Gifts Fics: Presents I Gave
Jan. 1st, 2013 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
argentum_lsThis year, I participated in four seasonal exchanges: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
tw_fallharvest, tw_holidays, hlh_shortcuts, and yuletide, and wrote five fics across four different fandoms. The following are the gifts I gave in order:
Title: Amazement
Event:tw_fallharvest
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
queerly_it_is
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Characters: Scott/Isaac
Word Count: 3512
Rating: PG-13
Summary: On Scott's first date with Isaac, the boys run into a few twists and turns, and a few more scares.
Meta Notes: Though the exchange didn't require it, participants were encouraged to incorporate a seasonal theme into their stories. From the get-go, I wanted to write a story with the boys getting lost in a corn maze because it's seasonal for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and fall in general, yet is not a common trope. My goal was fluff. Like most of my other stories this exchange season, this one was incredibly hard to write. I kept trying to approach it as established relationship and I struggled to find a point for the story. Tons of words were sacrificed in the crafting of this. Not until someone suggested a different angle did the story start to work. Many thanks go tohtbthomas who beta'd and cheerled this story, and to the members of Team Enabler who asked some key questions.
Title: Long Time Coming Home
Event:tw_holidays
Recipienthtbthomas
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Characters: Allison, Scott, Finstock, Danny, Isaac, Melissa, Sheriff, Stiles with Allison/Scott, Danny/Isaac, and background Melissa/Finstock
Word Count: 11,500
Rating: PG
Summary: Allison finds her efforts to reintegrate into BHHS challenged when Coach Finstock acts on an assumption he's made about her. Meanwhile, Scott is distracted with trying to figure out who his mother is secretly dating.
Meta Notes: I started writing this midway into NaNoWriMo and ended up counting it as a big chunk of my words despite my goal of not using fanfic for the event. Originally, I started it from Finstock's POV (which I'd still like to do a version of) and had the whole plot based on how he was going to circumvent the drug testing. When the POV flipped to Allison, I didn't yet know the story was about her reintegrating. That version was originally a lot more about Allison and Scott getting together with most of Allison’s thoughts about how much she wanted to be in a relationship. Underbethskink's guidance, the real theme of the story emerged and the story about Allison remerging from her psychotic break took precedence. In the process, a superfluous scene with Harris got cut, the beginning developed, and the whole section of the story following Scott catching up with Allison in the hallway was rewritten from scratch--and somewhere along the way, this became one of my own favorite stories. Early on, I realized that this story was going to be long. My rough estimate for how long kept getting proven wrong, yet I was never sure where all those words were coming from. When I submitted the story, it was just over 11K. A few days later, I went back in to the file to make sure all the coding was right and to do an extra spell-check pass. I corrected a couple errors, fixed a minor formatting issue, and somehow closed the file with nearly 500 more words that it had had. It probably could have been longer, too. Sometimes you just have to appreciate deadlines.
Title: And Hell Follows With Him
Event:hlh_shortcuts
Recipient:ishafel
Fandom: Highlander
Characters: Methos, Joe
Word Count: 3000
Rating: PG
Summary: On the eve of the apocalypse, Death walks into a bar with a message. That's both exactly what happened, and not at all what happened.
Meta Notes: This story was the second one that caused massive writing problems. I had the basic idea right away, but couldn't seem to turn it into anything except 100 words of joke and punchline. At one point I had five documents opened with somewhere between 200 and 500 words in each with pieces of different story: ones from Joe's POV as the clock strikes midnight and the world officially hasn't ended, ones from Duncan's (who didn't even end up in the final story) with the same bit, and finally ones from Methos' with him bantering with a waitress named Kelsey (who also got cut from the final) about how he never does anything exciting. With the deadline for turning the story in well past, I finally found the central core of the story to hang the joke on and got the words to roll. In the end, I had to cut the line that started it all: Methos making the comment, "If the world was going to end, don't you think I would have done it already?" Again, thanks tohtbthomas for the word wars and the help, especially since she doesn't know the fandom.
Title: Fate of the World
Event:yuletide
Recipient: Insomnia
Fandom: Tower Prep
Characters: Ian, Gabe, CJ, Suki
Word Count: 1936
Rating: PG
Summary: Ian, Gabe, CJ, and Suki get their next assignment.
Meta Notes: The third story that didn't want to be written. This one was the hardest because the canon is so tightly woven that trying to figure out how to fit anything into it proved to be a bigger challenge than my imagination could handle at the end of the semester. I tried approaches with each of the requester's prompts and ended up going with the post-Season 2 one because I thought I might be able to finish it in time. Even so, like the Highlander story, I had several files open at one point with bits and pieces of conversations going on. The hangup was figuring out how to get each of the characters back to Tower Prep after they'd put so much effort into escaping. While I'm happy with the solutions I came up with, I'd like to revisit this idea when I have more time to unravel the clues in the show and can do a closer canon review. Guess who also helped me with this one?htbthomas. I wouldn't have made it through this holiday season without her.
Title Flight of Fancy
Event:yuletide
Recipient:tvashti
Fandom: My Secret Identity
Characters: Andrew and Erin Clements
Word Count: 1230
Rating: G
Summary: The 21st century has some new challenges for Andrew.
Meta Notes: I've been wanting to write an MSI story for 20 years, and never could. I'd just put the finishing touches on the Tower Prep story on Christmas Eve when the idea for this story popped up. The recipient had mentioned being interested in how Andrew would fare with his powers in the modern world with its increased security. Though she was talking about cameras, my mind went other directions. We know from canon that Andrew doesn't cope well when his powers are gone, and I started to wonder how much worse he'd cope a) when he's had his powers for a lot longer and b) when he knows he's going to lose them and he can't do anything about it. For a few minutes, this story was Andrew and an OC co-worker at the airport, then I realized that there was no reason for an OC when the canon provides a younger sister, Erin. With that, snark was born and the story practically wrote itself.
tw_fallharvest, tw_holidays, hlh_shortcuts, and yuletide, and wrote five fics across four different fandoms. The following are the gifts I gave in order:Title: Amazement
Event:
tw_fallharvestRecipient:
queerly_it_isFandom: Teen Wolf
Characters: Scott/Isaac
Word Count: 3512
Rating: PG-13
Summary: On Scott's first date with Isaac, the boys run into a few twists and turns, and a few more scares.
Meta Notes: Though the exchange didn't require it, participants were encouraged to incorporate a seasonal theme into their stories. From the get-go, I wanted to write a story with the boys getting lost in a corn maze because it's seasonal for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and fall in general, yet is not a common trope. My goal was fluff. Like most of my other stories this exchange season, this one was incredibly hard to write. I kept trying to approach it as established relationship and I struggled to find a point for the story. Tons of words were sacrificed in the crafting of this. Not until someone suggested a different angle did the story start to work. Many thanks go to
htbthomas who beta'd and cheerled this story, and to the members of Team Enabler who asked some key questions.Title: Long Time Coming Home
Event:
tw_holidaysRecipient
htbthomasFandom: Teen Wolf
Characters: Allison, Scott, Finstock, Danny, Isaac, Melissa, Sheriff, Stiles with Allison/Scott, Danny/Isaac, and background Melissa/
Word Count: 11,500
Rating: PG
Summary: Allison finds her efforts to reintegrate into BHHS challenged when Coach Finstock acts on an assumption he's made about her. Meanwhile, Scott is distracted with trying to figure out who his mother is secretly dating.
Meta Notes: I started writing this midway into NaNoWriMo and ended up counting it as a big chunk of my words despite my goal of not using fanfic for the event. Originally, I started it from Finstock's POV (which I'd still like to do a version of) and had the whole plot based on how he was going to circumvent the drug testing. When the POV flipped to Allison, I didn't yet know the story was about her reintegrating. That version was originally a lot more about Allison and Scott getting together with most of Allison’s thoughts about how much she wanted to be in a relationship. Under
bethskink's guidance, the real theme of the story emerged and the story about Allison remerging from her psychotic break took precedence. In the process, a superfluous scene with Harris got cut, the beginning developed, and the whole section of the story following Scott catching up with Allison in the hallway was rewritten from scratch--and somewhere along the way, this became one of my own favorite stories. Early on, I realized that this story was going to be long. My rough estimate for how long kept getting proven wrong, yet I was never sure where all those words were coming from. When I submitted the story, it was just over 11K. A few days later, I went back in to the file to make sure all the coding was right and to do an extra spell-check pass. I corrected a couple errors, fixed a minor formatting issue, and somehow closed the file with nearly 500 more words that it had had. It probably could have been longer, too. Sometimes you just have to appreciate deadlines.Title: And Hell Follows With Him
Event:
hlh_shortcutsRecipient:
ishafelFandom: Highlander
Characters: Methos, Joe
Word Count: 3000
Rating: PG
Summary: On the eve of the apocalypse, Death walks into a bar with a message. That's both exactly what happened, and not at all what happened.
Meta Notes: This story was the second one that caused massive writing problems. I had the basic idea right away, but couldn't seem to turn it into anything except 100 words of joke and punchline. At one point I had five documents opened with somewhere between 200 and 500 words in each with pieces of different story: ones from Joe's POV as the clock strikes midnight and the world officially hasn't ended, ones from Duncan's (who didn't even end up in the final story) with the same bit, and finally ones from Methos' with him bantering with a waitress named Kelsey (who also got cut from the final) about how he never does anything exciting. With the deadline for turning the story in well past, I finally found the central core of the story to hang the joke on and got the words to roll. In the end, I had to cut the line that started it all: Methos making the comment, "If the world was going to end, don't you think I would have done it already?" Again, thanks to
htbthomas for the word wars and the help, especially since she doesn't know the fandom.Title: Fate of the World
Event:
yuletideRecipient: Insomnia
Fandom: Tower Prep
Characters: Ian, Gabe, CJ, Suki
Word Count: 1936
Rating: PG
Summary: Ian, Gabe, CJ, and Suki get their next assignment.
Meta Notes: The third story that didn't want to be written. This one was the hardest because the canon is so tightly woven that trying to figure out how to fit anything into it proved to be a bigger challenge than my imagination could handle at the end of the semester. I tried approaches with each of the requester's prompts and ended up going with the post-Season 2 one because I thought I might be able to finish it in time. Even so, like the Highlander story, I had several files open at one point with bits and pieces of conversations going on. The hangup was figuring out how to get each of the characters back to Tower Prep after they'd put so much effort into escaping. While I'm happy with the solutions I came up with, I'd like to revisit this idea when I have more time to unravel the clues in the show and can do a closer canon review. Guess who also helped me with this one?
htbthomas. I wouldn't have made it through this holiday season without her.Title Flight of Fancy
Event:
yuletideRecipient:
tvashtiFandom: My Secret Identity
Characters: Andrew and Erin Clements
Word Count: 1230
Rating: G
Summary: The 21st century has some new challenges for Andrew.
Meta Notes: I've been wanting to write an MSI story for 20 years, and never could. I'd just put the finishing touches on the Tower Prep story on Christmas Eve when the idea for this story popped up. The recipient had mentioned being interested in how Andrew would fare with his powers in the modern world with its increased security. Though she was talking about cameras, my mind went other directions. We know from canon that Andrew doesn't cope well when his powers are gone, and I started to wonder how much worse he'd cope a) when he's had his powers for a lot longer and b) when he knows he's going to lose them and he can't do anything about it. For a few minutes, this story was Andrew and an OC co-worker at the airport, then I realized that there was no reason for an OC when the canon provides a younger sister, Erin. With that, snark was born and the story practically wrote itself.
