Things I am glad for today: a week between deadline and reveal

I am SO GLAD that Night on Fic Mountain has a week between the "fic due" deadline and the "fics live" date.  Because I think I'll be able to get this fic "finished" and posted by four this afternoon my time (the deadline), but it is SO INCREDIBLY ROUGH you have no idea.  Like, when I started I had no clear idea what the fic was going to be, and it changed several times as I was writing but I didn't have time to go back and fix things to smooth it over, and even now I am changing the ending from what I was building up for and so there's gonna have to be serious editing to go through and make it all make sense (switching the character in the main finale means she, uh, has to appear before the last scene so she's not completely coming out of left field, since she hasn't even been MENTIONED in the fic as written so far ....)

Yeah.  Not good.

On the other hand, my email provider went wonky and I missed a whole weekend worth of emails. I'm getting things now, but the backlog hasn't shown up.  For emails sent directly to me, that's no big deal, because people will resend them.  But I subscribe to a lot of fics on AO3, so I usually get between three and five fic update notices each day from AO3, and those DON'T go in your inbox, and you can't sort your subscription list by date updated, so that's anywhere between nine and fifteen fics that I'll be confused by the next time they update.  (I just hope none of them finished, because I wouldn't know.  Blergh.)  I have requested the ability to sort subscriptions by date updated, but who knows if they'll ever do it.

(no subject)

I am writing an Agent Carter fic.  The show usually had some badass fight scenes between Peggy and the villain du jour, and I was planning on doing that.  But she’s an espionage agent, and so for her fighting often means she’s failed because she’s been spotted.  The most important thing, in most counter-espionage (which is what she’s doing) is to spot the enemy without being spotted in return, so you can tail them and find out their contacts and keep the enemy you know from being replaced by agents you don’t know (and hopefully feeding them false information while you do it).

It has just occurred to me that maybe instead of a fight scene, I should end this fic by the target being positively identified and put under surveillance.  But it seems so anticlimactic.   (On the other hand, it means I don’t have to figure out what the villain’s plot is, because that’s part of what the surveillance is meant to find out.)  (On the third hand, it also means I don’t have to write a fight scene, which is good because I suck at action.)  (On the fourth hand, given the time constraints, I think I’m going to write the surveillance ending so I can post it today before the deadline, then send it out to beta and see what they say–I’ve got a week until it goes live.)

Thoughts, opinions?