not what you look at, but what you see

when I hit a fic-writing dry spell I try not to dwell on it, but there's still that vague little voice in the back of my head going 2022's almost over and you've got nothing, seriously? I spent a lot of last year bashing away at a fic where everything I was trying to do was new to me, and when I was done with it I didn't write anything for months. but that's not the point of this post, the point is that now I have 80% of a new story going, and it's a relief.

Signal Decay, the fic that ate my 2021, is a machine I decided to bang together while thinking "yeah I've seen someone use a welding torch, I'll figure it out." and like, pardon my bias, but it sure does walk! and fire the occasional laser! if it also happens to creak like a motherfucker that is okay, what I learned is showing. but getting it there turned to be a much crunchier process than I'm used to, and at this point I can admit I chipped a tooth on it. I have 10 drafts of this fic (a 16k fic! that's too many!!). at some point I was just creating new docs and copying and pasting and saving as, and I didn't do barely anything by hand. after I posted the last chapter the writing switch flicked off. I know that's how it works, can't pour from an empty vessel et cetera, but it gets to be a jittery bottled-up feeling.

then, at the beginning of the summer, a friend gave me a little bottle of the bluest fountain pen ink I have ever had the pleasure of getting on my hands and desk and cat, and the part of me that is not immune to pretty colors got REAL thirsty to see that ink on paper. making my words, not copying articles and lyrics. and not journaling about mundane shit, but the tremendous hit of creating something, word by word, that does not exist.

that hit, unsurprisingly, is way more potent when you're watching the ink of each letter flow and dry and shade on good, smooth paper. tl;dr by the power of "ooh pretty color" I suckered myself into writing the companion fic to seen and not seen that I have wanted to write for two years. I'm not an analog fetishist, I don't like the speed at which talking about old tools tends to veer into magical thinking. but that supernatural AU demanded a specific atmosphere that sits well on paper. it needed its time, and so many moody rain scenes, and if I fucked up the cadence of one sentence or phrase I just had to skip down the page and go again, writing slowly enough to live in it. (so okay, yeah, if you talk too much about writing maybe you can't escape a little magical thinking.) the last of many things I learned from Signal Decay, probably, is that it's possible to give yourself LibreOffice poisoning, the cure for which is paper and pen that just - feel like they're demanding less. not the ceremony and commitment of a new doc, just enough room to put down a sentence, which is a world. feels like I'm laughably late to this realization! but this is me putting it down for my future self, who will absolutely forget it again.