5:59am July 7, 2014

One of those “dark night of the soul” episodes, meta version

(a) Find yourself reading a fanfic in which things are happening to a favorite character so violating of their generally-accepted in-fiction nature that you realize with a chill that it would be preferable for this character to be dead than for this ever to happen to them. However fictively. (ETA: This was not due to an absence of trigger warnings. They were there in abundance.)

(b) Wish for about the tenth-or-so time that AO3 had a “reverse bookmarking” feature that would automatically prevent you from reading a given author’s output ever again.

© Spend eight hours working at other things to try to get the taste of what you’ve read out of your mind.

(d) Realize in the middle of the first cup of tea the next morning that there is a better-than-even chance that somebody somewhere has already done something similar to one of your characters. Or is doing it right now. Or is thinking about it real hard. And that they most likely think that this is/was a good thing.

(e) Find that you have a new referent for the term “her blood ran cold”.

(f) Sigh and get on with work, because time’s arrow runs only one way (though make a note to have words with Stephen Hawking about this at a later date).

(g) (mutter)