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Apr. 27th, 2014 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardSo I managed to get stung by a bee or bitten by a spider or something without realizing it, and as a result my left foot is swollen and itchy and red and I've spent the weekend limping around the house. So that's fun.
(My mom: "Why didn't you tell me you were in pain yesterday?" Me: "Because I'm used to being in pain and I just assumed it would eventually go away.")
*
I've been throwing myself at Gambit 9 for a couple of weeks now, partially because I broke my cardinal rule for Wake and Gambit and posted Gambit 8 before I had a complete draft of the next chapter. I've broke it down and built it up and broke it down again about half a dozen times so far, thrown in plot threads, pulled them out, started assassinations, stopped them mid-stream, put Chekhov's gun on the table, took it off, put a different Checkhov's gun on the table, left it there, wrote a flashback that won't go in this scene, wrote some more backstory, wrote some porn, wrote some action, killed a character, resurrected a character who's dead in canon, wrote a scene I like but can't use because it screws with the timeline, and so on and so forth.
Right now I'm trying what's usually my last-ditch attempt to get things in order, which is writing each scene in its own individual word doc so I don't get overwhelmed by everything on the page. I don't actually like doing this, because it's bulky and unwieldy and I can lose track of the big picture, but since I was getting lost in the big picture... *shrug* If I can get enough individual scenes down, I can start sorting it out again and go back to working in chapter docs. I do this with academic papers too, but then I break it down by paragraph. It does work (especially for editing), it's just...annoying.
(Technical stuff: I write in Word, I usually put each chapter in its own doc, sometimes I have a master doc for the entire story but sometimes not. For Gambit they've just been titled things like "Queen's Gambit 1", "Queen's Gambit 2"; for Wake I went back and added in the chapter titles; for Dust they've got the aka's -- "dust 35 a.k.a. please gods let us finally get off the damn island", "dust 29 a.k.a. run away run away and tell someone." For the individual scenes, they're just titled "dooku 1", "padme 1", "ani 1" at the moment.)
I actually write a lot of backstory that never makes it onto the page, and which would probably be interesting to read if I could ever figure out how to post it properly, because most of my SW readers are on AO3 now (I assume) and would probably never see it, but it doesn't really feel...organized enough? to go on AO3.
I've also been posting some context for my Star Wars fic over on Tumblr. So far just for Wake, but it might come up for some of my other fic too. Part of my ongoing attempt to treat Tumblr as an actual blogging platform instead of just a more fannish Pinterest. (On actual Pinterest, I do have boards for Gambit, Wake, Naboo in general, and Oxygen & Rust. I have a board solely for O&R hair inspiration. I love Pinterest. I'm always weirded out when I see people interacting fannishly on it, though.)
*
Anyway, here's a Rex POV scene from Gambit that probably won't make it into Gambit because it doesn't work with the current timeline.
Rex had fallen in with a mixed group of clones and regular humans (and one Togruta woman who reminded him a little of Ahsoka) from the Palace Guard as they came off duty. A few of them had been part of the Queen’s security detail, which was probably why he had gotten the invitation; he’d tagged along with the Queen and Senator Amidala all day, relatively inconspicuous as long as he kept to the back of her entourage. The Queen’s relative unconcern toward his presence had led to Drift, one of the other clones, dragging him away for a few minutes to be fitted out in an RNSF uniform and given standard weapons to match the other members of her detail. As far as Rex had been able to tell, these orders had been given by one of the nearly interchangeable handmaidens; Drift hadn’t asked for his identification number or his unit, just his nickname, and didn’t seem surprised that he had apparently attached himself to one of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens.
Drift had already gone off duty by the time Rex joined up with a group that had, for lack of a better term, felt all right to him. They accepted him without question, introducing themselves to him as they made their way back to the palace barracks and the mess.
In the GAR, there was almost no fraternization between clones and the non-clone minority in the military, with a few of the Jedi commanders the only exceptions. Walking into the mess and finding clones and regular personnel interacting – as equals, as comrades, as friends – was enough of a shock that Rex froze just inside the door, staring in surprise before a clone called Foxtrot elbowed him to get him out of the way.
He followed Foxtrot to the nearest queue, collecting a tray and a plate of food he didn’t recognize, but which looked and smelled more appetizing than the GAR rations he was used to.
“You been out in the cold awhile?” Foxtrot asked after they’d settled down at a table, along with the rest of the group they had come in with.
“Something like that,” Rex said, trying to decide if using a fork instead of chopsticks would mark him as an outsider. Then he saw another clone, Hod, sawing at what turned out to be a meat-filled steamed bun of some sort with knife and fork, which made up his mind. “It’s, uh, classified.”
Foxtrot nodded as if that was the answer he had been expecting, using his own chopsticks effortlessly as he picked up some noodles.
Rex ate hungrily – definitely better than anything the GAR had ever provided – and tried to work out a way to ask about the mixed company. Unsurprisingly, the topic of conversation at the round table was the Federation bombardment; almost all the regulars had lived through the occupation a decade earlier and the clones had picked up on their comrades’ intense hatred for the Republic, the Trade Federation, and the other commerce guilds. Reprisal was the word on everyone’s lips. Blood for blood.
It hadn’t been Rex’s men out there dying today, but he understood the sentiment. What surprised him was that the clones were just as vicious as the regulars, even though Naboo wasn’t their homeworld. By dint of a few delicate – and delicately timed – questions, Rex eventually worked out that only two of the clones he was sitting with had come from the same batch back on Kamino and that none of them were permanently assigned to the Palace Guard. Instead, Amidala and Kenobi rotated the clones and the regulars through planetside detail with the various branches of the RNSF and offworld detail with the Naboo units detached to the Confederate military, both ground forces and space navy depending. It led to less specialization, but more personal loyalty, especially on the part of the clones. Rex could admire that; few of the clones in the GAR had really understood what they were fighting for, just that they were fighting, while the Confederate clones he’d met considered themselves as much Naboo as the regulars.
Which meant, he realized after several minutes’ thought – the topic of conversation had moved onto some kind of sporting event he’d never heard of before – that every clone in the Confederate military was owned by Naboo, not by the Confederacy itself. Rex had a rough conception of how much individual clones were worth, and even if Naboo had only a fraction of the clones that the GAR had, that it must have cost a fortune. He didn’t know much about Galactic politics, but while he knew that Naboo was a resource-rich planet, he had never heard of it being called a particularly wealthy one. They had to be so deep in hock to the Banking Clan that it would take them a century or more to pay off.
It took him a couple of minutes to realize that one of the regular officers, a young woman who seemed barely out of her teens, was trying, not terribly subtly, to ask him if he was assigned to something that she referred to obliquely as ‘The Unit.’ Rex had been around enough clone commandos to have a pretty good idea of what she was actually asking him.
“I couldn’t say, specialist,” he told her, which she, unsurprisingly, took as a yes. She grinned in delight, sitting back in her seat, so pleased by his answer that Rex almost felt bad for lying even though he hadn’t done anything of the sort.
It was an answer that satisfied all the other questions that no one else had asked, though, and Rex, listening carefully to what was and wasn’t said, came to the conclusion that Queen Amidala’s Captain Kenobi really did have a specialized unit, some of whose members dated all the way back to the Occupation. Rex had spent the past three years watching the Jedi work and knew the difference between what they were capable of, what they were trained for, and what they were willing to do; if Captain Kenobi and his unit did even a quarter of that, then he was honored to be considered a member of their rank, even if it wasn’t strictly true.
They were finishing up as another shift, one that had apparently been working on the damaged parts of the palace, came in. Rex’s group immediately finished their drinks and ate their last remaining bites of food, clearing away the table so that another group of dirty, exhausted guardsmen and women could take it.
“You have somewhere to bunk down tonight?” Foxtrot asked Rex as they left the mess.
“You offering?” Rex asked, unsure whether that was meant to be a come-on or not. It happened sometimes even between clones; the Kaminoans hadn’t bred out sexual desire.
Foxtrot grinned, meaning he’d understood the question. “We’ve got a couple of extra bunks; a couple of my guys were on furlough when all this started. Clean sheets and everything if you want.”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” Rex said. He was pretty sure that if he asked the right people the right questions he could find out where the Senator and the generals had gone, but the problem was that he didn’t know who the right people were.
“Great,” Foxtrot said, then yawned and caught himself with a fist over his mouth. “The officers will start sorting things out tomorrow and then you can find the rest of your unit.”
“Just me,” Rex told him. “The others aren’t here.”
He didn’t know whether that was true or not for Captain Kenobi’s actual unit, since for all he knew they’d accompanied him to wherever he’d been captured and were now either dead or POWs, but his people certainly weren’t here. Thinking about them brought on the ache he’d been trying to avoid since he’d come to on Queen Breha a week ago: living stars or Force or whatever is out there, please let my brothers be safe.
That was the thought that haunted him the rest of the evening. He met the members of Foxtrot’s squadron that he hadn’t been introduced to earlier, half clones and half regulars, as seemed to be standard, and got a chance to shower before falling into a borrowed bunk. Everyone in the room was as exhausted as he was; they had been on duty as long as he had, and they’d gotten split up in the chaos of the attack. Some had gone with the Queen or the other palace guard units, while others had ended up with the city security patrols. No casualties, Rex had been glad to hear; he’d slept in dead men’s beds before, but he had never been comfortable doing it.
If he shut his eyes, except for the lighter breaths of the women in the room, he could almost be back in the GAR barracks – racked out on Resolute or one of the other transports, or on deployment planetside, or even back on Coruscant. Clones had never been meant to be alone, and even with the company of the two Jedi and the Senator, Rex had been alone for far too long.
(My mom: "Why didn't you tell me you were in pain yesterday?" Me: "Because I'm used to being in pain and I just assumed it would eventually go away.")
*
I've been throwing myself at Gambit 9 for a couple of weeks now, partially because I broke my cardinal rule for Wake and Gambit and posted Gambit 8 before I had a complete draft of the next chapter. I've broke it down and built it up and broke it down again about half a dozen times so far, thrown in plot threads, pulled them out, started assassinations, stopped them mid-stream, put Chekhov's gun on the table, took it off, put a different Checkhov's gun on the table, left it there, wrote a flashback that won't go in this scene, wrote some more backstory, wrote some porn, wrote some action, killed a character, resurrected a character who's dead in canon, wrote a scene I like but can't use because it screws with the timeline, and so on and so forth.
Right now I'm trying what's usually my last-ditch attempt to get things in order, which is writing each scene in its own individual word doc so I don't get overwhelmed by everything on the page. I don't actually like doing this, because it's bulky and unwieldy and I can lose track of the big picture, but since I was getting lost in the big picture... *shrug* If I can get enough individual scenes down, I can start sorting it out again and go back to working in chapter docs. I do this with academic papers too, but then I break it down by paragraph. It does work (especially for editing), it's just...annoying.
(Technical stuff: I write in Word, I usually put each chapter in its own doc, sometimes I have a master doc for the entire story but sometimes not. For Gambit they've just been titled things like "Queen's Gambit 1", "Queen's Gambit 2"; for Wake I went back and added in the chapter titles; for Dust they've got the aka's -- "dust 35 a.k.a. please gods let us finally get off the damn island", "dust 29 a.k.a. run away run away and tell someone." For the individual scenes, they're just titled "dooku 1", "padme 1", "ani 1" at the moment.)
I actually write a lot of backstory that never makes it onto the page, and which would probably be interesting to read if I could ever figure out how to post it properly, because most of my SW readers are on AO3 now (I assume) and would probably never see it, but it doesn't really feel...organized enough? to go on AO3.
I've also been posting some context for my Star Wars fic over on Tumblr. So far just for Wake, but it might come up for some of my other fic too. Part of my ongoing attempt to treat Tumblr as an actual blogging platform instead of just a more fannish Pinterest. (On actual Pinterest, I do have boards for Gambit, Wake, Naboo in general, and Oxygen & Rust. I have a board solely for O&R hair inspiration. I love Pinterest. I'm always weirded out when I see people interacting fannishly on it, though.)
*
Anyway, here's a Rex POV scene from Gambit that probably won't make it into Gambit because it doesn't work with the current timeline.
Rex had fallen in with a mixed group of clones and regular humans (and one Togruta woman who reminded him a little of Ahsoka) from the Palace Guard as they came off duty. A few of them had been part of the Queen’s security detail, which was probably why he had gotten the invitation; he’d tagged along with the Queen and Senator Amidala all day, relatively inconspicuous as long as he kept to the back of her entourage. The Queen’s relative unconcern toward his presence had led to Drift, one of the other clones, dragging him away for a few minutes to be fitted out in an RNSF uniform and given standard weapons to match the other members of her detail. As far as Rex had been able to tell, these orders had been given by one of the nearly interchangeable handmaidens; Drift hadn’t asked for his identification number or his unit, just his nickname, and didn’t seem surprised that he had apparently attached himself to one of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens.
Drift had already gone off duty by the time Rex joined up with a group that had, for lack of a better term, felt all right to him. They accepted him without question, introducing themselves to him as they made their way back to the palace barracks and the mess.
In the GAR, there was almost no fraternization between clones and the non-clone minority in the military, with a few of the Jedi commanders the only exceptions. Walking into the mess and finding clones and regular personnel interacting – as equals, as comrades, as friends – was enough of a shock that Rex froze just inside the door, staring in surprise before a clone called Foxtrot elbowed him to get him out of the way.
He followed Foxtrot to the nearest queue, collecting a tray and a plate of food he didn’t recognize, but which looked and smelled more appetizing than the GAR rations he was used to.
“You been out in the cold awhile?” Foxtrot asked after they’d settled down at a table, along with the rest of the group they had come in with.
“Something like that,” Rex said, trying to decide if using a fork instead of chopsticks would mark him as an outsider. Then he saw another clone, Hod, sawing at what turned out to be a meat-filled steamed bun of some sort with knife and fork, which made up his mind. “It’s, uh, classified.”
Foxtrot nodded as if that was the answer he had been expecting, using his own chopsticks effortlessly as he picked up some noodles.
Rex ate hungrily – definitely better than anything the GAR had ever provided – and tried to work out a way to ask about the mixed company. Unsurprisingly, the topic of conversation at the round table was the Federation bombardment; almost all the regulars had lived through the occupation a decade earlier and the clones had picked up on their comrades’ intense hatred for the Republic, the Trade Federation, and the other commerce guilds. Reprisal was the word on everyone’s lips. Blood for blood.
It hadn’t been Rex’s men out there dying today, but he understood the sentiment. What surprised him was that the clones were just as vicious as the regulars, even though Naboo wasn’t their homeworld. By dint of a few delicate – and delicately timed – questions, Rex eventually worked out that only two of the clones he was sitting with had come from the same batch back on Kamino and that none of them were permanently assigned to the Palace Guard. Instead, Amidala and Kenobi rotated the clones and the regulars through planetside detail with the various branches of the RNSF and offworld detail with the Naboo units detached to the Confederate military, both ground forces and space navy depending. It led to less specialization, but more personal loyalty, especially on the part of the clones. Rex could admire that; few of the clones in the GAR had really understood what they were fighting for, just that they were fighting, while the Confederate clones he’d met considered themselves as much Naboo as the regulars.
Which meant, he realized after several minutes’ thought – the topic of conversation had moved onto some kind of sporting event he’d never heard of before – that every clone in the Confederate military was owned by Naboo, not by the Confederacy itself. Rex had a rough conception of how much individual clones were worth, and even if Naboo had only a fraction of the clones that the GAR had, that it must have cost a fortune. He didn’t know much about Galactic politics, but while he knew that Naboo was a resource-rich planet, he had never heard of it being called a particularly wealthy one. They had to be so deep in hock to the Banking Clan that it would take them a century or more to pay off.
It took him a couple of minutes to realize that one of the regular officers, a young woman who seemed barely out of her teens, was trying, not terribly subtly, to ask him if he was assigned to something that she referred to obliquely as ‘The Unit.’ Rex had been around enough clone commandos to have a pretty good idea of what she was actually asking him.
“I couldn’t say, specialist,” he told her, which she, unsurprisingly, took as a yes. She grinned in delight, sitting back in her seat, so pleased by his answer that Rex almost felt bad for lying even though he hadn’t done anything of the sort.
It was an answer that satisfied all the other questions that no one else had asked, though, and Rex, listening carefully to what was and wasn’t said, came to the conclusion that Queen Amidala’s Captain Kenobi really did have a specialized unit, some of whose members dated all the way back to the Occupation. Rex had spent the past three years watching the Jedi work and knew the difference between what they were capable of, what they were trained for, and what they were willing to do; if Captain Kenobi and his unit did even a quarter of that, then he was honored to be considered a member of their rank, even if it wasn’t strictly true.
They were finishing up as another shift, one that had apparently been working on the damaged parts of the palace, came in. Rex’s group immediately finished their drinks and ate their last remaining bites of food, clearing away the table so that another group of dirty, exhausted guardsmen and women could take it.
“You have somewhere to bunk down tonight?” Foxtrot asked Rex as they left the mess.
“You offering?” Rex asked, unsure whether that was meant to be a come-on or not. It happened sometimes even between clones; the Kaminoans hadn’t bred out sexual desire.
Foxtrot grinned, meaning he’d understood the question. “We’ve got a couple of extra bunks; a couple of my guys were on furlough when all this started. Clean sheets and everything if you want.”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” Rex said. He was pretty sure that if he asked the right people the right questions he could find out where the Senator and the generals had gone, but the problem was that he didn’t know who the right people were.
“Great,” Foxtrot said, then yawned and caught himself with a fist over his mouth. “The officers will start sorting things out tomorrow and then you can find the rest of your unit.”
“Just me,” Rex told him. “The others aren’t here.”
He didn’t know whether that was true or not for Captain Kenobi’s actual unit, since for all he knew they’d accompanied him to wherever he’d been captured and were now either dead or POWs, but his people certainly weren’t here. Thinking about them brought on the ache he’d been trying to avoid since he’d come to on Queen Breha a week ago: living stars or Force or whatever is out there, please let my brothers be safe.
That was the thought that haunted him the rest of the evening. He met the members of Foxtrot’s squadron that he hadn’t been introduced to earlier, half clones and half regulars, as seemed to be standard, and got a chance to shower before falling into a borrowed bunk. Everyone in the room was as exhausted as he was; they had been on duty as long as he had, and they’d gotten split up in the chaos of the attack. Some had gone with the Queen or the other palace guard units, while others had ended up with the city security patrols. No casualties, Rex had been glad to hear; he’d slept in dead men’s beds before, but he had never been comfortable doing it.
If he shut his eyes, except for the lighter breaths of the women in the room, he could almost be back in the GAR barracks – racked out on Resolute or one of the other transports, or on deployment planetside, or even back on Coruscant. Clones had never been meant to be alone, and even with the company of the two Jedi and the Senator, Rex had been alone for far too long.
More Dust...pretty please?
Date: 2014-05-03 01:59 pm (UTC)I can tell you're fully into your Queen's Gambit project now (sadly, I've never watched Star Wars and try not to read fanfic for stuff I've never read/watched in the original, so that I don't end up with spoilers if and when I actually decide to watch the original. Of course, I have ended up discovering several new authors simply because someone wrote crossover fanfic where I didn't know one fandom, and then I had to find out more. Sorry, that was a long digression.)
Anyway, I realise you're into Gambit right now, but just wondered if you're still working on Dust? Or Revelations? I've loved both of those since I started reading them, and still check out your blog regularly to see if you;re posting more. (And I love your aka chapter names for Dust -- care to share what the rest of them are?)
(I'm Priscilla, by the way. I don't have a Dreamwidth or OpenID account, so am an anon commenter here.)
Re: More Dust...pretty please?
Date: 2014-05-04 08:38 am (UTC)I tend to go through long phases with fandoms, flipping back and forth between Narnia and Star Wars, and right now I'm in Star Wars and will probably flip back to Narnia at some undetermined point in the future. As a writer, I'm actually really bad at working on multiple projects at once; I will eventually go back to Dust, largely because the next scene is so cool I have to get it on the page, but unfortunately I can't say when because I'm hoping to finish Gambit before my brain switches fandoms again. I did stop writing literally in the middle of a chapter, because I had to start working on my MA dissertation, so I do still consider Dust an active WIP, even if I'm not currently working on it.
Let's see, the chapter names for Dust are, according to my Dust folder:
dust 00 a.k.a. fun times in the high reaches
dust 3 a.k.a. death by exposition
dust 7 a.k.a. thieves, drugs, and money
dust 12 a.k.a. oh god poor susan
dust 15 a.k.a. fun times with criminal types
dust 16 a.k.a. escape from cair paravel
dust 17 a.k.a. escape from cair paravel mark two
dust 18 a.k.a. fun with naiads
dust 19 a.k.a. hit the ground running
dust 20 a.k.a. gangs of cair paravel
dust 21 a.k.a. into the diamond mines
dust 22 a.k.a. finally someone gets laid
dust 23 a.k.a. cair paravel is a more savage place
dust 24 a.k.a. edmund and the charcoal-burner
dust 25 a.k.a. again (an earlier draft was called "start the rocks rolling")
dust 26 a.k.a. jill in anvard
dust 27 a.k.a. the lion's paw
dust 28 a.k.a. white bear hall
dust 29 a.k.a. run away run away and tell someone
dust 30 a.k.a. the queen of anvard
dust 31 a.k.a. dances with criminals
dust 32 a.k.a. dwarves dwarves dwarves
dust 33 a.k.a. wtf and also an aggravation of dwarves
dust 34 a.k.a. women are each other's lions (original draft: dust 36 a.k.a. hell hath no fury)
And the in-progress chapters (some of these are variations on the same chapter, because I poked at a couple of different options):
return to murder island
archenland again
a challenge in the high reaches
please gods let us finally get off the damn island
Re: More Dust...pretty please?
Date: 2014-05-05 03:34 pm (UTC)Thanks for your reply. It's good to know the Dust-verse is still alive somewhere there in the back of your head, just waiting to re-emerge someday! (In the meantime, maybe I should finally check out Star Wars to see what it's all about...)
Priscilla
Re: More Dust...pretty please?
Date: 2014-05-09 07:57 am (UTC)