#and my big fic I'm still polishing/finalizing if i want to post as 1 post or as 3 one shots

[charmmycolour]

Hallo chrammy Colours (sorry if I got your name wrong) i have a question,

I recently got into your fanficana normal life. And because some of the chapters were postet for from another this made me wonder:

How do you keep track of your story? Do you right every chapter out in concept before you start writing? And did it ever happen to you, that you got an idea while writing a chapter, which you really liked and wanted to implement into the story? Would you change future, already planned chapters for it (under the condition it's not a massive plot change).

I was wondering bc your 12th chapter was my favorite one despite being posted later then the others. There's no shift in writing style either so I'm just curious. How do you manage that?

I'm looking forward to an answer.

greetings from Québec's Sweethearts.

I hope you have a great day.

My my this is such an interesting question. Thank you!

About my writing process, I have my own steps system (note this doesn't apply to fics I co-wrote with other authors, where I use a different one, only those I wrote entirely myself). For me writing a fic usually goes like this:

Idea: I have an idea for a concept I find interesting or a scene that would be cool to do. Sometimes these ideas don't tie to anything, they're just small fun scenarios I make up for fun, but if I like them a lot, I will develop them into the next step.

Outline: Now I have a core concept or situation I want to write, so it's time to decide how the rest plays out. I think of a beginning, an ending, and a general line of events that happen in the middle. It's a written draft and not set in stone, but has the general feeling (romance, comedy, angst, etc.)

First Draft: I will start writing whatever scenes I'm more excited to do. I usually work on the first chapter too so it's easier to set the tone later. The big events should be set in the draft, mostly, but can still change if needed; all the small things can wait. If I don't know how to write a part I jump to another.

Second Draft: Now we have a bunch of little stories! It's time to tie them together with the boring parts. It's not as exciting to go over exposition, or have the characters move around, but it's necessary. It's also the step where I make sure everthing is coherent and it's not contradicting other parts of the story.

Usually at this point is when I will clean the first chapter and start posting. I usually haven't finished the fic when the first chapter is up, but roughly half of it if not more will be written or planned. Note the first chapter will first go through step 6 and 7 first.

Final Draft: I rewrite everything correctly, polish the details, cut the filler and in general focus on making the flow dynamic and interesting. At this point it's possible I had a better idea for a future scene and I change it, but once something is published that detail is FINAL and will stay until the end.

Beta: I ask someone (usually my boyfriend) to revise and correct the chapter, fix the grammar and tell me if something is confusing or they have noticed a mistake in the timeline. This is important because I'm NOT English so I make a lot of mistakes lol

When I posted chapter 1 of ANL, up to chapter 9 I think? Were already in first draft at the very least. Some scenes from the ending had been the first I wrote, but as I developed the story and had new ideas, they have been heavily altered from the first idea.

Currently ANL is written to second draft completely, and the only reason I'm not faster uploading is because I'm lazy making the proper rewrites and drawing the illustrations that come with it (sorry!). The ending of the story went through several changes but I think I'm happy with the current one - nonetheless I never discard the idea of implementing changes if needed.

To keep the tone and writing consistent, I read the chapters together with the prior one (from the same character) together to make sure the narration flows the same way. Even if I learned a way to do it better, I try not to make it too different - I think keeping the flow is more important.

Often I will go back and correct things on prior chapters, but only grammar or oddly-written sentences, never events.

I hope this answers all your questions! Please don't hesitate to send more if you have them, and a big big thank you for reading my story! It makes me so very happy.

Have a wonderful day!

[littleoddwriter]

Hello! I have three things to tell you: 1) You're the best and I'm happy to know you! 2) I wonder when did you start writing on Tumblr 3) I would like to request you a story with Zsaszmask and their son Andrew when they are not very happy to discover that their "little boy" hangs out with Harley. Humor and fluff would be nice! Thnks in advance and have a nice day!

Sacrifices | Roman Sionis x Victor Zsasz | ZsaszMask | KidFic

1) Thank you so much, I’m happy to know you as well! <3 2) Actually, I only started last year in early November! After having taken a break from writing altogether for 4 years, I got back into it with ZsaszMask fics and then thought to write Reader ones as well and post them here, and here we are now. :D

3) This is probably not very humorous, but I hope you like it anyway! Thanks so much for the request, it was quite the delight. :) <3

summary; see above.

notes; TW // Mention of/Implied Past Child Abuse; Misogyny (this is written in Roman’s POV, so- you know) and Ableist Language. Domestic Fluff; Kid Fic; Painting Nails; Group Hug; a tiny bit of angst, I guess? Also, this plays before BoP, so Harley is still with the Joker and Andy is 15 here instead of 17 like in the last fic!

Roman and Victor had been out attending business most of their late afternoon. It hasn’t taken as long as they had anticipated, though, as Sionis has reached a compromise and secured a deal with his business partner relatively soon.

Apparently, Andrew – their fifteen-year-old son – hadn’t expected them to be home so early, either.

When the two men had entered the loft, they could already hear this really obnoxious voice and accent. Harley fucking Quinn.

What the fuck was the Joker’s little princess doing here?

Roman glared at his partner, who just shrugged, frowning as well.

“Fix me a Martini. I’ll go take a look at what the fuck is going on here. ‘Kay?” Sionis said and headed towards his son’s room, not waiting for an answer from Zsasz.

Stopping at Andrew’s room’s doorway, Roman took in the atrocious scene that was happening right in front of him.

Harley was painting Andrew’s nails.

Harley motherfucking Quinn was painting his son’s fucking fingernails.

Clearing his throat, Roman drew their attention to him. It should have been on him the moment he’s stopped to stand there, but they were too caught up talking and laughing with each other. It disgusted him. This was his son! He wasn’t supposed to tattle with the woman he hated most (right after his own mother anyway).

When Andrew noticed him, he jumped a little, probably surprised to see him.

How long have these two been friends without Roman even knowing it?

“Dad- Hey, uh-,” Andrew started, chuckling nervously.

“Oh! Hiya, Romy! You’re home already? Or did we lose track of time, Andy Baby?” Harley chirped so fucking sickeningly, that stupid bitch.

“We came home early. That’s not important, though. What’s important is what the fuck you are doing here?” Roman asked, fuming already, and took some steps towards the other two.

“Painting our nails, silly! What else does it look like? And here, Andy’s nails are so pretty now!” The crazy bitch said, shoving his son’s hands into Roman’s face, making him look.

Begrudgingly, Sionis had to admit that the glittery baby-blue nail polish fit his son really well, but he wasn’t going to say it out loud. Not when she was listening, too.

“That’s not what I meant, Ms. Quinn,” Roman sneered, “I want to know what you are doing here, in my apartment, with my son. How long has this been going on, hm?”

“A couple of months,” Andrew finally piped up, “I like Harley! She is fun to hang out with, dad.”

“Awww, Andy Baby, you’re fun to spend time with, too! See, Romy, it’s all fine! What’s the buzz about, anyway?”

Clenching his jaw, Roman forced himself to take a deep breath, trying so hard not to explode then and there. He wasn’t scared of Harley, but her stupid “Clown Prince” – boyfriend – wasn’t someone he necessarily wanted to be on the bad side of.

“It’s nothing. Still, I’d prefer it if you could leave, now, Ms. Quinn. I’d like to spend some private family time with my son and partner, ‘kay?” Roman hoped she’d catch on and leave without any big theatrics; he really wasn’t going to able to hold onto the last shred of his patience for much longer.

Harley made a sad little sound, playing it up big time, but then she nodded, grinning so stupidly. “Fine, I’ll leave! I’ll see you soon then, Andy?”

“Uh, yeah, sure. Bye, Harley. And thanks for the nails,” Andrew said, hugging the crazy bitch, before she got up, patted Roman on the cheek and left, skipping to the door.

Roman was glad that he was going to wash his face anyway. Now he had all the more reason to scrub it thoroughly, though.

Cautiously, Andrew got up from his bed, which he’s sat on with Harley the entire time. “Dad?” he asked quietly.

Before Roman could reply, Victor finally came back with his Martini. He downed it in one go, desperate for the liquor to numb some of the pain he felt.

“So, what exactly was that Harley-Bitch doing here?” Zsasz asked, ever so gracefully.

Roman looked at Andrew expectantly, “Why don’t you tell your father why she was here, hm?”

He knew he was being an asshole; he should give it a rest and just pretend as though none of this happened, but he just couldn’t. He felt betrayed by his own son, and he was just so fucking pissed because of Harley’s mere presence anyway.

“Uh, well, we’re friends. And she came over to paint my nails while you were gone. I didn’t expect you back so early. I’m sorry,” Andy explained, fidgeting with his hands nervously.

At the sight of his son being so nervous – scared, Roman’s heart clenched painfully. He knew what that was like. Worse even. He didn’t want to be like his own father. He should do better. He wanted to do better.

“Well, you know how much we don’t like having her here, Andrew. You shouldn’t have let her come to the apartment in the first place,” Victor responded calmly.

Roman was a bit in awe of his partner and how well he was handling this – so much better than he was.

“I know, I’m really sorry. I wasn’t thinking, I guess. Can I stay friends with her, though? Please?”

Sionis sighed, setting his Martini glass down on his son’s bedside table. “Come here,” he murmured, stretching his arms out in invitation, all anger gone and exchanged for a strange kind of sadness he’s not felt since Andy was still just a boy.

Andrew took some cautious steps towards him and when he was right in front of him, Roman wrapped his arms around his boy, who reciprocated the embrace immediately, resting his head sideways on his father’s chest.

“You too, Victor,” Roman then said and Zsasz immediately joined in, embracing them both tightly.

“So you’re not mad at me anymore?” Andy asked, his voice a little muffled by the hug.

“No, baby. I’m-,” Roman sighed heavily, the next words not coming out of him very easily, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. My differences with Harley shouldn’t extend to you. If you want to be friends with her, so be it. But don’t meet with her here in the future, ‘kay?”

“Yeah, alright, that’s fair. Thanks, dad.” Momentarily, Andrew’s arms tightened around his waist, eliciting a genuine smile from Roman.

“Show your dad and me your nails, will you? I want to see them properly, now.”

They all let go of each other and Andrew lifted his hands, spread his fingers and let his dads inspect them.

“Looks good,” Victor commented, smiling crookedly.

“Agreed. As much as I hate her, she did a good job painting your nails. Not only that, but the colour looks incredible on you, my boy.”

Giggling, Andrew’s cheeks turned a light pink colour. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Roman replied softly, gently stroking his boy’s cheek with his knuckles.

While Roman would never be able to like Harley, he guessed that perhaps he should at least try to tolerate her some more. For Andrew. He wanted to do him right and that meant making some sacrifices, as he’s had to learn from the very beginning of adopting him. It would be okay, though, as long as Andrew never ended up hating his guts the way Roman did with his own father.

#roman sionis #roman sionis fanfiction #victor zsasz #victor zsasz fanfiction #zsaszmask #zsaszmask au #zsaszmask fanfic #harley quinn #kid fic #fluff #domestic #birds of prey #harley quinn birds of prey #birds of prey and the fantabulous emancipation of one harley quinn

[anghraine]

Having been wowed by your fanfic ("wandering inside this night" holds a special place in my RO heart), I'm curious: what is your writing/editing process like?

Oh, thank you!

My writing process really varies depending on what I’m doing, but I can explain it in terms of wandering inside this night.

It’s long and rambly, so you can scroll down for a very concise tl;dr version of The Process.

1. Eureka!

I pretty much always start out with 1) a vague sense of something I want to write about, and I sort of mentally fish around until I land on an idea, or 2) an idea pops into my head, or 3) some combination of both.

The last two are the most common for me—I have more ideas than I could ever write. With wandering, it was definitely that way. 

I was hollering into my tags about the Cassian-Leia parallels pretty early, which … Jyn-Han is obvious, but I felt like the Cassian-Leia ones went relatively unnoticed but were probably more profound. And as spies in the ragtag ANH-era Rebellion, it’s more than possible that they’d know each other; I’d made babbling posts, but I really wanted to do something with it. So I sketched out a backstory in until the last chance is spent, but I still wanted more, and also to get into Han-Jyn at the same time, and also just—have something fun! And suddenly (I was actually at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert, lol) the idea popped into my head of jumping to the Han/Leia meltdown of 1980 with established relationship Jyn/Cassian.

2. Percolation

This is particularly important for longer fic (or any long-form writing, really), but it helps with shorter things, too. It’s where you’re not actively working to figure out details or more ideas, much less writing, just passively letting your mind wander. It’s best if you’re actually doing something else—something that doesn’t take much attention, but enough that you can’t completely focus on your thoughts, like showering or washing dishes or something.

When something does come to mind, I scribble it down (or stick it in a doc in some form that will hopefully make sense to me later). Sometimes it’ll be scraps of dialogue, or a phrase I want to make sure gets in somewhere, or a plot-point, just anything that pops up. Ideally, though, I don’t write anything beyond that—just note down anything I might forget and let my ideas develop freely. 

Normally, I’d only do so much of that with something like wandering (fairly short, fairly light). But I ended up snowed in with my extended family, where I was both bored and unable to sit down and write. So I’m sitting there entertaining myself by imagining Jyn and Han, drinking buddies, and how that’d work with the Cassian-Leia brotp of ruthless idealism (Han would be jealous!), and just having that percolating in my head while I read fic and let stray thoughts pass through my mind. (‘Okay but Cassian would fucking hate Han’ being uppermost among them, lol)

3. Brainstorming/Outline

At this point, I try to pin down the free-floating ideas and/or organize what scraps I have into something coherent. With something longer, like ad astra, I generally do a pretty traditional outline—decide what the story is specifically going to cover, and where the things I’ve actually written fit with that, and what’s going to go in the spaces between.

It’s not classroom-style brainstorming; I usually brainstorm ideas by trying to put together an outline. I’ll be “okay, I want to start with something like that shot of Jyn on the platform with an Imperial ship at the end, but it’s Bodhi” and “they get sucked into the Death Star and Jyn exploits Cassian’s injuries to get in” and then I sit down and figure out how I’m going to get from one to the other. “Okay, so—there’s no way they can actually get Kaytoo, but maybe something—yeah, she just up and grabs his dismembered head l o l, okay, and there’s the jump into the ship which rattles Cassian further, and she’d try to treat him with whatever supplies are available, and we’d have Bodhi trying to get out without being shot down, and maybe I can work in the your father would have been proud of you line, and Jyn goes to check on Bodhi and they see the Death Star and…”

Also, it helps a ton to actually talk ideas over with someone else. With me, it’s generally @steinbecks​—not some strict ‘this, then this, then this, tell me what you think’, but ‘I had this idea’ and ‘OK BUT IMAGINE IF’ and ‘haha yeah exactly’ and ‘shit you’re right they do change outfits’ etc. 

4) Drafting (The Big One)

Ideally, I only get to this after nailing down an outline or at least getting a lot figured out in chats/notes to myself. That’s what I did for pretty much all my most successful longfics—First Impressions (f!Darcy/m!Elizabeth), Season of Courtship (Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement), we get dark, only to shine (AU of The Borgias that moves the canon pairing getting together from S3 to S1), and now ad astra. It helps a TON if you have trouble with discipline and direction, as I do, because you can always go back to it and figure out where you need to be headed when you’re muddled/uninspired, even if some details change along the way. (They always do, for me.)

I did some of that with wandering, but … I was snowed-in, lol, and finally everyone had gone to sleep and my head was full of ideas. So I laid down with my laptop and just dove right in with the only clear line I had in mind: 

Han Solo once had apleasant conversation with Cassian Andor.

Just once.

That was where I planned it to begin! The actual beginning came later, because I very quickly ran into a problem—the sentence worked to jump into exposition, not an actual scene. And with the exposition, I needed to introduce 1) Cassian’s hatred of Han, 2) Han’s lesser but firm dislike, 3) Cassian and Leia’s history together as spies, 4) Han’s brief and half-hearted attempt to suck up, 5) Jyn and Cassian being married, 6) Han’s friendship with Jyn, 7) Han’s jealousy as contrasted to Cassian and Jyn’s mutual trust, etc. Yikes.

So I kept getting mired down in explanations and flashbacks (I actually wrote the scene where Jyn drunkenly complains about finding something for Cassian’s birthday, lol) that slowed it down. And I wasn’t really happy with anything—I constantly niggled at sentences and moved things around and rephrased and it just didn’t work right. I actually have the document I worked in (I didn’t have Internet at the time), so you can see this sort of intermediate stage:

I niggled with it for the rest of the vacation, then it hit me that the issue was that starting a fic with exposition was the real problem. Starting with ESB-era Han just being ESB-era Han could let me work the exposition section in, and without the pressure of it being the opening section I could keep it to a tangential aside and move the jealousy around and so forth. And from there I could just leap to the canon scene with bonus Cassian-Leia shared indignation, and impulsively I added Kaytoo at the end. 

Moral of the story: if you keep trying to make something work and it just won’t, there’s probably something deeper going on. Take a step back and figure out why it’s not working, and often you’ll be able to correct course. Once I tacked in that little ‘Han sulks’ section at the beginning, it all fell together easily. 

5) Revising!

You can probably guess from #4 that I do a lot of this as I write rather than after I write. That’s true, to an extent.

It can be a very … I wouldn’t say discouraging, but sluggish way to write, because you end up struggling over phrases you might not even keep in the end. I genuinely think it’s best to at least try to restrain the impulse to polish everything, but at the same time, there are some of us who genuinely can’t keep going if the current section isn’t working (again, see #4!). So I allow myself a certain amount of freedom in polishing-as-I-go, while restraining the impulse to do anything more substantial. The single best way of doing this is sprinting—writing in short, timed bursts with little to no editing, ideally with a partner that you check in with. (Again, I generally do this with @steinbecks​.)

However, even if you edit as you go and turn out pretty clean drafts, you should still revise at the end. What I generally do is, first of all, just quickly re-read. The writing process is a lot slower than the reading one, and it’s easy to get so focused on particular passages or sections that you lose sight of how it’s working as a whole. So that quick read-through is a way to back up and see how it’s holding together. It’s best if you give yourself a break before you do this—a day or two at least, to get your mind out of the writing mode and look at it with relatively fresh eyes. 

(I will say that I almost never wait. But I do pretty much always end up editing chapters yet again in the first couple of days after I’ve posted them. Sometimes it’s contuinity, sometimes a passage that isn’t working quite the way I thought, whatever. There’s always something. It’s why the chapters I post at Dreamwidth are generally cleaner than the ones at Tumblr, which are cleaner than the first versions posted at AO3.)

However you do that read-through, the most important for me is the next one. At this point, I read the whole fic/chapter/essay/whatever from start to finish—out loud. In fact, if it’s possible, I’ll do a full-on dramatic reading. By reading aloud, you can catch things like typos that your mind silently corrects for your eyes, but also it’s easier to notice sentence-level problems like repeated words/phrases and unvaried sentence structure. If something makes me cringe when I read it aloud, I cut it or rewrite. If saying it aloud makes it sound wrong for the character, it probably is wrong for the character. Sometimes I do the dramatic reading revision two or three times.

And then I either post or print!

The short version:

1) I get an idea, 2) I let the ideas develop without thinking too hard about them, 3) I nail down and think up specific ideas, mostly through chat and/or outlines, 4) I plow through a draft, rearranging/adding material if things just aren’t working, and 5) I revise, once with a quick re-read of the whole thing, and then again by slowly reading it aloud to myself to catch problems with (primarily) mechanics, voice, and word choice.

#faithfullyfalse #respuestas #nice things people say to me #fic talk #esb au #words about words #thank you for this! #in my other life i've taught writing so this was like SING THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE