#a couple of snippets really - I'll probably build off of this later

[nocentis]

Reforged┆x791

╳┆The ground beneath them groaned, preceding its shift by mere moments. He prepared to leap from one platform to the next, but his borrowed attire got the better of him and he sorely undershot the landing. The ledge scraped him from shin to chest on his downward plummet, arms just barely catching the platform before he managed to sink toward oblivion.

As he began dragging himself toward safety, fighting the rotation of the still-turning maze, he felt someone grab his wrist and hoist him to relative safety.

“Stay on yer feet,” Gajeel snapped, irritation laden in both face and voice, “If yer gonna be embarrassing, do it away from me.”

“Right,” he agreed, just barely managing to suppress his mortification. Only the first event and he was already making a mess of things. Not using his own magic was going to be even more of a challenge than he'd already anticipated.

Blasted pants. It’s hard to believe there is any alternate version of himself that would wear these gravity defying monstrosities.

Belatedly, he tossed out an underbreath, "Appreciate it," as they turned to catch up with the others, who had taken the shifting map into stride and carried on without missing a beat.

Gajeel grumbled back, "Don't mention it."

╳┆As the third day's events began and the stadium came abuzz, he found his window to slip away unnoticed. The past few nights of aimless roaming about, catching whispers of that sour presence on the wind, have yet to bear fruit. All that time wasted was compounding; it made his bones itch. He hadn't attended these games on holiday — hadn't broken the rules and risked Fairy Tail's elimination just to suffer a humiliating forfeit and then sulk in the stands. No, there was something evil lurking about, and he fully intended to find it.

"They went that way."

Despite his prickly countenance, Gajeel seemed adept at sneaking about. Jellal barely heard him approach before he'd issued his offhand comment, pointing in the opposite direction in which Jellal originally intended to go.

Just as he opened his mouth to respond, Gajeel cut him off to explain, "They stink."

Jellal nodded, remembering the reaction he received upon his last expression of gratitude, and shifted his stride accordingly. "Tell me how the day goes."

"Nah," Gajeel called behind him, "I ain't yer fuckin' parrot."

[tlbodine]

Stuck? Try junebugging.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but we're 5 days into nanowrimo so maybe this will be helpful.

Do you want the safety and surety of knowing what happens next in your story but can't stick to an outline? Does knowing in advance what will happen suck the joy out of discovery writing? Do you try to wing it through plots but get tangled in plot holes or have a story that runs out of steam because you can't figure out what went wrong? Are you at your most creative when you have a little bit of guidance? Do you tend to under-write? Do you get ideas in your head for random scenes and snippets that drop from the sky without context?

If any of these apply to you, junebugging a draft might be for you!

What Is Junebugging?

Since you're on Tumblr, you might already be familiar with the concept of junebugging as it relates to cleaning. If not -- I think the idea was first introduced to me by @jumpingjacktrash.

The basic idea is that you tackle cleaning by way of controlled chaos. You pick a specific area you want to focus on, like your kitchen sink, and then wander off to deal with other things as they occur to you, but always returning back to that area. You end up cleaning a little bit at a time in an order that may not make sense to an outsider but which keeps you from getting overwhelmed and discouraged.

How Does Junebugging Work in Writing?

OK, so that's great, but how does this work with writing? Well. In my case, the general idea is to jump between writing linearly, outlining, and writing out of order. It usually looks something like:

Start free-writing a scene, feeling my way through it and enjoying the discovery process.

Thinking, ok, now I have this scene, did anything need to happen to lead up to it? Do I need to go back and add some foreshadowing? Does this scene set anything up that needs to be paid off? And then jump forward/back to make those adjustments.

I'll usually have a bunch of disconnected ideas of ideas that have popped into my head, so I'll write those down in a list somewhere and then try to figure out what goes in between them and what order it goes in.

I'll write what I call "micro-scenes" which is where I'll just sketch out a few essential elements of what's going on without worrying too much about details, description, etc. -- just he did this, she said that, the setting was this, real bare-bones script. Then I can come back through and flesh out each of those microscenes into an actual scene later.

Got a story that has a complex structure? No problem. Write through each storyline one at a time and then chop them up and weave them together afterward. Write all the B plot scenes first then come back through to do A plot and C plot. Move the pieces around like legos. No one ever has to know.

This method works for me because I can't "decide" story elements in advance. I have never been able to just sit down and "figure out" what happens in a story beyond a couple steps ahead -- I have to discovery-write my way forward. But at the same time, that gets really daunting. So I zoom forward with micro-scenes, roughing out the beats in the most bare-bones way possible, then when I run out of clear vision for what happens next I backtrack, flesh out those scenes, build in connective tissue, etc. and by then I will probably find more inspiration to jump forward.

It's basically folding drafting, outlining, and revising all together into a single phase of writing, which is chaotic and goes against everything people teach you, but if it works? then it fuckin works.

Anyway, sorry for the jumbled-up post, I'm dashing this off quickly while I heat up a pizza and I'm about to dive back into my WIP -- but I hope this was a little helpful. If nothing else, take this as my blanket permission that it's 100% OK to jump around, write out of order, write messy, outline sometimes, pants sometimes, and do whatever else it takes just to get through the story. You've got this. Good luck.

[littlesparklight]

I'm indulging with an OT3 Mermay AU I'll post later, but I'll either want to get further or finish before I start to post. So, for now, call this an intro snippet?

"Is that a dolphin?"

Turning around to where Helen was looking off to the right, Menelaos squinted. Something large had ended up beached along the surf.

"It's too long and… snakey? for a dolphin, isn't it? A large squid?"

Not that he'd heard of dead giant squid washing up on beaches in the Mediterranean.

"Let's have a look," Helen proclaimed and immediately went to pick her way down the rocks.

Groaning, Menelaos still followed his wife, though what they could even do, he didn't know. If it was a stranded dolphin - which he still doubted - they might be able to get it out deep enough themselves, otherwise they'd need to go back and make a call. If it wasn't… he wasn't sure what else it could be.

"Oarfish?" Menelaos called after Helen, who threw a hand up and he chuckled - he could very easily imagine her scoff.

"There are no oarfish or giant squid in these waters!" she called, exasperated. "Swordfish, maybe?"

Maybe. It might be about the right size for that, and maybe the build was right. It still looked too… sinuous, but that might just be the distance. And if it was a swordfish, it'd already be dead. Which would make it all the easier for them, since then they could just leave it behind, compared to a living dolphin that might yet be saved with a bit of effort and attention.

"Probably--- Helen?" Menelaos called, surprised when she slowed to a stop some distance away from the fish. "What--- is it."

Menelaos, having caught up, stopped as well, the sand and gravel shifting with a soft, sliding crunch under his unsteady weight.

It wasn't a swordfish.

Or an oarfish or a small giant squid, either, for that matter. In fact, either of those two options would have made more sense, been more realistic, than what was laying in the red-tinted surf, the sand below washed clean of the blood still pumping out of a long gash down the side of that long, sinuous tail they'd noted earlier with every breaking wave.

"Are you seeing this?" Helen asked, her voice no more than a whisper.

Her hand closed about his, clutching hard and even her rather short nails digging into his flesh. Menelaos found no voice to protest the pinching pain, busy gaping, instead. This couldn't be right. He was sure--- But blinking changed nothing; the figure a couple meters away was still there. Breathing, certainly, and it wasn't that it was impossible to make a puppet or animatronic as lifelike as what they were looking at, Menelaos was sure, but the skin that gleamed under the sun was not plastic, nor silicone. The longer they stood there, the more, not less, real the thing looked.

"If you mean, am I seeing a mermaid? Then yes."

It - she? - was turned away from them, so all they were currently seeing was a wet, sand-encrusted back with some rather fine musculature and long, long curls that were pale in the sun, but might have been some shade of pale brown and not dark blonde. There were also a small pair of curving horns, like cow horns, perhaps, and it almost seemed familiar, but he couldn't quite decide why. If the mermaid had been laying lower in the the water, she might have looked like an unconscious human at first blush, the transition between human torso and fish-like tail hidden among the swell.

But the mermaid was lying high up, the waves washing up barely wetting her hips at the highest. There was no denying the gleam of scattered scales about the hips that clustered into fully covering everything, no denying the long, long tail, muscular but sleek, the scales in shimmering blue-greens and a twisting, delicate pattern of pearlescent white. It didn't really look like any fish tail Menelaos had ever seen - more snake-like, like he'd first thought, than fish-like, despite the very much fish-like scales and fins.

And then there was the wound snaking itself partway down the tail, revealing pink flesh underneath instead of a fish's white meat. Boat propeller, probably. A wound like any poor dolphin might be struck by, but this was no dolphin, and the mundanity of the injury compared to what was injured almost choked a laugh out of him.

"We have to do something," Helen proclaimed, a bare glance his way before she surged forward.

"Helen, wait!"

Menelaos let himself be pulled along, however. What were they supposed to do? Leave? Let someone else find the… the mermaid? Make an emergency call? Laughable. He just wasn't sure what they were going to, or could even, do, if they didn't do any of those things.

"Here, help me---"

Helen had barely brushed a surprisingly strong-looking shoulder when the mermaid - merman, rather - surged up, twisting away from them as he twisted around, shaking and pale-faced. He was flat as a board, if sleekly so, and had an Adam's apple, so definitely male. Even if, as Menelaos glanced down with embarrassing quickness while reflexively steadying Helen so she didn't fall on her ass, the merman was also flat below. But as fish-like as he was below the hips, maybe he just didn't---

Menelaos shook his head, ashamed and awkward. Knelt down on reflex and held his hand out.

"You need help," he said, keeping his voice soft and even.

Because that much was clear. The wound was still bleeding, if only sluggishly, and at this point that was probably a cause for alarm rather than relief; it was no small wound, and the merman was clearly struggling holding himself up. Maybe this would be a very short-lived rescue, but that frankly made the idea of standing up and leaving even less attractive. They couldn't just walk away.

"We will help you," Helen insisted quietly, her voice dipping into a deep, soothing hum. "If you let us."