questions for fic writers
1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)
4. What detail in My Brother's Keeper are you really proud of?
11. Are you partial to a certain character/pairing or are you more equal-opportunity? If you are partial to any character/pairing, why do you think that is?
40. Do you tend to reread fics or are you a one-and-done kind of person?
50. Answer any question of your choice, or talk about anything you want to talk about!
Yay, questions! Thanks for asking! (and whoops mobile wasn't playing nice and it took me a few days to get to this on desktop sorry for the delay)
1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)
Oooh that probably depends if I know what fandom they're coming from. If I don't know, I would probably offer up one of my rare original works. I'm currently fond of my most recent OW, sing a song of death and life, a ghost story with a happy ending (a side character in which definitely deserves to have their own story told). Alternately, I've written a couple of stories for exchanges in which I expected the recipient to read fandom blind, so they contain (hopefully) enough fandom context in the opening author's notes, that I'm happy to rec them to anyone. At first glance, The Twins, seems like a good option because the fandom is little more than "cultural awareness that the Mars Rovers exist" but it wasn't written in my usual style so probably not a good intro to myself as a writer.
But in general, I like being able to totally omit the fandom context, and trust my readers to have encountered it before. For Harry Potter, crookshanks and the rat is a good, if extreme example of the way I love to get deep into limited third person pov, or Jewish readers would also have the religious-ritual knowledge to untangle Dayenu (and which things are irl traditions vs magical vs Lovegood-family-specific; a non-jewish beta unfortunately confirmed that Dayenu is a bit opaque to the goyische reader for exactly those same details) and I loved exploring those traditions for both worldbuilding and characterization readings. Also the grief. For some reason I write a lot of Major Character Death and grief (and I have since before I had equivalent grief experiences in real life. Psychology can probably explain why grief fic scratches the id so nicely but I don't bother looking that deeply at myself lol.) For DCMK (my other eternal fandom alongside Harry Potter) I would probably recommend one breath at a time. It's on the short end of my typical works, but again a good example of how I like to just skim past canon events and dive deep into a limited pov to character study. Or for pokemon, either of my Eevee-centric works, but if I had to pick just one, Is Your Eevee Okay? Oak "Deeply Concerned" For Species isn't quite my usual style (re: all the footnotes/clickbait) but does reflect my enjoyment and pattern of worldbuilding, or, as some recent exchanges have made a matchable tag, "put more thought into this than canon did" ie forcing coming up with explanations that make seemingly contradictory canon details play nice together after all. It also has a recent VoiceTeam podfic that I'm delighted with.
4. What detail in My Brother's Keeper are you really proud of?
Hmm. Much of chapter two, tbh. such as
...every joint ached or throbbed. Even the muscles and joints he hadn't known he had. Even his toes hurt. Even his tongue.
and then later when Regulus is sniping about Sirius choosing to have a Different Brother, and startling Sirius into some painful honesty, and the whole double-Sirius reveal... it's hard to put my finger on just one thing, but it's the first chapter where Regulus is not-drugged enough to be moderately reliable as a narrator, which means I get to let him Observe and Speculate and draw conclusions that may or may not be right, which is always something I enjoy playing with.
11. Are you partial to a certain character/pairing or are you more equal-opportunity? If you are partial to any character/pairing, why do you think that is?
Hmm. A bit of both, probably. I tend to write the same characters over and over because I'm most comfortable with their voices or because they're my favorites to put Into Situations. But on the other hand, I am very much a multishipper. I can be swayed into enjoying (or even writing) nearly any ship if the author (or prompter) is enthusiastic enough and has a clear vision for why a ship Works together.
40. Do you tend to reread fics or are you a one-and-done kind of person?
Reread! I'm autistic enough that the familiar events are soothing and Right, and I'll read a favorite several weeks in a row, if it's long enough to take a few evenings to finish bc that's long enough to not immediately get boring with repetition. Plus sometimes I get into A Mood, and I want something that scratches a certain itch, and it's so much easier to find such a thing in my ao3 history/bookmarks (which I belatedly tried making into a filterable "history" since the history page... isn't) than fresh in the filters. I'll admit that on rereads I'm much more likely to skip painful conversations or slanderous news articles and skip straight to the characters having emotional fallout about them.
50. Answer any question of your choice, or talk about anything you want to talk about!
Okay! Picking from the list at random by vibes and mood, and oops this turned into mainly a cluster of consecutive numbers bc I liked all the questions there
26. Would you rather write a fic that had no dialogue or one that was only dialogue?
I feel like I've already written things with no dialogue. It comes more naturally to me. There's so much information in most environments besides just what people say to each other. How they say it and what they don't say carries so much. one breath at a time (the same link as above) in fact is one of those. We don't actually see Kogoro scolding Conan the next morning, but I really really like that closing parenthetical in place of that scene:
(And if, in the morning, Kogoro only succeeded at communicating his anger that Conan had stressed Ran like that? Well. perhaps it was better to leave some emotional distance between them. The boy's parents surely intended to claim him again someday...)
I like how the indirectness of this not-epilogue reinforces the denial he's trying (ineffectively) to maintain about his parental relationship to Conan.
34. What aspects of your writing are inspired by/taken from your real life? 35. What aspects of your writing are completely unlike your real life?
honestly, a wild mix of both. Even the things tagged 'ventfic' range from "I've had nearly the exact same experience as one of the POV characters" to "something loosely related happened to someone in my community and writing this about characters closer to the trauma helps me process my approximately-fourth-hand grief(?) about it" to even "given what a loved one has told me about their childhood, I worry this even worse thing might also have happened to them, and they've just blocked out the trauma" (except I think that one's still in an anon collection mainly bc a third party who subscribes to my ao3 and also knows loved one's stories might recognize the puzzle pieces and draw incorrect conclusions about why I've written that particular ventfic).
Any time there's magic or monsterfucking, it's a safe bet that I haven't had those exact encounters myself lol.
On the other hand, I tend to write overthinker characters for my favorite limited third pov because I too overthink everything (and it's a good excuse to ramble about the background details without the prose feeling out of character)
36. Do you visualize what you read/write?
lolol no. If I focus all my effort and attention on "visualize the thing", I can get blobby shapes and flashes of color, but when I'm working on anything else - like when I'm actively writing - I'm solidly a 5 on the scale below, and I too grew up thinking "visualization" was a metaphor and never connecting the word "imagination" to the root word "image" even though I was hyperlexic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (this is a superpower tho bc people can share all the gross stories they want at the dinner table and it won't bother me!! I can't see/smell/feel any of this shit! And I can only hear it if you mimic the sound successfully, like, Foley style. onomatopoeias are insufficient to squick me)
37. Promote one of your own “deep cut” fics (an underrated one, or one that never got as much traction as you think it deserves!). What do you like about it?
tbh, (and after filtering my own ao3 page by kudos to find where to focus) a pair of kink/smut works are my picks for "underappreciated". possibly because the tags are in contrast to my apparent prevalence of gen works (I write more smut than anyone else knows to associate with me, but I leave a lot of it in the anon collection(s) for a variety of reasons), possibly because they were both written for multi-gift fic events for Creator's Choice of Fandom (CCOF) rather than for people already in the fandom(s), or as a single primary gift for an exchange.
For the Thrill of the Hunt is a little off the beaten path for anyone - it's a cross-genre crossover (eternal anime vs live action tv show that got wrapped up jarringly quickly with a movie in place of season two), postcanon for both (one of which, the ongoing anime canon, has wide open plot threads that the creator seems to be in no rush to follow through on), smut (addressed above), and I wrote it for Battleship, which was an event for which a ton of fanworks revealed all at once, and even among my subscribers it had the potential to get lost in the flood... But I really enjoy the characterization I put into it, and exploring River's supernatural ability to Fit In (only as much as she wants, of course), only feel slightly cringe about the exposition narration necessary to set up the noncanon setting and the Marriage Hunt/Chase tag compared to the two essentially T-rated canons, and generally I would just love more eyes on it. It was even written with intent to be fandom blind so there's some context in the opening AN that should give more than enough background on the characters if either fandom is new to you (pspsps)
sensitive open and strong I wrote with So Many details from the video game (I was stuck on the second to last boss battle lol and just. Played again to grab more details) and the pokemon fans don't seem to have found it to appreciate the lore (I have recently discovered the tag "no foreplay without loreplay" and omg insta fave yes please always loreplay) beneath the sexy teasing.
38. Did any of your fics get surprisingly popular (whatever that means to you)? Which ones? Why do you think they were so successful?
so I linked The Twins way back in question 1 and tbh one of the reasons it came to mind as a possible starting place for someone wanting to get into my fic is because it was (is?) so popular. It seems to have been so successful partially because I managed to write it within the day or two of the Opportunity Rover mission officially being declared over, when everyone was sharing screenshots of That Tweet, and being emotional about her and apparently I hit the right emotional chords in the process. (I do get certain dedicated readers - though tbf, specifically ones I know afk - who reread The Twins at unpredictable times every year or two and just comment again or text me "hi this broke my heart again" so. Whatever I did right, it seems to have lasting power, in addition to getting the timing perfect to take advantage of the viral wave of attention Oppy was getting when it first went up).
