Completely unrelated to the previous post, my AO3 playing card deck came a couple of weeks ago!

I think it is just using the 52 most-used freeform tags on AO3 (not counting the ones too pornographic for Legal to allow) which is why there is both a Fix-it card and a Canon Divergence-Fixit card, but they are very fun and I can see them being good for both story-plotting and divination. The graphic design for every tag is also very clean and fun, although none of us could figure out what the heck was going on with the Gen card.

Anyway, there are fifty-two tags (and two wild cards) in the deck, and COINCIDENTALLY, I have more-or-less 52 files in my "wips I really wish I was finishing" Scrivener file. So what I should do is match the cards to the files and every day I draw a card and have to add at least one word to that file. But instead I'm probably just going to write them up here. For fun.

( You'd think being this good at coming up with reasons not to work on these would translate into writing skill, but no )

(There are nearly 200000 words of fic in that Scrivener file.)

1. For those of you who were at the party last night, I looked it up, and "Natural Harvest" says that semen has approximately the same textural qualities in cooking and baking as egg white, so you probably wouldn't need extra stiffeners. ^_^

2. Also, Riddles of the Exeter Book, our grand and noble heritage as English speakers, and 100% definitely what really happened in "Riddles in the Dark", someone ellenfremedon should write that version.

3. So I didn't quite manage the October challange to finish at least five wips so I could earn the right to do NaNo; I'm actually REALLY CLOSE but when it came down to the wire I said "screw it" and went to bed early instead. oops. So as punishment, instead of NaNo, I have decided I have to add at least 1500 words to one of my wips every day in November.

To aid this effort, last week (...when I could have been writing) I went through and made a new Scrivener file that includes every story I have worked on but not finished in the past three-and-some years. It has 154 files, containing 294,856 words, divided into four main folders: "WIPs", "WIPs that I claimed were finished and posted to AO3 anyway", "stories that exist only as outlines", and "notfic and ficlets I could expand". Along with some original fiction and nonfiction stuff, there are approximately 63 different fandoms represented.

(compare this to my complete fic posted to AO3, where there are 104 stories with 97 different fandom tags, and 284875 total words. --there's overlap there, though, due to the 'WIPs I claimed were finished and posted anyway" category, though only about 50,000 words' worth. Of course AO3 represents over ten years' output as opposed to three-and-a-bit.)

Anyway I will be posting the stories I worked on and how many words here periodically, to motivate myself, under the tag 'nanowrimo' if you care. Also I have realized I have a bunch of money I budgeted to give away this year that I've spent hardly any of, so to sweeten the pot, every time I finish a WIP this month I will donate 1% of its wordcount (in dollars) to a semi-related good cause of some sort. whooo.

So far I have:

• Added 850 words to the one where Bucky Barnes is a Yankees fan, because when even the Hydra Trash Party thinks that's going too far, I can think of no better endorsement.


• Wrote 850 words of the next bit of the aNitLO megacrossover, since it matches my Halloween costume.

So I'm not technically behind until I go to bed tonight without writing anything more!

4. Harry Potter LJ fandom is apparently having a reunion party this week. I'm not sure if I'll do anything for it (...finish a ten-year-old HP wip, maybe?) but I think there's still some old HP friends hanging around here who might be interested.

Well, if everybody else is doing the "titles of your works in progress" meme:

( WIPS )

If you want to know more about any of those, ask and I will babble about them!

But! That is not all! Okay, there are a bunch of wips that have been put in the non-recent folders even though I do still plan to finish them. Not listing them all here, because that just gets depressing. And there are some other fics which exist only on various anon memes because I commentboxed them.

And then there is all the stuff that goes in my commonplace books. I got in the habit of carrying a notebook in which to write things when I was in high school - yes, we were supposed to have binders and careful dividing up by subjects and class and whatever, I just had a notebook. In which I wrote things. In whatever order. After I left school and stopped carrying bookbag-sized bags, I switched to carrying smaller notebooks, but I still generally have a notebook or two which just contains whatever I feel requires writing down at the moment - everything from a few thousand words of fiction to a bit of long division. I started privately calling them "commonplace books" after I learned that my grandmother kept one - because they certainly aren't organized enough to be anything else.

Anyway, I have just about filled up the one I've been using recently, so I thought it might be fun to list out the contents in my more journal-y journal, for my own reference if nothing else! So here is the page-by-page contents of one of my paper notebooks, summarized but unfiltered, for y'all:

( 100 pages! Pages of pure brainstuff! )

...and fin. I must have only torn one page out of that whole notebook! It is apparently still 1/5 blank pages, but considering how scattered they are, yep, I think it's retirement time. (I do save these though! For, like, future historians. Or something.)

And yes, this system of note-taking works best for me. It's organized by when it happened, and what else was going on at the same time, and by tactile sense, and that really does seem to make it easier for me to find things than any more 'rational' system. ...as long as I remember that I wrote it down. And which notebook I wrote it down in.

Since I just posted - as my final argument on poetry, a poem (Snake, by D. H. Lawrence) that always makes me want to write fic, I thought I ought to actually post some of the fic I have written around the poem.

Also, siegeofangels just posted about how she likes seeing people post stories that failed, that never quite worked and will never be finished. Well, I think this was the Harry Potter novel I was working on when I first friended her - in, what, 2003? It would have to be, this pre-dates OOTP.

So, yeah. Seven-year-old fic! Yay! What went wrong that I never finished it? Mostly that I was trying to do way too much - the bits of this novel that I have wind together so many characters, so many plot threads, so many things I wanted to say that even if I'd had the stamina to finish it, it would've been a giant unfollowable mess of a story. And I think I sensed that at the time, because I spent a lot of effort trying to figure out how to structure the plot, when I should probably have instead been cutting things out of it, or just writing the damn thing.

Anyway, I have here just pulled out the scenes that string together into a story about Ginny Weasley and Draco Malfoy striking up an unlikely alliance, which were in fact *directly* based on the Lawrence poem (as you'll see particularly in the first scene, which follows it terribly closely.) Pulling out just that thread works surprisingly well, actually - while I wouldn't call it complete by any means (you can clearly see all the dangling ends where other plot threads were meant to weave in, and several of the conversations cut off before the important things happen, and much of the middle of the story is missing) it's actually fairly coherent, and the most of the missing bits don't really interfere with what's going on with Draco and Ginny. So, verdict: if I was still interested in working on this, I think I would be tempted to re-work it as just the Draco & Ginny friendship plot, probably set during either book six or a post-book-seven Hogwarts year; none of the stuff in the D&G plot really got contradicted in the last four books. But I'd have to re-work everything around them.


So, Verdict: suprisingly readable as-is, interesting historical artifact, works best if you have recently read the Snake poem.

ETA: I suppose I should warn that non-explicit consent issues come up in this - they come up in the part that I didn't ever actually *write*, so in this version they exist only as a short bracketed plot summary insert - but I shall warn anyway.

( Thread 2: Something to Expiate )

Here are some posts I have made to DW communities in the past week:

asexuality: Queering the Census: We ALL Count, in which I gripe about the Queer the Census campaign, which is about greater visibility for LGBT people but erases everyone who isn't heterosexual but doesn't fit it one of the L-G-B-T boxes.

common_nature: Welcome!, In which elke_tanzer and I have started a community that is all about nature, and you all should join it! And post stuff there! And leave comments!

create_my_comm: Little Details, in which we are all agreed that DW needs a community that is like l_d only awesomer, and none of us want to be the one to start it! (So you should!)

starry_sea: Anybody still here?, in which I apologize abjectly for abandoning my own community, and talk about how to get it active again.

tarot: An Amazing Tarot Blog, in which I rave at length about Pre-Gebelin Tarot History, which discusses tarot from a strictly historical and rational perspective, a perspective which is deeply awesome and far, far too hard to find.

treknovelfest: Illustration for "Three T'kay Stories", in which I have done a lot of research in the Starfleet Archives and found photographs & descriptions of the original ancient Vulcan artifacts that were used to illustrate ljc's treknovelfest entry based on my prompt, From The Terran Coyote to The Klingon K'Ortar: Tricksters of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

...there, that can be my followfriday. :D (What posts have you made to DW communities in the past week?)

Most of those were posts I have been procrastinating on making for months! Having them done is like breathing clear air again. (Also, omg, I might actually have to change my to-do list now - I'm afraid the dry-erase marker might have set in on some of them.) There's several more I've had on hold, though - maybe now that I'm on a roll I can scratch even more of them off.

In the spirit of getting things done, how about that WIPs meme that was going around awhile ago? One paragraph from everything in my "In progress" folder, was it?

( This includes fics, meta posts, vids, fanmixes, and various stranger things, in all states of completion, fyi. )
...it says something about me that my reaction to all of that laid out is "That's less than thirty things! Not at bad as I thought!" If you ask for more information about any of them in comments, I will probably give it to you. (At length! ^_^ )

Also while I am doing random meme-y things, poall:

The Jack/Thor Epic of Epicness. Or perhaps that should be "saga-ness". (finally posting this here mostly so I can link it to finishathon. If I decide to do finishathon.) File last modified: 2006

( Part One: The Rainbow Bridge )

So I have been trying not to get to emotionally involved with the politics (though I still want to do that "Sarah Palin or TGP: Who Is More Qualified?" point-by-point comparison), but I have been following fivethirtyeight.com pretty closely. And OMG, if Obama takes the South? That will be not only win, it'll be the most important thing to happen in American politics in my *lifetime*.

***
Anyway.
1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your blog.

stellar_dust gave me "D".
...I had a list of twenty-five characters to pick from, and that was before I checked my notes. So, um, have the short list as meme x 3.

And hey, while I'm at it, why not give me two numbers between 1 and 15 and I'll write you a comment-fic where those two characters meet. :D (Random or calculated, I don't even care.)

( Five Large Fandoms )

( Five Small Fandoms )

( Five Nonexistent Fandoms )

...Yeah, I should probably stop there. Even if it means I have to leave out David Starr, and Mike Doonesbury, and Dick and Dorothea (the D's), and Diana Fowley, and Dick Grayson**, and Dickon Sowerby**, and Daystar, and Death**, and Doli the Dwarf, and ....

(** marks characters I have either written in fic or tried to write.)

I don't think you JF people have ever experienced this, but when I go too long without writing any fiction at all, I'll find myself lying in bed one night, completely unable to go to sleep until the story that's tearing itself through my head has been written down. And it's always sheer crack.

It happened last night.

So now I find myself in possesion of SGA sort-of-slash, in the person of 2,000 words of John/Rodney as *Gethenians*.

I blame limyaael for this, for inspiring me to finally pull down and read The Birthday of the World. We're probably lucky that I decided to write this one instead of the one where they're all on Seggri.

(I do find it .. not so much surprising, really, that the first time I can recall ever writing a fic that was actually, honest-to-god, one of the huge slash OTPs, I manage to make it AU, crack, crossover, genderfuck, incest, ponn farr, huddling for warmth, (kind of)The Alterrans Made Them Do It, and if I write the next part, also telepathic bonding and (m)preg. And kite-flying. And all of that except the kite-flying is, of course, canonical for Left Hand of Darkness.

... on reflection, maybe the reason I fell for LHoD so hard *wasn't* entirely the subversive exploration of gender roles. But hey, if Le Guin can write femmslash orgy fic for it, I can write John/Rodney.)

I present to you: the WIPs I currently have in my check-every-day bookmark folder!

State of Grace by Sailor_Ptah (Fake News Fic, character!Stephen/Charlene/Tracey/Jon.) The long-awaited companion story to Expecting, which is of course Daily Show fandom's one and only completely canon-compliant Jon/Stephen mpreg fic. :D Although State of Grace is expected to be somewhat angstier, as it brings in Stephen's (completely canon!) past as a rentboy. :D!!

This is actually basically the least crack-like story on the list, btw, since it's meticulously canonical. Watch the trailers if you don't believe me. And just *try* to not squee while you're doing it. (My glee, it goes on and on. PS: Does anyone have the Billy Joel song State of Grace? I can't find it and it gets stuck in my head every time.)

The Luck of Dennis St. Michel, Vicount Stokington by Captain Thunder, a denizen of Comics Curmudgeon (Newspaper comics, Dennis/Margaret, Dennis/Joey; AU): The sordid tale of the Viscount's return to Menacing Hall upon his expulsion from Oxford; and his discovery that Lady Margaret, still unwed and shrewish at 22, has come into a duchy and fifty thousand pounds a year. :D (There will be many :D faces before I am done with this, I'm sure. And possibly some \o/ . It takes a special brand of joy to keep something in my wips folder. Like, say, Dennis the Menace Regency Romance AUs.)

Readjustment by Seanchai and Elspethdixon (Marvel comics, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark): the sequel to their Reconstruction, Resurrection, and Redemption, the post-Civil War fixit AU in which Captain America comes back from the dead, he and Iron Man realize it was all a misunderstanding, they're in love with each other, and all is right with the world. Well, mostly: the rest of it they're fixing in this sequel. :D And, as a bonus, there's superhero fights and the aftermath of Civil War is actually being *dealt with*. Elspethdixon was the first fic author I really fangirled over back in my Remus/Sirius days, and, well, she still writes the manly angst better than anyone else. She the only person I'll read specifically for the H/C instead of despite it, because it's *just right* and totally true to the characters. And Tony just does manpain so well. Possibly even better than Sirius and Remus. (PS: Her Avengers fic also features background Danny/Luke/Jessica and Jarvis/Aunt May \o/ )

Burntcopper's NaNo project (Jack Harkness/Indiana Jones/(Methos)): She posted about this in little_details, and mentioned that it involved Jack Harkness, Indiana Jones, and Methos teaming up during WWII--

Oh, there are still people reading this review and not over there reading the story already? Why?

Actually, being a NaNo project, it's pretty rough and starts slow, although there's lots of WWII British spying in the beginning, so still worth reading. Indy shows up halfway through and almost immediately finds himself in bed with Captain Jack, though, so that's all right. Methos hasn't appeared yet, but he'd better before November ends. Oh, and there's a really cool plot with a nifty mcguffin. Did I mention the plot? No? Well, how about the Indiana/Captain Jack? ETA: AND NOW THERE IS JENNY!!!

Out Of Bounds, by icarusancalion (SGA, John/Rodney, AU): Okay, this one is basically figure skating porn with John and Rodney in it. I mean, it's excellent, the character work is great, but I have a feeling that the only people who'll get into it are the people who fall in love with men's figure skating at least every few years. (Note to self: must find my ice-skating lessons gift certificate before January.) It kept showing up on my fflist and I kept reading it, so I finally gave in. Mind you, it's long and lush and rich and porny and full of atmosphere and detail like everything Icarus writes; it's also a figure skating AU SGA slash WIP.

PS: Read everything else these authors have written. You don't get on my wips list unless I've loved a bunch of your long-form stories. Or I've never heard of you before and you're gloriously insane. one or the other.

Knights Arrant,
or, the Romance of Sir Alain du Côte and the Cup of Truth

Knights Arrant,
or, the Romance of Sir Alain du Côte and the Cup of Truth
(Boston Legal fic; WIP)

( How Queen Shirley of Cranepool sent the companions forth upon their Quest. )

( How King Dennys had an altercation with a Beggar, and Sir Brad met with a Damosel most fair. )

( How Sir Brad and Lady Dyones parted from the others, and how Sir Brad did strive with a fell beast, and how Lady Dyones gave unto him courage in battle. )

(Sorry. I tried. It won't flow. Maybe more in the morning.)

iv. How they encountered a Priest most Foul; and what passed at the pavilion of Sir Daniel the Merry.

v. How King Dennys and Sir Alain set out upon the Quest of the Cup of Truth.

vi. How they found the Chapel of the Just, and what happened when they entered into it.

vii. How King Dennys fought many battles, and Sir Alain defeated the Friar of the Cup in a battle of wits.

viii. How Sir Brad was smote upon the head by a knight most dishonorable, and how by enchantment King Dennys was held captive.

viiii. How King Dennys did make love unto a damosel, and Sir Alain came upon Lady Dyones in the field.

x. How King Dennys did defeat the stratagems of the false Lady, and how Sir Alain freed Sir Brad from the captivity of the Knight of the Hands.

xi. How Queen Shirley was sore displeased, and how Sir Alain and Sir Dennys took refreshment upon a balcony.

This is the Highlander The Series / Batman-between-the-crises amalgamverse crossover genfic. About 3500 words and in need of some fact-checking still, but otherwise done. Until I start another section.

( Observe and Record: In Which Timothy Drake is given his first field Watcher assignment, and Adam Pierson has a conversation with Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Broody that doesn't end in drawn swords. Quite. )

I also read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the other day, which was ehhh in all the ways I remember it being. People on the flist have been posting a lot of Narnia meta-links in the run-up to the last movie, and I greatly fear that I will have to re-read the whole series in order to write about the things that are wrong with Narnia that do not have to do with ham-handed Christian allegory that misses the point entirely, or post-feminists feeling guilty about sex. Pity me, who may have to struggle all the way through to the Last Battle just so I can write the rest of this story:

( The Perils of Susan )

Yes, it's a silly crossover. Did you expect anything else? Upstairs in the typewriter is the beginning of the story where the Professor becomes the guardian of three unfortunate orphans, who find a weird wardrobe and travel through it, because what Narnia *really* needs is a good case of the Baudelaires.

(bwahahaha.)

Okay, I am still here, but you don't want to know how badly I'm doing on wordcount.

Or maybe you do, if you need reassurance that somebody's worse off than you. But I'm not giving up; I still like the story (most of the time, anyway) and I've managed at least a few hundred words every day, although they're getting harder and less good.

But I did manage over two thousand words tonight, which are actually good enough that I'm not ashamed of them. Too bad they're random x-files fanfiction intead of novel.

Oh, what the hey! I'll post it anyway. I need to prove I can actually write, sometimes.

( There's a rumor that Mulder's really gone crazy, maybe psychic again. There's a rumor that he talks to dead people. Actually, that one's not so much a rumor after John and Monica get Scully alone down in the old office one day... )

Chapter 2: 1-5-05
( think warm thoughts )

Part 3: ( I made this )




Part 4 (snippet): ( In brightest day, in darkest night )

Well, yesterday was a bust in more ways than one.

I did get about 800 words down, sitting in midstream and at the top of a slide (not *intended* metaphorically, although . . .) during my peregrinations today. However, the only writing implement I had along was my new calligraphic fountain pen, and about fifty words in the nib decided to stop working properly, so only about one stroke in three got through to the page. Example:



A very *effective* way to prevent myself from going back and fixing things, to say the least. However, it is novel and I did write it this month, even if it is unreadable in more ways than the usual, so it goes in the word count, at my standard 200 wpp.

I'm hoping to get about a thousand more in the next few hours, which will at least keep me from falling even farther behind. I'd like to get to another one of my main characters introduced, at least!

Hello. This is melannen, posting the warning note that this journal is now on NaNoWriMo standing. If you've friended it and no longer want my crazed ramblings cluttering your reading, please, please, defriend. I'm turning off my internal editor for this, so I'm not going to worry about quality or pace or anything like that.

On the same note, if you do want to read, friend! I'll friend back, and follow your nano if you're doing one. I will probably friend random NaNo journals with this account as I procrastinate, too. And I'm always very happy at comments of any sort.

However, I probably won't be posting everything here-- chances are a fair portion of the story will be pen-and-paper, and I'm not going to type it all up, so you won't be reading a complete novel. Anything I do type will be here, though, along with regular status updates, excerpts I particularly like, and whining. It will be mostly flocked, and I will make liberal use of lj-cuts.

Scared you away yet?

Well, here's what I'm going to attempt to write, the first four steps in my hybrid story-building system:

Label your story: The current working title has changed from "Consubstantiation" to "By Bread Alone". It's your traditional, old-fashioned faith-based alternate history vampire novel. (But Catholic, Protestant, Pagan, and Other friendly.)

Summarize it in fifty characters or less, counting spaces and punctuation: Bet learns to live with being undead.

( Outline the plot in exactly five sentences. )

( Explain why this story is worth writing. )

I also have a Random Plot Element, courtesy of the meetup on Friday: A very good book. Which is probably going to end up being the Good Book. Or possibly The Hammer of Hell, the pastor's guide to persecuting the supernatural, although that one's not so much good as amusingly ovedone.

Spoilery character-arc summaries will be going up under f-lock soon I hope. I'm not doing any more plotting, however, as that tends to kill the story.

Also, to copy a disclaimer from Anne McCaffrey: Any of the above is subject to change without notice. q:

I can't believe nobody else has done this yet. Seriously. I've lost my faith in slashdom again. (Crossover. Set several years pre-movie, season sevenish or eightish)


( I was just wondering if I could borrow it. Since you kind of shot mine up. )


Bloody britishisms. *stabs*.

Pre-movie, during Book 4:


( limp black hair and an oversize T-shirt that said 'Let Me Show You My Magic Wand' )