#egomeme

[callmearcturus]

I think your specialty is conveying love, in the extraordinary range of ways people can both feel it and show it to each other. Familial, platonic, romantic, tender, rabid, subtle, painful, redemptive- I've never seen a writer with such a well-diversified love portfolio as yours!

i...... wow. thank you. i like that a lot actually. 8)

[callmearcturus]

13, 14, 21, 25 for the fanfic writer meme? Feel free to only answer the ones you want to, of course! :)

13. favorite writing song/artist/album of this year

I wrote more of the TESv2.0 edit to Hawaii: Part II by Miracle Musical. It rooted me in the process so hard it was a little spooky. And I've been really upfront about how 80% of the Abraxas Intermission was written with "Sometimes" by Nick Lutsko on loop. And I wrote a lot of Karkat's part of the SWDKTOWL to The Black Keys' El Camino rerelease.

14. a fic you didn’t expect to write

I WOUND UP BACK IN WHOMSTVE SO YANNO

21. most memorable comment/review

When I posted the TESv2.0 new epilogue and got comments from the same people who had commented on TESv1.0 five years ago. Like, you gotta understand, I spent an ungodly amount of time rereading old comments as I was doing the edit, making sure I didn't lose anything someone had loved. So to see familiar faces fucked me UP.

25. a fic you read this year you would recommend everyone read

Jungle Slang

[callmearcturus]

You are EXCELLENT at world building. I read chamomile rose water yada yada like 6 months ago and I STILL think about it. SWDKTOWL? I cannot stress how interested I am about what's under the table.

something something blowjob joke

[callmearcturus]

for the meme: 12, 24, 28?

12. favorite character to write about this year

Karkat Fucking Vantas. Like, I have always liked Karkat a lot, but something just... clicked in me about him when I did that first relisten of Lets Read Homestuck, like it wasn't any new information but something about him made me want to fucking scream. Then I rewrote TES and like........ Hot Karkat. And then I started figuring out the plot of SWDKTOWL and like we're not there yet but when I tell you it would take an act of literal god to stop Karkat Vantas, jfc.

He's just so heavy he seems to bend things around him. He has gravity that I don't think I really 'got' before. Now, I just want to fling him into impossible situations and see how he fixes it. Because that's his pathology. He's going to fucking fix things if someone doesn't snipe him from the rooftop, and if that requires changing lives or changing the world, he's gonna dig his claws in and make it happen.

God, I'm so excited for the dismount of SWDKTOWL. I'm so excited.

24. favorite fic you read this year

In a rare break from Whomstve: and springþ þe wde nu, by escherzo. My favorite post-200 TMA fic.

28. longest fic you read this year

I just reread all of All I Know Are Sad Songs, by BlackHolesAndUnicorns, and its still a fucking masterpiece that leaves me struck dumb by the weight of it.

[callmearcturus]

21 & 23?

23. fics you wanted to write but didn’t

So I was originally going to do a totally different assassin AU. I had a pretty extensive plan to write a DirkJake AU based on Grosse Point Blank, which is one of my favorite movies. The concept was that Jake and Dirk were high school sweethearts, but Jake skipped town right before prom and wound up joining the military just to get the fuck out of Austin and to travel.

There, they find he has a Certain Psychological Profile and train him as an assassin, which he does for years before going into freelance work for himself. He's very professional and good at his job but as he gets older, he starts to feel unfulfilled. It leads him to check in on his old beau, Dirk.

Dirk, who still lives in Austin and has been gifted a radio station by his ultrarich dad, Dave. Dirk has a radio show, and Jake obsesses over it, keeping a timer on his phone to let him know when its starting no matter where he is in the world. Imagine a neon-drenched Jake English laying in a shitty rental car in Tokyo, listening to the voice of Dirk over the internet stream. The torch he's carrying is epic and devastating.

I was going to write out the 'script' for all of Dirk's spoken segments (and was even considering recording them and embedding them into the fic to listen to) with Dirk going on rants about the ghosts that haunt you, on how fucking annoying it is that Alex Turner is aware of how talented he is, and on long lost loves.

Eventually, circumstances drag Jake back to Austin for an assassination job. There's some hilarious complications with Jane trying to rope Jake into opening basically a Murder Franchise with her and threatening to kill him if he won't join up. And Jake gets thoroughly in over his head trying to reconnect with Dirk, to the point he doesn't even look at who's on the dossier he's been given, who he has to kill.

Until he finally does open the dossier and finds out his target is Dave fucking Strider, Dirk's father, and Jake has to save Dave's life and convince Dirk to take another chance on him.

ALL OF THAT ENERGY got funnelled into SWDKTOWL which is good because KTOWL has a much more original plot and is definitely pushing my abilities to their edge, and as much as I tried I couldn't actually write better lines than the original Grosse Point Blank movie itself (it's truly a phenomenal script) so I went with the right choice but MAN. MIDLIFE CRISIS ASSASSIN JAKE. SIMMERING ANGRY DJ DIRK. It woulda been stupendous.

[callmearcturus]

Your stories have almost a synesthesia-like quality -- each one has a sort of internal moodboard that comes across really strongly for me. Like if you could make a multi-sensory moodboard that has places, smells, weather, emotions, food, and nebulous concepts/aesthetics in addition to visuals. The vibes are all really strong and unique and I love it.

i feel this, yep. every story has a sensory palette in my brain too, i'm glad i can convey that.

[callmearcturus]

For the Fanfic ask thing how about #3 and #14?

3. favorite line/scene you wrote this year

TESv2.0, the Epilogue, specifically Karkat's long forum reply to Jane. Very specifically:

TAKE IT FROM ME, BECAUSE I KNOW THIS BETTER THAN ANYONE: SURVIVOR'S GUILT IS JUST A SLOWER POISON.

I almost want to say there is a lot of me in TES Karkat but hoenstly that's not right. It's through writing him that some things about my own trauma and life snapped into focus.

[callmearcturus]

you have been one of my biggest writing inspirations for a long time, and asafaf was my first ever whomstve fic and i reread it yearly. your prose is so tangible it’s like the first time you put on prescription glasses and realize what kind of potential the world had this whole time. it’s really really incredible and i’m grateful you want to share with us 💜

AAAH thank you. jfc that's a very lovely metaphor to fling at me. uwu thank you for reading