proof as to my not getting out much
Well, drat. I think I have realised why I am at such a standstill with my writing these days: I am writing nothing but ruddy fragments and it is on the very verge of driving me mad. My fanfiction, with the exception of The Wise and the Lovely (which took me an absurd six months to complete), consists mainly of weird vignettey bits in which people angst about life, the universe, and everything, and T.S. Eliot is usually involved. (The last isn't so much of a bad thing, I reckon.) This wouldn't be so bad if this were not also what anything I happen to do with any of my novels seems to turn out as. The problem lies in my inability to, um, have plots. You know. I should just stop getting ideas for things that involve intricate plots and action, but when something about geeky superheroes in Boston launches itself at you, or vampire-fighting, opinionated librarians start nattering on in your head, it's very hard to ignore them or tell them that they really ought to be something simple with a plot you might be able to discover and iron out in a year or less.
I was writing some
tuesday_skyline bits several nights in a row not too long ago, and mostly hating them, and I wondered why Ian and Tuesday are being so vivid in my head and so ridiculously flat on paper, and I reckon it must be this writing-about-insignificant-incidents thing, hoping that the story is going to come together and scribbling all these mostly-useless things in the meantime (which could all turn out to be self-canon'd in the end, because, blimey, they're supposed to be SAVING THE WORLD, so how do they have all this time to be going to coffee shops or having Christmas parties or roller-skating or lying around for days in shock on account of Neil being dead? and what are they saving the world from, anyway?), and--I don't know, I think I am having this craving for writing things that go through a whole arc instead of puttering about disconnectedly in the Wide World of Writing.
On the good-news front, the Evangeline thing does seem to have a clearer plot than Skyline, except that a lot of it involves things I don't know how to get to. (Like, timid young librarians being recruited as vampire hunters. Or why there are vampires in 1913 and whether or not normal people know they exist. And what to do with the humanity of vampires and how much of a soul they really have got and how you go from trying to stab them to Campaigning For Vampire Rights especially when the vampire in question probably really does just vant to suck your blood. Or where the blasted thing is set--am I really nerdy for wanting to set it in Salem, Massachusetts so that I can have a bit of ranting about how there were NO WITCH TRIALS in what is currently known as Salem? Also, they have a nice library. Don't know if it was around in 1913, but from what I remember about the outside of it, that's not unlikely. And, hee, I could throw in little potshots at Lynn-Lynn-city-of-sin a.k.a. the former shoe capital of the world, except that there is altogether too much Boston-area geekery making its way into Skyline already.)
Am ravenous. Will cease blathering and have a sandwich. Or three.