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SVSSS Fics IV
Part I, Part 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 breakdown. Nothing.
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.
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