A Supremely Black Tai Affair

Look! I wrote another coda for Vendetta that is literally longer than Vendetta. Hold my beer. Here is my open disclaimer: I know Harry/Pansy is not the pairing you hope and dream of from me. I know you saw this post and were like, “Yay! A new fic!” and then looked at it more closely and felt vaguely horrified that I wrote something that didn’t involve Draco OR Hermione. But I do not care, because this is a sidebar ship that brings me excessive joy. Here is my secondary disclaimer: this entire fic is dialogue. If you hate that, let’s be honest, you may want to abandon ship on reading anything from me ever again. But I DID try to use the word “said” significantly less, so at least some of you will be happy. Maybe. Probably. For the people in comments who expressed enthusiasm for this idea: this one is for you. Freefall, Harry/Pansy, R, 13300 words. Harry checked his watch for a third time. Pansy was actively tapping her foot, looking annoyed, and when she saw him do it, she downed the rest of her drink. “I’m calling it,” she said. “Either something came up at work or they’re shagging in some utterly inappropriate place and forgot about dinner.”

Downside: I started a new job last week that includes a two hour commute, so I basically have time to make dinner and collapse into bed face first after work. I have thus become an incredibly slow writer. Upside: the thing I am working on (slowly) is pretty great. What’s that, you say? I keep writing everyone as stable and thirty and it’s incredibly boring? Totally going the teenager route. Everyone is twice as dumb as usual and about four thousand times more stupid about sex.* But, I mean, as a consolation prize, there are dragons. * If you thought you didn’t need Draco Malfoy being generally hopeless about everything and getting intensely flustered about second base**, you thought incorrectly. ** British people, the fact that I can’t use the American baseball sex metaphor ruins my life on a regular basis. Why don’t you have baseball? Why has no one come up with some sort of equivalent with rugby or cricket or some other Very British sport? Damn you all.

I have a 20,000 word H/D/H fic that I stuck in the “abandon” folder because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it, except now I’m spending my Saturday afternoon trying to figure out how to finish it because it has a really witty joke about lethifolds that I can’t seem to work into anything else. If you ever wondered about my writing process, it’s pretty much a) googling poisonous plants for the 4000th time so I don’t accidentally reuse one and b) laughing at my own really bad jokes. PS. No one panic, the two things I’m procrastinating on are both Hermione/Draco. At least one of them will get finished eventually. Right? Right. PPS. I know Tumblr isn’t livejournal, but whatever. Sometimes I want to update the world on my thoughts instead of sharing photos of attractive humans and cool interior design ideas. I’m old school, clearly.

Sometimes, people leave comments on my fic, and sometimes those comments are secretly inspirational. So thanks to a) to whomever said, “I only ever read H/D/H fics where Harry and Hermione are together first, I haven’t seen the other pairings much!” and b) to the person who resulted in me commenting, “This isn’t the fic where they get together through casual threesomes!” This fic is also c) owes things to all the people who were like, “Ooh, hot sex!” at all the fade-to-black scenes in Vendetta. (I was initially like, “Sex? Where? What are you people talking about?”) So, you know, I pretty much combined all these ideas and went, “Here, hold my beer.” Ways this is like Vendetta: there is literally only dialogue and actions. You have been warned. Ways this is not like Vendetta: you should also be warned that I decided to write something where everyone was a functional adult. This fic is very lacking in drama and angst. It is not, however, lacking in sex. There is a lot of sex. Voussoir, Harry/Draco/Hermione, NC-17, 13,000 words. “So,” Draco said. “Are you coming over?” He was leaning against the bar, watching Harry across the room. “I don’t know,” Hermione said. “Are you asking?”

I have three 15-20K+ fics that are done except for sex scenes. Would you like to guess what I am writing tonight? If your guess is “starting a fourth one because sex scenes contain basically no dialogue and are really boring to write and I hate them,” you would be 100% correct. 

1. How many Christmas fics is it possible for me to work on simultaneously? I don’t know, I don’t appear to have reached an upper limit yet. 2. This process would probably be a lot easier if I stopped using file names such as “hdh_something” or “christmasthing1″or “christmasthing2″or  “maybechristmasthing.” 3. As a delightful bonus, I pulled this stunt last year, so I have badly named files from 2016 too. Woo! 4. My plan is to win and profit!

I wrote like 15K of this one thing, decided I didn’t like it, and am now up to 7K on this other thing. I should just combine them, and then I could have like 22K of have-a-threesome-for-Christmas plus ridiculous-fic-trope-Draco/Hermione-Auroring thing. No one’s going to notice that switch in the middle.

The problem with finishing a bunch of stuff in a row is that your “ideas! to do!” folder turns into a wasteland of things a) you have poached for the stuff you just wrote or b) things you didn’t want to write in the first place. I need ideas, people. I will take literally anything. Jobs! Relationship status weirdness! Themes! Settings! Plants you really like! Otherwise, based on my ideas folder, I am going to throw together hate sex, the Amazon rainforest, and undercover work. (I have a PDF in there on electric eel taxonomy and I’m not afraid to use it. Actually, I’m pretty sure that was an inadvertent save into the wrong folder, but still.) That’s not going to end well. Please save me from myself and reply to this or send me an ask with ideas. Something. Anything. No promises I will use it, but it will at least keep me from writing undercover botany.

Look. I did this thing. It was meant to be a, you know, writing exercise. Growth! Development! Better skills! Except now it’s a 12,000 word writing exercise, so screw it. I was trying to see how much characterization I could get across through dialogue alone! ...then I wrote an entire fic that is exclusively actions and dialogue. I don’t know, man. I really don’t. This fic: a) spends literally no time inside anyone’s head, ever, and b) is in competition for the most off-screen sex scenes I could manage in 12,000 words. Vendetta, Hermione/Draco, R, 12,700 words. “Well,” Hermione said. “That was…” “A spectacularly bad idea?” Draco said.