2020 year-end writing retrospective

[younglegends]

reusing my same format as last year~ this is probably gonna be long because i LOVE talking to myself about writing so. yeah! 

FICS COMPLETED AND PUBLISHED: 10

TOTAL WORD COUNT: 113,600 which is weird bc it honestly felt like i didn't write that much this year/spent so much of this year lamenting the fact that i had nothing to write... i guess it still just happens somehow huh!

FANDOMS:
kpop (4): loona (3), bangtan (1)
video games (3): dishonored (2), the last of us (1)
movies (1): it chapter 2
animanga (1): gekkan shoujo nozaki-kun


TOP TAGS OF THE YEAR:

1. canon-typical violence (4)
2. grief/mourning (4)
3. alternate universe - college/university (2)

NOTICEABLE TRENDS:

well... i mean.

i think something that's evident is that i used to write for a lot more lighthearted fandoms... aside from yuletide and if i weren't into kpop, everything i wrote this year would have been... uh... a slog. (and even some of the kpop ones too!) i used to classify myself as a very hopeful writer, as in someone interested in writing about hope, and i'm still inclined to say that about myself, i just think... i have a different idea of what hope is, now? or at least what it means to me. because honestly, every canon i've ever enjoyed about grief/mourning and everything i've ever written about grief/mourning has been, in my mind, very hopeful (except in your black heart i'm so sorry. i went all in on the bleak ending in that one).


FAVOURITE OPENING LINES:

The first thing Jungkook did in his first year of university was fall in love, badly.

from that comes after spring. have i mentioned that i am adverb lover? i am adverb lover. 

(alternatively: emily's dream sequence at the beginning of to a point. could it be removed entirely from the fic with very little consequence? yes. but have you considered: Writing It Was The Most Fun Indulgent Shit Ever, And Also I Love It?)


FAVOURITE CLOSING LINES:

Ellie holds her hands in her lap, all she’s got left, and watches as Abby pushes the boat out to sea, into the fog. Look back, she wills. Turn around and look back. Look at me. Look me in the eye as you leave, and look at everything you’ve left behind. Look at what we made.

But her eyes are facing forward.

from but the song is lost. very interesting to me because this is one of the earliest passages i ever conceptualized while planning this and in fact came to me hand-in-hand with the structure of the whole fic, but i received a comment letting me know that in fact abby apparently did look back at ellie when driving away on the boat? and honestly i accepted that, like, my bad, i didn't see that, but then i went back to watch the gameplay vid and... it still looked to me like she hadn't?! so i genuinely have no idea if she did or did not look back, i cannot tell, but either way it's ok i am still subscribing to My Narrative Interpretation... thank u for ur time...


TOP SCENES I WOULD WANT TO HAVE ILLUSTRATED:

1. in your black heart: yves with her cigarette under the cherry tree; hyejoo riding into the night on her bicycle; or yeojin's house spilling all that light under the shadow of the overgrown azalea bush in jungeun's yard
2. the chain: stan riding on the back of silver. wow i really do think bicycles are neat
3. to a point: emily and billie on the deck of the ship. also, anything, period.
4. i think everything has changed: the gang ice-skating <3 
5. that comes after spring: seokjin and jungkook's second meeting on the train, i think, when seokjin's asleep. i realized this year that i really do write a lot of falling-asleep-on-public-transit scenes, but in my defense, that's also just a lot of my life. 

SURPRISES OF THE YEAR:

i wrote a fic commission!!! amazing!! another good surprise i think is the fucking unbelievable revelations that possessed me while writing the chain during spring quarantine, and also everything i learned from the dry spell i had in autumn when i could only read wretched shit and didn't have a single thing in me to write, though i wanted to so, so badly. it really surprises me still that i could learn something from not writing, too.


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

FEB 2020

IN YOUR BLACK HEART: loona, sooyoung+hyejoo ambiguous gen, i genuinely don't know how to classify this au, 5.4k.

Hyejoo doesn’t want to be any of these things, mirrored in any of their endless grief. She wants to be a shadow slipping out of sight. Out of reach.

But even more than that, she doesn’t want to be alone.

i just wanted to write something using that title and this song so bad. i have no idea where the specific premise of this fic came from. sorry to hyunjin i really wanted to write somebody crying. ok i'm so mystified by where this fic idea originated from that i actually went back to the original gdoc. here you can have some early-days planning/throwing-shit-at-the-wall stuff:

 

this is so funny and says so much about how i plan/write shit. this really makes me look like i get all my ideas beamed into my head through telepathic alien signals. yes i do believe it is essential to keep a record of good words i might want to use. anyway as you can see the originally planned ending is not what went down in the final version, and i have mixed feelings on it still... i was planning it to be a little less wretched. they were gonna be closer, and also maybe burn down some shit together, and maybe hold hands. alas, that is not the direction i ended up going in, and the truth is i have to chalk it up just to my feelings at the time of writing it. shrug emoji. i like to think that if i were writing this now it would be much more polished/maybe a little more subtle LOL but it really is just what it was and that's OK! 

i am very into the sentiment of misplacedness. displacement of closeness/feeling? whatever that means.


MAY 2020

WE HAVE BOTH BEEN HERE BEFORE: dishonored, corvo-centric gen, The Experience Of Being A Video Game Protagonist, 5.9k.

You wonder what it is they see when they look at you, that scares them so. A mirror, perhaps. A blankness in which to reflect their own wretched selves: what they’ve always done, and what they’ll always do, and what will always, in the end, be done.

You return their empty gazes. You lift the glass to your lips, and you drink. 

honestly more a thinly veiled writing exercise than anything else. i just wanted to write excessive prose, and i also thought it would be fun to write a pure videogamefic, i.e. the protag is experiencing the Video Game Mechanics of my playstyle, i.e. save scumming lmfaooooo. the way burrows dies in this fic is LITERALLY the way i accidentally fucking killed him after going through all the trouble of the nonlethal route which i find very hilarious. just... the sweet combination of doomedness and futility and being a literal puppet powerless over your decisions/fate in combination with the already bleak canonical themes of betrayal and becoming an instrument of revenge. yknow? i am aware that i tweet all the time about how hopeful i find this story even with (because of?) all its misery but this fic is very much like... there is no hope u are a video game character and this is a high chaos playthrough. godspeed

really grateful for this game's existence so that i can always return to it like i did this spring. it's funny bc this isn't technically a time loop fic but it also literally is. it's also the first time i wrote excessively indulgent second person POV since i was in high school writing wretched homura fics and idealized gsnk stuff... i am the me that i am...


JULY 2020

THE CHAIN: it chapter 2, stan-centric time loop au, 36.0k. ♡

Here are all their secret things, their fiercely guarded fears and wants and sorrows turned over at last. Here is the torch Ben has been bravely carrying for twenty-seven years, here is the crutch Eddie lets go of like a limb, here is the regret Bill has folded up and preserved careful as a paper boat now released to the tide. Bev reads out a child’s painstaking script, the words she knows by heart; here is love. Mike casts the rock that had brought the seven of them together; here is love. Richie flips an arcade token into the fire like a coin into a fountain, as though making a wish. His face drawn in shadow. Here is—?

laughs nervously... here just take this giant post about the entire process that i wrote after finishing the fic. 

do i have anything else to say? well, really, just that i was lucky enough to receive some very kind and heartfelt comments that i will remember for a long time. and that this, really, has been a fic that is so vastly important to me, in my writing of it and in the story itself, and i'm very grateful i had this to work on during spring 2020, rewriting the outlines by hand over and over by candlelight on the couch in the middle of the night lmao. it meant a lot to me, to write it. and while i certainly have moments of remembering this exists and being struck by OH GOD, THIS IS JUST OUT THERE, THE CRINGE OF THIS BEING OUT THERE FOR ANYONE TO READ, i have to say that over the course of reworking and rewriting it so much, i genuinely only became fonder of it... the stupid opening scene that i had to find ways to somehow repeat in interesting ways over and over again... the struggle to write dialogue that sounded like something real people would say let alone these specific characters... the overly lengthy paragraphs of rambling prose that i had to cut, and the ones i probably should have cut but still kept in... yes, all of that, i still stand by all of it, and all of it could only have been written by me <3 

im one of those people who tend to write, like, One Definitive Fic for a canon that gets out all my #feelings about it, and then i don't have anything more to say about it lmao, so on one hand this is that for me and i don't have any plans to write anything else for IT... but on the other hand Whom Can Know, esp as i am rereading the novel in this year of 2021 (THANKS SAVANNAH <3)? we'll see. other than that... horror is soooo fun to write and i would really love to write more of it! it's also such an excellent vehicle for character exploration, and the IT movies really did drop the ball in terms of making their horror character-relevant, so *gestures vaguely* You See What I Had To Work With. 


AUG 2020

TO A POINT: dishonored, emily/billie, 12.9k. ♡

Emily walks along the exposed skeletons of ransacked buildings, balancing high above the street, a faint wind in her hair. In the sky, the clouds drift like whales in the sea. If anything haunts this city, it is her.

i recognize that a lot of what i choose to write in fic is, like, not super interesting, because the majority of my fics are canon retellings of some sort, whether time loops or just a straight-up blow-by-blow of events in narrative form. (all my video game fics this year were essentially just that!) so yeah like me @ me come up with an original plot sometime... but also i will unfortunately never change because this is actually what i like about writing fic and what i find interesting to write slkjdsjghjlslglk. anyway.

this is one of my favourite fics of the year, because i love this game, and i love this world, and i loved writing for it. i don't think all of it is "good" at all but when i reread it i am always pleasantly surprised by how clearly i loved writing it so much. umm about the fic itself... honestly at the beginning i couldn't decide whether to write low or mid or high chaos emily so i guess i went with, like, all three? lmfaoooo. i decided on an escalating trajectory through each stage resulting in billie not telling her the truth and leaving but no lieeee guess whattttt i was on the "final" scene and was like Wait so here's how hope can still win... yeah i decided people have the capacity to change people or whatever so billie told her the truth and emily didn't kill her. What A Surprise... idek if it reads as believable but it is. TO ME

i've always loved that you can find delilah's painting of billie in the royal conservatory... i also apparently have intense delilah + emily feelings EVEN IF i feel like delilah's "backstory" in dh2 wasn't all that well-developed. something something family something something all of what's yours belongs to me, from your bloodline to your body (re: delilah's original plan in the dishonored dlcs). more than anything else though i love how intertwined billie and emily's lives are like tfw you saved the empress whose mother you helped kill and whose reign you almost prevented and whose life you once schemed to end with your ex-lover for whom you betrayed your mentor figure/person who saved your life from nothing and made you who you are except you gave yourself up at the last minute and almost willingly died for it but you were spared, AND NOW you're helping her against that very same ex-lover but if she knew who you really were she would probably kill you, AND she's kinda hot... like. Damnnnnnn

i'm actually very sad there will never be a dishonored 3... i know there's not really any viable storyline for it and also doto exists but like. I WILL NEVER EXPERIENCE A DHGAME FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN........ ARGH


RUN THE HEART: loona, heejin/hyunjin, university au, 16.1k. written as a commission for dancingqxxeen.

After a while Heejin rests her head against Hyunjin’s shoulder. Her hair tickles Hyunjin’s throat. For her, Hyunjin keeps still.

Heejin smells of something faintly earthy, like the woods.

A few stations later Heejin is asleep.

Hyunjin keeps her eyes straight ahead. She can just barely make out their reflections in the window. She watches them, in the glass.

extremely lucky and grateful to have been reached out for a commission to write this!! i was nervous about whether or not i could do it (because my writing speed can be... laughable) but i didn't have much else going on at the moment anyway and i wanted to try it. also so lucky to have received cute and lovely fanart for this fic T___T  

this is kind of a love letter to first-year uni, or at least, to the fantasy version of first-year uni... now that i'm out of undergrad forever i'm solidly in the oh-god-i-can't-believe-it's-OVER phase of missing it so badly, the way i always romanticize the past for no reason other than that it's over. but quite honestly the first two years of my undergrad were the absolute worst of my whole life and i was so miserable and lonely. i never really had a "stereotypical" university experience—not once did i ever join a club or go to a party or live in a dorm, which are all things i hilariously write about in my (many) university aus—but i became pretty fond of what it was in my later years of undergrad, or i guess it became familiar and beloved in that dearly mundane way... 

but what i did do in my first semester of university was write a university au of my favourite canon from high school, of high schoolers (my gsnk futurefic: it was a love story after all), and in that miserable and lonely time, it was an imagining of possibility, a wondering if this would be what it would be like, a hope for something i couldn't yet grasp... and in a sense this fic is that too, but from the other direction: a fantasy of something that never was, but could have been/could be. an ode to that over-the-top romanticized university experience and how i do believe it can exist imagined in the air alongside the reality. in the end i feel like first-year is all about that hopefulness of new things beginning, and regardless of how it fails to meet expectations, it's always inherently, objectively, absolutely true that the new things are beginning. it's really such a hard time, when everything feels like it's so big and important and if you miss out or mess up on anything you can't come back from it, and i wanted to write something that took those feelings seriously. 

the biggest challenge of this was writing two people get together from a meet-cute. most of the "love" stories ive written are about people with history, while this is a fic about two strangers getting to know a lot about each other in a very short amount of time, and trying to somehow make the undertaking of that hugely terrifying risk believable. so i essentially wrote this like an over-the-top romantic comedy while at the same time not wanting there to be some kind of cliche third-act ~misunderstanding~ or conflict other than just that—the hugely terrifying unquantifiable risk in the air between them, with them. i was also thinking of, in such a stressful and lonely and often meandering time, what it means to give and receive kindness. to take care of one another, with intent. 

anyway probably the biggest instance of projection in this fic is the giant paragraph dump of heejin thinking about yves having gone through what she's going through now years ago... yeah in case you can't tell i have an older sister

final fun fact: i have been wanting to use "run the heart" as a fic title since 2014.


SEPT 2020

THAT COMES AFTER SPRING: bangtan, seokjin/jungkook, university au, 11.1k.

How tempting it had seemed to him back then, when he lived loneliness as a time of day, that empty hour when he would lie in bed and listen to the sounds of the night around him: Taehyung on the phone talking into his ear about another perfect stranger, music muffled from the other room, slow traffic moving outside his open window. How tempting it still is. It isn’t that Jungkook’s afraid of being alone. It’s that he wants to become a person who is good at love. Knows himself capable of it, as though a hollow space carved inside his chest, ready and waiting. That he could someday fill it with someone’s heart, and handle it with care, and it would almost even fit.

this is an old wip from last year that i dug up from the recesses of my gdocs and decided to salvage. i am very fond of this fic's mundaneness, and for the me of last year who wrote most of this, who was clearly thinking a lot about love and longing and loneliness. i don't think i could have written this now, the me i am today, who has graduated from uni. i wrote this from the thought of actively wanting to grow and become someone better through love, to be loved, and i actually only found this song after i wrote most of it but its chorus pretty perfectly encapsulates a lot of what i was trying to convey lol... oh the romanticism of wanting to love and wanting to be loved... 

from this i would say i really feel the "I know I needed that time, to get to where I am now. That doesn't mean I can't make fun of it." line, which is something i've spent a lot of time working through myself: making peace with certain times of my life, treading the line between simultaneous self-acceptance and self-judgment. i also wrote the last scene late at night when i was actually feeling very sad, and very aware of my own sadness, and the memory of that experience has really stuck with me... writing a love confession scene of risk and bravery and hope when you're actually feeling very sad... hits different


HAND OVER FIST: loona, heejin/jinsoul post-disbandment exes au, 1.8k. written for ficmix.

At the time they’d been at their peak. That was the well-earned excitement of it, working themselves up to a position where they wouldn’t have to worry about anything knocking them down ever again. Or so Heejin had thought, until it turned out everyone else had some kind of contingency plan all along, hanging her out to dry. Jinsol, too, had looked down from their dizzying height, all the view it had to offer, and found it wanting. Sort of like how she was looking at Heejin now.

the only fic i wrote in past tense this year! i was SUPER nervous writing this and also completely scrapped my original plan/draft in favour of writing this single scene instead, which i think was more effective and interesting anyway. but who's to say. i'm acutely aware i've never written anything about exes before (except last year's ficmix i guess... wait didn't i also write a confronting-your-ex-bandmate-and-lover-at-a-mutual-groupmate's-wedding scene in last year's ficmix LMAOOOO HOLD ON... EVERYTHING I WRITE REALLY IS THE SAME. But also isn't that just what mutual groupmates' weddings are for), nor have i ever tackled the topic of disbandment through anything other than softened romanticization (*pensive emoji*), and idk if the tone landed too hard or clumsy or if i successfully pulled it off but i'm happy with what i tried!! 


BUT THE SONG IS LOST: the last of us part 2, ellie and abby-centric gen, 7.6k. ♡

You stupid girl, she thinks, both despairing and triumphant. How could you be so shortsighted? How could you just ruin everything like this? You thought you lost everything? You hadn’t. You never even came close. But now you’re going to, just like me. Now you’re just like me.

i'm really proud of the structure of this fic (abby's povs starting from the end and going backward in time to the beginning vs. ellie's povs starting from the beginning and going forward in time to the ending, and the entire fic starting and beginning in the same place, and with the sense that there's only one way to go on from here)... the way the story follows the part of their paths that have intertwined and then dives deeper like into a stitched wound before breaking off at the seams to their different directions... or something.

a fave part of this is in the fight between abby and ellie at the theatre, and how for the duration of it, neither of them are referred to by name in the narration. and their names are only "remembered" by the narration when lev shouts abby's name, stopping her from killing dina, and she remembers ellie's name also, starts thinking about her as a person again, about owen and mel and everyone... 

really had a thing this year for writing videogamefic about two central female protagonists paralleling each other in their cycles of loss and grief and brutality and vengeance... and then being forcibly, unbearably freed from it... and then being left with the weight of the question, What next? What now? yeah it's like that. i really enjoyed writing abby and especially the part where she thinks about her hands vs. her father's, his as those of a lifesaving surgeon vs. hers as violent. and then abby holding lev... and also im thinking AGAIN of joel whittling those miniature wooden animals... ARGHHHH i am simply very gotten by this video game 

now that i am rereading this i realize i actually kind of paralleled the ending "Look at me. Look at what you've made" paragraph with ellie's first pov with joel in which she thinks to herself, Go on, Ellie. Look at him. but she doesn't... whoa holy shitttt that was completely unintentional... go off @ my subconscious


DEC 2020

I THINK EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED: gekkan shoujo nozaki-kun, nozaki/sakura, seo/kashima, 9.5k. written for yuletide.

...and anyway, Nozaki’s gotten used to giving half to Sakura by now: the back seat of a tandem bicycle, the shelter of a single red umbrella, the space set aside on the desk in his apartment with pens and inks neatly prepared and waiting. She’s his assistant, after all—one who’s stuck steadfast by his side through thick and thin, and who’s only here now out of obligation to their work. The story they’re coming up with together.

hehe i was so excited to write for this prompt... seokashima being requested in this year of 2020!!! the outline came to me pretty easily enough esp with everything my recipient gave me to work with in their letter, but i did find to my surprise that the nozachiyo ended up taking over more than the seokashima itself... ig that's just the consequence of writing nozaki POV lol. BUT I CAN'T HELP IT.... NOZAKI POV IS SO FUN. where else can i get away with shit like having him think A mangaka's observant eye catches every detail, after all while cackling madly to myself. i mean come on

i wrote the confession scene in a fever dream—it was the easiest thing to write ever which astonished me bc i think it's the first time i have ever really considered how a nozachiyo confession scene would go down (yes i wrote one in 2014, no it doesn't count). i can't express how simultaneously easy and difficult writing this fic felt... anyway i love getting to write for this fandom again after years and seeing how similar and different it is from when i was writing for it as a teen ^__^ a lot really has changed (see title), and yet it also hasn't! they're the same and i'm the one who has changed! what an interesting feeling...



WORKS IN PROGRESS:

ALL OUR HEROES: power rangers (2017), post-canon drifting apart au, ~7.4k.

So she buys a new coat and a scarf and a pair of woolen gloves she has to remove every time she wants to answer a text or check her email on the subway, so she ends up never wearing them anyway. She gets used to her hands being numb. What’s a bit of cold, anyway? She used to jump off mountain cliffs. She used to smash apart rocks with her bare fists. Once she climbed out of the earth itself, and she even laughed afterward, so hard it hurt to breathe.

Could she still do that? she wonders.

The rattle of the subway tracks.

TAGS PREVIEW: #Post-Canon, #Future Fic, #Drifting Apart, #Grief/Mourning, etc etc... lmfao of course i would find a way to write a disbandment fic about a feel-good teen movie that is literally, by the way, POWER RANGERS. what the fuck, honestly. but also—what a surprise!—trust me guys this one is also about good old HOPE. really!! i swear!!!

anyway the reason why i'm so stalled on this fic is because there is this one specific pov i am stuck on that is just so unbearable and wretched that i don't think i have the skill or abilities to write it. like, i genuinely think it is beyond me. every time i attempt it i just think, oh god, and close the tab. but i also feel that this scene is necessary to include, so... uh... yikes. we'll see, i guess. i will say that writing kimberly and—very surprising to me, as i have previously found him difficult to write—billy in this has been extremely fun.

i genuinely think its ok if i never finish this bc all anyone has to do is listen to the playlist to receive the exact kind of psychic damages i wanted to convey.


GOALS FOR NEXT YEAR:

idk honestly. keep... writing? because i really like writing? and it feels good to write? so, yeah, keep doing more of that? thanks. i genuinely have no ideas rn so who knows what i'll be writing next year! can't wait to find out <3

Comments

[headstone]

I love this postttt and I read the whole thing even though I don't have anything constructive to say... I just Like To See It. Can't wait to see what you write this year as alwaysssss.

[younglegends]

thank you for reading roscoe T____T the same goes for you always! esp as ik it's gonna be an exciting year for u fic-posting-wise <3