Entry tags:
snowflake challenge, day one
I debated on doing the Snowflake Challenge, mainly because I'm terrible at finishing things that have to be done everyday, as evidenced by my numerous attempts to do ![[personal profile]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=88)
dogdaysofsummer all the way through. In the end, I like the idea behind it, so I decided to go ahead and do it, even though I'm already days behind.
I've also waffled about each fic a little, which I also plan to do with Day 2, where I rec other people's fics.
Day 1
Confidence Men [American Gods; Wednesday, Loki, gen]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fell and I used to joke that I was half of the American Gods fandom all by myself -- for a long time, there were only fifteen or sixteen American Gods fics on the internet, and I'd written seven of them, and I'd directly caused another when I bullied bookofjude into writing me Mad Sweeney/Shadow porn. Happily, things have changed in the last couple years, mainly because of Yuletide: the American Gods page at AO3 currently boasts 58 fics. 51 of those fics were not written by me, and that fills me with joy.
American Gods can be incredibly difficult to write. In short, its about of bunch of shifty drifters who can't settle down because they really don't belong anywhere, so the canon wanders through deliberately nondescript parts of the vast American wasteland without lingering in one place for too long. It doesn't have any familiar touchstones -- no Hogwarts, no Burrow, no flaming Bentley, no Black Pearl, no Swamp -- and that can make things a little weird.
Confidence Men is probably my favorite thing I've ever written. It was self-indulgent in a lot of ways -- I wanted something that explored Wednesday and Loki's working relationship prior to the book, and when I couldn't find it, I wrote it -- but I'm also proud of it, because I had to do a lot of the sort of frontwork you can normally avoid in fanfiction. I also had to create a lot of Loki out of whole cloth, because he spends about three-quarters of the book off camera, which was not the easiest thing I've ever done.
The Next 48 Hours [M*A*S*H; Hawkeye/Trapper]
A couple years back, a meme was going around during the spate of anonymous holiday exchanges where you listed ten things that more or less defined your fics. I ended my list with 'It's all about Sirius, even when it isn't', because it's utterly and pathetically true -- to the point that I eventually broke down and made a tag for it. At the end of the day, most of my HP/MWPP fic is about Sirius, even when he's off camera. It's not intentional. I never plan it that way, it just sort of happens.
The same thing happened here, with Hawkeye Pierce. Only, I did plan it that way. In Yankee Doodle Doctor, Colonel Blake says Hawkeye Pierce is kind of the heartbeat of this place, and it's terribly true. For the first six or seven seasons, the entire camp revolves around Hawkeye and his whims. Things settle down a little after that, mainly because BJ was willing to call Hawkeye on his bullshit where Trapper was not -- in Preventative Medicine, BJ fights with Hawkeye about removing a healthy appendix to meet his own ends, something Hawkeye and Trapper do together in White Gold without a second thought.
This fic is about Trapper, and all the different ways the war has changed and defined him, but it's also about Hawkeye in a lot of ways, because so much of the 4077th was changed and defined by Hawkeye, and that was an idea I wanted to explore.
Fall of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black (the last of the family line remix) [Harry Potter; Regulus, gen]
Speaking of creating characters from whole cloth: I'd written heaps of Regulus!fic prior to this one, but all of those were very, very different, because I never spent a lot of time fleshing Regulus out as a person. I'd mostly written him from Sirius' POV, which made everything fairly easy at the end of the day -- I could always put Regulus off camera if I didn't want to deal with him, and if a particular aspect of Regulus' character felt lacking, I could always backfill that space with Sirius' ridiculous and often heavily-biased opinions on Slytherins. One of the rare times I used Regulus' POV I didn't bother delving too deeply -- he spent most of the fic thinking Grimmauld Place was trying to tell him something, so any serious character work would've been lost in the general state of crazy.
This is a DH-compliant remix of a fic I wrote literally days after the release of HBP. I mainly tinkered with it because DH showed that I'd nearly got it right in terms of the Regulus/RAB/locket Horcrux situation -- I'm usually content to leave a fic alone when it's buggered by new canon, because that's the nature of the beast when writing for a fandom that's still in progress, but the original fic was omgsoclose in so many ways that the handful incorrect details really, really bothered me. But also, I'd once again glossed over Regulus as a character. I showed him doing a lot, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time on why. After HBP came out, I was full of speculation regarding RAB = Regulus, but I had no way to express it outside of keyboard smashing and helpless hand gestures. I don't meta very well, because my thoughts usually aren't linear enough for a coherent, five-paragraph essay. In the end, the original fic was my attempt at RAB = Regulus meta, because making it into a fic was easier than typing up a discussion post that actually made sense.
Unfortunately, a lot of what makes Regulus Regulus got lost in the shuffle, because I was too busy trying to prove a point. When I decided to remix the original fic, I also decided I would sit down and do some of the character work on Regulus I'd cleverly managed to avoid the first time around. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't quite as bad as Loki, because with Regulus I at least had a framework of sorts. Loki was Shadow's cellmate for a few pages of American Gods, and then he wasn't Shadow's cellmate for a few pages after that, and that's all there is too it, as far as the book is concerned. Regulus was a pureblood, and a Black, and Sirius' brother, and a Death Eater to one degree or another, so I at least had a starting point.
I learned a lot about Regulus as I wrote this. In fact, 25 Random Facts About Regulus Black is pretty much all the personal canon about Regulus that cropped up as I was writing this remix. I recently recced a Regulus/Sirius fic I absolutely loved for a lot of reasons, one being that it touched on something I've thought for years -- a lot of Regulus' life was planned out before he was even born, and some things were more or less inevitable because he was a Black and Sirius' younger brother. Believing all that didn't make him any easier to write.
Anatomy of a Prank [Harry Potter; MWPP, gen]
This probably doesn't belong on this list, because it got quite a bit of attention when I posted it. Which is funny, because I was terribly nervous when I posted it. I remember tellingthemostepotente that no one was going to read it because it was genfic and bafflingly long-winded and kind of cracky and also I hadn't written anything in almost two years. She pretty much told me to stuff it, and then I was pleasantly surprised when it promptly got a bajillion comments.
In the end, this is probably my favorite Harry Potter fic that I've written. I've written close to eighty, and some I like and some I don't like and some I positively hate upon rereading, but this one I really, really like. Partially, I think, because it was one of those labor of love kind of things. I picked at this in fits and starts between fic fests and one hiatus and another, and it took me nearly two years to finish. Also, a large portion of this fic is from Peter's POV, and that was a first for me. I'd never written from his POV before, so it was a learning experience in a lot of ways, trying to navigate his personality and his views on the other Marauders.
I recently saw a rec for this, which said it's good fun but exhausting in places, and that made me smile a little, because that was precisely the point. It was supposed to be exhausting in places. I've always imagined the Marauders being faintly ridiculous, but also terribly exhausting, in a going-at-full-throttle-all-the-time kind of way.
Things We Lost (and Found) During the War. [Harry Potter; Snape/Minerva]
This also probably doesn't belong on this list, because it also got quite a bit of attention when I posted it -- more than I ever thought it would get, because it's non-linear het about a crossgen rarepair and also Minerva is in her seventies. However, I really think this is my best piece of writing, in any fandom.
Which, strangely enough, is directly related to it being non-linear het about a crossgen rarepair and also Minerva is in her seventies. I wrote this for an anonymous exchange, and fest gifts always make me a little nervous, because I want the recipient to like it. Also, porny het isn't exactly my strong suit. On top of all that, I'd never really written Minerva, and I'd only written Snape as a teenager, in ways that related to the Marauders in one way or another.
With that in mind, I spent a lot of time hammering out the non-physical aspects of their relationship. Of course, I cheated a little: a majority of the fic takes place in Grimmauld Place, which meant I could always blame anything that felt out-of-sorts on the house.
dogdaysofsummer all the way through. In the end, I like the idea behind it, so I decided to go ahead and do it, even though I'm already days behind.I've also waffled about each fic a little, which I also plan to do with Day 2, where I rec other people's fics.
Day 1
In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.
Confidence Men [American Gods; Wednesday, Loki, gen]
fell and I used to joke that I was half of the American Gods fandom all by myself -- for a long time, there were only fifteen or sixteen American Gods fics on the internet, and I'd written seven of them, and I'd directly caused another when I bullied bookofjude into writing me Mad Sweeney/Shadow porn. Happily, things have changed in the last couple years, mainly because of Yuletide: the American Gods page at AO3 currently boasts 58 fics. 51 of those fics were not written by me, and that fills me with joy.American Gods can be incredibly difficult to write. In short, its about of bunch of shifty drifters who can't settle down because they really don't belong anywhere, so the canon wanders through deliberately nondescript parts of the vast American wasteland without lingering in one place for too long. It doesn't have any familiar touchstones -- no Hogwarts, no Burrow, no flaming Bentley, no Black Pearl, no Swamp -- and that can make things a little weird.
Confidence Men is probably my favorite thing I've ever written. It was self-indulgent in a lot of ways -- I wanted something that explored Wednesday and Loki's working relationship prior to the book, and when I couldn't find it, I wrote it -- but I'm also proud of it, because I had to do a lot of the sort of frontwork you can normally avoid in fanfiction. I also had to create a lot of Loki out of whole cloth, because he spends about three-quarters of the book off camera, which was not the easiest thing I've ever done.
The Next 48 Hours [M*A*S*H; Hawkeye/Trapper]
A couple years back, a meme was going around during the spate of anonymous holiday exchanges where you listed ten things that more or less defined your fics. I ended my list with 'It's all about Sirius, even when it isn't', because it's utterly and pathetically true -- to the point that I eventually broke down and made a tag for it. At the end of the day, most of my HP/MWPP fic is about Sirius, even when he's off camera. It's not intentional. I never plan it that way, it just sort of happens.
The same thing happened here, with Hawkeye Pierce. Only, I did plan it that way. In Yankee Doodle Doctor, Colonel Blake says Hawkeye Pierce is kind of the heartbeat of this place, and it's terribly true. For the first six or seven seasons, the entire camp revolves around Hawkeye and his whims. Things settle down a little after that, mainly because BJ was willing to call Hawkeye on his bullshit where Trapper was not -- in Preventative Medicine, BJ fights with Hawkeye about removing a healthy appendix to meet his own ends, something Hawkeye and Trapper do together in White Gold without a second thought.
This fic is about Trapper, and all the different ways the war has changed and defined him, but it's also about Hawkeye in a lot of ways, because so much of the 4077th was changed and defined by Hawkeye, and that was an idea I wanted to explore.
Fall of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black (the last of the family line remix) [Harry Potter; Regulus, gen]
Speaking of creating characters from whole cloth: I'd written heaps of Regulus!fic prior to this one, but all of those were very, very different, because I never spent a lot of time fleshing Regulus out as a person. I'd mostly written him from Sirius' POV, which made everything fairly easy at the end of the day -- I could always put Regulus off camera if I didn't want to deal with him, and if a particular aspect of Regulus' character felt lacking, I could always backfill that space with Sirius' ridiculous and often heavily-biased opinions on Slytherins. One of the rare times I used Regulus' POV I didn't bother delving too deeply -- he spent most of the fic thinking Grimmauld Place was trying to tell him something, so any serious character work would've been lost in the general state of crazy.
This is a DH-compliant remix of a fic I wrote literally days after the release of HBP. I mainly tinkered with it because DH showed that I'd nearly got it right in terms of the Regulus/RAB/locket Horcrux situation -- I'm usually content to leave a fic alone when it's buggered by new canon, because that's the nature of the beast when writing for a fandom that's still in progress, but the original fic was omgsoclose in so many ways that the handful incorrect details really, really bothered me. But also, I'd once again glossed over Regulus as a character. I showed him doing a lot, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time on why. After HBP came out, I was full of speculation regarding RAB = Regulus, but I had no way to express it outside of keyboard smashing and helpless hand gestures. I don't meta very well, because my thoughts usually aren't linear enough for a coherent, five-paragraph essay. In the end, the original fic was my attempt at RAB = Regulus meta, because making it into a fic was easier than typing up a discussion post that actually made sense.
Unfortunately, a lot of what makes Regulus Regulus got lost in the shuffle, because I was too busy trying to prove a point. When I decided to remix the original fic, I also decided I would sit down and do some of the character work on Regulus I'd cleverly managed to avoid the first time around. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't quite as bad as Loki, because with Regulus I at least had a framework of sorts. Loki was Shadow's cellmate for a few pages of American Gods, and then he wasn't Shadow's cellmate for a few pages after that, and that's all there is too it, as far as the book is concerned. Regulus was a pureblood, and a Black, and Sirius' brother, and a Death Eater to one degree or another, so I at least had a starting point.
I learned a lot about Regulus as I wrote this. In fact, 25 Random Facts About Regulus Black is pretty much all the personal canon about Regulus that cropped up as I was writing this remix. I recently recced a Regulus/Sirius fic I absolutely loved for a lot of reasons, one being that it touched on something I've thought for years -- a lot of Regulus' life was planned out before he was even born, and some things were more or less inevitable because he was a Black and Sirius' younger brother. Believing all that didn't make him any easier to write.
Anatomy of a Prank [Harry Potter; MWPP, gen]
This probably doesn't belong on this list, because it got quite a bit of attention when I posted it. Which is funny, because I was terribly nervous when I posted it. I remember telling
themostepotente that no one was going to read it because it was genfic and bafflingly long-winded and kind of cracky and also I hadn't written anything in almost two years. She pretty much told me to stuff it, and then I was pleasantly surprised when it promptly got a bajillion comments. In the end, this is probably my favorite Harry Potter fic that I've written. I've written close to eighty, and some I like and some I don't like and some I positively hate upon rereading, but this one I really, really like. Partially, I think, because it was one of those labor of love kind of things. I picked at this in fits and starts between fic fests and one hiatus and another, and it took me nearly two years to finish. Also, a large portion of this fic is from Peter's POV, and that was a first for me. I'd never written from his POV before, so it was a learning experience in a lot of ways, trying to navigate his personality and his views on the other Marauders.
I recently saw a rec for this, which said it's good fun but exhausting in places, and that made me smile a little, because that was precisely the point. It was supposed to be exhausting in places. I've always imagined the Marauders being faintly ridiculous, but also terribly exhausting, in a going-at-full-throttle-all-the-time kind of way.
Things We Lost (and Found) During the War. [Harry Potter; Snape/Minerva]
This also probably doesn't belong on this list, because it also got quite a bit of attention when I posted it -- more than I ever thought it would get, because it's non-linear het about a crossgen rarepair and also Minerva is in her seventies. However, I really think this is my best piece of writing, in any fandom.
Which, strangely enough, is directly related to it being non-linear het about a crossgen rarepair and also Minerva is in her seventies. I wrote this for an anonymous exchange, and fest gifts always make me a little nervous, because I want the recipient to like it. Also, porny het isn't exactly my strong suit. On top of all that, I'd never really written Minerva, and I'd only written Snape as a teenager, in ways that related to the Marauders in one way or another.
With that in mind, I spent a lot of time hammering out the non-physical aspects of their relationship. Of course, I cheated a little: a majority of the fic takes place in Grimmauld Place, which meant I could always blame anything that felt out-of-sorts on the house.