20, 54, and 60 for the fic writer asks !!!
some of this is going to be nsfw:
20. Have you noticed any patterns in your fics? Words/expressions that appear a lot, themes, common settings, etc?
people rly do just have pinched miserable expressions in my fics all the time. i really like describing people crying as childlike and unglamorous??
my favorite word is pearlescent so i use that to describe lots of shit that definitely is not pearlescent. there's pearls fucking everywhere
i spend a lot of attention on fashion and hair/makeup descriptions, especially when it's for sexy reasons
i recall someone saying i'm the only person they've ever seen use the word "catarrh" and that is a high compliment but also incredibly silly bc i first learned that word from reading All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (horrifying book but responsible for so much of my vocabulary, for which i felt secretly special and prideful) and then it showed up in fucking Gideon the Ninth
the words i've been consciously using recently include arbiter, administering (as in for a drug), effulgent, vacillate, jocularity, rebuke, disavow, fractious, and carotid
i'm looking for an excuse to use the word détente
i use too many fucking commas. but the exact right amount of em-dashes. and i don't know what hyphens are but i'm apparently determined to use them incorrectly every time
mental health issues and suicide ideation. so much casual suicidality. like deep droning bloodrush levels of depression
people in situations where they have 0 autonomy and crave to self-harm to regain some sense of agency
people who are "trapped" in a physical environment whether by an actual material threat or by their own emotions
young people having unwanted romantic/sexual fixations on older mentor figures and it fuckin them up for life. FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON!!!!…….. AHAHHA…..
psychic shame rooms. running through your traumas one after the other like the tomb raider, or whatever it was megan thee stallion said
paranoia, unreality, the sensation of being haunted by something
SA allegories without actually involving SA (sometimes it's a double-allegory where the SA really does happen but there's another factor specific to the fic that serves as the allegory so i don't have to touch the SA part as much)
questionable polyamory dynamics. what if the polycule was me and you and you and me from the evil dimension
at least one (1) pov character who is highly intelligent and trained in some STEM subject and thinks in the framework of their speciality and often uses it as an extended metaphor
moms who are crunchy difficult fully realized humans with internality
surrogate fathers who are ostensibly the devil reincarnated
emotionally torturous but sexually rapturous bottoming
(contributed by @zoloftsexdeath) "A deep affection for morally complex gender men"
for whatever reason my fic characters always end up having horrible emotional confrontations on beaches (4bp). also longing miserably on beaches (echo bren). also coming together and reconciling on beaches (broken horses). also fucking on beaches (rockstar au). it's almost like i live in a place where tropical beaches are a geographic staple. it's almost like tropical beaches are the supreme romance biome for a reason
i know i've written multiple instances of characters fighting in or near bathtubs??? which is weird because i hate bathtubs. but maybe that's why they're fighting.
also: restaurants and the club. the klerb. the klerb is often implied in some nostalgic fleeting flashback, like a dead wife
i usually pick a room that becomes the "hub" of activity and emotion for the majority of the fic, unconsciously or consciously. does this have anything to do with my hermit lifestyle? maybe.
54. What’s your favorite part about the fanfiction writing process?
the first draft where i go shrimp mode and sprint through 4,000 words in a day and stumble out of it with seven status afflictions
60. Have you had a writer you admire comment on your fic? What was that like?
LOOLL this actually happened just recently! @existwound is a klance writer who has rightly earned a lot of attention for their fics and in the big 2026 no less, and they left the COMMENT OF ALL TIME on four-body problem, for which i freaked out for days
i've also had a wonderful time getting comments from a ton of shadowgast author peers by nature of making friends with them in a server, and then attracting some of that attention to my ao3. some of them i didn't realize where the same authors of the fics i love until after!
notably, a writer i very much admire for their fics (the most insane of which was a body in absentia) ended up becoming a very close friend!! @nonwal is my buddy and their editor voice on rockstar au and echo bren has become indispensable :")))
