#writer thoughts

Happy STS!

Kit's is boring. He'd like to pretend it never happened.

Alex is on the other end of the spectrum- he's very used to being made an elaborate fuss of on his special day. Most years, in fact, he's had two seperate birthday parties. There's the very lovely PG one with his family, with cake and candles and nicely-wrapped presents. Then, often on another day for plausible deniability (and to fall on a weekend for the hangover's sake), there's the party with his friends, where people's idea of a good present could be anything from an elaborately-wrapped sex toy to a half-smoked joint shoved into his hand because he's not being fun enough yet. In both events he is the absolute epicentre of everyone's attention.

I revisited this fan fic and I realised I had a massive plot hole in one chapter. But it literally only took like three sentences to fix it.

Come here.

You don't have to follow the rules of our natural world in fantasy writing.

Heal someone's wound with a dragon scale wrapped in a leaf.

Let crops grow at whatever pace you want. Also, make a weird fruit. Mash a couple together. Make it taste like beef stew.

And in science fiction, you only have to take some sort of logic to start with, but you can manipulate it however you like, as long as you have a crumb to hold onto.

Make that super suit out of an unknown quantity of star matter refined into thread. Yeah it's strong as hell and sparkles in the moonlight.

Have phones that fold into the size of a quarter and fit in your pocket.

Or, like, mess with weather patterns. Make the seasons change. Make areas of the world entirely different climates.

Get weird.

How I started my first book at 13 and published it at 22. How I became a full time writer at 23, and haven't stopped since, published 2 more books and now still write full time and still write books.

I remember 15 year old me being told I would never be a writer, that the career was a silly idea, how I even gave up hope of it for years but still carried on in my free time.

And how now, half a lifetime later I spend my days writing.

On hard days where the writing is intense, the topics very corporate and delicate, and my brain is fried. It reminds me how grateful I am to be here.

Some of my depart from the MCU fandom (I was never really a DC fan) is just in general a superhero movie fatigue at this point and how formula based the movies are now. But also it comes from some of my own interactions with some fans on my own fanfics that soured me a bit to the enjoyment of the fandom, but I think I could have put it aside if I wasn't also at that point just done with the entire franchise.

Because for me personally the entire MCU had been built around Iron Man and Tony Stark. He was the superhero that launched the entire MCU and most, if not all, superheros that came after him interacted with him or were influenced by him in some way (positively or negatively). So when he died in Endgame, that was kinda it for me. And there have been only two Marvel movies that I've seen since watching Endgame in the theaters, No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness, and at this point I have no interest in seeing anything else.

All these movies that are coming out now are catered to an audience that I have never been a part of, comic book fans, and I love that for them. I love seeing their reactions to these movies and pointing to the comic books that are being referenced and giving their opinions, both negative and positive, about the movie but I'm not that fan. I didn't read comic books as a kid, I did watch the old X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons but it didn't impact my life like it has for some other fans. So for me, my introduction into these characters was from the movies and the first superhero that I connected with and followed his journey throughout the movies was Tony Stark.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark was my superhero. He was the one that I got excited to see on the screen or get referenced in the other movies and read a lot of fanfics about. So when he died I couldn't even read fix-it fics about it, I grieved that character like I would loosing a long-term friend, I bailed my eyes out in the theater at his death and after that I was done with the MCU.