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rallamajoopThis would be the post where I celebrate having Ghost Stories finished by giving in to my desire to pontificate at length about everything that went into writing it. (There are no words to express how much I've been looking forward to being able to do this. Seriously.)
It's been a week, so I'm starting to get over the novelty of being able to say The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories is complete - or at least up to working draft stage. But going beyond the story itself or the fandom aspect, even if it sounds like a bit of a petty thing to focus on, a lot of the real joy is being able to say I now have absolute proof that I can write novel length fiction! Perhaps not publishable novel-length fiction, or even necessarily very good novel-length fiction, but when 20,000 words used to be Really Unusually Long for me, that's an awesome thing to be newly qualified to say.
The nice thing going into it was that even though it was a hugely experimental project, I never had to question too deeply whether I'd be able to get to the end. I'm good at finishing writing projects these days, xxxHOLiC/Tsubasa fic has always been strangely cooperative for me, and I had enough of the plot figured out from the beginning that most of the writing process would simply be filling in the details. What I didn't count on was quite how long it would take me. Or how long it would end up.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that 'it will be longer than you thought it would be, no really' is practically a universal law of writing projects, going by how often you see writers saying things like this out on the web. The question is never how close to your initial word count prediction you're going to end up, it's how ridiculously you'll overrun it. I knew that well enough that I was even expecting it up to a point, but thanks to the recursive nature of Hofstadter's Law, I couldn't possibly have realised just how much longer than expected it was going to be. (You should all click that link, btw, it's more true than I can express.)
I should also stop and make a point here of just how much the whole idea came out of the blue from the start, let alone the extra 30,000 words at the end. Way back at the beginning when I posted the AU request meme,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lunargeography's request for a post-apocalyptic world was one of the later ones that I thought was neat as soon as I saw it but didn't seriously expect to get around to writing. Then a couple of days later once most of the others had been written up, an idea for it leapt on me unexpectedly and turned into two scenes, the second of which included a one line reference to the Tsubasa cast sharing Doumeki's camp. Then around when I was posting the earlier ficlets, Fye's backstory was getting going in the official manga, and regardless of what I thought of that particular sub-plot, it inevitably got me on to the topic of thinking about how all that would work in the post-apoc AU - which led to the Complexes and how Syaoran was cloned and where various other characters would fit into this world. By the time that poll was done sending its loud message that the post-apocalyptic AU was the one everyone reading wanted to see continued too, it was already practically a foregone conclusion. A lot of you probably remember all that, but it bears repeating for context.
Anyway, when I first decided that I was going to turn that snippet into something longer, I made a rough estimate it'd probably turn out about 60,000 words, which was pretty ambitious when you consider that the longest thing I'd ever written back then was a story called Catalyst (also a Tsubasa crossover, which may or may not mean anything) which clocked in around the respectable but hardly epic 24,000 mark. I had the my then-untitled epic mentally broken up into five parts based on major plot developments - part one would cover everything up to the end of Watanuki's first scavenging trip, part two would be from then until the mission where he gets shot and finally gets to start feeling like the camp's accepted him, part three would cover Doumeki's trading trip to the Complex and the rest of the events up to Kohane's first appearance, part four would let Kohane settle in and finish with Doumeki and Watanuki finally Sorting Their Relationship Out in a manner justifying meaningful capitals, and the last part would cover Watanuki's kidnapping and everything the others had to do to get him back. It's useful having that kind of structure in a project this big, since it gives you a way of marking how far through you've gotten versus how much more you've got left to write. The mistake was assuming those parts were all going to be about the same length.
Initially, it did seem to be going to plan. Part 1 ended up at around 12,000 words - dead on what I was expecting. Part 2 didn't even make it that far, petering out before hitting 9,000, and part 3 was again right on the expected 12,000 total.
Then came part 4, after a long break which I blame on being temporarily derailed by seeing official manga leave Kohane on a major cliffhanger just as I was about to introduce her myself ("But... but what if they're about to do something which finally explains her role in the series and redefines everything I think about her character?" ;_;). It clocked in at 12,000 words long - but only if you exclude the extra 7,000 words of flashbacks into various characters' backstories. Naively, I assumed part 5 probably wouldn't wind up any longer than part 4 had.
Part 5 was longer than part 4. Not only was it the least well planned out and most emotionally charged and difficult part of the story, it dragged out until well over 37,000 words before it was finally done. Ouch.
And that is how enough extra words to make the story half as long again as I'd expected snuck up and leapt on me at the last minute.
Inspiration, huh? You never can trust it.
That aside, for a first foray into the terrifying world of novel writing, most of the project went embarrassingly well.
Like nearly all amateur writers, getting something novel-length published is one of my long term, semi-serious goals, but not something I've attempted before, mostly due to the lack of a seriously novel-length idea. Even the closest I've had before have lacked important characteristics like plans for how to end it or half the necessary details to qualify as a story rather than very limited concept, and consequently they never got very far. On the other hand, writing for xxxHOLiC has always been so bizarrely easy for me, which is the only explanation I've got for why this particular idea broke all those rules so thoroughly. I've said it in comments before, but it still stands out just how easily all the major plot details - what would happen in what order, how it would end, how the world worked and how the camp would interact - fell right into place in my head as soon as I started seriously thinking about turning the first snippets into something longer. Tomoyo was a slightly later addition thatjaseroque will gleefully take credit for, and who gave me a good deal more trouble, but the general idea of Watanuki's abduction and a decent amount of the motivation behind it were there well before she showed up. Honestly, if the story hadn't all been falling into place so easily that I could be that confident I could finish it, I wouldn't have started it. Plain and simple.
But let's be realistic, an awful lot of the reason why it was so easy is that it was going to be fanfic, and fanfic doesn't need to be publishable, you're writing it for fun and you've already got an audience, many of whom would prefer something light-weight and enjoyable (or dark and angsty, or short and porny, or whatever, but you get my point) than something that could be passed off as real literature. Making it Tsubasa fanfic only increased the effect, because takes the realism quota down to the standards of extremely soft sci-fi at worst, and also because if a scene ever started getting boring or I wasn't sure what to do with it next, I could usually fix it by pulling another CLAMP character out of the box for a cameo appearance (Oruha, Kazuhiko and Gingetsu were typical cases) or, if all else failed, by inventing Giant Mutant Birds. It also meant I could get away with posting the draft in increments as I went along, which both kept me on a schedule and meant I had feedback to egg me along, and having that kind of instant reassurance that the work I was turning out still kept people's attention made all the difference in the world.
However, for all the enthusiastic feedback I've gotten along the way, I'm acutely aware that all the main ingredients are nothing very special. The basic plot is one of the most utterly textbook romance-plus-token-action cliches there are: the main characters meet and go through various ups and downs in the process of settling in, the romance gets consummated at the end of the third act and just when all looks to be resolving something big and nasty happens to give you the conflict you need for a big finale. There's the huge hurt/comfort cliche of the abuse victim Watanuki gradually learning to trust again driving most of the story. The post-apocalyptic setting is an old trope, including the domed cities and the inside-versus-outside lives of the survivors, and most of the rest of the important elements - especially the acid rain and the Diet Building/Tower - came direct from Tsubasa's Acid Tokyo universe (minus the reality hopping vampires). The only parts that were ever going to have much scope for originality were in finding ways to reinvent as much of the Tsubasa/xxxHOLiC cast's histories in the AU setting as possible, and in whatever twists and turns and surprise details I could work in along the way to find something new - or at least not too overdone before - to do with a collection of old ideas. I'd like to think I managed to pull that much off reasonably well.
Of course, no matter how carefully you plan you never quite know what kind of story you're writing until you've written it, so there were plenty of things I didn't expect. Somewhere back at the start I know I'd envisioned Chi as being as much a part of the camp as its human members, but in practice, by the time she'd been hidden in the lab for the first 20,000 words of story, it just didn't make any sense for her to be out in the open very often. Conversely, I hadn't expected Kamui and Fuuma to have more than about one or two scenes each, and we can all see how that wound up. (Oddly, I was never remotely interested in writing or reading X fanfic back when I was first getting into the fandom, yet hand me an excuse to work X characters in to something like this, and my old fangirl shows up like a rash.) For a post-apocalyptic story where everyone carries a gun just as a matter of course, it wound up with remarkably few action scenes and only one real gunfight. And there's the fun of discovering that details you never realised were important add up in surprisingly neat ways that explain things you never even realised you'd need to explain, like discovering the reason why Doumeki reacted quite so badly to hearing Watanuki talk about Haruka's death was that he hadn't known for sure whether his grandfather was alive or dead up to that moment. I didn't have more than the vaguest idea exactly why Tomoyo would need Watanuki kidnapped in quite that manner until I was very close to having to write it on page, but that said, I was entirely confident she'd have to have some good reason that would tie up all the lose ends, and I'd find out what it was eventually. The story was very much there the whole time, with a whole life of it's own.
...and I could continue to go on at length about what went into writing for every character individually, but unless people really want to hear all that, I should probably cut all that short. >.>
The crunch came at the very end, when I was finally starting to realise how much those last 12,000 words were going to blow out of proportion. I have spent the last couple of months terrified of losing momentum to the point of practically banning myself from working on anything else. No matter how frustrating the story was getting, it was obvious that if I let myself get too distracted for too long it was only going to be even harder to get back into the groove of writing it again, and the extra weeks it took me to get back on track to finish chapter 31 after being sick were more than enough proof that I was right to be worried. Not to mention the fact that after working on the one story for so long, the enjoyment I was getting out of telling it was seriously clashing with the increasing desire just to have the damn thing done at last so I could work on something else.
So that, in short is how a few hundred, vaguely-possibly-pre-slashy words about Watanuki and Doumeki in a post-apocalyptic setting picked up the rest of the Tsubasa cast (all requiring their own elaborate backstories and roles), most of the more important supporting casts from both series and a huge supply of extras, as well as a complicated landscape with futuristic domed cities ruled by a manipulative teenager, huge rival camps that somehow created an area of unnatural safety by fighting with each other, a whole lot of ghostly mythology and a good does of politics. It was a fair bit to juggle, to say the least. Even more so when it came to getting to a resolution that could give everyone a happy ending despite the horribly bleak setting, but allowing for those rather trying last couple of months, I'd say the whole project was well worth all the work.
At the risk of sounding like I'm falling into some sort of award speech cliche, I owe a lot of gratitude tolunargeography, both for giving me the original idea and for a wonderful amount of support and encouragement while I was working on it. jaseroque too, mostly for explaining to me what I so obviously needed to do with Tomoyo. Also a general thank you to everyone who sent me loudly enthusiastic feedback along the way - I don't know whether I deserved it all, but it make keeping up my own enthusiasm so much easier.
All that said, it's not really done, firstly because I've still got the whole editing round to go through. I've got a whole post worth of thoughts about that too (though mostly that'll be a loud request for concrit), but that shall be saved for a week or two at least while I take that much needed break from this thing. The second reason it's not really done is because I've still got half a dozen ideas for side stories I'd like to write in this universe. So that this post isn't entirely my own mindless rambling, and in the hope it'll prevent me from forgetting any later, here's a quick outline of what they'll be about:
1. Flashback showing when Syaoran first met Kamui.
Status: Already written!
2. The scene between chapters 23 and 24. Yes, that scene.
Status: I'm actually about halfway to three quarters of the way through this one in notebook form. No particular promises about when it might be finished, this is... not the kind of scene I'm particularly practiced at writing.
3. More miscellaneous Dou/Wata smut. May have to carefully avoid the difficult question of what passes for lube in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Status: Soooo there's this paragraph that's been sitting around in the back of one of my notebooks since sometime last year. It could totally have been going somewhere. >.>
4. Actual ghost fic! Touya, Yukito and Hokuto hang out somewhere near the camp and chat about stuff that may or may not be very enlightening. Touya and Yukito got so little screentime in their cameos that most of the audience didn't even recognise them, so this would be my chance to make up for that.
Status: Been planned since around when I started writing the main story, though I have a feeling it's going to be a bit of a bugger to actually write.
5. The missing scene between Kurogane and Fye during chapter 17, after Fye's Complex has been destroyed.
Status: This one's planned out almost word for word. The only real question is how it's going to end, or, more to the point, how much detail I'll have to go into about how it ends.
6. Fye backstory, hopefully to fill in that big, glaring hole left between him leaving the Complex and meeting Kurogane.
Status: I have most of a page of notes about this one. It could get pretty involved.
7. Scene with Haruka and Watanuki. Possibly not their first meeting.
Status: ...y'know, this is one of those ones that seemed like a really good idea when I first thought of it, but I'm not sure whether I've got any idea what I was going to do with it anymore. Something may still come of it.
8. Flashback to the time Kurogane met Haruka
Status: Pretty much like the last one. I really ought to get into the habit of making more notes about these things when I first think of them.
That list is, of course, subject to change with the whims of the author, but since I've already gone and proven how horribly influenced by feedback I am, have a poll about which one I should write first! You get radio buttons rather than ticky boxes this time, becauseI am feeling evil tonight I do intend to finish all of these, I'm just curious about what people want to seem me prioritise.
[Poll #1230946]
Right, so now that's done (excluding the editing, which I am not yet in any rush to start), and after I get through a few blissful days of not feeling any pressure to write anything at all (already just about over, says my conscience), it would be time to tackle the fun question of what I get to do next. Right now, I am looking forward to finally being able to get back to finishing a few certain bits of fic for other series (Discworld and Guilty Gear, to be specific) which have been sitting around being sadly neglected now for far, far too long. Beyond that, the next logical step would have to be to stop making all those excuses, dig up one of those other novel ideas, dust it off and finally make a start on proving to myself that I can write novel length fiction that is publishable (legally if not technically).
Actually, considering how well it worked on Ghost Stories, I wonder a bit whether I actually work better with other people's prompts, and whether maybe I should start by asking someone else to throw me original story ideas they want me to write and pick whatever latches on to me...
Eh, I'll figure it out as I go.
It's been a week, so I'm starting to get over the novelty of being able to say The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories is complete - or at least up to working draft stage. But going beyond the story itself or the fandom aspect, even if it sounds like a bit of a petty thing to focus on, a lot of the real joy is being able to say I now have absolute proof that I can write novel length fiction! Perhaps not publishable novel-length fiction, or even necessarily very good novel-length fiction, but when 20,000 words used to be Really Unusually Long for me, that's an awesome thing to be newly qualified to say.
The nice thing going into it was that even though it was a hugely experimental project, I never had to question too deeply whether I'd be able to get to the end. I'm good at finishing writing projects these days, xxxHOLiC/Tsubasa fic has always been strangely cooperative for me, and I had enough of the plot figured out from the beginning that most of the writing process would simply be filling in the details. What I didn't count on was quite how long it would take me. Or how long it would end up.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that 'it will be longer than you thought it would be, no really' is practically a universal law of writing projects, going by how often you see writers saying things like this out on the web. The question is never how close to your initial word count prediction you're going to end up, it's how ridiculously you'll overrun it. I knew that well enough that I was even expecting it up to a point, but thanks to the recursive nature of Hofstadter's Law, I couldn't possibly have realised just how much longer than expected it was going to be. (You should all click that link, btw, it's more true than I can express.)
I should also stop and make a point here of just how much the whole idea came out of the blue from the start, let alone the extra 30,000 words at the end. Way back at the beginning when I posted the AU request meme,
lunargeography's request for a post-apocalyptic world was one of the later ones that I thought was neat as soon as I saw it but didn't seriously expect to get around to writing. Then a couple of days later once most of the others had been written up, an idea for it leapt on me unexpectedly and turned into two scenes, the second of which included a one line reference to the Tsubasa cast sharing Doumeki's camp. Then around when I was posting the earlier ficlets, Fye's backstory was getting going in the official manga, and regardless of what I thought of that particular sub-plot, it inevitably got me on to the topic of thinking about how all that would work in the post-apoc AU - which led to the Complexes and how Syaoran was cloned and where various other characters would fit into this world. By the time that poll was done sending its loud message that the post-apocalyptic AU was the one everyone reading wanted to see continued too, it was already practically a foregone conclusion. A lot of you probably remember all that, but it bears repeating for context.Anyway, when I first decided that I was going to turn that snippet into something longer, I made a rough estimate it'd probably turn out about 60,000 words, which was pretty ambitious when you consider that the longest thing I'd ever written back then was a story called Catalyst (also a Tsubasa crossover, which may or may not mean anything) which clocked in around the respectable but hardly epic 24,000 mark. I had the my then-untitled epic mentally broken up into five parts based on major plot developments - part one would cover everything up to the end of Watanuki's first scavenging trip, part two would be from then until the mission where he gets shot and finally gets to start feeling like the camp's accepted him, part three would cover Doumeki's trading trip to the Complex and the rest of the events up to Kohane's first appearance, part four would let Kohane settle in and finish with Doumeki and Watanuki finally Sorting Their Relationship Out in a manner justifying meaningful capitals, and the last part would cover Watanuki's kidnapping and everything the others had to do to get him back. It's useful having that kind of structure in a project this big, since it gives you a way of marking how far through you've gotten versus how much more you've got left to write. The mistake was assuming those parts were all going to be about the same length.
Initially, it did seem to be going to plan. Part 1 ended up at around 12,000 words - dead on what I was expecting. Part 2 didn't even make it that far, petering out before hitting 9,000, and part 3 was again right on the expected 12,000 total.
Then came part 4, after a long break which I blame on being temporarily derailed by seeing official manga leave Kohane on a major cliffhanger just as I was about to introduce her myself ("But... but what if they're about to do something which finally explains her role in the series and redefines everything I think about her character?" ;_;). It clocked in at 12,000 words long - but only if you exclude the extra 7,000 words of flashbacks into various characters' backstories. Naively, I assumed part 5 probably wouldn't wind up any longer than part 4 had.
Part 5 was longer than part 4. Not only was it the least well planned out and most emotionally charged and difficult part of the story, it dragged out until well over 37,000 words before it was finally done. Ouch.
And that is how enough extra words to make the story half as long again as I'd expected snuck up and leapt on me at the last minute.
Inspiration, huh? You never can trust it.
That aside, for a first foray into the terrifying world of novel writing, most of the project went embarrassingly well.
Like nearly all amateur writers, getting something novel-length published is one of my long term, semi-serious goals, but not something I've attempted before, mostly due to the lack of a seriously novel-length idea. Even the closest I've had before have lacked important characteristics like plans for how to end it or half the necessary details to qualify as a story rather than very limited concept, and consequently they never got very far. On the other hand, writing for xxxHOLiC has always been so bizarrely easy for me, which is the only explanation I've got for why this particular idea broke all those rules so thoroughly. I've said it in comments before, but it still stands out just how easily all the major plot details - what would happen in what order, how it would end, how the world worked and how the camp would interact - fell right into place in my head as soon as I started seriously thinking about turning the first snippets into something longer. Tomoyo was a slightly later addition that
jaseroque will gleefully take credit for, and who gave me a good deal more trouble, but the general idea of Watanuki's abduction and a decent amount of the motivation behind it were there well before she showed up. Honestly, if the story hadn't all been falling into place so easily that I could be that confident I could finish it, I wouldn't have started it. Plain and simple.But let's be realistic, an awful lot of the reason why it was so easy is that it was going to be fanfic, and fanfic doesn't need to be publishable, you're writing it for fun and you've already got an audience, many of whom would prefer something light-weight and enjoyable (or dark and angsty, or short and porny, or whatever, but you get my point) than something that could be passed off as real literature. Making it Tsubasa fanfic only increased the effect, because takes the realism quota down to the standards of extremely soft sci-fi at worst, and also because if a scene ever started getting boring or I wasn't sure what to do with it next, I could usually fix it by pulling another CLAMP character out of the box for a cameo appearance (Oruha, Kazuhiko and Gingetsu were typical cases) or, if all else failed, by inventing Giant Mutant Birds. It also meant I could get away with posting the draft in increments as I went along, which both kept me on a schedule and meant I had feedback to egg me along, and having that kind of instant reassurance that the work I was turning out still kept people's attention made all the difference in the world.
However, for all the enthusiastic feedback I've gotten along the way, I'm acutely aware that all the main ingredients are nothing very special. The basic plot is one of the most utterly textbook romance-plus-token-action cliches there are: the main characters meet and go through various ups and downs in the process of settling in, the romance gets consummated at the end of the third act and just when all looks to be resolving something big and nasty happens to give you the conflict you need for a big finale. There's the huge hurt/comfort cliche of the abuse victim Watanuki gradually learning to trust again driving most of the story. The post-apocalyptic setting is an old trope, including the domed cities and the inside-versus-outside lives of the survivors, and most of the rest of the important elements - especially the acid rain and the Diet Building/Tower - came direct from Tsubasa's Acid Tokyo universe (minus the reality hopping vampires). The only parts that were ever going to have much scope for originality were in finding ways to reinvent as much of the Tsubasa/xxxHOLiC cast's histories in the AU setting as possible, and in whatever twists and turns and surprise details I could work in along the way to find something new - or at least not too overdone before - to do with a collection of old ideas. I'd like to think I managed to pull that much off reasonably well.
Of course, no matter how carefully you plan you never quite know what kind of story you're writing until you've written it, so there were plenty of things I didn't expect. Somewhere back at the start I know I'd envisioned Chi as being as much a part of the camp as its human members, but in practice, by the time she'd been hidden in the lab for the first 20,000 words of story, it just didn't make any sense for her to be out in the open very often. Conversely, I hadn't expected Kamui and Fuuma to have more than about one or two scenes each, and we can all see how that wound up. (Oddly, I was never remotely interested in writing or reading X fanfic back when I was first getting into the fandom, yet hand me an excuse to work X characters in to something like this, and my old fangirl shows up like a rash.) For a post-apocalyptic story where everyone carries a gun just as a matter of course, it wound up with remarkably few action scenes and only one real gunfight. And there's the fun of discovering that details you never realised were important add up in surprisingly neat ways that explain things you never even realised you'd need to explain, like discovering the reason why Doumeki reacted quite so badly to hearing Watanuki talk about Haruka's death was that he hadn't known for sure whether his grandfather was alive or dead up to that moment. I didn't have more than the vaguest idea exactly why Tomoyo would need Watanuki kidnapped in quite that manner until I was very close to having to write it on page, but that said, I was entirely confident she'd have to have some good reason that would tie up all the lose ends, and I'd find out what it was eventually. The story was very much there the whole time, with a whole life of it's own.
...and I could continue to go on at length about what went into writing for every character individually, but unless people really want to hear all that, I should probably cut all that short. >.>
The crunch came at the very end, when I was finally starting to realise how much those last 12,000 words were going to blow out of proportion. I have spent the last couple of months terrified of losing momentum to the point of practically banning myself from working on anything else. No matter how frustrating the story was getting, it was obvious that if I let myself get too distracted for too long it was only going to be even harder to get back into the groove of writing it again, and the extra weeks it took me to get back on track to finish chapter 31 after being sick were more than enough proof that I was right to be worried. Not to mention the fact that after working on the one story for so long, the enjoyment I was getting out of telling it was seriously clashing with the increasing desire just to have the damn thing done at last so I could work on something else.
So that, in short is how a few hundred, vaguely-possibly-pre-slashy words about Watanuki and Doumeki in a post-apocalyptic setting picked up the rest of the Tsubasa cast (all requiring their own elaborate backstories and roles), most of the more important supporting casts from both series and a huge supply of extras, as well as a complicated landscape with futuristic domed cities ruled by a manipulative teenager, huge rival camps that somehow created an area of unnatural safety by fighting with each other, a whole lot of ghostly mythology and a good does of politics. It was a fair bit to juggle, to say the least. Even more so when it came to getting to a resolution that could give everyone a happy ending despite the horribly bleak setting, but allowing for those rather trying last couple of months, I'd say the whole project was well worth all the work.
At the risk of sounding like I'm falling into some sort of award speech cliche, I owe a lot of gratitude to
lunargeography, both for giving me the original idea and for a wonderful amount of support and encouragement while I was working on it. jaseroque too, mostly for explaining to me what I so obviously needed to do with Tomoyo. Also a general thank you to everyone who sent me loudly enthusiastic feedback along the way - I don't know whether I deserved it all, but it make keeping up my own enthusiasm so much easier.All that said, it's not really done, firstly because I've still got the whole editing round to go through. I've got a whole post worth of thoughts about that too (though mostly that'll be a loud request for concrit), but that shall be saved for a week or two at least while I take that much needed break from this thing. The second reason it's not really done is because I've still got half a dozen ideas for side stories I'd like to write in this universe. So that this post isn't entirely my own mindless rambling, and in the hope it'll prevent me from forgetting any later, here's a quick outline of what they'll be about:
1. Flashback showing when Syaoran first met Kamui.
Status: Already written!
2. The scene between chapters 23 and 24. Yes, that scene.
Status: I'm actually about halfway to three quarters of the way through this one in notebook form. No particular promises about when it might be finished, this is... not the kind of scene I'm particularly practiced at writing.
3. More miscellaneous Dou/Wata smut. May have to carefully avoid the difficult question of what passes for lube in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Status: Soooo there's this paragraph that's been sitting around in the back of one of my notebooks since sometime last year. It could totally have been going somewhere. >.>
4. Actual ghost fic! Touya, Yukito and Hokuto hang out somewhere near the camp and chat about stuff that may or may not be very enlightening. Touya and Yukito got so little screentime in their cameos that most of the audience didn't even recognise them, so this would be my chance to make up for that.
Status: Been planned since around when I started writing the main story, though I have a feeling it's going to be a bit of a bugger to actually write.
5. The missing scene between Kurogane and Fye during chapter 17, after Fye's Complex has been destroyed.
Status: This one's planned out almost word for word. The only real question is how it's going to end, or, more to the point, how much detail I'll have to go into about how it ends.
6. Fye backstory, hopefully to fill in that big, glaring hole left between him leaving the Complex and meeting Kurogane.
Status: I have most of a page of notes about this one. It could get pretty involved.
7. Scene with Haruka and Watanuki. Possibly not their first meeting.
Status: ...y'know, this is one of those ones that seemed like a really good idea when I first thought of it, but I'm not sure whether I've got any idea what I was going to do with it anymore. Something may still come of it.
8. Flashback to the time Kurogane met Haruka
Status: Pretty much like the last one. I really ought to get into the habit of making more notes about these things when I first think of them.
That list is, of course, subject to change with the whims of the author, but since I've already gone and proven how horribly influenced by feedback I am, have a poll about which one I should write first! You get radio buttons rather than ticky boxes this time, because
[Poll #1230946]
Right, so now that's done (excluding the editing, which I am not yet in any rush to start), and after I get through a few blissful days of not feeling any pressure to write anything at all (already just about over, says my conscience), it would be time to tackle the fun question of what I get to do next. Right now, I am looking forward to finally being able to get back to finishing a few certain bits of fic for other series (Discworld and Guilty Gear, to be specific) which have been sitting around being sadly neglected now for far, far too long. Beyond that, the next logical step would have to be to stop making all those excuses, dig up one of those other novel ideas, dust it off and finally make a start on proving to myself that I can write novel length fiction that is publishable (legally if not technically).
Actually, considering how well it worked on Ghost Stories, I wonder a bit whether I actually work better with other people's prompts, and whether maybe I should start by asking someone else to throw me original story ideas they want me to write and pick whatever latches on to me...
Eh, I'll figure it out as I go.