15:What did you learn from writing this fic? From this.

Aww, thanks for asking~ 

Damn, though, this is an enormous question.  I will try to separate it out a bit, but I think there’s going to be some inevitable bleed between stories, because honestly.

It’s almost hard to say what things I learned from doing the first SWAN because whatever they are, I’ve now learned them over ten years ago and they feel sort of inherent to me existing on a daily basis.  

But I guess the first one was that people would read the shit I wrote, and they would enjoy it?  And actually react to it in the intended emotional ways?  This seems such a weird thing to say, but SWAN was the first writing I showed anyone else, it was the fanfiction I did ‘for real’ and not just in my head accompanied by a random doodle, so it was the first thing that showed me that other people might be interested in the ideas I have and that they would have the same effects on other people.  I still have a hard time internalizing that, but it’s so much better than it was in 2004!

I learned in putting my experiences and feelings into these kids that there were yet more things than I originally thought different about me that didn’t fit with everyone else, though I didn’t get a name for ‘asexual’ for a Long Time after that. 

I learned doing SWAN that people can fall for you through your work and have it only increase when they meet you properly, and this is still sort of my wish for how things would go down in my life.  I wish I could show people words and images and ideas long before they saw my face.  

I learned that people will trust their favorite fanfiction author with things they should be telling their parents, friends, or doctors.  This was both alarming and flattering, and I still take it being Big Sibling LYX rather seriously when someone contacts me for help because of something I’ve made.

I learned to pay attention to boring daily shit, and how it feels, and the thoughts I have when doing it, and how it might look from the outside.  SWAN!Johnny paid attention to such tiny trivial bullshit and his world was focused differently from people who were visible to others, so I tried to find something in tiny bullshit, whether something funny or something odd or something approaching deep or meaningful.  Though, it’s hard for me to view the original SWAN in a deep or meaningful way now because to me its age shows not just glaringly, but retina-obliteratingly. 

Related to that, though, I look at it and think about it as something a person who is the age of the kids I’m now re-writing wrote, and I think they would take it very seriously, because I so clearly did at the time.  I think my cousin, who is 13 and is very earnest with me about the things she enjoys, would take it very seriously if she knew the canon (and I expect her to be that sort). So across the whole experience, I’m learning to see things retroactively and in the future at the same time.  Wanting it to feel like the sort of shit that teenagers would find important, but not damaging anyone (including myself!) in the future.   

Finishing SWAN taught me quite painfully that Johnny and his friends were like real people and I mourned finishing that story like there had been a real life death.  So I learned I had more to say.  And when I finished ISH, I experienced a satisfied sense of closure instead of crushing loss. 

There’s technical garbage, too, like pacing and not losing track of shit and then cramming it all in all at the last minute in Chapter 16 (A+, Past Lady), which I tried to learn even with ISH, but feel like is best being shown to me while I do reSWAN.  

reSWAN is not letting anything stop me from doing something exactly the way I want to do it. (Asexual and Non-Binary Nny.  Long-winded adventures!  Whatever songs I fucking want!)  It’s not clinging so desperately to the way something used to be that you restrain the proper flourishing of the new thing.  As I type this, I’m coming off the end of a day in which I considered that the end of the story might have a large wrench thrown in it and I’ve been grappling with what to do and it is just WILD.  

I learned to let characters develop the way they wanted to in ISH, or at least to really consider what was happening and what environment would be like before I forced a character to be the way I envisioned them at the start.  Because you don’t turn out good-natured and slightly wacky when you’re raised in a van by haunted people who didn’t really ask for you and use you as a prop.  You turn out angry and you break people’s arms.   I am somewhat re-learning this in reSWAN, which is transforming in front of me just because I decided Edgar should be more of a person in the first chapter.

I learned doing ISH that some people can be really obscenely entitled about things they get for free.  

I also learned doing ISH that some people are so delighted and honored to be getting this junk for free that they will fall apart trying to communicate and then they’ll make fanart.  It is preferable to focus on this one.

I learned that other people were using this story to escape, and to define themselves,and this both scared and delighted me.  It still does.

I learned starting reSWAN that I can do a shit ton of work if I am excited and not traditionally employed.  

I learned that having an already completed version of something is some kind of magic for writing something and that if I were writing a proper book, I’d probably end up writing the fucking thing twice because of the way reSWAN has just exploded with growth off of the original version. 

I learned that I might want to start considering myself a writer and an artist instead of an artist who occasionally throws words on the internet.  I’d never consider myself a writer who occasionally posted paintings, so I don’t know why I was adamant to think about it the other way.  Maybe it’s the degree. 

There must be so more, this is over ten years of my life, but because it’s so long, it’s hard to remember what hasn’t always been there in some cases.  Plus ISH and SWAN were right next to each other in terms of when they were made.  reSWAN was ten years after the first one!  So there were things to be learned in the projects that came in between.

Chiefly, though, I think we can all agree that at no point - not at 150,000 words, not at 300,000, and not at 450,000 – did I ever learn to shut the fuck up.