Entries tagged with self indulgent blog post

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Stuff Currently on My Plate

I've been taking a short break since finishing the rough draft of Chapter 5-A' of FFO. Here's what I've been up to:

Doing some new fills for the Persona 4 kink meme.
Chipping away at some beta work for another fanfic writer.
Writing some analysis essays (gender, politics, foreshadowing) about "Mega Man: Guiding Rainbow's Light", which presents one of the more interesting expanded fanfic worlds I've seen since "Childhood of a Modern Dynasty".
Plotting ahead for Books 2 and 3 of FFO.
Listening to the latest Writing Excuses podcasts.
Bumming around the SpaceBattles forums.
Considering what, if any, projects I want to do in the Evangelion fandom after I finish Taking Sights. I've talked about a few plot bunnies here in the past, and An Exchange of Fates still twigs my Spider-Sense as having a lot of potential, but I'm leaning more and more towards Taking Sights being my last long-form work in the Evangelion fandom. It's not that the fandom has exhausted its potential for good stories -- if anything, it's ignoring them in favor of OOC shipping and shitty crossover fics -- but that I have a damn hard time writing for the characters of Evangelion. I can belt out 20k or 30k of Harry Potter or Avatar: The Last Airbender fic in the time it takes me to do 5,000 words for Taking Sights.
Repairing two flat tires on my car -- fucking bumpy back-country roads and fucking weakass stem valves....

Fun Question: Does anyone know any good recipes that involve goat cheese? I've recently come into possession of a surplus of the stuff and there's only so many times I can make a pasta cream sauce with it before I start going "bb~aaAAAAaaaahhhhh".

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Writing Progress - 7/22/2009

Today's project is Chapter 4-B of Facing Fearful Odds.

Starting word count is: 2,645

Goal for 11:45am: ~~750 more words.~~ 2,974 words (+329)
Goal for 5:07pm: ~~750 more words.~~ 3,493 words (+519)
Goal for 5:41pm: ~~600 more words~~ 4,023 words (+530)
Goal for 6:17pm: ~~600 more words~~ 4,348 words (+325) (damn you, wikipedia!)
Goal for 8:32pm: ~~600 more words~~ 4,866 words (+518)
Goal for 9:10pm: ~~750 more words~~ 5,433 words (+567)
Goal for 9:45pm: ~~650 more words~~ 6,159 words (+726)
Goal for 10:30pm: ~~750 more words~~ 6,270 words (+111) (time for a break)
Goal for 11:55pm: ~~500 more words~~ 6,887 words (+617)

TOTAL WORD PRODUCTION FOR 7/22/2009: 4,242 words

...aaand that's a wrap for today. Goodnight, folks!

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Writing Progress - 7/20/2009

Today's project is Chapter 5-B of Facing Fearful Odds.

Starting word count: 1,852

Goal for 9:08am: ~~1000 more words!~~ 2,493 (+641 more words)

Goal for 9:43am: ~~800 more words!~~ 3,070 (+577 more words)

Goal for 8:40pm: ~~500 more words!~~ (+304 more words) -- Chapter 4-B

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self indulgent blog post

Current Project Schedule

1. Finish my Avatar: The Last Airbender AU project, "Facing Fearful Odds".
2. Finish the last nine chapters of Book 1 of "Taking Sights".
3. Finish my Harry Potter AU novel, "The Broken Masquerade" for its December 2009 release date.
4. Sleep through all of 2010.

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United Breaks Guitars

Too true.

Facing Fearful Odds -- Book 1: Earth (10 chapters planned)
     Chapter 1 is 100% and GOLD. (10,328 words)
     Chapter 2 is 100% and GOLD (15,117 words)
     Chapter 3 is 100% done and currently away to my betas. (7,276 words)

Chapter 4 is 75% done, with the first away to my betas and the second part halfway done. (7,827 words)
Chapter 5 is 50% done, with a lot to be written. (6,621 words)

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Writing Progress - 7/7/2009

So this quasi-public writing goal thing seems fairly effective. I've finished Chapter 4a of Facing Fearful Odds, and now it's off to Chapter 4b. I won't be writing for long this morning, as I have some beta-ing of my own to do and a new Johnny Depp movie to see. Expect more updates in the PM.

July 7, 2009

STARTING NUMBER IS 6,219 words

9:52 am -- 6,776 words (716)

10:25 am -- 7,306 words (530)

(break time)

"Public Enemies" was all right. Nothing to write home about.

(break time ends)

3:26 pm -- 7,419 words (113) -- (had to stop and answer the telephone / dogs needed to play)

4:17 pm -- 7,840 words (421)

(Chapter 4b has its raw text. Time for the editing stage.)

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Writing Progress

The next chapter of Taking Sights is off to the pre-readers. In the meantime, I'm going to try something new here. I'm going to be posting public updates of my daily writing rate, broken down into half hour increments. I'll be updating this sporadically throughout the day (and maybe tomorrow. We'll see.)

Facing Fearful Odds -- Chapter 4 writing totals (IN PROGRESS)

JULY 5, 2009

8:49 pm -- 420 words (start)

9:19 pm -- 875 words (455)

9:51 pm -- 1,327 words (452)

10:22 pm -- 1,702 words (375)

JULY 6, 2009

9:51 am -- 1,738 words (start)

10:21 am -- 2,176 words (438)

10:56 am -- 2,593 words (417)

1:27 pm -- 3,006 words (413)

3:15 pm -- 3,710 words (704)

3:56 pm -- 4,325 words (615)

9:21 pm -- 4,919 words (594)

9:55 pm -- 5,346 words (427)

11:50 pm -- 6,060 words (714)

Current Mood: sad

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The Coming Death of Fanfic

This is a more serious post than I normally do, so bear with me.

Yahoo just announced that it will be shutting down GeoCities later this year. Yahoo says that existing sites will stay up for now, but that users should look for new providers. It doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the wind's blowing on this story -- sooner rather than later, all those GeoCities web sites are going to go up in a puff of smoke.

Once GeoCities does go away, so too will vanish thousands of fanfics, mostly ones from the late 1990s and early 2000s, published back before the advent of FFnet and other modern fanfic archives. Now, for every classic Ranma 1/2 or Sailor Moon or Bubblegum Crisis fanfic uploaded to FFnet, there are probably five more that never were -- mostly because their authors vanished from the internet or retired from fandom. When I tried to find HERZ for instance, I didn't find it on the author's website -- that was long gone -- but on an obscure fanfic review archive, buried eight pages down. I never would have found HERZ if I hadn't waded some twenty pages deep into Google search results for it. It was literally the last edition of HERZ left on the internet. Well, the case of HERZ is going to be writ large when GeoCities finally shuts down.

If you remember an old story you like, go out and download a copy before it vanishes forever. I have, for a while now, downloading old fanfics and ripping the odd website. Sure, it's "just" fanfic, and most of it was written for fandoms that have long-since died out or faded away, but when it's going it'll be gone forever.

Pass the word along, please, before a lot of old fanfic is lost.

Current Mood: content

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self indulgent blog post

Sunday Post

Been a while since I posted here, so I thought I'd put up a status update on my current writing projects:

1. Taking Sights -- The next chapter will be post this coming Wednesday. I'm currently in the final edit of the chapter, which needs a far bit of reworking. I've cut out a fair bit of the end of the chapter and am considering making a mini-chapter to tie up certain loose ends before going into the next story arc.

2. Ineffable Crossover -- My very own crap/crack fic won't be updated for at least another month. It's going to be loooong, though, and much more meaty compared to the last few crack-fests. Marissa Picard will be guest starring.

3. And the Gods Danced in the Night -- The next chapter is still in progress but I can't give an estimate for when it will be done. I'm writing the rest of the fic in one go for the sake of narrative tightness (the perils of writing a mystery).

4. Doctor Who and the Orders of Merlin -- After five months of writer's block on this fic, I've decided to junk it and start over. Instead of going for the haphazard chapter-by-chapter approach, I'm going to trying canabalizing what I've already written and make an 80k word novel out of it. Not what I normally do, but I think it'll be a good challenge to help develop my writing skills.

5. End of Line -- WIP. This is a Battlestar Galactica fic I've started writing after watching the series finale. It's a one-shot dealing with the final fates of all the characters (and I mean ALL the characters) after the events of the finale. It's about 20% done.

6. I've been tooling around with some Persona 4 fic, mostly femmeslash. I was quite taken by the game when I played it, especially with how shockingly (by video game standards) it explored topics of sexuality and gender. Nothing concrete fic-wise yet, but I'm in love with the game and want to try my hand at writing for it.

So that's what's going with me. How about you?

Current Mood: crazy

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On (not) Writing Children

So, while I've been chipping away at the "Unit-00/Asuka" and "Gendo/Sandalphon" fight scenes in the latest chapter of Taking Sights, I've been contemplating other projects.

First, let me say I'm not going to publish anything until one of my current trio of ongoing stories (TS/IFC/DADA) is done. I don't want to be one of those FFnet authors that starts a million stories and never finishes them. But I do look to the future. Sometimes proto-fics I have on file wither on the vine, like my Rei-centric romance/mystery The Stranger, and sometimes, in the mode of Viva Pinata, I cannibalize several of my stories together to create a single, better fanfic. "Doctor Who and the Defense Against the Dark Arts" originally started out as two difference stories: one was a DW/HP crossover, the other was (I Am Not Making This Up, God help me) a Doctor Who / Evangelion crossover.

I know, I know.

It was called Doctor Who and the Children in Need and parts of it might even see the light of day... when the Sun turns fat and red. It started 10 and Rose showing up during the 12th Angel attack, hijinks ensue, and the Doctor ended up being blackmailed by Gendo into becoming NERV's scientific adviser a la UNIT. There was no real plot to it and I had no plan for an ending. But my DW/HP story was stronger overall, especially with the metafiction component to it, and I knew exactly how it would end. Plus I'll take a story with Donna over Rose any day.

So I killed Doctor Who and the Children in Need, looted its corpse, and stuck the best bits into Doctor Who and the Defense Against the Dark Arts.

But I digress. The title of this post is about children. And short skirts. And getting roped into another longass fanfic project.

AFTER I finished one of my trio of stories (or my secret Evangelion lemon I post under another name) I'm moving onto a new longass fanfic project. I'm not sure which but it'll either be in Doctor Who or Harry Potter. Either way it'll be a gender-bender.

See, a couple months ago in a blog post here I mentioned an idea for girl!Harry fanfic. I wrote out a detailed plot outline, the beginning and end, as well as a few key scenes. While I have a few problems with formatting -- like does the internet really need another rewrite of the seven books? -- my biggest concern is writing the children as children.

Sometimes, well, really, most of the time... the cast of HP aren't written very well for their ages (in fanfiction). Usually this comes from either the author not being very good at characterization or from the author wanting to make ~~themselves~~ Harry a badass wizard who takes guff from no one (especially Dumbledore) and has rockin' sex with Hermione and Draco while on fire atop a dragon.

This latter phenomenon is not entirely unknown in Evangelion fanfiction.

But then fanfic like Stealing Harry comes along and just smacks you upside the head and you realize you're reading children as children, not as mini-adults. And if I'm going to make the "Jamie Potter Series" any decent I need to write like Sam the Storyteller here, because his characterization is simply amazing. And...

...I've lost my train of thought. Damn it! This is why I don't blog. I rant and it morphs into something pointless. Essentially, I suck at writing kids and I need to practice.

Ah well. Back to work on Taking Sights....

Oh, and Happy New Year!