Meme-tacular!

[wordinista]

A meme, ganked from various people on my f-list:

Keyboard or Longhand?
Both.  A lot of my brainstorming happens longhand, and sometimes I just get the itch to write.  But sometimes I get bitten by the bug, and will type and type and type until the urge subsides. 

Beta or no beta?
Beta, beta, beta, beta, ALWAYS A BETA.  Sometimes I won't really bother if it's a short little drabble, but anything over half a page?  I ask someone to look it over.

Plot?
Yes, and often to the point of absurdity.  These days, seldom do I ever not have a plot.  Sometimes my plots grow and mutate and I'm pretty convinced they'll start demanding voting rights sooner or later.

Title?
I hate titling things.  Hate. It.  My titles are LAME.

Smushy or smutty?
Depends.  Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, sometimes neither.  Too much of the smush makes my teeth rot, though.

Summary?
I like writing summaries almost as much as I like coming up with titles.

Funniest fic?
Hmm.  I... do not know.  I'm not really one for comedies, but I do think that "Shaken, not Stirred" is pretty cute, still. And "Where Have All the Chapters Gone?" still amuses me.  Then again, I'm pretty easily amused.

Most popular fic?
Um.  I'm... not sure?  I think... I don't know.  I mean, "Of Gods and Monsters" seems like the logical answer, as it had 500+ reviews on FFN when it got pulled, has about 139 reviews on MMO currently, and had I have no idea how many reviews when it was hosted on Green Tea.  Then again, the story is three years old. According to my FFN stats page, "A Bump in the Road" is the most popular, and that one's just over a year old.  Who knows?

Most fun to write?
Hmm.  "Where Have All the Chapters Gone" was fun, just for pure snark value.  That said, I had a lot of fun writing "Whither Thou Goest" for artyartie in the 2005 Yuletide Challenge.  I've wanted to tinker more with Sayers fic since, but it just doesn't seem to happen.

Best and worst?
Crap.  Um.  Hmm.  Best?  *thinks*  I don't know.  I'm really proud of "Whither Thou Goest", because it was so unlike anything I'd done before.  And I'm really pleased with how the voices came out, and... I just like the story.  I'm also very, very pleased with "Glimmer".  My multi-chaptered fics have high and low points, so in my mind they're to inconsistent to be considered my "best." 

Worst?  Gawd.  Probably some of the X-Files fics I have out there, if the Gossamer archive is still up and running. 

*wanders off to check* 

Holy monkey jebus, the Gossamer Project IS STILL AROUND? OMGWTFBBQ!

*clickety-click*

Ohhhhhhhh, god.  OH, GOD.  DELIVER ME FROM THE GHOSTS OF MY PAST.  Oh, there's a "worst" in my fic-writing past, and it's somewhere on that page.  I can't bear to look.

Coulda been contenders?
There was a story I've wanted to write for a long while, set in the Whedonverse (Angel, specifically).  I started it, actually.  Not sure why I let it die out, because I still think it was a good idea.  I think maybe the train-wreck that was Season Four killed my urge to write any more for AtS (aside from "Glimmer").

Strengths
Conveying angst-ridden moments emotion.

Weaknesses
I get too wrapped up in exposition.

Dirty Little Secrets?
I'm not sure what this means.  My author page at Gossamer is a BIG "Dirty Little Secret."  I still treasure a bit of feedback given me by yahtzee63 on an Angel/Cordy fic I wrote, called "Cleanse" (written after "Apocalypse Nowish" when all of us were awash in WTF after Angel saw Cordy and Connor together) -- she called it "the canon of her heart," and that stuck with me for a long while.  I also selfishly wish my AtS fics had more reviews.  How's that?

ETA: Oh! Oh! Oh! I thought of a dirty secret! I have a secret pseudonymn on FFN, where I've posted an AU WIP Furuba fic (upon which I collaborated somewhat with someone on my f-list who shall remain nameless because I don't want to drag her down with me, but it IS NOT Evvie) that is very unlike anything I've ever done, and I've forgotten the password so I can't get in to update it, even if I wanted to. And the story is getting a few nasty "WHY WON'T YOU UPDATE YOU EVIL H0R" reviews, hee.

Comments

HOLY FUCK!!!

[hecallaghan.livejournal.com]

*I*'ve got a page of crap stories on Gossamer! Well, crap and "Version 3.0", which I always had kind of a soft spot for. No "Interior: Night" however.

I wonder if, when I'm rich and famous, my flagrant disregard of copyright will be used against me when people are slashing Danny/Middleton and writing MPREG about Brazelton. I hope you are likewise looking forward to "Mary Sue Goes to Grove Academy" and she has pink hair and is curvy without being overweight and has a fantastic singing voice and is a more powerful dryad than Diantha and all the guys are in love with her and ... you know the drill.

Still, Anteros/Dionysus slash could be HOTT! LoL, as I believe they say on the internet...

Re: HOLY FUCK!!!

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

I must confess, I looked you up after I looked myself up. And, of everything, I read Version 3.0. I do wish somewhere had "Interior: Night," as I remember laughing myself sick over that one.

I myself am looking forward to poorly conceived and even more poorly written AU Grove Academy/Hogwarts crossovers.

....

And I am disturbed at how very... *pretty* Dionysus/Anteros slash would be. Oh... my.

Re: HOLY FUCK!!!

[hecallaghan.livejournal.com]

Nyah! No fair! I want an atrocious AU HP crossover!!! And I've decided somebody has to make out with Voldemort in it. I'm not bothered who, provided that everyone involved is of legal age. Dying of embarassment would be enough; no need to compound it with charges of enabling paedophilia. It is possible for too much joy to spill into someone's life, after all.

Oh well, s'pose I better finish the book first.

Tell you what hon, you finish your book and I'll do you some little Anteros/Dionysus slash confection. Or possibly do them a version of "Interior: Night". I've got to be able to wring some comedy out of that, God knows...

Re: HOLY FUCK!!!

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111

M-DELTA + VOLDEMORT = TRU LUV 4-EVAAAAA!!!!!!

Because none other than M-Delta could ever hope to possibly melt the Heir of Slytherin's heart like a gal would could literally reach in and rip steal it still beating from his chest.

Re: HOLY FUCK!!!

[hecallaghan.livejournal.com]

I know it's a cliche, but Diet Coke just went *everywhere* right now.

Actually, I think this crazy idea could work...

EXTERIOR: DAY - A DECAYING LANDSCAPE IN FUTURISTIC LONDON. M-DELTA, who has been DISTRACTED by a SHINY THING lying in a pile of rubbish left by the side of the THAMES, PICKS UP a STRANGE AMULET and RUBS IT.

VOLDEMORT appears in a puff of GREEN SMOKE!

VOLDEMORT: Araarghhh! Prepare to die horribly, you puny mortal!

M-DELTA: Ooh, where did you come from? I like your green smoke. Why are you pointing your little stick at me that way?

VOLDEMORT: Dammit, I'm the Lord of All Dark Magic! Start quailing in the face of my terrifying visage and unstoppable evil, you stupid and pathetic piece of human waste!

M-DELTA: I like your eyes. I've never seen glowing red eyes before. But what is evil? And is all evil unstoppable, or just your particular evil?

VOLDEMORT: What? (Thrown) Um, well... *my* evil is unstoppable, I suppose. I really couldn't answer for other people's. Do you really not know what evil is?

M-DELTA: No. At present my character rests upon the device that I am incapable of distinguishing good from bad, and that I keep failing to make this distinction in a cute and yet chilling manner.

VOLDEMORT: How extraordinary. For many years I've… well, I've believed that the division between good and evil is the fundamental bedrock of the human psyche, and it is only through the medium of consciousness filtered through morality – in other words, conscience – and also through the comcommittant hermeneutic of listening to that voice and meeting its demands, or in my case, doing the exact opposite whilst laughing insanely, that one can be defined as a truly sentient being. And yet you have challenged this morality-centric dichotomy with your all-embracing amorality. You have introduced a new paradigm to my personal philosophic belief system. I have never met a woman like you before. I love you… I'm sorry, what's your name?

M-DELTA: M-Delta 579.

VOLDEMORT: I love you, M-Delta 579, and from this day forth declare us both an OTP. Come with me to the dark haunts of… oh, wherever it is that I actually live, some graveyard or somewhere like that I expect, and be my dark bride and general fluffybunny.

M-DELTA (worried): Oh, I don't know… I haven't told Danny about us yet.

VOLDEMORT: Oh come on, we'll have fun! We'll have gloating sadistic sex and drink blood out of the skulls of our freshly slain enemies and hang out and do cool stuff. It'll be awesome. I bet you won't get that at home with this Danny person.

M-DELTA (thinking): Hmm. Probably not. He gets very funny when I rip out people's skulls. Especially if they're using them at the time.

VOLDEMORT: Sounds hideously provincial to me, my dear. You're better off out of it. Oh, kiss me with tongues!

She DOES. They then SKIP AWAY, whilst HOLDING HANDS, into a convenient sunset. Romantic music SWELLS in the background.

COMING SOON: CHAPTER TWO – M and Voldie Get Married!!!!!!11! Featuring pages of description of M's dress, shoes, and veil! Many more pages of canon characters appearing at the wedding and congratulating the happy couple and lots of M and V crying with happiness whilst exchanging sappy speeches set to song lyrics from Tool, Nine Inch Nails and Avril Lavigne! Soon to be followed by Chapters Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, and most of Eight – THE HONEYMOON! (Rated NC-17 for OMGWTF evil!pr0n!!!!1 LOL!)

Re: HOLY FUCK!!!

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

If I weren't already married, I would be proposing to you right now.

Ah, to hell with it. Marry me anyway! :D

Reasons a person would never dare to write...

[hecallaghan.livejournal.com]

A proposal! At last! And people told me staying in and writing as opposed to getting out more would leave me a lonely old maid!

(Tears of joy)

Actually, the thought of spawning a fandom should be enough to put any reasonable person off writing any original fiction ever. You'd never be able to use the internet again without wanting to weep inconsolably and drink undiluted bleach. I hear that J K Rowling's public appearances are accomplished by a lifelike robot and that she herself lives under the floorboards in her house, being fed chocolate bars through the cracks and threatening to stay there until "they all sod off and latch on to something else".

Re: HOLY FUCK!!!

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Tell you what hon, you finish your book and I'll do you some little Anteros/Dionysus slash confection.

...On the one hand, this should be huge motivation for me. On the other hand, I find myself quailing in the face of adversity! ;)

Really, though. They despise each other so much that an Interior: Night would be a riot with them.

You know, I'm half tempted to google that one and see if any wayward XF archives have that gem hidden away somewhere. I seem to recall tears of laughter shed over that one.

Vanity Surf? Moi?

[hecallaghan.livejournal.com]

Oh God, it's up at the RATales archive!

http://www.iyam-fic.com/ratales/interiornight.html

My past haunts me! Hope it's as good as you remember it (I doubt it myself - fanfic has a kind of short shelflife) - I've not read it in years... Oh well, it was fun to write at the time.

Almost as much fun as being locked out of your house!

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Yes, m'dear, there are still quite a few giggles in that one. I particularly like the part where Slash Writer makes Alex cry:

KRYCEK: (pointing at the SLASH WRITER) You! Look what you've done to us!

SLASH WRITER: Me?

KRYCEK: You... you with your attempts to eroticise your own subversive discourse on male/male power relationships, using us, just using us like sex-dolls, to give a commentary upon definitions of masculinity in the context of popular culture! You did this to us! You threw us out of our Eden! We were happy in the unproblematic duality of our ideologically opposed roles within our own perceived reality!

SLASH WRITER: What reality? You're fictional characters!

KRYCEK: Don't you marginalise our subjective existences with your real-people-ist assumptions, bitch! We're real if we think we are! And we were happy, just happy, to hate each other and beat the crap out of each other, but no, no, that wasn't good enough for you - you had to meddle in our hermeneutic symbiosis by symbolically loading potent and dissenting sexual meanings upon our assigned iconic roles! You monster!

(KRYCEK is now practically crying. The SLASH WRITER is biting her lip.)

KRYCEK: You've destroyed our unexamined ideological paradise of identity through hostility and replaced it with an endless relativism where instead of representing opposing stable poles that the audience can identify with in dramatico-religious sense, we are forced into an undifferentiated amalgam of erotic and socio-political subversive messages that reflect only your own dissatisfactions with the unequal and societally pre-determined personas inherent in male-female gender relationships in the late twentieth century West! How could you DO that? My God! And with power tools, too! What kind of sick, twisted person ARE you!?!

(KRYCEK bursts into heartbroken sobs.)

MULDER: (to SLASH WRITER, uncurling from his foetal position) Now you've done it.

Re: Almost as much fun as being locked out of your house!

[hecallaghan.livejournal.com]

I read it again, and I'm not wholly displeased, though I think MKLovee's titles were too explicit. They should have been something pretentious like "Semper Tenebris" or "Grey Swallows In A Red Morning". In fact, I would have to sit and think of something that was so violently pretentious that it physically hurt me to type it out. And then repeat the title multiple times in the fic. After all, comedy is somebody else's tragedy. Namely mine.

God, that sort of thing came so easy to me back then. If I could write my original fic that fast, I'd be done by now. Many times over.

Re: Almost as much fun as being locked out of your house!

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

You know, I've been thinking about this. Fanfic usually does come a LOT easier than realfic. In fact, I'm struggling over writing UT's chapter 11 right now, and it's KILLING me. And do you know why? Because before, I just wrote, and I didn't care about the finer points of my technique. NOW I'm sitting in front of the PC, typing, and I swear to god, the internal dialogue goes like this:

Is this too much exposition? I think it is. I should cut back on the exposition. I always write too damn much exposition. Hmm. Am I spending too much time describing Eric and Ani? I know we've seen them both from Anteros's POV, but this is Liam's POV, and it's a few chapters later to boot, and he SHOULD notice them, shouldn't he? And there's bound to be some odd little vibe he'd get off of them, because Eros isn't just one of those little throw-away gods that no one's heard of. But how much description is too much? Am I giving too much? Is it too flowery? Maybe I should cut back on the description. Especially in light of all this exposition. All the same, it's less exposition than I had in the first draft..."

And so on. Really, it's a miracle I get anything written at all.