teach me the art of war

After a long creative fallow period, my writing mojo has suddenly come back all in a rush. I've published 32k of fic in the last few weeks, which is more than I've managed in the last three years combined. It feels amazing! And maddening, because I have so many fucking ideas right now and not actually all that much time to work on them. But it's the good kind of maddening. I'm having a blast!

Candy Hearts exchange
My Candy Hearts assignment is what set everything off. 'It'll be fine,' I told myself, signing up. 'My last few exchange experiences have been highly stressful scrambles to get anything written by deadline, but this time I'll take it super chill and write a modest little ficlet for a ship I'm already super confident with. What could go wrong?'

And then instead of doing that I got way too inspired by my recip's excellent prompts and wrote, uh. Nearly 15k of Kylo Ren getting beaten up by a giant slug and having frottage with Finn about it (here, if you're game). The words all just came rushing out, I was writing a few thousand per sitting and having so much fun. My starting concept was 'Finnlo h/c and huddling for warmth on Hoth', but it felt like nerfing Kylo a bit too much to have him rendered helpless and dependent on his stormtrooper escort's mercy by just a wampa, so I was browsing Wookieepedia for inspiration as I puzzled it out and that's how I learnt that these bad boys canonically exist on Hoth (never change, Star Wars). After that everything just fell into place.

After that I thought I was done with CH, but then reveals got delayed and a treat idea came blazing fully formed into my brain. So I wrote another 5k of teenaged Poe, Jacen and Ben getting into trouble at Luke's Jedi temple, all in one frantic sitting the day before work reveals. I was putting in typo fixes down to the minute on that one, lol. Live fast die young. :D

Bad Sex Bingo
I've also gone absolutely mental for my Bad Sex Bingo card. I've been tracking my progress at the linked post, but to summarise: eight fics so far, bingo in two directions, ideas in reserve for every remaining square. Kylo Ren has been having SO much bad sex, you guys. :DDD I'm trying to rein myself in now to save some energy for May the Fourth, but I'm really enjoying having something of my own to just noodle away at.

It's actually made me realise how long it's been since I wrote for myself instead of putting all my effort into exchange fic. No regrets - exchanges have been really good for me for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they seem to have cured me of a long-running insecurity about feedback stats. I'm generally pretty confident about my writing itself (I know my strengths, I'm working on my weaknesses, and I'm good enough that I can always make the words say at least a close approximation of what I want them to, which to me is the most important part) but I used to feel so self-conscious and vulnerable about the social side of things. I felt like I needed "permission" to share my writing publicly, and permission could mean a small close-knit fannish friend group or a bunch of kudos from strangers but it always had to come from other people, if that makes sense. Writing for exchange requests was about the most explicit permission possible, and it seems to have acted as an interim step in weaning me off a need for public approval? Because I've gotten used to writing all sorts of niche stuff that I haven't felt embarrassed to publish so long as one person wants it, and from there it's a much easier jump to "well, I myself am one person, I can publish things just because I want them" and I just...don't feel worried about it anymore? So now I'm posting all this niche Bad Sex Bingo fic written solely to amuse myself, and some of it is attracting lots of readers and some of it isn't, and I'm feeling able to just enjoy whatever feedback I get for what it is without needing it to reassure me that I haven't made a fool of myself by being That Loser Who Posts Fic No One Wants And Who We All Just Wish Would Shut Up.

...anyway. That's me done navelgazing for now. Although, derailing a smutfic project into a big introspection session on my own issues feels very on brand for a Kylo Ren's Sex Life Is an Angst-Fueled Disaster project. The point is I am having a LOT OF FUN and feeling really comfortable in my own fannish skin right now, and it's nice.

1loulu5 is running Obscure Sorrows, a prompt challenge based on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I've been assigned the prompt agnosthesia:

n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

Signups are open throughout the writing period (until 29 July), if you guys fancy it!

This year's Sunshine Challenge is also up and running. I'm not Committing(TM) to completing the whole challenge, but I'm going to keep an eye on the prompts and see if anything sparks an idea.

Fannish update: I am not doing Chocolate Box this year after all, because Chocolate Box mods are taking a (by the sound of it, badly needed) year off. Instead I'm doing candyheartsex! It's a one-off replacement exchange running on exactly the same schedule and I'm super excited for it.

I admit I'm also a little anxious about taking part in a gift exchange again, after having a go at writing the little ficlet I was talking about. It went really really badly. I'm so rusty: my prose felt sloppy, but worse than that, my thinking was all clouded. I couldn't seem to get the characters to do what I wanted, or even answer 'what the hell is this story about' to a satisfying extent, even though it felt so clear until I started trying to put it in words. Just, a mess. Fucking baby's first fanfic all over again. I don't want to ruin anyone's Valentine's Day by accidentally gifting them legolas by lucy, so I have to sort my shit out before signups, but right now I kind of feel like deleting gdocs and never looking at it again. Gah.

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Bret Devereaux, of in-depth military historian's analysis of LotR fame, is back again with a deeply satisfying breakdown of what made the worldbuilding in Rings of Power so broken. I have complicated feelings about RoP: it gave me a shiny new blorbo who I love to pieces (Adar, bby <33333) and I'm defensive of it thanks to all the ridiculous right-wing outrage about Black elves and female leads, but it was also just really bad, and not even in a fun trashy way, but in a borderline unwatchable way. I never put much thought into exactly what made it bad - the extent of my critical engagement was nodding along angrily with Erik Kain's coverage and ranting to my sister about how bugfuck crazy it was that Amazon put two guys with zero IMDB credits in charge of such a massive production - so I really enjoyed seeing all my vague 'something's off here' feelings laid out in Devereaux's trademark pedantic detail.

But I'm not just linking the article for RoP hatewatch reasons. It has interesting things to say about writing craft and the 'rules' of worldbuilding in general, and also some very interesting facts about volcanoes.

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Some great new metal finds this week!

All That Was Promised by Hath got recommended in a 2022 best-of that Bandcamp emailed me, and was good enough to make me forgive the fact that I've opted out of Bandcamp promo emails multiple times now so shouldn't have received it in the first place. It's blistering, richly emotive death metal with strong blackened and melodic elements. My days of being hopelessly weak for harsh vocals seasoned with just a tiny pinch of cleans are clearly coming to a middle.

Freedom of Fear win massive bonus points for being 1) Aussie and 2) female-fronted, but they honestly don't need the help. Per AMG: "influences including 90’s symphonic black metal, traces of the classic Gothenburg sound, and a heavy dose of blistering tech death". I hope they tour near me soon. I already know I won't go, but it would be nice to entertain the fantasy that I might.

Just Before Dawn fill a hole in my collection of bleak war-themed death metal that I didn't even know was there. Seriously, it feels like I should have been listening to these guys for years. They remind me a lot of Hail of Bullets, minus the really distinctive vocals but no weaker for it. Link goes to one of their newer songs about the Vietnam War. I've got WWI, WWII and plenty of War Not Otherwise Specified in rotation, but I don't think I've ever listened to metal about Vietnam.

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Edit, I almost forgot: new trailer for Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Fallen Order! IT LOOKS AMAZING OMG.