#set it to read-only now. let's hope for the best 🤞

[cas-fulleditmode]

ms crumplebottom showed up on my home lot

ist es over für mich?

[honeyhotteoks]

serious spoilers for the next chapter of tnt so please click at your own risk here but i just have to rant about something and that includes revealing some future plot / future choices so please only click if you don’t mind that kind of thing.

okay so after the last chapter went up (literally almost a year ago i’m so sorry i didn’t realize it had been that long????) i felt weirdly stalled with the story. i had it fully outlined from the beginning, but made some decisions on the fly in chapter 15 that made me generally feel like hmm maybe i should rework things. then obviously i took a break and then worked on across stardust.

now that i’m working on TNT again… i realized the thing that was holding me up was the decision in chapter 15 to have yunho and mingi have a moment of intimacy between themselves that isn’t centered on reader. it’s something that in omegaverse outside of fan fiction i’ve noticed people are SUPER polarized on. in reverse harem in general, it seems like there are two camps of people, people who like “sword crossing” so to speak or m/m content and people who are very not into it. when i was writing the husband series, i remember getting a little bit of heat from people who didn’t like some of the scenes where yunho and seonghwa were hooking up explicitly on page… which is funny to me because at least in that fic i was extremely clear that they were married and lord do they be fucking… but people were still uncomfortable / would have preferred the guys to be fully focused sexually on the reader character.

when i set out to write TNT, initially i was never going to have yunho and mingi be intimate with one another, way more like two bro-y best friends and their girl….. but the more i wrote the more i just kept wanting them to have their moment, hence chapter 15. after that…. i just got super locked up trying to figure out where to go and how hard to push that because i was afraid of upsetting either one of the two camps of people who might be reading this fic.

and then i realized….. i don’t care anymore what you guys think. i mean i obviously want everyone to love it, but i guess what i’m trying to say is that i’ve always written the fics that i wish i could just read, and i personally enjoy m/m content in the context of a harem. i always find myself writing queer characters into my fics, and as a bisexual person who loves hot people of all kinds…. that’s the kind of fantasy i enjoy. so i was working on chapter 16 and i just decided…. fuck it. i don’t want to be afraid of upsetting someone anymore, i just want to write the thing and let it be what it will be.

the result of that is basically one of the hottest ideas i think i’ve ever had where yunho and mingi go down on reader together and end up making out and i know some people are going to hate that…. but i just don’t think i care anymore. i know enough people will be down for it, and i know at the end of the day i will love it more knowing i was honest about what i wanted for these characters.

anyways….. there’s a real dynamic shift coming in the next chapter, and it doesn’t completely change everything and isn’t this huge deal on the page, but for some readers who didn’t expect this i feel like it might be. i really hope everyone enjoys it and is happy regardless, but after some of the messages i got post-husbands series i’m not sure how this one will go. we’ll just have to see. i just wish it hadn’t taken me almost a year to figure that out because i love this fic and i know so many of you have been patiently waiting for its return.

okay sorry for the rambling i’m going back to writing these three be literally feral for each other i hope i can finish it up soon 🤞

[mindbat]

Writing Circle: 23 June 2023

Happy Friday! And thank goodness for the first weekend of summer 😎

As you can see from the title, I’ve decided to swap out Keeping Score for Writing Circle for these updates. I think the latter is closer to what I want these to be, for several reasons:

It implies a circle of trust, which is what we build when we write; we invite the reader into our circle of trust, because when we write we’re vulnerable, in ways we can’t always see at the time.

The writing process itself is a circle: idea, draft, edit, new idea, new draft, new edits. There’s no real beginning or end, only calling time on a current project.

As we travel on a circle (working on a project), the idea of “winning” or racing doesn’t really make sense. There’s no where to go, really, other than forward, no destination to arrive at where we can compare ourselves (favourably or unfavourably) to others.

A circle is bounded, which (hopefully) will keep us from wandering too far astray.

With the last point in mind, I think I want to start exploring a different aspect of writing each week. Share something I’ve learned from other writers, in the hopes that it’s helpful to someone else. Small tricks of the trade, if you will. I’ve got ideas for the first few (starting next week), but if there’s something you’d like to discuss, let me know!

As for my own projects, I did manage to wrap up the second round of novel edits last weekend 🎉✍️

So now it’s on to the stickier bits. The relationships I didn’t properly flesh out before and the background characters that exist as little more than a name right now (if even that). For those, I’ve just been brainstorming this week: Opening my notebook to a fresh page, writing a question at the top, and then listing out all the different possible answers I can think of in fifteen minutes. Yes, I do set a timer, and yes I do make myself keep jotting down progressively silly ideas until the time is up 😊

This weekend I’ll make time to go back through all of those, pick out the ones I like best, and then start planning how to work them into the story. I’m hoping to make more targeted edits this time, adding these new parts of the story as extra scenes or flashbacks or dialog where appropriate, instead of having to read the whole thing through again.

That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see if it works 🤞