#lsits

🔦: Did you learn anything while writing it? About yourself? About writing?

so much about writing! i mentioned before this is the first finished thing i’ve written of this length so definitely i learned a lot about like, the very basic fundamentals of writing fiction. especially about pushing through the boring (to me) sections to get through to the parts i really was excited to write. also i tried actually outlining before i started so that was new hahah and definitely something that i know now that i Need to do going forward

🎵: Did you have a playlist/piece of music that went with this story? 

omg yes i have SEVERAL playlists lol one of them is all hindi music (im south asian so it’s like 50% of what i listen to), the other one is super long but a couple specific songs that i listened to a lot throughout are: winterbreak & stayaway - muna; 8 (circle) - bon iver; forever rain - RM; tonight (i wish i was your boy) - the 1975. also this should really go without saying but so much taylor swift lmao 

i need time to finish reading & digesting (i am a extremely slow reader) so i can leave a more detailed nice comment (in ur tumblr inbox maybe bc my ao3 name is different) but what stuck out to me is like, the way you write character interactions feels very warm and grounded in these little details like ‘hannah looking at owens cards’ and ‘jamie flinches at dani swearing’, feels v human. i really enjoyed reading them. also there’s a really fun rhythm to ur prose (opening sentence of ch 2 is a gr8 line!!). like my gut feeling is to describe ur prose as elastic but i cant quite place what i mean by that yet :/

...but that’s what stands out to me immediately! hope this makes some kind of sense, & i hope ur having a nice day, night, whenever :)

I love reading works about lesbians by lesbians bc ‘Pining after ur best friend who is dating a dude she is clearly not into and also u don’t know what to do about this weirdly intense friendship you have and you kinda hate urself for it?’ that’s a lesbian experience if I ever read one!!

I’m gonna rehash my prev comment but I love how grounded and realistic it feels emotionally, the way everyone interacts w each other? I really like the dynamic of Jamie begrudgingly liking Eddie despite her best efforts, or that jamie does actually get frustrated with dani. “it sent an ugly thrill through her to imagine Dani seeing her with another girl” wormed its way into my brain bc i love reading about ugly feelings like that.

I said ur writing feels elastic and i have spent so long tryna figure how to explain it other than like, something adjacent to comedic timing? like pulling an elastic band and then it snaps back into shape. eg, ‘The message it would send: look, I don’t need you, either, not that that was remotely true’ or ‘it doesn’t feel like a confession, it feels like letting all the air out of a balloon.’ I feel like you really capture the push and pull of how jamie presents herself & builds these walls up vs like, she is v tender and emotional? loved the ‘she still feels like that hypersensitive, lonely little kid’ paragraph a lot.

This last bit is just lil details I really enjoyed for one reason or another:

- Describing ‘Saturn devouring his son’ as ‘fucked up in the kind of way jamie wants to keep looking at’

- ‘[dani] using her tongue to lick the cup clean. Jamie has to avert her eyes’

I feel like this is totally incoherent but I hope I SORTA explain my many feelings about LSITS

Omg this was such a delightful message to start my day with thank u so much. I do love how specific and yet somehow universal to gays this particular pining experience is hahaha like...i have absolutely had an lsits jamie experience myself obv and like u said it’s so.. specifically relatable LMAO why are we so prone to these weird intense romantic friendships

I’m so happy to hear u felt like all the various character dynamics felt grounded :D  that is like the #1 thing I notice and enjoy in other people’s writing, the way certain writers are able to capture all the small gritty ugly feelings that come with being a person hahah and i’m really glad i managed to somewhat do that myself in this story!! Also i think I said this already to you but i LOVE the description of my writing as “elastic”, that rly stuck with me after your first message and continues to!! ALSO also, this is probably way more than you intended to know about my own thoughts on my writing lmao, but I for some reason started really struggling with Jamie’s characterization the longer i wrote her - i was kind of starting to worry that she was becoming a featureless cypher lol - so it means a lot to hear that u felt like I captured her character well :) 

Like Dani fighting with Eddie, then JAMIE showing up and making her feel better. Spending nights at Jamie’s like “hey how can I make this subtle that im def staying here” Jamie going on dates cause she cant handle it™️ and Dani just not understanding why it upsets her that Jamie is sleeping around it must be because then she can’t have sleepovers with her right??? And when Dani stops contacting Jamie so much after she leaves like MY HEART. OH. And when Jamie gets back from her run and Dani loses her shit in a lowkey but high key way??? The headcanon-ing i did of Dani’s head during all that man.

📈: was there a clear character arc you wanted ___ to go on?

putting this under a cut because it became obscenely long im so sorry