boogie down

writing this was such a crazy labor of love, and i really appreciate everyone who has read along and shared feedback. i'm really, really proud of this piece of writing—it felt like both a continuation of themes i've always loved writing about (career-ending injury and how it changes relationships, death of a family member and grief, brudders, generational trauma) and a huge departure in terms of style and substance and my own willingness to engage with real-world issues.

it also felt really risky to share. my goal in writing this was to thoughtfully engage with the disconnect between Alexander Ovechkin's clown persona and his very sobering ties to Vladimir Putin. and i was, and still am a little, afraid that writing from his unreliable, self-serving pov would be taken as my personal endorsement of his politics.

as i've said in a couple of comments, i find willful ignorance as an emotion/defense mechanism so fascinating, and i wanted, with this fic, to write from ovi's pov—someone who is increasingly aware of his complicity in something harmful and bloody, and who is going to great lengths to justify and minimize it. i wanted to explore the outlandish self-justification and myopia it must take to ignore how your choices are hurting people, and i was also interested in the inertia that comes when you do start to accept that you've made awful, unforgivable decisions, and that people around you have aided and abetted you, and that it will take a hell of a lot of work to get out of the trap you've made for yourself.

this fic is about all of that! it is also about bodies and hockey and family and land and water and sex and repeating cycles and regret and power and tenderness. and it is also a love story :-) cheers

like why wouldn’t i want to read an essay about how this woman who makes sewing patterns i like feels about motherhood. it makes life richer.

Jesus fucking Christ this is such a PR nightmare 😭 my brandddd

your anon who was saying she was a decent dancer is underselling it LOL, she was absolutely one of the it girls of the competitive dance scene! she won The Dance Awards best dancer (really prestigious dance competition) in the mini, junior, and teen age divisions, and is still the only person to have won in all three. she was also on So You Think You Can Dance. genuinely suuuch a gorgeous and natural contemporary dancer!! I was shook at her switch to music and sharp ascension into fame tbh. she had popped out some covers on youtube back in the day, but I assumed she would work as a professional dancer or choreographer like most of these top of the line competitive dancers. she always came across like a bubbly, smart and devoted kid, so yes the version of herself that she presents to the public now is very much a contrived image to sell records, rather than who she actually is, imo

Ok very cool!!! This is great context, thank you.

Honestly the roads diverging between popstar and choreographer/professional dancer is really interesting to me…and it’s like when you are 19 and can’t yet name what’s important to you, that’s such a no-brainer. But then it’s so easy to look over at this other version of events where you chose dance and you can take on a more background role and speak however you want and post on your instagram without having a communications team and you don’t have to kiss Jake Shane’s ass and you can have friends and free time and a life like a normal 23-year-old. And if you are wired and lonely at midnight in a hotel room after your MSG concert with security detail outside your door, I feel like it would be veeeery easy to romanticize that other road you could’ve taken.

And having to pretend to be dumber than you are and like you’re happy with your mediocre record will like really eat away at you! Especially when you are used to being such a high achiever. I would imagine especially as a young woman in the music industry, where you are already talked down to and told what to do and etc., it would be a hard act to keep up.

Hmm so a shared childhood experience of competition and pushing one’s body and performing and high achieving and holding records that have yet to be broken. Potentially being abducted from one’s schooling but being naturally bright. Much to think about.

that's a good point and does make me rethink it a little—i guess i could see her being pretty realistic about her brand and understanding her role in the music industry, and how it is dependent on being both sexy and safe. because like...she wins!! she plays the game and makes it huge and collabs with morgan wallen (Get Me To God's Country) and has no moral qualms about any of it. and it's all very polished and rehearsed and she's very, very good at it. riding that conservative backswing all the way to the bank.

but (maybe) there's a slightly more hollow feel to it after the release of album #2, because she's not really taking risks or changing her sound that much, and she's working with songwriters and not really putting her back into it, and she's cultivating a fanbase that is excited for a version of her art/performance that she doesn't really feel is the best she can do, and who (maybe) she doesn't trust to come along with her if she were to evolve her sound and style of performance. i truly did kind of feel for her on the pod because she clearly came with talking points and lore and it's just like....jake shane doesn't care about that, babe! why would you expect him to. pls ask your publicist to find you a pod that cares at all about music or art or anything in the world other than himself next time.

and (rpfing HUGE! crazy style!! and really couldn't tell you why i fixated so heavily on addison rae) maybe there's a part of her that wishes that her persona was less polished and dependent on her being an ingenue, a role that will be inevitably yanked from her in her mid to late 20s. like on the pod she called herself a woman in this very tentative voice and i was like exactly!! you are an adult woman. do not let them tempt you into deifying girlhood.

yeah it’s like she was trying to turn her brain off and hang and be patient and vocal fry it up and talk about the useless monotony of his meaningless life (pertinence is THEE #1 Jake Shane shooter hater. humiliating to use the wrong word. i hate this guy.) but she was too genuinely excited to talk about her music :-/ and then she kept having to be like 🙃 that’s so true Jake!! 🙃 anyway back to why purple lace bra is about the pop industry sexualizing me.

On this podcast I got the sense she is thirsting in the desert dyinggg for someone to take her seriously and to treat her like a competent young woman who is doing things intentionally. and I’ll be honest. I really don’t know that Jack Rowden Hughes filled that gap for her!

Ummm it really depends! Both are fun in their own ways. I think that a lot of what I like about writing players with a long history together is there's a general shape of their relationship that you're drawing from, and so you're kind of stringing these visible, in many cases Iconic moments together with speculative scenes that never happened to create an accompanying narrative, but you have some idea of where they end up. Also, because they are real people you have no control over, sometimes they do insane, bizarre things over the decades that starkly diverge from canon interpretations of their character and that's honestly one of the most interesting parts of RPF to me. See: Trevor Zegras's raisin company. I couldn't make up anything that funny if I tried and he just gave it to us!!!

I also like that with a lot of teammates with a long history, there’s been so many fan interpretations of them to kind of draw from or contrast against. Like the nickeovi I wrote is so intertwined with other nickeovi other people have written and there are so many landmark gifsets and iconic moments that I'm referencing with the piece, and it's fun because it feels like I'm in conversation with slash paying homage to those fanworks a little! I think that's a neat part about writing fanfic and it makes me feel like I am part of a community. Pairings with a longer history also inherently have like resentments, disappointments, failures, things unsaid and regrets and like 😋 yum I love regret and resentment and things unsaid!!! So I think there's more I'm naturally drawn to.

And on the contrary I think the open-endedness of a willmack-esque new pairing is fun because it's more about the present, and the idea of the future and the newness of everything—they have nothing to reference in each other because they're experiencing it all for the first time and learning who the other is. I feel like the joy and terror of discovering who somebody else is and them bringing out something new in you is also fun to write but in a different way. To me, this brand of building intimacy maybe feels more repetitive and less automatically interesting to me than interpreting decades of history, so the dynamic is less specific. But I also know plenty of authors who manage to make the first fumblings of intimacy feel so special and unique and new every time! I just don't know that that's me.

Also sometimes a new set of boybestfriends stresses me out because there was a time when Dylan Strome and Connor McDavid were narratively inextricable from each other, and now they like :-/ don't talk. I think that after you watch a couple of dynasties rise and fall in hockey (& I also don't mean to obnoxiously mansplain this to you specifically btw!! i mean the royal you and I'm saying this for the folks reading who maybe are coming to Hockey RPF via willmack) things seem a lot less static.

can we talk about this for a second because for the longest time I thought that using other fics for inspiration was plagiarism. I’d read a scene and be so inspired by its setting, prose or allegory used and I would get mad I couldn’t write my own fic because it constituted as, the kids say these days, reheating someone else’s nachos.

ok dawg to preface i'm having the most insane fucking week and my nervous system is not in its optimal state. there is a world where i interpret this ask as you saying that *eye* am reheating someone else's nachos. but i'm choosing not to take it that way. feel free to clarify further if that's where you were going with this.

so. personally i reread this fic (stay the course by theundiagnosable) when i am preparing to write a first kiss scene because it is an evergreen reminder to me that it is possible to:

write elegant prose—without overwriting or showing off—that creates sensation in your body

show us in teeeeeny snippets of conversation and body language that there is tenderness and history and a power dynamic between these very lovable characters

concisely flesh out their dynamic and give readers really high, believable, specific in-setting stakes that make the tension absolutely sparkle

create such a stunning sense of place through sensory details

...in 7,900 words.

it's one of the cleanest pieces of fic i've read—you meet these new variants of william nylander and kyle dubas and are so quickly compelled by them and convinced that a) they are people and b) they want to be together and c) there are external and internal circumstances keeping them apart, and most importantly, d) you want them to be together. and it's slow, but it's also quick, and there's history and future, but it's also like two scenes, and every single sensory detail contributes to this cozy, warm, new romance feeling of tension boiling over. it's just a really fucking excellent fic.

It’s exactly as pent-up as it felt, a shaken can fizzing over into teeth tugging at lips, into Kyle leaning into William’s space, chasing the little noises that William makes, like gasps, and he’s so absurdly aware of the feeling of William’s hands in his mittens, soft on Kyle’s neck, his jaw, grasping him close like a desperate thing.

like. you're kidding.

so i don't mean that i reread it and then immediately rush to use a shaken can metaphor in every first kiss scene. to my knowledge the first kiss scenes that i have written have been under pretty different circumstances and it's never ever been my intention to take any images or details from this work because i have such incredible respect and reverence for it. and also hopefully it wouldn't fit in my work, because this story's details support its specific mood and setting and characters, and it's probably my top goal in writing to have my story's details support my setting/characters/mood.

i more mean that i use it as a reminder to myself of what's possible: that really solid, interesting romantic writing uses images and sensations that are specific to the characters, grounds us in a place that has meaning to the characters, shows us in concise ruling scenes why they care for each other and what's keeping them from going for it. and i use it to remind myself that it is worth it to take the time to write with clarity and intent and detail and rhythm. i feel the same way about kitty and levin seeing each other across the party in anna karenina. the eros that a good romance scene inspires is worth aspiring to. i'm not there yet but i'd like to get closer!!!!