writing wrap-up!!

[dayflies]

i haven't dreamwidthed in forever, i had to look up a primer because i couldn't remember how to do cut tags and collapsibles lol. and it'll probably look like ass anyways.

so about my writing. this will not be very coherent, but when have i ever been coherent on this site.

i think this year was pretty good, writing wise? i wrote 3 fics, and 3 newsletters (one doesn't really count. so 2). i'll focus on the fic aspect, but u can find my newsletter here

published words in total: 19762

 

published works:
years and years: 4,425 words / stranger things / lucas sinclair & erica sinclair sibling-isms

stay soft: 6,167 words / fe3h / lysithea character study

be still, my broken bones: 9,179 words / fe3h / sylvain & claude sort of. and also sort of a character study

 

only one stranger things fic... i am finally beginning to break the curse of hyperfixation [insert i can finally kill myself meme]. okay, in all seriousness, i am honestly still very happy with all of my fics. all of them are character studies – maybe except be still, which still veers closer towards introspection anyways.

regarding hits and stats and all of that i obviously did not do so well but that’s fine, that was to be expected. my most successful fics in the hits department are the m/m romance ones (my bnha tdbk fics & my and they were  roommates!byler fic), and the only romance fic i wrote this year was the claudevain rarepair fic. i think there will always be some kind of feeling of initial disappointment that your writing didn’t get the outreach you wanted, because i mean - let’s be honest, we write for an audience, otherwise we wouldn’t put them online for the world to see. but still, i’m very happy and content with everything i’ve written, and i always receive valuable feedback from people who do read them. plus i can tell my writing has improved from my txt rpf days lol. one of these days i will have to reread the first real fic i published (am not counting pre-txt fic because… yeah) and compare it to my most recent fic. 

 

i wanted to write commentaries for all the fics i published this year because i like reflecting over my choices for future reference and because i think it’s fun. but then i didn’t. so i’ll write my commentaries for every fic in this post as well

 

 

YEARS AND YEARS:

 

post-summer of 2022 (the summer of stranger things) i got really obsessed with writing character studies, because they’re such a great way to really dive into a specific character; the way they interact with the world and their relations to other characters etc etc. 

 

considerations:

 

i honestly don’t remember much about writing this fic, so this will be the least in depth commentary. initially, i wanted to write an erica character study because i generally don’t think she gets enough appreciation as something past her silly goofiness, but as i wrote it just turned into a sibling thing, and i’m glad it did! lucas is another underappreciated (occasionally mistreated) st character not even amongst the fandom but by the writers themselves. and it's hard to completely utilize a character to their full potential when the cast is so huge, but he's supposed to be one of the core kids yk. the show will give us some good ideas; ie s4 lucas  joining the basketball team, a group of predominantly black teens - and then abandon them; ie. having both his and ericas arcs center around his white girlfriend lol. no hate to max, i love that girl, i just wanted to write something that centers lucas and erica, and THEIR relationship – the ways they love each other and the ways they resent each other –  something that goes beyond just erica helping lucas save his girlfriend. i am thinking, once again, about how lucas screaming for erica in the creel house was IMPROVISED which just goes to show that caleb mclaughlin really just gets his character. because listen, lucas is SUCH a big brother, he is the big brotherest of all the core four. i’d been thinking a lot about how all boys encompass their own sibling role in their friend-group dynamic: will is so clearly The Youngest Child, mike is the Middle Child, dustin is the Only Child, and lucas is The Eldest Child. it just makes sense. and it’s really a shame we don’t get to see that very often.

 

favorite bits:

 

the ending. i have always been fond of a nice circular moment where the ending ties back to the beginning (in a way that’s intentional and makes sense, ofc lol). also i just love a solid last paragraph and a solid last line. last lines have always come relatively easy to me as opposed to beginnings, where i almost always struggle lol.

 

this bit with them biking:

While Max is in the hospital, Erica stays firmly by Lucas’s side. “You don’t need to,” he tells her once, when she’s about to follow him out the front door.

 

“Do you not want me to?”

There’s a long pause before he answers. “I don’t mind, but you don’t have to. I’m not forcing you to.”

“She’s my friend,” she says. Then, she echoes what she’d said a few months ago, that one time on the grassy hill. “And you’re my brother.” 

He cracks a small smile, knowing what comes next.

“Just the facts.”

They bike through the skeleton of their hometown together, on opposite sides of the road because there are no people left to drive cars. He keeps her in the corner of his eye, and briefly, after they make a left turn at an intersection, she looks like any other normal kid, racing her friends for the prize of an X-men comic book.

 

(looking back, the semi archaic wording of “do you not want me to” is weird and not something erica would say. it screams fe3h actually. but apart from that!!)

 

it’s a very simple scene but idk. i think it portrays what i wanted it to portray in terms of their relationship with each other, and erica’s relationship with max who is her brother’s girlfriend before she is erica’s friend. i like the image of them biking together because biking around town with his friends was such a large part of lucas’ boyhood. when he thinks erica looks like “any other normal kid racing her friends for the prize of an x-men comic book”, he’s thinking not thinking of other kids, just what his own childhood looked like.

 

i like “skeleton of their hometown” and them driving on opposite sides of the road. just in terms of painting this quietly post-apocalyptic scene, i think i did okay!!

 

from “Maybe he’d always been meant to split up on his own. Maybe every road would lead him back to the week of Will’s disappearance, the day he had headed into Mirkwood alone.” to “Because then, maybe he wouldn’t be standing on the cracked pavement as the hero of his basketball team, miserably watching his friends from the other side of the road, from 40,000 years away.” i love lucas. i hate that his friends treated him like that in early season 4. in general the whole jocks versus dnd deal was so… why was it just never addressed again… why jason… ugh it’s all coming back to me now [shudders]. anyway

 

things i want to improve:

- first lines/beginnings

- just my overall use of imagery. i have this habit of overemphasizing metaphors because i’m too worried about them being too subtle, but you know. i should trust the audience more i think. at the same time, especially in this fic i think, my imagery gets kind of murky and vague, almost to the point where you’re questioning whether it was necessary… like we have erica’s fascination of space which ties in with spatiality and distance to represent her and lucas’ relationship. which makes sense in my head, but you know. i could get a bit more specific

- i want to get better at writing action, and having it seem naturally incorporated even while my fics tend to be more introspective

- vocabulary. i tend to just say the same things over and over again and its like. bro u need to get some new material

- pacing

 

misc:

- lucas’ favorite school subject is canonically history, so i made him a future anthro major

- i hate that erica is a capitalist so i made her a childhood space nerd. it's a form of science a lot of kids fixate on, but it's also genuinely difficult enough to be a topic “worthy” of erica’s ambitions

- the title isn’t from a song (the audience cheers)

 

 

STAY SOFT

 

this is my first fe3h fic EVER, which is funny considering i’ve been playing the game since early covid-demic. my fixation tends to come and go; i wrote this in february, because i actually had time to play in the beginning of the year before uni started back up again lol. lysithea and claude are constantly warring the #1 favorite character in my mind, they are both very dear to me, and i really want to write something claude-centric one of these days. but anyway, about stay soft.

considerations:

 

title from mitski song lol. not that i associate lysithea with mitski – in my head she’s babymetal/poppy-core. but stay soft, get eaten, only natural to harden up….. so lysithea-core

 

for context, just before i started writing, i’d written one of my semester exam papers on literature where people turn into trees (think greek mythology, the vegetarian by han kang, the overstory by richard powers etc.) so i’d read a lot of academic literature about that tradition. i thought a lot about how people, in death, return to nature – a lot of tree metamorphosis portray a life after death, and we also see this in some burial rites and burial grounds, where trees are planted in peoples’ graves to signify a new cycle of life. so that was what had been on my mind when i started my lysithea character study. which i feel like becomes fairly obvious once you know lol. lysithea speculates a lot on how she can become useful, even after death. in-canon, when she takes her first life, she says something about not letting his sacrifice go to waste. and i place a lot of emphasis on her different “cycles”, which was also impacted by all the tree-stuff that was happening in my head lmao

 

the fic is structured around the present (IN BETWEEN), which is framed by different stages or cycles of her life: PRODIGY, GIRL(HOOD), PUNISHER, which are all the products of the singular event that befell her family. crest experimentation made her a prodigy at a terrible price, it stole her girlhood, and it carved her path towards retribution. and then the last stage is the present (ANYTHING). it’s the first time i’ve structured a fic like this, not in terms of non-chronology, but just in terms of putting more thought into naming sections more than just numbers.

 

this fic is a lot about lysithea, and a lot about her relationship with other people. i’ll just go over some of them:

 

hilda:

so the hilda hair-scene was the first scene i wrote (even though i ended up deleting most of the original scene). the mental image of lysithea sitting in front of the mirror was just very vivid in my mind for some reason. i love hilda and lysithea’s supports (hilda wanting to give an inexperienced lysithea a make-over, and lysithea ultimately deciding it isn’t for her) because rituals commonly associated with girlhood are just fun when recontextualized. it’s just impossible not to think about how lysithea never got the opportunity to play around with “frivolous” things such as make-up and perfume, because all of her childhood years were stolen from her, and she doesn’t have time to do that now, because she’s too busy training to protect her family while also being acutely aware of the fact that she could die at any moment.

 

cyril:

okay cyril just doesn’t receive enough love. in fact, he gets a lot of unwarranted HATE from the fandom and it’s just upsetting, especially given the fact that he’s one of the only poc in the game and the whole nature of his role in the goneril family (and also the hilda support… ??!?!). and he’s just great?? one of the funniest characters fr. haven’t played hopes, and idk if i ever will, but apparently, at one point shez goes “did you know that cyril?” and cyril immediately says “don’t use my ignorance to feel better about yourself.” lmao.  he and lysithea’s in-game supports are really sweet. one thing that struck me while rereading their supports is this part in their C support, where cyril points out that they are from two different worlds, class-wise, to which lys says they aren’t that different. the class thing is definitely true lol, but i do think it’s interesting how many other similarities they share. they are the two youngest kids at the monastery, yet, both were forced to grow up too fast due to different circumstances, and as a result, both of them have incredibly strong work ethics, and also this intense devotion to people they think they “owe” something to. in their supports with each other they can just Be Kids, like the most dramatic thing that happens is cyril spelling happy incorrectly. so i really wanted to have them established as close friends who matter to each other, even though i don’t think any of them are the type of people to express that out loud (“Lysithea tells Cyril to stay until the weather clears because she knows he won’t unless she invites him to”). the rest of the story pretty much builds on that whole trope where two old friends meet up at a diner and reminisce about their past lol.

 

claude:

i wouldn’t be me if i didn’t at least MENTION claude lols. their interactions are so sibling-like in-game which is sooo heart-eyes to me because both of them grew up all alone. lys obviously lost her family as a toddler, which kind of eliminated all prospects of her having siblings. claude, as we know, has siblings, but he doesn’t talk to any of them and they hate each other. so they both embody two kinds of familial loneliness which i think they both fulfill in each other - it’s very sweet and just lovely to watch them bicker. i also just think lys and claude are similar in many other aspects: they both hunger for justice and fairness, and both hold so much passion for other people. 

 

as a sidenote i really loved writing lys and cyril talk about claude together!! such a fun dynamic

 

my favorite bits:

the beginning paragraphs!! which i usually tend to struggle with lol, so i am very excited about this.

 

generally the common thread with lysithea mourning her resemblance with her mother (through her hair turning white due to experimentation), and her father later telling her that she is like her mother because of her courage 

 

the bit about energy:

When she is dead, she wants her parents to plant a tree on top of her grave. She’d read that trees benefit from the nutrients of the dead, that it helps them flourish. The idea is poetic, like all those myths of women turning into trees to watch over their loved ones that she’d once found in an old book. It’s probably something someone more artistically inclined would appreciate, but to Lysithea, it mainly translates to this: Nothing ever stops, energy can never be created nor can it ever be destroyed. I can still contribute to something, even after I am dead. 

 

She never writes about this, not at ten, or twelve, or fifteen, or twenty, but she tells Claude about it, during the war because he is the only one who knows about her double crests, apart from Byleth. He tells her it sounds like a beautiful idea, that it reminds him of something Petra had told him when they were in school.

 

so clearly i was a bit more overt with the tree metamorphosis stuff (arboromorphism… if u even care) than i remembered, which just means i could read this at any given point and know that i wrote it immediately after turning in my  climate fiction exam paper lol. anyway, i’m really glad i wrote this bit in because it seems very true to lysithea, but also i like the idea of her talking about it with claude, and the reference to petra, and the things he and petra talk about.

 

in general, i think i managed to pack a lot of information into like, one line, a few times which i am very happy about (“[Cyril] slips out the door. She shivers a little although he is careful not to let too much of the cold snake its way inside after him.”)

 

things i could improve:

- a lot of the same as in years and years

- it becomes kind of name-droppy because i mention so many characters, and i can’t really tell if it’s fine or annoying. but just to BE CLEAR, here was the army i had in mind:

> the og deers + the church gang

> balthus because he’s an alliance boy

> sylvain because i always think he should betray faerghus for some background faerghus patriotism spice that i dont make any mention to here whatsoever. and because i have my silly claudevain agenda

> petra just because i think she deserves better than fight for the army of the nation that keeps her as a political prisoner T___T all love to the beagles <3 just. yk

 

misc:

“[Ashe] is the first of many old friends turned foes that she will meet again, and there is something inexplicably cruel in that. In him, being the first domino to fall every time.” i didn’t think about this before i was writing this scene and it struck me. i kind of love it idk! pre timeskip, his adoptive father triggers the events (at least from the students’ perspective), and post-time skip it’s Him Again. 

 

“They kill Thales, and his last words are directed at Professor Byleth, not her. He doesn’t even recognize her.” this is CANON because there isn’t special dialogue when lysithea kills thales – i would know because i get her to deal the finishing blow every time. IT’S MESSED UP.

 

 

 

BE STILL, MY BROKEN BONES

 

i had FOUR documents of my gdrive that were different versions of this fic in different states of completion… FOUR!!!!! plus one on my actual laptop. also saying completion is misleading because they none of them were even near being complete lol.

 

i must have started this more than a year ago, and then i just really struggled with fucking just everything. pacing, chronology, dialogue, voice, even THE EVENTS, like i had no idea what i actually wanted to do with this except i wanted to give claude and sylvain the interaction i am owed. then i forgot about it for a really long time, until i started reading claudevain fic again a few months ago and then i just fucking finished it

 

considerations:

 

i initially wrote it from claude’s perspective but i switched to sylvain which i think was the right call for this story, since i got to explore his contemplations of duty and patriotism towards faerghus and dimitri in the context of faerghus fighting a “hopeless” war, and how these are impacted by sylvain being a past member of the golden deer and having been friends (and in ambiguous with) claude. to me, it doesn’t make sense for sylvain to join the deer and betray faerghus immediately, which is what happens in-game if you recruit him, or any other character for that matter. obviously, the game’s recruitment mechanic isn’t very nuanced lol, which is fine, but consider this my take on how he would end up on claude’s side of the war? i think he would feel deeply conflicted for a long time, and ultimately something would have to push him to do it (e.g. facing the deer and claude).

 

 

favorite bits:

 

the first scene in the bar. that kind of back and forth really does not come naturally to me when i’m writing lmao. it’s kind of a cliché but whatever!! it’s fun

 

the bit where claude asks sylvain to join the deer, from “When they’re at Gronder Field for their second mock battle, Claude is the one to take Sylvain out – “Gotcha,” he says.” to “He can’t fight a grin, as he takes Claude’s hand and lets him haul him to his feet.” in my first draft i this happened during a game of chess, but i’m glad i got to include this whole exchange! i feel like i got their dialogue right – they’re very boyishly playful here which just makes me happy.

 

this exchange between sylvain and ingrid:

 

“I don’t know what the right thing is to do, Ingrid,” he whispers into the fire.

“All we can do is our best. For Dimitri,” says Ingrid, and her voice is sadder than he remembers it ever being, weighed by the knowledge that Dimitri hasn’t been the same in a very long time. “For the Kingdom.”

Her face is inscrutable in the dim light, and her words echo in his head. It’s an old song, hundreds and hundreds of years ancient. 

That's what you do when you’re born as a Faerghan, which is to say, you are born for the king, you serve the king, and you die for the king, and nothing is ever going to change that. That was what had happened to Glenn, and it will be what happens to Ingrid, to Felix, to Sylvain, to all of them. You forge ahead for your fatherland, you fulfill your duty, even after you've started questioning why. Even after you've stopped seeing any point at all. By that time, it will have been too late to turn back anyways.

 

and this:

 

Claude returns home, and so does Sylvain, because Sylvain may have been one of Claude's for some time, but it had never been permanent, never like that. In the end, he would always find his way back to the North with Felix, Ingrid and Dimitri – if he was more religiously inclined, he might have said it was his Goddess-ordained destiny. 

The Kingdom will always welcome him home with open arms. As much as its cold chills him to the bone.

 

exploring faerghan patriotism is fun, what can i say!!! also the whole deal with faerghus just being really cold takes on another layer when you know that miklan once took sylvain out to the mountains in a snowstorm and left him there to die.

 

generally i think i’ve gotten a lot better at not writing enormously long sentences!! which is great. parts of the fic i’d written a year ago, and i think it shows because my sentences are generally longer, but it’s fine

 

i like the last line “The night around them is quiet”. it’s probably the least conclusive ending i have ever written, but i prefer it like that. it seemed natural to just let it all hover in the air

 

things i want to improve:

- dialogue - sylvain and claude are just two very smart characters, and i feel like maybe. i am not intelligent enough to be writing them

- tbh i am still riding on the high of having finished it, so i’m way less critical of it than i am of e.g. years and years. but it’ll come eventually!

 

2024 writing?!

okay so i obviously want to write a lot more in 2024. because it’s fun and i need to practice in order to actually improve. here are some of my current goals:

 

fandoms:

fe3h:

- i’m still working on a college au claudevain, which would make it my first college au, given that i finish it!

- i’ve been thinking of a companion piece to be still… but i’m not sure yet. it might be perfect as is

- i’d love to write some claude & cyril gen fic

- lysithea & hilda & girlish rituals – could be either romantic or platonic, we’ll see where it goes! generally lysithea’s relationship with girlhood is so interesting to me, i might just write another lys study

haikyu!!!!1

- have been on a kurodai kick lately again. idk if i will ever write them, they’re more of a “will read 500 different versions of them falling in love” than a “wants to depict them falling in love” kind of ship for me. maybe?? depicting a more rivalry-oriented dynamic could probably be good practice though. also exploring both of their feelings re: graduating and their teams moving on without them could be interesting!! 
- a kageyama character study for sure!! i love that kid. one day!!!

 

general things:

- i’d love to write meta-fic. i read this really great troybed community fic, which is just a blogpost that analyzes abed’s full body of work (canon films and fictional ones) and it’s one of the best things i’ve read tbh lmao. it really plays around with the different levels of knowledge inherent to meta-fic (there’s the fictional blogger writing from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know abed at all, and then there’s us, the audience, who have seen the show and therefore are privy to information that the writer would not have) and it just creates this strange combination of distance and intimacy that genuinely makes me emotional lol. okay moving on

- generally i’d love to do more experimental stuff! both in terms of language and format

- i want to try my hand at something more plot-heavy

- i want to write a fic involving something so weirdly specific, i will have to do tons of research on it

alright i think that was it. i hope you're all well. happy new year, i hope 2024 treats you all kindly! <33