this story ends in light

• the most ridiculously self-indulgent thing i wrote all year and maybe ever, like this is up there with the oikawa/hana yugioh au i wrote back in the haikyuu days but idc i had soooo much fun. why SHOULDN'T i put dream into a tennis fic it's myyyyy fic. i loved setting dream free in a room full of absolute megafreaks and i loved writing jaemin's creacherisms from an outsider pov who nonetheless is smart enough to see the deliberateness underneath. and i loved making renjun a yukimura stan #YUKIRENJ_REAL
• this is the 82 sequel to a nyotayuri 3b futurefic i wrote in 2020 about marui and niou reuniting just before kirihara and an's wedding. and there's literally nothing i love better than writing tense ambiguous highranker femslash that cracks open at the end to reveal a crazy and desperate depth of feeling. niou suits my writing preoccupations pretty well after all, i think i complained about having trouble with niou pov in 2021 but this fic came out so seamlessly... it may be simply a parade of headcanon-fuelled highranker interactions but at the very least it made me smile and i represented my views accurately. niou who cares so deeply under the nonchalant attitude and runs away from things she loves because it's easier than facing the idea of staying with them...
• in my future visions 82's path comes to a crossroads at the kirian wedding, i love my ship too much to entertain the possibility that they simply part ways again so i haven't thought too much about that option but i do think they either enter World Of Light where they rekindle their connection except in a genuine and sustainable not-too-toxic way this time premised on them being different people who acknowledge that they are different people and move into long-term endgame territory, or World Of Dark where they hurtle headfirst back into their old bad habits and folie a deux their way into mutual destruction (which is also endgame! in a way), or even worse only niou's doom because imo yagyuu has always been the one getting more out of the 82 identity switch/overlap thing. obviously i don't think toxicity or power imbalance is any barrier to true love and in fact could even be a prerequisite, but endgameness is about stability and i think the iteration in 82 can't keep going indefinitely into the future. anyway this fic is the World Of Light route, because i am ultimately a romantic optimist and i want my ship to win. so it's yagyuu making the overtures to niou this time and niou picking up on the ways in which they are not alike And That Is Ok.
• overall i think this is a solid fic with a good jokes/terror balance and some really nice moments of prose and i enjoyed writing it a lot... the standout parts to me are yanagi / renjun / yukimura. i wasn't sure how to end it though so the ending is a bit abrupt but it's passable i guess. the real point was the cameos anyway.

• it's probably obvious i am so obsessed with 3byuki in the context of marui's conscious betrayal of her own (and yukimura's!) ethics in order to save yukimura + how niou would have done the same for yukimura, although it wouldn't register as a betrayal to anyone other than herself because she's been so good at concealing the fact that she does actually also have a sense of ethics... this is drawing a parallel to niou's attitude towards the 82 switch, which i read as niou getting in over her head in that yagyuu is basically The Killer which means niou has to match that despite any discomfort she has about yagyuu's lack of ethics.

• really i just wanted to use pinkette in a fic, ironically unironically yk. also i love a dichotomy and i'm happy with the one i set up here - the way the spotlight is on different things for marui and niou.

• made myself laugh so much with this one ngl best joke i pulled off all year... shoutout to 2020 me deciding to make nyota jirou's name juri and creating theee perfect joke setup 3 years later.

• i think these are nice lines :) i used them for the cut tag text.

• probably obvious my other obsession is niou vs fuji at nats finals and the idea that niou pushed herself so far even though it was harder for her than anyone else due to delicate constitution + added illusion energy consumption 2x combo to deal with, all for YUKIMURA, and then it amounted to nothing because she lost and rikkai lost, and then it turned out that yukimura wanted her to lose anyway, and [yukiniou essay ver 4833894 redacted for length]
• but i think this is a nice balance of jokes and terror just in this one paragraph.

• i think everything about the 82 part of this fic is sooooooo romantic but especially this exchange... the unasked question being why niou left if she still cared so much about them, yagyuu chivalrously offering to take on the burden for her but like in a way that's showing niou it's possible and that there's a genuine future there, the contrast between 82 switch vs niou illusioning marui in the prequel fic or jaemin earlier in the fic, niou being literally tired from physically running and also tired from emotionally running... real true being the same person but actually not being the same person at all LOVE.

• i already did a lengthy dvd commentary <here> including my fave lines but basically i again had a fucking ball in this bitch. probably i had too much fun in 2023. this was an extremely ambitious and experimental project but i think i pulled it off and i'm glad i tested my abilities and i still like the final product... i did reread it recently (having forgotten everything about it) and kind of understood nothing but the vibes were good and this is a strong contender for my personal #1 fave fic of my own, perhaps finally unseating longtime rank holder rtfbt...

• im gonna be honest this fic nearly killed me and it's kind of making me redevelop trenchitis thinking back on the writing process... i actually started a dvd commentary for it and then got too harrowed on reflection to keep going. like first of all the fact that i had to set an alarm for 2am so i could make sure i claimed the prompt i wanted. and then the way i wrote 6k in like the first week before all my inspiration died for the rest of the writing period right up until literally 2 weeks before the due date. AND THEN I DECIDED TO READ THE ENTIRETY OF ORV. i make such smart and wise decisions. i was staying up every night to write in that last week and also writing in court in order to get it done 😭 and yes that was including the porn scene as i always leave those until last, although it ended up being the fastest i've ever written a porn scene since it usually takes me a couple months. and then i still needed an extension after all that. probably the most stressed i've ever been about a deadline and this is including the time i was writing a sex scene to finish my yuletide assignment on my phone with the screen brightness turned down to minimum while sitting next to my parents on a plane on xmas eve.
• but i do feel a great sense of accomplishment for managing to finish in the end, i don't think i'm thattt happy with the end result although on more recent reread it's not as terrible as i remember thinking it was when i posted it, but i am ultimately glad i pushed through with it. i'm already kind of historically revising my own memories to be like well it probably wasn't even that bad... i should do that again sometime... but i am seriously not built for longfic LOL.
• for some reason i was severely in the characterisation struggle mines in this fic even though it's literally dream but i think it's just that mark is one of the hardest povs i've ever tried writing, i really don't do well with earnest types. what's a fire moon idk her. i did want to challenge myself but i think i pushed it too far lmfaoo four years after i vowed never to write mark pov again bc i struggled so hard in fractionation i decided to try again on the grounds of How Bad Could It Really Have Been and the answer is . so bad. but i lived bitch.
• having to come up with new hero/villain aliases instead of using the ones from my other superpower au fics in order to not deanon myself was so hard lmao but i like the names i landed on for everyone except markren(hyuck who will always be full sun) better so in future superpower aus i'll probably combine the sets for maximum verse confusion.
• speaking of deanoning it's so funny to me that my epigraph usage gave me away sorry for being unable to resist the siren call of pretentious poetry excerpt opener... i thought using emojis for scene breaks instead of my usual 7 empty lines would be enough to sow doubt 😔
• time stopped at 5:27 because may 27 is the halfway point between renjun's birthday and mark's birthday btw. also renjun's friend who taught him how to use his powers is jun <3

• longass section but actually started writing this part before i'd even claimed the prompt because i liked the prompt so much and i thought it was so fun not directly naming renjun even though mark (and the audience) knows it's renjun. i like the effect!

• made myself laugh with this conversation, jaemin giving renjun advice on bed choice is one of the funniest jmrn moments to me and i think of it fondly and often. i was originally setting up for a pre-get together bedsharing scene but i couldn't figure out how to do it lol.

• obligatory dream scene... one of the first parts i wrote and it really made me be like damn why's the markmin hitting harder than the markren rn. fellas is it gay to stab your rival with your hand i mean part of your body is literally inside another man's body 🤔

• soooo romantic to me!! writing this part made me feel exactly like how markren makes me feel so i hope that came through.

• this was the first time i'd done yuletide in a few years (i used to be an annual participant until i fell into full-time kpop mainism) and i feel so lucky to have matched with a recip who was up for just about anything and expressed a preference for aespa's mv lore as you know i fucking love superpowers. i'm really happy with the one i came up with for ningning, which is just an extension of her canonical hacker powers in the sense that emotion-reading/mind-reading is basically hacking into humans... although now that i think about it maybe i should've given her mind control powers. but it meant i could do a lot of fun synaesthesia stuff with other people's emotions manifesting mainly as tastes to her and i liked coming up with flavour associations. original winter was an armamenter per canon hence karina saying she never misses, which included her shielding abilities, but winter soldier winter also has lie detection/teleportation/other stuff beyond the scope of this fic.
• i repurposed an old wip which was a sequel to waiting for you to move on (hence giselle's mention of renjun dissolving his partnership with jaemin and becoming partners with haechan instead) but i took most of the parts with dream in them out and then wrote like 11k more.... originally i meant for this fic to be 3k 😭 accidentally doing 4x planned wordcount problem. this can only be the fault of the perfect visuals of DRAMA.
• i had everything except for the actual emotional resolution of the winrina + Ethics Of Supervillainy storylines done by the deadline but i was furiously grinding out the scene where karina shows ningning her memories of winter during cafe writing date with mich in la on her laptop and editing on the plane to singapore... basically shoutout to mich for once again saving my ass lmao.
• i was really struggling with character voicing for a while, i watched a bunch of aespa content for canon review but the problem is that my only other rpf fandom is dream who i've known for 6 years and i just felt so uncertain about my grasp on aespa in comparison. but i think and hope i did my girls justice... it was very hard to make winter recognisably herself when she's mostly just her hollowed-out stage persona in this fic and she's being seen from essentially an outsider pov since ningning never knew her as minjeong, but i tried to give little hints at winter's personality starting to show through as the fic progresses. towards the end i was also starting to get worried about not having any overarching motif/extended metaphor other than the sisterhood of the travelling snowflake necklace but it worked out as usual 🙏 genuinely i do not know what i'm writing until i'm writing it.
• i seriously love writing superheroes/supervillains as a parallel to idolhood lmao, i love the bureaucracy of heroism/villainy being conducted through institutions and agencies and the networks of coworkers and rival-equivalent-of-coworkers and the public vs private divide of having a hero/villain persona and a civilian persona. i've been refining the concept over quite a few fics and i think the iteration here is the one i'm happiest with so far. i think i ended the year on a high note so i'm pretty pleased with my performance overall.

• i had such a vivid image in my mind of this scene and i was really careful about word choice when constructing it and i think i achieved the effect that i was aiming for so i'm happy with this part.

• i love bringing random violent imagery into mundane actions in general but i think it really works as a characterisation enhancer here too.

• i was mainlining the skulduggery pleasant series when i was writing this part and the whole frankenstein convo is sooo skulpleas inspired lol. i think it's funny!

• i like the cadence of this section! and i chose the imagery carefully: net/trawl - callback to ningning trying to sense winter in the courtyard scene + ties in with shipping dock setting. empty basin - another callback to courtyard scene + identification of winter with the empty fountain ie a vessel for something dead. defeat tasting like tears - self-explanatory. distant sound of the sea - ties in with defeat=saltwater=tears + ningning's ever-sharpening senses + the way she can always perceive nature with her physical senses (sound of the wind, coolness/brightness of the rain, sound of the ocean), which is also the only way she can perceive winter and goes back to the natural/unnatural conflict that is winter's existence.

• most romantic declaration of rivalry i've ever written probably, not even for the jokes marriage vow slash graverobbing callback but because they're touching each other's pulses. life in each other's hands literally!! And The Ghost Of Karina's Presence Was There Too, And Even Giselle If You Think About It, I Love You Aespa.

• winter's personality (as in, quality of being A Person) breaking through... also there's nothing more satisfying than doing a bunch of phrase callbacks to bring things full circle :') afterimage of aliveness from the courtyard scene but now for something that continues to be alive + vivid proof of rescue vs karina's vivid proof of care.

• the one-way mirror motif occurred to me at the very end of writing but i'm sooo happy with it and the connotations of expression vs performance vs truth it conjures up. isn't that what being an idol is all about!

• came up with these ending lines very early on and then later went back and made sure i was always referring to karina's hands as cold for the thematic contrasts of it all. also i love a negative comparison.

• [fic] to perfectly perform in reverse
• [commentary] soul weighed down by gravity
• books i read in 2023 q1
• book i read in 2023 q2
• posting about company time on company time - judgment quote roundup
• more recent skincare buys
• no longer quarterly books i read may-aug 2023
• [wip amnesty] an indispensable suggestion from afar - alice in borderland kuzuryu/mira wippost
• books i read aug-sep 2023
• even more beauty product reviews
• books i read oct 2023
• why is it called final fantasy when they keep making new ones though - ff7 fmv compilation

Miraculously, the helmet itself had remained totally intact without so much as a chip in the light red paint, but the faceplate had cracked right down the middle, fissure so clean it looked intentional. Only a coincidence of design. Renjun pressed a thumb to the edge of the broken polycarbonate and the fabric of his glove snagged. If he had been barehanded it would have broken the skin.

Seconds until Jimin arrives, a supernova brightness Yizhuo could see even with her eyes shut. That roiling heart almost brilliant enough to taste now, a promise of acidic sweetness under her tongue like a strawberry. Until then, only until then, Yizhuo is alone. Winter’s fingers had been shockingly warm where they kissed Yizhuo's palm. How counterintuitive, that heat. It lingers like Winter doesn’t.

• finish dreampuri ❌ HELP GIRL...
• write more akam ❌ sorry to my otp... i did pick away at some wips during the year but all my available time was being spent on 1) my coworkers 2) dream, in that order.
• refine my style ✔️(?) i think i've gotten better at more consistently hitting the right balance of comedy and seriousness without compromising my prose style.
• i did achieve my 2022 goal of writing aespa fic though! just one year late.

• finish dreampuri REAL NOT CLICKBAIT!!!
• clear out current wip rotation before starting any new wips. although i'm kind of already failing step 1 of this because i've been vaguely rotating a few ideas in my mind (undercover as vip x bodyguard au although i don't know which ship i would do i've just been really into the idea lately, jisung-centric sungren sequel to future metropolis heart which i have like 5 lines written for in my notes app except they're somehow all about dongren and jmrn, ningning/lexie liu idolverse pwp set at the miumiu holiday event in a canon divergence au where ningning became a miumiu girl instead of a versace girl).
• join another fest or exchange - maybe ggjukebox this year? i'm not familiar with sza's discography but i'll investigate to see if any of her songs work with my ningxie brainworms... i kind of want to get back in the ficmix mines too i miss remixing.

He lingers over his grip tape, keeping the tension perfectly even with each pass around the handle, lining up the overlaps in precise parallel diagonals. He drags a thumb over the ridges, sharp with the definition of newness. Not yet worn smooth by his palm. So many more hours of work, and then once he’s done with this one he’ll have to start the process all over again. By the time he finishes the task and looks back up, the room is empty.
//
“Huh?” Jeno glances up. “Oh, the logbook entries. Me and Renjun have been editing your self-evals after you do them so they actually have some useful data.”

All the 3s Jaemin circled have been mercilessly crossed out and the 0 in each row circled instead. Jaemin feels this is a little unwarranted.

“How cute,” Jaemin says. “I didn’t know you were watching me like that.” Jeno gives him a look. “I didn’t know Renjun was watching me like that,” Jaemin amends.

“Renjun is monitoring you. Kind of like how a national security agency monitors a flight risk,” Jeno says. “He thinks you’re going to leave.”

“Hello, Rye,” Bourbon says. He tilts his head and smiles, a closed-mouth expression that still communicates the baring of teeth. His gloved hands, ostentatiously white, rest folded over the gun in his lap with an exaggeratedly telegraphed casualness. “Long time no see. Though it’s FBI Special Agent Akai Shuichi now, isn’t it?”

“Bourbon,” Akai greets. “Here to kill me?"

“We’ll see,” Bourbon says. “You know, it was a little too easy to break in. Anyone could have done it. Put a bullet through your head you before you even noticed the trap.” Smugly: “You let your guard down.”

Since Bourbon is clearly here for a reason there probably isn’t any danger in turning his back. Akai heads over to the kitchenette, opens the cupboard over the never-used stove and takes out a couple of glasses. "Want a drink?"

Beyond the doorframe there was only white. Snowstorm void that would envelop him as soon as he stepped outside. The wind was all he could hear. Under his hand the doorknob felt like ice. He wanted to twist his head back, check to see if Chenle was still looking at him, if there would be the same flash of understanding that passed between them on the stage. Something to reassure him that Chenle would be there on the other side in the moment when he reached out.

"How are Minion One and Minion Two?"

"I wish you wouldn’t call them that," Renjun says, "but they’re good. It’s just this new customer we have who’s kind of a problem."

Yizhuo’s voice hardens to steel. "Problem as in, Karina and Alexandra should pay them a visit?"

"No, no, not that kind of problem. Problem as in, we keep having to buy out pretty much the entire flower market to keep up with his orders.” Renjun hesitates. “Also problem as in, Full Sun can never find out about this if I want a single moment of peace for the rest of my life.”

"Oh," Yizhuo says knowingly. "A handsome young man problem. A rich handsome young man problem."

“We’re not what?” Livia sets her glass down on the grazing table and puts a hand to Clemensia’s elbow, leaning forward into her space again. She smells like roses. In the tastefully dim light her eyes look more grey than blue. “Come on, Clemmie. I’m a Cardew. You’re a Dovecote. We get to have everything—why shouldn’t we? It’s practically our birthright.”

“What about Coryo?” Clemensia can barely flatten the tremor out of her voice.

“I hardly think Coryo would mind.”

“I mind.”

Livia scoffs. “When did you get so boring?” But she snatches her glass back up and whirls away into the glittering crowd.

Barely thirty seconds later Coriolanus appears. He hands Clemensia a glass of wine and slings an arm over her shoulders, easy and familiar. She accepts the wine. She allows the arm to rest there for the span of three breaths. Then she shrugs it off and turns to face him. If he’s upset by the dismissal it doesn’t show in a single relaxed line of his posture.

He looks devastating, in the sense of capacity for destruction. The sapphires at his cuffs gleam the same deep blue as Livia’s dress. As Clemensia's earrings.

“Look at that,” he says. He raises his glass to her. “We match.”

• i think this is a really solid fic that achieves what it intended to do, which was #JUSTICE_FOR_KIR, and i'm happy with how it turned out!! i love kir a lot and i really enjoyed doing a deepdive into her interiority and her conceptually hilarious multi-level coworkers without benefits relationship with bourbon. like kir's entire cover and thus life hinges on akai being dead because she killed him, which is the very thing bourbon is devoting his entire life to disproving, so their aims are fundamentally opposed and totally incompatible... and yet they barely seem to know each other, bourbon doesn't even appear to register that his pursuit of akai is directly endangering kir's life, it's like they're operating on adjacent parallel tracks bridged by the people they have in common--vermouth, akai, and in this fic scotch (TO MEEEEEE. scotchkir my beloved tragedy tinhet.....)--and if there's one thing i love it's highrankers ranking highly next to each other without actually interacting.
• also kir is like at ground 0 of the corrosively toxic fallout caused by akam being around each other, which is really funny but also my poor kir... i tweeted this already but akam are like the inverse of the post that's like the guys in this ship may make each other worse but at least being together quarantines them away from inflicting their problems on everyone else. akam are literally totally capable of having nontoxic relationships with others individually but as soon as they're together they become so obsessively violently hyperfocused on each other that everything and everyone around them gets blown up as collateral damage. and kir is first in the firing line 😭 i hope they both send her some nice and expensive flowers and fruit baskets for all the agonies they have put her through.
• anyway i don't really think this fic has any standout lines but overall it's a story of decent quality with just enough thematic cohesion to tie the whole thing together, and there aren't any parts that jump out at me as being lazily or poorly written, and i had fun seeding my fave agendas (i kinda wish i could have snuck a bit more akam in there but it just wasn't directly relevant... but it very much is the driving force behind the entire situation lmao).

• i took care with the word choice here and i'm super happy with the result... and the ghost of scotch was there!!! i think both kir and bourbon loved him (SCOTCHKIR REAL IN MY MIND) but neither of them know the other felt the same way

• verkir sexy recon/honeypot mentorship is sooo important to me i think vermouth specifically does enjoy self sabotage by fixating on + helping out traitors

• literally the entire thesis of this fic... it's about being the same but not the same... it's about viewing and being viewed... it's about the crushing weight of the many griefs both kir and bourbon are separately secretly bearing...

• idk i really like the rhythm of this paragraph and i think i chose good verbs

• this is the final part in my 3byuki series which was originally two unrelated dw fics i decided to collect together when crossposting to ao3, which meant i had to reverse engineer a narrative throughline, which meant i needed to write yukiniou to complete the triangle. this one taking place in the future after the u17 world cup gave me a bit of trouble because i severely hate the actual canon surrounding this particular point in time for rikkai so i didn't want to canon review even though i obviously was just going to ignore the parts i didn't want to acknowledge in my personal version of tenipuri canon.
• ummm anyway yukiniou is my favourite dynamic within 3byuki because it's the most difficult for me to pin down and i think they have a lot of trouble understanding each other even though yukimura really really wants to know niou better and niou is one of yukimura's most loyal followers even if it doesn't seem that way at first. and on top of that they also have to deal with the godzilla of niou knowing that yukimura purposefully let him lose/die at nationals finals but not being able to help forgiving yukimura for it even if he wanted to hold a grudge. like i think niou is the only rikkai member who has a complex about his yukimura complex, everyone else has either consciously accepted it (yanagi, marui), doesn't actually have one (jackal, yagyuu), or simply doesn't even realise that what they feel about yukimura is in complex territory (sanada, kirihara), so the levels of Awareness and resentment that never actually becomes fully-fledged resentment because niou literally cannot hold that kind of feeling towards yukimura make yukiniou So Fucking Complicated... but in the end it is LOVE. terror and incomprehensibility and all.
• i always struggle a lot with yukimura's voicing, i have terminal CannotWriteOnepickitis and i find it really hard to strike the right balance of polite society lady / viewpoint that doesn't quiiite align with a normal human moral outlook / the terrifying yawning chasm of yukimura's feelings about tennis. but i think i did pretty well here and also with yukimura's somewhat unreliable narration in that he thinks he is understanding niou but he seriously isn't. yukimura's main problem when it comes to rikkai is that he has these very strongly held assumptions about everyone, and because they love him so much they do their absolute best to fulfil those assumptions even if it's causing them intense psychological damage, but since those assumptions are not always entirely correct they will ultimately fail to be what yukimura wants from them. that's the tragedy at the heart of rikkai. and even though this is a hopeful fic about Growth and Future i think that's the bittersweet element underlying everything that yukimura doesn't quite clock, but niou maybe does.
• i do like this fic a lot!! i think it's the strongest out of the trilogy on a technical level and represents my views well and has good dialogue and strong atmosphere and includes some lines i'm super proud of, and i think i did a good job of tying the "plot"/things that are actually concretely happening to the metaphorical/narrative aspects of yukiniou's relationship i wanted to explore. probably my favourite thing i wrote this year :')

• this feels like an extremely Me section it makes me very happy to read back over... i think the prose has swag and the dialogue has yolo and the pacing and tone is exactly what i wanted to achieve and i loveee the technique of breaking up a conversation with an introspective paragraph in the middle. i'm not sure what my writing style is or if i even have a style but i think this is a good example of writing that i can recognise as typical of me, like if i had amnesia specifically about my fics and i had to pick my own writing out of a blind lineup

• i think that more than anyone else niou relies on structures and archetypes and titles to define the world and his sense of identity, even though he's meant to be the unpredictable trickster chameleon, so rikkai is even more synonymous with yukimura in niou's mind than it normally is. niou is yukimura's niou!!!

• 1) summer is theeeee most fucked up season of all time 2) yes i'm constantly writing garden metaphors about yukimura/rikkai but as if it's my fault it is right there in the text

• i already wrote a massive dvd commentary post <here> so i won't go back over all of that but i'm glad i finallyyyy wrote idolverse for nct that properly reflects my current understanding of the meta. i love jaemdongren... i hate writing explicit fic so i will always feel negatively about the actual porn but i think the rest of it is a good jokes/terror balance and thematically tight and i also think this fic has the largest quantity of Good Prose both in absolute value terms and ratio of normal writing to writing i would consider special/pretty so i would say that this fic is probably 👍 overall.

• 1800 i love writing light imagery...

• sorry to c/p in this huge chunk but this conversation is really funny to me i love contrarian jaemin

• reading back over this made me bite lemons and die a bit from AGHHHH MY SHIP COULD HAVE BEEN REAL so i think it also warrants a multi paragraph c/p... this is the default image i have of jmrn in my mind, the two of them in a dark and quiet room where they can't see each other's faces, everyone is holding their breath, everything is very delicately paused so even though the contact is temporary in the moment it feels like it could last forever. i also think this section is a good representation of my """style""" insofar as it exists

• i think this part is nice

• i also think this part is nice

• surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something!!!

• literally just a silly meaningless storyless cute jokes fic but iiiiiii enjoyed myself :) i started this halfway through last year as a brief writing exercise to get past writer's block and indulge in one of my favourite tropes WOUND CARE which i literally haven't written since..... 2019? except i ended up getting severely blocked on this and approx 800 words in i decided i actually wanted to write jaemren emotional anguish porn instead of markren dorohedoro style gory romcom. so i cannibalised the fic premise into waiting for you to move on and made everything 500% more depressing. and then this year markren quiet down glass box simulated sex reignited my desire to create markren content so i dusted this wip off again... but as the slowest writer in the world it still took me another 4 months to finish lol.
• i was especially struggling with the lighthearted tone + ending it's really out of my comfort zone... it does kill me a bit to write straight up romance without some kind of antipathy or anguish in the mix i find it soooo randomly embarrassing like yo look at this loser writing unabashedly about LOVE -_- but i got over it with the power of michsprints! i think i am still too close to this fic to tell if it's good or bad but i do think it's pretty funny, i had to cut some of the jokes because i wasn't sure they were in character but i was definitely prioritising comedy over like... accuracy and quality. but i also think jokes are the most important thing in the universe so like on god i hope this fic is funny to other people and not just myself.
• i don't even think i like superheroes/supervillains that much, i'm most interested in the POWERS part but i Fucking Love bureaucracy and administration and institutions so i keep finding myself writing about professional superpower users lmao. anyway can you believe it's taken me four years to finally finish a fic for my second favourite nct ship........ my gdocs is a veritable graveyard of abandoned markren wips *pained smile* i have had my ups and downs with markren over the past year or so but the return to my preferred mark<-ren dynamic during candy promos feels so fortuitous :') it's all coming up MARKREN... except for the part where i literally could not stop bringing up jaemin. you can't blame me for being jaemin no onna though.

• this conversation is really funny to me (guy who loves laughing at their own jokes) and i do think it's the kind of stupid debate evil dream would get into heated arguments over and also ndr of light(?) with the jokes/terror meter firmly tuned to the jokes end makes me smile in contrast to the ndr of dark in my last fic... i kinda love bitchy supervillain coworker classmates trio ndr i feel like i keep writing them like this

• henchman jokes are so funny to me personally and the idea of jaemin in particular being a henchman is even funnier, though i think jaemin would make a great starscream like he just needs to decide to commit to the bit

• sylvix crimson flower route paired ending - abandoned wip post
• rating all of the night world novels
• adventure (singular) in music arrangement - my piano arrangement of color by fuji syusuke & hirakoba rin
• love isn't a word - favourite quotes with the word 'love' in them
• skincare routine update again
• thoughts on gundam seed
• i love you miss mystery 🎶🎵 - top 10 detective conan ops/eds
• i love scents and smells - my favourite perfumes
• who said triangles had to be stable - discussing my favourite dream 3ps and triangulations
• fave jokes tennis songs
• fave terror tennis songs
• fmv (fuck my vlife) - collection of my favourite fmvs
• tropes are so good tho - favourite examples of my favourite fic tropes
• desire path commentary
• you will become a swallowtail butterfly - summary of my fave scenes in turn a gundam
• ranking char clones by handsomeness
• skincare routine update reup the reloaded
• randomly heart touching quotes from my legal philosophy class readings
• i could fix him (yugioh arc v) - rewriting the plot of my favourite and least favourite anime of all time yugioh arc v in an attempt to make it maybe not the worst story ever told in the history of humanity
• and the lake was frozen in a lightning flash - gundam witch from mercury playlist for my otp 4sule
• that guy, he is a JAEMIN - powerscaling various fictional jaemin clones
• books i read in 2022
• buying beauty products is my passion - review of various recently-trialled beauty products
• cc archive (ongoing)

“So we were thinking,” Donghyuck says, offhand, as he drops into the seat beside Jaemin, even though there is plenty of unoccupied furniture real estate on the other side of the table where Jaemin would not be required to acknowledge his presence. There are only four out of seven of them present, which is actually quite the impressive ratio these days; meals involving more than half of them are a rarity, now that they’ve largely dispersed out of the Dream dorms.

“So make sure you come back to us soon,” Yukimura says. “I’ll be waiting.”

And Niou smiles, that classically sly and opaque tilt to his mouth that could mean truth or mockery or both in the way only Niou can manage. “For you?” he says. “Anything.”

• finish dreampuri ❌
• write itzy or aespa fic ❌
• academy era hagimatsufuru 3p ❌ (but i did write a different detective conan fic!)
• write something good that doesn't make me feel disappointed in myself ✔️

• finish dreampuri 😭🙏
• write more akam!! i still have a rye/bourbon a/b/o pwp without porn wip from last year but i'm not really feeling her, i kiinda want to write akai/bourbon in the handful of years after akai's cover got blown but before the start of canon, but obviously if i were writing akam it would have to be porn otherwise it's a waste of their crazy chemistry and i don't know if i have it in me to write any more explicit fic. i hope the fujobait critical mass in next year's detective conan movie since akai and amuro are both going to be in it will kick me into gear
• refine my style, i think my writing has become a lot more boring and plain and dry recently and i feel a little bit sad reading back over my fic from like 2016 which was worse story-wise, sure, but my prose was so much more interesting and creative back then. i've been working mostly on improving my dialogue skills these past few years and while i think i've gotten a lot better on that front i feel like it's come at the cost of being able to write beautiful descriptive and introspective passages that Convey Emotion and i want that ability back!! like i truly think my writing is so clinical (comparatively) these days idk... some of it is down to pov choice but i'm pretty sure i used to be able to do emotional intensity with pov characters with outwardly controlled images... i think i forgot how to feel emotions myself. maybe i need to rephrase this goal as Re-Remember How To Have "Feelings"
• i think i need to drastically lower my goals i'm honestly not even sure i will have enough spare time to write even one fic next year since i'm starting full time work with really long hours so i will legitimately be happy if i can just manage to do that. one thing about me is that i will never have a consistent output :''''')

“Your concealer’s melting off,” Jaemin says. “I can see the moles on your neck.”

Donghyuck swears and shoves his hand into the outer pocket of Renjun's sports bag, fishing out a slim tube and a phone. Squinting at his reflection in the phone screen, he unscrews the top of the concealer and dabs at his neck with the applicator. “You know, Renjun usually does this bit for me,” Donghyuck says, closing the tube and tossing it back into the bag. He pats the pigment into his skin with the pad of his index finger. “You could make yourself more useful.”

“You have a perfectly good reflective surface right there,” Jaemin says.

“Come on, Jaemin, play along a little,” Donghyuck says, heaving a gusty sigh. “It won’t kill you.”

Aeri flicks a tiny shard of light at Yizhuo. It bursts apart when it hits her skin, fizzing into the air with a gentle tickling sensation. "Hey!" Yizhuo protests. “Don’t attack me!”

“I’m not attacking you, I’m literally giving you free LED light therapy,” Aeri says. “People pay a lot of money for this, you know. I can do different colours and everything.”

Yizhuo laughs. “Is that your new business model?”

“Totally. I’m offering a murder-plus-spa-day combo. It’s my special self care package, like, getting rid of the stress in your life at every level.”

Yukimura is unreadable to Niou because she is so fundamentally different from her she might as well be an entirely alien being; Niou has accepted that she will never be able to place herself in Yukimura’s shoes and thus Yukimura will forever remain miles out of reach. Yagyuu occupies the precise opposite extreme in terms of distance from Niou and yet she is just as unreadable. The gap between an object and its reflection in a mirror is no less a gap for its asymptotic approach to zero. We’ve been together for a really long time, Renjun had said, but hadn’t Rikkai, too? Invincible Rikkai, infinite immutable Rikkai, and none of that had helped them to know the difference.

She has not become a good woman like her brother hoped, but she can live with that. She is, after all, still living.

She does not return to medicine. She does not trust herself not to cut away more than is strictly necessary to heal.
//
In her mind’s eye her brother is always leaving and she is always reaching for him, pleading for him to stay, and this time he isn’t yielding to her like he used to. Again and again the pattern repeats itself. When she’d seen the Zaku for the first time, red and backlit from fire, and her legs gave out beneath her before she even registered the sight, her body understanding before her mind. In the sandstorm with her face bare and his still masked. Amidst the debris of A Baoa Qu when he’d held her and told her to become a good woman and she’d thought, flash of terror or precognition, this is the last time we will ever—