Music Mania! Win Cash and Prizes! Well, A Prize, Anyway

Immediately after I claimed SLS 52 was stalled at page seventeen, I scuttled off and wrote two and a half pages. You've the tea aculeatus so generously supplies to thank for that. The caffeine spurred me to a second wind. Without it, I'd've been facedown and dribbling into my keyboard. This means that SLS 52, barring a cataclysmic change in the weather, grievous injury, or death, will be up by July 1, if not before.

Actually, though the tea certainly played a part in my ficcing resurgence, it was not solely responsible. The impetus for resuming the fic marathon stems from an inventory of unfinished fics that I took a few nights ago. Like many ficcers and writers, I've got a hard drive crammed with unfinished snippets and drabbles and one-shots. Most of them are Harry Potterfic, but a few are CSI or original work. They're ideas that caught in my filter enough to be written down, but never fleshed out, flashes of character insight or a description of a place.

I went through twenty or so; most were five pages or fewer. Three of them were dreadful tripe that made me wonder just how sleep-deprived, sugar-buzzed, or horny I'd been when I committed them to paper, including one gem wherein Orlando Bloom was married to a WWE female wrestler named Josefina. Yes, you read that sentence correctly, and no, I don't know what I was thinking, either.

Anyway, monstrosities aside, two were workable ideas. The remaining fifteen were-if I do say so myself-quite good, but for some reason, I had deemed them unworthy of completion at the time. Some of them dated to 2003. Time away from them allowed me to see them from a fresh perspective, revealed flaws and hidden strengths I had earlier dismissed. The writing was crisper, stronger than I remembered, and that made me feel good.

So, fifteen of twenty, or a seventy-five percent success rate. Not too shabby. So, I decided that if seventy-five percent of my work was very good to excellent, I had no reason to be sitting here like a sulking, frightened child, wasting time with poisonous doubt and letting the barbs of a few rob me of my fun. If, at the end of the day, Summon the Lambs to Slaughter disintegrates into a morass of muddled plotlines, abstract navel-gazing, and prose purple enough to have Voldemort reaching for the yark pail, well, at least it made people sit up and take notice for fifty-two chapters. That's more than a lot of dedicated ficcers ever get.

And now some fun:

The Music Meme

Here are the first lines to twenty-five songs randomly selected from my jukebox. The person who guesses the most artist names and titles wins a five-hundred word drabble of HPfic featuring the character of their choice.

( The Music Meme )

Good luck, and no cheating. If nobody's guessed more than half by Tuesday, I'll add a line until they're all guessed.