#brains really are just big ol' jerky jerkwads

[zmediaoutlet]

writing asks: 10, 11, 19 and 30, please and thank you :)

yayyy thanks bud

10. Top three favourite fic tropes & 11. Three tropes that are fine but overrated.

Combining this answer into one with the help of handy-dandy meme:

Top three remains true; overrated would probably be the... B tier? I definitely think sharing a bed is wildly overrated. But, of course, all of this depends on execution. I won't click on anything just because of a 'mutual pining' tag -- tropes are helpful tools but you have to be a decent builder to use them properly.

19. Share a snippet from a wip without giving any context for it.

Something about the flick of the woman's long fingers, the reference. Sam's face heats and Dean sees, of course, and gives him a narrow-eyed look, but apparently he's reading it as embarrassment because he breaks out in a grin. New expression on this new face: this woman's got a slightly crooked canine and a smile that gives her slanting fox-eyes, charming and wicked. "Sammy," Dean says, sing-song and high, and Sam drags a hand over his face. "Shouldn't do it if you can't talk about it."

"Any-way," Sam says, while Dean sniggers. Figures, Dean chills out while Sam gets more flustered. Jerk. "We've got approximately squat to go on. We've got random details but we have no idea why, for any of it. We've got to figure out why it happened if we're gonna have any chance of fixing it."

The smile dims, although there's still a sorta-twinkle in Dean's borrowed eye. "We know how to fix it," he says, oddly neutral.

Sam stands up, flipping his legal pad into his bag and packing up, though with no clear idea of where they'll go. "Let's aim for a fix that's more long-term."

30. Describe a fic that almost happened, but then it didn’t.

Oh, tough one. I have a bunch of fics that are still allegedly waiting to be written, on the long long long to-do list. A slightly different answer, a fic that was intended to go one way and went entirely another? I wrote a s2 fic a while back called in tenebris veritas (stupid title, but oh well), and the actual first idea for the fic was pretty different. What I ended up writing was a Dean POV fic where he and Sam had had blackout, unexpectedly violent sex, and Sam was deeply embarrassed and ashamed, and Dean ended up making Sam feel better because it turns out he’ll take whatever Sam will dish out. Which, okay. Fine.

What I wanted to write was a Sam POV story with the same inciting premise, but one in which he woke up and went, wow, we were pretty crazy last night, and it’s a slow dawning horror that he (it turns out) was fairly rough and violent and Dean’s actually quite hurt, this morning. He was going to be ashamed and, particularly, ashamedly turned on, because we know that Sammy is an animal in the sack and I think it’s very interesting to peek into the ways he wants to want things, in particular the ways he wants not to want things. We got a bit of that in the fic that was published. But what I really wanted to do was have Dean be a mystery -- that Sam would look into his face and not know, not for sure, whether Dean liked it or not -- whether Dean was lying about being fine or whether he was actually fine -- whether Dean were just trying to make Sam feel better -- whether he was, and this is key, afraid of what Sam might be or do. All of that tied into the larger s2 story of Dean keeping secrets + “is something wrong with Sam?”  Somehow, though, when I went to write it, I just... couldn’t. (And it was a bad depression day and my brain was lying to me about how I was a terrible writer, because it’s a dick.) So I flipped it, and went for the more boring but easier version.

I sometimes think about doing the exercise of rewriting it. A diptych, or something. But there’s always the next story, so -- it may just be lost to the ether.