There's no I in "meme", but there's plenty of Me.
Okay, so I don't suck totally at pattern recognition and put together the meme.
1 - It will be long. My drabbles range from 1000 words to 15,000 words. I have written two novels (one ~165K words, one 202K words), one novella, and my WIP novel crossed the 100K-word mark a couple of paragraphs into Chapter Ten. I have earned that Prolix Lass icon. It's also completely unintentional -- I never set out to commit logorrhea. It just happens.
2 - My geography fetish. If it is set on Earth, there will be identifiable and as-accurate-as-I-can-get-them place descriptions. If it's set in NYC, forget it -- miss_porcupine/NYC is my OTP. I have written stories solely to justify descriptive narrative. The Pegasus galaxy... in my head, it does not always resemble British Columbia and I will probably explain how, at length. See #1.
3 - It will be genfic. I read slash and I have written explicit slash in three fandoms. But I hate everything I've written in that mode; the prose feels strained and reads as unnatural to my eyes. My slash feels fake to me, like I'm whoring my prose out to get more readers. Which I did, sadly, and am embarrassed for it. (Even though it worked.) I enjoy pr0n as much as anyone else, but my default creative mode does not include that setting. Or romance or relationship fic for that matter. There is a chastity belt on my brain, apparently.
4 - It will have OCs, Part One. Pretty much any media -- comics, television, movie series -- is selectively populated for the purpose of keeping the narrative streamlined. But just because the audience isn't introduced to the rest of the population doesn't mean that the lead characters aren't. Rodney McKay and Radek Zelenka aren't singlehandedly responsible for every repair, discovery, or invention in Atlantis; the Homicide detectives know dozens of patrolmen calling in cases, not just Sgt. Sally Rodgers. These secondary characters have names and personalities known to the leads and have histories with those leads. I firmly believe in populating any universe I play in. White Rabbit had at least a dozen fully realized secondary OCs for the primary characters to bounce off of and SGA has plenty of named Marines and scientists, as well as the advent of Major Lorne's team, all of whom threaten to take over any fic they appear in.
5 - It will have OCs, Part Two. Sometimes, you really do need to create a new primary character, even at the risk of scaring off more readers, or else the universe simply becomes too incestuous. When I do it right, I can get someone like Lily Beck or (my version of) Ultimate Havok. When I don't... there are Mary Sues who shall go unnamed. Sometimes I split the difference and dilute the gene pool a little by fleshing out a secondary character and turning him into a primary -- see Major Lorne. With the Ultimate X-Men universe, I can similarly cheat and ultimatize core-canon characters for my purpose.
6 - There will be consequences to actions. When shit happens, the stink lingers. There are no magic cures in my world, no panaceas, and no easy happy endings. People die in my stories and it's not always the OCs and secondary characters who buy the farm. [Although many of my OCs do -- and some that are still running around have their deaths already planned out.] Acts of Contrition is so hard to write because it is one layer of consequences upon another, each action causing a cascade of reactions.
7 - I have my favorite characters and tend to stick to them. Or, why I can't write an SGA story without Sheppard showing up. Similarly, I can't remember the last X-Men story I wrote without either Alex Summers or Piotr Rasputin. I tend to write stories with Ben-Hur-sized casts, but there are always constants.
8 - There will be copious description of the quotidien stuff that nobody else cares about. I spend far too much time pondering the particulars. How do the X-Men get to and from the Blackbird? How are medical/military/administrative duties split up in Atlantis or at 1407 Greymalkin? Doesn't it make sense that there were bouts of dysentery once the Atlantis expedition ran out of rations and had to trade for food? How does Xavier maintain accreditation from the New York State Board of Regents to run a school and which documents had to be faked for which pupils? I've worked it out and will probably explain at length. Conversely, I tend to keep lead character backstories as vague as possible even when I've worked them out in detail.
9 - It will tie in to another story of mine. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but continuity can be fun. Reusing OCs fills out a universe, but so does carrying over consequences from other stories. For the X-Men, all of my Ultimate stuff feeds off each other -- Saving Cain to "Dasyatidae" to Acts of Contrition -- and any story that would possibly get written after AoC would have to reflect it in its turn. In SGA, every single one of my stories takes place in the same universe, no matter how many OCs appear. The incident Sheppard flashes back to in "The Pegasus Galaxy Presents: George Romero's Alice in Wonderland" was the same one Jack O'Neill referenced in "Cosecant" and in the Rising novelization because it's the same John Sheppard.
10 - The hardest part of writing it was coming up with a title. I have some fantastic titles and I have some clunky ones and most of the rest are in between. But with rare exception, they were decided upon with great angst. Future Pluperfect got named because that was the working title and, lacking an alternative, aliciam used it to code the document and so it stuck. "Cosecant" was pure, unadulterated randomness -- I have a math degree, but there's no hidden meaning behind that title and I may as well have titled it "Protective Cup" for all the connection it has to the story. "The Pegasus Galaxy Presents: George Romero's Alice in Wonderland" was proposed as a joke because I couldn't come up with anything and kept because I still couldn't come up with anything after making the joke. Another story's title was pretty good on its own, but ended up having a more profound meaning later on.
1 - It will be long. My drabbles range from 1000 words to 15,000 words. I have written two novels (one ~165K words, one 202K words), one novella, and my WIP novel crossed the 100K-word mark a couple of paragraphs into Chapter Ten. I have earned that Prolix Lass icon. It's also completely unintentional -- I never set out to commit logorrhea. It just happens.
2 - My geography fetish. If it is set on Earth, there will be identifiable and as-accurate-as-I-can-get-them place descriptions. If it's set in NYC, forget it -- miss_porcupine/NYC is my OTP. I have written stories solely to justify descriptive narrative. The Pegasus galaxy... in my head, it does not always resemble British Columbia and I will probably explain how, at length. See #1.
3 - It will be genfic. I read slash and I have written explicit slash in three fandoms. But I hate everything I've written in that mode; the prose feels strained and reads as unnatural to my eyes. My slash feels fake to me, like I'm whoring my prose out to get more readers. Which I did, sadly, and am embarrassed for it. (Even though it worked.) I enjoy pr0n as much as anyone else, but my default creative mode does not include that setting. Or romance or relationship fic for that matter. There is a chastity belt on my brain, apparently.
4 - It will have OCs, Part One. Pretty much any media -- comics, television, movie series -- is selectively populated for the purpose of keeping the narrative streamlined. But just because the audience isn't introduced to the rest of the population doesn't mean that the lead characters aren't. Rodney McKay and Radek Zelenka aren't singlehandedly responsible for every repair, discovery, or invention in Atlantis; the Homicide detectives know dozens of patrolmen calling in cases, not just Sgt. Sally Rodgers. These secondary characters have names and personalities known to the leads and have histories with those leads. I firmly believe in populating any universe I play in. White Rabbit had at least a dozen fully realized secondary OCs for the primary characters to bounce off of and SGA has plenty of named Marines and scientists, as well as the advent of Major Lorne's team, all of whom threaten to take over any fic they appear in.
5 - It will have OCs, Part Two. Sometimes, you really do need to create a new primary character, even at the risk of scaring off more readers, or else the universe simply becomes too incestuous. When I do it right, I can get someone like Lily Beck or (my version of) Ultimate Havok. When I don't... there are Mary Sues who shall go unnamed. Sometimes I split the difference and dilute the gene pool a little by fleshing out a secondary character and turning him into a primary -- see Major Lorne. With the Ultimate X-Men universe, I can similarly cheat and ultimatize core-canon characters for my purpose.
6 - There will be consequences to actions. When shit happens, the stink lingers. There are no magic cures in my world, no panaceas, and no easy happy endings. People die in my stories and it's not always the OCs and secondary characters who buy the farm. [Although many of my OCs do -- and some that are still running around have their deaths already planned out.] Acts of Contrition is so hard to write because it is one layer of consequences upon another, each action causing a cascade of reactions.
7 - I have my favorite characters and tend to stick to them. Or, why I can't write an SGA story without Sheppard showing up. Similarly, I can't remember the last X-Men story I wrote without either Alex Summers or Piotr Rasputin. I tend to write stories with Ben-Hur-sized casts, but there are always constants.
8 - There will be copious description of the quotidien stuff that nobody else cares about. I spend far too much time pondering the particulars. How do the X-Men get to and from the Blackbird? How are medical/military/administrative duties split up in Atlantis or at 1407 Greymalkin? Doesn't it make sense that there were bouts of dysentery once the Atlantis expedition ran out of rations and had to trade for food? How does Xavier maintain accreditation from the New York State Board of Regents to run a school and which documents had to be faked for which pupils? I've worked it out and will probably explain at length. Conversely, I tend to keep lead character backstories as vague as possible even when I've worked them out in detail.
9 - It will tie in to another story of mine. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but continuity can be fun. Reusing OCs fills out a universe, but so does carrying over consequences from other stories. For the X-Men, all of my Ultimate stuff feeds off each other -- Saving Cain to "Dasyatidae" to Acts of Contrition -- and any story that would possibly get written after AoC would have to reflect it in its turn. In SGA, every single one of my stories takes place in the same universe, no matter how many OCs appear. The incident Sheppard flashes back to in "The Pegasus Galaxy Presents: George Romero's Alice in Wonderland" was the same one Jack O'Neill referenced in "Cosecant" and in the Rising novelization because it's the same John Sheppard.
10 - The hardest part of writing it was coming up with a title. I have some fantastic titles and I have some clunky ones and most of the rest are in between. But with rare exception, they were decided upon with great angst. Future Pluperfect got named because that was the working title and, lacking an alternative, aliciam used it to code the document and so it stuck. "Cosecant" was pure, unadulterated randomness -- I have a math degree, but there's no hidden meaning behind that title and I may as well have titled it "Protective Cup" for all the connection it has to the story. "The Pegasus Galaxy Presents: George Romero's Alice in Wonderland" was proposed as a joke because I couldn't come up with anything and kept because I still couldn't come up with anything after making the joke. Another story's title was pretty good on its own, but ended up having a more profound meaning later on.