"The Mushroom Mine" sign by @shantismurf, with assistance from @tickles-ivory
As part of the celebration of the one year anniversary of the Bagginshield Book Club, we asked the lovely @chrononautintraining a few questions about this wonderful work.
June 2024 Author Q&A with Chrononautical
Q1. What name would you like us to use and what are your pronouns?
A1. Chrononautical or Chrono, She/Her
Q2. How many years have you been writing?
A2. Most of my life, but posting publicly for about 15 years.
Q3. What do you think of as your writing style - are you a plotter or pantster?
A3. Pantster, primarily, though I've learned my lessons and do like to know where a story is going to end when I start it these days so I try to plot.
Q4. What’s your favorite genre/trope to write?
A4. Speculative fiction: stories about magic or science fiction, primarily.
Q5. Is there a genre/trope you haven't written as much of yet that you're excited about for future writing?
A5. I'd like to do more comedy.
Q6. Was there an idea or scene that inspired A Passion for Mushrooms?
A6. Passion for Mushrooms is one hundred percent inspired by the quote I used for an epigraph: "Hobbits have a passion for mushrooms, surpassing even the greediest likings of Big People." - The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien.
When I decided to write it, the fandom already had more than a few stories about Bilbo planting gardens and deciding to stay in Erebor with a miraculously alive Thorin. I was completely here for all of that, of course, but I wanted a story where the garden wasn't special because of gold or rare plants bought with gold. I wanted there to be a treasure that Bilbo could appreciate with the Baggins half of his heart, as well as the Tookish bit. And I know next to nothing about mountains, but I do know mushrooms do okay in caves, so...
Q7. Did you do any special research before writing the work?
A7. If you're asking this because I go deep on How To Pluck A Chicken In A Medieval Kitchen during the cooking scenes, you're right and you should say it. I am a middling cook, but all of my ingredients come from grocery stores. I had to do a fair bit of research on the cooking aspects of the story that were furthest from my own experience. Fortunately, the professor already put tomatoes and potatoes in Middle-earth, so I didn't have to go Full Historical.
Q8. Did the story change from how you originally envisioned it? Were there scenes or plot elements you had to cut out?
A8. It absolutely did. Because I am, as previously said, a pantster. I wanted a bigger bang for the ending of the story than I was set up to get. I could have stopped with Bilbo and Thorin getting together and had some simple falling action, but that didn't perfectly tie the subplot of Dis and Tauriel back to the main pairing, which I knew I wanted. Having Doron try to poison Bilbo was actually a late in the game choice. If I'd planned that from the start, I would have threaded him into more of the middle sections of the novel.
As for cutting things out, the additional stories in the series started as deleted scenes/reader requests that I couldn't find use for. So most of what I cut didn't end up in the rubbish bin. Anything that wound up there really wasn't worth posting.
Q9. Do you have a favorite moment from the entire series?
A9. I still really like "A Spy In The Shire" a lot. I know it's so self-indulgent to say that about a story focusing on an OC, but if the point of the Battle of Five Armies is to reclaim Erebor for the dwarves, then I want that to mean something. I want the average dwarf to be in a bad place. I want the average dwarf to need Erebor the way Thorin needs Erebor, to be willing to do anything to get back to the Lonely Mountain. Because if that's the case, then all the sacrifice means something. When I talk about this one luckless dwarf on the world's silliest quest to figure out how to help the king hook up with a hobbit, I'm talking about hope for the future. I'm talking about all the people who long for and dream of the home that Thorin was willing to die to reclaim. I think about them going back there and living better lives. It brings me peace.
