Call me Basil. Disaster Bi. They/Them 39. Pacific Rim, IT and whatever strikes my fancy at the time. A little bit scatter but I try. Basilintime on AO3.
So, this is a bit overdue though I'm not sure how many people will see it or even care at this point.
I've been thinking over what to do about my unfinished fics that are sitting over on AO3 for a while and I think I've decided that most of the unfinished ones I'm going to remove. There will be a few exceptions but I'll sort of break it down here.
Finished fics, I'm going to be leaving up for now. I go back and forth often with myself about removing them but with them being finished works I pretty much always land on keeping them up even if there are a few anymore that I don't feel great about.
The Why
The main reason is that I've not been writing for several years now. Covid hit, a bunch of things changed in my life and I've continued to sort of just struggle to get back into writing in any substantial way. I think part of me has struggled to feel it's worth it as I've never felt my writing was up to par and it didn't seem to find a solid audience.
Now that it's been so hard for me to get back to writing, the little I do I would like to focus on some original stuff that is more for myself again.
On top of that, I've strayed away from fandom sort of overall. I still have things I love but I've not been as embedded in a fandom for quite a while.
The Fics
IT Fics
Pretty much any of my fics from the IT fandom are going to be gone likely sometime this weekend. I still have my copies, of course, but I'm going to bring them down from AO3.
The IT Fandom felt a bit like a flashbang of time for me. I was deeply into it but then it very quickly turned into something I didn't enjoy. I was never directly involved with any drama but it seemed like I constantly was seeing the in-fighting and toxicity. Whether this was the nature of the fandom itself, if it was due to this being the one and only fandom I ever was more invested in on Twitter than Tumblr or simply just I managed to fall into following some toxic accounts is sort of beyond the point. It became more stressful and less fun very quickly.
I have accepted these fics will likely never be finished. Some of the concepts I truly to love and a few of the AU sort of concepts will likely be explored in other ways for myself. But the fics will no long be available on AO3.
Pacific Rim
Most of my Pacific Rim fic are finished and will, therefore, be remaining up on AO3. I am going to remove the links to my PR inspired songs.
Be like a Tree will remain up. I was originally intending to continue the premise but will likely no longer do so. However, as the first chapter was originally written as a gift for someone I will be leaving it up but editing it to reflect that it is a one chapter fic.
Guilty Bones will be removed as I never got as far as I hoped with this fic but I don't think I'll be finishing it. Again, I do still have all my original drafts of these so if that does ever happen to change I can report but for now it will be gone.
Poetic Lies will remain up...for now. It will never be finished and I will likely edit the chapter count for it to reflect that it is done despite being incomplete. This fic never had a dedicated ending to it as it was honestly but I still had a sort of thread it originally was supposed to grow off of and I don't think I have it in me to try and weave it back into place anymore.
Mass Effect
Over the Dust of a Ghostly Trail will be taken down. It was originally one I had started up literally almost a decade ago for a at the time friend but never went anywhere and never will.
Overall, I've enjoyed my time writing fanfic since I first started with the Pacific Rim Fandom in 2014. I've written 1,021,319 words of it during that time mostly for the one fandom.
The unfinished fics though just sort of hang over me at this point as things I know I can't promise endings to. I could have done it silently but I felt like it was better to at least put something up just in case someone out there wonders at some point.
Having a traumatic childhood means you cannot talk even objectively about your basic foundational experiences without it being "venting", even if you're not actually venting. You just straight up have a huge chunk of your life you can't talk about, full stop, without it being trauma dumping.
And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.
It's to the point I get irritated when something I said is framed as venting when I'm literally just talking about my life experiences, doing my best to keep emotion out of it.
when I was in high school, I overheard two older students talking about a friend of theirs.
One of them said something like, "it doesn't bother me that [Friend] was in residential mental health treatment, I just wish they wouldn't talk about it ALL the time".
The other replied, "Well, that was all of last year for them. So when they say 'when I was in treatment,' it's like when you say 'last year'."
I try to remember that any time someone says something that sounds Shocking to me. sometimes one person's scary special crisis is another person's last year.
People are so precious about preserving their nerves. I once had a friend group sit me down and tell me that I was triggering them talking about my day to day at work, in particular, when I talked about having to break up a fight. Okay, but did it occur to any of you that maybe it was upsetting to ME the person who had to run with my very much actual real body to try to pry two kids who are bigger than me apart???? I didn't even actually have to do so, some other kids had pulled them apart by the time I got there. But I was just so floored. Like okay, you can go on for hours about how your boss doesn't like you or your job sucks, but it's not okay for me to say, hey, this was really scary, I thought someone was going to get hurt and I didn't know what I was going to do because I'm definitely not strong enough to pry these kids apart, I was just hoping me red-rovering through them would be enough. But that was too much for YOU????
If you can, definitely talk to different people. I am now interacting with people who don't treat the fucked up stuff as an inconvenience. Also, we are ALL off-putting sometimes. It's only fair that you let your friends be off-putting, you are too.
