Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love reel_merlin.

I suicidally signed up for two reel_merlin fics in July: Imagine Me & You, and Laws of Attraction. (RM, like many others of its kind, is a comm where people write Merlin AU fic based on movie plots. You sign up for a movie and, in this case, get a two-month deadline.) Due to circumstances quite beyond my control, I found myself being signed up for co-writing a fic with firstlightofeos; after much debate, we settled for Closer. Runi also had a fic of her own to write—Mean Girls. I of course didn't actually start writing much of my fics until, like, two weeks before the deadline (which was September 1st; later, it was extended to September 8th).

In the meantime, Runi and I discussed the Closer fic at length. And by that I mean TO A TRULY RIDICULOUS EXTENT. Seriously. 'Overthinking' doesn't begin to cover it. We watched the movie—I think I watched it, like, three times in the past month—and read (and annotated) the play, and discussed each character thoroughly—their motivations, their personalities, the play/movie's recurring motifs and timeline quirks, the locations, shit, everything. We drafted an outline, picked a structure and what would happen in each scene. I started spouting Closer quotes in all kinds of everyday conversation; I swear, even my brain started monologuing in Closer quotes.

Er. We ended up not writing the Closer fic, and chose to focus on our individual fics.

( My creative process, let me show you it. )

And now I'm writing Imagine Me and You. I have no idea whether I'll finish on time—I have four days, which is not much, but it's somewhat doable—but I'll do my damnedest!

So like, if I start spouting flower meanings out of the blue, please don't mind me, really. *grins* These fics have quite clearly eaten my brain.

I've just posted chapter 10 of Hopelessly Addicted. Hee. It's been, what, a year and a half? It feels so weird to get back to this.

My fic exchange fic, on the other hand, is nowhere close to being done. *headdesk* firstlightofeos finished hers in just a few hours today! *feels incompetent*

Damn it.