rockyroadster

It's close to the end of the year, so probably the best time to recap on the year, right?
I actually got back into writing this year big-time. Which is nice. I moved into a house, did a bunch of renovations, generally grew as a person and whatever. Even for the winter my mental health has been pretty alright. I think as a person I've become a lot better at ignoring things that bother me. I used to be a lot more of a reactive type. Which is not a bad trait to have, but it means that I eat up ragebait and get ill-tempered and ruin my own day sometimes. I still slip up. I don't mean to say I want to be a toxic positivity 'never criticize anything ever' sort, more that I think it's good to just know when to say something isn't your problem?

It sucks, because sometimes the ragebait/reactions get a lot more interaction. There's a post I made in the heat of the moment on my simblr that I sometimes want to delete about people being lame about female premades. I still think it's true, it's just kind of annoying that the whole "getting momentarily upset and declaring a Stance" post is one that gets a lot of notes. I think simblr in itself is an odd place for me to be in because I had been a sims fan for decades before ever trying to join a proper community about it. Which is also why I get very surprised when people read/enjoy my fanfics for it, because I feel like my writing tends to be... not shippy? Even for a ship fic. I don't really consider Tiny Creatures to be a ship fic. Like, there is a relationship and it does serve as a major thing in the final quarter, but for me it's definitely not the point. I don't know how to phrase it without sounding like an ass. It doesn't help that I'm not really into a lot of the popular fanon. Not that I think it's bad, I just don't care too much about it after a point. Fandom will Fandom.

Tiny Creatures is definitely the thing I put the most writing into. 60+ chapters, 90k words (not counting rewrites and cut content - this thing was a beast). I don't really regret anything I wrote into it. I almost regret making it a shipfic in a way, but that's more from how I know it will always get seen as a yaoi and not as me rambling for 90 thousand words about grief and mental illness and finding a place in the world as someone who isn't very normal. Being a teenager and struggling to handle normal teen life with things that are supernatural. A little bit of me reclaiming nostalgia because I really did not have a good time as a teenager. That is fandom being fandom and AO3 being built primarily for the culture of fans wanting to read about characters kissing each other, though. Which I do like the relationship in it. I think it's a fun couple and I gladly will write more about them. I think my very specific and personal interpretations of the characters have a very nice dynamic. Maybe potentially codependent. I also don't mean to snub on anyone who does like shipping fluff or say that people need to read my fic, because I am 100% of the stance that it is definitely not for anyone and I'm the target audience for it. I have written chunks of a sequel to it from Beau's POV, which is sort of where the one-shot came from, but I may never publish that one because it gets a lot more rough in ways that people may simply find unrelatable. Or maybe that is why it'd be good to publish it sometime? Who knows.

I want to get back into writing my Oblivion fanfiction, plus another that has been a disjointed pile of notes for years. I might go back and refresh my AWL fanfic. I ran into the issue of not really having my footing for it. I have worked a little on another sims 2 fanfiction with veronaville, but I also have trouble motivating for it. I've become burnt out on suburban melodrama and teenagers. I also have scrapped together some of my Nervous Subject headcanons but I will be honest and say it is so far from popular fanon of that character that I probably won't do much with it. People really like him and his character. I like writing fic of less popular characters because I can fool around with characterization as much as I want and people won't try to go "actually he wouldn't do/say that" because the popular characterization wouldn't. I can give Alex Goth OCD and make him socially inept and weird and a little bit stuffy because there isn't really a solid characterization of him. I don't know. I digress.

Either way, it's cool that it's almost 2024.

I want to get more into indieweb fandom type stuff, especially since tumblr seems to always be about to collapse. that and I still don't really care for fandom meta, which is always unavoidable but it seems to be slightly easier to avoid in smaller spaces. any time I get any level of popularity in a fandom I tend to back out a little bit. it's hard to communicate. I think tumblr bugs me because as much as i like reblogging and the form that it uses, I do sometimes want a platform where it's literally just my own separate page and people have to make efforts to see each other's content.

right now I'm still very fixated on the sims 2 :P
I've been sort of working on a couple WIPs right now, but nothing remarkable yet. I'm slowly moving my existing fics to squidgeworld. I'm big on decentralized internet and having a similar but direct alternative to AO3 is important. i may also make a fandom-specific neocities for my own use but who knows

I should move some of my ts2 gameplay over here, but that's a project for later.

Tiny Creatures and Silver Spoons (5504 words) by rockyroadster95
Chapters: 4/51
Fandom: The Sims (Video Games)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Alexander Goth/Beau Broke, Alexander Goth & Lucy Burb
Characters: Alexander Goth, Bella Goth, Cassandra Goth, Mortimer Goth, Beau Broke, Lucy Burb, Dustin Broke
Additional Tags: Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Friends, Missing Persons, Death, Time Skips, Nightmares, Generally a lot of depression, individual warnings will be on chapters that need it, Coming of Age, it takes place over 12 years, Alternate Universe - Real World, Everyone Has Issues, Psychological Trauma, there isn't romance until basically the very end, it's more of a friendship story, but it does get gay eventually, some vaguely religious imagery, Aliens, Ghosts, Poverty, Dysfunctional Family
Summary:

Having a graveyard in the back garden is just one of the many eccentricities of the family living in the old manor within Pleasantview. They say the ghosts of ancestors roam the halls, chilling rooms with their presence and haunting the residents and their guests alike. You should really be less concerned about those six feet under and keep your eyes to the sky. You never know who might disappear.

Of course, when you're just a boy in elementary school, you don't worry about any of that. It's a nice day, and the butterflies are out. Maybe you can make a friend. All you should worry about now is growing up.

OHHH YEAHHH
I have been working on this for a few weeks. It's almost entirely done, a few of the final chapters are still being worked through, but as of now it's sitting at 60k words over 50ish chapters. I'm very proud of this work and while there are still flaws I'm nitpicking about I think it's a solid story.

I've realized that I write better if I can do it all at once as one draft before posting it, mostly because I love callbacks and foreshadowing and work best if I can go back and clip stuff out or rework earlier parts. I have entire chapters cut from the original form. :P

But yeah, it's a Sims 2 fanfic about Pleasantview (groundbreaking), specifically Alexander Goth and his coming-of-age after all of the various town dramas unfold. I think the most fun part of writing this was following the march of time. It takes part over a twelve-year span, so all of the characters are aging and changing dramatically through the story. It's a challenge to make them mature realistically while still maintaining consistent thoughts and I'm *hoping* I did a decent job of it.

I took a few weeks break from writing (or doing anything on the computer, really) because I have moved! I own a house now. It has enough land for us to have a little hobby farm and pursue the solarpunk dream.
I'm going to be back to writing soon, once I have a little more free time.

I'm replaying Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town in my free time. It never inspired me to write as much as Another Wonderful Life does, even though gameplay-wise it's a lot more fleshed out. Maybe that's why?

I finally got a new chapter out on my Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life fic.

-Obviously, spoilers for the fic below-
This one was just an idea for a while, and it was a bit of a drag to write. It's one of those chapters where you kinda want something big to happen, but it's hard to make it feel big. Either way, now Aya's been forced to recon with the bad side of a chaotic goofball. Sometimes guys like that take it too far, and it's usually up to their followup actions to show whether they're just as aware of their flaws or double down and make it worse.

Navigating Aya's mental state can be tough. She is a lot harder on herself than is reasonable, and definitely has a history of giving up if things can't be perfect. She always tends to run through the catastrophic potentially bad outcomes of every choice. The games only give a bit of a glimpse into your farmer's mind, which is definitely so you can fill in the gaps with yourself, but the farmer in this one always seemed a bit timid and stressed, especially from the game's ending and how she rarely has dialogue beyond nodding or emoting. Clearly that's just for game mechanic purposes, but I like to interpret it as being a person who doesn't have much to say (which is why I liked the Gustafa heart cutscenes so much - fading to black gave us a lot to work with and at least implied she was carrying a conversation).

Also I'm pretty sure it's getting obvious what the Final Pairing is going to be. I wanted to give Rock a shot, at least, especially since the game itself is so good at forcing him on you (I think I gave him one gift the whole year and still had to be fighting his heart scenes off!)

I want to do more chapters featuring more villagers, but it's a bit of a challenge to work them in. Slice-of-life is not a usual genre for me.

Idk what to do for my first post so I'm just gonna make note of what I'm working on fanfiction-wise. Anyway:

Living in Color (23401 words) by rockyroadster95
This is my only published one right now, 12 chapters in. Chapter 13 is roughed out atm and I write scenes far in advance and squeeze them in so a lot of the late content is filled out. It's a Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life fanfic. I'm pretty proud of it so far. I do in fact have unlimited thoughts about my blorbos and plans and fight the urge to spoil all of it constantly even though I talk to literally nobody about my writing and the fandom for bokumono is so small asdf (I might do a thought pile on this blog now that I have it)

I'm also working on a couple of fanfic ideas for The Elder Scrolls. One is an arena torunament, there's an idea about a trio of friends doing quests, and just other random one-shot types of things.

There's a few bits of a Kuragehime fanfic and a couple of Harvest Moon one-shots.

And a mostly-done Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines one-shot.