fic post (frickin finally): Walk the Straight Path Alone

[neveralarch]

I finished a fic!!!! It is for like... two people to read. Maybe three. But I've been meaning to write it for 1.5 years and now it exists!

Walk the Straight Road Alone
The Crossroads and the Gate - Imogen Calhoun
Rating: adult
(swearing, non-graphic violence, explicit sex, god problems, and a lot of stuff about consent - mostly trial-and-error negotiation)
Characters: Arruén/Venadan
Wordcount: 7100ish
Summary: Gods make endings difficult. Gods make everything difficult.
(Alright, Venadan makes things a little difficult too.)
A/N: This is a fanfic of The Crossroads and the Gate, which I love a lot and also have thought way too much about. I recommend reading that before you try to read this (also, I just recommend it in general).

Read it on the AO3!

I wrote this and three other fics by voice memo while driving across the country, which means that I have a weird first draft podfic. Dunno what I'll do with them, maybe some kind of process post. It was interesting, though! I've been reading about Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham and several other authors from around that time dictating their novels and my reaction was basically 'woah what how????' The writing technique that I've built up through constant word processor use tends to be very choppy and non-linear, and would drive a typist up the wall. But I was stuck in a car and my phone has a very good voice recorder, so I thought I'd give it a shot with some fics I've had kicking around for 1.5 years to a couple of days, (relatively) short fics that I had fully plotted out. I think it turned out well! Although I then put this fic through four drafts, haha, and I'm still catching typos now that I've posted. ...Let me know if you see anymore.

Comments

[aralias]

wow - writing by voice post sounds so incredibly difficult and cool. also - as a person who likes podfics, and who also likes thinking about/writing about the process of writing, the idea of keeping that dictation/possibily even posting is is like... woooah, [much like you and dictation] so cool. i don't know if i would have the courage to do it myself, particularly because i am not a very good first-draft/writing under pressure in a limited time frame person. but i think it's cool.

[neveralarch]

Haha, it was pretty hard. I will post it eventually if you're interested, but it's weird because there are a lot of blank spaces and trying to remember words and also I kept getting distracted. There are a few points where I'm just laughing to myself about a line and saying 'you're gonna cut this, it's terrible.' I did cut those, too. And I wrote some Master and Commander fic on the third day and couldn't remember my main character's name, so I just called him Mr Ryan the whole time (his name is William Marshall, so... not even close). I couldn't possibly do this with a real human being trying to type it up.

I think it worked because I was writing one-shots that I had been turning over in my head for a while, so it's not like I was trying to plot as I went. And also because my first draft goal is always just 'get it on the page and edit later,' so I wasn't super worried about getting it right. I rewrote this fic a lot and added about 2,500 words to it after I'd finished transcribing.

It also takes a long time! I think shorter than just typing, but still a long time. The audio draft for this fic was almost 2 hours.

And thank you!! I really appreciate your icon, and also the opportunity to babble about this.

[s2b2]

Hello! Would you mind if we linked to this from the The Crossroads and the Gate wiki page? Either way, just let us know, and thanks!

[neveralarch]

Hi, that's absolutely fine! Thanks for checking.