#probably scale + new fandom combining into please take 3 months instead of 2 months about it

[hideyseek]

hmm ... thinking over today's progress (some) and one of my more unfortunate tendencies as a writer under the cut

reworked the outline for the middle third of the distance that i run to you again tonight and it's feeling pretty good! i'm lightly despairing at having to go back over another five scenes but well, perhaps at some point "revise five scenes" will become so familiar it feels like only a small bite of work. alas currently it, well. currently it's still daunting. but!!! more importantly!!! i turned a couple dials all the way instead of just halfway and suddenly the shape of the experience of the fic that i've been hoping would happen is — happening, almost naturally as a consequence of fic events, rather than merely me writing grandoise! what a wonderful development.

i think the trend i'm starting to notice, when i write a first medium-complex fic in a new fandom is that, possibly because i don't have much of a handle on the characters, i'm extremely reluctant to ... mm, have consequences in the story, is the bluntest way to put it, i suppose. i have suuuuuch a tendency to allude to some misfortune without ever letting it happen on the page, or spend a lot of time having a character worry about something for pages and pages and pages. much love to my beta who said to me "gu yiran thinks a lot..." not really! i just think a lot! and ultimately — well, often what's more compelling is to just have the misfortune happen! and then somehow write my way out of there! but alas i'm always so nervous i won't be able to write my out of it that even in outlining i tend to avoid even going there. aaaaauuugh and then it takes like two months for me to go "what is going wrong with this fic why is nothing happening in it?" before i realize. hopefully, now that this is the second time i've concretely noticed this (narrative!fic being the first), i might remember next time to take "why is nothing happening in this fic?" and try to translate it to "what dials can i turn up in this fic to make something feel to me like it's happening?"

anyway! all that to say ... i love navel-gazing and i hate story structure! unfortunately this fic is determined to have structure apparently ! whatever, lol! this will teach me to start writing a fic without having a sense of the whole thing. for now i am just beholden to seeing it through !