#aboutfrisson

In writing Frisson, I decided to challenge myself. Because I love pain. If it isn't obvious. "But this was supposed to be corn with plot!" You say to me--- "Hush, I am cooking a delicious meal" I reply.

And every meal needs a recipe. Right? So like a bad dom, I've given myself a set of guidelines to live by, 24/7 while dealing with writing Frisson. It helps me keep my mind off... other things.

--- Own every mistake and make it work. This includes artwork I draw as concept/companion material. If I make a mistake, such as forgetting a prop, changing a characters appearance, moving the cast from a location I wanted to remain in, I have to write myself out of it instead of editting it out. Why? Because I'm insane. But surprisingly, it's led me to some absolutely incredible results. Once the first draft is posted, its my canon. After that, I can only add or elaborate. If you see a mistake in Frisson, such as a prop that's disappeared-- being most common-- POINT IT OUT! Seriously. I will thank you and you may be surprised in the result.

--- Write what you are good at. I used to write for the Naruto fandom, Warrior Cats and Pokemon when I was younger. Left 4 Dead in its self is a... humorous canon to explore. I love 'crackfics', especially ones with real depth. Naruto feels like a crackfiction that rips your soul out most of the time (I know people find it derivitive these days but I still appreciate it as an influence in my art). So I told myself; I want angst, I want feels. But I know 'crack'. So I'm going to lean into that. "Ellis and Nick do BDSM and Nick is the bottom" is a fucking cracked out plotline in and of it's self, but some of the other moments I have planned, some of the plot-points I intend to take, inspite of the tone of the fic, would 100% be a crackfic in another setting. I think this odd mix of intensity and levity encapsulates the feeling I get when I write most of all.

--- Stick to the script. I've never outlined before. By the end of the week, Frisson will have a completed outline. When the arcs I have planned are completed in the outline, it is my rule that I write all of Frisson before I begin work on Cynefin or Monachopsis (which takes place at the same time as Frisson). If I continue to script beyond the current book I am working on, I feel I will get lost in the script and also that I may loose key character interactions and building. I want the pacing to be good, for myself and others. I have a lot of information I want to put in this. If I continue to add to Frisson past the planned script, it could become convoluted. I want to honor it, treasure it, and experience it as much as I want to read it when it's done.

--- Don't overwrite it. I have a tendency to become obsessed with the numbers- word count specifically. I once heard that 100K is the average size of an elementary school book and every since I felt the only way to prove myself as a mature writer is to surpass 100K before I even read the true meat of my plot. That is... insane logic. I didn't have alot of encouragement when I began my craft oh god, like 15 fucking years ago. Often this led my projects to be rambling, scattered, unfocused, jammed with side plots and 2D characters (see Dance with the Devil). It didn't work. It was stupid. Frisson doesn't need anymore than what it needs. It's length will be decided on what it has to offer, not a preconcieved notion of appropriate wordcount for a writer of my caliber.

--- When it's done, its done. I have a hard time accepting last words in a scene. I often find myself adding more and more, thinking that what I have written isn't compelling enough or it needs more suspense. Now, when I write my final line of a scene, instead of staring at it for 15 minutes and adding 40-80 more words, I copy it, post it on ao3, and then edit any grammar mistakes there. If you read it within minutes of uploading, you may find some differences in your second read through, because I have changed repeated words or adjusted sentence structure slightly for flow, but never will I add completely new content without pointing it out. When it's done, its done. Add it to the next one.

--- Everyone gets a good ending. I keep this goal in mind the entire time because it is my focus to write an emotionally driven story (this was supposed to be corn, am I demi? I might be demi.) and to put the characters through a variety of emotional and physical turmoil and conflict. I have added in character flaws, back story, motivations and feelings that are inherently toxic, and I have intent to make the other characters' reactions to those traits realistic and believable. That will lead them to hurt each other, they are flawed people, and mistakes will be made. But I do not want anyone to suffer needlessly with no resolution. So, in order to maintain my ability to give each of them a climatic end that fulfills their individual arc, the ending is the driving force behind all of the choices I make as a writer, and this limit prevents me from doing what I would consider irrepairable damage to them, in the most realistic way possible. I have a tendency to be overdramatic (see my original novel, The Dragonlord, wherein one person literally destroys an entire continent simply because one law upsets them), so keeping a good hand on the reins is important to me. A good ending is a satisfying one for me, but it doesn't mean I will take the fic out of it's tone to give them all 'happy' endings.

--- Write every. single. damn. day. even if it kills you. << this is self explanitory. I've reached an age where I need to finish a longform work or die trying, for myself. This is it. This is the one I want to write just for me. I'm glad you're all here with me.

Frisson (The Ties That Bind Us) is the first part in a 3 part series, encompassing what I could consider to be a single work. It is, at its core, only the beginning.

The series it's self also contains several companion materials. Below I will outline the names of each material, and the meaning behind the name that was chosen.

Synchroncity; the simultaneous occurence of events which appear related but have no discernible connection (The Choices We Made That Day) ----

---- the entire thought behind Frisson and its accompanying works is this; choices. We all make choices in a finite web that we call life and those choices define us as human. Once the plot of Frisson began to take root in my mind, it was clear that all of the actions taken, all of the words said, all of the paths followed, were choices my characters made that brought them to a single end, but for each of them, the day they made the choice that brought them together was different. It's not until we see the entire span of their story can we pinpoint it's exact beginning and end.

Frisson; a sudden feeling of excitement or fear, especially when you think something is about to happen (The Ties That Bind Us) ----

---- The titular work of this post, it was originally intended to be completely self indulgent smut. However, somewhere along the way, the lines got crossed, choices were made, and I manifested something far deeper than intended. As I was writing the first chapters, I meant to only name it (The Ties That Bind Us), however while searching for another word for 'anticipation' I came across the definition for Frisson. I became obsessed with the idea, that feeling, being on the edge of your seat, unsure whether to be afraid or enthralled, and it felt in many ways the definition of firsts, of lust, of desire, of love, of loss, and all of those feelings were things I wanted to portray in this text.

Cynefin; the environment in which you live and are naturally accustomed to (The Bonds That Divide Us) ----

---- Cynefin is a Welsh word, and its more of a concept than a word, but I did my best to create a definition that did it justice without being too philosophical. It means 'something familiar, almost haunting' like a memory or nostalgia. While developing Frisson, I realized the events that I wanted to take place would be far more impactful if spread between several encapsulated arcs, and I began to feel out the idea of a further series, wherein searches brought me to that silly part of pinterest that defines strange and unusual words in interesting ways. Cynefin was one of those words, and the idea of it haunting you, while also being something you know, was entirely the feeling I believe the mid-point of this work should have.

Nepenthe; something that makes you forget grief or sorrow (The Truth That Finds Us) ----

---- Nepenthe was another one of those words that is more of a feeling than a definable piece of grammar. As the final entry in the main series of this work, I felt that sense of finality should be coupled with the bittersweetness of relief, which I hope to give to my readers as well as the characters I, and hopefully you, have come to love in spite of their deviance from the canon depiction.

Monachopsis; the persisten and unwelcome feeling of being out of place (Your Time With Us) ----

---- My first intended companion material, this will be a re-tread along the same path as Frisson, following the perspective of another highly important but off-screen character as they navigate toward joining the larger group. It was incredibly important to me that this body of text reflect both feelings of isolation as well as the depth of fear that takes over one whom is forced into a place they don't belong.

Elysian; relating to or characteristic of paradise (What Lies In Us) ----

---- As much as I would love to say anything about Elysian, it is imperitive I say very little here, other than this will be the most original entry in the companion series in terms of perspective.

Wanderlust; the incredible, uncontrollable urge to explore the world around you (The Friends We Made Along The Way) ----

---- Entirely based in character building and comedic bonding, Wanderlust follows a side-quest of events from the perspective of a character in which the entire group finds insufferable up until their whimsy finds it's way into the niche hearts and minds of the survivors. As tragic as Synchroncity is, I felt levity was also of great interest, and I look forward to the adventure I have planned for the cast in this installment.

Frisson is both going to last forever in my heart and be a flash in the pan of a greater universe that I am falling in love with. I hope you do too.

As a transgender person, I did not get to have the gay male experience growing up, dating, and not even now as an adult. It's something I've always craved, to be seen, recognized by those whom I'm attracted to, to have the same thoughts and memories, to relate.

But I was raised on a farm and only when extra hands were needed did they ask me to participate in 'men's chores'. Otherwise I was thought to be mindful of my volume, speak little and less (only when spoken to), to do all the cleaning, the cooking, the picking up, for everyone. They encouraged me to do dance and ride horses, to braid my hair and wear skirts, to be afraid of sexuality at any turn because I should be pure--- get a load of that, freaks. Me, pure? Hardly.

But I wasn't like the gay boys in town, I couldn't get any of them to look at me and instead locked loyally into a four year abusive relationship with a woman who called us 'lesbians'. I've been going by he/him since I was eleven. I didn't want to do my hair or nails or make up, participate in theatre or drama, I didn't want to watch all the 'fandom' shows where people dreamed of a masc one and a fem one kissing. My favorite past time was Naruto. I loved to go out with the 4x4 in the mud. I enjoyed fishing even though my father would never take me. The boys I wanted were not the thin, demure, queeny ones I knew and the masculine ones that I did want had no time for me.

But I found as they reeled me into their little queer spaces because I was the only one with a voice loud enough to stop people when they slurred at us, that fanfiction provided a niche in my life I could not fill on my own. The gay male experience. Lifetimes I could live in and fall in love with where I could be solely me--- not trans, not less than--- just what I was meant to be. I could think and feel and see for me.

But I began to notice a pattern of feminine behavior inside the fics I was experiencing. Oh, how that made me so highly dysphoric. I love women, I surrounded myself with them at all moments until the male gender became almost alien, but it was not how I saw myself, it wasn't the experiences I wanted to ghost over the shoulder and see. So I started looking harder for queer media, consuming anything with an L, a G, a B, or a Q on it--- its hard to approach your own identity when you are at odds with it.

I am supposed to be proud of being transgender.

I am not. Just lonely.

It was this loneliness that brought me to read some westerns, Brokeback Mountain in particular and in that, there was no woman or man, there were two people in love, sometimes with preferences but mostly for fucking each other, regardless of what that meant and it scared them, the fear was real and palpable and I could feel it too, just as much in my own viens about my own identified lack-of-a-cock. And I did wonder, could I ever get someone to love me so deeply, as what I saw in these fictious pages?

Surely, all of it had to be fantasy. Love couldn't be real like that.

I left fiction behind for many years. Got almost stuck up about it, like 'you read fanfiction? isn't that just for glitter-queers?' but it wasn't, it was also for me, and when I did find that occasional piece where the author was either obviously of the opposite gender or really understood what it meant for men to love each other, oh yes then I was in heaven. It wasn't about self insert, it was about vicarious living and people experiencing the things that I had always wished I could see in my real life, it was about the salacious, the exhilirating trust between author and reader, the darkness and twisted cunning, it was the way the author strung me wherein I fell so madly in love with them.

I am in love with every author I read. They have given in me, a part of themselves which is most delicate.

And like some uncanny wight come to steal all the world's delights, I like to crush that delicate thing, I like to writhe it and find the sorrows and the pains and drink them entirely. Perhaps it was this way that I prefer violence over fucking that I got myself most comfortable in the kink community, where consent was sexy but everything else we did would probably get us arrested if seen by the wrong party, being that kind of fucking was not virtuous or fair or demure or kind, not like how my puritanical family had raised me.

That was the only place I've ever been he/him'd without correcting. Where gay men looked at me like I was snack-worthy. And yet still, I felt alone.

I felt alone because yes as much as I do love the harsher, the more intense, the thicker, more muscular kind of romance, I still did want someone to love me tenderly. In the gentle way that only love can be. In the way a man would love me. But no one seems to understand the difference between gentleness and feminitity.

Maybe this is not a safe place for me to say it, but I love being a man. I love being a man because I was forced to be a woman. I find women beautiful, exciting, powerful. The female form is exquisite in all iterations and conentations and for years I forced myself only in which to date them because society had at least, as it had conditioned me, conditioned them to be more understanding, open, in my confidence.

It took me 22 years to work up the balls to date a man and show him who I really am. We broke up recently, mostly for my health, but of his choice too as he was worried what I would do if he were to leave. It was the only time I think, he treated me weak. This was not a gay man, and he did not date me as a man would date another man, it was not what I was looking for so desperately, but I did find some perspective in it, what I wanted and what I didn't. He found my masculinity alluring, as do many that date within the trans-community, but he did not fetishize or pestalize me. He just accepted it, told me he wanted me, and moved on. It was simplistic.

That's what I wanted. The simplicity of being. Seven years, he stood up for me. I stood up for him. We were equals. He let me provide and he provided for my family, we were partners. Friends, even.

I will never lose him, or the parts I gained in my knowing.

But I lost all my gay friends for dating a straight man. The only one who would look at me. How lonely it was, to be gay in a sea of unwanting among my own community.

Even now, I am outcast and I find myself turning back to the fiction which once discovered me.

And finding the same faults which used to haunt in me.

Make me ask questions; "Am I really a man? Or just turned on by this activity between two of them?"

I worried.

I fretted.

I consumed and confused.

I was very close to going back on my identity.

Because why would I, find these things I've never experienced yet are so personal to me, truly alluring if it weren't for the objectification of these characters bodies, their minds, their orientations, for my own gloriously selfish purposes?

Then I remember being thirteen. How it was such a joke to see Sasuke and Naruto kiss on screen. How much their friendship meant to eachother, how much they would die for eachother, even when there was romance to distract them, they never lost focus on what that bond meant--- it wasn't about touching eachother, it was about the closeness, the understanding of someone who would only know you and know you completely, how that burned into hate or turned into passion, that's when I remembered---

Why being gay was so important to me.

If you see me calling myself bisexual, then you know those people accepted me. If you see me calling myself a kinkster, then you know those people accepted me. When I say I still love him for all the pain we caused eachother in our brokenness, then you know I found the one which burned as brightly as the sun, for him, for me, for us.

this is something I've been asking myself lately.

Is it fanfiction? The original shell is Left4Dead. And I would say, still? Yes. The characters, the setting, the canon, it's just a distorted version of itself, at the core. But it is a shell, and I continue to remind myself that. It's a base, it's a mold, a model I can sculpt. I am using it like... a prompt.

But will it remain that way? No, probably not. I have a lot of ideas, I have a lot of headcanons, I have a lot of feelings. Nick is a good suit to wear for basically all of my mental illness, and I enjoy torturing him, and taking care of him. It's not his usual role, and his backstory is entirely original due to the role reversal and certain tropes I chose for him. Ellis... Ellis is not version of himself the canon would recognize, but still the same person, like an actor taking on a different role, and I enjoy working with his naivety and visciousness. It reminds me of youth in my own way. Rochelle, Coach, Keith, the rest of the cast, they're all getting new outfits to wear, metaphorically. The role reversal I decided on is thematic in nature, it exists in order to turn the canon on it's head and mess with it like a pile of legos, like building blocks, like paint that I can touch with my own brush.

It is to be expected that the reception of this work as fanfiction may be bland, but I hope those of you who have really invested into the story, really sunk your teeth in, are enjoying it's original nature.

It was never my intention to interpret the canon, but instead to pay homage to where my inspiration in dystopian fiction started.

so at this point in the fic, some -changes- have occurred in the canon, and perhaps it is my desire more than yours to explore a few questions, but here are my answers if your brain feels the need to be so rotten; 

(there be spoilers below)

--- Why did I write it?

To be completely honest, I just left my relationship of 7 years. It consumed most of my 20s. I thought it would be forever and I was also the one who ended it. It was my introduction into the kink and polyam world, and there were a lot of things I did wrong, a lot of things my partners did wrong, and a lot of growing I had to do. I made and lost friends, I added and removed lovers, I hopped from apartment to apartment, situation to situation, crisis to crisis, for years. The last decade of my life will never not be colored by that place I found myself in.

He was not abusive, or bad, or mean in anyway. He was actually just too kind to push lil ol broken me away and I struggled a lot clinging to the idea of something that would never exist. We are still friends-- he's actually my only irl friend-- and there are not many ways for me to vent my feelings without showing it off to the world at large, and people who know him. So instead, I retreated to the anonymity of fanfiction, and subjected all of you to my trauma.

Ellis's issues with obsession are my issues with obsession, Nick's inability to reconcile his divorce is my inability to release a relationship that lasted far too long, Rochelle's naivety of her meddling in other people's problems is my own nosiness showing through, Coach's staunch withdrawn attitude is my own self isolation. Ellis is a bad dom because I had bad doms, Nick makes poor decisions for his own safety because I made poor decisions in moments that felt like survival, Rochelle's chipper attitude in the face of danger is my own mask to wear, Coach's missteps in social situations is my own awkwardness. Each of them has a part of me, in their backstories, in their mannerisms, in their quirks, in their falts and in their triumphs.

When I write Frisson, I feel like I am at home. It may be a broken home, a sad home, a bittersweet home, a home haunted by the ghosts of memories, a home of friends I hurt, a home of amends I made, but nontheless, it is a home, and it is mine.

The thing is, I know how it'll end. I know how they will fix it. I know how they will come back from this. And... I know that as they work through it, I will work through it too. I will come back from this.

Together, we survive.

---What is an 'Interlude'?

An interlude is a scene that takes place in the same time and space as the primary text, but may follow an uncommon perspective, be unrelated to the A, B & C plot, be centered away from our main characters or otherwise is a scene that I wanted to include but could not fit in any other organic sense. Alternatively, the scene may follow a different, less internalized writing style, wherein the reader is getting less of the character's internalized thoughts, or only the most important moments. Many interludes contain character building moments that would sometimes detract from the primary storyline due to their more lighthearted nature, and can thusly be skipped. Some interludes contain only dialogue, and it is up to the reader to understand the interaction based in context clues.