If you don't mind me asking, why are you changing your name? Also do you want us to start refering to you by that name?
I would like people to start referring to me by my new name, if that’s not too much trouble!
But I’m going to wait to disclose it until it’s all legally changed. I’m still torn between two first names, although I have settled on my new surname. For now, I’m happy to still go by Nat until it’s all figured out.
As for the why - it’s not a happy story, exactly and I’m not going to go into too much detail, but I’m gonna put it under a cut just in case.
My parents were abusive. Emotionally to an extreme, physically to a certain degree. My relationship with them now is practically nonexistent. I see them on occasion, because of reasons that mean I can’t just cut them out of my life. At least not yet.
My name has come to mean something dirty and disgusting and broken. I’ve never liked Natalia anyway, I go by Taz IRL to my friends and Nat to people online. But with the connotations that come every time I hear someone use my full first name, I feel sick to my stomach. It reminds me of things I’d rather forget.
My surname is representative of a family that I no longer want to be part of, so I intend to change that too.
It sounds stupid, but a name is part of my identity. It’s so deeply personal, it’s indicative of my life and my journey, and I want that to be something positive. Something that I chose for myself, to show I survived and I got out from such a horrible situation.
So I intend to choose my own name and let this be the start of my new life.
Thank you so much for publishing the Destiel-hater url. I need more anti-Destiel blogs to follow to make my life more complete because Destiel does indeed SUCK!
Then I have no idea why you're following me???
People are allowed to not like Destiel. I don't care what people ship (if anything), and I consider myself a multishipper anyway. I follow lots of blogs that don't ship Destiel.
What I object to is people who dedicate entire blogs to making fun of part of the fandom for seeking representation and happiness, in and for their favourite characters. It's nothing more than bullying and I don't want my blog associated with it at all.
Hi! So, what are your tips on writing a long fic? I’m a diff anon but i’m also making an attempt and really struggling. I know what I want the plot beats to be but they’re spread out over a really long period of time and attempting to fill that feels like pulling teeth. Thank you and good luck on your own writing!! :)
Hi! Okay so these are all the things I’ve done for my current major WIP, ARTEMIS. They’re not necessarily all going to be useful, but they worked out that way for me.
Outline each plot point you intend to use, chronologically. Then, once you’ve done that, separate them into chapters. These will be your chapter outlines! It’ll help you keep track of where you are and what you want to include so you don’t forget something.
With regards to fics that span a long period of time - you don’t need to fill in every detail of what your characters do in that time. It can get monotonous reading twelve different accounts of characters going about their day to day business. So once you’ve got something written, don’t be afraid to reread it and cut bits out that don’t further the story.
As an example of the above, in ARTEMIS, I have timestamps and date stamps. There’ll be gaps in between each individual case where you don’t know what the characters get up to, because that’s not the story I’m telling. The next date stamp could be three or six months later, or hours later. You don’t even have to do timestamps. You can just start your chapter with time having passed, just remember to make it clear that that’s the case. But I personally find having the timestamps as a crutch helps me, because I agree - filling time in fanfiction is like pulling teeth.
With long fics, there are lots of details to remember if you don’t want to contradict yourself. So I have a little character bio doc, where I include anything I’ve ever said about the characters, even in passing. Castiel is scared of heights? Written it down. Then I check it after each chapter and know if there’s anything I need to change/haven’t accounted for.
I also have two more documents: a character list, so I don’t accidentally reuse a character that had an earlier part (this might not be relevant to you unless your fic is an AU with lots of minor parts), and a planning document where I flesh out the chapter I’m about to work on in detail before I start writing it.
Obviously not all of these will be a help to you, but hopefully you’ll find at least some of them useful, anon? The best of luck with your writing!
Hello! I was wondering if you could maybe do a tutorial about wings in graphics, like how to add them and all that, please?
Hi there! Absolutely! There’s not really a lot to adding wings to a graphic, but I did my best :)
So firstly, you want to make sure that the wings you choose actually fit the position of your cap, You’ll want the join of the wings to line up with where they would actually meet skin. Most of the time this is pretty easy as you’ll be positioning them behind your subject, like so:
As a rule, most wings you find will be a front view, like the ones below.
Most often than not, these wings will work perfectly for a cap that’s positioned from the front or the side. These are the same wings in both pictures, just split across two layers and positioned so they look like they’re growing out of Castiel’s shoulder blades.
Where things get a little complicated are when you have a cap where the back of the subject is displayed. You can’t just stick any wing on and hope for the best (I mean, I guess you could?), because all of them won’t work. You need one that reflects the position of the subject and then blend it in.
This doesn’t look horrendous? But the seam is quite clearly visible and I don’t fully love the wing position. It would do in a pinch, as I don’t think it looks too bad, but it doesn’t truly match Castiel’s position. Whereas most of the focus on Castiel is on his back, you have a side view of the wings. You should try and match front cap to front wings, side cap to side wings and back cap to back wings.
This one matches much better. A back view of the wings matches the back view of Castiel.
You might need to play around with the colouring like you would anything else in your graphic, and the same with perspective. I talked a little bit on how to adjust the perspective of wings here. With regards to scale, it’s upto you! I try to keep it so that if I use spread wings, they completely dwarf the size of Castiel’s vessel. Think of the span of a birds wings compared to its body - the wings are huge.
If you’re struggling to find wings, you can find some cool ones on deviantart or google images.
That art is like different with different people? I’m confused
I’ll try my best to explain it, but I think it’s just something that you need to see and understand. I wasn’t even the first person to notice it, it was brought to me by numerous people.
Yes, the character is different. marril96 graphic features Rowena, mine features Castiel.
There’s a fundamental difference between ‘I want to make a mermaid Rowena graphic that is mine’ and ‘I want to make that Rowena graphic that someone else has already made with a different character.’
To further clarify: I made that mer!Cas graphic, with its composition the way it is. Underwater, with Castiel as the sole occupant of the foreground of the graphic. Positioned so the surface of the water was visible. With plants I added to the sea bed and a whale in the background.
Marril96′s graphic recreates that exactly with Rowena. There’s no original thought in her process. There was no - maybe a couple of jellyfish, maybe I won’t have a whale instead, maybe I’ll show some of the sky - originality.
There are a million ways she could have done it differently. Below is a different mer!Cas graphic I made to show how she could have done ANYTHING with her mer!Rowena graphic.
See how different it is to the other one I posted? The composition is completely different.
There’s a huge difference between inspiration and theft. I hope I’ve made that clear.
