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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1JG1sw5:
Like, thanks, Winter, for holding off until like two months late and then suddenly shitting all over me and my family. My baby sister left midday yesterday for a 2-day drive out Midwest to visit in-laws, and she and her husband and baby had to white-knuckle it through four inches of slush in Indiana; meanwhile my older sister and her husband and two dogs and three kids left first thing this morning and had to deal with the tail-end of the same huge storm system crapping freezing dribbles on them and slowing them enough that they got stuck in DC rush hour traffic enroute to their Georgia home. We hit bad snow about 3 hours into the 5-hour drive and it was real bad for a bit there. And it’s going to be 45 and raining tomorrow.
WTF anyway. I spent the drive first reading the gift fic I got in the first fic exchange I ever did, which was an adorable and elaborate bit of… I’d describe it as earnest sweetness. I’ll have to go back and reread it tomorrow and comment more intelligently– I just reblogged the post with the link, and it’s really delightful. The formatting was a bit messed up on my e-reader though, so I look forward to giving it another readthrough in a proper browser.
Then I read the literal actual novel I wrote while trying to come up with the fic I eventually wrote for my part of the exchange. I seriously wrote 50k of an AU that didn’t even have the correct pairings in it. I got off on the wrong footing, stumbled around, hit a tangent and started going, and couldn’t tear myself away even when I realized it was utterly unsuitable. And rereading it…
I could file the serial numbers off this one and do an original novel, like I’d been considering for literally years. Nothing else I’ve ever done would really work; all my epics are too based in canon of whatever thing I’m working off of to work. But this one was an AU enough that I could actually just shift everything about six inches to the left and be fine. It’s really tempting.
It’d probably be 100k long or more by the time I was done, but– I mean– why not?
Free sample:
“How long did it take you to nerve yourself up to come into my diner?” Angie asks.
“I staked the place out,” James says, “and watched for about three weeks, and decided out of all the employees you were the most likely to be nice to me.”
“Really,” Angie says. “How’d you figure?”
He shrugs. “Watched,” he says. “I started out by staking out the burger place.”
The only other restaurant in town. There was a pizzeria in the plaza by the post office too, but they didn’t do sit-down service. The burger place was only recently year-round, and was mostly staffed by high school kids and recent graduates. They seemed to make most of their hiring decisions based on the candidate’s softball ability, so the employees had a definite… demographic.
“I can see how that didn’t work out,” Angie says.
“Also I watched a kid pick his nose and then assemble a burger with his bare hands,” James says, “so that pretty much ended that experiment.”
“Are you good at stakeouts?” Angie asks.
“I specialized as a sniper,” James says. “I can sit motionless and watch just about anything for as long as you need me to.”
“That sounds like a good life skill,” Angie says. She has her pancakes syruped to her liking, so she starts to eat them. “Holy shit these are good!” He’s managed to get almost a crust on the outsides, without making them rubbery.
He shoots her a grin. “The recipe from the book, man,” he says. “I read the notes section though.”
“It has literally never crossed my mind to read the notes section,” she says. There’s always a how-to section at the beginning and it goes on and on about the fundamental underpinnings of whatever the food is, but Angie has never actually read the notes section of a recipe book ever.
“That’s because your mother taught you how to cook because it is something a human needs to know how to do,” James says. He flips a pancake a little violently. “Unless you want to doom your son to mess hall chow or force him to find a woman, apparently.”
“Could Steve cook?” Angie asks.
James snorts. “No,” he admits. “See, it was doomed.”
“Did you guys manage to actually date, or did you mostly just–” Angie stops, because it’s kind of a mean question actually.
James scrapes the pan, then flips a pancake. “No,” he says. “We kind of– mutually pined for years, experimented a little, and then we slept together once and I felt like I had to tell my mom and she put her foot down. Said it was okay for Stevie to be gay because he had the strength of character for it, but not me.”
“Wait, what?” Angie hasn’t heard this one.
James’s mouth twists bitterly. “Yeah,” he says. He turns the pan off, and brings a plate over with a serving for himself. He sits down at the less-cluttered end of the table and cuts up pancakes with his fork. “Her basic point was that Steve was already super-weird and would be fine no matter what he did, and she’d always kind of figured he was gay, but me? I was too normal, I’d need to live a normal life, I’d never be happy in that lifestyle.”
“That’s super fucked-up,” Angie says.
“She meant it kindly, I’m sure,” James says, and pours syrup onto his plate. He has a sweet tooth, she’s noticed, and he prefers his pancakes really drenched, but he’s being sparing.
“I got another thing of syrup,” Angie says. “Use as much as you want.”
He gives her a flash of a sweet smile, and goes back and adds more. “Not tryin’ to eat you outta house and home,” he says.
“I have food,” she says. “Food is cheap around here. I ain’t worried. What I’m worried about is your damn mother. That’s maybe the meanest thing I ever heard.”
James shrugged. “I sure proved her wrong, I guess,” he says, unsmiling now. “Didn’t matter what kind of life I led, I’d never be happy anyway.”
“I barely know you,” Angie says, “and I met you at what’s probably a real bad time, but I gotta say that’s the least fair assessment of anybody I’ve possibly ever heard. You’re the kind of person who could find happiness living in a goddamn storm sewer, as long as you had somebody to take care of.”
He stares at her. “That’s a weird thing to say,” he says, frowning.
“Is it not true?” she asks, gesturing around the room. “You show up in the middle of goddamn nowhere and like the first thing you do is adopt a literal box of helpless kittens, and the second thing you do is make friends with this weird little lost soul and become her sworn protector just because she smiled at you when you were scared.”
“You’re not–” he says, frowning.
“Sworn protector!” she says, throwing up a hand. “Even now! You won’t even let her talk shit about herself! And you like it here, even though all you do here is sleep on the floor and hurt yourself and work, and sometimes get fed.”
“Says the woman whose response to a freak coming into her diner and having a panic attack over nothing was to sit him down and devise a method of communicating with him so you could feed him,” James shoots back.
“Feeding people is my job,” Angie says. “You would not believe the shit that I see in that place, you weren’t even the weirdest thing that shift. But we weren’t talking about me. My mom never worried about what would make me happy.”
“Yeah but then I told you I’m wanted by some shady organization and am prepared to die in an armed standoff, and you’ve been eerily even-keeled about that,” James says. “Maybe I’m fuckin’ nuts but it still seems to me like that’s an odd reaction.”
I set it in my hometown and also set it in the year 2002 or so (texting is new, she sends emails from the library) and it’s a platonic friendship fic of Angie Martinelli and Bucky. Like… what? Why? Well. We’re not quite sure what my brain was doing.
The unforgivably unfortunate thing is that I inexplicably wrote it in present tense. WTF. Way to go. Bonus: James fosters kittens who need bottle-feeding. There’s a box of kittens in this story. In my head, it’s called Box Of Kittens.
Like, thanks, Winter, for holding off until like two months late and then suddenly shitting all over me and my family. My baby sister left midday yesterday for a 2-day drive out Midwest to visit in-laws, and she and her husband and baby had to white-knuckle it through four inches of slush in Indiana; meanwhile my older sister and her husband and two dogs and three kids left first thing this morning and had to deal with the tail-end of the same huge storm system crapping freezing dribbles on them and slowing them enough that they got stuck in DC rush hour traffic enroute to their Georgia home. We hit bad snow about 3 hours into the 5-hour drive and it was real bad for a bit there. And it’s going to be 45 and raining tomorrow.
WTF anyway. I spent the drive first reading the gift fic I got in the first fic exchange I ever did, which was an adorable and elaborate bit of… I’d describe it as earnest sweetness. I’ll have to go back and reread it tomorrow and comment more intelligently– I just reblogged the post with the link, and it’s really delightful. The formatting was a bit messed up on my e-reader though, so I look forward to giving it another readthrough in a proper browser.
Then I read the literal actual novel I wrote while trying to come up with the fic I eventually wrote for my part of the exchange. I seriously wrote 50k of an AU that didn’t even have the correct pairings in it. I got off on the wrong footing, stumbled around, hit a tangent and started going, and couldn’t tear myself away even when I realized it was utterly unsuitable. And rereading it…
I could file the serial numbers off this one and do an original novel, like I’d been considering for literally years. Nothing else I’ve ever done would really work; all my epics are too based in canon of whatever thing I’m working off of to work. But this one was an AU enough that I could actually just shift everything about six inches to the left and be fine. It’s really tempting.
It’d probably be 100k long or more by the time I was done, but– I mean– why not?
Free sample:
“How long did it take you to nerve yourself up to come into my diner?” Angie asks.
“I staked the place out,” James says, “and watched for about three weeks, and decided out of all the employees you were the most likely to be nice to me.”
“Really,” Angie says. “How’d you figure?”
He shrugs. “Watched,” he says. “I started out by staking out the burger place.”
The only other restaurant in town. There was a pizzeria in the plaza by the post office too, but they didn’t do sit-down service. The burger place was only recently year-round, and was mostly staffed by high school kids and recent graduates. They seemed to make most of their hiring decisions based on the candidate’s softball ability, so the employees had a definite… demographic.
“I can see how that didn’t work out,” Angie says.
“Also I watched a kid pick his nose and then assemble a burger with his bare hands,” James says, “so that pretty much ended that experiment.”
“Are you good at stakeouts?” Angie asks.
“I specialized as a sniper,” James says. “I can sit motionless and watch just about anything for as long as you need me to.”
“That sounds like a good life skill,” Angie says. She has her pancakes syruped to her liking, so she starts to eat them. “Holy shit these are good!” He’s managed to get almost a crust on the outsides, without making them rubbery.
He shoots her a grin. “The recipe from the book, man,” he says. “I read the notes section though.”
“It has literally never crossed my mind to read the notes section,” she says. There’s always a how-to section at the beginning and it goes on and on about the fundamental underpinnings of whatever the food is, but Angie has never actually read the notes section of a recipe book ever.
“That’s because your mother taught you how to cook because it is something a human needs to know how to do,” James says. He flips a pancake a little violently. “Unless you want to doom your son to mess hall chow or force him to find a woman, apparently.”
“Could Steve cook?” Angie asks.
James snorts. “No,” he admits. “See, it was doomed.”
“Did you guys manage to actually date, or did you mostly just–” Angie stops, because it’s kind of a mean question actually.
James scrapes the pan, then flips a pancake. “No,” he says. “We kind of– mutually pined for years, experimented a little, and then we slept together once and I felt like I had to tell my mom and she put her foot down. Said it was okay for Stevie to be gay because he had the strength of character for it, but not me.”
“Wait, what?” Angie hasn’t heard this one.
James’s mouth twists bitterly. “Yeah,” he says. He turns the pan off, and brings a plate over with a serving for himself. He sits down at the less-cluttered end of the table and cuts up pancakes with his fork. “Her basic point was that Steve was already super-weird and would be fine no matter what he did, and she’d always kind of figured he was gay, but me? I was too normal, I’d need to live a normal life, I’d never be happy in that lifestyle.”
“That’s super fucked-up,” Angie says.
“She meant it kindly, I’m sure,” James says, and pours syrup onto his plate. He has a sweet tooth, she’s noticed, and he prefers his pancakes really drenched, but he’s being sparing.
“I got another thing of syrup,” Angie says. “Use as much as you want.”
He gives her a flash of a sweet smile, and goes back and adds more. “Not tryin’ to eat you outta house and home,” he says.
“I have food,” she says. “Food is cheap around here. I ain’t worried. What I’m worried about is your damn mother. That’s maybe the meanest thing I ever heard.”
James shrugged. “I sure proved her wrong, I guess,” he says, unsmiling now. “Didn’t matter what kind of life I led, I’d never be happy anyway.”
“I barely know you,” Angie says, “and I met you at what’s probably a real bad time, but I gotta say that’s the least fair assessment of anybody I’ve possibly ever heard. You’re the kind of person who could find happiness living in a goddamn storm sewer, as long as you had somebody to take care of.”
He stares at her. “That’s a weird thing to say,” he says, frowning.
“Is it not true?” she asks, gesturing around the room. “You show up in the middle of goddamn nowhere and like the first thing you do is adopt a literal box of helpless kittens, and the second thing you do is make friends with this weird little lost soul and become her sworn protector just because she smiled at you when you were scared.”
“You’re not–” he says, frowning.
“Sworn protector!” she says, throwing up a hand. “Even now! You won’t even let her talk shit about herself! And you like it here, even though all you do here is sleep on the floor and hurt yourself and work, and sometimes get fed.”
“Says the woman whose response to a freak coming into her diner and having a panic attack over nothing was to sit him down and devise a method of communicating with him so you could feed him,” James shoots back.
“Feeding people is my job,” Angie says. “You would not believe the shit that I see in that place, you weren’t even the weirdest thing that shift. But we weren’t talking about me. My mom never worried about what would make me happy.”
“Yeah but then I told you I’m wanted by some shady organization and am prepared to die in an armed standoff, and you’ve been eerily even-keeled about that,” James says. “Maybe I’m fuckin’ nuts but it still seems to me like that’s an odd reaction.”
I set it in my hometown and also set it in the year 2002 or so (texting is new, she sends emails from the library) and it’s a platonic friendship fic of Angie Martinelli and Bucky. Like… what? Why? Well. We’re not quite sure what my brain was doing.
The unforgivably unfortunate thing is that I inexplicably wrote it in present tense. WTF. Way to go. Bonus: James fosters kittens who need bottle-feeding. There’s a box of kittens in this story. In my head, it’s called Box Of Kittens.
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no subject
Date: 2015-12-29 10:07 pm (UTC)After you ditch the present tense.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-30 12:57 am (UTC)I KNOW RIGHT. I write hundreds of thousands of words a year and always in past tense 3rd per POV, like, without even noticing, and this one-- I think I had been writing another sort of experimental scrap or something, and it hadn't worked, and it had been in present tense because it was supposed to be weird, and i just got stuck.
But it's SO not like me! And I was really annoyed because once I was in it I felt like I couldn't switch. And now it's going to be a bunch extra work.
But. I once rewrote a 250,000-word novel from 3rd person to 1st and back again, just to break myself out of head-hopping POVs, so-- it's not like changing a verb tense is really all that much work. Since I have to rework other stuff.
BUT STILL. Wahh.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-29 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 04:11 pm (UTC)I look at it occasionally. In retrospect i don't think this excerpt is the best part of it.
I'll work on it again pretty soon. I liked it a lot.
My problem is that it's structured like a romance novel but the solid rock foundation of it is that Angie's a lesbian and James is bi but too traumatized to fuck, and there's no possible romance there. So what genre is that, huh? I have to Adventure-ify it, I guess? Unless I just leave it fanfic, because you don't need a genre for that...
no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 04:20 pm (UTC)I think it's queer-gen? And there are enough queer publishers around that if you wanna scrub it off into original fic, that should certainly work. I know interlude press takes queer gen stuff if you're interested in that.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 05:53 pm (UTC)I have a vague notion of just self-pubbing a few things on Amazon, seeing if that scratches any itches, and then starting to look at real publishers. That sort of thing used to be considered the Kiss of Death but I think the market has kind of grown up since then. Because I know that if i can overcome the huge hurdle of finishing and editing a book, it'll be worthless if I can't then overcome the hurdle of shopping for an agent or submitting directly to publishers, so I figure i'll just-- start out self-contained and try to branch out from there.
If, of course, i can ever finish a fucking book, LOLLLLLsob.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 06:52 pm (UTC)If, of course, i can ever finish a fucking book
♥ Here's hoping; your writing is stunning and eminently re-readable.