3 unrelated things: lgbtfest, hammered dulcimer, Remix Redux

1. I have written 100 words of my lgbtfest story. The first line came to me when I was falling asleep last night, as ideas often do, and I picked a little at the idea on my way to work this morning. However, now that I have started writing it, there seem to be strange echoes of Queen Elizabeth I of England cropping up. I hope my subconscious has some idea what it's doing... (I am using the short outline, incidentally, as there is no way to make the long outline work by Monday.)

2. As I walked home after closing the smoke shop tonight, I went through the Commons rather than heading down Aurora St., and spent a happy five minutes listening to a man and a woman playing hammered dulcimer and cello, respectively, where Bank Alley intersects State St. They call themselves the Nomadic Minstrels, and they have a MySpace page wherein you can listen to some of their work. I adore hammered dulcimer, so this makes me very happy. :-D

3. Remix reveal day tomorrow! *twitches in anticipation*

[Fic] "What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed)" -- Naruto

Remix reveal day! I wrote What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed): Madara lied about the eye transplant's effects. Captured and brought back to Konoha, Sasuke must adjust to blindness and his unexpected survival. Remix of Put a little fixing on it, by megyal. NaruSasu, 21,000 words. (And here is an alternate link that will get you a sidebar with links to navigate the collection.)

[ETA: The ever-so-slightly revised final version is now up on ff.net.]

[[ETA 2: As of 12/5/10, I finished the revisions I did not have time to make before the Remix Redux posting deadline, which means the AO3 and ff.net versions are now the exact same text, and the story is now 24,500 words long, plus two sidefics. *headdesk* Look, I never claimed brevity was my forte!]]

...

21,000 words. Twenty-one thousand words. Which I wrote in exactly two weeks, starting the night of May 9 and finishing at 4am on May 23. Actually, it's even worse than that. When I posted the rough draft on May 16, I had about 5,000 words of story plus 1,500 words of outline: scene overviews, some rough-sketch blocking, and occasional dialogue fragments. That means I wrote 16,000 words in one week. And given that on the afternoon of May 22, I had about 15,000 functional words (the ending sections being more a half-assed expansion of my outline than proper scenes), I wrote 6,000 words in one day. So yeah.

In all honesty, the story is so long because I didn't have time to make it shorter. I could likely cut at least a thousand words out of it without affecting the plot or character arcs. (Of course, if I start editing, I may well write a thousand new words to even out the difference in sensory description and Sasuke's obsession with knowing the exact dimensions of his surroundings between the start of the story and the end, but whatever.)

Um. Where was I?

I knew from the start that this was going to be a long story, partly because megyal's story is long (7,300 words), and partly because I wanted to show the gradual progression of Sasuke's emotional arc, which meant that if I wanted to be convincing, I couldn't shorthand the steps. But I was thinking 8,000 to 10,000 words -- maybe 12,000 tops. Instead What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed) is, by over 3,000 words, the longest oneshot I have ever written.***

I sincerely hope I never break that record again.

[ETA: And then I broke it less than a year and a half later with Out of Season, which was written for the 2011 Narnia Fic Exchange and is roughly 27,000 words long. Whoops! But I doubt I'll ever have the patience to write a 30,000 word story as a one-shot, so... *crosses fingers*]

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( details about remixing -- you should probably read the stories first )

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I have at least three potential sidefics floating around in my head. One is about Iruka cleaning his house and setting it up for Sasuke to move in. (The room on the ground floor used to belong to his great-aunt -- who is, of course, Aunt Sadako from Lessons and The Way of the Apartment Manager, because I am nothing if not self-referential -- and Iruka has to take all her possessions and move them upstairs to his parents' old room, which he then locks.) The second is about Naruto and Sakura helping Sasuke move into his new apartment, arguing cheerfully all the while. And the third is about Naruto giving his genin the bell test, probably from the kids' point of view.

I will probably never write those, but it is, I think, a measure of how much I was eating, breathing, and sleeping this story by the end that they occurred to me at all. The world megyal created and I adapted became so real to me that it turned into something of a full-on secondary canon.

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***The second-longest oneshot I've written, incidentally, is Paint the Town, which is a 17,500 word Harry Potter fic. The third-longest is, I think, Finding Marea: Truth and Change in the Circle of Kemar, which is 16,500 words and is original fiction, not fanfic.

addendum to the previous post

Also, I should tell you that my remixer was hungrytiger11, who wrote Some Unseen Place on the Opposite Side (An Incompatible Remix), based on Compatibility. Once again, I say that you should really go read it (and comment!) because it is awesome. :-)

[You can also read the story on her journal.]

And now I am off to make a flying stop at my upstairs neighbors' garden party, before I leave for work.