goldgust | Fic - North Wind ch1

I want to do a context blog post for just the first chapter of this fic because a. who knows when I'll write the rest (right now I'm partway through writing chapter 2) b. this is the chapter with 70% of the setup so I wanted to talk about where I got my ideas from.

Last year I was sitting on a bus brainstorming a Cuocuo pov fic because I'm edgy and love rare POVs and I wrote this

what IS the fxjl post canon relationship. They're both wrong it would be dumb if they never saw each other again and also dumb to be officially married

Wow.... insightful. Jk but I think most FX/JL shippers would agree with this sentiment. No wonder there's so little fic about them post canon because wtf do we do with you two? I'm hoping some of them would like my fic even though Mu Qing is there (big ask).

I outlined their entire interaction in the first chapter at that point, without knowing where it would go after. I should have known, if it's a bad idea for them to be officially married then that's exactly what I should make them do muhaha.

A week or two after that bus ride I read erotica romance novel The Widow and the Orcs by Finley Fenn (thanks to Tumblr for putting "what if Bridgerton added an orc" on my dash) and became obsessed with it. The plot of that book is driven by a guy (a guy who often rolls his eyes...) trying really hard to get his bestie laid which is my kind of thing. I was thinking up silly ideas for how I could get this for mq+fx+jl for months and I never figured it out but it definitely had some influence on the current fic. At one point it was going to be Mu Qing and Jian Lan getting fake married. Not as juicy!

That influence from my beloved orc book is also why the story has this romance novel vibe. I've always said that fengqing are like the childhood friend and edgy bad boy love interests in a cliche love triangle, now we'll see if they are really up to the task... okay, I think you can guess that they are not up to the task.

Most of all I need to credit Bell's wonderful remix of my fic for being so heart wrenching and insightful on Feng Xin's inner state and making me feel literally so bad for him (okay, and I also felt bad for torturing him on purpose in so many of my other fics lmao) that I wanted to write him some sort of happier ending. That gave me the final impulse to synthesise all my different ideas with this more concrete and challenging goal of a happy ever after.

I didn't realise that having a difficult goal to work towards when plotting can actually be really helpful. Even if it makes me constantly think "oh god, I wrote myself in here and I don't know if I can write my way back out" it gives a lot of energy to the process.

The outline is done but it's long! We will see if I get there!