Lurking 'round the edges

1. Slow down at emotionally important moments.

Big emotions need space to land. If a scene feels rushed, pause the plot briefly to show how the moment affects the character.

2. Add reactions, not explanations.

Instead of explaining what a character feels, show it through physical responses, hesitation, or small actions that reveal emotion naturally.

3. Ground every scene in the senses.

If a scene feels thin, add one or two sensory details—sound, texture, smell, or temperature—to make the moment feel lived-in.

4. Let thoughts interrupt action.

A line of internal thought can deepen a scene without slowing it too much. Thoughts show stakes, fear, longing, or conflict beneath the action.

5. Expand consequences, not events.

You don’t need more things to happen—you need to show what matters. Focus on how events change relationships, decisions, or self-perception.

6. Strengthen setting where emotion peaks.

The environment should echo or contrast the emotion of the scene. Setting is not decoration—it’s emotional reinforcement.

7. Add specific details instead of general ones.

Underwriting often relies on vague language. Swap “they argued” for one sharp line of dialogue or a specific breaking point.

8. Let dialogue breathe.

Short dialogue exchanges without pauses can feel flat. Add beats—silence, gestures, interruptions—to give the conversation weight.

9. Show transitions between scenes.

If scenes jump too quickly, readers feel disoriented. A brief transition helps establish time, mood, and emotional continuity.

10. Clarify stakes early in the scene.

If readers don’t know what can be lost, scenes feel empty. Make sure the character wants something specific and fears losing it.

11. Use the “what are they feeling right now?” check.

After each major beat, ask what emotion is dominant in that moment. If it’s missing on the page, the scene is likely underwritten.

12. Expand scenes that feel “too clean.”

That post is long gone from my dash, but I do remember it mentioning lettuce and tomatoes and corn, and me thinking that honestly those would NOT be my picks for a survival garden. Like, I want to be clear, I grow those things, and those are good things to grow! But lettuce produces almost no calories and relatively few nutrients. Corn...corn has caveats. First, it has to be planted in large blocks in order to be pollinated, because it's wind pollinated. You can't just plant a row or two. Also, if it's sweet corn, it's very highly perishable, and if it's a dry corn, like a dent corn meant for flour, it requires processing. More on that later. And tomatoes kinda combine the above problems--large, not a ton of calories, and highly perishable, PLUS they take a bit of skill to get good yields (source: me. My tomato plants always suck ass.)

I think everyone's veggie picks are going to vary wildly based on their eating habits and growing conditions. But when I think about survival gardening, I think about calories per area. That is, in a given area, with a realistic yield, how many calories you can expect to get out of a crop. Because in a survival situation, what you need more than anything is calories. Nutrients matter, but I'll be honest, if you're really suddenly eating mostly unprocessed plant foods, along with what weeds you can forage (which is quite a lot where I am), you might be doing better nutritionally than pizza and tacos. And when it comes to calories per acre, potatoes and sweet potatoes (which are not actually related botanically) are basically the undisputed kings in temperate climates.

There are a bunch of other things along those lines that I would choose to grow--beets, turnips, carrots, onions, and things less known now like skirret and salsify are the calorie-dense vegetables that my European ancestors ate before the Columbian Exchange. Everyone once again say thank you to Precolombian agronomists and farmers for potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, squash... Or there's sunchokes, which take a little getting used to in the kitchen, but in most places they absolutely cannot be beaten for plant it and forget about it perennial food.

If you do have more space, the dry corn really is a good idea, but you need some means to grind it or nixtamalize it, and that and getting it off the cob, etc., are going to take time and energy. Another crop that takes a lot of space but has a great yield of calories and easy processing is winter squash, like pumpkins. The big advantage of those is that if you pick the right varieties, these will store for months, in their original form, if you just put them someplace cool but not freezing. You can have a hubbard squash in the garage until March and then cut it up and have food in half an hour. Also, as we all know from all the adorable zoo videos, a whole lot of animals will eat squash, including chickens.

Maybe He's Born With It (Maybe It's GlaxosEpsilonYor)

Author: Punk Fandom: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series Pairing: Kirk & Spock friendship Rating: Teen Content notes: No standard notes apply.

Size: 1,600 words

Tags: Bonding in the Bathroom Over Childhood Trauma, Spock Wears Eye Shadow, Jim's in Briefs, The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship, To Boldly Go (Obligatory Toilet Joke)

Me at 17: “god I can’t wait to go home and read fanfic”

I don’t care if your comment is coherent. I know what you mean and i love you

I don’t care if you ramble. I read every word and i love you

I don’t care if you leave a comment on a fic from four years ago or leave comments/kudos on like ten of my fics in one go. This isn’t IG, pls stalk my AO3. I love you

I don’t care if you mention the same thing in your comment that four other people have already mentioned. It’s actually really useful to know what resonated with people and I love everyone who takes the time to tell me they liked a particular turn of phrase

I don’t mind if your comment is super long or just a couple of sentences, i love them all

By some miracle, the doctor explains, they escaped with only minor injuries. Some burns, a few scratches and “several small wounds. We’re not sure what caused them.”

“Wounds?”

“Small holes in your ear lobes. Possibly they were old wounds and unrelated to the accident, but either way, our doctors were able to heal them for you. There’s not even any scarring.”

“Er, not exactly.  It can be redone. though it’s not gonna be fun.  But my people do that to ourselves on purpose.  It’s self-ornamental…  I don’t know the word.  We decorate ourselves with small stones and bits of shaped metal or plastic.”

“Oh!!  I’m sorry, that’s a fairly rare behavior among sapients.  Why, if I may ask?”

“uh.  It…  Looks cool?  I guess?”

As you might imagine, my inboxes have been flooded over the last few days.  My fic represents, for a lot of people, either their start in Avengers fandom, or the safe place they retreat to when the angst and infighting and shipwars got too intense.  Which I get, and I appreciate, and I’m so glad if my old fics can give people a little happiness, even after all this time.

But there’s a thread I keep picking up in comments, that kind of worries me.

That things that happened in the MCU have taken the fandom away from them.  That the way things happened in Endgame have left people distraught, or angry, or just grieving.  And a lot of people have worried that they’ve ‘lost’ these characters.

And look.

Look.

I say this as a fandom old.  I say this as someone who reads comics.  Who came from the Trek fandom.  Who’s lived through bad movie adaptations and subpar ghostwriters and writing staff changes that have destroyed tv shows before they had a chance to really fly.

Don’t let canon take anything away from you.

You can be disappointed in a thing.  You can have your heart broken by a writer.  You can hope against hope that something that means the world to you will be ‘true,’ but don’t let a corporation take your heroes away from you.

Every one of us has to pick and choose what we keep and what we leave behind.  But every single version of Captain America has been fanfiction since Jack Kirby and Joe Simon put their pens down.  He’s owned by a corporation, and they can decide what’s on screen, who gets paid to write him, who gets the big platform.  They get to decide canon.

But canon is meaningless.

Canon is a way to win an argument in a bar or in a schoolyard.  It’s knowing publication dates and issue numbers and who wrote what arc and when the reboots happened.  It exists.

But when I think of Hawkeye, canon is only part of the picture.  I do think of Matt Fraction’s run on the comics.  I do think of those early years, sneaking my brother’s issues of West Coast Avengers.  I think of the weird, wild, off beat run of Secret Avengers.  But I also think of @dr-kara’s art of him.  I think of fanfic long since deleted, that introduced me to the fandom tropes of Clint living in the vents.  I think of the Tumblr posts, diving deep into the psychology of trauma, into his place as the most human and the most pointless of the original six, into a thousand stupid memes.  Caw-caw, motherfucker.  I think of the comments I got, telling me he was OOC.  I think of the Hawkeye cosplayers I’ve met, including the one guy who was in full gear at Star Wars Celebration in Florida.  I asked him why, and he shrugged and said, ‘Clint would’ve.’  I agree with him.  

I think of the first time a friend put a bow in my hands, and showed me how to shoot, wobbly and uneven, at a straw target all the way across the yard.

I think of the bruises that dotted my arms afterwards.

So canon can add new things.  Take bits away.  Make me think.  Make me hurt.

But nothing canon does will ever cause him to be different, not on any fundamental level.  Clint Barton started forming in my head when I was eight years old.  He belongs to Marvel, but the version I carry with me has a lot more sources than that.

Guys, this is a long way of saying: find your own version of the character.  Find what you need in a fandom.  And think of canon like that one fic that has a million kudos on AO3 and you just. Don’t.  Know.  Why.  That one fic, that everyone talks about, that you just can’t stand.

If canon doesn’t work for you, then discard it.  And move on.

But don’t let a corporation take a character you love away from you.