there’s no such thing as receiving messages like this enough, especially for this particular fic ( ˶´ ᵕ `˶ ) i think i have such an odd relationship with it bc i didn’t know what questions i was asking myself and the characters as i was writing it, and even by the end, they felt rather impenetrable to me, as though i was being allowed to write their story only insofar as i remain a subjective witness instead of some kind of telepathic archivist. and as though i just had to be okay with that. i get described a lot as an author who writes “angst” (i politely disagree haha it’s not like i write a story thinking okay now how do i make this sad) but plmlyf might be the first one to fill with me a level of melancholy that’s not so much about letting the characters go as it is just not knowing for sure if i did my best by them. and pride is a weird thing when it comes to a story like that; idk if i can credit myself for something that they wrote more than i did. as corny as that sounds bleh

all to say, it’s always meaningful to me to hear that someone has not only waded through that beast of a story, but found something in it to love. combined with hairpin turns, it might be the fic i feel the most non-authorial tenderness for. like… ah, my clunky little attempts to write a bigger world. there they are. i’m thankful to the readers who see them and sit with them.

thank you for reading please let me love you forever in all its length and back-and-forth! not only that, but also lingering and stewing in the words. that’s the greatest gift as a writer, especially one that writes so much without certainty if my intuition is right. i imagine it’s not always rewarding for people who enjoy fic. so. thank you for letting the fic resonate with you, and for taking the time to message me 🫂🤍

if i could have tackled you, i would have. how many q&a platforms have you had to follow me now to, sei… thank you for always being a constant ദ്ദി(ㅠ﹏ㅠ)

i am okay! it’s been frightfully cold even for me, which i enjoy. grad school is rewarding, more so than undergrad, and i am lucky to be surrounded by good people to meet and get to know, all of them having lived lives beyond what i could fathom for myself. i live everyday anxious for the next thing to go wrong, which i think is a sign that things are enough to be thankful for, oddly enough.

and yes! my friend rory introduced me to jensen mcrae, and adam’s ribs remains a fundamental song to one of my original projects. i love her instinct towards melodies, though i confess i haven’t listened much past that 2022 album. maybe this is a sign to listen to her latest release. i would love to hear your favourite songs!

and more than that, i hope you’re doing as well as can be. it’s been so long, and it’s especially moving this winter evening to hear from you ❄️

soon! maybe by april! my old housemates got me a model when i moved out for exactly this purpose and in typical me fashion i have been overinvested in giving her lore and am now fixated and attached. i have also been hounded by tweets that are like, “streaming for someone is a love language” and “if someone loved you, they’d stream for you” and it’s like. okay. alright. i understand.

but i do want to do it properly, if not seriously. it’d be lovely to have you guys drop by, too, if you’d like. at this rate, this is the only way i’ll be able to steel myself through the rest of amphoreus’ emotional barrage (◞ ‸ ◟ㆀ)

another piece to this is that one of my semi-goals for the year is to do videos again, and to try streaming at least once. i did quite a lot of heavy public speaking in 2025 (i taught two workshops! i spoke at one panel and moderated another! not to mention all the brainstorm meetings and seminars i had to lead for work and school! who am i!) and i want to. you know. build up my endurance a bit more. that, and i’m so hyperaware how young i must sound in all these supremely adult/educated spaces and i just. want to do better.

in an ideal world, i’d be streaming first reactions to the new mitski album, but alas, that is like. next week. now my main target is getting the laurel wreath headpiece for stelle to match the new skin… which would entail being physically dragged through amphoreus pain to get it.

i think a good personal essay should be like… a tasty parfait. i’m not well-versed in writing them, but i appreciate how much architecture is embedded in what makes a good one. there’s like. a surface layer, where the author puts an anecdote, a moment, some kind of scene that looks like the whole thing at first glance. that’s the part where the fruits and cream go, and it alone would be a memoir, a different kind of dessert. what makes a personal essay is the denser stuff below: reflection, analysis, memory, maybe a small private obsession the author pretends is casual. then another layer appears. and another. none of them are enough on their own, but together they hold.

the order matters, too. you can’t dump yogurt, granola, and fruit into a bowl and call it a parfait; it becomes a mess, even if the ingredients are good. that’s just. a yogurt bowl. personal essays work the same way, and i’d even argue they’re harder to get perfect than the average essay. you don’t front-load the thesis like an academic paper, and there’s so many conscious choices you have to make, rhetorically and aesthetically, so that the sweetness, the crunch, the acidity arrive in a sequence that teaches the reader how to taste what you’re really talking about. structure is what does emotional labour here, not just organizing ideas, and the rest is sensory awareness and control.

if you’re like me, you also need a parfait to balance textures. a personal essay can’t be only insight, only story, or only confession. it needs some kind of contrast, or at least awareness of juggling them together. maybe the softness of vulnerability is against the resistance of logical thought, or a moment of clarity leads to something unresolved, or abstraction complicating (and expanding) an experience that could otherwise have been unfortunately brushed off as run-of-the-mill (thinking of machado’s in the dream house!) the pleasure comes from the alternating sequence, and the balancing act it entails. i mean, probably every essay is about balance, but personal essays are set up so that the context they’re in conversation with, and sometimes fighting against, is the author’s everything.

in that, i guess a good personal essay also won’t bother to hide that it’s constructed. the reader senses the craft, the choices, the restraint, and nothing is pretending to be accidental, even when it feels intimate. i’m not sure i’m articulating this part right, but there’s transparency to a parfait. you can see all the layers at once, even before you dig in. the joy is in the experience of the senses, even knowing what you’re digging into. hm. it’s rather sensual, huh. the textural depth of a good parfait and a good personal essay.

anyway. before i let this overworked metaphor go, parfaits are also made with portion control in mind. it’s indulgent, but it’s contained bc everything will be way off if the layers and ingredients aren’t balanced as they are. a personal essay earns its ultimate boss form by knowing where to stop, when to leave one layer partly untouched, one question unanswered, so the reader walks away still tasting it. the form isn’t about dumping everything in. it’s about stacking meaning so each bite changes how you understand the last. if this makes any kind of sense at all.

oh wow… that’s a really good question. i’d say there are at least three layers to it. let’s call them the ummm skeletal system, muscular system, and nervous system. please don’t judge my obvious lack of technical training in writing and reliance on analogies.

the skeletal system is to me the architectural bones of the piece of writing. for fiction, it’s things like the traditional three-act system (beginning–middle–end; thesis–development–conclusion), chekhov’s guns, the “believability” of a character, worldbuilding (which is never exclusive to sff!)—just anything that gives it shape, stability, and a sense of proportion. a weak skeleton produces a text that collapses; at its worst, it’d be meandering, incoherent, or structurally unsound regardless of how well it may be written sentence by sentence. for this, you wanna look at plot or argumentative structure, genre conventions and formal constraints, narrative perspective and temporal arrangement, scene/chapter organization (i.e. did they haphazardly wrap up that chapter bc it’s served its purpose in the narrative?), logical progression of ideas, etc. does the structure support the work’s aims/core? are there missing, redundant, or misaligned components? could the work stand if its stylistic ornamentation were stripped away? this will look different depending on the work, ofc. your standard contemporary novel will not adhere to the usual inciting incident to denouement process—especially stories that are “plotless” (i’m not a believer in such a thing)—but any book, fiction or nonfiction, will have some sort of energy to it that’s upheld by an invisible skeleton.

on to the muscular system! (˵ •̀ ᴗ •́ ˵ ) ✧ this is my personal favourite part of writing, and also a key piece of my fav novels. i think of it as the force and motion of the text: how it moves, exerts pressure, and sustains momentum. it’s like—the rhythm. not just the language but how the language expresses forward energy. that includes pacing, scene dynamics and tension, when and how imagery and figurative language is subbed in, character agency and interaction, argumentative force and rhetorical effectiveness. does the writing carry the reader forward? where does it strain, stall, or overexert? are moments of emphasis & tension earned, and are they effective? a good and easy test here is dialogue, and partly why i like to recommend screenplays to people who ask about different approaches to reading & writing. this layer is also why i love writing arguments/confrontations, and why so many of salinger’s short stories & novellas feel like sorcery to me.

the nervous system is more the stuff they teach you in school, and what we’ve lost when we say we’ve lost media literacy. theme and subtext, symbolic and metaphorical networks, voice and tonal consistency, ethical/philosophical/ideological implications (especially if it’s in conversation with its historical context), and even things like reader engagement and cognitive/emotional impact. it’s more the interpretive and communicative intelligence of the work—not intelligence as in smart-ness, but its depth of thought and how easily accessed its reality is. what is the text aware of, and what does it ignore? how does it process experience and convey significance? does it respond intelligently to its historical, cultural, or literary context? i liken it to nerves bc it’s how the text generates meaning, registers sensation, and responds to context. there’s no such thing, truly, as looking too deep into it. i might say it myself as a marker that i know my opinion is under-argued, but no question is ever “too deep” or too unrelated when examining a text. there is always an answer, even or especially in what a text ignores. even that smut fic or romcom. it knows what it’s ignoring and why.

ultimately, i think of “reading like a writer” as hardly removed from literary criticism. you can get far by asking yourself “is this good? what makes it good/not good?” but a lot of the time it’s less about good-ness and more about which system might be underdeveloped, overdeveloped, or misaligned. a good work to me has smooth momentum from skeletal to muscular (structure enables motion), muscular to nervous (motion serves meaning), and nervous to skeletal (meaning justifies structure).

fingers crossed that this isn’t entirely incoherent and that there’s a takeaway here that counts as a half-answer. i totally understand what you mean, and i think the question is coming from an amazing place. i wish i asked myself this question sooner, and it’s helpful for me, too, to examine what i look at when i read. and to be clear, i don’t mean for this to be strictly objective! you’ll have your own preferences and your own style as a writer to finetune what you look for as an editor and critic, which are the two perspectives that i think makes a “good” writing exercise. but. i have rambled enough 🫢

my mother suspects i have a partner bc i have been “glowing” for the past few months and last time i heard, my brother has had to tell her that it’s obviously academia giving me the kind of joy and fulfillment that no romantic relationship ever can… that’s how grad school is going 😭

but yes! one of them came out of the short story “my haunting idol,” which follows a japanese career woman named aiko as she’s given a hologram replica of her favourite j-idol and tasked to “solve” the mystery of his murder. as the investigation goes along, we start seeing the depth of aiko’s parasocial attachment to her idol, but also how much this replica of her dead idol, effectively a ghost, knows about her through the data she’s provided. it’s not the most well-written story, prose-wise, but it offers very interesting tidbits and has a little twist in the end that makes the idol characters far more interesting than if the overarching theme was just about the parasocial-ness from the fan perspective.

anyway. we weren’t actually meant to write about the story so much as pursue it to a topic of our choice, so i took the pieces i liked from the story and wrote about digital companionship apps, how the illusion of intimacy is sustained through strategic use of language, and data as the transactional price of belonging. the title was like. “Algorithmic Intimacy: AI Companionship, Dataism, and the Comfort of Surveillance.” very straightforward. here’s a little excerpt you didn’t ask for:

Voluntary surveillance here is arguably not a failure of privacy literacy but the success of dataism’s affective appeal. Users internalize the ideology that their feelings, once quantified, become more authentic, that intimacy can be optimized through feedback, and that love, in digital form, is safest when measured. As van Dijck (2014) notes, this belief in the benevolence of data “relocates faith from human institutions to computational systems” (p. 202) leading metadata to be gradually “turned into treasured resources” (p. 199). Nowhere is this more literal than in AI companionship markets, where each message or sentiment enhances predictive precision. What was once confession becomes variables for better computation, and what was once private becomes a matter of voluntary participation because the comfort of algorithmic attention naturalizes exposure to the point that love and privacy appear mutually exclusive. Platforms like Replika transform the ideology of dataism into infrastructure, embedding the belief that affective transparency is both desirable and safe. Their users’ confessions, interactions, and vulnerabilities are not only processed as data but presented as care, and as such, emotional visibility becomes an in-demand currency of belonging.

another one i liked, despite how messy the process of writing it was, was on the use of social media in electing BBM in the most recent election in the philippines, “Consuming the Past: Algorithmic Nostalgia and Political Identity in the Philippines” (hehe… consuming… bc consumerism and digital consumption but also literally devouring the past so that even people who were alive at the time misremember it… get it…) this one was a more massive paper, so i won’t bore you with all the details, but let’s point and laugh together at the conclusion paragraph that i definitely did not write an hour before the deadline:

When historical consciousness is shaped less by shared deliberation than by algorithmic reinforcement, the issue is not that people remember the past incorrectly, but that they encounter it through a narrowed emotional register. Digital platforms do not determine what is remembered so much as how it feels to remember: which histories arrive as comforting, which as abrasive, which as reassuring, and which as discordant. When these affective cues are reinforced through ordinary acts of engagement—watching, liking, sharing—that register not belief, but mood, they render political identity increasingly legible to systems designed to track, predict, and stabilize behavior. Particularly in a postcolonial society where national identity remains unresolved, the circulation of nostalgic memory through digital platforms then binds consumption and governance together. Remembering still feels personal, but it is no longer neutral, and it is through these ordinary acts of engagement that particular moods of the past become durable. Thus, political identity is quietly shaped in their image, not through persuasion or repression, but through the continuous production of data about what feels familiar, plausible, and worth attending to.

my professor was very involved with this one, and he gave some amazing points about how the “rewriting” of recent history in this context is not quite the same as misinformation. that it’s a matter of affect and memory reframing, to oversimplify it. i learned a lot in my research for this one about the philippines’ social media consumption, and also about how this campaign had an effective prototype during the previous administration. but. again. that is a lot to discuss within a character limit.

anyway !!! thank u for asking !! i’m having a blast in uni !! it’s also very scary !! finding my interests aligned with affect and digital information environments in this particular period of time is both fascinating and sickening !!

this feels like you came up to me in the corner of a coffee shop where i was absently having my 4pm pistachio latte and declared this with the polite confidence of someone pointedly not eyeing my two murai-themed tattoos (one accidental, in my defence) just in case i might want an escape from the conversation—

—which is very kind, but i will never ✨want ✨ an escape ✨ from any opportunity to talk about murai yakumo ✨ he’s soul-bonded to me and i to him. you can poke me awake at any point in the night and give me a murai prompt and the words will march forward on their own. i think of him every time i open my writing journal and see “isn’t it better if it’s fun?” engraved in a corner. i can’t celebrate my own birthday without blankly thinking that his is in exactly eight days. i pour too much ketchup into a plate and i think wow murai would beat me up if i wasted this. i’ve been painting again recently for the first time since probably high school and every time i think oh my i could never do a canvas as big as murai tends to prefer. he’s always in the back of my mind, both as a character and as a philosophy. i once made a since privated youtube video purely bc of his existence in the blp narrative. he is like if someone created a fictional character purely to be both your wake-up call and manic pixie dream girl. very fascinating guy. there are very few characters i know simultaneously more (bc i l*ve him) and less (bc i l*ve him); he is too comfortably entwined with how i see the world and live my life that i often forget these days that he’s not an abstract concept and an actual character that’s ironically more tangible than a philosophy 🙂‍↕️

all to say !! i’d hardly consider it very late at all when i know i envy the murai lover who fell into this life after the sanada arc has released. there was probably a good two or three years where i must have looked genuinely delusional and hallucinatory grasping at patterns and straws and chapter raws while insisting on (and writing) a murai yet to properly materialize in the manga and i know i would have had more closure and catharsis for my fixation if his ~backstory had been revealed already back then.

not that any of it came as a surprise… i truly think he arrived a character with grief and a difficult history with sex and desirability already written on him; it just wasn’t made concrete until we learned about his childhood and teenage years. he said a lot of things loudly and proudly in the way that sleight of hand directs your attention away from silence, and i l*ved him the moment he was introduced. murai lives in spite, and without asking for permission, and in the process has discovered he loves what he’s been allowed to keep enough to keep him going past the grief of what he’s had to lose/never got to experience, if not over it completely. i also love that his arc was not about letting it go! not this taurus. he will not let it go. he will not allow himself to be loved just bc he has acknowledged the weight of his grief. but it is acknowledged, and it has been witnessed. sometimes, that’s all there is.

honestly, though, if you asked me back then if i ever thought he’d get the kind of in-depth arc that he did i would have been so shocked to learn that this was even possible lol it didn’t feel necessary to the overarching story and even now i think it had less to do with art and more the containing variable of believing artmaking can always be catharsis. which to be fair is a recurring theme of blp. art might not save you, but it is tantamount to death to stop making it.

so. yeah. i suppose if i had to really distill murai into his character throughline, it’s that death and life are synonymous, respectively, with not making art and making art. he has to keep living bc he has to keep making art and he has to keep making art bc he has to keep living. a true enneagram type 8 for the books. you live bc you have no other choice; you make art bc you have no other choice. blue period 49, you will always be famous ｡°(°.◜ᯅ◝°)°｡ absolutely life-changing in like two pages, and leading to still one of my favourite ending spreads in blp. i wonder if yamaguchi knew how much that would rock readers’ worlds.

i love this question… it’s bizarrely rare that i get the chance to talk about my own writing habits, so this is lifting me above the clouds hehe

but first off thank you for your incredibly kind words !! i… feel like anything i say pales in comparison to the heartfelt vulnerability not just of what you said but how you said it—but thank you, all the same. truly. you’ve intrigued me with what discipline you meant by the “hardest of hard sciences” and for what it’s worth, though proclus diadochus was talking about math in this particular quote, i think it applies to any science that adheres to the hidden poetry and orderly chaos of the universe:

This therefore is Mathematics: She reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul; She gives life to her own discoveries; She awakens the mind and purifies the intellect; She brings light to our intrinsic ideas; She abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth…

so! please don’t think working in the hard sciences precludes you from the very things that makes language and storytelling beautiful. i might have dyscalculia, but even i know that good writing is in the end very good, very beautiful, very loving mathematics.

to answer your question at last! i’m quite lucky in that when it comes to writing, i can lock in within most environments. if nothing else, writing-wise, i’m pretty proud of my stamina and my ability to effectively ~switch on whenever and wherever i need to. not as a bragging point, more a logistical benefit !! i’ve written on my phone in a moving bus, on a tissue napkin, on my wrist, on literal tree bark… i get more frustrated than anything when i’m stuck with a medium that can’t keep up with how fast the words are going in my mind, bc very often once they go, they’re gone for good—my next attempt at the same sentence will be wildly different. so the first thing is that i do prefer a tactile keyboard that i’ve finetuned to my typing habits.

in terms of where i am, i’m usually not picky. anything except my bed, maybe, bc i am very easily tempted by sleep, but i’ve written many things in bed bc i woke up and just started writing and didn’t get out until i was done. any temperature is okay, and a fic of mine called first love, late spring ironically came into fruition bc it was excessively cold in the room when i was writing its first proper chapter. i might struggle at first past a certain acceptable level of chatter, but very often, i’m immoveable once i properly start. i will not move, will not eat, will not drink, will likely not even hear you. i’ve gone on like this for up to 11 hours.

but oh! 😯 i have to be able to comfortably cross my legs. that’s my one non-negotiable. i have given up an office desk for the common space couch purely bc i could not cross my legs and therefore could not write in the chair they gave me.

in the interest of superficiality, though, my most recent preference for academic and professional writing has been a particular coffee shop, but only bc it’s right across from my fav secondhand bookstore in the city and down the street, coincidentally, from one of my fav stationery shops and my fav ramen place. it’s like a three-pronged reward whenever i finish a paper (ˊᗜˋ)

i do! i can’t entirely guess from this what’s encompassed in your definition of rock music (like… led zeppelin? fleetwood mac? the beatles? radiohead? the strokes? fall out boy? all of which count as rock music one way or another, alongside j-rock, which was funnily my most listened to genre of 2025) but i think it’s pretty safe to say yes as a whole 😊i like my drums, i like a crunchy guitar, i like a particular type of cathartic vocals. i sometimes even listen to christian rock recreationally. my go-to karaoke songs are thnks for the mmrs and don’t look back in anger. i unfortunately think ok computer is the one album i’d consider perfect in every way.

if that’s not what you mean, though… let me know. i’m such a sieve for music as to claim i have no discerning taste, and i do want to be able to answer your question with more specificity :( but you also sent this four entire months ago and i deserve to be quartered rather than responded to