#i miss fics so bad... rattling my cage rn!!!!

[taihua]

20 questions for fic writers

Tagged by @gekidasa whose answers were excellent to read at 2am when I couldn't sleep <3

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 91

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 437,726

3. What fandoms do you write for? TGCF obviously is the main one, and Tolkien fic is something I regularly write because it feels like going home. I dipped my toes into Genshin fic this year and I've been known to randomly drop one-off fics for other fandoms when the brainworms hit!

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

After Hours. The magnum opus. Deserves its place at the top.

I Want to Ki** You. I never expected this fic to get so popular so it amuses me that it's still near the top.

Further Precautions. Dumb humor win!

Carved in bone, heart engraved. The trope inversion amnesia fic!

Bet On It. So near and dear to my heart that I have spent the last two years trying to scrub off the serial numbers for publication and if that ever happens, it'll be amusing to see who recognizes it.

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? I used to, but then a depression era hit and now I have Inbox (666) and it fills me with dread to look at the number. I do read each and every comment and 9 times out of 10 I start tearing up even if it's something short like "loved this, thanks!"

6. What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? I'm too sappy to do actual unhappy endings, but Still Have Time sort of implies a cycle of toxic breakups that can't be fixed.

... I also forgot that I have that one Celebrimbor/Annatar pre-torture fic, which is objectively much worse than breakups now that I think about it. Does it count when Tolkien is the one who wrote the death-by-torture ending for Tyelpë, though?

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? All of them!!!!! But I'll nominate Money Maker, because it's the only fic I think I have ever written, for any fandom, that involves the couple getting married at the end. I bullied them so hard in this AU that I decided they earned it.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Never in the comments themselves, but I saw people being dicks about my writing on Twitter every now and then, which is the unfortunate downside of having a well-known fic in fandom. Not everyone has to like my fics, but like... I can see what you're saying on the public forum in the community that I myself am active in, guys.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? *gestures at my AO3 profile*

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? The most I've done is throw in a cameo from other MXTX fandoms, and I guess that one self-indulgent Sk8/tgcf fic that lives in my drafts and will never see the light of day. I just don't find "they meet!" to be enough of a plot to be worth reading or writing. The thought of writing all that introducing sounds like hell, sorry.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Yup, there was that time the person almost word-for-word replicated Still Have Time. They claimed it was an accident and apologized before taking it down when I commented, but that wasn't fun. I felt like a jerk for commenting even though it was blatant theft; they even left kudos on my fic :/

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Yes, I have a handful of my fics translated into Russian thanks to some Twitter pals!

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Sadly no. I always thought this would be fun, though, so if anyone wants to try it sometime... just sayin'........ my inbox open....

14. What's your all-time favorite ship? 300,000+ of my AO3 wordcount is for Fengqing and they're always going to be one of the most specialest ships ever for me for many reasons, but I also feel like I have to give a shoutout to Maedhros/Fingon in Tolkien fandom for being my longest-running ship? I got into them in high school and they're the ship that I feel I can just sit down and write something for them whenever I want.

15. What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? There was that Fengqing police AU I started and I thought it would be good, but it ended up not really feeling like them and that was part of what pushed me to focus on original writing instead of fanfic this year. Funnily enough, I Frankensteined some of the concepts from that AU into Constellate, which is to date my only unfinished WIP on AO3. I never really had a plan for what I was doing with that fic and I thought I could just power through it, which failed miserably.

16. What are your writing strengths? Humor, probably! It's hard to be funny in writing, but I do try.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I have about a year's worth of fic that needs to be line edited and reposted because I was cueing--sentences like "He felt that he was afraid" rather than "His heart pounded in his chest" etc. A writing teacher pointed it out to me this summer and I've been consciously trying to fix it, but I know a lot of my fics are worse because of this.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I never see this done well in fic. Personally, if I'm writing Chinese characters in China in an English language fic, it's implied that they're speaking Chinese, so there's no need to stick "Hao jiu bu jian" in quotation marks, yknow? It only makes sense to change languages if it's implied that this section of language is different from the rest of the narrative, and even then it can be distracting in a bad way to have it written out rather than saying "'Hello,' he greeted in French."

19. First fandom you wrote for? Lord of the Rings probably. I'm not going to look at my FFN profile to check.

20. Favorite fic you've written? I have lots of favorites for lots of reasons, but I'll give a shoutout to No smoke without fire this time because it's my only OC-centric fic and I'm happy that people like it anyway even though OCs aren't really a thing in danmei fandom.

Tagging: I will take the lazy route and say steal it and tag me. I like reading answers to these