what’s your favourite fic that you’ve ever written??
This is a difficult question to answer, tbh? It’s like you’re asking me to choose between my children.
My go to answer for this one is TBiaM. It was the first fic that I wrote where I decided to just say ‘fuck it’ and write the kind of story that I really wanted to, even though my readers may not have been into it. Fantasy-ish AUs are a hard sell sometimes, and I had a lot of people say in advance that they weren’t really too into the idea, which was scary, but it turned out alright, and it didn’t matter to me if it didn’t. It was a story that I wanted to tell, and did.
ANbaHD has a weird place in my heart, because the story itself is very dear to me, and one of my strongest, but I was in the middle of writing it when I became disillusioned with niall and harry and 1D and all that. It’s a story exploring something that you don’t see very often, especially in fanfic, about a disabled person’s struggle to function in the world, both physically and mentally. It was such a challenge to write, and there were times where I wanted to throw the whole damn thing in the trash and forget about it, but that’s what makes me love it.
DtRH is one of my weakest stories, honestly, but it’s the one that earned me a place in the fandom, and really started my fanfic career, plus it turned into CGBtY, which I don’t entirely loathe because of Noah.
MMU MMY was a soul-clearing exercise for me, and helped me begin to cope with a lot of trauma that I had held onto from my past. It’s a weak and poorly written story, I know, but it’s important for me, and at least one other person has told me how much it means to them for very much the same reasons, because they’ve been through something similar to what I have, and what Harry went through in that story. That means the world to me.
Guiding Light is another one that I have a particular fondness for, because it’s a story centered around two people who are shoved together by fate and poor-decision making, and they fight so hard in different ways. Harry is so, so stubborn, because he thinks he’s living the life he deserves after what he did, and when not even the person he loved most in the world wanted to be around him, and Niall is fighting so hard to fix the mistakes that he made. Their dynamic is dysfunctional at best, and toxic at worst, but it’s also the only thing that can get either of them through the things they’ve been through.
WBSB is probably my strongest story to date, and one that I like probably more than any other story besides TBiaM. It was a particular challenge to write, because I had already fallen away from niall and harry as inspirations, and because I had to build so much of that world from the ground up. But I got to explore themes that no other story I’ve written has really given me an opportunity to work with before. It also is the first story I’ve written with my boy Calum as a major character, which was really fun, and helped me get a better handle on him for the three 5SoS stories that I have planned.
And, last but not least, there’s WKL- I know people haven’t read pretty much any of it, and haven’t even met the full cast, but I really enjoy this one. It’s such a treat as a writer to get to world-build on this scale. Nothing is what it seems with this story, and it gives me plenty of opportunity to explore yet another theme that I’ve never really gotten to do before.
All of my stories have a central theme that they focus around, and they’re generally all different, but some of them are similar. A very basic version of all of the major ones from my big fics are:
MMU MMY- Hope and connection
TBiaM- Leadership and sacrifice
GL- Loss, fear and loneliness
ANbaHD- Guilt, identity, disability and trauma
WKL- Exploration and self-acceptance
All of these are things that I’ve wanted to explore as a writer, and I haven’t always done the best job, but I think I haven’t done a terrible one either. They all mean something to me, and it’s actually very difficult to pick a favorite, despite the fact that some days I want to burn my ao3 page to the ground and say ‘fuck it’, and I kind of hate all of them sometimes.