#aphantaray

[phantomnationdraws]

~but I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day~

[ngame989]

Hey Ngame, hope you're finding ways to cope in this madness. Can't imagine how annoying studying remotely must be. I've been finding it pretty hard to sit down and write, even stuck at home with nothing but time, but I was thinking it would be nice to have folks to chat and workshop ideas with in these trying times, maybe get some more healing fluffy content out. Do you know of any Discord servers etc with writing groups or beta readers that are populated by folks in the SVTFOE fanfiction crowd?

Honestly, as far as my life situation goes, I’m actually less affected by this than most. I actually took leave from grad school this semester as I had been spiraling really hard and was very uncertain about a lot of things in life, and doing online tutoring as a full-ish time gig in the meantime, so I actually have even more prospects now than previously since there’s even more of a market for that now lmao. And lately I’ve gotten back into some old MMOs so that’s fun and also completely time consuming please send help

Honestly, outside of my very tight-knit friend group I’ve purposely avoided pretty much any and all fandom gathering spaces for years at this point because, well, I have Very Many Strong Opinions about things and don’t get along with other fans that well as a result. That’s more my issue than theirs, but it’s better for everyone if I’m not trying to be there. I’d be more than happy to chat about stuff one on one, if you’d like (DM me for discord if that’s more your speed than tumblr) but I can’t really say I’m too keen on larger groups.

Thanks for the check-in, and hope you’re doing well as well!

[ngame989]

Dear Ngame, I don't have another way to message you. Just wanted to say thanks again for throwing my stuff in your recs. The occasional kudos or comment that hits my inbox is a much-needed encouragement for me to keep going. You're doing something very kind for people by maintaining that list. Thank you.

Thanks so much man, and thanks for writing! A lot has changed in my life in the past few weeks which has set me back more than I wanted in updating/reworking the rec list and writing more TGG stuff myself, but I’m still glad it can help people out.

[ngame989]

I'm new to writing fanfic, and always work solo, so when I saw you have a whole team at your disposal, it blew my mind. I've got a list of questions about that: 1. How did you guys find each other and get started? 2. How does your work flow look for a story vs. a page/chapter of the comic? 3. How much do you love having an editor? 4. How does your work change from draft to final? 5. The quality of your prose is very consistent, is that just you as a writer, or is it your team keeping you good?

1. Seddm, EA, and Dino were all good friends of mine from the fandom from before or during Season 3 (I started watching the show between 2B and BFM). Toxic started watching the show sometime in late 2018 and messaged me on Tumblr for some sort of formatting help, or tips and tricks for getting posts more noticed in the fandom or something? I don’t remember and Tumblr DMs are awful to navigate, but we quickly bonded over what really matters most.

Lawchan had been a longtime follower of the show and fanfic author who inspired me to get into it back after 3A and we started talking and became friends at some point in the last year or so. BMC popped into my askbox when I opened it up to headcanon suggestions and ended up sending me over 100 in a span of 3 days that were all wonderful and creative so we started talking more. This really is a “team” in a loose sense, I just have a ton of awesome and creative and supportive friends willing to help out with this.

Oddly enough, this project started less than a day after (and was inspired by) Lake House Fever. I had already been thinking about getting back into fanfiction writing after S4 ended and we were pissed and salty and just needed good Starco thoughts so I hit him up and we started chatting and thought “huh wait a Star and Marco section of a family photo album would be a cool concept for some sort of series” and it evolved from there. We’d planned out a lot of the basics for the comic before the show ended and were waiting on the canon resolution before going any further, and Cleaved shook a lot up for what the postcanon status quo would be, so my whole aforementioned group all sat in a Discord channel on and off for literally 8+ hours the day after Cleaved and roundtable’d the entire backbone of the Earthni timeline for almost every major character (so if there’s people in the credits for TGG that haven’t shown up directly in any works yet, that’s where they contributed).

2.  Overall I’m the project lead and head writer so the majority of specific ideas, what should this page have or where is the story going, etc, come from me although anything we do gets signed off on by at LEAST me, Toxic, and Seddm first.  For comics, I usually plan the concept (Star goes here, these people are talking to each other, happy or sad, etc) and then let Toxic do his thing - he’s great already but is SUUUUUUUUPER amazingly wonderful at reading my mind and making visuals that represent my thoughts even better than the visuals in my head for them. He’ll do a rough page layout and sketch, we workshop that, then he does line-art, we look for any issues or revisions there, then he colors as I make the dialogue.  Usually takes a few days of back and forth.

Honestly my workflow for writing fics is absolute ass and you should not learn from us (ESPECIALLY me) if you’re getting into the game, hahahaha. Every day that I say I’m gonna write something, I usually end up dicking around at my computer until 1 AM and THEN decide to write a little bit and lose sleep over it. A lot of Glow was written between 2 and 6 AM on a Saturday night. I’m ridiculously nitpicky of my own work and half the time before I even finish typing a sentence I’m already erasing it because I decided it was dumb or did something wrong, which makes drafts take F O R E V E R, but the silver lining is that my first draft is already very polished by the time it’s done.

Overall, we play to our strengths - Seddm and I are general idea guys, “wouldn’t it be funny/cool if X” or “we should tell a story about Y” etc, and Toxic is especially wonderful at coming up with fantastic visual designs or gags or whatever else. So there’s plenty of times where I’ll give him the rough outline for a comic page and he’ll slip in some goofy background thing that makes it so much better, or I’ll give him a joke idea and it’ll work amazingly. I also like to call Seddm my “internal debate moderator”. When I’m struggling to figure out what to do for something, I’m often torn between a few ideas. Getting outside advice on it can obviously be really helpful, but there are times that it leaves me even more confused about what to do. But because my and Seddm’s understandings of the characters and senses of design and humor are so damn similar, he can basically serve as both a neutral voice and still part of my own thought process at the same time, which really helps me get my own personal ideas in order before running them by others.

3. Editors are great and wonderful and perfect and I love my friends to death for graciously helping week in and week out with this when I ping them with “hey guys shat this out, sun has been up for an hour so im gonna go fucking die now bye”. As stated earlier, perhaps my need for one isn’t AS high because I self-edit so compulsively as I go, but it’s soooooooo easy to get caught up in your own head and intentions and not spot obvious issues with your own writing that outside voices help a ton.

4. Whoops I guess I answered already. Very little.

5. Given that edits don’t change much about the structure of my writing, I guess it’s me - thanks! But my team is great about keeping me in line with my own vision in editing and hitting any lines that just seem out of place. There was one particular cut line in Glow that I won’t post here that was easily a full standard deviation of naughty greater than the rest of the fic’s tone (unintentional, it was very late -_-) and that got caught and shot down real quick lmfao.

[ngame989]

Do you have any tips for keeping a character's voice... in character?

I went through all the transcripts of S4 at one point after Promise and noted some trends for every major character in a document. Sometimes I’ll go back and check out transcripts or rewatch scenes that heavily feature a particular character or interaction if I want to refresh myself on it more of it. But otherwise I’m pretty freeform with it.

[ngame989]

Residual cheek marks: aesthetic fun or future plot point?

Mostly from column A, some from column B but not in the usual definition of "plot".

Toxic likes drawing Star far more with cheekmarks and Seddm came up with the Glossaryck scene in Promise that had too much potential not to use. If anything we didn't use enough of it's potential by not having a giant constellation of stars forming Glossy's smug bastard face in the sky that night.

But as seen in Glow, they still exist and react to their emotions, and aren't purely aesthetic. And we're far from done with the themes of the characters figuring out how they feel about their pasts introduced largely in Christumpmasday. I don't want to spoil too many ideas here but I can say that they won't be used in a "magical powers for Star or her family or kids or anything return" sense. The purpose was Gloss basically just saying "hey, the world's ability to directly harness pure magic is gone forever and it's for the best but if anyone deserves a little token of it to remember, it's you two bozos."