|
|
There's less than 2 and one half months left in the year, and I'm having a hard time deciding what to do with them, fan fic wise. I've been a bit squeezed for time this year, (a sick cat, lifestyle changes, spending more time in the gym, searching for other jobs, etc.) and haven't accomplished as much as I wanted. What else is new. I have 2 long-short stories ready to post, but I'm tempted to hold them back until 2010. Smart move? Should I spend the rest of the year revising old material or trying to write new stuff? This year I have been closely studying stories I admire, using them as models for my writing. Looking upon my rough drafts and my 3rd drafts, I have never felt so much contempt for my own efforts. So much hatred for the fruits of my labor. I have never edited and revised and edited my own material the way I have this year. That's slowed me down as well. I'm learning so much, but I worry it'll never be enough. One of the problems I'm dealing with now has come around because I’ve spent more time revising than creating new material, to the point where I've become afraid to produce another story. Because that will mean confronting another rough draft that is a failure. For the longest time I've dealt with the fear of failure in my writing by reciting the mantra that failure is how we learn. And besides, it's just fan fic, right? I still believe that, but damn if the fear hasn't got me pinned down anyways. "You always have the rewrite later on to get things right," I've told myself in the past. It gave me the courage to plunge through the rough draft. Get it done before the doubt could catch up to me. I used to enjoy rewriting. And oftentimes it's still fun. Yet, I get tired of having to write entire new chapters or redo chapters (yet another drag on my productivity). Nothing worth doing comes easy I guess. Just a font of platitudes, ain't I? I have got to overcome this, but when deciding on which new projects to pursue, other considerations make this even more intimidating. Most of my projects have been free-written. Free writing is the opposite of plotting and outlining one's story ahead of time. Writers who are outliners often have fewer revising drafts to complete before their story is publishable. Yet I've never enjoyed sitting down and plotting out a plot on paper. It feels like plucking arbitrary plot elements out of the air and using them to fill in the blanks, like those booklets of ad lib scripts that used to be so popular. It's seems so contrived. "Okay. Sonic is snogging Peach behind Mario's back. When...I need a complication here...Peach and Sonic both catch a Shadow Bug-based STD planted by the agents of Tabuu, and now a turning point uhhhhh, Mario's long lost 2nd brother returns and demands money. Wait, what?" Hey, that's not terrible. Maybe I'm just a moron when it comes to design and logistics. Free writers, which for the longest time is what I thought I was, come across our best ideas and writing by going in with no plan at all. Oftentimes I don't really know what my story is about until I've finished the rough draft and then re-read it. Discovery is what free writing is all about. We make a mess and then build something up from the chaos. Often times my approach has been a slight mix of the two. I keep a rough sketch of story goals and an abridged "movie" of the plot in my head as a write a story, ususally at least a couple of chapters ahead of where I'm currently writing. The goals, or the point, of the story don't always come through so clear to me though. I get a bix mixed up, forget things. So this method has produced rather mixed results. I seem fine with free-writing story events, plot, and details, through often these will need to be cleaned up and reordered and clarified. Hench the whole "I have to finish a story to know what the story is," thing. My free-written character development sucks, however. Now I'm trying to outline my characters before writing. Figure out who they are at the beginning, and what they show themselves to be at the end. Determine their goals, their conscious and unconscious goals, and desires. Their worst fears. Hard work, and I'm not sure I've got the hang of it yet. All this falls under the umbrella of crafting characters instead of using their inherent appeal as pre-existing intellectual properties as a crutch, which as been one of my biggest weaknesses to date. Then there's the issue that I want to write something big, something that comes in multiple installments. The video game fanfic equivalent of a long running manga or comic book series. But I don't want to still be writing fan fic five years from now. And the fan fic readership on the Internet seems skewed towards shorter, stand-alone works over doorstopper serials. Not that I blame readers for this. It's easier on the eyes, for one thing. More about this in a future post. Needless to say, I believe there's a sliding gradient of diminishing returns the more ambitious a fan fic project becomes. Until you move outside the text medium, that is. Dear oh dear. What to do, what to do… I don't think I'll be doing NanoWriMo this year. I've still got so much to revise, and the new stuff I want to write is either projected to be far less or far more than 50K word count scale. Then again, it’s an excellent motivator. I never got around to blogging about NaNoWriMo. I'll put that off yet again. If only there was some way to squeeze a novel's worth of content and emotional impact into a novella-sized serial. I wonder. Edit: oh, all my problems with character development would not exist if only I'd been able to listen to the King Of Fighters movie cast's views on character deveolpment. I am so angry right now. All those wasted years! Kaaahhhnnn!
This is a meme I found on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) firefly99's journal. Post the first line or three of the 20 most recent fan fics you've posted. Well, I haven't actually posted a full 20 fics in my life, though I'm getting close. So a few of these are from WIP's and some are abandoned fics no one will ever see outside of another Old Shame Theater installment. There are a few fics of mine out there, early stuff, that I've lost forever after they were posted to a forum. Just mentioning it so you know you're not getting a complete history here. These go from most ancient at the top, down to newest at the bottom. ( Here come the clowns... )Reading over these lines now, I see plenty of wince-inducing structure issues, awkward phrasings, and at least of couple of them don't appear to be grammatically correct. I always thought I had good opening lines, and granted a few of these are from un-revised works, but it's still obvious I need to work harder on first impressions.
Sun, Jun. 7th, 2009, 03:15 am
Imagine a boot
It's pretty well documented that in times of strife and war civil liberties tend to take the back seat of the bus seat. And by back seat, I mean that you come home one day to find that civil liberties aren't home. There's no sign of a struggle, a half-eaten plate of food sits on the table. You call the police, but they only make dismissive noises. Three hours earlier, unsmiling men let themselves in through the front door, put a bag over your liberites's heads, and carried them away in an unmarked van. They'll be driven out to an underground bunker in the middle of nowhere. There they'll wait, blindfolded, tied to a chair with a bucket set underneath. Maybe in a decade they'll be set free, at few of them at least. Or maybe they'll be led to the trees out back, and told to look down into that freshly dug hole in the ground. The liberties probably won't feel the bullete smash through the back of their skulls in concentric crimson ripples, but they might hear the beginning of the shot. Some say that the enemy has truly won when this happens. Others believe that we cannot win wars unless we are hard, and unless we are fanatically devoted to solidarity. Anyways. No matter one's stance on the issues, ( I see no winner here: )
I bid you welcome to the first installment of Old Shame Theater.
Upon this virtual stage I shall heap vanity upon failure by posting some of the better sections of my abandoned or unused fanfictions. These are odds and ends that will likely never find themselves placed in a greater, working whole. I realize it may seem like blatant self aggrandizement, or perhaps a form of compliment fishing, (and in truth it most certainly is both of these things) however it’s my intention to offer the choicer portions so that I may perhaps not entirely rip away the already flimsy veil placed over my incompetence.
This piece is from the dawn of time, written for a collaborative project based around a video game character popularity internet poll. A massive 64 character crossover, multiple writers were called on to help fill in gaps of canon knowledge, as well as tackle the massive amount of writing needed to bring the project off. There were 3 kinds of stories we wrote for this collaboration: Prefights, which covered the moments before the fight to the death (or to the pain). These were often used to foreshadow the fight itself, further develop the plot and characters, and sneak in some nice character moments. My example here is a Prefight. I cannot remember if I ever published this one. Then there were the battle scenes themselves, the result of which were decided by which character won the poll. The third variety consisted of all the kinds of scenes that didn’t involve the battles themselves. They ranged from drama to comedy, and often featured the different characters interacting as a community. Now that was probably more than you ever wanted to know about a project you’ll likely never read, so without further ado, here’s the fic. Conker the Squirrel from the infamous N64 game prepares to face Mega Man. ( Oh god, I'm already blushing... )This is the raw (mostly) unedited version from the original 2004 file. As you can see, "choicer portions" is a rather subjective judgement indeed.
Sadly, these collaborations never saw completion. Not my fault, I swear!
The one collab (year 2003) that came closest to completion died 3 battles before the end. 3 battles out of 63. After hundreds of thousands of words (none of which I had written, this was before even my time. I tried out for the later projects.), and no resolution to the cliff hanger, it hardly need be said the readers were crushed. I was one such reader. So I took up the pen myself, and swore that I’d never “publish,” solo, a fan fic on the Internet that I couldn’t finish. How well have I kept that promise? Aside from the collaboration projects that fell through, I’ve completed every story or collab entry I’ve ever posted. Of course, this isn’t saying much, since I only have about 3 serious stories archived at the moment. Thus the first installment of Old Shame Theater draws to a close. Please let me know what you think of this humble feature. Good idea? Good read? Just plain embarrassing? Thank you and good night.
Stuff coming soon. How soon is soon? Soon.
Consider this a warped kind of status report. Let us pry open the crypt doors and thrust a lit torch into the Stygian depths of Mild's writing folders. ( Click me that you may know me... )
Title: In Another Castle Word count: 2370 Fandom: Super Mario Bros. Genre: Drama, Romance
Rating: T or PG13 Summary: A dramatic retelling of the famous ending to the classic 1985 home video game, Super Mario Brothers, wherein Super Mario at last rescues Princess Peach. One shot. Beta read by: Byoshi, Flare Zero
( Everything's quiet now... )
Wed, Dec. 17th, 2008, 12:59 am
Index
I planned to write this big, epic post to celebrate surviving the first 1/3 of the month, but now that I come to it, nothing comes to mind. Oh well, time to ramble like I always do. More than anything, I want a journal entry written while in the guts of the experience, to commemorate the occasion. Writing, like all our life's activities, is subject to the laws of relativity. On Monday writing a thousand words comes as easily as breathing. On another, I write until my eyes burn and my body aches for the grave, and I bring up MS word count and find out I've only finished 600 or so. Some days, it gets so hard. You wrote in the early morning, late morning, during work, and now you're home, and guess what? It's time to write some freaking more! It's a nice feeling. I've never written so much in so short a time before. Its exhausting though. I never knew it could tire a body out just sitting down for 3-4 hours a day. I mean, I have to work at a computer at my job, and it usually doesn't tire me out this bad. And professionals drop word counts of this size like dandruff flakes. Oh god, here comes the panic again. Has the rush, the forced ass-in-chair time eroded the quality of my writing? An issue of quantity over quality? For the most part, no. I might be a little more free with the adverbs and adjectives than usual, but it's easier to delete later. I find myself bothered by how often I begin a sentence with a -ing word or a pronoun. I agree with the NaNoWriMo detractors on one thing, I think forcing oneself to have the discipline to reach a monthly goal can hurt one's writing quality. But only if one saves up 30K or whatever for the last 2 days, then write it all in one insane marathon. Some work better under pressure, sure, but that seems to invalidate the whole premise to me. After a the 10K or 15K mark, I figure it's all down to meat moving and the brain throwing out random gibberish. It would be an exercise in drudgery, not creative passion or imagination. If I have piece of advice so far, it's this: focus on the one small step ahead of you. Write this dialogue, finish this sub chapter, decide which character does what. Small tasks pile up into larger accomplishments. If you sit down, thinking about all 1667 or more words you need to write today, or if you think about the big picture and just how much damn story you have left to nail down, it defeats you before you even begin. If I had another piece of advice, it would be: Don't let a day go by with 0 words written. That just makes getting started the next day suckage enlarge by a geometric factor. ( Progress thus far )
Fri, Oct. 31st, 2008, 01:38 am
I love the Fall
The Earth turns her face from her Sun. Waters become still, black mirrors. Darkness grows to fill the ancient hearts of forests, Moving between the white trunks of corpse trees, a thing alive. Mountains disappear into the red haze of a funeral sky. The Moon falls away, pale in death. Shadows flit and gather in the corners of my computer room, Whispering of secrets, of ambition, of madness. Of sins and failures of the dead past that are anything but dead in me. ( It’s almost time. )
Wanna know how it all began? Of course you don't, but I'll tell you anyway. Wanking ahead.
Tue, Jul. 1st, 2008, 01:42 am
Scars 3
Title: Horizon Word count (excluding headers): 911 Fandom: Super Smash Bros Brawl Genre: Vignette, Drama Summary: Meta Knight experiences a team battle that changes him forever. Beta read by: Herr Wozzeck and Babycharmander.
Part 4: http://mild-guy.livejournal.com/2754.html#cutid1
Tue, Jun. 24th, 2008, 01:04 pm
Scars 2
Title: Devoured Word count (excluding headers): 851 Fandom: Super Smash Bros Brawl Genre: Vignette, Drama Summary: Ike bites off more than he can chew. Beta read by: Byoshi, Herr Wozzeck, and Babycharmander. Part 3: http://mild-guy.livejournal.com/2090.html#cutid1
Mon, Jun. 16th, 2008, 11:49 pm
Scars 1
Well, here we go. I welcome criticism, so anybody who reads this, don’t feel shy about expressing your heartfelt opinions. You think it’s terrible, then fire away. Title: Plan A Word count (excluding headers): 388 Fandom: Super Smash Bros Brawl Genre: Vignette, Drama Summary: Solid Snake has a confession to make to his newfound friends at the Brawl tournament. Part 2: http://mild-guy.livejournal.com/1874.html#cutid1
Finished reading The Tempest. Not what I expected. I am a fan of the old sci-fi classic film The Forbidden Planet, whose plot is inspired by Shakespeare’s play, so maybe that colored my expectations too much going into it. The most interesting character is, of course, Caliban, the monstrous son of a witch, and victim of the protagonist. He attempted rape so I can’t sympathize with him, but he’s still the most interesting. If I were auditioning for a part in a stage production of The Tempest, I’d go for Caliban. I’ve always had a love for the despised monster. Puts me in a blue mood to watch the end of Frankenstein or the Wolfman or Dracula even now. You’ve heard it a thousand times, I’m sure: how the villagers with their pitchforks and torches and righteous motivations are the real monsters. It’s cliché to some, and often falls on deaf ears, but it’s always been a powerful story to me. When I watched Saturday morning cartoons as a kid, I often found myself rooting for the villains to win. I would imagine the perfect plan for victory that Mother Brain or Megatron or Skeletor could unfurl to club the smug smiles off those good guy faces. Nothing for Cobra Commander though. I’m not a miracle worker. In other news, I’ll be posting 4 vignettes here that I completed a while back. Probably about one per week. They’re not related to the two rough drafts I mentioned earlier. Wrote them for a drabble contest as a challenge to myself. It was fun, and sometimes maddening to brutally cut out all but the most necessary words. Helps one to see how flabby our writing came become, how seldom even well picked words get to stand boldly on their own. Earlier generations of writers got their start writing for newspapers and magazines with strict space and word requirements. They learned the hard way to shave off the odd bits and strangle their darlings. I can’t help but to envy them for it, just a little. They’ll be newly revised, but I still feel embarrassed by them. 3 of the vignettes are over 500 words now in an effort to make them more coherent. I don’t think I succeeded in fully, truly capturing some mystical sliver of time that needs no further scrap hanging out beyond its immaculate contextual frame. I kept trying to squeeze a short story worthy of 1000 words into 500 words or less. Those were the only kind of story ideas that came to me. At least that was one problem. The others I’ll talk about after they’ve all been posted.
|
tired
embarrassed
exhausted
busy
confused
amused
worried