Fic Completed: Where Is My Werewolf Lover
Apr. 20th, 2022 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jajalalaFinally.... it is mine: 
Twenty-four chapters... 76,030 words... and now Where Is My Werewolf Lover is complete. Oh Hilda/Marianne (and the Golden Deer in general), it's been a delight, but it is also a sweet relief to be done and to have one less thing on my plate each week.
I'm not gonna lie I didn't expect it to go on this long. I think the whole first section of it was just fluff, unknown identity shenanigans, and some general bonding between characters, which flowed very easily for me. But I slowly threaded in some more serious 'plot' about a conspiracy with the library and the curse and demonic beasts etc... and the latter part of the story ended up thick with it, which made it a bit of a slog for me as a writer, as it's not my usual wheelhouse.
Still I think that was good for me. I think I should have tried to fit more of it earlier on in the story maybe (though there was at least a tiny bit of foreshadowing early on), but overall I'm happy. I had a lot of other Golden Deer bonding to do at the beginning, and I'm actually kind of surprised at how present the rest of the house ended up being. I tend to focus on the romantic couple, but these other characters ended up having various little subplots and relationship beats that popped in and out.
And there were some scenes that I imagined as purely Hilda/Marianne that I ended up bringing the whole house into, like the scene with werewolf!Marianne getting hurt, and then also the last chapter scene with them working together to pull Marianne/Hilda out of the water. Those were originally envisioned in my vague 'future scenes' as just the two of them... but one of my early commenters mentioned how much they liked seeing the whole Golden Deer house get time and development together, so when I got to those scenes I was kind of like "I spent so much time developing Hilda's bonds with these people, even if it's not romantic I think it's satisfying to bring them in for these intense scenes where she's very distressed and could use some help."
I also had some distinct Ignatz/Raphael and Lorenz/Claude moments/development... but I resisted the urge to put them in the main relationship tags. As annoying as I find it when people tag my WLW couples for only a few lines in a giant fic, the solution is not to do the same thing back to the MLM couples. Instead I used my usual "Minor Ignatz/Raphael" etc in the additional tags to model the tagging system for minor relationships I wish people would use.
In the end maybe the evil was defeated too easily, but this was a romance story first and foremost. I wanted to flirt with some action, but my goal was more to provide a reason for tensions and emotions to run high, so I didn't want to drag the writing further with even more fighting/conspiracies/mysteries than it already had.
Aaah it's always hard to end something, and I always worry that the final chapter isn't enough of a celebratory champagne pop, but I think I wrapped up all the threads I needed to, and let the happy couple have some fond time, so I'm satisfied.
I have not reread the whole thing at once. I probably will at some point this year (I love reading my own work on a cozy evening for comfort), and after that I will see how I feel about the work altogether. Will probably write about it in the 2022 fic retrospective, but that is far away for now.
Now the other things I'm still working on are:
1. The BNHA Toga/Ochako multichapter. That's currently posting every other week, but now I'm considering making it every week at some point... if I can develop more of a buffer again. I have the thing somewhat outlined to be between 15-20 chapters long, and I'm on chapter 5 now... we'll see what ends up happening as it develops though.
2. A fic for the BNHA Lady Nagant Big Bang. I think I'm about half-way done with writing that, and posting will be in June. So I definitely need to work on it, but its manageable.
3. The BNHA WLW Big Bang. This hasn't started yet though (summary submissions are in early May, posting in September) so I'm not actually writing for it at the moment (I do need to sit down and hash out what I want to write though).
(4.) Deep in the wings is another personal BNHA multichapter that was started for a Hero-to-Villain Big Bang that blew up and collapsed, but since that Bang is dead I could dig back into it and start posting on my own time, though I think there's only two or three chapters written... maybe after the Toga/Ochako fic has a bigger buffer, or when its end is in sight.
Twenty-four chapters... 76,030 words... and now Where Is My Werewolf Lover is complete. Oh Hilda/Marianne (and the Golden Deer in general), it's been a delight, but it is also a sweet relief to be done and to have one less thing on my plate each week.
I'm not gonna lie I didn't expect it to go on this long. I think the whole first section of it was just fluff, unknown identity shenanigans, and some general bonding between characters, which flowed very easily for me. But I slowly threaded in some more serious 'plot' about a conspiracy with the library and the curse and demonic beasts etc... and the latter part of the story ended up thick with it, which made it a bit of a slog for me as a writer, as it's not my usual wheelhouse.
Still I think that was good for me. I think I should have tried to fit more of it earlier on in the story maybe (though there was at least a tiny bit of foreshadowing early on), but overall I'm happy. I had a lot of other Golden Deer bonding to do at the beginning, and I'm actually kind of surprised at how present the rest of the house ended up being. I tend to focus on the romantic couple, but these other characters ended up having various little subplots and relationship beats that popped in and out.
And there were some scenes that I imagined as purely Hilda/Marianne that I ended up bringing the whole house into, like the scene with werewolf!Marianne getting hurt, and then also the last chapter scene with them working together to pull Marianne/Hilda out of the water. Those were originally envisioned in my vague 'future scenes' as just the two of them... but one of my early commenters mentioned how much they liked seeing the whole Golden Deer house get time and development together, so when I got to those scenes I was kind of like "I spent so much time developing Hilda's bonds with these people, even if it's not romantic I think it's satisfying to bring them in for these intense scenes where she's very distressed and could use some help."
I also had some distinct Ignatz/Raphael and Lorenz/Claude moments/development... but I resisted the urge to put them in the main relationship tags. As annoying as I find it when people tag my WLW couples for only a few lines in a giant fic, the solution is not to do the same thing back to the MLM couples. Instead I used my usual "Minor Ignatz/Raphael" etc in the additional tags to model the tagging system for minor relationships I wish people would use.
In the end maybe the evil was defeated too easily, but this was a romance story first and foremost. I wanted to flirt with some action, but my goal was more to provide a reason for tensions and emotions to run high, so I didn't want to drag the writing further with even more fighting/conspiracies/mysteries than it already had.
Aaah it's always hard to end something, and I always worry that the final chapter isn't enough of a celebratory champagne pop, but I think I wrapped up all the threads I needed to, and let the happy couple have some fond time, so I'm satisfied.
I have not reread the whole thing at once. I probably will at some point this year (I love reading my own work on a cozy evening for comfort), and after that I will see how I feel about the work altogether. Will probably write about it in the 2022 fic retrospective, but that is far away for now.
Now the other things I'm still working on are:
1. The BNHA Toga/Ochako multichapter. That's currently posting every other week, but now I'm considering making it every week at some point... if I can develop more of a buffer again. I have the thing somewhat outlined to be between 15-20 chapters long, and I'm on chapter 5 now... we'll see what ends up happening as it develops though.
2. A fic for the BNHA Lady Nagant Big Bang. I think I'm about half-way done with writing that, and posting will be in June. So I definitely need to work on it, but its manageable.
3. The BNHA WLW Big Bang. This hasn't started yet though (summary submissions are in early May, posting in September) so I'm not actually writing for it at the moment (I do need to sit down and hash out what I want to write though).
(4.) Deep in the wings is another personal BNHA multichapter that was started for a Hero-to-Villain Big Bang that blew up and collapsed, but since that Bang is dead I could dig back into it and start posting on my own time, though I think there's only two or three chapters written... maybe after the Toga/Ochako fic has a bigger buffer, or when its end is in sight.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 05:40 pm (UTC)And wow so many BNHA projects in the works, I'm very hype :D Sorry to hear the hero-to-villain bang collapsed, it sounded really interesting when you talked about it last time.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 07:34 pm (UTC)And tbh I think it was a good thing that particular Bang imploded... there were some red flags even in the beginning that I didn't quite parse since I had only just started getting into fandom events and didn't know how to scrutinize/check whether an event would be run well... If I go into detail I'll be here all day, but long story short I learned some things about events and am not actually that disappointed about losing out on what that particular main moderator envisioned.
In the end it got me thinking about a fun concept, and even though the Bang ended (before summary submissions even happened, so not a huge time/energy sink even), I'm more than able to post it on my own on my own time.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 07:53 pm (UTC)Wow, congrats! 76k is a LOT!
no subject
Date: 2022-04-21 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-21 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-22 12:47 pm (UTC)24 chapters :O Congratulations on finishing your fic! I'm always lowkey in awe of longfic writers. I have no idea how y'all do it.
Instead I used my usual "Minor Ignatz/Raphael" etc in the additional tags to model the tagging system for minor relationships I wish people would use.
As a volunteer tag wrangler, yesss good. (Users are, of course, free to tag however they want. But even if they put "Minor X/Y" or "hint of X/Y" in the main relationship field, we still end up attaching those to X/Y so they pop up in searches.)
no subject
Date: 2022-04-22 02:30 pm (UTC)And yes, sadly cannot control everyone's tagging habits, and even tagging in the main relationship field isn't technically "wrong", but I always advocate for not clogging certain tags when I can. I find the additional tags "minor x/x" strikes the best balance for me of recognizing the relationship is in the work (and making it filterable for or a warning to those who CANNOT STAND even some background focus on that ship) while also not disappointing people who are searching for a work that actually centers around a particular couple.
Thanks for your tag wrangling work!