#The General— Kenshin ♥

[plothooksinc]

🦋

📗

🦋 Which character is your favorite to write?

Thaaat is difficult to answer for some fandoms. I generally like most characters I dive into the POV for and if I don't like them that much, by writing their POV I start liking them, so it's a bit weird. My favourite character across the TMNT iterations is Leo but I like writing them all! In fact, for NRFTW I think the most fun I had was writing the spaghetti monster Donnie, so I think he wins that one. In Rurouni Kenshin it's probably a tie between Kenshin and Kaoru and Misao for different reasons - they all bring a different energy to their POV, from quiet intelligence to resourcefulness to chaotic, all equally fun. For any of these, though, it really depends on what I'm writing and context. In Final Fantasy VII though, that has an easy answer straight off the bat: it's Zack Fair. |D

📗 Do you want to write something outside of fanfiction? If so, what about?

I have an original novel I was trying to write/have picked away at for years now! I discussed it recently on another ask, actually, hang on: On Isekai before it was everywhere and random dark fae shorts

The dark-fae ones mentioned were more of a vibe and I contemplated turning them into a short story anthology just for funsies at one point or another (though the fae are a definite aspect in at least one of them, haha)

Thank you! ♥

Fic ask meme here.

[moonlightmagus]

@jaakunxkaze​​ asked:  "So did you just got envious about wanting to get kidnapped by someone or you just want to know the thrill of it?" Of course Kenshin heard the news about Nem getting kidnapped but he also knows he didn't need to rescue her either. But then again he really wasn't surprised that this happened knowing how his girlfriend is and all.

Oh fuck, he heard about that? What else could he have possibly heard about? Please don’t tell her that he also heard she wore a frilly dress and actually acted completely unlike herself. She quickly composed herself, but of course Nem was positive he had already seen her facial expression prior.

“What makes you think I would be jealous over people who want to be kidnapped and go prance around like weird Princesses?” Even evil women sometimes want to know what it feels like to be the Princess from her childhood. “I was only playing a part, nothing more nothing less.” 

[plothooksinc]

😈 ✍ 🎶 💖 🦅

I answered the first two in the previous ask, so let me tackle those last three ♥

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

I do! I have a cyberpunk playlist for when I write Zaibatsu (rarely as that is currently) and a TMNT one which is in the process of being refined. I had one off Spotify for ages and I might recreate that, but I'm looking for new and inspiring music and want to add a lot of other fans' amazing choices to it.

The song I've been playing on loop lately is Final Boss by Nitro Fun, because I'm making an AMV to it and thus listening to it many, many times a day. (Same reason as Bitch Boss by Doja Cat was the last ear worm because swagless!Leo AMV.)

💖 What made you start writing?

In general or fanfiction? In general, I've been writing since I was eight and my little child brain was devouring every book in the library and I realised that words were, in fact, magic and I could put them down on the page and keep rearranging them until they were amazing. And that meant I could write stories like the books too! So yeah, I've been writing for a very long time. I first started writing a novel at 14 and then at 18, and neither of them have been scrapped per se but my desire to write them has gone down with the state of publishing these days and the fact that the overriding premise of both of them was something that's glutted in the market these days.

I first wrote stories for my favourite cartoons in my teens (Defenders of the Earth and the original TMNT) but didn't know that was called fanfiction and it certainly wasn't for anyone else, it was just for me. And I discovered fanfic was a thing online in my early 20s, but by that point I'd become disillusioned with my writing (it was still pretty immature) and so it didn't occur to me to try for anyone else. Up until I got my first massive hyperfixation in my 20s, which was the Rurouni Kenshin fandom, and I decided to try. My writing was still awkward in the first chapter but had been polished some due to online RP, and then I discovered something called instant validation and encouragement and the more confidence I gained, the better I got. So. I fell into writing wholesale and loved it, because I might not have had confidence in writing to begin with but I loved telling stories in any format I could. (I have a very long tabletop RP career, too)

The short answer is: words are magic and they never stopped being magic, and I like working magic. And telling stories. And picking on my favourite characters. You know how it goes.

🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants?

Bit of Column A, bit of column B! All my early stuff + Tanabata Jasmine were written off the cuff, but my brain was really good at filing details and repeating motifs all on its own, so bonus. Snowblind has no outline but it's a reasonably simple story at heart and doesn't need one. My one shots are just moments in time. Zaibatsu Project was a huge cyberpunk AU and that required a lot of work, both working out who these samurai characters were in 2029 Japan and what on earth I was even going to write - the outline is half done and we're about halfway through the outline I have. At some point if I get to the end, I'll outline the rest, because at the beginning I was really just playing to see if I could write such an extreme AU. (I can.) Misconduct has no outline - it's taking a deviation in canon and writing naturally occurs along the same timeline with differences, so no outline required for me.

...Underdark had no outline. Underdark was meant to be 8 pages long and Underdark went and wrote itself, that fic was lightning in a bottle. No outline because I literally just zoned out and kept typing, though the point was always to shift the balance of strength from Leo to Mikey and thus Leo was always gonna get taken out. I knew that was happening. Legacy, Court of Miracles, and Desperation all have outlines because they were my entrance into writing for my very first and most beloved fandom, and I wanted to get it right.

And then we get to No Rest For The Weary, in which some part of my brain went "I want to write" and the rest of me went "no, I haven't written in years, it's not gonna work". Because I hadn't really written for 13 years at that point for Many Reasons. But I loved Rise so much that I made a deal with myself: if I could actually take some of the vague scenes playing in my head that I'd like to see and write out some kind of outline to make a cohesive story, I'd try.

...then it took me like. 20 minutes to write a 2000 word outline from beginning to end and I was like huh okay then. Writing it is. And then I tried. And it worked. So. Outlines are cool and useful and occasionally resurrect your writing career, but it also does not escape my notice that the best fic I ever wrote was one that had no outline at all. But all in all, outlines are just guidelines - they're me sitting down and going 'here's some dot point shorthand on a story skeleton' and then going 'huh' and using what works of it as I go and improvising the rest.

All of this to say: I GUESS IT DEPENDS. lmao. I'm sorry, I waffled, hope your eyes didn't glaze ♥

Fanfic asks here!