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writeraquamarinara · 4 years

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This is a bit late, but congrats on yet another trip around the sun, everyone!

I want to start this year off by thanking everyone who got me through the last one; I love you all.

Notes of appreciation are below the cut (because this got wayyyy too long, woops), and @s are in alphabetical order so you don’t have to dig through them to find yours, lol.

@arsenicpanda: Thank you for providing this fandom with wonderful gif sets, commentary, and tumblr tags. You do so much as a Discord mod, and your support of content creators is always so wonderful to see.

@awkwardteenwrites: Hi, darling! I hope you’re doing alright. Thank you for sticking around and being such a bright light in the fandom. Your gifs are always so incredibly beautiful, and I come back to them often. <3

@bettsc: You are such a lovely human being and your presence in the fandom brings so much joy. I love your fics, and how much you support those of others.

@bettycooper: Thank you so much for everything you do for the bughead fandom, Cat. Without you we wouldn’t have so many of the events, and thus content, that we are spoiled with. Your work in organizing the fandom and support of content creators does not go unnoticed or unappreciated. <3

@catthecoder: Lav, darling, you are one of the most beautiful people on this entire site. Your (not-so-anon) asks always bring me so much joy, as does your writing. We are so lucky to have such a loving person in our midst.

@cracklr: I love you, you hilarious gal. I wish you would send me vaguely threatening messages more often. :)

@crepuscolo-writes: I don’t know if I could have gotten through some days without your support and/or yelling at me to get shit done. Your edits are gorgeous, and your photography even more so. I love your commentary on posts, and you’re the most badass person I know. <3

@dottie-wan-kenobi: You make me smile, you make me laugh, you understand me so unbelievably well. You support me even when I haven’t been online or active for months on end, and you never make me feel bad for being absent. You are brilliant, and an incredible writer, and I look up to you for all of that and more. I love you very much.

@earthlaughsinflowersblog: You are one of the most thoughtful, insightful persons I’ve had the pleasure of coming across, ever. The details you pick up on, and comment on, the ideas you share, your outlook on and love of life, your appreciation and encouragement of others — I aspire. Thank you for setting such a lovely example for us all. Much love.

@fictitiousoshine: Oshine, you have one of the most brilliant souls I have ever seen. Thank you for thinking of me, sending me messages, and support on so many platforms. You write some of the most wonderful comments I have ever received. I hope you have the most amazing year, decade, and life. You deserve the world and more. <3

@halsteadandlindsay: Hello you gorgeous human. I love you very much. I love our conversations, and I love reading your writing — it’s so beautiful. Sending you so much love <3

@hellodinoflower: I appreciate you and your presence in this fandom more than I will ever be able to say. Thank you for making me smile with your thoughtfulness and your encouragement. Thank you for writing stories and comments I come back to often. Thank you for being kind, and friendly.

@hufflepuff-betty: Your posts, and the occasional commentary on them, always make me laugh, or smile, or think. Thank you for being in the fandom, and for supporting my writing. I can’t say I’ve ever listened to a podfic before, but rest assured that when I do, the first will be one of yours. (send me recs if you’d like!) <3

@ithoughtyoulikedmereckless: Thank you for always reaching out to me, and making sure that I’m doing okay. Thank you for being so kind and loving, and for the beautiful fic you gifted me this year. I love that you’re always smiling and enjoying life, and living it as unapologetically as you do. I love that we share so many interests, and I love talking about them with you. Here’s to hopefully meeting up soon <3

@itseitheryeetorbeyeeted: Hello, my darling Mia! You and your kitty always bring me so much joy. You are the queen of eyeshadow and I really wish you could teach me to be as good at makeup as you are. Also I really want to go to the Lightning Thief Musical with you one day — we can dream, right?

@justcourbeau: Mel, you are one of the most special people I have ever met. Your kindness and compassion know no bounds, and I am so lucky to have you in my life. You are hilarious, and I love that my appreciation for English Lit memes matches yours. I enjoy our conversations so much, even though I’m often absent for extended periods of time, but I promise to work on that in the new year. I love you so much, and I really cannot wait for when (not if, when — I promise I’ll visit eventually) I’ll be able to give you the biggest hug irl.

@miss-eee: The vibrant energy in everything you do — tumblr posts, Discord messages, and fic writing — always brings a smile to my face. You are such a wonderful person, and I’m always so happy to see you on my dash. Thank you for bringing me so much joy from day to day. Much love.

@panalegs27: I can’t believe I found someone so lovely and kind who also adores so many of the movies and shows that I do. Thank you for bringing me so much joy with every single one of your posts and messages. <3

@redundantoxymorons: Izzy, I truly don’t think I would still be online if it weren’t for you. I most certainly would not be writing anymore without our brainstorming sessions and your constant support and beta abilities. You are such a bright, caring person, and the world does not deserve you. I am so lucky to have your friendship, my darling. (Also the P&P posts on your blog make me SO HAPPY.)

@satelliteinasupernova: Thank you for providing this fandom with so much beautiful art; you’re my favorite artist on here, and your stories are just as well-crafted. Not only do you create such wonderful content, but you also support that of others. You send asks and interact with others on their blogs, and that is so important — you make us feel seen, and loved, and we could not ask for a better person to be in the community.

@sheriff-snikety-snake: You are so incredibly hilarious (and thank you for complimenting me when I try to be as well) and thoughtful, and I love hearing your thoughts on absolutely anything. Thank you for listening to me when I started ranting about my thoughts for Valhalla, and encouraging me despite it being a complete dumpster fire of a fic. Thank you for sharing your art and writing and craft-work with us — we are so incredibly lucky.

@shirly-gallagher: Thank you so much for supporting my fics this year. Your comments and excitement always brightened my days <3333

@stirringsofconsciousness: I consider you something of a mentor — in how to be kind, caring, and brilliant. I love reading your masterful writing, and helping you out with a story that one time still sticks with me as one of my favourite moments on tumblr. Sending you so much love, and hoping you have a wonderful new year, decade, and more. <3

@sublimateradiate: I absolutely adore your bughead edits, and you as a person. I admire the thoughtful way in which you run your server and the interesting questions you ask in it. I admire the posts you put on my dash and how cool your interests are (cephalopods?? dude!), and thank you very much for being here and being so wonderful.

@sullypants: I don’t really know where to start with this one. Your many blogs are so important to me, for so many reasons, and so are you. You have guided me through so many tough times this year with your kind, empowering words. You have sent me messages that I think about and come back to often. You are such a well-read person, and I honestly aspire. Thank you for being nice to me (and everyone else on here). Thank you for providing me, and others, with content that means a lot. I cried reading your riverdale art history yearly recap, and I thank you for that. Here’s to a 2020, and many more years after that, that’s as nice to you as you’ve been to me. <3

@theheavycrown: Sarah, I don’t know what I, and us as a fandom, would do without you. You are always reminding me of the events you’re running, and supporting all of the content that everyone creates for this batshit crazy show, while also creating incredible content yourself! I admire how much time, effort, and patience goes into being so involved in the fandom, and running the Discord/tumblr accounts. We all bow down to you and your brilliance.

@whaticameherefor: Your support of the crazy idea for a fic that I sent you ages ago made me so happy this year — I can’t believe you remembered it! You are such a wonderful person full of love, kindness, and intelligence, and I wish you all the best. Thank you for being a friend to me when I first joined the fandom, and for sticking around since. Much love.

@wolfofansbach: Your writing is so brilliant, so thought-out and well-researched, and I love reading your fics. I love reading your posts — because they are genius, and hilarious — and hearing your thoughts on the crazy show we all came together for. Thank you for supporting my writing even though it’s nowhere near as good as yours and despite me taking forever to post/update stories. Thank you for supporting content creators other than myself and for bringing so many of us so much joy. <3

I’m probably missing some lovely people but just know that I love every single one of y’all so very much, and I hope that you all have a wonderful new year xx.

#take a shot every time i say love or thank u or joy or brilliant or kindness #you'd die #i have a very limited vocabulary when not using a thesaurus ok #no beta all mistakes are mine and No I most def did not go back to edit this sap #the notes got increasingly long bc i do not know when to shut. up.#i just love u all very much #every single one of these people but also the ones i forgot to mention!#in general if you follow me i am a) astonished that u do and b) in love with u #(also if i messed up the alphabetical order i.. uh.. definitely did that on purpose. yep. iknow how the alphabet works)

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shalaena · 7 years

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I am a fangirl. I have been a fangirl of various things in my life, usually celebrities. I mean, what teenager doesn’t have that singer or actor they absolutely can’t get enough of?

Recently, though, I started fangirling a different sort of people. It all started with Chantelle Atkins. I was reading her articles for Author’s Publish, loving all of them, then one day I came across her Facebook page and started following her. I loved her book covers so much and I wanted to know who’d done them. It took me a good while to build up the courage to message her. I mean, come on, at this point I had little stars in my eyes over her work and I had this image of her in my mind of being this fabulous author while I was piddling away as a nobody.

So, I asked her who did the work. She directed me to Jakeart1. Chantelle and I continued to chat after that, and I think we’ve established a nice business relationship as well as personal. We go back and forth helping each other out, you’ll see in her own words how I assisted with her rebranding.

That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t fangirled a “real” person.

I asked Chantelle to add a little something about her own experiences with connecting with myself and with other authors. Here is what she had to say!

As a self-published author, getting the word out about your books is key. The key to everything! Because it’s so difficult, time-consuming and potentially expensive to do this, I try to keep my social media sites as active and engaging as possible. When I first started my Facebook author page, for instance, I was hesitant. I’m an introvert at heart and didn’t know how or what to post to engage with people. It’s been a few years now, and I’ve started to get the hang of it. Better yet, I truly enjoy it! I have to say, my Facebook page is my favorite place and I would hang out there all day if I could. Engaging with readers and other writers in this way is essential for indie authors. Making contacts and connections is vital and a lot of fun.

One of the best things I ever did was submit articles to Author’s Publish magazine. I think a fair amount of my likes on Facebook come from doing this. This means the majority of them are other writers, but I think this is great. You can’t imagine how lovely it is to receive messages from people who have read and enjoyed those articles because something in them resonated with them.

What’s even nicer, is when those people stay in touch and go on to become a real online friend. Someone who reads and reviews your books, shares your stuff and offers advice when you need it. Shalaena is one of those people for me, and one of the biggest ways she helped me when we first started communicating, was with the revamp of my blog/website.

At the time it was in dire need of a makeover and focus. Shalaena told me about a course she was on, where she had learned about making a blog more focused and driven in order to draw in the right audience. She helped me to think about the aim of my blog and also; who were my target audience? What did all my books have in common? What did I write about and why? Over a few weeks, with Shalaena’s help I transformed my blog from Chantelle Atkins blog to The Glorious Outsiders, which I am tremendously proud of. My books are about outsiders, those who don’t fit in and don’t even want to. This was the common theme and once I realized this, the rest came easily.

I’ve made other connections with other writers for different reasons too. I once noticed an author who had added her books to the same ‘themes’ as mine in iAuthor. This made me jot down her name and at a later date I looked her up on Amazon, then found her on Facebook and messaged her page. I told her I thought her books sounded similar to mine in content and couldn’t wait to read one. She was so lovely and surprised to hear this, and even more so when I posted again after reading one of the books, which had met all of my expectations and more. Kate Rigby is now a great friend of mine and we have even met up in real life. It’s so lovely when this happens! I like to think we also support each other, by chatting and by reading and reviewing each other’s books.

Survival as an indie writer is, for me anyway, dependent on other writers, on the whole community. It’s full of lovely, vibrant, brave and unusual people. They are the people who didn’t give up when one door was closed to them. They carried on anyway, honing their craft, learning from others, doing everything themselves and making great friends in the process. My top tip to anyone about to embark on independent publishing? Make connections! Reach out to people. Help each other.

I mentioned being redirected to Jakeart1. I immediately followed her page and went through her works and, you guessed it, became a fangirl. I commissioned two pieces from her—the front and back covers for The Worst Dyrkon. The whole thing was friendly and professional. Even though I didn’t ask her to, she bought and read my first book, Those Who Wander. She loved it, and even made some fanart to go with it! (No, I don’t own the prints, they are hers!)

The Dauntless encounters the Screaming Cliffs

Tsingsei “Song” in the crow’s nest

The most recent fangirling I did was over an artist in a World of Warcraft group I’m part of on Facebook. Miss B.R. Soule. She’d started a comic series called The Adventures of Grimory and Anarchaia. A demon hunter tasked by Archmage Khadgar, with aiding his apprentice in her research within Suramar. Soule believes in fanservicing (drawings and literature just for the fans and often by request). I remember messaging her, asking about posting stories on tumblr (I admit I’m still fairly new to it!). I shared my story with her, which she’d inspired by writing a short story for her characters, and she said mine put hers to shame. (I don’t know where she gets that crap, she’s a fantastic writer!) Upon discovering I was published, she asked me to edit one of her pieces. I’m going to use the term “edit” loosely because, to be honest, there wasn’t much to actually do. Because she’s a fantastic writer. (If you’re reading this, shut up and accept that you’re fantastic.) From there I joined her Discord channel and I fangirled all over the place, in secret, because seriously, just look at her work! Look at it!

One day, we joined in an RP chat session. And we had a lot of fun for a few days, just having our characters cause trouble in this tavern with one other RPer. About the same time, we thought about how much fun it would be to write a story with our characters and an actual storyline. We made our own server and started writing A Lesson in Patience, each in turn and controlling our own characters. I’ve never had so much fun writing. Ever. In just one month we finished 160,000 words of story. The first part is 44 chapters long! Yes, I’m planning on compiling it—with the art that accompanies it—for fans to purchase as a paperback at print-cost (no profit to the writers because it is a fanfic and we do not own the world it takes place in).

We’re still writing.

Every day, the first thing I check on my phone is if she has posted. I stop in grocery stores to post replies. She takes every second she gets during her busy work schedule, to write out her posts.

What have we gained? Quite a bit, actually. She is essentially getting free lessons in writing, as well as that much needed “write every day” practice. As am I! She’s working with an author and editor, who doesn’t just tell her something is wrong, but I tell her why. I’m learning things from her as well. Words I’d never known before that for some reason she knows (seriously, I thought it was ‘knock’ and arrow; I never would have double checked to find out it’s nock). She’s also been working with me a lot with drawing. I never would have tried digital art if it weren’t for her. As it turns out, I’m a lot better at digital work than I am with paper and pencil (traditional). And she is there every step of the way, even drawing on my own screen captures to show me how I can adjust the image when I’m absolutely stuck.

I don’t know how she feels about it, but I also gained a best friend in her. This is a person who can make me laugh when I feel like crying. When I’m having a bad day, she brightens it just by being there. And it sucks that we’re so far apart, because I would give anything to hug her and tell her to her face that she is one of the most important people in my life now, and I won’t give her up for anything.

So, go out, fangirl a “real” person, rather than a celebrity. Message an indie author you like or an unknown artist from tumblr that you follow. Because I guarantee 100% that they want to hear from you. Hell, I’d love to hear from a fan who is just bursting to tell me what they think of my books or art.

Indies love to hear that someone out there cares that they are working so hard to provide content for fans to enjoy. It keeps us going. It proves to us that we are doing something right. It also encourages us when we welcome in that dark storm cloud over our head that tells us we’re a failure, that tells us we should have gone traditional (and then most of us remember that we got rejected from traditional publishers and that’s why we’re indie).

Go forth, my friends, and fangirl. Then message those you fan over, because you just might find your new best friend.

As always,

Stay Abstract ❤

The Benefits of Fangirling “Real” People I am a fangirl. I have been a fangirl of various things in my life, usually celebrities.

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