Avon

I wrote this as a part of the btfchallenge. It is also a yuletide nyr fic.  It is based on a short film that is 100% worth the 15 minutes it takes to watch it.  This is a hard sci fi story.  No magic. No technoloigy indistinguishable from magic.  Just a good, old fashioned Orion Drive.

The Crew (4883 words) by spiderfire
Fandom: C: 299792 Kilometers Per Second (Short Film)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lt. Commander Malleck, Operator Tam, Operator Hale, Lt. Kai, Porter, The Captain
Additional Tags: Backstory, POV Multiple
Summary:

In the days before the Kestros IV left System Sol forever, final preparations are made.

Me, about an hour before I started sifting compost today - Honey, have you seen the pitchfork?

DW: It's probably in the shed out back.

Me: It's not. I looked.

So, I went onward and did the compost without the ptich fork. I am about a foot down into the pile when, what should I find?  the Pitchfork!  (And also a tablespoon, a paring knife and a screwdriver.)

Thank you compost for yeilding up my treasures! :) 

Three and a half months after the end of NaNo, I have now finished the first draft of my Nano Novel!!!!

It is clocking it at 81,160 words.

Next steps
1) Take a break, write some fan fic.  (btfchallenge & jukebox_fest and maybe write some gratuitous Bucky because it has been a while.)
2) print the beast out. Figure out where I need
  - more character work (there is a whole host of secondary characters that I found I needed as I was writing this thing)
  - more worldbuilding work
3) Plan a re-write
  -Right now the thing is 80k with no chapter breaks.  Look at where natural breaks occur.  Look at where I can outright delete stupid stuff. Look at what I need that doesn't exist yet.
  - re-write the whole thing, this time working scene by scene, chapter by chapter

Here is the last scene:

There was a knock and she looked up. Madison was standing in the door to her room, wearing the dark red-orange uniform of a crew member of dispatch and control.  Like Skylar she had no dots on her collar.  “Ready?” Madison asked.

Skylar shook her head, “No,” she said, but she tossed the tablet aside and stood up anyway.  The drop was slightly less than it had been on the planet and she constantly felt like she was about to lift off.

“Let’s go,” Madison said.

“I’m sorry you had to wait so long to get your dot,” Skylar said.  “You should have made crew weeks ago.”

Madison shrugged.  “Operator and scout always go together,” Madison said.   “Unless…” Madison didn’t say it, but they both knew that sometimes the young scouts died before taking their oath.  “I’m just glad you are here to stand with me,” Madison said.  “I am glad I waited.”

“Me too,” Skylar said.  “Me too.”

I am having a tough time with writing these days.  I am nearly 6K behind for being on pace for my year goal.  But I wrote some today, so that is good.  I just want to finish the first draft of Spero.

Does anyone else wake up and check the news each morning, wondering if we got into a war or if something else horrid happened over night? 

It was a good yuletide!

I got a story about Syndey from the Pretender - my favorite grey hat from that world of one shining bright light, and a whole lot of dark.

Renewal of Values (2121 words) by Marie_L
Fandom: The Pretender (TV)
Relationships: Jarod & Sydney
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Canon Compliant, The Centre (the Pretender), Emotional Manipulation
Summary:

Sydney must decide how far to let the Centre go with Jarod. Again.

****

And I wrote two stories - a pinch hit in the Tripods universe - the first time I have ever actually nabbed a pinch hit as opposed to treating people who got sent out on the PH list.  The request was for more of Will's POV.

Backpack (2708 words) by spiderfire
Fandom: The Tripods - John Christopher
Characters: Will Parker (The Tripods), Beanpole (The Tripods), Henry (The Tripods), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Missing Scene, Vagrants, Original Character Death(s), Canon Compliant
Summary:

Some encounters Will, Henry and Beanpole had on their way to the White Mountains.

*****

And my main story was a real treat for me.  I matched on Werewolf: the Apocolypse - which meant I got to write what largely was original fic set in the werewolf world. SO AWESOME.  The request was for kinfolk.

Duty to tribe (6627 words) by spiderfire
Fandom: Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Characters: Original Male Character(s), Original Characters, Original Male Character(s) of Color, Original Werewolf Character(s), original kinfolk characters, Original Child Character(s)
Additional Tags: Past Violence, off screen dubcon, Family, Duty, black furies, Kinfolk
Summary:

Eric Jensen is the proprietor of a trendy cafe, raising his three kids as a single dad, and trying to have relationship with his boyfriend, Aaron. He is also kinfolk to the Black Furies. I'll give you one guess as to what is the hardest part of his life.

2016 was a different sort of writing year for me.  I posted just 10 fanfics this year for a total of 36K of words, but I wrote nearly 200k - which is a lot for me. Most of it was in original works - the novel project I am working on and a variety of short stories that I have submitted various places (and had rejected - oh well).

Thanks to getyourwordsout, I have tracked both my words and my writing days this year and I have some cool graphs.  The first one shows my YTD wordcount in blue and my goal (150K) in red.  The month where the blue line takes off is thanks to NaNo! I wrote a total of 193,214 words!



My second graph shows the number of days I wrote in green. The purple like is the 1-1 line.  I wrote SOMETHING for a total of 262 days in 2016 or about 71% of the days I wrote.  Go me. :)



And finally, this year's wordle. Since I posted so little, this was made using all of my writing for this year. Skylar is the main character in the novel, Madison, Morgan/MRGN, Avery and Quin are other characters in that project. Maria and Moesha are vampire hunters and the main characters in another story I wrote.  Words I clearly overuse: back, one, around, looked, time, like, going, get, just, like...


Writing Goals for 2017:
1) Finish the first draft of the novel (about 10K to go!)
2) Do a second draft of the novel. (This will require revising and adding to my character sketches and worldbuilding docs, as well as a complete rewrite)
3) Participate in (at least) jukebox_fest,not_primetime and yuletide.
4) Do something in each of the MCU and Les Mis fandoms. (Exchanges? Finish WIP? Something new? TBD)
5) Write a NYR fic for a microfandom where the main character is this awesome hero/villian sociopath.
6) Submit some stories.  Maybe revise Maria and Moesha (the vampire hunters) and try again on that story, somewhere else.  Maybe some flash fiction.  

I am now 2/3 of the way through my story, roughly, but:



Here is a wordle of the story so far:



And here are the words that got me there.

<The yellow is a deposit of raw trisiunium nitrate,  the blue is chlorimate. They can be reacted to make fuel.>

“How does that help?” Skylar asked, as a vague memory of the chemistry she had had to study as a second year cadet, stirred in her mind.

<The engines can be run backwards,> MRGN reminded her.

Skylar blinked, pushing over to look at the map.  “I can use the burn chamber as a reaction chamber,” Skylar said, remembering the process.  “We can make our own fuel.”

MRGN zoomed in on a region of the map.  There was a blotch of blue overlapping with a blotch of yellow to make a region of green.  <There is a place where both minerals can be found.>

“We can make our own fuel,” Skylar said.  “We can go home.”

Today, I hit 40K! 10K to go.  I can do it!

The rough draft won't be done, but that's okay.

***

The walk over to Common three took a while.  The main corridor got increasingly crowded as they walked, filled with colorfully dressed people, mostly in casual clothes, not uniforms.  There were groups gathered together talking, there were musicians on the street performing. There were two Dohi who did a tumbling thing together that was kind of incredible to watch. There was a group of Rendann singing a bawdy song. Skylar didn’t recognize any of the lyrics, but she knew the tune, and she knew that it involved verses where each one was more improbable than the last.  There was an undercurrent of hilarity, of panic beneath it all. At one point, Madison suggested that they swing over to a side corridor so they could get there faster, but Skylar refused. Adventure begins at home, she reminded herself, twisting the bracelet around her wrist.  She needed to see home. To soak it in.

When I started NaNo - I thought a goal of 1K a day was pretty ambitous (considering up until that point, thanks to getyourwordsout I had been averaging about 400 words a day).  However, I am exactly on pace to win NaNo - averaging 1.6-1.7 words a day so far this month.

At 30K I also hit the end of the first disaster section of the story. Skylar, my main character, went out on a mission, that mission went badly awry.  Here are a few (very rough) words from when she is saved from certain death.

****