Fan Fic Focus

I had to rewrite this one because I lost the original, so it has taken me a while, but I'm getting there. This is a project that I started before Dragonheart 3 came out. Now that we're about to have a #4, and since I'm here and can share it, I'm going to start remaking my series. I know very few are familiar with the fandom, but give it a chance, especially if you love Dragons. The dragon this stuff is based off of is considered one of the top movie dragons of all time. :)


Title: Rose Among Thorns, Part 1 (PG)
Fandom: Dragonheart (noncanon)
Pairing: None
Timeframe: Taking place before the time of Drago. If you want years, the first movie takes place in the tenth century, the latter movies take place a few hundred years before that. I have no idea where my story fits numerically in all of this, but that's the general era you're aiming for, I suppose.
Content Warning: Contains non-sexual physical and verbal mistreatment consistent with forms of servitude.

Background for those unfamiliar with Dragonheart: The dragons of this fandom are peaceful. They are the ones who taught humans what they know of the world and for a long time lived beside humans (especially the Celts) in peace and understanding. Dragons come from the stars in the same since that religious people believe they exist because of God's will. They look to the constellation Draco as their heaven, where all dragons go after death, /if/ they have earned the right. In the more recent movies (3 and 4) this has been taken a little too literally for my taste, Drago /came/ from the stars. Not certain if this was the intended purpose of the original concept or not, Raffaella De Laurentiis is producer of all 4 movies, so I assume this was her idea from the start. These dragons fly because they are made of cosmic light. It is possible for them to open their chest, split their heart and share it with a human. Once that is done the human is bonded to the dragon for the life of the dragon, meaning that in order for the human to die, the dragon must die. They also share each others pains. Dragons in the first two movies, Dragonheart and A New Beginning, do /not/ require heart sharing in order to communicate, they talk, laugh, and show emotion just as a human would, all on their own. Drago is different, he is the focus of the most recent movies, The Sorcerer's Curse and Battle for the Heartfire, he requires heart bonding in order to talk in the human tongue the bond is also different, a little more psychic and magical as it grows. This is not true in Draco's time. There are inconsistencies between the first two movies and any others following the series. It is important to note that I write dragons as they began in the movie sequence, with Draco and Drake, not as telepathic beasts who are literally extra terrestrials, like Drago. (For those of you interested in actors: Sean Connery was the voice of Draco, Ben Kingsly was the original voice of Drago and Patrick Stewart will take over the role for the newest movie.)

For those wanting visual reference, there are no images of any of my characters, but you can get an idea from these:
Drago
Draco model
Draco and Bowen
Draco as a stone
Drake – a young dragon
Grifffin – a dragon from the Orient

Disclaimer: This stuff just floats around in my head. I don't have anything to do with the franchise and I'm just having fun here. I earn nothing other than the smiles of fans for doing this work.

The chill in the air did nothing to cool the heat that burned Róisín's cheek as she tore through the forest on wings of fear. Though she dodged as many trees as she could, there were a few whose long fingers reached out to cling to her dress. The fabric caught over and over again on the sharp sticks, ripping angrily before it was freed by the force of her run. She could hear shouts of rage flashing through the forest like lightning and all she wanted in this moment was to outrun the bolts before they hit her again. Dresses could be mended easier than arms or legs and if she stopped now, it was surely one of the latter that would take the most damage.

Twilight was at hand and the woods gradually darkened as she charged blindly ahead. There were many dangers in the forest, but Róisín had never thought much of them. Fear of being eaten by some wild animal was nothing compared to what she faced in her daily life, slaving away in the town market for the two adults who claimed to be family. There was not a soul among the people in the village that believed their claims to her were true, but no one had bothered to stand for her in her troubles, and so she had remained with the cruel couple who were keeping her as their slave.

Exhaustion began to drag her down, pulling her heart in all directions as fire burned in her empty lungs. If she didn't find a place to hide soon she would certainly drop where she stood. Somewhere in these woods was rumored to be an underground cave, filled with riches and treasure. There had always been tales told of this magical place where all of the wealth of the village had been kept, but no one had ever found it and many who went looking had never returned. She did not care about wealth, but a place to curl up and catch her breath without being discovered would be a welcome happenstance.

Suddenly her foot caught on a log and she tumbled to the ground, arms and legs flailing to try and break her fall. Her body rolled in the leafy debris among roots, stopping just short of the muddy part of a stream. Róisín looked up from where she had fallen and was struck with even more panic than before. She had, quite literally, stumbled upon a clearing. Certainly here in this open space she would be discovered without any trouble at all.

( Continue... )

After I swore I wasn't going to put Once stuff up... I have this amazing dream. :p

Title: The Message (PG)
Fandom: Once Upon a Time
Canon
Pairing: Not really, but it's the Gold Family, including Baelfire
Timeframe: Taking place after Gideon returns to Rumple and Belle, after he has settled in... There will be an episode for this, I'm sure. The shop has been renamed Gold & Son. We know it's coming, just hasn't aired yet. :)
No Content Warning

Background for those unfamiliar with OUAT: Belle and Rumple are Beauty and the Beast. Rumple's first son, Baelfire is from his previous marriage, hundreds of years ago. Yes, he's immortal. He was consumed by a dark power and is now known as The Dark One. He and Belle married, but had Gideon in a time in their relationship where they were going through some stuff. Both Baelfire and Gideon were lost to Rumple when they were children. Baelfire vanished into a portal to our world when he was a young boy, Gideon was stolen from his Fairy Godmother when he was only a few hours old. Both grew up without their father or mother around. It's way, way more complicated than that, but them's the basics.

For those wanting visual references:
Belle, Rumple, Gideon
Belle, Rumple, Baelfire
Inside Gold & Son Antiques
(It's a lot lighter on set than in the show, BTW.)

Disclaimer: This stuff just floats around in my head. I don't have anything to do with the franchise and I'm just having fun here. I earn nothing other than the smiles of fans for doing this work.

* * *

It had been a dull afternoon in the shop and Gideon found himself pacing among the displays and shelves with little to do other than contemplate this unfamiliar world. Storybrooke was the town that he was born in, yet of everyone that lived here he was the most foreign citizen of all. Of course no one /really/ belonged here, the town had been created by his father and the Evil Queen as part of a curse on their realm. All the people here had been plucked up from whatever they were doing and plopped down into the middle of the woods, surrounded by a town that had never before existed and memories that weren't their own.

The only person that Gideon had found so far who had gone through this awkward transition from other realm to this spot on Earth was Killian, the pirate most people called Hook. It wasn't necessarily something he had been told, but something he had observed. There was a restlessness that came with not completely knowing a place and Gideon had recognized it in the other man because he felt it strongly in himself. Would the honk of a horseless carriage or the music from a small box ever seem normal to someone who had never experienced disembodied sounds beyond what was allowed by magic? How had his father managed to put his voice onto a hard object filled with flimsy ribbon and allow his mother to listen to it repeatedly, if not with some spell? The pirate had lived here for years, Gideon held out little hope of adjusting as quickly as his parents hoped that he would.

To calm himself from these frustrations, he had begun studying what he could in his father's pawn shop. The place was filled with items from both this world and realms he knew. It felt childish, but Gideon had almost created a game from his observances, trying to guess the purpose of certain things or the place that they could have come from. A vase was a vase in any realm, but did this particular clay item with the dragon design come from his father's collection in the Dark Castle, or was it from this very town, created out of thin air and completely meaningless? Typically he could recognize magical things, but something as mundane as a hairbrush was anyone's guess. His father had several of those in the case to the right of the door and Gideon was certain that while they didn't all contain magic, they were used for it. The best at magic can do a lot with a single strand of hair.

Gideon leaned closer to peer at something on a shelf against the wall. The bronze of it shone in the dim light, though there wasn't anything magical about it. He lifted a tiny, infant-sized shoe and frowned. Was this part of a set? Where was the other one? Why had they been bronzed? “Father keeps everything,” he mumbled to himself as he placed the object back where he found it.

( Continue... )

Been popping in for a week or so and haven't seen much happening. Are we at a point where we invite folks, throw up some prompts, slap a fanfiction down, or start a discussion?

I guess as far as the prompts go, an important thing to find out is exactly how interested people are in typing words onto the screen AND how capable they are of accomplishing that goal. I don't mean this in a "you must give us something by a deadline" or "put out 500 words a day or else" kind of thing, I just mean this:

I've got a shit ton of stuff festering from ages ago and a bunch of Once stuff that will probably get written because it won't leave me alone. (All loved characters come with a price!) Do I want to get this stuff down? Yes. Do I have TIME to get it down? Not always. This means I will be a very inactive writer when it comes to getting out longer fictions that haven't been prompted, simply because I don't have the time to devote the concentration to more than a scene or two a week. If provided with a suggestion/prompt/discussion, I can become more active because said challenge or conversation is only going to take a little bit of time in a day or week and may or may not be as critical of it as I would be to something that isn't an exercise in writing. I can also use the shorter, prompted stuff as a jumping board to scenes I am having trouble with in the bigger picture.

My question regarding all this is how other people define their ability to write/post and what I am pondering is how we go about doing it. I don't want to throw out prompts/suggestions/discussions that make people shout, "ENOUGH ALREADY!" :)

Questions I have pondered today while walking dogs include:

1)Are we going to have criteria for posting prompts?
1a) Is there a request for a certain frequency for prompts?
1b) Is there going to be a format for posting prompts, or do people prefer it to be more like a free for all? Meaning: If I walk past an awesome tree stump that inspires me and I take a picture, do people want/care to have that thrown up here as a "Look what I found, anyone want to write something about it?" kind of thing. Or are we going to plan out a specific time/place/type of prompt that will be used.
1c) What are the prompts that people around here most enjoy? Should we do word games (trying to fit certain words into the writing), image games (as mentioned above with the stump), writing exercises (stuff that's kind of fun and meant to just get the juices flowing and may or may not involve physical objects in your life like bubbles or stickers), or something else entirely?

2)Do we slap each actual fanfiction up here in its entirety as it's own post, or do we post a link to the site where the work is located?
2a) If we are only going to link each fiction, do we simply create one thread for all works under a certain fandom that explains the fandom to those who may not know it, then let new fics be posted as comments to that single post? That would certainly keep things organized, but it would probably eliminate the use of the series title tags, unless we tag things in discussions as well. I imagine it may also be difficult to follow new posts that way.

3)When someone needs an opinion on something that is NOT part of a fandom (or is maybe part of an incomplete work not ready to be posted), how do we go about organizing that? Example: Skippyjohnjones is having trouble wording a certain section of his next novel and desperately wants opinions from writers he trusts. He posts a few paragraphs asking for feedback. Does he just throw it up at random, or will there be a specific thread for it?
3a) How offended would people be if we included or didn't include this option as part of this writing journal?
3b) Does anyone other than myself find this a useful part of being among fellow writers?

I'm sure I had a lot of other stuff, but it has run away from me now. Make this a diving board and jump on in whenever you're ready.