Down the rabbit hole...

Now posted here:

The Grey Daughter - Chapter 62 - Winterlyn_Dow - A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin [Archive of Our Own]

or

i was wondering, after working on fics for so many years, have you found your perspective on any of your past works to have changed? or even just previous chapters you’ve written? it must be so cool to grow with a ship you love but do you ever find yourself wishing you took a different perspective or exploring other storylines or anything?

also this isn’t as detailed ask - just for fun but do you think youll ever delve into more mature or ‘adult’ themes if you catch my drift?

love your work and hope you are doing well!

Hi! Thanks so much for reading (again) and taking the time to message. :)

It's interesting that you ask about perspective over time, as I have just completed a re-read (actually, I listened to it as an audio book--I plugged the work into Speechify) of The Grey Daughter and cleaned up the typos (so much more obvious to my ear than my eye!), so I've had a chance to revisit every word, concept, etc and just completed that endeavor today!

The quick and dirty is that no, on this particular story, my perspective hasn't changed, because by the time I was half to three quarters of the way through The Assassin's Apprentice, I had a pretty clear picture in my mind of the overarching story and how it would go. And the re-read didn't result in me saying, "Oh, I really should have done XYZ instead" since everything is pretty much designed to get us to the end point I envisioned years ago. I think also that this whole process is affected by the fact that I started writing these stories as an adult with a reasonable amount of life experience. So, my ideas haven't been massively impacted by some sudden maturity or experiencing heartbreak or tragedy for the first time. All of that was already in my rearview when I started writing.

As far as exploring other storylines, that's the thing that's so great about fanfiction--you have the freedom to explore those in another work (rather than re-working the original to include them--although I suppose that is another option). A variant of an idea can be written as a drabble, or a one-shot, without impeding the primary story. That's how Morpheum came about. This throw-away character of the Handsome Man got bigger and bigger, but he's not the star of the show in the trilogy, so to explore him a bit more, i just wrote Morpheum.

As far as becoming more explicit in my works, I guess I would never say never, but I think there are ways to write sex without it necessarily being smut. I don't have an objection to it per se, but it's not really my style, for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not sure how interesting I can make describing what is essentially mechanics laid out in stepwise fashion. And there is *so much* of it out there, I don't know what new angle I can bring to it, you know? I think there are ways to describe intimacy and sex that make apparent what is going on (the Bear and Olive have sex "on screen" at one point in TAA) without getting explicit. I think the source material does this--there is a lot of sex, a lot of sexual violence, etc, that happens without the sorts of descriptions so commonly found in both fanfiction and romance novels and I do try to pay homage to GRRM's conventions (somehwat). Secondly, though I don't know if she herself has read any of it, my teen daughter has mentioned to me that some of her friends have found and read my fanfiction, so as much as I try to keep my "real life' and my "fanfic life" from crossing over, sometimes they do, and I want to be able to face these girls when they come to the house! ;)

Thanks again for dropping a line, and I hope this answers your questions adequately!