Wherein I contemplate ficcish things.
I meant to post this yesterday, but I ran out of time, so here it is.
Fandoms covered: SVU, CSI: Miami, Law and Order, Doctor Who
General Topics: The requisite Little Brothers meta-blather; potential songfics and the merits of taking another stab at the Seven Songs, Seven Stories meme; frustration with the inherent limitations of crime drama fandom; on exorcising one’s demons via fanfiction; contemplation on compilation; zomg porn! (only not); an odd little habit I seem to have picked up with regards to Who!fic; and I have an attention span I swear to you.
At long last I have lost the battle against CSI: Miami canon. I’ve made the Highly Important Executive Decision to AU Little Brothers, or at least declaring it canon only up to the latter half of Season 5. Being canon-compliant would mean having to include Canon Julia, and my violent loathing for her has already been made known.
So, by this point, I can completely excise the “Julia” chapter, and with it any mention of Pensacola and the bother of trying to figure out what the hell that task force was all about, if I so desire. I’ve no need to include her at all or make mention of those events, as it no longer falls within the bounds of canon I’m following.
Problem? Now that I have a good excuse not to wrangle Julia into my fanon…I kind of don’t want to get rid of her anymore. At least, not my version of her. Much though I may have bitched and moaned about having to include her, I’ve grown fond of the opportunities the “Julia” chapter affords - namely, the chance to write Horatio as a little bit darker and a little bit more screwed-up than fandom generally paints him, without being accused of tossing in a gratuitous OC sex love interest in order to do so. Granted, I’m already trying to play up the “this kid needs therapy” angle in a few other chapters (namely “Dad”, in which he may or may not murder his father, “Emma”, where he calls his mother by her first name, and “Drugs”, where he gets into a fight with Ray), but “Julia” gave me the absolute perfect situation with which to shake his character up. Indulging in a casual relationship, which he supposedly never does? Actually getting some for once in his lonely, emotastic life? Having Serious Issues with Relationships? And then rolling this all together and making it work for his character? Sign me up, like, yesterday.
But, now that Julia has a canon personality (grrrr), I think my options basically remain a) excise the chapter completely and ignore the existence of Julia or b) make Julia follow canon. I don’t like either option, but if I leave the chapter the way it is I’m positive I’ll get someone wanking at me about how I’m Mary-Sue-ing Julia or twisting her character to accommodate what I want to do. Which, to be fair, I kind of am (the second one, anyway). I’d rather avoid that battle.
Of course, I say that like absolutely anyone cares about Little Brothers enough to rant about it, or care what I do or do not do with Julia. But I figured I should at least take these into consideration.
I think I’ve become just a touch obsessed with this “complicating the character through relationships” thing, which may be why I’ve developed a strange determination to write Horatio/Yelina smut in spite of my dislike for the genre of smut in general. I’ve already remarked on the complications I see in Horatio’s relationship to Yelina, and how he keeps secrets from her as a means of returning her to the ‘victim’ position that he’s used to, and how all that ultimately ties back to his mother. Now, my opportunities to comment on that are quite limited in the Little Brothers timeline, since presumably, no matter how messed-up he is, he wouldn’t be making moves on his sister-in-law while she was still married to his brother.
Hence, we come to the smut, which generally takes place sometime after he finds out about Madison but before Yelina does. That way, he can contemplate how much he’s lied to her, how he doesn’t know how to deal with her problems because he doesn’t have to deal with her problems, she hasn’t asked him to, how much he wants her to need him, etc. Complete with slightly troubling thoughts on Mom, which a non-emotionally stunted person would probably not be having while he was anywhere close to having sex. And, as a bonus, naked Sofia Milos! XD
That’s not to say that Yelina doesn’t have her own issues, which I went into in my porn battle post when I wasn’t cringing. Issues of feeling abandoned by her husband, of helplessness with regards to her husband’s drug use and her son’s delinquency, her frustration at being lied to…the works. I heart these two so much.
Speaking of which, I’ve grown rather attached to my little baby pornlet, even though it’s not all that good and it’s really not explicit at all and I realized too late to edit it that I repeated a phrase. Aside from that, I’d really, dearly love to edit and extend it, probably toning it down to an R in the process (where it arguably is already) and writing it with the aforesaid issues from both their perspectives, rather than just Yelina’s. I think that, while my knowledge of the mechanics of the whole deal may not be perfect, I did okay at portraying the emotions I wanted to - anger, hurt, spite, confusion, et cetera. Not to mention, it’s about mutual fantasizing rather than actual sex, which means I can write two different scenes and I don’t have to go into a whole lot of detail. And I think some of the details I wrote are actually kind of hot. *shame*
OKAI NEW TOPIC NOW.
I think I’ve figured out why my fic-writing for SVU and L&O has been so poky lately, in spite of the fact that I desperately want to write for them. See, despite some inspiration I’ve found myself unable to write more than a drabble for any of the Law and Order fandoms. Part of it is just that I haven’t been watching much TV of any sort lately, as I’ve been so taken in my first flush of fandom love for Doctor Who that I’ve mostly been watching the old serials. Of course, it doesn’t help that SVU Season 9 has been an almost complete disappointment, I kind of stormed out of CI after “Untethered”, an episode I loathed beyond description (though I caught Logan’s finale episode, and it was quite good), and I keep forgetting that L&O’s on Wednesday nights now. But, normally, that wasn’t enough to keep me from ficcing.
Thing is, I’ve found that I’m not fond of writing shippy fic for the Law and Order franchise. I used to be, but now I sort of feel like I’ve exhausted my options in that field. I’ve done Jack/Claire-related angst (some of it not even involving “Aftershock”! Gasp.), I’ve done bits and pieces of Elliot/Olivia before fandom made me utterly sick of it, I’ve done John/Casey drabbles (and that on-again-off-again extended drabble that won’t effing end), I’ve drabbled in Olivia/Alex…and, really, there aren’t that many other ships that interest me enough to write about.
I think it’s because romantic entanglements are just so not what these shows are about - the detectives’ and lawyers’ lives involve their work more than anything else, and even what exterior lives they have consist of substantially more than romantic entanglements. As such, the only L&O-verse fic I can write that feels like it really belongs in these fandoms is either the briefest of one-shots and drabbles, describing a single feeling and moment in time (mood varying from angst to humor), or a full-blown casefile, which is, after all, what the shows are about. And, as we’ve seen, I’m a bit crap at casefiles and don’t know ten words of legalese. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give one a go once I’m finally finished with Perfects (or hell, once I finish chapter freaking two of Perfects), but writing the kind of casefile I’d like to see and wringing the necessary characterization out of it is a bit more work than I feel like doing now that I’ve already got…*counts* five unfinished multi-chapter fics on my hands.
I guess what I mean to say is, it’s not the relationships that intrigue me so much about the L&O franchise. It’s the characters themselves, and the cases they work. In fact, when I first started watching the shows, it was almost entirely the cases that interested me, rather than the characters. Which means writing romance fic for L&O doesn’t really interest me as much, but it’s kind of hard to keep a characterization piece going for more than a few hundred words without getting boring or wangsty, so my option for longer fic is, basically, a casefile.
And it makes me a touch angry, because I want to write more L&O. I do. It’s been so long since I’ve done it and I miss the characters. But I keep coming up with the same few ideas over and over again, and I keep wanting to write more but having nowhere to go with it. Or, worse, I’ll get a few lines out and then stall. Because one of the other things that hampers my L&O writing is that I’m a little petrified of writing the characters incorrectly. I end up stopping whenever I get to the dialogue, because I’m so worried that one wrong word will just shatter the illusion and ruin the fic. It’s the same problem I have with CSI: NY, House, Monk, and, until very recently, Doctor Who, and I don’t think it’s a lack of familiarity with the characters at fault. I think it’s just that they’re so distinctive and have so much history to them that it’d be too easy to slip up.
Aaaaand…swing your partner to and fro, switch the topic and do-si-do!
I’ve had the urge to write songfics recently. Well, not songfics, precisely - fics set to music is more what I had in mind. I blame this partly on my recent acquisition of lots and lots of new music, and the subsequent desire to share my wonderful discoveries with absolutely everyone (even though a lot of these songfics involve music I’ve had since forever). So I’ve been considering giving the Seven Songs, Seven Stories meme another go, possibly doing two versions thereof - one for fanfiction and one for original fiction.
For some of those stories, I know very precisely what I want to write. I’ve already squeed, for example, on how “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” was basically written for the Ninth Doctor; indeed, I almost feel bad writing fic to that effect since it seems like such a gimme. And, for some reason, R.E.M.’s “Fireplace” reminds me very, very much of Three - damned if I know why, though, since I couldn’t tell you what the lyrics meant on a bet. I’ve been on-again, off-again trying to write a House/Wilson fic set to “World Leader Pretend” for months now, although every time I try, I stall for the aforesaid reasons or I stop because the whole thing seems trite. And I’ve got a couple of ideas buzzing about for an Eric-centric fic set to the Klazz Brothers and Cuba Percussion’s “Mambozart”, which a beautiful song that everyone should hear anyway.
Trouble is, there are a few songs that I really want to write to, just because they’re really cool songs and I feel like they should have stories written to accompany them, but I’m drawing a blank as far as ideas go. Even for my original fiction.
Take, for example, one of my newer downloads, “Gutter Glitter”, by Switchblade Symphony. It’s a creepy electronic lullaby with distorted, whispery female vocals, and it practically demands that appropriately disturbing fic be written to accompany it. But, unfortunately, very few of the canons I dabble in would easily accommodate weird abandoned nurseries, monsters in the closet, and sallow dead-eyed blonde tykes, which is what the song conjures up. I suppose this means I’d have to write more subtle, psychological creepy!fic, possibly involving horribly traumatic childhood memories and/or infantile regression, but those just don’t fit anywhere. Plus it sounds more cliché the more I think about it.
And so on and so forth for all the other songs I have in mind, although obviously they’re not all creepy lullabies: “Apocalypse Please”, by Muse; “Suliman”, by Infected Mushroom, “Bolero”, from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack; Vanessa-Mae’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”; “Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, by Urge Overkill (none of my May-December pairings are quite that icky); “Klein Mandelbrot”, by Blue Man Group…I could go on for days. All of these songs evoke a very specific mode and set of images, but I just can’t spin them into a coherent story, much less a proper fic.
You know, that whole “coherent story =/= proper fic” gives me a nice way to transition to my next topic!
I’ve got quite a few LJ fic-related groups on my flist, and whilst perusing one of them, I came across a fic with an author’s note that caught my attention. The author described how she was going through difficulties in her life, and she had used her fic to “exorcise her demons”.
Er. For starters, that seems just a touch melodramatic, but okay. I don’t know what you went through, hun; not my place to judge. But, even removed from this particular example, I have a problem with the concept of using fic to work through personal issues. Well, not so much that as posting fic that one has used to work through one’s personal issues.
I mean, I understand how cathartic fiction can be. I’ve done the same thing before, though usually with my original fiction rather than fanfic (I did it with fic once). I’ve written quite a few pieces that were basically myself, confronting issues I was uncomfortable with or coming to terms with something difficult.
But I never posted them, and there’s a good reason why. The reason is that, for the most part, they were self-indulgent hand-wringing of no interest or use to anyone but me. There’s a reason nobody buys the autobiographies of teenagers, after all; I can’t name five people off the top of my head who would actually care about some white-bread suburbanite with no real problems to speak of wrangling with mortality/faith/social discourse/mathematics versus art, etc. Those pieces were useful for a while. They made me feel better. But nobody else needs to read them. They’re not polished work and I wouldn’t show them publicly.
And for fanfiction, the problem is twofold. Writing fic may make you feel better, but odds are that the characters are not going to have the exact same conflicts and issues you are. And they won’t respond to it the same way you do. I’m of the opinion that, when one writes fic, one has a duty to be faithful to the characters - not that you can never explore them or add new dimensions to them, but you still have to be sure that everything you make them say or do is within the realm of plausibility for them, and if it isn’t, it had better be very well explained away.
Which means that, fine, sure, you can use the characters to work through your troubles if you want. But posting it? Not such a good idea. Not unless the work succeeds as a fanfiction. It’s not enough for it to be just a story.
I can’t be the only person who thinks this, can I? …can I?
I do believe it’s time for another topic. Movin’ right along…footloose and fancy-free…
Before I embark on my epic Classic!ficcing adventures, I figure I should probably finish up that Ten!fic I had all planned out. I mean, theoretically, each chapter stands on its own, and I only wrote the one, so I could declare “Imagining” a stand-alone one-shot and move on. But I had such ambitions for “A Fraction of Infinity”, and besides I already said in my summary that it was going to be a series, so backing out now feels like cheating.
Ahem. But the real reason I bring it up is because I’m still fiddling with the decision of whether or not to include a certain chapter.
See, “A Fraction of Infinity” is a series of one-shots from the perspectives of the people who encounter the Tenth Doctor in Season 3. So far, I’ve only got the one chapter (“Imaginings”, a Martha-centric post-ep for “Gridlock”); the second, third, and fourth chapter exist in draft form somewhere on my hard drive.
I was planning to do a chapter apiece for Joan Redfern, Sally Sparrow, Tish or Francine Jones (haven’t decided yet), one of the crew members in “42” (damned if I can remember their names), Tallulah, and possibly Jack (but probably not, because Jack gets all the fandom adoration he needs without my meager contribution); two more chapters for Martha have been vaguely sketched out as well.
Now, some time ago, I had also begun a desultory outline for a Lucy Saxon-centric story entitled “Thrall”, which purported to tell the story of Harold Saxon through her eyes. Poking around a bit in various fic communities, however, informed that approximately everyone on Earth had already written that story, so I ditched that. But, if I recast it just a little, I could possibly salvage a few bits of “Thrall” and use them for a chapter in “A Fraction of Infinity”. Of course, in order to fit into the framework of “Fraction”, Lucy’s chapter would have to be substantially less about the Master and more about the Doctor, which means that most of it would have to take place post-LotTL. Trouble is, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what actually happens to her, and I still can’t get inside her head all that well to begin with. My own sense of drama tells me that Lucy is tried and imprisoned for assassinating the Prime Minister (if only because no one can figure out what’s actually going on), and for some reason I’m rather set on the idea that she hangs herself in her cell, but I can’t get a firm enough grasp of her to figure out if that’s even in-character for her.
Um. So. Point is. Lucy chapter. Yes or no? (Also, getting a Teaspoon account once I’m done with this fic. Yes? No?)
Also, turns out I’m not that adept at creating actual stories for adventure!Who!fic. I am, however, acquiring quite the knack for creating OCs and situations that I wish to base a fic upon. Trouble is they’ve nowhere to go after that, and I’m not even sure which Doctor I’d use for which story, and really, one of these OCs is just a recent evacuee from that fantasy-adventure novel I kept meaning to write and never did, maybe I should put him back and get the thing finished so the poor boy won’t be all homeless and confused.
However, I think the idea about the 1950s librarian who keeps finding books from the future in his shelves might just be a keeper. Now all I need is a place for the plot to go. And to make the librarian character stop turning into a slightly more socially awkward and unfriendly Aziraphale, dammit.
…have I been talking for six pages? Gosh.
Fandoms covered: SVU, CSI: Miami, Law and Order, Doctor Who
General Topics: The requisite Little Brothers meta-blather; potential songfics and the merits of taking another stab at the Seven Songs, Seven Stories meme; frustration with the inherent limitations of crime drama fandom; on exorcising one’s demons via fanfiction; contemplation on compilation; zomg porn! (only not); an odd little habit I seem to have picked up with regards to Who!fic; and I have an attention span I swear to you.
At long last I have lost the battle against CSI: Miami canon. I’ve made the Highly Important Executive Decision to AU Little Brothers, or at least declaring it canon only up to the latter half of Season 5. Being canon-compliant would mean having to include Canon Julia, and my violent loathing for her has already been made known.
So, by this point, I can completely excise the “Julia” chapter, and with it any mention of Pensacola and the bother of trying to figure out what the hell that task force was all about, if I so desire. I’ve no need to include her at all or make mention of those events, as it no longer falls within the bounds of canon I’m following.
Problem? Now that I have a good excuse not to wrangle Julia into my fanon…I kind of don’t want to get rid of her anymore. At least, not my version of her. Much though I may have bitched and moaned about having to include her, I’ve grown fond of the opportunities the “Julia” chapter affords - namely, the chance to write Horatio as a little bit darker and a little bit more screwed-up than fandom generally paints him, without being accused of tossing in a gratuitous OC sex love interest in order to do so. Granted, I’m already trying to play up the “this kid needs therapy” angle in a few other chapters (namely “Dad”, in which he may or may not murder his father, “Emma”, where he calls his mother by her first name, and “Drugs”, where he gets into a fight with Ray), but “Julia” gave me the absolute perfect situation with which to shake his character up. Indulging in a casual relationship, which he supposedly never does? Actually getting some for once in his lonely, emotastic life? Having Serious Issues with Relationships? And then rolling this all together and making it work for his character? Sign me up, like, yesterday.
But, now that Julia has a canon personality (grrrr), I think my options basically remain a) excise the chapter completely and ignore the existence of Julia or b) make Julia follow canon. I don’t like either option, but if I leave the chapter the way it is I’m positive I’ll get someone wanking at me about how I’m Mary-Sue-ing Julia or twisting her character to accommodate what I want to do. Which, to be fair, I kind of am (the second one, anyway). I’d rather avoid that battle.
Of course, I say that like absolutely anyone cares about Little Brothers enough to rant about it, or care what I do or do not do with Julia. But I figured I should at least take these into consideration.
I think I’ve become just a touch obsessed with this “complicating the character through relationships” thing, which may be why I’ve developed a strange determination to write Horatio/Yelina smut in spite of my dislike for the genre of smut in general. I’ve already remarked on the complications I see in Horatio’s relationship to Yelina, and how he keeps secrets from her as a means of returning her to the ‘victim’ position that he’s used to, and how all that ultimately ties back to his mother. Now, my opportunities to comment on that are quite limited in the Little Brothers timeline, since presumably, no matter how messed-up he is, he wouldn’t be making moves on his sister-in-law while she was still married to his brother.
Hence, we come to the smut, which generally takes place sometime after he finds out about Madison but before Yelina does. That way, he can contemplate how much he’s lied to her, how he doesn’t know how to deal with her problems because he doesn’t have to deal with her problems, she hasn’t asked him to, how much he wants her to need him, etc. Complete with slightly troubling thoughts on Mom, which a non-emotionally stunted person would probably not be having while he was anywhere close to having sex. And, as a bonus, naked Sofia Milos! XD
That’s not to say that Yelina doesn’t have her own issues, which I went into in my porn battle post when I wasn’t cringing. Issues of feeling abandoned by her husband, of helplessness with regards to her husband’s drug use and her son’s delinquency, her frustration at being lied to…the works. I heart these two so much.
Speaking of which, I’ve grown rather attached to my little baby pornlet, even though it’s not all that good and it’s really not explicit at all and I realized too late to edit it that I repeated a phrase. Aside from that, I’d really, dearly love to edit and extend it, probably toning it down to an R in the process (where it arguably is already) and writing it with the aforesaid issues from both their perspectives, rather than just Yelina’s. I think that, while my knowledge of the mechanics of the whole deal may not be perfect, I did okay at portraying the emotions I wanted to - anger, hurt, spite, confusion, et cetera. Not to mention, it’s about mutual fantasizing rather than actual sex, which means I can write two different scenes and I don’t have to go into a whole lot of detail. And I think some of the details I wrote are actually kind of hot. *shame*
OKAI NEW TOPIC NOW.
I think I’ve figured out why my fic-writing for SVU and L&O has been so poky lately, in spite of the fact that I desperately want to write for them. See, despite some inspiration I’ve found myself unable to write more than a drabble for any of the Law and Order fandoms. Part of it is just that I haven’t been watching much TV of any sort lately, as I’ve been so taken in my first flush of fandom love for Doctor Who that I’ve mostly been watching the old serials. Of course, it doesn’t help that SVU Season 9 has been an almost complete disappointment, I kind of stormed out of CI after “Untethered”, an episode I loathed beyond description (though I caught Logan’s finale episode, and it was quite good), and I keep forgetting that L&O’s on Wednesday nights now. But, normally, that wasn’t enough to keep me from ficcing.
Thing is, I’ve found that I’m not fond of writing shippy fic for the Law and Order franchise. I used to be, but now I sort of feel like I’ve exhausted my options in that field. I’ve done Jack/Claire-related angst (some of it not even involving “Aftershock”! Gasp.), I’ve done bits and pieces of Elliot/Olivia before fandom made me utterly sick of it, I’ve done John/Casey drabbles (and that on-again-off-again extended drabble that won’t effing end), I’ve drabbled in Olivia/Alex…and, really, there aren’t that many other ships that interest me enough to write about.
I think it’s because romantic entanglements are just so not what these shows are about - the detectives’ and lawyers’ lives involve their work more than anything else, and even what exterior lives they have consist of substantially more than romantic entanglements. As such, the only L&O-verse fic I can write that feels like it really belongs in these fandoms is either the briefest of one-shots and drabbles, describing a single feeling and moment in time (mood varying from angst to humor), or a full-blown casefile, which is, after all, what the shows are about. And, as we’ve seen, I’m a bit crap at casefiles and don’t know ten words of legalese. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give one a go once I’m finally finished with Perfects (or hell, once I finish chapter freaking two of Perfects), but writing the kind of casefile I’d like to see and wringing the necessary characterization out of it is a bit more work than I feel like doing now that I’ve already got…*counts* five unfinished multi-chapter fics on my hands.
I guess what I mean to say is, it’s not the relationships that intrigue me so much about the L&O franchise. It’s the characters themselves, and the cases they work. In fact, when I first started watching the shows, it was almost entirely the cases that interested me, rather than the characters. Which means writing romance fic for L&O doesn’t really interest me as much, but it’s kind of hard to keep a characterization piece going for more than a few hundred words without getting boring or wangsty, so my option for longer fic is, basically, a casefile.
And it makes me a touch angry, because I want to write more L&O. I do. It’s been so long since I’ve done it and I miss the characters. But I keep coming up with the same few ideas over and over again, and I keep wanting to write more but having nowhere to go with it. Or, worse, I’ll get a few lines out and then stall. Because one of the other things that hampers my L&O writing is that I’m a little petrified of writing the characters incorrectly. I end up stopping whenever I get to the dialogue, because I’m so worried that one wrong word will just shatter the illusion and ruin the fic. It’s the same problem I have with CSI: NY, House, Monk, and, until very recently, Doctor Who, and I don’t think it’s a lack of familiarity with the characters at fault. I think it’s just that they’re so distinctive and have so much history to them that it’d be too easy to slip up.
Aaaaand…swing your partner to and fro, switch the topic and do-si-do!
I’ve had the urge to write songfics recently. Well, not songfics, precisely - fics set to music is more what I had in mind. I blame this partly on my recent acquisition of lots and lots of new music, and the subsequent desire to share my wonderful discoveries with absolutely everyone (even though a lot of these songfics involve music I’ve had since forever). So I’ve been considering giving the Seven Songs, Seven Stories meme another go, possibly doing two versions thereof - one for fanfiction and one for original fiction.
For some of those stories, I know very precisely what I want to write. I’ve already squeed, for example, on how “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” was basically written for the Ninth Doctor; indeed, I almost feel bad writing fic to that effect since it seems like such a gimme. And, for some reason, R.E.M.’s “Fireplace” reminds me very, very much of Three - damned if I know why, though, since I couldn’t tell you what the lyrics meant on a bet. I’ve been on-again, off-again trying to write a House/Wilson fic set to “World Leader Pretend” for months now, although every time I try, I stall for the aforesaid reasons or I stop because the whole thing seems trite. And I’ve got a couple of ideas buzzing about for an Eric-centric fic set to the Klazz Brothers and Cuba Percussion’s “Mambozart”, which a beautiful song that everyone should hear anyway.
Trouble is, there are a few songs that I really want to write to, just because they’re really cool songs and I feel like they should have stories written to accompany them, but I’m drawing a blank as far as ideas go. Even for my original fiction.
Take, for example, one of my newer downloads, “Gutter Glitter”, by Switchblade Symphony. It’s a creepy electronic lullaby with distorted, whispery female vocals, and it practically demands that appropriately disturbing fic be written to accompany it. But, unfortunately, very few of the canons I dabble in would easily accommodate weird abandoned nurseries, monsters in the closet, and sallow dead-eyed blonde tykes, which is what the song conjures up. I suppose this means I’d have to write more subtle, psychological creepy!fic, possibly involving horribly traumatic childhood memories and/or infantile regression, but those just don’t fit anywhere. Plus it sounds more cliché the more I think about it.
And so on and so forth for all the other songs I have in mind, although obviously they’re not all creepy lullabies: “Apocalypse Please”, by Muse; “Suliman”, by Infected Mushroom, “Bolero”, from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack; Vanessa-Mae’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”; “Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, by Urge Overkill (none of my May-December pairings are quite that icky); “Klein Mandelbrot”, by Blue Man Group…I could go on for days. All of these songs evoke a very specific mode and set of images, but I just can’t spin them into a coherent story, much less a proper fic.
You know, that whole “coherent story =/= proper fic” gives me a nice way to transition to my next topic!
I’ve got quite a few LJ fic-related groups on my flist, and whilst perusing one of them, I came across a fic with an author’s note that caught my attention. The author described how she was going through difficulties in her life, and she had used her fic to “exorcise her demons”.
Er. For starters, that seems just a touch melodramatic, but okay. I don’t know what you went through, hun; not my place to judge. But, even removed from this particular example, I have a problem with the concept of using fic to work through personal issues. Well, not so much that as posting fic that one has used to work through one’s personal issues.
I mean, I understand how cathartic fiction can be. I’ve done the same thing before, though usually with my original fiction rather than fanfic (I did it with fic once). I’ve written quite a few pieces that were basically myself, confronting issues I was uncomfortable with or coming to terms with something difficult.
But I never posted them, and there’s a good reason why. The reason is that, for the most part, they were self-indulgent hand-wringing of no interest or use to anyone but me. There’s a reason nobody buys the autobiographies of teenagers, after all; I can’t name five people off the top of my head who would actually care about some white-bread suburbanite with no real problems to speak of wrangling with mortality/faith/social discourse/mathematics versus art, etc. Those pieces were useful for a while. They made me feel better. But nobody else needs to read them. They’re not polished work and I wouldn’t show them publicly.
And for fanfiction, the problem is twofold. Writing fic may make you feel better, but odds are that the characters are not going to have the exact same conflicts and issues you are. And they won’t respond to it the same way you do. I’m of the opinion that, when one writes fic, one has a duty to be faithful to the characters - not that you can never explore them or add new dimensions to them, but you still have to be sure that everything you make them say or do is within the realm of plausibility for them, and if it isn’t, it had better be very well explained away.
Which means that, fine, sure, you can use the characters to work through your troubles if you want. But posting it? Not such a good idea. Not unless the work succeeds as a fanfiction. It’s not enough for it to be just a story.
I can’t be the only person who thinks this, can I? …can I?
I do believe it’s time for another topic. Movin’ right along…footloose and fancy-free…
Before I embark on my epic Classic!ficcing adventures, I figure I should probably finish up that Ten!fic I had all planned out. I mean, theoretically, each chapter stands on its own, and I only wrote the one, so I could declare “Imagining” a stand-alone one-shot and move on. But I had such ambitions for “A Fraction of Infinity”, and besides I already said in my summary that it was going to be a series, so backing out now feels like cheating.
Ahem. But the real reason I bring it up is because I’m still fiddling with the decision of whether or not to include a certain chapter.
See, “A Fraction of Infinity” is a series of one-shots from the perspectives of the people who encounter the Tenth Doctor in Season 3. So far, I’ve only got the one chapter (“Imaginings”, a Martha-centric post-ep for “Gridlock”); the second, third, and fourth chapter exist in draft form somewhere on my hard drive.
I was planning to do a chapter apiece for Joan Redfern, Sally Sparrow, Tish or Francine Jones (haven’t decided yet), one of the crew members in “42” (damned if I can remember their names), Tallulah, and possibly Jack (but probably not, because Jack gets all the fandom adoration he needs without my meager contribution); two more chapters for Martha have been vaguely sketched out as well.
Now, some time ago, I had also begun a desultory outline for a Lucy Saxon-centric story entitled “Thrall”, which purported to tell the story of Harold Saxon through her eyes. Poking around a bit in various fic communities, however, informed that approximately everyone on Earth had already written that story, so I ditched that. But, if I recast it just a little, I could possibly salvage a few bits of “Thrall” and use them for a chapter in “A Fraction of Infinity”. Of course, in order to fit into the framework of “Fraction”, Lucy’s chapter would have to be substantially less about the Master and more about the Doctor, which means that most of it would have to take place post-LotTL. Trouble is, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what actually happens to her, and I still can’t get inside her head all that well to begin with. My own sense of drama tells me that Lucy is tried and imprisoned for assassinating the Prime Minister (if only because no one can figure out what’s actually going on), and for some reason I’m rather set on the idea that she hangs herself in her cell, but I can’t get a firm enough grasp of her to figure out if that’s even in-character for her.
Um. So. Point is. Lucy chapter. Yes or no? (Also, getting a Teaspoon account once I’m done with this fic. Yes? No?)
Also, turns out I’m not that adept at creating actual stories for adventure!Who!fic. I am, however, acquiring quite the knack for creating OCs and situations that I wish to base a fic upon. Trouble is they’ve nowhere to go after that, and I’m not even sure which Doctor I’d use for which story, and really, one of these OCs is just a recent evacuee from that fantasy-adventure novel I kept meaning to write and never did, maybe I should put him back and get the thing finished so the poor boy won’t be all homeless and confused.
However, I think the idea about the 1950s librarian who keeps finding books from the future in his shelves might just be a keeper. Now all I need is a place for the plot to go. And to make the librarian character stop turning into a slightly more socially awkward and unfriendly Aziraphale, dammit.
…have I been talking for six pages? Gosh.