potentialities

I decided at more or less the last minute to sign up for the July session of Camp NaNoWriMo. I'm not planning on following any of the normal November rules—I set a more modest goal of 30,000 words and plan on counting anything fictional I write, including things I've already started. Basically anything could happen here, is what I'm trying to say.

Of course, now I'm vibrating with a potent cocktail of adrenaline and caffeine and generally a nervous wreck, but at least I'm those things and I have a posted story.

If I ever try to write a [descriptor redacted] story again, somebody smack me upside the head, will ya?

Yuletide is kicking my ass, as per usual, but mostly in a good way! I'd much rather have a story that I'm not sure how I'm going to finish in time than a story that I'm not sure how I'm going to start in time. Especially a story that I'm not sure how I'm going to finish because I want to put in ALL THE THINGS, as opposed to a story that I'm not sure how I'm going to finish because I can only seem to string together three consecutive words at a sitting.

In the meantime, if you're in the mood for rare fandoms, virgofolkiehas posted her latest Virgil/Dante story in two parts: The Shade Trees of Lucca Part I and Part II. This is the second part of a story triptych which traces its inspiration in some small part back to my own Virgil/Dante story and takes place, accordingly, in the same 'verse. It is lovely.

My yuletide assignment has been giving me fits, as is traditional! It's not that I don't like my assignment–I do, very much–it's just that, while my prompt would generate any number of stories that I would like to read, the subset of those stories that I find myself able to write is considerably more limited, so I hope my recipient doesn't completely hate it. And thus, for now, end my cryptic remarks until Reveal Day.

I love Ommwriter and wouldn't have gotten any amount of any story written without it.

I think I just figured out the why of my swan story.

(The Watsonian why, that is, not the Doylian why, which is that I've been batting around the idea of incestuous homosexual swans for the last four months and find it strangely compelling.)

I wish I could just mash my brain into my keyboard until somehow my story appeared on the screen.

I would even settle for a very bad first draft.

I do have a new fun toy to play with -- the re-release of the Vertigo tarot with the lovely, surreal Dave McKean art. I've been meaning to play around with the tarot a bit, for reasons including but not limited to research for Childermass/Vinculus slash. My mother is worrying about me bringing satanic influences into her house, and I suppose if she knew about the threat of gay porn, she would be concerned about that too.

My short_takes Kristy round fic is coming along quite nicely, and nerdygridbug's fantastic InuTez art is inspiring me to dust off the self-indulgent kinkfic I started while I was putting off my Yuletide story and start whipping it into shape.

It feels nice to be writing fic again. It's like somebody just hooked me up to a drip of the really good drugs.

Pushing Daisies may be the first television fandom where the annoying overuse of epithets is canon.

See, good writers, or so I have been informed, read their stuff and cringe in abject horror, thinking Oh god, what hath I wrought?

Whereas I read my stuff and laugh hysterically, thinking Oh god, this is the funniest book I have ever read!

I think I'll stick to being a bad writer. I'm having way, way more fun like this.

I've never kept (or, for that matter, made) a new year's resolution before, but my resolve to post more fic seems to be working out nicely. I started adding up figures and making graphs, and then Sam called me a dork, which was pretty funny considering he himself was attempting to replace the star in his default blogger template with a Koch snowflake at the time. (I initially thought he was trying to replace it with a cock.) He asked what the "Misc" on the fandom breakdown was for, so I read Towering Lust aloud to him and was forced to concede that I was the dorkiest person sitting at the table.

As shown in Figure 1, the vast majority of my fic this year has been about middle schoolers/junior highers. Gay tennis players edged out gay babysitters to secure first place, surprising exactly nobody who has had my journal inflicted upon them recently.

Fig. 1

I still owe a couple of people New Years Challengeathon fics, because I suck, but fortunately the year isn't over yet. I just dusted off the Sherlock Holmes/Good Omens crossover for nagasvoice.

The overall trend was a massive, massive increase in fic posting, demonstrated in Figure 2. I blame gay babysitters and gay tennis players for being so awesome.

Fig. 2