#nonbinarymerbabe

Here is the gfm link again ^ for easier access.

hohohOHOOHOIJOHOOO u have selected

ok so one time i was chronically online with @bayheart and @urieskooki because when am i not and we were taking about somnophila fics because there’s a few in gaalee that are simply delightoful. and y’all know me i simply have to stick my nose everywhere so then i was like wait let me cook (except tbh i was making a bread loaf that day so it was let me bake?) and then i started writing a somno fic

it’s set up so that it’s two unique smut scenes, one from each POV of the awake character, and it’s built around contrasts. one is boink to sleep with moon/night imagery, one is good morning boink with sunrise imagery. because when can i not utilise dramatic references to orbital revolution in my gay ninja fanfic. also this one is technically set in the sass universe although once again i am not linking them, same as i did with itsb knfgshfhdjjk

would u like the summary and taglist 😌

5. Do you have any writing superstitions? What are they and why are they 100% true?

i don't think so? i've actually never heard of such a thing, tbh.

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

i love when i get comments from people and it's very clear that they've put a lot of time and effort into thinking about what i've written. like whenever people point out lines/scenes they found meaningful or talk about interpretations that even i never would have imagined it just Rules.

i also just. love characters. a lot a lot a lot. i love fleshing them out and giving them real hopes and dreams and flaws and struggles. I LOVE IT.

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

i honestly can't think of anything that's important in my writing that doesn't make it into the fics themselves. idk i just don't write like that.

wait i lied. danzo and hiruzen Definitely did it back when they were starfleet cadets. next!

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end. 

for the most part, i tend to be like. very specific and perhaps kind of dogmatic as a writer in that i have a ~*~vision~*~ which very quickly becomes The Only Way Anything Can Ever Go, Ever, which means that not a lot tends to change when i go from outlining a fic to producing the finished project.

that said, a HUGE change that came about recently was blue's injury in the third jurassic world au chapter, because that was straight up never supposed to happen. originally, fugaku was just going to roll up to be like 'quit being in love with this raptor weirdo' and itachi was going to be like >:( but go along with it bc logically he knows he really doesn't have a choice and then eventually he and shisui would start dating (an absolutely Terrible way to summarize things but yk)

but as i was working on the chapter (and hating it l o l) i realized that something was missing--something that was big and dramatic enough that it would actually force a change in their situation, and would demonstrate a) how much itachi had grown since the beginning of the story and b) how Not Okay such a shift was to fugaku, which would then justify him putting his foot down and essentially trying to job-reassign his son out of getting a boyfriend. and i'm very glad i added that bit in, because i think it ended bringing a lot more weight to itachi and shisui's relationship which just. would not have been there otherwise and very much needed to be.

of course, adding this MASSIVE plot point ended up absolutely ballooning the word count of the chapter, which quickly led me to realize that there was no way in hell i could have this be a three chapter fic without compromising the quality of story i wanted to tell, which is why jurassic world au is now a four-parter. whoops!

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

this is the worst question ever but here we go.

basically i started writing when i was twelve and i wrote a novel that was actually just rip-off inuyasha fanfiction, which then progressed into me eventually creating more OCs that were actually, y'know, Original. but then once i hit high school Death Note Happened (rip mellomatt gone but not forgotten <3) which caused me to pivot into fanfic exclusively and fifteen years later here i still am!

in terms of bumps, i've talked about it before but there was a period of, like, four/five-ish years where i just. stopped writing entirely and couldn't finish a fucking thing until Star Trek AU Happened and now i've written more in the last two and a half years than i probably have in the last decade so. go figure.

N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you?

Gosh, yeah. I have a couple of fic ideas floating around in the proverbial hopper that I just don’t think I have the plot/action/adventure writing skills to handle. I’m much better with feelsy, character-driven stuff, so anything that has too much plot in it feels very intimidating to me. There’s one fic idea in particular that I wanted to write for GaaLee Fest last year that’s a “Lee Wins” AU where Gaara loses their chuunin exams match and is badly injured instead. The concept was sort of that jinchuuriki healing is imperfect at best, and so while whatever injuries Gaara sustained during the match would, like, not bleed out or kill him ... I’m not convinced that damaged internal organs would be restored to full function, especially with Gaara’s seal being fucked up and Shukaku being such a blunt instrument. So the idea is that Gaara is left permanently debilitated by the match. And the spin-out from that would be that Gaara isn’t able to participate in the match with Sasuke, and the Konoha Crush can’t move forward because their ultimate weapon is incapacitated. So Orochimaru-as-Rasa would ... probably try to kill him, and to take Shukaku and implant the tailed beast in someone else. Not to mention Gaara would have to grapple with losing for the first time in his life, and Lee also would have to contend with ending someone else’s dream (even though Gaara’s dream isn’t really to be a shinobi). Anyway, there’s a lot that changes if you change something that early in the plot, and I’d need to really comb back through canon and probably re-read a lot of the exams and the Konoha Crush Arc and I’m just ... not up for that at the moment, and I’m not convinced I would be able to make the logical A-to-B-to-C connections from a plot standpoint, even if I could make them from a character standpoint. So I’d love to just ... wave a magic wand and have written it (or have someone else who has the bona fide plot chops to have written it). 

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

Hmm, this is hard. I often go back and re-read favorite stories or favorite handlings of similar tropes before I launch into writing my own take on a trope. I went back and read ‘you can get what you want or you can just get old’ by hyperlight (that’s a BNHA fic btw) before I wrote my own superhero AU, because I loved how they handled the ethics of superheroism. And especially if I’m writing a gift for someone who is also a writer, I’ll go back and read their stuff first to get a feel for their narrative voice and try to incorporate bits of that. So for example, when I was writing ‘A Snowball’s Chance in Hell’ last year for the GaaLee Holiday Exchange, I went back and re-read ‘The Bright Side’ by @gidget-goes to get a sense for their voice and style (because their style is so fun and so off-the-cuff snarky but still has such beautiful imagery). I guess my thought process is people write similar to the stuff they want to read, y’know? And there’s always someone who has done-the-thing better than I can hope to, so I might as well try to catch some of that shine. 

If I’m trying to write an AU of a certain canon, too, I’ll go back and read some of that. So, like, I re-read parts of The Goblet of Fire when I was writing ‘Homespun, Heartfelt, and Handmade’ to try to get that feel. Before launching into writing ‘i think we’re haunted’, I re-read a bunch of favorite horror stories, so a couple vignettes from ‘Lullaby’ by Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Modern Coyote’ by Shane Jones, ‘Raphael’ by Stephen Graham Jones, parts of ‘House of Leaves’ by Mark Z. Danielewski, and ‘The Dionaea House’ by Eric Heisserer (which is not a book at all but a web-based text horror of sorts, like an interactive precursor to the modern creepypasta). The stories that are quoted at the header of each chapter actually made up a big part of the inspiration for that fic. Plus I’d never written horror before, so I wanted to get a sense of the pacing.

There are a lot of non-fanfic authors I like, but that I can’t say I’ve tried to crib styles off of them, necessarily. I do tend to read things that are similar in feel to what I like to write, so more character-driven than plot-driven. I love Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle, but I could never properly emulate anything she does. I really like anything that has that magical realism feel, so Helen Oyeyemi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges are some favorites. And I prefer short stories over novels. My favorite short story ever is ‘Story of your Life’ by Ted Chiang, but I could never, ever, ever hope to replicate the genius of that concept, and it’s a plot reveal that’s only really effective once. 

T: Any fandom tropes you can’t stand?

(answered here)

 “REMINDER THAN I’VE BEEN STANNING MY ANGEL BABY CHILD SHINOMOTO AKHO...”

pls someone save that child

ugh bless you for this eeri

(throwing in a read more because this got Long)

OMG sorry I took so long to get to these! These were for the WIP scavenger hunt meme. 

“Gaara!” someone barks breathlessly. He doesn’t recognize them in the dim, face covered in uniform tan balaclava and goggles to protect them from the night’s bitter cold. “Something’s landed.” A shift in stance reveals the tempered glass point of a rope javelin strapped to each hand, and the tremor at the end of the words reveals the speaker as Matsuri.

This is from an after-earth sci fi AU that I was working on for Naruto Sci-Fi Week and never finished. I’ll still get around to finishing it one day. It’s titled All the Grain of Babylon. 

“I could never hate you,” Gaara says, muffled into the fabric of Lee’s tank top. Lee’s nose presses the top of his head; he smells like sweat and pizza dough, like coffee grounds and stick deodorant. Gaara’s hands pat at Lee’s sides, half a return of the embrace and half tapping out.

This is from chapter 2 of the pizza shop AU: We Built Another World. 

Gaara hums, settling back into the pillows, and tugs at Lee’s shoulders until he’s curled down close, faces nearly touching. Then Gaara slips his fingers up into the damp back of Lee’s hair, the close-cropped strands on his neck that are the quickest to dry, and pulls him back in for another kiss.

Yay, more of these!

He and Lee have had two dates so far - coffee and dinner. The coffee date ended with a sweet and gentle kiss; the dinner date ended with a kiss that was altogether more heated. Gaara hasn’t kissed many people before (unless you count the time Naruto bit his lip in middle school), but Lee has the softest lips he’s ever felt.

I don’t actually know if I’ve ever mentioned this fic before. I went through a period where I was minorly obsessed with bouldering competitions, and I started working on a fic where Lee does competitive paraclimbing? Anyway this is from that.

“Listen to your elders, Kankuro,” Gaara murmurs as he passes, a wry smile quirking his lips. 

Kankuro’s shoulders slump. “This blows. You already outrank me, now you’re gonna take away my age--the one thing I have over you?”

This is from Chapter 3 of On My Way Home (the kidfic about Shinki’s adoption)!

Tenten was fascinated by anything that could predict the future: palm-reading, pulling omikuji fortunes at shrines, reading tea leaves. To hear Tenten tell it, she had a certain affinity for the cards as well, a particular skill and facility that wasn’t inherent in every person who shuffled a deck. Lee could see as much in the keenness of her gaze when she scanned a spread, eyes flashing like sharpened senbon.

This one should be familiar! This is from the prologue of Pomegranate Sun. Sorry I haven’t worked on it in a while :(