Gonna try to make savory puff pastry tarts with bechamel, caramelized onions, and sauteed mushrooms 🤤

4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 for the fanfic ask game!! Totally cool to pick and choose the ones you wanna answer lol

4. what is the plot bunny you’ve been carrying for the longest? optional bonus question: do you ever wonder why you haven’t written it yet and experience deep existential dread?

Ooof. I have plot bunnies that have been hopping around for like 20 years, I swear. But one that I actually started writing but just never did anything with was an ACD Canon Holmes/Watson story about Watson being blackmailed by Milverton. I think I wrote about 2k words of that before getting distracted by something else. That's also the answer to why I haven't written a lot of my bunnies, because I get distracted by other ideas.

5. have you ever made a playlist about something you were writing

No, I just put the same song on repeat and write to the beat. While I've been writing this week, I've been playing Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is A Place On Earth.

7. tell us about the plot of the first fanfic you ever wrote

Oh my god, it was this, from fucking 2008. I probably have followers younger than this fic. Zero plot. Just two characters fucking.

8. what’s your relationship with constructive criticism and feedback like? do you seek it out? how well do you take it?

If it's from my betas, I happily accept it. If it's some random person going 'Hey, I didn't like XYZ.' I ignore it. If it's someone going 'This sucks/I hate this/Fuck you.' I get really pissed off.

10. at what point in the process do you come up with titles, and how easy or hard is that for you?

Titles either come to me immediately when I'm plotting out the story, or as soon as I'm done. There's very little in between. The one fic that gave me the worst time with regards to a title was probably Whisper. I am SO proud of this story, but the title almost did me in. I actually put off posting it for like three days because I didn't know what to call the damn thing, and that was linked to the fact that until the point of the climax I still didn't know what I was going to call the Big Bad since they don't actually appear until then.

On the other hand, the ColdFlash series I'm currently working on, I had the first story titled after about 1k words, and that made titling the rest of the series that I've plotted out easy, because they'll all be along the same punny theme.

11. what’s something neat you’ve learned while doing research for something you were writing? also, how much do you worry about doing research in general?

My research is usually divided into two groups: Fact checking with the canon source material, for things like 'Wait, what's the height difference between these characters again?' (Three inches) 'Did Jason wear the weird muzzle mask thing while this story was taking place?' (Yes.) 'What would Eddie order right now?' (Chicken dan dan noodles and a steak for Vee) OR excruciatingly exact technical details that almost no one ever pays much attention to but if I don't make sure I get it perfectly correct I will want to tear my hair out, like 'How long would it take for these characters to walk from point A to point B?' (Roughly 4.5 hours, weather permitting, and trust me I have tried to find details about the weather on specific Roman feast days in early Roman occupied south Britain. No such luck.) When I was writing Holmes pastiche, I did a lot of research on late Victorian post boy and bath house scandals.

The neatest thing I've learned recently was probably the different 'mancies. Like Necromancy, Tyromancy, and so on. All so I could make a gag about a cheese and onion tart. Which I'm pretty sure only I and maybe three other people thought was funny.