Nym

After so many "someone stole my work again" fiascos, it took actual paid-for therapy to get me to the point of - still with reservations - posting the more notorious of these old fanfics back into the wild. If my therapist can now get me to the point of being happy throwing away the reams of 40-year-old notebook scribbles I'm still stuffing into my limited storage space, that would be awesome.

We have some Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Petshop of Horrors, and Once Upon a Time fanfic, plus some VR.5 fanzine art from ye olden days. I'll update this post as I add others.

As WorstWitch aka WWitch

Passage - Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Rated Mature - Buffy/Giles, underage, magic-made-them-do-it/fuck-or-die trope fic from 1997. The original, the only, the first ever fanfic for the pairing. Hence, notorious. Also the first piece of mine that got stolen and reposted - in this case to a gen-rated forum with a big flamethrower and my e-mail address. Hello, therapy.

From the Heart - Hercules: The Legendary Journeys - Rated Explicit - Hercules/Iolaus. A loving, gently angsty PWP with very light bondage.

Alone - Hercules: The Legendary Journeys - Rated Gen - Iolaus mourns his family but takes comfort from Herc's.

Because they were written in the 1990's, I've also reassigned my H:tLJ stories Hero Worship and Walking the Mile to the WWitch account.


As Nym

Beautiful Stranger - Doctor Who with a hint of Torchwood - Rated Gen - character study of Mel written about 2006, drawing on her Big Finish Audio portrayal more than the TV show, which gave the character very little room to develop. Bonnie Langford kicks arse as a voice artist, and of course had a tiny cameo in the most recent Thirteenth Doctor finale. If you haven't heard her opposite Michael Jayston's Valeyard in Unbound: He Jests at Scars, I highly recommend it.

Trouble - Doctor Who - Captain Jack without smut. (He does have a giant WW2 bomb between his legs, though.) Character study from the episodes The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances where Jack meets the Doctor and Rose. Circa 2008.

Angles - Once Upon a Time - Rated Gen - character study of Belle, David and others, with a 'fix it' for that time amnesiac!Belle got left in hospital being drugged in S2. I guess it's a Belle/Rumple bystander-POV piece, even though the evil mastermind himself is out of town. From 2013.

Kisses Speak - Once Upon a Time - Rated Mature - Belle/Rumple

In Sickness and in Health - Once Upon a Time - Rated Mature - Belle/Rumple

Timestamp Ficlet: Beauty - Pet Shop of Horrors - Rated Gen - short prequel to my adult-rated story, Beauty, written for a timestamp prompt meme. We look in on Count D and Leon ten years before their reunion in that piece. Circa 2009?


Never (6 drabbles) - Star Wars prequels/Jedi Apprentice - Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi, unrequited.

Timestamp Ficlet: Shattered - Harry Potter - Harry/Snape

Patience - Harry Potter - Harry/Snape

First Day - Harry Potter - Rated Gen - character study of Snape with Hagrid after his first day teaching. Circa 2003?

Just Let It Be - Harry Potter - Remus Lupin/Sirius Black

The Sins of Omission series - Harry Potter - rated from gen to explicit - Harry/Snape. One of the notorious ones. I'm always being asked for copies of this, and have duly sent parts 1-4 out by e-mail on request, but now I have a volunteer to fix the corrupted files on the longer pieces for me so they can go on AO3 properly. All praise to the volunteer, please! Written between about 2002 and 2005.


Work in Progress: In the Blood - Stargate Atlantis - Sheppard/McKay - from 2008-2011. (Y'know, I can literally see the dates when the welfare people added more "help" to my package in the history of my longer WIPs hitting the wall as my health tanked even further under the strain of complying).

 And then you blink and it's been over six months since you blogged. Blimey!

I've been rediscovering what it's like to have a Real Life, without the welfare state breathing down my neck and setting artificial ticky-box goals for me. I'm just now getting to the stage where doing things at my own pace is no longer a novelty, and where I'm not looking nervously over my shoulder and waiting for the next crushing shoe to drop.

The mastectomy has all healed up beautifully. I haven't looked back, and I've only donned a pair of falsies once, to wear formal dress to a neighbour's funeral. I'm so comfy without boobs that I don't even think about it until someone else notices I don't have any! My decision to grow out my previously short and spiky hair may not be unrelated. I felt kinda genderless with the flat chest and the pixie cut, plus, with one major discomfort gone, I have the mental breathing space to try out another. In the past, long hair gave me migraines. Since then, I've been properly medicated, and a genius has invented the Invisibobble. I'm at the haystack stage, but my decision paid off during Lockdown 2020 when nobody could get their hair cut.

There was no catastrophic Covid outbreak in my little area of England. More cases than should've been allowed to happen, but we never reached the overflowing hospital and backlogged crematorium stage of the disaster. Lockdown makes surprisingly little difference to my lifestyle, but it did affect my diet - with restricted shopping options, I made bad, bad food choices. For three months. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the arse, right? I can hardly fit in the armchair.

Fandom-wise, I'm still Once Upon a Time and Doctor Who. The most recent couple of seasons of each are just about finished percolating into my fanfic-brain. The rewrite of A Bed of Thorns has been rewritten half to death as I fix the bits that bother me, while drawing on the canon that came along after I wrote the first version.  Belle made a lot more sense to me by the end of season 6 than she did at the end of season 1 when much of the story was written. I filled in a lot of blanks with her and was a bit 'meh' about some of my innovations. I 'get' characters like Rumple - tormented with largely self-inflicted pain, trapped in their own web of fail. I can reach deep and find plenty of fail of my own to draw on when fleshing them out and filling in any gaps that a TV show leaves. Perky hero-types like Skin-Deep Belle, on the other hand, are a fascinating but total mystery to me when it comes to their motivation and decision-making. I'm a lot more comfortable with the idea that she's a reckless, well-intentioned-but dangerous hero-wannabe who holds herself and others to an impossible standard because of how she interprets her mother's death. And because of a book that frames her whole way of seeing the world. She always tries her best, and goes on doing it even after a massive fail. That I get.

I hope everyone's kept safe from the virus and has someone to look out for them. Take care out there.

Pencil and paper is way faster. Not all that much of a technical learning curve when you use a 4B and a sheet of A4. Photoshop doesn't get any easier with each 'improvement', and I couldn't get my head around Illustrator/vector at all. Couldn't even persuade it to let me make a mark on a document to create a simple square. Hey ho. Looks like I can, if I so desire, still slavishly copy the light bits and the dark bits from a head and shoulders photo, and get a likeness. I can do hands, too, for some reason, but not the bits in between.( Behind the cut )

Like playing with my fannish Sims, it's a great way to unhook my conscious brain and let it make fanfic while I'm focused 100% on a character. So there's that for taking 20x as long doing it on the Surface vs doing it on paper. Also, layers. I could get to like doing each stage in separate layers, once I figure out how to stop them trashing each other's opacity. Deleting half an hour's worth of mistakes without using an eraser or putting the bits I got right in danger... yep, I could get to like that.

Also, Emilie de Ravin is bloody gorgeous. I never really thought about it before, but then I never spent hours staring at her face before, or separating her eyes into their component light and shade.

I might have a go at finishing this tomorrow. It wasn't meant to be so wishy-washy (that opacity thing). The layer filling in her hair and the deeper shadow is misbehaving in ways I don't understand!

Working with Hemingway is like getting a school report every few hours. I don't share its aversion to adverbs, not in prose, but it turns out I use surprisingly few. Huh.

I intentionally wrote a lot of passive voice and archaic/purple-prose language into A Bed of Thorns. I had this whole idea about Belle's narrative voice changing throughout the piece as she came down off her bookish cloud, stopped acting like she was living a fairytale, and started dealing with real life. The language would get tighter and tighter as the story built towards its climax.  That idea totally bombed, didn't fit with the pacing that evolved nor with Belle's stubbornly-sensible mindset, so now I have to weed it all out and make her voice consistent throughout. Hemingway is going to make that job a lot easier. But I also need to make Belle a bit less stubbornly sensible. Her canon self is... prone to blind leaps of faith. She buys into the hero thing and believes in just desserts. ABoT!Belle asks herself too many of (what I consider to be) the right questions. She needs to be less cautious, more reckless. ( Hemingway stats screenshot behind the cut )

How do you reconcile Belle's canon line "No one decides my fate but me" with the overwhelming sense of duty that's in her character? She HAS to save her people, she doesn't give herself a choice about that. True, none of the men she's talking to can decide what she does, but wasn't her fate sealed as soon as the ogres started attacking?
~ Tumblr user kelyon

Having previously resigned herself to marry Gaston, stay at home, and not have the adventures she craves, Belle obviously doesn’t apply that fierce sense of independence to every decision in her life. I saw that line as burning her bridges with her old life - it’s almost hurling an accusation towards them, and it’s definitely a rejection of the role they want and expect her to fill in life. Later in the ep [Skin Deep], she speaks of self-sacrifice, of the hopes she’s given up to keep her bargain with Rumple, but without any bitterness. She’s content because it was her own choice. From that, I concluded that, whatever the bargain Rumple offered her, she’d do her honest best to fulfill her new role. She happens to think of that as a duty, but that’s more a case of her groping for a frame of reference than anything else. I plopped her into a society that’s much more overtly patriarchal than the one that emerged over the run of the show, and made assumptions about her behaviour and upbringing based on that broad outline for the society that raised her. ABoT!Belle has her sense of place as a woman muddled with a much stronger sense of the obligations of the ruling class towards the ruled, the strong towards the weak, the haves towards the have-nots.

Which doesn’t mean that she’s bought into the misogyny on a personal level - just that she lacks experience of living (and mentally describing) the alternative. She doesn’t share the same sense of her place in the world as the listeners (her dad, Gaston, and also, and I think importantly to Belle, Rumple) when she says that line. They’re trying to define for her what constitutes an unacceptable level of personal sacrifice for a woman, with the undertone that going with Rumple is worse than death because Belle’s virtue is at stake (a theme picked up by Regina at the end of the ep when she lies to Rumple about Belle’s fate). For Belle, marrying Gaston was already a personal sacrifice likely to involve sleeping with a man she doesn’t love, so she doesn’t share the mens’ moral outrage at the idea of her going off with a male “beast”. At her choosing that for herself. I didn’t read her choice as entirely selfless - I felt she was glad to get away, grabbing the first opportunity for adventure, for a different sort of life, that ever came her way. Having gone with Rumple, in Skin Deep, Belle cheerfully got on with being his put-upon housemaid to the best of her ability - that was her duty now, because she’d made a solemn bargain and isn’t the sort of person to break one.

We didn’t get any nuances to the situation until subsequent episodes - the weeping and her resentment of the way Rumple treats her in Lacey, her defiance of her father in Family Business and Her Handsome Hero, or Gideon’s later assertion that Belle was terrified the entire time she was at the Dark Castle [The Savior]. I’m still not sure what to do with the latter - it would mean that Belle had to put on almost as much of a mask as Rumple does, the whole time, which I can’t retcon into Skin Deep, in my own mind. She seemed very frank and hopeful, to me. She went willingly and wanted the adventure for herself - but motivated by a sense of duty towards others, a need to prove herself (if only to herself), and the honest intention to do her new job to the best of her ability. I changed the “job” on offer rather than changing my interpretation of her motives for going with Rumple, but the show’s eventual explanation of those motives turned out to be much more simplistic (along with most of the emotional reasoning behind the characters’ decisions). I’d do it differently if I started the same story today; I’d give her the mental vocabulary of independence and a wide-ranging education alongside the profound influence of her mother’s sacrifice, and incorporate the simplistic, show-definition of “heroism” into her thinking, and treat her decision to go with Rumple as typical of her reckless streak.

Belle does a lot of mental gymnastics, in ABoT, to reconcile herself with her decision, and to argue down her fears of the unknown. Holding down a maid job is less fraught with uncertainty and unfamiliarity than being a stranger’s spouse, when said stranger offers no clues. She was prepared for just about anything except Rumple’s vague, “do whatever you feel like, it’s nothing to do with me”. She finds herself in a situation where nobody has expectations of her, and where she has considerable power over others - and she struggles with that because it’s new. She has guilt about the people she left behind, even though her “sacrifice” has saved them - she still feels a sense of duty and obligation towards her father and her people, which she projects way too hard onto Odstone, in ABoT.

What she tells the reader isn’t always the objective truth, not least because she lacks a frame of reference much different to the one suited to a noblewoman marrying a nobleman and making his heirs in a castle somewhere, subordinate to the men around her. Her upbringing assumed that was all she’d need. She’s doing the best she can with the words and concepts in her possession. Her actions in ABoT belie her words, though. I don’t think for one moment that she’d have taken it passively if Rumple had been an unreasonable husband, or that she’d worry about learning how to be a housewife if she wasn’t so desperate to keep herself busy.