WIPs; DVD commentatries; narcissism narcissism
There is a meme going round where you post the filenames/titles of your WIPs without explanation.
I am not doing this, because my WIPs are apparently.... not like other people's. Other people have outlines and completed scenes or whatever; I, in contrast, just sent a fic off to beta that spent a significant amount of time as a WIP consisting of a named file and one line from a Weepies song (and everyone says this love will change you / and I asked, does anything ever stay the same). Like that. Yeah. They have filenames like "discworldfic2" and "ohgodwhy" and "ohgodwhy_pasttense".
More crucial to the meme, I don't keep them all in the same folder: they live in folders by fandom, not by state of completion, so they're all over the place.
Here are some of them, anyway.
Harry Potter, gen, 3000 words, hanging around half-written for, oh, dear, three years. In which Hermione is arrested, the summer after Voldemort is defeated, for doing magic in front of a Muggle, and is put on trial by the Wizengamot.
They had no choice, in the end, but to let her keep talking.
"A Patronus is unique to the witch or wizard who conjures it," she said, and felt her voice slipping registers, becoming unhurried, academic. She remembered the words as written in one of Remus's books, in a chapter about advanced defence; and then, with a sudden pang, remembered Remus himself, standing in front of a classroom with grey in his hair, with passion. "It is everything that is best about that person - their joy, their strength, their soul. I learned to conjure mine because we were in a war - because we needed that strength against the dark."
Ron's head was in his hands; the Chief Warlock was leaning forwards, his head propped up in his elbows but his eyes bright.
"One night this summer I heard someone follow me in an alley," Hermione said. "I was on my own, and it was dark, and I had a good long walk home. I heard someone's footsteps behind me, and I was scared, and I cast a Patronus to protect me from what was coming to get me out of the dark. I'm not sorry I did it. I fought a war because I wanted to be safe.
"Do you think," and now she was sounding methodical again, "that we're all safe now? Do you think that because we killed Voldemort, everything is better? "
"Ms. Granger, the relevance of this…" the prosecution was beginning, but the Chief Warlock gestured - "The Crown will rest or I'll make it rest" - and there was silence.
Star Trek reboot, currently about 2000 words, I plotted out the entirety of this fic lying in bed one night and then forgot it all. I've been trying to remember it ever since. I know how it was supposed to end, and that it started on a dark night with the Enterprise in orbit around the new Vulcan colony world.
The lift doors opened onto the bridge, and at first McCoy had the impression that he was walking into some sort of a domestic dispute. The helmsman on duty was a Sulamid, oozing purple tentacles lazily over the controls, and there were two human crewmen on the science stations. Centre stage was Spock, standing in front of the captain's chair and apparently having the Vulcan equivalent of a shouting match with the person on the viewscreen, who had, McCoy noted, a particularly severe cast to his lack of expression. "Your logic is in abeyance," Spock said smartly, and turned. "Captain, Doctor, I would appreciate your assistance in explaining to" - a pause - "this gentleman the fundamental illogic of his course of action."
"It is crucial to the cultural development of the new Vulcan world!" the stranger said sharply back, and there were small cracks in that emotionless façade. "And further, it is a private matter."
"I am Vulcan," Spock said.
"With respect, Commander, your fellow crew are not."
"Privacy taboos are irrelevant," Spock began, but Kirk had had enough.
"Say, gentlemen," he said, deceptively light, "that you tell me what the hell is going on. And then we'll see about that assistance, Spock."
Doctor Who, Rory. This is the entirety of the WIP. I don't have the slightest memory of writing this! Not the slightest. Oh dear.
After a year, Rory remembers sunshine. "I'm just popping out," he tells the Pandorica, softly, and follows the twirling dust motes up, up, to the light filtering in from above. He stands there inside the circle of stones, and says, aloud, "Ah", because he can't help it. He doesn't feel the cold any more, but that doesn't mean he won't soften in the warmth.
Someone screams. He spins around like a pivot, thinking, Amy, Doctor, Pandorica, but it's a stranger - a woman carrying a basket, hair tied up above her hand, standing on the other side of the circle. She's watching him, eyes wide with fear.
"Don't be scared, I won't hurt you," he says, and then remembers: the TARDIS is gone. There's no automatic translation; she's hearing gibberish, and while he did some Latin at school, somehow he
thinks shouting "cave canem" across the circle will not help.
But when he stands still, and tries to look as unthreatening as possible, she edges closer. Gingerly, she points towards his sword, and then to her own body. When he looks confused, she mimes pain.
"Oh," he said, "am I hurt, no, I'm not hurt, I'm just... I'm just waiting for someone."
And then it's too much - this is the longest conversation he'd had with anyone for a year - and he's running, back to the underhenge, away from the burning light. Inside he leans against the Pandorica and gathers his breath. "Back," he says. No one says anything.
But a day later, when he emerges again, blinking, back to the light, he finds a basket of bread on the edge of the steps. He can't eat it, but he smiles.
Firefly, an AU where a lot of things were different but I have of course forgotten precisely what.
The candles burn down slowly, inch by inch, and Inara knows her client is late. It is part of a companion’s training to be gracious and accepting, patient and punctual, but to watch the clock. She turns over the hourglass, watches the sand drift down, and waits.
The flame is almost snuffed out when there comes a knock at the door. A low, cultured voice calls out: “Inara.”
Inara walks towards the door, delicately, and pulls it open. “Ambassador. Do come in. Will you have some tea?”
The ambassador enters, barefoot and smiling. “Yes, thank you. My sincerest apologies, Inara, I was detained. Believe me, you are the only person for whom I am generally on time.”
“I believe you, Ambassador.” Inara smiles back, sincerely. “Please, sit down, make yourself comfortable.”
“Thank you. Inara, please, no formality. Just use my name. I know you know it.”
“Ambassador Tam,” says Inara, still smiling, and hands over the small porcelain cup.”
“My first name. It’s quite nice and no-one ever uses it.”
Inara sits back and laughs. “River, then. It’s a beautiful name. Surely your family must use it?”
River sips her tea. “Less than you’d think. My parents are fond of referring to me as their daughter, the ambassador. And my brother, Simon, he’s just Simon.”
Also, not WIP-related, the meme I posted a couple of days ago:
Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
gamesiplay already asked me for one of these:
"New life, new civilisations." He pauses. "They join the Federation and the diplomats sign the treaties, and then the scientists are sharing data and the cultural specialists are taking great dives into each other's libraries and the engineers are off doing, I don't know, whatever it is engineers do."
In his left hand, he holds a Sigman beacon. It activates in response to his touch, and McCoy throws back his hood, holds up the shining white light and brings it around in one long pendulum sweep. All's well, for settlements and satellites to see. Even Enterprise's sensors will make out the flare. It means the quarantine camp has made it through another day.
McCoy walks around the embers, carrying his light. "And they put me in my lab with the new humanoids and we compare notes on the traditional scourges - the old cancers, sexually transmitted wasting diseases, that kind of thing. And then we've been at it a couple of hours, and they turn to me and they tap their heads in a significant kind of way, and I stare back and shrug. No, we don't know what to do about that, either - and the look of disappointment? That's always the same, too."
This story is called " Autochthony". It is a 10,000 word epic - by my standards - that came to life in a surprisingly roundabout way.
Basically, "The Search For Spock". Remember? Spock's dead. No, wait, Spock isn't dead. Spock's katra - his soul - passed into the nearest person on the moment of his death. The nearest person was McCoy, who very quickly begins to act rather oddly - as though there were someone else in his head with him, funny that.
And what do the Federation doctors do? These are people who can recreate skin, who have cured cancer and AIDS, who can regrow you your own kidneys and stitch you up after whole-body annihilation without leaving a mark.
They sedate him and lock him up. In other words: mental illness has no magical cure, even in the twenty-fourth century. I thought that idea was, well, unsettling.
So, in this story, which is in some ways a "casefile", McCoy is on a mission with a group of Vulcan healers, to a little-travelled Federation world called Sigma Eridani V, where there's a strange outbreak of mental illness among the population. McCoy himself has caught it - but in humans, it manifests as a strange sort of telepathy. (This is why I love SF, by the way - freedom to use whatever metaphors you damn well like.) In this little bit, Spock has been sent to check on McCoy by Kirk (who's worried about his increasingly strange behaviour), and McCoy is talking about what happens when the Federation meets new worlds with different medical science.
I was really heavily influenced, throughout this story, by Diane Duane's writing: her characterisation of Kirk and Spock but especially of McCoy is something I just love, and I can see echoes of how she writes them here. Unlike Duane, though, it's pessimistic - both this bit and the story as a whole, and that does reflect some things I was thinking at the the time of the writing.
And all that said I look back on it with a lot of fondness because I wrote it, basically, on gamesiplay's couch, during a fabulous week in San Francisco. So there's that, too.
Anyone wants one, just ask. ( Fic here).
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.
I am not doing this, because my WIPs are apparently.... not like other people's. Other people have outlines and completed scenes or whatever; I, in contrast, just sent a fic off to beta that spent a significant amount of time as a WIP consisting of a named file and one line from a Weepies song (and everyone says this love will change you / and I asked, does anything ever stay the same). Like that. Yeah. They have filenames like "discworldfic2" and "ohgodwhy" and "ohgodwhy_pasttense".
More crucial to the meme, I don't keep them all in the same folder: they live in folders by fandom, not by state of completion, so they're all over the place.
Here are some of them, anyway.
Harry Potter, gen, 3000 words, hanging around half-written for, oh, dear, three years. In which Hermione is arrested, the summer after Voldemort is defeated, for doing magic in front of a Muggle, and is put on trial by the Wizengamot.
They had no choice, in the end, but to let her keep talking.
"A Patronus is unique to the witch or wizard who conjures it," she said, and felt her voice slipping registers, becoming unhurried, academic. She remembered the words as written in one of Remus's books, in a chapter about advanced defence; and then, with a sudden pang, remembered Remus himself, standing in front of a classroom with grey in his hair, with passion. "It is everything that is best about that person - their joy, their strength, their soul. I learned to conjure mine because we were in a war - because we needed that strength against the dark."
Ron's head was in his hands; the Chief Warlock was leaning forwards, his head propped up in his elbows but his eyes bright.
"One night this summer I heard someone follow me in an alley," Hermione said. "I was on my own, and it was dark, and I had a good long walk home. I heard someone's footsteps behind me, and I was scared, and I cast a Patronus to protect me from what was coming to get me out of the dark. I'm not sorry I did it. I fought a war because I wanted to be safe.
"Do you think," and now she was sounding methodical again, "that we're all safe now? Do you think that because we killed Voldemort, everything is better? "
"Ms. Granger, the relevance of this…" the prosecution was beginning, but the Chief Warlock gestured - "The Crown will rest or I'll make it rest" - and there was silence.
Star Trek reboot, currently about 2000 words, I plotted out the entirety of this fic lying in bed one night and then forgot it all. I've been trying to remember it ever since. I know how it was supposed to end, and that it started on a dark night with the Enterprise in orbit around the new Vulcan colony world.
The lift doors opened onto the bridge, and at first McCoy had the impression that he was walking into some sort of a domestic dispute. The helmsman on duty was a Sulamid, oozing purple tentacles lazily over the controls, and there were two human crewmen on the science stations. Centre stage was Spock, standing in front of the captain's chair and apparently having the Vulcan equivalent of a shouting match with the person on the viewscreen, who had, McCoy noted, a particularly severe cast to his lack of expression. "Your logic is in abeyance," Spock said smartly, and turned. "Captain, Doctor, I would appreciate your assistance in explaining to" - a pause - "this gentleman the fundamental illogic of his course of action."
"It is crucial to the cultural development of the new Vulcan world!" the stranger said sharply back, and there were small cracks in that emotionless façade. "And further, it is a private matter."
"I am Vulcan," Spock said.
"With respect, Commander, your fellow crew are not."
"Privacy taboos are irrelevant," Spock began, but Kirk had had enough.
"Say, gentlemen," he said, deceptively light, "that you tell me what the hell is going on. And then we'll see about that assistance, Spock."
Doctor Who, Rory. This is the entirety of the WIP. I don't have the slightest memory of writing this! Not the slightest. Oh dear.
After a year, Rory remembers sunshine. "I'm just popping out," he tells the Pandorica, softly, and follows the twirling dust motes up, up, to the light filtering in from above. He stands there inside the circle of stones, and says, aloud, "Ah", because he can't help it. He doesn't feel the cold any more, but that doesn't mean he won't soften in the warmth.
Someone screams. He spins around like a pivot, thinking, Amy, Doctor, Pandorica, but it's a stranger - a woman carrying a basket, hair tied up above her hand, standing on the other side of the circle. She's watching him, eyes wide with fear.
"Don't be scared, I won't hurt you," he says, and then remembers: the TARDIS is gone. There's no automatic translation; she's hearing gibberish, and while he did some Latin at school, somehow he
thinks shouting "cave canem" across the circle will not help.
But when he stands still, and tries to look as unthreatening as possible, she edges closer. Gingerly, she points towards his sword, and then to her own body. When he looks confused, she mimes pain.
"Oh," he said, "am I hurt, no, I'm not hurt, I'm just... I'm just waiting for someone."
And then it's too much - this is the longest conversation he'd had with anyone for a year - and he's running, back to the underhenge, away from the burning light. Inside he leans against the Pandorica and gathers his breath. "Back," he says. No one says anything.
But a day later, when he emerges again, blinking, back to the light, he finds a basket of bread on the edge of the steps. He can't eat it, but he smiles.
Firefly, an AU where a lot of things were different but I have of course forgotten precisely what.
The candles burn down slowly, inch by inch, and Inara knows her client is late. It is part of a companion’s training to be gracious and accepting, patient and punctual, but to watch the clock. She turns over the hourglass, watches the sand drift down, and waits.
The flame is almost snuffed out when there comes a knock at the door. A low, cultured voice calls out: “Inara.”
Inara walks towards the door, delicately, and pulls it open. “Ambassador. Do come in. Will you have some tea?”
The ambassador enters, barefoot and smiling. “Yes, thank you. My sincerest apologies, Inara, I was detained. Believe me, you are the only person for whom I am generally on time.”
“I believe you, Ambassador.” Inara smiles back, sincerely. “Please, sit down, make yourself comfortable.”
“Thank you. Inara, please, no formality. Just use my name. I know you know it.”
“Ambassador Tam,” says Inara, still smiling, and hands over the small porcelain cup.”
“My first name. It’s quite nice and no-one ever uses it.”
Inara sits back and laughs. “River, then. It’s a beautiful name. Surely your family must use it?”
River sips her tea. “Less than you’d think. My parents are fond of referring to me as their daughter, the ambassador. And my brother, Simon, he’s just Simon.”
Also, not WIP-related, the meme I posted a couple of days ago:
Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
gamesiplay already asked me for one of these:
"New life, new civilisations." He pauses. "They join the Federation and the diplomats sign the treaties, and then the scientists are sharing data and the cultural specialists are taking great dives into each other's libraries and the engineers are off doing, I don't know, whatever it is engineers do."
In his left hand, he holds a Sigman beacon. It activates in response to his touch, and McCoy throws back his hood, holds up the shining white light and brings it around in one long pendulum sweep. All's well, for settlements and satellites to see. Even Enterprise's sensors will make out the flare. It means the quarantine camp has made it through another day.
McCoy walks around the embers, carrying his light. "And they put me in my lab with the new humanoids and we compare notes on the traditional scourges - the old cancers, sexually transmitted wasting diseases, that kind of thing. And then we've been at it a couple of hours, and they turn to me and they tap their heads in a significant kind of way, and I stare back and shrug. No, we don't know what to do about that, either - and the look of disappointment? That's always the same, too."
This story is called " Autochthony". It is a 10,000 word epic - by my standards - that came to life in a surprisingly roundabout way.
Basically, "The Search For Spock". Remember? Spock's dead. No, wait, Spock isn't dead. Spock's katra - his soul - passed into the nearest person on the moment of his death. The nearest person was McCoy, who very quickly begins to act rather oddly - as though there were someone else in his head with him, funny that.
And what do the Federation doctors do? These are people who can recreate skin, who have cured cancer and AIDS, who can regrow you your own kidneys and stitch you up after whole-body annihilation without leaving a mark.
They sedate him and lock him up. In other words: mental illness has no magical cure, even in the twenty-fourth century. I thought that idea was, well, unsettling.
So, in this story, which is in some ways a "casefile", McCoy is on a mission with a group of Vulcan healers, to a little-travelled Federation world called Sigma Eridani V, where there's a strange outbreak of mental illness among the population. McCoy himself has caught it - but in humans, it manifests as a strange sort of telepathy. (This is why I love SF, by the way - freedom to use whatever metaphors you damn well like.) In this little bit, Spock has been sent to check on McCoy by Kirk (who's worried about his increasingly strange behaviour), and McCoy is talking about what happens when the Federation meets new worlds with different medical science.
I was really heavily influenced, throughout this story, by Diane Duane's writing: her characterisation of Kirk and Spock but especially of McCoy is something I just love, and I can see echoes of how she writes them here. Unlike Duane, though, it's pessimistic - both this bit and the story as a whole, and that does reflect some things I was thinking at the the time of the writing.
And all that said I look back on it with a lot of fondness because I wrote it, basically, on gamesiplay's couch, during a fabulous week in San Francisco. So there's that, too.
Anyone wants one, just ask. ( Fic here).
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.