WsIP: Learning to Let Go. Maybe.
It's the end of the year-a good time to clean old things out and make room for the new. In that spirit, I've decided to unlock some works in progress that have stalled so thoroughly, and/or for so long, that I don't know if I'll pick them up again. This is kind of hard for me, sharing unfinished rather than polished work and also admitting that I'm unable to finish something. In fact, I still can't admit that I'm unable to finish these. But instead of continuing to go back and try to push on and getting nowhere to the detriment of newer stuff, I'm hoping that showing these to you will help me either revive or let go of these stories, share their ideas/emotions/good lines/potential/etc., and focus on (a) a few WsIP that I do plan to finish and (b) entirely new stories, whenever (and if ever) they may occur to me.
I'm friends-locking this for now in an attempt to minimize the chances of something like this happening by accident. May change my mind later about being exclusionary.
Well, here we go. Comments of any kind on any of these are welcome. Feel free to say what you like, what you don't like, whether you wish any won't be abandoned, where you think the problem(s) lie(s); clearly I need help getting past problems so stories don't die. And laugh all you like at the headers; I like to prepare them while I draft, to psych myself up for posting, but they look kind of ridiculous when the story's not even done.
Self-indulgent Rodney torture story, "Progeny" tag
As the (not-)title says: I started this just to play around with some hurt!fic, based on this exchange in "Progeny":
Sheppard: What'd they do to you?
McKay: Ah-torture. In ways too hideous and, um-intimate?-to recount.
I took it literally, because I wanted to. Rodney was going to be taken from the Asuran cell and tortured-first by experiencing both highly localized and full-body pain via a futuristic sensory net-device, then by being invaded with nanites that he swears he can feel crawling through him, and finally with some sort of sexual assault, hence the "intimate" comment. All while they interrogated him about Atlantis and Earth. The nanites would work against his will to get him aroused. It was fun when I first thought of it, but I think it was too much for one story. There should be (should have been-grr, what tense is appropriate for this?) just one torture method instead of three, and Rodney probably wouldn't last long enough for all three methods anyway, between his lack of training for this kind of situation and his torturers being Replicators who can read his mind. That's probably why it faltered. Or the initial impetus just faded.
Just as an aside, because I don't know when else this would come up, I like friendshipper's interpretation of what might've happened to Rodney.
The draft is here: http://bironic.livejournal.com/94695.html
You'll see where it breaks down towards the end into sketchy notes and gaps where other stuff was going to happen. ...I don't know why I feel the need to explain all this, except as I said before, it's nervous-making to open up something incomplete with notes scribbled afterwards. Shutting up now.
House/Wilson MRI sex toy story
The premise was simple: write a PWP where House and Wilson fool around in the MRI room with an endorectal coil, which is clearly a sex toy masquerading as a piece of medical equipment. There was going to be bondage (Wilson held to the bench with a torso coil while House played with him, yum). Except it just-would-not-flow. It kept wanting dialogue and set-up and backstory and in-character things and a point and gahhh, I never even got Wilson on the bench to be kinkily debauched.
When it had been sitting there in the unfinished pile for a while, I wondered if switching House and Wilson would do the trick-have House on the bench with Wilson calling the shots, because Wilson doesn't get to be naughty like that enough in fic, arranging the whole thing ahead of time and calmly using the same piece of equipment the radiologists diagnose his patients with to play trust and submission games with House. Maybe that would've made things easier to write from a thematic point of view, but to be honest, House half-naked on his back doesn't do it for me as much as Wilson does.
The draft is here in all its early-stage, toy-less confusion: http://bironic.livejournal.com/93136.html
Sheppard sestina
I wrote this the same day I wrote Rodney's sestina, which got finished faster-well, finished, period-and posted to the flashfic community. This one was more stubborn. It got caught-bogged down-in the fourth stanza, and I lost momentum before I could fix it. The last stanza might have stayed as is, or the sentiment might have moved up and something new gone there instead. Who knows? But I like the second stanza a lot; the first line of it especially has a sestina-y feel to me.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/92174.html
Lupin sestina
Oh, man. This was the first sestina of all of them that I started, and it's still not finished. It was supposed to be a breathless sort of poem about the night Sirius nearly got Snape killed, bracketed by the somber reflections of current-day Lupin, but like Sheppard's sestina, it kept getting stuck the further I went, all tangled up in itself, trying to say too much in too little space. I wrote, I wrestled, I deleted, I wrote, it got stuck again, and again, and again. I still don't like the last filled-in stanza, and to fix that, the one before it has to be tweaked. Here it sits, forlorn.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/46904.html
Wilson hurt/comfort hypothermia story for Nightdog
Nightdog gave me a prompt... last New Year's? Jeez. Part of it required Wilson nearly getting killed (whee!). I struck all the ways she'd already done it from the list, and eventually settled on having him and House spend a day on Julie's family's boat and then Wilson almost drowning. (The runner-up idea was a dog attack.) It would've been early in their marriage, House's leg pain fresher, and Wilson was going to convince him to come to take his mind off the discomfort. After an afternoon in the sun talking and getting on one another's nerves, they were going to get in an accident like one my mother had once, striking a rock at low tide and blowing a hole in the bottom of the boat that would've set them frantically bailing. Wilson was going to be knocked overboard from the impact, and the nearly-dying would've been from hypothermia from the time he spent in the cold water (it was going to be very early in the season, the water still winter-chilled). That's the first part I wrote, and when that was down, I sort of lost interest in writing the rest.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/68067.html
Wilson/Ali 'Come As You Aren't' fic
I started this for karaokegal's Halloween fic party... in 2006. And tried to resurrect it for 2007. It didn't work. And it's so close to being finished. Well, this part is. The original concept was to do a PWP trilogy of masturbation sessions-House, Wilson, Cuddy-taking place right after the second episode with Ali the sexy stalker girl, in which the three of them spin out fantasies about Ali that turn out to really be about one another. House's was going to have femslash, something I haven't tried before, probably Cuddy and a mouthy Ali over Cuddy's desk with that infamous hairbrush or something, after House's speculative look in the episode when Cuddy said Ali had come to her house and tried to seduce her the night before. Wilson's is here; himself and a shy Ali, with strange twists involving his (and her) relationship with House. Cuddy's was going to start out as seductress!Ali/House and morph into Ali/House/Wilson and then become Cuddy/House/Wilson. They were each going to be in a different tense, too, with House's in past, Wilson's in future conditional (it was cool, I swear), and Cuddy's in present. Alas, all I ever managed was Wilson's part, and not even that's done.
I do want to thank usomitai and daasgrrl for offering opinions on what's missing-and if I ever do get back to this, you can bet I'll be taking your suggestions.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/49557.html (The future conditional version is underneath; Daasgrrl recommended, rightly, that it was more distracting than cool, so I re-did it in present tense.)
BtVS/Angel: Spike/William story
Sigh. This was my third prompt for slashfest in the same round that produced "Third Time's the Charm" and "A Helping Hand." This was for simple__man, who wanted time travel leading to Spike/William. The setup was easy: Spike gets thrown back in time during the final battle in Angel, and he runs into himself. Then they have to work together to get Spike back to his own time, and in the process they fight-representing Spike's internal struggle between his meek human self and the rebel persona he's adopted since becoming a vampire-and finally fall in love, or at least have sex a few times, representing the eventual reconciliation of those two selves into a healthy individual. William was going to go on into his future armed with the knowledge of himself and the impending apocalypse thanks to meeting Spike.
At first I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew, but then I decided to set the whole thing during one long night instead of several weeks or months as I'd originally envisioned. They'd be cloistered in a warehouse, talking, arguing, fucking, and the next night-the night William would be turned into a vampire-they'd go to the party we saw in "Fool For Love" and the new-and-improved William-turned-Spike would go forward into an uncertain future while the Spike-we-know is whisked away-back to where he started, we're to assume. The end.
Well, this is as far as I got: some pretty polished stuff in the beginning, but I couldn't finish in time for the deadline, and of course once that passed, I couldn't quite manage to keep working on it. It didn't help that a lot of what was left was formless conversation, and without a structured sense of where I needed to be when, I foundered. There are some pacing problems I'd fix if I were to go back to this-lots of things happening too quickly-and sometimes Spike sounds too much like House, but otherwise I think it's pretty good.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/52351.html
Hm, I think that's enough for one post. Maybe one more before the new year about story/vid bunnies that never made it beyond the planning stages.
Thanks for reading!
I'm friends-locking this for now in an attempt to minimize the chances of something like this happening by accident. May change my mind later about being exclusionary.
Well, here we go. Comments of any kind on any of these are welcome. Feel free to say what you like, what you don't like, whether you wish any won't be abandoned, where you think the problem(s) lie(s); clearly I need help getting past problems so stories don't die. And laugh all you like at the headers; I like to prepare them while I draft, to psych myself up for posting, but they look kind of ridiculous when the story's not even done.
Self-indulgent Rodney torture story, "Progeny" tag
As the (not-)title says: I started this just to play around with some hurt!fic, based on this exchange in "Progeny":
Sheppard: What'd they do to you?
McKay: Ah-torture. In ways too hideous and, um-intimate?-to recount.
I took it literally, because I wanted to. Rodney was going to be taken from the Asuran cell and tortured-first by experiencing both highly localized and full-body pain via a futuristic sensory net-device, then by being invaded with nanites that he swears he can feel crawling through him, and finally with some sort of sexual assault, hence the "intimate" comment. All while they interrogated him about Atlantis and Earth. The nanites would work against his will to get him aroused. It was fun when I first thought of it, but I think it was too much for one story. There should be (should have been-grr, what tense is appropriate for this?) just one torture method instead of three, and Rodney probably wouldn't last long enough for all three methods anyway, between his lack of training for this kind of situation and his torturers being Replicators who can read his mind. That's probably why it faltered. Or the initial impetus just faded.
Just as an aside, because I don't know when else this would come up, I like friendshipper's interpretation of what might've happened to Rodney.
The draft is here: http://bironic.livejournal.com/94695.html
You'll see where it breaks down towards the end into sketchy notes and gaps where other stuff was going to happen. ...I don't know why I feel the need to explain all this, except as I said before, it's nervous-making to open up something incomplete with notes scribbled afterwards. Shutting up now.
House/Wilson MRI sex toy story
The premise was simple: write a PWP where House and Wilson fool around in the MRI room with an endorectal coil, which is clearly a sex toy masquerading as a piece of medical equipment. There was going to be bondage (Wilson held to the bench with a torso coil while House played with him, yum). Except it just-would-not-flow. It kept wanting dialogue and set-up and backstory and in-character things and a point and gahhh, I never even got Wilson on the bench to be kinkily debauched.
When it had been sitting there in the unfinished pile for a while, I wondered if switching House and Wilson would do the trick-have House on the bench with Wilson calling the shots, because Wilson doesn't get to be naughty like that enough in fic, arranging the whole thing ahead of time and calmly using the same piece of equipment the radiologists diagnose his patients with to play trust and submission games with House. Maybe that would've made things easier to write from a thematic point of view, but to be honest, House half-naked on his back doesn't do it for me as much as Wilson does.
The draft is here in all its early-stage, toy-less confusion: http://bironic.livejournal.com/93136.html
Sheppard sestina
I wrote this the same day I wrote Rodney's sestina, which got finished faster-well, finished, period-and posted to the flashfic community. This one was more stubborn. It got caught-bogged down-in the fourth stanza, and I lost momentum before I could fix it. The last stanza might have stayed as is, or the sentiment might have moved up and something new gone there instead. Who knows? But I like the second stanza a lot; the first line of it especially has a sestina-y feel to me.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/92174.html
Lupin sestina
Oh, man. This was the first sestina of all of them that I started, and it's still not finished. It was supposed to be a breathless sort of poem about the night Sirius nearly got Snape killed, bracketed by the somber reflections of current-day Lupin, but like Sheppard's sestina, it kept getting stuck the further I went, all tangled up in itself, trying to say too much in too little space. I wrote, I wrestled, I deleted, I wrote, it got stuck again, and again, and again. I still don't like the last filled-in stanza, and to fix that, the one before it has to be tweaked. Here it sits, forlorn.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/46904.html
Wilson hurt/comfort hypothermia story for Nightdog
Nightdog gave me a prompt... last New Year's? Jeez. Part of it required Wilson nearly getting killed (whee!). I struck all the ways she'd already done it from the list, and eventually settled on having him and House spend a day on Julie's family's boat and then Wilson almost drowning. (The runner-up idea was a dog attack.) It would've been early in their marriage, House's leg pain fresher, and Wilson was going to convince him to come to take his mind off the discomfort. After an afternoon in the sun talking and getting on one another's nerves, they were going to get in an accident like one my mother had once, striking a rock at low tide and blowing a hole in the bottom of the boat that would've set them frantically bailing. Wilson was going to be knocked overboard from the impact, and the nearly-dying would've been from hypothermia from the time he spent in the cold water (it was going to be very early in the season, the water still winter-chilled). That's the first part I wrote, and when that was down, I sort of lost interest in writing the rest.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/68067.html
Wilson/Ali 'Come As You Aren't' fic
I started this for karaokegal's Halloween fic party... in 2006. And tried to resurrect it for 2007. It didn't work. And it's so close to being finished. Well, this part is. The original concept was to do a PWP trilogy of masturbation sessions-House, Wilson, Cuddy-taking place right after the second episode with Ali the sexy stalker girl, in which the three of them spin out fantasies about Ali that turn out to really be about one another. House's was going to have femslash, something I haven't tried before, probably Cuddy and a mouthy Ali over Cuddy's desk with that infamous hairbrush or something, after House's speculative look in the episode when Cuddy said Ali had come to her house and tried to seduce her the night before. Wilson's is here; himself and a shy Ali, with strange twists involving his (and her) relationship with House. Cuddy's was going to start out as seductress!Ali/House and morph into Ali/House/Wilson and then become Cuddy/House/Wilson. They were each going to be in a different tense, too, with House's in past, Wilson's in future conditional (it was cool, I swear), and Cuddy's in present. Alas, all I ever managed was Wilson's part, and not even that's done.
I do want to thank usomitai and daasgrrl for offering opinions on what's missing-and if I ever do get back to this, you can bet I'll be taking your suggestions.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/49557.html (The future conditional version is underneath; Daasgrrl recommended, rightly, that it was more distracting than cool, so I re-did it in present tense.)
BtVS/Angel: Spike/William story
Sigh. This was my third prompt for slashfest in the same round that produced "Third Time's the Charm" and "A Helping Hand." This was for simple__man, who wanted time travel leading to Spike/William. The setup was easy: Spike gets thrown back in time during the final battle in Angel, and he runs into himself. Then they have to work together to get Spike back to his own time, and in the process they fight-representing Spike's internal struggle between his meek human self and the rebel persona he's adopted since becoming a vampire-and finally fall in love, or at least have sex a few times, representing the eventual reconciliation of those two selves into a healthy individual. William was going to go on into his future armed with the knowledge of himself and the impending apocalypse thanks to meeting Spike.
At first I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew, but then I decided to set the whole thing during one long night instead of several weeks or months as I'd originally envisioned. They'd be cloistered in a warehouse, talking, arguing, fucking, and the next night-the night William would be turned into a vampire-they'd go to the party we saw in "Fool For Love" and the new-and-improved William-turned-Spike would go forward into an uncertain future while the Spike-we-know is whisked away-back to where he started, we're to assume. The end.
Well, this is as far as I got: some pretty polished stuff in the beginning, but I couldn't finish in time for the deadline, and of course once that passed, I couldn't quite manage to keep working on it. It didn't help that a lot of what was left was formless conversation, and without a structured sense of where I needed to be when, I foundered. There are some pacing problems I'd fix if I were to go back to this-lots of things happening too quickly-and sometimes Spike sounds too much like House, but otherwise I think it's pretty good.
http://bironic.livejournal.com/52351.html
Hm, I think that's enough for one post. Maybe one more before the new year about story/vid bunnies that never made it beyond the planning stages.
Thanks for reading!