thispatternismine | 7 Days, 7 Stories

This week I've been busy. I signed up for the 7 Days 7 Stories challenge on

There was a lot of trial & error involved. My plan was to select a bunch of fanfic ideas sitting in my notes & work them into story outlines. How much of an outline I'd get would vary of course. A multi-chapter longfic or a oneshot with a lot going on would get a bulletpoint summary of the plot, while a shorter/simpler oneshot might get a very very rough 'insert cool stuff happening here later' draft.

Because I couldn't be sure which ideas would work out, I didn't select a week's worth of idea's in advance. There were a couple that were promising because I'd worked on them enough that they had taken up their own section in the notes app because they needed multiple pages to cover the planning, & a few that had individual notes pages because they'd come from Tumblr posts that had gone into some detail on suggestions for the prompt, & then there was a page of miscellaneous ideas. I just created a new section in my notes, copied a bunch of ideas pages over, then culled anything that was too vague (there were a bunch of 'ideas' that were basically intriguing Ao3 tags I'd found) or was more an idea for something that'd be cool to include within a larger fic. And that was my pool of ideas to work through.

Day 1

For the first day I'd planned to start with an idea that I felt most interested in, which I had written a prologue for, but it had been sitting in WIP purgatory for 6 years. A Devil May Cry 3 AU where Vergil finds out he has a son while Nero is still a baby, instead of when he was an adult as in canon. It'd be fairly short, with possibilities for both angst & humour so I could lean one way or the other, or mix them. It's been years since I last played the game so I knew I'd need to do that (& I recently got a Switch & bought the game for that, so a perfect excuse!), but I figured I could at least get a rough outline in place. Nope! The layout of the game's location is a headache, & knowing at which point characters make certain decisions & where that slots in with everything else. Trying to look over maps & walkthroughs & figure out who was where when, while considering how this might change in this AU... it would be simpler to play the game. Which would not be happening in a day, so... back on the pile it goes. I at least have some ideas of what directions I might take the story (pending working out the details) though, so at least some progress was made.

Plan B! A Scum Villain's Self-Saving System fic based on a oneshot I'd read & liked that I thought could be continued into an interesting AU, based around a different first meeting for MBJ & SQH. I'd previously worked on this, & realised that if I fudged the exact time it took place that would send the whole main canon story off-course. So there was a lot to work with & surely I could wrestle this into a story in no time, right? Nope! Looking over my ideas, I realised that the fic was a huge sprawling thing, & MBJ & SQH, who were meant to be the central characters, were pushed to the side. Okay, no problem, just drop all the distraction. No fudging the timeline. Keep it simple. Only when I looked at it like that, it wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped. Turned out the original oneshot had pretty much covered the interesting part. There would be some consequences stemming from that, but they weren't as interesting as I'd hoped, & didn't scratch any kind of itch in my brain.

Plan C! Another SVSSS fic, this one based on a Tumblr post about what if SQQ dies in the Water Prison, & the poster had come up with a few ways this could happen. Once again I thought this would be simple. Once again my hopes were foolish. The first option proposed in the post forgot some canon details (SQQ didn't just escape for the hell of it), & while I could handwave them if I put enough effort in, it essentially ended up the same as in canon, just without the escape plot happening. The second option involved Without-A-Cure, which has one way of fixing it, & I am not a smut writer. It's possible to do a 'how to fix WAC' reveal with a fade-to-black smut scene, but that wouldn't work in this case, as it would be a bit, well, anti-climactic.

Plan D! A very simple, kind of cracky SVSSS fic idea where SQH gets sick & MBJ handles his paperwork in the meantime (cue the rest of the sect getting very annoyed at their expenses requests being denied). Success! Finally managed to put together an outline for this one. It was a very short outline, since this is a crackfic where I only needed to establish the setup (what sort of illness SQH has, how MBJ ends up making the decision to help, etc), plus a few ideas for things that could happen, & the rest would just be me actually writing the thing & going 'wouldn't it be funny if...?' But still.

I expected to be doing a bunch of decluttering of fic ideas, but I hadn't thought this would happen on the first day, as I'd front-loaded the week with what I thought were the strongest ideas to get me started.

Day 2

The second day was much easier. I did end up discarding the first fic idea I tried, as it was one of those concepts that sounds really interesting but ultimately makes very little difference for the canon story & characters, so ends up going nowhere.

But the next one I had a lot of fun with, A MDZS time travel AU, but where the characters getting the do-over are all the Absolute Worst Characters. Sounds angsty, but they all think it's just them that time-travelled & they're all working at cross-purposes, so it's basically 'bite each others' dicks off: the fic'. I worked out an outline for it. More a rough summary of the plot, but I'm happy with it.

Day 3

Actually got an outline done really quickly! Basically a bulletpoint list of what happens in the story. I'd actually picked it out as an potential idea to work on the previous day, but was more passionate about the other idea, so went with that one first. I'd picked this out as it was a simple idea (SVSSS fic where SQQ gets badly injured in the Water Prison, resulting in the loss of a limb), but not so simple that I'd find there was nowhere to really take it when I actually tried to think about it. It's planned as a oneshot, but I could easily continue it if I wanted to look at the healing/rehab he'd need to get over the injury. It depends on how I feel as I'm writing it out for real & getting more detailed into how the characters react.

Day 4

Another easy day. I discarded a few ideas (honestly, while I'm happy at the outlines this challenge has pushed me to write, I'm even happier at how much I've 'decluttered' the fic ideas in my notes through being forced to actually think about them & realising they just would not work), & put together an outline for another SVSSS fic, this one with LBH returning home instead of choosing to infiltrate HHP. There's some details that I've left vague for now since I'll need to check the book's timeline to figure out the exact starting point of the fic though. Ah, the perils of writing a fic for a character who is not the main pov character in canon, set at a point where a bunch of stuff is going on with him! Should be a simple enough adjustment once I've pinned that down.

Day 5

Not only did I get an outline done, but I managed a little bonus story idea which turned into a 2-fics-for-the-price-of-1 deal.

The outline I worked on today was another SVSSS fic, this one a fun, cracky AU where SQH is sent to Jinlan City instead of SQQ, & when he runs into LBH, decides to fix the situation at the cost of his friend's dignity.

With that done, I began browsing ideas for tomorrow. I'd mostly settled on a particular MDZS idea, but I wanted to look at some options for potential backups if it didn't work out. There was an SVSSS time travel fix-it fic idea that I liked the look of, where the System glitches when SQQ dies & ends up sending him back to a previous point in the story, & I started thinking about it & realised I had two different options depending on which points I chose.

There's one where, when SQQ dies at Maigu Ridge & the System goes to restore him as his reward, there's a glitch & it sends him back to a 'previous save point', right before LBH shows up at his room in Jinlan City. Having reached the end of the story he has context for a bunch of stuff & knows how LBH feels about him, & does his best to fix things without seeming insane.

And the other is a timeloop story where, when SQQ dies in Huayue City, but instead of the array sending him to his previously-prepared backup body like it's supposed to, he goes back in time to Jinlan City, though slightly earlier than the other idea, right before he reunites with LBH. Way more misunderstandings in this version as he's come from an earlier point in the story than in the other scenario, so he has way less information to work with & absolutely does not know how LBH feels about him. Cue him trying different things in different loops, until he eventually figures out what works.

(Non-SVSSS fans asking, 'Wait, how many times does this character die exactly?!?' 3. Though an argument could be made for 4. It's funnier than it sounds. For the readers at least - the characters are t r a u m a t i s e d)

Though it doesn't *really* count as I'm not going to do an outline for these. Mainly because writing a SVSSS time travel AU involves going 'ok what would be the dumbest/most insane thing the character could do/say in response to what just happened?' & then doing it. Doubly so in the case of a timeloop. Trying to plan out an outline would be an exercise in futility as things would go off script immediately, so they're still just concepts.

Day 6

This one was a bit of a struggle. The idea I'd settled on to work with was a MDZS fic where LSZ either has some long-term effects from spending a chunk of his early childhood living in what was basically a haunted graveyard, or remembers more of what happened, or a mix of both. I've read a few 'supernaturally-gifted LSZ' fics & they've tended to be quite humorous, playing up the comedy potential of a cute kid being chill with ghosts. So I was expecting that sort of vibe, especially as my writing style tends to be a mishmash of angst & humour. But when I started writing down cool snippets that came into my head for things that could happen, they turned out very angsty.

I kind of have an outline, but it's more a few stubs of sections of the fic, plus ideas & vibes. Which might be the best that I can do, as the general themes involved, the level of angst, & the pov character being a child means there's going to be some level of non-linear narrative & unreliable narrator going on. It's something to work into a story though, so I'll count it as a win.

Day 7

Woo! 7 out of 7!

Today's idea was an angsty MDZS idea, where WWX emerges from the Burial Mounds no longer alive, though not exactly dead either, & tries to keep it hidden from everyone, until his cover is blown by standing too close while LWJ is playing Inquiry oops.

Got a nice bulletpoint outline, at least up until a point. It doesn't quite feel like a satisfying place to end it, but there is at least some resolution, & I can't think of how to continue, & whether it feels like a suitable ending or not would depend on how the character interactions play out. It might turn out it works great to end it there. Or alternatively a means of extending the story may present itself as I'm writing. So I'll leave it as it is for now.

So I have a bunch of stuff ready to be worked on, which should hopefully encourage me to get writing them, simply by having an outline ready, so there's less initial work to do.

I might actually do this again. There are a couple of ideas still left in my notes. Plus my Tumblr has a 'writing ideas' tag full of posts where people suggested interesting ideas, that I could go through & decide if they'll actually work. I do have things to do this week though, so it'll have to wait.