OH MAN LITTLE HOUSE INCEPTION AU!!! The idea on that one was that Miss Arthur has come out west because the Reverend's wife was her best friend, and now there's no one to look after him or their children, but that despite the rumors, she and Father Cobb have no spark of marital inclination, and do not live together. In fact, she sets up house in a little place at the edge of town...only it becomes extremely apparent extremely quickly that Miss Arthur does not know the first fucking thing about how to live on the frontier, and Eames ends up feeling compelled against his will to take care of her in all kinds of ways: cutting firewood, teaching her how to set up the house for winter, showing her how to start a fire in the cookstove. Miss Arthur came from a wealthy east coast family, same as Father Cobb's former spouse, and never learned how to cook for herself or make hats, but she has beautiful handwriting, can play the piano, dances like an angel and embroiders like a dream--none of which means shit now that she's freezing to death on the prairie. But, she's the most stubborn little thing Eames has ever met, and over the course of a calendar year, summer melting into fall and freezing into the snow drifts of winter, giving way to the verdant softness of spring, they fall slowly, slowly in love in little pieces.

Also Eames teaches her how to use a rifle and she's WAY too good at it.

I really wish I had something profound to say about that story other than that sometimes, there is a demon inside of my head that says, "hey, what if made everybody cry," and that the demon is extremely compelling. Also it leans into a shared fandom tendency to identify a favorite character and decide the best way to mark this affection is by being unbelievably cruel to them--you can read this as my fave being either John or Rodney in this case, hahaha.

Insert bleak laughter here. Remember when politics was kind of fun and intellectually interesting, and I could watch things like West Wing without getting a facial tick....

I wrote that story so long ago that it's honestly hard to remember my state of mind when I was approaching it, but I had been reading a lot of books about the Clinton campaign and Beltway politics (I know I'm so cool right) and I love nothing more than to write super inside baseball narratives. I've gotten much, much better with research since then, so there's a lot of warts that show in that story, but it's an early relic of my forever tendency to decide no amount of research is too much research to do when I get kissing at the end of it.

I genuinely love how much people seem to love Lost in Translation. It was such a gloriously fun story to write, a loop-de-loop romantic romp, and I hope everybody enjoyed the rollercoaster feelings of pining and grief and dizzy mania and the long exhale of relief that I was aiming for once they found their way back to each other.

There's like a B-side to Lost in Translation that would be fun to explore one day that's just Oikawa's equally cursed weekend, starting with their knock down drag out fight that he was avoiding for ages, and then deteriorating into pure horror movie shit when for the first time in his entire life he cannot get in touch with Iwaizumi.

For Reasons, I am an anxious person when I cannot reach friends, family and loved ones, and Oikawa's immediate decision to cold call every single human being who might have had even glancing contact with Iwaizumi is something I would not hesitate to do. If you do not want me calling your boss's boyfriend or the lady who shows up in the background of your instagram posts at your favorite coffee shop then you should have answered my fucking texts you mouthbreather, so--per usual--I overly sympathize with the craziest person in the Haikyuu universe and think that Oikawa did nothing wrong. That said, would pay $1 million to watch Oikawa sob over his finsta account at all the sluts who are staring at Iwa-chan's muscles. What if they have been allowed to touch his muscles? Or kiss his stupid mouth?? What if someone else has been allowed to look at his penis??? Even Oikawa has not been able to look at his penis!!!!

Truly it is a blessing and a gift that a character this insane exists and that I get to write silly little stories about him and his long-suffering but equally insane boyfriend. <3

UNCOVERED! A story that is deeply meaningful to me for ambiguous, abstract reasons. It was the first thing I clearly remember writing that felt like me putting words to page about the lived experience of being an imperfect, wretchedly human adult woman, which was all I could ever be, and shared in that suffering and joy with Antonia DiNozzo. I've talked before about how writing women is terribly difficult because it feels so invasive, it feels at times eviscerating. I'm not a man and I don't have those lived experiences; everything I write from that POV has a sort of caul over it, a protective separation. When I write about women, about how they feel and what they do, the mistakes they make and the ways in which they allow themselves to be happy or sad or stupid -- it all feels so close to the skin, and Toni feels tremendously close.

I think someone on Twitter once said that nobody writes Oikawa as batshit as I do, and I take that as a compliment and carry it with pride. The minute that shitty little weirdo showed up in Haikyuu I was immediately smitten because I, too, am a complete psycho and every single one of his deranged behaviors and decisions made perfect mathematical sense to me. I think the thing I most love about writing Oikawa as a balls out lunatic is how at once liberating and vulnerable it is to put all of your crazy on display like that: there is not a single fucking person who has ever met this guy who thinks he is normal-passing for longer than 3 business minutes. He has the hyperfocus of a military sniper, the emotional stability of a 13 year old girl who's about to pass her first menstrual blood clot, the self-control of a toddler and he probably has a 26 step skin care routine that costs more than everything on my bathroom counter. I am literally obsessed with this man. And--in my interpretation at least--that level of tits out insanity also translates into how he would manage his romantic relationships, which is to be a complete fucking psycho at Iwaizumi, a person who comes off as completely normal, but who--over time--you realize is just as bad as Oikawa in a completely different but equally troubling way. Like you do not sign up to a lifetime tour of duty with batshit crazy unless you, yourself, are batshit crazy.

This is a thread that shows up in both Something Borrowed and Lost in Translation, although obviously the universes in which they manifest are uh, extremely different.

Also, fun fact, I started to write the sequel to Something Borrowed, called Something New, where Oikawa gets knocked up and because he can't play volleyball until he evicts his parasite he decides to make Kageyama his pregnancy project and everybody is like "lol RIP to Kageyama, couldn't be me," because all of Kageyama's friends are assholes. Will this ever be finished? Who fucking knows. At the current moment, the file is like 10 pages long and currently on a scene where I gave Kageyama food poisoning from eating airport sushi in Qatar.

@surreality51 The fact that you read User Since for fun is absolutely delightful to me because that entire comment section is just people crying.

I love playing with primary sources to tell stories. It’s that dumb reporter in me who likes scavenging details and knitting together a narrative out of public records. I also — obviously — have been in a lifelong love affair with fandom, and User Since was such a pleasure to write.

These openly mature spaces filled with other adults and complicated conversations were where I began my fandom life as a lurking child of maybe 11 or 12. Those adults taught me so much by modeling courteous behavior, writing challenging stories, and allowing me into their spaces as long as I could follow the spoken and unspoken rules. It’s something I think is really lost in modern fandom, the apprenticeship phase, you know?