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saunne · 6 months

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Writing - Reflection and Personal Analysis (Pt 1)

(mostly rambling, if you want to read what I plan to do for the rest of NaNo, wait for the Part 2)

So I've been putting this off for two days, but I guess the end of the first week of NaNo is a good date for this kind of personal reflection. During this week of writing, of attempting to write, of abandoning writing and of writer's anxiety, I had time to think about a couple of things, to have some fairly enlightening insights on others and to better understand the whole mess I'm in.

This post is mainly for me, to keep track of my thoughts, my process and my difficulties and it may be long, so good luck to those who take the time to read my whole rambling. Cause this is but a frustrated braindump lol

First Issue - Brain is an obsessive 5yo without parental supervision

The first problem I have would be that I love writing. I really like writing. I always have a lot of imagination and a lot of ideas and therefore, in fact, a lot of WIPs, mainly fanfiction. I am part of several fandoms and I mostly operate with a main fandom and two-three secondary fandoms.

I have a tendency towards quite severe obsessive hyperfixation. This isn't new, it's something I've known for years, but that doesn't mean it's easy to deal with. My current obsessive hyperfixation is SVSSS. My current obsessive hyperfixation is not my Original Project, Erasde.

This is a Problem.

This is a problem because I keep thinking about SVSSS. My daydreams, my dreams, my ideas, my thoughts are almost constantly towards this fandom. I've had a Self-Insert living rent-free in my head for a while now. It's all-consuming. It's inevitable. It's obsessive.

My brain wants to work on these ideas and WIPs, read fics and daydream scenarios all day. My brain doesn't give a shit that it's NaNo and I was planning to work on Erasde.

I'm currently REALLY frustrated. Because I have to work on NaNo (and my thesis, but that's another problem), but my brain is a 5 year old chanting "SVSSS, SVSSS, SVSSS" over and over. I can't work on what I need to work on and I can't work on what I want to work on because of what I need to work on.

I'm really feeling like : (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Second Issue - IRL mugged me in a back alley

This year is a relatively light year for me. Which is good, considering I'm recovering from a burnout that had been brewing for two years and exploded with full force in November of last year. I was an emotional wreck, a wreck at work and study, and I was probably an ass to everyone who knew me back then.

I'm technically finished with my studies and I don't have any more classes to take. I just have to write my dissertation and prepare my oral exam to be able to validate my diploma. I have a small job that means I only work on Sundays, but I sometimes take a few shifts during the week for a little extra money. I do a little volunteering at the LGBT center, something I've wanted to do for years.

I went back to regular therapy, got an ADHD diagnosis that should have been done years ago, and I'm starting to understand why certain periods of my life and some of my relationships were so fucking screwed.

I'm healing, even if it's slow.

But I still have a lot of moments of no energy, of no desire, of stalled motivation, of fed-up-with-everything, of wanting to disappear into the nearest forest, of wanting to not having to speak for 5 and a half years and such.

So let's say that my spoons refill is very... random. Which is complicated during a challenge like NaNo, which requires a lot more energy than I thought. If I do NaNo, I have to sacrifice the energy for something else except sometimes there's nothing to sacrifice which makes it... complicated.

And it's also not something I particularly want to complain about with my friends or my family, who work 35 hours or more/week, in very demanding jobs. That would just be a dick move.

Third Issue - Brain won't brain correctly

Well, that's not new either. My brain hasn't brained properly for years, university life and my mental health on the ground have only made it worse but we're getting by. I will soon be put on treatment for ADHD, with Menylphredate. The cardiologist gave her approval so I collect my prescription at the end of the month, at the next appointment. I have very, very high hopes for this treatment.

But the fact is, my brain doesn't brain. In addition to not being able to concentrate, everything is mixed up in my head.

The biggest problem is a language problems. I am a native French speaker, but I have become accustomed over the last 4 years to writing almost exclusively in English. The vast majority of my writing in French was assignments for university, courses and analysis papers. I can no longer write fiction in French. Everything I write feels off, uncomfortable, messy, meaningless and it's fucking FRUSTRATING.

The mixing of styles is also a problem. I don't have a defined "novel" style. I have a fanfiction writing style, which I have worked on and which has evolved with my practice over the last few years, but I have no basis in style for a novel. Which has been really annoying this week because everything I've written makes me want to send my laptop flying out the window.

The fact is also that in parallel with NaNo and my fics, I have to write my thesis. I'm shitty with academic methodology and almost literally have to rewire my entire functioning to write academic papers, so when I then have to write fiction, it goes haywire. It's tiring. I'm currently on a short schedule to send the first part for review to my teacher and it's taken up all my energy and my ability to function this past week.

And I won't be free of this shit until February at best, April at worst.

┻━┻ ︵＼( °□° )／︵ ┻━┻

Fourth Issue - There is a Whole World in my head

Originally, Erasde was just a worldbuilding project. Like, worldbuilding for the sake of doing worldbuilding, to put the cool facts I was learning in history class in one place and absorb my excess imagination to be able to concentrate on my classes.

It then became a sort of "refuge" for my favorite fandom OCs, reworked to adapt to this new universe, and then joined by old OCs from an original project and finally by OCs native to the project.

The fact is that I built this world for 3 years, it's still not finished but damn, I have a fuckton of information to pass on, so many things that serve as clues, from Chekhov's gun, forshadowing and... Yeah, it's a nameless mess. I'm not necessarily the most organized person in the world, but we've reached a new level of fuckery with Erasde.

Figuring out how to organize all this mess is what blocks me the most about writing NaNo. Because it's not a fanfic. The people who read don't know the setting like I know it, they have to discover it and there is a limit to what the "in situ" setting can do.

Fifth Issue - Planning didn't go as planned

Because I should have planned and I didn't. Well yes, I did it, but not correctly. Or not enough. Or both.

With fanfics, since I know the setting and the characters and I don't have a fuckton of information to pass along to make myself understood, this would have been less of a problem. I can get away with writing a multi-chapter fics mostly in freestyle, complete improvisation, or with the barest handful of notes.

I CAN'T DO THAT WITH A NOVEL.

Which will conclude this long rambling post and take us to part two, where I will actually explain my plan of action.

#writing process #writing analysis #writeblr #writing #self analysis #personal practice #mental health #personal issues #erasde #unneism

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intrepidacious · 2 years

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a look ahead

my loves, i've had some time away from this site and it's given me a bit more clarity as to what i want my blog to look like in the future. i don't know if this comes out of nowhere to any of you because i don't tend to announce my decisions to the internet, but since this is going to (directly or indirectly) impact y'all, i thought it was only courteous to tell you that there'll be some changes made around here in the next couple of weeks.

what is that going to look like?

come september, i am going to start blocking minors as well as ageless, blank and/or empty blogs.

apart from a writing challenge submission i'm set on finishing, i'm not going to be posting any fics for a little while.

sadly, that also means time after time is officially going on hiatus for now.

i've been thinking about these things for some weeks now and even though i feel like i'm letting people down in a way, i feel like this is the right move for me at this point.

there are several reasons for all this, if anyone cares <3

why block minors if you don't write explicit stuff?

excellent question. the truth is that i considered making my blog 18+ a year ago when i created it, but didn't. the main reason for that was that even if someone puts an age in their bio, i have no way of double checking that, so i thought, why bother. but the truth is that i've grown uncomfortable with the thought of literal children interacting with me, whether i post explicit stuff or not (and i have reblogged explicit fics more than once). i don't want to have to worry about these things when i'm just trying to enjoy my time on this corner of the internet. of course, i still have no way of checking this, but i still want to establish this boundary for my own mental wellbeing.

my main blog will remain all ages and i will continue posting on ao3, but i don't want any minors around on my writing tumblr anymore.

what about blank/empty blogs?

this is a trend i've only really noticed once i started posting my writing on here, and it seems to mostly pertain to the people who don't know how tumblr works and are unwilling to learn, or bots. just put something on your blog. if the only thing i can see on there is the list of people you're following and your likes – particularly if i can see that you're mostly liking fanfic but not reblogging anything – you're getting blocked. if you reblog fics with a sideblog, that's completely fine of course, but put something else on main then. support gif makers. support artists. support shitposters, i don't care. just reblog stuff. that's what this site is for.

what about your writing?

i told you only yesterday that i have a whole pile of wips right now, and i do, but the truth is that i'm exhausted. i put a lot of pressure on myself when it comes to my writing, and the truth is that i feel like that's part of the reason i think it's good, but it's simply not sustainable. i started a new job back in june, and i'm about to start working on my thesis, and what should be a hobby is burning me out. the same thing happened to my reading habit, and it's just sad to witness.

i'm currently hoping that by taking out the constant urge to post something, anything, but make it amazing, i can actually enjoy writing a lot more again. (don't get me wrong, i still enjoy it, i really do, but i need to do it without the whole immediacy part of it for a while i think.)

what does this mean for time after time?

i mean, let's be real here, updates have been scarce at best anyway. i started this series with a lot of momentum and then slowly teetered to a standstill against my best intentions. again, i hope that by taking away the pressure to post as fast/good/much as possible, i will find myself doing it more again, and doing it more gladly.

this series truly is my everything and i will finish it, but i want to have a few chapters already pre-written the next time i post a part. that way, i hope there won't be as much time between updates, either. depending on how long it takes me to get to this point, i might do a weekly chapter reblog or something to remind y'all what was going on lmao

hope y'all understand and i'm sorry if this is disappointing but it's my blog and i'm asking you to respect my boundaries. kay thanks bye <3

#nika rambles #writing update

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cupstealer · 3 years

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Re: your last ask.

I am also no longer into the fandom side of hockey anymore and hardly ever read fan fic anymore. (A senior thesis will do that to a person 😔) Buut I want you to know that I think about contact high on a regular basis. Once a week maybe type of regular, when I’m wishing I was reading something fun and not a science journal. Is that weird?! I mean I know that sounds a little crazy- but it might be the greatest fic I’ve ever read. While I was reading it I got the sense that it would be one of my favorites, but I had no idea how much it would still ruminate with me a year and a half later. I don’t think I can recall a single other rpf work like I can that one. You are such an amazing writer! And I hope you continue to write- whatever it may be that your writing about! 💕

(Sorry to keep putting these on y’all’s dash, but it’s the only way I can THANK these anons and they definitely need thanking.)

Your timing OP ;.; I really got this ask when I needed it most. 💕 Thank you thank you thank you! Sorry for the delayed response—it’s so hard to figure out how to thank somebody and explain how much words like this mean while not sounding like a flu patient or something.

To answer your question, it’s not weird! There are absolutely fics that live rent-free in my head to the degree that I’m basically sponsoring them on a permanent residency program [cut to footage of bring it if you really want it by staraflur]. And god, what an honor that Contact High is like that for you 🙏 Contact High is my favorite thing that I’ve written. A lot (pfff, all) of the content was so self-indulgent for me, just utter wish-fulfillment, which I usually try to dial back, but I wanted to see what might happen if I really leaned in instead. (The thing with toothpaste/walking in on someone actually happened to me when I was staying over at a friend’s house in high school... Sorry again to her brother, I promise I barely saw anything.) There isn’t a single element of that fic that I wasn’t excited about while I was writing it. And it’s that much more touching when the work that feels the most ‘me’ is someone’s favorite.

Anon, I hope you get some free time to read fun stuff soon! You deserve it. And good luck on your thesis! Defend that sumbitch like you’re Connor Murphy (no idea if it’s the kind of thesis you defend, but you get my meaning). Thank you again 💕

I am still writing, by the way! Just as slow as ever though, and for a very mixed bag of subjects! No hockey lately, though I have a few unpublished 1988 WIPs that I haven’t touched in a long stretch yet haven’t let go of either. Every fall, I pump myself up to roll up my sleeves and edit/finish this genre-confused frankenstein of a haunted house-type fic, and I haven’t given up hope yet! (Plus if I finish it, I can finally read jezziejay’s witch Jonny fic—which got posted while I was writing mine, and I made myself bookmark it for later so I wouldn’t be influenced or in my head about any overlap even though they’re almost certainly totally different in every way. I’m dying to read hers ;.;)

Hmm I hesitate to say this, but... If anyone is really interested regardless of fandom, there’s also an unorthodox fic I wrote as a Christmas present for my sister back in 2017 that she keeps telling me to post. (I know, and it gets weirder from there.) I think I want to but I’ve hesitated for several reasons. First: I need to re-do the ending now that I’m not scrambling to finish it on Christmas Eve. Second: It is a pairing that does not exist and kind of bananas. More info under the cut if you’re interested.

Basically, years ago, one of my sisters and I had a looong conversation about who was worthy of being shipped with Stacker Pentecost from Pacific Rim, and when none of the characters from the movie satisfied us, we reached out into the vast universe of basically anyone from any media to find him love, guess-and-check style. After literal hours, I brought up one of my favorite under-appreciated characters, Linus Caldwell from Ocean’s Eleven (Matt Damon). Which makes no sense, but doesn’t it a little? It became a running joke, and then a running a joke that I was gonna write it, and then not a joke. Ain’t that the way?

So yeah—Third: I’m hesitant to get somebody excited about a new hockey fic only to open the email and see it’s a batshit crossover that literally no one (except my sisters) is asking for. That being said, I started it as a joke/challenge, but ended up making something that I find quite a fun little ride because I was so loose with it (because, like, who’s ever gonna see this, right? Some real dance like nobody’s watching shit). I’ve written a bunch of stuff never meant to see daylight, but this fic in particular feels complete. It just has a lot going on (Hidden identities! Never Been Kissed-style fake student/professor tension! Chase scenes! Cameos! Close-up magic! Heist crew banter! Idris Elba’s North London accent! My total lack of military knowledge!). Also it’s over 30k words. (Yeah.)

Is there any interest in me posting this?? To be clear, I’m definitely not expecting it to be popular or anything, but taking the time to fix it up only makes sense if I know at least two people will lay eyes one it, lol. You don’t have to know both films really well for it to make sense, but familiarity with the Ocean’s trilogy and characters probably helps a lot for context since it takes place in between those movies. Goes without saying that no offense will be taken if there isn’t clamoring demand amongst hockey rpfers for 30k of Pacific Rim crossed over with a George Clooney movie franchise in a fic that has neither giant robots nor giant monsters (nor George Clooney, in any appreciable quantity)... Think I’m capable of taking that sentiment on the chin. 🤙

#replies #lOng replies damn #fic stuff

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bettsfic · 4 years

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tying up loose ends/wip update

i have a little over a month until i start my phd, and i realize, sadly, something’s gotta give, and that’s probably going to be my fandom interaction/social media time. so i’m trying to finish/tie a few things up before my schedule explodes.

renovations

chapter 10 is complete, and i only need to revise 2 scenes of chapter 9. i’ll post them both at once since they ended up being a little shorter than the other chapters. hopefully they’ll be up in the next few days.

ace of spades

per @fraxinus and a few other anons maybe? i’ll be rereading ace of spades in the next week or so, parsing through my notes, and writing a detailed summary of how it would have ended. it’s been four years, so i have a vague memory of what i’d intended for it, and can only hope i made a diligent outline. i’m sincerely sorry i didn’t end up finishing this fic. i still love it, and it framed so much of what became my MFA thesis. i made the mistake of believing i could get it done in tandem with grad school, and i was wrong about that. by the time i graduated and had time to write fic again, my writing style and interests changed so drastically i couldn’t go back to it.

fake-dating your step brother (and other terrible ideas)

i’ve gotten a lot of asks about this over the past year, and for the most part i don’t answer them because i don’t want to inadvertently launch a shit storm. the good news is, ao3 is adding a feature to turn off comments completely, so what happened with fdysb won’t happen again.

i will not be completing this story or re-posting it to ao3. however, you can find the pdf of the existing chapters here, and read how it would have ended here. more info can be found in my fys tag.

other bellarke fics

i know i had a few unfinished km fills, but i don’t plan to go back to those, not because i’m not into bellarke (i am, but am just disgusted by the show rn) but because it’s gotten really difficult for me to write smut. i have no idea why.

untitled coriojanus fic

i’ve begun fiddling with a bosas fixit (just a one-shot) that idk if i’ll manage to finish. i’m not in a huge hurry because bosas isn’t even a wrangled fandom tag yet on ao3, and the book publicity fell totally flat. i don’t think most people even know it’s out. at least, i didn’t.

untitled stucky fic for fth

hopefully i’ll be able to work on this in july. i’ll be writing a 10k stucky werewolf fairy tale fic for fandom trumps hate! i’d love to post it before i start school, but i may have to save it for winter break. either way, it’ll be up sometime in 2020. it may be the last fic i write for a long time :(

baby/patreon

baby will finish up in august, although i’m considering posting the last couple chapters at once in july so that no one gets charged an additional month, since i don’t have any other posts scheduled in august. if i come up with some posts, i’ll stay up an extra month. after that, i’ll probably be deactivating patreon until i have a new novel, or can commit to posting consistently.

this means that if you were waiting until the end to become a patron so you could read baby all at once, you’ll want to do that in july, because by august it will be unavailable to read. i don’t have tiers, so you could read all of baby for $1.

original projects

2019 and now 2020 are turning out to be shitty years for me in terms of publishing, as well as just being shitty in general. i’m getting really exhausted by rejection and disheartened. i don’t have a lot of hope for my short story collection, which didn’t even get a partial request from the agents i sent it to, and i’m afraid it doesn’t stand much of a chance in the contests and small presses i submitted to, either. i think it’s a good book, but it requires a certain kind of editor/contest judge to champion it, and i think it will be hard to place.

i have two literary novels i’m working on, one i feel pretty good about and another that needs a major structural overhaul. i’ve also finished the first (bare bones, extremely shitty) draft of a YA SFF novel set in a simulated reality, kind of the matrix meets breaking bad, but written like a douglas adams/terry pratchett book.

all i can do is focus on the work -- writing, reading, teaching -- and have faith everything else will fall into place eventually.

as always, i’m extremely grateful for all the positivity and support i’ve received, and which motivates me to continue writing during the times i begin to lose hope.

#writing update #ace of spades #renovations #fys #patreon baby #vandal #cherry pop #eden #my fic #bosas #bomb time

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inyoursheets · 4 years

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2, 16, 18, 23!

Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

wow ok this is surprisingly hard to answer! confronting! im not even sure, there isn’t anything specific ive got planned out that im excited to write. i don’t have any future projects planned out yet. or. i mean.....there are some things at the tips of my writing fingers but i can’t allow myself to think about them properly yet bc i need to focus on and commit to finishing warm water. and my thesis (ugh).

there are some things from warm water that ive already written that im excited to share, but right now im in a place where writing just isn’t going smoothly, so whenever i have an idea (like the eloquent “sweatpants dick” note i took recently) (my only contribution that day) im not all that confident or excited about it bc im afraid the actual writing itself will be a pain? that i’ll drag my feet for days and it won’t come easy and i’ll hate every second of it -- until things click and the words start flowing, not unlike this post describes. idk i keep really wanting to write and sitting down for it and then it just--won’t happen. or if i do actually try putting pen to paper i just start hating it all, which i don’t want.

so! this is a sad note to end on! here’s some vague things i am looking forward to: i’m looking forward to being excited about writing in general! i’m looking forward to writing something i’m proud of, either in terms of plot or theme or characterization or dialogue or whatever! i’m also looking forward to having that oh-my-god-the-words-are-flowing-from-me moment, regardless of the result tbh, bc i just love that feeling of loving writing and having it come easily. that’s what im excited about -- being excited about writing again.

Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

ok so i have this terrible writing tendency to not know how to not describe every single action characters make -- every movement, every gesture. particularly on first drafts i feel the urge to describe it all, otherwise i can’t continue. i know that it’s not always necessary to write what happens every single second of a scene, but i can’t seem to stop?

idk if im explaining what i mean correctly -- there’s probably terms for this that i dont know -- but someone who i think manages to do the opposite of what i do very well is @fairhairedkings, who is really good at time jumps and not going overboard w the minute-to-minute descriptions, the way i tend to.

i know it can be pretty tiresome and it’s one of the things that annoys me a lot about my own writing, both in terms of reading it (it can be plain boring?) and for the writing itself. it blocks me! but i can’t seem to stop doing it, feel like i’m glazing over things otherwise or lose track of where im going. i have to keep reminding myself that leaving out certain things doesn’t mean that nothing happens or that people assume nothing happens.

so, to answer the question, ive tried to be a bit more concise with it’s hidden in heartbeats, exhales and in the hope of open hands when i started writing it. that fic is a product of being fed up with my other WIPs and it didn’t take more than a week from its initial idea to the finished product, so i really wanted it to be a quickie, and i thought something tight and concise could work for the plot. i didn’t actually manage to succeed though, still ended up describing just about every action there, too. i don’t think i’ll ever manage to write something concise tbh. i do bad with time jumps, i do bad with less is more, which is unfortunate, bc less can truly, truly be more. so! im gonna try this again some time!

Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

mmm well, warm water originally didn’t include mutual pining -- beth wasn’t supposed to be in love with rio yet, we were gonna watch her fall in love slowly, while he already felt things. but then i ended up almost turning that entirely on its head and now we’ve got the mess that is that this fic in its current state lol. there’s also an AU to warm water that i briefly considered bc of you which i won’t go into now bc of possible spoilers -- but ive considered things!!!

also for it’s hidden in heartbeats, it was supposed to be more about petty!rio and haha, look, exes trying to get “revenge”, and to be light and funny, but i realized that idk how relationships work, let alone how exes work, so i couldn’t really find any good reasons for them splitting up, at least nothing that could generate comedy, so it ended up getting fairly angsty? idk why this keeps happening -- me planning to do something rom com-esque and it developing into something wayyyyy angstier, but it did!

What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

oh wow idek! ive definitely been working on warm water the longest, so i guess technically that one, but there are some other ideas that have been drifting near the surface that have been there longer and are very underdeveloped and need time and nourishment and attention and love, all of which i can’t give them yet bc im trying to stay focused on warm water and thesis writing. maybe the beth/stan friendship snippet ive got hidden in somewhere in my docs!

thank youuuu for indulging me!!! meta writing asks!!!!

#ask #ask games #foxmagpie #my fic #why am i so wordy

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abschaumno1 · 4 years

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AbschaumNo1′s Big Catchup Post of All the Fic You Missed

Okay so since I am back on my old bs apparently (for however long it lasts) and I just realised that I haven’t posted links to my fic since the beginning of 2017, I thought I’d do a bit of a roundup of all the fics I posted since then.

There are 59 of them since New Year’s 2016/17 (and no I don’t know who let me do that either), sorted here by fandom and then grouped together by series or pairing. Fic titles link to the fic on AO3.

Assassin’s Creed

Malik Al-Sayf/Altaïr Ibn La’Ahad

All That Still Needed To Be Said

Altaïr and Malik had a system.

Football RPF

Jakub Błaszczykowski/Łukasz Piszczek

You’re Driving Home For Christmas

Lukasz and Kuba celebrate Christmas together

Hermitcraft RPF

Hermitcraft Fantasy AU

Meetings (Gen)

Doc found the man in a tavern

An Unexpected Journey (Tangpulse, Minor and Background Relationships) WIP (Chapter 10/? posted as of the making of this post)

Xisuma sends Tango to talk to a potential new Hermit. Neither of them expects the journey that follows.

Home Is Where You Are (Tangpulse)

Tango and Doc are late to return home from their trip to the city. Tango just hopes he won't miss his and Impulse's anniversary completely.

Natural Phenomena

Meadows of Heaven (Scarian)

Grian and Scar get stuck in the rain on a resource gathering trip.

The Oncoming Storm (Gridoc)

Doc and Grian watch a storm coming in.

Let The Rain Come Down (Xisuma & Evil Xisuma)

Evil X discovers rain.

Finding Home (Zedaph/Tango/Impulse)

In the beginning all was chaos. But then the worlds were built.

Gridoc

Realisations

Five times Hermits see Doc and Grian together and have to realise that they may have gotten some false impressions.

Now The Armour’s Wearing Thin (3/3 Chapters)

Grian wasn't initially worried when Doc started to work on Area 77, but after he wakes him from a nightmare he starts to think that he should maybe figure out what's going on.

Keralis/Bdubs

Campfire Nights

In which Bdubs and Keralis are close and Bdubs is clueless until he's not. Neither of those make talking to Keralis about it any easier.

Zedaph/Tango/Impulse

The Bunny Slippers

The bunny slippers were supposed to be a joke gift. Little did Impulse and Zedaph know how much Tango would actually love them.

Hockey RPF

Back to You (Brent Seabrook/Andrew Shaw)

Your Love Will Take Me Home (5/5 chapters)

Andrew doesn’t usually go for team mates. But Seabs… Seabs is hot and Andrew will be damned if he’s not everything he’s looking for in a guy. And it’s just flirting, it’s not like there’s anything more going on between them. Or is there?

You’ve Got To Give Him Some Faith - Hold Him Tight

Andrew comforts Brent after the Hawks lose against the Stars.

Brothers Under the Sun (Brandon Bollig & Andrew Shaw)

A story in five joke mugs (and one non-joke mug)

A Night to Remember

Andrew surprises Brent for his thousandth NHL game

Together - A Family

It's Brent's birthday.

Le Ciel À l’Infini Embrasse l’Univers

Andrew and Brent take Pricey up on his offer to visit.

You Know I’ll Be There

‘When did we adopt Lehky?’ Brent texts Andrew as soon as he sees the photo.

You Can Depend on Me

Andrew seeing his family when the Habs play in Chicago

I’ll Fly Like An Eagle (Jesperi Kotkaniemi/Victor Mete)

Jesperi has a problem, Andrew has advice, and Victor has no clue (until he has)

Someday I’ll Be Where You Are

Three years after being traded to Montreal, Andrew is traded once again. This time he gets to go back home to his family.

You Were There When I Needed You

They tell the kids on Boxing Day

Skate Date Verse (Brent Seabrook/Andrew Shaw)

Sitting, Waiting, Wishing

‘I slept with Shawzy’ is all Seabs' text says, and… okay that’s not quite what Duncs expected. ‘Good for you’ he texts back, because well, what’s he supposed to say to that? ‘No. I SLEPT with Shawzy’

Your Best Shot

Andy and Brent spend their date night at Top Golf. It gets a little derailed.

The Hawks Cuddle Collection (Gen)

Tonight We Are Victorious

The Hawks cuddling after the win in Florida on November 24th 2018.

A Warm Welcome

Dylan has his first practice in Chicago. But the real cool stuff happens away from the ice.

A Welcome Surprise

Collin hadn't expected the cuddle piles.

Alex Debrincat/Dylan Strome

Not Your Fault

After the game Alex lets Dylan stew.

Brent Seabrook/Andrew Shaw

The Beginning of Forever

Andrew Shaw moves in with Brent Seabrook, falls in love, and accidentally marries him. Not in that order.

Brent Seabrook has a bunch of idiot friends, a husband he married accidentally, and three kids to worry about. Or maybe things are easier than he thinks.

Either way they're stuck together, so they better make it work.

Let’s Take On The World Together

The first Andrew sees of Brent Seabrook is a glimpse of broad shoulders and a sweaty face with a beard. Luckily it's not the last he sees of him.

Take A Chance On Me

It took Andrew all of five minutes while walking from his first lecture to where he was meeting Saader to dig up everything he could find on Brent.

In which Brent is a TA for one of Andrew's courses and they fall in love.

Brent Seabrook/Jeremy Colliton

We’re Breaking All The Rules

Brent and Jeremy have an arrangement. Then Duncs finds out

Carey Price/P.K. Subban

A Bigger Heart I Have Never Seen

No one does Christmas quite like P.K. does

Connor McDavid/Dylan Strome

Christmas Cuddles

Connor and Dylan don't get much time together over Christmas but there's always time for cuddles.

Corey Crawford/Trevor van Riemsdyk

Second Chances

As nice as it is to have so many Ex-Hawks around he already knows, Trevor can’t help but think that it would be easier if he didn’t have the constant reminder of what he doesn’t have anymore.

Duncan Keith/Brent Seabrook

Second Chances

What Dylan and Alex didn't expect when they introduced their dads to each other was that they already knew each other.

What neither Brent, not Duncan expected was to find out that things in their lives might have gone differently.

Duncan Keith/Jeremy Colliton

Let Me Take Care Of You

Jeremy figures out quickly that Duncs does a lot to take care of his teammates. It takes him a bit longer to figure out that Duncs needs to be taken care of, too.

Kyle Dubas/William Nylander

A Deadline Is Not The End At All

William Nylander was without a doubt the worst student Kyle had ever had.

In which Kyle supervises Willy's thesis, Willy doesn't actually show his work before the deadline, and feelings develop.

Leon Draisaitl/Connor McDavid

“Let’s Go”

After Game 5 against the Ducks

One Out Of 80 Million

Connor goes to Germany with his friends, gets lost and finds a handsome stranger

A Boy Worth Fighting For

There's three sensible survival instincts: to flee, to play dead, and to fight. Connor needs three tries to find the right one.

Let Me Worry

Connor denies that his ankle hurts

I Sang About You The Whole Time

There’s a playlist Leon has that he kind of hopes no one will ever find out about.

You Should Come Up For Coffee

Connor asks Leon to come along to dinner with Alex and Dylan. Realisations are had.

The End of Summer

Shocked But Fighting

Connor goes down with a knee injury.

Set during/after the game in Calgary on 7th April 2019

Leon Draisaitl/Milan Lucic/Connor McDavid

Let’s Start A New Tradition

There were lots of things Milan expected when he came to Edmonton. This was not one of them.

Acting Tough

Leon's a little fidgety, playing with the strings of Connor's hoodie, and his voice is soft when he says, "So I think I'll tell my family." "Yeah?" Milan asks. "Yeah."

Michael Latta/Tom Wilson

Christmas Morning

Christmas is not the same without Latts.

Patrick Kane/Jonathan Toews

Gift wrapping and a nutcracker

Patrick’s first reaction to the video of the gift wrapping competition is to laugh.

Saving You, Saving the World

It's the day before Christmas and Patrick gets to save Jonny's ass from a nefarious kidnapping plot. Again. He doesn't know what he did to deserve this.

Le Moose-bouche

Jonny quits hockey, becomes a chef and moves to Paris. Patrick is with him every step of the way.

(Spin off of Let's Take On The World Together but can be read as a standalone.)

Les Misérables

Enjolras/Grantaire

Feast of Love

Grantaire had thought Enjolras would be a grinch, but he's everything but.

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Bruce Banner & Clint Barton

Stages of Grief

When they find Clint he is changed.

Bucky/Steve

A White Christmas

Steve gets Bucky back. A story in three Christmases.

A Hundred Years in the Making

Five times Steve only draws others + 1 time he includes himself.

The Raven Cycle

Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish

What To Gift A Dreamer

Adam wonders what to get Ronan for Christmas

#Assassin's Creed #football rpf #hermitcraft #hermitship #hockey rpf #les mis #mcu #the raven cycle #scummyfic

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kingsandsaints · 4 years

Text

~ Author Meme ~

I claim to be tagged by @ihni ! wasn’t tagged directly but I wanted to do this so here y’all go !

I don’t have a lot of work published so far so I’m going to take some liberties and talk about some WIPs as well

Author Name: KingsAndSaints (formerly WhereTheWildThingsWent but who has the time to type or remember that)

Fandoms you write for: Nowadays it’s all Harringrove but I’ve written SO MUCH that I’ve never posted. Pretty much all of it was RPF, either of youtubers or bands.

Where you post: AO3

Most popular one-shot: The only one-shot I’ve published is Like A Sunburn, so I guess that one. It’s about Billy having chronic pain after the battle of Starcourt and doesn’t even have 1k reads. I’m still glad I wrote it because I gave Billy the same condition as my roommate and writing it was a way for me to imagine what her life is like on a day to day basis. I’ve only told her that I wrote it a few weeks ago and it’s going to be the first piece of my fanfic that she’s ever going to read which will be weird. More so because I’m kind of nervous that I got something wrong, but it will be good to be told so.

Favourite story you wrote: It has to be Definitely Something. I started it trying to write something light and funny for a change but it seems I can’t write anything over 1k without also throwing in some turbulent musings on the human condition. It was really fun to dig into the characters and come up with their family history, wants and needs. And some of the comments I got on that one can still bring me to tears. I’m still really proud that I finished it.

Story you were nervous to post: I have some mpreg stories in my drive that I am nervous to post, present tense. I know a lot of people are put off by mpreg because it tends to feminize male characters, which is fair. However, I think the problem is not that a man having a baby is weird. It’s that pregnancy itself is just insane, regardless of gender or sex. It’s an incredibly intense thing your body goes through and I think the fact that it’s happening to a male character just brings the inherent weirdness to the surface. We’ve just normalized and kinda glamorized pregnancy for women when I think it’s just as weird and beautiful and gross as a man having a baby.

There is so much conflict you can draw from in mpreg. In of the stories I’m writing Billy is intersex, gets pregnant by accident and hates every second of it. For him being a pregnant boy in the 80s is an incredibly traumatizing and dysphoric experience. He just wants to get out of Hawkins, get into college and move on with his life. Meanwhile, Steve is pretty excited about having a child and getting some purpose and direction in his life now that he doesn’t have college to look forward to. The tension between Billy not wanting anything to do with the baby and Steve wanting to keep it while both want to stay together is one I find really interesting to write about.

That’s part of the reason why I ended up writing my thesis about A/B/O. Because it’s weird and kind of uncomfortable but that discomfort is proof that there is something strange and novel going on regarding sex and gendered embodiment. For me, that initial discomfort is the main reason to explore male pregnancy and how it would function on a personal and societal level

How do you choose your titles:

They just come to me. I usually get a few ideas while I’m writing and pick one, but if I don’t have anything, I just chose something from a list I made of phrases that sound nice. In the case of Definitely Something, I had the title before I worked it into the story.

Do you outline: I start out with a collection of scenes that I like. When I feel like I have enough plot material and I want to make a serious effort to finish the story, I’ll do some outlining before try to fill in the gaps, just so I feel like I know where I’m going. I also outline during revision.

Complete: 3 on AO3, 5 if I count old Wattpad fics in.

In Progress: Too many. I tend to abandon stories for new ideas and pick them back up much later. What I’m working on changes from week to week. In the case of Definitely Something, I wrote the first scenes 16 months before I’d finished the final chapter and wrote a bunch in the meantime.

This week I came up with three one-shot ideas, none of which are finished just yet but the fact that they are short is very new for me. All my ideas usually end up being novel-length so it’s nice to get some ideas that I could actually finish within a week’s time. The one I’m closest to finishing is one where Steve doesn’t want Billy to get a tattoo for him, but then Billy remembers he’s a naughty bitch.

I also have my Two Princes AU based on a serial fiction podcast but more on that one later.

Do you accept prompts: no... I don’t have enough faith in my skills as a writer to ask for requests. There are already a bunch of incredibly talented writers in this fandom who can stir up some brilliant one-shots with one or two lines of prompt, but I don’t think I’d be one of them.

Upcoming story you are most excited to write: The Two Princes AU! The fun thing about writing an AU is that I know exactly what’s supposed to happen but you also have a lot of freedom.

The podcast is quite jolly and gets through events fairly fast, but in text, I have the time to really develop the characters, describe their train of thought and add a few additional storylines. Another thing is that in audio they don’t really describe the scenery so I get do add that element as well. Plus, it’s been really fun to study the story and figure out where how I’d cast the characters of Stranger Things into the existing roles.

OH, and making a playlist?? I found this string quartet that does classical covers of pop songs and they made albums of the soundtrack of the first two seasons of ST so you fucking bet I’m gonna have Prince Billiam enter the stage on a string cover of Rock You Like A Hurricane !!!

So yes I’m very excited about this. Feeling pretty confident this will be the next multi-chapter thing I’m going to post. I kind of want to finish it before I start posting so I can pop a chapter out every week and illustrate each chapter.

Tagging: I’m gonna do the same as Ihni and just say if you wanna do this I have hereby tagged you! You have my full permission to indulge in your own writing! Don’t forget to tag me in the post so I can read all about your process!!

#tag game

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coolgirl · 7 years

Text

Fic recs masterpost

ok so i used to have a lot of fics masterposts on my old blog and people keep asking for recs + i wont be able to upddate them or anything anymore so i decided to just move them all to this blog

under the cut: AUS / arkham knight / jaykyle / jayroy / robin!jason / gen / angst fics

*: last added (april 4) // for some reason the links arent working so go to jasontodd.tumblr.com/ficrecs for the links, sorry!

AUS

The Virtue of Revenge | young justice au with jason as red x making his own team with roy, starfire, raven, and others. i love it, even if it has shaky moments and stuff pls give it a chance.

crystal silence creeping down | young justice/lost days au

Flicker from View | another young justice au

Live to Rise | yes. you guessed it. young justice au.

Collide & Convergence | au where post crisis jason goes to the young justice universe

The Changeling Sequence | series where jason meets damian before he went to gotham. The last part is a wip that i doubt will ever get updated again, so uh be careful. read only the first or second part and forget about the third.

The Drag of Fate | au where jason is lady shiva’s son as well. Part of a series, which i also highly recommend but idk if they would be au as well

heavy on the heart | another jason and cass are bio siblings. A+.

Didymous | cass and jason are twins.

repairing the world | i dont know how to explain this series.. its an au and really really good. Jason doesn’t appear in all the pieces.

just go | jayroy, wings au

In the Shadows (of Who We Used to Be) | jayroy, black widow & hawkeye au

The Family (or how Jason Todd was adopted by the Avengers) | marvel crossover

bad boys bad boys (whatcha gonna dooo) ♫ | jason is damian’s batman. iconic fic imo.

Rise (And Try Not to Fall) | star wars au

A Bird in Morning | bruce finds jason when he’s at the hospital after crawling out of his grave

Moment Between | ghost jason & ghost martha and thomas wayne

We’re not in Crime Alley Anymore | au where jason was younger when bruce took him (and he didnt become robin)

Perhaps The World Ends Here | marvel crossover, future jaykyle

Batten Down the Hatches | a few different aus here. young justice + helena wayne

My Brother's Keeper | jason & damian knew each other from before + damian arrives to gotham just for jason

When the Moon Found the Sun | main story is clark/bruce but it’s preetty cute. soulmates au.

Between the Light and the Dark* | damian & jason uuhm i cant remember what this one was about per se bc im reading like 5487 similar fics but yeah

Two Dead Birds | time travel stuff

Red Blood, Blue Blood | jason (and the rest of the batkids) are bruce’s biological kids, yeah i wasnt a big fan of the premise at first either but its gud

Rebirth | talia & jason, mind the warnings

you belong among the wildflowers | kate n renee adopt jason instead of bruce

We're the warriors of tomorrow | Cass, Jason and Damian meet while with the League of Shadows

Can You Hear Me? | ghost jason

to death's other kingdom I will not go | bruce makes it on time au

The Ties That Bind | The pit restores Jason's body but not his mind, Ra's makes him one of his assassins and Talia adopts him as her own.

death’s outlet song of life* | the gordons find jason before the events of lost days

reflections on shattered mirrors.* | talia & jason stuff

Come Alive* | young justice s3 based

A Path Upon The Ground* | au from lost days, eddie and jason meet again

ARKHAM VERSE

If He Had Come & the sequel Desiderium | au where bruce rescued jason before he could become the arkham knight.

the roads we know

this gun needs no bullets

JASON & BRUCE CENTRIC (not romantic)

Quack | this one is so crackish but so so cute i love it, robin jason

If He Had Come & sequel Desiderium | arkham knight verse and its so good and has a lot of bruce & jason feels

Neverland / Keep Lying To Me | deaged/ little jason from another universe.. sad and cute

Icarus and Bubble Gum | fluff, robin jason

Knock On Death’s Door | bit of both but not so so so angst, red hood jason

dead and dying things | au

In Memoriam | angst, trying to fix their relationship, red hood jason

If the Fates Allow | angst, red hood jason

The D-Word | fluff kind of.. red hood jason

This Place We Built With Grace and Guilt | angst angst angst, red hood jason

I Love You | robin jason, fluff

Wayward Birds | fluff and angst, robin jason

yesterday’s gone, yeah it went away (i’ve been lost but i’m here today) | another trying to fix their relationship fic, its cute and sad

We’re not in Crime Alley Anymore | au where jason was younger when bruce took him (and he didnt become robin)

Little Absences | sad, robin & red hood

Schrödinger's Honest Man | sad, drugs tw, absolute fave

White Christmas | bruce & robin!jason

Frozen History | de-age

Stargazer | jason n bruce patching their relationship.. its iconic

Unconventional Family Reunions | bvs setting

Prompt: Trapped | mind the warnings

Safe In My Arms

The Failures of Reverse Engineering | ghhm not really bruce & jason maybe?

to death's other kingdom I will not go | bruce saves jason au

points of impact | glass case get fucked

is it my fault? (we've been missing each other)*

waiting for you. *

The Little Things*

World's Finest* | my uwus my uwus have fallen everywhere

JAYKYLE (all iconic)

In Which Kyle Confesses The Same Thing Six Times

milk and honey

Batman vs Space Bureaucracy

deadlock

attention to detail

tempest in a teapot

violet tendencies

no love, no glory (no hero in his skies)

keep the door open for me

waffles and war

The Art of Subtlety (jason lives au)

Perhaps The World Ends Here | marvel crossover, future jaykyle

Riding in Batcars with Boys

boy, you fill my lungs with sweetness

no chance, no way, i won't say it (no, no)

a change in the atmosphere

invitation to commitment

Overexposed

i deserve that, don't i, some sort of blazing love that i can live with

i won't say

The water is always warmest at dawn

JAYROY (all iconic too)

sleepless

Countdown

just go (wings au)

Unspoken

(for thy love is) better than wine (E)

Rooftops

Dick Wolf is a Really Funny Name

A headache isn’t always a bad thing

sad eyes, bad guys, mouth full of white lies [high school au]

kairosclerosis

The Night They Met

march down an empty street (like a ship into the storm) *

Archange de la mort (rallume ton flambeau) * | hic warning lol

this time, the loser wins | steph & jason centric though

So Baby Come Light Me Up *

Little Talks *

All the light is never ending, much like you and I; *

Don't let me go, for I feel I may fall * | soulmates au

Something Reckless *

OTHERS

how to make a home. * | some eddie/jason if you squint, rose/eddie/jason team up

This Car Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us* | could be read as jayconnor :3

Robin/young!Jason

The Art of Subtlety | jason lives au, jaykyle

Little Absences | sad, robin & red hood

I Love You | robin jason, fluff

Wayward Birds | fluff and angst, robin jason

Icarus and Bubble Gum | fluff, robin jason

Quack | this one is so crackish but so so cute i love it, robin jason

we were not tragedies | jason & babs, read warnings

Heavy Home | gen, alfred & jason

Good News (No One Mourns the Wicked) | Jason & steph & damian. harold they’re dead (kinda robin!jason??)

Love Yourself (So No One Has To) | good amazing au with some selina & jason (not really.. robin but it starts as robin!jason i guess?)

Moment Between | ghost jason & ghost martha and thomas wayne

We’re not in Crime Alley Anymore | au where jason was younger when bruce took him (and he didnt become robin)

Tired & Laundry | kinda au, read tw!

Smoke | jason & jim gordon

White Christmas | bruce & robin!jason

is it my fault? (we've been missing each other)* | mix of present and past jason

Sidekick*

waiting for you.* | technically baby jason

The Little Things*

World's Finest* | oh this one.. my uwus

GEN

hold on to what we are, hold on to your heart | gen, Barbara & Jason friendship. Some dinahbabs & jayroy

gotta give the boy points | gen, absolute fave

Strangers in Nothing but Name | marvel crossover, side steve/bucky

If He Had Come | Desiderium | Arkham Verse, gen

I can’t think up a good name for this | young justice verse, gen apart from canon relationships

A Better Thesis | gen, p short but i loved it

The F-Word | gen, batboys being batboys

until i’m in my grave | gen, wip

Robins United | gen, batkids bonding, except for cass, thats my only complaint

Free of Dogma | gen, canon divergence, marvel crossover w Jason & Bucky

bad boys bad boys (whatcha gonna dooo) ♫ | au where damian is jasons robin and not dick’s, obviously damian & jason brotp.

Heavy Home | gen, alfred & jason

In the Shadow of Two Gunmen | gen, Marvel crossover

Flicker from View | side Barbara/Dick, young justice verse

I Love You | gen, Bruce & Jason

how to hide a stray resurrected superhero from your parents/parental figure | au, jason & tim friendship kinda

One For The Road | Jason/Roy/Koriand’r but its SO cute

Baby, It’s Cold Outside | gen, Dick & Jason

The (Family) Doctor’s Appointment | gen, batboys bonding

The Family (or how Jason Todd was adopted by the Avengers) | marvel crossover, gen

Reason | wip, gen, canon divergence

Soliloquy | gen, tim & Jason brotp, and really cute batfam moments

Red As The Shadow Of Death | gen, young justice/under the red hood verse

Give Yourself a Chance | gen, duke & Jason & leslie brotpish

homecoming | outlaws brotp fic, could be considered shippy if you want to

And I Said What About Breakfast at Tiffany’s | jason & steph

Of Bats and the Forsaken | jason & all the batkids, side steph/cass and jay/roy if you squint

this is a long drive (for three robins who don’t agree on much) | no capes au, steph & jason & damian, background tim/tam

The Dying of the Light | marvel crossover, bucky & jason, canon divergence

Cat | selina & jason, catlad au

Killing for Love | cass & jason, au where jason was lady shivas son

Keep Lying To Me | de-aged au, just heartbreaking imo, cursed fic

The Social Habits of Robin | gen, batboys. Where_is_cass.jpg tho

Steph and Jay’s Excellent Adventures | series, Steph & Jason

Neverland | jason & batkids, young!jay travels to the future. sad asad sad

on a thin chain of moments and something like faith | gen, jason & cass & steph mostly. really good

Good News (No One Mourns the Wicked) | Jason & steph & damian. harold they’re dead

In a Parallel Life | batboys focused, it has amazing dialogue, dynamics, and characterization. It’s only missing Cass and the rest of the girls.

repairing the world | series, not everything is about the batfam.

Born to Run (Born to Rise) | Jason & Talia having a mother/son relationship reblog if you agree

Live to Rise | it updated again p recently so yay! young justice verse

To Save a Dying City | jason + other people

Let’s Have Some Fun This Beat Is Sick | mostly damian centric

Movie Night: The Mummy | read trigger warnings, batboys

The Trading Chain | not jason centric, but it has cass being older than jason and calling him “little brother” so noice

we sure know how to run free | jason & cass

Yesterday’s Voices | bruce loses his memory au

Nests and Cages series | read trigger warnings

Roots | barbara centric, really good plot and characterization

Love Yourself (So No One Has To) | good amazing au with selina & jason

Retrograde Motion | de aged jason au

Provenance | mostly roy centric, bruce fucks oliver’s life for what he did to roy. iconic

Schrödinger's Honest Man | sad, drugs tw, absolute fave

Batten Down the Hatches | a few different aus here. young justice + helena wayne

My Brother's Keeper | jason & damian knew each other from before + damian arrives to gotham just for jason

White Christmas | bruce & robin!jason

until i'm in my grave v2 | this one is already mentioned in this post BUUUT the writer started rewriting it so!

Frozen History | de-age

Stargazer | jason n bruce patching their relationship.. its iconic

show me yesterday, for i can’t find today | time travel au

Warm Enough | alfred & jay fluff

Parallels | mia & jason team up

Legacy | reverse robins, not jason centric but hes there alright.. i think.. i cant remember :D

What are the words I'm forbidden to say?* | damian & jay fluff

Cracked Foundation| jason n damian

Cat's Cradle | more jason n damian

spaces in between | damian & jason again

When the lights go out | damian & jason, theres a pattern here

in my head, i do everything right | some jason & steph

is it my fault? (we've been missing each other)* | past & future jason

life, if well lived* | jason travels back in time and meets martha & thomas wayne

In Charge * | babie jason

Pyrrhic victory* | jason & damian stuff

Twists and Turns* | more jason & damian bonding

Of Brothers and Batcows* | guess what.. yes! more jason & damian

This Car Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us* | jason & connor.. say no more!

First Gear* | back to jason & damian please read this.. damian tries to teach jason to drive

changing, falling, fading (please watch over me)* | jason bonds with damian & steph

ANGST

Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death [read the trigger warnings!!]

in the repairing the world series there are a lot of fics dealing with jason, tho Warm Enough ugh not all are centered around him. I would say read Escalation | Coup de Grâce | Interlude for the rh!jason arc, and Tired & Laundry for robin!jason. [also read trigger warnings]

Countdown | jason/roy]

those six days [trigger warnings again!!!]

Call | angst

the tune without the words | kind of character study from jim gordon’s pov

Unspoken | jason/roy, really angsty if you remember how red hood arsenal ended

If He Had Come & Desiderium | arkham knight verse, read trigger warnings!

Reason | on hiatus :/

hold on to what we are, hold on to your heart | this is my favorite ever.. read trigger warnings

Heavy Home | alfred & jason

until i’m in my grave [trigger warnings!]

Keeping Broken Pieces Together

Monsters | marvel crossover

gotta give the boy points | this one please!!!! another fav. read trigger warnings

The weight of it [trigger warnings!]

Live to Rise | young justice verse

Neverland | THIS ONE IS PURE ANGST!!! please its so sad..

Keep Lying To Me | this one has some angsty scenes too im sad emoji

hangman is coming down from the gallows | some angst

Movie Night: The Mummy | read trigger warnings, batboys

Love Yourself (So No One Has To)

All in the Blood [read trigger warnings]

Little Absences

Stargazer | jason n bruce patching their relationship.. its iconic

Rebirth * | mind the warnings and its really. sad.

The Failures of Reverse Engineering *

Eternal Soliloquy * | sad sad

throw me a lifeline (I might even catch it) *

changing, falling, fading (please watch over me) * | jason & steph & dami angst

#dc: fic #i'm posting from phone so if its fucked.. that's why #if the read more doesn't work i'll fix it tomorrow

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amorremanet · 7 years

Text

“what am i writing” meme

Okay, so, @bizeke tagged me in a, “what are you writing right now” meme, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I wanted to answer it because, for once in my life, I don’t have a huge pile of WIPs. Like, I’m deliberately trying to rein myself in and refrain from letting the rabid plot-bunnies have their way with my brain to the point that I end up getting nothing done because I get overwhelmed by how many possibilities there are and how many ideas I have.

Let me tell you what: as a Ne-dom (ENTP), this is one of the worst punishments that I could ever imagine and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, like, ever.

But I’m actually trying to stick to it, because it’s in the name of trying to focus on and do right by the project that is my main Thing right now, in basically all areas of life. Unfortunately for my desire for instant gratification, it’s going to be long. I mean, it’s a novel, so that’s part of the deal and one just has to suck it up and live with that, or just never write novels unless you can crank them out at a Stephen King-esque pace. Unfortunately for how much I like the community (and validation!) that comes built in with writing fan-things, it’s also original fic (which is also scary as fuck, but hey).

So, to get this part out of the way first: the “as yet untitled because I suck and titles are hard fml” project is a novel. It’s a superhero story with LGBTQ protags who are also largely neurodivergent, mentally ill, and/or otherwise disabled. The main story concerns a ragtag bunch of misfits — some of them super-powered mutants and some not — who come together in a new team and in just trying to do some good in the world for various reasons (and working together because they all realize that they can’t actually do that much on their own), they stumble into a bigger plot and wind up pitting themselves against a half-shadowy cabal of big deal neo-fascist supervillains (some mutants, and some not, though in their case, the non-mutants are generally treated like pets, rather than people and full team members).

ngl, the three biggest causes for this project were:

1. I needed a new project for my thesis because fuck this shit, I don’t wanna be in grad school anymore, and after having my project jerked around by practically everyone in my department at one point or another, the fanfic thing I settled on wasn’t working and I am really well and truly beyond fucking sick of grad school;

2. I had this one character in particular — the oft-mentioned mutant disaster, Sebastian — who I initially drew up for this game that my Sunday night tabletop group was playing last summer. The idea of there being mutant superheroes was similar, but Double Cross’s system is heavily inspired by the Parasite Eve series of video games, with a little bit from the novel that inspired them (by which I mean that the rule-book is pretty explicit about it; sure, they build on the world in their own ways to give players more options for their characters, and bring in some other influences, but they don’t hide that their primary source of inspiration is Parasite Eve).

Anyway, the Double Cross system relies a lot on character-driven drama and works it into the gameplay (one example is the “Lois” system, where you make up NPCs who help keep your character tethered to their sense of humanity, so they won’t get completely taken over by the shiny super-mitochondria that have gotten inside them and could make them turn into a monster). Additionally, I’ve been playing with my GM, Jake, since we were in high school, and I know that he likes having as much stuff to use against the characters as possible. I also know that it makes games with him more fun because he gets better ideas that way

(which is also why I knew damn well that the short, historical setting horror thing we did in January and February was going to be short, but still gave him a ten-page backstory for my French Jesuit priest that I could’ve backed up with sources for, “yes, this was actually a Thing in early to mid-17th century Paris” or, “yes, this was part of the process of becoming a Jesuit in that time period” had he asked for them)

Which, for Sebastian, meant that I started writing with the intent of it being three things

a brief apology note to Dr. Maeda (a scientist Jake borrowed from Parasite Eve because he’s a really fun character, whom Seb hadn’t really had an altercation with? But with his self-deprecating humor that almost no one else finds funny, Seb had accidentally made Dr. Maeda think that he’d offended him, and he wanted to apologize for that);

one letter to his older brother Max that would’ve been written while Seb was in rehab (which, in an idea that I straight up lifted from Augusten Burroughs’s memoir, Dry, had the prompt, “write to someone close to you and express your feelings about them and your relationship” and it had a lot of instances where Seb quoted something from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and somehow, whether fairly on himself or not, connected it to his and Max’s situation, in which he cast himself as a fuck-up on the level of Bosie Douglas. It also had a lot of snarky footnotes);

and one that he would’ve written to Max after the party’s first big adventure together (the major TL;DR point of which was, “ahahahaha, I was trying so hard to get my life together but oh no, shit, I fucked up and everything is terrible, you were right and I was wrong and now I can’t give you all the details of why you were right because the FBI says a lot of it’s classified but you were right and I fucked up and oh my god why” — just… with a lot of tangents and backstory and yet more snarky footnotes)

—but because I’m me, I quickly lost control of that idea.

I figured out the entire timeline of major events (largely but not entirely by hand, and in a few places, there is arguably too much detail, like how I know all of the classes that Seb took in undergrad, where it all fit into his substance abuse history, and exactly how that exacerbated his already Not Good mental health)

I did a lot of writing and a lot more revising and then more writing and then some research — like sketching out a list of TV Tropes that applied to Seb and his backstory, and by, “sketching” I mean that I listed them, and in most cases, I wrote up explanations for why he deserved the tropes or how I was trying to play with them

some of which were fairly brief (e.g., the explanation for his exact brand of being a Stepford Smiler is only 185 words, most of them actually being about how he made it to nearly 30 without having anyone suggest that he might be living with depression)

while others were kinda not (like, the 2,400-word explanation of why he got, “Angst, What Angst?” and “Conditioned to Accept Horror” on his list, which got listed together because they were part of the same larger problem and helped to fuel each other)

I went through multiple versions of all of those letters except the first one (and, in the case of the second, even made the drafts full-on “canon” things in their own right, documenting Seb’s ongoing attempts at paring a draft down enough to share in group therapy, because that was part of the in-universe conceit about why he was writing to Max in the first place)

I added other letters still (like, one to Pete that Seb was writing in rehab, with the in-universe prompt, “list 99 problems that you have that don’t have anything to do with your brother or his wife, because seriously? you’ve been going on about him so much, it’s starting to feel like you’re talking about shit with him in order to get out of talking about anything else in your life”; and one letter to Max that Seb wrote before his first overdose, which would have jossed his, “oh yeah, totally an accident, can I go back to class on Monday please” lie because it was explicitly a suicide note)

—and all up, by the time Jake decided that he was having trouble bringing things together into a larger game after the first adventure, I’d written about one order of words

”Order” here meaning, “a unit of word length measurement equivalent to the length of Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix, i.e. 257,045 words”

—which I exceeded somewhat but not by enough to make too big a difference, not least since most of these drafts will not be making an appearance in the novel itself.

So, I was like, “Well, fuck. I did all of that and we’re not even going to keep playing that game? ……Screw this, I didn’t do all that work for fuck-all nothing, I’ve gotta find something else to do with Seb and his story”

This first necessitated going back to the drawing board, scrapping a lot of the stuff that was directly related to Parasite Eve or Double Cross, or finding a new way to reconfigure it so that it wasn’t just me lifting shit from either of them

Because I’m me, that led to more and more ideas coming up, which in turn pretty much guaranteed that…… okay, yes, Sebastian got to be a POV character first, because in all due fairness, he was here first and the story wouldn’t exist without him…… but he’s not quite, “the main character” in the same way that, say, Harry Potter is (nor would he really want to be)

And TL;DR: this whole thing started because I wanted to help my GM make my character suffer, only for him to drop the game, after which I didn’t want all the work I did to go to waste and be totally meaningless, so hey

and 3. ……Well, I mean. I had a lot of ideas that I kept trying to turn into fanficcy things, but at a certain point, I just had to admit that they would have gotten into, “unless you can show why this is a legit interpretation or development for these characters, it’s going to be OOC” territory

and after enough rounds of this, I gave up and went, “Okay, fuck it, FINE. Rather than try to shoehorn any of my pre-extant fictional faves into these ideas that they do not actually fit into, only for the sake of writing them as fic and getting more or less immediate Validation, I’m gonna go write my own story! With mutants! And canon LGBTQ characters! And canon neurodiversity! Because FUCK IT, that’s why!”

I guess that one could say that I finally hit, “fuck it.”

In universe, the mutant thing isn’t being treated as an oppression allegory in its own right (I say, definitely looking pointedly at the X-Men, but not exclusively at them, because in fairness, they are so not the only guilty parties here), and the issue of metahuman licensing isn’t being used as a metaphor for any example of governments illicitly keeping tabs on oppressed or marginalized people.

Like, there are still major flaws in the system and how it’s enacted on people because it’s the U.S. government, but the entire thing is treated more like taking driver’s ed and going to the DMV because the fact of the matter is that we are talking about people who have shit like super-strength, telepathy, and heat vision, and it’s fair for other citizens to want to make sure that they can control their powers, and that they know and agree to abide by certain laws about how they can and can’t use them

(e.g., yes, it is considered rape if you telepathically coerce someone into sex. Exactly what charges you’ll face vary from state to state, but it’s still rape, and unless there are some seriously extenuating circumstances — like, say, if you have two teenage telepathic mutants who didn’t know that they were mutants and thus couldn’t control their powers, so both of them have broken the law here, but unless there was some other kind of force or coercion involved, neither can be held criminally responsible — you will be prosecuted if you get caught.

Whether or not you get caught is another issue entirely, and it’s a huge mess for a lot of reasons, but in theory, this is how the law works.)

The novel I’m working on now is also going to be the first in a series of four or five — give or take “Dunk and Egg”-esque tie-in stories, mostly because I’m still a Ne-dom and, even without all the world-building being set in stone at present, I’m already attached to and intrigued by several characters and parts of my world that aren’t part of the “main” storyline

(which is, itself, already an ensemble cast production, just with focal/POV characters for each installment because otherwise, I would probably pull a GRRM, get overloaded by all of the different POVs and trying to balance them effectively, and then either die or be photographed running around in a giant hamster ball because I’m trying to run away from my problems that I created all by myself)…

…but also partly because it is annoyingly easier to find potential “legit” places to publish shorter works and get yourself “legitimately” established by putting out some of those first.

You lot get three guesses each as to why I find this annoying, the first two don’t count, and if you guess literally anything but some variation on, “But, Kassie! You’re in the exact same TL;DR club as GRRM! One of your more popular TW fics was a 23k vaguely stream of consciousness beast in which you committed the same literary sin that you bag on Marcel Proust about all the time, because almost nothing actually happened”?

……then I probably love you for having such faith in me, but you have way too much faith in me because… yeah, no. That’s pretty much it. The “legitimate” “grown-up” publishing world’s fondness for short stories annoys me entirely because I don’t like being brief, or cutting things out, or so on and so forth.

Shit, I’m having enough trouble in Pages right now today, because I decided that this one beat in one scene of the novel was getting too far into territory that is actually meant for the chapter right after it, so I’m trying to figure out where to cut it, so I can then relocate the dialogue to where it makes more sense. Trying to be succinct…… is not one of my strong suits, period.

To be fair? The novel… well. It wouldn’t be a Thing without my years in fandom and my immersion in fan culture. It just would not be possible without that part of my background.

On one hand, that’s due to how many ideas I wouldn’t have been exposed to without fandom discussing them in the different ways that we have, and how many things I wound up reading or watching because I saw that other people were enjoying them and I wanted to know what was up, and then all the criticism that I saw from fans of said things about issues of how stories and media are shaped by the sociopolitical structures that content creators live with

And on the other hand, it’s because my story is a literary pastiche that is not entirely a deconstruction of the genre, but rather a recombination of different tropes and pieces of the superhero genre, plus pieces from other genres because fuck the idea that genres can or should be strictly delineated and kept separate from each other at all times that’s why, where I acknowledge that there is little room to actually do anything that is “entirely new” — both in the sense that we’re all influenced, both consciously and not, by everything around us, so you can make the far-end argument that nothing is “purely” or “entirely new,” since that would require things to be made in a vacuum, and in the sense that… well. I mean.

Come on, I’m working in an established genre that has had several different voices and perspectives chime into it in various fashions since it first got started with the original Superman comics in 1938 (and even that is arguably not the start, since the origins of the genre go waaaay the fuck back, and almost no one writing about the genre critically likes to let it just be its own thing without bringing up precedents like Gilgamesh, Heracles, and the Scarlet Pimpernel), and even if I weren’t also bringing in things from outside the superhero genre, I would have no significant chance of doing something that hasn’t already been done at some point, by somebody, somewhere.

Moreover, uh. I get why the Ang Lee Hulk isn’t everyone’s taste, I do. It’s not my favorite anything but any means, but I enjoy parts of it. But that being said, there are, in the superhero genre, certain expectations that certain tropes and story or character elements will appear in some fashion, even if they’re being brutally deconstructed, and Ang Lee tried his best to weasel out of a lot of them because he didn’t want his movie to have the, “stigma” of being, “just a superhero movie.”

Which is a shame, because a lot of his ideas about how he wanted to interpret Bruce Banner as a character, interpret the dynamic between Bruce and the Hulk, and so on? Those actually could’ve been really fun…… but he didn’t want to make, “a superhero movie,” so he ignored the value of all the shit that he should’ve been using to actualize these ideas on the screen, and he had to essentially paste that stuff on like, “Fine, here’s your superhero bullshit, you fucking comic book nerds”

Which all sort of adds up to, “I mean, I’m trying to challenge or play with some of these genre staples — and some of the more optional ones, I’m doing away with because they’re common but not necessary and I think they’re not part of the stories I want to tell, or they’re very particular to certain mediums that are not the one I’m working in — but…… fuck, man, it’s still a superhero story. It’s not like you can’t tell superhero-influenced stories without these things, but if you’re telling a flat-out superhero story, then…… yeah, you kinda do need to at least acknowledge them, and if you don’t have some kind of appreciation for the genre, then why the fuck are you working in it”

(And this is a brief aside to point out that Ang Lee isn’t the only content creator who’s been called a genius and has been guilty of going all like, “fuck superhero stories, they’re just pointless stupid trashy kid stuff for babies, lmao” while also being involved in working on one.

The list is probably even longer than I know, but I feel especially obligated to point out that Heath Ledger had nothing but disdain for the entire superhero genre before playing the Joker in TDK, literally only agreed to do that because Christopher Nolan was involved and Batman Begins had been noticeably “higher-quality” by most people’s standards than the Joel Schumacher Batman movies and the then-extant X-Men movies, and really only seemed to have come around about the quality of certain stories that he read as character prep — like The Killing Joke, The Man Who Laughs, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

—and frankly, he and Nolan both seem(ed) to see those stories [plus a handful of others, in Nolan’s case] as special exceptions were, “not like all the rest of the genre,” rather than seeing them as indications of what the entire genre can be capable of.

Which is not to say that I acknowledge the validity of any other non-Cesar Romero live-action Joker, because unless someone really wows me or they come up with an idea that Mark Hamill could do live-action and managed to talk him into it, that’s probably not going to happen, and both Nicholson and Leto can eat me because they were just awful as the Clown Prince of Crime. Awful in different ways, admittedly, but still. Just. AWFUL. Absolutely abysmal.

It’s also not to say that the superhero genre is entirely awesome, since… lmao, Sturgeon’s Law, people. 90% of everything is probably some kind of bullshit. It can be entertaining bullshit, sure, but it’s probably still some kind of bullshit.

What I am trying to say, though, is that the entire genre is not special for having a lot of bullshit in it, because frankly, EVERY GENRE has mostly a lot of bullshit in it, so holding the superhero genre to some special double standard is ridiculous and elitist, and no, we shouldn’t look at things like Watchmen, A Serious House on Serious Earth, or anything else you might want to put on a, “special exceptions” list as being separate from the genre that spawned them.

They’re superhero stories. Barring some examples like Watchmen that have characters that were new when they first came out, these stories literally have characters like Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman running around, having adventures and fighting bad guys. Being of an allegedly, “higher quality” than any random issue you pick off the rack on Wednesday does not mean that they aren’t superhero stories

—and I realize that most of the people reading this already probably kind of feel the same about the elitist nonsense that goes on regarding pretty much every example of genre fiction, except for like big-budget sci-fi and fantasy that either sticks to very conventional models, and/or is written and/or directed by someone we might call an Auteur™, like Ridley Scott, James Cameron, or Guillermo del Toro, or like GRRM would be called if he made movies

……but this tendency grinds my gears anyway because the fuck what even, people. All of the genre fiction that gets bagged on like this has an established history with enough examples to prove that they are is just as widely varied in content and “quality” as yet another movie about a cis white dude and a cis white lady who want to be together but they can’t because of Reasons Or Something, wow such innovation, very forbidden, etc. etc. obviously NO ONE has EVER told a story like this before in the entire history of human storytelling, ha ha ha, GAG)

But anyway, as I was saying. Pastiche or something.

Still, it’s not a deconstruction properly because as much as I love and am creatively indebted to some of them — with Watchmen on the, “it has problems but I overall love it even if I don’t always agree with what Alan and Dave had to say or how they said it” side, The Dark Knight Returns on the, “Frank Miller can go step on a rusty nail and get tetanus, what a douchebag” side,

Deadpool in general on the, “I mean, I respect that you have a vision of what kind of fourth wall-breaking self-aware hijinks you want to get up to, and I enjoy it sometimes, but on one hand? For all I don’t agree with everything that’s said in Wisecrack’s “Philosophy of Deadpool” video, I do think it’s fair to say that you guys often have a lot in common with hipsters, and that you have the potential to do cool shit like Cervantes did Don Quixote, but that you often don’t go as far as you could with it, which can sometimes be kinda disheartening. More importantly, though, your vision is cool and has a place at the table too, but it’s not MY vision, so you do your thing and I’m gonna do mine and if I ever do get published, I hope I can meet Gail Simone because I would just die” side

and several others falling at various points of somewhere in the middle and shit — uhhh? It’s just??? Like?

I just… don’t… really… want to write a massive deconstruction?

I mean. I enjoy reading some of them (or there are others like TDKReturns, where it’s less that I enjoy them and more that they’re important to the genre’s history but I hate them and the only reason I haven’t literally set fire to my copy of that book is that…… shit, man, that thing was expensive, and if I set it on fire, I’d have to either buy a new one or get a .cbr file for free, which would be illegal and I obviously do not condone it, nope, not at all, nudge wink ssssh)…

and I won’t deny that they’ve influenced how I approach the genre as both a reader and as a creator (I mean, ffs, I have a minor character who was literally inspired by a mix of Rorschach and my desire to petulantly piss off every fucking dudebro fanboy who reads Watchmen and doesn’t get that Rorschach is supposed to be seen as completely reprehensible. Yes, he’s a different kind of reprehensible from Eddie Blake and Adrian Veidt, but all of them are still pretty reprehensible, that’s kind of the fucking point. The only so-called “heroes” in Watchmen who accomplish anything of major historical significance are either completely reprehensible, or they’re Doctor Manhattan and so far removed from their former sense of humanity that they might as well be on a different existential plane entirely)

……but, for all I enjoy deconstructions, I don’t want to write one, personally.

And anyway, the original point to all of this is that my story wouldn’t exist as it does without fandom because, on one hand, I got exposed to pretty much all of this through/because of fandom, or while I was in fandom; and on the other, the way that fandom relies so much on envisioning new possibilities for characters and stories, and combining seemingly disparate elements into new shapes, and mashing up tropes and ideas that don’t seem to go together but finding a way to make it work…… like?

That’s shaped me so much as a writer, even outside of fandom, that I don’t know where to begin finding examples of it in action, because it’s just everywhere in my writing tbh. And I don’t think that it makes anything I’m doing, “new” as such, because I’m probably overly aware of what most of my different influences are and how they’ve influenced me in which ways and so on…… but I don’t need or want to completely reinvent the wheel, I just want to have fun making up my stories and maybe bringing in something that other people enjoy and can read without feeling like their time was wasted, y’know?

…also, I will totally admit to certain fandom mainstay tropes and idioms having different degrees of influence on my story, and to deliberately trying to work in phrases like, “to toe out of one’s shoes” that are almost exclusively found in fanfiction because…… uh, I know where I came from, and while I might have various problems with where I came from on a pretty much constant basis, I still love and respect where I came from, so why not use some of our idioms and popular tropes?

………also? I’m doing it because I want to, that’s why.

Just like how there was no actual NEED, as such, for me to make Yael and Elizabeth a deliberate middle-finger to Marvel and their penchant for baiting Cherik, and then screaming, “OH WAIT NOOOOOPE, NO HOMO, DON’T LET’S BE SILLY, CHILLAX YOU STUPID FANGIRLS!!!!” — like I could’ve had them in the story and the world without doing that…

…but I wanted to do that, so I’m gonna do that, and since I’m not violating any copyright or intellectual property laws because what I’m doing doesn’t rip off anything more than general concepts that Marvel has no exclusive or protected ownership of, and even if it did, what I’m doing would count as a commentary or satire and be protected by the First Amendment and the US Supreme Court, therefore no one can do shit about shit to stop me from having my two badass older lady lesbians who are, in fact, married and are co-headmistresses of their school for the exceptionally gifted. Nah nah nah nah nah nah, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

(……………I am a serious adult writer who takes her writing seriously. …also, I’m sorry, and I’m done now, and thank you for reading if you have, and if you got to this finishing point, please go help yourself to like…… a cookie. Or five. Or idk, any kind of treat you want, I don’t know you and I’m not your boss, so I can’t guess what your idea of a treat is much less tell you what to do. Okay, I’m done now, bye)

ETA: ……oh, and I guess that I tag whoever wants to do this themself, because I just spent a few hours writing it and I don’t wanna look at it anymore, not even to pass the meme on, so…… heeeey, free invite, you can do a meme just because you want to and then blame me

#bizeke #ella tag #memes for ts #mine: writing #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #opinions for ts #i wouldn't say that i'm being exactly critical of marvel or dc or anything that i mention by name in this #but i'm not being NOT-critical either bc i'm talking about how they all influenced my approach to the superhero genre & writing in it #and since i perpetually have some kind of criticism or some kind of problem with pretty much everything……… well.#things that vaguely resemble criticism do kinda tend to come up a bit #……also i yell for a while about the elitist bullshit that most genre fiction is subjected to and how much i hate it #because it's always a good time to hate elitist bullshit

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