Category: Random Author Babble

Scene #Sylus Escapes added to Love Spiked!

November 3, 2026

Okay, I’m on the fence on this scene, and I can’t tell if it’s because shit has just been difficult the last days or if there’s something seriously wrong with the pacing of the scene. Could be both, I dunno. I don’t think it needs to be this long…

I ran out of my immune stabilizing meds while writing it, and then by the time I got the refill, the brain fog was so bad, I just couldn’t remember what the damn point was of this scene beyond getting to the next scene. I’m going to let it go for now, move forward, and worry about it in the next draft. I’m not sure if I’m going to edit by events, or wait until I finish the entire first draft of the book before doing serious edits… The entire point of writing in events is that it’ll avoid greater edits at the end, which suggests I was drafting by events first…?

Who knows. It’ll figure itself out. Writing always does.

Sometimes I spend too long in a scene and just lose all energy, not because the scene lacks energy but because it’s all familiar to me. I need some space to be able to see it for what it is.

I feel like I need to look at how I used to approach action scenes. I don’t even know if I was any good at them—didn’t write a lot of action, after all. They always seemed far shorter than expected, and given that this scene is longer than expected, that could be a bad sign…

My cat, Arcane, is dying. He’s eighteen. We lost his brother two years ago to different health issues. We even got a little extra time with Arcane with some vet intervention to drain the accumulated fluid from his heart disease. But everything tipped right around Halloween. No appetite, he can barely swallow water—I have to hand water him cuz he can’t drink on his own. I’m not sure if he’s going to last the night, tbh. I woke to him so dehydrated, and while hand watering has helped, because of his heart condition, the fluid isn’t necessarily getting where it’s needs to to hydrate him.

He managed to climb up the pet stairs onto the bed, and I have him on a heated blanket and another blanket to prevent him getting too hot. Just watching over him, giving him syringes of water when he looks thirsty, and hoping his rest feels restful. He’s very weak and was meowing like lost earlier.

It’s sad to watch the kittens treat him like he’s a stranger, avoiding him, acting like he might attack if they get too close. I think his scent has changed or something. Maybe their instincts aren’t to comfort the dying… I dunno. He’s my little babybug, even if old and sick.

Voted. Full of dread that even though so much of the globe has gotten their shit together in the face of fascism and exploitation, that the US might still be struggling to even face the problem. Guess we’ll find out soon.

As a writer, it’s pretty easy to imagine the worst shit all the time, and call it being cautious or worse, realistic. But really it’s just trying to control fear through predicting the worst, and who the fuck wants to think about the worst things all the time? Hope is a better way to live.

Completed the Scene #Kian Awakes in Love Spiked!

October 26, 2026

I’m posting this tired. Already saw I missed something and should probably do a final pass when I’m properly awake.

I can’t tell if I’m getting back into the flow of writing, or if my brain is so out of it I’m not noticing I’m messing up. Maybe a bit of both. I’m so many scenes ahead in my sketch drafts (talking two Events ahead, easy), I’m losing attachment to the scenes I should be working on. It should make it easier, but sometimes it just makes it boring. Like, it’s important to actually care about the scene to write it well, which is why I haven’t obsessively edited it because I’m currently not feeling it.

I didn’t have to edit huge things to fit into the world building for this scene. Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel like a battle. See, this is the fucking ADHD deciding I can’t focus unless I’m fighting what I’m writing. And really, fuck ADHD.

Part Of A New Scene Up On Love Spiked!

October 23, 2026

I hope I didn’t info dump too much in this. Like, I’ll fix it later when I have more scenes to spread things out… Maybe. I dunno. We’ll see. It doesn’t seem too heavy atm.

Sylus will be snapping out of his trance soon. I’ve had to make so many names for this guy, and now it’s like, should I have been calling him by his birth name the entire time or his work name? That’s his big secret, his family name, something he doesn’t want to reveal as he breaks the magicborn laws, so that, presumably should be his name. But… like… he’s been going by a different name professionally for a few years now. Would he think of himself by that new name? We haven’t even gotten to his day job, where everyone there calls him by his professional name. Like, no one will be calling this character by his real name for the majority of the story… it’s probably weird that the audience knows him as a different name.

I’m both world building way too much, and also not enough (cuz I keep needing to go back and fill things in). I’m currently musing on property law… XD They’re going to break into Acantha’s house. Heaven Below is on territory owned by the same magicborn House by an heir who might decide he wants Acantha’s stolen power instead. There has to be some consequences with the locals… I’m scared I’m going to start talking about taxes at this point, so somebody better start having sex in this story before it goes completely off the rails.

But I’m having fun. Haven’t had to think about politics at all (still have with an amazing amount of rage, but I didn’t HAVE to). Been tired again the last week. Trying different supplements. It’s frustrating because sometimes my energy comes from immune responses and an underlying overpowering sense of suffering as my system is trapped in a chronic state of anaphylaxis. So being tired usually means I’m at least not suffering. But it’s chronic fatigue, so, like, I start hoping something will wake me up even if it absolutely sucks.

I’m missing Halloween this year. My favorite holiday. Don’t have it in me. Don’t have the energy to decorate, to make a new sculpture this year, nothing. I love my stupid monster pumpkins. There’s this fun Halloween painting I started… last year? Haven’t touched it. And it sucks, but I just feel relief that I’m not going to break myself trying to keep at a pace I just can’t do. But it steals fun away. I’ll still push to do all the responsible things. It’s the fun that gets stolen away. Like, the responsible shit still doesn’t always get done, but it absolutely takes priority. Just typing now, writing, it’s a job I’m trying to get back to, and I’m not doing any of the other things I was doing when I wasn’t writing, like quilting or art or embroidery.

There aren’t enough hours in the day, not when you’re exhausted through most of them. I feel like the kitchen is purgatory the way messes just appear after every time I clean it. There was a point I literally hid the majority of my dishware in the garage so no one could ever make a pile of dishes in the sink again. I might have to start hiding plates again.

I’m just bitching at this point. I want to make a pumpkin this year… I want to be well enough to want to make a pumpkin this year. I want to see a finished project that makes me feel like I’m still a functioning person. Instead, I’m trapped being tired.

New Scene added to Love Spiked!

October 21, 2026

I’m trying really hard not to info dump as I write lately. I’m not sure it’s working, tbh, but I think it’s a little more under control. The whole show don’t tell thing in writing is great to work towards, but at some point you just end up making a million scenes to show what you could just say in a paragraph. And I absolutely hate flashbacks as a rule, so I refuse—mostly—to time hop just to show the things that happened.

Fun thing is, Shrike can see through people’s eyes as long as they’re connected, so I can kind of use Shrike’s memory to tease at past events without needing to show a full past scene.

Next scene is going to be through Kian’s pov. I almost feel bad that I don’t have a scene before he’s love spiked. Like, maybe that’s an interesting characterization to see how the potion changed him. But… I don’t think it’s a story that needs to be told, if that makes sense. There’s no going back. The potion is permanent. This is who he is now, and will be going forward. It’s not a story about who he used to be, so better to start now, the moment after the potion, I think.

What does love really change? It’s a wonderful chemical filter that helps build permanent bonds of familiarity and affection, but how much does it really change a person’s behavior? I mean, in a story we exaggerate for the need of romance to drive the plot, for the characters to battle against everything to create conflict and suspense. But really, at the end of the day, love might add some new routines or place them in a different location with another person, but it’s not like it changes a person. It might inspire them to change, but that’s growth, not love alone.

Edited Scenes #1-4 of Love Spiked

October 17, 2026

Nothing super exciting. I just couldn’t go forward in the story until I took all the things I had world built and fixed what I had already written. Maybe it’s neurotic (I have a pattern >_>) and I’ll likely find myself editing and changing things later, but I think for now, the beginning makes much more sense. There’s a lot less fixation on the nulls who are literally not seen after this first event, and hopefully Kian is more interesting to look at than his outfit this time.

Maybe it’s good the neurosis showed up. It means I care enough to obsess. The story will get written.

It’s been a tough couple weeks. Our elderly cat is dying. He’s swelling up with fluid and doesn’t have long, but he’s still a total sweetheart and it’s just this difficult limbo of hoping his quality of life is worth the less than ideal circumstances he’s living in. Saying goodbye is so difficult with pets. We create this situation where they depend on us for everything, and when they get sick it just so… helpless a feeling, I guess.

Self awareness is such a fucking cosmic joke when everybody dies. EVERYBODY dies. Like, the absurdity of it all that we have to be aware of the inevitable. And if you’re lucky to age, it’s just experiencing loss more and more, knowing you’re the one holding onto those gone forever. Knowing that pain you’re holding, that’s going to go too, along with those memories, and you’re just lying to yourself that it makes any difference at all.

But we need to believe it. Because mortal beings with self awareness are just intrinsically doomed to suffer. So you either tell yourself that suffering matters and suffer more, or let it go, and then have to deal with that level of suffering to know none of it matters. And there’s no right answer (beyond don’t be a monster to others—yet somehow people manage to fuck this up too).

I dunno. I’m sad about my lovey cat. Sad I can’t fix it for him. Sad that I’m going to remember him forever, but not really forever.

I think that’s why the idea of ghosts still persist. Not necessarily because everyone believes in a soul or afterlife or any of that, but because we want our feelings to matter. We want that pain to matter so much that we fantasize that even death can’t stop it. It’s why horror stories around ghosts never made sense to me. Ghosts are a romanticization of our emotions far more than a symbol of death (well, in my opinion).

Love Spiked Scene #3+4 updated!

October 7, 2026

I’ve been working on the world building of this story the last few weeks, fleshing out the magic systems, world, characters, and plot until it now feels familiar and solid, instead of the wisps of ideas I started with. My goal is to focus on this story going forward, cuz I don’t want to pay much attention to the world around me, and I don’t want to find myself ending another short story and needing to go through this arduous process all over again. I want to live in this story world for a while.

I’m not a great writer. I don’t think anyone will be shocked to hear it. But I like what I do, have fun making these worlds, characters, scenarios. It’s the not being good at it that holds me back the most because I don’t stretch myself as much as I would if I were confident to take on a difficult scene or scenario. It’s been harder with the brain fog and cerebral perfusion drops from the dysautonomia. Confidence is never going to happen because the basic things normal people take for granted in regards to their brains just isn’t there for me. I don’t get a solid baseline. Everything is in flux. My cognition can change completely from the beginning to the end of just typing this, and that’s just shit I have to accept and let go of. Me learning to be better at something isn’t going to matter when my brain won’t function to reflect that.

I try to tell myself it’s freeing. That I can just stop caring. But I can’t. It’s really distressing. Do I even have the judgement to know if what I wrote makes sense? Not all the time.

It’s been difficult to come back to writing just on this one problem. I started writing professionally when I first got sick; I was able to not see how bad my cognition was fluctuating for years and was willing to work around it, brute force through reality. It was only after 3 years of it flatlining that I realized that might never be an option again. So to dedicate my time to these long projects while knowing at any time I could just glitch out… Yeah, it’s been difficult to find that as a positive path.

But I’m having fun more than being frustrated, atm. I have no sense of security like I did when I first started, that naive belief that if I kept going it would figure itself out. I don’t believe that at all. So I have to do it for the love of what I’m doing, knowing it’s not going to be great, that it’s definitely not going to be consistent, and it’ll probably need a fuck ton of editing once the first draft is done, if I’m well enough to be able to finish it. And that’s just going to have to be enough.

Maybe needing certainty isn’t particularly honest to life in general. Security is an illusion… But it seems to be an important illusion.

Tormenting A Second Kiss Completed!

October 1, 2026

I don’t know how the hell this fanfic ended up over 24,000 words, but it happened. It was a cute story, and with the world feeling totally shit lately, I need some cute. And hey, finished something for a change. How quaint.

Scene #7 Updated to the Free Fic Tormenting A Second Kiss!

September 25, 2026

Wasn’t expecting this one to grow quite so sprawling. Haven’t been well this week, so decided to try and finish up this fanfic instead of figuring out the complexities of world building Love Spiked. This has one more scene to go and then a final edit to catch any issues I missed. I think I really just wanted intimacy for these characters, making them less 2D and cartoony.

The new glasses seem to be exactly what I needed to stop the migraines. I’m currently not at my previous pace of writing, not remotely putting in the same amount of hours of screenwork yet, so I don’t want to be too certain about it all. But specific colors now pop up off the surface of things I’m looking at, showing that my binocular vision is working and my eyes are now overlapping images correctly, even though one eye sees the color red far more vividly than the other. Funnily enough, when the phenomenon stopped, I had thought my vision was in a better place. It wasn’t until the glasses made colors float again that I realized, nope, that’s actually normal when eyes see different levels of chroma.

This month has been extremely stressful. I don’t want to go into the details, but I suspect I’m going to need to recover before I find my writing pace again. It’s frustrating—every step forward feels like three back—but I know it’s mostly illusion. I am getting better, if I can survive the process. I was thinking of working on the WOES fic too. Sometimes switching between stories can help me be less clingy to outcomes, and it’s a Halloween story and all. But again, I don’t know my capabilities yet, so I don’t want to promise anything.

Scenes #1-6 Updated to Free Fic Tormenting A Second Kiss!

September 21, 2026

Posting tired, as usual, so I’m not sure what I want to say about this fanfic atm. Let’s see… I was frustrated these characters don’t get together until one is reincarnated. This is going off the books, not the show. Like, this is too long a story for that shit. They have this cute but cartoony dynamic where Wei Wuxian says everything without meaning, while Lan Wangji says nothing while meaning everything. This is supposed to be them at 20, and the original book has them communicating as children while also slaughtering ancient baddies, going to war, and saving Clans and upholding civilizations. So I thought, what if instead of blaming Wei Wuxian for being “oblivious”, maybe Lan Wangji could grow the fuck up and open his mouth and say what he means? And sex, because why wait until dead? Oh, and give them lube! (Asses aren’t vaginas. They don’t self lubricate, and kindly, not all vaginas are great at that either, so give your characters lube. Ugh.)

Saw The Untamed on Netflix, learned it was a Chinese censored gay romance (censored as in gay people are completely erased. It’s a terrible type of homophobia because it’s insidious, not suggesting violence or rejection, but that one doesn’t exist at all, zero place in society and the world. Completely erased). The entire original story is a romance, yet they insist on making a 50 episode story pretending it’s not, trying to insist long glances are the same as representation of existing. Might as well be some rare, magical being instead of an ordinary queer for how it’s treated, and I found it fucking offensive. This isn’t special shit. It wasn’t a very sexual or blatant love story. If you read the books you’ll see nothing sexual even happens until the last book. But the very identity of these characters had to be stolen away for the censors, ruining the ending completely. Like, wtf was it all for? The main couple wander off separate. They did nothing to represent them being gay and still made sure they couldn’t be happy at the end to punish them and anyone watching who might be gay and hoping they’d be allowed to have love. Fucking homophobic.

Another thing that doesn’t exist in the censored version is the agency of the dead. Apparently they’re fighting fears of superstition, which for whatever reason means that you will see negative depictions of the dead where they are controlled to commit atrocities, but all the examples of the dead saving, helping, being allowed to get revenge on their own for being wronged? Completely erased. You can’t have a hope that balance might happen if you’re wronged. No glimmer of an afterlife. It’s all erased because fear of thoughts. They have to create a nightmare or nothing at all. Lose your parent and hope they’re watching after you? Not in this place, but a zombie might kill you.

The main character Wei Wuxian gets help from the dead and controls their resentment to use as his own magic. That’s erased from the censored version. I seriously don’t fucking understand why they even adapted it for the screen since everything seemed to offend. They instead have him only controlling those who are still alive but missing their spiritual cognition (something like the soul being stolen. You can have a soul but you can’t be gay?). The show adds in an extra element called the Yin Iron that is used to take something complex and realistic such as a group of people going to war against their peers, and turning it into the 2 dimensional idea that one man is obsessed and corrupted by this evil object and everyone else is tainted by it and guilty by association. Good and evil are connected to an object, not choices or actions. The show was hard to get through, gonna be real. I’m not a fan of epic war dramas, and they pace it as the past being this huge block of episodes until I forgot wtf happened in the current time at the beginning. It was arduous. It picked up once they got back into current time, but the novel paced things much better and didn’t need to pad with pointless scenes.

I think the biggest theme change that raised my eyebrow was how in the show, events that the main character observes is now something he is directly involved in. They stop pacing it as a mystery and instead turn it into more action adventure. It would be like adapting the Great Gatsby and having Nick Carraway taking over Gatsby’s role, stealing the girl, etc. I’d like to think it was to make it feel more active, but I think it’s something to do with that censoring again, or maybe just cultural. The show seems to want to drill in the idea that being bold, different, brave, and doing what is morally correct when society is against you will be punished. By death. Without supernatural balance or vengeance after death. What happened to others is now Wei Wuxian’s fault instead of being an observer. He holds it all on his shoulders, and it’s suggested that his actions, and being corrupted by the evil object, are why he must suffer and be killed. Like, it’s a weird ass change. They take the grays of clans of power-hungry people who make their living off resentment of the dead through fighting the ghouls created by it, and therefore are, at a systematic social level, encouraged not to change the world to prevent such resentment, and say, nah, evil object made them do bad. Don’t question the system that needs inequality to feed the monsters so we have a purpose in life. Just fight the baddies who have the evil object.

This problem of the “good guys” feeding a cycle of violence is a pretty common trap for writers in those genres. When they build civilization around fighting a foe, you have a power imbalance demanding things stay the same. Somebody has to die for the good guys to prove they’re heroes. It’s not the rarest problem, but the adaption made it worse by introducing an evil object, and claiming it was reason for evil actions, and anything against said object is good. Slaughter of surviving innocents justified instead of, you know, questioning a shitty hierarchy where shitty people do shitty things and society doesn’t want to deal with conflict so looks the other way, being extra shitty. I don’t mind the people behaving badly, the conflict with society. I mind that it was flattened, exaggerated, and there’s no way to know if the problem was understood, or if it was changed because of the censoring. Like, did they need Wei Wuxian to be his own demise because the excessive homophobia needed him to suffer even after erasing that part of his identity? Who the fuck knows. It’s so scrambled by the censoring of the adaption that anything and nothing of these intentions could be true.

If I seem too critical, I assure you, I think about all shows and reading like this. I want to understand how it works, the world and minds that created it, and what it’s saying even when one might not know they’re saying something at all. This show just had two sources to see changes from, making it extra interesting.

Anyways, stayed up too late rambling. Got a new set of glasses that seem to be solving the eye strain… maybe. It’s my first day using the monitor instead of writing on my phone. I’ll know more by the end of the week. I’m doing okay with short things like this on the phone, but I don’t think I could write a novel like this. I organize things visually, including complex plot lines. Maybe I could go back to the sticky note method if I need to…

Scenes #1-5 updated to the FREE fic Foresight!

September 7, 2026

Hey, a new fanfic! After I wiped the Potter shit out, I didn’t think I’d ever be inspired. Then I discovered Pit Babe on Netflix.

I realized through a little research that it first existed as an omegaverse type story written by someone out of Thailand (I think. I can’t find the original fic to truly know. There name is _alittlebitch, I was able to find that at least, and it was adapted in Thailand, so I’m assuming they’re from there). I don’t write omegaverse stuff, my werewolves and shifters don’t come from that underlying theme, and I don’t read it so I don’t actually know many of the tropes (beyond mpreg, heat, uh annoying hierarchies forced on individuals when in real wolf packs things ain’t like that; but I get it, it’s a control bdsm kink slash power war for feminism, etc). It was a trip to see those kind of fanservice tropes on the screen, even though the omegaverse stuff wasn’t really present. I really wish I could find the original work just to see how it was adapted.

Anyways, Pit Babe has a really interesting plot once you get an episode or two in. It’s very sweet (cavity inducing at times) lol, and I kinda low key love the crazy amount of product placement. I think it’s nostalgia a bit for the 80s. There are some cultural things I don’t quite get, or maybe it’s the world created. There’s a weird normalization of domestic violence in some scenes that are just, like, okay, we need to have a talk and that doesn’t involve your hands, fucker. I haven’t watched the second season yet… It felt done with the first and I dunno, I’ve got shit to pretend I can do instead of watching TV. But I might give it a shot… Maybe if they drop the whole Mama thing (pretty sure it’s cultural, or just some weird need to force gender rolls on the bottom (is that an omegaverse thing?). Like, it’s not a perfect show, but it’s fun).

I then noticed Netflix recommending a bunch of different shows with not only the same actors, but also a lot of the same pairings. I’m sure it’s for the comfort of the actors–these kinds of softcore scenes deserve a level of familiarity and security for everyone involved, but it has this funny side effect of creating a sort of multiverse where you watch a series that has omegaverse themes, then one about cooking, etc. It makes me think of an anime I used to watch when younger, Project A-ko, where the same characters would keep appearing but in different scenarios each movie, the movies unrelated except for those characters and an underlying multiverse plot. I dunno, it’s fun for the sake of fun, something the world is seriously in need of right now. I know I am.

Ugh, there’s so much work that needs to be done on this site. Just updating the fact I’m not on Patreon anymore is tedious, all because they basically stabbed in the back everyone who brought money in to allow them to be stable and now they’ve decided they don’t like adult content. Funny that, how so many people will make a killing on sex as a business, and then clutch their pearls to ever be associated with it. Like seriously, you’re only here because of sex.

I should make a proper list of all the things I need to do on the site, and go through and fix things up, but my eyes hurt so I don’t want to. Maybe later on a down day if my eyes will agree.

I’ve found some new hacks to the eye pain/migraine situation. I think they’re working, although today is a terrible judge because of all the coding I had to do to get this fic up. I’m currently (on top of all the other things) wearing a specific migraine preventative tint over my glasses pretty much 24/7 to prevent the pain from tipping into migraine levels, while also trying a new to me allergy eye drop that stabilizes mast cells.

My current MCAS treatment is limited. It’s mostly antihistamines and sodium cromolyn, which has results, don’t get me wrong, but they’re limited. Sodium cromolyn is poorly absorbed and won’t do much for areas beyond touch contact and nobody can afford to bathe in this stuff. While the active ingredient in my eye drops can stabilize the entire system of mast cells, apparently. The results were immediate for my eyes on taking it, in 30 minutes I could see color properly again at a vibrancy I forgot existed, able to lift my eyes up and look and see things around me. Everything has been so dim and dull with a background of pain I didn’t realize was there until it lifted for a bit. I’m going to talk to my MCAS doc about it and see if it might be a better choice as an MCAS medicine, not just for the eyes.

For now, I’m seeing an eye doc this week to go over options on the binocular issues. I’m having issues in the car again, that extreme anxiety as my eyes try and fail to track the movement of vehicles. It’s not great. But things are going in a direction, and we’ll call it up. Better than stagnant.

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