We're all stories in the end...

Emily | she/her | AU | 30-something writer surviving on cups of tea and a miracle... Original works, along with Doctor Who and Tangled fandoms

[keysandopenmind]

New Writeblr Intro For 2026

I decided writing a whole new intro post was probably easier than updating my current one, which is from 2023.

Hello! I'm Emily (she/her), a 30-something writer and very beginner artist from Australia.

The writer/reader:

To give you an idea of my vibe overall, I love musicals and Disney movies and fantasy books, cosy and historical being my favourite subgenres. I'm not a romantasy girl as such, but I do love a good romantic subplot. Witches and dragons are my favourite types of fantastical beings.

Tag and ask game friendly, just be advised I'll take forever to get to them!

I'm a discovery writer, I start with a few ideas and see what happens.

I hate world-building. I admit it. I'm too impatient for it. Which is why most of my stories are set in some version of the real world. By the same token, I tend to have limited settings and small casts of characters, as I find it difficult to navigate larger plot lines.

I am a slooooow writer. Things take a long time to come together for me. It is endlessly frustrating and the source of a lot of angst.

Things I like to read and/or write about:

forbidden love

characters not realising they’re in love with one another, or being oblivious to the other one’s feelings

found family

friends-to-lovers and rivals-to-lovers

characters begrudgingly having to work together and realising they’re a good team

fairy tale/classic story retellings

jerk with a heart of gold

banter

male characters (especially love interests) who look like Josh Groban circa 2007 when I saw him in concert at age 18. All my MMCs look like this in my head, regardless of how I describe them on the page. 😂

WIPs:

Circus Carnival Fantasy Story

TAG: WIP: Circus Carnival Fantasy Story

Yeah... this one doesn't have a title yet. 😂

This is an amalgamation of two old WIPs, a circus fantasy romance and a theme park YA contemporary story.

There are ghosts, found family, magic rides, and saving the world! Or at least saving their little part of it. This story deals with grief and and love in many forms as characters reckon with their pasts and the legacies left to them as they try to move forward.

Current status: First draft

Wonderland

TAG: WIP: Wonderland

Inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this is the third book in my series of virtual reality retellings. Max Drosselmeier finally finds out the reason for his ability to remove things from the virtual world and into the real one, but not before his limbs start disappearing one by one. (Ahem, you can read about and buy the first two books here if you like.)

Current status: couple of completed drafts, still needs work before revisions can start.

Collection of Witchy Stories

TAG: WIP: Witchy Stories

So I've sort of got three of these, and they're entirely unrelated apart from each having a witch main character. But because I think they're all on the shorter side (one is a short story, the other two are still in planning stages but will be short-novella length most likely) I'm treating them as a collective project.

The Deal: Gwendolyn Gummesh helps a dragon track down her stolen egg.

Untitled #1: Hope seeks out a witch in the woods to help her escape her abusive husband, and is taken on as the witch's apprentice.

Untitled #2: Hester's apprentice, Thomas, requests a love potion to help him get noticed by the girl he likes. Hester refuses, but instead, starts preparing him to impress her at the upcoming Solstice Dance... with perhaps a few little magical touches.

(I'll update these with their titles as soon as they have them)

Current status: planning/drafting

Paradox

TAG: WIP: Paradox

A time travel romance with an Eleventh Doctor/River Song vibe. Meg takes on a job assisting an elderly professor sort through all his files and begin writing his memoirs. The last thing she expects is to fall in love with his younger self.

Status: first draft, but hasn't been touched in over a year at time of writing. It still sits in my brain, though, and whenever I read what I've written I'm like Oooh, yeah, this hits.

I also enjoy writing flash fiction (link goes to my tag) and fan fiction when the mood strikes me.

[ghostwriterofthemachine]

Goddddddd thinking about that narrative moment when something horrible is happening and the character who has been frantically trying to come up with a way to fix it and getting more and more frantic and panicky just—stops. Because. Oh. There’s the solution. They’re not getting out of this alive but like. It’s a solution for everyone else. Okay. Okay.

[antimony-medusa]

Why would you do this to me.

[ghostwriterofthemachine]

and!!!! like!!!! obviously this is delicious when you hit your Self Sacrifice Archetype with it, but honestly I think it's even chewier when you give it to, like. someone with a selfish streak. The one with some arrogance who's maybe not quite a team player. leans more towards loner. Give this moment to the one party member who has been shown to prioritize their own survival over everything else.

And then the eye-of-the-storm realization of "Oh. Huh. I am not making it to the end of the story. but everyone else is going to. Isn't it strange, that I'm not more upset?"

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

If you're comfortable accusing anyone of faking disability, you're not a real ally to disabled people

[teaboot]

One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off

[cleo-fox]

Writing tips:

“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context

“You feel the bugle in his pants” - implies that this guy has a military horn in his pants, invites confusing questions like why does he have that and how big are his pockets

[maple-seed]

Both options convey that he's horny

[cleo-fox]

How dare you be funnier than me on my own post

[ao3commentoftheday]

I don't know if it's just me being in small fandoms, but fandom as a whole feels...really lonely as of late. People have split themselves up so much that they don't discuss things the way they did before, they just kind of post their stuff and leave and half their audience "consumes" it like "content". There's no comments, barely kudos, the only places fans talk with each other anymore are on private discord servers that no one ever finds out about...I don't know, I'm a bit of an old and I feel like I'm screaming out into the void for no reason at this point. Sure, "somebody" will like my stuff, but will I ever get to know about it?

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

Even if nothing happens as a result, you tried. And maybe you just made someone's day. 💗

[curator-on-ao3]

Demographically, I have a fair amount in common with @ao3commentoftheday with the exception that I am a parent.

And my oldest child has entered online fandom.

Thankfully, my child and I don’t share fandoms (we both prefer it that way), but we did sit down to discuss how to maintain privacy and safety while also being friendly in online interactions. I taught my child about fandom red flags and green flags, from my experiences, and my child has since asked for my advice in terms of my child’s own fandom experiences and how to handle issues and concerns.

All that being said, I was surprised and confused when my child informed me that my child had not been leaving kudos or comments on AO3. Keep in mind, this child would read longfics for days, tell me how great the author’s writing captured the characters, etc.

“Why didn’t you kudos or comment if the fic was so good?” I asked.

While my child explained lack of ability to comment due to fic restrictions (my child has expressed not yet feeling ready to have an AO3 account even though my child is old enough and my husband and I would be fine with it), my child said kudos didn’t matter: “Who cares about one kudos?”

“The author cares. And, if the author for some reason doesn’t care, I know you care about doing the right thing. I think expressing appreciation for other people’s fanwork is the right thing to do. What do you think?”

My child went back and kudosed all stories read to that point.

But I’m just one parent. And it’s absolutely not the job of fandom to parent children. There’s an idea that the way we behave in real life is divorced from the way we behave online. There’s some merit to that in the form of maintaining privacy and boundaries online that might be different in person. When we’re talking about basic manners, though? Golden rule stuff? That’s what’s become lacking, and I hope it improves.

[queenofattolia]

i do think that a lot of this is just the result of a lack of lurk moar attitude in fandom/the internet in general.

when i was a tween who first found fandom in the late 90s/early 2000s, people didn't explicitly teach me how to interact with fandom. i lurked for a solid year before i signed up for my own account on the forum i'd found. (i can still remember how the adrenaline coursed through me as i signed up for my own account--i felt tingy and more than a little ill!)

by that time, i had a very good sense of social norms there. i still made a few mistakes, and the more established members smacked me down in a matter-of-fact but not unkind way. but i'd learned by watching. hell, by the time i started actively participating, i knew all the inside jokes!

as op mentioned, i don't think that people lurk anymore, and my theory is that the rise of social media/web 2.0 created a different approach to web communities.

today, every site is presumed to be for every person. the entire point of the really big social media sites is that everyone is on them. (this is one of the things i hate about them btw because it results in context collapse. i do not want to talk to my third-grade teacher, my favorite cousin, complete strangers, and my fandom friends in the same voice, but that's another issue).

whereas in web 1.0, the internet was riddled with niche sites/communities. you had to go out and find your place (and sometimes it took a while!). once you found it, you were invested in becoming a part of that specific community, so you did the research (lurking) to find out how people interacted, what all the unspoken norms were. by the time you picked your handle and made your account, you just knew stuff.

i'm sure this was not true of everyone, but it was true of far more people at the time. people looked before they leapt.

there are many, many reasons that i think that fandom has suffered from the web 2.0 environment. the fact that creators/writers/actors and fans are all on the same sites using the same tags for general publicity and for fannish nonsense is a huge problem. the way that sites are so big that people feel that their contributions (as with kudos above) don't matter is a direct result of the way social media undermines community and makes everything a performance of whatever your late-capitalist brand is. the fast pace of those sites makes people think that interacting with older posts is a bad idea. the lack of filters of the kind that we had on livejournal where you could determine who saw what or even just the way that forums often made you join before you could see content created walls within which communities could grow (think frost and walls making good neighbors).

i know we can't go back to the assumptions that operated before social media. we have to explore other options. i love when people make psas here telling people about fandom norms and history! i think it's the best thing! and maybe at this point that is the only way to handle it.

tumblr and ao3 are very weird sites in that they straddle the web 1.0 and web 2.0 kinds of internet.

from web 1.0 they get the lack of algorithms, the way you have to make choices about what you see, chronological arrangements, and (on ao3) lack of ads, etc. tumblr has a slightly slower pace than most social media; ao3 has a much slower one.

from web 2.0, though, you get scale, centralization (which is both ao3's greatest strength and greatest weakness), and the fact that it takes little effort to locate these sites--anyone, no matter their level of investment in fandom, can just stumble on them.

so you end up having a lot of people who are not actually fannishly inclined (aren't invested in a gift economy, don't really understand that fandom is supposed to be fun, don't really get the creative urge etc.) interacting with people who are fannishly inclined, and it causes some really problems. especially with younger people whose experience of the internet is as a venue to signify and perform certain kinds of morality/coolness/trendiness that are at odds with what fandom has always been about. basically: you have a bunch of normies clashing with a bunch of nerds. (obviously the normie/nerd divide is a spectrum and not a binary, so i'm overstating, but still.)

when you have people who are coming to fandom from different angles--some people who are coming to it as a provider of content just like all other media in their lives, especially elsewhere online; some people who are coming to it as a participatory hobby wherein we build community around shared affection for [thing]--there's going to be lots of clashes and weirdness.

i kind of think that fans need to go back to create set-apart spaces for fandom to happen. note that i am NOT talking about gatekeeping. everyone who treats others with respect would be welcome. but just having fenced-off areas that are explicitly for certain kinds of fandom interactions. where we can basically have our party away from the normies, but other nerds who are younger or just getting in touch with their nerdiness can find us.

i'm not sure how we'd go about doing it. but i think smaller, more intimate internet spaces are really necessary for fandom to be enjoyable. for fandom to be fandom tbh.

[depsidase]

[do-not-u-dare]

Stole this from somewhere but i think it’s appropriate

[8pxl]

gotta start the race to finish it ~ buy a wallpaper or leave a tip | bluesky | insta | my merch shop

[8pxl]

@foolfortune gets it

[siena-sevenwits]

When I was a kid, I used to tell my little sister so many versions of Rumpelstiltskin off the top of my head as bedtime stories.I just remembered one version I came up with that certainly wasn't incredible by any standard, but which I really enjoyed telling at the time. I don't remember every single detail, but here's the best I can remember with some cobbling to hold it together:

The king's son, much more kindhearted than his father, has always had a hidden talent for turning things into gold. So when he hears that the king has brought a miller's daughter back to the castle to test her ability to spin straw into gold, threatening death if she fails, he jumps in to help. He disguises himself in strange clothes with a low hood, and hunches over, and offers to help the girl spin straw into gold. Turns out that she's very lovely to talk to - they have a wonderful time getting to know each other through the night as they work. But the prince knows he's in disguise and cannot act on his attraction, so he merely asks for her for something to remember the evening by, and she gives her necklace. He helps her the same way the next night, and she gives him a ring, without his even asking for it, and blushes prettily as she does so.

The third day, the king says that if she can spin the straw into gold a third night, she will marry his son. Though the prince has been falling in love with her, he of course protests that his father cannot force her to marry anyone. But he gets shut down. That night when he comes to help her, he plans to tell her his true identity, but this time guards are in the room, as the king suspects some trick. She weeps, for she has no more jewellery to give him - in fact her only hope at this point would be to barter away her first born child like in a fairy tale. He's aghast, and waves it away, saying he'll certainly help her, but she thinks that he understood it to mean she WAS promising her firstborn. But she's afraid to unsay it, fearing he won't help her. He keeps trying to find a moment to confess the truth, but something always happens to prevent it. They finish spinning the straw into gold with hardly a moment for the prince to slip away and change into his own clothes.

In the morning, the king arrives at the door of the room full of straw, with a priest to marry them on one hand, and an executioner with axe in hand on the other. He is delighted to see there is gold after all, even with the guards watching, and calls for the wedding. The girl is willing enough to wed a prince - I mean, he's a prince but there's also something gentle and kind, and almost as if she *knows* him, though she doesn't see how she could.

The wedding is rushed through, and it's not till the bride and groom are left alone that both of them try to burst out with a terrible confession to make. She manages to gasp hers out - that she's happy to marry the prince, and she'll be as faithful and true as he could wish, but there's something terrible she must tell him. She was helped in spinning the gold, by a strange man with a hooded face, and... she may have accidentally bargained their firstborn child for his help.

The prince pauses, and says something like, "But isn't it true that with these magical sorts, knowing their name frees you from their power? If you could guess his real name, perhaps it would solve everything!"

She despairs - with all the names in the world, how could she possibly guess it?

He smiles and encourages her to try to guess.

"But what's the good of guessing now? How am I to know if I guessed it or not until he comes back for what I owe him? And then it will be too late!"

"Are you sure you can't guess his name, my love?"

And he takes out the necklace and the ring.

And joy, and laughter, and all's well that ends well, and even more rejoicing when she gives him their firstborn a year later.

[catmask]

smthing i can just never believe when ppl (mostly twitter users) complain about a girl character being made to look 'mannish' or 'masculine' and talk about the death of femininity and every time i get excited and think 'oh okay cool did we get a butch character or-' and its literally jusg a regular fucking woman like you would see at the grocery store. like jusyt a normal woman

[frenchifries]

i think those people would have an aneurysm and die if they saw how actresses were styled in the 70s/80s/90s……

not that these women are looking super masc lol but the parameters for “acceptable female appearance” in both media and everyday life have indisputably narrowed over the past couple decades :|

[afniel]

God tho I miss that vibe. Actresses who had some muscle and lines on their faces and (relatively) imperfect hair and also had like a 95% chance of being grungy and sweaty by the end of the movie. Golden era, let's go back, only this time let's let them also be fat and have real big noses too because then we'd have everything.

[archivist-caleb]

Hey solarpunk is possible btw.

Hey we can win btw.

Hey life isn't over until we fucking say it is, go plant native flowers and berries and when they bloom life Will be better.

We can still win.

[thetursithan]

Lighter than a butterfly...

[curious161]

AMAZING !

[notpedeka]

That is absolute trust.

[jmtorres]

it's crazy how unregulated cheer sports are

[antiastrology4ever]

Cheerleading is, legally, not classified as a sport in the United States. This is to prevent having to legally implement security precautions and safeguards.

I would like everyone to look at the above video and be reminded golf is a sport but this, somehow, is not.

[comingupwurlsisnotmything]

How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular

For decades, the sport has been shaped in large part by one company — and one man.

Paywall free version.

[batsandboba]

“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know

[catchymemes]

This was posted on a ‘second hand finds’ Facebook page…

…only to be followed by this amazing message.

The roller coaster ride started.

With a happy ending…

…and a sweet poem to finish.

[digg]

[tenaflyviper]

If you can’t find a place on your blog for Patrick Stewart in a bathtub dressed like a lobster, then your blog probably doesn’t deserve such majesty anyway.

[revdrfrog]

It has returned to my dash and I cannot fight the compulsion to reblog…

[dreaming-jaybird]

the patrick lobster appears only once in a thousand years, reblog for good luck

[whatagrump]

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

[thewritinggrindstone]

And!

“If you’re breaking dialogue up with an action tag”—she waves her hands back and forth—”the dashes go outside the quotation marks.”

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

Reblog to save a writer’s life.

[jaydove-writes]

Thank you

[localcanadiancryptid22]

Oh my god thank you. No wonder grammarly keeps complaining about my punctuation when I boot my writing up into word counter

[loucifersbitch]

if you need me, i’ll be sobbing on the floor. humans, man

[tpwrtrmnky]

humans should be able to do a special Ultra Sleep after major life accomplishments where you're just out for like 32 hours or something and then you wake up fully refreshed in every way