Attack of the really terrible idea: Switch, 1/?

There was a whole big disclaimer that was going to precede this, with musing on my current weird combination of creative productivity and selective writer's block, but my friend just showed up to take a walk with me. Look for this post to be edited later with relevant information, but for now, what you need to know is: I had this idea months ago, I came home and just suddenly started writing it, I don't know the plot, I don't know where it's going, but tell me if you find it interesting and I'll keep posting it in chunks as I try to figure that out.

( This doesn't even have a title yet, so for now I'm just going to call it 'Switch.' )

[Edited 1/19/2008.]

[All installments archived here.]

Okay, so I guess that disclaimer's happening in a different post.

This was all the preamble that was going to go with the story snippet, which may now be ... post-amble? Whatever. I also haven't really done a post like this over here before -- they usually happen on my fannish filter on my primary LJ -- but presumably those of you reading here have at least some interest in my writing and/or the process behind it, so it seems like as good a place as any to talk about it.

I've been having this strange experience lately: since the quarter ended, I've on the one hand been really motivated and productive fannishly. I made my first vid (look for that showing up in a week or so), got a WIP 95% of the way to the end, and have generally been all gung-ho for creativity. I've been plotting, with the help of the ever-generous anatsuno and svmadelyn, to get a website in the works so my fiction has somewhere besides LJ to live. But I've also been almost completely roadblocked on anything I'm working on that's remotely serious in tone.

( Speculation on why that is. )

( Plans for stories that have been delayed. Probably only relevant or of interest to my cheerleading squad, aka those people who have read snippets or heard me talk about them already. )

So, the story that is tentatively called "Switch." I think I first had the idea while talking to seperis about her fascinating Story of a Girl, but I was in the middle of "Rebuilding Babel" and just starting to really percolate on "Probability," and it didn't rate very high on the idea totem pole. Then I spent today at work listening to dodificus's excellent podfic of trinityofone's thoroughly enjoyable You're Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl), and it sparked my urge to pick this idea up again. (Please note I am not implying this will be anywhere near the caliber of either of those -- that'd be seriously presumptuous, this early on.)

Now, here's the thing. As you may have noticed, I only post finished stories, not WIPs. This is a little because I like to go over and over the language in my stories before I'm happy with them, and a lot because I absolutely don't want to paint myself into a corner. By that I mean, I don't want to put something out there until I'm relatively confident of the plot, because I don't want to feel that my hands are tied if I realize later that I should have done something differently. But for the purposes of getting my momentum back up, there's not much that I find more helpful than a five-finger exercise: a story I'm not yet passionate about, where working on it gets me back into the rhythm of writing without representing any commitment.

It should be noted that Unidentified started this way.

So I think that, for now, I'm going to take "Switch" out of the box and play with it for a while -- and for a change, I'm going to do that in public, because honestly, the encouragement and interest of other people does more for my writing momentum than almost anything else. But I do feel the need to warn you: I don't know what the plot of this story is yet. I don't know what the backstory is. It is entirely possible that I'll end up going back and retconning myself halfway through, or that I'll hit a roadblock and never go any farther, or that the next quarter will start before I finish and there will suddenly be months between parts. This is an experiment in many, many ways, one that's starting from half-meta, half-PWP roots, and I have no idea if it'll succeed or fail. So anyone for whom this sounds too self-indulgent or uncertain, know that if and when I finish it, I will put up a final, cohesive version so that you can still read the story while sparing yourselves my mucking about.

Uh. I think that's all for now. I'm going to go write some. :)