Tag Archives: so many

Do you have any writing tips? I’ve just started writing Loudtat fanfiction, and I’m not that good at writing. Is there any do’s and don’t’s?

Leave a comment

Hmmmm well that’s really tough! FIRST OF ALL to quote @monstersinthecosmos on a similar post: 

Dude! Just write some stuff. 😀 😀 This is a teeny little sleepy fandom and it is so thirsty for more content, just do it! You can do it! We all want you to write fic!!!!!!

…Fanfiction is awesome to flex your writing muscles a bit and get some practice in, and it’s helpful because it invites attention and feedback. It’s also easy to apply flash fiction or drabbles to fanfic because we don’t need exposition and backstory. Like, yeah! WE GET IT, WE KNOW! Quit dicking around and just jump into the story, we already want it! This is so valuable when it comes to just getting WRITING done and you really don’t even need a plot. You can elaborate on the teeniest mental images, headcanons, goofy or angsty situations, and that’s all it has to be! No one expects it to win a Pulitzer, it’s okay if it isn’t perfect!

In fact!!!!!!!!!! It shouldn’t be perfect! And you are not going to get better if you do not start somewhere!

I still get really nervous when I post fics and I doubt my abilities BASICALLY CONSTANTLY ALL THE TIME LOL but good and bad feedback are imperative to honing your craft and learning your strengths and finding things to fix. PLUS LIKE, it can really help to motivate you if you get some people on your side who like what you’re doing! Like I am consistently sappy and overwhelmed by the response to my fics and it’s what keeps me writing. 🙂  🙂  🙂  🙂

Anyway idk man, here’s an ungraceful dismount to my post lmfao but, listen!

Write! Do it! Share it with us we are thirsty.

^*APPLAUDS* Rules are made to be broken. Write the way you want! I had a teacher who told me that to begin a sentence with “And” was blasphemy, illegal. punishable by DEATH practically, but I know Anne Rice does it OFTEN, in published fiction, so that teacher was wrong. Maybe she was just trying to start us off with the rules so we could then break them. Probably that.

BTW I’ll reblog a really good graphic I saw once that described different types of fanfic.

So my advice?

image

Even though I write fanfic myself, I have my own tastes about it. Writing fic is an art in itself, you’re creating smtg, like sculpture or cooking, and as such it’s very subjective. There are courses taught on writing in schools at all levels, books written about writing, so while I can’t give you a thorough and objective answer in a short blog post… I can give you this much and NO CUTS WE LONGPOST LIKE MEN.

For me, writing is about 1 or more of these basic setups, sometimes combined and interwoven:

  • (a) presenting a problem and exploring it,
  • (a) presenting a problem, exploring it, and (b) offering a solution,
  • (a) presenting a problem, exploring it, (b) offering what the author feels is a BAD solution and (c.) showing the consequences of that bad solution.

^That’s all you really need. Everything else is in service to that. Even the fluffiest fanfic has some issue, even if that issue is just, “What shirt am I going to wear tonight?” Mundane, probably, but hey, it’s still a decision that needs to be made! 😉

~My-own-taste-based advice on writing fanfic~

  • Fluff tastes better with at least a dash of angst, Angst tastes better with at least a dash of fluff, etc. A friend of mine took a cooking class and was told that salt brings out the flavor in other ingredients. I definitely think that corresponds with fic. I’m not saying to use every ingredient at your disposal, but in an angsty scene, can you toss in one character trying to placate the other by doing smtg fluffy, idk, bringing them flowers? 
image

^X A flower offering might get rejected by the recipient in the scene (or it could provide ammunition!), but just the act of doing that can enhance the scene by so much. I MEAN LOOK AT THIS PICTURE. Is there not a rich story here??

  • Use epithets sparingly. PLEASE just use their names if you don’t want to use their gender pronouns. I can’t tell you how far it kicks me out of a fic when I see “the elder vampire” or “the brunette” so many times in close proximity bc it fixates the reader on those characteristics, which generally have nothing to do with the scene itself. YES I KNOW SHE’S OLDER/YES I KNOW HER HAIR IS BROWN. SO WHAT?? Even when it’s two characters of the same gender in a scene alone together, your reader can usually figure out by context which “he” you mean when you write: “he reached up and touched his shoulder” One way to do it is by leading with one of the characters in the para, so it’s clear who’s doing the actions in it, ’[Name 1] tentatively went in for a hug. He reached up and touched his shoulder.’ In the next para, the other character can take over the action. ’[Name 2] batted the offending hand away. “Don’t touch me!”’
  • “Said” is not a curse word. Go ahead and use other words for “said,” but too many ‘“Oh!” she cried’ ‘“Oh!” she moaned’ also kicks me out of a fic bc I become more aware of the writer sitting there trying to impress me. “Said” is just a notification that it’s a spoken word, let me breeze past it, it’s okay, really. Don’t let your “said” substitutes do so much of the work that the words of dialogue should be shouldering.
  • Purple prose when it matters. A fic with all dialogue and little descriptive details can read like a report. If you’re going for that, good! But purple prose adds texture and helps immerse the reader. Readers don’t need it in every para and every line of dialogue, it tends to slow down the action. It can be used to great effect, maybe describing the interior of a room gives a nice pregnant pause in the dialogue to increase the tension. Just don’t drown the reader with it unless you’re doing it for a reason.


To return to my earlier point, What is the purpose of your fic? Even if you’re just aiming for the fluffiest fic, I feel like it gives it a little extra substance if there’s some underlying thing/moment you’re exploring. 

I did a fic about Louis, Lestat, and Claudia getting ready for Halloween, but I also included some exploration of Claudia getting upset and missing her mother, and that led to her being informed that Louis and Lestat also missed their own mothers. It’s one of those defining but subtle moments in everyone’s life, when you realize your parents were also children with parents of their own. So the fic was not just about the premise “dressing up for Halloween,” but what other things that could stir up, and what we can reveal about the characters whether or not it was explicitly given to us in canon. In this instance, we didn’t get this in canon, this was in the interstices of canon.

Anon, start slow, dip your toe in, look at fic you love and try to figure out what makes it so good for you! Don’t be afraid to fail.

I’ve collected some somewhat more objective things in my #on writing tag, so you might try there, but again, those are things that I probably agree with, too 😉

Have you read any good Louis/ Lestat fics that you would recommend?

Leave a comment

Fanfic?? there’s no such thing as VC fanfic… pfffft. What are you crazy honestly??! J/k it’s out there. *blows kisses at AO3* 

Recommendations…

image

Thanks for asking! I haven’t had a fanfic rec request in awhile. 

However, as far as “good L/L fics,” that is wholly and wildly subjective. The danger of recommending any fic runs the same risk of doing those Follow Forever posts, which I don’t do, because I’ve seen ppl who were left out feel hurt and excluded. 

Recommending fic feels slightly different to me bc it’s up to every reader whether they like something or not, and I don’t read every fic with that pairing. My closer VC friends and I happen to agree on many favorite fics and that’s been wonderful, but please ask other ppl for recommendations, too. Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment with recs!

My tags:

Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) has a mission statement about protecting fanworks from copyright infringement arguments, so I feel pretty safe recc’ing stuff that’s on there:

  • Gulfport: A British Petroleum Fanfic (Part One) by hw_campbell_jnr – There are 2 parts and it’s incomplete but this is devastatingly beautiful long!fic. Hipster modern Lestat and Louis, Lestat going by a pseudonym, politics woven in, it’s just too good. It annoys me how good it is. I am annoyed. I would be less annoyed if it were COMPLETED.

Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment with recs.

Hi, I’m doing this project thing for class on IWTV and basically I have to analyze and write essays about themes, characterization, symbols, etc. on a bunch of different passages from our chosen book. I’ve done a lot but I still have some left to do and kinda have run out of ideas for the last of them. Do you have any favorite scenes/lines/moments/passages/excerpts from the book or any that stand out/you find particularly deep and meaningful? Thanks for the help (:

Leave a comment

Hmmm, this is a tough one! There are so many. I’m curious to know which you chose already!

image

It changes over time, but just skimming IWTV, these are some consistently favorite moments of mine. I think some of them are deep and meaningful, but what’s deep and meaningful to me may not be to you. We all sort of have a conversation with books, you bring your own experiences and tastes and see what matches up with the story you’re reading. Sometimes the story can expand your intellectual palette! It’s done that for me.

What makes a moment (scenes/lines/moments/passages/excerpts/etc.) a fave for me is the mixture of comedy and tragedy, so I’m drawn to parts where Lestat is insulting Louis, or they’re fighting with exquisite tension and clever dialogue, or bits of vampire physiology, or heartwrenching stuff. 

While I’m less interested in things like artful descriptions or didactic lessons from the author, each VC book is a mixture of many things, and I obviously love the series as a whole and in parts. Fave moments, for me, are like amazing desserts in which you can’t always figure out what the ingredients were, it’s just DELICIOUS and you gotta have MORE.

I was going through IWTV and selecting passages but I’m doing too many! Here’s the first few that come to mind, in no particular order, which is a very small fraction of all my fave moments:

  • Lestat telling Louis that he needs to grow up and quit pining for his mortal life: “’You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth.’”
  • Louis grappling with Lestat over Lestat wanting to kill Freneire. Wrestling in the mud and the cold!
  • Louis appreciating Daniel’s tape recorder (“Marvelous contraption, really”) and doing/saying other little things that make him seem

    anachronistic

    (” “That is, how would you say today … bullshit?” “)

  • When Louis discovers mortal Claudia, he mentions that he hears a dog that he could take instead (”But there were alternatives: rats abounded in the streets, and somewhere very near a dog was howling hopelessly. I might have fled the room had I chosen and fed and gotten back easily.”), but he’s drawn to her. He’s been malnourished for some 4 yrs, the inner demon pulling him to a human victim is sick and tired of junk food, it wants AN ENTRÉE ffs!
  • Louis finding Lestat post-trial under TDV clutching Claudia’s yellow dress! ;A; Heartwrenching!
  • Armand showing Louis he really can climb a tower, just try it! So motivational.
  • Lestat’s blind dad in general, how they had to pretend to eat dinner to humor him, how Louis was so nice and gentle with him and put him out of his misery when the time came ;A;
  • Louis telling Lestat he had to leave the plantation bc there was going to be an uprising, and Lestat responds with such a perfect slew of insults that are actually surprisingly accurate: “ `You want me gone! You,’ he sneered. He was building a card palace on the dining room table with a pack of very fine French cards. `You whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were people and standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and you smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a baffled idiot at the zoo.‘” 

A few more under the cut* 

Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment with their own fave moments ;]

*From when I was starting at the beginning of the book and pulling faves but only got to p. 13 and had 4 already, so I had to stop doing that or I’d have more many than too many.

After Paul dies, Louis talking about his sister, how she felt like she had to act a certain way bc society expected it. This was one of the first things cluing me into the whole idea of disregarding societal expectations, bc what good did it do her to pretend?

“People in society asked my sister offensive questions about the whole incident, and she became an hysteric. She wasn’t really an hysteric. She simply thought she ought to react that way, so she did.”  

The first time Louis really describes Lestat:

He came in from the courtyard, opening the French doors without a sound,
a tall fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality to his movements. And gently, he draped a shawl over my sister’s eyes and lowered the wick of the lamp… His gray eyes burned with an incandescence, and the long white hands which hung by his sides were not those of a human being… the moment I saw him, saw his extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I’d ever known, I was reduced to nothing. 

When Lestat is about to turn Louis, it’s so endearing, and there’s comedy in here, as well as some dubious consent, it’s just excellent.

But there was no time for courage. Or shall I say, there was no time in Lestat’s plan for anything but his plan. `Now listen to me, Louis,’ he said, and he lay down beside me now on the steps, his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover. I recoiled… 

…I wanted to struggle, but he pressed so hard with his fingers that he held
my entire prone body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at rebellion, he sank his teeth into my neck.”

Omg, Lestat telling his dad to get off his back about his lifestyle is priceless:

“[Lestat] was in his father’s bedroom meantime, telling the old man good-bye, that he would return in the morning. ‘But where do you go, why must you live by such a schedule!’ the old man demanded, and Lestat became impatient.

… `I take care of you, don’t I? I’ve put a better roof over your head
than you ever put over mine! If I want to sleep all day and drink all night, I’ll do it, damn you!’ The old man started to whine.”

A Note on #VC Casting

Leave a comment

That feel when you’d rather answer questions all day in a state of weird and pleasurable natural – albeit caffeinated – high rather than attempt to do any real productive Work for your Job. 

I just want to mention, and please take this completely w/o attitude bc I do not intend any attitude here: I get a number of VC Casting ideas on a regular basis, and I do enjoy them a lot! But if you don’t see an answer for yours it’s either bc:

  1. I haven’t had a chance to research the actor yet; 
  2. I researched the actor and they don’t reeeally work for me and I’m trying to come up with another role for them so I can still answer publicly; or,

  3. I researched the actor and they don’t work for me and I can’t think of another role for them, so I might have to let it go unanswered or just delete it. 

If you haven’t seen your Ask answered, and it’s been a long time, it may have been a #3 sacrifice. Not every male violinist can be the illustrious Nicolas de Lenfent! But you are more than welcome to post your own casting ideas, and tag them #VC Casting, and I will be tracking that tag so I might reblog from your blog ;D

(I’m only talking about casting in terms of the physical attributes of the actors and their acting abilities, not their personal lives.)

As we all know, casting is highly subjective, and “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” What a terribly boring world it would be if we all fell for the exact same faces! 

The whole thing stirs up beauty as a concept. We argue whether Louis’s hair is long and straight, and chestnut in color, like in movie!IWTV, or that it’s shoulder-length, wavy and raven black as described in canon. In some fanart it’s drawn just long and black and silky straight, in some, it’s short and curly! 

In considering VC Casting, we will have to make compromises, it’s unlikely that whoever is cast will look or be styled sufficiently to please everyone. I have my own subjective ideals for beauty and how the characters should look, don’t take any of my opinions personally (unless you want to agree with me!), I would never want to cause anyone discomfort simply because I disagree with their choice.

Whoever is finally cast, let’s try to give the actors a chance to do their jobs and try to keep in mind that these are fictional characters, and the movie people want us to enjoy their product, and buy the BluRay of it, and make a cult classic out of it, and all that jazz.

More on beauty under the cut.

My 8 year old cousin just told me on Saturday night, right in the middle of a lovely collage session in which we were cutting up models from Seventeen and making fashion plates, that she wished she had “straight blonde hair.” She said curly hair was ugly. Her hair is perfect Louis de Pointe du Lac hair to me, brunette and maybe a little lighter than his, but silky and slightly wavy to her shoulders, then descending like a little bubbling waterfall into the most perfect little shining curls for about 4 inches. Oooh purple prose! But I had to paint a picture since I can’t post one here, so let me be briefly flowery just for the sake of description, ok?

I knew I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for her concern, because telling her “But you have beautiful French girl hair!” “But mine is just like yours! Is mine ugly?” would have meant nothing in the face of a culture that forces certain ideals of beauty at us from such an early age. She said “I wish my hair was straight and blonde,” as if that would solve all her major problems, so that she could then go on to tackle the important ones. 

She then followed it up with “- like my dance teacher Lilly.” Ah! Now it was clear! She wanted to look like someone she deeply respects and appreciates! Hopefully that’s really where it’s coming from and not the mass media trying to convince us all from an early age that our inadequacies are many and can only be overcome with dye, paint, etc. I admit that I wear makeup, but for me, it’s more like war paint, and bc I enjoy the art of it.

I told her anyway, “My best friend has straight black hair, and she told me that many girls like her get their hair professionally curled, they pay a lot of money to try to get their hair curly like yours.”

“Really?” said my 8 year old cousin.

“Really.” I said.

She seemed somewhat pleased with this factoid and we went back to our art project, but still… It just brought up this whole beauty topic. It’s not resolved, the conversation is far from over, but at least we started it. 

Which songs remind you of the vampire chronicles / characters / pairings ?

Leave a comment

Oh gosh. SO MANY.

image

Well for a little appetizer, Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon St.” was inspired by IWTV! It’s from Louis’ POV.

And of course there’s “Arsonist’s Lullaby” by Hozier, which reminds me of Louis who kinda has a thing for fire…

“Someone edited R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” to be in major instead of minor and it is absurd.” [X] Very much reminds me of Lestat! Give it a listen, be patient w/ it, it’s worth the effort!

https://player.vimeo.com/video/57685359?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

I have so many VC feels w/ music, can you be more specific? You might find what you’re looking for here:

  • Music Lestat motorcycles to – Music and music-related things he loves, pics that he might have taken on long rides (like this one), some of which don’t have lyrics that are specifically Lestatuesque, but he gets smtg out of them, whether it be the beats, melodies, singer’s voices, etc.
  • VC Fanmix – fanmixes others have done for certain ships or characters (or mixes that seemed VC-adjacent to me).
  • Music – the larger music tag.

Bonus: Michael Bolton’s “How can we be lovers?” is so L/L!

People Off The Page, feel free to reblog and add your recs!