wordinista | Meme-tacular!

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

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.

Meme-tacular!

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

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

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