When I am seeking the Next Great Plot Bunny, I often drift through the little pieces of stories that I've started and never continued.  These range in size from a paragraph to (in one notable case) over 40 pages, and as I'm now entering my 6th year as an SGA writer, there are a lot of them.  So many of the ideas aren't workable for a hundred reasons -- the main idea of the plot has been jossed, or I was trying on a style that didn't suit me, or sometimes I've rewritten the seed of the story in an entirely different way.  I came across this little snippet from a story where John is the best man at Rodney and Keller's wedding (and I can't honestly recall where that was headed, though it was likely McShep) and discovered this little piece which obviously mutated later into one of the main ideas in Waiting for My Real Life to Begin.  Honestly, I'd completely forgotten that I'd tried writing that story before in this way!

“She’s got a very active libido,” said Rodney over their fourth beer.  John was buzzed enough that instead of making a grossed-out face and smacking Rodney on the back of his head, he found himself giggling quietly.  “Don’t laugh, it’s not funny,” protested Rodney, but giggling was contagious and soon enough he was snorting along with John.  “I worry that I can’t keep up.  She’s on the upswing, you know – women peak in their mid-thirties.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” John said.  “There’s always Viagra.”

Rodney made a disgusted sound and popped the tab on his fifth beer.  “She’s always telling me to be nicer to people.”

“I’ve noticed it’s not having much of an impact,” John reassured him.

So many of my little snippets are pretty much that, and not much more -- a few silly bits of dialogue that maybe have one good joke and not much else.  But I suppose, as tempting as it is to take those little moments and try to expand upon them, the real thing I need to be perusing is the core of the idea I was trying to write. 

More little incomplete fic nuggets below this cut:

Rodney is exploring his baser male instincts:

“Christ,” says John, “you crazy fucker.”  He helps Rodney into a sitting position, rubs his head with a gesture that’s half appreciation and half frustration, pulls him into a one-armed embrace.

“I think I hurt my hands,” says Rodney, amazed by himself, by what John’s drawn out of him.

John laughs a little brokenly and pats Rodney on the back.  “That was some right hook, McKay.”

“I think I actually lost my shit,” says Rodney, still bewildered.  “Is that what you call it?  Losing your shit?”

“You totally lost your shit,” agrees John.  “Your shit was most definitely lost, Rodney.”  He laughs again, sounding more like himself.  “What the hell made you do that?  You know Teyla and Ronon’ll be here any minute, we’ll be out of this place by sunrise.”

Rodney curls and uncurls his fingers, feeling the joints swollen and hot under his skin.  “He hit you.  He hurt you.”

John's ex-wife comes to visit Atlantis (and the visit itself turned out to be much less interesting than this first paragraph):

John knew something bad was on the horizon when Woolsey called him into his office and began with, “I know I can rely on your professionalism, Colonel Sheppard.”  Because Woolsey was still pretty new, and because he’d survived the first week of ATA hazing on Atlantis, John was willing to cut him a little slack – but really, two months in, Woolsey should know that John’s professionalism was deeply unreliable.

Ah, mood-bindi.  The idea here was to implant something in John's head that literally showed everyone what he was feeling.  Had the potential for comedy gold, but I never got beyond this first bit:

"Oh, relax, McKay," John had said.  "It's no big deal, take a breath for christ's sake," John had said, squinting with derision.  "It's not like it's going to hurt," John had said, smirking, as the priest tilted John's chin up, as the priest's assistant held out the small blue gem.

John was willing to admit, curled up with his hand over his forehead, his head splitting into two pieces like an overripe melon, that he might have been a little too confident that he was right and McKay was wrong.  The tiny harmless-looking bindi-thing, the little Ancient-y jewel that the priest had insisted upon bestowing, wasn't just stuck to the surface of John's skin; it had somehow burrowed into his forehead, expressing pointy little feet into his skull and biting down into his flesh until John was pretty sure that it wasn't coming out without anesthetic and possibly a bone saw.

"Oh my god, you lobotomized Colonel Sheppard!" Rodney was shrieking somewhere under the maelstrom of lightning-bolt pain swirling inside John's head.  "He better have retained his piloting skills with the brain injury because I am *not* flying ten kilometers back to your godforsaken gate, you hear me?"

The priest and his assistant were unmoved, both by John's agony and by Rodney's hysterics.  They only kept murmuring to one another about the auspiciousness of the ceremony taking place under the third sunset in conjunction with the second moonrise; but every time John blinked, his vision cleared a bit more.

"I think I can walk," he told McKay, staggering to his feet.  "You can fly, I'll just -- supervise."

"Are you bleeding?  Leaking cerebrospinal fluid?  Because I'm not good with body fluids, I really prefer them to stay on the inside where they belong," babbled McKay, getting one hand under John's elbow and dragging him out of the temple.

"Not bleeding," grunted John, trying not to throw up from the jarring transition from dark to bright daylight.  His head was throbbing harder again.  "Just -- ow.  You know.  Have a piece of rock stuck inside my head."

"Stuck inside?" repeated Rodney, sounding even more alarmed, stopping in his tracks.  "Let me see!  No, wait, don't.  I don't want to see, it sounds disgusting."

"It feels pretty disgusting," conceded John, gingerly flattening his palm over his beleaguered forehead, finding that while his head hurt in a general way, the actual entry wound was numb.  He used his fingertips to probe and discovered that the jewel felt like it was sitting on his forehead, very slightly inset; it wasn't unlike the Jaffa seal borne by First Primes.  But John had the sinking feeling that though it might look bad-ass on Teal'c, it probably looked more like a preteen girl wearing stickers on her face when it was John's forehead in question.

Sheppard's an organist and McKay's a reverend (aka Plor needs to quit her church gig, and thank god, she now has and can blaspheme with abandon)

Sw: 4’ Solo Reed, wrote Sheppard, and then, Gt: 8’ Open diaspon.

“Derek Kavanagh took the time to tell me after the service that if he couldn’t believe in a literal six-day creation, he didn’t feel like he could believe in anything,” said Rodney, leaning against the console and watching Sheppard’s sock feet shuffle silently over the pedals below.

Pd, wrote Sheppard, and hesitated.  He chewed on his pencil eraser for a moment, poked at something that made all the stops on the organ console go dark, then pulled a knob and dropped his right foot down.  The dim sanctuary vibrated abruptly with a bad-natured farting rumble while Sheppard pulled three more knobs.  Apparently satisfied with his choices (which had modulated the sound to something slightly less fart-like), Sheppard put pencil back to paper and finished his notation: 32’ Contra, 16’ Open D., 8’ 8ve.

“I told him that I was confident his faith could find other anchoring points,” said Rodney.  He stuck one finger under the edge of his clerical collar and scratched at the sweaty strip of skin just underneath.  “But I wanted to tell him to find another church and leave me the hell alone.”

Sheppard lifted his foot and dropped his pencil.

“Aren’t you impressed by my heroic restraint?” prompted Rodney.

Sheppard blinked out of his musical trance and Rodney could almost see him replaying the last five minutes of Rodney’s rambling.  “You’re the model of restraint,” agreed Sheppard, turning off his stand light and powering down the console.  “One might even call it Christ-like.”

“Well,” said Rodney, preening a little.  “Wait.  You’re making fun of me.”

Sheppard’s mouth slanted on one side.  “Never."

P.S., if you wish to demand more of any of these or from any of my past SGA WIP amnesty posts (SGA ones are here and here), please do.  I am all at loose ends and it may help to have someone say "THAT ONE.  WRITE THAT."