letterblade

So since Friday night, I've done all my laundry, made a pot of fantastic chicken soup, hung out for hours'n'hours with Teh Girlfriend, and written lots of KH fanfic. And I really want to talk about what I'm working on right now despite the fact that it's not finished and postable, so bwah, WIP post.

Friday, during Shut Up & Write Night (ask me more if you're local to me and don't know), I was kind of at a loss, so I fired up the Random Pairing Generator of Doom, wrote a ficlet or two, and then a ficlet got out of hand. Way out of hand.

No title yet, but it could be described as Roxas And Ventus' Excellent Adventures In Sora's Heart, Now With More Symbolic Stained Glass And Shit. It's currently at about 3,300 words and I have no idea when it will end or where, exactly, it's going. There may or may not be pr0n.

"You're..." The boy frowns, looking him up and down, and there's something like fear in his eyes. Roxas abruptly realizes he isn't wearing his coat. He's in his clothes from Twilight Town instead, and they're dressed nearly identically. The other boy's jacket is half-different, with a strange bit of armor strapped to one arm. "Please don't tell me I have another evil twin?"

"Hm. No. I'm Sora's evil twin. Well. Kairi says I'm more like his cranky twin. Who the hell are you?"

And today I abruptly started pouring out a bit of complete asspull headcanon/backstory for Luxord, which involves Xaldin. Because clearly I needed more manly-men who take their facial hair and piercings seriously. Or something. It is currently at about 2,100 words, called "What Happens In Vegas," needs one more scene to be complete, and despite the title it's not actually pr0n. It's also in second person. BECAUSE MY BRAIN IS WEIRD AND WRITES TOO MANY LARPS or something.

"I don't have tells," you whisper. You've been practicing in the mirror since you were eleven. And you are not, exactly, a young man.

He steeples his hands and looks at you--into you--and his eyes, the color of a stormy late sunset, are like scalpels. "You have a heart," he murmurs. "Of course you have tells."

Oh, I also apped a character for

aather. Because I'm insane. It's

mllelaurel's fault. I should know in a week or two, maybe?

What am I doing RITE NAO? I'll be competing in a an ongoing poetry contest:

Do You Like To Write?

Like to write? Love writing poetry? Great! There is a new challenge, called

lastpoetstanding, where you write a a poem every week based on a different style of poetry prompt! Then they get voted on and the person with the least votes is out that week and the person with the most is safe the next week till you have one author standing who wins! What do you win? A snazzy graphic and 3 free skips for the next round if you sign-up! You don't even need to be a GREAT poet!

..who will come out on top?

I'm doing this purely to see how long I last; I have no delusions that I'm a good poet. And how long I do last will probably depend upon what styles and forms they prompt, seeing as I have difficulty with meter and can't rhyme at all. Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!

Other things I need to post here: Three pieces of fic for

kink_las, photos of me in the Ballgown of Doom that I sewed in the last two weeks, game write-ups for Palindrome, game write-ups for Festival, catchup info on my life in general, etcetera.

Other things I need to do: Job research, writing my goddamn novel.

[There's, like, 3429834 things I should post here, but this is what is on my mind as I click to the update window. So this is what you get. *headdesk*]

So I'm in this

kink_las thang, and right now it's making me contemplative. At this point (after the last elimination) it's down to six writers. I've generally been coming in second place so far. Never won a challenge, but I obviously haven't been eliminated. This round I was second from last, and this has made me contemplative and vaguely emo.

( In which I ramble about fanfic preferences and my own writing, am a bit of a fic snob, and possibly sound butthurt. )

tl;dr: Comm has a Whoverse bias and is not always congruous with my own understandings of what kink is, which makes me cranky on a purely personal level that has little to do with the actual challenge mods and members. Also, I'm long-winded and I hate it. :P

I just got to use the phrase "the quiddities of enchanted headgear" in a character sheet.

Much progress today, even with time lost to

usernamenumber's birthday party. (He had karoake. My Achilles heel of party attendance.) I will treat myself to a nap.

I feel somewhat on writerly fire today, but this is the day I must write for

kink_las. Will try to get back to prompts. Will try. In between writing Crowns.

Which is finally cast and detailed character hints are out the door. I know how I write games; sheets will probably be going out week of the con. So I basically summarized them for character hints, along with costuming notes.

Speaking of

kink_las, btw, I have a backlog of fic to post here from the last two challenges...

Round 1, Challenge 3
Kink: Fantasies
Fandom: Final Fantasy XIII
Story Title: Lightning Would
Character/Relationships: Hope wanting Lightning.
Warnings: Hope's fourteen.
Notes: The only one of my stories so far that's gotten negative votes and not placed second. (Aside from this, I have a hilarious trend of coming in second place with exactly three votes. Which is fine...until the last round. -.-;;) Which I understand. There's no fucking plot.

( Just a batch of teenage fantasies about Lightning. So pretty much what the players are thinking. )

Challenge 4 I skipped. It was prod week for Jekyll & Hyde. (Which means I haven't posted the above since before prod week. Go me.) The challenges got delayed for a bit because the mod is going through crap (and yet heroically keeps them running 'cause she's awesome), and then there was...

Round 1, Challenge 5
Kink: Age differences
Fandom: Xenosaga
Story Title: Bodies
Character/Relationships: Junior/MOMO
Warnings: Er, age foo out the yin-yang? A twenty-eight-year-old in a thirteen-year-old's body, and a fifteen-year-old whose body just aged overnight from twelve to eighteen. Probably something counts as underaged by your standards somewhere in there.
Notes: I had promised myself back when the challenge started that if any age difference/age play/age whatever kink came up, I would write this pairing. It's just so rife with possibility. And lo, there it was. I was really off my writing game when this challenge came around, 'cause I was still drained from Stars Over Atlantis and Intercon in general. I also ran into moment after moment when I had to strip out Xenosaga canon references and subtleties of characterization to fit under the word count limit and keep things clear to non-fandom voters (which would be, um, everybody in the challenge.) So I'm not particularly happy with this, but it got me through the round in my usual second place and only annoyed one commenter, so yay.

( Epic space opera plus epic age foo awkwardness, go! )

My writerbrain needs a jumpstart. So I'm doing that thing I sometimes do where I open myself for ficlet prompts and do my darndest to actually fill them all. Comment with a request and I'll comment back with fic.

First five prompts will get filled. I'll edit this post if I'm taking more beyond that. For a request, please give me a character/pairing and a prompt of some sort. Crossovers welcome.

Fandoms I'm Interested in Writing
Primarily...
Sekirei - new fandom squee! I need to make a pimping post for this, 'cause this is a fun series (anime and manga) that most people don't seem to know about. Probably because it's a harem anime. But it's a good harem anime.
Xenosaga
Secondarily...
Doctor Who - Eleventh Doctor era, specifically.
Final Fantasy XIII
Kingdom Hearts
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Star Trek - TNG or Voyager. Don't know enough DS9 canon, not interested in writing for original series or reboot.

...yeah, I know, a lot of you know nothing about any of these. If you're really interested in something else, ask me.

Yesterday evening through to about 2 am: Work on Stars.
2-4 am: Take a nap. Wake up unable to sleep much because I have a gorram LARP to write.
4-8 am: Work on Stars.
8 am - noon: Sleep some more.
Noon - now: Work on Stars, with a few interruptions, like making a prop for Stars, going to the diner with my laptop to work on Stars with french toast, getting a tutorial in my housemate's sewing machine and sewing white headbands for Stars as a test project (making a skirt for

mllelaurel for a game that is not Stars), and hanging out with

mllelaurel to work on Stars.

Man. I haven't taken a 2 am nap since college.

Only three more character sheets to finish, all of which are in progress. Those shouldn't take me too much longer, assuming I have the brain juice. But there's also a large amount of supplementary material that isn't in character sheets to write before the con.

Augh.

Could be worse. Could be further behind. As is, I'm actually glad, at this point, that I don't have a Friday night game, 'cause I'll need that time to do prep for my non-Stars Saturday games. And possibly sleep. >.<;;

So my major new year's resolution can be summarized by my icon.

THINGS I have to write in the next few months:

- Finish a first draft (and pick a goddamn title already) of Teh Novel, a.k.a. "Oh, look, a demon." Would like to get this draft done ASAP so as to let it sit for a month, edit it, and start querying agents. Because I have waited too fucking long to do this sort of thing.

- Co-write Stars Over Atlantis with

mllelaurel, to premiere at Intercon in March.

- Finish writing A Crown of Hearts, to premiere at Festival in April.

- Continue participating in

kink_las, so a small piece of fanfiction every couple of weeks.

THINGS I would like to write in the next while:

- Scope out the market for original erotic fiction and try to write some. I know I write good pr0n. Getting money for it would be nice.

- Continue with the Xenosaga novelization project, ideally in weekly installments.

- Reboot and/or continue with Sire & Pup. I know, I keep saying I want to restart this every time I do one of these posts. But every time I mention to somebody that one of my writing projects is kinky bi poly genderfucky alternate-history gnostic epistulary porn, they squee. Hard. Like maybe paying for it hard.

So yeah. That's a lot of THINGS. But seriously, guys? I can write almost sixteen thousand words in twenty-four hours. I can finish NaNoWriMo quite comfortably, even after having lost more than a week's worth of time to LARP con prep. So fifty thousand words in, what, twenty-one, twenty-two days? I can be kind of freakishly fucking prolific as long as I actually get around to it. I CAN DO THIS SHIT IF I STOP SABOTAGING MYSELF.

I'm not going to do that thing where I look back to last year's resolutions and see how I did on them, because frankly? I'm just going to disappear into a mire of self-loathing and decide that I should never set goals for myself again and that I'm incapable of success. I know how my brain works. And it's not like there isn't a part of me saying that this is pointless, that I'm just going to embarrass myself by never living up to my own expectations, have another year of aimless dicking around, and so the fuck on. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

I have a couple of other vague and somewhat miscellaneous new year's plans, most of which involve Trying To Be A Fucking Grownup Already. Y'know, things like...

- Keeping better track of my spending.

- Remembering to eat more than one meal a day. ('Cause, seriously. Yes, I'm fat. No, I'm not going to try to lose weight, because I already have enough issue with my eating. Like forgetting to eat for up to twenty-four hours at a time. Problematic. Step one: stop treating my body like crap.)

- Try to get my constant exhaustion and lethargy and misc. other symptoms actually dealt with by an actual doctor. (There's a very good chance that something's fucked up with my thyroid, just like all the other women in my family. Former fail!doctor did not pursue that theory because I'm fat, and because fat is the root of all evil and there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with me besides my weight.)

- Have a sex life again.

- Shower regularly. (Carefully formed a habit of that over years; habit has been broken by long-term unemployment and my previous place of residence having no fucking hot water in my bathroom despite my repeatedly bothering my landlord who didn't give a shit.)

- Never run out of milk on New Year's Eve again, because oh my fucking god, I've seen less insane lines and parking at the grocery store before a fucking hurricane. WTF?

- But seriously, really, WRITE ALL THE THINGS!

So I signed up for

kink_las because, well, I'm insane. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept (which included me, until somebody on the flist mentioned it), it's sort of a reality show style fanfiction contest. Every two weeks, we get a prompt--in this case, a kink to include in our fic--and we submit the result anonymously for public vote. Every round, somebody gets voted out. (Or I think two somebodies, with how this one is set up.)

The first round of submissions is available for reading and voting. All 37 of them. (This is going to take a while.) Obviously I can't tell you which one I wrote, or even the fandom or pairing, because that would invalidate the idea of anonymous evaluation of quality (which is one of the reasons I signed up for this thing; people are encouraged to judge by talent, not by fandom knowledge, shipping preferences, or reputation. Which I like, because I tend to write obscure/unloved fandoms and pairings.)

(As an aside to the parenthetical aside, writing *specifically* for an audience of people who may or may not know the fandom is interesting, especially when aiming for something more emotionally involved than Random Pr0n. I found myself deliberately adding some exposition that I might not normally have added. Not much, really; I had to make a lot of cuts to get the fic to the right size to begin with, as I'm a wordy bitch. But little clarifications. There are some aspects which will be kind of meaningless to somebody who doesn't know canon details, but hopefully overall it will be at least somewhat interesting to the canon-clueless.)

So yeah, if you feel like reading 37 kinky ficlets and trying to decide which is best and worst, go vote! :DDD

Eleventy-one!

Just broke 40,000 in NaNo. Rather a bit behind due to SLAW (as I lost a full six days of writing time to con prep and con itself), but...I have reasonable confidence that I can hork up ten thousand words in four days, given that I've been known to write more in twenty-four hours.

I probably won't get much over 50k this month. Which given that there were about nine or ten days in which I wrote nothing at all (or at least nothing for the NaNovel, as I was busy with SLAW-related projects), is acceptable.

I've not flagged much in the story yet. There've been various unexpected developments--and if there weren't, I'd be disappointed--but nothing's been horrifically derailed yet. I'm most of the way through the third section, which is a doozy; with the amount of both fucky shit and plot/characterization/world development that had to be packed in there, it's currently over 14k, with three (short, maybe?) more scenes to come.

I'll probably hit the 50k mark at some point in the fourth section. I kind of hope I get to introduce a character who I'm quite fond of, but who doesn't hit the plot until that section, before the month is out. Just, y'know, to get all of the notable characters "screen time" during NaNo per se.

Well, except the big bad, who does not actually appear in person until the climax. And one other character, but that's a spoiler. So, okay, maybe that goal is kind of pointless.

Fifth section is climax, sixth is denoumont (which I can't spell for the life of me despite the fact that it's often my favorite part of a story). Am going to attempt to keep up a NaNo-ish pace and get those (along with whatever's left of the fourth) finished in December. Because, goddamnit, I am twenty-seven and have been saying I'd be an author since before I was capable of pronouncing the word. After over two decades of planning to be a writer, it's about time I have a complete fucking draft of a fucking novel, bitches.

Ahem.

Back to work. Am trying to cover enough ground today and tomorrow so that I have a reasonable chance of breaking 50k during the regional write-in on Sunday. Just because that would be kind of awesome. May not happen though.

Will certainly finish third section by then, though.

NaNo: 25,582.

Words written today: 6,265.

I hit the 20k mark earlier today, while having an impromptu write-fest with

slipjig. And now I hit the 25k mark, and just finished the second section. (Second section is looong, about 15k. Should probably get cut down in final draft, but that is SO not my concern right now.)

So I am about 5k ahead at this point.

Which is good because tomorrow,

mllelaurel and I shall be writing The All Crotchety Old Men With Shotguns Game. So I'll lose a day or two to that. And then several days to SLAW next weekend. But in the meantime, once I'm done with Crotchety, will start the third section of Teh NaNo, which is, as I believe I mentioned before, A Clusterfuck.

And, no, this book still don't have a name. But I am pretty sure that it will be either six or seven sections, or possibly six with an epilogue. And it seems to be falling out as supporting a sequel, should I chose (for there are sequel-like threads), but not requiring one. w00t.

But dude. Today: productive. I seriously feel like I can do it this year. *knocks on head*

I just broke ahead in NaNo!

Current total: 17,707 words. (Today's goal, for even progress: 16,670.)

Words written today: 6,218. And it went like a dream. The characters started talking and didn't stop.

Which means there may be some stuff to edit out of the final draft, because that's a fuckton of talking (and they haven't even covered a couple of crucial "person A needs to share this information with person B already" points), but still. WORDS.

I'm judging I'm about halfway through the second section. Maybe a little less than halfway, if they get to more chattering, or if the planned Epic Battle (yup, there is an Epic Battle coming up soon) takes long. There are a few Moments I want to capture, some more information to exchange, said Epic Battle, and then probably one more scene in which Shit Happens and they are transferred to the Third Section.

The third section is going to be a total fucking clusterfuck. :DDD

Current word count, out of target word count for this day of the month: 11,465/15,000.

Words written today, out of my goal for the day: 3,314/4,000.

At least I've broken the five-digit barrier. :) And if I can keep this pace up until this weekend (when I will have to pause NaNoing in order to write the All Crotchety Old Men With Shotguns Game with

mllelaurel), I'll have caught up, and then some. Which is good, because I will probably then lose four or five days' worth of NaNo time to SLAW and the preparations for SLAW.

I feel like I should be able to close those last 700~ words to meet today's goal, but I'm also brain-tired and have just written something traumatic. I find it fairly difficult to write other stuff immediately after writing something traumatic. And it's late. :P

I am lagging behind, but I think it's a manageable behindness, given that I can be sufficiently prolific when I am able to butt-in-chair.

In metrics that aren't sheer word count, I've finished the first section/large chapter. (At this point, I'm envisioning the book as somewhere between five and eight of these sections, and I'd guesstimate that it will be about 70-80k. So I'm v. unlikely to finish the story during NaNo. But if I can bang out a fair chunk of it, and then keep myself going through at the same pace, to finish in December, then I will have a finished draft of a novel. Which would be an awesome thing to have.)

(Saying this in my LJ will probably jinx it. Bah.)

Also, my characters are repeatedly surprising me. Sometimes just little stuff--dialogue, the particular ways in which they rankle each other and hit each other's weak spots. (The two main characters start the book on opposite sides of a war. There's a lot of fencing, both literal and verbal.) Sometimes big stuff--one of them decided to do something very brave, quite understandable in his current situation, and INCREDIBLY STUPID, and I kind of love him for it. It led to one particular element (the demons of the pseudo-title) being introduced earlier than I expected, which was nifty.

So I kind of <3 my two main characters right now. In spite of their being butts to each other? No, especially because they're being butts to each other. It's justified.

My favorite line of dialogue so far: "Claws off, you leathery sack of shit!"

Also, for the record, the pseudo-title, as I have no real title for this yet, is to be said in a dry, underwhelmed, and quite bored tone of voice: "Oh, look, a demon." May possibly demonstrate this via recording at some point, when I am not out of brain-juice, as I find it consistently hilarious, because I am easily amused.

Meme from

mllelaurel:

Comment with the name of a character I've LARPed, and I'll answer the following!

(Note: I've also seen this going around for characters from people's writing projects. Most of you don't know any of my original writing projects well enough to ask, though if you do, feel free. :))

01. Full name
02. Best friend
03. Sexuality
04. Favorite color
05. Relationship status
06. Ideal mate
07. Turn-ons
08. Last sexual experience
09. Favorite food
10. Crushes
11. Favorite music
12. Biggest fear
13. Biggest fantasy
14. Quirks in bed
15. Bad habits
16. Biggest regret
17. Best kept secrets
18. Last thought
19. Worst sexual/romantic experience
20. Biggest insecurity

Craft show: The only sale I made was to

nevacaruso, who offered to come along and help set up. So I got hang-out-tiemz with a friend. And did some crafting. And set up a pretty booth. And, well, that was otherwise a bust.

NaNo: So with everything else going on this week, I fell majorly behind with NaNo. I had written about 500 words of prologue/first scene in the early morning of November 1st--which made me happy, as I had no idea how I was going to begin this darned thing--but hadn't had any time or spoons to work on it until today. And in the past few hours, I popped out over 3,000 words. So, hey, not exactly caught up, but a lot less behind than I was.

Current word count: 3,839. Out of 8,335, which is the word count I'd have if I was doing an even 1,667 per day. So...not as bad as I was doing earlier today. :)

Especially given that most of the day was fired due to major depression flare-up. Stupid brain.

Spazzpoints:

- Court tomorrow. At 9 AM, fuck them. Paperwork screwup with my car, in case you were wondering.

- Due to my perpetually borked voter registration and the fact that I didn't get my shit together in time to get properly re-registered, I cannae vote this year. Yes, I fail as a citizen and have no right to complain about how fucked this country is, thanks for letting me know.

- Due to having another major writing project going right now, and my current spazz, have already fallen behind on NaNo. Can recover as soon as I get a chance to buckle down, but:

- Wednesday: court.

- Thursday: due to a long and bizarre set of circumstances, am doing a craft show on Thursday, solo. Never done anything like it before. Need to price a batch of stuff, get work together, find displays...ayyy, so much to prepare.

- Friday: have to get my car looked at at some point this week, so it's gotta be Friday.

- Saturday: party.

- Sunday: party.

- Why did my schedule suddenly go insane?

- I have a wiggly front tooth. WTFCHICKENBIRDFLU. Am I losing a tooth? As an adult? WTF do I do? Ayyy.

So I had already been fond of Muslims Wearing Things (a dryly awesome photoblog started in response to somebody being an asshat about muslims), but this post won the internet. All arguments are invalid.

In other news...writing, writing, and more writing.

-

mllelaurel and I are nearly done, overall, with the revision pass on The Sound of Drums. Well, except for one case...

- We're also putting together the last few pieces of the casting, and it's become pretty clear that we're going to have to genderswap one character to accommodate for the high male sign-ups, which players are falling in where, and which guys are okay being cross-cast. So there's that.

- At some point soon, we shall write The All Crotchety Old Men With Shotguns Game. Some point before the con. Drunkenly.

- NANO STARTS TOMORROW. Hoboy. My project has names for most of the characters, a fairly solidified plot, and no title whatsoever. So for the meantime, its working title is Oh, Look, A Demon. I may post a few public teasers as I go, but my plan is to be writing it largely in private, except for sending chunks to one or two draft readers. Because if I can't show my work to somebody, my attention whore attention span gets antsy.

In the non-writing category, I go to court in four days. Aiiiii.

I have been unemployed for eleven months.

I'm going to skip the part where I go on about what I've been doing instead of being a working adult. Suffice it to say that, while there were certainly some grand adventures and some (though not enough) selling of shiny things, my current life in unsustainable, either financially or, honestly, emotionally.

I have not the self-discipline to keep myself as productive as I'd like, nor to make myself more self-disciplined.

But the thought of dragging my ass through twenty-five more admin assistant interviews just to land another temporary or underpaid or stressful position. I got my last job through sheer dumb networking luck; I cannot count on getting anything that good again.

After a few conversations with my fantabulous roommate

fiddle_dragon, I am seriously considering getting an A+ cert and taking the plunge into job-hunting in the IT field. This is really not something I think I'm qualified for, but she thinks I have a chance. If I do go in that direction, I'll definitely take the route of getting a certification first. I have had scattered years of on-the-job learn-as-you-go support experience, but I am very bad at selling myself, especially on shaky credentials, and it would be very useful for me to be able to simply hold up a cert as proof to interviewers (and, let's face it, myself) that I Can Do This.

More than anything, I want to work part-time. I want to have enough time to keep doing things like my Etsy shop, writing, being in musicals, learning Ruby on Rails.

Speaking of writing...aiii. I've been unemployed for nearly a year, with nigh infinite time. How come I've not yet written a novel? I create best under adversity and under deadlines, yet I instinctively avoid those very things for the stress they cause me; and then I lament that I am not creative.

Well, it's That Time of the Year. I am pretty seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo.

This is kind of a pointless post. Then again, this has been kind of a pointless Tory recently.

In the solidly good news section, I spent the last while at my computer with a very cute dog in my lap, and both of the games that

mllelaurel and I are running at SLAW are full of enthusiastic players. Whee!

Mmm, and the requisite:

Paranoid & Crotchety website update!

Now with more info on works in progress, upcoming runs, and an addition or two in the pipe dream department.

...writing writing writing writing writing. Because things are getting rather interesting right now. There will soon be a ghost-girl...

This post is part of Letterblade's Blogathon 2010 madness, to raise money for Heifer Project International. Please go here to pledge your support.

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I Write Stuff

Entries tagged with writing

WIP post or whatever

Look at me I do stuff!!!

Some thoughts on kink_las...

Also?

So my writerbrain is being slow to start up

COMMENT FICLETS

My schedule today

GIP = NYR

In other news, I am a fanfic masochist

I R A WINNNAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR!!!

Also...

HALFWAY!

BWAH!!!

NANO FLAIL

Spamming LJ: I does it!

The Sound of Meh

Taking a moment to spazz

Cats, Muslims, Memes

What the hell do I do with this life thing?

Paranoid & Crotchety website update!

Blogathon post #26: Writing writing writing

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June 2020