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[bronze_ribbons]

New fic: When the Night Falls on You (FAKE, Ryo/Dee (and arguably Lupin/Snape, heh), 2000 words), in honor of lore.

busaikko!Snupin sighting: The Muggle War, an unfinished piece. This was for a Fantasy Fest request I'd made before DH, which was worth it not only for what did get written, but also for the discussions preceding it (I'd forgotten karasu_hime's reaction to my anon comment -- rereading it just now made me grin like a maniac. And further up in the comments there's Lore not-so-innocently observing that the prompt might have been cast as busaikko-bait to begin with).

Speaking of being a maniac, I'm now up to 1479 words and five six bulletpoints on the current fic. It's reminding me of a conversation I had with my friend J. a week or so ago, when we were talking about choosing to write novels vs. short stories vs. fic vs. poems, and whether people had certain formats/lengths that worked best for them, which got me to thinking about how I often average 500-1200 words for things that start out as drabbles, 3000-5000 words for things I start sketching as 500-word ficlets, and 11,000-18,000 words for fests with a 1K or 3K minimum. (The current fic is already well past LJ-springkink's 100-word minimum, and it's heading into multi-chapter territory. Which -- arrgh. If I can't scrape together enough time to do it some semblance of justice, I may have to resort to Plan B, which will be to write a separate one-shot drabble and to post the current fic off-date.)

I ended up saying to J. that, for me, the prompt or plot ends up dictating how long the piece is going to be. I tend to go for shorter formats because that's what I have time to write and read (and because, in the case of drabbles, keeping strictly to 100 words is actually a form of stress relief), but when I'm (1) devising a gift for someone, (2) in the mood to pick a fight with canon, (3) in the mood to pick a fight with fanon, (4) brainwormed with an opening line that's demanding a story to follow it, (5) brainwormed with a line of dialogue that's demanding a story to go around it, and/or (6) haunted by a mental image that's demanding a story to bring it to life, I'm inevitably surprised by where the bunny hops. It will invariably be way more interesting than what I originally had in mind, and unfortunately more complicated and therefore more daunting, and occasionally require library books I can't get my mitts on in time. (It also usually doesn't throw me for a loop right at sentence #2 -- hence yesterday's wailing.)

J. and I also ended up talking about why one ends up lavishing time on long pieces that can't be submitted to pro markets. There are plenty of valid reasons that countless people have enumerated elsewhere; in my case, reasons 1, 2, 3 listed above are compelling enough for me to write stories (and, more importantly, to finish them) even when I'm not expecting much in the way of feedback, never mind pay.

On a related note, I've lately found myself initially thinking up a story within a fanfic framework and then, as I start working out the logistics, realizing it would work better with my own characters/setting. I'm just now realizing that this often has to do with whether the plot springs out of reasons 1 - 3, or out of 4 - 6: I write fanfic when I want to indulge in in-jokes, to poke at character- or world-specific dynamics that aren't sitting right with me, or when I feel there's more to a character (or scenario) that I haven't seen canon/fanon address, or when I catch sight of an irresitably daft exchange or prompt. But when it's reason 4, 5, 6 -- be it a Japanese actor patting a red penguin in Louisville, or a Manhattan pickpocket becoming an accountant -- I know a story isn't meant to be fanfic when canon starts to feel confining rather than inspiring. (For instance, I have five pages of notes + timeline and at least two false starts for "When the Night Falls on You," which was originally called "Figures" and featured several ridiculously elaborate subplots that would have been hell on handstands to render with any verisimilitude on their own, never mind squished with any plausibility into a canon where the mangaka herself is notorious for Not Having Done the Research.)

Put another way, when I get bogged down by logistics -- e.g., when character A performing action B in universe C would violate the space-time continuum in thirteen dimensions, as well as the character's canon-recorded behavior seven hundred pages back, it's time to ask myself what is more important for the story in question: character A, action B, and/or universe C. If it's character A, then fanfic is the only answer. If it's action B, canon baggage can throw a character's ability to enact the action out of whack. If it's universe C, this is the point where I generally realize I don't know near enough to work on the story yet and it gets shelved for a year or five.

That isn't the whole of it, of course, and I'm going to stress that this is me speaking just for myself at this moment in time. Other writers have different thresholds and requirements: some of my friends wouldn't dream of starting a fic without a full-bore outline, and one reader's stretch of Tedious Exposition is another reader's Absolutely Vital Set-up. I spent way too much time dithering over a paragraph yesterday that kept snagging me when I reread it: it had a Showing My Work vibe to it that I just couldn't shake, but I'm not ready to delete it yet -- I think those details belong in the story, the dopey author just needs to herd the right words into place.


[On a side note, I really, really should know better than to visit tvtropes.com at this hour. I nearly quit writing two minutes ago after reading the entry on Badass Bookworms (OMG SO GUILTY...*flails*), but dudes, now I'm going to have to try writing a Crouching Moron Hidden Badass, just because.