Laughter Through Tears

fanfic fandoms are like watching an adult try to color with crayons.

I was looking at 12 Months of AU - A Year Long Fic Writing Challenge and came up with a just absolutely angsty idea for an Allegra/Clarmont A/U and I am not sure whether I'm up to it. I mean, just... ugh, my heart.

This year I'm determined to be a better recipient for Yuletide than in years past. Reveals start going up in about four hours and I intend to read my gift on my lunch break and comment on it immediately. And you can hold me to that. In fact, I'm gonna read and comment on all the 7KPP fics for this year (they're here). We're a small fandom and deeply dormant, and fic authors deserve all the attention they can get.

I am also deeply anxious about the gift I wrote this year, but that's par for the course.

Once again I slide in my Yuletide noms just under the deadline. I did nom 7KPP again of course, but it all depends on whether anyone requests or offers it. If there's a fair number of requests, I may decide to offer only characters I haven't written very much of (so no princesses or widows, for once). I just... feel the need for variety, and I can only flourish creatively under external pressure.

I've been sinking into writing lots of fanfic, which is a thing that happens sometimes when I'm going through a rough patch. My peak points of writing fic in three of my last four fandoms corresponded to periods of depression, health problems, crap jobs, low grades, etc.

But this time, this time I was supposed to channel it into writing original fiction. And for a while it was even working. I had developed a cast of characters that I liked, I had clear growth arcs for them all. I had even outlined about two thirds of the plot, in great detail.

Now I'm jammed, and I feel like shit about everything most days. So I'm back to fanfic.

I mean, there's an arc and everything, and fuck knows I have an entire supporting cats outlined in my mind...

But this wasn't the plan.

Yesterday was a bad day and for some reason that meant today was a bad day, too. I had a plan and everything. Maybe I can still muster the energy to, IDK, fold laundry or something. To give myself more of a feeling that I did something today, other than wallowing in self-pity. And washing my hair.

Over the last nine days I wrote so much fanfic that I feel like my brain is shutting down.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to properly rest my brain.

(Everything is fine. This is good tired. I have appointments and things and the immediately crisis is over.)

*~*purimgifts~*~

So, in my life as a fanfic writer (which lbh is the best part of it always and forever) I have had two (very bisexual) unfinished longfics that I considered filing the serial numbers off of. As an exercise in long-form writing, the thing I spend my life angsting about, it wasn't a bad idea per se. One of these, I have more or less let go of the idea of. I don't really have enough passion in me to write a novella's worth of bisexual vampire urban fantasy in some "vague North American city" setting, let alone constructing from scratch the kind of secondary setting that plot would require.

The second, I have more complicated feelings about. Because the crux of that second story is an emotional arc involving a series of relationships and shifting allegiances between three very different people. My emotional investment in these three characters and their need to resolve around each other hasn't flatlined, even if it's not as strong as it was two or three years ago. And I'm still pretty mad about the worldbuilding things in the canon for that fic that I was using the fic to try and address. But time has passed and my storytelling voice has grown and evolved and changed, I did NaNo for 2016 and started developing a story of NaNo 2017 that I have high hopes for.

One of the things that I have high hopes for w/r/t this story (henceforth TAOS) is that, as I only just realized, it takes a subplot from this abandoned fanfic, guts it, reconstructs it, and basically wears its skin. And wears it much better, I should add, while also incorporating some elements from two of my favorite stories, the kind that I've been obsessed with referencing or retelling since, uh, time. TAOS basically makes the "bones" plot of the fic redundant, and undermines a lot of my reason for wanting to file off and rewrite it.

What TAOS doesn't have, though, is that complex emotional dynamic that I was so attached to, that I still want to revisit in some way, shape or form. And no, I cannot inject this dynamic into the story, either, as its structure is completely wrong and its core cast can't be wrapped around the ideas central to the character conflict in the other. Individual elements, maybe I could. Like, I could add an antagonistic, resentment to respect relationship that starts sexual and evolves into a romance. Probably. I could add a poly relationship, probably, pretty easily. But not the whole thing, not the complete structure that was the pivot of the emotional arc of the original fic. Not without it being awkward as fuck and undermining the narrative integrity of the plot and characters.

Now I'm stuck wondering whether I should just mourn that whole story and move on. Or leave well enough alone, allow it to stay dormant in the back of my mind, until my mind can find a suitable home for it, which may be years from now or never. Or force the issue, try to deconstruct the core plot elements that made that dynamic possible and use them as bones to build a new story more or less from scratch, without the social/political component that compelled me to write it to begin with.

Writing is hard.

I'm experiencing a wave of nostalgia for my old fanfic that is both powerful and inexplicable.

When I was a teenager, my dream was to write a novel.

In the army, my dream was to write and publish a novel.

In my early twenties, I was convinced that it was just a matter of time before I wrote a publishable novel.

...I am terrible at writing novels.

Over the past fifteen or so years, I have been writing short fiction of various lengths and descriptions. I flatter myself that I have become quite good at it. I can look back at something I wrote two or three years ago and be largely pleased with it. Farther back than that, things get a little hazier. But no matter what else I've done, I've always struggled with writing longer form works of fiction.

Writing a novel is so easy and automatic an idea, that it took many years and many failed attempts before I considered the idea of not trying to write one. Most of my successful and satisfying works have been short fiction, and when I write in chaptered form I often feel like I'm floundering. Part of the impetus behind the Collar of the Damned project was to try and develop my short original fiction as part of a shared universe.

Then again, writing well-structured short fiction isn't easy, either. Looking back at the past few years of my writing, I feel like I have improved my pacing and structure a lot. Most often, when a story went past a certain length, I would structure it out of snippets clearly divided by sharp scene transitions. It made them read like chained vignettes. More recent stories are better paced and more cohesive in their structure.

Here are some hard numbers, primarily for my own reference: ( Read more... )

I had excellent intentions for this morning and then ended up spending several straight hours reading blogs.

I completed my jukebox_fest story and I don't know if I'll ever be happy with it. I feel like it needs to be torn to shreds by an editor and pieced back together over a month. My impulsive writing habits are starting to get me down and I want to spend part of this month working specifically on that.

Monday morning I made a big spreadsheet with writing goals for June. The spreadsheet has a category for blogging, with two specific meta subjects that I want to get around to. One of them is about The 100, which I have been overdue to write about since I glommed the whole series in amok.

Even though my mind is constantly churning with ideas and reactions to things, I feel like I actually bring up almost none of that. I want to change that, but I'm not certain where to start. My own fanfic? Characters that I find myself writing over and over again? How long it's been since I've even remotely kept up with contemporary SFF?

One of the items on my agenda is making a list of recent books to read and (possibly) review.