#I couldn't fit this into the fic I just wrote but spiritually this is going on in the background of that in case you were wondering

[vaguely-concerned]

sometimes I like to imagine julian bringing tennis to post-war cardassia and it ending up a popular passtime there. and this idea fills me with a great sense of peace and happiness.

[zet-sway]

@the-wip-project day 2 prompt

For your current WIP: (do you have many WIPs? I have so many WIPs. So I mean current as of right this moment, the project you’re thinking about right now.) What motivates you to write this specific story? What makes this story special for you? Is there a special twist/trope/setting you want to explore? What got you started on this particular story?

I love this question. Let's talk about my WIPs. In quilting we call these "UFOs" - "UnFinished Objects"

lmao I apologize in advance for this extremely sleepy word vomit

My drafts bin is just an unending ever growing pit of nonsense and I'm so fucking proud of it, in a weird way.

I have drafts going back like 8 years at least. I started using this feature when I was in college cause I could bounce quickly between my laptop and studio PC and again when I got my first smartphone.

I talked about this yesterday but I don't write "stories" really, more like snapshots. When I start something, I usually have a scene or a mood or even a song or color palette in my head that I'm trying to, like, paint with words. I get really hung up on the details.

When I write a first draft of something, it's a god damn mess. I'm sure I'm not the only one but the drafts folder is where I just puke words into my computer in whatever order I feel like. Sometimes a first draft is just a bulleted list of points I want to hit or a scrap of dialogue that I think will fit. My memory hasn't gotten any better over the years so if I have a thought, it's more important to write it down, because I'm almost certain to forget later. My drafts are filled with changing tenses and POVs, re-writes of stuff with zero transitions, ideas changing sometimes mid sentence. I try to roughly separate each entry by which fic I'm trying to write but it gets blurry real fast.

Most recently I'm working on a prompt fill for rosenkow's Spiritual Shrios Summer - the prompt word is "Pray." The premise is:

Night before the ME2 suicide mission, but after the sex

Thane helps Shepard suit up in her armor while praying to Arashu for protection

I have never written a prayer in my life and I got something half decent going but as usual, I wrote the "meat" of this fic and the beginning/end are shit.

One thing I do sometimes is force myself to stop working on something so I can come back to it later with fresh eyes. Sometimes time and distance give me a fresh perspective. But I hate to break my own momentum so it's hard. This prompt is kicking my ass because I really love the idea and I want to get it right. One way or the other I'm going to finish it though.

Some honorable mentions from my drafts:

A whole bunch of unfinished shrios prompts from the good old days of ME3, when I openly encouraged people to leave prompts. I made active attempts to fill 90% of these - I think my success rate was probably like 65-70%. I had a lot of fun, I might finish some of these.

An absolutely cracked angsty smutfic where Shepard is missing Thane after he dies, so she sleeps with some random drell she finds on the citadel when she's drunk, wakes up later with a hangover in a stranger's apartment and then tears herself apart. I wrote everything but the ending, I just couldn't get it to work. I tried like three totally different scenes and jfdslfjsdl this is why sometimes I just skip endings.

A "cutting room floor" scrap from my holiday harbinger fic in 2014 where Thane is methodically removing Shepard's hardsuit before they get busy. I can't bring myself to delete this, I'm really happy with it and want to use it so bad.

Recently I have a bunch of snips from Spiritual Shrios Summer prompts I hope to do

A bunch of shit about my wow character feeling sad and missing someone she cared about. I wrote these in 2017-2018 when I had to remove someone from my life but it was like cutting off a piece of my own heart. We were friends on world of warcraft.

Something pretty dark where I'm sitting on my balcony talking to quite literally no one, trying to figure out if life was worth living. It ends with a disembodied thought asking me "is he really worth your life?" before my lovely husband calls me back inside to sleep. When I wrote this, I was literally not sure there was a reason to be alive. Somehow, with words, I was able to decide that it was. That's some powerful shit right there. I've never shared this with anyone.

And since we're here, I got pinged for a smutfic by another tumblr user today! For the first time in YEARS. I'm really excited and I hope I can do it justice! I love filling prompts. I love writing fanfiction. Even if I don't get any comments I feel like I can rest easy in the knowledge that I'm doing good work for the other thirsty fans out there, and I learned something along the way.