dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Nate - Watchful)
Swiped from [livejournal.com profile] rubynye: Here's [a meme] where I'll post the working title of a story, and the first sentence, for my most current WIPs. No pairing or summary info.

Right now I have reasonably final titles for everything, but I'll use the handles I use when talking to other people about the stories, in their least summary/pairing-revealing versions.

Also, I only have three WIPs with first lines in place right now, and one of those is a biiiig reach in terms of actually being in progress. o.O

ExpandWIPs! )

*facepalm*

Oct. 2nd, 2011 10:10 pm
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Nate - Watchful)
Just cracked 10,000 words on the first properly Nate/Brad wolf-verse story. Nate took his clothes off around the 4,000-word mark.

GUESS WHO IS STILL FULLY CLOTHED. GO ON. GUESS.
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Nate - Watchful)
First, an awesome, AWESOME thing: [personal profile] missmollyetc has made fanart for the Generation Kill wolf-verse and it is the single greatest thing I have ever seen, and obviously I have no bias here whatsoever. :D

We were talking about what happens when a human Marine and his wolf brother or sister leave the Corps, and I mentioned that there must be all-day briefings about adjusting to civilian life with, of course, power point. A few hours later....

Lupine Civilian Integration: Transition Challenges and Responsibilities

:D :D :D

I have it downloaded on my desktop and I still giggle every time I see it sitting there. Molly made me a POWERPOINT, you guys. <3_____<3


Secondly I am thiiiiiiiiisclose to finishing this GK story I'm working on--it's not quite 17,000 words, and I'm still pretty sure I can bring it home in under 20--but I'm kind of ... stuck? Apparently I don't know what to do with these guys when they're not as miserable as humanly possible. It's so weird.


Thirdly I may or may not have said something completely disastrous to [personal profile] iulia this weekend along the lines of "Man, I want to make a contribution to the genre of Erik/Charles fixit fic where there's no beach divorce, but what would I write?" and then we sat there for hours and hashed out exactly what I should write and figured out how to solve several of the obvious logistical problems and when I woke up this morning the last scene unfolded in my brain and ... this was not on my list of things to write, dammit.
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Brad - In the Sand)
28 – Have you ever collaborated with anyone else, whether writing together, or having an artist work on a piece about your fic?

Well, I participated in a big bang this year, which resulted in awesome art for my story, but I'm not sure that that ever felt like collaborating? Mainly because I generally imagine collaborating has to do with giving up having total control over how my story goes, and I ... don't.

I've always felt vaguely hypocritical about this, because, you know--I'm writing fanfic, I'm picking up someone else's story and reworking it into my story. But I don't care who else writes what, or even what anyone reworks my story into, later on. Just, while I'm writing, it needs to be my story, and while I will tell it to a lot of people, and while there's a lot of input I do gratefully accept at pretty much all phases... it still has to be my story while I'm writing it or I just freeze up completely.

I'm trying to get better about this, mainly because it feels like a moral failing of some kind not to be able to collaborate in the myriad ways people seem to do all around me in fandom, but that's me. Closely though I work with betas and much though I talk stories out with people, I don't think I've ever really collaborated with anyone on anything.


ExpandAll 30 questions under the cut )
dira: My home is not a place ... it is people. (Home is not a place)
24 – Betaing – How many betas do you like to use to make sure there aren't any major flaws in your fic? Do you have a Beta horror story or dream story?

It depends on the story. For short things I usually manage to limit myself to one. Usually. Missing Persons went through at least nine, over the course of three years, and I would have been happy to have more if I had known more people I could inflict it on in good conscience. Everything That You Can Keep had four, which put me about at the limit of the amount of simultaneous input I could absorb, although as I say that I realize What to Do After Firing had five--it required no drastic rewriting, though, and beta comments are easier to take in inverse proportion to the amount of work they require of me. *g*

ExpandGoing on and on and on because I have no beta right now to tell me to keep it short. )

TRIUMPH

Aug. 19th, 2011 10:53 pm
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Amy - TARDIS)
File created: 8/19/10
File last modified: 8/19/11, 10:52 PM

At 20,406 words, my ridiculous gen Vorkosigan/Doctor Who crossover is DONE. ISH. UNTIL THE BETAS GET AT IT.

BUT MOSTLY JUST DONE. \o/
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Jack O'Neill - *facepalm*)
14 – Ratings – how high are you comfortable with going? Have you ever written higher? If you're comfortable with NC-17, have you ever been shocked by finding that the story you're writing is G-rated instead?

Yyyyes, I would say I am comfortable going to NC-17. I mean, there are levels of pornination I have never yet had occasion to hit, but, yes, I go all the way.

And, ahaha, no. I wouldn't say that I have ever been shocked to find myself writing a non-explicit story. I tend to have a pretty good idea which stories are which going into them.

I don't really like writing porn--I mean, I do it because I keep plotting out stories that call for it, because those are stories I like to tell, but writing the porn is frequently where I bog down to some degree or another, especially if the porn involves Aral Vorkosigan. When I was writing Jigsaw the story almost fatally stalled--in 2009--at what I fully intended to write as the first explicit sex scene. If [personal profile] iulia hadn't given me permission to fade to black the rest of the story probably never would have gotten written at all. As I worked on the rest of Jigsaw--which, if not G-rated, is certainly no racier than the show itself, apart from its array of pairings--I mostly just felt like I was getting away with something, because I didn't have to write the porn! *g*

ExpandAll 30 questions under the cut. )
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Charlie - In My Head by _kalliope)
13 – Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

Question the first: I prefer canon. At least in principle. There are some fanon tropes and characterizations that work for me--as they do for lots of people, or they wouldn't be fanon--but in my own writing I tend to get fixated on Getting Things Right.

(Which has led, in RPF fandoms, to the "be creepy or be wrong" dilemma killing a story or two. I realized when I was in bandom that the thing I found viscerally upsetting about the idea of the actual people in question reading my stories was not how horrified they would be--they have back buttons like everyone else--but that they would know what I was getting wrong. This... probably tells you altogether too many things about how my brain works.)

Question the second: I think writing fanfic in general has changed how I see all original source materials. Writing fic about it is very close to being my default manner of interacting with any movie or tv show, and books to a lesser but still significant extent. Long before I write fic about anything, I'm trying to figure out if I could and how I would.

Also, for a lot of the things I wind up writing fic about, I read fic first and then track down the source material, so I am already viewing the source through fic-colored lenses when I get to it. This occasionally means that I have these revelations about canon vs. fanon on first viewing the canon, which leads straight back around to generally preferring to stick as close as I can to canon when I get around to doing my own writing. AUs notwithstanding.


ExpandAll 30 questions under the cut. )
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Gerard - Gerard by supp_nads)
12 – Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" fic of a favorite book or movie but set in a different fandom?

Assuming that "adaptation" refers to the sort of AU where you recapitulate the plot arc and character roles of your source text with the characters from another fandom, then, yes, although never at the length of an entire book or movie.

Gerard and Rapunzel is a retelling of Rapunzel with the My Chem boys (version 2.0, with Bob). Also with 100% more genderqueerness, threesomes, and approximations of Medieval Christianity than I have ever seen in a telling of the fairy tale.

The Dead Speak: Charlie Eppes is a pastiche of Douglas Coupland's vignettes called "The Dead Speak" from Life After God--you can read the originals on this hideously ad-riddled website if you scroll down near the bottom of the page. They are even more gruesome than mine, although mine fits in an incest pairing right before all the apocalypse and horrible death. Yay?

Off to See the Wizard is an adaptation of the Stargate Atlantis episode "Grace Under Pressure" (which itself was a sort of adaptation from the SG-1 episode "Grace") in which a concussed character in trouble (Greg from CSI, in my version) hallucinates someone he knows (and has the hots for) who helps him solve the problem he faces (Gil).

(Now I really want to write "Grace Under Pressure" and "The Dead Speak" fic in every fandom, and by every fandom I mean Generation Kill.)


Ahem. There is also the one that I THOUGHT I was writing as an adaptation and which I assume no one in their right mind would ever recognize as such. When I was a kid I used to watch the Sunday afternoon Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies with my mom, and I remember many of them vaguely but fondly, and at some point after getting into slash fandom it occurred to me to try to recast Send Me No Flowers (to be clear: a screwball romantic comedy) as a Due South story. The essential premise is that Rock Hudson is a hypochondriac who becomes convinced that he's really dying this time, and so he starts making plans for his wife so that she won't be lonely when he's gone. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

I honestly don't remember much about the movie beyond the premise--I mean, I vividly recall the bit in the doctor's office where Rock Hudson becomes convinced that he's going to die, and then everything else is a bit of a blur.

So that was my premise: Ray Kowalski becomes convinced he's going to die, and he has to make plans, particularly as regard making sure Fraser will be okay without him. Um, and the first thing I did was take out all the comedy, because that is generally what I do with any premise that is supposed to have humor built into it. So it wound up being That Good Night: A Death Story, which is surely one of the worst things anyone has ever done to a perfectly innocent Sixties screwball comedy.


ExpandAll 30 questions under the cut. )
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Colby - Fingers by emily_reich)
10 – Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?

I am almost infinitely persuadable when it comes to pairings, provided they involve one or more characters I care about, so this question almost doesn't compute at all for me.

I have a distinct memory of this WRT to reading fic: not long after I got into Buffy fandom it occurred to me that someone, somewhere, must be writing Giles/Buffy. Age differences and power dynamics and Giles are all relevant to my interests--surely this would make for kinkywrongfun reading experiences!

Yeah, I have never been squicked harder in my life except for that one time I tried to read Steve Yzerman slash and my eyes actually filled with tears to spare me the sight.

I did do something kind of similar once--similar to my Giles/Buffy experience, not, thankfully, similar to ill-fated excursions into NHL RPS--in my own writing. I tried to write Don Eppes/Colby Granger. Powerplay, age difference, secrecy but not as much secrecy as Don/Charlie! In principle, I find this pairing intriguing! In practice, I wrote something like ten thousand words of fic which kept falling further into some hideous and incoherent rabbit hole, located an ending of sorts, sent it off to beta, revised, sent it off again, attempted to revise, realized that these problems were in fact really, really fundamental and also I was starting to hate the fic a lot, and finally declared defeat and went home. I think it's the only fic I've ever written to something like completion and then stuffed into a drawer; certainly it's the longest. I simply could not make the fascinating dynamic that worked in my head work on paper. Among other things, there was no way to make a roughly canonical Colby that crazy without doing a lot of setup I didn't want to do. (I was, at the time, about halfway through doing all the setup in the world to make Don and Charlie crazy enough for each other. I did not need another crazyfication epic.)

I eventually did succeed in writing Don/Colby a couple of times after that, by the expedients of not actually exploring the relationship dynamics at all and sticking to drabble length. So possibly Don/Colby doesn't count, but that one awful story is my one big failure to write a pairing I set out to write--getting distracted by something shiny and wandering off before I finished that Clone!Ten/Rose epic, or the Bones love triangle with Sully, hardly counts.



As for writing a pairing I didn't like but found I could write anyway, uh, hm. As I said, I'm vastly persuadable, so by the time I've worked my way around to writing, like, The Doctor's daughter and a Dalek, I'm convinced that they're MFEO anyway. I guess Red John/Patrick Jane was probably the most self-consciously sincerely wrong pairing I've ever successfully written.

(The most self-consciously wrong pairing that I was never able to write--both because I was forbidden by everyone I told about the bunny and because I myself couldn't really bear to have it in my head enough to properly write it--was Gerard and Mikey Way, bodyswapped into each other. For whatever that's worth.)


ExpandAll 30 questions, under the cut. )
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
7 – Have you ever had a fic change your opinion of a character?

I assume, given that the other 29 questions are about fic I've written, that this question is asking if the experience of writing a given fic has ever changed my opinion of a character.

My kneejerk reaction is to cite Burn Up in Love Love Love, Panic! at the Disco GSF that originated in me saying, you know, I liked all of the dozens of slutty bottom Ryan Ross stories I had read, but why couldn't there be slutty bottom Jon Walker? At the time I said it it was sheerly contrarian, but by the time I finished the story it seemed self-evident to me that Jon belonged on the bottom of the puppy pile (and Ryan on the top).

For a bit more, uh, depth, though, there's also the experience I had while writing When the Reckoning Arrives, which is how I learned who Arkady Jole is (and all about how his life works). This feels a bit like cheating since I was also making up most of what I know about Arkady Jole, but I can't talk about him in the OC question tomorrow, so you get him now. I wound up writing "When the Reckoning Arrives" only after making repeated failed attempts to write "Everything That You Can Keep" without the detour. But I couldn't figure out how Jole worked, what he was thinking, how to write his voice, and finally I went and gave him his own story in which to find out who he was. That didn't exactly change my opinion of him (my opinion: Jole is the prettiest! And best! And loves Aral a lot!) but it gave my opinion something to work with.

Other than that, hmm. I tend to be kind of ... a stickler for canon? (I feel like if I try to say I'm not [personal profile] iulia will turn up in the comments to LAUGH AT ME FOREVER, so I should just cop to it.) I try to keep even things that have no reason to be in line with canon in line with canon (and my interpretation thereof), and when writing something that deviates wildly I tend to have a pretty good separation in my mind between, you know, "This is what this character would be like as a professional hockey player" or "This is what this character is like after he's been held captive for months by the bad guys" and "This is what this character is actually like."

On the other hand, lately I have to reach in and forcibly remove the soul-bonded wolves from all my other bunnies that are not supposed to involve soul-bonded wolves. DAMMIT, WOLVES. YOU GET ONE AU. ONE. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A WHOLE UNIVERSE. BUT YOU HAVE TO STAY IN IT.

ExpandAll 30 questions under the cut. )
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Ray - Ready to Go)
I just cracked 10,000 words on the (hahaha "totally short") Ray prequel story in the Generation Kill wolf-verse. Ray has at long last removed an article of clothing other than his socks, so at this point I feel like I win.

...As long as I don't think about how long the ~real~ wolf-verse story is going to be. /o\
dira: Teal'c, Jack, Sam, and Daniel, in shades. (SG-1 - Reflected)
Soooo I'm about six days away from posting my SG-1 big bang, and I thought I'd let people get an idea of what it's actually about, courtesy of pairings, warnings, and the blurb I had to write when I turned in my rough draft:

ExpandBut I still can't tell you the title because I am weird and superstitious )

And if anybody wanted the [Title Redacted] Big Bang Playlist, there it is. Forty-one songs in a mix of m4a and mp3 formats, hosted at megaupload. This is the playlist I've been using to get myself into the right mindset for writing my story (i.e. a collection of all the songs that make me go "This is totally about Jack!" and "This is totally about Sam!" and "This is totally about [redacted]!" I listen to it on shuffle, so there's no specified order (I considered trying to arrange all 41 songs into an order that reflects their correspondences to specific moments in the narrative arc of the story, and then I realized that would mean never, ever getting around to sharing the playlist).

But if you want to get approximately the right feel, I would suggest listening to "Another New World" and then "Furlough" first, and "Solsbury Hill" and "Never Quite Free" last. Also, listen to "When U Love Somebody" followed immediately by "Sax Rohmer #1" just because the juxtaposition makes me wave my hands a lot.

ExpandMostly alphabetical track listing & lyrics snippets )
dira: Teal'c, Jack, Sam, and Daniel, in shades. (SG-1 - Reflected)
I just finished what I hope is the last round of major revisions on my SG-1 Big Bang fic, which is good because, uh, I'm due to post it two weeks from tomorrow. It grew by 8,000 words in the revision process, but is still (slightly) shorter than Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive, at least until it turns out I have 2500 more words of 'splaining to do on this draft.

Anyway, now I am going to go to bed. I may or may not have been so excited last night about the prospect of finishing this today that I had what I have decided to call Optimist's Insomnia, which is the only kind of insomnia I get with any kind of regularity. You could also call it Small Child the Night Before Christmas Insomnia, but sometimes I get it because I am super excited about ... a Monday when I finish writing something? And then I have to spend that entire Monday when I finish writing something functioning on five hours of sleep. It was almost totally self-defeating, EXCEPT I STILL FINISHED.

(PS In the interests of not being unnecessarily totally mysterious about what I'm posting two weeks from tomorrow, I have been thinking about posting the blurb I had to write and/or my perhaps a tiny bit excessive 41-song playlist (less than one song per 1500 words!) for the story sometime between now and then. Uh. If those are things people are interested in seeing in advance of the actual story?)

:D:

Jun. 5th, 2011 10:42 am
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Sam & Daniel - Geek Twins!)
I have just had the best idea ever for this next bit of edits for my SG-1 bigbang story. What I cannot tell is whether it is the sort of best idea ever that requires a lot of forward remodeling to the rest of the story but leaves it WAY MORE AWESOME, or if it is the kind of best idea ever that requires a lot of remodeling and causes your story to catch fire, fall over, and then sink into a swamp.

ETA: I mean, to clarify, this is way closer to being actually a good idea than sending anyone to Narnia. Probably. /o\
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Amy - TARDIS)
[livejournal.com profile] quintenttsy has recorded a podfic of my Doctor Who story, "The Box Below"!

***

And in a totally unrelated development, tonight's work on my SG-1 bigbang story has taught me this valuable lesson:

Any time you think that you can simplify a story by sending Jack O'Neill to Narnia, even just for a few minutes, you should probably look down and identify the very narrow ledge you have wandered out onto, and then you should move expeditiously back to the nearest window and get the hell inside. Because, in fact, no. No you can't.
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Amy - TARDIS)
This morning I woke up from a dream in which I was (probably drunkenly; we were sitting at a table very like my general mental image of Hanging Out In The Bar At A Con, give or take also being in a storage container or something) trying to explain to dubious people the inherent genius of my idea to write a story where the Doctor and Rory get soulbonded and obviously this leads to OT3 after some delightful angst, because obviously.

I had already had the idea for this story (late last night, after reading Generation Kill soulbond fic, like you do when you've never seen Generation Kill and you should've been in bed an hour ago but you just discovered that somewhere on the internet, awaiting your download, is a movie version of Persuasion starring Ciaran Hinds as Captain Wentworth LIKE I DIDN'T ALREADY WANT TO MARRY HIM ENOUGH and you figure you might as well read something while you download the constituent files). So, uh, thanks dream-brain, for trying to convince me that other people would be dubious about it. Too bad, because it is GENIUS and I have the EMPHATIC HAND GESTURES to prove it.
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
Two days after sending it off to beta, I have just realized what exactly the whole point of my Stargate SG-1 story is. Um. I guess better now than after I'd posted it and couldn't go back and make all the little edits necessary to make it seem like I knew all along?

*FLAIL*

Mar. 26th, 2011 02:43 pm
dira: Teal'c, Jack, Sam, and Daniel, in shades. (SG-1 - Reflected)
GUYS. GUYS. I HAVE ALMOST 49,000 WORDS OF FIC AND I AM WRITING! THE THING! THAT HAPPENS! AT THE END OF THE STORY! THAT I HAVE BEEN IMAGINING SINCE 2004!

SOMEONE COME HOLD MY HAND, OMG.
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
So I was reading T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets today, like I do, because I had finished the book I was reading and didn't want to write on my lunch hour. And so the end of "East Coker" particularly struck me, like it does.

ExpandRambling thoughts about T. S. Eliot and writing fic versus writing original fiction with cameo appearance by my 592nd Existential Crisis As A Writer. )

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dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
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