#writing!!!!!!!!

Finally worked out why it hasnt been working in the sparse time ive allowed myself to write while trying to pace and manage fatigue for the last 8 months (and its not because of having to slow my writing process down!)

Ive been saying 6 months in my head bc august in my head is half the year. But no. Its 8 months since i posted ch 25. Wild.

Anyway i was right. Me in the back of my head who insisted that no it wasnt that i was sufering from the pacing limits and that instead there was something legit wrong that i needed to resolve before my brain would let me continue writing the rest of the story. I was stuck bc of content problems not authorial problems! Finally pinpointed what it was that was wrong, made the change, got excited and inspired by the implications and moving things around to follow the change, finsihed fleshing out the chapter, sent it to my amazing beta reader and started getting some reactions and feedback and ahhhhh

What a day!!! I can in fact still write to the standard i demand i produce for redfic, i just - exactly as i knew i would the second i gave in to embracing writing again - threw out everything ive implemented for looking after myself throughout the day and pacing in favour of the pursuit of writing more redfic.

So satisfying though. I think i needed the day off looking after myself tbh even if i did some damage by not being anywhere like as hydrated as im used to and not giving myself quiiite enough food. I did still have a nap and i did eat and i did still do things other than writing and reading and editing. I just also did A LOT of writing and reading and editing all in one day.

This is the kind of brain day intensity i can only repeat once every other month or so. Cant imagine tomorrow is going to be pleasant from a fatigue perspective. But ahhh i needed this satisfaction and enjoyment and appreciation immersion delight of being in the intricacies of my story again.

Chongyunredfic, my absolute beloved!!!!! I get to update you soon!!!!

 Still haven’t gently tied up your hair (completed oneshot letter)

Hopefully I’ll be born to a farmer this time so it will be easier to find you, and I’ll find myself another really good-looking body that will last longer this time, and you’ll be able to keep me safe in your mountain paradise, and then I will finally get to call you my wife.

It’s Possible (completed oneshot)

As she finishes up her night time routine, Nan Xing thanks Su Yu for all her inspirational help, sends Mao Xiaojun a text goodnight, receives a teddy bear surrounded by hearts sticker and a sleepy emoji in response, and drifts off to sleep, feeling the lightest, happiest, most at peace she might ever have felt in her entire life.

Are you still asking? (completed oneshot)

“Yes,” Lan Wangji says solemnly before kissing Wei Ying again, enjoying the taste of his laughter.

If You’re Waiting for a Sign… (completed multichapter)

It will be Kara and Lena, cosy on the couch at game night, together, forever.

This Glittering Gold (completed oneshot)

My heart is healed from green

I adore our glittering gold

We are treasure in its wonder

My home is in his hold

I think what informed my choices about these ending lines the most is the state of completion/length of the wip/work. Completed work ending lines feel way more satisfying to me – as they were intended to make readers feel satisfied when I wrote them – than the ending lines of chapters that have more story to tell.

Notably, Something is Definitely Wrong has such a blunt ending that highlights the pov character’s losses and the sort of emptiness that comes with/came with my own personal experience of finally getting diagnosed and recognised for having a chronic illness, the hard push for self-advocating against healthcare is over, now what? It’s intentionally not satisfying, to reflect his own lack of satisfaction that this is what his life has become, as well as to lead us into the next work in the wip series which focuses more on his fatigue and trauma processing as he starts to overcome internalised ableism and adjusts to his new life limits.

I’m mega proud of This Glittering Gold and the ending always hits me so good. Doesn’t really look great/make sense out of context, but because I know the context even seeing this snippet makes me feel like: Yeah I’m so proud I wrote that!!! It works so well because it twists the lyrics we've seen woven throughout the story, like the song was always meant to become this and that it just needed the story to happen first in order to bring the song to its final triumphant and heartwarming finished verse. The verse before it from the other MC pov is also beautiful because it's like they were always meant to craft the song together and only when they are both adding and singing their own lyrics do they make the song into what it becomes. I also love it for the way it wraps up the themes and essentially summarises the happy ending happily ever after for the story without needing to do anything like an epilogue, their story begins with one verse which summarises the context before the two characters meet, and ends with a verse from each of them singing their song together. I adore this fic and the choices i made when writing it.

The longer end sentences of the completed works all reflect the tone of the works they belong to, and are often me trying to summarise the themes of whichever oneshot it was all in one go, answering a problem/need the character had at the beginning.

For Nan Xing in It’s Possible, she not only came out to her boy best friend crush as she started the piece wondering about, but she’s now also his girlfriend and a lot of other lovely stuff happened for her too!

For Xie Yun in Still haven’t tied up your hair, he’s finally stating clearly what he tried to avoid saying at the start of his letter, that he’s really struggling to grapple with the idea of his own impeding death and that he wishes he could call Zhou Fei his wife. And of course, because he’s Xie Yun he’s doing this through escaping into a fantasy about the future, so after we’ve seen him grappling with the present reality in its bleakness throughout the letter he’s drafting, by the end of it he’s back to being himself and we can see how he might go from writing this into writing the more lighthearted letter he leaves Zhou Fei in the tv show about wanting to dip her in vinegar to try encouraging her not to worry about him.

I’m really proud of how I wrap up my completed stories, this was fun to look at the end lines of some completed, some wips, and some that are open enough to lead into more parts in the series.

Ji Chong (The Wolf TV) x Xie Yun (Legend of Fei)

Everyone else’s gushing is going to seem so much less than ChongYun’s because they’re my hyperfixation and have been that persistently for the last 3 and a half years. They're in my head 24/7!!!

They’re equals, they’re opposites, they both escaped the battlefield and the royalty that they’d been born into because they wanted to help people and travel the world and they have hearts of gold and are capable of being playful and serious, they’re the one is autistic one has adhd dynamic, they’re both deeply traumatised, they respect each other so much that it’s their first priority to give the other space and opportunity to refuse to be vulnerable if they don’t want to share, they're so damn horny, they have completely different worldviews and clash and make each other worse before they can get over their mutual arrogance enough to recognise they want to learn and see the value in the other’s viewpoints, they both think the other needs protecting, they both try to protect the other from themselves, they’re both highly sensitive and passionate and terrified of the way being those things have hurt them and others in the past and don’t want to do the same to their prospective lover, they have survivor’s guilt and abandonment issues, they never want to be apart, being in love and being loved is the most terrifying thing in the world apart from when it’s not and it’s the thing that saves their lives and their futures, they comfort and challenge and change each other,

they are everything to me, I’ve written multiple fics but especially my beloved chongyunredfic so far at 420k+ words about them and I have so many more words to give to exploring them, they’ve never met on tv because they’re from different tv shows, I’m obsessed with them, they’re obsessed with each other, they like each other so much, they’re ridiculously into each other, they have so much fun together, third-wheeling them would be a nightmare no matter what stage of pining or if they'd been together 50yrs by that point, they try to help children have better chances than they had growing up, they appreciate beauty and want to explore the world to see as much of the beauty out there as they can, they love trees and are pretty much homeless wanderers, they are experts in their respective fields and complete idiots in other aspects of life, they love each other so much, they inspire each other, in redfic they’ve both known of the other’s existence for over a decade and fantasised about the idea of the person without ever meeting or even knowing each other’s faces, they care about each other so much they tend to each others wounds while they’re arguing, they almost kiss while peeling potatoes because the tension is so high, they take so long to believe it’s actually happening for them because nothing this good has ever happened to them before how on earth can this amazing man who they love be staying with them and agreeing to stay together for the rest of their lives????

They’re so intense, they’re so lighthearted, they’re so beautiful, they’re so devoted, they’re so embarrassing, they’re so bad at communicating at times that their well-meaning friends and also total strangers have to give them nudges like you know you’re into each other why aren’t you kissing about it? And they can only reply that they’re scared and traumatised, and that they’re taking their time and no rush no pressure, and they overcompensate for their own flaws and make everything worse in trying to make it easier for their loved one, and they have so many cute and symbolic ways of referring to each other, they work together in reality and in fantasy, they are the synthesis.

But let’s try!

Nan Xing x Xiao Wudi (Mr Bad, 2022)

The pairing from my fav tv show ever ever ever ever yeah I know I didn’t think I would get a more fav tv show than when I watched Sherlock and understood it to be 4 acts of a 5 act structure story I’m still waiting to see if they’ll get chance to make and release the 5th act, nor did I think I would find a more fav tv show ever than The Untamed although it's so intense that i struggle rewatching it in its entirety, nor did i think i would ever find a more endlessly rewatchable from start to finish fav tv show ever than when I was introduced to Leverage a couple of years ago and got to see a complete 5 act structure story and fall in love with the storytelling and characters including my fav character type that is Eliot Spencer <3 (coincidentally, the same character type that Ji Chong is, but in a different style of show <3)

But I did it, I found my fav show ever ever ever ever ever and it’s this wonderful fairytale enemies to lovers story of a writer whose wuxia villain OC comes to our real world when she wishes for an unforgettable relationship in a moment of impulsive indignance at the suggestion that she couldn’t have that, and it is just perfect, no summary can do this show justice tbh, but anyway I’m not trying to get you to watch it or gush about my fav director and her 3 for 3 most recent knockout hits of Getting It with portraying innovative slowburn romances, I’m gushing about my OTP.

I’m going to cheat and gush about both pairings in the show at the same time because they are such fantastic mirrors of each other. We love petty pathetic men who are super intelligent and arrogant and yet turn into comedic relief when they realise they are super duper in love with their competent women and utterly fail at communicating that!!! We love competent women who are also very strongly principled and so of course the bad guy who she hangs out with everyday couldn’t even be considered her friend – he’s a bad guy! - of course her business partner for the last decade can’t be in love with her, they both made a promise to his father their business investor that they would never date or they’d lose his funding and it would mean their shared dream of helping new authors to share their works would be ruined!

We love that aside from this, the mirroring is much more acutely seen across the gender divide. Xiao Wudi and CEO Ye Qing both being the get shit done and everyone looks up to for answers and utterly reliable to do whatever is needed – Xiao Wudi literally appears by magic whenever Nan Xing says ‘help’, CEO Ye Qing resolves every problem that pathetic cringefail author Lu Zichen comes across – until they both nope outta there in the same episode and their respective love interests have to figure out how to cope with the fallout. We love that Nan Xing and Lu Zichen start by Nan Xing’s hero worship of Lu Zichen’s novels helping her cope with a traumatic bereavement in her teen years making Nan Xing apply to be his assistant and then very quickly he reveals he’s a useless puppy besotted with Ye Qing and unable to do anything about for a whole decade and he asks Nan Xing for help and all the while Nan Xing is like if I knew anything about dating I wouldn’t have been single all my life! I could gush about the mirroring and the storytelling of this show forever. The enemies to lovers between Nan Xing and Xiao Wudi where Nan Xing is kind and wants to help, and yet offended by everything Xiao Wudi does because he’s selfish and arrogant and childish, and yet they are both very good fighters and very good supporters of each other and very silly fun times idiots, and when they’re actually together it’s fucking adorable and the story doesn’t end as soon as the slowburn ends because their story is about more than them getting together and it’s about them healing each other’s trauma – her, a past unrequited love that ended tragically, him, existential trauma once he learns he’s a fictional character and not just someone who time travelled as he thought - and giving the other something to live for and excel in and ahhhhhh I love them so much they love each other so much I have rewatched this show so many times and they’re so caring and attentive to each other and so intimate and safe and beautiful with each other and it’s just!!!!!! The best show ever.

One of the lines in the OST says ‘guess who likes the other more’ how fuckin cute is that?

Also one of the funniest line exchanges:

XW: *is in emotional turmoil over his existence*

NX: ‘I know what you’re worried about. I created you, I’m basically your mother, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to date your mother’

XW: ‘...I wasn’t even thinking about that.’

NX: ‘Oh’

XW: ‘But now I am’.

Funniest episode is episode 9, Xiao Wudi’s sexual awakening, featuring the most masterful demonstration of subtext that can get away with being PG/U rated that I’ve seen on tv, from blatant scene of him fantasising about her using his belt around his neck while the screen goes hazy pink, to him doing lots of actions with white liquids near his mouth or spilling over, his flat flooding and him obsessing over the way their hands are touching while they try to block the burst pipe together and her hair gets wet and it all slow mo’s, and him being so horny when she touches his forehead to check if he’s got a fever that first he has to sit up and pull his dressing gown further around himself to hide his boner, then he resorts to hiding behind a curtain until she’s gone blissfully ignorant of his moaning at how unbearable it is to be attracted to such a moron. It’s just, the BEST show ever.

John Watson x Sherlock Holmes (BBC Sherlock)

We all knew this was going to be on my list. I adore them. They’re so in love and so held back from saying it by the homophobic environment they grew up in and the way it traumatised them, both in-show and meta-textually in our world heteronormativity readings of what is and always has been a deeply romantic and lifesaving relationship between two people who didn’t really fit anywhere until they found each other. I can’t write about them much right now because I haven’t rewatched the show in a long while but they are forever my OTP and also the reason I joined tumblr way back when. The show speaks for them. TJLC, five act structure <3, series 5 episode 3. Sometimes you love someone so much you can’t say it, same goes for ships you love so much you can’t actually begin to gush about them because WHERE DO YOU START?!

Wei Ying x Lan Zhan (The Untamed/CQL) or if you’d prefer courtesy names, Wei Wuxian x Lan Wangji

The importance of these two to my life cannot be understated. It’s not the only reason I love them at all, but it sure is a compelling enough reason by itself. I won’t spoilers here bc I know my friend hasn’t watched the show fully yet, but ahhhhhh their devotion to each other is to die for. That one scene with them in the marketplace changed my life forever, I’d never seen a gay family as the mains depicted that beautifully and normally and importantly before in a show I cared about so much, truly a healed my crops and made my capacity for happiness grow three sizes during the first year of the pandemic moment. The feeling of walking the single log path is indeed not bad. <3 I probs botched the translation a bit but ahhhhhhh them!!!!!!!!!! Chen Qing Ling can be translated/interpreted as basically being called Our Love Story is a Song We Composed Together, while also being about themes of holding those in power accountable and sticking to principles of justice and the show is so fucking amazing and has so many well-developed interesting characters and makes so many statements beyond the romance but also the romance is part of what’s making the statement because you can’t have one without the other, oh what a beautiful tragedy that isn’t but it is but things are not black and white, it’s about growing the lotuses in the mud and it’s about family and what do we owe each other and guilt and music and what use are divides when those in power are corrupt and what use is being noble or virtuous if you sit by and let injustices happen, and what can we do to help, and what do we have to lose to give that help, and what level of self-sacrifice is considered normal to us from our history of trauma, and how can two brothers have so much history, and how can lotus root soup fix it all until it can’t anymore, and of course the true heart of the show: explaining how one boy in a teen coming of age lighthearted protagonist story can have so many traumatised uncles!

I can’t believe I have to limit this to 5 I’ve not even got through my top 5 tv shows on here and I have so many fav ships outside of my top 5 tv shows and I just now realised in drafting this I forgot to eat breakfast and take my meds so pausing here to do that oops. Anyways, here’s ship number 5: Vidal x Mary (Devil’s Cub, a novel by Georgette Heyer)

Georgette Heyer is probs my alltime fav romance novelist and I could list countless novel ships in here but my most favouritest of them all has to be the enemies to pining idiots who don’t understand the other loves them relationship dynamic that is The Marquis, My Lord Vidal x Mary Challoner. and this is far too niche a ship even for tumblr lmao, but anyways I’m gonna gush because regency idiots in love (and redactedfic dynamic inspo): after accidentally kidnapping Mary instead of her sister and taking her onboard his boat as he flees to France bc he killed someone in a duel while drunk and can’t get away with it this time, Vidal goads her to shoot him while thinking she won’t actually do it, and yet Mary shoots him in self-defence and gets a bullet into his arm, and he decides in that moment he has to marry her not just for propriety but because he’s in love, and then she’s tending to his wound and chiding him to take medicines the doctor ordered and all his staff are scared of him but he obeys her every word, she explains she went in place of her sister to the planned rendezvous to protect her dumb sister from being ruined, and he’s like bemoaning that he’s ‘ruined’ her instead and trying to convince her to marry him on that basis bc he can’t imagine she would actually fall in love with him because he’s basically treated her like cargo he has to hastily smuggle out the country until she took off her disguise revealed she wasn’t her dumb sister and shot him so he’s trying to appeal to her practicality and say well look we’re going to have to get married otherwise I’ll have ruined your good name forever by absconding you, but she doesn’t see how it isn’t all perfectly respectable to be travelling with him on his boat and insists she can pretend she was visiting a friend in France and no one will say she was ruined for that throughout the story and all this time he’s falling more and more and more in love and he’s begging her to marry him but she thinks it’s all for respectability sake and not because he could possibly love her as much as she has grown to love him while they’ve spent all this time together, it’s such a beautiful farce, and all attempts at romance being realistic have been ruined for me because honestly they set the standard too high that I want nothing less than to shoot someone and have them become instantly besotted with me while I gradually become more endeared to them and to the possibility that they might actually love me rather than just be saying pretty words to try and convince me for respectability sake. Also at one point Mary rushes into the middle of a swordfight to the death covered in only Vidal’s cloak as protection and Vidal stops fighting instantly and holds her in his arms and calls her ‘Mary, my little love,’ and then SHE STILL DOESN’T BELIEVE HE LOVES HER NOR THAT THEY COULD BE SUITABLE FOR EACH OTHER IN MARRIAGE and she tries to run away again!!!! They’re both terrified of tarnishing the other’s good name and reputation through their own and it’s a masterpiece of a romance dynamic and of storytelling. Available to order online, and also in most good charity shops for like 50p if you’re lucky. Step one of visiting any charity shop in the UK: scan the bookshelves for georgette heyer novels!

Bonus: Hardison x Parker x Eliot <3 Eleanor x Chidi <3 Riley x Maya <3 Will x Elizabeth potc <3 Duan Jiaxu x Sang Zhi <3 Anne x Gilbert from the book, I haven’t seen the show, probs one of my first ever ships <3 Xie Yun x Zhou Fei they are SO great in canon omg so tender <3 SuperCorp wives who are stronger together <3 Ji Chong x Xie Yun x Zhou Fei one day I will finish my ChongYunFei choose your fate fic and then it will be clear how fucking well these three would work as an ot3 triad in such a they all complement each other and give each other what the other needs and wants and doesn’t think they can have and how they can all comfort and challenge and change each other and the battle ship goals level would reach astronomical heights like fuck you disha, chongyunfei have resolved the war with minimal casualties because they’re just that damn good together, ugh I wanna get this fic finished it’s like a third of the way through first drafts and it’s very complex so it’s gonna take a whiiiiile <3 Master Gantang x Li Jinrong ugh them they have one scene together at the start of the show and their bond was conveyed so great with so much depth telling to their intimacy and history and the extent of how much they adore each other and how much they’ve endured together I was gone for them from that point, and it only gets better the more scenes we see, such a fantastic mirror for YunFei <3 Squall x Rinoa they shouldn’t be this low on the list I’m just very bad at remembering things in order of how much I adore them anyway I’m beta reading this amazing Squinoa fic and I adore them <3 I should probs stop the bonus listing here I just know I’m missing out so many excellent ships that have captivated me.

What is life without art? Creative fulfilment? Let me create something!!!! Ive got the zoomies but for writing and specifically the kind of zoomies where nothing is going to get done aside from being zoomy and then i will crash in a heap and the day will be done.

Also following the prev reblog of the treating hanahaki differently, i thought i wanted to go with new ideas, or a new wip, or a new fandom, or new characters, but nope. I don't. I have plenty of wips and ideas i already enjoy. Novelty isnt as alluring as my overwhelming passion for the story that is always on my mind.

I just want to write more chongyunredfic!!!!

And i will. Soon. And in the meantime i will continue my reread/texttospeechapprelisten, currently at ch 12 of the 25 completed chapters so far, getting closer.

Chapter 12 is such a wildcard and introspective chapter. Not wildcard for being introspective. There was just a lot of ji chong past and its significance implications on the present to explore with him recognising xie yun as his equal. And of course. Theres xie yun's actions and a big pivot in his approach. Also iirc i wrote a large amount of this ch on holiday so its nice to remember that i did have some pleasant experiences and some memories of those initial months after kip died. Wasnt all deeply gloomy. I wrote this fun and intense chapter of the story. I saw the sea and walked along the seafront and saw the moon and read a lot of other fics that no doubt somewhat influenced the tone and direction ch 12 took which both a) surprised me while writing it and b) worked so fucking well at exactly that point in the story to throw a spanner in the works and create space for deeper looming obstacles to hinder their slowburn relationship development. I should write a lil review for myself of each chapter while i still have enough of my memory of writing them remaining. Maybe i will. I've left myself comments on my docs and in my notes for them. But i havent got anything clearly and succinctly summarising the whole chapter writing process for each chapter. Might not be possible to do. Might not need to do it. I'll always remember some of them. I wrote part of ch 10 in kips bedroom the day after he died. I wrote a lot of the stuff in ch 10 that youd expect to have been informed from my experiences of grief actually before i even knew he was dying. Whcih then hit me like a fucking truck as i read and added and edited it between my visits to him on his deathbed. Like all the stuff about leaving while making it seem like youll come back even though you know theres no chance of that happening, so theres no more distress, so you can spend your last moments together happy. Wrote all that a couple of weeks before i heard kip had days to live. And then had to go and live out that intent for myself and kiss his temple goodbye knowing i wouldn't see him again but after spending a morning hanging out with him as much as possible enjoying the last shining moments of reading stories to him and snuggling on the couch and appreciating him.

I dont know why the kip grief is hitting quite a lot today but it clearly must be on some level for me to need to write all this as stream of consciousness. I do miss him.

Today is probs the exact last day i saw him prepandemic. It was like a week before lockdown so yeah probs around 20 march 2020. I remember walking away from his house to go get the bus and turning back to look and him and his sibling were playing infront of the house and waved bye to me again and it just felt significant even then at the time it felt like im not going to get this again. I think at the time it was probs from the rising fears about pandemic seeing the whole global catastrophe unfolding. But it bears such a resemblance to the poignancy of how i felt about seeing my uncle the last time i saw him before he died unexpectedly. We'd gone on a walk together with more family members. I took a photo of a wreath. I almost came out to him the walk we'd gone on in summer before that. Like some part of me knew i wouldnt get many chances.

I never did get to come out to my uncle chris. He died unexpectedly, only a month or two after that last walk together. One week from hearing the news that he was confirmed to have bowel cancer, he died during an operation.

Death is relatively simple compared to how strange grief can be, i think.

I havent got my words together enough yet but im sure I'll be writing about grief in one way or another for as long as i can find methods of communicating thoughts. Its such a heavy part of the concept of existing, that we make strong bonds with others and then they stop existing in any physical state and yet we continue existing and they always will have existed but their existence is always past tense in terms of their tangible physical presence and newness and opportunities for growth.

I'll never know what nine year old kip would have been like. He didnt get to grow older than five.

I dont know where im going with this.

I think probs to other types of losses, and to griefs not from death and to my lack of physical tangible presence in a lot of my loved ones lives and how weird it feels to be so limited that my opportunities for growth are now very restricted in many ways, and yet im not dead. I still exist. I like existing. I just feel very... like perhaps some of my irl friends would rather mourn me as if its a death rather than strive to adapt to my life as it is now with the weight of the griefs that surround me and the constant fear my presence must bring to them about the way their own lives might suddenly change in uncontrollable and devastating ways.

I dont want to be like disability motivational porn despite all the odds this infantilised hero managed to become an inspiring success story normies can celebrate. But i would like to have my irl friends feel at peace with me. I would like to feel like my irl friends can see my courage and my joy and arent prevented from engaging with me through several layers of fears and things my simple existence continued as it currently is forces them to confront about their worldviews and sense of security in an uncertain world.

I think perhaps this is the big challenge for me, that summarises everything im dealing with now and for the future in a few simple words: learning to sit with and appreciate the discomfort and uncertainty of existence.

And i think thats probably what grief and grief recovery is, too.

Writing is discomforting. It is an incomplete project that i cannot always be working on and as it is incomplete it is not guaranteed to go any certain way because it hasnt got there yet.

Exploring my health conditions and management strategies and learning my limits and my baselines and trial and erroring meds and experiencing new random symptoms and coping with the possibility of emergencies? Absolutely requires sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty.

And perhaps. Maybe. When ive sat with it enough to become familiar and on speaking terms, i might get to befriend discomfort, befriend uncertainty, embrace the instability and cherish the unpredictableness as well as the temporariness of life.

Perhaps, like grief and pain and hope and joy and death, discomfort and uncertainty can also become my friends around my bed and in my head? (Reference to a poem i wrote that i dont think i shared on here)