Spam subject o' the day, and a poll.

[amanuensis1]

So the header said:

and barbell be trollop or probe and vestibule be arsenide

And I thought, I'm sure I wrote that fic.

On the same subject, have any of the rest of you have written fics because you came up with a kick-ass title and thought it deserved fic? And how many of you have a list of titles that are waiting for you to write them fic?

Spill a little for me, here. Tell me the title that you love but have realized is never going to get fic written for it, because it's lingered too long and the idea you had for it is too stale. (Don't reveal the ones you're still sitting on, or before you know it someone will have run off with it.) Mine is And Melisande, By the Water which was going to be Lucius/Hermione and has a "file created" date of January 2003, and whose "last modified" date is exactly the same.

Tell me yours! Maybe we can have a title swap. ^_^

Comments

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

On the same subject, have any of the rest of you have written fics because you came up with a kick-ass title and thought it deserved fic?

I do this ALL THE TIME. And occasionally by the end, the title no longer fits, and I am vexed because I have to find a new title when I thought that had already been taken care of.

And how many of you have a list of titles that are waiting for you to write them fic?

*raises hand*

Tell me the title that you love but have realized is never going to get fic written for it, because it's lingered too long and the idea you had for it is too stale.

Metempsychosis

It was bring back Black, where at the moment he fell through the veil, Sirius's soul transferred into Harry and slowly began making itself known and freaking the kid out.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Oh, OH! Oh, that sounds like such a killer concept! I want you to write it anyway!

*remembers Molly Bloom saying, "Metempsychosis--who's he when he's at home?"*

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

I did have a 5th year fic that I started plotting out by the name of 'Veni, Vidi, Fleo'(I came, I saw, I wept), but after writing well over 20,000 words for it, realised it wasn't very good and abandoned it, I'm afraid.

I did love the premise and background of one of the main characters as well, looking at the fate of squibs born into pureblood families like the Malfoys and whatnot.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Abandoned after 20,000 words? Oh, that's so sad! That's, like chaos triumphing over order. Not on.

[snegurochka_lee]

If I don't have a title before writing, it pretty much means the fic is doomed. It'll meander and wander and never really find its centre, I find. Interesting. :)

My favourite title-without-a-fic was "The Great Hogwarts Christmas Gift Exchange Debacle of 1996." That was damn fun to flesh out.

*wants to read your abandoned Lucius/Hermione* ;)

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I'm always sad if the fic I've started doesn't at least have a working title by the time I hit SAVE for the first time. I know it's going to mean a struggle later to come up with something.

Hell, I do too! I want too look at it and find it already done and there for me to enjoy. I just, y'know, don't feel like actually writing it. ^_^

[verstehen.livejournal.com]

Drowning, Not Floating. One day, I'll get around to finishing a story and even if the title has no connection whatsoever, I'll use it. Right now, it's the title of to never be finished Robert Chase centered fic for House.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

OooooOOOOooooh. That is such a cool title. I got chills!

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I struggle with titles, always. My fics usually have a stupid-sounding working title, and it almost always changes a few times during writing, sometimes literally getting finalized just before the fic is posted. The only times I have had a title that stuck early in the process was when I posted WIPs. But that was because I was literally stuck with those titles, heh.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Do you never have a title before a fic? Or a title that pops very quickly? Oh, man, I feel for you, I do. The fics that refuse to have titles until the last minute always steam me royally. "Why don't you have a title? You think you're too good for a title? What the hell is wrong with you?"

[cluegirl.livejournal.com]

Mine is Wi' the Faeries Gang Awa, and it's going to be a Snape/Ron dub-con, POW, hurt/comfort fic... once someone vastly more talented than me gets a visit from the dream sprites, and has the plotline dumped into their head some night.

[zalil-z.livejournal.com]

I think that sounds great :) I imagine Ron trying to find his way through the gay bars in scotland and getting into a looot of trouble before Snape miraculously appears and saves him from the big boys!

[persephone-blue.livejournal.com]

I have an abandoned fic called The Private Practices of Young Gentleman. It was going to be a Ron/Harry let-us-experiment-for-we-are-horny-teens!fic. There was going to be a slice of Draco/Harry and Ron/Snape for flavor. The title is still just about my favorite part; when I scrapped the fic, I turned it into a few drabbles, though.

[persephone-blue.livejournal.com]

And now, because of this thread, I started working on it again. Oh dear.

[pinkelephant42.livejournal.com]

It's more like, I have random quotes and bits of inspiration without a story. The title is usually the last thing I do. I don't know, titles tend to be allusive for me, with the exception of Means of Escape. That came surprisingly early. But I have random lines I write for various characters in a document, and I keep thinking, I should write a story for that, but the right story never seems to quite take shape.

[delfeus.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine from another fandom is like that, too. She said that she gets random pieces of dialogue and lines running in her head, sometimes so much that it's difficult to write them all down, and what she dislikes most about writing is having to come up with the description around the dialogue and lines. :) I personally hate writing dialogue most.

[demonqueen666.livejournal.com]

Titles are usually one of the hardest things for me to come up with, especially for one-parters. Which means when I do come up with a good title and then don't write the story, I am very mad at myself.

The big one for me is Two Ships (taken off of Longfellow's quote about ships passing in the night), which was going to be a NCIS/Lost crossover and which I had a had a great start for, but...well, things happen -_-

[zalil-z.livejournal.com]

Who was it about? Who was it about? *is a NCIS freak*

[rancidmelody.livejournal.com]

Ah, my titles... I love them so dearly.

The one that plagues me most is I am become death. Also There in the Tomb Stand the Dead Upright. Neither have plots. Then there's Beyond This Place of Blood and Tears, which was my nanowrimo project, but needs to be rewritten so throughly that it mights as well be considered a ficless title. It's about a little girl that Voldemort has captured, whom he routinelly tortures into a prophetic state, and Draco takes pity on her and tries to help her escape, and then finds out, after's she's been freed, that she's a demon and they're even worse off than they were with just Voldemort running around. So... yeah. Random, but. I love the title.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Oh, cripes, the Voldemort story! *shivers in a good way*

[ariadneelda.livejournal.com]

Oh, god. That Lucius/Hermione would have been the perfect L/Hr I've always wanted to read it, I just know it! Er, not that I've read much of this pairing, but still. Is it weird that now you've said about it, I can almost see the story in my mind? Not, you know, what you'd actually write (of course not!), but the feeling of it, how the story would make me feel. Am I even making any sense?

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Totally! Tell me what your idea of the story is! (I wanna see if it fit in with mine!)

[soawen.livejournal.com]

It differs. My files are usually called 'HP pairing keyword' such as HP SSSB vamp (not written, but Sirius was going to come back as an a vampire because he died violently, and Snape the vampire was going to help him get used to his new condition: "Black, it would be of great benefit to us both if you would remmember to order your pizza without the garlic. Now stop scratching at your tongue and let me get a neutrilizing potion. Again.")

There is of course a few exception:

Christmas Traditions should have been drabbles going out with the Christmas cards last year. The titles of them all should have been Christmas Traditions, but then the Snape/Harry drabble ate my brain and I'm now plugging away at the second re-write and 10K+ words.

Reversator was to be a crack fic written as serious fic: Harry thinks this nifty little spell is going to turn Snape inside out, but what it does it to turn his personality inside out in the middle of the final battle while he is in possession of the last horcrux (either guarding it for Voldemort or planning to hand it over to Harry). I was going to have once-again-spirit!Voldemort possess small animals and attack Harry and Snape in typical horror movie fashion, and Ron was going to speak in allitterations only. At some point Snape, forbidden to use magic, was going to open a shop (The Slytherin Sex God, of course) and sell Fred and George's more daring toys as well as boxers with '20 inches for Gryffindor' and the like on them, courtesy of Snape's wit.

My Party (Scrubs) was to have Elliott on the party committee deciding to avendge JD's girl names. The guest should arrive as the opposite sex and to avoid the blonde Mary Sue, Dr. Cox "asks" JD to take him - JD is obviously counting as a man at the party because he isn't one in everyday life.

[bridgetmc.livejournal.com]

Yes. Quite a few.

I always have random inspiration of scenes or lines or titles and they never come to fruitation because that's all I have of them. :/

However! One title I especially love, that I was going to use before in a fic that got deleted when my computer crashed, is going to be used in a current fic I'm writing. I'll *make* it fit. Mwahaha.

[charlotteschaos.livejournal.com]

I wrote one for the title, but I didn't like how it turned out. I think it just had the wrong pairing attached, because someone wanted Snape/Lupin and anything where I try to write Lupin should be aborted on principle, as should anything where I try to write watersports. Combining them just just a biggo mess and not just because of the urine. But. I present to you, The Princess and the Pee, which is just begging to be written better than it was.

I also got a couple of comments on it at the time where people were disturbed that Lupin was urinating on Snape and I sort of wondered what they thought "golden showers" meant. I think a fic in which Snape is showered in gold or perhaps enjoying watersports of some kind, like surfing, would be grand. In my mind, I had this really fanciful idea of some sort of Lucius/Snape water ballet (another sport) in which at the end, they are both showered in gold. It would be entitled Golden Showers (Watersports Implied), but that would probably just garner me even more weird looks than I already get.

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid the only title I ever had before the fic was 'Dead Before Dawn', and the fic for it popped into my head about five minutes after I knew I *had* to write it. Though I've got a quote from 'Antigone' flopping around my head, 'From Darkness, to Final Darkness', that I'd love to find use for at one point :).

[figliaperduta.livejournal.com]

Till Human Voices Wake Us has wandered about a couple of fics for several years, but I think I've finally found it one where it's staying, with a torturer and his crippled and dying victim/lover. (The original story is by duskpeterson, and I think you would like it. The story is being posted to the community eternal_dungeon, and has the same title.)

These Ageless Kings of Iron always seemed a good title for something.

[figliaperduta.livejournal.com]

Er. That comm would be eternaldungeon.

I fail at the internets.

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

I'm rather fond of my old Sailor Moon fic Pre-Funeral Celebrations.
Actually, that's a lie. I'm very fond of the title (which I made up first and then centered the fic around) but I hate my writing there, and my complete failure to write any kind of porn into it.

I would love to say that my favorite fic title is Velvet Rain but unfortunately I stole it from the Zetsuai 1989 manga >_> No cred for me

[rane-ab.livejournal.com]

Icon love! :-)

[geoviki.livejournal.com]

Ever since I adopted the affectation of snagging song titles or lyrics for my fics, I'm awash in the little buggers. In fact, it occurred to me while driving to work in the snow this morning (yeah, yeah, uphill, both ways) that everything I write is a crossover between some song stuck in my head and the actual fandom stuff.

"Drowning in Holy Water" got stuffed into my LJ header instead - that's reworked from a "Live" song. As is "A Step Amongst the Stairs."

"Things That Make Us Cold" is hanging around in the background, as is its twin, "What Blurs and What is Clear To See". I think that first one might end up the title for this Le Carre fic I'm half-done with. A tip of the hat to Dishwalla for those.

[lady_songsmith]

"Coming of Shadow, Promise of Light", a MWPP-era piece I was working on the spring before Pheonix came out and tanked everything I'd written. Think there's any interest in a two-book-outdated Marauders-era now-AU?

[lady_songsmith]

Why do I always notice glaring typos thirty seconds after hitting "post"?

[wilde_stallyn.livejournal.com]

Fic titles hate me and usually refuse to show themselve until quite late in the game, and art titles are even worse. I generally forget art need s atitle until I go to post it.

I have, however, been sitting on the band name 14 Dead Goldfish since I was about twelve. Our first album shall be entitled Cleo's Eulogy.

[r-grayjoy.livejournal.com]

Wow, it's ironic that you should ask... I had this happen to me earlier this evening. Argh! I was finishing up a longish fic for which I'd had a title since very early on in the writing. Just as I reached the last lines of the thing, I stumbled across another great potential title. I ultimately decided that the original one was still more appropriate overall, but now I want to use the other... The thought of a sequel/continuation occurred, but I seriously doubt I'll ever write it. :/

No one should come up with more than one good title for a piece, but NO decent title at all for another! The distribution is just not fair...

[sor-bet.livejournal.com]

OMG. I have been collecting all the best spam subject lines in order to do a meme/fic challenge, with the subject lines as prompts. This is what I have so far:

sultry goodness
vodka dropout
weigh bedlam
meddlesome unprovoked
flannel impaired
excitedly terrorist
pathos irate
certain lewd seventh month, the Pirathonite, of his father, and
for exorcist of midwinter
gynecology catering
deathtrap funnel cloud
rectangular schmaltz
postwar virility
culinary ad lib (oh, that’s already been written: “Iron Snupin”)

And to answer your question: I've NEVER come up with a great title first and tried to write a fic for it. My problem is coming up with a title for the written fic.

[marginaliana]

Hee! Interesting to see how many of these are poetic. I'm slowly slowly writing Neville Longbottom, Plant Yenta which came out of catrinella's mouth at Lumos and I swore I'd write it.

[lexie-b.livejournal.com]

I came up with 'The Life and Times of Miss Pansy Parkinson', and have been trying to write the fic that goes with it, but nothing I really love and that really suits yet.

[oddnari.livejournal.com]

Okay, I so want to read the LM/Hr. When can that be exposed to teh intarwebs?
*begs at your altar*