Jackie Moonshine

i draw pictures and write stuff on occasion

[voidcat]

knowing knights moralis as the lw enforcement of wha, thyey're technically like cops for a better lack of a world but my god... is easthies not looking scrumptious as he is losing more and more of what sanity, patience and reason he has had in these last few chapters...

[voidcat]

if i may...

[weenwem]

Anders

[jackiemoonshine]

[bluboopy]

I was so mad that nobody had ever scanned these that I spent an egregious amount of money to do it myself

[7meik]

Man i am not prepared in that one episode 💔💔

[lavabunart]

the witch and the apprentice

[jackiemoonshine]

I was trying to write earlier and ended up drawing instead. Here’s the costume I envisioned as her high school uniform. Full disclosure: I traced Mina’s character to use as a base bc I’m lazy and honestly just needed to get this down on paper.

[jackiemoonshine]

How are we holding up?

[okohoshiweek]

🧡💜REMINDER💜🧡

We'll be hosting our OkoHoshi Birthday Bash on Friday November 21st, one week from today!

The purpose of this event is to celebrate the birthday of Hoshina Soshiro alongside the pairing of Okonogi x Hoshina.

The Vice Captain is a super popular guy, so we're sure many of you have made plans already... but if you happen to love OkoHoshi just as much, we welcome you to help us celebrate him in a special OKHS way!

Please see our pinned post for event details, and feel free to reach out with any questions.

[aucatgirl]

Mimic practice made fun

[jackiemoonshine]

What:

- A month long fandom-focused event that takes place in March

- a celebration of characters who may seem cringe or over the top to others

- an opportunity to focus on fun over craft when creating (although craft doesn't have to take a back seat)

- create new characters or return to old ones

- use the Mary Sue Bingo Chart to see how many MS characteristics you can fit into your character/story

For a lot of us, Mary Sues were our introduction to character creation, whether for fic or art or simply day dreams. Unfortunately, many of us also later learned to be ashamed of our overpowered, overloved, and sometimes obnoxious OCs. The characters we created to empower ourselves became objects of condescending critique, sneers and degrading remarks. Many of us ended up hiding them away from the world or even abandoning them and forgetting about them all together.

I propose a return to the Mary Sue. I propose a month of pure fun, a month when we embrace cringe and create the most self-indulgent OC we can conceive. This is the time to create and share your Naruto OC who comes from the secret clan that gives them both Byakugan and Sharingan...btw did you mention she's also a jinchuriki who was sent to spy on the Akatsuki and manages to win Itachi's heart (after beating him in a fight)? The MHA OC who is the only one who can calm Dabi's burning rage, the Harry Potter exchange student who is part mystical creature, Regulus Black's unknown child, and has every male in the school hanging on her every word...all these would be perfectly at home during March of the Mary Sue.

Remember this event is completely made up and the points don't matter. If you want to make the most cringe character you can, go for it. If you want to take a past character and refine them to be a bit more well-rounded, go for it! If you want to switch up the gender/sex of Mary Sue into Gary Stu or whatever-have-you --- have at at! The point is to have fun and go balls-to-the-wall on over the top character creation. Also, any genre is welcome -- comedy, angst, romance, dead dove, whatev!

I would like to create a bingo board of different Mary Sue tropes for people who may want some prompts or ideas to help guide them. It also might be fun to see how many someone can fit into a story and still have it be compelling.

And if art is more your style, that's ok too! Share your art -- original or commissioned -- and tell us about your character.

I'm planning on using the hashtags #marchofthemarysue #motms to post about it on social media eventually if I have others who would be interested in participating? What do you all think?

Do you have any ideas? I'm all ears. Mostly I just want to know if anyone else is interested in having an excuse to flaunt/share characters that are or are borderline Mary Sues.

AI content not welcome btw.

[youremarvelous]

[blue-likethebird]

I’m obsessed with how effortlessly Qifrey switches between participating in domestic antics with the atelier and being the most haunted man in existence. He exudes “tragic antihero seeing a montage of his dead wife” and “the dead wife” energy in near-perfect harmony. Masterful work on Shirahama’s part

[cyclic-abelian]

Found

[jackiemoonshine]

Guys I don't want to get anyone too excited but I finally got a little inspiration for the next chapter of 12 Stages Afterwards...it's only been like what, three years?? 🫠

[bookishdiplodocus]

The Neurodivergent Writer’s Guide to Fun and Productivity

(Even when life beats you down)

Look, I’m a mom, I have ADHD, I’m a spoonie. To say that I don’t have heaps of energy to spare and I struggle with consistency is an understatement. For years, I tried to write consistently, but I couldn’t manage to keep up with habits I built and deadlines I set.

So fuck neurodivergent guides on building habits, fuck “eat the frog first”, fuck “it’s all in the grind”, and fuck “you just need time management”—here is how I manage to write often and a lot.

Focus on having fun, not on the outcome

This was the groundwork I had to lay before I could even start my streak. At an online writing conference, someone said: “If you push yourself and meet your goals, and you publish your book, but you haven’t enjoyed the process… What’s the point?” and hoo boy, that question hit me like a truck.

I was so caught up in the narrative of “You’ve got to show up for what’s important” and “Push through if you really want to get it done”. For a few years, I used to read all these productivity books about grinding your way to success, and along the way I started using the same language as they did. And I notice a lot of you do so, too.

But your brain doesn’t like to grind. No-one’s brain does, and especially no neurodivergent brain. If having to write gives you stress or if you put pressure on yourself for not writing (enough), your brain’s going to say: “Huh. Writing gives us stress, we’re going to try to avoid it in the future.”

So before I could even try to write regularly, I needed to teach my brain once again that writing is fun. I switched from countable goals like words or time to non-countable goals like “fun” and “flow”.

Rewire my brain: writing is fun and I’m good at it

I used everything I knew about neuroscience, psychology, and social sciences. These are some of the things I did before and during a writing session. Usually not all at once, and after a while I didn’t need these strategies anymore, although I sometimes go back to them when necessary.

I journalled all the negative thoughts I had around writing and try to reason them away, using arguments I knew in my heart were true. (The last part is the crux.) Imagine being supportive to a writer friend with crippling insecurities, only the friend is you.

Not setting any goals didn’t work for me—I still nurtured unwanted expectations. So I did set goals, but made them non-countable, like “have fun”, “get in the flow”, or “write”. Did I write? Yes. Success! Your brain doesn’t actually care about how high the goal is, it cares about meeting whatever goal you set.

I didn’t even track how many words I wrote. Not relevant.

I set an alarm for a short time (like 10 minutes) and forbade myself to exceed that time. The idea was that if I write until I run out of mojo, my brain learns that writing drains the mojo. If I write for 10 minutes and have fun, my brain learns that writing is fun and wants to do it again.

Reinforce the fact that writing makes you happy by rewarding your brain immediately afterwards. You know what works best for you: a walk, a golden sticker, chocolate, cuddle your dog, whatever makes you happy.

I conditioned myself to associate writing with specific stimuli: that album, that smell, that tea, that place. Any stimulus can work, so pick one you like. I consciously chose several stimuli so I could switch them up, and the conditioning stays active as long as I don’t muddle it with other associations.

Use a ritual to signal to your brain that Writing Time is about to begin to get into the zone easier and faster. I guess this is a kind of conditioning as well? Meditation, music, lighting a candle… Pick your stimulus and stick with it.

Specifically for rewiring my brain, I started a new WIP that had no emotional connotations attached to it, nor any pressure to get finished or, heaven forbid, meet quality norms. I don’t think these techniques above would have worked as well if I had applied them on writing my novel.

It wasn’t until I could confidently say I enjoyed writing again, that I could start building up a consistent habit. No more pushing myself.

I lowered my definition for success

When I say that nowadays I write every day, that’s literally it. I don’t set out to write 1,000 or 500 or 10 words every day (tried it, failed to keep up with it every time)—the only marker for success when it comes to my streak is to write at least one word, even on the days when my brain goes “naaahhh”. On those days, it suffices to send myself a text with a few keywords or a snippet. It’s not “success on a technicality (derogatory)”, because most of those snippets and ideas get used in actual stories later. And if they don’t, they don’t. It’s still writing. No writing is ever wasted.

A side note on high expectations, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism

Obviously, “Setting a ridiculously low goal” isn’t something I invented. I actually got it from those productivity books, only I never got it to work. I used to tell myself: “It’s okay if I don’t write for an hour, because my goal is to write for 20 minutes and if I happen to keep going for, say, an hour, that’s a bonus.” Right? So I set the goal for 20 minutes, wrote for 35 minutes, and instead of feeling like I exceeded my goal, I felt disappointed because apparently I was still hoping for the bonus scenario to happen. I didn’t know how to set a goal so low and believe it.

I think the trick to making it work this time lies more in the groundwork of training my brain to enjoy writing again than in the fact that my daily goal is ridiculously low. I believe I’m a writer, because I prove it to myself every day. Every success I hit reinforces the idea that I’m a writer. It’s an extra ward against imposter syndrome.

Knowing that I can still come up with a few lines of dialogue on the Really Bad Days—days when I struggle to brush my teeth, the day when I had a panic attack in the supermarket, or the day my kid got hit by a car—teaches me that I can write on the mere Bad-ish Days.

The more I do it, the more I do it

The irony is that setting a ridiculously low goal almost immediately led to writing more and more often. The most difficult step is to start a new habit. After just a few weeks, I noticed that I needed less time and energy to get into the zone. I no longer needed all the strategies I listed above.

Another perk I noticed, was an increased writing speed. After just a few months of writing every day, my average speed went from 600 words per hour to 1,500 wph, regularly exceeding 2,000 wph without any loss of quality.

Talking about quality: I could see myself becoming a better writer with every passing month. Writing better dialogue, interiority, chemistry, humour, descriptions, whatever: they all improved noticeably, and I wasn’t a bad writer to begin with.

The increased speed means I get more done with the same amount of energy spent. I used to write around 2,000-5,000 words per month, some months none at all. Nowadays I effortlessly write 30,000 words per month. I didn’t set out to write more, it’s just a nice perk.

Look, I’m not saying you should write every day if it doesn’t work for you. My point is: the more often you write, the easier it will be.

No pressure

Yes, I’m still working on my novel, but I’m not racing through it. I produce two or three chapters per month, and the rest of my time goes to short stories my brain keeps projecting on the inside of my eyelids when I’m trying to sleep. I might as well write them down, right?

These short stories started out as self-indulgence, and even now that I take them more seriously, they are still just for me. I don’t intend to ever publish them, no-one will ever read them, they can suck if they suck. The unintended consequence was that my short stories are some of my best writing, because there’s no pressure, it’s pure fun.

Does it make sense to spend, say, 90% of my output on stories no-one else will ever read? Wouldn’t it be better to spend all that creative energy and time on my novel? Well, yes. If you find the magic trick, let me know, because I haven’t found it yet. The short stories don’t cannibalize on the novel, because they require different mindsets. If I stopped writing the short stories, I wouldn’t produce more chapters. (I tried. Maybe in the future? Fingers crossed.)

Don’t wait for inspiration to hit

There’s a quote by Picasso: “Inspiration hits, but it has to find you working.” I strongly agree. Writing is not some mystical, muse-y gift, it’s a skill and inspiration does exist, but usually it’s brought on by doing the work. So just get started and inspiration will come to you.

Accountability and community

Having social factors in your toolbox is invaluable. I have an offline writing friend I take long walks with, I host a monthly writing club on Discord, and I have another group on Discord that holds me accountable every day. They all motivate me in different ways and it’s such a nice thing to share my successes with people who truly understand how hard it can be.

The productivity books taught me that if you want to make a big change in your life or attitude, surrounding yourself with people who already embody your ideal or your goal huuuugely helps. The fact that I have these productive people around me who also prioritize writing, makes it easier for me to stick to my own priorities.

Your toolbox

The idea is to have several techniques at your disposal to help you stay consistent. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket by focussing on just one technique. Keep all of them close, and if one stops working or doesn’t inspire you today, pivot and pick another one.

After a while, most “tools” run in the background once they are established. Things like surrounding myself with my writing friends, keeping up with my daily streak, and listening to the album I conditioned myself with don’t require any energy, and they still remain hugely beneficial.

Do you have any other techniques? I’d love to hear about them!

I hope this was useful. Happy writing!

[dadith]

quick tartah brim hat concept

TO PREFACE—I AM NOT CAUGHT UP ON THE MANGA! I read the physicals only <3

always wanted to see tartah as a brim cap circa…forever…and whipped up my loose idea for his cap. Sorta based on protea flower since they symbolize change/evolution—further shown with the blooming forming the brim! Also fits his whole apothecary vibe.

[jackiemoonshine]

I LOVE this idea for a brim cap