Geek out with me

This is consistently the case. Creators tend to do their best work when they are in a healthy place and receiving proper treatment and not being self destructive in their efforts to cope. Go figure.

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

I just knocked out 8.5k words in one single day for a chapter update because of one reader leaving one of the most absurdly endearing comments I’ve ever gotten. That is unheard of levels of productivity for me.

The post blew up more than I thought it would, and a lot of people that reblog it with tags or comments are in agreement and it’s been lovely seeing everyone sharing love for their commenters and talking about the fics they’re proud of and inspiration boosts they’ve gotten.

But there’s also a percentage of people that still agree with the premise but aren’t having as much luck getting any engagement on their fics. And brother, that’s the most demoralising thing in the world - and we all know that intimately.

A few examples without calling anybody out:

So maybe I can encourage people to use the post as a bit of a Batsignal? If you’re gonna reblog anyway - whether your fic is brimming with comments or in need of a little love - BOAST. Self-plug. If the post keeps making the rounds - link your fic in the reblog chain and let other people link theirs reblogging from you. Let’s pass each others’ fics around because somebody might see your summary or a ship or just be intrigued by the title and in need of something to read on a commute and maybe it sends some traffic your way. Can’t hurt right?

One of those examples is right: you can’t make people be interested, but you can give a larger number of the people the opportunity to be interested.

I know it’s kinda awkward to put yourself out there and “beg” people to read your fic. But fuck it, we ball. We all know it sucks to pour your heart into something and feel like nobody’s seeing it or caring. Time to pay it forward. If you’re riding a comment high, maybe throw a little of your inspiration into dropping a comment on the next fic linked from your reblog.

We’re only gonna have a community if we build one.

I was going to leave it here and hope people feel welcome to post links to their fics or even just their Ao3 in general. But I suppose I need to put my money where my mouth is even though I’m embarrassed to draw attention to my less popular fics 😅 so I guess I’ll go first:

Jason Grace’s Anti-Bullying Policy