#this is the first longfic i've written and i'm proud of myself for sticking to it so. you're going to be hearing about it

[blessyouhawkeye]

Chapters: 2/6 Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV), 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn Characters: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī, Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Lán Yuàn | Lán Sīzhuī, everyone else is here too but we spend the most time with these three Additional Tags: alternate universe - figure skating, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Mutual Pining, Oblivious Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Kid Fic, Getting Together, figure skating as a love language, Teacher Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn Summary:

Lan Wangji feels like his brain is leaking out of his ears. He had been the only Chinese skater assigned to Skate America this year, meaning neither Jiang Cheng nor Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan had been in attendance. Meaning Wei Wuxian had woken up at three in the morning just for him. Wangji internalizes this fact, and promptly comes undone.

Wei Wuxian hadn't forgotten about him.

(AU where Olympic figure skater Lan Wangji reunites with Wei Wuxian, his teenage rinkmate. It's been seven years since Wei Wuxian abruptly retired from figure skating, and now teaches a children's class at a local rink. This would all be a lot easier on Lan Wangji if he didn't have a Grand Prix Final to win, and if Wei Wuxian wasn't so damn good with kids.)

hello everyone i am engaging in shameless self promotion - the second chapter of my wangxian figure skating au is now up :) 

[aimmyarrowshigh]

14. What have you been finding frustrating with writing this chapter/fic?

Complain a lil bit at me. I love me some complaining. Brains are the absolute worst, honestly, there has to be a better way to have a consciousness.

GAH, well, since you asked for complaining, haha...

I HAD written all of Lent From Tomorrow. Or, well. I had written fully-fully the first 3/4 of it and had a robust outline and chunklets in the last quarter. So I felt safe to start posting it. I KNOW myself. I am BAD at posting WIPs. I am bad at it. My track record of my entire life illustrates this.

So I started posting it and things were going swimmingly! "Yes!" I told myself. "I'm successfully posting a WIP!"

But then I pulled a WandaVision and went, "oh, dear, everyone consuming this story figured out my red herrings much faster than anticipated, I must CHANGE THE STORY" but not in a "screw the audience over" way like WandaVision, just in a "this reveal comes much sooner than I had written, because otherwise I'm worried it will come across like beating a dead horse to keep dropping hints when y'all already know."

So... that completely undid the back HALF of the story, and I started writing it chapter-by-chapter as I posted, and I was doing okay. It wasn't the weekly update schedule I'd had with the prewritten chapters, but that's fine. It's fanfiction. People go years without updating sometimes, especially me, because I AM BAD AT WIPS. But it was still going okay!

And then April and May happened, and I'm ngl, literally every day of April, something cartoonishly horrible happened in my real life and I did not write a word for the entire month. Or do much of anything. I don't even think I read any comic books. I did zero. And then May was... not much better. Like, maybe something cartoonishly horrible happened every three days instead of every day, but it was still way too much.

I actually wrote more in May than I've written in that same time span since 2024 started, which I'm really proud of myself for -- I wrote 14,000 words (plus like 800 words of unpostable noodling) in three weeks, and that's not, like, Impressive or Enough but it's better than I've been able to produce in a while. I told myself just focus on the drabbles and tiny ficlets that were coming out of the prompt/pairing list I'd set up for myself for MLMay, and I tried not to freak myself out, and words happened, and it was nice! And then the last week of May also happened and we're back to Very Bad Brain Times.

So... I know what happens in the last quarter of Lent. I WANT to be writing it. But my brain is just not "together" enough right now to slip into the mindset for such a heavy-duty, plotty, researchy, emotional longfic, and I'm just spiraling and making myself feel even worse by getting more and more anxious about how long it's taking me to write it.

I know, logically, that it's not a huge deal. If people are gonna stick around to read what comes next, they will, and if they don't, they don't, and that's fine. That's how posting serial fiction works. I mean, that's even how TV used to work in the before-streaming times, and it's not like I worried about the feelings of a showrunner if I got behind on a show or decided it went somewhere I didn't care to follow. That's just serialized art! It's fine! I know logically that it's fine!

But reader, Emotionally, It Is Not Fine. I love this story so much, and I'm so invested in actually finishing something for once and I've stupidly pinned like... a lot of my beliefs about my Worth As A Person on "whether I can finish and successfully post an entire longfic," which, I get it, that in itself is not the biggest issue at play here, but whatever. Baby steps. And I just... it sounds so stupid. And I KNOW that it's small potatoes.

I just want people to like it.*

And I know that every passing day that I don't update, fewer people are going to read it and/or like it, and that also feeds the Bad Brain Spiral. And I don't know.

So tl;dr, the most frustrating part of writing this chapter is myself? I guess????

*Before anyone jumps in to whine about and/or laugh at this statement, I'm not saying "I want it to be a stucky fandom classic," or anything ridiculous like that. I literally just mean that I want the people who choose to read it to enjoy it enough to finish it and maybe have an emotionally positive experience from reading it.

**I also feel very. This is another dumb complaint that I know won't come across right, because internet, but -- I feel very like... separated from stucky fandom (in part because I'm a newer fan who came to the fandom after its heyday, in part because I don't like a lot of currently-popular fanons, in part because I am way too shy for Discord?) and I feel bad bugging uninterested people with thoughts/feelings about my own stories, so I've kind of just... stoppered up my excitement for this story for a long time. Also, an asshole ex-friend of mine straight-up told me that "stuckies are going to hate it because there isn't enough sex and it's really boring for being a fic, especially since it's Steve POV and not Bucky POV" and that just kind of made me feel like. I couldn't squee about the story. And it's HARD to write longfic and not feel like you can share it with people??? IDK. Stuff and thoughts. Whatever. etc.

[anderstrevelyan]

2022 Writing Round-up!

I was tagged by @cleverblackcat and @barbex to share what I got up to this year—thank you!

I've actually been really excited for this moment since this time last year, since that's when I decided to start tracking my daily word count. I have a graph! Proof it all adds up!

For context:

I'd been trying to write for fun/just for myself for years, but it would never stick. I work in publishing (being as vague as possible here!), so I always stewed in the pressure of feeling like anything I wrote had to be brilliant, which meant I wrote...almost nothing that wasn't for work.

It turns out fanfiction was the perfect solution? Purely for fun, inherently non-commercial, and without any of the baggage that came with trying to publish under my own name. (Also: Anders.)

Words Written:

I started towards the end of 2021 (I think I wrote about 5,000 words?). But in 2022, I wrote 109,098 words.

I'm very much not a fast writer, so instead I tried to become a consistent writer—apparently my daily average was 307 words.

I always let myself go longer if I'm really into it on a certain day (though even then that was never more than 1,000 words or so, and looking back I only had seventeen 1,000-word days), and of course that counts days off—if I write today I'll have written on 234 days this year (about 65% of them).

But it's so cool to me to see the trends?? Like, June is low because that's when I started publishing Force of Nature, so I spent a fair amount of time editing chapters I first wrote in Jan-May. December was low because a) holidays and b) I spent a lot of time working on an exchange fic, which took longer since I was figuring out the character dynamics/arc from scratch—I write the longfic at a faster clip these days since a lot of that was already figured out in the early part of the year.

Words Published:

AO3 tells me I published 56,385 words this year. A little over 44,000 of those in the longfic.

Misc Thoughts:

I'm far and away most proud of Force of Nature, my Amell/Anders longfic—I never thought I'd work on a long project, but it's been so much fun and so rewarding!

I don't really have specific goals for next year besides to keep going: aiming for consistency, writing what I find fun, tracking again.

(Though I'm very excited for Anders and Garrett to finally get together in the longfic in 2023!!)

And just, thank you so, so much to anyone and everyone who's read anything I've written. It's been such a fun year and it's been great sharing it with you 🥰🥰

[practically-an-x-man]

🎬💀🔥🕷️📝📦📖‼️ <3333

Awww thank you so much!! <3333

OC/Ship Ask Game: Firsts

I actually answered most of these before, and they're the ones that aren't as repeatable since they don't change based on the character or story, so I'll just stick with the ones I haven't answered yet :D

📝 - Pick a character: first draft of that character + the final version of that character

Actually picking 2 characters for this one, since they began as only one. Mira and Rae began as one OC, though I have since forgotten her original name. She had powers more like Mira's, with the ability to heal others, but an appearance and story more like Rae's - lacking Mira's physical mutations, with Rae's silver light accompanying her abilities, and basic inspiration as a fix-it for Angel's death in X-Men: Apocalypse.

The main place where that character differed from both Mira and Rae in their final form is that the initial character became a sort of "halfway Horseman" for Apocalypse. This is echoed a bit in Rae's story, having her mutation enhanced by Apocalypse in the same event that transformed Warren's wings, but the initial character was fully altered and even joined the team to act as an emergency medic/healer for Apocalypse and his minions. Finally she broke out of the control and defected to the X-Men, rescued Warren and the others who would have died in the battle, so on and so forth.

Obviously Rae and Mira are two very different, distinct characters now, but it's interesting to think that they both stemmed from a single character, my very first X-Men OC that I ever created.

📦 - First story that really took you outside your comfort zone

Hm... they all have, in some way or another. That's why I started writing to begin with, to push myself and experiment with different styles. But out of all of them, I think Desert Song was the one that really took me to a different space - not following any canon story save for a single moment in Quinn's backstory, a dark and entirely original plot, plus a darker, more dynamic, and more morally-complicated character than any other character I had written at that point. I'm exceptionally proud of it and I can't wait to keep pushing it even further!

‼️ - Free space! Tell us about a notable "first" in your writing journey!

Hm... last time I answered this one, I talked about my shift from writing solely longfics to implementing oneshots and ficlets. This time I'll talk about when I first started being open about my OCs!!

It took me a while to get into posting about my OCs here on tumblr. I still don't do nearly as much as some other people do, but I started with nothing. No bios, no incorrect quotes, no art of them, and I didn't post about new fics or updates. I think I still had a bit of ingrained embarrassment about it, and it put me in this limbo where I wanted so badly for people to hear about them but couldn't summon the nerve to actually tell people about them. I posted the fics on AO3 and just kinda... left them for people to stumble upon.

And that's all well and good, no harm in that whatsoever, but as I started finding more friends in fandom and seeing how much they advocated for their works, I decided I wanted to expand a little more. I organized my writing into a masterlist, created bios for each of my OCs, started talking about them more, and really just started in with all this enthusiasm for both my own and others' OCs. And even though the old write-and-be-done thing served me just fine... I like this SO much more and I love the community I've found by being more vocal about what I create :D