#so i can't believe so many people read MY longfic because like if i didn't know me i almost certainly wouldn't pick it up LMAO

[eileeny]

For the writing game! 11, 19, 24, 26, 39 💖💖

11. Do you believe in the old advice to “kill your darlings?” Are you a ruthless darling assassin? What happens to the darlings you murder? Do you have a darling graveyard? Do you grieve?

if darlings are characters, not really? i usually write happy endings and those are pretty contingent on little to no dying.

if darlings are sentences/paragraphs/dialogue that i really, really like? absolutely. i have rewritten so many things just because the plot didn't work like i wanted it to. so many beautiful turns of phrase lost to the backspace key... and no graveyard, so they're just lost forever, i'm afraid (and if you can't tell, i do grieve. lots)

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

oh boy. picture this: summer of 2020, first year of the pandemic. i'm sitting at home bored out of my mind. i open ff.net and read my first fanfiction. i write some stuff. i get tired of ff.net and go to ao3. i write more stuff. i publish the stuff.

and thus, a writer is born.

no but really, the reason i started writing was because i was bored and i had inspiration about the stories i wanted to tell in the fandom i wanted to tell it to with the characters i wanted to tell it about. it's been frustrating at times—writer's block is very, very real and happens too frequently for my liking—but i think where my writing is right now is already so much better than it was two years ago because i had to figure out how to get past that mental block. hopefully where i'm going is to longer and longers fics (no hate to short fics, but i love longfic) that other people find interesting and like to read!

24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it?

it really depends on the story. anything that doesn't need to be fleshed out, virtually nothing; anything that requires me to understand how the larger world works (usually the bigger the fic, the more i need to plan), the prep work is meticulous. i'm talking outlines, timelines, schedules for each day, birthdays, days of the week, location trackers, historical accuracy research, pretty much everything so i can avoid having even the smallest plot holes. it's very fun but also time-consuming, so i only do it for the projects i really, really care about.

26. How do you get into your character’s head? How do you get out? Do you ever regret going in there in the first place?

i don't think i'm ever out of a character's head ALJFLSDJFLSDJSL. it's more like i push them to the back of my mind so i can focus on real life problems, but they're always there if i find myself with enough spare time to daydream. i don't really regret going in there because that's how i understand them enough to write the story properly, so whatever happens in there, it's all for the greater good.

39. What keeps you writing when you feel like giving up?

man, that's the question, isn't it?

a lot of the time it's spite, which i know sounds like a terrible way to function, but i only use it to give myself a jumpstart of sorts so i can get to writiing again. also a lot of the time it's the knowledge that only i can tell this story the way i want it to be told, so if i don't write it then no one will.

the third option is that i take a break. i stop writing completely, or i work on a different and unrelated topic, and almost guaranteed by the time a week or two has passed i'll have fresh ideas for the project and be able to implement them exactly how i want. this is probably the most effective at getting results i'm proud of, so i would definitely suggest doing this if you don't feel like writing. just. don't. listen to your brain, it knows what it needs, and sometimes what it needs is some r&r.

[thegeminisage]

hey quick writerly question (your fic writing masterpost has been an invaluable resource to me, btw, it's helped me soooo much): when you started broken road did you know how long it would be, ballpark guess?

WAAAH thank you <333 im so glad its been helpful.... to answer your question: sort of. it's actually a running bit between me and my friends (especially poor @callowyn with whomst i cowrite @cambionverse) that whatever my initial estimate is, that's way too low. so when i set out to do broken road i figured, "ok, somewhere between 50k and 75k. MAYBE 80k or 90k if it really gets out of control!" and then of course it wound up being nearly 110k, which is more than double my lowball estimate. it happens with every single longfic i write - i always underestimate my own verbosity. i don't like to cut things so there's basically no "deleted scene" stuff for me, almost everything that gets to prose format goes into a fic

broken road is an extreme case though, because the idea for that story, when i first conceived it in feb 2019, was to make it gen, because the dean/cas felt like it was slightly off-topic and too big to reasonably tackle while the john stuff was going on. when i picked it back up after nov 5 2020 i had OBVIOUSLY changed my tune because if i didn't write deancas i was going to die, but i also changed my mind about it being off-topic - john is inextricably tied to the feelings dean has about being queer and those feelings are also inextricably wound up in his relationship with cas. (i talked about it in this post and this post, but they're pretty heavy subjects so mind the content warnings.) you can't pull at one of those threads unless you plan on untangling the whole mess.

all that to say, i also frequently joke that a gen version of broken road would have been 30k-40k shorter, lol. so maybe my initial estimate wouldn't have been so off after all!! but yes, i know it would be pretty long but i didn't think i'd hit 100k. and then. i did 💀💀💀