#seriously with how obsessed tumblr is over john mulaney

[healingunscripted]

Day 17: I am so grateful for this goofy man. This is James Acaster, he has a four part series on Netflix, you need to go watch it. Now. Seriously, he's clean, he's funny, and he's got some great material on oven mitts.

[annakie]

Finishing the Fic

Exactly five years ago yesterday, I started writing a fic.

It’s still not done.

I really want to change that.

So back when Thrilling Adventure Hour was deeply encompassing nearly my entire being of fandom, I had an idea for a fic, and @shannondapper and I had a very long conversation planning this fic out.  It’s a Sparks Nevada fic full of adventure and angst, taking place after Custard’s Last Stand but before the Crisis on Infinite Marses episodes.

And I actually started writing it!

And over the next few months I wrote like 25k words (70 pages!!) of this fic and was like, halfway done with it.

Like almost all fic I write, it’s canon-compliant.  So things were going real well until six words spoken in canon really threw off my plans for this fic.

Those words were “And I love you... MY BUDDY!”

Well, shit.  What does that mean?  Is Ginny actually a Jupiter Spy?  And if so, did she know the entire time?  Is she evil?  Does she actually love Sparks? How am I gonna write this fic not knowing if one of the major characters in this fic is who she says she is or not, not knowing IF she knew and WHAT she now knows?  My favorite chapters in this fic are written from her perspective, how am I going to keep this fic canon if I didn’t know what canon even IS.

That episode was recorded on April 11, 2015.  I was in the audience for it.

Of course, that was the last episode that was recorded until August 2015.  I wasn’t there for that.  

I felt like any ability I had to actually write this fic and stay canon-compliant was at a dead halt. I just... gave up on writing until we KNEW.

In October, when I worked the TAH booth at NYCC I tried to pry a little info out of Blacker, but as expected, he held his cards close to his chest about it.  So few episodes were made that I didn’t feel like I had enough information about Ginny and her motives until December 2016 when Still Alive came out.  And by then, I had finally come up with my own plan on how to handle Ginny.  And I think it works.  SO I did some moderate revisions on her chapters then.

And then just... left it alone for another year or so, occasionally dragging it out to tinker with it.  In like 2018 I wrote almost an entire chapter, really loving the first half, and kind of getting stuck in the second half.  And then.. again, I’ve pulled it out for editing a time or two, but am really stuck on how to end this one chapter.

I’ve thought a few times of just... publishing what I’ve got (ten chapters that I think are pretty good!) but I’ve always been wary of needing to fix something that happened in an earlier chapter later, and don’t want to have to write around something I later felt like was a mistake.

And then a few months ago I saw a post here on tumblr that I loved that said “Hey, if you’re stuck at some part in a thing you’re writing, just like uh, skip over it?  Go write something else in the project, skip to a part you really DO want to write, and come back to the part you’re stuck on later.  It will probably have worked itself out by then.”

Shit, that’s RIGHT.  I’m gonna do that as soon as I get back to writing my big Sparks fic! I told myself

(John Mulaney voice) AND THEN I DIDN’T.

Anyway, the point is, I’m gonna.

I’m gonna just try and do 500 words a day as long as Shelter In Place lasts, and see what happens.  Even if they’re bad words.  Let’s see how it goes.

Let’s see if there’s even anyone existence who WANTS to read 50,000 words of a mostly slumbering fandom (but hey, maybe if they keep doing TAH Live it won’t be so slumbering anymore!)  Even if nobody does, I’m gonna write it for me, so I can say I actually finished something!

The worst thing is, there are certain plot points and things I knew were gonna happen and things I set up in the fic that I seriously have no fucking clue anymore how I was going to finish off or resolve.  I knew I HAD plans for those things, but did I write them down?  NOPE.

I did, however, save a very long chatlog between Shannon and I where we hammered out a lot of ideas, even if I changed a lot in the actual execution of the fic, and a chapter outline.  That... helps.  But now I definitely want to finish before posting a damn thing to make sure it all actually comes together.

My knowledge of canon went from probably being one of, if not THE most knowledgeable person outside of the Bens about Sparks canon (which will happen when you relisten to a thing obsessively and then write basically every wiki entry on a thing on the semi-official wiki) to... a little fuzzy.  I did a relisten about a year ago, maybe I need to do that again.

Anyway, if you are a TAH fan, I hope when I finally get around to you, that you may want to actually read it, and that you like it, but hey, I know it’s a Lot and maybe you won’t, and that’s OK.