#ask imochan

Whattttt this message is amazing and so unexpected!!!

Look, a huge part of me is deeply hesitant to answer this, because tumblr in 2017 is a vastly different world than livejournal in 2005. But y’all know I’ve never been one to shy away from writing problematic relationships, exploring those dynamics (& one hopes, resisting romanticization). I have dabbled in blackcest, not only because the Blacks are an old house with obviously aristocratic ideas about kissing cousins, but also because of course, of course, Regulus and Sirius both are supremely Fucked Up Dudes. I always imagined and wrote Regulus as a meeker, sickly, more anxious version of his brother (I’m not even sure if this is a popular interpretation anymore), but they were obviously both always as needy as the other—needy for affection, for a sense of belonging, confused about how they fit into a tumultuous and overly-divided political and social environment. Sirius turned away from what he knew in a kind of desperate lashing out, while Regulus turned, resigned and scared, inward, until he obviously couldn’t anymore (a single act of bravery). 

It’s almost as if they were born with a wedge already between them, two people who couldn’t have been more inherently damaged by that kind of isolation and refusal. It’s one of the greatest tragedies of the Harry Potter universe, honestly, that they obviously could have supported and loved each other as real siblings, could have gotten that sense of loyalty and belonging that they both craved so much from one another, but were never allowed to find it.

Short answer: hopefully yes!

Long answer: been struggling with motivation for fiction writing lately (in all fandoms), and am pretty drained by trying desperately to finish my PhD dissertation this summer, so I won’t make any promises about timeline on any new Credence or FBAWTFT fic. I am considering (maybe ill-advisedly) signing up for the @rs-games one more time this year, especially since it is the 10th anniversary, and the mods just announced that this will be the last year that the games will run. So, at the very least, there will be some HP fic in the next six months, but I can’t guarantee that it’ll be the sequel to such as is common to man. Sorry!

there are many reasons i love you, my buddy, but this—the fact that you picked three obscure-ish moments from my maybe-not-so-secretively-favorite fics, and moments that I’m myself absurdly sort of proud of—is definitely another one! thank youuuuu.

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Thank you!! We Build Our Own Unfolding is here, for ref.

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

Ohhhh for this fic, it’s not very straightforward, lol. When I started writing it for @rs-games two (?) years ago, I had the photo of a starry sky through the trees as my chosen prompt. Working from that, I had two main ideas that I was working with originally: 1) the recurring image of a night sky without stars, which eventually would be resolved into the prompt image in the final scene, ie, with stars; and 2) the line “He is in love. It hurts him.” 

I knew that I also wanted to write from Sirius’s POV—something about his own mental state being reflected in a environment gone awry seems uniquely his world to me, somehow. So a few things unfolded from here: logically the story needed to move from an urban environment (no stars) to a rural one (stars), and I knew that the line about love was about Remus, but not said by Sirius. I’d been elsewhere exploring themes of grief and mourning, and so from this evolved the idea that the major “event” of the story would be Remus’s mother’s death, and her funeral. The journal, which Sirius discovers, in which the line about love would eventually find a home, was meant to be a much larger character in the whole narrative, but I ran out of time :( It’s my biggest regret for this fic, that I feel like I couldn’t quite do justice to what I initially had planned for it. 

5. What part was hardest to write?

Ah, a good question! I struggled with the penultimate scene the most, I suppose. As I ran out of time towards the deadline, I had to make some concessions by shortening the fic overall, and the camping excursion was initially supposed to be a much longer and drawn-out affair. In deciding to condense that part of the story, I think I really struggled with the pacing of that scene: from about the circle of fairy-stones to the climax, when they argue and then kiss-and-make up. :) 

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ahhhh, hahaha, oh man. To Sit a Dead Man Between Us is getting a weird little presence bump on this blog, lately, and like—if you know me at all you know that I have a weird relationship to this story, like, didn’t even put it up on ao3 for years—but! I really appreciate the fact that if you have ever stuck all the way through this sad, unwieldy, confusing story, that there is at least a little bit of a sense of emotional pay-off, at the end? 

also: i guess if there is one part of the fic I don’t feel immediately and weirdly embarrassed by, it’s the very last section—so this ask is really heartwarming and i love it? thank you!

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[Part 2] I've run out of words hahaha basically your writing is WONDERFUL and also responsible for my new obsession 🙈🙈 i can't wait for next parts!!