#the comorbidities are a bitch and doctors weirdly hate you due to their own ignorance and biases

[babblish]

23 & 39?

I’m going to answer these out of order as I ended up explaining Uhl fic’s entire backstory and it got it super long and should really go under a cut. I hope you don’t mind, it’s a looong read.

39. What is your greatest strength as a writer?

I think ultimately it is that I have around 20 years of writing experience (I legit started when I was around 10) and I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can execute my vision for a scene/character/whatever and be happy with what I’ve written. Obviously I don’t think my writing is perfect and I’m forever going to be chasing that goal, but being able to go back over my writing and not despise it was a surprisingly hard skill to learn and I think it’s my greatest current strength because now I have the confidence and motivation to continue.

23. Name a fic you’ve written that you’re especially fond of & explain why you like it.

That has to be Whispers Within, I haven’t actually written a full length anything before and I am getting super close to finishing it now which is amazing to me because in part it feels like healing.

To explain this, I started the fic when my disability took a nose dive and I needed something to help me exercise my brain and make me feel like me again. At the time I couldn’t focus on a lot of “adult media” like Orphan Black, Game of Thrones, Sense8, etc because those shows were very long, very complicated and literally impossible for me to follow the plot of at all. 

HOWEVER Trollhunters shone out to me and I’d just lie in bed watching and rewatching and rewatching. Before this I liked the show, I had been introduced by a little man of around the age of 4 and by episode 20 had falling in love with the trolls and the changelings. I had my own changeling OC, a seer named Tristan, which I didn’t really do anything with beyond arting and assigning a backstory to, and maybe shipping him with the usual suspects. Season 2 came around and I fell in love with the human characters as well. I was doing a Cert IV in graphic design and sometimes I’d have it playing in the background as I was working on my assignments. Not always, but I recently started watching Voyager from the beginning and I’d need the occasional palette cleanser.

At the beginning of 2018 I crashed really hard, and the obsessive rewatching began. Especially the episodes S2:8-10, I literally watched one of those for each meal every day. At this stage I couldn’t write at all but I already had Tristan just sitting there in my head. Up until this point I’ve always been able to be creative, I first became disabled at 14 years old and as a response all of my identity became focused around sedentary things I could do alone, see: arting, writing, conlangs, worldbuilding etc. And almost over night I could no longer do any of those things. But creativity doesn’t go away and I lost myself to daydreaming since that was all I could do. As brainfog is an inherently unfocused plane, character ideas about new creatures merged with fandreams about Tristan and they twisted and curled, slightly different each time, and eventually became Sam.

And then in late May and early June, three things happened to me that gave me the drive to force myself to write even though it was so hard for me. 1. My doctor told me if I didn’t use my skills I’d lose them forever. (this isn’t actually true, dr was just a dick, but it was like that no fear, one fear meme). 2. Season 3 of Trollhunters came out and Bad Coffee did things to me and I dove straight into AO3 hungry for a fic that didn’t exist, although I found others such as Days in the Sun by @seagullandcroissant and was further inspired, and 3. My now SO confessed her feelings for me and we started dating. Suddenly I had the deep need to write, even if it was silly or high concept drabble. The concept of Sam’s visions was a way for me to make sense of that and give me a good contrivance to write little bites of speculative fiction within a universe. And due to my SO not being a man I suddenly had some intense internalised biphobia and felt the need to validate my queerness for my own personal reasons, and due to our relationship being LD, a sudden need for sappy domestic fluff.

At first it was so hard, it’d take me all day to write a short paragraph. But then it hit me that, I couldn’t art but I could paint with words. So the visions got more experimental, and I finally started feeling like myself again. I picked a love interest from ToA because that world was already in my head and I had just started learning German on Duolingo as more brain practice, so Uhl randomly became the guy. You have no idea how close I came to picking Walter but there was already so many fics about him out there and like… none about Uhl and I was salty.

Initially I had zero intention of putting it out there in the world because I was going through some internalised stuff about writing fan fiction over my own worlds, but then I shared some of with my SO (enduring the mortifying ordeal of being known) and she liked it so much that over several months I came to the decision that I actually I did want to want to be active in the fandom and have met some amazing people through it. I definitely have no regrets and for however long that I continue writing, Whispers Within is always going to be dear to me for these and a number of other reasons.