Meme: AO3 (20 Questions)

[graycardinal]

Here we go again - about a week and a half late, because I was finishing not one but two exchange stories - with an AO3 meme that's in at least half a dozen journals on my reading page. (You know, one of these days I'm going to try to think up one of these with different and more oddball questions....)

I note ahead of time that I have supplied links for some, but by no means all, of the specific works mentioned. This is partly because "all" would involve quite a lot of links, and partly a function of specific context; sometimes, just mentioning the story is enough, and sometimes, it feels appropriate to allow for immediate follow-up action.

[Technical note: After arm-wrestling HTML for an hour, I now think I know exactly how the DW rich text editor is broken where cuts are concerned. Certain kinds of formatting - notably involving indented paragraphs, but there may be other triggers - appear to cause the code parser to replace a "/div" with a "/cut" when one switches the editing mode between HTML and Rich Text (and sometimes when one simply edits the entry), which both causes the cut to break and mangles the syntax for subsequent instances of "div" statements. **Why** the code should do this is beyond me, but it's annoyingly persistent about it.]

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

106, now that the reveals for the latest round of Crossworks are live.

2) What’s your total AO3 word count?

AO3 says 255,666 - which seems low-ish, but then quite a few of mine are drabbles (and AO3's counter sometimes disagrees with my hand-count by one or two words on those).

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

Heh. (And note that AO3 does not attempt to give you this number on its stats page, probably because it would involve untangling numbers they've added together in inconvenient ways for the "And Related Fandoms" functionality.)

A hand-count of the Fandoms List from my dashboard says 84; stealth crossovers or Easter-egg appearances would add two or three more to that number. The half dozen or so frontrunners are, in no particular order: Castle, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (by way of a lot of crossover drabbles), Sherlock Holmes (including "and relateds"), Doctor Who (multiple generations), Kim Possible (including a couple of WIPs I didn't port from FF.Net), Gargoyles, and the MCU.

4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

By Any Other Name (Enola Holmes - Springer)
And I Do Mean Yours (Gargoyles)
It Takes Two to Kipple (NCIS)
Three Places Kim Merrill Lived, & One Where She Lived Happily Ever After (Mairelon the Magician - Wrede)
An Oblique Approach (Iron Man/MCU)

The most interesting thing about this is that the top story is the most recent by quite a wide margin - owing, as I've noted before, to the Netflix movie about Enola having lit a firecracker under the book fandom. It's also probably worth noting that "Kipple" was initially comment-fic on LiveJournal, but has been consistently getting kudos ever since I ported it to AO3.

5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Intermittently. I try, but do not always succeed, to reply promptly to the initial comments that come in on exchange stories, and I would like to be better about responding to the occasional comment-from-the-blue that comes in on a long-posted work. (With respect to the latter, I am better about responding to comments with specific questions than I am to general expressions of squee.)  It's not so much a question of why or why not as one of time management (which I have never been as good at as I'd like) and the fact that nowadays I most often see comments initially on my phone via email, whereas I much prefer actually writing responses on a proper keyboard here in front of the screen at home.

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

I actually write very little in the way of angsty endings as such; for traditional values of "angst", that's probably A Very Long Summer, which was an early episode/season tag for Castle in which I got very specific about the ways in which all the major characters were misreading each other's relationship signals. (Thus most of the actual angst was onscreen, rather than in the fic as such.)

There are a couple of cases where I've written stinger/cliffhanger endings - notably A Woman Is Entitled..., in which Madalena of Galavant is left trapped inside a magic mirror while an evil witch-queen steals her body, and Matters of Death and Life, a sequel story to a Bruce Coville kids'-SF trilogy in which the closing line is a straight, intentional quote from Madeline L'Engle that could theoretically springboard into a whole other novel. But neither of those is exactly angst, I don't think.

7) What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

That's probably a tossup between A Candle in the Fog:

"Mmmmf,"; Casey said, catching her breath and untangling herself sufficiently to pull her grandmother into the hug. "Everything is spectacular, but the story's complicated. Hey," she added, looking up at Priory, "what do you know? Good old Bart's cane really is lucky. But I still kinda want to go back for the crocodile."

and The Bat Lady, The Ball Boy, and the Appraiser from Boston:

"It may have taken 130-odd years worth of extra innings," Jasmine Davies observed, at the opening of a new youth baseball field sponsored by the Project, "but I think Casey's finally scored that homer. And I don't expect Twice-Great Bob will mind too much."

[glances at texts again while formatting]

Fascinating. I hereby swear that it is a total coincidence that there is a key character named Casey in both of these stories.

8) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you've written?

This is like asking Shakespeare if he writes plays. I am a long-standing crossover junkie of semi-epic proportions...and I like pushing the envelope to its limits. At first I didn't think I had an outright "craziest" example (because one of my particular things is to take two disparate source canons and fit them together as logically as I can, no matter how much handwaving it takes), but then I realized that there is, in fact, no doubt. The craziest is one of my Buffyverse drabbles:

In Which Owl Discovers An Office Key In His Files, And Reads It To Pooh

Nothing else comes close. Well, but let me give you some honorable mentions:

The Bat Lady, The Ball Boy, and the Appraiser from Boston (see above) is possibly the most meta thing I've ever written, in that it combines the story of "Casey at the Bat" with the actual real-world Antiques Roadshow as seen on US public television.

Charlotte Holmes in the 22nd Century fuses two already-odd Sherlockian outliers - one an animated cartoon series set in a future with flying cars and a robot Watson, the other a contemporary YA series in which the teen descendants of the original Holmes and Watson engage in absurd levels of interactive angst while fending off murder attempts and other shenanigans.  I am reasonably pleased with the way it turned out, but I am also positive that the resulting story is even weirder (if less angst-ridden)  than either of its source canons.

The Ursa Major Job is a remix of a story starring the animated bears from the Charmin TV commercials; I threw in the crew from Leverage and thereby papered things over a bit differently. (I am not sure that all of my readers understood the subtitle - "Not Exactly Your Uncle Walter's Remix".)

And the just-revealed Miraculous Batman - fusing Adam West's already-eccentric Batverse with the background and magic of Miraculous Ladybug - probably warrants mention in this context, if for no other reason than I allowed myself to indulge in (repeatedly) atrocious but irresistable punmanship.

9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not hate as such, though once or twice I've gotten comments that were something less than either kind or polite (and in one specific case I can think of, the snark was arguably deserved).

10) Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Very rarely - and amusingly enough, the one work of intentional erotica I have on AO3 is arguably more sedate in its descriptions than the Abby/Ziva kissing in It Takes Two to Kipple.

11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Scraped, yes; stolen, not to my knowledge.

12) Have you ever had a fic translated?

I don't think so - but I do have a blanket permission statement up, and it would not entirely surprise me if there are Russian versions of one or two things out there.

13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Both of the examples I can cite pre-date my AO3 history.  The Kim Possible fan community I was part of on FF.Net had an annual awards poll which they climaxed with a fiendishly complicated awards-show fic, and one year I volunteered to build the "red carpet" chapters of that fic and was recruited to edit the "Best Villain" chapter. This involved acquiring material from a number of the award nominees and integrating it into a coherent narrative - into which, because I could, I stitched a good deal of extra material including a genuine action subplot.

So Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this consist of a fusion of about a dozen different folks' work (all of whom appear as versions of themselves, because it's that kind of fic) with framing material by yours truly, and Chapters 11 and 12 feature more frame-work by me (with self-insertion) plus excerpts from the relevant nominated works.

The other instance, also a Kim Possible project, was a chapter of a round robin affair conducted on the now-vanished KP Slash Haven, in which Shego and her family were re-imagined as genies (and in my segment, got to go to Disneyland).

I should also mention Chance Meetings, a Castle/MCU crossover for which malnpudl did the podfic side-by-side with my written version for an early-ish round of Into A Bar. That was a genuinely enjoyable experience, and I've been increasingly interested in podfic ever since that collaboration.

14) What’s your all time favorite ship?

Oy. I am not primarily a 'ship-motivated writer or reader, and I can be flexible with respect to ships if the writing is good (to the extent that, for instance, I was a fan of both Kim/Ron and Kim/Shego stories during my Kim Possible period).

That said, going purely by word count, the answer is arguably Castle/Beckett from Castle.

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

Ouch. One of my informal fic goals for the next year or so is, in fact, to finish as many of my long-hanging WIPs as I can. That limits the field somewhat. In practical terms, the work least likely to be finished is probably one of the fragments sitting on FF.Net - Unsealed With a Kiss, which throws Yori, Ron, and Kim together right after the events of So the Drama. I had grand plans for the relationship arcs in that one, but realistically, that project is so far down the priority list (and involves one of the longest probable unwritten word counts on that list) that the odds don't favor its completion.

16) What are your writing strengths?

I seem to have a good ear for character voices in dialogue, and I produce extremely clean first-draft manuscripts.  Which isn't to say I don't rewrite, because that absolutely happens, but as a rule there's very little variance between a first complete manuscript and the eventual posted version.

17) What are your writing weaknesses?

I am entirely the wrong person to ask about this, but...

I'm entirely too good at procrastinating in the pre-writing stage, I tend to write longer and more complicated sentences than I necessarily should, and I tend to shortcut through plots as opposed to actually showing all the action onscreen (as it were).

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

I can do bits of other languages as flavor-text, but for full-on dialogue in something other than English I'd need a translation-beta. And I would hesitate to actually go there, I think, because there's no good way to do for straight prose what one can do with subtitles in film or TV, and by and large I want my readers to understand what my characters are saying.

19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I distinctly remember writing a Wizard of Oz story back in third grade which our grade school librarian helped turn into a physical cardboard-bound picture book - but that book vanished completely at some point, and I don't recall the details of the story at all.

The first instance of fanfic committed as fanfic would have been a short Doctor Who serial (featuring Five) for a local fan club newsletter I was editing, not long after I graduated from college. That one predates the computer age, and I am not certain I still have copies of all the newsletter issues.

20) What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

As most of my fellow respondents have noted, this is a hard question, especially with as many works as many of us have to pick from. And there are a fair number of my stories that I'm specifically fond of - particularly some of my longer exchange stories in micro-fandoms, where I've had a chance to build on the source canons in interesting ways. There are also a few stories that I consider particularly good on a technical level, and individual moments in particular stories that I like a lot. In all these cases, I can narrow things down to three or four stories, but not to a preference for any one of that little cluster.

And yet...

At the end of the day, there is one particular story that emerges - narrowly, but still clearly - as the one I can say I'm most satisfied with, the one that I'm least tempted to tinker with or retcon, the one whose canon I'm least likely to come back to from a different angle, the one where I feel as if I got the characters most right on the first pass. Again, this is a narrow "winner", but it's one I can commit to:

Ten Grinches Plus Two (Austin/Murry-O'Keefe - L'Engle)

This was my "Zachary and Kali" story, in which I borrowed two of Madeleine L'Engle's most complicated secondary characters and put them together. Both of them are unusually complicated characters, and neither really gets a properly completed narrative arc in L'Engle's overall "Chronos/Kairos" milieu. I like to think this story gives both of them a chance at a proper future.

Comments

[senmut]

Nice troubleshooting... hopefully it can be figured out now?

And way to go on the AO3 goodness.