View source for How to Write in the Ahmieverse

== How to Write in the Ahmieverse ==

The Ahmieverse is designed to be a shared playground. If you want to tell stories here — for fun, for practice, or for publication — this page gives you enough guidance to be compatible with the existing canon while leaving plenty of room for your own voice.

You do '''not''' need to know everything on this wiki to start. Begin with what interests you, check a few anchor pages, and then write.

=== 1. Start with Relationship and Place ===

Stories in the Ahmieverse are grounded first in ''relationships'' and ''places'' rather than in abstract plot twists.

* Pick a small piece of the world: a household, a classroom, a bus route, a social group, a coffee shop, a clinic waiting room.
* Decide how your character is connected to that space: do they live there, work there, pass through, crash there, avoid it?
* Let the story grow out of how people who share that place collide, cooperate, misunderstand, and care for each other.

For grounding, see:
* [[Key Locations]]
* [[Families and Households]]
* [[Lakewood Neighborhood Stories (Linked Works)]]

=== 2. Keep the Tone: Real Life with a Mythic/Crispy Layer ===

The Ahmieverse lives in a “real life plus one magical/mythical extra tasty crispy layer on top” mode.

* Everyday concerns (rent, homework, childcare, health, work schedules) are real and matter.
* Mythic elements, spirits, gods, or improbable coincidences can appear, but they do not erase consequences.
* Humor absolutely coexists with grief, pain, and bureaucracy.

When in doubt, ask: ''If this happened to real people in Lakewood (or wherever you’re setting it), what would the fallout look like?''

Also, please keep it all-ages-inclusive unless the topic you're addressing needs to be age-restricted. The Ahmieverse includes children, always. Child authors are also welcome to play here and will be treated with nurturing respect.

=== 3. Honor Disability, Care, and Chronic Illness ===

If your story touches disability, care work, or chronic illness, please skim [[Disability, Care, and Chronic Illness]] first.

Key expectations:

* Disabled and chronically ill characters are people with full lives, not just metaphors or plot devices.
* “Cure” is not the default happy ending; better access, support, understanding, or boundaries often are.
* Care work is visible and often shared; when it isn’t, the story notices the strain.

You do not have to write disabled characters — but if you do, treat them with the same complexity you’d want for yourself.

=== 4. Use the Frameworks as Deep Structure, Not Homework ===

Two frameworks created by Ahmie quietly shape the Ahmieverse:

* '''Intersectional Stoicism''' – Stoic practice filtered through intersectionality and modern neuroscience.
* '''Village Deficit Disorder (VDD)''' – What happens when humans lack the village structures we evolved with.

You are welcome to:

* Ignore the jargon and just write people navigating power, emotion, obligation, and community.
* Or, if you like theory, dip into [[Intersectional Stoicism]] and [[Village Deficit Disorder]] and let those ideas inform why your characters react the way they do.

Readers should be able to enjoy your story without having to read the essays; the frameworks are there to deepen, not to gatekeep.

=== 5. Canon, Continuity, and Spoilers ===

To avoid stepping on already-established events:

* Check [[Canon & Reading Order]] and [[Timeline and Continuity Notes]] for the rough placement of major works (they'll be there eventually, promise).
* If you’re writing ''before'' an existing story, treat that later story as fixed canon.
* If you’re writing ''beside'' or ''after'' existing stories, try not to contradict established major events for shared characters.

If in doubt, you can always declare your story to be loosely Ahmieverse-adjacent or an explicit “what if” AU.

=== 6. What’s Welcome (and What Isn’t) ===

'''Welcome:'''

* Noncommercial and commercial stories that involve genuine creative labor.
* Fanfiction, side stories, missing scenes, AUs, crossovers that respect other authors’ policies.
* Stories that reckon honestly with harm, oppression, and care, without reveling in cruelty.
* Accessibility accounted for proactively by creating audio versions is particularly welcome.

'''Not welcome:'''

* Plagiarized or auto-generated “slop” created by feeding existing Ahmieverse text into an AI and publishing the output as your own. Using AI to guide and tweak your creating in the Ahmieverse is fine, but '''''you''''' should be putting more into the creation process than the algorithm is. If you're creating stuff like that for your own private use and entertainment, I don't need to know and really wish you'd stretch your creative muscles more.
* Works that promote bigotry or dehumanization.

See [[Open Canon & Transformative Works Policy]] for the not-professionally-written-or-reviewed legal/ethical details.

=== 7. Sharing Your Work ===

Once you’ve written something:

* You can host it wherever you like (AO3, your own site, print, etc.).
* If you’d like it acknowledged or linked from this wiki once it’s public, you’re welcome to let me know. Currently, Facebook, IG, or Substack DMs are the best way to reach me.
* Please include some form of attribution, for example:
  * ''"Set in the Ahmieverse, created by Ahmie Yeung, used under CC BY 4.0."''

If your work becomes commercial, I would love (but do not legally require) it if you direct a portion of the proceeds to a cause you care about, in the spirit of the commons this universe was built to be.

=== 8. You Are Allowed to Be Here ===

The Ahmieverse exists in part to give emerging writers the kind of anchored practice space that fanfiction gave me. You are not “too inexperienced,” “too disabled,” “too busy,” or "to [insert rationalization here]" to play with us.

Start small. Write a scene. Write a conversation on a bus. Use speech-to-text on your phone to draft a quiet moment between a caregiver and the person they’re trying to help.

That counts.