#speak slow

[no-relief-next-to-me]

[no-relief-next-to-me]

[ticklefighthockey]

oh no… I’d kill for this fictional kiddo

[ticklefighthockey]

@horkey sent me her today and I keep reopening my phone to look at her and 😭😭😭

[ticklefighthockey]

Anything That Touches continues to destroy me emotionally (in a good way) and also really make me think about how we process the complexities and horrors of the worst parts of hockey culture (also in a good way). Just a really meaningful work.

If you can share any details about its sister fic, I'd love to hear them?

ah thank you!! I feel like that one began as pure dystopian AU and then slowly morphed into something that was wrestling some very real and painful aspects of sexual violence in hockey culture (albeit with an AU slant). that fic definitely absorbed a lot of my complicated emotions about the kyle beach story, specifically the way that bystanders can simultaneously ‘know’ and ‘not know’ ugly truths (the coexistence of ignorance and an uneasy knowledge)… and the way people can be directly looking at an awful thing and still not register what they’re seeing because their culture has conditioned them not to see (the mario kart scene, the whole kris arc)… and just what it does to a person to witness the systemic dehumanization of another human being but be utterly powerless to intervene (geno’s arc). yeah a LOT of stuff bound up in that one phew and I feel like the latest revelations just add extra painful ‘oh wait so this isn’t an AU’ layers to that fic.

I don’t want to talk too much about the sister fic yet because it’s still taking shape in my mind, but it’s a girl Sid fic set during the 07-08 and 08-09 seasons and it’s very much about how it would affect a girl to grow up immersed in a hyper-masculine, misogynistic culture. in my non-fic life I am obsesseddddd with novels and films about girls who are perceived by others as ‘cold’ or ‘unfeeling’, who are often stuck in hostile environments they can’t escape or don’t want to leave, and who use numbness, reticence, or emotional withdrawal as a tactic for insulating their inner lives against scorn and protecting the soft vulnerable parts of themselves. I want to write a story about girl sid slowly coming to trust and then love the shy gangly russian kid who also has no friends on the team and is just as lonely as she is… except that geno’s isolation is due to the language barrier, not his gender, and on some level sid understands & is trying to ready herself for the inevitable outcome: geno will move on, geno will probably be made captain, geno will want to distance himself from the too-cold and too-intense girl. (I also think it’s an interesting chance to explore a verse where geno’s the city’s golden child, not sid, and how much that would change both their lives!!) and it is a sister fic to ATT in part because I think it will grapple very centrally with what growing up immersed in an ultra chauvinistic hockey culture does to a girl’s sense of herself as a sexual being, and how that will shape her tentative friendship with geno.

[ticklefighthockey]

it’s been a rough stretch with writing for me but I’m getting back into the saddle sigh. I’m working on something I may or may not finish for kinkfest (depends on job stuff) but I’ve also started slowly chipping away at the thing I think will be my winter-to-early spring longfic. I kind of like the idea of following the same writing schedule I used for ATT—starting in mid to late september and then just working steadily almost every single day until february (or however long it takes). this one’s going to feel like curtis sittenfeld’s prep, I think, not content-wise but emotionally—v much that slow burn coming-of-age / grappling with the queasy awfulness of girlhood / moving through shame kinda feeling. my lips are sealed other than that! I don’t want to jinx it but it’s one that I’ve been circling back to for months and I like the way it’s been slowly unfolding in my mind/heart. also I want something to really dedicate myself to in my first dark seattle winter.

[ticklefighthockey]

first goal sid… chopped all her hair off after the draft, got sooooo much shit for it, and is now reluctantly growing it back out

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sid on the left might look conventionally prettier but I refuse to believe she would allow her curls to look that beautiful. no this girl transitions straight from gelling the shit out of her hair to refusing to do anything with it at all. she washes it with that terrible 3-in-1 shampoo/conditioner/all-purpose soap guys use, does nothing about the frizz besides put it up in a bun, and has insane split ends because the only person she’ll allow to cut it is trina so she only gets a trim once every four to six months. not sure how the bangs happened but I assume there were furious tears right after and then she immediately forgot about it