Bye Grey, I'll miss ailuronymy but I know you've done everything you could here. I wish you the best in all your future encounters

Thank you. I am so grateful that something that started more or less by accident found such a thoughtful, kind audience in all of you. The support Ailuronymy has received over these ten years has been deeply appreciated, always. 

Take care! <3

For the ask meme, 3) and 17), please? And maybe 25) if you're up to it? Irrelevant but I'm the Tormentil- missing/Harrierpaw ruddles from Ailuronymy – I love your writing too, it's amazing! (I'm very excited for a potential Riverclan full-length story, like MAMS, at some point – even if I have to wait quite a while)

Hello there! Thank you so much for saying so, that’s lovely to hear. Please don’t hold your breath for a Riverclan novel, though! It’s not even on my concept list at this point and there’s a lot of other stories, including full-length ones, I’m going to be attempting first. So it’s not impossible for me to write a Riverclan one--it would be pretty neat to have a novel for each clan--but I can’t promise it’ll ever happen at this stage. Maybe! But also maybe not. It’s a mystery for me too.

Now on to your questions!

Send an ask: get to know the author.

3. What order do you write in? Front of book to back? Chronological? Favourite scenes first? Something else?

For all my Warriors work so far, I’ve written from beginning to end. In part that’s just because of the episodic nature of chapters, but also I’d say that’s my default approach for all my writing. When I get into original fiction--and especially big original fiction, novel-length work--I expect I’ll be taking a much more flexible approach, probably jumping around based on the vibe sometimes, but I like linearity because the first draft is really just getting the building blocks on the page. After that point, then you start really sculpting and being clever with it and moving bits around once you have a sense of the whole.

But for me, I think that first stage is more about getting a clarity of purpose and a rough outline--and that can be done pretty well with front-to-back writing. 

17. If you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

Don’t sweat it. That stuff you think is important is completely not important at all. You’re doing all this nitty-gritty obsessive researching and “world-building” pointless, mundane aspects of the world because you: 1. are procrastinating actually writing; 2. have been tricked into thinking that’s what the “good” “serious” fantasy writers do, because that’s what a lot of boring old guys you don’t even like to read do and brag about, and you’re still believing can’t be a good fantasy writer without that, because that’s the popular image of a fantasy writer; & 3. are scared if you’re not perfect and exact in every detail, people are going to tear your writing apart for being “inaccurate” or making a mistake. 

That’s no way to live. You don’t like doing it, really. You’re trying to preempt criticism from people who weren’t ever going to like your writing anyway, and I think you know that. You’re trying to imitate authors you don’t even want to write like, because you think what they write is kind of boring and flat and it’s really straight and you sort of hate it, but you feel you should since it’s what’s “right”.

But you’re not being authentic to yourself, or your vision, or your talent, or what you want to write, and you should be. 

It’s really not your fault you feel this way, but you’re going to be so much happier when you realise this version of a fantasy writer is all total hokum and not your style and instead start writing what you want to, the way you want to. People are really going to like what you’re bringing to the table. It’s going to set you apart and you’re going to love writing fantasy that’s a bit weird and kooky and self-indulgent and fun and queer and all the things those old books just aren’t. 

I can’t stress how liberating it will be to put on heart-shaped pink sunglasses and decide that the most important thing your writing has to be is genuine and fun for you. You never wanted to write realist fiction anyway. Secondary worlds forever. 

25. Copy-paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of.

I thought about it for a bit because something I never do here is share any poetry I write, despite writing a decent amount of it. Partly that’s just not this blog’s audience, but also a lot of it I hope one day to put into publication, if only in a little chapbook. That said, I wrote this a while back on commission for someone’s character who was deathly ill and his lovers left behind, so I don’t mind sharing it now. It’s a tanka set (5-7-5-7-7, a bit like a haiku). 

summer has four hands,  he remembers, and twenty  loving fingertips-- and it doesn't end, ever;  it lasts a lifetime--at least, in his heart--even as his own fingertips grew slow and cold, his hands too weak to return a touch, to reach out and hold on, to find comfort in their  warm skin and promise them that he would be okay: each new winter weighed him down with the too-familiar  tiredness of a body with not quite enough life in it, like a garden under the frost, cold and withdrawn at the edges of the leaves, waiting for a sunrise that isn't coming. The ground, he remembers, was solid as stone under the snow that last winter, a final  cruel laugh from the world, as though giving him to the  earth--as though burying a lover--was not hard enough for them already-- but it was a pain that time alone could heal; so he waited, in the place so near and so far away, until the seasons moved once more and time brought them to his open hands, ten fingertips made of light, never to let go again. when he remembers the living world, he thinks of it better than it  was and forgives it for the brevity and falling snow.