silveradept | Encouragement Thread and Twenty AO3 Questions (Reply)

I should probably mention the rah-rah thread I've started on

mrsronweasley's post, because it's been a long sequence of days and weeks and it's sometimes nice when people stop by and say neat things about you. No obligations, of course.

For the rest of you, a questionnaire about fannish creativity and statistical matters with regard to the Archive of Our Own:

From

nyctanthes and

gloss:

How many works do you have on AO3?

186, plus any still anonymous works.

What’s your total AO3 word count?

Statistics says 1,045,885 words, plus anonymous. A little more than half of that is one series written elsewhere and then director's commentated on AO3, so I'm not actually that prolific in fic.

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Eighty-four fandoms, it looks like. If you want to see the full list, you are welcome to peruse silveradept.

By most works, you would think I liked the Dragonriders of Pern (meta series), Miraculous Ladybug, and I use the Archive to make weird original fic.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Winner by a mile is Chat Noir's Convention Cosplay Crisis, a silly con adventure in a big fandom that probably got good recommendations somewhere on Tumblr to produce the nearly 950 kudos that it has achieved. (For some people, that may be a massive failure. For me, it's a runaway success.)

Behind that, We Didn't Start The Fire, which is something I made from the bones of an idea alexseanchai had but didn't make themselves, so of course it was going to be popular.

Third and fourth, Rigging Random Chance and Superposition Jockeying, the first and third in a series of improbable events that exposes several conspiracies to attempt to make a supposedly random drawing deterministic.

Finally, Liberté, Solidarité, Accessibilité, which was my 2020 Fandom Trumps Hate offering, involving the consequences of a rash decision and the relationship that grows when one side learned to be spinier and the other learned to be more vulnerable.

The first non-Miraculous Ladybug work is number six, Take Care of Yourself, an Into the Spider-Verse AU about repairing broken relationships in highly supervised settings.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I try to respond as much as I can, because I want to encourage more comments.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I'm not sure. Take Care of Yourself ends with uncertain but improving footing between the main characters, but the reality that the rift between them is unlikely to heal fully. The Royal Test ends with threats destroyed, but a character orphaned from the only family they've known as a result of it. And Liberté, Solidarité, Accessibilité doesn't fix the consequences of the rash decision or push the reset button, and it's very clear that the characters and their relationship are going to be tested strongly because of the society around them. They're probably all angsty, but I don't know which is the worst.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

I tend to write happy endings, so "happiest" doesn't always make sense as a category. In terms of what may have made the readership happiest, rather than by volume of kudos, but by keysmash of comments, I might put up The Greatest Ambition, which was written for HP Trans Fest in 2020. (It's a fuck you to known transphobe and Suck Fairy J.K. Rowling,.)

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

All the time, usually for exchanges specifically themed on the matter. I tend to write universes together that I think make logical sense, so none of them would really hinge on being a super-crackfic kind of premise. I suppose the patchiest idea I've used is the intoabar premise to put Frida (of the Hilda cartoons) and Fran (of Final Fantasy XII) in a bar together, by making Fran's ship have a malfunction over Trolberg.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yep. Some people believe their interpretation of the canon is so inherently superior that they have to comment about how unrealistic the very clearly delineated as AU work is and to ridicule its premise.

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Define "smut." I have a couple works marked as Explicit because it has honest-to-Prime sexual content happening in the narrative, without a fade to black or waking up the next morning, but I tend to rate my works more on the prevalence of swearing rather than sex. I do acknowledge the existence of sex, and I do a sex jokes and innuendos, intentional or otherwise. I'd like to believe that when I write romantic or sexual content, even if it's not explicit sex, that it will be enjoyable to the audience, but I haven't written anything that I would classify as porn without plot, or tried to include a sex scene for the purpose of writing a sex scene.

So do I write smut? I don't know.
Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge. Don't know why someone would want to pilfer my stuff when there's better and more popular work to steal.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Can't say as I have.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

If by "co-written," you mean "scrounged around in the junkyard of ideas that alexseanchai sometimes sends things they can't or don't want to do, then bolt on a story around a particularly shiny bit," sure. But, like, plot a story with someone(s) else and write it together or alternating chapters between ourselves? Nooooo.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

…I will never have one single ship of all time. I may have ones I wrote more than others, but I don't I will ever find a single ship as my OT(X).

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I don't think it'll ever finish The Ladybug Variations, unless a flash of insight strikes on how to transition from the hero of the week form into the actual endgame that brings about the end of the story.

What are your writing strengths?

I don't know. I get comments about nailing character voices and actions, and my comedy skills seem to do all right with getting people to laugh at the right beats, but someone who has read my work can probably say better than I can about what I do well.

What are your writing weaknesses?

I don't catch all the tyops and autocucumber errors, because I perpetually believe that if I typed it correctly, the computer rendered it correctly.

I'm not good at writing explicit, describing the parts moving and actions being taken, sex. (I think I have the same issues that Sailor Jim has about describing parts in motion, in that a large part of human interactions that are sexy if you're experiencing them become somewhat comedic when you're trying to describe them.)

I may be over-reliant on dialogue as compared to action, and trying to prove my cleverness too much for the general reading audience.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I tend to employ the universal translator if the characters involved are all speaking the same language, but if there's something that would be a departure from that language, where a character would instead revert to another language they would know better than the one they're speaking, or if there's a pun to be made that works in another language or relies on someone being bilingual enough to be able to make the joke because of similar words (or faux amis), then I'll usually include enough to make the point. But I generally don't want to have entire conversations happening in another language because I'm not usually fluent enough in the language to make it sound anything other than bad Google Translate at work. If I really needed a Bilingual Bonus or an entire other language's conversation in a work, I'd probably contract that out to someone who is fluent.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

The first fic I still have record of, written when I was much, much younger than I am now, is a fusion of the Spider Mario Brothers and Batman 1966 universes. It is exactly as skilled as one might expect of a small child.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I don't have a specific favorite fic. I have ones that I'm proud of for their technical achievements, others for their comedy beats, still others for good words or lines, and so on. There's usually something I like about each work that I create, even if some of the ones have more things I like about them than others. There may be some fics that I would like to see have wider audience or to have had more tangible engagement numbers, but so long as the fic is right for the reader at the time they read it, then the fic succeeds.