Jesus fucking christ, so this is the paragraph that's the new bane of my existence I guess. Chapter six of goalie shane, right near the end of the chapter:
Up close, Rozanov looks warmer somehow. Alive in a way thatās visible, mouth curved in a loose, satisfied smile. His hair is damp and pushed back from his face, his normally light curls darkened from exertion, his skin flushed high along his cheekbones, tired and sweat-soaked and glowing under the rink lightsāand Shane has a bad second where he forgets what heās supposed to do next.
Purple prose absolutely, but intentionally so because this is the immediate aftermath of Shane realizing for the first time that he's got a fucking crush on another man. Lets go through the two steps of my writing process here: 1) Rozanov looking warm and alive in a way that looks visible: I'm using 'alive' as a shorthand for a bunch of other terms I could've used here: vibrant, happy, satisfied, glowing (I do use this one). We're post hockey game where ilya's team won and moved on to the next round of playoffs; shane, experiencing attraction to another man hockey player, would probably notice that his crush looks vibrant/happy/brimming with fucking life after winning at hockey. This is Ilya at his most attractive to shane, part of the car crash moment when shane can't deny his attraction any more. This is also an echo back to chapter four, where shane thought that Scott Hunter at All Stars "looks the exact same. If anything, he looks more alive than he did before, the environmental disruption that comes from proximity to Rozanov still clinging to him like a film." Shane (pre-crush realization) already thinks that close contact with ilya brought life back to hunter's decrepit cheeks; in this instance I was using 'alive' as a catch-all instead of something like awake/alert/engaged. 2) Damp sweaty hair, flushed, glowing under the rink lights: Again, description of an athlete after sixty minutes of professional athletics., and also a guy looking at his crush. Have you ever seen those interviews reporters do with players mid/after games? Those guys get nasty sweaty. Also earlier in this fucking chapter Shane was literally watching the way that ilya's necklace "shifts against Rozanovās neck, interrupting the slow progression of a line of sweat tracing its way from his hairline, skating between moles before disappearing under the collar of his jersey." Shane finds a sweaty man attractive!! Shocker!!! Why am I writing this post when the chuds on twitter won't be swayed by anything I say or do here? Idk. I'm feeling really fucking powerless against all of this. Prior to getting beta readers in chapter 11, this fic was a one person operation. I used fucking grammerly on chapter 1, (stopped when it tried to americanize the spell-checking) and then it was grammarcheck.net until chapter 10 (because it had canadian english mode.) I know a lot of this has to do with the fact that I'm writing an AU that already has a popular author in the tag and any 'competition' with a mega-hit fic is going to be scrutinized, but I genuinely don't know what to against one person dead set on hunting my story down and getting people to harrass me into not completing it. The fact that they're doing this shit on a platform I don't use and can't defend myself on, is just a bonus. TLDR: I'm not going to stop writing goalie shane till the story is finished, and if there are any other chunks of text (ai suspected or otherwise) that you want me to expand on, talk to me on this platform that I actually use.
