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Am I the only one who feels like two weeks in December are not the same as two weeks in any other month of the year?  It’s amazing how busy life gets around the holidays.  This year, throw in covid, the flu, that other virus thing swarming around, along with my family being split between multiple states for the first time in years, an impromptu work trip, and pet sitting for two weeks, and just…yikes.  I’m looking forward to the holiday season ending.

Pet sitting might sound easy, but my sister’s dog has a…difficult…personality.  Mostly, she just doesn’t like other people or animals, which makes it hard since I have two dogs.  Violet knows to leave her alone, but Newton is still very much a nosy puppy.  He just wants to be friends!!  Lots of barking going on around here…and shuffling them around so no one gets snapped…and counting down the days for my sister to get home!

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to make progress on other stories but feel relatively unsuccessful.  My mind’s been a bit of a mess due to how busy things are.  What I’ve found is that I can do some casual writing but sitting down and focusing on a specific chapter?  Forget about it.  This makes me think that maybe I should just try writing a oneshot instead of working on anything long or serious…at least until things settle down around here.

I’ve been working on the cops and robbers AU story though!  And I might have started a separate Google Doc for what might be the inevitable White Rose companion fic.  The situation feels very similar to Dream Theory where Weiss is stealing the scene whenever she appears, making you want to know so much more about her background and how she and Ruby got together.

I think this happens because whenever I give Weiss a small side role, I tend to give her a large personality despite her minimal impact in that particular story.  Whatever the cause, now I have another story that I’d like to write if I can ever convince my mind to do it.  I hope to finish these one day!  I really enjoy the storylines and these slightly different versions of familiar characters.

In the meantime, we’re rapidly nearing the end of Waiting (on You).  Which is great, right?  I think we all deserve a resolution by now, and you can probably feel the shift in Yang’s mentality that’s occurred over the past few chapters.  Homegirl’s finally gotten a clue or two!  Who knew that getting hit by a car would be so effective?

Not that getting hit by a car was the moment of enlightenment - I didn’t want to cheapen Yang’s personal growth by having that be the case, but the way Blake handled everything in the hospital definitely added to Yang’s certainty that she has the best BFF+ in the world.  The + obviously encapsulates all of those pesky other feelings that Yang has been dealing with recently.

Chapter 15 was a bit of a ‘settle into a new normal’ type of chapter.  We got through the whole ordeal with Sun.  We got through a hospital incident.  Now, we get to see them doing regular things and see how recent events have impacted their relationship.  Shockingly, they’re even cuter than before!

Sidenote - I don’t know exactly what Yang’s job is, but it sounds pretty perfect for her personality in this particular story.  She seems to be in charge of everything from sorting old scripts to taking care of zoo animals being used during filming.  That would probably be a really interesting job!  You’d never know what to expect when you get to work.  Zebras or coffee stains?

Plus, Pyrrha works there…that automatically makes it one of the best workplaces ever.

Adding Pyrrha to stories is always such a joy, and I’m not going to stop doing it.  I think I’ve cemented her role as Yang’s BFF at this point.  It just seems like they would be really good friends!  They’re both so beautiful that they would make the ultimate duo.  Kind of like in Red Carpet Romance!

Which reminds me that maybe I should try to crank out another chapter of that for when WoY ends…I don’t know if I had another chapter planned though or if I’ll be fumbling in the dark for a bit.  I don’t know how I ever posted chapters without the entire story being finished first!  I guess this is one of the common side effects of doing that - you move on to other stories and leave some dangling for eternity.  RCR was never really supposed to have an end though…I mean, there isn’t really a plot that needs to be tied up.  Perhaps once Blake and Yang get married I could end it with a ‘happily ever after?’  That seems like the most logical place to stop.  They’re not even engaged yet though…

I’ll worry about that later though!  Back to this story for now.

I’ve developed a newfound appreciation recently for using Ilia as another one of Blake’s ‘crew.’  I still really like Sun as her BFF/person who makes other characters (*cough* Yang) jealous, but Ilia is great as someone friendly yet obviously harboring a massive crush on Blake, but who never acts on it because she meets Yang and is like, ‘Ah, yes.  I get it.’

Poor Ilia though!  We need to get her a girl.  Who would she pair up with?  Is there anyone in the show that makes sense for her?  I need to know so that I can add them as a side character for our side character.

Ilia’s comments to Yang should make us really want to know what Blake says at work.  I want to know what Blake says in general, I guess.  That’s one of the drawbacks from only writing from one perspective: we never get to hear the other person’s thoughts.

I’ve read a couple of books recently that flip back and forth between the two main characters though and I didn’t quite enjoy it.  I think I would have liked it more if one character’s intentions remained a little more opaque, so we have to glean information through their words and actions.  Having both POVs is great in that the readers know where everyone stands but not what’s going to happen.  I suppose I just enjoy a bit of mystery, which I try to do through keeping one person’s POV hidden from us.

I could write all of Waiting (on You) through Blake’s POV though and it would probably be a riot.  So much frustration and patience followed by more frustration and disbelief, then understanding and plenty of reminders that it’s a marathon not a sprint.  She’s the tortoise, not the hare.

But she’s winning now.  Finally.

I would argue that she’s always been winning, but it was hard to tell when Yang was so busy masking her feelings in the most ill-advised ways possible.  Now that Yang’s not hiding behind first dates with random pretty strangers, the only thing she can do is focus on Blake.  And that’s a recipe for success (for Blake, at least).

Chapter 15 was so mellow that I almost don’t know what to say about it other than, “Look how cute and mellow they are!”  Picking up pizza on a Friday night…that’s it.  That’s the chapter.  But it’s so much more than that.

Yang and Kali had their shopping date just like they planned way back in that birthday chapter.  I imagine they had an absolute blast together.  Just Kali and her “beautiful blonde daughter-in-law” taking the mall by storm, doing some damage to their credit cards.

Blake probably really wanted to go too - not for the shopping, per se, but just to spend time with them even if it meant carrying their bags and being forced to try on new clothes that she didn’t want.  But she also wanted Yang to have some alone time with her mom.  I think that’s so sweet of her and also shows just how well she knows Yang.

Now I’m thinking about how awkward I would feel if one of my friends (or partner, I guess, since that’s what Yang really is to Blake) went shopping with my mom without me.  Like…they’re absolutely going to talk about me.  But what will they say?  Are they going to talk about me all the time?  Will my mom accidentally say something that probably shouldn’t be said?  (Like “My daughter is totally in love with you.  Why don’t you ask her out already?”)

I bet Kali got a very firm talking-to prior to this adventure.  NO implying that they’re married, dating, or otherwise romantically together.  NO suggestions that they start dating or become romantically involved.  NO embarrassing kid stories.  NO talking about previous relationships.  NO joking about Sun (Blake probably emphasized that one multiple times).

Kali probably nods along and assures Blake that she’ll behave.  Of course, her version of ‘behave’ includes making passing comments about Blake in Yang’s presence then sitting back and enjoying the results.  ‘The results’ being that Yang immediately launches into a long-winded flattery of Blake in return.  But Kali is sly, so she would never step too far out of line.  She just knows what she wants - Blake and Yang to finally get together - and isn’t afraid to nudge them in that direction.

I love looking forward to the future when Kali is Yang’s mother-in-law.  They’ll have an incredible relationship though, much to Blake’s consternation (but also joy).  In this particular universe, they probably call each other all the time to gossip, and Yang inevitably gets drawn into Kali’s covert war on the homeowner’s association.

Ok, enough about Kali - though I could talk about her for quite a while, it seems.  I know I brought up a while ago how I avoid using specific brand or place names in stories because I feel like those yank readers out of the story a little too much.  Also, there are a lot of rwby fans outside of the US, so some references might not even make sense.  So I mostly try to keep things as generic as possible to avoid interrupting someone’s immersion, causing confusion, but also to make sure the stories don’t age poorly.

For example, I used a generic restaurant name for the cafe/deli where Weiss and Cardin go for one of the most heartbreaking chapters in the story.  I didn’t want anyone to care about where they were more than what was happening, but I could have used a real restaurant like…Souplantation.

Let’s pretend that Weiss would even set food in Souplantation.  Maybe she would!  She might like it, actually - though definitely not at first.

Anyway, eight years ago (around when I wrote the story!) Souplantation was fairly common in certain regions of the US.  Flash forward to today and they’re all closed.  If I used the name in Rush though, people reading today would fall into one of several possible reactions.

A lot of people outside of the U.S. (and even in the U.S.) are going to think, “Souplantation is a weird name.  Did Miko make that up?  Is it supposed to be real?”

Another group of people who know the restaurant are probably going to either think, “LOL Cardin took Weiss to a Souplantation” or “Souplantation?  Didn’t they go out of business?”

The act of someone getting hung up on the name is a failure in this case.  I want readers to get hung up on the important things, like why did Cardin drag Weiss out to lunch and how big of an ass will he be this time.  The restaurant doesn’t matter in that scene.  If the restaurant did matter, then it should have a catchy name.

That was a really long-winded way to lead us into a similar instance that I noticed in Chapter 15, which I never thought about before - prices.

Yang and Blake’s pizza costs $14.50, which again probably means less to anyone outside of the U.S.  But other people probably thought either, “That’s expensive” or “That’s cheap” or they didn’t think anything at all because $14.50 matches their expectation for what a pizza costs.

If anyone reads this story ten years ago, they’ll most likely all agree that $14.50 is way too cheap for a pizza.

TLDR; I should be more cautious when adding prices to stories unless they mean something.  In most cases, the price doesn’t matter.  In those cases, I should just gloss over it so that we never even learn the price.

Who wants to know the price of a pizza when we have emotional angst to contend with??  In these two chapters, that angst arrives in the form of Raven.

Did you think we’d get a story about Yang’s mom issues without Raven showing up?  It seemed that way, didn’t it?

I’m actually a big fan of Raven and Yang’s relationship even though it’s incredibly sucky.  It’s appropriately sucky, I guess.  As in, it helps explain another large part about why Yang has developed such an aversion to putting herself in the position to be hurt or abandoned.  She’s already been abandoned by one mom, then lost another - which obviously wasn’t Summer’s fault but probably still felt like abandonment in some respects.  And she saw how much her dad suffered as a result.  I think it’s fair for her to say, ‘Nope!  Not doing any of that.’

Raven is so callous though - I kind of love it and hate it at the same time.  She’s an interesting character, I suppose, and it feels like you can do a lot with her.  She skews toward the dark side though, which I don’t write a lot.  I hope that she cares more about Yang in canon…because this version of her is pretty dismissive of Yang’s feelings.

I will give myself a light pat on the back for giving her a job with the military or whatever Vale’s equivalent of the CIA is.  She’s probably a spy or some other sort of undercover informant working abroad, which I thought was a beautiful excuse for her to appear and disappear on a dime without a message or note sent in between.

Because she’s pursuing a ‘righteous’ goal, she’ll never understand why Yang is so upset at her.  And maybe she is doing a good thing, but this is Yang’s POV we’re working with, and Yang just really needed a mom.  I guess it would be hard to hear someone talk about the sacrifices they’ve made for the country when you were one of the sacrifices.  Like, “Gee, that’s great.  Would’ve been nice to have a mom though.”

As much as Chapter 16 was Yang’s moment to deal with a lingering part of her mom issues, it also proved that Blake is the one for Yang.  Blake has already proven that time and time again, but this chapter shows it - she doesn’t even need to do anything other than be there to support Yang.

Internally, I bet she’s saying much more than we hear in the chapter.  She’s running the gamut of, “This is Yang’s mom?  Wow, I can see the resemblance” to “This isn’t going well.  Maybe I should give them some privacy” to “Ok, no wonder Yang hardly wants to talk about her” to “We could have been bowling…”

Primarily, she’s probably worried about how Yang will handle this, and how Yang ‘handling’ it might affect their relationship.  Because this is the point where Yang could easily tip back into her ‘I never want a relationship ever’ mindset, erasing all of the progress that’s been made.  They end up kissing instead.

In a cemetery.

I can’t tell you how many times I went back and forth on that part.  On the one hand, the emotions felt right.  On the other hand, they’re in a cemetery.  A nice cemetery!  But still a cemetery.  I didn’t want it to be weird, but the emotions were there and, ultimately, I sided with the emotions.  (Yang and Blake did, too.)

I also wanted to make it clear that the two kisses after Yang’s accident weren’t forgotten.  They’ve become kissing friends now, and that’s just a half step away from where we want them to go.

There are only 5 chapters left now, which doesn’t seem like long enough.  At the same time, I’m excited for everyone to see the ending!  This is probably one of the few stories that I would go back and read again in a few years.  It gives me warm fuzzies each and every time.  Maybe I’ll print this one so that I can put it on my shelf…

But anyway, that’s all I have for now - other than wishing everyone a happy holidays and even happier new year!


Until next time,

Miko

Comments

Ben Lockwood

Miko, someday we need to see a Kali-centric story. We all love her character and it sees liek it might be a lot of fun to write? Perhaps a one-shot of Kali vs the Homeowners Association?