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Yuletide: Four Yuletide stories down, hopefully one more by the end of today, and then editing like the dogs of war are at my heels until the deadline. I'm leaving the rest of the time up to Christmas entirely unplanned; better to write only if something hits me, I think. I keep looking at some of The Culture prompts, but for all that the letters are very good, no one story is quite leaping out at me just yet.

Work: has been hellish, even though I realise it doesn't have to be. It's still 9-5, but I'm the sort of person who can't look at a thing done badly and not want to fix it. I've definitely been more stressed over the firefighting rescue job we're doing on this other team's project than I need to be, and all told it's making me just want to go a completely different direction. I don't love coding, and sometimes the job feels like golden handcuffs. Don't know what I would do, though! I just know that, this taken in consideration with everything else in my life, it's time for a midlife U-turn fairly soon. Harder when I don't really have a target destination in mind, but...

Random meme: Why not, right? I'll do you if you do me, &c.

1. What made you start writing fanfic?
2. Which of your own fanfics have you reread the most?
~~3. Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic. Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?~~ Answer
4. You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?
5. Name three stories you found easy to write.
~~6. Name three stories you found difficult to write.~~ Answer
7. What’s your ratio of hits to kudos?
8. What do your fic bookmarks say about you?
~~9. What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?~~ Answer
10. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?
11. For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?
12. Name three favorite characters to write.
13. You’re applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?
14. Question of your choice!

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Question 9, please!

Yuletide is the timesink of the season! More of my time has been going to it than technically wise, and this treat still isn't cohering... Let's go with #3 for the random question meme to distract us both. :P

Editing like mad here too... good luck with yours!

Can I have question 6?

What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?

My recent writing is a little all over the place, because the last 5+ years I've mostly just done Yuletide fills and a good chunk of those are writing to someone's specific requests or wants. Looking at the others... I've got a lot of "intrapersonal conflict in relationships with deep power imbalances" going on - Tseng/Rufus from FFVII, Aral/literally anybody not Cordelia from Vorkosigan, Yakumo/anyone not Yakumo from Rakugo Shinjuu.

Other than that, I see a lot of institutional/power structure based conflict – large organisations (military, monopolies) with apex power holders (emperors, pseudo-emperors).

tl;dr I'm a sucker for power

3. Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic. Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?

Good god, well, my first fic was written when I was 10 and was a Lord of the Rings Mary-Sue self-insert, so I think I can just say "everything" and run away from that. If we fast forward to my post-16-years-of-age writing, I... Uh. /goes to look

I've definitely rubber-banded a lot. I used to write long, chaptered stuff (pre-16), and then switched to 1-2K bits, and then crept into the 3-6K sweet spot, back over to around 10K, and now I think I'm trending back down to 3-6K. Mostly I think I used to have smaller, more concrete scenes; I had a lot of time and I wrote a lot at night after school, so I just churned stuff out. Nowadays I kind of wait for a challenge and I have a lot of time to sit and think and let it swirl around in my head before I sit down for a day or two and pray I can type enough coherent stuff.

Ultimately, paging backwards, I think I've always been a character writer, though. Not good at plot, okay at worldbuild but only if there's a lot of motivated people-stuff going around. I fail epically at most shipping even though I'm an inveterate ship reader, so it's all just "here's an interesting person (or, more rarely, an idea) and let's see how much patience I have in 2 days to play with it."

Technically, I think I've added more scene changes as time goes by; I feel like a lot of my earlier stuff was the fiction equivalent of "one long take" in cinematic parlance. Regardless, all of my best stuff seems to be co-written stuff, even if I'm the primary (or sometimes sole) writer of the final product.

[edit] How about you?

Edited 2018-12-16 20:27 (UTC)

What's your own answer to the same question? :D

6. Name three stories you found difficult to write.

All of my good stuff would take time but never crossed the line into difficult; all of the stuff I didn't have a direction for would be like pulling teeth. If we delete anything I just didn't have inspiration for...

As Above, So Below (Heike Monogatari) was like... all the things. I loved the prompt, I love the source material, but holy fuck is it hard to write classical literature fic, even if punted into space (MY FAVOURITE COPOUT). I had a lot of vague IDEAS about the main character, a wonderful gentleman named Shigemori who is too good for his family but not what one might call a pure cinnamon roll, but nothing COALESCED TOGETHER coherently. The end product is like a well-polished but ugly af diamond? I'm glad my recip liked it, and I spent a lot of time on it (and re-read more classical Japanese than I want to think about) for it, but I never quite managed to lean into the original genre's epic poetry style of "give this one account, then drop the mic and talk about something totally different in the next section" feel. Maybe if I'd given myself 20K and wrote a completely off the walls AU with a plotline it'd have been something even better, but as it is this is one of the weird ones that I'm both very proud and very disappointed in. Ha!

Unwritten: the ending of Nasdack, an insane FFVII/FFXII crossover written in 2008 while the economy blew up around me and my co-writer. We both simultaneously ran out of steam and I've always wanted to CONCLUDE it in some way but it's too much to do alone.

OKAY THIS IS JUST TURNING INTO A LIST OF "THINGS SO HARD I HAVEN'T WRITTEN THEM YET" so I give up. xD

How about you???

Hm, interesting that your development has been so back and forth! I've just boosted my stamina and longfic skills, from "hmm should I sign up for Yuletide, I'm not sure if I can guarantee 1k" to consistently writing novellas. (Before, I'd write <1k of hook and have no idea how to continue; now, I can finish a plot.) Additionally, I have actually figured out adjectives exist, and description exists, and figured out how to do mood-building stuff via descriptions of the setting! My characterization skills have also improved: not everyone sounds and thinks the same way anymore.

I think I'm a somewhat unique case; I have a friend I write with (we were RP partners back in the bad old good old days of LJ RP communities, and turned into just general co-writers for what is somewhere in between epic novels and private gratuitous worldbuilding) on an as-good-as daily basis. We've churned out private work between us on the order of probably 300K+ per year, so I don't write longfic almost AT ALL (or fic in general) on my own because I scratch my creative person itch.

If I didn't have that, god knows what I'd do. Hard to say!

My answer is here. The tl;dr is that I write a lot of people absorbing power from bleak, eerie landscapes, and a lot of migrants/exiles finding a sense of home in each other.

PLUGGING, PLUGGING, PLUGGING AWAY AT MY YULETIDE TREATS! I think this is my most productive year ever.

I'll take #11 for the meme

12 please!

11. For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?

I... don't write a lot of E, do I. What I do write that gets up on AO3... has very little intersection! /pleased

NOW YOU

XD I SHOULD HAVE PICKED A DIFFERENT NUMBER hahaha

for my answer, most of my explicit fic is noncon or dubcon porn, so, "mostly being forced into doing things they don't want to do, or forcing the other party into doing something they don't want to do" lmao. I'm also a huge sucker for humiliating dirty talk so that happens a lotttt

*\o/* Go go you!

#1?

Interested in hearing about #10!

Well, for stuff I've posted in the past couple of years, 'the walls of where' took a huge amount of research to write, and I now know a great deal about the use of gliders in 1945 and all sorts of other stuff, plus even fictional atrocities are hard to write about. 'Recalibration' wasn't precisely hard to write, but it was very very hard to finish, the problem was that I loved that fic a bit excessively and wrote it about five times, using all three characters' povs and somewhat different details, and cutting it down to get one single coherent story involved killing so many darlings. And 'The Huntsman's Reel' was impossible, I choked so hard on that one and uploaded a completely different and much, much worse fic for the deadline, and only a day or two later had the mental image of Alys and Simon dancing around a room spotting assassins, and wrote that really quickly instead and swapped them out at midnight on Christmas Eve.

But yeah, I agree, the really difficult fics are the ones I haven't finished yet. I think the prize for sheer impossibility to finish has to be the one I started in 2005 and am still working on. I have made a lot of progress on it this year, so there's hope, but it's like pulling teeth. It's a short novel, Alys's POV on Memory, and when I started it in 2005 it was short and sweet and basically all h/c and romance and that was about it. But it didn't work and I didn't know why, so I shelved it and wrote other stuff. And the reason it didn't work is that it had no story. Alys and Simon going 'oh, okay, we like each other, let's have an affair now that I'm retired and not dying' and then doing so, does not constitute a story, but I knew there was a story in there somewhere. And I've gradually uncovered what the story is, which is romance with a shitload of politics and transition on Barrayar and changing your mind and Alys needing romantic advice not from Cordelia but from Aral, but it's at the limits of my writing skill, I think is the fundamental problem. So it's waiting for me to have the skill to tell the story, and I'm getting closer now, but now my problem is how do I assemble this story when half the pieces are sweet romance and the other half of the pieces are bitter old wounds healing and sexual liberation for Barrayaran women and Regency Romance capers and the tension between arranged and self-arranged marriages. IDK, maybe it's just not possible, but I want to write it so I'm keeping at it.

I think if you're going to have one theme you return to, that's a pretty great one. I mostly only read (or want to read) fic about relationships with power imbalances, but find it really hard to write.

wow, you yuletide machine you! awesome. gimme 13?

12. Name three favorite characters to write.

HAHA, I AM SO EASY AND OBVIOUS HERE:

1. FFVII, Tseng

I mean, dude's an assassin in a political world. SIGN ME UP.

2. Hikaru no Go, Shindou Hikaru

I write a lot of weird political people, and then HERE SHINDOU IS, random teenaged Go wizard who is also really bad at life. It's a nice change!

3. The Culture, any ship mind

Iain M. Banks was a wizard and gave us AI wizardry. Writing the Ships is basically an excuse to write SUPER LOGICAL SUPER ILLOGICAL PEOPLE all the time.

How about you?

1. What made you start writing fanfic?

Like most people, I imagine, friends! Friends were reading fic when we were ittle babies, and then it was just a natural thing to do. I used to print out what I wrote - which really became original fic really, really fast - and we'd read it in school.

I eventually wrote for myself what would be, er, "proper fanfic" because it was a way of stretching my brain; a mental game, I guess. When I was less mentally "busy" from work/mental health stuff/a kid with lots of spare time and stimulation, it was almost routine - I'd get an idea, churn it out. I miss those days!

You?

10. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?

Ooh, ha HA! Complicated ones. I love READING almost everything, but I love writing things that sort of hurt. Not quite angst - I almost never write pure romcom "X wants Y and doesn't have Y woe is them" kind of fic - but anything that's... twisty. I love ex-relationships or nearly-relationships that have to Deal With Each Other. People with Lots of History who can dance a lot of subtext-type dances around each other.

I parrrrrrticularly love personal relationships that are irretrievably bound up in Other Types of Relationships - political/military/whatever, so that you have almost a sort of graph of the different things Person X is to Person Y and vice versa - and that those relationships are not equal in both directions.

When they are not BAD EVIL POWER relationships, I really like deep/weird relationships where the lynchpin is some sort of shared experience: people who like the same game, who do things to a high level in the same field.

You?

13. You’re applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?

HAHAAAAAAA, instant fail.

Popular Vote, But Not Exactly Critic's Choice: Model Behaviour (Naruto; Kakashi/Iruka corporate AU)

Clever, But Not Edgy: 'Tis Impossible To Be Sure Of Any Thing (Discworld; Moist, Vetinari, etc)

Critic's Choice, but INCOMPLETE: Executive Reform (FFVII/Pacific Rim crossover where the Shinra C-suite somehow redeems itself)

Weird Film Festival Entry: Being Good (Hikaru no Go; Isumi/Ogata rarepair WTF)

Look, Ma, I Can Worldbuild: Year One (FFVII again, Reeve thinks about Urban Development)

NOW SHOW ME YOURS

I have wanted to ask a question on this meme since you posted but haven't had time until now. Since most of the questions I would have asked have already been asked and answered (so much <3 for your answer to #10), I'll go for:

14. Question of your choice! -- Talk about a fic that you want to write but either you haven't written it or you have started it but haven't finished it, and what is it about that fic that makes you want to write it (even if you never do)?

For the challenge! I thought it would be a great way to learn (a) characterization (b) how to smut. It...did not work on either front; my fic tends to be concept-oriented rather than character-oriented -_- and while I learned to write a little smut, for years I joked that I instead learned new and creative ways of fading to black. There are people who write smoking hot fanfic smut and I've read the examples, but I can't seem to pull it off myself. XD But then, these days I only write during exchanges, and trying to write something to my recipient's desires (where known) satisfies the "I want to do something different than what I normally do" urge.

Wow, watch me fail to get back to you in an epic fashion; thanks, Yuletide.

A fic I want to write but haven't written yet: the conclusion to Nasdaq. If I time it right, I'll write it the moment the U.S. markets go bearish on us; hey, we already imploded slightly on Christmas and it's Nasdaq's 10 year anniversary!

I have such fondness for Nasdaq and miss writing with Nyx/whatever she goes by now. Mostly because I felt like the stupider writer in the (metaphorical) room at all times. That aside - Nasdaq is a series about being on the inside of a Big Bad Thing, and navigating that. Sometimes the Big Bad Thing (Shinra, Bunansa, financially irresponsible behemoths, corporate overlords, whatever you want to call it) matters a lot, sometime it matters not so much, but the BBT always sort of fucks with people, even on the most personal of levels. It's also not just big *and* bad - it's structural. I really, really enjoy writing about BBTs in a sort of almost-devil's-advocate sort of way: it's easy to say a system sucks, but it's not easy to replace it. So Nasdaq's got a lot of both interpersonal and systemic squirrelliness, and I miss writing that sort of stuff! EVEN IF IT HAD AN AUDIENCE OF 5.

A fic I've started but haven't finished: the conclusion to Executive Reform, because it's spun itself out into a whole universe in my head and I've put a grand total of NO WORDS onto page for it.

Sooo, Executive Reform is basically just the FFVII version of FFXII/FFVII above, WITH KAIJUU, right? With the added bonus of Crim literally illustrating the whole damn thing for me. But the primary motivating factor is this: humanity fights, for the first time in its dirty little life, against a common enemy, and - sort of Le Guin style - manages to REALISE THAT IT'S A LITTLE DUMB TO GO TO WAR WITH EACH OTHER ALL THE TIME. But messily. Wars don't just stop, people don't just wake up and end up Better People, territories and nationalism don't just cease. But they shift, and ten *years* of fighting what most people ended up feeling was an unwinnable war against unstoppable aliens changes people. And peoples. I want to go back and wrap that!

A fic that really, really doesn't exist yet: a The Culture fic in which Cheradenine Zakalwe becomes best mates with Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints and they go blow a few planets up before getting hauled in by Diziet Sma.

No idea if you've read The Culture, but it's the same old brand new "good bad/bad good guy" set of characters which I love. Zakalwe is an overused grey/black ops agent on an INTERPLANETARY SCALE!!! and FOTNMC is a bored top-of-the-line killer AI spacecraft. Together, they're used by people they've never even met to topple planets like dominoes, and yet the two of them are some of the most leashed-and-collared individuals in the book. Diziet Sma is a badass female handler with a soft touch and a long reach. I WANT ALL OF THESE THINGS. I just want to keep holding out until someone else writes it for me.

NOW YOU, TELL ME YOURS. You write so much more than I do...

ha, good question! I haven't written much lately but from recent memory:

1) Dragon Age II - Carver Hawke. He's so awkward but also passionate and often snarky, he was a really good one to write.

2) Haikyuu!! - Hinata Shouyou. He's been the bulk of my writing this year, though the POV switched between him and Kageyama. He's a bundle of energy, excited about everything but quick to get riled up when he's not taken seriously.

3) FFVIII - Squall Leonhart. I haven't written him in a long time but he's been one of my core muses over the years. The way he keeps his thoughts to himself makes the narrative take place in his mind/actions rather than dialogue and I love that he can be shy but fierce. I'd love to write him again to see if he's developed along with my writing style.

Belatedly catching up on comments --

I feel like I'm drawn to writing relationships (usually platonic) in which one person has this Major Secret that they're keeping from most people, and they're always trying to figure out how much they can and can't share without hurting their relationships or making life more difficult for themselves. Working around that tension, even as it shapes how Person-With-Major-Secret responds to events (sometimes in ways that make no sense to other characters), is always fun to explore. Especially if there's some sort of breakthrough moment, where a barrier comes down -- or, in some cases, goes up -- and the relationship has to readjust to the new normal.

I'm also drawn to writing threesome/OT3 relationships, not necessarily for the romantic angle but because fitting the gears together encourages me to bring out aspects of characters' personalities that don't always come across in a two-sided relationship. For that matter, I have a WIP in which a V-shaped friendship is slowly resolving into a triangle, and there's something so damned satisfying about that prospective endgame...not least because it takes the pressure off the pivot person to make sure his two friends get along!

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