#that post has 58k notes what even is this website

[famousblueraincoatmp3]

yall are going to tell me you really truly cannot cook and that the only way to eat greens healthily is through eating them raw? in my own house

[sanguinarysanguinity]

Fic-Writer / Vid-Maker Meme

Tagged by @educatedinyellow and @gailbsanders, thank you!

Author/Vidder Name: sanguinity

Fandoms You Write For: Lately it’s mostly book!verse Hornblower and ACD!Holmes (although the ACD!Holmes is largely behind the scenes with a long-form WIP that I’ve been focusing on). I also write for assorted small Holmesian fandoms as the whim or prompts take me, and I used to write fairly prolifically for Elementary, before that show wore me into the ground with how persistently they don’t care about Joan Watson. I’ve written a fair bit of Strange Empire, some Doctor Who / Torchwood, and quite a few one-offs in random fandoms, from the Oz books to Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Fandoms I Vid For: Mostly one-offs or small batches that overlap with the fandoms I write for: Holmesian multiverse, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, plus a number of rarer Festivids-qualifying fandoms like The Middleman or Noah’s Arc. 

Where You Post Fic: Most of it is on AO3, excepting some three-sentence and five-sentence fics that I’ve never collected. 

Where You Post Vids: Variously Vimeo, YouTube, and DailyMotion, depending on who threw a fit about what copyrighted music the week I posted it, but all my vids are listed at AO3.

Most Popular One-Shot: “The Sincerity of Dust,” a BBC Sherlock Mystrade flash-fic I banged out one morning and which then went on to eat Cleveland. It has 1400 kudos and is working on 14,000 hits. Its nearest rival is “Score: Q to 12,″ an Elementary flash-fic featuring Sherlock and Joan playing Calvinscrabble, which performed modestly on AO3 but cleaned up on tumblr to the tune of 1700 notes.

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: “Holocene Park,” an Elementary case fic featuring dinosaurs under the streets of New York City. If I’m remembered in the Elementary fandom for anything, it’s probably for this or Calvinscrabble.

Most Popular Vid: “Something Good (Will Come From That),” my Holmes/Watson multiverse vid. It has 10K plays, the AO3 page has 2.5K hits, and the tumblr page has almost 800 notes. It escaped my corner of pseudonym-based AO3-centric fandom and has made the rounds of the Sherlockian scions on Facebook, as well as being rec’d on non-fannish websites in French, German, and Japanese. For a little while there it was making me anxious with how popular it got -- at the height of its popularity, I was worrying my mom was going to email it to me. After it hit it big I almost completely stopped making things for a while, because I was pretty sure that nothing else I made would be even half that good ever again. Happily, that turned out to be a stupid reason to not make things, and so I started making things again.

Favorite Story You Wrote/Vid You Made: Yeah, sorry, no, my brain burns out on “favorite” questions, especially ones that have no criteria. I’ll just refer you to my Fic/Vid Speed-Dating Score Card, which can be construed as a list of my favorite works on various axes, and is still fairly accurate despite being a year old. (Scariest nowadays is probably “Tea for Two,” a Moriarty-centric story from this last round of Holmestice.)

Story You Were Nervous to Post: “Any Service Required,” which is dark Bush/Hornblower porn. I always feel hideously exposed when publishing porn -- I’m nervous about posting it even in the best of cases. But what with this being dark-fic, I was half-expecting the self-appointed morals police who get prescriptive about “healthy” relationships to show up and make a stink. Or along similar lines, I was fearing that followers who are used to a certain kind of thing from me will look at this one, think it base trash, and lose respect for me over it. I’m happy to say that nothing like that has happened so far, and while readership has been light, I’m fine with that: I’d rather a story have a small readership who is genuinely into it than a large readership who isn’t, and I’d like to believe that this story’s small readership is mostly due to people taking a look at the tags and making good decisions about the kind of thing they enjoy reading. 

How Do You Choose Your Titles: BY ANY MEANS I CAN MAKE WORK. My preference is to grab a meaningful phrase from the text, but I’ll also use quotes and popular phrases, sometimes straight-up and sometimes with a twist, if it seems a decent fit for the story. Ideally, a title will speak to some deeper truth about the story, but when push comes to shove, I’ll settle for a title that is short, clean, and memorable: basically, anything that I and others can remember without having to look it up all the damn time. (This is my main problem with people using lines of poetry or song lyrics as titles: they tend to register in my brain as generic word salad, and in many cases I couldn’t say without looking it up what the title actually was, let alone what it had to do with the story.)

Do You Outline: For long or complex stories, sure, yes. If there are many scenes or multiple chapters, I tend to jot down a few lines listing out the succession of scenes or chapters; for “The Next World,” whose main body is a long and rambly conversation, I had an outline that listed out every twist and turn of that convo. The outline for “Langstroth on Bees” (WIP, currently 58K) is a monster of a thing, listing out the internal timeline (five years of current action plus another ten of backstory), various promises I’ve made that I need to deliver on, assorted events that I want to remember to include, and rough ideas about where chapter breaks should maybe fall. Given that I’ve been working on that story for five years now, often with breaks from it of nearly a year, that outline has saved my ass. I guarantee you that without it, I would have picked up this story at some point, tried to remember where I was going with it, come up with nothing much, and shelved it permanently. If anything, I really should outline more often -- I have a few long-standing drafts in my WIP folder that I just... don’t remember where I was going with that. I remember that I did have a destination in mind, yes, but what exactly? WHO KNOWS. Btw, my outlines are living documents -- I revise them often, as my understanding of the story develops. In fact, revising the outline is one of many tools for understanding where a story is going and what is still needed to bring it together.

How many of your fanworks are…

Complete: 92 stories or story collections (I have a few AO3 “stories” that are actually collected ficlets from tumblr or Sherlock60), and 26 vids and vidlets, 

In-Progress: Nothing published to AO3 -- it makes me crazy to have a partially-published WIP. My drafts folder has 36 partially completed stories in it, and there are probably a half-dozen vids that I started but haven’t finished.

Coming Soon: Four? For various values of “coming soon.” I have two Hornblower stories that are mostly done (one for the Tegmore verse and another for the Kraken verse), and I’ve been working steadily on “Langstroth on Bees” in the hopes that I’ll finish it this year. And I’m signed up for Remix Revival -- whatever I do for that will probably be the very-most-next thing.

Do You Accept Prompts: Yes! Although I have only a 1/3 to 1/2 completion rate on prompts -- I do hope that no one minds that too terribly! But I’ll actively solicit prompts from time to time -- to celebrate something, or if I’m having a shit day and want to turn it around -- and some of my best stuff has come from prompts people have given me. I never ever guarantee filling them (see my above mentioned completion rate), but if someone wants to prompt me something, my ask box is open. Even if the prompt never gets filled, I still get a warm flutter of “They want to play with me!” from it.

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: “Langstroth on Bees,” a 58K-and-counting Holmes/Watson retirement fic that I’ve been working for five years. I added a solid 13K to it this month, and have maybe 20K left to go -- I’m hope-hope-hoping to have it done this year. But I’ve gotten far enough into it that “Langstroth” has finally begun overlapping the territory covered in “From Allegany,” and by the end of this chapter I’ll have passed it entirely. Then I’ll be in unwritten territory, wheee! (Speaking of titles, I never really intended to call this thing “Langstroth on Bees” -- that’s just a working title for my drafts folder. But enough of you now know it by that name that I think I’m going to have to stick with it? So I’m desperately trying to figure out how to justify it. ONE OF MANY THINGS TO DO IN THIS DRAFT.)

Tag Five Fanfic Authors to Answer These Questions As Well: @beanarie @quipxotic @phoenixfalls @xserpx @amindamazed And of course anyone else who wants to play!