An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Color in Your Hands has updated.
At twenty-two, Adam has spent more time than he’d like to admit in hospitals and urgent care centers and free clinics. He has not, however, ever been directed to the not-medical part of such a place before, as he had been this morning. It still smells like antiseptic and there are people in long white coats, but the walls are wood paneled and no one’s wearing scrubs. It feels very much like if he looks down the hallway just so, he’d see a TV camera at the end of it instead of the shiny doors of the elevator that brought him here.
1. Tell us about your WIP!Right now, I’m working on a few things: the next chapter of CiYH (which is going exceptionally poorly), the first few chapters of The Rewrite, Heaven is the Place We Know, an OC project adjacent to something my bestest buddy @archer-and-anders is about to start working on, and also the unnammed CiYH Noah spinoff. I’m keeping busy and oddly unproductive. Go figure.36. Post a snippetI’m gonna give you a little bit from the Noah spinoff, because I love this thing and I really, really want to finally share something from it.
He rests his head on her stomach afterwards, probably dozing off a little as Blue cards her fingers through his hair, and his hands are finally warm where he’s tucked them under the small of her back. Noah sighs and rubs his cheek against her contentedly. They stay like that for an impossible stretch of time, and just when Blue’s nearly certain he’s asleep, he moves one of his hands to rub his face.
“Seven year streak, gone.” He snaps his fingers. “Boom. Just like that.”
“Don’t you mean with a bang?” she asks.
He snorts. “Yeah, with a bang.”
“It was super nice,” she tells him. He hides his grin against her stomach.
Hi! I absolutely positively love Color in Your Hands! Thank you so much for crafting this work of art and bringing it into my life. As a person who aspires to improve in her writing skills and grow into a better fanwriter, I'd like to ask questions 15, 16, 17, and 18? Again, thank you so much for doing what you do and for the wonderful opportunity to ask you about it!
Hi there! Thank you so much for reading, enjoying, and messaging me, I really appreciate it more than I can ever express.
15. Where does your inspiration come from?
I happen to live in a college town with an open-to-the-public campus and had been on campus at a private college (my future sister-in-law’s alma mater) before, so I took everything I knew about art, college, about college life, art school, about living with other confused twenty-somethings, mashed the campuses together and created a fictionalized college very heavily based on the one I can see from my apartment, and CiYH fell out. It’s trite and overused, but I really do write what I know. My experiences, and the experiences of my SO, are my biggest inspirations.Early on, I used a lot of my own struggles with my relationships, my self-image, my mental health and anger-based demons to fuel Adam. Now, several years later (and in a very different stage of my life), I pour my frustrations and alienation and Adult Fears into Noah (he’s also a vessel for my explorations of Judaism), and he also gets my SO’s Polish cultural background. My relationship with my SO, which has changed in infinite ways since I started writing CiYH, colors how I write Blue’s feminism, confidence, sexuality, and her intimate relationships. Tad has my social anxiety, my awkwardness around people I’m attracted to, the tone of my inner monologue. Gansey has some of my passions and interests and my SO’s anxiety disorder, autism-spectrum behaviors, and OCD tendencies (even though I don’t touch much on any of this in CiYH). Ronan got saddled with my post-teenage discovery of my sexuality and queerness, and my SO’s experiences of Catholicism, dubiously consensual early sexual encounters, and familial anxieties. Kavinsky is the extreme end of my worst impulses and my desire to be better than I am.
16. Where do you take your motivation from?
I want to tell stories. I’ve been doing it since before I was old enough to write my own name. I’ve been telling stories for decades now, and writing them for three quarters of that. I want to write. I want to spill my guts without getting emotionally naked and vulnerable. I want to spend years and break a million words in one piece, then go back and trim it down to half that, whip it into a better shape, and send it out into the world and see if I can legitimize my efforts by getting even a single dollar for my efforts.
CiYH is my best effort to date. An exercise in proving to myself that I have it in me to do this and that people (like you!) will validate it and me by reading and engaging with it and me. Someday, I’ll have something original to show for my work, and I can only hope by starting here some of you will be along for the ride.
17. On average, how much writing do you get done in a day?
Not as much as I’d like, lately! But, on a good day, when I’m in a better mental place to focus, I can crank out a few thousand words or a couple of pages of work across several WIPs, and I can do that consistently.
18. What’s your revision or rewriting process like?
I wing it. I’m impulsive, self-critical, anxious, and a perfectionist. I do what I can, when I can, in as little time as I can without half-assing anything, and throw what I have out into the ether before I can second-guess myself into never posting anything at all. This is a process that usually takes me about a month and a half, from the roughest first draft to hitting the “publish” button on AO3, and can sometimes take several months (as it is right now). I try not to get too hung up on it to not get in my own way, but that’s not always a reasonable thing to expect from myself.
Just so everyone knows, CiYH is not abandoned and is not on an intentional, planned hiatus; life has been crazy lately and I’m doing some work for a literary magazine and I’ve just been stuck at the same place in the draft for the next chapter for months now.
I may have to shift from the usual Adam-Adam-Ronan method of chapter progression, because Ronan’s POV is just refusing to be written this time around. I just really want to update soon and that’s not gonna happen if I keep trying to force this Ronan POV chapter to cooperate, you know?
Change is good, right?
Here, have some unused dialogue from the draft of the next update, because I really like it and I miss people looking at this blog lol.
“Oh God.” Ronan’s stomach drops, awkward horribleness weighing it down until it’s somewhere in the vicinity of his knees. “Is Blue pregnant?”
“What? No!” Noah makes a face like he’s sucked a lemon or smelled something foul. Ronan laughs, so relieved he can’t help it. Then Noah starts to laugh, too, and that he’s amused by the idea of fathering a child is somehow both heartwarming and concerning. “After all the shit I’ve been through, I’m probably sterile. Which--okay, thank God I’m not gonna be passing on these shitty genes--but that’s is a whole ‘nother thing.”
“Yeah, no, no amount of pretty girl’s ever gonna balance that shitshow out,” Ronan tells him, not particularly kindly. Noah makes an unoffended ‘duh’ kind of gesture, indicating that he doesn’t mind Ronan laughing at him; he knows he wasn’t a great looking guy even before his accident.
Noah half-groans and half-laughs. “I just imagined my fucking ears on a baby.”
It takes Ronan mere seconds to start laughing at the mental image, too. Noah’s covering part of his eyes like he’s shielding them from the Dumbo-eared baby they’re both imagining, but the flush of his mirth is visible on his cheeks.
also.... I could probably make a fanmix for ciyh (bc i associate everything with music so much damn) but u have an official playlist so it's like... hmm should I Do That anyways...
Go ahead! I’d never ever in my wildest dreams thought anyone would want to make/do anything like that for me or something I wrote-- far be it from me to not encourage any kind of fanwork making! Please do!
