hiii how are you? hopefully good
Hello and thank you so much for this sweet ask! How are you? I'm good, on vacation, writing a lot :3
How many WIPS do you currently have?
Two that I'm actively working on, To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause and Everything Is Illuminated. There's also a het story from the Thrawn part of the SW fandom, I last updated it in April.
3. What was the last thing you looked up for a fic?
I don't think we take grammar stuff into account here — so it was Kallus's rank plaque in Rebels season 3 and some tile count charts for Imperial rank plaques. I was trying to figure out if Kallus was still a captain or a commander by 2 BBY (the latter).
8. Has anyone ever drawn fanart for one of your fics before?
@fieldofheathers-stuff has drawn a lot of ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS fanart for To The Success of Our Hopeless cause (masterpost here) and for my Thrawn/Eli Vanto fic Presence, Connection (you can find the art here, here, and on ao3)
My friends also drew gorgeous fanart for my older Russian-language fics in the early 2010s — but I didn't save it all on anything physical, sadly, so it's now lost with the platform where it was posted.
12. Have you ever made a moodboard for a fic? (Do you want to share it?)
I collect a lot of stuff in my phone notes app: fandom meta, poetry, book and article quotes — everything that inspires me or gives me food for thought when I'm writing a certain fic. Currently, my notes app is full of quotes from Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" — a great memoir about living in a dictatorship state, for TSOHC and Everything is Illuminated.
14. What is something you really like about your work(s)?
I'm glad you picked that!
I love my worldbuilding. It feels so exciting, creating my own little Star Wars universes that feel lived-in and alive. This is my jam. I can legit tear up when I come up with something I'm particularly moved by (happened a lot of times with Everything Is Illuminated).
I'm also quite proud of my plotting and dialogue, and I enjoy constructing and writing all this A LOT. Writing dialogue sometimes feels like playing a very intense tennis match, and sometimes it can be a very musical thing.
Another thing I like about my writing: I used to feel really insecure about being a second-language writer, but now I think it's actually one of my strengths. When I write in English, I pay much more attention to detail than when I do in Russian. I'm more precise with words, and it feels more powerful emotionally.
27. What is a question that you never get asked about your fics that you really want to answer?
I can't think of a question I'm never asked, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE talking about characters' internal struggles and underlying motivations + I get so excited when readers spot tiny Star Wars easter eggs that I place in my stories.
In Everything Is Illuminated, there was a Ghorman remembrance day scene where I purposefully mentioned two men drinking in the corner. A tall and dark-haired one and an older one, a stout man with a beard.
Just one sentence. No names.
I was OVER THE MOON when one of the readers recognized Samm and Lezine.
(also, I love it when readers ask questions about my OCs)
31. How do you stay motivated?
Really, it's a combination of two things.
The first one is that emotional experience I'm hooked on — a creative journey that's come to a satisfying completion. We began, we middle'd, and we finished. Seeing a thing through the end.
The second thing is all the support and inspiration that I get from my friends and my readers. For me, community is very important — there have been a number of times the discussions around my fics really influenced some of the major creative choices I made.
