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

In case you haven't seen my posts elsewhere, I opened preorders yesterday for the print copy of my years-in-the-making zine about Beefleaf as trans gothic! You have a little more than a week to make an order. I'm ordering one big batch and don't plan on doing a reprint, so this is probably your only chance if you want a physical copy. The free PDF will go up circa March 1.

I will certainly boost this in other places between now and the end of sales, but I can't shut up about it because this has been a project in the making for a long time and is an attempt to express my love for something that, despite its flaws, is very important to me...

This wip. It’s evolved a lot! I’m really enjoying where it’s going now! It's proving really difficult to write, but so is everything else right now, so I think it's just a me problem.

I've never been Like This about a ship before... but y'all knew that. They just mean a lot to me and these are fictional worlds I love to play in time and time again. But I'm in the dumps with my writing at the moment so this is just one of those posts I write to convince myself it's worth sticking out creative projects even when I feel about as capable of writing interesting things as a slug.

( say my name in the morning, so that i know when the wave breaks )

panting like a dog at the edge of your bed: 64k, Tian Guan Ci Fu, rated E. He Xuan character study with He Xuan/Shi Qingxuan endgame and a lot of He Xuan/Hua Cheng along the way.

This is a DVD commentary in two parts, because I did in-line commentary and the fic was too long to fit all in one. It's also not technically finished because the last chapter is in-beta-progress, but I've had the first half of this post ready to go for ages, so I might as well share it?

Content warnings include rape, explicit sex, torture fantasies, disordered eating, amorphous dysphoria and other Gender And Body Problems, equally amorphous suicidality, graphic violence, and what I can only describe as “Huaxuan, weed smoking frenemies.”

( i have walked this body... )

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.