I’ve drawn, deleted and then redrawn this one So Many Times. So take the two I liked the best

Nick you’re so sweet, so wonderful, AND IT IS TWO IN THE AFTERNOON I WILL NOT GO TO BED! Dude, you’re like so cool, you are out of my league

I love you too! 💕

emoji asks

meanings under the cut

32 — Are any of your characters based on real people? I usually write cartoon fanfics so not really. I don't have any OCs and when I do use them they're almost always plot devices.

48 — Favorite trope to write? Post-reveal scenarios. Most of my fics are DP, but I just generally love writing about somebody coming to terms that everyone knows their secret... that they can't hide who they are anymore. That everyone knows they lied. There's something vulnerable and truthful in those types of stories that none of us really know what to do when somebody finally sees beyond our facade.

For this prompt.

Passage from Simulacrum (ffn | ao3 | tumblr)

This was a fun one to write! I wanted to show the horrible, painful violence of Danny’s death, and to leave no room for doubt: Danny is dead. He is dead, and he died horribly.

More importantly, I wanted to show this from a perspective that shows two major things: what he personally was experiencing as he died, and the significance of what was happening to him and to his corpse.

For the former, I wanted to focus on sensory details: what did he hear as he died? What did he feel? I might have gone into sound and taste as well if the section weren’t wrapping itself up as I wrote it. Not sight, though - sight feels less personal than sound or touch, or even scent or taste. Perhaps because I rely on and focus on sight so much for everything, and the other senses only tend to draw attention when either I’m deliberately focusing on them, or when something is strong enough to draw my attention to them.

But ye! Regarding sound: when I was little, my sister and I would go in the basement and scream high pitched together, because when we both screamed next to each other, we would hear this buzzing tv-tuner-like sound. So, knowing that Danny was screaming and his friends were screaming, that’s what my mind turned to first. Hence his scream buzzing with the screams of his friends. And of course, that’s not the only sound he experienced: I wanted to focus on the machine that killed him and destroyed his body, and on the ectoplasm that saved his corpse for someone else to take his place; so I put those things in there as well.

And that was what I focused on for feeling as well! I wanted to show the major somatic sensory things he felt and could process as he died (hence the heat of the electricity and the cool of the ectoplasm). And I wanted to show what was going on in his body as the electricity destroyed his cells and the ectoplasm replaced them, so I tied that to those major senses.

As for overall structure: I like parallelism, and I like threes, and I like occasionally breaking those threes with a four (for something finished) or a two (for something unfinished). And this passage and the passage it comes from demonstrate that. For the passage it comes from: there’s a single sentence starting things off with the finality of Danny dying. The next three paragraphs (really sentences, but they worked better as separate paragraphs) take the form of “He died [insert what he felt here, slowly leading into implications].” The next two take the form of “He died, [insert implications here].” I don’t know if others feel it the same way I do, but groups of three feel like their own complete phrase, but not quite an ending phrase. Groups of two feel like incomplete threes/fours: they can work as a phrase, perhaps even as an ending for a section, but they feel like they have to lead into something else, or else leave a feeling of incompleteness. Groups of four feel like threes with something tacked onto the end to signal the stopping of some flow. Of course, like any art form, these are not absolute, objective rules or feelings or anything like that! These are just the feelings I get from these sorts of loose groupings.

Regarding the structure of these two particular sentences: the first sentence was a set of three leading directly into a four: what he heard (screams, portal, ectoplasm) leading into the portal opening behind him, before him, and through him, and ending in the finality of him unable to hear anything in death. The second sentence is both the end of a three (the third “He died [insert what he felt here, slowly leading into implications]”) and a group of three in and of itself: the ectoplasm fused with him/fixed his body/replaced pieces of him. I didn’t want a four or a two here, especially at the end of such a large structural three: I wanted this to continue straight into the implications of how he died, and a four or a two would feel like a stop or a hiccup in the flow I had built.

So, yeah! Those are my thoughts on this passage! Sorry for the wait - I was gathering my thoughts, and I wanted to write this on desktop where formatting would be a lot easier.

3. In your opinion, what’s your best fic?

Oooooh that’s so hard to answer. Based on writing, I’d say Ghost Under the Skin: Wraith, because I’ve put the most planning into that story, and it has my most recent, most polished writing style.

But my main YJ fic, Not a Coin, But a Die, is a close second. It is the biggest story I have planned, although I only have the first arc written, and so much effort is going into it. So even though the writing it’s up to my current standards, I really, really love that story.

5. Is there any fic that makes you super happy to reread and remember you wrote that?

This question I actually just answered, but the answer is all of them! Except LDC: Big Enough, because that was supposed to be a fluffy series of oneshots, but I suck at fluff so I stopped at one. Also not with She Gets a Kiss, I Get a Prank, since that was just a spoof of a Phantom Alone chapter, and I don’t think it’s well written

13. What’s the biggest change between your style when you started in fandom and today?

I don’t pay too much attention to my actual writing style, but overall my writing has improved immensely, and I’ve also gotten a lot better at general narrative writing that isn’t dialogue or action, because I used to struggle with that

36. Have you ever sincerely written a ship you do not support into a fic?

Nope. If I write a ship, it’s only ships that interest me, or ships that are canon and I have neutral feelings about

Thanks for the asks! You’re the best, Nick! ❤️

Temporary Blind Ask Game

1: How long did you lose your sight for?

I was fully 100% pitch black no vision for only like a week I think, and then the medication started working so by the next month I was totally fine. So it was pretty quick!

3: Do you still have vision problems?

8. Favourite trope to write.

Oh, geez. There are so many I love. But my favourite one would have to be when a character is hiding an injury or illness that doesn’t get discovered by the other members of their group until the person collapses. It’s applicable to literally any story and there’s so many ways you can write it.

9. Least favourite trope to write.

I don’t think I have a least favourite, at least not one that I can think of right now. I just love taking tropes and twisting them into new, original ideas.

14. What’s the most research you ever put into a book?

Favorite character you ever created: I usually don't make OCs since I mainly write fanfic but there's this one novel idea I've had for a few years that I wrote for my creative writing class a few weeks ago. His name is Jaxen Ashby and he's a healer crosses over to necromancy. As a healer he was been taught that necromancers are less than scum so he experiences a lot of insecurity and dysphoria. 

Best piece of feedback you've ever gotten: probably all the tags that Luma left on this post