The Great Catsby

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! 

 I guess I'll also use this blog to write about the process of fic writing for some fics. At least, the ones that have more interesting backstories. 

So my most recent SKK fic, Do No Harm is a pandemic AU. I say where I got the idea in the notes, but even further than that, this kind of topic of contagious diseases and pandemics is a huge interest to me. Pathology is actually also a huge interest to me. I'm not good at science and I don't know a lot of the science behind a lot of diseases, but I still find it really fascinating. 

The disease in "Do No Harm" is a hemorrhagic fever (rather than the Spanish flu as originally suggested to me.) Hemorrhagic fevers are scary because of the bleeding they cause both inside and out. The most recent outbreak of hemorrhagic fever was Ebola in several countries in Africa, and I'd say that Ebola is the most well-known hemorrhagic fever that crops up. 

There's an excellent book called The Hot Zone by Richard Preston that details incidents of outbreaks involving hemorrhagic fevers. I read this a few years ago (probably around 2012) and it became relevant around the time of the Ebola outbreaks. It provides a good look at what hemorrhagic fevers are and why their outbreaks are so devastating. 

That said, a few liberties were taken for this fic. I based the virus in this fic off Marburg virus (which is very similar to Ebola, but had a major outbreak in Germany). Hemorrhagic fevers are extremely contagious, but they aren't actually easy to spread. These viruses spread through direct contact with bodily fluids, meaning that the bodily fluids of a sick person have to get into your bodily fluids for the virus to take. However, if you do happen to have end up with infected fluids inside of you, chances are you are going to get sick. 

That method of transfer is different from, say, the flu, which is a lot more easy to transfer. Viruses like the flu can be transferred through the air, by coughing and sneezing and by inhaling particles of the virus. That means that being in the same room as someone with the flu can get you sick. Something like the flu is easier to spread, so a flu outbreak could more easily lead to a pandemic than something like Ebola could. 

The flu also lasts longer. Severe hemorrhagic fevers tend to kill off their victims faster, which gives the virus less of a window to spread. People with those viruses are also less mobile once the severe symptoms kick in, which further hinders the virus' movement. 

Hemorrhagic fever viruses can't be spread through air or aerosol (droplets in the air), but for the purposes of this fic I made it so that the virus can be spread via aerosol. Viruses that spread in this way can't travel on the air, and survive for short periods of time in droplets released into the air. It isn't as bad as the flu, but it's easier to spread than a standard hemorrhagic fever. Because the setting is Japan, which has high quality healthcare and medical facilities, I wanted the virus to be easier to spread. Even though I think something like a hemorrhagic fever would be able to spread a bit in Japan simply because they've never seen it before, which could result in delays of treatment and improper handling, I still thought the virus would have to have an easier method of spreading in order for it to have the impact on major urban areas that it did in the fic. 

The title, "Do No Harm," has to do with the promise doctors make upon becoming doctors. It's also a reference to a memoir by Henry Marsh, a British neurosurgeon, which details the complex feelings and decisions and situations that come with being a doctor. I thought that sort of sentiment was relevant to the decisions Dazai and Yosano have to make in the fic. It's surprising how often there isn't a clear-cut right or wrong answer in medicine. 

Resources for those interested in more: 

• The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
• Do No Harm by Henry Marsh
• The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic (Time Magazine Article) 
• The Fight Against Ebola (Vice Documentary)