Behind the scenes of My "Straight" Ex-Boyfriend under the cut:
@whoipretended2b sent me a tiktok in October, like how cool would a fic from Lisa's POV about Dean be? I agreed, and wrote the initial post immediately, then shared it back to her asking for help with the comments, and she obliged.
and then... I was paralyzed. I had done a fic with the neat formatting before with Donna Morgan's Reddit Account, and that ended up being shorter than my original vision because coming up with the comments, formating them, and the usernames got too onerous. The idea of having a story format that really relied on comments was intimidating. I would want to do it right, but it would need to be meticulously planned out.
I am bad at meticulous planning. There's a reason why most of my Reddit fics are just the initial post (see: Canon Compliant Supernatural Reddit Posts). Planning is not my forte.
So it rested. I wrote a bunch for kinktober. I got really into Pluribus and posted a bunch of Pluribus fic. I posted a bunch for femslash February.
And then in early March, ao3 went down unexpectedly. It was like inside my brain, the Reddit fic got pushed to the forefront. I was suddenly able to focus, and plan out usernames and the comments, as well as how the future posts would go. While ao3 was down, I did that, and waited impatiently for it to be restored.
This is the first time I've posted without everything being pre-written, but I don't know if I would have been able to keep writing the posts. Having that much to format and publish would have been incredibly intimidating to me, I think.
And for the posts: there's a LOT going on in them. I've never been attached to an OC I've created like AliceYarrowStone. That really surprised me. Usually any additional characters in fics for me are just there to play a role, and AliceYarrowStone is doing that... but she's doing her role so well. I love to hate her.
Other usernames reference various things I'm a fan of, including: Heated Rivalry, Phoebe Bridgers, Carrie Vaughn's The Naturalist Society Series, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Pluribus, Cat Sebastian's Star Shipped, Weapons (2025), The Beatles, Star Wars, Fringe, Florence + The Machine, Annie Bot, and Stevie Nicks.
There's a lot of Lisa (especially in the first post) that I wasn't sure how it would be received. Like I think it's very human to be like, "part of what I liked about us as a couple was how good we looked together" but also, I get how people could hate that. But the reception of Lisa was very good and I appreciate that so much.
The Dean chapter was the toughest. There are more comments in that chapter than any other, because 1. there were more jokes to be made and 2. some of the storytelling hinged on things he would respond to. And also, sometimes I'll just have this feeling like "Dean needs to make a reference here" and just.... not know what the reference is going to be, just what the reference means.
I put a reference to Cheapest Room in the House by biggaybenny (deleted in text form but still available as a podfic here) because the mashed potatoes thing never leaves my mind. The "slow moving slide-show" Dean describes of every time his sexuality was called into question? Well. My personal one included eating food that had been in my best friend's mouth.
There may be a timestamp in the future. But for now, the story is complete as is.
