Let's write!

I did a thing! I wrote a short piece for fandomweekly, for their prompt "Chemistry". Here's the link! I'll be posting it for real on AO3 after the voting's done.

"Real Science"

I did ten minutes on that Ben Franklin fic I told you about. It's not really going where I want it to go, so I probably will throw this out, but I did do it, so here it is. This was probably more like twenty minutes, and I removed the part before the "..." because that had already existed.

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(Context: Will was trying to avoid sampling a disgusting-looking alien dish, and just got interrupted. The giffra is the eating utensil.)

Original paragraph:

Glad of the reprieve, Will dropped the utensil on the plate and turned to see two women, one bright-eyed with short blond hair and the other with long dark hair and a serious demeanour, trailing behind the first. From the greeting, obviously one was the Doctor, and judging from fashion sense alone, he knew it wasn’t the one in the back.


Edited paragraph:

Glad of the reprieve, Will stabbed his giffra in the mound of nauseating molluscs and pushed his plate away, then turned to the two women approaching their table. The blonde dashed past the other diners, her bright smile all for David, and Will guessed from fashion sense alone that this was the Doctor. The other, a slight young woman with long dark hair and a serious demeanour, trailed behind her.

Well, I did actually work on that WIP this past weekend, though I didn't do any actual writing. Basically, I worked through a problem I was having with the plotting.

The story involves two characters in a rather large, crowded, and maze-like area. Character A shouldn't be there and is trying to find his way out without getting caught. Character B finds out that A is there and is trying to find him. Much of the story is about near-miss shenanigans and misdirections.

The problem was that it didn't feel long or confusing enough. It's supposed to be a multi-chapter, and I had already plotted out the following:

1. A arrives and gets lost
2. B realizes he's there and goes to find him
3. A crosses to the other side of the area
4. B gets to the original side and realizes he's got to search some more
5. Someone engages A in conversation and at that point, B sees him and waves at him to get him to come over to talk.

That's not much, just basically one instance of missing each other. It didn't feel satisying or entertaining - and I've been stuck at that point for years now. A couple of months ago, I tried writing out a detailed outline, and I still couldn't think of anything to add.

I finally figured out what to do. I added a third character to the story and interspersed her between the events I listed above with scenes told from her point of view. So, in step 2, she's the person that B talks to, who says something that makes B realize A is there. She doesn't realize this, so later, after 3, when A is leaving the other side, he runs into her and has a bit of conversation which will be amusing to the reader even if it doesn't help A at all. Then even later, after 4, she runs into B again. And then she'll have a part in the end of the story, which is unrelated to these events but is the actual point of the whole thing.

So, I have my new(!) outline written, and I'm going to duplicate the parts I've already written into a new document and start rewriting from there. I am actually really excited to get working on this, because this idea has been, as I've noted above, in the back of my mind for years now. Unfortunately, life is also getting far more busy this week and not likely to let up for a couple of months. :(

All right, I'm doing this straight in the editor from memory. Luckily, there's no actual dialogue in this scene.

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I actually wrote! Not the challenge itself, mind you.

I mentioned an ancient WIP to romanajo123 earlier this week, and I decided to pull it out and actually start working on it. There are bits where I haven't worked out what's happening, so I decided to try out Paul Cornell's advice: write an outline of the story using storytelling language (e.g. "They traveled there, but suddenly...!"), to lay out the beats of the narrative. And here it is.

A good chunk of this story is already written, but many parts aren't yet. Also, there are a couple of bits that are left in parentheses because I don't have enough specifics about what's in those scenes to consider their lines done. I'll be working on those this weekend.

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I've been actively working on a fic, so rather than a Real Ten Minutes, here's a snippet I wrote today.

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Two things here, not actually for this challenge, but hey, the rules allow this.

First, I wrote a thing for a challenge in fandomweekly last week, but their rules are to post directly to the comm (not post to AO3 then link to the comm) and to not post it anywhere else until voting is over. Voting ended yesterday (and I won! Though that's not all that impressive, as there were only three entries), so here's the link! It's from my origfic, so it's not going to be posted anywhere else.

"What It's Worth" - origfic, Kit and Alex

Second, my husband and I were talking about "Wild Blue Yonder" (the latest DW episode) last night, and when I mentioned that I can't get any fic out of it because the story is so tight, he said, "Of course you can!" and he blurted out the first thing that came to his mind, in a hilarious way as is his wont, and I said, "You're right, I can do that!" And I did, though not in a hilarious way. It took me about thirty minutes - ten minutes of writing and twenty minutes of massaging it into a true drabble, so I guess it does kinda fill the Real Ten Minutes challenge. Warning though: it does not spoil the episode, but is also totally not understandable if you haven't seen it.

"The Long Journey" - Doctor Who ("Wild Blue Yonder"), the Doctor