#dxmichelle

some beast will find you by name, my healthiest child <3

💎: What was your favorite part?

Chapter 5 when Kaiba goes into Drift with Yuugi for the first time and ends up in Puzzlespace with Yami... I had SO much fun with the descriptions and his feelings and the weirdness of it all! Kaiba did NOT expect to find himself in a void and then a maze and he did NOT like it and every single part of it unnerved him but he took it like a champ. I also had a lot of fun introducing Yami more in depth here - terrifying and making threats, but also posturing because he sees Kaiba as a threat - and emphasizing Yuugi’s ability to get a very quick read on things and to strategize and implement on the fly (realizing Kaiba deeply wants out, but won’t let himself leave, and finding a way to give that to him.) I also love it as like a proof of concept... this is what happens when you mix the sci-fi neuroscience of Pacific Rim with the weirdo magic of Yugioh... Kaiba ends up wandering the labyrinth of the Puzzle trying extremely hard not to lose his nerve.

🗝: What were you thinking when you wrote it?

LOL YOU KNOW I AM THINKING ABOUT EVERYTHING WHEN I WRITE THIS!!! Mostly I’m thinking about what might be the best way to tell the story I want to tell, and what IS the story I want to tell - does this scene help that? Does this help me get there? Is this the right direction for the story to go? do I need to change my playlist? And that kind of thing. 

🎢: Were there any scenes you were nervous about? For audience reception or otherwise?

Probably when Yuugi and Kaiba get in a fight at the end of chapter 8... their feelings - their anxiety and their fears and their own separate flaws - really had to feel genuine and well-developed in order for that fight to make sense, so I re-worked that like a dozen times until it felt right. I wanted to make it feel like both of them were at fault here - Yuugi for withholding and Kaiba for mis-interpreting - but also that both of them had valid arguments and complaints - Yuugi’s anger over getting so blatantly insulted and Kaiba’s anger when he realized he was giving more than he was getting, so there was a lot of balancing going on. i was nervous about sticking the landing on all of that.

📣: What was the best piece of encouragement you got?

Thank you for writing such fun fanworks! 😊

Hello friend!

First and foremost, I am so glad that you discovered my fics and have been enjoying them!! That is absolutely wonderful to hear <3

Secondly...ah, the Star Wars AU. I will be returning to that AU at some point, I promise (this is a promise folks have heard me make so many times that I’m sure most of them don’t believe me, so won’t they be eating their words when I finally publish the last chapter of Episode III and, eventually, Episode VI). As to when, well, I feel confident saying it will be before George R. R. Martin publishes The Winds of Winter.

Hopefully.

Hi darling!

Oh wow, this is such a compliment and I’m beyond flattered! 

I began writing Paper Roses in 2009 and it’s almost 2021 now ... I never would have thought that almost 12 years after I first began writing my little plotbunny that I would still be lucky enough to gain new readers like yourself. It’s a huge compliment and I really don’t know how to thank you enough.

But let me apologise first because it was never my intention for Paper Roses to span this amount of time; I was a teenager when I first began writing it and now I’m horrifyingly approaching thirty and, while I still adore the little world I made, I have terribly neglected it.

But it’s not a dead-fic. I’m still writing on it and at the risk of sounding like GRR Martin  I hope an update will be soon. I even wrote a section just yesterday.

Which is why I feel the need to put out a disclaimer to my readers; my writing has changed over the years since I last updated Paper Roses. I’ve been working on my writing through different mediums since then and I learned a lot and hopefully grown for the better as a writer. I know Paper Roses needs an overhaul and I plan to begin that in earnest in 2021 - updating the paragraphs of prose and stunted dialogue and pace to flow much better.

But thank you again, and I swear I’m still writing on it!!

I hope it’s full of fun and cake!!

🎈🍰🥳

AAA Thank you so much!!

The meme says sentence, but I go for paragraph lol

Four missed calls, three texts, and a voicemail. The alerts from Keith, Wallace, and Mac had lit his phone screen as soon as he grabbed it out of his locker after the test flights had wrapped up for the day. They had all said the same terrifying thing: Veronica was in the hospital.

this was hard just pick next time LOL 😭

5. What’s the fic you’re most proud of?

“some beast will find you by name” is wildly fun to write and i love re-reading it at 2 AM on my phone. it’s my first serious attempt to write a long fic since 2012 and i’m super proud of what it is so far

11. Who or what do you find yourself writing about most?

I love writing about anxiety. I LOVE it. I love thinking about the ways anxiety shapes us and our thinking and our actions! Also insecurity and the fear of being perceived and found inadequate as a person, somehow; “the mortifying fear of being known” is a meme at this point but I love it whole-heartedly and find it resonant. I also love to write about characters who are lonely, and how that affects them. 

13. First fandom you ever wrote for?

yugioh :)

19. Do you prefer canon-compliant, AUs, or something in-between?

I like them all! i do end up gravitating towards canon-compliant for ygo because there’s a lot of bonkers shit in ygo that I really enjoy, and it makes me sad to lose it. 

21. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

3. Name a fanfic/story you are particularly proud of writing.

Chapter 4 of Amuse-bouche, Noah Kaiba + Guilt! Something about the way this one came together just feels very good and delicious to me... Seto understanding his status as Gozaburo’s favored son and reflecting on what that meant for the unfavored son, and driven by this mix of guilt and anxiety to try undo some the damage (which is not his fault!) by reawakening Noah... the descriptions are good, some lite stream-of-consciousness and kind of rambling, in a very anxious way... my deeply-buried hot takes about artificial intelligence and the digitization of human consciousness (read the comments)... I love that one.

10. What frustrates you the most as a writer? 

GOD it’s hard to say that any part of the writing process genuinely FRUSTRATES me, but my lack of clear and consistent outlining has fucked me up more than once, and outlining is a skill I need to work on improving. I do a lot of revising and rewriting and throwing out entire scenes (sometimes drafts) if I’m not happy. I deleted 600 whole words the other day just because I came up with a different way to write the scene that I just liked better (even though the first version was perfectly competent!), so by the time I hit rewrite #5 or #6 I am frustrated, first and foremost, with myself, and my inability to internalize the idea that perfection might be the enemy of the good, because that’s the point where it stops being fun and it just becomes neurotic. 

14. What’s one thing you dislike about your blog?