BTS FF Author Interviews

Izzy, hooverssweaterpaws

Hello, hello! Welcome back to another interview, and today we have the wondrous Izzy (hooverssweaterpaws), who was generous with her answers.

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❝It's very easy to get frustrated. The trick is just to realise that the brain isn't in gear sometimes, and needs a minute to just get back into focus.❞

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L: How did you fall into the ARMY rabbit hole? What made you fall for BTS' charms, and in what ways do they inspire you?

Iz: I became an army in 2016, just after the release of Save Me. I'd seen them on YouTubers React before, funnily enough, but I had a school friend who listened to them all the time. We walked home together for a few months when I was about 14, and I just realised how much I loved the music. I was a 14 year old looking for something to be fanatic about, so it worked well for me xD.

They inspire me in a lot of ways, to be honest. I've always been a music nerd, it's a part of me, and there's a little part of me that still wants to be a singer. I was watching this concert video, from the HYHH era, like the epilogue tour video on YouTube. They played a rock/band version of No More Dream, and there's a few seconds where Jimin's just vibing and the audience is singing his part. And there's a power in that bit, I can't really explain it, but in my brain I realised that I really want that moment.

They reminded me why I wanted to be a musician, at a time where I was still writing songs. I've not had time to do that lately, but they're an inspiration for me for that reason and also just generically some really fucking good music.

L: Why did you start writing? Why do you continue to do it?

Iz: I think I've always written in some form or another. I have memories of making little stories with my older sister when I was seven or eight: she would draw the pictures, and I would write the words. They weren't very good, and we'd probably cringe if we read through them now, but we found it fun at the time.

Then I wrote in notebooks, and got distracted by weird dreams and stuff like that. And then when I was 13, I joined Wattpad, and wrote original books for a little while. They were terrible, but they were a starting point. After I learned what fanfic was in 2016, I learned about BTS, and then it was easy to transfer that idea to BTS fanfic. And so I wrote Exchange, which I've now taken down, in late 2016. I've been a Taekook/BTS writer ever since.

I'm on hiatus at the moment, hopefully I'll have a chance to come back to what I love to do soon enough. I'm not sure when exactly, but eventually! I keep going because I love it, in all honesty. It's a chance to play around with narrative and techniques and writing and learn how to make a plot work and explore all of that fun stuff. One day I hope to do some original writing stuff, but I'm starting to lean further into fantasy based stuff, focusing on stories set in fictional words, so I'm hoping to keep doing that in the future, however that turns out in practice.

L: What books or authors have inspired you?

Iz: There's a lot, it would take forever to list them all but I'll mention a few: the Silver Brumby series by Elyne Mitchell, the Inheritance Series by Christopher Paolini, The Fire Within series by Chris d'lacey, the Charlie Bone series, I've read a few of the Alex Rider stories, a lot of Michael Morpurgo and Jacqueline Wilson when I was a kid, I read a lot of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid stories, Chronicles of Narnia, Dragonriders of Pern. The Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean Auel, the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness by MichellePaver.

Those are the first that come to mind, but I'm sure I'm missing others. I'm very much a fantasy nerd, I like there to be dragons or magical creatures (preferably dragons if possible, but only in intelligent form. They are not dumb firelizards). But those are some of my favourite series, anyway.