The internet was here, but now it is back in my computer.
So there was this whole Bitchin' Party thing, which was delightful. Fangirls are smart and amazing and fun and funny and just everything wonderful ever, and I am sad that they left and I would like them to come back. I enjoyed meeting people and giving them rides to/from the airport so I could chat with them in small groups, and I love sitting in our room talking about id-fic and things we're writing and stories and boys and just...ugh. Everything. I love you all a lot. All of the love and feelings forever yes.
Also, it's funny, because I consider myself an extrovert, but I'm HORRIBLE in large crowds, and I often have a tough time at conventions and the like because of that. I did okay for the most part, only skulking around the edges a little bit, and then I got home and burst into tears for a few hours. Apparently I am an extrovert-ish type person who needs a significant amount of downtime as well.
Today I went into work then left because I did not feel good - lack of sleep, overabundance of caffeine, upset stomach, blah blah blah. I also emailed my sister to tell her I wouldn't be coming over to exercise, and she informed me that that was okay, since she had an MRI and an MRA yesterday because they thought she might have a blood clot or aneurysm, but instead she has "sexual headaches" or "sexual tension headaches", which are like hormone-related migraines - when the body gets all revved up for sex-having, the hormones go crazy and sharp stabbing pain kills the mood.
NO THANK YOU.
Um...anyway. There were other things, but I don't remember them. Or something. I need to post my BRBBs to AO3 and also link to them on DW, since I thought we weren't supposed to do that yet, but I obviously was mistaken, so yes. I need to do that. I also want to make a thinky-thought post about the challenge and how I felt about it/worked with it. And I want to talk about short stories. So I will do that.
Undertow
So I was going to sign up for the challenge initially, and I went so far as to look at the art and the mixes and podfic-snippets, and I realized it wasn't going to work for me. I have the kind of brain that sees things in words. I don't see pictures, I don't see paintings or movies or snapshots. I don't listen to music and hear a story in the series of songs or in the lyrics. And I also can't parse podfic. I have nothing against it, but to me it all becomes white noise, and I can't focus on it or anything else when it's playing.
But I follow mod-type people on twitter and they were looking for pinch-hitters and I am something of a sucker for people in need, and so I offered to do something, and I got the picture by soundslikej. Pictures are a little easier - a snippet of time that can be a beginning, an end, a middle. I wasn't sure what it was, and I started a couple of things - initially it was going to be a Killjoy fic, for example. I kept turning it over and over in my head, trying things, and trying to figure out what it felt like. I had no idea who my artist was, and therefore no idea what she liked/wanted, but there were no notes, so I figured out that it had to be Gerard/Mikey or Party Poison/Kobra Kid, either as brothers or more, but I wasn't sure. It wasn't clear what they wanted.
Now, I've never been an artist, but with a whole fic (or most of one), you know where the author is going, and you have a choice of scenes to might speak to you, but this was one frozen moment, and I wasn't sure. I think I managed a good story, and I wove in my favorite things - band family and Mikey's internal issues and BROTHERS and Gerard's ridiculousness and all of their creativity and how sometimes things are just more that fits into words. I wanted to take the joy and happiness that they obviously have now, and make it work in conjunction with what has come before.
I think it was the easiest one, in that I was able to parse it on my own, but also the hardest because I just felt unsure.
Suddenly Last Summer>
This is the story that wrote itself. 12K in two days, one of those stories that just happens with no help from me at all. This is possibly because I have a LOT of feelings about Pete Wentz and Mikey Way. Maybe.
But because it was based on a mix, what I had to actually do is tell inlovewithnight to listen to the mix and tell me what it was saying. I had a clue from the cover art, but I wanted to be sure, and it all seemed to fall in line with the fic that I apparently needed to tell. I don't know that I caught the feel of the mix, but the fic made me cry, so I figure that's a good sign.
Possessed By Light
This kind of mix I'm a little better with - the kind that has an overall theme as opposed to telling a story - but I still made inlovewithnight listen to it and make sure I knew what I was doing. I started writing the fic without knowing who was telling the story, without knowing for sure if the "she" in the story was a real person or something else - a voice, a spirit. Eventually I figured it out, but it could have gone a couple ways - Mikey/Alicia, Mikey & Elena, Gerard & Elena, Gerard/Lindsey. When Mikey decided to let me know it was him, I needed something that was going to play on the animus/anima - someone who knew and accepted both of Mikey's pieces.
I'd thought about this before with Mikey (I think that, for me, Mikey and William are the two who have presented the most comfortable with the fluidity of sexuality and would work for this, yet surprisingly I never pictured William for this one) and I wanted someone who I thought would accept it - if not easily, then take it in stride and deal with it and eventually realize that it was just another facet of Mikey. Gabe, for all his douchery, is someone that I think accepts people as they are - loves them for who they are - and I think he'd be the kind of person that Mikey would feel safe telling the truth to, putting himself out on the line.
That said, I kind of want to write that story too.
All in all, it was a great experience and I think I wrote some good stories, but it's definitely one that I find challenging. I'd love to hear your thoughts on your experiences as well.
Another thing that came up in the course of BP was a discussion of big bangs. First I admitted that when I first heard of them, I thought they were redone origin stories (you know, as in THE big bang), but then we discussed how they rose out of people bemoaning the dearth of novel-length fic. And since then, there have been many a big bang. Many many.
And I mentioned how I think that a lot of times, people pad their stories to reach their word count, and what is a really really good 5K story gets lost in loose threads and sex scenes and words words words. Like a diamond buried in a block of coal or an pearl in an oyster shell. And I'd really love to see a short story challenge with a maximum 5K word count. Work to hone other writing skills that sometimes get overlooked when we plot out huge arcs of stories that fill 20-50K. What are thoughts on that?
I miss fangirls. TELL ME THINGS, INTERNET.
Also, it's funny, because I consider myself an extrovert, but I'm HORRIBLE in large crowds, and I often have a tough time at conventions and the like because of that. I did okay for the most part, only skulking around the edges a little bit, and then I got home and burst into tears for a few hours. Apparently I am an extrovert-ish type person who needs a significant amount of downtime as well.
Today I went into work then left because I did not feel good - lack of sleep, overabundance of caffeine, upset stomach, blah blah blah. I also emailed my sister to tell her I wouldn't be coming over to exercise, and she informed me that that was okay, since she had an MRI and an MRA yesterday because they thought she might have a blood clot or aneurysm, but instead she has "sexual headaches" or "sexual tension headaches", which are like hormone-related migraines - when the body gets all revved up for sex-having, the hormones go crazy and sharp stabbing pain kills the mood.
NO THANK YOU.
Um...anyway. There were other things, but I don't remember them. Or something. I need to post my BRBBs to AO3 and also link to them on DW, since I thought we weren't supposed to do that yet, but I obviously was mistaken, so yes. I need to do that. I also want to make a thinky-thought post about the challenge and how I felt about it/worked with it. And I want to talk about short stories. So I will do that.
Undertow
So I was going to sign up for the challenge initially, and I went so far as to look at the art and the mixes and podfic-snippets, and I realized it wasn't going to work for me. I have the kind of brain that sees things in words. I don't see pictures, I don't see paintings or movies or snapshots. I don't listen to music and hear a story in the series of songs or in the lyrics. And I also can't parse podfic. I have nothing against it, but to me it all becomes white noise, and I can't focus on it or anything else when it's playing.
But I follow mod-type people on twitter and they were looking for pinch-hitters and I am something of a sucker for people in need, and so I offered to do something, and I got the picture by soundslikej. Pictures are a little easier - a snippet of time that can be a beginning, an end, a middle. I wasn't sure what it was, and I started a couple of things - initially it was going to be a Killjoy fic, for example. I kept turning it over and over in my head, trying things, and trying to figure out what it felt like. I had no idea who my artist was, and therefore no idea what she liked/wanted, but there were no notes, so I figured out that it had to be Gerard/Mikey or Party Poison/Kobra Kid, either as brothers or more, but I wasn't sure. It wasn't clear what they wanted.
Now, I've never been an artist, but with a whole fic (or most of one), you know where the author is going, and you have a choice of scenes to might speak to you, but this was one frozen moment, and I wasn't sure. I think I managed a good story, and I wove in my favorite things - band family and Mikey's internal issues and BROTHERS and Gerard's ridiculousness and all of their creativity and how sometimes things are just more that fits into words. I wanted to take the joy and happiness that they obviously have now, and make it work in conjunction with what has come before.
I think it was the easiest one, in that I was able to parse it on my own, but also the hardest because I just felt unsure.
Suddenly Last Summer>
This is the story that wrote itself. 12K in two days, one of those stories that just happens with no help from me at all. This is possibly because I have a LOT of feelings about Pete Wentz and Mikey Way. Maybe.
But because it was based on a mix, what I had to actually do is tell inlovewithnight to listen to the mix and tell me what it was saying. I had a clue from the cover art, but I wanted to be sure, and it all seemed to fall in line with the fic that I apparently needed to tell. I don't know that I caught the feel of the mix, but the fic made me cry, so I figure that's a good sign.
Possessed By Light
This kind of mix I'm a little better with - the kind that has an overall theme as opposed to telling a story - but I still made inlovewithnight listen to it and make sure I knew what I was doing. I started writing the fic without knowing who was telling the story, without knowing for sure if the "she" in the story was a real person or something else - a voice, a spirit. Eventually I figured it out, but it could have gone a couple ways - Mikey/Alicia, Mikey & Elena, Gerard & Elena, Gerard/Lindsey. When Mikey decided to let me know it was him, I needed something that was going to play on the animus/anima - someone who knew and accepted both of Mikey's pieces.
I'd thought about this before with Mikey (I think that, for me, Mikey and William are the two who have presented the most comfortable with the fluidity of sexuality and would work for this, yet surprisingly I never pictured William for this one) and I wanted someone who I thought would accept it - if not easily, then take it in stride and deal with it and eventually realize that it was just another facet of Mikey. Gabe, for all his douchery, is someone that I think accepts people as they are - loves them for who they are - and I think he'd be the kind of person that Mikey would feel safe telling the truth to, putting himself out on the line.
That said, I kind of want to write that story too.
All in all, it was a great experience and I think I wrote some good stories, but it's definitely one that I find challenging. I'd love to hear your thoughts on your experiences as well.
Another thing that came up in the course of BP was a discussion of big bangs. First I admitted that when I first heard of them, I thought they were redone origin stories (you know, as in THE big bang), but then we discussed how they rose out of people bemoaning the dearth of novel-length fic. And since then, there have been many a big bang. Many many.
And I mentioned how I think that a lot of times, people pad their stories to reach their word count, and what is a really really good 5K story gets lost in loose threads and sex scenes and words words words. Like a diamond buried in a block of coal or an pearl in an oyster shell. And I'd really love to see a short story challenge with a maximum 5K word count. Work to hone other writing skills that sometimes get overlooked when we plot out huge arcs of stories that fill 20-50K. What are thoughts on that?
I miss fangirls. TELL ME THINGS, INTERNET.