the deep moans round with many voices

Oh hey, thing of potential interest.

Back in November, mothlights asked if they could podfic What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed), which is the epic-ish NaruSasu (or maybe SasuNaru? I dunno, they never get anywhere near actual sex and there certainly isn't any fixed "A always tops B" dynamic to their interaction, so whatever) fic I wrote in Remix Redux 8. I said sure, so long as the podficcer noted that my fic was a remix, because I would never have written it without megyal's amazing template. (That would be put a little fixing on it, for the record.)

Long story short, the podfic is now finished and available on AO3!

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. [Podfic by mothlights]

The fic is 24,500 words long, and the audio file is three hours and fifteen minutes.

I haven't listened to it myself, but that's only because I find listening to my own work excruciatingly embarrassing and because I don't have any sewing projects handy to keep my attention from wandering off. For those of you who don't have those limitations, and who have any interest in Naruto fanworks, why not give it a try? :-)

I am, incidentally, still working on the revisions to "What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed)." It's just taking forever. This is mostly because I laid out the story timeline and realized that in order to have it make sense in meteorological terms, I needed at least a full year to pass -- the story starts in spring, takes at least six months to play out, and ends with a thunderstorm... and those don't really happen until the weather warms up, which means I have to cycle all the way through winter and back around to spring or summer.

And that meant that even after tweaking some time jumps between early scenes (to make the start of autumn term at the academy match up better with standard Japanese school year patterns), I had a seven month gap between Naruto's return from Wave Country and the meeting in Kakashi's office. Which is just ridiculous.

So I figured I really should write the dinner party scene... but I needed something to hang it on, some point beyond just, you know, a bunch of people in a room, and for the longest time I couldn't think of any hook.

Until tonight it occurred to me that if Japanese school years switch between April and March, Sasuke really ought to be teaching a different set of kids by the end of the story. Since he clearly isn't -- the OC student remains the same from autumn to spring -- I figure he got switched from being a part-time teacher with only one class to being a full-time teacher with two or three classes. (I never really said in the story text, but I figure that the ninja academy does in fact split teachers up by subject, which is why Iruka seems to have taught Naruto at several different ages. Sasuke is teaching ninjutsu and general history; he's not teaching weapons, genjutsu, taijutsu, traps, math and writing, or anything else.)

So clearly what happens is that Naruto and Sakura decide to throw Sasuke a celebratory dinner party, and he is completely taken aback A) that they want to do that, and B) that anyone else wants to attend. Especially since he's still deeply ambivalent about this whole being-in-Konoha thing, and trying to convince himself he's going to escape and get revenge, really he is, any day now, he swears...

Anyway, I have only just started the new scene, but at least now I have a hook. And the rest of the edits are basically done, so once I get this part down, I think I'm good. Still, I'd really hoped I'd be done with this by now!

(23,000 words and counting. I always seem to get longer when I go from first to second draft. *sigh*)

1. Yesterday my work schedule was a little interesting. See, currently we have seven people working at the smoke shop. AO is not available, because she has been down in Philly with Josh while he's in the hospital recovering from his car crash. (He is off the ventilator now, incidentally, and has moved his head and all four limbs, but he still has some kind of tube in his throat which is interfering with his efforts to vocalize. I think they did more surgery on his arms a couple days ago.)

Of the remaining employees, JM does not work past 2pm, because she needs to be home to take care of her young son. MS does not open or close. And PM has been down at the Arnot Mall to supervise the madness as our outlet is closed and all its stock packed up and sent elsewhere. This means only BW, RE, and I can close the store.

On Tuesday, BW was working 7am-4pm and I was working 9am-6pm. So when RE suddenly couldn't close on Tuesday, because of a family thing, this was a problem. What ended up happening is that he clocked in around 11:30 and worked until 5pm, while I clocked out, went home to eat lunch and take a nap, and came back at 3:35 and worked until 9pm. PM was annoyed and told RE to call beforehand in the future -- either at night, or early in the morning -- since this could have been handled by a simple shift swap between him and me or him and BW.

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2. Years and years ago -- I think in late 2000 or early 2001 -- I read a book by Allen L. Wold, called Jewels of the Dragon, which is sort of sci-fi space opera crossed with Indiana Jones and also a criminal conspiracy thriller. The idea is that Rikard Braeth, the son of a famous gentleman adventurer/criminal/space pirate, is searching for his lost father and tracks him down to the lawless planet Kohltri, where he finds himself inadvertently plunged into both an archaeological mystery and the long-running search for an infamous interstellar terrorist. It is made of crack and awesome, like all the best adventure novels, and I love it passionately -- to the point where I used to amuse myself by imagining future adventures for the main character and one of the chief secondary charcters.

Today I discovered that Wold actually wrote two sequels! Now, granted, they seem to only follow Rikard Braeth -- Darcy Glemtide, sadly, seems to fall out of his life after he leaves Kohltri -- but still. Sequels! The second book is apparently called Crown of the Serpent, and I need to find a copy. The third book is called Lair of the Cyclops, and is the reason I know there are sequels at all; I spotted it this evening in Autumn Leaves used bookstore, and promptly snapped it up.

If the second two books are as fun as the first, I may have to nominate this series as an option for Yuletide this year. :-)

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3. Three months after RemixRedux, I am finally distant enough from my story that I am able to go back and start touching up What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed), both to fix some typos and phrasing oddities, and to work in more foreshadowing and development for the NaruSasu plot thread, so their eventual kiss feels less pasted on.

In the process, I have also tidied up "With a Vengeance" and "More Sins Than Condemnation," and intend to post them on ff.net and AO3 as well. The question is whether to post them as supplementary chapters or as a collection of sidestories, the way I have done with my "Apartment Manager" sidestories. At the moment, I am leaning toward supplementary chapters, if only to connect them more firmly to the original oneshot.

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.

The Remix Redux 8 archive is open!

The stories are anonymous for a week, so I cannot point you to the one I wrote. Also, I was at work when the archive opened and I did not get home until almost 10pm, so I have not had time to read anything beyond the remix written from one of my own stories.

And that remix is amazing.

Someone (I have what is probably a hilariously wrong guess as to who) took Compatibility, my story about Team 8 and the history of the Aburame clan, and remixed it into:

Some Unseen Place on the Opposite Side (An Incompatible Remix) [ETA: by hungrytiger11], which puts my story into the larger context of the prices all ninja clans pay for their talents, and is a lovely Hinata character piece as well. Or, as the summary says, "When someone marries into the Hyuuga, Hinata learns to make the seal. A daughter of the clan defends her own. Team Eight, Hyuuga-centric gen."

It is quiet, and moving, and utterly gorgeous, and I am in love.

*reads the story a third time*

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ETA: Okay. I cannot, as I said, point you to the story I have been despairing over these past two weeks. But if you guess which story I wrote (and tell me before the author reveal next week), I will write a ficlet to a prompt of your choice. :-)

I feel that my story has my narrative voice and pacing and paragraphing quirks and so on all over it, plus I only write for a limited number of the fandoms in this year's Remix archive, so theoretically it should not be too hard to guess?