#amethystmirror

@doctorhelena asked the exact same ones, so you two are just going to have to share a reply. ;)

5. You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

Canadian spelling, and at least one literary reference. ;)

6. Name three stories you found easy to write.

His and Hers - I wrote most of this in my head one afternoon while cleaning the stove.

The Simple Secret - I started writing this on my phone one morning while waiting for my ride to work. It turned out that she forgot it was her day to pick me up. By the time she came back for me, I had the first third of the story pretty much done.

Five Minutes More - this was a collection of Tumblr prompts that accidentally became a story when I realized I had a beginning and an end already in place.

7. Name three stories you found difficult to write.

Ain’t Love a Kick took far longer than I would have liked to complete. It took ages for me to decide how I was going to handle Steve getting his memory back. Then I lost a family member that I’d been close with, and stopped writing at all for a while.

Love Me Harder started out easy, but turned out to be more challenging than I expected. Because it’s such a different iteration of Peggy, it can be tough to get into the right head space. I’m about 2 chapters away from being done, but it’s slow going.

Pepper Potts Gets a Life sat unfinished for years. It originally had an additional chapter, in which Pepper joins a book club organized by some other SI employees. She finds the books kind of pretentious, but she has a couple of fun outings with them (book club doubles as wine club); she and Tony do some flirty drunk texting, and he teases her the next morning when she’s a little hung over. But then she discovers that the only reason the book club keeps inviting her out is because they’re hoping for juicy gossip about Tony, so she quits.

First off: I’m not the best person to answer this because I don’t write (or usually read) fics that I would rate as explicit.

(Also, as an aside, I’m not really sure what “non-explicit porn” means. It’s my understanding that the defining characteristic of “porn” is that it’s purposefully sexually explicit; in other words, sex in fiction isn’t automatically pornographic.)

But, since you asked: I try to give people the information they need to decide whether my stories are right for them, without giving away too much of the plot to readers who’d prefer not to know. And I try to adhere to AO3′s terms of service, since that’s where I post my fic.

AO3′s policy is that the rating is “a measure of intensity of the overall content,” distinct from warnings about specific subject matter such as sex or violence (which they also have available).

For Flames We Never Lit, I rated the story T. There’s no explicit sex (just some making out, and mentions of sex that happens off-screen). However, I did add a “Graphic depictions of violence” warning, because there is on-screen violence in the story (even if it isn’t graphic, in my opinion) and I wanted people who don’t want to read about that for whatever reason to make informed choices.

In comparison, Drive is about Tony and Pepper entering into a friends-with-benefits arrangement, rather than talking about their real feelings. There is sex, and it is described - but not as much detail as it could be. There are a lot of euphemisms, and a strong focus on what Tony is thinking and feeling. The only time the word “cock” is used is when Tony calls Rhodey a cockblock. So in my estimation, that’s an M rating, rather than an E.

Rose Dust: Describe your aesthetic in five words or less.

Soft queer space robot.

Plum: Are you insecure about anything?

Using public bathrooms makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Bittersweet: Has someone you loved ever hurt you?

3. What’s your favorite line of narration?

She’s kept and treasured the particulars of Steve’s biography for a very long time, but she comes to realize that it’s a bit like owning a suit of clothes that once belonged to someone you loved: clothes are not a person, and a list of dates and places and surviving relatives are not a life.

4. What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

This isn’t strictly dialogue, but:

SO ARE WE JUST NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE TACOS

5. What part was hardest to write?

The part I found most challenging was knowing where to end, because honestly, I could have carried on for about 15,000 more words about everything they get up to after moving to France. There may be a companion piece in the works. Shhhhh.

6. What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

I wrote it really fast! Normally it takes me ages and ages to get something down on the page, but this one flowed nicely from the start.

10. Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?

I’d been thinking for a while that I wanted to write a story about Steve Trevor in the new century, in which we get to see that how clever and adaptable he is. As a former spy, he is the embodiment of “fake it till you make it.”

I also wanted things to turn on this amusing conceit of him being able to blend into this particular time so easily because to everyone around him, he’s not a man out of time, he’s just a quirky hipster.

But of course, to get that story to its fullest extent, Diana can’t be there to guide him. I didn’t want it to wind up being a role-reversal of how things unfolded in the movie (which isn’t to say I don’t love that scenario, but it wasn’t what I had in mind for this particular story). So that’s how I wound up putting them into this situation where she’s in Paris and he’s in Metropolis. And then it turned from a funny little piece about Steve’s adventures in 2018 into a story about all the unique intimacies of distance, and the way in which the distance helps her to see Steve more clearly.

Oooh, a blast from the past!

1. What inspired you to write the fic this way?

When I started, I had this vague idea about writing something based on the seven deadly sins, in which each sin was the theme of a short story, and each of the stories had a different possible ending to Tony and Pepper’s relationship. Eventually I adapted the theme a little, and titled the stories after the seven heavenly virtues, mostly ironically.

And my motivations may have been just a tiny bit petty: when I posted my first Tony/Pepper story, Accountability, a few people who didn’t like where it left off commented that I “didn’t know how to write an ending.” So I decided to prove that I could, by writing a story that had seven of them. 😉

2. What scene did you first put down?

The first short, Honesty, was the first thing I wrote. The others didn’t necessarily follow in the order I wrote them - I think I did a lot of them simultaneously.

11. What do you like best about this fic?

I’m not sure what this says about me, but I think my favourite stories in the sequence wound up being the two saddest ones, Loyalty and Humility.

12. What do you like least about this fic?

I'd have liked a better setup in Benevolence, the story where Pepper gets pregnant and then takes off without telling Tony. It was really hard to imagine her doing that, but I needed it to happen for the sake of the story I wanted to write. In retrospect, I wish I’d finessed it a little more.

14. Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?

I try my very best not to teach people things with my stories. 😂