.

i have a job interview tomorrow. i'm stressed

*heavy breathing* I decided to try to find a workaround for the long covid brain fog tonight.

Aka a new pot pot strain a friend recced to see if it would help me out with this.

It worked.

Do you know how well?

I just came up from a fucking five hour writing spree.

I'd planned to edit TRT's new chapter. And I did for a bit. But it wasn't enough. I had that itch, one that had been rattling around under my skin for months.

I needed to CREATE.

I NEEDED TO WRITE.

So I turned my eyes to the Raven fic's final chapter, where I'd been slowly working on adding the new scenes I wanted and redoing a few to match the new ones.

I didn't just enter the writing zone. I blew that fucking door off its hinges. I saw the scenes in my mind's eye, and I typed the words that came, and even when the words didn't show up, I waved it off, slapped in a placeholder, and blew past it. My hyperfocus latched on like a gator and did fifty thousand death rolls.

I wrote FOUR. POINT. EIGHT. THOUSAND. WORDS.

IN FIVE HOURS.

I may have forgotten to drink or eat anything so that's familiar too

This proves it. Getting TRT's new chapter written, if not edited, proved the words were still there in my head. And THIS proves I can still enter that miracle zone that makes everything worth it oh god i missed the zone. As best I can tell looking over it, this didn't fix my 'what word did I want here???' problem that I continue to struggle with. I still have a lot of placeholder words. But what it did do was remove my frustration, my anxiety, and my long pauses when I couldn't find a word I wanted. It was far easier to just continue on. It also gave me, for just a few hours, the ability to focus, enough that even as it slowly wore off I'd built enough momentum to keep going for a while.

Now I just gotta find a way to get there more regularly like I used to, without the herby nudge. Tomorrow I'll try the same thing though, only with editing instead, now that my itch has been thoroughly scratched.

And if anyone hears triumphant howling tomorrow evening, just know that it is I, Pasta, summoning the words again.

shadowheart act 1 romance: spend a night drinking wine and talking, and maybe share a chaste kiss at the end if you pass an insight check

lae'zel act 1 romance: rough sex right the fuck now and then never speak to me again

Wild that anytime I post an update a lot of people read it and are even excited about it and have their own thoughts and reactions to it that I'll never know.

Comments are only the very tip of the iceberg with it. And I am Very grateful to commenters for letting me in on it. But in the same way that I'll be excited with my friends when a fic we love updates, it's likely that Other people enthuse with Their friends when my fic updates. And it's just so strange. An experience I'll never have access to.

Everyone's relationship with my fic is unique. So many different people with so many different circumstances and preferences... and the number of people that have told me that my fic is one of their favorites, some even saying it's their Favorite favorite... every single one of them have their own relationship with my writing.

It's just interesting to me. I think and think and think on my writing. I have my plans for basically the entire fic, the way I want it to end already thought out, all the major plot beats and the relationship progressions, All of that thought out. I love my writing so very much, but I'm on the inside looking out. This is my mechanical horse, and I'm in here laying out the groundwork and pulling levers and constructing limbs, puttering away making the horse move. Forever and always, my relationship with it will be more intimate than anyone's, and yet more clinical. Because I know it better than the back of my own hand, but I'll never have the experience of reading it fresh. Of reading it without knowing everything that's going to happen from now to the end and beyond. I won't have the thrill of the plot twists I have planned, the delight at seeing things progress, the horror at seeing things go wrong...

This is my mechanical horse, and I'm making it move.

I just always wonder what it must be like to see it from the outside. I hope to others that it's a pretty horse.

You learn to live with it, learn to love it if you can (Patreon)

Alright, you guys, the #salt and light tag has convinced me. I'm gingerly stepping into the frightening quagmire of AO3. You can find me there under the name queenlucythevaliant, same as here.

honestly what's disappointing to me about cy2 is simply the fact that it's another new book that i know won't immediately hook me or keep me excited for every new update like psi or hell or high water did when they came out, especially because it's been this way for several updates now. like there was a time where we could always count on new books being interesting and exciting but now it's just like oh... another one...

once again thinking about how satoshi's three categories of "thing that is bad" are, in order of priority, a) harms pokemon b) harms a person c) worries people satoshi cares about. thinking about how he excludes himself from the pool of people in category b. will try to stop doing a thing because it upsets a friend not because it causes himself any harm, but will most be concerned that it doesn't hurt someone else & most-most concerned that it doesn't hurt a pokemon. why is he like this.

twice now I have gone "my covid cough seems to be going away, guess I can smoke again" and then lit up two days in a row and on the third day had my cough come back in full force and had to abstain for weeks until it got better. the real question is will I break the cycle today or not

—the strokes, the adults are talking (2020)

oh fuck good omens s2 comes out in two days

someone talking about the ways media and common tropes/depictions of things that are either explicitly or implicitly linked to marginalized people are demonized and presented badly is not a fucking opportunity for you to flex how you're doing it Differently And Better

Things they don't tell you about playing 1-4 according to the actual dates:

I have been playing Ace Attorney for four hours and I'm still not done with the 26th despite it being well into the early hours of the 27th already

the thing is chapter 4 of Sentido was gonna be the hardest chapter to write anyways. my life goin kinda tits up just has not helped with that

buon lunedì, I wish I were in Venice right now