Meet My Invisible Friends

So like, I care, too much about engagement. Always have, probably always will. I'm almost forty, I'm not gonna become a better person at this point. I have gotten reasonably good at keeping the whining to a minimum but I am clearly in A Bad Place today because of work, real life stuff, and the added awesome stress of my parents coming up to my house to visit tomorrow which just. blarg.

And engagement for me is at an all-time low. If you're reading this and feeling any sort of guilt or responsibility - Don't! It is not on anyone to read or comment on anything else. This is a me problem. And I get that the engagement level is more reflective of the state of fandom than anything else. And that I'm making it worse by having three WIPs and a reputation for not finishing them and for putting people offside. And I know my writing is not to everyone's tastes, that's true of all writing, but I do make it even more niche by refusing to develop my writing into something tighter and better and more appealing to the masses - that's still more me problem but also I like the writing bit, I like that I'm not trying to make it better, I wouldn't enjoy that process as much as I enjoy just writing not-quite-as-well-as-I-could. Some other people enjoy improving their style, that's not me at the moment, probably because my work is so much about tightening and polishing writing styles.

These are all my problems but my percieved lack of engagement (and another me problem because I know I have some of the very best fic readers in the universe, sticking with me and taking time to leave me amazing, remarkable comments and I am thankful for that, incredibly!) pokes and prods and makes me feel shitty. And so I sit and stew in feeling a bit shit because I'm not getting billions of comments and having hour-long conversations with people about all my writing choices and the stories I choose to weave. And these are all me problems and so I bite my tongue because I don't want to come across pathetic and needy and gross (even though I am very aware, all the time, that I am).

And then I post something new and get less engagement than I'd mentally prepared for (me problem), and some of that engagement is just spam/bots (world problem) and some more of it is... shit.

If you're gonna comment on someone else's fic, having not commented but obviously read hundreds of thousands of their words, and all you have to say is how you would have written it differently. Don't. I am already aware a bunch of people do not care for the things I choose to write. That makes me sad but I would be a dickhead if I sent them messages telling them they were wrong and they must read my fics. if you read something and it's not what you wanted and it makes you sad, similarly, don't write a comment basically saying the author is wrong.

It's 400 words off being 90k and we all know I'll get there with edits. Huzzuh! Will have five little epilogues which I plan to get edited up nice and then have ready to drop one per day for five days.

Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale have finally entered into a romantic relationship, only to discover that was the easy part. Figuring out feelings and sex takes rather more work: Crowley struggles to say things out loud, while Aziraphale worries that increasingly kinky sex might somehow jeopardise their romance. What follows is a series of meals, arguments, reconciliations, confessions, and sexual misadventures as they spend their first few months together stumbling, fumbling, and ultimately finding their way to a happily ever after.

Wordcount: 46k/85k

Rating: E for sex reasons. Mind the tags, specific triggers noted at the top of individual chapters.

A/N: Thanks to Narumila and u/ModernDayKlutz for jumping on board as betas! They’ve managed to dive right into an 80k non-chronological beast of a fic and hardly even blink at the absurdity, not to mention wading through some very verbose sex scenes (as usual). Their notes and corrections have been big improvements!!

And thanks to all of you for reading! This is one of my absolute favourite chapters and it did not go in the direction I originally set out to write!

Excerpt:

“Crowley?”

Crowley responds with an incoherent sound and a tremble. 

[Once again, a tiny excerpt because everything else is too porny!]