The Middle Distance

No Porn Battle per se this year, but there is the Amnesty/Golden Oldies Fest at Dreamwidth, opening tomorrow. The source is all prompts still open from the last 15 rounds of Porn Battle.

I've got one almost totally ready to go (sans polishing) and one half-written. And much as I was trying to branch out? Yeah. I must admit it: My M/M/F poly triad kink, let me show you it. Given a chance to write that, I will ALWAYS take it. (At least it's two different fandoms this time)

Obligatory icon is obligatory.

So my original plan for The Straw Man Fallacy (the Sherlock/The Wicker Man crossover) was to begin posting at Beltane (achieved) and finish it all up by Summer Solstice (failed). But Chapters 6 and 7 are cranking right along, the story is nudging the 30K mark - and Chapter 6 is action-packed. Chapter 7 is full of delicious anticlimactic exposition (which is Sherlock's favorite part, not mine).

I would feel worse about the failure of my self-imposed deadline BUT! Here's the thing. I write by longhand a lot, in cheap Moleskine knockoffs - at work, in coffeeshops, in diners and bars, on the bus and the train and while waiting for such. I just filled one up a couple days ago, one I started in November or so, and it contains notes for the following:

1. The Corsair of Carcosa (Good Omens/The King In Yellow/Cthulhu Mythos/Sandman crossover).

2. The sequel to The Bone Fiddle, still in progress. (More of this than anything else, that thing's a monster!)

3. Spit, Don't Swallow (Sherlock AU, Bone-Fiddle verse, Sherlock/John. I'm pretty sure this is the only chewing-tobacco-spit-kink fic to be found for this pairing, and frankly, writing something unique for them at this point is an achievement to be proud of.)

4. Goldengrove Unleaving (The Hobbit, Galadriel/Gandalf. This one got a huge comment thread at Porn Battle, and inspired the lovely luzula to do a Quenya translation of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem I filched the title from.)

5. Start Me Up (Sherlock, Sherlock/Molly/John. NECROPHILIA ROLEPLAY. My favorite thing about this is that it's sweet little Molly who's the kinky freak; the boys are just GGG.)

6. Polar Vortex (The Dresden Files, Harry Dresden/Thomas Raith. HUMBOLDT PARK REPRESENT. I got to set incestuous wizard/vampire porn two blocks from my house, aww yiss.)

7. Darkness Alone is Worshipful (The Silmarillion, Sauron/Ar-Pharazôn. Still can't get enough of Tolkien villain porn.)

8. Genetic Markers (Sherlock, Sherlock/Mary/John. Started as a Porn Battle one-shot and grew legs. It was fertile. Pregnant with possiblities)

9. Tempestuous. An original story I'm not at liberty to say much about yet, but it is historical fantasy fiction, and it's f/f sex-magick erotica.

10. The Straw Man Fallacy (Sherlock/The Wicker Man)


That's right. In the last seven months, I've written, or at least worked on, 10 different stories, in handful of different fandoms, plus original. I think that's about the most prolific I've ever been. Half of them were Porn Battle-inspired. Gods bless Porn Battle (another thing that LJ/Dreamwidth excels at).

I'm also kind of pleased that precisely 90% of these stories are NC-17. Not only am I productive, I'm filthy. Come celebrate with me until my chatty roommate goes to bed and I can absorb myself writing yet more porn.

Just a reminder to everyone that the Good Omens Holiday Exchange opened for signups yesterday, and will remain open until the 30th. We have ten people's prompts/requests already in our List (anonymized for your perusal). Lots of really cool ideas already this year, I'm very excited.

***

Meanwhile, htebazytook and I are having so much fun it should be illegal, working on our collaborative story. Yes, the Appalachian!Sherlock AU, the one we call "The Bone Fiddle" to its face and "A Study in Redneck" behind its back. We're at about the 20k-word mark now, which means it's okay to talk about it a little now. It's definitely a real thing that is happening. There will be murder ballads, square dancing, evil coal companies, the Greenbrier resort and its government secret, deer hunting, tobacco-chewing, a serial killer, and definitely slash.

Here, have an Easter egg:

( Liner Notes From a Fictional Album )

For me, one of the very best parts of AUs is the worldbuilding. Those little explosions of epiphany you get when you're recasting a character's role or figuring out how a certain detail would fit in this universe. htebazytook and I really like the way each other thinks! Bouncing ideas off each other is the engine that's fueling this whole crazy coal train, I could never have gotten this far by myself.

We've created a fictional county and town (and we apologize to the real West Virginia counties of Raleigh, Mercer, and Wyoming, which I think are the ones that lose territory to make room for it) but it's very much like some very real places.

I haven't enjoyed writing this much in a long time.

Ask me a question about one of my stories or my approach to writing in general. It can be absolutely anything in any fic and I will tell you the honest-to-god answer. Don’t hold back. Anything. Whatever you ask, I will try my best to answer.


(Be warned that the honest-to-god answer to some questions might be "I have no idea, your guess is as good as mine." I don't always understand why I write what I write.)

I didn't sign up for Yuletide this year. It was a combination of factors: the delayed signup process left a short time to write. And I stalked the requested-fandoms summary and saw that no one had requested the fandoms I really wanted to write and no one had offered the fandoms I really wanted to ask for.

Plus, y'know. NaNoWriMo. And 1992 Drawer Novel From Hell. And GOE. And jobhunting. I'm sad because I really enjoyed the last two years I did it, but sometimes you just gotta sit a dance out.


I DID goof off enough to go see HP & DH with divinetailor and family last night, though.

( Fairly insignificant spoilers, but nonetheless )

Anyway, so...back to work!

I'm not in a mood to read SRS BSNS posts by SRS PEOPLE, but there were two entries that were VERY Relevant To My Interests.

Getting Medieval On Your Ass. It's about sex toys in pre-industrial societies and the fantasy analogues thereof. Yes, that's the best title ever for a post about that.

THE SPARRING LEADS TO SEX: A Manifest. Who loves this trope? Not me, I promise. *eyedart, fingers crossed behind back*

So, because I'm a procrastinator...

Will anyone be around on Saturday to do a quick and dirty beta of my lgbtfest fic? It'll probably be about 3,000 words (absolutely no more than 5k).

LOTR, with allusions to the Valar and events in the Silmarillion time-frame. Rating probably PG-13.

Slashy, sad, and ENT-CENTRIC. (Major characters: Skinbark, Quickbeam, Treebeard. At this point in the writing there is about a 93% chance of a brief Tom Bombadil appearance.)

I deliberately requested a posting date as close to Beltane as possible. Although it is unavoidably turning out to not be a happy-happy-joy-joy kind of story, it is still my gift to Yavanna and the Green Man.

Am working on lgbtfest fic, which is in LOTR fandom, and remembering that what I loved to write about most in Middle-earth are the characters on the edges and corners and margins who never got anything resembling their full stories told, because they are the ones who made Tolkien's worldbuilding as vivid and deep and enduring as it is. Every fictional world should be like that: the sense that the main narrative is by necessity only a tiny tip of the iceberg.

I'm feeling melancholy, though. Often, writers say that they look at their old stories and are embarrassed by how bad they are. Sometimes, I look at my old stories and think, "I wrote that?" and start to feel that I was once so much more confident and imaginative than I am now, and worry I might never be that good again.

The wintry Wisconsin weekend taught me how to breathe slowly and deeply again (the things you forget!). Lately my jobs have been reminding me that work actually goes better when you're not so tense you can barely move. Just show up. (physically or mentally). That's more than half the battle. You don't have to be justifying your existence every moment.

So where's the writing, though?

I have two GO WsIP that I'm very fond of, conceptually, and they're not abandoned by any stretch, and yet they're in a frustrating place. I add a few hundred words here and there. Been a while since I had the energy to sit down and really fly, which is when the good stuff happens. Been feeling a little fandom-isolated, and I'm sure that's a factor, but I've also been in grim hunker-down-and-work-on-real-world-stuff mode too, and that doesn't help either.

Suggestions? I need to get that lightness of being back, somehow.

What's making me happy today:

The day itself. It's chilly and grey and the trees on my street are half bare, half beautifully colored. It's the best kind of reading and writing and listening-to-music day. It's the kind of day where I can sit around in my PJ's writing all the time and not feel guilty about it, because there is no incentive to go anywhere.

Food. OH MY GOD. I just ate a bowl of instant oatmeal with maple syrup added, a chopped apple with honey, and half a pound of cottage cheese and I'm STILL HUNGRY.

Coffee. Trader Joe's has my beloved Wintry Blend back in stock (with cinnamon, cloves, and peppercorns).

WFMT. Beethoven's 9th by the CSO with Daniel Barenboim. That piece is a cliché for a reason, people. And the orchestra I phone-whore for is so frequently flawless.

wrisomifu. At last, a writing support community that understands Miserable Fuckitude well and sets the bar fittingly low. No, I haven't done 10 minutes every day. But when I do, it's never just 10 minutes, because paragraphs are like potato chips.

My three WIPs. Yes, three. One of them is very vague, but sinister and sexy and was inspired by a convo on an HP fic community. It's Grindeldore. It's historic. It's songfic. It's Current 93 (!) songfic. The others are GO, one is sekrit for now, and the other is REALLY FUCKING LONG and will only get longer.

You?