Fanfic Writer Questions
I was tagged in this by both @dreadfutures and @blarrghe ! I did this once a few years ago, so it's interesting to see what's changed since then.
1. How many works do you have on AO3?
35, though I believe 5 of them are artwork only for exchanges and not actually fics.
2. What's your total AO3 word count?
87, 413 words
3. What fandoms do you write for?
In my AO3 era: Hockey RPF; Dragon Age; La Sociedad de la Nieve/Society of the Snow
Pre-AO3 (the ff.net/LJ era): Digimon Adventure, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Beatles RPF, a little bit of DC/Marvel
5. Do you respond to comments?
Yes! Or at least I try to! There have been a couple of times where I've gotten overwhelmed or have been busy and fallen behind. But I try really hard to reply to every single comment I get.
6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?
That's hard to pick. I think that a lot of my fic endings lean more towards catharsis than raw angst. Perhaps "Lathbora Viran" is the angstiest ending because it concludes a trilogy of fics about Solas' spirit friend Wisdom and ends with the implication that Wisdom became corrupted into the Regret demon that appears in Skyhold in "Tevinter Nights".
7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?
Any of my romantic fics, I guess? If I had to pick one then I would probably say "Nothing Else Than What is Now" which was the extremely long one shot that led to all my Quinn Trevelyan/Horatio Morris nonsense. It originally wasn't supposed to have a happy ending, but about midway through writing it I changed my mind and even though OC / OC is extremely niche in just about any fandom, I'm still glad I did it.
8. Do you get hate on fics?
Not yet. We'll see if that changes now that I've mentioned I've written LSDLN fic.
9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?
Yep. 2 out of my top 5 fics are smut, and 2 more out of the top 5 have implied sex. I suppose that says I must be good at it. I don't really know what kind of smut I write since every smutfic I've written has been either a challenge or a prompt fill or a gift. I think I'm an example of that meme of "the 2000 word blow job is an important piece of character development". I really lean into tricking you into having emotions and feelings and getting introspective inside characters' heads while they're naked and getting down dirty. Come for the smut, stay for the emotional feelings!
10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?
I did when I was younger, but haven't really vibed with it much in recent years. In terms of published fic, maybe the Harry Potter/Beatles crossover drabble I wrote based on a piece of artwork that an old friend of mine had done. I still have the fic, but the artwork has sadly been lost to the ethers of the internet. But the idea was that the Beatles didn't really break up in 1970, they just took on a different career.
11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not to my knowledge.
12. Have you ever had a fic translated?
Not to my knowledge. But I have taken to granting permission in my author's notes of new fics for anyone who might want to translate them into other languages.
13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?
Yes, actually! Some of my very first fanfics were co-written with a friend of mine. We never published them, but it was just fun to write little stories together.
14. What's your all time favourite ship?
Even though I've never written any fanfic for it, I am 100% pure unleaded Chrobin trash. They are my OTP and I am probably due for a replay of Fire Emblem Awakening for it again. "YOU ARE THE WIND AT MY BACK AND THE SWORD AT MY SIDE."
15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?
One of the very first fics I ever started writing for the Dragon Age fandom was an Alistair/Cousland piece that looked at the period of time between the Warden's disappearance and their (hopefully) eventual return. It was meant to be 10 chapters, with each chapter split between a section in the past that looked at their romance over time and a section that took place in the more immediate present as Alistair navigated the events of DAI. I still have the document sitting on my laptop as well as backed up in my google drive, but I only ever finished the first chapter and even though I go back to it sometimes and make notes, I've not worked on it with any serious attention in years (I started this fic not too long after the Trespasser DLC was released) and at this point I doubt it will ever be in a publishable state let alone finished.
16. What are your writing strengths?
I think I'm really good at dialogue! I'm very good at conveying personalities and speech patterns in written dialogue.
17. What are your writing weaknesses?
Blowjobs
18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?
For me, I think it depends on the amount of dialogue that is being spoken in another language and whether or not it's something the character whose POV is being written would understand.
With fantasy settings like Dragon Age, most of my fics are written from the POV of one of the game protagonists which are all human in my world state. So they wouldn't understand things like Qunlat or Elvhen, but also as those conlangs are incomplete languages, I will usually just refer to dialogue as being spoken in a language that the POV character doesn't understand. In a few fics where I've written from Solas' POV, I have used things like italics or sometimes <<special dialogue brackets>> to denote that this speech is being spoken between two characters in another language. Since the languages are fictional but the story is being told in English, it makes sense that the "author" translates in a similar logic to how Tolkien's books are "translated" for us to read.
With stories and settings that are more grounded in reality, I'll use other languages where appropriate. Usually this is in the form of nicknames or titles or expressions that I feel can't really convey the same tone or idea if they were translated into English. I've been very fortunate to find several new friends in the LSDLN fandom who have taught me a lot about monickers and nicknames and phrases in different regional dialects of Spanish.
19. First fandom you wrote for?
Technically it was Digimon Adventure - baby's first Mary-Sue fic
20. Favourite fic you've written?
It's a tie between "In the Long Hours of the Night" and "The Many Faces of Wisdom". With the former, this was the fic where I first felt like I finally got Quinn Trevelyan. It was the fic where he emerged as a more formed and complete character and I'm still proud of it. With the latter, it was an experimental idea that toyed with a rather ambiguously-defined relationship between Solas and the Inquisitor. It also was the first time I played around with writing Fade scenes and spirits and you can see a lot of the building blocks that I would eventually revisit and explore more as I fleshed out my own lore. It's also the one fic where I started with a very specific image in my mind and that I would really love to commission art for one day.
