New Year, Same Me
Jan. 1st, 2023 05:17 pmBut also: new year, old fics.
I've been trying really hard to keep myself busy with writing since I finished Recovery. As previously mentioned, when I started the writing hiatus that ended up lasting two years, I wasn't sure I would ever come back to writing. Now that I'm excited about it again, I'm eager to keep the train chugging along as best I can.
I'm a solid 6300 words into a Sam/Jess/Mike Until Dawn fic that I'd quite like to finish, but it's taking some time because it's porn. I am deeply rusty at writing sex in general, since that's a muscle I had to train and not one that came naturally to me, but I also never really got a handle on how to write AFAB genitals in sex scenes. I've tried several times and only succeeded once. The success was What We Write in the Shadows, so it went great, but writing one fic is not the same as knowing what I'm doing. This means that I must turn once more to YouTube sex ed videos for research. But I'm lazy, so I don't want to do the research.
Instead, I am procrastinating writing one fic by working on another...few. I've got quite a lot of WIPs that I abandoned in 2016-2019 for essentially no other reason than that I thought I would get back to them sooner than I did. I'm happy to report that I've read through a good number of my fic documents from those years and still enjoyed what I wrote, which means they'll be a lot easier to finish than if I discovered I hated and needed to rewrite them.
As a youth I was an aspiring novelist, but as I grew up, I discovered that I don't enjoy longform writing very much. There's a reason that writing a 24k word fic took me out for two years, and there's a reason that most of my fics don't run longer than 10k. That said, some of my old projects that I still care about finishing are long ones, and that's kind of scary!
I'm currently spending my time working on an AU for Caste Heaven, a BL manga that peaked in 2016 and ended in 2021. I'm not going to pretend that I liked the original work very much, but I'm also not going to pretend that I didn't get deeply invested in the protagonist and his mother, or that there weren't good pages in the terrible chapters.
The first part of this AU, Gilded, is already up on my AO3. I think the fandom for that series was most active in 2016, which is frankly in large part to me and my good friend Ciara posting a fuck ton of fics around the same time because we were constantly talking about the series. I got a lot of really kind comments on that fic because of when it was posted, and I am afraid that I'm not going to get the same kind of attention since so much time has passed. Alas.
But the project still means a lot to me! I'm not usually the kind of person who follows trends in entertainment (FE3H was a huge exception), so I'm okay with the idea of not having a lot of attention on this fic, even if I would prefer otherwise. I still intend to finish it one day, regardless of whether that's this year or not. All that said, I sure do hope this is the year!
This AU has always been beloved to me. Before I got into Until Dawn, this was the recovery story I always wanted to write. The original manga is, uh, trauma porn and then a really weird ending where a victim falls for his abuser, for some reason? But my AU is about getting revenge, realizing that life goes on once you've gotten it, and slowly rearranging your life until you find peace. I pulled out the two most important relationships in the original manga--the caustic protagonist and the very first friend he's ever made, and the caustic protagonist and his mother who would absolutely kill to protect one another without ever mentioning the sacrifices they've made--and made the whole fic about that.
I left off in 2019 with a full 20k unposted words of this AU split into three documents and a very thorough notes document, all of which has stood the test of time. Can you imagine if I thought they sucked?? I'm going to do my very best to finish it this time! This is also my first project with real OCs that actually matter, so I've got to try to give them personalities and flaws and whatnot. It's a good fic, and I want to do right by the concept.
Here's to a new year! I hope I can keep up the pace I've been writing at for the last couple of months, because I've really been enjoying it.