Quiet time

So I decided to skip NaNo because my idea lacked cohesion in the days before November. I did want to write though so I'm just going to write more in my series stuff (hopefully finish And I'll Form the Head completely) and write some new material in one of my old fandoms. 

Whoa, just went off on a side mission to AliExpress to look for a handbag. Brain. Hurts. Too many options!

So anywhoo, writing writing writing.

 Um, I don't think it's completely insurmountable:

1. Camp NaNoWriMo - editing this time around
2. Jukebox - Some ideas percolating
3. BTFChallenge - I have a fandom *crickets*
4. Unspecified three sentence prompts. 

Oops.

I'm all juiced from reading excellent short stories and I need to capitalise on it. I have ideas, they need to be mapped out a bit but I think they'll be awesome! Keep telling yourself that girl.

I received a link to Felicia Day’s Advice for Creative People Who Suffer from Anxiety and Depression via Camp NaNoWriMo in my inbox this morning. I really must read her book.

Tomorrow is ANZAC Day, I shall attempt to make ANZAC biscuits. Photos may follow if I am successful.

Original writing this year seems to be the way of it. I've finished one and I'm waiting on Jukebox to close so I can receive my assignment.

Dear DJ

Oh how I love you for writing me a story, not in a stalker-love kind of way, but a very thankful, gosh you're a kind soul kind of way so may you have a lovely Jukebox experience. I do have a few DNW's (and every time I look at someone's letter I think, "Oh no, do I have to add that as well?") mine are below. I have made a few suggestions for each prompt but they are exactly that, just suggestions. It's your story.

I like:

• Complex many-faceted characters from all walks of life
• Characters that have human frailties and are flawed even if they also have strength and power
• Fairy tales rewritten in ways that reinvigorate and give new twists that make them contemporary
• I am a sucker for superhero or super villain origin stories
• Fantasy where characters are challenged mentally, physically, and emotionally
• Science fiction that is heavy on science
• Strong world building
• Urban fantasy (minus the romance)
• Also a sucker for happy endings, fluff, crack, plottiness, hurt/comfort, kindness, height difference, love, tenderness, friendship, families being families, curtain fic, heroism, magic, fix-it fics, holiday fics, rule 63, touch, intimacy, mentors being awesome, women being awesome, secret identity failures, aaaaaand did I mention happy endings.

Totes happy to receive fic with these:

• Offensive language
• Gen, het, slash, or femslash - it's your choice.

Specifically do not want please:

• Explicit sexual content of any kind
• Gratuitous violence (excludes fantasy violence or comedic violence)
• Sexual violence, dub-con, non-con, abuse, incest, underage, pregnancy
• Self harm and suicide
• Angst or depression (it's just too hard for me to read stories about depression as a sufferer)
• Animal abuse or pet death
• Character death
• I'm sorry if it feels restrictive but I have reasons.

Requests (in no particular order):

Team - Lorde (Song) | Fanfic | YouTube | Lyrics

Call all the ladies out, They're in their finery
A hundred jewels on throats, A hundred jewels between teeth
Now bring my boys in, Their skin in craters like the moon
The moon we love like a brother, while he glows through the room

I can think of a lot of possibilities with this story: superheroes or villains, a masquerade ball of aliens, fantasy, sci-fi, urban fantasy, fairytale. The choice is yours and if you want to go somewhere else with it, please do.


Glory and Gore - Lorde (Song) | Fanfic | YouTube | Lyrics

Delicate in every way but one (the swordplay)
God knows we like archaic kinds of fun (the old way)
Chance is the only game I play with, baby
We let our battles choose us

This feels like a song about fighting and drinking, drinking and fighting, more fighting, and then having fun afterwards. It could be the story of an epic bar brawl in a fantasy pub that spills out into a city, a cosplay battle between enraged fandoms at a 'con, a D&D type situation that takes on horrible reality, a book club getting out of hand, the possibilities are endless.


Princes of the Universe - Queen (Song) | Fanfic | YouTube | Lyrics


It feels quite grand this song, a song of men, strapping warrior men who cannot be bested by anyone except maybe each other. Princes of the universe, so like, aliens then? Conquering worlds in some one-up-manship type competition but really is it just love? Ugh, save me from my sappiness.


Wisdom, Justice, and Love - Linkin Park (Song) | Fanfic | YouTube | Lyrics

Cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love

This piece, I don't want to call it music because it borrows heavily from Dr Martin Luther King Jnr's speech. It feels like an AI is thinking about human qualities in theory and finding them hard in practice. It's science fiction-y, it's speculative. It's whatever you feel like writing.


Diamonds - Rihanna (Music Video) | Fanfic | YouTube | Lyrics

What I take from this video is that the narrator is a woman who can't help getting into trouble. I feel an urban fantasy witch thief type story would fit maybe. Up to you.


Kings - The Pierces (Music Video) | Fanfic | YouTube | Lyrics
Well, that was a marathon I hear you say. It was, I agree, but thank you for persevering. :)

Three Sentence Ficathon. I am still working on my NaNo, I can't be distracted! *is distracted for several minutes* GODDAMMIT!!!

Link is so I can find it again on Tuesday and hope it's still in progress:

Three Sentence Ficathon 2015

Ugh, body why do you do this every month? I hate you! I also side eye every comment made to me online and in real life so... *headdesk*

I got my Jukebox story back from beta, thank you lovely beta! Unfortunately it was done in MS Word, I don't have Word and the only compatible programme is playing merry hell with the comments portion.

Le sigh.

The feedback that I can read is excellent and has inspired me to burn the story to the ground and rebuild it, Million Dollar Man style; it will be stronger, faster, and more awesome than the original.

I need to do significant work on the characters, world building, cut two scenes, flesh out the remaining one, and just generally get my shit together in terms of my English language skills. I don't know how I've made it through life so long with a love of writing but only the barest understanding of formal sentence structure and grammar. That's the New Zealand education system at it's finest though; the cracks are so wide a building could fall through them.

The timing conflicts with NaNo so project Jukebox is being sidelined until later in the year or next year now.

Yuletide is a definite no go now. I can't trust myself to produce a work of quality for it. I can't see anyone wanting to write my requested fandoms. I do not like pinch hit fulfilments, they don't have the same sparkle as a story from someone in love with the fandom.

So I am tempted to go from "Planning" NaNo to "Pantsing" NaNo because the planning side is going against my nature as a spontaneous writer who makes it up as she goes.

Pantsing. Heh.

My icon is NW Forever so it's ironic that I've been considering retiring from the New Warriors fandom.

I've loved this fictional team for twenty-five years (I'm so fucking old) so it's no small decision but I'm just not feeling it anymore. I already left that forum full of diehard male readers assholes who had to nitpick everything I posted. AO3 doesn't generate much. A look at the latest couple of fics on ff.net? *shudders*

We're almost at the one year anniversary of the volume five series ending, it had so much promise but didn't quite click with readers for whatever reason, I loved those dorks.

( Read more... )

I, of course, am not an expert in this. Let's be honest from the outset though, there are very few, if any, original ideas left in writing. There are simply original takes on things that have already happened at other people's pens.

Context: I'm trying to write a story for "an upcoming fandom exchange" that walks a fine line between original fiction and inspired by the "core material" while not being a word for word copy, an uses 'tropes sparringly but well.

Fantasy: I want it to be fun, quirky, sassy. I want it to be memorable.

Reality: At this point, I'm going to hope for the best. I'm not feeling my story at all, it's the second major attempt at writing something for this prompt, the first attempt didn't feel right even as I was writing it-- this one feels moderately better but meh overall. It feels a little violent, vulgar, and ugly.

Another rant in my semi-regular programme of rants lately. It's very cathartic to vent on things that annoy you.


So I temporarily have a sign up for Night on Fic Mountain, that might and probably will change before the end of sign ups because all of my requests have a big fat zero against them and I don't want to go to a pinch hit list.

I've signed up to a few of these things now and pretty much each time I end up with a pinch hitter, the reason I know that it's a pinch hitter is because it could've been written from wikipedia entries, there is none of the little clues and hints that you're reading something that someone knew more than the basics, there is no soul.

My feeling is, as writers, because fanfiction writers will never not be real writers, we need to challenge ourselves just as much as our original fic comrades. Don't always take the easy fandom, you might not have anything new and fresh to offer it. Sometimes you'll find it's more gratifying to take on something more risky and write something that challenges you, forces you to write from unfamiliar character povs, or time periods, or genders, or comfort levels, the list could go on.

You won't get the enormous number of comments but surely that's not why you're doing this?

The first yuletide I participated in was the only time I didn't get what I consider a pinch hit story. What I read was from someone with more than a passing knowledge of the source material, they knew how the characters acted, how they moved and communicated with each other, something only gleamed from reading the book series my request came from.

When I wrote The Feline Specialist, I had watched Aliens a million times (or surely a few dozen), I know the source material, I loved Alien, I loved Jonesy and Ripley, I loved all of the characters in that particular movie except the one you're not supposed to love but even then, I loved his programmed villainy. It was a risk writing from the cat's pov but it paid off.

For Learning to Drive, I'd watched the film about three times over the last few years. I loved the source material, I loved the driver and I loved Betty, I yearned to know more about him and where he came from, how he met her, how things became the fucked up normal that things were in that film. It was risky to write it only having watched it three times but my ideas and the prompts were for things that had occured prior to the film so I was going to be worldbuilding a little, it was worth the risk. Maybe it paid off, maybe it didn't, I can't read into it to much.

There have been a few times where I was matched on my weakest offer and my attempts received mixed reviews, that's okay, I wasn't an expert and if anyone was an expert in that fandom they hadn't stepped up to write something better. I made an attempt, it was in one instance rejected, and one embraced and loved.

I weighed it up each time, take the risk and write in a fandom that I had only a passing familiarity to, or don't. What could I gain? What would I lose?

This NoFM I have signed up to write five passingly familiar fandoms, partially by choice, partially to push my personal writing envelope. It's a terrifying feeling. I am not a popular writer, I don't have a following, I don't have a bunch of people leaping out of the shadows to beta for me no matter what fandom I write in. I think sometimes that the requestors don't even know what to make of my efforts on their behalf but are almost all unfailingly polite to me, sometimes they rave, sometimes there are crickets for days.

I think what I'm trying to say is that if we all played it safe in these exchanges, no one in the truly rare fandoms would ever get a new story. If we all played it safe, we wouldn't find new fandoms to love and people to share them with. If we all played it safe and only wrote the new popular fandoms that have squeaked into these exchanges because they are new and haven't build up a firm and numerous following yet. We, doesn't that go against the concept of rewarding fans of rare fandoms?

It's fine if you have a solid idea for one of these "squeaked in" fandoms, but isn't it better to post it outside of the exchange and take on something truly rare in the spirit of the exchange?

In this years Night on Fic Mountain, it appears Agent Carter is the favourite, followed not closely by Forever (TV) and Jupiter Ascending. I ask you, are they rare? Truly rare?

My personal belief is that writers sign up hoping to get an Agent Carter and get something else entirely, something a little tougher than they expected, and how many default because it's too hard? Too many I think from watching how these things unfold after posting date.

And this is where I have an issue with pinch hits and why exchanges like Beyond Panels who have a history of posting the pinch hits publicly where the requestor can see that not a single writer wanted their requests-- any of them; well, it enrages me.There is something to be said for maintaining the illusion of dignity for the requestor-- no one wants to be rejected, even more not publicly rejected, no one wants to know they're holding up the entire exchange because their fandoms were "too hard" to write in. A smart moderator wouldn't have posted that publicly, that's why you have the pinch hitter's emails right? To do it privately? So fucking do it privately. The requestor knows because no gift has appears in their AO3, do you have to say it outloud for the whole world to know as well. Privacy, look it up.

So in closing this vent up tight, if I don't have a taker for any of my rare fandoms by close to sign ups finishing, I will drop out of writing in my five rare fandoms and not think twice on it. For my risk, I want a reward, and I want one from someone who actually gave a shit, didn't phone it in or more accurately, researched it in without feeling a thing for the fandom or the requestor. I don't want a shitty pinch hit that has no soul, I don't want to read something that doesn't sing to me about how much the writer loved writing it.