Deep substrate foliated Mandag!
I made a discord alt, hopefully just a temporary one. "mandagalternatives" if you wanna reconnect.

"Someone must have made a false accusation against Mandag, for he was permanently suspended one morning without having done anything wrong."

Hello there, Mandag here. Yesterday at 6:31 PM local time, I made a very light joke in a public discord server; Someone else was being annoying, and a second person responded with "You can stop ERPing as a grumpy British boomer now." I butted in with the joke "ERP? Where's the erotic part?" and received a permanent, platform-wide suspension of my account for it, no warnings or strikes. I've filed an appeal, but you know how Discord is these days.
So there goes my presence on that platform. If you're a friend or acquaintance of mine and you're wondering why you suddenly can't send me messages, there it is. I've been reaching out to personal friends on platforms like Steam to explain the situation, and figured I might as well make an FA journal, since those have wider reach.
Does anyone know a decent alternative to Discord? One where you don't live underneath a wobbly, intern-managed sword of Damocles? If you do, lemme know. Might be time to jump ship in the intermediate future, like we all did with Skype.

Well, look at that. A round number of watchers. That's a cause for celebration, right? Or at least a journal to mark the milestone.
It's been a while since I made one of these. A couple years, in fact. Not much has happened since then; the world has kinda been put on hold, and it feels like a lot of time has passed very quickly.
Anyways.
As for how I'm doing, I'm in a significantly better place than I was a year ago. I've retaken Maths in Norwegian school, and greatly improved my grades. Gave me a good dose of self-confidence to see there's still a functional brain somewhere under all the rust. I'm planning to continue on this academic path this autum. I've applied for a few different courses at Uni, hoping to get in there and out of the McPurgatory I've been stuck in for the last half decade.
For people who are wondering about how I'm doing in terms of creative writing, I'll have to say I haven't felt up to it lately. And by "lately" I mean the last year or so. It's not that I specifically hate doing it, it's more that I haven't felt the urge. I did a test run to see if I could handle taking commissions, and the commission in question ended up taking roughly ten months to write, so I decided I'm not gonna bother with it. Chances are I'm not gonna be publishing more Twokinds fanfictions, at least in the near future. But hey, ya never know, maybe I'll get hit with a surge of inspiration or something.

If any of the now 100 watchers have any questions to ask, fire away as usual.

Hello there. It's been a long while since I wrote anything, journals or stories, so I decided to do a journal for the heck of it.

First off, I still haven't quite found my groove for writing again since this winter, but I'm working on getting back into it. I hear people talk about how hard it is to start up a project when all they have is a blank page, but I personally find it much harder to pick up something that I left halfway finished... which is exactly what I'm trying to do right now. I have half a dozen unfinished or halfway started Twokinds fics sitting around, and I'll try to see if I can finish some of them.

Secondly, for those who follow my journals, I am hopefully gonna be taking the IB exam this winter. Still grinding those Maths at a steady pace. Pythagoras can eat my dick, to be honest. Things are looking gray for me, but probably much better than it does for most people in these shitty times. On that note, you should still wash your fucking hands and all that. Wouldn't wanna make the situation any worse than it already is.

Thirdly... I was on a podcast! Some guys named Poujoshy and Comrade started a Twokinds-related podcast, and were planning to do an episode on fanfictions. Being me, I PM'd them and got a guest spot. I also dragged Quinn with me, since we've worked together quite a bit. The four of us talked for almost an hour about what it's like to write not only fanfictions, but stories in general. I also rambled a bit about motivation, community feedback and... 4chan, I guess. The hosts were really pleasant to work with, and I'd give my recommendation for Twokinds fans. The episode in question can be found here! New uploads are scheduled every friday.

That's really all for now. I'm hoping to upload something in the nebulous future, but I'm not sure exactly what it will be, since I have so many half-finished thingies. I have one project in particular going on that's very big, but I'm not sure how people will respond to it, since it's... a little different from most of the things I've done. Won't say anything more, to avoid spoilers.

Well then.
A few days ago I received an email from the IB coordinatory saying that the 2020 examination has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This effectively means I won't be able to apply for uni this fall, as they won't let me in without having finished basic school. Thus, I will be stuck here in McPurgatory for at least one more year.
I'm not quite as bummed out by this as you'd probably think, but it's still a bit of a punch in the gut.
There's not much I can do about it, and I know there are people out there who have been hit way harder by Corona-chan than me. I honestly don't know what this will mean for my writing, which is what people are here for. My passion for it is as dead as ever, so don't expect anything.

And uh... stay safe out there, I guess. Wash your fucking hands and all that.

I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but I haven't really been posting much lately. Not that my upload schedule was anything to write home about in the first place, but these last few months have been really dry, even by my standards.
There are multiple reasons for this, and I'll start off with the most prominent one:
I don't find writing fun anymore.

When I started writing the story "Clovis' Inferno" a bit over two years ago, I had a lot of fun kicking off the rust that had been coating my writing skills since middle school. I had fun immersing myself in the atmosphere and world of the story I was writing. I would think about it at work and on my way home, and though I struggled with putting the words down in a way I found adequate, I had fun with simply creating it. Smut was of course fun to write for multiple reasons, as you can imagine, but there was more than that. I wanted to convey emotions. I wanted to paint a picture to the few people who read it, even though I'd only planned to post it as an anonymous pastebin on 4chan. When I posted the first WIP in the /trash/ thread I was genuinely surprised that people not only liked it, but thought it was well written. The adoration and fave counts were really just gravy on top of the satisfaction I got from seeing a story finally put down on paper.
That feeling tapered off as I kept writing, and eventually faded almost completely. I started obsessing over numbers. I began to compare myself with other writers in the Twokinds community, and constantly finding myself inferior. I started wondering if there was even a point in writing about characters like Keith and Natani, since people like amenon have already covered that topic more extensively, and probably with better execution than I ever will; a disposition that is extra silly to have as someone who doesn't even read fanfiction even though he's tried, and dropped them because he doesn't like how the characters are portrayed.

Anyways, back to the point of this journal. I've hardly opened a Word document since last year, when before I used to have it open constantly, tinkering with prose and writing whenever I got bored. I rarely feel the wish to produce anything artistic, and when I do, I take one look at my WIPs and close the document, dissatisfied with my own work, asking "what's even the point?"

I said I had multiple reasons for my low productivity, and the second one is school.
Back in 2015 (yes, we really are going that far back with this) I managed to fail the IB diploma with a single grade point. In my country, I am not allowed to even apply for higher education without that diploma; as far as they're concerned, I dropped out without finishing. Since then I've been working in fast food and generally not having a great time with my life.
However, this spring I will do a re-take of the exam. After five years in McPurgatory, I have a chance to start fixing my shit.
This all means that reading and studying Maths will take priority over literally everything else I'm doing, which includes writing schlocky fapfics for a mediocre furry webcomic.

So this is why I'm taking what I guess you could call a vacation from writing. I might post some quick stuff if I ever get a sudden surge of inspiration, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
...Not that most of the people who read this expected good things anyways.
As always, feel free to say whatever you want in the comments. Go nuts.

I don't often make journals. That's usually because I don't really have a lot to say, and I feel like the content I make manages to speak for itself.
That being said, I did want to write up something for when I passed 100 faves. Not much, but a milestone nonetheless. I feel like the big triple digit is nothing to scoff at for a guy who exclusively writes mediocre smutty fanfiction for a single webcomic, without anything else to his name.
So... Yay for me, I guess.

As for stories... Those of you who care about what I write can look forward to things involving Brutus and Clovis, Nora in humanoid form, and a rather lengthy piece on Keith and Natani's first time. That last one has taken me a while, but is about to reach its conclusion.
I know I mentioned writing a piece on Laura and Keith's shared past, but I'm afraid I will have to let you know I've cancelled that story. Some of Tom's sketches clashed pretty hard with what I had planned, and thus it will never see the light of day. F.

And I guess no milestone journal will be complete without a heartfelt sappy bit:
I never had any idea I could produce something that people could genuinely enjoy. Now, I know it's mostly smut, and people only read it to bust a good nut, but a proper compliment still feels really good.
When I got a (mostly) positive response to my first story, it was the first time someone told me I was legitimately good at something. I found it a little hard to believe, since I don't have any experience with writing outside of middle school exercises.
Those who know me are familiar with how I don't exaggerate my statements, so when I say that it really means a lot to me, then you know I mean it.
Thank you.

...Finally, if there's anyone wishing to ask me anything (requests, critique or just random questions), now would be a good time. I'll read any replies when I get home from work tomorrow.

I'll stick to .txt for the time being.
I may switch to .pdf in the future, in which case I will convert all my previous uploads as well.
Right now I'm too lazy to download Acrobat and deal with a new format. Not that a lot of people seem to care.
...I'll shut up about filetypes now, sorry for clogging your journal sections with this.
If you have any questions unrelated to that (like requests and stuff), feel free to fire at will.

This may sound pedantic, but...
what file format do you prefer?
Originally I used .odt and .rtf, but I quickly realized those were less than optimal, for multiple reasons. .txt files, which I'm currently using, are nice, since they let people read the story directly from FA without having to click any links or download anything.
The downsides with .txts are: 1) that it looks like a total mess if you do decide to download it, and 2) Putting things in italics doesn't work that well, which means the stories often lose a bit of detail, since I can't underline things like expletives, thoughts and dreams.
I've been thinking about converting them to .pdf, which seems to be the most common format for writing. Does that sound like a good idea to you guys? I have a few tech-savvy people I could ask about things like these, but I prefer to ask my readers directly instead. Sorry if this is total senseless to you, and is just clogging up your journal feed.

For lineup on fics, I'm probably gonna finish the dumb Grand Templar Trace story that no one reads, before moving on to some Laura x Keith stuff, and then more Keith and Natani.
...Wow, Keith sure is popular, huh?