i'm kind of in love with your writing. i just read no other love and immediately wanted to read more of your works only to realize that i already have?? you've got me hooked like a fish and i'm going nowhere at all speeds. seriously great stuff!!!
random writer question, totally cliche but i'm curious so who cares - what was the inspiration for no other love? what's your writing process like? what do you hate/love the most? do you write your dream scenes first or go for the narrative/plot/character/dialogue? how did you find bucky's voice?
Hi, God knows how long this has been sitting in my inbox. I'm so sorry for not replying.
First of all, thank you so, so much. That story was a labour of love, truly. I wasn't sure how it would be received, as it was originally a Kinktober story that I fleshed out more and more. The problem I have is losing passion for a story before it's done or the narrative becomes something messy and unrecognizable from my original idea.
The inspiration for the story was largely from the song the title comes from. It's featured in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie The Master and is essentially a Chopin tune with Jo Stafford singing on top of it. The movie The Master is post-WWII and I tend to get swept up in that sub-genre to a maddening degree. I also wanted to feature tenderness as a major theme of the story. It is a love story -- I used to do Kinktober with occasional plot snuck in, which didn't help my sanity much, either... when you're supposed to be writing 31 explicit stories spanning a month it's very hard to move onto the next thing. Hence why it grew like it did.
My writing process is non-existent these days but I used to manage about 2,000 words a day. The equivalent of about two hours' worth of work. I used to daydream more, but since last year I've had a lot of issues with concentration and motivation. I have stories in my head still. This comes through when I watch a lot of movies especially, and weirdly not when I read. Music is also a major inspiration, but I haven't listened to much new stuff in the last year, either. I'll spare you all the details but I am currently 8 months pregnant and I was diagnosed as Autistic in December after years of burnout and mental health crises. I tended to write chronologically. Finding Bucky's voice this time around was easy to know but harder to achieve, if that makes sense, because it was distinctly shell-shocked as opposed to his more adjusted and more grounded voices I've had in the past.
Here are some things that have helped me write before:
writing notes whenever something pops up, even if it's the most innocuous, boring tidbit
making a playlist of the songs that inspire the themes/tone/mood of the story
obsessively daydreaming about the scenes in a visual sense -- because I see stories as a movie, usually
write brief summaries of the story overall or the chapters (if it's a larger story in multiple parts and I haven't figured it all out yet lol)
give it time, or try your best not to rush the process
I hope this gives you some insight! Again, I'm sorry for the lateness of my reply.
