I Trust You

For Unwrittenmusings’ Rosvolio Wedding Challenge! I chose “We need to stop meeting at weddings that aren’t even ours” Thank you for this challenge! Ao3

Isabella and Helena

Rosaline would like the record to state that anyone still recovering from a breakup with the person you thought you were going to marry, and being flirted with by Benvolio Montague in a perfectly fitted suit  suit would end up in the same situation. 

Most people probably wouldn’t even need the breakup to end up in the same situation, but seeing as the entire thing happened because she was at the wedding of her ex’s sister, Rosaline thinks it should be added to the list of reasons she’s collecting to defend herself. 

Not that she has to defend herself to anyone.

Except maybe herself. 

Benvolio’s lips move from hers and start making their way down her throat, his hand sliding dangerously along the zipper of her dress. 

And god, this might just be the most undignified thing she’s ever done. She’s at a wedding, a black tie wedding at that, her very best friend’s wedding, and she’s about to hook up with a man in the bathroom. A Montague of all people. But she does not want him to stop. 

Rosaline had been sitting at the bar, watching Isabella and Helena spinning each other around for their first dance, trying her damnedest to be happy. Isabella was happy. Helena was amazing. Ever since they were 13 and Isabella told her that she might like girls, this is what Rosaline had been hoping Isabella would find. A beautiful wife and happiness, and the most perfect wedding to probably ever grace Verona.

And two weeks ago, that’s what it was. 

And then Escalus broke up with her out of the blue, and Rosaline would not - could not - talk to Isabella about it, she couldn’t risk the possibility of messing up anything about this wedding, so she was at the bar, avoiding the bride’s brother as best as she could, trying to not let her sour mood seep into the air, when he sat next to her.

Benvolio Montague. 

Family rival and Verona’s number one heartbreak three years running. 

Let’s gear up for the next installment of Rosvolio Writing Prompts: Song Lyrics!

Rules:

Pick a song prompt for your inspiration. Use any of the the songs below, or find your own song! Any and all fanwork is welcome.

Post your work by August 15th

Have Fun

The songs are listed in no particular  I tried to include a variety of genres and artists. I did have a post that included lyrics but sadly I deleted it on accident. Anyway, I hope you find some inspiration and that this prompt challenge encourage more Rosvolio Content! Special thanks to @fallinfor-youreyes and @queenofchildren for letting me talk to them about this particular prompt challenge and introducing me to some new music. Also, a huge thank you to @gentlesleaze for song recommendations as well. Remember, the songs under the read more are only suggestions. If you have a song that inspires you that is not included below, feel free to use that instead!  The list is quite long. I may or may not have gotten carried away…

‘I TRUST YOU!’

Still Star-Crossed: Two Year Anniversary

Hey everyone! The two year anniversary of the finale of Still Star-Crossed is July 29, 2019. To commemorate this, we are hosting a celebration week for the show with daily prompts to inspire fanworks including gifs, graphics, fanart, fan fiction, videos, or meta. Just make sure to tag all submissions with “SSC Anniversary” within the first five tags or @ this blog so we don’t miss anything.

To encourage as much participation and variety as possible, there are multiple prompts per day found below. We’re going with a theme of Seven Virtues and Seven Deadly Sins this year, along with more general prompts If you have any questions, send us an ask. Have fun!

damn you weren’t kidding with the old school

“I’m not jealous.”

Rosaline raises an eyebrow.

Benvolio shakes his head. “I’m not jealous.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he studies the pot boiling behind his girlfriend. “I’m not.”

He might be pouting.

“Okay,” says Rosaline, stepping around Benvolio to grab a plate from the cabinet behind him. “Let’s say I believe you. Then you have no problem with Liv and Jules and I hanging out at the bar tonight.”

Benvolio straightens. “I have no problem with you hanging out at the bar.”

“During Escalus’ shift.”

“Especially during Escalus’ shift.”

“And if Romeo and Mercutio happen to be there too - ”

“Now that’s just not fair,” whines Benvolio, throwing his arms up in the air. Rosaline probably laughs at him. “I’m stuck at a stupid training and you all get to - ”

Rosaline kisses him quiet, grinning. “Don’t worry, we wouldn’t dream of leaving out the birthday boy in his own festivities. We’ll wait until you’re done.”

Curling his arm around her waist, he pulls her closer. Burying his nose in her neck, he growls. “You better.”

Calling all Rosvolio fic readers and writers! As we all know, February is the month of love and romance, so, let’s spread some love! I am planning for a month full of weekly prompts to encourage Rosvolio fanfiction and other fan works for the month of February.

Rules:

A new theme will be presented each week.

Post your work on any day during the prompt week you choose to write for.

Use tag ‘valentines in verona' so others can easily find your work.

Have fun!

If you have any questions, send me an ask!

Weekly Themes:

Week 1 (February 1-7) Theme: Firsts (ie: first date, first kiss, first 'I love you’, first time, first dance, first anniversary…get creative!)

Week 2 (February 8-14) Theme: Soulmate AU. Search here for some great inspiration ideas or make up your own!

Week 3 (February 15-21) Theme: In-Canon. Our favorite OTP during the season of love along the streets of Verona, yes please!   (Slight Canon divergence is totally acceptable here also. After all, we only have 7 episodes of content to work with.) 

Week 4 (February 22-28) Theme: Dates (ie: blind date, first date, double date, speed date, impromptu date, make-up date, lunch date…you get the idea.)

(I don’t think I’ll be writing much more for these two, so I decided to go ahead and post this little scene from the Loud Places AU for the SSC Anniversary week! Enjoy some karaoke with Ben and Rose.) [Also on AO3].

Thank god for callbacks, Rosaline thought. If Mercutio hadn’t gotten that callback for Strangers in Stone, she’d be in a much more depressing situation this Saturday night. Thankfully, Mercutio had felt in the mood to celebrate so instead of eating a tub of cookie-dough ice cream and ranting on the phone to poor Livia for hours, she was twirling in the middle of the dance floor with Merc right by her side.

And All the Devils Are Here

Still Star Crossed anniversary, writing prompt for June 2nd: “Hell is Empty and All the Devils Are Here”:

It’s a story you haven’t seen on tv before: Girl meets Boy. Girl hates Boy. Girl and Boy infiltrate the most popular reality dating show on television to expose its unethical treatment of contestants… And suddenly, the lines begin to blur between the sparks flying on screen - and the real thing that grows when the cameras stop rolling.

Never One Thing  - Chapter 10

There’s some music for this one, and since I couldn’t get the link to work on ao3, here it is again: My official “Benvolio’s feelings”-song.

By the time they make it to the hotel, there seems to be nothing left of the nervous, insecure woman who burst into tears on his balcony last night. If ever there was a “real” Rosaline Capulet, he knows it has to be the woman with him today: Who opens up about her insecurities rather than letting them bubble up with no warning only to act like nothing happened the next moment. Who eats “Everything Ice-cream” like it’s a challenge, and not just some dumb line he made up on the spot (and which sounded a lot better in his head). Who takes time out of a trip intended to distract her from her responsibilities to visit her old nanny, because she may have a sharp tongue but she also has a big heart, and he likes both of those things about her.

Someone who deserves to be treated with honesty and respect, not used as a means to an end.

Which means only one thing: He has to come clean. Tell her about the bet and hope it won’t ruin all the trust they’ve so carefully built today. Maybe she’ll understand, he thinks with wild hope, maybe after he told her how bad things are with his uncle and how badly he needed that one shot at success, she can forgive him for making her the price of his shot.

It doesn’t sound very convincing even in his own mind.

When he kisses her later outside the hotel and thinks that it feels special, like their first kiss as something real, he can’t help but fear that it will turn out to be their last kiss ever.

Because as soon as he’s pulled away, Benvolio gathers all his courage and begins:

“Rosaline, there’s something I need to…”

Hmmm, planning is indeed a tricky thing. I for one am not a well-organised planner. Usually, from the moment I first have an idea I begin thinking of how it could play out, and then I write all those thoughts down into one big blob of text at the top of the document I’m writing the fic in, and I just add to that whenever I think of something new. (Alternatively, I excitedly yell about it to someone in private messages on here, at which point I later copy that stuff out of the conversation and put it in the document as well, to remember it. If that includes ideas suggested by the other person, remember to a) ask if you can use them and b) give them a shout-out in the author’s notes.)

I used to not plan at all, but now I find that planning out some semblance of a plot does help, especially with longer multi-chapter fics - at least then I know what I want to have happening, even though by the time I finally get to those parts, they might no longer work, and the story might be somewhere else entirely. (At which point, it is definitely allowed to abandon or change an intended plot point, even if it seemed like a good idea when you first started planning. Kill your darlings, as the saying goes.)

Recently, for a fic where the story is set over a specific period of days and one where the two main characters’ storylines diverged and reunited, I did make a spreadsheet to figure out what happens to which character on what day, so I knew how to make their timelines match. For stories with alternating points of view, that might be a helpful approach too, to prevent plot holes and non-matching character arcs and to make it less overwhelming to keep track of what needs to happen.

As for the problem of fic with “no plot whatsoever”: I think there’s no such thing. Some fics have less intricate plots (not everything is like, a government conspiracy AU), but even the simplest of coffee shop AUs has a basic plot: Characters A and B meet. Characters A and B interact. Characters A and B fall in love. That’s a plot. But if you feel like some of your fics don’t have a plot (I’m guessing because the reason you started writing it is because you could think of a few particular scenes you wanted to write and then just wrote those and didn’t know what else to write around them?), a useful question might be to ask yourself: What’s the point of this story, what do I want it to show? And then you work from that. If you’ve thought of one perfect scene between characters A and B, work from there and ask yourself: In what kind of situation could that scene happen? What could have happened before to prompt it? The character who initiates what happens in the scene: Why did they do so? What are they hoping to achieve by it? How does the other character react? What happens to the characters (internally or externally) during the scene, where does it leave them afterwards and what might it cause them (or other characters around them) to do? And just like that, you have a tiny little plot: You have a beginning, something to set the story in motion. You have a journey in the middle. And you have a point at the end where something has changed for the characters, no matter how tiny, and that might even trigger another action, and thus further your plot. Even a scene you wrote only for fun, just some pointless fluffy banter without plot twists or big gestures, can still have a purpose within the story, and that purpose can be as small as “give the characters a break” or as big as “make them see each other in a whole new light”.

And just like you can apply this process to individual scenes, you can and should do it for the entire story, just by asking yourself:

1) Where are the characters at the beginning of the fic, and where do I want them to be at the end of it? Again, that could be as simple as getting them from “strangers” to “people who speak to each other”.

and

2) What could, and what has to happen to bring them to this point? This is where your random plot ideas come in, and should be connected to question 1. If for example you thought “at one point I want character A to have a cup of coffee and absolutely hate it” then you now have to figure out how to make it happen, what drinking that coffee will do to character A, and how it will further their relationship with character B. Will having bad coffee be the last straw after a long, shitty day? Will they loudly say they hate it, thus prompting a fight with the barista who, oops, it turns out is actually really cute? Or will the barista perhaps commiserate once they’ve found out that this cup of coffee was supposed to be the one good thing of the day for character A, thus starting a beautiful new friendship? (See? Plot is already happening.)

So question 1 is the purpose of your fic, and question 2 is where you go absolutely crazy with your ideas, test them out, and see what works and helps bring you closer to your goal. This will also help you prioritise: Which plot points absolutely need to happen for your story to reach its goal, and which ones are just an added bonus but can, if necessary, be hand-waved away? (And readers tend to have a fairly high tolerance for hand-waving plot contrivances if the character development remains consistent, I’ve found.) That said, I absolutely think it’s possible to finish a long fic even when you don’t have all the plot figured out yet, so don’t get discouraged. If you’re not the type to meticulously plan everything beforehand, just start writing. I think the more important thing is that you love your idea and want to keep working on it. Sometimes that doesn’t work out and it will take you a long time to update, or you might have to abandon a work entirely, and that’s okay too. You’re not being paid to write. There’s no pressure for you to deliver. But if, in such cases, you feel like you’ve wasted the work you did before, I’d say: Try and get back in. Kill as many darling as you have to to make your plot work, but keep the things that made you want to write the story in the first place.

And, most importantly: Ask for help. What helped me the most whenever I felt that I was stuck on plot or had a plot hole that could not be fixed was to turn to fellow writers or tumblr friends who ship the same ship or who I know are reading one of my work-in-progress fics and ask them to help me talk over plot, ask for their opinion on this or that problem I’m having. Most of the time, that works like a charm - sometimes just typing out what exactly I feel the problem is makes me see it clearer, sometimes my friends can provide a solution I hadn’t thought of, or they’ll tell me the problem isn’t actually as bad as I thought it was.

So, I guess that’s my advice on plotting, which got a little longer than intended.