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So I was working on an original story until the concussion brought progress to something of a screeching halt.
Tooling around with writing became one of my rehab exercises but the totality of the story was still difficult, especially because I was blocked at the new point (I need to change some of the leadup to fix it).
What I ended up doing for a while was writing a crossover fanfic with my own original fiction and Stargate Atlantis, because it entertained me.
I have no intention of ever showing this to anyone other than ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya and maybe one other person.
Which in its way is freeing already because so long as this is entertaining me all good.
The thing is, because a lot of it was from the point of view of Atlantis characters, it was functionally Outsider Point Of View on my characters, and then my world, and it did an amazing amount of good for my sense of the world. I really solidified a lot of stuff in the course of writing about it that way.
Which makes it a lot easier to write about from the inside in turn, even though the SGA crossover was set like thirty years later.
For original fiction in a novel setting I really recommend writing some throwaway bullshit secondary story in which someone has to have all of it explained to them.
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For a while I even lost my password!
But also for the last few months I have been recovering from a quite severe concussion, so that doesn't help with text-based anything.
I now have a scar across the bridge of my nose like some kind of fantasy character.
Until the concussion derailed it I was writing an original work of fiction - I'm over 300k words in, but I'm struggling a little with it post-concussion, which sucks. We found a guy who specialises in concussion treatment (there are actually treatments, it's a whole thing) and it's helping a lot but I'm still having trouble with memory - short term especially, but longer-term is pretty erratic too.
I'm starting to be able to read things a little bit but not if it's too complicated or requires too much thought or mental engagement. I do better with things I've read before.
Nonetheless I came across some "writing advice" that was so bad it made me angry.
The initial advice comes from Chuck Palahniuk, and he advises that people avoid using "thinking" words - knew, realised, thought, etc. It had example passages of detailed descriptions of characters' body language and movements, and he was all "you'll hate me for this, but" and yes, Chuck, I do, but not because it's hard but because it's shit advice.
If you're stripping all of those things out of your writing, you're making it your deliberate intent to write every character as a thoughtless, reaction-only template with no interior life or cognitive processing. Which, sure, for some characters, but it shouldn't be your default.
(Honestly I think this advice says a lot about Chuck Palahniuk and what a soulless, tepid void of a human he must be.)
Because look at it from the perspective of a real person.
Say the person is me, and the other person in the "scene" is velithya.
I don't think: "V's shoulders are slumped and her mouth has something of a downward slant about it. Her movements are sharp and crisp, something jagged about the way she unzips her boots."
I think: "I think V has had a bad day."
Because people form conclusions! People think about things!
And if you strip that out, not only do you portray your character as a very specific type of void, but you lose the ability to do some of the most interesting (imo) character work out there: the unreliable narrator.
Now, I don't doubt it is far beyond Chuck Palahniuk's skill or capacity to write a character in such a way that the reader can see that the character's perception of events isn't wholly accurate, but that's fantastic in the hands of someone who has the ability to do it. Because that's a thing! People interpret what's going on all the time but sometimes they get it wrong.
I wrote a fic set called triptych that presents the same set of events from three different perspectives because perspective is interesting, and if you strip out all of that perception stuff? All the thought?
You've stripped out the perspective entirely.
Chuck Palahniuk's advice is shit advice that will only work for cishet white men with excesses of privilege.Current Music: cricket commentary
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Swiped from velithya
Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favourite opening line.
( Working backwards from most recent stories: )
Hmm, patterns.
9/20 start with the viewpoint character's name.
What's somewhat notable to me is that there is some difference between how I start fics that are continuations of a series relative to ones that aren't. Series continuations are a lot more likely to run with the expectation that the reader will understand something of the framework/setting specifics, unless you're looking at ridiculous future bullshit entries, which are usually outsider POV and are going hard for characterisation of the viewpoint character.
It also seems to run a little bit in waves, because often it seems like a few stories in succession will have a similar opening style - but the stories aren't posted in exactly the order they were written, in places, so I don't even know if that's anything but coincidence.
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Most of the last week went to Insomnia Jag and a replay of Final Fantasy XIII.
Insomnia jag: between Tuesdayish and Sunday night I got about sixteen hours of sleep, generally in blocks of 30 minutes or less, I think.
So that sucked.
While that was happening I wasn't really up for much that required substantial levels of brain, but I did play through FF13 again, because I had an outstanding, incomplete assignment from my old therapist:
To play FF13 again, and try to like Vanille.
Because - somewhat annoying voice aside - the thing that has been A Thing of discussion and all is that Vanille is very like me.
Vanille makes mistakes. She fakes every interaction. She hides things and she -
- is broken. She's traumatised and hurting and terrified. She's trying to fake normal, but she has no idea what normal even is.
But in the midst of all of that, she does try to help people, and comfort them, and be kind.
She's hurting and frightened and she doesn't want people to know that.
It's kind of a thing.
The other thing about FF13 is that it's a really good game with amazing characters and a good story that desperately needs fix-it fic, and inspired me to write fiction for the first time in a really long time. Several years, at least.
I'm starting small - editing and finishing a story I had mostly written but never quite finished something like five years ago - but it feels pretty good to write again, especially after the last several years of illness and injury.
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So, lazulisong and I have been posting a thing over at AO3. Aimed primarily at Teen Wolf fandom, because Teen Wolf actually has a major character with ADHD, it's a bunch of stuff about ADHD and about writing characters with mental health issues and about researching fic, iunno.
Anyway, this is the link to the entire work. I've done chapters 2 and 4 so far; chapter 2 is basically a breakdown of what ADHD is, and chapter 4 is my best attempt to explain what it feels like.
Sooo if you've ever wanted to try and get an idea of what it feels like inside my head, with the ADHD thing, then here's the quick link to Chapter 4.
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So I'm still sick - I'm over the cold but I have a nasty case of bronchitis ongoing now.
In my fevered state I've been working on a drawing when I have the strength. It's an ouroboros circling an image of the Earth, centred over Antarctica - the whole embossed on a shield.
I now have ideas percolating for a story based on the image.
Chas thinks this is cheating - getting inspired by my own art.
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These are things that are true, in my head, about Star Trek: TOS (not movieverse):
Uhura and Sulu made out at a party once. It only made their friendship closer - they laugh about it now but it will never happen again. They are friends for always.
Uhura and Yeoman Rand were on-again, off-again for years - sometimes many months would pass between times when they were anything but vaguely social, sometimes they would be in Uhura's bed (in the old Enterprise, Yeoman Rand had a roommate - I'm pretty sure that's canon, but it's definitely in my head) almost every night.
One time, not long after the aliens made them kiss, they were in the mess and Uhura sang a song about rejection and looked kind of tired and sad, and Kirk felt like ten kinds of asshole, and later he took her aside and told her that, just to be clear, he fought it so hard and hated it so much because it was forced, because it was ugly and tawdry to be kissing her for the entertainment of malicious telepaths. That he respected her, admired her, that she was a brilliant officer and a beautiful woman but it just wasn't right like that, and then Uhura laughed gently and told him yes, captain, she understood. And she kissed his cheek and smiled and left, and he felt kind of foolish and lucky as hell to have that woman on his bridge, knowing she was smarter than he'd ever be.
Sometimes, Scotty sleeps in Engineering, curled up in a corner where the engines can sing him to sleep. Everyone knows. Nobody says anything.
Once, when Kirk came back from a mission broken and bloody, and McCoy put him back together as best he could but they still all knew they might yet lose him, Spock and Bones kept vigil by his bedside all night. They played chess, and Bones lost every game until, cursing Spock and every Vulcan in his lineage, he made him switch to Go Fish. Christine Chapel brought coffee and fruit juice and food, an unobtrusive ghost when it got late enough that they gave in and talked. Bones said how worried he was and Spock told him that Kirk was strong and had recovered from worse and had an excellent physician by his side, and logically, therefore, he'd be fine. They played a few more rounds in silence, then tossed the cards aside and just watched the monitor bars above Jim's bed. Bones fell asleep, slumped in his chair. Chapel watched from a shadowed doorway as Spock got a pillow and gently adjusted his position so he wouldn't hurt his neck, and covered him with a blanket.
In the morning, when McCoy thanked her for her kindness, for the pillow and the blanket, she looked at Spock, at his carefully composed expression, and told the doctor he was welcome, she was always glad to help. When Spock gave her a grave nod of thanks, she knew she wasn't really lying - that, too, was helping.
There was this one time Chekov and Scotty had a drinking contest. Scotty was drinking vodka, and Chekov had whiskey. No-one knows who won, but Uhura confiscated all of the pictures anyone took of the two of them curled up next to each other in the mess hall, both fast asleep cuddling near-empty bottles with matching, drunken smiles. Rumour has it she didn't destroy the pictures - she just made sure only she had copies.
Uhura is the less-angry Ivanova of the Enterprise. If it happened, she knows about it. But she keeps her secrets, and everyone else's, too.
Everyone loves Uhura. At Comms she's the voice and ears of the Enterprise, off duty she sings in the mess hall and talks and listens makes everyone feel better because she's there. But nobody ever wants to piss her off. It's not a matter of what happens when you do - nobody even knows what that would be, because it hasn't happened. But everyone has the feeling they don't want to find out.
Christine Chapel knows people talk about her - they talk about how she's so obviously in love with Spock, and they sometimes laugh, and sometimes wonder why she doesn't just accept he'll never love her back. She never lets on how much those people disgust her, because she knows they're fools.
Christine knows that Spock will never return her love. Never could. That's not the point. He does love her, in his way, and he respects her, which is something else entirely. In her heart she knows that if he could change, if he could become a man who would love her the way she loves him, he would cease to be a man she could love. She loves him. He respects her. And that's okay.
Scotty likes his captain, respects his captain, would die for his captain... but sometimes he thinks Kirk's a little silly, because Kirk still seems to think the Enterprise is his ship, just because he's her captain. And Scotty knows the Enterprise will never love her captain as much as she loves him. It's okay, though - he's not the jealous type.
Hikaru Sulu has a rich fantasy life. Secretly, he writes novels of epic, swashbuckling adventure that no-one will ever see.
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