I don't make the rules but - if you don't get excited at the thought of going back and re-reading the story you wrote then you're writing the wrong story.

You are your first and most important reader.

For the meta for writers questions, 1, 3, 8, and 20!

Tell us about your current project(s)  – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

Ah, the Ace Longfic! Which still doesn't have a title to itself. It is supposed to be like ten chapters but will probably be more than that, and I'm in chapter four! I'm trying not to talk about it too much online because then I won't want to write the actual thing, but without spoilers, it's a series of solo adventures for Ace that explore her parallels with/similarity to the Doctor. I'm trying to actually write full adventures and I'm having fun coming up with interesting characters for her to meet. Plot less so, but we'll get there.

Since she is on her own and filling the Doctor's shoes, I've found she works less and less well as a POV character. So I'm writing from the perspectives of people she meets along the way, which also allows me to show how she's growing and changing and getting weirder (as she should). My current POV character is a wet-behind-the-ears military officer posted to an isolated space station where secret scientific experiments are being done. I'm sure you can guess whether the scientific experiments go wrong or not. My young officer has to step up and make complex moral judgment calls (which she does not want to do but discovers she will if she has to) when both her superiors get their brains taken over.

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

Hahaha I always do just write it anyway! That's why I have so many ficlets. The things I dream about and don't write are the big sprawling daydream AUs that won't distil into one scene.

Oh fine OK I do have one key scene but the reason I haven't written it is because no one will have any idea what it's all about. Remember you asked for this! This is from the viewpoint of an agent of the Gallifreyan CIA who's been spying on the Seventh Doctor during the events of the novel Set Piece.

--

It's a shame to see a good agent--never reliable, but brilliant at his best--end up in such a state. A shame, but not surprising. He's not the first agent to end his career like this and he won't be the last, especially being a renegade as he is. They know from his file that nine centuries' hard living has put him in his seventh body already. Most of his career he's believed he was defying the Agency. Some of it he actually was. They've retrofitted quite a bit of their timeline planning around his entirely unauthorized interventions--and it's always turned out better than you'd hope. Now he's stranded, sponging off an old friend, health broken, nerves shot all to pieces. He's lost that TARDIS of his--gossip says they'd grown hopelessly into each other--if she's dead he'll have a horrendous psychic wound. Perhaps that's even the root of what ails him; perhaps that's the reason he's drinking French wine laced with opium at ten o'clock in the morning local time. Not much else he can hope to do for it, not without a Gallifreyan medic. And he won't come home, they know that too. He'll wither away there, jumping at shadows, country servant-girls pitying him, before he'll come home and be properly looked after. Some of the agents think he can't anymore; after so long away, they say, he can't take his place in Gallifrey's telepathic web. The closest he can get, now, is the buzz and chatter of human voices around him. They note how he haunts the kitchens. He's made a wreck of his lives and fortunes, probably his ship as well. He's reduced to drifting about in the local skirmish called the Franco-Prussian War--a purely human conflict, not even a branch of the War, which would be something--and he isn't even doing anything there. He's serving as a dreadful warning to young agents: the renegade life may seem exciting but this is how it ends. There's some suggestion they should inform Cardinal Braxiatel. If you want to speak to him, you should do it soon. Before nineteenth-century drugs and living on his nerves and the loss of his ship and the unknown wound in his shoulder he keeps rubbing take their toll. Even the humans say he isn't quite all there. And wherever else it is he's going, it's somewhere the CIA can't reach.

--

It's a weird book, Set Piece. Don't worry, Seven has a very complicated plan going behind all this. But he does have something of a breakdown. It ends up being quite cathartic for him actually. (He's drinking the drugged wine because someone else is drugging it and he doesn't want them to know that he knows. He claims.)

8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

I like to read the sort of thing I write, certainly! (Although there's some things I've written that I'm pretty sure if someone else had written them I'd find hopelessly saccharine.) But there's also things I like to read that I could never write. Novel-length fics, for sure, I really appreciate but don't write; I also love a good pastiche of a book series with a strong authorial voice, but avoid doing them myself, after a really harrowing experience doing cod-Pratchett. (Although I had a really fun time doing that Stevenson-in-space bit. Maybe I just need the amount of distance provided by an AU to enjoy doing author pastiches? I should try space!Aubrey-Maturin sometime and see if that'll do it.)

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

These questions assume I don't shove all that in the notes already! :P

Oh yeah, I did do a bit of research for that Hornblower fic that I forgot to put in the notes! I wondered whether the superstition that it's bad luck to toast in water was old enough for the characters to think of it. The few minutes of research I did were pretty inconclusive, actually--one source did say it originated in the Royal Navy but didn't say when, which was not very useful to me, but I decided it at least sounds old enough that I could project it back to the 1800s. Apparently the superstition is specifically that someone who drinks a toast in water will die by drowning, which... well, both of them avoid that at least....

Random Writer Anon!!

When you get this answer one of the questions (or all if you really want!) then pass it on to 5 writer friends! 🥰If you have more than one WIP, pick at random! We want you to talk about your works, and celebrate with you! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

Don’t worry if you don’t know how to answer these questions, I’ll be back with more next Sunday. 😉

What are you most excited to write with this WIP?

How has this WIP changed since the “daydream/brainstorm” stage?

Who is your favorite character in this WIP and why?

Wooo!! Okay I got this sent to me twice (thank you anons!!!!) so here goes.

I'll go ahead and talk about my current favourite WIP which stars none other than the worst character ever: Ryder Harrison.

I am most excited to write the current (and 3rd) chapter of this WIP (and there may be more, who's to say). It continues to detail the inner battle of the female reader who keeps flip flopping between loving and hating him, and delves deeper into more intense feelings and what the two characters will do about that.

In this coming chapter there is a really fun, steamy scene that I'm chomping at the bit to get to, that helps display just how deranged the poor girl is when it comes to this awful man.

This WIP has changed drastically since the daydreaming stage because it initially started as just that, and was only going to be that, until a couple of people showed interest and encouraged me to write it and share it (sorry 🙈) and now the enthusiasm toward it is fuelling me tenfold to keep writing it like a crazy person.

I don't want to like him but I do, okay?

That being said, he's my favourite character in this 🤣😅 (help) but I also love how reader is turning out, because I feel very similarly to her in that you want to f*ing hate his stupid face but then you're like 🥴🥰 love me daddy.

It's been so fun to write someone as vile as him, and even more enjoyable to see my readers as excited as they have been for this story. It's definitely different from many of the other Deano characters I write, as there's no real redeeming factors for this character as opposed to some of the others where I feel I can justify their story/behaviours more and they are generally more lovable dudes.

It's been amazing writing the bad guy everyone loves to hate 😈

For the ask game

🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants?

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

🤩 Who is your favorite character to write?

thank you!

🦅 I mentally outline fics in the form of daydreaming about them for a couple of days until I want to write them down. This is not very effective but there's only so much a woman can fight her own brain, especially for something I'm doing just for fun. On rare occasions I have managed to bullet-point the key details of a scene or interaction but I tend to be thinking about these things when I can't write (eg driving in the car) and then when I can write, well, I want to just write what I've thought about. I never have a plan for an entire plot and the few fics I've finished, I only thought of a satisfactory way to end them by happy chance. So it's mostly a pants thing.

I run out of steam on longer fics because the comments die off and they're such a huge part of what stimulates the development of the story in my mind, plus the feeling that no one is paying attention any more. I don't regard this as some injustice or insult, nobody owes me the response I would enjoy, it's just clear that what I'm putting out is not getting picked up and the energy I have for that idea fades. Then another one comes along. I don't know whether outlining and having a conclusion planned would change or fix this but for the above-mentioned reasons I don't think I can pull it off anyway.

👀 The only things I have officially "in progress" (as opposed to tacitly abandoned like Just Business, Nothing Personal, alas) are Wrought Iron, the Mandalorian/Book of Boba Fett Bobadincobb farrier domestic AU (and I know my steam on that is getting low which is sad, it might end up in the abandoned pile) and the Stranger Things 4 Steddie fix-it canon divergence which I called Rock Steady only because I couldn't think of a title and defaulted to a pun. I've been really enjoying writing that but it has only one posted chapter so far with very little engagement (it's been up a week or so and has 168 hits) so I suspect it's not what many people reading that ship want, or it's too much the same as what lots of people are writing - Eddie Munson survives his injuries, the ending of ST4 is softened (for Max's sake if no one else!), Eddie and my dearly beloved Steve Harrington have the opportunity for the undercurrent of attraction between them to develop.

Two cakes, yes, but there can be a glut on the market of a particular flavour of cake. Elements of people getting their lives back together following a disaster, a tight friend group expanding/absorbing a new member, recovering from the physical and mental trauma of a near-death adventure, learning which after-effects will heal and which are just a part of life now, supporting each other and growing closer, teenage/young adult starting independent life/failing to launch goofiness, internalised homophobia causing hesitation, panic and will-they-won't-they, and also intermittently worrying about maybe becoming some sort of vampire.

A theme that I wasn't expecting it to develop but that I think follows from what we've seen in the show, ever since in ST2 we saw that even before Dustin picked on him for help, Steve was still carrying the bat with nails in it in the trunk of his car, is Steve's sense that what he may want to do with his life is limited by the need to stay at his post, as it were, and be a guardian. If your life is developing into a vigil against a villain you can never be sure is vanquished, how do you look to the future?

🤩 Whoever I'm writing currently, really! I regularly switch POVs in romantic/smut fics because it's satisfying to know what both/all sides are thinking, particularly when neither is sure what the other is thinking and both are inwardly freaking out about it. In the current WIP, Eddie is great fun because he's a weird nerdy bogan with an off-colour sense of humour, and Steve is a little bit more of a challenge because of the delicate balance of depicting his intellect. Steve's kinda dumb, Steve doesn't think he's dumb which is part of his dumbness, Steve does nevertheless have common sense and is gradually becoming more introspective. I love him a lot so it's hard to do him justice, and I want to show him a good time.

How do you plan out a story? I've got a very vague character set, story line and setting but I'm not sure how to tie it all together and draw the big picture instead of all these little parts.

To be 100% honest, I have never had a consistent way of planning out a story. Very early on I used to outline a story, then I'd just write summaries, and for awhile my main planning was to make a fake movie trailer for whatever I was writing. And whatever other planning I did was just violently daydreaming the story in sequence in my head and working with that.

For the current story I'm working on I had to do a lot of outside planning though because it's a hugely involved AU so I needed to make sure I kept details straight.

I did character bios for the first time for this story so I could keep up with them and figure them out to write them correctly and that's helped a bit.

I have absolutely zero planning tips for setting because I somehow always screw it up so I can't honestly help there oops

Storyline though is the thing I've always had the hardest time with because usually I also only know the big parts and not what will tie them together (which led to lots of dumb filler chapters in stories lmao).

For this story I'm basing all the major events that need to happen around very specific dates so a lot of the connectors are just... Pieces of ideas I've had for these characters since I started getting the idea. Figuring out how to lead to the next major event is stupidly hard because you want to just jump right into the next major event and not worry about the small stuff, but i'm pretty sure I tried writing a story where every chapter was a major event and it sucked.

What's been working for this story so far is trying to figure out how the characters are still reacting to the last bigger thing that happened. How it now affects them and what they are doing that will lead into the next big thing. Also giving them some leeway in building character moments so that I can add more to them since there's a lot going on. That's what the character bios have been most helpful for, figuring out their specific reactions to different things and what will prompt the story into moving forward.

Also if there's anything I've learned from my many false start attempts over the years, don't be afraid to get a good amount into something and realize that you need to start over! Sometimes you get anxious to write a thing and you start up writing and you want so much to just get to certain scenes that you know well that you rush everything else. I have so many false start stories that are incredibly rushed but also were the basis for the next better version. I guess these are technically rough drafts but I rarely think of them that way.

Even if you don't get everything you want down the first go through there's always the second time to elaborate on ideas. Sometimes I'm pretty sure my handwritten stories equate to really elaborately done notes that I end up sorting out better when I finally type them and that's what works for me. If you can get the story to flow right there might even be pieces that tie it together that you didn't expect but that end up working well.

Also this may not be helpful but there have been times where I just had to write out the last big fight scene or the biggest moment in the story first and that can be helpful? It gives you a piece to work towards and even if the story necessitates that the ending has to be tweaked that's fine. It tells you "here's this thing that you're leading to. This isn't exactly what will happen but getting this out of my head might give me a chance to come up with what leads to it".

Also come up with stuff that might not even make it in the story. Come up with pieces that are silly and out of character. Come up with details you're not sure will go anywhere. I've got a lot of daydream ideas for the current story that I didn't think would go right and then the story led to a point where I could use them. I also had a lot of ideas that once I started writing had to be reworked because the story didn't lead in that direction. (Which is half the reason I don't outline anymore).

Hell write dumb sidestories for a year and a half, write elaborate backstories that will never be relevant beyond your own archive of stuff, write stuff in the same setting with vague mentions of your characters, write whatever you can. Sometimes even just writing for the world , non-canon to your story or not, helps immensely. It gives you this connection to the world and makes you want to stick with it (in my opinion at least).

Give me the characters and I'll write shitty fanfiction for them LMAO that isn't actual advice I'm sorry

In all seriousness though, I'd say also look into other ways people plan stuff too. I've always relied more on the fact that I have all the major events laid out in my head and I work from there so planning has never really been the biggest part of writing for me because frankly I'm bad at it. And then just try and find what works for you.

but also seriously absolutely write 285 pages of useless backstory that will slowly take over your life for 9 months and will never be referenced in the main story because you've lost all control of your life can't tell you how much I recommend this option