WIP meme-ish thing
Apr. 12th, 2011 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafI'm not sure how many of these qualify as actual WIPs, as opposed to abandoned fics, but...
1. The really definitely in progress, but possibly lacking in plot one where Scotty recalls his childhood:
He’d wanted to be anywhere but the sleepy little Lowlands town, where the most exciting thing that happened was the slight current of air four times an hour as the fifteen-minute mag-rail service swished past on its way to Edinburgh or Glasgow, past the huddled houses and the emphatic aluminium spike of St Michael’s church. The mag-rail and the church crown were virtually the only things he liked about Linlithgow. They were the only things that didn’t look old and forgotten. Of course, as he later learned, the crown was old, it was twentieth century, but that didn’t change the fact that it looked like someone had dropped part of a Cardassian space station on a thousand year old church next to a ruined palace.
(Shamefully self-indulgent, but I ought to be able to get some fun out of the fact that some authorities hold that Scotty grew up where I went to school, right?)
2. Another genuinely IP WIP, another midrash fic, Jesus, John, and Legion:
The man – or the things inside the man – noticed him stiffening, and spat clumsily at him. “Afraid of us, human child? You should be.”
“No, you shouldn’t be,” said Jesus, his voice calm, untroubled, half-smiling.
3. The ill-advised fusion of Barchester Towers and Rev, a one-note joke which might eventually see the light of day in some form for the college revue:
“Has ‘Fresh Expressions’ been pretty well taken up in your archdeaconry?” asked Mr Slope.
...
“Thank you for the coffee,” said the Archdeacon, giving the Bishop an unenthusiastic handshake and Mr Slope a curt nod. Mr Harding, whose escape was delayed by his failure to graciously avoid Mr Slope’s clammy hand, noticed that the Archdeacon had scarcely touched his drink.
4. A UNIT-era Harry Potter cross-over, currently titled "Alastor Moody and the Fury in the Dark", with Moody, Three, Liz, and the Brigadier.
“Oh, it’s perfectly simple,” said the Doctor, with an air of superiority. “Clearly we’re dealing with a genetic subgroup, possibly combined with some sort of spontaneous mutation process – or perhaps it’s a matter of recessive genes re-emerging – which convey some sort of simple telekinetic power when focused with mental discipline through an amplifier. It would also, I imagine, be quite conducive to the development of a semi-concealed parallel society, for reasons of self-preservation if nothing else… I suppose you could call it magic if you liked, but it’s nothing to get superstitious about.”
If only I could remember what was supposed to happen in the plot...
5. The one with Hermione and Theo Nott, post-war, at Oxford.
Hermione took the envelope and its contents from trembling fingers. It was a photo of what she assumed was the St Edward’s boathouse, the boats in ruins on its floor, walls disfigured with red paint. But that did not make her draw in her breath in shock and sudden fear.
What made her do that was the figures in the middle of the picture: hooded, masked and moving.
It was a wizard photo. And scrawled over it in jagged capitals: “Blood traitor scum – thought you could hide forever? Think again.”
I have thirteen pages of this, and I'm still not sure whether the basic idea works.
6. The AU of "The Daemons"/ Starbridge crossover I will never have time to write (file name: Darrow vs the Master, which tells you exactly why it's a bad idea, especially as Lewis Hall insisted on narrating it):
A rural idyll. But as I said, I’m not much of a man for rural idylls, at least when they’re purely a matter of postcard prettiness, concealing – well, that was rather the point. I had no idea, at the time, what this particular one was concealing it, but I could feel the wrongness there. It was deep down, almost imperceptible, but it was there, in the same way that a slightly ill proportioned room feels wrong without the cause being immediately apparent. The trouble with psychic sensitivity is that it’s not very precise; or rather, it’s not susceptible of being put into easy words. It’s also not one hundred percent reliable: it’s fatally easy to mix your own imagination up with it. It wasn’t the loud, screaming sense of malignancy I had got off the Cathedral when I had first arrived in the diocese, when there was conflict in the Chapter and the Bishop – that was in old Ashworth’s day –, for all his undoubted spiritual strength and goodness had been being quietly and disastrously haunted by the ghosts and demons of his past. You can call that a metaphor, if you want, as long as you don’t assume that because it’s a metaphor it has nothing to do with reality.
7. Junked, because it's dull: the Grangers' school choice misery.
Then there was the vaguely trendy one, which was covered in lovely colourful murals and looked more like a primary school. The children seemed far keener on art and drama than on anything else, but the atmosphere was happy. The head-teacher there talked a lot about ‘developing the whole student’ and ‘enabling them to develop at their own rate’ (it sounded as if she was running a photography lab, not a school, thought Jane irritably). Then she had asked Hermione what she most wanted to do at secondary school. At the reply (‘Learn Latin. And Organic Chemistry. And Algebra. And History. And –’ the head-teacher had given the Grangers a reproachful look which clearly said ‘You middle class hot-housers, what have you done to this poor little girl?’)
8. Junked, in effect, because while it's quite good, my plot idea was jossed by canon, and anyway I haven't got time to write a massive Snape-POV AU, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Death-Eater:
This, then, is the story of Severus Snape, the chosen instrument, though unworthy, of the LORD, and of my struggles and wanderings before I came to accept that I am but a tool in His hand. My confession, if you will, in the Augustinian rather than the Papist sense, for I require no absolution. All I have done is walk, albeit often blindly, the path set before me. My testimony, certainly.
... and that's not counting the odd fragment posted here, such as the fob-watched Romana at Oxford, or the (possible related) plot-bunny about Nine meeting Lewis and Tolkien, or the hideously depressing Pevensie Nazi Germany AU, which I can't bring myself to contemplate, because that can only end well in the political-martyrdom-is-a-good-way-to-die sort of way...
I really ought to go back to 4 and 5, though - not to mention finishing 1 and 2.
1. The really definitely in progress, but possibly lacking in plot one where Scotty recalls his childhood:
He’d wanted to be anywhere but the sleepy little Lowlands town, where the most exciting thing that happened was the slight current of air four times an hour as the fifteen-minute mag-rail service swished past on its way to Edinburgh or Glasgow, past the huddled houses and the emphatic aluminium spike of St Michael’s church. The mag-rail and the church crown were virtually the only things he liked about Linlithgow. They were the only things that didn’t look old and forgotten. Of course, as he later learned, the crown was old, it was twentieth century, but that didn’t change the fact that it looked like someone had dropped part of a Cardassian space station on a thousand year old church next to a ruined palace.
(Shamefully self-indulgent, but I ought to be able to get some fun out of the fact that some authorities hold that Scotty grew up where I went to school, right?)
2. Another genuinely IP WIP, another midrash fic, Jesus, John, and Legion:
The man – or the things inside the man – noticed him stiffening, and spat clumsily at him. “Afraid of us, human child? You should be.”
“No, you shouldn’t be,” said Jesus, his voice calm, untroubled, half-smiling.
3. The ill-advised fusion of Barchester Towers and Rev, a one-note joke which might eventually see the light of day in some form for the college revue:
“Has ‘Fresh Expressions’ been pretty well taken up in your archdeaconry?” asked Mr Slope.
...
“Thank you for the coffee,” said the Archdeacon, giving the Bishop an unenthusiastic handshake and Mr Slope a curt nod. Mr Harding, whose escape was delayed by his failure to graciously avoid Mr Slope’s clammy hand, noticed that the Archdeacon had scarcely touched his drink.
4. A UNIT-era Harry Potter cross-over, currently titled "Alastor Moody and the Fury in the Dark", with Moody, Three, Liz, and the Brigadier.
“Oh, it’s perfectly simple,” said the Doctor, with an air of superiority. “Clearly we’re dealing with a genetic subgroup, possibly combined with some sort of spontaneous mutation process – or perhaps it’s a matter of recessive genes re-emerging – which convey some sort of simple telekinetic power when focused with mental discipline through an amplifier. It would also, I imagine, be quite conducive to the development of a semi-concealed parallel society, for reasons of self-preservation if nothing else… I suppose you could call it magic if you liked, but it’s nothing to get superstitious about.”
If only I could remember what was supposed to happen in the plot...
5. The one with Hermione and Theo Nott, post-war, at Oxford.
Hermione took the envelope and its contents from trembling fingers. It was a photo of what she assumed was the St Edward’s boathouse, the boats in ruins on its floor, walls disfigured with red paint. But that did not make her draw in her breath in shock and sudden fear.
What made her do that was the figures in the middle of the picture: hooded, masked and moving.
It was a wizard photo. And scrawled over it in jagged capitals: “Blood traitor scum – thought you could hide forever? Think again.”
I have thirteen pages of this, and I'm still not sure whether the basic idea works.
6. The AU of "The Daemons"/ Starbridge crossover I will never have time to write (file name: Darrow vs the Master, which tells you exactly why it's a bad idea, especially as Lewis Hall insisted on narrating it):
A rural idyll. But as I said, I’m not much of a man for rural idylls, at least when they’re purely a matter of postcard prettiness, concealing – well, that was rather the point. I had no idea, at the time, what this particular one was concealing it, but I could feel the wrongness there. It was deep down, almost imperceptible, but it was there, in the same way that a slightly ill proportioned room feels wrong without the cause being immediately apparent. The trouble with psychic sensitivity is that it’s not very precise; or rather, it’s not susceptible of being put into easy words. It’s also not one hundred percent reliable: it’s fatally easy to mix your own imagination up with it. It wasn’t the loud, screaming sense of malignancy I had got off the Cathedral when I had first arrived in the diocese, when there was conflict in the Chapter and the Bishop – that was in old Ashworth’s day –, for all his undoubted spiritual strength and goodness had been being quietly and disastrously haunted by the ghosts and demons of his past. You can call that a metaphor, if you want, as long as you don’t assume that because it’s a metaphor it has nothing to do with reality.
7. Junked, because it's dull: the Grangers' school choice misery.
Then there was the vaguely trendy one, which was covered in lovely colourful murals and looked more like a primary school. The children seemed far keener on art and drama than on anything else, but the atmosphere was happy. The head-teacher there talked a lot about ‘developing the whole student’ and ‘enabling them to develop at their own rate’ (it sounded as if she was running a photography lab, not a school, thought Jane irritably). Then she had asked Hermione what she most wanted to do at secondary school. At the reply (‘Learn Latin. And Organic Chemistry. And Algebra. And History. And –’ the head-teacher had given the Grangers a reproachful look which clearly said ‘You middle class hot-housers, what have you done to this poor little girl?’)
8. Junked, in effect, because while it's quite good, my plot idea was jossed by canon, and anyway I haven't got time to write a massive Snape-POV AU, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Death-Eater:
This, then, is the story of Severus Snape, the chosen instrument, though unworthy, of the LORD, and of my struggles and wanderings before I came to accept that I am but a tool in His hand. My confession, if you will, in the Augustinian rather than the Papist sense, for I require no absolution. All I have done is walk, albeit often blindly, the path set before me. My testimony, certainly.
... and that's not counting the odd fragment posted here, such as the fob-watched Romana at Oxford, or the (possible related) plot-bunny about Nine meeting Lewis and Tolkien, or the hideously depressing Pevensie Nazi Germany AU, which I can't bring myself to contemplate, because that can only end well in the political-martyrdom-is-a-good-way-to-die sort of way...
I really ought to go back to 4 and 5, though - not to mention finishing 1 and 2.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-12 06:31 pm (UTC)For the rest of them, I don't know the canon, except for possibly number 2. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-12 07:07 pm (UTC)