Could you tell us more about what is the Child’s Ink WIP of yours?👀
So, Child's Ink is a long-term project, which belongs to my Jedi Babies AU, AKA the one where the disaster trio go back in time, and Anakin gets to stay the same but Obi-Wan and Ahsoka get turned into an infant and toddler respectively. Child's Ink is, thematically, about Ylliben (Ben, formerly Obi-Wan) getting Meaningful Tattoos from the age of six onward, and a development of relationships (and general shaping of timeline) around the process of who gets to go with him, etc.
It's a three-chapter work, of which the first two have already been posted to AO3, in a series called Anakin and the Jedi Babies, which I have updated more recently. Child's Ink itself was last updated in 2023, but I feel like working on other fics in the same setting is sign enough that I'm still involved because it's mostly just me switching POVs and jumping around the timeline a bit, especially if/when I realize I need to nail down a cause-and-effect thing somehow. I've been working on Chapter Three since then, getting sidetracked by Related Stories (such as the Soka Kidnapping Troubled Boys saga), and also by the need to decide... well, okay.
The thing is, Chapter Two also took me forever to write, and that's because it was from Depa's POV. While working on it, I started getting into how the Depa&Ben first meeting went and the development, and started writing that, and then realized it was way too long to be just part of Child's Ink, in part because so much of it wouldn't really be relevant enough to the tattoos.
This is what birthed The Process of Acquiring a Padawan, AKA the one where Depa meets, befriends, and takes as Padawan little Ben who is mostly a child, except sometimes when he's asleep or meditating (and then he's a middle-aged war general).
The problem I've run into is that I have another dilemma in the realm of 'do I spin this off as its own fic, or do I keep this within the three-chapter tattoo fic?' Right now I'm leaning towards keeping it within Child's Ink, because I think I can make it work, but we'll see!
Also, I commissioned @shukruut to do art of Ylliben with his tattoos (and dead anime mom ponytail) a while ago! Go check that out!
