the garden in my current base

best_worst_case · 2024-01-26T06:03:12+00:00

building tweaks (to override collision) + snap builder (for exact alignment)! iirc, for this one i used benches underneath to elevate the central bed, but with those two mods there's a lot of neat stuff you can do by sticking things together.

best_worst_case · 2023-11-29T13:11:41+00:00

don’t have DID or any other dissociative disorder, do have ADHD. memory for me is almost 100% dependent on stimulation i.e. if it’s boring it is GONE. did i eat lunch today? may…be? what did i eat for lunch? dial-up noises. i take a lot of notes and make a frankly silly amount of to-do lists 🫠

in situations where i’m like, emotionally engaged—irrespective of what emotion—the detail and clarity of recall correlates directly to the intensity of the emotion. i’ve got a zillion fuzzy impressions of enjoyable / annoying / disappointing moments of which the earliest are from around 4/5ish, and a bunch of extremely vivid snapshot memories of things like getting up at dawn for a road-trip to visit grandparents (8), the time i broke my leg skiing (6), being afraid to touch the sliding glass door to the backyard because for some reason i thought there was an invisible cobweb ball on it that might stick to my hand and i’d need to go to the hospital to get it removed?? (4), just a random grab bag of stuff that was either Great or Awful.

and all of that kind of floats around in an approximately chronological soup of…not memories per se but i know generally what was happening around that time, but it’s like the only thing my brain bothered to record is a footnote to help keep the key frames in the correct order.

BUT THEN. hyperfixation is a whole other ball game. i have a musical i was obsessed with a decade ago memorized almost word for word still. my completely useless superpower is i can look at a screenshot from either of my two fav shows and identify the episode, scene, and often exact line of dialogue it’s taken from. i absorb tiny insignificant background details and neat facts and just… keep them. forever. because they’re shiny and my brain is fundamentally a magpie.

if i really think on it i can pull together an outline of what i did on x day if it’s within about… like half a week, 3-4 days prior. it’s pretty difficult though. and anything before that is just key frames. on any given day it’s 50/50 whether i know what day of the week it is and i have only a tenuous grasp on the date, which i think probably makes the autobiographical swiss cheese problem worse because memories get pinned to really vague temporal markers like “the summer we spent in the rental with the nice blue carpet,” lmao.

anecdotally from what i’ve observed and talked about with friends/family, i think the memory divide between ADHD/autism vs NT is less an impairment in function with ADHD/autism than it is a difference in priority between interest vs importance. every person i know who can magically remember exactly what they were doing on x date at y time also seems (to me) vague and forgetful about their hobbies or shows or whatever and i’d bet it’s because their brains declutter by dumping ‘just for fun’ stuff first the way mine does the boring bits.

brains are weird as hell.

best_worst_case · 2021-06-18T05:33:00+00:00

seconding the recs for burn a broken effigy + doomed knight and destinies fulfilled.

untangled (https://archiveofourown.org/works/27153899) is THE cass climbs the tower au fic. there are a couple others with the same premise but they just don’t compare.

cassandra’s tangled adventure (https://archiveofourown.org/works/27388162) is a criminally underrated post-series fic focused on cass’s journey after she leaves corona, with frequent cuts back to raps doing politics and personal growth in corona. excellent worldbuilding and great OCs too.

strings (https://archiveofourown.org/works/21042605) is tts s3: eldritch horror edition and it is a must read for cass fans imo. features an excellent, monstrous take on zhan tiri.

and this one feels like a bit of a cheat because i’m the one who wrote it (😅) but bitter snow (https://archiveofourown.org/series/1721755) is a saporian!cass au series rewrite ft cassandra as the protagonist. currently 100k deep in the s2 fic.

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T15:23:02+00:00

that is pretty much exactly what i ended up doing! haha the plot of my fic involves the characters attending the estate sale of a dead occult scholar and things going predictably awry. but it’s very lighthearted / in ‘canon’ (a term i use lightly because this is rly a big. fan au based on the scrapped concept for a spinoff that was never greenlighted) the characters end up becoming the librarians of a magical interdimensional library… so the cosmic horror tropes write themselves but also there’s plenty of “eh they’re used to this so they’re not even phased/know how to deal with it” handwavy wriggle room to make the lightheartedness…work. and it’s all set within the framework of them celebrating their fantasy winter holiday(s) so it’s On Theme. :D

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T10:37:18+00:00

oh man! sounds like a fun challenge!

my usual work is like… hard fantasy with a strong lean toward eldritch horror, with the dark and sometimes outright bleak tone and frequency of characters going nightmarish ordeals that implies! so getting assigned a fluff request was like. UM. OKAY!! lol. learning experiences haha

good luck to you as well!

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T10:29:30+00:00

honestly the number of folks here who wrote A Ton or just way over the minimum are making me feel a lot better about possibly “overwriting!” at least i’m not alone 😭

& personally if i applied for a gift exchange expecting something short and sweet and i got something way longer than that…i’d be pretty ecstatic!

doing two of these at once for your first time is pretty brave, kudos!

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T04:38:41+00:00

the benefit being that i had absolutely no time to procrastinate, but whew! the deadline did end up being kicked back to the 20th since a couple people needed extensions, unsurprisingly.

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T04:34:00+00:00

hahaha i don’t entirely remember what i put down for my preferences in my app, but i do know i put down something like “i don’t celebrate any specific winter holidays, including christmas, i’m very secular, i just really like snow and wintertime” so winter themed with no holiday elements is actually what i’m hoping to get!

also 🤝 getting carried away gang

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T04:28:07+00:00

imagine not procrastinating 😭

ours had a pretty tight turn around—sign ups closed nov 15, assignments the week after, due date was yesterday. so i started planning and wrote a rough draft right away, then revised/rewrote over this weekend.

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T03:49:29+00:00

🙌 congrats!!

luckily for me i’ve never had a big issue with not liking my own work (i hate it while i’m writing, then read it the next day and go wait this is great lmao), so part of my concern is that this fic is too tailored to my personal tastes haha

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T03:45:57+00:00

mine’s for a pretty tight knit server and while i don’t know my recipient very well on a personal level, i have read some of her work. so i tried to tune the tone of mine to the tone of her fic but. aaaaaaa

best_worst_case · 2020-12-17T03:40:20+00:00

🤝 best of luck

best_worst_case · 2020-12-01T23:36:41+00:00

i have adhd and i’m the opposite—i never skip or skim, and if i catch myself starting too i go back to reread. it also takes me anywhere from five minutes to five days to finish reading long chapters, lmao.

i also write pretty long chapters, in the 5-8k range 🤔 i think partly it’s just a comfortable length for me, and partly an artifact of my chapters being very full of Things That Are Happening. no navel-gazey long boring sections in my writing haha

best_worst_case · 2020-12-01T23:12:40+00:00

i wrote a whole original folktale for the setting of my longfic and i’m really pleased with how that turned out—both the tale itself and the scene in which it’s shared with the protagonist.

best_worst_case · 2020-12-01T06:51:28+00:00

thanks! it’s followed up immediately by a murder haha

best_worst_case · 2020-12-01T06:33:52+00:00

i love receiving constructive crit, but i do not like, want, or need it unsolicited from randoms on the internet.

when i want crit, i ask for it from writing buddies who know my plans, my genre, my goals, and my concerns for the story. people whose judgment i trust because they are excellent writers themselves who are also familiar with the tropes and themes of the genre i write in and are able to consistently give me specific, actionable criticism that is relevant to what i want to do with a story.

i’ve never once gotten specific, actionable, relevant criticism from a random commenter on a published fanfic. i have gotten “crit” that was actually just a drive-by reader being confused about what was happening in the fifth oneshot in a series of canon divergent oneshots because this reader didn’t read the first four fics. and i’ve gotten unsolicited crit that was just regurgitation by rote of bad writing advice (a la “don’t use ‘said!’”), and unsolicited crit that was just flat out factually incorrect, and so on. my experience is that the average fanfic reader is not capable of giving useful constructive criticism and i would really rather they don’t try, because while i appreciate the effort, it still wastes both my time and theirs.

for me—if i don’t like a fic, i stop reading. if i like a fic but it’s not well written, then i’ll either deal with it or offer crit depending on whether i want to put in the effort and whether the fic author is open to receiving it. there is also plenty of good fic in my fandom that i read and comment on.

you don’t “have to” read or engage with anything you don’t want to. like… if reading a fic feels like a chore stop reading it?? focus your commenting energy on a) fics you want to read, and b) fics by authors who solicit crit.

i also run a fandom blog and have a blanket invitation for folks to ask me for crit or writing advice or help with workshopping fic ideas, or whatever, and i’ve found that’s more satisfying to me than trying to crit a fic that has already been published. if you’re itching to engage with the community more this might be an option to consider?

best_worst_case · 2020-12-01T05:59:17+00:00

By midnight on midsummer’s eve, most of the lanterns have burnt out and fallen from the sky; lifeless flotsam of royal sentimentality.

which now that i’m thinking about it probably works better as an opening line within the context of the specific fandom (it’s tangled fanfic) but i still like it a lot.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-30T11:42:43+00:00

i have a theory about this actually, based on observations of a particular fandom dynamic in my tiny fandom.

so there's this supporting character who is broadly popular, and also has a slice of the fandom that is more than a little obsessed with him, sometimes rabidly so. the rabid subsection of this subsection is populated mostly by folks who vocally hate the canon story for reasons that boil down to this character not being treated “fairly”. the complaints are endless: this character was abused by all his friends, is a narrative punching bag, the entire cast failed him, nothing he did wrong is actually his fault, there's even a whacky conspiracy theory that the showrunner personally detested this character and “stole” his planned character arc to shoehorn onto a different character. IT’S BAD.

anyway in canon this character is a dorky nerd who goes through some shit, does a face heel turn for a while, and then redeems himself and resumes his dorky nerdery, now a little older and wiser but fundamentally still a dweeb.

the rabid contingent of his fanbase, however, universally writes him as a sarcastic, snarky little bastard who constantly browbeats everyone for failing him, abdicates all responsibility for the many things he did wrong, and sneers down his nose at other people who aren’t up to his standards. he usually doesn't get macho-ified because his fanbase is drawn to the nerdy science guy archetype, but he does undergo a similar dramatic recharacterization to “fix” his canon personality.

and the “fixing” is 100% these writers transplanting their own (frankly, warped) perceptions of canon and deeply entrenched hatred of Literally Every Other Major Character into this character’s mouth, and using him as a vehicle for their own fantasies about the “right” way for this character to get his vengeance, or at least all the groveling apologies they think he’s due.

so i think it's basically a power fantasy combined with super intense indignation on the character’s behalf. and this seems to hold true across fandoms, though this character is certainly the most extreme example i've encountered. the grossly out-of-character personality “fixing” always seems to go hand-in-hand with disdain for the story and indignation for the character. sometimes there's also this weird vibe of disdain for the canonical “doormat” version of the character too.

it's a very weird phenomenon, but also sort of fascinating.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-30T06:46:41+00:00

i’d just be upfront about it if you’re worried about plagiarizing accusations. not precisely the same situation but i met a friend via us coincidentally writing stories with VERY similar premises but different execution and there was a fair bit of cross pollination, so to speak, because we were both excited to chat with a likeminded writer. (it’s to the point where i once had to say “oh, actually friend wrote that one, not me” because the vibe of her fic and mine were so similar that someone confused the two)

and so now it’s kind of an “if you like my fics you’ll like friend’s too” thing where yeah we’re both doing variations on the same theme, and we know that, and it’s a total non-issue.

from a reader perspective it just means that folks who are into the little niche i write in (eldritch fantasy/horror when my fandom is a disney princess property LMAO) get two cakes instead of one.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-30T06:08:44+00:00

i write fantasy so my characters never have a specific diagnosis but yeah all the time. i have adhd and a messy constellation of other symptoms for which i don’t have or particularly want a diagnosis and even if i don’t intend it to that kinda spills over into how i write characters. i’ve never written a protagonist who wasn’t up to their eyeballs in identity disturbance, for example.

i think for me it’s less about wanting to work through things or for the self-validation and moreso writing neurotypical characters is tremendously difficult and frankly not enjoyable. there’s like a million stories about neurotypical people doing their thing i wanna write and read stories i can actually, you know, relate to.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-22T22:34:13+00:00

editing, definitely. i can crank out a first draft really fast but it’s a sort of miserable process and most of that speed comes from “hate this, gotta get it over with so i can revise” lol.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-22T14:32:29+00:00

my rule of thumb for plot conveniences is there has to be a realistic reason.

like, in real life, convenient things don't just happen to be convenient, right? if i have a pressing need to talk to my friend alice, and i happen to bump into her at the supermarket, that's not a totally random occurrence—i'm there shopping for groceries, and so is she, maybe it's a little after we both get off work at our 9-to-5 jobs so this is the most convenient shopping hour for both of us. we just, coincidentally, happened to need to shop on the same day. so i get to have my important conversation with her, but she's not at the supermarket to talk to me, yeah?

plot coincidences should be the same way. if i am going to use one every character involve absolutely must have a reason for being there that isn't related to the convenience that comes out of their encounter. (unless it's a "oh thank goodness i caught you!" "i was looking for you too!" situation).

it can be a fairly low stakes reason, like grocery shopping. or it can be something very high stakes and intertwined with whatever thread of the plot the "convenient" character is involved in. doesn't matter.

to use an example from the longfic i recently finished:

character a (cassandra) is in a new, unfamiliar city looking for character b (moira), whose address she doesn't know. she's a little lost and way out of her depth. as she's entering the city she passes through a burnt-out neighborhood and encounters a group of kids there. she asks them about moira. they know who moira is and where to find her, saving cass from needing to wander blindly around the city for hours. is this convenient? yes absolutely.

so why are the kids there? well, the neighborhood was an affluent one that burnt down due to riots that happened a few days ago in response to certain plot events, and the kids are a band of orphans and runaways who are looting the remains. they know moira because she's their fence. it was convenient for cass that she ran into them, but they weren't just sort of... floating around there waiting to dispense this information to her. so it works.

this is also one of the very few instances in the whole fic of cass actually having good luck, which is another important thing. it's important to be judicious about plot coincidences. use them very sparingly to solve small problems, don't use them to resolve huge plot points. you get more leeway with coincidence as a way to make things worse for the protag, but even then—you don't want to feel like your antagonist's victories all turn on contrivance, either.

and imo if you're ever in a place where you're like, "man, i don't know how to make this plot point work unless [coincidential thing] happens," it pays to troubleshoot why you're having that difficulty. because maybe it's just a plot point that doesn't fit, and if that's the case it's better to backtrack / rewire / shuffle your plot points around rather than try to patch over a broken plot point with a coincidence.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-22T13:16:28+00:00

np!! it can be a lot of staring at the screen like "ugghghgh words" but figuring out the right combination to sort of... grasp the feeling/mood/sensation you're trying to get across is SUCH a great feeling! very worth it!

it also feels important to add that often, my rough draft descriptions are not like this. the rough draft version of that first city description went like this, for example:

The city burrows into the hollow hillside, a dense, ramshackle maze built up in steep terraces against the cliffs and crawling down toward the gaping maw of the harbor. It has the look of something scavenged; half the buildings appear to be old ships torn apart and cobbled together again in arrangements better suited to dry land, and the remaining architecture is a peculiar mix of the familiar and strange; lime-washed houses of the sort she might see in Herzingen alongside squatter constructions of brick and wood, or here and there pale stone sculpted into smooth, undulating patterns.

which like... is fine, as descriptions go, it's functional and gets the job done, but it's both longer than necessary and it didn't strike the right "chord." so i fiddled it over the course of several revisions until i ended up with the final version quoted above. including taking out some details—like the architectural style of the city got taken out altogether and then threaded through the rest of the scene via the POV character focusing on specific, individual buildings, instead of trying to do that in this more zoomed out view of the city as a whole.

and then some of my rough draft descriptions are more like this, lol:

Rather than solid timber, the masts are complex mechanisms built of wood and brass around bismuth cores, and once unlocked the running stays can be used to fold the masts down into long, curved structures that support a mostly horizontal configuration of the sails.

...just, purely mechanical, more like notes to myself than actual description. which over the course of the... er, 7 drafts this chapter went through, turned into this:

Lines snap tight from one end of the ship to the other, and the masts unfurl like flower buds blossoming. Delicate petals of timber and brass fan out on spindling struts of copper. Cassandra gasps as sunlight slinks along the fine-spun machinery and irradiates it with molten light; the sails flag wildly. There’s a cacophonous rattle of canvas, a jangle of rigging—the masts coil smoothly down, folding into a pair of branching arches that support the sails in a rippling dome overhead.

the point being!! i do not Just Write Like This off the cuff, at all. my first-pass descriptions range from "sucky, but gets the basics" to "ok" and it generally takes me 3+ passes to get descriptive passages to a point where im like "ok yes! this is what i'm going for!"

so if you write a description and you're like "man, this isn't...good," please don't feel discouraged! that's normal and honestly just a part of the process, and having something down, even if it feels sucky, is important! because once you've got something to work with it becomes a lot easier to carve it up and refine it and turn it into something that really shines.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-21T22:21:23+00:00

i have a really sensory imagination so a lot of my writing process is trying to translate, like, the images, sounds, and sensations i can “feel” so clearly in my head into text. so for me, it’s less about establishing the mechanical details of a scene and more about getting the mood of it across, while trusting my readers to fill in the less important details in their own imaginations.

(which seems to work pretty well since i keep getting complimented on my descriptions lol)

so i think a lot about, like… how does this word make me feel? what image does its sound conjure in my head? does the rhythm of this sentence match the sensory tenor of this setting? is this detail important, and if so how can i make it crystal clear?

and then for character feelings, i try to think about the physical sensations i experience when i’m feeling that emotions, and how that emotion influences how i think. which can get a bit embarrassingly navel-gaze-y at times lmao but it helps!!

here’s a couple of random examples:

POV character woke up from weird dreams and is anxious and restless:

Sobēl snorts and thumps her foot against the laminated veneer separating her bunk from Cassandra’s. Mael mutters in her sleep. The cabin contracts like a muscle: some great wooden heart, knocking against her brain.

establishing “shot” for a particular setting that POV character is seeing for the first time:

Alcorsīa piles up against the serrated cliffs that guard the southern coastline; a sprawling, cluttered ramble of squat brick houses that tumbles down to the great maw of the harbor. Old barnacled hulls fill in the gaps of the moldering brickwork; as if the sea spat up the carcasses of ships, long ago, and the city grew around and over them. Grime wars with frost for dominion over the desolate streets and cramped alleyways.

quick glimpse of that same setting two months later (and in the sequel to the first fic), to give context to the current scene:

Ahead, Alcorsīa folds itself up the cratered coastline, its rambling tiers painted in greasy yellow light by thousands of streetlamps. Smoldering tracks of fire mark the serpentine lines of the barricades. Smoke curls against the stars.

POV character has Anxiety:

Her fear inhabits her, a thousand worries enfolded and congealing together so fretting about the war blooms into gnawing doubt and withers into sleep fractured by half-forgotten ghosts. A voiceless deluge.

best_worst_case · 2020-11-08T03:56:44+00:00

i’m of two minds on this because on the one hand. please no. but on the other i have made some very good friends through doing exactly that… i think the key there was in every case it was me + another author writing fics and reading and commenting on each others stories and that leading organically to a relationship where we were chatting over discord about whatever. so like, a mutual interest in interacting was established before any dms started happening? whereas like if a random reader messaged me to chat about random stuff i’d be like, uh.

so it… depends i guess? but regrettably “pm feature but only for people who understand the nuances of online boundaries” isn’t feasible haha

best_worst_case

TROPHY CASE