Nothing is always absolutely so.

The year is coming to a close, so I'm going to spend the last post of it on some shameless plugs! This post is pretty much laser-targeted at the folks who have asked when I will be opening my Ko-Fi up again - the short answer right now is IDK, but I do have a few others to recommend in case anyone out there is financially stable and is feeling generous! Thanks for the consideration 💗💙💚

TEF-related stuff

• I'm never gonna stop promoting racketballs' work for as long as I am drawing breath. Here's rb's linktree (and inprnt store if anyone's feeling something tangible)!
• Lalefue did the first Webtoons comic (manga-style!) based on TEF/MTH and has a Ko-Fi
• AurumMaiden did the second Webtoons comic (the colors QoQ) and has a Ko-Fi as well (linktree here)

Old friends whom I love dearly

• Doubledoe does fantastical forest art; here is the Ko-Fi
• Maz is one of my oldest PpG-lovin' buds and has a Ko-Fi here

Organizations/Activism

• Black Lives Still Matter and this carrd is still being updated with resources and GoFundMe links
• The Conscious Kid is one of my favorite orgs at the moment and they are also providing ongoing rent relief during the COVID-19 crisis; donation info is here

It's the end of what I am (and I'm sure several others are) hoping will be the worst collective year of our lives, but one thing that has never sucked has been you all. I'm grateful for your love and your support and encouragement. I'm grateful for you sticking around to hear what I have to say, even when there's a multi-year gap in between those things. You all have been a consistent bright spot during good times and some really unbearable times. I'm grateful for that. Thank you.

Survival is a sort of victory. Take your win, even if it's small. Whatever you're going through out there, I hope you're okay. I hope you're safe. Be endlessly, relentlessly kind to yourself, and see you in 2021. 💗💙💚

AO3 | FFNet | AskFM | Ko-Fi (currently closed)

Every once in awhile I go digging through old fic I used to read and I'm always amazed by how well some of it holds up. Most of it doesn't, of course! But I'm somehow always surprised by how good a lot of what I read was, particularly the HP fanfic.

I was never hugely into HP as a fan. I enjoyed the books, of course, but by the time HP came around I was just past that prime age of adolescence where you connect very strongly with certain media you consume. Plus, that spot was already occupied by the PpG, and would be for years to come. But for some reason, despite only a passing interest in HP itself, I got really sucked into the world of H/D slash!fic.

I never wrote for it, at least, not that I recall? I might've handwritten a fic for a friend of mine that I included with her Christmas card years ago, come to think, but I was never an active participant in fandom as a whole. I just remember being... completely and totally floored by the quality of the fic. I was a teenager at the time, and up to that point had only read fic written by other pre-teens and teenagers. It wasn't necessarily bad stuff (though let's be fair, some of it was. Just. Just awful. Awful trash), it was just... you know, a bunch of teenagers exploring things and doing some wish fulfillment stuff that involved pushing two characters together face-first. With the occasional edgelord dude writing more mature fare that tended to deliver on plot (yay!) spiked with a heavy dose of unnecessarily misogynistic bullshit (NO).

As a teenager, though, I thought that was just how things were. So my first few fics fall in that vein, too. A little bit of exploring, but mostly fulfilling wishes, etc. And I was parroting the romance narratives that I had grown up with, which mostly stemmed from the same romcoms and TV soaps that the other (mostly) girls my age had grown up with.

And then I found the HP fic.

I honestly... don't even remember how I stumbled upon it. I don't know if H/D fic is something I went looking for (possibly?) or something I just fell into out of curiosity. My best guess is that I went into the HP section on ffnet to get a fix while I waited for the next book to come out, read some decent fic, and then, somehow, stumbled upon something that was absolutely incredible. Probably something by an author formerly known as amalin. IDEK if her masterpieces are still up anymore.

I think from there I must've wandered onto someone's LJ account via their ffnet profile, realized I could search for HP comms on LJ, and then located an LJ dedicated to excellent HP fic recs. And that's where my fannish young mind was blown.

I wish I could convey how astonishing and inspirational that discovery was for me. I remember reading stuff that haunted me – and not haunted me in the sense of “I need this to be updated, I need to know what happens.” Stuff that haunted me in the way unrequited love haunts you, the way grief does. I read stuff that burrowed into my bones and stayed with me for years. The takes on relationships, on war, on internal conflict and self-denial – I knew that fic was just stories, but HP fic showed me that it could be an art in and of itself.

I think it helped that HP fandom was as big as it was. With as big a pool as it was drawing from, the cream of the crop got identified fairly quickly – anything less than exceptional was overlooked. It wouldn't take off unless it was that good. And that's not to say that there weren't patterns or tropes that you started to see reflected across multiple authors. (I mean, if any fandom could claim to have a circle-jerk of authors patting themselves and their friends on the backs over and over again, it was HP. And ohhhh, the drama and the wank I witnessed in that fandom...)

I think... the other thing that aided HP fandom was the make of the fans that wrote it. Adult women – mostly in their 20s, possibly 30+. (Mostly women, not all.) But that, there, was another perspective that had been missing from my early fandom years. To explore the imaginations of grown women when I had previously been surrounded by fellow adolescents echoing the stories we'd grown up with (and dudes that wrote either gory action fics or porn, always one or the other and never anything in between) was like throwing open a window I had never even realized existed. And oh, the light it cast upon the room.

ETA: If any of you are curious, this is the first of many HP fics I remember reading that floored me from the start. Tied Up Between the Lines.

Let's start with something important: the lovely P, otherwise known as xjabooo and formerly known as notkorra/patbby on tumblr, has opened up a Redbubble shop! P is near and dear to my heart, and I know it would mean a lot to her (and me!) if you would pay her store a visit, even just to have a look! (And, you know, buy something if you feel so inclined. That would be even more awesome!) TYFYT ♥

On the TEF front, I'm still (yes, STILL) working on that bigass outline for Part 3. I know I've said before that I played things looser on Parts 1 and 2, but since 3 is where, you know, things start wrapping up, I'm really invested in tying it all semi-neatly together. I've got the bigger plot points in place and am now trying to hammer out little details. It's an interesting process to work that closely with an outline; I went through it just the other morning and realized "Oh God there's barely any Blues in this chapter." And that turns into looking at their role in the other chapters/months and seeing if I can set up any of their major plot points over in this chapter some, or if I can plus out this other thing I was planning or tie it in to what the Reds or Greens have going on somehow, etc. Not just an interesting process, but an interesting lesson in plotting. The details I'm working out right now involve things right down to specific lines in conversations two characters are having with each other, which definitely wasn't the case with my Part 1 outline.

( In fact, here's the outline I worked from for the very first chapter. )

Finally, I'm planning on doing another chat, probably towards the end of the month. It was brought to my attention after the first one that there was actually a LIMIT to the amount of users you could have in a chatroom! So my apologies to anyone who tried to get in but couldn't. I'll make sure that isn't the case with the next one.

(Visit P's shop!)

To the person who sent me a PM asking about the thing - you can do the thing! Your account is set up such that I cannot actually respond to your message, hence the public post instead.

(The two things I would ask that you add are a disclaimer attributing PpG to Craig McCr*cken and, if possible, a note that your work is not necessarily hard TEF/MTH canon. Thank you so much!)

And for extra funsies, I want this to be on Blossom's warm-up post... well, post-Brick anything, really. I want her to throw that into the stereo and then just hit it so hard, to the point where she could legitimately be breaking shit by the end of it. Shit as in... the foundation of the studio.

... I wonder if there's anything she could suitably krump to, come to think.

The most important point of this entry is to alert you all to busterella's

PpG Squishy!fic contest!

Some of you are familiar with busterella's Squishyverse and how awesome and great it is, but for those of you who are out of the loop, basically the Squishyverse is a mature and sensible take on CTN'S Fusionfall game universe, set exclusively within the Powerpuff Girls canon instead of the massive crossover affair that Fusionfall was.

It would be impossible for me to list all the GREAT AMAZING THINGS about Squishyverse, but here are a few things I love:

1. The characters are set up to react like REAL PEOPLE
2. There is a much greater focus on the family conflict that arises out of Buttercup's/Belladonna's amnesia
3. BUSTERELLA'S GREAT AMAZING ART
4. Her design of everything - the world, the characters, the GIRLS - is so refreshing and fun to look at!
5. The reshaping of the Fusionfall concept is seriously inspired - busterella basically took a coal (Fusionfall) and worked that thing until it was a freaking diamond (Squishyverse) with her bare hands and fantastic brainmeats
6. NO SERIOUSLY LOOK AT HOW GREAT THIS SHIT IS

So what I'm basically getting at is, her world-building is wonderful and if anyone deserves to have fic written for her, it's busterella. It would mean so much (!!!) if any fellow writerly folk out there would check out what she's done and give some thought to entering her contest! Or actually enter, buuuuut I won't hold you to that. (I'll probably think better of you as a person, though. Just slightly. ♥)

Please check out the entry I've linked to and tool about her tumblr tags. Her work is really something and at the very least everyone should check it out!

Also, if you're looking for the TEF update, I sent my revised 1st draft of ch12 off to beta last week. HOO-ZAH