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Sorry that previous post was way more grumpy-sounding than I meant it to be.. I do have a soft spot for HP but it’s just not that soft a spot.
So I’m working on a story just now and it’s going well, and that’s great, I’ve finally coalesced all the fragments I wrote of it when I was not allowing myself to actively work on it and all into some kind of coherent whole. And that’s going well. So I mean, fuck outlining, right? I guess that’s working out for me, not outlining at all. It was a disaster for a while but I’ve worked it out.
And I’m really pleased with how the story’s going– I’m up to 2 chapters posted, and I have two more drafted chapters in the bag and I’m working on chapter 5 and there are enough almost-solidified segments to take it up through about eight or nine chapters before the big thing that might be the end of this story and the beginning of another.
(The only snag is that the first two chapters are getting the very lowest response I’ve gotten to a fic in recent memory, which is really discouraging– the prequel, people seemed to respond well to, so I went ahead with this one and… maybe it’s just the time of year, but it’s a lot of crickets. And I’d been feeling silly for my chapter notes on the prequel wherein I was worrying that this pairing wouldn’t attract many readers, but– uh… It’s awful quiet in here.
Not to passive-aggressively beg for attention; I have so much of this story written it’s getting posted anyway. Just, for the record, I was right. It’s just really funny because I’ve had that pairing in my other stories all along; it’s more, I think, the absence of another powerhouse ship. Fascinating anthropological data, I suppose. I’ll just have to see, when I eventually finish it, if it can manage to get recced as a finished work. Long payoff, but when you tend to write epic WIPs you can’t let yourself do a lot with short-term goals…)
MY POINT. I had a point.
Oh yes. My point was, the only issue with writing this thing so slow and scattered is that I swear to God there was a really poignant little bit I meant to include, one of those flashback sensory memory things, and I swear I wrote it but I can’t find it and those right there are the times when you hate yourself for writing epics with no outline.
I’ve been doing this for over two decades now, writing, and my brain is pretty good, inasmuch as it’s good at anything, at making things connect. I’m at the point now where I’m understanding that the themes in my whole thing have been present all along and it’s not what I set out to tell a story about but it’s definitely what I’m telling a story about and I’m delighted at the discovery and also feeling pleased that my trust in myself wasn’t misplaced.
That’s the thing. I’m good, is the thing, at what I do. So I always eye self-help books longingly, but I know: I’m not the kind of person that can help, and I wouldn’t want to change. It’s just hard to have faith when your method is kind of no-method.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that this scene I wrote is in something I’ve already published. I’m sure I wrote it, it’s not among my drafts– the prequel-prequel was in another folder. I’m sure it is.
I don’t want to reread it. Does anyone know, offhand– is there a scene in Ora Pro Nobis where James gives Natalia a bitter Latvian herbal liqueur called Black Balsam to prank her for her reaction, and she misremembers, later, being the one doing the pranking? I feel like I used it for some kind of memory-fuckery in there.
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