Arctic Light

I thought this might be of interest to the self-pub people here! One of my major goals this year is to take everything I've learned about promoting myself through the Zoe project, as well as the Lauren Esker project on the side, and apply it to relaunching my real-name books, and see if I can make some decent money off them without compromising the stories and themes I want to work with. I'm working against a steep uphill curve here because none of my books are particularly commercial and most of them are books I wrote years ago, had rejected by a bunch of agents, and eventually ended up sitting on. So I'm entirely unsure if I will actually make any money doing this at all. But I'm going to try.

( Mailing lists and the building thereof )

Here's a little grab bag of some extra stuff that goes with the fic I just posted.

First of all, for the last chapter I was trying to figure out what the generator room of a secret underground HYDRA base would actually look like (seriously, I swear THE big source of delays on the last couple of chapters was trying to figure out how a secret underground bad guy base would be constructed, probably in more detail than actual TV show/movie show writers generally do) and I came across this really cool page on the power station at the Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole. At least, I thought it was interesting! I started out patterning the HYDRA power plant after this one, although as you'll notice if you read the story, it ended up taking a somewhat different turn.

Second - the fic actually started out very different. I started writing it for a prompt at avengersgen last May, for Sam getting Bucky out of trouble. Originally I had imagined it as some kind of "5 Times Sam Saved Bucky" fic, or something along those lines, but I wrote this little tossed-off bit about Sam catching Bucky after he fell out of a plane, and then I thought "OKAY ACTUALLY I WANT TO WRITE THAT FIC", and then 32K words of fic happened. XD But I did actually start writing the other one. So here's about 800 words of the fic it almost was, but didn't turn out to be. It's still tempting to turn this into an actual fic, but I don't really have a plot, so mainly it's just some plotless speculating on how Sam and Bucky would work together in the field.

( The unwritten Sam and Bucky fic from last May )

And that's as far as I ever got with that.

The other thing I wanted to post is something I just pasted into a comment over on the fic at AO3, and I thought, why not repost it here as well? I tend to write out of order, and one of the early scenes I wrote was a reunion scene that got cut because the plot went a different way. Deets under the cut so I don't spoil my own fic.

( The cut reunion scene, with context - this would've been near the end of Chapter 4 )

I also have some thoughts about how this story was or wasn't jossed by Age of Ultron, but I'll put those in a separate post so people who are avoiding spoilers won't be spoiled.