#pavwrites

[pavloveed]

Captain to Captain

Ao3 Link // Playlist Link // @fencesummernationals

This is a little early for me! I have. Jury duty. And will be conscious again sooner than I'd like to admit.

Rarepairs! I am honestly kind of surprised I had to make this tag (Harvard & Jesse), it feels like it would be such a Thing to explore and dive into and I was halfway tempted to make it longer, but I think they'd need a few more meetups before they actually committed to long conversations. Captain to captain. I think that if given the opportunity they could be really tight friends.

Harvard's always a fun one for me to get into. I love being in his head in particular. Stylistically I wanted to opt for a little more traditional narrative versus my usual style (which I think tends to blend tradlit with scripts, which makes sense since I have heavy backgrounds in both), and I think it actually worked out well. This has been such a fun event to take part in, I'm really glad I buckled down and committed to it. Will be continuing to read fics and reblog art and such with time, so if you see comments on these summer nationals fics in a week, it's because I'm painfully somewhat gainfully employed.

[pavloveed]

Curated

Ao3 Link // Playlist Link // @fencesummernationals

I think you can tell I wanted to write this one more like a first chapter to a novel and gave up on it very quickly. I'm ultimately alright with that though lol

Nick and Harvard! I feel like if anyone is going to take Nick shopping, especially for a more expensive piece, Harvard's gotta be the one to do it. He's got the right energy to calm him down after seeing egregious price tags and you KNOW he's well practiced at making people feel good in their outfits, but honest when they're shit if he's asked about it. Maybe this was a wildcard pairing for this particular prompt, but something about it worked on the page. I'm but a man of the pen, and I listen to my pen. Or keyboard. You know what I mean.

[pavloveed]

Bruises and Bitemarks

Ao3 Link // Playlist Link // Song Reference // @fencesummernationals

Today's was fun! I mixed a bit of the literal and the figurative, which was a tad unexpected since I did fully intend for it to just be the literal. Things just come out sometimes though, you know? And who am I to stop someone from wiping the wrong shade of concealer off an emotional bruise. Also was not expecting Nick and Aiden to have such banter like they did, but this always tends to happen to me. I need to get these two nerds into settings more often where they can just riff off of each other. It's somewhat similar to the kind of banter Nick has with Seiji, but it winds up with wholly different undertones and allows Nick's emotional maturity to really shine that he is, in fact, on par with Aiden on that front even if it's a different font. If that at all makes sense.

Also they're in college for this. And they're at Ivies because I said so. And I did pay attention to color palettes for said ivies even if they don't particularly matter or really come up. But they're still fencing! Also because I said so. I did not do as much research as I should have.

I am for better or worse back to work. Ew. There's however two sides to this coin: one, it's slow enough that I'm deadass writing in a warehouse corner on the clock, whereas the other means i'm dead fucking tired and i need to be rolled out by one of those asphalt paver things. However. Money.

[pavloveed]

Dip Your Toes in the Sand (With Me)

Ao3 Link // Playlist Link // @fencesummernationals

This is one of those fics where it's just fluff. Slice of life type of shit. I took the prompt as literally as possible here, something kind of fun to me in a way, where it's literally just a beach day. Filler episode. Off day. Why are they in California? Couldn't tell you beyond better beaches, but they are admittedly there for fencing. Close enough. Why is the playlist exclusively French songs? Vibes.

I talk about this a bit more in the fic notes too, but it's a muscle I haven't stretched in a long time to just write something with no real plot, no ulterior motives, just for the vibes. It was harder than I expected, but I'm especially glad I went this route for that exact reason. Besides, what is a filler episode if not just vibe central where the gang may as well just hang out?

[pavloveed]

When You Hang Up, Don't Let Go

Ao3 Link // Playlist Link // Song Reference // @fencesummernationals

Weird one for me. Did have a hunch as to where I wanted to go with this one from day one too, didn't expect it to draw so heavily from personal experience though. Something something, lesbian discovery in a dorm room at a 75%+ women's college (or, in this case, boarding school). I did consider writing for Dafna at first, that was the main thing that changed here. Instead, it became Adrienne and Lia (who I named on a whim, I'll admit fully) a bit more last minute, but something about it flowed better.

Why does Adrienne live on Martha's Vineyard? Why does Lia have a landline phone? I don't know. Distance, vibes. That's the best I can get for answers.

Also take the all dialogue from yesterday and I raise you with next to no dialogue today. Harder for me than I thought it would be even if it was mostly internal monologue. I kept wanting to slip in random snippets of dialogue and had to keep smacking myself on the wrist.

[pavloveed]

1985, or The Summer Everything Changed

Ao3 Link // Playlist Link // @fencesummernationals

I actually wanted to keep it tame for the AU day, relatively speaking, and I did totally know I was going 1980s with it from the point it was announced. Maybe one day I'll turn it into a whole fic, but I'm not entirely there yet. Something about sticking the boys in a summer camp as counsellors is such a funny concept to me that I think would actually work really well, and it's also a chance for me to keep working the dynamics for the idea that I have about a story set in specifically the summer of 1985. Which will maybe just turn into a fic. Who's to say?

The concept was almost my thesis, actually! Was one of the three options and just never won out, got used in side workshops instead. Mostly the YA Lit class.

This one specifically I wanted to go in more on the dialogue focus, working that quite a bit and letting that be the real centerpiece. It's a nice exercise to come back to every now and again, to see how much you can get away with conveying solely through dialogue. Think it helps remind me on how to make lines especially punchy, or makes me consider just what the connotations of lines could be versus should be. Giving more weight to the words (literally lol), which I think after the last chapter chapter I wrote, I still feel really strong on. So this was kinda just a fun thing to do because I can't just ignore one of the staple exercises anyway.

[pavloveed]

I Ain't Too Proud to Beg (Coaches, Day Three)

Ao3 Link (Note: Explicit) // Playlist Link // Song Reference // @fencesummernationals

I don't have much of an explanation for this. Happy pride, lesbians be upon ye. If you squint it's during the '92 Olympics and there's some dynamics at play on what may have once been, I'll give it that much at least.

Oh, to know what really went down between Williams and Donati. Wouldn't that just be a dream?

[pavloveed]

Last Night at the Troubadour (Music, Day Two)

Ao3 Link // Playlist Link // @fencesummernationals

I flipped on this super last minute as to what I was actually gonna write and/or do for this day. But like, I've spent so much time in and around bandfic/s that it would kind of be a return to form in a particular way for me. It's probably not the standard in terms of what the lineup would be for a five piece band in terms of the fence boys, but I have a very specific dynamic in my head for how they would work which means I haaaad to throw Harvard on lead guitar. Really the one that I realize is probably a wildcard choice is the Seiji/Eugene rhythm duo, but like... if it's not Nick on drums it's definitely Eugene, and Seiji is more than capable of holding down the fort on bass. While it's the "easiest" instrument of the lineup which isn't as fitting I do know that mf would be doing some Flea style shit. In something longer I'd probably consider letting Seiji and Nick duke it out for lead guitar.

It's a short little snippet all things considered, but I am also trying to take some of my old writing exercises and actually utilize them to see where exactly they take me. Starting predominantly with building character through internal monologue (yesterday's) and setting the scene/moving through time and space (today). I'll have one that's dialogue focused somewhere, a dramatic scene elsewhere, maybe utilize that first three pages of a novel in a different place. So that's also been fun to stretch my brain in a different way when it has not been properly stretched in a long while.

Enjoy! See y'all tomorrow!