younglegends | 2019 year-end writing retrospective (Reply)

i was really struggling trying to respond to the usual questions, so in classic self-indulgent fashion, i've decided that instead of taking up the year-end writing round-up meme format, i'm going to just respond briefly to a specific few questions that speak to me, and then reflect at length about each of my fics at the end lol... mainly to revisit them and see if i can remember what the hell i was thinking when i wrote them. it's been a weird year

FICS COMPLETED AND PUBLISHED: 11

TOTAL WORD COUNT: 94,543 (sooo close to 100k damn)
+ roughly 35k of incomplete works in progress written this year... shakes fist @ self

FANDOMS:
kpop (8): bangtan (3), loona (4), oh my girl (1)
tv (2): the umbrella academy, stranger things
anime (1): gekkan shoujo nozaki-kun

TOP TAGS OF THE YEAR:

future fic (3)
canon compliant (2)
time loop/groundhog day (2)
background relationships (2)
alternate universe - childhood friends (2)

NOTICEABLE TRENDS:
this year i feel i really threw all planning out the window and just wrote whatever i was possessed to. (everything that wasn't for a fest or exchange, i mean!!) so going through my 2019 fic just feels like... going through a mood tracker lmfaoooo. also i really became so sucked into writing time loops... um i don't have any excuses for myself. but isn't writing time loop so FUN and EASY? all you have to do is set up a premise and then just repeat it over and over again!! and you can make motifs out of meaningless things!! and also i really just wanna put this quote here from natasha lyonne (re: russian doll) on what it is about the time loop trope that really matters, and explains quite well why i'm obsessed with it:

....the idea is deeply personal to me of going from a very disconnected, removed life [where] self-destruction makes the only sense because my behaviors don’t impact the world around me to a character who is by circumstance forced to look at this other idea, which is she accidents into a more connected life [and] realizes people are real, including herself. This is, of course, a much more vulnerable place to be at than this pseudo-punk rock idea of, “Nothing means anything and I don’t care. No one can touch me and I can’t touch them.” Just as soon as it crystallizes that we are of this world, then we have to be participating members...

as for the total slog of topics i wrote about this year, from friendships drifting apart to post-disbandment to apocalypses to death, the answer is: i was really depressed this year. that's it! i was also really obsessed with themes of Knowing and Truth (i.e. what you know to be true, even if it isn't "true" from an objective standpoint). so in that vein... unreliable narrators. and knowing your truth, and living with that, even if it's separate/apart from how the rest of the world lives. that said, looking at my fics, many of them do still have that element of surprise, of the unexpected, of finding there's more, whatever that feeling is called (hope?). bc regardless of all the dark-ish themes i wrote about this year (ok mainly just this summer), i feel like can't help but write what i (want to) believe.

FAVOURITE OPENING LINES:

honestly all my openings this year suck or are incredibly mundane but i suppose i'll quote from love you longer (loona):

Chaewon is in Hyejoo’s bedroom again. Hyejoo knows this even from where she is standing in the hall, because she can see the pale gossamer of her hair through the doorway, slight as the shiver of a butterfly’s wing. Hyejoo knows this even though the dorm is locked and bolted and closed to the world, because Chaewon has always found her way in through to Hyejoo, through to her trapdoors and hidden places. Hyejoo knows this even though Chaewon died two weeks ago, because Chaewon is turning her face to look at her now, silver hair spilling down over her shoulders like water, mouth parting in the memory of a name.

FAVOURITE CLOSING LINES:

from future changing colours (stranger things):

You couldn’t protect anyone from anything, not if they really wanted it. You could only go with them into the dark. “Slow down,” Steve should have called out after them, “you’re going to kill yourselves.” But he didn’t. Just leaned back and watched them go, blur of bright motion colour like they were never gonna stop, never gonna fall, like they were gonna bring this whole dead town right back to life again.

TOP 5 SCENES I WOULD MOST WANT TO HAVE ILLUSTRATED:

all i want: it has to be the concert with the pouring rain and heejin singing onstage... something there
worse things than this: 2jin standing in front of the window, watching the storm of butterflies in the sunrise
love you longer: chaewon's ghost in hyejoo's bedroom, watching and waiting. alternatively, the dream memory of the two of them sitting by the river in summer.
no other time like now: in the bar, hyojung and shiah watching mihyun perform onstage. alternatively, hyojung and mihyun sitting next to each other on the bus, or at the bus stop.
first love: vmin sitting on the beach before the sea.

SURPRISES OF THE YEAR:

aside from the usual "surprise" fics i end up writing for airing canons that i pick up throughout the year, i'd say the biggest surprise is genuinely returning to my roots and coming out with a gsnk fic this year of 2019! it's nice, though, because an ot3 fic was the first fic i ever started writing for gsnk (and ended up scrapping), way back when i was in high school, so it feels kind of right to end the decade on that note?
coming up with several ideas, writing them into wips, and then scrapping them. it's a surprise to find that some of the stuff i was really dedicated to working on earlier this spring—well, i just don't feel them anymore. (press f for the lipsoul hs fake dating au i hit 10k on and then immediately couldn't stand anymore lmao.) but that doesn't necessarily mean they're dead forever—i just gotta see if i ever get back to that feeling!
signing up for ficmix! the experience of remixing someone else's fic was suuuuuper fun and it was a delight to get my own fic remixed as well. at the time writing ficmix right on the heels of ggjukebox was a little daunting but in hindsight i'm glad i managed to do it!
finally, a surprising disappointment would be not finishing my main wip of the end of the year... my itfic :( considering i'd hoped to have it finished for HALLOWEEN, and that i really hadn't wanted to carry it over with me into 2020, well. still, it's really important to me and i hope to see it through to the end!!

GOALS FOR NEXT YEAR:

write whatever i want to. i think that's really what i want from fic writing anyway, right? and it's really nice to get to see, at the end of the year, everything i was feeling/thinking/writing about over the course of the year, even if that changes throughout. of course i hope to finish my more pressing wips but i also hope to surprise myself with what's on my mind/in my heart in what i write for 2020.

THIS YEAR IN FICS (personal faves marked with ♡):

JAN 2019
★ FIRST LOVE: bangtan, jimin/taehyung, small town childhood friends drifting apart au, 5.7k. ♡

Taehyung stares out over the sea. Thinks about the glaciers, the frozen side of the world he’s never seen, all gorgeous white hollowed through with blue, like the underside of a glass. Inside, the depths of ice that have never been touched by warmth, that have forgotten what it feels like. Giants, caved in with yearning. So colossal that when they begin to thaw, no one will notice anything for a long time, their true capacity hidden by the surface of the water. By the millions of years it would take for the melt to reach them.

for the record this was published in a tim hortons at 10-11ish AM. just to set the tone for 2019!

i'm not very subtle—i never am—but looking back i appreciate that i was trying to be more precise, more incisive in my writing. the ending lines aren't very memorable/meaningful and i do think they're pretty weak. that said, i think i really captured or evoked the mood/setting/atmosphere i wanted to express, and there are a few passages i'm proud of, or else return to wondering—man, just what was up with that? where'd this come from? damn.

MAR 2019:
★ NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION: the umbrella academy, gen nonlinear narrative, 6.8k. ♡

What use is a ghost with nothing to want, no good reason to haunt. Only holding relentlessly onto itself, or to the next closest thing, perhaps: a brother.

genuinely i think this might be my favourite thing i wrote this year, which is HILARIOUS, because the story of me writing this fic is so stupid lol. i was really depressed and i watched tua and found it incredibly fascinating re: sibling dynamics what we won't admit we've done to each other etc. but i also found the writing incredibly weak/failing to live up to the potential of its ideas. i wanted to write one of my usual gen character studies for it and there was so much to mine from the show but i found myself resisting writing anything for it because i felt... like... bad. i knew it would be incredibly easy to write something for it but i was kind of like, why is it so fucking easy for u to write something fake lol? maybe deal with ur own life instead lol? i was in a Bad Time. anyway then i gave in and wrote it and it was the most incredibly easy shit i've ever written in my life and i had the time of my life writing it in case you can't tell from the over-the-top indulgent prose. still it's the most fun and cathartic thing i've written this year and i think the closest thing to my natural narrative voice, that simultaneous neutrality and overwhelming emotion, i wish everything i write could be like that lol.

the title came to me right away even though it's not in my usual style, because it's so much of what the story is about: inventing stories, reasons, purpose to survive etc., and also, on a deeper level, my own writing of it. i feel like this fic is what i'd give as a representation of my writing/what i want to achieve with my writing. vaguely hopeful, dead-voiced, nonlinear character study with multiple perspectives and excessively indulgent prose... that's me

APR 2019:
★ IS IT YOU, NOW?: loona, jinsol/jungeun, haseul/sooyoung, hyejoo/chaewon, heejin/hyunjin, post-disbandment future fic au, 5.6k. ♡

Wasn’t Heejin supposed to be number one, anyway? Star of the show. Four out of nine. First girl of the month. Hyunjin’s stayed up countless nights on her couch or in her bed, scrolling through media articles, keeping up with the headlines: Jeon Heejin serenades fans with her guitar in rooftop mini-concert. Jeon Heejin makes generous donation to an animal welfare association. Jeon Heejin opens up a quaint café in Hapjeong-dong, Mapo-gu. In this way, she really has always been ahead. Hyunjin looks at Heejin, her round, patient face, the unspoken truths between them: The amount of time we’ve spent apart is slowly catching up with the amount of time we were together. You’ve aged into this far more gracefully than I. Those really were the best years of our lives.

i have no idea what possessed me to write this and looking back through my gdocs doesn't give me any clues, either. i think i've just always wanted to try my hand at a post-disbandment fic and i wanted to write one for loona because 1) i hadn't gotten into a kpop group to this extent in a while and 2) they're established/developing yet with enough unknown that their futures could be imagined in so many ways, and i wanted to try doing just that. my one regret with this fic is that i didn't work in choerry the way i wanted to—she was going to be a throughline connecting all the scenes/members, the heart of everything :(

the haseul section in particular felt very—stream of consciousness? to me when i was writing it. i always associate that part with water bc of the line where her longing to call sooyoung wells up in her like water but also bc that's exactly how i felt when i was writing this section, that the words were just welling up and rushing out and flowing like water and i was just being carried by them. that was kind of interesting! the hyewon part was the result of my Knowing agenda, aka where i like to have characters just Realize and Know Things. and the 2jin part is the heart of the whole thing and def one of the scenes that had first come to me in the whole fic—the image of hyunjin walking past a school field dreaming of wind in her hair is one of my favourites from the whole fic. also shoutout to my dear cc anon who drew lovely fanart of the 2jin cafe scene T___T it still makes me as emotional as the first day when i received it!!

★ A SUDDEN GLOW: bangtan, yoongi/jungkook, hyyh time loop au, 8.3k.

Familiar words like ambition and desire and hope. How they roll off the tongue.

argh truly i cannot even reread this because it's sooooo... lmao. okay. Anyway. um this is probably the most embarrassing thing i've written all year and i was really going through it this summer, sorry? i've also just always been a sucker for hyyhverse yoonkook.

JUN 2019:
★ LOVE YOU LONGER: loona, hyejoo/chaewon, childhood friends & ghost au, 9.5k.

She doesn’t want to be ungrateful. Wasteful. What a proper-mannered child she used to be, taught well by her parents, praised by her elders. She eats all of it there in the dark in small, economic bites, even though it’s long gone cold and hardened, was meant to be reheated on the stove and mixed with spice and shared at the table, surrounded by warm steam and soft light and the laughter of friends. But the closest thing she has to a friend is staring at her from across her desk, eyes with the same dull, flat shine as coins.

She scrapes the bowl clean with her chopsticks, picking up every last grain of rice. How she had thought then, that she couldn’t go on. Thank you for the meal.

ach. i don't know what to say about this one. to be honest in hindsight i feel a kind of—not shame, exactly? not regret. but i don't know if i feel the same way about this fic as i did when i wrote it. but i suppose i really needed to write it at the time. i had an idea about a lover coming back from the dead, but the story changed a lot from what i first imagined. it became a lot more about memory, and the unreliable nature of it, the twisting of it to get what you want from it.

i like the vision i had for dream!chaewon in this fic—the imagery about being radiant as a jewel, multifaceted and gleaming, too bright to look at, to be real. versus, of course, the ghost of her body, remembering nothing but its longing.

JUL 2019:
★ WORSE THINGS THAN THIS: loona, heejin/hyunjin, idolverse apocalypse au, 3.3k. ♡

Moving in unison like they’re parts of a single body: Haseul the head, Heejin the face, Hyejoo the hand. Hyunjin something deeper than that, under the skin, any of the immeasurable vital organs that impel the muscles and stir the blood. The pulse, perhaps.

this fic was actually also inspired by crj's real love, the song that pretty much defined so much of my writing this year. the apocalyptic elements were inspired by annihilation, of the idea of becoming a part of the world, and how it might be more of a release, or escape even, a surrender to one's desires... i've also just really liked the idea of an idolverse apocalypse au because it lends itself to those themes so nicely. aren't you tired of being idol!! don't you just want to be free and become earth etc. also i was going a little bit crazy watching tipsy lives on youtube and thinking, to be a kpop group past your heyday performing a tipsy live... god! god. smth abt getting that far, i think, in terms of career and years, to be past your prime and to have made it... smth bitter and awful but also incredibly freeing in that. getting to the finish line.

also shoutout to mimi who wrote a wonderful fic inspired by this one T____T go read her take on this verse here!

★ FUTURE CHANGING COLOURS: stranger things, post-s3 gen, 4.4k.

And all along the truth was the chill of your teeth when you went out into the cold; the shadow of the thing.

omg this is so embarrassing... but yes i watched stranger things s3 and kinda lost my mind. st is badly written but it's reminiscent enough of, yknow, that one thousand-page novel that has my heart hostage, for me to project a little bit, and by a little bit i mean a lot. i also luv a lot of the characters—three guesses who my top three are, it's not like they're the povs of this fic or anything!! my agendas for post-s3 narrative are so clear in this. i just want people ACKNOWLEDGING and EXPRESSING their GRIEF and TRAUMAS and also will and eleven interaction. thats all

anyway just how obvious is it from reading this fic that i don't know a single thing about the 80's or what was popular culture during the 80's

AUG 2019:
★ ALL I WANT: loona, heejin/hyunjin, bodyguard au, 21.0k. written for gg jukebox.

But maybe it isn’t actually that simple. Maybe the closest thing to it is the easy sling of Sooyoung’s arm around Jinsol’s shoulders, the tenderness with which she tucks a strand of Jinsol’s hair behind her ear. Something so small, so brave it makes Hyunjin’s teeth ache.

phew. this is the big one. thanks again to crj's real love for giving all of the emotion. i knew i wanted to write idol/bodyguard au but finding the lemony snicket epigraph is actually what gave me the idea of the late-night phone calls. the side scenes with jinsol are some of my favourite in the entire fic. the over-the-top idolverse stuff with jungeun and the concert were some of the most fun shit to write, ever. the party at heejin's apartment features cameos from fromis_9 chaeyoung, seoyeon, and nagyung, and itzy ryujin and yeji. um idk what to say, i think i really just poured a lot into it, all the detail and emotion and everything no holds barred bc it was... that kind of barren summer ig and when i reread this now, y'know, it's a lot, it's not actually one of my favourites from this year (as of now), but i put a lot into it and i'd never quite written anything like this before and it's something to be proud of, i think. also first fic i ever really put effort into making a playlist for!

a question i've been thinking about a lot lately is how i write about love. and to be honest i don't know. i don't know how i've ever written about love. i have always had trouble differentiating it from everything else. in a way the way i write about love is all-consuming. it's the most important thing, it's the answer, it's everything, and i'm not just talking about the romantic kind of love (but then again... what IS romantic kinda love, etc). love is there and it's real but love is... also... i think... when i try to approach writing it in a straightforwardly romantic way... i'd say it's risk. *metric voice* can i send this kiss right to you now... 'cause the risk belongs with you somehow... but ANYWAY the point is, i think i have really little experience writing about romance so when i do i tend to rely on conventional tropes or do-they-or-don't-they uncertainties and there's nothing wrong with those but i would personally be interested in exploring past that? i feel like i've forgotten how to write, y'know, romantic tension arising from internal conflicts or alignments. in a way, all i want has a bit of both (does-she-or-doesn't-she AND i-can't-anyway), but i think in 2020 i really want to maybe consider the question more deeply... (getting REALLY off topic now but as i'm writing this i'm thinking abt juno/peter from the penumbra podcast and how it's the singular most defining idea of #romance i have... anyway. it's all about the Knowing)

SEPT 2019:
★ YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL: bangtan, yoongi/jimin, parallel universes au written for ficmix.

Yeah, and I only did it with you, Yoongi doesn't say.

getting this finished on the heels of ggjukebox almost killed me but i'm happy with how it turned out—i'd instantly gotten the idea after reading the original fic (for a different ending, try— by kyokyou) down to the structure and outline, and the final thing is basically a crystallization of those initial ideas. i really wanted to play with the imagined verses while also remaining faithful to the feeling of the original. my favourite scenes are of yoongi and namjoon on the streets, and the final, very muted-like scene of yoongi and jimin in the hotel room, because that's the exact sense of it i got in my head and i really wanted to get it across.

DEC 2019:
★ IF THIS FEELING ISN'T LOVE, THEN THERE IS NO LOVE IN THE WORLD: gekkan shoujo nozaki-kun, sakura/nozaki/mikorin, time loop au written for yuletide.

“If I’m in love, I should do it right!”

i was completely suckered by the combination of gsnk + time loop as prompted by my recip's likes in their letter... i love time loops where life and death are at stake but i also love mundane ones where the freedom is given to slowly realize what you need at your own pace. felt incredibly nostalgic returning to gsnk the fandom of my heart that got me writing fic in the first place. it felt very sweet. writing these characters still feels like second nature to me. EXCEPT, oh my god, the """confession""" scene, was the most difficult fucking thing i've ever written because i just can't... write... nozaki... like. Realizing These Thoughts And Expressing Them. like, it just doesn't compute! but then i realized—actually, for nozaki, wouldn't he have to know, first? and then wouldn't everything else just be incredibly easy for him after that? so i wrote the part about him marvelling at how hard it is for characters to say it when he writes them (and also, reading between the lines: for sakura and mikorin) because that isn't what he feels at all, in fact it's the easiest thing in the world. i think that was maybe a breakthrough moment for me in terms of dealing with a character i've been writing since i was a fucken 18-year-old... =___= nozaki why are u this way... truly still my #1 anime boy after all this time

★ NO OTHER TIME LIKE NOW: oh my girl, hyojung/mihyun, coffee shop & roommates au written for yuletide.

A nearby presence, push and pull of a tide washing ashore, then drawing slack, receding; then forward once more. How strangely comforting. How startlingly familiar.

i was really intrigued by this ship prompt in the recip's letter and wanted to try writing something for it with the same feeling of secret garden... i feel hyojung and mihyun are both very refreshingly straightforward people but in very different ways and i wanted to explore that. idk how well any of that came across but this was really interesting and fun to write. i was also EXTREMELY influenced by this song they sang together; lyrics like "here you're shining brightly, hidden in that place, but you pretend you're not" and "i'm beginning to resemble your blueness" and, of course, "let's go eat something nice together, let's go somewhere nice together, to the place we pictured" T___T also let me tell you i wrote in that motorbike thinking it was going to be a cool character detail and envisioning a highly romantic scene of mihyun giving hyojung a ride on the back of it and then straight-up just wrote in the other direction instead and had their climactic scene at a bus stop 😭😭😭 who writes??? couldn't be me

in conclusion... i have no idea what i'm doing. and it's really interesting seeing how much of what i wrote in 2019 is stuff that i wouldn't write now or no longer have feeling for. i really was going through it huh. to be honest as well i'm not sure if i'm going to have time to write as much next year, so i hope i can finish the things that i'm really invested in!

if anyone is actually even still reading this or to everyone who's read or clicked on any of my stuff this year—thank you. i'm beyond grateful, always; it means an incredible lot to me. i hope 2020 is a year full of learning and growth and discovery for all of us and i'm excited to see where it leads. 💗💗💗

2019 year-end writing retrospective

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