recs game!

Tagged by @chaninfused​, thanks so much furat <3

recommend 5 or more of your own works that you would rec to someone asking what they should read first & explain a little bit about the work. these can be the most popular, the ones you think are underrated, or your own favorites! then tag five other writers!  

BREATHE, AND LIVE | SKZ CHAN — single parent!au, an ongoing series

Breathe, and Live holds a very special place in my heart. I often use writing to explore my perspectives on different situations, and as I was working through this universe, the fondness I grew for every single character is unfathomable. It was inspired with the help of a good friend I met here (@deathbykpopboys​ - sunny, if you’re seeing this, I adore you) and consists of single parents chan and mc trying to get through life with their rambunctious kids (twins Jilix and Hyunjin, respectively). While I haven’t worked on it in a while, it is not a finished series by far, and I look forward to writing many more drabbles for this universe in the future. For anyone curious who also happen to be a deobi, I have a The Boyz series called Touching Stars set in the same universe :)

LAVENDER MIST | TXT TAEHYUN & BEOMGYU — apocalypse!au, no pairing, drabble, 1.7k

I’ve written a lot of angst in my life (my mutuals will very much agree), but this is, I think, one of my greatest pieces when it comes to the genre. Inspired by two unrelated thoughts that I somehow threaded together (if you must know, one was about Febreze and the other was about an apocalypse), it was an attempt to convey an emotion I was feeling for some reason that I couldn’t quite describe to myself - something between wistfulness, longing, nostalgia, heavy and light and suffocating all at once. Lavender Mist is about reminders of the past, what empty cans of Febreze and friendship bracelets left on the side of the road come to mean when survival in an apocalyptic world is the only goal. While it’s short, I think that it was the first time I managed to write how I felt, and for that, it’s incredibly precious to me.

A YELLOW SCARF IN WINTER | SVT JUN — unspecified!au, drabble, 1.5k

A Yellow Scarf in Winter came a short time after Lavender Mist, and it’s another drabble based on emotion. While Lavender Mist does have some plot,  however, this story does not - it’s the only fic of mine that I think I can label as no plot, just vibes. If I were to try and describe it, though, I guess I could say that the moon is trying to find his home, and mc happens to be there as he takes a rest along the journey. It was inspired by a Chopin piece I’d recently relearnt called Feuille d’Album, which translated literally means an album leaf. It’s short and brief but incredibly beautiful, and this story was an attempt to write the feeling it evoked in me into words. For all the world I don’t think I could explain to you the emotion I was trying to convey, but I think the fic does it just fine. 

PARADISE | ATEEZ SEONGHWA — witch!au, completed series, 48.1k

How do I explain Paradise? It’s a world where witches exist and freely roam the earth under the guidance of their Goddess Mother. Seonghwa, a simple kitchen witch, learns early on that he is the reincarnation of a past life put back on Earth to complete a goal he left unfinished, but with the realization of that goal will come great heartbreak and sacrifice. Because a promise made with the blood of the dying is binding, and as Seonghwa learns more about the love he left behind, he begins to understand that it is not by duty to his Goddess Mother that he seeks revenge, but by will and will alone. I love Paradise - it was my summer 2021 brainchild and I think it was ridiculously underrated compared to many of my other pieces, but no matter. The comments I received for it told me the story touched many of those who read it, and really, that’s all I could ever ask for.

WHISPERS OF NATURE | SKZ — nature spirit!au, ongoing series

I feel like I’m almost cheating a little with this recommendation because it’s a series of stories rather than a single one, but I love all of them so much that I couldn’t pick just one. I think this series was probably my breakthrough work as a Stray Kids writer - I met a lot of my current mutuals because of it, and besides that, it was just a very fun series to write. It’s about Stray Kids as nature spirits - forest guardian Chan, fae Jisung, moon child Changbin, shrine messenger boy Jeongin, water nymph Hyunjin, princes Minho and Seungmin, and star Felix. If I tried to explain the plot of each one we’d be here all day, but all of them, even those I haven’t finished yet, deal with love and loss and learning to live for oneself and no one else. I think it’s one of my best attempts at world building yet, and for that, I’m super proud of it.

Tagging: @wingkkun @applejongho @itsapapisongo @thepixelelf @blueprint-han <3 (feel free to ignore!!)

little recount of the year for me. some heavy stuff, mostly positive tho

so like, this time last year i had just gotten my bachelors and was fairly confident i'd be all gainfully employed in no time. alas. remote jobs became steadily more scarce and the work gap on my resume grew steadily longer. and it's also been a hard year. i lost my brother. i lost my cat. i stopped smoking regularly - now it's maybe ~1-2 times a month. but comparing that to where i was for a long time, where it was abt once every two hours, i'm uh, more than satisfied with this progress.

after i stopped smoking sm i really regained a lot of my creative energy. got back into dai in an intense way. got back into being an active member of fandom for the first time in years. recently got back into rping.

i've made a number of friends recently and i'm very, very grateful - also grateful that i'm now at the point where i can give enough of myself to sustain friendships. i fell out of touch with a lot of ppl while smoking bc i was just too numb and weird in conversations and out of it.

oh, i started drawing. like i've always doodled here and there but this is the first time i've let myself actually focus on learning how to draw. made ample use of my tablet, although it's slowed down a lot with it being winter and my joints being fucky.

i'm incredibly proud of my bigfic, too. the length is impressive but it's more the content - i think it's the best story i've ever written tbh. and it's still ongoing, which is exciting.

overall it has been a strange, tumultuous year for me. and for everyone, ofc, so much has been happening in the world, but im not even going to touch on that rn. i still very rarely get out aside from grocery shopping and going to the doctor, but i'm managing the relative isolation better than i thought i would without being high all the time.

and im finding that i've become a lot more mature. a lot more willing to have uncomfortable conversations with people, to talk openly about boundaries, to be open about my feelings and reactions, to tolerate and appreciate differing opinions and points of view.

31 now and in a good place even that i'm still living at home which is far from ideal (bc i don't get along with my family, not bc of my age and shame/stigma around that) and even tho i'm still unemployed and that's both very stressful and embarrassing however much i try to talk myself down from the latter reaction. but overall i'm happy with where i am in terms of my personal growth and my day-to-day comfort with myself and my life

A little while ago, @deewithani and I made a pact to write some reader-insert smut. I'm so proud of us for following through--it would have been super easy to chicken out.

Here's a link to hers When the Snow stops Falling (Mayday x F Reader) on tumblr

And here's mine Dating is Overrated (Rex x F reader) on AO3

Because this was an exercise for me, I wanna talk about it a little. Feel free to ignore my ramblings in favor of just reading the porn above. S'all good.

Even though I have been writing fic for many, many years, I am new to smut. My first foray into it was only last month (and can be found here (AO3) if you care (Thire/OFC Jedi)) and I've been noodling on other pieces of it in private. Just to see if I could do it in a way that I found remotely believable. Smut is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I am awed by the folks who turn out quality in quantity.

Doing it as reader-insert was very difficult and I think that was largely because of the fact that the Catholics got me early and there is still an underlying sense of...venial sin deep in my subconscious. Which is to say...I found writing 3rd person smut embarrassing and 2nd person...mortifying.

And that made me wonder if that is why a lot of people have trouble with Reader Insert as a genre--because there is no getting around the fact that the word YOU appears in the middle of some pretty dirty stuff and even if you say you read them with an outside perspective...you still have to do the mental gymnastics to get around the POV.

And I also wonder if the POV make it more jarring when something happens in the fic that is not your personal jam or even something that you find sexually repulsive. Like...I recently read some Cody/Rex that contained some stuff that I was like "NO thank you, skim skim skim"...but I wonder if I would have had a more visceral reaction to it if the same acts were occurring in a Cody/F reader (or Rex/F Reader for that matter).  Go on Codes, put your fingers there for Rex, but try it with me and you're gonna pull back a stump? Maybe.

Is there some sort of consent-based hangup maybe? I can't quite figure out how to phrase it...but I think there might be something inherent to the understanding that (in the Cody/Rex example above, anyway) everyone is consenting to what's going on but if I (as a reader) am put in place of Rex and would not consent to a particular thing, suddenly the act is extremely NOT okay and that kicks me right out of the fic entirely.

In some ways, I thought it was a little easier to describe things in 2nd POV. I'm not sure why, exactly...maybe because I didn't have to do the mental gymnastics of passing the descriptions out of my brain and into the character in question--to describe them in ways ways that the character might. Of course, that sensation is immediately countered by the thought that omg people might think this is ME I am writing about and...back to church for elis.

There also seems to be a pervasive belief that all RI is poorly written. I have been reading a fair amount of RI fic in the past few weeks in an effort to understand it more and I think my ultimate conclusion that it's no better or worse than any other genre in that regard. Some of it is pretty bad. But some is really incredibly well crafted. 

There is a sense of...immediacy in it that is sometimes lacking in 3rdPOV and I like that. Though...it [the immediacy] might also come from the fact that a lot of it seems to be written in present tense. Not sure.

Anyway. I enjoyed it as an exercise and think it's good to try to stretch personal boundaries when it comes to writing. Not sure if I will ever do it again, but I'm not ruling it out. I don't have a a real sense of how successful I was at the task, but it was worth the effort, I think.

I'd love to hear thoughts on this (the topic, not my relative success or lack thereof)(though, if you wanna talk about that...sure) from anyone who cares to share. Maybe especially @deewithani if she is willing.