Clearly I need to reset my expectations re: writing

Because (AGAIN) I’ve written something with my only intention being “This makes sense for the character. This is how they would feel, based on their history,” and it’s turned out to be really close to my own issues when that hadn’t occurred to me at all.

Sorry, Fictional Guy. Turns out I don’t know how to deal with people expecting things from me either.

So, relatedly, I have way too fucking many feelings about Big Fluffy Dog Guy, and not romantic feelings, but “I don’t feel how you want me to feel, I’m lying to you, I’m leading you on, I am awful”-type feelings. Like, a really excessive amount of feelings that don’t really have anything to do with him. I am going to do my very best to behave like a responsible adult when I talk to him, but my brain is kind of imploding.

I’m wondering whether I should call this a subset of the general “I don’t like to disappoint people”/”I just can’t do the thing and how can I explain that” problem, or whether I actually have a specific issue about this re: relationships.

Well, this is a weird feeling.

A while ago I wrote a short story for Sparkly. And now I’m considering putting it someplace other people can read it, but…

Sparkly is in the story, and I think I wrote her well enough that our friends might recognize it as being about her? Maybe? (Not like there’s a description of what she looks like, but: the way she talks.)

So maybe I won’t.

I just really need to finish more of the less-self-insert-y stories, I guess.

Bad habits:

Writing stories where there’s sex and also really unsexy plot stuff.

This one is going to start with sex in an alley, and then progress to an awkward conversation in an all-night diner. Supposed to be the other way around, probably. And this is with a moderate does of “character is way more curious and adventurous than they should be, because otherwise nothing would happen”.

Quite a while ago

(years, maybe, I don’t remember) I thought to myself,
“Wow, I’ve read a lot of books about awful things. I bet if I wanted to write something like that I’d be well-equipped. I’m familiar with all the ways to make it really painful to read.”
Well, now I’m going to do it. Get ready, RP friends! You thought I meant just an embarrassing story, well, you’ll get it now.

ETA:

Yeah, if you hadn’t already guessed, this was a bad idea. But after getting myself out of my shitty mood, I suddenly found myself able and wanting to write about it calmly. So now there is about half of a sad, reflective story, which hopefully will get the point across still.

Writing

I thought to myself, “I should write something with a trans* character!”

And then I thought, “Actually, I already have. Or at least, a genderqueer character.”

The character just doesn’t think of it that way, because the culture she lives in doesn’t have that idea. But in a world that gave her the option, she would be some variety of androgynous.

I had actually asked myself before, “Does this character wish she was a man?” and she doesn’t, exactly. If she were able to rewrite her life so that she wasn’t (or at least, wasn’t perceived as) a woman, she probably wouldn’t. But that’s because she’s looking back on things from her late thirties, and because the society she lives in has such rigid gender roles, being (perceived as) a woman has made a big difference in the course of her life. When she was younger, being part of an organization For Girls was very important to her, and then she’s spent most of her adult life as one of the first women to integrate an organization that used to be very much For Men. If she’d been assigned male at birth, the course of her life would have been very different and she’d probably be a significantly different person. And she rather likes the course of her life, and her perspective, and her career, although the truth is that if she’d had more options, she probably would have chosen something else. So because she doesn’t want to change all of that, she wouldn’t want to change what gender she’s perceived as.

But that’s pretty much the only attachment she has to being a woman. I think if you asked, say, 12-year-old her, instead of 35-year-old her, she would be perfectly willing to be a man. She doesn’t actively dislike her body, but she isn’t strongly attached to it, either. I think she might like feminine fashions, in a different world, but she’s been pretty much scared off of caring about her appearance by her society’s emphasis on it. “Being attractive is the single most important thing you can do to get a husband, which is the single most important event in your life” is waaaaay too much pressure for her. She has had the experience of trying and failing to catch someone’s attention like that, and it was very anxiety-inducing. In the present-day of the story, I don’t think she even owns a mirror.

ETA several months later:
So my RP partner and I wrote (some without initially intending to):

a genderqueer-ish character
who if you consider her a woman is a lesbian
a bisexual character
a partner abuse survivor (though it was subtle power-imbalance abuse, not obvious violent abuse)
a child neglect survivor
a character with mild PTSD, and maybe depression too if you consider that separate?
actually several characters with “” because several of them are war veterans
a character who is arguably polyamorous, or at least her life would be a lot simpler if she weren’t expected to be monogamous

So apparently when I’m stressed I make bad things happen to my fictional characters. At various points I’ve come up with three or four different “What if X raped Y?” stories with absolutely no relation to my canon for those characters. And they correspond pretty neatly to times when I was especially stressed. No, Sparkly, you don’t know about any of these, they were solely inside my head.

—–

And then there’s the thing where years ago I wrote one of my characters essentially being triggered and dissociating, but didn’t think to call it that or flesh out why until this week. Yeah. How did that happen? I seem to be very good at giving characters issues unintentionally– and they sort of come from my own issues, but honestly only a little! They’re sufficiently different, and they make sense for the characters.