#so it's either rewrite or write another story and keep this one for later

[bonefall]

Now we've got all six of em, can I just say that CRIPES ALMIGHTY the titles for a starless clan suck major ass! Both separately AND as a group!!

I Do Not Rewrite Arcs Until They Are Done BUT DO YOU WANNA HEAR MY WIP RENAMES SO FAR

Remember: Don't get too attached yet, the only one I can say with certainty will show up somewhere is the title of Book 4.

ARC RENAME: A Starless Clan -> A Prayer Unanswered

The original name is really good but I'm getting a vibe that the theme of the rework is going to be... when love isn't enough.

It's about how some things can't get better. It's about how all the kindness in the world couldn't get Bramblestar to turn around as a leader. It's about how Heartstar might have had good intentions, but occupation never works out in the end. It's Nightheart's relationship to his family being salvageable, not because they don't all want to fix it, but because his life has worked out best with distance from them.

So, Prayers Unanswered is both about the religious part of how RiverClan doesn't have a leader and can't get in proper touch with StarClan, but it's also about every other wish that hasn't come true.

River -> Starcrossed One of the VERY large changes I'm considering is actually massively reducing Nightheart's POV. I'm thinking of doing this, not because I dislike him, but because I think it might actually be a better story if the audience is guessing as to his intentions just as much as the other characters are. So, until he's ACTUALLY needed later, his chapters are short and sparse. So Starcrossed would be about setting up the troubles of the Clans, especially the parts of the conflicts I want to highlight more in BB. It would be setting up the rule changes for "starcrossed lovers" (lmao) but also the brewing anger that the cats have towards code changes... and StarClan, if I do decide to keep the newest revelations and work them in better, in hindsight.

Sky -> Fracture There's a phrase in my head that is so interesting to me that I need to do something with it. "Only frozen water can fracture." I want to make the RiverClan situation worse than in-canon. First of all, there's going to be identifiable groups this time which begin to scramble for power. Instead of having the cats just... forget how to do the chores they've done their whole lives, the Clan is splitting up into factions. This is why they won't be able to win against Heartstar later, when she decides to take drastic measures. They're not fighting like a Clan; they're fighting like a bunch of disorganized teams. There should also be a bunch of needless injuries, maybe even a border aggression that lead to a death, before Heartstar barges in. I also want to make this a bigger part of the story, Erins willing. Too much time was spent on the Catnip Patrol, imo, we're going to have ANOTHER big trip and I don't want this one to eat up so much time. Rowankit is also still going to die; and maybe a couple of elders around the Lake too.

Shadow -> Snakes and Turnclaws Berryheart's hate movement has been too tame, from canon books 1 - 4 as of the time of writing. It's ridiculous that they haven't even injured anyone in the Battle Cat series. I saved Antfur from the previous arc so that she can die here. We've been seeing the Anti-Turnclaw movement rise from the first book, so now with Nightheart's boldness leading him to a place where he will be unsafe, we need to see his rusty butt in actual danger. I'm even thinking that, instead of Nightheart failing his task on purpose, Sunbeam makes him fail by stopping him from getting killed. I need to know the ending of ASC first though, because I MIGHT be having Berryheart getting her exile here. Whatever kills Antfur is either deniable enough that she's able to squeak by while Sunbeam quietly leaves (refusing to accuse her mother of anything publicly) OR it's so obvious that Heartstar casts her out on the spot. Meanwhile, we see the OTHER half of ShadowClan's conflict as RiverClan finally unites... against them, as their common enemy. Task failed successfully, Heartsy

Thunder -> The Source of the River I'm still unspeakably proud of this outline. There's so much I want to do here. She's going to come back with a DND party and I'm hoping that all of them end up in RiverClan with her; INCLUDING Nightheart. I want the fact that he accompanied Frostpaw to actually be the final straw for him. While he's away, Sunbeam is acclimating to ThunderClan and falling in love with her new home. There are parts she misses about ShadowClan, but as she's adopted by Sparkpelt, taken as a secondary apprentice by the deputy, smiled upon by Squirrelstar after she pressures Bramblestar to abdicate... this starts to feel like this is where she belongs. And that's too hard for Nightheart to ever come back to. "You come to the source of the river, and are vexed that you do not find the water that is flowing downstream" dude.... man. That's what BB's about. Change. I also really want Nightheart to choose HIS OWN NAME by the end of this series-- so at some point in this book he should finally admit "Nightheart" wasn't his choice either. (I'm thinking Deltastep. Because his journey with Frostpaw begins at the southern delta of my reworked map.)

And I haven't done them for Book 5 or Book 6 yet, especially since I might end up condensing them or chopping them up to put into the other books.

I do know I'm really love to play with the idea of a starless sky for one of the last books though, I may or may not keep Splashtail's lack of faith in StarClan (hate the Evil Atheist thing they keep doing), but the idea of a "Pitch-Black Star" absolute fucks as symbolism, ngl. Maybe something like "A Gap in the Stars" or "Constellation's Void" or "The Stolen Star"

Also also also I'm having Curlfeather come back as a Dark Forest Demon for at LEAST one scene.

I don't give a good goddamn if they don't go to the Dark Forest or not. ONE weird coincidence that could totally have been Just Good Luck but was actually Curlfeather. Let Her Drown Splashtail, she deserves it. Let her be a malevolent spirit who protects her baby. RiverClan can whine all it wants about Mothwing who ooo doesn't believe in God, Frostpaw's got a demon. Cry about it

Also I hope Frostpaw becomes leader because I'll make it go hard

#Mapleshade here like ''haha i will continue my curse on the appledusk bloodline'' #And Curlfeather looms behind her like ''dont.'' #BB!ASC #better bones au #ASC Spoilers

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Hello! Thank you for every advice you give here!

This might sound like a weird ask, but I don't know how to write the second(or more) draft. I've heard some advice about rewriting and not editing, but every time I try to write the second draft, I just end up copying the first one, with very few differences.

So my question is, what is your way of writing the second draft and if you have any advice on that? I know some things that work for some don't work for others, but I just can't seem to find the right way.

Oh, second drafts. Only the most difficult writing step after drafting, followed by the most difficult step of writing the third draft.

The good news is that almost no one pulls together their story on the second draft. If your first draft is putting down the bones of the story, the second is figuring out where to lay the connective tissue. Maybe you've got too many bones, maybe you don't have enough. Maybe some of your bones are too short, or too misshapen to work. The second draft is getting that story skeleton together, knowing full well you're gonna need to fix some of those bones first.

Get yourself a plan to put that skeleton together - make an outline. I swear I'm not the sworn enemy of pantsers that i sometimes seem to be (it's professional jealousy, I swear), but if you don't have an outline, now is the time to get one. If you do, go back and revise that first. You'll want to know what you want the story to become from the pile of bones you're working from.

Not enough bones - identify what you're missing. If you're like me, sometimes while drafting you write 'figure this shit out later' and then forget to do so. Thanks for nothing, Past Me. But chances are your story needs some added scenes, more character development, etc. Identifying those missing pieces and fleshing out your outline can help you tackle a second draft.

Too many bones - figure out what needs to be cut. Not every scene is going to be worth keeping no matter how attached to them you are. If you're on the fence about a scene, consider if it serves to move the plot forward, develops the characters, or establishes important worldbuilding. If the scene meanders plotlessly, repeats character beats instead of expanding on them, or seems to suck the oxygen out of the story, you may have to rethink or remove them.

These bones don't fit - figure out what scenes are lacking. Another thing I tend to do in first drafts is sell my scenes short. I just don't think of the best outcome, the most dramatic climax, or a great setting when I'm trying to figure out what happens. In going through your novel, think about each scene carefully. Should this argument take place in a deserted library, or would it be more emotional and dramatic on a crowded train? If the villain's plot seems small, how can you make him a greater threat?

Uuuh bro that's not a human bone - revising scenes that went off the rails. If you're gearing up for NaNoWriMo yet again, you might know the feeling of writing pages of bullshit to make that wordcount. It could be good bullshit! It could be really fun! But if it sticks out like a sore thumb in the story, it may be best to set aside to figure out what to make out of it later.

You're not going to get everything right in the second draft either, so don't over-stress in trying to get your story whipped into shape. But you will be better off after giving those bones a little polish and assembling them into what could conceivably pass for a decent skeleton, one that you won't mind sharing with others to see what other work it might need. Good luck!

#second drafts #plotting #onward toward that skeleton war #revising #writing advice #rewriting

[antialiasis]

Chess (2018 Kennedy Center revival)

So I was just going to briefly mention all the other different versions of Chess I have consumed in the big essay post I’ve been writing on and off, but there was just too much to say about this one which made it really awkward to fit it in, so fine, here is another individual chesspost. Nearly 7500 words of rambling under the cut, oh my god.

This production represents the latest official full overhaul of Chess. It sports an all-new book written by Danny Strong, also known as the actor who played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is some whiplash (Sarah Michelle Gellar is apparently a big Chess fan, too). It was later staged again as a concert with some further modifications in 2021, but I listened to an audio bootleg of the 2018 version. (There exist some videos of it online, but only scattered bits.)

The Story Changes

This version has London’s basic plot structure with the distinctive two chess tournaments (this time four years apart, which is neither the original number nor the actual number of years between world chess championships), but rearranges Act I, adds a lot more quippy dialogue and swearing, reinterprets the characters, and recenters real-world politics in the whole thing — sort of the exact inverse of what Chess på svenska did with the material. It opens with “Difficult and Dangerous Times” to set the scene in the Cold War and features the Arbiter narrating with sardonic omniscient commentary between songs/scenes throughout, which does feel a bit more consistent than the Arbiter suddenly having a narrator role for the duration of one song in Act II.

All the main characters in this version are reinterpreted with significant new background context, which is a very interesting way to rewrite it that I definitely dig in principle. For example, Florence’s first scene here involves Walter threatening her with deportation from the US unless she can make Freddie behave for the duration of the tournament. Most versions of Chess make the political scheming very symbolic and vague — exchanges of mostly unnamed political prisoners or handwaved concessions — but this version is noticeably specific, with specific nuclear arms treaty negotiations that the CIA believes would be negatively affected if Freddie keeps openly antagonizing the Soviets. She tells Walter to go fuck himself (told you it adds more swearing) and that nobody can control Freddie Trumper, but ultimately she doesn’t have much of a choice but to reluctantly play along. This addition recontextualizes her character and her interactions with Freddie in Act I a fair bit — it’s pretty significant, after all, that she is under threat and may lose her home if she doesn’t somehow control what she really can’t.

Meanwhile, Freddie himself here suffers from a full-on mental illness which he takes medication for. Walter asserts on a phone call early that they’re dealing with a “genuine paranoid schizophrenic”, but then later calls him a “bipolar bitch”; I take the blatant inconsistency combined with the obviously insulting nature of these remarks to mean probably we’re not meant to take either of them at face value, but these two lines from Walter are the only ones suggesting any specific diagnosis. (I unfortunately suspect Danny Strong didn’t have a specific condition in mind and research it so much as just slap him with a Generic Ambiguous Mental Illness for which he takes Pills.) One way or another, Freddie’s ambiguous mental illness gives him bouts of intense paranoia, driving him to do things like trashing his and Florence’s hotel room to look for listening devices at one point. Florence keeps insistently, frustratedly telling him to just take his goddamn pills even as he’s in genuine distress; it’s pretty uncomfortable, and also definitely one of those things that are at least more human when his episodes could cost her the only home she has: she’s desperate and in distress too.

(I do kind of feel as if this whole bit would make more sense if Florence and Freddie had a strictly business relationship here to start with, instead of being explicitly portrayed as a couple — when they have a committed intimate partnership going on, one would think Florence getting deported would also be pretty obviously significant for Freddie, and Florence quietly playing along with the CIA and crossing her fingers that she can indirectly coax him into behaving with seemingly no serious thought given to whether it’d be better to just tell him why he needs to stop feels stranger. The scene with Walter sounds like Walter/the CIA are not aware of their romantic relationship and Florence wants to keep it that way — they both refer to Freddie strictly by his full/last name and as “her player” — so I guess Walter would have assumed she wouldn’t tell him, but surely the calculus would at least look a bit different to Florence herself. Even if it just prompts her to realize Freddie would still be liable to react by becoming even more erratic and vocal about his paranoias, that feels like it’d be significant enough, at least for her feelings on this relationship going forward, that it never actually coming up or being suggested within the story starts to feel marginally odd. Not a major complaint, though, just a bit of overthinking.)

Freddie in general is noticeably portrayed much more sympathetically here than usual throughout. Where other versions of Chess tend to present Freddie as an attention-seeking drama queen who plays up ludicrous arbitrary demands for money and press, here things like his walkout from the first chess game are made to come from a much more genuine place: he has major sensory issues and is intolerably thrown off balance by distracting noise and lights (which really are deliberately arranged to sabotage him). “Florence Quits”, the song with the misogyny verse, usually reads as being triggered by his jealousy and inability to accept that Anatoly’s just playing better than him, but this version makes it feel more about how he feels persistently gaslit about the ways he’s being sabotaged than anything else: he accuses the Soviets of having a hypnotist in the front row to throw him off (which they do, and Freddie literally saw him and recognized him) and Florence of working for the CIA (which she has been, if not by choice) while they deny it and brush it off, and the tense opening notes of the song play under him desperately yelling “You’re lying to me! You’re all lying to me!” (Which doesn’t make the misogyny okay, obviously, but it does make it feel more like a desperate, paranoia-fueled lashout where you don’t know how much he really means all that.)

When he subsequently forfeits the match against Anatoly, he makes a speech that sounds absolutely despairing where he says chess has been taking a toll on his health since he first became champion at eleven years old, and he doesn’t feel he can trust anyone, even himself. In Act II, before “The Interview”, he even actually apologizes to Florence for how he treated her; heck, his motivation for going so hard after Anatoly in “The Interview” itself is portrayed as being that he is genuinely disgusted by Anatoly leaving his family so callously (which is a lot of fun given Freddie’s own issues about his father leaving him and his mother behind) and wants Florence to hear the truth about what a despicable man he is, which is still unpleasant to her but clearly comes from a much more sympathetic place than either simple spite or reluctantly complying with Walter’s orders.

As for Anatoly… he was taken from his parents when he was a small child to be groomed by Molokov and the KGB into becoming a chess champion, and he’s well aware from his very first scene that the state had killed the previous Soviet champion after Freddie unseated him. (Freddie excoriates the press early on for not covering why the former champion disappeared off the face of the Earth because they’re too busy bashing Freddie, which sounds like paranoia, but the narrative has actually told us Freddie is right and they really did execute him but no one but Freddie seems to notice or care — another way in which Freddie is jarringly sympathetic here. In general, Freddie is portrayed as paranoid, and the other characters treat him like he’s just paranoid, but the narrative keeps proving Freddie’s paranoia right.)

Anatoly, though, isn’t afraid of the same fate, because “The state cannot execute a man… that is already dead.” (This general sentiment could press my buttons, but it just feels super corny and melodramatic the way it’s presented and performed, especially with that dramatic pause in there.) He is deeply depressed, thinks his marriage to Svetlana is fake and his kids hate him, and says repeatedly in Act I that he hates chess and just wants to be free of it, though he also describes a particular championship match he watched as the only time he’s felt love. At the end of Act I, he defects to the UK along with Florence as usual (his defection fully blows up the treaty Walter was worrying about despite Anatoly’s victory, so Florence’s refugee visa is indeed revoked, and that’s why they end up in the UK). Theoretically he should be free of chess now, but it bothers him intensely that he only won by forfeit (here they never finished playing a single match), resulting in him returning to defend his world champion title, and win it ‘properly’, four years later in Bangkok against Viigand.

Unknown to Anatoly, by Act II, after the election of Ronald Reagan, the Soviets are extra on edge and believe a planned NATO military exercise is actually the US mobilizing for a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. Walter tries to convince Molokov it’s just an exercise; Molokov insists unfortunately the generals are going to believe it’s an invasion and be ready to retaliate unless Viigand wins the championship (if Viigand wins they will take it as a ‘sign of goodwill’ from the US, which will change their minds on the apparent invasion because, uhh, unclear). Throughout Act II, the larger stakes in this version are set up to be that if Anatoly should win the match, the Soviets are liable to start a nuclear war.

Does Walter go to Anatoly to frankly tell him that apparently the Soviets have lost their minds and are basically threatening nuclear war over a chess match and try to convince him to throw on that basis? Does Molokov realize that if he’s telling Walter to go rig the chess match so the generals will call it off, he clearly doesn’t actually believe that the US is about to invade, so probably he should be trying to convince the generals not to go for the nuclear option himself? No, of course not; this is Chess, so we have to have the songs that are in Chess. So instead, Walter and Molokov just go through the same indirect schemes as usual to unbalance Anatoly and convince him to throw the game, with some minor twists. Molokov actually actively threatens Svetlana with being sent to a gulag to die if she doesn’t convince her husband to return — and Svetlana does straight-up tell Anatoly this, only for Anatoly to brush her off and tell her they won’t do that. Florence learns the same from Walter and initially dismisses him, and fully doesn’t believe him about her father being alive, but does ultimately sympathize with Svetlana and worry for her, which I like. But Anatoly is obsessed with winning this championship above all else and fully convinced Molokov is bluffing.

In the end, he plays the game to win, oblivious to the nuclear threat; as he checkmates, Walter makes a desperate phone call to his superiors to call off the training exercise. (Why he didn’t just do that immediately when Molokov told him the Soviets were taking it as an attack, instead of spending all this time playing along with this elaborate chess mind game, is a mystery.) Only… they don’t, and the Soviets watch with their fingers on the nuclear button, but ultimately they don’t fire. The Arbiter’s narration informs us this was the closest the world ever came to destruction, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis, and that this then served as the wake-up call that prompted negotiations about nuclear deescalation.

Anatoly, meanwhile, returns to the Soviet Union as usual, this time successfully exchanging himself for Florence’s imprisoned father, and Walter gives the two of them visas so that they can return to the US together.

Broad thoughts

I feel profoundly weird about the mixing of real-life history and completely fictitious alternate history here — you can’t just assert in narration that the fictional events in your musical were what taught the US and Soviet Union that maybe they should just talk to each other, while making a specific comparison to an actual thing that really happened, after spending the musical asserting that the Soviets murdered chess players for losing the world championship. I think mixing history and fiction can work fine if we can imagine that for all we know this is what really happened, or alternatively that this is what might have happened in some alternate universe similar to but distinct from ours. But here, we’re creating highly significant and publicized events that are obviously fictional, making it absurd to pretend this is what really happened, while also presenting these fictional alternate-universe events in objective hindsight narration alongside real events that happened in the real world and as a supposed cause of them. This ending narration just feels like it’s weirdly trying to have its cake and eat it too.

All in all, though, I think this is definitely one of the most interesting efforts to rewrite Chess. It definitely has something it’s going for, there are several neat ideas in it, and in particular I appreciate that it tries to give extra attention to the characters, more context to their actions, and more messy, humanized depth, inner conflict, and complicated motivators and stressors behind what they do. I genuinely enjoy what it’s doing with Freddie in Act I, in particular, even though it feels somehow both jarringly like it’s woobifying him (I genuinely think he ends up coming across as the most sympathetic of the three mains here, with so much of his erratic, childish and unpleasant behaviour being recontextualized to be more understandable and the way his hatred of the Soviets keeps being validated by the narrative) and like the narrative is weirdly harsh on him (this much more sympathetic Freddie who suffers from an actual mental illness is treated like absolute irredeemable scum by every other character including the fourth-wall-leaning narrator, even more than usual).

I also think the restructuring of Act I was pretty solid for the most part, though there’s definitely some awkwardness, like how Freddie’s expanded encounters with the press sort of clumsily repeat the same beats a bit. On the one hand, I can get what Danny Strong was going for in choosing to introduce everyone first and then go into “Merano” instead of doing several minutes of narrative meaninglessness before the main characters are even introduced; on the other hand, that kind of just half-defeats the sole original purpose of “Merano”, which is to provide a very jaunty more stereotypical musical theater song so that Freddie can be introduced via barging in and interrupting it with his very different vibe, and if I were Danny Strong I would definitely have just removed “Merano” at that point. But the “Difficult and Dangerous Times” opening works great, and it nicely avoids the “almost nothing of note happens for nearly forty minutes” and “several meaningless fluff songs in a row” problems of the London script, introducing conflict and stakes early and keeping the narrative going.

Ultimately, though, a lot of what it’s trying to do doesn’t quite come together to me, and some of it is variously misguided or just strange.

The Politics

To start with, I can definitely get wanting to emphasize the role of Cold War politics in the narrative, and I basically enjoyed the increased political focus and higher stakes in Act I — but I don’t think making Anatoly unwittingly almost start a nuclear war works here, or fits properly into this narrative at all. The Soviet generals have to be holding idiot balls; Molokov has to be holding an idiot ball; Walter has to be holding the biggest idiot ball of all; and most importantly, the ludicrously massive stakes being pasted on top of the match despite none of the main characters even knowing about it means we zoom thoroughly out of the character drama of the situation: “Endgame” just becomes grotesquely trivial with that hanging over it without Anatoly’s knowledge, rendering the actual drama of the climactic song completely irrelevant to what’s really at stake.

I also dislike, in a version that emphasizes the politics, how distinctly slanted it is. One of the things that I like in the London strain of Chess is that Walter and Molokov are both slimy, manipulative bastards in different ways, both sides’ political actors cruelly toying with the lives of the players for their own impersonal ends; the righteousness of each state as a whole doesn’t really matter to this story, only the impact that the whole conflict and the mutual scheming has on the main characters’ lives. But in this version, the Soviets and Molokov are cartoon villains who literally abduct children to force them into chess camp and then murder them if they don’t win the world championship, while Walter may be a condescending asshole who’s willing to threaten Florence but is distinctly the ‘good guy’ in his interactions with Molokov, which comprise most of his screentime, especially in Act II. Walter even gets a humanizing moment where he explains he has a nine-year-old son and has nightmares about him suffering a nuclear winter (Molokov, meanwhile, tells Walter in Act I that Anatoly is like a son to him but could not more obviously not care about Anatoly at all when he proudly presents his new champion material Viigand in Act II). I just find it really detrimental to Chess’s narrative to make it about Soviets Bad, US Good, and more so the more you focus on that — to whatever extent you highlight the politics in this story, it should be done in a way that’s about how the political machinations of the Cold War impact the character drama at the center of it, and it’s distracting when instead you make it into a loosely related B-plot about Walter’s desperate diplomatic efforts to stop the evil Soviets from destroying the world with their shortsightedness.

I think a successful more politically-focused Chess could definitely exist, but I think it’s always going to function best if Walter and Molokov feel at least narratively like just about equal scumbags. It’s not even impossible to imagine nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction coming up in the course of it — but it needs to be using that to make us enraged at all of this on behalf of Anatoly/Florence/Svetlana/Freddie, not enraged at Molokov on behalf of Walter.

The Character Work

Meanwhile, I do basically like the setup and recontextualization done for all of the main characters in Act I, but unfortunately none of them quite delivered as well as I hoped in the end.

Let’s start with Florence. I actually quite liked the deportation threat, putting Florence herself under personal pressure in a way she usually isn’t. I dig characters being put through the wringer and making decisions under stress. But the story doesn’t quite do anything with that other than using it as silent context behind her early interactions with Freddie and technically as the reason she and Anatoly move to the UK offscreen. We don’t, for instance, ever see Freddie learn that that’s why she moved or that he was unwittingly indirectly responsible for that, or otherwise address that in any way, and as far as Florence in the rest of the story is concerned, it might as well never have happened — we never see her having any kinds of feelings on it, or even confronting Walter about that nasty little part he played in her life when she meets him again (she doesn’t even comment on it when he offers her the chance to go back to the US at the end!). To an extent this is, of course, because Florence being deported was never originally part of the story of Chess, so of course it doesn’t come up in any song or have any significant specific impact on the core series of events — but if you’re going to add it in at all, you really ought to be taking that somewhere in the rest of your additions that isn’t just briefly handwaving that she gets to go back at the end.

Like Long Beach, this version brings Florence’s father back at the end — but unfortunately, it feels really unearned here. Compared to other London variants, it actually ditches the bit of “The Deal” where Florence is tangibly emotional and riled up by Walter’s offer of her father — she fully dismisses the idea of her father being alive as bullshit, and instead it’s Svetlana who moves her to have doubts when she sees her begging Anatoly to return on video and realizes Svetlana still loves him. I do really like that, by itself, and it’s probably my favorite thing about this version’s portrayal of Florence; her empathizing with Svetlana to the point of feeling genuinely guilty for having taken her husband from her, and believing maybe the right thing to do would be if he went back to Svetlana for her sake, is actually very good, serves as a great lead-in to “I Know Him So Well”, and makes Florence’s character feel far more sympathetic in a production where she’s otherwise pretty lacking in that department. But it leaves us with no emotional connection whatsoever to Florence’s father — we’ve only heard her mention him twice before Walter’s offer, very briefly, in Act I, and not really with any sense that she misses or is all that invested in him. Seeing her reunite with him means nothing for her or her arc; it just comes out of left field, and winds up being another thing slanting this version towards Good Guy Walter, Bad Guy Molokov, what with Walter offering her visas back to the US for both of them seemingly out of the goodness of his heart.

It would have been possible to actually build up to this in a way that would make it satisfying. Florence and Anatoly have several conversations; we could have used some of those to have Florence actually talk about her father and how she feels about him being gone, and that could have been part of building up her relationship with Anatoly, made it meaningful that Anatoly’s parting gift to her is to ensure her father’s return. I suppose Danny Strong’s thought process may have been that if he built up Florence’s father too much, that should become her main concern once Walter brings that into it, and he wanted her concern to be about Svetlana instead, which I guess is fair; it also means Anatoly only really has to dismiss the potential harm to one other person in his obsession with the winning the game. But if you do make the decision to not build up her father, then bringing her father back is not an ending that makes any sense, and there was no need to do this — they could have easily cut out all suggestion of her father being alive entirely and it would only have made things smoother. I think the only reason she gets her father back in this one is in some hasty effort to make Florence’s ending less bleak, but because it doesn’t have any emotional resonance, it’s just not the right way to do that here.

Speaking of Florence and Anatoly, the romance here… once again has some neat, interesting things it’s going for but doesn’t quite come together as a whole. The two of them do have some actual conversations where they bond a bit, which is already a marked improvement over the default London script — but their very first conversation features Anatoly asserting out of nowhere that Florence has “a way of brightening his spirit”, despite not even knowing her, which isn’t super convincing and just comes off kind of creepy-awkward. Florence asserts a few times that he’s sweet and kind, but we don’t really see much of him actually coming across as sweet or kind — his lines tend to be either melodramatic or sardonic moping interspersed kind of jarringly with awkward jokes. He’s less charming or sweet and more like a lonely, kicked dog, which is fine if Florence is into that but doesn’t quite make her descriptions of why she likes him ring true.

This production actually goes back to the concept album a bit when it comes to Florence and Anatoly — namely, more than political manipulation and external pressures forcibly tearing them apart from the outside, there’s a more substantial internal tension between them as Anatoly genuinely simply prioritizes winning the chess match over her and dismisses her as she tries to question him about Svetlana. The two approaches can both work but do different things for the narrative; this internal approach puts more focus on the personal conflict and character drama and makes the relationship more interesting, which is definitely good, and in principle I think this is built up to in a pretty solid way here — Anatoly, raised to become a chess champion to the exclusion of all else, being maddened by the notion of not actually beating Freddie in Act I and needing to prove he deserves the championship to himself in Act II before he can feel “free from chess” works as a coherent reason for him to be so strikingly, unhealthily obsessive about it.

But I think the biggest problem is that Florence and Anatoly individually don’t hit well enough as characters to create investment in them. Florence is ultimately not developed enough and mostly just acts kind of unpleasant, especially to Freddie, all the way up until that Svetlana bit in Act II. More importantly, I just can’t like or understand or sympathize with Anatoly at all, beyond recognizing that core of what his arc is going for. Part of it is probably down to the writing of his lines, which I’m just not a fan of in general. I already named one example from his first scene. Here’s how Anatoly and Florence’s very first conversation starts:

ANATOLY: It’s not his fault. This game drives us all crazy. FLORENCE: I’m fine. Aren’t you even a little bit scared? ANATOLY: Of Trumper? FLORENCE: No, that they’ll kill you if you lose. ANATOLY: Oh. To quote the great Leo Tolstoy, “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.” FLORENCE: What does that mean? ANATOLY: I don’t know exactly, but it is very Russian.

I just don’t find this dialogue very convincing. Why is he reciting a dramatic irrelevant quote if he doesn’t know what it means and just thinks it’s “very Russian”? It feels like a generic quippy exchange off a snarky TV show. Does Anatoly use humour to cope with his situation? Not really; this is pretty much the only time he says anything that might be taken as that. This feels like a joke that’s there only to get a laugh out of the audience, not because Anatoly would actually tell it — and consequently, it doesn’t tell us anything real about Anatoly. Meanwhile, Florence responds to this with “Oh, you’re funny,” as if that’s one of the reasons she falls for him when I would decidedly not name that as a character trait he has. I feel like most of his dialogue just doesn’t have a great sense of character — in stark contrast to Freddie, who oozes character. I can’t get a good sense of who he is and how he thinks. He’s just there. And this also makes it harder to see what Florence sees in him and believe in the relationship.

Moreover, this Anatoly just comes across as kind of a terrible person, not in the fun coherent intentional way Freddie is a terrible person but in a flat, confusing and kind of unintentional-seeming way. Svetlana here is actually really sympathetic, with lovely little additional bits of dialogue that make her feelings hit harder (her voice as she tells Anatoly that “You left us!” breaks my heart), and this is possibly my favorite version of Svetlana in any Chess. But Anatoly is really, really terrible to her, by which I don’t even mean the cheating on her but the bit where he keeps angrily insisting to her face that she never loved him and she brainwashed their children to hate him and of course they’re not going to kill her (hey, Anatoly, guess who’s already well aware that the Soviet government in this universe is not above executing people over chess?).

And even that could be made understandable, given his situation — he could just be in hard denial about it because the thought of them having been suffering with him gone and being punished for his actions is so horrific he just shuts it down — but there’s never any sense that that’s what’s really going on. We don’t see him privately upset about the possibility later, for instance — he just keeps insisting the same and dismissing Svetlana to Florence, too. We know it’s not that it’s true — we see Svetlana admit to Molokov that even though he ruined her life and she never wants to see him again she still loves him, and we hear her sing “Someone Else’s Story” and “I Know Him So Well”. Nor do we ever get any hint at exactly what Svetlana or his kids did to make him think this of them, if anything (his own kids!). Anatoly just seems to sort of bitterly, adamantly believe this for no reason at all. And that makes it impossible to empathize with. Okay, sure, Anatoly, you were taken from your family as a child, but that really doesn’t even start to explain any of this. There could have been ways of making it feel at least believable, tragic in a deeply fucked-up way, but the story here just doesn’t do the work. And once again, Anatoly being so unpleasant for no reason just makes it harder to feel at all invested in his relationship with Florence or sad when they part.

The best fix here isn’t quite obvious, and I can’t say I envy Danny Strong trying to put all his neat little ideas together and make them work. If Anatoly were to appear substantially conflicted about Svetlana and put any real stock in Molokov’s threat, that would render “Endgame”, where he doubles down anyway, kind of jarring and inexcusable as he’d be not just refusing to return to her but refusing to care if she is killed. So in order for this to properly work with “Endgame”, he probably does need to be very deep in denial about whether they’d really kill her. I think what I would do, if I were writing this plot where groomed-as-a-chess-champion Anatoly knows the Soviets killed Boris Ivanovich and they’ve threatened to kill Svetlana too, is to emphasize better how irrational Anatoly is being and try to show it more as a consequence of growing up among the constantly plotting KGB.

Let him go off on a proper paranoid rant to Florence about the reasons why he thinks Svetlana is just plotting against him, and some innocuous things he saw his kids do once that mean she brainwashed them. When Florence tries to challenge him on how batshit he sounds, he just storms out, saying she’s being taken in by their lies and just wants to sabotage him, and disappears — and she doesn’t see him again until he appears at the final game and plays this manic, desperate match while insisting to himself that Svetlana and Florence both just never understood him and hated his success. Afterwards, we can perhaps see him finally, quietly asking Molokov if they’re really going to kill her, showing that on some level he already knew the threat might be real and had just firmly blocked it out (in the actual ending as it is Molokov simply tells him unprompted that she really will be punished unless he comes back, and he just asks why with no addressing of his previous adamant insistence that that wouldn’t happen). His and Florence’s final conversation could then involve a bit more of a reckoning with that and with what his relationship with Svetlana was really like, through a more honest lens.

I’m actually pretty tickled by this scenario because that would really drive home a pretty fun parallel between Anatoly and Freddie — which in hindsight I think this version must in fact have been trying for, but didn’t quite do in a focused enough way for it to really hit. Anatoly and Freddie are both chess players with deeply abnormal childhoods and bouts of paranoia that cause them to behave in toxic ways, which ultimately drives Florence away from both of them.

This production shows the first chess game as the “Chess Game” instrumental playing under Freddie and Anatoly having alternating inner monologues about the game and their issues, deliberately drawing a comparison between the two of them; they both say they hate chess, that they don’t feel like real human beings. It’s not exactly subtle, but I liked the way this was used to build up their respective brain gremlins and was intrigued by the parallel being set up. I didn’t feel they ultimately did much with the parallel, though, because the story then didn’t really continue leaning into it much from there. By emphasizing this Anatoly’s paranoia as paranoia and not just as him legitimately thinking the marriage was never real and the KGB wouldn’t kill her, we could properly build the story around that parallel, and I would genuinely dig that.

The one place after the chess match where the actual thing does sort of try to get at the Anatoly/Freddie parallel again is in the dialogue scene that precedes “Endgame”. This scene is not sung (though it has the “Chess Game” instrumental in the background, which connects it neatly to that previous bit comparing the two of them), but it’s clearly based on “Talking Chess”: Freddie approaches Anatoly to tell him Viigand’s weakness lies in his King’s Indian Defense, and:

ANATOLY: Why are you helping me? FREDDIE: Jesus Christ! Am I the only one who cares about this game? ANATOLY: It’s more than a game now. There is so much more at stake than who wins or loses. FREDDIE: No! No, winning is everything. Fuck politics! Fuck the KGB, fuck the CIA, fuck them all! We are the ones who have dedicated our lives to chess. We are the ones who have given up everything for greatness — our childhoods, our sanity, our loves. Anatoly, we’ve sacrificed everything. They’ve sacrificed nothing. What’s the number one rule of a chess champion? ANATOLY: Play to win. FREDDIE: As long as you do that you can never lose, even if you do.

Much as I love “Talking Chess”, though, this on the surface similar scene just didn’t feel right in this context when I listened to it. In Anatoly’s last scene here, he told Florence firmly that he just wanted to win and that his marriage with Svetlana was never real and it’s all KGB mind games. Him going “It’s more than a game now, there’s so much more at stake” suddenly now comes out of nowhere — if he believes that now, it could only be if he actively reconsidered something offscreen, but he doesn’t say anything elaborating on what he’s thinking now or what he might have reconsidered or why, just that vague, generic line that contradicts everything he’s expressed up until this point. It’s another example of Anatoly’s dialogue just feeling really flat and meaningless to me — his lines here don’t say anything, just serve as vague filler to prompt Freddie onward. And because unlike London proper the setup leading up to this is all about him already being absolutely determined to win the game at all costs, this just feels redundant, unnecessary, going through the motions of something that’s in London without realizing that with the changed context it doesn’t quite make sense anymore.

I think that’s unfortunately the case with Freddie a bit here too. I enjoyed Act I’s quite different take on Freddie, and his establishing narration for Act II petulantly stating Anatoly won the championship last year “by forfeit, I might add”, and “The Interview” is recontextualized in a very fun way as I mentioned before — but after that it feels like Danny Strong doesn’t quite know what to do with Freddie anymore and just has him sort of arbitrarily go through the motions of London in a way that doesn’t necessarily hang together with everything he’s established of Freddie so far. It made sense that this Freddie, despite being decidedly hostile towards Walter and the CIA, conducted the interview to show Florence what a bastard Anatoly is — he’s not doing it for Walter, he’s got his own reasons to want to do it once Walter’s shown him the Svetlana video. But I find it a lot harder to swallow that this Freddie — whose usual problem seems to be that he’s compulsively blunt about how he really feels — would then be easily persuaded to play his part in “The Deal”, which involves exaggeratedly trying to be all buddy-buddy with Anatoly. Maybe if there was better setup around it, like with “The Interview” — but “The Deal” only has seconds of kind of half-assed leadup here, and from there it moves directly into “Pity the Child” (after a segue featuring the recording of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, because nuclear war).

Freddie’s next appearance after that, then, is this “Talking Chess”-esque dialogue where he’s realized the parallel between the two of them, how they’ve both sacrificed everything for chess and the political schemers have sacrificed nothing and that’s why he should play to win. I can appreciate how the low point of “Pity the Child” would trigger that particular realization, contemplating how much he lost and sacrificed to achieve his status in the game and perhaps afterward realizing Anatoly is the only other person here who might understand that. That feels like it basically tracks and is interesting.

But… it also means that fun very specific contempt for Anatoly in particular based on him having left his family like Freddie’s own father did is just kind of… gone, I guess, or at least Freddie doesn’t consider it relevant enough for it to stop him from going out of his way to pep Anatoly up for the game with no mention or hint of it. (At least Freddie probably isn’t aware of the threats made against Svetlana in particular, so he doesn’t know Anatoly winning would shatter his family even further.) And we’ve lost the bit in “Talking Chess” where the notion of the political scheming actually leading to Viigand winning the match just personally offends Freddie because Viigand is not even that good; instead Freddie is just putting forward “Play to win” as some kind of general inviolable chess principle, which is kind of generic and not nearly as characterful, in my opinion. I’m not saying we ought to have had the “Viigand is mediocre” bit here — I don’t think it would quite fit in for this Freddie, whose feelings about chess itself are very conflicted and who is more concerned with showing up these political hacks who have sacrificed nothing while they sacrificed everything — but as a Freddie moment I would really have wanted to end on something stronger there than this vague assertion that “The number one rule of a chess champion is to play to win.”

Like in London, this is Freddie’s last substantial scene, but he does have a part in “Endgame”, and it’s also an interesting one: he gets Sixty-four squares / they’re the reason you know you exist (but not the preceding How straightforward the game…), but also a couple of other verses usually sung by the chorus, and the lines he gets are clearly very purposefully chosen to reinforce that final resolve regarding the sacrifices they’ve made for greatness, which I really appreciate: Listen to them shout / They saw you do it / In their minds no doubt / That you’ve been through it / Suffered for your art and in the end a winner and They’re completely enchanted / But they don’t take your qualities for granted / It isn’t very often / That the critics soften / Nonetheless, you’ve won their hearts / How can we begin to / Appreciate the work that you’ve put into / Your calling through the years / The blood, the sweat, the tears / The late, late, nights, the early starts?

All in all, Freddie is still definitely my favorite part of this Chess, but while the parallel itself is neat it’s too muddled and I find the second half of Act II pretty uneven for him. What would I do if I were writing this bit?

I’m not totally sure how I’d want to tackle “The Deal”, but as for the “Talking Chess”-but-not scene: I would ditch the bit where Freddie is trying to advise Anatoly on strategy and the bit where Anatoly is apparently suddenly not determined to play to win just so Freddie can then tell him he should be again. None of that is contributing anything in what this version has been building up. Instead, they just sort of bump into each other, Anatoly fresh off his paranoid rant to Florence about Svetlana, Freddie fresh off “Pity the Child” and the strange realization Anatoly might be the only person who’d understand him a little bit. At first they just sort of stop and look at each other. Freddie starts, guarded, with some kind of oblique accusatory prod about the leaving his family thing, which he still deeply resents.

Anatoly has calmed down now, but he tells him what he told Florence: that it was always a fake marriage, a fake family, that the video was just a lie set up for him by the KGB, that Svetlana had brainwashed their children to despise him.

This incidentally plays into Freddie’s existing preconceptions pretty well. He’s probably not instantly convinced but it checks out enough he’s willing to reluctantly leave it alone for now. Probably mutters something like, “Fucking Soviets.”

Anatoly says something like, aren’t you going to try to make me a deal to get me to throw the match and go back? Freddie says no, fuck that. Says the whole bit about how we are the ones who have dedicated ourselves to chess, who have sacrificed everything, childhood, sanity, love, and they’ve sacrificed nothing. Why should we listen to those CIA and KGB assholes? Draws out that parallel. The two of them are probably standing in symmetrical positions on the stage.

Anatoly just nods slowly, agreeing. “I would have beaten you.”

Freddie scoffs and says, “Dream on,” but not quite with the spiteful arrogance he would’ve said it in Act I.

Then they part, and we move on to “Endgame”. The scene isn’t about Freddie helping Anatoly, or about Freddie convincing Anatoly to go for the win; it’s about the Freddie/Anatoly parallel, about Freddie realizing it and in his profound loneliness finding a smidge of connection with this guy he hated because he’s the only one who sort of Gets It, and about showing how Anatoly’s conviction has developed since the first chess match where part of his inner monologue went, “I can’t beat him, he’s too good.” Anatoly is so ready to prove that he really is the world’s best chess player.

Conclusion

Man, this version is so interesting. It’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess with a bunch of tasty potential and a real sense that Danny Strong had some genuine thoughts on what the show was missing and how to rework it to fix that, even where his attempts were ultimately confused and don’t succeed. In some ways it’s the most me-core version of Chess and in other ways it’s deeply antithetical to me and in most all ways it’s trying to do something neat but does it in a flawed way. Special shoutout to this Freddie, who honestly deserves better than this Florence.

#musicals #chess musical #chess the musical #ramble #review

[bettsfic]

hi beth! i've got a fic that i've been struggling with for some time, and i think i could feasibly it scrap for parts and come out with a few smaller and (more likely to be finished) oneshots. i loved your advice that nothing is wasted when writing and not to be precious about ideas/words, so do you have any advice on whether it's the right idea to scrap a fic, and if so, how to do it?

i think if you're considering scrapping a fic for parts, it's worth it to try, just to see if you like the result better than what you already have. you really have nothing to lose, you know? either you'll get some good one-shots out of it or you'll get some new insight into the form you've already chosen.

one of the hardest skills to develop in writing is being able to feel and acknowledge when a story is working and when it's not. it's so amorphous and clouded by either doubt or enthusiasm, and you never know for sure until you get to the end.

going back to my knitting analogy, it's the point at which you realize the sweater you're knitting is not going to fit its recipient. so do you undo the whole thing and start over? use the yarn for socks to give to multiple people? or do you find someone slightly smaller to give it to, knowing you'll be a little disappointed in yourself for not doing what you set out to do?

i think the activity i'm about to lay out is good to do not just in this situation but also any time you feel very lost about a big project that you've been working on for a while. i've done it many times and i hope it helps you as much as it has me.

step one: go through the piece and highlight all the parts you like. this can be anything from entire chapters to maybe just a single sentence. these are parts that make you go "yeah this is working" or that you're particularly proud of. your darlings, if you will.

optional: in a different color, you can do this also for the parts you really don't like, that you'd be embarrassed to show someone else. what's left un-highlighted is what you feel neutral about.

step two: either zoom very far out on the document or do a multi-page view, however you can to see as much of the work as possible at once. notice the ratio of highlighted to un-highlighted text.

step three: brainstorm. i have to do this part with pen and paper, but however you get your big-picture ideas down is fine. at this point you haven't made any major decisions yet. it's just an experiment. IF you were to scrap a story for parts, what would it look like? and so you can start writing down your one-shot ideas.

at this point, you should have a better idea about how you want to proceed. maybe the highlighting activity brought to light the fact that there are really only a few spots you don't like and maybe you can rewrite or cut those; or maybe you have an idea for some restructuring. or you really like the one-shot ideas you've written and want to start the first one.

it's important to remember that there's really no loss here. you can write the one-shots, post them, and then come back to the longer version of the fic maybe years later and finish it. it's fanfiction; your audience will not complain about overlapping parts of stories. they'll just be happy to have more to read.

so if you've decided to play around with the one-shots, here's how i've done it in the past.

step four: open a new document. i call this document the stitch draft. the stitch draft is used for situations like this, but also for major structural edits. you need a bridge between the old draft and the new one. the sole purpose of this draft is to copy and paste over the parts you've already written that you want to keep for your first one-shot, in roughly the order you want them in.

step five: open another new document. put it side by side with the stitch draft. start writing the one-shot by bringing in the work from the stitch draft while also writing the connective tissue of the new context of the story. this may involve editing the stitch draft elements at the same time to make them relevant to your new story.

the stitch draft method has never really steered me wrong. in fact when you're very stuck i think highlighting and moving stuff to a new document is a way to help inspire new ideas, simply because you're fiddling with the text and getting out of your own head about it.

#writing advice #revision #structure #stitch draft

[helluvabossrewrite45]

Hey. I've seen some of your rewrite of Helluva Boss scenes and I really like them. I enjoy how you fixed the issues with the writing and how incredibly spectacular your writing of the improved dialogue within the scenes are.

Honestly, I feel inspired by your work. I have an idea for my own Helluva Boss rewrite where I not only fix issues the show has (ex. tonal shifts, inconsistencies & plot holes, worldbuilding issues, etc), but also integrate my HB OCs into my rewrite (ex. my main HB OC Alice Lola (Ally for short), who is an assassin at I.M.P. and an aspiring writer).

I was wondering if I could ask you this: do you have any advice & tips you could give for who have an idea for starting an HB rewrite, or a rewrite in general? I ask out of curiosity as an aspiring writer myself.

Feel free to respond back when you get the chance. Thank you and have a wonderful day/afternoon/night. Keep up the great work! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 🤗💕❤️🧡💛💚💙💜💖💕🤗

Thank you, im glad you enjoy my rewrites and of course, I can offer up some advice for rewrites;

I think one of the best things in writing a rewrite is that you can use these minor details the piece your rewriting has and use them to you advantage. For example, I noticed that Octavia listens to music whenever she hears her parents arguing or at the dinner table where her parents would be and probably would have at least some awkward tension so from rewriting seeing stars, I use that minor detail to highlight her character and her arc of using music or the moon festival to ignore her problems even though it clearly doesn't help. It also contrast with Loona in my rewrite ignoring her problems that she later acknowledges and the two would open up, closing the character arcs in a nice neat bow. Another would be that Millie is often depicted as either moxxie's wife or a murder machine and from the little time we see with her and her family, I rewrote millie growing up having to be in her sisters shadow and just wanting to be her own person instead as inferior or someone's tool. This would establish why she has a rivalry with her sister while also giving her more character for her to be explored (which we should've gotten from harvest moon tbh), Any details you find in helluva can be a tool for you to explore whether it be for the characters, world etc...

Something that even I learned is that when rewriting, you gotta plan what your gonna do with the characters, with the worldbuilding you establish, with all of these plots/ideas your rewriting. Most of the problems helluva has is because vivziepop didnt plan the show out until season 2 rolled around and if we wanna rewrite the show to be better, we ourselves cant make the same mistakes. If you already started the rewrite however, i suggest you look back on the rewrite your already doing for as much as you can to remember in order to not fall into the same mistake the show itself has

When planning an oc into rewrites, I think the main thing is to ask what are they doing here, what purpose do they serve to the plot and what is their character overall (their motive, personality, character arc, likes, dislikes, relationship with the characters, how they bounce off to the other characters etc...)

As another aspiring writer who has a lot of original stories in the works (there's even an original story inspired by helluva boss and some of my rewrite ideas for it), I think its important to approach criticism as a helpful tool rather than an insult. Especially when its rewrites. I always want whatever I'm writing to at least be of decent quality and is regularly curious of how people would react to my original stories still in the works so receiving it and even given criticism for it can help, you know? Since you have an established audience and them offering criticism can be your tool that you can use to improve. It should be noted though that their is a difference between criticism and personal bias/subjectivity. For example, if someone wanted to point out a plot hole or a mistake in your work, that's criticism you can use. But if someone just tells you to go touch grass for your rewrite or something like that, then its not criticism, that's personal bias/opinion they have of rewrites in general so it offers nothing you can use to improve it.

That's all I got so far, I hope this helps!

#helluva boss critical #helluva boss critique #helluva boss criticism #helluva critical #helluva critique #helluva criticism #helluva boss rewrite #ask #anon

[pechadream]

🦋The Butterfly Effect🦋

WOAH it's been almost a full year since my last Luna post, I didn't forget about her I swear-

Here is a (Almost completely) refreshed version of my SDV OC! I'm probably going to make a whole explanation for her timelines and universe in a separate post.

⚠  Do not repost my art or I will come after your kneecaps  ⚠

(Details about each lil segment of the wings under the cut!)

*it is VERY long because I go into detail about each bachelor/ette and how the moment I drew is important to their story with Luna

I made it so each moment with the bachelor/ette in the butterfly wing is when they either realize they're catching feelings or it's a moment during their confessions, I will say I haven't completely finished all 12 rewrites for how the confessions/realizations happens, so some might seem unpolished or unfinished. (Primarily the bachelorettes, since I focused on the bachelors first.)

*Note that this isn't all happening in one universe! I have alternate timelines with different outcomes for Luna, hence me taking inspiration from the butterfly effect, no cheating is going on here-

People who I drew with the idea that there's an active confession happening:

Elliott

This moment is technically the start of his confession, they've been friends for a while by that point and they've been writing each other letters and Luna's helped him grow some plants in her spare time since he expressed interest in learning how to grow things. So when he decided to confess to her he sent her a letter inviting her to dinner with one of the roses he grew attached. (*I'm realizing it might be kinda hard to see the rose in the picture, I'm sorry-)

Sam

With Sam, instead of him confessing, it's actually how Luna confessed. Luna knew he has bad allergies, and she didn't want to risk her bouquet for him triggering them so instead she made a bouquet of origami flowers, which he definitely gushed about to anyone who would listen (Sebastian) And he keeps them in a lil vase on his desk.

Shane

Like Elliott, his is also technically the start of the confession. I haven't really worked on his timeline with luna much yet but I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep his normal 10 heart event with him getting two tickets to watch the gridball match in Zuzu city with Luna.

Leah

Another one where Luna was the one to confess, they've been friends for a while by this point, so Luna invited Leah over for a walk around the farm and to just talk about everything going on (Since her farm was keeping her busy and Leah was busy with her art) Then near the end Luna confessed her feelings and gave her the bouquet. Later on when the flowers were no longer fresh Leah pressed them to keep them preserved.

Haley

I haven't really worked on her timeline with Luna that much, so what I went with for her was just the normal bouquet confession- Although, I will say- I like the idea of Luna actually making bouquets for her spouse to fit their interests rather than her buying a bouquet off of Pierre, so that's what she did for Haley with sunflowers.

(yes, this confession is the most likely to change out of them all when I work on her timeline more)

Emily

With Emily, I was trying to think of her craftier side, so I came up with the idea of her creating a bouquet of Luna's favorite flowers out of felt (or some fabric that holds its shape well) to use for her confession. This one is also kinda pre-confession, although she confesses pretty much as soon as the bouquet is ready.

People who I drew based on them realizing their feelings:

(These are longer since I have to write how they caught feelings and realized them and that is more tricky for me-)

Harvey

With him, the two of them started to fall for each other fast. They'd frequently see each other as Harvey took his walks around town and Luna ran around doing all sorts of errands and deliveries. And when they had free time, they'd have a conversation every now and again. Slowly talking more and more about their personal lives and why they moved to pelican town. Harvey started to open up more to her and break out of his shell as they got closer, he'd find himself more lonely at times and, if there's no work, he'd jot down things that happened that day (even if it were mundane normal things like going to Pierre's) since he knew she'd love to hear about it and he'd just wait for her by the tree outside his clinic.

(I'm so sorry to the Harvey lovers but I had absolutely no idea what to draw for him- I guess it could be seen as him admiring Luna from afar while she runs around town doing deliveries? I'm genuinely not sure, but I'll work on his timeline more and just know this is most likely subject to change!)

Alex

I guess his realization kinda leads into his confession? But I like to think that shortly after his 8 heart event him and Luna went back to her farmhouse to have lunch and continue to talk. And when it was time to leave Luna and him took a small detour so she could show off her new flower patch, she then took a flower and put it in his hair with an added comment of "Hey, it suits you pretty well!" and then that's when the two parted ways since she had to continue her farmwork. All that to say that the drawing of Alex is his expression watching her leave since I love the trope of a character giving the most loving gaze while the other is unaware-

Sebastian

For Sebastian, I was thinking of when he usually stands by the lake at night. I like to think that's when he thinks about his plans for life since he's spent a lot of time before thinking about moving out of town and I doubt he'd think about that when cramped up in his room. And when he started thinking more and more about Luna and staying in the valley that's when he realized he had caught feelings for her.

Maru

Luna previously helped Maru with various tasks and projects, which just by that alone meant that they were going to spend a lot of time together. But when Maru and Luna would just hang out for the fun of it, Maru realized how much she loved spending time with her and how lonely it'd feel without Luna around. *It took a whole reality check from Penny for Maru to realize her feelings though since Maru was in denial

(Maru's drawing is just her admiring Luna while Luna's helping test a gadget since I also didn't know what to draw for Maru-)

Penny

Penny caught on to her feelings fast, she pretty much realized as soon as it happened. She already admired Luna when they met since Luna was so determined to fix up her grandparents' old farm, but when she saw how gentle and nice she was with the kids and how much she took an interest in Penny's interests those feelings came rushing in. The two have frequent meetups at the museum's library on the weekend where they just read together and chat about what's going on in life, which usually ends with Penny getting flustered at Luna's compliments as Luna admires Penny for taking on the task of tutoring the kids in town, which Penny ends up hiding her face with her book to at least cover some of her blush.

Abigail

With Abigail, she also caught feelings very fast. Luna's always been very supportive of Abigail's dreams of adventuring and would frequently offer to come with if she ever noticed Abigail going off to the mines so they could have each other's backs. Abigail also loved how the two of them could pretty much joke about anything, the two of them spent many nights just playing games and joking around and they wouldn't even notice how much time passed until they started feeling like they were gonna pass out right then and there. 

#Stardew valley #SDV #Stardew Valley Oc #SDV Oc #SDV Farmer #Stardew Valley Farmer #SDV Elliott #SDV Harvey #SDV Alex #SDV Sam #SDV Sebastian #SDV Shane #SDV Leah #SDV Maru #SDV Haley #SDV Penny #SDV Abigail #SDV Emily #SDV Timeline #OC: Luna #Luna Lore #(I guess?) #Digital Art #My Art #I regret drawing so many characters- I forgot I'd have to tag them all 💀 #the price of wanting my blog easily navigable #I have some drawings planned for this month but I wanted to get this one out first and this was a PAIN to write- #also I'm sorry to Shane and Harvey lovers #I haven't drawn them before so they look a bit strange‚ I need to figure out how to draw them-

[aita-blorbos]

AITA for taking a 13 year old away from the corporation that’s been keeping her in a coma?

(AU/rewrite of canon)

I, (27, m) work for a secret organization that specializes in experimenting and containing anomalous things. They keep everything from the public so regular people don’t know about the anomalies either.

Anyways the story starts around last year after Christmas, I was talking to one of my co workers about how Santa does come into my house and he’s definitely real while my co worker tried to explain how I needed to call the cops (which I did it was not Santa). Then Santa runs by us and immediately I check it out only to find out that this ‘Santa’ was very recently created by one of the anomalous entities we house.

We’ll call her S, (13, F). S is capable of manipulating reality. Kinda like a witch or wizard. Realizing the similarities to her and a witch I made her a spell book and gave it to her in hopes she’d be able to have better control of her abilities if she were to write them down.

Unfortunately I never knew if this ended up working bc H, (31, M) put her into a coma under the organizations orders.

It should be noted that when this happened, H was a cyborg and the organization literally coded him to listen to the organizations orders. I fixed this not even a month later after S becoming comatose tho so we’re good on that.

Anyways cut to now, S was woken up by a researcher for unrelated reasons which accidentally lead into a site wide containment breach of almost every entity in the site because another guy really wants to kill her (don’t worry everyone was working to stop him during this)

S managed to get the guy trying to hurt her into a containment cell because she’s awesome like that but in the process accidentally summoned a dragon. So I went to help her handle that and kinda just told the dragon to die and it did. It disintegrated on the spot. So I go to make sure S is ok when another researcher shows up and injects her with something to make her pass out bc I guess they wanted to make her comatose again which is bullshit.

I manage to get to her first and in my panic I teleport her into this library place which is actually a zone in between worlds that’s controlled by another group that’s against the organization and wants all anomalies to either be known about or be let into society.

I immediately take S into a medical sector and explain the whole situation. As I’m typing this she’s very happily living over in the library with H (bc he’s staying there due to the whole mind control thing)

Anyways where I might be the asshole is that everyone over in the organization (except for a few) is super pissed at me for not telling them where she is. They keep saying she has the capacity to end the world which, sure, but also she is 13 and they put her into a coma

I don’t think I’m the asshole here but maybe I am who knows

#aita #am i the asshole #unreality #abuse #child abuse #medical abuse

[authoraemoseley]

I am very curious to know your response too so I am going to ask you the same question back!

What do you enjoy most about the revision process? Are there some things you enjoy more than others? How does the revision process compare to the initial drafting process for you, do you prefer writing a first draft or would you rather skip to editing?

Thank you! A lovely set of questions!

So I'm going to answer all of these questions in a slightly disordered way but I trust that it'll make sense. If not, feel free to send me more asks for clarification!

When I write, I typically bang it all out in one or two goes (for shorter works), or over a week, or a month or so. My current WIP is an exception as I hand wrote it as a young teen, typed it up and completed it during NaNoWriMo in my late teens and as an adult I've been world building, rewriting, adding and now finally going back and writing the book as a whole.

There's a lot of different parts and elements from a lot of different places that are all making it into this cohesive "final" draft, but I really do enjoy it! I enjoy those rapids like flow of inspiration and getting in the zone, but I also really enjoy this process.

Typically the whole editing thing for me goes

Draft hand written or typed up

Type up draft (if hand written) or print the typed draft and then type it up again into a new document. This let's me re-read the story, flesh it out, and get a new perspective. This has been so tremendously helpful for me!

Take a break from it (no, seriously, step away from the computer, self!!). This break also typically involves rambling about it to someone or another (my close friends, my family, my cat, my dog), getting new ideas and jotting them down.

Go back and re-read, print out what's typed again (I use cheap paper and always front and back especially for the longer stories), take so many notes on it, then just kind of marinate in the story. This also involves a lot of talking to my cat, dog, parents (Bless them half the time they have no idea what I'm going on about but they give helpful advice and encouragement either way!), friends, and then I go back aaaand....

Type it all up again! By this point the story is looking pretty swell, and it's close to it's final draft, if it's not already at its final draft.

I really love all of it, especially the parts where I can just take notes on my story, write all sorts of odd things and just let inspiration come at me in a new way. I think that's my favorite part, seeing how I can build upon the ideas I already had, making them stronger and more detailed. While the grammar stuff always feels like a drag during the editing process, editing beyond that is a delight for me. I get a lot of inspiration for sequels or spin-offs or new ideas altogether.

I do sometimes skip to editing like with what I'm doing with HoM. Because the book is coming from so many sources that I've written over so many years (and I've been using this as my project for school), I'm going back and re-reading a lot. This is in part to remind me what I wrote, and to help me keep the flow of the story as I go into the next part. So I'll do tweaks here and there, add in more details, fix a run on sentence, but it's more light edits.

I do jump around a lot though when drafting. If there's a scene I wanna write, I'm gonna write it and trust that I can get myself to connect it later on. When I edit I tend to go straight through the whole thing.

Thanks again for the return ask!

#editing process #answered #hom book 1 #hom:tpm #the writer talks #squarebracket-trick

[davekat-sucks]

Read your rewrite of homestuck and I loved it. I love that it is still true to what Act 6 was but greatly improved. John really did have the ability to get rings for all the characters or I don't know a dead/ doomed godteir feferi could probably have raised the dead. It's stupid to introduce that plot point of her saving someone only for the mayor, who was a mascot character that was never that interesting. The sprites in act 6 were pointless to the point of being stupid. Davesprite and Jadesprite were good but only because this was a plot device used on the main four kids. Rose, Dave, John and Jade deserved special treatment.

Only thing I would change from your rewrite is that the dancestors are still kinda a thing ish. Here's my idea, Aranea is still a ghost. The rest were all destroyed by Lord English or were lost to time. Who cares which. Hell, Maybe the dancestors just had their soul's crushed recently at the amusement of Damara and Aranea is the only one to escape.

When Aranea shows up in the story she talks to Rose alone. Maybe around the time Rose decides to start on her 12 step journey to sobriety. Aranea gives a short explanation of how she survived and then a recap of her friends' story in the same way that Scratch originally talked about ancestors. Quicker, to the point. Everything we got out of the dancestor's life stories, interests, relationships could have been said in one paragraph at most.

Aranea could still have an interest in Jake for his power, but she needed a better more clear motivation. I think Jake needed to work with her of his own free will but he isn't good enough for her liking and then she starts to manipulate him and brainwash him out of desperation. Maybe she is a victory at all cost kind of character? Maybe the years of isolation in space took a toll on her mind? She was by far the worst antagonist and shouldn't have been treated as one, just like she's a threat. Dirk should have actually used his power at some point to destroy a soul, heres a great opportunity to do just that. He could have actually killed her, and not as a manifestation of Jake's imagination, as himself. I still think Meenah is a fun character but she derails the story and her romance with Vriska was a joke when it happened and their breakup was the only payoff. Damara would be an interesting character to fit into the story but she would still just be another servant to Lord English and the empress was enough to fit that bill.

Maybe the dancestors could have still be a thing but as a side comic, not a part of the actual story. I recall a lot of fans enjoying them even though I did not. I feel the same way I do about them as I do all the new trolls in the new media homestuck has. Horuss is cute though.

I think Wayward Vagabond is interesting as a character, since he was the one to lead the revolution to go against his own Black Kingdom. But sadly after his revival, the writers don't write him as an individual and treats him like pet. It shows more with how Dave and Karkat treat him too. They don't see him as a person person. They see him as an object. And the worst part is that they desecrate his grave by keeping Kingdoms despite they had played with him for Can Town to being democratic. Did Karkat and Dave play along as a means to playcate his delusional fantasy? Was it in a mocking way because they will take over Earth C as Kingdoms later on in the future? Either way, they had fun with their toy and were ready to discard his dreams for their own. The only sprite that wasn't useless is ARquiusprite, but only because he is technically an extension of being parts of Lord English. So plot favors him more compared to the other sprites. As well as a joke that even if Equius is fused with AR/Lil HAL, the focus is more on the AI than the troll because the AI overshadows his personality for the most part and Equius being a Void player, his existence is barely there. The only Void player to have acknowledgement from the narrative is Roxy Lalonde. That could work, but confused on parts like how did Aradia became a ghost again if we see that she's become God Tier upon Derse being destroyed? Sure God Tier beings as ghosts is not uncommon as we see in the Dream Bubbles, but how would it get Aradia motivated to speak with the others when she is adamant on staying alive? Not only that, but I still feel miffed about her being the keeper and watcher of Dream Bubbles, when it was technically Feferi Peixies who made it happen. She was nice to her lusus, who was part of the horrorterrors, and it was her kindness that granted her wish to create an afterlife purgatory for her friends. Aradia taking it away because fan favoritism feels wrong. Worse is Meenah Peixies being created as a means to apologize to Feferi fans too. But would have really liked that actual real life Dirk destroys Aranea's soul. Let's kill da hoe! 8iiiiiiiitch! I also wouldn't mind if Dancestors' story is a separate story. Have it really called Openbound.

#homestuck #homestuck fandom #Homestuck rewrite #Beta Kids #Alpha Kids #Beta Trolls #Alpha Trolls

[dynared]

To start off, thanks for answering my overlong asks.

You almost make it sound like it’s if the Star Wars franchise got handed over to the bozos who hate the Jedi and consider them the cause of all evil for some batshit reason. Even as someone who doesn’t care about Star Wars those people annoy the heck out of me and there seem to be versions in every fandom. Or maybe just people who think nuanced characterization is making everyone an asshole.

I would like more Twitch and Hashtag, I’ve grown quite fond of them. I hope Nightshade doesn’t disappear, they may not be a favourite but their dreamy and slightly loopy demeanour reminds me a lot of me as a kid and I’ve grown attached for that. I’m also happy in general that kid’s shows are becoming more inclusive and I really like their design. Think they could slot into a kooky hermit role well.

That’s an interesting point about humans in Transformers stuff, something to think about. And I don’t want to sound like I hate the very concept of humans in these stories, I don’t.

The Skybound comics are really fun so far, and the art and action scenes are gorgeous. Pleasantly surprised I’m enjoying the human drama and very pleased with how rock solid Optimus Prime and Starscream’s characterizations have been. If it keeps up they may wind up my favourite renditions. Mostly I’m worried it will turn into a series where someone dies every couple issues and I stop being able to care about anyone altogether. I’m fine with it for a first arc but that kind of thing tends to kill my interest fast. Also hope they don’t try and make the Decepticon cause more sympathetic later on. I appreciate the odd twist but I’d like it to not become the standard. Still, that’s partly personal taste and we’ll have to wait and see.

The late 2000s/early 2010s were getting away from “everyone is gritty and grim” to another equally disliked archetype - “everyone wants to be the snarky one”, or as I’ve called it in the past - “Whedonesque” since it was mostly people trying to imitate the tone of professional creep Josh Whedon and how his characters COULD. NOT. STOP. QUIPPING. This resulted in a lot of asshole characters and character assassinations, a Prime who went beyond stoic to outright cold, Star Saber being reduced to that fanfic villain because teenage edgelord James Roberts didn’t like the idea of a Gundam being cooler than his Decepticons, etc. There are always versions of that archetype in fandom, the problem was in IDW they were writing the books, and as a result hardly anyone was reading the damned things.

Twitch I happen to like a lot, but she really is in pursuit of a better show. The reason I often compare her to Suletta Mercury (besides the red in their designs) is that same sort of naive exuberance and energy, as well as the ability to actually make connections with the rest of the cast. Hashtag I think would be more likable if she stopped trying so hard, but I think that actually makes her better for a rewrite, where she’s around characters who will be able to interact off of her desire to be cool in a different way than her siblings. Nightshade, if they are used again, probably will lean into the science aspect of their personality, a contrast with either the older Wheeljack or the more stoic Perceptor. It would be interesting to see if they went back to the original show bible’s pitch, that Nightshade identified as a machine, rather than an organic, and didn’t find gender a part of that dynamic, before I presume Mae Catt made them about gender almost exclusively. Either way they’re still non-binary, but the focus is different.

The Skybound comics, as much as I adore them, are still early on in their production. While I’ve often said that a dream production would be giving all of them (Void Rivals, Transformers, and the various Codename: GI Joe books like Duke and Cobra Commander) to Studio Trigger to make a full on anime, we are realistically years from having enough comics to have that be feasible. I understand what you mean about killing off too many of the cast, but I could also argue that if you focus on certain cast members by killing off more popular characters, you create openings for other characters to get the spotlight. Cliffjumper hasn’t had this level of characterization in decades, since he’s often seen as the sacrificial hero and the bot in Bumblebee’s shadow. No Bumblebee meant Cliffjumper could be in a role that he normally doesn’t get.

My optimism continues to be cautious, both that the Skybound comics will continue to be good, and that the Terrans will stick around this franchise, hopefully with some better material to work with. Whether that involves Twitch learning swordsmanship from Star Saber or Drift, or Hashtag interacting with Blaster, we’ll just have to see.

#transformers #transformers earthspark #twitch malto #transformers skybound #transformers IDW #tf Skybound #Earthspark

[lostvi21]

Tips for writing

I already had another story which I never got to post, since I kept rewriting it into eternity. After forcing myself to take a break from it, I think I finally figured out a way to keep consistently writing a story. So, I thought maybe this post might stumble across a reader who struggles with similar things as I did and I could provide a possible solution without them needing to go through a year and over 10 different versions of a first chapter ending in a failed project. (and admitting that I needed to stop was what hurt the most since I really love the idea I had and maybe I might even try to restart that story, but that's a topic for another post in maybe 2 to 3 years.)

Also Disclaimer: This is only my opinion on the matter and what I figured to be helpful. In the end, it's up to you how you want to write your story and to decide what works for you. I'm just sharing my experiences.

I had a couple of problems which mixed up together until I needed to give up.

First off, I lacked structure. With my first bigger story, I had an idea, a beginning and I knew some major plot points that needed to happen. But what I never knew was when or how the story ended. I just wanted to tell an endless story or figure out an ending on the way. That didn't work for me.

With my current story (which you can check out here, if you're interested) I researched a couple of ways how to structure a story properly. (It was just for fun honestly, but so helpful in the end) I already had, like before a vague idea, and some plot points I wanted to happen. What I did: See if my story would fit into any of these structures and what would happen at which point until the end. And then I found a structure that fit my story (almost) perfectly. After that, I wrote down the plot in bullet points creating my outline for the story.

(Note: Of course, you can take any story structure you find and bend it a little. For example, I decided to go for a three act-structure and decided to skip the introduction part, since I wanted to plunge the reader into the story without heavily explaining what was going on. They would figure it out on the way … )

This means I knew what happened at which moment. And most importantly, I had an ending. Now I had to face my next challenge, fighting my constant urge to rewrite everything. After proceeding with my used-to-way of just writing what comes to my head, I quickly figured out that this wouldn't work. It didn't work earlier and it didn't work now. So, I needed to figure out what was wrong with my approach.

For that, there are multiple options to do so. Either you can ask others for their opinion of what is wrong with your text or try proofreading yourself. I recorded how I read my texts and heard afterwards to the footage while I was reading along (and yes, it sucks hearing your own voice on record, but if you imagine it's another person, it's not that painful anymore, after a while)

Then I had another important realization. I still had no structure in my chapters. The story was now well structured and I knew what I wanted to write the chapter about, but my thoughts were jumping from one thought to another and then back again. To solve this problem, I came up with an approach that still works for me.

Before writing the chapter, I think about what I want to happen in this chapter. For example, in my current story, I needed to introduce the two main characters and they needed to meet. I also wanted to hide some hints on backstory and needed to write about the event that starts the entire story. With that in mind, I just start loosely writing down what comes to my mind. It doesn't matter if it's good or not, since I'm going to rewrite it later on. Once I come to a point, where I completed all of my goals for that chapter, I take what I wrote down and structure the plot into bullet points. Then I take these and write a second version along with the bullet points. This makes sure that my thoughts are structured in the end and that I have a clear storyline to follow.

After that, the last step is proofreading. As already said before, you can ask others to give you feedback or record yourself. Maybe use a grammar program to fix obvious mistakes you've overseen (helps a lot. especially if you're writing in a language that you don't use everyday) In this stage I mostly find some sentences that are hard to read / speak or just some wordings that repeat or don't quite sound right. So I go ahead, mark them and fix them.

And after that, I was by now always satisfied with what I wrote. This method might be a little overkill but it works for me and the most important thing you need to keep in mind: If you'd like to write something, it's supposed to be fun. No matter the way you do it. The process of creating an own story and slowly watching it come alive, that's the feeling that makes me happy and why I keep writing.

Hope you had fun reading and maybe I was able to give you one or another idea on how to write a story. If you want more tips, you can send me an ask or just comment on this post.

#writers on tumblr #writing #writing advice

[wilchur]

Saw someone else do it and I think I've done this before too, but the list has grown since then a bit so here's my current lineup of read dead wips that I'm working on!! :D Minus the stuff that's already posted on AO3 cuz I see no point in doing a synopsis for things that have left my google drive and you can go and read ahah.

Turned out loooooong so lookie under the cut if you're interested in knowing what I'm up to.

Morston Soulmate AU (title tba, multichapter, around 20-30k when finished) - An AU where you can feel all the injuries your soulmate gets, both minor and major ones. There's no soul marks, seeing your soulmate get hurt and connecting the dots is the only way to find out. Has a lot of time skips and focuses more on feelings than events, but starts out pre-canon when John almost gets lynched and works its way towards the end of the canon story. Chapters alternate between Arthur's and John's POV. Canon compliant :)

RDR2 "Modern AU" (title tba, multichapter, long as shit) - I only call it a modern AU for the sake of simplicity... I'm not sure if it counts as one. Set in 1999 and focuses on the case of Arthur Matthews -- a 36 year old adoptive son of the infamous criminal defence lawyer Hosea Matthews, who went missing without a trace for six months and then reappeared miles from his hometown, seemingly unharmed, but also... not quite right. Delusional, confused, suffering from some sort of memory impairment. The story is about Arthur struggling to adapt to being back home in a reality that is apparently foreign to him. Outsider's/John's POV, but not really shippy. It can be read as pre-slash, though.

My Self-Indulgent Jesse/Arthur fic (another title tba lol, it's too early to tell but I'm thinking multichapter? A collection of scenes from 1878 to 1899) - This one is for me and me only, though I will eventually post it 😂 Written in second person, like a reader-insert and can be read as one if someone wants to, but I am including Jesse's backstory and feelings that are way too specific to be immersive for anyone but myself... I'm working real hard to write it in a way that portrays growing up queer in that time somewhat realistically, so it's not always pretty, but I do try to keep it not that depressing. Features: Jesse's early-life backstory, the story of the scar, his first Gay Experience, how his brothers died, the ups and downs of his relationship with Arthur, why they eventually broke up for what felt like last time, how he got arrested (altered RDO storyline bit) and how he got back up with the gang. I'm planning to do a rough rewrite/fix-it of the canon story with him in it too, but that's... an "one day" thing ajsddjfk

Morston Omegaverse (title tba, one shot, around 10-15k probably? I can't keep things short, sorry) - Young-ish and freshly presented Alpha John, "Closeted" Omega Arthur. Ngl this one is smutty as hell... but! I think my take on omegaverse is rather fun (very transgendered) and it's porn WITH not without plot so something for everyone there lol. John's POV again + lotsa feelings, misunderstandings and some angst :) Just the way I like it.

Vandermatthews Daemon AU (had a title but ao3 yeeted my draft and I forgot what it was, oops)- I say Vandermatthews, but it's more of a "curious couple, unruly son" genfic than real slashfic 😅 This is supposed to be the beginning a series of oneshots from different characters' POV. This one is maybe a 1/3 done (needs a serious rewrite tho) and written from Hosea's POV. It's about him and Dutch finding and taking in young Arthur -- a very traumatised child who has undergone intercision and therefore lost his daemon. More of a collection of vignettes from that moment to when they take in John than a real coherent fic tho. The next one is going to be John's POV coming of age thing and we'll see where my brain will go from there. I want to do a separate big ass post about this one later because I have Opinions on the gang members' daemons that I need either challenged or validated...

1907!John/Isaac fic (title tba... a two parter, one set in the epilogue and the second is a RDR1 fix-it) - NOW HEAR ME OUT!!!!!! PUT DOWN THE GODDAMN PITCHFORKS FOR A SECOND PLS This is a plot bunny that Refused To Fucking Die. Isaac is obviously an adult in this (22), they have never met before, and the story begins in the months where Abigail and Jack were gone and John worked alone on Pronghorn ranch. It's not so much a romance (despite the slash) but more two people dealing with different types of grief in Very Unhealthy ways, okay. It's supposed to be a bit iffy because of that and the... 12 years of difference between them in this universe. I'm not trying to make this shit uwu or anything. It's also a bit of a daddy issues vent piece for me and I've been working it for MONTHS because I want to write this one right. This is the the fic I redacted in my last WIP showcase, but now decided that... fuck it. Here you go.

(Doubt anyone has made it this far, but if you did ily.. please lemme know what you think? My ask box is open for questions too... I love talking about the stuff I'm working on even if it's not posted yet ❤)

#wrote this instead of working on any of these like i promised myself i'll do today.. #master of procrastination #(well i wrote like 500 words of and i'll die if that counts.. but i've been at my puter the whole day so that's like nothing rip) #rdr2 #oh the joys of fic writing

[sparkanonymous]

Alright... who's ready for me to talk about Hazbin Hotel?

⚠️ Spoilers for Hazbin Hotel Below ⚠️

I'll most likely do this for Helluva Boss as well, if I even finish this, but I don't promise anything. If you're unfamiliar with how this goes, I jot down notes while I watch the episode. Most of the time, it's probably easier to watch the episode while reading the notes so that you know what I'm talking about, but it's not necessary if you just want to read someone's random thoughts on something.

I have not heard a lot of great things about the HH and HB fandoms. I'm not gonna try and be mean or anything, I'm just writing this stuff down for the shits and giggles. I don't see this doing well on my page anyway since I focus on Total Drama and Ninjago of all things. (I will most likely not join the HH and HB fandoms after this, either. I lurk a little bit in those spaces because of the art, but I don't really participate or go looking for anything related to these franchises... except for rewrites that I don't end up reading.)

Towards the end of this, I became increasingly more distracted and tired, so it's kinda just me listing things that I liked.

Have fun!

Hazbin Hotel - The Pilot

(I've watched this twice, but that was when it first came out.)

The song the pilot starts on is actually really pretty, imo. I've started getting sick of the songs that come from Spindlehorse (I watched the first episode of HH on Prime a bit ago, and I didn't really like either of the songs in it), but this song reminds me of why I wanted to watch this series back then.

Maybe this show is why I like the color red so much, lol

I've seen some spoilers on TikTok. I recognize the design of that one angel character by Adam- I think I saw Adam's silhouette for a moment too, that character that's Alastor's bestie, that techie demon, and maybe I'll recognize more. But how much of this story did Viv have planned before her show got the go-ahead?

(30 second unskippable ad after about 2 and a half minutes into the episode)

I remember when I saw this when it first came out, and I did not understand the point of having the snake villain. He was stupid, his egg minions were stupid, and there were clearly bigger things to focus on- like Charlie's hotel idea and advertising it, and then later, Alastor's whole thing. I had thought this entire battle between Cherry Bomb, Angel, and the snake (what is his name again) could have been cut, and there would be no issues. I still kinda think that this could've been written around. But I do like the snake guy. He's fun and eccentric.

(Another 30 second unskippable ad. We're 5 minutes in. Is it because I keep pausing to write?)

Wow, there are a lot of sound effects.

Where did those goat guys come from?

I wouldn't think that the princess of Hell would be this... innocent? Like, she can't seriously think that this whole hotel ordeal would be that easy, can she? She was literally singing at her balcony over the dozens of fallen demons. Is she just trying to stay happy and hopeful, or is she really just like this?

"I don't touch the gays-" So Charlie and Vaggie are open about their relationship? Or do they just do a terrible job at hiding it? I don't know why, but for the longest time, I thought that their relationship was secret. Damn, I'm just dumb.

"- I have standards." "Oh, yeah? How's that workin' out for ya...?"

Did we really have to cut to Tom in the middle of Kill Joy's rant? It takes away the focus.

Why is she threatening the princess of Hell? Charlie could break her scrawny neck with a hand and wouldn't be told off for it, or Charlie's father- fucking Lucifer- could catch wind of this and kill her himself. Does she want to die?

That quick sweep of the random characters and Vaggie behind the cameras was definitely sped up due to how short Charlie's "well" was. Or to save time. I don't know.

That one background character looks WAY too close to Blitz's design.

Damn. For how feared Alastor seems to be, he was able to walk behind those characters with no one screaming.

Was that Loona? Or that one character from Viv's Timber animation?

A lot of the scenes are way too quick. There are too many quick cuts, and some of the animations seem to be sped up?

During the song, Charlie's singing gets too high-pitched; I couldn't understand some of what she was saying. It's a nicer and shorter song than what Spindlehorse has been coming up with recently, though.

Is Kill Joy supposed to be cicada? Is that why the cicada sound effect keeps playing whenever we zoom in on her? I'm sorry... but if that's the case, she looks nothing like a cicada.

I know realistically bombs would make it hard to hear, but, realistically, being too close to bombs would also make your ears ring and would knock you off your feet. I don't know half of what Cherry Bomb or Angel are saying.

"Oh, harder, Daddy!~" "Son?!" I remember this clip being everywhere. I still like it. But, also, to the snake, have you even fucked anyone? Why would you immediately think that this is your kid? I honestly don't see this snake character enjoying the thought of sex.

The hat on the snake has teeth sometimes, and only sometimes. I can tell this character was probably HELL to animate.

Aw, Angel saving Cherry? Sweet...

So Angel can pull a Stitch and grow another pair of arms? Why? Spiders can't do that, so why should Angel?

I really enjoy Tom's design. He reminds me of a Looney Tunes character.

So... what happened to the turf war? We had like three different fights going on at the same time, and we see none of them? Do we hear more about that later?

Vaggie and Charlie's relationship here is really sweet.

You really thought anyone would want to stay there with how the place looks, Charlie? You're supposed to have the place ready before advertising.

So, wait... I thought Charlie's dad was really nice in the spoilers I saw. Did Charlie's dad say Charlie was useless, at least based on the intro?

How has Angel not heard of Alastor? Ah... for exposition purposes. Nevermind.

I'll be honest, Alastor's hair bothers me. I've never liked how it looks.

Was that an early design for Stolas in the Radio Demon exposition?

Alastor's colors were flickering a tiny bit when Vaggie and Charlie were talking about him.

Alastor clearly does not care about Charlie's dad being king of Hell or Charlie being the princess of Hell. He's just doing this for the shits and giggles.

"What can I do for you, my feminine fellow?" "Uh- I can suck your dick!" "HA- No."

"You think I'm some fuckin' clown?!" "... Maybe."

I thought HuskerDust was supposed to be canon. They're acting like they've never met.

I love the outfit change.

Alastor's reprise of Charlie's earlier song.

So, wait, when was Sir Pentious's first encounter with Alastor?

Alastor's smile when supposedlh killing the snake guy.

Episode 1

(Watched this when it was released on YouTube. After this, everything's new.)

So... new backstory. Also, new backstory for Charlie's dad?

New voices.

Alastor's little commercial is so lazy. He wanted entertainment. How will he get entertainment if the commercial doesn't sell it?

The sound effects haven't exactly been toned down.

The animation feels a little stiffer.

They noticed the fan love for Angel and decided they really wanted him to talk.

The threatening angle on Alastor is not as threatening as in the pilot.

What's up the random scene changes within scene changes? It's cutting randomly.

The first song is alright... for the most part.

I thought Charlie's thing was to not curse, at least not as frequently.

Adam's ramblings remind me way too much of Fizzarolli's boss. They're kinda the same in that aspect, and it doesn't really work for me.

Wow, the acting for the commercial.

How has Adam not been banished to Hell.

Nifty's great.

"You're doin' great, Vagina." lmfao

Exactly. Vaggie speaking facts.

The outfit changes are so nice.

Do sins not count once they die?

Adam should not be cursing, imo

If rules are black and white, you would be banished to Hell, Adam.

The second song with Adam is pretty good... for the most part.

You can't wait to murder? That says bloodlust to me.

Come on, let us see the commercial.

Tom's voice should have stayed the same.

But the body is just sitting there. How have more demons not seen the dead angel.

Damn, this outro song is sick.

Episode 2

That little cat thing is adorable. Kinda reminds me of the cat from Ruby Gloom.

Ooh, Sir Pentious is back.

"-battle, like, 20 times?" What? When? How long have you known Alastor.

I feel like Vox's voice should've been different. Like... imagine if he had Husk's VA.

How many accents does Valentino have?

Valentino x Vox?

Angel encouraging Alastor.

How many times does Sir Pentious have to die? Stop killing him :(

Vox trying to put a bad name on Alastor. He's so petty lol

"That's the tea-" Who told this old man about this generation's lingo?

Overall, the song's actually pretty good.

Face first into the sofa. Same, Charlie

Yay, more Sir Pentious! I actually kinda like him now.

Aw, poor Angel. But Charlie and Vaggie have a point.

Sir Pentious and Nifty give off Damien and Scary Girl from TDI, respectively.

Alastor burning the little piece of his coat in front of Sir Pentious, lol

Sir Pentious is so adorable.

The drug PSA with Angel and Pentious, lmao

The pig from the music video.

So Angel has self-worth issues, got it.

Well, that lasted all of five minutes. Poor Sir Pentious.

Charlie's bedhead is awesome.

His theatrics and the self-depracating comments don't really make Sir Pentious sound so serious about his apology.

This song was meh.

Episode 3

Why do you keep bringing that up, Vaggie?

I think a writer came on to the team and didn't look at the previous scripts very thoroughly.

Charlie, why do you look so uncomfortable with Pentious crying? You should've known that you would've gotten a lot of that.

Is Alastor trying to keep the egg minions safe? If so, cute.

"We have names?" Lol

Damn, they don't give a shit about Alastor. He got too comfortable with everyone knowing him.

The Velvet song reminds me of a different song. Pretty catchy, though.

Their definitions of trust are so different. Awesome.

Poor Nifty lol

Vaggie's army voice doesn't really work imo

Why are Carmine's earrings hanging off her hair?

The second song isn't really my thing, but I can understand why someone may like it... except for the green guy's echoing voice in the song.

Vaggie's singing voice is way too different from her speaking voice.

Pentious redemption. I like that Angel is warming up to him. The snake's precious.

Episode 4

Here's the episode on SA. Guess I'll finally be able to form my own opinion on this.

Poor Charlie and Pentious.

Aw, Husk being a people reader.

Goddamn, what did Nifty do?

So after ignoring Val's calls for days, he's suddenly answering? Maybe he realized it had been too long, and it would be worse if he continued to ignore him?

Charlie, you should've known that this would be difficult?

So Val knows to "respect" Charlie to her face, but

Angel's real name is Anthony?

Angel's VA is selling the performance here. It's gut wrenching.

Angel's song is okay.

I think the writing has been pretty solid since the song. I like Husk and Angel's dynamic.

I like the HuskerDust song and the visuals going with the song.

Goddamn the song's cut off, lmao

I dunno, besides the abuse part, I think the episode was solid. I can't speak on how well it handled SA, so I won't.

Episode 5

Why is this episode so much quieter than the rest?

Why is clown music Lucifer's ringtone for Charlie?

I like Lucifer's design, and his voice matches him, but I don't think he works as Lucifer, y'know?

Where was Alastor for that little meeting?

Alastor's eye twitching just the tiniest.

So Lucifer hasn't heard of Alastor? I thought he was the most threatening demon? Also, why is Alastor testing Charlie's dad?

Lmao, Pentious meeting the king of Hell.

Do people ship Lucifer and Alastor?

Nifty being in the song.

Alastor trying to insert himself as Charlie's father figure.

Oh, yay. Mimzy.

I like the song, besides when Mimzy came in from nowhere.

Lucifer's face in the background when Alastor's pushing Charlie away.

How does Mimzy know everyone? Did she meet Husk and Nifty because of Alastor?

New Alastor lore. I thought people would call him the Radio Demon, not that Alastor named himself that.

Alastor being owned by someone else makes sense.

Poor Husk.

Why does Hell even use money?

Aw, Pentious saving Nifty.

Angel and Husk enjoying the father-daughter drama.

So, does Alastor actually want to keep the hotel safe, or is it because of a deal?

The song reminded me of a Greatest Showman song. It's okay.

Vaggie, you're acting sus.

Episode 6

Yo, Cherry Bomb is back, and she's Aussie.

Pentious lol you're so nervous for nothing.

I love Sera and Emily's designs.

Heaven's song should've been church choir-esque y'know?

Adam has already talked about the exorsists with angels around. There's no way that more people haven't heard about them by now.

Adam named Vaggie? Wth

Damn, they ripped Vaggie's eye clean out with no struggle or hesitation.

Sarah's voice did not hold much confidence for Adam.

Why is Pentious trying to hit on Cherry?

Adam, you fucked multiple times. What the hell are you talking about, you hypocritical asshole.

Aw, poor Nifty. I like Angel and Nifty's dynamic.

Aw, man, poor Pentious.

Why did the music stop when Angel and Val argued? Let him argue without causing a scene.

I don't like that the song has to do with the plot so much, but I like the song.

Please banish Adam to Hell.

I love Sera and Emily.

Episode 7

Aww, Pentious petting the kitty thing.

Alastor is pushing Charlie a little too much.

Alastor kicking his feet while laying on Charlie's bed.

Charlie is going to push Alastor to beating her shit.

"I know something you don't know~" Love this guy.

Charlie's demon horns coming out when making the deal.

With how much they made out Vaggie's past angelhood, I would think that Charlie would be more offensive?

Ah, there it is.

"I know you're an ace in the hole-" "A what now?" Lmao

I love Rosie.

Rosie and Alastor's dynamic is lovely.

They have a month to prepare. What are they gonna do to keep their defenses up within a MONTH. That's like no time.

Who voices Carmine? She sounds mildly familiar.

Why did they have to introduce Susan?

Carmine basically calling Charlie a dumbass.

Vaggie getting her wings back is kind of bullshit. Or am I missing something?

Carmine's song is alright, but give it a little. The UnderTale fandom will get to it. There'll be a parody.

Rosie and Charlie's talk is so nice.

Alastor and Rosie kinda being the parents that Charlie needs is mad deIicious. Love me parental figures.

Despite the name, Cannibal Town is amazing.

I love the song here in Cannibal Town.

I love this episode.

Episode 8

Vox is here. Again. Yay.

Wrong Angel, Nifty lmao

I still love Sir Pentious. He has reserved a place in my heart.

Love this small peaceful scene.

Aw, Alastor and Nifty interacting.

Angel admiring Husk.

Pentious and Cherry? Kinda nice, actually.

Vaggie's song to Charlie is pretty sweet.

I can't... who's righting the relationships in this episode? They're all so lovely.

Adam's rocking "ATTACK!"

The 3 V's watching from the TV.

The outfits the main guys are wearing.

Vox getting turned on by Alastor's impending doom.

Beat his ass, Alastor!

Alastor's staff breaking and him mildly panicking.

Husk enjoying the sex jokes.

Alastor fake out death.

Angel saving the egg.

Cherry and Pentious kissing in front of explosion.

No, not Pentious!

Loved the animation where Charlie and her goats transformed.

Damn, Vaggie fighting even with a hole in her hand.

The angel bitch Vaggie was fighting ripping her arm off was a bit much for me.

Lucifer appearing and fucking Adam's shit up.

Adam's mask falling off.

Nifty getting the last hit on Adam. Awesome.

'Shitting and cumming' being in the headline during the news is fucking hilarious.

Lucifer is fucking fruity.

Lucifer and everyone cheering Charlie up.

Velvet recording Vox and Val dancing.

Sir Pentious's memorial.

Alastor showing up for the last bit of the sing.

I liked most of the song.

YO Sir Pentious showing up in Heaven?!

What was Lilith's agreement?

Overall, I enjoyed watching this show. The pacing and writing could use some work, but yeah. Mimzy was kind of annoying, but she was only in the show for a few minutes in one episode, so it was easy to ignore her... unless you're listening to the song that she so rudely interrupted at the very end of. The constant need to bring in new characters is kind of annoying, but I enjoyed at least half of them.

If I were to draw fanart of any of these characters, it would probably be Husk, Nifty, or Sir Pentious. I'll be patiently waiting for a second season. If there ever is one.

#hazbin hotel #spark speaks #I'll probably come back and edit this if I forgot to add on to a thought

[brigdh]

WIP meme: Blackbeard Wife! I just discovered lay me down… and I *devoured* it. The character writing got me like a spike through the head (and the sex writing like a spike through the [redacted]). I would love to see any more that you're willing to post. Thank you <3 <3

The WIP meme!

Thank you so much, anon! :D I'm really pleased that you like it!

This is a bit from much later in the story, plot-wise. One of the reasons I haven't been updating lately is that I have a lot of individual scenes but not the structure to connect them, which is definitely the case here.

This is Stede meeting Calico Jack for the first time, who of course has shown up to cause trouble. (Also I might end up rewriting this because I'm not sure if these are the vibes I want for past Ed/Jack; I might end up going for a more of a Jack->Ed emphasis instead of this scene's Ed-> Jack.)

Stede’s left alone on his side of the table now, as Ed seems content to stay where he is even after the play-wrestling works its way to an end or, more likely, a temporary break. There’s something similar about Ed and Jack, Stede thinks as he watches them side by side, practically in one another’s lap. It’s not exactly physical, despite some similar tattoos and mannerisms; one’s light and one’s dark, and Jack doesn’t have Ed’s easy grace and dancer-like movements. If Ed is a big cat, Jack is a weasel, sly and tawdry and cruel. But they’re so in tune. Two predators, and Stede feels like an awkward, useless mouse, not even interesting enough to be prey.

Though Jack does keep glancing at him out of the corner of his eyes, too frequently for someone who otherwise is vocally disinterested in everything about Stede. He throws his own arm around Ed’s shoulders, pulls him close to talk directly into his ear. He doesn’t lower his voice, though, so Stede can hear every word.

“Hey, man, you wanna get out of here?”

For an instant, Ed keeps grinning, even tips his head closer to Jack’s so that his hair spills across his shoulder and mingles with Jack’s paler strands. Stede’s mind goes entirely blank. He feels frozen; literally there seems to be ice in his stomach, in his veins, freezing his thoughts in place so that reacting is a physical impossibility. Then Ed’s gaze slides across Stede’s, and Ed’s grin slips away. He removes his arm from Jack’s shoulders and pats his knee instead. “Nah, mate, I’m good.”

Jack glances at Stede again. “What, the wife won’t let you out to play? Never thought you’d put up with a ball and chain, Blackie.”

“It’s not like that, c’mon.”

“Sure.” Jack shifts, putting more space between him and Ed. Stede feels like he can breathe again, but Jack has his eyes fixed on Stede now. He leans forward, elbows on the table. “You know, Steve, Blackie here proposed to me one time.”

“Oh?” Stede is surprised into saying; it’s out before he sees Ed grimace and shake his head.

“Jack. Don’t.”

“Wanted to captain together. Stupid idea, how was that supposed to work – two captains on one ship?” 

“I was drunk. I didn’t mean it,” Ed says, still mild, but he isn’t looking at Jack and even avoids Stede’s eyes when he tries to catch him. 

“Hell, man, I was drunk too, and I still knew it was a terrible idea!” Jack laughs loudly, but it doesn’t reach his eyes, which are cold and still locked on Stede. “Told him if he wanted my dick that bad, he could come be first mate on my ship, but he didn’t go for that idea.” 

“Fuck off.” The good humor is gone from Ed’s voice, replaced by something tight and brittle. It’s not mere embarrassment, and it’s not anger either, though that’s closer. Stede isn’t sure he recognizes what the emotion is, but he doesn’t like it on Ed. 

“Nah, Blackie, remember, you told me some whole story about – what was it? Hood and Beavis and their consortship. The fuck sort of word’s consortship, anyway?”

“I’m not surprised you don’t know it,” Stede says, lifting his chin and putting his palms flat on the table. “Given that you’re clearly an idiot.”

“What?” Jack glances at Ed, like he might come to his defense.

“You turned down an offer to sail with Blackbeard, history’s most infamous pirate? That was the only opportunity you’ll ever get at greatness, Jack, and you were too stupid to take it. Hope you have a nice life, picking at the scraps Ed leaves behind.” 

“Fuck you,” Jack spits, leaning over the table.

“No, fuck you,” Stede returns just as quickly. “You’re an illiterate, ignorant gutter-rat, and you’re too proud of your own petty meanness to realize it. You’re worse than a dog, because at least a dog knows how to be grateful to its betters.” 

Jack’s right hand goes for the knife at his hip, and he plants the other on the table, ready to launch himself over it at Stede. Stede has just enough time to flinch backwards, wishing that maybe he had let Ed teach him a bit more about knife work, when Ed’s hand locks around Jack’s forearm and wrenches him back into his seat.

“No,” Ed says. He’s gone cool and still, eyes dark, the way he gets sometimes when Stede suddenly understands how one man can keep seven hundred islands in terror. Jack must know it too, because he stops struggling almost immediately. 

“C’mon, Blackie,” he says, almost whining. “You gonna let him talk to me that way?”

Ed slides his gaze to Stede, studies him for a moment, then looks back to Jack. “Yeah,” he says, voice deceptively calm, as though he’s answering nothing more than a slightly curious question. “Looks like I am.” 

He jerks his head and Stede stands up from the table, mouth dry and heartbeat rabbit-fast. Ed releases Jack’s arm, and Jack shrugs it back toward himself, reaching up to straighten his hair. Ed stands too, and puts a hand on Stede’s shoulder, turning him away to leave.  

“Hey, man,” Jack calls after them. “You don’t gotta go! C’mon, don’t be like this.”

Stede glances over his shoulder, but Ed doesn’t, his hand a broad, solid weight between Stede’s shoulderblades as he continues leading him out of the tavern. Ed lifts a hand without looking back. “See you around, Jack.”

#meme

[writeblrcafe]

Digital interview with Arista Holmes @author-a-holmes

Arista Holmes comes into Writeblrcafé and orders a coffee. With a hot mug of coffee in hand, they sit down on a bench. We start talking about their writing journey. They are currently writing a book and sometimes flash fiction in their favourite genres fantasy and fiction.

What got you into writing?

Honestly, I don't truly know. I've been telling stories since my earliest memories, so around the age of 2, where I'd pull out old second hand toys and use them as characters. The first time I remember actually writing down one of my stories, I was about 7 or 8, and wrote a story for class called "Rosie the Rabbit Goes On An Adventure".

What inspires you to write?

I get my inspiration from all over the place. Observing the world. An interesting character trait. Overheard snippets of conversation. But what usually starts an idea is something that makes me wonder: "What if... XYZ happened?"

Which are recurring themes in your writing?

Slow burn romance, found family, and protagonists getting into more trouble than they know how to handle alone!

How would you describe your writing style?

Oooh, that's a tough one. I know how I hope my style comes across; clear, fun, whimsical, realistic. But whether I successfully pull that off? I think that's up to the readers to decide.

How do you deal with writer's block?

Depends on the source of the block. The first thing I usually try is stepping away from the manuscript for a couple of days in case it's the start of burn out. If I recover quickly, that's usually what it was, and I can get back to work. If I'm still feeling blocked a couple of days later, that tells me there's something wrong with the manuscript. I've gone wrong somewhere, and need to tweak something. I'll usually read back over the current chapter, or if I'm near the start of the previous chapter, and see if I can spot where I went off the tracks. As a last resort, I'll rewrite the previous chapter from another point of view. More often than not, this trick solves my block, either because it's given me a different perspective on the scene, or because it's just managed to get the words flowing for me again.

Do you have a wip? Tell us about it:

I do! My current work in progress is called 'Darkling' and it's book two of my debut series, The Fey Touched Trilogy. Book one launched last month, and is available at all the major stores e-book stores, and as a paperback and hard cover via Amazon.

Have you already published your writing?

Changeling (book 1 of the Fey touched trilogy)

You can tell us more interesting stuff about you here:

I'm an English writer living in the south-east of England. When I'm not cuddling my demon cat, or drinking coffee, I'm usually writing, reading, or playing computer games to relax.

Thank you for the good talk and keep writing!

Get interviewed by Writeblr Café!

Any writer can participate. Just fill in this form by clicking on the link below. Maybe we will host interviews in an audio format if you are more interested in listening to an interview than reading it.

#wc.interview #digital interview #writing community #writer gets interviewed #writing network #writers on tumblr #writeblr #writeblr intro

[elizaellwrites]

How Do I Plan Tag

So, appropriate to the conflicting sides of my personality, my planning style has two drastically different approaches... so let's get started! (I'm wordy, I apologize in advance.)

Thank you @my-cursed-prince for tagging me in this and for everyone who's ready to bear with me as I try to explain the war that takes place in my mind.

How do you plot your writing out?

Step 1- Inspiration

This almost always happens at the worst possible times, either while I'm at work, in class, doing homework, etc. Most of the time it's because I see or hear something that sends a lightning bolt of an idea straight into my mind, and I don't know how my brain jumped through the hoops to get what I got out of what I was given. When this happens, it's almost always frustrating in the moment, since I get the overwhelming urge to start immediately when I often can't. I either make a mental note of the idea, or I write a physical note to remind myself to revisit it.

Purposeful/directed inspiration can also come through listening to music, watching movies/TV shows, reading, and looking at art, but this is honestly less common unless I'm writing while doing these things simultaneously (which I do quite a bit.)

Step 2- Filtering

This can happen in one of two ways. The first is whether I decide to call my brother (my unofficial editor) to see if my idea even remotely makes sense to anyone that isn't me. Then we either scrap, alter, or build on the ideas over the next half hour or so. Most of the time he just tells me that it's my story so I know what will work best with what I'm planning, but I also know that some things can seem obvious to me as the author that will go unintentionally under the radar to a reader, so he's a great help in my process when I bring him in.

The other way can be best described as a mental file cabinet, where I keep all of my plans for current and future projects. Truly, I think this is the more common way I do it, otherwise, I would be calling my poor brother almost constantly. When I'm doing this, I'm basically skimming through each of the files, seeing if this new idea works anywhere, and which characters would be best for this plotline, or vice versa. If it doesn't fit anywhere but has potential, I make another file and save it for later. If it contradicts what I've built, it gets dismissed. If it does fit, I then go to the next step...

Step 3- Development

This is where I spend most of my time. If it's a character, this is background, personality, role, etc. If it's worldbuilding, I'm here for days to weeks until it's blended into everything I had developed previously, as if it was always there. If it's a plot line or event, I locate where it is in the master timeline and create a rough sketch of what I want to happen around the initial idea. Any research takes place here as well. It's pretty straightforward.

Step 4- Bullet Point Storylining

This creates a visual for me to go off of; a road map per se. It's flexible and very open to possibilities, yet holds me to the structure that I put in place during development. This way, nothing crazy happens, but I can still surprise myself in...

Step 5- Drafting

Where chaos unfolds. Anything can happen- as long as I try to follow the map I set up with my bullet points. Then I repeat the drafting of that part until my perfectionism is satisfied enough to where I don't feel like I need to burn the pages that only exist on my computer. So this period can also take quite a bit of time, as I refine and shape draft after draft. Editing is included in this step, as editing is simply rewriting, but way better.

In short, the process is: Plan, check the plan, plan some more, draw out the plan, then set the plan on (barely controlled) fire.

2. What's your favorite part of the writing process?

I really enjoy the actual writing part the most. It's incredibly freeing to get everything out on paper, and that feeling doesn't change when I'm even just rewriting.

Seeing how everything ties together even better than they do in the filing cabinets and scattered notes. I love to see my characters interact in a way that is better than I could ever simply explain that they would. I love when they come to life and react in a way that I didn't initially see from them but makes so much sense. I like painting my world with words so that others can fall in love with it as much as I have through the hundreds of hours I've poured into it.

In some ways, my writing process is a mystery to me in how my worldbuilding has gotten so expansive that I'm building a Google Site and a guidebook for myself. I don't know when my characters started acting without my explicit permission, and I don't know where the inspiration for my specific plotlines came from. Some have been there so long that they've just become a fundamental fact of the story and the world.

I love how it's gotten a life of its own through the chaos that has burned through the first four steps of my writing process in the last, but most important one. To me, my characters have been real people for years. Is that weird? Maybe, but it's also incredibly special, and I wouldn't change that for anything. They've grown with me, and so has my fictional world. As I grow to see the complexities of the world around me, and as I experience life, it reflects in my work for both the good and the bad.

I wouldn't have my writing process any other way. (Even if it creates an inner debate on how much chaos is too much chaos.)

Feel free to participate: @the-printed-words, @verba-writing, @marigoldispeculiar, and @queerlilchinchin & anyone else who may be interested!

#writer #writeblr #aspiring author #aspiring writer #writing #being a writer #writers of tumblr #writing community #about my writing #writing process #writing tag games #writing tags #tag games