#brynnmclean

[anghraine]

brynnmclean replied to this post:

This is lovely, friend!!!

Thank you so much!!! I kept poking at it because I wasn't sure it was flowing how I wanted on a sentence level, so I doubly appreciate hearing it :)

I will also admit that as I was writing at, like, 10:45 PM, I was thinking "so we don't know from TOS how the post-WWIII, post-scarcity, united planetary government affects immigration or language or pretty much any culture much less North American ones, and Roddenberry mandated way too much dewy-eyed Americana to allow much thought to go into that, but I have thoughts on what language and multiculturalism could look like in such a drastically different context without making everything unrecognizable in a way that doesn't suit the themes of the story, and while I know that if the writing/production side had thought about future Montreal much at all, they'd be like, there's no winter any more and stop there, but I have thoughts about the impacts of open borders and planetary union and The World Not Being Terrible on how Terran linguistic policies evolve in different places. obviously the natural POV character for this is an 11-year-old Ukrainian Canadian kid who just moved from Arizona, has spent 70% of his life in space as a Starfleet brat, and is mostly concerned with gardening and school and getting an A+ in Firstborn Much Older Sibling, and who is a canon character with no lines in the show because he only showed up as an adult corpse for approximately 2 seconds. but I have feelings about him and anyway, it has to be him in this section because the actual protagonist is a toddler. and genderbent but that's less important"

And then I thought: wow, Elizabeth, you are incredibly on-brand sometimes.

[linnea-ancalime]

For the end of the year fic questions: 1) favorite fic you wrote this year, 3) favorite line/scene you wrote this year, and 11) fandom you enjoyed writing for the most this year!

Hiiii thank you for the ask!! :3

1) favorite fic you wrote this year My actual favourite is still a WIP (to escape an empire, Mello/Near AU fic which we've been talking about for a while now... hoping to finish it in 2026. You know how it is with drafting longfics :D) so there's nothing PUBLISHED. My favourite that we've actually posted is. Tie between Nocturne (post-canon Matt/Mello/Near drabble) or coffee (immediate post-canon Mello/Near drabble)! They're both about Near not sleeping, but in somewhat different directions lol

(also I know you didn't ask, but looking through our own works, I was reminded!! We took a hefty amount of inspiration from Senua's Saga, specifically the dark forest area (not Járnviðr; the one at the beginning of chapter 3), for the atmosphere / setting in branching paths. It's Mello/Near, but if you're interested in venturing outside of your own devil's sacraments... would love to know what you think of the piece in that regard! :3)

3) favorite line/scene you wrote this year Right now, this line from to care enough to carry on (in our Mello/Near plurality AU series) that we spent SO LONG crafting until it sounded just right:

Mello is a ghost passing through on his way out of this life, one soul to preserve humanity lost, the spirit which Near so often lacks and cannot move forward without.

11) fandom you enjoyed writing for the most this year! With a few exceptions during the November drabble challenge, we've been extremely single-minded and wrote ONLY Death Note fics, so... xD Looking forward to continuing in that vein next year!!

[fanfic end of the year asks]

[niennawept]

🌹 very interested in what you're working on!

Hello, dear friend!

This is from a dark fic that I started writing a while ago set in the Adar's murky past, when he was still in Angband. Very dead dove stuff, but also kind of inspired by Cupid and Psyche.

It is often said that some darknesses are deeper than others, and it is in this forgotten place that she finally comes to believe it.

Thank you so much for asking!

[anghraine]

It's at the tail end of WIP Wednesday, but I wanted to write some S'paak POV of the K/S AU very early on, and was encouraged by the tags from @brynnmclean last week and @rain-sleet-snow this one:

S’paak could not have said when she first began to feel more for her new, young captain than any Vulcan should feel for anyone. It came on so slowly.  She’d thought her attractive from the day they met, at the ceremony when Pike passed the Enterprise—and in a sense, S’paak herself with it—to Captain Kirk. But everyone did. Kirk was aesthetically pleasing by any reasonable standard that could be applied to a human woman, the regularity of her bone structure and generous figure greatly increased by a force of charm that even S’paak could not have quantified, but still registered just as the humans around her did. A frailty on her own part, she supposed, that weak strain in her blood she always had to fight, but Kirk’s demeanor certainly didn’t help matters.  There was a lush, careless quality about everything she did and said. Even at her most authoritative and professional, Kirk flaunted herself; there was no other way to describe her. It wasn’t even physical, or at least not entirely so—S’paak had seen some of the men on the bridge glancing away and swallowing when the captain crossed her legs, and understood the impulse, but it was more than that. S’paak was less struck by Kirk’s legs, though she certainly noticed them, than by the intensity she failed to notice until after she observed a chess game between Kirk and Gary Mitchell. S’paak had taken Kirk’s easy conversation and laughter during the game at face value, the behavior of an impulsive, distracted player who was more interested in chatting with an old friend than victory. Mitchell himself had always been an erratic player of any kind of tactical game, prone to sudden leaps of brilliant intuition—what humans termed intuition—but also to simple mistakes a more disciplined mind would never be capable of.

Kirk had defeated him so quickly in the first game that S’paak, not far distant but more focused on her salad and the progress of a botany experiment updating in a nearby PADD, assumed he’d made one of his typical errors. But the second game distracted her; Mitchell was evidently trying to drag it out further, but lost quickly enough again.

A small crowd had gathered around them by the third game. Mitchell looked intense and focused, while Kirk appeared more interested in the crew members around them. She explained that she’d met Mitchell nearly ten years earlier at the Academy and they’d become friends, then asked them questions about themselves while haphazardly placing her pieces each turn. Mitchell managed to protract that game by a few more turns, then swore under his breath.

“I won’t make you say it,” he said, knocking his king over. “Damn, Jess, you haven’t changed a bit.”

Kirk smiled. “Do you want to play another round?”

“I think you’ve crushed my pretensions enough for one day,” Mitchell said ruefully. “I’m going to start having flashbacks to Kant soon.”

[zingsthings]

for the readers emojis ask game: 👀🥵🎀💐🧶🍇

👀 eagerly await updates from you every day 🥵 your smut scenes make me die of thirst 🎀 you describe tender, soft intimacy wonderfully 💐 love your female characters and what they are like 🧶 your dialogues are as if real people were talking to each other 🍇 your intimate scenes are written with great taste

ahhhh THANKS FRIEND this is the sweetest

this is also wild, because the vast majority of these are entirely new compliments to me!! generally i feel like i have a handle on my strengths as a writer, but i have basically never written fiction before, and definitely never written smutty fiction before, so it means a lot that the dialogue and the erotica are hitting as they should :)

[anghraine]

I'm not HUGELY familiar with Star Trek, but I have very much been enjoying all the Jessica & S'paak fic bits you've been posting about, so for the WIP title meme, that's my pick!

Ooh, it's very exciting to have intrigued someone who isn't necessarily super invested in the canon! Thank you :D

This is from "the future" of the fic (over a year after their equivalent of the TOS finale), and I'm going to slightly cheat and go for four sentences:

Something about Jessica's baffled expression lent S'paak more daring than ever before. She explained: "You said that you wanted to convey what you feel to me, and find words inadequate—and you also indicated that you consider other human forms of expressing such things inappropriate, given your current authority." She knew her face must be noticeably more green-tinged than usual; Jessica's was distinctly pink. "An obvious solution presents itself."

[helenvader]

❤️✏️📖

Thank you! ♥

I answered "favourite line" here and "first line of a chapter" here.

Share the last line of any chapter.

End of chapter 1 of Sleeping Beauty.

---

He goes back to swearing.

[niennawept]

For that fic writer questions ask meme:

2. a character whose POV you're currently exploring

5. first sentence of the fifth paragraph of an unpublished WIP

and 12. a trope you're really into right now

Hi brynn!

2. a character whose POV you're currently exploring:

I'm actually writing Adar's perspective for the first time? After almost two years of writing about him, I'm finally writing from his perspective and it's a little scary, ngl. I normally try to make my POV writing distinct enough that you can tell who it is without a chapter header but I'm not sure I'm always successful. I'm hoping this fic will help!

5. first sentence of the fifth paragraph of an unpublished WIP

“In the beginning, we woke in darkness,” he said, over the blend of beat and melody. I love the odd specificity of that question, btw.

12. a trope you're really into right now

Mmmmm, "they'd find each other in any universe," since I'm writing a fic that is an AU of my AU featuring my pairing of Adar/Palariel. It's definitely the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written, but real life is slowly killing me so I deserve a Valinor AU.

Thank you for the ask! ❤️I hope things are going well for you!

For the ask game here!