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anghraineSo, au_bigbang season is nearly over, and my fics are just about done. Naturally, this means it's time to come to the crushing realization that they're both awful and I should have done everything different and if only I had procrastinated less, or ... gone to school less ... I could figure out how to make them not-awful.
Lucy, for instance -- I've talked about how I didn't feel the need to stick as closely to the text as I did with First Impressions, last year, but I -- still have, a lot, because for a good portion of the story I can't think of any reason why it'd be different. So it's like 2/3 novelization (novella-ization?) with switched proper name/pronouns to 1/3 minor divergences. That's probably being generous. The last chapter is full of things happening and bored me out of my skull to write, because it's (1) pretty much identical to the original, scene-wise, and (2) heavy on dialogue, meaning there's even less opportunity to do anything remotely original with it. Gah.
Of course, unlike FI, a lot of that is because this is setting up a series, and not supposed to be a stand-alone, really. I know that at a later, as-yet-unwritten point, it swerves waaay off the canon path and a lot of this is setting up that.
Though not as much as Revenge. Once I realized that I wanted to map it even more closely (though far from identically!) to the original plans for a longer series, with Episode VI carrying on the story rather than trying to wrap it all up, it became -- well, possible to finish, for one. Which is good, obviously! But at the same time, its entire purpose is to set up its own sequel. There's almost no resolution, just setting up a bunch of arcs and plotlines and relationships and whatnot. And even by comparison to the much-shorter Lucy, nothing. ever. happens. There are scenes. People talk. There are flashbacks. Where people also talk.
Also, it really is as much about setting up the alternate canon, as well as the general AU, so that the plotlines-that-will-be-resolved-at-some-unspecified-later-date ... well, make any sense whatsoever. So there's lots of PT AU/alternate canon stuff spliced in, and I don't know if the pacing works at all -- though those were the bits I most enjoyed writing.
It's kind of weird, because I generally ship Anakin/Padmé and don't especially like PT stuff in general, but writing the Revengeverse alternate canon PT-era scenes between Anakin and Padmé were really fun. Maybe because it wasn't a full-length PT fic, but just glimpses at this whole alternate reality where I can have Tarkin, Padmé, Anakin, and the dread OFC all in the same scene with very little romance, and then jump to Anakin and Obi-Wan, to Anakin and baby Luke, to Anakin and dead!Shmi and his the-same-but-different response to her torture and murder, to his very-different turn. And Force-ghosts. And verrrrrrry gradual realizations instead of the verging-on Informed Attribute ones we got in canon.
That's more satisfying for me personally, but looking back over fourteen chapters of it I'm ... idk. Canon was at least interesting, and I'm not sure Revenge is, except as a sort of thought experiment. Maybe the PT bits are the only interesting bits at all. Or maybe they aren't. I don't know. And I've never written proper longfic in this fandom (the ten facts doesn't count -- it was shorter, for one, and lazy rather than proper fic, for another), so I don't know what anyone will think.
Hele's been reading it for me, which has been hugely helpful (okay, and hilarious: "denial boy" may be the most apropos nickname for a character ever), but there's a fandom. Out there. That mostly scares me and omg they might read this and they might hate it and tell all their friends how awful it is. But maybe everything will be sunshine and rainbows! They might like it. I just don't know.
*wibbles*
And I've also realized that ... I love SW and I'm really into it at the moment (a little burned-out at the moment, but I know that's just the au_bigbangs talking), but my writerly preferences are much more suited to writing Austenfic. I much, much, much prefer writing calm dialogue and introspection. I've had fun haphazardly feeding possible ships. But action scenes bore me.
I can watch them, sure -- though even watching, my favourite scenes tend to be the emotional revelations and such, and I can take or leave the space battles. Essentially the last thing I have to write for Revenge is an action scene (and the only one, I think), and I'm just dreading it because boooooooooring. But I'm terrified that everybody else will think everything else (the parts that are really my thing!) are boring. Basically, I'm writing this as if I were writing Austenfic, and it's only just now struck me that THIS. IS. STAR WARS.
And it's too late to fix. And honestly, you probably shouldn't be too free with the red pen in a late-night fit of paranoia. But I want them to be good! And I'm terrified they actually suck. :(
Letter meme
Fulfilling yet another bargain with ladyhadhafang...
Comment and I'll give you a letter; then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter. After, post this in your journal, and give out some letters of your own.
Asexuality meme
Day 25: What is the worst argument you've ever heard against asexuality?
Um. Probably that it's a soul-crushing medical condition and those poor people, they just can't understand what they've never had but we must cure them and then they too will see the light. In this context, "light" generally means "penis."
As someone who does have medical conditions (both psychiatric and... not), this bothers me on so many levels. Erasure of male asexuals, ableism (I am not your personal fix-it project in any respect, kthxbai), misogyny up to eleven, and, in particular, connecting personal assholery up to the society-wide dominance of the medical power structures.
That last one is -- it bothers me, yes. Sitting across from a psychiatrist who clearly believes my orientation is a diagnosable illness, watching her scribble down notes that I can't see and have no access to, but which may very well follow me for the rest of my life, is one of the more chilling experiences I've ever had. (For the record, I've nearly died several times. All but once, due solely to my for-reals chronic illness. The experience of being stripped of control over my own welfare has always been the worst part of that, and I don't appreciate repeating it in non-fatal contexts, either.)
I've seen "worse" arguments in the sense that they're more ludicrous, more poorly-constructed and so on, but for me, the pathologizing arguments are the worst in the sense of being the most harmful and most painful. So I'm going with that.
Fanfic meme
Day 25: Music -- do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain mood to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?
I generally listen to music. I have a general playlist of Things Elizabeth Likes, which runs the gamut from The Messiah to A Very Potter Musical, and I like to have it on in the background. Sometimes, songs with very distinctive lyrics are too distracting and I have to switch them; I like it as background. Sometimes I'll put on a specific song to aid the mood (problem: writing tragedy, but am feeling irrepressibly cheerful; solution: This Is Gallifrey: Our Childhood, Our Home). I almost never make playlists for a particular fic, though I'll skip to more suitable songs in my main playlist. The only exception is for SW -- while I often listen to the main list, I do have a John Williams-only playlist (or rather, a SW + Raiders Theme playlist) that I sometimes put on.
I can't deal with any other noise. I can't even do homework in noise (aside from my music), but writing -- definitely not. If there's any noise going on, I just wind my music up as high as it'll go.
Lucy, for instance -- I've talked about how I didn't feel the need to stick as closely to the text as I did with First Impressions, last year, but I -- still have, a lot, because for a good portion of the story I can't think of any reason why it'd be different. So it's like 2/3 novelization (novella-ization?) with switched proper name/pronouns to 1/3 minor divergences. That's probably being generous. The last chapter is full of things happening and bored me out of my skull to write, because it's (1) pretty much identical to the original, scene-wise, and (2) heavy on dialogue, meaning there's even less opportunity to do anything remotely original with it. Gah.
Of course, unlike FI, a lot of that is because this is setting up a series, and not supposed to be a stand-alone, really. I know that at a later, as-yet-unwritten point, it swerves waaay off the canon path and a lot of this is setting up that.
Though not as much as Revenge. Once I realized that I wanted to map it even more closely (though far from identically!) to the original plans for a longer series, with Episode VI carrying on the story rather than trying to wrap it all up, it became -- well, possible to finish, for one. Which is good, obviously! But at the same time, its entire purpose is to set up its own sequel. There's almost no resolution, just setting up a bunch of arcs and plotlines and relationships and whatnot. And even by comparison to the much-shorter Lucy, nothing. ever. happens. There are scenes. People talk. There are flashbacks. Where people also talk.
Also, it really is as much about setting up the alternate canon, as well as the general AU, so that the plotlines-that-will-be-resolved-at-some-unspecified-later-date ... well, make any sense whatsoever. So there's lots of PT AU/alternate canon stuff spliced in, and I don't know if the pacing works at all -- though those were the bits I most enjoyed writing.
It's kind of weird, because I generally ship Anakin/Padmé and don't especially like PT stuff in general, but writing the Revengeverse alternate canon PT-era scenes between Anakin and Padmé were really fun. Maybe because it wasn't a full-length PT fic, but just glimpses at this whole alternate reality where I can have Tarkin, Padmé, Anakin, and the dread OFC all in the same scene with very little romance, and then jump to Anakin and Obi-Wan, to Anakin and baby Luke, to Anakin and dead!Shmi and his the-same-but-different response to her torture and murder, to his very-different turn. And Force-ghosts. And verrrrrrry gradual realizations instead of the verging-on Informed Attribute ones we got in canon.
That's more satisfying for me personally, but looking back over fourteen chapters of it I'm ... idk. Canon was at least interesting, and I'm not sure Revenge is, except as a sort of thought experiment. Maybe the PT bits are the only interesting bits at all. Or maybe they aren't. I don't know. And I've never written proper longfic in this fandom (the ten facts doesn't count -- it was shorter, for one, and lazy rather than proper fic, for another), so I don't know what anyone will think.
Hele's been reading it for me, which has been hugely helpful (okay, and hilarious: "denial boy" may be the most apropos nickname for a character ever), but there's a fandom. Out there. That mostly scares me and omg they might read this and they might hate it and tell all their friends how awful it is. But maybe everything will be sunshine and rainbows! They might like it. I just don't know.
*wibbles*
And I've also realized that ... I love SW and I'm really into it at the moment (a little burned-out at the moment, but I know that's just the au_bigbangs talking), but my writerly preferences are much more suited to writing Austenfic. I much, much, much prefer writing calm dialogue and introspection. I've had fun haphazardly feeding possible ships. But action scenes bore me.
I can watch them, sure -- though even watching, my favourite scenes tend to be the emotional revelations and such, and I can take or leave the space battles. Essentially the last thing I have to write for Revenge is an action scene (and the only one, I think), and I'm just dreading it because boooooooooring. But I'm terrified that everybody else will think everything else (the parts that are really my thing!) are boring. Basically, I'm writing this as if I were writing Austenfic, and it's only just now struck me that THIS. IS. STAR WARS.
And it's too late to fix. And honestly, you probably shouldn't be too free with the red pen in a late-night fit of paranoia. But I want them to be good! And I'm terrified they actually suck. :(
Letter meme
Fulfilling yet another bargain with ladyhadhafang...
Comment and I'll give you a letter; then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter. After, post this in your journal, and give out some letters of your own.
Asexuality meme
Day 25: What is the worst argument you've ever heard against asexuality?
Um. Probably that it's a soul-crushing medical condition and those poor people, they just can't understand what they've never had but we must cure them and then they too will see the light. In this context, "light" generally means "penis."
As someone who does have medical conditions (both psychiatric and... not), this bothers me on so many levels. Erasure of male asexuals, ableism (I am not your personal fix-it project in any respect, kthxbai), misogyny up to eleven, and, in particular, connecting personal assholery up to the society-wide dominance of the medical power structures.
That last one is -- it bothers me, yes. Sitting across from a psychiatrist who clearly believes my orientation is a diagnosable illness, watching her scribble down notes that I can't see and have no access to, but which may very well follow me for the rest of my life, is one of the more chilling experiences I've ever had. (For the record, I've nearly died several times. All but once, due solely to my for-reals chronic illness. The experience of being stripped of control over my own welfare has always been the worst part of that, and I don't appreciate repeating it in non-fatal contexts, either.)
I've seen "worse" arguments in the sense that they're more ludicrous, more poorly-constructed and so on, but for me, the pathologizing arguments are the worst in the sense of being the most harmful and most painful. So I'm going with that.
Fanfic meme
Day 25: Music -- do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain mood to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?
I generally listen to music. I have a general playlist of Things Elizabeth Likes, which runs the gamut from The Messiah to A Very Potter Musical, and I like to have it on in the background. Sometimes, songs with very distinctive lyrics are too distracting and I have to switch them; I like it as background. Sometimes I'll put on a specific song to aid the mood (problem: writing tragedy, but am feeling irrepressibly cheerful; solution: This Is Gallifrey: Our Childhood, Our Home). I almost never make playlists for a particular fic, though I'll skip to more suitable songs in my main playlist. The only exception is for SW -- while I often listen to the main list, I do have a John Williams-only playlist (or rather, a SW + Raiders Theme playlist) that I sometimes put on.
I can't deal with any other noise. I can't even do homework in noise (aside from my music), but writing -- definitely not. If there's any noise going on, I just wind my music up as high as it'll go.
no subject
on 2011-09-06 02:57 am (UTC)hi!
on 2011-09-06 08:03 am (UTC)Heh, I do have to agree about the benefits of holding conversations. One of my notes for Revenge was "communication saves lives! ... billions of lives."
your description of this as basically SW content in Austen style only serves to make me squee that much more.
Thank you for this, really! This really is the thing I've struggled with the most -- I don't do casual, so I've been terrified that they're going to sound horribly stilted. (Admittedly, then I remember the Holiday Special. But still!)
Also, as a totally irrelevant note, I love your icon. Gorgeous, and Luke and Anakin in a nutshell (when I try to think of either's most distinctive trait, I always think of Ariel singing I want mooooore, so that's perfect).
Re: hi!
on 2011-09-06 10:34 pm (UTC)Yes! I have lost count of stories, some of which I love dearly, that would be about fifteen pages/minutes long if the characters would just talk to each other about what's on their dear little minds!
You're welcome! And the awesome thing about SW is that nobody who reads Austen for pleasure is likely to make George Lucas' characters sound stilted. :D (Someday, I swear I will figure out the thought processes that take Anakin Skywalker from the speech patterns he had in RotS to the ones Vader has in ANH. All I've got is that the man's entire social life from the end of RotS onward was basically, "Give it orders, kill it, or (in the case of the Emperor and his favored flunkies like Tarkin) take its orders with varying degrees of good grace". So he had no occasion to just talk to people. Not to mention that that chest plate/respirator looks heavy; casual conversation might have been off the menu anyway. But.)
Thanks! I'm an inveterate icon-scavenger; just about any of mine are available for ganking, with credit where it's due (i.e., usually not me; credits are on my icon page. :) )
Re: hi!
on 2011-09-12 05:46 am (UTC)I think my number one favorite thing in fic is "somebody who has really thought about this universe is putting their thoughts in story form." Dialoguing with the source material, you know?
YES. As far as I'm concerned, that's the whole point of fanfic. If I wasn't interested in that, I'd just write original fic! (Well, which I do. But I wouldn't bother with fanfic too, I mean.)
And the awesome thing about SW is that nobody who reads Austen for pleasure is likely to make George Lucas' characters sound stilted.
ahahahahahahaha. I laughed aloud at this. That...may be true. :P I actually had an elaborate theory about the speech patterns back in the days before (I watched) the PT -- I figured that Vader's native tongue wasn't Basic and he only acquired it relatively late in life -- late preadolescence, maybe. Of course the PT Jossed it, but it's definitely my headcanon for Revenge!Anakin, and I tried to keep some similarity in his speech patterns.
In canon, I think I'd go with ... hm, his lungs and throat were pretty thoroughly crisped, weren't they? Maybe it's physically painful to speak and so he developed a rather brusque style. The formality is -- maybe he was trying to conceal his identity, initially? Or simply to forge a new identity completely disconnected from his Anakin-self, went for the direct opposite of his earlier style, and by ANH it's just habit. (And the people around him are formal, too, so... yeah.)
Re: the icons, thanks! I'm out of room over here, but I think I may have to gank some of them for my lj.
Re: hi!
on 2011-09-13 12:07 am (UTC)Yes, exactly! Putting your own spin on someone else's curveball, so to speak.
Oooh, I like your headcanon for Vader's speech patterns! (Both your headcanons, actually).
That's also my take on it! It hurts to speak; and that chestplate does not look lightweight so maybe even taking in air is taxing for him. (It's also my headcanon that the reason he bulked up between the PT and the OT is that the cybernetic limbs were heavy to haul around; he developed the musculature as a result.)
I go back and forth on the identity issue generally; I wonder if he wasn't so much concealing his identity as it hurt to be reminded--- and he was inclined to share the pain with anyone who reminded him, by way of a nice Force-choking, so people pretty much got with the "Address him as Lord Vader" program? (I don't have an answer here.) But he was definitely hanging around with some very formal people, and he was in very... distant... relationships with all of them; there was nobody he'd, ah, just chill with (the idea is kind of cracky, actually) so he got into the habit of speaking more formally?
I feel your pain on the out-of-icons-ness! And I have a Seed Account! But feel free to grab any of my icons--- credits are in the keywords.