Lately I’ve been pretty busy getting ready for school and calming down after some major life events. But in my spare time instead of doing other things, I’ve also chosen to write.

Writing has been a life long love; while most little kids drew their way onto the fridge I instead chose to hunker down and write stories about weird crap. I never did get onto the fridge, but I wasn’t disappointed. Even these days, releasing something into the wilds of the internet causes my heart to palpitate with an alarming speed. I write a lot of fanfiction, erotica and original stuff, most of which never receives an audience besides a few unfortunate friends. Lately though, I’ve been branching out a little, especially after the resounding success of a fanfic that for a little while ended up on a whole lot of rec lists.

There are a lot of great articles on the legitimacy of fanfiction, and why it needs to exist, so for brainy discussions you can read those. What I’m going to talk about now is about the process of writing, how I plan and make it to the first fanfiction draft, and why this way works for me. …complete with tasteless bathroom graffiti.

Hopefully a few of you who struggle with finishing stories and putting together plots will find this useful, and anyone out there with a totally different approach, is more than welcome to chime in with their own special techniques.

Yep, that’s an initial outline. Pretty pathetic, huh? I take after the Lovecraft school of thought and have elaborate plans, outlines and summaries. I had a problem initially with maintaining steam to finish stories, and I find this helps a lot.

Here’s the start of a very complicated Akagi/Osamu mpreg fanfic. When you’re doing something even halfway elaborate, an outline like this can save your ass. I like having a lot of detail for major events, and keeping it simple for lesser stuff so I can get into the writing flow and write where the characters take me.

A ‘Sahara survives’ fanfic from Kaiji. You can see the start of a more active draft compared to the initial planning I did originally. Some good advice I received from a local award winning author was to allow enough room in planning for changes to happen.

This is a VERY polished rough draft for the Harry Potter fanfic that is THE most popular piece of fanfiction I’ve ever written. I’ve been told it’s quite good, though I may argue against that venomously. The most interesting thing about it from my perspective was how it started originally as a shitty fan drabble, and became so much more due to popular encouragement. This shows you that fanwork can take you to some interesting literary places, even if you don’t intend it.

With that said, I’m still not any closer to polishing the enormous stash of porn on my computer for release. Oh boy. Look at all those evil little file folders. (Yes Kirby is there as well as Anpanman, I never said I wasn’t twisted beyond all repair).

These early examples of planning and drafts give way to more polished pieces in the end. Take a look at Fighting The Green for what I feel is the best example of my writing available for public consumption. Feel free to look around my fanfiction account as well but be warned – most of the other stories there are old as dirt, and really really bad since I had the tendency for a while to start and never finish ideas.

These things happen when you’re a misanthrope for a great many years and care very little about an audience. I’m glad I’ve gotten a little better about that sort of thing these days. And I can’t deny that planning has helped a lot in that regard.

Now all I need to do is learn how to edit properly. Dohohoho~