6) If you had to delete one of your stories and never speak of it again, which would it be and why?
Oh gosh, this is surprisingly hard to answer! I’m not actually ashamed of any of my fics (in this fandom anyway) and don’t regret writing them, so picking one to give the boot “just because” is tougher than you might think. They’re all my children, in a way. 😭 I could say Give Everything because it’s just a drabble at less than 1k, was hardly worth posting to begin with, but that feels like taking the easy way out of this question. Hmmm… Blackout Blues? A short, fun fic that I wrote quickly and isn’t exactly dear to me. Gravity? My only SunDae, though an AU. I can’t choose!
(Y’all are probably expecting me to say 28 Days, but no… I regret nothing.)
8) Where do you take your inspiration from?
Everywhere! Daily life. My job and all it entails. People I meet, conversations I have. Music I listen to, movies I watch. News articles I read, comment threads on Reddit that I spend waaay too many hours browsing through. Dreams, occasionally. Walks in nature (for Carnivores especially). Tumblr fandom – scans, gifs, videos, moodboards, edits, art, text posts. And most important of all: Big Bang themselves.
Inspiration is everywhere to be found. Just gotta be paying attention.
19) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?
Absolutely! I don’t know if it will happen, but I would like to one day write a short sequel to Gravity. Something lighthearted and sweet… more SunDae with appearances by the other three. Kind of crack-filled though, because what else would you expect from starboy Daesung’s first days on the surface of the Earth’s – oh wait, that’s not right. He’s not a fallen star. He’s a piece of cosmic debris. And with only Youngbae and Co there to show him how to navigate his new human existence, what could possibly go wrong?
I’ve also had it in the back of my mind for-e-ver to maybe one day write an addition to Nesting Instinct. Most likely a smutty oneshot, ToDaeBae, but this time Youngbae’s reason for being there isn’t a medical emergency. I dunno, maybe?
And OH! I do still intend to write one more part to round out the Hearts On Fire series. Fingers crossed!
27) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?
It’s a bit of both. I start by compiling notes in a Word or Wordpad doc – whatever comes to me, whenever (if I’m not at my home computer, I’ll use the notes app on my phone). It’s messy at first – long, winding threads of thought, run-on sentences, disjointed dialogue, abbreviated names, and confusing punctuation. Sometimes a “thought” is just one line; sometimes it’s half a page of text. Because you know how it goes… when you’re really in the flow, one thing leads to the next.
For some reason I try to avoid paragraphs early on; doing that at this point in the process only slows down the flow of ideas, and the unbroken wall of text is fun to crack apart into more manageable pieces later. So everything starts out mashed together and all out of order, but… at least it’s in bullet point format? Come on, I’m not a complete slob; there has to be some separation of ideas. And I do love bullet points.
When I decide it’s time to work on the fic in earnest, I’ll rearrange this jumble of half-formed thoughts, divide into scenes (and within scenes, paragraphs), remove the bullet points… and start filling in the gaps. And after that? The most arduous part of it all: refine, refine, refine. That part I do take an orderly approach to, combing over it from end to end as many times as I feel I need to (i.e., until I’m sick of staring at it and can’t stand obsessing over it any longer). Toward the end I color words and phrases that I think need further attention. When there’s no red text left, the fic is ready to post.
So yeah, there is an element of planning and organization to my writing process, even if it starts out a bit haphazard.
