I got dreams so wide like a country mile

Comment porn fail :) 2000 words and counting. If this was a DW porn battle it wouldn't matter, but on LJ I think this is going to take about 6 comments to post! Sigh.

Well, I have a first draft of angsty Torchwood fic. That totally didn't end up where I thought it was going when I first started it. Anyone fancy giving it a read through? Post KKBB J/I date fic. Way back when I first started it I was going to call it "Magic soaking my spine" because that song (Read My Mind) is totally a Jack vid in my head but I think it'll end up being called Whiskey and Revalations in the end.

I'm actually kind of chuffed just to have something finished - my writing has been a little stalled of late, what with a combination of being crazy busy with work and getting sick on a regular basis (why yes, I am again!)

Fight scenes are so tricky to write! I think I need to give these guys names (or, this being Jack POV, nicknames) otherwise the whole thing is going to be rather too confusing.

w00t! First draft! Thank you for your helpful advice on my whiny post - it was definitely, well, helpful :) Now I have to actually leave the damn thing alone and not look at it for about a week, I think, before I go back and try to make edits.

Anyone want to beta 1.5k of SG1 post Homecoming (S7 ep 2) fic for me? It's about Daniel asking Jack to help him recover some memories but it's not smutty at all. I don't hate it as much as I thought I did, but I have a feeling it needs quite a bit of work. Or, alternatively, suggest somewhere/someone I could ask...

Bah! Why is this story proving so hard to finish! I know where I want it to end up, and it's kind of going there but it's just so fiddly! Anyone want to alpha read some Jack/Ianto for me (my holiday bang fic) and offer suggestions?

It's very frustrating to realise that I am going to have to abandon the 500 or so words I have written for the current work in progress, but I have come to the conclusion this afternoon that much as I like them, I can't use them to lead into the scene that the story needs to finally focus on because they are from the wrong point of view.

It's partly my own fault because I started writing with very little idea of where it was going to go. I found myself thinking one afternoon "I wonder what happened when Jack and Ianto did actually have that date" and thought well why don't I write the fic and find out. Which was, I think in retrospect, a mistake. I should have thought more about what the answers were to that question. Most of the J/I fic I have written comes from questions like this but they generally come in the form of an idea for the answer to that question, not just the question.

So, if I'd been thinking it through, I probably wouldn't have sat down and written the paragraphs I did. I got a little way in and then stalled, because I still didn't really know the answer. So I started turning it over in my head while on the way to places (which is when I do my best thinking) and didn't come up with an answer, per se, but I did come up with something else, which is a completely different question - "Why does Jack ask Ianto on a date in the first place?" What does that tell us about the relationship they had before and why does he want to have a different kind of relationship now? And those were questions that my ruminations gave me answers to as well.

Feeling pleased with myself and energised, I went back to what I had already written. Interestingly enough, the new question is actually implicit in some of the stuff I've already got down but it was just kind of an undercurrent. But unfortunately, what I had down was from a tight Jack point of view, and Jack already knows the answer to this question (if there's one thing a year hanging from your arms in an engine room gives you it's a lot of time for introspection). From his point of view, he knows what he's doing, and so he won't be thinking about it until Ianto actually asks him about it and then he'll be prepared to give an actual answer. So the fic now has no interest from his point of view at all - the pacing is all wrong and there's no progression or realisation because all the progression has happened for him during the year he was away (I suppose you could do it as an intercut - scenes from now cut with scenes from his time on the Valiant - but for various reasons I find myself really not wanting to write any of Jack's time on the Valiant). From Ianto's point of view though, it's an interesting speculation, discovery and decision process all rolled into one.

Sadly, this means I have to throw away what I've written already - I may keep a little bit and re-write the POV for that, but the rest really won't work because Ianto is asleep for it! On the other hand, I will hopefully end up with an actual story with a point and something interesting to say but nevertheless I find myself regretting that I couldn't have made it work out so I could keep that prose. Writing an enormous meta post has helped though, so thanks for that :)

Wow! Spent all of yesterday writing with synecdochic on AIM, taking the Jack/Daniel thing I wrote after seeing The Fifth Race from 1000 words and not quite knowing where it was going to go to 2400 words and finished and with smut! It was actually a really intense feeling - every time I started to lose the focus of where it was supposed to go, I went back to look at our discussion of the themes I'd started or posted a bit and got her to cheerlead and evaluate at the same time. I still don't have a whole lot of confidence in my writing yet so doing something like that with someone who's writing I really admire was a huge confidence boost.

It just really surprised me how much of a high I was when I left work to go meet up with the boyf and our friends for dinner - seriously, totally buzzed. I can't wait to publish the story now, although it still needs a bit of work before it's ready (hi, my inexperience at writing porn, let me show you it!) and I know I'm always going to remember writing it.

Bah. On the plus side, I think I'm at the point where I'm ready to go back and do a bit more on the Torchwood story I signed up to finish this month. On the bad side, the Jack/Daniel SG1 thing currently both refuses to leave me alone and refuses to actually become coherent. I've written a draft which includes all the neat conversational snippets that have been turning up in my head but they don't really connect. I can see what it should be doing/showing but it's really not doing/showing it at the moment. Possibly I'm just overtired (I certainly am overtired, but that may or may not be the cause of my writing woes). Tomorrow.

Still, I did come home to a lovely comment on the Martha thing I wrote a couple of weeks ago, so that cheered me up no end.

When I'm writing, I find myself checking the word count far too often. I guess it's nice to see the progress indicator going up. This is not coming on too badly actually - I started off thinking I should just write some straight PWP, but then I started thinking about how they would get there and where it would fit in my mental Jack/Ianto timeline so now we are 2k words in and no porn in sight :) It'll get there though. I have faith.