#but at the same time it can't be drudgery or I'll lose my mind

[cultivating-wildflowers]

💭

[perverse-idyll]

Hello! I hope you are well! 💛 The idea of you having works in progress thrills me to no end, let me tell you! So if you don't mind answering some more wip asks....what about 7, 10, and 16?

Also, sending you lots of good vibes for both writing, and life! ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨

Thank you so much, Danni! I wish I could be equally thrilled by my WIPs, but my main feeling about them is "For the love of sanity, let me finish at least two of them this year." And I appreciate the good vibes. I can truly use them right about now. ❤️‍🩹 I wish the same for you. Your outpouring of fic this year has been a fantastic fireworks display!

7. do you outline before writing? if so, what’s your outlining process like?

Nope! I'm a total pantser. I always have particular scenes in mind - I wouldn't be able to start a story without those intoxicating but very loosely linked moments of inspiration - but I don't plan and I don't outline. I've tried sitting down and hammering out outlines in the past, and it bored me to the point of abandoning the story. It utterly killed the desire. But I usually have a general sense of the buildup and the direction I want the story to take, and often know where it will end, although once I reach the ending it can give me conniptions because I can't nail down the specific lines as neatly or elegantly as I'd hoped. I also write out of order, especially now when weeks can pass with no time to write. I hate losing a scene to the erosion of daily drudgery, or feeling the life go out of it, so I'll write the image when it occurs to me and then keep it on tap until I've pushed forward to the relevant point in the fic.

10. how many wips do you actually have right now?

Seven total:

The Blood of Stars (Snarry)

Impossible Without It (Snarry)

Untitled "back from the dead" fic (Snarry)

The long version of The Lost World (Snarry)

The long version of Scenes from an Insurrection (Snape/McGonagall)

Untitled gift fic for Kelly Chambliss (McGonagall/Grubbly-Plank, with Snape friendship)

Fic of Harry finding Snape alive within Snape's memories (Snarry - this one only exists as a few opening scenes followed by several pages of notes)

16. do you count brainstorming/daydreaming/outlining as a part of the writing process? why or why not?

Oh, absolutely. The habit of daydreaming predates the act of writing. Once I embraced the world of reading as a child, I started learning how to translate the essence of an internal landscape or fantasy through storytelling; to shape and articulate those daydreams. These days, brainstorming and woolgathering and mulling things over are what keep the ideas alive when I don't have the freedom to sit down and put them into words. Sometimes the only thing that keeps them alive. All that wandering around in my own head is where the most vivid images come from, the glimpses that seem to appear out of nowhere and have the incandescence that really excites me. I always work best when I have several scenes in mind that I'm actually infatuated with - scenes that distill my feelings for a character or consummate a foreshadowed moment, usually some emotional payoff. Without the daydreaming, without the unpredictable and magical inspiration, I don't know if I'd still be writing. It's sustained me through some very dry spells.

Adding here, @fuck-mate asked for #23

23. what’s something that you think all writers should know? 

Speaking as a reader, I'd say SPaG aka Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar. I may be more persnickety than most, but persistent errors of this sort pretty quickly wear down my interest in a fic. Of course, when writing fanfic, you're not obliged to do anything except for fun, but in my ideal world, writers would care about the flow and clarity of sentences.

As a writer? I'm stumped. There are all kinds of rules and suggestions and practices, and none of them apply to all of us. Not everyone needs to be passionate about writing. Not everyone defines "fun" in the same way. Some writers have only one heartfelt subject, some have a hundred. Some people would stop writing altogether if forced to write every day. Some take years to find their voice, some burst forth complete from the first time they sit down to a notebook or a keyboard. The one truth that seems, in this current climate of overwrought moralizing, to bear repeating to the majority of writers is: "You can't please everybody, so the least you can do is please yourself."