#goingspare writes

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Finished another piece of original fiction (first draft only)! I'm really loving the process of writing short stories, it's so satisfying and fun to play around with all the mechanics in such an enclosed space. like, you get to a stop and you're like. huh. what happens next. well, if it were this kind of story this would happen. and if i was trying to say 'x' but not 'y' maybe this would. idk, it's making a lot of plot/mechanical stuff a lot clearer and more interesting to me. although i do then get haunted by all the if-then-elses not travelled...

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New fic alert! Fluid Dynamics, aka a snippet of my many many feelings about Gungans in general and Jar Jar Binks specifically, possibly the nichest of all my Star Wars interests...enjoy!

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New fic alert! And I even came up with a title! Nail Your Colours Up Next To Mine, aka Blind Date AU, aka Arthur is unobservant and Merlin is hiding something. So. Business as usual there I guess.

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Note to self: typing up all the tiny bits of fic in my notebooks courtesy of those "if you're seeing this write three sentences of your wip" posts is in fact extremely fun and very useful, I've worked my way out of at least three different narrative holes in the last hour and change and am excited about my work again!

In celebration have a snippet of the newly named "But First They Must Catch You", featuring many unhelpful rumours about the new Manda'lor, including but not limited to the fact that the easiest way to get him to do Proper Manda'lor Stuff is to catch him in a net or possibly a pit, and then ask nicely. Or be a crying child. One or the other.

Sabine shrugs. "That's what the message boards say."

"Wait," says Ezra, "wait. You guys have message boards? Mando message boards? Since when?"

"Since forever, Ezra, this isn't the Dark Ages."

This sounds wrong to Ezra, but he is not a historian.

They need a historian. Failing that, they need someone, really, really old.

"It was a tree," Fenn Rau says. Because he's a nerd. Even Ezra doesn't think he's old enough to remember when Mandalore had trees.

"Say more," says Sabine.

Fenn Rau looks at her like she's tap-danced over the last shred of his patience in full beskar'gam.

Ezra has missed Sabine.

"A tree. A large plant. You stuck a bit of flimsy to it with knives or pins or what have you."

"You don't know?" Ezra asks.

"It's not like I was there," Fenn Rau says. "We have the holonet now. It's not the Dark Ages."

Well, that's Ezra told.

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Last line

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or as many as you like).

Tagged by @tallangrycockatiel many thank!

Haven't been writing much recently due to the Oh So Sleepy, but here is the very latest line from the wip currently known as "Kallus vs. The Mouse Droids":

Drama queen, Dillis says, and rolls off to terrorize some other poor unsuspecting double-agent.

That is a lot of words, so instead tagging @july-19th-club @missfangirll @ereborne and anybody else who wants in :)

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Have been trying to resist writing this story in second person for over a year, going nowhere faster. oh goingspare, i says to myself, you cannot write everything in second person. what is the reason for the second person? what does it add? what is it doing for the story?

And it turns out the reason is that it slaps and what it's doing is making me actually write the damn thing

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If I finish a second piece of original fiction does that mean I have to go back and edit the first???

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heyyyy you guys would read a fic i wrote about a blind date even if i just called it Blind Date right???

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All of your wips sound delightful and congrats on naming so many of them so descriptively, but I would love to know what's going on with Sock Jokes!

Thank you! 💜

So Sock Jokes started out as a fairly straightforward, beat-for-beat retelling of His Majesty��s Dragon, except that Laurence is a girl now, and then became a meditation on how (through some classic for want of a nail, butterfly flaps its wings in Panama ripple effect nonsense) her perceived class would probably cause more problems/make for more significant narrative changes than the fact that she’s secretly been a girl this whole time, and then I made a joke about it to a friend along the lines of, “hey, wouldn’t it be hilarious if prim-and-proper Will Laurence, Jane Austen protagonist supreme, turned out to have a secret blackmail folder on fully half of the Royal Navy, Monstrous-Regiment-Sergeant-Jackrum-style, and the reputation to match, hahahah…unless???”. And now she’s an unfailingly polite politically savvy street brawler who makes friends with sex workers, teaches Temeraire revolutionary politics, and is in a polycule with 2-3 of her canonical love interests, and the series is about three books shorter and five times gayer.

A relevant snippet for your perusal:

"It's not like that!" Laurence insists, while Tharkay gasps for breath. "It isn't! Tenzing, please!"

"No, no," Tenzing says, wiping her eyes, "Do, please explain this to me. You are owed favours by over half the Navy's ranking officers -"

"Not half," Laurence says, "not nearly half-"

"- over half the Navy's ranking officers, including multiple life debts, and - whatever was that business with Commander Wilson, by the by?"

"I introduced him to his wife," Laurence says, into the surface of the ancient table. This table is her only friend in the world.

"I see," Tenzing says, with barely subdued glee. Laurence has to look up at that, she has to; Tenzing is never so beautiful as when she is gleeful, though Laurence will admit if pressed a passing fondness for her neatly hidden smirks, also.

"And as for the rest - "

"That was Edith!" Laurence says, and then, "well, mostly Edith." For it is true that while Laurence supplies the majority of the information, it is Edith who best understands how it might be used.

"And that is why on every ship we take the officers look like they have swallowed their tongues or wish to duel you or are considering soiling themselves in terror -"

"They do not!" Laurence says, aghast. "Tenzing!"

"It is as though you think the more emphatically you say my name the more likely I am to allow you to escape this conversation with your dignity," Tenzing says, and she is openly grinning now, leaning her chair back on two legs, long-limbed and limned in lamplight. Laurence is helpless before this hideous injustice.

"And so in sum," she continues, "You have the majority of the Royal Navy firmly under your thumb."

"You make it sound so sordid," Laurence says, wretchedly. "It really - I didn't -"

"No," Tenzing says, meeting her eyes with affectionate seriousness. "I know you didn't. Only you, Will Laurence."

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WIP Whenever

Tagged by @july-19th-club thank you!

Most of my WIPs are stalled out at the moment due to the Sleepy Bitch Disease crushing me beneath its elephant-sized heel, but here is a fragment of 00Q DnD How Is This My Life, otherwise known as Fully Realised Creation, which is the WIP I've been staring blankly at with the ghost of creative longing most often this week:

"Do you know what would be really useful in this situation?" Bond asks, concentrating on the map of the terrain with a focus usually reserved for disarming improvised explosives.

"Bond, so help me God, if you say an exploding pen-"

"-an exploding pen," Bond finishes, grinning like a shark.

"I will end you," Q says, "I can do it, you know. M need never know."

"M knows everything," Bond says, disgruntled, "it's a bore and a trial."

"Moneypenny knows everything," Q corrects, "M only knows what she thinks he ought. It's a delightful little loophole that I don't exploit nearly as much as I should."

Tagging @ereborne @missfangirll @tallangrycockatiel @sinni-ok-sessi

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Fic writer interview

Thanking @sinni-ok-sessi for the tag!

How many works do you have on AO3? 13

What's your total AO3 word count? 50455 - holy shit, a whole nanowrimo!

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Sleeping Arrangements (Good Omens) Habitual (Good Omens) Project New Hope (MCU) Passing the Time (Star Trek:DS9) With Friends Like These (Star Wars, The Mandalorian)

I think I kind of already knew about the top 3, but I would not have called the last two. Nice to see With Friends LIke These doing well, that was so much fun to write but I never felt like it found its audience, y'know

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Mostly not, alas - it feels very awkward to just repeatedly say Thanks <3, however genuinely and enthusiastically I would mean that! I want emoji reacts to AO3 comments, that's about the level I'm at. That being said, I'll try to make the effort if someone's written me an essay, because it's so cool to get that and I've had some really fun conversations that way

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending? I don't really do angsty endings. I've been known to write angsty fic, but I'm usually ending on an upswing...Story-Wise is probably the closest, being as how it's heavily implied that everybody involved is dead, and also Bilbo walks away at the end, but even that to me is more bittersweet than angsty.

What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending? Not Story-Wise, and probably not Lethe. But with the rest I don't know that there's much between them. The ship ones tend to end with a get-together, the dealing-with-shit ones tend to end on a found family gathering, and the funny ones end on punchlines; they're all happy but no stand-outs, if that makes sense.

Do you write crossovers? Write? Sure. Plan out intricately and in great detail? Absolutely. Finish? Never in my life. I tend to have the idea for a lot of crossovers too, but very few of those ever get started. Off the top of my head, the current list includes a Star Trek AOS/Disney's Atlantis fusion, thousands of words of BBC Merlin is happening in Starfleet now, a few incoherent sentences of post-Burial Mounds Wei Wuxian having absorbed all of its ghosts a la Matthew Swift of Blue Electric Angels fame, three scenes of Person of Interest and Castle, several pages of Phryne Fisher and Diana Prince are besties - ohhhhh, and my beloved "Oh Good, My Sith Found the Chainsaw" Star Wars/Lilo and Stitch nonsense, which is the only one of these I have any intention of finishing.

Have you ever received hate on a fic? Not as far as I remember. The closes I ever got was someone commenting on Project New Hope in a very "trying to start a fight about MCU Civil War" way, but claiming they agreed with my opinion on it despite MCU Civil War very much not happening in that universe. Very odd.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Not really? The closest I've gotten in anything published is the blowjob letter in And With It My Constant Mind, which is more of an extended sext, and the ending of Untitled #3...the theme seems to be Cyrano De Bergerac and blowjobs, so make of that what you will.

Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not as far as I know

Have you ever had a fic translated? No.

Have you ever co-written a fic before? Involves too much unfortunate-ordeal-of-being-known, I'm afraid. I'm in awe of people who do this though, the process mystifies me.

What’s your all-time favorite ship? I am invoking my god-given bisexual right not to choose. I cannot do it. Simply impossible. Cyrano/Christian/Roxane of Cyrano de Bergerac fame is probably a front-runner though.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will? Lin Chen's Hanahaki Research Project - I was having a lot of fun with character voices and style, and it was challenging me as a writer in interesting ways, but I think it needs more research and investment and full Nirvana in Fire rewatches than I'm ever going to commit to.

What are your writing strengths? Comedy, yearning, and sentences that sound good when you read them aloud.

What are your writing weaknesses? Actually finishing things and comedy (I contain multitudes)

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic? Absolutely do not have the confidence to do that, thank you and good night.

What was the first fandom you wrote for? By published work, the MCU, unpublished I was not immune to Supernatural

What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet but want to? Was not expecting this to be the trickiest one to answer, what the heck. Ummm. Idk. I get more enthused by specific ideas than by specific fandoms, I think - if I actively want to write for something it's because I've been Seized By An Idea(TM), Taken Hostage By An Idea, Had My Whole Brain Rewritten To Think Constantly About This Idea, rather than like abstractly, huh, it would be fun to write something for X

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written? I-love-all-of-my-children-equally.gif. No, that's a cop-out. Um. Usually I think whatever I've written most recently gets the most affection, so With Friends Like These is bang at the top. And With It My Constant Mind I suspect is going to have the most longevity at the top of my list, I was living with that one for years and I'm really really proud of how it turned out.

Right, no pressure tagging @starkey @missfangirll @july-19th-club @ereborne and any other writerly folks lurking out there who are interested :D

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I'm so torn on the WIP game, I'd love to hear more about either "00Q DnD how is this my life" or the "Zeb and Fulcrum late night radio"

Oh ho ho you have hit upon two of my favourites be prepared for a wall of text!

So “00Q DnD how is this my life” will probably, eventually, go into the world under the moniker “Fully Realised Creation”, and it is about, depending on your perspective, Q being a massive nerd, Bond and queerness, difficult weirdos making Real Friends(™), or growing into yourself via wizard roleplaying with your mates. It is one of my favourite things to write partially because so much of it is very very funny, partially because I accidentally ended up having real emotions about queerness, masculinity, and performance, and partially because it is very important to me that the fictional man-who-is-a-weapon can walk out of the story at the end. Bond Will get out of this labyrinth of suffering, and he isn’t even going to have to die to do it.

A snippet:

Q's watching him. "Stop that," he says. "What?" James says, innocence personified. "I do not need you to assassinate my way out of this," Q says, the tiniest possible smirk tucked in around the corners of his mouth. "Nor do I need you to steal, bribe, threaten, seduce or explode my way out of it." "But just a little explosion -" James says, indicating size with a pinch of his finger and thumb. "The paperwork, Bond," Q says, "think of the paperwork." "Judicious use of Tasha's Hideous Laughter?" "No," Q says, lips twitching, "bad wizard." "I've been thinking about that," James says, "and since my character's a woman, aren't I technically a witch?" "I know you're goading me," Q says, pointing an accusing finger, "I know you know exactly what's wrong with that sentence, and I am not engaging -" Except of course he does, and James sits back, and lets himself be entertained. And if he is also, maybe, scheming, just a little, well. Nobody needs to know.

Meanwhile, “Zeb and Fulcrum late night radio” came out of a couple of things. Firstly, I’m a sucker for the tank who thinks they’re stupid/only good for bashing heads together getting to exist and being known outside of that, and I thought it would be funny/interesting if Kallus was the one to (mostly by accident!) give Zeb that. Secondly, I love it when sci-fi digs in on non-human sapient biology and cultures, and I think Zeb being the only Lasat in the rebellion is an interesting place to put that. And somehow from those two things I got “what if Kallus started sending live Fulcrum transmissions for Plot Reasons and Zeb keeps being the one who picks up? And also because vocoders are designed for human-standard speech/hearing, Zeb has actually known who the new Fulcrum is this whole time?” and now they have this deeply weird incomprehensible-to-outsiders friendship that nobody else in the rebellion can at all get their head around, and this entertains me deeply.

Snippet:

"Yep," Zeb says, folding his arms behind his head and leaning back in his chair as infuriatingly as he knows how. Sure enough, Kallus is practically vibrating with repressed rage. Zeb can see his fingers twitch like they're going to reach for the bo rifle. He lets his smirk get wider, tooth by tooth. He has no idea what's happening right now, but Kallus is in prime wind-up territory and Zeb has never let an awkward interpersonal discussion get in the way of a good time.

"Everyone excuse me," Kallus says, in his politest imperial drawing room tones. "I have to commit a murder."

"Hah," Zeb says, "like you could take me."

"Care to test that?" Kallus says, with that aura of palpable menace that Zeb hasn't been able to take seriously since he heard the guy shriek like a baby about one itty bitty bird monster.

"Sure," Zeb says, "maybe this time I'll break your other leg."

"For the last time," Kallus says, like a lothcat with a trod-on tail, "the impact of the escape pod with the surface of the moon broke my leg. You just happened to be present."

"Eh," Zeb says, "you say tomato."

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Once again the horror of the fic-naming is upon me. Options include:

"To Catch A Shiny (Mandalorian)"

"No Refunds On Excalibur Apparently"

"Strange Mythosaurs Lurking In Underground Lakes Handing Out Laser Swords Is No Basis For A System of Government"

"[The entirety of Beacon Tazamnesty's first monologue.mp3]"

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also i forgot i leechblocked ao3 before noon in order to claw some semblance of meaning and structure back into my life so i can't even post the fic right now anyway ashdfkl;fdhfk

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Seven(ish) Sentence Sunday-Monday

Oooops I am very late and have missed yet another Sunday by the skin of my teeth, thanking @ereborne for tagging me!

Mostly I am now working on oh good my sith found the chainsaw, so have the most recent few sentences of that :D they are discussing pit-traps, and pit-trap-related idiocy

“Leave us out of it,” Maul says. “Some people are simply not stupid enough to fall into holes.” “Pykes,” Kenobi says, “or something like? Might have stumbled across an old smuggling route.” “Not content with falling,” Maul says, to the ceiling, “but now he’s digging, too. Weren’t you supposed to be a diplomat?” “Weren’t you supposed to be dead?” Kenobi asks, venomously. “If you wish to keep handing me evidence as to your own incompetence, feel free,” Maul says, “one does not like to do all the work oneself.” Kenobi’s arm twitches, as though he’s thinking about throttling. Owen is enjoying the circus, he’ll tell you that free gratis and for nothing.

Tagging anyone who's interested and doesn't mind that I don't know the days of the week!

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New fic new fic new fic! In which Bo-Katan's stress headache reaches epic proportions, Din is beset on all sides, and Grogu experiments with his dad's approach to problem-solving.