#then the ending where quark is just being a kid maybe not fully understanding the weight of what all just went down

[hecksupremechips]

another thank you thank you thank you. friends reading my fics means so much to me and <3 i am so glad you enjoyed!!! they WILL get those onions theyre going in a very good stew

YESSSSSS 👏👏👏

[toast-the-unknowing]

lydia-st-james tagged me in a writing in review meme, which, man. That takes me back. I haven't done one of these in ages.

Main take-aways: 1. 2017 was the year of the long-ass fic titles, apparently. 2. It only took ten freaking years but I can mostly write romance without dying of embarrassment. Mostly. 3. Ten years has not been long enough to teach me how to start something and just finish it already before starting twenty more things. Seriously, there are so many stories that I started this year that I keep thinking ya'll have read already and then I remember that no one has read those because I haven't finished them yet. Oh well. Maybe 2018 will be a year of extraordinary personal growth and self-discipline. Spoiler alert: it won't be.

Anyway. These are the things that I've published so far this year.

Listed in chronological order of publication, with one exception:

new worlds for the weary, new lands for the living Okay, so, I don't know if anyone else thinks of any of their stories this way, but I have a very small handful of fics that are my heartsong fics. I don't think of them as being stories. I think of them as being thousands of words of meta and criticism and gushing and character love and, just, me, pouring my heart out over some aspect of canon that is important to me, and then maybe if I'm lucky, I trick people into reading it and thinking it's a story.

Yeah. This is one of those. I started this story before I had even finished Blue Lily, Lily Blue, which is not a thing I do. I always finish canon (to whatever extent canon exists at the time of my joining fandom) before I start writing. But I wanted so badly to write about Adam and Ronan and how I felt about their relationship that I couldn't wait.

This was something like a five month writing process all told, and I'm really happy with the end result. The moment where Ronan smears ink on Adam's face, in particular, I'm very proud of. I'm proud of that whole fight scene, really, but that moment is such a strong visual, and I'm not generally great at creating those.

don't think about how much it will hurt God, I still hate this title, but I do love this fic. It exists because I had been toying around with a canon-divergent AU that I quickly realized was going to take a shit-ton of work and not actually be that interesting. I ditched the AU, but there was one scene I liked enough that I didn't want to give up on it (Ronan trying to provoke Adam into punching him and then holding his hand while wondering wtf he's doing), and I realized it could pretty easily be made canon-compliant and given the legs to stand on its own.

I briefly considered tagging this as "preslash if you consider fighting and bad decisions to be flirting, which if you ship pynch, you probably do," and then I considered how poorly that would match the tone of this story. I am very happy with the tone of this story. It was hard to write, and I think it's hard to read, and it's a better story for it.

the more we move ahead the more we're stuck in rewind NO ONE ON EARTH READ THIS FIC BUT I DON'T GIVE A SHIT I LOVE IT. There are so many, many, many things in this fic that make me happy: -Clarke being an unholy mashup of my sister and talldecafcappuccino -"You thought that there was an intersection of sentimentality and camp that Miller wouldn't be interested in?" -Just, Murphy. All of Murphy. -The Inseparable, Indestructible Blake Siblings (which is when the Blake siblings are at their best, fuck you, canon) -"Do you ever worry that we're going to turn out to be warped people with unhealthy relationships/Honestly at this point I'm counting on it." -the whole scene where Raven friend-dumps Clarke -Monty taking "gas grass or ass" too seriously -Nate's stupid "you know what they say about those guys with Bigfoot" t-shirt (I would wear that t-shirt)

Like, I know why this story wasn't successful as an item of fan culture. And I acknowledge that there are weaknesses in the writing. But I still fucking love it.

so familiar, like an old bedtime song Ugh, this was called "came in quiet with the rain" right up until the very second I published it and then I changed my mind and I still regret it. Never second gues yourselves, kids. (Either way: "Raising Cain" is a good Adam/Ronan song.) I wrote about half of this on a whim and then shoved it in a corner waiting for inspiration for the longer story that I thought it was meant to be a part of. Then I was sitting around on Adam's birthday/my birthday weekend, a little tipsy in the middle of the day, and I decided, nah, this can be a standalone. I'm not kidding myself that it's great literature but I think it does what it sets out to do well.

The Fake Geek Boy Job This is a rare example, for me, of coming up with a title first and writing the story around it. So that was fun. I was so, so, so happy with the response to this fic. I've written case fic before, but I'm not good at heists, and I was really worried that the way I handle the heavier plot elements here – basically cutting around them and explaining all of the offstage action through snarky banter – was going to feel like cheating. Like, there's probably a version of this story that's 20k words longer and is twice as good, but it would have taken ten times as much work. It seems like people understood the plot as it stands and didn't feel robbed, and it was such a relief to hear that.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name IT IS THE PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF MY ENTIRE LIFE that there are only two fanfics on AO3 tagged with the relationship tag "Quark & Jake Sisko" and I wrote both of them. Though I fully admit that "Everybody Comes to Quark's" is the better story of the two. This one feels like the first half is from one story and the second half is from a different story and neither of those two stories is complete, per se. But love a lot of the individual lines, character moments, etc. Also, just, any times spend with my beloved ridiculous giraffe boy Jake is good time.

faith, hope, all that bullshit This is the best thing that I have ever written that is based on a typo. And...I don't really know how to talk about this fic beyond that. It took something like seven months of on-again-off-again work; I am super grateful to Pynch Week for giving me the kick in the pants to finish it. There were so many things that were challenging about this – I hated everything in life the entire time I was writing Matthew. Plus trying to write all the characters as being a little older and more mature and their relationships as having progressed. But it was worth it because there are so many moments in this fic that just are still living in my head, even though I've put the fic down.

I think my favorite scene of all is the Christmas Eve scene, partly because I love Declan and partly because I love the "fucking Cain ruined it for the rest of us" exchange. But from a craft point of view I'm proud of that scene a lot. The first scene is its own contained story with beginning/middle/end; the Christmas Eve scene is what makes the proposal scene the beginning of a longer story, and it happens without the POV character understanding that it's happening. I'm pretty happy with how that all turned out.

People really liked the wedding scene, which is gratifying and totally baffling. That scene was murder to write. I don't even want to plan my own wedding, now I got to make one up for someone else? Of course, I mean. I cheated, because I didn't actually write the reception. Maybe the lesson here is if I don't even want to write a scene then for sure no one would want to read it?

Word on the Street This is another one, like The Fake Geek Boy Job, where I think there's a version of the story that's twice as good and eight times as long and a hundred times more work to write; I'm satisfied with my version. Also, I think the longer version is much more serious, whereas this is a comedy and I am happy with it as a comedy. Adam maybe comes off a little poorly, in the way that comedy characters sometimes come off dickish/rude/sociopathic. But it makes me laugh and honestly if I make myself laugh I'm happy. (That's not to say I'm never going to write the epic tale of how Ronan becomes Greywaren – I know what the first line of it is – but it's a real low priority).

come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls OKAY I WROTE THIS IN LIKE LITERALLY TWO DAYS AND YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND HOW HAPPY THAT MAKES ME. Even just writing something of this length usually takes weeks if not months between when I start it and when I finish it. This was like a dirty little fling, and as someone who never has dirty little flings either in life or in writing, that was a fun change of pace.

The Dragon's Nest Avatar: The Last Airbender is, in my eyes, basically a perfect television show, and it's a lot harder to write fic for something that you think is well-written/complete on its own, because where do you and your fanwriting fit in? As such, this was a challenge, but I'm pretty happy with it. Alchemicink, for whom this was written, mentioned being happy just from seeing the "intergenerational friendship" tag, and I gotta say I was happy just from getting to use that tag. And any day you get to write Toph stomping around yelling at people is a good day.

while we're on the subject, could we change the subject now So credit where credit is due: lydia-st-james gave me the prompts here and put up with my intermittent screeching as I was working on it. It took me a while to get it all done, but I wrote literally 13k words of this in the first four days, which is bonkers; I'm usually much more of a percolator in the early stages of writing. As such a lot of the outlining process is lost to the sands of time. I don't remember making an actual decision to set this in LA; I think my subconscious realized before I did that this was going to be a story about loneliness and depression, and, fairly or unfairly, I associate loneliness and depression with the city of Los Angeles. In any case, it gave me lots of opportunities to throw shade at LA and I'm always down for that, and I've loved hearing people respond to the specificity of the location.

It's funny to me that people are responding to this one so strongly because I don't generally groove on fake dating; I’ve never written it as a trope and I always find it hard to swallow as a reader. I wonder if there's something to be said for writing tropes one is somewhat critical of. Though I don't think, generally, it works out when people write a thing they actively hate. It's a theory I'm tinkering with, anyway.