#lok drawerfic hell

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'I just Perfect Blue myself.'

The City Will Follow You has a lot going on with it because writing it is like... I'm playing a version of Exquisite Corpse with past versions of myself while trying to follow a rough plot structure, but one dumb thing I'm on the fence about is that the Lieutenant never really commits to trying to be Amon. There's an opening there for the Lieutenant to... basically do something very similar to what [REDACTED] did with Mima in Perfect Blue, and I feel like this would've been Narratively Tidier than what is actually going on in the fic, but instead I have the Lt. flirt with the idea but then chicken out because on some level he doesn't Wanna Be the Guy, he wants to look up to The Guy, and it's tricky to do both (although The Guy still gets to live in people's heads rent-free, regardless).

*Disclaimer: if I was writing marketable fiction, I would outline it within an inch of its life. But I am not trying to write marketable fiction at the moment because that stuff is work.

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Do you ever write dialogue and the character's voices just kinda segue into lyrics that are stuck in your head:

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Found myself writing the following in a rough draft:

Jiang snorts. “The whole schtick with that guy was that he was a concept, not a specific individual,” he says, while something in his brain chimes in with, Oh, really? So you spent years having sex with... a concept?

And now I'm picturing a Chuck Tingle V for Vendetta fanfic titled POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY THE ABSTRACT CONCEPT OF RETRIBUTION.

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Small Jiang moodboard.

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Signs from that post I just reblogged as applied to characters in The City Will Follow You:

Noatak/Amon:

The Lieutenant:

Tarrlok:

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I'm too mentally tired lately to be writing fanfic but I have found myself thinking, 'Noatak seems like the sort of guy who'd have a league of evil exes.'

Scenario: after the Lt. slaps Noatak with some brain damage and gets him put in prison in TCWFY, the Lt. then has to fight Noatak's exes 'monster of the week' style because they're like 'you bitch, that was MY nemesis you were funking with', and some of these exes somehow manage to be worse than the possessed abomination that the Lt. has turned into. Maybe there's an actual minor deity out there somewhere that's like 'if I see Noatak, I'm going to throw my drink on his outfit'.

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Due to the possibility of people selling fanfiction, in 2023 I will try to make my fic even more financially unviable. The next chapter of The City Will Follow You will consist entirely of a flashback where Noatak does an eyeshadow haul while talking about how the Red Lotus never invited him to join them, and IF THEY DID, he would have rejected them anyway because the only person in their group who has a good outfit is P'Li.

This will then be followed by a scene in 'present day' where Jiang demonstrates how to carve little flowers out of human teeth vegetables as he infodumps about the nuances of stage lighting. Jiang has a lot of feelings about scrims. Meanwhile, Lan successfully builds a doomsday device that makes reality fold like a deckchair, but no one cares because she neglected to stick it on top of a giant robot. There will also be a segway into the nature of quantum physics that will have no scientific basis whatsoever, and will just consist of the author getting really confused about the holographic principle because the name sounds cool.

Tarrlok is made to do a dialectical behavior therapy workbook but pitches it out the window in a fit of rage.

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my brain: write a 'no serial numbers' version of The City Will Follow you where Amon is an AI that Noatak trained, and then you can blatantly reference the Fake Maria from Metropolis, and there's a social divide between people who are compatible with cybernetic implants and people who are incompatible, and Jing is like what you'd get if you wanted Wintermute but your mother said 'WE HAVE WINTERMUTE AT HOME'.

me: but I am le tired. Also we already have Metropolis. Metropolis is kind of a big deal.

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How I picture Jiang: handsome fortysomething gentleman in a generic 'model of unadventurous luxury menswear' sort of way

What Jiang actually looks like:

Anyway please remember to microchip your DILFs otherwise they go feral if left to wander for too long.

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Sometimes my Inner Critic Who Wants To Produce Commercial Fiction likes to list all the things wrong with my fanfic, and then I have to scream 'NO! PLEASE JUST LET ME WRITE MY OWN EQUIVALENT EMPRESS THERESA!' and then I have to blast the Inner Critic in the face with a spray bottle.

And, eh, I want to be a good writer (I want... a lot of things, not all of which I will necessarily get), but it's not my biggest concern. My biggest concern is accessing the headspace associated with writing, if that makes sense: I like the state of mind it puts me in.

I'm a little ambivalent about the fact that I post stuff online. I have text files full of unposted stuff kicking around, but I rarely finish something unless I intend to upload it to a place where it can be viewed by others. I need the promise of an audience to actually complete anything.

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Writing LoK AU fic is a torment because sometimes I'm like like 'X Canon Event was badly executed, but I like Y Canon Event and Y Canon Event is dependent on X Canon Event happening, so ugh, I don't want to scrap X Canon Event', and then I remember that Y Canon event was probably just as badly executed as X Canon Event, it's just that I thought Y Canon Event was fun despite being silly as balls.

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In a perfect world, I feel like The City Will Follow You would've been split up into separate stories (Noatak is getting way more words spent on him than I initially expected) but this is not a perfect world so instead it's like 'heehoo this is my equivalent of The Stand'.

Anyway I could at least, like, change the existing chapter naming conventions.

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95% chance that The City Will Follow You will end with Jiang trying to break the universe so hard that the Ocean Spirit* has to hop into the ring and hit him with a chair.

Why stop at having a Mary Sue? Why not make a character so powerful that an actual diety has to intervene and yell 'STOP DESTROYING THE EARTH, IT'S WHERE I KEEP ALL MY STUFF' at them.

*Headcanon: the Moon deals in diplomacy while the Ocean Spirit just runs up to people and bodyslams them. Also, the Ocean had a big part in creating the world in my fic canon. Humanity doesn't know it, but the world was mainly constructed because the Ocean has 'crabs' as their special interest. The Ocean sees all non-aquatic, non-crab mortal creatures as just different forms of overly-complicated fish.

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Sadly I miss writing Noatak.

Dude's character arc is basically:

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The spirit writing system in The City Will Follow You works in a way comparable to coding, so I guess it's like:

Jiang: I know how to write X, and I know how to write Y, so I bet it'd be easy to combine X and Y to get Z.

One hundred and forty-two hours later, Jiang has gone deaf in one ear, accidentally set himself on fire six times, fallen into an abyss, ate a potato battery, fought an enormous glowing spider from beyond space and time, drunk dialled his ex, and somehow kicked himself in the dick. He still can't get Z.

Jiang: ANYWAY I have deadlines coming up for other stuff I'll put this unfinished project on the pile with all my other unfinished projects.

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'later hater water pater' sounds like a terrible title I'd use for a fic about Tarrlok's relationship with his dad.