Non-fic update

[lah_mrh]

Hey, guess what I’ve been doing!

 

As you can see, I won NaNoWriMo! 

If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, the website is here. But put simply, it’s a challenge to write 50,000 words during the 30 days of November. And I did it in 26 days! (Admittedly the challenge was set up for original novels, but it says in their FAQ that fanfiction is totally fine, so I don't really care.) I feel pretty accomplished, given it took more than twice that to write the 33,000 words of Hearts and Minds. 

Which, speaking of... the project I was (and am) working on is actually the sequel to Hearts and Minds. I got kind of blocked on it, and almost gave up, but then I thought, “Hey, maybe I could use this challenge to motivate myself.” And I think it worked. It’s still going to be a while though – I’m nowhere near finished, and I need to go back and sort through the stuff I’ve already written, and probably add in some of the stuff I wrote prior to starting the challenge. 

NaNoWriMo very much values length over coherency, so the 50,000 words I’ve written will probably be a lot less than that once I’ve finished taking out the stuff that doesn’t make sense. (At the moment at least half of the fic can be summed up as, “Kirk is ill and Spock is worried, and sometimes McCoy is worried as well,” so it’ll definitely have to be cut down a bit.)

But anyway, I thought you might be interested in how it’s going, so here’s a quick snippet of Spock being worried. (I can’t guarantee that this’ll actually be in the final story – like I said, I really need to go through and edit it.)

 

* * *

Not a day goes by that Spock does not regret never being able to tell his mother how much he loved her. Both Kirk and Uhura have attempted to reassure him that she knew, that she must have known, but he still carries the illogical wish that he could have said the words, just once.

 

He gazes down at Kirk’s face as the captain shifts restlessly in his sleep; their relationship is still very new, and he thinks that they are both still attempting to sort out their emotions. He does not love Kirk, but the other man has become very important to him, and Spock thinks that maybe, in time, he could.

 

He closes his eyes and begins to catalogue his feelings. The first – in fact, the first positive emotion he ever felt for Kirk is curiosity. From the moment an arrogant cadet sat in the captain’s chair of the Kobayashi Maru simulation and proceeded to beat the unwinnable scenario, a part of Spock – even as he reported that same cadet for cheating – wanted to know more. Even now, when he effectively (sometimes literally) has the other man’s mind at his fingertips, there is so much he still does not know about Kirk. Even his counterpart, who has been bonded to a version of James Kirk for two decades, has confessed that he does not think an entire lifetime would be enough to fully understand him.

 

The second, emotion, almost as strong, is affection. Kirk is at times utterly illogical and frustrating, but he is also determined, loyal to a fault and willing to sacrifice himself for any member of his crew. He is a difficult person to truly dislike, and, once they managed to get past their somewhat turbulent first meeting, Spock found himself beginning to warm to him. He has difficulty, now, attempting to imagine a life without Kirk in it.

 

The third emotion is currently battering at his controls. This is the desire to protect Kirk – to save the captain from the myriad dangerous and potentially deadly situations that he manages to get into on an almost weekly basis. It is an instinct that has, on at least one occasion, led to him being injured himself, but he can no more keep himself from attempting to protect Kirk, than he could keep himself from blinking at a bright light shone directly into his eyes. He thinks the instinct may actually have grown stronger since the mindlink, as it is currently screaming at him to do something, anything, to take away Kirk’s pain.