hello darkness, my old friend

It has been several years since I had a livejournal account. I can't even remember my first account, but it must have been about 1999 or 2000, I want to say. It was definitely before college, which I started in 2001.

I really almost can't believe I'm back. I don't feel facetious at all in saying that this feels like I've picked up a long under-control drug habit after many years on the wagon. And I promise I've never had substance abuse issues, but man, I've had internet codependence issues for just about all my adult life. That sort of thing was kind of shunned at one point in my life, but nowadays I think people don't judge you anymore for it. It's normal. It's not just nerds who are like this. (I'll confess I think of many of the people on tumblr as one of the cool kids, and I envy that they get social media in an age of geek chic.)

But this nigh uncomfortable nostalgia trip is something I feel is fairly unique to the generation that discovered the internet, as opposed to the generation just after mine that was basically born into it. (Insert Bane reference here.)

Or maybe I'm talking out of my ass because I'm sleep deprived. Maybe it's not generational at all; maybe it's just personal. All those years ago...livejournal in particular was not a positive place for me. I feel like over the years, I've forged the internet to be a much more positive place for me. But it used to be nothing but a bottomless trough of post-pubescent angst. Not because of anything inherent in it, but this place was one of solace and anger and grief that life wasn't what I wanted it to be, and nothing at all resembling squee. It was shelter, and very often just an echo chamber for my personal venting. I was so depressed and angry. It saddens me just to think about it.

Now I'm anxious, but I don't think rage issues and depression are the name of the game anymore. That's something like progress.

I checked out some of my old accounts. Skimmed, because so much of it was still really painful to go back to. I found an old tagline of mine that I remember using often, across many account moves. "My name is Caroline. I live in New York. Everything else is a work in progress." Thirteen years later and this is still the case. I guess I never expected any different. I was never going to turn out like some kind of cake, but the surprise really is that life feels very circular indeed. Back on lj of all places. Caroline, this is your life.

In future, friends, I might put personal posts like this one in a friends-only bubble. It's strange the things we share with the world, the walls we put up. Personal posts on an ostensibly fannish existence livejournal. I'm mostly anonymous to my fandom friends, even though many of you actually talk to me more often than some real life friends, and you are privy to the nightblogging world of my mind and you know my kinks and preoccupations. The shape of my privacy in this world seems strange and I'm making it up as I go along. But for now, chalk it up to the sleep deprivation. Another thing that hasn't changed in my adult life.

fluff from angst is my new blood from water

Originally posted to the TPP squee mailing list. This is the long rambly thing I wrote that convinced me I should keep my inanity off of email lists and should just bury myself in livejournal again. It's basically longform nightblogging. I'm basically longform nightblogging.
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About six weeks ago, I signed up with the springlock exchange. Never participated in an exchange before, but man, I did most of it right. I signed up early and had something like 5 weeks of prep time. Which I used! Kind of. I mean, I did in fact storyboard the hell out of a story. (Exhibit A from 4 weeks ago) I originally was gonna attempt to do it with art and not fic. I'm no reapersun, but I've never embarked on that sort of multipanel storytelling before, so it was hard.

But I scrapped it after rereading the prompt and realizing my exchange person probably wanted more fluff than that. And my thing was quite hurt/comfort. Original prompt, for the record: (optionally humorous) fluff? My heart hurts for Pining!Sherlock right now, so maybe something comfort-related?

And then I was lost. Prompt asks for fluff and humor, but I absolutely didn't know how to separate comfort from angst.Really didn't know how to art that at all, so I decided to try fic. And my god...I'm not sure if it was easier or not. These last few days were absolute hair-pulling, twitter-meltdown madness. (I apologize to everyone who was there for it.) I didn't have writer's block, so the words would come...it's just that I'd have to sit and rewrite them because they were too angsty. Fluff isn't my forte or default setting. By the time deadline rolled around, the 29th, the 30th, I had such issues with what I wrote. (Excerpt of what I wrote my last minute beta is screencapped here as exhibit B)

But I got it in under the deadline. Somehow. Barely. I even drew a companion piece while my beta was writing me back, and for something with zero reference and done in under three hours, I'm pretty proud of it (the art bit).

And then I published the fic on ao3 and waited for the stress to die down. Which it did...slowly. I was wound up over this fic. Maybe it was the deadline?

And comments started coming in. Some of them solicited -- through twitter, me melting down, asking what people thought of my terrible five thousand words of brain splat. Some nice ones from my beta actually. And then I posted to ao3, and I've had some of the nicest comments I've ever had on my fics -- and I realized...I don't get comments on fluff (because I don't write it). I get comments on porn (because I write it).

So it's super nice to get superlative comments on porn, and a couple recent ones I have just wanted to up and marry, but...fluff comments are different. I'm feeling weirdly touched and I don't even know how to handle it.

So...god, maybe it's inversely proportional to how low I was feeling in the leadup to forcing that fic out the door, but I feel weirdly good now. My person who I wrote it for has apparently enjoyed it at least, and I'm just...really glad. Blood from stone, this fic.