Pulling Strings draft finished!

 *flop*

So I just finished my draft for Pulling Strings. I’m currently posting the fic on AO3, but it wasn’t quite done yet when I started posting. 

I almost abandoned that fic, several times in fact. It was darker than any TF fan fiction I’d written before, and even if it wasn’t blatantly explicit in its violence, the emotional overtones certainly made it a hard fic to write.

Plus, I totally got blocked on that story last September. I got so blocked that I just set it aside and started writing The Ghost of the Howling Plains instead. That worked out ok, since it turned out that Ghost came before Pulling Strings chronologically anyway. But even after I was making progress on Ghost, I still couldn’t do anything on Pulling Strings.

I’d run into a problem with the story that i just couldn’t resolve. It wasn’t until I’d explained the plot of the story to Spouse that I realized what the problem was. Spouse gave me a solution for the problem, but I saw that I would have to do some major surgery on the story to fix it.

So it sat. I finished Ghost, wrote a bunch of Sparkr stories (which were good, smutty fun and were exactly what I needed after how dark Pulling Strings was), then came November when I started writing the 30-day OTP stuff for Bluestreak and Hound, and after that I started on Renegade, and that took me into January, and then I was working on random stuff - one shots, and the Pacific Rim crossover, and another Sparkr story I’d been working on - and suddenly it’s May and I hadn’t done anything on Pulling Strings.

That’s when I made a promise to myself that I’d just get the damn thing done and posted. I was very concerned about posting it, specifically because it was so dark compared to my other stories, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to be received.

So… Thank you for all the comments and kudos I’ve been getting on it. It really did give me the confidence that this was a story worth telling, and a story worth finishing. I don’t think I would have been able to finish it without all the feedback I’ve been receiving. <3

PS. Once the story is finished, I’ll probably do a little post explaining where I got blocked and what the problem was. I’m curious if it’s something visible in the story, so if you have any ideas on what I was struggling with, I’m interested to hear your theories. :)