Too darn many June birthdays! :)
A happy b-day shout-out to rusty_chevy! Hope it's a good one, hon. Here, have two Lambos. I certainly don't want them hanging around me... ;)
In other news, progress has been made on "Redemption"! Whee! I cleaned up the final scene yesterday, making it into something that I really like instead of something that was just kinda there in a blobby, bloated, overly angsty/melodramatic sort of way. Instead, it's now a meaningful (and slightly goopy) ending to a ...Well, a hopefully meaningful (and slightly goopy) story. I just love it when that happens. I love it when a plan comes together.
So, today's project: Streamline the Thundercracker arc in the story. Since those chapters were written literally years apart from one another, they're kinda sorta just a wee bit disjointed. And there's stuff in them that sets up a future story arc that we've decided not to do anyway, so that needs to go. And there are ideas that are repeated and need to be deleted, and there are ideas that need to be shuffled around and evenly distributed between the Thundercracker bits. So, basically, it'll be an all-day project and then some, most likely, because the little bugger did somehow end up with the most chapters in the whole darn story. (Because he's adorable, you see, but don't tell him that I said that...) And then we'll tackle the Starscream arc and the Skyfire arc. Those...need serious help. ::le sigh:: But at least the Jazz arc is pretty good as is. It's the one arc in the whole darn 200-page story that doesn't need much work.
Y'know, weekends are just too darn short. If the work week was two days long and the weekend five days long, I could get SO much more writing done...
Ah, what the heck:
I skulked in the depths of a darkened, shadowy corridor, studiously trying to ignore the absurdity of my efforts to blend into my surroundings. After all, it wasn't as if stealth was really my thing. Yet there I was, nonetheless... There I had been for several hours, in fact, waiting...waiting...
Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? Ravage? one of the omnipresent inner voices that lived in my head suddenly demanded to know, and it demanded to know at a decibel level that made me cringe even though I knew the voice was all in my head.
Shut up, I mentally growled back at the voice, and for once it huffily subsided into a brooding silence, and I patiently went back to waiting.
And waiting…
I was in the corridor outside of the medbay, had stationed myself a hundred meters or so up the corridor from its heavy double doors. I was trying to blend in with the shadows. It was, I knew, a rather vain attempt. I was a warrior, after all. As such, I was designed to stand out and be…intimidating, although rare were the times when I actually felt truly intimidating. Still, I was trying to go unnoticed. And the few medbay workers who'd left the bay after completing their duty shifts hadn't noticed me - or at least if they had noticed me they hadn't bothered to acknowledge my presence as they'd passed by, and that was just as well. No doubt, even if they'd noticed me, they wouldn't have wanted to…I don't know…anger me or something by challenging my presence there, anyway. Menial medbay workers had much to fear from the warriors, after all. Or at least they thought they did.
Or maybe they knew why I was there, and their lack of a reaction to my presence was some sort of unspoken approval of what I was about to do…?
Now you're just getting all stupid and mushy, that inner voice snickered at the exaggeratedly heroic turn of my thoughts.
Shut up, I inwardly growled once again.
I was nervous. Extremely nervous, in fact, and my wandering, argumentative thoughts were certainly a symptom of that. I was standing there with my back pressed as closely as possible to the bulkhead behind me, energon pump hammering frantically away in my midsection, so loudly that I could feel it and hear it, and I wildly imagined that anyone three decks above or below me could hear it, too. My fingers were digging anxiously into the cool, smooth expanse of purple-grey bulkhead behind me. It was a reassuringly solid presence, a presence that should have steadied me, that should have made me feel more secure, more at ease...but it didn't. I was, in fact, more nervous about this "mission" that I'd spontaneously imposed upon myself than I was just before I charged into a pitched battle with the Autobots, even one in which I and my comrades were vastly outnumbered and there was a fairly strong possibility that I'd end up crashed, burned, and in worlds of pain.
That's because then you simply have no choice in the matter, that nagging inner voice cheerfully, helpfully informed me. That's because then you're just carrying out orders...and if you don't obey those orders then you know that you're liable to meet up with Megatron's fist, if not the business end of his fusion cannon, too. So fighting an uphill battle, in that case, is just the lesser of two evils. So there’s no sense in being nervous about it.
But this? Ohhhh, this is all your own doing, Thundercracker my boy, all your own crazy idea. And woe to you if you get caught...
"I told you," I muttered, this time aloud, "to shut up."
...And that's all I'm sharing for now. The rest will give too much away :)
And now, before I get too into the whole editing thing...breakfast! :)
In other news, progress has been made on "Redemption"! Whee! I cleaned up the final scene yesterday, making it into something that I really like instead of something that was just kinda there in a blobby, bloated, overly angsty/melodramatic sort of way. Instead, it's now a meaningful (and slightly goopy) ending to a ...Well, a hopefully meaningful (and slightly goopy) story. I just love it when that happens. I love it when a plan comes together.
So, today's project: Streamline the Thundercracker arc in the story. Since those chapters were written literally years apart from one another, they're kinda sorta just a wee bit disjointed. And there's stuff in them that sets up a future story arc that we've decided not to do anyway, so that needs to go. And there are ideas that are repeated and need to be deleted, and there are ideas that need to be shuffled around and evenly distributed between the Thundercracker bits. So, basically, it'll be an all-day project and then some, most likely, because the little bugger did somehow end up with the most chapters in the whole darn story. (Because he's adorable, you see, but don't tell him that I said that...) And then we'll tackle the Starscream arc and the Skyfire arc. Those...need serious help. ::le sigh:: But at least the Jazz arc is pretty good as is. It's the one arc in the whole darn 200-page story that doesn't need much work.
Y'know, weekends are just too darn short. If the work week was two days long and the weekend five days long, I could get SO much more writing done...
Ah, what the heck:
I skulked in the depths of a darkened, shadowy corridor, studiously trying to ignore the absurdity of my efforts to blend into my surroundings. After all, it wasn't as if stealth was really my thing. Yet there I was, nonetheless... There I had been for several hours, in fact, waiting...waiting...
Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? Ravage? one of the omnipresent inner voices that lived in my head suddenly demanded to know, and it demanded to know at a decibel level that made me cringe even though I knew the voice was all in my head.
Shut up, I mentally growled back at the voice, and for once it huffily subsided into a brooding silence, and I patiently went back to waiting.
And waiting…
I was in the corridor outside of the medbay, had stationed myself a hundred meters or so up the corridor from its heavy double doors. I was trying to blend in with the shadows. It was, I knew, a rather vain attempt. I was a warrior, after all. As such, I was designed to stand out and be…intimidating, although rare were the times when I actually felt truly intimidating. Still, I was trying to go unnoticed. And the few medbay workers who'd left the bay after completing their duty shifts hadn't noticed me - or at least if they had noticed me they hadn't bothered to acknowledge my presence as they'd passed by, and that was just as well. No doubt, even if they'd noticed me, they wouldn't have wanted to…I don't know…anger me or something by challenging my presence there, anyway. Menial medbay workers had much to fear from the warriors, after all. Or at least they thought they did.
Or maybe they knew why I was there, and their lack of a reaction to my presence was some sort of unspoken approval of what I was about to do…?
Now you're just getting all stupid and mushy, that inner voice snickered at the exaggeratedly heroic turn of my thoughts.
Shut up, I inwardly growled once again.
I was nervous. Extremely nervous, in fact, and my wandering, argumentative thoughts were certainly a symptom of that. I was standing there with my back pressed as closely as possible to the bulkhead behind me, energon pump hammering frantically away in my midsection, so loudly that I could feel it and hear it, and I wildly imagined that anyone three decks above or below me could hear it, too. My fingers were digging anxiously into the cool, smooth expanse of purple-grey bulkhead behind me. It was a reassuringly solid presence, a presence that should have steadied me, that should have made me feel more secure, more at ease...but it didn't. I was, in fact, more nervous about this "mission" that I'd spontaneously imposed upon myself than I was just before I charged into a pitched battle with the Autobots, even one in which I and my comrades were vastly outnumbered and there was a fairly strong possibility that I'd end up crashed, burned, and in worlds of pain.
That's because then you simply have no choice in the matter, that nagging inner voice cheerfully, helpfully informed me. That's because then you're just carrying out orders...and if you don't obey those orders then you know that you're liable to meet up with Megatron's fist, if not the business end of his fusion cannon, too. So fighting an uphill battle, in that case, is just the lesser of two evils. So there’s no sense in being nervous about it.
But this? Ohhhh, this is all your own doing, Thundercracker my boy, all your own crazy idea. And woe to you if you get caught...
"I told you," I muttered, this time aloud, "to shut up."
...And that's all I'm sharing for now. The rest will give too much away :)
And now, before I get too into the whole editing thing...breakfast! :)