WIPs update

[melannen]

So, motivated by finding that USB drive, I have gone through all of my copious backups, and sorted ALL of my wips into a single Scrivener file. (Well, not all - there’s quite a few that have only ever existed on paper, and this doesn’t include filk and comic scripts, and this is only things where I’ve actually started a writing file, not outlines and commentfic and bunnies and notfic, and my entire Stargate/Supernatural period in the mid-2000s seems to be missing - I’ll have to try to dig that out from the old backup drives. But this will do for now.)

There are just over 100 different stories, and well over 250,000 words! That’s almost impressive, until you realize it took about 20 years. (On the other hand, 20 years makes the total number of stories seem a little bit less terrifying?)

Every year I make a resolution to reduce that number rather than growing it, and every year I fail. So I’m going to try again this year, with a twist: the goal isn’t to finish them, it’s to either finish, post unfinished, or trash them. Surely I can do that! And maybe if they’re posted in some form, they will haunt me less, since the primary reason I write is that it makes me sad that my daydreams are trapped with me. (That means I will be posting fic on average every four days…. Maybe I will batch them by fandom.)

Per that goal, I have sorted them into categories:

1. True WIPs: These are stories where I have a fair amount left to write, and I really want to finish them properly. (10 stories, oldest is about 10 years)

2. Finish Quick: These are stories where it should take less than 1000 words to finish, and I should really just do it and post them; or at least write the 1000 words and then re-evaluate. (10 stories, oldest is over 15 years.)

3. Cauterize: There are stories where I had big plans, but on re-read, maybe the reason I stopped working on them is that I said what I wanted to say and got to a good stopping point? So the goal is to revise them to pass, and post, as finished stories without adding much more content. (8 stories, oldest is about ten years)

4. Carrot: I have written less than 1000 words of them but I really want to finish them! (17 stories, oldest is about 15 years old)

5. Post undone: I have not finished these, will not finish these, have no particular interest in finishing them anymore - many of them are in fandoms that went in a direction I was not interested in following. (71 stories in 28 fandoms, oldest is over 20 years old.)

There’s also a separate category of “things I have posted as finished even though I want to write more.” Also original stories. But those are just depressing, so we’re not going to enumerate them.

The point of the “Carrot” category is that anytime I finish and post something in category 1 or 2, I get to either move something from the “Carrot” category to the “Actual WIPs” category, or start something new and add it to the “Carrot” category, and otherwise I’m not allowed to touch that category. We’ll see if that actually works as a carrot!

Below the cut are the stories in the first four categories. They have tickyboxes! Not because the tickyboxes mean anything, I just felt like it’s been too long since there were tickyboxes.

Poll #21170 WIPs

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 45

View Respondents

True WIPs

View Answers

The First Sedoretu of Ankh-Morpork: How Samuel Vimes of the Watch came to marry the Duchess of Ankh. And the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. And Lady Margolotta of Uberwald.
27 (67.5%)

A Big Enough Umbrella: The one where Enjolras is aro/ace and Grantaire is akiosexual and they become flatmates and everyone is very confused, especially them
8 (20.0%)

Shadow on Snow: The Alternate First Meeting AU where Breq and Seivarden stumble over each other on Gethen instead of Nilt.
9 (22.5%)

Next part of the Deadpool mpreg
9 (22.5%)

Body Meet A Body: The one where Mayor Madeleine's cock cures TB because of secret prison experiments and everybody is very very traumatized, just in general, not specifically about MAyor Madeleine's cock.
3 (7.5%)

Spidroin: The Jack Harkness/K's't'lk snuffkink pwp, because it needs to exist.
5 (12.5%)

Clark Knows Better: The one where Clark tells Lois he can't ethically have sex with her until she discovers his Deep Dark Secret on her own.
12 (30.0%)

I ♥ Boobies: the f/f where Cosette is a marine biologist and Eponine is a vet tech and Marius is a traumatized blue-footed booby.
11 (27.5%)

Natashenka: The one where the Winter Soldier is on a mission-gone-wrong with a four-year-old Red Room trainee and she has to go undercover as his kid.
23 (57.5%)

Stargazers: Ace OTP fic for Welcome to Mars which is a fandom nobody but me has heard of.
2 (5.0%)

Finish Quick

View Answers

Hello My Name Is: Post-canon happy-ever-after Nimona fic about nametags
5 (12.2%)

Paris Lui-Meme Imite: from a dare to write modern-day Enjolras/Grantaire as Hugo himself would have if he were alive today.
10 (24.4%)

Children of Barrayar: The Barrayar/Study in Emerald crossover in which being Vor has slightly different meaning than canon.
14 (34.1%)

Slow Fire: PWP Amelia Rumford/Vivien Fay from the Fourth Doctor Who episode "The Stones of Blood"
4 (9.8%)

A Summer Wardrobe: Valjean/Montparnasse D/s porn that makes sense in my head. (Valjean wants to reform him! Montparnasse can only accept 'hot rich older dude takes an interest in me' in one context!)
5 (12.2%)

Deadpool/Reader fic: because people keep posting Deadpool/Reader fic that doesn't exploit his fourth wall powers sufficiently.
16 (39.0%)

Super-Soft: a rarepair porn prompt I have been attempting to fill for the Deadpool kink meme.
4 (9.8%)

Timekink: Fifth Doctor/Ainsley Master RACK porn with mindsex and sensory deprivation and species dysphoria and drums.
5 (12.2%)

Christmas, 1982: A very sad Harry Potter holiday story that absolutely nobody needs.
6 (14.6%)

Hot Cognition: Post-war f/f, Hermione gets really into both feminist theory and smart women.
26 (63.4%)

Not Made For Any Man (The Moon's Second Quarter): Next part of 2011 yuletide fic. I have ONE CHAPTER left.
5 (12.2%)

Finish Quick

View Answers

Trigger Warning: Steve/Bucky soft trash party
9 (24.3%)

Hikarigakure: the Les Mis/Naruto crossover where Eponine, Cosette, and Marius are Valjean's genin team.
4 (10.8%)

The Fury Road/Highlander crossover where Max took a very bad quickening awhile back and needs to find a Holy Spring.
15 (40.5%)

Earbud porn: the one where the Leverage team don't need a telepathic soulbond because they have earbud radios.
24 (64.9%)

The Men Who Bond With Wolves: Psychic Wolves/The Men Who Stare At Goats crossover.
12 (32.4%)

Sleepy: Unfinished story from the Dresden Files kinkmeme
6 (16.2%)

The DoctorDonna meets the Dowager Duchess of Denver, started from a very old prompt for characters that start with D.
9 (24.3%)

Carry On Till The Night Is Gone: my Nick Fury/Peggy Carter fic, I will have to post this before Captain Marvel if I ever post it at all.
14 (37.8%)

Carrot

View Answers

BfU prison AU
1 (2.3%)

Next part of the Deadpool/Cable kidfic
4 (9.3%)

Hermann/Newt serial killer AU
3 (7.0%)

The one where Grantaire voluntarily takes a sketchy 'love potion' that forces him to do whatever Enjolras orders him to do
9 (20.9%)

The Good Omens Easter fic
21 (48.8%)

The Imperial Radch wolfbond fic
11 (25.6%)

The AU where Javert picked criminal instead of police and he and Valjean run the Paris underworld together
16 (37.2%)

The one where Anne of Green Gables is a dragon but everything else stays the same
17 (39.5%)

The one where one of the uterine replicators from Escobar carried the Emperor's half-brother
18 (41.9%)

The one where the Winter Soldier is sent to honeytrap Captain America instead of assassinating him at the beginning of CA:WS
21 (48.8%)

The one where Spock grows pigtails for Vulcan religious reasons and McCoy can't stop pulling them, and occasionally dipping them in ink.
12 (27.9%)

The BfU one where Shane thinks he's posessed by a demon and Ryan has to talk him out of it
3 (7.0%)

The post-Pac Rim Uprising Newt/Hermann romcom fic
5 (11.6%)

The one where Methos has never dated a man before MacLeod
9 (20.9%)

The John/Rodney a/b/o knotting fic with the maths
11 (25.6%)

If anybody would like to mention one of the stories above in a comment, I will whine at them about how writing is hard and that story, in particular, is impossible. (The short version that all of these have in common, though, is: I only feel confident in my fanfic when I’ve been immersed in the fandom, and I can’t be immersed in 100 fandoms at at time all the time, it is not possible! So instead I finish nothing.)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Hot Cognition

Earbud radios

GOOD OMENS EASTER

[kore]

YES YES YES

[melannen]

Hot Cognition is probably the very oldest story on this list! It's a few years post-canon when Hermione's in her early twenties and she and Ron are On A Break and Hermione goes to a witches' rights rally and runs into her old professor Septima Vector, who is like "Oh, hey, you're very much Not My Student now, would you like me to introduce you to the joys of sapphism?" and Hermione is like "Um, yes!" and then there is porn, incl. indecent use of wands.

I stalled out on the porn the first time; now my problem is that I am now much closer to Vector's age than Hermione's (which I was when I started it), and from this end it just feels very different to write that age gap. :/

[melannen]

The problem with the Good Omens one is that the premise of the fic is that nobody bothered to tell Aziraphale and Crowley that that particular obscure street preacher was actually more important than any of the others, and do you know how hard it is to find history resources for 1st century Jerusalem that don't make that particular obscure street preacher the center of the universe? Extremely difficult.

[katherine]

Christmas, 1982: A very sad Harry Potter holiday story that absolutely nobody needs.

Maybe nobody needs that, I would read it though.

[melannen]

I have been stuck for a decade on the section where Lupin brings Christmas dinner to Mrs. Pettigrew's house because neither of them have anybody else left. I thought the sections for the other characters were already too sad, but I think that one's both too sad and too real. :/

[kore]

Oh wow, very neat!

The one where Anne of Green Gables is a dragon but everything else stays the same

WAIT WHAT HOW DID I MISS THAT ONE

[melannen]

I don't think I've ever posted any of it! It was for my cousin, whose mom wanted her to read Anne of Green Gables, but who does not want to read anything that does not have dragons, and this was when Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was big, so I was like, "it's public domain! there's an easy solution here."

I posted all of chapter 2 a couple of years ago but it was under lock - you should be able to see it now.

[morcai]

Earbud porn! You have provided exactly one sentence about this, and I find it to be absolutely DELIGHTFUL.

Both of the psychic wolves crossovers sound great, and (having had to look up The Men Who Stare At Goats) The Men Who Bond With Wolves sounds like it must be hilarious and/or bizarre. Also, the Imperial Radch one sounds like YET ANOTHER reason to crawl to the library and actually read those books. Which I keep meaning to do and then I...don't do that.

A Big Enough Umbrella--I feel like I vaguely (very vaguely. incredibly vaguely) remember a tumblr post on this topic from days of yore when I was immersed in Les Mis fandom tumblr, and I love it.

[melannen]

The E/R fic is weird, because I could swear I read it, written by someone else, on AO3, during the height of the movie fandom! It was in the 10-30000 words range, modern AU, lots of sunlight, no sex or resolved romantic tension. But whenever I went looking for it, I could never find it again. I basically went through the entire tag on AO3 a few years ago, and found nothing even close, and I've asked on every 'find this fanfic' venue I know, and in various Les Mis fandom circles, and I've gotten a few people saying they vaguely remember it as well, but nobody who could actually find any evidence other than previous posts by me asking about it, and then people kept saying I should obviously just write it myself.

So maybe someone else has written it and it's out there? If so, somebody needs to link me to it finally, and then I can take it off my WIPs list. :P

[lannamichaels]

Children of Barrayar: The Barrayar/Study in Emerald crossover in which being Vor has slightly different meaning than canon.

pleaseeeeeeeeeeee. I was weak and only wrote Vor tentacles as a metaphor. I need it to be true :DDD

[melannen]

It's set up as basically one drabble per book, so I would have to re-read the ENTIRE SERIES just to write the last thousand words or so of a crack ficlet, and is it really worth it??

Also I suspect I should read "Flowers of Vashnoi" for it, for Barrayaran biology at least, but no library in our ILL system has it.

Aral Vorkosigan know he had met the woman he was going to marry when she saw Admiral Vorrutyer, in all his naked, unfettered madness and glory and terror, and flinched - flinched, but did not break.

When she came and found him on Barrayar, and didn't seem to remember the truth of the Vor, he started to wonder if he'd been wrong about that.

But he married her anyway.

[hannah]

The Men Who Stare At Goats!

[melannen]

You may ask yourself, "But what if 'A Companion to Wolves' was a history myth/conspiracy theory, and some of the generals from MWSAG decided to try it and see if it would really work, but what actually happened was a disaster, a bunch of deaths, a massive cover up, and a few traumatized veterans scattered around the country on disability with suspiciously wolfish and intelligent 'service animals' who refuse to comment?"

Or you may not ask yourself that. Honestly, is it a question that needed to be asked?

[cadenzamuse]

Okay but, WINTER SOLDIER HONEYTRAPPING CAPTAIN AMERICA!!!!!!!!

[melannen]

The thing is it wants to be two storylines running concurrently, that being a) the Winter Soldier being given a mission to make sure Captain America is too in love to notice anything going on around him, and deciding that actually he likes this mission for once and he is going to stick with it until the end of the line; and b) Natasha, Nick, Sam and Maria going 'look, Steve seems like he's actually HAPPY for once, let's not bother him' and taking down the helicarriers and Hydra on their own. But part 1 requires me writing a super fluffy romance, and part 2 requires me writing complicated action plot, and I am bad at both of those things. D:

[primeideal]

Victor Hugo pastiche!!

[melannen]

I have to do so much sewer research though!

[rushthatspeaks]

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES DRAGON

... you realize that literally has the potential to be the best-selling middle-grade book series OF ALL TIME

just saying

[melannen]

I keep running into the issue where there are entire chapters at a time where nothing actually changes if Anne is a dragon!

[beatrice_otter]

Emperor's brother in an Escobaran uterine replicator.

(Also: we're voting for what you should work on, not what you should drop, yes? Because the title of the poll is confusing me.)

[rmc28]

I was assuming so! I wish to read ALL the ones I ticked :-)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

To be clear I ticky-ed according to things I knew or in the case of Vimes, know well enough of.

Because being grabbed around the knees is less awkward for fandoms I understand broken mutterings of a writer's plight.

Writing is hard, titles are hard, summaries are the worst.

[melannen]

Writing is impossible. :/

[marginaliana]

The DoctorDonna meets the Dowager Duchess of Denver - YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU

[melannen]

HOW DO YOU WRITE THE WAY DDofD TALKS? IT'S EVEN HARDER THAN LORD PETER.

[sineala]

I am into Jack Harkness/K's't'lk, oh my God.

[melannen]

So am I! But I can't work out how the actual mechanics of it will work. I mean, presumably there will be spidersilk bondage, Welsh choral singing, and temporal metaphysics, but beyond that?

[dhampyresa]

Paris Lui-Meme Imite

Paris is "elle", but I've been wanting to go visit the sewers for a while, so if that's still doable, I'll gladly go do it and take notes on whatever you want.

Edit: Also please tell me about the Winter Soldier and the little Black Widow.

[melannen]

That is actually a quote from the Sewers chapter of Les Mis, so you'll have to take the question of Paris's gender up with Victor Hugo. :P (I am nowhere near confident enough in French to do a French title in my own words. So I went with a lot of pretentious quotes for titles instead.)

Part of it being a parody of E/R modern AUs is that it's set in the US for no particular reason, and I've already toured the Chicago waterworks museum for it, but honesty, I never need a reason to learn about the Paris sewers.

They were on a mission with a full agent who had WS along for emergency muscle and Natashenka along for camouflage, but then the handler got shot and things went very wrong and Little Natasha and WS have to make it all the way back across Russia without being noticed, with Natasha pretending to a child and WS pretending to be her guardian! Luckily they are both much better at their jobs than anyone realized. The whole thing is in Little Natasha's POV which is both very fun and very hard to write, and the idea was to leave it extremely ambiguous to what extent WS is a) remembering Bucky and his sisters and b) actually trying to get Natasha out of the game instead of getting her back to the Red Room. The phrase "love is for children" appears several times in very different contexts from the way Natasha used it in the movie.

[umadoshi]

I...I need to just sit and stare at this post in AWE. So I'm doing that. FYI.

[melannen]

TOO MANY STORIES

[swingandswirl]

I have slowly been warming up to Clois as a pairing (mainly due to watching The New Adventures of Lois and Clark, I admit) so I'm curious about that one!

[melannen]

I have never seen Lois and Clark! I should. My Lois and Clark are based on no particular version, just the Lois and Clark I knew about from the air, before I'd ever read a comic books, mixed in with bits and pieces from all sort of other versions. (That tends to be the fanfic I like best for them, too - not a particular canon, just Superman canon.)

And a big part of that ur-story for me is that Lois is near the top of the very short list of baseline humans in the DCU who can go toe to toe with the top rank of metahumans, and win. And she does it without a billion-dollar corporation, or fancy weapons and technology, or vaguely-racist secret martial arts training - just with the power of Lois Lane, Girl Reporter. Because she's just that good. And good reporters are RL superheroes already.

And I think that's one of the reasons Clark is so drawn to her - both that she is just plain great, but also that she, along with Bruce, is one of the few people he knows could and would stop him, if he ever needed to be stopped - and who he trusts to know if he ever does.

And there is not nearly enough out there that just focuses on Lois being able to take on everyone else, if she's motivated enough, and the "Lois finds out about Clark" story is a classic, and it occurred to me I've read a lot of things where Lois could have figured it out but didn't try as hard as she could, out of respect for him, so I wondered what would happen if she was doing it because he wanted her to.

And then the first few thousands words of that one came spilling out! And then I got to the part where I needed all the Lois competence porn and realized I didn't even know enough about how her powers would actually work to fake it well, and stalled. :/