bitter / sweet

Looooove this series, one of my favorites! Everyone should read, social media AU lovers and avoiders alike. Thank you!

decide...... if only...... fic ideas come to me like eye-stinging wisps of debris flitting thru the wind. two of my longest fics are based on a single typo and a bad pun that I had no plans to write. i wish i had more agency in this process.

lots of talking but appalling communication. i do like a bit of pain but i also make an effort to be funny and I laugh at my own jokes. agony is sharper when you compare it with levity, and vice versa :)

This is an old fic of mine and it’s drarry, but my quasi retelling of the calypso section of the odyssey. christopher nolan WHO! I love the lighthouse. i love the little seabird.

i just read get gone by geniflux. it was perfect. the last chapter is ilya, shane, yuna, and david involved in a four-way tense horrible double dinner date fight. i would propose marriage to that chapter if i could.

my least read heated rivalry child: the domovoy. just bc the main pairing is ilya/sasha and shane isn't in it doesn't mean it isn't a hollanov fic!!!

anyway my answer is social media AUs. this one i read yesterday is perfect.

i'm better at editing my own writing, killing darlings, etc. all of my beta readers live in my head like a greek chorus and sometimes when i read a line back i think of exactly how a beta reader would change it/delete it. and then i say to myself who am i to argue with this voice in my head and make the change.

*(even if they have only ever written one fic for a fandom I read, even if they wrote it 10 years ago, even if they clog my inbox with the most random pairing for the most random media I’ve never heard of in my life for years… it takes a LOT for me to unsubscribe! I live in eternal hope!)

Hayden goes to therapy at Jackie’s behest (he can’t stop having Shane sex dreams; he tells Jackie he “can’t sleep”). He sees a very Freudian PhD psychologist who charges $1000/hour and has never heard of a copay (I don’t know how mental health care works in Canada but for the purposes of this fic there are psychologists practicing out of sumptuous home offices who don’t take insurance in Montreal!!!). The fic is told via the notes of Hayden’s doctor. Every chapter recounts a session where they discuss his dreams, home life, and relationship with Shane. Per Dr. Montreal, Hayden is DEEP in the phallic stage of his psychosexual development; see: the hockey stick, the expression of the id via brutal physical sports. Another 10,000 words on how Hayden’s recurring dream about getting Shane pregnant is definitely actually about his latent attraction to his own mother. Hayden’s dreams persist, get weirder. Hayden has a dream that he and Shane are loons (mated for life) protecting their nest and baby egg from bald eagles who all wear Boston Raiders jerseys. In the next dream their baby is riding on Shane’s back while they paddle around the lake together. In the last chapter, by complete happenstance, Dr. Montreal runs into Ilya Rozanov at the drug store (unbeknownst to anyone else he is on his way to Shane’s fuck apartment). Ilya casually says something so incisive to Dr. Montreal that the psychologist pulls his car over on the drive home and calls his old supervisor, suddenly doubting everything he thought he knew about the field of psychoanalysis.

Heated rivalry is the only fandom I’ve been feral about that’s based on a visual medium, so I’d say I have the most solid image of those characters of anything I’ve read/written, but even the very real faces of those actors get a little smudged when I’m reading and especially when I’m writing. Words definitely have texture and shape to me, but written language occupies a very different plane in my mind than sight. What I “picture” when I read and write is more like the feeling I get from the character/place/etc that’s described.