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Thank you to the incredible @jawsandbones​ for tagging me in this challenge!

Rules: tag 5 or more other writers. If you want, feel free to use these questions anyway and consider yourself tagged!

Short stories, novels, or poems?

Novels and short stories, for sure. Every time I try to write in short story format it seems to want to turn into a novel, though XD. It takes a lot of structure for a story to read as effortlessly self-contained and I admire authors who can pull this off, because I STRUGGLE. I never really delved into poetry and I should definitively read more of it, haha, but I love the craft of wordplay, the focus on sound and rhythm... I think all prose writers have something to learn from poetry.

What genre do you prefer reading?

I love a bit of everything, really. I love polar and horror for the twists, fantasy for the world-building, sci-fi for the Big Questions... but most of all I love seeing it all mixed up. I think what I look for in writing transcends the barriers of genre: what I want is tension, strong emotions, novelty, and good characters grounded into an interesting world. I can get that from across all the literary spectrum if i'm lucky enough to find the right pieces. I think I love reading fanfiction so much because a lot of it is written by people who more or less think this way, and when you're already grounded in an established universe, you can really put the characters forward, so all that I love comes forth in strength.

What genre do you prefer writing?

Well, I'd say the same, but lately the low fantasy of the dragon age lore has really been it for me. In the modern!au as well, what I end up focusing on is character drama anyway, but I like a touch of magic and speculation to spice up the surroundings of my characters. 

Are you a planner or a write-as-I-go sort of person?

I do my best to plan but fundamentally I think I am an improviser. When I’m tackling something long I have basic plot points and overall arc structure and themes written out ahead of time, but I often find myself filling in the blanks as I go, and the blanks are BIG. I want to improve on that aspect, because sometimes I write myself into corners because of this process, or have issues with continuity, and that's just hell.

What music do you listen to while writing?

Omg Jaws, you and I have the same issue. I can’t focus at all if there’s words I can understand in a song! It goes even further than that though, as even strong melodic lines can take away from my weak focus. So what I really love listening to most of all when i write is just plain old white noise as such. It blocks out all outside noise, which helps a lot since i like to write in cafés, and it keeps me in a nice sound cocoon so I can concentrate.

Fave books/movies?

Woof, always a tough question. This sort of thing changes monthly for me lol. For books, lately A song of Ice and Fire has really been #it for me, but I love Stephen King as well, Thomas Harris, Neil Gaiman... His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Tolkien and french author Eric L’Homme are some of the first things that inspired me to want to write. Truth is I really don't read as much as I used to lately, I need to get my game back on.

As for movies, oh jeez. I watch SO MANY so that too sort of moves around. I have comfort movies like Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes series, The Avengers, Silence of the Lambs and The Lord of the Rings trilogy that I can watch over and over again and quote from memory, but recent highlights have been the Shape of Water, Gone Girl, Nightcrawler, Into the Inferno... The last movie I watched is The Incredibles 2 and I loved it.

Any current wips?

Oh boy. Next question? Just kidding XD I have so many, but my biggest most important wip is of course Vigilance, Victory, Sacrifice. I think about vvs all the time and am super frustrated at the current posting schedule. It’s really a tough one!! Apart from that I have so many one shots and open rps that I'm kind of loosing my mind, but it's all good haha, I'll get there eventually.

If someone made a cartoon out of you, what would your standard outfit be?

I dress casual but I like to sprinkle in a bit of edge, more original pieces, volume contrast... So something like a wider culotte-style pant, sneakers, and maybe a crop-top with a dumb print. My stile is very inconsistent actually, haha it would be a challenge to pin it down.

Create a character description for yourself.

Hm skip.

Do you like incorporating people you actually know into your writing? 

Not so much, no. I mean, we all take inspiration from our surrounding and everything, but it would feel very awkward for me to outright insert someone I know as a character in a piece omg. Writing is where I process reality by disassembling the pieces and putting them back together, not a place for me to act out stuff that concerns me directly. Not without at last 100 layers of separation lmao. I really admire people who are able to be this open and put so much of themselves into their writing, but that's not me at the moment.

Are you kill-happy with characters? 

I am, there’s no denying it. I used to be even more kill-happy than i am now, in a pointless kind of “edgy” way, but I'm really trying to outgrow that. But boy, do I still love me some good major character death. I think the reason behind it is that grief is a very important theme for me that sort of sneaks its way into all of my work, and one way or another I always end up incorporating it into my writing. What interests me most is not really killing a character, but exploring how others react to their death. I was always into the mythology that surrounds characters whose main purpose in the story is to be dead for other people to interpret lol. I'm thinking figures like Raegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark... I love world-building so yeah, that’s an angle I really love to explore.

Coffee or tea while writing? 

Both lol, and I don't stop at that. My poor pc is always full of crumbs.

Slow or fast writer? 

Slow, baby. I can churn out big chunks of text all at once in very productive writing sessions, but my editing process is excruciatingly slow, so that text is going to sit in a burner for a long-ass time and be rewritten over and over before it sees the light of day. I write so much more than what I show, for those reasons.

Where/who/what do you find inspiration from? 

I’d say the world as a whole inspires me lol. When I'm out there I always find myself observing and dissecting, a movement, a person walking down the street, my own perceptions and feelings. Throughout the day I’m always thinking about my stories. I also love brainstorming with my irl best friend and my boyfriend.

If you were put into a fantasy world, what would you be? 

Don't know don't really care lol.

Most fave book cliche? Least fave book cliche? 

I love leitmotivs. George R.R. Martin has rocked my whole world on how satisfying having those payoffs could be. “If I look back, I am lost”??? “Where do the whores go”??? Memorable, quotable, high-impact sentences that come slap you back in the face when you least expect them. #goals Anything that's about set up and payoff is huge to me, so a nicely planned twist is EVERYTHING.

Something I dislike is cop-outs, or characters who are not agents of their own story... I hate it when a character is put on a difficult spot and then the story bails them out without resolution. Take the conflict all the way!!

Fave scenes to write? 

I love big dramatic scenes: confessions, fight scenes, breakdowns. I also love soft intimacy, and banter omg, I love writing banter so much. Trying to be funny and quippy is a big challenge, especially in english, but i love to try and take it on. I loooove environmental descriptions, setting the mood of a scene through nature, defining the background to make it feel like the characters are evolving in a world that’s real and perceptible by the reader. Oh, and smut babey ;D

Most productive time of day for writing? 

“Day,” lol. It’s veeery late too, of course. A bummer, really, but that’s when the inhibitions are low and the really funky out of the box ideas come out. Some of my best most rigorous writing and editing has been done during the day at the coffee shop, though. It requires discipline from me but it can yield much better results than my late night ramblings lol. I just have to get in my zone, which is much easier to do in my own bed than in a public place lol.

Reasons for writing?

It just means so much to me, and there’s mostly two different fronts to it. The first is that the act of writing itself is just so goddamn exiting to me. When i write, I feel so much, and not just the emotions my characters are going though. On the long run, the satisfaction of crafting a piece out of nothing, to get it to be better and better, the thrill of finding just the right word... It’s just a fucking blast. And then of course, there’s the other side of the coin, which is being read. It’s an emotion i can’t describe when someone says they felt what I was trying to convey.  It gets pretty intimate when you try to get into what the world feels like through various lenses, and to have people say back that yes, they get it, is a rush like not much else in life can give me. To be read is to be seen and that’s the one kind of spotlight I thrive in.

@joufancyhuh tagged me in this challenge. Thank you so much! :D

Rules:  Find 3 given words in your WIPs and share some sentences where they appear, then tag some more people with different words. My words are nice, secret, and combination (so cute! <3)

Disclaimer: Some of the following pieces of writing are unfinished works and are susceptible to change between now and publication.

Nice [Vigilance, Victory, Sacrifice, Chapter 4, “Captives”]

“If you tell me who you're working for, we can...”

A guard brutally interrupted him with a nasty kick to his exposed belly, making him cough out whatever air was left in his lungs. The man then grabbed him by his chains and pulled him up, before he had time to recover. He was a short, burly warrior, and got him off the ground with ease, despite the King's own impressive stature.

“Fine,” King Alistair wheezed out, once he was on his feet and had managed to somehow restore his breathing, “Let nobody say that I have not tried to be nice.”

Secret, [Untitled Zevran/Warden one-shot]

“Fereldan dancing was as much about the eyes as it was the limbs, Zevran had learned. It was only natural, really: how else could the young dog-lords and ladies exchange secret vows from in-between the constraints of their harsh, soldierly culture, if not by way of shy, stolen glances? Aedan was displaying the notion to its full extent, right then, albeit with not much of the customary subtlety. He was giving in to none of the traditional coynesses, it appeared: his gaze was locked firmly in Zevran's, and never once did it lower.”

Combination [Ongoing Dragon Age Modern!au RP session. Hey @cupofrenchtea :D]

'San just waited for him to go on. For a moment, Alistair saw himself not doing it. Getting out of there. Bailing out. In a rush of feeling Aedan's dead eyes were in front of him again, and the back of his hand stung, and it was a big mangled combination of past and present, in his mind, the letter on 'Dan's desk, the numbness of his expression, the betrayed twitch of his lips, the panicked bleeps of the monitor, and his words, his words, his words...

@inuy21 prompted me to write for this pairing with @jchnmulany ‘s prompt “God, you look good.” I loved doing it, even if it didn’t turn out very nsfw in the end XD! Thank you for prompting me and participating in this fic exchange! :D

Title: Making Memories 

Pairing: Fergus Cousland/Oriana Cousland 

Rating: Teen and up

Words: 2443 

Summary: Fergus and Oriana slip out of their own wedding for a few moments of long-awaited intimacy. 

OMG Thankyou so much @joufancyhuh for asking about my oc! I’m going to go withAedan again… I’M SORRY I JUST LOVE HIM

Lasttime I focused exclusively on the base!timeline, so this time Ithought I’d sprinkle in a few modern!au Aedan facts, because WE LOVETHAT BOY TOO

kay lol here we go

1)Aedan sleeps mostly on his back, with his arm either propped underhis head, or slung across his face. Fergus jokes it’s a remnant fromfalling asleep reading well into the night so many times as a kid,but it’s actually always been like that, as Bryce and Eleanor wouldtestify.

2)He is fluent in Orlesian, and speaks a good deal of Nevarran andAntivan as well, although he does it all with a pretty strongFereldan accent. He was interested in learning more Tevene than justthe chance words he knows, but never got around to it.

3)After recovering from his wounds in the modern!au he can still drink,in moderation, but beer and white wine have straight up become bigno-nos. Harder stuff doesn’t make his digestive symptoms spike asbad, so he could get drunk on those, but then again, he’s not reallyinto finding out how bad being in too much of an altered state couldinteract with his PTSD. So he’s kind of become the designateddriver at every social outing now, and he doesn’t mind it. Kind ofthe opposite, really: he likes watching Alistair having anopportunity to unwind without having to worry about that kind ofstuff, for once, and having Zevran doze off against his shouldertrusting him entirely feels incredible. Overall being able to drivehis boys home safe after a night out is actually a big deal to him.

4)Aedan needs to see the sea, once in a while. Like… he just needsto. It’ll take him like a craving and as soon as he’s got the timehe’ll take the dogs and drive to the beach, usually alone, even ifjust for a quick walk. Rain or shine, he’ll always at least take hisshoes off and walk in the swash, if he doesn’t feel like a full-onbath (and he often does lol). He likes living in Denerim because it’sso close to the Ocean, but of course nothing in his eyes will evercompare to his native Waking Sea.

5)He’s an avid reader and he’ll read anything. And I mean: anything. Cheap thrillers, cringeyromance, cliché detective stories, science articles, newscommentary, popular novels he got curious about in the paper…whatever you hand him, he’ll read. He might complain loudly about thequality of it by the end, but he’ll diligently finish it anyway lol

The lovely @lyriumyue tagged me to write five facts about a character! Thank you so much! <3 I’m going to go with my fave boy Aedan Cousland, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

1) Aedan is a great singer. You can bet Bryce Cousland made sure both his sons were trained to succeed where he had failed lol. So both Fergus and Aedan have been taking musical lessons since they were children, but where Fergus favors the wood-flute, Aedan’s best instrument was always his voice. He has a very rich baritone and always loved to sing, especially in prayer. It happened once or twice that he sung during the Blight, so the companions are aware of it, but it wasn’t often... Let’s just say the mood wasn’t there.

2) He was horribly afraid of Flemeth growing up. In my hc Highever has a lot of legends about her, she’s a figure of sorrow and horror who represents a lot of things, like the powers of nature, magic, and the dangers of passion, revenge, the threat of violence, justice... When the wind howls through the narrow streets of the town, Higheverians call the sound the Widow’s Wail, and toddler Aedan would hide under his covers shivering whenever he heard it, fearing the Grey Widow would come take him... Fergus always made gentle big-brother fun of him for it, but whenever things would get really bad he would come to bed with him and tell him stories to distract him until he fell asleep in his arms <3 Meeting - and killing her - for real during the Blight was... an interesting experience.

3) Fereldan nut-cake is a baked sweet loaf similar to spice-bread, made with rye flour, cloves, honey, pepper, and of course, whatever nuts and candied fruit you have available. Aedan. Hates. It. It’s unclear why, since he likes all the ingredients well enough separately. Maybe it’s the texture, or maybe he’s eaten too much of it once and lost the taste for it. Who knows. Fact is he can’t stand it, and can barely bring himself to force it down even in the direst of circumstances. Alistair was very perplexed but he would have his share so that was fine.

4) Another skill of Aedan that he didn’t get much use out of during the Blight is that he’s a fierce swimmer. Being a Coasltander makes it sort of inevitable but Aedan, just like his mother, really had the taste for it. He’d swim with the other town children until he was well of age, and throughout all his teenage years as well. It was a great way to keep his body trained, but he also loved the feeling of it, the serenity, the effort, the communion with the sea. Sometimes him and Eleanor would go on swimming trips together: They’d strap bundles of waxed sail fabric to their backs and swim to the nearest small island. There they would sit on the beach, or on some rocks, and eat the snacks they carried with them, talking, or sometimes just sharing the silence. Aedan is the one who taught Oren how to swim, cheered on by the rest of family of course.

5) Aedan is a fervent Shartan inclusionist. Ever since reading of the Dissonant Verses, baby Aedan became quite obsessed with the way Andraste’s story was told and retold, with which passages were considered holier than others, and with how closely the events of the Chant could be linked to the actual historical chronology of Thedas. There’s zero doubt in my mind that, had the Blight not  happened, he’d have gone on to write at least a few pamphlets on the subject of the Missing Verses and of the quest for traces of the original close circle of Andraste’s advisors, like Justinia the First and of course, Shartan. “Andraste and Her Allies, A response to Sister Petrine’s "The Dissonant Verses"” or something lol