#It looked beautiful but I guess I'll never actually find it because of these dickheads

[kay-elle-cee]

wow i really wish i could find the lily fanart i clicked into the lily evans tag to see

absolutely losing my patience here

DO NOT TAG THINGS FOR REACH. IF YOUR POST HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CHARACTER YOU'RE TAGGING, YOU ARE DOING TUMBLR WRONG AND YOU ARE PISSING PEOPLE OFF.

[essayofthoughts]

For the weird questions ask game, 10 and 13?

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

In terms of writing that I keep on returning to - overwhelmingly the HP fic series The Sacrifices Arc. It has it's flaws but it takes a whole load of the ideas JKR started out with and then went wibbly on and actually continues them - would it be possible to break down the boundaries between magical and muggle? Shouldn't the house elves and centaurs and veela all be freer than they're seen to be canon? It also has some of the most beautiful prose I've ever seen and there's a few scenes and quotes I perpetually return to - last time pays for all is a quote I cannot get out of my head and what is in my hands to give, I will provide with open palms.

It's also just... a really great look at manipulation and subsequent trauma, codependency and self-abnegation and while I take issue with some of the healing process it has some fantastic moments too. It's just... there's a lot of this fic which is #Goals to me and I don't think I'll ever forget it.

In terms of what of my own writing has haunted me - mostly unfinished things I want to finish at some point? The one that's really haunting me, albeit quietly, is a Vampire Apocalypse Wanda/Vision fic I started and was slowly chipping away at before Critical Role ate my brain. Once I've got through a lot of these WIPs I'd like to go back to that, especially because I think a lot of the skills I'm learning from my current WIPs will help me awfully with that.

As for what haunting means - something which recurs, which comes back, an emotion repeatedly evoked that you can't escape. That's what I define it as for the purposes of this question.

13. What is a subject matter that is incredibly difficult for you write about? What is easy?

Difficult... I don't know. I'll be honest that I've generally stuck to writing what I know I'm good at and gradually increased what that means. I'm bad at writing smut but I don't really consider it a subject matter I have incredible difficulty with - that implies, at least to me, a more mental difficulty with tackling it. There's certainly subjects I don't like to write, but...

I spent a good chunk of counselling trying to figure out why my dickhead ex did the things he did to me so while I can be quite uncomfortable writing things based on what I figured out from that it's not difficult. I know what I mean to write. It just leaves me feeling kind of gross.

And... I think that kind of ends up being the crux of it, really? There's things I'll probably never write because I don't feel comfortable writing them, and some of that's specific subject matter and some of it's themes, but I don't consider those an answer, really, because it's less "Incredibly difficult" and more "I flatly refuse" - I'm not even going to try, encounter that difficulty, and stop, I'm just nixing it out of the gate.

On the easy end of things - I think people have probably guessed looking at my fic that I am competent, comfortable and at times happy to write codependency, trauma, manipulation and even the precise dynamics of abuse as long as I get to address all of those things and provide at least some degree of investigation of the consequences and possible healing. That's stuff I find interesting, for all of the horribleness, and I find it fulfilling to try to find new ways to show it to people who don't have any familiarity to it. I've got several fics at this point where a part of my goal is to show to people without any experience in that area what those experiences and the healing process can be like so - yeah, I find that kind of thing almost easy, because it's familiar and I understand it and I'm very, very practiced at it.

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