…all the way into writing originals!

I’ve been thinking about writing a post like this for a while. And I think it’s finally a good opportunity to connect the thread between two sides of my writing journey. You see, your girl Neutron has been writing originals too! So hi, hello, my (pen) name is @kathrynthornwood, nice to meet you!

I think I have been around long enough now to call myself a fandom old, and that Inuyasha is well established and well loved, and especially that we here often love our specific ships and don’t stray too far from them. But, if you want to see short stories and originals from me, I would really appreciate your follow either to my Tumblr (or even better, a visit to my website!) I blog and I write originals there.

But that also is not why I am writing this post right now. Nah, that is for a far more exciting reason.

Don’t ever believe someone who says that fandom friendships are fleeting. Because @ruddcatha and I met in 2020. Rudd was actually one of my very first friends in fandom and Inuyasha, and is the reason I wrote as much as I did while we were all locked down. We still talk every single day, and took the journey into writing originals together.

But we also realized that we adored gabbing about writing and fandom, and started to organize those chats enough to turn it into a podcast. So I hope if you have a moment, you’ll check out the @writingafflictionpodcast with Kat & Katze. Because our first episode is about our love of fanfiction, our friendship, and why fanfiction is such a special community for writers, whether they decide to try their hand at originals, or live and breathe new life into the beautiful worlds of fandom.

Please check us out! And from the bottom of my heart, to all my friends and fellow fans in Inuyasha, Yuri on Ice, and beyond, thank you for being the type of place that inspires people to write millions of words……or maybe speak to their amazing fandom friend for a 40min podcast.

The Debutante and the Dog: Chapter 9, now live on Ao3!

Hello everyone! @ruddcatha and I are very pleased to bring you the next chapter of The Debutante and the Dog (rated E), a gift for our friend @cannibalsforbreakfast 💖

In this chapter, Kagome contemplates her life post-weddings and post-Inuyasha, even as she still has (some very awkward) interactions with him. But later, when Kagome gets devastating news, will Inuyasha give her the comfort she needs?

First of all, no matter what you’re talking about it probably hasn’t always been like this. Things change constantly. Second of all, there’s a middle ground in life between tearing down the system to the foundation and allowing it to continue unchanged. In fact, that middle ground is where a lot of utilitarian, unglamorous progress happens while those two groups on the extremes are sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

The day to day actions of making the world a better place are boring and they’re often a repetitive slog. Voting, donating, protesting, volunteering, picking up trash, lying down in a government building, boycotting, planting gardens, working, parenting, walking from office to office and asking for things directly. Chipping away at a concrete wall with a spoon.

First, he said, you write the methods. You’ve been doing the methods for months, you know what goes there. You know what questions you’re trying to answer and how you went about answering them.

Now that you’ve done that, write the results. Do your analysis. Take some time to bask in having done that and chew it over.

Next: the introduction. What information do you need to set up the conclusion? Do you need to write the six worst sentences known to man as a draft conclusion so you can go back that up in the introduction? Do that.

Write that conclusion. Tie things up, you’ve done amazing. It’s looking good! Unfortunately. The hardest part is yet to come:

The abstract. An unholy melange of introduction, results, and conclusion. The thing that 90% of readers are going to stop after reading. The ultimate test of your ability to communicate your science. Thank goodness you have all this prep work done and aren’t trying to create it out of nothing! Thank goodness you didn’t try to write it first because it was the first thing on the page!

These three things are different:

* the order of the words on the page

* the order the reader will read the words

* the order you should write the words.

If you try to write the words in the order of the page or the order they are read first, there will be PAIN.

(You should of course think about the other two as you write, but that’s not the same thing.)

One of my first childhood animes got me obsessed over wolves for a loooong time