dragonlady7

Poor Bob.
My friend Abbie has a number of goldfish. Bob was an orange one with a big head. He died today. Bummer.

The other fish seem depressed, she tells me. Aww. That's very sad.

In other news, I keep getting logged out of livejournal, which means I'm looking at my friends page and not seeing any indication that I'm logged out, but am also not seeing anybody's protected entries. So if you've confided something important to a friend-group including me, and I haven't reacted, that'd be why.

I'm on IM helping poor Abbie compose a eulogy for Bob. He's currently in cold storage until she next goes home and can have him cremated in the woodstove. Ah, tragedy.
She now has more frogs than fish, among her pets. Very weird.

In still other news, writings...

So I sat down and worked out the various stories I'm working on, organized them chronologically, worked out what characters I'm addressing and which I'm not. Decided what I still have to write, tried to work out what needs to be written first so the other stuff can build on it.
You'd think that the earlier chronological stuff has to be written first, but I'm actually finding that sometimes writing something that happens later first, helps to determine what shape the earlier events should take.

Yes, the stories I'm talking about are still Tolkien fanfiction. But when I write fanfiction I have an *audience*, do you understand? People read it, give a crap, and give me feedback.

I don't currently have the strength to write an original novel alone. Especially not a fantasy one. The only person I have to regularly discuss things with is Dave, who hates fantasy. No matter what I do, he's going to be disgusted by the sillier aspects of fantasy, and he's just not going to be able to tell me whether I'm telling the story effectively.

So. I might as well work on the fanfiction. Perhaps I'll finish it sufficiently to publish it on my own website as one of my experiements in hyperfiction structure. I can't sell it, right, so if I'm going to make any of my works freely available, it should be the stuff I can't sell anyway, right?

Unfortunately it would then be difficult to add to my portfolio, unless I've made such a big deal over the structure. Fanfiction is a funny thing. A lot of people write it. A lot of really good people write it. Some excellent writers use it to sharpen their teeth on. Professors of mine in college had written it, including my favorite one who I totally want to be (well, not entirely, but sort of).
But nobody really wants to admit that they write it.
And yes, it's a deeply dorky community, and a lot of people write a lot of abysmal stuff.
To be honest I'm starting to yearn slightly for my own original characters, and the freedom to establish my own world. But I am also yearning for an audience and some feedback. In college, you get pieces workshopped, you get papers graded-- people tell you whether you suck. Out here in the real world, polite people tell you your writing's lovely, and idiots leave you flames (a recent example left on an essay in my bridget.kelly.name blog read simply "BITCH BITCH BITCH UR GAY SUCK A COCK". I deleted the comment as I felt that wasn't relevant to the history of Thanksgiving and probably wasn't really aimed at my ideas so much as my existence, which isn't really what was up for debate).
So, not a lot to go on there. In my novel-writing earlier this year I got into some very bad habits, because I simply didn't have anyone reading to tell me that they were bad. Now it's not so much the criticism as the awareness that yes, someone is going to read this. I need to focus on communicating my ideas so that someone else can read them, not on getting my ideas down on paper so i can see how cool they are.

Sigh.

I am not far from completing an original novel. I have the hardest parts worked out for not one, not two, but three distinct original novels. One of which I was working on in collaboration before I went away to high school. (Yes. Before high school. I typed that right.) My co-collaborationist is working on it this summer. I will see how far she gets, before I overhaul my end of it. I have much more writing experience than she does, so I may come in a bit later when she has some writing done and help work out some kind of structure. Ideally, two different novels, each written independently about the same subject-- that would be cool.
Anyway.
Need some time on that one. Might do some work on that one online, since we live far apart and are going to be living still farther apart.

But, in the meantime, fanfiction it is.