G Y J O
(how dare)
G. Where do you think you grew the most this year?
Writing dialogue, absolutely! It’s been my biggest hangup, historically, largely because it seemed to drag down the pace so goddamn much. (It turns out that, yeah, it drags down the pace because I was writing more of a summary of a fic than a fic itself, which you can really see if you dig back to the beginning of my JJBA fic and compare them to the later ones. I haven’t yet managed to incorporate good dialogue into a short fic, but, well, always something more to learn!)
Y. Why did you write? For fun, for a friend, for acclaim?
A bit of all of these, I guess! I’d wanted to get myself doing more creative things, and had spent a while trying to get myself to do freewriting every day, but, well, turns out that trying to write just for the sake of creating words did not work out for me. Finally reading JJBA gave me an easy path to ideas to write - and, also, more importantly, more of a community to set that writing against. (Thanks for that, by the way!)
Obviously one of my fics was explicitly written for Queenie, and a lot of my writing has been set against the background of her writing, but honestly, overall, I try to make sure I’m writing for a reason that’s mine and mine alone - and usually that’s ‘for fun’ or ‘to stretch my brain’ or ‘to do literally anything with words that isn’t editing them’.
(At the very, very beginning of my Ao3 account, there’s a Teen Wolf fic I wrote for a friend back in like 2012, which is kind of an amusing bookend; you can see both how different my writing was then, and also how little concept I had of romance or sex. I tried to write porn for her - she explicitly wanted more porn of that pairing - but I had absolutely no idea how that worked. It’s funny now.)
J. What are the best jokes you told this year? Any jokes you thought were funny that people didn’t catch? Vice-versa?
How am I the person to judge my best jokes? How can one sit in judgement upon oneself--okay, yes, sometimes I do like my own jokes.
My favourite is from vengeance:
‘Kakyoin could have resisted, he supposed, but he didn‘t really need torn neck muscles on top of everything else. (And that was always the problem, wasn’t it? Harm reduction meant that you accepted the harm as, well, not harmful. You either died resisting or there was nothing to resist.)’
It’s not really....that funny, but look, if I can’t put bleak humour in my fanfic, where can I put it.
A more light-hearted one is the section on making pancakes at the end of the first chapter of this love, which I will not copy here for the sake of your dash; let it just be known that I really love Holly/Jotaro/Joseph antics.
O. Do you believe in outlines? Show us one!
I absolutely one hundred percent do not. I write the first draft and then refine from there. I generally try to have an idea of the themes, and if I’m doing something with the structure on purpose I’ll have an idea of the bones of that, but in general... no.
