...in which I ramble a bit.
My initial assignment matched on Dancing with the Stars RPF. Now, you may have observed I don't so much write RPF/S, but I'd said I could, possibly in a fit of insanity, so though I considered, hard enough to acquire the source material, going a different way (as I did last year), I eventually wrote my assignment.
The request was for Mark Ballas/Derek Hough, who, as wikipedia will tell you, are not related but grew up together kind of a lot because Derek and his sister went to live and train with the Ballases when they were kids. All three of them are/were dance pros on DWTS. Thanks to
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snegurochka_lee for beta help and cheerleading.
Thus, I wrote
First Dance (6400 words, adult, Derek/Mark from early teens to present, with a reference to fumbly adolescent fooling around but not so much explicit underage smut).
Next, I started picking up pinches. I love pinch hitting a lot, and while there are a couple of exchanges for which I just can't do it because the characters require me to listen to them yammer for seventy-eleven days before they will concur that it is time to write anything down (heh), for yuletide, oh hey, I will pinch.
First, a pinch for someone who I've concluded then defaulted:
Apprentice, (1400 words, gen) which was for a request not unlike one of my own. It is for the YA trilogy (of which there are only two books out so far),
Hunger Games, and is backstory for a secondary character, Cinna. It's more 'scene' than 'story,' but has been relatively well-received, I think. Thanks to
imaginarycircus for comments, some of which I didn't really have time to implement well, but which did make me think a little more about motivation versus action.
Then as I was thinking on that, along came a pinch for Huck Finn. Yeah, that had to be done. So, I wrote
West of the River (2650 words, gen), which was improved by comments from
regan_v, who told me where I was lacking in US history (this is not news; my US history education was and is dreadful; most of what I know is because I either looked it up on my own at some point, or because I learned it in a lit class, which tends to mean the focal points are a little peculiar. Fortunately, Huck himself is a highly unreliable narrator, which means that while I did poke and prod at this one quite a bit prior to the opening of the archive, I also had more wiggle room than I might have for a source material that's less thoroughly reliant on narrator point of view.
Then, because I am batshit insane, I took on yet one more true pinch (as opposed to treats), because I saw it come across, thought ummm, I do HAVE that source material, sat on my hands for 15 minutes so someone more qualified could pick it up, then took it. This is the one for an album--
21st Century Breakdown, Green Day. The album is, as Green Day's previous one was, a rock opera sort of thing, in which there is a story told throughout the album, and the same characters show up in the various songs. The themes of the album are about societal upheaval, about governments and individuals and spying and manipulation. My 14-year-old thought, therefore, that I should write about one of the primary characters being aware of being observed and written about by the band and not being able to distinguish between having her story told and being eavesdropped-upon and used as propaganda by her government due to the paranoia brought about by being watched (do you know your enemy?). Yeah, I wasn't sure I could do that in the 20 hours or so between picking up the pinch and the deadline, so I listened to the album on repeat for a while, took notes about recurring themes, and wrote
Life is Calling (1450 words, gen).
( cut to save your scroll bar; there were also five treats, heh )I originally posted this at http://florahart.dreamwidth.org/1021639.html, and you are welcome to comment there. OpenID and/or anon comments are allowed. ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
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