HLH Shortcuts Fic reveal!
Jan. 5th, 2025 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annavereShortcuts has concluded and it was an amazing feast. The perfect end to one year and start to another. I even managed to comment on all but four stories before reveals, despite a rocky real world week.
I wrote Guests for the Weekend for Coralysendria. I was apparently not hard to guess, which is fair. Like last year, it ended up being a somewhat comic adventure heavily featuring Amanda, and this time it became my first Highlander story to go beyond the timeline of the show.
Faced with an excellent set of prompts, I instantly combined two of them: Murder mystery weekend gone wrong, and Amanda and Anne (with Richie) hanging out. However, I ran into problems as soon as I had to answer the question: how does a mystery weekend go wrong? I wanted to keep it as light as possible, so no actual murders or cops could be involved, and there was a request for a heist, so somewhere in my whirl of ideas, I landed on the notion that maybe Amanda could preempt a heist by stealing the object herself, which sounded appropriately amusing in theory.
However, I am not terribly good with designing heists and everything I came up with was a mess of plot holes. Finally I realized since I was writing quite amateur crooks, I should just lean into that and make it a completely petty theft (and since Amanda started instantly grousing about being dragged in on such an unworthy plot, the dialogue shaped up fairly quickly and there was no turning back).
For the question of when precisely this adventure was to take place, I used Mary's age as a yardstick. I wanted to avoid excessive "and here we are" recapping, but if she was too young, then it would be hard to justify her absence from the frame scenes (and no way in hell was I going to try and write a cute kid on a time limit), so I went with eight, which was the youngest I felt she could be promptly shipped off to a sleepover without overmuch fretting from Anne. This put the story in 2003 by happenstance.
Things went smoothly until the mystery portion was almost complete. Then I started to worry that it felt too slight even for what I intended as a light-hearted adventure, so I started trying to find deeper emotional throughlines for the characters. Richie I already had, with his desire to remain his original self. Anne I decided would be the natural advocate for mortal concerns and I dug deep looking for echoes of her life with Duncan. Amanda, of course, didn't care a jot about anything happening around her, and I couldn't make her.
So I had the whole thing nominally complete when I realized that I could actually make use of my random '03 setting, and fold in my pet theory that the Gathering is the Immortal equivalent of the End Times and throughout history, there have been periodic beliefs that the Gathering is at hand (when it isn't). Of course various paranoid or power-hungry Immortals would leap at the millennium. That gave Amanda something to care about and appreciate - at which point all the building blocks were finally in place and I could proceed.
I really love the challenge of writing for Shortcuts. It pushes me to be decisive and to try stuff I never would on my own. Tackling Richie was especially petrifying, because I knew there were bound to be some amazing Richie stories in the collection (and there were!).
And just like that, I'm already looking forward to next year.
I wrote Guests for the Weekend for Coralysendria. I was apparently not hard to guess, which is fair. Like last year, it ended up being a somewhat comic adventure heavily featuring Amanda, and this time it became my first Highlander story to go beyond the timeline of the show.
Faced with an excellent set of prompts, I instantly combined two of them: Murder mystery weekend gone wrong, and Amanda and Anne (with Richie) hanging out. However, I ran into problems as soon as I had to answer the question: how does a mystery weekend go wrong? I wanted to keep it as light as possible, so no actual murders or cops could be involved, and there was a request for a heist, so somewhere in my whirl of ideas, I landed on the notion that maybe Amanda could preempt a heist by stealing the object herself, which sounded appropriately amusing in theory.
However, I am not terribly good with designing heists and everything I came up with was a mess of plot holes. Finally I realized since I was writing quite amateur crooks, I should just lean into that and make it a completely petty theft (and since Amanda started instantly grousing about being dragged in on such an unworthy plot, the dialogue shaped up fairly quickly and there was no turning back).
For the question of when precisely this adventure was to take place, I used Mary's age as a yardstick. I wanted to avoid excessive "and here we are" recapping, but if she was too young, then it would be hard to justify her absence from the frame scenes (and no way in hell was I going to try and write a cute kid on a time limit), so I went with eight, which was the youngest I felt she could be promptly shipped off to a sleepover without overmuch fretting from Anne. This put the story in 2003 by happenstance.
Things went smoothly until the mystery portion was almost complete. Then I started to worry that it felt too slight even for what I intended as a light-hearted adventure, so I started trying to find deeper emotional throughlines for the characters. Richie I already had, with his desire to remain his original self. Anne I decided would be the natural advocate for mortal concerns and I dug deep looking for echoes of her life with Duncan. Amanda, of course, didn't care a jot about anything happening around her, and I couldn't make her.
So I had the whole thing nominally complete when I realized that I could actually make use of my random '03 setting, and fold in my pet theory that the Gathering is the Immortal equivalent of the End Times and throughout history, there have been periodic beliefs that the Gathering is at hand (when it isn't). Of course various paranoid or power-hungry Immortals would leap at the millennium. That gave Amanda something to care about and appreciate - at which point all the building blocks were finally in place and I could proceed.
I really love the challenge of writing for Shortcuts. It pushes me to be decisive and to try stuff I never would on my own. Tackling Richie was especially petrifying, because I knew there were bound to be some amazing Richie stories in the collection (and there were!).
And just like that, I'm already looking forward to next year.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-08 06:46 pm (UTC)And also I'm still trying to finish my book - I mean, comment - on part to of your so-delightful Teen Wolf fic! Thank goodness for the floating comment box.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-08 10:06 pm (UTC)You are too kind. And here I am, putting finishing touches on chapter three in the next day or so... :)