How I Wonder

I wrote Better Off UnTed for innie_darling. I'd been wanting to write Better Off Ted fic but really hadn't been very productive this year in fandom, so being able to do it for yuletide made me happy :)

The story ended up being almost X-File-y at the end; I guess my roots are showing ;)

Thanks to Ronnie, who helped with the ending, was my beta, and came up with the title!

I wants to write more stories this year but really couldn't get up the motivation to do so. Maybe next year...

I'll have a longer post up at some point, but I had to rec this one now!

all your heart-melodies, Lilo & Stitch.
Summary: At seven, Lilo wants to grow up to be an intergalactic space hero.

Lilo & Stitch has a rather significant place in my heart. It's the first movie I saw with rinnaldo (and hellosarah and probably Emily, too); it's damn near guaranteed to make me cry and this fic just hits all the right notes and makes me want to cry again :P I don't want to spoil it, but suffice to say that it's got Lilo & Stitch in it, and Nani, and they're all exactly right.

I was the 931st to upload this year. A bit slower 'cause I wasn't done until a couple hours ago, and then rinnaldo beta-read and offered comments, and then I edited, and then rinnaldo came up with the title, and then I had to make sure I liked all the formatting...but yeah. It's 2450 words and quite different than stories I've written for yuletides past. :D Now, to wait until the 25th!

I did my signup for yuletide! Now to do my Dear Yuletide Writer letter...

Spent today doing pottery analysis things. I think I get to go to Mesa Verde and hike around in the backcountry on Friday to help download information from the temperature monitors we have there...hopefully I'll feel well enough to do so :P

First, thanks again to opheliarising for the beautiful, surreal, and wonderful By The Waves We Left Behind. It's absolutely stunning, and I'll read it again and again (and should probably read Many Waters again too).

I wrote What Keeps The Light for katie_m, a Journeyman/Sarah Connor Chronicles crossover. (It's posted at the bottom of this entry if you want to read it here.) I actually signed up to write Journeyman alone, and not SCC, but when the assignment showed up it was really cool to think that I had a couple of options, this time around. And then...I got this crazy idea that maybe I could do a crossover, where Dan time traveled to meet a couple of the SCC's main characters, while also being investigated for his abilities by someone who wanted to use them. Which I still intend to flesh out; I started working on the "sequel" yesterday. (I wrote like 500 words and then scrapped it and started over.)

I had a couple of midnight revelations about how to make the story better, as those of you on my flist know from my late-night "oh, dammit" posts; once I finally had the ending down, though, it went a lot better. Despite those small hangups, it was a lot of fun to write this; I wrote more words (um, initially it was up over 5000 words, and in the end it was 2843) on it than anything I've done in several years.

Getting the characters right, especially for Journeyman, was interesting. I used to write in XF now and then, and since there was so *much* of that show I had a particular Mulder and Scully that was easy to access in my head. With only 13 episodes of Journeyman, it was a little different, especially since I didn't actually spend time rewatching the show until, um, after I posted. But Dan was pretty amenable to being written, and so was Katie, although I'm gonna need some help with Zack in the future. So to speak. ;) Writing Sarah was much easier, especially since T2 was on one night while I was writing, and SCC still had new episodes.

I'm really pleased with the end result, and it actually garnered me the most comments I've ever gotten in three years of doing yuletide, too.

Thanks to medie and rinnaldo for looking it over!

Oh, and since I managed to hang on in the Top Commenters list, despite falling to #14, I get to submit an additional request for the NYR!

( What Keeps The Light )

I'm up to 254 stories read so far! I probably have another dozen or so to read in the fandoms I know. Hey, that's like .10 of all the stories posted this year! *facepalms*

First of all, the incredibly awesome story I got: By the Waves We Left Behind. It's a great, perfect look into the lives of the Murry twins from Madeleine L'Engle's books; post Many Waters, with all that means for their memories and how they go forward. Also, an important creature from the canon shows up now and again. :)

( Other recs )

Okay, I cut a couple thousand words' worth of story. It'll be better this way, and if I play my cards right, I could end up with a good lead-off point for future chapters instead of trying to mix all that other stuff in right now.

I'm not done done, there's still a lot of work I need to do in the last couple sections of it, but my yuletide draft is complete and pulls in at 5299 words. I desperately need to edit the last parts because I totally cheated on some things that need to be fleshed out more (oh god, more?) but it's more done than it was yesterday. Um. Maybe I should go to bed now?

edit, 12:52 am: dammit. I realized I would have a much, much better fic on my hands if I cut a lot of my initial ideas and went with what makes for a more compelling and less confusing story. so...crap. It'll be a lot better once I jettison a lot of the random junk in the middle. :P

Hohshit, I'm only, like, a sixth of the way into my story, and I'm already at 1400 words. Eep. This thing's turning into something of a monster--I never write long stories! What am I getting myself into?

I'm in a Starbucks on Fisherman's Wharf in SF; got two awesome Fifth Element stories for yuletide, linzeems did you get my package? Text me!, I should let rinnaldo check his email so *hugs* to all and I'll post more later :)