Whispers

Lots of things on plate, starting with I have a strong tendency to disappear when I'm not feeling well. And that happens far too often.

But I'm alive and thoroughly into my new fandom, each more obscure than the last, but seriously, I am in love with Accelerator as a character and have eaten up all the anime for A Certain Scientific Accelerator, most of A Certain Scientific Railgun (I got impatient getting to the Sisters storyline, what can I say?), and all of A Certain Magical Index, then poked around in the manga for a bunch of Accelerator bits, and am now inhaling every bit of the LNs that feature him (I'm currently in the middle of Volume 15; no, I did not read all the non-Accelerator bits and I should, I know).

That said, I'm gonna have to rewrite my first completed treat for Happy Belated Treatmas and still want to write 5 others. I gotta get some good writing time, which is tough with me always having work-related stuff to do on the weekends. It's possible I should not run Freeform Flash at the end of the month, though I was looking forward to it. Now it feels stressful. We'll see if next week gets better.

And I think of stories way too fast, faster than I can write them. I've got three full grown stories in my head that happened in a week or two but I haven't had time to write them and am worried I'm gonna lose some of them before I have enough time to get them all down. Gah, why?

I also need to develop a better system of getting stuff distributed. I'm doing better at logging new writing, but it's still work and I'm behind. I've got first access on the patreon, but it means I need to do a better job at putting things in first access, telling people they exist, then moving them to general access. System creation, this is a thing I need to do and am good at doing when I have the time/energy— See the first sentence of this post.

Hope everyone's doing well! What's going on in your world? How's the writing? How's fandom? Reading/watching/otherwise consuming anything new and great?

So we wrapped up the Bungou Stray Dogs Rolling Remix, Christmas, and I'm utterly buried in work, which put a crimp in all my late treat plans when they didn't come together on first (or tenth) tackle.

That said, highly recommend all the stories from the remix. There are eight, including mine, and I read the whole collection. It was so, so good, even the stuff for a ship I'm not normally into. I love how they all delved into the characters and relationships, and you should go read if you haven't.

I am halfway through commenting because I was raring to comment and realized that I would de-anon if I did so at the time, so I waited and then was in the thick of the buried at work stuff. And I'm more interested in writing good comments that express how I really feel than Loved it! Not that there's anything wrong with a Loved it! but seriously. I've been doing a lot of that lately what with everything that's happened.

We made it through Christmas. It's hard, and it hurts, and I'm spending a lot more time than I can afford with my family just because it helps raise my grandfather's spirits and that's priceless right now. It was a good Christmas overall and that was more than I truly expected, so I'm grateful. I haven't sent out cards this year and I reserved my funds for gifting family members, but if anyone does want a fic / ficlet, feel free to comment and I'm going to try and do a little January treatathon. Maybe the fic that doesn't want to be written will come together as something better than snippets and snatches in the interim. (I was going to do a lot of Fandom Stocking treating, but the way it's all rolled out has just made it impossible to retain enthusiasm for that project.)

I'm maybe a quarter of the way through my Chocolate Box letter, and I think I'm going to keep my exchanges this year down to Chocobox and Multifandom Drabble, which I run, so not skipping that one.

I've had a really successful Lexember, a month-long challenge to coin a word a day for your conlang. I went with Akachenti because I finally got somewhere on the protolanging business this year when I was grieving hardest and found that fiction wouldn't come. I haven't coined words every day, but I've coined lots of words several days, and so am way ahead on the average.

There's been so much good new content coming out for K Project, lots of delightful or heart-wrenching shorts and K Seven Stories is already live and available and free—and in Japanese. I need to learn it so I don't have to keep waiting for translations.

I'm almost to the need for a year wrap up post with an indication of what I challenged myself to write, what I actually wrote, and all that good stuff for the year, but I didn't do quite as good a job at logging things as I ought to have, so I'll probably be a few days late with that. But on some fronts, I was surprised at how productive a year it was considering how bad the year has been overall. I started off having a meltdown in January, barely keeping head above water at work through the middle, and lost my grandmother towards the end, who's pretty much the most important person in my life, alongside my sister. And yet, it wasn't all bad either. I picked up new fandoms, made new friends (whom I adore), better reconnected with old friends (whom I also adore), wrote roughly 700 poems and more than 100 drabbles and actually committed original fiction again. Didn't finish that novel, but did finish a 15K novelette I'm still itching to write the sequel to. Not horrible everywhere.

I hope you all are doing fantastic and have an excellent last weekend of the year!

I have not in fact gotten writer's block on the original story I've been working on, working title Canaf, but I have been super sleepy and I did do that thing I always tend to do somewhere between 15-20K in, which is go back and clean up all the gaps I left lying around. There's a couple new scenes in my head too, or well, scene expansions, like the fact that I've got Rhezere and Bhazaf wearing clothes they didn't buy and weren't provided but their wardrobes pretty much went up in smoke. So logisticking, because I care about logistics and this is the novel where I get to be self-indulgent a bit. And because I get to put Bhazaf in clothes that are on loan from someone a lot taller than him and Rhezere likes looking at the way he has to fold up the sleeves and it looks good. I'm shallow sometimes.

I get to go back in at some point and make sure the introductions work for me on the who's who, what do they look like, and what's their ethnicity and regional culture because there are seven major regions with several major cultures, and then separately, there's ethnicity. And why did I say they were all integrated in Ijeve? Because really if I go with the character I want for Savanes, either she's from the Flux or she's really not from Ijeve, but of course, there are only seven regions, so maybe she's from somewhere else not close to Ijeve and that's just the training station she went to because it was the closest to her planet.

And I've got one week of settling Bhazaf in and getting the rest of his complement (except A'tevh) off of Canaf, and I am sooooo many words in and not done with this simple task. The real story you'd think would be in all the repairs that will happen after the family's gone.

Recovery. I'm basically writing one long science fiction recovery fic with my favorite tropes thrown in to keep me happy. This is the story I chose to be my first novel to retrain my brain that I'm perfectly capable of finishing one. :headdesk:

And it doesn't fit with the storyworlds I had or the stuff I want to publish under any existing pen name and I kind of don't care because at least I love it and it's new and it has no baggage, which major plus.

I have some novels with baggage that I want to finish, so the goal of this one is palate cleanser, I guess. Just finish something with no pressure on it. And while writing something every day (on average) would be great, I know I didn't stop writing this because I got bogged down but rather because I've been doing extra work for the day job and crashing at night. So onward and upward.

Just a few thoughts, I guess, because it's after the holiday and I'm feeling reflective, and somewhat less than pleased with myself. Well, my body.

I've been recovering from massive health challenges for roughly five years. I've also been writing very little during that time despite all the stories in my head. And the only reason I still have a job despite not applying for FMLA is that I have a super understanding boss who sees value in the work I do.

That said, I'm sitting here today with no excuse to not being trying to move stuff in, and I'm... recovering. I'm not putting together the poetry anthologies I'm giving as gifts this holiday season or writing the cards I've already bought for those I'm sending to. I'm not writing my Yuletide exchange fic or my Marvel is Marvel exchange fic, and I love both canons I offered but feel listless trying to do canon review.

I have stories in my head and I tried to dig deeper into them to write this November, and while I made more progress than I have in the last year, that was very little progress at all. I have been writing poetry, but that's like this, the spilling of my thoughts and feelings rather directly, and they're mostly tiny little things instead of the longer poems I know I'm capable of.

More interestingly to me, I started this November with the goal to write Collateral Damage, a story about healing and damage. I ended up obsessed with a side story about... recovery. A character who opts out of the other book to go deal with her own past and the person she's been that she loathes the most, trying to figure out how to stop being all the things she hated and how to stop wanting a battle to fight.

I like how this world keeps coughing up more and more to keep me fully engaged and interested but at some point I need to figure out how to write fast enough to get one story down and move on to the next, rather than having so many floating around unwritten. The universe is almost too big now and I don't even care. I love these characters so much. I've been rather hampered by my difficulty with writing actual plot rather than series of character moments, but that can be fixed, right? Just write. Just write stuff down.

Now if those bits and pieces would just come together into books, I'd be really getting somewhere. And if I could just get my moving in done and my laundry put away instead of piled up neatly in a chair I used to like to sit in before I turned it into a makeshift laundry table every time I'm not feeling up to it, and if I could finish some of these bug audits that keep dragging out so long while I work operational support in the busy season at work...

I'm grateful, I am. I'm alive. I have friends. I have loving family. I have cause for joy. And yet... I'm still recovering. Some day I'd really like to feel healed.

I watched a movie the other day that I love, High Strung, about a ballerina and a violinist and a street dance crew and it was fun and awesome and actually satisfying. I want to buy it.

Oddly enough, I noticed that the story felt a little slight, even though it had all the right elements of a full movie and it kept all its promises (thus satisfying), but it almost felt too easy for the characters. Almost.

Finally today, it clicked in my head. The story kept its promises and followed up on its threats, but it didn't follow through on any of its threats. None of the things I feared the most were realized. And I hadn't really put my finger on it before, but a story's threats and promises are two different things.

On the one hand, this is comfort viewing and I'm glad it didn't, but on the other hand, it helped gel a lot of things on what makes some stories satisfying and unsatisfying for me and that I have a tendency to get bogged down in threats when I'm writing. (I have a friend who's even worse at that, realizing almost every single threat and never getting to the end of the story/promises.)

Just something I thought about because of a nice little movie.

And it's not bowing to my powers of ignoring it, so.

1. I will continue to love you all and lurk 90% or more of the time.


2. I will finish exchange fics on time.


3. I will finish pinch modding the exchange that has reduced my nonwork life to almost nil. fandomgrowth


4. I will use whatever spare time I have to continue working on trovia's birthday fic and One Good Storm

And that really is all. I just have no other room here.

Mentally incapable of writing today. Ah well.

And all due before film camp, which starts the week of the 24th.

1. Transition (MI4, Will/Jane): Somehow this bang fic became animal transformations, Jane gets her own team, and babyfic all in one. Plus accidental, slow build relationship because she ends up helping Will raise his acquired kid. Sequel to a Yuletide fic and I'm seriously glad the artist likes this because it's so tropey, I wonder if anyone will ever read it.


2. 128 Stage (The Unusuals, Beaumont/Walsh + Casey/Davis with an emphasis on the Walsh + Casey): AU in that Casey starts out as actual hooker (not pretending to be one) and he's actual diner owner (not diner resident/cop) and he accidentally acquires a barista while the two of them deal with relationships and life kind of thing. I wrote a prequelish to it for shipswap.


3. Tracing Trouble (Kingdoms and Thorn, Cate/Marc + Killinger/Hasheni): This one boils down to, don't mess with Cate's family, but a lot of other stuff going on under the surface as she tenatively moves forward with trusting Marc more, and the whole mess of Thorn's underhanded way of getting a toehold in the kingdoms gets explored a lot more.

And not due but halfway written anyway...

1. Tying the Knot (Hawkeye, Clint/Kate + Natasha): So Kate goes to Natasha to learn how to tie Clint up. Sequel to the five times experimentation fic where it was really, really clear that Clint liked bondage.


2. Not Memory (or Along Came a Spider) (Leverage/MCU, Parker + Natasha): Parker's side of the meeting Natasha again in my Red Room crossover, wherein I also decided Parker and Dottie were related.


3. Awesome exchange fic for mcu_aufest I can't talk about but is sooo much fun.


4. Exchange fic for jukebox_fest that has me kind of freaking out about it. Am I biting off waaay more than I can chew? Due very shortly after return from camp, so high priority to get done.

And totally not due but knocking on the brain cells (am ignoring you):

• Robbing the Cradle (616, Natasha/Kate/Clint): because in 616, she really was a bit of a cradle-robber with Clint and he was Kate's age when he got started and she fell for him and then here comes Kate and she's that age now and they are soooo alike and I can see the attraction and because "The Art of Human Relations" was fun to write and I blame this totally on you, findthesea!

And then there are my other two original projects, one with a headspace that promises productivity when I can attend to it and one without.

Ah well. I just needed to get this list off my chest.

Gacked from melannen (on DW):

If you want to see me do one of these, leave a number in a comment and I'll answer!

1: Go to your oldest work online and find the most cringe-inducing section.
2: What's the most embarrassing porn you've ever written?
3: Most embarrassing drawerfic.
4: Laziest ending.
5: Worst beginning.
6: Send me one of my own fics to flame.
7: Rank your top five worst fics.
8: How do you disagree with your AO3 stats page?
9: Send me one of my own fics and I'll write the worst comment imaginable for it.
10: Write a parody of your own style.


And for a nicer meme, gacked from xenokattz ages and ages ago and just felt like unearthing it:

If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.
— Alfred Hitchcock

When I write a story, what do you immediately look for?

I lost 2/3 month to downtime and am playing catch-up because of it. Those 2/3rds were originally allotted to finishing up One Good Storm and A Game for the Gods. Now, I have to write 3 bang fics this month if I don't plan to default (I don't):

Title: 128 Stage
Fandom: The Unusuals
Pairing: Beaumont/Walsh, Casey/Davis
Summary: Prostitute/Coffee Shop AU where Walsh offers Casey a cup of coffee and accidentally acquires a barista.

Title: [not sure yet]
Fandom: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Pairing: Jane/Will
Summary: They didn't mean to accidentally acquire a kid, and they certainly didn't mean to end up raising said kid together because they're just friends and everyone's getting the wrong idea.

Title: Tracing Trouble
Fandom: Original (Kingdoms and Thorn)
Pairing: Cate/Marc, Killinger/Hasheni
Summary: Catherine April isn't a military operative anymore. She's a member of the Special Unit, a law enforcement team dedicated to all cases in the city involving those with special abilities. But when a fledgling tracer tests his power over computer systems in the city, it hurts someone she loves and hits too close to home. She may not be an operative anymore, but she's still in the business, and she still knows how to own the game.

I don't know if I like these summaries, but it was required that I write them and the fics aren't done, so I couldn't cheat and pull an excerpt. (I'm good at that. :shakes head at self: )

And then I've got three books to read, which is not a hardship. As far as that goes, I can skip Jane the Virgin, Agents of SHIELD, and Nashville this next week and bank book time.

So that's what's up. I've got to do what I did to clear three weeks for those two original stories last time, get through the next round of deadlines in a hurry, and not let myself get thoroughly distracted by small prompts. Hope y'all's writing is just as fun! (and less hectic)