Lights Across the Sound (R, Nick Carraway/Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby) + fic writing round-up 2010
Firstly, now that Yuletide authors have been revealed, I can now tell my funny story about my awesome Yuletide treat:
A Blade
(Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame)
This made me so happy: after seeing the movie, I was really intrigued by the hints of the relationship between Emperor Wu and her handmaiden/bodyguard Jing'er, and this story seemed just tailored to what I wanted to know about Jing'er's past, how she came to the palace, and what she meant to the Emperor. And the writing is just beautiful, the tone, the images, all of it.
Well, it's funny to me. :) So I got to open this story the morning before I went out to see a film with Ro. I read it once - thought omg omg yay! - and then had to rush to catch my train. While out with Ro, she rather casually mentioned a Yuletide treat she'd written (Last Call, a post-movie Blade Runner ficlet about Rachael) and said a few more things about haha, there was a glitch in the AO3 system where you can find out what fandoms a person has written in, and I noted it but was TOO THICK to put two and two together.
It wasn't until I got home, read my Yuletide treat a few more times, wrote a gushing comment about how awesome it was, and posted it before I realised - hang on. This writing is beautiful - and strangely familiar. And moreover - how did this author know so well exactly what I wanted from my Emperor Wu/Jing'er scenario?
AHAHAHAHAH. So yeah, Ro may not be the sneakiest liar, but I am also not the sharpest blade in the pack. And she is the best - for enabling me, for encouraging me to write, for being a patient and thorough beta and for being a great friend who writes great fics. :D
She also wrote a great Spirited Away story:
Tales of the Bathhouse
It's so lovely - three tales that flow into each other, and into a narrative in the present that sings with details while feeling part of the bigger world of the story of the movie. And it's so vividly and beautifully written.
Rather embarrasingly, I only managed to write two fics this year. So I can't really do the writing round-up questionaire, but I do want to talk a little about each fic.
For Yuletide 2010, I wrote fic for The Great Gatsby:
Lights Across the Sound for
bethfrish
There was one party at Gatsby's that summer that Nick Carraway never wrote about.
bethfrish wrote in her assignment: Nick has to be one of my favorite narrators of all time, but I think there are probably a few anecdotes he'd rather not share. Force it out of him. Write me a scene that wasn't in the book.
Yes, I signed up for The Great Gatsby, because I am quite familiar with the text - I studied it my final year of high school, and I saw Gatz last year (which is basically a magnificient seven hour re-reading of the entirety of the book on stage) - but I still freaked out a little when I got my assignment.
I have to thank
bethfrish for a great prompt though. Without it I wouldn't have known where to start; with it, it became a lot easier to adopt Nick's voice (even though first person narration isn't something I naturally write in) and to start sketching an outline for a moment that didn't happen on page, but could've.
I decided fairly early on what two things I definitely wanted to write in: the first was to incorporate that indelible image of Gatsby yearning across the water for the green light and what it stood for; and the second was to aim for a tone that extrapolated from Nick's own summation of his experiences that summer and made his infatuation with Gatsby explicit:
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart...If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life...it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
I had the outline by early December, six scenes that ended up pretty much as sketched out (which is unusual for me - normally a storyline will have changed three, four times by the time I finish writing). But it was really just sketches; for example, my personal favourite scene (the moment between Gatsby and Nick in the library) is outlined as just "Library - Gatsby alone, frission, Nick's desire". And then RL became crazy busy and one work project took over my life (including weekends) and I started to seriously panic about starting, let alone finishing. I ended up writing 2/3 of it longhand into my notebook, taking two nights to transpose and edit it into Google Docs (where I found that it was twice as long as I thought it was, heh), and then using one unsupervised afternoon at work to polish it. I must admit I entertained thoughts of defaulting more than once, but luckily, I haz a
littlerhymes who gently pushed at me until I made it with barely a day to go. :) She also did a bang-up beta job considering how little time I had left for that.
Right after I finished writing and submitted my story, I re-read The Great Gatsby to doublecheck canon facts and I was in absolute despair at the end of it; Fitzgerald's writing is so beautiful and detailed and delicate that I felt what I had written was complete lumpen rubbish in comparison. But ah well, we can't all be geniuses.
The other story I wrote this year was a long-delayed gift for
littlerhymes:
All the Friends You Need
You'll know when to move up / You'll know when to take all the right chances / Never looking back. Otherwise known as the TAI high school AU.
So this monster was more than two years in the making. In August 2008, Ro and I went down to Melbourne to catch a second show on the Cobra Starship/The Academy Is.../Panic at the Disco tour, and to amuse ourselves over the trip we came up with six or seven AU ideas, including a TAI high school AU based on the beautiful behind-the-scenes polaroids from the About a Girl video shoot, and a separate Guys and Dolls AU where I think I had Jon as Sky, Brendon as Sarah, Spencer as Adelaide and Ryan as Nathan.
A week later, while squeeing over another of the polaroids from that set, Ro wrote snippets of fic in the comments and despite the fact I was trying to get her to write me this story, it ended up being my pet project. In a delusional fit, I decided to write it as a Christmas gift for Ro - four months to write a 5000 word or so story? Sure! - and in the end only managed to eke out a tiny Butcher/Sisky ficlet along with promises to finish the actual fic in the new year. And then, when a few months had passed and I was only a couple thousand of words in, I resolved to have it done for her birthday.
HA!
Her birthday and another Christmas rolled by. By the beginning of 2010, I had a detailed outline that I kept changing, about 8000 words (the bulk of William's section and half of Sisky's), and a sinking feeling that this was going to be much much longer than I had anticipated. And I had never ever, before this fic, written and finished anything over 8000 words.
So look, I know that in the end it seems only five people read and liked this fic, and it may be really obnoxious to say so, I am really proud of this fic. Yeah, quantity definitely isn't quality, but goddamn, I managed to write something over 20,000 words! And there were plots, not just atmosphere, and I resolved things! \o/
Apart from the sense of achievement, I really enjoyed writing the fic because it was so much fun plotting, and thinking about different bandom people and how they would fit into this universe, and throwing in jokes and references for Ro's amusement (and occasionally stealing bits from her writing...as a homage, of course *cough*). This included trying to write like Ro - we've talked a few times before about our different approaches to fic writing, particularly when it comes to structure, and I experimented with planning and keeping to a stricter structural balance than I would normally bother with (I failed, btw).
There are also one or two other things I wish I could fix - there were more Brendon/Spencer moments originally, the movie night scene with Butcher and Sisky should've been longer, and I struggled all the way through with whether or not to make Mike and Michael just friends or more.
But oh well. Them's the breaks - I think no matter what I wrote, there would always be something I would want to do better. In the end, I finished it and Ro liked it, that's what really matters! :)
What am I going to write next?
Well, first I have to get some RL stuff out of the way. I'm still somewhat amazed that I managed to find a RL job that lets me work with words, but after a day of writing and editing, it is pretty much the last thing I want to do for fun when I come home. Especially when I have a deadline hanging over my head.
But I do have a backlog of WiPs that I am thinking of releasing into the wild as-is, and in the last few days a number of bunnies for White Collar stories, and I still have a figureskating RPS AU outlined in great detail, and there's still one or two bandom ideas lodged in my head. ;)
A Blade
(Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame)
This made me so happy: after seeing the movie, I was really intrigued by the hints of the relationship between Emperor Wu and her handmaiden/bodyguard Jing'er, and this story seemed just tailored to what I wanted to know about Jing'er's past, how she came to the palace, and what she meant to the Emperor. And the writing is just beautiful, the tone, the images, all of it.
Well, it's funny to me. :) So I got to open this story the morning before I went out to see a film with Ro. I read it once - thought omg omg yay! - and then had to rush to catch my train. While out with Ro, she rather casually mentioned a Yuletide treat she'd written (Last Call, a post-movie Blade Runner ficlet about Rachael) and said a few more things about haha, there was a glitch in the AO3 system where you can find out what fandoms a person has written in, and I noted it but was TOO THICK to put two and two together.
It wasn't until I got home, read my Yuletide treat a few more times, wrote a gushing comment about how awesome it was, and posted it before I realised - hang on. This writing is beautiful - and strangely familiar. And moreover - how did this author know so well exactly what I wanted from my Emperor Wu/Jing'er scenario?
AHAHAHAHAH. So yeah, Ro may not be the sneakiest liar, but I am also not the sharpest blade in the pack. And she is the best - for enabling me, for encouraging me to write, for being a patient and thorough beta and for being a great friend who writes great fics. :D
She also wrote a great Spirited Away story:
Tales of the Bathhouse
It's so lovely - three tales that flow into each other, and into a narrative in the present that sings with details while feeling part of the bigger world of the story of the movie. And it's so vividly and beautifully written.
Rather embarrasingly, I only managed to write two fics this year. So I can't really do the writing round-up questionaire, but I do want to talk a little about each fic.
For Yuletide 2010, I wrote fic for The Great Gatsby:
Lights Across the Sound for
bethfrish
There was one party at Gatsby's that summer that Nick Carraway never wrote about.
bethfrish wrote in her assignment: Nick has to be one of my favorite narrators of all time, but I think there are probably a few anecdotes he'd rather not share. Force it out of him. Write me a scene that wasn't in the book.
Yes, I signed up for The Great Gatsby, because I am quite familiar with the text - I studied it my final year of high school, and I saw Gatz last year (which is basically a magnificient seven hour re-reading of the entirety of the book on stage) - but I still freaked out a little when I got my assignment.
I have to thank
bethfrish for a great prompt though. Without it I wouldn't have known where to start; with it, it became a lot easier to adopt Nick's voice (even though first person narration isn't something I naturally write in) and to start sketching an outline for a moment that didn't happen on page, but could've.
I decided fairly early on what two things I definitely wanted to write in: the first was to incorporate that indelible image of Gatsby yearning across the water for the green light and what it stood for; and the second was to aim for a tone that extrapolated from Nick's own summation of his experiences that summer and made his infatuation with Gatsby explicit:
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart...If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life...it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
I had the outline by early December, six scenes that ended up pretty much as sketched out (which is unusual for me - normally a storyline will have changed three, four times by the time I finish writing). But it was really just sketches; for example, my personal favourite scene (the moment between Gatsby and Nick in the library) is outlined as just "Library - Gatsby alone, frission, Nick's desire". And then RL became crazy busy and one work project took over my life (including weekends) and I started to seriously panic about starting, let alone finishing. I ended up writing 2/3 of it longhand into my notebook, taking two nights to transpose and edit it into Google Docs (where I found that it was twice as long as I thought it was, heh), and then using one unsupervised afternoon at work to polish it. I must admit I entertained thoughts of defaulting more than once, but luckily, I haz a
littlerhymes who gently pushed at me until I made it with barely a day to go. :) She also did a bang-up beta job considering how little time I had left for that.
Right after I finished writing and submitted my story, I re-read The Great Gatsby to doublecheck canon facts and I was in absolute despair at the end of it; Fitzgerald's writing is so beautiful and detailed and delicate that I felt what I had written was complete lumpen rubbish in comparison. But ah well, we can't all be geniuses.
The other story I wrote this year was a long-delayed gift for
littlerhymes:
All the Friends You Need
You'll know when to move up / You'll know when to take all the right chances / Never looking back. Otherwise known as the TAI high school AU.
So this monster was more than two years in the making. In August 2008, Ro and I went down to Melbourne to catch a second show on the Cobra Starship/The Academy Is.../Panic at the Disco tour, and to amuse ourselves over the trip we came up with six or seven AU ideas, including a TAI high school AU based on the beautiful behind-the-scenes polaroids from the About a Girl video shoot, and a separate Guys and Dolls AU where I think I had Jon as Sky, Brendon as Sarah, Spencer as Adelaide and Ryan as Nathan.
A week later, while squeeing over another of the polaroids from that set, Ro wrote snippets of fic in the comments and despite the fact I was trying to get her to write me this story, it ended up being my pet project. In a delusional fit, I decided to write it as a Christmas gift for Ro - four months to write a 5000 word or so story? Sure! - and in the end only managed to eke out a tiny Butcher/Sisky ficlet along with promises to finish the actual fic in the new year. And then, when a few months had passed and I was only a couple thousand of words in, I resolved to have it done for her birthday.
HA!
Her birthday and another Christmas rolled by. By the beginning of 2010, I had a detailed outline that I kept changing, about 8000 words (the bulk of William's section and half of Sisky's), and a sinking feeling that this was going to be much much longer than I had anticipated. And I had never ever, before this fic, written and finished anything over 8000 words.
So look, I know that in the end it seems only five people read and liked this fic, and it may be really obnoxious to say so, I am really proud of this fic. Yeah, quantity definitely isn't quality, but goddamn, I managed to write something over 20,000 words! And there were plots, not just atmosphere, and I resolved things! \o/
Apart from the sense of achievement, I really enjoyed writing the fic because it was so much fun plotting, and thinking about different bandom people and how they would fit into this universe, and throwing in jokes and references for Ro's amusement (and occasionally stealing bits from her writing...as a homage, of course *cough*). This included trying to write like Ro - we've talked a few times before about our different approaches to fic writing, particularly when it comes to structure, and I experimented with planning and keeping to a stricter structural balance than I would normally bother with (I failed, btw).
There are also one or two other things I wish I could fix - there were more Brendon/Spencer moments originally, the movie night scene with Butcher and Sisky should've been longer, and I struggled all the way through with whether or not to make Mike and Michael just friends or more.
But oh well. Them's the breaks - I think no matter what I wrote, there would always be something I would want to do better. In the end, I finished it and Ro liked it, that's what really matters! :)
What am I going to write next?
Well, first I have to get some RL stuff out of the way. I'm still somewhat amazed that I managed to find a RL job that lets me work with words, but after a day of writing and editing, it is pretty much the last thing I want to do for fun when I come home. Especially when I have a deadline hanging over my head.
But I do have a backlog of WiPs that I am thinking of releasing into the wild as-is, and in the last few days a number of bunnies for White Collar stories, and I still have a figureskating RPS AU outlined in great detail, and there's still one or two bandom ideas lodged in my head. ;)