it's a magical world

Secret Mutant is live! If you like XMFC fic, you should totally check it out. It's...mostly Charles/Erik, but there are a handful of other pairings & gen fics strewn about in there, too.

I wrote two fics. They are POLAR OPPOSITES in popularity at the moment, and I expect that won't change. There is pretty much zero anonymity involved in my pinch-hit; the other is less obvious (and has almost no hits on AO3 at the moment, which does not surprise me). If you manage to guess both, I'll...write you a thing? Seriously, no points for guessing the pinch-hit alone, it's that obvious.

I received an XMFC/Bond fusion fic, which is also not even a little bit anonymous, but I'll not reveal the author early. ;) She has excellent taste in fusions; I've been mainlining Skyfall fic over the past few weeks, so that was very well-timed.

Aaand...I really need to get cracking on Yuletide, fuck. Instead, have a Yuletide meme! ( i've been participating since the very first year, godDAMN )

A meme that actually looks really interesting, and that I need to make sure I check out everyone else's responses to:

Pick a character* I've written and I will give and explain the top five** ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.

* Try to make it someone I've written either often or recently in order for me to answer.
** May not actually be five

I have BUCKETS OF HEADCANON for most of the POV characters I've written. Like, to the point that I feel guilty if the plot of one fic requires me to ignore my headcanon from a previous fic. (AU scenarios aside, of course, but even then, there are crucial elements of Who A Character Is that go for any iteration. Otherwise, I may as well be writing original fiction.)

I did get some Secret Mutant fic written last night! And I reorganized the outline of it a bit, which helps -- I have a bad habit of imposing a structure on fics to help organize my thoughts which then fails to actually best serve the story itself. I need to let go of that a bit.

Also today I sold my car. Which makes me feel a bit like I've lost a friend, weirdly enough. Oh, Martha my dear, you got me to so many rehearsals around DC and then to Colorado and back, you were a good car and I am very sorry to see you go. :( But I really, really don't need a car in NYC, and I can't afford to pay $350/mo on insurance for a vehicle I won't ever drive. Still, I am sad.

Not sure who's even seen this movie, so, um, anyone willing and able to do a quick beta on 6000 words of Snow White/Huntsman fic?

At least this ought to get this fandom out of my system. And I have to admit, writing het sex does have its advantages, mainly being that I can just use "his" and "her" a lot instead of having to constantly name the participants to distinguish one person's body parts from the other's.

Yes, I spent my one day off writing het porn. These things happen. In fairness, the fic is only like 20% sex, and it's not all that explicit. But that's the part I hadn't written yet, so.

Apparently I misunderstood the X-Men Reversebang schedule -- and it sounds like I'm not the only one, since they just posted a clarification that while there's a mandatory author check-in on May 21, the rough draft itself isn't due until June 20. THANK JEBUS. Seriously, writing this thing has been like pulling teeth, and while I've been planning on devoting this weekend to working on it, it's extremely unlikely I'll be 80% done with the fic by Monday. And now I have a whole extra MONTH to get there!

I've shoved other WIPs to the side over the past few weeks to work on this one, which has been massively frustrating given my lack of significant progress, but now I think I can allow myself to poke at Queen's Gambit again. Because I'm finally at the exciting part of that fic, but I didn't want to give it too much attention while I had this huge deadline hanging over my head. I feel so free now!

...though, okay, I'm crap at the collaborating-with-your-artist part of Reversebang, because for me, writing is a very private and isolated process -- I almost never share WIP drafts with anyone else until they're polished to a ready-for-beta point (which, for me, means I've gone through and done my own edits several times through already). Even Queen's Gambit, which I'm posting as a WIP -- I need to have a complete, coherent 10k-ish word chapter before I'll even show it to my betas. I don't know how to write collaboratively. Should I be e-mailing my artist scenes as I finish them, even though I know I'll rewrite them a bunch more times and I hate hate hate having other people see my roughest drafts? Should I, like, offer to share the gdoc with her? How is this supposed to work?

Since all the cool kids are doing it, and I clearly love nothing more than pretending to be cool and failing magnificently, AO3 hitcount meme time! For the record, I have 138 fics uploaded to AO3.

( my top 10 fics, by hitcount )

( observations )

Speaking of fic, I sent the next chapter of Queen's Gambit off to beta earlier this week. So that's coming. :) And my show closes Sunday, which means a solid month of only working my day job and having BUCKETS of writing time and packing to move more than halfway across the country, holy shit.

Ugh. It's been a week, let me tell you. So I'm going to do my level best to put myself into a writing coma all weekend, since I've got nothing else to do. It's going to be my last real free weekend for a while -- next weekend, I'm heading up to Philadelphia with my mom to figure out whether or not I want to move there, and the weekend after that is the last before my next show kicks into gear, so I'll be frantically prepping for tech.

Now the question is which of my various and sundry WIPs to focus on. SO HOW ABOUT A RANDOM POLL.



It's probably telling that I'm super fucking excited at the prospect of locking myself in my bedroom and writing all weekend. Um. Introvert, much?

Well, this roommate search is proceeding MUCH better than the last one. Posted ad on Craigslist Friday evening, got 15 responses by yesterday morning, showed five people the place yesterday and have three more coming today and tomorrow. I have no idea how I'm going to pick a roommate -- everyone seems very nice, though they're all quite different from one another. No red flags, but no one I've been like YES LIVE WITH ME PLEASE. So, yeah. I feel weirdly guilty knowing that I'm going to turn most of them down, even though of course that's how this process works. But I remember feeling rushed and slightly bullied offering the place to current!roomie (though I liked another girl slightly better), and that clearly didn't work out, so I'm more inclined to listen to my gut instincts this round. We'll see.

I caved and requested an extension on my white_lotus exchange, thank goodness. This weekend has been insane enough as is. And the fic I'd originally been writing for it really, really wasn't working for me, so I scrapped it entirely and am now working on something completely different. Which I like so far, but doubt I could finish by tomorrow. So yay extension! I'll definitely have more time this week to complete it.

Am completely, miserably stuck on the next chapter of Queen's Gambit. I've got scraps written, but no complete scenes. I have such a clear idea of where I'm going later in the fic, but not how to get there, and it's deeply frustrating. And with all the holiday exchanges, I haven't even been thinking about that 'verse for about a month now, and getting back into that headspace is harder than I'd expected. Ugh. I'm really excited about what's going to happen a chapter or two down the line, but connecting the dots in between is just...not working. And I don't know why. Can't I just skip straight to the job itself? Why do I have to write all the crucial set-up crap in between? Bah. (Part of it is that there are certain POV characters that come way more easily to me than others, but no, Logan and Emma are actually doing important things and I actually do need to write about them. It's just a constant struggle for me to slip into their voices. Why can't Alex narrate everything? And then there's the side issue of certain characters knowing more than I want the audience to know just yet, so I've either got to avoid their POV or be very, very careful about what they give away.)

And current!roomie is either never home or has shut herself in her room, which is frustrating because I actually do need to talk to her about what her plans for moving out tomorrow are. And get her share of last month's utilities, which she still hasn't paid me back for. And also she needs to come out of there before someone stops by to look at her room today. Argh.

Heeeey, Yuletide! My fic will surprise absolutely no one who knows me.

The World's Fastest Snowball (4010 words) by kaydeefalls
Fandom: Sports Night
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Dan Rydell, Casey McCall, Dana Whitaker, Natalie Hurley, Jeremy Goodwin, Kim (Sports Night), Elliot (Sports Night), Isaac Jaffe, Chris (Sports Night), Dave (Sports Night), Will (Sports Night)
Summary:

In which a network plot may or may not be afoot, interns are procuring desks for unwilling sportscasters, and inclement weather threatens the course of baseball history. So business as usual, pretty much.

I'm kind of amused that of all the fandoms I offered and requested, I managed to both write and receive the same fandom. BUT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH SPORTS NIGHT FIC OKAY. This was fun to write, although it took me a very long time to get it started because I really, really don't know much about actual sports. The only sport I both understand and enjoy watching is baseball, hence this fic, but even so, I have never done so much research for such a relatively short fic. (The MLS trivia alone, dear god.) Anyway. It's nothing special, but I made myself giggle an awful lot while writing it and my recipient enjoyed it, so that's all that matters. :D


You know what else matters? NEW SHERLOCK TONIGHT OMG. Can. Not. Wait. And I wrote many, many words for the Charles/Erik pinch hit last night, which I now need to double-check for, y'know, coherency. And then actually fucking finish it today, oh god, I really need to do that, how is the pinch-hit I'm writing in a week longer than my original assigned fic which I worked on for a month. *facepalm*

secret_mutant fic done! Now it just needs, y'know, a beta. And for me to reread it when I'm not a wee bit tipsy. (Finishing fics drunk after a pub crawl: not highly recommended. On the other hand, alcohol breaks through writer's block like nobody's business.)

I'm not usually a music-oriented person when I'm working on fic, though I do have a generic writing playlist of soothing background noise. (And I write a lot of Boden's Mate / Queen's Gambit with the Inception soundtrack on loop.) But seriously, Tom McRae is my Charles/Erik fanmix. Every single damn song of his relates to them in some way or another, I swear to god. And I'm not usually the sort of person who assigns every love song on the radio to my current OTP. This is NOT normal for me. And yet. Guys, the dude has a song titled "Ghost of a Shark", and that is not even the most fitting element of the song. ("I'm gonna leave any minute...") For this fic, in particular, I've been listening to "Best Winter", "Houdini and the Girl" ("He says I’ve been under the water / I’ve been under the ground / And honey one thing’s certain / There’s no escaping now"), and "Sound of the City" ("And I watch you fall from a great height / and you watch me fail night after night"), but...ugh. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH, and Tom McRae is totally their soundtrack for ever and ever amen.

And now I need to write Yuletide. FUCK.

First off, guys, I am so sorry, I am like the dullest journal-writer in the history of people writing boring things about themselves. I see I've got some new friend-ofs on LJ, and for the record, no, it never gets more interesting than this. I apologize. My life, it is not ever worth writing about. One week into rehearsals on a new show, and it is actually driving me to drink. Like all of a glass of wine or whatever, but still, this makes three nights running I've turned to alcohol in order to quiet the Endless Loop Of Stress in my brain enough to fall asleep. This is VERY unusual for me. And mostly only due to the fact that my roommate opened a bottle of cheap wine on Thursday and told me I had to help her finish it before it went bad. But still. This show, man, I am not enjoying it much so far.

ANYWAY. (This is why I don't post about my life.)

So yeah, I spent the summer writing an insanely long XMFC/Inception fusion fic called "Boden's Mate". Which I finished a few weeks ago on the kinkmeme, and is still in beta, and will be posted properly...eventually, when it has been all beta'ed and stuff. That's not the point of this entry. The point of this is that I got to the end and realized that while THAT story was finished, I still had several other stories I was interested in telling in the same AU 'verse. So I started writing a sequel, which also throws a generous dash of Ocean's Eleven into the multifandom fusion mix, because I really love cons and heists and teams and implausible plot twists okay whatever DON'T JUDGE ME. And I intend to start posting it one chapter at a time, once "Boden's Mate" is edited and posted on AO3. Which could happen this week, or next month, I really don't know, RL has been deeply unfair to my beta of late so these things will happen at their own pace and it's not important.

But now that I've completed the first chapter (10k words, just one chapter, why did I ever fool myself into thinking this fic would be any shorter than the last), I would very much like to find a beta for the sequel. And, look, I know people post WIPs ALL THE TIME, and they somehow find wonderful, marvelous people to beta for them the whole way through, and I have no idea how that happens. I am a complete awkward turtle when it comes to interacting with people fannishly, and I always feel like an awful imposition whenever I ask someone to beta for me. Which is probably dumb, because I kind of LOVE playing beta for other people when they ask me, but I always judge myself on a horrible double standard in everything ever, it's a thing. All of which is my terrible long-winded way of saying: would anyone be willing to work with me as a beta throughout the process of writing/posting this sequel? And I don't mean just finding typos, but, y'know, pointing out the bits that don't make any fucking sense and making me clarify plot elements and smacking me upside the head when I invariably abandon character development in favor of nifty plot twists (which I am ALL TOO GUILTY OF, ALWAYS). And, yeah. Ugh, no one is going to be interested in this at all, how am I even posting this?

Because I don't know how else to ask.

So, yes, socially inept author in search of beta for ongoing WIP of XMFC/Inception/Ocean's 11 fic sequel thing. If you haven't been arsed to dig through endless comment threads on the kinkmeme to read the first fic (can't blame you there), I'm more than happy to pass along the most recent draft just so you know what the fuck I'm talking about. But yeah. It's...long. And plotty. And ensemble-based, with a generous helping of Charles/Erik and a developing side of Hank/Alex and quite possibly Raven/Angel because that's just how I roll. And it needs a beta.

I will bake you cookies.

Three-day weekend. Mmmm. Three full days with no obligations or plans of any kind. I'm going for full fannish immersion. Especially with the next show kicking into gear, making this my last free weekend for the foreseeable future, and quite possibly my last full day off of any kind until Thanksgiving. (I'm keeping my fingers crossed for one rehearsal-free Saturday or Sunday in October, but trying not to get my hopes up.) So. Three days of pure, unadulterated fannishness for me. I already completed one vid this morning, am hoping to get another one mostly done by Monday night as well, for ladiesbigbang. That's all due October 1, but again, won't have much free time this month, especially not for vidding. Writing I can do at my day job, at least; vidding, not so much.

I also want to start properly working on the sequel to the epic XMFC/Inception fusion. I've written the first couple of scenes and mostly hashed out the overall plot structure, but I'd like to make significant progress on the first chapter this weekend. I'm partly hampered by the fact that the original fic is still in beta -- it feels weird to poke at a sequel when the first fic hasn't officially been posted yet, even though the first draft has been up on the kinkmeme for weeks already. And without the self-imposed obligation to post a new scene daily on the kinkmeme, I'm writing at a MUCH slower pace, ugh. But yeah. I also need to figure out posting etiquette for WIPs, since that's something I've traditionally avoided. Unlike the original fic, which I posted one scene at a time (generally 1-2k words each), I'm going to post this on AO3 in chapters (at least 5k words each; though knowing me, maybe closer to 10k). So do I get each part beta-ed before posting? (Probably wise.) Who the hell would be willing to beta a work in progress one chapter at a time? Do I spam all the fic comms every time I post a new chapter, or wait until the whole thing is complete? OPINIONS. I AM SOLICITING THEM.

But yeah. This was a good summer for me, fandom-wise. I'll miss my free time when rehearsals kick back in. Normally I thrive a bit on the constant chaos and become depressed and restless between shows, but having a fandom completely eat my brain like XMFC filled the time marvelously. Oh, well, I'll just have to use what little time I have more effectively, I guess. ♥

This week is almost over, and that's about all the good I can say about it. I am so tired. On the plus side, I just realized yesterday that Sunday will actually be a full day off for me! I haven't had one of those in over a month, OMG, so excited. Maybe I'll finally get to see the last HP movie! Or Captain America! Or just hole up in my apartment and write all day.

In the meantime, meme! Yoinked from several people:

The Hypothetical AU Meme: Take any one of the fandoms you know I write/rec/read AND give me a type of AU (space opera AU, pirate AU, superhero AU, etc) or another time period (Ancient Rome, Regency England, etc). I will then explain the gist of the story I would write for that AU.

Since I'm in an AU frame of mind these days. :)

Aaand it's time for my favorite meme of the new year: fannish creativity round-up!

I know it's meant for fics, but I'm including vids in here too. Since I've made roughly the same amount of each this year.

( 2010 writing/vidding round-up )