this is completely self-indulgent but i'm going to be threading a few random process tidbits about this story as they come to mind - i have been living in it for MONTHS lmao and now i can finally share random shit https://twitter.com/boldsurvive/status/1250216904783990786

first of all, here is the initial rough google maps itinerary i put together when i initially mapped out where i wanted them to go: https://tinyurl.com/t2qwgqb 

as you can see, a few of the places they ended up going aren't on here, but shanghai/hang zhou/hengdian are all clustered close enough together that it was easy to do separate google maps searches when i got to that part of the narrative

secondly, for a while at the end of january/beginning of february, when i was in the thick of writing, hunantv's twitter account kept fucking scooping my ideas ( @bonbonruru can attest to how much i whined at her about this)

that second tweet felt especially egregious at the time because i had literally JUST finished the first full draft of the story like, two days prior

stop spying on my gdocs, hunantv

also, obviously, earlier today xz released a blog post about chongqing (you should read it, it's very good) and his shoutout to jiefangbei (the pedestrian square in downtown chongqing) made me very happy

believe it or not i did not actually set out to write car sex in this story either the whole sequence where xz thinks about "bringing wyb home before they've even defined the relationship" was actually supposed to happen AT WYB'S HOUSE

but then as i was writing the driving scene my hands were like, nope, this is happening RIGHT now, sorry, time for xz to be brave and also for them to bone in the audi - which i guess ended up being sort of thematic given how much time they spend in the car

that's all i can think of right now off the top of my head, but i'm sure i'll come back to this thread when some other thought resurfaces eventually! thank you for indulging my navel-gazing and long-windedness