Hey! There’s this thing I like to do with the authors I’m yet to get familiar with :)
What stories of yours are you particularly proud of? Which got less attention than deserved? Please feel free to rant about what makes them so special, this is literally my favorite thing 👀
Hope you’re having a lovely day ❤️ thank you!
Hey! Thanks for the ask. I'm not so great at tooting my own horn, but obviously there are things I like about my stories, so I'm gonna do my best. And I'll stick to spn, since that's our shared fandom ^_^
For how long I've been a fan of the show I haven't been able to produce nearly as much as I'd wish, so I'm proud of everything I've finished, really. Buckle up because I went longwinded on this ask, lol.
Andrew Lloyd Webber Gets a Pass (2017)
This one is important to me because it's the first story I'd finished in years. Not just fic--any story, full stop. If nothing else, I'll always be grateful to the show and this wonderful fandom for that fact alone. I started writing again.
Obviously the best thing to love is that I got paired with delicious irony as my artist for tropefest! Talk about hitting the jackpot your first run out the gate! But as for the story itself...well it's all wrapped up in my love of the theatre, isn't it? I had such a great time imagining all the various spaces actors and crew rehearsed and performed in. Especially Paradise Theatre, which is built from bits and pieces of the venues I've seen over the years. But I have an incredibly soft spot for Bobby's shop...
The other fun bit, I've got to say, was the casting. Cats was the first musical I ever got into, back when I was a kid, so as you can imagine I've had some time to develop strong opinions on what a production of it would look like if I were in charge. But the offstage casting was a blast, too--Ezra has got to be my favorite. I must have been wearing my brilliant pants that day when I thought to use her as the costume designer. It was so fun trying to recreate her voice and having her interact with the boys.
This was a DCRB, so this was inspired by cloud_wolfbane's art. The initial piece was of Dean riding a rearing black horse with glowing blue eyes. And I was like, oho! I like horses. I like fantasy. I like animal transformation (I've got a strong background in fairy tales). Perfection.
And then it grew to be over 70,000 words. The first novel-length story I've ever finished. I'm proud of that, but it's even crazier because of how bombarded by stress I was near the end, including my power going out around posting day! But it gave me the confidence to take on bigger story ideas, for sure.
This story is really amazing though, and not the least because of cloud's art. I'd send her a scene, and she'd send me art back, and there are literally over a dozen pieces. It really does read like a long fairy tale in that sense, with all these beautiful illustrations throughout. I'm still humbled to have inspired that, though obviously she was inspiring me in turn. I'm serious. Like I sat there and described the royal crests, the map of the continent, the armor for human and horse alike...and then she created these astounding pieces.
A part of the writing that I really love surrounds our main characters going deep into the dark wood and stumbling upon a cottage and the people who live in it...just those couple chapters were so fun. I also absolutely positively enjoyed imagining Impala as a big, badass horse. She is 100% her own important character in this story.
And This, Your Living Kiss (2019)
What can I say. You asked what got less attention than it deserved? I cannot possibly say that about any of my fics...for some reason this did quite well when released during pinefest, and then somehow got a second surge during the post-finale boom. Why? I have no idea why lightning struck here. And because of this fic, my other fics have gotten more reads than they otherwise might. I just got really lucky.
As with the previous fics, I was spoiled by the art for this one. Elliot Draznin did such an amazing job. Like, they made actual real life paintings, with amazing color and texture! One of which was specifically inspired by a poem I wrote for the fic! What an honor.
I am proud of the poetry I wrote. For the prose, I'm proud of chapter 5. I'm proud of that chapter because of the responses I've gotten. In allowing myself to go there, I brought others with me who seemed to have needed that as much as I did. Relationships like that cause such a particular, private grief, so often invisible to the world. But we're not alone. We're not.
I've lived such a small, unimportant life, that sometimes I think this might be my only contribution to the world. The gift I have given that has touched the most people. What a tiny thing for all my years of living! But then I read the comments: the love, the tears, the shared grief, the shared poetry, the vows to revive the joy and passion in their lives. The later updates, where they've made those changes. What a gift to receive those messages. If it truly is all I leave behind, then there are at least a handful of people out there who feel the better for it. And that's enough.
Let the Old Ways Die (2019)
I wrote this with quite a quick turn around for tropefest and yes, with my continuing luck I scored another fantastic artist in dreym! I love the greyscale, and the expressions on their faces are perfection! They make me full-on grin when I see them.
This story was interesting to write because it's a double movie fusion with Begin Again and A Star is Born (the latest one). So I took our spn characters and smooshed their stories together with two other stories, and actually got something coherent in result, lol. Surprisingly I ended up cutting a lot of the darker stuff I was going to put in, so the story is lighter than planned. Unusual for me.
It's also a love letter to music and musicians. I had a great time choosing the music to include in this fic (to which I provide the links), especially because I think spn greatly underutilized the music from the eras in which the boys were growing up.
I also just love the idea of the Wayward gals being in a band together. I still want to write a timestamp that spends more time with them.
Not gonna lie, once again, the absolute best thing about this story is the art. This was for another pinefest, and deathbycoldopen did two stunning pieces, for two of my favorite scenes. Cas as a kid learning to really ride his bike, and then Dean and Cas as adults on Cas's motorcycle...the wistful look on Dean's face gets me every fucking time.
What can I say about the story itself. Unlike the last one, this was meant to be very light, short, and fluffy. It ended up long and much darker. And no wonder...I rewrote this several times in the midst of early pandemic pandemonium, and pushed myself really hard. Probably too hard.
It was kind of fun writing the action; as the story is inspired by Grease 2 it is all very goofy. But to me the center of it is Dean and Cas alone together at night, just them and the motorcycle. That little slice of freedom we all long for.
Also it has the best last line of my spn fics, imo. I was writing the last chapter and then it came to me as I was nearing the end and I fucking swear I must have grinned like the og animated grinch. It's such an iconic Dean line, and it fit perfectly.
Everybody Needs the Light (2020)
My first ever DCBB. I've had to pull out of that biggest of bangs so many times (including last year), but by the gods I finally did it! And could not have asked for a better partner in this than kayanem, whose art is incredible. I just do not lose with my artists. She created custom banners for every chapter and did three gorgeous pieces in addition. I was doing my best to create a certain atmosphere in the story, and she so perfectly understood what I was going for. I simply can't imagine this story existing without her art (and her support too--which should be said for all my other artists as well).
I've always wanted to do a pre-canon, canon-divergent story that also functioned as a kind of fix-it, something where we meet Dean during the ~Standford era~ and the beginning of the show is all turned around. I'm so happy to have been able to add to that genre, and to have it be so firmly set on the North Shore of Minnesota. I hope that sense of place comes through.
I very much enjoyed writing Dean and Cas together in the lodge at night during a storm. The softness it brings out of them, how this Cas with a canon divergent background interacts with pre-canon Dean, and how this meeting still has profound impact.
My favorite aspect, however, is Klara Nováková, the name and characterization I've given to Cas's woman vessel from "Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets." I love her. I wish I could've done more. Maybe I will do more.
My favorite single detail, though, is the easter egg I begged kayanem to put in the banner for chapter six as a nod to one of my fav paintings. Has anyone spotted it yet? Not that they've told me...
The only fic I was able to finish last year. That alone is its own triumph.
I love it for so many reasons. It's my first bunker fic, so I had to think about it in a lot more detail than I ever have before, what this place looks like to me, what the images of it we get from the show might mean. It's a lot shorter of a story than I've written recently, so it's great to know I'm still capable of something this contained.
But also, just...it started with a simple image, a small scene inside Dean's bedroom. It nagged at me and nagged at me until I asked myself, how did we get to this point? And I started writing the story, and only once I got to that scene did I understand what had to happen next...I was discovering what was going as Dean was, pretty much, and no more suspected where things were really heading than him. But I like where it went.
I love that it was a short story, but I still got to sink into descriptions. I love that I had to figure out how to convey very mundane things, slow things, quick things, industrial things, nature things, physical things, nigh incomprehensible metaphysical things...I hope people find beauty in it.
To Have and to Hold (2020, posted 2021)
I wrote this for the To Hell + Back Anthology. I am so proud that I got to participate in it. I got paired with eriisoo, whose artwork is included with my fic. It's heartwrenchingly lovely--a full page laid out like a comic, elevating my words into an image. Amazing.
Though I started writing this fic at the end of 2019, I was working on it into early 2020, which is when "The Trap" aired. Suddenly the story seemed to coalesce and I was able to integrate some of that dialogue into a very emotionally charged scene. And wouldn't you know, that's the one eriisoo was inspired to depict. I will miss having the living, continuing show there to inspire me every week with new material, somehow answering questions I didn't know I had while I wrote.
The final version you see of the fic is half the length it originally was, due to word count constraints. I had to do a tremendous amount of editing, which was a challenge of my skills in and of itself. My fav piece of writing, though, beside that scene inspired by "The Trap," has to be the sequence where Cas remembers what it was like to watch Dean sleep, leading into finally understanding the depth of his feelings for him. Yes, I'm still proud of that.
But that's it. That's all I've got for the fandom.
Well, you said it was you fav thing to hear people talk about what makes their fics special...I hope you enjoyed my rambles. Thanks again for the ask. Would you mind doing the same for your own work? You've got me intrigued now!
