poppyseed

just a quick note to say that my dear sweet friend frecklebombfic made a podfic of my viviz fic tip of your tongue and it's BEAUTIFUL! if you are a podfic person you will be so pleased to see them back in action :') and if you are not this podfic is imo a perfect way to sample the genre bc it's under 30 minutes and includes the sweetest most charming free talk at the end. 

i love podfic and transformative work! i love that we are all always bouncing off of and inspiring each other! podfic 4 ever! <3

Happy May! Quick April wrap-up below:

In April I wrote a little over 16k words :') and I'm so pleased that I did! And that I've continued to dutifully track my writing output in a spreadsheet. Notably, I updated trust/fall and got most of the way through the next chapter, and my Olymfics fic was revealed. I also drafted and lightly edited a very wacky original short story that I'm looking to eventually submit to some journals.

On the taking media into my heart and body front, I read a few books that I really enjoyed. Aside from what I read for work, I picked up Alexis Hall's (author of A Lady for a Duke) contemporary boss/employee fake amnesia (yes, fake amnesia) romance novel Ten Things That Never Happened, and I had an absolute blast. Hall has been cemented as a go-to for me when I'm in a romance mood. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, and the audiobook was particularly fun.

I also, for a local book club I run, read Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuang-zi, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. It's an interesting book first because of how many layers it has between its various framing devices and footnotes and prefaces and afterwords. It's also a fairly quiet historical novel that focuses on relationships on both micro (Aoyama Chizuko and her translator O Chizuru) and macro (Taiwan and colonial Japan) levels. Many food descriptions! Many tight turns of dialogue and head in hands moments due to the close POV and the ever-present specter of colonial violence. I found it to be beautiful and moving and loved our discussion about it, which we all agreed made us like the book even more.

No one ever expects me to have updates on the television front but I did finish The Pitt as it came out! Even watched the finale the night it dropped. I had a great time with it and immediately had to write like 400 words of goofy gen fic as a little coda. I want to poke around in the tag more (I started a pretty good fic but lost all my tabs and haven't dug it up again). It's weird to have seen a show that is trendy... I'm like a TV fan or something.

And finally, I've been really tearing through a lot of fic! I'm having sort of a minsung renaissance. I'd distanced myself from SKZ fandom in general for a while, though I never stopped keeping up with the group itself, and I'm only recently dipping my toes back into the kind of fannish feelings I'd had before that distance. Following some new folks on tumblr and bluesky has helped. My relatively peaceful and vaguely anonymous bubble on bluesky has also been a nice place to engage with fandom from. And the minsung ficathon also helped, lol. There were SO many fics that were dropped and I was deeply impressed by the length and scope of so many of them.

Some recent fave reads, since I haven't recced fic here in forever. Mostly but not only minho/jisung:

• bury me at makeout creek by mhrek - 40k, minsung, fake dating a cabin in the summer, incredibly convincing love story
• wick to wax by unconscious - 4k, minsung, future fic, coming out, so tender ;__;
• Case 54 by the problematique - 35k, minsung, jisung is straight (or is he) and kind of ruining minho's life about it, big messy queer friend group vibes
• Who Comes At Night by nuttinonice - 20k, minsung, minho talks in his sleep and unintentionally says something that sends both he and jisung into a tailspin
• Made To Be Broken by nuttinonice - 14k, minsung, established relationship canonverse where they have their first fight
• would you still date me if i went to prison for dropkicking a child? by sunshinedozing - 10k, 2minsung, v funny au where jisung is 2min's couples counselor and all is not as it seems
• duty of love by hanville - 42k, minsung, modern royalty au where minho is jisung's bodyguard, thank god people are writing this trope
• Bonsai by disturbeddreams - 9k, seungin, severance au, i'm literally obsessed with this one, so good and interesting

Wow I had more to rec than I thought! Anyway this has been April on this corner of this internet :) what have y'all been into lately!

I've been re-training my community interaction muscle and I started by making a couple of threads on bluesky with questions for writers to answer. They were written with fic in mind, but anyone can answer! hwarium encouraged me to archive them here on dreamwidth so they don't go to an early grave in case of social media implosion or account deletion, so this is the first bunch of questions for posterity. Feel free to copy-paste and answer on your own journal, or just drop some thoughts in the comments!

1. of all the tropes you've written, which would be least appealing or applicable to you irl? e.g. you wrote a fic with a pivotal bedsharing scene but can never fall asleep yourself if you have to share a bed

2. what is a classic "you"-ism that often slips into your writing? e.g. you often experience road rage, so all of your characters hate stop and go traffic with a vengeance

3. what is the most interesting or memorable thing you've learned while doing research for a story?

4. share a little about your "white whale" story, aka the idea you have had for a long time but haven't been able to bring yourself to write for whatever reason.

5. tell us your secret! what's your favorite sneaky (or not so sneaky!) trick that you implement in your writing to draw out an emotional response from your reader? e.g. inverting a trope, highlighting parallels, quoting canon, etc. bonus points for examples

good news: i've completed another read-through/edit round on this short story, and it's not as much of a mess as i feared

bad news: the issue is for sure in the last 20%, and i feel confident that it needs an overhaul but not so confident what my actual landing place is or how exactly to get there while maintaining brevity.

it is heartening to realize that my original work has really gotten a lot better this year! i've dedicated much more time to it (*waves at ao3, considering 2024 is the sparsest update year i've had since i was a teenager*) and really been intentional about trying to get to know myself as a writer without the scaffolding of canon and lots of other works of characterization to bounce off of. with every original story, since i am a character studier at heart, i am discovering more answers to the question: what do i, personally, think are the most essential components of humanity that make us different from one another? it's fun to explore. it also makes me feel very young! who am i, at this age, to try to find an answer, but the point is so much more about the exploration than it is about where i land.

 Tuesdays are currently my day off work outside of weekends (I am going to be clinging to my 4-day work weeks for as long as I possibly can — the nature of this job means I am mostly in charge of my own schedule and burnout sneaks up on you so fast even with abbreviated hours), and I don't know that I have ever actually figured out the right rhythm for myself to make them count. 

Historically my Tuesdays look like seeing my therapist, doing some chores, writing, and every other week recording a podcast episode, but today I've got nothing on the calendar. It's 2pm! I've accomplished nothing of import aside from a tiny bit of admin work from bed and some lunch. And also a bunch of episodes of Love is Blind UK. I had grand plans of going on an early morning walk before it got hot but then I stayed up until 4am last night  (yikes! haven't done that in so long) so that was out of the cards by morning.

I'm trying to be better at approaching my self-sabotage with curiosity. I think it would be really easy to berate myself for being irresponsible/lazy/careless with that late night rather than being disciplined and following through on my commitments to myself (or even just hopes for myself). As I typed that out I was once again forcibly reminded of the fact that those negative traits are all words I heard a lot growing up as a high-achieving child and teenager who also almost definitely had undiagnosed ADHD. It's that framework again coming back to haunt me: You have so much potential, what's wrong with you that you keep messing it up?

But the pressure does me no good. If I push myself too hard the rest of me hardens and retreats. That's been a tough pill to swallow in adulthood, and being aware of it has been the only way out of a lot of my struggles with rigidity, depression, disordered eating, etc. I'm lucky I was able to sleep in so late and take the day easy today. I have to wonder if staying up so late was my brain's way of trying to force my hand into resting. Maybe I have a strong worry about going too all or nothing, and choosing nothing, whether consciously or not, stops me from burning out or overwhelming myself. My logical brain knows that a walk around the block wasn't going to drain all my energy reserves, but I have a lot of memories of pushing myself too hard that I'm sure are haunting moments like this.

I mostly started writing this post to try to take gentle stock of the day and decide what to do with the rest of it. There is genuinely nothing pressing or urgent that couldn't wait until tomorrow or Thursday (which is a blessing!), so I'm going to try to treat this as a menu of items. A buffet of options, if you will.

If I've got the energy and I think it would be good for me, I could:

• unload my dishwasher
• listen to my audiobook
• go grocery shopping
• do some meal prep
• go have a solo dinner somewhere
• return my library books
• work on some writing
• go get bubble tea
• see if i can find some nice wide-legged dress pants
• start planning my luggage for upcoming europe trip
• message some friends
• stretch/do some yoga

I'll leave it there! All of these things are very chill and nice, and also I am maybe understanding why, looking at it all in a big list, my brain went "can we just lie down actually". It's a privilege to be able to call this "a lot", and also I've lived alongside my depression a long time. I speak its language, you know? I can and do accomplish significantly more than this on work days, and I also am working on my 2024 resolution: to slow the hell down and do less. I've gotten better at it. And I'll keep getting better!

I may come back this evening to update on how my day was. It was nice and helpful to think about all of this in writing. Stay tuned for more glimpses into the poppyseedbrain. <3

This is my third time writing this post because I keep forgetting that dw's autosave feature is useless and there is no manual draft feature. I really thought I saved my second attempt somewhere but can't find it (maybe someday I will!) so forgive me if this is short/messy but I think I need to get it all out in one go if I want any hope of finishing it and successfully getting it up.

This post is the first in a theoretical series where I take a personality indicator (in this case MBTI!), find kpop idols who have the same type as I do, and utilize it as a space to reflect on personality tests and why they're compelling, how we utilize them to understand one another, and my own relationship with my alleged personality types.

( Read more... )

As I work on the neverending final chapter of what's mine is yours, more and more often I come back to the idea that I am generating for myself a uniying framework around conceptualizing, complicating, and portraying moments of confict between characters. My entrypoint to fandom was primarily via hurt/comfort. I was a young teen and accidentally stumbled onto ff.net, and the soapy drama of someone being or feeling deeply hurt and subsequently experiencing the exact kind of care they need appealed to me greatly.

I have posited before that the core draw of hurt/comfort is the promise of perfect safety. In a lot of h/c fic, there is almost an element of mind reading. What do you need? How can I give it to you even if you're ashamed to ask for it? And can the fact that you've been broken down "enough" by either physical or emotional pain allow me to give it to you when you might otherwise turn it away?

In this way, h/c can be a surprisingly conflictless genre. What conflict exists often exists in service of total apology by the end of the story. The older I've gotten the more critical I've become of stories where someone, either intentionally or unintentionally, utilizes their own pain as an excuse for any and all bad behavior: "I hurt more than you, so I'm owed remorse because [my trauma response is outside of my control / I'm not emotionally stable enough to reckon with the ways I can cause harm myself / you didn't intuit my needs quickly enough so you deserved to take everything I dished out / etc]." This isn't really conflict. It's sanitizing and somewhat dehumanizing. Accountability takes a backseat to comfort. The victim gets to be perfect, and then the story gets to end.

I say all of this as someone who is still a huge h/c fan and loves the genre and what it can offer around vulnerability and getting to the root of something. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to really complete the cycle of healing something. That's all true! Also sometimes my blorbo needs to get sick and have someone give them soup, and to believe they've done nothing wrong now or ever amen.

But this fannish upbringing did not help me write conflict. 

My understanding of all of this has changed slowly over time. This current WIP has pushed me harder than any other story in terms of conflict without easy answers. I put some guys in an impossible situation and tried to honor their individual perspectives. No one is really all the way right or all the way wrong, or even most of the way in either direction. Someone gets hurt more, yes, but does that make them a victim? I think a younger version of me would have structured this much more as a hurt/comfort fic, but adult me ended up having a different take.

I worried before posting chapter one (and the subsequent chapters too) that the comment section would turn into a courtroom: who is the poor baby and who is the predator? I've been really delighted actually to see so many different takes, many of which go all in on acknowledging that everyone here is hurting. That is literally the point. It's all about pain. It's all about what we do to each other. All I've done is make it literal.

When I think about writing conflict I am thinking about the ways I have hurt the people I love, and the ways they have hurt me. I am thinking about the people in this world who hate me, and what might be driving that hate, and the fact that I'll never be able to change it, and the fact that I don't have to. I am thinking about getting it wrong when you're young and don't know any better, and then looking back and holding that messy young self with all the compassion you can muster.

I am thinking about:

• core immutable personality traits and their healed and unhealed forms
• saying the thing you didn't mean and trying a dozen different ways to take it back
• microexpressions and posture
• how a story changes with every telling
• fighting as a release of tension
• the thin line between courage and impulsiveness
• and hurting someone just because you're angry and you want to

My framework for writing conflict ultimately centers the unsettled. What isn't being said and needs to be? What need isn't getting met? What unhappiness will eventually transform into resentment?

The challenge for me as a writer is to leave it unsettled. Stop fiddling, stop making it better so quickly, stop making your characters say exactly what they mean and especially stop letting them hear what the other person is saying without their own filters and biases in the way. Let them fight, be angry, verbally spar, retreat and cry. Let them hate one another. I don't necessarily struggle when it comes to bringing things back around. I'm fundamentally an optimist, and I'm pretty bad at holding grudges — my characters will come with me into that space if I let them, and what the story so often needs is for me to hold off as long as I can before letting them clear the air.

I may come back to this topic at some point, either to talk about revising conflict or to discuss specific craft strategies to evoke some of those difficult emotions without letting them overwhelm the story or veer into soap opera land, but for now I think this is where I'll leave it! I hope you are all doing well and that if you're writing you let them fight a little. <3

filled a prompt at the paradisediner comment fest! it's a tiny jihan ficlet. hoping to fill some more at some point, and if i do i'll make a little compilation post!

writing my big bang over the last approximately four months was an exercise in not giving into despair.







listen, we all experience setbacks in this life. i'm actually surprised i ended up pulling it out in the end, but i'm glad i did! modding the big bang ended up being a whole lot to chew once we'd bitten into it, but man was the end result satisfying. so many beautiful stories! so much stunning art! i wanted to sit down and write a little bit about my story and the planning process, as well as things that didn't make it in or thoughts i had that aren't obvious in the final text.

first things first: as usual i planned around themes. this is my usual first brainstorming step for any substantial story. i wrote this out by hand and then copied it into my notion page for this story, and i think most of it did end up pretty clearly in the fic, even if it looked a little different than i anticipated:



this brainstorming session is also how i got my title, which i settled on before i had written a single word into any document! it's always true that either i know my title early or i fumble for it right at the end. this time, thankfully, was the former.

the above brainstorming happened in may of this year. MAY!! zb1 had not yet debuted when i decided on my story, wrote my summary, and started fumbling my way through an outline. we didn't know the roommate situation. i actually titled the fic open water and planned a bunch of boat/ocean metaphors about 24 hours before jiwoong's card to matthew with the infamous "hyung will row" declaration. the hardest part of this story by far was just trying to write alongside the actual trajectory of real life. things kept unfolding before our very eyes and i frantically crammed them into my plot map, or totally reworked things i thought i was going to be able to write. things kept changing! camp zerobaseone upended my understanding of zhang hao who got a little sidelined in this story (i'm sorry king i love you), for example. there are lots of little references i made to real life happenings that folks have commented on and 90% of the time it's because the thing happened and then i wrote the scenes where the thing happened within like a week.

i would be remiss if i went any further without talking about my playlist. my sweet companion <3 i listened to these songs so much that all of them are in my spotify wrapped top 20 lmao. some even made my top 5! let's get into it.

1. dog eat dog by tommy lefroy

Couldn't reason with the underdog
Once you've been it then you'll always be one
Looking around the arena
Thinking I'm just like you

boys planet! we're adversaries because we have to be not because i want to be. fear & frustration, when the top of the pack feels like the bottom. "a girl's gotta eat, too."

2. sweet tooth by maya hawke

I'm grateful for everything you put me through
It's the only reason I'm any good to talk to
When I'm sick or suffering, I'll still call you
About my big, sore sweet tooth

my mattbin song. matthew who even when he is mad doesn't know how to stop trusting or loving hanbin. and vice versa. and how that's hard! "and instead i found a soundbite / of someone i love saying something mean and hard."

3. mastermind by taylor swift - i will spare you a quote or explanation, i just lose my mind over this song being my haobin theme song after an edit i saw months back.

4. what if i love you by gatlin

By now I should be OK
That's easy for you to say
What if I loved you?
What if I loved you way too much?

mattbin again. it was really interesting to write about a platonic pairing with tropes you often see in exes to lovers fic! did it really only mean this much to me? are you really going to leave me behind? "still looking for your car, just kill me."

5. glory by snail mail

You own me
You own me
I could never hurt you, my love
You know me

jiwoong to matthew... i wanted a song that looks at this almost worshipful obsessive love where you'll take whatever you can get, and snail mail delivered. "you want it all / superstar / jesus died just to save you"

6. you're on your own kid by taylor swift

From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes
I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this
I hosted parties and starved my body
Like I'd be saved by a perfect kiss

my jiwoong song!!!! i didn't even know i wanted to write his pov at all until i listened to this song thinking about him and almost cried. to want something so much. to give yourself over to it. to be the one person that believes in your dream. he's so brave. it makes me wonder if he was lonely. "my friends from home don't know what to say"

7. 7PM ft Peder Elias by BSS

And I keep saying okay
I never listen to my own heart
I do whatever they say while looking like you're happy as hell, oh, I
I really hope that you feel the same, oh, I tonight

more mattwoong. frothy evening riverside walks. meeting eyes in golden lamplight. coming home to the same person again and again. what we can give each other and what we can't. "been a long day / but it's okay"

8. satellite by harry styles

Spinning out, waiting for ya to pull me in
I can see you're lonely down there
Don't you know that I am right here?

jiwoong to matthew. playing on similar themes as glory. i will be what you need me to be. i will let myself be subsumed by you. i'll orbit you for as long as it takes. "i'm right here / right here"

9. i know it won't work by gracie abrams

But it's a lot
All the shine of half a decade fading
The whole facade
Seemed to fall apart, it's complicated

again, ex-lover songs for a friendship that's straining. nothing breaks your heart like losing your best friend! "you will love me until you resent me"

10. touch tank by quinnie

'Cause he's so pretty when he goes down on me
Gold-skinned eager baby, blue shirt out the laundry
He tells me he's gentle when he wants to be
So I think he wants to be gentle with me

one of my top songs of the entire year. i am obsessed. absolutely a jiwoong song, are we kidding. made me want to include a sex scene at the end not for any narrative reason just bc i wanted to think about ways i could mirror some of this language. "i'm swimming into you"

11. feels like by gracie abrams

Livin' in a movie I've watched and
Funny 'cause I couldn't have called it
Met you at the right time
This is what it feels like

mattwoong's happy ending :) good for them! it's a slightly bittersweet song because it's not a perfect happy ending by any means, but i like that about it. "i would do whatever you wanted"

tonally i tried to put this story somewhere between sweet canon getting together and angsty exploration of being a queer idol in a different country. i think it worked the way i wanted it to! at several points i wanted to make the ending much bleaker, but that would've been a different story. one i would write! but not the story for this particular big bang, i don't think.

i don't currently live in a different country from the one i grew up in, but i am a queer person from a multicultural household who has had to try on many occasions to figure out how to express myself authentically in my second language on another continent. i tried to be mindful of all the ways this version of matthew and i are not similar while still drawing on my own experiences and honoring the ways we are.

with canonverse/idolverse fic, i think there can be a tendency for people to comment on whether you as the author got things "right". there are useful places for that framework, i think, but it's important too to remember how much of this is made up! i don't know this guy and never will. so a lot of him is me, because that's what we do when we write. this is true of jiwoong too, and to a lesser extent all of the side characters whose POVs we don't get to see. i was the scared person who didn't know how to say the hard thing. i've been the person in a position of relative authority who had to figure out how not to destroy friendships while keeping the boat afloat. i'm sometimes the more ~seasoned queer who's been out for a while and gets to experience others coming out to me, and sometimes i'm the first person they've ever told. i'm the jealous one and the quietly devoted one. i'm the anger and the apology and the sly observations from the outside all at once.

what i am trying to say is that, as with any piece, there's a lot of me in here. it's imperfect! but it meant a lot to me to get it down, and i'm grateful for everyone who read it (or will in the future!). thank you for reading all of this, too, if you've made it this far.