Daycare Maintenance (Sun/Moon x Reader)

QnA

Some questions were paraphrased during the making of this chapter. Questions from both Wattpad and Quotev were used.

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Q: What inspired your passion for writing?

It was my grade school that really got me interested in writing. Despite that school being a living nightmare to go to after 1st grade, one of their big curriculum changes was having kids learn to write creatively before they learned grammar. So, I was taught from a young age to not focus on grammar and just write what comes to me and I did. What really helped, but has also caused me problems, is I have a very powerful imagination, as my dad puts it. I can come up with lots of different scenarios in my head for all sorts of different things. While it's absolute hell to deal with when it's paired with anxiety, it's helped me come up with so many different story and character ideas.

Little anecdote time, so I said my school focused on writing creatively before teaching us grammar, right? Well, the school started falling apart and getting new teachers, who were teaching based on the normal curriculum. So, they all assumed we knew proper grammar and never taught us. So I never learned proper grammar until high school, and even then I only learned a lot of it through constantly writing on Google Docs and picking up on a lot of the grammar corrections.

Q: What were your thoughts when you first started writing this story?

Honestly, I don't remember. I had been staying up late writing this story because at the time, I was stressed and just wanted to do something to take my mind off my stress. The story was being written around the time of my birthday, so there's a good chance I was worried about growing up or family drama during my party. All I remember was I was taking comfort in Sun and Moon because they reminded me of my old obsession with the solar system.

I remember being very fascinated with the premise of animatronics thinking they're human in the Silver Eyes novels, as well. It was a very interesting concept to me and I wanted to experiment with it.

Q: Were there any deleted scenes or scrapped ideas?

There weren't a lot of deleted scenes. I would delete and rewrite stuff, but there weren't many scrapped scenes. One of the deleted scenes was to have the daycare shut down after the Eclipse incident and for Monty to have seen everything that happened but was physically unable to make himself move to intervene, causing him to beat himself up over it. I still have the scene. I wrote it on the plane when I was going on my Spain tour during the summer. I think the biggest change I made, though, was very early on, and you guys might find this hilarious.

Peter was originally supposed to be an antagonist.

I am not joking, he was originally going to be a rival to Sun and Moon. And you wanna know why I changed that? Because in the middle of writing one of the chapters, I decided that it would be both in character and funny if Amanda started teasing Peter for having a girlfriend. So I gave him a girlfriend and changed him from future rival to Oliver's new uncle/father figure.

I really think that sums up how I write. I have ideas for characters and plot points but will change stuff mid-story and just try to roll with it. Sometimes it works and makes the story even better, other times it lurks in the background before popping out to kick me in the back of the knees.

Q: Did your story end up going in a direction you didn't expect?

If I'm being honest, yeah. One of the bigger changes in direction was to have the daycare shut down later on. I was going to have it shut down earlier, but for some reason it didn't wind up that way. Some of the other changes were having the reader be infected by the virus and Oliver's death in the one star ending. He wasn't supposed to die, but everyone kept commenting "don't hurt Oliver" or "I hope Oliver doesn't die" and then my brain went "hey, wouldn't it be funny if you killed him?" and so I did. I kid you not, I did that because I was just the tiniest bit annoyed with the number of "don't hurt Ollie" comments and decided to be a little shit about it. I don't regret it, it honestly makes sense that the one star ending would be the shittiest ending and I feel like it wouldn't make sense for me to make it very happy or hopeful.