#i think i shared a version of this scene before but i’ve been reworking it 🫣

[lavampira]

wip wednesday whenever

tagged by @hythlodaes and @lilas days ago - ty beloveds!! this is so late but I’ll tag @coldshrugs @scionshtola @ghostwise @creaking-skull @aphoticfairy @daggertongue @narrativefoiltrope @veeples if anyone has writing or art or other creative things to share because I’d still love to see it!! from the sidalia wip again:

“Did you mean what you said earlier?” she asks, and though she whispers, ‘tis nearly too loud in the sparse, quiet inn room.

D’alia braces for him to deflect with residual bluster, perhaps brush her off with yet another turned cheek and grumbled dismissal of the matters of the heart again, or simply allow her to float adrift in the expanding gulf of silence between them. She would not blame him, particularly after all they had been through in recent moons.

She continues to wind the bandaging around his biceps, careful with the tender flesh and scale beneath her fingers. She decidedly does not think about the memory of those selfsame arms around her that has lingered with her for some time, or the dizzying warmth that seeps into her now from his body so close to her, still wedged between his legs with his large hand gripping her thigh as she works. Nor does she look at him until he tilts his head into her focus, his sharp eyes searching her in the dim candlelight.

“And if I did?” Sidurgu returns.

A frown tugs at the corners of her mouth even as her heart flutters in her chest. You were injured because of me, D’alia wants to snap.

He doesn’t allow her the chance.

“Listen, Alia.” Sidurgu easily encircles her wrist in his warm, calloused palm, halting her work. “I meant it. If you need me.” His scaled throat bobs as he swallows and a desperate look flashes across his face. “And I— Well, I want you to need me.”

[xoxoemynn]

5, 12, 18 for the fic writer asks??

YAY THANK YOU!

5. first sentence of the fifth paragraph of an unpublished WIP From the Big WIP aka my Afterlight Boys! This is where, if he were in one of his shows, someone would point out there’s always a rainbow after a storm, and only bright and magical things ahead, and they’d burst into song and dance as the stage lit up in color and the audience gasped and cheered and clapped.

12. a trope you’re really into right now MAKE IT ACHE!!! I don't care how, I need Ed and Stede DESPERATE and HURTING and YEARNING and DEVOID OF ALL HOPE. I need them to CRY. I need them to push each other away. And then I need them to cry more and kiss the tears away. idk if that's really a "right now" so much as an "always" but... yes. Pain.

18. if you keep them, share a deleted sentence or paragraph from a published fic Okay I had to search for this, because I lost a lot of my deleted snippets when my computer died since I kept so many on Scrivener and did not back up appropriately. 😭 But here's an earlier version of a scene from Here's to the Night. I reworked it because the tone was getting more melancholy than the fic called for. Behind a cut because I couldn't just pick a single paragraph and it's long.

Ed licked the remnants of the chip off his thumb and then leaned in close to Stede. “Why’d you and your wife split up?”

Stede shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I guess you could say we were incompatible.”

“You mean that you’re gay.”

All the air left Stede’s lungs. He didn’t know why this felt like crossing such a line. He’d been flirting with Ed on the company phone line all night and had made an excuse for him to come up just so he could spend more time with him, alone, on a holiday traditionally spent with couples.

But hearing the word out loud, and describing him, made Stede like he was caught talking too loudly in the library by the strict librarian. He just barely resisted the urge to look over his shoulder to make sure nobody heard.

“Stede, mate, you okay?”

Stede shook his head. “No, you’re right. I just…” He let out a soft half-laugh. “I’ve never actually said it before. I knew it. Have known it. And by the end I think even my ex-wife knew it, although she never said anything. I just… wow. Wowie wow wow.”

“Do you want to say it now?” Ed asked quietly. “Just for the hell of it?”

“I’m gay,” Stede said. The words sounded loud in the empty office, so loud Stede was semi-surprised they didn’t echo throughout the hallways. He smiled. “I’m gay.”

“Congrats, mate.” Ed clapped his shoulder. “Felt good, didn’t it?”

“Felt weird,” Stede admitted. “Like it wasn’t even really me saying it. But also I felt… more me? Does that even make sense?”

“Completely,” Ed said. “And maybe now you can start living your real life.”

“What, just because I’ve said out loud what I’ve always known?” Stede scoffed.

“Listen, I get it,” Ed said quietly. “Obviously. It’s not like things have been easy for us of late.”

Stede’s throat tightened, and he shook his head. “No.”

“Do you want to tell me, or do you want me to guess?” Ed asked.

“I… I thought it was just something you grew out of,” Stede said. “I went to an all-boys’ boarding school, and it was just what you did. But while all my classmates did… I didn’t. I figured I just needed to try harder. I dated girls all through uni, and it still never felt right.”

“And…”

Stede sighed. “I pulled a classic Stede Bonnet move and ran away. Moved to New York. I thought when I was off on my own I could finally explore who I was without being surrounded by all the relics of my old life.”

Ed nodded. “And how’d that go?”

“Great. I loved it. Made me want to travel more, see everything the world had to offer. And I even dated a few men. Really nice ones, too. Not right, but it felt closer.” He looked down at his hands. “And then it was the eighties.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah,” Stede said. “So, I moved back home, met Mary, convinced her I was the man of her dreams. We were married before she was able to come to her senses.”

Ed rested his hand on Stede’s knee. “I’m sorry, mate.”

Stede shook his head. “It’s fine. I was lying to myself, to Mary, to my family. It had to all come crashing down eventually."

[coraniaid]

sorry, hit the ask button so soon:

Coexist - ⭐

Thanks!

Um.  So I'm going to talk about chapter 21 of Coexist in frankly excessive detail.  It’s one of my favorite chapters so far, but the problem with writing dream sequences without a beta reader is that you do sort of feel the urge to ask anybody who reads it: “hey, did you spot that bit of symbolism?". Even, or perhaps especially, when the symbolism probably isn't as clever as you'd like to think.

And I sort of think that the actual fic should speak for itself, but ... well, on the other hand I've just written a thousand words about it, so:

Let's start with the title, which is meant as a reference to Sarah McLahlan’s Full of Grace, as heard in Season 2's Becoming Part 2, specifically to this verse:

I feel just like I'm sinking

And I claw for solid ground

I'm pulled down by the undertow

I never thought I could feel so low

Which is later echoed by Faith's speech to Joyce in Season 4’s This Year’s Girl – “It's like you just keep sinking a little deeper everyday and no-one even sees” – in the very same way that Faith herself echoes Buffy’s situation at the end of Season 2 and into Season 3’s Anne (��no friends, no hope“, as Angelus puts it).  And … well, this is a chapter which is all about Faith and how she defines herself in relation to Buffy, so it seems appropriate.

Up to this point, every chapter has been a reworking of a specific episode from Season 3.  Sometimes the connection’s been very clear (especially in the earlier chapters), and sometimes it’s been a bit less clear (and in one case there are two chapters devoted to a single episode). 

But this chapter is slightly different, in that while it basically takes the place of Season 3’s Doppelgangland it doesn’t really have much in common with that episode (although I guess one of the vampires from The Wish rewrite does make a cameo).  Instead it's more or less Restless from Season 4: a series of dream sequences culminating with a final Slayer versus Slayer showdown in the desert.

(As an aside: I’ve always thought that it was a shame that Eliza Dushku was apparently unavailable for the filming of Restless, because Tara’s role as a mediator for the First Slayer in that episode would make so much more sense if given to Faith.) 

That said, it's not just Restless that's being referenced here: there's obviously quite a lot of This Year’s Girl too and the opening scene borrows heavily from the dream sharing scene in Graduation Day.

One idea I had for this sequence that didn't quite make it through to the final version was that each of the individual dreams Faith had should feature a character that has been used to mirror Buffy at some point.  Not necessarily as a full shadow self, but at least as a deliberate parallel.  There’s still a lot of that original plan in the published chapter – it’s why we see Dawn and Drusilla and Lily, among others  – but the big absences are obviously Cordelia and Spike.  

Spike’s sort of there by omission, if that makes sense, in that Faith at least mentions him to Drusilla, but Cordy’s not present at all.  The original version of the scene where Faith sees Buffy and Angel sleeping together was originally going to have Cordelia take Buffy’s place – complete with Faith “remembering” that Diana had told her about the Slayer before her, Cordelia Chase – but in the end I just thought that was too confusing to really work.

It was fun writing cameos for Dawn and Drusilla here, but at a certain point while writing this I really wished I just let both of them introduce themselves to Faith by name.  It’s hard not to make repeated use of “the vampire” or “the girl” not sound really clunky.  

Also, and I don’t know how well this comes across, but the idea is definitely that this is Drusilla here, not just a dream or a prophetic vision. If Faith and Buffy can share dreams, and we know they can, and if Buffy and Drusilla can share dreams, which Season 2’s Surprise strongly suggests, then I figured that Faith and Drusilla should also be able to share dreams here.  

(Also a very, very early draft version of this chapter, when it followed the plot of Season 3’s Doppelgangland a lot more closely, was that Drusilla would actually arrive in town trying to find Spike, and end up taking on the role that vamp!Willow plays in that episode.  So her little appearance here is sort of a nod towards that, as well.)

One idea for this chapter that I did stick with is that Faith -- in all cases except one --always transitions between dreams by falling or moving downwards.  Which makes sense because, as well as the general theme of falling and sinking that I mentioned at the start, Faith is literally in a coma after being thrown off a building.  I think it makes sense that she’d be dwelling on that, even if she’s not consciously able to remember what happened.  

She first falls down to the sewers from the collapsing hospital, then falls down through a door into Dawn’s bedroom while running from Angelus, then is escorted back downstairs and out of the house by Joyce, then in the classroom she falls through a broken window and down into the warehouse, and finally she’s pushed down through the portal in the floor into the desert. The one exception to this is that after vamp!Buffy dies Faith wakes up, which I like because it deliberately breaks the pattern and stresses what a big deal this moment is for Faith. 

Also, I should perhaps admit that I have no clue how obvious it is that the “something worse” [than vampires] that Faith keeps mentioning throughout this chapter – the thing that’s always close by, that she can’t escape; the same thing that kills vamp!Buffy here and later attacks Anya – is meant to be Faith herself, or at least the Slayer part of her.  (This is one of the things I sometimes wish I had a beta reader for, honestly, but I know from experience that I’d write even more slowly if I had one.)

The final fight in the desert was a lot of fun to write.  It’s also the closest I’ve come in this fic to writing something like “canon” Faith.  (I mean, I hope that this fic’s version of Faith does come across as reasonably in-character given all the changes in what happens to her – I wanted to make it seem like this Faith is somebody who could have turned out more like she does in canon, even if she doesn’t.  But in terms of temperament this version of the character owes much more to Amends or the first half of Revelations than she does to Enemies or Consequences.)  

And of course the “I’ve got somebody…” line at the end of this scene is a reference to  (and repurposing of) what Faith says to Willow in Choices.  That moment’s really what the whole chapter has been building towards.  Well, that and the image of Faith questioning whether she’s really a monster, deciding not to give up on herself and carrying her own unconscious body out of the desert.  Which I like a lot, even if it’s not particularly subtle.  (Actually maybe I like it because it isn’t subtle.)

Anyway, I liked working on this chapter a lot and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.  There are lots of other little details that I probably forgot to mention, some of which are going to be relevant before the story ends, but … yeah.  Probably written enough for now.

Thanks for the ask! 

[mrsgreenworld]

Son Yaz Season 2, Episode 22

"Adaletin Bu Mu Dünya" ("Is This the World of Justice?") aka Barren Land

So a new season came in like a wrecking ball. I've missed watching something that gets this level of emotional response from me. That's the beauty of this show - it played on my emotional strings from the very start. It is a different type of show now, however. In season 1 Son Yaz was pretty much a show about family, with all the mafia stuff being just a background noise. It may have seemed that it was Akgün's story and his found family. And in a way it was. But it was never just Akgün's story. It's the story of the Kara family as much as it was Akgün's. This estranged family comes together when this hurt and abandoned kid lands in their lives. The gift of family and love was something that Akgün not only got but also gave in return. That's why in season 1 intro we saw the blurry image of the Kara family, all four of them, and Akgün who was standing a bit to the side, like an outsider. And he was, at the beginning. Throughout the season we saw him close this distance, both literally and figuratively.

If we look at season 2 intro, it is something else entirely. The intro music theme is still the same but it's a reworked version, it sounds lower and more intense. The blurry image of this new intro is of Selim and Akgün, just the two of them, standing next to each other, at the dusk of the day. And I feel that's what this season is going to be about - the story of these two men and either their redemption or their further downfall.

But there is another pillar the story lies upon - Yağmur. These three are going to be the focus of this review. Let's get down to it.

Yağmur

I've decided to discuss Yağmur first because she's the first one we see three years later. I also believe that she's the one who had the strongest connection with Canan. Sure Canan was loved just as much by Altay, she was and always will be the love of Selim's life. But there's usually one person among our loved ones who we share a very special connection with. And I believe that for Canan that person was Yağmur and vice versa. That's why Yağmur is the one keeping Canan's memory alive. She dresses similarly, she keeps the key to the restaurant (that's named after Canan) under a flower pot which looks remarkably similar to the one in Çeşme. I even suspect it's the same pot. Yağmur has flowers in the restaurant that she takes care of first thing in the morning. In season 1 there were scenes of Canan watering the flowers.

It might look as if Yağmur has everything under control. She seems put together, almost like her old self. But it is the calm before the storm. It only lasts as long as she doesn't stop. Yağmur said it herself: if she stops, she'll start thinking about what happened, she'll have to face it and just the possibility is making her lose her mind. But this madness won't just go away, it's brewing just beneath the surface and it showed its face in the scene where Yağmur finally saw Akgün. She was absolutely unhinged. It's like after having been in denial for three years she was catapulted into anger within the first seconds of seeing him. That's the sort of maddening rage that stems from denying yourself a chance to grieve and truly experience loss. Yağmur's drawn-out denial is going to take its toll. She's clearly suffering from PTSD and from a glimpse of her in episode 23 fragman it's clear that it's starting to affect her physically.

I don't know what the writers have in store for Yağmur but right now it seems to me that she will have to go through all of the stages of grief and in the end find acceptance and peace.

Selim

And next we see Selim who lives alone in a secluded house in Rize. He walked away from his children and his old life. He left behind his vocation. He's no longer a prosecutor. I find it interesting that Selim repeated it several times throughout the episode: "I'm not a prosecutor". We saw in season 1 how much Selim's job meant to him, how something that he had initially pursued just to be closer to Canan had become his calling and a part of him. And now with Canan gone it's like that part of Selim is gone too. Or maybe he just killed that part of himself when he took his revenge on Halil Sadi. And the way it happened is the reason why Selim decided to stay away from his children. It was gruesome and savage and Selim understood clearly how that would taint a person. That's why he tried to convince Akgün to leave him alone to take care of it and that's exactly why he kept his distance from Yağmur and Altay so as not to taint them with his darkness. Selim owns his darkness and his sins. Selim Kara is not a good man. And he knows it. Now that I think about it, he was never a good person. Back in season 1 we saw what a shitty husband and father he was. Yes, they tried to redeem him and give him a second chance. He took this chance and, I think, he really tried to be the kind of a man who deserved his family. But the bitter truth is that he never deserved Canan or his children. And I think that Selim is painfully aware of this. That's why I'm not angry with him for leaving Yağmur and Altay. I don't love or even like him but I understand him. I'm also not angry that he involved Akgün into that nightmare. Selim gave Akgün an out, in the end it was Akgün's choice to stay. I'm definitely not gonna blame Selim for the choices Akgün made.

I've already mentioned that this season can turn into either a redemption story or even further downfall for both Selim and Akgün. But I feel that no matter which way Selim chooses to go - up or down - we won't see a happy ending waiting for him. It's clear now what's waiting for him. I believe that if we don't see Selim pulling that trigger again, it will be someone else's bullet that sends him to Canan.

Akgün

Or my sweet, sweet boy... He is a boy no more 😢

Killing his own brother, going to prison, giving up the love of his life, living on the run for three years - all of that took its toll and changed Akgün irrevocably. But most of all it was that horrid night and the choice he made that turned his hopeful and blossoming future into a barren land.

He's always been hot-headed, doing-first-thinking-never. Always ready to sacrifice himself for the ones he loves. And the way he loves is fierce and maybe even a bit suffocating. And all of that hasn't changed. But now Akgün seems torn between being resigned and suicidal. He's resigned when it comes to Yağmur and the future he wanted to have with her. He's suicidal when it comes to saving his father and helping Selim.

I know that it's been pointed out in the show a number of times that Selim and Akgün are very much alike. And it may seem that what they did to Halil Sadi brought them closer together and made them even more similar. While that night definitely tied them together in a very special way that only the two of them will ever be able to comprehend, I also saw how in fact different Selim and Akgün are. And the ultimate difference lies here: Akgün is a good person. I just hope that he'll get a chance to become a good husband and a good father. The kind of a husband and father Selim never was and I don't think could ever be.

A few honourable mentions

🖤 Eray is the sweetest, most precious cupcake on this planet and he makes my heart burst with love and gratitude. He was so loving and affectionate with Akgün. From the way he hugged him and he called him "Canım benim" to the way he sent Akgün updates on Yağmur and how he comforted Akgün after the disastrous reunion.

🖤 I already said while I was live blogging that I really like the siblings role reversal they've got going on. Give me all the bitter moody teenage Altay who also has a picture of himself and Akgün from Canan and Selim's wedding.

🖤 Soner and Naz are cute and all but they're also incredibly dumb. Especially Soner who comes from a mafia family and has to marry a girl from another mafia clan. Her father is a mafia boss who's giving away his only daughter. And to make things even worse Soner had to drop the ILY at the dinner. For fucks sake... Where's your only brain cell? On the run with Akgün?🤦

And... That's pretty much it. I have to stop before it gets completely out of hand. Until next episode. I'm sure we're in for a wild ride.

[emerald-amidst-gold]

It’s always so interesting to go back and re-read my older writing because it’s like some things have changed a lot and other things haven’t. What I see in my writing now is a lot of word play, metaphors, spiraling questions (at least with Fane because that’s how his mind is), heavier descriptions on how a character’s voice sounds (Fane’s ‘softest of the rolling thunder’ or Solas’ ‘silk and lilt) among other things, and lesser walls of text. I also seem to struggle with dialogue now, though. I’m no sure why. Maybe I just like describing the flow of a character’s thoughts rather than them voicing them? Maybe, but it’s something I’m working on! :D

I actually read Chapter 3 of my first main fic with Fane and I was like, ‘Man, I just went for it, huh? No heavy context, no sense of desperate urgency.’ Like, I’m not saying it was bad because to me, all forms of art, writing or drawing, is well done. Quality comes with time and practice, support and passion. I do have moments where I get frustrated and think, ‘This doesn’t sound right. What am I going for? Fuck, I have no idea.’��but if I stop, shift my focus on something other than writing for a bit, and then come back later with a clearer mind, it falls into place. 

Writing and drawing require mental stamina just like sports or physical activities of any kind require bodily stamina. Each person has a different amount and with continued practice, reiteration, that stamina builds, but like a muscle, you have to give your mind a break when it doesn’t want to give into your push. And I’ve found that my stamina ebbs and flows depending on what’s happening in my life. Lately, my writing has been taking weeks to form when otherwise it had been *snaps fingers*, and it’s mainly because of work and because I’m working chapter to chapter. 

Like, I tried to write the first kiss scene for Fane and Solas the other day and I physically couldn’t because it requires build up from several chapters before that I have no clue as to how they’re going to go because they require their own prior chapters to form. I’ve tried to make an outline, but my plot changes on the daily, so nope. XD It’s another thing that’s changed about how I write. I’m more inclined to inch towards originality than sticking to established canon. I’m taking the structure and reworking it like a lot of other fanfic writers do, and it’s hard, and I can’t help but be in awe of how great everyone’s interpretations are of events, of characters, of meta or canon. 

And let me just say, those that say I’m inspiring, well, so are you to me. I only decided to share my works because of half of you that have interacted with me, and let me tell you, it gives me life and so much happiness when I see a note, a comment, or an ask saying I wrote such and such character well or that I have actively made people feel sorrow towards killing the dragons in Inquisition. Like FUCK. I don’t want people to be sad, but was the idea that potent, that gripping that people paused and went, “But maybe it is true!”? Those various things are the reason my writing has evolved and I’m grateful to every single person who continues to listen to me ramble, theorize, and analyze the hell out of stuff that seems thin at the surface. 

Gah! It seems this post got away from me, buuuut...yeah! My writing has changed, improved, and I love everyone! That’s the short version! Hehe. :3 *lays down while pushing a thank you card towards everyone* 

[discordantwords]

@khorazir asked: 1, 18, 23, ...

Thanks for the ask!

1. Tell us about your current project(s)  –   what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

Funny you should ask, @khorazir, since my current project is your FTH fic! :)

Without giving too much away, the fic has Sherlock and John forced to spend the night in the London Aquarium while waiting for a suspect. Awkward silences! Conversations! Uncomfortable truths! And angst, though slightly less angst than might be expected given the setting. There's a funny-ish scene that I've had in my head since the initial planning, and I'm really looking forward to writing it down.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Actually, yes! I make small changes to my outlines all the time as I'm writing, but there are three instances where I really deviated from what I'd first intended:

In my original outline for Borrowed Ghosts, Arthur Bell was a lot more menacing than sad-- much more of a villain character. And I was leaning a little too heavily on the S4 imagery, so John was going to wind up struggling with Bell and falling into a well on the farm property. Sherlock would find him there, and they were then going to spend the night huddling for warmth in the farmhouse. But none of that really felt right, and once I put John in the ramshackle, crumbling farmhouse instead, all of the parallels about how he'd let his own life collapse around him while he let himself fester with rage and anger and misplaced blame just sort of came together. I can't imagine the story any other way at this point.

(Never) Turn Your Back to the Sea was originally intended to switch perspectives between Sherlock, John, and Mycroft throughout the story. I wrote a few draft chapters before deciding that it didn't really work, and that the story was much stronger when restricted to just Sherlock's perspective. There was also a plotline involving Molly and the Borgia pearl that I cut because it seemed too lighthearted. I posted some of the outtakes to AO3 in my Little Contributions collection (chapters 5-10).

And Out There, my Sherlock/X-Files fusion and the longest thing I've ever written by far, was actually supposed to be even longer. The story is structured where each chapter is an "episode" and the place where the fic ends is only the midpoint of my original outline. I realized pretty early on in drafting that there was just no way I was ever going to reach the end, and reworked the story to wrap up with John's abduction and return.

There's a sequel that lives in my head that incorporates a lot of the elements of my original outline. I've never actually typed this all out before, but here's a brief hint of some of the planned events:

John and Sherlock are sharing an apartment (which the FBI is aware of), and secretly in a relationship (which the FBI is decidedly not aware of). Things are good for a while, until they are assigned to a case involving the disappearance of two children. The case seems tailor-made for Sherlock, with details incredibly similar to the night of his brother's disappearance. He's forced to confront his unreliable memories, and it shakes his faith in what he's believed for so long. This puts him at odds with John, who is still reeling from his disappearance and is determined to uncover what was done to him. In the midst of their suddenly unstable partnership, we roll into a mashup of HLV/Bad Blood, where Sherlock is accused of murdering a news baron he believes to be a vampire. After that, Irene, Sherlock's first partner on the X-Files, makes an unexpected return, and John is j-e-a-l-o-u-s. There's an Abominable Bride/Triangle mashup where Sherlock vanishes in the Bermuda Triangle looking for a ship where the crew was rumored to have been the victim of a murderous bride. Then we rush into Gethsemane/Reichenbach, with faked deaths and uncertain alliances, and FINALLY it would end on a reimagining of the events of the first XF movie and a reaffirmation of both the relationship and partnership.

I really, really hope to have the chance to write that all down one day. I think it could be a lot of fun.

23. What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

A crackfic taken entirely seriously-- a fusion with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Essentially, this would be an excuse to write Sherlock and Moriarty locked in battle and tumbling off of a cliff over a chocolate waterfall.

Writer Asks!

[jdramione]

Updates on Touch

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I am not gonna lie - this story is hard. It's been very difficult to write, due to it's content and direction, and I jump off the deep in in the first chapter. There are triggers in this chapter and in this whole story.

TRIGGER WARNING. PLEASE READ TAGS before reading this fic. I don't want to spoil anything that is to come in a chapter, as I don't enjoy trigger warnings that spoil chapter plot lines at the beginning of certain stories I read, and have decided to make an active choice not to do that. HOWEVER, I want every reader to beware. If you have triggers of any kind - assume they ARE included in this story and be careful making the choice to read it or not.

This story feels very vulnerable to me and I feel raw after writing this chapter. It hurts. It's painful to write, so I'm gonna guess it's not an easy read either.

This is a story that has weighed heavily on my mind for a long, long time. I'm using this fic to somehow finally put some words to some emotions I've been carrying with me.

I do not condone the actions of rape or abuse in this story. This is a hurt/comfort and recovery fic with emphasis on healing and support post-abuse.

Please note that there are explicit, violent, and hard to read scenes throughout this fic.

I encourage anyone who is triggered or has gone through rape and/or abuse - please reach out. Please get help. Feel free to message me, even, I'm very happy to listen and help in any way I can. You are not alone and you are strong.

A HUGE thank you to my Beta, whose name I don't have permission to use as of yet, but still want to give a huge THANK YOU to.  As soon as she gives me the go-ahead, I’m gushing and linking and co-linking and whatever she wants me to do.  She's completely amazing and I'm so thrilled she has held my hand through this amazing process.  I could just not have survived the last year without her.

Please leave a kudos and a review.  I have worked so hard on this story, and hope you are able to connect to it on some level. Let me know what you think! Please note that I take all reviews to heart, so please be constructive in your criticism.

Thank you all for your patience with me. Your support and encouragement have kept me going and it means the world to me that you've given my first-time fic a chance.

***

Okay - now here's the hard part to admit. I have worked very hard the last year to go back and rewrite so much of this story. In some places, it's as little as a verbiage alteration. A word here a different use of one here. In some places, I've written new scenes, gone to darker places, delved into this universe a bit more deeply and what I feel is more thorough. This is the story I needed to tell, but feared going to certain dark places the first time around.

I have posted the original version for those interested in going back to certain scenes. I didn't want to just delete them on you if you liked something particular, but also needed to update this story so I could keep writing and move forward. I hit a huge wall before and it took a lot of time and effort to go back and rewrite and rework to be able to move forward again.

I have learned so much as a writer this past year. How I work, what works best for me, things I need to do better. I am not too proud to admit my mistakes, and if I can't learn with fanfiction with the amazing support and encouragement I've received, then where is a safe place to learn?

Thank you for sticking with me. I am updating these chapters - please, please go back and start over. I pray you won't be disappointed, rather, get more from it the 2nd go around. I have no plans to go back ever again and rewrite previous chapters, so I appreciate you all working with me as I have worked my way around all the learning fails an author goes through in figuring out what it is to write something.

I will be updating with the new chapters actively!  I am very excited to share them with you when I get each one complete.  But until they are ready, please enjoy my heartfelt efforts and work in progress over the last year. Chapter 9 has been posted but don’t start there.  Go back to the beginning.  There’s so much MORE.  It’s all new at this point!  Start here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12464469/chapters/28366737 

[amarits]

If there's anything you're rlly sad about losing why not post it as bonus content? Like as deleted scenes or w/ever.

I might post some bonus content after the actual chapters come out. There’s one scene that I wrote from Bruce’s POV first to get a feel for what was happening before switching to Jason’s more limited POV. I’ll probably share that one because there are a few little things I really like that you don’t get in Jason’s version of the scene. That one I wrote knowing I wouldn’t use it though. 

Most of the scenes I’m talking about I wrote back in November for NaNoWriMo. I knew what I wanted to happen, had a few preplanned scenes and convos, but not a play by play. I thought that if I just started writing, I would get into the flow and everything would come out. What actually happened is that I wrote several thousand words before realizing I had no idea how to get from Point A to Point B. There were good parts of what I wrote, but also a lot of meandering. I had to take several steps back, figure out what everyone was trying to achieve scene by scene, and outline how everything worked together. 

And then I had to rewrite. A lot. 

Honestly, that’s the main reason the Act has been delayed. I spent two months just trying to get back to where I was before. Most of the things I really liked, little conversations and events, got reworked into the current version, but a few things got left behind. 

The good news is I’ve gotten through the hardest part, and writing is going much smoother now. Plus, it’ll be way better because I put the time into fixing it. 

I know this is more than you were asking for, but the short answer is I’ll share some bonus bits if I think they’re worth sharing. We’ll see when I get there. 

[livesincerely]

hi!! domestic au for 1, 4, and 11 (and any chance of a new chapter soon? 🥺)

(This ended up being really long... 😅)

00000

1. What inspired you to write the fic in this way?

I really wanted to establish Davey, Jack, Crutchie, and Racetrack as a family unit, with Jack and Davey as the happily domestic couple/parents and Race and Crutchie as the teenaged kids. Except, Jack and Davey aren’t ~actually~ together.

So the whole opening scene with the phone call and the lost keys is basically just an excuse to introduce this status quo. Davey has a key to Jack’s apartment because he’s basically helping Jack raise Crutchie and Race, and he figures out that they’re locked out before Racetrack can tell him (its the mom instinct). And then I just tried to carry that idea through to the end, what with the super domestic conversations between Jack and Davey about dinner plans and Jack’s night shift and the ‘who’s taking the bed?’ argument.

I also made a point of not having Davey share too much of his internal monologue. I wanted the opening chapter to feel like a day-in-the-life, so I made a point of taking out any descriptive lines like ‘Davey shook himself out of his daydream’ or ‘Davey tried to ignore the flutter in his chest,’ etc, as that was too obviously pining and I felt like it detracted from the fluffy tone.

This ended up being especially important because I knew that the chapter was gonna close with Jack accidentally kissing Davey. The idea is that, because they’re so comfortable together and because Davey’s his partner in all other aspects of his life, Jack forgets that they’re not dating. And I thought the moment worked best if Davey hadn’t already been having ‘oh, if only Jack returned my feelings’ thoughts, because it’s so obvious to the characters and the readers that they’re in love with each other—the only one surprised is Davey.

4. What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

This is an understated moment, but I really love the

“Um,” says Crutchie.

“Holy shit,” says Racetrack.

moment. Like??????? God, I can just picture their expressions and tones of voice so clearly in my mind and it always makes me laugh.

(I give Racetrack so many good lines because smartass/lil’ shithead characters are my bread and butter. He actually has what’s probably my favorite line in the whole fic coming up in the next chapter...)

11. What do you like best about this fic?

I’m really proud of the dialogue/banter in this fic. Like I said, I purposefully didn’t include a lot of narration besides scene shifts and basic descriptions of actions, so the dialogue really drove the tone of the story.

And I know I wrote it so I’m biased, but I think the banter??? Is pretty good??? Especially the opening between Race and Crutchie, the scene in the middle between Race and Jack, (really happy with that ‘yeah dad, mom says you’re distracting me’ type line Race has) and the whole kitchen scene with Jack and Davey.

00000

Updates on chapter 2!

So, I theoretically had some 1,600 words written for the next chapter. ‘Had’ because I’ve decided that I didn’t like the direction the chapter was heading in and basically have to start over.

The version I had was pretty angsty. Like, there was a whole moment where Race and Crutchie have to talk Davey down from a near panic attack because having the love of your life kiss you and then run away isn’t an ideal situation if you have anxiety, which is how I head canon Davey. And the more I thought about it the more I felt like it was too extreme of a tonal shift, so I need to rework it.

Chapter two is still gonna open on the immediate aftermath of the kiss, but I’m aiming for more of a Crutchie-and-Racetrack-exchange-exasperated-glances-and-wish-their-peusdo-parents-weren’t-such-dumbasses. Lots of ‘yes, mom, we know dad’s in love with you,’ ‘yes, we’re sure,’ ‘yes, really, it’s super obvious, please for the love of god just get together already.’

And then a ~*~*~S O F T~*~*~ ending because that’s what they deserve

(I also have soooooo many ideas for other fics in this same universe, including a bed-sharing fic and a fic where Race and Crutchie get in a fight a school and Davey gets called down to meet with the principal, which is just an excuse for a mama bear Davey moment)

00000

@61-flaming-sour-cherry-scones

[fmdjoosungarchive]

location: gold star studio

date: july,, smth,,,

word count: 1572

tldr; audition for our songs. sung decides to do a remix cover of artist by seyeon(rip) npc and answer questions as he goes. mentions of @fmdjoohwan @eunahfmd @fmdtaeyong @fmdsooyeon @fmdxsuji @fmdbyul (whoops forgot to add those mentions in before)

when sung first heard base was launching two new shows, he wasn’t surprised that gold star staff came to him saying he ought to send in auditions. he’d looked over the prompts, and while both of the show concepts seemed interesting, what really grabbed his attention was ‘our songs’.

it shouldn’t have. he knew that. he was already so busy, and trying to write songs for his own album, and for element, and for other friends who requested music from him. if this show was like what he’d heard from others of the same type, he’d have to be writing songs regularly while on the show, for the show, no matter what he was doing behind the scenes as well. and yet, even knowing all of that, he impatiently waited until he had some time alone in one of gold star’s studios to film his questions and record his cover.

the producers of the show might look favorably on him using a studio to film this, he thought, which in turn made him sigh internally at himself for trying to appeal to the casting directors like he was.

in his slivers of time between schedules, sung thought often of what cover he might want to do. although there were so many artists he admired that he’d love to cover, most of the artists he liked were singers, and sung wasn’t sure if the show was looking for him to dip outside of the rap zone. it wasn’t show me the money, but gold star didn’t let him sing as much as he wanted, so the show probably wouldn’t either.

he contemplated options for a long while, before landing on artist, a song he’d written with a friend in mind. it would show his previous songwriting, and give him the opportunity to show what else he could do with a song, at once. and, bonus, he had the track dissected already since he wrote the composition himself.

it was this composition he loaded into a computer in the studio, as his phone ran a video of him off to the side. he greeted the camera warmly, introduced himself, and explained that he was going to be working on the composition of his cover while he answered questions.

as his chair swiveled back to face the computer, he immediately started off by removing elements from the song. although he liked the mess of sounds he’d ended up with when writing the song, it wasn’t him. the goal was to scale back, and keep the bright tone, while slowing everything down into more of the ‘beats to relax and study to’ vibe. at his current place in songwriting, that’s where he felt his heart most. of the small amount of his next album he’d written, that was the only sound he’d managed to fish out for himself.

working bit by bit, listening to what he’d done through the one side of his headphones cupped over his ear, he looked off to the side to check out what the first question was. “anything i come across can inspire me. this song, for example, it started because when i was at the company building, someone was going to throw away a coffee can, and for some reason, i was struck with inspiration to use it as percussion. most of the time what ends up inspiring me, is the people close to me. my element members, or friends, a lot of the songs that are released by them that i wrote were written with them in mind. my friends are very inspiring as people and artists.”

he paused his answering, then, to explain what he’d done with the composition, and show the camera a work-in-progress version of what he had so far. “i’m hoping to get a basis of a few of the elements i recorded for it, and re-record everything so it’s accurately concise.” the phone was replaced back on its spot, while he kept working more, speaking up now and again to explain if he’d done something important.

then, “my favorite song, ah, i’m not sure. i have quite a lot of love for hello tutorial, which origin’s joohwan and 7rophy’s eunah performed, because it was my first composition that was released outside of element. but, i feel a bit more particularly proud of one of my own songs from my first album, in sensitivity. the intro, it’s called sad memories. i’d spent such a long time trying to rework it to be the best it could be that i was pushing my due date. it’d gotten to the point the company was telling me if i didn’t finish it all myself, it wouldn’t be on the album. but i’d really wanted to challenge myself to make a piano piece i could feel proud of. i ended up doing that, in the end. i think it’s a really beautiful addition to my album, and i’m glad i was able to finish it well.”

by that point, the composition had been stripped down enough for sung to work with it. he wasn’t planning on touching the coffee can percussion, as he told the camera, because that was the original beginning of the song that he wanted to preserve, but everything else was going to be reworked. despite the tonality of his words, he still sat at the computer, using his digital landscape to give him a rough idea of what he was going to re-record or record for the first time, so that when it came to the recording, it could be swift, in little soundbytes for whichever gold star employee edited this to work through.

in the meantime, he decided to answer the next question. “um, yeah, there are a lot of songwriters i admire. many that aren’t idols, but in terms of idols, byul sunbaenim is one of my all-time biggest idols. i’ve been blessed enough to be in the same company as her, and have been around for the majority of her career, to see her grow and blossom as an artist. the songs she writes and performs are so healing to me, as well. she’s definitely someone i look after when i’m writing music for myself. i also particularly admire idols like knight’s taeyong, wish’s vivienne, and fuse’s suji who have such strong solo careers that they’ve participated in, despite having such busy group schedules.”

the composition didn’t sound great at this point. sung wasn’t really planning on sharing this portion of it with the camera, though he continued to point out details as he went. re-recording was the best choice here, that much he knew. although, it was coming to a close, something he could work with and base his recordings off of, so he answered the second to last question. “it may seem small, but my goal as a songwriter is to simply make music people enjoy. i’ve never been one to hold too much towards awards, or chart numbers. what matters most to me is that i make music that i enjoy, that people i make music for enjoy what i’ve made, and that their fans and mine enjoy it as well.” he finished, then, and turned to the camera to finish his answer, “in general, i’d like to write for all different kinds of genres, and become better at more instruments so i can more easily make songs.” and with that, sung clapped and told the camera he was going to be recording now.

he started with the piano piece, which ended up sounding more reminiscent of the original version than what ended up in the final product. something more personal to him. next was the guitar lines, then some secondary percussion.

for the simplistic version, that was enough. he moved his phone then setting it up in a different space to watch him as he did recordings. he started with the main melody lyrics, going through that a few times, padding back to the computer to realign what he’d done. usually, he’d take longer to solidify the base before adding adlibs and harmonies, but here, he went back to the microphone quickly, so there wasn’t much dead air. he spoke as he went, telling the camera about every step of the way, why he did things the way he did.

after recording, he set the phone back up on the desk, facing him again from an angle, and decided to wait on finalizing the production of the track until he finished this vlog. the last question stumped him, a little. he told the camera as much, with a small laugh following. “hm, uh, i think, there’s so much to gain from being around other songwriters. i’d like to learn from them, for us all to feed off of one another. it would give me more connections, give me other people to write with in the future, show me methods and thought processes i wouldn’t have thought of before. i write most often on my own, so i don’t often get to see those sorts of things. i hope, mainly, to become a better songwriter. that’s always my goal, every time i sit in a place like this. and i hope you’ll all want me on your show. thank you for listening and watching all of this. have a good day.” and with that, he reached forward to turn the video off, and start working on the cover’s production.

[bettsfic]

betts, you've always given amazing writing advice in the past, so I'm coming to you with a question that legitimately keeps me up at night. I really want to write literary fiction. the only issue is - whenever I start writing that kind stuff, it immediately starts turning into porn? like, obviously, there is plot and stuff but it feels like ultimately all I want to write is people fucking and all the fall out that comes with it. is there a way to make this more ~literary? or is it just erotica?

i actually have a real, serious answer to this!! 

so, before the MFA, all i’d written was porn. it was all i knew how to write. i got to the MFA, and my first semester i decided to workshop candy tongue. bad idea. i was so comfortable writing for my fandom audience that i wasn’t aware of the stodgy nature of non-fandom audiences. my cohort was fine reading the incest stuff and the gratuitous sex, but they had trouble giving me feedback because they didn’t understand the point of it. and truly, there was none. i made maggie a gold-star submissive because i wanted to, even though it had no real function in the story. i wrote like 4 graphic sex scenes into a 25k novella, and i workshopped it, and made everyone, myself included, deeply uncomfortable.

i decided i could not write porn in my MFA. i was allowed and even encouraged by my thesis advisor, but ultimately i didn’t want the stress of it hanging over my head. so i started writing about money, and picking through my resentment toward my decade spent in finance. in fact the working title of my thesis was Sex & Money. i workshopped each story without being nervous at all, and realized i was taking no risks. by the end of my MFA, i really thought i was pulling my punches. 

and let me share the results of this sex/money content divide -- i’ve sent five stories out for publication. the two that haven’t picked up are the ones about money. the three that have been picked up are about sex. in one, a middle-aged woman buys her first dildo. that one won an award. in another, a 22 year old woman pursues her middle-aged boss. that one got nominated for a PEN. and in my most recent publication, an asexual masochist falls in love with his professional sadist. 

what i’m saying is, sex and stories about it are important. i’ve since separated my thesis collection into two -- zucchini, which is about (a)sexual exploration told through realism/absurdism, and dotted lines, which is a collection of fabulist stories about commodification and regulation. will they ever be published? probably not. will they ever even be finished? who knows! i’m a novelist, not a short storyist.

the resolution to your problem isn’t in how to avoid porn. rather you should ask, why do you write porn in the first place? and that answer is most likely: it’s the easiest conflict to write, and it exposes the characters’ true colors and intentions most easily. it’s a tool to uncover the story you are trying to tell. when you write two characters banging it out, you are resolving their conflict of desire in a tangible way. moreover, it’s an extremely high stake. when characters have sex, they’re at their most vulnerable, their most exposed. they’re literally laid bare for you, the writer, to see. if you think about the highest possible stakes in a story, it boils down to creation and destruction, sex and death. writing about death is a fucking bummer, so you’re left with sex to figure out who your characters really are. 

with porn, so many of your decisions -- like what and why, you know, conflict and motive -- are made for you, and you can focus on the important stuff, like pacing and voice and character. i firmly believe that when you begin any major project, you can’t make all your decisions at once. you can only make a few at a time, draft over draft, until eventually you’ve created an entire world. if all character A wants is to bang character B, you can get him across that distance without figuring out the make and model of the car he drives, or how often he calls his grandmother. those are decisions that can be made later, after your characters boink.

i have accepted that nearly everything i write will have what i call a “prime draft” in polite company but which is actually a porn draft. this isn’t even a first draft, it’s the 0th draft, where anything goes, and my id can run wild. the entire purpose of the porn draft can be frivolous nonsense with no depth or complexity. completely pressure-free and all for funsies. but i have to tell the story the fun way, the story i want to tell, to figure out what the story even is, what work it’s doing, and what i maybe want it to become later. in the porn draft, i’m allowing myself to focus on certain decisions, and sacrifice others for future drafts.

when i sit down and think of a novel i want to write, and that novel is Real and Important and tackling Difficult Topics, my boner flags. that’s not fun. i’m not inspired by seriousness or profound meaning. i may have all these important things i want to say in my writing, but in terms of the actual act, i mostly want to entertain and engage myself. and call me shallow, but the fastest way to do that is by giving me a hot character who is pining over another hot character, and they fuck a lot. 

once i’ve written the porn draft, i can go through and uncover the ~literary work i’m trying to do and the messages i’m trying to convey. usually i’ve figured out the major beats of the story, the voice, setting, motivations, etc. -- all things that are hard for me to figure out on the front end -- and i rework it into something more palatable for major audiences, that actually is Real and Important and tackling Difficult Topics.

the thing is, often the work i’m trying to do is about sex and sexual exploration, identity and its discovery, so usually i can’t take out all the porn. but i can make sure each scene is focused not on the pleasure or arousal i intended in the porn draft, but what i mean to uncover in my characters and plot by having it occur. that’s the difference between literary fiction and erotica -- in erotica, you’re trying to arouse your audience’s body; in literature, you’re trying to arouse their heart :’)

sex is allowed to and should exist in literature. some of my favorite literary works have tons of sex in them. it is not something to be shied away from or self-censored. if you want to write about sex, you should. but let the story tell you its underlying intentions, and in future drafts, pull those discoveries to the forefront of the story. 

i wrote training wheels solely for the detention scene in chapter 8. everything that happened up to that point was leading to that scene that i desperately wanted to write. and now, in the original fiction version, it doesn’t exist. it was scaffolding, an illusion i was chasing to lower the pressure on myself and convince myself i didn’t have to take anything seriously. but once the story was built and i saw what it really was, i could remove that scaffolding because the piece stands stronger without it. now, on the fourth draft, it’s no longer the story i originally intended it to be. it’s its own beast. there’s still a ton of sex in it, but it’s more subtle now, less over the top and gratuitous. it still ends in overt bdsm. i didn’t sacrifice any of that, because that was the work of the story. what i did sacrifice was descriptions of enormous throbbing cocks and characters coming 5 times in a row. 

same goes for some of my km prompts like coping skills and shut up and kill me -- stories that have way too much sex in them right now but have literary merit yet to be uncovered. coping skills might currently be a noncon pissplay fic, but it’s also a world in which character A has given blanket consent to character B, and B takes advantage of it, and beneath all that, they still somehow love each other. it’s an interesting space to explore, ripe for a story in which maybe nobody pees on anybody else, or maybe they do and it’s described in a different way. whatever might happen in that space, i needed the porn draft to even see those characters in that world with that conflict. and now i have it, and i can build something else with it.  

writing advice tag | ko-fi

[tothedarkdarkseas]

For fanfic writer ask meme: E, J, K, M, P(for any fic or all your fics), R, T, X, and Y. (If that's too many questions, then you can split the answer into multiple posts. Also, no need to answer if you already answered these questions before.)

Thank you so much! I’ll put these below a cut just to account for the length, and I pray Tumblr works like it’s supposed to this evening! I appreciate you having an interest!

E: What character do you identify with most?  Is there a certain fic of yours that captures these qualities particularly well?

I really do not identify with Gorillaz characters and thank god for it, or most characters I tend to prefer! Haha, I know that might sound a bit strange, but I can think of very few characters I’d call “my favorite” that I also felt were a reflection of myself in a major way. Of course that isn’t implying that representation isn’t important, but just speaking for my own personal relationship to media– I live with myself all the time, I like people who live very different lives! Having said that, of the characters I write (all two, possibly three of ‘em) I’d say I identify with some of Stu’s worst qualities over anything else: being unambitious but craving reward, self-centered yet lacking in a concrete sense of self, dumb about mostly everything, overcompensating (to be fair, this is Murdoc as well) and so on. Despite picking fun at him I definitely have an affection for an unlikable guy like Stu, I do have sympathy for being sorta pathetic because I feel like I can access that.

J:  What’s your favorite fanfic trope?  Have you written it?

Hmm! That’s hard to say! At the risk of being an absolute knob, I don’t tend to be a fan of tropes, or at least what I think is meant here by “fanfic tropes” like uhh… the heat goes out and we have to share a bed, or that kind of thing? Is that what this means, the sort of repeated setups for fics? There’s of course a place for everything so I’ve got no real beef with more innocuous stuff, but I wouldn’t say I ever pick to read something because it’s got a “classic” trope. I’m definitely rife with tropes in the broader sense though, I’m rife with things I like and clearly just repeat, haha. I do not smoke pot, but I have a real affinity for characters who do, and this is evidenced by having like… half my stories feature that, haha. If a scene where two characters creep up to being intimate via sharing a joint/bowl/bong counts, that’s definitely a trope I’ve done and would probably do again.

K:  Do you have a guilty pleasures in fic (reading or writing)?

Does the above count? I’d certainly call myself self-indulgent, haha, I like what I like and I don’t stray very far from it. I think unsatisfying or incompatible intimacy is really interesting and I honestly never get tired of reading or writing that. (Er, as much as I “don’t get tired” of writing anything, which is not saying much as I’m very bad and undisciplined.)

M: What’s the weirdest AU scenario you’ve ever come up with?  Did it turn into a story?

The only AU I’ve written is Coffin Dancer, which is a story set in the early 1900s about Murdoc being a reanimated corpse and Stu being a gravedigger who buries/exhumes him. Sexy, I know, nothing hotter than… long paragraphs about digging. I think the occult element makes that one a bit weirder than anything else I’ve come up with. I’ve kind of entertained other AU ideas but they tend to be a lot more mundane, to be frank I just really like the characters as they are and I don’t want to change their dynamic too much. As a joke I once suggested something about a riverboat casino (Stu working there, Murdoc trying to pull a money laundering scam via currency exchange, potentially convincing Stu to go in on the scam with him) and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still think about it sometimes and question how to make it work, haha. I think it might be fun to do an AU again, but I think there’s just too much of a gap between what I’d want to do or be capable of doing, and what people actually want to read.

P:  Where did you find the most inspiration for your story ?

Oh gosh, this makes it sound so important and I feel like the biggest jag going to pretend I’ve made anything that great or with particularly impressive roots, haha. A couple came from prompts, so that’s a fairly straightforward answer.

I first began planning Coffin Dancer because I was playing Graveyard Keeper on Steam at the time, haha. If you load up this game, you’ll quickly see there is next to no plot and it is simply a crafting sim. I just sorta… liked the setting, I guess? It is the 1900s and it does follow a graveyard keeper! Following that, I decided it would be a story about Murdoc’s skin turning from tan to green as it does in canon, but giving it a bit of a morbid tint, as opposed to the vague canon handwaves of Murdoc being “immortal” with no clear explanation of what that means.

Ampersands was mostly inspired by me being a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan and thinking it’d be fun to show a dynamic similar to Angelus/Drusilla/Spike, but heavily reworked to fit our characters. The first scene I imagined was the shoelace-tying one which has some resemblance to a shot of Angelus knelt at Spike’s feet while still mocking him, and that ended up being the very last scene I wrote (and probably one of the weaker ones.)

On Oysters and Black Water was actually the story that required the least research from me, as I already had an interest in oyster filtration and oyster reef restoration. By no means am I an expert nor is this story a genuinely educated look at this process (I am Genuinely Educated on zero things) but I definitely knew when planning a PB story that I wanted oysters to be used for a filtration system on the island, just as a little nod to something I find neat!

R: Which writers (fanfic or otherwise) do you consider the biggest influence on you and your writing?

This really puts me at risk of sounding knobbish, so to start with: I’m not really a writer. Fanfiction writer is already not the most impressive title, but even that I feel is a little generous for me. I’ve written things, but I struggle far too much and have too little dedication to pretend it’s something I feel “cut from the same cloth” as these folks to do. The writers I admire have “influenced” me in the sense that I’ve wished I could write that way, and I’ve probably/definitely ripped them off.

Some will find this laughable, but I’m a fan of Joey Comeau’s writing style. I’ve enjoyed every book he’s published, in particular the short novels Malagash and Lockpick Pornography, and especially his… err, non-novel collection of cover letters Overqualified. (I think I’ve read Overqualified more than anything else on my bookshelf, but this is saying very very little as you can sit down and read it in about 30 minutes.) The darkly comedic way he presents these ideas, how he’ll expand on these very offbeat details and veer so far from the topic, then take sudden sharp turns into something uncomfortable is just enjoyable to me.

Also somewhat cliched now, but Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is a beautiful book to me. Beagle’s writing style is ideal for the fantasy setting, the poetry in his prose does not tip over the “purple” line for me (but I’ve always been unclear where the line is, obviously) and I’d really… feel like I’d accomplished something if I could say anything half as powerful as this book.

Shirley Jackson, (famously) the author of The Lottery and (less famously) We Have Always Lived in the Castle springs to mind as well. The latter in particular has a gothic tone, an at times strange sentence structure and an unreliable POV, which probably influenced Coffin Dancer stylistically and everything else I’ve done in perspective/structure.

But as far as influences, nothing more directly influenced me than @elapsed-spiral‘s writing and characterization. Old drum I’ve beat before, but it’s simply the truth. I would not have tried to write fanfiction again (after… many, many years) if I hadn’t found Danni’s stories and felt that excitement of reading something truly special. Now, it’s important to note that Danni is British so they’ll come out in hives if I praise them too much, but sincerely nothing in recent years has made me feel a “passion” for reading or writing like Yearz did. The oneshots Fairy Vale and Beside the Sea also deserve special mention for just being goddamn phenomenally good character studies. “Influence on your writing” could be misleading, in the sense that Danni’s biggest strengths (namely Being Funny, Being Realistic and Knowing What You Are Talking About) are among my biggest weaknesses, and I don’t feel that stylistically we’re all that similar; on the flipside though, I think so much of my “improvement” is really owed to Danni, aaaand I don’t think you’d ever look at something I’ve written and miss the fact that it’s ripping off Yearz in one way or another.

T: Any fanfic tropes you can’t stand?

Ahaha, alright, this jogs my memory and I do remember stepping on eggshells to answer this before! I mentioned above that I’m just not a big fan of tropes in general, but that means nothing as I don’t… have good taste. I never have. Famously bad taste over here. I don’t have any interest in raining on anyone’s fun or policing fan content, but I think we’re all perfectly fine just co-existing without feeling obligated to anything. More than anything else, in Gorillaz specifically I’d say there are some portrayals of their relationship that I find a little dodgy and I tend to avoid, but I recognize full well that many people may feel the same way about me! I also just like the characters to be compelling and to be themselves, whatever your version of them is. Of course my characterization is bonkers and mostly made-up and I have no expectation that someone else’s should resemble mine, but even if we have different ideas, I don’t like to feel you can slot them out and anyone else in? Which is why standard tropes like “coffeeshop” or “fake dating” don’t tend to be my favorite. Oh, I’m also a fuddy-duddy and I don’t love the nicknames, haha.

X: How would you categorize your fanfic reading?  Are you a voracious reader?  Do you carefully pick and choose?  Something in between?

I’m not a very big reader these days! I’d like to offer you a good excuse here, but I’m just picky, truth be told.

Y: What are your thoughts on your personal satisfaction with something you’ve written vs. the popularity of your stories?  Do you tend to be most satisfied with your most popular stories?  

In total honesty, it takes all of about a month to become completely unsatisfied with anything I’ve written. That’s not like, a plea for sympathy, it’s just being objective. I write comparatively little and comparatively slow, so whatever growth that may happen is still pretty limited and it’s a little disheartening, even if it’s also my own fault for having poor discipline. I would not call any of my stories “good,” at best “good for what they are.” There are definitely some I wished did better, I wished with a stupid amount of sincerity would hit some magical validating number that would Suddenly Mean It Was Good… but after a little distance, I can always understand why they wouldn’t.

Hoooowever, some are undeniably worse than others. Based on both hits and kudos, my most popular story is my first one (I Couldn’t Feel, So I Would Touch) and this is truly baffling as it’s garbage. I mean, with no exaggeration I just think this is bad writing through and through, it’s truly just the worst thing I’ve written over the age of 20. I hoped I’d get this question purely because of this, haha, I feel such shame every time I see this story at the top of my statistics page. If we consider that to be the “most popular,” no, I do not tend to be most satisfied with the most popular story. We could define that differently though; for example, I think the story that got the most notes here and I received spectacular fanart on (a thing I just… can’t believe can happen, how nice is that?) was Oysters, and at a time I did consider that my favorite, I was incredibly proud of it when I posted, and even if I’ve grown exhausted by my overwriting too much to read it again I do still rate it pretty favorably compared to the others. So it depends on what constitutes popular! But if we’re just talking hits and kudos, sadly my stats page puts some of the worst stuff at the top.

[goldeneyedgirl]

2019 Fic Meme

My end of year fic meme, compiled from some old Livejournal fic memes that I do when I write stuff. I do this for fun, because I like looking back at what I have and haven’t written, and what keeps popping up again.

It’s meant to be silly fun, and if anyone else wants to do it, PLEASE DO. I don’t want to tag anyone and put pressure on you in case you don’t want to/don’t think you have enough fic/hate memes. 

Twilight

12 Days of Fic-Mas (Twilight, WIP) Day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, bonus.  Twelve days of fic extracts, previews, and drabbles focusing on Alice Cullen. Encompasses Folie A Deux, The Only Girl in the World, JessaminexAlice, Omens, Asylum, The Long Way Around, The Dark and the Unknown, Hybrid, Runaway, All These Broken Things, & The Unexpected Second Life of Mary Alice Brandon 

Shadow to Light  (WIP) (Alice/Jasper, AU Angst, PG) In 1918, Jasper lures the newborn known as Mary-Alice back to Monterrey. He is lost to her before it even begins.

Total number of completed stories: Lol.

Total word count: 33,304 words were posted. 

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?  Look, I just... 2019 was a wash in so many ways. I played a lot of Fortnite really badly. I would have loved to be able to say Shadow to Light was finished, or that I was posting Hybrid regularly or something, but I can’t. I wish, wish, wish I had posted more but alas. 

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? Outside of Twilight, I dabbled with some reader/Ben in the Umbrella Academy, and I was messing around with some Janet/Wanda in my personal MCU canon. As for Twilight, I think my stuff got a lot darker? Like, we’re down the rabbit hole here, and somehow Alice ended up being the most feared vampire in the Americas? Yeah. 

And there’s the Avengers/Twilight fic that is simultaneously three fics and one fic because I cannot make Executive Decisions and I can’t decide if I like 1. Alice knowing Bucky from Before Jasper; 2. Alice knowing Hawkeye from when he was a kid in the circus and being how Natasha and Clint got out of Budapest, or 3. the Volturi hooking up with Hydra and ... yeah, I think this one is legit the most second-most one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever written. (I’ve been filing today, and boy howdy have I written some actual shit.)

What’s your own favourite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest? That’s like making me pick a favourite child. I’m always so, so proud of Shadow to Light, and I love The Dark and the Unknown ‘verse, and Hybrid is just hanging out there, chilling and ugh. My babies <3 

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?  TwilightFicMas was a huge risk! I wasn’t sure anyone cared unless I was posting more Shadow to Light, and people were SO nice and enthusiastic. So I guess the lesson is shut up and share more fic? Get out of your own head and spend time in the community because fandom isn’t meant to be lonely?

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?  I’m starting a graphic design business AND my masters in design in 2020, so I figure fic is going to be my downtime next year. Ideally, I would love to get STL finished, Memento Vivere’s sequel going, and have a few of my shorter pieces posted. I would really love to get some of my original stuff ready for publication, but I’d be happy studying, running my business, and doing the fic thing for 2020.  

My best story of this year: That’s up to the readers, I guess. Everyone seemed obscenely enthusiastic about The Unexpected Second Life of Mary Alice Brandon, though, and I was not expecting that at all - I was actually upset that I left the ‘dud’ fic for the last day of FicMas. 

My most popular story: Shadow to Light. Everyone is so nice and enthusiastic and polite about that one. I’m not used to it! Fandom for me is usually me sitting in a corner, doin’ my obscure thing, and maybe one or two people will read what I’m working on.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:  I think everyone was super enthusiastic and nice about everything I posted this year. Maybe Folie A Deux? But like, that reflects more on me and the excerpts that I chose to post rather than the fic or the audience itself. 

Most fun story to write:  The Unexpected Second Life of Mary Alice Brandon because that Alice is so happy; I have this playlist for it that is super upbeat and funky. 

Hybrid is fun because that Alice likes to torment Jasper. He understands Edward on a molecular level once Alice arrives. 

Most Sexy Story: The Dark and the Unknown is the front-runner for that, because most of the sexy goings-on in Shadow to Light is very much focused on the psychological and emotional aspects rather than the physical.

Story with the single sexiest moment:  The Dark and the Unknown. I am still deeply uncomfortable writing sex scenes, so this may be the only one I ever do. The implication of a blow job in Shadow to Light nearly kill me tbh.

The forest behind the school is silent; just her breathing, and the slight wind. No birds or wildlife, none of the hum of the traffic or of the school.

They don’t undress more than necessary, her skirt slid to her hips, and he takes her roughly against a tree, flakes of bark falling into the dirt. She is hot and slick, and silent as he fucks her, his fingers digging into her hips, a growl rising in his chest. She is every bit his fantasy; the smell of damp flowers, the sweetness of her flesh, her willing supplication. His fingers tear through the lace of her tights as he grips her thighs, and the heels of her shoes must be bending, she’s digging them into the backs of his legs so hard.

Most “holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story:  The Long Way Around makes Jasper and Alice’s relationship pretty fucked up, and tbh I look back at it and really struggle with how dark it is and how dark Jasper’s character becomes. There’s a reason that Shadow to Light is the ‘official’ version - it’s a better balance, and I actually think Maria is a lot more interesting in Shadow to Light as a villain with complex relationships with both Jasper and Alice to the point where none of them really want to have to kill each other, but there is a lot of hate on both sides. 

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:  That’s a hard question. Shadow to Light definitely did that because I had to consider what happened when you took Alice out of the picture, and how that changed what happened, and considered the inter-family relationships. So much of canon relies on Alice’s visions that things can’t just happen the same way. 

Hardest story to write: Shadow to Light isn’t easy because I have such a specific idea of how it plays out, how it ‘looks’ in my head, and because Alice is so fundamentally different to canon. More innocent when it comes to normal interactions, and so controlled because it meant life or death - but she’s still got to be Alice in a way that people can recognize. It also has to sound right? If I can’t get the right turn of phrase for one scene, it has to be put aside until I can work it out. 

 All These Broken Things is hard because I started it back in, like, 2014ish and my writing and understanding of the characters and canon has changed so much - plus there are a few sections that came to me quite early in the writing, and now sound really out of place, but are such a strong linchpin for the story that I have to rework them in. It’s a good kind of hard, though, because I’ve improved so much, my ideas and goals are more refined. 

Most disappointing:  Omens is a little bitch, honestly. I started it for a fic contest and kept going to explore Alice’s human life, and it doesn’t quite feel like my writing? It needs reworking, and be a little less obvious because I think the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ is a good theme for a Human!Alice fic. 

Easiest story to write: Depends on my mood; Hybrid is great when I’m in kind of a ‘girls kicking ass’ mood and boot up my action girls playlist.

Biggest surprise:  Hybrid started as a love story that was basically ‘yeah, let’s make this shit super dramatic and overwrought’, and turned into this actual story with a huge focus on family and relationships. I can’t remember why I decided Alice’s father had a husband except that I was thinking about small town ‘otherness’, and LGBT+ people can and are still considered ‘other’ in these spaces. 

Then you add in Alice and Cynthia who are basically in the same boat but have been separated for their entire lives. Alice has knowledge in her corner, whilst having to fight through foster care, abuse, and hospital; whilst Cynthia has lived a very normal but privileged life as the daughter of a mixed-race same-sex couple in a very small town. I went full-hog with this, and added in an extended family, because I really hated how canon went balls-to-the-wall to isolate Bella from everyone, including Charlie. 

Like, this thing is a monster, and whilst I plan to sit down and rewrite the outline (which dates back to 2016, and I hate the ending of), I stopped outlining at 65 freaking chapters. 

Most unintentionally telling story:  I think this question that still confuses me finally gets a decent answer in The Dark and the Unknown - Jasper is seeing most of it from his perspective, and there isn’t a ton of dialogue. I’ve tried to avoid an info-dump, but it’s meant to be quite supernatural in tone, and focusing on vampire senses and gifts enhances that. 

Story I’d like to revise:  All These Broken Things wins that one. Due to the age of the piece, there are some pacing and tone issues in later chapters that are the reason I haven’t formally posted it. 

Story I didn’t write but will at some point, I swear: Oh man, I really want to finish A Thousand Years of Solitude, which is a Tanya fic. I’m really happy with what I’ve got so far, but it sounds smarter and more layered than it really is, so I’m kind of stuck. 

Mad World because Romani!Alice is super sassy and taking 0% of Swan or Cullen bullshit - I think 90% of my fic is just me going, “yeah, that’s not how normal people react.” And I’m a sucker for gothic horror. 

What else? Aww, Against A Wall which is AU Human Jasper coming from the shittiest home, and Alice finding him. It’s meant to be short, and another one I have a really clear idea of how it needs to work. 

And the one where Alice’s gift is a sentient power that pushes her to follow it; that Bad Things happen if she doesn’t; that Renesmee was always Endgame for Something, and Alice was a key piece to get that result. Or the one where Aro takes Alice as a ‘guest’ for a period because of Edward and Bella, and Alice’s gift is basically broken. 

Good times. I have like 5 years of fic on this computer, we could be here for awhile. 

[youknowmymethods]

Content Creator Interview #6

Hello again and welcome to our sixth interview. This time, it’s the turn of @ashockinglackofsatin to put @sunken-standard ‘s writing under the microscope. Together they chat about the early days of the Sherlock fandom, how music can influence writing, and why the I Love You scene helped end sunken’s own great hiatus.

For those who don’t know me: I am @ashockinglackofsatin on tumbr, satin_doll on AO3. My test subject...erm, sorry - interviewee - is the notorious sunken_standard, probably most famous for her two epic, novel-length stories Longer Than The Road That Stretches Out Ahead and Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, which can be found on AO3 (along with her other wonderful stories) and should be required reading for anyone aspiring to write fanfiction.

 You should know, first off, that I’m crap at doing interviews, which I discovered years ago when I had to interview musicians and various personalities as a job. I didn’t last long at that job.

 So here is Kat’s Idiotic Interview with @sunken-standard.

  satin_doll:  You’re very good at writing Sherlock’s emotional cluelessness without making him seem like an idiot or an ass. Can you talk a little about the way you see Sherlock’s character that allows you to do this?

 sunken_standard: Thank you :D  So the answer to this is going to carry through to some of the other questions, but basically, I write Sherlock as a version of myself.  I feel a kinship with the character, a highly intelligent person surrounded by idiots and so, so frustrated by it, but even more frustrated by his own brain and the inability to control it.  Probably autistic, just like I'm probably autistic (and I don't want to get into it but I'm not trying to co-opt an identity here or anything; I've tried to get a diagnosis and found out that's just not possible with my current healthcare options).

Anyway, one of my probably-autistic things is being hyper-aware of other people's emotions, but also having trouble identifying them and the appropriate responses.  At times I do lack empathy, like I honestly can't understand why someone is feeling what they're feeling because I wouldn't feel that way in the same situation and it doesn't make sense.  Sometimes I can empathize so much that it's overwhelming and I just kind of short-circuit, especially when it comes to grief or loss, and I end up being insensitive or just not saying or doing what a normal person would.

 So basically, I approach his responses to other people's emotions the way I would my own, only stripped of female socialization and self-awareness.

  satin_doll:  How much do you draw on your own life and experiences in your fics?

 sunken_standard: For scenarios and specific scenes, not a lot.  For emotional and sensory experiences, more. I haven't done very much or lived to my full potential, so it's not a very deep well on either account.  Every now and then anecdotes or details creep in (like Mars Cheese Castle and the “call me Daddy” during sex thing [which, for the record, was skeevy as fuck irl]), but most of it just comes from nowhere or stuff I saw on TV.

  satin_doll:  Both “Longer than the Road…” and “Fumbling Toward Ecstasy” are novel length stories. “Road”, however, is written without breaks/chapters. Did you ever consider breaking it up into parts or chapters? How hard was it to keep it all in one piece and how long did it take you to finish it?

 sunken_standard: When I write, I usually just start and then go 'til it's done or I burn out.  I got through three or four chapters' worth of FTE (and was on the verge of giving up until maybe_amanda convinced me not to).  Since the story wasn't nearly finished and I wanted to start putting it out into the world (mostly because I have no patience, but also because I knew there was a window to stay relevant and a large number of people were looking for a longer, meatier [cough] post-TFP fic), I decided to start posting what I had and just write as I went because I was, in hindsight, probably hypomanic and I was keeping a good pace at that point.

 I dunno, I think there was a lot more of that long-format thing happening in fic back then, where you'd have a 40k piece that only had breaks because of the word limit per post on LJ.

 As far as how long it took, I don't remember.  I know I started it February of that year and had probably a good 75% of it finished (all written at a tear, over the course of probably ten days or so, because when I was still smoking actual cigarettes I could and did do 3-5k words/ day), but then I dropped it and went on to try other ideas.  I went back to it when those other stories fizzled, and I finished it in maybe another 2-3 weeks with editing and beta reading.  I had some real problems with the ending and it was never good enough for me, but I just got to a point where I was sick of it and it was good enough.

 So basically, it's harder for me to work in chapters than it is one long piece.  There's more discipline to a chaptered work; each chapter is its own story, in a way, and each one needs to end on a certain kind of beat.  I still don't feel like I have a knack for it, and I think if I did anything long like that again I'd have to write most of it without breaks and then shoehorn them in where I could later on.

  satin_doll:  You took a long hiatus from Sherlock fic after S2, and came back for S4. What was it about S4 that sparked your writing again?

 sunken_standard: I don't really know.  I mean, the ILY was a big thing, but I think S4 gave me more to work with for the kind of things I write (all the angst and inner monologue) than S3 or TAB.  I had mixed feelings about S3.  I didn't like Mary much for a long time because she was one of Moffat's women (and anyone who's seen my tumblr knows how I feel about that), but I finally unclenched after a while because I like Amanda Abbington a lot and Mary was preferable to Sarah Sawyer (who I'm more ambiguous about now, but really didn't like for a long time because there was something about her that I read as smarmy, though now I see her reactions as more subtly uncomfortable and kind of like “what's going on/ this is weird/ John's a nice guy but is everything around him always this weird?”).  Anyway.

I did try writing a bit after S3, but I never finished any of it; I didn't really feel like there was a place in the fandom or much of a community at that time, either—at least, not like what I had been used to from the early days.  The tribe that existed wasn't my tribe (any of them).  I think I need a certain degree of shared enthusiasm to motivate me to keep writing.  Like, I have a lot of ideas for fic in other fandoms, but they're dead or never existed in the first place.  And I know I'll have some audience for the small fandoms and people will read and kudos and everything, but there's no one around to geek out with or bounce ideas off of, so it just isn't as appealing.  If I'm going to be miserable and alone while writing something, it's going to be something I can at least make money off of, y'know?

  satin_doll:  Do you edit as you go or finish the story first and go back over it to edit?

 sunken_standard: Edit as I go.  When I get stuck, I break that cardinal rule of writing and go back over what I've written and nit-pick it to death.  It's a bad habit, but at the same time, small changes have led to big developments in the course of the story later on.  I mean, I think sometimes this is why I have so many unfinished things, but I've tried just writing through and that doesn't work for me either. Once I get to the end of something, I've already made most of big cuts and done a lot of the reworking, so the beta polishing isn't as labor-intensive.  I'm one of those people that when I feel like something's finished, I don't want to have to go back to it again.  And if I didn't edit as I went, it would kind of feel like redoing the whole story and that's extremely unappealing to me.  It's kind of like baking—it's always better if you clean as you go, rather than waiting until the cake's out of the oven to do the dishes and put stuff away (which I do when I'm low on spoons, but it ends up seeming like double the work).

 satin_doll:  Do you proof it yourself or rely on someone else to proofread it for you? I’m talking technical details here, proofing as opposed to simple beta reading.

 sunken_standard: Mostly proof myself, since I edit as I go (and proofing is inevitably part of that when the mistakes just jump out).  My beta catches everything else (and she's amazing; I misuse words and just legit don't know spelling differences for a lot of things [stationary vs stationery] and I'm not great with grammar and prepositions because I'm an ignorant fucker with no education).

  satin_doll:  When did you first start writing? When did you first discover that you COULD write?

 sunken_standard: I remember writing stories as a kid, but I burned them all when I was a teenager so I don't even know what most were about or anything.  I do remember that I wrote one when I was in like 4th or 5th grade that was ST:TNG self-insert fanfic and I think the plot was me working with Data to bring Lal back. I know it was Data, because I had a huge crush on him as a kid.  I really thought I could grow up to write ST:TNG novels at that point.

 And as for CAN write—jury's still out on that one. Ask my 12th grade English teacher, who laughed in my face when I told him I was thinking of pursuing English so I could be a writer.  But before that, I had some other teachers that used to give me A+s on my creative writing assignments (despite all the spelling and grammatical errors).  In 11th grade, I had a really great teacher, Mr. Lansing, who turned me on to the good parts of American lit and really encouraged me to read (and write) what I liked, not just what other people told me I had to.  He encouraged me when I applied for the Governer's school, too. (The Governer's School is this program in PA for kids who excel; it's like a summer camp for the elite nerds.  They have a bunch of them, each for different areas—math, science, medicine, I think one that's like history/ government/ civics, and then one for the arts.  For creative writing, they take a total of 20 kids—10 for poetry and 10 for prose.  I tried for the poetry category and made the first round of cuts and went for a regional interview (with about 50 other kids, so like maybe 150 kids state-wide); long story short I didn't make it.  I was the first alternate, meaning if somebody couldn't attend, I would get their spot.  #11 out of 10.  I was so crushed, because it basically reinforced what I'd been told by other people—I was a big fish in pond too small to even piss in and there were always going to be people better than me.  I was already mostly checked-out when it came to academia and aspirations; after that there was just really no point to keep going.)

 Anyway though, I did write bits and pieces here and there even after school, thinking one day I'd get my shit together and write my own Confederacy of Dunces and then off myself (it's still a viable plan). Then, in 2008 I was recently unemployed and everything in life was shitty, so I wrote a big happy-ending fic for The Doctor and Rose.  It was kind of the right bit of media at the right time that inspired me.  More about that later though.

  satin_doll:   What/who do you think has had the biggest influence on the development of your style?

 sunken_standard: I've been asked this before, and I always feel like I'm a little pretentious and I trot out the same names (both fanfic authors and book authors), but I had a realization a while ago that I'm always missing one person—Vonnegut.  I think he's got this kind of no-bullshit way of saying things that still manages to be poetic and delicate and that's what I most aspire to.

I think a lot of my style is influenced by film, too. Some influences are probably Todd Solondz, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, and John Waters, as far as the way I approach the reality within the story.  I think I tend to focus on a lot of the same things—the weird, the mundane, the mildly uncomfortable—but I don't go nearly as far in any direction.  I think even the way I string scenes together and the shifting of focus within my scenes between action, dialogue, and inner monologue are influenced by cinematography.  I always say I'm just transcribing the movie in my head, so I mean, there's bound to be some kind of influence.

  satin_doll:  You’re noted for the banter between your characters, humorous and otherwise. Do you have rules/profiles for characters that establish their voices for you? Are there things, for example, that you think Sherlock or Molly simply would never say/do or would always say/do? How structured are these characters in your head when you start writing?

 sunken_standard: It varies slightly from story to story/ universe to universe, but I think I have patterns for the banter (and I have a different set for Sherlock and John, and Sherlock and Mycroft, but there are common threads throughout).  As for comedy, it's not quite straight man/ funny man, but I tend to default to Sherlock being more literal and deadpan and Molly being more expressive and emotive. I use the scraps of the dynamic the show's given us and just build on that.  It's kind of formulaic, actually: Sherlock does a not-good thing (degree of severity varies), Molly reacts with a blend of annoyance and amusement while going along for the ride.

 I have a kind of mental file for things I think would be out of character for each of them, but sometimes I like to try to find a way to get to one of those things and slip it into a fic organically.  One of the reason I liked doing the one-line prompt fics so much was that so many of them could easily have been intros to the kind of fluff that makes me gag; I'm no fool, though, and I love me some low-hanging fruit, so I just adjust it to my tastes.  I'm a never-say-never kinda gal.  Mostly.

 That being said, there are a lot of things that I think would take a lot of doing to make them be in-character.  I don't think they'd ever use pet names for each other unless it was through gritted teeth or with at least a bit of irony (like how I used “yes, dear,” in FTE, and I think in some of the universes in Ficlet Cemetery).  I can't see Sherlock ever doing housework unless it was for a case (though dishes and sanitizing surfaces are an exception, because both those chores are tangent to the kind of cleaning up after oneself one does in a lab setting, and imo that fits with his logic).  I can't see him being very affectionate in public, except under rare circumstances when he might do an arm around the shoulders or a guiding palm to the small of the back.

 And as for structure, I think they all start with the same scaffolding, but in every new universe they get draped slightly differently according to variations in backstory or tone or genre or whatever. Or like, they're already sculpted, but the lighting changes.  I think that as I write, they take on different nuances and acquire more depth, though.  Like it wasn't really until a few chapters in to FTE that I got a fuller picture of the Molly I was writing, even though I had the rough idea of her backstory from pretty much the beginning.  Same with Longer Than the Road, too.  As I come up with details of someone's past, I experience those scenarios and it makes me rethink and fine-tune everything about them in what I've already written, and adds more texture as I keep going.

  satin_doll:  You’ve listed a playlist for “Longer than the Road…” Do you write to music? How much does music inspire your writing? Does every story have a playlist?

 sunken_standard: It's funny, but I don't listen to music nearly as much as I did even 5 years ago.  Not sure why, honestly, maybe something to do with my mental health and overstimulation?  So I don't write to music much anymore.  Not every story has a playlist or songs attached (I don't think any of the FC stuff does, at least not in any significant way), but it seems like my best work is inspired by music in some way.

 FTE didn't really have a soundtrack, but I listened to a lot of the music I had in common with the version of Molly that I was writing—very 90s alternative and pop rock.  Lots of Pulp (which I picked as Molly's favorite band because I think they're Loo's favorite, or one of her favorites).  For the proposal, I had “Dreams” by The Cranberries on a loop as I wrote.  There's just something musically about that song that's full of anticipation and the wavy kind of guitar (I don't know the music terms and it's been so many years since I was into anything instrument-related that I'm not even sure how the sound is made, like a whammy bar or wiggling their fingers on the frets or whatever but anyway) just has this kind of wavering emotion that makes it feel like it's on the cusp of something.  And also it's the big romance song from every coming-of-age thing ever, and so just hearing it is like an auditory shorthand for breathless, adventurous romance, at least for women of a certain age (namely, my age, and I'm only a year younger than Loo/ Molly).  There was another scene—I can't remember what it was without rereading the fic—that I spent like three days listening to nothing but “The Way” by Fastball.  It might have been the thing with the drink testing and then the sex on the sofa and the cake baking.  (As an aside, I just started listening to the song and immediately got hit with a sense memory of night-wet spring air blowing in my window, because that's what the weather was when I was writing to this and it gives me a weird yearning pull in the back of my throat, like nostalgia almost but something else in it. Like, did you ever hear a pop song that taps into some deeper part of the human experience, both musically and lyrically, and you just feel like there's some universal truth in it that's too much to totally grasp?  That's how I feel about both of those songs.  Anyway.)

 Another story that had a few songs attached was Stainless, Captive Bead.  Radiohead's “Creep” was what they were listening to in the tattoo parlor, and a lot of the sex bits were written while listening to Nine Inch Nails' “Closer” (look, if it's set in the 90s and there's fucking in it, I'm going to find a way to relate it to “Closer,” because that song is just dark sex and angst set to synthesizers and a high hat).

 Also, sometimes when I write I listen to ambient noise stuff, cityscapes or rain or whatever fits the tone of the piece and my mood.  I can't listen to anything for too long, though, because I get listener fatigue and I burn out faster.

  satin_doll:  Have you ever considered self-publishing your stories as a book or series of books?

 sunken_standard: I've tried to file off the serial numbers on the Girlfriend series, but it was harder than I thought it would be so I back-burnered it.  I still like to think that one day I will, it's a life goal, but if I put too much pressure on myself I only make it worse and nothing gets done.

  satin_doll:  You seem to have a detailed backstory for every character in your stories, from Janine to Molly’s mother. Do you work these out beforehand or do they just happen in your head as you write?

 sunken_standard: Both?  I kind of touched on it earlier, but I usually have an idea of the backstory, the bones at least, and then as I write it gets richer.  I have multiple headcanons for every character, so I just start off with one of those.  Like I have five different families for Molly, all things I was coming up with when I was writing other stories.  Hell, I've got like five different Uncle Rudys (most of them highly unpleasant and most likely triggering).

I have a habit of just sitting and thinking about a character, like “what would make them this way?” armchair psychoanalysis stuff. And if I can establish a plausible-sounding backstory, I have a better foundation for introducing non-canonical traits or details.  I think that's the downfall of a lot of fic authors—they just write a canon character as they would an OC and expect us to play along without demonstrating any internal logic.  Maybe I'm just picky; there's certainly an element of that, too.

  satin_doll:  How detailed is the story in your mind before you start writing it? Do you work from plans and outlines with every story?

 sunken_standard: It all depends on the story.  Sometimes I have a whole series of detailed scenes just waiting in my head to be written out.  Sometimes I only have one thing and I just keep going.  I say I use an outline, but it's not a proper outline.  More like a collection of notes and bullet points of what I want to happen and what kind of beats I want to hit.  I usually keep it at the bottom of my working document so I don't have to switch to another doc to look at it if I need to.

  satin_doll: Where does a story begin with you? What constitutes the “urge” to write? You once mentioned (in a comment reply I think) that you know the ending of the story first and then write the rest of the story to get there. What do you do when a story goes off track? How do you get it back to the way you planned it, or do you even try to do that?

  sunken_standard: (I don't know why my document formatting went tits-up here, so I'll answer 1 & 2 both here)

 So stories are a visceral kind of thing.  I always have ideas.  Seriously, give me a theme or a title or something and I can spit out a summary and details in as long as it takes to type it out.  But actually crafting prose (can I sound more pompous?) is best likened to the urge to poop.  Classy, right?  I said it was visceral.  Really though, it's that same kind of state of heightened awareness/ arousal (in the strictest medical sense of the word, not sexual arousal), something is happening and if it doesn't things are going to get weird and I'm going to be very uncomfortable for a very long time.  Also, like pooping, if it's not ready, no amount of grunting or straining is going to make it happen, and it might even make it worse in the long run.  As you can tell, I've been very, very constipated for the last year.

 Anyway.

 Stories going off track... a lot of the time I just let it happen because it's taking me to a better place than where I thought it was going to end up.

  satin_doll:  Quote from you: “I spend way too much time thinking about who Molly is as a person. Writing porn and comedy both have their appeal, but I really like sitting down and thinking about what makes any given character tick and how they might feel about what's happening around them. 30s and single has so much baggage to it, even if all the women's magazine articles and whatever-wave-we're-up-to-now feminist thought pieces say it's a myth or a stereotype or whatever. It's a truth we don't want to be true because it's not fair. I mean, it's not the thing that solely defines any woman, but it's there, just like cellulite and brand new and worrying moles and our favorite brand of whatever suddenly being discontinued (or significantly changed) because some marketing person decided it was too 'old.' But anyway, such is life. And I like putting that in fic.”

 Do you write character studies to use as a reference for your stories, or just wing it for each individual piece?

 sunken_standard: The character study is dead, isn't it?  Like, as standalone fic.  Never see them anymore, which is a real pity.  I used to write them (or, well, start them, heh) before I took a break from writing/ fandom, mostly to try to get some of my headcanons down in some kind of usable way.  But I haven't really written a character study (in prose, at least) since 2012 or so.

 So when I write, I keep two documents open—the working copy that's a first-through-final draft and a “notes/ cut bits/ things to work in somehow” document.  In the notes document I usually keep any character details (backstory or how I want them to react to something later, whatever).  There are themes I go back to over and over, like a cluster of traits I reuse in some fashion because I think they fit the character (Mycroft and disordered eating, Molly as a middle child in some fashion, John as the child of alcoholics, etc.), so a lot of that just lives in my head. Any bits of characterization specific to a story go in the notes doc for that story, while any generic thoughts or something that I think I might want to use later gets stuck in another document full of random ideas, snippets of dialogue, jokes, AUs I'll never write, that kind of thing.  I've got a few of those docs from different writing periods.  They're mostly just a way to externalize a thought so I don't lose it; I hardly ever go back to them for anything.

  satin_doll:  What was your first involvement with fanfiction? Where did it all start?

 sunken_standard: I started to answer this in another question; basically, fanfic's been in my wheelhouse in one way or another since I was a kid (Star Trek novels are fanfic, period).  I discovered fanfiction back in the days of eXcite searches and webrings while looking for translations of Inu Yasha manga scans; I stumbled upon an English-language fancomic/ doujinshi called Hero in the 21st Century and it was so well-written, funny and poignant and well-researched I was just drawn in.  I still think about it and the author's other works to this day.  I did pick at the idea of writing myself, sometimes even put down scenes or outlines and did hours of research, but never did the thing.

 And then, in 2008, the stars aligned and I started a thing.  Journey's End spawned a ton of Doctor Who fic, and that was good, because I could just kind of slip mine in there and I probably wouldn't get a lot of criticism or attention.  So I wrote like two chapters without any idea of how it was going to end, and I submitted it to Teaspoon and an Open Mind (which was the Doctor Who fic archive at the time; it was curated/ moderated and where you went when you wanted to read something you knew would be good, or at least conform to certain standards, unlike The Pit [which is still garbage today]).  And I got rejected.  My grammar and spelling were awful (I didn't even have spell-check in whatever program I was using) and they said the whole thing had good bones, but I really needed to work on the English before they'd look at it again.  Getcherself a beta, they suggested, and I think they had a forum where writers and betas could connect.  So I got myself a beta and she stuck with me for like 30 chapters, answering questions and keeping my characterization on-track and basically re-teaching me the rules of written English.  I tried to email her a few years ago to thank her again, but her email bounced back. Her name was Julia and if she sees this, thank you Julia.  You're a wonderful person.

 Anyway, I wrote lots in that fic universe for like 2 months, then got another job and tapered off.  I abandoned it completely after a year.  Life got in the way of a lot of things, and the next time I was really inspired to write anything was a couple years later, for Supernatural.  I only put it on my LJ, never posted to a community or anything, and no one read it.  Literally, I don't think the post got any hits at all and for sure no one commented.  I sometimes think about putting it on AO3 just because.  And then Sherlock happened and here we are.

 satin_doll:  Do you think writing fanfic has hurt or hindered your original work? Why or why not? (that looks like a high school test question - sorry!)

 sunken_standard: Lol @ test question :D

 I'm not really sure, tbh.  On one hand, I only have so much creative energy—it's definitely a finite resource, and a scarce one—and devoting it to fanfic diverts it from any original work.  On the other hand, all writing is practice.  The only way to improve is to keep doing, no matter what it is.  So in that sense, fanfic's certainly helped me to find a comfortable voice and a prose style that works for me.  There are still problems to solve, figuring out the best approach to a scene or story from a technical standpoint (stuff like tense and perspective and all that), so I'm always learning something as I go. Mixed bag, really.

  satin_doll:  What was it about the Sherlock/Molly dynamic that got you started on a piece like “Longer Than the Road…” What did you see there that made you want to explore it in such detail?

 sunken_standard: So I always talk about how Sustain was my come-to-Jesus moment with Sherlock and Molly. Here's something I've never told anybody, not even maybe_amanda (because I was kind of ashamed, but not for the reasons people might think): before ever reading Sustain, I started a story that was Sherlock/ John and Sherlock/ Molly.  I had it roughly outlined and a few pages written, but I just kind of lost the feeling of it and it was starting to get problematic for character motivations, yada yada, so into the scrap heap it went.  It had a passing similarity to Sustain because of a platonic-sex-for-pregnancy element (hence why I never talked about it), but the major difference was that it was going to end up as a kind of polyamorous arrangement, Sherlock loving both of them and having a kind of co-parenting triad.  In mine, John wanted a baby, and Molly wanted her own baby, and Sherlock thought “best of both worlds!” and why do IVF when you can write awkward angst-fucking instead.  But yeah, I never finished it.  

 Anyway, I always saw something there, but I couldn't make it work in a way that was consistent with my own characterization of Sherlock until after Series 2.  Even in Series 1, he looks at her with a kind of fondness and a sort of bewilderment that just lends itself to nerds in love.  At the time (and even now, tbh), I kind of attributed that to BC having a crush on Loo (and oh man do I have theories, which are gossipy and gross and not the kind of thing I usually even bother having opinions about, but have you listened to the S1 commentary and some of the interviews around that time? there's something more there) and that kind of just spilling over onscreen and it working for the editor because it makes BC look sexy.

I mean look, I make no secret of the fact I started off shipping Sherlock with John almost exclusively (though I'd read just about anything), and after S1 aired it was just a different time.  I get really annoyed when people talk shit about the pairing and the people who still ship them, because most of them weren't even in the fandom at the time and didn't have the same experience as the OGs. When Series 1 aired, hardly anyone knew who BC was, and Martin was just the guy from The Office and some other shows that were kind of unremarkable; most of the fandom was composed of old-school ACD Sherlockians and a few stragglers (like me) that got there from Doctor Who or were just general mystery/ thriller fans that got sucked in. We had a different perception of it because we weren't led into it by Star Trek or Hobbits or MCU; the characters didn't have that baggage attached for us.  A lot of us already had a perception of Holmes and Watson as some shade of gay, so it was no great leap to see the very obvious romance (and yes, they all called it that in interviews at the time) onscreen as a romantic one. Martin, when asked, said basically that he'd play the next series (S2) however they wrote it, and if romance was there he'd go down that road.  Whatever, I don't need to defend it because people think what they think anyway.

.

Anyway, getting back to the actual question instead of a million tangents and rants, I think I saw a lot of the things that have since become like backbone tropes of the pairing (even in canon, with the whole “alone, practical about death” thing).  Their interactions in S2 were great; everything hinted at more than what was on-screen.  And I really liked the idea of exploring the dynamic that was pretty much already there, as far as Molly having both a crush and self-respect and Sherlock suddenly having to rely on this person (that he picked because she was reliable to begin with) who's a friend, but also kind of a stranger in the way that a lot of the people we consider friends are (at least, friends made in adulthood; work-friends, church-friends, club-friends, gym-friends).  Past that, I really saw the potential for character growth stemming from their interactions, but not like her humanizing him or whatever; both of them gaining insight about themselves, with the other person (and their relationship) as a vehicle for those realizations.  I think I could have done better on that front, but hindsight blah blah.

  satin_doll:  How familiar were you with the Sherlock Holmes character before the BBC series aired, and what made you want to write about him?

 sunken_standard: So I wasn't very familiar at all.  Just what was in the general cultural lexicon, maybe a few episodes of the Granada series on PBS as a kid, a few of the stories that I just couldn't get into when I tried to read them because I hate Victorian prose (hate it, everything about it, I won't read anything written before 1920 or so because I just hate it [Wilde being the singular exception, but I even get bogged down by him]).  Oh, and the RDJ movie, which wasn't really Sherlock Holmes to me, but just like a Victorian-era action movie.  After S1, I just devoured canon (though, full disclosure, I still haven't read all of it, probably only about 80%), then moved on to other adaptations and canon-era fic and pastiches, read a bunch of extra-canon material on the internet.  So as far as that goes, I'm very much a poseur and newbie in the greater Sherlock Holmes fandom.  At least I did my research?

 Anyway, it really took the modern adaptation and BC's performance to make the character resonate with me.  The aspects he chose to play up—the frustration and impatience and frantic mental energy—just hit a nerve.  He really channeled the “gifted” experience (which I suspect was just a lot of BC himself bleeding through).  Finally I could use a fictional character to bemoan how stupid everyone around me was and sound like a complete asshole and be completely in-character!  The heavens smiled upon me.

 Really though, I was initially attracted to how cerebral it was and how smart the fandom was overall.  It was the early fandom (and I mean early, like days after episode 1 aired) that drew me in, at least to a participatory (vs. consumptive) level.  Lots of very clever, very educated, very queer people having these deep, insightful discussions about everything (sometimes only tangentially related to the show).  When I did start writing, I didn't have to dumb anything down; the challenge was to sound smarter than I actually am.  And, I mean, I got to dredge up a lot of my own emotional baggage from being a perpetual outsider, which is always cathartic (and probably not very healthy, long-term, because it's not resolving anything, just exploiting myself, but that's a can of worms).

  satin_doll:  Are you more drawn to Sherlock or Molly as a character, or both equally? Why?

 sunken_standard: Sherlock, I think, for the reasons described in the last question.

I don't generally identify with female characters in fiction, since my own identification as female is tenuous (and in general they're poorly written and poorly realized, but that's another story). I mean, I can draw from my own experiences as a (mostly) female-shaped person with female socialization, but I have a hard time intuiting feminine and it's harder for me to write a “normal” woman.

Paraphrasing something I read in an interview with another fic author I admire, writing a woman is always a self-portrait, and how much of yourself do you really want to reveal?  Since I don't know how to woman correctly, I'm always afraid I'm going to slip up and hit the wrong beat for what a normal woman is and end up ruining the characterization.  I do manage to channel a lot of my own frustrations with men, relationships, being a single and childless woman over 30, and the patriarchy into Molly's character, though.

 I mean, don't get me wrong, I really love Molly (and always have—I was one of the first to use her as a main character and not just a punching bag or a punchline).  I love her sense of humor and her job and her fashion sense, all of it. She's not one-dimensional.  It's just easier for me to write Sherlock than it is to make decisions about who Molly is.

  satin_doll:  You are “internet famous” for Longer Than the Road (rightfully so!) What about that story do you think is so affecting for fans? How has “Road” influenced subsequent work you’ve done in the Sherlolly ship?

 sunken_standard: You know, I'm really not sure why it seems to resonate with people.  Maybe the homesickness or the exhaustion that comes with impermanence (and I mean, we all feel that on an existential level, everything's always changing and it's faster every year, just existing is like trying to walk in an earthquake).  Or the healing/ recovery aspect of it (I tried to balance both sides, the affected and the caregiver).  Or maybe I just wrote it at the right time (when there wasn't much else out there) and people kept coming back to it because it was familiar.

 As for how it's influenced subsequent work... I'm sure it has, but I don't know how, exactly.  I still think it's the best thing I've ever written and the closest to something literary I'll ever get, so in a way it's an albatross (no one ever wants to be reminded that they already peaked).  I get frustrated when my newer work doesn't live up to the standard I set for myself with it.  That frustration doesn't make me a better writer, it just makes me tired, so everything I do now is paler.

 One thing it did do was cement my characterizations of Sherlock and Molly and the dynamic between them.  I tend to write them a certain way and don't deviate from that, and that all has roots in the push-pull, love-hate thing I established in Longer Than the Road.  I can't write Molly without a degree of contempt for Sherlock and I can't write Sherlock without a degree of shame and contrition in his feelings toward Molly.

  satin_doll:  How does feedback affect what you write? How important is it? Is it more important that a reader “get” the point of the work or just that they like it? What kind of reader do you write for?

 sunken_standard: I try not to let feedback affect my writing.  I mean, I only get positive feedback, really, so it's a high.  I'm not trying to brag or anything; I count myself lucky that I don't get the shit others do (though I honestly think anybody that posts on The Pit is opening themselves up to it because it's a garbage dump, but I've never liked the site, so).  I try not to let it go to my head or anything though.

 I also try not to let it influence the direction my writing takes; I might do a comment fic or write a silly HC or something, but I like to keep my substantial pieces pure, so to speak.  Though sometimes a comment sparks something and a whole other fic grows out of it, so I fail there, I guess.  Sometimes it's a lot of pressure when people say they want to see more of something, or want me to write a kind of specific scenario, so I usually just don't, and then I feel bad about not giving nice people what they want and it starts this whole weird spiral of guilt and obligation and then swinging the other way and getting (internally) belligerent over not owing anybody anything.  I uh, have a complicated relationship with my work being acknowledged in any capacity.

 As for people “getting” it...  I don't know if they really do or not.  Sometimes I get comments and I can tell they're definitely on my wavelength and they picked up on an allusion or a detail or just saw or felt everything in the scene like I did when I was laying it out.  Once in a while I get a comment that has a different interpretation than what I was trying to get across, and that's really cool because it makes me re-examine my own work and see it from a different perspective (which I think makes me stronger for the next thing).  It's really validating when someone “gets” it, but at the same time, I write to entertain other people (as well as myself), so as long as they like it, I feel accomplished.

 It's cliché, but I write for an audience of one. I've tried to write outside my taste and it doesn't end well.  Sometimes I write tropes that aren't my bag (like the Wiggins “the Missus” thing, or kidfic/ pregnancy), but it's kind of like a nod and wink to people who do like it, rather than outright pandering.  At least, that's what I tell myself.  Sometimes you need to try on every bra in your size, even the ones you know you hate, just to make sure you're getting the right one, y'know?

  satin_doll:  Do you think fanfic has changed since you began writing it? If so, how?

 sunken_standard: Yeah, but I don't think it's a good or bad thing. And it depends on where you look and what you consume.  

 In the last like five years, Tumblr's purity culture has shamed a lot of kink back into the closet, I think, and people (in my fandoms, at least) aren't really writing on the edge.  I see darkfic, but it's about as dark as the night sky over Hong Kong.  I think people are afraid to go really dark anymore because they don't want the backlash from a generation fed on a diet of pink princesses and promise rings.  And I think everyone's desire for happy-ending escapism has ratcheted up because the real world is shit and TV shows are all playing Russian roulette with surprise deaths to add drama (thanks, The Walking Dead, for making that element so ubiquitous that the rest of the mainstream picked it up and ran).

On the other hand, I'm not seeing near the amount of badfic as I used to.  It was never as much of a problem on the old platforms and AO3 (compared to The Pit), but there were always some.  I mean, there are still lots of turds out there, but they all seem a bit more polished these days.  As far as the English goes, at least.  Maybe my fandoms are just maturing.

 I think people interact a lot differently now, too. This is going to kind of tie into the next question, but the types of feedback are different now and I think authors have changed what and how they produce to kind of chase the dragon of positive feedback.  Like, when I started, most public archives (read: not just one author's own website with all their fic, like you found in webrings a lot)—both completely open and curated—had some way to submit comments and allowed author replies. There was really no other way to let an author know you liked their work.  I mean, some sites tracked numbers for bookmarking features or hit counts, but those weren't as... active(? I guess), they weren't really participatory for the reader.

 Then AO3 came along and started the kudos thing (which people still bitch about because they think they get fewer comments; like be happy you get anything, ya fuckin' ingrates).  Kudos count became a de facto rating system, thanks to the sort feature. Whenever I start reading for a new fandom, I pick a pairing, pick a rating, and sort by kudos.  Sure, popularity isn't the best way to find good fic, but in any decent-sized fandom you can assume that the stuff on the first page is going to be written to a minimum standard.  Anyway, one of the ways to game the system a bit on kudos is to do a multichapter fic; I've seen works that are like 80+ 200-word chapters (don't get me started on omnibus fic across fandoms).  They aren't the best fic by far, but they pick up kudos every chapter, often from guests that are just people not signed in or on a different device.  I'm not knocking it, exactly, since it front-paged me for more than one fic. Part of me still feels like it's disingenuous, but I also recognize that I should pull the stick out of my ass. Anyway, the kudos count was kind of the death of the one-shot longfic (which, when I wrote Longer Than the Road, was a pretty common format).

And now, it seems like the Tumblr fic culture is writing ficlets (under 1k words) and posting without a beta (and I do it too). Fic consumption has become a social activity.  Reblogs aren't always about one's personal taste, they're a social signal of group affiliation.  If you don't reblog certain things, you're suspect and given a wide berth.  Woe betide the poor fucker that crosses party lines and posts one of the verboten ships.  And I mean, this isn't just one fandom, I've seen complaints about it from all corners—Supernatural, Star Wars, MCU, Steven Universe ffs.  I think when you have predominantly female spaces, you're always going to have an element of Mean Girl culture, y'know?  I'm probably going to get my fingernails pulled out for being misogynistic or some kind of -phobic for saying that.

Whatever.  It's true that a kind of hive-mind develops and all kinds of tropes and HCs get repeated until they become fanon.  I mean, that kind of thing's always happened, but the whole culture of Tumblr forces you to identify yourself and your group affiliation by what fanon you subscribe to, probably because it's harder to find your tribe without dedicated community spaces like LJ had.  With Tumblr, you basically have to trawl tags until you find your echo chamber.

I'm old and I fear change.

Tumblr ain't all bad, though.  It's very collaborative, kind of like the old-school round-robin fic people used to do.  Authors and artists riff off each other and a lot of really cool stuff comes out of these casual collaborations.  And I do like the prompt lists; I remember kinkmemes and prompting communities back on LJ, but it feels more off-the-cuff and spontaneous to just give someone a numbered list and let them roll the dice for you.

You know what else has changed?  We're kind of in a new era of epistolary storytelling with memes and shitposts; stories emerge that aren't prose (though might contain a prose element).  I mean, people did mixed-media epistolary in 2008, but it was a lot harder then (create graphic, hand-code into text piece, hand-code all the italics and bolding and font changes to denote various media types, if you're really a wizard add in-line text links to audio clips to add ambiance).  It's a lot easier to add a new thing on each reblog now, like someone does a video, followed by a 3-panel comic sketch, followed by a ficlet, and then a gif, you get the idea.  I like it; it's just a shame that it's so ephemeral.  Maybe that's part of the charm, though.

  satin_doll:  You’ve talked a bit about your experience with LiveJournal in the “old days”; what other platforms have you used in the past? Which ones did you like best?

 sunken_standard: I went into it a little in another question, but I first posted fic to A Teaspoon and an Open Mind (www.whofic.com).  Honestly, I don't remember much about it.  I'm not sure, but I don't think they had a richtext editor at the time (2008) and I had to hand-code some or all of it.  I vaguely remember having to do HTML for italics and paragraphs.  I know I had to do that on LJ sometimes because the formatting from whatever word processor I was using at the time did some hinky shit sometimes on a copy/paste.

 Next came LiveJournal (and DreamWidth, but I really only used that to back up my old LJ blog).  It wasn't better than Teaspoon, just different.  Teaspoon is niche, only fanfic and only for one fandom (well, one universe of fandoms, really, with all the spin-offs), where LJ was all kinds of stuff under one roof—personal blogs, communities with various intents and levels of participation, fanfic, fanart, gossip blogs, you name it.  I liked the friendslist view thing; it was like proto-Tumblr.  And you could talk to people on the threads; even personal blogs were like a forum.

 I joined AO3 in 2011, after waiting like six months for more invites to open up, but I didn't post anything there until 2012.  I'm really happy with it as a platform for posting fic.  I like the editor and I like the tags, ratings, and sort features.  I never even considered posting to ff.net because I'm a snobby fucker (and they can blow me with their whole “adult content ban” that still continues to be selectively enforced).  Anyway, I preferred having my fic on AO3 before I even left LJ, since I didn't have to split my stories into parts because of character limits.

 And then Tumblr took over and I kind of hate it, since you can't have conversations anymore, it's like leaving passive-aggressive post-its and there's no editing something once it gets reblogged, so typos and bad links and all that are always there.  And even when the original is deleted, the reblog keeps going, which I really hate from a creator's standpoint (though the archivist/ curator part of me likes it because it doesn't get lost in the ether [the recent purge notwithstanding] like so much of the early days of the web did). Tumblr's really bad for posting anything but ficlets and links to fic on other sites.

  satin_doll:  What would your ideal fanfic publishing platform be like?

 sunken_standard: Honestly, AO3 is just about as close to ideal as I can think of.  I just wish you could directly upload images instead of having to do code jiggery-pokery to link to something hosted elsewhere.  I've tried a million times and followed all the tutorials in an attempt to add the cover art to Longer Than the Road (gifted to me by @thecollapseinwonderland), but it just never works.  It shows on the preview, but not on the live version and it's frustrating because I'm computer literate, goddamnit.  Anyway.  And I mean, in an ideal world there would be better ways to find quality fic to my taste, but there's no real way to add a rating system (like 5-stars) independent of kudos without discouraging authors (and I mean the potential for abuse and bullying is just too great).

 Additional reader questions from @ohaine:

 Stylistically, Longer than the road is quite different from the other fics at the top of the AO3 Sherlolly ratings; stream of consciousness at the beginning, and the nested internal thoughts. How much of that was a deliberate departure, and how much was you just channelling the story as it came out of you?

 sunken_standard: At the time I was really influenced by a Sherlock/ John fic (I can't remember the title or author, it was 7 years ago, but I feel bad about forgetting). It was originally on LJ and their journal was a lightish blue color and the font was small (if anybody remembers this... there was something with an EKG and I think something with shooting up blood as a romantic gesture?). It was Sherlock POV and the author had a really unique way of presenting internal monologue. Anyway, at that time there was a lot of experimental writing going on on the slash side of things, it was great. To be perfectly honest, I hadn't read a lot of Sherlolly fic at that time because what did exist (as far as happy-ending/ happy-for-now stories vs like darkfic/ angst) was really, really not to my taste (the exception being Sustain). So it was only deliberate in that—even when I wasn't being experimental—I didn't want to write Harlequin books.

 I wish a story like that would just come out of me. I mean, to a degree it did, but doing the thoughts and sub-thoughts was work. I mean, I've always been a brackets-and-footnotes kind of person because I like reading it, but the way I did the thoughts was more like writing HTML than a regular rambling narrative.

  I think I read recently (maybe on a blog post?) that Riders on the storm was the original inspiration for Longer than the road. Was the scene in the storm your starting point with the story, or where did you begin?

 sunken_standard: That was the first scene I wrote; at that time I had a really nebulous idea of the story. The imagery was really clear in my head, though the very earliest concept took place in the desert—the classic American image of the road going on forever and rusty sands and the heatwaves rising up off the asphalt. I'm not sure how it morphed into North Dakota, I might have seen a picture of lightning over the plains or something.

 So after S2 aired, I just kind of sat and chewed it over for a month before any really strong ideas emerged for a story. I had to find the internal logic for the kind of plot I wanted to write—namely, them on the lam together. Making Sherlock have a breakdown seemed pretty natural at the time; in ACD canon (and many, many pastiches) he was always having them and going off to the country to recuperate. But he was supposed to be dead and he was all over the tabloids, so it's not like he could just move to some sleepy little village and hope no one recognized him.

I thought about sending him to Europe, using the places ACD Holmes went after Reichenbach (and I did start more than one with them in Florence, a few incarnations of which were Molly/ Irene wanklock PWPs, I actually think one of the Rusty Beds stories came from that, but I digress). The only problem with Europe is the language barrier; I thought it was too convenient to make Molly fluent in another language (she might have some conversational Spanish from a holiday or something, but that's it), so I had to make them go somewhere where English was common enough. I also didn't want them too far from the UK; I wanted Sherlock to be able to get on a plane and be back within half a day (I realize this isn't the reality of flying, but deus ex Mycroft, so). So Asia, Australia/ NZ, and even South Africa were out, leaving Canada, the US, or parts of the Caribbean. I didn't want them to by happy, so they didn't go to the Caribbean. Canada's great, but it's too nice and they also don't have deserts. America it was; it also really added some background tension because I think a lot of non-USians have a love-hate with us. Movies are okay, music too, and of course the tech and consumer innovations, but everything else is garbage and we're all just rude, ignorant, obese Yosemite Sams. For someone like Sherlock, I think the US is the last place he'd want to go (even though canon ACD Holmes was really into America). And I mean, write what you know, so that was that sorted.

 Once I got them here I needed them to do something; I wanted to tell a very intimate story, and that would be boring if they were just living in a 2BR cape cod in Jersey. And I mean, what city would really suit Sherlock? Where could he have a life that wasn't London? Anyway, the inside of a car is just about as intimate as two people can get, and the greatest tradition in American literature and film is the road trip, and that was when I knew I had a solid foundation for a story. After that, it just kind of flowed as I planned the route.

  Perfect, not perfect-perfect is a beautiful, brave piece that I think has a real air of authenticity to it. It was a very tough read, purely because of the journey the characters are on, and I wondered how difficult it was for you to write? Was it catharsis or an emotional black hole?

  sunken_standard: You know, I'm not really sure if it was either catharsis or black hole. A lot of the particulars and even the emotional places in that story aren't mine, but an amalgam of some other friends' experiences with polyamory. My own experience with it was pretty shit and pretty unremarkable, but I learned a lot about the human heart and how some people can lie to themselves because they can't let go of their ideals and their identities (I'm also still a little bitter), but that's got nothing to do with the price of tea in China, so moving on.

 Since a lot of those experiences weren't mine, it wasn't raw, so it wasn't very hard on me, personally. I think I wrote it in like three days? I don't think I wanted it to be a slog, so that's why it's in present tense and very sparse and matter-of-fact. Dispassionate, even. There are times when I'm writing really emotional stuff that I'm disconnected from it (which is a fuckin' mercy, because most of the time I'm right there going through it, over and over for days sometimes until I get the scene right and can move on to the next thing), and this was one of those times. I was writing this alongside the Girlfriend series, so there was some overlap there; I'd already done the emotional labor for everything up to Mary's death and I was thinking of different angles of approach for later installments of the series.

The most “me” part of it is near the beginning, writing my way around the bisexual experience from someone else's point of view. I don't have a lot in common with any of the characters; they're a higher social class, urban, products of a more liberal culture, yada yada, but there are some things that are just kind of universal and misunderstood about bisexuals, the stereotypes that we have to contend with and end up internalizing.

Oh, and the perpetual alienation is all me, too. Molly's feelings of being left behind are mine, how I felt every time friendships drifted apart or when female friends got married and then had kids. So a lot of the fatalism and insecurity are me projecting how I would feel or react. I kind of like depressed Molly, more than the perpetual ray of sunshine/ cinnamon roll at least.

 *********

 Many thanks to sunken_standard for taking the time to answer these questions!

 And many thanks and much love to OhAine for all her hard work putting this project together! It’s been fun and enlightening!

Next week, Friday 29th March, it’s the turn of @ellis-hendricks and @geekmama 

[sol1056]

let’s just leave this here

so let’s see how quickly I can get through a bunch of these, just so they don’t languish for the next month... here we go. behind the cut:  why the opening never changed, why DW is deploying Josh again, a few about Iverson & Hedrick, is a reboot possible, staying in fandom vs leaving... and some others in the same vein. 

why did they keep the same opening for all of vld seasons, considering the line-up was never supposed to come back to the original from s3?

Every indication is that originally, the team would return to the original lineup. Keeping the opening was probably meant to remind audiences of that inevitability. Or you could believe LM, who said the opening cost 20K to make, and thus was too expensive to do more than once. She’d rather spend that money on a vacation. 

So I've heard that Josh Keaton is doing damage control for S8. Do you think Dreamworks sent him in because they know that he's the one guy that no one can get mad at? After what some of the fans have done to him this past year [...] I’m amazed that he's willing to stick around and try to make his fans happy for as long as he can. I can see why people say "We don't deserve him."

Josh has somehow managed that sweet spot between charming the fandom and gaining its trust. Doesn’t hurt that he’s got the chops, voice-wise, to take written dross (no, really, some of those lines are horribly clunky) and spin it into gold. More than anything else, he comes across as genuine, and that adds a certain credibility to his words. 

But... Josh doesn’t really have a choice. Playing Shiro is what catapulted Josh upwards, and the last thing he can afford to do is piss off DW by refusing to play ball. He’d only be damaging himself (and his reputation among potential employers) if he didn’t snap to attention when called. Plus, I think he really does sincerely love the character, but it’s got to be a tough spot for him right now. 

When you get down to it, the only one on VLD’s (former) staff who seems to believe Shiro belongs in the story and should be respected as part of the story... is Josh. Who else can Shiro’s fans look to, if Josh stops speaking?

So, yeah, Josh is it. And I bet he knows that, and knows it’s just part of signing up for such a major role. This is part of his job. 

So I came across a pic of Mitch Iverson from SDCC 2018 where he and Tim Hedrick weren't in the panel ... and [Iverson] was wearing a SHIRO BLACK PALADIN top ... while the EPs & Hamilton were in the panel promoting S7, Iverson supported Hedrick & his story, and Shiro.

Hedrick was actively involved in every script as the story editor, and reportedly conceived of Shiro as an astronaut returning after his capture by aliens. Iverson got his start thanks to Hedrick, thus it makes sense that Iverson would be simpatico with Hedrick’s vision of the story. 

On top of that, by SDCC Iverson already had his next gig lined up. He continued to write for VLD, so he had to be subtle... but a t-shirt was a good way to make his sentiments clear. Can’t blame the guy, seeing he probably knew what was coming and chose a quiet protest of his own.

As an American, how would you take it if someone, that is, Iverson, called himself a redneck? From what I know thats derogatory term & for people not exactly inclusive & supportive of minorities. He also retweeted an art of Allura with a quote: ‘Laters’, which I found in really poor taste...

Redneck is another slur adopted by the in-group. My guess is that if you called Iverson a redneck to his face, he’d be offended. But if you introduced yourself as a redneck, and then called him one, it’d be different. And yes, as a term, redneck has a complex history, and it changes subtly in terms of how each generation defines/uses it. 

As for retweeting things in poor taste... eh, most people don’t have any training in social media. Jokes are the hardest; it’s so easy for them to go so wrong. Until VLD, I’d bet Iverson was lucky to have a few hundred followers. How many follow him now? It takes time to find your footing in striking the right balance of humor and dignity. 

Sometimes the best course is to ignore the stumble. They’ll either learn, or they won’t. Either way, it’s their problem, not ours. 

Will Tim Hedrick be allowed to continue the voltron universe the way he planned it?  

I doubt it. He’s got a new project. If you’re now an EP finally getting your name at the top, would you really want to go back and fix someone else’s story? Sometimes it’s just better to leave it behind, and make sure the next thing you do is something you can have pride in.

...why do you keep saying the last episode Tim Hedrick wrote was The Feud? A lot of people keep repeating it, like it was his last 'fuck you' to the showrunners. But official sources all say 'The Journey Within' was his last episode.

All we can say for certain was that tJW is the last Hedrick episode broadcast. That doesn’t mean it was the last one written. 

Here’s why a lot of us peg tF as Hedrick’s last written episode: the story editor credit. Hedrick's the sole story editor on all his other episodes; tF is the only one in which both Hedrick and Hamilton share credit. The simplest explanation is this episode was edited in that window during which Hedrick had one foot out the door, and Hamilton had one foot in. iow, Hedrick put it into the queue, edited half, and moved on. Ergo, last written.

I can’t believe how they just managed to anger literally everyone no matter your favorite character or ship.

I recall a quote from early on, where LM said they had a feeling they couldn’t please everyone. The problem (which I noted at the time, and has remained true) is that the answer isn’t to just piss off everyone. 

It’s to figure out who you want your audience to be, and to write the best damn story you can for that particular audience. If you end up with a story only old-timer DotU fans love, and kids are lukewarm about, fine. If the reverse is true, fine. You can’t please everyone, especially in a reboot/remake. So you pick your battles, and write your story accordingly. 

Looking around social media, most people I'm seeing are either rightfully upset, or they're hyperfocusing on the one single scene they liked because they just don't have the energy to deal with the show's bullshit right now. How can they fuck up the last season so badly that it seems like the general reaction is disappointment and denial?

I think there’s a common cause for the fandom reactions: exhaustion. 

In American broadcast television, a 26-episode season runs from September to May, then a summertime lull, during which people digest and discuss. Binge-watching is changing this, but it seems one thing hasn’t changed: no matter how fast we watch a show, we still require processing time. 

What did we get? A half-season, two months’ break, another half-season, two months’ break, a full season, three months’ break, and a final full season. If every season had provoked a spike equal to S1/S2, we might’ve been begging DW by June to just freaking chill. Fandom had barely begun to process one season and a new one was already landing on our heads. 

On top of that, S3-S6 weren’t exactly walks in the part, post-release. In terms of controversy, S7 dwarfed them all. That made an awful lot of people (across the entire spectrum, from almost every sub-group in the fandom) disengage. Those who remained dialed back on their expectations (”as long as X happens, that’s all that matters”), or they hung in there, insistent it would turn out alright. 

So either you’re exhausted from not being able to fully disengage with the final season still in the wings, you’re exhausted from convincing yourself this one specific thing would be enough, or you’re exhausted from defending what turned out to be indefensible. 

Frankly, disappointment and denial is a fairly soft landing, compared to what might’ve been. But any way you cut it, the fandom’s worn the hell out.   

Do you think LM and JDS are gonna address this or are they just going to ignore the complaints, wash their hands and move on?

They don’t need to do anything. They don’t work for DW anymore. If someone has to address the complaints, it’d be DW or DW’s chosen spokesperson. I guess you could call that washing their hands, but the simple fact is they’re not on the payroll. They’re not responsible for VLD anymore.

do you think it's possible for dreamworks to rewrite season 8? i've never heard of a show doing that before and i'm afraid that we'll be stuck with what we got, but damn, i really hope that we will get to see the characters get the endings they deserve, if nothing else.

I’m not sure why anyone would bother. S7 was rife with problems; S3-S6 meandered back and forth. If I were to do a soft in-series reboot, I’d go back to the end of S2. That’s the clearest break, story-wise. 

But if you’re going backwards 50+ episodes to the 26th, just keep going and start over. More to the point: not a lot of creators would sign on to inherit problems not of their own making. Same reason new directors on a property will want to rework the script in some way (if not start over from scratch). 

Do you think this is truly the end of Voltron: Legendary Defender? I know that a lot of the cast and crew wanted to continue on with a sequel, and there's so many possibilities and things they can do in that universe, not to mention that Voltron is (or rather, was) a money bank...

Your guess is as good as mine, really. Hopefully we’ll get at least hints when the SACanime panel rolls around in early January.

There's a change petition for the "original s8" to be released ... [people] believe that LM and JDS are NOT the ones who ruined the last two seasons and that it was "exec meddling." Like, no, sorry, exec meddling appears to be what made it good in the beginning.

If we consider Yoo an exec by virtue of being CEO of Studio Mir, then I kinda wish he’d meddled a bit more. 

...I'm wondering if the original version exists, completed. In one post, you said DW picked Tim over L/J so surely that got animated? What do you think? Be real. I don't want to get my hopes high thinking there's some buried treasure out there to find.

Ah, no, sorry, I wasn’t speaking in the sense of VLD but in the overall corporate sense. Here’s how the scenario often plays out: manager A and employee B do not get along. The longer they clash, the greater the chance A will find an excuse to fire B. The project is literally not big enough for the both of them. 

B could resign, quit, or do a preemptive strike: go over A’s head and ask for help. If B leaves the company shortly after, it means the higher-up said: “I’ve heard A’s side, and I think A is right.” The exec might offer a good reference, or blame it on a no-fault bad fit. Doesn’t matter; the exec’s chosen A’s side. 

Now, consider what actually happened: B gets transferred off the project, and gets a major promotion -- basically up to the same level as B’s former manager. Either B has some of the most amazing dirt ever, is phenomenally good at twisting reality to seem like the wronged party... or the higher-up reviewed the situation and decided that of the two, B was the one worth keeping. 

Having decided that, the exec made an offer B couldn’t refuse, which would be to run a show that’s practically tailor-made to fit B’s dream job. That’s what I meant by losing the battle (how VLD would go) and winning the war (being the party seen as in the right, by the execs). 

The only way for A to turn things around is to have a blisteringly successful final product. It could literally kill two careers with one stone: the (former) employee, B, who spun such a good story, and the exec(s) who believed B. 

Given the numbers I’m seeing for S8... that exec did choose wisely.  

ETA (sorry forgot this part): There might be pieces, but it really depends on what version control is in use (if any). For that matter, even if there were saved copies, who’s to say those didn’t get, whoops, deleted at some point? I’d put my bet on there being nothing, now, except what we got. Sorry. 

I could understand if you never want to have anything to do with this show ever again.

Oh, jeez, I was here before VLD and I’ll be here after. Once we all get over our mutual exhaustion (and the holidays, bloody great timing, there), it’ll be time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Fandom’s got a lot to do, putting things back together in all the shapes that’ll make us happy. This is the best time to be in a fandom, if you ask me. Everything’s just getting started!

[themagiciansreccenter]

Author Spotlight: AlexxAplin

Every week we interview a writer from The Magicians fandom. If you would like to be interviewed or you want to nominate a writer, get in touch via our ask box.

First things first, tell us a little about yourself.

I am a gay, 25 year old who loves most things entertainment related, from gaming, to TV and Film. I'm an Entertainment Journalist by trade, and I write (and roleplay) in my spare time as well, mostly because my creative energy can't be contained by just articles alone.

How long have you been writing for?

That is quite a hard question. Technically I've been writing various things since I was 13, but I didn't really get into Roleplaying or Fandom writing until I was about 16, so...almost 10 years?

What inspired you to start writing for The Magicians?

That is a tough question, but I think I can answer it fairly concisely by saying that Prior to 4x13, I had written mostly with a few people that weren't REALLY fans, but were humoring me lol. After the finale, I was very upset and aimless, until I met a group of like-minded people on Discord, who not only encouraged me and supported my ideas, but also decided to write with me too (a few of them anyhow :) )

Who is/are your favourite character(s) to write? What it is about them that makes them your favourite?

I absolutely LOVE writing Q. I identify him pretty well, and I enjoy playing him a little more...sensual than he is allowed to be in the show or in the books. I think my second favorite (not counting a character i've created and haven't ACTUALLY shared yet) would have to be Eliot, because he is just so much fun in general.

Do you have a preference for a particular season/point in time to write about?

It really depends on my mood honestly. I love doing Fix-its, Canon-Divergent AUs, and anything involving reworking things, or adding new ideas to make things even crazier. My favorite season is Season 3 though, so I need to write more in that timeline context.

Are you working on anything right now? Care to give us an idea about it?

Oh boy, do you have all week? Lol. Uh, right now i'm in the process of editing a fic I wrote with a friend of mine, and I have another collaborative fic (that I worked on with the same Author) that i've got to find time to post.

I also have a fic for the MHHE (Magicians Hallmark Holiday Extravaganza) I'm working on with a friend, and a DOZEN and one other projects that are in progress.

How long is your “to do list”?

Too long to name to be honest, and it keeps growing! I swear my brain is housing these ideas in some flubbery substance.

What is your favourite fic that you’ve written for The Magicians? Why?

I only have two fics up right now, but my favorite fic is one I hope to actually put up on Ao3 either today or tomorrow, called Eau De Spicy Nerd. It is a cheeky little play on a few things, and I can't wait for people to see it.

Many writers have a fic that they are passionate about that doesn’t get the reception from the fandom that they hoped for. Do you have a fic you would like more people to read and appreciate?

I'll be honest, most of my favorite fics are from other people. However, I think of my fics, my "Is that Alright?" Fic (which is currently two standalone chapters but will be expanded soon for a full cohesive story) is an emotional feelings train that I hope more people see and resonate with. Fair warning I have been told it will make you cry.

What is your writing process like? Do you have any traditions or superstitions that you like to stick to when you’re writing?

My writing process is very instinctual. I'm terrible at writing by myself in most cases, because I thrive on interaction, bouncing ideas back and forth, and then just letting things go where they go. As stupid as it may sound, sometimes I feel like the characters are more in control of what lands on the page than I am. I just...feel it. Sometimes I lay awake with scenes playing in my head, that i have to write down or I just can't sleep at all.

I usually write a fic (with a friend usually, minus Is That Alright? and its first two chapters) and then afterward I compile it all in a doc (usually pasted from Discord) and work my way through, adding things that come to mind. I pass it off to any other authors collaborating, then once it is polished it goes on to a Beta.

Do you write while the seasons are airing or do you prefer to wait for hiatus? How does the ongoing development of the canon influence and inspire your writing process?

I am quite literally ALWAYS writing. It keeps me sane, especially when work is hectic. Unless work is taking too much of my focus, i'm always working on things. Canon ACTUALLY has helped me finish things before, or has given me ideas to start new things. Sometimes even the smallest plot thread will spark a full idea for me, for example I had the idea for a full AU verse I haven't started yet, just from a conversation about Fillorian marriage and Polyamory.

What has been the most challenging fic for you to write?

Well, I can't REALLY talk too heavily about it because it is my MHHE fic, but the hardest part for me has been sticking to the prompt and not deviating. Sometimes I have ideas for things that stray too far, and i'm having to learn to NOT do that, since it is for a challenge and not my own enjoyment.

Are there any themes or tropes that you like particularly like to explore in your writing?

I love writing smutty things. I think our society should be more sex positive, and so I often try to make my fics the "NC17" version if possible. Some plots aren't conducive for that, which is fine, but anything with smut, or fluff, is A++ in my book. I also love soulmate AU's, Soul bonding, and lots and lots of cheesy things.

Are there any writers that inspire your work? Fanfiction or otherwise?

Oh goodness, I'm not sure I should call out individual folks here, but I am totally inspired by SO MANY Fanfic writers. I also love Neil Gaiman and Lev Grossman as artists and people. To be honest though I am most inspired by fanfic writers these days, because the world is a scary place and fanfic gives me a break. I've learned so many great techniques from fanfic writers too.

What are you currently reading? Fanfiction or otherwise?

I gobble up as much Magicians fic as I can, usually the fluffy or smutty stuff unless i'm in the mood for tears lol. I also keep up with a few different authors, but these days I don't have as much time to read novels as i'd like.

What is the most valuable piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?

The best advice I've ever been given is actually two pieces of advice. 1. Never force yourself to finish something your heart isn't in. If you do, you won't be satisfied with the end result. 2. Do not set out to tell the story you planned. Set out to tell a GOOD story you and your readers will love. If you love it, other people will too.

Are there any words or phrases you worry about over using in your work?

Oh there are plenty, most are descriptors for facial expressions. I sometimes find it hard to balance too much detail with not enough detail.

What was the first fanfic that you wrote? Do you still have access to it?

I actually don't remember what my first Fanfic was. I don't think I've posted most of my beginning work. I think the first one was a Queer as Folk fanfic that got lost on an old, dead hard-drive lol.

Rapidfire Round!

Self-edit or Beta?

Both, a good author knows their flaws and also seeks critique.

Comments or Kudos/Reblogs or Likes?

Give it all to me, or whatever makes you feel most comfortable. I'm not fussy, I just want people to enjoy what I write.

Smut, Fluff or Angst?

Smut or Fluff. Angst is reserved for if i'm in the right headspace, i've had...bad experiences.

Quick & Dirty or Slow Burn?

Depends on my mood, some days I don't have the attention span for a slow burn fic, especially if it is incomplete.

Favourite Season?

Season Three

Favourite Episode?

The Musical Episode with Under Pressure. So much of that was AMAZINGLY done.

Favourite Book?

Haven’t read them.

Three favourite words?

Love, Fuck (it fits so many purposes) and Symphony

Want to be interviewed for our author spotlight? Get in touch here.