#tempestaurora

Quick sketch of my boy Bucky Barnes. Inspired by @tempestaurora’s beautiful fic, “Let me be buried under your name”.

I am such a sucker for them exchanging dog tags. It’s very tiny but you can see Bucky wearing Steve’s tags here.

Oh man these were good ones. The second one got away from me LOL

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

To me, "haunting" means that even if you haven't read the story in years, you still think about it, and it still influences your work.

A piece that has truly haunted me for years is Love Will Tear Us Apart, a love story between a zombie and a zombie hunter told in second person, from the short story collection Zombies vs Unicorns. I read it as a teenager and to this fucking day I think about it regularly.

As for my own writing... I mean there are some bad pieces of writing I did in my earlier years that "haunt" me in that sometimes they pop into my mind and I cringe at the memory. I would say the closest thing to "haunting" in the more traditional sense for me is a couple of my poems that I've written. They were penned in a fit of trauma and fury, and I still think about them. I think they're some of the rawest and most honest things I've ever written. I don't know if they're good, exactly. I hope they are. But I think they say something real.

11. Do you believe in the old advice to “kill your darlings?” Are you a ruthless darling assassin? What happens to the darlings you murder? Do you have a darling graveyard? Do you grieve?

I mean you're asking the person who orphaned 100 of her old fanfics because she was sick of looking at them when she logged onto Ao3 so...

(and yes. I do grieve.)

I believe that "kill your darlings," like most writing advice, is something you should be aware of but not follow to the letter. I think that as writers we can definitely get over-indulgent, or be unaware of when we're being self-indulgent, and so we need to listen when others (editors, beta readers, etc) point those moments out. For example I have a thing for sticking women in pretty dresses for stupid plot reasons because I'm gay, and I had to cut that shit out because it was just way too indulgent. Yes, we all love pretty women in pretty dresses, Mads, you need to stop shoehorning it into your stories.

My "darling graveyard" is more the overall plots that I've had to bury. A thing I've actually done several times now is taken two separate plots and combined them, which made the story and characters richer and got me out of a major block I was having with both plots when they were separate. But there are a few plots I've had to take out back and put down like Old Yeller, and they reside in a neatly-kept graveyard lined with flowers.

Mayhaps someday I'll resurrect one or two, now that I'm older and wiser. I might be able to make something out of them that I couldn't before. But most of them were really just... a fun premise and characters, but no real plot, or at least none I could really put together. Sometimes I have rescued the characters from the crappy plot and placed them in a new story - characters tend to live on in my head rotating through stories until I find the right one for them.

I'm not really one to weep over killing a darling if it's, say, a scene that's not working. I've murdered quite a few of those in my fanfics as I think I've mentioned in previous ask games. I don't mourn those. They weren't working, I axed them, I did what needed to be done. No fuss no muss.

12. If a genie offered you three writing wishes, what would they be? Btw if you wish for more wishes the genie turns all your current WIPs into Lorem Ipsum, I don’t make the rules.

wandavision: try to draw a fanart for one of your fics

I cannot even begin to explain how much pain I am saving you and everyone else by not doing this. Just imagine a stick figure swinging around very crooked buildings.

captain marvel: what author in the fandom is your biggest inspiration?

Not to be really lame but anyone who is writing anything at all in these covid times is inspiring to me as I've been able to write very little. But also @frostysunflowers because she's an amazing friend and her fics are always written so beautifully and I've learned so much about writing from her in general. ALSO she listens to me ramble about my fic ideas and deserves a medal for that alone.

guardians vol 2: create a playlist for one of your fics

for my upcoming Tony revival fic that doesn't have a title yet (you can take this as playlist or just songs I've been listening to while plotting/day dreaming it up)

by your hand - los campesinos

back in black - acdc

enemies - post malone

we are beautiful, we are doomed - los campesinos

landslide - fleetwood mac

toxicity - system of a down

demons - imagine dragons

camisado - panic! at the disco

better now - post malone

let it be - the beatles

“Febuwhump already had some popularity before I took it on, so maybe that was part of what made it work so easily, but I will give a lot of credit to everyone I pushed the post onto and asked to share so I could get the word out.”