As you might know, I got my start writing fiction in the fanfic world, writing Sons of Anarchy fic on fanfiction.net and AO3 as “laughingwarrior.” I took all that down around the time that I published Move the Sun, but I’m happy for you to read it, if it’s something you’re interested in.
From November 2012 to August 2013, I wrote 10 fics, most of them novel length, all of them occurring in the same AU (alternate universe). My first fic, The Rose and the Thorn was my first attempt at writing fiction in about twenty-five years, and my first endeavor remotely as involved. It is entirely accurate to say that I learned to write fiction writing fanfic.
Over the course of writing these fics, becoming better and better at it as I went, I realized I had some talent, and that readers responded to the stories I had to tell and the way I told them, and I decided to give original fiction a whirl. That first attempt was Move the Sun.
I love my first fic, but I saw the novice moves and mistakes in it fairly quickly after I got a few hundred thousand words under my belt. I felt like I could have written the OFC (original female character) better, and that she deserved to be better. So I took her, wrote out the backstory I’d alluded to in the fic, and made her the female lead of my first original story. If you read The Rose and the Thorn, my very first fic, that’s why you’ll recognize Lilli.
She has the same childhood in the fic that she has in MTS. She’s the same woman, with the same personality. My premise in reclaiming her for MTS was a question: what if she had chosen a different path in college? In The Rose and the Thorn, she went to grad school and became a professor (yes, I was totally self-inserting, ugh). In Move the Sun, she chose the military.
Anyway, that’s why you’ll recognize her. The stories themselves aren’t related at all, except that there are bikers.
Here are my old fics, approximately in the order in which I wrote them:
- The Rose and the Thorn (novel-length, Opie and Lilli): RoseandThorn
- Make Me Right (novel-length, Juice and Frank, Part 1): make-me-right
- Phoenix (novel-length, Happy and Vivian): phoenix
- Right Now (novel-length, Juice and Frank, Part 2): right-now
- Danger and Play (novel-length, Tig and Desi): danger-and-play
- Sandpiper (novel-length, Chibs and Laura): sandpiper
- Hope & Happiness (novella-length, series of vignettes, Hap and Viv): hope-happiness
- Lost Hope (novel-length, Abel and Hope): lost-hope
- Regret and Promise (short, Tig and Desi): regret-and-promise
- Eating Crow (short story collection, focusing on Croweaters): eating-crow2
***Please note: There are around a million words total in these fics. I didn’t go back and re-edit all this, so I know there are typos and formatting glitches, and probably some stray Author’s Notes I missed deleting (publishing fanfic is a highly interactive endeavor). And remember that I was learning how to write fiction while I wrote these. I’m actually still learning how to write fiction, but back then I was starting from scratch. So please forgive the errors and rookie mistakes. 🙂