Just a Tired Writer

[image id: On the left, a drawing of a nondescript character smiling and throwing up peace signs, labelled "First fanart of a character you liked". On the right, the same character is seated in an elaborate dress, with feathered wings, in front of a birdcage covered in sparkle. This drawing is labelled "30th fanart of the character. This is how you know you're cooked". /end id]

And of course the second part of the tragedy, which is: which quadrant did you think you were in vs. which one you were really in

This feels like a second puberty of the mind I swear

Real thing that changed how i write: I started asking "what does this character think is wrong with them" and separately "what is actually wrong with them." Those two things are almost never the same. She thinks she's too much. She's actually terrified of being too little. He thinks he's bad at commitment. He's actually just never met someone he trusted enough. The gap between their diagnosis of themselves and the real thing, that's your character arc right there. you don't have to explain it. just write both.

If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules

Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u

going to start calling it ethical monogamy. catch me giving a fuck

"i mean yeah it's fine that you're in a monogamous relationship, man, but, like, you're letting her have friends, right? she can go out and you won't freak out? her texts are private? she doesn't just say 'alright sure' every time you want to have sex? you interact with her friends and family without trying to make her look good? i just wanna make sure this monogamy is ethical"

the other week i was talking to a girl and she told me that her boyfriend made her cut off one of her friends (or only see him at group settings) because he was jealous. and in the meantime that man got shot and died. and she missed out on her last two years with him. and i started seeing fucking red

I kept forgetting my nighttime antidepressant so I set an alarm where the sound was a recording of me saying "HEY. TAKE YOUR FUCKING PILL" because I thought it would be funny. It was funny about three times, and then it started making me mad and I'd dismiss it right away to make it stop. So I handed my phone to my partner, who made another recording sweetly saying "Okay Shira, it's time to take your medication" and now I don't get mad anymore and I take my pill. The "compassion over punishment" camp has gotta get something wrong one of these days

being a fic writer can be hard because sometimes you’ll get a random scene in your head and be like “oh this is neat! can i get some context?” and the characters go “lol no, figure it out” and so you need to shake your own brain like it’s a piggy bank like come on, there’s gotta be some more quarters in here . . .

Signed, the creator of the Gravity Falls Transcendence AU, which at one point started taking over the canon GF tag. Everyone in the community collectively understood and stopped maintagging the second it was even questionable. It's still easy to find us, we have literally lost nothing by not maintagging. Peace and love on planet earth

You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.

Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?