#scribeshan

Hi there, Shan! Thanks for asking!

Toby Curtis: What is your sense of humor?

Honestly I kind of just laugh at everything 😊 I’m known amongst my friends as being someone who will just crack up laughing over the tiniest jokes. Like, the other day at dinner we were talking about really weird alien conspiracy theories, and someone was like “what if you were an alien and then every time someone brought up aliens you had to act all chill, like ‘what I’m not an alien?….’” And for some reason that just cracked me up, even though no one else was laughing. So I guess my sense of humor is just super liberal?

Happy Quinn: What makes you angry?

This doesn’t make me “angry” exactly, but I definitely get super annoyed when I get interrupted. I had a friend in high school who was really a nice guy, but he would interrupt me all the time and it just drove me up the wall. Also when people chew with their mouths open — I can’t stand that.

Paige Dineen: Are you extroverted or introverted?

I took an online quiz once and it said I was an ambivert? I really enjoy hanging out with people, but it definitely tuckers me out and I need some alone time to recharge every now and then, so 😊

Happy raises an eyebrow. “Really, now.”

Toby can’t keep his grin off his face. “Yeah? Yeah?” He spins around, feeling the leather pants rub against his skin in a new, unfamiliar, but not unpleasant way. “What do you think?”

“I think they’d look better off of you,” Happy says. 

Toby can’t read her face. “Really? Damn it. I thought you’d like them.”

Date Night - ScribeShan

~

It’s been seven long weeks, and Toby’s got a special night in store for Happy. But nothing goes according to plan.

~

Hi there, Shan! Thanks for asking!

Attic: What’s one thing you have a sentimental attachment to and you will never throw away?

Answered here 😊

Kitchen: Favourite comfort food?

Pretty much any dessert! Raspberry bars, brownies, oatmeal & white chocolate cookies, Oreos, Moose tracks ice cream, Rita’s…

Library: Favourite book genre?

Legal thrillers & mysteries!

Laundry: Favourite and least favourite chore?

I really enjoy doing the dishes and the laundry. I’m not so big on taking the trash out or mowing the lawn.

Hi there, Shan! Thanks for asking!

Hi there, Shan! Thanks for asking!

4: What time of the day/night do you like to write?

I’m definitely most productive right before I go to bed, for some reason. I can stare at a blank Google doc on the computer for an hour and a half and get maybe two paragraphs down, and then I get into bed and open the notes app on my phone and just knock out a whole chapter in thirty minutes?

5: Do you write scenes in a linear fashion or do you write future scenes/dialogues sometimes?

I normally write pretty linearly, but sometimes I write things that are going to happen a few chapters down, especially if those things are big plot events or I just have some inspiration for some future dialogue.

6: Hardest/easiest character to write?

I say hardest is Sly and easiest is Walter, though I don’t write either of those characters very often so I say that just based on the very superficial writing I’ve done of them.

28: Are there any scenes/lines you wrote that you didn’t expect to write/that surprised you once it was written?

Something I’ll do a lot is say “okay, here’s my chapter and here’s what I need to accomplish in this chapter” and then I write the chapter and that stuff just… doesn’t… happen? Like for some reason I just write something totally different than I had planned. Like, for one of the more recent chapters of TTWDFL, I was trying to write a normal conversation between Happy and her dad, and it just turned into a huge argument, without me really trying for it to?

34: A scene/paragraph you wrote that you’re proud of?

This is from chapter eighteen of TTWDFL:

Toby didn’t normally participate much at the meetings; GA-goers spoke in a language of addict clichés that he’d grown tired of in med school. Even so, there was something absolutely liberating about sharing here. Even among Scorpion, Toby had a uniquely shady past. Unlike the other misguided geniuses, some of the worst parts of his life were unequivocally his fault, and, because of that, there were years’ worth of stories that he didn’t tell the team. But, in this room, he wasn’t The Criminal – he couldn’t be, because there was always someone here more fucked up than he.

All at once, standing up in front of twelve recovering addicts, Toby was hit with a wave of gratitude.

Something about this meeting, this unassuming church basement and eclectic group of people, made Toby want to take down his better-educated-than-thou veneer. Here, his ideas came out in small words tied together with simple syntax. He’d split infinitives and leave modifiers dangling over a precipice of unselfconsciousness, and sometimes an eyebrow would raise just enough for him to know his mistakes were caught, but the brow would almost immediately fall again into completely-uncritical listening. When he spoke here, Toby could feel degree after degree – layers of education that he normally wielded like shields – fall off his psyche until he was nothing but a man with a gambling problem looking for help.

24. favorite scene you’ve ever written so backstory on the mentalist for anyone reading this who didn’t watch it, in episode 7.10, they killed off michelle vega (my icon on here), and the show ended with 7.13 which took place just a week or so later, so I found a way to write this big elaborate fic called if I can leave off burying the white involving a secret military hospital with medical abilities that are experimental etc etc to “fix” the death by having them find out a month after the series finale that she actually made it, though barely, and she had a huge amount of medical complications, etc (she was shot in the abdomen on the show) so the fic dealt with a lot of her physical and mental struggles, and my favorite scene I’ve ever written is in that fic.  she’s in this counseling thing, like a post trauma program, in the secret hospital, and basically they keep asking her if she is suicidal by asking if she ever thinks things would be better if she hadn’t made it.  she goes off on this rant about how she had x many surgeries and y many complications and sure, without the high tech hospital she probably wouldn’t have lived but four out of every five people with her injuries would have died even at this place so “at the end of the day I am alive because I want to live.”  and I don’t know I just am really proud of that scene

37. canon or AU? honestly that depends on what you consider an au.  to me an au is a full blown alternate universe, like a Beauty and the Beast AU or a Hamilton AU or an Oregon Trail AU or something like that.  so going off of that definition, I prefer canon, though I like both.  if you call anything diverging from canon an au, even if it’s writing future fic or sending a canon storyline in a different direction, then by that definition I prefer an AU.

44. do you write linear or do you write future scenes if you feel like it? if it’s a oneshot or just a couple chapters I will usually write linear.  in longer fics, like serendpity (scorpion), the parental ambition (the big bang theory) or in the name of science (scorpion) etc etc, I will write future scenes for several reasons.  1. the fic relies on some big event happening and so I write that first to make sure it’ll work 2. my depression means it’s hard to find motivations so I write whatever part of the fic is at the forefront of my brain at the moment or 3. I write my personal favorite parts of the fic first because then I have that part done, I love it, and the only way I can share it with anyone is if I write the rest, so that also helps my motivation.  now in some cases that ends up being more work (like I gave linda a huge storyling in serendipity and when I started outlining that fic she didn’t even exist, and paige was suffering from some radiation side effects in that fic but when I started publishing it chernobyl intentions hadn’t aired, so obviously I had to add things and rework other things as I went) but the extra work is usually worth it because if I hadn’t written some stuff out of order, the workload that all my new ideas would have created in my head would have probably felt too daunting in the end and I never would have published at all.