A Little Bit of Loveliness For Everyone

Hi Everyone! My name is Lovely, she/her pronouns, and this blog is for me to have fun and destress. I am a huge outsiders fan and enjoy sharing my headcanons and thoughts. Asks and requests are always open! Any asks that are respectful and not ill intentioned are welcome and don't necessarily have to pertain to fandom content.

My ao3 username is NerdGirl07 if anyone is interested in my works

Love you all xx

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Headcanons Masterlist

Metas and Analysis Masterlist

There was nothing calm about drowning. 

Every book he ever read where someone drowned always described a moment of calm just before the character slipped out of consciousness, a soft peace as water filled their lungs and pushed the life out of them, a horrible but tranquil final sleep. 

Drowning was nothing like that. 

Drowning was blind panic and frigid water and trying desperately not to breathe until he choked on an inhale. It was panicking more when breathing meant burning, pain searing through his chest and his head and behind his eyes, his whole body rebelling against the wrongness of it. Drowning was harsh hands holding him down, muffled shouts and frantic splashing. It was fighting as hard as he could and the ralization when his vision started to fade that it wouldn’t be enough. It was bone chilling fear and mindless panic he felt to his core until he couldn’t feel anything anymore. It was going limp seconds before he passed out not because he wanted to but because his limbs had stopped listening to his brain and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. Whatever that paralysis was, it wasn’t any sort of calm. 

He still has nightmares about it sometimes. When he isn’t lurching awake screaming for Johnny to run or Dally to duck, it’s usually because he’s choking and paralysed, phantom water clogging his mouth and his nose and filling his lungs, leaving him a shivering, gasping mess. Sometimes Soda’s soothing hands feel like Bob’s brushing grip and he leaves bruises trying to get away from someone who has never done anything but the exact opposite of hurting him. Consciousness means breathing again, in the memories and the midnights, but Soda’s worried eyes burn almost as much as his lungs did when he was dying and it's a different kind of drowning, knowing he’s hurting his brother with the well of pain he doesn’t know what to do with. 

Sometimes he steps under the shower and he swears that the water knows, that somehow the well carries memories from the fountain and it’s determined to finish what it started, to work it’s way inside him by any means necessary and push everything that makes him Ponyboy Curtis out. Some days he fights it, lurching out of the shower and clawing at his skin until he regains enough of his mind to grab a towel and wipe the sting of the water droplets off of him. Other days he’s tempted to let the shower finish what the fountain couldn’t- but the panic still comes before any sort of peace and if Windrixville proved anything it’s that he is the worst sort of coward. 

There was no peace in drowning. It’s a shame then, that he’s been drowning for months now. 

Ever since the fountain it feels like the water that was forced into his lungs never really found its way out. Instead it’s a part of him, a little bit of poison that makes it hard to breathe or think or exist. Even in Windrixville, standing in an inferno, on the verge of burning to death, the acrid smoke filling his lungs felt just like water, pushing air from his lungs and the sanity from his head, making it hard to move or fight or think.

There is a weight now to his existence, a constant struggle that comes with drowning with your head above water. Fish on beaches flail and die trying to get back home, and Ponyboy Curtis chokes on air every time he sits down at the breakfast table and his best friend isn’t there to sit beside him. 

The whiff of the wrong brand of cigarette feels like it crawls into his lungs and fills them, memories of a hood with a dangerous grin and cold eyes filling him, leaving no room for his tenuous present the doctor called healing. He breathes and breathes and there is no air, no nothing, and he drowns and drowns and drowns without a drop of water in sight. You get tough like me and you don’t get hurt, except he got tough and he is still hurting anyway, gasping for air that doesn’t exist in some diner he didn’t even want to be at, all because Dally’s ghost won’t leave him alone. 

He knows his brothers are worried, sees the looks they shoot each other when they think he isn’t watching and hears the low murmurs around corners and through shut doors. It doesn’t matter anyway. They could be shouting right in front of him and he wouldn’t understand a thing. He’s drowning and the water in his ears makes everything muted, keeps his eyes blurry and his thoughts disjointed. 

Steve is quieter than he used to be, and Two-bit is louder, and their false cheer is never enough to drag him from the depths. Even his brothers’ gentle hands and softer words are not enough to pull him free from whatever he’s submerged in, cannot push life back into his lungs or pull the clogging veil of unreality from where it’s settled over his senses. Whatever he’s drowning in now, it’s worse than water for all it feels like it, keeps him alive but somehow isn’t air, and burns like fire without any of the smoke.

There’s no calm in drowning. He flails and gasps and chokes and tries, he tries, to claw his way free from the suffocating prison that surrounds him, but when it’s life that’s drowning you, it’s hard to bring life into your lungs without making everything worse. 

There’s no calm in drowning, and Ponyboy Curtis has been drowning for months.

He doesn’t know how much longer he can keep fighting. His limbs are starting to go slack. There’s nothing he can do about it. 

- from a book lover who also loves the musical dearly lmao/

This isn’t for me, rather it’s for my sister. She has started writing fanfiction this summer and has been posting weekly. She’s a great writer! But she’s kind of losing confidence because her work doesn’t get as many views/likes as she would like?

So I’m wondering if there’s any advice I could pass down to her?

Please and thank you

Here's the unfortunate fact about ao3 anon: you're never going to get as many hits or kudos or comments as you'd like. I've been on ao3 for quite a few years now. I've been in big fandoms and small fandoms, dead fandoms, and new fandoms in their absolute heyday. No matter how much or how little traction my works get it never feels like enough. My favourite works, the ones I'm most proud of and consider my absolute best writing are often the ones that get the least attention, and it's incredibly disheartening sometimes, so I really, really sympathize with your sister. I poured my heart and soul into my Angela Shepard series, and I most of those works don't have a single comment. It sucks, but it doesn't mean my writing is bad, it just means my target audience is, well, me I guess. Try and reassure your sister she isn't doing anything wrong. A lack of engagement doesn't mean her writing is bad, it's just an unfortunate reality of existing in fandom spaces and writing fanfiction.

That said, I do have some tips and tricks (or just info ig) that might help her reach a target audience more effectively:

Make sure she's tagging correctly. If she's new to ao3 she might be making errors such as adding hashtags (something users from wattpad sometimes bring over, which is unnecessary and a glaring sign you don't know what you're doing on the archive.) I'd also make sure she's tagging any romantic ships with a '\' and platonic ones with an '&'. On ao3, conflating the two can alienate an audience very quickly when they think your platonic pairing is supposedly romantic, or everyones favourite relationship is suddenly back to being just friends. It's also increases the chances of your fic being passed over, as people tend to filter out romantic pairings they aren't interested in reading, or platonic tags if they're looking to read romance. That said:

Don't overtag. There's a happy medium when it comes to tagging. You want enough to give adequate warnings about whats in your fic and to hit the main tags people tend to search for (ex: hurt/comfort, angst with a happy ending, modern au, everyone lives, etc). However, if the wall of tags is longer than the description of the fic itself, it can sometimes be a red flag, and might have the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of drawing people in, it might just be the thing that turns people off.

Add a Summary! Tags are great, but they're not the same as a description and a work with no summary is going to be a lot harder to sell than one that has a blurb or an excerpt showing what the fic is about. The happy medium rule applies here too: it's hard to grab someones attention with just one line, so if you go that route make it a memorable one. But a wall of text before opening the fic can make some potential readers scroll right past. Think of the summary as a quick advertisement of your fic meant to entice readers. Catch them with a hook that makes them want to see more! (And for the love of god don't include one of those 'this is my first fic and it's probably not that good but give it a chance plz' notes. No one is going to pity read your story. You might think you're helping yourself but you're not. Believe in yourself and let your writing speak for itself.

Make friends. The best way to guarantee a comment or a kudos on your fics is to make friends within that fandom. Tumblr and discord are great places to find like minded people in the same fandoms, and a community rallying behind you is a great way to build engagement on your works. Often, one or two in depth comments from friends mean more than a million 'great jobs' and it's such a great experience to have people to beta read for you or bounce ideas off of.

Rare pairs means rare readers. I'm a rarepair connoisseur, but the truth of liking characters or pairings that are unpopular is that less people are writing and reading them. it's unfortunate, because there are some absolutely incredible works written for side characters and unconventional romances, but it's the truth. If your sister wants engagement over anything else, she might have to play to the fans a bit and try writing for a more popular pairing or character. To be clear I don't really endorse this! It's always better to write what feels true to you as a writer and not just what people want to see, but i'd be lying if I said I'd never written a fic I knew would have wide reach in a fandom specifically because I really wanted some praise.

Big fandoms means big engagement. The bigger or more popular the fandom, the more engagement your work is going to get. I was in the Young Royals fandom when it was first getting started and a lot of my early fics got a ton of comments. But my favourite story of all time was posted in that fandom more recently and it did not perform nearly as well. More readers means more engagement, it's simply a fact of life. I had to really adjust my hopes and expectation when I started writing for the outsiders because it's an old and small fandom, so it's way harder to get engagement, compared to some other fandoms I've written for in the past. It could just be the fandom(s) your sister is writing for just don't have that many readers in the first place.

I think that's all the tips I can think of off the top of my head! Engagement on ao3 is just something writers just don't really have that much control over. It sucks but it's true, and praise is addictive. Comments on ao3 create the same dopamine release as instagram likes, so the best advice I can give is to not focus on the numbers and focus instead on the joy of creation and sharing your hard work with the world. It's hard but focusing on the numbers is the fastest way to lose the joy that comes with writing fic.

Just out of curiosity, what fandoms is your sister writing for? If you want to drop the links and it's a fandom I'm into I'd love to check some of her stuff out. Either way, wish her the best for me. I'm rooting for her

Awwww thank you! I'm so glad you liked it, that fic is so near and dear to my heart because in another universe it COULD have happened, y'know?

The creativity unfortunately has faltered a bit lately but I hope to have some new works posted soon xx