hello! i am very early in on reading transubstantiation (still in the first few chapters!) and it really just struck me how cleverly you've taken the coffee shop framing (which has its own loaded implications within the context of fanfic) and turned it on its head in introducing the string of perverse murders. i love that it's a genuine mystery with a confident sense of its own internal lore. i love how brittle your adam parrish is. i love how the setting is textured and grimy and brimming with secrets. you're awesome!
This has been sitting in my inbox for two months and I have thought about it every day with sheer excitement at such a nice comment and also mounting shame at how long it has taken me to respond lol
Thank you so much for sending this! I feel so often with fanfic and also published fiction that I can never really get what I truly want which is a combination of a compelling mystery and an engaging romantic pairing. There's either ROMANCE with a lil plot going on or there is MYSTERY and the couple sort of gets together at some point but it's ancillary at best. So I really wanted to be able to write my best approximation of what I want to read lol
And as for the coffee shop part, I really love the classic trope of "it's a cute small town where nothing bad ever happens EXCEPT FOR THAT ONE UNSOLVED MURDER" but I wanted the fanfic version of the small town setting which landed on a coffee shop
It means so much to me that you love my brittle Adam. "Brittle" is one of my main adjectives for his characterization that I refer back to when writing him to make sure I'm keeping him in line. One of my favorite lines in the books is about how Ronan recognizes the cracked lines all over Adam and I really wanted to reflect that in my own work, so thank you.
Really, thank you for this! I've been spending a stupid amount of time and energy on this and I always feel like people have forgotten about it since I don't have much time to write, so it's just really nice to get such thoughtful messages. Thank you!