So that’s where the fic updates go these days –> My tumblr. To be honest all I really post there is fic updates, occasional small and inconsequential rants, and other than that I reblog gif sets and porn. Cos tumblr is for porn *nods*

My twitter is still a great place to chat, though it’s a lot quieter these days than it used to be.

So, NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. Two weeks to go. I had big plans to rewrite (I know that’s not the done thing, but meh) my first NaNo novel, Vital Depth, which I wrote in ’09, but to do that I had to sit down and snowflake the everloving crap out of it. And I haven’t done that.  Also, I’ve come to the realisation that anything I write during November (or for Camp NaNo – did that in July this year) is invariably a giant mess due to the word vomit that is necessary just to make the daily wordcount and needs so much rewriting that it freaks me the crap out and I never look at it again (hence the planned rewrite of my ’09 effort – 4 years later).

So, Vital Depth, because it means so much to me, will be getting a much more relaxed effort, hopefully sometime early next year.

And because I’m finding fic so easy to write at the moment, and have plot bunnies coming out my ears (or spilling out of my filofax), I’m just going to write a bunch of fic. I’ve never written fanfic during NaNo before–well, it’s never been the big planned project during Nano, though I have written shorts during November and counted them towards my goal–so this is a new thing for me. Hopefully, with the many short fics, my attention span will remain constant, and short fics are much less scary when it comes to rewriting and editing.

Also happening over the last few months of the year, is Yuletide, the rare fandom fic exchange. I’ve signed up for the first time this year, and plan to write my gift fic during November, and it can count toward my NaNo word count.

So, that’s what’s coming, as far as updates go, it lacks what’s been. Not much, really, except writing. I’ve been doing little else this year, so far I’ve clocked almost 140,000 words published in 2013 to date, and that’s not counting the 50+k I wrote during July for Camp NaNo. That’s almost exclusively Teen Wolf fic, with about 18k of Harry Potter and a couple of thousand words of Buffy.  And that can all be found on my AO3 account (it’s the only place I post nowadays).

I need something fresh, so I took the leap. So, now I’m looking at a mad snowflaking dash for the next two weeks, and then early mornings for the month of July. I do have both kids at school now, and I’ve set myself a 30k target, so technically it should be more doable than ever before, but I’m still feeling wicked apprehensive.

At least I actually get to do NaNo during winter as it was intended—never had that before.

I’m having a bit of a clean out, and I’m finding a lot of fic I started and never did anything with. So I’m going to chuck some of the pieces up here, list them on Happy Tales Plot Bunny Adoption Center (LJ community) in hopes that someone will give them a home and a life. No point them wasting away on my hard drive, potentially getting lost in a failure.

It’s all first draft (or zero draft, in some cases, beware epic typos and markdown!) stuff, so please don’t judge me too harshly.  Any and all of it is completely editable, the adopter gets free reign within the scope of the licence.

I’m CC licencing them, licences will possibly vary depending on how much of the source material went into them (fuck all and I’ll allow commercial use, quite a bit and I’m sorry, I can’t condone making money off fanfic, KWIM?).

Human Chased by a Wolf

POV character runs from a wolf through woods and an abandoned house and is caught, but the wolf turns out to be his lover. Incomplete from the beginning of the sex scene. 622 words.

Originally a twific idea (Human Alec/Seth) but could easily become Teen Wolf, or profic, or whatever.

My throat burns, and my heart pounds hard enough that I can feel it in my wrists, my temples. Each time my bare feet hit the ground it sends shudders of impact up my legs. All I can hear is my harsh breathing, the trees as they fly by, stinging as they hit my cheeks and chest and naked limbs.

And I can hear the wolf behind me. Crashing through the trees, huge paws sending tremors through the forest floor, his panting as he gains on me.

His hot breath reaches me, he’s right behind me, I feel it on my naked ass and I throw myself forward in a last burst of speed. I know it won’t be long, he’ll catch me very soon, but I can’t give up.

I won’t.

There’s pale light through the trees. I don’t know this part of the forest, but I reach for it, if I can only make it out of the woods…

I break through the trees and into the weak afternoon sunlight. There’s a house, old, broken, reclaimed by the forest, and dodging the smaller trees that grow all the way up to the edge of the rotting porch, I run up the step and shove open the door that hangs off it’s hinges.

I barely have time to look around me as I run through the house, all I notice is a smell of decay and rot, wet floor beneath my feet, boards that give way beneath my pounding steps. Everywhere is green, and there is a warmth inside that wasn’t out there in the forest.

I don’t look back when I hear the ancient door fall in as he crashes through after me. I head straight for the stairs, and they don’t look safe, but I’ll do anything I have to to get away, to keep him from catching me.

I make it up without falling, and then I run down a hall so overgrown with ivy that it’s like being in the forest again. I hear the stairs give way behind me, then his paws on the floor behind me, his hot breath on my heels again, and I know it’s almost over, he’s almost got me, and my lungs are burning, I’m out of breath, the muscles in my legs are screaming at me to stop but I can’t until he catches me.

His paw gets me between the shoulder blades, and I go down fast, grabbing at vines and air as I roll. My breath comes out of me in a rush as my back hits the floor and my eyes widen as I see him above me, enormous, a mass of tawny fur and white teeth, and though I try to force them open, my eyes close reflexively.

Hot canine breath washes over me, heating my flesh. I moan as warm fur brushes the length of my entire body, and then as he shudders above me, is replaced by hot, naked flesh. Hard flesh.

“You’re getting faster,” he grunts in my ear, and then kicks my legs apart and lies between them, pressing his long, thick, hard cock against mine. “I actually had to run to keep up a couple of times.”

I groan. I can’t form words, and even if I could, my throat is so tortured that I doubt I’d be able to make any sound at all. He grabs my arms in both hands and pulls them up over my head, pinning me with one large hand, and then he grabs his cock with his free hand and lines himself up.

“Knees up, baby,” he whispers.

I lift my legs and wrap them around his waist, and then slowly he sinks inside me.

Particularly for longer stuff, that’s par for the course for me. Whether I’ve outlined myself stupid or not (which I did this time), there’s always some retconning (my word to mean there’s stuff I have to go back and fix to fit the rest of the story) to be done, and way more than general SPaG, it scares the beejeebus out of me.

So I’m chuffed to have taken the story all the way to the end, but simply dreading the edit job. Of course, once it’s all done, I’ll look back and wonder WTF I was worried about.

Hoping to get it all done by February. Cross your fingers for me, shake your pompoms. Ta :)

Oh, it’s called Stronger in Numbers, or, And Will He Starve Without Me (cos I couldn’t decide, but we’ll just call it SiN for short, shall we?). It’ll go up here and on AO3 when it’s done.

There are NaNoWriMo word count calculators out there, but I always ended up making my own. I wanted a little more than the NaNoWriMo website stats could give me, but I didn’t need sheets and sheets of linked… stuff, either. My spreadsheet skills are very basic (I don’t even know how to link sheets) but they do what I need them to do, and they keep me writing for the most part, which is the main thing.

I started, of course, with a NaNo calculator, then after NaNo ended one year I started making the calculators for different targets, different time periods. This November, I made one for NaNo that had both the standard 50k target, but also had space for a custom target (I found 50k to be no great challenge, after three years of wins).

Thought I might as well share them. Maybe they’ll be useful to someone else :)

To use them, click on the spreadsheet title. It’ll open the Google Doc in a new window. File > Make a Copy, and give it a name. It’ll be saved in your own Google Docs/Drive. If you don’t have a Google/Gmail account, or if you prefer to have it on your computer rather than in the cloud,  use File > Download as > and choose Excel or Open Document format.

If anything is messed up, let me know so I can fix it!

Seven Day Word Count Spreadsheet

Fourteen Day Word Count Spreadsheet

Thirty Day Word Count Spreadsheet

NaNoWriMo Word Count Spreadsheet

NaNoWriMo with Custom Target Word Count Spreadsheet

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sigh. Derek. Sigh. Stiles. They’re just OMFGPERFECT, aren’t they?

Anyway, it bit me so bad that my NaNo faltered and I had to ban myself from Teen Wolf till the end of the month. But post NaNo, I dived right in and now have a ridiculous collection of images in my dropbox for those late night pretty cravings.

Started a fic this morning. I’ve been planning it out for the last couple of days, and I’m ridiculously organised. Now I just have to write it. I’m hoping I can get it done inside this week, but time will tell. I have my trusty OCD word count spreadsheet, so hopefully that will drive me.

Anyway, with luck, it’ll get written and edited in a decent time frame. I’m posting my fic here on my blog as well as on AO3 nowadays, so it’ll go up here first.

For NaNo and all the long form stuff I ever write (and it feels a bit weird saying that now considering NaNo is the only long form thing I’ve written in close to a year) I always use Scrivener. It’s also the only computer software I justify paying for. Usually, if you can’t get it Open Source, it’s not worth having IMO, but Scrivener is actually that good. It didn’t break the bank (and I have a very small bank), it cost me US$40 (for the Windows version – it is originally a Mac app) and I won’t have to fork out again till they come out with another major release, the little updates won’t cost me anything.

Final scene of the NaNovel & laughably awful as per spec, with the cover art in a split view.

Scrivener gives you the ability to outline in several different ways, you can store all your research including PDF’s, image files, even webpages right within the main project file, it has a full screen distraction free writing environment, real time word counts, ability to set targets for the project and the session, you can fuck about with your toolbars endlessly so you get everything you need and no buttons you don’t. You can toggle pretty much every bar on or off, have pretty formatting or no formatting at all, and two of my favourite features of all time in Scrivener are:

1. Convert formatting to default text style
   OMG this feature is beyond awesome. I do a lot of writing on my phone, export the text and C+P it into Scrivener. No more faffing about fixing the formatting. A couple of clicks and it’s done for me :D
2. Name Generator
   No more opening the browser and loading babynames.com when suddenly a new character walks into the scene, it’s all right there in the app! This is a comprehensive name generator with origin options out the wazoo, I made good use of the Ancient Roman option during NaNo, and there’s an Arthurian Legend option for those of you writing Merlin fic ;) It has name meanings as well, for those of you like me who like to match the name to the character in that way.

I say Scrivener is definitely worth the money if you write anything longer than a short story or one shot fanfic at all, ever, even if you only write something longer once a year in November it’s totally worth it, and if you write all the time (like I plan do be doing again now that my epic block of epicness is over). But, if you can’t justify the outlay, there is always yWriter. I used yWriter for my first NaNo back in ’09, and used it to write an epic (for me) 110k novel, and it’s free! You can do a lot of what you can do in Scrivener in yWriter, it’s got the basics, chapters, scenes, the ability to shift stuff around without having to rename a thousand files. It also has dedicated character profiles. It’s not as pretty as Scrivener, and it doesn’t have the ability to compile your epic document in a trillion different ways, but it’ll definitely do the job.

I mentioned up there that I do a lot of writing on my phone. I have an Android smartphone, and a fairly basic one at that. I like to lie in bed in the mornings when hubby is around to kid-wrangle and write up to 1k on my phone before I even get up. No distractions, plenty of coffee, snuggly warm bed, hubby’s stolen pillow behind me… *sigh* Bliss.

If I did all my writing in Google Docs, I’d use the Drive app and never need to export stuff to paste into Scrivener, but I have a love/hate relationship with Google Docs, also, if I am copy pasting from Docs, Docs messes up your formatting something chronic (so I don’t recommend doing that).

I prefer a simple text editor, something that allows me to export the stuff I’ve written for later pasting into my main writing file. I discovered Power Writer during November, and it’s been bloody awesome. It has formatting within the app, but I don’t bother with it. What I need from a Droid writing app is plain text, real time word count, and text export, and this has it all. When I’m ready to add it to Scrivener, I export the text to Google Drive and it appears in the Drive folder on my computer. Cut, paste, convert formatting (yay Scrivener!), and away I go again :D

It’s offline, so I can write while I’m waiting with the kid at the bus stop in the mornings without cutting into my limited data, too, something you can’t do with Google Docs/Drive.

Typing on your phone can be a challenge, of course, but there’s another app for Android that I swear by and it’s one of the few Droid apps I’ll pay for (weirdly, I’m more inclined to pay for a Droid app than I am a Windows app). You need a decent keyboard on a touch screen. I use Swiftkey and can pretty much touchtype in portrait on my little Droid. It costs a few bucks, but it also has a month long trial version and it’s full featured, so you can give it a bloody good test run to see if it’s indispensable or not.

Phew. I’m buggered. Epic blog post! I’m not done yet though. Please bear with me :)

Right now, I’m writing a Teen Wolf fic. Bit of an experiment, really, some PWP to see if I can actually do it. Not planning on anything epic, couple of thousand words or so perhaps. Don’t need Scrivener for this, no planning, just pantsing my way through some single scene smut. Could write it directly into Open Office Writer, but honestly, on my little netbook it takes a while to open, and I’m just doing a little bit a day, 1k tops, so there’s no need to have the file open all day either like I was doing during November.

Just like on my phone I want plain text, real time word count, and easy cut and paste.

What I do have open pretty much all day is my browser. I’m all about the Chrome apps, all about the pinned tabs, a window can be open constantly and be there when I need it but be almost invisible when I don’t. I have a bunch of Chrome writing apps in my browser, so I just kinda picked one at sort of random.

Laughably awful Teen Wolf smut in Pillarbox.

Pillarbox is doing the job nicely. It’s another offline app, my shit isn’t on some random server somewhere, it’s safely tucked away on my computer. It’s not a file either, it’s somewhere in my browser memory, so it’s a definite cut and paste job. I don’t have to be connected to the internet to use it, so when I go into that weird corner of my bedroom that hates the internet, I can still write. There’s the word count right there, I can even set a target – and it’s got a clock and a timer too! For short form stuff, or even for the days writing before cut and paste at the end of the session, it’s brilliant.

At the end of everything comes Open Office Writer.  This is what I use for my final edits (it’s got a New Zealand English dictionary) and the final formatting of stuff. It’s better than M$ Office, and it’s free. The addons are awesome, I have one that makes epub files, another that cleans up the stuff you’ve cut and pasted from apps like Google Docs that shove all sorts of rubbish that shouldn’t be there into the document.

*deep breath* Okay, I think I’m done. Thanks for listening to my ramble :)

If you’ve got any favourite writing or related apps, please share! I love new shiny things :D Oh, and if you’re iOS/Mac, too. Let’s be inclusive ;)

Anyway. Had a bit of a rough start to NaNo this year. I got two days in and realised my POV was completely fucked and had to rewrite several scenes (while keeping the cut ones in my ‘shit-but-keep-for-word-count’ folder). Yesterday I realised my story was completely and utterly boring, and while my wordcount was rocketing along quite happily, I wasn’t actually saying anything.

If in doubt, add ninjas. So my fantasy world just got invaded. Not actually by ninjas in this case, but you get the picture. Now, my three boys have to somehow get out of the magically impenetrable castle I locked them in, AND THEN fight off the invading barbarian hordes.

And there’s gonna be some sex in there somewhere, too. Before fighting off the invading barbarian hordes. I have epic fuckloads to look forward to! I can’t wait!

Hubby expressed concern over my impending battle scenes. I think he’s under the impression I can’t write that sort of thing because I’m a girl. Pfft.

Oh, I procrastinated yesterday by watching several episodes of Teen Wolf and making cover art.

But for 6 months or so, I didn’t write a thing. Then I got dragged into signing up for Kink Bingo and at least attempted to write something.

That resulted in the infamous Harry/Draco butter!kink failure O.O You don’t even want to know, but it at least got me started. I won’t go into the other stuff I’ve begun and then abandoned, but finally I actually started, finished, edited and posted Painted Green, and while it was only 700 odd words and fairly meaningless, I finally fucking finished something! Epic reason for celebration after a 6 month complete block.

So I figured I could handle NaNo this year. God only knows if I’ll come out with something readable (I’ve done exactly nothing with my last two efforts), but I’ll be writing.

Still don’t know what I’m going to be writing for NaNo this year, because I know from previous experience that whatever I decide to do and tell the world I’m going to do, invariably changes at the last minute (several times, if I know me). I’ve already told venis-envy that I’m doing The Lucky Ones (an SSE AU that I started planning 2 years ago), but it’s looking like that isn’t going to happen yet again. Right now I’m writing what could be an epic Harry/Draco mpreg (gasp!) so I might just decide to continue that for NaNo (counting only the words I write during November of course).

There’s always the option to hit a random plot generator at 11.59pm on October the 31st :D

One thing I’m not doing is planning out the wazoo like I have done before. There is no big red book this year. I’m thinking about rereading all my previous NaNo posts though, see if I feel like doing any of that in the week and a bit I have left.

Find me on the NaNoWriMo site here.

Alright! Months and freaking months since I posted here, haven’t written a word of fic in almost as long. Then a couple of ficsters who will definately not remain nameless (I’m looking at you, venis-envy and sapphirescribe) bullied me into signing up for Kink Bingo.

Ummm, yay?

Yep, I’m pretty much terrified.

Anyway, it’s done now, and it’s not too scary considering minimums are 500 words and I have close to a year to post them.

Anyway, here’s my card:

I hope to write in a couple of different fandoms as well as perhaps doing a little original fic, and I’ll be posting on my AO3 account.

Yeah. That is all :D