Meme: 20 Questions for Fanfic Writers

[yalumesse]

Borrowed from delphi:

Look! A meme I can actually do because it's not limited to things I've written this year! Fingers crossed next year I'll have more to work with.

1. How many works do you have on AO3 or other archives?
42, but I've orphaned rather a lot over time, for various reasons. Perhaps another 20. (For the purpose of this meme, everything below relates only to the 42 still actively connected to me.)

2. What's your total archived word count?
310,868

3. What fandoms do you write for?
At the moment, nothing, I've not found inspiration in a long time. Historically, Supernatural and MCU have the most fics, but I'm not active in either of them anymore; MCU because I wasn't interested enough to keep up with the endless new content, and SPN because years of disappointment followed by the most infuriating pair of final episodes was enough to make me reject it entirely. I hate it now, and have seriously considered orphaning all my SPN works. But I'd probably regret that eventually. I would still very much like for it to stop being at the top of my works list (11 to MCU's 10. Maybe I'll write another MCU fic just to kick it off the top spot).

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?
#1 is Saving People, the gigantic Supernatural fix-it that I never finished, clocking in at 50k including the two huge appendicies I wrote to summarise what would have happened, which made me feel better about abandoning it at the time. Readers seem to like the closure of having that, and I'm always quietly hoping it's a habit other authors might adopt when they decide to abandon works, so that I might know how those would have ended.
#2 is Little Sister, which is part of the above Saving People fix-it series.
#3 is Joy To Be Claimed, which really surprised me: It's a little fluff fic for Enchanted that I wrote for Yuletide back in 2012, looking at how Nancy and Edward got together in the background.
#4 is Morning, and X-Men: Apocalypse fix-it where Erik's daughter doesn't get fridged for manangst, and he appears at Xavier's house looking for help with her nightmares. I do a lot of fixits...
#5 is Welcome to the Hunter_Bros Comm, also a Supernatural fic, but I still like this one. It was a love letter to LJ communities and that particular era of fandom, with all the SPN characters being fans of the show. It's all epistolary, made up of LJ posts and emails and chats between the characters, complete with gifs and icons, and I'm proud of how it turned out.

5. Do you respond to comments?
I used to respond to literally every comment, short "Thank you!"s for the short comments and longer replies for the longer ones. Then at one point my anxiety was mean to me and declared that (nearly) all my replies were terrible, and I deleted them, which I regretted soon after, but it's even more awkward to go back and re-reply to old comments now, so I've left them be. Any new ones that come in, I try to reply to.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?
There aren't many, but the clear 'winner' is Child Killer, a Torchwood AU that's technically a fix-it for Children of Earth, but which saves the canon characters by sacrificing a kid, who I tried very hard and apparently succeeded at making likable enough to shred everyone's hearts when she died.
The only runner-up is Distraction, a short Firefly fic set after Wash's death, but I did a sneaky "Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" and let everyone think he was just hanging out with Zoe until the last few lines.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?
So many of my fics are fluff and fixits and happy endings, but now that I look at the list, a lot of them are happy endings because they have a touch of the bittersweet to them. I think the purest happy endings are Theives of London, a friends-to-lovers future fic for Assasin's Creed: Syndicate, or Indulgence, a cracky MCU(ish) fic focusing on a very spoiled young Sleipnir, but that one is quite old and I'm not so thrilled with my writing of it anymore.

8. Do you get hate on fics?
No, not that I recall.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?
I tried my hand at it a few times, in a SPN slashfic that's since been orphaned and a straight MCU fic with Peggy and Daniel, but it doesn't seem to be my thing.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?
I've only written one, Bucky of Borg, a Stark Trek/MCU fusion with the Avengers in the roles of TNG characters during the Borg incident at Wolf 359. I was pretty happy with it but I think it's my least-read fic overall.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not that I know of. I hope not :(

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?
Not a whole fic, but Morning had a lot of Polish lines which I did my best with, but were much improved by a Polish-speaking reader who was kind enough to help me out there.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?
About fifteen years ago, yes, but I can't recall if it's still online anywhere.

14. What's your all time favourite ship?
Hmm. I have favourite ships in most of my fandoms, but I never think much about comparing them to each other. A lot of my favourites are gen/friendship, actually, so that makes it even harder to pick! I've been sitting here for five solid minutes trying to pick a favourite but I have to give up on this one.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?
I wanted to write more of my Wheels of London series, expanding more into Ned and Jacob's future, exploring a little more into Ned's past with Adam Worth and all that, but I never managed to ger past half a chapter or make an outline work that I felt would be manageable. I also had an idea for an Agent Carter murder mystery fic, but that never got past an outline either.

16. What are your writing strengths?
I think I'm pretty good at worldbuilding internal consistency, and researching whatever facts or historical details or how-to-do-a-craft or whatever the fic mentions in a single line :D

17. What are your writing weaknesses?
Characterisation consistency.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?
I've done that in Morning, and I used footnotes for the direct translations, however I tried to make the gist of the meaning clear in the narrative without it, because it can jar you out of the flow of the story. The other way I'd do it would be to write the words in English, italicise them, and use dialogue tags like "said in Language", which takes more care but can be easier to read overall.

19. First fandom you wrote for?
Uh..... that's almost thirty years ago now, well before I had internet access. I think it was the Magic School Bus, a typical self-insert is the new kid in class fic. The first thing I posted online, to FFN, was for Star Wars (the prequels had just started coming out).

20. Favourite fic you've written?
I think Theives of London; I was very proud of it, in terms of worldbuilding, charactersation, and the primary ship development turned out feeling as natural as I could hope for.

This was fun :)