Curate, connect, and discover
You thought it would be IBIMM I asked about, or the star, but it is not. No, I need to know what was going through your headspace with Chains' journal entries. You see, they are my actual favorite part of Chains, because I struggle to write journal entries and make them feel like journal entries. But this one:
‘Entry 47
This is a small lie: I do not mind the pushing of the Teacher’s assistant because I understand it.
This is perhaps a little bigger than a small lie.
I can not understand it. He thinks I have begun to. I lie. […] ’
From Chapter 23 (24 on ao3) plays in my head often. I do not think you know how much this fucked me up when I read it because we weren't talking about it, but I've never forgotten it and I've wanted to do a diary-style fic for AGES because of this. Help me. Tell me how you made this so damn good. (The whole entry, I just didn't wanna quote the whole thing back at you when its a little on the long side.)
I have a feeling a lot of my director’s cut reveals would just be me shrugging and saying idk where x came from??
Because I think that’s. That’s just the majority of my writing. And in terms of coming across the idea of journal entries, I honestly have no clue what spawned that
But the journal entries were one of the few random things I wrote down before even starting on outlining or chapter 1, along with some other random scenes/sentences/dialogue (THK’s scene with the Troupe Master when he’s leaving for the first time, the first White Lady scene, things like that). I think there were actually a few og journals that the fic wove off of that ended up being changed/deleted. I knew Myla’s song would get to be an entry, the entry you mentioned up there was written pretty early on, basically I knew that I wanted to have the entries show their writing style and discomfort in calling themself an ‘I’ and how that evolved and progressed over the story. The entries and gender subplot were basically the backbones that the rest of Chains spawned on. So fun fact! We wouldn’t have it if not for the journal entries subplot. Even if THK was screaming over their ‘homework’ for a good half of the fic
(As a side note, about by the 20s of chapters, a friend had convinced me to use the sort-of maybe-PK arc from the end and I had the image of them just dumping giant stacks of journals in front of him to go “read”, and so I kept that in mind for all the entries that got to take place for the next 40ish chapters)