It would probably just be the scene in which Neal breaks into the Burkes' house and gets an OMGWTFDRAGON to the face and all the fallout from that, because, erm, context is for the weak? ...mostly it's because the stuff I write out in braintics for my own amusement is generally just the high notes and the stuff I find shiny, with even less attention paid to creating a viable story.
But I do have circa 7,200 words of it written out, complete with Neal having knowledge I can't actually justify him having about shrikes and larders. (Maybe Mozzie went on a ramble about it sometime?)
...7,200 words and it's also incomplete, go figure, because my brain doesn't operate at lengths under 4k. ...I was, at one point, going to post a long thinky-thoughts ramble about why I find angst enjoyable and whether in fact "enjoyable" was the correct word, and my odd preconception with brainticcing out characters who are passively suicidal, but then I realized that I didn't actually know what I could say on the topic, so I didn't.
[though the squee/ "shiny!" element exists in a lot of original fic too -- it's not usually at the forefront, though]
*nods* I think there's a kind of slant parallel with the "why do I care?" aspect of original fic. This is something that comes up now and again in the slush that I read: I'll come across a competent story, the prose is there, the mechanics and the arc are in place... but I don't care. I didn't feel like I had a reason to read the story.
In fanfic, a good chunk of the "why do I care" is built-in: you care because you already have an emotional investment with these characters and/or this world. Granted, that's usually not the only criteria; most of the people I know don't want to read every single story in a fandom. It's usually "I cate about this world/these characters, plus the genre of the fic and the basic predicament promised in the summary, possibly also plus I care about this author's stuff." It's not "I like White Collar fic!" so much as "I want a White Collar fix in the form of some gen Neal angst!" But the genres of fanfic – hurt/comfort, character study, episode fic, whatever – and the pre-existing engagement with the canon material gives you a really convenient framework to hook people with. And it's the sort of thing that only really works when you have a canon to riff off.
In original fic, you can't just deliver squee. You also have to construct the subject matter people will squee about, and that construction is a whole 'nother skillset.
...and I just realized that "a whole 'nother" is a kind of emphatic infixation and that is SO COOL I LOVE LANGUAGE
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2014-03-10 07:29 am (UTC)It would probably just be the scene in which Neal breaks into the Burkes' house and gets an OMGWTFDRAGON to the face and all the fallout from that, because, erm, context is for the weak? ...mostly it's because the stuff I write out in braintics for my own amusement is generally just the high notes and the stuff I find shiny, with even less attention paid to creating a viable story.
But I do have circa 7,200 words of it written out, complete with Neal having knowledge I can't actually justify him having about shrikes and larders. (Maybe Mozzie went on a ramble about it sometime?)
...7,200 words and it's also incomplete, go figure, because my brain doesn't operate at lengths under 4k. ...I was, at one point, going to post a long thinky-thoughts ramble about why I find angst enjoyable and whether in fact "enjoyable" was the correct word, and my odd preconception with brainticcing out characters who are passively suicidal, but then I realized that I didn't actually know what I could say on the topic, so I didn't.
[though the squee/ "shiny!" element exists in a lot of original fic too -- it's not usually at the forefront, though]
*nods* I think there's a kind of slant parallel with the "why do I care?" aspect of original fic. This is something that comes up now and again in the slush that I read: I'll come across a competent story, the prose is there, the mechanics and the arc are in place... but I don't care. I didn't feel like I had a reason to read the story.
In fanfic, a good chunk of the "why do I care" is built-in: you care because you already have an emotional investment with these characters and/or this world. Granted, that's usually not the only criteria; most of the people I know don't want to read every single story in a fandom. It's usually "I cate about this world/these characters, plus the genre of the fic and the basic predicament promised in the summary, possibly also plus I care about this author's stuff." It's not "I like White Collar fic!" so much as "I want a White Collar fix in the form of some gen Neal angst!" But the genres of fanfic – hurt/comfort, character study, episode fic, whatever – and the pre-existing engagement with the canon material gives you a really convenient framework to hook people with. And it's the sort of thing that only really works when you have a canon to riff off.
In original fic, you can't just deliver squee. You also have to construct the subject matter people will squee about, and that construction is a whole 'nother skillset.
...and I just realized that "a whole 'nother" is a kind of emphatic infixation and that is SO COOL I LOVE LANGUAGE