4. Change
Fandom: Rise of the Guardians
Genre: Angst/Hurt/Comfort
Character(s): Jack Frost
Summary: He hates that things change, move on, evolve.
Note: Inspired somewhat by one of Mistress Weatherwax’s lines in Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett:
“You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don’t die can’t live. What don’t live can’t change. What don’t change can’t learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you.”
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Fanfiction Writer Questions!
quillowl:
1) What inspired you to write?
2) What fandoms do you write for?
3) What works have you already done?
4) Any future ideas?
5) The fanfiction you’re most proud of?
6) What stories do you regret/dislike the most?
7) What music inspires you to write?
8) What else inspires you to write?
9) Very public/talkative about your works?
10) Any friends/family that have actually read your works?
11) Family/friends opinion of you being a fanfiction writer?
12) What do you think is better: Pen, Typewrite or Computer?
13) Ever drawn/received fanart?
13.5) Do you want to receive/draw fanart?
14) Ever researched before writing?
15) 5 things you want to improve about your writing.
1) Other fanfiction writers. One Christmas holiday at my aunt’s, I ran out of books to read. I’d heard about this ‘fanfiction’ thing from a friend but had never really been interested before, so I set about finding things to read. It was amazing - a whole new world, right there, waiting to be discovered. Not too long after, I discovered my first actual fandom - Legend of Zelda. I read many many marvellous stories, but also many many terrible ones. I decided, if they can post this kind of stuff and still get favs, why can’t I? So I started writing.
2) Zelda was my first fandom, but I seem to have lost much of my enthusiasm for it lately. I wrote a sad oneshot for Doctor Who, but I don’t think I’ll ever write for it again; the characters are too well-defined, I think, for me to ever hope of getting them right. Portal I still love and I have a longshot sitting half-done and plans for a multi-chapter. My current fandom is Rise of the Guardians, and as of yet I have posted six separate stories and have four other multichapters I want to do.
3) Currently, I have 14 stories - three multichapters, one twoshot and ten oneshots.
4) Too many. Far, far too many. Adversity is a LoZ:TP angstfest what-if multichap I first started writing when I was eleven, almost five years ago; it’s changed an awful lot since then. Nonentity is a post-Portal 2 multichap that is 80% Chell being a bamf. Exile, Vilify is a RotG AU angstfest multichap with Jack as a very young spirit. Endless Possibilities[?] is a post-RotG multichap dealing with parallel universes that could have three very different endings depending on what I decide - dark, angsty or happy. Perceptible[?] is a RotG AU multichap where Jack was never a spirit but still dies and came back. Somebody Else’s Problem[?] is another post-RotG dealing with alternate realities, but this time with only Bunny and Jack.
5) Voice, probably. I like my poor mad Jack. But Last Man Standing, The Open Sky and Talking To Snowmen have special places in my heart too.
6) In all honesty…it would have to be Cold War. I like the idea. I like the ending I’d planned. But I struggled to write it, and it just wasn’t fun. It really doesn’t help that I’ve grown to hate 70% of it and yet people are still reading and wanting more. I’m only keeping it up because people still seem to like it :/
7) All music. Every story I’ve written was written to music, and all of my multichapters were influenced by songs. I listen to music on long journeys and especially on the bus where there’s nothing else to occupy my attention. So I apply the lyrics to characters, and yes, sometimes it doesn’t quite work, but more than once a song has inspired a plot twist I would never have come up with otherwise.
8) School; for example, Talking To Snowmen would never have been written if not for English class and I would probably never have started writing so much if it weren’t for all those hours I spent in etude with no homework to do. Showers; I don’t know why, but many of my revelations have taken place while standing in the bathtub. In bed, late at night when I’m trying to sleep; I get an awful lot of ideas that at the time seem so perfect and amazing but later I usually discover to be impractical or ridiculous. Not all of them are, though; some can be quite good, if I do say so myself.
9) Hell no. I think I might be vaguely afraid that people will think less of me for it - although knowing them, they could well do. I’m nervous enough admitting that I like Rise of the Guardians and How To Train Your Dragon, let alone love and read and write for.
10) Mnope. Actually, that’s a lie, I think one friend of mine, who I haven’t seen in ages and is a Sherlock and Doctor Who fangirl and fanauthor, read my DW oneshot. But nobody else because I am a sad lonely person.
11) No friends of mine know (except the one mentioned above). My family is vaguely aware that I write, but has never been particularly interested.
12) Oh, computer, definitely. It might be much easier to make typos, but it’s quicker and easier to fix too. I think only a little faster than I type, at least compared to how fast I write with a pen.
13) Um…I’ve drawn art for my own fanfictions, does that count? I don’t draw for others because I’d just get embarrassed. Hell, I get embarrassed drawing birthday pictures for my little sister.
13.5) Who wouldn’t? Not that I really have anything to get fanart of…
14) Are you fucking kidding me, there are actually people out there who don’t? 80% of my ‘writing’ time is spent doing research - just for the 700-odd words I’ve written so far for Somebody Else’s Problem[?], I’ve researched burn scars, all manner of mythological figures, the present range of the grey wolf and the Pyrenees. For A Wolf’s Life, I spent half my time making maps and charts and graphs for how Link-the-Wolf aged compared to a normal human. EVERYTHING MUST BE PERFECT AND ACCURATE OR I WILL BE FORCED TO REWRITE THINGS AND I FUCKING HATE REWRITING. …Apologies. That got a little out of hand.
15) Children - Cold War, if nothing else, proved to me that I am really bad at writing groups of children. It really doesn’t help that I can’t relate personally - I’ve never been a normal child; I was reading Harry Potter by age four, and my parents have always said I’m unnaturally sensible, and my views and opinions contrast enormously with those of my peers and always have. I don’t understand anyone under twenty and even then the things people do baffle me completely.
Consistency - I have discovered that I have a habit of hopping back and forth between tenses, a quirk that inspired a whole paragraph in Voice. I love to write in the present tense because it feels so fluid and alive, but I could never bring myself to write a multichapter in my preferred tense. I don’t know why. But any time I write something, by the time is gets to over 1500 words, I start writing in the past tense regardless of how I was writing before. I spend half my time sifting through the last few sentences trying to figure out what tense they should be in, and I’m sure some slip through my fingers.
Words - Actually, I think this one is less my fault and more the English language’s. A lot of things I write about simply don’t exist in the English language, or the closest words just don’t express what I want them to. So I have to make up new compound words or just try to explain the feeling, and I don’t always do too well at that. One I like is Jack’s ‘not-quite-agony’; one that I do not is how I tried to explain his connection to the Wind. It’s something I still can’t put into words no matter how hard I try and sometimes I just wish I could transfer the feeling, the meaning into my readers’ heads directly.
Names - I have a horrid tendency to omit names. It started in A Wolf’s Life as a challenge to myself - Link is a wolf, and wolves do not need names; why give him one now? Then it just continued from there and barely any of my oneshots name the central character - just Aside, Affably Evil and Iceman do, though Talking to Snowmen and Failure have their respective protagonists’ names once. It’s fine when it’s just a oneshot - actually, I quite enjoy it; knowing exactly who is being talked about while never actually being told - but it’s different when it comes to longer writings, and this is where I have trouble.
Regularity - I can’t write well if I’m not in the mood and if I can’t write well, there’s no point in me writing. At the moment I’m trying to find ways to stimulate my writing muse more often, and it seems to be working at least a little - I’ve written 50% of all the words I’ve published since the beginning of this year. That’s 16 197 words in less than four months, not to mention all the words I haven’t published. My muse is still extraordinarily unreliable and easily distracted, but I’m working on it.
Oh god I’m writing another RotG fic, only this time I decided not to actually plan anything at all and just fucking write it, because otherwise nothing will get done ever.
As of this moment it has 730 words and deals with an alternate universe where everyone is either dead or miserable. Or both in Jack’s case.
I have no idea where I am going but that’s okay because mostly it’s just writing itself at the moment. The one thing I do know is that I’ll only post when it’s done, so as to avoid a hiatus like Cold War’s.
Speaking of which, I’m actually thinking of scrapping CW and incorporating its key aspects into this new one (its working title is Somebody Else’s Problem) - I still like the idea, but I hate 90% of what I’ve written for it and can’t seem to get any further. But this way I can write something that makes me happy while also satisfying my need to get that idea out of my head. Hopefully.
Also I will probably illustrate something for this one, if only because I really need to practice my humans. And injuries.
