could you share the director's cut of digging for orchids?
i have never rewritten a fic so many times as i did with DFO. there are some chapters that went through six revisions. i just kept getting it wrong.
so while i was reading tgcf, i was already coming up with fic ideas. for some reason my first fic idea was an au where hua cheng is a hospice nurse. i was just really into the emotional fuckery and whump of book 4. after revising it three or four times i realized there was just something about it that wasn't working and decided to write something a little more light-hearted.
(i still want to finish and post the hospice au. it's on the list! [it's xie lian's father who is in hospice care, and xie lian is dealing with daddy issues alongside a mounting crush on the in-house hospice nurse])
anyway. even early on while reading tgcf, i knew i wanted to do an actor au, but i thought they were both going to be actors, xie lian the washed-up has-been and hua cheng the rising starlet who grew up with xie lian's movies. that was going to be a different fic. DFO's initial draft was about xie lian as a former stunt actor who couldn't act anymore due to an injury, and hua cheng was his weird roommate/bff who was kind of slowly piecing xie lian's life back together. initially i wanted the story to be about xie lian's slow recovery from a pill addiction and finding more effective pain management.
why did i read tgcf and come away with story ideas about hospice care and the opioid epidemic? i have no idea. that's what happens when you read a 600k-word novel while glaringly depressed i guess.
i would write 10k, cut 6k, add 10k more, cut 8k, back and forth. it was awful. it took me weeks to realize the problem was the xie lian was OOC. without much thinking about it, i had given him my belief in the highest ideal: becoming a cottagecore ho. and then i realized, xie lian is a god! he wants to be worshipped! so modern au xie lian would be a superfamous c-drama actor and he'd want his acting career back. i think i related so much to xie lian i neglected to realize the ways in which we're different. i would absolutely hate to be famous. and it was hard for me to write the drive for attention-seeking as a positive thing, after so much of my life being convinced it was the worst thing a person could be. so that was one of the major narrative questions for me -- how can i portray xie lian's ambition and desire to be worshipped in a positive light? how can i make it a strength?
once i realized all that, the plot came a lot easier. i still think because of all the major changes, the pacing is kinda wonky (it takes 10k just to reach the hook). and thematically it's all over the place, but i also think those things are what make it tgcf fanfiction, because tgcf is a thematic and pacing nightmare (lovingly).
the chronic pain aspect was hard to write, because i don't currently live with chronic pain but i used to. i didn't want to write a "and then he made a full recovery!" kind of story, because a lot of his battle involved dealing with the shame of his injury and its aftermath. i hope i did that aspect of the story justice. when i had chronic pain, i struggled a lot with the underlying belief that it was normal and i didn't deserve to be helped. that was the epiphany i wanted for him, the realization he deserved to recover. obviously that was heavily inspired by the self-harm themes of tgcf.
and lastly, possibly the most fun part of DFO for me was coming up with hua cheng's art, which i based on all the truly wild stuff i saw when i was doing artist residencies. i hope i did that aspect of the story justice too -- i learned so much from the artists i stayed with, and even if i couldn't fully understand their work, i still had a deep respect for it.
despite all these struggles i really had a good time writing it. i'm glad it found its audience, and i'm grateful for all the comments, fanart, and translations i've received for it.
it’s @oficmag promo day, send me asks!
