ASAL: Progress reports

Most of my fic writing since [19 February] has been work on the big WIP, so I have little to show for it, although here’s an excerpt from a conversation between Jecht and Jyscal Guado that I wrote last night and will probably revise several more times:

Jyscal nodded. “Baaj. His mother went with him; she was hardly beloved of the people either, alas. It is a shame, a great shame. I do think about him sometimes – I know he resents his exile. It has damaged him, I think.”

“And where is he now?” said Jecht warily, having correctly guessed the answer.

“Oh, he’s still out there,” Jyscal replied. “It has been years now, of course; but the longer it gets, the harder it would be for me to call him back. I do feel for him, but I fear for our people if he is not kept away.”

“What,” Jecht muttered; he shook his head in disbelief. “Are you – are you totally crazy?! He’s your son, yeah? You love him, right? If you leave him out there, it’s just gonna get worse! Forget all this fear for your people bullshit, you gotta get him back and fix things before –” He waved his arms around in lieu of a concrete example. “You know, I get it. Like, I go in for the tough love thing with my kid too, yeah? But if you’re talkin’ about somethin’ that bad, you need an intervention right now, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Yes, I,” said Jyscal hesitantly, “I see the logic in what you are telling me. I admit that I hadn’t thought about it that way before. We Guado do tend to be unforgiving, even towards our own kin, but there is perhaps a point beyond which –” He sighed. “You have given me a lot to think about, Sir Jecht. I thank you.”

The still unnamed WIP remains the single biggest use of my fic time; I’m now attempting to expand a few scenes so I can link them to each other more effectively, but what I really need to do is familiarise myself with more omniscient narration stuff so I can go through doing a proper systematic edit (and also work in that “Braska and the fayth” subplot that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about recently). A lot of what I wrote this month was about Braska being sad; here’s a bit that isn’t, from early in the story:

“Remember me by on the road?” said Jecht with a smirk. “Who’s that from, some girl you stood up?”

“What?” said Auron sharply; Jecht had hardly expected him to react positively to the jab, but his angry expression seemed a disproportionate response. He stood there frowning for a while, and then said tensely, “No, of course not. It’s from Wen Kinoc. A friend.”

“OK, steady on,” Jecht replied.

Auron shook his head, searching for an excuse for his discomfort, and then said truthfully, “I’m surprised you can read.”

Jecht let out an incredulous laugh. “Seriously? What, you think I’m a bum or somethin’?”

“A –” Auron shook his head again, thinking it best not to ask. He didn’t know why Jecht seemed so offended: illiteracy was fairly common among Yevonites. Those of more noble birth, such as Kinoc and Braska, were normally proficient readers; Auron, who lacked any especially privileged background, had received basic instruction as a boy, but he had never had many chances to hone his still fairly underdeveloped skills. Jecht’s own interpretation of the note had seemed unusually effortless, but Auron resolved not to waste any more time asking him about it, and turned his attention to the letter, trying unsuccessfully to angle it so Jecht couldn’t get a look.

“Eviction notice?” Jecht said, raising an eyebrow.

Auron shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m leaving anyway.”

Just sharing one short paragraph from the WIP this month, because I love it. I don’t know why, but I think these few sentences may be the best thing I’ve ever written.

“Auron,” said Jecht calmly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but – you kind of seem to be losing it. I think you need to see someone – like a doctor? A shrink?”

I was reminded by the renegadepublishing post [this one] that I did actually put together a fairly basic template for typesetting novels in LaTeX a year or two ago, and I’ve just been playing around with it by shoving in some of the WIP and seeing what comes out. It is honestly hilarious how semi-properly typesetting something just makes it look so good.

By way of example, here’s some slightly shite first-draft-ish content in its original form:

And here it is looking quite nice:

Honestly, this is the inspiration I need right now; what I really need to do is go through the whole thing and edit it, now that I have a clearer view of the various backstories that need to be incorporated, but … there’s just so much of it – over 500 pages in this format – and the amount I’ve done over the past few weeks is negligible. But seeing it looking nice like this is a real motivator!

I did [do work on the WIP in May], although less of it than I would have liked to. Most of what I did consisted of going through and making one particular thing more consistent; there are a lot of other things that also need to be made more consistent, so I’m not sure how efficient this strategy is.

[…]

Lastly, my customary WIP snippet, although two in this case because the one new scene I wrote this month is like Emotional Whiplash Central, so, there is a choice between …

the sad bit:

“We’re all on this pilgrimage together,” said Auron sternly.

“It’s hardly something you can ignore, as much as he tries to hide it.” Jecht seemed to have stopped protesting, so he went on, eager to make his point. “He’s better than he was, anyway. Doing this has given him a sense of purpose. You should have seen him a few years ago.”

Jecht was frowning, and Auron went on, relishing his discomfort. “I mean, you can imagine. Being widowed at – how old would he have been? Thirty-two? And hardly anyone in Bevelle even did him the courtesy of looking at him. Having to bring up his little girl on his own, while everyone around him was pretending he didn’t exist. That’s what people in Bevelle are like, you know: petty. Like schoolchildren.”

He looked away from Jecht, getting his teeth: it made him angry just thinking about it. The way those supposed holy men had acted towards him – towards Braska, he reminded himself. He’d been talking about Braska. He hated being this on edge all the time.

and, barely a few paragraphs later, the comedic bit (featuring confusion over units of measurement):

He paused. “What’s a car, anyway?”

At that, Jecht grinned. “OK,” he said, “so you know how you sometimes see someone in a carriage, and there’s a chocobo pulling it and they have to steer it by, like, pulling on the chocobo reins?”

Auron nodded.

“Well,” said Jecht, “get this. Imagine there’s no chocobo, and instead there’s a motor – like a machina – and you sit inside it and you can basically just make it go where you want, and – hey, how fast can a chocobo run?”

Auron considered. “About twenty miles an hour, normally. Maybe forty, in short bursts.”

“Uh-huh,” said Jecht, “and what’d that be in kilometres?”

“Well, it would be about seventeen knots,” said Auron unhelpfully. “They can travel just over forty-five leagues in an eight-hour day.”

Jecht shook his head. “Whatever, it’s not important. Point is, cars go way faster – like three or four times as fast. Hey, we could probably have done the whole pilgrimage in a couple days! That wouldn’t be so bad, huh?”

After months of moaning about the immense task of getting my WIP into a serviceable shape I’ve actually started going through the whole thing and knitting the scenes together, and, amazingly enough, it’s going extremely well? I’ve worked through the first two days’ worth of scenes, mostly just writing/editing a little bit when I wake up and before I go to sleep, and on the bus to and from work, and I have about 14k so far … which means if I continue at that rate the whole thing will be about 300k. Which is nuts. I don’t think it’ll really be as long as that because these early parts have a lot of scene-setting-type stuff in them, so there’ll be less to say as we get into the swing of things, but … it could be very long. Yikes.

I suspect that my unanticipated success here comes from the fact that I’ve been working on this in some form or another for over a year now. In the course of that time I have, like, totally internalised this story. I have thought about these evolving character dynamics and all the Things They Get Up To so much that this stuff is just flying out of me. Keeping things consistent will probably be some job, but I’m making copious notes on each chapter as I go, so hopefully it’ll be a fun challenge rather than completely overwhelming.

[The WIP] (still unnamed … I’m so bad at titles) has been the focus of my writing energy since late May. I have first drafts of the first five days (out of maybe fifty?), which will probably equate to six chapters in the end; 42930 words in total, which means the full thing is still on track for being maybe possibly at least 300k and taking absolutely ages to write, yikes.

From what I worked on today:

He turned to Jecht, having resolved earlier to speak to him about his swordfighting prowess.

“Your fighting’s improving,” he began.

Jecht looked at Auron, frowned momentarily, and then barked out a laugh. “Wait – are you kidding me?” he said. “Is that a compliment? Don’t tell me you’ve finally realised I have talent?”

“Shut up,” Auron snapped back. “I was going to say, it’s improving, but it still needs work. You can’t afford to get complacent – there are some dangerous fiends out there.”

“Dangerous like those flans that took you out the other day, huh?” said Jecht, grinning.

“Yes,” said Auron, ignoring the jibe. “And if we find ourselves in a position like that again, with Lord Braska unable to help us, you’ll need to be as precise with your sword as possible. We can’t afford to make mistakes.”

“Braska wasn’t unable to help us, you were just being overprotective, as usual,” said Jecht dismissively. “Anyway, what am I supposed to do about it, practise? You gonna give me lessons, if you’re such an expert?”

Auron shrugged. “I can go through some of the basics of proper technique with you, yeah.”

“Oh yeah?” said Jecht, raising an eyebrow. He considered: he didn’t fancy having Auron order him around, but if it would make him an even more successful sword wielder, he thought, it might be worth the experience. “OK, then,” he said. “You wanna do it now?”

It was still raining, of course, but they were soaked anyway, Auron reasoned. “Sure,” he said.

A fairly boring scene, but it’s such fun writing Auron and Jecht’s relationship – they’re still at the “do I really have to work with this guy” stage at this point.

Sometimes a flash of inspiration hits me for fic titles, but a lot of the time, the title is the thing I find hardest to write. (One of many entries on the “features I wish AO3 had but would probably be extremely problematic in practice” list: non-mandatory title fields.) Recently I’ve had moderate success with using song titles/lyrics for this on the rare occasion it doesn’t make me cringe too much, but other than that, especially for shorter stuff, I tend to just pick one word that tangentially fits the theme and shove it on there. One consequence of this is that I have a number of extremely short fics with one-word titles that give me absolutely no clue about what their contents are. Checking my stats page on AO3 … apparently I have fics called “Subsidy” and “Investment”, and what am I, some kind of banker??

Anyway … over a year since I first started writing the random scenes that would eventually be assembled into my current WIP, I’ve finally come up with a title for it. I had a few vague ideas for a while, none of which really worked: one of them was “Prelude”, because it’s FF and it’s a prequel to what happens in canon, but come on, what a cliche. Another early idea was “Exordium”, which is supposedly another word for a thing that precedes another thing, and there was also “Quo vadis?”, which actually has minimal relevance: I eventually saw sense and rejected both those for being too pretentious. I was considering “Zero-Sum Game” for a while, because it has a z in it and the letter z is cool, but then I looked up what a zero-sum game actually was and it turned out I’d had the wrong definition of it in my head all along and it had nothing to do with the actual story. Wild!

So then I started thinking about themes. Life, dreams, hope, journeys: these were the themes I thought had some significance in my WIP, and, tbh, in most narratives that exceed a certain length. I looked these up in a few sources and considered some things, including this verse, which is kind of perfect:

Let neither us deluded be,
Good Lord, with dream or fantasy;
Our hearts waking in thee thou keep
That we in sin fall not on sleep.

But I can’t give a fic an entire stanza of poetry as a title, alas. Listen to the motet though, it’s gorgeous.

I went back to the idea of using lyrics and sticking with the “life” theme. One of my favourite albums is More Life, although is it kind of memey to use Drake as a fic title source? The “more” sort of fits, but it didn’t completely grab me. Bring Me To Life, while apt and a banger, is definitely memey. One of my even more favourite albums is The Division Bell by Pink Floyd, and one of my favourite songs on that album (lol jk they’re all my favourites) is Coming Back To Life. I thought this could be a decent fic title; I even thought about doing “(Back)” in brackets because it sort of doesn’t quite apply to all the characters I’m intending to refer to, but then I decided that wasn’t the vibe I was going for.

After that I thought I should probably look that title up on AO3 to check whether the “fics with Coming Back To Life as a title” niche is oversaturated, and, damn it, it is. One of them is even an FF fic, not ten of course because who writes that in this day and age, but I still don’t want to run the risk of pissing on other people’s lawns (for some reason I thought this was an established, if crude, metaphor, but turns out I may have made it up?).

The next iteration was A Call To Life. I was quite pleased with this one: there was a nice echo of “call to arms”, which I thought was appropriate. I told lissajous and was amazed that his own life wasn’t immediately revolutionised – I think we’d just gone to bed and he was trying to sleep, but I guess I couldn’t contain myself. Over breakfast this morning I insisted that we continue the discussion and he came out with “a chance at life”, to which my reaction was “isn’t that a line from the game?”

Turns out the said line from the game, spoken indeed by the de facto protagonist of the fic, is actually “he wanted you to have a shot at life”. So then I started thinking: A Shot At Life? Would that work? It kind of works for all three of the main characters, for reasons that I will write another extremely boring post about several months down the line. I think “call to” sounds a bit more sophistiqué and all that, but the fact that “shot at” is actually from the game and spoken by that character in particular, in relation to that other character in particular … you know what, it fits. So, that’s the title, until someone tells me it’s shite.

I’m up to a complete first draft of ten chapters of A Shot At Life now, which apparently equates to about 72k – in one sense this is a lot of progress, in another it’s potentially only a fifth of the whole thing and it could take me, like, another two years to get to the end of the full draft? And then I’ll have to go back and edit it, probably? aaaaaahhhhh. I mostly took a break from it over September while I was doing the no_true_pair stuff, but now I’m back at it and I just really love writing it. It’s so great to be writing something long where there’s development from one chapter to the next and there are little clues I can plant in the story that end up developing into bigger things later on, and it’s just really satisfying even if it is going to take a non-zero number of years to finish. (I just hope there’s no surprise FFX prequel drop before about 2026 … because they’d definitely make my boys much more heterosexual than I have.)

A wee snippet because writing Braska getting conned by a couple of Hypello was an absolute blast:

Heading back to the Hypello, Braska opened the purse and showed them its contents.

“You’re welcome to some of this,” he said. “And I do apologise, most sincerely.”

The two Hypello seized the purse, looked inside, made a few clicking sounds at each other, and then the second one spoke. “Thank yoo, yesh. We will take thish.”

Braska watched, a little startled, as the Hypello emptied the entire contents of the purse into the pouch it wore at its belt, and then handed the empty purse back to him, more limp and insubstantial than Braska had ever seen it.

“But I doo not think thish will be suffishent,” said the Hypello. “Shoopuf treatment will require a shpeshalisht. Thish gil will not go very far, yesh.”

Both Hypello were still looking at Braska expectantly. “That’s all we have,” he said.

“A pity,” the other Hypello said. “Will be very difficult to crosh with shuch shmall shum. Perhapsh we shut croshing for tooday.”

Sighing, Braska searched in his robes for the extra cash he had mentioned to Auron earlier. Retrieving it, he showed the little bag he had been keeping it in to the Hypello, and watched with resignation as they inspected the money and then once again took the entire amount of it from him.

“Thish will doo, yesh,” said the first Hypello. “Croshing will prosheed.”

Anyway, it’s now past midnight so I should undoubtedly be brainstorming for chapter 11 ideas sleeping before I have to get up and write chapter 11 go to work tomorrow. 👀

[from a journal meme]

21. Do you plot out your stories, or do you just figure it out as you go?

The WIP is Extremely Long so in that case I do have a few documents relating to plot planning, even a spreadsheet; although as I work through it writing the first full draft I’m finding that it’s moving away from what I planned in various respects. Other than that, sometimes I write an extremely vague outline of the main scenes, but if it’s shorter than 10k I invariably just start writing and see what happens.

24. What story(s) are you working on now?

An extremely long prequel to FFX that I don’t shut up about.

25. Do you plan your next project(s) before you finish your current ongoing story(s)?

Typically, a fic idea just takes up residence in my head and I’m obliged to remove it, regardless of whether I’m working on anything else at the time. Recently it’s tended to be scene ideas for the WIP rather than separate fic ideas, so I just skip forward to write that scene and then get back to wherever I was before.

26. Do you have a daily writing goal set for yourself?

No. Before I started serious work on the WIP I would probably write on two or three days of each week; now it’s more like six days, but that can vary from several thousand words to a single paragraph.

32. What is the hardest thing about writing?

Not being able to do it quickly enough! Why can’t I just type for like three hours and then this 300k fic is there, damn it!

WIP progress: Braska has gained the aeon of Djose and is suffering.

I’m now halfway through what is currently chapter 12 of A Shot At Life, and will soon be at the 100k word mark on the proper first draft, which means I’m … maybe about a third of the way through the story. So if I continue at this pace, I may have a full first draft by around this time next year. Judging by how the past 23 months have gone, though, I’ll probably still be just as obsessed with FFX by then, so that’s ok.

The customary snippet:

”You guys can have women in the army, then?” Jecht remarked.

“The Crusaders aren’t an army,” said Auron dismissively. “But yes, they do have women in their ranks. So do the warrior monks, although the temples are a bit more reluctant to let them take powerful positions.”

“Right,” said Jecht.

“I know you just see women as sex objects,” Auron added, “but it may surprise you to learn that they’re capable of more than that.”

Jecht let out an incredulous laugh. “Hey, what?” he exclaimed. “I never said that. Just know how to appreciate a nice girl when I see one.” He clasped both hands to the back of his head and stretched. “Ain’t no harm in looking. Anyway, I’d say the same about a guy if he was hot.”

Auron turned towards him, suddenly alert. “What?” he said.

“Yeah, I’m into guys,” said Jecht with a shrug. “Life’s too short to discriminate, right? Might’ve even slept with more guys than girls, if I count ’em.”

“Slept with …” Auron echoed.

“Aw man, Auron,” said Jecht, “you’re so pure. I know you were a monk and all, but – you really don’t know what that means?”

“I know what it means,” Auron muttered, now looking quite deliberately in the other direction.

“Then why’re you actin’ so weird, huh?” said Jecht, lightly punching him on the shoulder and unusually receiving no reaction, not even a shove in return. “Wait a minute,” he added, suddenly becoming suspicious, “you ain’t one of those people that have a problem with it, are ya? It’s totally natural, you know.” Braska, he thought, was always talking about how tolerant Auron was; he would be disappointed if he really was a homophobe. In Zanarkand, indeed, such people were thin on the ground; most of the population were perfectly happy for others to make their own decisions about who they involved themselves with.

“No,” said Auron quietly. “I don’t have a problem with it.”

I’m enjoying exploring the huge culture clash between Zanarkand and Spira, which is (in this fic) particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of social equality. Neither Auron nor Jecht knows exactly what the other is getting at in this section, mostly because their respective experiences of being Not Straight are very different. Which means, of course, it’s time for (sighs contentedly) more angst.

[from a journal meme]

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

[…] On a purely personal and non-capitalist level it may have been getting the first 100k or so of my WIP written.

In terms of wordcount, my output [from 2022] is only about half what it was last year, but I think that’s mostly because I’ve been working a lot on A Shot At Life since July and won’t be posting any of it until the first draft is complete – I don’t imagine that will happen before 2024, but I’ve written about 100k and the boys have made it from Bevelle to the Mi’ihen Highroad with some ✨development✨ along the way. Another reason why I’ve written less unprompted stuff this year is because the spontaneous ideas I get tend to be funnelled into ASAL scenes rather than standalone pieces: one of the unprompted pieces I did post was actually a bit of ASAL canon divergence.

[from a journal meme]

5. Something you find comforting

Genuinely … writing my WIP. Seeing this monstrosity slowly come together.

When I started work on the WIP back in mid-2021 and was trying to get the characterisation straight, I put together a wee “which character are you” quiz. Today I took inspiration from snowflake_challenge and finally converted it to HTML/JavaScript and put it online. (It’s been literal years since I wrote any JavaScript … this was quite a slow process.) It’s just a simple thing, eighteen statements to tick if you agree, and based on what you have most of, it’ll tell you which of the three protagonists of my FFX prequel fic is most similar to you (according to these very limited criteria) and provide you with a brief description.

Here’s the link to the quiz.

The real reason why [I didn’t post much fic in March] is that I’ve been working a lot on A Shot At Life. I’m now on chapter 18 of c. 50; the boys have made it to Besaid, and Braska is about to receive Valefor (while suffering a lot)! I haven’t posted a snippet here in a long time, so here’s one I posted to fail-fandomanon recently.

Jecht nodded decisively, and then said, “Anyway, now you know all that, I guess that’s me sayin’ I’m available, if you ever wanna, uh, fool around.”

“What?” said Auron, turning red again, although considerably less so than the previous time.

“Well,” said Jecht, “you’re a good-lookin’ guy, I’m an even better-lookin’ guy, we’re on this pilgrimage together … it’d be a shame if we didn’t bang, you know?”

“If you can’t go a few weeks without sex,” said Auron, “that’s not my problem.”

“Just thought you might wanna have a bit of fun,” Jecht said. “Well, sure, let me know if you change your mind. I’m gonna get back in the water! You coming?”

“I’m not much of a swimmer,” Auron lied.

“Ah, too bad,” said Jecht, and he stood up and jogged back towards the sea.

One of the lads in the first scene [of FF16] says “These Ironblood are more beast than man.” In my WIP just a few weeks ago I wrote the following:

“That Jecht is more fish than man,” [Braska] remarked once he made it inside, brushing some of the rainwater off his robe.

Clearly I have been plagiarised here and I will be taking this up with the relevant authorities forthwith.

Today I finished the first draft of chapter 25 of A Shot At Life, which brings me over the 200k mark. This also means I’m definitely over halfway through: not entirely sure how many chapters there are going to be in the end, but probably about 40. It seems to have taken just over a year to get to this point from my original piecemeal draft, so depending on how long edits take and how much of a buffer I decide to implement before I start posting, I think it’s still likely that I could start getting this thing out in 2024! 🎉

Here’s a wee passage from the chapter I’ve just finished (Auron & Jecht, discussing ambiguous Auron/Braska):

“When he got back tonight,” said Auron, ignoring the remark, “he put his hand against my face, and just left it there – and last night, he –” It felt ridiculous to say it out loud. “He kissed me. Several times.”

“What?!” Jecht yelled. “Seriously? Hey, uh, congrats, man! Why’d you keep that quiet?”

Auron frowned. “No, I don’t mean – it wasn’t – it was on my neck.” He indicated the area with a trembling finger.

“Hot,” said Jecht appreciatively. “So you didn’t go any further?”

“That’s not what he wants,” said Auron. “He’s not doing it because he has feelings for me – he just needs someone beside him. He’d have done the same to you.”

“You really think that?” said Jecht.

“If I start thinking otherwise,” Auron said quietly, “I’ll – by Yevon, Jecht. I’ll go out of my mind.”

They were both silent for a while, and then Jecht said, “I dunno why you’re talking to me about this, Auron. You should tell him. He obviously doesn’t realise it’s, you know, affecting you.”

Auron shook his head. “I can’t tell him. He’s having a hard enough time as it is – he doesn’t need to know I’m pining after him like a little boy. I just wish I didn’t have to be so stupid about it. As soon as he touches me like that, I just lose the ability to think straight.”

The boys are currently in Luca, where Jecht is about to play his blitzball matches, of “working on your form” fame. (I say “fame”, but realistically that’s only the case if you have a whole archive of extremely obscure lines from FFX stored in your head like I do. I am very normal about this game.) I’m sticking to the “one chapter = one day of the pilgrimage” format, which is, very helpfully, making it extremely easy to keep track of the passage of time! This means the chapter lengths have varied depending on how much the lads get up to – the current range is about 4k to 15k – but the majority of them seem to be fairly consistent at around 7–9k. This last chapter is on the short side, but we won’t be back on the road for a couple of days so there’s been a bit less going on.

Auron is actually doing a bit more suffering than I’d initially planned for this point in the story, but Braska’s also kissed him more than I’d anticipated (see above), so … you win some, you lose some, I guess.

My current strategy is the following: only when I get a chapter of the WIP finished am I allowed to write something about Dion. I’ve got some kind of story about dragons in my head, but I have to suppress it for now and write about blitzball in its place. I love blitzball, this is fine! Auron’s going to have a good time not telling Jecht what the Ronso are, Braska’s going to get lightly injured by his own aeon, it’s fine. I’m still quoting FFX lines all the time to lissajous (pray 4 him); the curse has very much not been lifted. It’s just that now there’s a second curse to balance it with.

I still love Auron a lot. I banged out a huge amount of the WIP earlier this week and it reminded me of that[.]

I’ll probably make a separate post about my WIP, with the main thrust of it being that I have c. 13–15 chapters left to draft and so I should be able to have a full draft if not start posting it by the end of next year. 2025 will then be the year of interminable commentary on this thing as I gradually post it … just a warning.

I now have 30 complete chapters in my WIP; at the end of 2022 there were 13. That means I’ve drafted more chapters this year than last, although iirc I only started working on the full chapter drafts in the summer of 2022. I’m currently about 3k into chapter 31, so that should be done in a few days but not before the end of 2023 because that’s basically happening right now.

The 17 chapters I’ve drafted this year amount to 135,375 words. Some of these were already present in my original, non-chronologically written draft of random, unconnected scenes dating back to mid-2021, but I’ve found myself rewriting more and more of this material while going through, so most of the words in this year’s set of chapters are new. In comparison, it looks like I’ve posted c. 69k words of other fics this year (including a couple of as yet un-author-revealed things).

The Final Summoning is scheduled for chapter 42, and I anticipate another three chapters [of Auron being emotionally and physically destroyed] after that, so that means 15 chapters remain to be written. So, as I noted in a previous post, I may be able to get this draft completed in 2024 if I keep up my rate from this year. I probably won’t spend the summer being extremely distracted by some other guy from some other game this time, so that might help.

Once all the chapters are drafted, the next step will be to go through the full piece for a consistency check – a few things will definitely need to change as some of the headcanons/worldbuilding etc. have evolved over time. I’ll also attempt to play through the game as I do this to remind myself of the locations and lore. I’m going to have to have a couple of concurrent save files on the go to try and match up with the boys’ itinerary: they start off in Bevelle and go to Macalania Temple first, which is obviously different from the game. The plan is to use Tidus, Auron and Yuna as my party as much as possible as they’re the closest we can get to the three lads; I’ll have to study the tomes sphere grid in advance so as to work out a way of letting Yuna learn black magic.

Yet another FFX playthrough then, alas, what a hardship. As another way of checking the lore, but also just having a nice time being reminded of the game script, I very recently set up @dailyffx@botsin.space, which posts a random line from the game once a day; it was extremely easy to do using Cheap Bots, Toot Sweet! (and despite the name of the service, entirely free).

So I’m writing chapter 31 at the moment: Braska received the penultimate aeon on Besaid some time ago and the lads are now heading towards Zanarkand. They’re currently in Guadosalam, where Jyscal Guado has just invited them to a banquet, although Auron suspects this might be some kind of attempt at sabotaging their pilgrimage – it wouldn’t be the first. Jecht has recently watched someone be killed by sinspawn for the first time and is also starting to notice that things seem a bit more, er, real in Spira than they do in his Zanarkand. Braska is befriending (and developing an unhealthy reliance on) his aeons, kissing Auron quite a lot while also not always being entirely kind to him, and experiencing unexplained headaches. Auron has recently discovered he’s been betrayed by his so-called best friend and is also trying not to be too fucked up by the fact that Braska keeps (platonically?) kissing him. So everyone’s having a great time!

And a wee snippet from what I’m working on atm; according to tradition, it’s some Auron + Jecht interaction.

“So,” said Jecht when they got there, “what are we meant to do? Just, uh, think of a dead person and they’re supposed to appear?”

“That’s right,” said Auron.

“Creepy,” said Jecht. “So you got someone you wanna …”

“Plenty,” said Auron, “but you’re the one who wanted to come up here.”

“Right,” said Jecht. He considered: he didn’t know many people who had died. The most obvious example was the Crusader who had been mauled by the sinspawn the previous day. Jecht pictured him, and immediately, a ghostly, lifesize image of the young man appeared before him, his face mercifully intact once more. “Whoa,” he muttered.

“Seriously?” said Auron.

“What?” Jecht complained. “What’s wrong with –”

“He’s only just passed on,” Auron explained. “It’s in poor taste. Isn’t there anyone you actually knew?”

“Not really,” Jecht admitted. “There was my grandpa, I guess – died when I was a kid.”

“Try him, then,” said Auron dully. “I’ll leave you to it – I’ve got … people to see.”

… I am embarrassingly obsessed with this story I’m writing, tbh. At the beginning of the year I predicted that I’d probably have a full draft by the end of 2024, but I wasn’t accounting for the fact that I would immediately get so into it that most of my other free-time activities would slow to a halt. I’ve only read 8 books so far this year, most of them short. I’ve posted a whole three fics, and they’ve also all been short (barely over 2k in total) and all had Auron in them anyway, so it’s not as if I’ve been challenging myself. I was signed up to an exchange, but I just couldn’t think of anything that was going to go anywhere. (This is the first time I’ve defaulted on an exchange, and I have two gifts and feel bad about it! I want to write some treats but I don’t know whether I’ll get anywhere with that because, as above, all my fic ideas are just for the WIP.)

Anyway, I’m managing about three chapters a month, which means that I’ll have a full draft by the end of May if I keep things up at this rate; maybe once that’s over I might rediscover the ability to write other things. That’s what I was doing for the first 2.5 years of writing this – I posted like 17k of fic in the first three months of 2023, and must have been working on this at the same time, so it should be possible, right? I posted nearly 40k of FF16 fic in the second half of 2023, most of it unprompted, so that can happen again, can’t it? I’m playing FF7 Rebirth atm, and all the FF7 characters are so great and I know them well and the game is doing a great job of promoting Barret/Cloud and Aerith/Tifa, but do I want to write fic about any of this? Apparently not?

[…]

God I’m so obsessed with this thing that I genuinely can’t tell if anyone else would ever be interested in it, but here we go. Chapter 40 is the big climactic moment where the boys reach Zanarkand and meet Yunalesca; there’s a lot of game dialogue to slot into this one, from three separate Zanarkand pyrefly flashbacks plus the memories Auron shows to Tidus. After Jecht’s huge amount of character development the lines he canonically has at this point (“I was expecting parades, and fireworks!”) seem pretty out of place, so I’ve concocted an in-universe reason for his (by this stage) uncharacteristically arseholish behaviour. Beyond that, everyone is delightfully fucked up by this point! Jecht has recently learnt that his Zanarkand is just a dream, and now believes that he has to become the Final Aeon because Bahamut’s fayth has told him he has a “destiny” to fulfil and he sees bringing the Calm as the only meaningful thing he can do with his life. Auron has spent the past few days having various flavours of breakdown while slowly coming to terms with the fact that he hasn’t found a way to bring the Calm that will allow Braska to live, and also that Braska doesn’t want to be alive in the first place. Braska … is experiencing increasingly debilitating headaches because he’s allowed himself to become too reliant on his aeons as a kind of antidepressant, but at the same time they want him to be ready to go to his death and they think the best way of ensuring that is to make sure he’s in a lot of pain all the time. Oh, and Jecht’s also just told Braska that Auron is in love with him, and that he’s gradually being destroyed by the knowledge that Braska is determined to sacrifice himself, but Braska had never realised because he was too depressed to pay proper attention to Auron’s wellbeing; so now, at the point of gaining the Final Aeon and defeating Sin, he finds out that he’s potentially about to drag Auron into the same grief and depression that his own wife’s death caused for him.

After all that, a characteristically emotional snippet from this chapter:

The memories came to an end; Jecht let go of Braska’s hand, cleared his throat, and said, “Huh. Well, I guess that’s what it’s like to be a good dad.”

“No, no,” Braska protested, wiping his eyes. “I was a terrible father. I couldn’t be there for her – after her mother … I was too weak.”

Jecht shook his head. “Nah. How can you say that, when – look at all that stuff you did with her. And you made her those spheres every night – you –” He broke off and sniffed loudly. “You fuckin’ told her you loved her. That’s more than I ever did.”

“Oh, Jecht,” Braska sobbed.

Jecht heaved out a long, shuddering sigh, and then said, “Look. Let’s get on with it, yeah? Else we’re both gonna be too – ugh. Come on.” He reached forward to take Braska’s hand again.

I’m sorry I’m like this. They have to have a bad time, it’s the rules (I mean, yeah, all three canonically end up dead, so it literally is the rules! You wouldn’t want them to be having a great time loving life and then die, right? That would be worse, right??).

I have a full draft of my WIP! Very slightly ahead of schedule, as I was envisaging three chapters per month this year, which would have taken me to about this time next week. But the last chapter was one of those that had mostly already been fleshed out in my head over the course of the last three years, so it didn’t take as long as I expected.

I started writing this thing in the spring of 2021, probably very soon after I first beat FFX, and then started making the effort to write it from start to finish in June 2022. At the time I said:

if I continue at [the current] rate the whole thing will be about 300k. Which is nuts. I don’t think it’ll really be as long as that

Guess what, it’s over 375k!! And if anything, I suspect that editing will make it longer, because a lot of it will consist of adding more descriptive detail about locations etc., which I need to go back to the game to check the accuracy of.

I’d been doing each chapter as a separate file in (boo, hiss) Google Docs, but I’ve now collected them all into an org file that I can easily export into various formats using my usual fic exporting functions. It’s funny because in Google Docs I reread my writing and think “meh, this is ok”, and then something about seeing it in a nice book-sized PDF in a serif font makes me think it’s perfect and will require no editing ever, lol. Help, I’m so easily swayed by aesthetics.

From this point my plan of action is to go through each of the 45 chapters doing the following:

• Making notes on which characters appear (except the main three), so I can check their consistency throughout the text;
• Playing/watching/noclipping bits of the game that take place in the locations covered by the chapter, so I can add descriptions of scenery/significant fiend encounters and make sure what’s there is accurate;
• Checking that certain key words and ideas are included at appropriate moments;
• Checking that each day that passes follows the usual routine (e.g. Braska recording a sphere for Yuna every night – I obviously don’t have to explicitly show this happening in every single chapter, but need to make sure I’m not saying things like “Braska ate his tea and then went straight to bed”);
• Checking for consistency with game lore, and also for internal consistency of the narrative itself, particularly regarding characters’ beliefs about certain points of moral debate e.g. “is it right to sacrifice oneself”, “should we follow this religion which is actually quite mean to us”, “how interested am I in having sex with my fellow guardian/frenemy”, etc.;
• Thinking of chapter titles! I wasn’t going to name the chapters until I decided some of them could do with names to draw out the most significant themes, and now I’m strangely keen on the idea despite my usual aversion to naming anything at all.

I have no idea how long this will take. I’m probably going to need to be at my computer to do all of it because it will require me to switch between chapters and other sources, so it’s likely to be a weekend-only activity. This will make a big change from my working pattern so far; I’ve worked on this nearly every day this year, often on the bus to/from work and also in bed before I go to sleep, which will no longer be possible. I’m going to have to find something else to do when I have only my phone for company (related: I commented on, by my standards, quite a lot of Dreamwidth posts last night). I haven’t gone a single day this year so far without writing something, if you count this post, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that now. Maybe I’ll start getting ideas for fics that aren’t this one again, like back in the olden days??? I honestly don’t know.

Here’s an excerpt from the penultimate chapter, featuring part of my attempt at dealing with the slightly contradictory way the game presents the timeline after the Final Summoning!

Rin returned some time later, shaking his head. “Not a doctor to be had,” he said, “not even a white mage. The parades have started – all the businesses are closed.” He looked down at Auron’s lifeless body; it was a dreadful irony. If the people of Bevelle had known that the High Summoner’s guardian was in mortal danger, they would be falling over themselves to help him, even the Al Bhed. He had walked through the city trying not to grimace at the banners and bunting that had been put up everywhere, averting his gaze from the enormous drawings of Braska’s face plastered over the temple porches.

“We shall have to hope the potion was enough for him to last the night,” he said, rather doubtfully. “I shall try again in the morning.”

“Does Lord Braska have daughter?” Kimahri asked him.

Rin frowned at the unexpected question. “He does,” he said quietly. “Little Yuna – she can’t be more than eight or nine years old. And an orphan now, the poor child. Braska,” he muttered, “fro? Fro tet oui ajan pameaja drec du pa y kuut etay?”

“Where is she?” said Kimahri.

“In Bevelle, no doubt,” said Rin. “Why?”

“Guardian left message,” Kimahri explained. “When Kimahri found guardian – he spoke. Said to take Lord Braska’s daughter to Besaid.” He frowned a little. “Where is Besaid?”

“Let me show you,” said Rin, and he went to fetch a map and pointed out the location of the southern islands.

“Long way,” said Kimahri.