Now Playing: III-I. Reeling

A cup of tea, a bowl of soup, and AO3. Truly, the happy single girl's equivalent of a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou. Or, to parody it better—— A bevy of fanfics on AO3, A cup of tea, a bowl of soup——just me!

Now Playing: II-XV, Preparatory

In which Ahsoka makes a decision, Rex is too trusting, Luke and Leia get up to mischief, and Padmé and Vader argue politics over Zoom, er, holo. Again.

When two straight hours of sitting and listening to presentations at a conference starts to wear on you...

Drawing lightsaber blades with just a black ballpoint pen was an interesting challenge!

I've been listening to Brandon Sanderson's Wax and Wayne series at work, and the kandra naming pattern reminded me of Plo Koon in Star Wars, so then my brain was like, "PloKoon? Plo as a kandra?"

What if he takes a bag of spare bones with him on campaigns during the Clone Wars, and one of the Wolfpack finds it one day—

Trooper: "Hey buir, do we want to know why you have a bag of bones under your bed?"

Plo: "Ah... those were from Little 'Soka's first hunt."

Trooper: "Um... okay, that makes sense for the nuna bones, but some of these look human, and I'm getting a little concerned for the safety of the 501st."

And yeah, the nuna bones probably are from Ahsoka's first hunt. She gave them to him the way kids give grownups useless little things they find or make. Plo of course treasures them, and they're secretly his favorite bones.

Also, just saying, being a kandra would allow Plo to survive Order 66. He would just have to sneak off as a mistwraith.

(Not sure how you explain a Force-sensitive kandra, or how a kandra got out of the Cosmere and into the SW universe in the first place, but anyways.)

Now playing: III-XVI. Desperate Measures

In which Padmé makes her desperate call, Luke and Leia are having a grand old time, and circumstance forces Vader to return to Tatooine.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/33008734/chapters/163911436

20 Questions For Writers

Thank you, @sinvulkt! I saw someone else post one of these a while ago, and it looked fun, so thanks so much for the tag! 💛💛💛

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

Seven. Technically eight, but one of them is part of another and just separated for logistical reasons, so it doesn't really count.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

190,105 words

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Star Wars

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Fortune's Rule, 536 kudos

Missing Pieces No More, 142

Whispers From Tomorrow, 126

Petrichor, 42

Threadbare, 30

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Most of the time! Sometimes it takes a while because busy + tired, but I enjoy it when other authors respond to my comments, so I want to respond other people's comments. :)

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Probably Threadbare. Wouldn't say it's a full-on angsty ending, because I tend to go for angsty beginnings/middles and happy endings, but it's the closest I've got.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Whispers From Tomorrow, by virtue of it being a pre-Order-66 fix-it.

8. Do you get hate on your fic?

I've gotten a little. You know how FFN can be. There was this one kinda funny one instance where somebody was silent for like 20 chapters, and then absolutely flipped their lid in a comment after I killed off a character. Not even a main character! Oops....

9. Do you write smut?

Nope.

10. Do you write crossovers?

Not as a rule, but I did start scribbling down this weird idea for Anne Shirley, from Anne of Green Gables, ending up in the GFFA during the Clone Wars via some witchery in the Haunted Wood. What gets me is how I told my brother about it, and he promptly started nagging me to write it because he wants to read it XD

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, but feel free to do so if you're interested!

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

No.

14. What‘s your all-time favourite ship?

Meh, not really a big shipper.

15. What’s the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

WIP I will never finish? What are you talking about?

There are no unfinished WIPS in Ba Sing Se.

Seriously, though, probably my Padmé ROTS time loop fic. I had this idea for Padmé to keep looping back to some point in ROTS after she dies. I love the idea, it's roughly outlined and I've written some snippets, and there's this one scene that I'd really like to include, but I'm just not sure how to make the time loop AU work in this scenario.

16. What’s your writing strengths?

Grammar, usage, and mechanics. And maybe angst, oddly enough. Never figured myself for an angst writer, but then I started writing Fortune's Rule, and here we are.

17. What’s your writing weaknesses?

Speed. I write slowly. I also tend to end up going down research rabbit holes that suck up my time and energy. And I have a really hard time saying no to adding more characters, which adds to the whole writing-takes-a-long-time thing.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Sure! I've enjoyed putting little bits of Mando'a and Huttese into Fortune's Rule.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Calico Captive, by Elizabeth George Speare, when I was in my early teens. Never managed to get a whole fic out of it, and what fragments I did write were terribly underdeveloped, sentimental, and shallow. But we all have to start somewhere!

20. Favourite fic you’ve ever written?

Fortune's Rule, all the way! I know it's not finished yet, but it is my precious and my problem child, and I love it to bits!

In a way, it's a very self-indulgent story, because it's got all the tropes I most adore, and it's like a puzzle, trying to figure out how to put all these different elements together in a way that's believable, and how to have characters develop to where I want them to be.

Plus, it's also given me some fun surprises, like Padmé and Ahsoka being besties, Ventress becoming Obi-Wan's confidant for a certain matter, and Piett becoming a friend/confidant/emotional support admiral for Starkiller.

And there's so much more fun stuff planned, especially as we're getting close the start of an arc I've been planning since before I started posting the fic in 2021! (There will be child hijinks. There will be pirates. There will be sand, and angst and fluff galore. And I am so kriffing excited.)

Tagging (If you're interested! I'm doing like sinvulkt and tagging some authors I've interacted with a bit on AO3; hope this isn't a nuisance to anyone! :) ) @musewrangler, @clawedandcute, @xxiamnotokay666xx

Art: Mother and Daughter

Padmé and Jobal Naberrie.

Sketched in pencil on watercolor paper, outlined in pen, and then used paintbrushes to fill in with pigment from Derwent Inktense blocks. I've barely touched the Inktense blocks since receiving them about ten years ago, so it was really cool to actually, finally use them for a finished piece, rather than just messing around! They worked super well for both intense and subtle coloring, too.

The scene is based on the image from the Wookieepedia Legends page for Padmé's mausoleum.

Something funky's going on with Padmé and Jobal's arms, and the angle of the stone under the stained glass ended up a little off somehow, but on the whole, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out! (Especially Padmé's cloak; I don't quite know how that happened, but glad it did!) The stained glass worked out much better than expected, and Inktense was a really nice medium for getting the tonal variations. Could just be me, but it seemed easier to move around on the page than watercolor, which made it more forgiving if an area ever became too light or too dark.

The way Vader speaks differently from Anakin, not just accent but diction, makes me wonder how the heck he picked that up. Did Palpatine decide, "You must speak properly and menacingly, my disappointingly casual apprentice"?

Or, oh geez, did Vader actually start voluntarily looking up higher-level vocabulary and practicing stiff, formal sentence construction, just so he could avoid sounding like Anakin?

Well, he's nothing if not extra.

When Obi-Wan inevitably finds out about this voluntary study in the Force ghost afterlife, he really wishes he were sufficiently corporeal to bang his head on the wall, because how many years did he spend trying to help Anakin with linguistic skills, and now he decides they're actually useful?

"Wrongful Death"

Finally sketched out the scene that pops into my head every day on my commute!

There's this billboard on the way to where I work, advertising an attorney who deals with wrongful death cases, and every time I pass that billboard, I see this poor, bewildered attorney looking on as Padmé, Satine, Fives, and a whole lot of other clones and Jedi pack into his office, shouting and jostling and trying to get him to take their case. It's been months since the billboard first went up, but I finally managed to remember it when I was at home, with access to art stuff, and in a sketchy mood!

All Our Scattered Remnants

Threadbare, oneshot on AO3

Ahsoka stared into her mirror. An old woman stared back at her. “You’ve outlived your usefulness,” she observed to the crone in the mirror. “Outlived your friends, and even your enemies. Why are you still hanging on?” Aged and world-weary, Ahsoka sets out to see the galaxy and rouse herself from her melancholy. At the end of her journey, she heeds the call of the Force and ventures to Jakku, where she encounters a Force-sensitive young girl. Ahsoka is not going to take a padawan. (But then, neither was her master, and look how that turned out.)

Yet another side project, yes. I developed this weird urge to write Ahsoka as a jaded old woman.

I'm planning to make this a short oneshot series.

Haven't seen the ST, maybe shouldn't be writing this under those circumstances, but the degree to which I care is limited, so. We'll see how this goes.