Writing roundup (so where are the Yuletides you wrote, ppl? as opposed to recs)
Now I can exclusively reveal that... canis_m was right, obviously. XD
Traffic, parts V-VII [Viewfinder]
Finally.
Speak, Mirror [Black Lagoon: Yuletide gift for escalove]
I offered this because I could cheap-ass my way through it; so cheap-ass, in fact, that I wrote what amounts to a mock!canon episode. The recipient, too, was asking for stuff like evocative setting descriptions ahahaha in retrospect I'm not sure why I didn't write Malacca but call it Roanapur since it made no sense for anything to happen in Malaysia. It was meant to be Revy/Eda but the structure didn't allow for nun muffdiving. When I look at it I can see the phrasing I borrowed from Bester and Bradbury, like swiping someone else's coat for a corner store run when you can't be bothered to dig in the closet for your own.
So that's 11000 words of finished project, plus 1500-2000 words of abortive origfic fragments (mostly SSBB attempts XD). Here is one I'm likely to pursue:
Werner moved into the new studios in March, before the refitting was complete. The first floor was done, which was the main thing. Chester had been by with the engineers, set all the equipment up and reproduced the wiring, in as fuss-free a configuration as the additional 500 square feet allowed. The bathroom was down there as well, and the integrated laundry. That left the newly painted upstairs loft as living space, and the rooftop terrace that was not yet a garden. He bought a new bed and had it delivered.
***
Werner had been raised secular, but the moment of Judeo-Christian terror was reflexive. Then the angel swung its off-white trainers and hopped off its perch. It scooped up a mesh carry-all that had been lying on the concrete at its feet. The apparition resolved like a lens focussing. Not an angel, not Percy, still-young and alive and there. It was Percy's son. Ben.
"Hi, Werner," he said.
***
"It's perfectly safe nowadays," Anna said. "Reversible, hypoallergenic. He got his A-levels, that was the deal, now he has the right to do as he wants. It'll be his own money in six months."
Percy's money. Werner knew he didn't understand, knew he was reacting out of a fundamental lack of grokkage but was unable to stop himself. "It's just- can he even get into an elevator?"
"Why on earth would he want to get into an elevator? God, no offense, Wern, but you have become such a fucking bourge."
He watched out of the corner of his eye as she picked her way over an invisible obstacle. It was cooler and windier than here, wherever she was. The software eliminated all but the faintest artifacts of background, even compensated for changes in lighting as the input segued from one camera to the next, but her hair still moved in a breeze he could not feel against his own skin. The morning pedestrian traffic had thinned, but the humidity, oppressive, had not done likewise.
"You have a whole factory to yourself," Anna said. "I had a look at it on Google Street Map. Look, forgive me for assuming it would be all right, all right? That you might want to get to know him a little. He hasn't seen you in person in five years."
Werner thought back to the apparition of this morning: last sighted at the counter delineating the loft's minimal kitchen space, grey-blue wingtips trailing halfway to the centre of the floor, scarfing down his second bowl of Werner's breakfast granola without the milk Werner had left to pick up. Five years before that, a skinny, dark-haired kid with sullen eyes, half hidden behind a sliding partition.
"Just give me some advance warning next time," he says.
***
Ben was - unsurprisingly - no more interested in conversation than he had been at thirteen; at least, not with Werner. He went out a lot, or rather was outside most hours of the day, coming in only for meals and cold drinks from the fridge. He spent a lot of time on the roof. He didn't seem to cultivate an extensive online presence. Werner couldn't tell if he had friends.
It unsettled Werner. Percy had never been silent. At that age he'd been a neverending, vociferous succession of comical enthusiasm and even more comical outrage. There had been a Hesse period, Werner remembered. A Paisley Underground period. Stax Records. Fluxus. Francis Bacon. Cyber-privacy... The blogs still trotted out that DDoS attack against Pitchfork as column space filler. One small part of a larger legend.
(Some of those enthusiasms had been his own, or had even remained so, over the years. But he remembered them as Percy's. The photographic record was a surprise: in his mind he had always been himself, the internal Werner uncharacterized by that hair, those shoes that they had bought together. In his mind's eye he saw only Percy.)
Conclusion: a reasonable tally, for me, and when one considers that for two years I wasn't able to write at all. No wonder, too, because it's the same energy I used to get through b-school, only turned completely inward. Writing fiction for three hours takes the same effort as sitting a three-hour exam, judging from the level of hunger it induces. ^_^; Writing for three hours every two days for two weeks is therefore as strenuous as finals period. B-school taught me to turn the tap on at will (I never thought it would help with writing, of all things), but I can't point the hose in two directions at once.
Resolution: I had a wordcount resolution for '09 and frankly forgot about it. XD; I'm reasonably certain I made it, though, if blogging counts. In early 2010 I want to finish that one Tenipuri story, and the one originally started for the SSBB fashion/dressup issue. After that... we'll see.
Traffic, parts V-VII [Viewfinder]
Finally.
Speak, Mirror [Black Lagoon: Yuletide gift for escalove]
I offered this because I could cheap-ass my way through it; so cheap-ass, in fact, that I wrote what amounts to a mock!canon episode. The recipient, too, was asking for stuff like evocative setting descriptions ahahaha in retrospect I'm not sure why I didn't write Malacca but call it Roanapur since it made no sense for anything to happen in Malaysia. It was meant to be Revy/Eda but the structure didn't allow for nun muffdiving. When I look at it I can see the phrasing I borrowed from Bester and Bradbury, like swiping someone else's coat for a corner store run when you can't be bothered to dig in the closet for your own.
So that's 11000 words of finished project, plus 1500-2000 words of abortive origfic fragments (mostly SSBB attempts XD). Here is one I'm likely to pursue:
Werner moved into the new studios in March, before the refitting was complete. The first floor was done, which was the main thing. Chester had been by with the engineers, set all the equipment up and reproduced the wiring, in as fuss-free a configuration as the additional 500 square feet allowed. The bathroom was down there as well, and the integrated laundry. That left the newly painted upstairs loft as living space, and the rooftop terrace that was not yet a garden. He bought a new bed and had it delivered.
***
Werner had been raised secular, but the moment of Judeo-Christian terror was reflexive. Then the angel swung its off-white trainers and hopped off its perch. It scooped up a mesh carry-all that had been lying on the concrete at its feet. The apparition resolved like a lens focussing. Not an angel, not Percy, still-young and alive and there. It was Percy's son. Ben.
"Hi, Werner," he said.
***
"It's perfectly safe nowadays," Anna said. "Reversible, hypoallergenic. He got his A-levels, that was the deal, now he has the right to do as he wants. It'll be his own money in six months."
Percy's money. Werner knew he didn't understand, knew he was reacting out of a fundamental lack of grokkage but was unable to stop himself. "It's just- can he even get into an elevator?"
"Why on earth would he want to get into an elevator? God, no offense, Wern, but you have become such a fucking bourge."
He watched out of the corner of his eye as she picked her way over an invisible obstacle. It was cooler and windier than here, wherever she was. The software eliminated all but the faintest artifacts of background, even compensated for changes in lighting as the input segued from one camera to the next, but her hair still moved in a breeze he could not feel against his own skin. The morning pedestrian traffic had thinned, but the humidity, oppressive, had not done likewise.
"You have a whole factory to yourself," Anna said. "I had a look at it on Google Street Map. Look, forgive me for assuming it would be all right, all right? That you might want to get to know him a little. He hasn't seen you in person in five years."
Werner thought back to the apparition of this morning: last sighted at the counter delineating the loft's minimal kitchen space, grey-blue wingtips trailing halfway to the centre of the floor, scarfing down his second bowl of Werner's breakfast granola without the milk Werner had left to pick up. Five years before that, a skinny, dark-haired kid with sullen eyes, half hidden behind a sliding partition.
"Just give me some advance warning next time," he says.
***
Ben was - unsurprisingly - no more interested in conversation than he had been at thirteen; at least, not with Werner. He went out a lot, or rather was outside most hours of the day, coming in only for meals and cold drinks from the fridge. He spent a lot of time on the roof. He didn't seem to cultivate an extensive online presence. Werner couldn't tell if he had friends.
It unsettled Werner. Percy had never been silent. At that age he'd been a neverending, vociferous succession of comical enthusiasm and even more comical outrage. There had been a Hesse period, Werner remembered. A Paisley Underground period. Stax Records. Fluxus. Francis Bacon. Cyber-privacy... The blogs still trotted out that DDoS attack against Pitchfork as column space filler. One small part of a larger legend.
(Some of those enthusiasms had been his own, or had even remained so, over the years. But he remembered them as Percy's. The photographic record was a surprise: in his mind he had always been himself, the internal Werner uncharacterized by that hair, those shoes that they had bought together. In his mind's eye he saw only Percy.)
Conclusion: a reasonable tally, for me, and when one considers that for two years I wasn't able to write at all. No wonder, too, because it's the same energy I used to get through b-school, only turned completely inward. Writing fiction for three hours takes the same effort as sitting a three-hour exam, judging from the level of hunger it induces. ^_^; Writing for three hours every two days for two weeks is therefore as strenuous as finals period. B-school taught me to turn the tap on at will (I never thought it would help with writing, of all things), but I can't point the hose in two directions at once.
Resolution: I had a wordcount resolution for '09 and frankly forgot about it. XD; I'm reasonably certain I made it, though, if blogging counts. In early 2010 I want to finish that one Tenipuri story, and the one originally started for the SSBB fashion/dressup issue. After that... we'll see.