Let's write!

Having a bit of fun with what little I know about the upcoming 60th anniversary episode. I've only seen the original trailer and otherwise been avoiding all news and spoilers, so I don't know much.

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This is something that I've played around with, though not seriously. It's set after the main events in my origfic, and honestly, it's not likely to work in a real story, but it's fun to think about.

In my orig fic, the main characters are Kit, the human who discovers she can do magic easily and well; Alex, the keror (looks kind of like a canine-ish winged demon); and Gray, the otan (looks like a dragonborn without all the pointy bits). The creatures from the other world can transform to become human, so Alex is from the other world and is trying to fit in here, while Gray was brought up as human here and only recently discovered that he's not actually human.

The concept of this bit is that sometime after the main story, a rival mage needs to get rid of the two men, so they wipe the memory of the character and incarcerate him. It's not an actual prison, but a facility where the ultra-rich can pay to make someone they want to get rid of disappear rather than having them killed outright. The people live in this secret underground facility, where they get everything they need to live, but can't escape and have no contact with the outside world.

So, the character wakes up here, with no memory of who he is, where he is, or why he's here. And I'm calling him "the character" because if he doesn't know who he is, you shouldn't either. :)

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The crewmembers stared, glassy-eyed, as the Doctor blathered on, striding back and forth across the bridge to point at this display or inspect that device. With a sigh, Donna crossed her arms and leant back against the doorframe.

The Doctor stopped cold in mid-sentence. "We-e-ell," he drawled as he eyed her, then spun. "Another time, I think. Right now, to the engine room. Morax, Ileth, with me," he called as he beckoned them with a hand. "The rest of you, stay here. Don't move a toe, not even into the corridor. That means you, Donna." He dashed out, the two engineers sprinting after him.

Once ten seconds of silence convinced everyone he'd gone, Jarn breathed a sigh of relief. "I didn't think he'd ever stop!"

"Yeah." Donna shrugged. "It took a bit, but he finally got the hint."

"What did you do?"

"This." Donna crossed her arms again, but this time, she pointedly wiggled her fingers against her upper arm. "It's a signal we worked out. It means, 'If you don't shut your gob right now, I'm going to slap you silly first chance I get.' Didn't work the first time I used it, but it took a week for the red to fade, so he's a bit more responsive now.

Jarn grinned. "Nice system. So, is it okay if we head back down to the canteen then?"

"No. The trick is to figure out which of his words are important. All those insults and that babble about electrofields and such? That's all nonsense. But he says, 'Stay here'? He's got something in mind." She plopped herself into the chair behind the navigation console. "So we stay here until we can't."

Another spur-of-the-moment fill, this time because I don't feel like working in general. :) This needs a bit of explanation, though.

In my origfic, one of the rules of thumb of the magic system is that using magic to directly affect someone else's mind is Bad Idea(tm), because anyone, even non-magic-users, resists direct mind manipulation and the effect is that it hurts your mind - intelligence or even sanity. Even something as simple as influencing the choice of ice cream flavor is harmful.

I don't know if I really plan to use "thaumaturge" to describe the type of magic user that Kit is, but it might be a good choice.

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Not exactly a morning ritual, but a scene I've always meant to write.

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I've been meaning to rewrite the beginning of my origfic - what I have isn't particularly good, and there's a bit I'd rather take in a different direction. So here's an attempt, but I don't like this one either.

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I didn't get much done this time. This one's not bowling.

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Context: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1282765/chapters/2656192

This is one of the first stories I ever wrote, back in 2014, and the first multi-chapter, a Doctor Who / Harry Potter crossover titled Mistaken Identity. It's a David Tennant doppleganger crossover, well, sorta - it capitalizes on the Doctor looking like Barty Crouch, rather than having Barty and the Doctor meet.

Back when I first posted it on ffnet, one of the comments, which has stuck with me all this time, was that it was a nice story, but it was too short, and that I should fill it in more. At the time, I thought that was crazy - why add words just to make it longer? However, after a few years, I happened to go back and read it and I understood what the commenter had really meant. The story had no meat - I skipped through descriptions and basically rushed through everything in my haste to produce a finished story. Also, on reread, I realized just how much years of writing practice had taught me as I winced at the horrible early writing.

I really need to rewrite Mistaken Identity (and my other longfic from that time, The Actor, which is surprisingly popular despite its horrible writing), but I know I never will. However, I decided to give it a bit of start for this challenge. Here's a new opening page.

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So, I did almost the exact opposite of what the challenge asked, because I was working on one of my WIPs. At least I got a little of that done. :)

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I didn't do much actual writing this weekend, but I did do research. The first bit was on a fic that I've done bits and pieces of work on in the past and caught my attention this weekend. The research wasn't so much research as cleaning up my room to find the notebook in which I'd written my previous research. :) Much of it would have been reproducible from web searches if I hadn't been able to find the notebook, but the notebook also had maps I'd drawn of the important places that I would not have been able to reproduce. But, I did find it! What I need to do is transfer the maps to a drawing app on my iPad, because I won't lose that.

The second bit was real research for a story idea that occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. The story has to do with an episode ("Human Nature" / "Family of Blood", actually, which is why my entry last Friday was also about that), but I needed to get a good grasp of the episode's events, so I spent the weekend poring over the transcripts... instead of just watching the bloody episode! (I am such a doofus.) The next step will be to review and collate the extended information that I've already created in my existing stories about that episode (like all of the new characters and events I've created), because I want it to all be in the same space. I also wrote an outline of the story that I want to tell, and of course I want to fill that outline in with all of that information as well.

As you can imagine, don't expect a finished story any time soon. But I'm actually eager to start writing, which is a change from the past, oh, four years or so.