Nov. 13th, 2022

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Part IPart II and Part III.

I'll edit this tomorrow, I'm le tired now. Missiles after nap.

13. 
Ungovernable

M; 8.5k; "Shen Qingqiu is a widowed scholar of modest attainments, presently attached to the household of a provincial official as a sort of governess: a thoroughly unremarkable man, take him for all in all.

Shen Qingqiu is not a very reliable narrator."

This story is considerably more popular than some of its much stronger siblings. That's fine, but kind of puzzling. I don't dislike it, but there's always a fic that does significantly better than I think it ought to, which over time I come to almost resent for illustrating how little I understand what will work for readers. That's always more of a shot in the dark than it ought to be. I guess maybe “Ungovernable” is shaped like the sort of fic people in this fandom are really content to read a 60k version of? The sort 
written in instalments with OC family members, etc. Not really my thing, as a reader or a writer.

It's points like this where I really feel the gap between fandom origins or 'careers' and resultant expectations and desires for stories. For me, the limitations of wholesale instalment composition and even instalment reading are mostly too severe for me to bother with. I am a far worse reader, in chunks--it kills my memory and investment. I don’t even like episodic television schedules or editing in batches. I'll read a text when it's finished, but something that came out thus often still shows the strains of this production method in a way that's difficult to erase even with editing: a dropped stitch can prove exceedingly hard to retrieve. MXTX recoups some of the fumbles which emerge from the affordances and limitations of her publishing platform via edits, though not all of them. She also usually pre-plans extensively (Dickens also pre-planned, to the point where his chapters are not truly comparable to, for example, Varney's episodic shenanigans: plus, experience made his instalment writing smoother over time.)

For an ABO, the sex is really restrained and de-centred here. I'd like to do a more traditional, whole-hearted ABO for the pairing.

14. 
Plastromancy

T; 16k; "One night, Luo Binghe notices something odd about the way his blood is pooling on the floor of the woodshed."

A twelve year old Luo Binghe meets his Other Shizun."

This is one of my favourite things I've done in this fandom. I did learn via comments on this that people younger than me primarily think of "Coraline" as a film rather than a book. I don't like Neil Gaiman, but I still think the original was considerably more resonant than the film adaptation. We should celebrate one of perhaps three total occasions on which ol' 'I like my women with a brown bush on their heads, YES every single time' put down his giant phoning it in phone and thought, 'fuck it, I can sustain a story for--what, 200 pages?'. And the spirit of DWJ entered him, as it did when he wrote "Ocean at the End of the Lane", and it was good. (I don't entirely think Gaiman's terminal mehness is entirely his fault, 
as I've said elsewhere. It’s commercially thrust upon him.)

I don't think I mentioned in the notes that 'plastromancy' is the term for divination with tortoise shells. I certainly didn't know that before 2021. The idea for the title came from a Chinese History Podcast episode on pre-Han dynasties’ use of the method and from my wondering what the button eyes would be made of in a xianxia (and lighting on this).

I got the most unhinged comment on this fic, as well. Someone, dead seriously, castigated me like 'how do you sleep at night, having done this to Shen Jiu?" Like a baby, mate. It's fiction and he's a bit of a cunt.

15. 
Natural Remedies for PMS Symptoms

E; 7.4k; "Luo Binghe races to Jinlan City to protect her estranged shizun from a deadly epidemic, only to find that she cannot protect either of them from the use Xin Mo has made of her own anger."

This is a weird one because it's really not the substantial femslash I was planning, and still am planning, to write. I just scrambled to execute a reasonably sized project while procrastinating on the subsequent challenge fic. A week after I wrote the last fic my wife's mom died (expected). and my dad died (un) on the same day. We had to go to this island between the UK and France to deal with the one, and then I had to go home to the American South to deal with the other, and that took fucking weeks. (Hah, weeks! To be honest, I still have no idea if my dad left me with any money or just his many, many ongoing lawsuits, and it's been over a year. Classic dad.) And by the time I wrote this fic, I'd just come back from emergency dental surgery in Warsaw. So basically, your humble savant needed a win. And what says winning like gratuitous porn? Having living parents and no 'year-long and counting' ruinous stress breakdownNothing.

I'm not sure sure about the emotional through-line in this. Yeah, it enables the porn. So far, so good/giving/game. And yes, canon Binghe is this volatile, confused about what he wants and deeply emotional at this stage of the story. But everything happens so fast in this fic, and we don't have access to the other character’s PoV. I'm not sure I'm selling it, and I don't love the blocking. We go from an emotionally tense moment to Shen Qingqiu touching Binghe intimately, then pulling back so that they can have another conversation, and then going in again. There's exposed peerless melon, then concealed, then exposed again. 
That's not a very elegant progression, and wastes narrative energy: it's a strange hitch. It's all explicated, but it shouldn't be happening because that should have been caught and smoothed out. 

Anyway, at least it’s stated that they’ll both get to come, and there's flows of power rather than a fixed clear 'top'. That's more than you can say of most danmei femswaps at the moment. Sweet ever-loving Jesus, what is with that bizarre allergy to good sex we have going on in these spaces? 'And then everyone was stone, but not in an actual stone way where you enjoy being stone and have desires met thus, but a secret, shittier way--'

16. This is How BingGe Can Still Win

E; ???; "Luo Binghe has employed his cunning, charm and shameless adaptability to seduce hundreds of wives. Shen Yuan's affection is a prize he knows how to win. However long it takes and whatever means Luo Binghe has to employ, Shen Yuan must come to him entirely, wonderfully willingly: that is the whole point.

After all, your soulmate is supposed to love you."

This one! My white whale. So after everything that happened, I totally floundered this challenge fic and only posted an initial chapter. I hate challenges, why did I forget how much I hate them? Never again.

I have 22k of part-written fic and notes, but it's a massive project. Like it's a 60k realisation, easily. And that's daunting, when I have so many other, slighter asks on the docket that also need attention (just far, far less attention). I also might need to know more about Hong Kong in order to write this. I've looked around for books on the city and marked Jan Morris' offering in the library ap. We'll see?

There’s a fundamental problem with the fic, the way there was with that Five/Ainley!Master "Christmas Carol"-ish modern AU I had plotted a decade ago. There, I didn't know what to do to effectively resolve the ethical questions raised by the Master's business empire to his partner's satisfaction. Here, I've hinged a big ethical question of the fic on BingGe not getting to flounce from PIDW to find Twu Wubb, but having to stay and clean up his mess. And my clean up is fine, on paper. People would generally go with it, either because they don't give a shit on that point or because it's just a fic, and they want it to work: they have a proportionate sense of the stakes and the genre. They're reading right. But it wouldn't convince me, and if that's the case we're nowhere, because I’m the one who has to believe the shitting thing for long enough to write it. I keep setting myself what the Blake biography of the writer and politician would characterise as Disraeli novel style challenges, like 'what do you do after you get to Jerusalem?', and then, in true Dizzy fashion, absolutely failing to usefully answer a question I probably should not have structurally asked.

I think what I'd need to do is write everything I can of the story and then work out this last problem at the draft stage. It's too squirmy at the moment, I can't move bits around. And no one's really excited about this one, you know? My friends like it fine, but not more than other offerings--and it asks so much more of me than a comparable ficlet. You don't make canard a la presse when everyone's happy with cheese on toast.

Though arguably, people do like my harder projects more than they like the light stuff? Readers responded better to "Peerless Melons" than to any of the lighter fare since. Or at least it lingered longer? Though it's only 3x more popular by hits than nothingy little "Rachel for Leah", and it was certainly more than 3x more work. Idk, trying to judge not only how people will respond to a piece, but even how they actually have responded to one, devolves into Kremlinology.

PS Incidentally, do you know what you have to do to get ahold of Disraeli novels in print anymore? Because I had to literally buy PM Harold Wilson’s copies at auction. Why did he have these?? Worked out well though, at like £8 a book for the lot. I wasn’t going to get them cheaper elsewhere, and it meant I could stop looking (stick a silver fork in me, I’m done).
 And sure, they’re shit novels, but they are somewhat important for the period.

x_los: (Make a Note.)

 Part IPart IIPart III and Part IV.

17. 
Peerless Melons vs the Patriarchy

E; 38k; "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a stallion protagonist must be in want of a horse girl."

This had a great reception, which I'm pleased with. It seems like it has a lasting place in the fandom. That's particularly pleasant because people have gotten very weird about cis-swaps in the past years; I can't tell you how many 'I normally find this trope disgusting, but you are acceptable' comments my Wangxian one got. (Gee, thanks.)

The weak point of this is very much the discussion of gender in the last chapter, which is somewhat essentialist. It's on-the-nose, flat and not challenging. It feels phoned in. I could do better, and have more interesting things to say there. I was having such a bad flare-up when the beta got back to me with this after a delay; the posting and editing process was done with the very limited energy available to me in the evenings, when the pain lifted sufficiently to permit thought. It's possible that's why I wasn't sufficiently light-handed on this point.

I quite like this 'substantial chapter a day' posting schedule. It felt structured, not overwhelming for readers or strung-out in a way I think lends itself to less attentive and invested reading. I'd definitely re-use that. It doesn't max out the hit count in the same way as longer waits and jillions of micro-chapters can, but I think the resultant experience is significantly better, so fuck it. Also, this allows for readers who prefer complete texts to come back in a week and not have too much FOMO/not simply forget this exists.  

18. 
Binghe and the Great Ass Elevator

E; 12.5k; "For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, Shen Yuan wakes up in an unholy fusion of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and a xianxia.

Luo Binghe makes an ideal children's story protagonist, but children grow up—and the protagonist is only willing to follow the plot so far."

Ahaha what a weird way to come back after a few months' absence. Did you miss me? Well that was a mistake. 

Katy's pointed out, and I did know it as well, that I've made a really limited effort to integrate the "Solaris" -infused cosmology bit about Systems with the tonally-clashing core fic, and that I ought to at least have brought the intro around to the end to bookend the thing and give it some more structure. But while I, and a lot of readers apparently, like the System shit, it really should simply have been cut. It's so big that it makes anything that happens within the story feel really frail, contingent and at-risk. It doesn't work with a romance played straight. It's too much like my Who fic "Sweet Cheat Gone", with that tone whiplash Dickens taught me actually was fine--and he's right, it is, but only in a work long enough to sustain multitudes, you know? Like, if I valued this individual story as a whole, if my loyalty sat primarily with the story I was telling, I'd simply nix this weird bit, because I couldn't think of an actually integrated way to handle the material or an appropriate showcase for it. But I didn't, because I hate wasting things to the point of absurdity, so here we are.

I don't know, in general I probably need to cultivate editorial relationships with people whose sense of shape is better than mine, or who have some distance there by virtue of not being me, and have them tell me 'no' sometimes. People don't tell me 'no' much in editorial contexts, and I rely on hearing it a lot. I'm not sufficiently self-disciplined in this respect, I always expect pressure from an external interlocutor there. Like, I really hate my own prose and often it needs sieved like lumpy gravy, but I don't know where that needs to happen or how because it's my own brain-sludge, of course I don't. There's still a considerable distance between where I am and where I want to be, in many respects. 

19. 
Congratulations! You've Won! (Click Here To Claim Your Prize)

M; 7.7k; "Luo Binghe wins his shizun in gladiatorial combat and loses him on the long walk home."

I went on a big, two-stage quest to gather up all the fic thoughts in group chats with Feelie, Jane, Blue and Ataratah, to catalogue them and then to write the ones I had the most 'ownership' of. The admin side of this took many, many hours of work (manually combing over every strand of the Discord chat--without key word lookups, because they simply weren't sensitive enough), and resulted in a Scrivener file and a shared google doc folder with hundreds of entries. That covers all of us. I'm only working with my own content right now, but eventually I hope to look at the Multiples (ideas I couldn't clearly assign to any one or two of us, on a fast pass) and see if any of those are primarily mine/something I want to adopt (and the others can also cover the same territory--we've discussed it and decided to apply a Two Cakes rule).

With notes, I find projects like this easy to execute. The downside is that they can feel rushed, and people do often say things like 'oh, I wish this were longer!' Are they just talking to talk, or are they commenting on a presentation issue? Maybe a bit of both? A lot of the time, people don't actually want the things they ask for--they don't want a sequel, they just want to feel this way again, which a sequel wouldn't accomplish because the novelty is gone and the emotional work is already accomplished. They don't actually want me to write MoShang or LiuShen, which I can't because I don't care (and oh my god, can you ever tell if a writer doesn't feel it), they want someone else who does and could to have my skillset--which is kind of unlikely because writing skill is hugely a precipitate of reading preferences, which develop in an interconnected way, and mine were never going to get me to a MoShang or LiuShen place. (It reminds me, in a grim way, of the PhD advisor who said that the idea I'd come up with was so good, she just wished someone more generally acceptable than me had had it--as though the sort of respectable British-born student she was envisioning would have somehow arrived at the precipitate of my particular experience; it's like saying there's too much sex in Freud--yeah, dawg, it's a fundamental view of the self as predicated on relation to the Other in society? Have fun making milkless chocolate milk over there or whatever the fuck it is you wanna do. (G-D it's tiresome when people don't get Siggy Siggy Siggy/can't you see? What's not to get? Man's generally right. Or at least have a much better quality of problems with him--we could talk about the move to Stages or the abandoned Copernican revolution thing, I have real questions there, but I've nothing to say to 'I didn't actually read this'. Freshman-ass behaviour.)) You can definitely be a good writer and write MoShang--I've seen it happen!--but it's a different specialism. You can't be me or some near equivalent and do it. (Even MXTX couldn't hugely bestir herself on either front.) The upshot is, people often don't know what they want or how to describe it, which makes unsolicited writing advice tough to weigh.

There's a sort of weird ambient pressure from this fandom to only write like four things, but to have each of those be 120k. I tend not to even like fic over about 70k. Not to say that it never happens for me, but honestly there are challenges unique to fandom as a mode that I think are difficult to deal with after your project reaches a certain size (especially under conditions of instalment composition/posting). 

Mostly, I think these fics are only worth roughly the real estate I afford them. Readers get the idea. Perhaps the realisation could have been a little richer at 30k, but is that the best use of my time? How much better would the work have been for that extra 24k or whatever? But then maybe I should only be doing projects that I do think are worth 30k--but then how well do I even know what works for people, versus what's a b-side? Everyone likes "Ungovernable" and "Rachel for Lean", and to me they're potato salad at a buffet. You know, 'oh.' You're not mad to see it but you're not like OH MY GOD, IT'S POTATO SALAD!!

I reread this not too long ago to access my suspicion that it was overly-clipped and found myself surprisingly pleased with the style and pace. It felt good in a sort of--unusual for fic kind of way? Like, texturally off for fandom, more pro-fic in feel (which is for the most part a question of mode rather than skill-level). It worked for me, on that read at least.

20. 
A Sensible Arrangement

E; 12.3k; "After fending off a siege on Huan Hua, Palace Mistress Su Xiyan decides to gather support in the cultivation world and shore up her sect's position by brokering a diplomatic marriage between a cultivator of good standing and her son, Prince Su Binghe. To ensure her highly romantic offspring's cooperation, Su Xiyan allows him a great deal of choice in the question of his bride.

Shen Qingqiu is prepared to enter into a practical, political union. He is unprepared for Binghe."

I can't think of many fics with this kind of set up! It's fun, right? You get free Su Xiyan, Tianlangjun, Zhuzhilang, maybe some Gongyi Xiao--I didn't make a full use of the lot of them, but the premise enables writers to. It's not a full AU that leaves you floundering without coordinates, but it does scramble the elements of canon in play and shifts emphases. This fic is actually going to be the basis for about three other small-medium projects. I don't mind that this one is kind of overly-smooth because it sort of needs to be, to provide me with the pieces I need for these others. Also, eh, why not? Let me have one no-stakes comedy of men-ners. 

I was super high on IVF egg collection hormones when I wrote this one. That sucked. What a year, right? 99 problems and a bitch is probably one, I can no longer remember, I've lost all ability to discretely conceptualise the problems and can now merely guesstimate the size of the host.

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