#I thought about this a lot when I was writing dielectric

[jessepinwheel]

there’s a thing I think about sometimes when I’m writing that I call ‘the rabies condition’

by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.

every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like ‘don’t take this if you’re allergic to it’ or ‘if you’re pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor’ or ‘don’t give to children below age 6′ or something, but not the rabies vaccine. if you’ve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccine--you can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you don’t, you’re 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)

which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been ‘exposed to rabies’, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesn’t make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know you’re deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but it’s still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc

and then, after your character’s prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.

#I thought about this a lot when I was writing dielectric #runner too come to think of it #I write about this kind of thing a lot #because it's about being pushed to the absolute limits #to the point where you can't even ask what you're willing to do #you don't have a choice in the matter you just have to live with it #when you have exactly one goal #you can basically do anything #so long as you don't care about what happens afterwards #or what the price might be #it's a scary thing to think about

[cosmosogler]

today i got up soooort of on time. then i got distracted by the internet!!! so i was 2 minutes late for class. the air was chilly today though so the bike ride over to campus was gucci. perfect weather.

i took furious notes in both classical and quantum. classical today was “graded” by a professor who left the comments portion of the lecture very open-ended. we weren’t really sure what to say. i ended up kind of dominating the conversation even though i didn’t really want to.

gotta keep my trap shut!

after that we went to get spaghetti. i missed it, even though we only skipped one week. suzanne asked why i talk to my parents. that got me down a pretty dark lane of conversation. i tried to focus on how i wish i had a closer relationship with my siblings... but i’m still so angry. all the time.

eventually harrison said something like “we need to pick a different awkward topic before my day gets ruined.” 

and i said “OH. i’m sorry my life ruins your day.” 

i was mostly joking. he apologized but we did change the topic to “awkward topics.” 

then i went to group therapy. i had to fill out a survey beforehand. i thought about how i was feeling the last week or two. i only really started feeling like i had any energy at all yesterday-ish. so i kept my answers pretty low mood-wise. 

i only consciously lied on one of the questions because i wasn’t sure what the required response would be. and it wasn’t a big lie. i’m not really at “high risk” of killing myself. maybe 5%. right now at least i feel ok. the past week collectively though, i wasn’t feeling too hot. 

group therapy was... actually good? we tried to focus and dwell on some conversation topics even though most of us are usually lightning-fast about responding. i ended up talking quite a bit. they seemed worried. they also seemed pretty upset about the department thing, where the professors/coordinators lie about how your classmates are doing to try to push you to work harder.

one thing the group leader said though is “how can we help you?” 

i told her i’d get back to her on that. i don’t really know. i said hearing about their self care routines and comparing ideas helps. i have made adjustments to my routine over the last two months. pretty drastic ones. i haven’t yet been able to re-cram in time to meditate before bed but the podcast helps me doze off at least. 

i’ve been drinking more tea too and i think that keeps my stomach a little more settled. caffeine free so i can drink it with dinner.

i need to think a little more about what other people can do to help me. i don’t really have any hope of actually being helped any more. i still get let down all the time by the people who are supposed to be in charge. but like... you only get out of group therapy what you put in. if i can find a specific goal to achieve that these guys can help me get to, and how to get them to get me there, that’d be great! but i also might not have Problems if i am able to get that far? i mean, like, you gotta be pretty on top of things to know exactly what you need help with and what that help needs to look like.

after that i went to e&m. something about that classroom really throws me off, because in the last ten minutes of class my eyes started hurting AGAIN. like a cramp, almost? this doesn’t really happen anywhere else. reading for too long i just get a headache and then i grind my teeth which makes the headache worse. i tried some eye exercises and that helped for a few minutes but by then i was way behind and i was just tired. 

the frustration builds up. the professor will make a step that doesn’t make any sense and not explain it. someone will ask a question and he won’t explain it still because he thought the question was dumber than it actually was. he goes too fast. just little things, but millions of them for 50 minutes straight. and then trying to focus on the board hurts. maybe his handwriting is too small and it strains my eyes? maybe i get frustrated because he stands directly in front of his writing and his lecture is incomprehensible and the anger and anxiety make my muscles tense up which hurts my eyes? i dunno.

after class i checked my email and then biked back over to the group therapy building. but this time i went to the third floor. the person i was having a meeting with was like 10 minutes late even though i got there 5 minutes before my appointment. i took the time to update pokemon go since i haven’t touched it in over 8 months. i caught a murkrow and looked at the entei raid a few blocks over.

i want entei. not gonna happen at level 20 though. my strongest pokemon is 1400 cp. this thing was like 19000.

anyway this new person is annie. the student “care area” is not a therapy office but they can help coordinate between the drc and my department. we talked about maybe dropping e&m for now since the workload is getting to be too much. (i am 4 weeks behind in grading.) 

so i will talk to danielle about it tomorrow, and then see how i do on the test on friday, and then talk to both of them again next week. i’m a little stressed about the consequences of dropping the class. the financial aid requires a certain amount of credit hours. and we’re supposed to be done with classes by the end of our second year, and i won’t even have finished UNDERGRAD e&m by my first year if i drop it. and it’ll give me a glaring weak spot on my next round with the prelim right after new year’s. 

well, i haven’t talked about it with the drc yet, so i probably won’t get anywhere worrying about it right now.

at the end of group therapy i said that even though i like to complain, i will try to follow up with actual solutions more. 

it just seems like... most of the things i complain about don’t really HAVE solutions. or i’ve already made a decision about how to deal with them but they are still very difficult and/or stressful. my classmates said it might be a good idea to reach out to my brother more after he moves away for college because teenagers are super moody and just not very enthusiastic about talking to family members in general. so that just means being patient for another two-ish years.

after that i biked back to the office.

OH! I ALMOST GOT HIT BY A CAR THIS MORNING. it was like three inches away. they were making a left turn across the road i was riding down and they just... didn’t stop. or go and get out of the way. i had to pull a hard turn and swerve up on the sidewalk and i almost hit a pedestrian. 

it’s like they weren’t even looking.

anyway i got back to the office at about 5:15 or so. i took a 45-minute break to eat some food and walk around a bit and goof off on facebook. i felt a little better after that, and then suzanne helped john and i study for our e&m test. we covered the entire chapter, just the main ideas, but it helped a lot i hope. i had my mind blown once at least. i understand dielectrics WAY better now.

we got done with that at 7:10-ish, so longer than a full class period. i was exhausted and antsy by the end of it. i packed up my things, yelled at luis a little bit about the alphabet song since we’d been having an argument about it earlier, and then biked home.

he told me the alphabet song came before the alphabet and that’s why they are in the order they are. i think the vowels should have all been put together.

the alphabet song was based off a mozart piece apparently and copyrighted in 1835. TAKE THAT, LUIS! EAT IT!!

when i got home i made some dinner and hid some cookies around for snoopy to find. she was WAY more interested in looking for them after she watched me hide them. and also had some catnip that i put on her walk-through brush. then she seemed to realize for the first time that her cat bed has two levels, and the lower level had cookies on it.

she’s a goofy one.

by the time i finished eating it was after 8:30 so i watched a few youtube videos and checked the 9 o’clock updates. then i ACTUALLY SAT DOWN AND DID SOME GRADING. i got through 2 pages of a whole lab section, which comes out to 36 pages. i did that in about the same amount of time, and then i spent a few minutes feeding snoopy and preparing my daily planner for tomorrow, and then it was 10 so i started writing. now it is 10:43.

it feels like this week has been going extra slowly. maybe it is because i feel more focused so i am losing less time to the Void of the Internet? my breaks have been more... deliberate. i set aside 90 minutes to play smash bros, and then got back to work after i felt more relaxed. stuff like that. it was a lot of fun, too.

i am a little worried about friday, between the test and the fact that i have to have 9 sections of labs graded by the end of the day, which is just not going to happen. tomorrow i don’t even get to sit down and take a BREAK let alone do work until after 4. friday is busy all the way through 4 too. and today was busy through after 5.

AND i gotta start the classical assignment somewhere in there too so i don’t have to try to slog through a 12-hour assignment over the weekend yet again. 

tomorrow my labs ungraded are gonna bump up to 12. but i made progress today. i have doubled the amount of grading i’ve finished. that’s something, right? 4 is twice as much as 2, even if you need to get to 70. and then 20 more after that.

something good. i jumped right away to asking questions when i got to my meeting with annie today. i admittedly did not have time to look up their office before i got over there, but she was very kind and explained how their office was different from the drc and counseling centers and what they are useful for. we got a solid plan set and another appointment scheduled within 25 minutes. 

now i just need to apply that “here is how this will be helpful” authority to emotions i guess? i’m not very good at asking for help from peers. i do it a lot but that doesn’t mean i’m good at it. well, i can do academic questions pretty well. but personal help is like... a league of its own.

i think i did a good job making use of some break time today and then getting back to work when i was ready. i didn’t have a LOT of time today but i stayed busy at least. and i paced myself really well yesterday because i wasn’t miserable and exhausted today! 

well, i was miserable and exhausted. but not AS miserable and exhausted as i usually get when i work too hard for too long without breaks. because i took breaks!

[amarantine-amirite]

And Another Thing

I feel like a failure. I feel like I’ve invested all this time and money into an education, only to screw up so badly; I run the risk of being expelled, or at the very least winding up on academic probation. The normal part of my brain tells me that they don’t assess whether not you’re on academic probation until the end of the semester, but I don’t feel like things are going to look good by then. It’s giving me a knot in my stomach that just won’t go away. Actually, scratch that. I feel like my stomach acid hardened into something like a giant kidney stone, but the size of my stomach.

Why? Well, the Friday of the reading week, I got the grade on my capacitors lab back. I didn’t do well on it at all. In fact, I failed it. I got a 2%.

Here's what we had to do: we had to measure the permittivity of a vacuum by making a capacitor and spacing the plates closer together. In case you don’t know, the permittivity of a vacuum arises from the ratio of change in an electric charge to the change in its potential encountered as you form an electric field in a vacuum. We measure permittivity in picofarads per metre, and we accept a value of 8.85 picofarads per metre for the permittivity of a vacuum.

I don’t believe it. I got a 2% on a lab writeup. I usually bring home grades in the 70s to high 80s. If things really had a rough patch, the worst thing I usually bring home is a 60. But this? 2%? Unthinkable! Two percent is for milk, not labs!

Good, my friend Mark is here. “How’d you do on the lab?” he asks me.

“Well,” I began, “I thought I did well, but I wound up getting 2%.”

Mark laughed. “You did better than me.” he said, “I'd, uh…rather not say how I did”

I snickered to myself. Wow, I thought, I guess my mom was right. If I screwed up badly, everyone else did do worse.

"What sucks is that things seemed to be going great." I continued, "the equipment didn’t act weird on us, the computer didn’t crash, and everyone knew what we were supposed to do." It shouldn’t have been so bloody frustrating. It shouldn't have made me cry after writing up the discussion. "Everything basically went to hell after I started going over the data."

"What was the problem?" Mark asked me.

"When I made the graph to show the relationship between capacitance and distance, stuff went wrong." Saying "stuff went wrong" was an understatement, The data didn’t follow the relationship outlined in the equation. The capacitance is inversely proportional to the distance between the plates, so the curve should look like a hook. It didn’t.

It got worse after I converted the data so that it followed a Y=mX+b relationship. Since the capacitance increases as distance decreases, Y represents the capacitance and X represents the inverse of the distance. The slope of the line contains the surface area of the capacitor plates times the permittivity of the air. The dielectric constant of the air is close enough to 1 that the permittivity of air is about the same as the vacuum. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Anway, that’s not the frustrating part. I get the theory. The frustrating part is this: after getting the slope and dividing out the surface area of the capacitor plates, the answer I got was not that magic number of 8.85 picofarads per metre. It was 6.59 picofarads per metre. Not even close to the real value. Not even close.

I’m trying to be patient with this. Really, I am. But I have no idea what the hell happened with this lab. I understand that electromagnetics labs get screwed up a lot because of all the interference from the computers and other electronics in the lab. But this was really bad. It was so bad that I couldn’t tell whether it was from interference or whether I screwed something up while doing the experiment.

As I read about the sources of error for this kind of experiment, I’m starting to feel better about it. It doesn’t look like I’m the only one who had a problem with it. Some other guy designed a different experiment to measure the permittivity of a vacuum. That experiment; however, used Coulomb’s law instead of a capacitor. He ended up with a value of 12 picofarads per metre. I feel kind of relieved knowing that it’s not just me. The permittivity of free space is hard to measure

Class let in. We sat down. Jorielle, our TA, said to us “OK guys, hands up if you’ve heard of the CS Help Center shutting down”

My hand went up quickly. I never took any proper CS courses, but I’ve gone down there once or twice for some general coding/debugging help. I’m not at all surprised that the university shut it down. The CS department only runs Help Center the weeks we have an assignment due, and even then, they were only in the office from 2-5 in the afternoon.

Only about four or so TA's worked there at it given time, so that meant people would wait in lines that stretched out the door. They also institute a five minute time limit for each student. That means that out of about 150 or so people there, only 40 to 75 of them would get help.

On top of that, the TA's would only help the boys. They totally ignored everyone else on the sign up sheet for help. As a result, I'd always try to do as much of the assignment on my own.

“I know a fair amount of you encountered many frustrating bugs during the coding portion of the assignment, and felt like it got to be too much,” she continued, “so you went to the CS Help Center, only to find it closed.”

By this point, about half the class pricked up their ears. They leaned further forward in their seats. “The university closed the CS Help Center because they had to fire all the TA's.”

A handful of people gasped. The rest of us widened our eyes. Serves them right, I figured.

Then, Jorielle dropped a bomb. “As for those of you who asked me when CS Help Center would reopen, it won’t.” she said, “It won’t come back on line until next semester”

My classmates sat there in shock. I heard them whisper “What?”, “Are you kidding me?’, and “This is horseshit!”

“Now,” Jorielle said, clapping for emphasis, “hands up if you got your code working all on your own?”

Once again, my hand went up. Only three other people raised their hands.

“Chang, Amir, Lucy, and Eddie; congratulations.” Jorielle said with a smile, “the four of you automatically get 100% on the lab.”

#writing #writers #writers on tumblr #short fiction #short story #creative writing

[jessepinwheel]

🌟 (for that ask prompt you reblogged!)

I think the intention was for you to at least give me a story to pick an excerpt from, but sure, I can talk about dielectric breakdown again

there's a lot of kind of small details in dielectric breakdown that I'm not sure anyone's really noticed, because nobody's ever commented on it

one of them is the fact that I gave echo vitiligo:

This is when he realizes there's someone waiting in the corridor just outside the courtyard. It's a brother, leaning against the wall and dressed in a civilian's dark jacket and trousers set--not the typical wear for a Temple-bound clone. His face has pale splotches trailing from around his eyes up to his short-cropped hair, creating a short streak of snow white against black. There's a constellation of silver neural ports embedded in his temples and pale scars visible along his scalp and he's got a scomp link for a hand. His cheeks are pinched and he's on the scrawny side--not scrawny like he hasn't gotten enough to eat, but scrawny like he's been sick for a while.

it's also mentioned later:

Echo is silent and reaches for the cup of tea. There's pale splotches on his hand, too, covering a few of his fingers and going down to his wrist. He holds the cup carefully between his hand and his scomp link, blows on the tea, and takes a careful sip. The smell of the tea is just as Cody remembers from all those late nights with Obi-Wan. It feels…appropriate to have it now.

which was kind of my response to echo losing all his melanin for whatever reason while he was a POW, he gets some of his pigment back but not all of it.

the other thing that nobody's ever commented on is this section where cody is talking to rex:

Rex sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. "Some...incendiary words were said. I'll leave it at that. It's one of the reasons Ahsoka doesn't come around as often anymore."

"If one of my brothers had insulted and degraded my family the same way Skywalker had done to Tano's, I would probably not talk to them very much, either," Cody says.

"Yeah," Rex replies. "I know."

There's an extremely awkward silence.

I try to generally trust that my readers can read between the lines, so I'm not typically pointing out meaning in these things here, but the unsaid part here is that rex said some shit about cody's family (and obi-wan) which is why they don't really talk anymore.

the relationship between rex and cody is probably the most important one in dielectric breakdown, and one of the things I thought about a lot when writing it is that they are mean to each other. like this is five years of their relationship being on the rocks, three years of not really spending time with each other anymore, and they know each other better than anyone else and they use that to get under each other's skin so bad. they are existing in a sort of perpetual sliding scale of passhole aggresshole to straight shouting at each other because they just can't get over the things that pulled them apart to begin with because they're just so stubborn even though they both want to be good brothers again

dielectric breakdown is notable because it's one of the stories where rex is the big brother instead of the little brother, and that's not because of like oh I think rex is a big brother so much as the story is a lot about cody being a big brother to so many of his men that he has kind of a hard time working with the reverse relationship, of him and his big brother rex

I know I've explained in previous posts that obi-wan and cody are explicitly not in a romantic relationship because that would undermine the point of the plot, but more than that, obi-wan gets deliberately cast as a big brother figure to cody, by drawing direct parallels to the scenes with cody and echo. there's also the callback to the scene where cody tried to call rex so he could tell him he was about to get brain surgery and terrified about it and found out he was blocked, where cody is telling obi-wan how he was terrified to have his surgery and obi-wan tells him it's okay to be scared

anyways. dielectric breakdown is a good story.

send me an ask about "director's commentary" on one of my fics

#ask jesse #fic: dielectric breakdown

[jessepinwheel]

💝🤍💥

💝what is a fic that got a different response than you were expecting?

well I already answered this one but I've been surprised more than once.

one thing that surprised me a lot was when I posted dielectric breakdown and people were saying that they were really surprised by the reveal in the last chapter. I mean I understand why people were surprised by it, it just wasn't something I'd thought of as a huge reveal because I'd taken it for granted the whole time I was writing, partially because the story couldn't exist without that revelation so it always seemed like a foregone conclusion to me

🤍what's one fic of yours you think people didn't "get"?

I don't feel like any of my stories have been grossly misinterpreted (at least none really come to mind) but I do get somewhat peeved when the stories I write that are meant to not focus on obi-wan get construed as being focused on obi-wan (e.g., propagation delay, dielectric breakdown)

💥find your least kudos'd fic - say something wonderful about it.

well according to my statistics my fic with least kudos is short circuit, which I don't really consider as a fic because I mostly just posted it for archival reasons because I was in tumblr jail at the time

the fic with the lowest kudos that I actually consider to be a fic is glass transition, my first lego movie fic. I'm actually surprised this is the lowest kudos because for a long time parting line had less, but in any case, I think glass transition is a nice little vignette of a character who appears harmless but is revealed to be rather sinister.

send me fic writer asks

#ask jesse

[jessepinwheel]

hello! so i just read dielectric breakdown and, it was magnificent? you're a genius? i have, feelings, and stuff, etc.-- anyway, i guess i was just sort of wondering about your thoughts on the mandalorian clone vibes the swtcw fandom is so attached to? like, hmm, idk, do you wish there were more fics out there where it went a little differently? or where the mandalorian aspect wasn't there at all? idk, i guess i just got really curious, haha-- also, have a great day!!! <3 <3 <3

yeah okay I'll swing at this hornet's nest

in honesty I don't think it's unreasonable that, if the clones were trained by mandalorians, that they might have picked up some amount of mandalorian culture, whether that's a little bit of the language or a couple of the customs, the way that someone living in a different language-speaking household would probably just pick up those things growing up

however. I don't believe the trainers would ever actually go out of their way to teach the clones their culture. I don't think they would be fluent in the language because nobody would bother to (or want to) teach them, and I don't think they would be invited to participate in whatever mandalorian things mandalorians do, if they're not explicitly excluded from it. I think I've made my opinions on "jango is a good dad actually" takes pretty clear (as seen by the story I'm working on where jango is literally such a bad dad that he ends up directly causing the destruction of his own empire)

(brief aside, clones using mandalorian as their personal private language is ridiculous not just for the "who the hell would have taught them" reason but also because it wouldn't be fucking private if literally every single trainer could understand what they're saying. this is why I gave clones private sign language that's derived from military sign, because it's easier to conceal and clones probably lived in an environment with extreme noise discipline.)

the insistence that clones are mandalorian and would speak mandalorian and have all these specific cultural views was baffling when I started reading star wars stories and it's still baffling now. my understanding (from talking to people who actually watch star wars) is that there's pretty much nothing in the actual canon to indicate that clones would be mandalorian or care overly much about mandalorians.

yes, I have stories (asynch and related works) where I mention mandalorian stuff in passing with relation to the clones because, again, I think it's reasonable that it would be part of their culture, but I've stopped doing that in all my other works because the fandom obsession with mandalorians is fucking annoying. it's similar to why I made dielectric not romantic--I'm not against clones having some amount of mandalorian influence, but the way people read it is that any quantity of mandalorian culture, no matter how small, will completely eclipse the culture that would develop organically from having four million identical men raised in weird prison boot camp hell

I can only assume that people want clones to be mandalorian so bad because either they want to write fandom mandalorians (fandalorians, as the kids call it) but the clones are the only characters available to put that archetype on, or because people want clones to have fun cultural stuff so bad but don't want to actually build some organic homegrown clone culture, or because despite people saying "blood doesn't matter" they think blood does matter a lot actually and jango being mandalorian means all his clone sons who he sold to the republic for his weird genocide plot means that the clones should definitely for sure also be mandalorian just by virtue of sharing genetic material, which. sure is a take.

I would be less annoyed about the insistence of making clones some quantity of mandalorian if it wasn't fucking ubiquitous, but the tumblr star wars fandom is [gestures vaguely]. if there was a wide variety of interpretations of clone culture, and one of them was that they had mandalorian elements, that would be fun and cool, but the "mandalorian clone" thing has taken over pretty much the entire fanfic sphere like a rampant c. diff infection, which is fine if you're into that I guess but when I want to read about clones I don't want to read about tumblr's workshopped mandalorian culture I want to actually read about the clones.

me writing clones where they are explicitly not mandalorian and reject jango and have their own distinct culture is my attempt at increasing biodiversity. will it inspire people to homebrew their own clone culture and make something that hasn't been repeated ad nauseam? considering I occupy the smallest possible corner of fandom and don't interact with the star wars community at all, probably not. but they're stories that I like and they're out there for anyone else who feels similarly (which, based on my statistics, is a not insignificant number of people).

obviously people can write what they want. it's not other people's duty to write stories that appeal to me, and two cakes etc. I don't read that much star wars fic anymore because I'm bored of reading the same +/- 10% story and mandalorian clones is just one part of why that happened

#my hot take is that mandalorians are just dudes #I don't know why the entire fandom goes absolutely bonkers over them #but I don't care about them so it's just grating

[jessepinwheel]

fanfic writer ask meme: A, L, Z?

henlo o/

A: Of the fanfic you’ve written, which is your favorite and why?

I think my favorite right now is probably Dielectric Breakdown. Partially it's because I really like Cody despite not really having any stories to write about him, but also because I think it's a very...me story. It's a story about how relationships fall apart, about how sometimes feelings aren't simple and that's okay, and about how things will never be the same again, and those are themes that I carry in a lot of my stories and I think are important to think about.

Besides that, it's more working in my own territory re: opinions on the Star Wars universe. You can tell that back when I wrote Asynch I was a lot less annoyed with common fandom tropes and fanons, and Asynch is of course still a very good story which I like a lot, but there are definitely some things I would do differently if I were to write Asynch now. (As it is, I will have to stick to my guns as I write Race Condition because I am nothing if not a stickler for internal continuity.) By the time I started writing Dielectric, I definitely got more settled into the direction I personally want to interpret relations between clones and Jedi and the fact that Mandalorians are really goddamn annoying.

L: Which of your fanfics was the most emotionally challenging to write?

Hm. I'm going to go with Propagation Delay. It's more of a coming of age story, and about growing up without ever really getting closure after someone you cared about disappeared without a trace. Like how do you deal with that? How do you move on from that sort of event, to have someone who you thought would always be there suddenly be gone? I don't know. I did my best.

Z: Is there a story you’ve written that doesn’t seem to get much love?

I think Parallel Processing is one of my least popular Star Wars fics (the only exceptions being stories I've written much more recently). I can only imagine it's because of the "not a fix-it" tag which is pretty emphatically not what people who read Star Wars fics want to read. It's kind of a shame, because I really like Parallel Processing. Not just because it features completely non-traumatized AgriCorps Obi-Wan, or because it's a dimension travel story where Obi-Wan gets to hang out with Obi-Wan (as he should), but because it's about being able to see this different version of yourself and see how things didn't have to be the way they were, and to really admire this alternate version of yourself for the things they've done and been through while simultaneously realizing you have a lot of things that they never will.

Also I think it's pretty fucked up that everyone who writes about AgriCorps Obi-Wan writes him as like. really bitter and angry and he turns evil or something. Obi-Wan's defining characteristic is picking himself up even when things go to shit. Not everyone is obsessed with that one thing a mean adult said to them when they were twelve, guys.

Fanfic Writer Ask Meme

#ask jesse