Fannish thoughts

[rivkat]

Alpha wolves? Only in scarcity. I enjoy a good alpha/beta/omega story plenty, believe you me, but I’d love to see more that hit harder on social construction. Debates over how people behaved in the environment of evolutionary adaptation; religious perspectives on eternal human nature; etc.

Xkcd is now doing what-ifs. My favorite so far is the first, about the baseball thrown at nearly the speed of light: pitcher of steel, batter of Kleenex.

I like this meme: You know when you get that first idea for a fic, all shiny and exciting and you immediately latch onto ONE scene or ONE moment that you desperately want to write? Sometimes you write thousands of words JUST so you can write that ONE scene or moment? [...] Ask me about any of my fics and I'll tell you what my key scene was and whether anyone noticed it...assuming I have ANY recollection of the instigating idea. I might!

Comments

[thefourthvine]

Can I ask for two? Skin Deep and Useful Arts. (If just one, then Useful Arts, please!)

[rivkat]

Skin Deep: my memory may betray me here, but I think I wanted to write the workout scene where Clark doesn't really spot Lex (in more ways than one, actually). It was hot!

Also, and you are learning lots about my id, the initial "morning after" scene in Useful Arts. However, when I got to Kara, I was very proud of "kidnapped by homophobia."

[thefourthvine]

I guessed right for one and wrong for the other one, but I am still super proud of myself.

And I salute your id, for clearly it leads you to do GREAT THINGS.

[rivkat]

What was your wrong guess?

[thefourthvine]

I thought for Useful Arts it might be the scene where Clark comes back for the Phosita after the first use and demands more, and Lex asks him to steal a Monet for it.

[rivkat]

Heh. Phosita is made of concentrated id.

[thefourthvine]

...Why wasn't THAT your summary for the story? ACCURATE.

[norabombay]

I love A/B/O fic largely for that world building. If you really start to break down what a society looks like, amazing things happen.

Or, you can get Stiles/Derek Teen Wolf fic where uh, that break down isn't done.

lots

[auroramama]

The reason I always cite "Captured by the Game" is that I have a lot of it memorized (one of the gifts that keep on giving from reading stories aloud). So to me it's a string of fireworks, and I have no clear idea which was the most compelling to the author. I like the transition from Sam at his initial cockiest (inappropriately grateful to somebody that this is what he's supposed to cozy up to) to Sam unconsciously thrown off to the point of blurting, "I dream about you." But that's just the beginning.

Re: lots

[rivkat]

Probably because of the structure (following S1's path), that one started almost in chronological order, though I did fill in a bunch of the middle at one point, looking more carefully at S1 recaps. Sam's name, by the way, was John until nearly the end when my betas convinced me that readers would find it too confusing and that I could sell "Azazel was so cocky he didn't hardly bother to change Sam's name."

[serrico]

I would like to hear about Under Darkening Skies or Unto Others, please!

[rivkat]

Under Darkening Skies: This was a prompt to write a Buffy/SPN crossover, and when I was figuring out how to do it, the first scene came to me first--Sam and Dean in trouble with the feds, then grabbed by the military, forced to go in undercover. I was worried that the mythologies wouldn't mesh, but once I got to "powered a resurrection spell with his own soul" it started to pull together. The "wrote the rest to get to this part" is, of course, the soul-meld, with Cartoon Dean and Cartoon Sam. And while I didn't have it in mind starting out, the demon dimension with the department store is a point of pride for me.

Unto Others: that was really just the idea: Cas learning that it's okay to change memories to fix problems and applying that principle to Dean and Sam (mostly to Dean), and then making it clear that Cas was not done "fixing" Dean.