this is the light of autumn, it has turned on us

i haven't done one of these in a hot minute and i have a deadline in a few hours so what better time, am i right (it'll be fine i'm mostly done)

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1. one of last year's beefleaf fics has been podficced! this has only happened to me once before so it still feels kind of wild. go listen to soph's wonderful reading if that's your thing!

2. i have a piece in yuri zine, forthcoming very soon. you have a week and a bit left to preorder a physical copy if you want one! free pdfs will be going up shortly after the paper copies ship.

3. i also appeared in the t4t: trans fic by and for trans friends zine compiling and expanding on the speaking notes from the fanworks 2023 panel of the same name.

4. my zine of my very own (the gothic beefleaf analysis tome) will be coming to the internet near you quite soon, whenever i get my act together to revise the conclusion and fix a couple indesign errors. someday..........

There are lots of ways in which beginning to focus more on my original work over the past year or two has, in turn, made my fic better, but I'm running up against some areas now where it's not exactly that it's making my fic worse, but introducing some minor complications. At the moment, this is largely around OCs--obviously, if you're writing original work and you think, "it would be great for [protagonist] to have an opportunity to interact with a person of [x] background/social standing/etc in order to illuminate things about their character (or whatever)," and don't already have any characters fitting that description, you'll just invent one. It gets more complex with fic, as there are a lot of preconceptions about Including OCs In Fanfiction. I keep finding myself in this position lately, and expending way too much effort avoiding including an OC in a story because it's cringe and blah blah, but then undercutting my own ability to tell the story well because I'm not letting my choices be guided by my (fairly reliable) instincts about what needs to happen, but by these semi-arbitrary rules about How Not To Write Fanfiction that I internalized reading anon meme threads as an impressionable teen.

There can be a tendency to course-correct too hard in this area, where people will avoid including OCs in fic at all costs because they've internalized that it's inherently cringe to do this and any OC they come up with will be a Mary Sue and readers will bail en masse etc--this definitely isn't the only reason people do this, there's also just simple laziness, as well as the desire to give other canon characters an opportunity to show up in the fic because the author/readers already have attachments to those characters, but I don't think it's not a thing, either. But I really hate when canon characters get shoved into a contrived background role in a fic that doesn't make sense and ends up distracting me/disrupting my suspension of disbelief way more heavily than just coming up with a utilitarian OC to help move the plot ahead.

And then there's the plain and simple truth that a lot of fic OCs just aren't very well-written, or they're well-written but in a way that distracts from the story the reader came here for, which is usually about the canon characters. This isn't to say I've never encountered OCs in fic that I thought were compelling on their own merit--I'm thinking of this one Fallout 4 longfic where the author's Sole Survivor was way more interesting than anything coming out of the actual game, for example--but I think there's a bit of a delicate tightrope to walk between underwriting an OC out of fear of making them seem Super Cool and Special in a cringe way (and I think this is the side I've erred on out of caution in the past), vs. having them take up up too much narrative breathing room.

I'm trying not to hem myself in unduly by what I think Fandom At Large's tastes are, because to be blunt Fandom At Large has bad taste and isn't a reliable metric of what is or isn't a good storytelling choice for any given fic. But it still makes me way more anxious than I can actually justify, lol.

This has been a bit of a stumbling block with Beefleaf 2, as it's become increasingly clear that writing this as actual factual casefic is probably the best route to make it a serviceable narrative, but casefic requires so many OCs! And also so much planning and outlining and work--you have to write a mystery!--but oh god the OCs!

I'm trying to push through my internal resistance... I think this would be good writing practice, since it's a type of story I've never written before and I think it could be helpful to get myself to do the exercise of coming up with and writing a mystery story instead of having my plot just be Vibes and Feelings like they generally are, and it's nice to have some scaffolding in place re: canon characters and details so I'm not overwhelmed with all of the stuff I need to come up with at once. Even so, this is an example of a time where a story being fanfic poses some challenges compared to original work... Beefleaf are lucky that I'm so obsessed with them or else I'd be sparing myself this misery and enjoying playing around in my mind palace of 70000 OCs that no one else knows or cares about.

Though most wouldn't know it, Wakamiya Shinobu can still remember a time when the housekeepers didn't call her the little lady. In fact, she still remembers a time when she didn't have housekeepers at all, though the memory's faint. It was just the two of them, Shinobu and Shiho, against the world, or at least against Shiho's creditors. Much later in life, Shinobu would wonder if those were the days her mother loved her best. Surely not, as back then Shinobu was a great inconvenience that pushed Shiho into returning to the immaculately maintained family estate where she spent her girlhood, begging--Shinobu knows her mother and knows, surely, that she must have begged, even though her grandmother hates to see grovelling and demands dignity in all things--to be taken back in, despite everything, for the sake of her little girl. Shinobu imagines--in truth, this may have happened; the scene is so burnished and blurry in her mind she can't distinguish it from early childhood memory--sitting on the tatami in the reception room she would later be scolded for practicing in, listening to her mother's pleading. Grandmother, her hair still black back then, said, You want me to take her in and raise her so she can leave and then come crying back, like you? Shiho, to her credit, didn't weep; she held fast. Look at her, mother. She's a sweet girl, and she's smart. You can raise her into anything you like. Shinobu might've been smart, then, perhaps even sweet, but she surely couldn't sit still, because Grandmother's gaze flayed her coolly before she murmured, Well, you'll teach her to sit seiza in my house before you teach her anything else.

Shinobu remembers, or perhaps just imagines, that's when Shiho wept. For her own deliverance from total disgrace, but perhaps also for Shinobu. In those days all they had was each other, and, though still a burden, Shinobu hadn't yet proven herself difficult to love.