Mmm, tasty random meta
HI FLIST. Because today is the day that I spam with everything but the springkink things that I'm supposed to be writing, I give you this post full of meta-Final Fantasy VII drivel! 8D 8D
First up is The Morning News' guide to men's fashion. I personally consider their articles on suits and dress shirts the bible verse on how a Turk would buy his clothes. In fact, in my mind, these articles were written by a very, very snide Turk with a very, very good idea on exactly how sharp he's meant look for the job. Read them. They're hilarious. They're informative, too. But mostly hilarious.
Next comes my attempt at writing porn. I fail at porn, but I fail worse at resisting the siren call of new challenge communities, so here, have a porn_battle Tseng/Rufus drabble.
Then logistika_nyx and I were discussing the process of plotting and outlining fic, because obviously that is what sane people do in their free time, and out of it came the idea to do a behind-the-scenes kinda thing. And so this run-through of Empery for the Extremely Bored was born. 8D
You can click the cut to read it, or (for greater fun and benefit) you could check it out at logistika_nyx's pimpin' new community, bunny_bit_me. You've got to be a member, but it's a wonderful concrit place where you can read the twisted inner workings meta of a handful of really good and cool authors.
Oh god, writing behind-the-scenes stuff is so pretentious and and and big headed and I apologise totally if it sounds presumptuous to you guys. D: D: D: I are a tiny, scared author in a big world filled with authors and readers who are better than me.
General idea
Empery was something that I wanted to write for a very long time; I didn't know what I wanted it to be, exactly, but I knew that I wanted a Tseng-comes-from-Wutai fic that would justify the entire fanonical invention of Tseng's backstory. Plenty of fics out there have Tseng as coming from Wutai - some say he's a second generation kid, others like to play up his potential traitor-status as a man on the wrong side during war time. When writing in-canon, I still don't really know where to put Tseng, and I don't think I ever will explicitly etch down the nature of his origin. At the same time, I wanted to write about Tseng-the-foreigner; the Tseng who came from a completely different culture, who knew none of the language that makes him such a powerful character (and Turk) in the original canons, who didn't have any of the trappings of station that he has as a Director and who - in spite of all of that - would still rise as one of the strongest men in a difficult world filled with strong men.
SO HOW NOW, BROWN COW? Since I was writing Tseng for the roads_diverged challenge over at IJ, it struck me that it'd be a very good way of killing two birds with one stone if I wrote an AU Wutai backstory short for my challenge response. I mean, the prompt was empire and Tseng's in Shinra and buttonsmash!
Plot outline and writing-ness
It was going to be an enormous fic, and the way I write - I can't write enormous fic. Enormous fic scares me. Enormous fic is for writers who are 100000 times better than myself, like astolat, whose brains I would steal if I ever had a chance. Normally, when I get an idea in my head I sit down, loop a music track, and just keep writing until the words on the screen approximate to how I feel about the idea. Every once in a few hundred words I get an idea for another snapshot or scene, but there's really very little premeditation to my stuff. But I really wanted Empery to be good - good in the sense that the pieces fit instead of flowed, good in the sense that I could hit all the points of Tseng's life and personality that I wanted to hit without things sounding arbitrary.
THEN WAS BIRTHED THE PLOT OUTLINE AND THE RANDOM INSERT.
Plot outlines I never do, and for pretty good reason. I take Empery's plot outline- verbatim - from my draft post. I apologise for my own head. No, I don't know either:
[tseng's youth --> dad leaves --> army!beginnings --> unwilling!leader tseng --> vet!tseng --> empire ENGULFS and takes over and tseng gets CAPTURED like a photograph --> long march to Midgar (disguised as an underling) because they offer solace and peace hahaha omg rufus --> language is a bitch --> the first words you learn are swear words --> you're tired of fighting --> just start new life in midgar and forget: selling fuckin' dirt, and maybe a few bodies --> school is the only way to go, seriously, but no one wants to teach you --> suffering is so ungodlyly painful that you just want to give up some days --> some one picks you up and gives you a hand and you could cry --> and they teach you about empire and you think of the honour of the old days and really what is there left what is the point there's only point in strength --> give up it; it doesn't matter who's WRONG or RIGHT anymore --> then your mentor is some sort of crazy general --> don't want to fight? then don't bother living. you can protect some people, but not all the people all of the time --> ]
get the language going; talk a lot about analogies -- or rather, write them, you have so damn many anyway -- then get the language changing halfway through; more precise, more pertinent, more fit, yet grungier and less noble; have it go whatever; let them bring whatever -- technology and vice, yes, and let honour and history fade into the background, the analogies disappear; the want for revenge disappears; you have suffered so long now that you know better, better, best: save yourself.
So… Yeah. 8D 8D Every individual point in the parentheses indicated a "chunk" - it could've been a small paragraph or a couple of hundred words, but those were the bits that I felt needed to be written. Extra details would (in my utopian vision of fic writing) be added later. The stuff not in the parentheses was what I felt was most important to the fic theme-wise; I really wanted language and old values to be important, so I scribbled some of it down and let it float in the forefront of my brain while writing.
Random inserts came in the form of the worst culture smashee-trashee that I've ever done. Wutai needed to be foreign in the fic, but nothing is ever really said about Wutai in the games except that a) there was a war, b) there are pagodas and other cultural forms that could be Japanese or Chinese or "Asian" or anything, c) Yuffie exists, d) a bar exists and e) they don't like Shinra very much.
Without canon, writing Wutai is a pain - inventing something foreign and fantastical in a fic that doesn't breach 10,000 words is just asking for reader disbelief. I could count on people either drawing from the game or knowing my earlier stuff for Midgar to appear real - I couldn't make up an entire history and culture for Wutai independently. There wouldn't be enough content to make it real - so I stole from my own experiences. I live in a crazy, tiny island, and our population is almost entirely migrant; my own family doesn't speak Chinese natively, but we're Chinese ethnically - I poured a little bit of the RL culture clash into the fic, threw in a whole lot of RL Chinese proverbs tweaked for an English speaking audience, tossed in a few historical references for taste, then crossed my fingers and prayed a lot.
[[Proverb wise: the analogy of music being played on deaf ears comes from the ci yu (traditional phrase composed of 4 characters) dui niu tan qin (lit. "playing the piano to a cow", or - even more literally - "to cow play panio"). It's a nicely packaged metaphor about music falling on deaf ears that do not know how to appreciate it.
The analogy of remembering comes from the equally-famous (and ethically important) proverb yin sui si yuan (lit. remember the source of the water you drink, or - even more literally - "drink water think origin"). It's a hugely relevant proverb to a lot of Chinese people, since it reminds people to always remember their roots and to be grateful for what they have. Commonly associated with filial piety, this one is.
Historically: China's very name is written in characters as zhong guo - Middle Kingdom. Yeah, in the past they were all "UP NORTH ARE BARBARIANS, DOWN SOUTH BE BARBARIANS, CIVILISATION IS ONLY HERE IN THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD".
The moving closer to the king thing is also historical - court officials would be allowed, in certain eras of Chinese history (my memory is too fuzzed to recall which right now), to sit so-and-so many paces from the king. The closer, the better. There's probably a proverb about this, but I'm not the best speaker of the language that you'll find…]]
Long story short: it's easier for me to cheat and used pre-supposed notions of what is foreign to the reader than it is to create a foreigner out of thin air. Since most of you guys aren't Chinese, it all works out pretty dandy - and for those of you who are, I just have to hope really hard that the references I chose are poignant enough that it makes emotional sense instead of sending you for a vomit bag. 8D
The actual writing was the most fun, and the most OMGWTFBBQ AM I DOING. I looped - don't laugh - Fall Out Boy's cover of Michael Jackson's Beat It. Now, whether you like it or not, you will be subject to the lyrics:
So beat it (beat it) beat it
No one wants to be defeated
Showing how funky and strong is your fight
It doesn't matter who's wrong or right
Just beat it, just beat it
NOW COMPLETELY ANACHRONISTIC AND INSANE AS IT MAY SOUND, the song actually fits the right parts of Tseng for the fic. 8D I wanted Tseng bashed up and broken (beat it), and I wanted him not to give in (no one wants to be defeated) and I wanted the Turk-morality-meter of perma-amoral-greyness to be present (it doesn't matter who's wrong or right). I also wanted the really loud guitars and fast rhythm, because I started writing this at 10 in the evening, and didn't want to fall asleep halfway through. *beams*
One of my biggest problems is that I have to - have to - finish my fics in single sittings. The only fic that hasn't had that treatment is my 2007 Yuletide fic, and it suffers for it reading-wise, even if I think it's a lot more solid and has better chosen content than any of my other stuff. Most of the time I have the attention span of a goldfish, though. Empery took 6 hours of nonstop writing; sometimes I wanted to break my fingers in half, other times it felt really good to go with the flow.
The outline helped some - but not entirely. A lot of it got chopped off, or ignored towards the later parts of the writing process. A better writer would've laid it down to fallow for a night and come back the next day, but that better writer would've had a fic that was at least 10,000 words. The best laid plans included writing more about Midgar and Shinra - but they went awry, and the fic (and my patience) ended with a simple conclusion. It was probably too simple and too fast; maybe one day I'll write an overlap, and expand on it further.
Still workin' on those prompts, too. FORGIVE ME, FOR I WRITE SLOW LIKE A WOMBAT*.
* uh, even though I have no idea how fast wombats actually go
First up is The Morning News' guide to men's fashion. I personally consider their articles on suits and dress shirts the bible verse on how a Turk would buy his clothes. In fact, in my mind, these articles were written by a very, very snide Turk with a very, very good idea on exactly how sharp he's meant look for the job. Read them. They're hilarious. They're informative, too. But mostly hilarious.
Next comes my attempt at writing porn. I fail at porn, but I fail worse at resisting the siren call of new challenge communities, so here, have a porn_battle Tseng/Rufus drabble.
Then logistika_nyx and I were discussing the process of plotting and outlining fic, because obviously that is what sane people do in their free time, and out of it came the idea to do a behind-the-scenes kinda thing. And so this run-through of Empery for the Extremely Bored was born. 8D
You can click the cut to read it, or (for greater fun and benefit) you could check it out at logistika_nyx's pimpin' new community, bunny_bit_me. You've got to be a member, but it's a wonderful concrit place where you can read the twisted inner workings meta of a handful of really good and cool authors.
Oh god, writing behind-the-scenes stuff is so pretentious and and and big headed and I apologise totally if it sounds presumptuous to you guys. D: D: D: I are a tiny, scared author in a big world filled with authors and readers who are better than me.
General idea
Empery was something that I wanted to write for a very long time; I didn't know what I wanted it to be, exactly, but I knew that I wanted a Tseng-comes-from-Wutai fic that would justify the entire fanonical invention of Tseng's backstory. Plenty of fics out there have Tseng as coming from Wutai - some say he's a second generation kid, others like to play up his potential traitor-status as a man on the wrong side during war time. When writing in-canon, I still don't really know where to put Tseng, and I don't think I ever will explicitly etch down the nature of his origin. At the same time, I wanted to write about Tseng-the-foreigner; the Tseng who came from a completely different culture, who knew none of the language that makes him such a powerful character (and Turk) in the original canons, who didn't have any of the trappings of station that he has as a Director and who - in spite of all of that - would still rise as one of the strongest men in a difficult world filled with strong men.
SO HOW NOW, BROWN COW? Since I was writing Tseng for the roads_diverged challenge over at IJ, it struck me that it'd be a very good way of killing two birds with one stone if I wrote an AU Wutai backstory short for my challenge response. I mean, the prompt was empire and Tseng's in Shinra and buttonsmash!
Plot outline and writing-ness
It was going to be an enormous fic, and the way I write - I can't write enormous fic. Enormous fic scares me. Enormous fic is for writers who are 100000 times better than myself, like astolat, whose brains I would steal if I ever had a chance. Normally, when I get an idea in my head I sit down, loop a music track, and just keep writing until the words on the screen approximate to how I feel about the idea. Every once in a few hundred words I get an idea for another snapshot or scene, but there's really very little premeditation to my stuff. But I really wanted Empery to be good - good in the sense that the pieces fit instead of flowed, good in the sense that I could hit all the points of Tseng's life and personality that I wanted to hit without things sounding arbitrary.
THEN WAS BIRTHED THE PLOT OUTLINE AND THE RANDOM INSERT.
Plot outlines I never do, and for pretty good reason. I take Empery's plot outline- verbatim - from my draft post. I apologise for my own head. No, I don't know either:
[tseng's youth --> dad leaves --> army!beginnings --> unwilling!leader tseng --> vet!tseng --> empire ENGULFS and takes over and tseng gets CAPTURED like a photograph --> long march to Midgar (disguised as an underling) because they offer solace and peace hahaha omg rufus --> language is a bitch --> the first words you learn are swear words --> you're tired of fighting --> just start new life in midgar and forget: selling fuckin' dirt, and maybe a few bodies --> school is the only way to go, seriously, but no one wants to teach you --> suffering is so ungodlyly painful that you just want to give up some days --> some one picks you up and gives you a hand and you could cry --> and they teach you about empire and you think of the honour of the old days and really what is there left what is the point there's only point in strength --> give up it; it doesn't matter who's WRONG or RIGHT anymore --> then your mentor is some sort of crazy general --> don't want to fight? then don't bother living. you can protect some people, but not all the people all of the time --> ]
get the language going; talk a lot about analogies -- or rather, write them, you have so damn many anyway -- then get the language changing halfway through; more precise, more pertinent, more fit, yet grungier and less noble; have it go whatever; let them bring whatever -- technology and vice, yes, and let honour and history fade into the background, the analogies disappear; the want for revenge disappears; you have suffered so long now that you know better, better, best: save yourself.
So… Yeah. 8D 8D Every individual point in the parentheses indicated a "chunk" - it could've been a small paragraph or a couple of hundred words, but those were the bits that I felt needed to be written. Extra details would (in my utopian vision of fic writing) be added later. The stuff not in the parentheses was what I felt was most important to the fic theme-wise; I really wanted language and old values to be important, so I scribbled some of it down and let it float in the forefront of my brain while writing.
Random inserts came in the form of the worst culture smashee-trashee that I've ever done. Wutai needed to be foreign in the fic, but nothing is ever really said about Wutai in the games except that a) there was a war, b) there are pagodas and other cultural forms that could be Japanese or Chinese or "Asian" or anything, c) Yuffie exists, d) a bar exists and e) they don't like Shinra very much.
Without canon, writing Wutai is a pain - inventing something foreign and fantastical in a fic that doesn't breach 10,000 words is just asking for reader disbelief. I could count on people either drawing from the game or knowing my earlier stuff for Midgar to appear real - I couldn't make up an entire history and culture for Wutai independently. There wouldn't be enough content to make it real - so I stole from my own experiences. I live in a crazy, tiny island, and our population is almost entirely migrant; my own family doesn't speak Chinese natively, but we're Chinese ethnically - I poured a little bit of the RL culture clash into the fic, threw in a whole lot of RL Chinese proverbs tweaked for an English speaking audience, tossed in a few historical references for taste, then crossed my fingers and prayed a lot.
[[Proverb wise: the analogy of music being played on deaf ears comes from the ci yu (traditional phrase composed of 4 characters) dui niu tan qin (lit. "playing the piano to a cow", or - even more literally - "to cow play panio"). It's a nicely packaged metaphor about music falling on deaf ears that do not know how to appreciate it.
The analogy of remembering comes from the equally-famous (and ethically important) proverb yin sui si yuan (lit. remember the source of the water you drink, or - even more literally - "drink water think origin"). It's a hugely relevant proverb to a lot of Chinese people, since it reminds people to always remember their roots and to be grateful for what they have. Commonly associated with filial piety, this one is.
Historically: China's very name is written in characters as zhong guo - Middle Kingdom. Yeah, in the past they were all "UP NORTH ARE BARBARIANS, DOWN SOUTH BE BARBARIANS, CIVILISATION IS ONLY HERE IN THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD".
The moving closer to the king thing is also historical - court officials would be allowed, in certain eras of Chinese history (my memory is too fuzzed to recall which right now), to sit so-and-so many paces from the king. The closer, the better. There's probably a proverb about this, but I'm not the best speaker of the language that you'll find…]]
Long story short: it's easier for me to cheat and used pre-supposed notions of what is foreign to the reader than it is to create a foreigner out of thin air. Since most of you guys aren't Chinese, it all works out pretty dandy - and for those of you who are, I just have to hope really hard that the references I chose are poignant enough that it makes emotional sense instead of sending you for a vomit bag. 8D
The actual writing was the most fun, and the most OMGWTFBBQ AM I DOING. I looped - don't laugh - Fall Out Boy's cover of Michael Jackson's Beat It. Now, whether you like it or not, you will be subject to the lyrics:
So beat it (beat it) beat it
No one wants to be defeated
Showing how funky and strong is your fight
It doesn't matter who's wrong or right
Just beat it, just beat it
NOW COMPLETELY ANACHRONISTIC AND INSANE AS IT MAY SOUND, the song actually fits the right parts of Tseng for the fic. 8D I wanted Tseng bashed up and broken (beat it), and I wanted him not to give in (no one wants to be defeated) and I wanted the Turk-morality-meter of perma-amoral-greyness to be present (it doesn't matter who's wrong or right). I also wanted the really loud guitars and fast rhythm, because I started writing this at 10 in the evening, and didn't want to fall asleep halfway through. *beams*
One of my biggest problems is that I have to - have to - finish my fics in single sittings. The only fic that hasn't had that treatment is my 2007 Yuletide fic, and it suffers for it reading-wise, even if I think it's a lot more solid and has better chosen content than any of my other stuff. Most of the time I have the attention span of a goldfish, though. Empery took 6 hours of nonstop writing; sometimes I wanted to break my fingers in half, other times it felt really good to go with the flow.
The outline helped some - but not entirely. A lot of it got chopped off, or ignored towards the later parts of the writing process. A better writer would've laid it down to fallow for a night and come back the next day, but that better writer would've had a fic that was at least 10,000 words. The best laid plans included writing more about Midgar and Shinra - but they went awry, and the fic (and my patience) ended with a simple conclusion. It was probably too simple and too fast; maybe one day I'll write an overlap, and expand on it further.
Still workin' on those prompts, too. FORGIVE ME, FOR I WRITE SLOW LIKE A WOMBAT*.
* uh, even though I have no idea how fast wombats actually go