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Entry tags:
>> glue & lotus | mdzs
so yeah, I think I'm gonna combine my writing journals after all. it doesn't make sense to keep so many for so many fandoms o(-(
mdzs hell has caught me entirely so here I am, back to writing after a full year, for a pair that's - amazingly - almost as angsty as, or even angstier than, laviyuu is.
chengxian.
in the span of two weeks I've written and published two whole fics, both easily longer than 1k. caesura aside, the last time I wrote anything of this length without wanting to give up halfway was.. um. herding cats last October.
anyway, let me briefly jot down my thoughts on the two. spoilers for later chapters of mdzs within, so proceed with caution.
01. glue
I'm personally very invested in mdzs in no small part because of the place of the dizi in the story. that, coupled with all the thoughts and feelings I have about the complexity of jiangcheng & wuxian's relationship with each other, meant that I was utterly destroyed when jiangcheng returned chenqing to wuxian at the guanyin temple. I remember being in absolute shock when I first read that scene, and then sometime later that night when I'd processed it better, my first thought was: after 13 years, there's no way the dimo would still be usable. there's no way that wuxian could have played it as well as he did if the dimo hadn't been replaced; and that would mean that jiangcheng had replaced it for him. he had already planned to return it, and that dimo was the last thing he could give to wuxian. him giving chenqing back was already a message to wuxian - it wasn't forgiveness, but an olive branch.
in any case, I took that thought and ran with it, and after a lot of crying with ewa it eventually turned out to be more of a character/relationship study of chengxian through jiangcheng's eyes.
jiangcheng is... not an easy character to write because of all the things he's gone through. there are many nuances to him and understanding just the surface of all the emotions he must have bottled up over the last 13 years - and trying to convey them - made him a very challenging character to write.
not to mention I had the problem of source material being in a language I understand - which meant that to me, I was translating character voices from chinese to english, which is impossible. there were - are - so many things I wanted to write that just didn't translate over. I would think of the words jiangcheng would use in chinese, but in translating them I either lost its nuance or the rhythm of the sentence.
for example:
I'd originally wanted wuxian to say "江澄！我们先走一步。" but because I had to translate it, it ended up being “Jiang Cheng! We’ll head on first.”
to the non-cn speaking audience this would make no difference; the idea is there, that wuxian was leaving. but 先走一步 also has that innate nuance of leaving before and without you. english could never hope to capture that, no matter how expansive my vocabulary might be.
02. lotus
I knew almost immediately after I finished glue that I would want to continue writing more chengxian/mdzs fics, and one of them was exploring jinling's relationship with his uncles and his uncles', well... relationship with each other.
the core of this story was born from ewa's turning of years, where she brought up a chengxian reunion at midautumn, spurred by them meeting thanks to jinling. as luck would have it, midautumn was three days after she published turning of years, so I decided to build on it and expand it into a story of its own.
but because I wanted to publish it on midautumn, lotus ended up being slightly rushed. I didn't want it to be as painful as glue was, so a lot of moments that might have otherwise been very angsty and emotionally heavy ended up being brushed over. according to ewa's estimate, this fic should have taken place maybe three or four months after the novel ends. in so short a time, there were definitely a lot of unresolved things between chengxian still, but I chose to ignore them for jinling's sake haha.
this fic was also an experiment in conveying messages without explicitly saying them... there's a part where jinling totally does not understand the significance of the conversation between chengxian, and I think perhaps even my readers would not have understood it.
also, I struggled so much with finding jinling's voice wow... he's too young but also he's been forced to grow up very quickly and that formed a dichotomy I wasn't sure I could properly write. I also had an unexpected amount of trouble trying to figure out what he calls wuxian by; kay's name spreadsheet was hilariously correct in saying he calls wuxian "hey you" because no matter how much I searched and reread parts of the novel, it seems that jinling never directly addresses wuxian by name. I ended up using "wei wuxian" because he calls wuxian that to jiangcheng's face at the very end of the novel, lol. my dear princess...
I'm currently working on what was intended to be a sequel to lotus. I might be scrapping it and posting it just as a small ficlet. we'll see. it was planned to have a lot of Heavy Talk, just like lotus should have had, but I think I would like to... avoid Heavy Talk for now because it stresses me out to write. there's also... something brewing for october - a something that sounds like 2am impulsive decisions with ewa and is probably a Bad Idea but oh well.
of course, there's... a lot more chengxian and a lot more character/relationship studies in the works. I'm really excited to write them, and that is such a huge load off my chest after staunchly staying away from writing for the last year sans my zine and sportsfest fics.
mdzs hell has caught me entirely so here I am, back to writing after a full year, for a pair that's - amazingly - almost as angsty as, or even angstier than, laviyuu is.
chengxian.
in the span of two weeks I've written and published two whole fics, both easily longer than 1k. caesura aside, the last time I wrote anything of this length without wanting to give up halfway was.. um. herding cats last October.
anyway, let me briefly jot down my thoughts on the two. spoilers for later chapters of mdzs within, so proceed with caution.
01. glue
I'm personally very invested in mdzs in no small part because of the place of the dizi in the story. that, coupled with all the thoughts and feelings I have about the complexity of jiangcheng & wuxian's relationship with each other, meant that I was utterly destroyed when jiangcheng returned chenqing to wuxian at the guanyin temple. I remember being in absolute shock when I first read that scene, and then sometime later that night when I'd processed it better, my first thought was: after 13 years, there's no way the dimo would still be usable. there's no way that wuxian could have played it as well as he did if the dimo hadn't been replaced; and that would mean that jiangcheng had replaced it for him. he had already planned to return it, and that dimo was the last thing he could give to wuxian. him giving chenqing back was already a message to wuxian - it wasn't forgiveness, but an olive branch.
in any case, I took that thought and ran with it, and after a lot of crying with ewa it eventually turned out to be more of a character/relationship study of chengxian through jiangcheng's eyes.
jiangcheng is... not an easy character to write because of all the things he's gone through. there are many nuances to him and understanding just the surface of all the emotions he must have bottled up over the last 13 years - and trying to convey them - made him a very challenging character to write.
not to mention I had the problem of source material being in a language I understand - which meant that to me, I was translating character voices from chinese to english, which is impossible. there were - are - so many things I wanted to write that just didn't translate over. I would think of the words jiangcheng would use in chinese, but in translating them I either lost its nuance or the rhythm of the sentence.
for example:
I'd originally wanted wuxian to say "江澄！我们先走一步。" but because I had to translate it, it ended up being “Jiang Cheng! We’ll head on first.”
to the non-cn speaking audience this would make no difference; the idea is there, that wuxian was leaving. but 先走一步 also has that innate nuance of leaving before and without you. english could never hope to capture that, no matter how expansive my vocabulary might be.
02. lotus
I knew almost immediately after I finished glue that I would want to continue writing more chengxian/mdzs fics, and one of them was exploring jinling's relationship with his uncles and his uncles', well... relationship with each other.
the core of this story was born from ewa's turning of years, where she brought up a chengxian reunion at midautumn, spurred by them meeting thanks to jinling. as luck would have it, midautumn was three days after she published turning of years, so I decided to build on it and expand it into a story of its own.
but because I wanted to publish it on midautumn, lotus ended up being slightly rushed. I didn't want it to be as painful as glue was, so a lot of moments that might have otherwise been very angsty and emotionally heavy ended up being brushed over. according to ewa's estimate, this fic should have taken place maybe three or four months after the novel ends. in so short a time, there were definitely a lot of unresolved things between chengxian still, but I chose to ignore them for jinling's sake haha.
this fic was also an experiment in conveying messages without explicitly saying them... there's a part where jinling totally does not understand the significance of the conversation between chengxian, and I think perhaps even my readers would not have understood it.
also, I struggled so much with finding jinling's voice wow... he's too young but also he's been forced to grow up very quickly and that formed a dichotomy I wasn't sure I could properly write. I also had an unexpected amount of trouble trying to figure out what he calls wuxian by; kay's name spreadsheet was hilariously correct in saying he calls wuxian "hey you" because no matter how much I searched and reread parts of the novel, it seems that jinling never directly addresses wuxian by name. I ended up using "wei wuxian" because he calls wuxian that to jiangcheng's face at the very end of the novel, lol. my dear princess...
I'm currently working on what was intended to be a sequel to lotus. I might be scrapping it and posting it just as a small ficlet. we'll see. it was planned to have a lot of Heavy Talk, just like lotus should have had, but I think I would like to... avoid Heavy Talk for now because it stresses me out to write. there's also... something brewing for october - a something that sounds like 2am impulsive decisions with ewa and is probably a Bad Idea but oh well.
of course, there's... a lot more chengxian and a lot more character/relationship studies in the works. I'm really excited to write them, and that is such a huge load off my chest after staunchly staying away from writing for the last year sans my zine and sportsfest fics.