elrhiarhodan | Entries tagged with elr writes

Today is a strange day - I am unmoored from any kind of fannish obligations.

From April 22 to May 22, I did a meme here - Thirty Days of Song - that required some serious navel-gazing and a commitment for daily posting (Oh, Dreamwidth, will you ever implement a scheduled post function?). Additionally, I committed to the Merry Month of Masturbation (

mmom), which is now over. Although I posted for 29 out of 31 days, I actually wrote 30 fics (I wrote the first one a day early), which is something of a success. I just didn't have it in me to beat off two more stroke fics.

So it's weird - I don't have anything I'm required (by my own self-imposed sense of completeness) to post today, and yet I feel compelled to do a bit of a wrap-up on MMOM.

Now, if you know me, I'm an all-in kind of person - bingos have to be blackouts, month-long challenges have to be done EVERY DAY. And of course, that kind of thinking can lead to epic failure. I have learned to manage the MMOM challenge by writing 300 word ficlets - and they have to be exactly three hundred words. Not 301 or 299. They have to be 300 words.

Also, while the fics can be interconnected (most of the stories this year were for a Hartwin series I called "Happily Married Spies"), the stories have to be complete, with a beginning, middle and end. That wasn't easy at it used to be, not when I've become accustomed to writing sprawling epics that don't get to the meat of the plot until I've passed the 15k mark.

All in all, I'm pleased with this year's results. Like most ficlets, they don't get a lot of hits or kudos or comments (although one ficlet I wrote for The Witcher got over a hundred kudos and I don't understand why), but I really don't write these for an audience. It's more that I write them to see if I can actually do the challenge (one year, I took the wordcount restriction off and managed all thirty-one fics and many of them were over 3k. I don't think I wrote anything for the next two months).

This year, I had additional motivation. I have been writing, but I haven't been publishing. I don't publish incomplete stories and I have about 500k worth of WiPs, some active, some not, and I wanted to get my name back out there. And more than that, I've been having some serious trouble with my writing - too many words spoiling the story-telling. Having the 300-word handcuffs really helped me pare down my writing style to what is essential.

It was a good exercise, but I'm glad it's done and happy that I'll be able to get back to the stories in progress - and the new ones percolating in my brain.

Since I didn't post the individual MMOM ficlets here on my journal (just on the MMOM community), here is a list of the stories below the cut, in case you're interested.

( Don't Be Afraid To Touch Your Meat )

Know I've been a bit too quiet the past few months, but it's been an oddly difficult season.

( Discussion of grief and loss and health related matters )

So, with all of this going on, writing has been a bit difficult of late. The first eight months, the stories flowed out of me like water out of a high-pressure hose, but since September, I've been struggling. Part of it has been that I simply over-committed myself. 2019 for me was the year of the writing exchange - Chocolate Box, Smut Swap, Age Gap, Just Married, and Pining, plus Poetry Fiction and the Kingsman Reverse Bang were all due by mid-August, and every single story far exceeded the minimum word count requirement by significant margins. I published 290k in eight months.

It took me nearly three months to get out another ten thousand words.

I ran into problems with my Fandom Trumps Hate story. I don't know why, but it took forever to gel and I never really felt happy with it until I got almost three-quarters done with it. Setting aside the emotional difficulties I have in autumn, I think I had just gotten to the point where I wanted to write for myself and I couldn't - so everything just got stalled. I finished it about two weeks ago and am finding myself pleased with the result, despite the hair-pulling.

And despite my desire to write something for myself, I'm writing a story for this year's Kingsman Secret Santa event. Yes, the prompt is not my own, but it dovetailed nicely into a holiday story I wrote this time last year - an everyone's Jewish story (I do this in every fandom). It's a five+one - a format I love and loathe in equal measure. I'm a bit stuck on the fourth scene, but it'll come to me.

I'd also signed up for a gift exchange for the Inspector Morse and related series fandom. While I'd never felt fannish about the original series (it is really a product of its time and filled with everything terrible and wonderful about the 90s, including raging homophobia), I still love and adore the early seasons of Lewis and want to write for it, and finally watched the first six seasons of Endeavour. The jury's still out (for me) on whether Shaun Evans is really convincing as a proto-Morse, but honestly, it doesn't really matter. The H/C all but writes itself (the character canonically hates doctors and hospitals and faints at the sight of blood) and the secondary characters are wonderfully developed.

Since it seems that

poetry_fiction is not happening this year (I am having a sad about that), it looks like these will be my last two exchanges and challenges for a while. 2020 is going to be the year I write for myself. My dear

anarchycox brought it home in a post she made on Tumblr yesterday about how she really wanted to write for herself and not feel like she had to carry the weight of a contracting fandom. These days, I am nowhere near as prolific as Anarchy (too many other things on my plate right now), but what she'd said about needed to write for herself really resonated.

If I keep signing up for challenges, that's where my focus is going to be, and the ideas I have for my own fics are just going to keep dying on the vine. I have works in progress that I am dying to get back to - one is almost 175k and I haven't touched it in years. Another is 5k from finished. Three others are each close to 30k. I'll never get them done if I am committed elsewhere. As much fun as I had writing for others this past year, I need to think of myself for this year.

Give myself permission to be a little selfish. That's not such a bad thing, is it?

It's August (gasp!) and it's time for another update for the "I Need To Be Committed - Writing Edition" saga.

It goes without saying that I'd gotten myself into a bit of a pickle, signing up for too many challenges and exchanges and instead of developing short stories that just go a little beyond the minimum, I decided to write epics for all of them.

Kingsman Reverse Bang:

Story for MMmouse15 Artwork - Shooting Star - Writing Completed, Posted Complete - 52k
Story for AnarchyCox Artwork - Booked and Bespoked - A Mills & Boon Romance - Posted Complete - 31K

Just Married Exchange: Posted Complete but the covers haven't come off the challenge so I can't reveal it here - Due by July 28 - 21k

Pining Exchange: Abandoned original idea, since it would probably need about 80k to do justice to. Started the story on July 31, finished this morning. Story complete, due by August 10 - 15k (still needs a title)

Slashorific: For the prompt "I'm Leaving On a Jet Plane" - Hartwin - Currently, just 200 words. My challenge is to write something less than 5k. Mod had been kind enough to give me an extension until August 15.

It's a strange feeling, but now that I've finished the fic for Pining, I have no immediate (like within the current calendar page) obligations to write something for someone based on their prompt/likes/dislikes. The Slashorific prompt is a community thing, with no other obligations, and I've kind of challenged myself to keep it under 5k. My buddy and partner in crime,

anarchycox, doesn't think I can do it.

Other obligations:

Fandom Trumps Hate: Hartwin with supernatural elements - No official due date, but to be completed by the end of the calendar year - 0 Words Currently

"Achievement Unlocked Round" Story for AnarchyCox Artwork - Due by November 1 (date changed because pinch hits for primary round stories are still posting) - 0 Words Currently (may not write)

Kingsman Fairy Tales: Retelling of The Golem - Due by ~~July 7~~ December somethingorother - 0 Words Currently

Other things carried forward:

There's another Kingsman thing floating around and I might have agreed to write two stories for it. It's called "Royal and Oiled" - based on a prompt on Tumblr about a king making his military advisor/guardian/teacher his boytoy. That has very gentle due dates.

There's also plans for an AO3 challenge exchange for Kingsman AUs, which will have a 5k initial wordcount on story turn in and then authors have six more months to complete if they want to write an extended story. Anarchy and I are still working on the deets, but that will probably be a 2020 thing.

On the health front, knees are better (thank you cutting edge drugs). I am still coughing, although the bronchitis is supposed to be over. Doc says bad post nasal drip is responsible for the hacking and the perpetual sore throat.

At the end of May, I posted the insane number of stories I've committed myself to for the rest of the year - challenges that have definite due dates.

Figured it's time to update:

Kingsman Reverse Bang:

Story for MMmouse15 Artwork - Shooting Star - Writing Completed, still posting - 49k
Story for AnarchyCox Artwork - Booked and Bespoked - A Mills & Boon Romance - Posted Complete - 31K

"Achievement Unlocked Round" Story for AnarchyCox Artwork - Due by October 1 (starts posting July 2) - 0 Words Currently (may not write)

Kingsman Fairy Tales: Retelling of The Golem - Due by ~~July 7~~ December somethingorother - 0 Words Currently

Just Married Exchange: Idea in development - Due by July 28 - 0 Words Currently

Slashorific I completely forgot I signed up for this! Prompt: "I'm Leaving On a Jet Plane" - Peter, Paul and Mary - Hartwin - 0 Words Currently May do artwork instead - Due by July 31

Pining Exchange: Assigned, have notes on an idea - Due by August 10 - 0 Words Currently

Fandom Trumps Hate: Hartwin with supernatural elements - No official due date, but to be completed by November 1 - 0 Words Currently

There's another Kingsman thing floating around and I might have agreed to write two stories for it. It's called "Royal and Oiled" - based on a prompt on Tumblr about a king making his military advisor/guardian/teacher his boytoy. That has very gentle due dates.

There's also plans for an AO3 challenge exchange for Kingsman AUs, which will have a 5k initial wordcount on story turn in and then authors have six more months to complete if they want to write an extended story. Anarchy and I are still working on the deets, but that will probably be a 2020 thing.

Yes, I definitely need my head examined.

And oh, I have bronchitis.

::headdesk::

All of those darn details you have to get just right.

It's annoying when you're writing something in a canon that you've recently played in, it's down right aggravating when you're (1) going back to a canon you really haven't written in three or four years and (2) you're finishing a story you'd started over a year ago but had abandoned because you had lost those characters' voices and rhythms (not to mention the skill of writing a case fic-type story).

But I'm almost done - one scene to finish and then a bit of an epilogue.