30 Days of Fan Fiction Meme, Day 17

17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?

I'm okay with titles. Sometimes I strike on one I really like... um... "The Madder, Better World" for my Please Save My Earth fic, which is a Doctor Who allusion and just came to me and captured what I wanted to illustrate. Sometimes I get really stuck for a title, and it's usually a sign that I don't know what my story is about yet. Usually, I come up with something that's fairly descriptive, either literally ("Kagetora and the Women") or metaphorically ("Exorcising the Demon," i.e. in Naoe's neurotic head).

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X-Men Fic: Erik & Charles, Angst, Gen

Title: "Blemish"
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Characters: Erik & Charles (gen)
Rating/Warnings: R for Holocaust.
Word Count: ~1000
Summary: In the midst of a pleasant evening, Charles says the wrong thing.
A/N: This fic is an attempt to explain what seems to my eye a casting discontinuity in XMFC (but perhaps my eye is deceiving me). The Nazi bits (minus mutants) are based on historical information, which makes me feel rather ill.

( Blemish )

30 Days of Fan Fiction Meme, Day 18

18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?

This is what bites me in original fiction and why I'm probably more a fan fic writer at heart. I get inspiration from pre-existing characters and situations, almost always as a result of thinking about the characters' motivation, personality, background, future, about explanations for inexplicable behavior, etc. As I think more deeply, the filler/fanon I come up with forms itself into narrative. Thus, for example, I wrote a Mirage series about Kagetora's sexual relationships with women because this is something that exists in canon (historically, he was married twice), but as far as I've read, it's not much dealt with, and this leaves a gap for considering how his background, personality, neuroses, etc. would play out in these relations.

Occasionally I'm prompted toward AU to "fix" things, as in Blake's 7's PGP genre (of which I've actually only written one). Banana Fish demanded similar treatment; I just couldn't take it! For different reasons, Please Save My Earth was the same: I'd loved that story, and I just couldn't handle where it ended up.

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