Dumbassary of the highest order

ITS THEM! ITS THE BABIES!

I figured I'd send this ask so that you could have it on your blog or whatever, but since my own tumblr is basically dead, here's the link to my Twitter for anyone who's interested!

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SCREAMING!! CRYING!! LOVING!! WOW!!

AMAZING WORK!! 

I'd like to start off by saying that I've been a huge fan of your works for a while. Everything from the way you write the characters to the pacing to the setup always leaves me feeling impressed because it's just soo good!

Recently I've been giving fic writing a go and I was wondering if you had any tips or recommendations for somebody just starting out.

Hi there!! Sorry for the late response, I've been very busy recently, but I hope you're having a good day too!! And thanks so much!!! ✧･:*♡(´∀`ʃƪ)♡*:･✧ i always feel like pacing is my weakness so thats really nice of you to say!!

Now, I'm by no means an expert, but I can make a little (long actually) list of tips I try to use/think about:

1. Quantity over quality - Obvs quality is great too, but like my really old stuff is garbo, however! I just kept going at it like crazy and eventually I learned what I like and dislike and how to write things in more interesting ways and everything just bc of how much I'd already wrote. No one is born a perfect writer with a golden pen in their hand, its all about keeping at it!

2. Fanfic writing is free labor (at least most is, mine included). This is kind of a no duh point, but it really helps me out when I get into a mindset thats like, 'oh no, this paragraph isnt perfect and everyones going to get their pitchforks out and burn me at the stake bc of it!' A) People are actually really nice, but B) fanworks are acts of love to the fandom/characters, theres no expectation that every single word has to be 100% super duper perfect. Someone out there will love your stories and they will remember them for the themes or the characters or whatever else, but not for that one sentence out of thousands that you thought was a little bit shaky.

3. Get creative with it!! This is my most biased point bc I looooooove adding in visuals and stuff to fics. Like the soon-to-be-released-hopefully chapter of my robo lance fic is coded nearly to the absolute max. Btw, if anyone ever has any questions they want to ask about ao3 workskins/html, feel free to message me and I will guaranteed talk your ear off about it!

But anyways!! Being creative doesnt have to be about coding if thats not your thing! Formatting is something I love to use too, especially to express a characters state of being or to highlight differences between characters. Like, when Keith gets frustrated, his inner dialgoue paragraphs are short and snippy. When he's panicking on the other hand, his thoughts repeat over and over again. Another example is that Lance loves to ramble so some of his POV chapters have long big chunks of text that are just tangential related thoughts often cut off by people trying to get his attention. Things like that really breath some life into a fic and get people into the head of the character youre trying to write (in my opinion at least).

I just couldn't pass up the excuse to reread the whole thing again (for, like, the 4th time)

Thank you for updating, and good luck for future chapters. I can't wait to see where it goes <3<3

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THANK YOU TO BRATAKAT FOR THESE WONDERFUL MEMES!!

(I seriously am looking forward to reading all the updates you did to "what does it mean to be human)

It was all part of my evilllll plannnnn, my dear jester!! That way youd have something to look forward to after work! Wait, that doesn't sound very evil... I'll work on my evilness, I promise

For people who want to know more, I was not vibing with the newer chapters and had to do some rewrites so I'm completely deleting chapters 48 through 58. There's a lot of coding work in chapter 47 (plus I'm a sucker for comments and it's already breaking my heart to delete 10 chapters), so I'm keeping 47 untouched and then replacing 45 and 46 with new work.

It's so good omg, i just like. had to tell you again lmao

Ahhhh, thank you so much for your kind words!! The Arrival soundtrack is one of my favorite all-time OSTs. I listened to it the entire time I wrote the fic so you listening to it while reading is (in my clearly non-biased opinion) 100% the best way to read it

Now how have you been doing? Everyone needs checking up on every now and then.

Hey there, anon! I'm glad you like my stuff and that I could distract you even if just a bit!! ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Also! I should note, Keith and Lance are strangers in this fic and I, for one, firmly believe that Lance would flirt with anything with legs if it wasn't for the fact that Keith and him were rivals in canon.

CW: A plane crash, minor injuries including bruising and a bit of blood, and a dead body

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Keith’s head was ringing something fierce as he came back to a slow consciousness. God, maybe this was why he never slept on planes if this was the apparent outcome. He blinked out the stubborn weariness from his eyes. The sound -the real sound- slowly welled back up, birds chirping distantly. 

…Wait, birds? Why would he be hearing birds on a plane-?

And that’s when he saw it. Over the tops of the shitty main cabin seats in front of him, between the useless dangling oxygen masks, there was a forest. 

Not like out the window or like some fake painted on trees to make it not seem like they weren’t in a metal tube flying high in the sky. There was an actual forest filled with actual trees a good few rows in front of him, all framed by the broken-in-half plane. 

Ok, no, maybe he did sleep on planes because that absolutely wasn’t real. Not a chance in hell. Keith sat up to try and find more evidence that this was clearly just a stress dream, only to cry out in abrupt stabbing pain from his midsection. He looked down, wincing as he pulled out his shirt slightly. He was met with his own skin painted with a mirage of angry purples and blues around the edges of where the thick seatbelt still held him in place. 

A bruise. He had a bruise all along his lower stomach. Which would make sense to have if the seatbelt stopped him from going forward extremely abruptly. Like, let’s say, in the event of a plane going from some super fast speed that Shiro would know to an absolute and utter zero. And that only happened when… 

In a second of what he would later convince himself was momentary hysteria, all he could think was, damn, looks like we aren’t making it to the connecting terminal on time.

He then much more rationally jolted forward in his seat again (and was greeted with the same sparking pain) at the fact that the plane had fucking crashed. What the fuck? What the FUCK?!

As quick as lightning, Keith undid the stupid seatbelt and turned to Shiro beside him. The man was still out like a light, but breathing, thank fuck. He checked diligently for anything seriously wrong (shrapnel, lacerations, currently bleeding anything- oh god, oh fuck? What was happening?). 

Somewhere near Shiro’s hair and all across his nose area was covered in dried blood, a bruise forming around the former. That definitely meant a concussion, right? Keith wasn’t a doctor, he had no idea how to check that. The blood seemed to be slowing to a crawl, which was probably good.

There wasn’t anything majorly wrong on his body so it seemed. Or at least, there wasn’t anything wrong that wasn’t already wrong. His arm was missing, which sounded terrible until it was taken into account that it was his already amputated arm… From a plane crash… A different plane crash… Oh, Shiro was going to be so pissed when he woke up. Who gets into two plane crashes??

A groan coming from directly behind him derailed that train of thought. Keith whipped around to look at the source of the noise (much to his strongly protesting body). A tanned, narrow-faced guy somewhere around Keith’s own age was slowly blinking his way into consciousness just like Keith had. His face was full of freckles and what looked like only a few slight bruises from where Keith could see. Overall, the other… survivor looked to be in about as good a shape as Keith was. 

Jesus, just the thought of saying ‘survivor’ was not really sinking in. They had survived a fucking plane crash. That wasn’t a thing that just happened, much less twice in Shiro’s case. He even joked that he was flying with Shiro because lightning never struck the same spot twice. Evidently, it fucking did. Maybe he shouldn’t have tempted the universe like that… 

“Mullet?”

Keith refocused on the guy now staring at him, scoffing at the incredibly slurred and equally confused ‘nickname’.

“Are you… dying or whatever?” Keith asked.

The guy tilted his head, his face scrunching up at the question until he refocused on the mask sitting securely on his nose. He yanked it off as careful as a band-aid, watching it strangely as it bounced back up toward the ceiling.

The guy turned back to Keith, a silent question in his eyes. It seemed to answer itself though, as the stranger’s widening eyes filled with the soft sunlight trickling in over Keith’s shoulder.

“Ho-ly crow,” The other survivor shook himself like that’d get him to wake up. Keith understood the feeling.

“I… I think the plane went down,” Keith winced at his own statement. Obviously the fucking plane went down. No plane landed fine with only half of it left, especially not just the back half.

“Looks like it,” The guy replied hollowly before his face filled with alarm, “Oh my god! Hunk! Pidge!”

Blue Shirt (he really needed to learn this guy's name, but that would have to do for now) turned to his oddly named friends. Which was Hunk and which one was Pidge, Keith had no idea. They seemed to be like Shiro, alive but not quite up yet, if the sigh of relief Blue Shirt let out said anything.

The guy turned back to Keith with a lot more awareness, “What happened??”

“Like I said, the plane-”

“No, no, I don’t need the obvious! Clearly!” The guy frantically gestured over the seats, “I meant like, how are we even, you know?”

“Alive?” Keith finished, “I don’t have a damn clue.”

“And what about everyone else?” Blue Shirt asked.

Keith tilted his head.

“Like, the other people. There was a- a cute, little elderly couple right over there,” Blue Shirt pointed across the aisle, “Where did they go? Where did everyone else go?”

Probably thrown from the plane, Keith’s mind darkly supplied. He didn’t, however, want to come off as a complete freak to the only other survivor awake right now.

“Maybe they already got out?” Keith tried (and failed) to sound optimistic.

The guy frowned, seemingly trying to process that, “...Right. Okay. And they probably just left us because… because… Because! They didn’t know how injured we were, and that’s, like, a rule! Totally! You don’t move the injured people because their spines could be damaged and everything! Trust me, I’ve watched all of Grey’s Anatomy, even the truly bad seasons.”

Very trust-inducing, Keith didn’t voice. He nodded tentatively despite that thought. 

Blue shirt stood- oh goddamnit, this was getting annoying, “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Hm?” The guy stretched out in the aisleway, pain evident in his face, “Oh, um, right. The name’s Lance, but you can call me the man of your dreams.”

“W- what?” Keith definitely didn’t squeak that out. Also his face definitely didn’t go tomato red. Also his heart didn’t feel like it just had a palpitation. Also- You know what, shut the fuck up. How was he supposed to react to that?? Who realized they were in a plane crash and immediately f- flirts with the only other awake survivor??? 

Lance (the man of Keith’s apparent dreams, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the-) grimaced in what looked like sincere apology, “Sorry, sorry, not the place. I think my head’s a bit, uh, scrambled, you know? From all this? Anyway, what’s your name, Mullet Man?”

“...Keith,” He dragged out of his mouth (stop fucking staring at the pretty guy who just trauma-flirted with you), “And it’s not a mullet.”

Lance put a hand on his hips, or tried to. He winced at the touch and let it drop, “Puh-lease. I spotted that thing the moment you walked on the plane. Shorter in the front?”

“I guess,” Keith answered tersely.

“And longer in the back?” Lance raised an eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“Ha! See, that’s literally the definition of a mullet: business in the front party in the-” Lance abruptly choked on the air, hand going to cover his mouth as his eyes went wide as saucers. He stumbled backwards, grabbing on to the flimsy blue seats to stop himself from falling completely, “O- oh my god.”

Keith stood ready to catch Lance, expecting to see him losing blood or something, “What’s wrong?”

With a face three shades paler, Lance pointed over Keith’s shoulder. Was… was he just now processing their wrecked plane? Even after they talked about it? Nevermind. Trauma was weird sometimes. That was what his old therapist used to say at least. Maybe it was still settling and that’s why Lance kept going on weird, unnecessarily long tangents?

“The plane crashed,” Keith repeated slowly like he was talking to a spooked deer, “Are you hurt or-?”

“N- no, Keith, look,” Lance demanded, voice shaking.

Keith turned in confusion to follow Lance’s eyes only to be meet with-

Oh.

Oh.

A woman -one of the stewardesses, Keith assumed by the neatly pressed uniform- laid dead-eyed in front of them. Her limbs were sprawled out, her head haloed by the bent edges of where the broken plane met the open air. Grimly, Keith thought that that made sense. Of course not everyone would survive a goddamn plane crash. 

But then he noticed what killed her. It wasn't being tossed by the aggressive turbulence, nor was it the excess metal shrapnel from around the edge of their halved plane, no. 

Really though, first one ever completed in full!! Very exciting (to me at least)!! Thanks to everyone that’s read it!!

Here’s the link to the now completed Voltron Klance Arrival AU:

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