in the quiet hours

i love making friends in fandom, i love playing with our toys together, i love coming up with increasingly niche aus, i love lifting strangers up, i love motivating people to create, i love watching someone get excited over an idea and immediately running with it, i love yelling in tags together, i love seeing someone gain confidence in their writing/art because people were kind to them <33

Let people misunderstand you, let people miss you, let people be wrong about you. Your peace is not dependent on their accuracy.

The most interesting question you can ask about any character is not what do they want. it's what do they believe they deserve. because those two things are almost never the same and the gap between them is where your entire story lives. a person can want love completely and believe they don't deserve it and that belief will destroy every good thing that comes toward them in ways they won't even notice they're doing. write the gap. the gap is the character.

Fandom needs to go back to it’s roots of shipping without any expectation of canon agreement, shipping characters that have never even met, shipping characters from entirely different properties that came out decades apart, shipping just for fun, and generally speaking mostly not bothering the creators about it. Put fandom back in the shadows, being profitable has only made everything worse as grifters saw easy marks and forcing creators to play pattycake with fandom has led to so much open resentment.

when youre stressed about your current wip, start a new one! now you can be stressed about two wips instead!

There's gratitude in not ending up with what you thought you wanted.

one genre of fanfiction that seems to have mostly disappeared since i became an adult is shenanigans-type fics. like not exactly crack but just "the gang goes to 7-11" type, extremely low-stakes plot stories. the beach episodes of fanfiction. i just feel like i don't see those around so much anymore. whered they go. i miss them :(

The writer pipeline is: (1) i have an idea (2) i am the only person who has ever had this idea (3) i google the idea (4) seventeen people have already written this idea (5) mine is different though (6) is mine different though (7) mine is different because of the FEELING (8) i cannot explain the feeling (9) i write it anyway (10) it comes out completely different from the idea (11) the new thing is better (12) i have a new idea. we begin again. this is the whole job.