navel-gazing retrospectives: not just for pop art and college rock!
Hurrah, a meme from deepsix: Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.
Yeeeah, I am just cutting this because I have decided to include excerpts because some of these I am kind of sad I never finished. If I have learned anything from this it is that a) I never finish sequels; b) sometimes I label things chronologically which is more depressing than helpful; c) I love tiny fandoms and cracky xovers like crazy; and d) when it gets to be sexytiems I usually give up.
01. 2009.05.06-kenamy.doc // 628 words
This was a Freaks & Geeks story for japanpeterpan about Seth Rogen's character and that hermaphroditic girl he dated and how much better than him she was and how he goes on a road trip to win her back because his life is shitty. I did a lot of research on marching bands.
The day before she leaves for band camp, Amy rolls her eyes at him and goes, “Well, you better get used to it, because I’m planning on spending another four years there.”
“Wait, what?” says Ken. He pulls back to his side of the back seat to peer at her through the dim dregs of twilight, and she does the same, pushing her hair out of her face.
“University of Wisconsin has the best marching band on the planet, Ken. They have fifteen tubas.” Amy says this like it’s vital information that he’ll need to know for the coming apocalypse, when marching band brass breakdowns will be the key to saving civilization.
Ken waits for her to expand on this factoid, and when she doesn’t, instead just staring expectantly at him, he says, “Is that a lot?”
02. 2009.07.02-bear/hiscameraman.doc // 1702 words
Did you ever see that show Man Vs. Wild? Where the guy drinks his urine out of a snakeskin? This is about his cameraman's true and abiding love for him while they hang out in the middle of nowhere together pretending to be near death and eating cans of baked beans.
Once, Karl woke up in the Mojave dreaming that it was raining. It took him a long minute to realize that the sound and the splatter was Bear pissing two feet away away from his head, practically on top of his half-packed pile of recording gear.
The man was tanked. Karl rolled his whole sleeping bag away, croaking indignation and saying things like, “Jesus fucking ass, you asshole, what the fuck are you fucking doing to my cameras?” Bear said, “What cameras?” and kept pissing.
03. 2011.01.31-OK Go does Twilight.docx // 3015 words
This I will probably finish, but basically OK Go contributes a song about astronauts to the New Moon soundtrack because Damian doesn't actually know what Twilight is, per se, and Tim didn't tell him in time. Andy is in love with Spencer Smith from Panic. Also, they get fitted for suits. This is kind of a five-years-later continuation of Faster Than You Go When You're Alone, in my head.
They are invited to the premiere, of course. For a while, Tim didn't think they would be because of that MTV spot where Damian thought the movie was like Pretty In Pink but with witches, and Tim had to go along with it because it's a band rule that you don't disagree with each other in public, and yeah, the Berkeley student they hired as their PR intern gave them shit about that and wrote them a five-page annotated summary of the series so that when asked in the future they could definitively declare for Team Edward.
04. bolt-action heart II.doc // 2283 words
The sequel to a Firefly/SPN crossover I wrote roughly one billion years ago. It's about how Sam and Dean hunt Reavers and are in love with each other and doesn't really mention Serenity at all.
“Dean.” Sam’s voice over the radio sounds thin and tinny, but dead sure. “Airlock. Now.”
And Dean, waiting with his guns and his cleaver in the cockpit, hits the button, and winces through the shudder of decompression as sixty percent of his ship’s innards vacate. It leaves him - always leaves him - with a hollow fear in his gut, gaping wide as the void itself. “Sam.” He says back into the input. “Sammy. Was that it?”
There’s a pause, and a crackle. “Yep. That’s it.”
Outside, a half dozen bodies float past, writhing in the sudden and explosive emptiness. Reavers: their blood floating like wreaths, like tiny solar systems around them. They always die so slow.
05. Lords Commander PART II.odt // 90 words
Another unfinished sequel. To a Song of Ice and Fire fic I wrote for Yuletide 2006 that was maybe my first piece of proper fanfic as an adult. Except, it is all notes and comments from this hardcore GRRM fan and the only thing I actually wrote was this:
Jon found Jaime Lannister drunk and naked in the baths underneath Castle Black, his beard wet and tangled, his golden hand abandoned on the floor. He was alone, but it was difficult to say whether he had started that way or chased the other men off with his sharp eye and cruel tongue, all the more barbed for the strongwine he'd commandeered from the kitchens. The flask lay empty near the edge of the tub Jaime reclined in, and Jon reached down to pick it up before Jaime had roused enough to notice him.
06. Oct.07 310 to yuma.doc // 2762 words
3:10 to Yuma prisonfic. I love semi-canon-gay movie fandoms so hard. Also, I love cowboys. And BEN FOSTER, jesus. This is backstory that explains why Charlie Prince loves Ben Wade (Russell Crowe's character - I had to look up his name just now, man) so much. Talk about your slavish devotion kink. I had so much fun with the first half of this, but then it got plotty and I gave up because really I just wanted to write about how Wade strings Charlie along.
He’s maybe seventeen years on this earth, and the manacle around his ankle, the thirty pounds of iron he carries in his hands to spare his splintered joints, is more constant than the drag of air in his lungs. Crouching at the edge of the yard trying to keep the memory of water in his throat, he steeples his fingers and clenches his eyes. Deliverance. A word his mother used.
“How far’d you get?” A voice that is the sheathed edge of authority jerks Charlie to look round himself like a wild thing, startled.
He sees a man in black, dusty all over, clean-shaven, standing behind him. And sees his executioner. Sees a black hood, the snap of the noose, kicking legs like a colt. He staggers up off his haunches, cradling his iron ball like a babe in arms. Can’t tear his eyes away. Gentle-faced man in a black billycock hat with a velveteen suit jacket.
But the man just juts his chin out at the desert. “How far, boy?”
If not the executioner, then the governor. Or the new warden. Charlie takes a bare glance out across the yellow dirt, still half-crouched, blinking. “Twenty miles, they said.”
07. Royce.docx // 3400 words
I've posted bits of this before. More movie fandoms! My thinly veiled attempt at getting Adrien Brody to make out with BUrie. Predators crackfic where a bunch of bandslash kids get dropped into the game preserve and Royce and Isabelle (who survived the movie because they are BAD ASS, in case you did not see it three times in theatres) try to figure out why the fuck they are not dead yet without actually, you know, talking to them or going near them or helping them. It got too action-packed to finish. Running through the jungle is hard to write interestingly.
"They're not hunting these ones," Isabelle says, eye pressed to her rifle's scope.
Royce says nothing. He is cloaked, invisible. No opportunities have come up watching the camp or the ship, so she and him are here now, squatting in the underbrush, waiting to ambush the hunters when they come for the kids.
But the kids are sitting in a loose circle around the fire pit, chewing and yapping. Some of them are stretched out on the ground. Sleeping. Isabelle hasn't slept like that - sprawled out, unconscious - since she got here. It twists her stomach to see.
"Nothing at all is hunting them," she says it again, tearing her eye away from the sight of them down there. She's almost a little offended. "What, they turn this place into a fucking conservation area or something?"
Royce is silent. He could not be there, for all she knows.
08. step up, supernatural.doc // 5042 words
As it says: SPN/Step Up AU, wherein Dean is an injured dancer teaching at Maryland School of the Arts and Sam is his pissy little brother who is too sexy for ballet and would rather breakdance for tips on the street. Jo shows up as a promising student who is maybe a little hot for teacher; Jess is Sam's bad-influence girlfriend. It was always supposed to be wincest but somehow Jo-as-ballerina derailed me on that one. I stopped writing it 5k in, when I had to decide who was going to have sex with whom. IMPOSSIBLE.
Sam starts giving him shit in the middle of second period senior classical technique. Not smart-ass shit - nothing concrete that Dean could take to the Director so that Sam could spend his next thirty lunch hours spooning out soup in the cafeteria - but that smug, street kid shit that he’s been affecting lately. It’s the twist of his right hand and a glance back as he lands the third grand jeté; it’s this tilt of his hips during a sly glissade; it’s the way his head angles as the whole class dutifully rises from plié to relevé at the barre, and back down, over and over like he’s fucking someone slowly.
Every time Dean turns around he catches the class in the mirror, collective lips twisted in repressed smiles as their arms lift from second to third, third back down. Dean makes a point of snapping at whoever’s smiling the most: a show of teeth and he’s got a swaybacked junior doing fifteen minutes of beats at the barre while everyone else blanks their faces.
09. The Conjectural Technologies compound.doc // 2230 words
The truest Venture Brothers story of my heart, about Pete White and Billy Quizboy living in their airstream trailer being not-quite-gay-for-each-other.
At least, being in the desert, they save on energy bills with the homemade solar panels (dusty garbage bags and a railing from a stolen garage door opener). It's good, because the royalties from the three Big Pharma patents that Billy sold in 1992 mostly go towards Fritos, sparkling lemon-lime seltzer water, and cooking wine.
Still, Billy tries to keep the bill low by running the air conditioner five minutes a day, between midnight and twelve oh five, and using a newspaper to fan the steam out of the bathroom when necessary.
White, on the other hand, keeps the playstation idling for three hours while he reads the latest issue of Fibreoptician. “I’m coming back to it,” he protests when Billy gets too close to the controller with his dustrag.
Yeeeah, I am just cutting this because I have decided to include excerpts because some of these I am kind of sad I never finished. If I have learned anything from this it is that a) I never finish sequels; b) sometimes I label things chronologically which is more depressing than helpful; c) I love tiny fandoms and cracky xovers like crazy; and d) when it gets to be sexytiems I usually give up.
01. 2009.05.06-kenamy.doc // 628 words
This was a Freaks & Geeks story for japanpeterpan about Seth Rogen's character and that hermaphroditic girl he dated and how much better than him she was and how he goes on a road trip to win her back because his life is shitty. I did a lot of research on marching bands.
The day before she leaves for band camp, Amy rolls her eyes at him and goes, “Well, you better get used to it, because I’m planning on spending another four years there.”
“Wait, what?” says Ken. He pulls back to his side of the back seat to peer at her through the dim dregs of twilight, and she does the same, pushing her hair out of her face.
“University of Wisconsin has the best marching band on the planet, Ken. They have fifteen tubas.” Amy says this like it’s vital information that he’ll need to know for the coming apocalypse, when marching band brass breakdowns will be the key to saving civilization.
Ken waits for her to expand on this factoid, and when she doesn’t, instead just staring expectantly at him, he says, “Is that a lot?”
02. 2009.07.02-bear/hiscameraman.doc // 1702 words
Did you ever see that show Man Vs. Wild? Where the guy drinks his urine out of a snakeskin? This is about his cameraman's true and abiding love for him while they hang out in the middle of nowhere together pretending to be near death and eating cans of baked beans.
Once, Karl woke up in the Mojave dreaming that it was raining. It took him a long minute to realize that the sound and the splatter was Bear pissing two feet away away from his head, practically on top of his half-packed pile of recording gear.
The man was tanked. Karl rolled his whole sleeping bag away, croaking indignation and saying things like, “Jesus fucking ass, you asshole, what the fuck are you fucking doing to my cameras?” Bear said, “What cameras?” and kept pissing.
03. 2011.01.31-OK Go does Twilight.docx // 3015 words
This I will probably finish, but basically OK Go contributes a song about astronauts to the New Moon soundtrack because Damian doesn't actually know what Twilight is, per se, and Tim didn't tell him in time. Andy is in love with Spencer Smith from Panic. Also, they get fitted for suits. This is kind of a five-years-later continuation of Faster Than You Go When You're Alone, in my head.
They are invited to the premiere, of course. For a while, Tim didn't think they would be because of that MTV spot where Damian thought the movie was like Pretty In Pink but with witches, and Tim had to go along with it because it's a band rule that you don't disagree with each other in public, and yeah, the Berkeley student they hired as their PR intern gave them shit about that and wrote them a five-page annotated summary of the series so that when asked in the future they could definitively declare for Team Edward.
04. bolt-action heart II.doc // 2283 words
The sequel to a Firefly/SPN crossover I wrote roughly one billion years ago. It's about how Sam and Dean hunt Reavers and are in love with each other and doesn't really mention Serenity at all.
“Dean.” Sam’s voice over the radio sounds thin and tinny, but dead sure. “Airlock. Now.”
And Dean, waiting with his guns and his cleaver in the cockpit, hits the button, and winces through the shudder of decompression as sixty percent of his ship’s innards vacate. It leaves him - always leaves him - with a hollow fear in his gut, gaping wide as the void itself. “Sam.” He says back into the input. “Sammy. Was that it?”
There’s a pause, and a crackle. “Yep. That’s it.”
Outside, a half dozen bodies float past, writhing in the sudden and explosive emptiness. Reavers: their blood floating like wreaths, like tiny solar systems around them. They always die so slow.
05. Lords Commander PART II.odt // 90 words
Another unfinished sequel. To a Song of Ice and Fire fic I wrote for Yuletide 2006 that was maybe my first piece of proper fanfic as an adult. Except, it is all notes and comments from this hardcore GRRM fan and the only thing I actually wrote was this:
Jon found Jaime Lannister drunk and naked in the baths underneath Castle Black, his beard wet and tangled, his golden hand abandoned on the floor. He was alone, but it was difficult to say whether he had started that way or chased the other men off with his sharp eye and cruel tongue, all the more barbed for the strongwine he'd commandeered from the kitchens. The flask lay empty near the edge of the tub Jaime reclined in, and Jon reached down to pick it up before Jaime had roused enough to notice him.
06. Oct.07 310 to yuma.doc // 2762 words
3:10 to Yuma prisonfic. I love semi-canon-gay movie fandoms so hard. Also, I love cowboys. And BEN FOSTER, jesus. This is backstory that explains why Charlie Prince loves Ben Wade (Russell Crowe's character - I had to look up his name just now, man) so much. Talk about your slavish devotion kink. I had so much fun with the first half of this, but then it got plotty and I gave up because really I just wanted to write about how Wade strings Charlie along.
He’s maybe seventeen years on this earth, and the manacle around his ankle, the thirty pounds of iron he carries in his hands to spare his splintered joints, is more constant than the drag of air in his lungs. Crouching at the edge of the yard trying to keep the memory of water in his throat, he steeples his fingers and clenches his eyes. Deliverance. A word his mother used.
“How far’d you get?” A voice that is the sheathed edge of authority jerks Charlie to look round himself like a wild thing, startled.
He sees a man in black, dusty all over, clean-shaven, standing behind him. And sees his executioner. Sees a black hood, the snap of the noose, kicking legs like a colt. He staggers up off his haunches, cradling his iron ball like a babe in arms. Can’t tear his eyes away. Gentle-faced man in a black billycock hat with a velveteen suit jacket.
But the man just juts his chin out at the desert. “How far, boy?”
If not the executioner, then the governor. Or the new warden. Charlie takes a bare glance out across the yellow dirt, still half-crouched, blinking. “Twenty miles, they said.”
07. Royce.docx // 3400 words
I've posted bits of this before. More movie fandoms! My thinly veiled attempt at getting Adrien Brody to make out with BUrie. Predators crackfic where a bunch of bandslash kids get dropped into the game preserve and Royce and Isabelle (who survived the movie because they are BAD ASS, in case you did not see it three times in theatres) try to figure out why the fuck they are not dead yet without actually, you know, talking to them or going near them or helping them. It got too action-packed to finish. Running through the jungle is hard to write interestingly.
"They're not hunting these ones," Isabelle says, eye pressed to her rifle's scope.
Royce says nothing. He is cloaked, invisible. No opportunities have come up watching the camp or the ship, so she and him are here now, squatting in the underbrush, waiting to ambush the hunters when they come for the kids.
But the kids are sitting in a loose circle around the fire pit, chewing and yapping. Some of them are stretched out on the ground. Sleeping. Isabelle hasn't slept like that - sprawled out, unconscious - since she got here. It twists her stomach to see.
"Nothing at all is hunting them," she says it again, tearing her eye away from the sight of them down there. She's almost a little offended. "What, they turn this place into a fucking conservation area or something?"
Royce is silent. He could not be there, for all she knows.
08. step up, supernatural.doc // 5042 words
As it says: SPN/Step Up AU, wherein Dean is an injured dancer teaching at Maryland School of the Arts and Sam is his pissy little brother who is too sexy for ballet and would rather breakdance for tips on the street. Jo shows up as a promising student who is maybe a little hot for teacher; Jess is Sam's bad-influence girlfriend. It was always supposed to be wincest but somehow Jo-as-ballerina derailed me on that one. I stopped writing it 5k in, when I had to decide who was going to have sex with whom. IMPOSSIBLE.
Sam starts giving him shit in the middle of second period senior classical technique. Not smart-ass shit - nothing concrete that Dean could take to the Director so that Sam could spend his next thirty lunch hours spooning out soup in the cafeteria - but that smug, street kid shit that he’s been affecting lately. It’s the twist of his right hand and a glance back as he lands the third grand jeté; it’s this tilt of his hips during a sly glissade; it’s the way his head angles as the whole class dutifully rises from plié to relevé at the barre, and back down, over and over like he’s fucking someone slowly.
Every time Dean turns around he catches the class in the mirror, collective lips twisted in repressed smiles as their arms lift from second to third, third back down. Dean makes a point of snapping at whoever’s smiling the most: a show of teeth and he’s got a swaybacked junior doing fifteen minutes of beats at the barre while everyone else blanks their faces.
09. The Conjectural Technologies compound.doc // 2230 words
The truest Venture Brothers story of my heart, about Pete White and Billy Quizboy living in their airstream trailer being not-quite-gay-for-each-other.
At least, being in the desert, they save on energy bills with the homemade solar panels (dusty garbage bags and a railing from a stolen garage door opener). It's good, because the royalties from the three Big Pharma patents that Billy sold in 1992 mostly go towards Fritos, sparkling lemon-lime seltzer water, and cooking wine.
Still, Billy tries to keep the bill low by running the air conditioner five minutes a day, between midnight and twelve oh five, and using a newspaper to fan the steam out of the bathroom when necessary.
White, on the other hand, keeps the playstation idling for three hours while he reads the latest issue of Fibreoptician. “I’m coming back to it,” he protests when Billy gets too close to the controller with his dustrag.