closure

[dragonlady7]

This is only of interest to fanfiction geeks. The rest of you, ignore my dirty little secret double life, or alternately pretend it's much more interesting than it is and keep reading.

I finally finished a story.

What kind of story?
Read more to find out. :)

An Éomer / Lothíriel story.

Shock. Astonishment. Horror.

Before the sky falls, I will qualify that.

I finished my first, preliminary, abandoned draft. It would have to be considered A/U by my current standards. I took little heed of Tolkien's views on sexuality, I hadn't yet discovered Lothiriel's actual age, I almost completely ignored social convention.

However.

It's a damn good plot with some damn fine smut, if I do say so myself.

It was written in response to two or three E/L stories that I personally felt were drivel. it is, as a whole (8-chapter work), less A/U than any single chapter of any of the other ones. I know, being relatively good isn't the same as being really good.
But.

I liked it. It was fun to write. I abandoned it, but had already done over 25,000 words of it, fairly polished.

So, not long ago I decided what the hell, I was going to finish the end of it and post it somewhere besides HASA. (I have a bunch of stories in beta on HASA, and they're all much better-researched. Putting this one next to them would be kind of... confusing, at best. So I decided to put it somewhere else.) I thought fanfiction.net, but realized that the plot-essential smut chapter was really bending the line of R (I mention body parts by name, as well as describing what they're doing. That's not R). And fanfiction.net doesn't allow anything higher.

A lot of the other good archives don't allow anything higher than R either.

The whole point of this story was that I wasn't devoting that much more effort to it, so rewriting it to be R or lower would be sort of point-defeating.

So, I posted it at Open Scrolls Archive. They allow NC-17, though only het. Suits me fine-- it's het. And there are het fans there.

I posted the first four chapters or so and got a ton of responses (for me-- i don't have a big readership and at the moment, there are only two people following my updates on HASA, on all my stories put together. Oh well). So, I polished up the rest of the story, and finally have posted the whole thing.

This is a big deal, as i started the damn thing in January and just couldn't finish it.
Finishing it in this version is a kind of closure. I feel reassured that I'm capable of finishing a long and complicated story. It's not long-long-- it's probably 35,000 words-- but there are several optional sections I haven't written, and it could be a novella.
So.
I've finished it, and am proud of myself for that.

If you're at all interested, and don't mind shameless A/Us like Lothiriel being 24 and frequently unchaperoned, and (this one's bad) Imrahil being a wencher (I know, sorry), and other assorted ridiculousness, I do think that the plot's quite different from the usual saccharine pap you get with that couple.

And my fourth-draft version is currently scrapped, so you'd be waiting a long time for my book-faithful version.

So, I present to you a dubious accomplishment but a very important accomplishment nonetheless, given that I never finish anything:

Title: Playing Field
Rating: NC-17 (in chapters 4 and 5; otherwise a mild R)
Warnings: Het smut, language, non-LACE compliance
Genre: Romance / Intrigue

Enjoy.