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It has now been so long since I was tagged that I do not remember who did so. I think perhaps @beautifullights1? Someone kind.
I also don’t remember the specifics of the thing. I think it was just a chance to look at your own body of work and pick out five examples that you either wanted to revisit or you think got overlooked or whatever. I don’t know.
I have interspersed the horrible terrible not going wellness of writing with the looking back at some sixty-odd works I have up on AO3 and being like that can’t really be all mine and going through them and realizing no, they are, just, somehow, i don’t know. It’s difficult, when you’re in an anhedonic kind of phase, to genuinely assess things, I must admit; I keep glancing at things, thinking I loved that one!, and then rereading it and closing the tab with a shrug, because I can’t engage with it. Oh well. So this took me forever, when it shouldn’t have, but– brainweasels, you know?
So I thought oh, I should like real carefully rec from each of my Eras, but then I was like, I don’t really have Eras. Not anymore. I started writing novels in 1991, and so the vast majority of my development as a writer, in a purely mechanical sense as well as an artistic one, is invisible to the Internet, because it happened so long ago. Even my Early Works, on here, are relatively stylistically mature, because even in 2004 I’d been writing intensively for over a decade.
However.
I realized that no matter how much I complain now about never finishing anything, I used to be so much worse, because for my entire fic output from 2003-2009, there are like. Two completed fics. I was writing every day for a lot of that period, but so much of what I produced was disconnected fragments that never cohered into anything usable. Holy shit. There’s nothing to find, because I never had enough to publish. And it was just all– little pieces, scattered through word docs, all over the computer. I was bad, folks. I was real bad.
I’ve always known how to put a sentence together. I’ve only recently started to know how to make that cohere into anything recognizable. So, the older stories on here are writing-wise I think pretty similar to what I produce now; I haven’t grown enormously in my abilities as a putter-together-of-words, precisely. But nowadays most of what I write winds up coherent enough that I can share it with an audience. That didn’t used to be the case.
So it’s been nice to recognize progress where it happens, I guess.
contents behind cut, because I put in brief excerpts but even brief, five is a lot! :)
1) Rebuilding, Éowyn/Lothíriel, Lord of the Rings (books), f/f Mature 7700 words, circa 2004
“Éomer has always been good with children,” Éowyn said, in a voice that was unaccountably frosty.
“So I gathered,” Lothíriel answered, wondering at Éowyn’s coldness. Was she angry with Faramir? Or was she truly this hostile to strangers? Or perhaps, was there something in Lothíriel’s manner that was particularly repulsive to Éowyn?
“Children and animals,” Éowyn went on. “And soldiers. He will be an excellent King of Rohan.”
“I notice you did not include women in that list,” Lothíriel said.
“No,” Éowyn answered. “He is not good with women. He is forever sending them off to mind the children when he is too busy.”
Lothíriel nodded. “Or to busy themselves in social intrigue while he does the important business of running the country?”
The look Éowyn turned upon Lothíriel could have frozen hot water. “What are you implying?” Éowyn asked.
“I am implying that to a degree all men are like that,” Lothíriel answered, “and most women. I am not without an education in politics, and I know more of the customs of the realm than many of its lords, but I am sent with a picnic basket to make nice with a probable future in-law while the rest put their heads together and frown solemnly over the reports from the fiefdoms. There is a king to crown, they say, and send me off to spend an afternoon in the sunshine.”
Éowyn looked down at the sling that held her arm. “I,” she began, but did not continue.
“I will now change the subject,” Lothíriel said, “to something about which we are expected to speak. Did that hurt, when your arm was broken?”
“Not as much as the other one,” Éowyn answered a little absently. She looked up into Lothíriel’s face after a moment. “Is there no escape?” she asked, a little quieter.
2) Hey Mister Deejay, gen, Stargate: Atlantis, 3839 words, General Audiences. 2013.
Aiden Ford’s one personal item was a 40-GB iPod loaded up with the good stuff. One of his biggest regrets about the trip being one-way was that his music collection would get out of date. John Sheppard and a couple of the Marines collaborate to keep Atlantis’s music library current, and John uses his wiles on the scientists to make sure the audio equipment is up to par.
A bittersweet little gapfiller, an early experiment on my part with filling out canon a little more. I didn’t include it in the related series, so people miss it when they’re reading through.
3) Perfectly Adequate, Natasha/Steve/Sam/Bucky OT4, Explicit, 5400 words. 2015.
Pegging. Natasha pegs the fuck out of Steve, who loves it. Part of a series, stands alone just fine.
“If I fuck you in the ass,” Natasha murmured sweetly, “you will like it, and you will remember it.”
“Oh?” Bucky tilted his head to look up at her. “And what will you fuck me with?”
“If you think I do not have a perfectly adequate cock, then you do not know me very well,” Natasha said.
“Oh-ho,” Sam said, “now that? Yeah.”
Bucky considered it. Of course. “Do you really,” he said. He didn’t know why he hadn’t expected that.
“I most certainly do,” she said.
“I think I’m missing something,” Steve said.
4) Full of Grace, Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanoff, 2015, WIP at almost 93,000 words. This one’s a tough one to rec, because WIP, and I wish I’d divided it up, but with the huge sprawling canons I wound up mentally creating in the MCU, this kept happening to me.
This one, though. I love this one, and it’s still active in my mind. (They all are, let’s be real.) This one, though. In particular, in chapter 10 where Bucky speaks frankly about suicidal ideation– the scene came to me pretty much in one go, and I wrote it and it felt very honest, and I got a lot, a lot, a lot of responses where people said me too and were moved by it in a really heartfelt way, and it seemed important in a way a lot of my stuff isn’t. So. This story is really important to me and I’m sorry I structured it poorly and so sprawlingly. But here it is, and TW for suicidal ideation:
He brought his hand up and rubbed his face, and left it lying on his chest. “Like today. I’m lying on my fuckin’ bathroom floor because I can’t— you know, it just, it hurts, all the time, and it never gets any better, and it wears at you until it drives you crazy, and I can’t think about anything else.”
His breath hitched a little as he breathed, and he didn’t speak for a long moment. “But while I’m thinkin’ about that and I’m thinkin’ about all the comments I got sayin’ I should just fuckin’ do it, and I’m thinkin’, those fuckers, they’re fuckin’ right, I should, I really should— and I’m thinkin’ about that, and then I’m thinkin’, shit. What if I wasn’t the Winter Soldier? What if I was some, some kid, some teenager who didn’t understand much about the world yet and hadn’t ever lived through anything this bad yet?”
His voice shook a little. “And everybody in between,” he said, a little thickly. “All of us who are lyin’ on our bathroom floors alone thinkin’ that there’s no way to get up off this floor and there’s no point to any of it anyway. I know I’m not gonna do it, I’m not gonna kill myself, because I can’t, I got too much shit I gotta do. There’s all this shit I gotta do. Nobody else can do it, I have to.”
He rolled his head a little toward the camera. It was the most of his face he’d ever shown. His eyes glittered in the little scrap of light. “And there’s all this shit, I’m the only one who remembers. And if I’m dead, it’s gone from the world. I’m the only one. I can’t do it, guys. I gotta get up off this floor and stay alive. I can’t do it, I can’t kill myself.”
His voice wavered again, and he stopped, and after a moment he rolled his head back to full profile, and closed his eyes. “But that don’t make it any easier to get up off this fuckin’ floor,” he said unsteadily, voice thick. “It don’t— God! It fuckin’ hurts! It just, it hurts, all the time, all day, all night, every day, every week, there’s no fuckin’ end to it, and I can’t, I can’t fix it and I can’t ignore it and I can’t make it stop and I’m just so fuckin’ tired. I’m so tired.” He lifted his hand and rubbed his face, and his hand was visibly shaking. His breath hitched, then stopped, and he let it out slowly after a moment, and took a breath in.
“I don’t wanna lie here alone,” he said. “But I’m not. I’m not alone. Statistically, there’s a fuckload of you lyin’ here with me, thinkin’ the same thing. Hurtin’ the same way. It fuckin’ sucks, don’t it?” He laughed bitterly, and glanced over at the camera, teeth bared. His breath was tight as he sucked it back in, and he sniffled.
5) The Spectrum Of Bad Ideas, Poe Dameron/ Armitage Hux, Explicit. 2016.
Yeah, I really wrote this. Pretty early on in my SW fandom involvement. I wanted to explore a more concrete expression of Poe’s seeming recklessness, and strategic giftedness. What better outsider perspective?
“It would be a waste to damage you,” Hux settled on saying at last. “But you like the idea that I might.”
“Like is too strong a word,” Dameron said tightly.
Hux grinned in delight. “You’re getting off on the thought that I might,” he said. “It is different, you’re right.”
“I really,” Dameron said, expression going a little glazed, “really think you should–”
“You know it’s not your verbal wit I’m here for,” Hux said.
Thanks, this has been fun! I would tag people but I genuinely don’t know who hasn’t done it, because everyone else did it so long ago.
Ask me again tomorrow, I’d rec five totally different stories. I really wanted to include the Bucky/Peggy friendfic I wrote, but, it said five, and I wanted to include a Star Wars story. So, sorry. (And the sequel to that fic is like. 500 words from done. Sigh.)
Anyway. If you missed this meme when it went around, please consider yourself tagged, and tag me back so I can read. I want to be better about engaging in this stuff, I’m just. Not all here.
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