So Sid and and were nattering about our old fanfic projects yesterday while they were walking their child and I realized very belatedly that I actually have two whole chapters of unpublished content for a game novelization I started in uhhhhh 2005 and was last updated in 2011 or ‘12 before my work schedule completely consumed my will to live
and now I’m apparently morally obligated to work on it again but also to upload it in its current form, warts and all, as we have decided collectively that my stopping right before I introduced any of the characters they cared about is exactly the reason I have cancer now.
And having typed that I realize it might look like a toxic conversation? but actually I think I really needed it.
I couldn’t drink my way through my sibling having an existential crisis at me about cooking Christmas dinner while I struggle with All My Own Shit and not being able to make myself leave my office for like 24 hours again, but I could write through it, so now I’m almost done with the next chapter of There Are No Monsters, which is kind of like getting myself a Christmas present.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I’ve been informed that I ought to post the link to this, so here is the link to this.
I swear to god the story is more about Lotor and Allura than their dads, it’s just also about their dads and I just really like writing interactions between Zarkon and Alfor.
It’s really gratifying to be working on a Good Dad AU since I know that I’m going to be absolutely horrific to everyone involved in ReVolt.
I posted the fic and now my hands are shaking and I feel like a dumbass.
There really isn’t any of Lotor or Allura even though the kids are meant to be the focus, somehow in the first couple of chapters I got derailed into writing their dads because I enjoy writing Zarkon and Alfor for some reason.
It’s fucking 14k+ and still manages to say nothing. Glorious.
Some part of me really wants to try to do Black Dog in comic format--at least some of the scenes for my own entertainment, if nothing else--but I sat down for a few hours to fiddle with character designs for Hana and MY GOD am I bad at this.
So real talk I’ve slept like 30 minutes since 4 am on the 11th and I spent ten to fifteen minutes trapped in my bathroom bya big slab of wood that got lodged between the wall and the sink this morning and I have had better days but not only do I have progress on There Are No Monsters Here I have five pages of progress. That’s almost equal to the discarded material!
Was trying to actually work on something but my brain is stuck on loop. So instead I’m gonna make a post of the Voltron stuff sitting unposted in my writing WIP folder to help me organize my thoughts.
I guess since I’m posting this, if you have anything you wanna say/ask about any of these feel free. I respond well to outside interest.
1. Project ReVolt is without a doubt the project I’ve posted about the most here. And talked about in random tags. And tangents. Originally it was just the name the project had in my internal brain filing cabinet but it’s kind of spread and stuck to where my wife and I just refer to it as that when we talk about it.
ReVolt is basically going to be a VLD series rewrite more along the lines of how my wife and I would have done it or at least liked to see it done. In some places it will probably stick pretty damn close to the events of the series canon, but in others go completely off the deep end. We’re each going to be doing one, so a lot of the headcanon and worldbuilding and such that we’ve worked out together in various other stories and RPs will be consistent between the two stories, but it will also give us a place to veer out and do things without the others’ input (as we’re not gonna let each other see our fics until they post, tee hee). I’ve done a SHITPOT of rules and infrastructure work using actual alchemy tracts to try and make sense of the series’ largely Powers As The Plot Demands system, and am pretty convinced I’m going to A)fall hard into my very common Esoterica Ranting Mode pitfall and B)enrage literally everyone who reads it with my character and plot choices. Most conservative estimate says this will be six ‘books’ long as again, we’re doing literally the entire series. Current status: at the ‘ridiculously large amount of notes and setting up actual arcs and outlines’ stage, and waiting for the wife to finish ‘Happier HOPEless’.
2. There Are No Monsters Here is a fic I really want to do but cannot seem to get off the ground, set to take place entirely in the ‘last universe’ from season 8--the one native-Honerva died in and crazed-death-god-Honerva picked out as her ideal and tried to wedge herself into. I guess the basic idea was that, like the ‘main’ universe, it got rebuilt pretty much as it was prior to Nightmare Mom Ruining Everything, and I have it with no one fully remembering the events of season 8 that took place there, but characters really closely tied to those events having some itching feeling that something happened, and all the Altean alchemists agreeing that some kind of massive quantum Event certainly occurred even if they don’t know what.
Mostly the story exists as a place for me to have a canon-compliant AU that still lets me explore stuff like Altean history, the racial and cultural tensions of the Coalition, dink around with Oldadins that DON’T die in one fell swoop, a living Daibazaal and Altea, Lotor growing up with a decent-but-not-without-strains relationship with his dad, teen Allura and tiny Lotor being absolute shits to each other while also coming to terms as they grow up with who and what they MUST be both on a political and quantum scale, and generally prove that even a perfect universe isn’t, all in one place. The title is entirely facetious, and anyone who’s read any of my alien culture headcanons for this series knows that. Lol. Current status: lots of bits and pieces, but no good beginning or connective tissue. I have a lot of notes, some arc outlines, and a few scattered scenes and bits of dialogue from later in the story, but my god, I CANNOT get it off the ground.
3. Someone Must Get Hurt (But It Won’t Be Me) is supposed to be a pretty wholly Honerva-centric fic that starts...sometime in her youth?...and carries forward to an as-yet-undetermined point. Probably her death. I mean the first one. I’m not sure. Another chance to dig my fingers into Altean culture and Alchemy, this time leading up to All The Bad Shit That Happened, with the added bonus of being done from a focal point of a character I have a lot of really strong feelings about both positive and negative that’s resulted in me somehow being EVEN MORE wrapped up in her than I was before I added abject knee-jerk trauma hatred to the mix. In no way meant to make Honerva more sympathetic, I think I just want to write her even more like my mother so I’ll feel EVEN BETTER about killing her? Idk man my feelings about her are so complicated. Also an excuse to write a shitpot of her and Zarkon because listen, I’m really glad they’re married because I ship them so fuckin hard. Current Status: SO many notes. SO much infrastructure. Like three pages of an opening I’m almost definitely throwing away because I can’t decide where, when, or how to open but feel like this isn’t it. One short but very telling scene of Honey and Zarkon from late in the story. I’m obsessed with it but I can’t get anywhere.
4. Currently Untitled Demon Hunter AU started because my wife talks to me about Happier HOPEless a LOT and I just got an itch in my bones to work on one myself. In spite of the entire Demon Hunter AU thing getting started by a prompt on a Shance blog, neither Shiro nor Lance are set to appear for at least a chapter? And I am not confident in my ability to not veer off into utter non-shipping anyway because man, am I bad at it. Or like...just an entirely different ship for either or both of them. Current Status: A lot of vague notes, a POWERFUL urge to structure the chapters and overall arc after Ripley’s Gates even though that limits my chapter count and means I will DEFINITELY have 20k+ word chapters, and about seven pages of the first chapter so I guess I’m committed now?
5. Currently Untitled Post Series Fic basically exists for me to vent my frustrations about two main things: The Universe is Fucking Huge And There Are Dangers Other Than Galra, and The Galra Empire Was Huge and Is Not Going To All Fall In Line Behind Voltron Coalition and Especially Behind Keith Who Just Arbitrarily Fucking Decided To Tell Them They Couldn't Pick A New Leader According To Their Own Traditions And Need To Do What They’re Told Now What The Fuck. Also there was a lot of stuff in the series that got left hanging, and while ReVolt is an IN-series fix-it fic, I wanted something that patched up loose ends in a way that was satisfactory to me but also kind of canon-compliant. Current Status: A lot of notes and screaming. No one has seen my progress on this and they might never.
6. Dog Runs And Death Dreams is a warmup file turned deeply self-indulgent series of scenes in which I choose to assume that Shiro’s rare neuromuscular disorder was left so ambiguous so I could plug the symptoms of mine into it. It’s genuinely not any deeper than that. The whole thing is set pre-Kerberos, and includes copious Shiro x Adam content because of it, but also not the kind that makes me feel good about writing because that means it includes the ‘slow fizzle’ that leads up to their breakup before the mission. Ugh. Working on it does make me feel better when I've been having symptoms, though, and I’ve been letting myself write it, unchastised, in a really loose rambly way that I usually deride myself for. It’s just cathartic. Current Status: no notes, no plan, just strain-writing between seizures, but somehow it feels like it has some kind of structure and just keeps growing? Possibly too close to the bone for me to ever post.
7. Birth and Rebirth was born out of two things: the fact that Zarkon is shown to have two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT reactions to first being presented with his baby son in different flashbacks and different seasons, and the fact that in spite of the flashbacks we get at the end of the series, earlier on, the impression I got of Lotor and Zarkon’s relationship wasn’t of a young man who had never had affection from his father, but who had instead lost it. Well, three things: I have a lot of underlying issues at work, at play, and at large when it comes to the Galra Imperial Family. Also, anyone notice the monitor blips in the first baby Lotor flashbacks indicate a heart murmur? Anyway, it was supposed to be a thoroughly self-indulgent and thoroughly self-hurtful examination of Lotor’s early life and the death by degrees of what was left of his father in the husk Rift Adventures left behind, but I got stuck on it a little way in. Current Progress: ten pages, a lot of notes, and some wistfulness. I keep hoping I’ll get inspired to pick it back up again. Contemplating rewriting some of the beginning, maybe it’ll help?
Bonus entry that is not actually in any form of progress soever:
50/50 Voltron Trashfire Edition is spawned from the ‘50/50′ challenge on an old TF board I used to haunt. It’s a fifty-prompt smut challenge using the list of ‘50 reasons to have sex’ from some tv show, and the idea is to write a different ship for every prompt (hence the name). My wife is blazing through it and has several (like twelve?) up on her AO3, but I’ll be utterly blunt: I haven’t written fifty porn fics in my LIFE. Over ALL my fandoms. Current Status: Literally all I have done is assign a ship to each prompt, and I might actually have some prompts with just question marks beside them still. I have one aborted start to one entry. That’s it. It’s not happening. But the empty file is technically in the folder, SO.
