Archive
The links below are for the pre-rewrite version of Sleeping Habits.
Read online: archive.today
Downloads
Rewrite info (for the curious)
See original announcement here, posted on August 04, 2025. This version has been edited to be up-to-date.
For several months, Sleeping Habits was hidden on AO3 while I did extensive re-writes/changes. When I re-uploaded it, I posted it in chunks, took another unplanned hiatus, then finally posted the last re-written chapter on June 1, 2026.
About 54% of chapters 1-25 is new text, with about 45k words added and 31k words removed.1 Three new chapters have been added in between what were previously chapters 5/6, 9/10 and 15/16. Old chapter 10 was split into two chapters as well.
If you’re curious to hear me ramble about what was changed overall and why, see below. (This is not super interesting; it’s mostly just a bunch of personal reflection that I struggled to organize into anything coherent.)
what changed (broadly):
- Improved pacing (hopefully) and characterization (hopefully)
- Added two new chapters
- Removed or revised setup for things I’ve scrapped
- Added setup for things I have planned
- Adjusted tone in a lot of areas
ok what actually changed
no more jmart
What
ok yes, but that’s been true for a while. that’s not actually the main reason I decided to rewrite it.
At the heart of it, it’s just that I realized the story I was writing in 2024 was not the same story I started writing in 2021. My plans for it kept changing even as I was writing it originally, then even more when I came back to it last year, and now it’s something entirely different.
I wrote a long thing explaining how it’s changed and the different iterations it has gone through, but ultimately, it pretty much boils down to “I started writing a whump fic where Martin saves Jon from evil scary Elias four five years ago, then became more interested in the J/E relationship and wanted to develop that further instead." I disliked Jon's lack of agency, and I was unhappy with the ending I had originally planned, which was going to be a fairly generic sort of fix-it with Elias ending up dead and JMart riding into the sunset.
Needless to say that plan has changed a lot.
Anyway, I actually could’ve kept most of what I had written and still made it work. But I started looking at how much I had left to do, and if I was going to spend multiple years on an age regression fic of all things, then I at least wanted an end product I could be somewhat proud of.
I originally took it down and told myself I would give myself one day to revise each chapter. That was in November. (2026 note: it was down for about 8-9 months)
Anyway, even after re-writing it, I still feel like it’s not the kind of fic I would write nowadays. I did not set out to write a novel-length Magnus Archives age regression fanfiction. I would never set out to write a novel-length Magnus Archives age regression fanfiction. It just kind of happened. It’s an extremely bizarre piece of writing that has only turned out this way because it has been torn apart and put back together so many times.
So why not just scrap it and write something new? Because this stupid fic has cursed me and I can never escape it, for one thing. But I also just have a sentimental attachment to it, I think.
I started it during a strange time in my life (graduated during the beginning of covid, had a shitty office job, was trying to decide whether to go to grad school or not). Writing this fic got me active in fandom again, encouraged me to start drawing again, I ended up meeting a lot of my very close friends because of it, etc. I think it sort of gave me a creativity and confidence boost that directly or indirectly affected a bunch of other things in my life, and I've very grateful for all of the connections I've made because of it.
Will I finish it? I hope so. I’m planning on it, I have the next few chapters drafted and the rest of the fic outlined. Maybe it’ll take me another 2 years, idk. But I’m going to try.
Thanks for reading my weird ass fic.
1. using difflib, ignoring punctuation and capitalization changes. (my original script over-estimated the number of words changed)