The color of infinity inside an empty glass

I ended up taking a few more days away from the cursed witch to edit the fic I'm writing for the sunflower_auction, which was good both because I really like what this fic turned into!!! :D I hope the recip does, too! And I guess it gave my brain more time to think about the ending of the cursed witch.

And the conclusion is that it wasn't enough time and I still don't know. There are elements of the resolution I'm still unhappy with, no matter what angle I look at them from. And in the last post, I was thinking that removing the more obvious f/f bits to better set up the f/f/f endgame in the sequel would work well, but the thought of removing the most obvious queer bits and ending up with a story where the queer storylines are all subtext or background massively, unexpectedly bummed me out. Huge downer, mentally. So I'll have to work out a different solution. I'm playing with different ideas that could work to set things up without making it all look dusted and done (and may incidentally "solve" the "relationship is too perfect!" comment I got) but I have to be careful because it is the end of the story and I want a generally hopeful ending, and not something half-baked that leaves the reader frustrated and opens up new narrative question marks way too late in the story.

However, I can't leave the draft alone any longer. Letting projects hang midway is the worst thing for me, I just really struggle to pick them back up and remember all the threads I was working with. (One of the reasons I'm dreading returning to the Soul Thief because I was midway or two-thirds of the way through creating the post-draft outline back in January, and I don't know where to pick it back from. I can't just pick up that outline again. My brain will try to remember what I meant to do and think then, rather than just do it. Realistically, I probably should restart that step from scratch and treat all previous notes as extras, as if someone else (vriddy from the past!!) had taken a look at it and left me a few partial notes, but redoing work I know I already did before is also a bummer.) (I'll figure it out for sure, it's just more energy and way more activation energy required overall, so I really don't want to do that to myself when I can avoid it at all.)

So! My current plan is to leave the ending as is with no major changes. Just do the smaller edits, add the conversations and easy missing bits that had left people with questions in a couple of places, and leave myself good notes about the problems I see and the potential solutions I have in mind. Then let it rest, don't even do the pacing stuff yet. I'll do a reread in a couple months (without reading the notes!) and see what I think then.

That way, I'll still have a complete story to work with when it's time to hammer down the final pieces. I'm not overly worried either because I'm happy about the changes I made up to now (well, also worried it all sucks, but happy generally). It's only the epilogue and the last bit of the previous chapter I'm gnawing on, so about 5k words out of 57k that'll likely need reworking. Hopefully my brain comes up with something cool in the background XD Counting on you, brain!!