#a year

Remember when I mentioned that @vioofc and I were cooking??

🔬 generation one

↳ rosie bones

i have a CRAZY ASS headcannon for rosie and im super excited for it! our girl is starting out on a blank lot with no funds, and think of her as the new circe: her only plans are getting rich, being a world famous scientist and convincing some poor fool to marry her and become her lifetime test subject (at least until they give out)

lifetime wish: scientific specialist

traits: neurotic, hot-headed, genius, green thumb, computer whiz

likes: sushi, indie, purple

star sign: aquarius

on rainy days like

ON YOUR PAGE.

IF I DONT SEE IT

YOURE ASSUMED UNDERAGE.

WIP Wednesday

Y'all! We are halfway done with the countdown, which is hard to believe, and some of the best is still to come, which I am so excited about! To celebrate this milestone, I figured I'd do a little behind-the-scenes tour of i do not regret you, my collab with @mooncello. This fic has been such a labor of love and I think it deserves a spotlight!

First of all, as I said in a recent wipsday post, Heath and I started dreaming up this little world A YEAR AGO. How does one do that exactly? Data.

Once we committed to the idea, Heath and I are both such perfectionists that we knew we couldn't wait on the prompts reveal to make the highest quality content. So, I made a frickin' spreadsheet. Yes, that's right. I went through ALL NINE YEARS of previous prompts (or as many as I could find) so we could most accurately predict what prompts *might* show up.

Exhibit A (Am I extra? Always. Did Heath embrace it? Of course.)

Here is what we discovered, in case you are curious.

Prompts that show up every year include: WLW, Angst, Sideships, and AU

Prompts variations that show up every year: vamp references (bleed, teeth, fangs, bite, etc); food references (dinner, sour, sweet, cake, hunger, cooking/baking, etc.) -> this one often shows up more than once per year; music inspired (lyrics, music, song, musicians, etc); snow/holiday inspired

Finally, these don't show up every year, but they showed up enough that they were worth noting: florals, fluff, family, wings, and stars.

With that in mind, Heath and I tossed around potential AUs where we could easily hit as many of these prompts as possible. Ultimately, we landed on our band AU because any prompts we couldn't predict could be met with song/album titles, lyrics, or art (celebrities are known for their interesting fashion choices and I could figure it out with the dolls).

FAST FORWARD TO MARCH:

Heath begins plotting our AU and proceeds to send me pages (and pages and pages) of backstory. (PAGES, y'all.) After reading a full novel before a single tweet was born, I loved the idea.

Exhibit B (Is Heath extra? Also yes. Was I super into it? Always.)

So, Heath starts drafting and I begin the long and arduous process of making dolls based on the extensive cast of characters needed. (I learned my lesson the HARD WAY last year that you cannot make that many dolls in just one month.)

By April, I'd finished the first doll: Trixie. Once she was made, we used her to determine several other characters' felt tones.

Exhibits C (Did I buy every skin tone adjacent felt I could find at every fabric store I knew? Yes.)

It took me until October to finish making all the dolls, mostly because of Niall. While I now machine sew almost the entire doll (minus the arms and head), it took a few weeks to embroider all of Niall's tats and then hand sew each body part so the tats all lined up perfectly.

Exhibit D (Enjoy the sneak peek of Penny and Shep!)

I should be clear that the whole time I was making dolls, I was also working on clothing. Heath had a blast sending me inspiration images that looked, quite frankly, daunting AF. And I had an even bigger blast sending progress shots being like, "nailed it!"

Exhibit E (EVERY BEAD AND SEQUIN IS HAND SEWN Y'ALL!)

FAST FORWARD TO OCTOBER:

At this point, Heath is largely done drafting the main AU (tweets and texts) and we've roped in @thewholelemon as a beta. We've also roped in @artsyunderstudy to make art (check out her amazing Tour Poster here!), @whatevertheweather for the killer soundtrack to our AU (I have not stopped listening to these playlists since they dropped!), and @emeryhall to write the song lyrics for Baz's love song to Simon (those are coming so soon but here's a sneak peak!).

Now it's time to start assembling everything. Heath and I spent weeks figuring out what platforms to use to generate the tweets and texts. In the end, nothing was exactly what we wanted, so I NEED you to know that many of these are made in Canva one. by. one. I also had to start photographing everything.

Exhibit F (Of course I forgot to take a real picture of the doll shoot so have this BeReal. lol)

FAST FORWARD TO OCTOBER 25th:

The prompts are finally released. Heath has a minor panic attack that we've done all this work to not fit the prompts. After telling them to take a few deep breaths and calm the f*ck down, we rally our creativity and start the long process of matching content to prompts. At this stage, we ended up planning like 7 more doll shoots (which means SO many more tiny outfits). Heath also came up with a whole host of in-universe supplemental content in order to meet all the prompts, even if it didn't occur in the body of our main fic. (There is SO MUCH bonus content y'all.)

Exhibit G (More sexy spreadsheets? Yes. Heath and I are nerds.)

Anyway, as silly as a social media AU may seem, this one---given all the evidence---has been painstakingly crafted to be the best of the best. If you aren't already reading it, I encourage you to do so. It is a love letter to this fandom, and every molecule of our beings was poured into making it as amazing as it is.

You can find @mooncello's smau masterpost here (the link above is for the accessible version on ao3). You can find my masterpost of every single thing (fic, art, and in-universe bonus content) here.

peace, love, metal, and happy coc!