Wild nights are my glory

Yesterday was the last day of classes, next week is exam week, let's celebrate with some Veilguard!

Previously: I want to say there was a lot of futzing around with big fights in the Crossroads and Hossberg, and I know I have at least two Big Dragon Fights to jump in on at this point. Also, you know, a bajillion companion quests and the whole defeat-the-gods thing.

2. a character whose POV you’re currently exploring

One WIP unexpectedly now involves some Solas POV, which has been wild. I also technically haven't posted anything from my Lavellan's POV, so that's another new one in another WIP!

(I'm also always exploring my Rook and Lucanis's POV! Not to mention Spite.)

3. how you feel about your current WIP

The sequel to How the Light Gets In is a fic I'm absolutely thrilled with and so excited to get back to writing. I'm getting a chance to explore a lot of the emotional fallout post-game in the context of these characters I spent 70k words building up. It's going to be great!

Also excited about my post-Inquisition fic, but holding off a bit on that one until DA2 is fresher in my mind. There's a few other little WIPs flitting around, but they're less immediately interesting to me!

5. first sentence of the fifth paragraph of an unpublished WIP

I'm just gonna blatantly cheat on this one and post a bit of a chunk from the post-DAI Solavellan fic:

Years ago, they’d sat at a campfire, both of them exhausted and having fallen prey to more than a few swigs of Blackwall’s suspect bottle of moonshine in the wake of a difficult battle. Solas had tipped his head against her shoulder, unheeding of their companions’ raised eyebrows and muffled chuckles, and he’d slipped into a quiet, earnest monologue about the Fade: that it was an ocean, and that mortals could only ever be drawn into slow circles in its depths, unable to fathom the crashing waves at the surface. When she dreamt, even now, Zephyr would feel him at her side: the warmth of him against her cheek; the soft, idle touch of his fingers against the back of her hand. She would slip into dreams and know herself to be on slowly shifting sands, buffeted by the gentler currents, and she would wonder at the surging waves somewhere beyond her comprehension. She would wake alone, but the warmth would remain.

7. your preferred writing fonts

I quite like Sitka, the default in Scrivener!

11. a WIP you’d like to finish someday

All of the above!

13. a fandom you’re thinking about writing for

I worry about re-reading the Vorkosigan saga because I fear this will be the time I get sucked in and write fic forever!

17. talk about your writing and editing process

Answered exhaustively here.

19. the most interesting topic you’ve researched for a fic

Answered here.

23. pick three keywords that describe your writing

Uhhhhh. Hmm. Let's say aspirationally? Pensive, intimate, unexpected.

29. how easy is it for you to come up with titles?

15. favorite weather for writing

Oooooh! I feel like I'm not too picky when it comes to weather for writing, but there is something really nice about a rainy winter day with a cup of tea and a laptop.

16. favorite place to write

18. if you keep them, share a deleted sentence or paragraph from a published fic

“Lucanis would love that,” Rook said. “He’s been cooking so much lately that we’ve had to start taking our leftovers through the eluvian, which just feels like a weirdly pedestrian use of ancient elven magic.” Emmrich raised an eyebrow. “Most uses of magic have their roots in the pedestrian. Extraordinary abilities meet ordinary circumstances all the time.” He pulled Lucanis into a firm hand-clasp, then froze, hunting for something in his eyes. “Ah. Yes. I understand."

(from a very fun cut scene in How the Light Gets In in which Rook and Lucanis and Neve consult with Bellara and Emmrich at a fancy dinner during an academic conference - I wound up having to cut it and introduce these two later in the fic because any time I put the two of them in a scene, they'd instantly solve the entire story's mystery about 10 chapters too soon. After a bunch of rewrites, I realized there was just no way they wouldn't puzzle it out if given half a chance. I had to separate them and bring them into the fic much later to avoid that!)

19. the most interesting topic you’ve researched for a fic

Oh gosh. I love when I have to look up weirdly specific fandom stuff, and of course the amount of anatomical/medical stuff that comes up is always painful for my search history. I'm blanking on specifics, though!

pretend the eyes emoji is here I don't know how to put it in

“Right,” Rook said, and drank the obligatory toast in her own honor while Teia chuckled.

17. talk about your writing and editing process

Oh gosh, this one's going to be a bit of a mess, because it's changed a lot! I'll limit this to more recent stuff, but thank you for the opportunity to babble!

Conceptually, I 100% just daydream fics on the bus or before bed (incidentally, that process is so much easier since I banned screens from my bedroom a few months ago, ugh how dare that actually work). For writing shorter fic (less than 10k-ish), I usually sketch out ideas in a document - if it has some sort of structure, like the dream sequences in Darkness Had No Need or the Five Things in A Place at the Table, I list out each component so it doesn't slip my mind, but it's not so much a detailed outline as it is an unstructured list of things I don't want to forget. I've been making liberal use of the tabs feature in Google Docs to do this, so I'll have a separate outline tab where I keep these details. But especially for much shorter stories (~5k words), I usually know ahead of time which beats I want to hit and how they're going to end, so I can ride the energy of one or two writing sessions to knock it out. While I'm writing, I generally avoid editing as I go, just to get words on the page and try to capture that momentum.

I also keep a separate tab with anything I delete, because you never know when you might want to take some of that carcass and chuck it in a soup to make decent stock for next time.

For editing shorter fic, it depends on how happy I am with that first draft. If I think it needs a lot of work, I do a splitscreen where I retype it from scratch in one window with the original fic on the other side - that seems to help me pick up large-scale stuff like "this emotion happens too fast" or "this sequence is confusing". Then, once I'm happy with the draft, I either read it slowly aloud or run it through a TTS, which helps me catch things like poor word choices, awkward phrasing, typos, grammar, overuse of words, etc. etc. etc. Then it goes to the amazing @loquaciousquark, who leaves incredibly helpful comments and suggestions and will 10000% call me out if something doesn't follow structurally or emotionally (and her knowledge of canon and voice is so much stronger than mine that I really lean on her knowledge base!!!). Then I make changes and read through it again (sometimes throwing chunks of it back to quark for her wisdom), and it's ready to post!

For longer fic (I'm thinking of How the Light Gets In, which is 70k, and its sequel, which is shaping up to be about double that), I start by sketching an overall shape/scaffolding the same as I would with a short fic. This "outline" is by necessity way more detailed for earlier parts of the fic - for instance, HtLGI is broken into four "acts", and I had all five chapters of Act I pretty well planned out from day one, but I only had a vague sense of the ending and no particularly strong idea how we'd get there. Then, as I write the first act, I start daydreaming scenes for the next act and iteratively fill out that outline as I go. By the time I was down to the last ~15k of the fic, I had a document with an extremely detailed chapter-by-chapter outline that helped me keep track of the mystery even in the midst of these twenty really, really beefy chapters.

I did a fair amount of editing while writing on this one, by necessity, but generally only when I finished a particular act - I sat on all of Act I for a few weeks without touching it, then jumped back in to edit it and changed a lot. It was always helpful, after taking a break, to listen to audio from the game to recapture voices (I had a work trip where I remember just listening to companion banter for the entire flight). When I finished, I went through and re-typed the entire fic, editing along the way, which let me snap the early stuff into alignment with the later stuff.

Quark was incredible with her comments on this, digging really deep, and highlighted some unsatisfying moments in the final couple chapters that I really agreed with but wasn't quite sure how to fix. I took a couple weeks off to think it over, then came back to the fic and retyped the whole thing again, making changes along the way, and that retype wound up culminating in a complete rewrite of the last three chapters that I was really satisfied with. I sent it back for one more beta-read, made those changes (with the new ending approved by quark!) read through it again, then posted it chapter-by-chapter - I would do one last read-aloud/TTS edit on each chapter before posting it, which helped me catch a bunch of small stuff last-minute. My cut-material document wound up with about 15k words in the end!

Now, the sequel to this fic has been a Thing. I've been using Scrivener for the first time, which I think works quite well for my outlining approach (I can switch between higher-level outlining and writing pretty effortlessly and keep the bigger picture easily accessible at all times), but I've also been way busier with life in general and haven't had as much time for writing. I made it through the first 2/5 of the fic, approximately, and had to set it aside because I couldn't see a way through to the ending. I've also been a little more ruthless than usual with cuts, so uh. I basically have ~50k written with ~90k in cuts. But! I'm on a much more clear shot now and have at least a loose outline that goes all the way to the end, so now I just have to take the time to sit down and write (I've been working on a rewrite of what I've already got so I can properly include/foreshadow certain stuff I'll need later). It's definitely a messier process, but I'm enjoying it a lot!

Jumping in for a Thursday stream!

Previously: Weisshaupt! Everything went great, from our well-scouted entrance point (an eluvian that turned out to have been moved to a storage room and promptly fell out of a building) to our allies (who tried to throw us in jail and then were almost all killed) to our plan of killing a god (or at least giving her a little scratch on the face). Also, the team is not doing well with any of this. At least Ghilan'nain is mortal now?

Anyway, the game is throwing up the most aggressive "GO DO COMPANION QUESTS BEFORE MORE MAIN PLOT" signs ever witnessed, and who am I to ignore a patently obvious narrative nudge?