The Fic of a Snick

I have Big Plans for my Sid/Geno exchange fic. I know the story I want to tell, and I have a pretty good idea of the emotional beats (subject to change, of course, once I get into it). However, I am not just sure how I'm going to tell it yet. I'm not positive whose POV I'm going to tell it from. I'm still figuring out how best to introduce the worldbuilding and how much of it I need to make explicit. Some of what I'm imagining as backstory may not make it into the story at all. I don't even know when in the timeline the story starts. It's top-down writing: I have an idea for the end result, but I have to then write the words that produce that result.

On one hand, there's something very satisfying and concrete about having a clear goal for what I want to do. On the other hand, that means it's easy to get frustrated when the words I am writing do not, in fact, achieve that goal. I think this is part of the reason I had SO MANY false starts when writing the girl!Sid D/s AU that posted in January - I knew what I wanted, and I kept having to backtrack because what I'd written didn't get where I wanted. I think I cut 6k out of an eventual 9k story. Here's hoping that doesn't happen this time.

The thing is, this is completely the opposite of how I write a lot of fic (and original fic, too, for that matter). Very often I'll start with a scenario - "A meets B" or "A, B, and C go on a road trip and develop feelings" or "A gets pregnant" - and then work out what that means for the characters. I think of this as bottom-up writing. Emotional beats develop more organically, which sounds nice until you look at ivy climbing up a wall and realize organic is often code for "messy and nonlinear with a lot of unnecessary side tangents." If your writing strategy is "plant the seed and then let the story grow of its own accord," that's going to mean pruning. It also means that the story can't be hurried along, and no matter how you push at it, it might take much longer to grow to maturity than you would like. (See: my Illyria fic. Five years and counting!)

Anyway. That is my writing thought for the day. Is there one of these strategies that you guys use more often than the other? Do neither of them fit your mode of writing at all? Talk writing at me. :)

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

It hasn't been quite a year or 21 fics new fics posted yet, but nonetheless I was in the mood to do this meme again. I am startled by how much more directly these enter into the action, and there are almost none with explicit time cues, versus, well, MOST of them last time. All in all, I think I actually prefer these. That's called improvement, right?

( lines and links )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

Behold, I have written hockey fic! 16.5k of it, all at once! I feel like anyone who knows me even moderately well who happened to read this fic would know it was mine, because it is so much bound up in my particular a/b/o preoccupations. And indeed, both Brutti and June guessed it ahead of time. Brutti sent me a PM that was basically, "Soooo, I'm pretty sure you wrote this fic..."

( notes and process for this fic - possibly better read after reading the fic )

Base Notes (16505 words) by Snickfic
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin, Evgeni Malkin/Maxime Talbot
Characters: Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby, Maxime Talbot, Sergei Gonchar
Additional Tags: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Pittsburgh Penguins, Scents & Smells, Romance, Language Barrier
Summary:

In which Evgeni Malkin comes to America as one of the few omegas in pro hockey, lights up the NHL, and spends a lot of time wondering why Sidney Crosby is so damn weird.

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Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

* This Rarewomen fic is finally turning into something I like. You know how there are fic that you can write in one or two sittings? And then there are fics that you write 300 words for, and then you have to go away, and when you come back you delete the last fifty and write another 300, and so on? This is definitely one of the latter.

* I have my Fic Mountain and Not Prime Time assignments! Fic Mountain will require a tiiiny bit of new canon and some review of old canon, but should be fun. No worries there. And the NPT assignment is a great fit, so my trouble there is mostly narrowing down what I want to write.

* Yesterday in a pile of papers I found part of a hopelessly self-indulgent hockey fic I started writing longhand a month ago. I thought it was lost forever, but lo, it is not! So, yay, even though all 1600 words or whatever I have will need major rewriting if it's ever to see the light of day.

* In the department of "I don't have to write RPF, because the media writes it for me," have an article about Sid and Geno and leadership and stuff. Also FEELINGS. Lots of feelings.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

I have rarewomen words! Words I like! I know exactly what I want to do with this fic and have known since a day after I got the assignment, and it is a thing I can do without the handwringing that began my Beyond Panels assignment, and I am altogether very pleased. Plus the prompt gives me an excuse to write an aspect of canon I've been wanting to write for quite a while. YAY ALL AROUND.

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Upcoming films, because I went to see Winter Soldier yesterday and there trailers.
* Lucy, with body horror and ScarJo with out-of-control powers? And also Morgan Freeman? YES PLEASE I WILL WATCH THE HECK OUT OF THAT. Even though the ~science is clearly ridiculous.

* Godzilla looks very silly, but also probably cooler than the last Godzilla remake, and I am a TOTAL SUCKER for giant megafauna which I may have mentioned, so. Also Bryan Cranston, what even.

* Maleficient looks more interesting than I expected. I can see why people have been getting a femslash vibe from it. I will definitely wait on reviews, though.

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Speaking of, yes, I saw Winter Soldier! Unspoilery version: I enjoyed it quite a bit, for pretty much exactly the reasons I expected to enjoy it.

( spoilers )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

I never want to write 20k in a month again. At least not on purpose. It's basically what I did for RBB, but then I was writing to the end of the story, not to some arbitrary word count.

This draft definitely falls down at the end. It needs at least one, maybe two more scenes to end properly, and also we may very well remove the gratuitous porn at the end, or else make it less gratuitous. Ideally I will clean it up some before I send it to my artist. Artist claims on SATURDAY, EEEP.

Also I post for genteensybang tomorrow. Blessed be to the teensymod that my posting date was not today. (I didn't think to ask when the schedule was being made.)

Speaking of teensybang, go look! Glorious fic already being posted! Glorious art likewise! I can already tell this is going to have one of the highest awesomeness per work quotients of any event this year. Proper recs later.

Also, now that bb is out, I have to tidy up rarewomen. Guys, I love rarewomen and all that it stands for, but I'm skipping it next year if I sign up for bb again.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)

Nabbed from likeadeuce this time around, here are stats and more blathering than you care about.

( table o' stats )

( me blathering about the fics )

Original entry posted at Dreamwidth. Feel free to reply here or there. ( DW replies)

Because I want to tell someone that words are happening. Slowly, but they are happening. And I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, which is basically my single biggest hang-up when trying to write, especially long things. So.



(word count thingy generated here)

Original entry posted at Dreamwidth. Feel free to reply here or there. ( DW replies)

Y'all, I have had the most spectacular fic-writing year. I said something like that last year, but this year blew that out of the water. I wrote 135k worth of fic this year (including 15k posted that I haven't yet put my name to); best previous year was 75k. I wrote a whole range of things I'd never have guessed: explicit sex, some real actual kink, some m/m, some f/f, and a threesome. I wrote two fics longer than 20k. I wrote fics for The Vampire Diaries, Downton Abbey, and my Yuletide fandom, all brand-new fandoms, as well as my old standbys.

Below the cut I go into more detail. A LOT more detail. This got long, folks.

( my year in fic, in much greater detail, with a meme )

( other fannish things )

Y'all, I am so proud of myself this year. I really, really am.

Original entry posted at Dreamwidth. Feel free to reply here or there. ( DW replies)