#this also was written very fast and very haphazardly with a lot more that i'd want to expand on so sorry if it makes no sense

[starrystevie]

steve harrington, luxury hotel heir, who wants nothing to do with the family empire. steve who remembers running away from every hotel he was dragged to as early as his memories allow, who stood in the lobbies and screamed until his throat was raw and his mother was so embarrassed she would take him outside.

he grows up knowing it’s in his cards to take everything over once he gets old enough and he despises it. the very idea of being in charge of the hotel chain has his skin crawling, electricity humming through his veins, makes the joint in his jaw constantly tense. rebelling isn’t really an option, not unless he wants to be kicked to the curb, so steve fights back in the smallest ways possible. he grows his hair a little too long, he wears his muddy reebok sneakers with his fancy suits at dinner parties, he snorts out a laugh with a roll of his eyes when his father introduces him as the future of the company.

it all gets to be too much. when steve, freshly 24 and old enough to take on more responsibility, tells his father that he won’t do it, that he won’t be a pawn in their game anymore, he gets cut off. credit cards canceled, fancy loft apartment lease forcibly broken by his father, access to the garages of bmws and mercedes taken away. he could get it all back, return to the ice of luxury he always knew, only if he could prove to his father that he could be a leader the company is proud of.

which is how steve finds himself working at the front desk at a smaller property of theirs in a place that should be named bumfuck, indiana. it’s the only hotel in town, which keeps them steadily busy with a bustling lobby bar and restaurant, as they’re the only lodging for out of town guests. he hates it, hates being confined behind the desks he’d look at with disdain as a kid in uncomfortable slacks and button downs that mirror his uniform now. he has to smile and schmooze and works off upgrade commissions and force himself to not stare off into space during the slow hours, imagining a life that could have been.

he’s been working there a little over a month when summer hours start and the lobby band comes back for the busy nights. it’s nothing exciting, a jazz band of sorts complete with a sax, but their guitarist catches his eye. he’s all long hair and smirks, leather and boots, and exactly the type of person mommy and daddy harrington would lose their minds over. he’s a way of rebelling all on his own in a gorgeously perfect package.

steve catches his eye as they’re setting up next to the bar for the night. the wink he confidently flashes causes the guitarist to stumble a bit before sending back a wave and a shy grin of his own, cheeks flushed the prettiest pink. there’s a phrase rattling around in the back of his head, something about not mixing work and play, but all steve can think of is tangling their fingers and pressing a kiss to the man’s temple before running away wherever together with his father’s angry face fading away behind them.

it’s too tempting of an idea not to try, especially when the guitarist keeps looking at steve with the same look he’s sure to be giving him. especially when they’re both ducking their heads with upturned lips only to glance back up and have their eyes meet again and again. especially when he comes over to the desk after the band's first set and slides a piece of paper with a name and phone number over to steve dotted with x’s and o’s and a smiley face.

and the thing that bothers steve the most is that something amazing could come out of this whole mess and he'd owe it to his father for giving it to him. he's still going to try, though, especially because some hotel band guitarist named eddie is smiling at him like that.

[not-poignant]

how do you have the time to write all this stuff /and/ play video games etc etc at the same time? Is it just that you write insanely fast after all these years? I have a lot of hobbies, writing being one of them, and i have such a hard time juggling them lol.

Hi anon,

So, real talk -> The reality is I don't have the time to write and play video games at the same time most of the time.

I haven't written anything since the 17th. I haven't started the next Palmarosa chapter. I'm on day 8 of not having opened a new document and writing anything.

I've edited a whole two chapters (which I suspect I have to go over again) and I've responded to some comments and asks, and that's it. No writing, no growing wordcount, I've been stagnating / not doing anything due to burnout since the 17th (I know the date because I have a giant whiteboard of completed chapters next to me).

Honestly, most of the time I don't actually have the time to read, play video games, watch television, or movies. I am too busy writing/editing/sleeping. With Toby in the mix, the small amount of media I was consuming has vanished.

Sometimes I can play certain video games while writing - these are usually low stakes video games I can endlessly put on pause and then play for five minutes at a time, like Dorfromantik and Garden Galaxy. Any kind of idler video game, like Havendock is also good for this.

Anon, you can't have a lot of hobbies and actually keep up with them and write the way I do, and therapist/s wouldn't recommend you drop all of your hobbies to write the way I do anyway. Trust me.

I had two things I wanted to start learning this year, and I haven't started learning them yet. I don't have the capacity. I had a therapist gently point out to me that if I was always at 100 in terms of output, how can I have any energy leftover for self-work and processing? The answer is: I don't. (That's actually why I've spent a week playing video games, and if anything it's just reminded me that my capacity is still at 100 and this is going to take a bit of concerted decompression).

Most of the time it's not normally quite this overwhelming. Toby has just maxed me out because he's a high energy dog who is also a puppy with Separation Anxiety, and there's no quick or easy fix for that. But most of the time it's still very intense. The list of shows I really want to watch, and books I really want to read, is very long. But I often don't have time to indulge in those things because I'm too busy writing.

A lot of the time I don't actually have the time to reread my own fics anymore, outside of editing.

This year was meant to kind of tackle that more decisively but you know then we got a puppy so... not so much.

But yeah anon, there is no 'how do you do this and do this' - you don't do one of those things, or you do it very haphazardly, in small amounts.

I do write very fast (my wordcount is 120-150wpm), but I don't edit fast (I'd tender that editing fast for most people is a bit of an oxymoron), I don't answer asks fast (some of the longer ones take me an hour to compose), etc. And even then, writing fast is not the same as the time it takes to think out the chapter, to figure out what's happening, letting it percolate etc. A lot of my life is also just resting. I lose about 2-5 hours of every afternoon to sleep or rest for example, where nothing productive happens. And I think one of the reasons I read so many manwha atm is that they're so easy to read comparatively, and so quick, and that's the only way I can really consume stories these days.