cunning as a weevil (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
firethesound) wrote2016-01-11 06:09 pm
firethesound) wrote2016-01-11 06:09 pm
Entry tags:
Claiming my Erised
Claiming my Erised:
So. This one’s mine:
Title: A Convenient Impracticality
Author: firethesound
Recipient: isinuyasha
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco (background Ron/Hermione, Dean/Seamus, Ginny/Luna)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~38,000
Warnings: none
Content/Enticements: Friends-with-benefits, fake-dating, pining, lots of bickering, and all of Harry’s and Draco’s friends are terrible.
Summary: Somehow Harry ends up agreeing to a fake relationship with his ex-nemesis-turned-friendly-acquaintance-with-benefits, except for some reason it involves an awful lot of actual dating and, sadly, not much sex. Confused? Harry is too, but when has anything with Draco Malfoy ever been as straightforward as it seems?
Once again, the Erised mods have done an outstanding job matching. I was so pleased to have gotten the wonderful![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
isinuyasha as my assignment this year, and when I first clicked over to her sign-up to look at what she wanted, my first thought was “oh, okay, I see why we were matched up!” Right away I knew exactly the sort of story I wanted to write. Something around 30-35k, a bit on the lighter side, lots of bickering and a bit of silliness, very romance-y, something that people would read and it’d leave them with a smile on their faces.
So imagine my frustration when the story idea that blossomed in by brain and then wouldn’t freaking leave was a behemoth of a fic that I initially estimated around 60-70k, with a tremendously large cast of characters including OCs, multiple locations, an exceedingly slow burn enemies-to-friends-to-lovers relationship, Character Growth For Everybody!, and a lot of critical things to say about wizarding society and politics. (Wait, what?)
Obviously, I did not end up writing this story.
I spent the month of August and much of September sulking and trying to think up a new idea, because I very much Did Not Want to write a novel. But the more I thought on it, the more this idea took root so eventually I threw my hands up in defeat and sighed and accepted, yep, a novel is happening. My mantra became “Not as long as Erised last year!” and Under-80k seemed like a reasonable goal with two months left, so I rolled up my sleeves and got to it.
I like to write about places I’m familiar with, so this time I picked Savannah, GA because I have a friend there and she’s the wonderful sort of person to whom I can say, “I’m writing a story set in your city,” and she’d reply “That’s awesome!” and make plans for us to go sight-seeing and exploring and let me bounce ridiculous ideas off her. This also had the advantage of me getting away from the stress and distraction of my own life, where in the back of my brain I’m always thinking about what laundry needs to be done, or what's for dinner and when I need to start cooking, or who remembered to buy more milk, etc etc etc. I’d stayed with her before and gotten some serious wordage done because while she was at work during the day, there was literally nothing to do but write, and bake, and take her dog on long walks whenever I hit a plot snag. (Dogs, it turns out, are excellent listeners and will let you ramble on at length about gay wizard without complaint or interruption.)
So I made plans to stay with her for a week and a half, and we did all sorts of touristy things and wandered around the historic district and spent an afternoon poking through all the cobblestone alleyways and climbing up and down the stone steps of River Street taking lots of pictures and working out where we thought the entrance to Savannah’s Wizarding district would most likely be tucked away.
Brimming with new ideas and a clear picture of where I was writing about, I got in one day of amazing wordage, and then the next day I found out a very dear friend had just been killed in an accident. I took some time away from fandom and some time away from writing, thought long and hard about dropping out, but decided that writing would be just the distraction I needed. (and also, at that point, the idea of receiving an Erised gift was one of the only things I was actively looking forward to.)
But when I went back to my story, wrote on it for about a week, and finally made the connection that I’d severely underestimated my wordcount, and to properly tell the story I was trying to tell, I’d probably need closer to 130-150k. And that… was not going to happen with the state of mind I was in.
Here, I owe a great big enormous THANK YOU toeidheann_writes for being the voice of reason when I sent her panicked, flailing emails of, "I think I want to start over, am I nuts for wanting to start over this close to deadline? What if I start writing it and it doesn’t work and I have to come back to this one? What if I start writing it and it turns into another novel??" She talked me down and gave me good advice, as she always does, because she is very wise and an excellent friend.
Whereupon I turned tocatplusfox to whom I owe another great big enormous THANK YOU for putting up with my flailing via gchat of, "I’m starting over but I don’t know what to do! Should I write this fake-relationship story? Or this other only-slightly-different fake-relationship story? WHAT DO I DO??" And she was very lovely and very encouraging and, most importantly, she picked which story I should write. And because I trust her opinions of all things fic better than I trust my own, I went with it.
And, it worked. And, oddly, it turned out to be exactly the sort of story I’d wanted to write when I first got my assignment, which I was very pleased by. And somewhere along the way of writing it, it made me remember why I love writing about these two magical jerks in the first place, and how much I love the HP-verse, and how much I love writing in general. I hadn't been writing much in the past year, and was starting to worry that I wouldn't get it back. But I had a blast writing this story, including a very fantastic afternoon spend withdicta_contrion where we drank lots of tea and ate cookies and wrote all the words (And a great big THANK YOU to her as well, for the use of her dining room table for this purpose and for letting me bounce ideas with her. That was so much fun. <3 )
And so I ended up with a story I was very pleased with, one that I felt pretty sure isinuyasha would like, one that I felt pretty sure the rest of you would like, too. Even so, I’m still a little bit blown away by just how much you all seem to like it. I can’t say thank you enough for all the comments and kudos and messages. I am all a-flail and so, so grateful. So thank you, for reading, for your kind words, and for being so wonderful. Comment replies still incoming. <3 <3 <3
(And the Story That Wasn't? Still happening, just on a slower schedule. It is floating around #5-6 in my writing queue. So, hopefully at some point this year? We'll see.)
So. This one’s mine:
Title: A Convenient Impracticality
Author: firethesound
Recipient: isinuyasha
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco (background Ron/Hermione, Dean/Seamus, Ginny/Luna)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~38,000
Warnings: none
Content/Enticements: Friends-with-benefits, fake-dating, pining, lots of bickering, and all of Harry’s and Draco’s friends are terrible.
Summary: Somehow Harry ends up agreeing to a fake relationship with his ex-nemesis-turned-friendly-acquaintance-with-benefits, except for some reason it involves an awful lot of actual dating and, sadly, not much sex. Confused? Harry is too, but when has anything with Draco Malfoy ever been as straightforward as it seems?
Once again, the Erised mods have done an outstanding job matching. I was so pleased to have gotten the wonderful
isinuyasha as my assignment this year, and when I first clicked over to her sign-up to look at what she wanted, my first thought was “oh, okay, I see why we were matched up!” Right away I knew exactly the sort of story I wanted to write. Something around 30-35k, a bit on the lighter side, lots of bickering and a bit of silliness, very romance-y, something that people would read and it’d leave them with a smile on their faces.So imagine my frustration when the story idea that blossomed in by brain and then wouldn’t freaking leave was a behemoth of a fic that I initially estimated around 60-70k, with a tremendously large cast of characters including OCs, multiple locations, an exceedingly slow burn enemies-to-friends-to-lovers relationship, Character Growth For Everybody!, and a lot of critical things to say about wizarding society and politics. (Wait, what?)
Obviously, I did not end up writing this story.
I spent the month of August and much of September sulking and trying to think up a new idea, because I very much Did Not Want to write a novel. But the more I thought on it, the more this idea took root so eventually I threw my hands up in defeat and sighed and accepted, yep, a novel is happening. My mantra became “Not as long as Erised last year!” and Under-80k seemed like a reasonable goal with two months left, so I rolled up my sleeves and got to it.
I like to write about places I’m familiar with, so this time I picked Savannah, GA because I have a friend there and she’s the wonderful sort of person to whom I can say, “I’m writing a story set in your city,” and she’d reply “That’s awesome!” and make plans for us to go sight-seeing and exploring and let me bounce ridiculous ideas off her. This also had the advantage of me getting away from the stress and distraction of my own life, where in the back of my brain I’m always thinking about what laundry needs to be done, or what's for dinner and when I need to start cooking, or who remembered to buy more milk, etc etc etc. I’d stayed with her before and gotten some serious wordage done because while she was at work during the day, there was literally nothing to do but write, and bake, and take her dog on long walks whenever I hit a plot snag. (Dogs, it turns out, are excellent listeners and will let you ramble on at length about gay wizard without complaint or interruption.)
So I made plans to stay with her for a week and a half, and we did all sorts of touristy things and wandered around the historic district and spent an afternoon poking through all the cobblestone alleyways and climbing up and down the stone steps of River Street taking lots of pictures and working out where we thought the entrance to Savannah’s Wizarding district would most likely be tucked away.
Brimming with new ideas and a clear picture of where I was writing about, I got in one day of amazing wordage, and then the next day I found out a very dear friend had just been killed in an accident. I took some time away from fandom and some time away from writing, thought long and hard about dropping out, but decided that writing would be just the distraction I needed. (and also, at that point, the idea of receiving an Erised gift was one of the only things I was actively looking forward to.)
But when I went back to my story, wrote on it for about a week, and finally made the connection that I’d severely underestimated my wordcount, and to properly tell the story I was trying to tell, I’d probably need closer to 130-150k. And that… was not going to happen with the state of mind I was in.
Here, I owe a great big enormous THANK YOU to
eidheann_writes for being the voice of reason when I sent her panicked, flailing emails of, "I think I want to start over, am I nuts for wanting to start over this close to deadline? What if I start writing it and it doesn’t work and I have to come back to this one? What if I start writing it and it turns into another novel??" She talked me down and gave me good advice, as she always does, because she is very wise and an excellent friend.Whereupon I turned to
catplusfox to whom I owe another great big enormous THANK YOU for putting up with my flailing via gchat of, "I’m starting over but I don’t know what to do! Should I write this fake-relationship story? Or this other only-slightly-different fake-relationship story? WHAT DO I DO??" And she was very lovely and very encouraging and, most importantly, she picked which story I should write. And because I trust her opinions of all things fic better than I trust my own, I went with it.And, it worked. And, oddly, it turned out to be exactly the sort of story I’d wanted to write when I first got my assignment, which I was very pleased by. And somewhere along the way of writing it, it made me remember why I love writing about these two magical jerks in the first place, and how much I love the HP-verse, and how much I love writing in general. I hadn't been writing much in the past year, and was starting to worry that I wouldn't get it back. But I had a blast writing this story, including a very fantastic afternoon spend with
dicta_contrion where we drank lots of tea and ate cookies and wrote all the words (And a great big THANK YOU to her as well, for the use of her dining room table for this purpose and for letting me bounce ideas with her. That was so much fun. <3 )And so I ended up with a story I was very pleased with, one that I felt pretty sure isinuyasha would like, one that I felt pretty sure the rest of you would like, too. Even so, I’m still a little bit blown away by just how much you all seem to like it. I can’t say thank you enough for all the comments and kudos and messages. I am all a-flail and so, so grateful. So thank you, for reading, for your kind words, and for being so wonderful. Comment replies still incoming. <3 <3 <3
(And the Story That Wasn't? Still happening, just on a slower schedule. It is floating around #5-6 in my writing queue. So, hopefully at some point this year? We'll see.)
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<3 <3 <3
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And your fic was awesome, definitely a lot of fun!
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(Seriously, thank you so much for all the hard work you did in making this fest run. I appreciate it so, so much.)
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Thank you for sharing this fascinating glimpse into your creative process - I am very glad you seem to have recovered your muse.
♥♥♥
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Am glad you appreciate my rambling! I love getting to see the behind-the-scenes glimpses of how other people work, I think it's interesting. And that makes two of us who are glad about my muse. It's come back with a vengeance and I am very very happy. <3
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It was such a brilliant fic, can't believe I deserve something so lovely! I'm sure anything you would have put out there would have been awesome but I'm glad it was this story in the end, as it was completely lovely and completely fit my taste. Thank you so so much again, I absolutely adored every sentence of it.
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And yes,
XD
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(In all seriousness, thank you so much for all the hard work that goes into running this fest, I know it's a huge job and you all do such a fantastic job. This writer is immensely grateful for it. <3 )
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::squishes you::
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That receipt, every time