Thanks for reading "Teaching Qrow", and welcome to the epilogue. In my longer stories, I use my epilogues to discuss how the story came to be, how I came to the decisions I made, and other craft-of-writing topics.

I suppose the first thing I have to do is apologize, after a fashion. When you love characters, you want them to be happy, and this story lets Qrow be happy only for a moment before smiting him. The thing is… that's who Qrow is. That's canon. He's both comedy and tragedy. Maybe in the future he'll get to be happy (we can hope!), but a prequel could only have a bittersweet-at-best ending.

That was a constraint, but not an unwelcome one. As I've talked with others about writing, lately, I've come to appreciate the role of constraints. What characters can't do, the choices they can't make, help define them as much as the things or choices they can make or do. The same is true of settings and plots. Constraints are not a penalty or restriction. They're a tool. As I go through some of my thoughts here, it will be with the idea of constraints in mind.

The first constraint, for a canon-compliant prequel, will always be what comes next- the canonical start of the story. That helped define how this one had to end, and I fleshed out the mechanics relatively early in my planning. In the foreword, I gave credit to Akisawana for the germ of this story: the question "Why would Qrow teach and who'd let that happen?" It wasn't long after that when I decided I had to answer another question. Qrow says in V5E1: "I quit teaching for a reason." Well, what reason is that? It's not that he doesn't like teaching. He looooves teaching: over and over again in his on-screen appearances he's mentoring, or providing exposition, or narrating "World of Remnant". He doesn't miss an opportunity to teach. Why would this be different?

Answer: because the end of his teaching stint was wrapped up in the same sore topic they're discussing at the time.

This speaks to my general approach as a fanfic author. I really enjoy digging into less-explored parts of the canon and prodding there and making something that fits with canon, that amplifies canon.

For me, then, this story did a couple of different things. It let me explore an area canon hasn't touched; it let me proffer answers to some interesting questions; and it let me write for some really fun characters.

I knew from the start that I wanted to conclude with a big set-piece battle. This is RWBY, after all, and I wanted Qrow to have a Moment of Awesome. World of Remnant put in place some constraints that helped me stage the battle. If Patch is protected by shallow water that keeps the biggest nautical grimm away, then I needed a grimm that was a threat at long range. That, in turn, narrowed the options for how the defenders of Patch might kill it, and before I knew it the general outline of the battle was coming into focus.

Incidentally, the nautical jargon in this story is genuine Earth nautical jargon transplanted to Remnant. "Pan-Pan", for example, is a distress code similar to Mayday, but while Mayday means "please come help me", Pan-Pan means "stay away from me". All the scenes involving the Diligence are informed by personal experience, down to the name of the tug (a tug named "Eagle" serviced Port Canaveral every time I worked that port). While I've never heard a skipper say the words 'pack sand' over comms, I have heard captains pass code phrases that amount to the same thing. (Dolphin Code 65, if we're being specific and you're curious.) I didn't go into this story hoping to use my nautical background, but when I started putting those chapters together it just so happened I had relevant knowledge. Serendipity is sweet.

Once the ending was nailed down I started work on the beginning. That was easy enough. The only big decision to make was how old Qrow would be when he started teaching. Once I decided that he liked teaching, then his latent Qrow-ness ensured he wouldn't be able to be a teacher for long, so I settled on one year. Those two decisions fixed the ending and the beginning. That was enough: from there I started writing, with the intent of discovering the middle.

There were a few themes I wanted to work in, some major ideas, but there was also a substantial amount of exploration. I kept finding new ideas to play with, new things for Qrow to deal with. It was fun.

One thing that was not a constraint: word count.

Apparently I'm terrible at anticipating how long my stories will be, even for stories that have a plan. My initial estimates put this one at around 70k. Whoops. (And that, somehow, is not my biggest miss.)

I don't envy CRWBY their quite difficult task. I have unlimited time and special effects budget. I can edit as much as I want. There's no money riding on this, and so no corporate oversight. If something takes twice as long to do as I thought, I can just write it as it needs to be and chuckle about it afterwards. I don't have to go back and cut it down and make it fit. It's almost unthinkable luxury, from a creative perspective.

So if I wanted to spend a few thousand words expounding on Qrow and Ruby's shared weapons nerdness, or if I realized that Qrow's inability to keep his mind out of the gutter might cause problems when he's around the same people all the time, I could work those things into the design at no cost.

My general approach to OCs is that they're supporting characters. They exist to serve a purpose. If they're important, the story will tell me that they're important, and I'll flesh them out as needed.

I knew from the start that I would need Signal's headmaster. Too many scenes in my outline involved him. I wanted to maintain the "Wizard of Oz" theming of headmasters, and lo and behold there was a munchkin named Boq, and everything about him flowed from there.

Aspro and Mel didn't have names in the first draft of "First Day"; I didn't know I'd need them again, so I didn't bother, not until I'd written another four or five chapters and realized what they could do for me. They didn't have their final names until days before I posted "First Day". I was operating within the constraint of the Color Rule when I realized that most characters have the color in their first name, not the last, so Gabe Aspro became Aspro Andino. In his case, chasing his name suggested things about him: I was browsing color words in other languages when I remembered that 'Pyrrha Nikos' comes from Greek and she's from Argus. Aspro Andino derives from Greek, so he could be from Argus, which implied he'd be aware of Pyrrha, and it all came together.

I defined Aspro's semblance before I matched it to Aspro. I wanted to show off things about Qrow, and Trueshot Aura from "Warcraft III" was in my memory banks, just waiting to be used. Eventually I realized what a nice match it was for the selfish character to have a Semblance that helps others, and that was that.

'Mel Cyan' was a name I wasn't happy with for chapter after chapter. It satisfied the color rule, but didn't fit with anything else I was doing with the character. It wasn't until very late that I realized Mel could be short for Caramel rather than Melvin or the like, and it came together so naturally it was almost like I'd planned it all along. To some extent that describes his character and role in the story. The initial outline didn't have any mention of his storyline. It was something I discovered along the way.

Professor Tavi, as some readers sussed out, is a "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" reference, with his build, color scheme, semblance/style (which emphasizes speed/agility/motion), and details (like his overlarge canines) all serving the allusion. Just for fun, I named one of his teammates "Darzee", who's another character from the same story.

Because of the way I create my OCs (based on the needs of the story), I find it easy to come up with Semblances for them. The plot tells me what roles I need to fill, those roles lay out the type of character, and the character lays a foundation for the Semblance. It's a lot easier, in my opinion, to do things that way than to generate characters and then try to figure out what to do with them. Generating characters in a vacuum is an invitation for analysis paralysis.

Also my opinion: Semblance is a garnish. It illuminates (or clashes with) how the character ticks. It's not a build-around.

The part of the story I was least satisfied with was the recurring "stalking Cinder" bits. I felt obliged to include them to keep the air of menace, to ensure that the threat to Amber (and so Qrow's teaching career) felt real, but I too often felt that I wasn't doing much with them. Other than play with the Emerald-simping-for-Cinder angle, I didn't have much going on in those scenes. I couldn't help but feel there had to be a more economical way to maintain tension, and I didn't know what it was. Frustrating.

Cinder's approach was important for another reason. This is easily the most episodic of my longfics. Certain chapters or sets of chapters could easily have been reworked into stand-alone stories. I almost went in that direction, but spam is not my nature. There are a small number of unifying factors that tie the story together in time and show progression. Cinder drawing closer is one of those.

So those scenes were structurally necessary even when I wasn't pleased with them. That's an annoying feeling for an author!

"Strawberries" is the opposite: It's superfluous, but I love it. It plays little role in the plot. The handful of plot-relevant blurbs in there could have been distributed differently (and more efficiently) and the whole chapter could have been disposed of without being missed. Not much happens; it's ~4k words of sitting in a bar and talking. It's almost hard to imagine it and "Exam Day" as being chapters of the same story.

Yet "Strawberries" is also one of the chapters that motivated me to write the story in the first place. I really super wanted a good, long, meaningful Qrow-Yang talk, something we just haven't gotten in the show, and something rich with dramatic potential. In the end I included it, regardless of whether it was "needed".

On the other hand, the purest joy of the story was any time Qrow and Taiyang are in the same room. RWBY Chibi laid the groundwork of Qrow and Taiyang-as-old-married-couple (cue "entire team" joke), they have distinct voices, and I delight in writing dialogue. It was a lot of fun.

Almost as much fun was "Exam Day"—just the entire chapter. I got to pay off all the groundwork and setup I'd laid over preceding chapters. I was able to pull themes, character traits, and characters together in a way that made sense tome. That's such a satisfying feeling when it works.

The question of how seriously to take Chibi is a vexing one. Obviously it's not canon. At the same time, it uses canon characterizations as the base of its humor, and then expands those characterizations in natural (and funny) ways. The association of Ruby with cookies, for example, is largely owed to Chibi. For every miss (Chibi throwing its weight behind Snowbird) there's at least one hit (Emerald being "just evil-curious").

This story pulls from Chibi in a number of places. The rhythm of Taiyang and Qrow as an old married couple; Taiyang's car Zippy; and Yang knowing about Misfortune but Ruby not all come from Chibi. (The latter is plausible for canon, too, but not demonstrated.)

Here's where I have to come clean about Snowbird. It's the only ship that I really got into or supported. I usually don't "do" shipping in my writing. I honor canon when it pairs couples, but I rarely write to support or sink ships, and I don't get invested in who a character "should" end up with. (When I was younger in another fandom, I wrote two stories—one satirical, one dramatic—for the explicit purpose of sinking ships. I like to think I've matured since then.)

The only exception was Snowbird. The Qrow-Winter interaction in V3 hinted strongly at a shared past, and Chibi explicitly characterized bickering as how the two of them flirt. That's the sort of interaction I relish and enjoy, and also love to write. Unfortunately, V7 and V8 offered no Snowbird support at all. (Cue Whiterose shippers nodding in sad solidarity.) Snowbird appears sunk. Some people have advanced Jailbirds and Alcoholics Anonymous as replacement ships, but neither really catches my fancy. I'd be fine with either because I'm invested in Qrow's happiness, but that's all.

All of that informed how I wrote this story. If Qrow and Winter are exes, then we still get that shared history, but it also explains why he knew she'd be prickly and picked her as his target in V3, and also why she was so very quick on the trigger. It accords with their distance in V7/8. It (alas) fits.

I went out of my way to avoid endorsing any particular configuration (as it were) of Team STRQ. Part of this was future-proofing (canon may yet say things about it) and part of it was that it's all so much fun, I didn't want to exclude any of it. I've read and enjoyed STRQ fics that had all different hypotheses about STRQ's dynamics. You could talk me into just about any pairing/tripling/poly arrangement of the members of STRQ and I'd be on-board.

I have a rule for the stories I write: "Don't start posting until it's done or has a clear path to finishing". This is a great rule for helping keep me on schedule once I start posting (because I have a huge buffer). It also helps keep my plots/characters in order: if I need to change something early in the story to match something I develop later, I can at no cost. This rule has its limits, however. For stories that are sufficiently long, I eventually get to a point where I have to start publishing or risk losing all writing momentum. The pressure of needing to write to stay on-schedule is useful, and feedback is a tonic.

My limit appears to be eight to ten chapters. Once I have that many written I have to start publishing or I may never finish. It helped that the first chapter is largely self-contained (if I didn't have larger ambitions I probably could have posted that all by itself and it would have worked); I was able to buy myself a bit more time that way.

Overall, I had a lot of fun writing this story, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

I don't know what my next project will be. I have a couple of smaller stories in the chute that'll be posting in the coming weeks, but I haven't decided on the next big thing. There are a couple of ideas spinning around, but none of them are really speaking to me. We'll see.

Until then, thanks again for reading, and goodnight.