#btfg

Awww, thank you so much for this sweet message, Nonny. 🥹🥰💖

It’s looking like this will be the plan. I have a few ideas for different little snippets from their Christmases at the cabin and I’m just hoping my brain-finger connection cooperates with me when I actually go to try to write them out. But knowing people are excited about seeing more from this universe is definitely helpful so I really appreciate your kind words of encouragement. ❤️❤️❤️

Hey there, Nonny! 💖

Actually, I did!! It’s called Where The Embers Burn (We Will Always Be). It’s just a short one-shot, a tag of sorts that’s set 15 years after BTFG that brings the story of the boys and the cabin full-circle. It was commissioned for a fundraising drive back in 2020 to help the Black Lives Matter movement.

If you’re meaning a longer multi-chapter sequel, well…it isn’t currently in my upcoming plans, but never say never. I seem to be in the mood for sequels recently, lol. And I know I dropped a few nuggets in the tag of some of the big life events that happened at the cabin over the years, so I could conceivably go back and delve into one or several of those in more depth.

Hey Nonny!! ❤️

8. Ok, so I’m going all the way back to the beginning for this one. This is from chapter 3 of By The Firelight’s Glow. And I’m proud of it for 2 reasons: first, because I think it’s just a beautifully real moment of vulnerability and love between 2 people. And second, because this was the very moment that I understood what that story actually was. It started as a way for me to make sense of something painful in my own life. Therapy through art and all that. But this scene showed me how much more it could be, how it was, and should be, about them. And it’s when I let go of the reigns and let the boys tell me THEIR story. I was simply following their lead and trying to keep up for the last 75k words or so.

After what seemed like hours but was probably only minutes, Armie’s voice broke the silence. “You do this thing with your hands, when you get nervous or overwhelmed. You curl and uncurl your fingers slowly, digging your nails into your palms. Or when you’re deep in thought, you run your thumb across your bottom lip slowly. When you’re excited, you literally cannot stop yourself from bouncing. And when you’re upset, you curl your whole body in on itself, making yourself into this tight ball of angst. You have three distinct laughs. There’s the one where you’re uncomfortable with praise and being self-deprecating that you do during public appearances. Then there’s your ‘I’m bored but I was taught to be polite’ laugh that you sometimes use during work functions when you’re forced to mingle and network when you’d rather be dancing. But your real laugh, the one very few people ever hear, is like sunshine exploding all over the sky on a rainy day, blinding, mesmerizing…beautiful.” Timmy had slowly turned to look at him as he spoke, but Armie’s gazed remained fixed straight ahead. He takes a deep breath before continuing. “It occurred to me at some point that I don’t know these things about any of my other friends. I figured it was because we spent so much time together filming and then the press tour, just us, that this type of close intimacy was bound to happen, and it was just normal, our normal, and screw everyone else.”

Timmy tried to keep his breathing steady as he listened. He had so many emotions wrestling with each other, each one trying to come to the surface and overwhelm the others; fear, relief, love, guilt, hope. He remained silent as he sensed Armie had more to say.

Armie closed his eyes and spoke again, even softer now. “I lied before. I didn’t kiss you because I was drunk. I wasn’t even that drunk. I mean, my inhibitions may have been lowered, but I knew what I was doing. I just…”, he paused, searching for the right words, “When you told me you’d wanted to kiss me, not Oliver but me, something finally snapped in me, something that’s been there for a long time and felt right, and I gave in to something I hadn’t realized I wanted so badly until you spoke it out loud.” At this, he finally turned to face Timmy, looking straight through his eyes and into his soul. “Of course it meant something. It meant everything.”

Hey all! So here’s the deal - I had planned to have the next chapter of Irish Christmas ready to post by like mid-afternoon today, but it’s very doubtful that will happen. I woke up with a throbbing headache which still hasn’t gone away, so it’s made any actual writing pretty impossible so far this morning/afternoon. I do still hope to finish it today at some point, but it might not be ready to post until late tonight or even tomorrow morning. I hope you can forgive me but I promise you’ll enjoy some romantic Charmie Christmas-y goodness whenever I do get it posted. And hopefully the following chapter will be up by Sunday-Monday.

And in the meantime, if you’re still craving a bit of holiday cheer, if I could do a bit a shameless self-promotion, I have written a few other fics that have winter/Christmas as the theme, so if you haven’t already read them (or even if you have and might want to revisit them), here are my other Christmas fics:

By The Firelight’s Glow and the sequel Where The Embers Burn (We Will Always Be)

A Very Merry Christmas Surprise

All I Want For Christmas Is You

Hey Nonny! 😊

Aww, that makes me so happy to know you’re reading that fic! 🥰🥰🥰 I was just saying to a friend last night how much that story means to me, and how the overwhelming response I got from it was pretty much the reason I came out from lurking and joined the fandom for real. So it’s very special to me. I really hope you enjoy it! 💖

As for pictures, before I started writing, I did do a google image search for cabins to get an idea of how to visualize the space they were in (since I’m from Florida and we don’t have log cabins here, and no real winter, either). Unfortunately, I didn’t save the exact ones I used, but I just did another quick search, and these are at least similar to the ones I had been going off of at the time.

And I have, in the past, mentioned that if anyone ever wanted to make some fanart for that story, I would be ecstatic because I’d love to have a visual companion for it. But so far no one has taken me up on that. 😔 But looking through my pic folders, this is basically how I imagine BTFG Armie and Timmy to look like.

Maybe Armie with a little less scruff (I do think at some point he shaves completely, iirc), but that’s the overall aesthetic for how I see them in that story.