Jun. 1st, 2026 03:24 pm

Write with Other Markets in Mind: a Backup Plan for Rejected Stories

dannye_chase: (Default)
[personal profile] dannye_chase
 

Write with Other Markets in Mind: a Backup Plan for Rejected Stories

As writers, we sometimes create a story for a specific call for submissions—winter stories or small-town sci-fi—something that really sparks our muse. It’s wonderful when those stories are accepted, but of course, that’s not always the case. And if the story is rejected, you’ve got to try to sell it elsewhere.

I wrote a piece for SFWA about how to rewrite a story for a different call, but you can get ahead of the game by writing with that possible rejection in mind. If you make the story match common submission guidelines, you’ve got a built-in plan B. Here are three things to consider.

Word count

Many, many publications ask for a story less than 5,000 words, or a flash story of less than 1,000, so those are good targets to aim for. In fact, those word counts are so common that there’s a good chance your call will have them already. But if your call has a longer limit, you’ve got two options: either keep it under 5,000 or have a plan to cut down the story if it’s rejected.

Genre greats

Genres have favorites. You’ll have to research your own genre to figure out what publications are looking for, but as an example, I write a lot of horror. So I know there are quite a few places (especially podcasts) that will take a scary, suspenseful horror piece with common tropes readers love—haunted house, lake monster, ghost train, etc. And I know there are a lot of publications looking for horror with a female main character, and not many want vampires or werewolves. So if I see a call for horror stories with a winter setting, I can write about a woman discovering something monstrous frozen at the bottom of a lake. And that will fit quite a few publications.

Watch out for super-specific calls

A podcast or magazine will run out of stories if they choose to publish only summertime urban horror about clocks. But a one-time anthology or themed magazine issue can be as specific as they like. There’s no problem with writing such a story—those are great markets! The problem comes when lots of writers produce clock stories, and then most get rejected at the same time. This means other publications will be inundated with rejected clock stories, and they’re certainly not going to take very many of them.

One solution is to simply hold onto your rejected story for a while, until the flood of clocks has dried up. Another is to put something else specific in your story that will make it right for other publications, in a way many other clock stories won’t be. Go back to your genre greats. Make it scary, suspenseful horror with a monster, and you’ve opened up more markets for yourself.

 

Of course, if you’ve got a great idea for a story that won’t fit anywhere else, absolutely write that. If you don’t feel like writing to common word counts or genre greats, then don’t. But if you’re sitting in front of a blank page with no plot bunny hopping about, it can make sense to plot and write with rejection in mind. It never hurts to have a backup plan.

Here’s where to find those calls for submissions.

This article was first published on my writing blog          

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ The Vampire Haven erotic romance series ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers 

Tags:
Jun. 1st, 2026 04:31 pm

(no subject)

shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
[personal profile] shadaras
Posted about the aikido seminar yesterday during the period of time DW was having trouble actually posting posts, so idk when that got out of the cache relative to when people check in on their DW feeds.

It's also getting warm again after the weekend that was weirdly chilly/rainy for the end of May, but hey that went well with "do physical activity in a space without AC for most of the weekend".



Apparently it has been a full year since [personal profile] hafnia and I started our origfic series which wasn't supposed to get this long or complex or include a second generation of story ideas about their kids. xD (The ones up there are shorts, but we do have novel-length thoughts about them all too...)



Summer plans continue apace. Apparently my twin is going to be in the area around our birthday? Which is cool, especially since my mother informs me that he did not realise it was going to be so close to our birthday when he first made the plans (with other friends of his who happen to be relatively nearby), but hey once he knew he was all "okay, I think I can extend my stay until our birthday so we can celebrate together". So! That'll be neat, should be a good time.
Tags:
Jun. 1st, 2026 12:15 pm

Some horror and horror-adjacent media

lucymonster: (horror)
[personal profile] lucymonster
A book as well as two more movies! I'm off my sickbed now and a bit movie'd out for the time being, so this will probably be the last of the deluge.

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher: Trying to get back on her feet after a divorce, thirtysomething Kara (nicknamed Carrot) goes to stay with her eccentric Uncle Earl and help him run his small-town museum of curiosities. She and her new friend Simon (a flamboyantly gay barista from the café next door) are repairing a hole in the museum's drywall when they discover a secret passageway on the other side of the hole that leads to a mysterious other world. At first, they think they've stumbled into a sort of Narnia. They very quickly learn that the truth is much darker.

I'm coming to think of Kingfisher as an author with a very strong brand; every book of hers I've read so far has featured some combination of relatable millennial protagonist (usually sorting herself out after the end of a bad relationship), lovable elderly mentor, casually queer supporting cast, quirky sense of humour, cute-but-has-attitude animal companion, and worldbuilding that straddles the line between horror, fantasy and fairytale. It's a lot of fun to read and has left me with a lovely cosy feeling despite the fairly extreme body horror scares along the way.

The Hitch-Hiker (1953): More thriller/noir than horror, but this seventy minutes of three men driving car through (as far as I can tell) the same stretch of American desert multiple times in a row was up there with many a lauded horror flick for how hard it made me sweat. Serial killer Emmett Myers poses as a hitch-hiker and forces two blokes on a fishing trip to drive him to a port city from which he plans to flee the country. There is something so satisfying about older movies that have not yet fallen prey to our exaggerated modern action/adventure norms: the fact that Myers has a gun he's willing to use is taken really fucking seriously. Nobody is badass-karate-disarming this guy. Not even when he’s asleep, in case he wakes up and shoots them. The lack of daring hand-to-hand combat does not make the film one iota less exciting.

The Shallows (2016): Blake Lively plays a surfer with no survival instincts, who hitch-hikes solo with a strange man in a foreign country whose language she barely speaks to get to a secret beach where no one knows to look for her. When this fails to get her killed, she goes out in the surf and stays there even after the local surfers who know the conditions have called it quits for the night and advised her to do the same. She sees a dead whale floating in the water and swims right up to it to investigate, and in doing so, royally pisses off the massive great white shark feeding on the carcass. She manages to get up onto a tiny rock island that is only above water at low tide, but the shark now sees her as a threat to its hunting ground (I have no idea how accurate this is in terms of shark psychology, though suspicion tells me Probably Not Very) and is so obsessed with killing her that it loses interest in the whale. This was very fun and very dumb and made me love not being a surfer even more than I already do. You will never, EVER catch me out there in water deep enough for sharks. Fun fact, this movie was shot in Australia! Motherfuckers are like, “Oh, Australia is so scary, all the snakes and spiders want to kill you!” and then they come here and go surfing. I have literally never even heard of anyone being harmed by a snake or spider. I personally know a guy who was bitten and almost killed by a shark.
Tags:
May. 31st, 2026 07:06 pm

waiting for dreamwidth to sneeze

[personal profile] chanter1944
Because it apparently has the crud. At least two different people have posted about having issues with the site within the last day, and now I can't click on comments to other people's journal posts without getting an Oops! error. GRRRR.

I'm grateful I've still got my reading page intact, that's for sure. But ugh.
May. 31st, 2026 04:28 pm

"aikido is joy," sensei said, and that was indeed the theme of the weekend

shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
[personal profile] shadaras
I took my nidan test yesterday. (And passed, of course; these are tests that do not happen unless you're ready.)

Everyone who watched it says that it was a wonderful test and I looked fantastic and all my aikido shone through. All my sensei complimented me, all my friends were delighted, and it was an excellent ending to a full day of seminar practice.

Also I do not remember eighty percent of what I did because all I was doing was moving and breathing. This is the core of the art, really; connect to the person you're practicing with, move, and breathe. So long as you keep that connection, know where your center and your partner's center are, and keep moving, you'll find something to do.

One of my friends informs me that I thwacked her hard against the ground (she's fine, it's just funny). I have no memory of this. I told her that "I only remember the bits I had to think about" and she was like "yeah that was definitely a bit where you were just doing, not thinking."

More description of the weekend as a whole:

( cut for length )

Very good weekend. Got to see a lot of friends and have a lot of fun, and also it was cooler than usual for this time of year and thus perfect seminar weather! We were not melting and sweating horribly much, just a reasonable amount for the amount of physical activity we were doing!
Tags:
May. 31st, 2026 01:10 pm

Movies: Backrooms, Saccharine

snickfic: Text: It's always time for horror (mood horror)
[personal profile] snickfic
PLEASE NOTE: several of my keyboard keys are going out intermittently, so I’m going to suck at responding to comments for a while. 😩😩😩

Backrooms (2026). A furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers an entrance in the store basement to a seemingly endless series of uncanny office rooms.

The second huge horror sleeper hit of the summer! Although maybe not a sleeper to those paying attention, because this movie is adapted from a wildly popular series of CGI Youtube shorts by teenager Kane Parsons, who also directed this movie at the age of 20. The last I saw was that its opening weekend receipts might beat The Mandalorian and Grogu’s from last weekend, which is just incredible. (LOL Disney.) The word is that this is getting huge number of middle and high schoolers into the theater. I know my local theater has been nearly sold out, and I saw it in a nearly full theater. It’s wild, honestly; I’m not used to going to movies that other people want to see, too!

Anyway, this movie is maybe the purest expression of Vibes™ that I’ve encountered in a horror movie in a long time. The horror here is: what if empty rooms? What if the 90s? (This is also a period movie, by which I mean it’s set in 1990.) But most importantly: what if empty rooms that are apparently infinite and don’t make any sense? The comparison used in the film is “What if you described a dog to someone who’d never seen a dog, and then you asked them to draw it?” Stairways go nowhere and carpeted ramps lead to tiny, Alice in Wonderland scale doors with three doorknobs. Furniture is stuck in walls and floors. And everything is very bright and very yellow.

What this movie does not do is clutter up all those vibes with, say… a plot. That sounds like sarcasm, but I’ve seen too many horror movies that feel the need to pull some bullshit plot out at the last minute to justify their existence, and Backrooms is confident enough to eschew all of that. It does have a narrative structure as we follow first furniture vendor Clark and later his therapist around the treacherous backrooms, learning things about them (or at least making conjectures which are never confirmed or denied by the film itself). Some people die, because of course you can’t have a labyrinth without a monster or two. There aren’t even many jump scares, though the whole atmosphere of wrongness is so intense that I spent the whole movie clutching my blanket very tightly.

--

Saccharine (2026). A med student (Hana, played by Midori Francis) starts taking a weight loss pill made from human ashes and becomes haunted by the ghost of the person she's consuming.

Francis is absolutely the star of the show here and does a great job portraying Hana's insecurities. I also really enjoyed Danielle Macdonald as her friend and fellow med student Josie. The movie also has a clear cinematic vision for how it tells its story.

As for the themes, I don’t feel fully qualified to make a judgement one way or the other, but here are some thoughts.

( spoilers and a BUNCH of stuff about weight loss and fatphobia )
Tags:
May. 30th, 2026 01:23 pm18

Four Or More 2026 Bingo Masterpost

May. 29th, 2026 09:39 pm

Movies: Obsession, Corporate Retreat

snickfic: Dean getting out of Impala in the rain (Impala)
[personal profile] snickfic
I have watched what feels like an absurd number of movies recently and am trying to work through the backlog. Can I just say I've seen a whole string of movies recently that were just... good? (With one exception.) None I loved with my whole heart, but all of them ambitious with style and a clear vision. Feels like we're in some kind of golden age rn. Obsession, Saccharine, Backrooms, I Love Boosters, Is God Is all came out within the past three weeks.

Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not making original movies anymore.

Obsession (2026). An awkward young man wishes his crush would love him more than anyone in the world, gets his wish, and wishes he hadn’t.

AKA the (first?) huge horror sleeper hit of the summer! Even if you’re not that into horror, you might’ve heard that Obsession’s box office in its second weekend was 30% higher than its first weekend, which basically does not happen outside the Christmas holidays when release dates are weird. It cost less than $1M to make, and it’s going to clear easily $100M in ticket sales; as I’m typing this, just two weeks in, it’s at over $95M, and its domestic daily receipts are ahead of the Mandalorian and Grogu movie that’s only been out for a week (although tbf I think that’s probably as much a commentary on that movie as on Obsession).

Anyway! Having gotten that out of the way: the movie. I was actually not that excited to see it, despite the hype, because the premise seemed so familiar. Yeah, yeah, monkey’s paw, love wish/potion/whatever, we know this story. Buffy the Vampire Story had an episode on this in, what, 1998? But the key is in the execution. This is one of those movies where everything feels so thought out and deliberate, and all the writing is so tight. In so many ways, both in execution and themes, it feels like a different iteration of last year’s Companion, which I loved.

I’ve heard a lot about how scary Obsession is, and I guess my scareometer is broken, because I didn’t think it was. However, it’s very tense, especially starting about a half hour in, and things get progressively more fucked up as we go. It’s also not all that gory overall, but the one scene where it is, oh shit it goes hard.

The movie hinges almost entirely on Michael Johnstone as dweeby Bear and Inde Navarette as cool girl Nikki, and they are both fantastic. Navarette in particular plays arguably three different characters, and between the two actors they do such a good job of making every scene SO uncomfortable.

( spoilers )

And it’s funny! Director and writer Curry Barker does sketch comedy on Youtube, and he layers in just the right amount of funny-awkward and funny-horrible moments. I laughe a lot in the theater, even though this is by no means a comedy.

I walked out of the theater not sure whether I’d enjoyed the experience, but the more I’ve thought about it and discussed it with other people, the more it’s grown on me. I might even go see it again while it’s in theaters.

--

Corporate Retreat (2026). The young execs of a tech company go on a corporate retreat, which turns out to be an exercise in vengeful sadism by the founder they pushed out of the company.

So this is the exception to that string of wins I mentioned above. It’s worst movie I've seen so far this year, old or new, and it's not close. Alan Ruck plays the founder, and he is entertaining as the sadistic yet pompous self-styled guru of enlightenment. Unfortunately, he feels like he's been airlifted in from some other movie that has a sense of humor, because nothing else in this movie is funny or even apparently trying to be. I think the execs are supposedly to be hateable, but they're such nonentities that I can't even tell them apart, much less muster a feeling about them. I was dismayed when the shady HR gal died fairly early on, because she was the only one who seemed to have attained two whole dimensions, and I genuinely couldn't imagine who the rest of the movie was going to be about. It took probably another half an hour for me to identify the final girl, which is wild in a movie like this. (In fairness, I did miss the first five minutes, so maybe that would have made it clear up front.)

Also, like. Why is everyone currently in this tech company under the age of 35, if the founder was in his 60s? How does that even happen?

Meanwhile the horror parts, where Ruck's character goads the characters to ever greater feats of self-mutilation on threat of death, is just kind of tedious? At one point we spend ten solid minutes watching a series of characters dig one of their eyeballs out with a spoon. One of them failed to do so, but that still leaves four separate eyeballs being removed in the same way! Ten minutes! And the effects were just lol. At one point, a bunch of characters were giving each other injections of a poison antidote, and the injections looked so fake I laughed out loud in the theater.

The one bright spot was the founder’s two henchwomen, who stalk around in nice skirt suits with automatic rifles. I’d forgotten Ruck was going to be in the movie, so I was bummed when he showed up, because honestly I’d rather the movie have been some scheme of theirs.
Tags:
May. 29th, 2026 05:31 pm18

The Friday Five

May. 29th, 2026 10:16 am

Horror movies: Host, Halloween, White Zombie

lucymonster: (freddy)
[personal profile] lucymonster
(Yup, still sick and out of commission. Here are three more silver linings.)

Host (2020): As my horror binge has continued, I've already started to notice diminishing returns on the actual fear element - desensitisation, you know? But this one gave me a good hard scare. Set during the COVID pandemic, it's a little under an hour long and confined entirely to a Zoom call between a group of friends who have decided to conduct a virtual seance. The seance works. Aside from being scary as fuck, I really enjoyed how the film made use of the weirdness of life during lockdowns: new relationships forced to turn prematurely cohabitating, established friendships strained by distance, one of the characters reflexively stopping in the middle of a terrifying demonic manifestation to put on her mask before leaving the house. The storytelling is super lo-fi and pared-down, and I think it's a really good example of how a simple idea done cheaply and right can outperform many more lavish productions.

Halloween (1978): I have now watched the first instalments of all the "big three" teen slasher franchises, and this was by far my favourite. Michael Myers is an ontologically evil six-year-old who murders his teenage sister right after she's done having sex. Fifteen years later, he escapes from an insane asylum and goes back home to kill a bunch more teenagers before, during or immediately after sex. Jamie Lee Curtis is such a lovable Final Girl in this, and the music has to be up there with some of the most memorable movie theme songs of all time. I think I disagree very firmly with John Carpenter's conjecture that a pure, inhuman killing machine would be scarier than an actual character with actual motives, but I do admire the total lack of pretence to deeper meaning. Sometimes you want to watch "elevated" horror with Themes and Meaningful Stakes and shit; other times you just want to watch a monster in a mask cut people up for no reason.

White Zombie (1932): Did you guys know that zombies originate from Haitian folklore? Because I did not! In their original form, they are not plague-spreaders or brain-eaters but cheap, mindless labour in thrall to the sorcerers who raised them; early Western use of the lore seems to have revolved around zombies being forced to work on sugar plantations. In White Zombie, the first ever zombie movie, that is exactly what's happening. But one plantation owner takes the exploitation further when he enlists the help of sorcerer Bela Lugosi to zombify Madeleine, the newlywed woman he's obsessed with, and compel her into his romantic servitude. It is a gloriously silly story, shoddily produced by contemporary standards and almost comical by today's; I loved it anyway, not least for the maiden-in-trailing-gown-traipses-sadly-through-massive-gothic-castle vibes it delivered par excellence. And Bela Lugosi is, as always, brilliant. His smug, smirking expressions managed to be simultaneously hilarious and intimidating; I feel like even in intentional comedy-horror, those two emotions usually have to take turns? Good times.
Tags:
May. 28th, 2026 04:51 pm

Minecraft++

knave_of_swords: (piplup)
[personal profile] knave_of_swords
I got caught in a death loop while trying to build my wither skeleton farm in my single player world, so I'm giving that world a bit of a rest for a moment before coming back to it to try and retrieve all of my gear again. Instead, I'm playing on a server! I had a bit of a rough start, including falling into the void with diamond gear on while trying to find an elytra despite many end cities already being looted, but the community Villager Trading Center got up and running enough to gear up well enough for me to finally get rid of the elder guardians at the ocean monument that I claimed! I needed full protection 4 armor for that. Protection 2 was not enough. I got caught in like at least three separate death loops on different occasions. So now I'm working on the project of draining the inside of my ocean monument, and making it all hollow inside. 

I also made my nether portal on the nether roof look nice!:


 


This is what it looks like inside the dry parts of my monument right now: 



And this is what feels like my 'actual' base right now, where everything that I actually use is located: 



Future plans for this base include an automated multi item redstone storage system, a nautilus stable inside the tippy top of the monument, and maybe an axolotl pond? It's tricky because guardians spawn within the monument and they're hostile to axolotls, but apparently guardians need two blocks of water on top of each other in order to spawn, so I might be able to get away with a very shallow axolotl pond. I'm also definitely going to make the surrounding seabed look nice, and I'm thinking of doing like, a coral garden on the inside too? Coral and flowers and bees and particles! I'm also thinking about making a mini guardian farm inside the base. It won't be super efficient, because the outside of the monument won't be drained and so will still be spawning guardians too, but I don't need massive industrial rates, I just want an xp farm at my base and a renewable way to get prismarine. I might sell it in the server's shopping district? Depends on the farm's rates. Though I could also just harvest prismarine from the mining dimension's ocean monuments... 
Tags:
May. 28th, 2026 05:31 am

AKC Courtneyyyyyy Culture Festival #223: Sakagawa Hiyuka

sonofgodzilla: moon healing escalation! (bunny)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
Against all odds, we get to mention UNLAME again to-day simply because we get to talk about Sakagawa Hiyuka!

Hiyuka


Winning a place as a member of the short-lived group alongside Sato Suzuka, Shiato Miu, Kuranoo Narumi, Arai Sae, and Kubo Hinano as part of the OUT OF 48! reality TV show, Hiyuka initially joined AKB as a member of Team 8 in 2019 during the group's fourth stage, Sono Shizuku wa, Mirai e to Tsunagaru Niji ni Naru., produced by AKB record producer, Yuasa Junji. Unlike many Team 8 members we have spoken about previously, Hiyuka was from a successive generation of auditions, the continuing expansion of the team during this moment leading them to be treated by some as a sort of sister group. This was a moment during which a lot of previous Team 8 members were graduating, in fact this specific run in the theatre in which the team's next national tour was announced also saw a slew of graduations, not least of all Yokomichi Yuri. Yet with the national tour lined and new members having debuted, things were looking good—until covid derailed plans in March 2020 and performances were cancelled. Before that, there had been a successful appearance during New Year on Kouhaku as part of the "World Senbatsu," but after that it was all livestreams and hoping for the best.

It feels so unreal to talk about covid sometimes.

As people started going back to work later in the year as lockdown eased, Fukui Prefecture native, Hiyuka, became an ambassador for training, appearing on billboards with Hashimoto Haruna and Hirano Hikaru. She continued to work hard throughout the following year despite covid, and in 2022 became a member of Kuranoo Team 4, a position that would stick as Team 8 was dissolved the following year and all former members found themselves exclusively in the original AKB teams that had previously been drafted in to support before the complete dissolution of the whole team structure in 2023.

Hiyuka didn't make the senbatsu until Masaka no Confession alongside Arai Sae. Despite that, she has appeared on B sides since Nemohamo Rumor, earning a turn as centre for the delightfully summery Majika from Hisashiburi no Lip Gloss and a Wcentre with close friend Tokunaga Remi, Ishi no Taiboku from oh my pumpkin!.

A former member of local idol group, Amigas, Hiyuka replaced Cho Kurena as Fukui's representative in Team 8, and she continues to bring that love of her home to everything she does in AKB. If it takes roughly seven minutes for each girl to get a line in a song, as Team AKB Oshi suggests, then I'm totally fine with AKB ditching the senbatsu and releasing only seven minute songs from now on if it means we get more of girls like Hiyuka.
  • Current Mood: tired
  • Current Location: somewhere
  • Current Music: Carcass - Microwaved Uterogestation
Tags:
May. 28th, 2026 12:16 am18

Community Thursday

May. 28th, 2026 12:43 pm

Two video essays

lucymonster: (meesa back)
[personal profile] lucymonster
...that I found thought-provoking. Two hours long each, but very talky - I listened/semi-watched while doing other stuff, and I don't think I missed much that way.

If Pretty Is a Privilege, Ugly Is a Curse by Olurinatti: This is not, as I half-expected from the title, someone's personal plea to be less mean to unattractive people. It is actually a very thorough analysis of lookism as a form of structural inequality. It's SO uncomfortable to watch, because more than just about any other "category" of person I can think of, labelling someone as conventionally unattractive still feels like a malicious personal attack as opposed to an objective trait that materially affects their life. And yet, there is a very strong cultural consensus around beauty standards that operates independent of who a given individual does or doesn't find attractive, and these standards affect everything from employment opportunities to criminal justice outcomes. Our reluctance to discuss the issue in structural terms is really just one more example of lookism in action: we wholeheartedly embrace the premise that ugliness is an inherently bad thing, and a personal failing to be addressed on a personal level by some combination of grooming, lifestyle changes and beauty therapies. We can no more envision a movement of class solidarity among ugly people than among dishonest people, or selfish people, or people who are in any other way choosing to suck.

I'm not ready for this tier of activism, tbh. I'm too much in the thick of existential despair over the erosion of my own pretty privilege by ageing and weight gain. But hey, who knows, maybe the video has planted a seed?

The Rise and Fall of Misery Memoirs by Sarah Z: This video essay connects misery memoirs, the satanic panic, fraudulent holocaust survivor stories and the phenomenon of "celebrity" defectors from repressive regimes as different iterations of the same storytelling template within our hyperindividualist society: a vulnerable, childlike narrator recounts the unspeakable exotic horrors they have endured through a strictly personal lens, ending with an uplifting message about overcoming adversity through personal resilience. The audience enjoys a good, cathartic cry and a sense of virtue for having borne witness to the suffering. No further action is asked of them. No analysis of the structural failings that allowed that suffering to occur is admitted. Survivor stories that DO demand action or advocate for policy change, or that end with the survivor failing to perform the expected inspirational boostrap-pull, get shunted aside.

In my teens I remember voyeuristically devouring the "trauma" parts of popular mismems without much interest in the "uplifting" final act; I spent a good chunk of my twenties reading about the Holocaust and North Korea and various recent wars in the Middle East. So I've never had much interest in the bootstrappy stuff, but that's not a virtue so much as a mismatch between the bootstraps and my more cynical aesthetic tastes; I am absolutely guilty many times over of consuming real hardships as entertainment. Like Sarah Z, I'm left with no idea what to do about any of this, nor do I think that curiosity about the dark stuff in other people's lives is something it is necessarily either possible or desirable to excise from human nature. But it's something I think is worth reflecting on, especially when that natural human ghoulish streak collides with broader political trends in a way that discourages reform, rewards fraud, and silences the large majority of survivors whose complicated life stories do not fit into a neat narrative template.
Tags:
May. 27th, 2026 01:26 pm

Miscellaneous Updates

knave_of_swords: (Default)
[personal profile] knave_of_swords
Sorry for the long post! I wanted to share various updates, and lately the dreamwidth text editor has been a little janky for me about putting in readmore cuts. There's a lot that I'm giving updates on, so of course don't feel like you have to read the whole post. If you want to reply about just one little part of it, feel free! 

Real Life
I've started my first semester of online college, and it's an easy class but the adjustment is a little rough. I'll look at my todolist of chores and think I don't have that much to do, but then I have the weekly readings and assignments. It's going alright so far, though, I guess. I've been submitting some stuff late, but the late penalty doesn't seem too bad? And I have to keep telling myself that a late submission is better than just skipping it entirely and not submitting anything. But it's a bit hard catching back up to where I'm supposed to be. At least I have my three day weekends back now; the last two weeks I'd been picking up an extra shift each week on Tuesdays at a high-earning location, since it both made good money and helped out my friends at that location, but it did mean that I lost that crucial third day of my weekend that I did a lot of my schoolwork and chores during. The first day of my weekend is always basically a day where I just catch up on sleep, so if I only have one other day to do stuff, things tend to get lost in the cracks. That happens much less so when I have two days that I can really do stuff. 

Work has been normal, it's been getting busier more often now that summer and the end of the typical school year is approaching. Which is good, because slow season is always a bit rough financially, but it does mean that I have to hit the ground running at work and not stop until after I clock out. I could take it a bit easier before, with it being so slow. 

(edit) Oh! And we got our raises! The union came through! We didn’t get the $10/hour for tipped workers like I was hoping, but we’ve got gradual bumps every six months until a year from now, when it’ll end up as about $8/hour. And the non-tipped workers got $20/hour! 

I've also been journaling lately in a physical notebook, and it is actually super helpful? It's like talking it out with a real person, except I don't have to wait for a real person to be available or have to explain intricate details to them. I also write down a lot of todo lists in it, and just ramble about whatever I'm thinking. It's nice. It took me several months to start writing in it regularly, but now writing in it is something that I want to do, not just a chore to check off of my list. 

Another thing that's been happening for me has been losing weight. It's going really well! It's slow going, of course, but it's happening steadily and it feels like my goals are definitely possible and maybe even within reach. 

My cello journey continues as well! I don't talk about it much on here, but I still do lessons every week. My big barrier here is that I need to practice outside of my lessons, but that's something that I find super difficult, especially now that I'm taking online classes. THIS is the current piece that I'm working on. It doesn't sound nearly as good as the performer in the video, but I'm able to get through the entire thing! I've mostly got the rhythms, and I'm mainly working on intonation, dynamics, and general musicality. 

Minecraft
Minecraft has been rough for me lately... last night I accidentally fell into the void in the end on the server I play on while I was trying to get an elytra (I managed to find two end cities, but the one ship that I found was already looted... and we don't have the world seed, so this took a long time to begin with), and this morning I died twice in a row while trying to build a wither skeleton farm and then trying to recover my stuff again. That was a rough one two punch that makes me just want to give up on Minecraft for a while. I doubt I will, but ugh. At least the server's Villager Trading Center is now partially up and running, so getting good gear again shouldn't be too arduous, just a little tedious. I claimed an ocean monument on the server for my future base, but the problem is that I have to now clear it out of elder guardians and then drain the inside of it without dying to regular guardians. Maybe I'll ask for some help, since I've just been struggling by myself before now. 

Meanwhile, in my single player world, the wither skeleton farm is a fair bit away from my main nether portal, so I have to fly there with an elytra. I'm so glad now that when I last lost my elytra, I didn't stop my end city raiding at just getting one again or even just a backup. I got like five or six elytra, so I should be good to have a couple more tries at getting my stuff back. I think the key will be some enchanted golden apples and/or regeneration potions in addition to fire resistance. The first time I died it was mainly because I accidentally hit a zombie piglin, summoning all of them to hunt me down. Then the second time, I only took one totem of undying and ended up getting mobbed by wither skeletons. So for my next attempt, I think I'm going to bring a hotbar of totems, some enchanted golden apples, a regen potion, and some splash health potions since they double as harming undead mobs like wither skeletons. I don't think I have it in me to do that today, though. Probably tomorrow. I can't really stay away from Minecraft for very long.

I've decided that I want my YouTube series of my Minecraft world to be mainly about the builds instead of my favorite adventuring parts, so that I can play privately for myself while also having it be a YouTube series. Because of this, though, I need a beacon for my second episode because I want to make a vertical mineshaft with different tunnels at different layers. Thus, an ianxofour wither skeleton farm (though the one I'm making will also collect blaze rods from blazes and gold from zombie piglins, since I don't need industrial amounts of wither skeleton skulls). 

I was also thinking for my YouTube channel of making an adventure map for my brother to play on! I want to design an escapable prison with various different escape routes, and then record him trying to escape it. Like one escape route could be parkour focused, another could be puzzle based, and another route could be focused on dodging hostile mobs, or something like that! I think it sounds really fun, and my brother luckily agreed to do it and said that it sounded fun! The goal isn't an inescapable prison, but like, a fun little maze game. 

I've also gotten into some Minecraft mods! Mainly utility ones like miniHUD, flashback, shulker box contents in the tooltip, but also some creative mode mods like worldedit and axiom. I think I'm going to try to get the hang of worldedit first, because axiom sounds intimidating and seems to be more for landscaping? Idk. I'll probably try both around the same time and see which one ends up being more intuitive for me to learn. Anyways, I don't really want any content mods that change a bunch of stuff, like create mod or other mods that add a bunch of stuff, or mods that feel too cheaty. If I have freecam, I know I'm going to use it in ways that would be cheating on a server. Nothing is really cheating in single player worlds, but if it feels cheaty to me then I know it's just going to make everything stop being fun for me in survival. 

Hermitcraft
I've caught up with all of the season 10 playlists that I wanted to watch! I watched Pearl, Gem, Bdubs, and Welsknight. I thought about also watching Tango, Grian, Scar, and Cleo, but Pearl and Tango overlapped a fair amount and so did Gem and Grian. I might still watch some of Scar's season 10, mainly the building of his zoo habitats, since I'm just completely uninterested in poe poe and exile shenanigans. Welsknight is a new favorite! I love his building and playstyle, and honestly it was his videos that gave me the push to start making my own videos. He made it feel so accessible, like something I could do instead of just watching other people do it. And then of course I try it, and I feel like a kid pushing sticks into the dirt next to Wels' impeccable log cabin lol. I think Bdubs had my favorite season 10, but Pearl is a close second place. Honestly though, all of them had really great season 10s. 

Season 11 has also been really fun to watch! I'm caught up with all of the hermits that I watch even a little bit, and it's so hard waiting for new episodes compared to just putting on a playlist of a whole season and being able to watch like three hours in a row of just Hermitcraft. I'm really liking Xisuma's season 11, I watch him sporadically, and I love his whole music theme that he's doing. Pearl and Bdubs are of course doing wonderful builds as always, too, and Welsknight going for a Japanese theme is super fun and I'm excited for his next video, whenever he gets around to it! I'm also enjoying Cleo's and Gem's season 11s, and it's once again so cool to watch Tango work on Decked Out. I can't believe that Tango calls himself "not a builder"! 

Other MCYT
I've also started kind of getting into Lifesteal a little bit? Rekrap's videos where he like, hides every end portal, or steals every netherwart, or makes secret tunnels in the server, or softlocks everyone are super fun. I'm not sure where to start with Lifesteal, though, in general. They just ended their most recent season and it looks like another one will happen soon, so I suppose that I'll just start there? I plan to watch Rek of course, and also Jojosolos. I really liked Jojo's commentary about the whole Marlow situation and women in MCYT, and she's just fun to watch. I'm not sure who else to watch on Lifesteal, though. 

Something about Lifesteal, though, is that it kind of feels like what I wanted the Life Series to be? I've kind of fallen away from the Life Series and haven't watched really anything past the first one or two episodes of Secret Life, because it just felt like it was relying too much on the unique gimmick of the season. What I wanted from the Life Series was like, competitive battle royale for survival with high stakes, and it feels like it's kind of moved away from that and became more focused on shenanigans and unique gimmicks for each season. Lifesteal seems less gimmicky, despite having a central gimmick, if that makes sense? Like there's the mechanic of losing hearts upon deaths and taking other people's hearts, but that feels like it's on the same level as 3rd Life's, Last Life's, or even Double Life's and Limited Life's rulesets. So I'm looking forwards to Lifesteal season 8! I hope it's something I enjoy. 

What I've Been Reading
I haven't been reading very much, especially not fanfiction, but I started reading the YuGiOh manga a while back! It's fun, though of course dated. Yugi is a sweetheart, and I actually really like Kaiba? The sexism in the manga is annoying, but it's not so bad that I can't keep reading. I like the mystery stuff about the Millenium Items and Yami Yugi's identity and past. I know the basic ending and Yami Yugi's true identity, but I kind of wish that Yami Yugi really had been a secret aspect of regular Yugi's personality? Instead of basically just a different person sharing the same body. 

I also have been reading a webcomic called I Married The Male Lead's Dad, because I thought it would be fun, and while it definitely had comedy bits, it was surprisingly more dramatic than I expected! I actually thought the writing was really good, especially with how it integrated the highly specific premise in a way that felt like it made sense. I love it when weird transmigrations and things like that end up being deeply linked to a world's lore and history or whatever and actually make a bunch of sense within the world, even if it feels totally random at the time to the person it happened to! I'm so glad that the whole initial conflict got resolved within what was already adapted, and I didn't have to wait for updates. It's still going, though, which I'm also happy about! I like the characters and the world, and I like seeing the relationships more, especially without the huge major life and death conflict hanging over their heads. 

On Writing
I haven't written any fic since my Candy Hearts assignment (which I also need to put on this journal, I've been meaning to do that). I think I've just kind of... lost interest, for now? I'm not sure why. I just am not really currently feeling the urge to write, even in an "I want to write but am having difficulty/writer's block/etc!" sort of way. It doesn't even feel like a fallow period of recharging, exactly, because even in those periods that I've had, I've had the urge to write creatively. Right now I just mainly want to write in a journaling sort of way. Idk, I figure when it comes back, it'll come back. My ideas are still all written down, and if I want to get back to them, I can. Nothing is abandoned forever. 

I've also stopped doing exchanges lately, which is also about my urge to read fanfiction. I just am not really feeling that urge anymore right now. Maybe one day I'll get back to it. I do want to run [community profile] diegetic_exchange  again sometime, but I am not currently up to it right now, which feels unfortunate, because this time of year was about when it ran last year. I don't want to say that it won't run again in 2026 at all, but I also can't put a timeframe or date on when I will want to run it again. It'll happen when it happens, I guess. If anyone wants to run a similar or copycat exchange, feel free, but I do not plan on passing this specific exchange on to anybody else. 

Future Plans
Now that I've pretty much caught up on my MCYT playlists, I think I'm going to go back to watching anime more! Unless I spend that time playing Minecraft instead, I guess. Naruto Shippuden is a priority, of course, and I still need to actually finish that BL bean counter isekai show. I also kind of want to give Witch Hat Atelier a try! It looks super pretty, and sounds interesting. I'm going to wait until the whole season is out, though, since I'm pretty bad at keeping up with releasing anime. I'm a binger, and if my momentum gets interrupted, it can be hard to get it back. Just look at my progress with Naruto Shippuden and the bean counter isekai, lol. But it's going on my list! Also on my list: Akane-banashi once it finishes airing, Yuru Camp, CITY, Haikyuu!!, and Jojo Part 6. 

Anyways, that's what I've been doing and what I'll probably be doing for the summer. Work, school, Minecraft, and anime. 
Tags:
May. 27th, 2026 10:01 am

How to Write Sexual Tension

dannye_chase: (Default)
[personal profile] dannye_chase
 A photo by Trung Nguyen on Pexels of two people of unknown gender loosely holding hands, with only their hands and forearms visible. The background shows unfocused mountains and sunset. https://www.pexels.com/photo/unrecognizable-couple-holding-hands-at-sunset-5108999/
ALT

How to Write Sexual Tension

One of the fun things about writing romance is that it’s actually your job to annoy readers! And you do this by ramping up the sexual tension between two (or more) characters and then repeatedly denying anyone relief. That first touch or kiss (etc) is just so much more satisfying if the characters, not to mention the readers, are desperate for it. So whether your characters are the type to explode into passion or just have a really emotional handshake, sexual tension can make it all the more delicious. Here are some tips to turn up the heat.

Purely romantic tension—a romance writer’s bread and butter—often involves a character imagining future dates, couplehood, or marriage; wishing they had the courage to confess their feelings, wondering if the other person might share those feelings, turning red when Aunt Griselda pipes up at the Thanksgiving table to say she’s always thought they would make beautiful babies with their best friend. Romantic tension is quite lovely! Sexual tension does basically the same thing, but it’s more physical.

Sexual tension is all about touch. Your character can imagine brushing hands with their crush, linking arms, bumping shoulders, and on into kissing and other bedroom activities. Your character might focus on a certain body part of their love interest: lips and mouth are common, along with hands and, well, any other areas they might spend too much time thinking about.

And it doesn’t have to be the case that these two characters have never touched. In fact, they might regularly hold hands, squish themselves onto a too-small couch, or even give shoulder rubs. The point is, your character wants more, and as a writer, you should almost give it to them, and then snatch it away. So fun!

To write sexual tension, start by getting your characters close—close enough so Character A can feel Character B’s body heat and smell their scent, see details of their skin and eyes, and be aware that B can sense the same of them.

So now, the almost touch. Or, if they’re already touching, the almost this-is-definitely-more-than-a-friendly-touch. Character A can hover their hand above B’s shoulder, or A’s gaze might fall to B’s mouth and stay there. A may look like they’re about to brush B’s hair back or hug them. But then either A or B or both pull back, or they’re suddenly interrupted by another character or noise or other convenient plot device.

Good, that’s one. Now let’s do it again, and this time, A and B have a new thought to obsess over: Was B really about to touch me? Were they really going to kiss me, or was it my imagination? So the tension is already high to start.

Let’s say this time Character A is climbing down a ladder after wallpapering the kitchen with B’s favorite flower, which is a total coincidence, and B puts a hand on their elbow to steady them. Such a tiny touch. It would hardly be noticed, except your characters are already thinking about touching, and that sets off a whole reaction, and more frantic overthinking. Rinse and repeat. 

Popular plots as this progresses include dancing or dancing lessons, massages, and that not-super-plausible-but-so-delicious thing where Character A trips and falls into B’s arms. Bonus if A’s all warm and sleepy in their way-sexier-than-they-should-be flannel PJ’s.

But again, nothing happens except B desperately wondering what would have happened if they hadn’t gotten interrupted by the cat growingly menacingly at a dark corner (whoops, sorry, wrong genre). What does the rest of A’s body look like under those PJ’s? How would it feel to touch A without the PJ’s at all?

And maybe at lunch A gives a groan of appreciation into their mac-n-cheese, and now B wants to hear that noise again during sexy times. Or B blushes and A helplessly comes up with a 7-step plan to make B blush again.

Of course, this is not a one-way street. If you build the tension high enough, at some point the characters are probably going to realize it’s happening to both of them. That adds another layer of tension: what is the other character thinking? A looked like they were going to kiss me and didn’t—why? Are they going to make a different choice next time? What do I do if they kiss me? What do I do if they don’t?!

(This would all likely be resolved by the two characters having a frank discussion about their feelings, but this is romance, so nobody wants them to actually do that.)

And then, the moment finally arrives. A kiss, a hug, a touch to the cheek, a night of passion by a roaring fire, a hookup in the bathroom of a haunted bookstore, whatever. Your readers and characters are so happy! Except now the readers kind of miss that tension. Have no fear—you can start it over! Yes, even if they had sex.

To do that, you need to come up with some plot reason why it can’t happen again. No more kissing, no more bedroom sporting events. A is betrothed to someone else, B is a space alien (and betrothed to someone else), or whatever. (Note that readers don’t tend to like it if A and B split over a simple misunderstanding, so an actual plot reason is best.) The sexual tension is actually easier to write at this point because your characters have memories of those events now. They know how good it was. Losing it after having it once is almost worse.

But of course, this is romance, so at the end, the tension will be relieved by a happy ending. Yep, that kind of happy ending.

Thanks for reading!

Want to be SFW with that eventual love scene? How to write implied smut

This article was first published on my writing blog

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers 

Image credit

Tags:
May. 27th, 2026 11:03 am

Naruto Shippuden: Akatsuki Suppression Arc complete!

knave_of_swords: (inosaku protec)
[personal profile] knave_of_swords
Phew, I finally finished the Akatsuki Suppression arc! It took so long mainly because I got back into Minecraft YouTube, and so most of the time I spent watching something on my TV was now spent watching MCYT videos, usually someone's Hermitcraft season 10 playlist, instead of watching Naruto. It didn't help that the anime pacing was just... bad. So many repeated scenes and the like. I really enjoy watching the anime and having it all in full color, and animated, and voice acted, but the pacing is killing my desire to watch the show, so I'm increasingly wanting to just switch over to the manga, maybe watching the anime for key battles or arcs. But next up is the big Sasuke/Itachi arc!!! So how am I supposed to switch to the manga here!!!! 

Anyways, I really liked the battle vs Kakuzu and Hidan, especially Shikamaru vs Hidan.

Highlights: Shikamaru thinking everything through and coming up with a successful plan, when Hidan stabbed himself and it's revealed that he just accidentally destroyed one of Kakuzu's hearts, and how everyone had faith in Shikamaru's abilities and his plan. I already loved Shikamaru, and this was just so great. Naruto's Rasen Shuriken is also really cool, and it was fun seeing Kakashi without his vest. 

Unhighlights: I didn't really like how Naruto was able to destroy three of Kakuzu's hearts in one go with a successful Rasen Shuriken. I really loved how Naruto learned and used his first attempt at the Rasen Shuriken to formulate his plan on how to actually succeed at hitting Kakuzu with it! That was great. But it felt like a bullshit power up moment when that Rasen Shuriken just blasted all three of Kakuzu's remaining hearts away. It took so much effort and skill to destroy each of his first two hearts! It almost felt like Kishimoto was getting tired of writing the fight and decided to just have Naruto come in and sweep it up and end it. Like I know it's supposed to show how the Rasen Shuriken is crazy powerful, but I feel like a better way to accomplish that while not totally being bullshit would be if it blew away the two backup hearts Kakuzu had? So then everyone had to work together again to destroy Kakuzu's last heart that was in his body. He could even be totally weakened by the Rasen Shuriken! Give Ino and Chouji a moment together to be badass! Or have Sakura and Sai come back for the killing blow! I was super disappointed that Ino was just there for the whole arc and didn't do anything. Even Chouji had more to do than Ino did, and Chouji barely did anything. It was the Shikamaru and Kakashi show, and while I loved the Shikamaru spotlight I wish it hadn't been at the expense of Chouji and Ino. Especially since Kakashi already gets a lot of spotlight! Kakashi is cool, I love him too, but it felt like instead of exploring how badass Ino and Chouji could be too, it just went back to retread the old territory of showing how badass Kakashi is. Like, we know that! We don't need to see it again right now! 
Tags:
May. 26th, 2026 10:38 am

Weekly Shounen Jump, week of May 24th

knave_of_swords: (sakura)
[personal profile] knave_of_swords
Akane-banashi #207: And Akane's Shinigami story concludes! I think it was really good, and I liked it a lot. I'm excited to see what Kaisei's Shinigami looks like! I predicted earlier that I thought that he would ultimately outperform Akane, but I'm less sure of that now. Idk. Like, narratively, I don't see how he can't top her here, it wouldn't make sense for the story to have him compete after her if he isn't going to surpass her. But it's also difficult for me to imagine how he can perform his Shinigami story in a way that will definitively surpass Akane's. Like she had the whole thing going on where it was horror and comedy at the same time depending on the audience member, so how can Kaisei surpass that without doing the exact same thing but better, which has never been how anybody in this story gets beaten by somebody else? If a character loses to another character, it's always because the winning character (okay, mainly Akane) reached deep within themselves and pulled out a performance that was unique to them and their experiences, and the quality of that performance beat whatever unique thing the other competitors had going on. Nobody has ever gotten "beaten at their own game" before, I think, which is what would happen if Kaisei had a similar Shinigami to Akane's but better. But again, I have no idea how he can beat her without doing her method but better! So I guess that means that this is a really good arc, lol. 

Alien Headbutt #15: Oh, this one is definitely about to be cancelled. I didn't think it was that great, but idk, it could have been something. I liked the wrestling moves incorporated into the fights, and I liked the physicality of the fights being mostly hand to hand combat. Kagurabachi has great fights too, but mainly uses swords as weapons instead of the physical bodies of the fighters like Alien Headbutt does. 

WSJ continues their hunt for a new popular battle shounen. I think all they've really got right now is One Piece and Kagurabachi? There are a couple of other battle-ish series that they've got ongoing, but iirc none of them have any anime adaptations upcoming or already produced, and my impression is that they may have a niche but they're not flagship-type titles. It's a rough dry period for WSJ right now. Akane-banashi continues to be great, of course, and I still really like Kagurabachi, but you know WSJ is not doing great when it's only really got two ongoing manga series that started in the last five years that are pretty good, especially when one of them isn't even a typical battle shounen. I have heard good things about Ichi the Witch, though, so maybe it's time for me to try that one? 

Hima-Ten! #91: This is another one that feels like it's wrapping up, though the trajectory is smoother and it feels like the story is going how the mangaka wanted it to go rather than a flat cancellation. I would love though if the series continued past the get-together! I feel like a lot of romance manga tend to end with the get-together, and while the confession and get together is certainly a peak climax moment that's hard to top afterwards, I think it's still worth it to see how the characters work as a couple together and what their story is now that they're together.

Anyways, I'm genuinely not entirely sure how this is going to end. I'm still rooting for the throuple ending, of course, but that's just not going to happen in a WSJ manga for another couple of decades at least. Honoka is still a strong contender despite the series' title indicating that Himari is endgame, and it makes me wonder how the mangaka will pull off the pivot to Himari after building up Honoka for so long. At this point, though, I do have faith in the mangaka, since this set up was clearly planned from the start, so I imagine that how to resolve it has been something that the mangaka has been thinking about for a long time, if it hadn't been planned from the very start. 

Kagurabachi #122: I'm really liking this backstory, it vividly illustrates how the current state of affairs came to be. Even if it ends early, I can still easily see how things ended up as they currently are. I like the tragic flavor of this backstory too, in that we know how it ends up for certain characters. It makes their story feel more poignant to me. I'm definitely interested in getting back to the present timeline, though, now that the sword master has been freed. What will the status quo look like now? Is there going to be a timeskip? Will Chihiro's design change? 

With the anime coming up, I saw someone comment that the series looked like a sausage fest, which surprised me because usually that sort of gender ratio imbalance is something that I notice and care about, but it wasn't something that I really noticed in Kagurabachi, and I'm not sure why that is. Maybe because there's less overt sexism, misogyny, and masculinity espoused by the characters? Maybe because the mangaka really likes to draw characters of all genders fairly androgynous and with long hair, so it's not as visibly noticeable that there are women missing? Idk. I think for me it might also be that while the story has side characters, I wouldn't really call it an ensemble cast. There's Chihiro, the main character, and then everyone else is a side character to his journey, without there being any deuteragonists or rival characters or primary antagonists. He has allies, of course, but Chihiro is pretty much the only one who gets the spotlight. Contrasted to a more ensemble cast that's only compromised of male characters, I can kind of see how I more easily missed most of the side characters here being male. 
Tags:
May. 27th, 2026 01:28 am

Dear Summer Of Horror Creator 2026

theirwolf: (come to me)
[personal profile] theirwolf

Dear Summer of Horror Exchange Creator,

Thank you so much for creating something for me! I am excited to see what you come up with! While I will include some thoughts about, as well as prompts for, the fandoms/dynamics I'm requesting, please don't feel constrained by this letter. I will enjoy and appreciate whatever you create for me in this exchange!

This letter isn't obligatory at all and all of the prompts are completely optional — there is zero expectation on my end for them to be incorporated into your creation.

If, like me, you find it helpful to have more of the recipient's thoughts and ideas when going into creating for an exchange, hopefully this will provide some inspiration or at least give a decent starting point. Some sections are much longer than others, but please don’t feel like I won’t appreciate fanworks for one of the shorter sections just as much — I would be delighted to receive something for any canon I am requesting. Some fandoms and dynamics are easier for me to articulate my thoughts about (or ramble incessantly about). A lot of my ramblings tend to be geared specifically towards fic — I've only recently started to request fanart (just a personal preference until of late), but the fandoms I have opted for art with I 100% would love any fanart. Feel free to take any of my thoughts or prompts and use them towards art for those fandoms.

I also have a general author letter here* if you want a look, plus my auto ao3 app results here.

(*Note: While only the sign-up DNWs are enforceable, if you are like me and take the time to read DNWs in letters, just know that my DNWs have evolved over time and I need to update my general letter post, so you can disregard that section and just rely on the DNWs in my sign-up. :3)

 

Fandoms Requested:

Nosferatu (2024) • IT: Welcome to Derry • IT (Films) • Hellraiser (2022) • Skinwalkers • Barbarian • Locked (2025) • Don't Breathe • Crossover Fandoms 

General Likes (noncomprehensive):

werewolf aus • vampire aus • "missing" scenes • filler fic • pov of canon moments • codependency • obsessive/possessive behavior • mysteries • soulmate aus • reincarnation • hurt/comfort • fluff • creepy fluff • toxic relationships • incest • throuples • polyamory • bisexual characters • nonbinary/genderqueer characters • pining/mutual pining • emotional porn • sex as coping (unhealthy a plus) • hatefuck • enemies to lovers • enemies to enemies who fuck • power imbalances • manipulation • age gaps • Dom/sub dynamics • informal BDSM • modern (but still horror/fantasy/whatever) aus • medieval aus • high fantasy aus • five times fic • men crying • found family • toxic found family • porn without plot • porn with so much plot • gothic romance • dungeons and dragons aus • chronicles/world of darkness aus • ride or die dynamics • hands/hand intimacy • forbidden romance • mutually assured destruction • self-destructive tendencies

Horror Specific Likes (noncomprehensive):

slasher/final girl dynamics • gothic horror • Stockholm syndrome • Lima syndrome • cosmic/lovecraftian horror • cosmic romance • stalking • monster romance • horror tropes • captivity/kidnapping • reincarnation but make it horror • horror romance • rival killers in love • the hitcher aus • architectural horror • haunted houses • serial killer aus • ghosts • erotic horror • werewolves that love being werewolves • mindfuck • thrillers • investigative horror • couples that slay together stay together • southern gothic • coastal horror • killer finfolk/merfolk • isolated/trapped/stranded horror • ghost sex

Opt-ins:
genre/setting shifts • modern aus • art for any of my fics • sequels/remixes for any of my fics • fusion fics • using prompts from previous exchanges


DNWs:

Abrahamic religion horror • harry potter crossover/fusion fic • unrequested ships (however inclusion of canon ships is fine unless specifically DNW'd) • permanent non-canon death of requested characters (permanently a ghost/vampire/other undead creature or spirit or fic set within the underworld/afterlife is more than welcome) • extremely violent/unaroused victim noncon (noncon with aroused victim and dubcon is fine, so is implied/referenced noncon) • scat/watersports/emetophilia • over the knee spanking • a/b/o • pregnancy • sounding • infantilization • vore • inflation • stuffing • food related kinks/fetishes • emphasis on fatphobia/weight issues • major underage sex (preferably 15 and up, unless otherwise noted) • bestiality (monsterfucking/teratophilia/xenophilia are encouraged though) • breast fucking • emphasis on large breast size • genderswapping (trans/genderqueer headcanons are okay) • extremely bleak/downer endings • character or relationship bashing • easy redemption arcs • stories that focus heavily on current real world issues • animal abuse • graphic animal death (non-graphic mention (especially for vampire feeding)/off screen/past death okay) • graphic torture • gory genitalia related violence • infection horror (pus, sores, squishy and non-bloody type body horror kind of stuff)
 

(Note: This letter will include spoilers for the requested fandoms)
 

 

( Nosferatu 2024 )


( IT: Welcome to Derry )

 

( IT (Films) )


( Hellraiser (2022) )


( Skinwalkers )


( Barbarian )


( Locked (2025) )

 


( Don't Breathe )

 


( Crossover Fandom )

 


Tags:
May. 27th, 2026 05:35 am

"From a Certain Point of View."

sonofgodzilla: incest era (holding hands)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
This is unfortunately a stealth fic post but because the story in question is my further repurposing and rearranging of elements of Wonderful Precure! via the [personal profile] kera method of filing the serial numbers off, I feel a bit self-conscious trying to promote it as part of the Write More PR Fic event. Nonetheless, it is a part of that, and that's where ignoring the thin lines between fanfic and original fic has got us. I want everything to count. I started writing this way when I was younger because I was really impressed with the way in which the comic book crossover WildCATS vs Aliens mattered to the overall story of the former and now here we are, several years later, a grown up problem child.

Over the sweltering heat of the Bank Holiday week-end, I did nothing but lay in front of the fan and watch cartoons whilst promising myself that I won't carry on like this, that this time next year I'd have made an effort to pick myself up again. Having handed in my notice now, I am practising the art of letting certain things go. I worry that in the last year, in order to defend myself against my job, I've too thoroughly invested my heart in pop music and rude pictures on pixiv, but every now and then, I get glimpses of a path in the darkness, a way to celebrate what you love without giving up ownership of it. This is your mid-year reminder that when I said I was giving up the idea of being a real writer, I meant it; this is also your mid-year reminder that I came away from that resolution with even more conviction that the themes I want to talk about were worth talking about, no matter how unpopular.

I spend a lot of time trying to justify why I want to see work that features unsavoury themes.

I've really been having an Assault Lily renaissance this last month! You're going to hear about that really soon. In the meantime, I've been watching these awfully edited compilations of Adventure Time episodes on youtube kids, the manner in which they are cut and pasted being so haphazard and weirdly paced that I can only assume that it must have been done by an AI of sorts as it has no respect for narrative. The other alternative, of course, is that Warner Bros are worried about copyright striking themselves because of the unwieldy nature of corporations on the internet, which is a notion that makes me smile. Regardless of this, I find myself becoming really invested in it again.

For a while, I didn't really want to watch the show again as it came from a time in my life that was a little unsettled, but watching it now, I'm really struck by how cleverly it introduces its deeper themes as it goes along—something that comes through even with the choppy and abrupt nature of the editing. I've still never seen the final seasons, but at the moment I am full of admiration for this story, for the complexity of its characters. Despite moving away from the show, I never really stopped thinking about Princess Bubblegum and the way she both represents the traditional princess character of earlier media from the 1980s—Princess Peach, Princess Daisy, Princess Zelda &c.—and how she subverts those ideas the more we spend time with her. I think, if handled less adeptly, Princess Bubblegum would come across as a villain, yet because of the storytelling of the show, it becomes more and more apparent that she's so much more than that, a character who won't allow herself to reply genuinely to the feelings of others but lives in fear of driving them away. Princess Bubblegum's relationship with Finn is especially interesting to me in the way it is portrayed and the way she is always trying to control that relationship whilst at the same time refusing to take responsibility for it. There's a lot of nuance and complicated feelings in this depiction that I wasn't really expecting.

Also over the last month or so and certainly over this week-end whilst laying in front of the fan, I've been watching Beast Wars, which I'm equally surprised by. I don't have as strong feelings as I do Adventure Time, but, having more patience for it than I did when I was a kid, I'm learning to appreciate its story for what it is. I do wonder, however, when my default viewing preference for media because marathons on youtube kids.
  • Current Mood: tired
  • Current Location: somewhere
  • Current Music: Napalm Death - Mentally Murdered
Tags:
Page generated Jun. 9th, 2026 01:32 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios

Style Credit