#i started this fic back in october 2019... how nostalgic

[delimeful]

pull apart at the seams (7)

continued from this fic! some of the chapters for this (5&6) are only on ao3 so make sure to check there if you haven’t!

warnings: arguing, PTSD, panic, dehumanization, angst

-

“Logan Sanders!”

Above him, Logan froze, and for a moment his expression was nearly comical, reminiscent of nothing more than a cat caught with both paws stuck in the canary cage.

A heartbeat later, his features forcibly smoothed down into a cold neutrality, and with the giant’s shadow still weighing heavy over him, Virgil was swiftly reminded just who the canary was in that metaphor.

The giant didn’t reach for him, though, stiffening up from his admittedly incriminating looming position to turn and face Patton’s glare head on. Virgil didn’t think he’d ever seen Patton look so angry, and he probably never would again if his estimate of how likely he was to get out of the situation alive was correct.

Behind Patton’s shoulder, the other werewolf— Roman?— was peeking out past the doorway, making sheepish eye contact with Logan, and silently but exaggeratedly mouthing what looked like an apology. It made a confusing addition to an already alarming situation.

Virgil himself felt as though the rug had been yanked out from beneath him. First, some semblance of a conversation and even a near-apology from the guy he’d been convinced would horrifically murder him for the past week, and now Patton was, what, defending his property from his packmate?

“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” the giant in question continued, lips curling up in a barely-suppressed snarl.

“We were simply having a conversation,” Logan replied, sweeping a hand back slightly to indicate Virgil in the ‘we.’

Virgil just barely managed not to flinch, remaining perfectly still instead. Patton’s gaze flickered to him for a moment before returning to Logan somehow more intense than before.

“Was it really just a conversation?” he asked, firming his stance as though to say that he wasn’t going to let this go.

Logan’s shoulders rose a few millimeters defensively, but his demeanor only grew icier. “I wasn’t aware that you were the only one in this household who was allowed to try and communicate with the human.”

“Communicate with--,” Patton stepped forward, “You looked like a scavenger bearing down on a pup! Why would you corner him like that?”

Logan clicked his tongue irritably. “It’s impossible not to corner him, he’s a human! Being in the same room as a creature that small and slow could qualify as ‘cornering’!”

“You know what I mean!”

Still hovering in the doorway, Roman was grimacing, glancing between the two of them as though watching a particularly heated tennis match.

Virgil felt more like he was watching bombs go off, the argument too loud, too harsh, too reminiscent of his months in conditioning. Each sharp gesture or cutting glare registered as wrong-bad-hisfault, electric-spark phantom pains building up in the back of his skull. He swayed on his feet.

“He’s terrified of you, and you’ve certainly given him plenty of reason to be!” Patton shouted, and the room went quiet and suffocating, Virgil’s survival instincts dragging his attention back to the present.

“He told you.” Logan’s voice was monotone, but it sent terror racing down Virgil’s spine worse than any growl. His mouth formed the shape of protesting words, I didn’t I swear I didn’t, but no sound came out, his lungs constricted by the tense certainty that this was it, this was really how he died.

Patton shook his head, some of the anger fading from his frame, washed away by misery. “I guessed, Logan. The pieces were all there, sitting in front of my face, but I… I didn’t want to see the full picture.”

There was a terrible, fraught stretch of silence, and then Logan’s gaze slid to the side, going distant and glassy. “How long do I have to pack, then?”

“What?” “What?” The other two giants asked, voices overlapping.

“I understand. I’m being evicted for my transgressions,” he forced through grit teeth. “How long do I have?”

“Logan, no,” Patton replied fretfully. “We’re not kicking you out, you’re part of this family! We want you here!”

“I don’t believe the human I tormented will agree,” Logan bit out, but the words were double-edged with guilt, cutting back against himself. “Forcing him to share a residence with me would be cruel.”

Cruel.

There was a sharp, bitter sound, almost unrecognizable as a laugh, and Virgil only realized it had come from him after every eye in the kitchen turned his way. His chest seized with panic again, and he crumpled to his knees.

“Vee!” Patton gasped, and steps thundered closer, a hand hovering overhead--

“Don’t!” Virgil managed, the cry cracking halfway through. He curled in on himself, as though presenting a smaller target and begging would do anything but diminish him in their eyes even more. “Please don’t.”

Patton paused above him. “Don’t-- Don’t what, kiddo?”

Don’t grab him, don’t touch him, don’t look at him. How was he supposed to explain? They didn't understand anything.

“Don’t,” he said again, and flinched away from each of Patton’s movements.

“I-- I don’t understand,” Patton started weakly, and this time it was Logan that cut him off.

“Forcing him to share a residence with me would be cruel,” he repeated slowly, like he was puzzling each word against Virgil’s reaction to see how they fit. “Forcing-- Oh. Forcing him to stay where he doesn’t feel safe… would be cruel.”

A beat later, Patton’s shadow retreated from him entirely. The bands around his chest eased slightly.

“Let me go,” he choked out, each word bringing back memories of singed hair and tingling skin. “Just let me leave. Please. I didn’t want to be bought. I’m a person.”

A beat of silence, and then a set of footsteps rushed out, followed shortly by another set, leaving him behind. The fragile threads of Virgil’s hope dissolved back into nothingness.

“Leave and go where?” the last giant in the room asked.

Roman stepped closer, meeting Virgil’s gaze stubbornly. “To go get caught again? Or die out in the first storm that catches you? Everything here is just as huge as us.”

“Better than… dying here,” Virgil spat, and then his throat closed up, deciding that was enough words for today and quite possibly forever.

“What about living here?” Roman asked, glancing after his packmates briefly with unhidden worry. “Genuine living. Not as a pet or a-- a captive. Just as a roommate. I mean, obviously you don’t precisely trust us at the moment, but a mutually beneficial arrangement could be worked out.”

Virgil stared at him with dull, confused eyes, watching as the giant got more antsy with each passing moment of Virgil’s unresponsiveness.

“Don’t get me wrong, I still find humans downright impertinent, but if you go off and die, my pack is going to be miserable and morose for more than a few moons,” he continued to ramble. “We can negotiate terms, set up rules, anything within reason to ease their guilt and your terror.

“And this way, you have a real chance,” he finished. “Think on it, won’t you?”

It seemed to be an earnest request, but Virgil’s mind had done enough rapidfire processing for one day, and was now thoroughly shutting down.

Good thing he didn’t have to worry about thinking while unconscious.

[madzilla84]

creator tag meme 2019

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favourite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2019. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

Thank you for tagging me, @ahappydnp and @alittledizzy! <3

This was my first year posting fic in the phandom, and my first year writing anything in ages - my last thing was a novel-length fic I wrote in 2015 in a different fandom, and the complete non-reaction was off-putting enough that I didn’t feel like coming back to writing at all until I joined the phandom this year. I’ve been absolutely floored by how welcoming and kind everyone has been, and how supportive people are of new writers. I’m still amazed every time I get a lovely comment on the stuff I write.

To my own amazement, I wrote 12 fics this year; the first was posted in May. October was by far my most productive month with 5 pieces posted (thank you bingo and the phanniversary). Total word count was 42K. (Which might not sound like a lot compared to the outputs of a lot of phandom authors, but I’m amazed I did it!)

My fave 5:

the same old song 

about Phil having a bad day on holiday. This was the first phandom story I posted and as such is a nostalgic fave. I still like it a lot - I was having a hard time with anxiety during April - Julyish and I wrote this during a particularly bad time as a sort of therapy, and I was happy enough with the results to post it. Everything else followed on from this one, and the positive reactions to it.

love is an open drawer 

Phil moving into his first apartment. I’d half-written this before BIG and COTY came out (pun not intended) and wasn’t sure if I’d ever return to it, but I liked it too much to abandon it. Probably one of my favourites to write as it just flowed well; like i could hear the dialogue particularly well in my head and it was fun to write. 

someone 

this was one of my bingo fics, looking at the early days of Dan and Phil’s relationship from Martyn’s point of view. I loved writing this and at the time it was the longest phanfic I’d written. I had a very clear idea of it before I started, which is always nice.

hangrover 

this was a lil bit of nothing that popped into my head while i was having breakfast in a cafe, but I particularly like the dialogue in it. My shortest fic by far but did really well, so just goes to show not everything has to be 50K to be popular.

sparks of fire 

the obligatory 10th anniversary 2009 fic. Didn’t do quite as well as I’d hoped, but since I got properly into the phandom I always wanted to write my own version of their first meeting - feels like a rite of passage somehow. It was very 11th hour and I’m glad I got it done in time.

honorary mention: my secret santa fic, which obviously I can’t talk about yet - it was a bit of a departure for me and I was really proud of it. Perhaps I’ll talk a bit more about it after author reveals tomorrow. :)

I don’t know what 2020 will bring for writing. Like most writers I have a bunch of ideas that may never see the light of day - some of them I think would be quite long; intimidatingly long in my head, lol. But I don’t feel any pressure to keep producing *something* whether I want to or not, which is good... let the ideas come as they may!

I’ve seen most creators I follow tagged, so I’m tagging everyone who hasn’t been tagged but would like to do this! 

[scifrey]

2019 Writing Round Up

The new year is here, and with it everyone is talking about what they wrote this past year. The last quarter of 2019 was a brutal rollercoaster for me, emotionally and personally, so it’s good for me to have the chance to sit here and reflect on what I accomplished and the good things that happened too.

2019 started with receiving a grant from the Toronto Arts Council for The Maddening Science – said grant went to research materials for the novel, a new computer, printer, and keyboard, and paying off some debts. But 2019 also started in a place of utter burn-out, having slammed through writing, editing, and publishing five big novels in three years, as well as rewriting a feature film and completing the scripts for three seasons of a webseries.

I was also working two dayjobs – one first thing in the morning, for an hour and a half, and then a standard eight-hour shift in the evenings which got me home at around 10pm – so my sleep schedule was a mess and I was having trouble not only making time to write, but concentrating when I did have the time.

I started the year in a place of complete exhaustion and mild frustration that neither of my book series had really caught on, and as my agent once said, “burned out from tried to break out.”  I’m not happy to say that I think I still occupy that place a full year later; but I’ve had the opportunity to rest more, and begin to refill my creative well again, and to reclaim my writing space by no longer needing a roommate.

I’m not quite there yet – turns out finishing two series in four years really takes it out of you – but maybe in a few more months I’ll be ready to sit down and begin to spin out a new novel. In the mean time, I’ve got lots of irons in the fire, as you’ll see.

January

The first third of 2019 was dedicated to rewriting The Skylark’s Sacrifice a second time. I’d rewritten it in the last third of 2018 and my editor ended up agreeing that while the rewrite was exactly what she asked for, we should not have gone down that street in the first place. It was what was asked of me, but it didn’t work. So I took it back to the drawing board, and started the re-write all over again.

I also published WORDS FOR WRITERS: The DO-ING Trap.

I finished the edits/polish on A Woman of the Sea, which I had begun in October 2018 and loaded the book onto Wattpad in preparation for serializing it.

February

I spent February rewriting and jobhunting. I tried to write a short story and Did Not Do Well. It’s half done and likely to end up on the Pile Of Unfinished Tales.

At least I got some new words on the page with WORDS FOR WRITERS – Beta Readers.

And I began releasing A Woman of the Sea a chapter at a time on Valentine’s Day.

March

I completed the Skylark rewrites and handed them over to Reuts Publications.  I also published WORDS FOR WRITERS – From Signing to Signing.

At this point I tried to start The Maddening Science, the book I received a Toronto Art’s Council Grant for in 2018, and bashed out a few chapters and a few scenes. But something was off about it, and I couldn’t pinpoint why, so I kept going into the file and only put a few hundred words in here and there. I couldn’t really sit down and dig in, and because I don’t believe in Writer’s Block as a mystical magical reason for why people can’t write (there are always reasons), I had to step back to try to figure out why I was struggling. I assumed it was probably because I was in the middle of job interviews and decided to try again later.

April

I started a new copywriting job, leaving my other two dayjobs, and it sucked up all my brainpower and creativity and made it very hard to want to sit down and compose yet more words at the end of the day.

I resumed working piecemeal on The Maddening Science, pecking out what I could one molasses-slow sentence at a time. I realized that the incidents in the news regarding the current political comment and the toxic white supremacist misogyny that is rampant in our society today has made it very hard to figure out how to tell a responsible story about a supervillain as the protagonist.

I’m still working on that. In the mean time, while I figure out how to restructure the tale, the book and the progress blog are on hiatus.

May

Still brain-dead from work, I only managed to bash out WORDS FOR WRITERS: How do social media and writing/publishing work together?

June

There were some final edits on The Skylark’s Sacrifice to be discussed, but I really did nothing this month beyond marketing pushes and watching all the webseries I judged for TOWebfest.

July

The director of my feature film, To a Stranger, was going to start shopping the script around to executive producers, so before he did that I got some actorfriends together to do a table read. The read, and their feedback, revealed some character motivation gaps in the film, and I set about organizing their notes and figuring out how to solve the issues.

I also wrote and published WORDS FOR WRITERS – How To Write a Synopsis.

This was also the month of TOWebfest, the festival itself, and I spent a lovely day with fellow creators and spoke to some executive producers about my own webseries to try to garner interest.

I was a guest at Pretty Heroes Con for the first time and LOVED it. It’s great to celebrate strong female leads in SF/F and I loved Sailor Moon as a kid, so I was in nostalgic nirvana. It was lovely to introduce those Girl Power-loving fans to The Skylark’s Saga.

August

I restructured and rewrote To a Stranger, added extra characters and extra scenes to clear up some character motivation in the screenplay. It’s now back with the director and I hope to hear that he’s got a production house and an Exec attached to the project soon.

I appeared at FanExpo Toronto to do some panels, sell some books, and judged the short fiction contest. I also wrote and published WORDS FOR WRITERS: How to Create a Pitch Package.

September

The Skylark’s Sacrifice was published! Yay! I had a wonderful launch party at Bakka Phoenix, and got to simultaneously launch the incredible book trailer for the duology animated by Elizabeth Hirst to a song by Victor Sierra. Friends Adrianna Prosser and Eric Metzloff, and Danforth Brewery made it extra special.

I also got to read at Word on the Street, which was been a career-long dream, reading on the new Across the Universe Stage.

However, September was also the month when I lost the copywriting job. I saw it coming, so I was shocked when it happened and how it went down, but not surprised. I wasn’t fitting in well with the team, the original project I had been hired for had been vetoed by the execs, work was being taken away from me and given to freelancers, and I didn’t have the training they wanted (though that makes me wonder why they hired me in the first place.) In retrospect it’s been a blessing, as the workplace was not at all a good fit for me and was slowly becoming toxic, but at the time it was a devastating blow to my confidence and my coffers.

Just a few days after I was fired, on my 37th birthday, I won a Watty Award for A Woman of the Sea. Happy birthday to me! I was offered a place among the Wattpad Stars program and accepted – and wow, is there a lot of paperwork for that – and I’m still trying to figure out what benefits the program offers. (Though I’m pretty chuffed with my free Canva Premium subscription!) A Woman of the Sea was featured on the home page as an Undiscovered Gem and as of today has about 82k reads. Whoa!

I also wrote and published WORDS FOR WRITERS: How to Plan a Series.

October

I spent most of the month sleeping and crying and working through how I felt about getting fired. When one identifies oneself as a writer, to finally get a job in writing was a thrill and felt like a confirmation that although I was struggling with my next book, I was a writer and I’d get through it. Being fired from the job – even though the reason was an exec decision to eliminate my project and thus my role – felt like a very personal blow. I wasn’t a writer after all. (Or at least, that’s what it felt like).

This had me thinking long and hard. Especially about where I wanted my writing career to go next – as much I’ve been writing in the realm of SF/F the past decade, I’ve begun to realize that was I really am is a Character-Driven Romance writer. Romance set in spec fic and fantasy realms, sure, but Romance and Character Work are my wheelhouse and how I should be selling myself.

This realization has been pretty freeing because it means that the frustrations and roadblocks I’ve been coming up against can maybe be dissolved by reframing my brand and rethinking my career map.

Wattpad added the sample of City By Night that’s on Wattpad to their Halloween Reads list on the homepage and I decided to put the whole novella up on the site for people to read. Read it now, though. It won’t stay up forever as the eBook rights to the novel are signed with an indie publisher. This is just a limited-time promotion.

And knowing that readers were asking what I would be posting next on Wattpad after A Woman of the Sea, I rejigged Triptych for the site and started serializing it from the start. You can read it here. This story also won’t stay up forever, for the same reason.

I also started serializing Words for Writers on Wattpad. I won’t be copying over all 75+ articles I have on my website, just the ones that are specifically useful for Watties.

I also polished a webseries and sent it to a producer with a major broadcaster after our convo at TOWebfest for consideration. I’ve followed up but there’s no reply. I’ll follow up again in January 2020 but I can pretty well assume that No Answer is my ‘No’ Answer.

I am thinking about maybe pitching it as a graphic novel in the future, though I’m going to have to reach out to my friends who write them for publishers to figure out how to put at pitch together.

November

In 2017 I handed over a YA contemporary re-telling of “Northanger Abbey” to my agent, and it was lukewarmly received by both her and the handful of editors she showed it to. It was then shelved for possible future reworking.

In the first part of the NaNoWriMo month, I decided to tackle this reworking, and I was still wrestling mentally with The Maddening Science. This reworking was inspired a lot by reading Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston in October, and realizing that the tone I’d been going for with my narrator hadn’t been irreverent or GenZ-y enough for the story I was trying to tell, and not grounded enough in the technologies and social media that my modern-day Catherine Morland would have access to.

I reworked the Pitch Document for the novel, now currently called “Title TBA”, and got to chapter seven during NaNo. I’ve got some thinking to do about structure for the novel, and how far into using Social Media As A Storytelling Tool I want to go with the idea, but generally speaking I’m pretty pleased with the result of the rewrites.

Partway through NaNo, it occurred to me that there was another story that my Wattpad readers were asking for, and one that would be a lot of fun to write. In A Woman of the Sea, my fictional Regency-era  Jane-Austen-analogue authoress Margaret Goodenough writes her debut novel “The Welshman’s Daughters”. As I describe this non-existent novel in A Woman of the Sea, it’s a gothic romance that’s very Elizabeth Gaskell-and-Jane Austen-esque in terms of it being a character study driven romance, with some of the fun high melodrama and gothic tone of Anne Radcliffe. And, in the world of A Woman of the Sea, it’s the first queer kiss in Classic Western Literature.

A handful of readers have asked where they can find this book, or have confessed to going to the library to ask for it, only to learn that it’s not real. I made it up.

And I thought… well, why not make it real?

So I’m working on the pitch doc and the first chapter now, to see if a) this is something I want to pursue and b) this is something that will help me break through my burn-out slump. I hope it will, but I think I still need to take time to rest before I really push into it.

And I still have the “Title TBA” rewrites to complete.

December

I published WORDS FOR WRITERS: How Do I Get An Agent?, and spent the rest of the month just trying to chill. I’ve become a bit of a reluctant reader, so I am trying to push myself to read a little each day, to remind myself why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place.

A Woman of the Sea was turned down for Paid Stories, unfortunately, because of the structure of the romance. The Stars Team explained that romance stories like this one, with one romantic partner in the first half of the book, and a different one in the second (a la Brigit Jones’ Diary) doesn’t tend to do well on Paid because readers are reluctant to shell out for a romance where they don’t meet the HEA partner until later. It’s heartbreaking to hear, because I was really hoping that this might become a viable stream of income for me. At least the team who turned it down were very kind and expressed how much they loved the story in and of itself.

But no matter – onwards and upwards!

What’s ahead for 2020

Well, I’m not sure. This has been a really, really difficult year and I have really, really struggled with trying to figure out who I am and what I want, both in life and as a writer.

Certainly, there will be lot of hard thinking about the future of my writing career. I have ideas that I love and want to pursue, but this post-firing-return-to-the-job-hunt-depression is killing my desire to create. And honestly, the fact that I’ve worked so hard for so many years and haven’t managed to get any sort of break-through or cultural foothold or ability to even really to pay my bills with this job is disheartening. I’m still paying more in marketing every year than I’m making in Royalties.

However, I have some new opportunities on the horizon – conversations happening behind closed doors, as well as Divine Paradox Films still working toward filming To A Stranger, and Alpaca vs Llama shopping The Skylark’s Song as a teens animated series. And the webseries I wrote is under consideration with a new production team, so I can keep my fingers crossed.

Who knows, perhaps the rewritten “Title TBA” might be just the thing to propel my work into a realm where I’m really earning money. Though I had originally envisioned it as the first of a series, the more I work and think on it, the more I feel like it would be best as a stand-alone. I think it would slap a lot harder if it was a one-off.

And I am genuinely liking the plot of The Welshman’s Daughters, and all the research reading and viewing I am doing to get the tone and mood of the book right (please recommend me your favourite Gothic Romances – film, TV, or books!)

But I’m not going to rush anything. It’s nice to be able to remember how to putter with a book and have no looming, razor-blade deadlines hanging over my neck.

2020 will be, I hope, a year of renewed creativity, motivation, and the year where I complete at least one of the three novel projects I’ve started.

For now, I think I’m going to go have a nap.

*

If you want to stay up to date with my writing and happenings, sign up for my newsletter.