#on the docs the ending bullet point for this chapter was

[starry-bi-sky]

Childhood Friends Au: Danny's in Gotham Again

when the wool is off your eyes you'll stop counting sheep at night cause you'll eat your fill of them during the daytime

A few weeks after Danny’s visit to Gotham, he buys an apartment in the city. It’s this little thing, a studio apartment on the same street he grew up in. In Crime Alley. When he tells his parents, they protest heavily. They don’t think it's safe. They think he should reconsider. There were plenty of apartments and places to live somewhere else. And what about college? 

Danny doesn’t think he’ll go to college. He isn’t sure what he wants to do, now that being an astronaut is off the table. It’d be a waste of money to go without a goal in mind, he thinks. He says he’ll take a gap year and apply at one of the community colleges funded by the Wayne Corporation, possibly. It just wasn’t in the cards right now. 

“If things get tough,” He says at dinner that night, “then I can talk to the Waynes. I’m friends with the family, remember?” He ended up getting Bruce’s number in his phone again before he left, and in the process got Tim’s as well. They don’t talk much, Danny isn’t sure what to say. But he sends Tim memes whenever he comes across one and thinks he’ll like. Tim sends memes back in return.   

His parents do remember. They remember. They also remember the horrified shriek that echoed through the house when Danny learned of Jason’s passing. They remember running up the stairs and bursting into their son’s room and finding him sobbing into his bed, curled up like a little kid, like he was in pain. He lost his voice that day, stuck between screaming out his grief and sobbing it. 

They’re still not sure if they should let him go. 

In the end, Danny wins them out, and he lets them help him search for an apartment. They take a break from their lab work to help search for cheap furniture to buy. They may have more money than when they were in Gotham, but that frugal part of you never fully goes away. They all agree that they don’t want Danny to be seen carrying in nice-looking furniture when he moves in. 

He ends up with a basic furniture set, all mismatched, and in the warm summer of June, his parents rent out a u-haul and drive him down to Gotham to move in. They meet the landlord when they arrive, a skinny and frail old man with wispy white hair and a wrinkled face. He gives Danny the keys and tells him what apartment number he is, and then he leaves. 

His parents help him move in. They help him carry his heavy furniture up to the second floor, where his apartment is. Danny isn’t sure if he wants them to help. His mom and dad are strong, but they are getting old, closer to their fifties now that their children are grown. His dad’s hair is slowly beginning to thin, and rather than the white eating at the sides of his head, it now streaks through his hair like salt-and-pepper. His mom’s hair is graying out too, and there are more lines in their faces than he remembers there being. 

When he voices his concerns, his mom laughs spiritedly and says that they may be getting old, but they are still as spry as when they were in their twenties. Danny isn’t sure if he believes them or not. He can see his dad struggle a bit when they return to get his bed frame, and they have to take a break before they go back down for the rest of their things. 

Five years ago, his dad could do this without breaking a sweat. It forces a heavy thing in the back of Danny’s throat. (He is less afraid of his own death than he is of his loved ones, and while he has always felt rocky with his parents, he still loves them more than anything else.) 

Danny’s apartment is exactly as he would have expected it to be: shabby and worn through. The entire room smells like stale cigarette smoke and weed, nicotine stains the wall with poorly covered bullet holes, and stains in the carpet that are a color he can’t discern. The fridge has a broken light and when he tries to turn on the gas stove, it click-click-clicks before lighting, fire fwooshing out while the smell of gas fills the air. There’s rat droppings in the cupboards and the closet-like bathroom is just as bad. 

The ghostly part of him can sense the heavy stench of death in the room; people have died in this room. People have died in every room of this building, he thinks. They have died on the streets outside and in the alleys squeezed between them. He can feel it like a heavy fog in the air. 

It is painfully nostalgic, a bittersweet feeling in his chest that he grimaces to. 

When the last box is placed in his apartment, his parents offer to help unpack. They are hesitant to leave and Danny knows it, although he doesn’t know if it’s from empty nest syndrome or because it's Gotham. He thinks it might be both. He is their youngest child finally leaving home to a city known for its danger. 

“Are you sure you don’t want us to stay behind, sweetie?” His mother asks, a frown she tries to hide settled in the creases of her face. She fiddles with her hands, a nervous habit Danny has since noticed when she feels truly unsure and doesn’t need to hide it. Hesitancy looms over her like a heavy cloud. 

His dad jumps in hastily, splaying his hands and smiling painfully wide to hide the glistening in his eyes. “You’re mother’s right! We can help you get everything set up, champ. I could probably do something with that stove of yours to make it faster!” He says, his voice still booming like it always does even if there’s a stumble in his words. 

It makes his heart squeeze, knowing just how much they care. It was hard last summer, telling him that he was the Phantom. Terrifying, actually. They couldn’t comprehend it. He hadn’t felt his heart beat that fast in years when he stood in front of them at the kitchen table and told them he was a halfa, begging them to believe that ghosts weren’t inherently evil. 

His parents were people of science, however, and after much, much shock, they slowly came to terms with it. How could they not? The evidence was right in front of them. Their son was dead-alive, alive-dead. Somewhere stuck in the between. The tears they shed that night could fill a river, moving from the kitchen to the living room as Danny explains how he died. 

(When Danny tells them that he died after a week Jason did, his mom and dad look horrified. His mom covers her mouth when he adds that it was his idea to go inside it, his dad looks ashy pale, gripping his pant legs so tight that his knuckles turn white. There is a conclusion coming to their minds that he can tell they don’t like.) 

(“You’ve always hated our inventions, Danny.” Mom says in a hushed voice, and Danny winces at the wording, sinking into the back of the cushions in shame. He never thought that his parents noticed. Mom quickly grabs his arm, “No, no, there’s nothing to be ashamed of Danny. We were… perhaps too careless with our inventions, too enthusiastic. You had every right to hate the things we made when they had a tendency to… to malfunction.”) 

(Malfunction is a delicate way of putting it, when Danny remembers every time they had to evacuate their old apartment complex because whatever half-baked creation his parents made inevitably blew up into ash and smoke. There were soot marks permanently stained into the ceiling.) 

(Her hand slides down and grabs his, and she cups it in both of her hands, squeezing tightly. He forces himself to look up, and there is a look like her heart breaking when he looks into his mother’s eyes. “You’ve always avoided the lab after we moved, Danny. And you had every right to, so why on Earth did you ever think about going into the portal?”)

(Danny struggles to come up with an adequate answer, a way to verbalize what came over him that day five years ago. The answer is there, hanging in the air like a knot in a noose. He opens his mouth, and then closes it.)

(Finally, with a tongue made of lead, he shrugs lamely and looks away. “I didn’t know there was an on button inside it.” He mumbles, and despite being the truth it feels like a lie. But that is the truth. He didn’t know there was an on button inside it. So he didn’t care what happened.)

(Something dulls in mom’s eyes, like she thought of something else that Danny hadn’t said. Her eyes shimmer, and she squeezes them shut, breathing in so deep that it shakes. And then she pulls him into a hug, a hand burying into his hair and pressing him close. “It must have hurt so much, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”)

(It is something that Danny doesn’t expect her to say, like missing the last step of the stairs. It startles him so much he laughs this short, bark of a thing. He feels his dad press against his back and wrap his big arms around them, his nose pushed into his hair.) 

(Because yeah. Yeah, it did hurt. It hurt more than anything else he’s ever felt before. It had torn him apart and sewn him back together again, only to rinse and repeat. The pain was nothing he ever spoke to Sam or Tucker about, and it was something they never brought up. No, that’s not true. If they ever brought it up, Tucker would call it a zap. As if Danny only experienced a mild static shock. Like it was painless. It’s a pretty lie that Danny lets him and Sam believe.)

(His eyes sting and water immediately wobbles into his vision, coming up with such a force that he doesn’t even need to blink before it spills over. “Yeah.” He forces out, voice unexpectedly rough and cracking. “Yeah, it- it hurt. A lot.”)

He tells them about fighting the Lunch Lady a month later. He tells them about finding Jason. It comes spilling out like a waterfall. “I found him, mom.” He says, holding onto her tight while she keeps him tucked under his chin like a little kid. The secret of Jason being Robin stays hidden under his tongue, it is not his secret to tell. Not his identity to expose. He grips her tighter. “I found him, mom. Right there in the Ghost Zone, and he was my Jason. He wasn’t an echo or a— an imprint of him.”

Mom is silent; quiet and attentive, and so is dad, who rubs his large hands up and down Danny’s spine in an attempt to soothe him. It only works a little. Danny breathes in like a gasp as the urge to cry overcomes him again. He always avoids talking about Jason, his grief is like a never-healing scab that can be picked off at any time. It is ingrained into his core. 

“And then I lost him.” He forces out, a sob layering under his words that he chokes on and swallows. The hand on his back stills, and he can feel mom and dad breathe in like a question. He turns his head and pushes it into mom’s shoulder. “He disappeared, mom. Just— just gone.”

“And he didn’t move on.” He says, voice snarling like teeth biting before his mom can ask, because he knows that’s what she was going to ask. It’s what Sam and Tucker asked when he came to them in tears hours after he found Jason gone. It’s what Jazz said when he finally told her about it. It’s what every one of his ghosts asked when he told them about it and begged for their help. 

Danny grits his teeth and tries not to dig his nails into mom’s clothes as a fresh wave of tears run down his face. “His haunt is still there. If Jason really moved on it would have disappeared with him. That’s how it works. But it’s still in the zone, so Jason’s out there I just don’t know where.” 

(Sam once asks him why Danny didn’t just move on from it a year after Jason’s disappearance. She asked him why he didn’t give it up. Danny nearly saw red, and nearly bit her head off for it. It was incomprehensible to him to just stop looking for Jason, to give up. Not when he was out in the zone somewhere. Because he had to be in the zone.)

(Danny once tried to take Jason through the portal with him, and much like what happened to Kitty, it didn’t work. Jason was too tied to the ghost zone to leave.) 

(Some bonds are just unbreakable, he thinks. Bonds forged through blood and time and trust, and when you’re on the streets of Gotham, you hoard what little trust you have in someone like a dragon with its gold. It is scarcely given and fiercely kept.) 

“I’ve been looking for him.” Danny whispers when talking becomes too hard for him, when it runs the risk of him crying. “When- when I’m not fighting ghosts or, or in school or with my friends, I’ve been looking for him.” He has explored the Ghost Zone in every reach he can. He has met so many people. He’s met the ghosts of aliens from planets in every corner of the galaxy. He has met gods or god-like beings and their disciples. 

He’s met famous scholars and writers (he’s gotten the autographs of all of Jason’s favorite writers). He has found entire cities that have so much life in it that it's been permanently etched into the ghost zone, like a mirror version of itself. 

He’s visited the ghostly vision of Gotham so many times, and he avoids the imprint of Wayne Manor like the plague. There are ghostly newspapers that he reads. There are the ghosts of Martha and Thomas Wayne in many of them. 

Jason’s haunt connects to Wayne Manor, but it is also the street they grew up in. It is a small brick building with a door that leads to Jason’s room. A ghost knows when someone enters their haunt, it alerts them like a doorbell in the back of their mind. A foreign ecto-signature in a place drenched in your own. 

Danny visits it every time he goes into the Ghost Zone. It’s always his first stop. 

He tells his parents all of it. He tells them of the ghosts he’s met, of the places he’s seen. And when he feels brave, he tells them about Rath and the terror that his future self brings him. He keeps some details hidden, the ones that he can afford to keep without muddling up the story. 

(Rath is a tall, spindly thing, like a funhouse mirror version of Danny himself. He has arms that are much too long and legs that are much too tall, with skinny fingers that extend into claws.He wears his suit the same as Danny does, with it partially undone and the sleeves wrapped around his waist.)

(There is a black hole in his chest that is much bigger than Danny’s own. It takes up his chest cavity and drips the same, viscous black liquid as the tears falling from his eyes. Danny never forgets his voice; a scraping, quiet thing like he’s screamed himself hoarse. Rath has a voice like goosebumps, and it haunts Danny like a bump in the night.) 

Danny speaks and speaks and speaks until he can’t think of anything else to speak of. He is tired and sad, and it feels like his heart has been ripped out and rubbed raw again. And yet, he also feels so much better. Like a long heavy weight has been taken off his chest. 

Yeah, last summer was hard. His parents walked on eggshells around him, and they forced themselves to unlearn their bias of ghosts. It was more than Danny could have ever dreamed of, and when they felt ready for it, they asked him more about the ghost zone.

He smiles sadly at his dad, “I think fixing the stove can be a priority another time, dad.” He says, watching him wilt and his smile fall. Jack Fenton was always so good at making himself look like a kicked puppy. “I can handle unpacking by myself, I promise.” 

His parents still look so unsure, like they want to argue. Danny watches his mom purse her lips tightly, confliction running across her face like a datastream. She takes dad’s hand, squeezing their fingers together despite the droop in her shoulders. 

“Oh, alright then, I suppose.” She relents, her hand placing on Jack’s arm. “I guess we could go, we’re just going to miss you so much, Danny.” 

Tears seem to have won over his dad, and Jack Fenton sniffs back before he can cry properly. “Our little boy, all grown up.” He says, voice wobbling. It makes Danny laugh, and it makes his heart pang. His smile grows impossibly wider and so much fonder. “You’ve become such a kind, wonderful young man, Danno. We’re so proud of you.” 

Danny laughs again, and it cracks. “You’re gonna make me cry, dad.” (He feels a welling of guilt in his gut that he ignores — he doesn’t feel like a kind man. He doesn’t feel like a good one either. Not with what he plans to do.) 

His father holds out his arms in hopefulness, “One last hug for your old man before we head out?” He asks, mustering up a smile on his face. 

Danny barrels into him, nearly knocking his dad over with an oomph. He’s as tall as him now, but he still feels little in his bear hugs. With arms wrapping around his middle, Danny hugs his father tight and breathes him in one last time. 

“Careful there, Danno.” He laughs, patting Danny’s back roughly. “You’ll break my ribs with that ghostly strength of yours!” But he holds on just as tight.

Out of spite, Danny bends back and lifts him off his feet, laughing when Jack tenses up and nearly scrambles out of surprise. His mom laughs with him, stepping back to give them room for the few seconds that dad is in the air. 

When it’s his mom’s turn, Danny has to hunch to hug her. Something bittersweet to him as she plants a kiss on his forehead and says that he’ll always be her baby. “Even if you do have that horrid smoking habit.” She adds on with a disapproving eyebrow raise. 

Danny turns red in embarrassment, and walks them back to the GAV. Gothamites of all kinds slow to stop and boggle at the monstrous, road-illegal thing that is parallel-parked next to the curbside. In the past, Danny would have died with mortification to be seen with it. Now it just makes him laugh. Before he goes back into the apartment building, he buys a newspaper from a nearby convenience store.  

The first thing he does when he gets back up to his room is one: make a mental note to buy a bicycle chain lock for the door. The locks jiggle and there are splinters along the side that show signs of it being broken into in the past. The second thing he does is pull his cigarettes out of his pocket and light one. 

Danny starts to unpack with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, placing the newspaper he bought onto the counter. He has a cheap loveseat that he pushes off to the side, and he moves the boxes into the kitchen. It’s a matter of organization that Danny has to think about before he does anything. 

It’s as he’s pushing the sofa up against the wall facing the windows that his phone rings a familiar tune: Sam. The phone is fished out before he can think about it and when he stares down at the screen, he realizes it's a facetime call. 

He presses answer and walks over to prop his phone up onto the counter. The smiling faces of Sam and Tucker greet him, rather than just Sam. Immediately, Danny grins. “Hey Danny.” Sam greets, smiling a dark-painted lazy thing. From the background it looks like they’re in Tucker’s room. Sam is in Tucker’s desk chair, and Tucker is behind her, leaning against it. “Have you moved in yet?” 

Danny pulls the cigarette from his mouth and huffs, a cloud of smoke following his breath. “Yeah! It’s a shithole.” He grins lopsidedly, and his feet carry him off to the side to allow Sam and Tucker view of his apartment. He lets thirty seconds pass, allowing the both of them to really see the rest of the room. And then he steps back into frame. 

Sam and Tucker both look like they’re trying not to look judgemental, like they’re trying to hide a grimace that Danny sees anyway with the small turns at the corner of their mouths. He grins wider, mirth filling his lungs. “I know, it looks awful doesn’t it?”

“It’s— it’s not so bad.” Sam says with a strain in her voice, a forced smile on her face that tries to be reassuring. Tucker nods along readily, and he looks just as unsure as Sam does. Danny stifles laughter behind his teeth. 

“No, no, it looks bad,” He takes a drag of his cigarette, shaking his head. “You can say it, I won’t get offended. It’s a fucking apartment in crime alley. Of course it looks bad.” 

Sam remains silent, a rearing of her stubbornness showing itself. Tucker takes a different approach, and heaves a dramatic sigh of relief, slumping like a weight. “Okay, you’re right. It looks bad.” He frowns, “Sorry, man.” 

While Danny snorts, Sam sighs. “Yeah, it looks bad. What even are those stains?” She asks, and both she and Tucker lean closer in tandem to the screen, eyes squinting at the floor behind him. Danny glances at the floor, and shrugs. 

“Blood, probably.” He says, and while years in Amity Park have accustomed him to a clean environment, the desensitization of Gotham still remains. Tucker and Sam both make faces and lean away, as if the stain itself was capable of passing through to them. “Yeah, there are bullet holes in the walls.” 

“Are you sure it’s safe to be there?” Tucker asks, a furrow appearing between his brows. He adjusts his glasses and leans against the chair. Sam is frowning heavily, and Danny can already see her thinking up of a new way to fix the problem. 

“Oh, I never said this place was safe.” Danny tells him cheerily, taking a last hit of his cigarette before placing the dead stick onto the counter. He itches for another one. Instead he walks over to the shelf his parents brought in and starts moving it. “It’s Crime Alley, Tuck. Safe isn’t even in its vocabulary.” 

Tucker and Sam look like they’ve both swallowed a lemon.

“But it’s where I want to be right now.” He says, grunting quietly when the shelf is against the wall he wants it to be, near the short hallway leading to the front door. He can push it in front of it if someone tries to break in. “And Crime Alley’s apartments are the only ones I can really afford right now without mooching off my parents, and I’d rather not depend on them.” 

He can hear the disapproving hesitance from where he stands. And he ignores it. 

Danny walks back into frame, lifting up a box onto the counter. He hums lightly, fingers run over the tape keeping it shut. “Why do you even want to be in Gotham, Danny?” Sam asks, and she sounds genuinely perplexed. Danny stills. “I thought this place only had bad memories for you.” 

His blood turns cold, and like a dime being flipped his slow heartbeat fills his ears. “It does.” He replies automatically, before he can think. Shit, shit. He knows that Sam or Tucker would ask that question, and yet he still feels unprepared for it. His heart pulses quickly against his ribcage, knocking, asking him what he’s going to tell them that isn’t the truth. 

Danny stammers, “I mean— I just— I guess I felt nostalgic.” He says, and it sounds like a weak defense. He looks away, finding himself instinctively scratching his jaw. A new tick of his when he’s nervous. From the corner of his eye, he sees Sam and Tucker both narrow their eyes at him. 

He cannot tell them the real reason why he’s moved back to Gotham. He can’t tell them of the little secret and vow he told himself five years ago, the one that’s been left to fester and burn like an open wound close to his core. The one that, if he thinks too much about it, sends a searing hot electricity through him, filling him from crown to toe top-full of direst wrath.  

(Danny was always the angrier one in the duo of Jason and Danny. He was always the one with glass in his mouth, cutting his teeth and tongue so that he could spit blood at the world around them. His knuckles had more blood and bruises on it than skin, once upon a time. All because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He has grown from it, that fury has turned to a small simmering candle.) (But sometimes, sometimes it rears its head, and electricity will buzz under Danny’s skin. There is lightning before the thunder, the second before a fist pulled to punch lands, the spark before it becomes a blaze.) 

He stumbles over his words, and then sighs long and low, drooping his head. “I… was thinking that I can’t avoid this place forever.” He says, and the best lies always have the truth in it. Because it’s not a lie, not completely. But it’s not close enough to the truth either. “And that maybe if I came back, I’d be able to do something about those bad memories. Make them better or make it hurt less.” 

Like wool over their eyes, it fools Sam and Tucker. Their narrowed eyes soften, and Danny feels like a snake is in his lungs as they both adopt their own versions of gentleness on their faces. “Oh, Danny.” Sam breathes out, and the snake squeezes, “Of course, we understand.”

Tucker nods, smiling at him. “Yeah, bro, that’s really brave of you. I know it can’t be easy coming back.” He says, “Maybe you can reconnect with the Waynes again, you always thought well of Mister Wayne whenever you came back from visiting.”

Danny smiles weakly, the gesture cutting into his cheeks like a knife. Perhaps he could. He was still upset with Bruce for hiding Jason’s killer from him. But he doesn’t hate him. Maybe five years ago, he did, when the death of Jason was still fresh in his mind and freshly bleeding in his heart. Now he just doesn’t know what to think of him. He was Batman. Jason was Robin, and the Joker killed Robin. 

It would need to be something he’d have to speak to Bruce about in person, he thinks, in order to resolve it. To hear his judgment on it and make an opinion from there. Danny has learned in the last five years, much to Jazz’s smug delight, that talking to people about something he was upset about did make him feel better. 

The conversation slips on from there into something more light, more breathable. And while they talk, Danny unpacks. He sets up his bed in the corner of the room, adjacent to the windows, and unpacks his cheap TV and table stand. It’s directly across from the couch, in front of the windows. He puts up knicks and knacks he’s collected over the years on the shelves.

When he puts up the curtains, he notices that more than one frame jiggles loosely. Sam makes a comment on the musty stains permanently dyed into the glass, and Danny talks about getting something to fix the cracks. Gotham winters can get brutal, and even if he can withstand the cold, doesn’t mean everything else in his apartment can. 

“Oh, watch this.” He says halfway through unpacking, and pulls out a stick of thick white chalk from a box. “This is something I learned from Clockwork a while back; I think he knew I was going to move to Gotham.” He grins sillily, popping into the camera frame to show them. “I wonder how?” 

Sam rolls her eyes, smiling while Tucker huffs. “It’s not like he’s the Master of Time and can see all past, present, and future.” Tucker snarks. 

Danny hums lightly, curt like he isn’t sure he believes Tucker, and walks to a piece of bare wall not yet blocked by furniture. He starts to draw on it. The chalk shimmers with faint ectoplasm on the wall. 

“Uhh…” Tucker’s voice cuts through, “Are you sure you should be doing that? Won’t you get in trouble for that?”

“There are bullet holes in the plaster, Tucker.” Danny retorts dryly, arching his hand to make a big circle. “I don’t think the landlord is gonna care if I get washable chalk on his walls.” Inside the circle, he inscribes the symbols of the Infinite Realms. “I don’t think he’d be able to see it anyways, he was really old.” 

When he is done, Danny steps back to admire his work. It’s not bad, he thinks, for a lack of practice. He tosses the chalk off to the side, it lands on the couch and rolls back into the cushions. Ectoplasm heats under his hand, slowly glowing from his fingertips before stretching down the rest of his palm. 

Danny’s fingers press against the wall, into the center of the circle. The result is immediate, ectoplasm is siphoned off his hand and into the circle. It glows, and then swirls. He steps off to the side for Sam and Tucker to watch its transformation. The circle fills with a swirling pool of ectoplasm, like a smaller version of the basement portal, and then it warps and stretches. 

It fills out a rectangular shape, shifting like taffy being pulled this way and that, before settling into a solid shape. It solidifies, and instead of a wall there is a glowing purple door, warped in nature and seemingly shifting like a trick of the eyes. He can hear the gentle hum of the zone standing next to it, and can see the carving of the circle in the wood. 

He gestures dramatically, grinning from ear to ear. “Ta-da~” He sings, “A door to my haunt! For whenever I feel like visiting it.” He pats the wood, making a strange thunk-thunk sound. “And then watch this.” 

Danny touches the circle again, and the door twists and recedes like water going down a drain. The circle flashes bright green, and then fades into nothing on the wall, invisible to the naked eye. “I can hide it whenever I want! So if I ever invite someone over—” which he doubts, “—I won’t have to worry about them asking, ‘Hey Danny? Why is there a creepy fucking door in your studio apartment?’”

He gets a pair of laughs for his efforts, and Danny grins wider. 

Sam and Tucker have to end the call when Danny is nearly done unpacking, leaving him alone with only his thoughts and the Gotham ambience outside. There were only a few boxes left, and they promise to call him tomorrow. He tells them that they better keep that promise. 

The silence that follows after they leave feels somberly, as if the reality of moving in has finally set in and filled the air with its loneliness. With its change. Finally, Danny lets the strangeness of moving back to Gotham hit him when he reaches the last box, and he stops to take another smoke break to let it settle. 

It feels so strange to be back in Gotham, he thinks. He’s all grown up, or almost grown up. He can vote and pay taxes, but he doesn’t feel much older than he was at fourteen. There’s a disconnect that makes him feel sad. 

There are cars running outside, driving by. He can only catch glimpses of them, his apartment faces an alleyway. There are dogs barking in the distance, strays he bets. It’s already dark out, and he wonders if he looks out the window he would see the bat-signal shining through the night and staining the permanent cloud that hangs over Gotham. 

Bruce would be so disappointed if he learned the reason for Danny’s return to Gotham. But Danny’s not here for him. He’s here for someone far more important. And like that, the simmering anger that has tucked itself into the furthest corners of his heart starts slipping through. His heart has teeth, ready to strike and snarl and bite. 

He crushes the cigarette in his hand and throws it away. When he opens the last box, it is with hands that tremble and with a face of stone. With a delicateness he does not feel, he reaches in and pulls a corkboard from the box. On the corner frame is a small, near inconspicuous carving of another ghost rune. 

Danny hangs it up on an empty space on the wall, out of sight from the window. It’s plain, and he has nothing to pin to it. He presses the small rune on the corner, pushing ectoplasm into it. Unlike the door, it does not twist and warp and shape itself into something new. Instead it bursts into green flame, eating away at the board and revealing the same thing underneath it, just in dark blue-black-purple. 

Now this board, this board Danny has something to pin to it. The newspaper he bought earlier sits abandoned on the counter, and Danny unrolls it with something like viciousness in his chest. On the front page is an image of a damaged street, and above it is titled: “JOKER STRIKES AGAIN, 3 DEAD AND 27 INJURED”

Danny rips out the first page, he rips out every mention of him. His hands shake and threaten to crumple the paper as he turns back to the board, there is hot blood pounding in his ears. There is an impending sense of finally in his chest, like a setting sun giving the stage to a starless night. There is a stern set in his jaw, five years of festering rage rushing forth like a tidal wave, threatening to make his vision swim. 

It would be so easy, he thinks, to go out as Phantom right now and hunt the clown down. It would only take a night. All it would take is a night, and then he could sink his hands into the Joker’s chest and rip out his heart where he stood. It would be so easy. 

The thought alone forces Danny to stop as he is hit with another rush of fury, really making his head and vision swim. Thorny vines wrap around his throat, making it hard to breathe. He stares at a spot on the wall until the shaking passes. 

If he wants to be discreet about this, then he can’t do it now. Even if he wants to. He doesn’t want witnesses. He doesn’t want an audience. He made a mistake, telling Red Hood about his plan. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all. But he can only hope that the Hood hasn’t mentioned it to Bruce. He knows it hasn’t been long since they started working together. He hopes that the Hood has already forgotten about it. 

He pins the newspaper clippings onto the black-blue-board, and stands back. It’s bare now, but it won’t be forever. 

He presses the circle again, and the pinboard reverts back to its original blank state. 

-----

Was I expecting to make a third part?? No. No I was not. I was also not expecting to make an entire google doc filled with summaries for short story ideas about this au that all tie into each other so that way if i DO continue this i have a skeleton pathway to follow rather than making everything up from scratch and potentially cornering myself

you can find this on ao3 or on tumblr 1 2 :)

#dp x dc #dpxdc #dp x dc crossover #danny fenton is not the ghost king #dpxdc crossover #childhood friends au #cw swearing #cw smoking #im calling them short stories bc if i call them chapters i might intimidate myself #fun fact every single chapter will have a crane wives lyric on it i am DETERMINED #i hope yall are subscribed to this on ao3 bc i almost didnt post this on tumblr #the fentons being good parents were a surprise to me too but also i never really planned on them being BAD parents #okay so they appear as negligent in the first post but we'll just call that a plothole #i had the idea that danny was the angrier one out of the duo earlier today and it felt like an epiphany #there's no guarantee of a next part but yk immm kinda hoping there is #on the docs the ending bullet point for this chapter was #'make it feel like a tv show where the seemingly inconspicuous and friendly character has something sinister up their sleeve' #WE know that danny's not inconspicuous in the least he's been thinking of this murder for the last five years. but nobody but red hood know #i had to come up with a in-story reason why danny doesnt kill the joker NOW but my out-of-story excuse is: there'd be no tension otherwise #its about the BUILD UP. Its about the RISING TENSION. Its about KNOWING that danny is planning to kill the Joker but you dont know WHEN #its about knowing that something is going to explode but never knowing when #i made the doc yesterday and spent my entire pluralism for educators class going thru the crane wives albums and looking up the lyrics and #matching them to the *checks doc* 18 short story prompts i have prepared #i am still missing one :(( #its the tim and danny story and i have NOTHING PLANNED FOR THEM. i cant think of a thing for them to bond over :(( so i cant match a CW son #even DICK has a story and that was also a surprise #my favorite lines: He was always the one with glass in his mouth cutting his teeth and tongue so that he could spit blood at the world #aND danny slapping his door like a used car salesman and going 'now people wont ask why i have a creepy fucking door in my studio aptm :)'

[magneto-was-fucking-right]

The Ghost Next Door - Chapter 3

Prompt: After suffering an almost lethal injury in combat, Simon "Ghost" Riley expected a dull, and uneventful leave back at his shitty apartment. His new next-door neighbor ruins his plans. Pairing: Simon "Ghost" Riley x Reader (named Riley Thomas for plot purposes)

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 4

Disclaimer: slow burn; neighbor!Simon; will eventually contain very graphic descriptions of smut;

Chapter summary: In which Simon’s neighbor gets to work and he ends up with his pants down. Word Count: 1.9k

12.30 pm

How long do I have to be MIA?

His fingers nervously danced around the keyboard, his stomach a pit of anxiety and resentment.

He let his mind wander, running over the events of the last mission: the adrenaline sharpening his senses, his balaclava soaked in sweat and rain, Soap yelling out in warning, a stray bullet piercing his thigh so quickly he had barely noticed it until the blood loss caused him to collapse in the muddy floor. A shiver went down his spine as he recollected the familiar sensation of having metal cutting down his flesh, tearing it open only to be restitched moments later.

His eyes were back on the tiny screen as soon as it lit up.

12.35 pm

Doc’s orders, Lieutenant. You need time off.

Simon sighed deeply in exasperation, running a hand down his face as he threw his phone on the table. He took a long, bitter look at the bloody bandage around his thigh, his sutures still partially torn, but he hadn’t dared to check how bad it was yet. The absence of a structured routine was already getting to him, and he was terrified of his mental well-being once the weeks turned into months of being alone with his thoughts and traumas he had fought so hard to bury.

The knock on the door hardly surprised him, as he had been expecting his groceries, but dreaded the social interaction that was bound to come with it. As he reached for his facemask, the young woman was once again on his doorstep, looking even more disheveled and fatigued than she had been hours before.

She carried two heavy plastics bags in each hand, the dog’s leash entangled on her wrist as his tail wagged furiously.

“You look terrible.” Simon pointed out. “Did ya have to fist fight for the groceries, kid?”

“Oh ha ha” She replied sarcastically, rolling her eyes as she struggled to hold up the bags. “A little help, please?”

Simon was quick to reach for the groceries, lifting the weight off her hands so easily she seemed embarrassed at having struggled in the first place. He limped back to the kitchen to put them down on the table and froze once he heard her step inside along with him.

“What are ya doing?” He asked coldly as he saw her stare at his leg, stepping closer as if entranced.

“Y-you’re bleeding.” She pointed at his wounded thigh, the blood soaking through his sweatpants.

“Fuckin’ hell” he muttered as he glanced at the dark wet spot growing in the fabric.

“What happened?” His neighbor asked, deep lines of concern in her expression as she tied the dog’s leash to his doorknob.

“Work injury” He grunted as he stumbled to the couch, feeling progressively dizzier as the wound seemed to have reopened completely.

“Christ…Where’d you get deployed to?” He vehemently ignored her curiosity before hissing as she softly pressed the area around the wound with delicate fingers.

Her face reddened under the heavy silence, and as she knelt between his legs to run her uncalled diagnosis, Simon felt the urge to put distance between the two of them. Physical or emotional.

“Confidential” He replied, coldly and she gave a shy nod, an anxious exhale leaving her frame. “And before ya offer, I don’t need ya help.”

“Right…I’m sorry for asking” She purposefully dismissed his last remark. Simon was just about to ask her to leave when she stood up on her own, eyes still focused on his leg as she retreated to the door, grabbing the pup’s leash and taking him away.

Simon stared at the entrance of his residence in confused shock, not expecting her to leave in such a strange manner, leaving his door ajar, nonetheless. But before he could protest, after hearing a wide variety of noise coming from next door, his neighbor was back with a small box in her hands, this time alone, as he heard the dog whine in the distance.

Simon Riley remained quiet, a grumpy glare burning her figure as she put on surgical gloves and placed a small first aid kit on his coffee table.

“My father was in the military too.” She spoke softly as she prepared clean gauze and a topical iodine-based antibiotic. Simon tried to hide his surprise as she gestured to his thigh. “Let’s just say this isn’t my first rodeo with short-tempered men who can’t admit when they need help.”

He observed her in stunned silence, eyes trailing the small scar over her eyebrow, the deep eyebags that settled on top of a slightly freckled complexion. His thoughts were temporarily invaded with images of a small, introverted child who waited anxiously for her father to return home, months on end with no news or the prospect of a stable life. A chipped canine tooth and dimples. Untamed hair and ill-fitting clothes.

When his eyes returned to hers, she was kneeling in front of him once again, awaiting his permission.

“Would you mind pulling your pants down?” She asks, blushing profusely at the request, to which he sighs deeply and sits in silence for a few more seconds before finally giving in. Limbs stiff with discomfort and suspicion, Simon reluctantly pulls the hem of his sweatpants down, lifting his lower back off the couch slightly to pass them over his muscled thighs, exposing a raging-red gash with tore black stitches.

“Look at that” She mumbled disapprovingly. “This could’ve gotten infected.”

She reached for a sterile tweezer to remove the mangled stitches, and the man let her work in peace, not letting out as much as a sigh when the anti-bacterial medicine burned into his open flesh. Her feather-light fingers revealed such care and compassion towards his injury, he was inclined to enjoy her touch on his thigh, not that he’d ever admit that to himself.

Riley Thomas felt her face and neck burning up with embarrassment. Despite her professional laser focus on tending to a wound, just as what was usual at the Vet clinic, her brain wasn’t quite ready to process the size of his muscled flesh, as well as her hands’ proximity to his most sensitive areas. She did her absolute best to avoid letting her gaze linger on anything other than what was strictly necessary, occasionally glancing up at him to make sure he was okay, always finding his gaze focused on the wall, legs stiff, face half covered.

“I might have an anesthetic spray in my flat. You might feel a slight pinch” She grimaced apologetically as she showed him the small needle and sutures, and he shrugged, unbothered.

“Don’ worry about it” he grumbled, despite his paleness, and she swallowed dryly before raising a slightly trembling hand. This was the hard part.

He cocked his head to the right, mocking her.

“What’s the matter doc? Never worked on an animal this big?” He taunted and she huffed, her face as red as a tomato.

 “I usually do this under the right circumstances, that’s all…” Riley explained nervously.

“And I usually like to be taken for dinner before anyone gets my pants off.” He deadpanned and she almost choked on her saliva, her dimples popping up as she laughed whole-heartedly, diffusing any previous tensions.

“There ya go, kid.” He nodded in approval as she expertly prodded the first patch of skin with the needle, her hands now firm and breath steady as she confidently moved about.

Once she finished, having wrapped bandages around the protective gauze on his thigh, she sat back on her heels, removing her gloves with a sigh of relief.

“Regiment?” He suddenly asked and her eyes snapped back to his, startled. Her lips pressed into a thin line before she answered.

“Marines.”

“Yank?”

“Yes.” She nodded.

“Hmm” He grunted, lost in thought.

A comfortable silence settled between the two as the soldier pulled his blood-stained sweatpants back up and she cleaned up the mess.

“Dead?” He asked plainly and she stilled, fiddling with her fingers for a few seconds, gaze set low. Her mouth opened and closed twice before she gave a proper answer:

“Yes.”

 “KIA?”

“Blue on blue” Riley stood up and turned around quickly, hiding her face from her neighbor’s intense gaze. There was a massive lump in her throat and she forced herself to breathe deeply, etching a smile on her face.

“Where’s your bin?” She changed the subject, interrupting the man’s pensive expression.

“Bottom cupboard, under the sink.” He replied.

She threw away the bloody gauze and plastic wrappers from the equipment, before properly washing her hands on the basin.

“How come your faucet doesn’t leak?” Riley asked in fake outrage and the man blinked slowly.

“Does yours?”

“Everyone’s does in here.”

The man shrugged.

“I can take a look at that later if ya like…” He reluctantly suggested but seemed so uncomfortable by the idea she giggled at his expression and forced politeness.

“It’s alright. My flat is a mess anyway, wouldn’t want you to see it.” She smiled nervously before moving to the grocery bags on top of his table. “Anyway, I got you a rug.” There was a devious expression in Riley’s face as she pulled out the outdoor rug, its pink fibers engrained with the words Live, Laugh, Love. Her neighbor’s abhorred expression and reproachful look made her laugh so hard she had to cover her mouth.

“Thanks. I hate it.” He spoke from the couch with his arms crossed over his chest. “I think I prefer the one covered in shite.”

“It reminded me of you” She still giggled as she set it on the table.

“Because I’m a such a ray of sunshine?”

“Because it’s what you look like you need” She explained “To live, to laugh and to love” She shrugged, two dimples dotting her cheeks.

“People have committed homicide for less.”

“Don’t be ungrateful!” She set her hands on her waist, playfully staring him down. “My housewarming gift was an eviction petition and leaky faucets.”

“Speakin’ of” He bent over to his coffee table, looking around between a few scattered documents until he fished out the petition papers he still hadn’t gotten rid of.

“D’ya have a pen?” He patted his legs as if he was looking for one, and her jaw hung in shock, her hand on her chest in feigned offense.

“You prick!” She grabbed a beer cap from the counter and threw it at his head, which he caught easily and held between his thick fingers.

If Simon wasn’t wearing a facemask, she would’ve noticed the small smile that had plagued his chapped lips. He threw the papers carelessly unto the table and she nodded once, grateful.

“I’ll get out of your hair. Do you need me to put away the groceries before I leave?” She offered, kindly.

“I’m okay.”

“Alright then, you should rest up and eat somethin’ sugary. You’re still a bit too pale.” The young woman advised as she grabbed her purse and her first aid kit, heading for the door.

Just as she was about to close the door behind her, his deep voice spoke from the couch, without turning around to acknowledge her:

“Name’s Simon.”

She froze at the door, trying to contain her happiness.

“I’m Riley.”

She shut the door softly, and he chuckled to himself.

Simon and Riley. Simon Riley.

A/N: Happy Holidays everyone! I hope you guys are enjoying it and it gives you as much comfort to read it as I get from writing it. Let me know if you'd like to be tagged for the upcoming parts, and as always any feedback is welcome! Thank you to the people who have taken some time to comment on it <3

#ghost cod #ghostxreader #cod #ghost imagine #simon riley imagine #simon riley smut #simon riley x reader #ghost smut #modernwarfare2 #neighbor!ghost #ghost fluff #simon riley fluff #TGND

[anna-scribbles]

can you share some of your writing/planning process for thirteen? i adore the non-linear format - how do you decide what scenes to put where?

ahh thank you!! idk how much of a defined process I have, but there's definitely a lot of planning that goes into it and i can show you some of that.

i keep all the chapters in one doc organized by month, and then i plan everything out in bullet points in a timeline at the beginning. here i just have october and november as examples bc after december things started to get more detailed/messy

all of the scenes (especially at the beginning) set the stage for things i’ve planned to happen later, or establish something that feels relevant to adrien’s character by the time we meet him in canon. the task of condensing an entire month into about 2-3 scenes has been a bit difficult; i’ve found out that i’m a very present-moment kind of writer so it’s harder for me to describe the passage of, like, weeks of time. so i’ve been pinpointing specific threads of adrien’s story that i want to be sure to tell and choosing scenes from each month that build on that.

i’ve had the idea for this fic in the back of my mind since about 2021 so i’ve had several scenes cemented in my mind, ways i’ve decided things played out, etc. some of the writing process has been building the narrative around those things or figuring out how we get there. that’s what i love about prequels in general, honestly - it’s inevitable where we’re going to end up, but how do we get there?

adrien’s situation, at the moment we meet him in origins, is SO endlessly fascinating to me. he is in the process of doing something reckless and rebellious and bold - running away - against the will of his father, a man he spends the rest of the series struggling with his compulsion to submit to. we find out, via the rest of the show, exactly how difficult it is for adrien to stand up to his father. and yet, in his very first appearance, adrien is running away from him.

how did he get here? what, exactly, pushed him to this point? was this the final escalation of a steady build of rebellious behaviors, or an impulsive breakthrough after one awful day too many? what has this small boy been through in the last year, and why does public school seem to be his only fathomable escape?

and WHY, if his circumstances are so dire as to compell him to rebel so boldly in the first place, does he still throw it away to help the old man in the road? what makes him so kind, when he has everything to lose? what happened? how did he get here?

i’m interested, obviously, in the character of émilie. i think that the hole she leaves in the narrative is a compelling silhouette and i’ve been having a blast trying to pencil in its details. it’s obvious that adrien loved her deeply and had a stronger connection to her than with gabriel. but also, adrien was still shut off from the world while she was alive. he was still, presumably, an exploited child star while she was alive. she was an actress and a mother and died by broken magic and never told her son the truth about any of it. figuring out who i think she was and then how to show that through young adrien’s eyes has been a huge part of planning this story for me.

as far as the twenty three year old adrien sections, those have been less involved as far as planning goes. i only recently mapped out which areas of the house i want him to visit during the different months. i wanted his sections to line up at least thematically, if not physically, where thirteen year old adrien is at in his story. for example, in december twenty three year old adrien cleans out the dining room where thirteen year old adrien was having terrible christmas dinner. and in january they’re both in the garden, etc.

it’s a bit harder to map out twenty three adrien just because it has to also make sense geographically - i can’t have him running back and forth up and down the stairs, let’s be real he doesn’t have the energy for that. i’ve also opened up the agreste mansion page on the miraculous wiki so many times while trying to map this out 💔💔 did you know that apparently there’s a third floor we never see in the show. yeah i have to figure out what to do with that now

ANYWAY long story short: the planning process for thirteen is kind of a mess, but the whole story is built around some central plot points that i knew i wanted to hit from the beginning. the details change a lot (as you can see from the outline above - it’s not quite right) but i keep the end in mind. just have to figure out how we get there.

thank you for asking!! mwah<3

#thirteen #anna rambles #asks #sorry for writing SO MUCH #in my defense i’m sleepy #and i just started rambling #adrien agreste…..kissing your forehead my love. tucking you into bed. agreeing with you about tamaharu #i don’t even know if this answered the question this is just truly my process #the process is that i think about adrien agreste and then write it down #ml

[frostedpuffs]

Hey do you have any advice on how to just…start writing. Like I have so many brilliant ideas that have the potential to be really really good fics but I just can’t write them. As soon as I sit down and open a doc i freeze up and just stare at the cursor and end up with like a word or a key smash. Help?

it sounds like you're getting intimidated by the idea of writing something good rather than just writing. my advice for writing is simply to just WRITE. i know that is easier said than done, but don't let the idea that your first draft has to be perfect intimidate you out of writing! the truth is, no first draft is perfect.

when i write my fics, i usually write the chapters in two to four sittings, smashing my keys and spitting out words on the page without thinking much about what comes out. then i leave the document alone for a day or two and come back to edit. editing is actually how my stories form! i will edit the draft once, then go back and edit it again another day, and then again and again until i have something i feel is worthy to post. now, i am a bit of a perfectionist, so you do not need to edit extensively if you don't feel the draft requires it....but my point is, just write! get some words down. something. anything. it is infinitely easier to go back and edit those words than it is to try and make everything perfect from the beginning

just get something on the page. even bullet points or messy key smashes of thoughts. that way you have something to go off of instead of staring at a page. if you have a fear of writing, it won't be solved by avoiding writing

that's always what my advice will be when i get these sorts of questions. if you're scared of writing, do it anyway. write scared. it'll get less scary the more you do it. i promise :) good luck

#ash answers #Anonymous

[senblades]

Tell us about the planning doc!!!

thank you very much for indulging me HAHA

So I started writing the planning doc like. When I really shouldn't have LMAO- I wasn't busy right then, but I was absolutely about to be. Oh well! What's done is done.

The planning doc is, essentially, a full outline of all the plot of fftsr, told exclusively in dumb jokes and memes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or, well, more accurately, a dumping ground for all my ideas in chronological order, marked with dates and some (emphasis on SOME lmao) of the confidant rank ups for Akechi and Ren.

I'll share some of the outline already written in chapters to get my point across: (UH MAJOR AND MINOR SPOILORS FOR FAITH FOR THE SECOND RUN- earlier chapters, mostly)

As you can see, not everything from the doc makes the cut. Sometimes things just don't work anymore, or I can't quite find a place to shoehorn it. I'm pretty sure a line showing how Sumire was struggling without a team never made it into the chapter- or, if it did, it was so negligible that it doesn't even matter.

Plus, I definitely hadn't figured out all the scene-by-scene POV's by that point. The "April 18" bullet point implies that scene might have taken place from Sumire's POV, but the final chapter actually has it as Ren's.

I also put all my Metaverse powerpoint slide intermittently as they become relavent. I'm not actually sure if this explanation ever made it into a chapter... I think Akechi might have implied it? But I don't think it was ever spelled out, since I couldn't find a smooth way to do it. Oh well! Here it is now!

There's also outlines of character conversations and motivations, as expected. The level of detail within the planning doc is VERY uh. Well, it's dependant on a lot of things. There are some major beats that I just hadn't thought of until writing the actual chapters, but some of the character-related convos that are more centred to the plot got written down pre-writing chapter 1

From memory, I think the above scene also changed slightly in the final fic. Sometimes what I write as character motivations in the planning doc ends up being VERY DIFFERENT by the time I get to the actual chapter. And, sometimes, the characters just run away with a scene HAHA

Speaking of character convos, some of my jokes in the planning doc made it, almost word for word, into the fic's chapters. Akechi hysterically wondering if Rank 3 is the "deepest darkest secrets" Rank Up is something that I wanted to immortalise lmao

As you can also see, though, not all of the confidant rank-ups were planned- Magician rank 2 is implied, but I didn't actually know what it was going to be at the time.

And then there's the confidants I didn't have planned at ALL:

(UH SPOILERS UP UNTIL CHAPTER 46)

The Tower and the Aeon are the worst offenders of this: I retroactivaly added the Aeon into the planning doc- an easy feat, since it coincides with the Justice, but just know that it absolutely wasn't there originally lmao. The Aeon came about in two stages, if I'm remembering correctly- I wrote the dream sequence where Ren didn't remember shit, but some vision of Crow was there and did remember, pretty much on a whim, and then thought "okay what if that kept happening though"

I think that descision was one of the best things I could have done lmao- it made October third MUCH more exciting to write (and, I assume, to read)... (originally Metatron was not a factor in the boys remembering- just some annoying headaches and visions. Shadow Maruki was also a last-second addition! While Ren was off galivanting with Crow, I wanted to give Goro something interesting to do as well. So! Impromptu therapy session)

Now the Tower... I did have some. uh. Plans, for cognitive Akechi right from the start; I can't remember my exact thought process for when I started cooking for this confidant, but I think I saw a comment on Throw Away Your Mask explaining why the Tower was particularly apt for the character it's used for in that fic, and thought "wait I can cook with this". or something HAHA I can't quite remember. (I was also VERY MUCH inspired by Marigolds and A Tale of Two Tricksters for all of that... (love those fics you should read them if you haven't))

All of the PT's rank ups are missing from the planning doc, too. I knew I wanted to have all of them as confidants, but I had no idea what their arcana was going to be, or when those confidants would start or rank up.

I unfortuantly can't share some of my best jokes from the planning doc, since I'm joking about MAJOR SPOILERS from future chapters HA

ty very much for letting me gush lmao <3 <3 <3

#ask #fftsr #I was a little afraid someone would ask me this question and I'd forget every thought I've ever had about my fic #but word vomit has been achieved!

[aadmelioraa]

Hi! I was just wondering, what is the difference for you between the Scrivener categories you use? What makes a certain section redrafted vs revised vs punched up vs polished? Thank you!

Hey!! I am more than happy to elaborate on that post. Here are the scene (or chapter) draft categories I use via the "Label" function in Scrivener, and what each category means to me:

To Write. Any scene that I haven't fully drafted, ranging from an idea in my head to a few bullet points to a scene that doesn't yet have a beginning, middle, and end. Lots of ellipses and all caps notes to myself [ADD CONVERSATION WHERE X AND Y ARGUE ABOUT DINNER PLANS] at this stage. I am a planner-pantser hybrid—I usually start writing without a real outline, and then create and reshape my outline as I continue writing new scenes, the outline evolves as my draft evolves and vice versa. 

Drafted. I have written a full version of the scene. It has a beginning, middle, and end. I have hit all the major points I want to hit. It's messy, but it's on the page. These scenes comprise the Rough Draft.

Redrafted. At this stage, I follow Matt Bell's "Rewrite Don't Revise" advice in Refuse to Be Done (highly recommend this craft book!). Once I have a Rough Draft version of the project (the entire book has a beginning, middle, end, and enough essential connective tissue scenes to prop it up), I print that off* and open a fresh Scrivener file. I hold myself to Matt Bell's no copying and pasting rule, and it's honestly been a game changer mentality for me. I refer to my Rough Draft and my Revision Plan Outline as I create a new draft that is both leaner and more fleshed out as needed. The Revision Plan Outline is the roadmap of the book I wrote (the Rough Draft) spliced with a roadmap of the book I want to write, including new scenes, stronger versions of the scenes I already have, and notes about what needs to be cut. *This is probably obvious, but you don't need to work from a printed copy, you can open your Rough Draft doc side by side with a blank doc if that is more your speed. The important thing is to start with a blank document rather than making revisions to your Rough Draft. It might sound insane, but I've found that it allows me to let go of what I would otherwise struggle to cut, and opens me up creatively to write new material.

Revised. Once I have the fresh, stronger, more intentional version of my scene, I go through and check that it's doing what I need it to do in terms of character work and plot points. It's not only a complete scene in that it begins and ends where I want it to, it's also functioning as part of a whole. 

Punched Up. This is my favorite draft stage in most ways, I just find it really fun and satisfying. My goals are to make sure that the tension is properly threaded, that the emotional beats are landing how and where they need to, that the humor is working, that each character's voice is coming through, that my language is vivid and interesting. 

Polished. Here I am making final cuts and changes, taking things at a line level and evaluating individual word choice. Nitpick city, but ideally in a productive way.

Right now in my current WIP I have an array of scenes at every level in a single Scrivener file. Most of them are Redrafted or above (I already completed a Rough Draft, printed it off, and am working from that and my Revision Plan Outline to create a new version of the book) but there are plenty of scenes in my Revision Plan that didn't exist in the Rough Draft. I will once again shout out @bettsfic and her invaluable developmental insights, you can check out her substack here and read more about her services here.

Anyway, this is what works for me, it definitely won't work for everyone, but hopefully you find something useful here! I will note that you can use the Scrivener "Draft Status" category to function in a similar way as the "Label" category, allowing you to use "Label" to denote POV or something else. Labels are visible in the sidebar (you can find options under "View," and Draft Status shows up in the corkboard view (it's stamped over the notecard for each scene if you select that option).

#kat replies #anon #long post #sorry for the charlie day red string board energy of this reply lol #i hope it's helpful in some way! #i have used a version of this framework for long form fanfic and past (abandoned) original novels #but this is definitely a more organized and functional iteration #writing #scrivener #[redacted novel project]

[breannasfluff]

Hey, I'm actually curious because I just recently started to actually plan out my fics a bit better. How do you plan out your fics? Go into as much detail as you would like, I am genuinely curious

I had to wait to answer this till I could pull my docs. I'll use Eldritch as an example because it's the one I planned the most.

I've got two word docs of notes and one physical paper floating around. I started with writing notes down on paper, then moved them into word. Here's an example:

There's a lot of pages of random notes like that. Some of them changed, some weren't used.

I have character notes which I've dropped in Zeldas because sharing Wild's would be spoilers. I didn't end up using Zelda's, really.

I had a table of info on the Chain. Some of this we've seen, some of it got dropped when I shortened the storyline.

I listed out the order of people I knew I wanted, or roughly

I also bullet pointed out some main storyline things

Essentially, it's a big brain dump document that I now needed to wrangle into something more useful. I switch to my timeline document.

I start writing out bullet points of what each chapter-ish should be. This can also be a free-flow writing and then you pull it apart later. I've done this outlining for a long fic before so I knew how I wanted to break it up.

I crossed them out as I finished the chapters. This was laid out in detail to the midpoint. When I hit the break, I outlined the second half. I knew from the start where I wanted the story to end. I decided that as soon as I knew I wanted to continue Eldritch past the first Eldritch Echoes. That will, hopefully, help the whole thing feel cohesive despite stretching so long. Some little hints could be hidden right up front.

And then it's just 6 pages of that, haha, plotting out chapters. Some things were combined later, some pulled apart, depending on how it flowed.

After that, writing! Hope it helps :)

#asks #outlining #writing process #eldritch wild #lu wild #linkeduniverse #linked universe

[arcielee]

Interview With a Writer

Thank you so much @inthedayswhenlandswerefew for always being willing to take time out of your day and allow me the chance to fangirl over another brilliantly written story. I don't think I can even properly express how grateful I am to relive this literary trauma you have blessed our eyeballs with. Just... thank you. 🦀

This is the 20th installment of Interview With a Writer! You are welcome to read over the other talented souls on Tumblr and ao3 who shared their brilliant writing! 🧡

Dividers are by @saradika-graphics 🧡

Name: inthedayswhenlandswerefew

Story: When The World Is Crashing Down

Paring: Aegon Targaryen x Reader

Warnings:  Language, warfare, violence, serious injury, alcoholism/addiction, references to sexual content (18+), be mindful of chapter warnings!

Where did the idea for When The World Is Crashing Down come from?

For a long time (since last spring, at least), I’ve had kind of a vague inspiration for a story that would take place between Rook’s Rest and the end of the war, essentially chronicling all the destruction that the Greens endure and how Aegon would cope with it. I had a sense that there could be a deeply honorable, romantic story somewhere in the midst of all the large-scale horror.

Then—around the time I was finishing Comet Donati at the end of the summer—one day I had a vivid scene pop into my mind, and true to my usual writing modus operandi, it was at the end of the story: a woman who is just emotionally demolished, crossing a field as sparse snowflakes begin falling to meet her supposed rescuer, Cregan Stark. He thinks it’s this wonderful reunion, while she feels like it’s the end of the world. Once I saw that scene, I knew I’d have to write this series immediately. It just possessed me!

For the first month I was working on WTWICD, I listened almost exclusively to Fall Out Boy’s second album, From Under The Cork Tree. The songs are absolutely riddled with anxiety, self-loathing, violence, desolation, pride, lust, and defiance in the face of defeat. That album helped shape the general tone of the series and, of course, gave it its title as well.

You have notoriously stated before that the vivid scene for inspires an entire story. What are your next steps? What were the pivotal moments that had to happen in WTWICD?

So once that first scene occurs to me, I know I have a week or two of really powerful momentum in terms of figuring out the major arc of the story, so I take advantage of that and get right to work making a chapter list and brief character notes. I knew that the series was a bit like a circle in that it would start the same way it ended: ashes would be falling instead of snow, Aemond would be taking her captive instead of Cregan, and Angel would be mistaken for a Green instead of being wrongly assumed to be a Black. I also knew that I wanted WTWICD to (generally) follow the same canon events as Fire & Blood, so I matched each chapter to the actual events from the war, and then had another bullet point beneath with a description of what would be happening with Angel, Aegon, and the other characters that are the heart of this story.

In those first few weeks, I’ll hear a lot of random snippets of dialogue that I swiftly jot down in my Word Doc under the heading of whichever chapter I feel it will likely end up in. One of the very first quotes for this series was Aegon’s greeting to Angel in Chapter 1: “Hello angel, welcome to the end of the world.” These quotes help flesh out the story and transform requisite general events, like Angel meeting Aegon when he is near death after Rook’s Rest, into specific scenes. And then for any necessary detail that I don’t have an instinctive answer for, I start researching.

For example, here’s how I determined that Angel was a Celtigar. I did some Fire & Blood research to see which Westerosi families were allied with the Blacks vs. the Greens. I knew I needed a family that started out on the Blacks’ side and stayed there, and also wasn’t already decimated by the time Rook’s Rest happened, so that narrowed it down somewhat. I had felt that the vibes of the fic were oceanic, yet bleak—grey mist, rocky cliffs, rough waves—so I was leaning towards Angel being from the Crownlands. I stumbled upon the Celtigar family (having never heard of them before to my recollection) and was so excited! Firstly, I loved that Angel would be Valyrian, though not in an obvious way; the Celtigars, after being shunned by the Targaryens and Velaryons, intermarried with non-Valyrian houses until their features weren’t so distinct. Secondly, the crab metaphor was perfect. I had already known that the theme of perpetual resurrection—rebirth/reinvention that is repeated, though not necessarily leaving the person better off—would be present in this story, and crabs molting was symbolic of that. (Also, I’m from Maryland originally, so I appreciate crabs more than your average person, haha.)

Then for Angel’s faux family (Thorne), I knew I needed a Crownlands house that was loyal to the Greens throughout the war, which narrowed the options down considerably. I wanted a Crownlands house because I thought Angel, as a very academically smart person, would be savvy enough to know that another Crownlands family would share her accent/appearance/general knowledge more than someone from the Reach or the Riverlands, thus making her lies less likely to be detected. I also loved that Thorne (as in rose thorns) could be a subtle nod to a previous series of mine that was a Wars of the Roses AU: Now I’m Covered In You.

Tell me about your Aegon interpretation. Why is he the way he is in When The World Is Crashing Down?

Aegon is someone who has already gone through a number of transformations before Angel ever meets him. He is an innocent child, an unloved and mistreated adolescent, a man who succumbs to his worst vices, and then an aspiring hero who is trying his absolute hardest to live up to being king after his coronation. When he is wounded so horrible and painfully at Rook's Rest, Aegon is at the point where he's just ready for his suffering to be over. He got a brief taste of greatness and then was knocked back down to being useless and in agony all over again; he's accepted that his story is over.

Angel saves Aegon’s life literally, but she also gives him an opportunity to be honorable in a way that he hasn’t fully been able to before. She never knew him before his maiming, so she has no memories of his drunkenness, whoring, or any other sins. She is kind and gentle, and she sees Aegon as someone desirable and brave, particularly when she gives him (unintentionally) the opportunity to be her rescuer: from the brothel, from Cregan Stark, and from the world itself. Once they’ve met, Aegon is motivated by Angel—and the future they hope to have together—to be the greatest version of himself yet: someone who can both give and accept love in its purest form.

It is Aegon's love for Angel that compels him to fight to stay alive even under the most dire circumstances and when hope seems irrational. He's not doing it for himself; he's doing it for her.

What about Aemond? How is his relationship with Aegon?

Oh Aemond. The duality of man. Throughout this series, we see evidence that Aemond has all sorts of negative feelings towards Aegon. He feels that Aegon is physically weak, intellectually unimpressive, morally corrupted, and just generally unworthy of being king. However, at the same time, Aemond loves Aegon and is entirely loyal to him. Aemond borrows the crown when Aegon is unable to rule, but he never tries to take it. Aemond will flirt with and proposition Angel, but he never tries to get her to actually leave Aegon. And each time Aegon is wounded, we see that Aemond not only cares for him physically, but tries to uplift his spirits and carry out his wishes. We see Aemond hunting for a healer and then helping to clean Aegon’s wounds at Rook’s Rest. We also see him comforting Angel and stopping her from treating Aegon’s bleeding, shattered legs on Dragonstone (which is what Aegon begs for him to do in High Valyrian). Finally, we see Aemond’s repeated denial that Aegon might not survive the war. Daeron, Larys, and Autumn are all pragmatic enough to discuss it, but Aemond isn’t. His love for Aegon is too great.

Aemond’s interest in Angel is 50% ego-driven. He knows that she prefers Aegon to him, but if he can win her affection, he scores a figurative victory over his elder brother and gets to feel worthy/superior. This impulse (which isn’t necessarily something Aemond is consciously aware of) only intensifies once he learns that Angel is a Celtigar and therefore of Valyrian ancestry. But that means that his obsession with her is also 50% inspired by her intellect, skill, courage, and dedication to Aegon, all things that Aemond highly values. Angel never has any romantic feelings for Aemond, although he does increasingly become a source of strength, guidance, and comfort for her as Aegon’s health deteriorates. But he is definitely a little in love with her, even if that emotion is in large part merely a manifestation of his own inferiority complex.

What characters in your story that you enjoy writing?

Aemond “There are other Targaryens” Targaryen was definitely my favorite character to write in this series. He is a menace!! But a menace who is also loyal, clever, vulnerable, capable, flawed, and—it must be said—very, very nice to look at.

I really enjoyed writing Daeron too, who I envision as similar to who Aegon would have grown up to be had he not been beaten down by so much emotional and physical trauma. Daeron’s a ray of sunshine who is also an unrepentant war criminal, energetic and arrogant and a diehard warrior for his family. He jokes around with Aegon, but strategizes (or at least attempts to) with Aemond, recognizing the role that each brother plays in the family.

Finally, I loved Autumn! She was essential to Angel’s survival—street smart instead of book smart, experienced instead of sheltered and naïve—and while Autumn’s arc is tragic in some ways, she gets one of the happiest endings in the series.

Was Angel ever relieved of her guilt of what she did for Aegon?

Oh no, Angel felt horribly guilty for betraying Aegon, and I don't think she gets over that in her lifetime.

Aegon is definitely aware of Aemond’s interest in Angel, but isn’t especially concerned about it. He’s used to Aemond coveting the things he’s been given and feels that the Aemond-Angel dynamic is just the latest iteration of that lifelong pattern. Aegon relies upon Aemond both emotionally and physically—all the Greens do, as he and Vhagar are the muscle behind their war effort—and ultimately trusts him to do the right thing. Aegon doesn’t suspect that Angel would ever consent to being more than tentative allies with Aemond; it’s not even on his radar.

She acted impulsively in a moment of great emotional turmoil and misdirected desperation to help the Greens win the war and, in my mind, Aemond bears the responsibility of manipulating her into making that decision. (Even ghost Aemond alludes to regretting how he handled that situation in Chapter 12!) But Angel personally feels that she was disloyal to the love of her life, and wasted time that she should rightfully have spent with Aegon doing something that would have hurt him instead.

And she never gets to confess to Aegon, so she never gets the absolution of his forgiveness (which he undoubtedly would have given, under the circumstances).

What inspired Angel?

I love writing “readers” from all sorts of backgrounds and perspectives; we’re all unique people, and “readers” should be too!

Angel is the archetypal poor little rich girl. She has material comforts, but is ultimately ill-suited and dissatisfied with life as a noblewoman. She floats around aimlessly with nothing to look forward to (except her eventual marriage to a stranger, of course) until her brother Everett is nearly killed in a fire when she’s fifteen years old. Healing gives Angel a hobby, a purpose, and a sense of agency (indeed, the power to save or end lives) in a world where she has vanishingly little control over her own fate.

At the beginning of the series, Angel has a profound fear of sexual intimacy. I think this is something that would have been very real to women in a situation like hers, but isn’t often spoken or written about. She doesn’t have much knowledge of how sex works, and what she does know is pretty discouraging: women who are resigned, at best, or tortured at worst, with blood stains on sheets, death or disfigurement in childbirth, and being physically completely at the mercy of an older, larger man who you didn’t choose for yourself. It’s the stuff of nightmares! I once stumbled upon a Reddit threat of people sharing stories of their 90-year-old grandmas not knowing what an orgasm is, and it just completely broke my heart. I wanted to give voice to all the girls and women throughout history who have been robbed of agency over their own bodies and pleasure in sex.

Angel’s journey is a circle: she begins fearful, then becomes intrigued as her feelings for Aegon grow and she realizes she trusts him. (I think it’s significant that the two men Angel loves most, Aegon and Everett, are both disabled and therefore physically not as threatening to her.) She gets to experience informed, enthusiastic consent and pleasure, and then that joy is slowly taken from her as Aegon grows weaker.

And at the end of the story, Angel is back to where she started: forced to give herself to a man she didn’t choose—and he can have her whenever, however, and wherever he wants her—and without expectations of pleasure, only pain and resignation.

Do you feel Angel and Aegon complement one another?

Angel compliments Aegon because she is both clever and resilient enough to heal his body, but also provides him with opportunities to be a hero and prove his worth, not to her but to himself. She needs him to save her from danger, she looks to him for reassurance when she is fearful, and she relies upon him to be king when the war is over and therefore ensure their happy future together. She is, to Aegon, the perfect balance of strength and weakness.

What Angel gains from the relationship is someone who she actually admires and desires, but also someone who values her for who she really is. Aegon likes Angel regardless of who her family is and what her political affiliations might once have been; he does not care about heirs, bloodlines, prestige, obedience, or power. With Aegon, Angel knows that her own desires and feelings will always be first and foremost. That’s a rare thing to find in a Westerosi marriage.

Was there any contentment with her marriage to Cregan Stark?

I don’t feel that Angel ever found anything like happiness in the North. Several readers commented that they believed she was only existing with Cregan for the rest of her earthly days, not truly living, and I think that’s accurate. Cregan Stark never questions the narrative that he saved her from the immoral, violent, rapist Usurper, and in Winterfell Angel would have had to hear—from servants, from guards, from her husband, from her children once they were old enough to know the story—comments about how horrible Aegon was an how honorable Cregan was for ensuring his defeat and “rescuing” Angel. So her loss (and the fact that it’s this indescribably heavy secret she has to carry around with her) is a wound that is ripped open again and again and again. She can never develop a sense of fondness for Cregan, because she can never forget his hatred for and his role in killing the man she loved. She can never truly get joy from her children because they are just like Cregan: large, loud, rugged, dark-haired wolf pups who repeat the fictions they’ve always been told were truths. It’s a very hollow, soulless existence for Angel.

But of course the bright side is that because she remains alive and has some influence over Cregan’s political decisions: Angel is able to protect Jaehaera, Autumn, and other Greens after their faction’s defeat. She is also able to share the true legacy of the Greens with Jaehaera once Aegon’s daughter is older. Jaehaera otherwise wouldn’t really understand their true motivations, personalities, or gifts, nor the love they shared for each other; she was a child when most of the Greens died, and Autumn would not have felt comfortable sharing what little she knew at risk of endangering her ability to stay at court with Jaehaera. We can assume that Angel was eventually reunited with Aegon (and her other lost loved ones) in the afterlife, and so there is some happiness in the long run.

Angel definitely showed some magic in her Valyrian blood: we saw her dreams with Aemond, Helaena, and Daeron, but when Aegon told her, “If there’s anything interesting on the other side, I’ll find a way to let you know," was this what you were referring to at the end with, "…dreams that you never want to wake up from."

Yes! That is exactly what I was referencing, and I was thrilled that so many readers picked up on it. 🥰 It’s the closest we get to a “happily ever after” in this fic.

Celtigars are the black sheep of the Westerosi Valyrians. They’re glorified pirates as opposed to royalty or well-regarded merchants, and they aren’t nearly as magical at Targaryens or Velaryons. In the ASOIAF canon, there are no references to a Celtigar ever riding a dragon or joining the Targaryen bloodline. Angel was never going to be a dragonrider (she hates them!). But Angel does have some very subtle magical abilities that show up occasionally, and the dreams are one of them. After the events of WTWICD, for the rest of Angel’s life she is really only a shell of herself (not me making crab puns!), but dreams of Aegon give her comfort and remind her of the promise that she will see the people she loves again one day.

In Angel’s dreams, the ghosts appear in settings that they were attached to in life. Helaena was in the gardens with her insects, Aemond was in the rookery hard at work writing his letters, and Daeron (the closest thing this family has to a sunshine personality) was on a warm summer beach with Tessarion, exactly like he was the first day he ever met Angel. I feel that when Aegon appeared to Angel in her dreams, he was probably on Dragonstone, invoking memories of those idyllic first few months they got to spend alone together before Aemond started showing up (uninvited) and the battle with Baela and Moondancer.

In addition to the dreams, I think that Angel has some very slight clairvoyance. Even in the early chapters—and even as his burns are healing—she was always filled with this heavy dread regarding Aegon’s long-term health, and the threat of organ failure after repeated trauma is something that crosses her mind over and over again. She even mentions it to her brother Everett in Chapter 6. Part of her, I believe, always knew on some level that he wasn’t going to live to see a peaceful world.

Out of all your "Readers" so far, which one do you feel you relate to the most?

Out of all my readers, I think I personally relate the most to Appletini from North to the Future.

Our situations are different in a lot of ways (sadly, scruffy Juneau fisherman/rockstar Aegon is not real nor in love with me), but I think we share a) an innate fixation on responsibility and aversion to risk, and b) a sense that there is something more out there that we are always wrestling with. Do we take the leap, or do we stay where we are? Are we worthy of more? Are we doomed to relive the curses of prior generations? That sounds a little dark, probably, but I don’t mean for it to. Appletini gets a happy ending, after all!

Do you wish to share any possible new story that might be coming up?

At this point I have no comment whatsoever and nothing to announce. But I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas! 🎅🎄🎁😏

#iwaw #interview with a writer #bts #of their brilliant stories #writing community #writers of tumblr #when the world is crashing down

[sibillascribbles08]

Okay ramble that will probably not get anywhere but I will put it here anyway because I saw yet another post about people struggling to get any writing done. And someone in the comments made a good point. You write/draw so much more as a kid because you're less practiced and ergo less worried about the imperfections that may arise from just gunning it.

And this is true! And this is why I want to tell you if you are struggling to write much, learn to write like a kid again.

You know how with a lot of art you see processes and it always starts with really shitty thumbnails that have silly faces or just blobs of color? Then you have an actual sketch (during which the artist likely moves a lot of shit around on a digital canvas) and then possibly the inking phase or just painting which is more blobs that slowly get sharper and sharper the more the images is rendered.

Yeah uh, do that with writing. Going under the cut because long

Writing as a process is something that is unique to an individual, just like there's 800 ways to slap paint on a canvas. If you look at guide books for writing and none of it is sticking it's not cause you're a failure that technique is just not gelling for you.

And as such I can only speak from MY experience with it but like, here's how I generally stay on top of projects

A) Sketch phase! It's outline time baby! "Ughh but outlines suck" listen I know school made the outline phase of an essay the worst fucking thing ever but hear me out on this. Sure some people CAN write by the seat of their pants but in terms of long projects this does not work out for me. I'm inevitably gonna hit a point where idk where to go from there and it's so hard to map all that out in long form

Listen, outlines are not there to be formal. They're not even there to be fancy. This is time to get down the bare bones and if you have to make it only a paragraph long and then extend that paragraph into multiple then DO it.

Like hell, NONE of my outlines are formatted the same! Some are a paragraph per chapter. Others are just endless bullet points that I split up later. I'm sure in one book due to all the plotlines I'm just going to have a storyline for each character laid out in columns so I can draw lines between them. Whatever works.

And again, do not have to be formal, like here is a legit line in one of my outlines

As for the ruined building… Hypno will cover the damages……….. Right? : )

Go crazy.

B) Now that you have your baselines start working on the actual story. Do you like writing shit out of order? Do it, because with an outline you still have your baselines to reference for any important details you don't wanna forget "Remember [character] is supposed to get a scar in chapter five!" Or write shit in order, and every time you hit a lull consult those baselines to say "oh yeah that's where this chapter was going"

And hey, keep writing it like a kid if that's what it takes to get this crap down. Hit a fight scene you don't wanna write? Slap down some brackets. [Insert a fight scene here where [character] gets his head smashed in so he ends up with this concussion later like a dumbass]. Boom, done, worry about it later.

Worried the dialogue isn't flowing well? Slap open another document or grab some paper and write it out in a play format to keep it moving. Add in all the beats, expressions, and details after.

Not sure if this detail you're putting in is historically accurate? Leave an easy to search symbol in the doc so you can go back to it to research later.

Write the sappy shit. Write with poor grammar (but still like, comprehensible you know what I mean). Slip in adverbs to swap out with strong verbs later. Use a run on sentence.

"But it's gonna sound bad" Who cares who tf cares that's what editing is for ! You go back and refine that shit and clean up sentences and add in all the extra research and pull out the repetitive words.

You gotta quit treating writing like you're supposed to just swing your brush on the canvas and suddenly you have some beautiful scenery. There's layers. There's blobs that turn into refined shapes. There's blending and shading. There's fine lines and thick lines. And sometimes there's mistakes that you have to wait until it dries to go back over it again.

It is a process! Let yourself have FUN with the process.

Okay rant over.

#scribs speaks #I will never tell people how they should write #but so many times when I talk to fellow writers who say they haven't touched their WIP in ages #9/10 I ask if they have an outline and they say no #sir you are trying to write a fic that could be like 20 chapters #give yourself some sketch layers

[void-of-unparalled-chaos]

So that's a big follower influx 0_0

I'm assuming most of you are here from the Roy and Jason snippet I posted from the ghost chirps/unintentional ghost adoption WIP. As such I figure now is as good of a time as any to post an update on the fic.

I have completed the first 3 chapters. I'm aiming for each chapter to be between 3500-5000 words. The current word count on the doc is 12,825. Chapter 1 includes the writing for the AU I did under the original post while the Roy and Jason snippet is from chapter 3.

Another 3 chapters are outlined in bullet point lists, but I have yet to complete an outline for the rest. I still want to include a lot of stuff, but I need to find a good way to link it all together. I also have no idea how I want to end it yet but uh... I'm hoping that will come to me as I go. I have no idea what the final chapter count will be.

College finals are just around the corner so I don't know how much more writing I'll get done in the next few weeks. I'm hoping that I'll be able to get another few thousand words on the doc over the course of winter break but I will be traveling. My hope is that the flights will force me to get more finished for lack of anything else to do.

#ghost chirps/unintentional ghost adoption au fic #writing wip

[callsign-bunnie]

hey chef do you have any tips or trick to help overcome writers block???? or are u just a writing machine??? im an aspiring writer in college getting my ass whooped by writers block

Uhhhh, so I just don't let myself have writer's block?

*cracks knuckles*

Alright, look, as you guys have seen, I can write a LOT. And I delude myself into thinking it's fairly decent writing. My main trick is having so many projects that if I get tired or bored with one, I just switch.

I don't know what project you're doing, but I'm going to assume it's a book or something similar. My main tip? Just fucking write it. It doesn't need to be good, it doesn't need to be structured, it just needs to be words. You can always rewrite it, but you can't rewrite an empty page.

Even if you're writing down wattpad style bullshit, like I'm talking just pure crap, write it down, anyway. I've written and rewritten so many chapters before because I could feel writer's block coming.

I also have about three fics that I write that I have not released. One of them, I have no plans to. I use them to just have something I can write whatever I want for when I'm dealing with writer's block that are just my most fun fics.

Obviously, however, none of this works if you don't have an idea of what you want to write. So, there's two methods that I've found personal success with.

The first is to lay awake at night and obsess over-

I'm jk. I do that, it's successful, but it's not healthy and/or recommended. However, I do think for quite a while and write down every single detail that I can think of for a scene and just follow the structure. I do this in bullet points, and in fact have a google docs for it

This isn't the best example but my best examples haven't been released yet, so...

I don't have an example of the second, because I use that for my real books, but I've found that if you have dialogue in mind, write all of that down, and fill in the blanks with action later.

I also have friends who I regularly discuss scenes with, which helps me brainstorm. My friends, whom I adore, also will ask questions. This really helps because it points out plotholes and things I wasn't thinking about, it also helps me extend a scene.

End of the day, don't take advice from me, I literally just force myself to write and tell myself I'm letting everyone down if I don't! It's not a protip, it's a fear of disappointing people.

#bunnie speaks #writing #fanfiction writer #writing tips

[notasapleasure]

WIP ask meme

@stripedroseandsketchpads tagged me in this. And oh my god. If you think there are Too Many Words in the fic I publish, you should see my poor notes app. Here is a sneak peek of its contents. I haven't edited for brevity/those I'm actively working on, these are just all the unfinished files I could find. Some I don't intend to do any more with, others I'd really like to pick up again. The only ones being actively worked on right now are the Andor Saga AU and the first one on the list for Andor.

I put ALL the Lymond I could find in mainly for @oughtaagh who has been leaving the most lovely comments on my Lymond fics that I have totally failed to respond to. I'm sorry! I will cycle back round to Lymond one day, it's inevitable <3

Tagging uh.... @distressednoise, @r0b0tb0y, @faceofpoe, @donnaimmaculata, @batri-jopa, @elwenyere, @notabuddhist and anyone else who wants to say I tagged them! Also sorry if you'd already been tagged, I'm not keeping up with the dash very well at the moment!

Anyway please send me asks/comments/cease and desist orders about these. xxx

ANDOR

C: We decided we were thirsty, and you wanted to go to Cavo's. As yet untitled Brassian alternative scene - what if instead of a great collaborative cover story this was a great collaborative fuck? Almost(?) finished?

Saga AU pt 2. This actually does have a working title of 'The Bear and the Berserk' but this doc is just a short bullet point list of plot things for a specific part of the fic.

Cassian pov. It's a Cassian pov chapter! For...drumroll...the first chapter of the Saga AU pt 2! The rest is going to be back to Brasso FPN. The file actually includes a rough first draft of chapter 2, as well.

"You're up early this morning," Bix says lightly. A follow-up chapter to Only Ever Just One Night started back when I had epic plans for continuing this, bringing in Cinta and Vel and Luthen, whumping the hell out of Brasso, and having Cassian rescue him. This is just one scene of awkward conversation with tea though.

Oh god it developed Plot. Related to the previous chapter - a bullet-pointed list of things that might have happened in this fic I Wil Not Write (not least as I'd rather just see what happens in S2 first anyway).

AND THEN WE DANCED

It was a sunny day in Batumi... Patchy few paragraphs of the next chapter of Inchoate.

Plannnnns (again). Plans for how Inchoate would/will continue.

THE LYMOND CHRONICLES

Canon-verse/other AUs

Multiple pieces of follow-up to The next man with a ladder, Danny/Jerott post-canon: It was dark when they rode into the port town... [Chapter 3, basically done, plus most of Chapter 4 but it devolves into broken paragraphs at the end]. "I'm going to the other bed," Danny said in a voice like someone was standing on his throat... [??? there's loads of this written! This is the file where they Get Down To It] Stitch the scenes together [a few paragraphs in which I hoped to make a logical leap from Chapter 4 to fucking, but seemingly never quite got there].

Lymondar saga draft. Actually two files of the abortive first effort at writing a saga AU. I was trying much harder to write in saga style and playing with lacunae in a way that was fun for me but exceedingly nerdy. I think I found the idea more fun than the execution, too.

St Seb. Remember ages ago when I was writing a post-canon 'Jerott gets shot full of arrows and has to admit his feelings because he thinks he's gonna die' fic? This is the file! Some bullet points and some text, some of which I even posted as Sunday sixes way back when iirc.

Fait prosperer qui n'est à croire vain. Fuck me, there's LOADS of this. Pawn in Frankincense/Ringed Castle AU where Marthe steals Lymond's ride with Kiaya Khatun and persuades her they should take over Russia together. Meanwhile Francis is left with Jerott. Hahaha. It kept getting longer because Francis kept trying to escape and I kept finding ways to drag him back, but the 'and now kiss!!' with the two of them behaving in character was just not coming easily.

Francis Crawford's Holistic Inquisition Agency. I wrote this??? One chapter of a Lymond/Dirk Gently AU, where Francis is obviously Dirk and Jerott is a furious/bemused Todd.

She tried every instrument, she redrew every chart. A few short chapters, never finished, of Marthe wrestling with her role in canon and her fate as assigned by La Dame. A couple more paragraphs of a similar sort of thing in Volos.

Malta. Half-arsed few paragraphs of wondering how Jerott would cope with meeting a fellow Knight being imprisoned for sodomy.

Band AU (my 1980s rock band AU for the series, see also @theartistknownaslymond)

Au of an Au. What if, after the Battle of the Bands at Solway, Jerott went to stay at the Edinburgh townhouse for a while and he and Francis got to collaborating in the shed? There's quite a lot of this and it's quite fluffy.

Out out out! The band celebrate Thatcher's downfall. Happy epilogues for everyone! However it's an epic task trying to do all the characters justice, so I was trying to write it as vignettes to match each song on the playlist. Six-ish are written. And earlier draft with plan for characters intercting is in Ding dong the witch is dead.

Jerott/Marthe - four times it just about worked, one time it really didn't. What it says on the tin? aka you just know Jerott has said 'Francis' instead of Marthe at least once when he comes. Only the beginning of the first time exists in this chapter, but I think I explored the idea elsewhere, whenever I dig up that file...

DWTH missing scene. Jerott/OC missing scene from Don't wake the house. Not finished, probably not going to be finished. I think I have enough Jerott smut on the go.

Workshop. Patchy draft of pre-canon Jerott and GRM 'therapy' session in which GRM learns about Francis Crawford and what a hold he has on the boy he thought of as his own plaything. GRM doesn't like sharing.

F/P. Draft of a fluffy kiss prompt someone (@erinaceina? @notfromcold?) sent for Francis/Philippa. Post-canon pregnant Philippa and worried Francis written when it was too hot in summer. It's probably complete enough to post tbh! hmu if you want it posting.

Jerott behaving badly (again). Somehow this ended up in the 'comfortember' section of the notepad, which...no? Maybe it was intended to be originally, but it grew a life of its own. Post-canon, post split-up with the OC, pre-getting together with Danny. Joining the mile high club and regretting it, then ending up crashing at Joleta's (who he meets coincidentally at the airport, NOT who he's screwing in the airplane loo!!). It's meant to end up cathartic, but didn't get finished :') I'm actually really pleased with what I have - post-canon Joleta is so much fun to write!

Somewhere (Google Drive?? an actual Word doc??) there is also loads and loads and LOADS of Pawn in Frankincense band AU around Baron Morgan's place (the Aga Morat), featuring fucked-up Francis/Morgan, fucked up Marthe/Kiaya, fucked up Francis/Kiaya, and bewildered cold turkey Jerott. There's also some Jerott/Marthe from later on.

Other

Crossover. A sequel to my ATWD fic I will shake mountains, where Merab and Irakli encounter celebrity diners in the restaurant they work in: respected musician Francis Crawford and friends take the boys for a drink and share queer/artistic inspiration/history with them. There's quite a lot written but I couldn't quite manage to finish it off.

St Mary's. Another ATWD/Lymond crossover, placing Merab and Irakli among the mercenaries of St Mary's. Mostly bullet points.

3m. Furious that there was no fic for the film Three Months I decided to jot down a scene I wanted to see afterwards. I wrote four lines and cannot remember what my plan was at all.

#often i think it would do me good to fear a wordcount more #my wips #my writing #my fics #wips #wip ask meme #memes #asks #please send asks about any of these!! #long post #:))

[burntheedges]

Congrats on your follower milestone, you deserve it!! 🩷🎉 You have been nothing but so welcoming and sweet in this space, and I’m so happy we connected ☺️

❓For the ask, what is your writing process? Is there something that motivates you or helps you to write?

Jamie!! Thank you!! 🧡 I feel the same way 🫶🏻

this is a fun question! I had a lot to say apparently lol

So in terms of actually sitting down to write, I do a lot of it on my couch, tbh. I like to write in coffee shops so I try to do that sometimes, I like the vibe. I like background noise. Mild deadlines (without like a ton of pressure) motivate me which is why I like challenges, probably. They’re friendly but still something to work towards. I try to take breaks and let myself come back to things if it’s feeling like a slog. (Breaks are good for your brain!!)

I definitely prefer writing on my computer, not on my phone. When I wrote Maintenance Request I tried out Scrivener (since it was for NaNo) and I do like it, but the way Google docs sync across my devices is helpful for when I need to make quick changes or edits. Or write down a sudden thought.

I try to always have an outline before I start. For a oneshot that might be like… 3-5 bullet points. Basic plot outline and anything I know I want to include. Longer, depending on the length of the fic. Sometimes I’ll have specific scenes that I know I want to happen so I’ll list those.

I like to have a full outline, especially for a fic I know will be long, so I don’t lose sight of where it’s going. And so I can tell if all of the beats are there. But I’m also an almost-or-fully-finish-before-I-post person (MR was mostly done when I started posting, other than a couple of chapters near the end and the epilogue. But also thank god for @katareyoudrilling because without her as my beta it would not be what it is now). The outline doesn’t have to be fancy, it’s usually bullet points and incomplete sentences.

I think part of the reason I like to write this way is because I like to empty my brain of all of my ideas for a fic to help me brainstorm, and that becomes the outline. It also helps me not worry if I’m forgetting any ideas. And seeing it all laid out helps me find gaps or like places where I need to add things. I also skip around when actually writing within the outline — I don’t just go in order.

Mild spoilers for Maintenance Request under the cut (but not past where you’ve read, just for anyone else reading this).

For Maintenance Request I had an extensive outline — almost everything that is still in it up to chapter 16ish was in the outline, just not necessarily in the original order. (I just went back and looked, the outline is 6 pages 👀.) I knew I wanted the beginning scenes where they’re at odds, and the scene outside the building when she kisses Joel was actually the first scene I thought of for the fic. Some of it developed as I was writing (like the date and what’s coming this Friday 👀) and a lot of the outline was vague, so there’s still the element of surprise lol. And Joel likes to do what he wants. 🤷🏻‍♀️

was this too much information? 😂 thank you for asking!! 🧡

followers celebration

#ask me anything #bte600 #writing #writing process

[essential-oils234]

Writing 101: Tips and tricks for experienced authors to novice ones, or just a little reading for anyone who wants to learn something new.

Have you ever gotten into a slump where writing feels like a failed career and nothing you write ever seems to turn out well? (I know I have). Maybe you're itching to write something, it's been so long since you've looked at your notebooks of inspiration or google docs of madness. Maybe you just don't know where to start, and it feels like you've failed before you even begun.

Well, I have a few tips that just might remedy that!

(I'm in no way an experienced writer. I've read a lot of books, watched a lot of character analyses on Youtube, but I'm only at the start of my writing journey. So please don't take this to be expert advice and don't feel disheartened if my methods don't work for you. Everyone has a unique style of writing, and it's only through trial-and-error that you can really begin to find yours too.)

So, without further ado, here are some tips and tricks that helped me organize my thoughts and plan out chapters, develop my characters, and resist the call of procrastination.

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"What do I want from this story?"

It's a question that sounds elusively simple, but it's one that's more tricky to answer. For me, at least, it's hard to pinpoint a few ideas that manage to encapsulate what I want the readers to feel or understand from my story. It's even harder when I try to summarize my thoughts into broad themes/ideas, such as love, compassion, hard work, etc.

I usually start a story on the basis of something really small, and then I work out from there. For example, I'm currently working on a Genshin Impact fic that I only started writing after watching an animatic. An animatic. (The link will be at the end of this post, if you guys want to check it out and show some love to the creator.)

A whole freaking story started on the basis of an animatic that is 1 minute and 41 seconds long. It's kinda crazy how that worked out. But in a way, it makes sense. The biggest creations start from small, simple ideas that slowly grow over time.

What I'm trying to say is: don't disregard those silly little ideas that you think don't hold much importance over trying to figure out the big, important plot. Oftentimes, it's those silly little ideas that make up the big important plot. So I'd advise you to turn to a blank page or start a new google doc and write that question at the top. "What do I want from this story?" Your answers could be anything, from little details like "he goes back to his birthplace to confront his family" or more broad ideas like "they have a conversation about loss and how to cope with that". Bullet points or sentences, whatever you choose, this is your dumping ground for all the stupid ideas you have that might not ever make it into your story. The point of the question is to exercise your mind and get it thinking about the main plot, as well as a helpful organization tool for all those scattered thoughts that don't really fit anywhere else.

2. "What if I can't start writing a story because I just don't have any ideas?"

That is a harder question to answer, since writer's block has a multitude of solutions that work for some people and don't for others. My advice is, keep focusing on the small things, since it essentially forces you to start minimally and branch out from there. Inspiration is all over the internet, and those small ideas can help jumpstart your brain into creating something new. If you see a few posts about 'cottagecore' on Pinterest and that inspires you to write a fantasy story about witches, then go for it! If you read a book and want to write something similar, except with a different ending, go ahead! (Except if you're posting it on the internet, please credit the original creator.)

Don't feel guilty for "stealing someone else's idea" or mad at yourself for "not being able to come up with anything original". We all have to start somewhere, and it's okay if what you write isn't completely novel. (That's what fanfiction is for, after all!)

Oftentimes, our brain puts us in a corner where we convince ourselves that we just can't write anything because we don't have any ideas. Maybe that's true, but the thing about writer's block is that you really won't have any ideas unless you start actively thinking about potential plots or characters. Searching up 'writing prompts' on Tumblr will no doubt feed you with a slew of interesting ideas that you can build off from there, and Pinterest is a gold-mine of creativity. The main thing, of course, is to have fun in the process. In the end, the person who you're really writing for is yourself.

3. "Okay, I have a few ideas and plot points, but what about organizing it? How do I go about organizing a multi-chapter story?"

This question is from people who are mainly like me, who like organizing their chapters out before they actually write them. It's good to have a reference point to come back to if you take a writing hiatus, and it's just nice having everything jotted down somewhere I can easily find.

I'm not going to get too specific here, since everyone has their own way of writing notes, but after I have a bunch of main ideas that more or less make up the whole plot, I start narrowing those ideas down into chapters. I have sections of bullet-points for each chapter, which have general ideas that aren't too specific, since I tend to figure out the specifics as I'm writing. (ex. He has a flashback that shows his past before switching back to the present) If you're a person who's pretty gung-ho about these things, you might lean towards the idea of "figuring it out as you go along". If you're super organizational, your chapter notes might go down to the most minute detail before you actually start writing.

I also have a few 'braindump' sections that are pretty much like the "What do I want from this story?" notes, except they're a bit more relevant to the plot instead of just random details and dialogue I want to insert sooner or later. I also have sections where I write about important themes in my story that require further elaboration (ex. the concept of morality, what it means to be human, etc.) It's important to flesh out these ideas beforehand so you have a good idea of how to show these underlying themes in your actual story.

Last but not least, please, please, please flesh out your characters before you start writing a story. It's honestly my least favorite part of writing, but it's incredibly important because your characters are what makes up your story. A good story is known from it's good characters. I, personally, create lists of traits/flaws for my main characters so I can, as a writer, understand them better and know how to show their personalities in writing. I also write lists of attributes before and after they go through ✨character development✨ so I can understand how they've changed and grown and start formulating ideas on how to show that in my writing.

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So, we've reached the end! Yay, that took way too long and I didn't even get to talk about procrastination!!🎉🎉 Hopefully, this will not be the first and last 'Writing 101', since there's plenty more I'd like to talk about and plenty more to learn. If you have any questions or anything you want me to talk about next, don't hesitate to drop a comment or ask me anything! I'll try to answer to the best of my abilities. If you liked this post, please leave a like or a comment. It's really motivating and just feels great to know if people like my content.

(Here's the link to the animatic I mentioned earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REBxGWSMRn4. It's been a huge source of inspiration for my writing and art, and the person who made it is insanely talented. If you're into Genshin Impact or just want to see some good art, go check out their other animations and comment/leave a like!)

I hope your writing journey is nothing short of spectacular and creatively amazing, and I'll see you in the next one!

#genshin impact mentions #genshin impact fic #animatic #writing 101 #this took like 2 hours I've been sitting in the same position for 2 hours #writing tips #writing advice #writer's block #first official post #brainstorming #organization #planning #chapter planning #how to start writing

[thana-topsy]

When writing, do you plan the entire story first or the first few chapters and continue planning once those chapters are done? How often do you make changes to your plans? Do others look over them so you can have their thoughts and opinions? Are your plans detailed, small snippets of scenes, dialogue, and setting, or both?

(Sorry for all the questions)

Hey Nonni! No need to apologize.

Generally I get an idea for a story, and then the story itself is emergent over time. The first few chapters are usually the easiest part, and then the rest takes a little more thinkin'. More than anything my stories are driven by a ~desire~ rather than a solid plot.

My outlines change constantly, but I HAVE to have one in order for a story to be successful. I'll plot it beginning to end with basic rough bullet points of what happens in each chapter. Like I said, this can and does change pretty often. The way I like to put it is "I have to have a map to see where I'm going, but sometimes I wander off the main trail."

Okay, a cut, because I am long-winded:

When my plot does change, generally I'll take the time to rework my outline in the new direction. Again, so I have a map.

My docs are usually structured like this: - First Draft, divided by chapters - Current Outline - Notes, references, quotes from in-game sources - Non-Linear bits

Here's what my Halfway to the Sky doc looks like:

Also, I almost always have a beta reader for my work. Sometimes I like to just throw things into the void because I'm not doing this for money, I'm doing it for fun. But if I really want the quality to be top notch, I get a second pair of eyes on my work. But with enough practice, you can self-beta with relative efficiency. Never underestimate the power of a second opinion though. I love getting feedback, even when it's critical or heavy handed. So long as I know it's not coming from a place of judgement or scorn, my friends have permission to tear my work to shreds. Because it helps me improve!

Thanks for all your questions! I hope I answered everything.

#topsy's asks #writing meta #writeblr #fanfiction

[fallstaticexit]

how do you keep up with your story and plot? Are you a google doc girlie or just write as you go?

Thanks for asking! Great question, I’m happy to share 🤗

So, a bit of both, I think. More like 80% writing/pre-planning and 20% manic daydreaming and writing on the fly.

When I’m on the go, I write in my notes app on my phone. I have so many freaking notes it’s actually kind of a mess and I really try to avoid using it because there’s no organization or anything. Just blurbs of thoughts I have that I don’t want to forget when I’m not at my computer.

I do have Microsoft Word through work that I use and it’s more organized and cohesive there and my main source of planning comes from there too. The way I post my story in chapters is how I write in my word doc. Right now in COTF, I’ve posted up to Chapter 3 and in my word doc, I’m currently at Chapter 15. At the Chapter 8 mark, it’s less dialogue and more just bullet points of main plot points I’d like to have in my story but as I keep writing, it becomes a fleshed out story.

What I’ve been meaning to do is create another doc for abandoned storylines so I can revisit at some point (to use again maybe or just for nostalgia). For example, in an alternate universe Simeon killed L.Faba in that final showdown. I didn’t originally intend to have her turn into a vampire but I loved her as my main antagonist so much that I scrapped it pretty early on and we have the current ending we do which of course domino affect the rest of my story. (Plus, I just couldn’t picture any of the sages taking her down the more I developed her)

I’m kinda rambling lol But this ask just made me realize I got some housekeeping I need to do!

#cotf tag #thank you for letting me ramble 🙏🏾