dear little fic, please oh please don't be made of fail.

[arcanetrivia]

The Snack ficlet I asked for betas for the other day totally failed to be a lightweight, smutty little morsel. It came out at ~6800 words, which is by a long shot the longest fic I have ever completed. It's almost triple the next contender* and over 3.5 times the next one that I have actually posted anywhere.

It was also written incredibly fast, for me, since I only started it on the 11th, I think. I am regularly in awe of how people can get down more than a thousand words at all, never mind over a short space of time. 10k+ really makes my jaw drop. If I get any ideas in the first place, I run out of them long before I fill up that kind of column inches.

Anyway, it's with said betas now, but I am still chewing my nails. Not over what they might say, but over the idea that I might have been entirely wasting my time.

It's supposed to be a surprise gift. What if, not knowing her well, I made assumptions about what she would like that are going to bite me in the arse? What if she's just not into this pairing or even this fandom right now? What if it's not kinky enough for her taste (it's incredibly vanilla; the kinkiest thing is one finger up someone's arse)? What if there was something I really should have included if it was to be a personal gift, and didn't, because I don't know her well enough to know that, and didn't bother digging as deeply as I could (short of actually asking) to find out?

What if I'm trying too hard to be clever? I did in fact go back to that "eat wool until he shat sweaters jumpers" line, because I couldn't think of anything else that didn't sound flat, and it made me snicker. But there are several other incredibly cracky lines in it too, which I worry are out of place in an overall non-crack/humour fic.

What if it's just plain not hot? I have one other smutfic that I have been dithering about and failing to complete since, oh, November, so this is the first explicit smut I'll be releasing into the wild and I really feel like I have no idea what I am doing. (That time I remixed ships_harry's "Not Touching You" was well sub-explicit, mostly Sirius's train of thought, not descriptions of cocks and tongues and sound effects.)

Nnyerghmrrgh.

About the worst thing in the world would be if she said "Sorry, but I just don't like it." I think she'd have the white-lie courtesy to just say "Thank you" instead, but still. I have tried to soften the blow (to her enjoyment, or to my ego? you be the judge!) with humorous "warnings", but I worry that those will come across as "trying too hard to be clever", too.

Yeah. Something about cats and rooms full of rocking chairs comes to mind.



* - Which has not seen the light of day because I fear it is dull and has a stupid premise and is in fact an astronomy lesson rather than a fic, even though I've toned that part of it down several times from the original draft. (This is the one for which I asked a while back whether people recognized the word "planisphere" without looking it up.) I don't want to waste a beta's time just to find out "this is dull and has a stupid premise and is an astronomy lesson rather than a fic". It was originally intended for the snapedom Valentine's party on the prompt "stars", but serious prompt abuse occurred.