This is just so incredibly sweet, thank you so much! 🥹 You have made my night. Gotta give props to my dear friend @cchapsticck who wrote adjacent to with me. A lot of their lines in there killed me when we were writing <3 And I absolutely love questions, never apologize at all! I love to talk writing and writing craft!
9. start to finish, how long did it take you to write the last fic you posted?
Oh, I could go back in the chat to give an exact date but I think it was 3 weeks? I watched the show first, made @cchapsticck watch and Olympians kind of put us in a chokehold. It started as a DM back and forth with some ideas of what a post-Sochi pre-Vegas meeting between them would look like and we ended up putting it in the doc. This is not an indication of how quickly I can churn out a fic in any regard, though. I was spurred on by HR-induced delirium and that we were feeding off each other so well.
10. what is the longest amount of time you’ve let a draft rest before you finished it?
I have drafts languishing right now! I have one so close to being done from the Strangers Things fandom that I would love to finish but I lost my drive for the characters. It's a good fic though :') But I would say 4-6 months at most to actually post something. Sometimes I'll run through a fic and just need distance from it before I can look at it close enough to edit without wanting to tear out my own eyeballs.
17. talk about your writing and editing process
Ah, this is gonna be a doozy. So I usually spend 1-2 weeks fretting about the concept/idea, trying to map it out in my head (unless I am working off divine visions from god and then I just slam that thing out with my eyes half-closed). Writing is - a process. Sometimes it's smooth and flowing, other times it's pulling teeth.
I remember reading an interview with an oil painter who described the concept of an underpainting, where they rough sketch an idea of the painting in big bold strokes and maybe a one dimensional colour and then add all the details in on top. I've kind of adopted that mindset. My writing style is pretty detail-oriented, exposition heavy, not a lot of plot to hang my hat on. I go all in on the metaphors or the internal narrative. It's almost always an in-depth character study of some kind. So while the hardest part is the actual body of the work, my real process comes in with editing, which I include in refining ideas, tweaking phrases, rewriting scenes to better fit my vision. Some of my rough drafts are so horrendously rough, no punctuation, quickly typed dialogue not properly spaced, unfinished sentences cause I only got half of it out of my head before it sputtered out and died. I could spend months editing a single fic if I feel like it's not where I need it to be.
But it's almost my absolute favourite part, like I said in another ask. It's where all my love for writing and language and narrative gets to shine. It's where I feel like I get to work my magic. I may not be able to write a compelling plot or smut, but for the most part people really enjoy my style of writing so that is what I lean into.
29. how easy is it for you to come up with titles?
Middle of the ground? I'm either stealing from lyrics or poems. Sometimes I'll catch a phrase within the fic that I can use or like an abstract concept that relates to the fic. adjacent to actually came from this picture I found on Pinterest:
That hit me like a ton of bricks especially re: Ilya reminiscing on his relationship with Sasha but also his own mixed up narrative on how he is with Shane (Ilya, my best and beautiful unreliable narrator of his own life). The or alongside of just kind of came about when I felt adjacent to wasn't enough; we decided a kind of dictionary type of quality was fitting. I always try to draw it back to an overarching theme or motif within the fic.
ask me more writerly asks!
