#recency bias is killing a lot of y'all | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shastafirecracker · 8 months

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4, 6, 17, 20?

oooh well this got long so I'll do a break to save everyone's dashes

4 a sentence or paragraph that you’re proud of oh man, I’m proud of a lot of what I’ve written, especially lately. I feel like a lot of the stuff that hits hardest only hits right within its larger context. I love a sucker punch sentence after a long, slow buildup. I was really happy with the bit with Nick walking into the lake at the end of “don’t stop if I fall”:

It felt so strange, but also like a need as primal as human touch being met for the first time after an eon of starvation. His whole body was a raw burn and the water that rose up around him was a cool compress. His hands, cracked and callused from a lifetime of abuse, drank up the moisture and grew soft. He kept walking.

I mean, how bizarre would it feel to have never been submerged in water? if your only contact with water had ever been via sinks and showers and maybe a tepid, cramped bath?

I’m really proud of a lot of my comedy moments, too. I think my comedic pacing and timing has gotten better over the years and I’ve always loved to write banter. But I think I’ve gotten better at structural comedy via the narrative also, not just funny dialogue, particularly for characters who would not say funny dialogue - like in “I’ve seen all the demons that you got”:

Vash came back into the shop stinking of cigarettes[…] Knives sprayed him with air freshener and retreated to his office while Vash spluttered. […] he told Vash where he was going, and Vash's eyebrows did a little dance. Knives was sorry he didn't still have the can of air freshener.

6 what character do you have the most fun writing? ok there’s recency bias happening here obviously, but I fucking love writing Zazie. they’re so fun. y'all won’t know why I’ve had so much fun with them until November but it’s just refreshing to write a chaos gremlin who doesn’t have baggage, lol.

17 do you think that readers perceive your work differently to you? what do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or motivations? until fairly recently I would have said that readers would be surprised to know that I’m asexual but then I found out that apparently aces who write smut are, like, the backbone of society XD but seriously, my go-to answer for “why does someone who doesn’t want to have sex write about sex” is just why would someone who doesn’t want to go to space write about going to space. why would someone who doesn’t want to commit a murder write a murder. stares directly at the stupidly massive quantity of speculative fiction ever written and then looks into the camera.

other than that uhhhh I have no idea? a few times I have had readers leave reviews like “oh wow, you must have experienced [thing] because you describe it so accurately” and I take that as a huge compliment because it means I’m a very good study of human character and psychology. but no, to those specific commenters in the past, I have not been a member of a cult, grown up on a farm and/or killed chickens to cook, nor had any transcendent group sex. thanks for thinking my life is that exciting tho! <3

20 tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble about (symbolism, character or relationship development, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes) ok there’s a big one in the big bang fic that I can’t talk about yet but I HOPE people see what I did there. and are just like “I see what you did there”

yes I love these!!! generally it’s wordplay or symbolic references that I just don’t know if anyone picked up on because no one said it in any comments… argh I’m struggling to think of a lot right now but in “I’ve seen all the demons that you’ve got” I really hoped that when I used the phrase “dose makes the poison” that people connected that all the way through Knives’ past work refining ricin and him having been dosed with ketamine (which is, like, a legitimate and important medication but the dosage is SO important)… ummmm also in “don’t stop if I fall” there’s just so many. I hope people grokked every usage of the lyric that the title came from - every time the words “don’t stop” were used in that fic it was very deliberate (including the extremely dubious consent sex scene).

one small one in that same fic that I hope someone/anyone caught was this sentence: “He remembered this ground like an old friend, this stained glass landscape.” because Wolfwood remembers the grounds of the orphanage as stained (with his own blood, with the attempts to water the seedlings when he was a kid), and because the ground is glass (sand, silicate) and therefore contains no nutrients, and because of the obvious religious connotation (but which doubles back on the other two as meaning, you know, a bright thing with no substance). I was happy with that sentence.

a bit of a character note that I cling to at all costs is that if I’m writing something post-canon, any version of canon, even my own AUs’ iterations of “canon,” then Vash WILL miss Knives and grieve him constantly. and he’ll feel a lot of guilt about feeling like he shouldn’t grieve Knives, shouldn’t be allowed to feel grief because Knives was so “evil” and Vash “won” and blah blah blah, and that every time someone celebrates the world not ending it is another twist to the knife in his guts. look up pyrrhic victory in the dictionary there’s a mugshot of vash. it just matters to me to always be clear that vash is not actually okay with how it all shook out in the end.

#sf writes #it's so hard to remember anything ive ever written as soon as im asked a question about it #oops #lohikaar #writer ask meme

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