she's a bandit and a heartbreaker

⛔ Do you have a fic you started, but scrapped?

lol yeah. i mean—i do think scrapped sounds so purposeful and i’m rarely like “this was a horrible idea and wouldn’t be a good story, i’m out,” but yeah, i start writing lots of things and then fail to follow through on them because writing is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. for fun, some wrestling stories that never made it off the ground, but hey, who knows, maybe someday—

a story where jim’s always been a girl and dustin’s still a guy, and they’re still best friends, and then dustin gets engaged and things get Complicated. i didn’t get DEEP into this fic but i did do some pretty involved  outlining and tbh i was kind of nervous about writing it because—lol i don’t wanna get into it that much, actually. i still might return to this well. the plot involves a lot of sexuality journey stuff that isn’t, like, ripped from the headlines of my life or anything but DOES feel pretty personal in that it’s about, like—figuring out who you are and what you want while also navigating other people’s perceptions and expectations. and also, there was gonna be very hot sex. and maybe someday there still will be….

story where dustin hurt his leg and jim was being nice to him about it. i can’t remember what the plot was gonna be, really…..i assume they were gonna have sex. i only have some scenes of injured dustin being VERY annoying and jim being extremely patient about it.

i BARELY started this one but i was SO horny about the concept— it was a fic where jim and dustin hook up and the next morning, dustin’s like, fuck. fuck. FUCK!!!!!! like, just fully freaking out, big I MADE A HUGE MISTAKE vibes, and then jim wakes up and is just like 😌 we’re dating now. i think i must have conceived of this as kind of a counterpoint to When you know why you’re happy, in which jim is ALSO like “😌 we’re dating now” but he thinks dustin’s fully aware of it and onboard. in THIS story, he knows dustin’s freaking out because dustin keeps verbally, with his mouth, being like “that was a huge mistake” and jim’s just like uh huh, okay. you want a breakfast sandwich? i’m gonna go get breakfast sandwiches. and then he brings them back and hands one to dustin and kisses him on the mouth and goes to take a shower. and that’s the whole story— i mean, more scenes of that— but it’s just dustin being like, this CAN’T be happening. i’m NOT a guy-dating guy!!!!! and jim’s like, oh, okay, and keeps dating him, and they keep sleeping together, and dustin keeps being like “we’re not doing this” and jim keeps being like, mm, yeah, okay. and then eventually dustin was gonna just wake up one morning and look at jim in the bed next to him and be like— oh. i’m in love. i’m in love with him. this whole time. and i didn’t know. and he DID. and the story was gonna be called “golden” for some reason, presumably light-imagery related. and the ending was gonna be SO tender, like—it’s just dustin being like, i’ve been throwing this priceless vase at a wall for MONTHS. HOW did it not break. HOW did i not know it’s PRECIOUS and PRICELESS????? and jim IS a precious and priceless vase but also he's just like—you weren't throwing me. you were SAYING "i'm throwing you" but not doing it. and i know the difference.....

CLASSIC story where jim and dustin drunkenly hook up and basically don’t acknowledge it afterwards except that jim gets pregnant and Is Keeping The Baby and dustin has a slomo nervous breakdown about it. literally nothing new or unexpected about this fic. every single thing about this fic is By The Book. jim actually isn’t going around being like “dustin is an unsupportive deadbeat dad” but somehow everybody still seems to know it’s his kid. matt jackson pityingly tells him to get his shit together. [this is the only scene i really got into writing, the rest of what i produced is just here and there snippets.] dustin is kind of scared to be gay but VERY scared to be a father. jim is scared of that thing that happens sometimes in pregnancy where your abs separate. if his abs separate, he is gonna murder dustin even more than he wants to murder dustin for doing great sex with him and then making his life a lonely living hell for 6 months straight. eventually jim freaks out about the fact that he’s full on having an actual literal child and he’s gonna be a SINGLE FATHER and dustin’s brain gets shaken loose and he’s like— oh my god, you’re having my baby….i’m a gay-sex-having guy-loving-guy and the guy i love is YOU and you’re having my CHILD— and he gets his shit together because he DOES understand that when you’re on a team with a guy—when the two of you are a team— only one person is allowed to freak out at a time. them’s the rules. and they live happily ever after

i wrote a whole paragraph here about another story i’ve REPEATEDLY started and scrapped, and then i stared at it in agony and deleted it bc i was like “no i can still write it. i can write it. i can STILL actually WRITE that and i don’t wanna explain any of the ways i might do it because then it wouldn’t work right.” so delete this paragraph too, girl. no, i won’t.

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

alright, because i’ve actually been making progress on it—honestly pre-crying at how i’m about to explain this. you know that gay christmas movie netflix released last year, “single all the way”? a film that made honestly zero emotional sense and featured one of the most deranged slash dragon families i’ve ever encountered in any media property? it wasn’t a good movie. apologies if anyone reading this enjoyed it. anyway, i watched it and was like— this SHOULD be so good….but it isn’t…..but what if it was……and that’s one of the stories i’m currently working on. it’s got the same basic deranged premise, where someone— in this case dustin— begs his roommate (bryan danielson— jk ,jim)  to come be his fake christmas boyfriend bc his mom is on his case about being perma-single. but in my story— i guess i should say that many reviews of “single all the way” were like “it IS nice that this movie is about two openly gay people and there’s no drama about anyone’s sexuality” and i was like, oh….disagree……— so, in my story, yes, obviously everyone is not “openly” or even “knowingly” gay, and some hidden feelings are “coming to the fore” in “startling but sensual ways” in “dustin’s childhood bedroom.” and what i did with those quotation marks was fine, actually. i’ve tried to type like seventeen sentences actually describing some more of this fic and they were all so embarrassing and stupid. it’s a hallmark movie fanfiction, but hopefully, also, realism. and also about family. and about love! and maybe it’ll even be done in time for christmas 2022, but no promises, Ha Ha (darkly).

🤲 Would you please share a snippet of a wip?

well, why not….this is from the first scene of the aforementioned christmas wip—all you need to know is that, for comedy reasons i won’t get into at this time, jim’s planning on spending christmas alone in philly; dustin has spent all night bemoaning the fact that his mom’s on his case about getting a girlfriend; and both these men are drunk.

🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants?

i used to not outline that much but now i do, although sometimes my outlines are pretty robust and sometimes they’re really not— often they’re basically checklists so i know pretty much which beats i have to hit on my way to the ending, and some scenes that i THINK on the outset might help me do that. specific scene stuff changes a lot as i write and find unexpected ways of getting particular points across etc, but the basic emotional arcs pretty much don’t— i always kind of know what the characters are struggling with and what their damage is and how that’s gonna impact their relationship and how they’re gonna solve it. mostly. i used to jump around a lot more in the writing process— like, historically, i have ALWAYS written my endings first, and even if they change a little as i fill in the rest of the story, i have, like— a far off island that i’m building a bridge towards. but i tend to write stories straight through from beginning to end much more often now, probably as a result of, like—having a writing community in fandom, and getting joy from the process of writing fic ~with a little help from my friends as much as the actual finished product. it’s fun to build a story in its correct order and show it to people and get feedback that way instead of messaging @drunktuesdays like “okay now look at this out of context snippet from a scene that’s gonna happen near the end of the fic, and here’s 17 things you need to know for it to make sense and this is how it’s supposed to be operating emotionally but we haven’t even put up the scaffolding for that part of the build yet. but this is how it’ll probably look when we do. anyway, enjoy!” i mean, i do still write stuff out of order and jump around to a certain degree, sometimes more and sometimes less. but yes i do outline, she said, veering back onto the road, having fallen asleep a little at the wheel…..

🤯 What’s a genre you struggle with as a writer (ex. romance, action, etc.)?

✨ Give you and your writing a compliment. Go on now. You know you deserve it. 😉

picture me doing the most nervous “haha!” face of all time. don’t wanna…..jk thank you for asking me to be nice to myself! i think i’m pretty good at developing a little motif or, like—Meaningful metaphor/image/object— and bringing it back at the emotional climax of a story. and i think i’m good at— at least at THINKING about how to structure stories so that there’s a clear relationship between form and content, mostly because i do tend to be motivated by formal challenges. like— i honestly think the only reason i wrote The spin I’m in is because i was so interested in doing a thing where the pov character Does Not Want to tell you, the reader, what happened when he get sex pollened, so the story starts after the event and then when he DOES have to double back and tell us what happened, there’s a framework of— this nurse is making him explain it, so he grits his teeth and grimly starts laying it all out for us, and it’s HARD, and he doesn’t WANT TO, but he’s telling us the facts. he’s play-by-playing it. and then—right before they actually fuck—he stops short. he can’t tell you that part, he won’t tell you. take his word for it that things happened the way he’s saying and everybody felt the way he’s saying they felt—because he's in SUCH extreme denial. he feels like he had this secret desire he was even lying to himself about and it got RIPPED out of his head and forced on the person he loves most in the world. it's horrible. it feels horrible. he just can't look at it head on. and the whole story goes by and you just have to be like "i guess i got the full version of events.....i guess......." but then the arc of the story is obviously towards this ending where he finally gets outside his own head and realizes how favs actually feels about the whole thing and suddenly we’re back in the moment where he left off his reportage, and the camera angle has completely changed, and the lighting is different, and we get the rest of what happened and— oh, fuck— that’s what it was like?????? like— the way he’s describing it has completely changed and he’s seeing it completely differently. and it turns out it wasn’t horrible. it wasn’t horrible at all. i ONLY got to the finish line with that story because i was like— fuck. that’s such a great structural payoff. i wanna write that payoff!!! so anyway, i’m not saying i always do an amazing or even especially interesting job at structuring my stories, but i do think i try very hard, and put a lot of care into that aspect of my writing. 

🤩 Who is your favorite character to write?

🥺 Is there a certain type of moment or common interaction between your characters that never fails to put you in your feels?

oh man……uhhh. hmm. between my characters in my stories i write………why is this challenging me so much. i love writing characters for whom lite bickering is a love language, so any time two people are kind of fondly sniping at each other in a way that speaks to How Well They Know Each Other, i’m probably feeling emotional about it. also, because i write and think about a lot of stories where one person is really Being The Obstacle to a relationship because of their private deep-seated emotional issues, i looooooove writing the moment when the other person is like—i’m sorry, but i’m RIGHT about this. i’m RIGHT that we’d be good together. i’m RIGHT that whatever problems you had in past relationships, it wouldn’t BE like that with us!!!!!!! I’M RIGHT AND I WON’T BACK DOWN! also— this is a copout because i think and talk about it way more than i write actual stories about it, but i imprinted on helenish’s Your First Time Should Be Special waaaay back when and the last paragraph of that story is THE moment for me. it is everything to me. any moment in a story where one person is like “i’m a fucking idiot. a careless, hapless idiot. and yet you, the person i love, a precious vase, the most precious vase in the entire world, have placed yourself in my arms. and you expect me not to drop you?????? which is INSANE? BUT OBVIOUSLY WHAT CHOICE DO I HAVE….EXCEPT TO SIMPLY DO THAT (NOT EVER DROP YOU)???????” have i actually written this into any of my published stories? kind of When you know why you’re happy— the very end when dustin is looking at jim feeling exasper-horrified about the fact that jim was just gonna let dustin break his heart. this is nothing but i did just make myself laugh bc i was mentally flipping through my fics and i got to Got your tape and it changed my mind and was like “.......lucas is not a vase. lucas is little king trashmouth and the oh my god FINE moment in this story is joe being like, either i keep not letting him in the house and he sits outside my window eating garbage every day of his life anyway OR i just go limp. raccoon in the house. raccoon lives in the house now.”   

😈 Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?

🧐 Do you spend much time researching for your stories?

no, not really. like— i WILL look up basic facts about canon/characters if i don’t already know them rather than just making stuff up. and i do a lot of googling as i’m writing about, like—in wrestling, for example, i've really been forced to contemplate how men pass the long hours of their lives and it seems to be mostly by watching sports, so you KNOW i'm deep into a new story when suddenly my google history is a wall of “baseball season ends when” “basketball season ends when” “hockey season starts when” “baseball playoffs called” “philadelphia soccer team” “soccer league america” “what channel soccer is on” etc. but beyond that, i don’t really have much to research, so…..honestly the thing i maybe enjoy most about rereading my own stories is when i hit a little conversation where i KNOW i must have done seventy googles to try and figure something out and what i’ve produced SEEMS reasonable and realistic but actually i don’t even know anymore. has this made it sound like i DO spend a lot of time researching? i don’t think so….i don’t think i do……..

🛒 What are some common things you incorporate in your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc.

this was actually a sobering question because i opened so many of my own fanfictions just now and, am worried that perhaps i’ve never written anything funny even once in my life…..jk i think i have….i think i’ve entertained myself once or twice…..okay, uh—i think all the d&d/larping/sword jokes in When you know why you’re happy were very funny. i believe that when i put those in, i was in the middle of subjecting all my friends to discussion of a kenny omega/luchasaurus ren faire au (not because i ship kenny/luchasaurus, just because— the plot of that story was that they were the two most prolific sex-havers at the ren faire, which i think objectively adds up IF you first establish that kenny DOES have sex. once you’ve overcome that obstacle— the obstacle of it sometimes not seeming like kenny's ever had sex in his life— it it adds up). anyway, i thought all those exchanges were very funny. especially: ““It was orcs and wizards,” Jim said sleepily, and shoved his face into Dustin’s armpit. “And goblins. And tomb kings.”” cute….dumb…..and jim getting shrill about how he's NOT a LARPer—now remembering that maybe i was also trying to make people talk to me about an au where jim DOES work at a ren faire and dustin meets him bc he's thirdwheeling a day out with greg and his girlfriend. or vice versa.......well, i'm NOT doing a good job of answering this question, and good for me.

i also think the whole high comedy get-together ending of We built another world is very funny. a frantic cross-talky confession of love under inopportune circumstances with some poor rando stuck in the middle will always delight me—i’ll put some of that under a cut: