zoe-bug

[zoe-bug]

Is there an up to date link for your raven cycle podfic “kinda new?” the ao3 link is broken.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention!

My old mediafire account expired and I didn't realize I hadn't updated the link on that podfic's AO3 to the different hosting like I did with others!

I've now updated the link to the Go/ogle Drive hosting! So the post is all updated and should be good to go: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7435797

Again, thanks for letting me know! Always feel free to message if there's any other issues!

[zoe-bug]

big believer that writing doesn't always have to be writing. sometimes writing is going for a walk. sometimes writing is rehearsing your characters' dialogue in the shower. sometimes writing is putting a song on loop and staring at the carpet. sometimes you need to hang out with your story instead of writing it

#100000% #you gotta let stuff cook in your subconscious sometimes #gotta gather ingredients before you can start cooking

[zoe-bug]

#semicolons and em dashes my beloveds

[zoe-bug]

You gotta write for funsies sometimes. Everything doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Like. Who cares if it’s a little silly it is made out of love

[zoe-bug]

[zoe-bug]

#sounds a little too familiar for my comfort

[zoe-bug]

Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!

Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.

[zoe-bug]

Ursula K. Le Guin

[zoe-bug]

HRT Voice Progress Update after 10mo!

Took a video every month for months 1-6, now I'm doing every 2 months

(For anyone wondering, I'm on topical testosterone gel 1.62% at a dose of 1 pump daily (20.25mg each))

This essentially half of a "regular" T dosing. Always willing to answer questions about my experience for people thinking about low dose T!

#hello this is your captain speaking #video #voice update voice update! #im so happy

[zoe-bug]

I often think I could be such a good writer if I were better at writing

[zoe-bug]

someone: hey I noticed this thing you did in your writing!

me, kicking my feet up flirtatiously: oh??? do you want to hear my thoughts on why I did that? do you want a play-by-play of the language choices in every related sentence? do you want an exhaustive breakdown of The Themes???

[zoe-bug]

I find it personally offensive how many bad writers can get published so easily.

[zoe-bug]

sometimes I think people think "narrative parallels" means "exactly the same" and like...that's not the point, actually, the point with narrative parallels is that they're variations on a theme that are meant to illuminate something about each variation. a narrative parallel that is just a precise reiteration of another thing isn't saying anything. it's just redundant.

[zoe-bug]

Forgive me for writing when I’m in such a dark room.

Anne Sexton, from ‘A Self-Portrait in Letters’ ⁠— Brother Dennis Farrell, 21st June 1962

[zoe-bug]

Cutting Shapes - Ending Snippet

So I’ve pretty much accepted that I’m probably not going to go back and fully finish writing the last coda arc of Cutting Shapes. I apologize to everyone who loved CS and had hoped I might do that. I’m happy I managed to finish out the main emotional arc of the story, ending with chapter 13.

I did have in my docs folder the final ending piece of CS that I thought I’d share.

It’s not a full scene with dialogue or anything, but simply the emotional bookend to the fic that I had written forever ago knowing I wanted to place it at the very end of the fic to wrap it up.

And so figured I’d share it here for anyone interested who might want to read it. 

(Song I had picked out for the final scene: “Frame of Mind” - Tristan & Bracken)

---

I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the act of living is one of cracking open. 

I used to think that cracks meant you were broken. I think lots of people do. But I’ve come to understand that “breaking open” does not mean “broken.” 

Because we are all, day by day, fracturing. 

There are fissures in all of us, made by the things we care about and the people we love or people who failed to love us in the way we needed. Each time our lonely hearts slam against the pane of glass separating us from the rest of the world, reaching desperately outwards, the force of it sends hairline fractures through our solitude.

That splintering is the sign that you, at the deepest core of yourself, do not wish to be alone―that your heart is not content to beat a solitary and singular existence.

Marco was right when he told me all those weeks ago that we weren’t made for boxes. That’s why all attempts at defining and cohesion felt like wounding, felt like closing myself off.

Yet, it is tempting. Aloneness will always call to the small and scared parts of us who have been sliced open by those jagged edges, whose instinct is to see cracks and immediately recoil. Because oneness feels safer. Cracks have sharp edges and hearts are fragile things. Reaching through them into the unknown spaces between ourselves and someone else is a terrifying feat to attempt.

And understanding this doesn’t make it less terrifying. Living isn’t suddenly easy once you realize it. 

Living hurts. Cracking open is painful and awful and at times you feel as though you will not survive it. But despite this, despite everything, you must.

Because nothing compares to that sensation when you reach outward and touch something that, perhaps for the first time, does not hurt you. The confirmation that you do not have to be deathly afraid of what lies outside―of realizing that the peace of “singularity” I thought only music could give me was truly just the sensation of knowing what it is to exist without walls.

And slowly, so slowly, we learn how to gaze through our fractures instead of at them―to understand that our hurting and our suffering and our thinking we were somehow less whole simply means we don’t want to be alone.

And that is the furthest thing from broken.

Because, god, how beautiful the world looks when we gaze out at it through shapes that love has cut into our existence.

How beautiful is the light that glints off our jagged edges, sparkling and shining like music in my head when I close my eyes or the sight of Marco’s eyes on me when I dance.

I am not at my worst. Nor am I at my best. I might always be in this process, because that’s what life is. Life is movement. Life is a constant cyclical work of inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, of finding changes in rhythms that help you live without suffocating. Of letting the outside world in, and then also letting it back out again.

I am working and living through this harrowing yet beautiful process of splitting open at the seams in order to let the world in.

And certainly does it have its rewards.

Like the feeling of a bass line vibrating through your chest or the sight of freckles disappearing into the creases of laughter lines. 

Like that feeling you get sometimes when everything is calm and you finally feel like a part of the world around you.

Like peace. Like love. 

Like light.

------------

I love you all so very much 💓 --ZoeBug

#fic: cutting shapes #fic cutting shapes #zoe-bug #zoebug #jeanmarco

[zoe-bug]

90% of my writing experience is doing this

[zoe-bug]

doom yourself before the narrative does