fic DVD commentary meme

[forestofglory]

Yesterday was katzenfabrik's birthday and in celebration ve did a fic commentary meme and asked vir friends to play too.

The meme is
Let's play a game: pick one of my fics (or a chapter/paragraph/line of one of my fics, as you like) and I'll write you a dvd commentary on what I was thinking when I wrote it

So far I've been asked about two fics and I wanted to save what I wrote somewhere more permanent feeling than Mastodon


To Live without Regrets
oh I could ramble about that one for a while! Let's see ...

This is probably my fic with the longest time between having the initial idea (What's it like for LWJ to be chief cultivator? Why would he do that?) to the time I started actually writing

I had to figure out what the chief cultivator's actually job is! (Not just some vague paperwork and meetings but what are those papers and meetings about?) Which required reading some philosophy and watching more wuxia

Structural wise To Live without Regrets is very tidy. It's a 5+1 and each section starts with a letter from WWX and then the rest is LWJ POV. I love how Maureen mixed letters and stories and narrative in On A Long Journey so I wanted to play around with that, but her version feels much more artful! (She also wanders around in time) But I think the structure worked well for this fic!

I did consider just not having an overarching case, but I really really wanted to have WWX show up at the end and explain the mystery to everyone. He's so good at that, but rarely gets to do it in fic!

Anyways I like the mystery that I did pick in the end. I allowed me to spend more time thinking about Qin Su and her relationships

oh and I still really like the bit where WWX is like "why don't you like my nephew?" And LWJ is like "He stabbed you!"

Also this fic is very my "let WWX have a Taren Wanderer phase" angenda. A lot of fic portrays wwx's post cql wandering as a waste of time! But I think it could be really healing for him to wander around and make stuff and think about his place in the world

in that vane the things keeping wangxian apart in this fic are not that they don't know they love each other

Also the pottery especially is Taran Wanderer inspired

I've come across at least one other fic with a similar title that's a time travel fic and I see why it's a good title for that but I'm more interested in people having to live with the past than trying to change it

I think that's all I wanted to say


End Racism in the OTW | Desk Tour: Dr. Jiang Yanli
o the desk tour was written for the End OTW Racism event last year, I really wanted to write something for the event but it took me a bit to figure out what

This fic actually started out as just a list of things on Dr Jiang's desk -- I was trying to do environmental storytelling I guess

But then I showed it to Coreo and they were like this needs more context let me co write it and add awesome librarian stuff. So of course I said yes even though I hadn't co written fic before

nyways co writing this fic turned out to be really fun!

I have been trying to write something about textiles for a while and had read a lot about Tang textiles, and it was awesome to put all that on the page and share it with a friend at the same time

This also the first and so far only fic where I have used zotero to make a bibliography, and that was very satisfying !

We have talked about making this a series and doing desk tours for other people at the CIMC. We even have notes for WWX's desk tour

but I'm not as knowledge or passionate about the things on WWX's desk as I am about textiles and we don't have a deadline for anything so it never quite gelled. Maybe someday

If you'd like to ask me about another fic of mine I'd be happy to rammble on for a bit.