For all of your fics, published and unpublished:
3: What’s your favorite line of narration?
4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?
5: What part was hardest to write?
6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?
7: Where did the title come from?
I literaly asked for this, so here goes. Regrettably, most of these are parts I don't have yet for most of my projects as most are still in the concept stage where i work out what I want to have the story encompass, so the bulk of this will be about Another Burning Candle, unless specified otherwise.
3.Favourite line of narration: Has to be "The moment she crosses the threshold and is outside, freed from the party, the tension drains away as the cool night breeze blows the weight from her shoulders and loosens the clamp around her head." near the end of the one-shot. I really tried to capture the feeling of getting out of an overstimulating environment, and, seeing as i get an echo of that feeling whenever I re-read it, I definitely succeeded (at least as far as my own experience of such scenarios is concerned).
2. Favourite line of dialogue: I can actually answer this one twice, once for Candle, and once for a Spectrobes thing that is still in the extremely early stages (I'll need to replay the game before any of those projects can advance).
For Another Burning Candle: All of the direct speech is directly from RWBY and I cannot claim as my own, so Ruby's thoughts will have to count for this one, but the opening line "‘Don’t fall. Whatever you do. Don’t. Fall.’" Which was the first line I considered 'complete' of the entire fic. I decided on the tags last, so the hoped-for "when is this? V8?" response is much less likely than when I first came up with the line, but I'm still very happy with how concise it managed to be. The ramble that follows was fun to write too. All of Ruby's rambly thoughts were fun to write, resisting the impulse to write those when a scene isn't from her perspective is almost certainly going to be a challenge in future fics.
For the Spectrobes idea, I first need to give the context that I'm toying with retelling the plot of the first game through the paperwork that needed to be filed. I have only one line actually written(technically two, but it is a set-up+punchline thing), but I like it a lot: "Rallen* killed a fungus that was reviving all killed Krawl**. Meido*** collapsed."
Clarifying notes for people not familiar with Spectrobes: *[the player character/hero], **[swarm of star-eating monsters/enemies you save the world from], ***[the planet the final battle happens on]
The draw of this story is in getting to write out the absurdity fo the game's events in a way that forces understatement. This story is still in extremely early stages, but I am looking forward to developing it further.
5. What part was hardest to write?: Aside from overcoming my executive dysfunction? Not any single part I can cite, but Ruby's opinions on what other people were doing. I ended up eliding so many things I'd wanted to have Ruby comment on to herself that I ended up cutting (Yang and Blake's dancing, Blake's time with Sun, Emerald and Mercury's entrance(also why I went and looked into the one (plausibly) Gemstones scene, but concluded it was too ambiguous to work with without derailing my one-shot into an examination of Ruby's romantic orientation), and several other parts. I also ended up cutting out the "Ruby is asked to hold Jaune's punch, drinks from the wrong cup"gag ads I couldn't get the reasoning(basically, Ruby being too unfocused by the overload that she instantly forgot which cup was hers) on paper in a way that felt like it fit with the rest of the fic. [I'm personally rather strict about not drinking from containers that other people use, but I also forget which one was mine really easily if I do not deliberately memorise distinguishing features, so I wanted to do something with that and saw an opportunity in that joke, but the words refused to cooperate.]
I cannot answer this question in detail for any of my toher projects as they are still unwritten (and I cannot say which part is hardest unless in hindsight), but there are two things that i know will recur in my writing plans that i will struggle with: first, i do not expect that romance will ever become easy to write on account of being aromantic myself and just not truly comprehending romance. (Particularly, I have RWBY ideas that have Blake and Yang as important characters, and the Bees are something that I do think need active interference to stop them from pairing up. If nothing actively makes Bumbleby impossible, those two are a question of when, not if when working close to canon.)
The other thing I fully expect to struggle with (though it is a challenge I am deliberately seeking out) is Ruby's mental health post-V8. I have quite a few ideas that branch off after "The Final Word", so Ruby is hurtling towards her lowest at the start of those ideas. unlike the expected struggles with romance, I actually do not think I'll struggle to understand the relevant headspace. The problem I anticipate is that I understand it a little too well, and will emotionally put myself through the wringer to do it justice. (Incidentally, none of my plans involve Ruby getting as low as she did in Tea Amidst Terrible Trouble", as none of my current plans have as many characters available that would be invested in directly torturing Ruby. In general I'm more interested in writing the recovery part of the story.)
6. What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?:
Another one I'll answer multiple times. For Candle, the two things that make it stand out are that it is my first fic, and that it is a deeply personal one, where I dug deep in processing/projecting my own experiences. It doesn't really have a plot I came up with, I just saw a scenario in canon that felt like taking a different perspective would really alter the impact of, and it is also in a way a reaction to how the Beacon Dance(and parties in general) is portrayed in other fanfic too. Ruby's terrible time there is (presumably unintentionally), glossed over when acknowledging it could be so much more interesting. People do cotton on to "Ruby is not a good fit for conventional parties/formal dances" more often than they do for other characters, but I wanted to actually explore the "why". Even when it is acknowledged that such busy events can be uncomfortable, rare is the story that takes the side/perspective of such a character who is uncomfortable with the type of event itself, rather than the discomfort with specifics.
As for other projects that are in the works that stand out: the RWBY/Pokémon crossover I'm working on stands out as a probably the most focussed on the nitty-gritty of psychological recovery, and probably the one where I focus most on preparing things like themes and motifs before the actual writing. (I'm not good at maintaining overview, so i normally focus a lot more on the individual scenes, with the large-scale patterns emerging from those. In secondary school questions about themes and motifs and the like on literature tests were always where I'd fumble, even though my close reading skills were already solid even before I studied Literature academically.)
And finally 7. Where did the title come from?
I tend to struggle to come up with non-working titles, so I only have a finalised one for the published.
"Burning the Candle", the episode of RWBY that focusses most on Blake working herself to exhaustion (and the first ~half of the event I adapted) formed the template, as Ruby pushing herself to (and slightly beyond) the limits of her endurance (thus, Ruby being another candle that burns up) is a reflection in miniature of Blake's arc across these episodes. The reasoning is limited, but I'm just happy I have any title that isn't "Ruby suffers sensory overload at the Beacon Dance".
Incidentally, the working title for this piece was "Sensory Overload" and started life as a set of scenes in a longer story, before I realised that 1: it could work as a standalone, and 2: that the larger story would take very long to get to it, and i wanted to do something with the idea long before the larger story could get to it.
And that's all of them. Thanks for the ask, @notoftheskaal!
