It's been a ridiculously long haul, but I'm done with (the first draft of) this stupidly long fanfic! 🥳
Of course, this is still just the first draft. And the second draft will require a stupid amount of work. But I get to do other things before I have to deal with that! I want to get the third book of the God Killers out as soon as humanly possible (hopefully sometime next month), and I have a couple of really short fics I want to write (because I am stupid) and I need to actually go looking at other peoples' April A to Z theme reveals because I want to stop being the kind of jerk who joins blog hops and then forgets to look at the other blogs. 😰 But for tonight, I'm just gonna put up this post and relax. Or possibly work on the summary of book two of the God Killers, but who really knows what I'll do before I do it. 🤷🏻♀️ Mostly, though, I'm just going to celebrate that I finally finished this massively long work: the first draft is 494,315 words long! (Which took from April 23, 2023 to today, March 24, 2024...omg...that's kinda freaky that both dates are the same as their year...) And that is just stupidly long. (Admittedly, there's a lot of stuff in there that's been given the strikethrough treatment, but I doubt that contributes more than 10k, if even that much.)
I still have a lot of problems to contend with in the next draft, like the primary romantic pairing being a lopsided "romance" in which he's in love and she only feels friendship, but... 🤷🏻♀️ Compared to the way their stories end in the original work (he eternally loveless, she long dead) it's still pretty good as an ending point. I hope. 😅
Anyway, I really enjoyed how I started the first scene of the epilogue, and I wanted to post it here because it will be a very long time before I can post it anywhere else. In the final battle, the fic's lead, Jiang Cheng, took a massive injury, but didn't want to relax his guard and get medical care until after his enemy had finished dying...meaning by the time he could relax he was about halfway to passing out from all the blood loss, and ended up being fairly delirious before he finally did lose consciousness. So then the epilogue starts as he's waking up again... [...and I should probably point out that even though I'm working with the TV adaptation's canon, I'm following the novel's formatting of using italics to indicate the POV character's direct thoughts.]
Jiang Cheng was…asleep? Or maybe napping? Unconscious? Resting?
Is there a difference?
Whatever he was, his eyes were shut and he was lying down, insensible to the world. Then the world came barging into the room, screaming and stomping and shouting and smelling like blood and sweat and death and soup.
Or that was how it seemed to him.
Opening his eyes with a low grunt, he slowly spotted the cause of the noise: Wei Wuxian. Why am I not surprised?
Wait, shouldn’t I be surprised?
Isn’t he somewhere else right now?
Ugh, why does everything hurt so much?
“Now see what you’ve done? You woke him up, Qing-jie!”
“Me?! You’re the one making enough noise for a whole army!” Wen Qing’s indignation made Jiang Cheng laugh. Hadn’t she known Wei Wuxian long enough to know better?
“Hey, you okay?” Wei Wuxian sat down on the side of the bed. “You look half dead.”
“I feel worse.” Jiang Cheng tried to sit up, but didn’t manage much. “Where am I? How did I get here?”
“You passed out due to massive blood loss,” Wen Qing told him, walking up behind Wei Wuxian. “Next time, don’t refuse treatment just because the enemy hasn’t finished dying yet.”
[Wei Wuxian is the lead of the original work, and kind of Jiang Cheng's adopted brother (though also kind of not, since he wasn't formally adopted). "-jie" as a suffix means "older sister," and can be used with an actual blood sibling or (as in this case) as a term of endearment (or affectionate teasing) with a woman older than the speaker who is not related to the speaker.]
Anyway, it's kinda freaky. When I did a mini-outline for what needed to go in the epilogue, I looked at what I had written and then said to myself "Ugh, looking at this, it’s gonna be even more than 10k, isn’t it?" and you know what?
The epilogue ended up being 10,300 words.
To me, that seems pretty freaky, since I usually cannot judge in the slightest how long something will be from the outline. (Like the time I thought an outline section would be about 50k and it turned out to be more like 150k....)
I have a terrible tendency to do things like the above, where I was writing along and just started typing my own thoughts instead of the narration. I did that a lot in this scene, actually, because I had plotted it all out and written it in my head twice over (consistently) earlier in the day, but when I got to the scene--the point of which was for Jiang Cheng to talk to his love interest, Wen Qing, and establish that no, his grandmother wasn't forcing her to marry him, but that she actually wanted to--it came out all wrong and kind of went insane. To the point where I gave up on it and decided that future me could deal with it.😅 I'm too burned out to write a scene that difficult right now, you know? Besides, I probably need to retool their whole relationship in the next draft, so she's more into him the whole time, and thus doesn't have to have this weird aromantic but somehow still into him even though she only thinks of him as a friend thing going on.
Anyway, in the case of the above, the problem was that I am just far too aromantic and asexual to write a detailed kissing scene. Because I've never done any kissing, and it just sounds icky. (This is also one of the reasons I cannot write detailed sex scenes.) In this case I was also extra uncomfortable about it because it was hetero, and it's been a while since I wrote anything hetero.
Aaaaaaand it's dinner time, and I have not stopped working on the computer since getting up this morning. (Seriously, ate lunch at the computer and everything.)
I think I need to just hit "publish" on this post and leave it a jumbled mess and worry about the rest later.
Like tomorrow. After I've eaten and slept and done other vital functions that I have been putting off.
Because I have finally finished this %$^#$in' long thing and I deserve a rest! 🤣
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