#ask maggie

[mag-nifico]

What do we think of sub mikey? I'd love to read your take on this lil dude

Listen I will absolutely admit that I feel like I don’t know enough about Mikey to write him well…. HOWEVERRRRR !!!!

I think that he fits full on simp category and lets you do anything you want with or to him lmao

Like he’s ditching his friends, he’s wearing the stupid couples bracelet or necklace you got him, and he’s an absolute mess when you’re on his lap sucking hickies into his neck (he’s told you to stop but folds the second you get on top of him and is putty in your hands)

I think he’s a whiny baby, and you’re constantly hanging on him and pouting if you don’t get what you want. He’s wearing your clothes and vice versa for sure. He gives ‘you’re my first girlfriend’ vibes to me

I am SO SORRY for the Mikey girls out there, that’s just how that specific era of him feels for me 😭😩 not bad by any means like baby come over just lay down ill take care of you BUT it’s how I see it

I was telling my sister today that him and young Ray are very much Sabrina Carpenter “When did you get hot?” Coded for me personally

PLEASE DONT EAT ME I MAY JUST BE MISINFORMED!!! Always willing to learn

👁️👅👁️

[hopetorun]

🌻

i learned last year about the elaborate tile color system used by one of the train systems that were eventually merged to make the nyc subway and now i can't stop noticing it! the tiles change color when you pass an express station and show you how far you are from (the middle of) manhattan!

[hopetorun]

🌻

i'm currently working on my first-ever colorwork knitting project! it's stranded colorwork but i've never done stripes or intarsia or anything else. in theory it will be a short-sleeve sweater with a leaf pattern on the yoke

also last month i bought a new air purifier that tells me what the particulate matter is in my air and long story short i have learned that my hair dryer is very bad for the air quality in my apartment!

[hopetorun]

🌻

my heart rate was doing some wild stuff all of last week which i did not bother to share with anyone because i truly do not believe people care all that much (my mother, bless her, does tell me what sleep score her fitbit gave her every single day if we're in the same place) but it was definitely freaking me out a bit. but it seems to be going back to normal! i blame the wild temperature swings (for a bit of it) and drinking more than usual (for most of it)

[bymiar]

Oh, I almost forgot

Questions are open!

(Actually, I'm always happy to answer questions, but this time it's speciallly for the Showdown)

So if you want, you can ask Maggie anything you want! (Not Volt because he can't answer in his current state, lol)

@sonic-mini-showdown

[hopetorun]

🔎💬😩

🔍 — what tiny writing detail do you fixate on the most?

it is finding the absolute perfect word to express the thing i'm trying to convey. i AM on thesaurus dot com clicking through different synonyms until i can remember the word that precisely captures a feeling or a movement or a color or whatever. i will leave myself notes about it when i don't think i picked the best word in hopes that when i come back to it i will have remembered that perfect word that was eluding me. i do think this improves my writing but i am not sure it improves my writing enough to justify the time i put into it, especially in fiction, especially especially in fiction where i decide later the narrator wouldn't use that word

(to be fair, in nonfiction writing i think this is pretty unequivocally a strength and in fact one of my favorite compliments i've ever gotten on my nonfiction writing is that i always use good verbs)

💬 — how do you approach dialogue vs. narration?

i confess i'm not entirely sure what this question is asking me. perhaps it's meant to be open-ended. i don't know that i have an overarching philosophy about when or how i use dialogue versus narration?? i use them when they feel right. i try to keep a decent balance between the two, but beyond that ... idk. i do try to keep a certain amount of character voice present in close third person narration? i guess that's a philosophy. i want the narrator to sound like the character whose head we're experiencing the story through.

😩 — which trope do you struggle with even though you love it?

oooh dubcon stuff for sure. the first time i wrote sex pollen i was in the wars, i was really just muddling through. writing a lot of winner's room definitely got me more comfortable with how to pull it off, but i feel like even with winner's room and sex pollen i tend to want to slide some stuff in that adds more consent. even though i love dubcon!

[hopetorun]

hi maggie! happy saturday! here are some craft questions:

🧠 — what is one writing rule you break constantly?

🔗 — what theme or motif keeps appearing in your writing unintentionally?

🧵 — how do you weave emotion into your scenes?

🧠 — what is one writing rule you break constantly?

oh probably all of them. it's been ages since i even bothered to consider any writing rules besides stuff like grammar. i don't know that this is a strict rule but i definitely don't edit as thoroughly or thoughtfully as i should, because especially for longer stories it just makes me kind of miserable. building more of a tolerance for editing would probably help me a lot as a writer, but i'm just not motivated enough to do it. it would probably help to have a consistent beta/editor with whom i have a good and honest relationship, but i've never had that, and i have to imagine that my bad attitude about editing is part of the reason, since i don't think i'm a particularly fun person to give notes to (though i think i've improved on this front since i was a teenager at least)

🔗 — what theme or motif keeps appearing in your writing unintentionally?

loneliness and connection. lmao. i'm sure this says nothing about me so let's just move right along

🧵 — how do you weave emotion into your scenes?

it really depends on the character! especially in close third pov, which is what i tend to write. i try to think about whether a character is someone who feels their emotions very intellectually, or someone who experiences them more as physical sensations. and if the latter, do they understand those sensations as representations of an emotion or not? i try to bring in some physicality regardless because just writing "he was scared" is so much less compelling than "his hands shook" blah blah show don't tell but at the same time some people are very emotionally aware. (i myself am very much a feelings are in the brain person, years ago i had a therapist ask me about where a feeling was in my body and i was like girl it's in my brain, what are you talking about.)

i also really like to try and weave some emotion into the setting, or at least into how the characters perceive the setting. i'm struggling to give a good example of this but it is something i think about!

[hopetorun]

✍️ and 🧩

✍️ — what’s your favourite part of crafting a scene?

i love feeling my way through the emotional arc of a scene, figuring out what ground the characters are going to cover and how they're going to express (or not express) whatever emotions they're experiencing. i'm not much of a planner so generally i have at most one or two beats i'm sure i want to happen and everything that fills in around them is done on the fly! it's so fun to just kinda vibe with the characters

🧩 — what’s the hardest thing for you to write?

the like ... final third of a story, especially a longer story. i always worry that the climactic moment and the resolution aren't really earned and that i haven't done enough buildup to the dramatic kiss/confession of feelings/whatever it is, and then bringing the story home in a way that resolves the issues without feeling too pat