FKFicFest thoughts

[brightknightie]

Did you see the fkficfest timeline and rules finally go up last weekend?

FKFicFest promos: I haven't yet posted our usual promos. (I've been slammed. Sorry!) I'm making the banner today, and will start rolling tomorrow (one per day, to as many appropriate DW communities as we know, plus ForKni-l). If you'd like to post about it on your own journals, or outside DW, or chat in communities, or alert me to more DW promo venues, or anything at all... yes, please!

FKFicFest wishes: I'm thinking of posting one (or maybe even two, if others post theirs between?) wishes on our fest wishing post. To reiterate, no matches this year, and no claiming, but for those who like best to fulfill requests, let's share some requests?

• "The girl or the cup." My favorite FK fanfic trope. Stories before/after/during Nick caught between a rock and a hard place, mortality and humanity, his own good and a greater good. In the metaphor where Nick is Everyman struggling to choose to store up in Heaven rather than on earth... In our first FKFicFest, 10 years ago, our co-mod surprised me by sharing this prompt with everyone playing, and everyone rained down an amazing shower of drabbles and ficlets! Yet never think the theme is exhausted. :-D


• Nick/Urs. This rare-pairing works for me. So few stories explore it. I love its potential for disrupting third season, for making that road turn early. Not only do Nick and Urs have commonalities as musicians and vampires who don't wish to kill (or so I interpret), there's also a specific dependency in each character that I like to imagine could, as a healthy interdependency, make them stronger. From Nick's side, for example, his tendency to put the women he loves on pedestals: among our recurring characters, only Urs seems to me set to positively benefit from and equally return in kind this bent of Nick's, subduing its detriments and opening to its benefits, to both their wonderment and growth. I feel that the characters have unique potential in each other.

FKFicFest brainstorming: It's been a very long time since I've played challenge-style! So I find that I'm inventorying my mental back-stock of long-intended, never-written stories, and also my own prompt slates from previous fests, looking for one that will click with the "10 years" (or "10" & "years") prompt. I've happily found at least 2 long-neglected FK ideas that I'm excited about, given permission now to write for my own enthusiasms rather than a match, but I haven't yet successfully found the prompt in them. I need some pencil-and-paper brainstorming to see what there may be!

How about you?

Comments

[nicholas_lucien]

I had thought about doing a particular type of story, but after starting I realized it will be much too big to do by the due date (my own fault for trying something so large), so now I am brainstorming something else for "ten years." Scraps of paper abound and will somehow come together into a story!

[brightknightie]

Yay! Good luck!

Story ideas too big for the time available are one of my besetting stumbles, too. I commiserate!

[greerwatson]

"I've happily found at least 2 long-neglected FK ideas that I'm excited about, [...] but I haven't yet successfully found the prompt in them."

Yes, indeed. This is a plaint I know all too well. I shall continue to delve deeper in seach of the missing prompt. It must be there somewhere.   ;)

(Meanwhile, I have to finish a story with a much, much closer deadline.)

[brightknightie]

Good luck with your closer deadline!

And good luck to us all, finding happy intersections of appealing FK ideas and the common prompt. :-)

[pj1228]

I must admit, I'm still as clueless as to how approach the prompt as I was 2 months ago when it was first proposed. I've played through several scenarios in my mind, but none wants to fit into this 10-year scheme (or the alternative). 5 years, yes, 20 years, yes, but 10 just doesn't ring a bell yet. Sigh...
I've started to rewatch all episodes a while ago. I'm on disc 5 of season 2 now, but still nothing!

[brightknightie]

Sorry! If we do challenge style again, we'll definitely elect the prompt as a community. (I was afraid that an election could make some people who felt they "lost" not want to play.)

Would it maybe help to re-package the prompt at all?

How about a novel, play, or movie titled Ten Years that has a role in the story? There was a movie a few years ago titled Ten Years a Slave, and one of the sequels to The Three Musketeers is properly titled Ten Years Later in French, although we generally call it The Vicomte of Bragelonne in English...

How about a business, fad, or fashion with "10 years" as a name, product, or slogan? A psychic, fortune-teller, or futurist who makes a prediction or revelation about something 10 years ahead or behind? A product that promises to make you look ten years younger, live ten years longer, or, colloquially, "take ten years off your life"?

The character Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer used to use the colloquialism "10 by 10" to mean "everything is fine." Ice skating and gymnastics use the phrase "perfect 10." "10" in decimal form is "1010" in binary form...

[pj1228]

>Sorry!<
No worries. Everybody else seems to be fine. It's just me.

Thanks for the re-package ideas. I've probably been trying too hard to squeeze the 10 years into canon, which started with the problem that Nick wasn't that long in Toronto due to the cancellation of the series. I guess I have to approach this differently and not so stricktly.

I think that movie was 12 years a slave, but I might be wrong. I've seen it.

On Monday I'll have a lot of time to think while waiting for trains and planes. I hope I'll have a breakthrough then.

[brightknightie]

You're correct about the movie title! I misremembered.

Good luck brainstorming on Monday!

For finding "10 years" in canon, perhaps it's a criminal who gets a prison sentence of that length (or is released after that long), or it's something that happens every 10 years and the 10th year coincidentally occurs during canon (like a decennial census, or a certain year in the Chinese zodiac, or a cicada outbreak), or it's something that's the best (or worst, biggest, smallest, coldest, hottest) in 10 years in Toronto or in the precinct, or perhaps something (a lease? a treaty?) expires after 10 years or is newly achieved to last 10 years...

I must admit that I don't have a compelling, prompt-related story idea of my own yet either, and I am very much hoping to build an idea this weekend. Sunday afternoon, I plan to sit quietly with a paper notebook and pen, and no electronics, until some idea arrives. :-)

[pj1228]

Thank you and good luck with your own idea-building efforts!