ratherastory (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratherastory) wrote2010-05-27 01:06 pm
ratherastory) wrote2010-05-27 01:06 pm
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Two writing memes
1- From ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
embroiderama: a passage less than 500 words (paragraph/excerpt/very short fic/whatever) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
2- Fromsinnerforhire: First line of last 25 fics you wrote and try to find a pattern.
This one made me laugh, because I have exactly 27 fics written/in the works. A few weeks ago I wouldn't even have been able to do the meme in its entirety.
1- Lisa feels as though she's failing some subtle test which she never signed up to take.
2- A barista's work is never done, but sometimes there are slow days, and that's the day he comes in, complete with laptop and kicked-puppy expression.
3- This never happened...
4- A certain degree of separation was to be expected when it came to the Winchesters.
5- They stop in Toledo a couple of hours before sunset, and Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, fingerless gloves useless against the cold.
6- There are only a handful of people who have Bobby Singer's cell phone number.
7- Dean finds Sam sitting cross-legged on the floor of their motel room, clad in jeans and a soft, faded grey t-shirt, bare feet tucked under his knees.
8- Getting jumped by regular humans is bad enough, even if those humans are seasoned hunters.
9- After twenty years of dealing with it on and off, it's not a big deal anymore.
10- In her everyday life, Lindsey isn't much of a hand-wringer.
11- Dean's not exactly sure how he and Sam have ended up here, but he's learned to roll with the punches after fifteen or so years of being on the job.
12- “You going to eat that or keep turning it into a valuable work of abstract art?” Dean waggles his fork in the general direction of Sam's plate.
13- Sam is getting really tired of waking up in pain, alone and in the dark.
14- He's blind.
15- Sam hasn't screamed in days.
16- There is water dripping slowly onto the Devil's Trap, and Dean doesn't care.
17- Sam is sick to death of angels.
18- The first thing that Dean ever steals is a sandwich.
19- “I got it,” Sam is pulling their duffel bags out of the trunk of the Impala, not waiting for Dean to help or even come close.
20- Castiel is a bad angel.
21- Sam peered through the window of the dingy motel room, staring as roiling clouds slowly obscured the moon, plunging the parking lot into shadows, flickering orange in the light from the vacancy sign.
22- There's nothing on television except for Christmas specials.
23- “Cas! Castiel! We need some help over here!”
24- Sam is sulking.
25- “Sam, any day now!”
Patterns? I apparently like short, declarative sentences. Sometimes I change it up by starting with dialogue, and occasionally I add in some description about the weather or the time of day. I write primarily in the present tense, which is something I never did before writing fanfic.
embroiderama: a passage less than 500 words (paragraph/excerpt/very short fic/whatever) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.2- From
sinnerforhire: First line of last 25 fics you wrote and try to find a pattern.This one made me laugh, because I have exactly 27 fics written/in the works. A few weeks ago I wouldn't even have been able to do the meme in its entirety.
1- Lisa feels as though she's failing some subtle test which she never signed up to take.
2- A barista's work is never done, but sometimes there are slow days, and that's the day he comes in, complete with laptop and kicked-puppy expression.
3- This never happened...
4- A certain degree of separation was to be expected when it came to the Winchesters.
5- They stop in Toledo a couple of hours before sunset, and Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, fingerless gloves useless against the cold.
6- There are only a handful of people who have Bobby Singer's cell phone number.
7- Dean finds Sam sitting cross-legged on the floor of their motel room, clad in jeans and a soft, faded grey t-shirt, bare feet tucked under his knees.
8- Getting jumped by regular humans is bad enough, even if those humans are seasoned hunters.
9- After twenty years of dealing with it on and off, it's not a big deal anymore.
10- In her everyday life, Lindsey isn't much of a hand-wringer.
11- Dean's not exactly sure how he and Sam have ended up here, but he's learned to roll with the punches after fifteen or so years of being on the job.
12- “You going to eat that or keep turning it into a valuable work of abstract art?” Dean waggles his fork in the general direction of Sam's plate.
13- Sam is getting really tired of waking up in pain, alone and in the dark.
14- He's blind.
15- Sam hasn't screamed in days.
16- There is water dripping slowly onto the Devil's Trap, and Dean doesn't care.
17- Sam is sick to death of angels.
18- The first thing that Dean ever steals is a sandwich.
19- “I got it,” Sam is pulling their duffel bags out of the trunk of the Impala, not waiting for Dean to help or even come close.
20- Castiel is a bad angel.
21- Sam peered through the window of the dingy motel room, staring as roiling clouds slowly obscured the moon, plunging the parking lot into shadows, flickering orange in the light from the vacancy sign.
22- There's nothing on television except for Christmas specials.
23- “Cas! Castiel! We need some help over here!”
24- Sam is sulking.
25- “Sam, any day now!”
Patterns? I apparently like short, declarative sentences. Sometimes I change it up by starting with dialogue, and occasionally I add in some description about the weather or the time of day. I write primarily in the present tense, which is something I never did before writing fanfic.
no subject
Okay, well, the first one is actually harder to explain than the second. It's Dean with PTSD, the insomnia, the hyper-vigilance, the whole nine yards. After forty year in hell, I figured that Dean wouldn't be accustomed to not hurting in some way, that just existing from day to day without knowing if it would bring pleasure or pain or something in between would be somehow worse for him. Sometimes anticipation is the worst form of torture.
As much as I love Sam, the Dean from Season 4 (and even Season 5) feels very isolated, and I can easily see him pulling away from human contact.
The second passage has been floating in my mind since last November or so, when I started the first draft of this (which will never see the light of day). The Show made a point of saying that Alastair was an artist with a straight razor, so I decided to exploit that.
I had the image of using the razor to cut patterns in the skin like Maori tribal tattoos almost right away, and it wasn't much of a stretch of the imagination from there to having Alastair recreate the same pattern every day. Like I said, anticipation is the worst form of torture, and so having it go on for fifteen years, knowing every day exactly what was going to happen and when and just how much it was going to hurt... yeah. If it were me, I'd lose my mind.
I also wanted to play up the erotic undertones here. I hinted a LOT at Dean/Alastair in this fic, even if I never actually came out and said there was a sexual element to the relationship. In fact, I'm not entirely sure you can call it sexual, though it's certainly sensual and erotic. Blood-play is a kink I've come across a fair bit in the fanfic for this fandom, and hell, it's practically canon, if you count Sam/Ruby.
There's a fine line between pleasure and pain, and since hell is nothing but pain and damnation, my reasoning was that eventually Dean would stop seeing the difference and look forward to the more "gentle" forms of torture as pleasurable. It's a way for Alastair to assert his dominance more subtly.
Last but not least, I have a personal squick about eyes. I do include it in my fic, but there is *nothing* that makes me cringe and look away faster than eye injury. Even talking about it is hard. So, uh, yeah. Cutting away eyelids? Blick.
no subject
"I also wanted to play up the erotic undertones here." This definitely came through!
"There's a fine line between pleasure and pain, and since hell is nothing but pain and damnation, my reasoning was that eventually Dean would stop seeing the difference and look forward to the more "gentle" forms of torture as pleasurable." That makes a horrible amount of sense.
Thank you!