#so basically my future is 100% bleak and miserable and i NEED to die before i turn 26

[joy-yet-again]

how am i supposed to confront my fears if even thinking about them makes me have a panic attack 😭

[margridarnauds]

A, F, G, M, S, T, V

THANKS AVERY. 

A. If you could rec a piece of music to accompany one of your fics, what would you pick? Why?

 Yakety Sax for Goosefic. 

Alright, seriously? It’s totally not like I have a playlist or something stored anywhere, because that would be insane, right? 

Illuminated by Hurts - Ah, Ça Ira. “Time waits for no one/So do you want to waste some time/Oh, oh, oh, oh/Tonight?” AKA “Ronan realizing that he might not make it back the next day and trying to get Laz to come to bed and reconcile with him, not necessarily because he wants to SLEEP with him, but because he wants his boyfriend there with him. “Swim with your sorrows/And try delusion for a while/It’s such a beautiful lie” Lazare frantically scribbling out his justifications on the paper, even though he has to KNOW that Artois’ going to abandon him and it’s going to be worthless. “Suddenly my eyes are open/Everything comes into focus/Blinding” GENERALLY I get Laz vibes from this line, with him gradually realizing how important Ronan is to him and that some part of him WANTS the new world that Ronan was, but the last few lines also work for Ronan’s (unstated, in-text, but there in canon) decision to charge in front of du Puget, realizing that he HAS to save Olympe from being orphaned like he was. 

Either Dream of Sky (Dancing Line OST) or Forbidden Friendship (HTTYD OST) - Le Cri. Both of them have that sort of tentative, new feeling where things start out so soft and with that kind of innocence but as time goes on, it becomes so much MORE. 

I’ve Seen Hell (North and South OST)/Ashes (Celine Dion) - Pour la Peine. I’ve Seen Hell is one of my go-to Period Drama songs, but I LOVE how it has that bleak feel while also not being COMPLETELY bleak and miserable, there’s that idea of PUSHING through in spite of it. And Ashes also kind of has a similar vibe, as far as openly asking how...there can be any GOOD after that kind of devastating tragedy (even though a part of me will always seen Ryan Reynolds doing interpretive dancing to it, tbh). Ashes is much more...RELIGIOUS in bent than Solène generally goes with, but I think it WORKS as far as that general feeling of despair and abandonment that she starts off with “Every word shot down in flames/What’s left to do/With these broken pieces on the floor?/I’m losing my voice/Calling on you” 

Wicked Game - Personally, I favor it for A Pressing Matter, though it really works for Peyronan in general. “What a wicked game/To make me feel this way/What a wicked thing to do/To make me dream of you” AKA “Peyrol’s ENTIRE thought process when he realizes that, against his own judgement, he’s gotten attached to Ronan and that that’s a MAJOR weakness. 

F. What stories are you planning for the future?

I have. So many WIPS that I’m DYING to release soon. One is very obviously the Fairy Tale AU, which I’m very pumped about. There’s the one that’s just called “Madame Roland is a Lesbian” that I’m excited for. At some point, I’m going to have to expand the Abomination and the Verse it encompasses, stretching from where we start off in the Beauce in 1777 to at LEAST the early 19th century, possibly into the 1840s. 

Between the Waves is going to get a LOT more added to its Verse, hopefully. I already have at least two WIPS that are partially finished and give a little bit more context to things that are happening in the next few chapters, one from Olympe’s perspective on the pre-canon events that stretches to the post, one from Artois’ on some of the events of PLP, and I either have an Afterlife AU, a Reincarnation AU, or both to wrap it up, possibly with us ending up where we began. (No, not on Marat’s printing press.) I’ve also toyed with fleshing out a little more about how Peyronan got to where we see them in A Pressing Matter, to round out the series. Either way, though, I do intend for this to end up being a VERSE, not necessarily just one or two stand-alones. There’s a lot that’s...going to pop up here or there that I INTEND at least to expand on. I rarely like to leave things HANGING like that. 

There’s also the Peasant Lazare AU which, even though it’s basically a laughing stock among my friends IRL at this point, is still very important to me and I’ve never fully given it up. 

I’m definitely going to expand the Ripples in the Rockpool Verse, HOPEFULLY dipping more into the historical events that are happening around this time and a little more on how the OT3 ended up where they get to be in Back on the Shore. 

There’s a Vampire AU that I’ve been toying with back and forth, and I STILL haven’t given up on The Zombie Apocalypse AU, though I’d like to focus on that one more when I have a fewer WIP count and I can more thoroughly outline it. Also @lehetsz-kiraly and I have toyed around with a Superhero AU that I would 100% like to see get off the ground, and I also am totally planning on toying with the TN crossover as time goes on. I obviously have no idea....WHEN or HOW, but it’s somewhere nebulously on my To-Do list. 

And, of course, the Disneyworld AU. One day, I will finish it. 

G. Where do you think you grew the most this year?

Honestly, I think the drabble challenge was a GREAT opportunity to throw myself into a variety of things that I NEVER would have considered before. I’ve gone from EXCLUSIVELY writing 1789 and Irish Mythology stuff to really working with anything that really vibes with me, which has been VERY exciting. And, between Le Cri, A Pressing Matter, and Back on the Shore, I’ve gotten several things that I’ve been talking about and tossing around for YEARS on the page and out there in some form or another. I’m still going to stick around 1789, of course, that’s still my BABY, but I really got the chance to work with a lot of things I’d have never normally have thrown myself into and had the chance to toy with my style in a way that I normally wouldn’t. 

M. Meta! Have any meta about a story you’re dying to throw out there?

Oh God, there’s ONE THING that I WANT to write the meta for but SPOILERS. That I don’t even know if it’s SPOILERS anymore. (I should honestly get into the habit of asking people “SO WHAT DO YOU THINK’S GOING TO HAPPEN NOW” like a thirteen year old who’s just uploaded their first Wattpad fic, but alas). But, since I’m working on PLP at the moment, have this: 

No, she gets no sleep tonight, her eyes locked on the bayonets as they gleam in the moonlight. She lays and waits and thinks.

Several hours later, a shot rings out in the dark. All the demons of Hell break loose, the only thought on Solène’s mind being that of another night, another volley of shots.

They mean to massacre them all.

The Queen has changed the King’s mind again and they will all be killed.

Every part of her knows it, screaming in her mind as they make their way for the Queen’s quarters, all else, all other thoughts disappearing.

A panicked voice asks them what they think they’re doing and another voice, she doesn’t know if it’s hers or one of the women with her, replies, “We’ll cut off her head, rip out her heart, fry her liver, and that won’t be the end of it!”

They are done with this, done with the queen, and they will take whatever they can get.

They have endured too much pain at this point to just curl up and die.

This wasn’t a fight they wanted to begin, but if it was a fight they needed to survive the night, they could give it to them.

They could give and give and give as they had always done, all of their lives.

A few guardsmen try to stop them, but they disappear beneath the wave of bodies flooding the palace. One of them breaks free, runs and pounds on the door, his bloodied hand staining the expensive, gilt wood as it slams against it before he’s tossed aside. “Save the Queen!”

A door slams ahead of them as they reach the room, the room itself is deserted, except for one woman who rushes in front of them all.

“I am the Queen!”

Solène recognizes the voice even before she can see her in the light of the torches, still wearing the clothing that she’d worn the night before, and she freezes.

So, for this section, I ripped a LOT from the historical record, as far as the threats the women made on the life of Marie Antoinette, the guard slamming on the door, the shot in the dark panicking the mob, BUT I also actually did look up at least one article on mob mentality to try to understand HOW someone would get involved with something like this. And the first thing I focused on was the INDIVIDUAL getting pushed aside in favor of the group. And the main way I ended up TRYING to get that to show through was in Solène’s reaction. 

At first, she starts off as a singular: “She lays and waits and thinks” “The only thought on Solène’s mind,” etc. But then, immediately AFTER that, as the panic sets in, she becomes a PLURAL, “They mean to massacre them all” “They will all be killed,” “they are done with this” “they have endured too much.” And it really reaches its height when they enter MA’s chambers, as she doesn’t even know WHO is speaking. It could’ve been her, it could’ve been the woman by her side, likewise with the guard who’s severely hurt (also, the “wave” of bodies, going back to the overall theme of water that’s there in PLP). She doesn’t know, because at this point, they’re one whole body acting out at the same time.  (There’s one brief point where Solène becomes a “her” again, but it’s only to say that her brain is NOT necessarily...its usual self, “all other thoughts disappearing,” which repeats what she’d also said when the shot first went off; she’s very much acting on INSTINCT here.) 

When does she become Solène again? When Olympe runs in front of her. She and Olympe are not a Thing per se, not at this point, even though Solène’s recognizing that she’s “a little bit in love with her,” but Solène does care enough for Olympe that she was able to be snapped out of it. In the chapter that I currently have sitting in my drafts and that SHOULD be published in the next day or so, there’s a bit where Olympe questions whether Solène would have continued on if she hadn’t been there. Solène says that she doesn’t know, because to HER this unlocked a part of herself that she didn’t really know was THERE, the kind of radicalism that she tends to associate with Ronan and the other revolutionaries (ESPECIALLY Maillard, who is kind of Ronan-By-Proxy here as a vanqueur of the Bastille who is ultimately ineffective when it comes to Solène’s complaints.) Personally? Even though I fully leave it up to interpretation, and everyone’s free to say “No, you’re wrong,” I wrote it with the idea that Solène probably would have done a Hell of a lot more harm had Olympe not been there. 

This is also fully intended as a parallel to Peyronan. (”NO, RACHEL, PEYRONAN ARE A THING? I HAD NO IDEA! THE SPOILERS!”) Both Peyrol and Solène had the same choice in this chapter, at its core: Their goal at hand, or the person they love. Peyrol let the army and his loyalty to the Monarchy get the better of him, Ronan ended up paying the price for it, and, as we see both at the funeral and at the trial at the beginning of the chapter...Laz is BROKEN by it. Solène doesn’t realize why he’s broken and even doubts that he is, because she doesn’t have the perspective, but...LOOK at him. He is not doing Well. He didn’t gain anything from what he did. In a snap-second decision, he chose his career and decades of indoctrination over Ronan, and he ended up losing both. Solène chose to break out of it and save Olympe, even if she was personally endangered by it. It doesn’t mean that one loved their person more than the other one, but it DOES mean that they get very different results. There’s a climb to the light for Laz as well, I’m not going to just...LEAVE him, but it’s going to be much, much longer than Solène’s. 

S. What’s the sexiest thing you wrote this year?

I’ll be honest: I know I have (2) Official Smut Fics to my name now, but I honestly don’t FEEL like anything I’ve written’s particularly SEXY so much as Describing Sex. This isn’t me being a Pretentious Literary Author who Does Not Write Porn, oh no; it’s that I genuinely don’t believe that what I write...qualifies as “sexy”. That being said, despite being only 100 words, “Honey Plunged Into Water” is probably the sexehiest. Which is hilarious because it’s also the kind of thing I would NEVER have written otherwise. There is one...unpublished fic for A Passage Through the Light that features Madame Roland/Marie-Anne that is....very, very gay and is probably honestly the sexiest thing I’ve ever written even without them actually doing the do. 

T. Themes, motherfucker, do you have them? What are they?

Earn Your Happy Ending, the question as far as the difference between society and what someone’s been conditioned to be like VS the individual, uncertainty, unease, that question of how much you really CAN know someone else, that general feeling of the calm before (or even during) the storm and how people can find intimacy then. There’s a lot of the gothic element there as far as the past, and the people who were THERE in the past, never really being...GONE from the narrative. Like, one way or another, they have the tendency to come back, whether it’s as a literal ghost or whether it’s just their skeleton buried underneath a tree somewhere. 

V. Which story was the most viscerally pleasing to write? Tell us your narrative kinks.

This is painfully predictable, but I THOROUGHLY enjoyed every second of writing Forgiveness. To this day, it’s probably the ONE piece of Peyronan stuff (besides Fowl Play!) that I’ve written where I’m, like, 95% happy with the final result, which is REMARKABLE for me. I really, really loved getting to WORK with their relationship and what makes it WORK at the heart of everything, the progression of it, the gradual increase in intimacy, the way they come to have that moment of “We’re in this one TOGETHER,” and an ending that’s HOPEFUL even though there’s still the ever-present promise of the Revolution in the background. All of that is a LOT of what I tend to like in my Peyronan to begin with, so it was really fantastic to just get that all out on the page. It’s one of those moments where I just want to gesture all over the page and go “THESE TWO LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH” even though they still have their bickering and their petty little moments. 

Another one that’s a WIP but that I feel’s far enough along to actually TALK about is the Fairy Tale AU (It has a name, but I tend to feel like announcing its name is jinxing it and I DO desperately want to get it out soon) and...it’s not my usual writing style, it’s not my usual way of doing things. There are some things that I do there that I wouldn’t necessarily do in a usual, realistic fic because it’s a FAIRY TALE that’s being given the 1789 treatment. It was really, really interesting to get to work with some of my favorite fairy tales, see some of the ways they’ve been told and retold throughout the years, especially looking for the ones that focus on commoner protagonists, elements of the gothic and dark fantasy mixed in there with the light. I’m not really that USED to getting to go wild, so it’s been a lot of fun to have one project where the research is less on the minutiae of 18th century life and more on...like....the similarities between the Italian and the Breton versions of The Travelling Companion folkstory.