on my writing process: a lot of my fics have commentary that accompany them, particularly the longer ones or the more meaningful ones, and that tends to explain the process in detail for that specific fic. for the other ones that don’t have commentary, it’s likely bc i have less to say or the fic was so unplanned that i have no idea what to even say.

either way, the idea comes first. every fic begins with the plot itself, and i weave in the characters or the ship afterwards. sometimes i pick the ship based on who it would fit best, and sometimes i pick the ship to bend them into that situation.
for example (and i picked these examples specifically bc they don't have commentaries out yet or at all):
a fic where i picked the ship based on who it would fit best: everything glows
a fic where i picked the ship to bend them into that situation: surface tension

with everything glows, the initial idea had actually been a gyucheol fic, with seungcheol in jeonghan's position. but the more i started thinking about this fic, and roughly outlining it bc it's a longer fic and i do need like 3 bullet points per chapter just so i can maintain momentum; though i will say three chapters in and i have not stuck to that initial outline at all, so. there is that. anyway. this particular fic needed more of a familial weight to it and i love seungcheol, but he is also the cherished family darling. he didn't suit the story the way jeonghan, eldest son, and mingyu, eldest son, both did. and similarly, because the main pairing changed, the tone of the story and the dynamic also naturally changed to match these characters.

on the other hand, surface tension was not a planned fic. coming off the lowest of lows of the mcat and how draining studying for that and preparing for med school applications was, this was an entirely self serving fic. a time capsule of all the misery of the past few months, with a happier ending than reality because what is fiction is not escapism? that being said, this would have been a perfect jeongcheol fic. swap out mingyu with jeonghan, who's naturally got lower stamina and isn't necessarily the king of positivity, and it would've worked. but i wanted to write gyucheol, so okay, switch them out again and mingyu is the entertainment industry office worker while seungcheol is the jaded and burnout grad student—except, the idea for this fic came from that very first scene of the little brother showing up after witnessing that traumatic event. initially, it would've been easy enough to write both hansol and seungcheol as brothers—except, again, one of my favorite things about writing seungcheol is that he is such a younger brother and taking that away takes away some of the shapes of his character—but i also wanted to explore burnout from the pov of someone who doesn't seem as prone to it. from here, the fic took the shape it did and seungcheol gets to be a cute family maknae while also being a doting hyung for mingyu.

as for my editing process: it's kinda. nonexistent. i write in ellipsus, so i lose the spell check, but i have a copy of the google doc that converts text to html for ao3 posting, so i don't lose the formatting when i like to play around with that, so the only real editing that happens is 3 months later when i'm rereading a fic and i notice a typo and it bothers me so much that i end up sitting up and editing it... only to see another typo and give up and put it off for another day. jokes aside, any developmental editing takes place while i'm writing and rudimentary grammar/copy editing takes place after, when it's been long enough that i can just sift through and make those edits, rather than get caught up in reading my story.