#sacredpools

[gurguliare]

For a minute I thought that shrew mummy was some take on the duct tape banana thing

duct tape banana w i s h e s

[azzandra]

sacredpools replied to your post “I’ve been getting better at finishing WIPs these past few years, but...”

Even putting that aside, five years? Really? I’ve seen quite a few fics get updated after three or six years. The longshot I’m still lowkey hoping for is this one hp fic that will have gone 11 years with no update this August (the author said this was the exciting part they’d been waiting to write all along! We /still/ don’t know what kind of magical creature harry was turning into and why the elves were wary of him!) And if something isn’t working for you anymore it’s perfectly fine to move—

—on and write something else. Frankly the alternative seems like it would be never posting wips and only posting already completed works, which might work for some people but feels like a huge amount of pressure to me. And tbh I think I speak for more than myself when I say that I’d much rather get to read incomplete stories than never see them at all. Some of the best stories I’ve read are incomplete, and if the authors hadn’t posted them anyway I never would’ve gotten to read them. So that— 

—much from a reader-centric perspective. As someone who’s never posted written work online I don’t feel exactly qualified to speak from a writer’s point of view, but I guess I’ve also heard people say it’s valuable to post stories as you write them - for advice, for inspiration, for cheerleading, for engagement w/ the community, whatever. Not that I think you’re going to stop posting wips or even that I’d be trying to talk you out of it, but I guess this is something that I’ve thought about b4 

Honestly, yeah, the only time I publish already finished works is when it’s a relatively short fic, up to 10k words. I can’t really manage to keep up the steam on a fic without feedback from an audience, but the flipside is that sometimes... I just lose interest. Either canon has jossed the premise of my fic, or I’ve moved on to another fandom, or I just get interested in a different idea, but mostly I just drop stuff because I get bored and I’m moody and I have too many ideas to work on all of them at the same time.

And I don’t even mind comments on old fics or on fics that have been on hiatus for long. But sometimes when I get a comment like this, I reread the old fic (that I have often completely forgotten) and I reach the point where I stopped writing, and I’m a bit bummed out myself that I never continued, because I’m curious about what would have happened next, and I know I left a lot of people feeling the same.

But also, like... I’m not going to change. I’m going to keep leaving behind a trail of unfinished fics, and my only comfort is that I’ve gotten a lot better about finishing things than I was before, and I have only been improving with time, so if that’s the best I can manage, then at least that’s something.

[thelioninmybed]

I’m subscribed to your wordpress, so I noticed you guys posted the thing about Matt’s exes there earlier today. Does that mean that you couldn’t find a publisher [ :( ], or are you still looking/“in talks”?

We’re absolutely still querying! It is a slow process though (any literary agents want to jump in here and save us all the emailing? Please? It is very stressful!)

The Tragic Tale of Matt’s Exes is a bonus story we wrote in response to a prompt from the kind and brilliant @vardasvapors first published on @fakemattrose (our Official Novel Blog) here. 

….We have a slight problem in that we cannot stop writing side stories and at this point have a second novel’s worth of extras that we’ll likely be posting in the coming weeks to drum up publicity because we can’t shut the fuck up about our useless actor children. We will also, of course, take any prompts anyone wants to send!

[simaethae]

Re: Dan Simmons Achilles/Patroclus, really? I never managed to finish Ilium but from my vague recollections I thought there was a part where they have sex with women who look exactly like the other one or something like right next to each other and I thought he was trying to suggest desperate pining? It's been a while tho, so I might be misremembering

ok i went and looked it up online and looks like i was misremembering slightly but:

Achilles and Patroclus are sleeping together naked, the slave girls long gone, Patroclus’ arm flung across the man-killer’s shoulders.

This sight in the dim light stops me in my tracks. Achilles is gay? That means that stupid gay- and lesbian-obsessed junior professor in the department was right—his ranting papers correct—all that politically correct babble true!

I shake this out of my head. It means nothing except that I’m three thousand years away from Twenty-first Century Indiana and that I don’t know what I’m seeing. These two men have just fornicated with slave girls for two hours and fell asleep where they lay. And besides, who cares about the secret love life of Achilles?

sooooooo. mostly I was just super irritated by the “politically correct” stuff because, like, this is not a modern theory, ughhhhh. also the narrator is generally gross but whatever, you were right not to finish the book :///

[bedlamsbard]

(1/2) Hi, I'm sorry if this comes off as weird or forward but I don't know if you've heard the latest lj news so I wanted to warn you. They changed the tos and now apparently everything will be under Russian law and they may just randomly start deleting journals? I remember you had a bunch of commentfic, but I don't know if you imported all of your comments or entries to dw, and I mean theoretically lj could probably screw with the importation tool eventually.

(2/2) You have to agree to the tos to actually do anything including import stuff. Anyway I just wanted to let you know in case you weren't aware, sorry if you've already heard about this and I'm just bothering you

Hi!  Yes, I’m aware, though I haven’t said anything publicly about it anywhere.  I’ve been on Dreamwidth since it started in 2009 and everything’s been crossposted from DW since then (and was imported when I originally went over to DW), though I haven’t been importing comments on the regular.

At this point I’ve only been talking to one or two people on LJ still (I went back to journal blogging last year when I was having my Relationship Crisis and needed to sort through my feelings under an access lock where I controlled who saw it, but that was all originally posted on DW), and all my significant content is on DW.  I’m not deleting my LJ, I’m just, uh, going to let it wither away, I guess?  I don’t have the energy to make significant decisions other than “turn off the crosspost button” right now.

Though I just realized that most of the Warsverse links lead to the original LJ entries, which I guess I’l fix manually at some point when I have the energy, sigh.  (99% of my Narnia fic isn’t on AO3 and isn’t likely to be.)

[gurguliare]

This is kind of a loaded question, but... have you read the homestuck epilogues? I was curious about any thoughts you might’ve had on them. IMO they’re very... homestuck, for whatever relative meaning that has

Lmao lmao YES I just finished them this morning.

I enjoyed reading! But they were a confirmation of something I already knew about Homestuck, which is that it stopped being “for me” as a reader some ways through Act 6. I don’t mean that in the general sense of, like, this story is nice it’s just not to my particular taste for some mysterious reason, I mean more that the target audience royally shifted and did not take me with it. 

I am not personally invested in:

misogyny examined exclusively through the POV of misogynists in the form of flip-flopping between indulgence, guilt, and a charming lack of self-awareness

metatextual buffoonery that won’t crack a grin but instead commits fully to the strawmen it creates—this is a very compressed sentiment, but I’ve set a daily hour limit for my tumblr usage and I do want to be able to browse fanart later, so I’m cutting even more corners than usual. Basically, in a similar vein as Princess Tutu, being asked to examine problems of narrative bias as solely represented by clowning fictional narrators feels oddly like being assigned mandatory training wheels. I’m not saying it can’t serve a purpose, but it really feels like a dull parody of what was, for me, a lot of the pleasure of the earlier comic’s more genuine, unstructured, unstable play with perspective and storytelling.

“Was Homestuck ever for you, Gogol?” — yeah, shut up.

[thelioninmybed]

1 and 18?

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

DONE

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?

Pratchett’s Discworld stuff had a huge effect on me when I was in my early teens. Honestly, it was kind of stifling since I tried way too hard to imitate it and everything I produced read like a mediocre pastiche of him. I like to think that now I have a better understanding of why his writing works and what tools and tricks of authorial voice are relevant to the kinds of stories I’m interested in telling so it’s been reduced from wholesale theft to more of an influence, but you guys tell me! Who do I read like?

[thelioninmybed]

I appreciate @sacredpools establishing their not Matt (and hopefully not Not Matt either) credentials early, and I hope everyone in my inbox will keep this up as Star*Boys becomes more of a thing. I do not need Matthew Rose shitting up my inbox, that boy needs to get a hobby.

We’re still really sorry about the trolling, Confused Anon and Only Person To Leave A Sincere Comment On Alienation Anon (and I will love you forever for that). To make it up to you, June is gonna hit you up with the secret backstory to the Alienation comments i.e. the first part of the novel ever written, all the way back in 2016.