#hawksflatass thoughts

I had a situation where someone began to exhibit unhealthy dependence. It’s resolved now, but it’s worth highlighting for anyone who might be feeling “off” around someone and can’t quite articulate why.

To start: I am fucking busy. From five a.m. to midnight. Like Cyrus from Trailer Park Boys: “Fuck off, I got work to do.”

This isn’t new. It’s been this way for months.

People who’ve asked for beta reads know this. People I collaborate with know this. People in my servers know this. The person I’m describing knew this.

It’s not a secret. I’m extremely open about it.

And if I’m not busy, I’m dealing with a chronic pain attack. Cluster headaches, specifically. These are no joke. They’re one of the most painful conditions known to medical science and are poorly understood. Seriously, after spending the day in the ER at 14, a doctor burst into the room, plopped his ass unceremoniously onto a rolling stool, and said, “Congratulations, you have cluster headaches, or as we like to call them, suicide headaches. Meet your new best friend!” My life has been an escalating grab bag of rescue meds ever since. I’d rather have a migraine ad infinitum than another month-long cluster.

But throughout all this goddamn busyness, this person would message me snippets, world-building notes, lore, ideas, etc. Stuff I genuinely enjoyed seeing, but, ya know, I’m busy. And sometimes, not wanting to leave them unread forever because I cared about them, I’d skim and give them what scraps of energy I had left. Sometimes, that meant a simple “aww, cute!” or something not fully attuned.

Apparently, that meant I was “distant.” “Walled off.” “No longer warm like I used to be.” “No longer interested.” Surely, I must be rejecting them, right? Because the reality—that I was simply, predictably fucking busy—wasn’t sufficient.

And just to highlight the hypocrisy: this same person started bulldozing me in conversations, immediately pivoting to themselves the second I shared a win and had the unmitigated audacity to say “same tho” when I brought it up.

This, dear reader, is unhealthy dependence. And if you are finding yourself in a similar situation, heed the warning: It can become co-dependence if you let them pull you into a caretaker role. But it doesn’t have to cross over to that if you have firm boundaries.

And yes, sometimes that’s easier said than done. No good person wants to know their friend is hurting.

I struggled to be firm until far later than I should have. I avoided the caretaker role, but I was still too permissive.

If you find yourself in this situation, the best thing you can do is reiterate your boundaries. Be firm, not harsh.

In my situation, what I should have said was:

“I hear that my perceived distance is impacting you. As we discussed earlier, I have a very full schedule. I am not rejecting you, but I do not have the time right now to give you my full attention.”

Do not apologize here. You’re not doing anything wrong by living your life without orbiting someone else. (I personally am still working on this.)

We are all influenced by what we know and what media we consume. This is a fact. Inevitably, we will be inspired by an idea that we encountered in our daily life. We might not even remember it.

I myself pulled a line from Futurama that is pervasive in my every day vernacular for Azure Down: 'fired, out of a canon, into the sun.'

This doesn't mean I deliberately ripped off Groening. But this phrase is so natural to me that I included it without thought until someone said, "Hey! Futurama!"

But I've seen some weirdness first hand about whole ass concepts.

For example, I've had one writer adamantly accuse another of stealing from them in my DMs. Author A had written a story about an artist FL, and a different story with a drug addict ML. Author B wrote a story where FL is an art student and ML smoked a cigarette.

Christopher Booker also brings us the concept of the "Seven Basic Plots" which all stories follow in some fashion. While the story around those plots will vary, the core of the story has already been told.

Claiming ownership of a career concept is ludicrous. No one owns the idea of 'artist', and there are thousands of art student insert stories in AO3. Then to compare a single cigarette to a harder substance addiction is just a major leap that minimizes the experience of addicts. To take it a step further, this wasn't an original concept - there are plenty of stories where that exact ML is an addict of some kind.

By the logic of idea ownership, this would make Hunger Games a rip off of 1984.

There's obviously limitations to this. Robert van Winkle and Under Pressure is an example. You can't take Halo, replace Master Chief with Master Chef, and sell it. You can't copy someone's fic, change one thing, and call it yours. That's not how creative commons works.

But fandom writing isn't the same as copy written media. The whole point of fandom is to share. To have fun in low stakes environments, inspire each other, and explore our writing and world building abilities and concepts without pressure, deadlines, or expectations that can be the death of creativity many published authors experience.

If you are directly inspired, yes, call that out. Credit your collaborators. All that good shit.