Looking back, looking ahead...
Sep. 24th, 2025 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittkestraWell, the last month or so of writing has not gone as planned, haha. Unfortunately, real life kind of took a bit of a nosedive (everything is fine!), and it definitely threw a wrench into the careful plan machine.
Unfortunately, this is a frequent pitfall for me. I know it's not a unique difficulty to face, but it's certainly one that comes up repeatedly for me: my careful plans basically have no flexibility to handle the sorts of normal shit that come up as a part of life. Part of me really longs to believe that I can somehow come up with a plan or a schedule that's so perfect that it will become the key to infinite productivity! Alas, it never actually works that way. I work well with schedules, and they help me to do more than I manage without them. Inevitably though, something comes up. Family commitments, or inescapable home responsibilities, or I get a migraine, or get sick, or my partner and I go out to do something fun, etc. etc. etc. When I schedule things out to the extent I usually like, one day getting derailed can lead easily to the whole week falling apart, as I'm unable to get caught up, and just keep falling farther and farther behind instead.
Lots of that is to say... when I do start falling behind, writing is often where I try to pull from to get caught up. Also not a unique difficulty, but one I definitely need to do something about, because that was part of the point of this whole exercise, finding a pen name and all! I want writing to be a priority, and continuing to put it at the bottom of the task list isn't letting it be that.
So August and September both feel... not wasted, but not successes, either.
Only tangentially related, but one of the things I'd sort of decided on recently was trying to dip my toes into bluesky a bit more, because that seems to be where a lot of the active writers are...
Just in time for them to turn around with some truly hideous new restrictions set to start in a couple weeks. (Primarily governing visual art, but it's very over-broad, and disallows for an awful lot of fictional content, equating fictional or kink-oriented content with actual abuse of real people. The broadness and vagueness means that an awful lot of things *could* fall under these new restrictions, including discussion *of* actual abuse by victims, and in practice will almost certainly be weaponized against specific users or creators. I'm sure that's a pretty familiar risk, from anyone who remembers LJ in the days of strikethrough.)
My understanding on a read was that it is less likely to apply to written content, and very little of my own works are likely to bump into those restrictions... but then again, it's arguable that some of it could. Omegaverse is a divisive trope, and the "fuck-or-die" flavors of the trope would absolutely qualify. Anyone who has spent much time in and around modern fandom is probably perfectly used to how easily people will bend over to justify why the thing they don't like is actually morally reprehensible and abusive.
(And blah blah, yes I DO understand sites needing policies to keep actually abusive material off of their sites, and that does mean closing some avenues of plausible deniability, even if that means there are some false positives. However, rules that say that a drawing of two fictional characters engaging in *any* possible behavior is the same thing as, say, actual revenge porn? Fucking insulting.)
My work really isn't likely to be in danger from most of these restrictions. It's written rather than visual, it's not typically *that* dark, I tend to be happy-ending focused, etc. But some of my stuff touches on dark topics, on characters who have had bad things happen to them, etc. My stuff is queer and poly and that in and of itself is horribly deviant to plenty of people. I'm not sure it feels worth it to try and cultivate community in a space that feels likely to turn around and kick anyone that they might decide is icky in the future.
I've yet to see much of a consensus on where anyone plans to go, since bsky seemed sort of like the last social media bastion for people fleeing meta's various platforms and twitter's descent into full nazi-bar... Discord's forthcoming policies are actually somehow *worse*, and it's a poor substitute for social media anyway.
Even as it doesn't seem to be where many people are trying to come, I remain even more grateful for Dreamwidth and the site's commitment to allowing users the freedom to post any legal content.
Unfortunately, this is a frequent pitfall for me. I know it's not a unique difficulty to face, but it's certainly one that comes up repeatedly for me: my careful plans basically have no flexibility to handle the sorts of normal shit that come up as a part of life. Part of me really longs to believe that I can somehow come up with a plan or a schedule that's so perfect that it will become the key to infinite productivity! Alas, it never actually works that way. I work well with schedules, and they help me to do more than I manage without them. Inevitably though, something comes up. Family commitments, or inescapable home responsibilities, or I get a migraine, or get sick, or my partner and I go out to do something fun, etc. etc. etc. When I schedule things out to the extent I usually like, one day getting derailed can lead easily to the whole week falling apart, as I'm unable to get caught up, and just keep falling farther and farther behind instead.
Lots of that is to say... when I do start falling behind, writing is often where I try to pull from to get caught up. Also not a unique difficulty, but one I definitely need to do something about, because that was part of the point of this whole exercise, finding a pen name and all! I want writing to be a priority, and continuing to put it at the bottom of the task list isn't letting it be that.
So August and September both feel... not wasted, but not successes, either.
Only tangentially related, but one of the things I'd sort of decided on recently was trying to dip my toes into bluesky a bit more, because that seems to be where a lot of the active writers are...
Just in time for them to turn around with some truly hideous new restrictions set to start in a couple weeks. (Primarily governing visual art, but it's very over-broad, and disallows for an awful lot of fictional content, equating fictional or kink-oriented content with actual abuse of real people. The broadness and vagueness means that an awful lot of things *could* fall under these new restrictions, including discussion *of* actual abuse by victims, and in practice will almost certainly be weaponized against specific users or creators. I'm sure that's a pretty familiar risk, from anyone who remembers LJ in the days of strikethrough.)
My understanding on a read was that it is less likely to apply to written content, and very little of my own works are likely to bump into those restrictions... but then again, it's arguable that some of it could. Omegaverse is a divisive trope, and the "fuck-or-die" flavors of the trope would absolutely qualify. Anyone who has spent much time in and around modern fandom is probably perfectly used to how easily people will bend over to justify why the thing they don't like is actually morally reprehensible and abusive.
(And blah blah, yes I DO understand sites needing policies to keep actually abusive material off of their sites, and that does mean closing some avenues of plausible deniability, even if that means there are some false positives. However, rules that say that a drawing of two fictional characters engaging in *any* possible behavior is the same thing as, say, actual revenge porn? Fucking insulting.)
My work really isn't likely to be in danger from most of these restrictions. It's written rather than visual, it's not typically *that* dark, I tend to be happy-ending focused, etc. But some of my stuff touches on dark topics, on characters who have had bad things happen to them, etc. My stuff is queer and poly and that in and of itself is horribly deviant to plenty of people. I'm not sure it feels worth it to try and cultivate community in a space that feels likely to turn around and kick anyone that they might decide is icky in the future.
I've yet to see much of a consensus on where anyone plans to go, since bsky seemed sort of like the last social media bastion for people fleeing meta's various platforms and twitter's descent into full nazi-bar... Discord's forthcoming policies are actually somehow *worse*, and it's a poor substitute for social media anyway.
Even as it doesn't seem to be where many people are trying to come, I remain even more grateful for Dreamwidth and the site's commitment to allowing users the freedom to post any legal content.
