Finally getting around to answering the writing meme questions. Thanks for asking and sorry for the delay… my travel connections yesterday were a lot tighter than I was anticipating.

2. Favorite piece overall?

Hmm… I think The Tree of Knowledge is probably the best-written, but The Abyss Gazes Also has a special place in my heart because it’s still the longest thing I’ve ever written, including my dissertation. It has been a labor of love, pain, and trying to get some people to fucking read it instead of complaining on Tumblr about how there’s no fanfic about what happened to Loki during the year between Thor and The Avengers, no fic about what happened between him and Thanos, no fic where Loki does cool stuff and uses his powers…

10. Favorite line or lines of dialogue that you’ve written

Since “lines” is an option, I’m going to be self-indulgent and pick several.

From my first fic, The Third Time, Loki talking to Thor: “You want to know where it all went wrong before you lose the chance forever. And you want to know whom you’ll be mourning when I’m gone. So here’s your answer: it was all me—all the lies, the schemes, the illusions. I don’t believe in souls, and I don’t believe in true selves. My brain is a bag full of cats, remember? Well, it’s cats all the way down.”

From “Abyss,” Thanos to Loki: “You still fear madness. You think it a dangerous weakness. But I will show you: madness is strength. It is a danger to others, yes, but not to you. It is your safety. It is your only safety.”

And then a really long one from Starting Over, my fantasy Thorki version of Thor and Loki’s reunion after TDW (which is, in my humble estimation, better written than Ragnarok), Loki ranting to Thor about Odin:

“Let me enumerate his sins. He lied to me all my life about who and what I am. He could have told me at any point during my childhood—he could have explained to me why I was so often ill as a child, why I could never bear the heat, why things frosted over when I was angry or afraid. But instead he let me find out under the worst possible circumstances—when I was fighting for my life against them, fighting for our lives—that I am the kin of our most hated enemies, a creature that I had always been taught to regard as savage, vicious, cowardly, scarcely better than a beast. He claimed that he never told me ‘because he wanted to protect me from the truth,’ ‘because he never wanted me to feel different.’ Well, he failed spectacularly at that, didn’t he? And then he conveniently fell asleep when I needed him most, leaving me with a weight of responsibility that would have been difficult enough to bear even if I hadn’t just had my entire sense of my identity shattered, but since I had… well.”

Loki paused his tirade, apparently just for breath, but Thor still took the opportunity to try to calm him down. “Loki, please…”

“Oh, but I’m not finished yet!” Loki stood up from the throne and began walking toward Thor, slowly and inexorably, taking a turn at driving him back. “When he did finally wake to see how well the little Jötun foundling had ruled in his absence—which is to say, when he woke to find me suspended over an abyss, in the physical as well as every other sense—all he could think to say to me was ‘No.’ And then, when I returned after a year in the Void, having miraculously survived the suicide that he drove me to, did he ask me why I tried to invade Midgard? Did he ask me what had befallen me during the year I spent Urðr-knows-where? Of course not; he simply assumed I am as power-mad as the father he stole me from—as power-mad as the father who raised me—and threw me away, left me to die forgotten in the dungeons to hide his shame, the shame that he could not civilize the monster after all.”

Thor’s heart seemed to twist in his chest; this was what Loki thought of their father? Thor could hardly find it in himself to defend him, but still he felt obligated to make the attempt: “Loki, I’m sure that’s not what he…”

“And you still think two years’ exile in Midgard is enough? I suppose it must be, if three days was punishment enough for nearly starting a war…”

“Loki, listen to me, please,” Thor tried again; his attempts to rein in his brother’s mounting anger were growing increasingly desperate.

But Loki did not want to listen. “He never asked!” he repeated, his face contorted with rage and pain. “He never asked what happened to me, why I did what I did. ‘All this because Loki desired a throne’—that was all he needed to know. Did it never occur to him to ask why that throne? Did he never wonder why the boy who fell was not the man who returned? Was it what he’d expected from me all along? Why did he never ask?”