primeideal | Entries tagged with writing: fic adjacent

Obviously it doesn't take much for me to look at a work of fiction and be like "hey, I wish it had been different, I'm going to write fanfic about it!" Well, obviously since I learned what fanfic was, which is easy to say now after decades and many orders of magnitude of digits worth of it, but there was a time when I not only didn't have this outlet, so I had a lot of pent-up emotions, and then felt ashamed for having emotions about books of all things, and...that was kind of a vicious cycle, but that's another story.

But yeah, novels, movies, TV shows, etc. They are fictional characters, they don't actually exist, I can write about them as long as I'm not doing anything to violate the canon creator's copyright, which I'm not.

There have been a couple semi-recent "fandoms" where it's like, I have the same intensity and same desire to imagine something different, but there are more internal barriers that made it harder to write down. One is in the context of TTRPGs--like, the "original" version of the character belongs to the game designers, and that's fair game just as a video game character would be. But the version who transpired in our playthrough "belongs" to my session partner(s), am I "allowed" to write about them or are they somehow not "mine"? The other is in the context of "historical fiction but it's what people from my side of fandom would call historical RPF"--the novelist is including both characters of his own invention, and historical figures who actually existed. And, again, I have no problem imagining "missing scenes involving fictional narrator and his equally fictional wife and their family," but "AU interaction between fictional character and real historical character" or "AU where events in historical character's life transpire differently" feels way too self-indulgent, even though...fictional character...never actually existed...so how could his dialogue be "wrong." But it's like, again, that historical character doesn't "belong" to me, so making things go AU is...somehow worse than what original writer is doing.

Anyway, this has somehow led me into wanting absurd/not RL historically realistic in the least/over-the-top fannish tropes for these characters. Even if it's tropes I'm not normally into. (Okay one of them I would kind of be into with a few twists, and in this case, "Fictional Character Is A Pragmatist And Would Not Put Honor Before Reason" is sufficiently different for me to want it.) Which is to say that I might be saving a plot bunny or two for Be the First/later non-exchange ficcing. (Because of course if I'm going to do this silly fluffy trope I first have to do All The Worldbuilding Research to make sure I'm Doing It Right, sigh.)

I tend not to enjoy writing smut very often. Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's Okay, etc. etc., it's just very infrequent that I'm interested in sexy times for its own sake. Most of the time my "brand" is dialogue or worldbuilding stuff and I'm happy with that.

Buuuuut that being said, I do have certain tropes that I enjoy that are very much NSFW/iddy/deserving of the "this is fiction not reality, please do not emulate" sticker. [I do not actually apply the sticker because those kinds of authors' notes tend to kill the mood for me, I'm going to assume my readers are adults who can distinguish between fiction and reality also.] And looking back over my output, it's like...one self-indulgent idfic in the middle of several other all-ages works is fine. Looking at them all back-to-back? I definitely have Types.

So, naturally, the other day I was browsing prompts and came across a delicious prompt that I read too fast and interpreted as something else adjacent that seemed even iddier to me. Obviously I'm not going to make that version a giftfic to a specific person, but I probably will write it all the same. And then...sock up? I go through this weird cycle of "I'm posting this fic anon/under a sock because it's too graphic for my main" -> "actually I've gotten better at handling some of the kinkier stuff, I'm going to post this one on main" -> "oh no this is Too Much of the same thing, better go anon again." And like, I'm sure lots and lots of other people do this too, when it comes to smut! But for me it's darkfic, and that just feels...different somehow, even if it's almost certainly the same neuroses.

Part of the problem is that I've been doing this for years/decades, and I know my own tastes a lot better than anyone else knows me. I can look back on my older writing and be like, "I wrote this same self-indulgent nonsense many years ago and it was overwrought and terrible then, it's going to be just as regurgitative and tropey now." Even though I recognize in many ways my writing has probably gotten better over the years. People who read my new fics aren't necessarily the same people who read my old fics that handled the same tropes in equally-or-more melodramatic ways. It's the same IRL with "oh no everybody is judging me and thinking about that terrible thing I said three years ago"/"no they're not they don't even know what you said last week, chill."

I was thinking about this and it occurred to me: if I see a prompt I like for actual fanfiction, no matter where it falls between the extremes of "highbrow worldbuilding" and "self-indulgent kinky id," it's going to Ao3. Because it's fanfic, transformative works, I don't have copyright, yada yada. But if I see an Original Works prompt that's RTMI, well...if it's something that could lend itself to being plotty or mainstream, I'm less likely to write several thousand words of it for a fanworks exchange, because part of me thinks, "if I'm putting in that much effort I might as well try to sell it to a short story market." That's not at all to say that it's likely or I'd manage it, just that it's less likely. On the other hand, if I see an OW prompt that is mostly "self-indulgent idfic," then I figure, the only place it's going to be read is by pseudonymous fanfic appreciators, so sure, why not. This means that my OW posted to Ao3 skews darker/iddier/kinkier than my overall fic output, and that's...probably okay!

Also, even though the vast majority of this story will indeed be over-the-top kinky nonsense for its own sake, I am nevertheless going down silly rabbit holes and throwing in silly worldbuilding for its own sake. Because I'm me. And also thinking up increasingly nonsensical tags.

Wikipedia is, as always, an inexhaustible bounty of knowledge, let's just leave it at that.

Any Star Wars people who'd be willing to look over a short fic in the next couple days? It's a bit outside my wheelhouse so I want to make sure it's a good fit for the request. No archive warnings apply. Comment or PM if you have questions.

Late but still relevant:
-in a city full of museums, there are a lot worse themes for a museum than "conceptual art"
-nevertheless, WRITING WORDS IN BIG LETTERS does not, in and of itself, create aesthetic value
-this is the conceptual art that got displayed in a very prestigious museum in a very prestigious city, which means it's kind of at the...tip of the pyramid, as it were. For every level you go down of less fame, there's an order of magnitude more people who are doing the same thing but to less success, perhaps because they are even more inscrutable/pretentious. What does the bottom of the pyramid look like. (That was a rhetorical question, don't tell me, I don't want to know.)

In happier news, completed a draft of mini-bang project, and got to the exciting midpoint? main encounter? scene in bigger-bang project, so that's coming along! :D

-Apparently interstate Civil War flareups persisted into the 21st century...over battle flags. (Given more recent discourse about the Confederate flag I would expect this to die down.) But it's wild that three different 2000s Minnesota governors have been asked by Virginia, and said, "nah, we won, the flag is ours now."

-Blog post from 2012 about computer vision and "what are we processing, mostly subconsciously, when we decide that this picture is funny? How hard would it be for a computer to do that?" I think this is also the kind of thing that's substantially more difficult than Sally-Anne tests as a "theory of mind" test. (This got linked on Twitter in the context of "a decade later, someone else is able to coach their machine learning system to have a fairly deep understanding of the picture"--but it still requires some human input/guidance.)

-I'm done with a draft of Part II of my extremely sprawly "Crying Suns" trilogy! And yes, I cut down on the "language evolution is hard actually" stuff. I still need to go through and take out a bunch of the semicolons because there are way too many. Because Part I and Part II kind of complement each other and hopefully can be read in either order, I've been holding off on posting Part I until Part II was complete. And now that I'm finally here, it's like...do I really want to do this or since I've put it off so long, should I go ahead and write Part III before posting them all? (Part III shouldn't be read first and probably makes more sense after reading I and/or II.)

I was going to post this on

fictional_fans but it got rambly so I'm just going to link it there, heh.

As You Know, Bob, language is always changing over time. Example: this Tumblr post with the Biblical 23rd Psalm as expressed in English at different eras. Written language is less likely than spoken language to change over time--in Shakespeare's poems, "proved" and "loved" rhyme, and we still spell those the same way even if they're pronounced differently. And even though I would have no idea what "Drihten me raet, ne byth me nanes godes wan" means out of context, thanks to the Internet I now know that it's Psalm 23. Yay internet!

( General setting spoilers for Crying Suns )

TFW you're writing a long fic with lots of time skips and you're like...is this just about wrapping up or do I just want it to be wrapping up so I can move onto other things? I'm guessing the parts I have yet to write will still be pretty lengthy for these reasons. One of the good pieces of advice I got from a panel at Capclave recently was "instead of 'show don't tell,' you want to make the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow." (That is, it's okay to summarize/skim over periods where not much is happening, and linger on the scenes that are important.) So I think I'm just in "a slow part that needs to be fast."

Also, the last fanfic I wrote that wasn't for an exchange/fest was fairly long and still has not posted, because I want to post it along with a companion fic. And I haven't started that one, because of all the fest stuff I have going on, plus original deadlines, plus this current fic which is like "would selfishly love to finish something inspired by a new and hot fandom before everyone moves on..." So that might also be throwing off my sense of "am I really getting close to the end or am I just in a rush for validation" even though it's past 7k /o\

Completely unrelated news. I don't blog about it too much because there's nothing much to say, it's just whining, but I struggle with frequent migraines. Usually there isn't exactly "good news" on the migraine front, just "bad news" and "no news." Well, today I was grocery shopping, and I was like, "I'm running low on Excedrin, time to restock. Doesn't matter if it's generic or name-brand, just get a bulk size and have plenty on hand." So I grabbed a large supply. When I went to check out, the scanner was like, "item not found, help incoming." So I'm thinking...is this a new controlled substance? Is the FDA watching to make sure I'm not trying to use Excedrin to produce sketchy drug content? No, the checkout person was just like "...I don't know, this bar code is not recognized. Guess it's free." Score!

There's discussion of an Animorphs mini bang on Tumblr. If I were to write something (that worked as a standalone, though possibly in connection with one of my other series), would people be interested in:

-Aftran stays in Cassie after book 29 and they deal with the later events
-Elfangor stays on Earth and forms a human resistance, not knowing that the "Andalite bandits" include Tobias, Ax, and the others
-something else?

(I'm not going to do a crossover.)

No poll because I'm cheap.