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SVSSS Fics V
Part I, Part II, Part 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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I adored the chocolate factory one and I love the "stallion protag must be in want of a horse girl" tagline omg
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