poppyseed

Since you last saw me here I started ADHD medication. That isn't where I actually intended to start this entry, which in theory is about the ups and downs of writing, but the salient change in my brain chemistry seems like a reasonable launching point for further discussion. I'm still adjusting dosage and such, but I was thinking about this new chapter of my life as being connected to my writing because I signed up for Get Your Words Out at the beginning of the year with the same cheerful optimism I always do. Typically, I fall off of recording either my daily word count or whether or not I've met my habit goal somewhere between mid-February and the end of March; this year, we're into April and I'm still going. Check on me again in December for a truer test, but even this small victory has inspired a delicate and fragile kind of awe in me. I'm checking my calendars more often. I'm remembering appointments. I'm only getting a block down the street before realizing I left my jacket behind instead of getting home freezing and wondering at my own object impermanence. Little changes with massive impact. A series of tiny affirming victories.

Until March of this year I hadn't posted any of my writing online at all, a continuation in the downward trend of the last couple of years. I used to average a posting total of something like 200k each year. This year I signed up for 150k and felt it land inside of me like an impossibility. And let's be real: I'm behind, though not discouraged.

There is a strange rewiring I'm having to do when it comes to understanding how writing is going to fit into my life for the next however many years. For a long time it was a given, but it isn't anymore. I've gone a week without writing a single word. Two weeks, three, a month. That was unthinkable even just a handful of years ago, but times are changing and I'm figuring out how to change with them. How to carve time aside on purpose (my weekly writing residency time, Sunday writing with friends) and how to remind myself through the haze of being busy with work and focused on other things that this is important to me and I want to keep prioritizing it. I think sometimes that writing means too many things to me at once: hobby, outlet, study, play, challenge. The way one sprint can feel like skating across a smooth clear patch of ice and the next has you plunging through it into water. Whether this is a problem to be solved is the question I haven't answered yet.

I've now posted three things in 2025 :) if I add the original short story I'm submitting around and a handful of words in various WIPs, my written total for the year comes to about 19,000 words. It's low for me coming into quarter 2, but they're words I'm proud of, and some of them are even words I've had a lot of fun with. I am trying to soften towards my writing. I only have the one brain, and this is, for better or worse, the art it's chosen. This is what happens when I have something to say. Letting it move through me and resisting less (even resisting the quiet periods! the blocks!) leaves me space to breathe and exist.

More to come soon about the connection between writing, mindfulness, and the vague edges of spiritual practices to come. The softening in me is spreading! I'm still sorting it what it all means to me.

Hope you are all doing well. <3

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

It's time!!! Happy day 2! Yesterday I wrote 2.3k in a tea shop with gf and it was very lovely, I made good use of Scrivener's full screen writing mode and it was an extremely cozy aspirational vibe honestly. I've been thinking lately about how many parts of my life younger me would go Hell Yeah about and it's kind of a lot! Which is really bolstering during times when I'm stressed out. Like, life is good. Chill out!

I wrote most of my words yesterday on my big bang (sorely needed) and the remaining ~700 on what's mine is yours chapter three. I will drag this fic across the finish line if it kills me. I'd love to finish it this week or next so I can revise and POST! Did you know chapter two came out this month last year. God. It's fine!! We're not giving up.

I feel pretty chill about nano this year, honestly. I have a fairly calm month ahead of me in terms of work and social interactions, with a writing retreat planned on the weekend of week three (yay!! absolute highlight of last year so I'm excited to do it again), and though I was in a massive writing rut for a lot of September and October, the words have been coming fairly quickly this last week. We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping it's another solid nano win. 

Are y'all doing nano? Or other things going on this month?

World cold, words hard.

I had typed a whole intro to this entry but it was so unnecessarily long! Mostly I just want to wave at the title a bunch and have it somehow sprout into a fully formed post on its own.

2023 hasn't been my most prolific writing year to date, but it certainly hasn't been as fallow or drudging as my brain keeps trying to convince me of. It doesn't help that I haven't posted anything in over two months now — that's uncharacteristic for me, and definitely challenging me to locate new and exciting levels of chill considering how few WIPs I have close to finished right now.

There's a parallel here between my internal unease and the post I keep threatening to write about the many many impacts of late stage capitalism and advertisement-centric state of the modern internet on fandom culture. I think I sound very old when I say that it didn't use to feel like this, but I don't really mean that fandom was "better" when I first joined. Mostly I just mean that I was 13. When I was 13 I was just really excited to be making stuff. I'm glad I'm a better writer than I was then, and I have a lot more feelings about craft and growth and my trajectory, but I sometimes miss how easy it felt to sit down with a blank document and only feel a rush of pure excitement.

These days writing is a bane and a lifeline. I am, for once in my life, trying to ease up on committing to deadlines. I'm not participating in Yuletide! I'm not looking for new things to join! I'm writing my big bang and that's more or less it for things I'm actively on the hook for. It makes me antsy but I'm trying to get better with stillness. & I think it's a good choice and a good change but it really has felt like 2023 is just lesson after lesson and I am getting tired of learning.

So maybe I'll make some old mistakes, just for fun. Maybe I'll set myself some deadlines, or start another event, or stay up late late late into the night recapturing the magic that always brings me back to this endeavor in the first place.

I keep threatening to walk into a bog and never emerge when I struggle to get into a good flow. I overthink and underplan and write myself into weird corners. I let my brain get weird about what it says about me if I'm not accomplishing as much as I'd like to. Even opening an old doc and being really pleased with what's in it can be demoralizing if I feel far enough away from it, like someone else did that work and now I'm burnt out and confused trying to figure out why I can't reach that magic again. It's not easy to remind myself that it always comes back.

Writing is hard! But not writing is harder. So we keep trucking on.