I've got some poetry which I really really should get around to publishing in a magazine or something. Currently just sitting around, just existing, I guess.

But recently, I've been working on a short story, which I suppose I'll turn into a novel, if it goes well enough. Gotta get those creative juices flowing, and start writing more of it though.

And lastly, I'm tinkering with a nonlinear story. I tried to swap between the present and memories, but after having it reviewed by a couple beta's, it isn't prominent enough, and I ended up confusing people, instead of bringing new understanding to the writing.

Write more, write often. And if you feel so inclined, make yourself some cocoa as you work. :)

all in the planning stages for years at this point.

"Because We Like You"
The chronologically next story of my spin-off, this takes place immediately after "Pick Your Poison" and shows my little Sue kid recruits being officially inducted to the PPC. It's actually a fairly complex interlude, with a handful of cameos and, I think, the first really detailed description of the nursery we've had yet? If anyone knows of an existing one I may have missed, let me know. But yeah, this one kicked my butt for literally years, and I'm glad it's in the beta stage and close to release. Just waiting for feedback from one more beta, Nesh! :)

* * *

"A Fistful of Hs"
My Thirty Hs mission, now into its second draft. I'm trying to make this mission fairly unique and different, and not to turn it into "oh no the badness is so bad," out of respect to the folks who find it legitimately entertaining. I'm trying to keep it pretty silly, but still have a plot surrounding it. I had quite a lot of fun drafting it, actually. There's also going to be a mini-mission side story of my Cafeteria agents going into Thirty Hs in search of edible substances.

This one will take a while to release, as there's another interlude I need to write for Doc and Vania that takes place between "Because We Like You" and this one, covering the 2013 Blackout.

An unbetad excerpt?
Vania nodded to Doc and started forward. “Let’s do this.”

“Wait. But.” Doc glanced from his partner to the scientist. “Disguises?”

“Do not bother,” said Minutia. “None of this story actually takes place on the surface of the Wizarding World.”

“Okay, that was some very suspicious phrasing you just chose, there.” Doc continued talking even as Vania dragged him towards the portal. “Nobody said this was a crossover, and I don't see where a Harry Potter story could take place other than oh my God we’re in outer space.”

Indeed, they were. The Potterverse version of Earth, geographically indistinguishable from World One’s, stretched out below the agents for a seemingly endless distance (with the British Isles facing them, appropriately enough). The moon loomed huge ahead of them, and the sun, still too far away to look any bigger, was somewhere behind them, allowing the agents vision.

Doc began to scream for a split second, but then clamped his mouth shut with his cheeks puffed out. He pressed his back to Vania and moved around her in a circle, flailing his arms. As his cheeks began to darken, he sank down at Vania’s feet, grasping at her hand briefly until the hand fell and he went still.

“Doc, please stand up. You're embarrassing me in front of all the celestial bodies.”

* * *

"The Garden Spells Trouble"
This is going to be a weird interlude, even by PPC standards. It appeared in my head fully formed after I read Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, an obscure little romance with a very light dash of urban fantasy. It's somewhere in between an interlude and a mission, and will finally reveal the Cafeteria Division's head after all these years. And will also connect to Phobos's Catastrophe Series, somehow. I doubt anyone was clamoring for Yoof and Séverine to get their own big episode, but uh. It's coming.

This story is actually ready for a third draft before betaing, but I've been putting it off since it takes place so far in the future from my current writing. I wanted to bang the whole thing out right after reading GS, so I didn't lose the idea.

Another unbetad excerpt:
Meanwhile, Yoof had been checking out what food was available. Uneaten food that required reheating had been carted back into the kitchens by the previous shift. (Nonperishable food was left out in the Cafeteria to keep agents occupied while new food was prepared. Less popular foods of this variety tended to sit out for weeks before either getting eaten by a desperate agent or managing to escape on its own.) The kitchens also featured massive walk-in pantries, refrigerators and freezers, containing various raw ingredients and unprepared food acquired from various fics and canons.

"What are our options today, Yoof? Sound off leftovers."

Yoof stood rigid and saluted. "From the leftovers! Slowpoke tail! Frosted guano! Meatloaf!"

Séverine rolled her eyes. Even all this time after the Blackout, the meatloaf was hardly getting touched. Didn't agents understand that not eating the meatloaf was what had caused Slorp in the first place? "And what other ingredients can we use?"

"From the freezer! Belgian fries! Sea salt ice cream! Maui's dolphin steak! Ants! Meatloaf!

"From the fridge! Spinning leek! Rukh eggs! Ham and jam and spam!"

"A lot?"

"Yes! Also, Superfast Jellyfish! A few good taters! Armored goat milk! Meatloaf!

"From the pantry! Dehydrated dextro-amino foods! Kupo Nuts and Deku Nuts! Beebles! Monkey biscuits! Some DHARMA supplies! Meatloaf!"

"Excellént, excellént." Séverine rubbed her hands together, mentally combining ingredients. She moved each of the mixing bowls to a separate counter. "We will put the guano and meatloaf back in the fridge. We need the food to be eaten this time." She paused again, glancing between the doors. "Okay. Yoof, I am going to begin mixing Kupo Nuts into dough. Please go knock some Beebles unconscious."

"Yes!" Yoof grabbed a large metal mallet from a corner and dragged it into the pantry, which was filled with tittering laughter. Unnervingly, the sound only increased with each loud thwack, but Séverine was too focused on mixing to notice.

—doctorlit, the slowest writer

Which are, uh, partially why I took so long to respond to this.
Also, procrastination.

By 'a few thing', what I actually mean is is that I have two main projects:

1. My first actual PPC story spinoff! Finally, after two years or so of being here, I've nearly got the spinoff, er, begun. Not to imply all that time was spent on that spinoff, because that would then imply that the thing has had more effort put into it than it has, therefore implying that it's better than it probably will be! That was mostly just finishing school, and, and trying to figure out what I was even doing and, uh, procrastinating.
It will consist of a bunch of short stories all connected to a larger one. It will have no missions or sues and it will be about an Operations division that's had basically nothing written about it.

Dos. A weekly prompts thingy with Alleb.
I would actually really recommend this, if you lot have troubles with motivating yourself to write things - it was for this reason that Alleb and I started doing it, after all! It's also useful for that whole worldbuilderitis thing, which was also partly why I started doing it.
It's essentially a workshopping thing - one of us will find a prompt, we each have a week to write a thing on that prompt, and at the end of the week, we look at each other's stories, and beta them. Repeat next week, with the other person finding the prompt.
Thus, you manage to:
- Get writing practice done (which is a bit important considering that the only way to get better at writing is to write things)
- Get a bit of betaing practice in
- Get your writing consistently critically looked at
And so on and so forth.
Also, you get to talk consistently to cool people about your stories. At least, I do.
I've been using it as a way to help me to further expand and look at my own original universe - using the prompts to write little vignettes within it. Which, of course, is very good for further developing it, and the like.

I've been writing bits and pieces of a PPC mission (that I probably won't publish) of a fic that I'm not sure is badfic-bad but otherwise has a Gary Stu, uncanon, contrivance issues, consistency issues, general stupidity, and writing that goes from being not so great to sounding pretentious.
Even though I might end up not publishing the mission, I'm writing it as an exercise and as a way to vent out my dislike on the stupid and annoying parts of the fic.

Ozzielot

A number of months ago, a friend (hi Thoth) and I were discussing the horrors of A/B/O dynamics and I got so mad I decided to make something with A/B/O that wasn't horrible. It's nowhere near done, and there's no beta yet so of course it's kinda gross but here it is, I guess. :D Really the only reason I'm posting this is so I'll have a better incentive to keep writing it.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jXIp75yKyyNpYUiAIWD4qvfJOBKcpTYfVT7rkTbHWP4/edit
Also if anyone wants to beta for me, I will pay you in souls.

I've come up with 5 different works for future Badfic Games and other joke badfics, but I haven't worked recently on anything legitimate I have. Oh dear. I need to go do that...

But if you guys want to know what any of my legitimate works are, I can elaborate.

-Twistey

First and foremost, I continue to write my Magic: the Gathering blog. I'm rather proud that I've kept it up this long.

I'm also working on that Baron Phobos story that I keep saying is almost done. In my defense, it is more almost done than the last time I said it was almost done. So...

Also, I keep meaning to go back and figure out a way to take the suck out of this mission I've been writing. I should do that.

-Phobos

Aka, the pile of files I have open that I could see getting bigger at some point.

- Honors thesis (the experiments are done, I just need to write the thing, due by May)
- An interlude set after the RP in which Kk'kttak fell into HQ (aka, the one where he's been arrested)
- Two short stories
- An effectively abandoned recruitment interlude for Peregrin (like, I might maybe get back to it eventually, but probably not anytime soon)
- A dormant Young Wizards/Animorphs crossover (... there's an outline! I have a plan! Sort of...)

And as to questions, do any of y'all have this problem where you sometimes get a project blocked by fleshing out the middle of a story? Like, you know where you are, you know where you'd like to end up, and you have a general notion of how to get from here to there, but you need much more detail than that to write the thing. If so, how do you deal with it?

- Tomash

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Hey Thoth,

I recall you've seen my own sort of take-on-the-PPC-that-isn't-a-PPC-spinoff; I've considered rewriting it to more closely resemble the PPC continuity since. Unfortunately, some of the elements conflict too much with what's established and existing to make it compatible with the PPC continuity, so Watanabe & Smith has unfortunately been in limbo for the past little bit and I'd like to discuss the direction I'm going in with other people. I'm currently leaning toward continuing on the road I'm on, and just keeping the disclaimer that it's not endorsed in any fashion by the PPC.

I've also been working on writing a couple essays and how-tos that I also intend to put on my website for different pieces of advice. One that I've thought to add includes a more expansive take on what I'm calling the "micro-story" method of describing a character or as an exercise to brainstorm when building a character. I've mentioned it here before although it was on the tailing end of another discussion. It's a method of using small, short descriptions of what your character does or has done, rather than use adjectives. I find that adjectives are inherently subjective and open to a wide amount of interpretation depnding on who you describe your character to and in many cases can be extrapolated to fit almost any character at all, wheras what they do say much more about them. That's why I champion the "micro-story" method so much and why I like to share it with other people. After that, we'll see what else I have to offer.

Unrelatedly, I might add some musings on the (extremely sad) state of computer security at the consumer level and some tips to stay safe at a later date.

Even though things have been going much more slowly than I'd like, I wanted to mention that they're still going.
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And by that I mean I'm stuck in the World Builder's Syndrome, unable to even write an opening, but spending hours nitpicking every possible aspect of my universe.
.
.
.
.
.
Send help.

The first bit of this popped into my head almost fully formed while I was in the shower a few days ago, and the second bit followed fairly easily. Then I spoke about it with a friend of mine who is a songwriter, and she's going to help me make it into an actual song next month. Apparently February is album-writing month. ^_^

First two verses on my dA. I'm holding off on sharing any more until I know what the final form is really going to be. The title (new today!) may not be the final title, either, but it's what I like right now.

Also:

- 1 active cowrite
- 3 dormant ones (one of which will become active again whenever hS can work it in; dunno about the other two)
- 1 interlude set in the near-ish future
- 1 regular mission, barely begun
- 1 epic sorta-filk
- Been thinking about working on my Skyrim stuff again. I chugged out many, many words, some of which might not suck!

All the irons. All the fires.

~Neshomeh may be slightly overextended, but doesn't care.

Yes, really. I know I haven't actually edited the document in over a year, but Real Life happened and then I decided to get rid of one character because they were pretty flat. I'm just trying to think of a good character to replace him, then I'll have to re-do the prompts.

I haven't been writing much lately, and nothing for here, but I'm definitely thinking about the problem and hope to have a few concepts down Soon(tm).

In a less facetious sense, I've been working on stuff for my degree. My first major assignment, a 1500 word essay and accompanying 500 word critical reflection concerning how colonialist ideology affects writers of speculative fiction, was handed in a few days ago. It went well! I... think. =]

Other than that, well, I've been tidying up Trenchbreakers, working on my first actual literary book review (a compare-and-contrast article about Rivers Of London and Full Dark House), polishing a new division's introduction, hammering together the next couple of Doktor Trollenfisch und Gabrielle missions, thinking about an interlude involving Algie and Lola, and putting together a plan for my next Wobbles and Notary PPC Power Hour.

Also: would anyone be averse to me swiping teaching material from my course and posting it to the Board as writing advice? It might help people out. =]