Alara Rogers' Writing Journal

Callou callay! I have finally managed to actually write a story this year!

This is sort of a songfic, in that neither the song nor the lyrics actually appear anywhere in the story except for the title, but the song kept playing in my head the whole time I was writing it.

Charles/Erik. AU but semi-canon compliant (ie, not a "Erik owns a coffeeshop and Charles is a foreign prince who turns into a cat" AU, but the kind where this *could* have been what happened at some point after First Class; we just happen to know it didn't because we saw the sequel movies first.)

( Veteran of the Psychic Wars )

So I sort of have this thing that I'm building in my head, which is an entire universe based around genderswapping Charles and Erik in First Class because I've never done that -- I've swapped Charles, and I've swapped Erik, and I've swapped them both in a universe where *everyone* swapped, but I've never done just the two of them and everyone else is their original sex.

I want to do this because lately I totally have this thing about writing women, and putting women back into the center of stories, and that means either original fic or one-offs about characters I actually don't care about much or genderswaps (or writing about the female Q, but I seem to have exactly one fan who cares when I do that, and I am shallow and like attention.) But I really, really like the whole queer subtext of the X-Men universe and the Charles/Erik relationship being used by fans for years as a parallel to the mutant oppression thing, and I do not want to de-queer these guys. So, swap them both! Then they get to be queer women!

So this is eventually totally going in a femmeslash direction (in fact given that I am sure Destiny will turn up at some point, it may fall into that trap I mock sometimes of "everyone's a lesbian!", so I promise that Emma and Angel and Moira are NOT LESBIANS.) It is also going to feature a major, major role from a character that I have no idea why I am putting him in here because my god this was the only movie he *didn't* take over so why am I doing this, except that I have my reasons, so there. But right now, I'm just trying to get into the characters. They haven't even met yet.

So here's what I'm thinking: women think about beauty.

Men may think about women being beautiful, or not. But women have to think about *making* beauty, all the time, whether they like it or not. Women must always consider whether to try to be beautiful, and the consequences if they don't, and the consequences if they do, and what happens if they try and fail, and they're also encouraged to try to make other things beautiful, and there's a reason it's little girls who cover things with sparkly sequins and not little boys.

Erika and Charlotte are not going to be Erik and Charles without balls. They'll have had different lives, different challenges. Fundamentally they'll be the same people, because genderswaps would be totally uninteresting if they were about completely different people with vaguely similar names, but there will be things that are different.

Like the fact that a girl who's frustrated that her older brother Just Doesn't Get It that she hates having to pass all the time and she thinks she's ugly... would probably take out a similar frustration on an older *sister* by being deliberately prettier than her.

Like the fact that a female telepath might have some different thoughts about sex than either a male telepath from the same milieu and time period, or a female non-telepath.

Like the fact that a man who loves metal doesn't actually have any really good excuse for wearing it to bed, or all over his person at a fancy party... but a woman who loves metal can totally wear jewelry. And then kill you with it.

This, itself, is just a character sketch and won't have a "sequel" per se, but when I have a bit more time I have both short storylets and longer shit, some of which contains porn, of the femslashy variety, in mind.

'Course, I also gotta deal with Q, and a backlog of ficathon stories I missed, and Meg, who wants me to Finish Her Goddamn Book already... but *Meg* refuses to have sex with her female nemesis because Meg insists that she's straight. And Q is not a girl. And Q *is* a girl, but since I'm more or less inventing her personality based on one terrible episode and a few other appearances by her actress, nobody likes her but me and Urania Calliope. And Janeway is a girl but zombies require plot. And canon Charles and Erik are not girls either. So right now, I am writing Charlotte and Erika. Nyaah.

( Beautiful )

Deja Q, the anti-deus-ex-machina remix. What if the Continuum had not intervened to save Q from the Calamarain? TNG, ensemble cast, gen. Written for the 2011 Finish-A-Thon. The word count is miserably pathetic at about 5,500; I had planned to do 30,000 words for it, but I have had almost zero time to write.

Previous parts:

Published portion of story: Working in Groups on fanfiction.net

Portion posted only on this LJ: Working In Groups on alara_works

( Working In Groups )

... yeah, that's not really an ending at all. Sorry about that, folks. I'm running a business and working for it as well, and it's eaten all my free time.

How bad do you have to suck to miss your deadlines for your own ficathon? In my defense, I got strep throat and it set me way behind on everything. I'm going through all the fics I promised to do for various fests and ficathons in the order of the deadlines I've missed. :-(

This is for the matrithon. Prompt: "Janeway, frivolity". The story is set in my "Friends With Benefits" arc, a loose collection of stories about the alternate post-Endgame timeline.

Oh, and for those who missed the 2 episodes or so of Voyager where it came up, it is actually canon that Voyager, unlike other Starfleet vessels, can land on a planet.

( The Beach On The Edge of Nowhere In Particular )

Written for where_no_woman's Mother's Day fest, but massively late because I got strep throat. The prompt for this one was "Voyager, Female Q, Motherhood was not what she expected".

I don't know why, but about two years ago, maybe right around the time where_no_woman was launched and I became especially interested in telling the stories of women characters, I fell in love with my version of the female Q. There's so little canon about her, sadly, that I really have only my own work to read about her, because other people's takes on the character are often very different than mine -- nothing in my version *contradicts* canon, but when a character appears in only one episode, fanon can be widely divergent. She's also just not a nice person, by our standards; I love her because she's fierce and prickly and driven and because she has so much internal pain that she won't even express as easily as her boyfriend does. (I get him to break down and confess to his problems on a regular basis; I haven't gotten her to do it *once* yet. Well, sort of, almost, to Janeway, one time, and then she made Janeway forget it.)

The character is widely... um, shall we say, not loved, in fandom. She's initially presented as Q's "ball and chain", a kind of shrewish and unpleasant person who's irrationally jealous of Janeway despite Janeway's lack of interest in Q. Then she has this baby with Q, and the next episode where Q appears, we found out she disowned Q and the kid for the kid's bad behavior, which really is pretty well guaranteed to make fans dislike a female character. In this fic, and many of the others I do about her, I try to explain her reasons for doing that, why she felt driven to do so, to make her more understandable and sympathetic, even if still not someone we can *like*. (I mean, I like her, but, well. She's Suzy Plakson. I have never *not* liked Suzy Plakson. Suzy Plakson can actually make me want to watch Worf having sex.)

So anyway. Probably nothing triggering here unless you once had a really, really, really bad experience giving birth. Notes about my sources at the end.

( Mother Q )

Written for where_no_woman's Mother's Day fest, but massively late because I got strep throat. The prompt was "Non-human motherhood". Being me, the non-human I chose was a Q, but I used it as an excuse to explore a canon character who, to the best of my knowledge, has never appeared in fic, aside from a few cameos in some of mine: Amanda Rogers' mother, the Q who decided to actually bear a child in her body and who (at least in my interpretation of the facts) gave up her power, her immortality and her life to protect that child.

Notes on sources at the end of the fic.

( What The Gods Call Miracles )

See here for the first part of the new segment (also contains link to earlier published portion.)
( Working In Groups, new segment, 2/2 )

Deja Q, the anti-deus-ex-machina remix. What if the Continuum had not intervened to save Q from the Calamarain? TNG, ensemble cast, gen. Written for the Finish-A-Thon; I had planned to do 30,000 words for it, but between massive headaches, vacation planning and craziness at work, I've only gotten 14,000. But I have the next several scenes in my head, and now that I'm on vacation and my internet access is seriously restricted, maybe I will be able to write the rest of it and have it ready to post when I come back.

Rest of the story is here.

( Working In Groups, next segment )

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )