enchantedsleeper (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
enchantedsleeper) wrote2023-03-02 10:56 pm
enchantedsleeper) wrote2023-03-02 10:56 pm
Entry tags:
deep fic writer asks: part 1
Hi again, Dreamwidth! It's been a minute! I've had a bunch of ideas for Dreamwidth posts over the past few weeks that I've wanted to write and not found time for - obviously I can still write them (none are particularly time-sensitive), but I really wanted to keep up my momentum from the Snowflake Challenge and not let my blog fall completely inactive now that January is over.
In my Fannish Goals for 2023 post I mentioned wanting to complete something called 'deep fic writer asks', which as the name implies, are a set of asks for fic writers that are meant to go deep (into things like fic writing motivations, successes, difficulties, writing process, etc.) I'm answering all of them for my own enjoyment, and in my goals post I mentioned that I was a little over halfway done. Well, it occurred to me that posting the answers in instalments was a pretty good idea because there's a lot of them, and my answers are pretty long, so even half of the responses still translates into me rambling for several thousand words (eheh).
Anyway, even though I've been writing them out of order I'd managed to finish almost all of the first half (questions 1-10), so this evening I sat down and wrote the last answer and brought the other responses up to date a bit, and here we are! This is my first set of answers for the deep fic writer asks. I have a lot more gaps in the second half, so I have no idea when I'll manage to complete that, but that makes it an even better idea to post these, since at least they won't get any more out of date while I'm trying to finish the others.
I've been pretty lax about putting cuts in my posts but this post definitely needs one, since I'm not subjecting anyone's feed to the length of this post 😅
1: La Bella Donna: This was my first Yuletide fic (a Jonathan Creek/Cadfael crossover with time-travel crime-solving hijinks) and I sort of can’t believe I wrote it, because the mystery and the setting and the characters all came together better than I could have hoped for. I’m proud of the plot, the jokes, and the fact that I wrote more than 10k mostly in a single day (I took the day off work before the posting deadline xD).
I feel like it also encapsulates what I love about Yuletide fic: writing for a fandom you wouldn’t normally (though I love Jonathan Creek, I’ve never really had any fanwork ideas for it) and finding a prompt that challenges you a bit while also falling enough in your wheelhouse that you enjoy it. I also loved the comments that I got on it. Definitely a best possible first time Yuletide!
2: Staying on the Yuletide theme, I’m insanely proud of the fic I wrote for Yuletide 2020, Mission Log: REDACTED. While this wasn’t at all a new fandom for me (I’ve written more fic for The Strange Case of Starship Iris than any other fandom), the prompt again took my writing to places it would never have gone otherwise, and I had so much fun with it.
I created a whole post-episode 9 canon divergence AU! I saved Alvy! Violet got to go undercover and be a spy! And I wrote the whole thing as a series of “audio transcripts”. I love playing with unusual “formats” and so when my recipient mentioned this as a like, it was a total gift. Also, my recipient and a group of other talented peeps created an INCREDIBLE multi-voice podfic adaptation of the whole thing. Just, damn.
3: Any Day Breathing: This is another TSCOSI (Starship Iris) fic of mine that I happened to reread recently, and I remembered how proud I was of it so I’m putting it on this list in place of a different fic that I originally had here. This is another one of those fics that I look back on not quite sure how I wrote them, even though I distinctly remember the process of writing it.
It’s a fic that mostly headcanons a background for a character we don’t know that much about (and knew even less about at the time I wrote it), Ignatius Campbell, and I really enjoyed developing my headcanons for Campbell (who also barely appeared in fanworks and didn’t become popular in the fandom until he got more canon ‘screentime’ in season two) and weaving into them the bits of canon info we did have and telling a story of how he met our heroes. I really like my prose and some of the dialogue exchanges between Campbell and his love interest, Sana Tripathi, in this fic, as well as the little bits of worldbuilding I incorporated for the planet of Telemachus.
4: a Film by Peter Parker: This one makes my ‘most proud of’ list in retrospect, because at the time, I definitely don’t think I was pleased with how it came out; I was just glad that it was Done. It was only after I posted it and with a bit of space (and lots of amazing comments from people) that I came to feel proud of it. The fic is titled after that little movie that Peter makes at the beginning of Spider-Man: Homecoming that recaps the events of Civil War from his perspective, complete with the same capitalisation. In it I imagined that a few years after Spider-Man: Homecoming, now in his final year of high school, Peter had an assignment to make a documentary film project about the people around him, and what that might look like and what they’d be doing.
I wrote it in the style of film footage, that is describing the events as if they were film footage, and with the exception of a short narrative bit at the beginning and the end, the whole fic is written in that style. So yeah, it was pretty challenging, I questioned my choices and sanity a few times, and I was very glad to be done (it took me a few months to finish and post, and is one of those projects I absolutely could have abandoned, and I’m really glad I didn’t). But looking back on it, I’m also like “damn, that was a cool choice and I like what I did with it”.
I got the chance to include a lot of wholesome headcanons (like Tony and Pepper’s wedding, or Peter asking Tony for advice about college) at a time when everyone was preparing to be Very Very Bummed Out by Infinity War (which hadn’t come out yet, but people were writing fics based on the comics plotline). So it’s nice to look back on, and it resonated with people a lot as well. I actually have a sequel I started writing as a fluffy antidote to Endgame, but it’s stuck in permanent WIP status at the moment, sadly. I still have hopes of dusting it off and finishing it.
I’ll leave my picks at those four, otherwise my answer to this question will never end, but here’s a few honourable mentions: Puzzles, my 17k i-reversebang Inception fic; The Strange Case of the Iris Express, my steampunk/western AU for the TSCOSI mini-bang that saw me finally write an idea I’d first had more than two years earlier; Five Times Park and McCabe Were Mistaken For a Couple, which I just really like and it actually came out the way I wanted it to; and Envoys of the Gods, my most epic Road to El Dorado fic I will never, ever finish. Sorry to my readers for that one; I wish I’d tried harder to update it 😅
I don’t write a lot of angsty fic in general as it’s just not my thing, and I particularly don’t write about loss and tragedy much because I’m worried about dealing with it in a trite way, but I tried to get into Peter’s mindset as much as I could. I’m a big fan of Irondad and Spiderson, so it was quite bittersweet to write in headcanons like Tony having a room for Peter in his 5-years-later house and having held onto his things, in the context of him being gone.
I don’t really remember if it was hard to write, but I remember feeling that push to sift through the emotions somehow and channel them into words – Endgame was this huge deal, the climax of years of Marvel films (and years of Marvel fandom), and I really enjoyed it, but it also left me feeling hollow, particularly the ‘5 years’ revelation (I still hate that writing choice) and what it meant for the cinematic universe going forward. Writing about what that must be like for the characters helped me make sense of it in a way that I felt the film didn’t.
For Starship Iris, I love reliving the silliness of my HP AU, Firewhisky in the Jar (Harry Potter is seeming a bit over-represented in this list, but it is one of my most-written-for fandoms…), and Sana Tripathi’s Day Off is very fluffy and fun. The Insomnolence Game in Doctor Who is also a super self-indulgent fic since I love fics that centre around sleep, dreaming, nightmares, etc. and again, I enjoy the silliness of it.
(In the abstract? Sure, I’m happy to note that I wrote a bunch of fic for Rurouni Kenshin and assorted anime fandoms in my early days. You want to read it? Please no, or if you do, never mention it to me xD)
(This argument is harder to make for tiny fandoms, which is why the fandom I’ve published in most consistently has been The Strange Case of Starship Iris. Well, that’s one reason; there are others).
Or I’ll be onto some other idea (or even some other fandom) that’s newer and shinier and I’ll have convinced myself that this one is the one that’s going to get finished; I’ll come back to the others later. And sometimes that’s true, and I actually publish something, but 2/3 of the time I just end up with another WIP to add to the pile xD
It works most of the time; in Starship Iris fandom, I knew not to expect too much by way of comments, and not to expect comments immediately, so I would treasure the kudos and Tumblr likes I got, and I think I got into a pretty good groove of writing because I wanted something to be written, not for some kind of hypothetical reception from readers. At the same time, it did discourage me if I got even less reception than usual on a fic I’d written, especially if it was like, the second chapter of something that had got excited comments on the first chapter. Clearly people did like the story, so what was wrong with the second chapter? Had it gone downhill? Were people disappointed with it?
Ultimately you never get the answer to questions like these, so as I say, I try not to let it determine what I write or how much, but just enjoy it as a surprise bonus. Sometimes, a comment on something out of the blue has inspired me to pull a fic off the backburner or look at an old work with new eyes – last year, a comment from a writer I admired on one of my old, old drabbles inspired me to start a drabble collection for my latest fandom, SK8 the Infinity, and I’ve since published 7 of them! All the same, if you’re motivated by positive feedback it’s hard not to also feel bummed at its absence, so, I just try to find ways of motivating myself even when I might not get the feedback that I was hoping for.
Outside of close friends and family, it does come up every now and again when people ask how my husband and I met, and depending on who it is (and how nerdy or otherwise savvy I think they are), I’ll either say that we met through a “writing group” (the normie response) or that we met through a fanfic writing group (if I think they’re likely to know what that means).
I increasingly write fic on my phone these days, because it means that I always have the “document” with me and can work on it in idle moments on public transport, at work or whenever inspiration strikes me. (I wrote the entirety of my Yuletide 2022 on my phone, which I think is a first). It also helps the act of writing fic feel less formalised, which removes some of the intimidation factor, although I do think I write more slowly on my phone and so it takes a bit longer for the words to get from my brain to the screen. Anyway, once I’ve started writing I generally write the fic from start to finish in chronological order and work on it as consistently as I can before I run out of steam. I often daydream scenes when I’m not writing and will sometimes brainstorm aloud (assuming I’m reasonably alone and not, like, at my desk at work) if I’m stuck to try and figure out a tricky plot point or sequence of events that doesn’t quite fit together.
However, when it goes well, writing is a great mood booster and often just knowing that I have a cool fic idea I can work on at any given moment in the day (another reason I like writing fic on my phone) helps me to get through the day. Being creatively productive is a great feeling. (Being creatively unproductive is not, see paragraph one of this answer xD) Also, I feel like I’m getting a bit better at writing the types of fics that feel good to write, if that makes sense – namely low-key, self-indulgent fics that aren’t too intensive.
There’s definitely asterisks to this – I’ve been writing a SK8 superhero AU since last November-ish that I’m frustrated with because there’s an action sequence I can’t avoid (and don’t want to avoid) but I’m also finding it really challenging to write, so I haven’t made progress in ages. But I was really pleased with my Yuletide 2022, which was pretty much the definition of low-key and fluffy, and I really needed that after two consecutive years of very plot-heavy Yuletides. Also, drabbles are great little mood boosters because for me, they’re relatively easy to think up and then it’s just a matter of tinkering away until I get to the right word count, and voilà. New fic! (In particular, I was really proud of the very first MastoDrabble that I wrote for The Murderbot Diaries, which put me in a great mood all day).
In my Fannish Goals for 2023 post I mentioned wanting to complete something called 'deep fic writer asks', which as the name implies, are a set of asks for fic writers that are meant to go deep (into things like fic writing motivations, successes, difficulties, writing process, etc.) I'm answering all of them for my own enjoyment, and in my goals post I mentioned that I was a little over halfway done. Well, it occurred to me that posting the answers in instalments was a pretty good idea because there's a lot of them, and my answers are pretty long, so even half of the responses still translates into me rambling for several thousand words (eheh).
Anyway, even though I've been writing them out of order I'd managed to finish almost all of the first half (questions 1-10), so this evening I sat down and wrote the last answer and brought the other responses up to date a bit, and here we are! This is my first set of answers for the deep fic writer asks. I have a lot more gaps in the second half, so I have no idea when I'll manage to complete that, but that makes it an even better idea to post these, since at least they won't get any more out of date while I'm trying to finish the others.
I've been pretty lax about putting cuts in my posts but this post definitely needs one, since I'm not subjecting anyone's feed to the length of this post 😅
1. what’s the fic you’re most proud of?
Of course this goes in with the hardest question straight off xD Genuinely, I’ve often imagined what my answer to this might be if I’m ever asked this, and it is impossible to pick just one. I have a lot of fics that I’m really proud of for different reasons, but thankfully I’m not honour-bound to just pick one fic, so here’s a list:1: La Bella Donna: This was my first Yuletide fic (a Jonathan Creek/Cadfael crossover with time-travel crime-solving hijinks) and I sort of can’t believe I wrote it, because the mystery and the setting and the characters all came together better than I could have hoped for. I’m proud of the plot, the jokes, and the fact that I wrote more than 10k mostly in a single day (I took the day off work before the posting deadline xD).
I feel like it also encapsulates what I love about Yuletide fic: writing for a fandom you wouldn’t normally (though I love Jonathan Creek, I’ve never really had any fanwork ideas for it) and finding a prompt that challenges you a bit while also falling enough in your wheelhouse that you enjoy it. I also loved the comments that I got on it. Definitely a best possible first time Yuletide!
2: Staying on the Yuletide theme, I’m insanely proud of the fic I wrote for Yuletide 2020, Mission Log: REDACTED. While this wasn’t at all a new fandom for me (I’ve written more fic for The Strange Case of Starship Iris than any other fandom), the prompt again took my writing to places it would never have gone otherwise, and I had so much fun with it.
I created a whole post-episode 9 canon divergence AU! I saved Alvy! Violet got to go undercover and be a spy! And I wrote the whole thing as a series of “audio transcripts”. I love playing with unusual “formats” and so when my recipient mentioned this as a like, it was a total gift. Also, my recipient and a group of other talented peeps created an INCREDIBLE multi-voice podfic adaptation of the whole thing. Just, damn.
3: Any Day Breathing: This is another TSCOSI (Starship Iris) fic of mine that I happened to reread recently, and I remembered how proud I was of it so I’m putting it on this list in place of a different fic that I originally had here. This is another one of those fics that I look back on not quite sure how I wrote them, even though I distinctly remember the process of writing it.
It’s a fic that mostly headcanons a background for a character we don’t know that much about (and knew even less about at the time I wrote it), Ignatius Campbell, and I really enjoyed developing my headcanons for Campbell (who also barely appeared in fanworks and didn’t become popular in the fandom until he got more canon ‘screentime’ in season two) and weaving into them the bits of canon info we did have and telling a story of how he met our heroes. I really like my prose and some of the dialogue exchanges between Campbell and his love interest, Sana Tripathi, in this fic, as well as the little bits of worldbuilding I incorporated for the planet of Telemachus.
4: a Film by Peter Parker: This one makes my ‘most proud of’ list in retrospect, because at the time, I definitely don’t think I was pleased with how it came out; I was just glad that it was Done. It was only after I posted it and with a bit of space (and lots of amazing comments from people) that I came to feel proud of it. The fic is titled after that little movie that Peter makes at the beginning of Spider-Man: Homecoming that recaps the events of Civil War from his perspective, complete with the same capitalisation. In it I imagined that a few years after Spider-Man: Homecoming, now in his final year of high school, Peter had an assignment to make a documentary film project about the people around him, and what that might look like and what they’d be doing.
I wrote it in the style of film footage, that is describing the events as if they were film footage, and with the exception of a short narrative bit at the beginning and the end, the whole fic is written in that style. So yeah, it was pretty challenging, I questioned my choices and sanity a few times, and I was very glad to be done (it took me a few months to finish and post, and is one of those projects I absolutely could have abandoned, and I’m really glad I didn’t). But looking back on it, I’m also like “damn, that was a cool choice and I like what I did with it”.
I got the chance to include a lot of wholesome headcanons (like Tony and Pepper’s wedding, or Peter asking Tony for advice about college) at a time when everyone was preparing to be Very Very Bummed Out by Infinity War (which hadn’t come out yet, but people were writing fics based on the comics plotline). So it’s nice to look back on, and it resonated with people a lot as well. I actually have a sequel I started writing as a fluffy antidote to Endgame, but it’s stuck in permanent WIP status at the moment, sadly. I still have hopes of dusting it off and finishing it.
I’ll leave my picks at those four, otherwise my answer to this question will never end, but here’s a few honourable mentions: Puzzles, my 17k i-reversebang Inception fic; The Strange Case of the Iris Express, my steampunk/western AU for the TSCOSI mini-bang that saw me finally write an idea I’d first had more than two years earlier; Five Times Park and McCabe Were Mistaken For a Couple, which I just really like and it actually came out the way I wanted it to; and Envoys of the Gods, my most epic Road to El Dorado fic I will never, ever finish. Sorry to my readers for that one; I wish I’d tried harder to update it 😅
2. what’s a fic that took you to an emotional/dark/hard place?
The fic that immediately springs to mind is ‘What Happens Next’, my post-Endgame Peter/MJ fic, which I wrote to try and deal with all of my Endgame feelings (I wrote it in a couple of days after watching a midnight premiere of the film). In it, Peter and MJ each try to process what happened to them during the events of the Snap and the changed reality they now live in – particularly Peter as he tries to come to grips with having lost Tony and everything that took place right before the Snap.I don’t write a lot of angsty fic in general as it’s just not my thing, and I particularly don’t write about loss and tragedy much because I’m worried about dealing with it in a trite way, but I tried to get into Peter’s mindset as much as I could. I’m a big fan of Irondad and Spiderson, so it was quite bittersweet to write in headcanons like Tony having a room for Peter in his 5-years-later house and having held onto his things, in the context of him being gone.
I don’t really remember if it was hard to write, but I remember feeling that push to sift through the emotions somehow and channel them into words – Endgame was this huge deal, the climax of years of Marvel films (and years of Marvel fandom), and I really enjoyed it, but it also left me feeling hollow, particularly the ‘5 years’ revelation (I still hate that writing choice) and what it meant for the cinematic universe going forward. Writing about what that must be like for the characters helped me make sense of it in a way that I felt the film didn’t.
3. what fic are you emotionally attached to?
Pretty much all of them! Even the oldest, crappiest ones still have a nostalgic attachment for me. To me, every fic shows that “I was there, in this fandom, making fanworks”. I like to look back over my fanfic ‘eras’ and recall making them and think about how they fit into the timeline of my life. So even the little throwaway ones mean something in that context.4. what fic of your own do you read for comfort?
The fics I read for comfort are more likely to be someone else’s than my own, but I do have fics of my own that I re-read that make me smile. with flowers in her hair is a fluffy uplifting HP fic about Ron and Hermione’s wedding that I’m pretty proud of (it was also written as a gift for a friend, which is a nice association to have, in that the act of writing it was to hopefully make my friend smile); also in HP, I enjoy re-reading Best Served Cold, which is a Weasley-twins-and-Ron-centric fic that I dashed off after reading east, west, home’s best by taizi (which is super lovely. So sometimes I’ll re-read that one and then mine).For Starship Iris, I love reliving the silliness of my HP AU, Firewhisky in the Jar (Harry Potter is seeming a bit over-represented in this list, but it is one of my most-written-for fandoms…), and Sana Tripathi’s Day Off is very fluffy and fun. The Insomnolence Game in Doctor Who is also a super self-indulgent fic since I love fics that centre around sleep, dreaming, nightmares, etc. and again, I enjoy the silliness of it.
5. what fic of your own won’t you read?
I think that answer is basically the same as my answer to #16 (coming soon, oops), so I’ll refer people there – the only fic of mine that I won’t (re-)read is just the stuff that’s so old and cringey I don’t want to acknowledge it xD(In the abstract? Sure, I’m happy to note that I wrote a bunch of fic for Rurouni Kenshin and assorted anime fandoms in my early days. You want to read it? Please no, or if you do, never mention it to me xD)
6. what’s the hardest part of the writing process for you?
Finishing things xD I suppose in part it’s about plotting something out in its entirety, but even for those projects where I know how they’ll end, I still tend to lose momentum before I get to the point of writing that ending if it’s anything longer than a few thousand words. I guess you could say I struggle with discipline/just-showing-up-to-the-page? I’m really happy to daydream about a fic endlessly, but when it comes to writing it down, ehh… I’ll do it for a few days, maybe a week or two and then if the fic isn’t done by that point, I generally tend to lose belief in the idea of it needing to exist – sure it would be nice, but there are plenty of other good fics out there, why does mine need to be one of them?(This argument is harder to make for tiny fandoms, which is why the fandom I’ve published in most consistently has been The Strange Case of Starship Iris. Well, that’s one reason; there are others).
Or I’ll be onto some other idea (or even some other fandom) that’s newer and shinier and I’ll have convinced myself that this one is the one that’s going to get finished; I’ll come back to the others later. And sometimes that’s true, and I actually publish something, but 2/3 of the time I just end up with another WIP to add to the pile xD
7. how does receiving or not receiving feedback/support impact you?
In a general sense, as much as I try not to let the reception I get for a fic impact me, I do get spurred on by feedback and often feel less encouraged if I don’t get any, or very much. I feel like I’m hardly alone in this (as the endless debates about feedback culture in fandom attest), but obviously there are a lot of totally random factors that go into the reception that a fic gets (most of which are unrelated to actual writing quality), and so I try to set my expectations as low as possible. That way, I’m pleasantly surprised!It works most of the time; in Starship Iris fandom, I knew not to expect too much by way of comments, and not to expect comments immediately, so I would treasure the kudos and Tumblr likes I got, and I think I got into a pretty good groove of writing because I wanted something to be written, not for some kind of hypothetical reception from readers. At the same time, it did discourage me if I got even less reception than usual on a fic I’d written, especially if it was like, the second chapter of something that had got excited comments on the first chapter. Clearly people did like the story, so what was wrong with the second chapter? Had it gone downhill? Were people disappointed with it?
Ultimately you never get the answer to questions like these, so as I say, I try not to let it determine what I write or how much, but just enjoy it as a surprise bonus. Sometimes, a comment on something out of the blue has inspired me to pull a fic off the backburner or look at an old work with new eyes – last year, a comment from a writer I admired on one of my old, old drabbles inspired me to start a drabble collection for my latest fandom, SK8 the Infinity, and I’ve since published 7 of them! All the same, if you’re motivated by positive feedback it’s hard not to also feel bummed at its absence, so, I just try to find ways of motivating myself even when I might not get the feedback that I was hoping for.
8. does anyone in your personal life know you write fic? if not, would you tell anyone?
Hard for them not to, since I met my now-husband through fandom! So, my significant other definitely knows (and more to the point, also writes fic), and all of my close friends are either fannish or fandom-adjacent. Birds of a feather, etc.! So, yes, my closest people are all aware, my parents and sibling are also peripherally aware but we don’t, like, discuss it xDOutside of close friends and family, it does come up every now and again when people ask how my husband and I met, and depending on who it is (and how nerdy or otherwise savvy I think they are), I’ll either say that we met through a “writing group” (the normie response) or that we met through a fanfic writing group (if I think they’re likely to know what that means).
9. what’s your writing process like?
Errr… I’m not sure I have a writing process? Possibly if I were more consistent with writing I would have a Process. As it is, I often use my phone to jot down ideas for fics (I use InkpadNotepad and have separate notes for fic ideas from each fandom or sometimes for individual fics) and sometimes excerpts, then I’ll begin writing the full thing either on my phone or on my laptop.I increasingly write fic on my phone these days, because it means that I always have the “document” with me and can work on it in idle moments on public transport, at work or whenever inspiration strikes me. (I wrote the entirety of my Yuletide 2022 on my phone, which I think is a first). It also helps the act of writing fic feel less formalised, which removes some of the intimidation factor, although I do think I write more slowly on my phone and so it takes a bit longer for the words to get from my brain to the screen. Anyway, once I’ve started writing I generally write the fic from start to finish in chronological order and work on it as consistently as I can before I run out of steam. I often daydream scenes when I’m not writing and will sometimes brainstorm aloud (assuming I’m reasonably alone and not, like, at my desk at work) if I’m stuck to try and figure out a tricky plot point or sequence of events that doesn’t quite fit together.
10. how has writing positively impacted your mental health or overall mood?
That’s an interesting question, because honestly, thinking about writing fic more often brings to mind my frustration over my own inability to finish things or how I haven’t written enough lately and how I haven’t worked on my latest story idea for ages, so there’s a lot of stressful emotions there, honestly. It’s not that writing stresses me out, per se, but the gap between what I want to achieve and what I do achieve does get me down.However, when it goes well, writing is a great mood booster and often just knowing that I have a cool fic idea I can work on at any given moment in the day (another reason I like writing fic on my phone) helps me to get through the day. Being creatively productive is a great feeling. (Being creatively unproductive is not, see paragraph one of this answer xD) Also, I feel like I’m getting a bit better at writing the types of fics that feel good to write, if that makes sense – namely low-key, self-indulgent fics that aren’t too intensive.
There’s definitely asterisks to this – I’ve been writing a SK8 superhero AU since last November-ish that I’m frustrated with because there’s an action sequence I can’t avoid (and don’t want to avoid) but I’m also finding it really challenging to write, so I haven’t made progress in ages. But I was really pleased with my Yuletide 2022, which was pretty much the definition of low-key and fluffy, and I really needed that after two consecutive years of very plot-heavy Yuletides. Also, drabbles are great little mood boosters because for me, they’re relatively easy to think up and then it’s just a matter of tinkering away until I get to the right word count, and voilà. New fic! (In particular, I was really proud of the very first MastoDrabble that I wrote for The Murderbot Diaries, which put me in a great mood all day).
no subject
Definitely feel you on writing for smaller fandoms too oh gosh. The comments come fewer and farther between but I treasure them when they come. And often (at least in my experience) the feedback tends to be lengthier/more in-depth? *shrugs* eh, who's to say what the feedbacking gods are feeling at any given moment, so better just to yeet it up when it's ready to go, and anything that comes my way is a gift XD
Anyway!!! Thank you for sharing this--I might hijack these prompts for meself! I've been trying to be more active here and this looks like such a fun list of prompts :D (also I reaaaaaally need to watch SK8 baha it's been on my to watch list forever!)
no subject
Absolutely, I've had such good interactions in small fandoms, especially because I think everyone there is just so happy to have other fans to talk to that they're really keen to talk! And interact! And appreciate! XD I like how much easier it is to get to know people, as well, like being part of a very intimate club. Being in a small fandom for a while also really recalibrates your expectations for levels of feedback, so when you post in a bigger fandom it's suddenly like "wtf.... where are all these people coming from" 😂
You're so welcome, and thank you for the lovely comment on my very long rambles XDD It's so nice to get a comment on this, and I feel inspired now to finish the set! Please do link me if you answer them yourself!
Also sdfsgfsgdg I thought you had already seen SK8! You should definitely watch it, it's super funnnnn~ :D