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Organizing the fic endgame for Cover of Knight
And some of those times I wrote notes about it!
Which I figured, for readers who like behind-the-scenes type content, could be a fun read.
Felt too long to put on Tumblr, but hey, this DW journal used to get process posts about other fics. Why not go back to that?
This may have spoilers for everything posted so far. If you're not caught up, do that first.
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A writeup I did on February 20 (2023), when 30: Birnin Zana was the last posted Cover of Knight chapter.
Annotated with links to each thing, now that we're in July and they've almost all been posted:
I decided a bit ago that CoK is going to have all my Phase 4 meeting-the-Avengers chapters, then I'll start a new work to collect everything that takes place during Phase 5. So there's a built-in switchover point. But there's some wiggle room with where I put things -- like, if I come up with a Quantumania-based meeting, that's a Phase 5 scene, but if Team Moon Knight has a run-in with Luis that could happen any time, it could go in either fic
Current slate of "MK meetings with other superheroes" drafts looks like this:
Tentatively in Cover of Knight: [last chapter posted at the end of April]
drama with Shang-Chi's sister [Reveals 3: Macao]
Eternals shenanigans with Phastos' husband and son [35: Faith]
cute shenanigans with Thor and Love [33: Orlando]
big team-up scene with a bunch of Avengers [36: Actually Cleveland]
Probably standalone fics that happen in between:
the return of Kate and Yelena [Stars That Have A Different Birth -- I had the first 2 scenes written as of December, realized it deserved to be a standalone, put it aside while finishing Cover of Knight, and picked it up again in April]
Bucky + Marc + a dissociative episode [Emergency Contact -- this was half-written in frickin' September, put it aside, picked it up again in March]
Dark Dimension shenanigans with sorcerers [still not posted! Saving it for a Reveals by Knight chapter after all]
The actual DID reveal to Bucky and Sam (...maybe) [wasn't finished in time to post it between Cover and Reveals, but this is Come In From The Night]
Tentatively in Reveals By Knight: [first chapter posted at the end of June]
Ant-Man team-up with bodysharing jokes [Reveals 2: San Francisco -- as of February, the only part I had written was Luis and Hope's exchange about body-sharing]
Jake/Jen comfort some time after the SH finale [the main premise of this became Reveals 1: Los Angeles...but I separated out some of it, like the reveal of Steven's name and the dunk on the Bemis run, to make Cover 31: Los Angeles/???]
I have a couple thousand words of the Bucky-and-Sam mission, but also, I want some of the other characters from the Thunderbolts to be involved! And we know so little about their deal, I'm sitting on that for at least a while, until we find out more. (It's the second-last movie in Phase 5, it's not even coming out until July 2024, so I probably won't have the patience to put it off that long...)
Along with the tag consideration, I kinda want to have Cover of Knight end with a nice round number of chapters! And right now it has 30. Probably not gonna hit 40, but maybe 35? Or 36, for good luck
So I'm trying to finagle 1-2 more scenes into the Cover of Knight list. [31: Los Angeles/??? and 32: Queens] And if I bump any of the ones that are currently there, gotta think of something else to replace them [34: Brush Tunnel, replaced the Macao scene with Xialing]
(Also in the queue, this one coming up pretty soon: a fic where the guys don't encounter any other heroes, they just go to Chicago for a non-Elias-related mission and manage to have a bad time anyway) [Heart in Pieces, posted between CoK chapters 31 and 32]
***
Fics not mentioned in the writeup above, but posted as-of now:
5+1 times Marc was definitely not having a threesome: Started posting in May. I don't even know if I had started drafting it back in February? Might have had some general sexy scenes, but the 5+1 structure hadn't come together.
Meeting the Team 3: Under The Hood: Posted in mid-June. As of February, I'd been sitting on a "Steven reveals the Moon Knighting to Dr. Sterman" draft for a while...but it was a vague unfocused scene, with no good lead-in, and no real conclusion. Didn't have any reason to think it would be finished in time to post between Cover and Reveals.
Then I started thinking about comicverse-inspired plots I could put Dr. Sterman in, and came up with the "kidnapped by Yelena's proto-Thunderbolts" premise, and what do you know -- that worked as a lead-in.
***
Unposted fics currently listed in the Table of Contents, and their current status:
Meeting the Team 4: TBD: Okay, technically I have a document with this title...but it's not a coherent story at all, it's a few hundred words of disconnected "deleted passages from the earlier fics that I wanted to bring back" and "miscellaneous Possible Therapist Fic Ideas."
(We started with headmates -- episode 1 was Dr. Sterman meeting Marc, 2 was Jake -- then 3 was when she met Khonshu. There are so many other non-headmate options, starting with Layla, I'm not worried about having more ideas for sessions at some point.)
Come In From The Night: The long-awaited Bucky-and-Sam reveal fic. I had a bunch of disconnected scenes for it way back in October 2022...but got the distinct feeling it was dragging the Moon Knights through a traumatic level of Revealing Too Much All At Once.
So I repurposed some of the scenes to post them earlier. Mostly in Cover of Knight 22: Cairo (where Bucky fesses up that he and Sam have tracked down Marc and Layla's wallet names), and the Cover of Knight Holiday Special (where Marc lets out a few details about his childhood trauma).
You might think this would make the final fic shorter than anticipated. Hah. At some point I thought this would be two chapters! As of now, it is mostly finished, and it's five.
Here's What You Missed: I jotted down a whole batch of notes for this, also in October 2022. But it involves a bunch of characters (including Sam and Bucky) knowing What The Moon Knights' Deal Is, and I knew those reveals weren't going to be happening in the posted chapters any time soon. So I put it aside.
Came back in mid-December for a furious stretch of writing out whole scenes, which turned into half-a-dozen whole chapters. Did the same thing in mid-January. Reminded myself that this wouldn't be much use if I didn't finish writing the lead-in reveals. Put it aside again.
At this rate I probably won't start posting the thing until 2024.
Reveals by Knight Holiday Special: For once, this is not an idea I've been sitting on for 8 months already!
Started writing it in June 2023. The premise came together when I was getting Come In From The Night into its final shape, and realized there was a kind of emotional gap between where it ends, and the start of Here's What You Missed. This fills the gap!
Also, it's fun. Looking forward to sharing it.