i do things

I started actually publishing Vattu in July of 2010, and planning and development around a year before that. So let’s call this an anniversarial thing, but really I just think it would be helpful to collect my thoughts publicly a little around this book that still feels extremely personal and quiet and idiosyncratic to me.

I struggle to think about how big this project has become, and how long a period of my life has been covered by it. While the broad strokes of the plot have been clear from early on, in the last few years I’ve felt myself slipping into a different sort of approach to writing it: less like I’m dutifully recording a self-contained story, and more like I’m using the story I’ve built so far as a way of exploring ideas. The more of it there is, the more it feels like I can live in it, instead of just building an interesting thing. I don’t know how else to say this, and I’ve never felt that it’s a betrayal of the plot-focused approach to the story. This isn’t like anything I’ve made and I have to believe that whatever value there is in it is because I’m doing it my own weird way?

This isn’t to say that it’s been consistently exciting and engaging to work on. This is something I want to be clearer on because I feel like a lot of people approach creative work as something you should only pursue when you’re 100% engaged or “inspired.” For me for practically any large-scale project, the most exciting part is early on, when I’m developing the idea and it’s clear enough to fit in my head, but not clear enough to feel too nailed-down to one particular finite incarnation. My excitement about a project is significantly lower than that throughout the entire rest of the process, but it varies a lot within that. It’s a commitment, it’s not a magical feeling all the time. Vattu has occasionally been a struggle, and I’ve occasionally felt totally out-of-touch with the vision I had when I planned it and started it. And the guiding vision of it has changed considerably, in a way that my previous books never did. But I feel that I still know what I’m doing with it, and I’ve been doing a lot more writing on it lately and getting pretty excited about where we’re going. (Having a couple of other things to jump between usually helps me through this process)

Where we’re going: in the interest of having four books that aren’t of enormously different lengths, I’ve recently decided to change the ending point for Book 3 (the one we’re currently in). This decision comes from a formal place but I do feel it works for the story, and makes Book 3 work a little better as a unit. I estimate now (July 2017, page 847) that we’re around 100 pages from the end of Book 3. I am thinking of the current moment in Book 3 (or the moment starting in the next couple of scenes) as a major turning-point for the story; I’m excited about finally being here and I don’t want to say more than that. And Book 4 will be intense, and even with all the planning that’s gone into it it’ll be the most challenging writing I have ever done, and it may be bigger than I think it’ll be. I am thrilled and horrified to think of what the whole story will look like in a few years when it’s done.

Oh and titles! I’m changing the title to Book 3 slightly (it’s hardly been posted anywhere, but until now it was “The Lantern and the Shadow”). Here’s the titles of all four books of Vattu; finally:

The Name & the Mark

The Sword & the Sacrament

The Tower & the Shadow

The River

I’d like to be getting the third book printed this time next year. I have the cover art pretty clear in my head and I’d like to get that done and visible in the next few months.

FFVII REVISED

Thing/Idea 1: Nursey gets talked about way, way more than Shitty by the fandom, which by extension means they’ll talk more about him vis-a-vis privilege.

Whether this is because people like Nursey more or because we are in a crash-course with the #nurseydex singularity, I can’t tell. I don’t know how to disassemble tumblr tags into data, but I can definitely mine some stats from AO3 and trawl through a couple pages of sort-by-kudos.

So here’s some fic counts, by character/relationship, as of April 2017:

Dex/Nursey at 966 fics

Shitty/Lardo at 380 fics

Nursey character tag at 1300 fics

Shitty character tag at 1376 fics

As you might expect, Dex/Nursey is a popular pairing, with over twice the fic count! You might be wondering why Shitty’s tagged more than Nurse overall, but (a) Shitty was introduced at least a full year earlier than Nursey, and (b) Shitty gets tagged a lot as a side character in fics. In the first five pages of Shitty’s sort-by-kudos, he’s typically the 3rd-8th tag. There aren’t many/any “solo adventures with Shitty” fics - he’s typically a tool to help Jack along his journey around his anxiety and/or into Bitty’s heart. We’re not following Shitty’s point of view very often. But there’s plenty of fics that follow Nurse from sort-by-kudos page one (though mostly in the Nursey/Dex context), and sit in his head, and invent his past.

So why do people like writing, and writing about, Nurse more than Shitty?

Thing/Idea 2: With or without from #nurseydex, Nursey has a lot of unknowns that make him interesting to write and speculate about. 

We get a ton of Bitty/Shitty interactions in the comic, either because Shitty is like Bits’s crazy older brother, or because living in the Haus together means they’re more likely to interact regularly. We get a lot of what Shitty’s all about, but much less about Nurse. (Like, the bit about how Nurse thinks he’ll probably be able to annoy Dex out of Haus and into space in 3.17? Actually surprised me!)

Let me count the ways - what makes a Black kid from New York start playing hockey? What makes a prep school outsider (is he an outsider?) want to be a poet? Why’d he get sent to boarding school anyways? What, actually, is the deal with his parents, two moms or bad dad or okay parents or all of the above? Or, hey Nurse, how come we’ve never heard of you dating ever, making it so no one can say for sure what your sexuality is? Like, I know we’ve come up with a lot of cool fanon reasons for all these things, but the point is that it’s all speculation, and we are making up some really cool stories off of crumbs of information. Which leads me to:

Thing/Idea 3: Shitty’s entire existence is a backlash against his upbringing and defines his character, while Nurse’s perceived/actual privilege (and how he really only talks about it twice) deepens our interest in him.

Shitty’s at Samwell, instead of Harvard. He’s doing Women’s Studies instead of Law. He’s got long hair that he’s not supposed to have, and he’s loud about women’s/reproductive/gay rights instead of learning cool golf or toting expensive cars. He’s not shy about how much he hates his family. Like, we get it, Shits - you’re paying for the sins of your family by being everything they’re not. When you graduate Harvard Law, $10 says you become a public defender because your family hates the poor. We don’t need to analyze or talk about your privilege, because you would rather chew your own foot clean off than go to the country club one more goddamn time. You’ve said it twice now.

But Nurse... well, we can say so much more about Nurse. We can get tropey with him and make him not understand poverty, sure. I see more fics depicting wealth as a synonym for loneliness to Nursey. But I think the point I’m trying to make is that I think we talk more about Nurse & privilege than Shitty & privilege because we just talk about Nurse so much more.

My mum says she feels much better after getting tested and it’s just the knowing what it is that has helped take the weight off her.

“You know I could pay your fines, right?” Nursey asks, his eyes trained on the fiver Dex freely dumped in the sin bin.

“I’m not about to squeeze a sugar daddy for five goddamn dollars,” Dex huffs. “I’m your boyfriend, not the IRS.”

The smell of bacon mixes heavily with the pancakes Bitty made minutes earlier; the whole morning is warm with light flooding through the kitchen windows. Though his attention was mostly fixed on his laptop screen, Dex could usually sense when Nurse was coming back in from an early morning Annie’s run—something about the smell of the coffee, the way his clunky feet stomped out snow on the way in. He’d chosen to lazily feed Nurse a square of pancake once he was in range, and pull away from the code on his screen long enough to plant a kiss on Nurse’s cheek. Chowder didn’t notice until Nurse garbled an “mm, chofcorate schip” mid-chew—rather than shouting “FINE” at his fellow frogs’ cuter moments, C had taken to simply pushing the jar over to them with a grin. (Today, he nudged it into Dex’s arm with a badly-stifled giggle.)

Nursey gestures with the two coffee cups in both hands. “You say that like I don’t get you coffee at least twice a week.”

“But you’d do that anyway,” Dex says, hooking his elbow around Nurse’s to grab one of the coffee cups. Nurse snorts and mirrors the gesture, linking their arms such that both can drink from their own cups with their faces close together. It would theoretically be a rad-looking, Nordic-style toast, if the coffee wasn’t still piping hot.

“Shit,” Nursey coughs, puffing over his tongue to try and relieve the burning while Dex cackles at him. “That’s why we stopped doing that one.”

“If y’all want to keep pulling this weird Game of Thrones courtship, may I suggest feeding the pig?” Bitty says, prodding the fine jar once. For the sake of true irony, he plants the plate of bacon to its immediate left.

“You know I could pay your fines, right?” Nursey asks, his eyes trained on the fiver Dex freely dumped in the sin bin.

“I’m not about to squeeze a sugar daddy for five goddamn dollars,” Dex huffs. “I’m your boyfriend, not the IRS.”

The smell of bacon mixes heavily with the pancakes Bitty made minutes earlier; the whole morning is warm with light flooding through the kitchen windows. Though his attention was mostly fixed on his laptop screen, Dex could usually sense when Nurse was coming back in from an early morning Annie’s run—something about the smell of the coffee, the way his clunky feet stomped out snow on the way in. He’d chosen to lazily feed Nurse a square of pancake once he was in range, and pull away from the code on his screen long enough to plant a kiss on Nurse’s cheek. Chowder didn’t notice until Nurse garbled an “mm, chofcorate schip” mid-chew—rather than shouting “FINE” at his fellow frogs’ cuter moments, C had taken to simply pushing the jar over to them with a grin. (Today, he nudged it into Dex’s arm with a badly-stifled giggle.)

Nursey gestures with the two coffee cups in both hands. “You say that like I don’t get you coffee at least twice a week.”

“But you’d do that anyway,” Dex says, hooking his elbow around Nurse’s to grab one of the coffee cups. Nurse snorts and mirrors the gesture, linking their arms such that both can drink from their own cups with their faces close together. It would theoretically be a rad-looking, Nordic-style toast, if the coffee wasn’t still piping hot.

“Shit,” Nursey coughs, puffing over his tongue to try and relieve the burning while Dex cackles at him. “That’s why we stopped doing that one.”

“If y’all want to keep pulling this weird Game of Thrones courtship, may I suggest feeding the pig?” Bitty says, prodding the fine jar once. For the sake of true irony, he plants the plate of bacon to its immediate left.

“You can draw me something for free, I mean you love drawing and animating It’s not a big deal if you do one only for me, it’s your passion!

Free art, it’s the best you know, just a little one for me :3″

Yes it happened a lot this week I don’t know why, maybe my smiling avatar face! Free art, let me reply to you little guy.