#but they weren't on Cybertron it's just the people who write these things can't name worth shit

[canadian-riddler]

I have a hard time remembering the difference between Shockwave and Soundwave and this book I was reading had both of them and it also had the Hall of Records on one planet and the Hall of Justice on another but I kept reading them as being the same place, so that story got incredibly confusing to me at one point

[autobot-scout-riella]

1, 2, 7, 9 and 15 for Shatterpoint? uwu

ask me about my fics | accepting

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

It's been a WIP for eight years, so there was a lot of inspiration along the way. The core ideas - someone getting trapped in her own head in the process of protecting herself, needing someone else's help to undo it even after she was physically safe, and not being able to get someone else out with her - came out of the two years I spent at a residential boarding school (no, mine wasn't on the level of the kinds of places that make the news, but I still can't recommend the experience).

Everything else was built out of things I was interested in exploring - telepathy without the required secondary powers to make it useful, the kinds of things that might have happened during the war before Cybertron died, elements of Bayverse that I liked in theory but not in execution. Also, girl robots. Basically Shatterpoint is the super-long plotty fic that I really wanted to read and couldn't find.

As for why I went with the "write the whole damn thing and then post it one chapter at a time" approach, I wanted it to be done because I have a bad habit of not finishing WIPs if I post too early, but I also wanted the fun of watching people yell about my carefully chosen cliffhangers.

2: What scene did you first put down?

The very first scene I ever wrote for it was a very early version of the Ion Storm fight that ended up in Chapter 14. It was a lot more of a fight at the time; the posted version is pretty one-sided, because all the characters involved went through drastic changes in the edits. Riella is the only character who stayed involved all the way through the edits - I don't think the Decepticon antagonist originally had a name at all, and Red Alert's role rotated through half a dozen people.

7: Where did the title come from?

The title just popped into my head back when I was working on the cortical psychic patch scene for the first time - at the time, I didn't know where it came from, but it was so perfect for both that scene and the broader fic themes that I didn't question it. It's been Shatterpoint basically since I started working on it.

I later realized I'd stolen it from a 2003 Star Wars Expanded Universe novel. Thankfully it's pretty good, so I don't have to feel weird about the association.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

It went through a lot of alternate versions over the years! Originally it was just three scenes in my head (the Ion Storm fight, the cortical psychic patch, and the one I just posted today). Basically everything not in those scenes has changed at least twice.

-Riella wasn't originally an Autobot spy. That got adjusted for "it's too convoluted" reasons. The specific Autobots that rescued her also changed up a few times - I went through and cut out a bunch of characters at one point because there were "too many", only to add back an equal number in the final draft.

-Project Trypticon went through a bunch of different types of mad science, with the antagonist in the chapter 28 scene not always being related to it. Shockwave really was trying to make his own custom outliers at one point, like First Aid speculates in the early chapters. I think I also bounced around Predacons and combiners, though neither of those made it out of the plot notes stage.

-The character death in the Ion Storm fight was a relatively late addition. The plot was in desperate need of some actual stakes, First Aid wasn't doing what I needed him to do, and near-death injuries weren't cutting it.

-Soundwave showed up at one point. I cut him out almost immediately, because he made the Decepticon side of the plot impossible unless I made every single character deeply unintelligent and also a terrible person. Relatedly, Prowl was originally a lot less likable (not that he really is now, but he was a real piece of work in the early drafts). Had that characterization stayed, Riella would have punched him at one point.

-That Thing That Just Happened In Chapter 28 was always planned to happen, but after I started posting the fic and saw which characters people responded to, I started bouncing around an AU in my head where it didn't happen. It was never an option for the actual fic, but somewhere there's a parallel universe where the war ended super early in a few spectacular explosions.

15: What did you learn from writing this fic?

On a purely technical level, I learned a lot about writing and editing and what worked and what didn't through the process of writing it. I didn't have a beta reader (aside from a friend who very kindly read over the early Electron sections to make sure I wasn't doing anything weird), but I went to college and got an English degree right in the middle of working on it; I went through my drafts pretty regularly to apply the stuff I was learning in class and could literally watch the fic get better right in front of me. It's one reason I'm glad I was determined to finish it before posting, because it is so much better now than it was eight years ago. (Not perfect! There's a couple chapters I still want to edit chapter 20-21, looking at you. But a whole lot better.) I also figured out about halfway through the writing process that some of the themes were IMAX-level projection, which both gave me some things to chat about in therapy and some places where I needed to adjust the writing to be less me and more character.

On a less-serious note, I learned that fight scenes work a lot better if I stand up and wave a sword around for a while to get a feel for what motions the characters are making, that I ship Lancer/Greenlight/Arcee, and that no matter how hard I try to finish the fic in advance, I will be editing right up until the second I hit post.