"Kipukkadt a lufi: semmi újat nem mutatott Magyar Péter
Egy Varga Judittal való beszélgetésről készített, rossz minőségű, zavaros hangfelvételt közölt." – Magyar Nemzet, 09:31
"Egy nyilvánosságra hozott hangfelvétellel kezdődött, órák alatt megszervezett tüntetéssel végződött az év belpolitikai szempontból messze legmozgalmasabb napja" – 444.hu, 20:40
Haven’t read Guarding Your Heart yet? Click on the link below for our masterlist and get ready for eight chapters filled with suspense, a little drama, angst, smut, character developments and lots of funny moments, wrapped in a modern bodyguard AU!
GUARDING YOUR HEART MASTERLIST
Q & A
From @the-poldarkian: How did you manage to come up with this whole idea of GYH? Did you guys have to do a lot of research? How much time did you spend brainstorming and do you have any tips for an aspiring writer who's a little insecure about sharing her work with others?
@laurfilijames: It seems like so long ago now, but when @guardianofrivendell asked me if I wanted to do a collaboration series with her I nearly died. She had the idea of the bodyguard AU in her WIPs and I instantly fell in love with it. (We all know I’m a sucker for Modern!Fili) We initially laid out all of our ideas in a doc and added to it whenever things came to us and we constantly had conversations about the plot and how the chapters would go, but always had the general idea in the back of our minds: Fili is Lucy’s bodyguard, they don’t get along, but slowly fall in love.
As far as advice for gaining confidence to share your work: it’s not easy!! I still freak out when I post a fic and writing a series with a partner didn’t make those feelings go away either. I feel most writers can agree that posting your writing is like sending a piece of you out to the world where your biggest fear is people not liking it. I think it’s important to find someone you trust to read through your work before posting it, even if just to double check grammar and give you that “THIS IS AMAZING” cheer that gives you the confidence boost to share. Luckily, I have GOR for that!
@guardianofrivendell: Like @laurfilijames said, it was sitting in my WIP list and I really wanted to write it, but the whole plot thing asked for a multichapter, and I didn’t want to write it by myself. When I was talking with @laurfilijames about our work, and how similar our writing style was - and our love for Fíli and Dean - I asked her if she wanted to write it with me. And I think we published the first chapter of GYH about three weeks after that? We didn’t waste any time :D
I had the plot worked out already, but we changed a lot of things along the way. Originally it was going to be with canon Fíli, set in their Ered Luin days but we quickly changed it to modern era and I’m glad we did.
As for research, the main things I kept looking up were gun related, and self defence.
And I agree with everything @laurfilijames said about putting your work out there. Even when we noticed GYH was getting good comments and you all loved it, we were still nervous every Friday when we posted a new chapter.
We match incredibly well, our writing style is the same and there are no hard feelings when the other one shoots down an idea or thought you had. With the edits as well, if @laurfilijames suggested changing a paragraph I wrote or deleting it all together, it was always a huge improvement so I never felt bad about it. If you want to work with someone else, you really need to find yourself someone like her :)
@aduialel asked: I love the idea of Q&A for GYH! I was always wondering how you work out the time zone difference? Did you agree on a specific time to communicate or just send a message and wait for a reply. I know that’s how it goes with me and my friends across the big pond or down under.
@guardianofrivendell: We only have a time difference of 6 hours, so it wasn’t that hard to keep in touch. We worked on the chapters whenever we had the time and edited each other’s parts. When we were both online, we brainstormed, talked about where we would take the chapter and what parts we were working on.
But I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we wrote our best lines when we were both online and working in the doc together. It’s more fun that way, I would write a few dialogue lines and @laurfilijames would comment a keysmash in our chatbox or an ‘OMG I LOVE THIS’, so I knew I was doing a good job and I could do the same with her. Instant feedback :)
@laurfilijames: Luckily the time change between us didn’t make things difficult. I agree with GOR though that when we were able to write at the same time it was the most fun. I’d be working on a section and see the words of the doc moving and have to tell myself to continue what I was doing and not scroll up to see what she wrote! I wake up early, so we would always find time together before I went to work to sort things out and clear up any questions or parts of the chapter we were stuck on. The best was going to sleep and waking up to multiple messages and ideas or just seeing what she had written while I was dreaming! Also sending each other Dean/Fìli spam was super helpful and inspiring when we weren’t able to work at the same time.
Anon asked: Was the smut always part of the plan, or was there an… influence involved in that decision?
@guardianofrivendell: Yes. It was always part of the plan, the only thing that kept changing was the timing. You can’t have @laurfilijames working with you and not give her the chance to write smut, right?
@laurfilijames: Smut is absolutely always part of the plan, with this series as well as literally anything else I am involved in writing. I can’t not write smut. And who could deny some smut from modern bodyguard Fili? He’s all the influence needed to write smut. GOR can attest that she had to keep me reined in so I didn’t write any smut too early in the chapters. It really tested my restraint.
FUN FACTS
For our OC we wanted to have a shorter name that Fíli could still turn into a nickname. Like with Lucy and Luce. A few of the names that we thought about instead of Lucy: Rachel (Rach), Olivia (Liv), Juliette (Jules), Chloe (Clo), Layla (Lo)
Kíli wasn’t supposed to appear as much as he did. It was after the first chapter when everyone was like ‘oh we love the sibling dynamic’ that we gave him a more prominent part in the series
We purposefully named Lucy’s boyfriend ‘Chad’ because we wanted something that hinted there was more to his character than we initially let on. There’s just something about the name that rubs us the wrong way (sorry to any lovely people out there named Chad, we’re sure you’re not all bad!) We had similar feelings with Jasmine (@laurfilijames dreamt that she introduced @guardianofrivendell as Jasmine to someone so we thought why not use it!)
We wanted to include as many canon characters as possible. (Nori, Dwalin, Frodo and the natural choice for the Gundabad cartel with Bolg)
We wrote all of our chapters ‘live’, we didn’t work ahead. Like we published chapter 4 on Friday, waited for the feedback to come in, and started working on chapter 5 during the weekend. Some chapters were finished by Thursday, some were not so we had a couple of very exciting but very stressful Fridays. Only one time did we miss our deadline on Friday and we posted the chapter 15 minutes late.
Every time we started a chapter we were worried we wouldn’t have enough content to put in, and we would end up with 1k chapters instead. GYH has an average of 7k chapters so no lack of content at all ;)
We made a floorplan of Lucy’s condo to make writing easier. It was a huge help with the action scenes in chapter 3!
EASTER EGGS
We included a few Easter Eggs throughout the chapters and a lot of you caught them no problem!
Lucy reading Little Women in the cabin- our faceclaim for Lucy is actress Florence Pugh, who starred in the 2019 Little Women remake
“I belong with my brother” we had Kili say this, a slight change to canon, but it was necessary to include in the story
Gus the mouse- named after one of the mice in Cinderella
Fili says “that’s a relief” when he finds out that Gus is still alive, originally said by Kili in Bag End
Anders Johnson reference- unfulfilled fantasies, said by Kili about Jasmine
Thank you to everyone who joined us on this ride that was Fíli x Lucy! And don’t hesitate to send one of us more questions about the series if you think of any after this.
