blood runs thick

Questions from here!

1. What is a common ear worm that you get?
Most often it's music I like and in those instances I don't mind it at all, but the ones I commonly get that I'm more neutral-negative about are songs from children's shows I watched as a kid.

2. How long do they last?
Sometimes it's just until I get pulled into a task, other times I might be plagued by one that recurs over the period of a few days.

3. What do you do to get rid of them?
It'll usually stop if I listen to other music or a podcast for a sustained period of time.

4. What is the worst ear worm you've ever had?
On the awful scale this ranks pretty low, but I get the English dub Dragonball Z theme stuck in my head sometimes and it can be annoying considering I didn't like or watch the show. 😅

5. Do you get some guilty pleasure in passing the ear worm along?
My partner and I pass them to each other when we have particularly annoying ones, and I don't feel guilty at all 😇

Challenge #15: How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

I had really been hoping to have more opportunity to participate, but alas... I hate to admit how little energy I have to be Online and do stuff like this nowadays 🥲 Still, I think it went okay. I did find the time to do a couple of the challenges, leave some comments on other peoples' posts, and I was able to (somewhat) break the mental block that I have about posting here, which was kind of my ultimate goal with participating this year beyond the community aspect.

So yeah! Not all I was hoping it'd be, but it's more than I've been able to do before so I'm calling this a win. I might even try and go back and do some of the challenges I missed, I really wanted to do the moodboard and fandom promo ones.

And finally, a shoutout to the organizers & mods who keep the challenge going every year, it really is invaluable to have an event like this that can bring the community together across fandoms. 🩷❄️

Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.

It's been a long time since I did graphics so I'll talk about my creative process as a fic writer! I asked myself questions to help me structure my answer:

What makes you write a fic?
When I decide to write a fic it's 90% of the time because I saw a jumping off point in canon that I wanted to dig deeper into for one reason or another. Usually there's some kind of image or a scene in my head, and that turns into a fic. I typically like writing stuff that feels like missing scenes or that expands on feelings & relationships we're seeing in canon, but sometimes I also just feel like writing something that's very iddy to me personally and I decide to put my blorbos in a jar (my fic) and shake them around (put them in a situation). I almost always try to be canon-compliant in one way or another though, even when I'm writing an AU one of my favourite parts is trying to keep everyone in character and feeling like themselves.

What's the writing process like?
I'm glacially slow at writing and I've been coming to the realization that it's because I'm both a perfectionist and a discovery writer and this combination is lethal if I'm not careful about when I allow myself to edit/swap things around/etc. For years I've been constantly getting myself stuck in editing hell where I just tear down and polish a thousand times and it takes forever to get anything done. I've been trying to train myself out of it with these two things:

a) I write in a different program than I edit in & make the text the same colour as the background so I can't easily see what I wrote.
b) I stopped attempting to outline before I've started writing. If I have certain scenes in my head or a rough idea for the story structure I'll jot it down, but making meticulous plans takes me forever and I never stick to them anyway, so I just don't bother anymore.

How do you decide when something is done?
A fic is done when I read it, like it, and the idea of someone else reading it doesn't make me want to sink into the earth 🥲 Even then I give finished fics a bit of time to marinate so I can come back and tweak stuff with fresh eyes before I release it.