galadhir

Title: A Meditation Upon the Dawn, by Lan Xichen
Author: Galadhir
Word Count/Drabble Type: 100 words
Character(s)/Ship(s): Lan Xichen/Jin Guangyao (remembered)
Rating/Warnings: None
Summary: Lan Xichen stands at the doorway of his seclusion and muses about the sunrise in Cloud Recesses

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Where there are no shadows one may attain a kind of snow blindness. Light, in its perfection, robs the eyes of sight, even as the tomb, closing, blots out all hopes, thoughts and dreams.

Early morning. I stand by my half open door and look out at the sunrise. There, at the horizon, night and day are co-mingled in glory. A burst of gold more splendid than any Jin-created tower. A colourless dew-drop coruscates upon the water-weighted pine. I step forward, exaltation kindling in my heart.

And then the clouds return.

In mist too there is a kind of blindness.

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

Chapter 6

Meng Yao frowns, his brain clattering to a halt. “You think my arm is haunted?” 

CWs: non-descriptive medical procedures... and an exorcism! :)

Notes:

I must have been very tired when I recorded this one because I had to edit out a full quarter of it where I was audibly breathing, yawning or coughing. When I complained as much to the folks on Mastodon bluedreaming@fandom.ink sent me a meme saying "Get rid of the breaths! We can't let people know we breathe!" Which is now my new motto

Bane of my life this week - the word 'zither.'



Chapter 6 is up here