To the Sixes

^
That's how I'm feeling about the home stretch of FMB Chapter 2. I've edited it down and it's still 12k with another ~2k to go. EDIT: Never mind. I found a work around. Chapter 2 of FMB is off to the betas!


On other project fronts, I'm...

* Junking my current outline for Bastard of Kyoshi Island, because it's too effing long and I want the project to be manageable for the Big Bang.
* Stalled out on Alike in Heart, for several reasons.
* Finished a Kyoshi-centric drabble that I'll be posting (and expanding?) soon.
* Scaling back my plans for Praise Be to Nero's Neptune. Along with Facing Fearful Odds and Taking Sights, it'll be the last MEGA fanfic projects I'm going to be working on. From now on, I want to stick to the sub-50,000 word range. Too much damn time investment is needed to complete them. On that note, is anyone reading this interested in being a Praise Be beta reader? Because cold calling the FFnet beta listings has prove spectacularly unsuccessful.

On a completely unrelated note, they're apparently making a Young Justice animated series helmed by the guy who did Gargoyles. My inner geek rejoices at the thought of Miss Martian, a fairly obscure character, getting airtime. It'll help keep her from being stuffed in a fridge for a few years at least. Interestingly, they're not using Wonder Girl on the show because of some crazy rights issue. Apparently neither she nor Wonder Woman can appear in a TV show unless they're a main character. Who knew?

* Facing Fearful Odds -- Still stalled out on 9-C. Not sure what to do next. Might be time to seek advice from the betas on where to go from here. As I'm getting ready to publish, I find that you can really see the arc of my improvement as a writer over the ten chapters of FFO. The project has taken a year to complete and you can see that. For a long time, I thought Chapter 5 and 6 were the bee's knees, just the best things I'd ever done (because they took so much fucking effort -- I'm looking at you, Chapter 6-A/B). Now I have enough distance to see the seams in the monster's costume.

* The Full Metal Bitch -- Chapter 2 stands at a solid 2,774 words! Hurray! Still not loving having to mash up The Chase and Bitter Work. The Toph/Iroh fight feels like it should be the climactic scene, not at the 1/3rd mark. I'm not sure what the story beats should lead to instead. I do want to cover Toph teaching Aang, and how she's somewhat more philosophical as a teacher in this AU. Going non-linear is one solution, but tricky. I'd like to avoid it if possible. Blocking out the Toph/Iroh fight has also been a bitch -- I hate writing fight scenes. At least the subsequent three chapters (3; The Library -- The Serpent's Pass, 4; The Drill -- The Guru, and 5; The Crossroads of Destiny) have clear arcs.

* Praise Be to Nero's Neptune -- Been doing some more worldbuilding, such as trying to justify the in-story civil war. I'm interested in this project but it'll take a damn long time to write. It's such a major AU that everything needs to be settled before I can leap into it. I'm doing a dry run on some of my ideas for the Siege of Ba Sing Se and Fire Nation/Colonial & Iroh/Ozai politics in Full Metal Bitch. Two of the Big Ideas that have emerged over the course of outlining it have been "What are the consequences if the Balance is destroyed?" and "What if Aang had a whole nation backing him up?". I want to make this story different from FFO, and that latter idea, of the Avatar not traveling but working within the system, appeals to me as a writer.

* Alike in Heart -- I've picked up my Big Bang genderswap again. Got about ~1300ish words in over the past day or so. It's been interesting getting to know Sonna (girl!Sokka) as a character. My main goal in this fic is to avoid writing "Sokka with boobs." If you swapped Zuko's or Aang's or Toph's gender, there really wouldn't be much changed in their character arcs. They've got high enough status (or wealth) that gender isn't as big an issue for their roles in life as it would be for, say, Sokka, Yue or Suki. Gender roles are key to the shape their lives take. Viewing Sokka's basic personality through the lens of motherhood makes for... well, something of a cross between Team Mom, Papa Wolf and a Mad Scientist. Because if Sonna is going to look after her little sister Katara, she's damn well going to figure out a way to teach her waterbending.

* Trying my hand at some short-form fanfic, just as a change of pace. Nothing worth mentioning yet.

Currently 17,000ish words into the second draft of "Praise Be", which is more than I managed in all of NaNoWriMo. I finally figured out this morning how the story will end. Usually I start my projects with an ending in mind, but this one was a long time in coming.

I've spent the last day and a half heavily reworking Chapter 4 of "Facing Fearful Odds." I hit a growth spurt as a writer while Chapter 5 was in production and it's very clear that Chapter 4 is a gawky teenager. It's easily the worst chapter in all of Book 1.

Around the time I started writing Chapter 3, one of my two core betas recommended that I split up my earlier chapters into smaller sections for ease of reading. Chapter 1 is a little over 10k and he felt that was too long for casual readers. I didn't think so at first, but when I publish Siege of the South a few reviewers surprised me by mentioning that it was too long for a one-shot. I chalk it up to different fandoms, different standards. But returning to my point, I split up Chapters 1 and 2 after I had written them. Chapter 4 was the first chapter I wrote with the intention of splitting it up. I did a terrible job of this. There's no proper pacing. Unlike later sub-chapters, there's no self-contained mini-story in Chapters 4-A and 4-B.

Random observation on revising the whole of Book 1? I seem to frequently identify my characters by their hair and eye color in Chapters 1-4 of FFO, then stop doing that entirely starting in Chapter 5 onwards. It's a very lazy writing technique. I'm refraining from removing too many of these weakass hair/eye references, though, because I don't want to get stuck revising this story forever. My goal for March is to finish the first draft of FFO and by God I intend to do just that.

The past week wasn't the blazing "20,000 words in 7 days" I had going on at the start of March, but it's been okay so far.

* Progress on FFO has stalled out as I feel like I've lost the thread on Suki's arc for this current chapter.

* My Big Bang genderswap!Sokka entry has about 800 words to it, although I still haven't found the hook for the story. I'm not whether this is a "girl!Sokka's arc as the Gaang's Mama Wolf" story or "girl!Sokka's arc as a warrior." So the writing so far is more of 'exploratory surgery' of the genderswap concept than actual fic writing.

* I got another 7,000 words done the revamp of my failed 2009 NaNoWriMo fanfic novel, Praise Be to Nero's Neptune. The prologue and first two chapters are done. I'm about a third of the way through chapter three. I've decided to not go the full-force beta route on Praise Be that I'm doing for FFO. This is partly due to time constraints. FFO has a long beta phase and I'd like to try playing a bit looser with this project and see if I can cut down on post-production time but still deliver good fic.

* The outline for my upcoming Evangelion project, We'll Meet Again, has been completed. I'm tooling around with Chapter 1 so that the highly-AU premise is properly established before I start on Chapter 2.

Three Four awesome things I've found over the last few days:

1. johnny wander -- A autobiographical webcomic with the occasional short story. Take a few strips to get going. Pretty entertaining. Makes me want to start drawing comics again, but then I remember how terrible I was at it and how much I fucking hated drawing after nineteen straight months of M-W-F updates.

2. The Incredible and Angsty Journey of Rose Weasley, Girl Slasher! -- I can only hope to one day write a crackfic this awesome.

3. Damascus by drakensis -- This is less a 'found' than a 'rediscovered in my bookmarks folder'. It's an AtLA fanfic centered on an "Avatar Toph", which I'm enjoying both because it's a really well done AU and because it's interesting to see how someone else pulls off the "another canon character becomes the Avatar" thing I'm doing for FFO. There aren't a lot of alt!Avatar AUs, but this one's awesome. FFO riffs pretty heavily in canon, though in weird ways, but Damascus forges its own path -- for example, with what happened to Iroh and Azulon in the backstory. The author, drakensis, also writes Toph in-character but without the "Memetic Badass" vibe that plagues and dehumanizes the characterization of Toph and Iroh in a lot of AtLA fanfic.

4. Blocking ads on FFnet -- Yessssss.

Well, it's almost 2010. Let's look back on the year behind me and the year ahead, fanfiction-wise, and what I learned.

( 2009, Counting Up... )

In the last two weeks, I've been hard at work...

• ...on the revisions of Chapter 6-A and -B of Facing Fearful Odds. I needed to take my Editing Machete to 6-A in particular, purging 10% of the total word count (1,300 words) as well as completely rewriting the last three scenes. It's the first Zuko-centric chapter and I'm still trying to get into his headspace.
• ...doing beta work for other people. I won't say who, as I try to leave my beta work anonymous unless that author wants to give me a credit.
• ...writing an AtLA drabble series that ballooned into a 10,000 word one-shot AU. It's tentatively titled "The Siege of the South" and is currently away at a beta. It needs some serious revision, though. I'll be posting a link to the finished version in about a week or so. If you've got me on Author Alert at FFNet, consider this a head's up.
• ...reading a book called "All You Need is Kill" and writing a TVTropes page for it. (It's a good book. Brisk read too. I burned through its 197 pages in less than three hours.) I'll try writing a full review of it for this blog later in the week.
• ...slowly re-reading The Golden Power, which finally updated after nearly a year-long hiatus.
• ...outlining the final ten chapters of Taking Sights, as well finalizing the long-ass death list for Chapter 25 (of 26). Don't worry, both Gendo and Shinji will live to see the start of the sequel. Everyone else, however, is ripe wheat for the Reaper. Mwa ha ha...!
• ...writing the next chapter for The Ineffable Crossover!! IT LIVES!!!

So there's a chapter I'm writing -- well, one part (of three) of a single chapter -- and I just spent the last three days banging my head against my desk because of a pacing problem. See, the gist of the sub-chapter is that Our Heroes are being chased by The Villains across the countryside until they finally fight. So it was set up like this:

Flashbacks of the Villain's Journey Up Until Now ---> Inter-cutting Flight Across a Mountain Landscape ---> Heroes and Villains See Each Other for the First Time Across A Steep Canyon and OMG RUN ---> Heroes Leave Mountains But Find No Safety In Countryside ---> Villains Chase Heroes to Abandoned Fort ---> BRAWL ---> People nearly killed, Our Heroes Escape, Our Heroine Vows Revenge

Except this doesn't fucking work and I couldn't figure out why. Until now. Why it doesn't work is that the section highlighted in red below...

Flashbacks of the Villain's Journey Up Until Now ---> Inter-cutting Flight Across a Mountain Landscape ---> Heroes and Villains See Each Other for the First Time Across A Steep Canyon and OMG RUN ---> Heroes Leave Mountains But Find No Safety In Countryside ---> Villains Chase Heroes to Abandoned Fort ---> BRAWL ---> People nearly killed, Our Heroes Escape, Our Heroine Vows Revenge

...that section? Doesn't need to exist! I was tearing my hair out because, on a level I wasn't aware of, I knew that the section in red was about 5,000 words of prose that didn't do anything to advance the story. It was just padding. So I moved the fort fight into the mountains and my writer's block dissolved. So now we have:

Flashbacks of the Villain's Journey Up Until Now ---> Inter-cutting Flight Across a Mountain Landscape ---> Villains Chase Heroes to Abandoned Fort ---> BRAWL ---> People nearly killed, Our Heroes Escape, Our Heroine Vows Revenge

Only now I have to worry about the fact it's 6,800 words and OMGWTF I haven't even set up the key fight scene. Chapter Bloat should be a TVtrope....


6,800 in less than a week. I'm going to kick NaNoWriMo's ass.