(no subject)

[nny]

Today I read something beautiful and sharp-edged about fairies, and I remembered that yesterday I was writing about a half-giant who's the stoop-shouldered shoe-gazing reason her mother had to buy a minivan instead of the coupe she wanted. In my head there's a girl hauling around furniture and dusting behind it before the social worker gets there, muttering furiously about how much quicker she could do it if she went on elf-contract for her magic like all of her friends (even though she'd promised her father, even though he never came back from the deal he went to make and her mum still kept getting sicker anyway). In my head an angry wizard undertaker carries the bones of his misanthropic lover in a black gladstone bag and orders velvet drapes for the comfort of his vampiric best friend.

And when I attempt to put words into some kind of order I default to using names and faces from the telly box and freeze up and tell myself I'm all kinds of useless because the words just won't come and I feel like I'm trying to get a car out of a too-small parking space because fanfic, fanfic, no pressure, it's safer, it's easier, right?

Comments

[in_the_blue]

For the record, fanfic is not easier nor is it safer.

Just write when you can. *hearts;

[skygiants]

I want to read your stories, whenever they come out. <3

[genarti]

I agree with both Gwynne and Becca. <333

I will also say, if it's helpful, that there's nothing wrong with stair-stepping your way from a telly box character to an original one, if that's something your brain finds useful. (And if you decide you want to do it; fanfic AUs are also great.)

Like -- "okay, I will write this first draft of suburban!fairy!AU!Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle meeting Brian and Wensleydale of the Them, and put the focus on the plot and the ending instead of backstory stuff, and then later I will come back and change their names to other names and see if I can edit them so it's less obvious and is instead an easter egg for the friends who know its origin." Or "Okay, so Annie is a housewife, but personality-wise she's basically John Sheppard, and her version of piloting is competitive tae kwon do and her Atlantis equivalent is her family and the neighborhood kids, and this is a Tam Lin reworking but whenever I'm trying to work out Annie's reactions to something I'll come back to that core. Also, she's played by Indira Varma." It can give you a hook in, sometimes, you know? Nobody else has to know what your hooks in are unless you tell them. Original stuff is in dialogue with pop culture too.

The first story I ever sold -- one of very few stories I've sold, lbr -- came in part from me going "Okay, lesbian steampunk is the anthology theme and thus the prompt... what's a story I love and thus want to remix and rework? Hmm. Tolkien's ships sailing West!" That's not obvious, because there's nothing Tolkieny in the final story, but it's where the first germ of a story came from.

I want to read all your stories, fanfic or otherwise. This opening paragraph is magnetically compelling. The words may not always come for you, because they don't always come for anybody, but my god, can you put them together into beauty and sharp edges when they do.