How do you come up with chapter/story titles?
At the last minute and through relentless trial and error for the most part. I have a hard time coming up with titles that are relevant and succinct without feeling pretentious to me and much like with character names, it usually takes a while of working with a name for me to really get comfortable with it. My chapters in particular are often just called chapter 1, 2, 3 etc. until - and sometimes beyond - it's time to finalize them. As a result, I'm a big fan of coming up with some sort of overarching theme to apply to chapter names in my chaptered fics, since that way I can extrapolate the next name out of the previous one rather than having to go through the whole trial and error process each time.
Do you maintain a publishing schedule for your fic(s)? If so, how does yours work?
Only if I already have multiple chapters' worth of material written up ahead of time. In those cases, one per week or one per two weeks are the usual basic I work off, varied by reader interest and activity.
What words, or phrases, do you use too much?
Small interjections like 'However' and 'although' are regular offenders. In phrases 'on the other hand', 'as well as', and 'the fact that' are also quite common. I'm sure I have more, but I'd have to pay closer attention to my writing habits to ferret them out.
How do you get past a rut in the planning stages of your fic?
It depends on the cause of the rut. If I'm in a rut over wording or expressing the idea right, I'll just lay down a rough framework (typically bulletpoints) and either skip over to a different part of the idea or leave the clean write for later; if it's a rut of getting ideas out at all, I'll usually take a break away from the planning and let it hang on the back burner while I focus on other things. Things like this have a tendency to pop back up and develop on their own for me when given time, so if nothing's coming out it's usually a sign that the well's run dry for a while.
What was your main motivation for joining the Serebii forums? Was it the stories you read, the community, or just a whim? If it was the stories, which one was it?
In my case, I actually joined twice. The first time was way back when 4th gen announcements were just starting to come out and was purely on a whim as I recall. I was just curious about some of the things going on around the forums, so I made an account and got a few posts in. Then real life got in the middle and I took an extended break from the fandom as a whole and by the time I thought of the forums again, my original account name and verification information were long lost to the ravages of time, leading to my second joining. At first, I just poked around to see how sections I had lurked at were doing, and gradually I got more and more interested about the discussion going on in fanfic. The triggering incident was reading Negrek's Salvage though. It had been a long while since I lost track of time reading fanfic, so by the time I put it down I just knew I had to get in and say my piece. Then once the initial barrier of setting up an account was behind me, I spotted a bunch of Author's café topics that caught my eye and then one thing led to another. Salvage was what gave me that initial push though.
Have you ever tried/want to write some other fandom besides Pokémon?
Besides Pokémon, what is your favorite fandom, and would you ever want to write a story within that fandom?
These two questions are very much in the same vein, so I'll just go ahead and give a one for two answer here and say I'm not actually that much of a fandom person usually. I have a ton of different game series that appeal to me, but I don't actually keep contact with the fanbase in all that many of them, and the ones I do do it for are mostly strategy games that interest me mechanically rather than narratively, so pass on the favorite fandom I suppose. I do get inspirations when I read, watch, or play something I enjoy all the time though, so I've at least dabbled with writing for most fandoms I've enjoyed.
That being said, Persona is a series I pick up and bounce ideas around for all the time. Tarot has always fascinated me as a storytelling tool, and when you throw in the delightfully alien aesthetic with the shadows and the series' potential for using environment and creatures as a tool for characterization there's a lot of appeal to go around. It also shares some common characteristic with pokémon in that it feels like a lot of these things are only lightly touched upon in canon, which leaves a lot of comfortably wide gaps for me to work with.
More specifically, I've toyed with the idea of trying to diverge from my normal creative process by writing a chaptered Persona fic where each chapter corresponds to a different major arcana from tarot. The idea is to firstly work with a set length (Prologue + 21 chapters tops) and secondly set soft limits on the wider dramatic arc of the story (through the arcana associations), both things I normally leave wide open when I write. Needless to say there's plenty of ways it can go horribly wrong, not least by winding up overly pretentious because of the arcana thing, so it's not really something I've planned to put out for general reading, but I'm hoping it'll be good exercise and it'd be nice to finally get some of my ideas for the fandom (and my enjoyment of tarot) into writing.
Thank you so much! Now I know the direction I want to go; it's just a matter of actually getting going XD
