Couldn't put this in an ao3 comment without practically doxxing myself, but La Playa Azul IS still around and IS still great. Got jumpscared with my favorite restaurant reading fanfiction tonight, lol. Anyways, really enjoying the story so far, the yearning is truly all-consuming and so well written. K, thanks, bye!!!!

i was wondering 1) what are your favorite hollanov fanfics that maybe deserve more love and attention? and 2) do you have any tips or advice on writing a longfic? i have my first one all mapped out, but i'm really struggling with making progress. love you, UH!

what a fantastic set of questions, thank you for asking them! Fic recs from me come with a, let's call it a caveat, so i'll save that question for the end. To answer your question two let me tell you a story.

high likelihood this is apocryphal, but it's more about the metaphor than the truthiness so we'll roll with it. The story goes that abraham lincoln, who you may or may not know still is the tallest president in usamerican history, was six foot four. Which is tall today but was TALL tall in 1850ish when he was first campaigning for office. Possibly you may have heard the term "stump speech" which comes from the mid-19th century politicians campaigning through small rural communities who would stand on tree stumps to give their speeches so they could be heard and seen over the crowds. Lincoln famously didn't require a stump. The story goes that one day as he was campaigning a reporter asked him, kind of mockingly, how long did he think a man's legs needed to be. To which lincoln replied, "long enough to reach the ground."

which is, i hope we can agree, a banger line even if it's not true.

so why am i mentioning this? Because this is my answer to the question of how long a story needs to be. Answer: long enough to reach the end. Which means that if you are aiming to write a fic that is longer than 100k, you need to be sure you have enough story to reach that end.

there is no heart for me like yours, at 154k (will prob be 160 after the second epilogue) is by far the longest thing i have ever written. My previous longest fic was just under 120 and that was far longer than where i usually land, which is 30-80k. i'll tell you honestly that i don't usually vibe with longfics, as a reader or a writer, because i find that nearly every time they don't have enough story to justify their length. This is waving a red flag in front of a bull, i know, as i am very much in the minority with this opinion but i'm a hyper critical reader (and writer!) and that's just where i land.

however! i knew going in that no heart... would be lawnggg because there was so much story. i almost didn't write it for that reason. i remember telling @thisonesatellite in january that there was no way i was escaping this fic with less than 100k unless i really didn't do the story justice and i wasn't sure i was ready to take that on. Fortunately, because the story i had follows canon events so closely it was easy to plot and then easy (comparatively!) to write. Plus it actually gripped my soul, no exaggeration. i was wiped out near the end but couldn't stop writing it because it lived in my bones and allowed me no peace until it was on the page. ANYWAY.

all of this is a lot of words to say that the first thing you should do for your longfic is really think about how much story you have. Is the fic going to be long because it needs to be or because you want it to be? Are you trying to force a length that the story doesn't need? Let the story guide you to the length it needs to be; the result will be satisfying if it's 10k or 100k so long as you have done the story you have the justice it requires.

if there really is a lot of story and it needs to be long, then advice number two is plot it thoroughly. Chapter by chapter. The outline can (and probably should!) change as you go, but thorough planning helps you to pace yourself and know how much plot you can fit into each chapter and where you're going as you write. It also helps keep the story consistent and lets you foreshadow later events and other fun things. Nearly always the story will end up deviating from your outline so you don't need to be a slave to it or anything, but the guiding force of a good plan is incredibly helpful.

advice number three is try to diagnose what's preventing your progress. Is it because the length of the fic feels overwhelming? Is it lack of motivation? Time? Have you lost excitement for your story? Are you someone who struggles to get started? Figuring that out will help you know what strategies you need to employ to dig into the project.

final advice is to find a good alpha 😏. Which means someone you can bounce ideas off of. In some cases this person is also a beta who can check your writing for cohesion, spelling and grammar, etc. Sometimes they are different people. But an outside perspective from someone you trust can be invaluable. On which note, if you'd like some feedback on your outline or what you have written already, drop a link in my inbox and i will take a look at it. i do a lot of betaing and am (almost, there are some things that are hard nos from me) always glad to help.

if your eyes haven't crossed from reading all this yet, let us on to the fic recs.

so, caveat. i am, as i said, hyper critical as a reader. i have a long literary criticism background and i can't turn that off so it's rare that i am completely and uncritically in love with any fic. i should add though, that criticism is my love language and i only keep it to myself because most people don't want to hear it. There are many fics i really do enjoy and have only a few nitpicky points i make in my own head (and sometimes ngl to my groupchat). Also, people's tastes vary widely and what one loves another will hate so take these recs (and all recs!) with that grain of salt.

having said all that i have combed through my bookmarks and chosen a few fics that have fewer than 10k kudos (because in this insane fandom that's sort of the benchmark for popularity. What wild times we live in). They're mostly from january when i was reading more fic because i wasn't busy writing my own, so unfortunately if anything brilliant has been written since then i may have missed it (please drop links if anyone has any they think i might like based on these!).

also if any of these writers are on tumblr please lmk so i can link them.

Aftershock by Maarlix. Ilya breaks up with shane before shane can invite him to the cottage, shane is pissed. They play mean against each other and ilya ends up being the one to put shane in hospital instead of marleau. He feels terrible about it, goes to the hospital, DRAMA ENSUES. This is top-tier ilya pining and a fic i started reading when it was a WIP then put my whole life on pause when the final chapter dropped.

But I hate when I feel like this (and I never hated you) by SatsumaSegments. This author also wrote a stunning ilya-at-the-cottage POV but it has over 10k so alas. Still, read it, it's like a hug. This one is an open wound, which is not normally my jam in fics. However it's SO beautifully written and the emotions are just raw in the best way that i bookmarked it in case i ever had the urge to self-harm again (complimentary). It's ilya in the rose landry era spiralling tf out when shane shows up with a hickey. Parts of this fic still live in my brain.

the cadence of a secret by marigoldens. Very interesting magical take on a soulmate fic. Lyrical vibe to the writing, which i enjoy. They can only communicate by writing, not speaking, until they are prepared to say the words they need to lift their spell. i THINK WE KNOW WHAT WORDS THOSE ARE.

finally, one fic that is more recent. So recent that it's still a WIP, but i am betaing it and the author is hard at work to get it finished. This one i am excited to read every time there's a new chapter to beta (which is not always true!)

The Unbearable Ordeal of Being Scott Hunter by @sunless-garden. The events of HR/Game Changer through the eyes of a scott hunter who is lowkey obsessed with shane (everyone is in this verse, it's very very fun). Lots of great pining and BAMF shane and i think the ending is going to be a banger. It's an AU set in its own verse so keep that in mind, and also there are other parts of the everyone wants shane hollander verse that you can read while waiting for this one to be complete.

of course!

also, general PSA to all HR fic writers, if i could gently suggest that you take some time to really listen to ilya's dialogue from the show. It still kills me every time when we have show!ilya saying stuff like "i have always wondered what it would be like to be a metro" (present perfect+adverb construction, relative pronoun, second conditional construction) we still get fic!ilyas left and right barely conjugating verbs even after years in the US. With full appreciation that this shit is not easy and parsing grammar is not a thing most native english speakers have been taught, you really can get a decent sense of ilya's abilities just by listening carefully to what he says.

June 2010. Ilya Rozanov is delayed after the CCM shoot. By the time he gets to the locker room, Shane Hollander is out of the showers and Ilya’s entire plan is ruined. Only not quite fully ruined. Hollander invites him to dinner with his parents as a thank you for arranging the shoot and Ilya, in a burst of insanity, agrees. He hits it off with Yuna and David. They all exchange numbers. He and Hollander become friends. At no point does Ilya stop wanting more from him.

June 2016. Ilya Rozanov is a superstar. A Cup winner. An MVP. Women want him, men want to be him. He’s fucking miserable. He’s in love with his best friend. He can’t deny it anymore. Only now Shane is dating a movie star and happier than Ilya’s ever seen him. Ilya can’t ruin that for him, can’t ruin their friendship by asking for what he knows Shane can’t give. No matter how much it kills him.

A charity event in San Francisco. A catastrophic computer failure. A fateful decision to drive, not fly. Two days in a car, just the two of them. Alone. Together. Ilya’s sick with excitement and with dread, because how can he keep his secrets with Shane so close for so long?

What he doesn’t know is that Shane has secrets too.

4 chapters, 34k words, rated E for the final chapter

LINK

June 2016, Palm Springs 

Ilya wakes up in the particular silence of just-before-dawn. It takes him a bit of time to realise why. 

He’s in Palm Springs, he recalls. In a nice hotel there. In bed. With Shane. 

Shane, who fell asleep on his shoulder, tucked into his side. Who is now almost fully on top of him, soft lips on his collarbone, one thickly muscled thigh between Ilya’s legs.  

Ilya is hard in an instant. He was hard already but the full understanding of what is actually happening here sends every millilitre of blood his body doesn’t immediately require to keep him alive, straight to his dick. It makes him dizzy and weak, so weak he tightens the arm that’s slung around Shane’s waist and pulls him closer, lets his eyes fall shut, breathes in the scent of Shane’s hair and his skin then presses his lips to that hair, just for the space of a heartbeat. 

Then he gets a fucking grip on himself. He’s got to detangle them, now, before Shane wakes up. Above all else, Shane cannot ever know the way he cuddled Ilya when he was wine-drunk. He’d be so embarrassed and guilty he’d probably  get on the phone to tell Rose fucking Landry immediately, and then where would they be? Someplace Ilya decidedly does not want to go. 

Slowly, carefully, he lifts his arm and starts to ease out from beneath Shane’s body. He achieves possibly ten millimetres or so of movement before Shane shifts, makes a small sound of protest, and snuggles closer. His hold on Ilya tightens. 

And then—fuck—his eyes flutter open. 

He blinks sleepily. “Wha—” he begins, and Ilya scrambles to come up with something, anything to say to defuse this situation, to brush it off with a joke or a chirp. He cannot. He speaks two languages fluently and both of them fail him. 

He watches helplessly as Shane blinks again and the grogginess vanishes from his eyes. Watches as he realises, as Ilya did, what is happening here. Where he is and who he’s with and what they are doing together. Waits, for the rejection. For Shane to push him away and say what the fuck, Rozanov? What do you think you’re doing? I have a girlfriend/fiancée/whatever the fuck. Someone in my life I want. I don’t want you. 

But Shane does none of those things. He just looks at Ilya with those devastating eyes, a faint flush beneath the freckles on his cheeks. He licks his lips and Ilya swallows a moan as his dick leaps up, trying to reach Shane at any cost. 

Shane feels it. There’s no way he can’t with the way they’re pressed together, but the leap makes him realise. Ilya can see in his eyes that moment of realisation. 

Those eyes go wide and Shane shifts again, pressing his thigh harder against Ilya’s poor, suffering cock. His eyes search Ilya’s face. “Ilya?” he says. “Are you—?” 

I’m sorry, Ilya wants to say. I’m sorry I’m so fucking sorry I tried to keep this from you but my body just won’t obey when you’re near it won’t happen again I promise please don’t hate me please don’t go don’t leave—

“I—” he croaks, but he gets no further than that single, ragged syllable because Shane kisses him. 

For a brief, shocked beat, Ilya freezes. Then his mind goes white. 

He rolls Shane over onto the bed and kisses him back. Kisses him with fierce intensity and a desperation he can barely control. All his years of loving and longing and holding back, beating himself up because he wants Shane so deeply and he can’t fucking stop—all of it distils into this single, fiery moment of Shane’s lips on his.  

And the miracle of it, the absolute transcendent fucking glory of it is that Shane is kissing him too. In exactly the same way. 

Ilya devours him with his lips and his tongue, nips his lower lip and swallows his moan. Shane’s dick is hard, flush against Ilya’s own, Shane’s fingers are fisted in Ilya’s hair. 

“Shane,” Ilya gasps, then kisses him again. “Shane, what the fuck?” 

Shane laughs, a choked, manic sound. “I was going to ask you that.” 

Ilya kisses him some more before he can, deep kisses edging into filthy. Shane arches into him, moans when Ilya’s lips move to his neck. 

“Fuck,” he gasps, “I can’t think.” 

Ilya can’t either but there’s nothing to think about here, surely. Surely there’s nothing they need to think of or talk about or—

a commenter asked me when i thought shane and ilya fell in love in the world of there is no heart for me like yours; in response i unleashed the following wall of text. Why am i posting it here? why not.

when did they fall in love? is a really great question!

so i don't believe in love at first sight. i believe in attraction at first sight and maybe more importantly in recognition at first sight. i do think it's possible to meet someone and know right away that they could be your person. The potential is there. This for real happened to me, i knew within 24 hours of meeting my husband that he could be the one. But that is just potential.

when emily said that marriage isn't work but it is effort, that was my opinion, word for word. Relationships shouldn't feel like work but they do take effort. It also takes effort to get into a relationship in the first place. The potential isn't enough, you have to actively decide you want to pursue the potential. Also, a lot of things have to fall into place. You can feel potential with someone then have it not work out, because your lives don't align in some way or because you aren't quite ready. Right person wrong time, as they say.

since this fic diverges from after their first meeting, basically we've established the potential and the spark of attraction they felt in the hotel gym. From there, they choose to build a relationship far earlier than in canon and even though that relationship isn't supposed to be "real" the fact of its existence forces them to choose each other repeatedly, which is ultimately what brings them closer sooner than in canon.

which is a lot of words to still not answer the question of when they fell in love. i don't think it was on their wedding night. As the author maybe i should say that it definitely wasn't then, i deliberately wrote it not to be then, but i do respect differences of opinion and different interpretations so i'm not going to tell you what to think. Their wedding night shows that they have strong compatibility, both sexually and just hanging out together. The fact that they spent so much time together and did so harmoniously and had a lot of sex but not only sex is very important, but at that point they still barely knew each other.

my intent was for it to be clear that ilya was in love by the end of their first summer. His crisis of standing up to his father and choosing shane over him, choosing canada over russia made their marriage real to him in a way it hadn't quite been up to that point. Spending the summer with shane and just getting to be with him, learning to live together, that's what made it More for ilya. When he calls svetlana to say his secret is too much for him, the secret has grown too big because he loves shane and is struggling to hide it. He still manages to hide it from himself, of course, but he wouldn't be ilya if he didn't.

shane is a little harder to pin down. He is a Committer, in that once he chooses a path he gives it everything he has. He was all-in on the Agreement from day one, so much so that he couldn't allow himself to deviate from it, even when he began to develop feelings for ilya. Because the feelings weren't part of the Agreement, shane basically dismissed them as irrelevant. Shane buying coffeemakers for ilya, designing the cottage to include things he likes, those acts aren't because he's in love as such, they're because he is Committed. At some point that commitment becomes something he's devoted to not for the Agreement but because he wants ilya to be happy. When exactly does that happen is a very good question.

shane is definitely in love by the time of ilya's citizenship ceremony, fully in love to the point he could be aware of it if he allowed himself to think that way. i'd say he was falling slowly for a long time and probably landed somewhere just before sochi, or maybe the summer of their third anniversary. Somewhere in between those points. It's not for nothing that shane gets the elizabeth bennet "the hour the spot the look the words" quote, it genuinely is very difficult to say precisely when he fell in love.

so, tl;dr: ilya falls hard after their first summer, shane drifts down slowly and lands somewhere around their third.

June 2010. Ilya Rozanov is delayed after the CCM shoot. By the time he gets to the locker room, Shane Hollander is out of the showers and Ilya’s entire plan is ruined. Only not quite fully ruined. Hollander invites him to dinner with his parents as a thank you for arranging the shoot and Ilya, in a burst of insanity, agrees. He hits it off with Yuna and David. They all exchange numbers. He and Hollander become friends. At no point does Ilya stop wanting more from him.

June 2016. Ilya Rozanov is a superstar. A Cup winner. An MVP. Women want him, men want to be him. He’s fucking miserable. He’s in love with his best friend. He can’t deny it anymore. Only now Shane is dating a movie star and happier than Ilya’s ever seen him. Ilya can’t ruin that for him, can’t ruin their friendship by asking for what he knows Shane can’t give. No matter how much it kills him.

A charity event in San Francisco. A catastrophic computer failure. A fateful decision to drive, not fly. Two days in a car, just the two of them. Alone. Together. Ilya’s sick with excitement and with dread, because how can he keep his secrets with Shane so close for so long?

What he doesn’t know is that Shane has secrets too.

LINK

Hannah tucks her pad back into her apron pocket then hesitates. The intent look is back on her face. She glances over at the middle-aged couple across the room, who are still talking quietly together. Then she sits in the chair opposite Ilya. 

“Tell him,” she says, in a voice that matches the look on her face. “I know it’s none of my business—” 

“You are right about that,” Ilya retorts.  

“But you should tell him.” 

Ilya doesn’t bother to play dumb. He knows his feelings for Shane must be written all over his face, plain to see for anyone who knows how to look. “I can’t,” he says. “He has a girlfriend.” 

“Does he?” 

“Yes. Hot one. Perfect for him. Makes him happy.” He takes a gulp of coffee. “I think they might be engaged.” 

“Well, if that’s the case then you’ve really got to tell him. That boy cannot marry a woman. It’d be a huge mistake.” 

“Maybe,” Ilya says. 

Hannah eyes him shrewdly. “I’m bisexual myself,” she tells him, “I get it. But if he”—she gestures out at the beach where Shane presumably is—“is not fully gay then I will give up sex entirely. And I really like sex.” 

Ilya shrugs. “Maybe,” he says again. 

There was a time when he'd believed the same. That Shane was, if not gay per se at least into men enough that he’d entertain something with Ilya. But in those first few encounters of theirs, Ilya had not been subtle. Short of actually stripping down and jerking off right at him there’s not much more he thinks he could have done to let Shane know that he was interested. If Shane likes men then that means it’s Ilya he doesn’t want and Ilya gets that, he does. He just can’t face it. It hurts too much. 

Hannah sighs. “It’s scary,” she says. “Feelings suck. I still think you should tell him.” 

“Maybe,” Ilya says, for the third time. 

the wonderful and talented @kowabungadoodles designed these jerseys for the owls and i am blown away. The heart-shaped owl logo! 😭

perfection.

(there is more owls lore on the way it is all in my head. It just needs to go on the page) (thank you to everyone who loves this fic and this team. i love you.)