#chuthulhu-writes

I was tagged by @chuthulhu-writes. Thank you!

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

All right, so here's the current list:

Shame Lina Isn't a Werewolf

Room Full of Vampires AU

Jailbreak

Unexpected Reunion

Parasocial Relationships

Hey have I mentioned recently that I'm posting drafts of my fantasy novel on patreon? Because I am! I have one small paid tier that gets em a month early but they're free after that!

Leah struggled to grip at Miranda’s mane, her stomach lurching at the sudden speed. She felt Miranda’s back sink unnaturally beneath her, the shifting water wrapping around her wrists and legs to ensure that she wasn’t shaken off as the kelpie accelerated to the speed of a landragon. The landscape blurred around her into an impossible swirl of colours, until Leah had to close her eyes against the fizzling brightness of it all. She really didn’t want to throw up on a kelpie. When Miranda finally slowed, the sun had moved barely a finger through the sky. “Is this the city?” Miranda asked, moving the water that made up their form enough to push up Leah to see over their head. Sure enough, they were facing a high wall, carved with the sigils of a protective circle, each curving letter taller than Leah was. Leah looked back over her shoulder to see the hills she’d come from rising up behind her, the mountains beyond them already distant. She heard a bang and looked back to see that the guards on the wall ahead had noticed her, and were starting to shoot at her. The wall was high, but not high enough to be Caisteal Dubh—standing in front of it, Leah could still see the sky beyond. “This isn’t it, keep going!” Leah called, ducking down behind Miranda’s head. She heard several splashes as bullets hit Miranda, though they didn’t seem to do anything. “Do you have to follow the river or can you go around?” “I can go around,” Miranda said, and in a rush of speed the town was now behind them, the river still flowing on ahead. “How will I know which one it is?” “I’ll know,” Leah promised. “Just… don’t stop close enough for them to see us at the next one, okay?” “Why not?” Miranda asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Why did they throw metal at us?” “They wanted us to go away,” Leah explains. “It didn’t really do anything to you, but that metal could kill me. I’d rather it didn’t.” “Oh, yes, that would be no good,” Miranda murmured. “Alright, further away next time. Hang on!” And away they went again. Leah instinctively tried to bury her face in Miranda’s mane, and then quickly turned her head to the side when she started to sink in to what was, at the end of the day, water. Miranda was a newborn kelpie, and seemed to have some portion of their mother’s knowledge of mortal creatures, but Leah didn’t know for sure if that included an awareness of what drowning was or why it was bad, and she didn’t want to chance it.

And of course AO3 went down for maintenance RIGHT after I posted this so I couldn't link anything :v

1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?) Ooooh, hmmm... probably The Dose Makes The Poison for like, my general Vibes about where I like to go with fanfiction: hey what if something portrayed as inherently evil in canon wasn't so clear-cut black-and-white; odd experiences with memory and headspace-sharing with other entities; physical health and pain; family stuff. Maybe The Family Business for original work and for the added factors of: I love sibling relationships; I love writing weird wee creatures; have I mentioned that I am Scottish today?

23. What’s a trope, AU, or concept you’ve never written, but would like to? I find gender-spectrum AUs very interesting when they're used to outline how a character's experiences might be affected by them having, or being perceived to have, a different gender than in canon. In particular, Bruce Wayne really sticks in my head as a character who has been in the public eye all his life and that eye would be looking at him VERY differently if he was (or was perceived to be) a woman, and I think it's worth exploring the different ways he might have constructed his public persona under those circumstances.

26. Would you rather write a fic that had no dialogue or one that was only dialogue? I think I've written both! I do tend towards dialogue-heavy fics because my academic training is in scriptwriting, but honestly I enjoy the challenge of no-dialogue stories more.

37. Promote one of your own “deep cut” fics (an underrated one, or one that never got as much traction as you think it deserves!). What do you like about it? It's not so much that I expected a lot of folk to read the oneshot Graveyard Shift from a few years ago as that I am continually baffled and saddened by how goddamn hard it is to find anyone else on the internet who's ever read Christopher Brookmyre's books. Like the bulk of the man's work is very funny, politically incisive crime fiction but he's also done a couple of sci-fi books, one of which was about a guy finding his mind transplanted into an old video game in what winds up being a fantastic execution of a very silly concept. He had one book about Scottish teenagers on a school trip winding up fighting demons and more than a few of them are relying on their experiences playing custom Doom maps to hold it together. He's got a spy fiction novel about a grandmother becoming a superspy to rescue her son. He's doing a Victorian murder-mystery series with his wife. I have never seen another male writer consistently write female protagonists and characters this well across decades of work. Most of his romantic leads canonically eat pussy. This has wound up me talking about Christopher Brookmyre being underrated instead of me but dammit, he is!

38. Did any of your fics get surprisingly popular (whatever that means to you)? Which ones? Why do you think they were so successful? I was almost overwhelmed by the response to What Little Monsters Are Made Of because I'd never written a super-popular fic before, but that's what I get for writing that fic when Undertale was one of the hottest fandoms on the planet! I think we all felt sad about Flowey and I managed to hit on a piece of game lore that fit perfectly and gotcha right in the feels, so that's why it worked. I am also continually pleasantly surprised by how much people like Not All Who Wander Are Lost; I wrote it because I thought I was the only one obsessed with siblings raising each other and the concept of all four Todoroki siblings running away together, and I couldn't find that fic anywhere so I just wrote it for myself, and it turned out a lot of other folk wanted it to!

“Hi,” Leah said, waving. “You’re that kelpie, aren’t you? Do you have a name?” “Of course,” the kelpie said. “I am…” The water rippled and splashed. “That is my name,” the kelpie said helpfully. “I’m not sure I can pronounce that,” Leah admitted. “You cannot,” the kelpie confirmed. “No more than you could pronounce my mother’s true name. But you give my mother a name of your own, that you can address Her, and I would be glad if you would do the same for me.” “Hmmm…” Given complete freedom to choose a name, Leah’s mind, of course, went completely blank. Water, water, I feel like it should be a name to do with water, ummm… “Pedro said their captain on their last ship is called Miranda,” Leah said. “Would the name Miranda be alright?” “Very well,” the kelpie agreed. “Which is Pedro? The smoky one or the saltwater one?” “Saltwater,” Leah said, grateful that the kelpie had gone for descriptors she could somewhat understand. She’d once heard a river-kelpie ask after a “rippling” human that they’d known, and nobody could figure out what on earth that meant. “We’ve met before, but it feels polite to introduce myself properly, so: I’m Leah MacRita. It’s very nice to meet you, Miranda.” She held out a hand, and Miranda formed a hand out of water to shake, though they formed the hand out of where a mouth would be on a human face. Leah shook anyway, because it’d be rude not to.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Susan McCloud & Tiffany McCloud Characters: Susan McCloud, Tiffany McCloud Additional Tags: Grief, Mourning, Depression housekeeping, supernatural legal issues, something that is not animal abuse but is adjacent to it, entitlement Series: Part 5 of The Family Business Summary:

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Susan McCloud, Grant McCade Additional Tags: Honestly the T rating is just for language, they're functionally Glaswegian workies after all, Urban Fantasy, Supernatural Creatures, Mourning, Grief, slight drug mention, Again, they're workies Series: Part 3 of The Family Business Summary:

She's not taking up the family business. One and done, that was it.

But.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Original Characters Additional Tags: Animalistic mermaids, Gore, supernatural animal death Series: Part 2 of The Family Business Summary:

Sometimes, a new pet just chooses you.

This is a thing I wrote years and years ago based on a contest prompt, but I really liked Madame and W(his name has changed in literally everything I've ever written about these people) and so I kept poking around and writing little supernatural creature concepts with them. They actually predate Susan and Tiffany by a few years, but they felt like more fun as weird recurring characters rather than people who could emotionally lead a story, hence becoming people who exist in the same world as The Family Business rather than the leads.