November Writing and December Plans

[osprey_archer]

Did not get much writing done this month. Feeling discouraged about writing in general, to be honest. I’ve been struggling to write (so many of this year’s writing posts are some variation on “didn’t get much writing done this month”!), and my royalties are considerably lower than last year, and it’s all very frustrating.

I have decided that for whatever reason I am simply not Ready to write Sleeping Beauty, so rather than continuing to bang my head against that wall, I’m going to set the project aside for at least a year, probably more, it seems optimistic to imagine that I’ll be able to stand the sight of it after a mere year has passed. I remind myself yet again that Ursula K. Le Guin had to sit on Tehanu for eighteen years before she was ready to write it. Eighteen years!

Have been noodling on a couple of projects but who knows if they will come to anything.

***

Anyway, in years past when I have been struggling to write, I have found prompt memes really helpful. (The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball originally grew from a prompt meme.) So I thought I would post one!

Tell me a little about a winter story I haven't written, and I'll give you several sentences from that story.

Winter doesn't have to mean holiday (although it certainly can!). Think snow, icicles, hot beverages by toasty fires, sledding and sleigh rides and being trapped by blizzards and unfortunate incidents involving holly dryads.

I will write ficlets for most any fandom I've written before (Captain America, Queen's Thief, various Sutcliffs, American Girl... I haven't actually written a Biggles or Worrals fic before but I've been thinking about trying) or for my own books, or for a completely original story.

Comments

[sholio]

This is so sweet and lovely! Naturally Biggles's immediate thought is not "oh no, I'm stranded in the middle of nowhere with my prisoner" but "I will untie him immediately so we can work through this problem together."

We'll only survive this cold if we huddle for warmth.

And thus 10,000 fanfics were born.

He swallows the joke and wonders if there is anything else in the aeroplane that he could feed von Stalhein.

AWWWWWWW.

[osprey_archer]

Biggles is perhaps delighted to get this providential chance to try to talk von Stalhein into joining the good guys. "Usually we can only exchange brief words at gunpoint," Biggles thinks, "but this time I'll have a whole entire snowstorm to try to talk him around."

[rachelmanija]

Yes, absolutely!

...now I want "Biggles and von Stalhein are imprisoned together."

[osprey_archer]

Von Stalhein's lowlifes of the week, tired of von Stalhein's inability to kill Biggles and more than a little convinced that von Stalhein and Biggles are already working together, chain them to the walls of a pitch-dark dungeon beneath a crumbling chateau in some neglected French province.

The real difficulty will be figuring out how von Stalhein comes out of this experience STILL resisting Biggles' blandishments to join his side.

[rachelmanija]

I LOVE this.

It could be a canon AU where he comes over earlier. I also discovered that once you trap them together long enough, it becomes very difficult to not do that.