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comradesalazar · 3 years

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2020 Creator Wrap: Favorite Works

I will admit I got a lil Emotional that I got tagged in this but I’m so excited to go through it because this year has been SO PRODUCTIVE for me when it comes to writing. Thank you to the legend @that0negayslytherin for tagging me and the other legends, you the real MVP (and also thanks again for setting up the LV fic discord bc that place... really b Wild and really b a wonderful place to motivate each other to be our best.) Legends only!!

Anyhway! Onto this thing... I’m excited.

[rules: it’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 (or so) favourite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought to the world in 2020. tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!]

So. Most of my works from this year have been Venji related because I’m still in the deep pit of Love, Victor obsession and idk when that’ll go away. Hopefully not anytime soon because I’m having a great time and fic was an amazing way for me to improve my craft. I do have one piece of original work on this list, but the rest is fic. It’s difficult to choose favorites so I think I’ll go chronologically. A couple of these have graphics but not all of them. Anyway... let’s get into this, shall we.

Arakhne of the Floating Mountain

So this the first work I completed this year. It’s an original novella I wrote for Wattpad’s Open Novella Contest and it’s a very fun, character-centric story that reimagines Arakhne/Arachne (the one from the legend who gets turned into a spider after challenging Athena) as a lonely lesbian who lives alone on, you guessed it, a palace on a mountain in the sky, until three sisters drop by asking for her to create their coronation dresses for when they become the queens of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. The sisters (Soledad, Luna and Estelle) basically try to court her and it’s a good time. Obviously, I didn’t win the competition but it was still a really fun story for me to write and part of my journey of realizing I can create a writing habit and work on something over the course of a long time, since the only other completed long work I had was for NaNo, which was just binge-writing over 30 days before I had the chance to get bored. If you’re into magical lesbians, check it out!

The stars will love me even if you don’t

I have so much to say about this work. I started it just on a whim in August after I watched Love, Victor in July and began wanting to actually contribute to the works of fandom. Little did I know that I would be embarking on a journey of 120k words and counting, with 33 chapters. This story deals with a whole random of issues -- from long-distance relationships, substance abuse, mental health problems especially around anxiety and depression/suicidality, toxic relationships, codependency, self-harm, the project of becoming oneself and being able to manage life and navigate the world in a healthy way, all the things. In a lot of ways, it is a personal project. But also in a lot of ways I wanted to correct a lot of ideas we have about what constitutes a healthy relationship and what love should look like. There were many times when I wanted to give up on this project due to frustration and exhaustion, but I continued to work at it. I learned so much about my own capabilities, about developing a writing habit, and about what it’s like to write a behemoth of a story. It isn’t perfect by any means but I appreciate the people who have reached out to me and told me that they learned some things about themselves from reading. This is truly a labor of love and I can see that it already accomplished the goal I set for myself which was to help people. It’s lit. And thank you so much to @callmevenji for the lovely cover!! She’s a legend!!

The Thousand-Eyed Wraith (TTEW)

This was a little one-shot I wrote for the Halloween Venji Fic Fest and it takes place in the world of my original work, The Thousand-Eyed Crow. Basically, it’s about what would happen if Venji ended up in that world and had to deal with some spooky nonsense and eventually ended up joining a cult. It was fun for me because it was more stream of consciousness and post-modernist, which is very different to how I normally write but it was a really fun experiment tbh.

You Only Live Forever (YOLF)

This was another one-shot I wrote for the Fic Fest, but this one was much smuttier and mature than TTEW. I was really inspired by Beyonce’s “Partition” (the song and the video lmao) and thought it would be interesting to put Venji in a world similar to Greendale in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina but with s*x magic, so it was essentially a Love, Victor and CAOS cross-over for grownups lol. Apparently it worked out well, though, and they ended up trying to summon Satan which went... questionably. But I had a lot of fun writing this, as well, especially when it came to sorta balancing the old-timey setting with the modern day and the smutty scenes with the softer, fluffier ones.

Part of Your World

So one day I had an idea to write a Little Mermaid-inspired Venji story that would be so sweet and romantic... And so I did. I took a lot of inspiration from several sources -- one, of course, was the Disney version of the Little Mermaid, as well as the original version which is a lot darker and more sinister, as well as mythology around sirens and selkies and just, I guess like, class warfare. So I ended up with a sorta more adult-version of the Little Mermaid where Benji gets attacked by humans and is distrustful of them until he meets Victor who is “not like other humans” and helps patch him up, and they embark on a bit of a whirlwind romance. This has been a treat to work on even though it’s probably one of my least popular fics because I imagine people are coming for something a bit more light-hearted but I’m incapable of writing something that is 100% fun and not chock full of imagery and meaning. I think this has also been the work that showcased and tested my imagery-writing and dialogue-writing abilities the most and brought out my inner poet. And once again a huge thank you to @callmevenji for the fanart, if you haven’t already followed her you should bc she’s a legend.

Dead Men Feed the Fish

Finally, my last and most recent work is also the story I worked on for NaNoWriMo this year. 63,000 words completed in less than a month, depicting the initial meeting of Venji and the way their romance develops and deepens over time. It’s just (chef’s kiss). I had originally had the idea for pirate!Venji and really wanted to write it because I was inspired by That One Scene in Pirates of the Caribbean, which is probably one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen and between the only het pairing I stan. So I just had to write a story that included this scene and that allowed me to write my dream scenario of Venji out on the open seas being gay and having a good time and going on adventures and having homoerotic sword fights. This story has basically everything -- romance, action, adventure, magic/fantasy, a lil bit of spice/kink, good communication, tension, cute animals, everyone is gay, what’s not to love. I’m also looking to edit and publish traditionally so I’m in the process of fixing all that up now. And once again, thank you to @callmevenji for the brilliant fanart!

Anyway, that was that, and I hope that if you have the time and you get the chance, that you give some of my works a shot because I would be very grateful and I think you will have fun.

I’ll tag @kateis-cakeis, @g531, and I guess anyone else who wants to do this!

#long post #writing #fanfiction #love victor #venji #author #my writing #gay literature

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