#jacqui goes off on some tangents everyone regrets

[wily-one24]

A (for Paint it Black), F, R, S, T

How did you come up with the title to [Paint It Black]?

I don’t think it was a very big process. I had written, probably, about one or two chapters of it before it was named. By the time I realised it was going to be bigger than I had first imagined, the theme had set in. And... after that... I couldn’t really get the song out of my head. 

I mean, that whole “I have suffered a great loss and my despair is so big that I am literally offended by everyone else’s happiness and I don’t know what to do other than try to turn everything else black” is pretty much the beginning of Regina’s entire story line, no?

Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Oh, wow, ok, that’s hard to do off the top of my head. There are so MANY different dialogues, do I go for the funny or the angsty or the hot? Which ones? *the stress*  

Ok, you know what, let’s make it a theme, let’s just go PIB with this one, too. Which, oh, so many to choose from... but... let’s go this snippet off the top of my head. I’m proud of it because... I don’t know, sometimes I like to really push the characters into a corner and see the truths they have desperately scrambled come flying out against their wills, and jfc, sometimes Snow can be so blind and I think maybe doesn’t want to see the truth and needs a bit of it slapped into her, but also... this is a conversation that desperately needed to happen on the show, perhaps not quite as angsty and hate fuelled as this one, but there you go:

Standing above her, Regina is monstrous. She’s always been tall, always been bigger, more times than not she’s been threatening. But like this, Snow wonders if she’s played the wrong hand, if Regina really might kill her.

“I never cared for you, either of you.” Regina hisses the words, pushed past the point of pretense. “The sniveling little brat and her bastard father.”

“No.” The end of magic leaves no reprieve as Snow is hit with words instead. “My father was a good man!”

She does not have time to stand.

“To you!” Regina screams it, more unbalanced than Snow has ever seen her and so she stays on the ground. “To you and to your poor dead mother, the perfect wife. Was he a good man to the frightened girl whose hand he forced against her will? Was he a good man when he took everything else against her will? And then punished her for it? Was he?”

Snow shakes her head, she can’t hear this.

“Yes, I killed him.” Regina seethes. “He deserved it. And you deserve to be punished, so does your daughter and everyone else tainted by his blood.”

Dizzy, scared, panic overriding the common sense she thought would save her, Snow gasps as she crawls backwards crablike on her hands.

“Even Henry?”

This stops Regina cold.

Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

I knew someone was going to ask this. This is a difficult question for me to answer. And not because I’m deliberately being difficult, but because I subsume a LOT of different works. And yeah, I am absolutely sure some of them (all of them) have influenced my writing over time. I cannot point to one exact place and say... hey, that’s it, that’s where I got it. L.M. Montgomery, Enid Blyton, Ann M Martin, Anne Rice, G.R.R. Martin, Stephen King, James Patterson, James Clavell, Dan Brown... these are all writers I have gone through phases of just consuming everything they’ve written. And that’s not even mentioning the tomes and tomes of fanfic I have read in the last decade or two. So much fanfic. 

Maybe one writer here or there gave me the courage to experiment, because I saw it in their book/fic, but I cannot for the life of me remember each and every name and I wish I could, but I cannot. I have experimented with second person, past tense, present tense, etc... and I have found a groove that works for me. A bit of this and a bit of that.

Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

In terms of reading? I guess I am a sucker for the angsty slow burn, the fake relationship. Gimme, gimme, gimme. 

For writing? I think my readers would probably be able to pick up my tropes better than I can, but... definitely angst. No matter what else, there’s always angst. 

Any fandom tropes you can’t stand?

There are probably things I generally don’t write... I tend to just write the ideas that come into my head. But I don’t think there’s anything I have specifically banned myself from writing. There are several pieces out there that I, myself, would never have thought to write, but wrote on a challenge or dare from someone else and are actually quite good. Like... I once wrote a (canon, NOT AU, think about that) tentacle porn fic for VM. That’s a challenge as a writer, right there. Also, there may be one or two weird little anon pieces in the OUAT anon fic kink meme that belong to me that I WILL NEVER ADMIT TO. But I like. Also not what I would have written, but there you go. 

As for reading? I generally stay far away from ABO type things, I don’t like cross overs, Teen/high school/college AU. In terms of fandoms, things like “modern AU” piss me off. I watch the show for a reason, gimme those characters in THAT SETTING or go away. I also steer clear of a lot of “cheating” fics, that’s a person thing, and I try not to get too invested in kid/baby fics, but that’s just me nit picking, because I have rarely read anyone who writes children well. Some that are catastrophic, like having a NEWBORN FUCKING BABY reaching out and grasping hold of things or eating food. Like, no, people, no. If you don’t know kids, just don’t write them. Just... don’t. 

#jacqui goes off on some tangents everyone regrets #its-rowark