rynling | 2025 Writing Log, Part 26

- I finished the ninth and final chapter of What Dreams May Come, a high gothic Zelda/Ganon story set in a future Breath of the Wild timeline. At 17,000 words, this story isn’t quite a novella, but it’s still a substantial piece of work. That sort of wordcount is equivalent to 70 double-spaced manuscript pages, which is nothing to sneeze at. That’s like writing a respectable Master’s Thesis on romancing Ganondorf.

- I posted the second chapter of the story on AO3 (here). I like how this is turning out, by the way. I’ve been reading a lot of Charles Dickens while editing to help get that crispy Victorian style, and I want to think this story has a nice texture.

- While reflecting on what Chapter 3 of Deltarune is saying about analog technology, I started thinking about how much I used to love my Nintendo DS, and I drew a new PFP for Instagram of me and my beloved. I posted it on Tumblr (here).

- Also: it turns out that I wasn’t quite finished writing about Mr. Tenna Deltarune, so I wrote another piece of Spamton/Tenna smut that’s a slightly more in-character expansion on my first story. This one is like. An undergraduate midterm paper. On getting a reach-around from Spamton. It’s on AO3 (here).

- Unfortunately this story fell just outside the window of popularity. My first Spamton/Tenna story got about 1,500 hits overnight, and this one barely got 500. This isn’t a complaint (especially since the numbers rose later); it’s just an observation. To put this in context, the game itself came out on June 5, making the “window of popularity” about 17 days. That’s about two weeks to play the game (with no guide), read the meta, pick up on the fandom trends, and write + edit + publish a story. The devil works fast, but yaoi writers work faster, I guess.

- Speaking of which, to prepare for the release of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment (date TBA), I started writing a four-part “sexual training” story about Zelda and Ganondorf in the ancient era of Tears of the Kingdom. It’s called “An Esoteric Training in the Art of Power,” and it’s basic PWP filth. The story is fully outlined, and all I need to do is snap the paragraphs into place like lego blocks. This week I finished the first two chapters. I want this to be pre-emptively finished and ready to post at the right moment.

- If you’re curious, I think the Zelda smut story is going to be around 6k words. Which is about 25 double-spaced manuscript pages. So that’s like a graduate seminar paper. On getting blasted by Ganondorf.

- To prepare for Romancing Barret Week (on Tumblr here) next week, I wrote a short story about Barret and Cid (from FFVII of course) repairing a motorcycle together. It’s called “Good Old-Fashioned Grunt Work,” and it’s very goofy.

- This week’s post on my book review blog (here) is a substantial review of Shimeji Simulation, a slice-of-life speculative comedy about the gentle end of the world. This manga is very smart and fantastically creative but also deeply surreal, and I’d be very surprised if it gets an English translation. Still, it has a huge fandom in Japan, and I love it as well. I want there to be some material about this manga in English besides the bare-bones Wikipedia page.

- And finally! It took a while, but I formatted the print and web versions of the second edition of my short fiction collection Terrible People. I should get the paper copies back from the printer next week. In the meantime, a free digital version is available on Itchio (here).

If you’re thinking, “Wow that’s a lot of writing, are you okay,” the answer is that work has been uncommonly infuriating this week, and it’s better that I write pornographic fanfic than an unhinged manifesto. But also, I just really enjoy the weather this time of year. Praise the sun!