Week 10: Pairings: Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?

Yes to both.

Ages ago I promised a giftfic to someone. They wanted T/J slash. I could see the potential—canonically, the two are goofy, rowdy, very loyal best friends—but I just couldn't write it. At all. Months went by. Guilt accumulated. I finally had to bring in a third character, a sort of frenemy of them both, who more or less tricks T into a seme-off to see who can please J more.

In 2011 I participated in a multi-round fanfiction contest solely to push my comfort zone. Every round a new pairing was revealed, and I had 2 weeks to write something for it. Because I'd typically focused most of my fics on only a few characters in the canon, chances were that most of the rounds I was going to have to not only write characters I'd never written before, but in pairings that hadn't ever been on my radar (and a lot more quickly than I usually write). ~ As it turned out, my most popular fic in that fandom came from that contest, and involved characters I'd never written before.