#december posting

Summary

Kim, Chay, and a world of difference between them, but also no space at all.

[a Shape of Water AU, no knowledge of the movie required]

; ; ;

aka a million years ago, @crescentlyautumn asked for a reverse wuju bakery AU, I naturally went "of course, shape of water AU," and then this slowly manifested.

so! 5k of monsterfucker kimchay where they're insufferably adorable :D

Nudging the tray with the last slice over to Steve, Bucky gets up and starts putting dishes in the sink.  

“No,” Steve says.  “Hey, no.  Let me do that,”

“Ha!” Bucky snorts.  “No guest of mine does dishes.  Geez, my mom’d skin me.”

“Yeah?” Steve counters.  “Well my Ma’d skin me if I let my host do the cleaning.”

“Sounds like we should get the two of them together,” Bucky says, and Steve’s bright smile fades, sadness pulling at the edges.

“Shit,” Bucky says.  “I’m sorry.”

Shrugging, Steve takes his plate and sets it in the sink, hip-checking Bucky aside.  

“I..fogot,” Bucky says.  “I forgot you’re Captain America.”

Steve turns, his eyes piercing as he stares at Bucky.  Slowly, the expression on his face melts from grief and sadness into something warm and brilliant; something real.  Bucky’s stomach swoops with warmth to have all that sunshine directed at him.

“That might be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me this century,” Steve says.  It leaves Bucky feeling caught out.

if you want to incorporate more humor into your writing, what you really want to practice is timing. writing humor is rarely about writing an individual funny line-- you don't remember the punchline because of the line itself, you remember the punchline because of everything else that came before it. a punchline without a proper build up or proper timing is just a non-sequitur.

so, when writing a humor fic, a good thing to remember is that the punchline comes last. you can't have your funniest line at the start of your story. think of it like action-- if your first fight is the boss fight, any fight of lower stakes or difficulty that follows is going to feel lackluster in comparison. you want your story and your jokes to build to the final line, or else you'll step on the joke and lose its impact.

and this does take practice! putting the joke at the end doesn't always feel 'natural' at first, learning how to structure and build a humor story is a skill the same as learning how to do it for any other genre. personally, i'd also say humor is something that really comes out in the editing stage more than the initial drafts-- humor is very reliant on timing and rhythm, and it's hard to find and stick to a story's pacing when you're still working on the overall story structure. i mean, this sort of thing tends to go for any sort of writing, but nothing makes humor fall flat faster than wonky pacing and so (for me at least) editing is the stage where the story goes from "oh, haha" to actually funny.

(i also bring this up because fandom has a lot of jokes about not editing a finished draft before posting-- and like, totally feel you, i'm not huge on editing after i reach the end of the draft. however, i have noticed in fic circles where people will get caught up on and sometimes even discouraged by trying to be funny in the fic larva stages when the framework to be funny just isn't there yet. personally, i highlight the humor lines i'm unsure about and move on. then, when the fic's closer to 90% done or so, it's much easier to skim the overall story and cut/format/refine/etc any jokes because they're already highlighted for easy finding.)

another thing to keep in mind is that humor as a writing device is often used to release tension. i would say this is a large part of why humor often falls very naturally into scene transitions; that natural release of tension is very useful as an 'end bracket' to a scene while also setting up the audience to be freshly wound up again. this feature is useful for stories aiming for a more light-hearted tone overall, but in general stories often incorporate humor as a way of controlling a story's pacing so that the tension doesn't get too tight too fast. even if a punchline isn't your end goal, you're still building up to something and it's really helpful to edit your humorous lines by asking "does this fit with my scene/story's pacing, or is it disruptive to my buildup?"

it doesn't really matter how funny an individual line might be on its own-- if its disruptive to the story's overall flow, the joke's effect is going to come off as strained and forced. because humor is really an exercise in structure and story rhythm, the most ineffective way to study humor is to fixate on the individual jokes you remember in your favorite stories-- instead look for the threads that came before the joke that made it memorable, and then practice doing that in your own writing. usually when humor falls flat in a story, it's because either the specific joke pops out of nowhere (missing the build-up) or the joke is in the wrong spot in the story (disruptive, breaks reader immersion). sometimes the fix is as easy as reshuffling a few lines, other times it's a matter of adding more to the build up, or even cutting it altogether so that something else packs a bigger punch.

The Dating Scheme

I've been trying to get back into painting this year, watercolors in particular. I feel extremely rusty on them, so most of my painting has been stuff like stain glass windows or other very geometric sectioning of the paper as I remember how to mix colors and smush them around, but I'm really pleased with how this lil guy came out, I love that he looks like a friend coming to say hello.

used a technique called 'accidental watercolor', which is where you first soak the paper and blob 3-4 colors on it, then decide what you want to paint over it. for example, this is my sketch over the first stage of painting;

one of my favorite photos I took when I visited Spain back in May this year 🥰 this is a photo from inside Sagrada Família, which is an extraordinarily gorgeous church in Barcelona. I could gush for hours about how much thought and care and ART went into building this church, it's amazing. but to keep this post short-- the east windows are the cool toned blues, greens, and purples reminiscent of the cool light Barcelona gets in the morning, and the west side windows are the brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows of its sunsets. plus, Gaudi was deeply inspired by nature, so the interior columns and ceiling are very reminiscent of trees and light coming through the canopies;