write like you need it to survive

So months and months ago I wanted to write a story where Bucky comes to Steve and confesses that he has always been in love with Steve, and Steve is totally blindsided because he never thought of Bucky that way, but he wants to try a relationship--and then there's a whole uncertain process of trying and figuring things out en route to them both being happy in their new romantic relationship.

I figured that the logical way to have Steve go from "never thought of you that way" to "aw yisssss" regarding someone he's known since before puberty was to make Steve demisexual. I then decided to make Bucky (post-Hydra-traumatically) asexual because... I... like making life difficult for myself? Anyway. This story is extra-specially dear to my heart for a lot of reasons but hard to write for nearly all the same reasons, so it stalled out about a chapter and a half in, but I've never been able to stop going back to it and poking at it and thinking "well, I could probably write just a little more..."

This morning I posted a snippet of it in response to a tumblr ask and once again found myself wishing I had somewhere to post fic that isn't really finished, or sure to ever be finished, but is too substantial for me to feel comfortable just casting it upon the waters of Tumblr. Somewhere less formal and permanent than the AO3, but with commenting capabilities, like a kinkmeme where I could post five thousand words in one go...

Oh hey, I said to myself, I HAVE A DREAMWIDTH AND A LIVEJOURNAL. RIGHT.

So! Posting an unbeta'd WIP on the journals like it's 2008. I don't know when or if I will continue writing this! I just wanted to share what I've got. It ends in a pretty nice place, though.

Title: Try to Take a Shot
Chapter: 1/?
Pairing: Bucky/Steve
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 5,575
Notes: Bucky is now asexual (pursuant to general post-HYDRA depersonalization) but was bisexual previously; Steve is and always has been demisexual/biromantic

Summary: "I want to date you, Buck. I want to try--it'd be a hell of a shame not to. So what's different if we're dating? We already live together, we eat together and watch movies together, anything we feel like talking about we talk about with each other. What else?"

( Try to Take a Shot, Chapter 1/? )

So before I got around to writing, or even plotting, my Stargate SG-1 magnum opus, I really, really wanted to write a Moebius story. You remember Moebius, right? It's the one where SG-1 goes back mumble thousand years in time, and everyone EXCEPT Daniel dies, and then he's trapped alone in ancient Egypt for years until an alternate-timeline Sam, Jack, and Teal'c show up to fix the timeline, and then, reality having been repaired, that Daniel, Sam, Jack, and Teal'c are left in ancient Egypt to live out their lives.

Well, I thought to myself, this begs some questions. One was: How does Teal'c survive in a world with no Goa'uld and no Tretonin? And the answer was, he probably doesn't. Another was: How the hell does this hardened, battle-scarred, even-more-fucked-up-than-most Daniel deal with spending the rest of his life with alternate versions of Sam and Jack?

But the most pressing question was why, this time, Daniel survived when his team died. So obviously I came up with a more satisfying answer than "to defeat Ra" and it was "because he and Sam and Jack had a baby and Daniel was the parent best equipped to raise her alone in ancient Egypt, so he was designated to hang back and survive if things went wrong in the uprising."

I mean. Obviously, right?

But the idea of Daniel raising his daughter in ancient Egypt, with all the miseries and limits that would entail, was also really depressing. Ah, I thought, well. There's still a puddlejumper around somewhere--that first one that got buried in the desert, stranding the original team in the past. It's bound to get unburied eventually, and when it does, hey presto! They can all go home!

And it was that--the going home, with all the complications it would entail, all the ways it would disrupt the equilibrium they might have arrived at, Daniel raising his daughter with doppelgangers of her other parents--that I found I really wanted to write. I made several starts at it. With the Dying, my story about the alternate Teal'c dying in ancient Egypt, was one of those starts.

The next one picked up right after that and just kept going, with the shaky start of Daniel's relationship to the geek!verse Sam and Jack, and the introduction of Daniel's daughter.

( Breakfast. 1500 words. )

My third try at the story was next in internal chronology, jumping forward a year and a half, to a point where Daniel and the new Sam and Jack have settled into a new triad relationship, and also more or less settled into living in ancient Egypt.

This also showcases the way ancient poetry and backstory were going to be sprinkled into the story--the title by this time had advanced from "OT3gypt" to "Out of the Unexpected", which is one of Sappho's more fragmentary bits of poetry.

( Honey, I'm home. 1800 words. )

The middle attempt at the story got the furthest in terms of words written, although it spans maybe three or four hours of internal time, tops. It's set a day or two after the scene above, on a very eventful day.

( Out of the Unexpected. 15,000 words. )

So, if it's not already obvious: I still love this story to tiny, team-y, kidfic-y bits. But, yeah, there's no way I'm ever writing it, so I hope that other people get some warm fuzzies from these pieces of it!

I am definitely not sufficiently frustrated with wolves that I started writing fic where Nate is a sexbot. And even if I were writing sexbot fic, it would definitely not be creepy, dubcon, and/or under the cut here.

( Creepy dubcon Brad/sexbot!Nate fic I am not writing under the cut. Apparently I figured out how to write the Uncanny Valley. \o? )

I was thinking, I don't have anything to post for More Joy Day, but I guess I should at least post and say Yay! More Joy Day! with my happy shiny Rose icon.

Then I thought, hey, what about that WIP about Rose and Metacrisis!Ten that's been sitting around for... a while...? That's relatively happy (for Rose and Metacrisis!Ten) and has a reasonable stopping point, and it's ... 8,000 words long.

So! Here! Have the first two scenes of what could eventually be a long and schmangsty and profoundly ridiculous kidfic: Orphans of Time.

Rose/Metacrisis!Ten. post-"Journey's End". 8,000 words. Explicit.
"Well, he's the same old Doctor so far," Jackie remarked.

( Orphans of Time: Scenes 1-2 )

...And one time they did.

This was topical when I wrote it in email (as "something I want to write" although looking at it now it seems kind of ... written) a year and a half ago--in fact I think there must be some sort of factual basis for the precise date of #3 but I no longer remember what it was, did somebody find a marriage license?--and then I forgot it existed until just now, trying to dig up a piece of the Bob-gets-knocked-up story that I know I wrote down somewhere.

So! I'm just going to post this.

( Four or Five Times Frank and Jamia Didn't Get Married and One Time They Did. )

This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/531462.html.

I just finished this and I have to post it right this second or it will continue dragging out toward infinity. Please excuse any infelicities you run into toward the end. :)

7300-ish words. I am bad at summarizing.

As best I can tell, the Bob Wakes Up with Ladyparts idea started like this, on June 28, 2007, talking to iulia about an interview with Patrick Stump:

dira: Patrick: Yeah, it was...was it 'Thank You For The Venom'? Can't remember the name of it, can't remember what song I played. But it was one of their fast ones.

ChartBlog: That's SO unfair. You wanna be doing one of their slow ballads.

Patrick: I chose that song! And I did pretty well, except Bob Bryar, the drummer, likes to set his drums pretty far away, and he plays with his arms instead of his wrists. And so I couldn't come up with some of the really fast fills, cos I don't have the arm strength that he does. He's a lot more buff than people give him credit for.

iulia: Mmmm, Bob.

dira: (...I kind of want to write girl!Bob fic, where switching fucks with Bob's upper body strength, and he's fucking furious about it.)

dira: (Like, yes, okay, his dick is missing, but mostly HE CAN'T PLAY THE FUCKING DRUMS RIGHT.)

...Obviously, Bob is my favorite.

The initial idea was reinforced by this video of Bob talking about and then playing Welcome to the Black Parade, in which he mentions that the big Black Parade kit was at the very limit of his ability to play, and that he was never actually comfortable with it, hence the dual kits starting on Projekt Revolution.

So over time this idea--Bob gets switched and can't drum right and hates it--turned into a whole Bob/Gerard story called, naturally, ( Juliet Loves the Beat. )

This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/531063.html.

So the awful thing about rounding up these stories for telling is that I was going through my email and IM chatlogs, trying to find copies of what I'd told people before to work from, and in the process I have run across A LOT of other stories I'd completely forgotten about over the last two and a half years.

(For instance:

[17:40] DiraSudis: I have been wanting to write an AU (OR IS IT) where Dirty and Pete met in one of Pete's Philosophy classes in college, and Dirty is actually smarter and better-educated than Pete and just would rather run around the country being a professional goofball than slaving away in academia somewhere and not getting taken seriously anyway.
[17:40] DiraSudis: And just now I realized that it's not just that he's writing his thesis when he's not busy getting shot in the ass with a t-shirt gun, HE'S WRITING HIS THESIS IN MEDIA STUDIES ABOUT PETE.
[17:41] DiraSudis: PETE AND DIRTY ARE JIM AND BLAIR.
[17:41] DiraSudis: ...I just needed to tell someone that.
[17:42] DiraSudis: POSSIBLY THEY HAVE SPIRIT ANIMALS I DON'T KNOW.
[17:42] misspamela: Dirty's spirit animal is a FROG I THINK
[17:42] DiraSudis: Pete's spirit animal is probably a bulldog. And probably like eats or steps on the frog.
[17:42] DiraSudis: So that's probably not going to work so well.
[17:43] misspamela: but is accurate

That's the whole thing, please don't ask me to talk about it.)

ANYWAY, I managed to locate most of the bones of the Spencer/Bob story, which I had actually started writing in the hilariously mistaken belief that I could just write part of it and it would be fine! It's set from late September 2004-September 2005, so basically from shortly after Spencer's 17th birthday to a little after his 18th. It would have been stupendously NC-17 for underage sex all over the place; as it is there's nothing really graphic under the cut, but there are descriptions of what 17-year-old Spencer and 24- or 25-year-old Bob would have been up to in this story.

I did an alarming amount of tour date research for this story, mostly via the Wayback Machine and the MCR LJ comms that date back far enough, so if nothing else I have the timeline more or less right!

I wrote nearly 6,000 words of setup, which just barely got to the point where Spencer and Bob speak to each other. By that point it had accumulated two working titles - one for the part covering the first 48 hours of Bob and Spencer's acquaintance (which I figured I could keep to about 30,000 words) and the other (from a Mountain Goats song, of course) for the insanely long subsequent story spanning the entire year. So without further ado...


Spencer/Bob, 17,000 words of not-quite-fic.

( Crash Boom Bang & Through This Year: the insanely long non-AU underage Bob/Spencer story. )

So in between episodes of Merlin I am putting off working on Die Hard fic by writing Torchwood fic, and putting off writing Torchwood fic by doing, um, this (and this, and this and this) in comments. In case anyone did actually want some Die Hard McClane/Farrell kidfic arranged in sort of random order. It's, um, avant-garde.

(renenet, I think sheerly for the sake of delicious-ing, may or may not have dubbed this "Something to Hope On," but rest assured that if I ever put it in chronological order and one tense and really write it, it will almost certainly have a new and much stupider title. *g*)

So! Here is a story that I thought up and yet am definitely, definitely not ever going to write. It is definitely not fic, and definitely not fic not for iuliamentis's birthday, which today is not. Or something like that. Point is: we watched Journey's End yesterday, and I found I needed to write this down.

It all started with lucythedragon's amazing and brilliant Castiel vs. Ten Picspam Poll, which, among other things, has Donna Noble winning (over Anna) for best redhead-who-bosses-him-around, and Dean Winchester winning (over Rose) for best troublesome big-eyed blond he adores.

Which left me saying "Oh, man, Dean/Donna" and then, in really quite short order ( it collapsed into schmoopy Dean/Donna curtainfic. )

More drabbles, and more fandoms this time:

misspamela wanted Supernatural! Something about Bobby!

( The Third Sunday in June )

mclachlan asked for Torchwood, Jack/Ianto - Jack discovers Ianto is a timelord.

( Nobody Dies at This Time )

iuliamentis requested Doctor Who! DoctorDonnafriends!

( Just the Claps )

strangecobwebs wanted the bandom/Criminal Minds crossover of my heart: Spencer/Spencer! Smith trying to explain...something...to Reid!

( Hard to Explain )