Chapter 16 (out Of 18) Is Up!With This Chapter, As Long As You Follow (247,126 Words) Has Officially

Chapter 16 (out of 18) is up! With this chapter, As Long as You Follow (247,126 words) has officially surpassed its predecessor, Go Your Own Way (233,279 words) in length, and I have also officially posted more than half a million words to AO3 (in just 14 months, which I feel like I should be more concerned about, oop). It's been a wild ride, ya'll. Still (hopefully) more to come, though.

WIP Wednesday

I was tagged by @sixhours. Have a snip from the next chapter of As Long as You Follow (which should be updated in the next day or two, and if you noticed I just added to the final chapter count again, no you didn't).

Tagging: @march-flowerr @two-birds-alone-together @bumblepony @becomethesun and @hypnotisedfireflies.

I think this segment was entirely my brain just being excited about all of my modern AU plans tbh.

Her exhaustion finally claimed her; her body, previously a taut knot of tension, now yielding to the comforting warmth emanating from Joel. And it felt…nice, in its own way, when she closed her eyes; his shoulder so firm against her cheek, the steady rumble of the engine a rhythmic lullaby. It reminded her of the more heady moments of her youth, of going out on dates with boys that had pickup trucks that made her mother shake her head and tut fretfully, of those days where her worries amounted to nothing more than the wind whipping through her hair and the pursuit of enough joy to drown out the persistent ache that always seemed to exist in her breastbone.

She wondered if this is what it would have been like, if things were different. If fate had dealt them a different hand, if she was older, or he was younger – everything she’d whispered to him on the bloodsoaked floor in that apartment building, this grand fantasy where the world hadn’t ended so catastrophically, yet they managed to find each other anyway. She’d tried to imagine him in his youth so many times before, had held that photo of her husband and her brother-in-law, clean-shaven and beaming, in her hands and tried to imagine what it would have been like to meet that Joel, to date that Joel, to fall in love with that Joel.

Would he have swept her off her feet with reckless charm just like the boys that came before him, who drove her around in trucks just like this, one arm around her shoulders, hand a little too eager to wander? Somehow, she didn’t think so. The image that materialized of him even as a foolhardy boy remained so steadfastly the man she already knew: the same protective instincts, the same aura of safety that had drawn her to him in the first place, the same warmth that he reserved for her and Ellie and shared so sparingly with others.

“Wake me up when you need me to navigate,” she said, her voice punctuated with a yawn. And he muttered something under his breath that, just from the one or two syllables she caught, was filled with irritation, but she felt the fleeting pressure of his lips press against her hair anyway.

I really need to start keeping this in mind.

sometimes i need to remind myself that i'm writing fanfiction for free and i'm allowed to have a shitty sentence or two

💡💛🎯

💡How many WIPs do you currently have? I suppose, technically, four. I'm trying to finish ALaYF, while working on my Tommy fic, Stand on the Rock, on the side, and I've been dabbling around with a one-shot I never got very far with before (where Ellie actually meets Bill and Frank after she and Joel leave Boston), while slowly gathering things together and plotting for my upcoming modern AU. 💛 What is the most impactful lesson you’ve learned about writing?

I'd like to say that it's to write for yourself - which I still strive to do. I write the fics I would want to read. But it's still a bummer when you don't feel like you're really breaking into the fandom that way, because other people are apparently less interested in the types of fics you want to read, haha.

🎯 Do you have a writing milestone you’re working towards? Just finishing ALaYF, currently! I don't like to leave things unfinished. ❤️ 

Joel, Ellie & Tommy + Horses

I remember that there used to be a LJ community dedicated to making fun of people - like, that was it, "look at this loser dressing weird," or whatever. And I got posted in it, once - someone went through my photos and reposted a bunch of them while making fun of me and calling me ugly and picking apart my clothing. LiveJournal was...quite the time.

Remember how LiveJournal let you have several icons (or avatars or "pfps" as you might call them now)? And you'd carefully choose an icon to fit the subject matter, your tone, and the blog on which you were commenting or posting?

And it could make your argument look that much snarkier if you used a rude one? Or you could use it to add a multiplier to a joke?

And icons, alongside banners and wallpapers, were a whole genre of fanwork with its own design language, conventions, and norms, including carefully crediting people for them?

That was neat.