#my best guess is since there's different publishers for other languages they might not have the licenses for those areas

[wha-archive]

Publisher Update - English Simulpub announced

K-Manga, a US publishing site for Kodansha's manga, is due to launch in a week and has announced that the English translations of Witch Hat Atelier will be available as the Japanese chapters come out!

As it's a US site, you'll find you aren't able to access the teaser site without a VPN (I'm in the same boat!) - and I cannot confirm yet if payments will work outside of the US, but this is fantastic news for Witch Hat regardless!

If you're outside the US and wish to ask about whether the region will expand in the future, be sure to be polite when registering interest in wider coverage! In the meantime, be sure to support the official releases you can access - either by buying the volumes or the Japanese chapters on official sites.

[leliosinking]

Hot take I guess but the fandom was way too hard on this book (and still is tbh) and for what? Because it isn’t interested in fan service? If anything Anne’s writing was at its best when she ignored what fans wanted, and I think it’s time for a reevaluation of my boy Vittorio the Vampire.

I just think this was such a promising start to New Tales (more than Pandora, even) and I sort of hate all of you for boycotting it or telling new readers to skip it. (as far as i’m concerned TVA, Merrick, B&G, BF and BC are all unofficially New Tales anyway.. TVL-MtD are the only proper vampire chronicles, everything else falls into different categories, but I digress).

With regard to Vittorio, however, we were given a true blue Ricean vampire hunter novel (the only one mind you) with an actual, functioning plot and some of the best action she’s written since TVL… and you all shunned it. And I get it, we don’t read these books for conventional, commercial plot contrivances, but for the florid language and richly crafted characters; but this is the rare Anne Rice novel that’s just.. fun for the sake of fun?

And no, I’m not blind to its problems. It absolutely needed another draft or two (as do a lot of the later VC entires) and no, Vittorio is not her strongest protagonist by leagues. But what we got was still filled to the brim with good ideas?

The Court of the Ruby Grail cult, especially, is one my favorite of Anne’s inventions. Like their dynamic with the local human villages feeding them their castoffs was legitimately disturbing and IMO better executed than most of the times she retreaded the Children of Darkness post-TVL.

And while Vittorio the character might be kind of boring, Florian and Ursula carry this novel and deserved to enter the larger narrative tapestry on their strengths alone but “waaah Lestat and co. aren’t here” so “it’s bad” or whatever.. I really can’t stand some of y’all.

Anyway, this is long enough and I really didn’t set out to write an essay in defense of what is ultimately a mid-tier entry into this series. But. I still feel that much in the way that MtD and Blackwood Farm have been recently reassessed as good novels that happen to be bad VC entires I think it’s time for some of you to similarly reevaluate Vittorio the Vampire, because this is a good vampire novel, it just isn’t a good vampire chronicle (well I think it is and yet and yet and yet). But it’s still part of the series and it does fit into the larger picture despite what some will have you believe.

If this is your first time, I personally like to read VTV between Body Thief and Memnoch. I think it is better thematically situated there than between TVA and Merrick as initially published. The archangels that enter later in the story build nicely upon David’s vision of God and Satan in TTOTBT and make for a strong intermission full of angels and demons that assist in setting up the Dantean finale of MtD. (I have more suggested reading orders btw, some other time perhaps).

I dunno.. if you like this book please let me know lol like I could use the solidarity because I feel like I’m the only one (I have it ranked #6 out of 15). But yeah, I think Vittorio is probably the most underrated and most unfairly slandered entry in Anne’s entire catalogue if I’m being completely honest.

[thedragonagebigbang]

Bang Creator Interview: Tumblr: @fatale-distraction  |  AO3: Fatale_distraction |  Wordpress: History Will Say This Was Just a Book Blog

The Collaboration period has begun! In these quiet months before works are due, we want to foster a sense of excitement, camaraderie, and celebration among our participants. To that end, all participants were given the option of a formal interview by our mod, Dema, or an informal “ask-game” survey. We hope you enjoy getting to know our phenomenal creators as much as we have! 

Woman single-handedly ruins decades of work using one simple technique you won’t believe!

Fataleity and Dema talk rarepairs, Swayze-coded Cullen, punk rock Solas, and Shenanigans

Dema: Starting very, very basic: how long have you been in the DA fandom? What about it inspires you to write?

Fataleity: ​​Gosh, it’s probably been around fifteen years or more? I played DAO not too long after it originally came out and while I haven’t always been active in the fandom, I’ve been a fan since then. I’m super inspired by the characters and the lore, in particular anything relating to the elves. I love that the DA universe took typical elven lore and kinda flipped them upside down.

Dema: Do you have a favorite bit of Elven lore? Or if “favorite” isn't the right word, a piece of lore that particularly struck you?

Fataleity: Along with everyone else atm, I am really fascinated by the Evanuris and the idea of Ancient elves like Abelas and Felassan. I also love that each Dalish clan has different customs, different levels of knowledge, etc, but are still connected by a common history and language, lost as they might be, and try to lean into that in my writing.

Dema: So, you played all three games more or less as they came out, but when did you start writing fic for DA? What prompted you to start?

Fataleity: It’s been a while, but I believe it was around the release of Inquisition that I started actually posting. As far as writing, it would have been from the start in private notebooks or sharing with a friend of mine. Inquisition’s release was when I started getting into the tumblr fandom and seeing others posting their work, and figured if others were going to, why shouldn’t I?

Dema: Oh wow, right from the beginning! You’re an OG! What was your first published DA fic about?

Fataleity: It was a short one-shot of Leliana and Zevran during Inquisition. They crack me up as a couple. It was mostly banter and porn tbh, very little if any plot, lmao.

Dema: Oh my god, this was a pairing I did not know I needed until this moment. Fabulous, thank you.

Fataleity: You’re welcome. It’s a good one.

Dema: So do you tend to be more inspired by the canon characters or by your OC's? Or if not "inspired" per se, do you write more of one than the other?

Fataleity: I wanna say it's about even? I’ve noticed that recently I’ve been writing more from the perspective of canon characters than I did when I first started writing, even when writing about OCs. I think it's fun to try to emulate their voices, and also their reactions to some of my OCs ridiculous behavior.

Dema: Who is your most ridiculous OC?

Fataleity: My Inquisitor for sure. She’s the youngest of a very large Dalish family so she’s a little childish for her age, very affectionate and kind, but she has a powerful sense of justice. She’s best friends with Sera and the Chargers, so she gets herself involved in all kinds of shenanigans.

Dema: Gotta love the shenanigans. Did she romance anyone?

Fataleity: She romanced Solas primarily, but I have also shipped her with Krem and Fenris. I did a few OT3 fics of her, Krem, and Solas that I think came out pretty sexy. 

Dema: Krem is under-shipped, I fear.

Fataleity: I do my best to fix that. I’ll put him with anyone who will treat him softly. Or not. Depending on his mood I guess. He deserves the world and more.

Dema: Thank you for your service. This is like asking for your favorite child, but do you have a particular canon character you really love to write?

Fataleity: Krem for sure. Great narrative voice, great jokes, and since he’s not as canonically developed as other characters, there’s a lot to play with.

Dema: Do you do anything in particular to get into the heads of the canon characters? I find that's such a challenge (a fun one!) to adopt the voice of a character I didn't create, and am always curious how other people do it.

Fataleity: Getting super familiar with the source material is obviously very important. For some characters that’s easier than others, so I will also rely on similar characters from other media that I feel resonate strongly to the character I’m trying to portray. Also simply putting myself in the character’s shoes. “If I was this particular character with this particular background, how would I react to this particular circumstance based on my prior experiences?” I feel like I’m also pretty influenced by whatever media I’m consuming at the time. For instance, writing 90s Cullen around the same time I rewatched Dirty Dancing, he ended up VERY Swayze-coded.

Dema: Omg, incredible. Is there any non-DA media inspiring your fic for the Bang?

Fataleity: I’ve been listening to AURORA’s newest album a lot. My partner and I are also watching a lot of comedic detective shows recently, so I feel like that sense of humor is going to be a big influence by the time this is done.

Dema: Man, I feel like any follow-up I ask to that question will have to be redacted, ha! What's the most out-there piece of media that has inspired a fic for you?

Fataleity: I don’t recall if there was a particular piece of media that inspired this, but I created a Y2K dragon age AU specifically so I could cram the characters into specific period-appropriate outfits, specifically young Solas as an early 80s late 70s punk kid. I think It might have stemmed from rewatching That 70s Show. This is also where Swayze-Cullen came from.

Dema: Was there a musical number. Please say yes. 

Fataleity: I tried to shoehorn my Lavellan into having a band on top of everything else, so there were definitely musical numbers. Krem was playing the solo from Freebird. ABBA was involved.

Dema: Amazing. God, I am dying to see some Solas 80's punk fanart now.

Fataleity: I would die. I would pay blood, sweat, tears, money, and my first, second and third born children.

Dema: Anarchy patch on his leather jacket…

Fataleity: Piercings. The piercings alone, man. I made him a college professor so he got rid of most of the piercings, but he kept a few. “The ones that would hurt most if I wanted to get them done again.”

[Dema and Fataleity have an increasingly suggestive emoji exchange.]

Dema: Sorry, I'm incorrigible.

Fataleity: As am I.

Dema: Do you find you write a lot of AUs?

Fataleity: I think I imagine more than I actually put down in words. My favorites are definitely different time periods. I’m a sucker for costuming.

Dema: Same. Costumes tell you so much about the culture and the characters! Do you tend to have visual references when you are writing, beyond what is provided by the games?

Fataleity: If I have a particular outfit or setting in mind, especially for AUs. For those I’ll have Pinterest boards or the like. If I’m doing something more based around existing settings, I’ll look up a reference as needed, but I don’t tend to have, like, a vision board or anything for those.

Dema: If you have any visuals for your Bang fic, will you give us a teaser? 

Fataleity: https://unsplash.com/photos/purple-flowers-near-mountain-during-daytime-S73YlRU8hy0 

Dema: Oohhh the vibes! I’m looking forward to it. On a very different note, if your bang fic had a clickbait title, what would it be?

Fataleity: “Woman single-handedly ruins decades of work using one simple technique you won’t believe!”

Dema: Perfect. Thank you for your time, Fataleity! 

Fataleity: Of course, this was fun! 

[plague-of-insomnia]

what kind of accents do you think the cast has? im a dub main for various reasons (one of my friends had a reading/memory disability so i ended up watching dub w them) so im kinda used to everyones dub accents.

but bards defo got an american accent right? (not in the dub, but im thinking manga terms?)

and ik soma & agni have barely a trace of an accent but does that mean they sound basically british?

and does finny have a german accent? sieglinde? diedrich?

idk food for thought?

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

(Sorry it’s been a rough couple days and I didn’t realize I hadn’t published this yet.)

Hey anon… so I’m a bit confused as to if you’re asking about the Japanese accents in the various anime, the English dub accents (or some other dub), or just my thoughts on what their various accents would be like based on the manga and independent of the anime.

Now I have only watched Kuro in English bc that’s the only thing that was available/that’s available on what I have at the moment (though I’m finally getting the blu rays for BoM and BoA so I’m hoping they’ll have the Japanese to try that out for once), so I can’t make judgements based on that. (And I’m not a good one to ask about Japanese accents anyway, lol.)

I also favor dubs bc of my disability. I love hearing the Japanese but it can be hard for me to follow sometimes, and even english alone without captions I can struggle with (please fix this, CR!!! Grr), so I feel you there.

Also not sure which characters you had in mind with this ask (other than the ones you specifically mentioned). Since kuro has so many, I guess I’ll just focus on a few. I want to make clear I am American and Latine, so I am not an expert on British regional accents by any stretch, or the historical accents of the Victorian period, so I’ll just do my best. Some may be partly inspired by how the characters are written in Japanese, since there’s a bit more… complexity to the Japanese language in regards to things like formality, rudeness, etc, that may not convert into English when translated in writing.

This is a long post so I’ll use a readmore to keep it a bit less chaotic. Below the break I’ve broken down my hypotheses on how some of the major players might talk:

Sebastian

As a high-ranking servant who regularly interacts with the nobility, Sebastian would have a high-class accent, and it is reflected in how his Japanese (and even his English) is written. It is a fairly neutral, polite manner of speaking. I’m sure the Victorians probably had a term for this accent (a high-class servant accent), but if they did, I don’t know it lol.

Ciel

Most nobles like him would be educated in a public school like Weston, like his father was, and those schools taught a standard accent that often varied slightly from school to school. So everyone who went to Weston would have a similar manner of speech. Ciel has been “home schooled” his entire life, aside from a short time at Weston for the investigation, so his accent might have been slightly different than his father’s. Nevertheless, especially under Sebastian’s tutelage, he would have learned how to speak properly (if he didn’t already). Still, unless Sebastian intentionally had him learn the Weston/public school accent, anyone who speaks to him would know he did not go to school, but was taught by tutors/governesses instead.

Bard

Yes, Bard is American despite his dub accent. We don’t know where he’s from exactly, but we can assume it was probably somewhere west of the Mississippi (that’s about 1/3 of the way west if you’re looking at the US map, going east to West, if you’re not familiar with our Geography).

I say that bc the river was the first real demarcation of the frontier. It’s likely he was living somewhere like Texas or Oklahoma. Ofc where he’s from would affect his accent, but I imagine it as a kind of cross between a more neutral southern midwestern accent (“no accent”) and a subtle Texas or OK one. Which that’s hard to explain unless you really know regional US accents, bc most of Texas doesn’t sound like most people think it does. The accents really change depending on what part of the state you’re in, since it’s such a big place. But basically not too heavy an accent but a bit lazy, definitely coarse and brutish since he was a soldier and a farmer. Lots of slang and not big on politeness. (Which he definitely is in Japanese.)

Mey Rin

She’s interesting because she’s one of the few characters who has a couple different ways of speaking. She has her “maid” voice and her “assassin” voice. The first one stutters a lot and uses imperfect grammar, as reflected in the English translation when she repeats things, like “I’m not one to talk badly about my betters, I am.” The second does not have this quirk. Not sure if the first is meant as an affectation as part of her idea of what a maid is, or if she just has such a divide he her personality/personas that she speaks differently when she’s wielding a gun. Since that wasn’t really mentioned in her subarc, I doubt we’ll get an explanation. We do know she was likely a child of immigrants from China, but not whether she was born there or in England before she was orphaned. But it is unlikely she has any hint of a Chinese accent since she was orphaned so young. She definitely has more of a working class accent, especially when compared to someone like Sebastian.

Finny

I had momentarily forgotten that Finny didn’t speak English when he first came to the manor. It’s likely that he would have had some kind of German accent, but I expect that Sebastian would have drilled it out of him, considering how strict he was with Sieglinde and Wolf, and Ciel didn’t blink an eye.

Finny’s accent in English never struck me as particularly high class, either in the manga or anime, but in one of the recent chapters, Theo makes a point to compliment his “upper-class accent.” It does seem highly probable that Sebastian played a hand in how he speaks, since he probably was the one who taught him English.

However, the fact that it came up in this sub arc could indicate his way of speaking is significant, somehow tying into what’s going on with Undertaker and the orphanage. Either way, his accent is apparently closer to Ciel than Mey.

Snake

Snake is tricky, because he almost never speaks as himself (I’m still not 100% sure what pronoun he would use for himself in Japanese, and even he doesn’t seem sure lol). He speaks via his snakes, and they all have different ways of speaking (which I think the dub does a decent job of, personally). So I can’t really say, but for the most part I would probably say his accent(s) would be closer to working-class, but he might have gotten some lessons on speaking from Sebastian, since, as a footman, he would have been expected to speak at a higher-class level than other, below-stairs servants would.

Undertaker

Like Mey, UT has two manners of speaking. He has his “humble old undertaker” accent, which is Cockney-esque (I don’t wanna do a disservice by saying it IS that), definitely a lower class accent. Then he has his “revealed” voice, or how he speaks after he reveals himself on the Campania. I have not read this arc in Japanese so I cannot base this judgement on how this shift is portrayed by Yana, only based on the translation. But it definitely seems to be a higher-class accent than the other one. It’s likely that it’s his “real” accent, while the other is part of his cover persona. However, we don’t know anything about him or his background from when he was alive, or even how old he is. For all we know, that accent could be an affectation too.

Agni & Soma

I know their dub accents annoy a lot of people, since Yana specifically mentions how they don’t have an Indian accent. I expect both of them would speak with a British accent, probably something close to how Ciel speaks, most likely, since Soma would have been educated by tutors and Agni probably was as well, since he came from a very high-caste family. I would expect that if their dub accents has been closer to Yana’s intent, they would sound more like Hakim in the dub of the anime Emma. That’s how I imagine them, anyway.

Sieglinde & Wolfram

I expect both would have German accents when they speak English, especially Wolf. Sieglinde might do a better job of working to improve and lose it, but I don’t think Wolf would, partly because of his animosity toward Sebastian. I like to imagine he sounds like Hans in the English dub of the anime Emma, and I really hope we eventually get the Green Witch Arc animated and dubbed so we can get a hot German English accent 🥺.

Diedrich

Dee, on the other hand, I think would not have a German accent in English, especially not in the present. I think he probably was educated in English before he went to Weston, likely by a private tutor, probably someone British, and then when he went there would have acclimated to the public school assent there. So probably he would sound like Vincent did, but I expect he’d throw in some German every now and then, especially when he gets irritated, lol.

Lau

Lau is originally from China, and his accent (as far as I know?) has never been remarked upon in the manga. We also know nothing about his background except that he rose quickly and at a young age to be head of Quin-Bang. I would assume that he speaks English very well, and the only hint at his origin that I’m aware of in the Japanese is the kanji (character) for the pronoun “I” he uses, though he doesn’t pronounce it as it’s normally done in Japanese nor does he with a Chinese pronunciation. I would take this to mean he probably has little if any hint of a Chinese accent when he speaks English, and since he keeps company with nobles and was able to pass as a doctor, he likely speaks in a high-class accent.

I hope that satisfied, anon. This was a fun and different ask. I apologize I didn’t publish it sooner.

[isleofair]

20 Questions For Fic Writers

Thank you, @seaofolives, for suggesting I answer these! 💚

(I'm pretty sure I did once before, but I've written more since, so...)

Under a cut because it's long, and if you're a fellow writer and would like to, please join us in answering this! 💖

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

15 🥰

2. What's your total AO3 wordcount?

247,322

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Still just Tiger & Bunny 😅

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

The best cure for free fall Stereoscopy (The Hero's Shoulders) Three Dates Snowdrift Love, Counted along the Fibonacci Sequence An Honest Mistake

(It's a top 6 because the last two have the same number of kudos.)

5. Do you respond to comments?

Always, and probably at excessive length 😅

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I think last time I answered Stereoscopy (The Hero's Shoulders) and the answer is still the same (it's a happy ending, just with more hanging threads than the others).

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Probably still Love, Counted along the Fibonacci Sequence

8. Do you get hate on your fics?

Never so far.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Sometimes, when I feel the story needs it. And I guess you could say it's the "a smidgen overly poetic, but without descending into purple prose" kind? 😅

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

Never done one.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I really don't think so (not much sense in stealing something so... I'll say niche and not unpopular to be nice to myself, lol)

12. Have you ever had a fic translated

Nope

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, and although I like the concept, I think I'd be a nightmare to work with and would not actually enjoy it too much myself (I need to be behind the steering wheel of my writing at all times)

14. What's your all-time favorite ship?

FireSky my beloved 🥺🥺🥺🥹🥹🥹🥰🥰🥰

15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

There's a fic I tried to write for the September leg of the 2023 YOTP challenge that I was very unconvinced by, so I abandoned it and wrote a different one. It had some elements I really liked, but I don't know if I will ever try to salvage it.

16. What are your writing strengths?

I get compliments on characterization, although I would like to improve it even further. Also I seem to be good at finishing things (although the fact that I ever only publish once the whole fic is done probably helps).

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

If my sentences don't stop running away from me I might have to adopt an imaginary shepherd dog to wrangle them 😅😅😅

Also, I SUCK at predicting how long any given fic will turn out 😜

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in a fic?

It would have to be needed and I'd need to check with someone who is fluent to make sure it makes sense. Also, I'd have to be sure I have a way to handle translating it for the reader if needed (depending on whether they need to know as they read or not, and so on)

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Technically, Smallville, but I never published that (it was just a weird tiny thing I wrote in a notebook like twenty years ago?)

20. Favorite fic you've written?

Yeah, no, that's still Stereoscopy (The Hero's Shoulders) ❤️💜💖.

[mrrightandmrbubble]

Hi, Kirri! I'm from South America and I'm trying to do a research about australian high school. I would like you to clarify some questions I have about school subjects, like: which ones are optional and which are mandatory? also, if you could send me some reliable websites than i can look up. every website i see says something different, can be very confusing so I decided to ask a australian person. Thank you!!!!

Hi, hey, i've been summoned! Okay, i'll admit to you upfront, it's been a hot minute since I was in high school so my knowledge is partly from personal experience but also what is published online. The school structures and curriculum differs from state to state, so it's no wonder you had trouble finding clear answers. I'll try to explain simply:

Australian high schools run from years 7 to 12. (We actually have 13 school years in total including Kindergarten, or preparatory, which is not numbered.) Students can finish in year 10 if they choose not to complete their senior years and test for university entry. If a student finishes in year 10, they get a Record of School Achievement; if they finish senior studies, they get a certificate of education depending on which state they're in:

NSW - Higher School Certificate (HSC)

VIC - Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE)/Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL)

QLD - Queensland Certificate of Education (QCE), Queensland Certificate of Individual Achievement (QCIA)

SA - South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE)

WA - West Australian Certificate of Education (WACE)

TAS - Tasmanian Certificate of Education (TCE)

ACT - Australian Capital Territory Senior Secondary Certificate (ACT SSC)

NT - Northern Territory Certificate of Education (NTCE)

The national curriculum has eight compulsory learning areas, which can be categorized into subjects:

Then there are a wide range of electives, which vary greatly depending on region, type of school (state-funded vs private/faith-based) etc. Students in years 9 and 10 typically choose three electives. Here is an example of electives available to a school in NSW.

In addition, many schools offer the opportunity to study a vocational (often trade-based) course in preparation for studies after high school, called TVET (TAFE-delivered Vocational Education and Training). Many of these course results in credits toward school outcomes. I guess you could say that TAFE to Australia is like community college to the US.

The school year is broken up into four 'terms', with dates varying between states (see links at end for a list). A typical school day goes from 8:45am to 3:00pm Monday to Friday, with breaks for recess and lunch between period. A 'period' = one class, which typically runs for 40 minutes.

Upon completing senior studies and final exams, students are given an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank), which they can use to select and be admitted to university. In fact, senior exams have just begun so it's a good time to keep an eye on social media and see how current students are talking about the experience! 'ATAR Day' (when rankings are released) is on December 14, another time to take a look.

Australia also has specialist high schools, such as creative and performing arts schools, intensive English centres (for students with English as a second language), sports schools, and technology schools. All of these must teach the compulsory subjects, but offer the chance to specialize in these areas.

Websites where you can learn more about the Australian curriculum:

Australian Curriculum Version 9.0 Australian Schools Directory

Study Australia

ACARA (for statistics)

TVET

ATAR

Hopefully that will help you! I hope you don't mind that I posted this answer but I thought it might be useful to others as well. If you have any other questions, go ahead and ask and i'll do my best!

[meichenxi]

Obsession, ‘productivity’ and habits vs routines: starting learning in a healthier way

cw: perfectionism, obsessiveness, allusion to eating disorders, depression, anxiety (very non-explicit) I’m going to be writing a series of posts from some asks I’ve had waiting for me, on how to build a cohesive language learning routine, but I wanted to preface that first with something we talk about less than we should in the language learning community: obsessiveness, perfectionism, recovery from mental health, and how to approach language learning in a better way. If the personal stuff bores you, feel free to skip the first two paragraphs. 

I have been trying to ‘be more productive’ - in healthy ways, and unhealthy ways - since I was about ten. If you don’t fit in, for whatever reason, hobbies - and especially creative or ‘productive’ ones - are a wonderful escape. They make you feel that it’s ok not to have friends; they let you look down on all those other stupid children with all the misplaced arrogance of every single bored, clever pre-teen. When I was twelve, I realised there was no point eating with people that didn’t like me and went to the library instead, because that was ‘dead time’. When I was fourteen, I realised getting the bus was ‘dead time’, and started doing Anki for two hours a day. When I was sixteen, I realised walking was ‘dead time’, and started either listening to podcasts or talking out loud. By the time I was eighteen, I was doing four A-levels in school, an EPQ, teaching myself an extra Latin GCSE, and taught myself the Spanish A-level in 3 months right before the exam. I also worked out for two hours a day - because eating lunch was ‘dead time’, and sleeping was ‘dead time’ - trained martial arts four evenings a week, tutored twice a week, had a part-time job as a waitress, played the flute in a prestigious orchestra, and was 150,000 words deep in the first draft of a very gay, Norse-mythology inspired fantasy novel. 

I had it all under control. My marks were excellent; I was a well-rounded person, musical and sporty and already decently on the way to becoming a polyglot, I was training to be a teacher, and I had plans to publish my novel. My home life was painful, but I was painfully independent with what I now like to call the ‘Elsa complex’. Or, actually, like Zuko: I could look after myself, by myself. It was all under control. 

I guess everyone can see where this is going. School ended, and with it came endless, open days. I fell apart. 

With endless surprise, I can now say that, four years later, I think I’ve come through the worst of it. I still have tendencies to get obsessive, but my anxiety and perfectionism are a lot better, I don’t dissociate, and I have - gasp! shock! - actual interest in life again. I never wrote that novel, but I’m still gay and still love Norse mythology, so I’m slowly finding my way towards writing again. What people don’t tell you about getting better, though, is that trying to define yourself, trying to find yourself, as a person who exists without mental illness, is very, very hard. Many of the things that you used to identify as core components of your personality or important values may have changed, and you may be hesitant about trying to take up hobbies that you used to enjoy because you recognise - and rightly so - that the incessant drive to be doing something, all the time, didn’t necessarily come from anywhere healthy. That those things which you clung to and which protected you may actually have ended up harming you in the end. A lot of figuring out old patterns of unhelpful thoughts involves realising that the things that you defended or framed as helping - weren’t. That’s a hard thought, especially because those mechanisms developed to try and protect you, one that’s immeasurably sad. 

Seperating your reasons for doing something obsessively and your love of it in the first place, before it became unhealthy, is difficult. And it means that when you feel - finally, finally - ready to start tackling something like language learning again, you end up sorting of approaching it sideways, shiftily, as if you’re hoping to trick yourself into it. It’s a delicate thing, like a baby bird, and it’s dangerous too, because if you do everything which you did before - the only thing you know how to do - it’s not going to work. And every time it fails is personal, because being able to do it again represents getting better, and reclaiming parts of your identity mental illness stole, and it hurts.

I’m writing this post because somebody asked me about my approach to creating a successful language learning routine. And I do have a lot of thoughts - but I wanted to preface that post with this one, to say:

If you are reading this to be more productive, if it is becoming obsessive, if you want to fit the most possible language learning into the tightest schedule possible, STOP. Take care of yourself. These tips for ‘productivity’ are for people who want to learn a little bit more about organising their time, and are in the right space to add more learning to their life. If you are only defined by what many hours you get done a day, if that’s what motivates you, these tips are not for you. Look after yourself. 

And on that note, here’s a confession: I don’t have - have never had - a successful language learning routine. Because of what happened, the only way I can keep going and prevent myself from falling into bad habits is if I approach it sideways, if I pretend I’m not taking it seriously, because I know if I don’t things will go wrong. But I want to be honest and upfront because I know a lot of people read my posts for advice and say that this doesn’t work for me. It might not work for you either. I especially know there are a lot of conceptions of successful langblrs with 7, 8, 9 etc languages in the title - that that we spend 5 hours a day on Anki, fall asleep to Glossika, and so on. And it’s especially important to mention now, because I feel like my language learning habits have only started being healthy in the last year or so - essentially since I started actually enjoying Chinese media. I could teach you how to cram every spare second with language learning, or how to successfully pass an A-level in 3 months with no teachers. I was good (and arrogant, and cocky, and needed bringing down a peg or two). But I won’t.

What I do have are succesful language learning habits. Apart from being a generally more flexible appraoch for all learners, the advantage of building successful habits over a fixed routine is that it allows for learning according to different in energy levels, how busy you are, what you find difficult and what else is going on in your life. Most crucially for me is that it is always a much healthier approach, because what I do is not based on number of hours, or number of units a week, or anything quantifiable that allows me to get obsessive again or frustrated that I’m not doing enough. 

Routine is important, especially when it comes to routinising daily tasks. The only thing I have is that sometimes - on good weeks, and once or twice even shockingly on good months - I have a decent Anki streak going. That’s it. I don’t listen every day - I don’t read every day - I certainly don’t do grammar every day. There’s nothing specific I do every day, though I usually rack up a good few hours of immersion or study - to be honest, I fail at Anki probably at least 60% of the time. Everything else - all these tips I have written about - I do as and when. Framing it in such vague terms makes it sound like I must have an extraordinary amount of motivation to keep going, that maybe I’m just lucky to be interested etc, but that’s really not the case. What I have done to keep learning regularly and somewhat successfully (I hope!!) without limiting myself to a routine which I know I will starting obsessing over is tying specific language learning behaviour to certain moods or levels of concentration. 

All routine is just habit. Habit, with a ribbon and packaged nicely. But allowing yourself to adapt your learning to the circumstances gives you more flexibility than any strict routine, and is more sustainable in the long term. What building habits rather than a specific routine does is allow you to learn what works best when, what works when you’re tired, and what is best to do when you have energy, or when you want to watch a show, or talk to people. It puts you at the centre of your language learning, rather than framing language learning as a central part of you. 

So how can we build healthy habits? How can we utilise ‘dead time’ whilst keeping it light, and fun? How can we adapt our language learning for times when we are tired, and stressed? Or what about when we don’t have time to give 100% of our attention or concentration? How can we identify our own strengths, our own weaknesses, and unite these with our personal goals to figure out what to prioritise in active studying, and what to do when we don’t have the energy for that? 

I’ll give my thoughts on all of these over the next couple of weeks, in what I hope will be a comprehensive overview of how best to practice, addressing everything from how to practice speaking to how to start as a complete beginner. If you have any thoughts or interim questions, or if you’d like to add your own experience to anything I have said, please feel free to!

In the mean time - 

chenxi out. 

[venteamocha]

Hello! Sometimes I see you post stuff from IF blogs and I've recently started playing some IF games, which I've enjoyed so far. Do you have any IF stories you'd recommend in particular? I'm not attached to any particular genre and I don't need romance or a self-insert main character, (though I'm not opposed to either). Though, it's a definite plus if it's LGBTQ+ inclusive! I'm not really sure what the "cornerstones" are of IF so I'll take any and all recommendations haha

Oh god, I play so many IFs. So many. And it’s not even close to all of them, but I’m trying!!

Tbh IFs without romance seems to be very rare, I think because when I think IF I think Choice of Games, and those pretty much always have romance in them. At least, the most well known ones do. But a well done one without romance would be nice too!

Okay, this is a list of my favourites! They’re all LGBT+ inclusive, and most have gender selectable love interests, or at least ones that change gender depending on the gender and sexuality combination you pick. In no particular order, of course.  Behind a cut because I’m gonna give them each a mini review. Because I haven’t done that yet.

(There are so many.)

Mind Blind: I absolutely love our big brother Nick, I love how witty and sharp so much of the dialogue is, I love how the MC clearly has a rather large handicap, but is still such an important person to so many people and not looked down on in the slightest. And when they are, we all know it’s because that person is a jerk! They’re not defined by what they aren’t, but what they are, and that’s a great message.

Shepherds of Haven: Part of why I love this one so much is I just love fantasy settings and this one just pulls it off so well. The cast is full of amazing characters, and I gotta say I die inside pretty regularly for not being able to afford the patreon content, lol. The author puts so much amazing stuff on there, and gives us so much great content in the game and through answers on tumblr, and you can tell this whole thing is just the best thing ever to them, and that makes it the best ever for us readers too!

The Wayhaven Chronicles: I’d be shot if I didn’t mention this one, the series that literally killed dashingdon when the book 3 demo dropped!! Again, another author that cares a lot and does their best to do right by their fans. We’ve been given drip after drip of these amazing characters backstories, and I just cannot wait for more! It’s definitely very romance centered, but the overall plotlines are also very good, and I have to say that no matter who I romance, I just feel like the group as a whole is a family. And that’s wonderful.

Speaker: I really like the lore. I really like the lore. I can’t wait until we get more of the overall plotline. Mostly I want my Speaker to get in deep trouble so Seb, Li and Seer (best sister ever) go off and beat the shit out of whatever is causing it. This probably says something about me, but what can I say, I thrive on angst and inflicting near death injuries on my OCs. Sometimes I even kill them, although all of this is offtopic. Or is it? I guess we’ll find out, although I doubt we’ll actually be able to kill off Speaker. And yes, I am definitely playing the Seb & Li poly route. I love them both so much. 

Wilhelmina: I love vampires, ok? Ok? And this one is based off Dracula!! The OG!! And you can choose Drac’s gender!! Shit, sign me up forever!! Yeah, she might be literally killing my bff, torturing my fiancé and low key fucking with my mind, but vampires are hot!! Let me live! Or not. But yeah, this is a really well done retelling of the Dracula novel and I like how well it works as an IF. Did I mention I like vampires?? Especially when they get all monstery?? (This one has an MC with a set gender, as it’s based on an already existing literary figure. Mina can have a same sex relationship with dracula, if you make drac a female, or with Lucy, a female love interest.)

More Things in Heaven and Earth: Hi Nell!! First off, I gotta uncover a deep shame of mine. My family literally has a Shakespeare heirloom collection. As in, my greatgrandfather passed down through the family a collection of Shakespeare that was published in 1911. In ye olde englishe. I tried to read it when I was like 10 and was like what language is this?? What the fuck? What the fuck??? And ended up reading As You Like It, a bit of Romeo and Juliet, and a little of Hamlet. Didn’t touch the rest of it. I only got into the other stories through trashy ya reimaginings. That said, this retelling of Hamlet inspired me to go read the whole of the original and now I have a lot of fears for these characters that I’m so much more attached to, oh god I hope my Ophelia has a happy ending. I hope Hamlet himself has a happy ending. The dialogue is so well done, everyone is engaging, and yeah it made me finish an old af book when nothing else did. (This one also has an MC with a set gender, female, for the same reason. However, there are two gender variable love interests, so you can very much play a bi or gay Ophelia if you so choose.)

Guenevere: I love King Arthur. All the myths. I have so many books based on the King Arthur mythos, oh dear god. I love pretty much every version of it. All the movie and tv shows too! I just can’t get enough of those knights. I could go on for paragraphs about how courtly love worked and how all the different social castes were, but I’ll try not to. This series lets you customize Guen as a character to an amazing degree, considering that she’s also based on an actual literary figure like the other two I mentioned above. It really feels like she becomes your own character, and yet she still exists within this world very very well. I worry quite a bit that the author might have bit off more than they can chew with the current book they’re working on, what I’ve seen of it looks absolutely massive in scale. What is out so far is a wonderful read though, full of drama and laughter and lots of chances to make the story your own.

Bastard of Camelot: Yep! Another King Arthur series! Sue me! This one lets you set Mordred’s gender though, so it’s more inclusive in that way. It is very interesting to play as one of the “bad guys” of the King Arthur mythos. You can play them as straight up evil, as good, or you know, a bit of column a and a bit of column b. Or they can just be a rude little shit. It’s got dragons too! You get a dragon pet! Dragons are cool. It can be a bit tough to play sometimes, since a lot of people dislike Mordred quite a lot because of prejudices. Hopefully this will change a bit later in the series if you’ve been a fairly good person up to that point. Gotta say though, as a warning, that Mordred is a product of incest. It’s not glossed over, and it does cause a lot of problems for them in the story.

God of the Red Mountain: I just love that this inspired me to read more chinese mythology tbh. There is just so much here! And it’s just such a good read. I wish I was better at describing things. The MC being a spirit that you can define, the whole setting, most of the love interests also being spirits, the massive amount of history and culture and lore, how it all fits together. It is such a well done story. I really wish it got more attention than it does. I still miss Big Sister. I still can’t wait to find out more about the foxes, and how we can heal our MC.

The Nameless: Another one that lets you play as something otherworldly. I love the lore behind this one, and I love all of the cast I’ve met. I kind of like that our MC isn’t loved right off the bat, that we’ll have to win over all of our love interests and even the other npcs. I’m up for the challenge! Everything I’ve read on the tumblr for these characters just makes me love them all more tbh. I love how much they’ve written for all of them! Most of all though, I love Oisein. All the art of them is just *chef kiss* and their personality is magical.

A Mage Reborn: This is a really recent one but!! Wow, it’s really well done! That cliffhanger!! Oof!! Not many books literally start with killing your MC off! That takes guts! I told the author this already, but I love the way they formatted this, the way it starts with the end, so to speak, and then fills it all out. It just made everything feel so poignant, how MC is literally looking back at all these moments in time in the last minutes they have before they die. Shit. That’s powerful. And there’s gonna be more??? Can’t wait for that angst. Give me that drama. Of course I picked the one who had me killed, that’s just how I am!

These are all just the COG type games, there are a few twine games with graphics I’d throw on here, but the list is long enough as it is and they feel like they’re in a different category to me. Maybe it’s just me?

[missroserose]

Fic Writer Question Meme!

Thanks for the tag, @venhedish—I love stuff like this! I'd apologize in advance for how long this is likely to be, but I suspect we share that tendency, haha.

How many works do you have on AO3?

20 total. I've been publishing there since late 2018, so about three years now. That sounds right for me—I'm way too perfectionist to ever be prolific.

What's your total AO3 word count?

125,744! Apparently it takes me three years to write a novel's worth of words I feel are worth publishing...which also sounds right.

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Three, primarily: The Lost Boys, Stranger Things, and Supernatural. Mostly Stranger Things, since I was pretty enmeshed in the Harringrove community for about a year and a half, though these days I'm hanging out more with the SPN crowd. We'll see if that translates to more fics.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1.) Sunflower (524) 2.) Quickly, look away (506) 3.) We'll Become Who We Meant To Be (383) 4.) Too Young To Fall In Love (333) 5.) When the Waters Start to Cross (283)

First, what's not surprising: all are Stranger Things/Harringrove works. I'm a little surprised to see that "Sunflower" had edged out "Quickly" as my most-kudosed story, for years it was the other way around—but maybe that's actually not that surprising—part of the reason I haven't been as active in the fandom is that I really love the darker and more complex renditions of Billy Hargrove's character (a la "Quickly") and since S3 aired it seems like the fashion has moved more towards more lighthearted fluff (a la "Sunflower"). Still, both are pretty undemanding smut, so it makes sense that they're on top; similarly, I'm not surprised to see "Too Young To Fall In Love" in the top five either.

I am a little surprised that "We'll Become Who We Meant To Be" is #3—it's honestly close to genfic, there's only the tiniest moment of hinted-at attraction in there. I'm not mad about it, I honestly feel like it's one of my better efforts; on the other hand, "Wake Me Up" was in a similar vein and it's close to the bottom. I guess there's just no telling what's going to catch on...in fairness, a 25K outsider POV novella is a much bigger ask than a 3K short story.

Honestly, I'm probably most surprised at "When the Waters Start to Cross" cracking the top five—it's a 52K+ WIP and a profoundly complex atmospheric existential horror/romance, which is, like, five strikes against it. I'm not mad about it, though—I love that fic, even if it is a huge time and energy suck, and it definitely contains some of my best writing.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do! Sometimes it takes me a while, but I genuinely appreciate people taking the time to leave feedback (even if it's just a string of emoji!). And every once in a while I'll get really thoughtful or incisive comments that spark whole conversations—that's one of the best reasons to write fic!

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

Hmm...to be honest, nothing immediately comes to mind; I love angst but tend to want it to serve a purpose, i.e. it gets a character closer to who they want to be. So most of my endings are at least hopeful. *checks list* It looks like probably my angstiest ending is also my first fic posted, "Blue Masquerade". Poor Michael.

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you've written?

I don't currently write crossovers; I wouldn't rule it out, but frankly I haven't come across an idea that appeals to me. Waaaaaay back in the mists of time I had a Daria/Harry Potter crossover that I was actually pretty proud of, but I got about as far as getting them to Hogwarts and then kinda ran out of ideas, so I never posted it.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not that I can think of? I'm not big-time enough to get hate, haha. Worst I ever got was some rando asking for top or bottom tags, which I just ignored, and one person on "We'll Become" who was like "I don't like this pairing but you did a good job", which kinda had me like ??? thanks, I guess? I did get one comment on "Quickly, look away" from someone who felt like it was in a different headspace from the fic I wrote it as a sequel to, but that didn't strike me as hate, it's a perfectly fair observation.

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

So first off, yes, and second...I recently came across this great Garth Greenwell quote that really gets at what I'm trying to do when I write smut:

In America in 2019 we are inundated with images of bodies to an absolutely unprecedented degree—images of eroticized bodies, images of sexual bodies; the Internet makes all our fantasies visible, and it trains us in new fantasies. And yet it also seems to me that our culture suffers from a dearth of representations of embodiedness, by which I mean of bodies imbued with consciousness. I’m not at all antiporn, but sometimes pornography (maybe especially Internet pornography, with its arms race of extremity) seems to want to evacuate bodies of personhood, to present them as objects. I think literature is the best technology we have for representing consciousness, and so I think there’s a kind of intervention that literature can perform in representing sex explicitly: it can reclaim the sexual body as a site of consciousness.

"Embodied porn" is probably the best description I can come up with—I love writing sex precisely because it's such a charged form of communication (Greenwell's words again), because there are things a character can do and say in that context that they never would normally. Like, sex acts are great and all, but what really does it for me is what's going on in their head, what's the history that brought the character to this point, how're they handling the inherent vulnerability and intimacy of this incredibly risky but potentially rewarding moment. Kink (whether through roleplaying, props, costumes, or whatever) is really just another way of adding to that personal meaning, since without the characters' reactions any trappings are meaningless.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of!

Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, although I'd love to work with a translator someday (whether with fic or another context)—I'm fascinated by the inherent puzzles in translating between languages, especially with informal speech and its many idioms and cultural references.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not yet! I'd be open to the idea, but it definitely has to be with the right person...

What's your all time favorite ship?

Isn't that basically like asking a mom to choose her favorite kid? Seriously, I like different things about all of them...which one's getting the most attention depends entirely on mood and headspace and other effectively random variables.

What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

I don't have any I've given up on entirely, yet. Even Waters, as beastly complicated as it is, I've been ruminating on and adding to and arranging in my head lately...

What are your writing strengths?

Atmosphere, character, dialogue. I've said it before, I'm a capital-R Romantic at heart: I love writing settings that reflect and reinforce a character's headspace—while also implying what said character might be missing in their viewpoint.

Something I've noticed—my husband worked for years as a penetration tester, which meant he would regularly have to talk his way past people on a moment's notice. So, unsurprisingly, we both notice people, but he tends to observe their presentation (clothing, accessories, especially ones that're markers of social class and group belonging that allow him to tailor his approach), whereas I notice what they say and how they say it—and, often, what they don't say.

What are your writing weaknesses?

I suddenly feel like I'm in a job interview, haha. Perfectionism is a big one—I have a tendency to feel hopeless and quit if something's taking too long, rather than persisting until I get it sorted, even though some of my best work is stuff where I persisted. Also, I'm big on emotional intensity—which isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but I sometimes read back over my stuff and I'm like "geez, Ambrosia, ease up a bit"...I could definitely use some comic relief in my writing sometimes, but I think I'm often too insecure to try it.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I don't have any in particular—I rarely do it myself, because I don't trust myself to do it properly. (Perfectionism again!)

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Daria, way back in the day. My work is still up on FF.net...sometimes I wonder if anyone's ever going to dig it up and confront me with it, haha. (I doubt anyone will ever care that much...I guess I'm more just curious if my style from twenty years ago is recognizably me.)

What's your favorite fic you've written?

If we're talking about finished fics, probably either "Wake Me Up" or "Young At Heart"—they're both pretty oddball, but both required a fuckton of work and both came out pretty close to what I wanted. But "Waters" is my biggest baby...maybe I'll open up Act III to work on today...

Thanks again for the tag, Ven! I'm going to tag @ihni, @redmyeyes, @twobrokenwyngs, @skybound2, @sambrosia, @shewritesdirty, @introvertia, @coffeeandchemicals, and @anarchist-billy—if you're up for some rumination, I'd love to hear your thoughts on your writing!

[strangerays]

Nothing in Particular Update #3

About seven months and I finished the first draft at 93k!

I always imagined how it would feel to finish a first draft (I’ve been writing novels “seriously” since about 2017) and now that I’ve finally done it, I can say it’s a better feeling than I imagined! Telling my friends and family (and even my doctor, who was really quite excited about it) was an amazing amazing thing. I’m generally pretty nervous to tell people about my work, but I had a really positive reaction. Honestly all of it has me on a creative high (not sure I’m coming down from that any time soon lol).

I’m going back for my last year of school in two days, which means I’m not going to have as much time as I did to write all summer. This is okay, because I’m actually going to take an entire month off of writing! I’m really burnt out - don’t want to start editing a story that’s so near to me if I don’t feel ready. I’ll talk more about editing when the time comes!

In a lot of ways, I found that my life mimicked my art. I think for a lot of people, it tends to be the other way around, but this story did a lot to heal me.

Going to hop right into excerpts now! I’m not going to explain much this far into the story because I would like to try to publish this story (FAR in the future) so I apologize for that! Also, I stopped naming most of the chapters until I go back and edit because there are just SO MANY and I didn’t have the time to stop and think of cool names. Anyways... enjoy!!

(Here is the link to the original masterpost!)

#1

text: Rays of gold curled to the ground, primordial and shy as the fire reeds on the cusps of shallow pool around the bay outside of Mothouse combed them to fine sparkles. I remembered the way Lonan kneeled on the edges of this pool. He never dove in – just blinked slowly as he watched crabs and minnows chase each other in a swirl of sand. I could not resist the water. I’d made it a part of me. My hair was longer then; down to my elbows, fading from dark red to orange and white, soaked always. Lonan let me borrow his shirts when I forgot to bring my own. They hung from my waist, too big for me, and I was warm even as the breeze rocked us inside.

#2

text: The sky was never blue in Point Blink. At least, I couldn’t remember the last time the clouds hadn’t given way to a dark gray mist. Jude was here. I was out of place. I was floating – watching slender, underfed pines wave in the breeze behind houses on the water before they disappeared underneath furls of cloud. Bursts of warm light shone in windows on the bay, like hungry eyes watching for a storm. A group of kids our age chaffed on a rocky expanse, their heads popping over pockets of darkness when they laughed. Froths of cloud stretched across the sky, moving the ground with it. Long stretches of trees and islands far on the other side of our small pocket of ocean looked more like large freight ships. Lights glittered and beamed on the roads and highways that belonged to the city. Pink was starting to show over the horizon. Lonan was on the other side. Somewhere.

#3

text: 

Jude sucked her lips in and flopped onto her stomach so she could see the blue below her feet. Her dark curls draped over her ears and hid her nose.

“I can’t see the bottom of the ocean.” She cupped her fingers with the other hand. “See where the water fades to white and back again? The endless tide. Why do people say the ocean is blue?”

I leaned forward. She was right. Blue ocean climbed up the side of the cliffs and turned the rocks a dark gray; ate the erosion as if from a plate. I’d never had the ocean explained to me that way before.

“I think I like it that way,” I said.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was at the bottom of Point Blink.

#4

text: 

She smiled weakly. “It’s okay. This is just guesswork. Patchwork.”

I wanted to apologize again, but I had a strong guess that it might make her annoyed with me. “It’s kind of like… I’m just waiting for the next bad thing to happen.”

She wrinkled her nose and eyebrows, scrunched up her little face. “That’s dumb.”

“I think it’s a smart way to live.” Sometimes it felt like worry was the only thing that kept me alive. It wasn’t dumb at all.

“You’re going to be fine though. We’re going to be fine. If something bad happens, we’ll deal with it. Don’t let it eat you.”

There was wisdom in what this seventeen-year-old girl on my bed had offered me. I caught it like a gold coin. Before I could reply with anything, she launched into another question. I didn’t want to think much about change anyways.

#5

text:

“Oh. Wow. That’s like, next year.” I sort of laughed.

“A year can be a long time,” Lonan said with a wince. “What do you think?”          

I sighed through my nose and leaned back with him. The sun was going down. Sometimes, my life felt less like a golden hourglass and more like a stopwatch with a broken face.

“For once, I think I agree with your mom.”

Lonan just stared at me, with something like awe.

“I think you should do what you want,” I said.

 “Ray,” Lonan started.

“No,” I interrupted him. “It’s not about me. She’s stopped you from doing anything and everything you’ve wanted to for the last four years, so when you go to college, you’ve got to separate yourself from this place.” I pointed to him. “You’re allowed to do this.”

#6

text: 

Maybe I was just being strange. Lonan was my best friend. It didn’t help that there was a little bit of him in everything – the tide pools, the echo of shells, my broken camera.

Soon, we stood in the center of the field. A breeze whispered through the cattails, fanning against our knees. Ellis loped behind me as I stepped in and out of tire tracks under the cloudless sun. She wasn’t much different than Jude. Her footsteps crunched excitedly behind mine, excited at the prospect of an unprecedented adventure. I’d missed those.

Lonan said he didn’t like to walk in fields because the wind tricked him into thinking that someone was behind him. Every brisk of his heel was a trick of the mind. Sometimes I felt the same way, like I might be haunted.

#7

text: 

The ageless water begged me closer, frizzed my hair and swathed my arms in a sweet, familiar scent. I remembered galloping down to the shore with a childhood friend in one May. Soft piano accompanied croaky lyrics from someone’s radio when we fell chest-first into the water. Static erupted in my head. There had been nothing new for me in Point Blink for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to float. Grass turned into pebbles, and I heard Ellis’ footsteps soften to the beat of the sand. Our eyes crumbled the shells that walled the long expanse of dark sand where waves rolled in. We leaned over like two swans, crunching shells beneath our feet, displaying shells to one another, naming the ones we recognized, and when I looked out at the horizon, I saw blue.

Red plastic cups, cigarettes, and even some broken glass stuck out through the sand as we made our way further down the shoreline, as if someone had thrown a party. My brow furrowed. Maybe this part of the beach wasn’t so abandoned after all.

Between the spit of the waves and dry sand lay some sort of book. Sand trickled out of the pages and onto my shoes when I swept it out of line of an oncoming wave. Ellis was beside me in moments. Shells tolled under her shoes.

#8

*Warning for mention of blood (fake blood and fake knife!!) this takes place on Halloween haha*

text: 

Jude held the container in her palm, kneeled down so we were shoulder to shoulder. Her eyes fixed on the knife in my neck, mine on her hands, then her focused expression. Her fingers tipped my chin up, cold on my skin. I tried not to move. Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking about Dad, or Raven, or Lonan. I only let Jude in – this girl who had come out of nowhere and wrecked me, saved me. And she didn’t know any of that. I didn’t owe anything to her, but I needed her. She kept us afloat when I couldn’t even keep myself above water. Her fingers painted blood over the center of my throat, our breath quiet on each other’s cheeks. She held my shoulder as she set back.               

“Absolutely feral,” she said.

#9

text: 

“Point Blink is all I have. It’s where I am, what I am.” My throat was tight. “It’s all I’ve known. I am happy with my life. And I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to throw all of that away so we can dig up answers. I want to stay.”

 Jude sat there for a moment. I think Florian and Ellis had turned to look at us, because when we went silent, I could no longer heat their hushed whispers, only the sound of water as it rose and rose and rose. I wondered if it would rain.

Jude sat up on her hands, then her knees, then she stood over me.

“Is that what you honestly believe?”

Tears bubbled in her eyes. Blood streaked down her cheeks. I’d been so focused on not crying, I had missed when she started to.

“Point Blink is just the same as anywhere,” she said. The words sat somewhere above her inside her chest, weak and frail, as though they’d been realized a long time ago.

I’d stared into her eyes until they disappeared. She grabbed onto a branch above her and quietly swung herself around a corner. Her footsteps echoed until they dissolved into waves and birds and frogs and left me in the dark.

#10

*Warning for strong language!*

text:

“Why didn’t you tell me how you’d been feeling?” he asked after a few moments of silence. It was beginning to stretch uncomfortably.

“I know I don’t deserve to know,” he added, “but you’ve always put me first.”

I picked at the wood that peeled from the fence.

“I just want you to be okay,” Lonan croaked. ��Please tell me what to do.”

Even when we were together, we still worried about each other. It wasn’t always that way. Maybe that was my fault. I didn’t want to think about it.

 “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I mumbled into the crisp, red air. “To be fair, I didn’t know it like I know now for a long time. I think sometimes I got the same way as a kid. Now I have a name for it, and I still don’t know if it feels right.” I sighed. “I guess… I guess I just thought that was how things were supposed to be. I thought I was only the humming low and the high.”

“Of course that’s not how you’re fucking supposed to be.”

 I coughed on a laugh, wiped away a new set of tears. On the rare occasion that Lonan did swear, he sounded much like he was doing it for the first time.

I hadn’t fully realized what I’d said before Lonan’s hand was around my arm. He pulled me close to his chest. I felt smaller than him; warm and safe. I exhaled and sunk into him, didn’t allow anything else in. I’d almost forgotten what that felt like.

“You’re funny and smart and better than a lot of people.”

And... that wraps up all of my excerpts for the time being! I really enjoyed writing the last four chapters of this book. Of course they aren’t perfect. A lot of the book needs improvement. There are entire characters who are flat and plot lines I just forgot about! Come October, I plan to get back into my edits/rewrite the story.

Really quick before I finish writing this:

I just wanted to thank everyone who read about my story and showed genuine interest in the characters. Had I not received all of this love from people in real life and online, I might never have finished this draft at all. When I started this story, my mental health was really quite bad. (I’m doing a whole lot better these days!!) I guess you could say the idea started as more of a journal entry. All of these characters are like little parts of me coming together to help the main character, and I think there’s something really special about that.

Thank you so much! Good luck on all your creative endeavors! It pays off in the end, I promise :)

tag list (ask to be +/-); @wannabeauthorzofija @a-completely-normal-writer @baguettethebooklover @corkytheguar​ @writeherewaiting @cryptid-s-wips @kingsinking @author-a-holmes

[chierafied]

20 Questions: Writer’s Edition!

Thanks so much for the tag, @blitheringmcgonagall​ and @the-dream-team​! 💙💙💙 I was really hoping to get to do this one lol

***

How many works do you have on AO3

300 (though I’ve yet to post 8 fics from my backlog there)

What’s your total AO3 word count?

1 281 330

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Three. SessKag (Inuyasha), Jily (Harry Potter) and IchiRuki (Bleach)

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

If I did the REAL top 5 fics by Kudos it would be all SessKag and my answers overall are very SessKag heavy as is so I went with top 2 SessKag, top 2 Jily and top 1 IchiRuki instead.

1. Life After Loss

This was not the happily ever after Kagome had always dreamt about. This could not be happening to her, not after everything they had gone through... She never knew that her whole world could screech to a complete halt in a blink of an eye.

SessKag, M, Chapter Fic, 98k words

2. Stranger Than Fiction

The books have been all the craze recently, boasting an epic adventure set in the chaos of Sengoku Jidai. Kagome has steered clear from them; she has spent quite enough time dwelling in the past as is. However, when her roommate and a die-hard fan  of the book series laments the latest plot twist, Kagome realises that the accursed books might be hitting even closer to home than she ever suspected. 

SessKag, T, One Shot, 913 words

3. #Jily

Twitter seemed awash with the hashtag Jily. Lily blinked at in confusion, until she realised it was one of those silly couple monikers people had  bestowed on her and Potter. …Though there was a small dissenting crowd following a tweet from Potter’s bandmate Sirius Black: Jily? Hah! More like LAMES. 

Jily, G, One Shot, 2,991 words

4. Much Tweeting About Crushing

James has a hopeless crush on his neighbour and tweets about it, which is fine. Until Evans follows him. 

Jily, T, One Shot, 3,050 words

5. Miscalculation

Rukia planted her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers. “I want my brother to think we’re dating so I can get him off my back.” Ichigo scoffed at her. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” 

IchiRuki, T, Two Shot, 1,820 words

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yes and no? 😅 For a long time I had a policy that I’d reply to comments if I had something more to say than just “thanks”.

Nowadays I reply to nearly every comment I get on AO3. I feel if the people bother to take the time to comment, the least I can do is thank them and I’ve made some friends in the comment section along the years too. But all that said... since I went on my hiatus I haven’t really been replying to my comments on Dokuga much, the clunky reply system there makes it feel like a big hassle which makes it feel draining. 😅

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hmm, Probably either Foil (SK) or Vagary (SK)?

... And I just realised Vagary is another one I never posted on AO3 argh when will the backlog end???

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Probably Life After Loss, all things considered. 💙

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I’ve never written proper crossover, i.e. characters from different series interacting but I’ve written crossover fusions i.e. charas from series 1 in the setting of series 2, such as Disney AUs etc.

The craziest one would be probably the SessKag Star Wars AU because I’m not a Star Wars fan and know very little of it but it was requested so... 🙈

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I got Anon hate at one point from an anti-shipper on my IchiRuki fic on FFnet, it was wild. 🤣

And maybe not as far as hate but the notorious plot twist on Chain of Love (SK) was very much criticised to the point where even years later when I got a comment notification for Chain I would inwardly flinch. 😅

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I don’t.

I have written and will write a sex scene if the story requires it (most recently in Do I Remind You Of Somewhere You Wanna Be, SK). But they are never explicit in nature, I’m not naming genitals or anything lol. The thing is, if I have to write sex I want to keep it... tasteful, for the lack of a better word. So a term like smut, with connotation to dirtiness would never apply to my writing.

(Back in the day, because I don’t write explicit scenes I did not consider my sex scenes “lemons” either. Which is why I’m still cackling about the fact that Chain once won the 1st place award for a best lemon scene.)

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yes, I have. Chain was posted on Wattpad without my knowledge or permission. It is wild having to file a DMCA over a fanfic. 😂

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! Some of my SessKag one shots have been translated to Spanish, I believe!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I’ve tried, with a close IRL friend of mine, but as our attempts never got very far I wouldn’t say I really have. 😅

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Oof, that’s a tough one. Maybe IchiRuki?

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Probably the Bodyguard AU (JL) and the Shotgun AU (JL)? I love both of these stories a lot but I’m very much in the beginning with them and both are ideas I’ve had for years yet have never really been able to actively work on?

What are your writing strengths?

Hmm. I feel my writing style leans towards short and simple so it’s easily approachable? I think I’m pretty good with dialogue. Sometimes, I can do a lot with very few words. And I think I’m fairly good at slipping in little details or giving a sense of backstory, even if it’s a short one shot?

What are your writing weaknesses?

I suffer from a perpetual lack of motivation that I try to combat with having a writing routine. I’m slow to update because unless I’m inspired which never happens or am on a deadline crunch I am perfectly comfortable just adding 300-500 words to my WIP and calling it a day. I loathe editing so I rarely do much else than a cursory proofread before posting.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

My initial thought is why? 😂 I mean I guess I don’t mind but I feel using another language in the fic should be justified and done in moderation. Personally, I probably wouldn’t write dialogue in another language.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Okay so the first fic I ever actually wrote/published was a 2nd gen arranged marriage fic for The Belgariad and The Malloreon, my favourite book series growing up. The fic, which fizzled out after 2 or so chapters, was deleted years ago lol

SessKag came second. 😉

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

*vaguely gestures at the 300+ fics* It’s pretty much impossible to choose among my children but if you put a gun to my head I’ll say Life After Loss.

Tagging: @drosselmeyerwrites @mythicamagic @sagemcmae @stormielikeweather @wbficaholic

[3wisellamas]

Tagged by @the-golden-ghost

Tagging: Nobody!  :3  If you wanna do this, go ahead and steal it!

How many works do you have on AO3?

23, currently.  I have a WIP that’s getting pretty close, though, so that may tick up to 24 here soon...

What’s your total AO3 word count?

245,354!

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Only two on AO3, Adventure Time and OK KO.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1)  The Robot Diaries, with 433!  The one where PV is learning to stepdad with all six of the Boxbots.

2)  My Big Fat Villain Wedding, 218.  Voxman wedding, ‘nuff said.

3)  POW Con 201X, 143.  KO bonding with his dad and new stepfamily, with a side of lots of trading card, cosplay, and convention jokes.

4)  Daddies, Bosses, and Big Brothers, 138.  Fink and Darrell bonding time!

And finally,

5)  Graffiti, 107.  Darrell being an angsty graffiti boy.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I...do not.  ^^;  Not because I don’t read and appreciate and want to hug my readers for every single one!  It’s just...have to talk...to people...hurrrgh...

(If I get a question, though, I will answer it as soon as I’m able, so I don’t forget and leave them hanging!)

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I’m...not sure I even HAVE one with a super angsty ending?  ^^;  I can write angst, but usually I tend to leave stories on a fluffy final note.

I think Growing Pains might count, though.  It’s pretty much the only one that’s got a sad ending, since growing up is a sad thing.

Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

No, sadly.  ^^;  I tend to stick very close to canon material in general, and crossovers...don’t work so well with that.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

No!  I did get...I think a criticism on my formatting once?  But I got it while I was right in the middle of fixing some glaring formatting issues literally thirty seconds after I published the thing, so I dunno.  I guess I just got lucky, or I’m flying too under the radar to receive hate.

Do you write smut? if so what kind?

I do NOT.  ^^;  I accept that smut is an inevitability in fandom, and nothing wrong with it!  But, it just tends to REALLY squick me out in general, especially when it involves characters I like, so I try to avoid it.  

That said, I have written a couple of scenes where the characters are clearly screwing each other right after it fades to black, in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of way.  But, I will not ever write anything actually explicit.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

No, thankfully!

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Sadly, nope.  ;v;  I would do it myself if I could, but the only languages I really know besides English are French and Japanese, and even then...I’m only barely conversational in the former, and barely still able to form a sentence in the latter.  So, not the best idea...

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Nope!

What’s your all time favorite ship?

...Sparrell.  ;v;  Hey, I am pretty much the only one who even writes them!

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Believe it or not, I’ve had a Radmond fic in progress literally since the month the show ended.  It’s about...75% done?  But I dunno if I’m ever gonna get the inspiration to finish.  ;v;

What are your writing strengths?

Super in-character dialogue, apparently!  I dunno if I’m AS good as people say, but I’m surprisingly good at mimicking other peoples’ tone / manner of speaking IRL, and try to bring that in to copying different characters’ speech and mannerisms to make them sound authentic!

What are your writing weaknesses?

Descriptions.  I am AWFUL when it comes to describing things, since my writing style is very to-the-point, though at least that’s not as bad an issue with fanfiction since readers pretty much know what everything looks like.  ^^;

I also admit I can have issues with pacing, when I get to portions where nothing exciting or funny is really going on or no one’s talking...

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I dunno if I’ve ever done this in a fic, but OCCASIONALLY I’m okay with throwing in a little gratuitous French when I’m writing OC stuff, for funsies.  Or another language, if I’m feeling so inclined, after a ton of research to make sure it’s somewhat understandable (screw Google Translate).  Even French I have to be careful with though, because I’m not a native speaker and am terrified of missing some nuance in there...  ^^;

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

On AO3, Adventure Time.

Before that, though...either NiGHTS Into Dreams or Pikmin, of all things.  Don’t go looking for those, though, they’ve long since been purged off the face of the internet.  And trust me when I say you do NOT want to read the shit I was writing when I was like 11.  ^^;

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Shades of Gray!  AKA that one where Mr Logic is a dad, and has lots of dad feels.

[snarktheater]

Hey, d'you have any French book recs? I'm trying to work on my French, and rn I have downloaded one of my favourite book series' French translations, but I figured maybe books already written in French might work better? Also have you read the Ranger's Apprentice series? 1/2

RA's def flawed - the books' narration does like to point bright arrows at the protagonists' intelligence, and the last few books def have the tone of 'old white man trying to write feminism', although at least he's trying? - and it's aimed more to the younger side of YA, but it is still a very fun series, and I can ignore the flaws fairly easily, at least partly due to nostalgia? This rather long lol but I'm wordy.

I'll start with the second question: no, although every time the series is brought up I have to check the French title and go "oh, right, I've seen these books in stores". But I've never purchased or read them. It sounds like something I probably would have enjoyed as a teen but I just missed the mark, and these days I'm trying to drown myself in queer books, so that probably isn't happening.

As for your first question, geez, I haven’t read a French book in years, so this is gonna skew middle grade/YA, though that may not be so bad if the point is to learn the language. I will also say that as a result, these may read a little outdated.

I'll put it under a cut, even if Tumblr has become really bad with correctly displaying read mores. Sorry, mobile crowd.

It's also likely that old readers of the blog will have seen me talk about most of these. I don't feel like going through old posts.

One last thing: while I was curating this list I took the time to make a Goodreads shelf to keep track of those.

The Ewilan books by Pierre Bottero

(It's a testament to how long ago I read these books that these are not the covers of the edition I own, and I can't even find those on Google. I'm settling for a more recent cover anyway since it'll make it easier to find them, presumably)

There are at least three trilogies (that I know of) set in the same world.

The first trilogy is essentially an isekai (so, French girl lands in parallel fantasy world by accident) with elements of chosen one trope, though I find the execution makes it worth the while anyway.

The second trilogy is a direct sequel, so same protagonist but new threat, and the world gets expanded.

The third one is centered around a supporting characters from the previous books, and the first couple of books in it are more her backstory than a continuation, though the third one concludes both that trilogy and advances the story of the other books as well.

Notably these books have a really fun magic system where the characters "draw" things into existence. It's just stuck with me for some reason.

A bunch of stuff by Erik L'Homme

I have read a lot of this man's books, starting with Le Livre des Etoiles.

They also skew towards the young end of YA, arguably middle grade, I never bothered to figure out where to draw the line. They're coincidentally also using the premise of a parallel world to our own (and yes, connected to France again, the French are just as susceptible of writing about their homeland), but interestingly are set from the point of view of characters native to the parallel world.

It also has a very unique magic system, this one based on a mix of a runic alphabet and sort-of poetry. I'll also say specifically for these books that the characters stuck with me way more than others on this list, which is worth mentioning.

This trilogy is my favorite by Erik L'Homme, but I'll also mention Les Maîtres des brisants, which is a fantasy space opera with a pirate steampunk(?) vibe. I think it's steampunk. I could be mistaken. But it's in that vein. It's also middle grade, in my opinion not as good, but it could just be that it came out when I was older.

Another one is Phaenomen, which was a deliberate attempt at skewing older (though still YA). This one is set in our (then-)modern world and centers a group of teens who happen to have supernatural powers. I guess the best way to describe it is a superhero thriller? If you take "superhero" in the sense of "people with individualized powers", since they don't really do a lot of heroing.

...I really need to brush up on genre terminology, don't I.

The Ji series by Pierre Grimbert

This one is actually adult fantasy, though it definitely falls under "probably outdated". It is very straight, for starters, and I'd have to give it another read to give a more critical reading of how it handles race (it attempts to do it, and is well meaning, but I'm not sure it survives the test of time & scrutiny, basically).

If I haven't lost you already, the premise is this: a few generations ago, a weird man named Nol gathered emissaries from each nation of the world and took them to a trip to the titular Ji island. Nobody knows what went down here, but now in the present day, someone is trying to kill off all descendants from those emissaries, who are as a result forced to team up and figure out what's going on.

I'm not going to spoil past that, though I will say it has (surprise) a really unique magic system! I guess you can start to piece together what my younger self was interested in. Which, admittedly, I still am.

Once again, this one also has a strong cast of characters, helped by rich world building and the premise forcing the characters to come from many different cultures (though, again, I can't vouch for the handling of race because it's been too long).

The first series is complete by itself, though it has two sequel series as well, each focusing on the next generation in these families. Because yes, of course they all pair up and have kids. Like I said: very straight.

A whole lot of books by Jean-Louis Fetjaine

OFetjaine is a historian, and I guess he's really interested in Arthurian mythos especially, because he loves it so much he's written two separate high fantasy retellings of them! I'm not criticizing, mind you, we all need a hobby.

The former, the Elves trilogy (pictures above) is very traditional high fantasy. Elves, dwarves, orcs, a world which is definitely fictionalized with a pan-Celtic vibe to it. The holy grail and excalibur are around, but they're relics possessed by the elves and dwarves with very different powers than usual. Et cetera.

Fetjaine also really loves his elves (as the titles might imply), and while they're not exactly Tolkien elves, there's a similar vibe to them. If you like Tolkien and his elf boner, you'll probably like this too. And conversely, if that turns you off, these books probably also won't work for you.

This series also has a prequel trilogy, centered around the backstory of one of the main characters. I...honestly don't remember too much about it, but I liked it, so, there you go, I guess.

I said Fetjaine did it twice. The other series is the Merlin duology, which, as the title implies, is a retelling of Merlin's story. Note that Merlin is also in the other trilogy, but it's a different Merlin; like I said, completely different continuities and stories.

This one is historical fantasy, so it's set in actual Great Britain, and Fetjaine attempts to connect Arthur to a "real" historical figure...but, you know, Merlin is also half-elf and elves totally exist in Brocéliande, so, you know. History.

Okay, that's probably enough fantasy, let me give some classics too.

L'Arbre des possibles et autres histoires - Bernard Werber

Bernard Werber is a pretty seminal author of French sci-fi and I should probably be embarrassed that the only book of his that I read was for school, but, it is a really good one, so I'll include it anyway.

It's a novella collection, and when I say "sci-fi" I want to make it clear that it's very old school science fiction. It's more Frankenstein or Black Mirror than Star Trek, what we in French call the anticipation genre of science fiction: you take one piece of technology or cultural norm and project it into the future.

It has a pretty wide range of topics and tones, so it's bound to have some better than others. My personal faves were Du pain et des jeux, where football (non-American) has evolved into basically a wargame, and Tel maître, tel lion, where any animal is considered acceptable as a pet, no matter how absurd it is to keep as a pet. They're both on a comedic end, but there's more heartfelt stuff too.

L'Ecume des Jours - Boris Vian

(no cover because I can't find the one I have, and the ones I find are ugly)

This book is surrealist. Like, literally a part of the surrealist movement. It features things such as a lilypad growing inside a woman's lungs (and, as you well know, lilypads double in size every day, wink wink), the protagonist's apartment becoming larger and smaller to go with his mood and current financial situation, and more that I can't even recall at the moment because remembering this book is like trying to remember having an aneurysm.

It is also really, really fun and touching. Oh, and it has a pretty solid movie adaptation, starring Audrey Tautou, who I think an international audience would probably recognize from Amelie or the Da Vinci Code movie.

I don't really know what else to say. It's a really cool read!

Le Roi se meurt - Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco is somewhat famous worldwide so I wasn't even sure to include him here. He's a playwright who wrote in the "Theater of the Absurd" movement, and this play is part of that.

The premise of this play is that the King (of an unnamed land) is dying, and the land is dying with him. I don't really know what else to say. It's theater of the absurd. It kind of has to be experienced (the published version works fine, btw, no need to track down an actual performance, in my humble opinion).

The Plague - Albert Camus

You've probably heard of this one, and if you haven't, let me tell you about a guy called Carlos Maza

I'm honestly more including this book out of a sense of duty. The other three are books I genuinely liked and happen to be classics. This book was an awful read. But, um. It's kind of relevant now in a way it wasn't (or didn't feel, anyway) back in 2008 or 2009, when I read it. And I don't just mean because of our own plague, since Camus's plague is pretty famously an allegory for fascism, which my teenage self sneered at, and my adult self really regrets every feeling that way.

Okay, finally, some more lighthearted stuff, we gotta talk about the Belgian and French art of bande dessinée. How is it different from comic books or manga? Functionally, it isn't. It really comes down more to what gets published in the Belgian-French industry compared to the American comics industry, which is dominated by superheroes, or the Japanese manga industry, which, while I'm less familiar with it, I know has some big genre trends as well that are completely separate.

The Lanfeust series - Arleston and Tarquin

This is a YA mega-series, and I can't recommend all of it because I've lost track of the franchise's growth. Also note that I say "YA", but in this case it means something very different from an American understanding of YA. These books are pretty full of sex.

No, when I say YA I mean it has that level of maturity, for better or worse. The original series (Lanfeust de Troy) is high fantasy in a world where everyone has an individual magical ability but two characters find out they're gifted with an absolute power to make anything happen, and while it gets dark at times, it's still very lighthearted throughout, and the humor is...well, I think it's best described as teen boy humor. And it has a tendency to objectify its female characters, as you'll quickly parse out from the one cover I used here or if you browse more covers.

But still, it holds a special place in my heart, I guess. And on my shelves.

The sequel series, Lanfeust des Etoiles, turns it into a space opera, and goes a little overboard with the pop culture reference at times, though overall still maintains that balance of serious/at times dark story and lighthearted comedy.

After that the franchise is utter chaos to me, and I've lost track. I know there was another sequel series, which I dropped partway through, and a spinoff that retold part of the original series from the PoV of the main love interest (in the period of time she spent away from the main group). There was a comedy spin-off about the troll species unique to this world, a prequel series, probably more I don't even know exist.

Les Démons d'Alexia

Something I can probably be a little less ashamed of including here.

Some backstory here. The Editions Dupuis are a giant of the Belgian bande dessinée industry, and for many, many years I was subscribed to their weekly magazine. That magazine was (mostly) made up of excerpts from the various books that the éditions were publishing at the time; those that were made of comic strips would usually get a couple pages of individual scripts, while the ongoing narratives got cut into episodes that were a few pages long (out of a typical 48 page count for a single BD album). Among those were this series.

For the first few volumes, I wasn't super into this series, probably because I was a little too young and smack dab in the middle of my "trying to be one of the boys" phase. But around book 3 I got really invested, to the point where I own the second half of the series because I had canceled by subscription by then but still wanted to know more.

Alexia is an exorcist with unusual talents, but little control, who's introduced to a group that specializes in researching paranormal phenomena, solving cases that involve the paranormal, that kinda stuff.

As a result of the premise, the series has a pretty slow start since it has to build up mystery around the source of Alexia's powers, but once it gets going and we get to what is essentially the series' main conflict, it gets really interesting.

Plus, witches. I'm a simple gay who likes strong protagonists and witches.

Murena

There was a point where my mtyhology nerdery led me to look for more stuff about the historical cultures that created them, and so I'd be super into stuff set in ancient Rome (I'd say "or Greece or Egypt" but let's face it, it was almost always Rome).

Murena is a series set just before the start of Emperor Nero's rule. You know, the one who was emperor when Rome burned, and according to urban legend either caused the fire or played the fiddle while it did (note: "fiddle" is a very English saying, it's usually the lyre in other languages). He probably didn't, it probably was propaganda, but he was a) a Roman Emperor, none of whom were particularly stellar guys and b) mean to Christians, who eventually got to rewrite history. So he's got a bad rep.

The series goes for a very historical take on events, albeit fictionalized (the protagonist and main PoV, the titular Lucius Murena, is himself fictional) and attempts to humanize the people involved in those events. Each book also includes some of the sources used to justify how events and characters are depicted, which is a nice touch.

It's also divided in subseries called "cycles" (books 1-4, 5-8 and the ongoing one starts at 9). I stopped after 9, though I think it's mostly a case of not going to bookstores often anymore. Plus it took four years between 9 and 10, and again between 10 and 11. But the first eight books made for a pretty solid story that honestly felt somewhat concluded as is, so it's a good place to start.

[forevercloudnine]

pre-new 52 scarebat ship meme

 (I actually have no idea what to call this period of comics. The dc wiki calls this the “New Earth” universe... it’s like, everything after Jason Todd was retconned out of being a circus acrobat up to Flashpoint. Anyway like a month ago I asked @heroes-etc​ to send me questions for this version of scarebat from this ship meme but then forgot that I did it because I got distracted by other ships. Sorry Jonathan...)

4. Who can’t keep their hands to themselves?

Bruce does DO physical affection — I mean, how many comic panels do we even have of him making out with Catwoman on rooftops — but he’s not especially forthcoming with it. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that his love interests are more likely to instigate contact than he is, especially when that love interest is a villain like Selina or Talia (can you even IMAGINE him trying to take them off guard in a fight by grabbing their face for a kiss? Because I cannot).

He does occasionally instigate affection with his children/proteges, though usually it’s in instances where they obviously need comfort. Bruce isn’t always great at handling complicated emotional situations, but grief and trauma is something he understands very intimately, and he never hesitates to physically reassure people who are in that kind of pain.

In situations where someone isn’t in the active process of being traumatized, he’s less forward with physical affection. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll reject it if it’s instigated — depending on who you are, of course. I’m guessing he wouldn’t put up with hugs from random members of the Justice League. Superman is his best friend and he would probably try to wiggle out of 90% of Kal hugs if doing so was physically possible. Most of his loved ones don’t really spring physical affection on him unless they need it or it’s an especially emotional moment, however. It’s not really Bruce’s primary love language. 

Jonathan seems even less physically affectionate than Bruce, though obviously doesn’t have a lot of opportunity to demonstrate how he feels either way. Master of Fear offers the only example of him expressing explicitly romantic affection that I know of (unless you count his terrorizing Becky Albright in New Year’s Evil as physical affection, which... might be how he’s thinking of it...?), and it’s entirely instigated by Sherry Squire. He does ask her to the Halloween party, but she’s the one who takes him down to the furnace room for some “one-on-one” time and tells him to kiss her. 

He also notably does not actually get a chance to kiss her, mainly because the whole thing was a prank meant to humiliate him. This might be why he doesn’t try to instigate anything similar with his next crush, Dr. Linda Friitawa (again, unless you count Becky Albright, but I can’t find New Year’s Evil to read anywhere so my only knowledge of his interaction with her comes from Tumblr. I’m like 80% sure he was supposed to be interested in her romantically, but asking someone to do supervillainy with you isn’t the most direct way to express attraction, so I’m taking that as more obliqueness from Jonathan).

He never expresses any direct romantic interest in Linda, but at the very least he clearly cares about her more than he cares for most people, since he, like. Defends her in conversation and apologizes to her for things that aren’t even his fault. Which means a lot, coming from a sociopath with no regard for human life. They do hold hands at one point, but Linda reaches out to him first, and he waits to see if she’s going to back away from his reciprocated touch before he reaches for her other hand. 

He never instigates anything further with her, possibly out of fear of rejection. Unfortunately, it turns out that this was a good call, because Linda was only pretending to be nice to him while Penguin was paying her to experiment on Jonathan without his knowledge. When Batman figures out what they’re doing, she immediately fucks off and starts dating Black Mask.

Even more unfortunately, his 45 seconds of hand holding with Backstabby McMad Scientist is probably the only mutual physical affection Jonathan has ever experienced in his entire life, so honestly I have no idea if he would be more into it as a concept if it was offered to him more often. He’s clearly willing to return physical contact when it’s initiated by someone else, so maybe it is something he would seek out in an actual relationship? He DOES get handsy with Bruce when he has Batman tied up sometimes. 

9. What is the most embarrassing thing they have done in front of each other?

Trip out on fear toxin, both of them, hands down. There are few things more embarrassing than, as Jonathan aptly describes it, being “reduced to whimpering quivers” in front of your enemy. Especially an enemy who’s presumably jotting down notes on your worst fears, since Batman/Scarecrow fights tend to just be competitions in who’s more frightening.

11. What do they hide from one another?

I mean, obligatory mention of the fact that Bruce hides things from absolutely everyone (with the possible exception of Alfred, because Bruce trusts him as completely as he is capable of trusting anyone, and also because it’s really hard to hide things from a parent whose involved in every aspect of your life and already knew you before you developed your pathological need to obfuscate your feelings and intentions).

As Wonder Woman pretty aptly describes during the Tower of Babel arc, even Bruce’s closest allies are never going to hear the full story from him. So it’s deeply unlikely he’d ever be 100% truthful with a supervillain, even if they got close AND Jonathan reformed. 

But it’s notable that Jonathan’s fear toxin has actually given him a more honest look into Bruce’s psyche than he would ever purposefully give to people who aren’t close family members. And by “close family members” I again pretty much just mean Alfred. Unfortunately for Bruce, nothing forces emotional transparency like mind altering drugs. Fortunately for Jonathan, nothing forces emotional transparency like mind altering drugs! Not that I’m recommending that anyone drug a romantic partner into being honest with them. But Jonathan is a trained psychiatrist, so I assume his psychological know-how combined with insights gleaned from the dozens of “sessions” he’s had with Batman in the past would leave him more prepared than most to decipher the mystery that is Bruce Wayne. (@heroes-etc: riddler is SEETHING.)

Jonathan meanwhile is more than capable of putting together a clandestine scheme, but in respect to himself he’s actually pretty straightforward. Though his driving motivation in this continuity gets more and more complicated over time, from the early 90’s “I just like fear” to the early 2000’s “my Granny tortured me with birds when I was a child and now I’m obsessed with inspiring the same fear and submission she forced on me onto others,” what doesn’t change is his willingness to monologue about it to anyone who’s listening.

Also, anything that Jonathan is unable or unwilling to go into detail on, Bruce is more than capable of puzzling out himself. In Scarecrow: Year One he successfully tracks down Jonathan’s old home to recover and read through Granny Keeney’s diary, and after Scarecrow’s Master of Fear origin was published, it’s clear that Bruce has done his research on Jonathan’s childhood. There’s even a (presumably unintentionally) hilarious scene where Bruce pauses mid-rescue of a man that Jonathan has kidnapped and traumatized with fear toxin to lecture him on having bullied Jon in high school.

Is this really the time, Bruce???

(@heroes-etc: oh 100% he nailed that timing.)

13. When do they realise they should get together?

Well, circling back to Tower of Babel, it’s revealed when Ra’s al Ghul has Talia steal Bruce’s contingency plans for defeating the Justice League that Bruce has “borrowed” Scarecrow’s fear toxin in case he has to take down Aquaman.

This was back when Scarecrow had a number of different toxins that induced different phobias, or made people hallucinate hyper-specific nightmare scenarios (such as “being eaten alive by roaches from the inside,” for some terrible reason). Batman notes in his contingency files that Scarecrow has already done the work for him; presumably Jonathan had already designed a formula to induce hydrophobia, so all Bruce had to do was steal a vial of it from a crime scene.

(The sentence “Why not make him incapacitate himself... perhaps through fear?” alone is like 90% of why I think these men would get along like burlap on fire if they ever actually cooperated on something. Also, unrelated, but the polaroid of Jonathan he has in the Aquaman file is weirdly adorable.)

Bruce’s plan for Arthur is incredibly effective, and notably also Bruce’s only contingency that isn’t either inherently lethal or a ruthlessly sociopathic betrayal of emotional vulnerabilities that had been revealed to him in trust and friendship (RIP Kyle Rayner).

(Notably, Bruce’s plans for Kyle and several other leaguers directly involve using their worst fears against them, even without a fear toxin conveniently tailored for this purpose. Bruce just really likes using fear as a weapon against people.)

After Tower of Babel, Bruce obviously needed to create new contingencies, since the whole point is that they were secret plans that no one could see coming. In canon, Bruce goes on to create the A.I. satellite Brother Eye for this purpose (which backfires even worse than his first set of contingency plans, because of course it does). But I think an interesting alternative could have been Bruce tapping Jonathan for more toxin strands tailored to taking down the Justice League. If Bruce Wayne offered to pay Scarecrow’s way out of Arkham in order to develop formulas that could neutralize the world’s most powerful superheroes, is there any way that Jonathan would turn him down? I mean, obviously he would plan on betraying Wayne at some point, and Bruce would similarly be working against Jonathan’s best interests. But maybe if they set aside their “who’s scarier” dick measuring contest to work together for once, they could come to recognize their shared passion: scaring the shit of people.

Also, the Jonathan in this continuity really likes books. And you know what’s a reliably sustainable source of books that can’t be confiscated by the authorities? Dating Bruce Wayne. The manor alone probably has an insane amount of rare books that have been hoarded by his family over the years. It’s like a weird reversal of the Beauty and the Beast, where the rude rich guy who gives a library to the love interest he may or may not have technically kidnapped is the pretty one.

21. Where do they get nervous about going with one another?

If they were dating, I’m guessing Jonathan wouldn’t want to go anywhere in public with Bruce at all. Bruce Wayne is a celebrity bachelor, and celebrity bachelors get a lot of attention, and people who take celebrity bachelors off the market get a lot of NEGATIVE attention. The public reaction to Bruce settling into a committed relationship with anyone would be the kind of weirdly resentful gossipy judgement that the girlfriends of famous princes or actors or musicians always get from tabloids and entertainment television, but in Jonathan’s case it would be a million times worse. Not just because he’s a supervillain, because if there’s any town that would expect its most eligible bachelor to eventually date a supervillain, it’s Gotham. But more specifically because “ugly social outcast” is one of Scarecrow’s most enduring character traits. Not exactly the traditional trophy wife. And though Jonathan’s Scarecrow identity seems to distance him from a lot of the shame he suffered growing up, I’m guessing that the kind of spiteful vitriol that would follow him anywhere he accompanied Bruce would at the least bring back some very unwanted memories.

Bruce probably doesn’t have the same discomfort Jonathan would with being seen together in public. He doesn’t care if people think Bruce Wayne is insane or lacking in judgement as long as they don’t think he’s Batman, and I’m sure he’d find a way to spin “dating a man who prefers to dress exclusively in burlap” into something appropriately characteristic of playboy idiocy. But while he'd definitely respect Jonathan's wishes to stay out of the public sphere, he would probably enjoy any opportunity to bring Scarecrow into Gotham high society, since his presence would definitely shake up a party, and Bruce is generally extremely bored at any social event where he doesn’t have anyone to snark with. And with Jonathan’s scathing wit as entertainment, Bruce might one day fulfill Alfred’s wish and actually make it through an intermission sometime.

I’d say that Bruce would be nervous about taking Jonathan out for “field research,” but I’m sure it would be one of Scarecrow’s requirements for any long term collaboration, so it’s something that he would have to get used to pretty quickly. He would probably endeavor to keep Jonathan away from anything that could retrigger his less healthy behaviors. On the other hand, it’s not like Bruce does that for himself, so it stands to reason that he probably wouldn’t be able to successfully control Jonathan in that regard either. 

It doesn’t help that one of Jonathan’s primary motivations in villainy is his childhood, which is... exactly the same thing that Bruce is fixated on. A significant portion of Scarecrow: Year One is the two of them waxing poetic about how similar they are in this regard. 

Relating to this, even though it might be a terrible idea, I don’t think Bruce would be able to resist encouraging Jonathan to reconnect with his mom. Bruce would never recommend for someone like Cassandra to seek out a relationship with her father, but if someone he cares about has a LIVING parent who WASN’T abusive to them? It seems unlikely that Bruce wouldn’t advocate for reconciliation. Jonathan’s dad obviously never cared about the teenage girl he knocked up or their bastard child, but Karen Keeney is a different story. DC Holiday Special ‘09 makes it clear that Jonathan was taken away from her against her will, and she’s spent a significant portion of her life wracked by guilt imagining what the woman who abused her was doing to her son.  

Ultimately she attempts to commit suicide because she feels personally responsible for every terrible thing her son has ever done, which is tragic because really she’s the only member of the Keeney family completely blameless in the creation of the Scarecrow. In Scarecrow: Year One Jonathan clearly resents her for leaving him and moving on to have another baby that she actually did keep, which I would call a really paranoid case of jumping to conclusions if it didn’t seem extremely likely that Granny Keeney told him his mother didn’t want him and left him to be tortured on purpose.

(Side note, it is REALLY weird how young Karen Keeney is depicted in Scarecrow: Year One. At times her son looks older than she is, and it doesn’t help that her second born child is an infant for some reason. Even if Jonathan is only thirty years old here, then unless she had him at younger than fourteen, she should already be in her mid-forties. Why did she only have a second child so late in life? The implication with her abusive husband is that she ended up getting trapped in a bad relationship for survival when her family kicked her out as a teenager for disgracing the family by having Jonathan. It would make way more sense for her child with him to be at least in elementary school. Also the scene would have been way more interesting if Scarecrow’s sister was old enough to talk.)

Thankfully Deadman manages to convince Karen to hold on to life long enough for someone to call 911, and she ends up surviving the suicide attempt. But were Jonathan ever to reform, it seems like reconciliation would be really healthy for both of them, since miraculously Karen still seems to care about Jonathan despite everything he’s put her through, and they’re both clearly still suffering from the after effects of Mary Keeney’s abuse. 

Bruce would be enthusiastic about this prospect for obvious reasons, although he would presumably still be nervous about the possibility of everything going terribly wrong. And even if everything went perfectly right, he would STILL be nervous, because everytime Jonathan goes to see his mother there’s a chance that she will mention the time that she kissed Batman full on the mouth. And that is not information you would ever want your psychologist boyfriend to know, unless you want to be mocked with Freudian buzzwords for the rest of your natural life. 

(...This would also count as a thing that Bruce hides from Jonathan.)

[thatfeanorian]

I was tagged to do this writer game by @arofili! thank you!!

how many works do you have on AO3?

33 (counting my two unrevealed TSRBs)!

what’s your total AO3 word count?

177758 (wow somehow thats only a third of what I’ve written)

how many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

I’ve written for.... literally one fandom published and 5 unpublished. We’ll stick with published since I don’t want to expose myself lmao: Just Silmarillion because I’m a high key nerd. That and the whole fandom and work facinates me to the extreme because it is so open ended and nearly any interpritation of the text can be canon!

what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

All The Ways To Love - 198 (a longfic about Maedhros and Fingon in an arranged marriage finding exactly what they need in each other, side appearances by baby feanorians)

Make You Mine (the way you should be) - 99 (a short Kidnap Family fic featuring prophetic dreams E&E who have known Maedhros and Maglor would always be coming for them and loved them for it)

Fëanor Finds Out Sort Of But Not Really - 78 (another Russingon fic about Maedhros and Fingon’s secret relationship being found out at the consequences that go along with that)

From The Ashes, Rising - 69 (a 13k four chapter fic-- medium length?-- about Maedhros and Fingon growing up and falling in love, a Modern AU.)

the difference between you and I - 69 (a kidnap dads fic about E&E’s first night with Maedhros and Maglor and how they began to understand that their first impressions might not have been right.)

do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Always. Comments are one of the best things I, as an author, can receive and I adore each and every person who takes time to put their thoughts and appreciation into words. Thank you so much to all of you who have done that for me!!

what’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hooooo boy that’s a hard one. So many of mine have angsty endings on purpose because pain is always fun. Still if I had to pick one, I would choose Learn Your Place, another fic in my Modern AU “To Build the Bonds That Tie,” featuring middle school age Maedhros questioning his sexuality and being told that he doesn’t belong.

do you write crossovers? if so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

Very rarely, and I almost never publish them. The only one I have published as of right now is very old and embarrassing so I won’t link it but it was about Finrod, Turgon, and a self-insert OC being tossed into The Hobbit to try to retrieve the silmaril-arkenstone.

have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yes I actually got my first bit very recently and I laughed so hard I almost threw up. I just don’t understand why people keep reading my fics if they know from the first few sentences they don’t like them. I’ve read my fair share of fics that weren’t my style and somehow I’ve never left a single piece of hate on any of them.

do you write smut? if so what kind?

Absolutely. I write everything from very kinky sex to soft aftercare and all the variations in between. The one thing I absolutely refuse to do is non-con although I am okay with sex used as a method of torture. I love love love writing LGBTQ+ themes and do my best to incorporate as much diversity as I can into all my pieces NSFW and otherwise just because they’re not realistic if I don’t.

have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of.

have you ever had a fic translated?

 I’ve gotten one request but the person who asked dropped it and never got back to me :(

have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes! A few of my fics are based off of an old RP server I was in with a couple friends and so as such the ideas are theirs as well as mine and I at least consider the fics co-written.

what’s your all time favorite ship?

.....if you can’t guess.... go take a look at my AO3 (I’ll give you a hint 90% of my fics contain this ship)

(it’s russingon)

what’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

My (first) Modern AU. I have it two thirds finished and only a third published but the entire idea is so enormous that I don’t think I will possibly be able to finish it. I adore my baby and I’ll do my best but I think I made the right decision splitting it into seperate fics so that we all can enjoy the parts I do get out instead of waiting ages for things to go in chronological order.

what are your writing strengths?

I adore writing emotion and description! I feel most comfortable writing long winding explanations of the scenery and people that put you (as people have told me) right in the scene.

what are your writing weaknesses?

oh my god smooth dialogue. I struggle so much it’s painful. That’s the part of any fic that takes me the longest because I sit there saying each part out loud to myself like it’s a play and trying to decide if it’s at all reasonable.

what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Yes! Absolutely. I love including in-verse languages in my writing in both names, pet names, and even small sentances, but it really really bothers me when people will go on a winding speech or a chunk of dialogue in another language and then have to translate the whole thing at the bottom. Another huge pet peeve of mine is when people use words in other languages and then *don’t* translate them at the bottom. I can’t at all get the full vibe of the fic if there’s words I don’t understand!

what was the first fandom you wrote for?

Uhhhhhhhhhhhh.... I wrote a self insert fic when I was 10 about this one elf statue at the Santa’s Village Amusement Park in NH (please don’t ask)

but if that doesn’t count --please tell me it doesn’t-- then PJO and I still write the occasional fic for them now because PJO is just iconic.

what’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Omg that’s a hard one. I really struggled picking just one because there’s so many that I’m proud of but if I had to pick a genuine favorite I’d say... Inure, a fic I wrote a couple months ago detailing one of the darkest experiences of my life from Maedhros’s perspective. It was both incredibly hard to write and extremely cathartic for me and will remain one of the most terrifying things that I have ever had the courage to publish.

Mind the tags though, it is quite dark and can be triggering if you’ve had an experience similar to mine!

I’ll tag.... @findrahil, @sianascera, @admirablemonster and @secretlythranduil if any of y’all feel up to it!

[electricshoebox]

writing tag

Tagged by the lovely @adventuresofmeghatron, thank you!

Tagging: @junemermaid, @molliehaswords, @desynchimminent, @valkyriejack, and @mercurymiscellany​, if you’d like to do it!

1.  How many works do you have on AO3? 

39. Holy shit. 

2.  What’s your total AO3 word count?

533,274 words. Holy shit.

3. What are you top 5 fics by kudos?

How to Share a Bed Without Killing Each Other: a Love Story (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, 5 Chapters, Complete) The trials and tribulations of literally sleeping together.

Rivers in the Sand (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) The Hissing Wastes unsettles Bull’s memories, and when he and Dorian are trapped together by a fallen pillar, Dorian helps him deal.

a soft place to land (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) When a letter from his father sets him off, Dorian turns to Bull for a distraction.

Always Good at Bad Ideas  (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) Bull gets injured fighting a dragon, which leaves Dorian frantic enough to blurt out the one thing he was trying to keep to himself.

Flashpoint (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) “One time he got so excited he set the curtains on fire.”

4. Do you respond to comments?  Why or why not? 

Yes, always! I’ve seen various opinions on whether authors should, but to me, engaging with and getting excited with readers is half the fun and half the point. I also just really want people to know how much it means to me not only that they read, but that they take the time to leave a comment. Comments are hard to write. I completely sympathize with that, sometimes you just don’t know what to say or how to say it, and I absolutely don’t begrudge anyone that doesn’t. It just means a lot to me when people do, even when it’s literally just “This was cool!” or something, and I want them to know that it’s appreciated!

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hmmm. I guess that sort of depends on your definition of angsty. None of them have directly tragic endings, it’s just not in me to write that way, but I have one or two with open or less definitely, obviously happy endings. The rarepair DA2 oneshot I wrote for Merrill/Orana, Counting the Cost, has the most open ending, left completely up to interpretation. The Inception AU DAI fic I wrote for Dorian/Bull, In the Shadow of Dreams, has what I think of as an optimistic ending, and less a happy one. I tried to end that one with more romance, but it just didn’t fit the tone of the rest of the fic, so a quiet ending that signals a road to recovery was what I chose instead.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Most all of my oneshots have pretty happy endings. I guess I’m tempted say A Line in the Sand, my Deacon/MacCready start-from-scratch slow burn novel, just because it goes from antagonists to lovers and has the longest road with the most earned happy ending. I feel like the long struggle to get there makes it feel happier. 

7. Do you write crossovers?  If so, what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

Not really. Instead I’m sometimes tempted into AUs based on other media, but not full blown crossovers with actual different characters meeting. Even then, I’m really picky in what I enjoy. I’ve only written one, the Inception AU for Dragon Age that I mentioned above. Honestly, it requires no knowledge of Inception at all. I really just stole a bunch of concepts from it and then made my own modernized Thedas around them.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Thankfully no! I’ve received one or two kind of odd comments, but otherwise I’ve been very lucky and everyone’s been really nice.

9.  Do you write smut?  If so, what kind?

Hell yeah! I’ve written many kinds, really, whatever I feel like or whatever fits the fic. I’ve done plenty of your typical smut. I branched out into light BDSM with several of my Dorian/Bull fics, as well as waxplay and praise kink. I’ve also done some roleplay in the vein of “established relationship pretending to be strangers meeting at a bar” for Deacon/MacCready with By Any Other Name.

10.  Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. 

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! Two of my Dorian/Bull fics, Wishing Stars and No Patron Saint of Silent Restraint, both by the same lovely person: landanding on AO3. I don’t think I stopped flailing for a solid day when I got the request for permission either time.

12.  Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not since pre-AO3 days, beyond collaborating in a tabletop setting. I’m not completely opposed to the idea but it would have to be someone I felt really, really comfortable with and with whom I have really good communication. I’m really particular about my writing, and I’d need to know someone’s emotional comfort level with trading and changing and even eliminating ideas.

13.  What’s your all-time favourite ship?

Oh god that’s honestly really hard. I’ve written the most for Dorian/Bull and that ship will always have a special place in my heart. But I did write my first full-length novel for Deacon/MacCready, and they’ve already got me in the middle of my second. So they’re the ship that taught me I could do that, and they’re my beloved rarepair. There are a few more I absolutely love, but I think those are my top two right now.

14.  What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Definitely Uprising. It was the first time I tried longform fic, and it was meant to be an entire retelling of DA2 with Velanna as the Justice-bearing character, rather than Anders, because after learning the developers almost took DA2 in that direction, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I had a lot of plans for it, for how Justice might develop differently, for what it might have looked like if elves had been more of the battleground issue instead of mages vs. templars, for some angsty bittersweet long distance Nathaniel/Velanna and some complicated Fenris/Hawke and Merrill/Orana. But I drifted away from Dragon Age fandom in interest a long time ago, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get the steam back for it. I’m proud of how far I did get, though.

15. What are your writing strengths?

I feel pretty confident with dialogue, I can usually make a scene flow with it pretty well and I spend a lot of time trying to be meticulous about character voice. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on my descriptions, which I appreciate and wouldn’t have considered a strength, but my readers have been kind. I think I’m pretty good at including body language, too, though maybe to a fault.

16.  What are you writing weaknesses?

Much as people have been kind on the feedback, I really feel like action scenes are a weakness for me. I don’t enjoy writing them and I struggle a lot to make them feel like they’re flowing over just bulletpointing. I also feel like I struggle to make them exciting. I feel like I struggle with exposition scenes as well, and keeping them interesting over info-dumping. 

17.  What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I’m generally in favor of including them, but with the caution of doing thorough research if it’s not a language I speak. I shy away from it if I can’t be completely sure it’s accurate, because I don’t want to risk putting off a native speaker reader, or saying/doing something offensive. I’d expand that to include anything about another culture, really. For example, I’ve been slowly picking away at writing a Fallout fic for my Sole Survivor Anthony and Preston, and part of what has been slow going is just making sure I’m getting Anthony’s culture right. His parents immigrated from Vietnam, and I want his experiences with them and with his culture to be as accurate and respectful as possible, not falling into any stereotypes but also being allowed to be complicated. 

18.  What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Depends on what we’re measuring. The first fandom I ever wrote fic for of any kind was Sailor Moon. The first fandom I actually put fic on the internet for was Lord of the Rings, on good old fanfiction.net. The first fandom I published on AO3 for was Dragon Age.

19.  What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

God this is such a hard question to answer, my feelings on my writing change so often. I think it’s hard for A Line in the Sand not to be my favorite for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, it’s my first successful novel-length fic, I accomplished a lot with it and learned a lot from it, and it’s a rarepair I got to kind of develop from scratch in my own way. 

But if I look back at my whole repertoire so far, just to branch out from the usual answer, I’d say I’m also really fond of To Have and to Hold, which was the first time I ever participated in a minibang, or really any kind of writing challenge. It’s a Dorian/Bull established relationship fic set during Trespasser, and it’s kind of a meditation on Dorian’s past and present and how they’ve shaped his feelings on love and commitment and marriage, all while he’s trying to decide his future. I’m proud of how it came out, and I think my Dorian voice still holds up okay. Plus I had two incredible artists working with me who put together stunning work for it, and how could I not be super grateful for that? 

It’s funny, most of the top ones up there for kudos are ones that I don’t personally think are my best, it’s a lot of my very early offerings for Dorian/Bull that I think I could improve on a lot of if I tackled them now. I’m grateful people like them but I feel like they’re more an accident of timing, being published early in the ship’s popularity.