This month is April, and for the first time I’m confident enough to try Roughtrade— the writing challenge site by Keira Marcos and Jilly James, among others, where you do a themed version of NaNoWriMo (essentially). This year’s April challenge allowed for one 25k fic so, after double-triple-checking, I jumped on the chance.
If you know me, you know I rarely have the golden time/spoons/motivation combo to accomplish a genuinely long fic, or a full-length novel of a fic (50k). In fact, my longest completed fic is A Trebled Soul, which I published earlier this year, and acts as a sort of prequel to a future unwritten series. It’s thirty thousand words long.
My project file on Roughtrade is here and my submission is called “With Flying Colors.”
So far I have around 12,000 words published for my choice of fill, which is a BNHA/Fairy Tail crossover featuring Izuku as a celestial spirit wizard. I anticipate I’ll be able to meet my 25k goal, but not to finish my story there– I’m not quite sure where this fic will want to end, but for once the wordcount isn’t much of an issue as I navigate the ideal timeline for the story I want to tell.
The fact that it’s a rough draft is freeing all on its own; once I get draft one done, I can consider what I want to add or take away, and if I want to adjust the final course as I pull her into port. It’s an ambitious project to be sure, as I decided to fill in the missing canon U.A. second year class– with Izuku, Shinsou, and 18 OCs. At this point, I hope to end the story not at the end of the fic, but at the end of an arc, and I’ll consider myself successful at the challenge.
I might even, once I have this rough draft, break it down into an episodic format and tinker with that kind of approach. Time will tell.
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I’m still pretty firm on not wanting to upload any unfinished fics to ao3, which I think is behooving me. Not putting WIPs up also gives me the mental peace of mind to explore more things– with my IRL job being the way it is, I haven’t had much time to write more than 3k one-shots, but the room in my mind has allowed for a cautious exodus of longfic ideas. Without the burden of “but people want me to update XYZ fic, I should work on that,” I feel very free to focus my writing on, or at least indulge myself in plotting, various new ideas– and that’s a nice place to be.
It sometimes feels like a breath of fresh air. My private, unpublished WIP folder is thriving– but more importantly, so is my idea folder.
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I participated in and have finished my fill for the BNHA Rarepair Bang. April is the posting month and we’re now just waiting for my date to come up. I went with a Power Rangers 2017/BNHA crossover, with the rare pair being Mina Ashido/Midoriya Izuku/Bakugou Katsuki/Kirishima Eijirou/Hagakure Tooru– the aforementioned Power Rangers. The fic covers a slice of their life, specifically their performance at U.A.’s entrance exam in canon.
The banner will look something like this, and I’ll be posting both here and on ao3.
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This is the preview:
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My active WIP folder, insomuch as I’ve bothered to add wordcounts to it, is currently at around 130,000 words. The fics I have completed and published (or pending publishing for a challenge) are 15,000 words.
If I meet my wordcount goal for Roughtrade, that number will shoot up to 35,000 words.
I’m pretty satisfied with that.
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Current fandoms include S&D Tier, all three MXTX novels, Power Rangers 2017, Naruto, HP and BNHA.