For the fanfic writer ask game!
2. talk about a notable time a narrative or character has looked you dead in the eyes and said āfuck your plan, hereās what weāre actually doing.ā (Good question given our last conversation LOL)
8. whatās your relationship with constructive criticism and feedback like? do you seek it out? how well do you take it?
11. whatās something neat youāve learned while doing research for something you were writing? also, how much do you worry about doing research in general?
43. how did writing change you?
Ohhh thanks for sending these, these are fun ones!
2. Okay this one got really long my bad. So the one thatās given me the most headache is, hands down, BeyFae. The plot has a lot of narrative pieces and characters who are justā difficult. Like, imagine bringing your kid to the mall and they just suddenly decide that they are too tried to walk or even stand, so they collapse to the floor, and you have to figure out how to move them to get them home. Except your kid isnāt a tiny toddler but a gangly teenager who just passed the 6-foot mark in height. Oh and also there are several of them.
I have to wrangle the magic system ā which includes magic used by the living, magical relics originating in the world of the dead that are supposedly immune to living magic, and several ways for how to resurrect the dead that are supposed to fit in with that; politics, not only between the nine main kingdoms in the Fae world but also satellite kingdoms and the human realm; and PLUS the huge cast of characters, many of whom had been alive for centuries, so I have to figure out what their motivations and relationships with each other are and how they might have changed over the years. To counter that, there are also these satisfying moments when some pieces just instantly click together in this brilliant āAHA!!ā moment. But mostly itās a lot of headaches ahaha.
The most notable moment hmmmmm. That would probably go toā Behemoth. That bastard cat Behemoth. Dropped a dead mouse plot line at my doorstep, looked me dead in the eyes, and said āhave fun figuring this outā. In BeyFae, one of the main conflicts was always that the Threshold between the human and the fae realms had been sealed so that no one could cross it. But then this hellspawn of a cat showed up saying that he was able to go anywhere he pleased! Excuse me?? But what about the Threshold? He told his friend Svetlana he couldnāt cross itā was he lying about that? He refused to tell me! And then ā and then ā it turned out that there were a bunch of other characters who could also cross the Threshold this entire time!! Suffice to say I am still cleaning up the mess they all left behindā¦
8. I donāt seek out constructive criticism for my fics, although I wouldnāt mind if either my irl friends or my mutual writer friends gave it to me. My actual job is in academia, where you have to publish academic articles. Whenever you submit an article to a journal, a lot of times it gets outright rejected, and otherwise it gets reviewed by referees who purposefully provide constructive criticism on all the ways in which your paper can be improved. So, given that, I donāt really want to then also have to deal with that sort of rejection and criticism in the thing that I am doing for fun lol
11. *sighs like a sad deflating balloon* I do a lot of research. Probably way too much research, although it does depend on the fic. When I was trying to solidify how the magic system in BeyFae worked I watched a lot of videos on how thread is made and how iron is forged. Iāve also read (and reread) a lot of Slavic fairytales and folklore for that one. My favorite thing to learn about were the various versions of Morozko/Grandfather Frost that the many different ethnic groups who live in Russia have! For other fics, I started doing research on historical wars in England for the long Alucard x Alchemist!Reader series to pick locations of ritual sites. I also of course now know a bunch of names of bones in the human body because of Church of Bones. Probably most of my research goes into looking up locations and names.
43. This deserves a long, long answer. But suffice to say that it changed me a lot. Iāve processed a lot of my own personality traits, habits, and traumas through my characters. Iāve learned about my values by following my charactersā journeys to find theirs. Most importantly, it connected me to a lot of wonderful people, both in real life and online. Iāve learned that itās something I am (decently) good at, and I can use it to brighten peopleās days. One of my friends, after reading some of my stuff recently, said that theyād rediscovered joy that they had not known in a long time. They are even considering getting an AO3 account because they now want to read more fanfic! Most days I feel like I canāt really do anything meaningful to change the terrible things happening around the world ā but hearing things like that reminds me that I do have my own special power to make the world a kinder, brighter, warmer place. I hope everyone can find that one thing that helps them realize that they, too, have that kind of power in them.
