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unopenablebox · 1 year ago

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N, R

N: Any fic ideas brewing that you’d care to share?

i perpetually have like 6 WIPs floating around that i usually only finish by wedging myself into being assigned that fandom/pairing for a fic exchange, thereby imposing a deadline. taking "ideas" to mean "things i've sketched out but not outlined or written much for", stuff im thinking about includes:

sabriel au where sabriel and lirael meet immediately post- the events of sabriel via a Time Artifact and have fun adventures that actually exist to illustrate the bizarre temporal and cultural contrasts between "growing up in a perky 1910s british boarding school" and "growing up in a glacier where it is 1500 or something and everyone there hates you so you learned all information you currently know entirely from manuscripts + your ghost dog", which i think the books severely underplay in terms of how totally alien lirael should be to like, everyone, but especially everyone from ancelstierre. the punchline of this fic is that lirael thinks four humours theory is real and incontrovertible and also sabriel cannot fucking understand her accent

my own stupid variation on the classic star wars fic premise "darth vader gloms onto leia prior to the events of the original trilogy and elevates her to immense political power, freaking everyone out", in which this comes to pass via, like, palpatine-is-restarting-the-clone-program genetic testing farce that reveals leia is padme's kid. exists mostly for a scene which lives vividly in my mind in which darth vader spends two hours trying and failing to get the Space Illumina Gene Sequencer software to work. he cannot get help because he has already killed the genomics tech in a moment of panic. it keeps giving him a network access error and he cries. i probably won't write this because i think it would require that i first read the extended universe leia novels/comics in order to consciously either incorporate or reject their canon and i simply doing feel like doing that. also as currently sketched out it would be like 40k and i just dont have that kind of time. but it would be fun

R: Which writers (fanfic or otherwise) do you consider the biggest influence on you and your writing?

i'm constantly trying to write diana wynne jones and/or dorothy sayers-style prose/dialogue, it's a failing. in that i fail at it.

i am extremely influenced by certain of the big-name lj-era bnfs in terms of just like, thinking about what a fic is, what constitutes a "unit" of fic, etc, because i feel writing a short fic is almost totally different from an original short story. not least in that most non-fic short stories i read i often end up kind of hating because they're so clearly there to make a Point rather than execute a character moment, and also they suck. (to be clear i only usually read short stories when someone i know has just gotten something into a sci-fi magazine, and i know a lot of people who write about the Issues of AI and the Climate, so that may help contextualize the nature and limitations of my complaints. this is not about, like, raymond carver, who i like but simply do not think about enough to call an influence.) anyway i really like re/sonant and sp/eranza for exemplifying the satisfying short-fic form. just like everybody else who for used to be really into stargate atlantis.

slashmarks/basketofnovas is a real inspiration in the world of "forcibly extrapolating totally unintended worldbuilding that is nonetheless coherent and fun and interesting", something i aspire to, but, not being myself a medieval historian, am pretty handicapped at. but it's fun to try!

there's a lot of other stuff i'm sure but this is what i can currently think of

#thank you cham for sending prompts!! i appreciate it #this was fun to think about despite the thinly veiled panic evident in my efforts to 'think of' 'writers'#box opener #⍰#vanillatalc

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