#alamorn

Death, Death (i defy thee) by alamorn

Beth knows what they say about failure. Try, try again. She'll get out of Grady sooner or later.

After going to see Dawn, Beth went to see Carol. She brought a mop with her, to have an excuse, but when she got in and saw Carol's eyes open, she dropped it and hugged Carol hard without thinking of anything else.

Carol's arm around her shoulders felt frail, a word she never associated with Carol. "Beth," she breathed. "I'm so glad you're alive."

"I should be saying that to you," Beth said into her neck. "I'm gonna get us outta here, Carol, don't you worry." Beth pulled back to look Carol in the eyes, make her promise real, and Carol smiled sadly, pushing a lock of Beth's hair behind her ear.

"We were on our way to get you. Didn't realize you had it all under control."

"We?" Beth asked, heart leaping to her throat.

"Me and Daryl," Carol said.

Beth let out something that would have been a sob, if she was still that sort of person. "Daryl's alive? Thank God."

"Yeah," Carol said. "Yeah, Daryl's fine. He's pretty torn up about you. Blames himself."

"No," Beth said. "No, the only person whose fault it is, is the ones who took me."

"You'll have to tell him that yourself," Carol said, eyes sliding back closed. "Don't think he'll believe it any other way."

Thank u I love a god-killer/monsterfucker and don't engage with literally anyone about it

Thanks for asking! Just answered 9.

1. What are some writing tics that persist in your work but that you dislike?

Too many to name. For starters, I use semicolons waaaay too often. I’m trying to get better. It’s not working.

Overusing my commas also leads to my ridiculously long sentences. I’m not sure if they’re run-ons exactly, because they logically make sense, but I think sometimes I ask a lot of the reader to understand a complicated sentence, when by comparison, turning them into two or three may not be not as elegantly phrased but would be much easier to understand. See, there I go again.

I also tend to fluctuate between two styles of writing, depending on the fic: the purple prose overanalytical fic monster that eats subtlety for breakfast, or the special snowflake ~new age aesthetic~ style where nothing is overt and the reader needs to come prepared with a magnifying glass. I think they’re unescapable side effects of reading too much of both in fic and trying to emulate it myself; usually I worry that on the whole I just end up coming off as inconsistent instead. (”Water on Mars” and “Pompeii” are great examples of both, respectively. Like, just looking at the wordcounts should make you wonder if these two fics even deserve to be in the same series.)

4. How much do you trust the reader?

I guess a fair amount, but I also tend not to think of it as trusting so much as ‘would I have to think for more than five seconds to understand this, or would I have to reread this sentence/scene more than once if it were new to me?’. I try to trust my reader as much as I want to be trusted when I’m reading fic. Having something smacked over my head to me feels boring, not insulting, but sometimes leaving the reader to jump through too many mental hoops will put me off (usually when I’m in the mood to read fic, I don’t want to do a ton of mental gymnastics, unless I know I’m walking into a plot that calls for it). 

oooh my favorite poem is a tough one. i think i’d have to settle for a tie between ‘Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out’ by richard siken, and ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ by ocean vuong.

as for favorite activity…ahh i can’t choose just one for this either rip! camping/backpacking, cooking/baking, browsing bookstores, writing of course. really anything that gives me that sort of sunlight feeling. 

(she says to replace 5 with 22 or 23 but…)

5. Is there any fic that makes you super happy to reread and remember you wrote that?Found Every Reason to Lay or to Lie, which is the Carnivale/Fantastic Beasts crossover fic I talked with you the other day! Rereading it, I loved the language and I wished I could get back to that kind of imagery I had a hold of.

6. Is there any fic that makes you super embarrassed to reread and remember you wrote that?I am embarrassed of literally anything remotely sexual I’ve ever written and you know this and how dare.

13. What’s the biggest change between your style when you started in fandom and today?I think the biggest change is how much I can write and what tenses I feel comfortable writing in. And maybe what I’m comfortable trying. I love researching and trying things. Juggling a bunch of characters instead of two people in a room.

15. Have you ever purposefully written one fandom/fic idea over another because you knew it’d be more popular? I have been influenced by popular fandom ideas, yeah absolutely. But I can safely say no I haven’t purposely changed an idea because it would be more…palatable I guess? And the only reason I know that is @goddamnrey is my beta. We have had the exact conversation of:Me: Why is this so hard?Her: Well, is it what you WANT to write?Me: I don’t know what I want to write, but it’s not fucking this.At which point it usually becomes kind of obvious I’m writing more what people want to see instead of what I want to see and I make some tweaks.

22. Has there ever been anyone who’s made you freak out because they read your work and followed/favorited/reviewed? Yes. @damalur. She liked or reblogged some post of mine related to TBBT I think? I honestly can’t remember how it got started but I DO REMEMBER:-I loved her fics in college-We eventually ended up in the DA2 fandom together-I wrote a giftfic for her and she came and commented on it (okay, yeah, fair enough)-I had this…jolt of realisation that I used to read her stuff in college and things had come full circle and hence the freak out <3SECOND PART OF THAT STORY:-Small world, her friend lives near me and now WE’RE friends because @odylism is awesome <3 We go out for movies and my dog loves her-damalur came into town and we all had lunch and played SlashWhat I’m trying to tell you is…nothing. I’m literally just bragging about how cool my friends are and that I met them through fanfiction. I don’t do it often, let me have this.

whoops, sorry i went to bed early last night so i’m just getting to this now!

3. Favorite fandom?

my favorite fandom tends to be the one I’m most engaged in at the moment, but BioWare fandom is so full of dramalama I can’t genuinely say it’s my favorite lol. though I have made tons of friends in DA/ME and I love diving into all of the amazing fanwork here, which is something I haven’t been able to do in a long time and I do genuinely appreciate the fact that it’s a place I feel free to contribute to the pile without feeling like I’m intruding on a members-only club.

some favorite past fandoms that have inspired me a lot to write, or otherwise shaped my fic or helped me grow as a writer and reader, are:

harry potter (when i was real li’l, it was technically the first fic i ever wrote, and tbh, no matter how terrible it is, i will always come back to hp fandom if it comes calling -- i loved the feeling it came with being a part of a fangroup that became cultural, not just thing exclusive to nerds)

pirates of the caribbean (the first fandom i ever really wrote “serious” fic for at 12 years old, AKA i spent more than five minutes on it, however terrible it was)

yugioh (the first fandom i engaged in actual discussion and i feel like it was the first to expose me to social justice, which is a bizarre thing to say, but i also made a lot of older friends that made me start thinking about writing seriously as a career, or at least as a serious pastime)

sherlock (i didn’t engage in this as much as i read, and i had to wade through a lot of bullshit, but there was a lot of talent in that fandom that inspired me to try out new styles, so i can’t regret it)

and legend of korra (RIP, but that was the first time i really started feeling somewhat confident about my fic. i was getting and giving feedback, which was an amazing thing to be apart of in the book 1 heyday)

9. What is the longest fic you’ve read?

do series count? i know a fic that is two series long – the revival and identity series – and it is by far one of the best fic i’ve ever read across fandom, and also the longest, at ~500k-ish words. also uh it’s yugioh, but everyone should know i’m a nerd by now.

runner-ups, and i am working almost entirely off of memory here in the “oh yeah i remember that fic was long” mental database and then going to check the word count as i type:

embers (mass effect), 280k

the grey morrow, another series (sherlock), 213k

a handful of dust (mass effect), 180k – and i might be cheating because i actually cannot remember if i finished this one, i think the author has updated since i reached the last chapter which…. was a while ago…

blue sky (portal), 170k

nenju (samurai champloo), 130k – which is AMAZING BY THE WAY AND MADE ME CRY

a ton of other ~100-200k sherlock fics that are all merging in my head atm

ETA WAIT another runner-up is also ghost by @theherocomplex which is around 220k atm!!! wow and now that i think about it i could’ve sworn there is some other 200k~ish shakarian longfic i’m forgetting but honestly i’m so tired my brain might have made it up and it was probably just that one

33. Least favorite AU tropes?

I think I already kind of answered this one here and here, but to summarize, my least favorite ones are alpha/beta/omega or vampire, werewolves, slavery, any sort of AU that involves biological or animalistic sub/dom tendencies. I’m also generally not usually interested in AUs that don’t have canonical narrative significance. for example regency AUs, partly bc I’ve never been a fan of period dramas, but also because oftentimes I don’t feel there’s any new understanding or angle to the characters or ship that’s explored in this AU, or at least if there is, it’s rarely explored in a way that engages me. (and I understand that’s not really the point, the point of writing is for fun, not to always to ~bring some new awareness~, and that’s totally fair.) for an example of what I mean by “canonical narrative significance,” I mean something like a First Contact War Shakarian AU – it’s a bit cliche at this point, but I also think it’s fascinating because it puts these two otherwise allied characters, who are very alike in their skills and sense of duty and honor, on opposite sides of a war that is neither of their fault. that kind of stuff is fascinating to me. another good one is the Hawke-never-existed AU, because it forces Varric (and the reader) to confront uncomfortable truths about the nature of DA2 and Varric’s straight-from-his-mouth-onto-the-page narrative.