#this is the longest and most ambitious fic I've ever completed

[trillscienceofficer]

Best Left Raffi Musiker/Seven of Nine/B'Elanna Torres, 38.3k words, rated T

A road trip to Coppelius becomes very complicated for Raffi, once an old friend of Seven's shows up in mysterious circumstances.

She’s older now, and out of uniform, looking much worse for wear after what she just went through. But there had been a time more than twenty years prior when her face had been on every Federation newsfeed, along with the rest of the crew of the USS Voyager. “You know her?” Raffi turns to Soji, frozen in bemusement beside Emil. “I’ve never met her but yes, I know who she is,” Raffi says. “You two stay here and keep an eye on things. Seven needs to see this.”

—

Here it is, the fic I wrote in the Rare Pair Exchange 2023 for @ceruleanphoenix7, who requested a story about Raffi, Seven and B'Elanna going on adventures and getting out of tight situations together. Set post-Season 1, it has a plot (!), polyam romance, friendship, a bit of a reunion of the crew of La Sirena (Soji and Elnor play important parts), Raffi slowly figuring out whatever the hell is going on between Seven and B'Elanna, as well as what she wants for herself. Also, lots of references to DS9.

I hope you enjoy!

[supercantaloupe]

ao3 stats game

tagged by @malcolm-f-tucker, ty!!

Rules: Give us the links to your wonderful words with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and fewest words.

expect this to be skewed towards d20 bc while i haven't written much for that in a while it is easily the biggest fandom i've written anything for

Most hits: The Disappearance of Adaine Abernant - dimension 20 (fantasy high), 2,637 hits

Most kudos: ^, 193 kudos

Most comments: Extra Credit - dimension 20 (fantasy high), 73 comments

Most bookmarks: ^, 54 bookmarks

Most words: Starlight - oklahoma!, currently sitting at 34,091 words.

Fewest words: The Symphony of Hadestown - hadesotwn, 191 words. my first posted fic ever! look at her, she's so tiny, lol. my next shortest clocks in at exactly 400 words longer; even when i'm trying to be brief i tend to go on a bit, haha

i shall tag @tragedyposting @theresa-of-liechtenstein @kingfisherkink @grasslandgirl and @druid-for-hire! idk who else of my mutuals really uses ao3 at all so i'll just leave it there lol

[carry-the-sky]

20 questions for fic writers

tagged by my one and only brainpipe bestie @ninzied ♡

How many works do you have on ao3?

43!

What's your total ao3 word count?

163,202

What fandoms do you write for?

mostly good omens at the moment, but i am also tinkering with an old kanthony fic. i have so. many. hellcheer wips collecting dust in my google drive. and of course kastle my og, my beloved.

Top five fics by kudos:

say my name (and every color illuminates) - kanthony

the wonderful part of the mess that we made - stranger things trio

warm, solid things - hellcheer

every bit of beating heart - kastle

my head is filled with ruins (most of them, i built with you) - kastle

Do you respond to comments?

always! if i don't, i probably didn't see it.

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

definitely any of my older kastle fics 🙈

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

probably the one lucky dog series? i based the proposal scene (spoilers for a fic that's five years old lol) off of my own, which made me happy, at least!!

Do you get hate on fics?

thankfully no!

Do you write smut?

i have, but it's a struggle. the stage management of it all!! it's definitely something i'd like to work on and improve though

Craziest crossover:

probably my good place au. i was hmm shall we say overly ambitious with that idea, but it was a fun covid project!

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

not that i'm aware

Have you ever had a fic translated?

i haven't!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

in theory i would love to, in practice i think it would stress me out immenselyyyyy

All time favorite ship?

i like nina's answer for this one. i love and appreciate them all for different reasons!! kastle will stick with me forever obviously. truly the fandom to rule them all. ♡

What's a wip you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

the hellcheer detention fic i started for @majicmarker under threat of being pushed into a pool if i didn't finish, oop. wrote about 5k and just lost the plot completely. tale as old as tiiiime

What are your writing strengths?

capturing a vibe. dialogue. exploring smaller moments.

What are your writing weaknesses?

plotting?? i don't know her. also finishing chaptered fics. i probably overuse semicolons and em dashes.

Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

i've done this before with very simple words/phrases. anything more in depth should probably be looked over by someone who speaks the language?

First fandom you wrote in?

kastle!!

Favorite fic you've written?

probably warm, solid things. it's the longest one-shot i've ever posted, and it's personal to me in many ways. i'm happy it seemed to resonate with people!

honorable mention to my most recent good omens fic, which took years off my life to write, but i'm quite proud of the end result; also this kastle ficlet which sort of just fell out of my brain fully-written?? what sorcery????

tagging! (no pressure!): @majicmarker, @redbelles, @heartonfirewrites, @imashybear, @evilbunnyking

@onebatch2batch, @ejunkiet, @malachitegrey, @andromeda4004 and anyone else who sees this and wants to play :)

[sroloc--elbisivni]

bunnyguard reflection

in the spirit of 'fuckit it's my own blog i can be sappy if i want to' as well as 'this took a year and 78k and i get to keep talking about it for at least one more day' now and here is the time and place for personal yap that did not go in the last author's note.

preliminarily speaking, i had this concept in mind before I'd finished either the usagi yojimbo comics OR watching Rise. i spent so much of both of those series fishing out little moments and choices by leo and usagi that made me go 'oh my god i NEED these guys to meet, i need to watch them bounce off each other.' I kept collecting snips of ideas, and dialogue, and encounters that never quite all panned out or fit together because this was just so much fun for me to play in. I had a lot of wanting to turn this into a real story but no concrete frame to build it on, and then in january i saw the year of the otp prompts go by. and went 'oh haha that looks fun.' it was even the year of the rabbit. and then i went 'oh!! what if i did VIGNETTES for these!!' and then less than three days later the Battle Nexus as political element of the Hidden City, complete with connections to the very different other iteration of it that we'd seen, fell into place and suddenly this silly little whim was an actual big project staring me down with an ambitious goal in mind, and I had no idea if I could pull it off.

structuring it as a month by month thing was something i'd never done before. it forced me to wait to find out what would happen, to keep building to something that didn't exist yet, to lay down the track while I was driving the train. and at the same time, it gave me space to grow, to practice putting together a beginning, middle, and end every month. and it gave me something to look forward to, and the excitement of dropping in threads that wouldn't pay off for months, and watching as it went to see what the audience reaction would be. were people getting out of it the things i wanted to give them? was i hitting the notes i wanted? i had the sketch of the year, but i was still learning what was going to happen until the moment the last word hit the page. plot and character choices, but also big thematic stuff! i described November's fic as 'the ten of swords' to Space and then went 'wait a fucking second' and realized that I could draw a connection, in order, between each fic and a numerical card of tarot's suit of swords. (mostly one-to-one --october straddles 9-10, and December loops us back around to the Ace of swords, for new beginnings.) i couldn't have done that on purpose. if i'd had that thought in january i would have gone 'no that's too pretentious and too hard' and avoided it.

also!! this has been a year of my life!! over the course of this series, i've had four different living situations (that lasted longer than a week), two different jobs, and gone back to school. i had to change meds, which was an anxious ordeal in 'am i even going to be able to focus on anything now?' the cat that was purring on my lap while i worked on the first few months has now passed away. this fic kept me company on the flight for my move to a different continent. it kept me sane in the middle of a very stressful summer. it's helped me meet and get closer to some really cool people. i can FEEL how it's made me a stronger writer.

and on top of all that: i am deeply, genuinely, truly proud of this series. i'm glad i wrote it. i'm amazed at how it's turned out. i can see things i would change if i did it over, but i'm glad i won't be. i'm glad this is the way it exists. and i am utterly blown away that there are people who told me they were looking forward to it every month, that they've been following it since the beginning, that they like what i've done with this place. this is the longest-term project i've ever done. it's the most words i've ever put into a single narrative. i can't believe it's never going on my wip rotation again. whadda hell.

i have no idea if i'll ever do anything like this again. i hope it won't be anytime soon--there are other things i want to do in the meantime. but god, am i glad i did it.

[domoz]

4, 11, 15 & 28 for the ask game, if you're still doing it?

Why yes I am :) 4.How do you channel characters' voices and personalities? Actual Dialogue is the big one for me I think, internal or otherwise. And I'm a very action oriented writer, so I end up thinking a lot about, like... "what is this character thinking, and how does that show in what they do. What do they want everyone ELSE to think about them and how does that show." And on and on into layers deep forever.

11.Are there any tropes that you particularly enjoy writing?

I guess you would call it 'getting together'? Though not always even in the romantic sense. I just really like thinking about how characters meet and how their relationships begin and develop.

15. Do you plan your fics or prefer to let the story unfold as you write? A little of both... I'll write out a whole outline of plot beats from start to finish for most of the things I want to write, but there's a lot of room for the story to change and grow as I go, and I'm not afraid to change the whole plot if the story feels like it needs to go somewhere else.

28. What's the most ambitious or challenging fic you've ever written? I mean... It's got to be Just a Concerned Citizen, right? It's still the longest thing I've ever written, it's got a complete story arc and it's even got a Mystery in it... it feels crazy that its been 3 years... someone let me stay home and write another novel...

Ask Meme

[deadendtracks]

🎈 and/or 🕯️for the fic writers ask?

🎈describe your style as a writer; is it fixed? does it change?

I've been asked this before and I don't really know how to answer it; most of the time I'm not doing anything deliberate with style so I find it hard to articulate, though I do try to get a sense of the voice of the character whose POV I'm writing. I guess that could be style? The POV often dictates a bit of the style, maybe.

Alfie is of course more verbose and tends to do a lot of ruminating and self-rationalizing, though I probably write him as more self-aware than I think he is in canon. He's a story teller and has a bit of a circular thing going on. He avoids things in his thinking because he's not ready to admit them or face them, and covers with all that rumination and stream of consciousness stuff.

Tommy is more stripped down, fewer words, doesn't necessarily do a lot of overt thinking beyond the present moment, not in a verbalized way. Not that he *doesn't* think about things but in my view he's very present- or future-focused most of the time; when he *isn't* present-focused he runs into trouble and his 'voice' gets more fragmented. To me Tommy runs a lot more on instinct or nonverbal thinking than he'd ever admit to or be able to articulate, so I try to have a sense of things happening underneath and driving his conscious narration. Tommy's a highly compartmentalized, avoidant consciousness in many ways; things are locked in boxes that he knows are there-- he's self aware, he knows what is in most of the boxes, he just knows not to go into those places or he'll implode and he can't afford that. He's not wrong.

Charlie Strong's voice is fairly close to Tommy's though not as present-focused in the same way and not fragmented. The story I wrote from Polly's POV was my first fic in this fandom; if I had to write it over I'd probably think more about what her 'voice' sounds like, though I don't think it's terribly off in that fic it's not quite right. Ada and Lizzie when I've written their POVs are more straight-forward and pragmatic. I probably find Arthur the hardest to write.

The more overt stylistic pieces are probably short little things like hobnail, tenderfoot, or all soul's night, where I did play around a little bit with the writing in a more deliberate way.

Whatever style I have has probably changed since I started writing fanfiction many years ago, but my core interests haven't really changed.

🕯️was there a fic that was really hard on you to write, or took you to a place you didn't think it would take you?

Probably This Bed of Shattered Bone, mostly because the pandemic started somewhere around two-thirds of the way through writing it and at one point I didn't think I'd finish. Also it's my most researched story, the longest story I ever completed, and the ending wasn't really what I expected.

My current WIP is hard on me to write for a variety of reasons but primarily because I've had a harder time writing at all this year and also because it's just... probably too ambitious of an idea and it's taking forever to get to the point and I'm not entirely sure how to tell it.

To be honest most fics I write take me to places I don't think they will take me, because anything longer than a few thousand words usually starts off with very little plan or even really any idea what it's about or where it will go. Often I think I'm just going to write something short, lol. This Bed of Shattered Bone came to me with that first scene kind of pouring out of me and I had no idea really what was happening, just this image of Tommy showing up mute in Alfie's sitting room in Margate. Not was supposed to be a PWP. Famous last words.

I'm a seat of the pants writer for the most part.

[joeys-piano]

🌸

🌸 wip you've been working on the longest

Considering I write short stories and some novella-length fanfics, I think the longest I worked on something was around a month and a half. Not consistently every day, but how long it took from conception to final draft in between life stuff. It would mostly be this fic here. It was the last thing I completed as I was finishing college, and at the time it was the most ambitious thing I've ever worked on. It definitely shows my range as a background character writer when I've had to flesh out 11 goons just enough for a gang fight.

Summertime Writing Asks

[marypsue]

A year and a half, 13 notebooks, 9 playlists, nearly 250,000 words, and I will not admit how much writerly angst later, I am proud to be able to say (and unable to believe) that the first draft of the monster Stranger Things longfic I started in July 2020 is finally finished! There is still so, so much editing to do, but now I can edit it as a whole! 

And, in honour of it finally being drafted, here is a tiny little teaser:

...

El stands in the middle of the cabin, turning a slow circle as she takes in all of the things that have become so familiar in all the days she lived there. The mugs that had hung on the wall still lie in shards on the floor. The mounted deer’s head stares down at her with beady black eyes. Sunlight filters down through the broken roof, catching on motes of hovering dust. The wind whistles mournfully through the holes in the walls, halfheartedly ruffling the mismatched curtains.

The damage the Mind Flayer’s meat-body had done hasn’t been fixed or cleaned up. The whole place will be left to rot. No one, after all, was supposed to know it was there.

Behind her, there’s a click, and a buzz of static. El turns. The television set is on, the screen fuzzy with grey-and-white snow. The lights on the radio blink on, one by one, and snippets of words spill through its higher-pitched crackle.

“No,” El says, and storms over to the radio. She turns it off with one sharp motion and stands staring at it, breathing hard.

The radio clicks back on, with a hiss. El reaches out and turns it off again, but it turns itself back on before she’s even pulled her hand back. She yanks the plug out of the wall, and the radio falls silent for just long enough that she can catch her breath.

Then it clicks back on again.

El lets out a short scream of frustration, and grabs the radio with both hands. “I can’t! I’m trying! I can’t!”

The voices continue, oblivious, relentless. “Hel- El - -el- -elp -”

El pulls the radio off the shelf and throws it, as hard as she can, at the floor. It crashes down with a crunch and a grind of metal, and lies there twisted on the bare boards. One dial pops off and rolls away across the floor with a little rattling sound.

For a moment, the only sound in the cabin is the quiet hiss of the TV static.

And then the radio crackles back to life. “-even? Jane? – find -”

El screams, and screams, and the roof tears off.

The walls peel back. The floorboards fall away. The TV and the radio both dissolve into swirls of colour and disappear into the blackness, the last echoes of Hopper’s voice going with them. El reaches out, but she can’t do anything. In seconds, everything’s gone. Vanished into a vast, empty, silent darkness.

Leaving El alone.

She drops to her knees, with a faint splash, the sob she’s been holding back for so long tearing at her throat. El wraps her arms around herself, digging her fingers into her shoulders until it hurts, and gasps and shudders with a grief that feels too big for her body.

“Eleven?”

El freezes.

The voice hasn’t changed. Kali was able to call it up so clearly because it’s always been burned deep into El’s memory. He doesn’t sound angry, only curious, a little surprised, as though he hadn’t expected to find her here. Somehow, it’s worse than El imagined it. It would have been easier if he’d been angry.

El doesn’t want to look. She can’t stop herself.

He’s standing a few paces away, looking at her – looking at her as if she’s some kind of stray pet. Or a specimen out of its cage. Something interesting but unpleasant, unexpected, pitiful. Something that needs to be cleaned up and put back in its proper place.

He smiles when her eyes meet his, that same old familiar smile. The scars that rope across the left side of his face twist it into a sneer.

“Papa,” El breathes.

“Eleven,” her papa repeats, taking a step closer, his shiny shoes plashing loudly in the echoing silence. El scrambles to her feet, tries to back away, but finds herself frozen to the spot. “Where are you…?”

“Papa, no,” El says, but she can’t stop her bedroom from swirling into sight all around her. Her papa pauses, near enough to reach out and touch her, and looks around. Then his gaze settles, once again, on El.

El backs away as her papa steps forward, but the backs of her legs hit the bed. There’s nowhere to go.

She can’t move as he reaches down, almost fondly, to cup her face in both hands. Can’t do anything.

“Don’t be afraid, Eleven,” her papa says, in the voice he always used to ask El to do something that wasn’t really a choice. Almost kind. His thumb skims over El’s cheek, cold as dead flesh, almost gentle. His smile is as cold as his hands. “You’ve been made entirely obsolete. But you’ll always be my Eleven. And I will always be your Papa.”

El wakes up screaming.