WIP Fanfic Writing Meme
Taken from marag. If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNaWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence from each of your current works in progress in your journal.
The sad thing is, I have way more of these WIP things than I do actual posted stories. I've cheated a bit here; sometimes I've posted "exactly one sentence," sometimes a paragraph. So here we go...on with the WIP madness!
FIREFLY
1. From Trail of Tears, a now-abandoned Firefly fic that had something to do with Mal and the gang forcibly relocating a group of settlers to a distant planet, just like...well, the title alone should be enough to clue you in.
Serenity landed with a shudder and a long groan, crunching down into the frozen crust of waist-high snow. The big ship let out a sigh, inaudible except to those who knew to listen for it.
2. A story that was supposed to fill the gap between the end of the series and the movie, and if I'd gotten my act together sooner it might have even worked. This was the opening paragraph.
Persephone was the largest of the border worlds, a way-station for settlers and smugglers, shepherds and charlatans. Its docks bustled with the dream of the frontier, the promise of wide-open spaces in a crowded universe. A thousand languages were spoken on Persephone: Mandarin and Universal Standard, English, Arabic and Japanese, the archaic tongues of earth-that-was and the flat, heavy-accented dialects of the rim worlds. Added to the white noise of so many different human conversations was the cluck and cry of livestock, the jangly, disjointed music of heavy machinery and the eternal hum of ship engines.
SUPERMAN RETURNS
3. An aborted attempt at Superman Returns fanfic.
One autumn night when Clark was small, his father woke him and wrapped him up in a big flannel shirt that smelled like tobacco and the Kansas sun.
4. Yet another Superman Returns story, this one untitled and lacking any semblance of a plot. I went ahead and posted it to fanfiction.net even though it lacks an ending.
If he had been forced to duck out for a moment or two during the course of the day, Clark simply had listen to the decibel level of the Planet newsroom to determine exactly how much time he had before the five o'clock deadline.
THE DCU
5. An early-in-her-career Wonder Woman story that never made it off the ground, pun entirely intended.
She’d smelled death in the air from above, the stench of it stronger than the smells of the chemical plants west of the city or the endless stream of toxins pumped out by traffic on the LIE to the east. A bad smell in a world filled with them.
6. Continuing with Wonder Woman, here's a story I started to slot into the arc in the comics where she goes up against Medusa and loses her sight.
It was a stupid mistake, one of a thousand she’d made since the world had gone dark. A feint to the left instead of the right, trusting the wrong sense, the wrong instinct. It had nearly cost Diana her life.
BATMAN
7. The latest chapter from that Batman/Catwoman epic Days of the Advent, which I alternately give up on and plug away at.
The light was so dim in the hallway Bruce could just barely make out Selina’s features. Those calm and clear green eyes of hers gave nothing away, which was a useful skill in a thief but frustrating in a lover. He pressed his thumb against her lips and Selina opened her mouth, taking his finger inside.
8. Another Batman story that might be mined someday for something else. I am *so* dramatic and over-the-top when I do a Bruce voice.
He was haunted by dead women.
They were old, young, middle-aged. Death left them all in shock, their mouths open in mid-scream. Some had been prostitutes, drug-addicts, criminals themselves. Some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Housewives. Secretaries. Doctors and lawyers. Death did not discriminate amongst the socio-economic castes of Gotham.
9. A look at Alfred's personal history. I think I was aiming for some grand immigrant narrative about coming to American in pursuit of that elusive Dream and finding mostly heartbreak. But then I started making jokes about fish.
He wrinkled his noise at the odor of fish and the filthy water lapping at the docks as he made his way to the Port Authority processing office. The harbor reminded him of the one in Liverpool the day he left England behind; he would forever associate the smell of fish with departure.
10. I'd almost forgotten about this one: my Batman Civil War AU in which Bruce Wayne is a slave-owner on a plantation in the Deep South. By night, of course, he operates the Gotham County line of the Underground Railroad and dresses up like a bat to discourage Klan activity. It's a weird story.
For the other half of Gotham County, the half who toiled in the tobacco fields and saw their children auctioned off before the church picnics, the half who loved the beauty of the streams and meadows but could never own such things, life was very far from a biblical paradise. They called the Wayne Plantation something else, something the whites in the area felt was too common and ugly to use as a real name for the farm: Specter, so named for the old spiritual and the great quantity of specter bats who lived in the caves beneath the farm.
11. This opening sentence has really stuck with me. I've tried to re-work it a dozen times or more into other fics but I keep coming back to pair it with this first paragraph. The resulting story is less than stellar (it was some lame Batman/Wonder Woman thing I got bored with and abandoned) but I think the opening is worth something.
He was staring at the light again.
Every night for the past two weeks he had come to an empty apartment in a Wayne-owned building which smelt strongly of turpentine and freshly-poured concrete. There, in the echoing silence of the room, it took only a few moments to set up his surveillance tools: listening devices, honing beacons, a digital camera with infa-red sensors. It took longer for the quiet of the wait to settle in over him, for his breathing to steady and his mind to clear. Because he knew what was happening in the luxurious brownstone across the street, whose windows sometimes glowed neon, sometimes soft candlelight.
12. Another Batman story. I've clearly amassed a hell of a lot of false starts in this fandom. This one is from Robin's POV, set sometime during Dick Grayson's first year in costume.
Here is the beginning and end of my dream.
It’s always dark, and it smells like somebody puked on the floor, or worse. And I’m cold, because tights and short-pants don’t cut it against the chill of a Gotham winter. I’m scared, too, and I watch my hand tremble as it reaches for a sling-shot. My hand is trying to preserve a body that’s is too stupid to save itself. I’m trapped, I guess, maybe dying, and it’s something I never really expected to be. I thought I was better than this. So did he.
Whew! Looking at all of those (I have much more on the rescued files from my old PC that synecdoche was kind enough (stupid enough?) to save for me) I feel a little proud. Yeah, it's a lot of effort and hours to put into something that doesn't pay off, but there are good *ideas* hiding in all of those WIPs. I just need to get better at finishing.
The sad thing is, I have way more of these WIP things than I do actual posted stories. I've cheated a bit here; sometimes I've posted "exactly one sentence," sometimes a paragraph. So here we go...on with the WIP madness!
FIREFLY
1. From Trail of Tears, a now-abandoned Firefly fic that had something to do with Mal and the gang forcibly relocating a group of settlers to a distant planet, just like...well, the title alone should be enough to clue you in.
Serenity landed with a shudder and a long groan, crunching down into the frozen crust of waist-high snow. The big ship let out a sigh, inaudible except to those who knew to listen for it.
2. A story that was supposed to fill the gap between the end of the series and the movie, and if I'd gotten my act together sooner it might have even worked. This was the opening paragraph.
Persephone was the largest of the border worlds, a way-station for settlers and smugglers, shepherds and charlatans. Its docks bustled with the dream of the frontier, the promise of wide-open spaces in a crowded universe. A thousand languages were spoken on Persephone: Mandarin and Universal Standard, English, Arabic and Japanese, the archaic tongues of earth-that-was and the flat, heavy-accented dialects of the rim worlds. Added to the white noise of so many different human conversations was the cluck and cry of livestock, the jangly, disjointed music of heavy machinery and the eternal hum of ship engines.
SUPERMAN RETURNS
3. An aborted attempt at Superman Returns fanfic.
One autumn night when Clark was small, his father woke him and wrapped him up in a big flannel shirt that smelled like tobacco and the Kansas sun.
4. Yet another Superman Returns story, this one untitled and lacking any semblance of a plot. I went ahead and posted it to fanfiction.net even though it lacks an ending.
If he had been forced to duck out for a moment or two during the course of the day, Clark simply had listen to the decibel level of the Planet newsroom to determine exactly how much time he had before the five o'clock deadline.
THE DCU
5. An early-in-her-career Wonder Woman story that never made it off the ground, pun entirely intended.
She’d smelled death in the air from above, the stench of it stronger than the smells of the chemical plants west of the city or the endless stream of toxins pumped out by traffic on the LIE to the east. A bad smell in a world filled with them.
6. Continuing with Wonder Woman, here's a story I started to slot into the arc in the comics where she goes up against Medusa and loses her sight.
It was a stupid mistake, one of a thousand she’d made since the world had gone dark. A feint to the left instead of the right, trusting the wrong sense, the wrong instinct. It had nearly cost Diana her life.
BATMAN
7. The latest chapter from that Batman/Catwoman epic Days of the Advent, which I alternately give up on and plug away at.
The light was so dim in the hallway Bruce could just barely make out Selina’s features. Those calm and clear green eyes of hers gave nothing away, which was a useful skill in a thief but frustrating in a lover. He pressed his thumb against her lips and Selina opened her mouth, taking his finger inside.
8. Another Batman story that might be mined someday for something else. I am *so* dramatic and over-the-top when I do a Bruce voice.
He was haunted by dead women.
They were old, young, middle-aged. Death left them all in shock, their mouths open in mid-scream. Some had been prostitutes, drug-addicts, criminals themselves. Some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Housewives. Secretaries. Doctors and lawyers. Death did not discriminate amongst the socio-economic castes of Gotham.
9. A look at Alfred's personal history. I think I was aiming for some grand immigrant narrative about coming to American in pursuit of that elusive Dream and finding mostly heartbreak. But then I started making jokes about fish.
He wrinkled his noise at the odor of fish and the filthy water lapping at the docks as he made his way to the Port Authority processing office. The harbor reminded him of the one in Liverpool the day he left England behind; he would forever associate the smell of fish with departure.
10. I'd almost forgotten about this one: my Batman Civil War AU in which Bruce Wayne is a slave-owner on a plantation in the Deep South. By night, of course, he operates the Gotham County line of the Underground Railroad and dresses up like a bat to discourage Klan activity. It's a weird story.
For the other half of Gotham County, the half who toiled in the tobacco fields and saw their children auctioned off before the church picnics, the half who loved the beauty of the streams and meadows but could never own such things, life was very far from a biblical paradise. They called the Wayne Plantation something else, something the whites in the area felt was too common and ugly to use as a real name for the farm: Specter, so named for the old spiritual and the great quantity of specter bats who lived in the caves beneath the farm.
11. This opening sentence has really stuck with me. I've tried to re-work it a dozen times or more into other fics but I keep coming back to pair it with this first paragraph. The resulting story is less than stellar (it was some lame Batman/Wonder Woman thing I got bored with and abandoned) but I think the opening is worth something.
He was staring at the light again.
Every night for the past two weeks he had come to an empty apartment in a Wayne-owned building which smelt strongly of turpentine and freshly-poured concrete. There, in the echoing silence of the room, it took only a few moments to set up his surveillance tools: listening devices, honing beacons, a digital camera with infa-red sensors. It took longer for the quiet of the wait to settle in over him, for his breathing to steady and his mind to clear. Because he knew what was happening in the luxurious brownstone across the street, whose windows sometimes glowed neon, sometimes soft candlelight.
12. Another Batman story. I've clearly amassed a hell of a lot of false starts in this fandom. This one is from Robin's POV, set sometime during Dick Grayson's first year in costume.
Here is the beginning and end of my dream.
It’s always dark, and it smells like somebody puked on the floor, or worse. And I’m cold, because tights and short-pants don’t cut it against the chill of a Gotham winter. I’m scared, too, and I watch my hand tremble as it reaches for a sling-shot. My hand is trying to preserve a body that’s is too stupid to save itself. I’m trapped, I guess, maybe dying, and it’s something I never really expected to be. I thought I was better than this. So did he.
Whew! Looking at all of those (I have much more on the rescued files from my old PC that synecdoche was kind enough (stupid enough?) to save for me) I feel a little proud. Yeah, it's a lot of effort and hours to put into something that doesn't pay off, but there are good *ideas* hiding in all of those WIPs. I just need to get better at finishing.