#9w

Rules: post the beginning lines of your most recent 10 published fanfics, then attempt to tag 10 people!

tagged by @blue-glasses-dork

From most to least recent:

I watched you drown for love of me (a prayer, Helios/Phaidros (past), Phaidros/Dionysus, The Hymn to Dionysus)

If you give me a night and a chart (Polaris, January Stirling/River Gale, The Mars House. It’s the latest chapter of for much more than a month, but as the chapters are all finished poems, I think it counts here)

I saw you dance, and I loved you. (Take my hand, January Stirling/River Gale, The Mars House)

Though love crossed with me, love lost greeted me (finding mist, January Stirling/River Gale, The Mars House. The fourth and last of the starlit sonnets, my soulmate au)

I find I can’t peel my eyes from you (You Are Not Beautiful, And Yet, Nine Worlds/Greenwing & Dart, but also Midsummer Mess by Crackfoxx, because it’s the second of two poems written by their fictional (and unbelievably terrible) in-world poet. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be, so be forewarned: it’s bad. It’s so bad.)

I go to find our firewood (The Kindling of the Ashen Heart, Nine Worlds/Greenwing & Dart/Midsummer Mess. The first of the poems by the terrible poet. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever written.)

the winter chill seems endless, (winter’s sun, January Stirling/River Gale, The Mars House)

he is wild-eyed and wild-helmed (wild-eyed and wilder-helmed, Hannan, Critical Role Aramán)

Awake, alone, I look for your star, (evening mist, January Stirling/River Gale, The Mars House. The third of my soulmate au sonnets)

We want to keep every letter and every note (Silver-cast, both Csevet/Maia and Csevet & Maia, The Goblin Emperor)

For the post limerick, I may as well post it here because I don't think I'll be putting it anywhere else (except in the discord that sparked it, where it's been for a while). To set the scene, here’s the background if you haven't read the books: the postal system is kind of broken, definitely inefficient, and also curses get in the way sometimes. The background if you have read the books: the post, pre-Kip.

Anyway, the limerick:

Let me impart upon you some wisdom that you need to use our postal system: to make sure that your scrawl will arrive there at all give up on the post and just visit them!

winter sun is from January's pov and going much better than the previous iteration, probably thanks to the major shift in metre. The only lines that have stayed consistent throughout it all are the lines I wrote first, which are - as is often the case - the lines at the end. These are half of those:

wip tag game

rules: make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous and tag as many people as you have WIPs. People send an ask with the title that most intrigues them, then you post a snippet or tell them something about it!

(tagged by @nemainofthewater)

right, to make things a little easier on us all, I'm going to organise these by fandom:

A Taste of Gold and Iron

there I am (currently this is three lines of 'Evemer Has Made a Bad Decision (and He Definitely Doesn't Think Kadou's Hot)')

Critical Role (Aramán)

wild-eyed and wilder-helmed (this is no longer a wip; it was when I started, but it took me too long to actually write the rest of this post)

Nine Worlds

Correspondence 4 ('Correspondence 3' was the unfortunate victim of a counting error and was therefore demoted from that series of sonnets due to not actually being a sonnet)

The Troubles with Trespass (I’d forgotten about this one entirely, so oops. It'll probably become an active wip again now I know it exists)

Post limericks (so far this contains a single limerick about the postal system pre-Cliopher. I'm not entirely sure it even counts as a wip for this because I'm pretty sure I've actually posted this in the discord that spawned the idea, but the title is plural and the number of limericks is singular, so it's getting included)

Running Close to the Wind

A Lament to Six and Fifty-Two (I said I'd write this and I did! It just sounds much more like (the way I've written the poetry of) Fitzroy Angursell than it does Avra, so it's sitting here while I get the motivation and inspiration to rework it. It’s too organised. It needs more chaos)

The Goblin Emperor

this post I wrote about Maia writing poetry is pretty instrumental in understanding the entire premise of these. It's almost/nearly/not-quite-but-close-to a fic, in which I wrote a few lines of several poems and about or explained several more. These poems are part of that.

The Loss of the Zhasan

Maia's last poem

The Mars House

January 3

finding mist

for much more than a month poem 6

rainstorm (rainfall?)

to River (no one get excited for this. It's in a folder called 'this one sucks so it's here now'. It was meant to be January’s 2nd poem but it’s been through at least three different iterations of form, metre, and rhyme, and I liked exactly none of them. This is not a poem to pin your hopes on. It certainly didn't treat mine well)

future poem (something something time travel? The impetus was this post by @spittinwatches and the poem draft I added to that started as the end of this)

winter sun (good lines from the bad poem) (this is my attempt to salvage something from the aforementioned hated poem, in which I took the only lines I liked from the first poem and shoved the rest of it into the aforementioned folder. I… hate it less. We’ll see how it goes)