2023 writing

[younglegends]

another year huh.........

WRITING LOG: i kept a very casual writing log this year! i completely stopped updating it after september but to be fair i wrote very little during the fall/winter of the year. it was fun keeping track even if it doesn't really work for full rewrites (which i do. a lot.) and i'll probably try to do it again this year. mostly it's just interesting to compare how different the writing process/routine for every fic is lol. also harrowing to realize i don't write very often at all...

COMPLETED FIC (5)

TOTAL WORD COUNT: 25,316. very close to last year (26k)!

FANDOMS:

• one piece (4)
• omniscient reader's viewpoint (1)

NOTICEABLE PATTERNS:

• no AUs, but that feels dishonest to point out when the wip i worked on the most this year was one
• the obligatory non-linear narrative(s) (two of them!)
• the obligatory amnesiafic(s) (i really have to come to terms with the fact already that forgetting is one of my favourite tropes Of All Time). now that i'm thinking about it 3/5 of my fics this year are about forgetting in some way LOL
• the obligatory timeloop (writing timeloops from the pov of a nonlooper is always sooo fun)
• in case u guys couldn't tell i love writing things that are about memory and time... So true
• once again things are mostly gen... it is what it is

INDIVIDUAL FIC COMMENTARY: this year i wrote most of these up immediately after finishing the fics so i won't have that much to say here, but revisiting what i wrote is still kinda interesting to me since most of them were from the first half of the year.

1. LIGHTNING TURNS SAWDUST GOLD: fic | commentary | jan 10 | op, sabo canon divergence, 5.9k.

He tastes blood, it hurts; what’s a little more blood, a little more hurt. He holds his brother back and laughs the hoarse creaking rattle of a rusted chain pulling taut, anchor finally striking the bottom of the sea.

i still really love this one, love remembering what a delight it was to write, love rereading it and feeling all of it again, that rush of everything when i was just starting to play around in the bottomless sandbox that is op after getting out my definitive love letter to nami last year. you can really tell, too, because jesus there's clearly so much here i have feelings about and i was only just realizing i'm Allowed to write about all of them! the way this starts clearly reads as one of my typical overarching character studies, and then halfway through ace just muscles his way into the narrative and turns it into something else entirely. and i love that, but it also means there's still more i want to write about sabo, about ace, because i didn't even get to write the thing i wanted to write, lol

ok real talk idek why i'm so interested in writing sabo... i just think he's an incredibly romantic and idealistic character and again forgetting is one of my favourite tropes of all time and most of all i think about ace and sabo before luffy and it just kills me. how badly they hated where they came from, how badly they wanted to remake themselves new, and they were the only ones to know each other for who they really were, they made each other into who they were... Which is why it's so fucking crazy that sabo forgot it all. and then ace died. and then sabo inherited ace's devil fruit power. LMAO... anyway.


2. SIMULATION SWARM: fic | commentary | jan 27 | op, reiju nonlinear character study, 3.4k.

Before her brothers were born Reiju didn’t know what she was for. After was when it all fell into place, where they stood on the measuring stick and what numbers lay between. But not every difference between them could be defined in such exact terms. She had to appraise these values for herself: the satisfaction of beating Niji’s score in training, the childlike happiness of earning her mother’s praise, the mute dread with which she watched Sanji lag further and further behind. After a while, though, it became harder to tell these things apart. The swift thunderstrike of fear, the scathing burn of anger, the acidic churn of resentment. Eventually they all lost their bite. The ache that was jealousy, that was wanting, that was regret. There was only one feeling in the world.

not so enamoured with this one, mainly because i remember how hard of a time i had writing it lol, which makes me less inclined to forgive its flaws. there are parts of it i do like, and there are also parts i would write differently or leave out entirely. i will always love writing my excessive little character studies but unfortunately some characters actually don't need that much to be said imo... and i feel like i learned that through trying to write this fic LOL. if i could rewrite it, i think i would actually write reiju from a colder angle, and i think it would make the moments of relenting tenderness hit harder, the earnedness of the word love... oh well!!


3. LIES ABOUT SEA CREATURES: fic | commentary | mar 9 | op, post-timeskip, 5.1k

For the past two years there was no time for self-pity. That isn’t to say they passed fast. Reliable markers of time lost their meaning above the clouds: the position of the sun relative to the horizon, the angle of the shadow it cast. So she learned new ones and tallied the days like she would money, a more precious ledger, her promise paid by the hour. She grew out her hair. She tried to make maps, but her view from above was too telescopic to be useful to anyone using them on the sea, and what was the point if not usefulness? She made lightning instead, winds that rose from the clean release of knots from their ropes, remorseless sheets of rain. She wished for Usopp’s craft or Franky’s handiness to fashion herself a waver; she wished for them. She thought, her younger self would kill her for living her life according to somebody else. Her younger self didn’t know anything at all. She returned to the Sunny with a bento Haredas packed her and a slippery joy in her chest and the sinking feeling of having lost something she can’t ever get back. But she is back.

hahaha... hehehe... this fic wrote itself. in my heart i'm always writing this fic.


4. DEUS EX MACHINA: fic | commentary | aug 8 | op, usopp character study through the vehicle of a parasitic memory-eating island, 7.7k

“What,” Kaya says. “Are you keeping secrets from me now?” She laughs, and it hurts like she’s reached out and plucked something straight from his ribs, some underripe fruit or flower that snags on the stem. He hasn’t heard that laugh in— “Come on. What is there you haven’t told me? What’s left?”

“There’s so much,” Usopp says; he shouldn’t speak to her honestly like she’s real, like she’s anything at all. His blabbermouth’s gonna be the death of him. He’s always known it, everyone’s always known it. “You don’t even know. You won’t. I’m not gonna just give it all up.”

“You already are,” Kaya says. Head tilted at him through the window. Her eyes shine like an oil slick, deep enough to fall into. “Don’t you want to at least tell it how you want?”

“How I want?”

“Yeah. You know, how you remember it.” She smiles at him. “How you like it.”

“That’s not how I...”

“Love, even,” Kaya suggests. “It’s so much sweeter that way.”

since i'm committed to playing in the op sandbox i think i should get to have a turn on every single tried and true op trope actually. (this is foreshadowing for one of my current wips btw.) hey did u kno i love characters who are LIARS, i love characters who tell STORIES, and i love it when those characters are one and the same. probably what i'm most proud of in this fic is the gut punch of getting kaya when you're expecting luffy.


5. EVENTUALLY: fic | oct 23 | orv, lee seolhwa throughout the regression turns, 3.0k. written for the untold stories zine.

Kim Dokja is looking at her with something like pity. She is looking at him with something much the same. He thinks he knows how her story will go, but between the two of them, she’s the one who has outlived it. Who has surpassed the sorry dog-eared page.

honoured to have been part of this beautiful zine... seriously gasped when i opened it to read through for the first time 🥲 my first experience writing for a zine and it's led me to apply for another one hehe...

as i said i love writing timeloops from the pov of the nonlooper and i had a #vision for the twistiness of the 3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2 order of the loops at the beginning, no idea how well that actually worked in practice tho. rereading this it's really clear that the least interesting parts are her doomed love story with yjh lol though that's kind of the point, in this and in orv as well. but it was real, it was imagined, it happened, it was a beloved story... wanted it to be morbid (had some lines in there about being buried which were chopped), wanted it to be about living. did feel my abilities were challenged but in a different way, for once: wrangling the word count was definitely the hardest part so i'm just glad i was able to cut it down to this.

btw, everything i used as inspiration during the writing of this fic:

• BUTTERFLY NET, caroline polachek: faithful inertia
• I BELIEVE, caroline polachek: i don't know but i believe
• THE MAD SCENE, james merrill: Why did I flinch? I loved you.
• ANNIVERSARY, cecilia woloch
• A MYTH OF DEVOTION, louise gluck: ...the beloved body, compass, polestar...

WORKS IN PROGRESS (3+)

1. THIS LOVE IS BEING TURNED INTO... | orv, yoohankim reverse gsnk au, 20.1k.

Why me? An empty classroom, a notebook opened to the damning words within, the burdensome silence as she thought of how to respond.

“Hey, didn’t you know?” Han Sooyoung responds now, eyes fixed on that scene. “Everything’s really boring.”

yes this was in my wip section on my writing round-up post from last year........ consoling myself with the 14k increase in word count. unfortunately that does not mean it's almost done... it's like 40ish% of the way through?? and i haven't touched it since september?? i'm sorry... it's just hard. LOL. there's a lot i want to do with this and i fear i won't be able to do it well. i want to measure up to the vision that i love. part of me is upset i couldn't finish it this year and part of me is relieved that i will still have this to work on for probably a long time. i've also changed the gdoc background colour to pale grey so like obviously that's how you know i Really mean business.

if i'm thinking about it, which i am now i guess, there are really three main parts of this fic's writing process that have been particularly challenging for me:

• ok i won't lie i have to CANON REVIEW. because there are certain orv arcs i want to "adapt", if you will, or integrate, or even reference. And to do that well i feel like i have to reread those arcs. but i kind of don't want to reread those arcs, i want to reread the whole thing in order 😭 like i started doing last summer. but the thing about orv is that well it's 551 chapters long........... So you see why my brain is stuck on this lmfao
• there's a specific change in relationship dynamic that is really killing my brain here. the premise of my reverse gsnk au is that kdj confesses to hsy he's a fan; she thinks he's just confessing. all of that has been very fun to write so far. unfortunately, yoo joonghyuk exists. LOL I'M JK but basically this au premise means that hsy had to start writing about yjh before knowing kdj; in other words, she didn't originally write it for him. the implications of which i've found very interesting to think and write about! but i still find it difficult because it's a marked change from canon and thus changes a lot of things. not everything, but a lot. so that trips me up sometimes.
• and finally, the obvious one: it's shipfic, and not only that, it's freaking high school yoohankim... kms. OK I'M SERIOUSLY JOKINGGG but like. God. I am killing them in my brain and they are killing me etc. it's very fun and it's very agonizing and i haven't even really GOTTEN to the relationship wrangling part yet, augh! fuck. i need to write this.

2. A FAR CRY FROM AN EMPIRE | op, five times not telling luffy something, 3.0k.

She said, when we were kids Nojiko and I used to climb trees.

She said, You can have it. You didn’t ask for it, then. But you can have it.

She said, Luffy. Did you hear me?

Luffy wasn’t really listening. Well, he was, but he stopped halfway through because he was thinking of something else.

How tall?

What?

How tall were the trees?

this was a fic i thought would be a fun little exactly-as-described thing and it is turning out instead to be about grief!


3. DEAR | op, sometimes you look into the past and it can't look back, aka my take on the rainbow mist, aka mom said it's my turn on the deaging trope, 1.5k.

Chopper had a theory. The fog clearly had some kind of hallucinatory effect; those who had stayed out on deck had caught the worst of it, and opened the kitchen door to witness a mass delusion. “You weren’t there,” Usopp insisted, “you didn’t see it, this was real!” “None of this explains what happened to my kitchen,” Sanji said, still itching for someone to blame, but for some reason nobody would really look him in the eye. “Anyway, it couldn’t have been Sanji,” Franky reasoned to no one in particular, “that kid couldn’t cook at all,” and the cigarette fell straight out of Sanji’s mouth, fizzed out on the floor.

Robin had a story. In some distant kingdom some distant years ago, a conqueror had sailed off with an army of two hundred warriors to brave the treacherous seas. A day later their ship drifted back to shore, teeming with two hundred and one children of various ages, each of them crying for home. “But that didn’t happen to us, right?” Chopper said, looking down at himself as if to double-check. “Alas,” Brook said, primly tapping his skull with a single pointed fingerbone, “I still appear to be a skeleton.” “It wasn’t all of us who turned into kids, it was just the cook,” Zoro pointed out, so Sanji turned on him; “who’re you calling a kid, mosshead?!” “It’s only a legend,” Robin said. “And legends tend to get the most important parts of the story wrong, after all.” “What was the point, then?” muttered Usopp, but Robin only smiled, closed her book. “Now isn’t that the question,” she said, and if she had any more thoughts on the subject, she kept them to herself.

Luffy had a secret. On his way to the toilet he’d spotted a little girl lurking by Nami’s desk in the library. Nami must have stepped out; the girl was peeking at the maps she’d left laid there. He stopped in his tracks to stare at her. She saw him, and her face went briefly blank at having been caught snooping. Then she pressed a finger to her lips: shh. Tch, when’d they pick up such a shameless stowaway, thought Luffy, but he really had to pee, so he fake-nodded at her all seriously and continued on his way. Then when he came back she was nowhere to be found.

“Uh, Nami,” he said, “did you see a kid around here earlier?”

“What?” Nami didn’t look up from her desk.

“Never mind.” He decided it best to scuttle away and pretend like he hadn’t seen anything at all. So he did.

the thing i'm currently working on. i don't even know if it will get anywhere but i started it, it's alive, i'm living in this thing. btw orv was literally right, OMNISCIENT VIEWPOINT is where it's at!


FINAL THOUGHTS

thought i'd write more this year, or at least the year seemed to get off to a promising start, but it really fizzled by the end 🥲 which is like, fair enough, i guess, that's just how these past few months have been. typing up all of this about my wips has made me excited though... funny how that works! i really have a lot to work on and that's a relief! it's so much better than when i have nothing to write lmao

last year's goals:

• next year i am going to write SHIPFIC (maybe). i am going to write it with INTENT. i am going to CHALLENGE my ABILITIES
  • well uh. abilities were certainly challenged but that's why the damn thing's taking so long haha. don't think i tried that hard tbh but i'm working on it!!

• if i do not write an orv timeloop next year... whats even the point
  • not what i intended but my lshfic kinda counts for this LOL?

• kinda wish i could write shorter fic. imposing restraint--feels like i need that lol. had the vague idea to start a collection of really short op flash fics just whenever they come to me as i'm rewatching it, just for fun, without committing to anything more than a scene or a bout of imagery... idk if i'll do it but we'll see!!
  • didn't do flash fics but did write shorter fics for more op ideas so i consider this fulfilled!!

i never really know what to set as goals. writing's an elusive thing that feels so tied to my #feelings that i really just write whatever the hell i feel like whenever. i always say pointless shit like, i would like to write things i feel strongly about, i would like to write things i haven't written before, i would like to be surprised by whatever i write, i would like to be happy and have fun :) like DUH? i'm just gonna keep going. salute emoji.

i received so many lovely comments this year. i really treasure and cherish every single one 🥲 thank you as always for reading.

Comments

[liptinted]

I think I said something similar along the same lines years ago through twt dm introduction after i first read your loona remix fic and edge of seventeen fic... my apologies that was so long ago fghfghjs, but what i admire about your writing still rings true even if you've mentioned you've felt your writing style was changing! I love reading your thoughts on your own writing, it makes me want to always be kinder towards my own :') i hope you achieve all that you're happy reaching towards for your goals this new year, thank you for talking about your writing adventures! - twt mutual _cheektint