So, despite the fact that CQL/MDZS is by far my most-read fandom, I think that the clearest influence on my own writing is The Way Down by lettered. 

 

When I was noodling around with the structure and atmosphere of singing through the dark, I kept going back to the repetition embedded in The Way Down and how it changes throughout the story. That’s the kind of poetic flourish I love using in prose work and I think it shifted my thoughts about what’s possible in fic. 

 

While it most clearly influenced the structure of singing through the dark, that line of thinking was also part of how I built the structure of on a long journey. Throughout that story, I wanted to echo the way poetry often holds different lines and stanzas in tension and builds meaning through sometimes hidden connections. 

 

In a lot of ways, singing through the dark and on a long journey have been my most technically ambitious stories to date, and they both owe a lot to the way The Way Down influenced my writing brain!