write like you need it to survive

30 – Do you have a favorite fic you've written? What makes it your favorite? And don't forget to give us a link!

...No, I don't. I mean, the ones that are the longest, or took up the most time, kind of Stockholmed me into loving them enough to feel like the time and effort were worth it, and I have certainly written a lot of stories I love, but ... there are 286 of them (plus WIPs and not-quite-written things) so how can I choose just one?

That said, if you give me some kind of category (favorite for some fandom/pairing/character, favorite het/gen/etc., favorite story with a dog in it, whatever), I will try to identify my favorite story I've written in that category.

Also, whoa! I finished a 30-day meme! I will be honest and say that the thing that really kept me on track for the last ... several days was that I accidentally synced up with the date, and was too nerdily delighted by that to let it get messed up by missing a day. Anyway--I did it! \o/ And now I will go back to being... much quieter than this.


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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.


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26 – What is the oddest (or funnest) thing you've had to research for a fic?

So the thing is that I'm a librarian, and I'm a librarian in large part because if someone asks a factual question in my hearing or sight I cannot rest without finding the answer. Even when that person is me. Especially when that person is me.

So I research a lot of things, is what I am saying, and the vast majority of them never end up in the fic. Most of the time I don't even write the fic in question. I just really enjoy the research; I don't like to plot things without knowing that I've got a factual basis in place. For a while there, between moving between fandoms and my propensity for plotting kidfic, it seemed like I was reading up on California custody law every year or so. (The time I went and read entire history of sodomy law in California was not actually research for anything I planned on writing, although after reading it I did consider writing some things on that basis.)

Anyway. I've lost track of what constitutes odd (knowing all about the points system for Canadian immigration isn't weird, right? and ditto stuff like Googling paddle party and then realizing it's going to work better--for these purposes--if you include Marines), and all research is more or less equally fun for me, but a couple of months ago I spent a really unconscionable amount of time doing research for the Ham Radio Apocalypse (or, as it developed over time, Gay Post-Apocalyptic Sleepless in Seattle with Recon Marines on Ham Radios). Eventually I decided against writing it because, you know. Apocalypses are sort of depressing; 99.999% of everyone is dead and the people who are left are communicating by ham radio. But also, as it turns out, it's really hard to find exact information online about how far you can propagate a radio signal with stuff you can loot from an electronics store, and precisely what atmospheric conditions would be required for those scenarios. I eventually concluded that I would actually have to contact humans who knew this information and tell them I was researching a novel and then later tell them that the novel died a sudden, tragic death, lest they ever ask to read it. Which was further than I wanted to go researching something I didn't even plan to write.

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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*

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

22 – Have you ever participated in a fest or a Big Bang? If so, write about your favorite experience in relation to one. If not, are there any you've thought about doing? And if not, why not?

Fest - as narrowly defined - no. I tend to find fests confusing and overwhelming, so I steer clear.

Big Bang - yes! For the first time this year, I actually managed to align a long story I was writing with the submission window for a Big Bang. It felt a little bit like cheating, since Jigsaw had been in progress for a long, long time when I realized I could get it into stargate_summer, but it was a really fun experience having other writers to commiserate with, to say nothing of getting omg awesome art for my story!

But my ongoing favorite fest-y (festive, if you will) challenge-y thing is, of course, Yuletide! I've done Yuletide nearly every year since its beginning (2003-2006, 2008-2010), and I adore everything about it--secret-giftyness, terrifying deadline, obscure fandoms, my Christmas-Eve-night and Christmas-morning ritual of sneaking as many stories as I can between site slowdowns and my family wanting to actually celebrate together. This past year, 2010, was my favorite so far, possibly just because it's the most recent and I have more fun with it every year. I wound up writing three stories this year, my assignment (Not Alone in the Dark, which as far as I know is one of the only two stories on the internet for Susan R. Matthews' Under Jurisdiction series) plus a couple of Yuletide Treats (The Most Important Meal and Sex on a Frozen River Mayhem, which could not be more different while both being more or less linear narratives in English). I do not know how on earth this year's Yuletide will top the awesomeness of slashing Jack Harkness and Mayhem, but I have faith in the Yuletide magic. And I am already working on my list of offers/requests.


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20 – Do you ever get bunnied from other people's stories or art in the same fandom?

Stories, occasionally, although I almost never write the stories I come up with that way.
There are a couple of obvious exceptions--I wrote a fix-it sequel to the second most depressing Fraser/Kowalski story ever. I also did a remix once.

But usually I get bunnies contrariwise, from the negative space of stories. I find myself thinking, you know, "There are all these stories about Brad showing up on Nate's doorstep, I want to write a story where Nate shows up on Brad's."

(Are there stories about Nate showing up on Brad's doorstep? Inasmuch as Brad has a doorstep, which I guess is sort of the logical problem there. Um. ANYWAY.)

I don't think I've ever gotten bunnied from art--I mean, fanart is probably responsible for me crying over Boromir for half an hour the first time I saw Fellowship, and it's responsible for me getting into Due South in general, but, idk. I never feel like I'm seeing much fanart for fandoms I'm actually in. I suspect that I am out of the fanart loop.


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18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?

Er. Seriously, we're doing the "where do your ideas come from?" question? Who wrote this meme?

Ahem. Anyway. I get bunnies from everywhere. The whole long Aral/Jole saga came from me tin-hatting Aral and Jole in canon and then sitting down and trying to work out how the hell that would work. The Generation Kill wolf-verse came, as far as I can reconstruct, from me trying to figure out how to take the GK guys and turn everything about them up to eleven--raise the already-high stakes, make their culture even weirder and more insular and intense and more serious about warrior spirits. I have a bunny that comes from listening to a particular song over and over and wanting to shove Brad and Nate inside it. I have a bunny that comes from me talking to Iulia and saying "I don't think anyone's written X. Oh, hey...." (The maximum case of that is Hawks and Hands, which was spawned, in all its enormity, from someone assuring me that they didn't mind how hockey kept cropping up in my Due South stories and my replying, "It's not going to be funny anymore when I write a whole AU where they're hockey players. Oh, hey....") I have a bunny that came from reading someone's unanswered request for recs of fic featuring a specific scenario, which, in retrospect, I probably misinterpreted enough that she wouldn't want to read the story I want to write.

Mostly my bunnies come from the fact that when I'm into a fandom, it's right there at the front of my brain, and everything I encounter bumps up against it. Sometimes it throws off sparks. Sometimes the sparks catch.


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16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?

I do use summaries--I certainly like to see a summary on a story before I click on it, so I feel it's necessary to give people some idea what's ahead when I post.

I do two different kinds of summaries: pull-quotes and ... actual summaries, I guess. I've come to prefer doing pull-quotes, where I grab an evocative line from the story itself and let that stand as a representation of its content. But if there's no good line to take out of context, or if the story is really complicated or otherwise difficult to sum up properly with any one line, then you get a description of the story's premise/content.

I only hate summaries when I'm about to post and suddenly realize I never came up with one. That doesn't happen too often anymore, as I've been burned often enough that How Will I Summarize This is one of my main ways of avoiding working on a story, right up there with How Will I Warn For This, and, the all-time champ to be discussed tomorrow, What Will I Call This....

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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 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*

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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.


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