#but uh that feels silly to do. in the tags of my post about snape in drag

[moonymode]

actually do you ever EVEN think about the connotations of remus's japery during the boggart lesson. snape in mrs. longbottom's clothes. man with magic hiv teaching kids how to defeat the evil fear creature that lives in the literallllll closet. and he says neville would you please put this man who is trying to out my socially loaded condition with all of its various implications, in DRAG. yes thank you, for the class :)

[luthienebonyx]

Fic Writer Interview

I was tagged by @thisbluespirit who has most excellent timing in providing me with this fabulous procrastination tool for talking about writing when I should actually be writing.

Name: Luthien. I’ve been Luthien in online fandom since 1998-ish, but it was also a joke nickname in a group of RL friends before that, which is a long story. But yeah, I’ve been Luthien approximately forever. (Ebonyx is the nickname for my now departed much-loved tuxedo cat, Ebony, if you were wondering. I’m Luthien most places in fandom, but the cat comes with me if Luthien isn’t available as a username.) 

Fandoms: I started in Xena: Warrior Princess fandom, and there have been lots of others since. Fandoms that I stayed in for longer than five minutes (and a couple of times for up to five years)/wrote more than one story for include (the ones that I can remember off the top of my head) Harry Potter, the original Battlestar Galactica (1978), Pet Shop of Horrors, Stargate Atlantis, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Lewis, Once Upon a Time, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and, of course (and entirely by accident) Game of Thrones. 

Where you post: These days, only on AO3, apart from some small tumblr prompt fills that then end up on AO3. Originally, I posted to mailing lists, and my fic ended up in lots of small, stand-alone archives devoted to a single fandom/pairing/character. Then LJ was where I posted for a long time. Tried ff.net at one point in the early 2000s. We weren’t a good fit. Oh, and I had my own website, too - had to learn html to do that originally. 

Most popular one-shot: In terms of kudos, A Night to Remember, which is a Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries PWP. In terms of hits, Plain Jane, a Once Upon a Time canon divergence, which is one of my favourite stories out of everything I’ve ever written. (Also, some of my HP fic back in the day probably would take the prize overall, but it was all posted long before AO3 was a gleam in astolat’s eye. In Whisky Veritas, one of my Snape/Hermione fics, still has a stupid number of hits for something so old. I never know which of my fics are going to be zombie fics, and never quite die, but that one is definitely the biggest zombie of the lot.) So far as my JB fic goes, it’s Beloved and A Doom Unescaped. 

Most popular multi-chapter: I actually haven’t written all that many multi-chaptered fics over the years, partly because I often wasn’t well enough to write them, and partly because they were frowned on a lot in the fannish circles I used to move in. That said, The Personal Touch is the most popular multi-chapter fic I’ve ever posted in any fandom, on every metric.

Fic you were nervous to post: Well, every fic. I always feel sick right before I hit the “post” button. But more than usually nervous? I think the first time I posted het I was pretty nervous, because I was a slasher, and there was a much bigger divide then than there is now. I’m usually not that nervous when I first post in a new fandom, though, because I don’t know anyone, I’ve got nothing to lose, and it’s like I can just sneak in, drop the fic, and then run away without being seen. (That was what was supposed to happen with JB. Oops.)

How do you choose your titles? Sometimes they’re song lyrics or quotes from poems or whatever; often they just come to me. I have a very big thick book of quotations for those stories that just don’t WANT to be named. (Sometimes this works really well. I really liked the fit of the title when I finally found the right quote for As Sunlight Drinketh Dew, for example.) I like a title with more than one meaning to it, if I can manage it, or something which points to things being not quite as straightforward as they appear on the surface. My recent Queen’s Thief story was about an eleven-day journey through the mountains, but the fic was called Twelve Days, because the story was actually about the emotional journey the characters were on rather than the physical one, and that didn’t end until they were out of the mountains.

Do you outline? Hahaha. Um, I am definitely what GRRM calls a gardener rather than an architect. I have TRIED to outline, and all that happens is that I end up with scene drafts instead of an outline. My usual method is to just keep a list of bullet points and jot things down as I work them out. Sometimes I’m wrong, and then I argue with myself from bullet point to bullet point. They’re usually in any sort of order, and include details ranging from the main beats of the story to some silly joke or line or reference that I need to remember to include when I get to a later part of the story. I DID write a chronology for both Twelve Days (for obvious reasons) and also for my Yuletide fic, but those were definitely not outlines. No, nuh-uh. (Don’t want to scare my brain by making it think it has to deal with an actual outline.)

(Slightly more) seriously, though, I know the way my writing brain works. It needs to know the skeleton of the story: the general shape of the story, the main beats, where it starts and where it ends. But everything else, the flesh in between the bones, comes out in the writing. If I know too much before I write, the story tends not to work.

Complete: 128, not counting my Yuletide fic, and also not counting various old stories that never made it to AO3.

Do you take prompts?  Sometimes. If I’m foolish enough.

In progress: 10 on AO3, but that includes a couple of open-ended collections, plus a couple of WIPs in old fandoms that, realistically, I’m very unlikely to ever return to. There are four JB fics that need finishing, and no, I haven’t forgotten about any of them. I just only have so much energy available for writing. I also still have to finish my JB chill exchange fic - which is what I should be working on right now but hey, there was this meme...

Coming soon: My Yuletide fic, which I obviously can’t talk about yet. I’ll just say that it’s a story I’ve thought about writing for quite a while, and I was thrilled to finally get the chance to do it. And also my JB Chill Exchange fic, which is... well, you’ll see. ;)

Tagging: Fellow procrastinators @robotsdance and @firesign23. Also: @samirant @slipsthrufingers @nire-the-mithridatist @kiraziwrites @sdwolfpup @scoundrels-in-love @schweetheart @woodelf68 @blatheringbluejay and anyone else who wants to do it.