#southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance

[joiedecombat]

💕 🎁

💕 favorite ship to write? 

Squall Leonhart and Rinoa Heartilly from Final Fantasy VIII, my original fandom OTP. I’ve probably written more about them than any other fic, and though it’s been a hot minute since I’ve written anything new for FFVIII, Squall and Rinoa and their relationship dynamic have left a permanent mark on my writing - especially Squall, who is eveything I love in a romantic hero.

By which mostly I mean “aloof, stoic professionalism on the outside, utter emotional garbage fire in need of rescue on the inside.”

🎁 have a quote from a WIP? 

I batted back and forth with myself for a while on how deep to dig into my files of unfinished fiction and whether to stick to fanfic or not, considering that how much any of my WIPs can really be said to be in progress is always pretty dubious.

Anyway, here’s two different and unrelated excerpts for you.

“Why make the suggestion in the first place if you’re so against it?”

Because I’m not strong enough.

The answer rested on the tip of his tongue, too bitter to swallow. As much as this whole situation galled him, fact remained fact: he lacked the influence, not to mention the manpower, that it would take to challenge Juliano directly.

He’d grit his teeth and send this woman into the trenches, knowing full well what he was sending her to, because like it or not he needed the opportunity she could give him.

But some things a man in his position couldn’t admit to out loud. Especially not to a woman with eyes like Elizabeth Colvin’s.

This one’s from “Reason or Rhyme,” the Gotham Memoirs Vittorio fic I swear I will get back to when I have the chance.

The other is from an older original piece that is still more conceptual than really planned, but which I still really want to do something with one of these days:

Keeping herself propped up suddenly seemed like far too much effort. As the car’s drivers side door swung open, Raine sank back down onto the corrugated surface of the truck bed and closed her eyes. From there she heard rather than saw him approach, steps light and measured, the long shadow he cast in the headlights flickering against her eyelids: the central figure of all the problems she’d tried to forget.

“Warden.” 

“Special Agent.” 

She’d hoped to sound as calm and dispassionate as he had, but to her own ears her voice just sounded petulant. Saying anything else seemed like a bad idea. Instead she kept her eyes shut, as though if she didn’t acknowledge him any further, he might  go away and leave her alone.

No such luck. 

“What the hell have you been drinking,” he said with a flatness in that rich voice that made it not so much a question as a demand for explanation.

“Two for one margaritas, mostly.” 

She opened one eye to find Alsandír standing at the side of the truck, looking down at her. In the stark backlight of the headlights, he was all sharp contrasts, silver and shadows like some kind of moody artistic photograph in a style there was probably a fancy name for. Chiaro… chiaroscuro. Something Italian like that.

He drew in a slow breath, the line of his jaw shifted fractionally as the corners of his mouth tightened. “With incredibly cheap tequila, by the smell of it. You are in no shape to drive.”

“A very astute observation,” Raine enunciated the words with great care to keep her mouth from stumbling over them like it wanted to. “That’d be why I’m not driving.”

He lifted an eyebrow. 

“So your solution is to spend the night out here?” he asked, a note of incredulity creeping into his tone. “Because that’s safe.”

“Oh, go away,” she muttered sourly, closing her eyes again and lifting a hand to flap it in his direction. “Nobody asked you.”

Her arm caught up short against his palm, and he closed his hand around her wrist -- not a tight grip, but trying to tug free of him proved fruitless. By the time Raine opened her eyes to frown at him, he was already moving around to the tailgate, pulling her up and along with him until her feet touched the ground and she was sitting nominally upright. 

“Hey,” she protested, but he gave no indication that he’d heard.

“Can you stand?”

Insulted, she hissed a breath out through her teeth. “I’m not that drunk.”

He said nothing to that. He just stood there, watching her with that too-steady gaze, inhumanly still except for the barest ruffle of the breeze over his hair. Expectant.

With a half-voiced grumble of capitulation, Raine braced her hand against the tailgate and pushed herself the rest of the way up so that she could sit on her own. It wasn’t standing, but it seemed to satisfy him, because he let go of her wrist and took a single, precise step back. 

“Where are your keys?” he asked her.

She patted her hand against the hip pocket of her jeans, not so much by way of an answer as to reassure herself that she hadn’t done something stupid like leave them in the ignition. The hard edges of the keyring pressed back against her palm, unyielding and familiar. She had just enough time to think that if he meant to take her keys from her, it was going to be a fight, before he said “Good,” and turned away.

Raine sat on the tailgate and watched as he went back to his car, moving around to the passengers’ side to open the door. Her mind felt thick and sluggish, like the summer humidity had crept into her head; when he turned back towards her and said, “Get in,” at first she only blinked.

“...No thanks,” she decided after a moment, and heard him breathe out a quiet sigh.

“I’m not leaving you out here like this.”

Something about the absoluteness in his voice, like he was saying something that had already been decided, had her bunching up her shoulders with rebellious tension. 

“Go to hell,” Raine shot back. “I don’t take orders from you.”

“Dios mío, it’s not an order--” He broke off with a hiss, for once sounding as aggravated as she felt. 

Curling her arms around herself, she hunkered down to rest her forearms against her knees and looked down at the ground. Presently she heard his steps on the gravel again. The distorted length of his shadow split the flood of light from the headlights like a knife as he walked back toward her; even when he stood right in front of her, close enough that if she kicked out it would catch him right about in the kneecap, she kept her head bowed and glowered at the toes of his no-doubt-designer shoes.

“Raine. I am asking you. Please.” The word sounded awkward in his mouth, as though it were something he wasn’t accustomed to pronouncing. Surprise had her lifting her head to find those pale eyes fixed upon her, implacable. “Get in the fucking car.”

For a long, taut moment, neither of them moved. Raine was the one to finally break eye contact, uncurling herself with a little huff. 

“Fine,” she said, “if you’re going to make this much of a thing out of it.”

She gripped the end of the tailgate with both hands, but as she pushed herself off and onto her feet, the ground tilted dizzily underneath her. Off balance, she pitched forward with a very undignified sound, and would’ve planted her face right into his chest if he hadn’t caught her by the shoulders.

Catching the upward quirk of his eyebrow, Raine glared up at him. “Shut up.”

“Mm,” he said, and hitched a steadying arm around her by which to steer her towards his car.

#time princess #gotham memoirs #vittorio puzo #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #fanfic #ask meme #aliboo

[joiedecombat]

Can you tell us more about Special Agent Alsandír?

Gladly!

I mentioned how that whole concept was inspired by Bright. To be more specific, the original seed of the idea came from watching Edgar Ramírez in the supporting role of an elven FBI agent and feeling like I'd rather have been watching a movie about what those characters were getting up to.

What can I say, I have a type.

So - Alsandír. He's originally from the West Coast and that's where his family is, but he moved to the East Coast when he joined the FBI and mostly lives in New Avalon (the setting's version of NYC). No siblings, but elven families are structures more around clan than nuclear family with a number of generations sharing a household so he's got a number of cousins who are basically like siblings. His family can trace their lineage back to the Magic Wars (or at least a couple of them; there's been a few) (this is not really special, most elven clans can claim similar). His grandmother runs the clan and she's terrifying.

As I mentioned he's the rebellious liberal kid. That tension didn't really take hold until he was already out of the house and established in his career, because a lot of the values he holds in conflict with his family's were formed via his experiences in the field. He's also a lot less ambitious than his clan would like; they want to see him climb the ladder to a position of more power, he prefers to stay in the field where he can personally make a difference. It's not a full estrangement, though, and he's still got access to all that family money, which is important for keeping up appearances, which is important because image is everything in elven culture.

Ultimately he is a) an aloof, elitist snob with Opinions about a lot of things, a job to do and little interest in ingratiating himself to people along the way and b) a workaholic nerd with a fairly barren social life who does logic puzzles and reads case studies in his spare time.

He's out of place in the poor, small-town Deep South setting in almost every way. Which is one of the main things that drives him to connect with Raine: between the immense amounts of culture clash and the jurisdiction friction with local law enforcement, if he intends to get anywhere with his investigation in Cloven Pine, Mississippi, he's going to have to have some kind guidance from a local ally, and Raine's position as Warden means the case lies within her expertise but she can be otherwise neutral in matters of jurisdiction.

#100daysofwriting #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #work in progress #aquagirl1978

[joiedecombat]

I love the worldbuilding details of the Southern Gothic urban fantasy! Can you share any more details about this WIP? What are the main characters like and do you have a favourite character type to write?

The bones of the idea were originally inspired by the movie Bright, which is a vaguely Shadowrun-esque cop flick starring Will Smith if you're not familiar. I have no interest in writing gritty urban cop stories, especially not in this day and age, but a modern-day setting in which magic and fantasy elements not only exist but exist openly alongside the familiar, an established and acknowledged part of the world rather than a hidden one, is always interesting to me.

What's the same? What's different? How do the mundane and fantastical elements intersect and impact one another?

My other major inspiration is the manga/anime series Mushi-Shi, which is hard to describe but in some ways almost resembles a cross between a nature documentary and a paranormal investigation reality show with its focus on the strange, surreal ecologies of the supernatural critters that inhabit its setting, the impact they can have on humans who can't always perceive or understand them, and the efforts of the protagonist to find ways for the one to coexist with the other.

It's a mixture of soothing, dreamlike natural beauty, quiet psychological spookiness, and skin-crawling body horror and I highly recommend it, but let me try to refrain from getting too far off the subject.

Back to the WIP in question, behind the cut for tldr.

The primary setting is a small Southern town based to some extent on Oakland, Mississippi and places like it. The main POV character is Raine Mallory, who is a member of the Warden service I described previously as basically "faerie animal control." She's a local girl who kind of fell into her job due to growing up familiar with all the spooky stuff that goes bump in the night out in the kudzu, and also being an introvert who is just as comfortable with nature as she is with people. The rest of her family has moved to the city a few hours away, but Raine inherited her grandparents' old farmhouse (most of the farmland once attached to it having long since been sold off in pieces) and lives there on her own. She's pretty content with her life, but at the same time she doesn't entirely fit in with the small-town community - a little too educated and well-read, a little too liberal in her values compared to most of her blue-collar salt-of-the-earth neighbors.

Then a dead body turns up - not a local, and there's suspicious circumstances, by which we mean suspicious magic circumstances - and then a special agent from the FBI Magic Regulatory Division shows up, which means elves because elves are great big snobs and think magic should be strictly controlled and by that they mean "controlled by elves."

Special Agent Alsandír is the other lead character. He's actually the rebellious liberal kid of his clan in that he's not nearly so much on the "elves uber alles" train as most of his relatives and has seen too much of the dangers of careless magic use to think anybody should have much to do with it, elf or otherwise. He's still an elitist image-conscious snob, though. He and Raine represent more or less opposite ends of the same general line of work - managing ways in which humanity runs up against the preternatural elements that share their world and working to limit the potential damage that can come from such collisions - but the Warden service is county level, underfunded and understaffed, mostly dealing with low-grade hedge magic and magical wildlife, and Raine in particular takes a very "live and let live" approach, where the Magic Regulatory Division is more elite and focused on bigger threats like people actively misusing magic for their own ends.

There's a whole lot of culture clash is what I'm saying, but they're also both a bit out of place among their own, which is a source of common ground.

As per usual, I have no idea where I want to take this idea, beyond the general premise of these two characters having to work together and rely on one another to unearth whatever nefarious goings-on are happening in Raine's little town that left a dude dead in a gully apparently killed by magic. There's far more worldbuilding than plot attached to this one, as you might be able to tell.

#100daysofwriting #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #work in progress #writing #aliboo

[joiedecombat]

For the stories that have ✨Magic✨ how far have you got with designing the magic system? (who has it, how do they get it, what does it do, how does it change that world etc.....................)

In my opinion, less is more where it comes to writing about magic.

I prefer to use magic sparingly, and not to quantify it too much. I think it's possible to get carried away with building a System of how magic works and giving it a lot of spelled-out rules until the... uh... magic is sucked right out of the whole thing. I prefer mystery to midichlorians.

As such I haven't spent a lot of time so far worldbuilding how magic works in my settings that use it. I have some general ideas, though.

Magic is an important element of the setting of my Southern Gothic urban fantasy procedural, and so is the fact that it's difficult to understand or control. There are multiple government agencies devoted to managing the ways in which people and magic can collide with one another and minimizing the damage likely to occur when it happens - efforts complicated by the fact that magic doesn't respect the scientific method at all. It's almost impossible to study in a controlled environment. It's connected to nature in some ways, less active in heavily urbanized areas where there are a lot of people and the land has been developed and controlled, but there are exceptions.

Whether the Fae is a form of energy or a separate plane of existence people have no way to access, inhabited by forms of life that don't conform with understood natural laws, is a topic of ongoing debate among experts. Elven lore claims the latter and that elves originally came from the Fae; there's a subculture of obnoxious elven hippies who believe their ultimate destiny is to return there. Alsandír can't stand those guys.

There are also Artifacts, items imbued with magical power and capable of a lot of bullshit in the wrong hands. Tracking and containing these is one of the frequent duties of Alsandír's team. something something possible sequel plot involving the Crown of Oberon (or at least a Crown of Oberon; a lot of Artifacts are purported to be connected to him and it's not all the way clear he was a real person, so mostly it's a case of "the thing is very old and very powerful and could have been connected to Oberon if there was such an individual")

I have yet to really contemplate how magic works in "the ciphered letter" but it's probably more of a Dresden Files ish concept of ritual actions that serve to shape the expression of a person's inherent power. Such as chanting St. Patrick's Rune! Or drawing symbols on things with a Sharpie. It's really mostly down to the individual's will, but people being people it helps to have rules to follow, if only so they can make sure they only turn it on when they mean to.

And then there's the "drinking games" WIP, which has magic in the form of pseudo sciences such as alchemy and astrology.

#100daysofwriting #worldbuilding #magic #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #the ciphered letter #wip: drinking games

[joiedecombat]

100 Days of Writing: Day 23

@the-wip-project

Have you ever read a thing in a book or seen in a show/movie where you thought: "Oh, this is bad, I can do this so much better!" What was it?

All the time. "Ways I could do this better" accounts for a good half of my writing ideas.

I already mentioned that my Southern Gothic urban fantasy procedural romance started off, before anything else, because I was more interested in a side character of a movie than any of its leads, and that "Reason or Rhyme" is basically my Gotham Memoirs fix-fic to inject the canon text with about 200% more romance.

The WIP I've been referring to as "drinking games" is another example - I read a book that contained a couple of elements of the basic premise, which I found very intriguing and which I felt were utterly wasted on bad worldbuilding, unnecessary magic, and a generally uninteresting plot direction.

I always feel a little self-conscious about doing this when it's an idea for an original work instead of a fanfic... but when you like part of the base premise and hate almost everything about its execution, what else can you do? At that point, just writing it the way I want to will make it different enough as to be unrecognizable.

Or so I hope.

#100daysofwriting #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #reason or rhyme #wip: drinking games

[joiedecombat]

Going back through my notes for the aforementioned original project and I’m remembering just how much I love this particular worldbuild.

Some random highlights:

“Like animal control but for weird fairy shit. Perpetually underfunded and understaffed. The guys you call when a fairy ring appears in your yard or someone leaves out a six-pack of wine coolers and the cookout gets crashed by a hive of drunk pixies. That was an especially eventful Fourth of July.” 

“Goblins just get into the trash and stuff, mostly. Pixies are mean. One pixie isn’t so bad, but where there’s one, there’s a whole damn hive, and they like sugary stuff so leave out a piece of fruit or an open soda in the summer and you are just asking for it.”

Three pixies trying in combination to open a coke bottle. Pixies banging against a screen door making high-pitched noises that sound suspiciously like swearing.

Mermaids are the serial killers of the deep. Mermaid horror movies. Jaws but it’s about a mermaid.

European unicorns: pretty, dainty, hunted nearly to extinction, mostly seen in preserves and sanctuaries nowadays. North American unicorns: big, muscular, highly aggressive if provoked. North American unicorns will fuck you up.

“You get a lot of unicorns out here, do you?” “Okay first of all the virgin thing is a myth.”

“Sorry, honey, my flight was delayed, there’s a dragon circling San Diego.”

The Magic Wars.

Elf mafia, where the punishment for screwing up is they cut the point off your ear. You have failed as an elf! >:|

“The internet is very possibly a lot closer to the Fae than most people realize.” “Thanks, there’s a thought that’s going to keep me awake at night.”

Literal code gremlins.

“Namedropping your bloodline is crass. Talking about whose family line you’re connected to is too obvious. If you’re a human in politics or otherwise involved with elves a lot you’d best study that shit, though, because asking is also crass.”

Appalachian dwarves.

“Most people are only capable of super low level kitchen witchery that doesn’t really have enough oomph to cause concern as long as you do it in the privacy of your own home and don’t wake the neighbors. But every now and then you get someone with the bad combination of talent and ambition, and/or someone gets their hands on a stray Artifact or some dumbass tries selling joints rolled with fairy weed, and then you get an elf in an Armani suit at your door looking disapprovingly stern.” 

“In these small towns there’s much more of an attitude of ‘we don’t poke it in case it decides to poke back’ and here [Alsandír] comes turning over all kinds of rocks, making the locals hella nervous.”

Forensic magic.

#worldbuilding #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #this is my problem #I get so involved in worldbuilding that I never get around to telling a story

[joiedecombat]

Muse Meme

(Electric Boogaloo)

I was tagged by @greyias! ...also a while ago.

I will return to my regularly scheduled yammering about SWTOR characters very soon, but this time I’m going to mix things up a little with a character from one of my perpetually-simmering, never-cooked original WIPs.

This is partly an excuse to air this concept out, and partly because I looked at the questions and couldn’t think of any answers for Maia that I haven’t already talked about in previous meme posts. <_<

Your Muse’s Name: Alsandír. “San” for short, at least among a fairly select group of people.

One favorite picture/face claim of your muse:

(Édgar Ramírez in Bright, a direct inspiration.)

Two headcanons you have for your muse:

He’s the rebellious liberal kid of his family, not that anybody could tell it from casual observation. Most of his relatives hold the fairly common attitude that magic should be controlled by elves; meanwhile San, who has had firsthand experience of the kinds of Bad Things that can happen when magic goes wrong, is really not keen on seeing anyone use it and is not so much on the elven superiority train. (Comparatively. He’s still kind of an elitist snob, just not as much as you’d expect if you have much personal experience with elven culture.) He’s also a lot less ambitious than his family would prefer, since he prefers being out in the field where he can take direct action rather than being focused on climbing the ladder to a position of greater power. All his means his relationship with his family is kind of strained.

As a child he wanted a pet jackalope. They’d venture out into the lawn and garden of his family estate sometimes and he liked watching them.

Three things that your muse likes doing in their free time:

Logic puzzles, mostly sudoku and unnecessarily complicated variants on sudoku. It’s a way to occupy his mind whenever he has to sit around waiting for whatever, which is a frequent occupational hazard. 

He’s an astonishingly good cook, which he claims is in self-defense because it’s impossible to find decent cochinita pibil anywhere on the east coast. (When you’re as long-lived and fixated on lineage as most elves, the family recipes - like pretty much anything else involving elven family lines - become Very Serious Business indeed.) Plus relying on someone else to prepare all his meals, whether it’s takeout or a personal chef, would ultimately be a security hazard. It’s more convenient for him to be able to feed himself, and if he’s going to do it, he’s damn well going to do it right.

Reading up on cold cases and supernatural history because he’s a workaholic nerd with a fairly barren personal life.

Seven People your muse loves/likes:

Here’s where I admit that the overall concept is not yet really developed enough for me to list many specific characters, but...

His family, despite the increasingly strained relationship mentioned above. Elves tend to be clannish, multiple generations sharing a household, so while he doesn’t have siblings he does have cousins (several branches removed in some cases) who are basically like siblings, an absolutely terrifying (great-)grandmother, etc etc. He doesn’t necessarily see them often (since most of them live on the opposite coast) and he mostly tries to avoid talking about his work or other sensitive subjects because he’s the rebellious liberal black sheep and that’s a great way to start an argument, but they’re important to him nonetheless and nobody else had better say a word against them.

His team in the Department of Magic Regulation*. Mostly humans, mostly subordinates rather than peers, but they’re pretty much all people he trusts and are honestly the closest thing he has to friends for the most part (that barren personal life I mentioned). One of them is very loosely based on Pete Wisdom because of reasons.

Co-protagonist Raine Mallory, who is in essentially the same line of work (magic regulation) but way on the other end of the spectrum (underpaid county employee vs elite federal agent) and ends up presenting him with all kinds of new perspectives on quite a lot of things. Because yes this is ultimately a romance, why do you ask?

*(Actual official name still to be determined.)

#tag meme #ask me about my ocs #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #and a partridge in a pear tree #sorry it's not SWTOR #don't worry #I have plenty more jedi knight and disaster spy thoughts still to come

[joiedecombat]

100 Days of Writing: Day 12

@the-wip-project:

So for today, lets do some discovery writing. I give you a prompt, and you write at least three paragraphs of a character reacting to it. Let's see who you discover.

The prompt: Unfortunately, things never go according to plan around here.

Raine tried, not very successfully, to hide a grin behind her drink. "Sure that's all you want?"

It was probably unkind of her to be this amused, but the liminal space of a Waffle House at two in the morning didn't lend itself much to filtering her reactions. Humor really seemed like the safest response she could manage at the moment.

Across the scratched Formica tabletop, Alsandír glowered into his coffee cup. "Very sure."

Raine swallowed a laugh in a gulp of cola. She didn't think she'd ever seen a living creature looking more out of place than he did just now - drawn up so stiffly in the booth that it seemed like he'd levitate himself right off the seat if he could, the too-bright glare of fluorescent lighting doing the subtle colors of his expensive suit no favors whatsoever.

"Well," she said brightly as she picked up her fork, "I hope you don't mind me eating in front of you."

"Of course not." He said it a little too crisply for full sincerity. His gaze slid from the coffee to the plate in front of her, studying the pile of egg and sausage and artificial cheese product as though it were some kind of lab specimen.

The corner of his mouth tightened as she dug the fork into her food, and Raine had to bite back another bubble of laughter. "Go ahead," she told him, grinning. "Say it. We both know you want to."

At first he seemed like he wouldn't rise to the bait. Philosophically, Raine got busy inhaling her breakfast, and watched Alsandír's expression of elegant disapproval give way to a faintly pained look in the face of her gusto.

"You're taking your life in your hands," he said at last.

"Probably," she agreed once she could speak without doing it around a mouthful of food. "But nowhere else is open at this hour, and someone promised me dinner before the call of duty interrupted."

He exhaled a long, dissatisfied breath. "This," he said, "is not what I had in mind."

This time she did laugh. "You might have noticed, Special Agent, but unfortunately--" she paused to salute him with her fork before loading it up with more egg. "--Around here, things rarely go according to plan."

#100daysofwriting #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #elf in a waffle house

[joiedecombat]

100 Days of Writing: Day 6

Once again a day late!

@the-wip-project:

What worldbuilding idea did you come up with that you would have loved to use but just couldn’t get to work?

I have to admit that none of my original WIPs have really gotten to the point that I've had to make much by way of executive decisions about what worldbuilding details to use or not use.

However, I still haven't figured out how to work the Welsh Faerie Mafia into my urban fantasy projects.

(Not that the original idea is mine, there - in fact it's an inside joke from a Mage: the Awakening campaign back in the day - but I desperately want to include it somehow because... really. Elf mafia! Originating out of Wales! Tylwyth teg even means "fair family," it's practically a euphemism for organized crime to begin with.)

#100daysofwriting #worldbuilding #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #welsh faerie mafia #and a partridge in a pear tree

[joiedecombat]

100 Days of Writing: Day 5

Yes, I have skipped Day 4. Time is fake.

@the-wip-project

What’s a worldbuilding detail in your WIP that you really like?

Almost the entirety of my Southern Gothic urban fantasy procedural romance WIP is random worldbuilding details I just really love.

For instance: goblins, gremlins, and pixies.

Goblins are basically the raccoons of the fae. They get into the trash, they shimmy in through pet doors to eat your dog's kibble and steal the odd shiny thing you have lying around, but they're basically harmless and can even be befriended if you take the time and don't mind never managing to keep a full set of silverware.

Gremlins are among the few kinds of fae vermin to flourish in urban areas, where the close concentration of humanity and the relative sparsity of nature mostly keeps reality pretty well nailed down. They get into all kinds of machinery and electronics and are common nuisances. The worst are the code gremlins, since they're incorporeal, lurking in software and capable of escaping across the internet if given the chance.

Then there are the pixies.

Pixies are mean. They're tiny, so one pixie isn't a threat to anything larger than a hamster, but where there's one there's inevitably a whole damn hive and they're stupidly aggressive. Pixies will come after you, and cling to your screen door making high-pitched noises that sound suspiciously like profanity. They're also attracted to sugary things, so leave out fruit or an open soft drink and you're just asking for it.

And this is why rural areas have Warden Posts, a government department organized at the county level to deal with unruly preternatural wildlife like inconvenient pixie hives or a North American unicorn wandering down small-town Main Street in the middle of morning traffic making threat displays at people's cars.

#100daysofwriting #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance #worldbuilding

[joiedecombat]

100 Days of Writing: the List

Since it seems there is some interest, why not? List of works (nominally) in progress, old unfinished fics, and Stuff I Want To Write below the cut. Feel free to ask about any of these.

Works (nominally) In Progress

Fanfic

"Reason or Rhyme" (Time Princess - Gotham Memoirs). The Vittorio expansion/fix-fic, because I will be forever disgruntled at how little romance content was actually included in the Mafia romance route.

Galactic Date Night Shenanigans aka "The one where everything is Balkar's fault." (SWTOR - Theron Shan/Jedi Knight). Theron "disaster spy" Shan is goaded into trying to take his wife out for a nice date for once, and it goes like every other plan these two have ever had anything to do with.

#3: [I] trusted [you] (SWTOR - Theron Shan / Jedi Knight). A post-Nathema prompt fic I swear I will finish one of these days.

Original

super secret short story/novella project - Okay it's not that super secret, but it is something I'm mostly keeping under my hat for now as I work on it because of reasons, and is actually (inconveniently, for 100 Days of Writing purposes) the main thing I've been working on lately. I expect to be able to say more about it later. Maybe even within the 100 days! We'll see.

southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance - Faerie Animal Control Warden meets FBI Elf during investigation of a suspicious death out in the kudzu. A little bit of Bright, a bit Mushi-Shi, a drop of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Stuff I Want to Write

Distinct from works in progress in that I have not actually gotten past the planning stage on any of these - if that. A few of these have been rattling around in concept for long enough to have gone through several distinct evolutions without ever getting any writing done on them. Still, hope springs eternal and ideas are never wasted.

Fanfic

the rival bands AU / the rock opera playlist fic (Sailor Moon - Makoto Kino/Nephrite). Currently exists entirely as an incomplete playlist.

space opera Pride and Prejudice retelling - exactly what it sounds like on the tin. Do y'all know I have yet to encounter a futuristic/space AU? Surely there's one out there somewhere, but I have yet to see it. If you know of one, for the love of God don't tell me.

"Ten of Swords" - (Archer EMIYA/Minako Arisato). fate/stay night + Persona 3 Portable crossover what's even wrong with my brain.

Original

the Regency fae story - a Regency-era fantasy in which a lot of the needlessly complicated and restrictive social rules followed by the upper classes are actually an attempt at defending against the Fair Folk. Sort of Pride and Prejudice vs Changeling: the Lost vs Labyrinth. Could turn into a whole Pride and Prejudice retelling, I guess?

drinking games - fantasy imperial court intrigues involving a romance between a court poison taster and a master spy/assassin.

untitled - East/southeast Asian-inspired Beauty and the Beast retelling in which the Beast is a mountain god whose appearance is based on a tiger. I'm probably too white to write this.

untitled - Private investigator hired to investigate local bad-boy-made-good for insurance fraud, turns out it was actually an ill-advised teenage deal with the devil coming due. Might fit in with that other southern gothic urban fantasy idea, I am not sure.

the ciphered letter - This one started off as a combination of a Mage: the Awakening campaign and a really, really weird spam email I got one time. Orphan gets mysterious ciphered letter, meets snarky Welsh mage, awakens to magic and maybe almost gets made a human sacrifice to an eldritch abomination.

Forfeit - Regency/Victorian-esque fantasy involving reincarnation, a race of immortals, and a half-immortal teaming up with a mortal who sacrificed his future reincarnations for pseudo-immortality to uncover and stop the sinister secrets that power a colonizing empire. It makes more sense in my head... probably?

untitled - Slow burn enemies to lovers between the world-conquering emperor and the rebel leader who's opposing him, over the course of a time loop. AKA Lord of Heroes Kartis/Monarch with the serials filed off. Or I guess I could just write Lord of Heroes fanfic?

low fantasy Magnificent Seven Samurai - Farming village scrapes together a group of starving mercs to protect them from marauders, drama ensues. That's it, that's the whole idea.

Unfinished Fics

Distinct from works in progress in that these are all old enough I can no longer claim I intend to finish them. Some of them I may come back to, especially the few that had substantial progress made before they fell by the wayside. Most will probably be left abandoned, either because I have lost interest in continuing to work on them or I have just plain forgotten what I was planning to do with them.

dreameater - A very old, loosely Forgotten Realms-inspired concept involving an aging half-elf, his fully elven partner, and a mysterious magical threat that's devouring people's dreams.

"Fortune Favors the Brave" (Baccano! - Luck Gandor/Eve Genoard). The Luck/Eve shipping fic.

"Intermezzo" (Blood+ City of Nightwalkers). Follow-up fic to an obscure manga prequel/side story for the vampire anime Blood+, involving Hagi and the Hong Kong cop who semi-adopted him that one time.

"The Art of Losing Everything" (Dragon Age: Origins - Alistair Theirin/f!Cousland). An Alistair/f!Warden fic with themes of loss, duty, and sacrifice.

"In Pieces" (Dragon Age II - Fenris/f!Hawke). A terrible horrible no good very bad AU where Hawke actually turned Fenris over to Danarius and then came back to try to fix her mistake, which I can never finish because I can't make that initial decision make internal sense no matter how hard I try.

"Pas de Deux" (Final Fantasy VIII - Squall Leonhart/Rinoa Heartilly). Exploration of how Squall and Rinoa's relationship could develop after the events of the game.

"With Good Intentions" (Final Fantasy VIII - Squall Leonhart/Rinoa Heartilly). An AU in which Rinoa discovers that technically you can change the past, it's just that if Squall has an actual decent childhood the world ends. Way too ambitious for me to ever actually finish, probably, but I can't quite give up on the idea.

"I've Loved These Days" (Gundam SEED - Mu la Flaga/Murrue Ramius). One of several partly-written Gundam SEED fics kicking around in my files.

"The Last Night of the World" (Gundam SEED - Mu la Flaga/Murrue Ramius). Another Gundam SEED fic, one that began as a prompt in ye olde LiveJournal days. "I've Loved These Days" might have been a prototype, though they don't appear to have any text in common. Could in theory still get finished, maybe.

Valentine's ghosts (Gundam SEED Destiny - Andrew Waltfeld/Murrue Ramius). I'm just saying, Andy/Murrue would have been so much more interesting than the whole Neo thing in Destiny.

"Lion Passant" (Kingdom Hearts). Something something Leon as a failed Keyblade Bearer. The Kingdom Hearts franchise has rewritten its own lore at least three times since I originally had the idea, I can't imagine I'll ever continue it now.

"Vigil" (KotOR - Carth Onasi/f!Revan). Carth/Revan retrospective somewhere around the tomb of Naga Sadow on Korriban.

"Semper Fidelis" (KotOR/KotOR II - Carth Onasi/f!Revan). Post-Sith Lords Carth/Revan resolution fic.

"Clarity" (KotOR II). Atton Rand backstory study from the POV of that one nameless Jedi.

"A Simple Game of Cards" (KotOR II - Atton Rand/Jedi Exile). Spoilers: it is never a simple game of cards. Turns out someone already did it with more or less the same twist I had in mind.

the besieged base fic (Mass Effect - f!Shepard/Kaidan Alenko). A fic rendition of the "Besieged Base" mission from the first Mass Effect.

"Get Up, Jonah" (Mass Effect). I woke up thinking about Turkish drummers. Didn't take long; I don't know much about Turkish drummers. Virmire, before the other shoe drops.

"Long Night" (Mass Effect). Ashley on Virmire.

"My Heart Dances" (Mass Effect - f!Shepard/Kaidan Alenko). Liara POV of Shepard/Kaidan.

"No Way Out" (Mass Effect - f!Shepard/Kaidan Alenko). Heading up the Citadel during the ME1 endgame.

"Right Here, Right Now" (Mass Effect - f!Shepard/Kaidan Alenko). An ME1 epilogue / pre-ME2 sort of fic.

"While the Night is Still Young" (Mass Effect - f!Shepard/Kaidan Alenko). Shepard/Kaidan en route to Ilos.

Apparently I had approximately a million little Mass Effect shortfic ideas I never finished and in some cases never started. Apparently they're all for the first game. (I think there was a Thane idea or two for ME2 that I just never started on at all. RIP.)

"To Absent Friends" (Tiger and Bunny). Sad, sad futurefic of an elderly Pao-Lin reflecting on the deaths of all the other heroes over the years.

#100daysofwriting #works in progress #stuff I want to write #writing #fanfic #southern gothic urban fantasy procedural romance