my head is a weird place

I dreamed this morning one of my usual urban fantasy things where I was secretly a princess and I was at a party and got attacked by a bunch of dudes in chainmail. I gathered allies in a hurry, and we had swords, but there's often a shortage of people who know how to use them. Then in the crowd I spotted Skandar Keynes. I raised an eyebrow and said 'Once a king or queen of Narnia...?' and he grinned and caught the swords I threw him. And then he kicked arse.
I was not aware I remembered the name of Skandar Keynes. Having him turn up to do RPF in my regular nightly marysue saga is sort of offputting.

The bit with the immortal guy from Misfits and going home to meet his dad and it all getting awkward because I'd known him when he was the character in Press Gang just mixed the crossovers every which way.

I think I prefer dreaming about older people. Just in general. If I get to pick a cast.

I should probably sleep.
I tried it though and it didn't work.
It's very boring when that happens.

My journal is boring. Nothing happens here except word counts and dreams that didn't make sense when they were in my head and don't get better on the page.

I wrote some more story but I still haven't written the scene I sat down to write.
Also I don't currently think this year's book is going to turn into something to show people.

Build a colony

I have been looking at housing, and at science fiction. Now I want to set up a space colony, only without the spaceship bit. Just make it on Earth. Make lots of housing, make it self sufficient for essentials, put lots of people in it.

It suddenly sounds harder when you're not taking the crew of the starship Enterprise, you're just making a new housing estate with really interesting allotments.

I think I've read enough about spaceships. I need to read about planned communities and how they turn out. In a bunch of countries, and cultures.


or, possibly, I need to finish my novel on a nice small spaceship in the week and a half before college starts again.

... I'm wondering if I should have had a letter about college starting again. I can't find anything on the timetable and I did find an email that said we should have access to next semester's subjects on Blackboard all holiday but I totally don't. Which is what usually happens so I hadn't paid it any mind.

I shall wait until September and panic then.

fic writing crazy

I have been thinking about writing, and I think that writing fanfic requires a different kind of crazy than writing original fic. I mean, either way, we have people in our heads talking to us. The writing skills have a lot of overlap. Fanfic and tie in fic and screenwriting for established shows all require you to grasp character voice, and mostly want you to work to template, with established genres and possibly a five act structure or something. It's writing inside scaffolding. Original fic has to build its own scaffolding, decide its own structure for certain, figure out its genre, and put character descriptions in somewhere (which my fic, at 54000 words, has thus far failed to do. A couple of comments on skin tone and hair color, quite a lot about uniforms, and some names. I may need to fix that.)

The major difference though is that fanfic is a conversation. It may be the part of the conversation where you realise everyone wandered off or possibly stopped to feel eeew, but it's part of a conversation. There's people talking about it already. You are taking in what they say and responding to it. You know there's going to be a response. Okay, sometimes that response is deafening silence, but seriously, any fic can get at least one hit. Some of mine on AO3 only had one, last I looked, but it was the stuff I put warnings on for first ever finished fic that is quite terrible. I'm kind of glad there's no eyeballs accruing to the terrible fic. But even so, somebody looked at it. I can't imagine why. Possibly to point and laugh.

ANYway: Fanfic has an audience.

Original fic requires you to talk into the void.

There is not just a blank sheet but an empty auditorium. Nobody is talking about these characters. Nobody will miss them if you say sod it half way through and stick it in a drawer. You have a head full of imaginary people, but you are the only one who imagined them, which may or may not be crazier than the way fanfic does things, I can't figure that part. But you are definitely, as you are writing, talking to yourself.

Different kind of crazy.

The risk/reward ratio is all different too. I mean, if someone reads and likes my original fic, it's ( Read more... )

So there are a lot of ways that writing fanfic is a different game than writing original fic, and does not prepare you for it.

And having written a ton of words does not actually make it easier to write another ton of words into that big empty.