#writing with hyperfocus and completionist tendencies is like

[minici]

Idk I might actually be addicted to writing...

[threewaysdivided]

💖👻🧠 (is this too many??)

Not at all!

Fanfic Ask Game

👻 What is one WIP you think you may never pick back up?

Funnily enough, I don't have any of these! The closest thing is my bird painting, which has been languishing as a result of my moving house twice and just not having the time or table space.

I know myself well enough to be aware of my tendency towards completionist over-commitment to stuff. I tend to hang back on actually starting projects that need more than a couple of weeks unless I'm ready to actually see them through. WIP-projects mostly stay in my head or as...

🧠 What’s an idea you have that you can’t quite call a WIP yet?

There's actually couple of these in a fairly developed state that have stayed bunked in my brain either because I didn't feel like spending the time to turn them into prose with all the connective tissue, or because they work in that liminal dream-sequence brain-space where I can blend from one scene to the next and hop in and out of flashbacks for context but I would have no idea how to structure them as an actual story that makes coherent sense to someone else.

A run-down:

YJxDP Brother's AU story concept #1, building on this starting point. Dick finds out from Jack Haley that he has an older brother, only to discover that Fentonworks is gone and the trail is completely cold. Meanwhile Wally finds himself getting drawn into the life of a new classmate at Keystone High, who seems to be estranged from his family, is perpetually tired and a bit standoffish... and who looks an awful lot like an older Dick Grayson at first glance (but that has to be a coincidence, right? Because Dick doesn't have any living family.) First impressions can be misleading and the more Wally looks the less certain he is that they're related but the more he notices other things. Most importantly: that this is a person who needs help and maybe a friend.

YJxDP Brother's AU story concept #2, would completely not work in writing as it would fully rewrite both canons but basically exploring the concept of "what if they DID grow up in the circus together and somehow got separated, lost contact and then reunited as heroes", going into the loss, hurt, anger, distance and misunderstandings that would come from being suddenly split apart from your only remaining family with no warning. In which Dick is sitting on the kind of vicious anger that only a deeply hurt child can, Danny has been drowning in the guilt of a broken promise for five years and a certain someone has been interfering with the mail because the timeline needed both Robin and Phantom. A lot of shouting and crying ensues. The other reason I probably won't write this one is that it turns Danny into a distinctly different character to his canon counterpart.

Danny Phantom AU where the Fentons are not malicious but are also not very good as parents due to hyperfocus on their work. Jazz leaves to try and make a safer place where she can eventually petition to get custody of Danny. Meanwhile Danny - in attempt to be "part of the family" - volunteers to participate in some tests with ectoplasm that make him increasingly unwell and eventually into a halfa whose ghost form is shaped by his parents anti-ghost rhetoric and is mostly used by them as an anti-ghost countermeasure. Even though Danny is the same person in both forms he and "Hunter" aren't treated that way, and he ends up feeling as though "Hunter" needs to conform their ideas about about ghosts (not feeling emotion, not feeling physical sensation etc) - which is not a good thing for him and inadvertently makes him a lot of enemies among the ghosts that come to Amity Park. After struggling with that on his own for a while, he eventually leaves to be with Jazz and has to slowly learn how manage being a halfa, and to unlearn most of the things he's internalised about both ghosts and himself with the help of Jazz and some ghostly allies he stumbles into finding.

💖 What do you like most about your own writing?

Tricking me into complimenting myself, how very dare you! (Affectionate.)

I think it's probably best said in this quote from C.S. Lewis:

I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.

That's a pretty good summary actually. I started writing Deathly Weapons because I noticed these consistent gaps in the DP x DC (mostly DPYJ or DPTT) fanfic collections at the time, where certain ideas or opportunities weren't getting used and I really wanted to see them.

Specifically some stuff that I like and/or am looking forward to doing:

Causality - I try to make it so that things have a solid in-universe reason to happen. It's totally not necessary for fanfic (its perfectly fine if a story is just an excuse to put your blorbos into interesting positions) but I like to make things feel a little bit more grounded. Especially when it comes to missions in fanfic, often times I kind of found myself wondering why the Team's covert squad was being deployed on certain missions rather than other heroes - it's just one of those things that I like to have an answer for in my own stuff.

Fair-play mysteries - I'm writing for myself but I'm also writing the story that I wish Baby 3WD could have found, and part of that is I think readers like to feel clever, not stupid. I love leaving little hints that point to stuff that's going to come up later (for example, in Chapter 18 I tried to foreshadow Nano being tied up in the cupboard behind the boss before the Team even knew a hostage was missing from the main room) - I feel terribly witty while doing it and I super love hearing when people notice. Two people left comments speculating about some character stuff that's going to go down in Equilibrium and someone else already DMed me with a correct guess at part of the final twist and I love all of you. It's fun to give people the chance to realise what's coming before the characters do.

Character specificity - this is probably more of an upcoming thing than a current-chapters thing, but I really enjoy digging into the specifics of characterisation, character motivations and character relationships. And especially when it comes to grief arcs. I don't know how successfully I'm going to pull off Flashpoints, Combustion and Equilibrium but if I can get even some of the character stuff to work, I'll be happy.

Descriptions - settings are fun and I like describing them, especially when they also set scenes and build mood. I feel like its a part of writing that doesn't see as much love in fic (again, totally fair, we're here for the blorbos) but I love doing it. The oil rig setpiece was fun, I liked giving Wayne Manor a sense of its own personality, and I'm really looking forward to stuff like the jungle setting in In the Mists, the mountains in Rituals, the night sky scenes in Enemy Lines and a lot of gentle flavour descriptions wrapping through Equilibrium.

This was fun! Thanks for playing!