Meme: Writer's Favorites

[nebroadwe]

Snagging a meme from lyricnonsense (whose response to it can be found here):

Writer's Meme: Sometimes it's okay to pimp yourself out. Post a list of your top five favorite fics you've written, regardless of fandom or the reason you love them. This isn't about the BEST things you've written, but what you LOVE most.

I thought it was going to be more difficult just to pick five, but it wasn't. It helps not to have that large an oeuvre yet. Although I do have some things in the queue that might bump a couple of my current favorites out of their spots once they're finished. But for now, my choices ...

Honorable Mentions: Me and My Shadow (in which I drabble by the seat of my pants but have the luck of all beginners doing it) and Ubi Sunt Gaudia? (in which I managed to write a character piece in a historical setting and won much kudos).

5. Drabbles: The Four Last Things

In which I take my English major out for a walk that turns into a fantasia. An organizing conceit straight out of Catholic eschatology; quotations from Marlowe's Faust; a deliberately "high" style to accentuate the character angst: I'm having fun with my pen, writing with elaborate flourishes until the last drabble, when I settle into a rhetoric plainer yet perhaps more noble.

4. Ivory Gate

In which I anoint myself the Apostle of Backstory. This was the first piece of fanfiction I began to write; it sprang out of a desire to make explicit some character and action connections the FMA movie left implicit (probably for timing purposes). It was a bear to compose, but now that that's over I can just enjoy it. I particularly like the way it fills out Noa's motivations and the fact that I could book-end her part of the story with a repeated phrase that takes on additional (and, I hope, painfully ironic) [zing!] from what passes between those repetitions. (It's a device I will use again. :-) I'm also exceedingly fond of the joke with which the story begins: I cannot resist adding a little humor to my work, even when it's dead angsty.

3. Sketch: Gnosis

In which I manage to express some of my own ideas through a character without becoming preachy. Scar's older brother's thoughts on faith and reason are very much influenced by my own; I wanted to explore the position of a religious man who thinks -- who, in fact, has a calling to think. Pastiching an early twentieth-century chemistry book was fun, too: I like the flow of the rhetoric, so different from early twenty-first-century science texts. Any excuse to localize FMA in its analogous real-world historical period is one I'll take and run with.

2. A Story To Tell

In which I try my hand at fisticuffs. It was the Crackbunnies who gave me the courage to write this one. It turned out quite light-hearted, a humorous action piece seen through the eyes of two very different original characters -- one of whom I regretted dumping into this work more than the other. (I know exactly what happens to poor Andy after all the dust settles; fortunately, he does get a happy ending.) I'm not sure the setting or the characterizations of the OCs hold up completely -- I'm much happier writing in the not-now, because I can get away with more mistakes -- but I like the jokes (even the petty ones, such as calling Ed "Girly-Boy") and I flatter myself that I managed to pull off a reasonably plausible machination-plot. I did cheat a little on the fighting by having my POV character partially blinded through most of it, so I wouldn't have to describe the moves. But I still giggle when I reach the punchline, even though I know it's coming.

1. Tick-Tock

In which I visit the Riviera. One of my earliest pieces, this, but the one I'm fondest of because it contains more set-piece scenic descriptions per unit narrative than anything else I've written and they all work. I don't have an eidetic imagination, but I can see this beach and the house and garden very clearly -- research into the actual location helped, but so did my one-and-only drive down the Pacific Coast Highway. My history fetish gets a workout, as I introduce Ed to little Scotty Fitzgerald, daughter of the famous novelist, later a journalist herself. And my English major is out for a stroll again, bringing up Ozma of Oz and using Tik-Tok as a correlative for Ed's temptation to isolate himself. I like what this piece manages to show of both the characters and the scenery; it still gives me a warm fuzzy glow to reread it.

Thus me. What favorites among your own work, my dear writer-friends?

Comments

[lyricnonsense.livejournal.com]

Ooo, Tick-Tock! I love that one. :)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I tend to feel it's the neglected middle child among my long shorts; on FF.net, frex, it's got fewer hits than anything else I've written featuring one of FMA's central characters. But there's no romance and the angst is low-key and nothing really happens. Still, I'm very fond of it and wish more people shared that opinion. :-)