austerlitzborodinoleipzig asked: 5, 12, 22 and 27 for the writing meme 🙂

Enjoy the verbose answers 🙂

5) If you had to choose a favourite out of all of your multi chaptered stories, which would it be and why?

Hard pick, but probably Release from Bondage, because the style narrator is consistent and that fic contains so many of my vices/strengths/personal foibles: the central characters (in fact the vast majority of the cast) are OCs, except they and their plotline are strongly inspired by characters from an unrelated story/fandom, and in-universe their social standing is not that of the ruling class but at least one or two steps below it. Therefore they are relating to the audience the events of the main novel, but from the perspective of the ‘lower deck’. And it’s harder to get lower than the pov of a slave imprisoned in Angband. Speaking of Angband- look, a story where there’s only off-screen mention of Melkor or Sauron and the entire work has almost absolutely nothing to do with Maedhros. I get to indulge in writing horror without becoming the focus or getting graphic. Speaking of world-building a setting, I also dive into Nargothrond and a little of the other locations in Beleriand, having a great deal of fun expanding those settings and especially the shift over time, as Faron is my snapshot of both the earliest days of Nargothrond’s founding and of the very narrow and specific period between right after Celegorm and Curufin’s coup-d’etat of Nargothrond to the Fifth Battle – He misses Beren and Túrin but is tangled up in their aftermath. And then through the wonders of Angband’s secondhand gossip I get to write characters reacting to the fall of Nargothrond, the fall of Gondolin, the Second and Third Kin-slaying, and the War of Wrath. Then in the last few chapters I can skip to the tail end of the War of Wrath, indulge in a little “Fantasy AU World War I”, write about the aftermath and recovery efforts, and start to segue-way into Second Age Valinor, another personal favorite setting to write. And because, when I was more than halfway through writing this fic, I had the belated epiphany that yes! this IS a slow-burn romance and I CAN label it as such, because I spend enough page time building up the connection between the two main OCs and the last scene(s) will establish their romantic intentions; the main thread throughout the fic is the devotion swelling behind the surface despair. Happy Endings, dammit, Babies After All, Everyone Reunites in the Lifestream and Has Tea Parties.

And for the most part there’s very few sentences or passages that I find clunky, and I still like to think some of my best writing is in this fic.

12) Who is your favourite character to write for? Why?

Good question! Even more difficult for me to single out only one pick. Elu Thingol, for certain stories, is my surprise pick, because it’s easy for me to slide into him through the angle of the oldest of three siblings, the overwhelming and crushing sense of responsibility and desire to protect and the survivor’s guilt and that he can and will recognize his flaws and mistakes, even if he makes them- he knows he has a temper (I love the expulsion of Finrod and his brothers because, first of all, Thingol has every right to be furious that his people and family members were robbed and murdered and this heinous transgression and treachery was hidden from him- and that’s underselling the amount of bad faith the Noldor were acting under, jfc- but he let’s them know that he, Thingol, knows right now his reactions are that of emotion and anger, so for both their sakes they need to leave until he can deal with this from a detached perspective. It’s both very humanizing folly and yet also some wisdom). He will regret mistakes that he makes, he’s not the self-deluded egotist that is one of the reasons among many that the Fëanorians as a whole are of the few Silmarillion characters that I loathe. And when writing him, I get to play with so many of my other favorite characters. I get to write about so many places I want to write about, have a long stretch of time in which to place stories, have both wartime and peace, can go back to the earliest civilization or to a kingdom at its Golden Age.

For OCs: Indomunie (Dondwen) and especially Heledir.

22) Do you have a story that you look back on and cringe when you reread it?

Some of the really old original work, if I bothered to re-read it. 

None of Silm stuff, really, except ugh, I do need to go polish up the Maeglin/Elwing fic and Indis and her children compete in Valinorean Olympics. Not a full cringe, but a ‘this needs improvement.”

27) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?

So at least for the fanfics, I don’t type out actual outlines. And while the majority of what I have published are one-shots, they are sometimes in a series, or there are the multi-chaptered works. So I know where the story beats need to lead to. And I …let’s say seven or eight times out of ten I write something out of order. For instance, the Beren’s Band of the Red Hand: the first fic, Arodreth’s, I wrote knowing what the first and last lines more or less were going to be, so everything else was connecting the two. For Heledir it was the image of the kingfishers and that those images were a memory trying to suppress the dungeon, and thus I spiraled it out into the delusion bleeding into the memory. Costawë was all around the refrain “He won’t remember this”, and the fact that his character was based off of Cloud Strife from FFVII, as Bân was Zack Fair, so for them it was more about picking cut scenes and tidbits from their games and reworking them, then deciding which order to write them on the page. Thus Soldier is nestled flashback after flashback. Consael was a single-sitting not sure where it was going until I wrote it. Release from Bandage: the first two things written were most of chapter one to get the idea of the story onto paper and then the scene where Faron jumps with Faelindis in his arms (Aka “they flew”, the last few paragraphs of Theon’s final pov chapter). Some scenes and passages I don’t plan ahead months and years in advance, some I do.