#kloppend

this Megabus thing

5:  What part was hardest to write?

ALL OF IT... I think one of the difficult things about a war novel - or any novel that deals with fighting - is how to treat battle, because technically it is horribly repetitive and pointless and painful - and it’s very hard to write the same thing without sounding the same? Of course the weight of what’s transpiring outweighs however it is that you write especially for something like war, but still there’s that fictional element where you have to make it important and cinematic, almost, without trivialising it. Probably yeah the line between wanting to write something that is important to me and not wanting to trivialise it was difficult?? like i’ve boofed at u before !!! rolls

6:  What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

a few things!! one is obviously the slightly different dynamic between cawwaviwwe, where they don’t outright hate each other, because it’s difficult to get that in a different time period - so adjusting it to just the right amount of banter and affection was something new. two was like writing a real war story - I know I did Joemilly but that was boring milly and so slightly different - when I was a kid all I ever wrote was war stories, and I hope that by writing those I started to realise important things about war and history and why people wrote and still continue to write war stories, even if they don’t have any part of it; it’s something that affects us as humans regardless. When I write I’m usually writing about something beyond just the ship, so that isn’t new, but I think that dealing with a topic like war is always completely different. three was just the SHEER AMOUNT of research l  b r

9:  Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

answered, but! before I read about the footballers’ battalion and decided to put becks there instead I was going to have him die at the Marne, which I think would have made Gary’s reaction and the story after that very different? AnD also I wasn’t going to have Thomas in it at all but I’m glad for it now! 

15:  What did you learn from writing this fic?

ohhhh just. So much. A lot of history stuff, a lot of the way that football played out in the 1910s which was incredibly interesting, a lot of the way the sport and society have changed since then, a lot of How To Dig A Trench, a lot about my own feelings on what fic writing is and what we deal with and why we write - just thinking about how there is so much WWI fiction out there and why that is, what that says about war and humanity, how those two things and football are linked. I HAVE. A lot of feelings. Vores them. SCREMS

9. What are the best things about your current fandom?

for carraville?? crOSS CLUB FRIENDSHIPS MAN THATS WHERE WE AT and it’s beautiful it’s like. world peace for football 

15. Is there an obscure ship which you love? 

 i think the easier question is is there non obscure ships i lov??? ok carraville has gotten quite mainstream which is Amazing but some of the more obscure ones (i.e. the ones I’ve written 80% of the fic for) are barknapp, mcgrowler, ryanbutt, scheville 2.0, and also there’s this old ship from the livejournal days that was scholesy/ole and i can honestly get behind that for some weird reason

20. Any ships which you surprised yourself by liking?

Well I didn’t expect to like half of the fuckin spice boys but HERE I AM 

23. Name a fic you’ve written that you’re especially fond of & explain why you like it.

Horizon will always e something I’m especially fond of because it was my first proper serious kind of character study / Supremely Emo fic and it still hurts me v much when I think about it... I feel like it was also the first fic I went beyond relationships and shipping and wanted to do something more about football in general and the short stick that footballers get when they retire / also how loving football is essentially eternal and i just get v emotional about it!!!! 

28. If someone were to draw a piece of fanart for your story, which story would it be and what would the picture be of?

DSFKLSDJFLSJSDLKFJ  are u...suggesting something <: umm i would say all of them but mb beville standing under the lights of old trafford near the canal in that ch  3 with no name?? bc I kno u like the ending <<<: 

thanks bb <333

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14789546

SDKJFLSDJFLKSDJ U LIV MONSTER………vores ur paws

okay okay okay full disclosure: i hate liverpool more than anything and i’m also more jealous of them than any other club in the PL and it’s very? confusing? I don’t know. I think it harks back to the way that Gaz talks about them or the way that Steeb talks about us - and this is something that keeps coming back whenever we talk about this rivalry - it’s that it’s different, somehow, from other ones like say Newcastle/Sunderland or even El Clasico - because of the similarities of our rises and falls and how the rivalry is rooted in jealousy - down from the industrial rivalry - which somehow makes everything...different.... 

ANYWAY I DIGRESS BUt that’s what makes writing liwerpuwul easier I guess?? for me?? because I get where you’re coming from and where steeb is coming from, and it’s really just writing about united in the guise of liv hurrrrrrr *mancsona* but also I admire and am jealous of the liv narratives of istanbul and ynwa and the kop end singing because if there’s one thing I can admit it’s that ggmu does not sound as good as ynwa...(BUT WE HAVE WE’LL NEVER DIE SO IT’S OK)

SO UH TO GO BACK TO FIC - it was just, like, all of these liv feelings + all of these steeb feelings because YOU KNOW I HAVE A LOT OF ONE CLUB MEN FEELINGS - the way they tie themselves to the club, the way their entire lives are defined by how they have played and what they have done - I always remember yr goddamn gifset of the interviewer telling steeb the Margaret Aspinall quote and it kills me - I don’t know how to explain this and I feel like only people who have had one club players at their clubs will be able to understand this but it just KILLS ME THE NARRATIVE!!! 

SO I GUESS!!! this whole bit was me trying to figure out how to explain what steeb meant to the club and more importantly what the club meant to him - it’s kind of like stepping on a stage and off again at the same time - leaving and coming home - it’s horribly circular the way they feed off each other and the way they always come back. and I found it curious for steeb because my lads have never had that big send-off (stares at scholesy just walkin off and telling NO ONE) or even that one year hurrah in the USA and I can’t imagine what kind of decision it must have been for steebie? or what he mustve felt! just the overwhelmingness - and you could see he was overwhelmed, i watched his farewell thing TOO MANY TIMES to write this - and I just tried to stack up everything, Anfield and the history and his trophies and the number and the make us dream that hurts all the time (because he did and didn’t - it’s that whole idea of loyalty vs trophie and I love that Liv is so dedicated to him Despite It All) - and slug it out in one emoshfest !! And I love doing throwbacks so it’s like - harking back to Ya Beauty, his goal, his best goal, now applied to the best experience of his life. And how all of his trophies fit in with something as small as a debut against Blackburn. AND THE ONE COLOUR. because isn’t it always? that colour?

bfu cawwalonso? my favourite fling?

3:  What’s your favorite line of narration?

I haven’t written comedy in a while so like it was a Real Challenge to get back into that sort of funny mood and try to pin down the way I used to be able to sort of work through timing through narration which was HELL and I still don’t think I managed to get it right but UH I guess this was vaguely funnY? Stevie beats a tactful retreat, only to knock over a potted plant, two scarf stands, and a life-sized cardboard cutout of Ian Rush along the way. rolls with dissatisfaction

4:  What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

THIS FIC IS HALF DIALOGUE UH!!! god writing bfu was so hard because the show is basically banter and to transcribe that to written form was Whoa 

“You don’t even speak English. You’re not allowed to make that bad a pun.”

“Neither do you.”

“Make bad puns?”

“Speak English.”

bc I always get a kick out of making fun of livaccent…leers

10:  Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?

ITS THE GREATEST BANTER COUPLE OF ALL TIME! no srsly they were perfect for this, they’re perfect for everything, jamie ‘excitable dog demanding love’ carra and xabi ‘you’re just a pundit’ alonso, i love them, i hope they never leave me

11:  What do you like best about this fic? 

THAT IT’S FINISHED

honestlee…that i actually managed to pull it off that fast without it turning into a massive trainwrek

I scream like that was - oh that was inherently personal. I FEEL LIKE I GOTTA TELL MY LIFE STORY NOW BUT. HOKAY.

so moyes’s season was the first one I ever like, watched all the way through because that was after my A Levels so I had some time to stay up past 3am without dying the next day - and what a shit season it was. I tell everyone about watching us lose 4-0 to MK dons in the middle of the night but it was just all of it - endless crosses, ‘aspiring to be city’, fuckin fellaini - and it was shitty, you know, just awful, especially because the only other time prior to that i’d been up at night for united was to celebrate our 2013 win. and just the feeling of things spiraling out of control, which kind of ran perpendicular to my life in general which was doing ok for once - and it was just a very despairing Football period of *stares into the distance* who are we??? 

And then Moyes got sacked and Giggsy took over and it was just - that moment of sudden, iono, salvation. Like you know I’m incredibly scared of my faves going into management hahahhaha valencia hahhahahha but back then it seemed right, you know? just for four games. like. it didn’t matter, suddenly, if we lost all four - it was just the idea that something had returned, that OT had a voice again, that there was a point to me waking up. There was that first game and this moment where they were all sat together on the bench and it was - A Feeling. 

And I know that I place way too much store in the co92 and I know that their narrative is as engineered as anyone else’s and I know that I love the club and not the players but there’s always this - this way that the co92 is inexplicably tied up in the story of United, in the way that they embodied everything from youth to treble to never giving up, and the way that they fought and bled and UH died for the club. They’re a huge part of why I fell so hard in love w United in the first place and to see them back was exactly like that clear sky, exactly like that feeling you get when you hear old chants strike up again, like how they sing gaz’s song at Liverpool games or Cantona’s song at palace games.

It’s comfortable. It’s a comfortable, nostalgic place to be and sometimes I think we forget that nostalgia isn’t always a bad thing - how can anything that makes you happy be inherently bad? - of course we can’t live in the past but it’s still there and we can love instances of it whenever it appears. It’s nostalgia for the whole idea that once upon a time there were these boys who had a dream and now they’re managing the club they played for and supported. For fairy tales. I feel like at the end of that season I desperately needed a fairy tale, something to salvage all the bad stuff, and this was it for me - just four people in the same row. It’s like that feeling of your old players coming back to your stadium to watch a game except this was them Right In Front! And I think the crowd could feel that too - what was that in Giggsy’s speech, something about dreaming again - and even though they didn’t stay past that season it didn’t matter. It was only about those four games, only about that last snatch of defiance in what was otherwise a joke.