Fest Entries Roundup

[argentum_ls]

The second batch of exchanges this year got off to a really rough start. Unlike normal, I got started right away, and was making great progress. Then my computer went up in a puff of smoke and all the data went, irrecoverably, with it. Not only did I lose everything for the three extant fests/exchanges I was signed up for, I also lost everything I'd been working on for the previous eight months, including several fandom_stocking fills and partial chapters for each of my two WIPs. What really irks me is that the day before the crash, I'd commented on the need to back everything up--and I thought I had done so. Only afterward did I realize that the backup hadn't worked. I still haven't figured out what went wrong. In the end, I was left scrambling to recreate my work while also finishing a household move that started two years ago, unpacking on the other end, interviewing for and starting a new job, and trying to break in a new computer. Fortunately, deadlines in the two exchanges both got pushed back.


rarepairfest

This one bore the brunt of the assorted crises, yet was arguably the one that should have been the easiest. For rarepairfest I matched to punkpinkpower on several pairings for Teen Wolf. I decided to go with Danny/Isaac because I liked the last story I wrote for them, and I can only seem to write this pairing for other people. Prompts included requests for an amnesia story and for fake dating, neither of which are tropes I've written before or have much experience with. Still, I had the idea for a story within a day of getting the assignment, which is unheard of for me. Starting from the premise that Isaac lost months of memory, rather than hours, in the third season premiere, the story places Danny as the person in the wrong-time/wrong-place situation of needing to be the one to look out for him. The fake dating is Danny's ploy to get around the "only family can visit" rule and was meant to be a much more elaborate part of the story. The Great Crash took out the first several scenes, including one of Danny trying to convince the charge nurse that he's dating Isaac while realizing how little he actually knows about his "boyfriend." After the crash, I ended up rewriting the story backward, one scene at a time, always in hope that the missing files would mysteriously reappear and I could plug them in. It never happened. I really want to revisit this one to try to make it more like the story I originally planned and less like what it got stuck being.

The resulting story was: If You Knew What I Know, 5959 words, G.

The title, oddly enough, has nothing to with Shriekback. Titles in this round were agonizingly hard to find, and this one didn't fall into place until minutes before the archive opened.



crossovering

I think this was my favorite fest of the year because of how much I love crossovers. The way the matches were done, as essentially three sets of bucket lists with at least four fandoms in each bucket, meant that I could have matched with a lot of people on any of the nine total fandoms I offered, yet ended up matching with the only other person (besides htbthomas) who requested The Tomorrow People (2013): teaotter. From the start, I knew I wanted to do the crossover with Teen Wolf, as I have very little experience writing Leverage (which were the other fandoms we matched on), and, while I like my own prompts for a TP/Leverage crossover, I don't like using my prompts in exchanges; that seems to defeat the point of an exchange, to me.

Since teaotter provided no prompts, I went back through other fest letters for ideas. What came out of it was a vague idea to do a story about Scott, Stiles, and Stephen being caught up in a shared hallucination. Possibly from seeing a horror movie that was really the prelude to an alien invasion. I also toyed with the idea of telling the story from ghost!Allison's POV. All I knew for sure was that I wanted the reveal scene to hinge on Stephen having to teleport Scott and Stiles to safety from a falling or exploding wall. One of the early difficulties was balancing the story, as my initial ideas were all TP-centric, which the Teen Wolf characters effectively acting as spear-carriers.

The Great Crash might have been good for this story because I ended up losing all the early attempts. With deadlines closing in, and with the fourth season of Teen Wolf wrapping up, I realized that there was no need for hallucinations when the show provided the assassins plot. The next trick was getting the TP to Beacon Hills, and that's where Irene entered the story. In a fortuitous twist, it turns out that Irene is one of teaotter's favorites. I had no idea!

The final story was: Twice Across the Same River, 6307 words, G.

This title was also a last minute scramble, though not quite as last minute as the rarepairfest story. I do seem to have a theme in my stories about characters going home or returning home or creating home, which is the whole TP side of the story here. Once I recognized the theme manifesting itself, the phrase "you can't cross the same river twice" wouldn't leave my head. Like usual, htbthomas held my hand through all of this, including helping me structure the phrase into a useful title.



badbang

A surprise fest! It started from a comment on FFA and turned into an overnight event. The point of this fest was to produce bad fiction, which was a nice breather after the other two fests. It also gave me an outlet for a story I'd been trying to write seriously for some time and just couldn't seem to get traction on. So, instead I dumped it into: O What a Tangled Web", 275 words, G.

The title was an attempt at unwarranted pretentiousness, as in keeping with badfic everywhere.



genficexchange

It's hard to believe that, with all the fandoms I have to request, that I both matched, and was matched on The Tomorrow People again for this one. In fairness, I was matched with my old friend tptigger, which meant I could have chosen any of her four offerings that we share. And she has as many to choose from on my end. That we were both going to write TP for each other was only briefly a point of discussion. However, she requested multiple versions of the TP, so which one I was going to write was not so easy to settle on.

The answer came as a fluke. While we were chatting one day, she threw out a comment about wanting to see Charlotte from the '13 series save the day. Figuring out how a 12-year-old can save people who have superpowers is exactly the kind of challenge I enjoy. After having my daughter eye-rollingly point out something I should have noticed on my own, I decided that Charlotte's version of "saving the day" would be to bring a child's perspective to the chaotic world the TP are living in post-series. The next challenge was figuring out how to get John back, and what kind of person he'd be after he returned. I ended up hand-waving the first part of that so I could spend more time on the second part.

Though the idea for this story was clear in my head, getting the words down was a lot more difficult and mostly happened in bursts of deadline panic. Scores of rewrites and revisions later, and I was still trying to get the ending right in the brief hours before the archive opened. I don't know why endings are always such a problem. Maybe because I don't want the stories to end?

The finished story is: Angle of Observation, 3859 words, G.

The title? A simple statement of fact. Sometimes the most obvious title that comes to mind is the one that's worth using.



genficexchange #2

I picked up a pinch hit! For whatever reason, lynndyre's request was thrown to the wind. I think this is the first PH I've ever picked up, though my big fannish eyes being what they are, I've often wanted to. This one was posted the day assignments went out and I simply couldn't resist after I saw that one of the requests was for Highlander, and for Methos+Joe, at that. The prompt letter had so much to work with too: identity porn, hanging out and drinking beer, Joe finding out about Methos, the importance of the Watchers to the two of them! With permission to do an AU, I figured out the scenario I wanted right away. Then spent weeks pulling the words painfully out of that place that stories sit before they've been written. Knowing what I wanted to write was never a problem; figuring out how those two would go about having the conversation they needed to have, though.... I've never before had a fest story take the entire length of a fest to write. Joe and Methos having a serious conversation about who they are is long overdue, though, and I'm pleased with the result.

In the end, I found: Quid Pro Quo, 2249 words, G.

The title is another statement of fact, plus an excuse to fill out my alphabet of titles with a Q entry. Finally.

Comments

[brightknightie]

Much sympathy on the computer disaster! Oh, gracious goodness!

Marked your HL story for whenever work leaves me alone for two whole days in a row...

[argentum_ls]

Thank you. The sheer scale of what I lost pains me. I keep hoping that the computer will magically start working so I can rescue some of the WIPs on there.

I hope you find the time to read the story, if for no other reason than it means that worked as eased up.