On all levels except physical, i am a wizard

Hello! I am like Gandalf, in that my attention wanders all over the place and I have a tendency to walk out of projects halfway through because there's something interesting going on over there and I've gotta check it out/there's a fiery chasm demon I gotta kill real quick. I love all things Arda (which is mostly what you'll find on here) but, whenever my wandering brain lets me focus on things, I like to write Tolkien fics and think about Gondor. I enjoy resurrecting Tolkien's female characters, rage and grief, overuse of parentheses, and unromantic discussions about love and marriage. Loving the Dol Amroth family is as close as I come to specialising.

The Lord of the Rings fics

hello! :)💚

3. How would you describe your writing style?

Ooooh, now this is a hard one. I'm going to go with expressive and reflective, definitely emphasising emotions and relationships rather than action, with a tendency toward rambling and a humorous edge from time to time. I also tend to make a lot of allusions to specific imagery that fits the religious/cultural setting of the world I'm writing in/I'm just fond of for reasons e.g. the multiple allusions to Finduilas' death and birds. Not much is happening but people are suffering a lot and potentially making jokes about it.

36. How do you come up with fic titles? What's the one you're most proud of?

Most of my fic titles are just references to key thematic lines from the fic e.g. The Last of the House of Steward (“So. We are the last of the House of Steward.”) or When the sun rises ("When the sun rises, you'll think of me?") or a summary of the key concept the fic is getting at e.g. Shadows of the Dead, referring to the varying, distorted visions of herself that Finduilas casts after her death. However, every now and again I get real artsy (read: cannot think of a title using the former two methods) and reference a poem or a song (or, that one time, a Greek tragedy). Florence + the Machine unsurprisingly features here and she likely will many times in the future. As for the one I'm most proud of at the moment I have to say like a bullet in the back, because "Dog Days Are Over" fits so perfectly with the emotions and themes of that fic. Also because it would be so like Caeveneth (depression haver since childhood)(healer) to describe happiness/love/any positive emotion ever as physically incapacitating her like a weapon of war.

For the writing ask game: I'd love to hear about 8, 10 and 30 if you don't mind!

Thank you so much and have a fantastic day/evening! 😁

Thank you! (it has been a frustrating day, as predicted, but my evening has been relaxing if still too warm for my taste.) Hope you are having a lovely whatever time of day you are having! <3

8. How slow is a slow burn?

I feel like this is the sort of thing that isn't an exact science, each writer is going to have their own 'speed' dependent on style, characters, plots and subplots, but as a general rule I don't want those idiots to even register that they might have feelings—register, not admit—before knowing they person six months. None of this 'oh wow he's hot and i am immediately drawn in by his magnetic charm' bullshit two seconds after meeting him.

10. Top three favourite fic tropes.

I tend not to like tropes so much as how they are executed so I don't really remember tropes that I like/dislike. But off the top of my head:

Angst - I love suffering. I love making people deeply upset and probing at what it is that makes them feel that way, what it reveals about them and their relationships and their support system (or lack thereof), what it reveals about how they cope (or don't) with negative emotions and vulnerability.

Friends to Lovers - I will always be a friends to lovers > enemies to lovers person. This is probably because I to this day genuinely cannot understand romantic feelings as anything but friendship in a different shade and also I love the idea of a couple knowing each other and having an established dynamic and sense of mutual respect and love before they start developing any sort of romantic feelings.

Unrequited Love - Again, like with my love for angst, I love looking at a person's response to loving someone in a way that the other does not return. How the implicit rejection of their feelings impacts those feelings. How they love when they know they won't be loved in the same way in return. Whether any bitterness, hatred or self-loathing is involved. How it impacts their other relationships. I just think there's so much fun stuff to dig into in there.

30. Describe a fic that almost happened, but then it didn't.

Oh, too many times to count. That said, I rarely truly abandon fic ideas, they're always lurking, waiting for me to realise what I need to change to make it work or how to incorporate elements from it into another fic. But the most recent example was an idea for a Finduilas/Ioreth fic that came out of a desire to have more F/F fics for them. I tried so hard to write it but they just didn't work together in character. Ioreth being incredibly loyal to and protective of Finduilas absolutely checks out, but even making Ioreth a lesbian does not make her romantically or sexually interested in Finduilas. Which is a disappointment because what I have written for them has some stuff that I really love in it like Ioreth and Denethor doing a passive-aggressive tug of war over Finduilas, worldbuilding around queerness and specifically sapphic identities in Gondor and some very crunchy lines about Finduilas' sexuality and gender identity and how she by turns ignores, indulges and rationalises them.

thank you! <3

17. Past or present tense? Why?

I almost exclusively write in the past tense, purely because it feels more natural for me and I hate how it reads in third person, which is again what I mostly write in. However, I do find present tense helpful for writing more emotional or reflective snippets when I'm trying to get into a character's head or work out the thematic core/voice of a person/work, so some of my (by now very big) word doc on Caeveneth is written in present tense and a black evil, a fic which is less a narrative and more a collection of horrifying rumours, news snippets, gossip and observances from an omniscient narrator, is also in present tense.

20. Do you work on a single project or many at the same time? How does that work for you?

*looks at my massive pile of wips* *sighs in frustration* Many at the same time. And it doesn't. I am unfortunately incredibly easy to distract and have far too many ideas, so I am constantly jumping back and forth between WIPs, to my own detriment. I assure you that if I have mentioned a WIP months and even years ago, I am almost certainly still working on it, I'm just awful at focusing on anything.

25. Is writing the whole thing beforehand better or worse than writing it as you go?

Whole thing beforehand definitely. Firstly because plot details, characterisation and themes evolve too much between the first and last chapter for the beginning and end to be coherent without multiple rounds of edits and rewrites. Secondly because I rarely write linearly (see: cannot focus to save her life). This is why I have multiple multichapter fics death-staring me every time I open my WIP folder.