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ashcroft-writes · 7 months

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20 questions for fic writers

I was tagged by @bluedaddysgirl! Thank you; this fits well into my master plan of attempting to be more alive online hahaha @unmarked-credits @xinambercladx @sinisterexaggerator Not obligated to do this, I'm just trying to be social and thought it may be fun!

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 5 🥹 I am baby compared to some people I see answering these

2. What's your total A03 word count? 512943 words!

3. What fandoms do you write for? Actively, right this second, Star Wars! I do have a huge Fallout 4 WIP that hasn’t been updated in a hot second, but I love it dearly and do wish to finish it one day.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

The Idiot’s Array

Rot, Dust, and Steel

Strong Hands

Homeworld Elegy

We can pretend this last one doesn’t exist lolololol (It’s the .hack Penguin Fic of DOOM, a reposting of my very first fic from the twee LULZ SO RANDOM era of my high school days. I like to have my history all together, and I own it, but goodness no one should read that.)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Oh I desperately wish I still was. I used to, every last one, and I still read and treasure all the ones I do receive. Over the last couple years, my life kept getting quite… upended, however… and I my well of communication energy just… died… and this is also partially because I find it physically impossible to just say “wow thank u <3” in a few seconds; I usually get really into it! Still, the kindness and joy folks have left for me has been so deeply appreciated and cherished. I can’t help but want to go back and respond eventually (“Hi! I know this was left like, two years ago, but you pretty much gave me the gift of sunshine then, sorry this is so late <3”) Hopefully it won’t be weird.

(If you’re reading this and you are, in fact one of those whose delightful comment I have not responded to, hi, I see you, and thank you so much for the gift of sunshine)

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Ooo. So though my stories definitely contain some angst, they usually end in very hopeful ways. Even the one about the collective grief for a destroyed planet 😆 Especially that one!! The future yet contains light! So perhaps the answer’s actually in a story that I never finished and isn’t available anymore.

I had this series I was writing when I was a lot younger set in Sonic the Hedgehog. It has this character who had been a villain switching sides and helping the Sonic group win their fight, and thusly secure his own pardon and freedom, a redemption sort of story. And it ended pretty sunshine and roses for most! But for the POV character, he never really would belong among the victors. They gave him a ship and his freedom in payment, and he took it and left for a world he didn’t know, off to try and find some new life on horizons where he would be either at best a stranger, and at worst hated for what he’d done in the past. I suppose there is still some hope in all that! New chances, new beginnings. Like I said, I’m a hopeful writer. But it was the most uncertain and melancholy of the lot, for sure.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? HA, almost certainly The Idiot’s Array; there’s a frickin’ romantic poem, a hopeful promise to see each other again, healing and reconciliation, and a man who flings himself out of the window dramatically in lieu of saying goodbye. What more could you want, I ask you.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Fortunately, no!

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Sure have! The Gunslinger’s Paean series has been my first public work with a couple hot and heavy sort of scenes, mostly because at the time I was dying to write Cad Bane, who is an extremely blunt and direct character, told initially from the POV of someone bringing what he feels are shameful parts of himself into the light. Thematically, it just didn’t feel the sort of story in which smut should be anything less than on the page in every last detail where it had to be unpacked. I guess you could say they were the sort of scenes meant to reveal the changes in the characters because smut scenes are vulnerable scenes.

But judging how I’m talking about it, you might detect I’m running some obscure ace algorithm in my internal software that demands a very particular ratio of what it deems smut too unprompted 😆 AND THAT WOULD BE RIGHT AHHHH. I don’t write a lot of pwp, though I’m known to partake (and I hope this even answers the question lmao)

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? Not really my thing, but it sure is a valid lifestyle!

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not to my knowledge, unless you count the LLM-training data scraping of Ao3, which I suppose doesn’t precisely qualify as theft in the classical sense 😅 I do wonder if a shard of my characterizations will some day jump out at people using those chatbots. Weird to think about.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Nope

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? I have not. I think I’d like to try some day, however, if I vibed with someone hard enough on an idea!

14. What's your all-time favourite ship? Hilariously, I don’t even write for this fandom I'm about to name. I HAVE NOT READ A SINGLE FIC AND THE FANART ARRIVES ON MY DASH WITH NO ACTIVE SEEKING. But Good Omens really went off with Crowley/Aziraphale! Gives me SO many warm fuzzies. What a great queer yearning story.

And I know, I know, that’s weird, someone probably expected me to say something I read/write for at the very least, but the character ships I adore exploring creatively genuinely exist on such a different brain circuit for me than the “fave ship I cheer for like a sports team” heh, though they are in no way lesser.

15. What's the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? You know that Sonic the Hedgehog series I mentioned earlier? That. My remaining mojo-energy in the Sonic-verse is just not powerful enough to overcome the inertia of revisiting something YEARS AND YEARS gone, and I have too many works other works open and waiting, but I’ll always look on that unfinished beast with affection. Yes that means all other stories I haven’t updated in a long time I still intend to finish 🥺 Please don’t throw rocks 🥺

16. What are your writing strengths? I’ve been told it’s my worldbuilding and characterization! And boy howdy do I love doing those things, so I’m really happy I’m doing it well!

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I get real maudlin sometimes in my early drafts! A LOT of characters on my pages work through a complex array of feelings and internal monologues before I can wrest a moving story from their emotional morass. You would not believe how much I tone down in editing. And oh god I write a lot of words. Somehow my chapters are now often 9-12k words and I just can’t stop myself; they feel complete when they’re complete 😭

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I dislike it usually, because in my work I’m often trying to immerse my (sometimes monolingual) reader in the headspace of another person… and if that’s the case, and my character runs into someone speaking a different language than the story's overall text, there’s usually three outcomes:

The POV character understands the other language fully. In that case, the reader should likewise feel the understanding is effortless, or they might get jarred out of the flow of words and character headspace. So I just write the translation of the words, i.e.

“I really wish I had a pet raccoon,” said Talky McTalkerson in soft-spoken French.

The POV character does not understand the other language at all. In that case, why would they mentally be able to give us a perfect transcription of the foreign words for readers? In that case, the character experience really is:

The man was saying something in a bashful sort of French—at least I think it was French. But I didn’t understand.

The POV character partially understands the other language. In that case, the translation struggle might even be part of the reader experience, and remains immersive, i.e.

“I really wish I had a…” Talky McTalkerson was saying in his quiet French, my poor student-learner brain straining to pick apart the mumbled crumbs. Something about… laveur? Washing? “I really wish I had a new washer too,” I tried in solidarity, and he looked at me as if I was an idiot.

(Note, I do not speak French and picked it out of a hat for examples <3)

Anyway, I think some exceptions can be made for words that don’t have precise translations! I like to do that with some of my alien language stuff if talking about the words deepens some understanding about the culture and people who speak them.

19. First fandom you wrote for? Pokemon, when I was a wee sprout in elementary school. It was never published lol but it was so incredibly dramatic and terrible. And it rocked

20. Favourite fic you've ever written? I will never get over Homeworld Elegy. It gets a little less attention than its predecessor—ah, such is the fate of all sequels, especially when it's not quite the same sort of story! But it means just as much to me. I don’t know how I pulled it out of my brain in six months, though I think I was processing a lot at the time, and looking back at the themes, hoo, it makes sense. I’ve never written something quite that complex before, the multiple POVs, all the wholesale alien culture invention, the making use of a past and present timeline, and the endless little circles connecting the two right up until the end. That and bringing in a stable of OCs and hoping people would like them… and I think it all worked even better than I’d hoped. I had no idea if I could stick the landing writing it, but I’m so proud of how it turned out and the things it’s inspired in some of my readers since.

Here’s hoping the next thing I publish will continue the trend of being my new favorite thing!! I’m really excited about literally everything I’m working on!!!

#ashcroft answers #ashcroft has opinions

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