@strawberryrosegarden / strawberryrosegarden.tumblr.com
writer problems: trying to figure out how many chapters you’re going to stall until An Event™
more writer problems: trying to figure out how many chapters you can fit between Events™
even more writer problems: trying to figure out what Event to put in between your chapters
the ultimate writer problem: what are events and chapters and words
the One True Writer Problem: writing
Other, More Considerate People: I like to keep my story as close to canon and ship-free as possible so everyone can enjoy it. :)
My Self-Indulgent Ass: ‘Sup, assholes, here’re all my implausible OTPs, their future children, a bunch of OCs that play prominent roles, and all my sexuality headcanons are in effect.
“To understand this fic you’ll need to refer to page 15, side A of my Extensive headcanon timeline of the entire history of this character and everyone he ever met, the contents of which are helpfully provided absolutely nowhere.”
“behold as I construct the precarious scaffolding of this story from discarded tumblr shitposts, my id, a dream I had once, poorly concealed psychological projection, the abstract concept of the way it feels to look out at the sea, and a bunch of dumb jokes I couldn’t stop cackling to myself about. oh, but it’s fanfiction.“
This! ALL of this!
I feel attacked.
I’m not dead! Promise! I’ve just been mostly on twitch and twitter lately. Sorry I haven’t been around at all! I won’t promise I’ll be around more, but I do miss my tumblr friends and aesthetic blogs, so maaaaaybe I’ll be around? Who knows lmao
Imagine a group of humans and aliens talking about their home worlds while in the ship’s canteen. One world is covered entirely by water (the crew members from there have to wear special masks to help them absorb the oxygen they need from the air); one is full of rare minerals and littered with what, on any other planet, would be precious stones and one is carpeted with dense vegetation and has the more biodiversity than any other planet.
Once they’ve all finished talking about their own planets, everybody turns to the humans and asks them what Earth is like. They’re only doing it to be polite though. They haven’t heard much about humans (except the usual stories, and only fledglings believe in those) and they can’t really believe that these fleshy bald looking things come from anywhere even remotely as interesting as their own planets.
There’s a pause and then one of the humans speaks up, “well, I come from a part of Earth called ‘England’ and, to be honest, it’s nothing like as cool as your planets sound. It’s alright though. We got some snow last year, so I’m hoping that we’ll have some this year as well when I get back.”
“Snow?” one of the water breathers asks, hissing slightly through their mask, “what’s that?”
“Frozen water that falls from the sky.” The human explains, “it’s really fun to play with. It’s only called snow when it’s soft though— when it’s hard it’s called hail. Nobody likes hail, you can’t do anything with it and it hurts if it hits you. I looked up during a hail storm once,” she adds, “when I was a kid. Huge hailstones and one hit me right in the eye! Hurt like Hell.”
“Is your planet really cold then?” one of the aliens asks, sounding doubtful since nothing has looked less equipped to deal with cold weather than a human.
“No,” she says, “not everywhere. England’s pretty cold, but in the Summer sometimes we get heatwaves. Last year I went out in one and forgot to wear suncream and got sunburn all down my arms.”
“Your planet’s sun… burned you?” a horrified creature asks, “was it painful?”
“Not really, just stung a bit,” she shrugs, “it was fine once the skin started to peel.” (At the back of the crowd that has now amassed around their table a voice says “I didn’t know humans moulted.” and another, horrified sounding voice replies “that’s because they don’t!”) the human continues on regardless. “It was really annoying actually, because it meant I couldn’t go out for a bit without wearing a jacket. Then when my burns had finally healed, I wanted to go to the beach, but when I got there there was this huge thunderstorm and I had to go home again.”
“Thunderstorm?” the word is whispered, mainly because the person asking secretly hopes the human won’t hear them so they won’t have to know.
“It’s when the clouds get all dark and it starts raining,” the human explains and everybody sighs with relief. Most planets have rain. “The clouds make these really loud banging noises,” she continues, “that’s the thunder, and electricity shoots down from the clouds— that’s called lightning. Sometimes people get hit by it, a few people even survive. I once—”
But one of her human friends cuts her off. “God,” he says, “you Brits are so boring, always talking about the weather!”
While she argues with him, the creatures seated around the table stare at them in astonishment and start to give a little more credit to those old stories. Because, though they look pretty harmless, a species would have to be tough to be able to survive on a planet where a person could be pelted with ice, burned by the sun and nearly electrocuted by the sky and then have another person describe those experiences as boring!
shoutout to the woman somewhere behind me at the movie theatre who gasped and whispered “she’s beautiful…” when cate blanchett came on screen
a saga
Title: Adventures in Solitude (Are You There, Sirius? It’s Me, Draco) Author: Anonymous Recipient: @strawberryrosegarden Pairing(s): Harry/Draco, background Ginny/Luna Rating: NC-17 Word Count: ~25,000 Content/Enticements: magical portrait lore, slow burn, romance, friendship and family, scheming children, confronting one’s mistakes, taking accountability, happy endings Summary: Draco is grateful to have had Sirius’ portrait to confide in all those years ago, about his sexuality and unwanted feelings for a classmate named Harry. But when he gets the portrait out of storage after twenty years, the secrets he has kept from Sirius all along come out. Secrets about Draco’s role in the war… and secrets about Harry Potter. Author’s Notes: This fic was inspired by the song Adventures in Solitude by the New Pornographers. I’ve had this plot concept for a long time and it was a thrill to finally get the chance to write it. I hope you like it, Strawbs! (StrawbbyG? StrawbsyRose? You can smack me and tell me to shut up)
You guys!! You guys!!! Look at this fic! It’s my Erised gift, and even twelve hours after reading it I am such an EMOTION, it’s so beautiful. You should absolutely go read it as soon as possible!! ❤️❤️❤️
YO DUDES GUESS WHAT I HAVE TIME TO DO THINGS AGAIN I THINK (I hope) and guess what that means I have a fuckton of stuff to catch up on
Also I guess I’ll actually reblog things on here again?? My main blog has been mostly abandoned for the last few months too, lol. I recently did a nostalgic dive back through the old Hobbit Kinkmeme and man, I hadn’t realized how much I miss those guys and that fandom. So I might have to like, do an ‘if you post this stuff pls reblog’ post with the Hobbit actors as the focus haha. My dash is active, but I miss Richard and Lee and Dean and Aidan and oh man they must be actually?? Doing things still, right??
Anyway, consider this an ‘if you follow me and we’re not mutuals and you post this content pls reply to the post or something so I can follow you’ lol
So that’s all the stuff that’s like, theoretically upcoming. But for right now I’m still super emotionally exhausted and am gonna just go chill a little more. I’ll try to actually do stuff soon!
casual fan? no sorry i only know how to invest my whole livelihood into something and spend every waking moment thinking about said thing
If you want to go and immerse yourself in a very warm bath of Garganega wine and the heat of Verona, and hear a brilliant story about a young woman who is challenging the restraints of her time; then Romeo and Juliet is a great listen. I’ve really enjoyed reading it, so I hope that the audience enjoys listening.
Hi there! Firstly, I am so in love with your drawings - I showed your blog to all my friends and they couldn't believe how accurate and detailed your drawings were! Secondly, I was wondering if I could get your opinion on something. I know this has been questioned and theorized a lot, but I wanted to get your insight. Was Sirius Black on the Gryffindor Quidditch team? And if so, what position? Thanks so much! :)
I don’t think he was in the team (I don’t recall any information about it either). I think he was always cheering with Remus and Peter and informing James about Lily’s reaction after every match. To be honest, I think he was sort of “whatever” about Quidditch. “You know what’s even better than a firebolt, Prongs? A motorcicle.” “We are not going to have this discussion again.”
so I forgot to mention that one time I had a dream that ginny and luna became aurors to track down the still active supporters of voldemort after the wizarding war and they were a GREAT team i mean it was like the perfect “good cop bad cop” dynamic but also their clash of personalities made their duo absolutely Iconic because luna kept messing up their badass reputation (that ginny was desperately trying to perfect) because luna is luna and she would always mess up ginny’s one liners like it was straight up out of the office “Luna, tell this deatheater where he can stick his little dark arts wand” “In the confiscated wand bag” “No, Luna.”
Had a dream I found a penny from 1851. With Hermione Granger and five other magic folk (pretty sure at least one of them was Neville). We were attempting some kind of incredibly finicky currency exchange calculations, the purpose of which have been entirely lost to me. Also we were doing this around a table in the middle of the driveway of the house I lived in for most of my childhood.
I’ve been writing too much HP fanfiction, I think.
I saw some #discourse go by about how adults shouldn’t be in fandom writing about younger characters because it’s uncomfortable and gross to younger people to have adults ‘thinking about them’ in romantic/sexual terms.
1, This is not a restriction that any writers in any other venue have to deal with, wtf, or the entire YA genre would be banished; 2, Excuse you, children of Tumblr, no one is thinking about you.
If other people in fandom are older than you, by definition, they have been your age. When fans write about younger characters, we’re not peering through a keyhole at young people now and creeping on them.
We are drawing on our own experiences, thoughts, feelings and memories of what it was like when we were that age.
No one has the right to ask older writers to cut themselves off from their own past just because young’uns don’t want to acknowledge that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, all of them, were also young once. I’m 41, but I remember vividly what it was like to be 14. If I write a high school AU, it’s about my high school experience, even if I were to set it in the present day and decorate it with some (probably comically out of touch) Stuff The Kids Are Into Now. If I write a high school AU with sex, it’s because I remember that too! I’m not thinking about kids today, why would I– I have my own experiences to draw on. And honestly, sometimes there are things about being young that you don’t really understand until you’re much older and have some perspective– and that’s worth writing about.
If someone is genuinely a creeper, you’ll know, because they’ll ask you questions about you. But people who aren’t even directly interacting with you, who are just expressing themselves in fiction, are not a threat to you, and it’s not creepy for them to draw on their own experiences and their own past to write about younger characters.
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
