Rynling R&D

Because why write new fic when you can torture yourself by editing old fic?

After the World Was Won
This is a story about sexism in STEM fields wherein Daryl is frustrated with Setzer for achieving more recognition for doing basically the same work. Now that I am closer to the age I intended Daryl to be in the story, however, I realize that intelligent adults don't express frustration in quite the way I had her doing. I therefore made Daryl's language less blunt and her sense of ironic detachment drier. Setzer has an awkward monologue that I could have edited, but I decided that it's in character for it to remain a bit stilted.

Another Chip in the Pile
Dubious consent was a major theme in m/m fanfic when I wrote this story. I remember being bothered by that but at the same time interested in what dubious consent can do that depictions of healthy relationships cannot. For whatever reason, I still find stories of emotionally damaged people stumbling backwards into sex compelling, and I'm surprised by how fond I am of this fic, which is about Owzer attempting to fuck Setzer out of his depression. Politics aside, editing this fic taught me that the word "guttural" achieves semantic satiation very quickly, and I am hereby instating an ironclad rule that it can only be used once in any given story about buttsex.

Every King Needs His Guard
This is a very short postgame fic about Sabin assassinating Cid so that Edgar doesn't have to. I edited it to get rid of some of the more florid phrasing while making Sabin a bit scarier.

The Lure of Machinery
You can really tell I was still developing my chops when I wrote this one. Instead of fixing the numerous instances of stylistic awkwardness, I just deleted them wholesale. I should probably delete this entire story, but I am still to this day super into the idea of Setzer and Edgar being engineer husbands.

Float
I wrote this Setzer/Edgar story only five months after "The Lure of Machinery," but it is worlds better. It's not good, exactly, but it's moving in the right direction. I edited the dialog to make it tighter and crispier. I've been so tits deeps in the pretentiousness of Zelda fic that I forgot I enjoy writing banter... I should get back to that at some point.

Two Kingdoms
A year or two ago the great and noble Kashuan reblogged a post about how the OP immediately hits the back button upon realizing that a fic is written with a first-person narrative voice. I thought of this specific Peach/Bowser fic when I read that post, and now I have finally edited it to be in third person. This actually took a substantial amount of work, but I will not embarrass myself by revealing just how much. The story is still a heap of weird and pretentious garbage based on deep lore culled from the instruction manuals of the NES era Super Mario games, but at least now it's marginally less cringe-inducing.

Claws and Lace
This is not old fic, but I've been returning to it to make edits every week since I posted it. When I said that it needed a lot of editing I meant that it needed A LOT of editing; I am very serious about my crackfic and would never joke about something like this. If I am going to write a story about Peach and Bowser having awkward monster sex then it is going to be classy and well edited, so help me Crackfic Jesus.

Okay wow, making these cosmetic changes has indeed made me feel a lot better about my monumental lack of progress on more meaningful projects. Good job team!

I'm working with Lightsintheskye on a series of illustrations for my Zelda/Ganondorf fic The Legend of the Princess. She did the cover illustration a while ago, and yesterday afternoon I posted her illustration for the first story arc.

Despite the incredible quality of her art, the post only got 11 notes.



I was really surprised! I know that this piece will get the attention it deserves when the artist reblogs it later during the peak time for her blog, but I still can't help but wonder why so few people who follow me on Tumblr or track the fandom tags were willing to offer their support for a collaboration like this. (The people who did like or reblog the post are lovely and wonderful and have my eternal gratitude, of course.)

I think this is what it what it means to "create for yourself" - you need to have faith that what you're doing has worth and value, even if it's not something that's immediately recognized by the larger community. Despite the doubts I have regarding my own writing, the artist's talent is readily apparent. Like, what she does is really good, and I'm so lucky to be able to work with her on this project. Even if it's difficult for me to have faith in myself, I can believe in the quality of the artist's work. Along with the artist, I'm creating something interesting and unique and meaningful, and I'm gonna keep going, no matter what...

...if only because the actual process is so much fun. I mean listen, as much as it sucks to get so little positive feedback on Tumblr, I'm not going to complain about how cool it is to get to play around with concept and design sketches like this one of Zelda in fancy princess clothing.

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Although I probably won't get around to it until May, I'm looking forward to the series of Peach/Bowser flashfic stories I'm planning on writing.

I think it would be interesting if Bowser were totally conventional, meaning that he wants romance and marriage and kids. He knows that Peach doesn't respond to his relationship ideals or his usual brutish way of getting things done, so he's at a loss for how to communicate his affection. Over time, what started out as his innocent confusion and mild frustration has transformed into real bitterness and anger.

Meanwhile, Peach is a psychological mess from having lived her entire life according to a harshly enforced set of double standards. Bowser is the only person who sees how stressful this is for her, but he doesn't seem to understand the larger implications that her precarious position has on their relationship, which she finds infuriating. She doesn't want to compromise what she's worked to build, and she hates how easy everything seems for him from her perspective.

In this set of stories, Peach will have had a fling with Mario, and Junior is most definitely her child. I can't think of any other circumstances that will cause her and Bowser pain at the moment, but I'm sure something will come to me.

I'm still considering the "different species" thing, and

I said I would stop writing fic for a while, but I lied. Now that I have the formula for romance, it would be a shame not to put it to use.

I've started writing a new Zelda/Ganondorf fic based on Twilight Princess. At the end of the game, instead of having Link kill Ganondorf, Zelda decides to marry him. Hyrule is falling apart because the Triforce has been broken for so long, and Zelda's political position is unstable. She sees an opportunity, and she takes it. Ganondorf still wants to burn Hyrule to the ground, but he returned to the kingdom to find it already mostly in ruins. He needs time to reassess the situation and regroup his forces, so he accepts Zelda's offer.

I'm calling the story "The Marriage of Lanayru," and each chapter is going to be very short, about 1,000 to 1,200 words. Each of the twenty steps in the romance formula will be seen from both Zelda and Ganondorf's point of view, so there will be a total of forty chapters with alternating narrative perspectives. It's been helping me to envision this project as something like a webcomic, with each chapter being a page and each paragraph being a panel. If I put about fifteen minutes into this story every night, I think I can put out one "page" every week. This isn't a huge investment of my time or emotional energy, and the fandom is very quiet right now, so it's not like I have anything to lose by performing this experiment.

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle the theme of sexual menace. Maybe I can just skip it?

I'm writing another "gay dads otp" fic. I didn't mean to, but I was working on something else and my hand slipped.

This story is a Contemporary AU set in the Spirit Tracks universe, and it's about Ganondorf and Daphnes raising Tetra. I'm having trouble getting a handle on how the dynamic works, but I still have to almost physically force myself to do my actual work instead of writing the story. I'm super gross about it too; I'm literally sweating and chewing my bottom lip and being like, Just 200 words and then you have to stop.

I sincerely wish that this wasn't what the universe gave me in terms of inspiration, but it looks like I've found a weird niche where I feel oddly comfortable. I've been suffering from a powerful urge to write more Yotsubato-themed Bowser and Ganondorf stories for the past several months, but I think that sort of crack crossover is only cute the first time around. And honestly, it's so OOC that I'm seriously tempted to file the serial numbers off the characters and start writing original fiction.

This isn't a hard game to play. Your goal is to get so drunk that you...

• Outline a fic novel and refuse to feel guilty about knowing that you will never write it.
• Go to a fic you love and leave a comment saying exactly how much you love it.
• Announce on Tumblr that you will accept open prompts for fic drabbles.
• Forget how language works as you write, which is okay, language is stupid.

I usually won't engage with people online unless I am 100% dead sober, but hosting my own private fandom parties from time to time might not be such a bad idea.

Some lovely and wonderful person left a comment on one of my Powser fics saying that the bickering between Peach and Bowser reminds her of the dialog on Archer. I was like, What the fuck is Archer. Five hours later, the Netflix app on my PS4 was telling me that prolonged periods of physical inactivity may be accompanied by health risks.

What I've been trying to capture in the Peach/Bowser dynamic is a theme I'm going to call "adults being shitty to one another." I'm not into sexy kidnapping or any sort of Beauty and the Beast redemption nonsense; I'm into the idea that both characters have terrible personalities. Bowser is thoughtlessly obnoxious, Peach is cloyingly passive-aggressive, and they're both extremely narcissistic.

I thought I'd made good progress in how I write the characters, but watching Archer has taught me just how much of a novice I am at adults being shitty to one another. I need to step up my game, and I want to get started by writing flashfic. Here are some scenarios I came up with:

* Peach shits on Bowser for buying ridiculous things
* Bowser taunts Peach for not having children
* Peach cuts Bowser down for complaining about villainy and double standards
* Bowser mocks Peach for being obsessed with beauty products
* Peach gets up in Bowser's business for eating nothing but garbage
* Bowser tries to bully Peach into admitting she has a problem with alcohol
* Peach and Bowser bring on the snark as they speculate about who Mario and Luigi are dating
* Peach and Bowser accuse each other of being an unpopular character in Super Smash Bros
* Peach and Bowser get nasty and jealous about Zelda and Ganondorf
* Bowser gets sloppy drunk and calls Peach
* Peach watches Bridget Jones and calls Bowser

The romance, such as it is, needs to come from the sense that these two garbage people have somehow managed to find an equally garbage partner; and that, underneath their spiteful pettiness, they care about one another because of their flaws, not in spite of them. A lot of shipfic I read tries to normalize characters with difficult personalities through romance, but honestly bros, that sort of thing stopped being interesting to me a long time ago.

I'm structuring the Zelgan fic I'm currently writing like an adventure game, which means that I'm devoting an inordinate amount of attention in the early chapters to setting up clues that will be important to the plot.

In the second chapter, the major clue is a scrap of paper that will later function as a linguistic palimpsest. Basically, instead of Chekov's gun, I'm setting up Chekov's research question. ISN'T THIS EXCITING.

I commissioned one of my favorite artists in the Zelda fandom to do an illustration of the first chapter, and she has been very patient and supportive as I try to describe the background. I don't know whether she's genuinely interested or just curious to see how pedantic I can get, but she has prompted me to write detailed descriptions of the architecture of Hyrule Castle and the plants in its garden. I'm like, LET ME TELL YOU, ABOUT THE PHENOTYPES, OF THE MORNING GLORY, WHICH CAN BE POISONOUS, WHEN,

Honestly bros, writing plot is hard, especially since the only thing I care about is the fucking.

Still going through old stuff, still finding mistakes.

The Zelgan Big Bang fic has seven obvious typos, about a dozen redundancies, one minor formatting error, and one major formatting error. In my defense, the formatting errors are not my fault. To my chagrin, all the other errors are.

Meanwhile, A Game of Castles must be procedurally generating typos, because I have no idea where they're all coming from. This is the fifth or sixth time I'm editing that fucking story.

I remember reading somewhere that imperfections are like a signature, a proof of individuality and personhood. I get that, but I also suspect there are very few people on this planet who care more about their writing being clean and error-free than I do. Why can't my signature writing style be not having any mistakes whatsoever?

When I mentioned "the fic that gets an inordinate number of readers" in an earlier post, I was referring to Bowser and Peach: A Love Story. Because I serialized it at the height of interest in FFN, it got a lot of traffic, and it's currently indexed very high on Google.

This story is my first fic, and I feel bad for the version of myself who wrote it. She was so innocent, and she had no idea what the fuck she was doing. I've since gone back and edited it twice. The first time was to find and correct typos, and the second was to delete every instance of the female lead crying or being unnecessarily stupid.

The story is still a mess, however, and hurts me to look at it. It's like a train wreck, with cargo exploding into flame and passengers and livestock attempting to flee. Do I try to save the people and put out the fire, or do I just let it burn like the magnificent spectacle of failure that it is?

I've been content to avert my eyes in favor of other projects, but this ridiculous story still gets over a hundred hits a day, so it's probably time to roll up my sleeves and wade in.

Meanwhile, I'm still fixing small typos and wooden dialog in A Game of Castles. Despite my general incompetence as a writer and editor, people seem to be reading that story too (atthough it's been more or less ignored on AO3 and Tumblr). According to the statistics gathered by FFN, something like two to three dozen people are reading the entire story every day. This makes me wonder where all these silent readers are coming from. I suppose I'll never know. I'm assuming that a portion of the "readers" are spambots, but that's okay; it would make me happy if the nascent singularity ships Peach and Bowser too.