Fanfic Facts Meme
Apr. 6th, 2022 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherMemed from thisbluespirit: Tell the world one (1) fact/anecdote/secret/etc about each of the last ten (or whatever) things you wrote.
I will also be using thisbluespirit's addendum: since the whole point of meme flash fic is writing fast rather than thinking too hard, I can't say there would be much to tell, so I will count fic (of whatever length) but not flash fic, unless I do have something to say about them.
1. The Limericks of the Ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Of all the stanzas in this, the one I remember as giving me the most trouble was the one in which the corpses of the mariner's dead crewmates get up and start manning their stations as the ship gets moving again. I went through multiple versions that mostly worked but had one line where I just couldn't cram in the right rhyme or the right number of syllables. At one point, I had a very neatly constructed version that rhymed "crew" with "hove to", but then I made the mistake of looking up "heave to" to make sure I had the meaning right, and it turned out it meant exactly the opposite of what I needed.
2. Teachable Fucking Moments (Lost in Fog Remix) (Inception)
The first sentence of this I wrote was the final sentence of the first scene, and I wrote the rest of the story backward and forward from there. It just came to me out of nowhere, and I always assumed (as who wouldn't?) that my brain had cleverly come up with it -- until, some time after I published, I was re-reading an old favourite Sherlock fic, and there in the middle of it was the same sentence. I don't feel at all guilty about it, because the two fics are very different, as you'll see if you read the other one -- and in fact I'm only mentioning it all as a cunning ruse to get you to read Green Grow the Rushes, O!, which is really excellent, and is one of the fics that embodies for me what the Sherlock canon could have been and signally chose not to be.
3. A Step Forward into the Unknown (Wonder Woman/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover)
The last time I did the AO3 Stats meme, this was by some distance the story with the most people subscribed to it, which indicates some desire for more of the story. I wouldn't mind knowing more of the story too. The trouble is that I'd feel obliged to do a proper canon review before attempting to write more, which at this point would mean watching several movies, on both sides of the crossover, that I would really rather not. At the time I wrote it, I did have a couple of ideas for other scenes in the same setting: one was an incident during the sailing trip, and the other was a vaguer intention to do something with the fact that Natasha's and Diana's most iconic enemies (in their film incarnations) are respectively the self-declared God of Lies and the self-declared God of Truth.
4. Time Out of Mind (Old and Young Together Remix) (Star Wars)
I'm not sure I have any anecdotes about this that I haven't already shared in previous posts, here and here. Um, let's see... the line “Well... good!” says Rey, when her brain fails to suggest anything more eloquent is 100% a case of me giving up when my own brain failed to suggest anything more eloquent for Rey to say at that point.
5. An Equivocal Kinship (The Ship Who Sang/Doctor Who)
A classic example of my characteristic trick for tackling longer stories, which is to find one scene where the characters talk about the premise and write only that, thus avoiding having to come up with an actual plot. I never even figured out which Doctor would have been involved, or even definitely if there was one and it wasn't just Helva and Niall having to figure it out on their own.
6. A week next Saturday at the Stork Club (Captain America)
I think I've already told the anecdote about how this was meant to be 100 words long when it started, but it ended up being 4 times that long. I'm still quite pleased about the final line.
7. New Flowers Bloom (Snow-White and Rose-Red)
I've definitely already told the one anecdote I have about this story, which is the one where I re-read Margaret Hunt's version of the fairy tale as canon review and then my brain insisted on writing it in Margaret Hunt's prose style, which made it rather more challenging to fit into the mandated 100 words than might have otherwise been the case.
8. Ten Alternate Universes: Kay Harker (Kay Harker novels)
This is the kind of thing that probably hardly anybody would notice or care about, but it's been on my conscience ever since I realised it: There's no such character in canon as "Edward Jones"; Captain Edward Jones in the Pirate AU is the result of me absent-mindedly conflating Kay's friend Edward in The Midnight Folk with Kay's friend Peter Jones in The Box of Delights. It doesn't help that they both have sisters named Maria, which is the only instance I can think of where Masefield used the same name for unrelated characters, and I've occasionally wondered if there was a real Maria he had in mind when he was writing both books.
9. Ten Alternate Universes: Havelock Vetinari (Discworld)
Vetinari turned to be quite difficult to create AU scenarios for, since he works so resolutely to avoid being at the centre of any story. What I eventually did, as you may have noticed, was mostly to come up with City Watch AUs and then figure out where Vetinari fit into them.
10. Ten Alternate Universes: Bernice Summerfield (Doctor Who)
This is my only work on AO3 that's labelled "Author Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" instead of "No Archive Warnings Apply". The warning, if I'd chosen to use it, would have been "Major Character Death", but it's only in one of the ten ficlets and it's alluded to so indirectly that it's entirely possible to read the thing without noticing the implication, and I figured that if people didn't notice it would be better not to upset them by pointing it out.
thisbluespirit: Tell the world one (1) fact/anecdote/secret/etc about each of the last ten (or whatever) things you wrote.I will also be using thisbluespirit's addendum: since the whole point of meme flash fic is writing fast rather than thinking too hard, I can't say there would be much to tell, so I will count fic (of whatever length) but not flash fic, unless I do have something to say about them.
1. The Limericks of the Ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Of all the stanzas in this, the one I remember as giving me the most trouble was the one in which the corpses of the mariner's dead crewmates get up and start manning their stations as the ship gets moving again. I went through multiple versions that mostly worked but had one line where I just couldn't cram in the right rhyme or the right number of syllables. At one point, I had a very neatly constructed version that rhymed "crew" with "hove to", but then I made the mistake of looking up "heave to" to make sure I had the meaning right, and it turned out it meant exactly the opposite of what I needed.
2. Teachable Fucking Moments (Lost in Fog Remix) (Inception)
The first sentence of this I wrote was the final sentence of the first scene, and I wrote the rest of the story backward and forward from there. It just came to me out of nowhere, and I always assumed (as who wouldn't?) that my brain had cleverly come up with it -- until, some time after I published, I was re-reading an old favourite Sherlock fic, and there in the middle of it was the same sentence. I don't feel at all guilty about it, because the two fics are very different, as you'll see if you read the other one -- and in fact I'm only mentioning it all as a cunning ruse to get you to read Green Grow the Rushes, O!, which is really excellent, and is one of the fics that embodies for me what the Sherlock canon could have been and signally chose not to be.
3. A Step Forward into the Unknown (Wonder Woman/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover)
The last time I did the AO3 Stats meme, this was by some distance the story with the most people subscribed to it, which indicates some desire for more of the story. I wouldn't mind knowing more of the story too. The trouble is that I'd feel obliged to do a proper canon review before attempting to write more, which at this point would mean watching several movies, on both sides of the crossover, that I would really rather not. At the time I wrote it, I did have a couple of ideas for other scenes in the same setting: one was an incident during the sailing trip, and the other was a vaguer intention to do something with the fact that Natasha's and Diana's most iconic enemies (in their film incarnations) are respectively the self-declared God of Lies and the self-declared God of Truth.
4. Time Out of Mind (Old and Young Together Remix) (Star Wars)
I'm not sure I have any anecdotes about this that I haven't already shared in previous posts, here and here. Um, let's see... the line “Well... good!” says Rey, when her brain fails to suggest anything more eloquent is 100% a case of me giving up when my own brain failed to suggest anything more eloquent for Rey to say at that point.
5. An Equivocal Kinship (The Ship Who Sang/Doctor Who)
A classic example of my characteristic trick for tackling longer stories, which is to find one scene where the characters talk about the premise and write only that, thus avoiding having to come up with an actual plot. I never even figured out which Doctor would have been involved, or even definitely if there was one and it wasn't just Helva and Niall having to figure it out on their own.
6. A week next Saturday at the Stork Club (Captain America)
I think I've already told the anecdote about how this was meant to be 100 words long when it started, but it ended up being 4 times that long. I'm still quite pleased about the final line.
7. New Flowers Bloom (Snow-White and Rose-Red)
I've definitely already told the one anecdote I have about this story, which is the one where I re-read Margaret Hunt's version of the fairy tale as canon review and then my brain insisted on writing it in Margaret Hunt's prose style, which made it rather more challenging to fit into the mandated 100 words than might have otherwise been the case.
8. Ten Alternate Universes: Kay Harker (Kay Harker novels)
This is the kind of thing that probably hardly anybody would notice or care about, but it's been on my conscience ever since I realised it: There's no such character in canon as "Edward Jones"; Captain Edward Jones in the Pirate AU is the result of me absent-mindedly conflating Kay's friend Edward in The Midnight Folk with Kay's friend Peter Jones in The Box of Delights. It doesn't help that they both have sisters named Maria, which is the only instance I can think of where Masefield used the same name for unrelated characters, and I've occasionally wondered if there was a real Maria he had in mind when he was writing both books.
9. Ten Alternate Universes: Havelock Vetinari (Discworld)
Vetinari turned to be quite difficult to create AU scenarios for, since he works so resolutely to avoid being at the centre of any story. What I eventually did, as you may have noticed, was mostly to come up with City Watch AUs and then figure out where Vetinari fit into them.
10. Ten Alternate Universes: Bernice Summerfield (Doctor Who)
This is my only work on AO3 that's labelled "Author Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" instead of "No Archive Warnings Apply". The warning, if I'd chosen to use it, would have been "Major Character Death", but it's only in one of the ten ficlets and it's alluded to so indirectly that it's entirely possible to read the thing without noticing the implication, and I figured that if people didn't notice it would be better not to upset them by pointing it out.
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