🦋: my original answer was a little too personal, so let’s change that to something tangentially related: something i’ve been thinking about a lot is art, what it means to me and the artists that i know. being able to talk to someone with similar views on what art means is really special. it doesn’t have to be an identical view too; i’m friends with artists, writers, composers, performers and everyone’s art form gives them a differing outlook on things that’s eye-opening to find out about. not everyone holds the art they do to such a high regard and that’s fine, but it really is a privilege and an honor to be able to interact with/witness a piece that means a lot to the creator/performer.

🍅: this is going to be harsh, but it is constructive and something i probably need to hear: “because it’s not for an assignment” is not a valid reason for sloppy work. not editing work is lazy for one thing, but more importantly it’s hindering my growth as a writer. editing should be a significant amount of my writing process and shying away from it is cutting corners and there’s no honor in that. when something is a first draft and unedited, it really shows. people can tell when there was an artistic vision but the execution ends up being too rough to live up to the potential. honestly, it’s really. fucking. wasted. to have a good concept but not put in enough effort to do it justice. and by doing this, i’m only ever going to sell myself short, because let’s be real: literally nothing i’ve posted lives up the actual standard that i’m able to hit. the things i’ve written for commissions? zines? i knew i could do better if i just reached out and asked for harsh but useful feedback, but i was willing to accept work that wasn’t as good as it could’ve been just because others said it was fine. i’m literally making up excuses right now about how for fests and zines, the mods/betas weren’t willing/able to give actual good feedback, but then what i should’ve done was be hard on myself and critiqued my own work as if i wasn’t the author rather than skimming through it for bare-minimum SPG and coherence and calling it a day. okay, so maybe self-indulgent fanfic doesn’t have to meet publishing standards, but it’s still self-sabotage if i’m never willing to push myself to get better. it doesn’t need to be at that high of a level, but omg i need to start flagging all my problematic paragraphs for fixing, rather than glossing over them...

🔪: hmm but i feel like most of the things i’ve researched are relevant enough to the fic they were for for them not be weird? i have bookmarks on chinese mourning poems, but that makes sense if you’re writing about specific funeral customs. i did a deep dive on a fictional flower (looking into the flowers it was based on, their significance, the care for them and also some etymological details) but it was for a hanahaki au, so it’s again very logical. the weirdest i can think of is maybe the time i was doing a bird hybrid au for someone, so i sort of ended up finding out more about birds than non-bird owners would like to know i think...