Little Flashes of Writing

I did it again. Just completely ignored this blog last week. Even though I AGAIN had actual writing to promote.

Hacker Girl
Facebook sticker
by Birdman, Inc.

I don't know why I keep doing this. It also kept me two full hours of having Blogger open this morning before I started working on this post. I just have been struggling hardcore with starting any sort of writing lately. Once I get those first couple of sentences down I can go OFF for hours; gladly lost in a craft I enjoy. However, getting the motivation to put those sentences down, or even forming sentences in the first place? I dunno, guys, it's still rough going for me.

I mean, I know I stated last time that I need to give myself another break; that I'm clearly more burnt out than I keep giving myself credit. So, I'm sure you fine folks didn't bat an eye about the fact that I missed last week.

The irony there though, was that I randomly wrote a little vignette pretty much right after saying I need to be on a writing break. I published it online. I've had a fair amount of positive feedback - which I'll get into in a little bit - and I was feeling pretty good about my writing after that. I was all pumped to tell you guys about it, and I'm back to having my Tuesdays off. I really had no reason to NOT write up the post. Instead, though, I just... sat on YouTube catching up on my subscriptions list and playing on my Switch.

Generated by Bitmoji
cropped by me

During the first few days of my "writing hiatus", I decided to focus on reading fanfic again. I was looking for fluffy pieces to maybe inspire me for a belated Valentine's Day piece or a way to FINALLY get the "Your Voice" prompt from last year's Fluff Week to form into a publishable story.

I can't quite recall anymore which story did spark something, but all of these identity reveal/love reveal/Love-Square becoming a couple stories made me want to write my own. I think one of the stories had Adrien so excited to find out that Marinette loved him that it took all he had to not just literally sweep her off her feet or something? 

Anyway, I couldn't figure out a full story, but I did have a scene that needed out of my head, and so I complied.

There is a much larger story here. I know there is. Mostly, I don't don't know where Adrien and Marinette are in this vignette, or why she suddenly decided it was time to abruptly (and kind of aggressively) confess her feelings to Adrien. I also don't know how the story concludes; how it resolves whatever conflict has Marinette confessing in the first place. There's so much that could bookend this scene to build it up into a full story, but, whatever.

I didn't want to sit on a scene that I enjoyed but had NOTHING for what came before it or after. At least other scenes I have waiting in the wings have surrounding stories I'm trying to form - mostly just threading those scenes together for One and the Same - and so sitting on them makes sense. This, though? To pull my hair out to force myself to come up with the surrounding story? Or to shelve something I enjoyed because it's incomplete, and who knows when I will complete it?

Screw that! This is my way of being self-indulgent: just go ahead and post the thing; let the readers sort out the details surrounding it. I mean, fan-artists do it all the time with concepts surrounding a single image, right? I'll actually touch on that in a moment.

So, anyway, I went ahead and posted my vignette of less than 1000 words (I know, right!?) up on Tumblr as one of my few Tumblr exclusive drabbles. I mostly do that because I don't like posting incomplete stories/drabbles up on FFN or AO3. However, I had torn through so many stories that were either around or under the 1000-word mark leading into that spark of inspiration. So, ya know what? Let's do this. Everyone else posts short little blips, why shouldn't I?

It kept me until the 24th - about a week after publishing to just Tumblr - but I finally went ahead and published in my normal spots as well.

So, for your consumption, I give you

Is It True?

Summary: Marinette instantly regrets confessing her feelings for Adrien. He decides it might be time for a confession of his own.

On FanFiction       On ArchiveOfOurOwn       On DeviantArt       On Tumblr

It's been about a week since I published to FFN, AO3, and DA, so might as well check out my stats. This story truly has blown up. I get it though. It's suuuuuper short, especially for me. It's a love confession. It's Adrienette fluff. If ANY of my stories were going to blow up, I'd be surprised if it WASN'T this one.

Also, reminder that the story was up only on Tumblr for nearly a week before I published to the other sites, so the stats for Tumblr is actually for the 2 weeks it's up. That said, it wasn't until I reblogged the story with the links to the off-site publications (and remembered to tag discoveringmiraculouswriters) did I get most of the notes. That first week, I only had 7 likes and one reblog.

FFN: 508 views, 27 faves, 9 followers, and 7 reviews
AO3: 664 hits, 115 kudos, 6 bookmarks, and 6 reviews
DA: "1k views" but no favorites or comments*

Total Results: 2172* views! 142 faves, 15 followers, and 13 reviews
      *I don't know if it's exactly 1000 views on DA once the site switches count to 1k. For all I know, it could be 1010 views, but DA just keeps it in a "1k" category.

Tumblr Notes: 31 notes; 22 likes, 8 reblogs, and 1 comment

FFN reviews:
  1. This was sweet. I love the mutual love without identities coming into play. Great work. - sparklehannah
  2. Great one-shot. Thank you for writing it. - Agiani
  3. Ahhh. So cute! Marinette running away is so like her. Very nicely done. But you're right. I sense a larger story... Lol thank you. - Wildfire's Flame
  4. Holy crap this was so cute ;w;- puppydogs68
  5. Great! Adrien is so cute that he was desperate to kiss her after her confession. - CharlieBoneFan
  6. Awwww so cuuuuteee - Marichat.crazed
  7. Cuute - Wrightless

AO3 reviews:
  1. That was very sweet. It gave me cavities. - GalaxyWanderer
  2. Ooooooooh this was great!!! Sometimes, we just need fluff and self-indulgent love confessions. - P_Artsypants
  3. This was cute! - mayuralover
  4. Marinette's fear of rejection is borderline crippling. She even suffered under its weight as Ladybug in Origins. - AFWebster
  5. "Almost all the time." Smooth! / They're so cute. 💕 - chatonne-rousse (thefullbeaumonty)
  6. Aw, so sweet! Very nice story! - pkk

Tumblr comment:
  - THIS IS FANTASTIC 😭👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾 - rikareena

The fanfic promotional blog Ladynoir Feed also shared it once I published to AO3. Their promotion on Tumblr on the 25th has garnered an additional 19 likes and 1 reblog as of this writing. The story itself isn't shared to Tumblr with this promotional post, so those were at least 19 people who were directed to my AO3 publication. Likewise, 5 of my reblogs were either directly or indirectly connected to discoveringmiraculouswriters, allowing at least 4 new people (5th reblog would be DMW themselves) to see my story. Thanks for the assist, guys!

Generated by Bitmoji

Also, one of the bookmarks of my AO3 post included "THIS IS SO CUTE / I LOVE NON-OBLIVIOUS ADRIEN" in the notes. So.... yay!

It's been a nice week to get so many emails and alerts to let me know someone new liked, favorited, reblogged, or commented on my story. Heck, I think even I have re-read this short vignette about 2-dozen times by now.

If only I had more of the story to build off of it....

Which brings me back to what I was saying before about fanartists capturing a small scene - such as my vignette - and just leaving the core story behind it open for the consumers to figure out.

One of the people I follow on Tumblr - carpisuns (formerly chatnoirinette) - had posted some fanart of Alya and Adrien in matching red sweatshirts with "LADYBUG SIMP" embroidered on the front. She also included the caption:

they battled fiercely for the title of #1 ladybug simp but in the end alya won because she pulled the “i run the ladyblog” card and poor adrien was unable to play the “im chat noir” card so he had to graciously accept the #2 slot. and then they had a photoshoot in their custom-made hoodies

 Carpisuns then reblogged with a screenshot of the tags someone included. She added the comment:

#marinette totally made those for them #mari totally embroidered a secret heart on the inside of adrien's
can pieces of art have backstory canon....if so I declare this canon thanks @miraculousmolls

So, right out the gate, a single scene, captured by fanart and a caption about the backstory to it, birthed a deeper story.

And I want to keep digging.

I haven't figured out whose POV I should use for this story - Adrien's, Marinette's, or 3rd omniscient - and I don't know how to start the argument between Adrien and Alya about who is the #1 Ladybug Simp. I'm also trying to decide if Adrien should find the hidden embroidered heart... or maybe Plagg finds it and keeps that info to himself????

There's so much potential here that I can't quite lock down, but I WANT TO.

So, I'm again on a bit of a writing break - in part because work has been crazy - as I let that stew. 

My point, though, is that, much like how fanart captures a single moment, ignoring the bigger story surrounding it, and forces the consumer to try to figure out the surrounding story, my doing the same with my vignette should be fine. I don't know why I can't embrace that more frequently, though. Why must my stories be complete? Why can't they just be small moments?

In a similar vein, I did mange a little bit more writing as recent as yesterday. One of the writing blogs I follow on Tumblr had reblogged an ask list for writers about their OCs. The way this works is a person reads the list, decides which questions from it they'd like the blog owner to answer, and sends them via the Ask feature on Tumblr. Usually the questions are accompanied with an emoji so the asker doesn't have to worry about rewriting the question they want to ask.

It is very rare that I find people - on both Tumblr and Facebook - who will actually play along and ask me the questions from these lists. But I've also noticed that I'm over 300 followers on Tumblr, and I received something like 6 new follows this week alone - probably because of my Adrienette story? - so I figured, "what the hey?" Not even 24hrs later I did indeed get an ask! It was by someone not even on my Following list, nor do I recognize their handle as someone who has liked/reblogged my posts at all recently. I honestly have no clue where this person came from, but they asked, and so they received.

When I reblogged the initial list of questions I had added a small bio of sorts of my 7 most fleshed out OCs that people could ask about:

1. Amara Yori
2. Lia Madrox
3. Willow Driver
4. Trish Morrison
5. Jolene Crislebaulm (I think that's how I spelled her last name? Why the heck did I come up with a last name I can never remember how I spelled????)
6. Kriv Myastan
7. Emerald Gaze

That way people could ask me about any of these OCs, even if I haven't really talked about them much on Tumblr. The ask was for Lia and Trish. The questions are a bit involved, but the long-and-short is asking how they handle being scared, and how they handle being sick/cared for. Fairly easy to know the answers to those questions for both of these ladies since those exact situations more-or-less already canonically happened within the X-Future roleplay game. 

If you want to know my answers, you can read them on Tumblr here.

So, uh, yeah. I've actually had quite a bit going on with writing, so I have no clue why I skipped last week, or why it kept me just about all day to get around to writing this week's blog. I'm just glad to be writing ANYTHING again though. Guess that's a start, right?

Generated by Bitmoji

Let's keep this train a-chuggin' along. Hopefully it will keep chugging right into an on-time blog post next week. We'll see, I guess.