Writing Filter: Works in Progress and Story Seeds

[the_rck]

The list is alphabetical by fandom with the crossovers at the end in no particular order. I'll probably add new items as they occur to me. I've also left off a bunch of pairings from ithurtsmybrain because I don't actually have even an inkling of a story to go with them. I just noted them because I thought that I *could* come up with something if I thought about it for a couple of days. (I mean, who wouldn't want to see Batman meet War (from Good Omens) or Maleficent trying to talk to Elmo or Treebeard negotiating with Hisoka (from Yami no Matsuei)?

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Fandom: Back to the Future
Description: "It took Marty three days to realize that he didn't belong and three weeks to admit it to himself."
Status: That's the first sentence up there. I've got vague ideas about what comes next.
Rating: PG to PG-13

Fandom: Chronicles of Amber (Roger Zelazny)
Description: King Merlin and King Random talk after the funeral of Random's wife, Vialle. Future fic ignoring the short stories.
Status: Has been sitting at 2000 words on my hard drive for a couple of years.
Rating: PG-13 Done. I need to post it on my site.

Fandom: Chronicles of Amber (Roger Zelazny)
Description: A Patternghost schemes. Far future fic ignoring the short stories. Dark. Slash.
Status: I keep attempting to make this one work and getting distracted. I've got about half of it written, I think.
Rating: NC-17

Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia (book universe)
Description: The first king and queen of Narnia had to learn to live very differently from what they'd once known.
Status: Vague idea with nothing yet written.
Rating: G to PG-13

Fandom: Harry Potter
Title: Auguries of Innocence
Description: AU diverging during Half-Blood Prince. The war is finally over, after years and many, many deaths. Both heroes and villains have changed to become people they never expected to be. Rather dark trio. Violence, torture, non-explicit rape. Somewhat surreal. Not quite sane Draco and Luna points of view.
Status: WIP. I've got three and a half chapters on my hard drive and would love to carry the story forward. I've also got a completed side story that centers on Luna before the start of the main fic.
Rating: R to NC-17 (I'm not certain it won't get explicit)

Fandom: Homeward Bounders (Diana Wynne Jones)
Description: Jamie walks the Bounds to keep Them out, but it's not a job for one person.
Status Vague idea
Rating: G-PG, probably

Fandom: The Lost Prince (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
Description: Um... This one's nebulous but won't quite go a away. I keep thinking of parallels between Marco and the Rat and Gregor Vorbarra and Miles Vorkosigan. I want to write about them as adults dealing with politics, possibly looking at heading into WWI or possibly going into a happier alternate history. May be gen or slash depending on where it goes, may contain some vague het
Status: Vague idea
Rating: I've no idea. It could go anywhere. I'm not expecting sex or heavy violence, but I can't rule either out entirely.

Fandom: Planet Ladder
Description: Something about Bambi and the choices she makes and what they mean to her.
Status: Vague idea
Rating: ???

Fandom: Planet Ladder
Description: What happened as Kaguya tried to save all the worlds? Who sided with whom and why? How was it resolved? Basically, filling in the gap in the last volume of the manga.
Status: Vague idea
Rating: PG to PG-13

Fandom: Pretender
Description: Jarod has a dark side that the show liked to pretend wasn't there. What would bring it out? Could he control it? Would he want to? Would he even see it as a problem?
Status: Vague idea
Rating: PG-13 or R

Fandom: Princess Tutu
Description: AU (divergent). Rue learns that Ahiru is really a duck and thinks that Princess Krahe and Ahiru have a great deal in common. Probably slashy.
Status: Vague idea with nothing yet written.
Rating: PG-13 (they're too young for anything explicit from me)

Fandom: Ranma ½
Description: The other side of "Rustication," basically what the folks back home are doing. Probably focused on Ryoga and/or Shampoo.
Status: Vague idea
Rating: G-PG

Fandom: Ranma ½
Title: None as of yet
Status: Vague idea
Description: Kuno's known about Ranma's transformations for a long time. (Somebody asked for and got this for Yuletide, but I love the idea enough to want to write it from a completely different angle.)
Rating: G-PG-13

Fandom: Ranma ½
Description: Akane wants to find out what changing sex feels like so that she can better understand Ranma, but she doesn't want to be cursed.
Status: Vague idea. I think this prompt could still be a NYR 2009 fic, but I'd have to check to be sure.
Rating: Maybe as high as R but probably not NC-17

Fandom: Rurouni Kenshin
Description: AU diverging during the Kyoto arc. I want to explore what happens, on a grand scale, if Shishio wins the showdown with Kenshin. I expect it to focus mostly on Kaoru, Misao, Megumi and Yahiko, but that could change, and some of the fragments I have are Saito, Sanosuke and Aoshi points of view.
Status: I have about twenty pages of fragments of this on my hard drive.
Rating: R. (I don't expect explicit sex, but there will be lots of violence and angst.)

Fandom: Sky High
Description: In canon, Warren chose to be a hero. What if he'd been one of Royal Pain's allies even as he became friendly with Layla and her friends? Divided loyalties and angst and probably a very dark AU.
Status: Vague idea
Rating: R (explicit sex is unlikely as this is a live action fandom, but there would be violence, nastiness and implied sex)

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Title: "Apotheosis"
Description: AU/divergent timeline in which Crawford is a mage with the rest of Schwarz bound to him magically. He gets his hooks into Yohji magically in order to have a spy on the rest of Weiss. Slavery. Magic. Possibly gods and/or demigods, eventually.
Status: WIP continuing "Snare." I have fragments of two later chapters
See http://www.therck.org/
Rating: NC-17

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Title: Rheotaxis
Description: Nagi/Yohji, Stockholm Syndrome, aliens and politics.
Status: Continuation. I've got 17 chapters posted so far with a draft of chapter 18 and half of chapter 19 on my hard drive. See http://www.therck.org/ for c.1-17
Rating: NC-17

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Description: "Torsion"
AU in which Kritiker mentally programs and enslaves its agents. Aya is on his last chance when Omi accepts him for Weiss. Aya searches for something he can offer Omi that no other agent can. Dubious consent.
Status: WIP. I've posted two chapters on my website. See http://www.therck.org/
Rating: R (I don't expect it ever to get explicit. I could be wrong, but I don't expect it.)

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Title: Scapegoat
Description: Crawford/Ken, OMC/Ken. I have a completed and very flawed draft of this on my hard drive already. This one's pretty dark. Ken wants both to be innocent of his crimes and to be punished for them. Crawford, having access to a telepath, can make the fantasy come true.
Status: Completed first draft. Needs beta reading and a rewrite. Started in an attempt to answer a prompt on the anonymous kink meme and then went sideways
Rating: NC-17 Posted at my website.

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Description: Crawford rescues Ken from a nasty trap. Seduction probably ensues. (Someone complained to me that there's not a lot of happy fic with these two paired. This is my effort to see if I could do it. #11 was a try, too, of sorts, but that version of the characters is too broken to make for happy reading.)
Status: I've got about 5000 words of this on my hard drive but haven't touched it in months.
Rating: NC-17

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Description: A grown up Nagi dominating Crawford and Schuldig at Crawford's request and with Schuldig's consent. I've got a few thousand words of this, but it keeps developing more character complications. I'm not sure I can make it work without throwing out most of what I've already got.
Status: A few pages that go in a direction I didn't expect and that want to sprout vast relationship plot
Rating: NC-17

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Description: Manx/Crawford with both of them using the other in an effort to get something
Status: Vague idea
Rating: NC-17 most likely

Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Description: Crawford/Yohji, prisoner seducing captor
Status: Vague idea
Rating: NC-17

Fandom: Secret Adventures of Jules Verne/Rurouni Kenshin
Description: Rebecca Fogg meets Hiko Seijiro (sp?)
Status: Vague idea
Rating: PG-13

Fandom: Secret Adventures of Jules Verne/Sherlock Holmes
Description: Very vague and based on a friend saying that she couldn't see Jules paired with anyone...except maybe Sherlock Holmes
Status: Vague idea
Rating: Not explicit because SAoJV is a live action fandom

Fandom: InuYasha/xxxHOLIC
Description: AU ending for InuYasha with Kagome guardian of the reconstituted Shikon no Tama. Kagome meets Yuuko and probably doesn't make a wish.
Type: Gen
Status: Vague idea
Rating: No more than PG

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I see the Weiss Kreuz is the fandom in which I'm most willing to write explicit sex. It's also a fandom in which I don't seem to have ideas for non-sexual stories. I'm not sure it means anything much, but I find it interesting to note.

I welcome discussions about how some of the vague ideas might develop into stories or comments about which stories people'd prefer to see me work on (I will note, though, that I seem to need somebody to talk to-- to babble as I write, preferably-- about a story in order to move it forward. "Rheotaxis" has been stalled in part because of that).

Comments

[lady-of-mists.livejournal.com]

:grins: I really ought to make this my first project after the pillows. It's a lovely way of keeping things straight.

And I don't know why, but the first two seem to be intriguing me. I really enjoy the Amber novels (I haven't read any of the short stories) and your first line from the Back to the Future fic is very eye-catching. I personally think that Random was an awesome king and that Merlin had potential in that line. :D And Vialle was really cool from the glimpses that we got of her.

(Of course, the Pretender and Narnia are good concepts as well -- the other two were the ones that sort of stood out to me this morning.)

[the_rck]

I fully intend to finish both Amber fics. They're two different takes on a single Yuletide New Year's Resolution prompt from about three years ago. The requester had listed the fandom and two characters, Merlin and Random, with no other details. I kept thinking about it and wondering if zie had wanted gen or slash with those characters. The two different stories took the characters in the two different directions.

I need to write the Back to the Future fic eventually. I think it's going to nag at me until I do. I simply can't fully buy the happy ending built up in the movies. I don't think Marty'd necessarily end up miserable, but I don't think he could be happy where he was.

I don't think I'll touch the Pretender fic any time soon. I need to review the canon to get back into understanding the characters.

The Narnia fic will probably sit for quite a long time, too, but it's another case of thinking that something wouldn't be as simple as canon implies. I especially wonder about the first Queen of Narnia as she didn't get any sort of choice.

[lady-of-mists.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Keep us posted! :D

I feel the same way about The Pretender. I've not seen it since it went off the air and I only watched the first couple of seasons. I would need a good refresher course on all of it if I were to try to write in that universe.

And canon with "simple" happy endings does that to me too. I think it's one reason why I have so much trouble with some of my own characters. I want a happy ending for at least two of them, but I can't seem to figure out what would make them happy. Merely being on the winning side of the conflict, in this case, might not be the answer.

[the_rck]

I think it's one reason why I have so much trouble with some of my own characters. I want a happy ending for at least two of them, but I can't seem to figure out what would make them happy.

Would it work to give them the possibility of happiness rather than a happily ever after? That is, some stories and some characters work better by ending up with choices rather than with a tidy ever after no matter what the ever after is. For other characters, the story ends right after they make a major choice because the next part isn't within the story being told.

I think I'm saying that badly. Do you understand what I'm groping after?

[lady-of-mists.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do and thank you. That may be the most logical of solutions for them -- especially since they have very long lives. I can't possibly map out all of the choices that they would make (nor would anyone else be interested).

Then if they decide to tell me a bit more about themselves, I'll still be open to the possibilities for them. ;)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

The Back to the Future one and the Lost Prince one instantly caught my eye--both because I know the works, and because the ideas really draw me.

[the_rck]

Those are both story seeds that came from things on Yuletide. IIRC, there were requests for both that came through the pinch hit Yahoo list. I didn't get either, but I had ideas I wanted to write.

I'm not entirely sure that I could do the Lost Prince right. I won't know until I try, but I'm intimidated by it to some extent.

The Back to the Future idea keeps pestering me. I keep thinking that Marty has years of memories of the people around him that have nothing to do with what they remember about themselves or about him. They're quite different from the people he knew even though they have the same faces and names. Him not fitting into the new world is at odds with the canon but seems to me to be likely. That is, returning to a different and improved world isn't necessarily a happy ending. He's also got to wonder what happened to the Marty who used to be there. That Marty was never him and has vanished.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes!

Re the Burnett--it always seemed to me that she laid on the emotional slash, but she so highly disapproved of taking it to the logical conclusion, the story in effect hung there. At least to me, it seemed to need to be carried right to the implied end, a romance.

[the_rck]

I don't absolutely require a romance for The Lost Prince, but I suspect that that's because I first read it in third or fourth grade, at a point when I just didn't find romances particularly interesting and tended not to see them at all unless I was bludgeoned by them. Even when I did see them, I tended to think of them as profound friendship rather than as anything more because 'more' was so nebulous and outside of what I would want in that situation.

As an adult, I can see the romance potential. I think that I don't push too far with it because I keep remembering that Marco and the Rat are children.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, but farther along. At least, when I read it as a college student, it seemed soooo slashy to me.