For the FanFic Ask Game: F, H, P, T, please! (I know I'm very late to the party, but I adore your DWP fanfiction, particularly Clean Rooms and Dirty Lights, the Land Fathoms and Legible series. The Doubt fics are gorgeous too. Your work is full of beauty tinged with sadness. So yeah, big fan.)
Thank you, @thisandsomuchmore, for the ask and for the kind words about my writing!
F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
This scene is from “Lightyear” (final part of the Land Fathoms series, Miranda/Andy), and I’m proud of it because I wanted a lot to change in a brief, casual moment, and for it to feel casual, even easy, but not so casual that a reader might question the moment’s importance, the way it feels momentous for Miranda and Andy.
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The week before Thanksgiving, Miranda arrives pulling a large suitcase. She never over-explains, but tonight she says, “So I don’t have to keep going back to the house for clothes all week. Marcia has the week off, anyway. And I hired a courier service to deal with the Book.”
“To have it delivered here, you mean?”
Miranda nods. “Is that all right? It seemed easier.”
“Yeah, of course,” Andy says slowly. It’s incredible to think that, for the first time in decades, neither of Miranda’s assistants will have to worry about delivering the Book. She ushers Miranda through the front door, reaches for the suitcase. Even on wheels, it’s heavy, and she’s impressed that Miranda just climbed three flights with the thing.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a garment steamer, would you?” Andy can hear now that Miranda is a bit winded.
“Um, I have an iron. As you know. Is that similar?”
Miranda rolls her eyes. “No matter. It’ll wait till morning.” She heads to the couch, where she collapses with a sigh, kicks off her shoes, and closes her eyes.
She looks so worn out and peaceful and relieved to be where she is—relieved to be home, Andy realizes—that Andy hesitates before walking over and taking a seat on the couch next to her. But she must understand, and, suddenly, that has to happen now. “Miranda?” she says tentatively. “Are you moving into this apartment?’
Miranda’s eyes flash open and she sits up straighter. She glances around. “Not intentionally,” she says.
“But you are, aren’t you?”
There is a long pause. “I think I must be.” She raises a hand to her lips.
“Um,” Andy starts. “Yeah. That’s great, but we should probably talk—”
“Yes,” Miranda says quickly.
But neither of them say anything. Miranda breaks the silence first, not with words but with a bark of laughter.
“You can move in. You can move in times a thousand. But I want the loveseat,” Andy says. “The one from your study. I can’t believe I’ve been back this long and haven’t gotten to fuck you in it once.”
H: How would you describe your style?
My goal is to write things that could actually happen, and my hope is that when a reader reads one of my stories, they feel on some level like the moments in the story did happen--because then, somewhere in the world, they did. *hugs all queer women*
For me, in terms of style, that means writing concretely and (hopefully) concisely enough that the description doesn’t get out of pace with the plot. I feel like this is the least pretty sentence about craft ever, but it’s what I try to do?
P: Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an “architect” or a “gardener”? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?)
I’m an architect until I reach the point where I have to garden. For any story longer than a couple thousand words, I almost always plan a checklist of scenes--some with action and description, others that are simply a mood or emotional touchpoint I need to achieve at that spot in the story. I usually stick to it pretty well, especially during the first draft, but finally I get to a point where it feels like I’m not propelling the writing but the writing’s propelling me, and at that point it’s safe to rely less on the outline and more on the actual thing I’m building. Safe to meander, and expand on unexpected places, so long as I know I can return to the checklist if I need to make sure my larger intentions are met.
More rarely, I start out as a gardener because an image or idea comes to me and I want to work to capture it, and then once I start to lose focus I zoom far enough out that I can create an outline.
T: Any fandom tropes you can’t stand?
While I tend to enjoy fic set in different time periods than canon, I’m generally not a fan of high school and college AUs. I find characters compelling because of the experiences they’ve had, because of the way they look and act, because of the living I’ve done. There are well-written high school and college AUs, but a high school or college student is never going to realistically retain the experiences that made the original character interesting in the first place.
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