Delightfully Useless

...I don't know if this is a good idea at all, but I have realized that at least 75% of all the fics I've ever planned to write have no existence on paper, and most of the others are in some state of outline-iness or snippetude. This is all for one reason: I'm a perfectionist who would rather not start than fail to produce awesomeness (and, okay, be complimented thereon. *wry grin*)

That is a Bad Reason to not write and/or not publish fics. Therefore I make a very late New Year's resolution: I am going to go through my list of fic ideas and try to write the ones I still want to see written, and then I am going to publish them. And (while I will be sensible and have them betaed for "is this any good?") I am not going to worry about having them as brilliant as they want to be in my head. If an idea is worth writing, A Story using it is at least somewhat better than No Story, y/n?

(And I am also not going to worry about whether anybody is going to be interested in reading them. I tend to shoot down far too many of my own ideas with "well, I never saw it done before, so obvsly nobody likes it" - which results in the writing of Bad Cliché!fic and nothing else. *g*)

Wish me luck! ;-)

Or something like that. Um... this me having watched Piles Of New Stuff since renewing my Netflix a month ago, and wanting to natter about the stuff people on my flist kept telling me I should see. ;-)

( Under a cut, because I am long-winded )

TL;DR: SGA begins to be boring. Mythbusters is awesome. Firefly is... if I could play in the 'verse without dealing with the characters, I would. The Real McCoys is lame. David Tennant's Hamlet is incredible. Sarah Jane Adventures is probably better on average than New Who. MST3K isn't my style. Psych is a fun show (and besides the pilot had Don S. Davis in it. Hands up, all who miss General Hammond.) Highlander is unwatchable-by-me if the first half of the pilot is a representative sample. And The Middleman is my new flash-in-the-pan fandom. :D

So stunt_muppet was wondering on her journal how other people manage to write such little short fics - a whole story in 400 words or some such. She asked, "Short-fic-writers on my flist, how exactly do you do it? How do you find the perfect small slice of a scene to write about? How do you condense an idea into such a small space?"

Well, in a classic example of "the grass is greener", I've always wondered how other people can write so much in one story that ficathons with minimum requirements of 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 words are common! So I offered to do a ramble/analysis post about how my fics are so short. Here it is.

( I have no trouble cranking out the words in non-fiction, of course, so they are under here. )

LOL, now I find myself wanting to remix "Well, That's Just Ducky" and see if I could make it into a longfic! *g*

If I followed common wisdom and "wrote about what I know"...

...it'd definitely be crackfic. I spent about three hours this afternoon up a ladder outside with a hairdryer, kitchen towels, scissors and a car scraper.

( Explanation under the cut... )