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Why am I like this

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Self care is writing fan fiction that you are the sole target audience for.

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Correspondence is up!

In which Arianne trusts a daedra, Gwendis hates everything about this and strange things start happening around Blackwood...

This is the little epistolary fic I mentioned a while back. The first chapter is all the letters and notes as rendered visually (and a note - those pictures are huge so be patient with them loading. I'm actually kinda amused I've managed to recreate the loading times of early internet fanfiction days by accident!).

In case they don't load/load too slowly/are difficult to read/you use a screen reader/I've screwed something up/I accidentally move or delete the files in the future/etc., there is also a plain text version available in the second chapter.

As a sidenote: as proud as I am of doing this, I doubt I will do anything quite like this again. Getting images onto AO3 is already a lengthy process, and getting 38 of them on there, and formatted so they should display correctly on any size screen (yes, they will resize to mobile! And in my test, are still very readable!) is a lot of extra effort. And that's after writing it, formatting it and adding extra visual details, uploading them to a (hopefully permanent) host server... I'm not saying I'll never embed image again in fic, but I might show a bit more restraint next time!

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The future of The Ravenwatch Affairs series:

A short epistolary story covering the events of Blackwood as told through a series of letters and diary entries between Arianne and Gwendis. (complete, but want to visually render the materials for posting. A plain text version will be available for accessibility)

WIP tentatively entitled 'Fenn's Penpal'. Focusing on Fennorian and the (original) character he met during the tutorial quest for Greymoor. In this interpretation, the character who is kidnapped by the Grey Host along with Fennorian is not the Vestige (because ESO timeline would never make any sense) and after escaping together, they loose contact (and the ex-Vestige goes on to do the proper plot of Greymoor)...until letters addressed to Fennorian arrive at the Castle. A sudden request to meet up leaves everyone wondering: is this Nord simply being friendly? Is this a date? Or is this a trap?

WIP: A two part, very smutty fic with Arianne, Gwendis and Verandis, taking place during 'Fenn's Penpal' but can be read independent of it.

WIP short: High King Emeric throws a ball that Adusa, Fennorian, Gwendis and Arianne are obligated by royal invitation to attend. Awkwardness ensues, Emeric enjoys it immensely.

WIP: 'The Lightless Remnant'. The Remnant is still in the hands of Molag Bal, and the Ravenwatch hears that he intends to use it. Their only choice is to infiltrate Coldharbour and render it useless before it can be transported to Tamriel, but can their source even be trusted? What chance does a small force of vampires and mages stand against the might of Coldharbour? What will be lost in the attempt?

WIP dealing with the fallout of Coldharbour. (Details redacted for spoilers!)

Tentative WIP: Verandis manages to free himself from the Dark Heart.

AU Skyrim (incomplete and unlikely to be continued): Arianne is transported into the far future by mysterious means. Tamriel has changed significantly and most people she knew are undoubtedly dead...but she clings to the hope that the Ravenwatch has survived, despite the many years that have passed. (There are two very good chapters written which I will post but I have no intention of making this into a full story - I have enough on my plate!)

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To Burn The Past is COMPLETE!

In which Arianne and Gwendis celebrate in a manner that will surprise absolutely no one who has read this far, and then talk turns to future plans.

Authors note: Speaking of future plans, as I have said before, this is the last currently complete fic in this series, and as such, weekly Sunday updates are not happening until other fics are complete. I really dislike posting chapters of WIPs because I simply cannot guarantee when I will get around to finishing them these days, especially when I should be focusing more of my free time on original fic. That said, I still have strong ideas for continuing this series, and there are a couple of little 'bonus' things I might throw up in the near future, but for now, consider this series on hiatus. Not dead, just resting.

I will miss the weekly updates, though. Until then, feel free to hang out, send asks, etc. on this blog or check out my original writing blog: @amewinterswriting

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Chapter 4 is up!

In which a fierce fight ensues between one (ex)Vestige, two vampires and three vampire hunters.

Additional authors notes:

I really needed to flesh out the vampire (Lenendore) from canon. All we actually know is his name, that he's an Altmer, that he's currently based in Grahtwood (possibly for some time, given that he has furnished the mine you find him in) and that he has no qualms about laying waste to Goldfolly and creating bloodfiends. I really wanted him to be a squicky skin-crawling type of villain, which I hope comes across. The mention of 'mongrel' is also a reference to Arianne being Breton and how the Breton race came to be (short version is non-consensual Direnni and Nedic interbreeding, long version is in the lorebook The Bretons: Mongrels or Paragons?) - it's the kind of thing a haughty racist would throw out in an attempt to push buttons.

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So a while back, there was a question like "You get transported to the last game you played and need to survive there for a year. Do you make it?"

My master plan for surviving ESO is making my way immediately to Castle Ravenwatch, to the great surprise of nobody who knows me. But it makes perfect sense, I have very few skills that would make a half-decent income in ESO and limited weapons/combat experience - I don't fancy my chances against 99% of Tamriel's wildlife. But if you're a willing blood donor, you have food, shelter and some very protective masters. Last time I donated blood IRL they only gave me some juice and a biscuit. Seems pretty obvious to me where my blood should go...

If I lived on Tamriel this would be my dream job

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Chapter 3 is up!

In which the ruins of Goldfolly are combed over, hunting a vampire in heavy armor is not advisable and Gwendis worries.

Additional authors note: I'm starting to think about how I want to handle future fics in this series. Mostly because I'm getting close to the end of my already finished stories. I have a pretty decent set of idea for future stories but getting the time to work on anything creative has been enough of a struggle and I really want to earmark a lot of that time for original fiction/endeavours. So at the end of this fic, I will probably throw up a couple more 'bonus' things that are already written but unconventional (the first is the plot of Blackwood told entirely through correspondence - I actually want to tell it through pictures of the letters involved because I think it'll be really fun to play around with the environmental storytelling of the appearance, but I would also upload the 'plain text' version for ease of reading and screenreaders. The second is two fragments of a Skyrim AU I will definitely never continue writing but think those fragments could be of interest - essentially what if Arianne got thrown forward into the future and had to navigate a strange world and try to find any members of the Ravenwatch who may or may not still be alive?) After that, I won't be posting on a weekly schedule anymore, but more 'as and when' future fics are completed. As always, I'll shout about them here, but also add them to series, so if you are signed up for notifications on either, you shouldn't miss anything, even when updates are more sporadic.

[headcanonrepository]

Chapter 2 is up!

In which there is a lot of travelling, some talk about other vampire clans who don't feed from the unwilling and a meeting with some rather green hunters...

Additional author's note: So I write myself one line summaries of chapters as part of my outlining process. The one for this chapter is: They aren't the only ones hunting the vampire. Unfortunately, the others are dumbasses...

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Things I've learnt from writing fanfiction

Done is better than perfect. We all love our ideas (at least at first) and want them to be as good as they can possibly be and we're brimming with excitement over the shiny new idea. But then we get bogged down in the weeds of actually writing the damn thing and practicality sets in. Fanfiction really taught me to lower my own personal standards and get the story out there. Even if that story is different to the original idea. And sometimes - not always, but often enough - it actually morphs into something I feel is better than the original idea, or at least different in a good way. All of my ideas respond to the characters and what they want to do, and that often winds up drastically different to the original expectation. Learning to embrace that and write it regardless helped me to actually make some progress in my ever expanding WIP folder.

Feedback will not always take the form you want/if you want to get a critique you're happy with, you might have to do it yourself. Fanfiction is great for getting eyes on your work - there is a pre-existing fandom waiting for content and if you throw it up online, especially on a platform like AO3, you will almost certainly have eyes on it within 24 hours. What you cannot guarantee is if someone will like it, kudos it, comment on it or give it any kind of meaningful feedback beyond "this is great, I really liked it". I know a lot of people throw fanfic up for external validation...I don't. It's always nice if I get feedback that points out an element that the reader loved, or gently points out a typo, but I don't actually expect engagement of any kind. Which makes every single kudos feel like a gift, and every single comment is a priceless treasure. If I want more detailed analysis, I purposely seek out my trusted friends in the fandom, with the idea that they know the level of feedback I'm after and know I'll take critiques in the spirit that they're intended. But that's a relationship built on trust and mutual respect and takes time to cultivate. If you want immediate analysis, you need to put on your critical hat and do it yourself. You are always going to be your own worst critic - you know what you intended and how you might have fallen short of the mark. So be kind with yourself and let yourself embrace the things you did do well, too. Look out for the happy accidents.

Taking risks and writing outside your comfort zone. When writing original fiction, you might shy away from writing styles or scenes you have never written before. Commonly, things like smut scenes, action scenes and experimental sentence structures feel too 'risky' to attempt for the first time with your own original ideas. But fanfiction can be a great vehicle for experimenting with unconventional writing choices in a lower stakes way. Fanfiction gave me the confidence to write smut (and I'm damn good at it, if I do say so myself) but also a reason to write a football match (never again, way too many moving parts and characters, would literally rather write an orgy). I wrote a first person descent into immortal madness that started eloquently and ended with the character only able to form single, simple words. I could experiment with writing in first person, in third person with an omniscient narrator and in third person with a close perspective and work out the pros and cons of each for the stories I wanted to tell.

Learning to analyse characters and subtext. One of my biggest strengths when writing preexisting characters (in my opinion) is being able to nail the character voice and motivations. I'd love to say there's a trick to it, but it's just a lot of analysis of the original media and reading between the lines. Working out what we actually know about the character, then what we can assume or guess based on the interpretation of that knowledge. An adult character who adopted a surrogate father figure in adulthood and never speaks of their birth family probably didn't have a great childhood, though the exact reason why might be conjecture (and a great idea for a fic!). A forgotten hero who willingly succumbs to a curse in order to go somewhere familiar must be quite lonely, and is simply seeking to return home, even if it destroys him. Once you understand why a character has done a thing, it's quite easy to find reasons why they might do any number of other things. As long as you can justify why, you can push a character quite a bit further than you might imagine.

Writing for an audience might surprise you. Most of my fics are in very small fandoms. Or a very small niche in a larger fandom. (I genuinely think I have one of the longest fics in a given fandom. Which admittedly only consists of about 30 people worldwide.) So I never really expect much attention and it's just a nice happy accident when I do get anything as simple as a kudos. That said, some of my fics get patterns of kudos that are really interesting. I will often get kudos out of the blue from the same person on everything I have written for a specific rare pair (so rare in fact that I believe I'm one of 2-3 people to ever publish anything for it) - likely a curiosity click that turned into 'wait, I actually ship this now, dammit'. I have a couple of stories with a specific pairing that consistently gets new attention every time there is a big bang or mini bang for that pairing, despite me not being involved in either of those events. Lately, I've had a single guest kudos per day on a little OT3 piece consistently for the last few weeks. Which probably either means someone keeps coming back with different IP addresses every day (which is really flattering) or that this fic is being shared around a friend group, one link at a time (which I love the idea of, someone reading it and then knowing exactly who else would love to read it and it continues to be passed around).

Formatting for ease of reading. Different mediums are read in different ways. Fanfiction is predominantly read on smartphone screens, in my experience. So learning best practices for formatting web text is useful: frequent line breaks, allow text to be dynamically readjusted by the web browser, if you are embedding images make sure they can also dynamically adjust otherwise readers are zoomed into the top corner of the image and have to scroll left and right to piece together the entire work, etc. But fanfiction (and web-based media as a whole) also lets you experiment with things that wouldn't be seen as acceptable in a novel. I've recently published fic that changes fonts to indicate the text written in a letter, and managed to assign different characters their own font to imply characteristics visually (if you do this, try to limit yourself to the most common webfonts around as these are only visible if the reader's browser has these fonts installed). I'm toying with the idea of a future fic - which is all entirely written via the medium of letters between characters - to be entirely visual renditions of the letters to include interesting environmental details like blood stains or scratched out words or torn edges, but I would definitely want to include image ID for people who use screenreaders or struggle with certain fonts.

Pst, if you enjoyed this and want to throw a few coins at my Ko-Fi, that would be very nice and would support me rambling on about other writing topics or getting more of the actual writing done!

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To Burn The Past chapter 1 is up!

In which Gwendis learns where the vampire who turned her is and preparations are made for revenge.

Additional authors' note: pretty sure I made a post on here ages ago about whether the Green Pact would apply to Bosmer vampires (and/or werewolves) or not. Basically, are they 'Bosmers with a condition' or does the condition erase their 'Bosmer-ness' and the pact is void? Welp, this was the chapter that inspired it. I don't have a conclusive answer, but it's just interesting to think about.

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It's finished!

In which Fennorian continues his training, Arianne settles in to do some research and Gwendis learns the price of leaves.

Additional author's note: The next fic in this series is already prewritten so the weekly updates will continue for a good while yet. (I'll always post here when I upload, but you can also follow the series on AO3 for email notifications, too) A little sneaky preview of the next fic:

Adusa's tail flicked. "This one believes you might want to hear this on your own. It is regarding the one who turned you." Gwendis froze. "You've tracked down that thrice-damned leech?"

Oh no, now I need to think of an actual title and not the working title...

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Chapter 3 is up!

In which Gwendis comes back to bed, there is a long and lavishly detailed scene of what exactly they get up to followed by a lengthy conversation about what exactly they got up to and will get up to in the future.

Additional authors note: my wife and I have a running joke whenever we find 'ivory, polished' in game. There's usually a bunch of them scattered around the bedrooms I've decorated...

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Possibly of some interest to the folks who follow me for vampire-related fanfiction...it's available here on a wide range of products and by buying from me, you are supporting more vampire-related endevours!

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Chapter 2 is up!

In which Arianne can't sleep and wanders the castle.

Bonus author notes: I particularly like my characterization of Estelle. When canon gives us so few details, I like fleshing out what little we have. That's the main thrust of the whole fic, really - a gentle domestic look at the Ravenwatch when they aren't in the middle of a mission.

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