#crackinglamb

Thank you so much @crackinglamb!!

In no particular order:

In and Out of Time Again. This is a time loop/time travel Solavellan AU I wrote that was inspired by the novel This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone. It's one of my favorite things I've written despite being one of the least read. I really immersed myself in so much DA lore, and the Chant in particular, when I was writing this. It contains some ideas and even specific lines that I'd been carrying around and looking for a place where they'd fit for years.

Val Royeaux. A modern Solassan one-shot. (It's part of my Overgrown series but can easily be read independently.) A recent addition but I loved the process of writing this one so much. It felt so personal, between the very specific images and music I had in mind while I was writing, and also the possibly ill-advised process of delving my own college emails for inspiration. I wanted to convey a very precise type of nostalgia and I'm happy with the results.

in the cracks of light / i dreamed of you. My one and only Solavellan piece in the Veilguard canon. It follows Solas discovering the little spirit cat in Treviso and the dreams he and Lavellan are sharing at night.

First/Second. An old piece (2017) but one of the first times I felt like I really understood how I wanted to write Solavellan. It answers the question of who fell first and who fell second, and I'm still pretty happy with it now.

If Varric were being honest, it was the fact that the Herald appeared to want solitude that made him want to seek her out all the more. He had gotten a feeling from her—same as Hawke after all that shit went down and everyone had gone their separate ways—that being alone was the exact opposite of what she needed. He wished he’d told Hawke that, before the Champion had suggested scattering to the wind. It was a stupid idea in retrospect. Strength in numbers, right? Even if the number itself was small.

And he hadn’t forgotten the way she’d gotten choked up over leaving her clan. Her family. Or how she had woken up screaming alone in her tent and seemed so unsurprised at it and the Mark’s instability in her hand. He had not forgotten how she looked down at her palm with such a forlorn resignation.

No. He didn’t think she should be alone.

(Click Through For More).

Varric witnesses a certain hedge mage and the Herald of Andraste out on the ice.

Rules: tag some people you wanna get to know better

Tagged by: @crackinglamb thank youuuuu!

Relationship status: Single.  So Single.

Three favorite foods: Wow, Lamb stole all my favourite foods, we would be amazing dinner-buddies.  Pizza (all day every day), kimbap aaaaaaaand Danish pastries of pretty much all kinds.

Favorite color: Teal, Turquoise, Aqua, anything in that range.

Song stuck in my head: Human Slaves in an Insect Nation by Bill Bailey - it’s a comedy song, very weird and will be stuck in your head forever.  You’re welcome.

Last song I listened to: Orbit by Hwa Sa.  Her voice, I just, ugh,

Last thing I googled: The origin of the phrase ‘locked and loaded’....for some frickin reason...I think maybe my Dad and I were chatting with not enough coffee in our veins or something

Dream trip: Just stick me on an island in the Norwegian archepelego in the middle of summer.  Or take me back to Jeju in Korea.  Anywhere but stuck here tbh.

Anything I really want: An ability to make any decisions about my future at all (I was embarking on a self-discovery, get-out-there journey in the arts when lockdown came down).  Also, a holiday.  Just for like a week.

Thank you for the ask!

5. What are your fanfic pet peeves? Do they have a huge effect on whether or not you decide to read something?

Hmmm... I think the formatting matters a lot for me. If you have no line breaks between paragraphs it really does make it very hard to read. And it has put me off enough to stop reading. When one paragraph runs along with the next with no breaks, no indentation, no visual cues to let me know which is supposed to go together with what. 

24. What’s a trope that you’d like to never hear about as long as you live, let alone write?

Hmmm... I don’t know if it’s a trope or more. But I do not like instant healing. Where’s the recovery? Where’s the awkward time when one has to figure out how their body works again? Where’s the relax after the climax where the character can take stock. Don’t skip over that part! It’s important too! Also this might just be my whumper talking. xD

UNIQUE WRITING ASKS🖋️

22. How do you come up with character names? Do the names have a special meaning? If so, what are they?

Some are canon, but require headcanon to explain a few things, especially if they don’t make sense: 

Kolyat Krios- his family name is not via Thane’s, but Irikah’s- he won’t give it up for that reason.

Oriana Lawson’s family name is Lee; Lawson is Henry’s name, not hers. Her adopted family were her actual parents, not the DNA donor.

Orishen (Kolyat’s nickname for Ori) is a play on siha, mainly as the thought of calling your girlfriend dumpling instead of ‘warrior-angel’ appealed. 

Ori’s real father called her Sunshine or Solnyshko, since her name means sunrise/golden light in latin.

Outside of canon and into the OCs, the names are often found through generators or for a particular purpose: 

Fish is Fish because cats named from foodstuffs is cute, and that she was smuggled onto the Citadel as a fish. (Kar’shan Snapping Eel, if curious.)

Bateseda T’Lori was chosen from a generator, mainly as shortening it to Bats made me laugh- and lo, Bats was born.

Vitacus, Phalia, Brath, most of the minor characters all came from that Mass Effect name generator. You know the one.

Patel’s name I didn’t use a generator for, I wanted a recognisable Indian name that felt familiar and warm. His first name by happy accident is Arjun, which is  based on Arjuna, a legendary archer. He’s a crack shot with a pistol, is Patel. 

Hoorik’s name is a bit of a mess- she’s Norwegian with a Thai father, but family name is clearly Dutch. That’s 2150 Earth for you, I guess. 

Welllllll, basically. I wrote one club fic and that was not enough for me. Solas in the club is a deeply insidious concept and I keep having to shove it into increasing levels of mental quarantine to prevent myself from writing (and thinking) only that.

So I made a document for a Solavellan club scene in Roots. Except there's no actual room for it in what's left of Roots. So it's going to have to go in something after Roots, whatever that will be. (Hence the R3, "Roots 3," the yet unnamed thing I am being gradually talked into.)

But this WIP is, currently, a 500 word outline nearly all in caps of mostly plot points but with a good chunk of dialogue written out. None of it is worth sharing at this point, but I can tell you it's an Ellana POV and is, therefore, unhinged.