more fics roundup
Two old fics that I impulsively decided to set free and two procrastinatory ficlets. You can tell my self control has been down the drain…
empty bones (from 2020)
I still find myself from 4 years ago funny yay. this one was originally planned to be longer (going all the way to the canonical murder suicide) (wtf is JCTN actually) but now that it’s been 4 years I was detached enough to just clean up and post what I had.
stuck inside my fantasy (from 2021)
I love Who Needs Friends and I love it as a songcall for the fic. It’s one of the few cases where I actually listened to the title song a lot while writing it. The combination of joyless success and tortured certainty that the other person will be horrified by the inside of their head, then the bridge with can I make you stop talking, how can I make you stop calling, which sounds so vulnerable and desperate like they just can’t figure out how to cut this friend off… OOHHH it’s so perfect.
This is an interesting one for me because it draws more directly than usual on images and feelings from my own life. I had a lot of fun with that, I suppose because it’s the only way I will ever share these things? But I put them together in a way that has nothing to do with me, so I don’t feel exposed (seriously, nothing Kazuma goes through in this fic is anything I have been through, except literally being a uni student I guess). That combination of ‘it feels real to me’ and ‘it’s impersonal and contributes correctly to what I wanted to say’ might be why I’m so proud of it. Should I aim to do this more?
One thing I can see in hindsight is that I wasn’t so comfortable with themes (ugh ~themes~) when I wrote this. It feels like a collage of different scenes more than a unified story even with my devices for linking them together. Also I used some crazy long sentences back then.
omegaverse played straight
negatives
This is a fic about Xie Lian’s hole (laughs madly at my immature joke) as in absence. You can argue that all fengqing before XL’s third ascension is about this.
The backstory is that I saw that there was fengqing omegaverse week going on, thought “what would it take to make such a story compelling to me?” and then realised the answer to that was embarrassingly obvious. Just give them the secondary gender designations that I think suit them best!!!! I’m drawn to ships that feel like they have some fundamental incompatibility which they’re struggling against, fengqing is one of those and now I get to physicalise it! WOOOOO
I am patting myself on the back for opening my mind and engaging with the trope sincerely despite how uncomfortable I was with it before, but perhaps I still haven’t truly done that considering nobody got railed…
hirahira dokidoki hajimari no kisetsu etc
While writing Negatives I realised that the events of this one must have definitely happened in that universe, and proceeded to horny grip meme about it for the next few weeks (I am always horny grip about mulian that’s my secret). Eventually I thought “castration!” and that’s when it all clicked. Omegaverse is so bountiful in its possibilities.
Shunjou Romantic is another songcall I’m way too pleased about. I’ll never get tired of combining the cute blushy first love flowers and hand holding aesthetic with their flavour of crushing dysfunction 🥰
In both of those fics I think the 1000 word limit was a bit of a detriment, both pacing wise and for exploring the concept to a satisfying extent. I would be more comfortable at 1500-2500 and I suspect there’s some sort of sweet spot even shorter than 1000. But at least it stopped me procrastinating too hard.
Very often with fics all I want is to communicate some very small concept (insert my tangent about how writing a story feels kinda like writing a mathematical proof did at uni). In Negatives it was the last line or so, in spring fever it was… I got distracted from it so I won’t say what it was lol. In general the prospect of getting my idea out quickly in a short wordcount is appealing because hello exorcising brain worms. But you know what would be even better? Giving every story the wordcount that serves it best and not clogging my ao3 with weird random things! So we will see if I employ this tactic again in the future.