if i fail, let me be wormfood.

ETA: if you've followed any links here and you want to (re)read a fic of mine that is not up on DW yet, send me a message! i will very happily send you a copy as an epub or something.

well! here we are. i started getting things together for the great crosspostening and realized immediately that while i keep a spreadsheet to record when i created a document, when i posted a fic to AO3, and what the word count is, i really don't save any other metadata not on AO3. this will be changing when AO3 is back up. :|

this outage has been interesting and eye-opening in a ton of ways, mostly in that every time i've seen someone say that their own docs only lived on AO3 and nowhere else, i have been flabbergasted. i still have a word doc of the very first fanfiction i ever wrote with the unaltered file creation date of somewhere in 2006. it's titled fanfic.doc and it's something like 80k words. i have it backed up in several places, actually. i re-download a copy of my cloud-hosted docs every month and i have epubs of my own fic. i hope this gets writers to think about offline archiving.

anyways, i'm honestly kind of embarrassed about not archiving the descriptive metadata for my own fics. this is very literally my whole entire full-time job. can i rebuild some of it? sure! but when AO3 is back, i'm going to archive all of the tags i can because what i chose at the time of posting is important metadata that's worth preserving.

onwards unto the crossposting breach... i'll backdate everything and then probably create a directory post. we'll see.

Fandom: One Piece (Netflix Live Action)
Rating: Teen
Relationships: Zoro/Sanji
Characters: Zoro, Sanji, Straw Hats (Ensemble)
Word count: 3,550

Summary: Something inevitable takes a slightly different path. Or: OPLA does Thriller Bark.

( Read here: )

Read on AO3

Fandom: One Piece (Netflix Live Action)
Rating: M
Relationships: Zoro/Sanji
Characters: Zoro, Sanji, Straw Hats (Ensemble)
Series: symmetry
Word count: 3,550

Summary: Something shifts after Drum Island.

( Read here: )

Read the companion fic

Read on AO3

this is as good a place as any to put long-form thoughts down about iaidō, so... here's the start of the iaidō tag for this journal.

i think i did pretty well in last night's embu! i was really warmed by M-san's comment that i didn't seem rushed at all, and that my wazas felt calm. i tried very hard to slow down and be deliberate, but perhaps a little too much—R-sensei accidentally cut me off at four wazas instead of five, which i honestly think is hilarious because it keeps happening to members of our dojo. i am a little sad that i didn't get to actually do shihōtō sono ichi as planned, mostly because M-san had given me a small correction that i really wanted to get at least one more repetition of. the two shihōtō wazas are still hard for me.

i've been working on straightening out my ōchiburi since i noticed last embu when watching the recording that i was doing something really off with it, and looking at the small handful of photos someone sent out already, i'm... still doing something really off with it. i have no idea wtf i'm doing wrong, much less how to fix it. M-sensei gave me a correction a little while ago, but i think i need something more. i'm really going to try to drill it during our cul-de-sac practices this summer. i'll probably ask my senpais wtf is going on since i'm, uh, way less intimidated by them than i am by any of our senseis, lmao.

the other thing that really stood out to me from the photos was my line of sight. R-sensei had linked us to a great blog post about metsuke that i've been thinking about a lot; M-sensei's metsuke is so subtle yet so forceful, and i would love to have even a fraction of that someday. it's also interesting to compare it to R-sensei's, since he's a stage actor—you can really feel the acting of it, and it's really fascinating. it's still a little hard for me to really visualize the teki when i'm doing a waza; i mostly use the "narrative" of a waza to make sense of what happens when and how, but last night when we were running through our wazas before the embu, i had a moment of real clarity and visualization... when doing kaishaku*, of all wazas. maybe it's because it's extremely clear what's happening and the teki isn't moving, but i could really just see where the teki was supposed to be. and then i looked back at the photos from the embu itself, and my line of sight during the embu was just straight forward! not where i was actually supposed to be looking, which changes throughout a waza! i never thought that this taekwondo habit would be so hard to break, but it's also been my presentation/public speaking fake eye contact habit for many years, too, so... it's turning out to be pretty hard to break, lol.

so i suppose the two things i want to work on while we're on our little summer break are that goddamn ōchiburi and getting my metsuke into better shape. one much more actionable step than just "hey fix your shit" is to pay attention to my line of sight during noto—i'm going to focus on that piece.

*this post is mostly for me to track where i am, but if you are reading this out of curiosity, kaishaku is a waza in which your role is that of assistant to someone committing seppuku; it's never performed "in public" (i.e., at an event like an embu), but it's still taught since iaidō is considered a traditional martial art.

Fandom: One Piece
Rating: M
Relationships: Zoro/Sanji
Characters: Zoro, Sanji, Buggy, Nami
Word count: 54,015

Summary: Nami claims they’re low on cash right as they reach an island ripe for the picking. Her goal, this time around, will require a little more creativity and cooperation than usual.

( Chapter 1 )

( Chapter 2 )

( Chapter 3 )

( Chapter 4 )

( Chapter 5 )

( Chapter 6 )

→ Read chapters 7-11

first and foremost, if you are Here, thank you for going on this fic journey with me in whichever way you’ve done so. this has been a really interesting writing experience for me, and i had a ton of fun posting something weekly again.

i said this over and over in the posts i was making as i worked on this fic, but i tried a lot of new things, and it was really challenging. i think this was the most challenging fic i’ve written, maybe ever, just because it required me to consciously do a lot of things i don’t usually do rather than just being on my bullshit as per usual. P vs NP and no quarter, the only other fics whose word counts and complexity this one rivals, were a lot easier to write, relatively speaking, because, like, it’s just (""""just"""") halo lore. it’s just action/adventure bullshit (affectionate). however, nothing about the plot structure of this fic came naturally to me, so it took some real effort to get this to be what i wanted it to be.

starting off with some miscellaneous notes:

( away we go )

"i think i'll wait till next week to post," i said, like a lying liar who lies. nah!

today i read over what i wrote this week, and it's really solid. way more solid than i thought it was when i was writing it, honestly. it's hard to estimate the word count since i had a bunch of bits and pieces written beforehand, but i think i did about 7k words this week across two chapters, mostly; there are things i want to go back and add or flesh out in those last three chapters, but after closing up the last major gaps in the front half of the fic, i really am ready for this to go out and see the world. i think i'll post tomorrow evening, depending on how busy the rest of the day is, and if not, possibly sunday (though i'll have a long day of travel). doesn't really matter.

for now, i feel solid about the first five chapters, and the first three in particular; i know i'll pick at chapters 5 and 6 before posting, and i've got bullet points written out for several point in chapter 7 that i want to clean up or flesh out, and more of the same for 8 and 9. i've had a very clear vision for 10 for a while, and i'm feeling good about that one; no specific bullet-point notes there from today's pass, just a general edit.

man! i'm excited to start publishing this fic. i have a few friends whose reactions i'm really looking forward to.

here's a fact about me that, if you didn't already know it, i think really draws a complete picture of me: i joined tumblr in early 2010 and stayed very firmly on the Hipster Side for quite a while. my stray to the Fandom Side was honestly very gradual; i still follow aesthetic photography blogs, and i lost touch with the last of the old guard of fandom friends that overlapped with hipster friends only in the great purge of 2018.

here's another fact: i just listened to brand new for the very first time today.

( Read more... )

words about words! i'm writing a long...er fic again and, as always, i have Thoughts. (primarily: oh god the word count keeps going up help)

for last year, one of the goals i set (and achieved!) was to write a humorous fic — something funny for the sake of being funny. i really, really love reading humorous fics and i'd tried multiple times to write something start-to-finish humorous (i'm pretty sure there's at least one author's note on my fics saying something like "well this was supposed to be funny"), but i didn't actually achieve it until in stitches. none of the fic i've posted since then has been explicitly humorous start-to-finish, but i've noticed that in general, humor has become much more present as i'm writing; the conscious effort it took to write something humorous really made an impression on me, and i've been wanting to do it again.

so here i am! 15k words into an explicitly humorous fic. with much more to go.

( help )

i've been in a major reading slump for a long time now, and somehow last year i started to read a bunch of nonfiction, which i'd never really gone for before, ever. i also had a realization today while mulling over the histrom i'm about 75% of the way through that i really like the problem-solving more than the romance itself, lol. anyways! words about words.

( misc. nonfiction, mostly fashion )

( back to histrom baybee )

it feels good to be reading again! it's been really good to get into reading nonfiction; i'm finding it very easy to pick up and put down rather than getting sucked in like i do with novels or longfic.