#aeal

Hey!

I have to say, I have blushed more today than I think I ever have in my life. I thought I was done blushing, but then I read your note and now I’m blushing again??? 

I hope that you pick up your fic! Losing motivation and getting distracted is such a mood, but I hope that you’re able to find your motivation again. I definitely look forward to reading it, if you get back to it!

My process was....hmm. Well, I’ll answer the second part of the question, first. I was able to stick to such a consistent update schedule because I had already written 43k of the fic before I ever posted the first chapter (so, about up to Chapter 7-8). I was working on it off and on from January to May, and I wasn’t even going to post it when I did, but I posted in discord and was like “hey, I have this multichapter fic going, should I just post the first chapter?” and was met with a resounding yes. So, I did, and then I had to keep posting because I decided to actually have a somewhat consistent update schedule. Which was fine, mostly. I was able to keep about 3 chapters ahead for almost the entirety of the posting schedule (up until the end of July, actually). 

My process was to basically just sit down and write. Sometimes I’d have a beer or two and the words would just come. Other times I’d write a whole dang chapter before realizing I needed to scrap it and start over. There’s actually probably a good....oh gosh, maybe 25k words? of outtakes for this fic (I have to actually total them up sometime). Honestly, if COVID wasn’t a thing, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get this fic done, because I wouldn’t have had time to write it. But then the pandemic hit and I had a lot of free time and...well, AEAL happened. 

Sorry, that’s a pretty long-winded answer without a lot of actual answers, I guess. 

rules: post the most recent sentence you wrote for a wip, then tag your writer friends.

Standing there, draped in human rags, was one of her kind.

this line signals beginning of a beautiful enmity <3

Hey! Sounds good to me!

13. When did you start writing fanfic?

 I actually just checked, and I was apparently 15 when I started writing fic! I started off with a few drabble-length fics, and then literally the next day, I started a multi-chap that, until AEAL, was the longest thing I’d ever written.

14. How do you feel about your older work?

Pretty conflicted, actually. 

I think that the ideas that I had were decent. The execution, though leaves something to be desired. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the fact that I know that people genuinely enjoyed (enjoy?) some of my older work, I would have considered taking them down and either completely starting them over from scratch at a later date or just never re-uploading them. 

But the stuff I wrote a year or two later (so, my Jori fics) I’m still proud of. I mean, I went and edited them all within the past year and finally uploaded them to AO3. Some of them I barely had to change at all, and some I didn’t need to change, but did anyway (like I did with Sober, actually). 

I’m glad I wrote the things I did (for the most part). They made me a better writer at the time, and I’m still pretty proud of some of the things I wrote. But they’re not up to the level of things I’m writing now (which need work themselves!), which is understandable considering I was a literal 15 year old when I was writing them

So yeah, conflicted but like, I don’t hate it 

19. What words do you think you tend to use the most?

Fuck. 

No, actually, I use fuck a lot without even meaning to. It just kinda slips out, especially in dialogue. 

Also, it’s less words and more patterns of words, but I use like, “arched eyebrows” and stuff like that a lot. Glances and glaring and honestly just anything to do with facial expressions...I tend to rely on that kind of thing. 

20. What feedback makes you the happiest to hear?

Gosh, how does one answer this without feeling a little conceited?

I don’t know if happiest is the right word, but if someone tells me that something I wrote made them cry, then I know that I’m doing something right because at least my fic made them feel. It’s also really cool when someone just is like “I spent all night reading this and just wanted to say that I liked it a lot” because it’s just so cool that someone would take the time to read something I wrote??? 

27. What time of day do you prefer to write?

It’s not that I like to write at this time of day, but I tend to write in the late morning and early afternoon because that’s generally the only time that I can actually write. 

Weirdly, I like to read and edit at night, though. 

31. What was the development process of [Fanfic Name] like?

Tell ya what, if I had known that AEAL was going to be somewhat popular, I probably would have kept a better record of its development process

But, just from deep diving through my records (literally, I was keyword searching through ancient messages and shit), it seems as if I started writing AEAL sometime in November of 2019. Well, I started doing research and very basic writing then. I don’t think I really started writing it until Christmas, maybe. At that time, I was still editing...Sober, I think? Wait, nope, apparently it was Empty. Dang, my timeline is all messed up.  Anyway

Maybe I should start from the beginning.  So, back in November last year, Victorious was put onto Netflix and suddenly, almost overnight, there was this fandom that just hadn’t existed the day before. I mean, it did exist- I know that there were still people writing Jori fic out there and stuff like that- but it was nothing like it had been back in like, 2012 and 2013. But then Netflix put it up and all of these people, whether they were like me and coming back to an old fandom or if they were brand new fans, were creating and interacting with Jori again. 

So I decided that maybe it was time to transfer over my old Jori fics onto AO3. Thankfully, I decided to read them first, though, and realized that I could make them better. Like, over 6 years had passed since I had worked on them and I figured I could try and fuck around with them a little just to see how they would be received. 

And, uh, they were received pretty well, I guess.

I started with Devil’s Advocate, which I considered my weakest of the three Jori fics I had at the time, and worked up to Sober, which was the one I remembered the most and was most excited to work on. And I got like, halfway through DA and was like “maybe it’s time for me to start writing again”. And that was...honestly, I was nervous. I hadn’t written anything other than research papers for years at that point, and even though my editing process had required me to write a bit (like, whole chapters in some places), it wasn’t the same as starting from scratch and coming up with something new. 

Around that time, I opened up a document and wrote down the line: “No one really expected Tori to go to college” (side note, I always think that I put “Vega” in there, too, but I guess I didn’t). And then I did some research (several hours worth) about the California university system, decided that it was way too complicated for me to do properly (and I kinda didn’t want someone to come into my comments and be like “well, actually” about the dang California educational system) and came up with a generic liberal arts college instead. 

And then I wrote the first page or two and got stuck. Like, really stuck. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, or what the story was even supposed to be. I wanted Tori and Jade to be at college together and that was about it. I think I almost abandoned it a few times just because like, the likelihood of me actually progressing forward with this fic was pretty small. It wasn’t even like some of the other fics I’ve started and never finished because at least with those I had written whole ass scenes before I stopped. AEAL (which was just known as “untitled as of now” until the day I uploaded the first chapter) only had a few hundred words and I wasn’t even happy with them. 

I don’t really remember what happened between then and early January. But in early January, I was struck with the imagery of...well, the piano scene. And I knew I had to write it because it was going to be stuck in my head forever otherwise. 

I just had to get to it. 

So I finished editing Empty, started editing Sober, and really started writing this silly little college fic that didn’t have a title. At some point pretty soon after, I had another image pop into my head: that of Tori stopping Jade from going up the stairs at a frat house with a guy they didn’t know. At that point, I didn’t know it was going to be the storyline it turned into- it was just going to be a catalyst for pushing them together, nothing more. 

I didn’t plan things very much at that point. I just wrote and the words just came out and by the time I hit chapter 6, I realized that I needed to make some decisions about the rest of the fic because whatever I did next would basically dictate what direction the story was going to go.

So I made some decisions. Wrote some things that didn’t work and pulled them and started over and by St. Patrick’s Day, I decided that they were going to go Shakespearean. 

And then there was Jake, and figuring out what to do with him, and the whole...well, everything else...and all throughout this I had that damn piano scene in the back of my head and goddammit I was going to write that damn scene even if it killed me. 

But uh...I almost didn’t write that scene. I almost didn’t write a lot of scenes. There were so many points where I had to make decisions about certain things and those certain things would have changed everything. 

But I guess I made the right decisions in the end (hopefully) because...well, I finished the fic. And I wrote that damn piano scene. 

Sorry for the literal essay of an answer, but uh...hope it provided enough detail for ya?