2024: in writing
capitalization in this post is a shambles.
TOTAL WORD COUNT (COMPLETE WORK ONLY): 30,878, a figure which is disappointing but at least 10k higher than last year!
FANDOMS: i continue to be in the tgcf mines worse than ever.
these are the streets of favour: ling wen-centric postcanon lingpei/three tumours fic, round 2 – 1,733 words, rated t
FIRST LINE: “—but us lowly ones ought to show greater respect in the presence of such eminence.”
LAST LINE: The cascade of simultaneous responses rendered the array for junior-officials-who-weren’t-affiliated-with-Ling-Wen (except for the handful of her deputies who had received leaked passwords and were now lurking), for a time, completely incomprehensible.
one of my favourite things i wrote last year was see you at the sun’s collapse, which was a gift fic for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophia_sol in the t4t exchange. they requested an exploration of ling wen, gender roles, and gender identity, and one of the prompts given was “ling wen as heavenly emperor.” i ended up writing a fic wherein ling wen consciously decides not to become heavenly emperor, but i still loved the idea.
soph went on to write free to be the greatest, which is a pitch-perfect take on the “ling wen for heavenly emperor” concept. i was then assigned to remix soph’s work for mxtx remix 2024. it took me a while to settle on the fic i wanted to remix, because i wasn’t sure i could return to this well and draw up anything worthwhile to say, but i… did.
one of my entry points was that soph’s fic was inspired by another mutual’s prompt for ling wen nonsexually domming pei ming. this didn’t end up surfacing in a direct way in soph’s fic, so that was one road not travelled. this led me to the idea that being a martial god seems crucial to jun wu’s emperorship. he's the heavenly martial emperor, the main street in heaven is the great martial avenue, etc. since i was taking up the idea of heavenly emperor ling wen, i wanted to explore how the rest of heaven would respond to a turn of events wherein a civil god becomes the emperor. would it shift the culture in heaven at all? my idea was that maybe ling wen would lean into her un-martial-god-ness rather than trying to compensate for it, a la A Vote For Ling Wen Is A Vote For Order. i decided to cut between past and present and use the headings of "wartime" to designate jun wu's reign and "peacetime" for ling wen's. i have since been asked about this choice, so i suspect my execution left something to be desired.
to circle back to the pei ming/ling wen stuff, which i didn't get to explore as deeply as i'd hoped due to what were ultimately time and energy-related restrictions (this will be a theme wrt my writing output this year), my thought was that, in typical three—now two—tumours fashion, they've processed recent twists and turns in their relationship & their lives by seeking a form of companionship and normalcy from each other that no longer works as it once did because of the baggage between them, and also how ling wen is the emperor now. they're looking for comfort via some nonsexual kink that pei ming doesn't know how to feel about but is compelled by anyway. the sword submitting to the pen, etc.
title: “Old Peel” by Aldous Harding, which is thee ling wen song
talking to strangers: longstanding “banquet pwp” item in my “beefleaf fic idea dump” doc – 1,578 words, rated e
FIRST LINE: “Lovely as always, Lady Wind Master,” the hostess gushed, and Shi Qingxuan did a little spin as she entered the hall.
LAST LINE: He looked her up and down, still nothing discernible in his dark eye, and oh, she hoped he liked what he saw—she hoped he liked her for what she was, no matter what she looked like—she thought it mattered more to her what he thought than anyone but her Ge—and carelessly replied, “Take what you can get.”
i have two modes when it comes to writing fic: longer projects that get extensively outlined and re-outlined and drafted multiple times, or vague ideas and moodboards of vibes that i riff on in a text editor until they turn into a story. this falls into the latter category (as do all the shorter works in this post.)
this was a smut4smut gift fic with fairly open-ended requested tags. i was guided by a mental tableau of he xuan kneeling to eat shi qingxuan out in the back rooms of some other god’s heavenly palace, which makes sqx feel very naughty and adventurous. i’m compelled by the image of hx taking on a seemingly submissive posture but in fact behaving very dominantly; using a sexual context as an opportunity to let loose some of that energy that goes suppressed most of the time.
i’m often inclined to think that penetrative vaginal sex with m/f optics is something hx would avoid during the ming yi era, at least when he’s on top, because i imagine it would trigger hx’s fiancee guilt in a particularly intense way. i wrote this with the idea that he wants to fuck her right now but he’s settling for the closest thing he thinks he can do and still look himself in the mirror.
this relates, somehow, to how i sometimes read hx as a sort of… schrodinger’s service top. in this fic he’s, like, fake service topping; he’s getting off on his own competence and her own pleasure, but it’s wound up in possessiveness and a “fuck you” towards heavenly officials in general.
not much of that came through in the fic itself, as it’s strict sqx pov, but it informed my Takes.
from a less pseudointellectual perspective, i think beefleaf have amazing sexual chemistry no matter what. sqx would be very expressive and enthusiastic in bed and hx has the whole ravening hunger, oral fixation thing going on, plus a lot of pent up passionate feeling in need of a pressure valve. local author enjoys writing porn about their otp, news at 11.
the title didn’t come from anywhere, it just felt right.
soul of vapour, light as a feather: 907 words, rated m
FIRST LINE: Shi Qingxuan has He Xuan half-naked before she says, in a voice redolent with false nonchalance, “Wasn’t it so funny how that man thought we were sisters?”
LAST LINE: “You’re my favourite,” Shi Qingxuan mumbles through her smushed lips, and lays another moist, sweet kiss on the side of his neck.
at one point i considered what would happen if beefleaf were mistaken for sisters out in the world and immediately jumped to “shi qingxuan would think this is really funny and kind of hot.”
i also wanted to play around with a hx pov where he’s not even at a point of being able to admit or recognize how into sqx he is, and the thorny consent issues that can emerge from one party being so distant from their own desires while also taking pains to occlude hints of uncertainty from their partner. it’s a different take than the vibes of pantingbed and is probably most interesting when read as an unofficial companion piece.
Title: “Lost Boys and Girls Club” by Dum Dum Girls, which has been a beefleaf song to me since summer 2023… I rise and shine and I look behind / your eyes are black Xs of hate and of hexes / my soul of vapour, I'm light as a feather / and I bind together the pain, the pleasure…
panting like a dog at the edge of your bed: he xuan character study with beefleaf and huaxuan – 64k total; 45k written in 2023, 19k in 2024, rated e
my big accomplishment, even though 2/3 of it was written the prior year in terms of pure wordcount. i find the sticking-the-landing part of longfics to be time-consuming and difficult compared to the rest of the story, so it feels like the work was cleanly divided between 2023 and 2025. 15 months is way longer than i hoped to take on this project but sometimes life gets in the way.
the first half of my dvd commentary on this fic is here; the second half will hopefully be up by the end of the week.
→ EXTRA #1: ain’t gonna sleep tonight: au version of a scene from the main fic – 770 words, rated e
FIRST LINE: There’s a beat of silence, and then Shi Qingxuan adds, « I’ve always wanted to touch your hair. »
LAST LINE: After tonight, they will pretend this never happened, he tells himself, and asks, Would you cry?
this is an unsubstantial little thing that came about when i was rereading the chapter in question and got distracted by horny daydreaming about all the phone sex beefleaf could have had if they had only let themselves. it has no narrative ambition or value. moving on.
title: “Slumber Party” by Britney
→ EXTRA #2: everything that i wanted to know about love: a short hualian diversion – 1,729 words, rated t
FIRST LINE: Hua Cheng’s life is bliss, alright?
LAST LINE: His Highness is a better person than Hua Cheng, but he’s always known that. No one else comes close.
a lot of this is cut content from the original draft for the final chapter to pantingbed, which, if you believe it, was going to involve an eleventh-hour pivot to hua cheng pov. if you’re like “why on earth would you do that,” you are correct to ask this question. i really felt like i needed to put a bow on/resolve some of the huaxuan stuff that was still relatively open-ended by the end of the fic. verity really got to the heart of it by reading my draft and going, like, “you know, sometimes you just… don’t get that kind of ex closure.”
i’ve salvaged anything i actually liked about that draft and turned it into connective tissue to the third, final, as-yet-unpublished extra, to which everything that i wanted to know… is a stepping stone.
title: “Rock’n’Roll Star” by Sorry, which is featured on my companion playlists.
thorn: the he xuan abortion drabble – 100 words, rated t
FIRST LINE: An impossible problem, life swelling within the dead.
LAST LINE: Strange to think herself not the last; yet so soon, again, she was.
luminaries on fedi called for more mpreg abortions, and it led to my favourite thing i wrote this year besides pantingbed.
the scenario i had in mind leading up to the events of this drabble is essentially acernor's fic Inside; hx agreeing to have receptive vaginal sex that is melancholy and sweet and they spend the whole time dissociating not because it's bad but because it's good and that’s hard to deal with.
i rambled on bluesky about my further “he xuan thempreg abortion” thoughts, if they’re of interest.
even iron still fears the rot: junlian.. evil junlian marraige au… – 5,061 words, rated e
FIRST LINE: “It is good to see you in the Heavenly Court once more,” the Emperor tells Xie Lian on the morning of their wedding day.
LAST LINE: In these statues, Xie Lian is never without a blade.
this fic was on the burner for most of the year but it still squeaked in under the wire. it honestly caused me so much grief in the writing process. i’m so glad to be done with it and i’m tentatively optimistic that when i can go back to reread it in six month’s time i’ll have enough distance to appreciate it. on the plus side, a miasma of struggle and guilt and despair is very in line with the intended affect, so even if there’s too much emotional bleed from my mindset as an author, it’s hopefully indistinguishable from the intended vibe of the fic?!?
there were a lot of false starts with this because i struggled to land on a tone and flipflopped between POVs multiple times. there were several months wherein i was trying to approach it from jun wu’s POV as a fairly on-the-nose approximation of humbert humbert’s narration in Lolita, and spin the whole thing as a horrifying dark comedy, but that was too disparate from the actual point of this story, which was to be… porn that is at least a little bit hot. in the end, i pivoted to a pretty dour and straightforward tone/approach.
this fic is inspired by a certain sequence in Disco Elysium, in an… oblique way. i was playing through the “the greatest innocence” scene and its exposition about dolores dei:
Every decade that passes she seems less human somehow—and more beautiful […] Although she is often considered to be the greatest human being to ever live, there was something ominous about Dolores Dei […] She was the most socially secluded and least self-aware of all the innocences. Some modern thinkers would consider her a war criminal for the campaigns she waged against the Mesque state. And then there were the resettlement programs… She adored chess, yes—but also military war games. Dolores Dei often holds a tiny tin soldier in between her index finger and thumb—in icons such as this. She was also blonde, the blondest woman you have ever seen, with green eyes the colour of the Pisantic mare interregnum […] In conclusion, yes, there is something lonely, paranoid, and even terrifying that people seldom mention, but feel when they think of her…
it’s obviously not 1:1 with anything in this fic for a host of reasons, but the descriptions of her physicality and persona and legacy tickled something in my brain along the lines of, “what would the human apprehension of a xie lian who had fallen and been defeated but seemingly come back into the fold as the ~companion~ of the emperor even, like, be?” the focus on statuary and some of the images (the toy soldier, etc) in the fic draw heavily on this.
title: “Ptolemaea” by Ethel Cain
i have a bunch of works in progress on the go but many of them are the same as the ones i had in last year’s eoty writing post, so there isn’t much to update.
this year: i’m not doing exchanges and the like except for mxtx remix. i’m not as reliable as i’d like to be and i need to conserve my energy! but beefleaf/tgcf continue to bring me a great deal of joy and i’m very happy to have those sandboxes to play in whenever i like.