operasteers | Network

.Fandom: Chen Qing Ling, Mo Dao Zu Shi
Pairings: M/M, F/M, F/F, poly…this one earns AO3’s Multi glyph. Cut for length: ( Continue. )

Characters:: Cut for length:
( Continue. )

Rating: Teen And Up Audience
Length: 75,126; 132 chapters
Content Notes: This is a raunchy parody; a lot of kinks are implied, and characters will be slipping off for papapa in combinations you may not agree with. Expressive and strategically placed use of eldritch glitchtext.

Creator Tags: Chatlogs, chatfic, Texting, Comedy, Canon Compliant, Crack, Memes, Humour, the untamed - Freeform, God Idek what to tag, Humor, meng yao is best bitch, i am afraid of when lan xichen finally snaps, xue yang is a highly cursed person, nie huisang is still mvp tbh, more relationships and characters to be added probably, tagging everyone was Hell, chatroom fic, Polyamory, Lots of it, ok maybe, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Just have fun everyone!!!, Additional: please do not eat or drink reading this enough people have choked x-x

Creator Links: (AO3)

Hades_the_Blingking; (Tumblr)

swaglexander-the-great

Theme: Crack Treated Seriously, Crack, Epistolary, Fandom Classics, Fix-it Fic

Summary:

The Untamed universe is exactly the same, except everybody has magical crystals that have a suspiciously familiar messaging system. The story is pretty much the same as the show, except everyone lives!! (so minor changes).
or
in which Wei WuXian tries his darndest to date Lan Zhan, Jiang Cheng possibly has a aneurysm, Jin ZiXuan is still the most awkward human alive, and Xue Yang makes me write some VERY cursed things. Written in chatfic format! :3

Comments are very much appreciated! ^.^b

Author’s Notes:

Listen, I know the premise of this fic is actually insane, but it somehow works really well.
The 'message crystals' they have work on some form of minor telepathy - they don't 'type' as such. That's all the explanation we are getting :3 Format best viewed on a desktop, but it doesn't matter too much I don't think!

On with the show

Reccer's Notes: Despite the author’s disclaimer, I read this just fine on a $10 3G flip phone.

This freewheeling bawdy Muppet Song turned epic saga got a lot of the fandom through quarantine; I admit to shoehorning it into the “serious” category, but an author (who isn’t writing for pay) doesn’t sustain a story through four years and 132 chapters without putting something resembling thought into it; a skeletal outline of the canon plot (with more survivors and a lot more innuendo) remains faintly visible.

Fanwork Links: Grandmaster of Meme-onic Cultivation, by

Hades_the_Blingking.

yourlibrarian posting in

common_nature

This photo wasn't the year's first sunset but rather the first one that was really a "wow". Loved the colors.

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anneapocalypse

Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV
Rating: Mature
Archive Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Urianger Augurelt/Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn, Urianger Augurelt & Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn, Ardbert & Urianger Augurelt, Unrealized Ardbert/Urianger Augurelt, Pre-Urianger Augurelt/Warrior of Light
Characters: Urianger Augurelt, Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn, Ardbert Hylfyst, Elidibus, Unukalhai, Tataru Taru, Minfilia Warde, Warrior of Light, Dewlala Dewla, Y'shtola Rhul, Yugiri Mistwalker, Thancred Waters, J'Rhoomale, Blanhaerz, Lamimi, Naillebert, Haneko Burneko
Additional Tags: Grief/Mourning, Angst, Religion, Isolation, Loneliness, Patch 3.4: Soul Surrender Spoilers (Final Fantasy XIV), Elezen Warrior of Light, Female Warrior of Light, Canon-Typical Violence, Guilt, Emotional Repression, Child Neglect, Childhood Memories, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Series: With Lilies and With Laurel
Length: 34,805 / 92,000
Chapter: 6/15

Summary:

Heartbroken after the loss of his dearest companion, Urianger labors to save two worlds in which he has never felt more alone.

Notes:

If you're new here, please start with Chapter 1!

Final Fantasy XIV is owned by Square Enix. This is a non-commercial work of fanfiction.

( Read on AO3 )

( ...or below! )

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

shadaras

1.
The guy in my cohort who I work with (which is an excessively long way to frame who this is, but whatever) was talking to me this afternoon and then was like, "Hey, can I ask you a question? It might be uncomfortable." and proceeded to just be like "Uh. It's kind of personal? It's about you?" when I was like "idk, what's it about?" until I was like "Just ask already", at which point.

"So I was thinking about this the other day, and I was looking at your chest, and"—at this point I figure out what he's trying to ask—"I'm pretty sure you don't have boobs?"

I tell him that yeah, I had top surgery, and then am like "So, this would have been a lot easier if you started out by telling me you had a question about what I've done to medically transition." and he's like "wow you're so smart you have such good words about this" when it's more like "I have been immersed in this culture for nearly half my life, I'd better know how to talk about it in a way that's both clear and polite".

He's nice, and wants to know things because he's curious, and mostly I'm like "yeah I have zero problem talking about this, I do not worry about people overhearing, I know some people are stealth (for good reason!) but mostly I don't talk about it because there's no reason to."

anyway this conversation included: (a) me telling him what a binder would look like under clothing, (b) me explaining that "how far are you in the process of transitioning" is a meaningless question because everyone's path is different, (c) him going "yeah everyone thinks you're a man" while not knowing what I mean when I was like "yeah everyone thinks I'm a cis dude", and (d) saying "the polite way to ask if someone has further transition stuff planned is to ask that and not say so are you planning on having bottom surgery". (apparently he follows some trans guy on tiktok who's been chronicling his bottom surgery process? which is cool, and I'm glad that's a thing the trans dude is comfortable doing and that my cohortmate was comfortable asking, but also, my guy, this is such a personal thing and it's more polite to ask generally...)

2.
A friend on discord was like "oh god pushing myself to work consistently with full focus at my full-time job is hard and I'm getting home exhausted and how do I deal with this, ahhhhh", and I ended up going "...okay I have Thoughts", because, well.

Welcome to what I've been working out ways to deal with for the last year? The kind of drain is different (I know they do a more academic/mentally stressful job), but the effect is often the same.

copied text of the thoughts I put on discord

- knowing that when I get home I will not be capable of doing anything until I (a) shower [necessity of physical job, but also just nice transition/feels-good thing], (b) eat [again, needful, gotta fuel the body], and (c) pet my cat who missed me very much and is going to demand to sit on me for a good 10-15min as soon as I sit down [this is why these things must happen in this order]
- accepting that there's going to be some time before I want to do anything again. for me this means not expecting anything of myself until like 4pm, when I've been home for about an hour
- knowing that I will probably only get One Major Thing done in the evening, and using that knowledge to prioritise. (sometimes this One Thing is like, required evening classes. or therapy. or aikido. sometimes this One Thing is working on a writing project. sometimes it's Friend Time. depends on the day.)
- I am deeply fortunate in that I enjoy cooking, but I also know that I do not have energy to cook every day of the week. this means that when I do cook, I make sure I make meals that generate leftovers not just for work lunches but for workday dinners, hopefully with enough variety that I am not eating the same thing for five meals in a row or the like. (I'm fine eating the same thing for every work lunch in a week so long as dinner is something else.) regardless, make sure you have plans for weekday dinners (takeout, leftovers, making food, frozen meals) and that you know what days you'll be capable of preparing for the days when you'll have less energy.
- accepting that some days you just... won't do anything other than poke around the internet reading fanfic and talking to friends?
- that said, if you know what you want to do and can scaffold that (like, having a friend to body-double with while you're doing chores/bookbinding/writing/whatever), making sure you know your limits is important. maybe don't expect more than an hour of "productive" time an evening right now, especially mental energy, since you're using a lot of that at work right now.
- if you know what you find restorative (showers, listening to music, reading books, petting your cat, etc), then explicitly scheduling time to do that after getting home and before doing something "productive" might also help, since then you can do something enjoyable before asking more of yourself.
- because I know my body will always wake me up at 4:30am (an hour before alarm), I require myself to be in bed around 10pm. so I'll get offline between 9-9:30pm so that I can get everything together for the morning, brush my teeth, do all my other bedtime routine stuff, etc. I'm usually tired by that time anyway! I am not doing anything useful! I still whine about it because I wish I could stay up later, but I've found that having a regular bedtime helps immensely with having the ability to cope with the next day. (sleep in general does, and for me that means enforcing my own bedtime, since my body enforces the other end.)

idk, sometimes I'm like "wow I feel so young and not great at adulting" but then friends who I know are older than me and who I think of as better at adulting were like "nah that was good advice <3" and I'm just. dunno. One of those things where it's really easy to see where you want to improve, all the places where you let stuff fall down, but that doesn't mean you're doing poorly overall?

Like, yeah, I would love to have a cleaner apartment. That'd be so nice. I do not have the spoons to do that all at once, and I sort of barely maintain the level of "this doesn't mortally offend me" cleanliness that I do. But it's something where if I really cared I could do something about it, I know how, it's just... prioritization. The only creature I share this space with is my cat. I almost never have friends over (partially because of feeling like the space is too much of a mess to host visitors, partially because it is my space and I don't want anyone else here).

...most of the conversation that spawned from me saying all that up there was about food and how much thought it takes to cook food, which: mood. so glad that my brain accepts variations of the same stuff pretty much all the time as being sufficient. (Doing other things would be fun too! But it isn't needful to me.)

3.
did I have other things.

a.
It's been COLD. It should hit highs of 32F-ish for a few days next week, though! That's very exciting and I'll be like "wow so warm" even though the likely lows on those days are forecast for uh ~10F. So, you know, warmth is relative. At least the storm predicted for this weekend seems more likely to swing out to sea than dump more snow on us?

b.
I've seen this song/music video linked a few place (re-found it most easily from

donutsweeper), and it's very good: Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Minneapolis (which is about exactly what you'd expect, and contains video clips of said streets)

c.
Having a teacher go "the only reason I'm letting it slide that you're drawing in class is because you get good grades; don't let other students think you're getting away with something" is baffling to me. Like. Tell me to stop drawing on the school-assigned tablet during class and I will draw on paper instead. Nothing will change about how I keep myself from being bored during lectures that are 90% "I am reading text off powerpoint slides". (Also this is the only way I will focus, anyway.)

d.
As motivation to myself to write enough more of this to have something more fun to share by the end of the weekend, a tiny bit from the opening of That Novel I Want To Write:

[The letter] was, by Ames’ estimate, blunt to the point of being rude. He set the note down delicately on his desk and glared at it, as if that would grant him insight into the writer’s intentions. His skill with objects was in crafting them, asking wood and metal and stone to come alive in his hands and hold magic in their shapes, not in looking at what already existed and finding meaning in it like the Inquisitives of Tal-Tamorn did.

tehexile posting in

100words

Title: Surprising Warmth

Original (or) Fandom: Octopath Traveler 0

Rating: PG-13

Notes: Tatloch, Delitia, spoilers

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mossy_bench

(Well, it's a series, but I'm still going to count it as one continuous story.)

We Don't Talk About the Drawerfic
It was only this past December that I posted anything to AO3 longer than 10k. My public output up to that point was largely one-shots and drabbles. Over the years, I think my productivity has slowed as my writing quality improved. My mounds of unposted drawerfic are a testament to this. For instance: over the span of 4 months in 2013, I wrote nearly 100k words. Most of that is terrible and will not see the light of day.

Though, I have been a bit inspired by a post

deerna made about Obsidian to at least organize those old fics more nicely. My current setup is just dumping them all into zip files and backing those up on a couple different devices.

Anyway, I think the revision process has always been a challenge for me. I'm comfortable with the act of editing itself, but I'm highly critical of my own writing, and the amount of things I want to fix can be overwhelming, especially when the solution doesn't feel clear. But I think I've finally found a way that works for me, and as such, I have not only been able to post a 14k fic for Yuletide, but also to write and post a 24k series! It consists of a prequel set in the future ("Closing the Loop"), a fic building out the tension and action ("Playing the Part"), and then the porn chapter ("Deepening the Craft"), which I posted on a separate archive-locked account.

I've found plot structure the best way to get unstuck. For the Yuletide fic, I very much drew upon the nuts and bolts of three acts. They so helpfully segment out the rising of the stakes, the worsening of short- and long-term problems, the evolution of internal and external conflict, the introduction of pinch points... as I wrote and revised, I kept coming back to those elements. It helped me get a handle on things instead of becoming overwhelmed.

I don't do this every time, but when I feel that something about a scene is unsatisfying, I make myself write out answers to several questions until I feel clarity. Who are the characters before versus after this scene? Does it increase tension, advance the plot, or reveal a character's goal (it should do at least one of those)? Does it show character development, show the cause/effect of the characters' conflict, reinforce or raise the stakes, or reveal something about the character's motivation? Does the scene change negatively or positively? Is it a scene that follow the "goal -> conflict -> disaster" pattern, or is it a "reaction to disaster -> dilemma -> decision" deal?

This does feel rather excessive when I recall that I began to write this particular series simply because I wanted to write two characters fucking. But so it goes, in the world of fanfiction. I swear, I tried really hard to just make them have sex and be done with it, but they insisted on 17k of set-up first.

The Fic Itself
( More detail about the canonical context and where I diverged )

Some fun AO3 tags I got to use for this: Identity Porn, this time literal, Fake Femdom, Idiots in Lust

rocky41_7 posting in

fffriday

I finished my second Sarah Waters book this week after devouring most of it on my flight to Texas and she has surely done it again! This book was Affinity, a much less-talked about one of her novels, which concerns Victorian lady Margaret Prior, who in an effort to overcome her grief for her recently deceased father and a mysterious illness that gripped her around that time, decides to become a "Lady Visitor" to a women's prison: someone who comes to talk with them from time-to-time. She almost immediately becomes enraptured with a young medium, Selina Dawes, doing time for murder and assault.

I don't usually like to do extensive summaries in these reviews, but I want to highlight what USA Today called "thinly veiled erotica" in this book. This book is best approached, I think, with a measure of dream logic (or porn logic, if you prefer), where things can be deeply erotic in concept that in real life would certainly not be. Nothing illustrates this better than the opening chapter of the book.

In the opening chapter, Margaret makes her first visit to Millbank prison. Waters does an excellent job of making the prison itself a terror; a winding maze of whitewashed, identical hallways inside a cocoon of pentagonal buildings set unsteadily into the marshy bank of the Thames within which Margaret immediately becomes turned around. She is passed from the gentleman family friend who first suggested she become a Lady Visitor to the matrons of the women's side of the prison, a realm populated entirely by women. As Margaret passes into this self-contained place which feels entirely removed from the rest of the world (the prisoners are allowed to send correspondence four times a year) she becomes keenly aware of the strange blurring and even erasure of the boundaries, rules, and customs of the outside world. Furthermore, Margaret is reassured over and over again that she is, effectively, in a position of power over all these vulnerable women, trapped in their cells and subject to the harsh rules of Millbank. The prison fully intends for Margaret to be someone for them to idolize and look up to, someone whose attention can make them strive to better themselves. Margaret, a repressed Victorian lesbian, is dropped into this strange realm of only women in which she operates above the rules that strictly govern the rest of them.

It is in this state, after this long journey through Millbank, that Margaret first catches sight of Selina Dawes, and is taken from the start.

The book is not heavy on plot, and some reviewers have called it dull, but I was riveted. The plot is the development of Margaret and Selina's relationship, and the progress of Margaret's mindset on the question of whether Selina's powers or real, or if she's just a very talented con artist. These are by nature things which progress gradually. Practically, it's true that not much happens: Margaret visits the prison. Margaret goes to the library. Margaret has a disagreement with her mother. But her mental and emotional changes across the book are significant.

There are also the vibes. Waters does such a good job of capturing a very gloomy, gothic atmosphere where Margaret (and the reader!) are constantly sort of questioning what's real and to what degree and there's a powerful sense of unease that permeates the entire story. It ties in so well with Selina's role as a spiritual medium and the Victorian obsession with such things; it creates a very holistic theme and feel to the book that I just sank into.

On the flip side of the erotic view of the prison we see early in the book, Waters also uses it to terrifying effect to simulate the paranoia of a closeted gay person at this time in England. As Margaret's feelings for Selina develop and become more explicit, she lives in terror that the matrons of the prison will realize that her interest in Selina is not the polite interest of a Lady Visitor in her charges. She is always analyzing what the matrons can see in her interactions with Selina and what might go under the radar; she is constantly wondering if rude comments or looks from this matron or that is simple rudeness, or a veiled accusation of impropriety. The panopticon pulses around Margaret more and more but she can't keep away from Selina even to protect herself from the danger of being caught.

On the whole, I thought this book was fantastic. I enjoyed it even more than Fingersmith. Waters was really cooking here and I've added several more of her books to my TBR, because she obviously knows what she's doing.