I just can’t wrap my head around writing gen

So today I got an email from FanFiction.net that someone added me to their Author Alert subscription. That’s cool. I think it means they clicked Follow on my user profile so they get notified whenever I post a new story. I think, rather than know, because Fanfiction.net’s Help is utter crap.

I post all of my stories (mostly slash but also some gen) on AO3 and I’ve also posted some on the S&H Archive.

I also have an account on FFN so I can post gen stories there exclusively, in case my mom or someone wants to see what I’ve written. But I really don’t like FFN’s user interface and I don’t get as many readers as I do on the other platforms (with the exception of one story).

But now that this person is following me, I feel somewhat motivated to post a new gen story on FFN. I might have other followers there as well, but I can’t figure out where to see that in my user profile, because like I said, their interface sucks.

Sooo…here is my dilemma. The first fic I ever wrote was gen, but the second was slash. And over the past year or so, I’ve had a harder and harder time writing gen stories, because the slash part of my brain makes them feel disingenuous to me. I want to write slash because that’s how I see the guys in my head. I want to write slash because that’s what makes me happy. So in order to write gen, I feel I have to turn off part of my brain and ignore the desire to put them together as a romantic couple.

Most of the gen stories I’ve written actually have a slash counterpart. Meaning — that either I wrote a gen version first, wasn’t satisfied with it, and wrote an alternate slash version — or, I wrote the slash version first and then removed any traces of romance/sexual attraction for the gen version. Either way, I personally prefer the slash versions.

I’ve only written three gen stories that have no slash counterpart. The first is a short crack fic suggested by my then-12-year-old son. The second is a short h/c fic where I wanted to concentrate on the friendship/comfort and decided that the slash part wasn’t necessary and wouldn’t have added anything more to the story that wasn’t already being conveyed. And the third is a deathfic which focuses on friendship, loss, and grief, and that didn’t require a slash component. (Although a couple of months later, I wrote another deathfic that absolutely required a slash component).

So now I have to try to come up with an idea for a gen story that I can post on FFN. And then I’ll probably end up doing a slash version of it anyway, which is the REAL story I want to tell.