#I still got plenty of homework in the ol inbox :)

[terrainofheartfelt]

9, 17, 18, 29?

9. Favorite pairing you wrote for this year? hmmmmmmmmmmm I don't know!! I think if I like a pairing enough to the point that I do in fact write about them then they are a favorite. perhaps....dan/nate? that is just a ship I keep coming back to because it is so comforting in such a singular way, there's an energy to them that none of the other couple I write carry. wait I changed my mind: dairthaniel. A ship I didn't plan to write anymore but I enjoyed so much that I did it anyway. I'm not sure how, but I think it's Cherry's fault :)

17. Your favorite character to write this year? I really liked writing Jenny's point of view in fics this past year. her voice and the way she looks at things, and how she is in the world of the show-verse while also being a spectator to it, and getting to write how she Got Out and healed...I just love her and want to give her wonderful things <3 (and writing her in the P&P AU with the The LBD Lydia as a blueprint, SO much fun.)

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year? strangely enough, I'm gonna say Blair, even though the majority of what I share is her point of view. my girl just has such a twisted fucked up mind that....the conundrum of writing Blair is that I kind of know her better than she knows herself, so the question becomes what does she not know/what does she refuse to know and how do I show that with my writing? and I have no idea if I do it well, sometimes I read friends' fics and they have phds in blair waldorf and I'm like "oh fuck they showed that SO much better than I could" I think it's something that I can't think too hard about for me to be able to do it well, which of course is so annoying. oh sweet blair, dear child. being normal is not an option for her.

19. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year? HARD QUESTION. and like I have written so so much that it's hard to keep track of it all? I think this year more s o than the last it's like....once the fic is posted it completely leaves my brain. But I am gonna go with a scene from such a lot of world to see, in the Rome chapter, what I call the dair breakup post-mortem, it's the cathartic convo that has been building up for hundreds of thousands of words in this fic series, and I knew I wanted to do that way for a long time and I worked on each line in this scene for a long time, and then I sat on it and wrote a lot of the series around that scene, and I still am just really proud of it. And I could probably argue that that scene in chapter 2 is the entire reason I am even writing fic at all. I started writing to make this big post s5 fixit I had constructed in my head, and anything that's come out of me since is a direct or indirect result of that AU and people's magnificent responses to it. so. yeah.... anyways here's a tidbit of it for context:

“I told her that I wanted to write a sequel to Inside, but real this time.” He stares down at their hands, as if too ashamed to look at her, “Real names, real everything. It wasn’t satirical, it was a hit piece, and Georgina had enough dirt on people to make it happen.”

Blair feels a coldness sitting underneath her ribs. “Did you write it?”

Dan glances up at her, then looks back down just as quickly. “A lot of it, yeah.”

“But you didn’t finish it?”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

He takes a deep breath. “Jenny - she called me while I was here. I’d been avoiding everything, everyone, and she decided that she was sick of it and harassed me until I answered the phone.”

“Sounds like her.”

Dan’s jaw twitches. “She asked me about the book I was writing but...I was too embarrassed to tell her. That was kind of my sign.”

“You think she would judge you for it?”

He shakes his head. “I guess not, but just,” he sighs, “hearing her talk, it made me think of something else. Something she said to you, actually.”

Blair tilts her head in question.

“When she came back to interview at Parsons...she said something to you - and him - like, ‘you two used to be in love, and now you’re only hurting each other.’”

It’s only a matter of time before your mutual destruction. Blair remembers.

“And it reminded me that - however it ended - I really loved you,” he says, softly, but confidently, with conviction, “and I needed to honor that. For me, if not for us.”