not a yuletide letter
1. I finished rereading draft 2 of my book, and making notes along the way! This is huge because it's the first step (in a 2-3 step program, we'll see) to planning draft 3, which I'm hoping to start actually writing next month. Rereading the draft took me a few weeks (it's currently 140,000!) and I filled over 50% of a notebook with my notes.
The next step will be rereading all the feedback I got from beta readers and making notes, and then integrating all the notes and hopefully coming up with a new outline. Writing is terrible kids, think carefully before you commit yourself to doing it /o\
Right now I'm in the terrible stage where the book is readable but not great, so I'm torn between "I will work on this and it will be super cool!" and "I will never turn this into something an editor will want to pay for", sigh.
Anyway, it's great to have this first stage done, considering I finished the last draft in like, May.
2. To drown my sorrows I've been fully indulging in this, my Fanfic Season, AKA the time between book drafts. So, since my last post I've written 2 fics:
Joe and Nicky's totally awesome Malta vacation (2005 words) by sabrina_il
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Characters: Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Additional Tags: Rimming, Fisting, Petty fighting, Towels, Relationship Issues, Old Married Couple, Food, Vacation, Fluff and Smut, Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Consent Play, Dildos, Vibrators, Sex Toys, Tears, Crying
Summary:
Sometimes Nicky and Joe need to blow off some steam so they can return to being their awesome selves. This is six scenes from the time Joe and Nicky decided to take some time to unwind in a house in Malta. Mostly based off of kink meme prompts.
and
Joys of the Modern World (4294 words) by sabrina_il
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Characters: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia
Additional Tags: Children, Pressure to have kids, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, The one where everyone suddenly expects them to have kids, childfree immortals lol, shifting social norms, this is not kids fic!, Homophobia, minor inconveniences as a result of receding homophobia, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Family Feels, Genoa, Italy, Germany, Munich - Freeform, Morocco - Freeform, Marrakech - Freeform, 5 Times
Summary:
5 times when Nicky and Joe were asked about when they're planning to have kids.
This last one took immesurably more effort than every other fic I've written in this fandom, and has of course had the least amount of comments, lolol. Isn't that always how things work out? lol
reutii who gave me the idea for the fic, saw how hard I worked on it, was like "wow, you're investing so much effort! People will love this fic more than everything else you've written!" to which I had to give her the Sweet Summer Child speech of the complete lack of correlation between how much time a writer spends on something and how much the audience responds to that thing, lol.
2. I've also been watching things!
I watched HBO's Watchmen TV series, which everyone was raving about a while ago.
I liked the comic, thought Snyder's adaptation of it was nice but kind of missed the whole point, and felt this show was much closer to the spirit of the thing.
I loved how WEIRD it was, and that it followed the original characters and all the futures it imagined for them, and I loved how tightly plotted it was, and how it went with rather than undermining the points the original was trying to make. About Rorschach, about Laurie's backstory, about Adrian, even about Dr Manhattan.
I also loved that it centered on Regina King, and that it chose the Tulsa Massacre as the focal point, and that Dr Manhattan is embodied by a black actor. I loved the adopted kids, the aesthetics of everything.
The things that ultimately didn't work though, is that this felt like a white dude's idea where he was like "I want to write a fanfic about all of my thoughts and feelings about Watchmen" and then, as interviews with the creator indicate, went "hmmm what should I replace US wars with, as a central theme?" and decided on systemic racism.
Which is a great choice! In the sense that making it the center of the show is the truest thing to the spirit of Watchmen that I can imagine. But it didn't feel like a true central theme, but more like a plot device, while the true meat of the show was elsewhere.
For example, in the original comic all the main characters were intricately involved in or affected by either the Vietnam War or the Cold War. It was a central motivation for them, or a central concern, and they were affecting the world out of that perspective.
Here, instead of things actually being about systemic racism, it's just about racism in Tulsa specifically, and the one Klan chapter there or whatever, that must be defeated. And the only people who are really involved in it intimately are Will and to a lesser extent Angela. Everyone else, from villains to heroes, don't really think about systemic racism, don't pick sides, aren't affected by it in the narrative, etc.
And of course, the parts that felt the most tone deaf to me, were in Vietnam. I was really hoping they'd just leave it as "Vietnam became a state" but no, they actually had almost an entire episode set there, and just... even to me, a complete outsider, it felt extremely weird and tacked on, as a version of what Vietnam was a conquered state would be. IDK, maybe I'm wrong! But it was... weird. Not that there wasn't weirdness or fail in the original comic of course.
And of course, in the final act, we have the heroes who save the day, who are all white characters - Adrian, Laurie, the mirror mask guy. We have the victims/bystanders, Angela and Dr Manhattan, and we have the villain, Lady Trieu (that entire plotline with stealing his sperm... I would have minded it less if the show didn't explicitly state that the only reason Lady Trieu was brilliant was because of Adrian's genes, ugh). And of course, a white dude who's a mass murdering narcissist is someone we follow with a lot of amusement and enjoyment, but a mixed-race woman who does the same exact thing is a villain who must be stopped. Blah.
Anyway, I enjoyed the utter WTFery of Adrian's storyline on Europa, and his turn as god in the garden of eden, where he tortured and murdered Adam and Eve over and over again on the one hand and created his own foe and punisher on the other. And of course, Laurie was fun as the person now in charge of hunting down masked vigilantes.
Anyway, I loved Will's storyline, and that they made him Hooded Justice, and how it completely reframes the concept of masked superheroes, in a way that's EXACTLY what I think a modern adaptation of Watchmen should do. IDK what to make of Will's queerness? Like I felt like it was handled a bit awkwardly. I mean it was great, but also kind of random? But not in a way where the narrative was just trying to say "this is a random thing about Will" but just in a way where it was handled awkwardly. Anyway.
Overall, I loved the plotting but felt it kind of got in the way of character a bit. Like Angela's romance with Manhattan is CRUCIAL to the plot, and I never even got why they were actually together? What drew them to each other? Unknown.
The final thing I'll say is, HBO's audience is, on average, I think older than a lot of other cable networks/streaming services/etc, like HBO kind of settled on the educated adults over a certain age market and that's who they aim their programming at, and I forgot how nice it is to see SFF TV made for adults.
Just... stories FOR ADULTS that contain science fiction. Stories that are complicated, that deal with real-world problems, where everyone is over 35, it's just really great to see on occasion.
3. I've been convinced to jump to S6 of The 100 after S5 was pretty terrible, and everyone said to just skip it and go straight to 6.
Wow, this show is extremely repetitive, but the thing is does works so well for me that I'm basically willing to go along with it no matter how many times they give me the same damn thing? lol
Like, yet again, just like in S1, our heroes find themselves on a planet they've never visited before where it turns out people already live, and yet again things start from a misunderstanding that leads to a violent confrontation while our heroes are trying to build a truly moral civilization without cruelty of injustice. YET AGAIN!
But I mean, this show still gives me one billion female characters of different ages and races and shapes that do a billion different jobs (soldier! politician! doctor! engineer! thief! leader!), and the relationships they weave still fundamentally work for me (BELLAMY AND OCTAVIA AND THEIR DRAMA FOREVER! Bellamy and Clarke's platonic friendship omg!) and the plot is so tight and fast paced, and they touch on well explored SFF moral dilemmas in a non-enraging way, and it's just... still a really nice ride?
Also I'm always here for Bellamy (OK, not always, when they write him right) because a Bellamy used to be my BFF in high school and I am HERE for this platonic f/m friendship representation. Anyway, I hope S6 continues to be good.
So far, I love that they're finally doing something with the thing where Octavia spent like 4 seasons being everyone's moral compass, the reminder of the worst things humanity did while in space, and then was forced to be in a situation where she had to do EVEN WORSE THINGS to help people survive. Like, that's some DELICIOUS AND AMAZING character angst, and S5 was squandering it by making her a ~villain and I'm glad we're over that now.
4. You know that popular book, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari? Well, I haven't been reading that, but I've been listening to the uni course Harari taught that was the basis for this book, on Spotify. (In Hebrew, since it was taught at a local university.)
It's... better than I'd hoped so far? I think the book would have a higher chance of annoying me, even though the lectures are undoubtedly longer to listen to. But since this is basically a historian talking about a lot of fields in which he's not an expert, and mostly just sharing his ~thoughts, I prefer to have it in the original academic framework where he knew he had to comply with academic standards.
Mostly so far it's a cool way to hear interesting anecdotes and catch up on what the latest theories in various fields are. Harari's own theories are sometimes cool and sometimes blah, which can be annoying, but it's a small percentage of the experience so far.
5. Finally, friends, I've missed you. Life has been kind of difficult. Aside from the pandemic and the being unemployed I mean.
After I finished being in quarantine we went into a national lockdown, and soon after that I was attacked by a large dog in a closed space, and got a serious dog bite for the first time in my life. I don't really want to dwell on the details, but it was traumatic on a level I've never experienced before. Like, I was fine for the while night while I was around the damn dog, and then the next 48 hours were like a delayed panic attack.
I couldn't sleep at all, I kept bursting into sobs at random times, like my body was just processing this trauma in delay. It was a weekend and a holiday and a lockdown so I of course got medical treatment for the bite (which wasn't that serious, but it was on my stomach and there was a huge bruise and some bleeding from where the teeth dug into me and the dog's jaw closed) but getting prescription anti-anxiety/sleeping pills or something was more complicated on short notice, so I just bought some homeopathic stuff and for the first time took medication so I could calm down from a panic attack and sleep.
Then less than a day after I stopped sobbing uncontrollably, the biggest SFF con of the year happened. Of course it was virtual, but I was still committed to doing 3 events in 2 days (about 5 hours total of being on camera) which turned into 5 events in 4 days ///o\\\ and all of it was super fun! But also just utterly, utterly mentally and socially and emotionally exhausting.
And then when that ended I guess my stomach was like, hmmm pal, you've been living in high gear and we need to take it down a notch. So I basically got a weird stomach situation where my stomach hurt badly and I was barely conscious most of the day for like 48 hours, and today was the first day I felt strong enough to like, go to the store and buy vegetables and make soup.
AND IN THE BACKGROUND OF ALL THIS there's been the pandemic, and also the lockdown which meant not seeing my parents or most of my friends for over a month, and also applying to jobs and getting rejected over and over.
And just... it's been a lot, friends. It's been a lot. Drowning myself in fanfic has helped, but ultimately I'm frayed and worn down and things are Not Great. And because of all of our ever shifting routines, it's tough to know how to cope, exactly. All the old mechanisms are shaky and uncertain.
So, I hope you're taking care of yourselves out there. I hope you're doing as well as you can. I hope life is treating you as kindly as possible in These Times. I'm thinking of you and I hope you'll do the same for me. ♥
comments on Dreamwidth
The next step will be rereading all the feedback I got from beta readers and making notes, and then integrating all the notes and hopefully coming up with a new outline. Writing is terrible kids, think carefully before you commit yourself to doing it /o\
Right now I'm in the terrible stage where the book is readable but not great, so I'm torn between "I will work on this and it will be super cool!" and "I will never turn this into something an editor will want to pay for", sigh.
Anyway, it's great to have this first stage done, considering I finished the last draft in like, May.
2. To drown my sorrows I've been fully indulging in this, my Fanfic Season, AKA the time between book drafts. So, since my last post I've written 2 fics:
Joe and Nicky's totally awesome Malta vacation (2005 words) by sabrina_il
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Characters: Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Additional Tags: Rimming, Fisting, Petty fighting, Towels, Relationship Issues, Old Married Couple, Food, Vacation, Fluff and Smut, Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Consent Play, Dildos, Vibrators, Sex Toys, Tears, Crying
Summary:
Sometimes Nicky and Joe need to blow off some steam so they can return to being their awesome selves. This is six scenes from the time Joe and Nicky decided to take some time to unwind in a house in Malta. Mostly based off of kink meme prompts.
and
Joys of the Modern World (4294 words) by sabrina_il
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Characters: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia
Additional Tags: Children, Pressure to have kids, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, The one where everyone suddenly expects them to have kids, childfree immortals lol, shifting social norms, this is not kids fic!, Homophobia, minor inconveniences as a result of receding homophobia, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Family Feels, Genoa, Italy, Germany, Munich - Freeform, Morocco - Freeform, Marrakech - Freeform, 5 Times
Summary:
5 times when Nicky and Joe were asked about when they're planning to have kids.
This last one took immesurably more effort than every other fic I've written in this fandom, and has of course had the least amount of comments, lolol. Isn't that always how things work out? lol
reutii who gave me the idea for the fic, saw how hard I worked on it, was like "wow, you're investing so much effort! People will love this fic more than everything else you've written!" to which I had to give her the Sweet Summer Child speech of the complete lack of correlation between how much time a writer spends on something and how much the audience responds to that thing, lol.
2. I've also been watching things!
I watched HBO's Watchmen TV series, which everyone was raving about a while ago.
I liked the comic, thought Snyder's adaptation of it was nice but kind of missed the whole point, and felt this show was much closer to the spirit of the thing.
I loved how WEIRD it was, and that it followed the original characters and all the futures it imagined for them, and I loved how tightly plotted it was, and how it went with rather than undermining the points the original was trying to make. About Rorschach, about Laurie's backstory, about Adrian, even about Dr Manhattan.
I also loved that it centered on Regina King, and that it chose the Tulsa Massacre as the focal point, and that Dr Manhattan is embodied by a black actor. I loved the adopted kids, the aesthetics of everything.
The things that ultimately didn't work though, is that this felt like a white dude's idea where he was like "I want to write a fanfic about all of my thoughts and feelings about Watchmen" and then, as interviews with the creator indicate, went "hmmm what should I replace US wars with, as a central theme?" and decided on systemic racism.
Which is a great choice! In the sense that making it the center of the show is the truest thing to the spirit of Watchmen that I can imagine. But it didn't feel like a true central theme, but more like a plot device, while the true meat of the show was elsewhere.
For example, in the original comic all the main characters were intricately involved in or affected by either the Vietnam War or the Cold War. It was a central motivation for them, or a central concern, and they were affecting the world out of that perspective.
Here, instead of things actually being about systemic racism, it's just about racism in Tulsa specifically, and the one Klan chapter there or whatever, that must be defeated. And the only people who are really involved in it intimately are Will and to a lesser extent Angela. Everyone else, from villains to heroes, don't really think about systemic racism, don't pick sides, aren't affected by it in the narrative, etc.
And of course, the parts that felt the most tone deaf to me, were in Vietnam. I was really hoping they'd just leave it as "Vietnam became a state" but no, they actually had almost an entire episode set there, and just... even to me, a complete outsider, it felt extremely weird and tacked on, as a version of what Vietnam was a conquered state would be. IDK, maybe I'm wrong! But it was... weird. Not that there wasn't weirdness or fail in the original comic of course.
And of course, in the final act, we have the heroes who save the day, who are all white characters - Adrian, Laurie, the mirror mask guy. We have the victims/bystanders, Angela and Dr Manhattan, and we have the villain, Lady Trieu (that entire plotline with stealing his sperm... I would have minded it less if the show didn't explicitly state that the only reason Lady Trieu was brilliant was because of Adrian's genes, ugh). And of course, a white dude who's a mass murdering narcissist is someone we follow with a lot of amusement and enjoyment, but a mixed-race woman who does the same exact thing is a villain who must be stopped. Blah.
Anyway, I enjoyed the utter WTFery of Adrian's storyline on Europa, and his turn as god in the garden of eden, where he tortured and murdered Adam and Eve over and over again on the one hand and created his own foe and punisher on the other. And of course, Laurie was fun as the person now in charge of hunting down masked vigilantes.
Anyway, I loved Will's storyline, and that they made him Hooded Justice, and how it completely reframes the concept of masked superheroes, in a way that's EXACTLY what I think a modern adaptation of Watchmen should do. IDK what to make of Will's queerness? Like I felt like it was handled a bit awkwardly. I mean it was great, but also kind of random? But not in a way where the narrative was just trying to say "this is a random thing about Will" but just in a way where it was handled awkwardly. Anyway.
Overall, I loved the plotting but felt it kind of got in the way of character a bit. Like Angela's romance with Manhattan is CRUCIAL to the plot, and I never even got why they were actually together? What drew them to each other? Unknown.
The final thing I'll say is, HBO's audience is, on average, I think older than a lot of other cable networks/streaming services/etc, like HBO kind of settled on the educated adults over a certain age market and that's who they aim their programming at, and I forgot how nice it is to see SFF TV made for adults.
Just... stories FOR ADULTS that contain science fiction. Stories that are complicated, that deal with real-world problems, where everyone is over 35, it's just really great to see on occasion.
3. I've been convinced to jump to S6 of The 100 after S5 was pretty terrible, and everyone said to just skip it and go straight to 6.
Wow, this show is extremely repetitive, but the thing is does works so well for me that I'm basically willing to go along with it no matter how many times they give me the same damn thing? lol
Like, yet again, just like in S1, our heroes find themselves on a planet they've never visited before where it turns out people already live, and yet again things start from a misunderstanding that leads to a violent confrontation while our heroes are trying to build a truly moral civilization without cruelty of injustice. YET AGAIN!
But I mean, this show still gives me one billion female characters of different ages and races and shapes that do a billion different jobs (soldier! politician! doctor! engineer! thief! leader!), and the relationships they weave still fundamentally work for me (BELLAMY AND OCTAVIA AND THEIR DRAMA FOREVER! Bellamy and Clarke's platonic friendship omg!) and the plot is so tight and fast paced, and they touch on well explored SFF moral dilemmas in a non-enraging way, and it's just... still a really nice ride?
Also I'm always here for Bellamy (OK, not always, when they write him right) because a Bellamy used to be my BFF in high school and I am HERE for this platonic f/m friendship representation. Anyway, I hope S6 continues to be good.
So far, I love that they're finally doing something with the thing where Octavia spent like 4 seasons being everyone's moral compass, the reminder of the worst things humanity did while in space, and then was forced to be in a situation where she had to do EVEN WORSE THINGS to help people survive. Like, that's some DELICIOUS AND AMAZING character angst, and S5 was squandering it by making her a ~villain and I'm glad we're over that now.
4. You know that popular book, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari? Well, I haven't been reading that, but I've been listening to the uni course Harari taught that was the basis for this book, on Spotify. (In Hebrew, since it was taught at a local university.)
It's... better than I'd hoped so far? I think the book would have a higher chance of annoying me, even though the lectures are undoubtedly longer to listen to. But since this is basically a historian talking about a lot of fields in which he's not an expert, and mostly just sharing his ~thoughts, I prefer to have it in the original academic framework where he knew he had to comply with academic standards.
Mostly so far it's a cool way to hear interesting anecdotes and catch up on what the latest theories in various fields are. Harari's own theories are sometimes cool and sometimes blah, which can be annoying, but it's a small percentage of the experience so far.
5. Finally, friends, I've missed you. Life has been kind of difficult. Aside from the pandemic and the being unemployed I mean.
After I finished being in quarantine we went into a national lockdown, and soon after that I was attacked by a large dog in a closed space, and got a serious dog bite for the first time in my life. I don't really want to dwell on the details, but it was traumatic on a level I've never experienced before. Like, I was fine for the while night while I was around the damn dog, and then the next 48 hours were like a delayed panic attack.
I couldn't sleep at all, I kept bursting into sobs at random times, like my body was just processing this trauma in delay. It was a weekend and a holiday and a lockdown so I of course got medical treatment for the bite (which wasn't that serious, but it was on my stomach and there was a huge bruise and some bleeding from where the teeth dug into me and the dog's jaw closed) but getting prescription anti-anxiety/sleeping pills or something was more complicated on short notice, so I just bought some homeopathic stuff and for the first time took medication so I could calm down from a panic attack and sleep.
Then less than a day after I stopped sobbing uncontrollably, the biggest SFF con of the year happened. Of course it was virtual, but I was still committed to doing 3 events in 2 days (about 5 hours total of being on camera) which turned into 5 events in 4 days ///o\\\ and all of it was super fun! But also just utterly, utterly mentally and socially and emotionally exhausting.
And then when that ended I guess my stomach was like, hmmm pal, you've been living in high gear and we need to take it down a notch. So I basically got a weird stomach situation where my stomach hurt badly and I was barely conscious most of the day for like 48 hours, and today was the first day I felt strong enough to like, go to the store and buy vegetables and make soup.
AND IN THE BACKGROUND OF ALL THIS there's been the pandemic, and also the lockdown which meant not seeing my parents or most of my friends for over a month, and also applying to jobs and getting rejected over and over.
And just... it's been a lot, friends. It's been a lot. Drowning myself in fanfic has helped, but ultimately I'm frayed and worn down and things are Not Great. And because of all of our ever shifting routines, it's tough to know how to cope, exactly. All the old mechanisms are shaky and uncertain.
So, I hope you're taking care of yourselves out there. I hope you're doing as well as you can. I hope life is treating you as kindly as possible in These Times. I'm thinking of you and I hope you'll do the same for me. ♥
comments on Dreamwidth