At any one time, we are:
- Writing a story
- Editing a different story
- Musing about future stories and ideas
May the ideas never run out!
Tag: writing
Surprisingly, writing episode based fics is harder for me than writing a unique story for BA, so there’s a very good chance that I won’t have anymore episode based fics. Home took forever to write compared to Shadows and Reflections, and was much shorter.
If, however, you want to send me any episodes that you’re curious how BA Sam and Dean would react, I don’t mind sharing my thoughts! I’ve mused many times while watching the show about what would happen if one of the bros was tiny. It won’t be an official prompt, because I won’t write it all out, just musing, but it could be fun!
I was just about to go to bed when this fell into my main inbox, and you made my night! *hugs* Many stories await you!
Getting this message on Monday morning had to be the best way to start off my day! You are just as amazing, and you put a smile right on my face.
That means the world to me to hear! I’ve tried hard to make the stories able to stand on their own, especially the Brothers Apart series and all the AUs that are based around it. Plus, the OCs in the stories are so fun to have around, both mine and Neon’s. They really seem to have minds of their own somedays.
Don’t worry about the stories ever running out. Even at three posts a week, we probably have around a year’s worth of stories we’re writing/editing/working on, and always more on the way! And honestly, since we’ve cried over some of the parts, you’ll probably feel a few tears coming up in them.
This can be a tough one! For myself, a lot of my best parts depend on inspiration. I listen to music at work during the day, and there will be moments where I just see an entire scene in my head. I keep a notebook to the side and scribble down every bit I remember. A lot of times these drabbles turn into 2k word story parts, and that’s a lot of how I write. Completely unorganized, too. I’ll have an entire story out of order in bits and pieces at first.
The collabs I do with neon, we build off of each other’s ideas. What starts out simple will end much more complicated with fun storylines we never would have come up with on our own.
It’s true. With collaborations, stories come together a lot faster just because, when you might be having a block, your partner is there to help bring you out of it. Nightmares and I have hardly slowed down with the writing since we started working together, and it’s great!
For solo writing, I tend to do things a little differently. While I also keep a journal nearby all the time for shorter stories and scene inspirations, I usually end up writing my stories in order. I develop an outline of major points I’d like to see happen in my story, so that I don’t get into a corner that I can’t write myself out of. From there, it’s a matter of making sure everything the story needs is there. Some scenes that seem like they’ll be bigger end up shorter than 2k words (on the flipside, some small things end up at 10k words).
Word count, in my opinion, isn’t as important as content. For example, the conclusion to Hershey Kisses and Salt Lines is around 1.7k words, and yet it got the most explosive response out of any chapter in the whole story. It accomplished exactly the goal in less than two thousand words.
That said, here’s how you can expand word count: give the scene more details. And I don’t mean details that add nothing to the scene itself or take away from the flow of things. Details that put the reader right there can help with the experience while also fleshing out the scene in general. I personally specialize in sensory details and painting the picture of the world that the characters perceive. Nightmares is the queen of getting their thoughts and feelings on point. Both are valid and helpful for telling the story, and it’s ultimately up to you to decide which you’d like to focus on (or put both in there!). Once you start noticing the places where you could add to one or the other, it becomes easier and easier and before you know it you’re considering splitting one chapter into two. 😉
Portability is definitely not why I write on this scale.
First things first, the main reason you see Sam standing at 4 inches tall is because the majority of my stories are either Brothers Apart, or AUs based on Brothers Apart. The scale is not going to change between them.
Second, I do have other stories that work with different scales. Reversal of Fate and An Ounce Of Courage both use the scale where Sam/Dean stand at 3 inches tall. This scale was discarded for BA because if he’s in it for the long haul, he’s going to need to do things for himself. He is not dependent on Dean in any way as some people seem to assume. Sam survived most of his life without his family around and could easily survive without them. He stays with Dean for reasons all his own.
–Sidenote here: In the horror story, Jacob is reduced down to barely an inch and a half tall and we’ll see exactly why that’s not a good thing. It’s a horror story for a reason.
I also won’t work with the Swift scale (Found in Gulliver’s Travels and The Borrowers). Since I write for enjoyment and I don’t enjoy writing my characters at 6 inches tall, you won’t find that here.
Lastly, the scales I and @neonthewrite use are not 4 inches = 6 feet.
Sam stands 4 inches tall, but his actual height is 6′4″. This gives us a ratio of about 1/19. If we put him and Bowman next to each other, they’re both 4 inches tall. Same scale, right?
Wrong! Bowman is actually the equivalent of 6′2″ in height. So he’s tall, but not quite at Sam’s height. He’s going to be disgruntled if they ever stand at the same scale and he comes to discover this human he can look straight in the eye is actually taller than him. Bowman’s ratio is about 1/18.5.
Writing is just as addicting, and I hope we never stop!
So far, replies are leaning towards posting after Salt Lines, so long as we finish editing the stories in time.
Does anyone else agree with this idea?
If I do this, there won’t be weekly BA updates. Instead, you’ll get a poll before a new story starts posting. The poll will include the next finished story in each series, including BA if it’s done. BA stories do take longer to write than the AU’s.
That story would have three weekly updates, at least for the time being, and since it’s the only one posting it would be easier to keep track of the updates.
Since prompts are going slow due to us writing them out into entire stories, *cough, BL, cough,* we’re going to start doing excerpts from the story to keep you all updated on how it’s going! Send in asks if you get any ideas, we love to hear them! After all, where would BL be without prompts to inspire it?
The excerpts will post on most days, but work has been bogging us both down so we may miss a day here or there.
Typo of the Day
Let me knife how you think = Let me know how you think
Apparently I am knifing thoughts, beware.
Brothers Apart 