#Sorry the birthdays are vague but i haven't settled on what I want the specifics to be!

[muppenthings]

🎂 BIRTHDAY CAKE - when is their birthday? do they like celebrating it?

💥 COLLISON - what emotions do they have trouble dealing with?

😨 FEARFUL - when scared, do they go into "flight" or "fight"?

🤥 LYING - are they good liars? do they have tells to show they're lying?

For Frida, Pyrra and erzika

🎂- Frida's birthday is in the winter and she will be extremely disappointed if it's not celebrated. We're talking kicked puppy level of sadness. Pyrra's born in spring and she does like throwing a party in celebration, but it's mainly an excuse to get rowdy. Erzikas' species hatches early in the spring, during a period they call Kuzed. So they have a collective celebration that lasts the entire period (roughly a month). Erzikas is very happy to not have to participate in those anymore. Singing? Dancing? Hatchlings?!? No let me fight giant creatures!

💥 - Pyrra doesn't handle sadness very well, she'll do many things to distract herself from it. Some strategies are better than others. Frida is bad with stress, if that's an emotion. She makes bad decisions and kinda stop thinking when stressed. Erzikas is bad with anger. They're prone to do or say things in the heat of the moment.

😨 - Pyrra will fight, she'll turn around and try and punch a dragon on the snout. Frida will have a freeze response. Erzikas' species have a strong flight response, but Erzikas has trained hard to deal with it.

🤥 - All three are actually bad liars. Frida may be able to tell a lie smoothly but then she'll be wracked by her bad conscience and come clean anyways. Erzikas will have a lip twitch going on, specifically the left side. And Pyrra will have very intense eye contact, and clench and unclench her fists, like she's getting ready to fight. xD

[k-s-morgan]

As someone who greatly appreciates your writing, I just have a few questions to ask. Your work always seems to have very complex plot points and holds a great amount of subtle foreshadowing. The execution and tying together of these narrative arcs imply an impressive amount of foresight so I can't even imagine how much planning it would require. Which is exactly my first question: how much of these storyline do you plan in advance? The way you write makes it seem like you have everything laid out in your head. Each arc seems to have a specific purpose in perpetuating the protagonists' development and no major plot point seems spontaneous or poorly planned.

When I ask these questions, I'm thinking specifically of TGSTLTH because with your original cases, each of them provide complex situations with realistic (and sufficiently unpredictable) solutions. The processes by which the cases are solved are equally believable and coherent. Even in the cases which you haven't made up - the ones from the anime - your extrapolations of them add an incredible level of depth (to the point where I can wholeheartedly say it improves them) in a way that makes it hard to believe it's not canon.

Once you've planned your chapters, how do you go about writing them? How do you perpetuate the plot points? And another thing I absolutely must ask is how do you achieve such a great dialogue-description ratio? Your chapter's are effortlessly long and extremely descriptive, but not to the point where the pacing feels slow or dragged out. The transitions between dialogue and description are seamless, and the speech always feels well placed and purposeful. Such a balance is something I've always struggled with in my writing so I'm keen to take any advice on board.

My final question is about word count. How the hell do you get it so damn long. That's the question. Forgive my laconism but the way you talk about accidentally reaching like 20k words in a chapter is literally baffling to me. I have to know how you do it  •_•

Hello! First I have to say, thank you so much for your long and thoughtful asks - I'm always so happy to recieve them, reading them is a pleasure. And I have to apologize because this answer is probably going to be useless!

Honestly, I wouldn't say that I plan match. I usually just have a couple of large ideas (in the case of TGSTLTH, these are mostly milestones from the anime) and a couple of smaller ones. Everything else comes when I'm writing, and that's one of the reasons why I love doing it so much. Things slip into their places automatically - I usually call it the magic of writing. It's like my mind knows where I'm going, but I do not, and I learn it very gradually, as more and more words are typed, uncovering more pieces.

As an example: I had an idea for a made-up case a few months back, and this is how it's described in my notes: "C and S have to allow themselves to be tortured, C plans, S snaps." Beyond this outline, I have no idea what I'm going to be writing about, but I know and anticipate the moment when I start typing and the ideas start being born, shaping a picture even I don't see right now.

From character development, most things I do plan are pretty basic. For example, in one episode Sebastian is weirdly cruel to Ciel but in the next one, he's suddenly almost nice. Something had to have happened between them, so I pick a potential idea and then the details add themselves.

I do have some minimal notes that I made when re-watching the anime. For example, about the tea-set Soma is going to break (I needed a story of Sebastian trying hard to find it) and about Ciel being drunk before the case with the ghosts in the castle (since Sebastian specifically doesn't allow him to drink there). Some of my other notes include: "13 birthday queen doesn’t interact because asks about christmas in 3.02," "discussion of why 19^00 circus 3.07", "BoC champagne tower bothers Ciel with what a good idea", etc. This helps include smaller details that I might have forgotten about if I hadn't made notes.

Most of this kind of planning also comes from re-watching the anime so many times that I largely know it by heart. I do a bit a more detailed planning right before writing a chapter: I settle on a vague scenario and describe some basic parts in one sentence. Then I follow this very loose outline and watch how it becomes detailed in the process of writing. For instance, the chapters about the teachers: all I knew before I started writing was that Ciel and Sebastian would have this game. I had no idea Ciel would pretend to be blind until the very second it happened or that he would make Sebastian lose his mind by pretending he's dying. It all clicked just at the right moment, like it usually happens. This magic of writing delights me.

As for dialogue-description ratio: I think I just use my preferences as a reader here, to be honest. I write something, then I re-read it and see how it feels. Sometimes I feel I overdid it, so I remove some bits. Or on the contrary, I feel like the scene is too hollow, so I add more descriptions/emotions to it. I also know that as a reader, I prefer it when writers focus on emotions, character development, and relationships first and foremost, so I do the same in my own works, paying only minimal attention to other details. I feel like 99% of scenes have to involve relationship dynamics even when it's a case investigation, so my writing reflects this preference.

And regarding the size of the chapters: oh, it's a curse because I keep misleading my readers! I always struggled with writing something short - my characters usually like to talk or suffer too much to describe it quickly, but it's still ridiculous. I think my long chapters come from the lack of proper planning. Like I said before, I just note down some basics. For example, about the scene in the next chapter: "Sebastian goes to talk to the demons, all threatening and possessive." I know this will happen, and I imagine it'll take me around 2K to describe, but in reality, when I start, it'll probably easily grow into 5K or so. Some demon might not want to talk right from the start or the other one might make Sebastian have some realization that he'll perplex himself over. If Sebastian ends up getting to Claude, then the size of this scene will increase even more, which will affect the entire chapter!

Sorry if this isn't much of an answer - I see writing as something deeply mysterious, and I'm just happy I get to experience the pleasure of doing it!