#my experiences writing uhl fic compared to writing my more recent stuff is like night and day

[babblish]

🕯️💘?

Thanks for the ask 🥝!

🕯️was there a fic that was really hard on you to write, or took you to a place you didn't think it would take you?

Oh Uhl fic on both accounts, hands down, this is gonna be long as I struggle to communicate how hard it was for me to write and how truly baffled I was to be writing that genre in the first place.

I literally started the project as medicine as prescribed by my doctor at the time because medically I was going Through It and he was convinced that literally all my problems were in my end/a result of "de-conditioning." Spoilers: He was very very wrong.

So the first few months of that was ROUGH and I had no intentions of sharing it publicly. But then my partner at the time convinced me to publish it which was a great call and I made some very dear friends of mine as a result of this.

And then I got the great idea to write a Part Two section with a different PoV which was going great to begin with, but I was getting basically no reader engagement at all and had zero idea what was going to resonate with people.

Uhl fic started out essentially a very silly slice of life oneshot which was good because it meant I wasn't trying to be Good I was just trying to have fun, but it also meant I was reinventing the wheel because I had never written in that genre before. (If you've read Under the Sun, Under the Sun, Primordial Awakenings, and Web of Starlight you have a pretty good idea of where my comfort zone is with prose, tone, and setting.)

Eventually the project dragged on enough and I just wanted it to be DONE and so I resolved to throw my everything into finishing it using NaNoWriMo 2019. But as I continued tying up all the loose ends new chapters sprung out of nowhere like mitosis and I was full on having a crisis over how I should end the fic because I didn't want what was right for the characters to be right for the characters and I wasn't ready to let the narrative be what I built the damn thing, intentionally or not, To Be.

I was writing every day despite being very very ill and the project had become a copying mechanism to avoid Being in My Body but I was also very miserable and alone and I don't think I've ever enjoyed writing less (outside of answering Key Selection Criteria, which is sort of like re-writing your resume AND cover letter a third time by answering a bunch of questions using as legalese as physically possible.)

By this time I had started keeping data on my writing habits so I can confidently tell you I didn't quite make NaNoWriMo but I did write 33558 words that month (not including the conlang and German translations) and NEVER AGAIN.

I learned so many value lessons with Uhl fic but the most important one is that writing is so much easier when you're not fighting yourself to do it.

💘Is there any posted fic you want to rework/re-edit/re-write?

To this day I have not finished translating the dialogue into changeling lang in The White Rabbit and it's my constant undying shame. The lang itself is mostly finished, it's just a matter of sitting down and doing it, but well you see... The Arcane Order happened since I set that goal for myself, and also... I have many other projects and I am still chronically ill... 👉👈 one day... one day... 😔