#gansey writes yearning songs about blue

[indeterminableillness]

AU (or maybe just headcannon?) where Gansey makes midwest emo music and starts a band and adam is def the bassist and ronan is the drummer and they make songs exactly like this.

[wonderwonderhowido]

fic roundup

Another year-end meme, this one looking back on my fic output in 2016.

Wordcount: 126,116 words according to ao3

Stories: 10

Fandoms: 7

January: None

February:

Goodbye Highway (first chapter posted in January, finished in February) - The Raven Cycle, Ronan/Adam, 69k words. The big amnesia fic.

Did I Say Too Much? I’m So In My Head - Haikyuu!!, kuroken, 3k words. Kenma pines and then is brave. This was the one I wrote during the one all-nighter I pulled in 2016, while I was in a semi-euphoric state after the Carly Rae Jepsen concert. Memorably, this was also the night I tripped and read all the ushioi and found myself with a new otp, but the fic I wrote that night was actually kuroken.

March:

Better Make Sure That You Get Yours - Haikyuu!!, ushioi, 6k words, written for Auto’s birthday. The rimming fic.

April:

Last Year’s Wishes Are This Year’s Apologies -  Haikyuu!!, ushioi, 13k words. The one where Oikawa saves Ushijima from a dude hitting on him, drunken hookup ensues.

I Am One Of Your People - Haikyuu!! x Attack on Titan, Armin/Kenma, 5k words and written for ouroboros for smutswap.

Stand Brave Life-Liver - The Raven Cycle, Ronan and Noah gen, 1,802 words. A missing scene from TRK.

May - August: None

September:

Change of Heart -  Haikyuu!!, ushioi, 12k words. The one where they get lost in the woods together and have to work shit out.

November:

Warm Blood - Mystic Messenger, Jumin/Zen, 7k words and the first chapter of a WiP that will probably never be finished. Zen’s a vampire in this one.

December:

Teach Me Just What Fast Is - Yuri!!! On Ice, Yuri/Otabek, 3k words. Basically just my manifesto of headcanons about Yuri P being a sub.

Tiny Islands Where We Didn’t Always Have To Be Afraid - Jessica Jones, Jessica/Trish, 4k words. Backstory of them hooking up while they were teenagers.

Leitmotif of the year:

I am not sure that there is a single leitmotif that runs through all or most of these, but all my ushioi plus Goodbye Highway have to do with struggles of reconciling the past with the present, and the general concept of, and importance of, the baggage you can have with someone. So I guess that.

Other themes I’ve noticed: healing from trauma; pining; jealousy, resentment, anger and the complications ensuing from these uglier emotions getting entangled with romantic yearning; gaining understanding and knowledge of another person and/or yourself through sex; sex and control, specifically the sexiness of surrendering control to someone else.

What’s the story that makes you happiest?

Goodbye Highway. I feel like a broken record for how much I’ve already talked about my positive feelings for this story, but, well. It made me happy to write and it makes me happy to think about.

My favorite stories this year:

Goodbye Highway; Better Make Sure That You Get Yours; Change of Heart

Most popular story:

Goodbye Highway, and I’m a little stunned by the popularity of Teach Me Just What Fast Is, considering I wrote it on an airplane. 

Story most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

Hm. I mean, both Tiny Islands and I Am One Of Your People were barely read by anyone, but I didn’t really expect them to be? I wrote the Armin/Kenma for ouroboros in smut swap, and they loved it, so I consider it successful by that metric, and Tiny Islands I wrote primarily for myself and I’m satisfied with it, so.

I guess I feel like Change of Heart and Last Year’s Wishes are underappreciated, partly because they got less kudos than the ushioi rimming and were harder to write/more plotty than that, and partly because I always think that ushioi is underappreciated by the universe in general.

Most fun story:

Change of Heart. Dramatic locker room arguments, a hike in the woods gone horribly wrong, forced intimacy, and all of Oikawa’s issues and hangups. The dialogue I wrote for this is some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing dialogue, and I loved pulling so liberally from my own internal monologues for Oikawa’s.

Sexiest story:

Better Make Sure That You Get Yours. Hard to argue with rimming and frenemies to lovers.

Story with single sexiest moment:

Adam sucking on Ronan’s fingers and then his dick before fucking him, in the middle of the longest sex scene I have ever written, at the end of Goodbye Highway. Oh also Oikawa coming on Ushijima’s face in Last Year’s Wishes.

Story with single sweetest moment:

Probably Goodbye Highway again, Ronan and Adam eating chocolate cake and watching porn together. I’m also awfully fond of Blue and Ronan’s first conversation together in GH, when she gives him the light, which maybe doesn’t strike other people as sweet, but it is for me. Also, Oikawa coaching Ushijima on how to make friends is very sweet to me.

Hardest story to write:

Warm Blood. It became hard enough to write that I’ve pretty much given up on continuing it, which is too bad; I kind of feel like I shouldn’t have posted it at all, oh well.

Easiest story to write:

Teach Me Just What Fast Is, or Did I Say Too Much? Both of them were written in p much one sitting, while I was sleep-deprived and in a good mood, and they just flowed.

Truest story of the year:

I still struggle with deciding on a definition of ‘truest.’ Tiny Islands is the story truest to its canon; Goodbye Highway and Change of Heart are the two truest to myself, I guess.

Story that made you cry/saddest story:

I don’t think Goodbye Highway is ultimately a sad story, although some might disagree, but it was the closest anything came to making me cry.

“Holy crap, that’s wrong even for you” story:

I don’t think I wrote anything that would fit this even remotely. All the porn I wrote was extremely right.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

I don’t know if this counts as shifting my own perceptions of the characters, but I wound up writing Jumin and Zen as kinder to each other than I’d originally intended in Warm Blood, and I’m still sort of mad that I wasn’t able to make their dynamic nastier.

Biggest disappointment:

Not writing the Blue and Ronan gen story where they become roommates after Gansey’s death.  

Biggest surprise:

I cannot fucking believe that HQ is the fandom I wrote the most for this year.

Most telling story:

Goodbye Highway, which is basically just 69k words of me processing my own brain shit. Change of Heart, wherein I wrote Oikawa a lot like myself.

Favorite opening line:

From Better Make Sure That You Get Yours: “Oikawa had a list of things that frustrated him about sex with Ushijima Wakatoshi.”

(Honorable mention, from Last Year’s Wishes: “Go suck a dick, Ushiwaka.” Listen, I love writing Oikawa more than I love most other things on this earth.)

Favorite closing line:

"Ronan sat on the forest floor, ignoring the occasional buzz in his pocket that indicated a text from Gansey, until it started to get dark. The temperature dropped, though not by much. Stiffness grew in his legs from sitting in one position too long. Distantly, he could hear the roar of an engine on a highway, so far away that it seemed quiet and kind. And around him, fireflies.” From Goodbye Highway. I just need to point out that I wrote this before TRK came out, and therefore m*ggie owes me for the concept of Ronan and symbolic firefly imagery.

And I can’t choose, I also love this one so much:

“As Noah crouched over Gansey’s body and said the words Gansey needed to hear, energy lines and time circles and knots in threads flitted through him like bird wings flapping. He was relieved to find that letting go did not feel like being murdered at all.” From Stand Brave Life-Liver

Favorite line from anywhere:

I’m very fond of this line from Tiny Islands, because it’s very simple and forgettable out of context but, at least to me and within the context of the show, it has a super bleak impact: “Jessica’s hangover the next morning was terrible, and she swore to herself she’d never drink again.”

But also like, the real favorite has to be this one from Goodbye Highway: “The holes in his mind scared him. But they were just holes. They couldn’t hurt him in the present.”

Favorite title:

Tiny Islands Where We Didn’t Always Have To Be Afraid, which is my favorite lyric from Run Fast by The Julie Ruin, a song that makes my heart hurt whenever I think about it. Honorable mention for Last Year’s Wishes Are This Year’s Apologies, because Fall Out Boy.

Looking back, did you write more stories than you thought you would this year, fewer than you thought, or about what you predicted?

I don’t remember having any real predictions about how many fics I would write, but hm, probably fewer? I wrote fewer than last year, but more of my stories were longer and/or more substantial.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2016?

Ushioi took me by surprise and I’m so glad and I’ve never looked back.

Story that could have been better?

Idk, I’m pretty pleased with the quality of most of them. Stand Brave Life-Liver probably could have been better, but I’m not sure how I could have improved it except by being an entirely different kind of writer than I am. I Am One Of Your People could have been more ambitious, but I think it works as a hot sex scene and a snippet of an established relationship. Warm Blood could have been finished, but oh well.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Goodbye Highway was risky, I guess, but it didn’t feel like it at the time because it mostly flowed easily. Same with most of what I wrote, tbh. I started working on a novel pretty early on last year, and the work on that was for the most part not something that flowed, so fanfic was more of an escapist thing for me, something I thought of doing purely for my own enjoyment and often something I spent time on when I knew I should be doing other things. This meant that most of the fic I wrote was id-driven and a blast to create. I guess what I learned is that it’s worth it to try and find that sweet spot where your writing is simultaneously you shooting from the hip, and striving to pull off an ambitious concept.  

What story do you want to have written?

I want to have finished the otayuri spy AU, I’m so impatient with this one, it’s all I’ve been thinking about. And I want to have written ushioi where Oikawa tops. And I want to have written some kind of otayuri fic that involves them having some kind of fight or misunderstanding and angsting about it and then resolving the conflict. And I want to have written the otayuri idea I have that I described as “orgasm denial but for kissing.” Look I just want to write otayuri all day, every day.

Story I want remembered:

Goodbye Highway.

What’s next for 2017:

I don’t really have any fic goals right now beyond finishing my current otayuri WiPs. Predicting next year’s fandoms is always fun to look at later, in a ‘wow I was hilariously wrong’ way, but I have no idea what’s coming up that could prompt me to write fic. Maybe I’ll write some stuff for Attack on Titan s2, if that starts showing up on my dash again. Maybe I will continue to tend my humble ushioi garden and write the bottom!Ushijima of my dreams; I keep thinking that I’m done with HQ but that hasn’t happened yet and I should probably learn to stop predicting it. I would like to write some victuuri, but I’m waiting for the right idea and it might never come.

You know what WOULD be nice, but I have no idea if this is actually on the horizon, is getting into a big western TV slash fandom again. I’m so ready for another Teen Wolf. I mean, I think a lot of us are and have been for a while, and YOI kind of turned out to be way more of a juggernaut fandom than I would have predicted, which of course I’m thrilled about. But it seems like all of the big non-anime fandom waves in recent years have been movie fandoms, which I can never seem to sustain an interest in, and I want another huge ridiculous TV fandom. I have no idea if this will be in store or not, though, beyond YOI hopefully continuing to gain momentum.