#delicatelingon

Chapters: 1/2

Rating: Explicit

Summary: He just looks at her, takes a drink, like he’s not buying it.

“Money’s missing.”

leads to regret and yet... still worth it imo

Thank you!! 😘😘

9. Talk about a time when your writing process felt inspired.

Bhahaha, as opposed to when I'm not inspired??

Well, I'd say that sometimes I get those extremely fulgurant streams of consciousness in my writing, when a fic idea just comes to me and I write it super fast, and I'm generally super happy with the result and don't do much editing before posting, and it just feels amazing. It's like, I don't know, the words come to me, and it just feels right, and I don't get frustrated that I can't find the tone for a scene or something. The only drawback is that for long-ish fics, I generally can't write the whole fic all at once, and when I get back to it I have generally lost this mental mood of inspiration, but it’s manageable.

Fics that were written in this state of mind include the Bourbon glass POV, the Ghost AU, and We're Living in a Powder Keg, for instance, and they are among my favourite fics.

11. When people praise your writing, what’s one compliment that you hear repeatedly?

That the way I write people's emotions feel very true and visceral, which absolutely means the world to me. I'm really committed to portraying relatable and raw emotions connected to physical reactions, so hearing that it rang true is the best compliment. ❤️

One more thing, can you tell that by the way that sex scenes are written that they writer may not be American? Do you ever watch tv show or movies that aren't american? I forgot to say thank you in advance in my previous ask and now I feel really rude. So thank yoooouuuuu!

I think this is actually a permission thing at its core! It’s been a fairly big conversation over the last few years in the US that there is a necessity to get enthusiastic verbal consent during sex acts, and there’s been an emphasis on the fact that it can be something sexy—so I think it’s part of letting them both voice that they really want it and each other. 

It’s especially important and comes up, I think, in stories where they’re about to engage in hate sex or if it comes off of a fight (I’m thinking particularly of my own stories, like when I have Beth and Rio fight in the “Bless This Mess” chapter of little gifts or when they have the really antagonistic against-the-siding-of-the-house sex in i will collect you and capture you). Not having this check-in or having both characters explicitly show enthusiasm through body language, particularly in these kinds of scenarios, should really get tagged “dubious consent” at the very least—and some people prefer all non-verbal consent to be tagged “dubious” as well. 

I think the specific phrases such as “I want you to fill me up,” etc. are about making that process a turn-on, and also I think a lot of people think it works particularly well for someone ego-driven like Rio and someone who loves praise and compliments like Beth.

I do watch TV shows and films that aren’t American, but this year has been all about rewatching, haha, so I feel like it’s been a while!

This feels right.

i have a few headcanons about this but, caveat, while they’re inspired by many bits and pieces of canon, it’s pretty much exclusively conjecture, haha.

#1: rio grew up in a family that struggled for money and he was motivated by becoming the provider for that family at a relatively young age

rio’s treatment of service works makes me think he respects them from personal experience—either having been a part of the industry himself at one point, or having people he loves and respects be part of it. i also tend to think rio knows the feeling of being devalued—possibly from watching the people he cares about experience it, but also from him starting at the bottom and rising through the ranks in the crime world. 

i like to think that rio connects with and respects beth’s scrappy determination to provide for her family and that she’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish that, and it’s something he relates to because family is important to him (i am pretty inspired on this point not only by how deeply they sketch rio and marcus’s relationship in just a few scenes and the implication that he’s fundamentally honest with rhea about his work, but also rio’s b&w photograph of a couple in his closet, and the picture of him and marcus on a stoop that i tend to imagine is his mother’s house because it does not look like anything we see at his apartment building or at our first shot of rhea’s house in the same episode, and it also looks extremely recent)

rio’s tendency to shield the girls from the larger crime world in a way that’s simultaneously protective and possessive in that it gives him sole control over them. it makes me imagine that it’s a dynamic that’s played out in his personal life—in a way that i read as him becoming the Man of the House too early

as an extension of that, i typically tend to believe that rio grew up around  women (mother, sisters, cousins?) and that, because of that, he fundamentally respects women and their capabilities and he can and does recognize them as worthy adversaries even if he has a coda in terms of how he treats (and punishes) them. i also tend to believe rio grew up around women because i think he has dual feminine and masculine energies, and i don’t think he carries self-consciousness or judgment towards his own or others’ femininity (both because of his visible confidence and because i don’t think he’s bothered by his attraction to beth despite the fact that her floral blouses and mama jeans are contrastingly soft compared to him)

#2: rio fought his way to the top and has a vested interest in remaining there

the “i flip my game” and “it takes balls to do what i do—this stuff’s medieval, darlin’” speeches both establish that rio rose his way through the ranks and earned his position through hard work and darker means. i suspect that he took out his former boss, but it’s unclear whether that was purely a power grab or whether it was motivated by something else as well.

i think this is also supported by his murder of eddy. despite the unconfirmed details of the extent of eddy’s betrayal, it shows that rio will turn on someone even if he was once loyal and protective of them (confirmed by rio having beth shield eddy when he was vulnerable and had people looking for him) to keep his position. he’s looking out for himself first and foremost—knows that he must in order to survive—and for him, beth is a rare exception. 

his rapid and thorough shutdown in 1.08 establishes that rio will make short-term sacrifices to protect longterm personal and professional interests.

rio’s (i think mis)assumption that beth wants to “be the king” suggests to me that he sees a kindred spirit in her—which she is, but i think he thinks she wants to take his spot rather than her wanting to carve out her own, and i think that comes from him ascribing what were once his personal goals onto her. 

#3: he likes what he does and he takes pride in his power

i think they’ve pretty much established that rio is not hurting for money in any way, shape, or form. even at his weakest and most vulnerable. even at the moment of feeling the pressure from his bosses, rio is apparently able to purchase a wildly expensive luxury car. rhea explicitly states that rio has set them up to the point that they could never see him again and they’d be financially secure enough to loan a new friend thousands of dollars at the drop of a hat. this makes me think that rio no longer needs to do this work to make a living (esp. because they seem to suggest that he has legitimate businesses such as the bar so has new money coming in too) and that he does it because he likes it and enjoys it. 

i also think rio makes an active choice to stay in the crime world unrelated to money. he had the opportunity vis a vis turner to disappear safely (and i believe the means and ability to get rhea and marcus with him) and he seemed fundamentally disinterested in both escaping the pressure of his bosses and the stresses of his work, choosing instead to use his connections and power to order the hit on turner rather than to relocate his family to a place where they could live a carefree existence. the fact that rio’s description of relaxing on a white sand beach was 100% inspired from a billboard also seems to suggest that rio has no personal interest in this. 

while i do think rio respects beth as an adversary that has the capacity to go toe-to-toe with him, it’s also wildly apparent that he has misjudged and underestimated her at key moments—namely 2.13, but also 2.06 and 1.10—and i think that speaks to his cockiness and his belief that he’s always one step ahead and will come out on top. 

i also think it’s pretty apparent that rio gets off on being in control and that he has a lot of fun playing the game with beth and snatching back the power—he is at his most joyfully unhinged when he gets to pull that rug back out from underneath her, namely in 1.06, 1.10, 2.04, and 2.13—and that doesn’t even go into his delight that he’s able to seduce her despite sending her body parts in 2.11 or that she’s still primping and preening for him after he murders her friend in 3.05.

so yeah! this is kind of my baseline assumption of rio’s background and motivations, and i tend to use it in all my fics even if i fudge the details around!

Thank you very much! It was a wonderful day and I didn’t want it to end!

I’ve thought a lot about your question for the past day and I just feel like I’m probably the worst person to go to for this one, haha, because I just don’t know!

On some level, I think your writing style is something that comes naturally to you, and that it becomes honed and refined from there through lots of practice and intentionality?

Like, for instance, think these are the things that “stand out” the most to readers—like @mego42 really loves an internal monologue, and @sothischickshe really loves to play with ambiguity and double meanings and miscommunications and she slips in sly humor, and @pynkhues writing is really atmospheric and has balanced conflicts where you can see both sides of the argument—which I think was always true, but which has gotten deeper, richer, and more satisfying to read the more that they’ve spent time writing these characters. I think in some ways, that just comes down to what you like and then what you work really hard at, and then you evolve from there as you figure out what works for you and your writing.

Like, I don’t think that any of those things that those writers are good at come naturally to me, but I’ve been inspired to try my hand at mimicking them and studying their techniques to see if I can do it on my own. The opening scene and internal monologue of Beth in Chapter 8 of delinquents is inspired by @mego42, I use less dialogue than normal and zero in quiet moments in collect/capture because of @sothischickshe, and the opening scene where I describe the house in Chapter 8 of delinquents is inspired by @pynkhues.

One of the teacher things I do for feedback is to make a T-chart and label one side “Strengths” and the other side “Areas for Growth.” I think you could do that with writing techniques and categorize the following things:

Scene setting & atmosphere: How do you establish the tone/emotion of the scene? How vivid is the world that the characters are operating in? 

Sensory detail & vivid imagery: Sight/sound/smell/taste/touch.

Realistic dialogue: Does it sound like the characters? Does it have a purpose? Does it reflect the mood of the scene—i.e. if characters are fighting, are they interrupting each other? If they’re confessing something difficult, do they hesitate and cut themselves off? 

Pacing: Do you build-up events so that they don’t drag or feel like they come too quickly?

Foreshadowing: Do you plant hints and seeds of what’s to come? Do you do it with subtlety, or is it a giant arrow pointing to what will happen next? 

Flashback: Do you utilize flashback scenes to flesh out a story? How much? 

Internal monologue: How much do you give us insight into the character’s thoughts and feelings? How do you balance it so that the scene still feels like it’s grounded in the present?

Ambiguity: How much do you leave things open to interpretation?

POV: First, second, third person? Close or distant? Reliable or unreliable narrator? 

Metaphor and simile: How much or little do you play with language to evoke certain feelings or understanding in the reader? Do they become jumbled and mixed?

Multiple plot lines: Are you giving weight to all the different plot lines in your story? Do they rely on each other and push the story forward, or are they separate? Are some forgotten about for periods of time? Do the events follow logically? X happens, so Y happens in response? Or X happens, then Y happens, then Z happens—because I want it to?

Character Motivations: Is it clear what your characters want, why they want it, and why they make the choices they make? Do they have a reason for every decision they make, from the outfit they wear to the confession they spill or the lie they tell?

Conflict: Is your character’s biggest problem with themselves? With others? With society, nature, technology, or the supernatural? Why is this their biggest problem? What are they going to do to fix it? What gets in their way, and how they get over it?

Characterization: How much do you care about adhering to what canon has told us? How much do you not care? How much have you thought about how your character would change under AU conditions? How much have you studied the canon character to translate them? Are your characters flat or round? Static or dynamic? 

Mannerisms & Body Language: How do your character express joy? Anger? Irritation? Sarcasm? Amusement? What are their speech patterns? 

Purpose: What is the goal of each scene, and how does it move your story forward?

Action sequences: How do you build tension and how does your sentence structure contribute to the mood/pacing of the action sequence?

Rhythm & Flow: Mix up sentence structure and short, choppy sentences with long, complex sentences. 

Structure & sequence of events: How do you decide where to begin a story? Where to end it? How do you decide what should be present-tense and what should be flashback? How do you decide where to start a scene? 

Suspense: How do you create tension?

Precision of language & word choice: How deliberate are you with your vocabulary and varying word choice and using descriptive language to bring a scene alive?

World-Building: In an AU, what are your places and spaces and what do they look like? Who are the characters that inhabit this world, and how are they distinguished from each other? What does your character’s personal space tell us about them and who they are? How do the character dynamics change in this new world? 

Here’s what my chart would look like: