#tramstrams

Thank you!

🎵 What do you listen to while you read?

This is such a weird question for me, because when I’m reading I’m not aware of anything else going on around me. So having music or any other sound running in the background would be pointless, I wouldn’t hear it.

💡 Tell me a headcanon (and who you wish would write it)?

This is going to have to be for my newer fandom, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: I’m obsessed with the question of how the Zones function in terms of food and supplies, and I wish that anyone else shared that - almost all the fics I’ve seen in the fandom ignore the issue of how the characters are managing to exist long-term in a radioactive desert.

🌍 What is your dream AU?

For Mag7 the one I’m constantly prompting is the Chief of Police Billy/ softly-spoken mob boss Goody AU which was explored in a tumblr post a while back. I don’t think I’m capable of writing it myself, but I would love someone who can do action/crime to write it.

📚 What’s the longest fic you’ve read in one sitting?

I tend to read a lot of fics as they’re being written, so the long ones would have to be completed fics in an established fandom, and that would be Captain America for me. It’s hard to remember all of the long ones that have kept me reading, but two I recall are the lovely Civilian by alby mangroves and CoraRochester and The Murder Ballads by BetteNoire.

🏆 What do you wish more authors in your fandom would write about?

I've always felt like present tense is more of a self-inself kind of writing. I mostly write past tense out of habit.

hazel-athena

I write about 99% of my stuff in present tense, and it is literally just personal preference for me. Same way I tend to default to third person point of view instead of first.

academicgangster

I used to stick to past tense because that's what I'd always read, but now I write exclusively in present tense because you can get away with SO MANY MORE VERBS that way! Somehow they all sound more visceral and in-the-moment than they would in the past tense, which suits my preferred (close/intimate) narrative distance.

tramstrams 

I write past tense out of habit and preference (the preference definitely grew out of the habit though). I can't even really say what influenced me though, or like the reason for it, it just "felt right". Which is why I was so surprised when six months after I posted my first mag7 fic I went back and looked at it and discovered it was written in present tense. I really don't know why that is, but I think it's because the first line of that fic came to me in present tense and it was what inspired that fic so I had to just go with it. On a similar note, one of my fics for mag7week last year (the one I named something like “all the hearts that we have forsaken” or something it’s a terrible title, and a kinda depressing fic), the first lines for that one were present tense as well, and I wrote the first bit in present tense before I could stop myself, and then had to go back and rewrite it because I knew it was going to be a long fic and there was no way I would be able to write present tense in a longer fic.

adigeon

100% based on what i just find myself writing in whenever i try out a snippet of an idea i’ve been thinking about. sometimes after 500 words or so i'll change my mind but usually present vs. past feels pretty obvious to me (i feel like i write more in present even though i prefer writing in past for whatever reason)

thesummoningdark

I got into the habit of writing in present tense because of rp

fontainebleau22

I always write in present tense, and if I post a fic in past tense then it’s been written in present and changed later. I think it’s the immediacy of the story for me: it feels artifical to narrate a story in the past, when it’s over and dead; telling a story in the present means that it happens as it goes along. It never occurred to me when I started writing that this was any kind of a big deal - I’ve been astonished at the number of people I see who declare a preference for reading in one tense or another (or in one person or another). But then I’ve always read a lot at the experimental end of literature, so I don’t feel strongly that there’s only one way to do these things.

-

-

3. Do you prefer canonverse or AUs?Depends on the pairing!

6. What’s the last thing you read that made you laugh?Just a Perfect Blendship by @poemsingreenink What a wholesome hoot that was

8. Bed sharing or roommates AU?Bed sharing.

An interesting set of questions!

4. What’s the next book you’re hoping to read?

The Mirror and the Light (Hilary Mantell) when the library opens again! I did embark on the Umbrella Academy comics, but to be honest I’m struggling with them - they’re more trad than I expected.

13. Are you a fan of autobiographies?

I’ve read a fair few, but in general I don’t find them particularly rewarding. I think the most recent I read was Gavin Maxwell’s series of autobiographies, but I came out of it thinking he was a much less admirable person than I thought when I started. Probably the one I like best, though it’s pretty strongly fictionalised, is Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony.

Thanks for the ask! 19 I answered below, so here are the others.

3. favorite line/scene you wrote this year?

There are quite a few lines in A Trip Down Paradise Alley that I like a lot, including:

Citizen Cullen scowls at him. ‘And I’ll need something else to wear: right now I look as convincing as a hoon in a hula skirt.

and

…life in all its galactic variety, a thousand habitats, a million sentient races, and all of them edible.

but I think my stand-out favourite scene is the start of chapter 3, because most of the ideas in the fic are deliberately drawn from other sources, but this was all mine:

Long ago, as a whim of some mediaplex heir or retired conglomerate zillionaire, a spherical arcology was brought to Alpha, towed in and tethered high over Terra Sector. Those wealthy enough to enter found its curving walls lined with manicured lawns, flowing streams and woodlands of carefully-selected trees; delicate herbivores drifted in little herds and clouds of long-tailed birds fluttered under a bright solstrip. For as long as the credit lasted it was a luxurious retreat, an escape for the privileged few, but in time its owner lost interest or the money ran out, maintenance ceased, and the artificial ecology was abandoned, its plants and animals left to fend for themselves.

Some failed and died, overwhelmed by the increasingly erratic environment, but many found the means to adapt to the fragmenting ecosystem: in place of the neat woodlands grew tangled forests of creeping vines and spined tree-ferns, able to shoot up three feet in a cycle when the solstrip flickered to sudden brightness, falling dormant again when it guttered low; instead of smooth turf fields of phosphorescent fungi bloomed in drought or endless downpour. And among them the introduced species and opportunistic newcomers found themselves new niches to exploit: scale-winged insects and predatory plants, skittering reptiles with poison-tipped barbs and vast-eyed night-hunting birds.

It’s Billy’s favourite place on the station, an object lesson in life’s determination to survive in the most unpromising circumstances.

21. most memorable comment/review

I actually sent this one in to ao3commentoftheday: someone read their way through five chapters of Necropolis and left the comment, ‘But how does it end?!’ And having a reader who was invested in the story galvanised me to finish it after a long hiatus.

23. fics you wanted to write but didn’t?

Ooh. There’s the secret fic that I’ve been struggling to finish - I hoped to have it done by Christmas, but didn’t make it; and I was going to write a Roman gladiator AU which never got off the ground. And I’m incubating one last prompt from Yuletide that I didn’t have time to do for the exchange itself. And there was that prompt that came up on tumblr, about police chief Billy/soft-spoken mob boss Goody - I don’t know if I’m capable of writing it, but I’d like to read it.

30. favorite fandom to read fic from this year?

Thank you!

13. What is your favourite fanfic trope?

I think it counts as curtain-fic! I prefer established-relationship fic to get-togethers, and domestic detail is my jam, though I do get distressed sometimes at how badly characters in modern AUs eat. It’s all takeout pizza and Thai food: someone should teach them all to cook!

14. What kind of plotline are you always here for?

Well, everyone knows I don’t enjoy unhappy endings, but I actually get turned off by a lot of action in the plot, of the gunfight/car chase type - I prefer slower and more introspective plots.

15. Do you like sequels?

Yes: if I’m invested in a fic then I’ll always read more of it, and if I haven’t read the first in the series then I’ll go back and catch up. One of my favorite fic series in the MCU has over a hundred related scenes and fics set within the AU.

16. Do you like oneshots or multi-chaps?

Thank you for the ask!

I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (readingor writing)?

When I find a writer whose work I like I read through what they’ve written in other fandoms, and I found myself inexplicably entangled in the John Wick fandom that way - it’s an idiotic film and not at all my kind of thing, but I just can’t resist the fic!

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

Not really - I read very widely so I don’t pick and choose much on trope or theme; I have some I don’t like much (not a fan of a/b/o, for instance), but I’ll give most fics a go if they look at all interesting.

W: Do you like more general prompts, or morespecific ones?

I think the more specific the better - I find that a weirdly specific prompt is better for sparking off a whole story. I find long lists of general prompts very uninspiring.