To the Sixes

The salvaging of 2011 begins. I'm currently planning on four projects in the immediate future (i.e. through the end of May).


* fanficforensics's Help_Japan fic. Currently in the outlining and snip-it scene writing stage. 

* kirai_akuma's Help_Japan fic. One scene written, although I'm still uncertain about what POV & tense is most appropriate. Currently on hold until I figure that stuff out. 

* Chapter 3 of Full Metal Bitch. Currently stands at about 6500 words, will probably end up at twice that for length. 

* Finish writing the last three chapters of Facing Fearful Odds, my long-unfinished Avatar Katara AU.


At the end of May 2011, if I've finished the first three projects listed, I'll sign up for the AtLA Big Bang. If I haven't, then I won't.

So my Macbook didn't end up dying after eating half a mug of iced tea. The Mac Store people checked it out and it looks like I managed to get the liquid off my keyboard in time before it penetrated into the laptop's guts. Everything's fine. I've backed up my files again (which I will now do more regularly). 

( Help_Japan Auction Related Stuff )

So my favorite mug broke today. Handle just snapped clean off as I was holding it over my trusty Macbook, spilling half a mug of (sugar-free) iced tea all over the keyboard. .

I pulled the power cord, shut it down, and eventually learned I needed to pull the battery (hopefully soon enough). I cracked open the back and the guts don't have any visible liquid in them. As a precaution I'm letting it dry un-powered for three days. I'm trying not to think about the fact that means I'll be finding out if it's damaged or not on April Fools Day.

Currently typing on my old, mothballed Dell laptop. It's sluggish as hell, can't handle much of anything, but it works so I can't complain. The one thing I'm kicking myself over is that I haven't updated my backups in about two weeks. Most of my fic projects are safe, but the drabbles and project notes for longfic that I've been writing since that point may now be gone. Not exactly heartbeaking but still annoying. The worst part (aside from a possible dead laptop) is that I'd just started sketching out a new one-shot after getting some feedback from Clockworkchoas and now that's gone: about 600ish words for scene ideas and general flow, with another thousands for various bits of dialogue or description.

In less exciting news, Mass Effect 2: Arrival kinda blew. I thought they were setting up an epic moral dilemma but it amounted to no choice at all. The missions weren't even that fun. Definitely no Overlord or Lair of the Shadow Broker in terms of quality.

Thank God that's over. Now I just need to write 14k more for my Maiko Big Bang fic by the 15th, then write my Rare/Crack Pairing fic for the 20th.

No biggie.

* I've begun the 612044th draft of the next chapter of Full Metal Bitch. I very much want this chapter to be finished already.

* Fanfiction.net is now practically unusable if you don't have an Ad blocker installed. 

* I finished the newest Caiphas Cain book and found it lacking in the back-half. By the last half dozen chapters I stopped caring completely about what was going on. Definitely the weakest entry in the series.
 
* Apparently AtLA has a kink meme (NSFW). Who knew? Sadly it's pretty much dead. Not a great loss since the prompts are pretty boring, although I'm morbidly impressed by the sheer number of permutations of "Zuko gets raped" there are. 

* I'm trying to bring myself to start reading Nobody Dies again, but I got really fatigued around Chapter 70 when it seemed like the story went several chapters without finishing a single damn conversation because there were so many ongoing plot threads. 

* I'm in the mood to do another fanfic mini-meme but I don't think now is the time for it. I have -- three? -- projects ongoing that need sunlight and watering.

Stolen from John Scalzi's blog:

"The end of the year is not a bad time to think about some of the things one would like to try one’s hand at moving forward. And to that end, here are some things I’ve been thinking about doing at some point in the future. Note that this is not a list of things I am making a resolution to do, or things I necessarily have planned to do in the next year (and yes, I have things planned for the next year). It’s just a list of stuff that I’d like to get around to before I, you know, am hit by a bus and/or get bored with creating stuff and just pack it all in to do nothing but watch movies on Netflix for the rest of my life."



Here's my own list:

1. Write a full-on romantic shipping-centric fic. I've hemmed and hawed in this field of fanfic, racing up to the line but not crossing it when expected to. I always feel very awkward writing romance-centric fanfics because I'm not particularly romantic myself, so I instinctively keep pulling back in my stories. I only vaguely had Mai and Zuko get together in 'His and Her Circumstances' because of this issue. I was much more interested in the story's worldbuilding and individual character arcs than the Mai/Zuko arc and it shows.

In 2011, I really want to do a fic that has a strong romantic/shipping element as its spine. I've been kicking around a few ideas in particular -- Loopy suggested a Sokkla fic I'm prepping as one possibility for this year's Big Bang, I've got a Maiko Big Bang to write for, and I'm currently chipping away at a TyZula fic -- so there's something to look forward to. 

2. Get back to writing Evangelion fic. I wrote very, very little fanfic for this fandom in 2010. I still need to finish Taking Sights, and my Nobody Dies genderswap, and I have a new Evangelion long-form fanfic that I'm excited to start called "Her Smoke Rises Up Forever". I really enjoy the Evangelion fandom. It was the first one I really got into hardcore, and fanfic-wise it offers opportunities that AtLA doesn't with its setting.

3. Finish All My Existing Projects. I'd like to be able to close the door on all the unfinished crap I have posted on FF.net. I don't want to become one of those authors. 

4. Write More Reviews. I'm a bad reader. I don't nearly review fics often enough. I need to work on that, providing fics I like or find interesting with decent analysis.

5. Write More Regularly. I've gotten really bad at this ever since I went on my hiatus with Facing Fearful Odds. I used to regularly crank out a thousand words a day on FFO. Now it's an exceptional day if I can hammer out five hundred words. I only write a lot in occasional splurges, not with any regularity. That's bad. 

 So after about a month's worth of writer's block, I seem to have found my mojo again. The other day, I posted a new fic, A Pocket Guide to Ba Sing Se, which is some fictional in-universe propaganda for AtLA. It's been received pretty positively, so that's nice. I also wrote up a TV Tropes page for Another Brother. (Beware: link contains memetic hazards!)

I've fallen behind in the reading and reviewing, especially for all the AtLA Big Bang fics. I've been saving them as a reward for finishing FFO. If you're looking for some good fics, I recommend checking it out. Also of interest is sylvacoer's new Mai-centric fanfic project -- Danger, Deceit (alt link to ff.net). I did some beta work for her early on and it's got a really amazing story in store, international intrigue and mannerpunk. There is far too little mannerpunk in the Fire Nation wing of AtLA fanfic, so check it out!

I've been doing some tinkering on "Praise Be to Nero's Neptune", fleshing out the pre-story background of the Fire Nation Civil War. I'm still on the fence of how I want to unload some of the exposition -- a one-shot prequel, fictional historical documents at the head of each chapter, flashback interlude chapters, or not at all. I'm hedging towards only touching lightly on most of it. Last Firebender does awesome fake history documents in its header, and I don't think I could top it. Also, Last Firebender has the benefit of having a future to set its fictional documents in, and part of the point of "Praise Be" is that the world may be somewhat lacking in that regarding.

I may be using "Praise Be" as my kinda-sorta-NaNaWriMo project. Dunno yet. Gotta see what my RL situation is like in November first. Also, I might do FFO Book 2 or my new Evangelion AU instead.

Currently alternating on two primary projects -- finishing FFO and writing out Chapter 3 of FMB. It's been hard to return to FFO because I got really blocked up on it and sick of it being a money on my back. I only have four chapter remaining, though. FMB's third chapter had a big plot tumor in the form of the Iroh/Toph confrontation, so I split that chapter into two parts. Chapter 4 will focus on the AU rendition of "Bitter Work". Chapter 3 will consist primarily of flashbacks leading into the Iroh/Toph fight. In order to maintain audience sympathy for her character, I've decided to consciously avoid showing much of Toph's life before the Siege of Ba Sing Se. 

I'll start posting FFO's chapters on a weekly basis, starting alongside Chapter 3 of FMB whenever I post that.

So His and Her Circumstances has been fairly well received. I didn't expect more than six or seven reviews, so I'm happy it's scored twelve as of this posting, including a very long one featuring constructive criticism of my use of description and details about some missed character opportunities I could have developed better. I'm content when an ff.net review has more than four words to it and doesn't include a "please update 'X' story pleazz" in it, so this made me happy.

The other Maiko fic that I was writing before I had to switch over to H&HC due to time constraints, Matched Set, is on the back-burner for now. I need to get work done on my current fanfic projects before I can do something else.

But to decompress from the large volume of AtLA fanfic I've been writing in recent months, I've started developing a new Evangelion AU project. I have 6175 words in on the first chapter (of 26 planned) and it's working title is Her Smoke Rises Up Forever, I can't talk about specific plot details, but I'm intending it as a remedy to the issues I've experienced with Taking Sights, a fanfic that was badly handicapped by my lack of foresight and writerly experience when I started it. Her Smoke Rises Up Forever is also being written in response to a lot of Evangelion fanfic I've been reading lately, such as the excellent Nobody Dies but particularly those posted to the Spacebattles forums. I want to tell a story that strips out the Gurren Lagann feel that contemporary Evangelion fics seem to have taken on, that avoids crossovers or fusions, and goes back to the TV canon's original flavor.

Don't worry. I'll be getting back to work on the next chapter of Full Metal Bitch soon. I've also scaled back my plans for Avatar Shipping Month, as I need a break from AtLA stuff. I'm only going to write an entry for Kacest now. 

 Whenever I trawl FFnet for new fanfic at random, a lot of the fics I come across from first-time writers have a big problem with stilted dialogue. It sound unnatural and it has me closing that tab faster than nothing else. That's why I want to share to this episode from the podcast Writing Excuses that focuses specifically on avoiding stilted dialogue. It's a good reference for writers, both new ones and ones learning to improve themselves, to think about how to use dialogue in their stories. 

  EDIT: Deleted. I should stick by my rule to never show off my stuff publicly before it's all done. Getting bitten in the ass by FMB proved that much.