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Writing meme from aramis_chan!

1. Which is your favourite fic?

wild flowers that are never seen in spring, definitely. I wrote it in an hour or so while I was just recovering from a bad cold (what really kept me going through the cold itself was this conversation with fulselden ; let's do that again sometime! Let's all do that sometime!) and I kept going back over it while I was writing to get every sentence, every word as perfect as I could make it. I don't think I'll write anything that really measures up to it for a long time -- but I'm definitely going to try!

2. Which is your best-received fic?

Content is the only thing I've written that's gotten over three hundred hits on AO3. It doesn't flow or mesh with itself as well as it could, but it turned out okay and I'm pretty happy with it. Also: first Yuletide fic! \o/

3. Which is your worst-received fic?

Mmm. Paper Roses, probably -- which wasn't really a surprise, since it's just weird crossover ficlet-things between movie!Utena and Otomen. I should write more of it now I've watched the movie again, it'd be fun.

4. Which is your angsty-est fic?

Uh . . . hm. I don't really do angst on purpose? But I guess Passion for Greatness counts. (Another thing I should write more of! I adore the idea of making basically all the younger generation of mafia female and seeing what the differences are. Also I need to find a way to work in something that focuses on genderqueer!Mukuro.)

5. Which is your funniest fic?

I'm not really good at writing funny things. But I did help with we could compile; a poem comprise, so I suppose that counts. :D

6. Smuttiest? Hahaha, I really don't do smut at all, so I'm replacing this question with What character did you surprise yourself by writing?

Kaiba! I haven't read Yu-Gi-Oh! in a long long time and I am only just now watching Episode One of Duel Monsters, but I wrote 115 words of trans!Kaiba for demoerin a few days ago and was amazed because I actually pulled it off. Like, Kaiba is actually in character and everything! \o/ (I was expecting it to be really really hard, because I do not have a good track record of writing characters with really intense personalities. And it was kind of hard. But also lots of fun.)

7. Fluffiest?

a bridge of many-colored leaves, written for cinaed  during fma_ladyfest. It's basically a bunch of happy fluffy Gracia ficlets loosely stitched together. (The title would totally have outed me if anyone had been trying, ahaha. :D )

8. Have you ever made someone cry with a fic?

Not . . . as far as I'm aware? If I did, I would be glad I wrote something moving and also feel kind of bad for making somebody cry.

9. Which fic frustrates you the most?

I'm going to pretend this isn't restricted to ones that are already finished, and say THAT GODDAMN ACA!ZUKO VERSE. Because it's going to be amazing and great and I am going to spend the rest of my life researching things and it will never get written. Unless I give in and do a half-assed job on the research, which is quite likely. Dammit. (Most of the stuff I need to research isn't even the kind of thing you can google for! What kinds of Asian literature are the fun ones? Which are the most likely for Zuko to run around looking for? What kind of poems would Yue know? What sort of literature would be popular in Ba Sing Se? Are novels -- like, actual novels with genres and shit -- really around in the A:TLA world as popular entertainment, or does everybody stick to plays and poems, things that can be widely disseminated without anybody having to sit down and spend hours writing the whole goddamn thing out every time somebody wants a peek? What do wandering scholar-sages usually do?)

On the upside, writing Mai and Azula probably won't require nearly as much research. Sorry, Zuko, this is turning out to mostly not be about you at all! :D

10. Which fic was the most fun to write?

I don't know. I mean, they're all fun but they're all hard. Part of the reason I post prompt-memes so much is because I'm trying to get faster and better, so someday maybe it won't take me days or months at a time to get a real start on any fic over 400 words. So I guess the short ones are more fun, because they're faster? Even though it's a little depressing that it usually takes me an hour or so to write a hundred words.

11. Who is your favourite OC you've ever created?

Lan! She doesn't really exist yet, because she's from aca!Zuko-verse Ba Sing Se and -- as mentioned above: oh god research -- but she's a second-generation immigrant from . . . wherever Guru Pathik comes from (does anybody know? or is he just Magic Indian-Inspired Teacher From Nowhere?), and she's kind of a lady? Like, not the way Toph or Mai or Azula are, but she doesn't talk about some things because she doesn't usually consider it polite: if she figures out your secret identity or something, she won't say anything unless you're about to get yourself caught. That kind of thing. And she sings while she cooks because her aunt always told her it was good luck, and she's mostly deaf (which, again, she would tell you if you asked; but it wouldn't even occur to her to mention it otherwise unless it was going to be a problem).

So basically she is the kind of character I don't get to write very much.

12. Are you better at oneshot or multipart?

Oneshots, definitely! Short things are way easier, because I tend to trim things down as much as I can. Why should I expand on something when I can make it more concise? (Of course, I love to read really long fics. I admire other people's ability to write more than a few hundred words without separating them into different stories!)

13. Which character do you think you're the best at portraying?

I consider myself to be pretty bad at characterization all around, actually. I can tell when I'm doing it wrong if I try, but it's not very easy for me to pin down how people act. Which is weird, because I'm very good at telling why people do things -- just not, it seems, the other way around.

I'm fairly good at Narcissa Malfoy, I suppose. And maybe Tsuna. Quiet characters are easiest, or ones who want to be quiet. Openly assertive people are more difficult.

14. Which character is the most difficult for you to portray?

Complicated characters are really hard, of course. The ones I'm really worst at, though, are the ones who change significantly over the course of their canon, or over the course of a fic -- not because I hate character development or anything, but because it's hard for me to keep in my head that, say, first-season Zuko =/= post-series Zuko.

Which is why I end up writing post-canon fic a lot.

15. Tag five other authors!

I would really love to see more people do this! So just do it if you want to.



. . . I think maybe reading lots of translated Japanese stuff has messed with my speech patterns. You know, just a little. ;)