#vim fuego's tell-all interview

[neil-neil-orange-peel]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Comic Strip Presents... Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Sally Friedman/Vim Fuego Characters: Sally Friedman (The Comic Strip Presents...), Vim Fuego Additional Tags: Complete Bastards Week, Prompt Fic, Loss of Virginity, Hotel Sex, Interviews, Cunnilingus, Post-Canon, Scars, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Eventual Smut, My First Smut, please be nice to meeeee Summary:

A year after the second Bad News documentary airs on Channel 4, Vim Fuego contacts Sally Friedman and asks her for an interview. He wants to tell his side of the story. Sally, for her part, is keen to monopolise on an opportunity of any kind.

Strange things can happen when you're alone in a hotel room.

I guess I'll kick things off for Complete Bastards Week! He's the monster I've been wrestling with for the first day. Prompt used is: Loss of Virginity 👀 @completebastardsweek

[neil-neil-orange-peel]

Fic ask game number 11 <3

Thanks for the ask, anon!

11. What makes a fic 'successful' in your opinion?

Oof. That's a really tough one. Just finishing a fic would sometimes count as a success. 😂

I'm not sure I have a stable answer. Nothing of the one-size-fits-all variety, anyway. Sometimes, as I say, I might count just finishing a fic as a success - standalone piece fics I've had to wrangle with a lot, or the sweet relief and accomplishment of finishing a multichapter. Fics like my Once In Every Lifetime series, Punks and Princesses, A Bastard's Carol, The Day a Spaceship Landed on Codrington Road, and Vim Fuego's Tell-All Interview might fall into this category. My opinion on the actual quality of some of these fics is a different matter, but just getting to the end of them felt like an achievement to me.

On the other hand, I don't necessarily count all of my unfinished fics as failures, even the ones I've decided to basically abandon now due to too much time passing and my writing changing (*side-eyes Voices in the Library and Dizzie Lizzie*). I think they were helpful stepping stones and were fun while they lasted. So, sure, they're not successes in my eyes, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna delete them and see no value in them. If that's not too pretentious sounding? 😂

I also have a lot of multichapters in varying stages of progress that are not abandoned, and I'd regard some of them as successful in different ways, even though none are anywhere near finished. I think The Basterds of Hammersmith is successful just in the sense that it got me to write an OC - and some people like her! Likewise The Ghostly Ones, which is technically a taster of what is a planned multichapter, I'd regard as successful because writing that forced me to actually make progress on something that had been in the planning stage for soooo long. On the standalone piece side, Darling and The Shower Scene too are successes to me because they were both something I was nervous to write (namely, anything remotely NSFW 😂 - same applies to Vim Fuego's Tell-All Interview). And A Different, and Better, Time I'd also call a success not just because it's a finished multichapter, but because I got so unbelievably neurotic about the voice while writing it and managed to stick to a posting schedule (right until the end, anyway, when another fandom snagged my attention 😂).

So, I don't know is probably the answer I'm grasping for. I think fics are successful to me literally just based on my personal feelings. What I absolutely DO NOT base the success of a fic on is how much engagement it gets on Tumblr/ao3. For any fandom, but especially for small fandoms like ours, you'll just get depressed if you do that. It's not that I don't appreciate all the comments and kudos I get - I very much do! It's just, I don't decide a fic's worth based on them. If I did, ABC probably wouldn't ever have been finished, as it only started getting attention (that I could see via comments and kudos) after I posted the penultimate chapter. The 16K Alan Partridge fic I referenced above has only 65 hits, 4 kudos, and 1 comment thread over a year after its initial publication date. Does that mean it sucks? No! It just means hardly anyone is looking for Alan Partridge fic. 😂 Unsurprisingly.

I've waffled on for way too long in answering this. Basically: a fic is a success if the writer thinks it is. ❤️

Here's the ask list if you'd like to send me one. ✨