodrigo feels like. jay talking abt amy

Oh definitely, tho there was a point where I was thinking of making it so that the feelings between Jay and Amy were like, where AMY was the one kinda jealous of Jay. That fell through pretty quick tho because it just wouldn't work. It didn't feel right lol (shocker)

This, and misery business by Paramour actually, work pretty well for Jay talking about Amy in Sorry, It's Locked. That was the song that made me think "hey what if Amy was kinda jealous over Alex", specifically the line "I watched his wildest dreams come true and not one of them involving you" cos like, yeah that kinda happened. Alex got a healthy, happy relationship with Amy for at least a couple years before the Operator caught up with him, and that life didn't involve Jay at all, y'know? But the idea of Amy being kinda spiteful and jealous just didn't sit right with me from the miniscule bit we see of her in actual MH.

She seems to kind and reasonable and, y'know, not a creepy dick like Jay is 💀

JAY BEING JEALOUS OVER ALEX BEING WITH AMY THO????? HOOOOOOOOOO BOY

Definitely

Definitely definitely definitely

I think it'd be one of those things that didn't stick around for super long, but like, for about a year or so after Alex "broke up with him" in uni and moved away to live with Amy Jay was VERY much "obsessed with Amy because she "stole" Alex from him. And sure yeah yeah Alex and Amy weren't Exes at that point (I'd argue they still aren't because Amy's dead, they didn't break up she died. She's not his ex girlfriend she's his late girlfriend, y'know?) but still, the general vibe of Obsessed by Olivia Rodrigo still stands.

For a year or so Jay was obsessed with Amy almost as much as he was obsessed with Alex, it was just that it was like a hate obsession rather than a love one? He probably just wouldn't shut up about it to their friends. (Fixing this by saying Tim simply forgot because operator shit between uni and S,IL lmao, so it's fiiiiine, he just doesn't remember that jay told him and their other friends so much about his and Alex's FWB relationship in uni. Hooray for memory loss! A writer's best friend when you're writing shit not in chronological order and aren't gonna go fix it all in a second and third draft lol)

I think Jay would still feign ignorance over why Alex moved away, partly because he can't bring himself to believe it is his fault, which it kinda is (because I do plan on making Alex moving away kinda a direct result of Jay's actions across their relationship, because I love using that pathetic wet cat of a man as my personal human punching bag) and he'd act like Amy just stole Alex away from him for no reason, rather than the reason being that Amy talked to alex and was like "hey, the way Jays treating you isnt okay" because she only hears alexs side of the story.

She's still right of course. The way Jay's treating him ISNT okay. It's shit. But they were both shit to each other in uni y'know?

Anyway yeah for a while jay talked about Amy fucking constantly to his friends because he felt 'wronged' by her because she stole Alex from her. (Probably making that a thing where she was like "hey how about you come stay with me for a little bit while your hands are healing up" —yeah hes gonna fuck up his hands, its gonna be a whole thing, you'll see it in chapter 6 of if it aint broken— and Alex agrees and then just, never goes back, he gets all his stuff moved to Amy's and enrolls at her uni instead and all that)

ALSO that line in Obsessed about watching every movie she's been in is PERFECT. I feel like Amy definitely was in at least a couple scenes of Alex's marble hornets, maybe as a background character or in some scrapped scenes, and Jay has watched them all a million times trying to pick her apart and find out why she was better than him, what about her made Alex pick her. He refuses to believe Alex is just straight, and he IS right but like... That would be a reasonable reason for him to stop "experimenting" and get a girlfriend lol

Jay also definitely remembers every detail Alex ever told him about Amy, or that he found out himself. I do think he'd at least TRY to do a little stalking of her and Alex once he moves away. Not a huge amount, he catches himself pretty quickly and tries to convince himself he just doesn't care enough to want to find out more about how Alex is doing now he's with Amy. But like, idk he definitely at least, like, Facebook stalked them or something lmfao. Even if it didn't get up to in person stalking like he got to in MH, he was definitely at least a little weird about them.

I wish i could have loved you right but i was just a child maybe I won’t, maybe I will Run back to you

maybe // flower face

I am experiencing constant, unexplained nausea going on four days now and it's just making my Parental Holidays (parents days and their birthdays) season so much worse. I had constant nausea when I was first sick and trying all kinds of medications and living on luna bars and my mom was always trying to make things that would tempt my appetite, like bread pudding, and it's just making me so sad. I ate two large bread puddings per week for a while there.

"Man, I haven't written anything for Hartwin in so long. What do I have in Ye Olde WIP cupboard? Mmmn. Yes, there's that, but I think I want to baby it more, not quite ready to be made public yet. And... what's this? I don't quite remember what this--OH. OH, I REMEMBER WHAT THIS WAS."

and that's the story of how I'm now editing a Kingsman-as-bodyguards AU that somehow may be the saddest damn Hartwin thing I've ever written and really, should have probably not been a silly AU, but here we are.

Still in the editing phase, so not sure if it's going to go anywhere, but man, sometimes it's nice to look back at fics you kept trying to make work, couldn't, put away, and then it turns out Six-Months-Later-You now sees what the problems were and that the fixes are in fact, quite easy.

Never give up on your WIPs entirely, folks. Store them aside, on the shelf, out of the way, but don't toss them into the trash.

Finally finished Staged.

Terrible shame I had been on the path to emotional recovery after rewatching Good Omens 600 times.

Guess it's time to accept that I am, in fact, Michael's and David's emotional bitch.

smth smth fawn’s self rivalry in the siblings!au

one of these days i need to find or make a video essay breaking down just how well Spamton was done as a character/plot device

UPDATE: Children not being hurt is woke now

Clair <3

something something, the power of prophecy destroying this already fucky family. Break the Wheel, Dany. And by that I mean go find your own path.

And isn't that what we see as the downfall in say, a character like Robb Stark, who tried to live up to the "noble" image of his father and got himself shanked for it? (Tywin was always gonna try take him out, but the Freys went with it because Robb insulted them).

Or Stannis channeling his own inner unhinged Targ by following Melisandre's prophecy to go north that's resulting in Shireen's murder.