#<- yes I'm still bitter about what they did to my boy WW in the three guns reboot iykyk

[according2thelore]

Are you still doing the ask game?

If yes, have you answered for:

5, 25, and (I'm so scared to ask) 30 😭😭😭

hi, anon! <3

i will ALWAYS answer ask games, haha! :) thank you for the ask!

5. What's a tag you never want to use for your works even when it applies?

"bittersweet ending" or "unhappy ending" (and variations therein, like "angst with unhappy ending," "no happy ending," etc.)

those tags immediately have me clicking out of a fic, i'm not going to lie. so i'm always trying to rationalize it to people about to click on my fic like "b-but 🥺 i promise it's more sweet than bitter bestie 🥺pls don't do this to us🥺"

only a few of my fics have this even apply to them, but whenever they do i go...hm...maybe i can put this as spoilers at the bottom of the fic instead? </3

25. Is writing the whole thing beforehand better or worse than writing it as you go?

depends! for fics over 20k i prefer an outline.

for example, when writing the BUABS rewrite, i watched the whole episode and took notes on canon timeline (i had a literal time line of events lol), and mannerisms meg!sam did when she thought she was losing control of a situation. that outline sheet was pretty funny, lol, but other than that i pretty much free-handed it.

i could NOT have gotten through or made "house song" or "we didn't get it right" coherent without an outline. for plot-heavy fics, i prefer to do an outline, and i still have most of them if y'all are ever interested, lol.

but if it's under 20k, outlining becomes tedious and the helpfulness decreases exponentially. sometimes, fics get away from me. for example, i didn't have an outline for "love potion no. 9," the hanahaki fic, or "souls tied." your average according2thelore fic has no outline at all.

30. Describe a fic that almost happened, but didn't.

oh boy! there were multiple! i have almost written a million fics, with varying levels of completion/planning. here are a few that came the closest!

fic where dean is cursed to think sam has abandoned him, and can't see sam no matter what sam says or what he does; sam has to find the cure while watching dean go through all of his stages of grief for him. [reason for abandonment: no plot, lmao; originally mean to fill "isolation" space for WW July]

fic where they get accidentally married, can't get farther than a mile away from each other without collapsing, and have to go on a quest to get a magical divorce but end up realizing they don't actually want to get a divorce [reason for abandonment: way too ambitious for a WW July fic; originally mean to fill "in sickness and in health" space]

"someone was listening" was meant to be a ~30k fic exploring more of junior's resentment of dean. i wrote a two page outline of what i wanted to happen, it was gonna be huge. [reason for abandonment: ran out of time, plain and shrimple. i'm still not super happy with it, and hope i can eventually come back and actually finish it.]

quote: "So much of my life has been about you. So much of my life was spent waiting for you, like you'd walk back in through the front door any second. Dad kept your keys on the hook." "You and Dad didn't talk for a few years, right? Before you came to pick him up from school? It was like, my whole life, Dad was just waiting for you to come pick him up again."

fic where sam has to decide what to do with all of dean's items after he's dead (i.e., toothbrush, dishes, clothes, trinkets, DVDs, records, etc.). i put up a couple of snippets for a wip ask game a while back! [reason for abandonment: i simply could not live in that constant wave of consuming grief. my stomach would sink every time i opened the doc; written originally for a WW event, can't remember which prompt though.]

thank you again for this ask, anon! <3

from this writer's ask game here!

-lizzy