Bragging rights
Jan. 30th, 2022 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverBack in December, I wrote an entry in which I mentioned that I had picked my writing back up and set a goal for myself of posting four stories in January. Well, it's January 30, and I just posted my fifth story to AO3.
Boo-bloody-yeah!
One's a bit obfuscated, because it belongs in an assortment of short stories so it isn't posted as a separate story itself, but it's a full story, even if it has a small word count due to being entirely dialogue.
Four of them, including the one above, came out of our new challenge community. They all run less than 800 words, but they're all new writing and are complete. One of them has a fun story behind it.
Sometime early last year, my husband and I were talking about Futurama for some reason (we like the show but rarely talk about it) and I happened to have AO3 open, so I was looking through the ship tags while chatting. I said to him, "Here's a tag for Fry/Bender/Leela." He immediately perked up and said, "You have to write that! The Doctor made her do it, and she's got the apron and white hat and everything!" It turned out that he thought I had said "Fry Vendor Leela", and even after I corrected that notion, he continued to insist that I needed to write a story in which the Fourth Doctor made Leela work as a "fry vendor" - a server in a chippy or maybe like a hot dog cart but it sells French fries instead. He kept going on and on about how condescending she'd be to the customers and say things like, "A warrior of the Sevateem would never take ketchup. It is a weak condiment." I had no interest in writing this (I just didn't see the appeal, other than the pun), but he kept bringing this up, at least once a week, asking how the Fry Vendor Leela story was going, and this went on for months, finally petering out in about November or so.
In January, we created![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
tenminutesaday, and romanajo123 posted the challenge of writing something for a trope on the "Fanfic Tropes" page on TV Tropes. I saw that "Coffee Shop AU" was one of the choices, and that's a trope I've never understood, being both romantically challenged and not much of an AU writer. But, I thought I might as well try it - challenge myself and all that - and I came up with "One More Grey Hair", in which A Charitable Earth!Ace goes into a new cafe and meets Leela the barista. So, I still "failed" the challenge - it wasn't AU and it wasn't romantic - and it wasn't Fry Vendor Leela, but I showed it to my husband anyway... and he loved it. Turns out, he didn't care about the chips; he wanted Leela in a strange situation being Leela, and the addition of Ace was just icing.
Okay, back to whatever it was I was talking about.
The last story (though AO3 messed up the posting times and so it looks like the penultimate story right now) has been in the works for years. It's a David and Will thing that I started formulating way back when I was actively writing that AU - most of it was written, but it took a good chunk of work to finish it up and then edit it into its final form, which apparently is over 15k words... woah. That had never been the intention. It started out as a simple adventure and should have been 5k, but it just kept growing. But the important thing is, I finished it.
I have also been working on a few other WIPs, getting them closer to actually getting posted. So, in all, in January:
I am rather pleased, and feeling very accomplished. At this point, I won't be posting the stories here until LJ gets its act together and allows automatic crossposting.
Boo-bloody-yeah!
One's a bit obfuscated, because it belongs in an assortment of short stories so it isn't posted as a separate story itself, but it's a full story, even if it has a small word count due to being entirely dialogue.
Four of them, including the one above, came out of our new challenge community. They all run less than 800 words, but they're all new writing and are complete. One of them has a fun story behind it.
Sometime early last year, my husband and I were talking about Futurama for some reason (we like the show but rarely talk about it) and I happened to have AO3 open, so I was looking through the ship tags while chatting. I said to him, "Here's a tag for Fry/Bender/Leela." He immediately perked up and said, "You have to write that! The Doctor made her do it, and she's got the apron and white hat and everything!" It turned out that he thought I had said "Fry Vendor Leela", and even after I corrected that notion, he continued to insist that I needed to write a story in which the Fourth Doctor made Leela work as a "fry vendor" - a server in a chippy or maybe like a hot dog cart but it sells French fries instead. He kept going on and on about how condescending she'd be to the customers and say things like, "A warrior of the Sevateem would never take ketchup. It is a weak condiment." I had no interest in writing this (I just didn't see the appeal, other than the pun), but he kept bringing this up, at least once a week, asking how the Fry Vendor Leela story was going, and this went on for months, finally petering out in about November or so.
In January, we created
tenminutesaday, and romanajo123 posted the challenge of writing something for a trope on the "Fanfic Tropes" page on TV Tropes. I saw that "Coffee Shop AU" was one of the choices, and that's a trope I've never understood, being both romantically challenged and not much of an AU writer. But, I thought I might as well try it - challenge myself and all that - and I came up with "One More Grey Hair", in which A Charitable Earth!Ace goes into a new cafe and meets Leela the barista. So, I still "failed" the challenge - it wasn't AU and it wasn't romantic - and it wasn't Fry Vendor Leela, but I showed it to my husband anyway... and he loved it. Turns out, he didn't care about the chips; he wanted Leela in a strange situation being Leela, and the addition of Ace was just icing.Okay, back to whatever it was I was talking about.
The last story (though AO3 messed up the posting times and so it looks like the penultimate story right now) has been in the works for years. It's a David and Will thing that I started formulating way back when I was actively writing that AU - most of it was written, but it took a good chunk of work to finish it up and then edit it into its final form, which apparently is over 15k words... woah. That had never been the intention. It started out as a simple adventure and should have been 5k, but it just kept growing. But the important thing is, I finished it.
I have also been working on a few other WIPs, getting them closer to actually getting posted. So, in all, in January:
- Four new stories begun, completed, and posted
- One large WIP completed and posted
- A handful of WIPs with significant work done on them
- No new WIPs
I am rather pleased, and feeling very accomplished. At this point, I won't be posting the stories here until LJ gets its act together and allows automatic crossposting.
