Hii!! I hope you’re having a great day/night! I’m rereading bbac for the third time (I think this is one of the few select fanfics I have to read every few years just to relive the first time I read it) and I never tire from how in awe I always get with each chapter. When I found out you had turned it into an original story, I was (and still am) ecstatic!! I’ll have to find a way to get my hands on it ><! I hope it’s okay to still bring up bbac after— wow, nearly a decade since it first got published on ao3 O.O
Maybe you had answered a similar or the exact question before, and if you had, please do direct me there! If not, I just wanted to ask: How did you plan this entire story? The plot is so rich in mythology and horror elements, especially from various cultures and countries, and you weaved them so beautifully into a harmonious picture with your own take on magic and witchcraft. I had commented years ago in the middle of my first read that bbac is the reason why I’ve come to enjoy magic/fantasy as a genre in fiction, and I’ve been dipping my toes into them since as a media consumer and artist. However, there’s only so much input and output that could happen and I do get overwhelmed by the info I find. So it boggles my mind whenever I wonder how you wrote bbac because it flows so naturally, especially for readers who are not familiar with such elements (it’s me, I’m readers). It’s literally the perfect example of show, don’t tell without excessive exposition.
Have you always been interested in and inspired by myths, horror and etc? How much research did you do before/as you were writing? If you’re comfortable with sharing your methods, that is.
Thank you so much! ☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆
first off, thank you!! it's so nice to receive something like this - words cannot describe the !!!! my heart did!
also, i'm SUPER gratified that bbac holds up to rereads!
don't tell me how long it's been tho
so waaaaay back when, i started bbac with 3.5 things in mind (spoilers for bbac endgame!): necromancer suga, stop the apocalypse plot, kiyoko being the one responsible for the final god, and ensemble cast. actually, in addition to the ensemble cast (believe it or not i hadn't written multiple subplots like that before!) i did specifically want to NOT spoonfeed information, so i very specifically withheld myself from doing so. and it means i succeeded in the show, don't tell, so yaaaaay
but seriously, as to how a huge project like bbac (and originale, now!) came to be... man. it was a lot of vibes, a lot of "what if XYZ, that'd be funny/cool", and some very cool friends i made along the way. also, alcohol. i don't recommend that part as much as i recommend the others.
it was very much a case of "this is cool!!" and throwing it all into a big mixing pot and shaking it. which is technically what all writing is, i just did it with highly concentrated tropes like "goopy shadow demon" and "angels are monsters, too".
i've always been a fan of fantasy setting with a big, worldwide-feeling scale, plus i was living in america (in several different places) writing fanfic about a japanese creation, so there was already incentive to do grabby hands at all kinds of mythologies. also, like many writers, i'm prone to falling down the research rabbit hole. whoops.
i HAVE always been interested in aesthetic horror, though it was only in the last decade or so that i have been able to actually watch horror movies. (i've been able to read horror forever!) i also enjoyed using lesser-known mythologies and delving further into more widely known ones (I WAS BASICALLY FLUENT IN R'LYEHIAN FOR WAY TOO LONG), but it was very much a case of research as i write. so very, very little was planned out from the start, because i'm not a planner.
bonus fun fact: i also originally thought bbac would be like 100k. ha. ha ha.
bbac was also a case in "what i DON'T want to write" - as an example, i very specifically wanted to NOT write werewolves and vampires! they're ubiquitous in fantasy already and i already wrote my werewolf fic so while i did mentally plot out where/how they'd fit into that world, i wanted to explore other things instead. and i did! for a lot of words!
in reworking the fic into an original series (please partake! ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿) i did also rework some of the mythologies i dug into. some were minor fixes, some were more major. (for example, there is no longer a skinwalker in originale, as it's not my place to use those and i don't know as much about navajo/dine as i ought to. but now there's 100% more old norse and 50% more lakota!) but the broad strokes of the plot are still the same. there is still a dragon migration. there is still the dreamlands. (HALF OF LOVECRAFT'S STUFF IS PUBLIC DOMAIN COME AT ME) the gods are new but there's still 3 of them. (or are there) there is, somehow, even more french.
in an ideal world, i also rework the notes i've taken into a creature compendium type thing and also publish it, because sometimes writers DO like telling in addition to the showing, haha.