1) Something old - A blurb from one of the first fics you’ve ever written.
"Brownies, Control, and Prepubescent Zombie Armies" (2011) - Maximum Ride fanfic
There are moments in life when a person has the opportunity to walk away. She can stop, turn, and leave before the explosion, before the tears, before hell breaks loose. Sometimes it’s a small crack of an open door or majestic, blown-out double doors, complete with a heavenly chorus rejoicing, Hallelujah!
68.23% of the time, a person will not seize that opportunity. She will stand and watch events unfolding or deteriorating with only a vague realization that she really should’ve hauled ass outta there, damn the consequences.
I blame it partly on my terrible sense of loyalty, but primarily on curiosity—morbid curiosity. It’s what makes you stop in the middle of the road to watch the aftermath of a car accident. It’s what makes you peek between your fingers when someone gets hacked apart in a horror movie. It’s what makes you go down into the basement even though the sounds you heard down there made chills reverberate through your spine.Â
2) Something new - A snippet from something you’re currently working on, or from the last thing you posted.
"More" (2012) - Derek/Casey, Life With Derek fanfic
Because that is what love is—a melding of opposites, so mixed and joined that the single entity is left unnamable. It’s confusing and there are no words to properly convey the frustration it entails. And that’s what makes it so beautiful. Thousands of languages, billions of words, and none of them are ever enough to explain it, to truly illustrate and illuminate, to tell exactly what love is. It’s never what we expected. It’s more than that—more painful, more perfect, more terrible, more beautiful. It’s always been more.
3) Something borrowed - A scene or section of dialogue from another writer’s story. Maybe something that inspired you or resonated with you. (Credit the writer and link to it if possible, please.)
"The Host" - Stephenie Meye
"Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?"
4) Something blue - C’mon, you know you’ve written a really gut-wrenching bit of angst at some point. Let’s hear the saddest or angstiest thing you’ve got. Alternatively?  Tell us about the last time you described the color blue.Â
"Jericho" - Captain Swan, Once Upon A Time fanfic (spoilers)
Kids learn language by listening to their parents. They learn behavior by observing people.
So when a person is exposed to constant abandonment, it’s only logical to assume that’s all they’d know. That’s all they knew how to do. Because it’s a learned behavior.
But she didn’t want to. Dear sweet Jesus Almighty in Heaven—she. Did. Not. Want. To. She could hear his cries, hear the doctor and nurse muttering, the shuffling of the cloth, her own heartbeat resonating throughout her body. The lights flickered and shorted out, like the whole world was crashing down, and it damn well felt like it was. And the heavy, indefinable ache in her chest ripped even wider. The hole that Neal had managed to fill was torn, ragged and unstable. The painful screams she held back as the doctor walked away with her son—her son—were so much more painful. It was physical, emotional, mental, and maybe even spiritual.
Because it all just hurt.
Everything—every pain she ever experienced, every betrayal, every time she saw a new couple come to the orphanage glaze over her and pick someone else, every time someone sent her back, every time she got that look, every time they walked away from her.
And she could only lie there and hate herself because she hated that. She’d become everything she hated. And she hated it even more when she realized that she couldn’t have done anything different. She couldn’t have… She couldn’t have kept him. She couldn’t have prevented him. She couldn’t have…held him. But not doing it hurt so much that she figured the difference wouldn’t have mattered anyway.Â
5) Tag Others: bsloths - ladymagdalene - swashbucklerswan - atruwriter - ej8302
