#spitegarbage

oops didn't think this through

🥑 ⇢ you accidentally killed somebody, which mutual(s) do you text for help?

God literally all of you drive busted-ass Ford Focuses (Foci?) so physically moving the body is an issue. Tentatively @masterqueef99 knows enough about anatomy to help me chop it up efficiently and uhhhhhh @subdee is the only person I know that doesn't drive a Ford Focus. Don't worry about what's in the bag.

🥐 ⇢ name one internet reference that will always make you laugh 

The Moonbase Alpha debacle. I don't care if it's an old meme, one day it will be old enough to be vintage and I'll be ready.

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

Surprisingly not murder-related. Was looking stuff up for Pinion and went down a rabbithole of extremely poorly documented science on highly specific intersex conditions, still never really found any good answers or research aside from personal testimony from the like two people in the world that have the condition and did a Reddit AMA.

(It's caused google to also switch from profiling me as someone with crippling erectile dysfunction from my TNI research to god knows what at this point.)

🦷 ⇢ share some personal wisdom or a life hack you swear on

When I am writing I like to start from the one scene I can see super clearly in my head and then build outwards from that. Makes it easier to build up to things more deliberately. Also I swear by making an outline but I know some maniacs that are only hindered by that because they get too into the weeds so who knows!

🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

"Everything is going to be alright," said Ignis again, leaning down behind the car to retrieve the handgun from the cupholder. "You've been very brave. You're being very brave, Noct --"

He didn't come back up right away. Noctis craned his neck to see, and immediately regretted it as he heard Ignis retch.

TRICK ME INTO WRITING THIS THING AGAIN WHY DON'T YOU I SEE HOW IT IS. This is from a XV/VII crossover AU thing??? Because apparently I just have a fascination with this game I don't even like. I dunno man I just work here.

Not really a motivation thing or anything, just for improvement. Your writing has captivated me, and I felt like it's better to get advice from an author that is reachable than reading a ton of articles online regurgitating the same steps.

Aw, thank you, I'm honoured!

Apologies if this is kind of a mess, I mostly went through stuff I come back to a lot that helps me. Also tumblr seems to have removed the ability to do indented bullets. Fucking great.

In General:

When I'm first starting out writing a story I'm excited about, I usually don't do things in order -- I'll instead pick one scene I can see extremely clearly and am super excited about, one of the things that made me want to write the story to begin with, and then build the entire outline out from there to set it up (what needs to happen to set the scene up exactly how I want it to be? How do I justify that stuff? What would happen afterwards that would add to the scene even more in retrospect?) This not only helps keep the energy going for parts of the story that might not necessarily be fun to plan, but will inherently cause you to start building a story that is either circumstantially or thematically building to something. It can be something as small as a single conversation but it should be the bit that you personally want to see realised most strongly.

On that note, people like when they can see foreshadowing! That's what it's there for! This has been said by other people plenty, but I'll restate it here: the audience potentially being able to piece together your twist after a while is not a failure in writing, it means you put information into a story that allowed them to engage with it and conveyed something that made sense.

I personally sometimes (but not always mostly due to laziness and because I do try to approach shit chronologically so I don't have to double back and do massive rewrites, also due to laziness) like to write big keynote moments of character arcs in full in advance once I have the whole plot more or less laid out. That way, I know what's coming emotionally speaking and can have characters start clearly building up to things, do stuff like plant specific phrases that come back in big ways or are recontextualised later on, and it makes the story feel more cohesive as a whole and helps the scene hit a whole lot harder when you do get to it. Like I said though I'm lazy and I also don't like creating more work for myself if I don't have to, and if by chance the story doesn't shake out the way I thought it would by the time I get to that moment then god is it a pain to rewrite that sort of thing.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Mostly I find it helps keep me focused on where it's going. It's a late stage thing though, I don't start doing this until I'm sure I know how the story will be laid out more or less chapter by chapter, which brings me to:

GO BACK AND CHECK IF YOU HAVE A MIDDLE OF YOUR STORY. ARE YOU SURE? GO BACK AND CHECK AGAIN. This is like the number one pitfall I see basically everywhere across any genre, both with fanfiction and professionally (and in movies always winds up manifesting in reviews as "the movie gets kind of aimless after a while/the third act kinda starts out of nowhere after a really slow part). People have an idea for a strong beginning, the rising action and the big dramatic moment when the stakes are raised, maybe a quiet moment in the middle reflecting on all the tension of the plot and how it's reflecting on the characters, a thing that sets off the end, probably an idea how it ends and how things resolve, et cetera -- and they will forget that at no point did they actually create any connective tissue between their plot development points. Travel! Character beats! The actual events in between big beat A and big beat B, no matter how barebones! Go back and check if you've made any!

As someone that writes a lot of heavily character-driven stuff I'm very biased here, but: in my opinion, if you have good, solid characters, they can carry even the most barebones dogshit story because they are the lenses that the audience is experiencing the world from and through, and whose actions are potentially shaping the course of the story, and of course who the reader is getting attached to. Conversely, even the richest, most lavishly detailed world and story is going to land with a thud if your characters aren't any good and don't have any more to them than making various political developments happen, because at that point you don't have a story with different elements interacting with each other to create events and tension, you have a lore wiki, which is not the same thing as a story. Maybe you could use that for a tabletop RPG, but people aren't necessarily gonna want to read it.

RELATED: JRRT was a linguist and historian first and a writer second. Lore is great and all and can help your world feel like it's a living breathing place, but think about if it's a good detail to include onscreen or not, or if it's just there to "flesh out the world". Stop to consider if this actually has a demonstrable effect on the things happening in front of the reader or not, and if anyone would notice if it were removed outright. Can some things be assumed? What might need to be explained?

Keep an eye on narrative voice versus character voice! If I stripped the dialogue tags from your story, could you still tell who was talking? Does everyone just talk like the narration? Like each other? Like you? Everyone is gonna sound like you at least a tiny bit because you're the one writing it, but at least try to keep an eye on how much you're doing that. It can be pretty boring to just listen to one guy talk the entire time across multiple mouths haha don't look at how long this post is getting shhhhhh

Any story (but especially horror, and especially especially cosmic horror), lives and dies by its suspension of disbelief. The rules don't need to be realistic because it is all made up, and they can be any rules you want, and if you establish them clearly then the audience will buy in as best they can because they want to engage with your story on its own terms (or they SHOULD grumble grumble but that's another discussion and not really something the author can control), but then once you've made them you need to stick to them, or when you do break them it should wind up meaning something.

Suspension of disbelief in horror or fantasy can be trickier, especially when it's something weird and the rules aren't even mechanically sound in their own setting. In that case, the important thing to preserve is emotional stakes the audience can buy into, about how this situation might feel to be in, or if there are any things in real life it might feel similar to. This one's more intuitive than you'd think. Sure, you might not know that the veil of reality is flimsy and all it would take to destroy it all is to get noticed by something much vaster than you could ever imagine; but you probably DO know what it's like to be one missed rent payment from losing everything and realising your safety was never really all that sound. I don't even flinch if someone's head explodes into gore in a movie, but I'll always wince and look away if someone has their fingers crushed or their eye pierced, because even though the violence is lesser I can imagine that happening to me and I don't like it one bit!

Horror can potentially struggle with this pretty badly. Unless you're writing a slasher where the point is to watch some dumb teens bite it, your movie won't actually be scary unless the audience can in some way feel endangered, and they won't be able to do that if what is going on is too disconnected from anything a human could experience. Writers tend to get fixated on making a Really Gross Scary Thing(TM) or Biggest Evilest Threat Evar(TM) and assume their job is done.

There's no one right or wrong way to do something, but be aware that sometimes things tend to come up in stories a lot for a reason. The tools you have are just tools. Complaining a story has tropes in it is like complaining a tree is made of wood.

That said, if you're thinking of your story entirely in terms of which tropes you want to use, it may be time to take a step back and think about what you actually want to accomplish rather than mushing the same paste into the same holes for the 800th time (more on that later).

Dialogue. If it's something you struggle with, remember that chances are you're a person that knows how to talk, and so you inherently know how to create dialogue. The biggest pitfall I see is people overthinking it trying to "Write Dialogue in this Story" rather than just typing an idea the way they know inherently that it would be typed. If you wanna try and capture a much different voice, spend time listening to people -- and I mean really listening. People double back, correct themselves, trail off, change their train of thoughts in the middle, do more or less of these things when they're in a certain emotional state depending on their personality.

Frankly I'd spend time listening to real people anyway. Spend too much time online and characters wind up sounding like Twitter threads, or worst case scenario you wind up with perfectly articulated ideas and Therapy Speak. A character might not have the vocabulary you, someone who has been online for eighty to ninety years (est) would to convey specific ideas, and not everyone is perfectly self-aware about what they're saying. Someone's probably more likely to say "fuck you I had a bad day" than they are to go "gosh i dislike how much your own success reminds me of how my own mother held me to impossibly high standards so i have very high rejection sensitivity which is why i'm lashing out". Or, again, if someone does talk like that make it mean something. It could be a good example of someone either being insincere and going through keywords to shut someone up, or someone that's very socially awkward giving a rehearsed speech, and those are all potentially interesting ways to then take a story.

(Sidenote because I see this come up sometimes: Hate to single out a single genre here, but anime and by extent video games but mostly anime is a bad place to learn to write dialogue from -- if you're listening to a dub, they had to translate stuff from Japanese and then make it fit lip flaps on a screen, and if you're watching subs, not only were the subs translated but anime trends heavily towards melodrama and Japanese people typically do not speak that way.)

You gotta know the rules before you can break 'em! Read books. Actual books I mean, not just fanfic. Broaden your horizons. When you start breaking rules it will be because it's what you want to do.

Personal nitpicks, some fandom specific and some not. I'm aware some of these are basic but also you never know who might need to hear this stuff so:

Hentai is not a good place to learn about writing actual sex. It's a great place to learn about sex that is following pure porn rules, in which case go nuts and godspeed soldier, but unless you want your scene to come off as either unintentionally rapey or full of nonsensical leaps of moon logic when you're trying to write an otherwise somewhat grounded setting, you should probably read actual books meant for actual adults about fucking, or pull from your own experiences if you're able.

* This isn't advice but I want it known at this point I've seen at least three fanfics clearly written by a middle schooler that's never fucked before and honest-to-god genuinely seems to think some degree of omegaverse is how actual sex works. So that'll be interesting to encounter going forward. If you aren't committing to porn rules (there's that "the rules can be anything you want so long as they're internally consistent" bit again!) do research is my point.

If you started your character creation with their outfit and can tell me their star sign, bust measurements, the four shirts plus jacket plus socks plus shoes they're wearing, the kind of weapon they can summon, eye colour, hair colour, skin colour, height and weight, their agility score versus their magic score, and their favourite ice cream flavour, and yet you have one paragraph about "personality", your focus might not be in the right place and you are making an MMO character. That's fine for something you're going to be staring at the back of for 200 hours but maybe not for someone you're going to need to live inside the head of. Start with personality, and you can tailor all that fun back cover dossier stuff around who that person is and how it would inform the way they dress.

Bad child dialogue is my biggest pet peeve personally and I will immediately put a book down when I encounter it lol. A bigger portion of people are around children than you think and will notice if you've never interacted with a kid before. Children are not cavemen and do not talk like them. The gaps in their vocabulary tend to come from them having a limited amount of it and adapting new phrases into the few existing frameworks they have. This carries over to their psychology, by the way.

Specific to cosmic horror: you can't just make a Gross Thing, your horrors need actual motivations. Nobody cares how big of a squid you can invent, and going "uhhh it's so scary I don't have to bother can't describe it" can only work so many times and is not an excuse to at least not try to describe something. How it makes the characters feel, what the experience is like, whatever. Now, you don't ever have to tell the readers directly what the motivations of your old gods are, but you the writer should come up with some to shape their behaviour so the readers can see the inscrutable ghosts of clear patterned actions that almost make sense yet remain just outside human comprehension oooooooooo. Also readers can generally tell when that's missing and all you have is Large Squid Scary doing random gross shit so it's not an excuse to skimp.

Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. We have pronouns. We have context clues. We have sentence structures that convey what is going on to the reader. We have nouns. If you are going to constantly refer to your character as The Brunette it better be hugely massively goddamn significant that her hair is brown or it's gonna become clear real fast that you just ran out of ways to phrase things and it's gonna take people right out of the story. If the only way you can think of to describe your character in an intense emotional scene is "uhhh this is the one with the brown hair remember I hope you didn't forget" then that's code fucking red. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets.

And the two biggest bit of advice I can come up with for people trying to improve their craft that I give out every time:

1 Have a point. Have a clearly identified reason in your mind about what you want to accomplish with this story. This will help you get your thoughts in order when you are stuck, it will help you outline the story if you're not sure where you want it to go next, it will help other people troubleshoot with you if you aren't sure how to start solving a problem, it will help you make decisions about what and what not to include to help it feel complete, and it will help motivate you when you start to lose track of why you even started this project. Saying "well it's a Vampire AU and I want to do Hurt/Comfort with an ambiguous ending and a BAMF!Scrongus with Soft!Cromgle" doesn't tell me a damn thing, either as a reader OR as someone potentially trying to help you whip the thing into shape. That's a bit like asking, "How do I write a Cute yet Cool character?" like bitch I don't know it's your story there are a million ways to write this stuff and yes that is a real question I got asked once.

Instead, have an actual, identifiable goal that is personal to you, what you want to write, and what you have to say. That can be anything from "I have a lot of strong opinions about why gender is, across the breadth of experiences possible with human consciousness, a zero sum game that must be internally and deliberately engaged with before one is then able to determine their own relationship to it" to "oh man i love the idea of Mark from Accounts Receivable one day going apeshit and beating Jake from Auditing half to death with an office chair and the fallout that would generate and maybe also someone FINALLY FINALLY asks him for the first time 'hey dude are you okay do you wanna talk'" to "god it'd be so hot if this guy were bent over a pool table drooling onto the velvet and i am going to do everything in my power to facilitate that somehow". Either way, clear mission statement and goal that isn't just telling me what tags you're slapping on the finished product! If you have that kind of clarity of vision it will come across in your piece and resonate with people because it's a complete thought that the work is able to deliberately showcase, instead of just churning out Content™ that fits certain templates that are popular, even if you like said templates. What do you have to say? Why did this idea stick in your brain so hard you had to write it down and tell the world about it? What parts of it especially did you want to convey so badly? Show us!

2 Writing is vulnerability by proxy. Until we get the technology for brain uploading, you are only going to ever be you in your own head with your own thoughts, experiences, biases, and worldviews. If you think you can write something without exposing a lot of really revealing shit about yourself to an audience that notices it, perish that thought now. Quentin Tarantino and HP Lovecraft weren't slick about it and you won't be either. This is neither a bad thing or a good thing, it just is, and whether it affects the work for better or for worse is honestly dependent upon how you engage with that fact. I will say trying to back away from it generally leads to problems (unexamined prejudices showing up in stories, worldviews that it turns out most people don't share going stated simply as fact rather than being supported by the writing around it). It can also lead to a stronger story, though, if you're willing to engage with it. Engaging honestly with what scares you and why, what you find comforting, uplifting, upsetting, et cetera. All of these require vulnerability, and allowing other people to see that, and it's going to happen with or without your consent because you're the one writing the thing, so you may as well make peace with it and lean in. "But what if it's cringe" too late baby most things are cringe and that shouldn't be your focus. You are fighting a losing battle. We are all cringe. But we are free.

Also how did his throat get slit?

Anyways it's such a great read. The characters feel real and dimensional and they can all be jerks and have problems and it's just an intrinsic and gritty part of being human where you say and act in ways that aren't good instead of it feeling like pasted in facsimile of a person in the narrative. The horror is absolutely superb.

Car Sephiroth is my favorite part and I could literally read a whole novel about a road trip where they all just argue

Thanks for the good stuff and a read that sometimes felt like a headache (in a complementary way)

Same thing it does in canon! Puts you in contact with the Planet and lets it kill anything that is a threat to said Planet... which may or may not include humans depending on what the Planet decides in that moment. They gave it to him in this fic because this is a setting where they not only have possession of said materia, they've got it because Ifalna doesn't exist here so their resources on studying the Ancients are extremely lacking and they don't have any alternate paths to pursue -- ESPECIALLY because there's no Zack either. They just have this one test subject that had a nervous breakdown hard enough to be receptive to Jenova before the brain damage kicked in (in large part also because no Zack, he was there completely alone for years and cracked way way sooner and much more profoundly). They're putting every single egg in this one basket because aside from Sephiroth they kind of don't really have any other avenues of study and Shinra wants results that are otherwise very lacking in this universe.

Tifa slit it in chapter 28. :) Make of that what you will.

"Car Sephiroth is my favorite part and I could literally read a whole novel about a road trip where they all just argue" funny you should mention that... haha yeah it'd be crazy if someone wrote an entire fic around that premise... haha...

Oh geez uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Obvious pick but check out TNI if you follow me, are into VII, and haven't already. It's the thing I'd say I least have the urge to go back and fix (in part because of the length lmao). This had no right to turn out as good as it did considering I started writing it as a 500 word joke about a terrible terrible headcanon I read but them's the breaks I guess, and then people started drawing stuff from it??????? (Hosted largely at @thenumberi.) Insane. Made a lot of friends through it too (you're one of them hi). Copying my synopsis here:

Cloud, now four years out from Meteorfall, struggles to adjust to civilian life given he’s still gene-spliced with an Old God, and begins losing control of his body to a heretofore seemingly unknown entity with inscrutable goals. As it gradually becomes clear that the events of the previous four years aren’t as they seem in more ways than one, things start to go off the rails completely as Cloud winds up enmeshed in conflict between multiple parties: an international initiative studying cosmology and the two doctors leading it; the WRO, who has considered him a Jenova-based liability from day one; interpersonal friction with his newfound family stemming from the residual baggage of everything he went through; and reality itself beginning to deteriorate. It’s slice of life, it’s cosmic horror, it’s a character study, it’s about grown men crying and legacies and grief and trauma and intimacy and autonomy and gender as a microcosm for broader truths about the nature of the self, it’s got angry tearful fistfights, bottoms that haven’t figured out you can take it in turn to service top, Cloud telling everyone his strong and correct opinions about magic and materia and bikes, found family shenanigans, and me talking about garlic for way way way too long. Something for everyone! I wasn’t kidding about any of that by the way, heed the warnings at the top of the chapters because I do NOT pull punches and we get into some heavy shit. Go hard or go home.

I shat Replacements out in six hours day-of and it's the only time in my life I've ever had something as a very clear vision in my head and realised it more or less exactly how I wanted without stumbling at any point. (I guess New Traditions was like that also but that feels like cheating a bit since I literally had to write that in an hour on paper for a contest and then was able to clean it up a little bit when I typed the thing up.) A story about how Cloud figures out where Hojo was getting his backup organs from, and the grieving process.

Cloud goes digging in Nibelheim and finds more than he was ready to.

Another thing I kind of vomited out all at once. I fucking love writing Yuffiefic and she is criminally underutilised by the fandom, as the only member of Avalanche that I think would actually have a social life outside of them. Also it was kind of a fun way to exorcise some of my own feelings about some cultural obligations I never like being dragged to (and feel guilty about hating) and why I hate participating them in the first place. Plus this one has like TNI has GORGEOUS ARTWORK THANK YOU TOFU

Also I put Halloween in the summer and added red bean buns and fireworks to it, fuck the police.

The Number I

Chapter 66: I am.

Here we are at the very last chapter (aside from the epilogue). I'll be posting that on the sixth anniversary of this fic (June 15th). Look forward to it! That said, I'm not putting author's notes on the epilogue's intro, so here we go one last time.

Thank you to: @fury-brand@terror-billie@tofucasserole@denebolaleo-ffwriter@voidrotted@shinjikari@cateringisalie@kaijudragon@farfromdaylight@kaasen@subdee@themateriodictable @auncyen Cat

and anyone else I've sought help from over the years that I've dragged into beta'ing. Thank you to @varethinsilico, @jenovacomplete, @waifujuju, @defiantinsect, @rosemochi, @death-rebirth-senshi, @yuquiitas, @spectroscopes, and frankly too many people to count for their emotional support.

Lastly, thank you, for reading. If I was writing this just for me, I wouldn't have written it out at all because I already know how the story goes; the fact that other people wanted to see this dumb pee joke that rapidly got so badly out of hand has been what's kept me going through all these years for the entirety of this massive undertaking. I have a couple short story oneshot side pieces planned for this universe for fun, but this was always intended as a complete story with a specific outline and endpoint since June of 2017 when I posted the chapter, and after 66 chapters and an epilogue and 6 versions of the outline, and not only is it finally over, but the act of ending it is something I never thought I'd have the privilege and burden of doing. Thank you again for being here.

Cloud hallucinates. Voices sometimes, or music – it’s hard to tell. It’s just another consequence of Jenova’s encroaching presence in his DNA, and four years after Meteorfall everyone’s more or less adapted to it and other oddities associated with being not quite human. Mostly.

The Number I

Chapter 64: The Number I

Thank you to @fury-brand, @tofucasserole, and @terror-billie for making this chapter possible.

Cloud hallucinates. Voices sometimes, or music – it’s hard to tell. It’s just another consequence of Jenova’s encroaching presence in his DNA, and four years after Meteorfall everyone’s more or less adapted to it and other oddities associated with being not quite human. Mostly.

What begins as a chance encounter with something that isn’t Jenova soon leads to a fight for survival that can no longer be contained in the spaces between numbers, as Cloud tries to keep himself together and finally put his past behind him.