Vixenscratch

If you have rules saying genAI use has to be tagged, for the love of creatives everywhere, please, I beg you, make that rule apply to supplemental content as well.

I was actually enjoying this story but the illustrations added in the A/N went from “hmm is this really human-made” to “yeah no I’m pretty sure this is generated slop” in the space of a few chapters.

- Medicine (particularly emergency medicine)

- Psychiatry

- Crash Investigation

Bonus: (not profession, but very much wanted, why do I do this to myself?) Person with connection to the Deaf community

(The mildly annoying thing here is I actually have at least two people among my friends/closer acquaintances who have psych degrees and are currently employed in the field. But, uh… I’m not comfortable asking a parent about how a minor with SA trauma would be treated, unless we actually met through profic spaces.)

I think all writers should just. Receive a complementary MD friend who enjoys answering weird questions for research purposes. Don’t worry about where this friend would be sourced from. I’m sure we can find some way to raise them organically and mostly cruelty-free, the stress of med school aside.

- Child Protection Services and/or child abuse (criminal) investigation

- Catholic

My infuriating little idiot guy deciding to be more religious than I originally intended or realized is… inconvenient but workable. He kinda does his own thing with his spirituality. Bad Catholic and okay with that.

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%

sprinkling trauma over the fic like salt to my plate

I'll give you my secrets as a fellow short fic writer who sometimes dips into medium-fic and the occasional long fic.

Be obsessed with your story. This can go a LONG way to helping you maintain your motivation. Daydream about it. Make playlists about it. Talk to friends about it.

Try to make each chapter feel like a oneshot. Give it an opening, a middle, and a closing. Have some character development or achieve a plot point or drop a clue that will be used later in the story. The more you can give yourself the satisfaction you get from a oneshot, the better.

Do jump to oneshots on the side to keep you going through the long fic. Sometimes you really do need to get the feeling of "done" to be able to continue something that's still in progress. Don't deny yourself that feeling just because you think you should. Life needs dessert and short fic writers need completed works.

Embrace a B plot (and a C plot and a D plot). These side plots can last for a single chapter or can be threaded through the whole story or they can bridge from chapter 12 to chapter 18. Whatever their final form, these smaller stories-within-the-story also help to satisfy the need for a short, punchy hit of dopamine when the story is starting to feel huge.

The fic I’m lasered in on at the moment has a lot of relatively short (~2-3k words, with a few exceptions in either direction) chapters, which isn’t how I usually work. Finishing a chapter does give me a bit of an “I did the thing!” boost. When I’m writing a longer non-chaptered story, I pat myself on the back every time I finish a scene, instead. (This has turned into an unexpected perk of using Scrivener as my writing software; having the scenes separated into their own distinct documents in the story binder means a finished scene adds to the “pile.” I know there’s other software out there that also does this; yWriter and Liquid Story Binder are ones I’ve used in the past, though I’m not 100% sure whether LSB separated scenes or just chapters. Been a hot minute.)

Also: Walking helps your creative brain. Like, there’s science. I will absolutely turn scenes over in my head as I walk. At this point it’s become habit enough that it happens automatically; if I’m walking alone, I’m thinking about the blorbos. (If I’m not alone I’m probably engaged in conversation, and I have yet to master the level of brain multithreading that will let me carry on a conversation and mentally put guys in Situations at the same time.)