#and what like. five different genres in there?? low fantasy horror comedy tragedy romance

[vamptastic]

every time i get back into mdzs its like being hit with a freight train of The Plot

[marypsue]

fanfic: First 5 prime numbers!

why would you force me, a writer and known dumbass, to try to remember math stuff

2) What fandoms do you write for and do you have a particular favourite if you write for more than one? 

I was going to be extremely witty and paste in screenshots of the list of fandoms on my AO3, but tumblr is having a breakdown and won’t let me, so I’ll just go with the short answer: lots. 

There are different things I like about all of the different canons - and fandoms - that I’ve written for. I love cheesy jokes no matter where I go, but I also like the rich mine of angst and garish darkness that the Lost Boys have to offer. I love the fairy-tale structure and the heady romance of Labyrinth, I like how I can basically just write original fiction when it comes to the X-Men and it’s probably canon to something somewhere, and I appreciate the challenge of trying to nail the tone of RAM while still keeping the depth of character and the core of sincerity and emotion that I’m gonna end up bringing to anything I write about. (And also, projecting. Did I mention projecting?)

ROTG in particular stands out for the sheer creative freedom the fandom encouraged - we made up an AU where several different versions of the main villain (English movie, Finnish dub, book, concept art) lived together and attended the same university (along with multiple versions of the other characters) and it was sheer unadulterated crack. We wrote mythos. We wrote an expanded steampunk Treasure Planet universe full of high tragedy and classic-children’s-lit drama. We wrote poetry. We wrote ambitious crossovers and extraordinarily complex backstories for characters who ended up being Not That Deep. We wrote ridiculous comedy nonsense. We wrote so much fluff. My partner @gretchensinister created an entirely original fantasy alternate world and wrote a high fantasy novel inspired by the characters, which she’s planning to turn into an original series (speaking of, I will always shamelessly plug A Draught Of Light. If you liked A:TLA, you owe it to yourself to read it, and you don’t need to know anything about ROTG to enjoy it. In fact, you might enjoy it more not knowing anything about ROTG, though a few inside jokes might go over your head).

With that said, though, I think I have enjoyed writing for Gravity Falls the most. Partly it’s because of the skills I developed working in the other fandoms, so that now I feel confident enough in my work that I can stop worrying so much about making it good and just have fun with it. Partly it’s because the tone, the mood and the theme, of the series align with my interests and my values so well. It’s the kind of story that I would like to write, it’s the kind of story that I wish I’d written, and I love all of the characters so much but also can relate to so many of them, that getting to expand on it and play in its universe is just a treat and a joy. I may have found my forever fandom.

(The rest of this is going behind a cut for length because it turns out all of my answers are like this.)

3) Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.

I…don’t get reader inserts. Especially the ones that include the little (y/n). (Partly because it jolts me right out of a story, partly because for the first while after the trend started, I was reading them as ‘yes/no’ and was extremely confused.) I understand that the intent is to create a story where the reader can easily imagine themselves as the protagonist, but…you have to give that protagonist some traits, and have them make choices, and in order to do that you have to give them some sort of a personality, and then 1) not every person who reads it will be able to go ‘oh yeah, that’s me’ and 2) you’ve got an original character anyway! 

I saw a post recently where someone had drawn a picture with the caption “this is what (y/n), the reader of my story x, looks like” and listed a set of personality traits/likes and dislikes, like, at that point…just give them a name! They’re an OC! 

With that said, though, like self-inserts, reader inserts are fun (for people who like that sort of thing) and harmless, and I really hope nobody’s being a dick about them. Fandom should be fun, and even if I don’t get that thing you’re doing for fun, that doesn’t mean you’re Doing It Wrong.

Also, I fucking love making up OCs, and if allowed, I would do nothing but that all day.

5) If you had to choose a favourite out of all of your multi chaptered stories, which would it be and why?

Oh, this is cruel. I should not have done this. 

So, there are a lot of them. Apparently some people don’t spend all their free time coming up with bullshit ideas that spiral wildly out of their control into full, developed narratives that require tens of thousands of words to fully express? I bet those people have cleaner bedrooms than I do. Also probably more money.

Again, I’ve gotten better at this with lots of time and practice, so a lot of my earlier stuff is less well-executed than I’d want it to be. There are still ideas that I like, and stuff I’m proud of finishing, but I wouldn’t say they’re favourites, because the execution is less skillful and less polished than some newer things. With that said, though, I still have a big ol’ soft spot for Northern Lights, which was my indoctrination into the genre of ‘wildly self-indulgent crossovers and rampant canon revisionism’. Same with It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, the first multi-chaptered thing I ever finished. You can see the seeds of some classic Mary tropes in it, including ‘what if we just took all the female characters who were mentioned once and develop them into fully-realised people with important roles in this story’, as well as some tropes that have since fallen by the wayside (I do not do nearly as much with fairy tales as I did when I was a teenager).

Dreamland deserves a shot at the title, as do Reincarnation Blues and Raising Stakes. But purely for scale, ambition, and how closely the execution matches the ideal version that exists only in my head, my absolute favourite multi-chaptered fic has to be Hive. I’ve been trying to write decent horror for eleven long years and Hive makes me feel like I’ve finally nailed it. 

7) When is your preferred time to write?

Preferred time to write is from midnight to 2am. 

Best time to write is literally any other time than that, probably. 

(I’ve read all the science and the thinkpieces. I am aware that the only reason 2am seems like such a good time for creative work is because you’re tired enough that your internal self-regulation is low and your inner critic is silenced, and also because it’s often the only time when we sit down and let ourselves focus on the work with no distractions - because there aren’t any. I’m working on introducing this environment into the rest of my day so that I am not in a permanent state of sleep deprivation. Funnily enough, writing in a dimly-lit room and working on a dimmed computer screen really seems to help.) 

11) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?

Not that I can remember.

To be fair, I have received very few criticisms after posting that were about writing issues rather than matters of personal taste (and most of those have been along the lines of ‘so uh, I know you knew mentally what was going on in this scene, but the critical piece of information never actually made it to the page’). But…I also…take long enough to work on things and have so many damn things on the go that once something is posted, it’s posted, and I have to make a promise to myself to never touch it again, otherwise I would spend all my time nitpicking and never finish anything. If somebody’s noticed a legitimate issue or possible improvement, it is incredibly likely that I will go ‘oh dang why didn’t I notice that’ and then mentally file it for use in future stuff. I’ve only ever taken one fic down, and most of the edits I do after the fact are for tagging or author’s notes.

I did amend the ending of Any Misery You Choose, but that was less because I got criticism (people were actually incredibly nice about it!) and more because I was extremely dissatisfied with how the original ending turned out, because I hadn’t adhered to the plan I myself had made, because I was rushing to finish the damn thing. (Protip: don’t do that.)

(please, please, please let these actually be the first five prime numbers)