#I rewrote this chapter from it's original draft and it took so long to get it right but I'm...okay with it hahaha

[twistedteatime]

Howling Witch, Chapter 3: Trap

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Original Fem Character

POV: 3rd Person

Summary: To the intelligence community the Winter Soldier is a ghost, but to HYDRA the Howling Witch is a harbinger of doom that will stop at nothing to get at their prized asset. A phantom that leaves swathes of destruction in her wake. She is the biggest mistake they ever made.

Chapter Summary: With the Howling Witch's identity revealed Steve demands answers from her Gamma he is far from prepared for. Meanwhile Pierce demands answers of his own and is no more prepared for them than Steve is.

Word Count: 5.1K

Warnings: Language, Canon Typical Violence, Canon Divergence, Gun Violence, Shifting Character POVs, Frustrated & Aggravated Superheroes, HYDRA ( legitimate warning on their own), Light Angst, Self-Loathing, Flashbacks, Electroshock Torture, Unwilling Medical & Scientific Experimentation, Blood, Vampires (the bad kind), Wolf shifters (the good kind). I may make a separate post just for warnings soon...

A/N: This one changed a lot from the initial draft as I didn't like how it flowed and I rewrote it and reorganized it several times. This one includes flashbacks that cover some of Essie's time with HYDRA among other things. I'll update the Ao3 link later.

NOTE: I DO NOT CONSENT TO MY WORK BEING COPIED OR PUT INTO ANY FORM OF AI. (Also if there are typos it's likely my keyboard. I will fix as I find them, because no matter how many times I proofread there's always at least one).

Masterlists: Howling Witch🔹MASTER Masterlist

Previous Part: Chapter 2: Bait

Ao3 Link: Chapter 3: Trap (Registered users only)

Next Part: Chapter 4: Mine

This was going to be a long day. Tanis knew that the moment he saw Steve Rogers’s blue eyes lock on his amber ones demanding even more answers. Essie had warned him about how ‘determined’ the man that was Captain America could get.

She wasn’t wrong.

“How? How were they HYDRA without anyone knowing?” Steve asked and Tanis looked at him silently, head tilted idly, eyebrows raised, “That’s different from now. What about Peggy? Did Peggy know? Carter? About Essie?”

Steve’s head was swimming between memories of what was versus what they were now. So many questions battered against his brain amidst the flickers of Bucky from different stages of their friendship to Essie from when he had first seen her to the last time he had seen her.

It was hard reconciling that woman with the person that had just been there with them. With someone that would do all of this. She had hardly reacted when he told her about Bucky falling from the train and then he’d never seen her again.

Once Zola gave them the coordinates and information for the base in the Alps they didn’t need to consult with her again. Phillips focused on the effort to stop Schmidt. So did Steve and everyone else.

As much as she said it wasn’t his fault, Steve still felt a well of guilt filling as he looked back. At everything everyone did. At what they didn’t do.

“Yes, but not at first. She didn’t find out until many years later. Blade says that when he got her to London, what he thought was the SSR and SHIELD’s forerunner took over completely. Everything checked out. It looked completely on the level. Nothing was suspicious. Not even to him and he’s…him.”

Fury snorted a bit before grimacing, “You think I’m paranoid…he’s a whole other level…”

Tanis nodded and saw Steve looking at him still, he debated how deep to go into what happened. On one hand he supposed Steve had some sort of right to a few answers, but on the other hand Steve Rogers was not his Alpha. Essie was and he was not about to take orders from anyone other than his Alpha in this situation.

“Some things aren’t adding up.” Natasha said, her eyes locked on his just as Rogers’s were.

That they thought they could intimidate him was funny. Then again they were human. They didn’t understand Pack ranking or just how terrifying Esteria Stark really was.

“How?” Tanis asked, his tone calm and carefully measured to convey that he was far from threatened.

“If Blade is so paranoid…why’d he leave her there? How’d she get out? It’s not like it’s easy to just walk away from something like that.” Natasha said and Tanis knew he’d have to answer now and understood why his Alpha had given her permission to reveal it to them: Essie wanted them to understand what they were up against on a new level.

Rogers would have known from experience but the rest had never fought HYDRA before.

“These were people that Blade had known for several years. That he worked with. That he had no reason to not believe. Something you all should have experience with now. He didn’t suspect a thing so he left to return to his own hunt thinking that she’d be taken proper care of and put back in touch with her friends because that’s what they told him.” He answered as he looked at them, “It’s something he deeply regrets because what they did to her next…that is what made her ‘The Howling Witch’. I’ve heard the story from both of them and as a Wolf it is…the stuff of nightmares.”

“What did they do?” Steve asked just as Essie knew he would, and Tanis sighed; it wasn’t a story he particularly liked.

“They started immediately…”

“I’m hungry.”

“We’ll get you some food soon, Agent Stark. First we want to run a few tests.” The nurse said with a smile as they led her through the clean, brightly lit halls.

The light hurt her eyes. Especially when they shined smaller ones into them. It stung and she couldn’t help snarling at them when they tried again.

“Where’s Eric?”

“Mister Brooks went on another mission. You’ll see him soon.” The doctor answered as he wrote something down on a clipboard and picked up a wooden depressor, “Just open wide and let’s have a look. You said your mouth hurt.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Yes, I know, but first…tests.” He said with a smile and she scowled yet opened her mouth.

The tests never seemed to end. One after the other. Measurements, reflexes, blood tests, but eventually they brought her to a room and fed her.

It smelled…wrong. It tasted that way, too, but she couldn’t resist it. She was too hungry.

When she woke up she wasn’t in her clean room anymore. She was in a cell. Chained to the wall.

Panic then adrenaline. Then they came with needles and tubes. Bigger ones.

They never left the room, but she did.

She didn’t get far.

The moment she stepped past the cell block’s door she felt the electricity course through her from her neck and through her entire body. Searing, jolting, stabbing pain. Then she felt the cold concrete floor and the metal collar around her neck. The last thing she heard was the alarm as heavy footsteps ran up.

“How did she get out of her restraints?!”

“She broke them. Stronger than we thought. Put her in deeper. Restrict her meals and water. Put her on a choke chain.”

The stone floor was cool underneath her as they dragged her over it and tossed her into a new cell.

One fit with a chain hooked to the wall.

It hurt every time they moved her as they slipped the chain over her head, locked it in place, and left her there.

At least until the next day, and then it began again. The tubes, the gurneys, the syringes, and then the burning, the shivering, and the pain.

Endless. It felt endless.

Days blurred to weeks and then came something new.

Something shiny and seamless.

There were no edges, just seamless metal encircling her neck, prongs dug into her skin digging deeper as she pried at it. Her nails dug into her skin. Sticky and metallic heat coating them as she tried to get it off.

She heard the coils inside heating up before she felt it.

Pain!

“Stop that.” he glared, her handler, holding the remote to the collar in one hand, and a leash with a choke chain in the other, she was still twitching when he slipped the collar around her neck and pulled, “Come. You will learn.”

Learn. Train. Learn. Train.

Obey.

Tired. So tired. Bloody. Aching. Hungry.

So Hungry.

So Thirsty.

Good girl.

She became their good girl.

“Good. You did good. All of the files. Every last page. Such a good, good girl, my pet.” He praised, hand petting her head affectionately.

She was used to it. The Director always praised her when she did well and if she did well they allowed her an extra ration. None from start of mission until success at the end, though.

It was worth it.

That’s what she told herself. She had to play along or she’d never get out.

They wanted obedience.

She gave it.

They wanted to train her, to hone her skills, to turn her into their own personal attack dog. Their perfect pet.

She let them.

Months of training. Every day, from sunrise to sunset.

Training.

Combat, munitions, espionage, the latest in technology, fashion to blend in, vehicles, martial arts, etiquette, everything they thought she would ever need to be their perfect little girl.

Essie did it all. She played along.

The Director gave her rewards if she played along and followed their rules.

Little ones at first. Praise. Then a bigger cell. Time outside. The removal of her shock collar was the last one when she choked her handler with the leash.

He had touched her.

That was against the rules.

Essie was their pet. Their specially bred pet. Their one-of-a-kind, special, fertile pet.

They made sure she was still fertile after their serums and blood fusions. She endured monthly tests to confirm it and they guarded that tenaciously.

They didn’t want just anyone breeding with their special pet and she knew it…and used it as permission to wrap the leash around her handler’s neck.

She was rewarded for it, too. She didn’t run. She just kicked his corpse out of her cell door and shut the bars again, glaring at it and whined when the Director walked up.

He was so proud of her. So proud he removed the shock collar from her himself as a reward.

She knew by the look on his aged face and in his pale blue eyes that he was going to give her another one.

“You are our crowning achievement, my pet. One of two. A perfect pair. You always were. From the very beginning and now you are again. The perfect soldier and the perfect pet. No, girl, he’s not for that, you’re too special to reward him with you. No, there’s another we have in mind for that, but a good soldier deserves an obedient dog to help him on the field.” He said and smiled when she blinked, playing at an obedient curiousness that she knew would get him talking; he loved to gloat and when he gloated he’d say too much, “You did so good, pet, so good. He was supposed to be a surprise but you deserve a reward so I’ll let you in on a secret…just because you’re my good, good girl. It’s there. On my desk. In the file. You’ll be so happy. Go on.”

“They really thought that telling her he was alive and kept in an ice box was going to make her happy?” Fury asked and Tanis chuckled, running his tongue over his canine.

“No. They miscalculated her level of obedience. She describes that period as she was biding her time, letting them teach her so she could learn enough to get out, playing at being their pet, but when she saw the file and read it…she saw red.” He explained, “They thought they had her full obedience. They were wrong and they paid for it…but so did she. There’s a device that HYDRA has called the Memory Suppression Machine. It’s like electroshock on steroids. They use it for what it sounds like, and yes, that is what they have used on Sargent Barnes to make him into their Soldier. Partially.”

“Why didn’t it work on her?” Sam asked with a frown, “Because it seems to have worked real good on him.”

Steve furrowed his brows as he thought before looking up at Tanis, “Because of what HYDRA put in her. Himmler’s people made her into a Wolf, but HYDRA did more.”

“Yes. Her healing rate is so accelerated that she can heal most damage in seconds but it has limits and it comes at a cost.” Tanis said and Natasha realized what it was as he said it, “It eats up calories and her metabolism is high as it is. They put her in the machine over and over again. Her body healed it over and over again…just making her hungrier and hungrier until…”

“She broke free.” Steve said, frowning, head spinning as it fought itself imagining her and Bucky going through it.

“Yes. She did. Violently. They locked the facility down. They left anyone that didn’t make it out the emergency doors inside and waited. Eventually…she got Hungry. That’s when her memory of the whole thing blanks…and that’s when Blade comes back. They called him back to try and get her to calm down.” Tanis said and they looked at him in disbelief, except for Natasha.

“They knew she trusted him.” She said and he nodded briefly, “So they wanted to spin it as she went berserk so he’d get her to listen to them again.”

“Exactly. It was a bad idea. She does not talk about it. Blade doesn’t like to talk about it. However, HYDRA can and has before in order to turn people against her.” Tanis said and Steve sighed as he sat back in his seat shaking his head.

“Peggy. They showed her what Essie did while in that facility and spun it so Essie was the monster.” He said and Tanis nodded.

“Yes. Along with other things that happened after Blade busted Essie out. Well, technically she busted herself out but he was the one that brought her around and out of her Feeding state. She gets too Hungry and…food takes on a whole new meaning to her.” He said and they frowned while looking at him, “He describes their escape as…explosive. HYDRA taught her how to make several different types of explosives and she put it to use…in the south sector of the facility. After he snapped her out of her hunt for food, by giving her…I think a candy bar…she detonated what she built, dragged him out of the rubble, waited for the HYDRA soldiers to go in, and then detonated the several other bombs she set through the building using the remote to her shock collar. He patched himself up later but he still has a scar from it to this day and one of the first things he’ll tell you: ‘Never turn your back on her when she’s Hungry and crazed’ and ‘I learned early on to always keep food nearby’. Whenever he visits the first thing he does is ask if she ate and then hands her a packet of jerky.”

“I don’t blame him.” Fury said while shifting in his bed a bit and Natasha spoke.

“That’s what they used to turn people against her, though. Spun her into a terrorist. She’d have no one to turn to.”

“Exactly, so they had to go in hiding. Blade spent several years teaching her how to really handle what she is. Not that he knew everything about it, but due to his own special status he was able to help. She’s not a full Wolf, she’s enough of one for us, but she’s right. We know some of what they injected into her but not all of it. We know she’s mostly Wolf, that there’s a bit of vampire in there that makes her sensitive to the sunlight and…blood crazed when Hungry enough, and that there was a concoction of Witch blood.”

“So she can do magic.” Sam said with a look and he shook his head.

“No. Not as you know it. It’s not fancy. Not sparkly or flashy. It’s just blood. Her blood. Usually.”

“Alpha? Didn’t you already do that?” Maggie asked.

She was younger than Ruun and Tanis, but highly skilled. Many of the warriors balked at Essie naming Maggie her Delta. Partially due to her young age at the time, partially due to her being female, and the rest for other reasons. At least until she wiped the floor with them when Maggie offered them a chance to prove she wasn’t fit. Then they accepted it.

Maggie was accustomed to being out in the field with her Alpha. Even after assuming her Delta duties she went out with Essie often. She was used to the sight of Essie cutting her fingers and drawing runes on the walls.

Now.

She had asked the first time she saw Essie doing it, but everyone did. Particularly Blade. Then again he had ample reason to.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He didn’t yell at her. He just asked as if she were crazy. Maybe she was.

She didn’t know if it’d work, but the files Essie had read about herself said something about blood magic. Something about the power of sacrifice. Something about how her blood wasn’t doing what they thought it would so it’d be pointless to train her in it.

Those memories came in fragments. Essie didn’t remember much about the files. She had been looking for food when she had seen them so she had only given them an absent cursory glance.

Truthfully, she had no idea what it was talking about and it wasn’t edible so she had forgotten about it until earlier. The book she stole from the vampire run club they had just torn through made her remember that the files had mentioned such a thing and the book explained it more. A lot more.

Finding a book about blood magic in a vampire base didn’t surprise her. It involved blood after all. Blood and power. Vampires liked both so it only felt natural that they’d have such a book even if they couldn’t use it.

“I’m trying something. I found this book in that tramp’s library upstairs…and I read something in a file back where you busted me out…” she answered him, reading from the book and copying the runes of the supposedly protective spell, cutting her fingers again and copying down the runes from the book before they healed, “My healing rate makes this difficult…”

“This whole room smells of your blood. This better work or we’re gonna have to find somewhere else to lay low.” Eric said with a resigned sigh, watching her carefully as he always did when she did something he viewed as worrying.

Essie knew why. He was making sure she didn’t hurt herself. Well, more than she was doing by cutting her fingers repeatedly to draw bloody runes on the walls.

“I know.” She replied flatly and he shook his head before looking at the book over her shoulder.

“Blood magic is dangerous, Ess. You sure you want to do this?” he asked carefully and she nodded, writing the last few runes on the walls and connecting the last one to the first.

Nothing happened at first. Essie looked at the book then back at the runes several times unsure. It said she had to Will it.

“What does it mean I have to Will it to work?” she asked as she looked up at him, blinking, confused, and her mentor answered.

“Blood magic requires a Price, paid in blood, and a Will to execute it. What are you trying to do?” he asked as he stood there, arms crossed, “Other than lead every vampire after us straight to us?”

“The book says it’s a protection spell to hide one’s location from those that would do you harm. I just want to make sure we aren’t found. We’re not far from the club.” She answered and he nodded and gestured at the wall, “What? You want me to just tell it that?”

“I’ve seen blood magic worked a handful of times. Never like this. Usually it was trying to summon something, control something, or turn something into something fucked up.” He said as he stood there, “I know it’s dangerous and the power is addictive.”

“All power is addictive. Why else would people want it so bad? I just want to protect us.” She said and gestured at the wall and looked as she heard a sizzling noise.

The runes on the wall began to darken and sizzle until they had faded into the wall. The sound of Blade’s gun cocking drew her attention back to him as he looked out the window carefully. Joining him she watched a group of cops stop at the door to the building they were in, sniffing.

“Shit.” He cursed then watched as they shook their heads and continued on, “Luck.”

It continued to happen. They’d sniff and pass on by. Eventually he opened the window to see if they’d do it again. They did. Even if she cut herself they continued right on past.

“Alright…maybe it’s not luck. What the fuck did they put in you?” he asked as he looked at her and she shrugged.

“Yes. I’ve done this already several times, but it doesn’t hurt to add in an extra layer. Especially with who we have hiding here. Every vampire in HYDRA’s employ will be combing the area tonight.” Essie said and Maggie nodded, “Are you alright? I know it’s…insanity right now. I know you’ve…been helping me with this hunt for a long time and…now it’s different. There’s more at stake this time but are you alright?”

She nodded, a few strands of her brown hair falling into her eyes. Yet her brows were knitted and she was unusually quiet. Shifting from foot to foot and quiet. Fidgeting with her vest making Essie’s lips twitch upwards slightly as she shook her head.

“You’ve all been spending too much time with Ruun lately. Speak.”

“I saw him…your Mate. The Soldier. What…what if you…don’t get him this time? You’ve been hunting him for so long, Essie. This time they hired you to take him out if he fails. That means they don’t need him anymore. What if…you can’t get him? What if he can’t come back?” she asked quietly and Essie sighed as she connected the last rune to the first, letting the wound on her finger heal over.

“Have you ever known me to stop trying?”

“No, but…you’re our Alpha. We worry about what will happen if the hunt fails. What happens if it does?” Maggie asked, looking at Essie’s face as she asked, tense, fully aware it was a sharp question, “Even if…even if he…can’t be what…what he is to you?”

Essie couldn’t blame her for asking, or Tanis for asking. They knew how important Bucky was to her. They understood it to an extent. They all did. Better than Blade did even if he had known her far longer.

To them Bucky was her Mate. In their Wolf-wired brains why else would she go through all of this? So they understood on that level, yet it was because they understood it at that level that made them worry so much.

Bad things happened when Mates were lost or rejected you. It was just how it was for them. That’s how they understood it and that’s why they worried even if Essie herself didn’t look at it like that.

Besides, she’d long prepared herself for that possibility. The probability he wouldn’t want her after he learned what she was now. Sure, he had blood on his hands as The Winter Soldier, but it wasn’t like the blood on hers.

“No one should ever live a life in chains as the puppet of another. I don’t know if he’ll want me, but I’m not worried about that right now. I just want him to be free. You’re all far more worried about what I’m going to do if he walks away from me after all of this. We’re not even close to that possible point in the future. First…we must free him of his captors…then we must free his mind…and that will take time.” Essie answered and Maggie nodded, still unsure, and Essie sighed opening her arms with a small smile, “Come here.”

She went into them without hesitation and relaxed as Essie hugged her. It was a soft sour tang, but one Essie could scent regardless. Fear and worry…for her Alpha, mentor, and friend.

“I’m going to be alright. No matter what he decides or does. I’m going to be alright. You are going to be alright. The Pack will be alright. I promised you and Tilda freedom when I found you. I trained you myself. Are you going to tell me you’ll let someone take that freedom away if I’m sulking in a corner for a week?” Essie asked as she looked at her and Maggie shook her head, “Good. Or I’d have to scold you and make you eat broccoli.”

“Ugh. I still don’t how you eat any of that.” Maggie gagged and Essie chuckled.

“I’m not a full Wolf, that’s why. It’s nutritious and good for you. Makes you tough. If you ate more as a child maybe you’d’ve been taller.”

“You can have it. I’ll take a rack of lamb and Benny’s brick jerky any day.” She said and Essie smiled, “Ugh. Broccoli. It’s like a cow barfed.”

Essie just laughed and pat her face gently, “I’ll be fine. There’s a long road ahead. A long road. I want you to make sure you wear that vest constantly. I know it’s heavy but keep it on. Keep your glasses on whenever you are outside.”

“I know.” Maggie replied with a sigh, having been told the same thing countless times by her Alpha over the years.

“I’m going on a food run. I need to eat. Go help Tanis keep them occupied. Right now I have him informing them of…well me. Don’t stare too much at Steve. He’s kind of cranky right now…which I can’t blame him, but…just…mind your manners.”

“Okay, I can do that. What food are you getting?”

“I’m gonna go put a Chinese restaurant out of business for the day and terrorize some people. Maybe get me some pizza. Garlic knots. Not sure. Maybe some donuts, too. I really want a jelly donut…mmm…yeah…I don’t know why but I really want one…”

His head hurt. Who was that man? Bucky. Who was Bucky?

Falling. A train. Blood. Pain. Dragging.

“Sargent Barnes…the procedure has already started. You are to be the new fist of HYDRA.”

Sargent Barnes…who…was…that? He’d heard that name before.

Who was that man? He knew him. He knew he knew him.

“Mission Report.”

 Eyes reflecting light. A female in green high in the trees.

She was there too. He knew she was there. He didn’t see her, but he knew she was there.

Who was she? He didn’t know, but he knew she always showed up.

“Mission Report now.”

Pain.

Pierce.

“The man on the bridge. Who was he?”

He didn’t get an answer. He got something different.

One more mission…but he wanted to know. It was almost there.

Blue eyes. Grey eyes.

“But I knew him.”

Disappointment. That was not what Pierce wanted to hear.

“Then wipe him. Start over.”

Pain.

So much pain.

“Sir…what about her?” Rumlow asked Pierce as he looked behind them at the screaming Asset.

“I have someone tracking her down.” He answered and looked at his phone as it rang, “Right on time. She won’t be an issue.”

He put it up to his ear, ignoring the sounds of screaming behind him. Crunching on the other end of the phone made him stop. Crunching and whimpering.

“Y’know…that’s a damn nice bank. Reminds me of a Roman temple.” She said through the phone as she chewed the eggroll and cracked open a fortune cookie.

Essie was doing her best to ignore the sounds of him screaming in the background. The sound of it rattled the cages in her mind. The sound of electricity joining it shook the bars violently enough the phantom sound and sensation of her own screams tearing out her throat slipped through. She stuffed them back in as rapidly as she could.

Instead she focused on her loathing for the man on the phone and the mission at hand, “I got you a fortune cookie, by the way, it says ‘You are kind and friendly’. Hm…missed the mark a bit on that one. By the way…that agent you called, y’know the one you said ‘you know I only call you in extreme cases’ to? Yeah he should be making his way to you in the next 30 seconds with that nice thick manilla filled with all the information on me he could dig up. When you see him, tell him it's not advisable to take two at a time when he runs up steps.”

“We were just talking about you.” Pierce said as he looked at Rumlow, mouthing that she was outside somewhere, and he nodded before signaling to the others.

“Of course you were. Your little…friend wants to say something to you. Here. Speak up so he can hear you.”

“She’s…nnn-nno-not…hoo-who you th-think…sh-she’s…” he stuttered and Pierce jumped as he heard the blow on the other end.

“That’s enough.” She cooed and hummed amusedly as the doors opened and one of his agents ran in, green eyes filled with concern he was wrestling down, and carrying a thick envelope, “I’m impressed. He got there faster than I thought he could. Damn that adrenaline must be working overtime.”

“S-Sir.” The agent said and handed him the folder.

Pierce emptied it onto a table and flipped the first folder open. He stared down at it, eyes widening.

It was her.

His blood ran cold.

“Sir? They got a bead on her.” Rumlow said quietly and he nodded rapidly.

He heard the shot ring out through the phone a few seconds later.

“Confirmed hit.”

Relief.

Then terror.

“Not bad…but…mm you’re rushing. Sloppy. Very sloppy. Didn’t confirm your target.” She said and he heard the machine finish behind him, “What are you teaching your operatives these days? Back in my day there were higher standards…so disappointing. Might be good to prep your Asset fully. Y’know. Inform him of things instead of just shoving him out the door while he’s still crispy. Just some friendly adv-”

He hung up.

Looking back down at the contents of the envelope, he assessed the situation and his options. Glancing back at the Asset for a moment one of them screamed out louder.

He looked back at the files again and went through them, removing several pictures even as his phone dinged with several messages from her.

He read them as he walked back over to the prep team.

“Young man that was RUDE. Hanging upon your elders. Unacceptable.”

A picture message followed.

It was the operative they had sent to get her. Tied up, unconscious, and with an open rice container balanced on his head.

“I left your poodle with a snack across the street.”

Then another.

“Oh, and if you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do…go ahead. HYDRA may have made him into a fist, but they made me into something much worse. Besides…he’d have to find me first.”

He put the phone back into his pocket and sat back down across from the dazed soldier looking at him. He held up a paper. The soldier looked at it.

“This person…this thing…is threatening our goals. The Howling Witch. She’s a threat and part of your next mission. Do you understand?” Pierce asked and once he received a nod, he left the file with the operative that had brought it in, “See that he has what he needs from that. Nothing more. ”

A/N: Ooo...Pierce is angry. Anyway, shorter but on time. Monday's chapter is a bit more up in the air as offline stuff may keep me from getting it out until Tuesday my time. Next chapter sees Steve and Essie face to face again now that he knows as well as a few other things.

I appreciate every like, kudos, bookmark, and view, I sincerely do, but if you really want to let me know you want more of this: comment, reblog to share my work, send asks, tell me.

Masterlists: Howling Witch🔹MASTER Masterlist

Previous Part: Chapter 2: Bait

Ao3 Link: Chapter 3: Trap (Registered users only)

Next Part: Chapter 4: Mine

[takeariskao3]

Hi! I'm curious about the part/scene you struggled with / maybe totally rewrote in TPFY chapter 17 ?

HAHAH are you talking about the shower scene lolol

i guess it’s fairly obvious of me to say that i struggled with the entire thing considering it took me three months to update. but it was a really good learning experience for me especially in regards to TONE

i had a lot of 17, 18, 19 already written from last year except the tone of the scenes was *really* different and i kept trying to orchestrate scenarios to make those pre written scenes fit instead of rewriting the scenes to make them fit where harry and ginny are now.

obviously me writing them last year was much more combative/contentious/non-communicative … and that’s just not where they are anymore. especially ginny’s pov and especially at the end of the chapter. things are softening. and i needed to go where harry and ginny were leading me instead of trying to force them into conflict.

two parts that i really struggled with and labored over were: harry’s convo with ron and hermione and ginny’s pov at the end.

harry’s internal admission that he doesn’t talk about things because he doesn’t feel ready or equipped to process them, took a long time to get right even though it is a very short passage in the grand scheme of things. but him acknowledging this is a coping mechanism, in addition to keeping the horcruxes a secret, is a major turning point for him story wise. he doesn’t just not talk to ron/hermione/ginny about his feelings and experiences, he also avoids them with himself. he has to internally process before he can ever do it outwardly.

the second part was ginny’s story about her 6th year. there were four drafts of that happening, and in my original outline i didn’t have ginny opening up that much but i really like how it turned out. her walls completely crumbled there. which is so important to show because that Only Happens With Harry and she gets to try and figure out why in chap 18.

the last part that has been forever in my outline and has evolved many many different times is harry’s apology to the house. but in all the other versions, ginny also has no doubt that harry is mostly talking to her when he talks about making up with Grimmauld Place and that has been so so important to me, and to the story, for him to acknowledge that running away from his feelings doesn’t make them go away, it just makes them bigger when he eventually feels them.

now it’s ginny’s turn.

[fieldsofview]

Talk Shop Tuesday: how do you structure your fics before you even get to writing them? Do you create outlines - if so, what do your outlines usually look like? If you write multi-chapter fics, do you plan out each chapter or write as you go? When in the process do you usually come up with titles? How do you decide when a fic is ready to post?

So we're gonna pretend that this hasn't been sitting in my ask box for 6 months... (Sorry! <3)

It depends on the fic tbh, which is part of why I procrastinated answering this. But the short answer is: the longer the story, the more I need to have outlined before drafting; otherwise, I wont finish/I'll have a lot of problems on the way.

Expanded rambles below the cut:

One shots and short fics tend to be written from a very loose outline/brainstorm. I usually have a document I call my "brain dump doc" where I just put everything relevant to the fic, and then I can copy and paste things over as needed when I'm writing.

Longer fics need to at least have certain elements of the narrative structure outlined (Mainly, where Acts 1, 2, and 3 start and end, as well as the midpoint twist, and the characters' goals/perspective for each act need to be determined at a MINIMUM). But! Having individual scenes outlined really helps. The problem is that sometimes I don't really have a vision for individual scenes before I start writing.

SMH had the most intensive outline I've ever had. The original outline was over 10k words, and I rewrote the outline for Act 3 when I was around halfway through drafting the fic, because some things needed to be updated. I had most of the main scenes at least somewhat outlined, and occasionally had quotes/lines already written to set the tone of each scene. BUT, as you can see, that 10k outline birthed a 167k fic, so it was definitely helpful for me not to forget things as I went along.

WMD, my current main WIP, just has 4 parts (though those will probably be split into multiple chapters each since Part 1 isn't done yet and it already 13k), but I mostly have the start and end point for each part outlined, along with small notes for scenes or emotional beats I want to hit sometime during each part.

I'm kind of pantsing my way through WMD in a way I wasn't with SMH. But, the total expected fic length is like 45-60k, so a lot smaller than SMH. AND, there are some things I'm really needing to figure out as I go along, because I didn't have a vision for it from the start.

Thanks again for the question and I'm so sorry it took me so long to answer <3

[god-fucking-dammit-mizutani]

Moonlight Mile 2

Rating: G | Word Count: ~5200 Pairing: Taishirou Chapter: 2/3 Tags: Summer Camp AU Part 1  | Read on Ao3

Across the field the early morning sun has ascended just above the tree line, slipping enough light under the propped open window boards to lighten the rec room cum mess hall in a gentle haze.

“I get it,” Mimi declares. Every curl in her hair shines with the vibrant hues of an artificial sunrise. The metal star clips fastened between each ringlet soaks up the sun and reflects little rainbows off the walls, the ceiling, the table.

Taichi stares up at her, watches her chew in an oddly considering way. The slight nip in the air causes his sleep deprived eyes to burn.

“You do?” Jyou asks around his fork. She nods at him, vigorously.

One of the little rainbow lights comes to arc over the back of Taichi's hand. He tries to pin the intangible light beam down with the weight of his fingertips, but they slip away when Mimi turns back to him. She raises her fork up nearly towards the center of his eyes in lieu of her pointer finger.

“What's more surprising than someone being in love you, right?”

“Oh, right!” Jyou thumps a closed fist into his open palm, exclaiming, “I get it!” He smiles brightly as Mimi beams back at him. Taichi's only seen Jyou look this excited when it rains during his field duties and everyone gets stuck inside playing board games and foosball.

“Wow,” Taichi says, dragging the syllable out.

“Not you, you,” Jyou puts in, sheepishly. He makes a gesture Taichi isn't really sure means anything. “But the general you, you know?”

Mimi pulls back her fork and wields it against Jyou next, swiping a few of his tater tots with a single stab. He glares at her, but Mimi just smiles. Jyou moves his tray just a few inches over, using the bulk of his shoulder to ward off any further invasions on his breakfast.

Taichi blinks up at them and then turns away, resting his cheek down on the table. They’re the sort he remembers using in elementary school and if he angles it just right, the laminate surface feels cool and inviting, like an ice pack for his swollen eyes. Beyond the windows, the outside world is quiet. Taichi watches as the wind ruffles through tree branches and thinks about his mother running her hand through his bangs, cooing and asking if he feels well. Taichi’s not sure.

“Come on, Taichi,” Jyou begs softly. He hums in response.

“Don't worry about him,” Mimi says. “Taichi's like a rubber band, he'll snap back.” He hears a crisp woosh over his head and Mimi shouts.

“What did you think was going to happen?” Jyou asks. Taichi tilts his head until his chin lays flat on the edge, watching Mimi wave her hand erratically. There's an angry, red bracelet of skin Taichi knows wasn't there before. It sits under the thick part of her palm, just barely covered by a hot pink hair tie.

“I was proving a point,” she whines. She rubs the mark with her other hand, frowning pitifully.

“It’s not good to wear those things on your wrist anyway,” Jyou adds, frowning.

Taichi laughs, a short little huff through his nose, but it's enough to steal back their attention. They smile at him.

Jyou's eyes flicker over the crown of Taichi's head and they widen momentarily. Taichi doesn't have to look up to know what's caught his attention. Jyou always insists on sitting where he can keep his eyes on the clock despite having a perfectly functioning wristwatch.

He slides his tray over to Mimi's awaiting hands. In her excitement the fork clears straight through the styrofoam, but it doesn't deter her from wiping the debris off the pronged tips and popping another tater tot into her mouth. Jyou winces. Taichi snorts.

“That’s just unsanitary, Mimi,” he says in a high whine already ambling to his feet. Mimi shrugs. “You don't know the last time these tables were washed.”

Mimi snaps her gaze up to him, cheeks puffed up in a pout. “Of course I do!” she shouts. Several people behind them whip their heads around to gander at the outburst. Taichi waves them off and they return quickly to their meals. “Because I washed them. Last night.”

Jyou keeps his nose wrinkled up at her.

“Not that I'm complaining,” she continues, “but there's still ten minutes left. You have plenty of time.”

“But the allergy kids, Mimi,” Taichi puts in just as Jyou follows up with, “but the kids with allergies will be coming in soon, Mimi.”

Mimi looks back to Taichi and they both giggle.

“I just want to be diligent,” Jyou sniffs at them. When his eyes meet Taichi's, a light smile lifts the frown lines along his face. “Hope you feel better, Taichi.”

“Thanks,” Taichi drawls, letting his forehead thunk against the table. It does nothing for the aching in his brain, but the darkness greets him like a comfortable friend. “Have fun getting puked on.”

“I will,” Jyou says back. Taichi makes a face, unseen, because he's not sure if Jyou's being facetious. His footsteps slowly become indistinct among the other camper’s, now little more than the white noise around them.

But Jyou’s still lingering at the far end of the building when Taichi tilts his head that way, giving his other eye a minutes reprieve with the cold surface. A camper wiggles and kicks in his arms, knocking a chair in front of her to the ground. It’s the one that usually keeps the back door propped open, Taichi notices with an amused snort. He’s seen campers and counselors alike through the years pull the chair from it’s post to climb that particular wall because it’s there—the sloppy red-purple stain that haunts the rec room. Even when the rest of the paint and plaster had eroded away, it had remained, stubbornly attached to the crown molding.

Taichi’s heard the rumors, the urban legends; they’ve evolved over the years from the stain being an ominous mark of the apocalypse to a symbol of good luck if you can reach high enough to slap the vibrant blemish with the full of your palm. Taichi’s never believed any of them. Mostly because he remembers putting it there himself after chucking his cranberry juice at Yamato when they were eleven. It’s his greatest regret, missing so poorly.

He can almost hear Jyou across the room, giving his lecture on the dangers of falling from high places as he ushers the camper back to her seat. He takes the chair back out with him, pushing the door open with the broadness of his back. Taichi watches him notice someone in the distance, waving as the door falls shut, Jyou on the other end of it. The slam echoes along the arched ceilings, over the shuffling and rabble of the campers, but no one seems to mind it. Taichi watches the door, though, his heart holding on a beat as the handle jiggles and someone pulls it back open.

Koushirou, notoriously late to breakfast, keeps to predictable this morning. He pushes the chair up against the door and fiddles with it a moment, making sure it’ll hold before stepping up into the rec hall. Across the room his dark eyes meet Taichi's for a moment, and they look, somehow, as if he’d gotten less sleep than when Taichi had last seen him.  

Taichi looks away, shoving his half eaten tray into Mimi’s hoard and let's his forehead rest against the table again.

“Hey, Taichi?” Mimi calls him gently. Her hand sits gently on the crown of his head. Taichi welcomes the chill of her fingers where they graze his scalp in soft waves of her hand. “If you don't feel good, you can switch with me today. Or I'm sure Jyou will let you sit out in the first aid tent.”

Taichi looks back up at her again. Mimi's smile is sweet, serene, and it makes his heart both swell and ache. For how much the three of them banter, Taichi enjoys her company, and Jyou’s. But he wishes, too, that Sora were here. He thinks she'd know exactly what to say, but Taichi has no way to contact her.

He props his arm up on the table, rests his cheek inside the cup of his palm, and tries his best to smile. “Thanks Mimi,” he tells her, voice hushed under layers of fatigue. “I'm just super tired.”

“You sure?”

Taichi nods, his eyes following the motion without his permission. He yawns. “I'll let you know if I change my mind.”

*

On the field, under the sun, Taichi thrives. Usually.

The listless cloud that had kept him company through the morning has since evaporated, the pull of his eyes to remain shut, gone. It feels like every ounce of his blood has been replaced by static, the crackle of it deafening in his ears. He wants to believe it's his natural habitat: the bright skies, the echo of laughter ringing in the air. But he knows it has everything to do with his unlikely company.

Taichi looks behind him, the top of his head scraping along the ground where he’s splayed himself across the slope of the hill nearest the field. Most of the counselors usually hide up in the shade, under the trees at the plateaued top. Taichi prefers being under the sun himself. Koushirou is of the former group, and Taichi understands why, his skin an unhappy shade of red. Taichi watches him struggle with a near-empty bottle of sunblock, alternating between squeezing and slapping the bottom, until it finally deposits the last dollop of lotion into his hand with an undignified plop. Koushirou’s nose wrinkles at the noise, dismayed.

Taichi watches his expression turn to a grimace when he slaps it against his face. He hasn't worn sunblock in so long himself, but his skin still feels the sympathetic prickle of cold as Kouhsirou soothes the lotion into his cheeks.

He notices Taichi's stare a moment later, dark eyes quiet and inquisitive. There is a moment Taichi has to fight the urge to look away.

“Yes?” Koushirou asks. He breaks eye contact to tug his laptop back into the seat of his lap. Taichi can only see the sprout of his hair, darkened by the shade above him, just over the lip of the the back of it. Which is fine. Taichi wasn't going to tell him where he'd missed spots along his face, anyway.

Taichi breathes in and the scent of sun and sweat and everything quintessentially summer wafts in through his nostrils. "It smells like barbeque," he says. To Koushirou's back, a small distance away, is a thicket of woods. Just beyond that is a residential haven, where Taichi hears the owner of the camp lives in a rather sizable craftsman house with a large acre of land for his two large dogs to run around. Taichi only knows about the dogs because they sometimes find their way to camp through the woods, jumping out of the bushes when campers have their lunch out on the lawn on nice days. The old man's daughter used to be Taichi's counselors for years, but now she's some high powered attorney in a big city.

He wonders if she's visiting now, and they're celebrating in that big old craftsman house with the dogs begging under the deck tables. Taichi's stomach growls with envy.

He rolls over onto his stomach, legs kicking up behind him and dismantling grass from the bottom of his shoes as Taichi swings them. He cradles his chin in his hands and watches the bob of Koushirou's hair over the edge of his laptop back. His lower thighs burn where the sun rests upon them. He takes in a deep breath and adds, "and Dr. Pepper." “That's oddly specific."

“Dr. Pepper is very distinct,” Taichi insists. This time when he sniffs, it has nothing has nothing to do with scent.

The clacking of keys stops momentarily. Koushirou tugs down the screen of his laptop until his eyes find Taichi's. It feels like he's staring back down the barren forest roads, deep in the thick of midnight, and Taichi can't seem to breathe in deep enough.

Koushirou sniffs at the air, brows furrowed deep. One of his hands comes up to curl around his chin. Taichi's seen the pose in movies before, the ones with mad scientists and rampaging monsters. Koushirou sniffs again, and the look on his face is the epitome of perplexed.

He should look confused more often, Taichi decides.

“Interesting,” Koushirou mutters. He lifts the screen back up with his other hand and the clicking starts again, but he’s still murmuring to himself. Taichi only understands every other word because he thinks Koushirou's still talking into his palm.

“Would you say it's—”

Koushirou snorts. “Don't start.”

“Come on,” Taichi whines. “You're berry un-raisin-able, Koushirou.”

Unexpectedly, Koushirou laughs.

It's raspy, but loud, and Taichi thinks the toothy smile Koushirou sports could have brightened their way home. His laptop slips from between his crossed legs, gingerly tapping the grass as he falls back, clutching at his stomach and Taichi can't help his own smile.

He can hear some of the kids on the field wondering about Koushirou’s health, asking if they should get Jyou, if heat stroke is contagious. Taichi turns over, crunching to a sitting position and waves them off. Half of them have taken up sitting in the grass, pulling up blades and stray weeds and tossing them at each other. A large group has started playing cards under the goalie posts. Taichi wonders if they'll get in trouble for not watching them properly today, and finds that he can't really muster up the energy to care.

Koushirou has righted himself by the time Taichi peeks back over his shoulder. He's rubbing under his eyes, face still blotchy with speckles of white. He wonders if Koushirou's one of those kids who gets freckles in the sun.

“Can I ask you something?” Rushes out of Taichi's mouth. Koushirou stills, hand already grabbing at his laptop. Taichi doesn't know if the red on his face is from lack of oxygen, or sunburn. It's almost indistinct in the shade.

“The more we talk, the more onerous it is to terminate this feeling.”

Taichi frowns. He looks back at the field, his own fingers skimming along the ground and plucking a few blades of grass when he finds them. It used to be green here, when the sprinklers were used in the summer. Now there's mostly patches of yellowed land that can't quite be called grass or dirt. He sits his collection upon his thigh. Taichi's always been dark, but the skin sitting just under his shorts is almost starkly pale compared to the bits that have been sun-touched.

“Why did you decide to come here—”

But Taichi doesn't know if his question ever makes Koushirou's ear as a shrill tweet cuts through the air. He checks his watch immediately. Five minutes to lunch.

The time doesn't seem to deter campers, or counselors, from leaving their posts. Kids clamber out from every hidden view, from the archery grove and the arts and crafts “tent”, yelling and waving and rushing their way to the mess hall.

Taichi looks back. Koushirou's laptop has already been packed, holstered to his back. His face is down, unreadable, but Taichi watches the sway of a bright orange whistle thump against his standard issued counselor’s shirt.

He watches him go without a word. Even among the crowd, Taichi can pinpoint the shock of red hair maneuvering around a sea of children. He's barely taller than the median age groups.

When he's disappeared into the old building, Taichi turns away. Across the field Hikari stares at him. He can make out the gesture of her finger tapping her wrist, and he shrugs.

*

“Don't move.”

Taichi opens one eye. A little girl glares down at him, tugging his hand closer to her eye level. Taichi sighs.

“I said don’t move!” she reiterates. She loops a key ring around his pointer finger. Taichi watches her weave gel threads together in what he can only assume is a lizard. Maybe a crocodile.

“Why is this happening to me?” he asks no one in particular.

There isn't much sun that reaches through the canopy of trees, but there's enough light for Taichi to notice the shadow hovering over him.

Hikari smiles down at Taichi. “Well,” she starts, tapping his nose with the feathery end of a paintbrush, “if you're going to lay on the table, then you're going to become it.”

“You don't paint on tables,” Taichi says, narrowing his eyes. Hikari giggles.

Taichi kicks his legs minutely. There’s barely enough room to accommodate six kids sitting up, and so Taichi's legs dangle over the edge. When they smack back down he winces where the wood bites in the plump of his calves. At the far end a little boy shouts.

“I'm going to make you into Miko,” Hikari decides.

She disappears from above him and Taichi breathes in deeply. This corner of camp smells unevenly of paints and sunblock, but above it all the scent of aloe vera is thick. The tickling sensation in his leg returns, the little boy focusing back on his masterpiece blooming along Taichi’s leg. He cranes his neck to try to gain a sneak peek of it, but a few other heads bob in and out of the way, some of the kids using his stomach to hold up their papers. On his free hand, a kid looks up at him with a bright, almost toothless, grin. His brush strokes leaves a colorful trail of paint along his nails.

“I'm going to look like pastel Frankenstein,” he whines. He doesn't really mind, but the outburst gains him several giggles from around the table. He wonders if they get the reference. Hikari returns, smiling back down at him, holding up a small, wooden palette. There's a splatter of old, caked-in paints, but the only fresh color is a giant dollop of black.

“Pastel Frankenstein’s monster,” she corrects him.

Hikari wets the tip of her brush and leans back over Taichi. He scrunches his nose at her as the first, cold plop of paint hits his skin, but Hikari doesn't even reprimand him for it. She looks peaceful, concentrating on her own art, as if she were crafting her magnum opus. She swipes three dark lines on his cheeks, up to his hairline and Taichi thinks she may have gotten some in his hair. The tree branches above them sway in the light breeze, shadows dancing along her face, as she drops three identical marks to his other side.

A crisp whistle in the field signals dinnertime starting in the rec hall. Hikari gets the campers to put their supplies back and Taichi lifts a bucket of water to splash over their hands as they scrub away the evidence of their activities. He fills it back up with a hose attached to the old shed, as the campers scamper off across the way. Hikari organizes the paints together, ordering them into a display of splotchy rainbow containers along the repurposed bookshelf. “So what's wrong?” she asks without looking up.

Taichi frowns. “Why does something have to be wrong?” He takes in a deep breath. “Why are you psychic?”

“You always take Mimi's field shifts for her,” Hikari says, breathing a laugh. “It's just reasonable to think something big must have happened if she was willing to take your spot.”

“She said, and I quote,” Taichi brings up his fingers to create the quotes himself in the air for emphasis, “‘I can finally work on my tan.’ I'm doing her a favor.”

Hikari smiles wryly at him. She strides back over to the table and collects the abandoned paint brushes and twirls them, one by one, into a mason jar until the water turns a dark, murky gray. Taichi takes the brushes from her and dries them off on a paper towel, until the repurposed soup can that houses the camp's paintbrushes is, just barely, full.

“Someone confessed to me,” Taichi says, suddenly, “kind of. I think.” he scratches the back of his neck, a rosy burn spreading across his skin. Hikari looks up at him from wiping paint offfrom the plastic art palettes.

“A camper?” she asks. When he says nothing she guesses, “Another counselor?”

Taichi sits down across from her. He folds his arms and rests against them, until he's looking up at Hikari.

“It's not your first love confession,” she mentions, turning back to her task. “So what's bothering you about this one?”

Taichi watches the shade freckle her cheeks, the sun sit in her amber eyes until they shine golden. “He said he's been in love with me since fifth grade.”

“How sweet.” She means it and Taichi frowns.

“Sure,” he drawls out. He can barely hear himself over the thudding of his heart, the beat of it aching in his limbs. Talking about it more has done nothing for his nerves and it frustrates him. “I guess it would be nice, except I only just met him at camp. This year.”

Hikari doesn't seem phased. “Maybe he met you in school,” she reasons. “One of your classes or clubs or something.”

She takes to cleaning up the table next, rousing Taichi from his resting spot. He almost asks her to thank him, his skin and uniform having taken the brunt of every real mess. But he knows she'll just remind him that he had a choice for where to nap. Maybe he should have taken the risk of getting puked on and rested in the first aid tent instead.

“I would have remembered him if he was in my school, Hikari.” He frowns. “I'm not that oblivious.”

“No,” she agrees, snorting. “But you are a social butterfly. And sometimes a jerk. I'm sure there's people you forget all the time. Sometimes on purpose. Like how you ignored Yamato’s existence for half a summer after he told Sora about your little crush.”

“We don't talk about that year.” Taichi glares at her without any real heat. He'd been at fault for Hikari getting sent home early; Taichi had spent half of camp fretting over whether he'd be an only child after the state she had left in. Their mother had been furious, and he almost thought he’d end up an orphan, too.

Hikari pins him back with one her own glares, the weight of it drooping his shoulders. “That's exactly what I'm talking about.” She takes a deep breath and tells him, “I think you need to talk to this guy directly, otherwise you're never going to get the answers you want.”

Hikari gives him a once over and snorts.

“You should probably wash up before dinner, Taichi,” she tells him from behind her hand, the laughter shining in her eyes. Taichi wrinkles his nose at her and that doesn't really help his case at all.

But he says, “Thanks,” and ruffles her hair on his way past her.

*

Just before the showers, Taichi hangs left.

His fingers graze through the chain link fence, the metal clicking and vibrating as he walks by. The pool hasn't contained anything but grime and litter since Taichi was fourteen, but it's also overflowing with years of memories. He kissed a boy on a dare, once, in the deep end for five bucks, right under the diving board. Joke had been on Yamato, though, because Taichi had kind of wanted to anyway, but cheating him out of his snack money had been like a price for reinstating their friendship that year.

Taichi grips the pole at the far end and swings his weight around it momentarily. The rod shakes in it's cement shoes and Taichi releases his hold, clenching his fists through the chain link on the opposite side.

Last year they’d hopped the fence, him and Sora and Yamato, after lights out, their stash of an entire summer’s worth of snacks dropping from their arms like a fairy tale trail of their misdeeds. Taichi frowns. It was going to be tradition, they had decided, agreed even when they spent the whole next day in the first aid tent, clutching their stomachs. He squeezes the fence tightly and then continues down the lake path behind the abandoned pool.

Even in twilight gnats hover tightly to Taichi's face along the trail. No amount of swatting shakes them, but Taichi knows this. It is absolutely out of habit.

Campers greet him on their way up, some of the more familiar faces jumping up to give him a high five. Some stop him to take pictures, complimenting Taichi on his new look. He thinks Hikari would be proud.

It's the best time to visit the lake, when everyone else is eating. Plus, it's Takeru's shift to watch the canoes, and he sometimes let's Taichi take one out if he helps fish out the stray life jackets and paddles tossed between the avenues of land and water.

Taichi stutters to a halt when he reaches the mouth of the beach.

Koushirou’s got the fabric of his khakis rolled up high on his knees, to no avail. They're already dark with damp as he splashes along the lakeshore, a small little grunt escaping his lips from the strength it takes him to heft one of the canoes up along it’s brethren on the beach. His hair is as radiant under the evening sun as it is in contrast to the night sky and Taichi frowns as he pads down the sand, coming up alongside him to share in the burden of the canoe’s weight.

"You're not Takeru," he mutters.

Koushirou startles, his fingers slipping from the lip of the helm, but his momentum continues backwards and he drops into the lake with a distinctive plop.

A heartbeat passes between them before Taichi throws his own head back, howling with laughter as he pulls the canoe up on the sand. Koushirou watches him, offering no help. His eyes look so impossibly wide, the sort of deep you can swim in, drown in, and Taichi pushes back the urge to offer him a hand purely out of spite.

He surveys the lake for any straggling gear before he drops himself on the shore, tucking his knees up towards his chest, his shoes squelching with every move. He grimaces, wishing he’d had the foresight to toe them off before trekking through the lake. The fabric of his pants chafing uncomfortably against his knees. Below that, his calves looks bruised, splotchy with a plethora of colors bleeding together where the kid’s painting had been compromised by the splashes of water. He never did remember to look.

"Where's blondie?" Taichi finally asks.  

"He's—we—" Koushiro splutters. His face tilts down, exposing the reddened nape of his neck. He manages eventually to say, "T.K. offered to switch with me after lunch.”

To not see me, something tells Taichi. "I couldn’t procure any additional sunblock," is what Koushirou tells him. Water drips from his bangs where his trip into the lake had splashed back up at him. "Jyou said he only had enough to spare for the kids until the next supply run." Koushirou turns to look at him, backlit by the evening sun and static charges in every one of Taichi's muscles. He grips a flat rock in the palm of his hand and tosses it just to the left of Koushirou. It glides quietly along the surface and sinks seamlessly into the folds of a languid wave.

Koushirou picks himself up and plops down a decent distance from Taichi. He notices since they’d last seen each other that the little bits of block he’d neglected to warn Koushirou about have been properly applied now. "Did it hurt today?" Taichi asks. Koushiro blinks at him and Taichi grabs for another rock indiscriminately. It hits the water less gracefully, like a belly flop among swan dives. "Your sunburn." "Oh, " Koushirou says.  "Just an iota." "Remember to apply aloe vera or it won't heal well." "I will," Koushirou replies. There's a smile in his voice that Taichi can just imagine blooming shyly on his thin lips and his stomach pinches.  "Thank you.”

He’s not the only one who seems to notice anything new, Koushirou’s eyes following from Taichi’s hairline, down to the tips of shoes.

“You look—”

“Don’t,” Taichi says, narrowing his eyes at the tight smile on the other’s lip.

“Glamourpuss,” Koushirou finishes in an absolute deadpan. “That was—”Taichi breaks his own sentence, laughing as Koushirou joins him “—the worst.”

“I purrceived as much.” Taichi sends him a look. “Just simple purrvenge."

Taichi groans and for a while the lake echoes with their laughter.

Wildlife chatters around them, fills in the eventual silence that settles between them, twilight critters stirring in the brush. A little chipmunk pokes out from the corner of Taichi's eyes and swiftly pilfers a forgotten batch of fruit snacks. He bets Koushirou would probably know the exact taxonomy of the little rodent. He probably knows every bird by their chirping alone, because the little that he knows of Koushiro is that Koushirou knows probably everything and Taichi doesn't.

"You said you were in love with me, you know?" Taichi breathes out. It feels like the exhale after taking a soccer ball to the gut. "You wanted me to shock you," Koushirou says smartly. His toe digs a short line in the dense sand, water lapping his toes with swift licks. His face colors, filling in the gaps where the sun hadn't touched. "Enamoured might have been...superlative." Taich breathes out again. "You don't feel anything for me, then?" The breeze shakes the branches above them, swims through the lake like a current. A fish breaches the surface, the only evidence of its ascent a strong, circular ripple. Taichi reaches for another stone and tosses it a good few feet into the water. It takes several steps this time before plummeting. He clutches a new one, but let’s his hand rest in the space between them. Taichi wonders if Koushirou would take it, is considering it, and his heart pounds.

"This lake is so sedentary," Koushirou says instead. "Do you think it's still down there?" Taichi narrows his eyes. Between them is a basin of questions that seems to be ever flowing, yet never emptying. "What?" This time, Koushirou picks at a rock instead. It's heavy and when it plops into the lake not too far from them, water droplets rain and scatter until there's an orchestra of ripples along the shore. A few drops land on Taichi's leg. "The headrest.” Taichi stares at him. There's a glint of mischief in his darks eyes that twinkles and Taichi thinks of stars, galaxies and it feels oddly fitting because Koushirou always seems to be somewhere close, but elusive.

“Fifty dollars says I can retrieve it by the end of the summer."

Taichi looks at the lake, the very last rays of the evening light dipping beneath the trees on the farshore and he licks his lips. "Deal."

[pierrotwrites-hc]

ok so this is probably gonna be weirdly specific but. ages ago, when i read the previous version of tgb, i seem to remember an author's note that said you rewrote an even earlier version of the story to make luca less like yourself & more into his own character (or something along those lines, it was a very long time ago). would you ever elaborate on what that meant? from what i understand you have been working on tgb for a really long time and even if i misremember that note, your writing process facinates me. i only read the version that was previously published on ao3 and the current one is definitely better but i'd love to hear what the rewriting process was like, as it apparently wasn't the first time you'd done it? huge fan of your work, i hope you have the best day :)

HA we are actually on the...*drumroll*...third revision of this story.

The first version was only a few chapters posted on the orig_slavefic community on Livejournal (shoutout to @maculategiraffe). I was still working out the sort of story I wanted to write and took an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, which meant there was MAGIC and DEMONS and god knows what else. I couldn't pace a story to save my life (did I mention I was 17) and the style and voice and characterization were wildly inconsistent, a patchwork of things I liked in books by other, better writers (Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Holly Black, etc).

Anyway, an LJ writer I admired wrote a post in which they sarcastically excerpted some of my writing, and I realized that the chapters I'd produced were not just unsuccessful but mockable. I thought about what I wanted the story to be, where I wanted it to go, and how I wanted it to sound. I identified a serious tone problem with Luca's POV: it was written too lightly, and made him come across as far too...well, plucky, for lack of a better word. It just wasn't how someone so broken would think or speak or see the world.

I rewrote that draft completely. This resulted in the version originally posted on Ao3. It was miles better, but I had miles to go, and I knew it, but I didn't know how to get there.

At that point I was in undergrad at a school which offered no creative writing classes and whose professors really and truly disdained the sort of books I liked best. (I'll never forget proposing a thesis on children's fantasy in postwar Britain and my advisor forbidding me from "applying my theory pyrotechnics to a pile of crap"). So I started a reading group with a friend, a very serious reading group with books assigned at the beginning and end of every semester and hours-long weekly meetings. It was here that I began to figure out what actually worked about the books I admired, and how I might adapt successful structures and strategies into my own work.

Then I went to graduate school for writing. This was the first time I'd gotten deep critical feedback on my creative work. I was also diagnosed with CPTSD by a therapist who assigned me a lot of reading (my love language). Now I could work on technical issues like tone and pacing while also developing a deeper understanding of how trauma shapes a person's identity and worldview.

Looking at the second draft of TGB through this lens, I felt that Luca and Robert were not distinct enough, either from each other or any of the other characters (many of whom were pretty cartoonish). I also realized that I hadn't been thinking of Luca's plot arc as a progress arc, a reparative curve along which we see him moving chapter by chapter and book by book. And I wanted to give myself room to illustrate his relationship with Robert in more nuanced shades of moral gray. Robert and Luca are both products of a society like but also quite unlike our own, and they don't have to be (and shouldn't be) "good" or "likable" in the way we're used to thinking about. Robert is not (or at least not initially) an abolitionist. Neither is Luca. Indeed, Robert is the one most willing to question the institution of slavery because he's also the one whose imagination hasn't been (as Kemp says of Luca) "hopelessly limited by slavery." Of course those limitations aren't actually hopeless, but they are very real, and they're something Luca will be chipping away at in increments for a long, long time.

It was useful for me to think about who I wanted Luca and Robert to be at the beginning of the story, and what I wanted their relationship to be, and then to think about who they and their relationship would become by the very last page of the very last book. Knowing our starting point and our destination allowed me to plot the distance between, and to shape that plot around the trauma recovery (with all its fits, starts, and setbacks) these characters needed to go through, both together and individually.

And then I started writing.

[sagaverse]

Sagaverse FAQs

Here is the list of the most Frequently Asked Questions about Sagaverse whether it's about the comic, staff, or other things surrounding it.

<===============>

1. Q: Will AlphaTale characters be in SagaVerse?

A: No LMAO (The number of questions this was asked during our early run was just ridiculous, and some still to this day so this FAQ will always stay)

2. Q: How long will each chapter be?

A: It depends on the storyline that the team sets each chapter to be, some may have shorter or longer parts than others. But that won't be a worrying subject at all, since more story means more enjoyment for you guys ^^

3. Q: Will every character be redesigned or not? And will there be original characters?

A: We try to redesign some of the important characters such as Error, Ink, Dream, Nightmare, and Core to differentiate them from their original counterpart. But the side characters won't need much redesigning.

And yes, there will be a lot of original characters and AUs. So be excited about that! :D

4. Q: What is each SagaVerse member's duty?

A: For Revolvius/@revolvius, he's the prominent leader of this whole project. He works on the story, dialogue, and line art that shaped the whole series into a reality. Also, he's the one answering your asks when he can, usually with drawings of the characters if it suits the QNA.

For Leviathan/@levi-weaver, she is the primary editor for the dialogues and helped on the storyline with Rev. Not to mention she helped him answer the asks when he's unavailable or busy.

For Nemesis/@theia-diki, they're not particularly active much outside of our discord server (Mostly doing the job there as the best moderator/Co-Owner).

For Leon/@leonightwater-s, they're our shading and effect MVP. They made Rev's line art and added so much atmosphere and feel into the panels and drawings that we're lucky to have them on our team, check out their Tumblr and Instagram for more great art from them.

For Joe/@joe-san he's just Joe. We all love Joe.

5. Q: What inspired you guys to make SagaVerse in the first place?

A: The whole idea started from a 6-month long roleplay session in our discord server back in late 2020 to mid-2021, we were having quite the blast but soon enough school, college, and work gets the best of us all. So instead of trying to get people into the RP all at once, we decided that we'll just make it into a comic series entirely, mostly because it was Rev's idea. And we don't want the session to be just another generic discord RP session, so the Sagaverse Comic Series was born.

It was inspired by UnderVerse and the Truce comic. But as time goes on we took a very different route from them to be more original.

So yeah, if the story's not digging it for you then it's probably not for you. But if you enjoy it then have a seat, and grab some popcorn, because shit's going down.

6. Q: Why are so many of the characters different here?

A: We tried to make them as close to the canon before, BUT we don't want to do that anymore. And so we mostly rewrote them to match what we liked the most about the characters and made our own headcanon of them. Because it's more fun for us that way.

Like we said before, if you don't like it, then it's probably not for you.

7. Q: X should work like this according to the original canon.

A: For the most popular of canons, we are aware of at least some of the details. When we do break conventions, it's either to conflicts between them, artist convenience, or simply a different interpretation. Sagaverse won't portray every character canonically, and that's alright. If our portrayal isn't to your taste, that's understandable. The team works hard to ensure that some level of believability remains though. New drafts are frequently popping in our Discord server to plan the next part or chapter.

8. Q: Can I dub/translate/make fan art of the series?

A: Feel free to dub/translate/and make fan art of the series to as many languages and media as you like, we really appreciate the support you guys have made towards the series. What we would like to remind you of is to credit not just one member but the entire Sagaverse Team, remember that this is not a one-man job. We need each other to fully maximize our process of making this series. So please remember that

Or you know, just credit this blog @sagaverse for convenience.

9. Q: Do you guys have a Discord server?

A: We do, but it's not for the public. We tried before but it's just not our cup of tea. Especially not with how drama can occur within a server if it gets too big and we just can't be fucked with it. We just want to focus on making the series as best as we can.

10. I'm in your walls.

<===============>

The FAQ may be updated if need be, but for now, it stays like this.

[bettsfic]

march pinned: ending the sex project

in the march edition of my lowkey writing-related newsletter, in addition to my writing-related post roundup and upcoming consultation availability, i have personal essay recommendations and a segment on the definition of a project!

for more information on my creative coaching services, check out my carrd.

if you want to receive my lowkey writing-related newsletter directly, you can subscribe here.

full newsletter below the cut, or you can read it here.

fuck february, amiright?

i thought january was bad. but february. february was the stuff of nightmares. my cousin passed away from covid (you can read about her here; she was really an amazing person and i feel so lucky to have known her). i was finally formally diagnosed with PCOS (bittersweet, i guess). my car broke down. i took two (2) days off and it took me two and a half weeks to get caught up again. i can only hope march treats us all a little more gently.

the good news is, i finished revisions on my short story collection to send to my agent, finished workshop submissions for the semester, and now i can return to my first love, fanfiction. that i am constantly working through original fiction to return to fanfiction has been making me think a lot about the nature of a creative, capital-p Project. so, this month’s BTALA (been thinkin a lot about) is going to inspect the concept of a “project.”

new resource

last month i unveiled a folder of my favorite short stories which i’m pleased to hear several of you have perused and gotten some inspiration from. this month i’ve compiled my favorite personal essays. there are fewer essays than there are short stories because i’ve broken them into two groups: personal and craft. next month i hope to have the craft essays compiled.

i’m always looking for more things to love, so if you have recommendations for your favorite short stories and essays, i’d be happy to hear them!

writing-related posts

how to physically maneuver the revision process

the difference between M and E ratings of fic

resources for worldbuilding (check out the reblogs for more!)

a couple syntax/prose book recs

how to break a long work into chapters

march availability

unfortunately i have to cut my coaching hours down a bit, so i don’t have any openings left in march, but i have some availability in april. if you’re interested in a writing consultation, please fill out this google form!

you can learn more about my services on my carrd.

what i’m into rn

for the past year, i’ve basically been trapped in a 10x10 room, and my health is definitely reflecting that, both mentally (does anyone else feel like they’re living in groundhog day? just, every day being exactly the same except fractionally worse than the day before??) and physically (i reorganized the kitchen and could barely move for two days).

reader, i have discovered something called “walking,” in which i put on real human shoes and go outside. it feels strange, bestial. neighbors wave hello to me. a harrowing experience.

while doing this, this walking, i’ve been listening to the lolita podcast which a friend recommended to me, a ten-episode series that dives into everything lolita: the novel itself, its context, adaptations, greater cultural responses, and — as a sticker on my laptop says — vladimir “russian dreamboat” nabokov. as far as i can tell it seems well-researched and presents the many perspectives of lolita in a fair way. i’m only a few eps in, but i’m entranced so far. highly recommended if you, like me, have a complicated relationship with lolita.

i’ve also found myself mildly addicted to a mobile otome game called obey me, which. look i know it’s like the definition of cringe but it’s also mind-numbingly fun and if i want to spend my minimal free time pretending 7 demon brothers are all vying for my affection then that’s between me and god. it’s a lot of what i loved about WoW: frequent events, bright colors, a daily to do list of simple but satisfying tasks, many many rewards, and it doesn’t take itself very seriously. and if i have 4k fic written of mammon/reader that’s nobody’s business but mine and my longsuffering ao3 subscribers.

i’m telling you this because i don’t know anyone else who plays it and am desperate to trade headcanons. so if you play, or start playing, hit me up!! i will give u mad tips and daily AP.

been thinkin a lot about

the project. the project. even the word “project.” PROject (noun). proJECT (verb). what is the project? “project” comes from the latin pro and jacare which means “to throw forward,” or projectum which means “something prominent.” a projector throws forward an image. to project onto something means to throw your perspective onto something else. to embark on a project is to make something prominent in your life. the concept of “the projects” comes from public housing projects, the government throwing forward affordable housing.

what is the project? in joseph harris’ essay “coming to terms” he says that “to define the project of a writer is…to push beyond his text, to hazard a view about not only what someone has said but also what he was trying to accomplish by saying it.” harris’ perspective is that of an english teacher encouraging his students to read critically, not just to summarize a text but to find its project, its greater purpose. and while i first read this essay in a seminar on composition pedagogy, it stuck with me as a writer. it made me reconsider the greater nature of the creative project.

how many of us, if asked to describe our writing project, would begin with a plot or character premise, the nuts and bolts of a specific story? maybe even the working title? but i wonder, is breaking out the plot really the project? is the discipline of sitting down and typing really the project? and when the story is finished, is the project over? what is the project?

in 2019, i wrote 86k words of a novel. i began revising that novel last fall, and i’m finding that i’ll probably keep maybe less than 10k of that initial draft. i’m not bothered by that. the novel i wrote before that started at 125k, then i rewrote the entire thing to 200k, then i whittled it back down to 160k, and next i’ll be tasked with paring it back down to 80k. i’m not bothered by that either. in the past five years or so i’ve written about 2 million words, and i’ve only published 20k of them. only 1% of what i’ve written, i’ve published. in the words of lauren cooper (catherine tate), i’m not bothered.

i used to see publication as the birth of the project, and writing it akin to a long gestation period. then i saw publication as the death of the project, and its life was lived in its drafting. now, publication seems irrelevant to the project. the confines of a story and its many revisions are also irrelevant to the project. the beginning of a story is not the start of the project and the end of the story is not the end of the project. the project is larger than the story, its revisions, its publication, and its eventual readership.

i think it took me so long to see this because for so many years i was still in my first project, the sex project, an exploration of trauma and sexual identity, which began in 2014 with destiel fanfiction, endured through many fandom shifts, my MFA, years adrift as an adjunct, all the way through 2020 with the completion of my short story collection. i used to wonder how anyone could write about anything other than sex. to me it was the only topic worth my attention. i was certain that i would spend my entire life being a sex writer and i’d never find fulfillment writing a young adult sci fi adventure or a highly literary novel about complicated family dynamics. i was baffled by people who were interested in other things, who could write entire novels without using the word “cock” even once.

then my sex project ended. i don’t know when exactly it happened or why, but suddenly i realized i never wanted to write another artful description of an orgasm or find a tactful euphemism for a vagina ever again (personally i prefer “wet cunt” because not only is it blunt, i find it phonetically pleasing). obviously i’m still writing explicit fanfic but it doesn’t feel the same as it used to. sex feels more sidelined to me, even if it’s still the center and drive of a fic. i no longer get any personal satisfaction from writing it, although i do get satisfaction in sharing the work for readers to enjoy.

it’s like i’ve somehow solved the biggest puzzle of my life. or i guess made peace with my meanest monster, that extremely complicated double-mind of desire that some non-sex-repulsed asexuals feel: you want to feel desire you can’t actually feel so you write it into fiction, to try to understand this thing you can’t have and which society tells you you’re missing, and you don’t even know if you don’t have it, because you still feel desire for affection and intimacy, and maybe even a desire to be desired. and for those of us who are asexual and have c-ptsd, sex you don’t actually want (but don’t know you don’t want, because maybe you’re ambivalent and mildly curious and touch-starved) and an unrelenting drive toward people-pleasing can be a dangerous combination. how can you ever know what consent is if you always put other people’s desires above your own?

maybe i’m alone in this. maybe i’m not. maybe for most people, wanting sex is a light switch: yes i want it, or no i don’t. but for me, i had to write a whole lot of words to figure out things like desire, consent, intimacy, forgiveness, the shape that good love takes. the lengthy theoretical flowchart of “i might be interested in having sex if this and this and this and this and this happens in this exact order and under these exact circumstances.”

it was hard to write something into reality that i have never seen except in pieces, in subtext i clung to with no lexicon to give it shape and meaning. te lawrence in lawrence of arabia. some of tarantino’s early work. the film benny and joon. and weirdly, the star wars prequels (that one’s hard to explain; i’ll spare you). i don’t think the sex project was about coming to terms with my asexuality as much as it was trying to organize my thoughts and feelings by continuously rendering my own experiences within a greater, shinier ideal — like how you sometimes have to unravel the entire skein of yarn to find the loose end, and only then can you get started.

i guess i’m in the infancy of the power project now. i’m moving toward themes of control, infamy, greatness. the exact circumstances in which atrocity occurs. how people rise into leadership and fall from grace. the consequences of success. i don’t know why this project has come to me, or what, if anything, it has to do with me. i’m not famous and have no intention of becoming famous; i don’t have social power or influence, at least not beyond my little corner of fandom, and i’m not interested in having it. and yet, here we are, already hundreds of thousands of words in.

my fics digging for orchids (tgcf) and a standing engagement (the hunger games) deal with the detriments of fame. and even float (breaking bad) to a degree is about the aftermath of being so close to power. my novel cherry pop, loosely based on macbeth, is about an ongoing power exchange between two teenage girls. my other novel, vandal, is about a girl who believes she has magic powers and casts a spell on her neighbor to fall in love with her. and i’m in the very early stages of a novel called groundswell, a cult story i’ve been wanting to write for years. i had no idea why i couldn’t write it until i realized it wasn’t yet my project. i’m not even to the stage of developing characters, let alone a premise or plot. i’m still just building my aesthetic pile (i discuss the aesthetic pile here, as well as vandal in more detail), watching documentaries on cults, reading books, finding inspiration, marking down ideas as they come. it may be years before i’m ready to sit down and write it.

now that i know what the project is, i have more patience with myself. it doesn’t bother me to rewrite a novel from the beginning, or to scrap novels altogether, because the story isn’t the project. the project cannot be diminished by cutting words, sentences, paragraphs, entire chapters. the project does not have a product. the project cannot be published. the project is in the practice, in dragging the impossibly large into clear, acute existence, so you can see it. so you can see the very center of what you thought was an unknowable thing.

[knit-wear-it]

im a new reader and ive been reading the harlequin for like the 4th time in 3 months and im just- 👏👏 💯 , how did you first came up with the harlequin? Like how did that masterpiece started? i dont know if someone asked this before kkskkdsk

Goddamn. I love you guys. Do those of you who re read it come away with anything new when you do? Or do you only read your fav parts? 😜

Oh, the history of the Harlequin. It’s actually quite a long story 😁

So back when TDK first came out in 2008 I became fully obsessed and promptly sat down and blasted out a few terrible chapters in which I spelled Harley’s name wrong. YEP. Left it unfinished. If you read on FFN that’s why the original publishing date is 2008.

Some years later—2013/14ish I think—I re-wrote those chapters and actually finished it. But it was not good even though it was pretty popular. There was no character development, the pacing was weird, it was incredibly self indulgent; it was just free-wheeling garbage by my current standards. I can’t honestly remember how it ended—not with brunch but they did run off into the sunset—and there were a few things that remained, especially in the first act (eye gouging @squooshybrainmeats 😜) Also, Harley was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder l and it kind of glorified that in a gross way. Even then the idea was to have her to be unique and independent, which included a version of the girl gang chapters, but I didn’t fully deliver. She was a shadow of her current self. I can’t emphasise that enough.

Enter me circa late 2018 with an idea for a sequel that would eventually become the Pantomime. I realize how fucking bad the Harlequin is after not looking at it for years. So I went back to the drawing board and rewrote it from scratch following a vaguely similar plot tragectory (Cosa Nostra murders, almost kills J, girl gang) but refining the wider plot & supporting characters, and most importantly Harley into what she is today. I consciously flipped her traditional characterisation—bubbly, blonde, ditzy— into a list-loving, ruthless asshole, and the Joker developed into a character with much more depth than “crazy/evil/sexy”. It took a year to complete a first draft—I think it was up to maybe chapter 24 when I started posting.

Unintentionally personal moment: I was a mess in my personal life back then. Even though I wanted it to be what it is today, I just wasn’t emotionally or intellectually capable of the self-awareness or depth, let alone the self discipline. And I am so proud of the Harlequin’s final incarnation.

Nostalgic moment: I just remember the relief of deleting all those old chapters from FFN in May of last year, and intentionally not saving them anywhere.

And I also remember having the first five chapters fully proofread & ready to go when I posted chapter 1, and just being like holy fuck this is SO good! 😂 Like, how the hell did I create this? I’m sure a lot of fanfiction authors feel that way about their work, but I genuinely think it’s brilliant 😅

And I am so so excited to show you guys where the Pantomime is going. Parts of it blow the Harlequin out of the water, and you’re going to hate me and love me in equal measure. 🥰

So how do I get more people to read this thing? 😅

[nicolewrites]

We Stand, Fate-Tested: Final Thoughts

You thought you’d seen the last of that title? Never! I may have been distracted by Sylvgrid Week for a while, but I finally got this cleaned up enough to post. 

So, to those of you who haven’t read We Stand, Fate-Tested, this post is going to spoil practically the entire fic, so do yourself a favour and read the fic HERE. This post is also very, very long, so I apologize if you read the whole thing aha.

Anyways, continuing on, I wrote over 70 000 words for this story and this was after two solid weeks of story editing to get the fic not to come across as incredibly clunky. I want to use this post to discuss my favourite and least favourite things about writing the story and to talk about some of the things I had planned that never made it into the final draft or things that were changed to fit the flow of the story better. 

Let’s start with my favourite and least favourite things!

Favourite Chapter: VII - What’s A Little Fear (I loved this chapter. It was a blast to write, creating the duality of the attacks as well as finally tapping into the mystery genre I stubbornly tagged this fic with. It’s also one of my favourites to reread).  Favourite Present Scene: Either Byleth/Claude in the coffeeshop (Chapter III), the car crash scene (Chapter VII) or the Byleth/Claude scene in the bathroom (Chapter VIII) Favourite Past Scene: Either Byleth/Dimitri’s first reunion (Chapter II), the Sreng fight scene (Chapter IX), or Dimitri’s death scene (Chapter X) Favourite Character to write: Past!Dimitri, Present!Edelgard, Present!Claude (probably no surprises there haha) Favourite Plot Detail: Byleth having a flashback in the tomb and then going to the lab and having that scene play out later, in Chapter XI, in the past.

Least Favourite Chapter: XI - No Rest For the Weary (Don’t get me wrong, I like how it turned out. I just had so many things that were scrapped for this part and something about it still doesn’t sit with me as well as I wanted it to. It was hard to write a past section without the anchor for the past: Dimitri) Least Favourite Present Scene: Probably the lab scene with Byleth (Chapter I) where she looks up Claude because it was written so early and it still feels a bit info-dump-esque to me. Least Favourite Past Scene: Hands down Byleth’s final scene (Chapter XI). I do feel like it came out alright, but I really struggled with this scene. It was tricky to highlight everything I needed to in that scene without removing all the development Byleth had gone through.  Least Favourite Character to write: Many of the undergraduates in the present. It’s not that I didn’t like them, I was just frustrated because the future was focused so heavily on a few key characters that none of the background characters had the voices I wanted to give them. Least Favourite Plot Detail: The Scorch and the Riots. I specifically crafted them so that there would be a plausible excuse for the physical records to have been destroyed and yet I feel like I relied too much on them in some cases.

Now let me talk about plot details that almost appeared!

Starting with some general facts:

The Golden Deer were supposed to be MUCH bigger characters in the present. I had programs, relationships, interactions and plot points hinged on their interactions with Byleth and Claude, but I ended up scrapping a lot of it when I moved forward with the undergrad dig team plot and decided to bring in Edelgard and Dimitri more. 

They were supposed to go to Shambhala. Instead of at Garreg Mach, the final attack was actually supposed to take place while at a dig site in Shambhala. After research into archaeology more as a whole, I realized this didn’t fit, so I removed it.

I considered having Jeralt be alive in the present.

I was going to write more dreams for Byleth and actually have them as independent scenes.

Byleth was supposed to make two separate trips to Almyra in the past. 

The fic was originally only 10 chapters and would have ended abruptly in the past. 

Rhea was supposed to make an appearance in the present.

Chapter Specifics: 

Chapter I 

Ironically, the only real trick with this is I considered renaming the university, but ended up leaving it. 

This chapter was actually mostly written before much of the plot was hammered out so it can read a tiny bit inconsistently to me now, but there’s not much I left out of it.

Chapter II

Initially, I had all three of the reincarnated lords in Byleth’s tutorial, but then I remember that that never happens in university courses so I fixed it. I hadn’t planned on introducing the Guardian’s Sword here, but I did accidentally and then just rolled with it.

Byleth and Dimitri’s Chapter IV argument was originally in this chapter. They were also originally married in between Chapters I and II, something which changed to between III and IV once I changed this chapter. 

Chapter III

Dimitri was supposed to tell Byleth that he was having odd dreams before he found out about the dig project in the present. This chapter also would have had a vivid dream scene before Claude and Byleth’s tea conversation lasted 3000 words. 

Claude was supposed to be a cause of strife in Byleth and Dimitri’s relationship in the past, but then I decided that was stupid and changed him to play the voice of reason. Additionally, this chapter changed a lot as a result of the moving of the wedding.

Chapter IV

This chapter was, again, supposed to feature a Byleth-brand dream, but I changed it to the scene in her office with Claude to set up the Almyra trip. This was the moment in the story where I had decided to make Claude the Almyran Prince. Before this, he was just an ambassador’s son.

Claude in the past was supposed to give a wedding gift to Byleth and Dimitri, but this was changed when I had him attend the wedding. Byleth and Dimitri were supposed to argue about Byleth and Claude’s friendship, but as I already said, I didn’t want Claude to be a source of jealousy.

Chapter V

This chapter actually stuck fairly close to the points of the outline I made. The only point I struggled with was having the tapestries be mostly ruined or preserved and I eventually landed on preserved.

The council meeting was an addendum to the chapter written after the heavier scene at the end. I added it to give a bit more background to Byleth being in Fhirdiad and the way that her relationship with Seteth and their friends would become a bit more strained in the future. 

Chapter VI

This chapter was supposed to highlight the argument alluded to in the chapter between Dimitri, Edelgard, and Claude. There was supposed to be a little bit about how the tomb seemed to be dragging up animosity that didn’t previously exist. I removed it because I wanted more space to discuss the dream and the scene with the TV.

The past section was supposed to feature more political drama. There was supposed to be a cabinet meeting that showed the progress of divorcing church and state and siphoning the power away from the nobility, but I came up with the idea for the Rhea scene which I ended up liking a lot more, so I rewrote the chapter, almost completely removing the politics.

Chapter VII

This chapter actually almost exactly follows its outline. The four go to Fhirdiad and deal with their pursuers and end in a car crash. 

The only change in the past was that it originally ended with the infirmary scene from chapter 8, but I changed it to create a stronger parallel between the past and the present by ending both on relative cliffhangers. 

Chapter VIII

The present section of this chapter was actually one of the first scenes I ever outlined for this fic. Naturally, there wasn’t much that was left out. I scrapped a few interactions with people including Dorothea, Sylvain, and Mercedes in order to give Byleth and Claude more time to chat in the bathroom. Basically, the point of the party was to really highlight the fact that while reincarnation had occurred, everyone had ended up in different situations with different people. 

Originally, Byleth was supposed to have recovered well from the assassination attempt and it was supposed to be Dimitri who took longer to heal. Because I was already leaning into the dying-goddess idea though, I swapped them to make it more impactful when Byleth still tries to go against all of her advisors to get Claude to take her to the Slithers.

Chapter IX

Byleth, here, was only supposed to begin to suspect Flayn. I considered having her not even speak to Seteth and Flayn, but I changed that because I think I wanted her to know at this point. However, it was only when I began writing the chapter that I realized that Seteth would know the Archbishop’s full name, so that tidbit was actually the very last thing added to this chapter. 

I wrote the past section of this chapter first. It was fairly cut and copy from the outline so not much was left out here, just one small scene where Byleth and Dimitri saw Claude off when they were still mad at each other and they would have been awkward.

Chapter X

Originally, Leonie was going to be the one to find Claude and Byleth in the alley, but I liked Edelgard and Hubert for it better. This is where Rhea would have appeared in the Modern section. She would have come looking for Seteth before the send-off party started and would have had a crypt conversation with Byleth, but instead, I changed her simply to be the mysterious benefactor that funded the original expedition and removed her physical appearance for flow purposes.

The only big change seen in the past section here, was that Claude and Byleth were supposed to bring Dimitri outside of Shambhala before he died and he would have died seeing the rising or setting sun. When I wrote the cave-in this was changed to match that. 

Chapter XI

Since Byleth was originally supposed to have had a different conversation with Seteth in chapter 9, when the four of them were running for the gunman, they would have revealed their ancestry and connections to the past lords which would have been the point that Byleth actually connected all the dots. 

Byleth and Claude were supposed to be en route to Almyra after dissolving the monarchy when she started to die, causing him to take her back. I changed this because it didn’t fit with the futility of so many of the actions that Byleth had taken after Dimitri’s passing. I also just really wanted her to have the ‘I never intended to return to the Monastery’ and the ‘I hadn’t planned on living this long’ lines. 

Chapter XII

Claude was supposed to be with Dimitri and Edelgard when they said goodbye. There was supposed to be strange tension between them, but it didn’t fit with their interactions inside the tomb, so I just sent him back to Almyra to coordinate his abdication instead. Originally, there would have been a shootout in the tomb as well, resulting in Byleth actually killing the gunman, but instead I used their escape to give Seteth and Flayn a reason to disappear. This is one of the points I was most tentative about changing and is one of my least favourite things that I changed in the whole story. 

The past section was originally just supposed to have been Claude admiring his commissioned tapestries, but I couldn’t resist adding a Hilda in because I love her.

That’s pretty much it for all the plot details and changes. And that’s pretty much everything I have to say about the story. This fic was a labour of absolute love and it has given me an incredible appreciation for the writers in fandoms who can continue stories into the tens of chapters because I found my plot tied up in a neat little bow at 12 chapters. 

If you have any more questions, please shoot them to me on Tumblr, in the AO3 comments, or even on Twitter (@nicolewrites37) and I’ll be happy to answer them. 

Thank you so much to everyone who read, commented, and left kudos on the fic because knowing that there were people waiting to see more was the reason I was able to continue writing and finish the fic. I hope you enjoyed the story overall and that you might find something else you like amidst my other Three Houses works. 

- Nicole

[cannibal-wings]

This was for that fanfic author director’s cut post I reblogged a few days ago.

I’m going to choose to talk about Survivors, because when do I ever pass up on an opportunity to talk about Survivors? The answer is never.

Specifically I’ll be talking about the character of David Annapurna.

David Annapurna is a minor character only mentioned in two notes, those being Request for Reassignment and Persecutorial Delusions.

He’s an orderly who started to get wind that something wasn’t quite right at Mount Massive. He threatened to quite and go to the authorities and was then captured and submitted as a patient against his will. (Sound familiar? Maybe like a certain other protagonist?) Good, because before Whistleblower came out, most of the fandom, me included, thought David was the one who originally emailed Miles. It turns out it was Waylon, but hey, it was a fun theory while it lasted.

I added David in originally because I needed another human contact for Miles to interact with, and I needed a man who had a good heart and would see the surviving patients in a similar light that Miles did. Sympathetic. I should mention now that the very first draft of The Aftermath at Mount Massive was outlined to be only four chapters and about 80 pages. Roughly they were: 1. Introduction of Miles and R (the chapter that became Home in Hell) 2. Introduction of the surviving patients. (what became Those Left Behind) 3. Waylon Park introduction chapter (what later became Eyeballs Don’t Go In Spaghetti) 4. Aftermath of dealing with the surviving patients. (The ideas here became the chapters Rain and Breaking Point. An aside, Breaking Point also has an interesting history behind it, but I’ll only dive into it if I get another ask asking for it)

David was set to be introduced in chapter two, and to my credit, I stuck to that. He had a cameo in chapter one and a formal introduction in chapter two. Now, it was about halfway through writing chapter two that I realized my idea of a four chapter story wasn’t going to work. Those Left Behind became a three part section of plot and roughly 60 pages on its own. It was by this point I had started to plot more deeply for what would come after The Aftermath at Mount Massive, the fic later to be named The Long Road. I realized that I needed to seed events for The Long Road in The Aftermath, so I began to do that in chapters two through four. After chapter four I swiftly abandoned the old outline in favor of a more detailed story that delved into life at the Asylum more than originally planned. In the original script, David was supposed to die in chapter two. Now, with Miles spending more time in the asylum, I still needed a friend type character. So I postponed David’s death and rewrote how it was all going to go down, this also gave me a chance to flesh out The Gospel of the Sand.

The problem was that the more I wrote David interacting with Miles, the more I didn’t want to kill him. You can tell when you read that I was getting attached to the character. So I pushed his death back to like, three chapters before the end and set it as the emotional climax of one of Miles’ arcs. However, even with the new death point in place, I began to wonder if I really wanted to kill David.

So here’s where the super directors cut information comes in. I actually have a whole outline and test scenes written for a version of The Long Road where David Annapurna goes with Miles, R and Waylon to take down Murkoff.

Much of the scenes that take place in the Park’s house were rewritten because David is visibly disfigured from the Murkoff experiments, this leads Lisa to have a very different reaction to the plan and to Murkoff as a whole. It also shifted the emotions that surrounded the Miles is the Walrider’s host reveal. The military base scene remained mostly unchanged as I had them leave David in the motel room for most of it. One of the biggest differences was that I started to draft a side plot where Waylon became increasingly anxious over the idea that the Engine Therapy he was subjected to would somehow cause him to start dying of the metal tumors that David was currently dying from. There was also a minor plot of David being jealous that Waylon essentially got away unscathed at the very thing David himself wanted to do and was caught and experimented on before he could do it.To David, Waylon embodied the future he wish he had for himself, but now would never have.

In the end, I decided to go with the original plan to kill David in The Aftermath and have it be at Miles’ hands. I found that the dynamic changed too much in The Long Road by adding David into the mix. I really wanted the contrast of Miles who is absurdly upbeat, headstrong and confident due to being the Host, and slightly unhinged to Waylon’s more reserved, nervous, and terrified early emotions. It also took a lot of the unsettling nature of R out of the picture, as David is quite used to the Walrider and sees R almost like a friend. I wanted R to remain more of a cold calculated creature that Waylon was frightened of. Honestly? I also didn’t want to plot out and write a new death scene for David and I felt that by removing him from the Gospel of the Sand plot that that arc would end more limply than I intended.

I struggled with this choice quite a bit, and while I don’t regret sticking with the original trio dynamic, you can see that I have Miles comment on David a few times throughout The Long Road. I specifically wrote in scenes where he wished David was still with him, and imagined what it would be like to have a friend who really understood what he had become with them on their trip.

David might be gone, but he’s not forgotten. There are still seeds left to sprout involving his character down the line, and Miles will continue to think about him. It’s really funny how a minor character mentioned in two notes could snowball into one of the more important characters in a 260 page story. He’s genuinely one of my favorite extrapolations I’ve done of the Outlast characters. So much so that I’m keeping his character intact and expanding his role in the novel version of Survivors I’m writing that is separate from the fic version. David just became too important to me to let go.

[letteredlettered]

I love 'Away Childish Things' beyond words. The possibility of rereading it and finding new meanings to previous parts each time a new chapter is released fascinates me (I'm so obsessed I wrote down in my calendar the dates each chapter should be posted. sorry if that's too creppy). There are so many little details it got me thinking: how long did it take you to create? Not only to write down, but the whole creative process since the story first popped-up in your head. Thank you very much!

Thank you so much for your kind words!  I don’t think you’re creepy at all, but that does mean I really have to stay on my toes and make sure I update at the right times!

As for how long it took me, I like to hear myself talk so I have here a very long answer!

The idea didn’t really pop into my head.  I am a tropey person, and the magic in HP means you can do basically any trope you want.  I think I have wanted to write a de-aging Harry/Draco fic since 2007.  I kept starting it, but could never decide what I wanted grown-up Harry and Draco’s relationship to be, which of them would de-age, and what age they would de-age to.  Beyond that, I had trouble coming up with why Harry and Draco would hang out with each other if one of them was de-aged–they have such a bad history that surely, even if the adult versions loved each other, they would realize the kid versions would be better off with someone like Hermione. 

I have the beginning of a draft from around 2009 in which Draco de-ages to a teenager just after Sectumsempra.  I have the beginning of a draft from 2011 in which Harry and Draco are a couple and Harry de-ages to a teenager.  I probably worked on that one the most.  I kept starting over.  Sometimes I would sign up for fests with the intentions of writing a de-aging fic, but the requests/prompts I got never quite fit. 

In 2012 I wrote The Kids Weren’t Alright, which is an MCU de-aging fic, part of a series called Responsible Science.  The idea of that series was to write every goddamn trope I wanted, so of course I wrote de-aging.  I had some of the same problems in that I couldn’t decide who would be de-aged with whom, until I realized I could just do whatever the hell I wanted and look at every combination I wanted.  Those kids were de-aged to 12, because I love middle schoolers.

When @tdcatsblog, @aibidil, and @frnklymrshnkly bid on me for Fandom Trumps Hate, they said they didn’t have specifics about what they wanted me to write; they just wanted me to write.  This was incredibly generous of them, so I decided I’d write the thing I’d been wanting to for over ten years.  I realized I could do what I did in The Kids Weren’t Alright and write every combination I wanted, which included kid!Harry with adult!Draco, adult!Harry with kid!Draco, either version with either one of them at literally any age I wanted, and kid!Harry with kid!Draco.  That last combination later got scrapped, in case you were wondering, and obviously the “either version at any age” got finessed for plot reasons. 

Since I’d written fairly believable 12 year olds in The Kids Weren’t Alright, I thought I’d do it again, except I realized 12 is a kind of random age in HP, where 11 is the really significant age.  Then I realized it’d be super fun to write Harry write before he finds out about magic and Hogwarts and everything, so I decided to start with that age.  I’d say thinking through all that took around a month.

Since Fandom Trumps Hate gives you a timeline of almost a year to write a thing, I thought I’d finally start a fic like a normal person and write a real beginning, instead of starting in media res, as is my wont.  I’d been getting kind of tired of Auror partners, and had had the idea earlier last year that you could still have them work together by making Draco a potions consultant, so in January I started writing that, and did about 8K.

I found it kind of boring, so I stalled on it until I got to meet @aibidil, @frnklymrshnkly, @zeitgeistic, and of course the lovely @icmezzo (who lives near me) in person in June.  Meeting them rekindled all my H/D love, so I started working on it again.  I poked at it for a while and still found it kind of boring, and realized it was because all I really wanted to write was smol!Harry. 

Then I realized if you start with smol!Harry, you get to have more information than the viewpoint character because you know what happens at Hogwarts, but less info than Draco because you don’t know how they interact as adults.  Since dealing with different levels of knowledge and dramatic irony are my favorite things, I started in media res after all.

I probably started writing smol!Harry around the beginning of July, though I will say that probably 2/3 of it were written in the last week of July because during that week I was directing and producing a play, and it was tech week, and I was quitting my job, so of course I was way too busy to think about fanfic, so of course that was all I wanted to do.  I liked smol!Harry enough that I sent it to @icmezzo to read.  She liked it!

The middle section with them both adults took all of August to write.  I used pieces of what I’d written in January/February, but rewrote most of it. Several times.  I sent that to @icmezzo too because I hated it, but she said it was great.

Then my parents visited I didn’t write anything, and then in a feverish 9 days after they left I wrote the 76,000 words that are the rest of it.  I understand that this makes me a freak of nature.  I was trying to get it all done so I could work on my original novel and not feel like I had quit my job to write fanfic.

I read over the whole thing, did some editing, then I sent it to my beta, @icmezzo, and a little later I started posting.

Tl;dr, it took me about 10 weeks to write, 9 months to plan, and 11 years to dream <3

[duhad]

Three Pillars of Writing: A Terrible Essay by Duhad

Since I ended up spending way too long writing this in response to a largely unrelated post about fan fiction, I’m going to post this overly long soap box rant about writing on its own in the vain hope the 3 or 4 people who follow me will read this if its not hidden under 3 feet of other peoples text.  -

I had a conversation with my friend Kit the other day, where I was trying to sort of argue/define an idea I had about stories fundamentally working on three central pillars. 1. Plot - The story of whats going on. The adventure/mystery/horror/romance/etc as an active and progressing narrative. 2. Characters - The central characters and their internal and interpersonal lives. 3. Setting - A mix of both world building and general attention to setting details, ranging from things as grand scoop as the history and cultures of fantasy and sci-fi worlds to as small and personal as the club scene in a big city or the neighborhood of a small town or the student body and facility of a school.

For comedies you can knock out one of these three to replace it with comedy without losing much, so long as the humor works.

In my original argument I more or less was saying that a story needs at least 2 of these to work in order to function, with one weak link not really unbalancing things, but two going out causing a collapse. But reading this I think I am coming to a more nuanced conclusion, that their are people for whom one or more of these are of much higher importance and who can over look flaws in the other one or two. That essentially each reader/viewer/player is, weather consciously or not looking for one or more of these things and the better or worse its handled, the more or less they like it. But since most people don’t really grasp this notion, they look for broader, more tangible things to explain WHY they enjoyed something or not. So for instance I have heard allot of people dismiss the works of Stephen King because he’s too long winded, to caught up on details and the daily lives of his characters and tends to meander, losing allot of steam in the middle of his books as the terrifying threats take a back seat to ‘pointless’ things like characters falling in love, falling out of love, dealing with substance abuse or stress or school or work or fascinations with silly hobbies. For people who are their for the plot, he’s a bore who needs an editor to cut out about 70% of any given new book. Especially when allot of his books end, not with a thrilling climax, but a chapter or two after that point, with the remaining characters moving forward with their lives. Yet his books sell like hotcakes because for people who pick up the books and fall in love with the characters and the worlds they live in. They get to just indulge in their stories for hundreds of pages before suddenly getting a thrill as these people they have spent the last ten to twenty hours with are suddenly thrust into terrible danger, with the fate of the lived in settings they inhabit, from whole world to tiny little communities, dangling in the balance! For another example “Rendezvous With Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke is a book I am sure about 90% of people here would HATE! Its slow, its uneventful, the characters are all consummate professionals who don’t have any drama with one another or really spent much time getting to know one another. The two most exciting things that happen are when someone we met one chapter ago almost gets seriously hurt while trying to fly a sort of winged bike and then does not and later when the Hermian colony fires a nuke at the Rama ship, but then it gets defused relatively easily with no lives lost. But I LOVE IT because it presents an utterly fascinating look at an empty alien spaceship that is unlike anything on Earth. Its strange and beautiful and endlessly fascinating to explore! And the people exploring it themselves are fascinating, not because their particularly deep characters, but because they represent a human culture that is at once recognizable and yet unlike our own. Its a setting first and for most book in other worlds. The Lord of the Rings is setting first, plot second and characters a pretty distant third, at least in the books. Fan fiction tends to be characters first, focusing on the lives and personalities of characters and their interactions with one another before anything else, though obviously their are lots of exceptions. Finally Sherlock Homes stories tend to be plot first, with the central mystery and how it gets solved being the center piece, with the characterization of Homes, Watson and a few of the central figures getting just enough attention to make us care about them and basically everything else being kept pretty out of focus unless necessary for the plot. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might go into the history of the Mormon Church in “A Study In Scarlet”, but mostly its just their to explain the motivations of Jefferson Hope and he only gets fleshed out to explain why he murdered Drebber and Stangerson, as soon as that’s done he basically just go’s to jail quietly and is never mentioned again. But that’s fine because its a story your reading for the plot, not the setting or the characters, so once the murder is resolved theres no need to keep and flesh out the characters and setting details unless their going to come up again. Which they will not. Hell Moriarty, Homes’s nemesis and biggest recurring enemy shows up in only two stories directly, the second of which he dies in and is only mentioned in a couple others as being basically just a guy who other criminals work for sometimes.

Now obviously these are only broad outlines of major elements that stories tend to work with in less tangible ways and their not the ONLY things readers/viewers/players respond to. Someone who loves plot focused stories might hate Sherlock Homes stories because they don’t like mysteries or prefer more modern characters. Someone who just wants a good character driven story might hate Bloom Into You because they don’t like the leads or just dislike anime as a medium. And someone who likes rich worlds might still hate Dune because its so dark and bloody and fatalistic. That’s fine. But I think knowing what key aspect/s of a way a story is told and where its focus is can tell you just as much about why you do or do not enjoy certain pieces of fiction as more tangible elements like it being a romantic comedy or a sci-fi horror.

-

And as an addendum for writers, I think knowing what you really love about stories can help you get thru allot of tricky spots. I love setting and character elements of stories, but have allot less patience for plot and so when writing I will breeze thru world building sections, people discussing culture or politics or the way things work in their sci-fi/fantasy/just plain weird setting and breezy banter dialogue. But then when it comes to moving the story forward its like, “Ahhhhhh... They uh... Do the thing and then... Uh... Hm... Time for a brake. I’ll get back to finishing this thing in a month or two.”

Before being able to crystallize by thoughts on this I would often get into trouble by setting out to write plot heavy epics, full of twists and turns and major events I knew would happen at X point in the future, but then never got anywhere in them because I found writing the quick and action heavy scenes that would get me to those big moments where just miserable and felt stilted as hell! Even now I write with my best friend and whenever she talks about these really cool ideas for things that will happen in the futures of the stories I get all excited thinking about how fun writing about how the settings and characters will change and how they will all interact with one another and how many fun scenes I can write in that new environment... And then I remember I need to actually push the story forward to that point and I suddenly get really stressed out because plotting out how that will all happen and then executing on that plot is my least favorite part of writing.

But when I wrote things for my friend’s game where it was like, “Write a history and mythology for this setting.” Or “Write two characters interacting and talking with one another in these short scenes.” Or “Come up with a type of fantasy creature or a culture or a tribe or a cult and then write about how they interact with a group of strangers.” And it was so easy and so much fun that I ended up writing so much stuff I actually got told several times to either stop or slow down because he thought I was pushing myself to hard to come up with this novels worth of setting details and short character interactions. But the truth of the matter was, I was just exhilarated to have a chance to just toss out all of these ideas I didn’t then have to tie together into a tightly constructed over arching plot!

Later I was writing a story for a comic with my best friend and though we had all of these cool ideas, it was not really coming together right. Everything was so detailed, so focused on notes about the setting and expository dialogue and aiming toward setting up for future events that it just didn’t feel right at all. So I took a brake and wrote a RPG based on the setting and spent about 100 pages just carefully building the setting and history for the universe it was set in. Then, months later, I came back to the comic and, now focusing just on the scene at hand and keeping in mind the setting I had built, I rewrote the opening chapter in a way which was SO MUCH BETTER then the first draft! Because I was no longer writing for the plot, but for the characters and the world and THAT was my jam!

Finally fairly recently, while dealing with a bout of writers block, I just for fun wrote something for my aforementioned best friend which was literally just a character looking around their weird room, commenting on some of the dumb stuff she saw and then having a conversation with her best friend. That ended up leading to a 23+ page story I am still writing with her that I find is so fun and relaxing to write I just pick it up and work on it when I am feeling stressed or down and it gets me feeling allot better! And though she is working on some long term plotting stuff for it, the thing I love about it is that, when I am writing it, its basically purely just setting details and characters.

And that’s what I want you writers out their to take away from my TED Talk today! If you find yourself getting caught up over and over again when writing, look at where you keep getting stuck and ask yourself, “Is their a pattern here? Am I getting stuck at random or is it when I try to focus too much on the world or on whats coming next in the story or when I need to write dialogue or back story that I am just grinding to a halt and not knowing what to write next?”  Because I think you might well find that their is a pattern and once you know where your just breezing along and where your getting stuck, you can work to either spice up the parts you have trouble with with the things you enjoy or rework your story to focus on your strengths and down play your weakness. It might seem odd at first, but if Michael Crichton can shove long expository monologs about science into a book about a dino theme park going to hell or a Congo safari filled with intelligent apes murdering people and if Andrew Hussie can hold up his story about cosmically apocalyptic happenings to have a couple of dumb kids talk to one another about nonsense for a few thousand words, you can indulge yourself a little. Its alright, it doesn’t make you a bad creator, just one who will appeal more strongly to a particular audience.

-

Now that I have spent hours writing some dumb nonsense no one will ever read I will go to be- Oh wait its already morning, to get breakfast then work I guess.

As for the rest of you, go enjoy yourselves indulging in or creating whatever flavor of narrative you best enjoy!

@roxthefoxinsox @balile

[jenroses]

Pocketful of Soul, part 1 is up!

Part 1 of Pocketful of Soul, the first five chapters, are all up on Archive of Our Own, here:

Here's some of the art from the first part. There is one major art piece which will be up soon, but it's so good that it deserves its own post. Here's my digital art. I do mostly photo and font manipulation. With all talismans, I went character by character, making sure I had the ones with the right meaning (mostly using Yabla and the wiki, but some other research for the hyperspecific cultivation terms.)

They are meant to be the gist of the thing, not accurate representations of actual Chinese talismans.

Wei Wuxian's talisman is hastily written in a loopy cursive, which I got from a Chinese "turn your characters into Chinese cursive" site. This took a long time, because I had to find font options which contained all the relevant characters, but which also had the right fluidity and haste. His is not fancy, not ornate in the least, improvised. And then Hanguang-Jun had to go and bleed on the darned thing, and it rewrote one absolutely critical character while stopping most of the talisman's function. One thing went right, though, as the blood managed also to stabilize the resulting disaster.

Apologies for images without alt text, Tumblr only gave me the option for one of the images. It's basically what I'm describing here.

And this is what MXY saw in Jiang Yanli's memories, Wei Wuxian's bloody hand as he falls, Jiang Yanli's hand ghostly over his.



Mo Xuanyu's talisman is another thing entirely, the precise and carefully crafted work of someone who both studied many schools of cultivation and saw the result of a carelessly drawn, distorted attempt. Where Wei Wuxian's talisman draws on resentful energy to power it, Mo Xuanyu is using qiankun techniques and manipulating the golden core to get the result he wants, They spring from the same place but end up completely different. And most importantly, Wei Wuxian's talisman never could have worked, but Mo Xuanyu's does. albeit with some unintended consequences.

We have here a combination of manipulated seal script (some characters have been merged, which is typical, and changed by stretching, which is also typical,) and the letter placement is not completely linear. My original drafts were vertical, top-to-bottom, right-to-left, without distortion or extra images. This has much of the text enclosed by the characters for "jindan", which have been divded so that the others may be written inside, which is much of the function of the talisman, to enclose the spirit within a golden cage made of qi, after separating it from the corporation, then move it into the past one day (the blood-dark runes are the "destination", written in after-the-fact in blood) and merge it with the body and soul that already exist at that point.

For more information on art, see my website.

[quinnmorgendorffer]

3. Which part of Etude was hardest to write? 6. Which scenes did you cut, and which were added in Etude? <3 <3 <3 love your work!!!!!

First of all, thank you for asking! And you are much too sweet because you have to know you’re like my all time fave fic writer so like?? This means so much thank you <3 <3 <3

And god I’m sorry this is so long. This is why I have to try to limit myself to 10k words a chapter I just can’t shut UP!

3. Which part of Etude was hardest to write?

Chapter ten in general was the hardest for me. That’s the chapter where he gets dumped by his first real boyfriend and has a breakdown. I originally planned on it being a full manic episode but didn’t trust myself to write it as such, so I mainly focused on it being how I get sometimes where I’m like “if I keep pretending like everything’s okay, things will be okay right!?!?!” but just to the extreme. I rewrote a BUNCH of it. And since I was dealing with moving at the time and stressing out about a lot of personal things, a lot of it related to his own fears in the chapter of being unable to do anything but music, it was a lot of emotions lol. Definitely the hardest chapter to get my head around in that fic. This sequel is mostly hard just because I’m trying to keep a bit more of an ongoing plot and it’s less vignette-y.

6. Which scenes did you cut, and which were added in Etude?

I removed a lot from chapter ten because I know not everyone likes long chapters and I was trying to keep it under 10k which is somehow a challenge for me because, well, look at this post. I can’t keep things concise lol. 

In chapter ten I originally wrote Gob and Tracey meeting for the first time, but I wasn’t sure if it would come across as funny to everyone else as it did to me, and I wasn’t sure how to end the scene. The whole idea was she didn’t know he was gay and there was a bit of a misunderstanding and she sort of thought he was hitting on her, it was funny to me lol but yeah. And there was a scene I cut that actually showed some of the convo Tracey, Lindsay, and Gob had regarding his break-up that I ended up taking out...it might be in this next chapter of the sequel though since there are ~flashbacks~.

Besides that, I know I took out a scene of Gob’s first piano contest and some more details on his physical therapist he saw post broken wrist. And in the last chapter of the fic, I re-wrote and changed the fight between Gob and George so much that I basically cut and added things to it by the time I finally published it. There was a version with no physical fight (Gob basically distracted his dad before he could question him), one with a full-out brawl outside the party, one with a full-out brawl in front of all the guests, and then the one that ended up being the final product. I have drafts of all the scenes I cut except for those unfortunately lol.

In terms of adding, I never planned on Seth returning? Or being like this big thing? Ever? I originally planned on it just being a sex thing but then I got emotionally invested while writing their summer together lol. Everyone loved him and I realized Gob would need the closure of at least seeing him one more time. And I also realized it made more sense for Gob to move away from Newport with a potential boyfriend than just a random friend like I originally thought. 

And chapter 11...all I really had planned was talking about HIV like I just needed another chapter before chapter 12 (again, 12 chapters for every note inside an octave because ~symbolism~ and I thought between 10 and 12 I needed a bit of space for some sort of “filler” sorta thing) and then I thought I could include Freddie Mercury into the conversation since I knew with the timeline I was creating he’d be graduating college in 1992, meaning Freddie would die in the middle of his senior year, and then it turned into the Queen chapter.

[solliewriter]

4 lessons from 4 novels

Novel 1

Novel 1 wasn't actually my first attempt at a novel, but it was the first one that had "the end." It took me approximately six years to complete the first draft. But that first draft wasn't the first telling by any measure. Oh no. I rewrote the entire idea about ten times, getting several hundred pages in (or a hundred thousand words) more than four times before realizing there was a crucial flaw that would utterly destroy the plot and/or the characters. The idea had been a wild conglomerate of inspirations that all revolved around a few key scenes. In every iteration of that story, a different plotting device was used. Sometimes I pantsed, sometimes I plotted, sometimes I did both.

The idea was complex. It had a main cast of about twenty characters, over a hundred named characters, and mysteries so weird that I, the writer, couldn't figure them out until the very end. It was a heartfelt mess of motivations, plots, and magic. I was in way over my head with this. I knew that, but still I kept going. As mentioned, this wasn't my first attempt at a novel. Given that past history, I desperately wanted this story to have two marvelous words: "The End." Out of pure stubbornness, I found a semblance of a plot and finished it.

After writing the ending, I swore I'd never try to write the story again. That was a lie: I will try to write this story again.

The lesson: Although this was the most painful story I've written, I learned so much from it. I learned the most after I was able to write "The End." I was able to look back and see the whole picture of what I had done, and the simplicities. I was right in that I needed the ending. Fighting to the finish taught me more than anything. Now that I've written "The End" a few times, I don't feel the pressure to finish ideas once I realize they're underdeveloped. I know I can set them aside and do something else until the ideas have finished marinating in my brain. Because I finished it, I've built confidence. So, for me, this story is valuable to me because it ended, and not because it's a good story.

Novel 2

Novel 2 came near the end of the "first" draft of Novel 1. I was going through Pinterest when I came across some beautiful imagery. I intended to use that imagery for a short story. Alas, the story spilled out over the course of 71k words. It was a simple adventure, and since I was struggling with the complexity of Novel 1, I was happy to keep it simple. It allowed me to focus solely on fleshing out the characters, who are now some of my best. Two other people read this novel chapter by chapter, and encouraged me to keep on with it. I finished the first draft in a year. I'm on my third draft, and there is little that has changed between the first and third writing.

The lesson: it's okay to keep things simple. It helped me build confidence and helped me remember the pure simple fun of creating stories. Writing simple adventures solely because you want to, especially when multitasking with a bigger project, is perfectly okay. And, the simpler it is, the easier it is to pants.

Novel 3

Novel 3 was different. I came up with the original idea around the same time as Novel 1. I had a giant folder of ideas, of summarized scenes and dark overtones. There was no plot, no backstory, only a mystery and two characters platonically in love with each other. At 13, I knew I was too young to write the novel. I wanted the characters to be older. I wasn't ready to write older characters.

At the time, though I didn't realize this, I also wanted a complex plot that I also wasn't ready to write.

So, I promised myself to only write these characters once I was 18 years old. As fate would have it, that was the year I finished Novel 1 and 2, the year I was ready to write about characters I had only dreamed about. Though it had been years, I still knew only the main premise and impressions of scenes. The only fully formed idea was the relationship and the attitudes of the two protagonists.

The plot? The skeleton was half-finished and half clear. But, like magic, the plot unfolded as I wrote. Symbolism, randomly chosen, exploded with meaning. Important yet mysterious details became clear. Dozens of different strands came together in such a way that, once again, completely changed how thought about the writing process. Although the first draft was 108k words long (several hundred pages), I wrote it in 3 months. This is partly because I remembered the lessons of my previous novels. This book is now ready for its third draft.

The lesson: it's okay to wait to write a story. Marvelous things can happen because of it. Ideas can develop, plots can be reformed, and best of all, the story will write itself because some part of the writer brain has already found the plot connections.

Novel 4

Novel 4 was the sequel of Novel 3. Because of this, I thought I could dive in a bit sooner than I was ready. As I wrote, I struggled to maintain subplots and continue stories from Novel 3. Brilliant ideas came and went. Although I knew the characters, this time I didn't know what events to throw at them. I had already challenged them with almost everything I knew in Novel 3. Now I had to do it again, but different, and if possible, even better. The resulting story had 25 plots, of which 4 were complete. It took me the entire novel and a few weeks of post-writing to understand why I had such a hard time with this story, a story I thought would be easy given I had been dreaming about it for many years. I wrote Novel 4 in five months, but it was a hard five months. The novel isn't half the mess of Novel 1, but it was messier than it needed to be for same reason Novel 1 was rewritten so many times.

The lesson: I need a simple, unadorned premise before I can write a novel.

Extrapolation on Lesson 4

This lesson was the lesson I'd failed to learn over the course of four novels. I was too amateur to understand the lesson for Novel 1. There was so much wrong with Novel 1 the lesson was lost in the clutter. For Novel 2, I was thinking that it succeeded because it was simple as a whole. I didn't credit its simplicity to its one-sentence premise.

I am not good at multitasking. I can't split my mind between two things, so I need to understand the core of what I'm writing. Otherwise I'll get lost in plots and ideas unrelated to what I actually want to write.

So, what is a good premise to help me?

The premise which drove Novel 2, as mentioned, is a sentence long. The premise which drove Novel 3 is a full paragraph long and makes use of spoilers and plot twists. Despite this, Novel 3 is still relatively simple, because all it does is declare the following:

The protagonist's goal;

an indication to the antagonist's goal;

and the detail that makes this story unique to me. I.e., the reason that this idea stands out.

Novel 2 premise is simple because the goal and the unique detail are the same. This isn't true of Novel 3.

What I lacked in Novel 4 was the indication of the antagonist's goal as well as the protagonist's goal. To top that, I forgot the lesson about complexity and reverted to my old habit of thinking that if I make it more complex, then surely the antagonist/protagonist goals will arise. But no. Complexity is built on simplicity. Even if the original idea is complex, I must first break it down to its skeletal core before writing it. Otherwise, when writing, I can get so lost in the complexity that the core is lost. I need to be able to return to the core to understand the complexity.

The premise is the heart of the story. I can put fancy garments over the top of it, but without that heart, the story has nothing to keep it alive.

[iamthewanderingbard]

Writing Reflections: From Finner

Greetings, everyone!

Today, I would like to look back on what has become one of my favorite stories that I’ve written, From Finner. It’s been almost a year since I completed it and posted it on FIMFiction, and the responses I’ve gotten to it and to Finner himself have made me smile and touched my heart. It’s a long one this time, but I have a lot to say about this story. So, without further ado, let’s jump in to this writing reflection!

The Inspiration

As noted in the story description, From Finner was greatly inspired by Of Monsters and Men’s song From Finner. While I loved many songs on the album My Head Is An Animal, From Finner was not originally one of them. That is not to say that I disliked it. It merely did not strike me in the same way that songs like King and Lionheart, Mountain Sound, or Little Talks had. But as time went on, this changed.

For those who are unfamiliar, a lot of Of Monsters and Men’s songs on this album are story-like. The song From Finner especially mentions an unidentified number of people on a journey and a man named Finner. They describe furrows on his skin, how the “waves that hit his face marked the past”, the rocking of his house, and how the singer of the song feels safe in his house. Well, the more I listened to the song, the more I started to think of Lyric as the one on a journey, and I started to develop the character of Finner.

Because the song mentioned waves, I decided to make Finner a pony of the sea. Because of the phrase “marked the past” and a misheard line in the song, I decided that Finner would have a lot of years behind him. “The rocking of his house” translated to a houseboat (even though I personally imagined a house on a cliff rocked by the wind listening to the song before I thought of the story). The line “That’s when Finner would say, ‘Keep your heads held high’” led to a creed that he would have held onto in life. And the title of the song made me think that he would leave a letter for Lyric in the end.

I also concluded that Finner would die in the final chapter pretty early on. I cannot say why I thought of this, why he could not simply live as Lyric goes on her way. But looking back now, I think that would have cheapened the experience as a whole. It would not have had the same impact on Lyric, or on the story itself.

Development

With all of these things in mind, I began to develop the story and the characters further. I came up with the overall arc of the story, and what kind of pony Finner was. I decided that he would tell the story of the ocean and the moon, although I feel that it may originally have been a standalone tale. I do know that the tale originally would have been about why the ocean is salty with the waters of the moon being only a component of that. More on that later. I also came up with the idea of the song and its dual meaning and purpose in the story, although I had no words for it yet. Those would come later.

As I got close to writing the story, I started to think more on Finner as a character. Who was he really? What brought him to this point in life? As I did, I thought of who he may have been in loved with, if he was ever married or had children. Thus, Lady Slipper came to be. Although she was a late addition to the story, I am so glad she was born at all. She helped to round out Finner as a character and put a lot of things about him into perspective.

Writing

The writing process was interesting for this one. When I first started writing, I got about halfway through the first chapter, right to where Lyric first enters Finner’s houseboat and he’s warming up the stove. And then I stopped.

For whatever reason, the story sat for about a year. I worked on other things in the meantime, and accomplished quite a few of them. But then, just as suddenly, I had the drive to work on it again. I got to work, and although I would love to say that I produced the story you see today, that is not the case.

The first chapter is more or less the same as how it was originally written. The second and third chapters needed extensive rewrites. In the original version of the second chapter, Lyric crumbled as Finner critiqued her performance in the tavern, and it weighed things down. The dialogue didn’t flow, and the interaction felt forced. This is when Finner was originally going to tell Lyric to keep her head held high as well, but that, too, felt forced. As I rewrote this part, the version you see now came to me, and it fit the story much better. Instead of a Lyric who was still wounded by her past, it showed one who still had some lessons to learn but was working to overcome it. Some things stayed the same, though, such as the tale that Finner told to the colts.

Although the third chapter was still the tale of Chandra and Blue, it did not flow as nicely the first time around. I had to take a close look at it and rework it. I am much happier with the end result. And even though I had originally intended to make the story about why the ocean is salty, the more I thought on it, the more I decided that the waters following the moon was a better theme and a better metaphor for Chandra and Blue as well as Finner and Lady.

I had not intended for Finner to have such duality to him when I originally thought of him, but the sadness hidden underneath his jovial surface is what the story wanted. It also led to me adding his line about keeping Lyric’s head held high after telling the tale because it fit his character arc and the story so much better. I also had not intended for the tale to be a reflection of Finner’s love for Lady as well, but I am so happy that it did.

The Song

Writing the song was an interesting process. I am not a poet, and so I originally enlisted the help of my good friend MelancholyIguana. The original approach was to try and create a song set to a piece of existing music, but we sat and looked at the story, I wrote the four stanzas that are in the final piece. Mel helped to alter the second stanza, and it flowed quite nicely. I originally also had “Sleep now, my love” written, but seeing as Lyric would sing the song to Finner at the end, I changed the words to “Sleep now, dear one” to better reflect their relationship. I had planned on having the song be longer, somewhere around six to eight stanzas, but the four stanzas felt right. They were short, sweet, and they captured exactly what I was going for.

The Letter

One thing I was concerned about at the end was the contents of the letter. I still am a bit. Although I feel that it fits the story and that it is something Lyric needed to hear at this point in her life, I was afraid that, from an outsider’s perspective, it would not be enough of a payoff. I had also wanted it to be longer, but what I came up with seemed to fit. It said everything it needed to say, and to drag it out would have cheapened its words.

Lady Slipper

Figuring out just what to say and how much to say about Lady Slipper was a challenge. I love her so much, and there is a lot of her story, and her life with Finner that I really wanted to show. However, that would have taken away from the points the story was trying to make, and so I took the “less is more” approach with her. I still love her, and I still have her story in my head, and I have seriously considered writing more about her and Finner together.

The Epilogue

As I was writing, I debated about making the epilogue a true epilogue, or if it should be attached to the last chapter. I could have seen it working either way. Making it a true epilogue won out, though, as I decided it was its own contained scene, as well as the fact that it shows a new Lyric, one not seen in the story thus far. It warranted its own space in the story.

The Revising

As I always do when completing the first draft of a new story, I went through it with a fine-toothed comb, weeding out anything and everything I could find that looked off or needed to change. After I had, I sent the story to a few good friends of mine to get their feedback and input. Among these friends are Will-Owl-the-Wisp and Haycart, who once again worked their magic and made wonderful changes and suggestions to make this story the best that it could possibly be.

That concludes this writing reflection! I hope that you had as much fun reading this as I had remembering and writing all this. From Finner really did surprise me in a lot of ways. I never expected to become as attached to Finner and Lady Slipper that I did. I never expected that the story would have quite the impact on people that it did, or that some people would fall in love with Finner just as much as I had.

To everyone who has read it, commented on it, favorited it, and to all those who gave their time to help turn this story into what it is today, I thank you all.

Cheers!