#haha this is just like the poet dean fic

[starberrysap]

me going through my life trying to not make every tiny little thing about supernatural

#me seeing a poem #haha this is just like the poet dean fic #then i hit myself over the head with a frying pan #spn #supernatural #destiel #deancas

[stellaluna33]

13. My favorite line of dialogue from this fic was [xyz]. What inspired it?

14. My favorite line from this fic was [xyz]. What inspired it?

Ngl - I've never read any of your stuff, because I've never actually WATCHED Gilmore Girls (i know... I'll see myself out).

BUT. Whats YOUR favourite lines of dialogue, or lines you've written from anything you've written, and why?

Aw, you're so sweet for asking! 😅

You're going to make me compliment myself, huh? Well, ok, haha. I'll be pulling stuff from my multi-chapter fic, The Long and Winding Road.

13. Favorite line of dialogue? This was hard for me, because even though I feel like I'm pretty good at writing dialogue for these characters, everything seemed kind of lackluster to me in isolation. But this is one I've always chuckled over even though absolutely nobody else has ever mentioned it to me. 😂 "Well, I was kind of in the mood for 'the Great Gatsby' today. You know, I can enjoy the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio finally looks like a grown man, and you can enjoy telling me how 50 Cent really captures the decadence of the Lost Generation…"

This line of dialogue was inspired by... my own feelings about Leonardo Di Caprio (I NEVER got the attraction back in his heartthrob days, haha) and Baz Luhrman's the Great Gatsby, and which of these characters I thought would agree with these opinions. I don't know, I just thought it seemed like something they would say. 😂

14. Favorite line? I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this one before, so people are probably bored of hearing it, but it's: Everything about him was uncontrolled and wild, and so were her feelings about him, and she was never entirely comfortable with that. Falling in love with Jess had been like being caught in a riptide and dragged out to sea. Dean had been the slippery rock she tried desperately to cling to, but her strength just gave out in the end. She could do nothing but drown.

I don't know, I just really like it, haha. I'm a visual artist first, a poet second, and a fiction writer only third, so I tend to think in images, symbolism, and metaphor a lot. I like it. And I have a longtime obsession with the sea, so I love a good maritime metaphor. I just think the ocean (something so huge, beautiful, powerful, and life giving, but also brutal and terrifying) and the way humans interact with it make for some really vivid comparisons to powerful human emotions. And it seemed like a good metaphor for what happened to these characters, that this was a character who liked being able to plan and control her own life, and this love was too inconvenient and too overpowering to allow her to do either of those things. And accepting it felt more like losing a fight than receiving a gift. Like, she wasn't happy about it, more exhausted and resigned. (And if you're thinking that's not a great setup for a healthy relationship, you'd be right! 😅)

(The questions are here if anyone wants to ask)

#Writing #The Long and Winding Road

[cinematicnomad]

Hey!!! If you have the time/energy, would you mind recc-ing fics that "center around dean's teen years and John trying and failing to be a good parent"? I havent read fic for supernatural in years but what you said intrigued me and I dont even know how to start looking that very specific thing Haha

💛💛💛

being called out on my tags and asked to pull receipts, okay 😂😂

these fics DO exist, i promise, but i def haven’t been reading a lot spn fics in recent years, so everything i’m gonna rec now are crazy old (like...i’m gonna be sending you to some ff.net- fics-old) most of which are more tangential to john and more just centered around how the dysfunctional childhood he raised dean and sam in affected them, but these are all still REALLY good. and then i’ll throw in a random favorite gen fic that doesn’t get enough love but also has like...0 to do with john lol + a destiel AU fic that is influenced by dean’s parenting but he’s not a present character in the fic. 

john winchester and the four universal truths by la guera (1/1 | 15k+ | T) pre-series; POV john winchester; introspection; character study

fatherhood brings with it four universal truths, and over the years, john winchester has learned them all. three he will perhaps pass on to his sons, but one will always be his dirty little secret. 

red beans and rice by janissa11 (1/1 | 4k+ | G) pre-series; POV dean winchester; character study

dean learns to cook, among other things.

i drew our car for you by septembers_coda (1/1 | 5k+ | T) pre-series; outsider POV; child neglect 

nothing kindergarten teacher april huxley has ever learned can tell her what to do when adorable, troubled little dean winchester falls into her life—or when he vanishes abruptly back out of it.

every now and then by mirrordance (1/1 | 8k+ | T) pre-series; sam/jess; POV sam winchester; hospitals; injured dean winchester

in a random ER waiting room in california, a delusional dean is waiting to be seen by a doctor after a job, and sam enters with a broken wrist after moving into a new apartment with his girlfriend in stanford. collision. 

don’t they look in peace (sometimes i wish that was me) by hunterpeverell (1/1 | 10k+ | T) pre-series; POV dean winchester; character study; angst

when dad and sam left him, dean turned to stories.

or, dean is famous for his one-liners, his references. he makes cracks constantly, grins like he expects sam to get the jokes. he was a hunter, though. when did he have time to get caught up?

loneliness, dean discovered, will make one do odd things.

the good little soldier by quotient (1/1 | 1k+ | M) pre-series; POV dean winchester; character study; canonical violence 

because this is the oldest you’ve ever been. 

christmas mishap by triskelion (1/1 | 2k+ | G) pre-series; sam/jess; POV jessica moore; character study

sam’s third year at stanford, his college buddies start sharing comical christmas stories from when they were kids. jess worries that her boy won’t have anything to say. as a matter of fact, he does. 

talk me down by mirrordance (2/2 | 16+ | T) pre-series; POV dean winchester; character study; hospitals; canon typical injuries 

sam just left for stanford and cut off his ties, and dean is running himself to the ground: “if he was the one i called last night, i’d be dead. i can’t put that together with this guy was by my side all these years. it can’t possibly be the same guy.”

and this, your living kiss by opal_bullets ( 7/7 | 56k+ | M) alternate universe; destiel; POV dean winchester; poet!dean winchester; professor!castiel

only a very few people in the world know that the celebrated and reclusive poet jack allen is just kansas mechanic dean winchester, a high school dropout with a few bucks to his name. not that it matters anymore; life has left him so wrung out he never wants to pick up another pen.

until, that is, a string of coincidences leads dean to auditing a poetry course with one dr. castiel novak. the professor is wildly intelligent, devastatingly handsome...and just so happens to be academia’s foremost expert on the poetry of jack allen. 

and then one of my favorites, that has basically nothing to do with john: 

dead soldiers: an oral history of the ends time by girl_wonder (1/1 | 43k+ | T) gen; canon divergent; POV outsider; POV alternating

although much has been written about the sociological and theological importance of the "End Tmes War", there has been much less written about the individuals directly involved. using interviews with primary sources, this paper seeks to examine how dean and sam winchester, two criminals with a history of violence and petty theft, became commonly known as a prophet of the Lord and the Anti-Christ.

#ask #tulipsfrom-medusa #some of these are like #VERY LOOSELY related to john #and then others he's more central #i love all of these fics #and highly recommend all of them #supernatural #spn #fic rec #also on ao3 a starting point is always the tag 'john winchester's A+ parenting' #so long as you filter out the unwanted ship tags and such

[garbagequeer]

Do you have any favourite destiel fanfictions?

i gotta be honest here and make it clear that my attention span has been shot to shit lately so much of what ive read these days ive basically skimmed and jumped aroud different parts and stuff AND im a sucker for domesticity also i havent gone back to check out whatever i have bookmarked from 500 years ago so. that said i really liked:

some thoughts you have while falling (1500 words) literally what it says on the tin. cas centric as in this is just cas’s thoughts but like is it not about a gay little angel falling and thinking about how it is brave to have a human life to age to remember and to go to the grocery store

to change the things we can (2k) 15x18 fix it. what if... you made a deal w the empty and i didnt let it take you... and i did this through the world’s weirdest hug. haha jk..unless

conversations with the living (3500 words) 15x18 fix it dean and sam talk about The Childhood Trauma of it all and dean accepts love 

a love of all things that grow (5k) cas starts a garden and dean builds him shit and cas is like. well he must not like me very much like. girl he MADE you a little bench just big enough for 2 hello?? i love it when it’s busy at the secret underground bunker and the gay angel gets insecure

occursus (5k) dean and cas discuss the handprint and i am so endeared by cas here cause thats just dean girl shit

a real chore (5k) human cas dean has to like. learn not to be overbearing and let people help him out and handle their own lives. may we all project

bron-yr-aur (5k) missing scenes for that time dean and jack went fishing. not dean/cas centric but literally they are coparenting a little guy and it’s the sweetest shit imo

a river leads you home (10k) dean comes back home after the shit w michael w cas’s handprint from 2008 back on his shoulder and his scar from michael on the other. please look away from my personal feelings about dean’s possession arc

cuckoo and nest (10k) established relationship. dean is particular about his space. cas takes it to mean he’s not welcome to stay and dean is afraid he’ll leave cause that’s just what they do theyre just so dumb

under the same sun (14k) finale heaven fix it but dean and charlie get to hang out and talk about cas so dean can begin to get his head out of his ass. cas and dean do household chores in literal actual heaven like. for the hell of it 

the family business (15k) sometimes we must indulge in post finale fix it fics where dean kills his father

crazy diamonds (25k) 2008 dean and 2018 who is in a relationship w cas swap places. wish 2008 cas (who is not taking it well at all obviously) was in this more but otherwise a good time

on drowning (29k) human cas has a near death experience yay

where the weeds take root (30k) THEY ARE LIVING TOGETHER IN SOME FARMHOUSE??? CAS WANTS TO RAISE CHICKENS LIKE. THATS WHAT I THOUGHT YOUD SAY YOU GAY FUCKING ANGEL...

and this your living kiss (57k) i usually hate aus but this is THE au. basically dean used to be a published poet under a pseudonym and cas is a lit professor whose poetry class dean decides to attend (no weird teacher/student dynamics it’s all very normal). draws parallels to dean and cas’s arcs in canon in a great way through teaching and writing tbh and dean’s complicated relationship with his dead piece of shit dad is depicted really well too

im probably forgetting some but well. look at me posting destiel fic recs in 2020 who would’ve thought? not me!

#destiel #supernatural #i have links to other ppl's recs too if u want some more #charlie kelly voice: i got BOXES full of destiel #answered #Anonymous

[shittyvalentinecas]

hey wondering if u could help.. im trying to get back into destiel fics, they got me into fic in the age of tumblr but i didn't have an ao3 acc back then bc gay panic and denial haha so no old bookmarks but anyway i saw ur they don't know im jack allen the writer meme u rb recently and i read that and a few others by the author and liked them! but now idk where to go, do you have any recs or favs?

Hello!! I have a really bad habit of breezing through fics and not saving them so there's so many I have read in the last 2 months and I just...can't find them :(

but!  these are some of my favorite fics! ( AU because that's where I live)

And This, Your Living Kiss (THEE Poet!Dean fic)

Asunder (if I could hug a fic.)

The Breath of All Things (written as a take your fic to work kinda deal, I didn't think I would like it but it stole my heart and made me cry)

FACE TURN (just, so funny)

Forget me Not Blues (Another classic, enemies? to lovers?)

Painted Angel (beautifully written, A LOT of angst)

For All You Young Hockey Players Out There, Pay Attention (so good made me want to get into hockey??)

Living in Agony (head the warnings)

Dean Doesn't Like Lemonade (!!!!!!)

An Exercise In 'Worthless' (classic tattoo artist Dean fic)

Four Letter Word For Intercourse (beautifully nsfw)

(within canon)

the girlfriend experience

like Moses and batman and James dean 

#ficrec #fanfic #ill make another list once i find all the once i read lately lmao #Deancas #destiel #ask reply

[sunshine-jack]

Hi Hi!!! I’m Cilla 👀✨to totally copy you I also identify as a Dean-coded Cas!girl haha!

I’ve been obsessed with adding to My fic rec !

I had coffee and cookies for breakfast ! ✨

If you have a fav fic or one you’ve recently read I’d love to hear about it !

Have a lovely day!!!!

Hi Cilla!!! 

I have had 3 cups of tea today and they were all decaf candy cane green tea!

I’m sorry I didn’t respond earlier, I had to run errands and do homework before I could sit and go through my AO3 history to pull out my faves!

(I’m gonna put them all under the cut because I think this might get a little lengthy, oops)

HOOOOOOO boy where to start. I have consumed so many fics recently. It’s pretty much all I did during December.

I’ll start off by saying I really enjoy human!Cas and AUs in general, specifically college ones right now (sue me, I’m in year 6 of undergrad)

I organized these from shortest to longest:

How to Say I Love You With Socks -> Adorable. Pure fluff. All about cute socks.

The IKEA Curse -> If you read any of these, read this one! Very cute!

One White Lie -> Also fluffier. Makes me laugh and cringe simultaneously.

There's Only One Sure Thing That I Know -> Hilarious concept. Very domestic and cute.

Everybody Needs the Light -> I read this one the other day and loved it so much!! Pre-canon Deancas meeting.

And This, Your Living Kiss -> AKA the “Poet Fic”. Incredible. So well done. Made me cry even, and got me to start writing my own poetry!

A Complete Kingdom -> This one is BONKERS. Absolutely incredible read, but READ THE TAG WARNINGS. I read it all in one sitting with a bottle of wine and then was so unsettled by the end I had to watch comfort spn episodes to feel whole again. So good I started describing it to friends who don’t watch spn.

alone together -> Quarantine fic! Very cute, lots of Deancas dumbassery. Will make you look up and say “Oh I get it, they’re both just idiots.” 

300cc -> A college AU inspired by the Poet Fic. Gets a little spicy. Very fun, lots of dumbassery, and they use a lot of spn characters really well! 

Yellow -> AU where Cas is in witness protection for ratting out his mob family. Very fun read, and Dean is a raging bisexual in this one.

Still Breathing -> High School AU where Cas is in the foster system and gets placed with the Singers! I really like the slow reveal of the backstory in this one. Read the content warnings beforehand! (Also I know I follow this person on here but I can’t remember their blog right now so I’ll tag it later??)

Four Letter Word For Intercourse -> I mean, come on. Of course this one is on the list! VERY spicy. I don’t particularly love smut, but this storyline is SO GOOD. Also one that I described to friends who don’t watch spn, because it’s amazing.

And there you go! Sorry it got so long, but those are the main ones from my recent history that I really enjoyed! I would love it if you wanted to send me any recommendations of your own!!

#julie speaks #ask tag #castielsbeeslippers #HELLO I LOVE YOU

[profoundchaoscomputer]

Becky as chuck and marie as amara. Becky is creation and raw emotion. Marie is decontruction and thoughtfulness.

Both part of a whole, just like the mirror of the duality thats always present on the show. chuck and amara, michael and lucifer, cain and abel, mary and john, dean and sam, becky and marie.

Becky as the text and marie as the subtext.

Just like the show we are a mirror of it on itself. Unparalleled experience of THEE show.

Lemme explain. (Destiel endgame warning btw haha)

Becky is the kind of gut feeling, full of emotions and feelings fan, she cries, she stans, she is brimming with joy when the boys succed, she is mad when the evil wins a round, she is crying rivers when things go sideways, its a wild ride for her, she gets attached to the characters.

 She makes them collages, edits, fanarts, mixtapes, fanfics, she can explain how the characters change on the silent journey just behind the books, what are the things they fear and what they love, how they percieve and yearn, what drives and shapes them.

She treasures all quotes, queen of gifs, "then why *insert a scene of the show*".

She knows all the minor characters and will fight for them, explain each of their lost potential, knows all plotholes and how to fix them. 

The fics she writes are like that too, a wild ride of emotions, heated up, pent up, clashing feelings, full of love and anger and pain and all there is to be felt, the characters are for her a way to feel catharsis, she knows the characters and their reactions like the palm of her own hand as she resonates with them. 

She dreams, of different outcomes, where characters were written ooc and thinks of what should have happened with characterization on points.

That was at least what she felt when younger. Now, after years, after addictive emotions had came to a past, she came to understand too that there is beauty in tender subtle emotions. The quiet grainy sound of grief, the soft peace of joy, the sunny melody of hope. She wants the boys to find peace, no longer the loud crashing glass of windows, guns and bones, too fast, too hard. 

She is the one writing the soft endings of daily domestic life, The daily life of healing, cas learning to make pie and dean singing jack hey jude as lullaby, seated on a sunset, fire cracking, making a future as they go; finding on the small menial stuff these little kaloidoscope of soft slow paced colors.

Marie is the kind of the brain damage time, meta, myths and book parallels fan, she goes on and on with framing and (how chuck is john, anger, light, his word is law, the writer, said take sammy and go, but then he commanded to kill abel and they didnt even cast THEE abel, they bring up colette. And there is rage, there is always rage, but cas asked dean to stop, and what broke the connection?) 

And she constructs and decontructs.

 What does the story thick? Is it the author, the audience or you? Framed to castiel but asked to the audience. She doesnt really develve on the show itself...but its the experience. Unparalleled experience. 

Lamp and flannel colors and overcompensation, gender studies, psychoanalisis, she quotes poetry, from all authors, ending with a quote from supernatural. All media is her playground, as the books are a mirror of society a la americana.

And we will always end up here so I win so I win.

Rather than sticking to the show itself, she takes the narrative and explores, curiosity, inspiration, she explores, questions and discusses, with all kinds of media, from shakespeare to freud to the bible and she takes appart the book, blakout poetry.

She writes her essays, but also fics too, always decostructing, drawing on new meanings on what we thought at first glance was, on the poeting subtle, the grand allegory on the little things.

Both of them together could explain to you all the ways the narrative could only be satisfied with dean having a soft ending. Im not a killer, I always wanted to experience new things. And sam wanted a purpoceful life. Leaving a legacy, helping, being proud of something.  And cas deserved the joy of being human, or belonging, feeling with his whole heart, proud of his son, loved by his husband, belonging and nesting, having a cat, to treasure this happiness on the having.

#destiel #deancas

[perfectlyelegantdelusion]

What makes your heart swell?

I’ve made an interesting discovery today. What makes me really, truly, deliriously happy, puts a stupid smile on my face and generally makes my day and my life for that matter, is that moment when I open a new fic, start reading it and realize this is IT. This is THE ONE. Another THE ONE. 

It’s like yay, I get to breathe! Yay, maybe life isn’t a hopeless bullshit! I don’t care what shit goes down around me, it doesn’t fucking matter. I get to live right now through a story and I don’t care what’s going on in real life. I’m out. Do not disturb.

I constantly check how much is left to read. As soon as I finish the first chapter and as soon as I know THIS IS IT MY JAM I AM LIVING, not only do I feel ecstatic and on the cloud nine. I also feel horrified and sad ‘cause this good shit is going to end, I’m going to finish reading it sooner rather than later and it fucking throws me off balance as much as it makes my heart burst out of my chest with happiness. I grieve because I will have to say goodbye to that story. I fucking grieve.

I have this genuine fear I’m going to run out of fics to read. I shit you not, it gives me anxiety. (It tops up my anxiety, let’s be honest here, ‘cause anxious and self-conscious are like the two words you’d need to describe me.) Every time a story grips me tight and raises me from perdition (haha, see, I’m original), I have this irrational fear crippling me, “What if that’s it? The last fic that makes me feel that way? What if I’ve read them all?!” I wonder what a shrink would say.

Anyway. I don’t know what I’m getting at. Just wanted to record this particular feeling, I guess. Also, ficwriters, know this: when you post a fic, you probably make at least one sad sad sad specimen of a human being really happy. You give someone the opportunity to breathe through the shit they deal with. You make someone wanna wake up the next day to finish the story. You give someone reasons to smile and snort and smirk and laugh. You make someone feel good. And that is worth the world. So what I was getting at was THANK YOU. Big fucking THANK YOU. Please, keep writing. You are awesome and you make a difference. What you might think is a silly attempt at a genre is making a huge difference to me. I love you. THANK YOU.

PS I suck at blogging, and I don’t think I follow a lot of ficwriters here, so this goes out to all of you. Every single one of you. Doesn’t matter what you write, codas or ficlets or longfics. Please, accept my love and devotion.

PPS I do want to mention two people I actually follow, though. @winchester-reload, “Talk Green To Me” is this little story that occupies a very special place in my heart. I think it is written beautifully and your description of a kiss is something that would make a poet pull their hair out in exasperation they were not the one to come up with it. I can’t even begin to talk about your art. It is everything. @whelvenwings, dude, I’m still awestruck, your “Stand By Me” doesn’t let me go! I still chastise myself I forgot to mention in my comment another thing I loved about Cas. When Dean asked him how he calls the no-brainers and Cas said, “I call them people.” It’s stuck with me on levels you probably couldn’t have imagined it could reach. All the love for you guys <3

#personal #lil old me #fanfiction #awesome people write #people i hope you realize #you might have saved someone's life at some point #i feel like i gotta tell you #so here you go #you awesome lot #destiel fanfic #all things destiel

[abeautifulblog]

you are honestly my favorite fanfiction author of all time, and it feels sort of back-handed in a weird inexplicable way to have "fanfiction" preface that... in my very humble opinion, if was to list my favorite (no preface) authors of all time, you'd definitely be in my top three; beaten only by Mitch Albom and Scott F. Fitzgerald for me, and youre steadfast one of the main authors I re/read for inspiration when i write... who are the authors that inspire you most??

O wow! That is – some high praise indeed, I am deeply honored. :) It’s gratifying to hear that this fic is resonating with you, because it is the most personal piece of fiction I’ve ever written. (Honestly, I’d be happy not to write anything this personal ever again.)

As for the authors who have influenced me (strap in)…

One of the most influential writers when I was a teenager was Anne Rice and her vampire series, though I think it was less about the vampire thing and more about the raging homoeroticism (I joke that Anne Rice made me gay) and the intense, almost claustrophobic emotional intensity of those books. I’ve actually written about her influence on my writing here. (I don’t update that blog anymore, I don’t even know how to approve/respond to comments anymore, but it’s got a pretty extensive archive for people who like hearing me talk about media.)

It’s interesting because just recently (like, last week) I reread a few of her earlier books – Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat, and I’m about halfway through Tale of the Body Thief – and was reminded that yes, she was in fact really good before she went off the rails. (After Tale of the Body Thief, the rest of the series is nigh-unreadable.) She writes lonely people really well – the struggle of endlessly trying to achieve intimacy and failing. When I’m on my game and writing powerful emotional content, I feel like my style owes a lot to the way she does descriptions, which is… kind of hard to describe, but it’s like… emotive language in unexpected combinations? Pairing descriptions of the landscape with adjectives that tie in to the character’s emotional state, or abstract nouns with adjectives that describe a physical sensation. I don’t know, I don’t have any specific examples I can give, but I’ll catch myself writing sometimes and go “ooh that’s good” followed by “haha, you’re pulling an Anne Rice.”

Besides Anne Rice, most of what I read is sci-fi/fantasy; I tend to have very little use for realistic/literary fiction. (Which is why it’s kind of funny that I’m 70k and counting into a suburban love story.) I like SFF, and I like it gay, and for many years it was my quest to find and read every book in the intersection of that particular Venn diagram – the fruits of my quest are here, The Gay Fiction Booklist That Doesn’t Suck. Anything with a throbbing “top pick” icon next to it is, well, exactly that, but I’m not sure whether I’d call them an influence, because I was already in my twenties by the time I read them, so my literary style was kind of settled by then.

(Although when I need to read something to ~get me in the mood~ for writing, Karin Lowachee, Jacqueline Carey, and Sarah Monette are excellent choices for top-notch prose and top-notch emotional engagement.)

Someone who’s not on that list is a relatively obscure manga writer named Miyamoto Kano, who I really wish I could rec to a wider audience, but her work is mostly inaccessible if you don’t read Japanese. Her stories have been a very strong influence on the way I write romance, namely that in the real world, sex doesn’t actually resolve anything (except sexual tension, I guess), and it is not where you should be investing your narrative tension. I’m much more a fan of letting characters jump into bed with each other before they’ve finished working out their shit, and not making the resolution of the drama hinge on them having sex.

(…Which, again, funny – because we’re 70k into A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and they still haven’t shagged, which means I’m writing exactly what I say I don’t write.)

I’m also a huge fan of Miyamoto’s brand of off-beat realism, that you’ll get these moments of comic absurdity popping up even at the most dire moments because that’s what life is. The universe has no respect for your personal crisis, and you get weird/funny/distracting shit popping up when you’re just trying to have a good cry, or a good solid screaming match. To reiterate my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote: “Life doesn’t cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” Miyamoto gets that, so beautifully.

And I’m probably forgetting something, but those are the strongest fiction influences I can think of. I read a lot of nonfiction too in order to understand people better on both an individual and a societal level – my top picks would be Influence (Cialdini), Whipping Girl (Serrano), Made to Stick (Heath), On Killing (Grossman), Stigma (Goffman), Collapse (Diamond). (With a much longer list of specialty books for specific subjects.)

For learning how to write emotional involvement, I am a serious nerd for narratology and I recommend Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds. It’s not a book on how to write, it’s one that documents the different methods for conveying a character’s consciousness to a reader. I read it for my thesis, but it wound up being an epiphany, because it explained exactly why some books achieve so much more emotional engagement than others.

And lastly, because it would be ungenerous not to give a shout-out to the very excellent fanfics that are no doubt feeding into my own writing in some way, here’s a sampling of some lesser-known favorites:

Ain’t No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down) - Steve/Bucky, with a very different take on Bucky than what you usually see. I guess maybe this one isn’t so unknown anymore, but I FOUND IT BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR.

Odi et Amo - Eagle of the Ninth, aka, that movie set in Roman Britain where Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell were being hella gay at each other. This fic is a Dead Poets Society fusion, beautifully atmospheric, makes you wish you knew more about poetry.

Love Is All You Need To Destroy Your Enemies - Dresden Files/Welcome to Night Vale crossover. So good that I don’t even begrudge it having dethroned my own Dresden fic from being top-in-fandom.

World Ain’t Ready - Les Miz high school AU. You don’t need to know anything about Les Miz to enjoy this; I didn’t! :D

In His Image - Supernatural, Dean/Castiel. There are a number of fics that are reworkings of season 5, but this one is brilliant. Like when you’re all of a page into the first chapter of a fic and you can feel a smile starting to spread across your face because, oh, oh, this writer is GONNA BE GOOD.

If You Liked The Book, You’ll Hate The Movie - X-Men: First Class, another high school AU because why not. I have a weakness for weird, dysfunctional people being weird and dysfunctional.

…And that does not even scratch the surface of the fics I’ve read and enjoyed, but yeah.

I should stop now. Thank you for reading this far.

#asks #dream daddy