#trix chatters

It's officially my birthday in my timezone! This time last year, I was gushing on the server @kintatsujo made for our circle of mutual friends about the best/most well-thought-out part of my Star Trek AU, now dubbed Galactic Warp, after its most important advancement. In a few weeks, it will be the one-year anniversary of my joining the Trek server where I would make all the friends I have in that fandom (particularly gonna shout out @roguetelepaths, who you may have noticed I've been reblogging a lot of posts from of late).

A lot has happened over the past year on that front, if I'll be quite honest. I've posted eight! fanfics for DS9 (holy shit), bringing my number of works on AO3 up into the double-digits and totalling about 140 thousand words! And there are many more to come, I assure you—the plot bunnies living in my brain evolved into tribbles and started churning out ideas for this fandom and these characters, as if making up for lost time.

I hit a lot of milestones this year (remembers the name of the first Trekfic I posted and laughs). Let's see if I can remember them all! :D

I discovered I can write Sci-fi, actually! Honestly I'm looking back at my confident assurance of the exact opposite of this and laughing, because I have proven that claim false in several ways over the past year. (See my Threshold fics for the most obvious example). But like. Also. The backdrop of one of my original series is kind of a Sci-fi setting, so I've been doing this for a while. Yeah, Kinta, laugh it up, you were right and I was very silly.

I can write Star Trek fanfics, actually, and if I mess up on anything, nobody's gonna care! I was so scared I'd embarrass myself in front of a fandom I found very intimidating, but so far, everyone's been so welcoming and people like what I've put out there! They really like it! I'm honestly humbled and grateful for all my lovely readers who have said such nice things to me in fic comments, and in private on Discord. You're all wonderful! But critically, I did make a mistake, and nobody gave a single, solitary shit. The story's an AU anyway, and people have been enjoying it, and I was worried for eleven years over nothing. You won't believe what that does for a lady's confidence.

I've learned some stuff about my own personal writing process, which is a big step forward! I've been taking in writing advice for as long as I've been fully online. I've listened to writer after writer tell me how they work, how they do things, and I've tried plenty of it myself, but to no avail. Earlier this year, I ran out of words to paste into 4TheWords, a website I'd joined several years ago because I liked its premise (turning writing into a game, where you could defeat monsters with words you wrote). I hadn't written on it live before, due to copy/paste issues I was able to resolve (the font in the site editor is different to the font I use on my computer when writing offline), but I actually started doing it because there is a particular group of enemies that are specifically time-based (all enemies have a time limit in which you must defeat them, but these guys set a timer within which you must keep typing), and I thought I could use that as freewriting sessions. Freewriting was something I'd been sure would work for me if I needed to get unstuck, and I'd actually noticed I could untangle issues I had by talking about them with friends in private, often without them even being around to help. So I tried it. And wonder of wonders! I got unstuck! On multiple stories! Just by rambling about them on a timer! And then I started writing words to defeat other enemies on the site live, and wait. How many words did I write this week? On this day? It's been a real game-changer, particularly as my edits count as more words, which impresses the fundamental truth that every word you write matters, even the ones you delete. Even the ones you edit away because the sentence didn't feel right. Even the passages that ultimately don't work. It all matters, and it all helps. And if I get stuck again, there's always the endurance monsters to help me out! About half of the stuff I've posted was shared in the last three months. And it's all thanks to 4TW. If you think this sounds cool, look them up! They're good eggs and don't support generative AI in creative writing. :)

I've also achieved a few writing firsts as a result of that last point!

This probably doesn't come as a surprise to my writer friends, but I've fully accepted the fact that the first thing I need to do as a writer is write. I have heard that a thousand times before, and I knew it was true on some level, but I would always let my anxiety and perfectionism get the better of me, and overthink myself to a standstill. With the method I've been employing on 4TW, I've had to press forward if I want to beat the clock, which has pushed my ADHD brain into doing what I want it to (part of why 4TW works for me is that it sets little deadlines outside myself. I cannot set my own deadlines, I know the person who drew up that schedule and she's too easily distracted and also likes to have fun too much). With even the low-stakes pressure of beat this guy before time runs out, I've been able to at least get started, and once I've picked up a little momentum, I get excited about my stories again, and we can have days where I write over 6000 words in twelve hours, because I don't want to stop!

I've stopped trying to force my chapters to be a certain length. I let each one be as long as it needs to be, and if that's a couple thousand words longer than the last one, fine! It achieved it's purpose for the story, and I'm not going to cut stuff when it was all important! Besides, I've noticed that each story finds its rhythm if I give it the space it needs, and the chapters end up being close to the same length anyways.

I've been getting bolder and bolder about the stories I write or consider writing! Too often in the past, I've been unsure about whether an idea will work for my audience, but the more times I've let myself be weird on main, and nobody has come out of the woodwork to yell at me for it, the easier it's been to be that little bit more wild with my ideas. And having friends to babble to helps with that too, people who tell me to go for it are super important and I appreciate every one of them!

I've actually written stories inspired by prompts! I'd never really done this before. Being prompted by a post is one thing (love ya, Threshold AU), but actually doing prompts for a challenge? That was always difficult for me. I'd always second-guess myself if I came up with any ideas for a particular prompt set, and then procrastinate on trying for years. But this year, I participated in Dominion Week, and although I've only posted four out of the seven prompt fills, I do have ideas for the other three days and will write them when the tribbles are done filling in any gaps they think should be patched in the AUs said prompt fills are relevant to. :D

Related to the above, I wrote oneshots! That stayed oneshots! And one of them stands completely on its own! That. That has never happened before. I've said several times on this blog that I'm not wired for short stories. I wrote my mother a story for her birthday and it was a backstory event from my Ylonaverse because I couldn't think of an idea that could stand on its own. And then Dominion Week happened, and I started two series of single-chapter stories, and wrote a oneshot that was a thought experiment and won't be a part of any of my currently existing AUs, and I'm still mind-blown that that even happened.

It has been a good writing year for me, in other words, despite its ups and downs.

Oh, and I also have had the capacity to Braille up my stories for a year now, and although I'm a perfectionist about this and want the Braille versions to be just right, because I intend to podfic them, I'm still very glad I can Braille things up at all.

I hope the author didn't turn out to be a bad person. The last time I brought up an author I'd been reading for years and enjoying the works of since 2010-ish, I found out something really dark about their history, and it wasn't the first time that had happened either. It seems about half the authors of speculative fiction are fucked-up in some way.

But this book was like, a middle-grade Sci-fi novel that I suppose was a coming-of-age/finding-your-own-identity/being-comfortable-in-your-own-skin sort of story, and I don't remember all the details.

But basically it's about a kid who finds out he's second generation alien. His parents and a bunch of others crashlanded in this town in the US (it's always the US that the cool shit happens to) and some of the aliens died in the accident, and some of the townspeople died in this accident. But the aliens had this technology/bioscience stuff that meant they could take DNA from humans and use it to disguise themselves as humans. (In hindsight this sounds weird and possibly questionable but also I didn't know the possible connotations back then and I'm not done.) The alien parents also used this science on their kids when they had them, so they'd not be found out or whatever, but some plot reason I can't remember means they have to alter the injections so the kids slowly turn back into their true alien forms. This means they can no longer go to school and stuff, and there's this normal non-alien girl the MC is interested in, but now he's finding out he's not human and this is upsetting obviously. The parents are good, they just feel super guilty for killing so many people/losing their shipmates and stuff. I don't remember all the details.

What I do remember is that the MC finds out his friend who he thought was dead actually isn't, and was the first kid who had to be reverse-disguised, so he gets to see what he'll look like when the process is over, and these aliens are gorgeous okay. They're described as having skin the colour of peach marble and being taller/more muscular than humans and having hair that grows from their shoulders as well as their heads and that shimmers like it's made of diamond. And they have blue or green eyes. God, the more I write the more worried I get that there's a creepy backstory about this book.

But long story short, kid nearly runs into the elderly parent of his genetic donor, freaks out, injects himself with the dna one of his friends uses, and his body freaks out and he almost dies. He wakes up to find that he's had to resume alien form completely rather than gradually, and also his girlfriend who he was keeping this secret from now knows the truth (something something she had to bring him to someone who could help or something, again, details, can't remember).

And at the end of the book there's this whole thing where the aliens send a diplomatic rep to the White House, and it's MC kid, and he's untangled his identity crisis, and the last words in the book stayed with me forever.

"I know exactly who I am. My name is Jason Jonathan Miller, and I am human."

And I can't find this book on Google and I don't know where else to turn. And I'm scared this has like racist routes or some shit but it was a lovely story to me at the time with a simple poignant message and I want to at least find it.

Just tried to watch an episode of DBZ on the website I found to watch free anime on and the player seems to be inaccessible. Certainly pressing Enter and Space on the buttons failed to do anything.

I really miss Watch Cartoons Online. I could view so many things on there and the Australian government were assholes for blocking it. It’s not harming anyone and most of what I was watching on there was stuff I couldn’t easily get access to anywhere else, like DBZ or Yu Yu Hakusho, or older series of Pokémon, or Digimon Adventure, or other older anime I’d heard about. Hell, most anime aren’t even on free-to-air or cable TV down here so where the hell else was I supposed to get that content from?

Next year I’ll have to change all my profiles and About sections to reflect the fact that I’m not in my twenties any more.