oh my god, I WOULD NOT
Jun. 17th, 2008 04:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardClearly there are not gossip mags in Narnia, especially not during the Golden Age. I mean, it's hard to have paparazzi, when you're so technologically advanced a snapshot is, like, a sketch. "It's Queen Susan! Hold still! I have to copy down every detail of her dress so I can report in on What Narnia Wears." Or, alternately: "It's the High King! He's collapsed! Is that blood? Where's his sword! Nobody move him while I paint a quick picture that will make the front cover of Narnia Us Weekly."
This is brought to you by the current fic in progress, "These Last Golden Days of Summer," where the narrator is an OC and has a little sister that's, like, in lust with Edmund and wants all of Lucy's dresses and has a huge girlcrush on Susan and wouldn't dream of crushing on Peter because he's, you know, the High King. It would be like crushing on Aslan.
Also, I forgot how much fun it is to have a new fandom. Everything is fresh and shiny and full of squee! And there is meta, and fic, and plot bunnies, and people that like you -- I'm serious, ducks, it's been a while. For the past eight months my fandom has been my original novel (a.k.a. On a Pale Horse, a.k.a. Spaceforce), and yeah, that's great: I don't have to worry about being jossed, and I can write anything I want and not have to make it AU (although me being me, of course I have the Evil Twin AU that will probably not make it into the final draft, although of course it could), and I can go off on meta all I want. Only -- only, well, it gets lonely being in a one-person fandom. All the toys are fun, but sometimes you want to sit down with someone who know what's what and say, "Hey, I have this idea; tell me if it's totally off base or not." Or, "Oh my God, this is the coolest scene ever, quick, read it and tell me how awesome I am." Or, "This is going to break my heart, and that's why I'm going to write it." And I love my novel, only I worked on nothing else for eight months, and I wrote 120K+ of military space opera science fiction, and for the past six months, I didn't even read fiction aside from what I was reading for class. I was reading military history and military memoirs and yes, I find it interesting and I still do, but it gets wearing after a while, after the fifth time you've had to look up casualty notifications, and the seventh time you've read about the lone survivor of some top secret mission in the Middle East, and what it's like to be nineteen, and a soldier, and have no legs. And it's also wearing to write about a war, about a hundred and fifty thousand Americans that are lost somewhere in space and are never going to make it home -- not to kiss their wives, not to hug their children, not even to be buried. Not even Earth. And I love my novel, I do, but my main character, my viewpoint character, was a thirty-six-year-old South Carolina twice-divorced Army Special Forces officer with PTSD from seven months as a maybe-so, maybe-no POW who was tortured on the Internet in front of the entire world when he was twenty-two and held grudges and could kill anything with his little finger stationed on a spaceship in another galaxy in charge of a battalion of Rangers, living two doors away from his Air Force CO, who happened to be sleeping with his distanced younger brother, the one who got kicked out of the Army for being gay. And Jesus Christ, I killed characters and maimed characters -- I thought it was an upside when I crippled a Navy SEAL in a motorcycle accident as compared to a firefight or a suicide bombing -- and destroyed planets and dreams and an entire nation. I wrote in parallels with World War II and the British Empire and Iraq and Somalia -- Black Hawk Down, this time with spaceships and tiny alien robots! sound fun? not so much -- and Jesus Christ, the fucking election, and did so much research I can still cite you just about anything you want to know about the military. I have pages and pages of notes, and character names, carefully divided by branch and department and unit, and just before Narnia came out, I realized I was going to have to subdivide even more by who died and when. Perils of writing a war novel.
And I couldn't really let myself think of anything else. I watched a lot of TV -- I watch about two or three hours of TV a night, but I write at the same time; I like the background noise. I'd be thinking of my novel in jazz band; I'd pull up "Night in Tunisia" and think, oh, of course, I have to write a scene in an alien bar, and the next scene I wrote would be a bunch of American soldiers in an alien bar. Or I went to New Orleans and took the ghost tour and I thought, oh, of course, I have to put in ghosts, because all cultures believe in ghosts, and it can be just like the LaLaurie House! Because I've already established slavery, and the Americans are literally aliens, and oh my God this is making me nauseous just thinking about it, but this is what I thougth about. All the time. Before first period, I'd be on the computer looking up "officer of the deck" and "Marine corps salute" and "arabic swear words"; during my independent study, I'd be carefully jotting down the specifications for the American starfleet. Movie in class? Prime writing time! When I turned my senior project portfolio in, I thought, "Oh, thank God, now I can write something else," and I didn't work on anything else. When I presented my senior project, I thought, "Oh, thank God, now I can take a break." When I had my car accident, I thought, "Oh, this is what it's like to be on a stretcher; my main character would hate this. I hate this." And then -- and then. I didn't stop writing. I didn't stop reading what I was reading. But I read a little more. Before, I'd be writing all the time. Now, I was carrying a book in my purse and reading that before class. Granted, I was reading The Night Stalkers and While They're at War and Under the Sabers (hi, you want depressing? Try reading about Army wives whose husbands are deployed during war. I don't even have any Army wives in my novel. I mean, my main character's a newly twice-divorced Delta Force officer. Although now I know why his wives divorced him), but I was reading. I still wasn't knitting; I didn't start knitting again until recently. I dropped a lot of things this year to write my novel: orchestra, private lessons for saxophone and piano, homework, writing anything else.
Now, it's not like I didn't have the odd fic-like plot bunny during novel period, but I rarely indulged them. I was strict. I only wrote if it was a scene that couldn't somehow be bludgeoned into my novel (guys...my novel is a mosaic of fandoms. I went, "Boy, I'd love to write SGA fic, but I don't know the characters well enough," and, "Boy, people sure did like that CSI:NY AU I wrote way back when, but I kind of want to explore the universe," and, "Boy, are those wonderfully capable Army boys on The Unit fun and deadly and angsty," and, "Boy, who doesn't love a big galactic war like Star Wars?" (in case people were wondering where the Lostverse went. It got eaten. By my novel. Although they have nothing in common, except for how those aliens are totally based on the Jedi and now I have the characters but I cannot figure out how to use them, but by God, I will), and, "Boy, I sure did like the concept of Space: Above and Beyond. Too bad it got cancelled," and, "Boy, that Colonel Mitchell sure is a hot Southern boy, isn't he?" and, "Boy, I'd love to have a universe as rich as Farscape's, but, well, I haven't seen the whole show yet," and actually, I'm not sure I even need the parentheses anymore since that last, uh, paragraph pretty much finished up my thoughts). When I wrote my Into the Woods fic, it was a lovely moment of, "Oh my God, if I don't think about something other than aliens, I will throw my computer and God damn powerpoint out the window and DAMN THE SENIOR PROJECT. I DON'T NEED TO GRADUATE," but immediately afterwards I went back to working on my novel and my senior project and so went the next three months. Madness. Outer space. War. Sorrow. Death. Maiming. Blowing up spaceships, which is fun until you have to start thinking about how many people were on that spaceship, and which other spaceships they were from, and was that spaceship carrying bodies? Before it blow up, did it have time to evacuate anybody? Where did those survivors go? What ship? Who are the attackers? What are their motives? Are they likely to take prisoners, or just shoot on sight? And if they are taking prisoners, are they likely to give medical care? What are they going to do with the prisoners? Are they going to ransom them back, or try and trade? What are the enemy spaceships? How many people are on them? Who commands? What are the weapons?
This was going through my head eighteen hours a day. The other six hours I was sleeping. Oh, yes, occasionally I had moments of, "What the hell is this, there is no Jesus Christ metaphor in Song of Solomon, oh, wait, what would I know, I'm not Christian anyway, hey, I still haven't figured out a religion for the alien empire, and would they have a single religion, or would they have let multiple religions flourish? What did the British Empire do? Or maybe they're more of a Roman Empire type. Huh, I wonder if the churches in America tried to send missionaries to another galaxy, and if that worked at all. Did the president have an official view on it? He was a Republican. I wonder if his opponent, the Democrat, used that. I wonder if that's going to come up in the presidential alection. Would Mara use that? Wait, I still have to pass this class." I'm not kidding. This was my life. For eight months.
And then Narnia came out. And -- I'd been so excited about it -- "Screw graduation!" I kept telling people. "I'm so excited for Prince Caspian!" -- but I didn't see it for a week. And then I saw it. And I was so excited, because I wanted to write and meta and squee and it was so different from Spaceforce! And I'd forgotten, really, what it's like to be in fandom, because for the past eight months -- for most of my fandom career, actually -- I've been a lurker, and a reader, and occasionally a writer. But I was so happy. And I forgot how wonderful feedback is, because you really do forget, when you're writing original fiction -- and I didn't even get feedback on my novel from the panel I presented to. (Except the vice principal, who apparently now thinks I am, like, next to God. "I can't believe I went through four years without knowing you!" he kept saying. "Sorry, I graduated, I guess you could have failed me.") I forgot how fantastic it is for people to be excited about the same things I'm excited about, and want to exchange intelligent discourse with me, and who don't think I'm over thinking, or that I'm too dark, or wonder why I care.
And I keep thinking -- "Thank you, thank the Gods, thank Walden Media and C.S. Lewis," -- but especially, thank you, for helping me remember why I got into this in the first place, for helping get me out of my own head. I'm reading. Fiction. And I'm writing fic, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with spaceships or the military or special forces, and I can be silly and talk about Narnian celebrity blogs if I want, or about my Aslan conspiracy theories, or why Peter is the High King and Caspian is just screwed, so screwed, and -- thank you so much, because I think I was on the edge of cracking. I was so tired, and now there's light, and I'm refreshed and happy and new again.
This is brought to you by the current fic in progress, "These Last Golden Days of Summer," where the narrator is an OC and has a little sister that's, like, in lust with Edmund and wants all of Lucy's dresses and has a huge girlcrush on Susan and wouldn't dream of crushing on Peter because he's, you know, the High King. It would be like crushing on Aslan.
Also, I forgot how much fun it is to have a new fandom. Everything is fresh and shiny and full of squee! And there is meta, and fic, and plot bunnies, and people that like you -- I'm serious, ducks, it's been a while. For the past eight months my fandom has been my original novel (a.k.a. On a Pale Horse, a.k.a. Spaceforce), and yeah, that's great: I don't have to worry about being jossed, and I can write anything I want and not have to make it AU (although me being me, of course I have the Evil Twin AU that will probably not make it into the final draft, although of course it could), and I can go off on meta all I want. Only -- only, well, it gets lonely being in a one-person fandom. All the toys are fun, but sometimes you want to sit down with someone who know what's what and say, "Hey, I have this idea; tell me if it's totally off base or not." Or, "Oh my God, this is the coolest scene ever, quick, read it and tell me how awesome I am." Or, "This is going to break my heart, and that's why I'm going to write it." And I love my novel, only I worked on nothing else for eight months, and I wrote 120K+ of military space opera science fiction, and for the past six months, I didn't even read fiction aside from what I was reading for class. I was reading military history and military memoirs and yes, I find it interesting and I still do, but it gets wearing after a while, after the fifth time you've had to look up casualty notifications, and the seventh time you've read about the lone survivor of some top secret mission in the Middle East, and what it's like to be nineteen, and a soldier, and have no legs. And it's also wearing to write about a war, about a hundred and fifty thousand Americans that are lost somewhere in space and are never going to make it home -- not to kiss their wives, not to hug their children, not even to be buried. Not even Earth. And I love my novel, I do, but my main character, my viewpoint character, was a thirty-six-year-old South Carolina twice-divorced Army Special Forces officer with PTSD from seven months as a maybe-so, maybe-no POW who was tortured on the Internet in front of the entire world when he was twenty-two and held grudges and could kill anything with his little finger stationed on a spaceship in another galaxy in charge of a battalion of Rangers, living two doors away from his Air Force CO, who happened to be sleeping with his distanced younger brother, the one who got kicked out of the Army for being gay. And Jesus Christ, I killed characters and maimed characters -- I thought it was an upside when I crippled a Navy SEAL in a motorcycle accident as compared to a firefight or a suicide bombing -- and destroyed planets and dreams and an entire nation. I wrote in parallels with World War II and the British Empire and Iraq and Somalia -- Black Hawk Down, this time with spaceships and tiny alien robots! sound fun? not so much -- and Jesus Christ, the fucking election, and did so much research I can still cite you just about anything you want to know about the military. I have pages and pages of notes, and character names, carefully divided by branch and department and unit, and just before Narnia came out, I realized I was going to have to subdivide even more by who died and when. Perils of writing a war novel.
And I couldn't really let myself think of anything else. I watched a lot of TV -- I watch about two or three hours of TV a night, but I write at the same time; I like the background noise. I'd be thinking of my novel in jazz band; I'd pull up "Night in Tunisia" and think, oh, of course, I have to write a scene in an alien bar, and the next scene I wrote would be a bunch of American soldiers in an alien bar. Or I went to New Orleans and took the ghost tour and I thought, oh, of course, I have to put in ghosts, because all cultures believe in ghosts, and it can be just like the LaLaurie House! Because I've already established slavery, and the Americans are literally aliens, and oh my God this is making me nauseous just thinking about it, but this is what I thougth about. All the time. Before first period, I'd be on the computer looking up "officer of the deck" and "Marine corps salute" and "arabic swear words"; during my independent study, I'd be carefully jotting down the specifications for the American starfleet. Movie in class? Prime writing time! When I turned my senior project portfolio in, I thought, "Oh, thank God, now I can write something else," and I didn't work on anything else. When I presented my senior project, I thought, "Oh, thank God, now I can take a break." When I had my car accident, I thought, "Oh, this is what it's like to be on a stretcher; my main character would hate this. I hate this." And then -- and then. I didn't stop writing. I didn't stop reading what I was reading. But I read a little more. Before, I'd be writing all the time. Now, I was carrying a book in my purse and reading that before class. Granted, I was reading The Night Stalkers and While They're at War and Under the Sabers (hi, you want depressing? Try reading about Army wives whose husbands are deployed during war. I don't even have any Army wives in my novel. I mean, my main character's a newly twice-divorced Delta Force officer. Although now I know why his wives divorced him), but I was reading. I still wasn't knitting; I didn't start knitting again until recently. I dropped a lot of things this year to write my novel: orchestra, private lessons for saxophone and piano, homework, writing anything else.
Now, it's not like I didn't have the odd fic-like plot bunny during novel period, but I rarely indulged them. I was strict. I only wrote if it was a scene that couldn't somehow be bludgeoned into my novel (guys...my novel is a mosaic of fandoms. I went, "Boy, I'd love to write SGA fic, but I don't know the characters well enough," and, "Boy, people sure did like that CSI:NY AU I wrote way back when, but I kind of want to explore the universe," and, "Boy, are those wonderfully capable Army boys on The Unit fun and deadly and angsty," and, "Boy, who doesn't love a big galactic war like Star Wars?" (in case people were wondering where the Lostverse went. It got eaten. By my novel. Although they have nothing in common, except for how those aliens are totally based on the Jedi and now I have the characters but I cannot figure out how to use them, but by God, I will), and, "Boy, I sure did like the concept of Space: Above and Beyond. Too bad it got cancelled," and, "Boy, that Colonel Mitchell sure is a hot Southern boy, isn't he?" and, "Boy, I'd love to have a universe as rich as Farscape's, but, well, I haven't seen the whole show yet," and actually, I'm not sure I even need the parentheses anymore since that last, uh, paragraph pretty much finished up my thoughts). When I wrote my Into the Woods fic, it was a lovely moment of, "Oh my God, if I don't think about something other than aliens, I will throw my computer and God damn powerpoint out the window and DAMN THE SENIOR PROJECT. I DON'T NEED TO GRADUATE," but immediately afterwards I went back to working on my novel and my senior project and so went the next three months. Madness. Outer space. War. Sorrow. Death. Maiming. Blowing up spaceships, which is fun until you have to start thinking about how many people were on that spaceship, and which other spaceships they were from, and was that spaceship carrying bodies? Before it blow up, did it have time to evacuate anybody? Where did those survivors go? What ship? Who are the attackers? What are their motives? Are they likely to take prisoners, or just shoot on sight? And if they are taking prisoners, are they likely to give medical care? What are they going to do with the prisoners? Are they going to ransom them back, or try and trade? What are the enemy spaceships? How many people are on them? Who commands? What are the weapons?
This was going through my head eighteen hours a day. The other six hours I was sleeping. Oh, yes, occasionally I had moments of, "What the hell is this, there is no Jesus Christ metaphor in Song of Solomon, oh, wait, what would I know, I'm not Christian anyway, hey, I still haven't figured out a religion for the alien empire, and would they have a single religion, or would they have let multiple religions flourish? What did the British Empire do? Or maybe they're more of a Roman Empire type. Huh, I wonder if the churches in America tried to send missionaries to another galaxy, and if that worked at all. Did the president have an official view on it? He was a Republican. I wonder if his opponent, the Democrat, used that. I wonder if that's going to come up in the presidential alection. Would Mara use that? Wait, I still have to pass this class." I'm not kidding. This was my life. For eight months.
And then Narnia came out. And -- I'd been so excited about it -- "Screw graduation!" I kept telling people. "I'm so excited for Prince Caspian!" -- but I didn't see it for a week. And then I saw it. And I was so excited, because I wanted to write and meta and squee and it was so different from Spaceforce! And I'd forgotten, really, what it's like to be in fandom, because for the past eight months -- for most of my fandom career, actually -- I've been a lurker, and a reader, and occasionally a writer. But I was so happy. And I forgot how wonderful feedback is, because you really do forget, when you're writing original fiction -- and I didn't even get feedback on my novel from the panel I presented to. (Except the vice principal, who apparently now thinks I am, like, next to God. "I can't believe I went through four years without knowing you!" he kept saying. "Sorry, I graduated, I guess you could have failed me.") I forgot how fantastic it is for people to be excited about the same things I'm excited about, and want to exchange intelligent discourse with me, and who don't think I'm over thinking, or that I'm too dark, or wonder why I care.
And I keep thinking -- "Thank you, thank the Gods, thank Walden Media and C.S. Lewis," -- but especially, thank you, for helping me remember why I got into this in the first place, for helping get me out of my own head. I'm reading. Fiction. And I'm writing fic, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with spaceships or the military or special forces, and I can be silly and talk about Narnian celebrity blogs if I want, or about my Aslan conspiracy theories, or why Peter is the High King and Caspian is just screwed, so screwed, and -- thank you so much, because I think I was on the edge of cracking. I was so tired, and now there's light, and I'm refreshed and happy and new again.