stunt_muppet

I recently wrote an SVU femmeslash drabble for one of the lawandorder100 weekly prompts, and it wasn’t quite as difficult as I’d thought it would be. Granted, it was very, very mild femmeslash, and there wasn’t even really any interaction in it, but it was still surprisingly fun. And I’ve been thinking about maybe continuing it into a full-length fanfiction.

 

Oh, stop looking at me like that. Like I said, it was terribly mild; if I did continue it, the story would be centered on dinner, drinks, and conversation. Besides, I can’t write straight sex very well even on the best of days; I’m sure I wouldn’t be any better at girl/girl sex, so I’m not even going to try it at this point.

 

Besides, Olivia/Alex is one of the few ships that I think I could really have fun with in SVU (and really, isn’t that what fanfic’s supposed to be for? Fun?). Elliot/Olivia is dead to me (for now), and I feel like there’s really not much that I could do, fanfic-wise, for Elliot/Kathy – I have nothing really constructive or interesting to add to what’s already going on. And any fanfic I’ve attempted about tensions between Elliot, Kathy, and Olivia have ended up cheesier than I’d care to admit.

 

Now, while I’d kind of like to take a shot at John/Casey, as the pairing presents some intriguing possibilities, I’ve found that actually writing both John Munch and Casey Novak becomes substantially harder once I have to do it for more than 100 words. Casey and John both have unique and distinctive voices that are tricky to imitate on paper, and it’s very, very easy to make their dialogue ring false. I’d rather not write them at all then write them out-of-character (or, woe betide me, with subpar snark – this is also why I do not write House fanfiction). And, while I have occasionally toyed with the idea of pairing John and Fin (only when I’m crazy, though), I can’t see that ever actually happening in the series; anything beyond friendship between the two of them feels intensely out of character.

 

Thus, I am left with Olivia and Alex. Of course, the problem is that I’ve already written far too many cutesy date stories for other ships; however, I don’t feel like I have enough of a handle on Olivia or Alex yet to write anything more intense or complex – I’ve never written anything more than a drabble for either of them, after all. And I’m sure the world is already flooded with “Ghost” post-eps that are better than anything I could hope to do.

 

I’ll probably take a crack at it anyway, just because it seems like it could be fun and I’ve got a line or two in there that I’m dying to use. But I’m still a little nervous about it, this being my first foray into femmeslash and all. I’ll have to be careful to make it actual, you know, romance\flirtation and not just Girl Talk. That’s going to be the hardest part.

 

I’ve wanted to write something for TOS for a while now, too – something longer than a drabble, even if it’s just a tiny ficlet like 4:37 a.m. was. Of course, that does force me to adapt to a new genre of writing, since there’s only so much shippy angst and/or fluff that you can even fit into TOS (and I’m sure the world doesn’t need any more Jack/Claire angst from me), and writing generalized angst tends to become tiresome in anything longer than a one-shot (or a series of one-shots). No, I would need some sort of story to follow if I planned to write a TOS fic of any substance, and so far I’m drawing a blank on that. Now, I do have kind of an idea for a ficlet based on a line in last night’s TOS, and I might just pursue that thread, especially since it involves Connie Rubirosa and I haven’t seen much fanfic with her in it yet. I could even take extra-special care to keep it non-shippy. Of course, there’s two problems with that: 1) I have seen very little of Connie, and I don’t know if I know her well enough yet to write about her, and 2) I already write way too much about Jack. Half of my TOS drabbles center around Jack, and much though I love him, the other characters need some love too. I’ve started to diversify my drabbles, moving on to Ed, Joe, and even a few about Lennie – but even the one Lennie-centric drabble I have up on ff.net involves Jack. Plus, just because I can write Ed or Joe or Anita or Nina in a drabble doesn’t mean I can do it for a whole fic. If I did write a fic centered around someone else, it would probably be Ed; I have a little trouble imitating his voice, but out of all the detectives, he’s the one I’m most familiar with besides Lennie (and I don’t really want to attempt writing Lennie for the same reason I don’t want to attempt writing John – I don’t want to write him wrong, pun not intended). I may go ahead with the Connie-centric fic just to see where it ends up, but…see, in some of my fandoms, I have scads of ideas for fanfiction but I become lazy and don’t particularly want to write any of them. I have the opposite problem with TOS – I really, really want to write about it, but I have nothing in particular to write about.

 

Of course, there’s always the issue that comes up whenever I check my ff.net stats – nobody actually reads the TOS stuff I write. They’ve got the lowest hit count, and the only drabble up there without at least a review is the one centered on Jack and Lennie. (It’s also the one I’m actually proud of, so that’s mildly irritating.) Maybe the TOS fandom just isn’t as active on ff.net as the SVU and CI fandoms? Maybe the TOS fans don’t do much ficcing? I don’t know.

 

I should try writing for my other fandoms on occasion, especially my non-TV fandoms. I do have ideas for a few of them – like PotC and FFX – but my drive to actually write them is quite low. Now, that’s kind of understandable with FFX, since I have no access to it here in college, but given that I’ve been planning out a series of PotC ficlets for a while, and a private viewing of Pirates 2 is a staple of most Friday nights, you’d think I’d be more motivated to get those out of the way. And then there’s Resident Evil, where I’ve had a half-finished first chapter of what looks like an interesting multi-chapter bouncing about in my head for the past two years but have had absolutely no desire to finish the thing. Whenever I try to work on it again, I become bored and go back to Sixth Date or Little Brothers. Maybe it’s because those are posted and the aforementioned other fics aren’t? Hmm.

 

Little Brothers, by the way, has very quickly become my favorite fanfic to write, much though I bitch about timeline struggles. See, once I get the logistical details out of the way – what happened when, who did what to whom, etc – the actual writing lets me do things I’ve never done before in a fanfic, things that may even come in handy when I try my original fiction. Not only does it let me write some of my favorite characters (Horatio, Yelina, etc) in a far different way than I usually do, it also forces me to think about character creation in a more psychological way, to use the information I’m given about the character and try to create some overarching mental scheme, try to connect the dots of their behavior. Most of the time I’ve spent on Little Brothers hasn’t even been actual writing – it’s been character analysis, developing this mental map of Horatio and Ray that explains how they act and why.

 

Of course, once I’ve got their minds figured out, I have to figure out how they got that way, and what they’re reacting to in the development of their personalities. And that’s when the most fun part comes in – writing the Caine parents. See, Mr. and Mrs. Caine developed first and foremost as a way to explain their sons’ personalities, but from that starting point they have to evolve as characters in their own right. For a while, I was worried about how I was going to keep the two of them out of stereotype-land, how I was going to keep them from becoming the mean, evil tyrant of a dad and the martyr-ish mom that are far too prevalent in TV and movies. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought to avoid that; the more I thought about and wrote about Mom and Dad, the more human they became. Really, as it stands now, they’re not that much different from their sons. They’ve been so much fun to develop, and I kind of wish I got to write about them more.

 

In fact, that’s been one of the major themes of Little Brothers – building a more complex character. That’s what I think will be useful in my original fiction. And it applies to Horatio and Ray as much as it does to their parents. Little Brothers allows me to write about Horatio in a less flattering light than usual, and it lets me portray Ray as something other than the general screw-up we see in “10-7” and “Rio”. (Admittedly, the latter happens much more often than the former; it’s hard to write about He Who Helps People in a negative way.) There’s a chapter later in the story where the two brothers argue; I’ve been writing that scene over and over again for the past few days, because the fight between them lets the ugly sides of both their personalities come out and claw at the air. Granted, I wouldn’t want to write about the unpleasant aspects of their personalities all the time (and I don’t – that scene’s one of the few times they’re explicitly brought up), but it’s been fun to discover and write about those aspects. Hopefully, this kind of thinking will make for more complex and satisfying characters, both in my fanfic and in my later original fiction.

 

...Feel free to thwack me with something next time I get like this.