Here are a few more questions and answers about writing from my Tumblr!

Are you only working on one project right now, or multiple?

I’ve got twenty-nine files in my WIP folder, and I’ll occasionally pop into one and write a few lines, but there’s no project that’s really grabbing me right now. Or there’s no fanfiction project, at least, because I’ve been busy building a Danganronpa website. I promised myself I wouldn’t make any more websites! They’re so much work! I don’t know why I keep doing this!

(To be honest, I know why I did this: it's because I got COVID and spent a week in quarantine. There are a lot of issues associated with COVID, but no one ever talks about the risk that, while you’re isolating in your bedroom, you will end up making a fourth goddamn website.)

What’s the best thing to get you in the mood for writing?

There’s nothing I can reliably do to get myself into writing mode, unfortunately! The only thing that will make me write is having an idea. Once I’m inspired, I’ll write at every chance I get, but I don’t know how to trigger that inspiration; I just have to wait until it hits me.

What plot points and themes do you find yourself falling back on again and again in your work?

There are a lot of themes I find myself revisiting constantly! The main ones coming to mind are:

- Being unable to trust your own memories. Memories being erased, memories being rewritten, memories of things that never happened filtering through from another timeline; I do a lot of writing about weird memory stuff in general!
- Feeling responsible for someone’s death.
- Seeing/speaking to somebody no one else can see. This often combines with the above one: a character hallucinates someone whose death they feel responsible for.
- Bad coping mechanisms.
- Isolation.
- Falling in love with and/or banging everyone you know. I write this so often that I made an entire AO3 collection just to house my fics on this theme.

How often do you write?

It varies a lot, but my general pattern is to go a few weeks writing almost nothing, then get a fic idea and write feverishly for several days, then go back into a lull once I’ve finished the fic. The exception is November, in which I try to write a little bit every day. We’re almost there; I’ll need to think of some ideas!

What books have inspired your writing the most?

Animorphs, no question. I was absolutely passionate about KA Applegate’s Animorphs series when I first started writing fanfiction as a twelve-year-old, and, looking back at my early efforts, I can see that the style was heavily influenced by Animorphs. I wasn’t writing Animorphs fanfiction; I was writing for Pokémon! But there’s no question of where my style came from.

Over the years, as I’ve grown up and become a more experienced writer, my style has developed. But you could probably trace a direct line back from my current fics to my childhood efforts to reproduce the style of Animorphs. If you dig up my writing style to see what’s underneath, you’ll find that the foundations are pure Animorphs: very straightforward, very unornamented, short sentences and short paragraphs, focused on emotion and dialogue above all else.

For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

The latest addition to the stable is a little weird!


Fanganronpas

The Danganronpa games have a very distinct formula: a group of people, each with a specialised talent, find themselves trapped in an unfamiliar location together. They're told that the only way to escape is to kill one of their fellow captives and get away with it; if they succeed, the murderer will go free, but everyone else will be executed. Every chapter is its own little murder mystery: someone turns up dead, and the survivors have to escape execution by working out which of their friends is responsible.

It's a great formula! The murder mysteries are fun, and the fact that you get to know all the potential victims and killers in advance really heightens the emotional impact of the cases. If a beloved character is killed or, worse, turns out to be the murderer, it's genuinely devastating, both to the characters solving the mystery and to you as the player.

Because the Danganronpa formula is so distinctive, some ambitious people have taken it upon themselves to create Danganronpa-style stories of their own: fan Danganronpas, or Fanganronpas. And then I got into these fan projects, and then I started writing fanfiction for these fan projects, and here we are now!

I didn't originally plan to check out any Fanganronpa projects; I love the original games, but I wasn't sure fan replicas would scratch the same itch. But I became vaguely aware of one Fanganronpa in particular, the YouTube series Danganronpa: Despair Time, because I follow someone on Tumblr who's very passionate about Ace, a character from it. I was a little surprised to learn via his blog that this fanmade character had won a Danganronpa character poll on Tumblr, beating multiple well-liked canonical Danganronpa characters; was this fan project really that popular?

When AO3 created a new canonical tag for Danganronpa: Despair Time, meaning Despair Time fics were no longer folded into the general Danganronpa tag, I messaged the aforementioned Ace enthusiast to let him know. I was very surprised to learn, in the process, that Despair Time had over 1,400 works on AO3. Apparently people really liked this thing! Given my love of Danganronpa, and the fact that at the time I thought we'd probably never see another official Danganronpa release, maybe I should at least give it a try.

I watched Danganronpa: Despair Time at the age of thirty-seven and went insane about it. It had its rough edges here and there, but it absolutely nailed Danganronpa's tone and emotion, it had a lot of fun plot developments and twists, and I really enjoyed the characters. One character in particular is up there with my absolute favourites from the official Danganronpa games.

The other Fanganronpas I've investigated since then are Project: Eden's Garden and Danganronpa Another, the latter of which I'm still working through. I really enjoyed Eden's Garden; I don't think it gets the tone as well as Despair Time, but it's a stunningly polished achievement - it honestly looks better than the official Danganronpa games do - and I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going. I'm struggling more with Danganronpa Another, largely because of translation issues, but I'm finding it interesting as a historical curiosity - it's an early Fanganronpa project that had a big impact on the overall Fanganronpa scene - and it does have a terrible boy I'm really enjoying.

As a side note, the large Despair Time AO3 work numbers that originally provoked my curiosity are actually a little misleading! It turns out there are four specific incredibly prolific authors who have, between them, written approximately 750 works for Danganronpa: Despair Time; the most prolific of the four has personally written 285 Despair Time fics. I have to admire the dedication that leads people to write literally hundreds of fics for a niche fan project, especially when there's not much of a readership to be found; half of the 1,600 fics in the Despair Time AO3 tag have under ten kudos.

Favourite character: David Chiem of Danganronpa: Despair Time, by a long way; I was not expecting to lose my mind this hard over a character in a fan project, but it turns out he's absolute catnip for me. My favourite character in Eden's Garden is Wolfgang; my favourite character in Danganronpa Another is Kinjo. Come to think of it, all three of them share the quality 'this seems like a pleasant young man - oh, no, something is very wrong with this boy', meaning they appeal to the same part of me that adores Light Yagami.
Favourite pairing: I really like David/Arei from Danganronpa: Despair Time; they have some very cute moments, and I was surprised by how invested I became in their dynamic. I'm also absolutely here for horrible David/David selfcest.
Number of words written: 9,645 across five fics: four for Danganronpa: Despair Time, and one for Project: Eden's Garden.


Absolutely historic development: if my Fanganronpa fics are counted, my latest fic means the overall amount of fanfiction I've written for Danganronpa (92,000 words) beats the amount I've written for Top Gear (90,000 words), making Danganronpa my most-written-for fandom by wordcount.

...apart from Assassin's Creed (128,000 words). Assassin's Creed is kind of a special case because I wrote about 120,000 words for a single project, which is very unusual for me; I almost exclusively write short one-shots. Let's discount that project for a moment, because 'another fandom has finally dethroned Top Gear after eighteen years' sounds a lot more impressive than 'another fandom has finally de-second-placed Top Gear after Top Gear got knocked into second place nine years ago'.