Havenât 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-poldarkianâ: 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?
@laurfilijamesâ: It seems like so long ago now, but when @guardianofrivendellâ 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 Iâm 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 Lucyâs bodyguard, they donât get along, but slowly fall in love.
As far as advice for gaining confidence to share your work: itâs not easy!! I still freak out when I post a fic and writing a series with a partner didnât 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 itâs 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 âTHIS IS AMAZINGâ cheer that gives you the confidence boost to share. Luckily, I have GOR for that!Â
@guardianofrivendellâ:Â Like @laurfilijamesâ 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 didnât want to write it by myself. When I was talking with @laurfilijamesâ about our work, and how similar our writing style was - and our love for FĂli 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 didnât waste any time :DÂ
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 FĂli, set in their Ered Luin days but we quickly changed it to modern era and Iâm glad we did.Â
As for research, the main things I kept looking up were gun related, and self defence.Â
And I agree with everything @laurfilijamesâ 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.Â
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 @laurfilijamesâ 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 :)Â
@aduialelâ 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 thatâs how it goes with me and my friends across the big pond or down under.
@guardianofrivendellâ: We only have a time difference of 6 hours, so it wasnât that hard to keep in touch. We worked on the chapters whenever we had the time and edited each otherâs parts. When we were both online, we brainstormed, talked about where we would take the chapter and what parts we were working on.Â
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. Itâs more fun that way, I would write a few dialogue lines and @laurfilijamesâ would comment a keysmash in our chatbox or an âOMG I LOVE THISâ, so I knew I was doing a good job and I could do the same with her. Instant feedback :)
@laurfilijamesâ:Â Luckily the time change between us didnât make things difficult. I agree with GOR though that when we were able to write at the same time it was the most fun. Iâd 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/FĂŹli spam was super helpful and inspiring when we werenât 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?
@guardianofrivendellâ: Yes. It was always part of the plan, the only thing that kept changing was the timing. You canât have @laurfilijamesâ working with you and not give her the chance to write smut, right?
@laurfilijamesâ:Â Smut is absolutely always part of the plan, with this series as well as literally anything else I am involved in writing. I canât not write smut. And who could deny some smut from modern bodyguard Fili? Heâs all the influence needed to write smut. GOR can attest that she had to keep me reined in so I didnât write any smut too early in the chapters. It really tested my restraint.Â
FUN FACTS
For our OC we wanted to have a shorter name that FĂli 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)
KĂli wasnât supposed to appear as much as he did. It was after the first chapter when everyone was like âoh we love the sibling dynamicâ that we gave him a more prominent part in the series
We purposefully named Lucyâs boyfriend âChadâ because we wanted something that hinted there was more to his character than we initially let on. Thereâs just something about the name that rubs us the wrong way (sorry to any lovely people out there named Chad, weâre sure youâre 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 âliveâ, we didnât 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.Â
Every time we started a chapter we were worried we wouldnât 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 Lucyâs 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
âI belong with my brotherâ we had Kili say this, a slight change to canon, but it was necessary to include in the storyÂ
Gus the mouse- named after one of the mice in CinderellaÂ
Fili says âthatâs a reliefâ when he finds out that Gus is still alive, originally said by Kili in Bag EndÂ
Anders Johnson reference- unfulfilled fantasies, said by Kili about Jasmine
Thank you to everyone who joined us on this ride that was FĂli x Lucy! And donât hesitate to send one of us more questions about the series if you think of any after this.Â
