Fluffy Promptables
Jun. 24th, 2014 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scribblemynameWe're prompting fluffy, lighthearted stuff of any variety, no canon/pairing/character information required, though permitted.
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Re: Cones and Constancy 2/3
Date: 2014-06-27 01:30 am (UTC)“I'm not accepting any ice cream from them. They can't accept us, so I don't want their ice cream,” Larina said, her chin jutting out a little as her stubbornness showed through. She shook her head, setting the hat on the gate and crossing over to him. “It doesn't make sense. Burditt loves you like a son. You'd think he'd find this perfect, you and me being together.”
Dillon shook his head. “Maybe he doesn't feel like that at all. Everyone assumes he did, but maybe he's never really liked me.”
“You say that because you're afraid that's true, but I know he's just being dumb,” Larina said, stepping up next to Dillon and tugging on his soaked shirt. “He's afraid of this, of me growing up and leaving him, but that's not going to happen. You're here, and that's where I'll be always.”
“And those papers for college?”
“Who needs college?” She asked, wrapping her arm around his neck and pulling him into a kiss. He tried to ignore his own doubts about that—she wouldn't have picked up the flyers if college didn't interest her at least a little, and she was too smart not to go to college just because he was almost a drop out with a fear of dormitories and hadn't gone himself.
“I see how this is,” Dillon said, pushing her back so that he could talk. “You think you don't need anything that doesn't involve us. You know that's not true. You need your family and your horses and even the little things like ice cream.”
She rolled her eyes. “If it really meant that they wouldn't let us be together—and I don't see why not—you and I would find a farm of our own and build it up from nothing the way Burditt's great-great grandparents did. We'd make things work.”
“Choosing us over ice cream is not going to make them come around to the idea, and Burditt would probably murder me if he knew you were out here in that dress.”
She looked down and back up at him with a snort. “It's almost to my ankles, is not showing off my breasts, and you're too much of a gentleman to ever think of looking up my skirt.”
“I don't think he's concerned as much with the looking as—”
“Stop that,” she said, putting her finger against his lips. “Don't cheapen what we have into a teenage cliché. Not only have we never done anything like that, this isn't about that, and we both know it. They might not see it that way, but even if my body reacts to yours a lot, that was never why I wanted to be around you and it still isn't. You were my friend first, and even if this thing fades, you'll always be my friend.”
He nodded, pulling her into his arms. “I know it's not about that. I'm not even sure it could be after all my father did to me.”
“You won't ever become him,” Larina insisted. “Ever. I won't let you.”
He leaned his head against hers with a sigh. “I wish I had your confidence.”
“You don't need confidence. You've got me. I'm your confidence,” she said, reaching up to pat his cheek before slipping out of his arms. He figured it was the heat—though he should have figured she'd hate having his sweaty dirty body next to hers in that dress. “And right now, I'm going to go get us both some ice cream.”
“I'm almost done here and then I'm headed out. Besides, they won't send you with any for me.”
“Who says they need to? We can share. I like it best when we do anyway.”
Dillon frowned as she skipped toward the barn door. “Larina Payne, have you been dropping ice cream on purpose all these years just to share it with me?”
She laughed. “Maybe. But you'll never know now, will you?”
“Here. I figure you need one of these.”
Dillon looked up from under the horse and frowned. “You know, if this is about our 'guest' earlier, me having to deal with my ex-wife requires something a lot stronger than ice cream.”
Re: Cones and Constancy 3/3
Date: 2014-06-27 01:32 am (UTC)He set the brush aside, accepting a cone from her, and she wondered again if she should have married him anyway to spare him from all that Meghan had done to him while she was gone. Still, if they couldn't stick together when she was in college, then it wasn't meant to be. That should have been obvious by now. Just because she was still as protective of him now as she'd been when he was a traumatized eight year old hiding in their barn because horses didn't scare him like people did—none of that changed what they were—and weren't—now.
“I don't understand her. This place was never worth that much. I don't see what she thinks she'll get out of it.”
Dillon shrugged. “Maybe it's still about making me miserable.”
“Why would anyone want to do that to you? You're only the kindest person around here since Burditt died,” Larina said. She shook her head. “I don't understand why people think they have to go around hurting others. Can that small bit of power be that worth it?”
“I don't know,” he said. “Neither of us has ever really craved that, so it's hard to know what the appeal of it would be. You could ask Will, though. He should know.”
She grimaced. “I'm not asking Will.”
“Your ice cream is melting.”
“And your horse is eating yours,” she said, laughing when he noticed Thunder's tongue lapping the top of his cone. “I think I'll have to start bringing him his own from now on.”
“Don't encourage him,” Dillon said, stepping away from Thunder. The gelding followed, trying to get at the ice cream. “No. This is—well, it was mine, and horses don't get ice cream and what is wrong with you anyway?”
“He's your horse,” she reminded him, and Dillon gave her a dark look. She smiled and reached over to pet Thunder's head, keeping her own ice cream out of reach. “You may as well give it to him. I don't think you want it back.”
“Not the point.”
“You used to let the dog eat yours when it fell.”
“That was different. Moxie was cleaning up. Thunder did this on purpose,” Dillon muttered, annoyed. He shook his head. “I'm not rewarding that kind of behavior. And I'm not sharing with you, horse, so you can stop now.”
“You want to share with me?” She asked, not realizing the danger of that until she'd already made the offer. He looked at her as though he was remembering the same thing—how much better ice cream seemed when it was shared—when it was their kisses more than anything that split a cone between the two of them—and she regretted saying it because that wasn't them anymore but for a moment she thought they'd both forget it.
“Yours is melting,” he said, and she nodded, because it was getting all over her, but she couldn't make herself eat it now. He took hold of her wrist and lifted it so that he could take a bite from the cone. She watched him, telling herself the past was bound to be caught up in even the littlest things and this didn't mean anything more than that.
Thunder snorted, shoving Dillon with his head, and Dillon let go of her hand as he stumbled. He lost his grip on the other cone, and it fell to the barn floor. He looked down at it with a smile. “Guess you don't get it after all, buddy.”
The horse stared at the mess, letting out an almost mournful noise. Larina laughed, and he turned to her with a pleading look.
“Is he really trying to beg?”
“It is a rather pathetic attempt, isn't it?” Dillon asked, smiling. “I keep telling him that, but he hasn't listened yet.”
“That's because you're normally a pushover and give in to his begging.”
“I do not.”
She should have known that would make him defensive, especially after a visit from his ex, but she would almost rather they fought then fell back into old patterns that had almost gotten the better of them before Thunder intervened. She kept her voice light and teasing. “You always give into mine.”
“You are different,” Dillon told her, shrugging. “You always were.”
He did not say that she always would be, but somehow she heard it anyway.
Re: Cones and Constancy 3/3
Date: 2014-06-27 04:12 pm (UTC)Hope you feel better whether you keep writing or not.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 04:51 pm (UTC)I also admit that some of my own commentfics don't match up with my own canon, but I figure, hey, it's commentfic. So there's that.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 05:30 pm (UTC)I even figured I'd pull as much of the Fire and Water stuff into a sequel if I ever got around to it, but I need my stuff to agree with canon and not waste time or become an unusable tangent. I have that bad habit of wanting to include everything I write for a story in it. When that stuff diverges or is crap... That's when I start having issues again because I can't separate, hate editing, and refuse to lose things I've written.
None of my stuff stands alone and I know that. I just thought I could make this work to get pieces for larger stories and was wrong because the stories didn't lose their problems. The new pieces make those worse.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 05:52 pm (UTC)I do fanfic of my own stuff as well as raw material in commentfics and snippets that will later be revised the mess out of to make work with canon. It does require a very large willingness to create a lot of fodder in order to create the good stuff. Every writer I know writes a lot of unusable material that was nevertheless necessary to write in order to reach the usable stuff.
I'm willing to lose my stuff though, not the good stuff, but the stuff I decide doesn't work for me and can't be revised into something I like. I'm willing to fic out several angles before picking the one I like best to canonize.
I think fanfic did that for me. I treat my own worlds like I treat fanfic writing, but most people don't do that, and it does make prompt stuff like this not as helpful.
And not sure if this will ever help you, but I did discover the secret to writing short after years of trying to ignore that rule when others spouted it: you really do have to start with one character and one focus and write only, only, only the words that get you there, never straying for anything. I didn't use to be able to write short either. Now, it's hard to make myself write long again.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 06:55 pm (UTC)I do have crossovers and little connections between stories that could make my stories into a larger universe, but I try not to make them very overt in the canon pieces. The trouble with me is that I'd make the crossovers canon, which is why I usually have some kind of outside threat to deal with when I combine worlds.
I am the express train writer. I usually do it in one pass, seldom switching tracks, and that one pass is what sees the story through from beginning to end. I can edit minor details to fix some bad track, but I can't mass edit until it's done and if I have to throw a large chunk out, I have to hate it because I do keep anything I can. I tend more to chuck the whole story than a section of it because once I know where it leads, altering its path means a completely different story, and that's not the one I meant to write, so I'd have to start all over.
I rarely do start over. There's too much baggage and water under the bridge and it's not the story I meant to tell, so I have to either give it to someone else (some other set of characters) or not do it at all.
Because I wrote fanfiction mainly to fix what bothered me about other people's writing, I don't usually fanfic myself because I've already cut most of that stuff out. The main characters are not people who would do the kind of things I object to, and so I don't go down those roads to begin with. I don't need a bunch of AUs when the story is going right.
I have accepted now, years too late, really, that I can never change the way others write what they do and the damage they do to the characters I love, even that the characters are not themselves if I wrote them the way I'd want them to be, and so I figure that I should stick to my own characters and writing because I don't need to change them and no one else's will ever be what I want because they will always be what they want.
I really wish I'd understood that earlier. So much could have been avoided if I did.
As for writing short, I'm not sure it's ever going to be for me. I do give my stories as much focus as I'm willing to give, and I generally only let one or two characters tell the story, which limits things as well. I'm just not willing to be word counting and trying to put in only what's absolutely necessary because my version of necessary is not someone else's, and too many times with short fic I've felt that things should have been explained and weren't, and part of my dislike for reading all together has come from consistently misunderstanding what I read. I put together details that writers forget, and I don't enjoy that how it feels when I realize everything I thought I knew and liked about a character was something I created in my head and not the story at all. I'd rather give more than the necessary details than make anyone feel the way I have, over and over again.
Like I said, I don't have the mental/emotional state to be a writer.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 07:36 pm (UTC)I'm going out on a limb and doing some guesswork, educated though. Your friend was probably wrong. I don't think you write to escape at all. I think you write to gain control of a safe space. Writing was your safe space. Because of that, you're right. If that's the case, it shouldn't be in public. It's not written for others; it's written for yourself, which is a good thing, but not usually very good for sharing.
The fundamental assumption of writing for others is that the reader brings as much interpretation to the story as the writer does. There's no way around it without creating a truly terrible, boring, didactic story. Implication goes a long way because there's no way to tell a GOOD story without it.
So, not a bad thing, your focus when you write, but for the first time I actually get why it's not really a public thing. I don't use fiction that way and haven't actually met anyone else yet who does, so it never crossed my mind.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 07:54 pm (UTC)Wow. That is actually a very depressing realization.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 08:35 pm (UTC)On this point, I disagree. It would have been better to decide up front whether you preferred the give and take of reader involvement, engagement, and interpretation or the ability to control the material and feel comfortable with the world you created being exactly what you would have that world be.
Even as a reader, you seem to prefer things nailed down solid. Reading and writing interactively is not nailed down solid. You have a few options, but they are all fairly mutually exclusive:
1. Write and throw your work out to the void without ever, ever considering how people receive it. This is sort of the compromise, but it requires more resolve than I possess.
2. Write for yourself and don't share your work so you don't get it all mucked up in other people's expectations and interpretations.
3. Write for yourself and enjoy/thrive on the interaction with your work and other's interpretations thereof.
4. Write for others and enjoy/thrive on the interaction with your work and other's interpretations thereof.
I vary it up, but I'm a serious 3 and 4 for the most part. I am extremely protective of my canon, but I have room to love things outside my canon, so I'm never threatened by them. Canon is mine. I might gift a change to canon, but that's it, e.g. letting Shift marry Kilter in the end instead of letting her marry someone else before she gets there.
So when I don't think you wasted your time; I just think you have to pick an approach because you can't create a safe personal writing space then allow others who aren't "safe" inside without it getting gunked up. But again, all that's predicated on an educated guess: the idea that writing is something you used as a safe space.
The only solution I have to regain a safe space is to kick everybody else out of it. The only solution I have to keeping them in it is to find another safe space. I think the angst you've been feeling is that you want both: the safe space where you put it in the first place and the other people, so neither solution sounds appealing.
Let me add this: my writing got pretty bogged down when I allowed anyone physically near to me inside the space I wrote it in. I had to kick everybody out or I couldn't write. At all.
Fandom is safe space for me. Liana Mir is safe space for me. There's only certain people in this space and if anyone comes in that puts me on edge again, I kick them out and carve out that space again.
I don't think you have a lot of safe people. I don't think you're as comfortable with room for interpretation as I am. I think your safe space would just need to be smaller.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 09:24 pm (UTC)I spent years in that path, not sharing anything with anyone, not people close to me or far away.
Then I started in fanfiction, that I shared, and it taught me a few things, but it put me into other people's worlds and things I knew better than to write about, but I didn't care because I was in a place where sharing my writing seemed like a good thing. Until I realized not only that I was writing against my own beliefs, I was doing it in part to get reviews. I did not think I was, wasn't one of those fanfic writers that held stories for ransom until they got reviews, but the way I reacted when I felt a story was getting ignored or when I had a bad review is not something I am proud of.
When I went into writing original fiction, I found I had almost no audience at all, and it was frustrating, but I thought it in some ways better that I didn't.
I thought I was chucking at least book 3 out there in accord with number one, same with my stubborn insistence on posting serials or snippets even after I left the few writing communities I'd tried and failed to join.
That didn't work, either.
I don't see how I can thrive on other people's interactions with my stuff. It isn't healthy for me. It puts too much of my happiness in other's hands, for one, but I also don't have all that many people to share with, and most of them don't have the time to read as much as I can write.
I don't have anyone to kick out of my space, either. I lost the twins in December, another friend a few months before that, and so I have a grand total of four people that see my stuff: you, my best friend (only one story there,) my mother, and one other girl who has seen a couple stories.
I know I'm not comfortable with interpretation. I have a lot of squiks, a lot of lines I don't want crossed, and I have also in the back of my head not wanting to stumble anyone else with what I've written.
I don't see anything to clear out, and I don't know how I could isolate myself more than I already have. *shrugs*
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 09:45 pm (UTC)When I say safe space, I'm not talking about proximity. I'm talking about control. A safe space is controlled by you. My safe spaces play by my rules and only have people affecting how I emotionally feel about that space who are playing by the same rules.
Very few people in this world relatively speaking play by the rules you do with reading and writing because you nail things down and that makes it comfortable and okay for you, but the world of reading/writing in general plays by the rules of the author writes what they intend, let it loose, and then it's no holds barred what the world does to it in return.
It's your vocabulary, your genre, your being closed to interpretation... You want the audience but you want it on your terms, which means you were right that publishing isn't the right world for you, and I was wrong. Publishing is on the reader's terms and no two ways about that. You have to be willing to write, resolve, and cede control to the reader. If your writing gives you the ability to control a world into something comfortable, then you need to keep that control, not give it away.
Fandom probably worked pretty well for you WHILE it worked because it's on the author's terms, which is why it's sacred, safe space for me even when my nerves are shot and I'm nothing but a big, huge scream that can't write an original fiction word to save my life. I write it when I need to put things back on MY terms.
I hope that makes sense.
I hope that makes clear why I said if you want the audience but you're not comfortable with it, then I don't have a solution because the two approaches are mutually exclusive and that's probably why this has all been so frustrating for you.
If there's anything you ever figure that I can actually DO to help, just let me know. I can't think of anything now.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 10:01 pm (UTC)I don't think there is a viable way to make what I have and what I did work, and I don't see any way of continuing on as I have.
It doesn't work. I never did, and I do still think it would have been better not to write because it has distorted my path too much and it so much a part of me that i don't know how to separate it, but it seems the only way to move on and get out of this rut is to let it go.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 10:08 pm (UTC)For me, it was graphics for a while. I'm good at those, so it worked for me for a little bit until I got the itch in my blood for words again. I know you've been having a hard time figuring out what to displace the writing with.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 10:21 pm (UTC)There really isn't anything in the world quite like writing, so I don't see myself replacing it any time soon.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 10:25 pm (UTC)And I wasn't recommending art, just mentioning that I used it for a while. Though graphic art. Can't draw to save my life.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 11:07 pm (UTC)So I don't really have anything that interests me like writing, and since there really is no safe place in this world, there isn't much point in trying to use something else to create that. I don't know why I bothered doing it with writing.