i'll tell you all how the story ends

i took a break from writing kpop fics around late february. the last fic i posted was around september last year. the reason was as simple as they come - i wasn't having much fun with writing, not to mention the whole Situation(TM) in the kpop fandom(s).

around the same time i decided to (once again) come back to the place that gave me the most space to spread my creative wings - warrior cats role play forum. as silly as it may sound, there's something comforting in creating a character in a world so simple yet so nuanced as this pbf's*. it's been around since 2007 i think, and i used to play there in high school, well before i got into kpop and "serious" fic writing, if writing fic could ever be called serious.

(*for anyone who wasn't around on the internet in the last decade and a half: pbf - play-by-forum. a way of roleplaying where the players all post on a forum board as their characters, sometimes with separate accounts for every character. the posts contain decriptions of what the character is doing and/or saying.)

also around september i found out i would actually be attending college again, this time studying something i had at least a mild interest in and planned to actually finish with a degree that i won't ever use for anything other than jokes. "the knowledge of film and audiovisual media" is a very long way of saying that i will have some basic understanding of any kind of media, but specifically movies. that lead to me writing stuff for classes - not only my first original fiction in literal years, but also my first serious stuff written in polish in 10 years at least. going so long without putting ideas onto a page in your native language does a number to your brain, maybe i'll talk about it someday. either way, i learned a shitton of things about the way stories are constructed. if i come back to writing fics, they're going to fit into the 3 act structure so sexily whenever i'd want them to.

and all this time, there's been something, like a swarm of ideas, rattling around in my skull. they weren't much, and some of them would require a lot of research, so i didn't even start working on them. i did make a pinterest board for one of them*; otherwise i just collected whatever inspired me to think about them on my tumblr blog or in one of my many notion notes. and that was it. some quotes, some artworks. just a bunch of stuff to keep my brain feeling fuzzy. maybe one day i'll write more about them here, but for now i'm scare that if i let them see the light of the internet in any shape or form, they might run away from me and never get finished nor started.

(*you can see it [here] but i don't think it would make any sense without whatever jumps around my cortex rn)

the problem started when i tried to actually focus on one of those ideas. i started jotting down the tropes that i wanted to play on, and the ones i wanted to avoid, the ones i wanted to bend and the ones i wanted to break into pieces and reassemble into something new. i went out of my way and tried reading more books in the genres i wanted to blend, i picked up stuff i would never notice and dug through libgen for books i've never thought existed. i started taking notes on who i wanted the characters to be. i started thinking about the world they enhabit.

and i found that i was stuck.

without the crutch of as much as a name and some archetypes that writing fanfiction gave me, i was completely lost. not even a semblance of a foothold, and i was drowning in the amount of things i had to come up with. somehow it's easier for me to have any kind of borders and limits than not having any at all. but this swarm, those ideas, don't care at all about what i find easy or hard or challenging. they want to be out of my brain, and that weird force, this creative current is absolutely all i can think about now.

there's a story inside me, crawling, coiling, rattling, eating me alive; it's trying to get out. it burns and i want it to be born already, but i have no idea how to get the energy to do it.

i'm so tired.