***

Basically, I blame juno_magic for this one, even if she didn’t intend to spawn plot bunnies. But she pointed out this page (warning: NWS!) while my muse was in naughty!Dean mode. And then there was that scene with Dean and Sam’s iPod in 401… and one thing just led to another.

o0o

And don’t forget: the deadline for submitting prompts to 3some_ficfest is this Tuesday, September 30. We have some awesome suggestions for threesomes in various fandoms already, but since there can never be enough plot bunnies, we could do with some more! Leave your prompts here.

***

 Yay, the kamikazeremix fics have been revealed! So I can finally post mine in my archive and point you to it. The story I was assigned hinged heavily on the Sam/Dean slash element, with the actual case only hinted at. There were several directions I could have taken this: work out the case fic elements—either what happened before, or during the original story—, write an epilogue type story from Sam’s POV including hard slash, or re-tell from another POV than the original.

After some debating and toying with those ideas, I started leaning toward an outsider POV story, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. But what really cinched it was this:

“Father Parelli kept fingering his collar as if it didn’t fit well and chafed him, while Father Jerrod jumped every time someone addressed him by name, giving the speaker a startled, guilty look, like he expected God to strike him down any second over some perceived sin.”

Once I had that, I had my angle. The rest was just juggling timelines and details, and far more researching of Catholic Mass than ever made it into the story.

***

One quiet Sunday morning, I told tanaquisga I had written a post-rape, hurt/comfort, healing sex fic for an obscure and long-since-canceled show, and all of it had been done “before breakfast”. She nearly packed up and ran for the hills, but was brave enough to offer looking it over, ask difficult questions and offer up suggestions, even though she didn’t know the fandom.

A couple of rewrites later, and what was initially a plot bunny for a badfic plot executed in a not-entirely-badfic manner had been turned into a serious story dealing with difficult subject matter.

Now, if only there was someone out there still reading Threat Matrix fic…

***

In the author’s notes of this story, it says “Because I promised myself I wouldn’t touch S3’s cliffhanger with a ten foot pole… and because I wanted to write a Cowboy!Dean fic.”

Supernatural Season 3 ended with a cliffhanger of epic proportions. Knowing there will be a Season 4, and knowing that whatever we speculate, Kripke’ll prove us dead wrong, I told myself I would not, not, NOT even think about how things might be resolved. It would be a waste of time, and I have plenty of other stories less likely to get jossed with the first episode of the new season to work on.

Naturally, the muses had other ideas…

Once I came up with the time travel concept, I though, well, okay, there’s still this Cowboy!Dean plot bunny, maybe I can kill both bunnies with one story. But as the story progressed (and trust me, I don’t think I’ve ever written a story that changed tack so many times during the writing process), I realized that there would be no Dean to speak of. After all, at the time, Dean’s kinda busy being dead…*

Though I knew fairly early on that Sam would meet Samuel Colt, and that it would be his knowledge that allowed Colt to make the special demon-killing gun that played such an important part in the YED-story line, the actual appearance of Azazel, and the realization that it was Sam’s time travel that started the entire Winchester tragedy in the first place, came as much as a surprise to me as to Sam and (hopefully) the reader.  Predestination paradox. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t bear thinking about too much, or you’ll risk migraines and spraining your brain. But it’s a great concept to play with as an author and despite the headaches, I had fun.

* I did manage to pawn off the Cowboy!Dean plot bunny onto erinrua, who has done a far better job of tackling it than I could ever do.

***

Heh, no, I didn’t write this story in the short time since returning from my holiday. Far from it. It was started shortly after the episode Dream A Little Dream Of Me aired, and I worked on it on and off at various times. First, I had to figure out how to discern the dream sequences from ‘real time’ events. Then I realized I also needed flashback at various points. So, now the story has past tense, present tense, and past perfect tense sections. Just to keep you (and me!) on our toes

tanaquisga was kind enough to read over an earlier draft and give invaluable critique, and erinrua nitpicked the final draft while I was chasing polar bears all over the Arctic.

Who says life’s not good?

***

Wow, that was fast…! One moment, tanaquisga, plot bunny flinger extraordinaire, says (somewhat out of the blue, I might add), Dean, smut, snow… and the next moment, I have three Winchesters snowbound at various times in their life! These vignettes largely wrote themselves, though I will admit that Sam gave me the most trouble. And I used to have a Sam!muse! What happened to her, I wonder…

erinrua WROTE COWBOY!DEAN FIC!! SQUEEE!

Yes, that requires capslock

A short time ago, Erin asked for fic prompts. Knowing she’s quite knowledgeable on horses and the Old West, I saw this as my chance to pawn off the Cowboy!Dean plot bunny.

Erin took up the gauntlet, and to what result!

A Thousand Square Miles of Wide Open is an amazing little story (well, not that little, it’s over 3,000 words of Supernaturally goodness) that hits in all the right places. To get to an old graveyard and perform a salt-’n-burn, Dean has to learn how to ride first. Erin makes us feel every agonizing mile he has to suffer on horseback. Her landscape descriptions are very vivid, and you can almost smell the desert or touch the dust. OC Chris is likable and credible. He’s your typical cowboy: gruff, a man of few words, and clearly in love with his land and willing to do whatever it takes to keep it.

All in all, a definite Must Read for any Supernatural fan.

o0o

Ok, after that, I’m almost embarrassed to announce my smut ficlet in the same post. But here it goes:

Fandom: Supernatural
Title: Wanna Make A Memory
Rating: ADULT
Characters: Dean/OFC
Spoilers: None
Word count: 2,200
Summary: Dean knows he can’t not go, and that once he leaves, he won’t ever return. So he wants to make this memorable.

***

I have no excuse, really. This story was entirely unplanned; I have no idea where it came from, or what triggered it. But the central idea was just there, popping into my head out of the blue. And when I started thinking how to make it happen, I realized it would be the perfect tag-on to my earlier story There’s A Girl In Texas, which was originally supposed to be smutty, but ended up being anything but.

***

Okay, so, the other day tanaquisga told me about a new fic term she’d learned from fandom_wank: sticky!fic. After I went to check out its meaning ^(*), we discussed a bit how fannish terms sometimes hop over from one fandom to another, and how sticky!fic could be incorporated into Supernatural fandom. She mentioned something along the lines of “Dean/Impala *shudder*”, which my muse interpreted as a challenge, apparently.

Much to my surprise, the story turned out to be more angsty and sad than cracky and funny, although tanaquisga assures me it’s funny as well as “disturbingly sexy”.

Anyway, the moral of this story: be careful where you thread on the intarwebs; plot bunnies lurk in the strangest places!

 (*) For those wanting to know: “Sticky is a term peculiar to Transformers fandom. It happens when giant robots have human parts underneath all that metal.” (Source)

She has now posted the first two sets of drabbles here. Make sure to check them out for a John-centric view of Supernatural’s stories.

Also, since muses tend to be fickle, she wrote an extra, underwear-inspired, Dean drabble for Phantom Traveler.

And because what’s not to like about Dean and underwear, my muse decided she needed to come up with a follow-up drabble…

Every Man’s Burden

“What’re you doin’?” Sam’s nose wrinkled in disgust as Dean rummaged through the greasy pizza boxes and burger wrappers of last night’s dinner.

“Nothin’!” Dean slammed the bathroom door shut in Sam’s face. If Sam found out… He’d never hear the end of it.

But the sales girl had been right: they were very comfortable. Snug but not too tight, and not chafing, even hunting chupacabras through the woods.

Where was it…?

A moment later: “Ha!”

Triumphantly, Dean smoothed the wrinkled cardboard that had come with the cellophane packaging. Now he could remember what brand and model to shop for…

***

So, there I was, taking a break from the fic I promised myself I wouldn’t write (…) and clicking around LiveJournal, when I stumbled upon a quickie!challenge at ohnokripkedidnt. One of the prompts read “Phone sex. ANYONE.”

And I instantly flashed back to Long Distance Call. The one where John Winchester calls his son…! The one where we learn later that that the caller is not even John Winchester…!

But too late, damage done. With a voice like that, how could I resist?

To be totally honest, I think all three Winchester men have it “in them”, so to speak. But who’s Dean gonna talk dirty to over the phone? And I was trying to get a break from Sam.

Anyway, a rough version of this ficlet was posted yesterday as a comment to the prompt, but tanaquisga was kind enough to beta-edit it and make it much better. The polished version is now available.

Note: in case the prompt didn’t alert you: this story is rated Adult. For, you know, phone sex.