michelel72

All the cool kids are doing it, so I'll jump in too. This is from "Sound of Silver", a tropey fanfic to a series that literally no one in the entire world has read. (Because it doesn't actually exist, because I never wrote it, ha. And don't @ me about "being a fan of my own stuff", Amy; I know this is technically original, but it's written-in-the-style-of.)

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The first thing he sees when he opens the folder is the badge, solid and gleaming. Opposite the badge is an identification card with his name and a picture of a guy who looks a little like Dad, if Dad had a short beard and middling-brown hair instead of almost-black. Jonathan stares at the two objects for several seconds before managing to say, "I'm a cop too?"

"Yeah, you're -- wait a second --"

He can't help interrupting her. "How?"

She just looks puzzled when he glances up at her. "What do you mean, how?"

"It's just -- I mean --" There's a huge reason no one would ever let him be a cop, if they knew, but maybe she doesn't know. But even without that, "There's tests, right? To get in? And my grades …." He fights not to flush with embarrassment. He's at least passing again now, but no one will ever mistake him for a good student. There's no way he'll be able to qualify for anything that requires a test.

Dread of next year rises up, as it always does -- senior year will only be harder, but he has to graduate, because he can't put his parents through another year of tuition, but even if he does, what will he do then? -- but he shoves it back down fiercely. He can't deal with that right now on top of everything else.

"Well, I wasn't there, but you must have done fine, because you've been doing this longer than I have," she says, casually, as if that wasn't just as impossible as everything else she's said so far. "But you said too. Did you remember something about me?"

She must mean from the now version of himself, the older version. "No, you just look like a cop," he says offhandedly, trying to memorize the image of his own name next to a badge like that. He's finally realized that this is probably all just a really weird dream, and he wants to remember this one nice thing from it.

So remember that time I was all fangirly about Love Is All You Need to Destroy Your Enemies (WtNV/Dresden)?

I sort of accidentally wrote a fic set in the same 'verse. A fanfic of a fanfic, if you will. (shadydave is the sort of hoopy frood who gives open permission via profile notes.)

I know this is the longest of long shots, but is there anyone out there who is familiar with this fic and willing to serve as an early reader of mine? Right now I've got a fairly rough draft of *cough* not quite 38,000 words.

I'm not looking for SPaG; this would be any or all of the following: Character voice, story flow, pacing, and "Dresden Files" canon. You know, the hard stuff.

To make this even more fun, I'm hoping to post it no later than Valentine's Day.

Whee!

I wrote something, I wrote something, oh holy cats, I wrote something!

Not any one of the three fics I meant to be working on, not even the same fandom, but I don't even care!

Anyone out there up for giving feedback on a 6k Iron Man fic? If I don't get nibbles within a day or two, I'll just post, but I should let it sit that long anyway just so I can give it a fresh look before actually posting. And I would like to improve if there's something about it that can be fixed.

It's gen (background Tony/Pepper and Howard/Maria), set between IM2 and the Avengers movie, and it's about Howard and Tony's relationship, explored via handwavium. I'm not looking for SPaG (though always appreciated) so much as general story flow and, more importantly, character voice. Because, well, Tony Stark. I've never written him before, never even contemplated it, never thought I'd write anything at this rate that had nothing to do with SGA, so ... yeah. Another pair of eyes would be good.

And now I will go fall down, since I need to get up for work in about five hours. Blah. But still, I wrote something, whee!

And, since I'm a bit punchy, I will leave you -- under a cut, because I'm not quite that cruel -- a listing of quasi-Tumblr-style tags I will not use when I post to AO3. Imagine them strung together with commas to separate them, because I can't be bothered to format them readably that way at the moment. Enjoy!

( (And not even one 'feels' ...) )

This is an odd one. I've written a story (fanfiction, for Stargate: Atlantis) in which a character has experienced auditory hallucinations for years and thinks he's schizophrenic.

It's a what-if, a character study, with brief snippets considering various episodes in light of this possibility. Only, the thing is, I'm probably about as neurotypical as they come. I really don't want to fall into ableism-fail.

Is there anyone out there who knows about schizophrenia and/or hallucinatory conditions (more than Wikipedia offers) and would be willing to review this story to (try to) make sure I'm not being offensive or ignorant (or offensively ignorant)? Does anyone know a place where I might find such a reviewer? (accessportrayal seems close but not quite right as a forum to pose this request ... but maybe I'm wrong about that.)

The story is ~4400 words. It's not a "fix-it". Knowledge of SGA canon is a definite plus, but I can provide supplementary notes for those who know the content area but not the TV show. It's also pretty rough, and it may not work as a story, at least yet.

If this is something I should just regard as "yay, I wrote something, now never publish it", I'd rather know up-front, you know? Thanks to anyone who considers!

This was my second full year of fanfic writing, and it was much less productive. I adore my job, don't get me wrong, but it sucks up a lot of time and energy (and I'm fully aware I don't have it half as bad as my supervisor, ninjamonkey73). I'm down to "only" six cats, but they also demand time; I got involved in stargateficrec; and then little things like the occasional book or video game (damn you, Okami!) steal even more time.

I'm reading lightly in a few other fandoms (Chuck, Criminal Minds, Sherlock, Doctor Who, even Sanctuary), but I'm still monofandom in my writing. I just don't have any stories I want to tell in other fandoms, no matter how much I've enjoyed the source. I think a lot of that is character identification; Rodney McKay is my "in", and I haven't latched onto any other characters in the same way.

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( The year's published stories … )

That adds up to … ~47.6k words for the year, which is a surprise. I thought I'd produced significantly less compared to last year's 53k.

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And just for the hell of it, I'll go through my uWIP list as well:( Let it WIP! )

And that's it. I'll probably be working on "Element Wheel", though I do try to keep nibbling away at "Broken Mirror"; the rest will probably get tweaked off-and-on as the mood strikes me.

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POV in writing can be a complex topic. I know I certainly have firm opinions on the subject. Some of those are from lack of exposure, though. For example: Based on my readings (modern, Western, English-language narrative), first and second person are sometimes used but third person is vastly more common, and limited third is particularly most common.

I know that, officially, omniscient third is an "acceptable" POV, but I don't have the experience to distinguish it from "wandering limited third" (I'll call that WL3)**, which I don't consider an acceptable POV. I was doing beta work last night for a story that is probably omniscient third, and I tried to find resources for ways to make the distinction between omniscient and WL3, but ... well. I swiftly encountered "workshops" with prescriptive examples that not only failed to work but included fundamental grammar/punctuation errors. (I'm not talking about the compromises inherent to writing dialogue and thought processes; I'm talking about simple, basic, blatant comma splices and the like.) The writing at those websites was just bad.

(** ETA: By wandering limited third, I mean third-person narrative that incorporates the thoughts, feelings, and internal reactions of more than one character within the same uninterrupted passage, paragraph, or even sentence without a clear scheme (and without telepathy). Use of different characters for third-person limited POV is one of my favorite tools, so long as the POV changes occur only at passage breaks. My problem is telling the difference between WL3, which isn't cool, and omniscient.)

So does anyone have any good resources for wrangling omniscient POV? If I'm doing beta on it, I really should know how it works to make sure I'm analyzing it effectively. I'm also interested in any thoughts anyone has on the topic of POV, whether this dilemma particularly or just in general.

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Yeah, no comment on the start of the quotation giving this post its title.

My currently active story now has 13,800 words of setup. I have 13,800 words leading me to "okay, and now what?" I have the gimmick fully established ... and no idea what to do with it.

I mean, I've got an idea of a plot to round it out with, but boy howdy is it tired. I guess it'd work, but if I'm having trouble caring ... meh.

If anybody out there is really, really bored and actively interested in trying to figure out a decent direction to take a strange (not-so-)little post-Trinity story, do please feel free to drop me a note. Otherwise, hey, maybe this'll finally let me move to a different story. So, not all bad, right? ... sigh.

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I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, not formally or properly. I've got too many WIPs as it is, and I'm too addicted to both editing as I go and jumping between stories to really feel motivated by the standard formula.

But I figure I might as well see if I can use the month many others are using for writing to see how much progress I can make. So I'm noting my current counts here, and I'll try to check back at the end of the month to see where I've gotten.

(I should note that I was inspired by a similar idea from bratfarrar over at writers_lair.)

( Counts inside )

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So, as I've previously mentioned (at great length), I'm long-winded. (See what I did there?) When it comes to prose, I've never been able to convey much of anything in short form. I just crossed 15k words of mixed summary-and-scenes for a sequel I never meant to write -- to an 18.5k story I never meant to write, either!

I tried short form, I figured, and failed.

And yet I'm writing drabbles now. Like, more than one; like, old-school hardcore exactly-100-words drabbles. Pretentious as all get-out, mind, but ... they're short! Yay me!

Short post is short.

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It's done! It's done! I've actually finished the first draft of my second story ever!

I'm not thrilled with huge chunks of it, but it's done!

Conceived as a drabble, expanded to an expected 2k words, final word count 16,023 just under (ha!) 16k words plus headers; need to find betas and rewrite; whatever. Done! Yatta!

(If anybody out there actively wants to beta a gen SGA/SG1 McKay-centric story, please do let me know. I have a person in mind for the SG1 elements, and I'll likely troll the SGA-Betas comm for full story content, but no harm in casting a wide net ....)

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