I was tagged by thesadchicken!   I’ll try to make notes about what all these things I’m linking to ARE for people not in the fandoms, though I haven’t put a lot of writing online, so this might be limited, answer-wise!

1) First fic you ever wrote.

Song Without a Name (SWAN, from here on out and in literally every reference I make to it), which I started in 2004, and put the first bits of online in early 2005.

Did I invent stories in my head before that, and even do some kind of roleplay something or other once?  Yeah.  And I drew a lot of those stories and just brushed them off when asked about them as nothing, no, no, they didn’t have stories behind them, definitely not.   But SWAN was the very first fanfic writing I’d ever done, and the first I ever shared, and I suffered some massive anxiety doing so, but it clearly needed to get out of me if it went online despite me being ill over it.

SWAN exists on FFN, on AO3, on my own website (where it has its own subpage full of art, fanart, fan-fanfic, cosplay, songs, commentary and all sorts of other batshittery), and the very oldest bits of it exist on Cherry Doom, the Yahoo Group we had for JtHM Slash back in the day.  

2) Best fic you ever wrote.

I’m not even sure how to answer this.   My current favorite pieces of my own writing are my rewrite of SWAN (somewhat dorkily called reSWAN most of the time), and some things I have shown a grand total of one other person.  

I want to be able to say ‘Oh, this one is the objective or technical best’, but I publish things so sporadically, it’s like every thing I put up is a big jump in skill, and I really like most of the things I put up as evidenced by the fact that they made it to the internet at all.  

 I was very pleased though with the reactions to ‘Snaps’ (a Deep Dish Nine gift for tinsnip featuring illustrations of the photos on Julian’s phone), and ‘Greetings From Cardassia’ (an illustrated DS9 story of a Garak/Bashir nature featuring Julian sending a message to Miles that I had fully intended to continue and still have pages upon pages of junk for).  Especially ‘Greetings’.  Reading the comments that I’d really made people laugh, and that it was my first Garak and Bashir thing really made me happy.   Funny that they’re both illustrated.  Clearly I should do that more often.

3) Most popular fic you ever wrote.

Very probably SWAN (and it’s sequel ISH), though Deep Dish Nine is also a contender, but sort of in a different way.  

SWAN/ISH spawned a lot of fanwork even though it was not an open universe for other people to make versions of like DD9 is, and I think it’s responsible for more people seeing my art and just meeting me in general than almost anything else I’ve ever touched.   It’s also something I’m still receiving comments about, still seeing important feedback for, and that’s really wonderful to me.  People still remember that I was doing this from five to ten years ago, so that probably says something about popularity.

Deep Dish Nine is an AU of Deep Space Nine in which the principal players are human employees and associates of a pizza shop.  This has been both hilarious and painfully poignant, to my deep amusement.  It’s been a huge bundle of fun here on tumblr, with tons of people writing and drawing and giggling over it when it was at its highest point and I made the most amazing friend ever as a result of it.  

It also has the most kudos on my AO3 profile if we’re talking about that kind of  ‘popular’, followed by Greetings From Cardassia.  SWAN/ISH has most of its stats and things on my website and FFN, since that was what we had at the time, so I can’t make a comparison with that.

4) Most unappreciated fic you ever wrote.

Through no fault of its own and entirely down to me just leaving it on my own website,  probably the Vampire Edgar stuff, Blood and Cherry Syrup.  I have so much more of that written, but got stuck having to wait to do the illustration because I was still in art school at the time, and then I just got stalled.  Since I never put it up somewhere super visible, it didn’t get the enthusiasm or interaction that is kind of my primary ‘continuing to fic’ fuel. 

Also going largely unloved was my planned-to-be-giant Classic Doctor Who Two and Jamie adventure featuring partially Cyber-converted Jamie, Ctrl-Z. It was going to be amazing, and I was so excited about it, and then someone told me it hit all their kinks and made them super hot and bothered and I dropped the entire thing like a stone, despite having like six word files of material and tons of illustrations.   So that was maybe over appreciated or appreciated the wrong way or something, but me dropping it led to it being something like “Oh, I didn’t even know you wrote Doctor Who stuff, Lady!” 

5) Fave fic kinks.

Hahaha, okay, we just talked about what people saying shit like this does to me making anything.   

But if we call it like, ‘favorite fic tropes’ or something…

I’m super super weak against an outside observer perspective on pairings I like.  I wrote some DD9 Miles watching Julian and Garak once, though I think it only ended up on Tumblr if online at all.  Greetings From Cardassia has kind of the spirit of it, though.  I have something large and unposted that is this concept, too, and I’m pretty sure everything I make will have this if it has the chance to grow long enough. 

I love mundane bullshit.  “Out Of Place”, the fic that switches DD9 and DS9 Garak is pretty much entirely mundane bullshit. (Though, to be fair, almost all of DD9 is mundane bullshit.)

I love the kind of Jeeves and Bertie fics in which they both think they are not likely to be what the other person wants because of personality differences, and then of course they are Exactly what they each need.  

I apparently like creating entire new AU worlds even though I would never say I love AUs, nor do I ever really read any?

6) Fave fic writing process.

I like writing things down in a notebook first, and then typing things up on the computer.  I don’t know why, but I think things come to me a little easier that way.   I know I definitely do more editing if I work that way, and once I just start typing, I tend to not stop, so the notebook gives me something to just get me moving.  It’s a nice thing.

Also, wow, having outlines and an actual direction planned to go in, jeez, that is certainly nice.   The experience of writing reSWAN has been so much different than writing anything else because I already have a massive pre-finished version of it.  I wrote the original SWAN just sort of in order, as I went, and I think it generally shows.   ISH was written in sort of significant chunks and then I filled it in.  Unfortunately, I lost a few scenes in the process of trying to write that way because nothing was in order, and I had to go add them back in later.  

The best thing, though, is when it just falls out of me.  Usually, my anxiety about writing is so much that I struggle or I let things sit a really long time, and then sometimes, I just wake up with a need to put something out there, and then it turns out great because I didn’t have a stranglehold of terror on it from start to finish.  That’s a great thing.   I guess it’s not a process, though.

These are getting longer and longer, I’m sorry.  You guys know me and my bullshit by now though, copious word count is how I roll.

7) Longest fic you ever wrote, in word count.

SPEAKING OF COPIOUS WORD COUNT!   It’s like this meme is speaking to me.

That would be, so far, I’m Still Here (ISH, the SWAN sequel), which is, according to AO3, 148,337 words long.  

It beat SWAN by only 4,000 some odd words.  AO3 says SWAN clocks in at  144,116.

8) Funniest fic you ever wrote?

I try to make everything kind of funny if it’s not dramatically sad, honestly.  I like funny and creepy as a combination, so I do that a lot.  I love hearing reports that SWAN made people laugh and then cry horribly, that makes me a happy Lady.

The most solidly funny, though, with no creepy or fucked up to balance it, was probably Greetings From Cardassia or one of the early chapters of Deep Dish Nine.    

I’d intended Blood and Cherry Syrup and Must Be This Tall To Ride (story about Squee and Pepito, older, working part time at a possessed amusement park) to be the Dark Funny, but I don’t think either got far enough, and they’re also so old I don’t even remember if they’re funny, haha.

9) Quote a line from your fic.

Good lord.  This is so much. 

Here, this single out of context line from ISH 12:

“Why am I the only one who hasn’t seen Johnny naked?” Tenna pouted. “Even Jimmy got to.  Is this why I’m not really in the band?”

Truly I am a bard.

10) Describe your fics in three words.

Witty Dialog Paragraphs

11) If you could only rec one fic it would be.

Of my own?  Or other people’s?   

I confess right now that I actually don’t read a lot of fic, and what I do read I’m super picky about.  

Of my own, I think I’d want people to read reSWAN, even though it isn’t done yet.  

Something I’ve read and I’d like to rec… It’d have to be something I read entirely and didn’t have to play porn chicken with. 

Ha, read Tinsnip’s What Ho, Garak!, which I still have to finish illustrating because I am garbage.  I’m certain that’s cheating because I’m involved with it, but fuck you, I do what I want.

All the people I know write things regularly for stuff I know have been tagged already, I think!   But if this looks fun to you, Do It, friend.  No Shame.  Do what you want cause a pirate is free