Hi! I'm Eli! I write sometimes (as the name would suggest)! I'm trying to be more active here on writblr, so I'm redoing my intro so it's more up to date with what I'm writing now.
About me
My name is Elias, but I go by Eli most of the time
My pronouns are it/he (interchangeable, but please don't just use he/him)
I'm a minor, so please be respectful of that
When not writing, I play the flute and the piccolo
This is the picrew I made my icon with
@ev-enhotterthanyou is the best no 1 fan and husband I could ask for <3
I'm also three rats in a trenchcoat - if you get it you get it
Where to find me
I have a shitpost/fandom blog at @eli-is-an-idiot
My AO3 - I only really post about my fanfic on my other blog, but my fic masterpost is linked below if you're interested
About this blog
As you might have guessed, this is a writblr!
I'm aiming to read and reblog other's writing, as well as posting more of my own original writing
I primarily write fantasy, with a focus on queer characters, found family and magic, as well as stories based on my own experiences
WIPs under the cut
I have a lot of old ideas and rambles about stories on here, so if you see something from a few months ago and don't see it here, I've either given up on it or just not had any ideas for it recently and it felt wrong having it in my intro
Ok with:
Being tagged in tag games - I love these, and I want to try and interact with other people in this community more, so if you want to tag me in anything, please do!
On a similar note, feel free to send me asks or DMs about your WIPs or OCs, or just anything you want to talk about, I'm always happy to listen!
On the other hand, if you want to ask questions about my WIPs, I'd love that :)
Not ok with:
Any kind of hate speech or prejudice
TERFS, transphobes, homophobes, ableists, racists or anyone that doesn't respect other people's existence - unkindly fuck off
Bullying
Entirely NSFW or 18+ blogs (I'm a minor)
Wips and navigation under the cut:
Tags:
There is quite a noticeable pattern in my tags, if you couldn't tell
General writing things - #eli writes sometimes
Things that don't include my writing (including games) - #eli doesnt write sometimes
Tag games - #eli tags sometimes
Ask games - #eli answers sometimes
Art - #eli arts sometimes
Reading- #eli reads sometimes
Each WIP has its own specific tag
FANFIC MASTERLIST
WIPs:
I have a lot of old, dead or on-hiatus WIPs, so if you see anything about God of Chaos, Face the Music, For All In-Tents and Purposes or Jason King's Guide to the Supernatural, then those are all old stories of mine that I do want to go back to someday, but these are my main ones:
CURRENT WIPS
Five Man Band
A collection of ocs and story ideas that i'm planning on writing short stories around, and that I'm considering turning into a webcomic one day when I have the skill!
Here are the current stories in the Five Man Band universe I'm working on!
FIVE MAN BAND MASTERLIST
Shifting Faces
(used to be called just Five Man Band, when this was just an idea for one novel)
Phoenix Hunter is different - labelled an Anomaly, their ability to shapeshift has always been a guilty secret. But when they are recruited to the Anomaly Rehabilitation Agency, a place that promises to train them to use their powers for the better, it feels almost too good to be true.
Their suspicions are almost confirmed that once they meet their new team - a self-proclaimed "five man band", with only four disillusioned members left and one crucial member missing, leaving only an empty hole where she used to be - a hole that Phoenix is meant to fill.
With a threat bigger than all of them approaching, can Phoenix gain their new team's trust in time to stop it?
Intro post HERE
wip tag - #five man band (older posts) #shifting faces (current posts)
The Almighty's Angel
The story I'm writing for the 40K in 42 days challlenge, based around Kai's backstory and his past catching up to him.
Kai Allen has been free of the cult that he was raised in for 10 years, and short of the god he once worshipped occasionally showing up to taunt him, he's managed to put it all behind him.
But just when he thinks he's finally escaped, a figure from his past suddenly reappears, searching for answers about what happened to the girl the cult revered as the chosen one, his childhood best friend, a girl apparenntly killed by the A.R.A. - a girl that Kai is far too familiar with.
Kai must grapple with his former and current loyalties as he tries to keep his past from his teammates, all while a drama-mongering deity hangs over them all, pulling strings for his own entertainment.
Will he overcome his inner conflict, or will it consume him?
Intro post HERE
WIP tag - #the almightys angel
OLDER WIPS
The Princess, the Pauper, and the Pirate
My main WIP, currently working on it the most and doing a nanowrimo-like challenge where I try to write 50000 words in three months rather than one
Three strangers. Three stories.Â
When Kai, Vera, and Rune’s paths cross in the middle of the forest, the three of them share stories and swear to help each other, come what may, as allies in a world out to get them.
Together, they face everything from pirates to cruel parents, and work to try and take down the system that stacked the cards against them from the start.Â
Will they succeed, or will they be crushed like everyone else?Â
Intro post HERE
Genre - High fantasy
Status - First draft
Specific WIP tag - #wip ppp
Face the Music
My NaNo WIP, I hit 50K and then immediately started working on something else, so there will be stuff about it, but not as much as PPP
When Miles Baldwin, a quiet kid who keeps to himself, is sent to a three-week long music camp, it sounds like a death sentence. But as he meets new friends, including trans boy Finn who is loud and proud about his identity, he starts to come around, even beginning to question his own gender.
Irritatingly, not everyone is as open to change as Miles and his friends, and as the music swells and tension builds before the final concert, can Miles come to terms with his identity without falling victim to the bigoted nature of his fellow players?
intro post HERE
Status - First draft
Specific WIP tag - #face the music (I also used #eli does nano 2023 for other nano stuff)
Superlosers
Four roommates, each with a unique power, each with their own set of wildly different personalities.
They barely know each other, the rent is due, and an egomaniacal villain is threatening to destroy everything they hold dear - and only they seem to care or want to do anything about it.
For the sake of the world, let's hope they can get their priorities straight.
Intro post HERE
Genre - Urban fantasy
Specific WIP tag - #superlosers
The Remnants of Shadows
When beloved Alya Maxwell, renowned pillar of the small community of Blackburn, disappears with only shadows swarming around her house to give any idea of her fate, no one really seems to care, giving up on her as a lost cause.Â
But two teenagers, both from totally different background and both with their separate reasons for trusting her, don’t accept this, and they begin to dig into what really happened. But when old, buried secrets begin to emerge, how far will any of them go for the truth?
Intro post HERE
Genre - Fantasy
Status - First draft/having a crisis over the plot
Specific WIP tag - #wip tros
That's all for now, thanks for bothering to read this far :)
OH MY GOD YEAH I DO I SAW IT IN THE WEST END LAST WEEK IT WAS SO SO GOOD YOU LIKE IT TOO??
i love it so so much i'm so normal about it, especially david but all of them really it's so good, i had no idea there was going to be a whole subplot about parental grief and the balladeer turning out to be david at the end of act 1 absolutely BROKE me
like i don't cry that much at theatre but i was SOBBING by the end, like using my skeleton fingerless gloves to wipe my tears without smudging my eyeshadow sobbing it was absolutely incredible its so good!!!
i can't believe you aso like it you've got really good taste!! :D
What's your favorite creature from any video game world?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
I kind of love the appearance of the Insulindian Phasmid in Disco Elysium, I love the moment of the confirmation of there being something beyond the world that we can see, and the moment where Kim whispers that he can see it too is beautiful I love it
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Ooh I can't choose - I love couch co-op when I can bully my brother when we play battlefront 2, but also online means that i can play with my friends when we haven't seen each other irl in months so... both. both is good.
Do you consider yourself a lucky person when playing?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Considering all the luck I had playing Disco Elysium the first time, I'd say so - I passed an impossible red check by rolling two sixes, I managed to spin-kick Measurehead in the face, and I got the tie down first try, so yeah I'd say the luck of the dice was definitely on my side for that one
some highlights of me being extra lucky from my playthrough:
What video game world would be your #1 travel destination?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
I tend to play pretty depressing games so there aren't that many that are ideal, like I wouldn't want to turn up in Revachol or the Aperture lab, but I reckon I wouldn't mind spending some time in my minecraft world
What game do you associate most strongly with a specific time in your life?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Definitely Lego Marvel Superheroes 2 for when I was younger just about before or during covid, it was my favourite game and it still means a lot to me, I've got hundreds of hoursand 100%ed it three times, I love it so much and it's so silly it's great
How many video games are in your backlog right now?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Not that many tbh, I've only got 9 games in my steam library and I've at least started all of them. There are a couple that I want to finish or play more, like Pathologic 2 or the Stanley Parable, but I wouldn't really say that I have a backlog as such
Not only is this allowed but it's something i encourage all writers of any kind to play with! :D
The idea that all writers know what to say all the time and just splash fully-formed drafts out one word after the other is false. There are some who can do it, but i think most of us... can't. Which is why we need tricks like square bracket notes! They're not cheats or lazy writing or some other flavour of Not Allowed, but instead really really important tools that we should use as much as we need to.
Some of the most helpful tricks I've collected over the years are:
make some notes in square brackets – e.g., I had to write a scene on a sailboat, but I know nothing about sailing so i literally just had notes like [boat part] and [how to do X thing?]. If you use square brackets as punctuation anyway, use something else like [[double square brackets]] or a unique letter combination like XY at the start of the note; the point is to pick something you can search for easily later on.
(You can also style inline comments in a different font/colour. Scrivener has an inline annotation feature; if you use Word, you can make a specific Style to make notes stand out at a glance, etc.)
bullet-point your way through any tricky parts – this can be pure stream-of-consciousness vague ideas. it only needs to make sense to me later. much more helpful than just leaving big blank gaps that Future Me has to work out how to fill, but also better than dwelling on a piece of writing forever.
use comment tools – mostly do this if I have ideas for alternate events and/or phrasing, or if I want to check something for continuity purposes.
write out of order – Best advice i ever got for academic writing is to know or even write your conclusion first and your introduction last, which your main argument in between. Similar principles apply in fiction, or any kind of creative writing. If there's a part of the essay that I can visualise clearly or a part of the story that is particularly exciting or important, I might write that first, then figure out how it fits/how everything fits around it.
keep a loose scenes and/or "outtakes" folder – anything that i write out of order goes here, along with any notes for how I think I want to incorporate it into the full text. In the same vein, if I delete something but don't know for sure it will never be relevent ever again, it gets cut and pasted into an outtakes folder.
Basic rule though is that you do not have to get your writing perfect on the first try. This is where drafts come in. The way I see it is to treat each draft as a fresh start – I create/open a new document (well, new Scrivener file) and start over as if from scratch. Each draft gets a narrower focus than the last. This is my process, as an example:
first draft is the word vomit. You do whatever you need to do to get it onto the page, and it can be terrible. In fact, it probably should be terrible. You can fix everything later. it's fine.
The second draft is a half-hearted cleanup attempt. I'll re-type everything because everything is subject to change, from the characters' personalities to the pacing to the order of events. It's all primordial goop, basically. i'm just poking and prodding and making a few adjustments, but mostly trying to create a more stable version of the first draft. All shortcut tricks continue to be my best friend.
By draft three I'll let myself copy-paste between documents if I'm particularly happy with a passage, but try not to get hung up on anything specific. I'll still make liberal use of square brackets etc. as I need to, but try to address as many from the previous draft as I can. This is where I get more brutal with making decisions and trying to fix parts of the story in place.
Draft four is usually my final draft, but there's literally no rules about how many drafts you're allowed to write. It's at this point that I try to keep square brackets etc. to a minimum (unless i've diverged significantly from the plot of a previous draft and having to rewrite large chunks), and make sure to address all the notes and problems encountered in previous drafts.
This is when I move on to revisions. Revisions are the "final do-overs", for me. I start them when I'm satisfied with all the large-scale aspects: plot and chronology; characters' personalities, motivations and arcs; large-scale pacing (so the over-arcing pace, rather than the pacing in individual scenes); backstories; and worldbuilding. I'll copy the last draft's document instead of starting with a blank one. First I run through those large scale things one more time and tweak until I'm happy, not just satisfied. Then I shrink my focus to in-scene pacing, dialogue, and the quality of the writing itself.
I'll also rewrite my plot outline between each draft, too. The act of actually re-writing stuff is very helpful for making your brain think about it.
Drafting like this isn't for everyone, but realising that you can just bullshit your way through chunks of text was a massive game-changer for me. Some people will do a draft, then work on something else, then come back and do another draft, work on something else, etc. Some people's drafting process will look more like what I consider to be revisions. Do whatever works for you. Just remember that from the moment you first decide you Want to Write a Thing to the moment you hit "post" or "publish" or give your manuscript over to a publisher, you can keep making as many changes as you like in any way you like. (And if you go the querying to traditional publishing route, you'll probably get suggestions for, and have space/time to make, changes to the manuscript quite far into the process).
I don't believe I've ever met two writers who have exactly the same process. Every writer I've spoken to about the craft of writing has their own process, usually developed over years and years of practice and trying things out.
For example, I don't rewrite at all, that sounds horrendous, I just save-as to create a new draft. I also get the big structure stuff done in outlining, but I'm a weirdo who writes 20k word outlines. As mentioned above, I am one of those people who needs space between drafts--or at least, between rough draft and first revision. And I do my first revision on paper, always. The human brain processes screens and hardcopy differently! I write all over my printed rough draft, and then go back to the doc and apply those edits and anything else that occurs to me at the time, so my draft 2 is more sort of draft 2.5??
There's a lot more, obviously, and it's different between novels and short stories (I don't print short stories unless I'm really struggling). But I'm always experimenting with different ways to write, and sometimes they work and sometimes I get stranded and have to go back to the drawing board. Some people have a lot more hand writing in the prep stages, in notebooks or on index cards--I visited someone once whose dining room walls were covered in butcher paper and index cards with pushpins!
So if you're a newbie writer, experiment! Read about a bunch of different ways to get those words down! Try new things! Put notes and placeholders and such in your drafts, write by the seat of your pants, try out the whole in-depth outline thing, revise every paragraph before moving on to the next one, whatever works!!
Also please feel free to come talk to me about it! I love hearing about how people write.
I think a lot of writers might benefit from giving themselves permission to get weird with format.
Use second person, drop classic rising action and climax format, write backwards, just sit in a moment, tell all you want and refuse to show, make an entire book that’s just one run on sentence, reject tropes, use all tropes, cliche yourself to death, produce something that’s completely gibberish. Break all the rules of marketability. Become ungovernable.
It’s the middle of the night and I should be sleeping but listen. Listen. Just get weird with it. Open your soul up a little bit. Like actually don’t worry about it being palatable. I’m serious. Get weirder. Get weirder right now. I’m demanding that you get weirder right now. It’s not your responsibility to make your reader feel good. It’s your job to make art, goddamnit. Make art. Make weird art. Open up your third eye and eat an entire cheesecake.
things to do to rekindle your passion for your big wip
Act like you're being interviewed, and answer a bunch of questions about how you came up with your story.
Pick a character, and think through how they were first conceived. Then go through all their different variations until they reached where they are now.
MUSIC!!! What would your characters listen to? What's a story-driven/musical song with lyrics that fit your story? What is a song that would be in your story's trailer? Look at video game soundtracks for your character's theme. (I recommend Undertale/Deltarune for some classics, Sonic Mania for a more upbeat techy sound, and The Great Ace Attorney if you have a more fantasy setting.)
Think about how your MCs would hangout when there isn't an ominous plot point looming over them.
Try talking to your MC or villain out loud, and think of how they would respond. Don’t feel pressured to write it down, just say it out loud. Record a voice memo on your phone so you can save any banger lines you'd wanna reuse. (Bonus points if you give the character a specific voice.)
Find a color palette for your story.
PINTEREST!!! They have lots of quotes and photos that are good character inspiration. But Pinterest is especially useful if you're like me and can’t draw for shit. (or just taking a break from drawing.) It's fun to be able to visualize your characters and settings, and gives you a better understanding.
Watch a show/movie or read a book that has a similar vibe as your story! Sometimes all you need is to see a finished product to be reminded that you have something special.
Talk your story out with a trusted friend or fellow writer. This often helps me the most because it leads to ideas just pouring out before I even realize. You also get free ideas and critique from them. (If you have no one to discuss with feel free to show me and I'll give you some honest feedback.)
TAKE A BREAK!!! I cannot overstate how important this is. The world's hard enough without you burning yourself out. Let yourself rest and when you come back it'll be like you unlocked a hidden part of your brain. Make sure to take proper care of yourself as well, sleep, eat, and drink water to ensure your brain is at peak performance for creating.
Have Fun! Seriously though, if your story isn't serving you or interesting you at all anymore then it may be time for a change. There will always be ruts and hard times, but if there's whole sections that you dread working on maybe you should just make a change. If you hate writing why should people love reading it after all? Just make sure you are writing because you want to, not because you have to. Love yall!
