how about some brio + things you said that i wasn’t meant to hear 👀
HELLO WEED DISCOURSE PART 2
First part here.
(Set in a post canon time)
20. things you said that i wasn’t meant to hear
Well, she did invite him in. It wasn't even a question, his steady gaze following behind her while both of them walked through her house. Beth can still feel his hand imprint on her ass cheek, whatever they smoke already kicking in.
She breathes out a laugh, running her fingers over the same wallpaper that covers almost every room in her home. There are lines, and tiny dots and they repeat themselves over and over again under her digits. And she wants too feel them a little more, but Rio's hands are everywhere, his chest against her back and mouth is sucking at her earlobe.
"What you thinkin', Elizabeth?"
She's not really thinking anything in particular, too busy just feeling. And Beth is aware what a cliché of a high person she's being, it isn't something she does too often. Remembers one time with Annie, they were so fucked up her sister ended up breaking her arm while trying to shower Buddy. She decided the dog smelled funny. But before doing it with him, she lasted years weed sober.
"Nothing." She says, fidgeting with a strand of hair near her ear, his lips already kissing the palm of her hand. They enter her room but he doesn't make a move to turn her around, his hot mouth sucking two of her fingers, his tongue sliding through them. But she's also lying. "Are you really seriously giving me only 30% for this new deal?”
And he doesn’t answer, too busy now falling to his knees and pulling down her jeans and panties with him. He’s too eager and doesn’t even wait for her to pull her pants off her ankles, his tongue already lapping at her folds when he sees her naked cunt.
He’s quiet, the only sounds she can hear are the ones he’s making by eating out her drenched center. Rio’s mouth and nose are almost buried inside her, both hands clinging to her ass and both his eyes closed.
And then he’s mumbling something while the tip of his tongue is circling her clit, so she closes her eyes too and tries to decipher what he’s saying.
“I already lost my empire for this pussy once. Not gonna happen again.”
Is he talking about—
Beth feels her pulse spike, hand going to her mouth to muffle a moan, stupidly high and confused. She was talking to him about that bakery deal to launder money outside their current one. She was trying to never bring their old partnership, that one full of deceit. Not like they had now: they’re good. Almost too good. But she knows he’ll never forgive her nor forget what she's done.
It’ll always be the same for her. Only difference is that she finally moved on.
Instead of getting angry, Beth focuses on how his lack of awareness —not even realizing what he just said, never stoping for a second his ministrations— is good thing for both of them. How could she not enjoy if he just fucks her with his fingers, with his mouth, with all of him, always relentless and without remorse.
She changes strategy. Prefers to let him know she listened to him, but her hands are busy massaging his skulls absentmindedly. He has to know.
So, Beth speaks again, a new found confidence running through her slightly drugged bloodstream.
“This pussy already has 50% of your business. Our business. We're partners. Never forget it.”
hi! a song inside the halls of the dark is an absolute masterpiece of plotting and pacing (and prob my fave fic I’ve read for the show so far), so for the ask a writer meme, I’d love to hear about your planning process(es). the idea of even plotting out something like that, let alone actually finishing it, just breaks my brain lol. do you do a lot of outlining? how much does the outcome end up looking like the ideas that sparked it?
adsfghgsj okay well first off, thank you! that is unspeakably flattering and i don’t know how to cope! my weird robot emotions are misfiring! but also, thank you for this question bc this is the kind of nerd shit i LIVE FOR and up until, idk, 5? 6? months ago my answer would’ve more or less been ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but sometime in between now and then i leveled up how much of a nerd i am.
okay so, the short answer to your (first) question is yes, i do a lot of outlining though the scale of outline varies based on the complexity of the story. in song’s case, how i outline actually evolved significantly over the course of writing it (see that level up) and if i were to outline it today, it would look very different from what i originally started with.
the short answer to your second question is in song’s case, the original idea was a v short, almost fluffy stuck in a hotel room for a night one shot i daydreamed up while listening to a halsey song (is there somewhere, if you were wondering). obvs what it turned into was uh, v different.
digging into how i outline is going to get long, excessively nerdy and borderline terrifying so i’m hiding the rest of this under the cut, read at your own risk.
I preface everything here with a couple of reminders:
1. i am a crazy person who straight up does not know how to have hobbies like a normal person
2. i am actively trying to push myself and grow as a writer including developing new skills and training myself to practice certain habits bc at some point I would like to push myself out of the nest and try my hand at original fiction one day with a vague goal of maybe seeing if i could get it published. idk if i’ll ever actually do that BUT in the meantime, i do stuff like the nightmare that follows to myself
initial outline / what happens next list
okay so the most basic of my outlines (and how i originally outlined song) are p much just lists of what happens next. i do them as bullet lists bc my brain finds them less intimidating and i just start with one and then ask myself what happens next. sometimes the bullets are v vague, sometimes they get so specific i end up writing what becomes dialogue, i try not to think too hard about it, i just keep asking what happens next.
it’s really specifically about what happens next, not asking myself what i want to happen in the story, bc next implies the bullet before informs the one after, so you end up with an overall picture of what you want with a base level of causality built in. it also gives you room to surprise yourself (i think literally every what happens next outline i’ve done has had me going oh, okaaaaaay at some point).
sometimes, this is all you need. for trade my heart for honey, i started and stopped here bc at the end of the day, the skeleton for that fic is super basic: beth and rio attempt to play pool without tripping over their horrendous sexual tension. they fail. the end.
for your monster looks like mine, i did a version of the what happens next list, but i brought in some of my tricks from the pace structuring method i’ve been honing for the multi-chapter i’m currently planning. instead of mapping tentpole beats by story pace, i mapped tentpole beats for what points i wanted beth and rio to be scoring against each other and then mapped out the lead-up and fallout to connect the two and also what they were doing to each other physically at the same time so i could see how it all played together so the conversation supported the smut and vice versa. it was a TOTALLY normal approach to writing pwp. not over the top at all.
song’s original outline was basically a SUPER long what happens next list and if i could go back in time i would slap myself upside the head like bitch you have no idea what you’re getting into and you are WAY TOO COCKY ABOUT IT, but it’s okay i learned.
the spreadsheet method
somewhere around when i was in the middle of i want to say ch 9 of song, @pynkhues posted about her outlining process including a super awesome spreadsheet she uses (i cannot for the life of me find the original post, forgive me but know that it was hers) and i immediately jacked a version of it to use as my own and oh my god it changed my whole life.
iirc hers was a bit more in depth but since i was sort of baby-stepping into it, i stripped it down into the following and did a sheet for each of the remaining chapters (well, ch 10 and ch 11, ch 11 ended up getting wildly out of control so i split it in two and mushed the epilogue i’d been planning onto the end of it as a closing breakout scene:
plot
character
it’s a lot of repetition, tbh BUT once i started using it, i found the repetition was incredibly clarifying and by making myself take the time to go through each column and go through the same stuff over and over, it honed in on the strongest, most relevant bits of what i was planning and helped me see patterns and connections i maybe hadn’t been thinking of on the onset.
when i outlined swear i used this method and added a layer to my chapter overviews where i track the lies and corresponding truths worked into the chapter narratives (bc that’s a key theme of the story), and color-coded the beats that corresponded to the main plot vs individual character arcs vs foreshadowing so i’d have an at a glance visual reference to make sure nothing was getting lost and all of the characters (even minor ones) had stuff happening to them and didn’t just feel like cardboard cutouts coming in and out of the story as i needed them
pace structuring
these are all fine and dandy but one thing they’re missing is pacing! for song’s pacing, i will be real with you, i v much went a lot with my gut. i’ve spent most of my life consuming and paying a lot of attention to stories. i’m fascinated with how they come together and literally cannot shut off the part of my brain that likes to pick them apart to examine the pieces to see how they all fit together. as such, it’s left me with a p instinctive grasp for how a story should feel when it’s working which is fantastic when it is, but really useless when it isn’t bc i struggle to identify where and why sometimes so i can fix it.
for the buffyverse, once i started to realize (with no small amount of horror) the scope of what i wanted to write, i realized p quick i needed some kind of tool kit to help me figure out the arc and pacing bc this was going to be a lot closer to trying to plot a whole novel from the ground up (which is great bc one of the things i want to practice is pacing and plotting out novels from the ground up, hahaha)
i’ve been working with a two main docs (and neither of them are spreadsheets, yet, bc one thing the spreadsheet method taught me it’s that while i find them very soothing, my brain works in bullet lists so i’m starting with bullets and then i’m gonna strain it through a spreadsheet):
1. Thoughts:
just a doc where I word vomit out anything I’m thinking, I don’t worry about keeping it organized, I just throw whatever I’m thinking in there so it’s memorialized and I can sort through it later.
2. Act Timelines / Scene Breakdowns:
basically, i have a basic three-act story structure with tentpole story beats broken out by general ballpark percentages of how far into the story/act they should occur for the pacing to feel right. i use that as the framework i run my plot and character beats through and do it in a couple of passes:
high level: i go through and break out what’s happening in the story for each tentpole beat (what the specific story and plot focus is)
by character: i go through and fill in (at least) one sub-bullet beneath each plot tentpole beat with what’s happening with each main character in their individual subplot, how they got there, what their general feelings and mindset is, if they’re having any revelations, etc (one thing i fucked up with song is not making sure i had stuff going on for all of the characters, the plot was super focused on beth and while i generally knew what rio was doing and why, ruby and annie more or less floated in and out of the story at whim and i hate that, so i’m trying to be better about it going forward)
by relationship: now i go in and fill in a layer of bullllets with how the plot and character beats are shaping relationships and how they’re progressing through each tentpole beat
at this point i’ve got a pretty fleshed out outline hitting on plot, character and relationship development at least in broad, general terms. i can look at it like a map and see how characters are growing and changing throughout the story and look for areas where the plot is pushing the characters vs the other way around and places where it seems weak or poorly connected/supported and i tinker with that for awhile until i feel like it’s in good shape.
next step is applying the what happens next approach to the scene by scene breakdowns. i’m trying an experiment with this one where instead of breaking the fic into chapters first, i’m breaking it into scenes and working out the beats of them so they incorporate all of my outlined stuff and then i’m gonna go back and see where the chapter breaks look like they fall.
I’m like, 75% of the way through my scene breakdown for this particular fic and once I’m done with that, I’m going to take everything and plug it into the spreadsheet I worked with for the last couple of chapters of song and highlight/color code like I did for swear to make sure my chapter breakdowns align with everything I’m trying to do and I’m tracking all of my themes and details and setting things up to pay them off later.
so, you know, an absolutely normal amount of planning for a hobby i do entirely for funsies in my largely nonexistent spare time.
(sorry this was i am assuming WAAY MORE INFORMATION than you ever wanted or needed to know but once i started i couldn’t stop)
(and seriously, thank you, am truly verklempt that you love song like that 💖)
yessoupy replied to your post “My take on that 1d bigbang mod post is that it’s not a great answer...”
Ideologically clean???? This is bare bones basic human decency we're talking about. It's not all that difficult.
And it wasn't just the one post. It was also the earlier one, where the mod mocked the ask re: conspiracy theorism. THIS ISN'T NORMAL that we allow the tinhatters to participate like this in fandom. Take a stand.
And of course my post did take a stand - just not the one you preferred.
It’s a stirring rhetorical move to identify one’s own position with “bare bones basic human decency,” because then anyone who disagrees with you must lack it. I don’t believe that I’m indecent or that the big bang mods are indecent, although larrie behavior often is.
lindybot replied to your post “My take on that 1d bigbang mod post is that it’s not a great answer...”
If they hadn't addressed it I prob wouldn't have thought twice about whether larries are allowed to participate, but that post (and the one before it) seemed so painstakingly written to avoid offending any one of them. It's one thing to not want to go through the effort of vetting everyone who signs up and sorting out the larries. I get it, that would be exhausting. Taking such care to maintain the Big Bang as a safe space for them is what really bothers me.
@lindybot it is a f1 wip (featuring daniel ricciardo, who you may know as the man with nice eyebrows i made you follow on instagram lskdjflkdsjf) and i put that one here! the snack that smiles back
HAHAHAHA I don't abandon my babies, I'm a good fic mother. For real, I tend to open a doc, write a simple outline and I don't let it go till I finish it. It's maybe the only virgo trait I have, an obsession with control. I do definitely write in that mindset (lol that's why my crazy ass can vomit 2k in an hour, it's madness).
29- Music or no music?
Pfff, Bad Bunny is my lord and savior. My best angst has been written with reggaeton playing in the background. But sometimes I'm so into what I'm writing that I forget I'm not listening to music, so I stop and play whatever raggaeton playlist Spotify has for me. ALERTA ALERTA new bb song lol I'm gonna write a one shot that's so stupid and smutty because a lost control of nsfw hc that turned a full fleshed fic
40- What should you be writing right now that you’re excited about?
lol I vented about it too much in like two days, but my romcom inspired post s4 fic featuring museums, airports and Beth & Rio being weirdos about art. Why? Idk, I definitely needed a lil break from hc angst and this is me trying not to be your resident emo brio writer.
✨- which fictional character (book, show, or movie) do you relate to most?
i tend to fall for and relate to character that struggles with mental illness and trauma. last one's that falls into these categories are rue (euphoria) and arabella (i may destroy you), which evoqued visceral reaction's from my whole mindbodysoul to both rue's especial episode and the whole season of imdy. honorable mention to ko mun-young (it's okay to not be okay) just because of reasons lol.
