So on general updateyness and a story-hopping muse...

I'm learning to roll with the punches. I'm just as bad at changing stories due to reading something as I've ever been, and I'm nothing like Dean Wesley Smith: I read my own work. A lot. That's why I wrote it.

What this means? I'm currently quite anxious to write some more Niko & Collie (read genderswap Black Widow and Hawkeye from Avengers) fanfic, finish up the story of the Thorn Rebellion I thought I'd never touch, and add new chapters to my various WIP while also finishing out whichever fics I think I can wrap up and off my plate.

Can you tell what I've been reading? My own work. And it's inspiring me. The only problem is I have a voracious readerly appetite and by the time I've read enough to get full, I'm inspired in waaaaaaay too many directions.

How's your reading or writing going?

:goes back to scribbling:

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Scribbling on illicit fiction...

Not all stories ask permission nicely to impinge upon my inspiration. No, they barge in and take over! We're at 2000+ words and counting.

Have a snippet:

"Storm."

He is just coming out of the conference room and glances down at her before they fall into step on the way to their team area in the underground military facility. They don't speak until they're on home turf, out of the way where it's safe, and Storm discharges enough electrical energy into the security system to kill any tracking or monitoring.

Whisper shows him the file. Code 48. The Department's way of cutting its losses and abandoning a compromised operative to their own fate.

Storm's jaw clenches. Alpha Wolf doesn't deserve this. "You know what you're asking?" he demands of her. Countering direct Department orders always results in punishment, and Storm has always deliberately made sure he took the heat for all of them. It is the way of the third ranking, which Storm now occupies. He has always had the temperament for it.

But Whisper shifts her head slightly to one side in a negative, bigger picture in mind than what he's implying. "Storm," she says softly, sotto voice, and his eyes darken as he listens. "I'm not asking."

Compromised operatives do not have family. They were stolen as children and have never been a liability for their knowledge, only the physical evidence of genetic manipulation and government illegal activities their bodies represent. Human weapons. Red Wolf, her lover whom she calls Alpha, has a family. He knows everything there is to know about too much classified information.

"I lost the Christian," she whispers.

The first man she had ever loved died while infiltrating a terrorist cell. Storm held her through that storm, anchored her grief after she had wiped out every person related to the Christian's death. He hears what she has not said outright. They're going to kill him.

She didn't ask Storm before she took on an entire terrorist organization and became known as the first ranked assassin in the Department. She isn't asking now if they can save their leader.

"Do you know what you're saying?" Storm raises his eyebrows, incredulous, because he does. This will require more than just defying orders and intercepting the kill team. They can't just extract him. They have to keep him alive and either out of the reach of the Department and their handlers or of his family who is now rushing to his side.

Whisper nods. "Shift owes me."

They're going to have to burn the Department to the ground.

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Open Letter to Yahoo Mail

Dear Yahoo,

You have never listened to any feedback I've ever sent you; you have never respected my privacy; and you  have never cared, so frankly, I don't expect you will now. You used to have one redeeming quality: you put out the one decent email program left.

Gone, gone, gone. As of today gone.

Not only am I required to downgrade to the BROKEN version of Mail that I kept telling you was broken and I wouldn't upgrade to until you fixed certain very nasty bugs, but with it, I am now required to let you rifle through all my mail and read it and use it to target ads to me that I will never click on. Unless there was a way to export my entire decade's worth of mail, which of course, there isn't.

Not only am I required to let you read my mail to make ads, you have moved the ads to the side so that I am required to never be able to move a blinking ad out of my line of view.

Not only am I required to downgrade to your lousy idea of an upgrade, but it's because you aren't supporting Classic anymore. Guess what? I didn't need support. It worked, unlike this new mail that only works if I have Messenger, chat, and photo slideshows active, which I hate and will never, ever, ever, ever use except to delete the spam messages you force me to have to look at.

Not only am I required to downgrade to the new Yahoo! Mail, but I'm required to use the Full Version I don't want because the Basic is so broken you can't even click "Previous Email."

You now have no redeeming qualities. And I still can't export all that mail that I need to keep handy since I used my email as a hub of operations before and now don't know how I'm going to hub without it.

No love,

the scribbler

P.S. Whoever invented infinite scrolling should experience ten levels of purgatory for making it cryworthy to try and clean up 14,000 emails in an attempt to actually see the number of emails in my inbox in the header.

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365 Challenge: on blood, guilt, and redemption...

This entry is part 40 of 52 in the series 365 Challenge

How Many Ways Can You Make Me Bleed?

Canon: X-Men Comicverse
Characters/Pairing:
Prompt:
Rating: K
Notes:

They told Prodigy his mental shields existed for a reason. They didn’t mention the reason might be horrifying.

   

Accounting for Redemption

Canon: Kingdoms and Thorn
Characters: Jennifer "Shift" Haller and Justus "Defender" Ellison
Pairings:
Prompt: "I got red in my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out."
Rating: T
Notes:

How do you account for redemption in a world where survival is the only law?

Justus once believed that his decisions were being guided by a God whose will was sovereign. Now he doesn’t. These sins were his own and he does not know what to do with them.

   

Counting Heartbeats

Canon: Kingdoms and Thorn
Characters: Jennifer "Shift" Haller and Justus "Defender" Ellison
Pairings:
Prompt: I was with Justus, wanting them all to regret the monsters they'd become.
Rating: T
Notes:

Follow-up to “Accounting for Redemption.”


She didn't have the luxury of regret.

Shift may not have had a soul, but she had a heart and for some d— reason it was still beating. And she had Justus. She just didn’t know how to save him.

   
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365 Challenge: Hedge Your Bets

This entry is part 39 of 52 in the series 365 Challenge

Hedge Your Bets

Canon: Avengers 919
Characters: Colleen "Hawkeye" Barton, Nikolai "Atrax" Romanoff, and Philippa Coulson
Pairings:
Prompt: Well, maybe later. Not yet. / Like an old comfortable coat that is tattered and torn.
Rating: T
Notes:

Collie Barton is comfortable with what she does and with being an archer in a sniper’s world. Then she gets Nikolai Romanoff as a target.

   
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It's That Time Again...

I've been mired in big fics or flexible prompts for a while now. Feeling blah and uncertain which big fic I really want to mire in at the moment. Prompts anyone?

1. Character/Fandom/Original Fiction World

2. Prompt or question of any kind

I'd like to commentfic if you all would be so kind as to help me out? :bats eyelashes:

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Getting Back to Normal

So after the fires, my creative brain was simply not present. When it did come back in snatches, I hit fanfic because that has always been more compatible with my burned out state than trying to create something I love in my own worlds. At that time, I had been six poems into a semi-epic and scribbling in Lovemark the Seasons. It's time to be getting back to normal.

So that means prompts, 365 Challenge posts, and probably long, chaptered work in both fandom and original worlds.

How are you creatively?

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Writing from the Inside Out

I have never wanted to write outsider fiction. Generally, fantasy and science fiction has taken the perspective of an outsider or someone coming of age. It makes it easier to explain things to the reader who is also an outsider. Though I read and enjoy a great deal of stories which use this device, I have never been drawn to write it myself. In fact, I have been frequently repelled or stymied by the very idea—because my outsiders don't understand what's at stake.

Immersive fiction (and fanfiction) tends to come from the inside out, a character who is already immersed in this fictional world and understands it, is part of it, whose challenges and personality completely arise from within that world. That's the kind of fiction I write and prefer to write, fiction that digs into someone whose worldview and understanding are radically different from the modern-day real world, who belongs to the world of my creation.

Naturally, this writing of the insider poses difficulties. Reading from the inside out may be more difficult, but for me, the payoff has always been worth it. M. C. A. Hogarth writes from the insider, dipping us wholly into vastly different and immersive worlds. Beneath Ceaseless Skies, my personal favorite fantasy periodical publishes such short stories. Rabia Gale does it, and it deepens her worldbuilding because of it. LeGuin does it by times in some of my favorite pieces of her short fiction.

I'm talking about stories where the character carrying the focus or perspective is not displaced from his or her home ground, where they are sitting on the territory or in the life they've staked out for themselves, where the story is not about the upending of one's environment, merely one's world. I'm talking about stories that write about the bridge between two perspectives and don't bother to immerse us in the side we already understand but in the other, leaping the chasm between and dropping us unceremoniously into that otherness. These are stories that don't explain themselves, but reveal themselves.

Does that mean they cannot "tell" necessary background details? No. It means that they written from the inside out instead of the outside in, training the reader in a new language and set of expectations without necessarily referencing or comparing to the set of expectations said reader walked in with.

But of course, that's just the big picture stuff. The raw, in-my-face reason I write from insiders is because I need someone who really has something and knows what is at stake. I write from those inside the foreign worlds I have built, or those who are becoming insiders, those who are inextricably bound up into all the threads and dynamics I can weave into a single tale. And that requires an insider.

Do you prefer to write outsiders or insiders? Any preferences on which you prefer to read?

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