The Great Catsby

ALMOST DONE!! When writing these sort of "climax" chapters it became more and more apparent that I like verbal climaxes rather than action ones.

The conflict ended up being (and will continue to be) a conflict involving words more than anything physical, and part of that is because I really like writing dialogue. It's kind of a problem that defined my writing in grad school and that I've tried for the most part to deal with by writing more visually and with more action, but sometimes I just...go for the dialogue. It's because I can't picture things in my head visually that well without seeing them in front of me (kind of like needing references for drawing but like...for memory) BUT I can hear people and dialogue pretty clearly for the most part. So characters start talking and thinking a lot.

Not that the stuff they're trying to deal with in this fic is something that can really be solved by violence. Chuuya's existence until now has been defined by what he can do, and while Dazai comes at things from a planning pov he also is involved with a lot of violence. There is a lot of action in BSD and not a lot of talking, which is another reason why I tend to make them talk. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I did enjoy writing it. Needless to say, there will be more talking.

I think I posted them at the end of my 2018 fic roundup, but I guess I want to go into more detail because I like talking about my fics. 

So one of my goals is to finish one of my longfics. I have two, only human and Gifted. To be honest, I should probably finish both of them, since Gifted is like fifty years old and only human has a full outline, but I've run into some problems that make me think that I'll end up finishing only human first despite it being almost a year younger than Gifted. 

I didn't really go into Gifted with a plan. I actually have a hard time going into longfics with a plan, and my first longfic for BSD didn't have one. It got finished in a pretty short amount of time, but it wasn't planned. I don't really have the discipline to commit to a steady schedule, or the attention span to make it happen. That is probably why I have a large output of one-shot fics. 

Gifted presents a challenge because it's similar to only human in themes, but only human is easier to write because it's closer to canon and therefore I know the world more and know what I want from it. It's hard to write them both at the same time without them influencing each other too much, and I get afraid that people will think they're the same (even though no one's said that yet.) So ideally, I'd finish only human, then Gifted. I didn't have a plan starting either of them but now I have an outline for both of them through the end. My goal is to finish only human by May. 

After that, my next longfic would probably be a Psycho-Pass au. I have that completely outlined but haven't started writing it yet, except for a prologue of sorts that sets up the main relationship in the story (skk.) 

I've also really wanted to write an au that people could really get involved in because the world would be detailed but not close to canon, and realized that I kind of was with my figure skating au. The au isn't a longfic but rather a bunch of shorter fics in a series, but I feel like that makes sense since figure skating itself feels like a bunch of parts of a season with breaks in between, and random things happening off to the side in addition to the main competitions. 

That world has a good amount of details and (as some commenters have pointed out) I've really poured my passion of the sport into the fics. It doesn't really get the engagement of other peoples' au's, and someone actually got annoyed on my blog that I was posting a lot of figure skating stuff, so that's discouraging because I actually do want to talk about the fic setting and characters and inspirations a lot outside of the fic. I kind of had this problem with only human, though, where me wanting to talk about the fic was dampened by less engagement and a feeling that people weren't interested outside of the fic itself. Certainly not in the way people are interested in the au's and fic tidbits of other writers in the fandom that I've seen. I'm just afraid I'll lose the want to talk about it the same way as I did for only human (which is another reason why only human has started to have updates farther apart.) 

BUT the people who read that series and like figure skating generally talk to me about it and leave great comments, which is good! And people are more interested in the stuff behind this fic than they were for only human, probably because figure skating has a lot more different stuff. Part of my goals are to keep writing in that series because I like it, and it would be really cool to write a series following the skating careers of Dazai and Chuuya as figure skaters who are past their younger days and going through a transition. It's definitely something I've noticed a lot in irl figure skating, the challenges of going through transition when older and, as people get older, wanting to change things about their skating to allow for longevity. It also helps that a lot of the themes something like a figure skating au brings forward are themes applicable to BSD characters. 

I don't really have any other fic plans at the moment. I always end up writing a lot of one-shots so I'm sure that will happen, and it's entirely possible I'll end up writing a few Psycho-Pass fics again when the new stories come out. It's hard to tell because I've never been a multi-fandom writer. Either way, I'm looking forward to all the things I want to write in the new year!