The Stars Were Brightly Shining - 1, 7 and 9.
I know FE is probably your best fic, but TSWBS is my personal favourite and I honestly can’t stop re-reading it. ❤️
I'm so embarrassed that this took me like a week to answer but that's parenthood for you, I'm a chaos mom
also, thank you thank you for saying that, it means so much to me that you love this fic and have read it multiple times!!!!
1. What inspired you to write the fic this way?
For a long time, it was my habit in December to give myself a break from FE, which is kind of a high pressure situation for me, and take on a short Christmas project as a way to have some fun writing, update frequently (therefore increasing frequency of reviews/dopamine hits), and just to do something really low pressure. So, the idea with SWBS (and Love Bites) was basically to just sit down, write, and publish the first draft of each short chapter as is and not sweat too much over revising or being compulsive about the plot and narrative. I remember starting like five or six different fics/premises out before I hit on this one-- the tone and the mood of it started off as very dark and brooding, which was unfortunately addictive to write, oops. I also remember thinking about writing a "Christmas fic" the way that The Quick and The Dead is a Halloween fic, and mulling over what that might mean-- and so I was thinking, well, what does Christmas boil down to? And I almost immediately thought, virgin birth, and of course, the idea of Klaus getting Elena pregnant but everyone assuming it was magical/there was no father flashed across my mind and made me laugh out loud, so I knew I had to write it. Because also we must write the stories we wish to see in the world.
7. Where did the title come from?
It's a riff on my favorite hymn, O Holy Night
"a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices"-- that theme of hope in weary the darkness really gets me
I unintentionally changed the tense; which I actually rather like with the (parentheses) because it almost makes the title sound like an aside, or something said quietly, under the breath, when I say it in my head
9. Were there any alternate versions of this fic?
Not really-- I wrote a lot of this without knowing where it was going except for some very general things until near the end of the fic when I sat down and outlined so that the salient plot points could come together