Writing Meme: Questions, Answered
There’s a set of questions going around for fic writers, and @phoenixfalls tagged me. Thank you! I have a bit of free time this week. So here we are:
What is your total posted word count on AO3? (Go to your Works, then click Statistics.)
656,171 words. Not totally shocking -- I’ve written in a series of fandoms and written at least a few longer fics in each fandom. I don’t know; I write quickly, so this isn’t massively surprising. It is a lot of words, though, shit.
Extremely dependent on my job and my life! My job is not writing*, and it can be a lot of work, so I have weeks- to months-long stretches where I’m just too tired to really think creatively, and I skip writing because I need to sleep and get exercise and so on. I have a whole social and personal life that I have never and will never discuss here, but maintaining healthy relationships and all of that is always more vital to me than writing.
*It’s been asked: have I ever thought about writing original works and attempting to get them published? I did think about it extremely briefly, but frankly I know a fair number of people in publishing and a fair number of people who have tried/succeeded at getting published and it just seems like an enormous fucking drag to me. Like, so much work, and not very much reward, and I love my current career and life and I enjoy writing for fun, so yeah. I thought about it for all of two days and then I thought again.
Do you have a routine for writing?
Mm, no. Well, sort of. I have to get some sleep, and I like to read published (professionally edited) fiction of different genres and authors to try to get some new words and styles into my brain. I write with music playing but I rarely end up with a playlist; in order to try to keep the voice and style of the thing I’m working on consistent, I always reread and edit without music, to make sure it sounds and feels the same without that influence.
What’s your favorite kinks/tropes/pairing?
Ohhhh, the dumber the trope the better! Obviously. I’ll do almost any trope; I’d like to do vampires, or begrudging rivals, or woke up married -- maybe I could combine all three? Vampire rivals who’ve been rivals for so long they’re almost over it, until they wake up married and spend the next fifty years trying to kill each other? I think the only tropes I’m not down to write or read are coffeeshop AU, the character is an amateur fiction writer AU, and mpreg. Sorry to all the mpreg aspiring novelist at a coffeeshop stories.
I like sly characters, characters who have tricks up their sleeves and who know their way around the world. Every main character has to be good at something, even if those things are very different. I like disparate characters teaming up to address an issue together, or finding that they click and communicate with each other in a way no one else does. I love a good supporting character. I really like a main character who’s smart enough to get by but still a little dumber than the object of their affections, and they know it.
Do you have a favorite fic of yours?
Let me look at my list of fic! I guess that sort of answers the question with “no” -- I don’t have a go-to favorite.
I like my NASA SPN AU for the dialogue and the jokes within the narrative voice, though I feel a little bit bad because I now have a friend who works at NASA, so, errm, sorry about the many inaccuracies. In the SPN world I also like the one Crowley POV fic I did, but I don’t watch the show anymore and haven’t for years, so I’m sure it’s all been Jossed to fuck.
The Nero Wolfe fic I just wrote, I loved writing that. I have a couple other niche fics in the pipeline -- The Transporter fic, yep, and hopefully some others -- and I have to love writing them to post them, or I wouldn’t bother. I’d just email them to my appropriate-fandom friends
In 1D: ‘Step Into My Office, Baby’ is probably the best thing I wrote in that fandom, followed by ‘Spies Like Us’. Both of them have the right pacing.
For hockey: I like all my Nicky/Ovi stuff, and the Sid/Geno mobsters AU, but I don’t know that any of them are gems. ‘Woman in Blue’ is good but I know it could be even better with some work, and some more length, and I think the pacing could be improved?
On the other hand, I’m super fucking pleased with how the supporting cast turned out in ‘Door to Door’: they’re so much better than the mains that it’s kind of embarrassing. ‘The Choir Invisible’ came out exactly how I wanted it to be, tonally, which is to say cheesy and funny and briefly really, really gruesome. Similarly, I liked ‘Long in the Tooth’, because it sticks to the point and nothing else, and because I love how the title works with the fic.
Your fic with the most kudos?
Door to Door! By a very large margin, wow. 2387, versus the next three at 1269/1252/1229.
Anything you don’t like about your writing?
Yes. My beta, who is a professional editor, can tell you them all, and some more she doesn’t like that I do anyway. I use too many adverb phrases, especially after the word “said”. I reuse/overuse certain phrases and sentence structures and will go back through old fics to clear them out when I get a chance. I rely too much on the supporting characters talking sense into the mains.
Now something you do like?
It changes! It’s obviously my writing, but it has evolved and I think that’s been really interesting. Some of the changes are for the better and honestly some are for the worse. Going back and rereading old stuff I’ve written has helped me pick out what I should’ve kept doing and remind me of what not to carry on doing.
