oh thank you!! i just logged back into this retrospring acc and saw this message!

thank you so so much for reading taking to water. im really touched to know that you connected with it and got so much from it! i spent months watching fishing and camping videos to capture the feeling of this fic (haha to this day I've still never ever been fishing or to busan) so im glad that it was as immersive and atmospheric as i wanted it to be.

honestly even though the fic is about jusang and stuff I've never done or places I've never been to, it's still a personal fic to me. thematically, it tackles a lot of struggles with sexuality and societal expectations that i related to, but seeing all the comments from people who read this and also related to it touches me too because now i see that everyone goes through similar things as me and im not as alone as i thought.

yes, I've retired from tbz ficdom but i still occasionally look at them and i am happy to see them all doing well and thriving, and also praying for that world tour to come so i can finally see them live. i may not write for them anymore but i still have a soft spot for them. i thought about doing another similar type of long au fic about haknyeon in hong kong, but that never manifested. im not entirely out of the kpop fic space though, since my retirement I've been writing boys planet/bp adjacent fic but now i think I'm even growing out of that. there's only one fandom now that i think i could start writing for longer-term but well... that would be a different retrospring answer.

thank you so much for leaving this in my retrospring. this made me reflect a lot about the past year and a half since i posted that fic, and im happy to say that even though there were a lot of rough times, im overall doing quite well. i hope you are well too anon!

ahhh hi!! i just saw this question sorry TT thank you so much for your words! i really do like toying with the idea that seongmin pines over allen and i am just fascinated by how seongmin is with other people vs with allen. ill let you know that i was tinkering around with a seongllen idea where seongmin goes back in time/starts having dreams where he meets early jyp trainee allen! early jyp trainee allen is still not used to being in korea/being a trainee/being on his own, has less control over his emotions, dressed differently, spoke differently, had different friends. i think it would be a very drastically different allen from the one seongmin met/knows that is much more gentle and controlled and polished, and i wanna see how seongmin would handle meeting that version of allen and how he can reconcile that allen with the one he knows. but well I'm not sure I'll get to this one haha boys planet is about to air... so we'll see. thanks for the question!

i already wrote a tiny bit of a changyeon before- its daisy x the stealer promo overlap and the ol' reliable music show bathroom situation! so id probably continue that. i think i had a good thing going on in that drabble, about how sangyeon would slowly, methodically, try to take changgu apart. it would be a fun contrast between the quick and nasty bathroom hookup expectation and the slow patience in the way sangyeon takes him apart.

well if i don't do that though i could do like... changsangjoon. yeah i know you hate sangjoon but you see i have an illness its called sangjoon disease. i think it could be one of those "changgu becomes our third" situations- oh i have an idea. maybe changgu gets a bit drunk at a party and kisses seungjoon and then later on kisses sangyeon only to find out the next day that they're dating. but they're not mad. in fact they want him to come back. yknow that one meme, i don't have it on hand but the one where someone kissed a couple one night and the next day they're in a gc with the couple and they ask them if they got home safe? that kind of situation. because i can't NOT write established sangjoon. but hey you get a nice changgu third situation. think about it, seungjoon guiding changgu on how to push all of sangyeons buttons just right or maybe seungjoon and sangyeon teaming up to ruin changgu. what about that

oooh! thats a really interesting idea! i think it could really work as a long-form type of fic and if i were to do it, id have sangyeon raising a little girl and jacob w a kinda rebellious teenager, both of them on their own after their respective divorces. jacob is the one moving in next door w his teenager and when setting things up he comes over to sangyeon's to borrow something and the two of them end up bonding over being single dads and doing traditionally "dad" things as jacob moves in. i think jacob having a rebellious teenager would give him the chance to then confide in sangyeon about it and they can get even closer talking about parenting. maybe jacob's teen could even help babysit sangyeon's daughter and become more well tempered... i think this would overall be a pretty light story if i took a stab at it?? maybe jacob's kid is babysitting sangyeon's kid and sangyeon goes out into the backyard w jacob and they share a few beers and get to talking about their divorces and how nobody really gets it except each other... and then they kiss! ohohoh if i keep talking and thinking about this i might really end up doing it huh ><

i quite liked writing sangric's dynamic in the first portion of the story because it kinda encapsulates everything the reader has to know about sangyeon: he loves his family, he's the calm to eric's restlessness, he really appreciates his company and having someone to look after, and when eric is gone it just shows how lonely sangyeon feels in busan yknow? and i feel so bad for having to drop my sangric so im making up for it here lol. sangric are just super close and cute irl like sangyeon really takes care of him like his own lil bro so writing it was really easy for me. other than sangric i liked writing milnyu (chanhee and jaehyun) too because like the milnyu dynamic is super interesting on its own. like ive been on the milnyu train for a while now and i swear to god i will finish my milnyu wips when im done with fishback. but in this story, they start off mainly as comic relief but jaehyun experiences some character development over the course of it (im not gonna say too much haha) and its kinda fun to watch their relationship evolve through it! (also originally the dynamic between jaehyun chanhee and younghoon was going to be quite different... jaehyun was supposed to have a crush on chanhee but spoiler... i scrapped that idea lol)

you know what? yes. i like their chemistry together a lot! i think they get along together really well because jangjun is unhinged and woong is hinged enough to keep him from his worst impulses while also being able to join in on his fun and Make Him Worse sometimes! if you want to add the canon compliant angle i think theyre both fully aware of their identities and how much of their idol personas are fake/how theyre selling out which is really interesting. i guess it lets them play it up more for the cameras because they know its all a show but at the same time the two of them actually getting to know each other's real sides... very interesting

OK.ok ok ok let me try and write i cant believe i can ever n wite in this point
i think the most likely way Should be like exo and ptg overlapping promos for group music should be the case but like at this rate ptg will be on a yearly cb sched.. and who knows when we'll get group exo promos... so i think they might even be more likely to bump into each other during individual promos. chanyeol acts on occasion but jinho doesnt do pure acting. but wait... what if they get casted in a musical together?
oh my god i wouldlove to see that.. because ... i could watch the musical and search for any interactions and also tie it into the screenplay source materiall... maybe like yeah and they have to be around each other for extended periods of time...???????? please cast them. in musical. what musical should they do together?