expect the worst

failed writer in progress since 1984

[jacksally]

SUPERNATURAL 12.09 — First Blood

[rageprufrock]

Wayfinding, Ch 2 (Finally)

If you're excited about this you can literally thank my Asian dad who is very disappointed I'm not feeding you guys enough fan fiction. Please find below Chapter 2, finally finished and cleaned up, and know that while you are reading this, I am forcing myself to read the fucking Book of Enoch so I can write Chapter 3.

Wayfinding | Chapter 2

Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand.

—Deuteronomy 28:41

[rageprufrock]

do you have tips on writing kidfic? i am trying to write a fic w msr and william (screw chris charter lol) but lmao babies/kids are harder to write tha expected

I am actually actively rocking two kinds of birth control, one in pill form, one in the form of a fucking plastic stick they had to shoot into my arm with a plastic gun so I am extremely not the best source on kidfic.

Honestly kids are both way simpler and more complex than we credit. There's the basic guidance of looking up developmental milestones to make sure you're not making a 6 month old run across a room or saying that a 4 year old isn't yet verbal, unless it's intentional. In terms of convincingly writing kids, mostly when I've had them in stories, I use the north star of having them be dumber than expected while also smarter than expected, while always, always, always being more inconvenient than anybody could have possibly imagined. Based on interactions with people in real life who have children and appear to love them -- or who are faking it extremely convincingly -- that seems to be the general gist of things. They are all also always covered in something sticky of unknown provenance.

Here are some movies I think really get kids right in a textured and thoughtful way, and that might be good references:

Little Miss Sunshine The Secret Garden Stand By Me

And here are some books I think really get kids, too:

Matilda My Side of the Mountain Holes Baby by Patricia MacLachlan The Midwife's Apprentice (actually just go read everything Karen Cushman ever wrote I would die on a battlefield for her)

Hope this helps!

[rageprufrock]

curious if you'd ever be willing to venture into the depths of rpf?

I don't think I ever pick fandom or fannish engagement with much deliberation -- just if something catches my eye or catches me at the right moment. I've definitely dabbled in RPF before and as long as everybody follows Fight Club rules I've got no issues with it!

[movielosophy]

The Heir ep 1

[rageprufrock]

I am eight episodes into The Heir (家业) and every single frame that the grandfather is in I am barely holding back tears because I love and ache for him so much. They’ve just reintroduced the male lead and I had to go take a walk around my apartment because he was making me so feral. This show is going to fucking kill me.

Also anybody curious about the aesthetics of gay little Southern Chinese poets needs to check this out because this is the ancient China of my childhood.

[rageprufrock]

are there fandoms you wrote like once for and never again? i wrote a top gun fanfic that got very popular and then basically was like why did i spend a month writing this lol rip

I think if you look at my recent writing history, it appears that I only write one story per fandom and then disappear into the night. Generally, this isn't some kind of buyers remorse thing so much as, sometimes I only have that one sentiment about the canon to share--for now, anyway! I always say never say never.

[rageprufrock]

Bad news for the mpreg industry

[rageprufrock]

this is weird but do you have tips on writin a story with a lot of sex in it -- a long story with an arc etc - but like so it's not repetitve or just a 50k long pwp lol

Firstly, to write 50K of good PWP is actually high fucking art and probably the hardest (hah) 50K you could ever write, so let's go ahead and establish that.

Secondly, I think this is where you need to interrogate the purpose of the smut in your writing. (I know, I know.)

We've all experienced writing where the pornography feels intrusive, and since we're all at this devil's sacrament together, I know it's because we're not prudes. But even in a story that's really sexually charged and intended to be erotic, that fucking has to be there for a reason. It still needs to do things and make you feel things -- every single thing thing you write in your story should be advancing that story somehow, whether it be via plot, character development, or helping to establish or expand on the setting and context. Even in a 200 page novel, each sentence should in some way be propelling the reader forward. So in this hypothetical 50K story with a lot of sex in it: does the sex do anything? is it moving the plot forward? is it growing your characters? is it revealing something? is it adding to the atmosphere? is it ratcheting up the tension? Or is this sex there as a creative writing exercise? Because people for some reason still believe that stories marked "explicit" are better received than something well-written but PG-13 or less? Does it need to be there at all?

If you can answer those questions honestly, and via those explicit interludes, then you shouldn't have anything to worry about repetition or readers feeling like the sex is extraneous.

[rageprufrock]

Do you have any tips on getting better at writing? I’m always amazed on how real your stories feel, both in atmosphere setting and realism (within reason) and also in how you write feelings in a way that feels like getting punched in the gut lmao

This is the best advice anybody can give you, but it's not fun and it's shitty to execute: the only way to get better at writing is to write a lot.

I'm not going to say that there aren't people who have a better intuitive capability at writing than others, but no matter how much innate talent someone may have, nothing will ever take the place of the journeyman grind of writing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. From the first story I ever wrote to the last one I churned out, the difference is immense -- and while yes, I've grown in experience, vocabulary, literary reference and maturity, the only way I was able to deploy those new tools and refinements was by continuously throwing myself bloody against the brick wall of writing yet another story.

The best way to be a good writer is to be a bad writer for a very long time, in essence, and to be able to grit your teeth through that process. That last part, the endurance sport of it, that's the thing a lot of people can't do; even once you're a quote-unquote good writer, writing doesn't get much easier, because you hold yourself to a higher standard, and chipping blood out of the rock of your frontal lobe so your story can have a climax is the same agonizing process it's ever been -- regardless of how you avoid thesaurus abuse these days.

Re: the realism and atmosphere, I wrote a long thread about my process there years ago (thanks @cherrysolitary for the off twitter link!) which now I'm thinking I should probably transcribe into Tumblr at some point.

Good luck! Happy (or not) writing!

[rageprufrock]

Do you have tips on making something inside baseball in when something is also rooted in like made up stuff? I’m writing an X Files AU and I know I could do research in the FBI side but also obviously the x files stuff can get kind of kooky lol

"Kooky" is such a diplomatic way of expressing it. That being said, congrats, you don't have to rely on on made up stuff for the X-Files: there are 1 billion and growing insane conspiracy and/or paranormal things exploding across the known universe at any and all times, and while you may or may not believe it, the stories/concepts adhere to their own rules and parameters, and you can always pull details to reflect those authentically.

For example, and I am extremely aware I am putting myself on mega forever extinction level blast here: you know that people believe in bigfoot -- but did you know that there are at least two camps of bigfoot believers? There are those that believe it's a flesh and blood creature that's either some lost branch of evolution or ape adjacent animal that's just phenomenally good at hiding its very small population. There are also people who believe that bigfoot is a transdimensional creature that may be traveling onto and off of Earth via portals, and that's nobody's ever found any material evidence of their existence. Some of these people also think that bigfoot is like a gray alien's pet, and that they get dropped off on Earth to shit like we take our dogs out to the park.

So yeah, it may be made up to you, but research it for the rules that are used by people for whom it is real, and it'll still that ring of authenticity!

Also I'm sorry for everybody who has to know this stuff now! Also also while I'm at it there was a guy who reported that a lady bigfoot forced him to nurse from her once because she found him injured and it's left permanent trauma for him! Frankly, I think that story also left permanent trauma for me! You're welcome for the permanent trauma we all now share!

[rageprufrock]

How do you write for a piece of media that disappointed you? I have a show that i adored the first two seasons of but I fell off from there so I’m digging deep in research to try and write a very long fix it for later seasons but get caught up in the canon of it all

Honestly, babe, I don't think I've ever engaged with media that didn't disappoint me, so I don't even know how to begin answering this question.

[rageprufrock]

Every time I give into the devil and read the reblogs on even a slightly controversial post, I am punished by having to experience the leavings of at once the dumbest and most self-righteous people on the planet and I know it every time and I do it over and over again as if by rage baiting myself I'll feel briefly alive when it will only make me think that the pissing on the poor meme is actually a vast underreporting of the level of illiteracy run rampant on this fucking website.

[atsu-kinnie]

Peak fan service in anime was when Furudate gave Oikawa glasses and made him analyze Karasuno vs Shiratorizawa while Iwaizumi sat there in casual clothes calling him a shitty person.

[h-l-w]

[petricorah]

pr training [id in alt]

[stillvolleyball]

Iwaizumi and Oikawa art by @atie1225 on Twitter/X