Back to Middle Earth Month so far
Two stories so far:
War Stories
An old soldier waits for his captain to return. Surely he will return to fight for Gondor in her time of greatest need! But that time comes and passes, and Thorongil does not come. But then there is a knock at the door… c. 6700 words. Gen. Character study. Friendship. No pairings, no warnings. Original character and Aragorn. Written for one of last year's prompts calling for stories in which someone who had known Aragorn as Thorongil meets him again as king.
An Unseen Question
"The caterpillar started it." Merry and Pippin are infected with a sudden bout of investigative fervour. Can Rivendell cope with two lively hobbits whose hunger for answers threatens to surpass even their hunger for food? c. 3900 words. Gen. Humour. Friendship. No pairings, no warnings. Pippin and Merry, with some Frodo, and a little Gandalf and Elrond. Written in response to the question "if Frodo hung the Ring on a chain, why didn't the chain turn invisible?" I decided to turn the question over to Middle Earth's sharpest minds. Well, to Merry and Pippin, anyway.
I'm glad I felt inspired to write these. Shadow of War consumed my brain for several months last summer, and left me needing some time off. I'd intended to start writing again after a few weeks, but never quite got round to it. For a while now, I've hoped that B2MEM would inspire me, but when it was revealed that ALL past prompts were available, numbering well over a thousand, and it was just too big and overwhelming and I didn't know where to start. I'm also not suited to the whole daily prompt thing, since I have no real interest in ficlets and drabbles; I'm a wordy writer, and even my "fairly short" ideas tend to grow. But in the end, I decided to focus only on prompts from the last two years - events I participated in and understood - and make a list of prompts that interested me, and see what happened.
I do like the way I can pop in and out of writing in this fandom. Most of my fanfic experience in the past has come through overwhelming obsessions: a TV show, usually, which has entirely dominated my imagination for a year or two, to the exclusion of all other fictional worlds. I've written in those fandoms prolifically, but in the end, the intensity of my obsession fades, and suddenly I find myself entirely losing interest in writing fanfic. But my period of intense obsession with Tolkien came with my second reading of LotR when I was 14, and after that, it settled into a more placid and enduring thing: a constant love, not an intense but shortlived obsession. Writing in this fandom is something I can pick up and put down again - can wander away from for a year, then come back to. While I'm writing it, I'm still able to enjoy other fictional worlds. I do sometimes miss the heady joy that comes from an all-consuming new obsession, but overall, I think I prefer this.
War Stories
An old soldier waits for his captain to return. Surely he will return to fight for Gondor in her time of greatest need! But that time comes and passes, and Thorongil does not come. But then there is a knock at the door… c. 6700 words. Gen. Character study. Friendship. No pairings, no warnings. Original character and Aragorn. Written for one of last year's prompts calling for stories in which someone who had known Aragorn as Thorongil meets him again as king.
An Unseen Question
"The caterpillar started it." Merry and Pippin are infected with a sudden bout of investigative fervour. Can Rivendell cope with two lively hobbits whose hunger for answers threatens to surpass even their hunger for food? c. 3900 words. Gen. Humour. Friendship. No pairings, no warnings. Pippin and Merry, with some Frodo, and a little Gandalf and Elrond. Written in response to the question "if Frodo hung the Ring on a chain, why didn't the chain turn invisible?" I decided to turn the question over to Middle Earth's sharpest minds. Well, to Merry and Pippin, anyway.
I'm glad I felt inspired to write these. Shadow of War consumed my brain for several months last summer, and left me needing some time off. I'd intended to start writing again after a few weeks, but never quite got round to it. For a while now, I've hoped that B2MEM would inspire me, but when it was revealed that ALL past prompts were available, numbering well over a thousand, and it was just too big and overwhelming and I didn't know where to start. I'm also not suited to the whole daily prompt thing, since I have no real interest in ficlets and drabbles; I'm a wordy writer, and even my "fairly short" ideas tend to grow. But in the end, I decided to focus only on prompts from the last two years - events I participated in and understood - and make a list of prompts that interested me, and see what happened.
I do like the way I can pop in and out of writing in this fandom. Most of my fanfic experience in the past has come through overwhelming obsessions: a TV show, usually, which has entirely dominated my imagination for a year or two, to the exclusion of all other fictional worlds. I've written in those fandoms prolifically, but in the end, the intensity of my obsession fades, and suddenly I find myself entirely losing interest in writing fanfic. But my period of intense obsession with Tolkien came with my second reading of LotR when I was 14, and after that, it settled into a more placid and enduring thing: a constant love, not an intense but shortlived obsession. Writing in this fandom is something I can pick up and put down again - can wander away from for a year, then come back to. While I'm writing it, I'm still able to enjoy other fictional worlds. I do sometimes miss the heady joy that comes from an all-consuming new obsession, but overall, I think I prefer this.