NanceFics

Things to do in Atlanta when you’re undead (3/5)

Author: Robin Nance

Characters: Frances Malone, Jack of all Trades

Story Type: A little drama, a little humor, and a whole lot of crack

Summary: A student and a serial killer walk into a Zombie Apocalypse. No, really.

Rating/Warnings: R-ish for language, violence and character (un)death

AN & Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my sandbox - I'll tidy up and return them unharmed as soon as I'm done playing. This was started as part of the 2010 Secret Santa Exchange at profiler_fans and is dedicated to my fabulous friend and fellow zombiephile serialbathera. Check out the fabulous iconage she made for this series too! *points*



part 1


part 2



( The current theory is that it's some kind of a virus, but there are other ideas floating around out there. )


part 4

*dusts the place off* Fic! I remember writing fic!

This is my attempt to get autumn and all those lovely "-ber" months off to a fun start. Plus to maybe, perhaps, actually finish something I start in my fic files. Here goes nothing. *G*



Things to do in Atlanta when you’re undead (1/5)

Author: Robin Nance

Characters: Frances Malone, Jack of all Trades

Story Type: A little drama, a little humor, and a whole lot of crack

Summary: A student and a serial killer walk into a Zombie Apocalypse. No, really.

Rating/Warnings: R-ish for language, violence and character (un)death

AN & Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my sandbox - I'll tidy up and return them unharmed as soon as I'm done playing. This was started as part of the 2010 Secret Santa Exchange at profiler_fans (the original post is over here) and is dedicated to my fabulous friend and fellow zombiephile serialbathera.




( By the time he'd blown the torso off the fifth malodorous, decomposing creature, Jack was ready to go the fuck back to Otis. )

part 2

The Iconage Stuff: I already posted this in empty_marrow, but what the hey, this little LJ feels neglected -- thanks to a weekend of basically growing roots in my computer chair, coupled with a 60-day free download of Animation Shop 3, I present to you Profiler-themed icons, to be found on page one and page two. They're very rough and newbie-ish, but hey, want 'em, take 'em.

The Growth-in-Ficcing Thoughts: These came about after I was perusing the old Skewedom site for icon-worthy pics, and I decided to meander off and look at some of my older fics -- always a dangerous idea and often rather cringe-inducing. Profiler was the first fandom I'd ever gotten involved in seriously enough to write fic for, and some of my earliest examples, still up on that site, are pretty damned ewwwwww. (And those are just the ones whose existence doesn't cause me extreme pain -- there are worse ones banished to the dark recesses of the many stuffed-full desk drawers in the office, never to see the light of day again unless I ever get ambitious enough to clean 'em out and use 'em as litter-box liner. *G*)

Looking back now, it's not so much the writing that strikes me as horrible -- I was an adult by the time I got into fic, so even though my "style" was developing, my vocabulary and my ability to put thoughts into words, such as it is/was, was pretty well formed and finalized by then. The thing that makes me shudder today is how I utterly butchered characterization to further the particular plot points I wanted to make, canon be damned.

Heh. If the word "canon" sounds weird coming from the keyboard of a girl who has been known to 'ship Jack/Coop and Jack/Frances, let me 'splain.

Really, I love canon, I do. As I've begun the growing-up process as a fanfic writer, I've come to the conclusion that nothing is as satisfying as starting with your proverbial feet firmly planted right in the canon-patch. Then, if you're me, you take out a weed-whacker and a stick of dynamite and blast that sucker into a completely different-looking space, one that furthers your plot and sends your characters in the direction you want to take them - but it's all the more satisfying that you started with that little canon-patch with the rest of the gardeners. *re-reads* OK, I'm going to stop with the Martha Stewart metaphors now.

One of my biggest personal examples of character-butchering-to-further-plot was ironically enough in the fic that I was most attached to, "Learning Experiences" -- a 200k+ Frances/Jack piece that took place in the AU-est AU that ever AU'ed. How attached was I to this idea? I re-wrote the entire thing over a period of at least two years and planned to make it part one of a three-part series (100k or so of which I also wrote but never posted). Then one day I sort of looked at it from a distance and thought "who the hell are these people?" The voices were off, and in the AU setting that I'd created to make it easier to get the characters together, I'd come pretty damned close to creating a *twitch* Frannie Sue.

Plus, by ignoring some of the big canon points, the act of getting these two together was just...not particularly interesting. In the interim, I'd watched more episodes of the show, paid attention to the voices and mannerisms, and started to write A Little Like Insane. It starts from canon, it gets really dark really fast, and it's been a bitch to push the characters toward any version of a "relationship" because they're both so damaged and resistant to the whole concept. But it's so much more satisfying and fun to write because of that.

So, growth-in-ficcing is the short version of why my AU will be retired. If anyone is still remotely interested, though, feel free to wander over and check out Learning Experiences, if only to look at the awesome cover art that a friend made for me. And despite all my previous fic-bashing, I'm still really happy that I wrote it, if only so I can use it as a yardstick to see how well or how poorly I'm weeding the canon-patch. *G*