beyond the wide world's end

So 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.)

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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.

( Reprisal was the word on everybody's lips. )

I am now writing a scene that means I'm going to have to, for the first time, throw this chapter at someone else because if I keep it in, that means Gambit will tip from gen to not-gen.

Actually, the funny thing is that Gambit was never meant to be gen; I went in completely unsure whether I'd keep it gen or write the threesome in. This is one of the few times I'm hesitating over audience reaction, because I don't know if I can deal with someone seriously badmouthing Padme at me, which is...a fairly likely outcome if I end Chapter 7 on the scene in question. (I've already been told that Padme should get over herself and forgive Anakin for the events at the end of Wake. I've also been told that Anakin doesn't love Padme the way Vader does, which was...disturbing, considering the way that Vader treats Padme. FANDOM.)

( snippet )

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Unrelated: Gambit is kind of interesting because, like Wake, it involves sliding one story inside another one -- Wake takes place between ESB and RotJ, and Luke and Leia spend a lot of time reacting to the events of ESB or preparing for RotJ. Except, unlike Wake, I can't assume that the audience knows the world that Our Heroes have been thrust into. So while Gambit has Plot A with Padme, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Rex, Plot B is already merrily rolling along and has been for some time; they walked into a world that was already fully formed and in the middle of a story that has nothing to do with them. (You could argue that the Quartet is actually Plot B and the Civil War is Plot A, but it doesn't really matter.) And that was something I really wanted to do, to make it clear that the world the Quartet had walked into wasn't their world, it wasn't their story; all of the things that are happening are happening without input from them. Eventually they do begin to have an impact on the larger scheme of events just because of where they are, but they're never going to be the main players because it's not their universe. They're just visiting.

Now, how large an impact...we'll see. *g*

Because I was at the point where if I didn't write it down, I was going to start contradicting myself fairly frequently. Um, ask questions if there's something confusing and/or especially interesting on here? A lot of major events aren't right now just because I'm not positive when they actually happened.

( Timeline for events leading up to Queen's Gambit )

Ah, yes. Alternate universe Anakin Skywalker, who's rocking the angry biker S3 Jax Teller look despite the fact that Hayden Christensen can't quite pull it off. Whatever, fortunately I'm not dependent on whether or not Hayden can grow a beard. (Okay, maybe that last link was gratuitous. YOU'RE WELCOME.) Also, pulling slightly from the RotS concept art, at least for the long hair.

( snippet from Gambit 3 )

(I missed being in Anakin's head! I was in Padme's head for most of the past two chapters, which meant that I kind of wanted to set Anakin on fire, but he's a fun POV to write from. Also, yes, the two Anakins just beat the crap out of each other while Obi-Wan and Padme watched and ate popccorn. More or less.)

Today in terrible typos: I accidentally typed "Palpatine" instead of "Padme." Which wouldn't be so bad, except that I typed it in the middle of a makeout scene. Surprise, Obi-Wan!

...at least I caught it pretty quickly.

( things I am writing right now )

While I am here, here is a snippet from what I was writing today, which is Obi-Wan/Padme backstory set about seven months after the Battle of Naboo went rather differently (as a hasty aside, since the ages aren't actually mentioned in the movie canon, my tendency is to age Padme up two years and Obi-Wan down two from what the EU says):

( Read more... )

* I am prodding very, very delicately at a possible sequel to Wake, which is tentatively titled "Queen's Gambit." The trick here, at least for me, is to keep it so firmly rooted in the canon even as an AU that there's no way it will work just as a plain original, which is what I've been worrying about. (In this case, not the parallel universe aspects, but the for the QK 'verse, because I've been looking at it and wondering if it would work better as an original novel than as fic.) I'm trying to keep "familiar enough to be instantly recognizable, different enough to be shocking" at the front of my mind while writing, which are generally good principles for a canon-divergence AU. (Yeah, I'm not too proud to say that I don't enjoy the shock factor, because I definitely do.)

And because I'm one of those people who loves to talk about what they're writing -- anonymous exchanges are basically killer for me, because under normal circumstances I just constantly livetweet my commentary on whatever I'm writing at the time and I can do that if I'm supposed to be anon -- a snippet. I hope it's as trippy to read as it was to write.

( snippet )

* I'm wondering how much of my freakout/panic attack the other day came from the fact that I'd just finished a fic and had nothing else to occupy my brain with except for panic about my future and current living situation. It's definitely easier for me to stop and readjust if I have something to work on. (On the other hand, I don't necessarily multi-task really well, which is why I don't usually have multiple live WIPs.)

* On a similar note, I put off replying to this e-mail + doing any further application stuff until I had finished Wake, and since Wake's now done, I have to reply to this 2-week-old e-mail from Leicester about my pre-app, which, uh, I'm pretty sure I probably should have replied to before. (On the other hand, they also took about three weeks to reply to the original e-mail, so...I have no idea what that means.) So I need to (a) look at it and (b) come up with smart, reasonable, well-educated and well-researched answers to it.

* Every time I think about telling my parents some of my post-MA options I also have to think NO DON'T DO IT IT WILL ONLY END IN TEARS so I don't actually do so. Because it will end in tears. (But, for the record, and because at least if I cry on the internet no one will see me and judge me for it: post-bacc in classics at UC-Davis or UNC-Chapel Hill -- I'll probably miss the deadline for Penn -- MA in Classical Reception at Bristol (I've been burned by classics so many times that I should start moving back into the early modern period), PhD proposals at a couple of UK schools, Museum Studies at Leicester, Library Science at LSU are all things that I am considering if I don't get into the MA program I'm waiting to hear back from. I can make all those deadlines if I need to.)

* One of these days I need to actually find out how the East India Trading Company worked because I don't know and it's driving me crazy.

* I need to get Netflix Instant again (we dropped it when I went to England and I haven't reupped because I have Amazon Prime) because STAR WARS THE CLONE WARS IS COMING BACK AND I'M SO EXCITED.



(I have a lot of feelings about Star Wars -- movies, books, comics, Clone Wars, and Rebels -- and I will talk about them at the drop of a hat, but I try and restrain myself except for the 75K time travel alternate universe fanfic I just wrote.)

I swear I only wrote this scene for completely legitimate reasons that were absolutely necessary for the ongoing plot of this fic. Totally.

( snippet from Wake 7 )

I'm sitting on the Chapter of Unending Agony for a couple of days before I go back and do edits -- I've got to do hard rewrites on a couple of scenes, since they're pretty messy and need to be cleaned up, and since 6 is essentially the climax, it needs to be perfect. Wake 7 is such a huge change of pace from previous chapters -- as you can tell from that excerpt, ha -- that it makes a good brain-change from the Chapter of Unending Agony.

My current scene of progress is putting me through basically unending agony. I can't stop grinning. And screaming internally. Because there are a couple of deliberate parallels in this scene, I had to run through various scenes in RotS and RotJ (with a dip into the RotS novelization and TCW 3.17) multiple times, so that was...painful. And now Palpatine is here, so we can get into one of the scenes I've been planning since the very beginning of Wake!

Hopefully this chapter is as agonizing to read as it is to write.

( tee-tiny snippet )

If I didn't already know how Wake was going to end, I'd probably be hard-pressed to resist the urge to have Anakin skipping through alternate universes for a couple of chapters, because I love alternate universes, and it would be so much fun. The one where Dooku is the emperor and Obi-Wan is his Darth Vader (except not Vader, because I have a different Sith name set aside for Obi-Wan*)! The one where Palpatine's original plan played out in TPM and the Jedi are an underground fringe rebel group! The one where Yoda went after Vader and Obi-Wan went after Palpatine in RotS and things went differently! The one where Anakin never became a Jedi, but the galaxy still fell and Padme is running this universe's Rebel Alliance with Bail Organa and Mon Mothma! Or one that's really out there, like where the old Sith Empire from the Old Republic never fell or something. Etc, etc.

(I really love alternate universes.)

* I just assume that every Star Wars fan has a running list of Darth -- names, you know, for reasons. You never know when you're gonna have to name a Sith Lord. Or become one.

Man, we still don't have any snow out here, which is pretty unusual for this time of year -- there's not much on the Pass, either, which isn't good. We had a little snow last week, but it melted by the next day. We actually have some new grass, so it feels more like February or March than December. On the one hand I'm glad because I'm not terribly fond of snow -- and I really hate driving in snow -- but on the other hand I'm starting to freak out for generalized reasons. (No snow now means far less snowmelt later on, for one, but on the other hand I just panic really easily even over things that I have no control over.)

*

Christmas happened -- my dad's still in Thailand, or maybe in Cambodia, who the hell knows, but my cousin Maya and her son Kenzo came over from the West Side. ( Family, the Japanese side )

I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas, which means that I may eventually read some of my massive collection of ebooks on an actual ereader instead of on my laptop, which is what I usually do. Currently it's sitting on my bookshelf while I continue to read ebooks on my computer, though I did download the Comixology and Dark Horse apps so I can read comics on it.

*

Currently I'm working on the fifth fucking draft of Bottom of the River 6, which has already bounced through numerous scenarios and three different POVs while I try and figure out what the fuck I'm doing. (In case anyone was under the impression that I was an organized writer: HA HA HA no. I know the quote-unquote big twist of River and roughly where the story is headed, but I keep getting bogged down in details. It used to be a much more straight-forward murder mystery, then Shara-Von switched from being a junior senatorial aide to being a former spy, so it's switched genres slightly from being a murder mystery to being more a political thriller, sort of) This isn't helped by the fact that my hands and wrists have been acting up again recently, so I'm less willing to spend extended periods of time typing.

I've got about 1200 words of Wake the Storm 3 written, but I think I'm going to cut and rewrite about half of that so the scene makes sense. ( Plotting )

I currently don't have beta readers for either story, so if anyone would be willing to step in on that front, I would really appreciate it.

*

I just saw Veronica Mars season one for the first time -- yes, I know, I actually was around when it first aired, but I didn't get the channel it was on. Right now the DVDs are sitting next to my Farscape DVDs, so it looks like Veronica's staring at Crichton going, "Dude, you got PROBLEMS."

*

I keep meaning to do book recs and Star Wars recs, but I keep forgetting. BAD BEDLAM. (Although if there's a specific SW thing you want to ask about -- at this point I can pretty much expound on most things except the OT and post-OT EU and the video games -- feel free to do so. I know I want to do a rec post for the KOTOR comics and Knight Errant, which are both set in the Old Republic. And Dark Times, because holy crap, Dark Times is BRUTAL. A lot of the PT comics EU -- I'm thinking of the Darth Vader comics here, and a little bit of Empire, which I haven't read all of yet -- are brutal, but GOD DAMN. And Legacy, which is set 130 years after RotJ, and is brutal in a different way, and also features the most manpain protagonist I have ever met. If Anakin Skywalker comes back from the dead to tell you that you've been making poor life choices, KID YOU'VE BEEN MAKING POOR LIFE CHOICES. But Legacy also has one of the most interesting female characters in the EU, so there's that.)