Yes! All of this! She's one of my favorite authors because of this. I love the way she weaves together the past and the present in those books, too. It's really masterful how they all feel like the same characters, but we can see their growth, too, over the intervening years.

🥰🥰🥰

Aww, they find each other! ❤️

🤣🤣🤣 He's being stubborn, but Soap will wear him down eventually.

Haha! We're really cooking now. 🥰😉

🥰😘❤️

🙌🙌🙌 Can't wait to see what you've got in store!

I feel this. My worst one so far was a one shot that turned into a six-chapter fic.

Every once in a while I can manage to keep a one shot short, but those are few and far between.

Awww. Soap being oblivious and just loving the heck out of Ghost in spite of the soulmate thing is so lovely. He's such a dope sometimes, and I love him.

It's glorious. (I'm imagining the soft "clack" of their masks as they rest their foreheads together.)

Wahhhh! The little blood hearts!! The intense eye contact!! The colors! It's so fucking beautiful I could cry! 🖤🖤🖤

👀👀🙌🙌

(🫣😅 lol, sorry!)

To use the baking metaphor, it's half chewing and then spitting out someone's homemade cookie on their plate before saying "It wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be." And leaving them with a glop of spit and cookie mush polluting their meal.

I've also had someone basically say the plot of a finished fic was boring.

🤷🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️

What good does that do? There's no exchange that can be had there. No opportunity except to be intentionally rude and potentially make an author feel like their ideas aren't good enough to continue writing.

Exactly. I'm honestly pretty open when it comes to people asking questions about character motivations or getting mad at the storyline if the storyline is *supposed* to make them mad. I've had people tell me they can't read something because it stepped on some boundary or another. All fine by me.