People have asked before, and I think I've mostly answered, but I'll mention again now: I do intend to finish the Noir. I tend to think of it as a series of stories and not so much as a chaptered WIP, though of course it's a work in progress in a more meta sense, sequential and connected. Actually, as is probably obvious, I mostly think of it as a virtual season, and cancellation midway through, in the manner of Firefly, would suck. Current hiatus has been dragging, though. Maybe if I carried this analogy through, I could convince people that there's an actors strike on...hmm.
I didn't really intend it to be a hiatus of course. For weeks and weeks, I intended every single day to sit down and get cranking, and then I lost track of time--which I do with frightening ease--and all of a sudden it's months later and I'm thinking, hmmm, maybe it's time to put a little note up.
Anyway. I have good intentions. I'll leave it to you to complete that thought. If I think about how long I've been working on this--well into year two, now--I feel kind of queasy. The prospect of a schedule for completion is admittedly gruesome. I wish I could write faster. I also wish my stocks were worth more and that I could retire and devote all my time to writing. I wish one of my readers was a millionaire and felt like patronizing me. Et cetera.
Authors who've been speaking up on the subject of writing and inspiration and such are right: you can't fight the current of where your inclinations are carrying you. Or you can, but your results are probably going to be questionable. If fan-fiction writers had contracts and advances for promised manuscripts and such, it might be somewhat different; but on the other hand, even those things don't guarantee that a professional author won't use blunt force, and crank out a suck-ass product to meet obligations.
I do feel strange--and occasionally even guilty, yeah--about making a name in Buffy fandom as a het writer, while at the same time raising people's expectations with a long series. First, it's just wacky, because I have always been a diehard slasher, but most Buffy readers new to my stuff had no awareness of this. At the time I started writing Noir, I was deep in the groove and in fact saw no real slashiness in Buffy fandom, but now it seems inevitable that I'd eventually get back in touch with my slash roots. Which aren't even roots, really. That's just the natural color of my head. Second, planning to write 22 stories of about 20,000 words each is
Anyway. To summarize: I want to finish Noir. I want to write Sidelines. I have had, in fact, a Sidelines story very close to being finished for over a month. Instead of working on that, I spent two weeks writing Subtleties. I couldn't really do much else at the time.
And sometimes I just get vacant-eyed about my own writing and want to read other people's stuff instead, or watch TV; in the same manner, I could spend more dedicated time answering every e-mail or comment I have ever received, and instead I play FreeCell, or watch TV, or read people's stories, or sleep, or stare at my ceiling. My personal equation of behavior looks something like this:
good intentions + guilt = procrastination + avoidance
Somehow despite this I occasionally get things written. And even answer e-mail and comments once in a while, though I still mostly suck. You guys all rock, though. People who heart me, I heart back, even if I don't always say so.
Now I must eat Red Vines and do some work and listen to "Harder to Breathe" for the thirtieth time. Oh--and I'm no longer writing Buffy fan-fiction at all. I'm going to be writing Elfquest. I don't know what it is, but it sounds like just my thing. See you on the other side!