Vixenscratch

Master blog for the artist/writer/cartoonist/crazy cat lady better known as quoting_mungo. Contains ponies, furries, random pet photos, some art tutorial things, and other silly stuff. Warning! I do curse, quite a bit. If you've got a problem with that, let's part ways now, before I offend you. somecrazyskunk ♥ vixenscratch       About Mod of: Ask I.C.Q. Witherby Tales - ask blog Unicorn Quest - interactive adventure Dear Heartmend - ask blog Side blogs: Shut Up, Vixen! - finished art feed Vixenscraps - story fragments Vixenscratch NSFW - assorted NSFW Vixen-Oh-Cee(ven) - OC information Art tags: Gifts for me Gifts for others Bad art Sketches Doodlets (tiny art) Pixel art Vector art Finished raster art Freebies (free-to-use bases etc.) Misc stuff: Ponysona ref Commission information Reposting permissions Before you follow... Thank you to...

[queerofthedagger]

okay let's actually do this properly

Where do you write your fics/stories

Word

Google Docs

Scrivener

LibreOffice

Obsidian/Notion

ProtonDocs

Notes App

Directly into AO3

Ellipsus

Handwriting

Other (explain in tags?)

Remaining time: 3 days 20 hours

[ellipsus-writes]

Uh WOWOWOW we're at #2?! (guys we can't let Google win 😬)

[vixenscratch]

Voted Scrivener because that’s the majority of my writing. I do, however, also occasionally work in Ellipsus, and have supplies for handwriting in my bag for a reason. And I have timeline documents that I keep on Ellipsus so I can reference them when I need to.

(Though LOL for the longest time I was actually writing in Notepad/Notepad++, hardmoding my writing with .txt files. Before that it was mostly RoughDraft. Dating myself here.)

If you’re writing fic in Gdocs I do recommend making the shift to Ellipsus if at all feasible for your workflow, though.

[vixenscratch]

“I do not like AI in creative fields, so I stay away from it, the exception being my cover and my ads.”

That sounds a lot more like “I don’t like AI in my creative field and fuck everyone else,” I’ll be honest. That’s one story I won’t keep reading because ew. Only thing worse than people using genAI is people being hypocritical about it.

[vixenscratch]

Okay I am just going to. Ugh.

If you have rules saying genAI use has to be tagged, for the love of creatives everywhere, please, I beg you, make that rule apply to supplemental content as well.

I was actually enjoying this story but the illustrations added in the A/N went from “hmm is this really human-made” to “yeah no I’m pretty sure this is generated slop” in the space of a few chapters.

I’m so fucking tired, you guys.

[vixenscratch]

Professions I have recently wished I had a profic friend working in:

- Medicine (particularly emergency medicine)

- Psychiatry

- Crash Investigation

Bonus: (not profession, but very much wanted, why do I do this to myself?) Person with connection to the Deaf community

(The mildly annoying thing here is I actually have at least two people among my friends/closer acquaintances who have psych degrees and are currently employed in the field. But, uh… I’m not comfortable asking a parent about how a minor with SA trauma would be treated, unless we actually met through profic spaces.)

I think all writers should just. Receive a complementary MD friend who enjoys answering weird questions for research purposes. Don’t worry about where this friend would be sourced from. I’m sure we can find some way to raise them organically and mostly cruelty-free, the stress of med school aside.

Or just give me the ghost of MDs past. I’d be okay with a ghost as a source of medical knowledge.

[vixenscratch]

List has expanded to include:

- Child Protection Services and/or child abuse (criminal) investigation

- Catholic

My infuriating little idiot guy deciding to be more religious than I originally intended or realized is… inconvenient but workable. He kinda does his own thing with his spirituality. Bad Catholic and okay with that.

But I underestimated the amount of stuff I would need to know because of his fucking extended family, who are, well… the Catholics are better Catholics than he is, at least. (Low bar.)

[vixenscratch]

I am so fucking confused I’m pretty sure Tumblr is messing with what blogs I’m following but I don’t know. Like I know I didn’t (intentionally?) start following any new blogs in the last week and the oldest post on this blog that I can see is less than a week old but maybe someone I was following on purpose just renamed their blog and nuked their old posts and…

Yeah idfk. The worst part is that now I’m wondering if Tumblr has also silently dropped some of my follows.

ETA: To be clear, this is nothing against the new blog on my dash as such. I’m just not sure how it ended up there.

[lightbulb-warning]

many such foolish cases of things left unsaid :)

[sergle]

are you guys hearing about this dude working to developing a vaccine for cats that he's hoping would like. theoretically double their lifespans?

[sergle]

turns out i wasn't making that up, his name is Dr. Toru Miyazaki! he also wrote a book called "The Day Cats Live To Be Thirty", so cats are kind of his thing.

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

Could the macrophage-derived protein AIM save cats from kidney disease?

As they age, almost all cats develop kidney disease, from which they eventually die. Just as in humans, kidney disease i

Cat Kidney Disease Cure Nears Reality: Dr. Toru Miyazaki’s AIM Therapy

Dr. Toru Miyazaki’s AIM injection for cat kidney disease enters trials in 2025, aiming for a 2027 release. Greycoat Research supports the sc

[moki-dokie]

whoa wait i actually read the articles and it's so much cooler than just that!!

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

man just think, not only could our kitties start living longer, healthier lives, but just maybe dialysis will become as rare and obsolete as the iron lung is for people. what a badass Dr. Toru is!

[fluxxdog]

"But I don't want to turn people into dinosaurs. I wanna cure kittie kidneys!"

[rorleuaisen]

Update: So they have done clinical trials and have submitted it for approval as of april 2026. They are expecting it to be available late 2026/early 2027

AIM Kidney Drug for Cats: 2026 Approval Update — How It Works, Efficacy & Expected Cost | Carelogy

The AIM protein drug for feline chronic kidney disease has been submitted for approval in Japan (April 2026). We break down clinical trial d

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%

New 2026 study: AIM protein boosts cat kidney disease survival from 20% to 80%. Discover how this scientific breakthrough is changing the fu

[idiomagic]

Our cat Scout is in the early stages of kidney disease. This might be available in time to save her!

[free-my-mindd]

[vixenscratch]

Lowkey hating how ArtFight is basically the artistic equivalent of NaNoWriMo. It’s ludicrously pervasive despite having major problems (in AF’s case, banning people for offsite fictional content being one of those problems), and you can’t get through June/July without hearing about it to no end.

Like, if you enjoy it I’m happy for you, and I had great fun the times I participated (years ago). I like seeing the art people have created and/or received on my dash when it happens, because the base spirit of “art gifting game” still conceptually brings me joy.

It’s just the event itself that makes me feel embittered. We are far too accepting of users getting banned over playing dolls wrong in their own spaces.

[succubusboyfriend]

are you “adaptable” or are you just willing to subject yourself to existing in low key background-level ambient misery

[clingyduoapologist]

Your friend’s unpublished fic idea is kind of a dead wife

[dazzling-galaxy]

i also want to read this guy’s dead wife

[vixenscratch]

Save 75% on My Lovely Wife on Steam

My Lovely Wife delves into the depths of a man’s grief after the sudden death of his beloved wife. Explore the notions of one’s willingness

[prismatoxic]

oh hey nate we thought you died

[ao3screenshots]

sprinkling trauma over the fic like salt to my plate

source (x)

[vixenscratch]

I’m upending the fucking salt shaker and you can’t stop me.

[lonestatus]

can i get paid handsomely for wtiting stupid bullshit no one even cares about

[vixenscratch]

“I don’t know how” can mean a thousand different things, which can make it very difficult for people to help you figure out. Sometimes you don’t even know, yourself, what the problem is. Just that there is one, and that it’s preventing you from doing the thing.

And I think we need to take people’s “I don’t know how” more seriously, even when they seem stupid to us. Like “how can you not know how to…?” is not helpful. It creates shame, and probably will just raise the difficulty.

Yes, having to find the right questions to figure out where the actual problem lies can be an exercise in frustration. Do you or do you not know how to handle that frustration?

[maxknightley]

"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane

[maxknightley]

one has you making posts like "okay but if the author UNDERSTOOD the POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS of the story they were telling, and leaned into it, it would actually be a really interesting exploration of..."

the other has you pacing your bedroom at one in the morning going "why. why would you ever in a million years do it like that. genuinely what possible thought process was involved. was the writer possessed by a fucking ghost or something."

[vamprisms]

being online is so scary aren't you guys worried about the world wide spider

[redfagdiver]

It took 36 years for someone to make this joke and by god it was worth the wait

[vixenscratch]

Getting big “discovering a deep crevice, then discovering the giant cave spider silk on the cave floors around it” vibes.

The Internet is a lot like a giant cave spider, really. Correctly and responsibly harnessed, it can bring great riches. Allowed to run rampant, it will tear you and everything you hold dear apart when you least expect it.

[ao3commentoftheday]

hey, blog! 🌸 anon here. I think there are probably other posts about long fic, but I was wondering if you or others have any advice on sticking to a single long story instead of jumping to another? I'm mostly of a short fic writer myself, and I'm so interested in the secrets long fic writers possess. Anyway, thank you for running this blog! An awesome project :)

I'll give you my secrets as a fellow short fic writer who sometimes dips into medium-fic and the occasional long fic.

Be obsessed with your story. This can go a LONG way to helping you maintain your motivation. Daydream about it. Make playlists about it. Talk to friends about it.

Try to make each chapter feel like a oneshot. Give it an opening, a middle, and a closing. Have some character development or achieve a plot point or drop a clue that will be used later in the story. The more you can give yourself the satisfaction you get from a oneshot, the better.

Do jump to oneshots on the side to keep you going through the long fic. Sometimes you really do need to get the feeling of "done" to be able to continue something that's still in progress. Don't deny yourself that feeling just because you think you should. Life needs dessert and short fic writers need completed works.

Embrace a B plot (and a C plot and a D plot). These side plots can last for a single chapter or can be threaded through the whole story or they can bridge from chapter 12 to chapter 18. Whatever their final form, these smaller stories-within-the-story also help to satisfy the need for a short, punchy hit of dopamine when the story is starting to feel huge.

I'll leave it there for now and open it up. How do the rest of you go about writing longer stories? Especially if you typically prefer to write shorter.

[vixenscratch]

Honestly? Just allow yourself to jump to another story if that’s what you’re feeling that writing session. I have about two dozen WIPs right now. Usually I’ll be loosely focused on a handful or so at any given point, but that focus can shift. And that’s fine; if I put something down for now I’ll still come back to it eventually. Right now I happen to be relatively laser focused on a single fic, which means the last time I updated anything else was Saturday and Sunday.

The fic I’m lasered in on at the moment has a lot of relatively short (~2-3k words, with a few exceptions in either direction) chapters, which isn’t how I usually work. Finishing a chapter does give me a bit of an “I did the thing!” boost. When I’m writing a longer non-chaptered story, I pat myself on the back every time I finish a scene, instead. (This has turned into an unexpected perk of using Scrivener as my writing software; having the scenes separated into their own distinct documents in the story binder means a finished scene adds to the “pile.” I know there’s other software out there that also does this; yWriter and Liquid Story Binder are ones I’ve used in the past, though I’m not 100% sure whether LSB separated scenes or just chapters. Been a hot minute.)

Also: Walking helps your creative brain. Like, there’s science. I will absolutely turn scenes over in my head as I walk. At this point it’s become habit enough that it happens automatically; if I’m walking alone, I’m thinking about the blorbos. (If I’m not alone I’m probably engaged in conversation, and I have yet to master the level of brain multithreading that will let me carry on a conversation and mentally put guys in Situations at the same time.)

And yeah, having at least one friend you can talk to about the story can help immensely. Nothing like a friend being excited along with you to hype you up!