#ADVENTURES IN FANFIC

[mittensmorgul]

There’s another post going around about this, but tumblr won’t let me reblog it but...

When I read a story written by a human being, I’m not just reading it because I want to read a coffee shop AU with a specific plot description. I’m reading it because it’s making a connection to another human storyteller and seeing a piece of them carved into the words. Storytelling is a human act of sharing joy, angst, tension, resolution, satisfaction. It’s an act of love.

Writing and reading a story isn’t just an act of creation and consumption. I hate that commercialism and AI are reducing it to that sort of transaction. Like oh, you need words on this subject and that’s the end of it. Like what we really needed was just a vending machine we can push buttons on to get a fix, as if the human creating the story wasn’t a factor. That the author’s life experience and views and feelings haven’t infused the words with their own unique touches.

I’ve read hundreds of coffee shop AU’s over the years (and thousands of fics in general). I’ve seen many similar tropes reused across stories, and just like an AI would, I’ve learned things about writing them that I will always carry with me. But unlike an AI, a human author is not just the sum total of coffee shop AU’s we’ve consumed. Even if we used the same prompt, the same sets of tropes, the same characters. I will always choose the human-crafted story over the computer generated one.

Because again, I’m not just looking for a very specific fix via a series of words. I’m looking for a human connection through story.

Unlike an AI, I have BEEN to a coffee shop. I’ve had experiences in coffee shops. I’ve had funny little meet-cutes with people. I’ve accidentally spilled coffee on myself and knocked heads with someone as we both rushed to wipe it up. I know what it FEELS like. The machine doesn’t.

I’ve also read millions of things that aren’t fanfic, or coffee shop AU’s. I’ve experienced things OTHER than going to coffee shops and having meet-cutes. And I know what all those things feel like when processed through my personal human lens of experience, which is different from every other personal human lens of experience.

All the machine can do is spit out what it THINKS a human experience is, and I honestly don’t care about that at all. Fic is not a “product” to be “generated.” It’s an art form that connects us to other people who share the same love of a thing that we do.

People who, even when all writing the same characters in the same setting to the exact same prompt, will all add something or have a viewpoint about something or bring a completely different personality and life experience to the story that no one else on the planet could. That’s what I’m actually reading.

[quillquiver]

Happy 2nd anniversary to those two old guys from supernatural [[ao3]]

Their room is a mess.

It’s not their fault; though they’re largely retired, Claire and Kaia needed backup on a nearby mystery monster situation. So Cas’d cracked open the books and Dean had packed a duffle and when they’d stopped hearing from the kids, they’d gone in after them. ’Course, by the time they’d gotten back they’d pretty much just shed their viscera-covered clothing and dropped into bed.

Bright winter sun streams in through the window, causing Dean to groan and Cas to burrow further into his pillow. The duffle has been thrown at the closet door, the thing busted open and swollen with weaponry. Cas’s angel blade thigh holster hangs off the bottom-right bed post and Dean’s gun sits atop the dresser. The room smells like sewage and monster guts, which isn’t exactly ideal for a second wedding anniversary, but Dean figures they’ve done worse; last year, Jack had been so sick they’d spent the day trying to stop his puking. 

But Jack is with Sam and Eileen today, and after a shower and a change of sheets, Operation: Oops We Did It Again can finally commence. Starting, hopefully, with a vat of coffee and Dean getting fucked silly as many times as they can swing it. 

“Cas,” he whines, eyes closed. He shakes his shoulder. “Coffee.”

“You do it,” Cas says.

“Did it last time.”

Cas slaps at Dean’s hands. “M’gonna burn it.”

“S’automatic, you loser.”

“Can’t.” He rolls over. Tucking his face into the juncture of Dean’s neck, Cas applies half-asleep kisses everywhere he can reach, mumbling nonsense about how good and strong Dean is, how he’s the best provider and so manly and wouldn’t he prefer to make the coffee?

Dean stumbles out of bed grumbling.

Cas smiles. “I love you,” he murmurs, eyes still closed. 

Yeah, Dean bets he does.

By the time he comes back with two mugs and his present under his arm, Cas has moved from his side of the bed to Dean’s, his head face-down in Dean’s pillow. Dean still has no idea how he manages to breathe like that. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. C’mon.”

Cas groans.

“Cas, seriously. There’s shit all over the room, I need you to grab this.”

He rises from the bed like a zombie from the grave, sitting up and offering his hands. As soon as the mug is cupped between his palms he sighs. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

“Kiss.”

Dean grins. Pecks his mouth. “We’re so nasty,” he says. “Feel like I need to go through a human car wash.”

“Mm.” His blue eyes are only barely open. “Made it though.”

“Yeah by the skin of our teeth.” Dean frowns at his mug. “Gettin’ old.”

“For fighting, maybe. For everything else...” Cas shrugs. Smiles. “I think you deserve a real retirement.”

Dean purses his lips. They haven’t really talked about going whole hog on their apple pie life yet, and it’s not something he really wants to think about; if his family’s in trouble, he’s just supposed to sit around with his thumb up his ass? He’d never leave Jack, how could he leave Claire and Kaia?

“We don’t have to decide right now,” Cas says, clearly more awake. He shrugs. “It might be something to think about. I don’t like it, but Sam and Eileen’s network has been doing great things. And I think we scared Claire.”

“Yeah,” Dean chews his lip, distracted. “Maybe.”

“...Is that for me?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah.” Smiling, again, Dean takes the badly-wrapped package from under his arm and offers it. “It’s, uh, nothin’, y’know. Just... yeah. Happy anniversary.”

Cas kisses him, soft and sweet. “What is it?”

“You have to open it, you dork.”

“Alright, well...” Cas stretches and reaches under the bed, bringing up a present of his own. “Happy anniversary to you, too.”

Dean grins. “Open mine first.”

Cas’s gift is a riotously coloured cotton sweatshirt and short set. The thing looks like it’s been pulled right out of the 90s, soft and bright and Cas smiles so big his gums show. “I’m going to wear it once I’ve showered.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to.” He leans in for another kiss, grinning when Dean chases as he pulls away. “Open yours.”

Dean shakes his head, moving to press soft, wet kisses across Cas’s top lip. “Wanna make it last.”

Cas gives as good as he gets, shuffling until he’s practically in Dean’s lap. Their empty mugs have gotten lost in the dirty sheets somewhere, hands holding and squeezing and grabbing as the kiss deepens to something sexy and slow. Cas has this way this way of kissing that makes it feel like the main event. “Trust me,” he breathes. “We’re going to want what’s in there for the next part.”

“The shower?” Dean teases, leaning in again.

Cas nips his bottom lip. “The sex.”

Dean tears into the wrapping paper. 

“Oh hell yeah.”

Sheets. 

“Egyptian cotton,” Cas grins. “500 thread count.”

“Mm, talk dirty to me.”

“Single-ply,” he says lowly. “Hand-dyed.”

“Oh baby.”

They beam at each other. 

“Thanks, man,” Dean says. “I love ’em.”

“That’s only part of your gift,” he explains matter-of-factly. “I also plan to fuck you on those sheets. And to have pizza delivered later.”

“Hot.”

They make-out for longer than they probably should given how gross they are, until Cas is trying to hump him like some over-eager teenager and Dean is rapidly forgetting why they shouldn’t just add to the mess (the answer: that would be disgusting). “Sweetheart, we gotta—we should—”

“What if we just, ah, like this. Then later—”

Dean shakes his head. “Want it to last. I want—”

“I can do that. I can—fuck—”

“Cas, if you come without fucking me I’m gonna be pissed.”

Cas wrenches away, frustrated. “Then just let me—”

“Woah,” Dean interrupts. “What’s the rush? Sweetheart, hey. Castiel.” But Cas refuses to meet his eyes. Dean cups his face. Cas grips his wrists. “Talk to me.”

“I love you,” he blurts out.

Dean frowns. “Yeah, I love you, too.”

“I love you so much,” Cas says, like it’s a confession. Like it’s being ripped out of him. “I’m here. We’re married. We almost died. And I just—Dean, I don’t know—There’s something wrong with me, I—”

Dean’s eyes soften. “Nah, there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Sorry,” Cas croaks, squeezing his eyes shut as if to stop himself from crying. “I want you. I-I want—So I don’t understand why I’m—I was fine. I’m fine.”

“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “You are.” His dirty fingers thumb away tear tracks from the apple of Cas’s cheek. “Look, sometimes... we think we’re fine but we’re overwhelmed, y’know? S’okay.”

“I wanted to take care of you today.”

“Who says the day’s over?” Dean asks. “We’re gonna go take a nice long shower and I’m gonna wash your hair, and then I’m gonna go order like 40 pizzas and choose a movie, ’cause you owe me for coffee this morning. Then we’ll shove everything in the wash, and change the sheets, and you’re gonna fuck me so good I’ll feel it for the rest of the week.” Cas huffs a laugh. Dean smiles. “Darlin’,” he murmurs. “We’ll talk about hunting.”

Cas bites his lip. “I don’t want to die,” he breathes. “I only just got you back.”

The smallness of his voice hangs in the air between them. Dean feels something in him break. “...Yeah,” he swallows thickly. “I know.”

“But I don’t want to leave Claire if she needs help,” Cas argues with himself. “And you love hunting, I don’t want—”

“Alright well, first of all I don’t love hunting.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Dean promises. “We always do.” They’re quiet as he rubs at the cut of Cas’s jaw, a smile teasing at the corner of his mouth. “Not to change the subject or anything,” he eventually says. “But that was some serious real adult shit right there.” Cas rolls his red-rimmed eyes. Dean puffs out his chest. “C’mon, you gonna tell me I didn’t just make that conversation my bitch? I win at relationships, man.”

Despite the smile creeping across his face, Cas shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Whatever, I’m totally winning.”

Cas squints. “You routinely put things away without asking where they go. And then you forget about them, like a squirrel.”

“Please, you leave your shit all over the place. What am I supposed to do? Just walk right on by?”

“Yes! You...” Cas trails off, eyeing Dean’s shit-eating grin with a grimace. “Fine. Yes. Thank you. You’re very good at relationships.”

“Some would even say...” Dean prompts.

“They’d be wrong,” Cas says simply. “If the sample size is the rest of our lives, there’s no way to tell you’ve won yet.” A shrug. “And as we aren’t even through the whole day today, the jury still seems to be out on that, too. Sorry.” He doesn’t sound sorry. 

Dean hums. “So what you’re saying is, we should get in the shower to figure out who’s better.”

“As a start, yes.”

“Cool.”

Dean’s halfway to the bathroom when he suddenly pulled into a hug. Cas steps in and around until they’re pressed chest to chest, clinging to him in a way that would have broken bones if he was still an angel. He pulls away with a kiss to Dean’s closed mouth. “Thank you,” he says emphatically. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but I’ll never stop being thankful for it.”

A blush explodes across the bridge of Dean’s nose. “That’s cheating.”

“I meant it.”

Dean looks at him, helpless. “Cas.”

Cas stares his fill until he’s apparently done, nodding to himself before leading Dean, by the hand, into the bathroom. “Come.”

Dean does, for the record.

[hazardous-arcadia]

Making Roy delivery a eulogy for the guy that tried to kill him and it’s taking forever to write because there’s no way to really adequately convey the massive amount of sarcasm he’s heroically with-holding.

[lyntergalactic]

Can I hear more about #5 oops rex and ahsoka time travel (star wars: the clone wars)? I love Force shenanigans!

of course!

the basic premise is rex and ahsoka, a couple of years after o66, are investigating some temple or relic or another when they suddenly find themselves back in the clone wars. early clone wars. and unlike most time travel fics they're not suddenly in their younger bodies so everyone who sees ahsoka knows that something happened.

it's a fun and angsty little fic because the two of them feel like they have no choice but to intervene and try and stop the empire before it rises. but that requires some very fast, very clever thinking, and also getting anakin on their side against the chancellor which they know will be hard.

plus there's all kinds of things that the audience knows that they don't at that point. like, for example, what happened to anakin and obi-wan post o66. so anything they tell past!anakin and obi-wan is bound to be slightly off.

[ap-trash-compactor]

I'm lazy but I want to use some Cheunh in fic so I'm giving Vulgar a go. I've used it before and had plenty of fun with it but that was basically using it to do something simple like 'make a fake French language.' It's really easy to find grammatical rules, sample words, and lists of realistic sounds already formatted in IPA for a language that exists that you just want to riff on.

I don't got none of that shit for this fake space language that Timmy has only given us like two sentences of, ever.

I used anthean's Faking Cheunh for Fun and Profit as a handy guide to some of the stuff we knew about Chenuh as of Feb 2019, and then started combing wookiepedia for a bit more detail without having to crack the books open. I'm tentatively using these as the list of vowels and consonants I'm feeding into Vulgar:

i iː o uː aː ɒ ɪ ei eu a ɛi

ʤ ʧ ʃ s pʰ p θ m ɱ n v kʰ k ɦ ɻ r ɾ β v f l ɫ ɡ ɥ j tʰ t

But I'm a little paralyzed on how to try and feed what very little we might reasonably guess about grammar into the machine.

ah well! it's not like this has stakes. i think i am going to leap, then look, now.

[heartensoul]

YES. GOD.

Me, staring at my own fanfiction:  man, I wish this would update.

[mebssann]

Hair routine and rituals

[adageyer]

boy do i love te

again, ethically sourced from tumblr

[myheartisstone]

LMAO saw this on instagram and had to bring it back

[mittensmorgul]

YES. THIS.

Supernatural was great at leaving us fanfiction gaps and understanding that the audience only saw about 42 minutes a week, about 17 hours a YEAR of these guys lives. they deliberately left us spaces to remember the 364 days a year of their lives that we weren't shown. They don't stop existing in those gaps to pick up the story again right where it left off. A good canon for transformative works is one that references the gaps without trying to fill them in for us. THOSE are the spaces where fanfic can truly flourish.

writing out of spite to fix canon atrocities will only get you so far with fanfic. a robust fanfic economy flourishes in the spaces between The Plot.

John Rogers, co-creator + executive producer: "Look, if we told you Eliot's entire timeline or Nate's entire timeline, you wouldn’t be able to have then have enough flexibility to fold that timeline in with Supernatural in your fanfics because they'd be no space for that. The space we leave is the space for you to write your slash! That's super important for us to do! We do that for you, people! The fans appreciate the empty space we leave so you can write your Buffy, Supernatural, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Leverage crossovers."

Geoffrey Thorne, co-producer + writer of this episode: "But don't do any Doctor Who ones because…"

John: "You're writing those."

Geoffrey: "Just don't do it."

Chris Downey, co-creator + executive producer: "You've staked those out?"

John: "He's staked those out."

— Leverage 10 Podcast: 512 The White Rabbit Job

*Kung Fu Monkey blog: LEVERAGE #205 "The Three Days of the Hunter Job" Post-game (August 24, 2009) for the original "I think fanfic is the sign of a healthy show" short essay

[mittensmorgul]

ive been wanting to reblog all my holiday fics from the last... however many years now, but i've been waiting to hopefully finish this year's holiday fic in time for the holidays... my brain keeps wanting to make it longer and i'm desperately trying to wrangle it into a ficlet lol. i think it's almost done anyway, maybe two or three more scenes... i hope >.>

[quillquiver]

somewhere out there | jonmartin, 2170 words, rated t warning: graphic depiction of past death/murder

It was the slight weight of him, his legs collapsing as if his strings had literally been cut from the inside, head lolling even as Martin cradled the base of his skull. The sickening wet that had followed oozed over Martin’s fingertips. Sticky. Hot. Nobody tells you that no matter how gentle you want to be, it takes strength; up through the space left by his two missing ribs, shoving through soft tissue and into the resilient muscle that is his beating heart. The smell had been cloying and Jon’s breath had gone ragged; a gurgling-wheeze as his arms went slack—

Martin comes to as he always does; impossibly, cradled in those very same arms, his own face slick with tears as he heaves gasping sobs. His fingers dig half moons into whatever part of Jon he can reach—his forearm, this time, and the sharp angle of his hip. It takes a moment to take stock of Jon curled around him; leg thrown over his own hip, free arm slung tightly around his shoulder and hand buried in Martin’s hair. As he does every time this happens, he murmurs a litany of thank yous, as if killing him was something to be grateful for. Martin squeezes his eyes shut in time with his grip of Jon’s body. “M’sorry,” he mumble. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

“I love you,” Jon breathes. “That day and every day since. You did nothing wrong. Martin, look at me. Please.” Jon carefully extricates the arm Martin has held hostage and thumbs at his jaw, catching his eye with a relieved smile. “There you are,” he leans in to brush a kiss to the corner of Martin’s mouth. “That’s it, stay with me. Breathe, love.”

He doesn’t even notice the encroaching fog until it stops, feeling slowly coming back to his numb fingers. Jon’s gaze doesn’t waver, his own hands cupping Martin’s cheeks, thumbs brushing back and forth over the freckled apples of them. Martin presses his palm to the raised line of scar tissue under his sleep shirt. “F-Fuck,” he breathes. He’s going to be sick; nightmares have haunted him almost every night since they arrived here, first at Jon’s bedside for the second time in as many years, and then in their cramped flat. It’s always the same. The same memory. The same moment. The same feeling of lifeblood turning sticky on his hands—

continue on ao3

[hazardous-arcadia]

The current arc I'm writing will pivot to making Ed suffer because he has been Repressing the Horrors and the Horrors are done being Repressed.

[a-midwinter-night-dream-86]

This is a favorite technique of mine! Very professional.

What to do when you don’t like a fic: a step by step guide

Step 1:

[lyntergalactic]

last sentence tag game

tagged by the lovely @qprstobin!!

RULES: Post the last sentence you wrote (fanfic / original / anything) and tag as many people as there are words in the sentence

or, in my case, last three sentences because i am incapable of limiting myself to just one when it's so short.

Jason can give himself all the excuses and explanations in the world, but when it comes down to it, he knows there was only one thing keeping him from talking to Bruce: his pride. And now he'll never get the chance to 'cause he's dead. His dad is dead.

i... don't think i have anyone to tag that hasn't done this already. but consider yourself tagged if you want to do it?

[brightgoat]

JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE PART Ø : STAND FREE

(but let's call the AU 'Standverse')

Transcript:

The universe has been reset! Twice, in fact.

On the flipside, a strange nonsensical purgatory made out of past places and memories, awaken the Stands - now equipped with an independence and self-autonomy that most of them are not used to.

The ones whose emotions, goals and spirits they embody; their Users - are curiously nowhere to be found.

The Stands awaken at the same time, no matter whether they've died before the Separation or not. Every version of every Stand (from parts 1-6 that is).

Each Stand sees their User differently - some with undying loyalty, some with dismay and others with a mix of both.

But most settle on one thing - that they need to bring their Users back and return the universe to how it was. So, some set out on a crusade, while others begin cultivating a plan.

And thus we explore the existential horror of being a Stand!

....... this AU is very silly but just uhh-- bear with me- let me cook-