#You need to understand that most of the books in my longfic list is over 100 000 words.

[estherdedlock]

So, A Little Life is one of those books that turns up on Dark Academia rec lists, and once again...I’ve been misled by Dark Academia rec lists. Sigh.

But what I really don’t understand about A Little Life is the critical acclaim. It’s fanfiction. I don’t mean literally, in the way that Fifty Shades of Grey started out as literal fanfiction. I mean the writing style, and the carelessness, and above all, the endless gratuitous torture porn. These are all classic hallmarks of fanfic that are acceptable, even to be expected from amateur authors who are writing for their own kicks. But how did Hanya Yanagihara get away with loading all of this crap into a book that not only got professionally published, but was widely acclaimed as important literary fiction? Even the critics who loathed the book didn’t catch on to the fanfic influence...I don’t know, I guess book critics still don’t know about fanfic? Or at least, they didn’t in 2015. Or none of them want to admit they know about it. But it’s so obvious.

I just need to rant about this for a bit because I’d like to get it out of my system.

First off, the writing style. Endless, endless blocks of text that you’d expect from a work that didn’t have the benefit of a professional editor. Reading this book was just like my attempts at reading other longfics where the author just goes on and on: after a few sentences, I would just start skipping ahead, knowing I wasn’t going to miss anything. I don’t mind big chunks of text if the writer has a particularly masterful style: Cormac McCarthy writes massive paragraphs (often with a dearth of punctuation) but his prose is so hypnotic and poetic that it never bores. There’s none of that here. It’s just the most basic, tedious narration you can imagine. The best description I found is from Tim Pfaff at the Bay Area Reporter, who said that reading the book was like being trapped in “an overlong gossipy phone call you’d hang up on if you could.”

And sometimes, the writing goes from just dull to outright crap. This, for example, may be one of most poorly constructed sentences I’ve ever seen in print: “His mother…had earned her doctorate in education, teaching all the while at the public school near their house that she had deemed JB better than.” The book is full of clunkers like this.

Then there’s the carelessness. Yanagihara cranked out this massive tome in a year and a half, and it shows: She obviously didn’t waste time on research. Again, I can overlook this in a fanfic writer who’s banging out a story in their spare time just for fun....but a lot of fanfic writers get called on that kind of thing (or at least, they did back when I was reading and writing fic.)

You see the carelessness in little things: early in the book, she describes how much JB loves watching the subway train fill with sunlight as it goes “over the bridge” to Long Island City. I have lived in Queens my entire life and I’m telling you: There is no subway that goes over any damn bridge to Long Island City. ALL of the subway lines that get you to Long Island City go under the East River. She also says it takes “thirty minutes” to get from Little Italy to Queens: she must’ve gotten this number from the MTA website, which always coughs up these wildly optimistic travel-time estimates. Yanagihara lives in New York but she writes about it like a fanficker whose entire knowledge of the city was gleaned from the movies and the most cursory Googling. This lack of care reduces New York City to a backdrop as bland as the laughably fake Big Apple of a Hallmark Christmas movie shot in Canada, and it packs the book with vapid observations about the city like, “New York was populated by the ambitious.“

But the carelessness extends to big things too. I just couldn’t get past the idea that Jude was supposed to have been raised in a monastery orphanage. There is no such thing in the modern United States. I have no idea when A Little Life is supposed to take place, but the setting of the book’s beginning seems entirely 21st century, which means that the 20-something characters were born in the mid-1980s. By the 1980s, there were no orphanages in the U.S., including no Catholic orphanages. A particularly notorious Catholic orphanage in Burlington, Vermont (St. Joseph’s) was shuttered in 1974, which is around when the entire orphanage concept was phased out in favor of the foster care system. I don’t know, maybe Yanagihara was going for some kind of time-shifting magical realism? If so, I don’t think it works, but I suspect the truth is more related to this next hallmark of fanfiction, and I’m talking: endless gratuitous torture porn.

I’ve read my share of fanfic torture porn, and written a little bit of it myself and I know it when I see it. Because Yanagihara doesn’t just abuse Jude, she mauls him with glee: raped and beaten by monks, he’s “rescued” from the monastery only to spend the next three years of his childhood being pimped out in motels to an endless parade of savage pedophiles. Then he’s molested by counselors and fellow orphans at yet another orphanage, kidnapped, tortured, raped, starved, run over with a car, left for dead; then as an adult he’s raped and tormented and beaten nearly to death by a sadistic psychopath...and I’m not even getting into the harm he inflicts upon himself. In the New York Review of Books, the critic Daniel Mendelsohn wrote: “The abuse that Yanagihara heaps on her protagonist is neither just from a human point of view nor necessary from an artistic one.” Obviously, Mendelsohn had no familiarity with fanfic...if he had, he’d understand that this level of torment needs no artistic necessity. It is the art. It is the whole point of writing the story.

In addition, Jude is the classic fanfic torture porn victim. He’s beautiful. He’s brilliant. He’s magnetic (or at least, the author tells us he is, because she never really shows Jude doing anything particularly mesmerizing). His extraordinary (and implausible) success hides an inner darkness that he bears with garish acts of self-destruction. Everyone he encounters either subjects him to ghastly sexual and physical abuse, or heroically tries to save him (while really just enabling him). He even inspires his straight friend Willem to embody that most tried-and-true fanfic trope, the classic “I’m Only Gay For You,” perfectly captured in this fanfic-worthy declaration: “I’m not in a relationship with a man…I’m in a relationship with Jude.” Seriously?!? How the fuck did Yanagihara get away with any of this?!? IT’S. FUCKING. FANFIC.

Some critics who have been appalled by A Little Life have made uncomfortable observations about Yanagihara’s artistic choices: “Male homosexuality,” Mendelsohn wrote, “is for the second time in that author’s work deeply entwined with pedophiliac abuse.” Others have slammed this book as a regressive throwback to the old cliché of gay men being tortured souls who are doomed to suffer. They’re overthinking it. All Yanagihara did was take some of the most lurid and hackneyed elements of fanfic and mash them up into a 720-page monstrosity that, somehow, fooled just about everyone.

#a little life #dark academia #i hate this book #not dark academia

[evilvarric666-archive]

This is gonna be long, so sorry in advance, but as someone who enjoys long fics here are my two cents:

I get why some ppl may not want 75 tags in fics, but this is gonna hurt long fic writers. On a long fic there are probably gonna be more relationships that are central to the plot that aren't the main ship. And side pairings that may be a squick to some ppl. Not to mention trigger warnings and tone tags.

For example: a long fic with the pairing Y x Z. Z had an abusive relationship, and that's gonna be explored. So the author tags abusive relationship, bc that's a trigger, but an explanation next tag saying "not current ship" or smth.

Then Y has very important friendships with some of the cast. These are central to the plot so they're tagged too.

Turns out, character W is controversial in the fandom, but they're central to the fic too. The author is gonna tag after the character tag W positive/negative; so ppl who don't wanna see positive/negative things about W can skip this.

And guess what? Ship A x B appears in this fic too. Maybe it's not that central, but this ship is also disliked by some people, so the author will tag it, so ppl can filter through.

Another problem is with media that has different mediums, like, the media Y, Z, etc are from has movies, and books, and games and a tv show. All these things actually have different stories, different enough at least that ppl may only want to see fics written for the movies! But the author wants to take plot from the movies and the books. So instead of just tagging the all media tag for that media, they also tag media (movies) and media (books)

These tags end up accumulating. And especially in long fics. The author could make the first chapter a list of tws and stuff that they keep updating, but that destroys the purpose of ao3 tags: you can't filter content like that, you can only filter tags.

I honestly think they should just find a way to delete the fics with the trolling tags, or make a readmore thing so it doesn't hurt the browsing. At the very least make the tag limit longer.

sorry in advance that this is going to be rambly and weird. I have a lot of thoughts.

I get where you're coming from but I also still disagree. Like it's definitely going to change the way longfic writers tag, but I really don't think it's going to hurt them. I think it's going to encourage more effective tagging and that that's going to be better for everybody in the long run. If anything, I think that overtagging is what's hurting longfic writers, it makes their works look unappealing, and actually important information gets buried in a wall of text.

i will admit though that I do understand better now why less room for trigger tagging is going to be an issue. My preferred tagging style is "General/umbrella warnings in the tags, with whatever elaboration/specifics the author deems necessary in an author's note/author's notes at the beginning of each chapter" (example: "animal death" in the tags, so that the filters catch it + people who can't handle the subject At All know to keep scrolling, and then the author's note specifying that its in the context of game hunting & not a pet death, so that people who were uncertain and needed more info could click in and get the specifics.) and I thought that preference was pretty universal? But apparently a lot of people use the tags as an exhaustive list of warnings, which I didn't know because when I see a work with more than, well with more than 75 tags, I just start scrolling until it's gone.

(this is a tangent and I get that my experiences are not universal. but I genuinely dislike full warning lists in the tags because, for me at least, it makes it harder for me to figure out if the story is something I can/want to read. The things I Really Do Not Want To Read about are rare, and rarely tagged the same way twice, so the exclusion filter isn't really helpful for me. I have to actually read the full list of warnings and if the things I'm looking for are sandwiched inbetween a bunch of trope/character tags in a big wall o text I am going to miss it. This has happened to me multiple times.)

I think that that's an ineffective tagging style, basically. Lots of tags is kind of the opposite of useful tags, imo. Short, to the point and consistently worded warnings are better and I think having less space will encourage people to do that. I understand why people do this other style, though, and also why it would frustrate them that they can no longer do that. I think it really sucks that ao3 let everyone wild west their website for so long that it managed to spawn like three distinct groups of people who all use the website in completely incompatible ways, and now it's at the point where any new rule implemented is going to screw a lot of people over no matter what. But I digress.

Anyways, as long as someone isn't putting Revolutionary Girl Utena levels of warnings in their tags (and if your fic needs that much... maybe you should just put yur top 10 biggest warnings on there and slap a Dead Dove Do Not Eat on the end there, yknow?), I think that 75 tags will fully accommodate them. I get that tags start adding up, but also I think a lot of people are underestimating how many tags 75 tags is.

Like to just add up how many tags are used in your example: three / pairing tags, lets go crazy and say three more & pairing tags, tag every character tag in those pairings that's twelve, #abusive relationship + #not main pairing tags, three fandom tags bc multiple source mediums, a #[controversial character] positive tag... that's 24 tags. Like all the necessary character & pairing tags are handled in less than a third of the space given (and personally I consider this slightly over tagged. I think the only character tags you should put on a fic are the very mainest/pov characters, but yknow) and honestly if you can't then figure out a way to communicate the rest of the necessary information about your fic in 51 tags and a 1250 character summary then I really don't know how to help you. I personally would have to really push myself to figure out how to put more than 75 tags on one fic, regardless of the length of the fic. And I can't help but notice that a lot of the fics I could find with over 75 tags while searching last night had a lot of... unnecessary duplicate tags, often for information that could've been easily otherwise intuited (tagging #mandolorian #mandolore #mandolorian character and #mandolorian culture on a Jango Fett pre-series fic, for example)

I do have some criticisms about the current change though. I think it would've been better to have individual tag number limits for each individual field (x number of fandom tags, x number of character tags, etc.) instead of a 75 tags over all limit (or make a "warning tags" field that's separate from "additional tags" but that's a separate essay and would... probably mean overhauling the whole site. so not very practical.) A readmore option would be good too, and I'm not sure why they didn't go for that? I also think that this change will be most effective if done in combination with other changes. Like posting very loosely or not at all enforced official tagging/style guides for the site. I really think that even a tepid attempt at standardization will increase the site's usability like, A Lot.

I'm not sure how cohesive that was. TL;DR I appreciate hearing your thoughts, mine are that I still think this is a step in the right direction. And that cutting back on overtagging will lead to more concise, effective tagging which will make browsing and filtering easier in the long run.

#ao3 tag

[magicofthepen]

Having put some amount of thought into similar concepts, I would very much love to hear about “Gallifrey BUT FANTASY”

Send me a WIP doc title (list here) and I’ll talk about it!

Thank you for asking about this one! It’s an idea that’s been slowly coalescing for at least a year and a half now – it’s never quite made it onto the active projects list because it’s a big one, and I keep having other big projects that I want to tackle first. But I love gradually coming back to and building this au, and hopefully I’ll write it eventually?

The general world premise is pretty straightforward: magic replaces both time travel and regeneration, so it’s a magic-based world instead of a tech-based one, and also the ability to do magic is only given to certain Gallifreyans (a Time Lords = mages sort of thing). Also in this world the different temporal powers/planets are different countries/kingdoms/empires. 

The story itself would be a series of three longfics that starts with a very narrow cast and gradually broadens to a more sprawling epic fantasy vibe as the series continues. A quick overview:

Fic 1 is a Romana/Leela Rapunzel AU (inspired by Tangled specifically tbh), ft. Pandora as the Mother Gothel figure. 

Fic 2 is the immediate aftermath of Romana’s return to Gallifrey and the "power struggle over the throne” conflict that emerges between her and Darkel. (Narvin and Brax show up in this one.)

Fic 3 is set some number of years after Fic 2. It’s a “Pandora returns” fic, but narratively it’s more inspired by the Time War. Devastating magical conflict, large cast of characters, but does have a hopeful/happy-ish ending. (Also: Romana/Leela/Narvin endgame.) 

Lots more rambling under the cut: 

Fic 1: Rapunzel AU

This fic is technically Tangled-inspired, but I should disclaim that I haven’t actually seen Tangled in many years, so my memories of it are somewhat vague? But there’s one scene from Tangled that inspired a scene in this fic, plus a certain similar enemies-to-friends-to-lovers vibe going on, and some inspiration for Leela’s backstory (if I’m remembering that movie correctly)? 

Romana is the Rapunzel figure, of course. The heiress stolen away from the kingdom as a very young child, so she doesn’t remember anything before being raised by Pandora. In this story, Pandora’s endgame isn’t to keep her trapped away forever – she’s grooming Romana to be able to possess her when the time is right and take the throne for herself. (Still need to work out a lot of plot details, including how much contact Romana has with the outside world, how Pandora is able to manifest without a body?? (because she’s definitely still a dark spirit of some kind in this world....), the exact nature of magic and magical rituals and how exactly Pandora stealing Romana and raising her benefits her endgame.)

(Also there’s an Etra Prime reference here, with Romana being trapped away from the world for twenty years. In this au, Pandora is also the stand-in for the Daleks – aka who/what Romana is most afraid of and traumatized by.)

Leela’s backstory is a work in progress, so I don’t want to say too much in case I change it, but at the point her life and Romana’s collide, she’s lived in Gallifrey before and it was not a good time. (On a side note: I feel like this fic may be a thinly veiled excuse to give Leela a sword.) 

This fic majorly focuses on Romana and Leela’s relationship arc, aka “extremely sheltered book smart mage who's been cut off from love and connection her whole life” meets “warrior who’s traveled a lot but has never really found a home anywhere and is (probably?) on the run from the Gallifreyan authorities for Reasons.” Short version: their lives collide, Romana gets tangled up in Leela’s plot drama (which is also mostly tbd) and ends up sneaking away from Pandora, they fall in love, just as Romana starts to see how much she’s been used and manipulated her whole life, Pandora tries to tear them apart and use both of them as pawns in her plan. Of course, they defeat her and all ends well (for now).

Fic 2: Struggle for the Throne

For Reasons (that will be uncovered later), the throne of Gallifrey has quite recently become vacant – just in time for Romana and Leela to show up in the capital city (they don’t ever go there in Fic 1). Romana just wanted to see where she was from after finally escaping Pandora, but in this world, Gallifrey has some sort of monarchy/inheritance of power thing going on, and Romana is actually the closest heir to the throne. The next closest is Darkel, who assumed she would take the throne, before Romana suddenly returns from the dead.   

Except Romana didn’t come back to take the throne. That was Pandora’s plan, Romana doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life and had no idea that she was walking into a power vacuum situation. But she ends up seeing how very terrible Darkel is, and how very terrible Gallifrey is, and starts genuinely wanting to be in charge so she can Change Things. She sees how terrible Gallifrey is to Leela (and other outsiders and non-mages) and wants to make this place better for her.....but over time gets swept up in the power struggles and the need to court favor with the other royals, which strains her relationship with Leela. 

Meanwhile, Leela’s dealing with returning to Gallifrey, a place where she already feels unwelcome (and probably is in some trouble with the law and needs to clear her name? again, lots of backstory details are tbd). And so she ends up struggling to decide if she really wants to be with Romana, if Romana’s going to end up in charge of this kingdom.....but she also hates Darkel and wants to help defeat her claim to the throne? I think there’s also going to be a plot thread in Fic 1 involving the village Leela was born in, and if so, this fic will also be dealing with the fallout of those events from Fic 1. (Keeping things vague because it’s all pretty up in the air right now.) 

And we finally meet spymaster Narvin, who is a main character from here through the rest of the series! I’m not going to get into his backstory in this au right now (because some things are still tbd, some things I don’t want to spoil), but he is not pleased about this young upstart heiress showing up out of nowhere and getting power handed to her without ever actually living in this kingdom. He doesn’t trust that she’s actually loyal to Gallifrey, especially since rumor has it she was raised and given/taught magic by some dark spirit – which goes against the long-standing Gallifreyan traditions of how magic is granted and taught and raises some major questions about how safe the kingdom would be in her hands. (These are also the prevailing arguments in general for tossing Romana’s claim to the throne.) 

Narvin and Leela also have.....a history. Not a particularly positive one. 

So this fic is also slowburn enemies-to-friends with Narvin + Romana and Narvin + Leela, as they gradually grow to understand and trust each other, and ultimately all work together against Darkel.

Brax is also in this fic? I am quite nervous about Brax being in this fic (I don’t feel qualified to write Brax! I usually avoid writing Brax for that reason!) But he’s the main “well-respected mage from an old family” who actually vouches for Romana and tries to help soothe the fears of the more conservative royals about supporting her claim to the throne. I’d also like to do a version of the “Brax as Romana’s tutor” thing, where he ends up working with her on developing her magic, since she didn’t go through the Academy system and is worried that her magic is tainted by Pandora. There may also end up being an almost-arranged marriage plotline with Romana and Brax, where certain people would be more willing to support Romana’s claim if she married someone respectable (and this is another thing that drives a wedge in Romana and Leela’s relationship). (She ends up turning him down, ultimately.) 

So it’s a fic about characters figuring out what they want in life and figuring out how to communicate better with each other and be better at relationships and friendships, all the while trying to stop Darkel from seizing the throne. 

Fic 3: Magical War

So there’s a significant time skip between Fic 2 and Fic 3 where the characters are going about their lives post-Darkel’s defeat and trying to make Gallifrey a somewhat less terrible place. 

But, however Romana and Leela defeat Pandora in Fic 1, it isn’t permanent. And when Pandora returns, it’s with an army of magical spirits (or something along those lines) that are slowly encroaching on the kingdom and poisoning magic itself (aka the Dogma virus But Fantasy). 

I don’t want to spoil too many of the plot details here, but this fic is a lot of “fantasy twist on specific events in the Gallifrey audios” – it draws some elements from the civil war, some from the Time War (especially because of that whole “Pandora is also Metaphorically the Daleks” thing), plus some other Specific Things from other audios. (Basically, I tossed the Gallifrey audios in a soup and stirred and made it fantasy?) 

Slow skirmishes and terrible attacks on the outskirts of the kingdom keep happening, Pandora’s forces draw closer and closer until they reach the capitol itself – and things go very wrong, and our main characters end up needing to wrest control back from Pandora (which may involve upending the entire system of magic in Gallifrey in the process? again, still figuring out how this fic is going to end – all I know is that unlike the actual audios, it will be a hopeful/happy ending). Lots of personal sacrifices are made, lots of old traumas need to be grappled with. Also re: Narvin/Leela and Narvin/Romana, this is the “friends to lovers” part of the “enemies to friends to lovers” slowburn arc. 

(Probably my biggest writing struggle for this fic is that I don’t really know what Brax’s arc is going to be. I’m not that familiar with Brax (I only know him from the Gallifrey audios), and I’m not strongly invested in his character, so I don’t feel like I’d do a good job writing him? But this is an ensemble fic and I can’t just ignore his character, so. it’s a challenge I don’t yet know how to deal with?)

But overall, one of the reasons I’m quite interested in this fic series is because it gives me the chance to write a version of these characters’ stories where things do get rough, but they do get a happy ending of sorts. (And more specifically, I get to write a version of Romana’s story where her self-sacrificing/suicidal tendencies actually get addressed, and she slowly starts to heal.) 

So that was a lot of rambling and vagueness, but thanks for giving me the excuse to talk about this au! It’s quite a daunting project (I have little experience with longfic and with plotty fic), but I’d really love to tackle it someday! (And I would love to hear about any fantasy aus you’ve developed!!)

#gallifreyanathearts #gallifrey audios #romana x leela #gallifrey ot3 #this idea didn't start out as three fics #it was a collection of multiple ideas that kept wanting to tie together and eventually morphed into this shape #and every time i spend time thinking about it i get very excited about it :) #also one of the many reasons i want to write fic 1 is that there is no romana/leela longfic and there should be #(i realize it would be an au fic But Still) #ramblings #asks

[wordcubed]

Some TodoDeku longfic recs

As requested by @todoizu-trash​, here are some longer TodoDeku fic recs.

For this list, I’m defining anything over 30,000 words as “long”, and I’m not going to include any content warnings, since this post is already long enough and you can just check the AO3 tags if you need to.

A beacon in the dark (294k words, ongoing) — This is, like, one of the most popular fics in the fandom, so I’d be very surprised if you haven’t read it already, but just in case. AU where is Izuku is blind, though he has an empathy quirk that helps somewhat with that. TodoDeku is the big ship in this fic.

Case Study (117k words, ongoing) — “Izuku's friends are easy to detail in his notebooks, powers and strategies and personalities. His misconceptions about them are fleeting and easy to correct. But some people just aren't open books. Todoroki Shoto, Izuku finds, is a complicated beast whose tells come in the slightest change of expression, specific wording, or the minute gesture of a hand. In his mind he catalogs each of these, and finds that he's easier to understand than Izuku had originally thought.”

Conventional Taste (44k words, complete) — Shouto goes with Izuku to a hero convention.

Cut From The Same Cloth (31k words, complete) — Endeavor threatens to reveal All Might’s secret and secures an arranged marriage between Shouto and Izuku to keep it quiet. Set in an AU where Izuku and Shouto never met while at UA.

demolition lovers (104k words, ongoing) — Shouto is born quirkless, and becomes a nurse instead of a hero. And then he meets pro-hero Deku.

Facts (49k words, complete) — “Shouto barely has any experience with friends, so having a crush on his best friend was not something he was prepared for. He's fallen hard, and he’s awkward and unsure what to make of his feelings, or how to act on them. It doesn’t help that he and Izuku seem caught on the delicate line between friends and romance, and Shouto more than anything doesn’t want to ruin their friendship.”

i am cold, can you hear? (60k words, ongoing) — “As Todoroki learned from a tender age, growing up with your dad as the #2 hero in all of Japan has a few hazards--especially when you’re his designated prodigy and are constantly being goaded to do more, to be better. Said hazards include: getting dragged to literally every villainous scene to observe from the sidelines, rigorous (and sometimes illegal) training sessions, and family issues out the whazoo. But hey, at least his dad’s rival's kid is kind of cute.”

my voice is yours (48k words, complete) — “a selectively mute todoroki and very talkative midoriya fall in love when they least expect it.“

Nobody's Boy (124k words, complete) — Rei Todoroki switches Izuku and Shouto at birth. Izuku grows up the quirkless son of the #2 hero. Of course, he still gets into UA, and he still meets the boy he was swapped with.

Passion (38k words, complete) — “When he was young, Shouto knew the meaning of kindness. Then he manifested his Quirk. He became Todoroki after this. He locked his younger, naive self in the strongest safe box his mind could muster. Then he met Midoriya and remembered who he was.”

Summer Stars (61k words, complete) — Izuku invites Shouto to stay at his home over summer break.

Victim of Circumstance (38k words, ongoing) — “When you're a Quirkless orphan on the streets, you have to fight twice as hard for just about everything. Survival. Respect. Allies. Most of the time, you're just barely scraping by. And, for that matter, so is everyone else around you. So Izuku does what he does best: he helps. Sometimes that means mediating gang disputes; other times, it's something as simple as grocery shopping. It's not like anyone else will, after all. With so many hopes riding on him, there's only ever been one option. Quirk or no Quirk, UA or no UA—he's going to become a hero.” Yes, the TodoDeku ship is in this!

#Boku no Hero Academia #BNHA #MHA #TodoDeku #fanfiction #fic recs #todoizu trash #actual blog post #effortpost #OPs

[themagiciansreccenter]

Author Spotlight: @ceeainthereforthat​

Every week we interview a writer from The Magicians fandom. If you would like to be interviewed or you want to nominate a writer, get in touch via our ask box.

First things first, tell us a little about yourself.

THE DREADED QUESTION! I'm a novelist, in my public persona, and so I literally write all day long.

How long have you been writing for?

For years, but it was off and on until 2014, when I suddenly just started writing all the time. I started with fanfiction, I wrote original stuff, and I've recently come back to fanfic after being on hiatus for a couple years.

What inspired you to start writing for The Magicians?

I got into the fandom late--my first live episode was 4.11--and I never saw a season finale that so desperately needed to be erased by as much transformative fiction as possible. I was so upset. I went into reading fanfiction to help me move away from the heartbreak of 4.13.

And fic is infectious. Once I started reading stories, I started getting an idea for one. And one day I just dashed off a really short scene of queliot thirst, thinking, I'll just get this out of my system. But it didn't work that way, and now I have a universe alteration timeline 41 story set in an alternate first year at Brakebills that's pushing 70k and it's not done yet.

Who is/are your favourite character(s) to write? What it is about them that makes them your favourite?

I am really torn. Do I love writing Quentin, who resonates so deeply with the part of me that doesn't realize that getting out of bed every day is an act of bravery? I love writing Quentin, because I feel like his headspace is so familiar--but since I'm in control of writing it, I can write these moments where Quentin comes up against his monsters and persistent feelings of self-doubt and show how he resists them by having faith in the people around him.

...Or do I love writing Eliot, who resonates so deeply with the part of me who went through growing up with people who were hostile to who you were, who you loved, how you were different, and how he walked away from all that bullshit and never looked back, and made himself what he wanted to be? I want to clutch Eliot to my chest because he seems like the typical queen bee meanie at first, and he's good at saying, "I don't care" while at the same time doing things that show that no, he cares a hell of a lot, but he's not going to get hurt again if he can help it--but since I'm in control of writing it, I can write these moments where Eliot walks up to what he fears most, and instead of slaying the monster, he embraces vulnerability and the risk of hurt in hope of something incredible.

WHICH DO I PICK? HELP

Do you have a preference for a particular season/point in time to write about?

So far I have been writing about the very beginning. First year. Season One. Where it all started, but different. Writing for The Magicians is a surprise for me because I'm usually writing Alternate Universe RomCom fics, but all my ideas are much more closely related to the Magicians TV universe than I usually ever write.

Are you working on anything right now? Care to give us an idea about it?

Oh boy. Two things! The first one is Enfleurage, the story that was supposed to just be a little flash/slice of (horny!) life between Quentin and Eliot,  but wound up exploding into this plotty epic fantasy. I didn't know what it was going to be when I started it, and so it starts out feeling like a flirty romance fic, and then I found the plot and went, "oh well, I guess I'm writing a longfic."

The other is a series of incredibly porny short stories. The series is called Hedonism for Beginners, and like Enfleurage, it was just supposed to be this simple one-shot. And then I wrote a sequel. And now i have a short list of stories that happen next in the series. I started working on a new story really recently, and ... it seems to want to have a plot. But I think it can progress gradually with each story I write.

How long is your “to do list”?

That's it. I don't have any more ideas for Magicians fic. *knocks on wood*

What is your favourite fic that you’ve written for The Magicians? Why?

Enfleurage and Hedonism for Beginners are the only fics I've written for the Magicians. I think I'm always going to be fond of Enfleurage, because it came in a time in my life where I needed to prove to myself that I know how to write a story, and I can trust my characters and my own sense of story to tell something that will keep people entertained.

Many writers have a fic that they are passionate about that doesn’t get the reception from the fandom that they hoped for. Do you have a fic you would like more people to read and appreciate?

There aren't as many hits on Hedonism for Beginners when you compare it to the audience for Enfleurage. I know that's partially because I locked the series away so it can only be seen by logged in members of the archive, and that a lot of people who enjoy the fic on Ao3 don't actually have accounts there. I think it might also have a narrower audience because the sex is explicit and the story really revolves around writing the smuttiest smut I can manage, ha! and so that probably limits the audience too.

What is your writing process like? Do you have any traditions or superstitions that you like to stick to when you’re writing?

My writing process is all over the place, and it depends on what i'm doing. Usually I outline but for the Magicians fics I've worked on so far, I've been working without much of an outline at all, just seeing where the characters and my understanding of stories takes me.

For tools I use a combination of scrivener and google docs. I'm really nuts about scrivener and I have an elaborate project setup complete with color coding and other bells and whistles. I write the first draft of a scene in Scrivener, and then I copy/paste it to google docs for alpha/beta reader feedback and do editing on it there.

I also track wordcount - I don't try to make a wordcount goal every day; I'm just tracking the work I actually did that day so when I feel like I've been wasting time doing nothing I have proof that's not true.

Do you write while the seasons are airing or do you prefer to wait for hiatus? How does the ongoing development of the canon influence and inspire your writing process?

I didn't start writing these stories until hiatus (and i don't know if I'm going to keep watching for season 5, I'm still really angry) but I think If I was still in progress on a long fic and the season started again, that's cool, but I'm writing for what inspired me at the moment of that first spark of an idea. Maybe something in the new season will be pertinent and maybe it won't. I guess I'll know when I get there.

What has been the most challenging fic for you to write?

The stories in Hedonism for Beginners are the more challenging stories to write. I don't precisely shy away from writing sex scenes, but I did kind of gloss over them a little, and I really felt like I wasn't bringing everything to the page that I could. I'm talking about the more frank descriptions of the action going beyond metaphor and feeling cues into exactly what they did with the envelope (and getting more adventurous with the kind of sex i'm portraying,) but I'm also talking about getting more intimate with the person whose point of view we're experiencing while reading--trying to get into the skin and mind and heart of the character, so we can see how that sex scene changes things for them.

It's been beneficial already. I can see that they've improved me as a writer in general--that working on writing better sex made me use skills that apply to everything I write.

Are there any themes or tropes that you like particularly like to explore in your writing?

I think I'm not good at seeing the recurring themes and tropes in the things I write. But I haven't ever written a story where nobody in the story falls in love. There's always a romance in everything that I write, even if it's not the main point of the story.

Are there any writers that inspire your work? Fanfiction or otherwise?

I think I gain inspriation from everything I read lately. Fiction, fanfiction, essays, non-fiction--it all helps to fill the well and inspire me.

What are you currently reading? Fanfiction or otherwise?

I'm not reading much fiction right now - I'm currently reading a book about city planning and how states try to make living spaces according to the ways in which they have attempted to make their citizens legible, through census data and other records, and how it doesn't always work. After that I'm going to read a book authored by a member of the Black Panthers during the Black Power movement (it's for a book I'm writing)

I'm having decision paralysis on my next novel to read. I'm really behind on novels, it's really quite sad.

What is the most valuable piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?

Don't hoard your best ideas. Use them right away, and clear up your brainspace to make room for another mind-blowing awesome idea. Another one will come - and the more you use your best ideas, the more excellent ideas you will get.

Are there any words or phrases you worry about over using in your work?

I'm overly fond of the word fingertips. I don't know why.

What was the first fanfic that you wrote? Do you still have access to it?

um. I think it was for the vampire lestat? and I don't have access to it any more.

Rapidfire Round!

Self-edit or Beta?

Both. Betas are really, really important.

Comments or Kudos/Reblogs or Likes?

I love getting comments on Ao3, and I love getting reblogs with tag comments on tumblr. Likes/Kudos are nice.

Smut, Fluff or Angst?

Can't we just have it all?

Quick & Dirty or Slow Burn?

Both. Yes, both. both is good.

Favourite Season?

Season Three

Favourite Episode?

the same as everyone. 3.05!

Favourite Book?

Haven’t read them.

Three favourite words?

petrichor, somnolent, euphoria

Want to be interviewed for our author spotlight? Get in touch here.

#the magicians rec center #author spotlight #author spotlight: ceeainthereforthat

[nautilusopus]

4, 28, 39

4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

40 (because I keep fucking adding to the list like a moron. All of them will be written, but I don’t want to start more than one multi-chapter thing in case it tempts me to slack off on my current project. 

I’m not counting one-shots because the ETA on those is “whenever I’m in the mood to put something up and don’t have any chapters to write”. So longfics only, but these are the current active projects that all have a chance of being the next thing I work on (after The Pale Man which is a oneshot but something I really should have done by now):

Diaspora: Me making Advent Children not suck. The end product will only bear a superficial resemblance to Advent Children, but I think that’s for the best. Strong case for this one being next, just so people will know what I consider “baseline canon” more or less (starting with an AU was a mistake). Also I really really really want to write a thing where Cloud interacts with a whole lot of kids because I think he’d be great with them, and The Number I lends itself very poorly to that despite the hints of it that I managed to cram in. Motorcycles and Jenova cults and Reunion, oh my.

She That Waits: Better title pending. Silent Hill and It – two great tastes that taste great together. What’s Dead And Buried (aka that time I just posted chapter 18 of The Number I as its own story to see how many random passersby would be interested in it on its own merits) was actually me focus testing some things for this story. People seem to have responded positively, and this is officially the next thing on the list, so there is a strong case for it being the next main project. 

BORD SHILLING. I LIKE BORB. [Better Title Pending]: Me yelling at Square for throwing around buzzwords. ANGEL WINGS DREAMS HONOUR DARKNESS SEE LOOK I CAN DO IT TOO. Postgame. For @limbostratus. Very sad, very sweet (I hope). Also probably kinda weird. Has priority due to being physically higher on the list and also for a friend. Also lower stakes than The Number I (though hopefully just as upsetting), which I think I might need.

Meddling Kids: Also high on the queue, also lower stakes, and probably a bit more lighthearted than some of the other stuff here. Modern Day AU. I’ve been enthusiastic about this idea for a while but just don’t have much of a plot for it yet. Pretty gay. Involves me printing out that one picture of Aeris wearing the skate-punk shorts and sneakers, grinding it into powder, and doing the entire rail off a picture of Bill Murray.  

A Symphony For Crows [Better Title Pending, god that one’s pretentious]: Me scraping up the remains of a novel I once wanted to write ever since I was like ten before I realised I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the characters I created and was a thousand times more invested in the cast of some RPG from the nineties and threw out the whole thing. Original setting. High fantasy. Oldschool faeries. Probably very flowery. Inspired by The Snow Queen a bit. Potentially the longest fic on here, apart from…

[Title Pending]: Me violently spewing hatred at the VII fanbase via allegory. That’s not what this started out as, honestly, but I noticed after a while that that’s sure what was sneaking in as unintentional subtext, so I just decided to roll with it. Partially the remains of several scrapped RP campaigns, partially some headcanons that I have kicking around that I realised could form a coherent story. Will not be published without at least getting Diaspora out of the way first. It’ll be tricky to pull off, due to its length, due to the fact that half of it is very OC heavy apart from Zack as the narrative shifts around, and due to the sheer scale of the fucking thing. I don’t know what order most of these are going to be in (and am accepting feedback on what you guys want to see first), but this one is definitely lower.

Dollhouse: Another story lower on the queue. Given that said queue is 40 fucking stories, “low” in this context means like… ten or eleven at most? but it’s not getting immediately published. Probably the darkest thing on this list, apart from maybe ^that one, and even then I think this one might be a little more upsetting. Won’t be published for a while because it’s the most OC-heavy story I have, and because I need to firmly establish myself as Not Crazy I Promise before I put it up. Thriller/psychological horror. 

[Title Pending] but I’ve been calling it Dumpsterman Roadtrip in my head: Cloud and Sephiroth and me examining their dynamic properly since no one else seems to be doing that. Not necessarily a redemption fic. I don’t know yet. Still a bit fuzzy, I haven’t done much concrete planning with it yet. It’s infuriating to me that there are a thousand million fics focusing on Cloud and Sephiroth’s relationship, and not a damn one of them does it properly despite being handed this great dichotomy on a silver platter. I get “OMG WHAT A SADIST THAT LIVES TO TORTURE THIS ONE MAN” is easier to write, but that doesn’t make it even remotely better. 

FROG ADVENTURE [Better Title Pending]: Cloud gets turned into a frog, separated from the group before anyone can realise what’s happened, spends like a year as a frog trying not to get eaten. The only G-rated one on the pending-projects list, I think. Still working out how I’m gonna handle this considering it’s also going to be either very OC-heavy or Cloud will be the only character saying anything throughout the entire thing. Either could be an interesting experiment. Classic sixties children’s book vibes for this one. 

The Doublemint Twins Visit the Kierkegaard Retrospective [Better Title Pending but I think this one is pretty good]: This fic used to be way different in the planning stages! In fact it was originally for sure going to be the next thing I wrote, but as I expanded the outline more and more everything just kept getting darker and darker and eventually I couldn’t figure out a single conceivable way there could be a happy ending. I consider happy (or at least bittersweet) endings mandatory for everything I write, so in the end I wound up scrapping it for a while until I picked up the bits I could still work with and rearranged them a little. This one’s still pretty existentialist, I think, but nowhere near as grim. I have no idea how to end this one either, but at least it doesn’t seem as grim as the last one did, which originally involved Cloud finding a lot of the clones (as in actual clones, not the way the story uses the term) Hojo made of him for the sake of backup organ harvesting still alive, and it turns out he’s also a clone, and the whole thing kind of devolved from there as I struggled to figure out what the fuck to do with like ten different Clouds that would end even remotely well. Also, I feel like a lot of people have done clones and siblings or whatever, but I have yet to see anyone that’s done this. 

28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

@cateringisalie, @auncyen, and @farfromdaylight are like the only people I read anyway. I can’t answer this question without my very very obvious bias showing. They have an actual understanding of the characters and don’t write the same fucking thing over and over again and that’s already more than anyone else is doing. 

39. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?

Only the weird one that called me double reverse racist against myself and also Christians. 

I thrive off of negativity and the knowledge of how terrible everyone’s tastes are is enough to give me the inspiration to write entire goddamn novels, as you can see. 

#asks #amazing literature #Anonymous #find this later #fic prompt #askmeme