You devour everything they’ve ever written, and when you’re not reading them – when you’re dragged by necessity into the world of the boring and distressingly real – it feels like you’ve left something unfinished. A tugging in the back of your mind, half-remembered phrases and snatches of plot points, tantalizing because you can recall them just well enough to get the swooping feeling in your stomach and the soaring in your chest but not enough to be satisfied, so that you have to go back and reread a paragraph – a chapter – the entire thing.
It’s a fidgety, giddy kinda feeling, like bubbles but more restless, insistent, taking your mind’s self by the hand and dragging you back into the world some magically talented person created. It’s a hollow feeling, too, this love of something you can’t have – because you didn’t write those words. The world, the characters, the story, it’s not one you created, it doesn’t belong to you no matter how much you love it. You couldn’t create it even if you’d wanted to; that’s part of why it captured you so intensely.
It’s a kind of helplessness, the edgy despair of a waiting room meeting the lost, floating scrabbling sense of trying to collect smoke in your hands, how you imagine it would feel to fall in love with a ghost. Falling for a writer’s work, you assume it’s a lot like loving history, and you wonder if archaeologists and biographers get this same keen sense of loss, the same feeling of wanting to embrace something with no tangible parts to grab onto. Just waiting for the next: next chapter, next episode, next novel, next bite of fairy food.
And then when they do, it’s almost hard to read that next – not because you worry it won’t be good, but because you know it will be, and you only have one chance to experience it for the first time. You want to make sure you savor it properly, a part of you already mourning the loss, the empty finished feeling and rereading that are just one next away.
This stranger has managed to capture your mind with a totality that’s almost frightening, no less so because it’s temporary. The odds of you ever meeting them are infinitesimal; the odds of them knowing how much their writing means to you a little better, thanks to the megaphone that is the internet; but it’s still strange, how someone with no face and no real name can have won you over so utterly, even if the infatuation lasts less than a week. Sometimes you luck out and they become a friend (hello, @ciphernetics), but more often than not they’re just someone who wrote something you fell in love with. If you’re really lucky you’ll take something from them, some little shred of influence to make your own writing better that starts as trying to copy them and morphs into something that’s your own.
If nothing else, they’ll raise your standards, and that’s an ache all its own.
This is … uh, a really long-winded and overly flowery way of saying I’ve been unable to stop reading @setepenre-set‘s Megamind fanfics, by the way. They’re all incredible, but “Code: Safeword” and “Pleasant Is the Fairyland” are the two that’ve got me heartsick.
Thank you for making something so beautiful, and fuck you for making something so goddamn beautiful.
!!!!
THIS!! IS SUCH A WONDERFUL THING TO HEAR!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
aaahhh seriously, reading this made me so happy–it popped up in my notes and I clicked on it, and I actually figured that it was something that I’d just been tagged in; that it was originally written for someone else
and then!!
I got to the end!!
AND IT WAS FOR ME
setepenre-set 