john_amend_all

20) Do you ever get bunnied from other people's stories or art in the same fandom?

Back when thisbluespirit was writing This Time Round stories, I think a lot of my stories were based on pinching concepts from hers and developing them. That sort of thing happened a lot in the Round, and I think it wasn't just because of the shared-universe setting; the format of USENET seems better suited to that kind of fanfic than a journal or archive site where a 'story' and a 'comment' are different things, and there's no guarantee that the same audience that read one work would read the other.

Another example was biichan's The Wake, in which an older Martha visits the Wheel and comforts Zoë. That was one inspiration for me to write The Logical Conclusion — the same scenario, but things don't end so well. (After I moaned yesterday about Zoë and her unhappy fate in spinoffs, it's probably not the best time to bring up that particular drabble, but at least I made it quick and painless. Fear not him that killeth, but him that hath power to cast into Hell).

19) When you have bunnies, do you sit down and start writing right away, or do you write down the idea for further use?

For the most part, I try to write the fic straight off — particularly if the bunny was a virulent one. I do have a couple of lists of mostly-generated prompts (from genremixer and my Unconventional Courtship generator), but they're more the exception than the rule.

In other news, Big Finish's last Companion Chronicle (the conclusion to their Zoë arc) is out. Judging by what I've seen on the forums, it's not something I'd like to listen to. *sigh* One of these days it would be nice if my pessimism regarding Zoë and spinoffs turned out to be misplaced.

17) Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?

As a rule, I don't try to think of a title until the rest of the fic is finished. That was something one of my schoolmasters told me when I was 10 or so, and it originally related to creating adventure games. Number of adventure games I've actually ever written = 0, but the advice about leaving the title till last stuck with me. Even so, they're usually a pain to come up with, and too often I end up posting the work under something bland and forgettable.

I usually leave chapters untitled, unless I can think of something particularly appropriate (such as in Thy Ravish'd Hair, where I took great pleasure in naming the two chapters "Goon Today" and "Hair Tomorrow".)

16) Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?

To answer the second question first: With difficulty, for the most part. Particularly when the fic has a nonstandard premise (for example, an alternate universe where the half the cast run a delicatessen and the other half dig drains) and I've got to come up with a concise description of it all.

I do try to make the effort, nonetheless, since I know how useful they are when I'm reading rather than writing. That said, I have two fics on AO3 which don't have a summary. Currently one has the second-highest hit count and third-highest kudos of all my fics, and the other has the third-highest hit count. Maybe I should take the summaries off some of the others and see what happens...

15) Warnings – What do you feel it most important to warn for, and what's the strangest thing you've warned for in a fic?

In general, I stick to spoiler warnings and the standard AO3 warning tags. Of the latter, the only one of which I've needed to use is 'Major Character Death'. This has given me pause for thought once or twice, because in a Universe containing Jack Harkness, the Master, and Dalek zombie puppets, major character death can be no more than a slap on the wrist. Losing Face was a candidate for my one and only non-con warning, but in the end I went for the 'chose not to use warnings' warning, because I'd deliberately left it ambiguous what happened between Michelle and Jamie when she had him at her mercy (ie, did she 'have' him at her mercy?)

Once or twice I've warned for less serious matters, such as 'crack pairings' on 22 Pairs. That's rather more tongue-in-cheek, of course, since I can't imagine too many readers who'd be left traumatised even by the thought of a pairing like One/Ben or Adric/Barbara.

14) Ratings – how high are you comfortable with going? Have you ever written higher? If you're comfortable with NC-17, have you ever been shocked by finding that the story you're writing is G-rated instead?

( Unrated )

13) Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

Regarding the first question, I tend to see fanon as building on canon rather than replacing it, so I'm not inclined to pick sides as the question seems to want me to.

The second question seems to be a wider version of question 7. Just as writing a character in a fanfic requires me to think about how and why they behave, the same is true for other aspects of a show's mechanism. When I was writing Ac Velut in Somnis, for example, I had to give myself a clear mental model of what rules the Knightmare dungeon operated under, what geographical relationship it had to Treguard's castle, and come up with a good reason why it was necessary for Rose and Lynda to wear Helmets of Justice. And (hopefully) avoid perpetrating infodumps in which I explained all the rules I'd just come up with.

12) Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" fic of a favourite book or movie but set in a different fandom?

That's more or less where I started — for a long time all my fic longer than about 200 words was in the form of Storytimes. I discussed these in my post of last December.

According to AO3, I have two other fics tagged 'fusion': The Horrible Thing, which explores the similarities between House from The Doctor's Wife and the Bad Tempered Thing from The Trap Door; and The Ace-Team, which... I really don't have an excuse for.

11) Genre – do you prefer certain genres of fic when you're writing? What kind do you tend to write most?

Certainly at one time, I had enough of a devotion to fixits to call myself john_amend_all. I also have a fondness, when writing longer fics, to make them murder mysteries. The great thing about a murder mystery is that it gives the protagonists a motivation to get involved, and a clear objective. The only bit that needs handwaving is why they're doing the detecting as opposed to the police.

Oh, and cake!fic, of course.