#but yeah my fic output is like 60% DP or DA

[maebird-melody]

5, 15, 23

5. Is there any fic that makes you super happy to reread and remember you wrote that?

Oh man. Let me tell you, every time I get a really nice, effusive comment on one of my fics, I go back and reread what I wrote. "Sympathy for the Dwarf Planet" is probably my absolute favorite thing I've written. It's an outsider POV story, which I think gave me a little more room to play. Some poor schmuck who works at NASA is forced to deal with Danny and his friends as they repeatedly break through their security to reclassify Pluto as a planet. I had a blast.

Other honorable mentions include "A New Haven," a Dragon Age Inquisition fic about another person's Lavellan, "Dreamers," my Hypnos fic from the game Hades, and "Glockwork," a crackfic that continues to be my most popular fic ever, based on another DP fan's artwork of Clockwork holding a gun.

15. Have you ever purposefully written one fandom/fic idea over another because you knew it'd be more popular?

Can't say that I have! Unless inspiration strikes, I can't write. But I have participated in a lot of events where either a) the person you're gifting your fic to dictates the kind of stories they want to see or b) the event has a pool of prompts written by the participants that you can pick-and-choose between. So in that sense, I have written fic based on what specific people want, but in general, I tend to write what I would enjoy reading. I do murder my darlings though when I know that removing things I would enjoy normally will make for a better, more satisfying story. But that's more about good story sense than writing what's popular.

I wrote a fic for my college roommate's book, like, no one knows that book except for a small circle of folks in my city and her readership from the serialization days.

23. What's the nicest review you've ever gotten?

Oh man. This incentivized me to go back and reread the comments in my inbox, because I honestly couldn't remember any specific ones to highlight and had to go searching.

My favorite reviews are, hands down, the ones where the commenter is screaming, unhinged with happiness, about the fic. But the best reviews in my experience are the ones where the reader feels I've captured the characters well, or they've come away with a new understanding or perspective on them because of what I wrote.

The nicest review I ever got was for a Dragon Age fic, back when I was heavily participating in DA fic exchange events. I was actually really uncertain about writing this person's Lavellan because her personality was not the sort I had a lot of experience writing--taciturn, unyielding, and sharp-tongued. But I wanted to push myself, so I read their entire character bible for their Dragon Age OC, then I did a bunch of research on blacksmithing techniques since she was a smith. It was a Solavellan fic, but the relationship between their Lavellan and Solas was a little more subdued and less overtly romantic. Their review was very long, but the part that stuck with me most was this:

"I never realised how often I wrote them just together, and how that togetherness translates best to doing things together vs talking and speaking past one another. You've taught me a lot about her with this, and how others view her vs how I try to present her, and it's an absolute joy."

The fic is "A New Haven" and I do think it might be some of my best work.