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Aug. 28th, 2016 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI have two writing dilemmas. The first, I think I just need to sleep on because making decisions is beyond what I can do right this second. That’s about the pinch hit I signed up for. I had settled on a story idea and started research, but now the moderators tell me that someone else has offered for it. I had told them that my canon knowledge was not all that firm, and they’re giving me the option to keep the pinch hit or to pass it on. I’m torn because I have a story in my head now, not in detail but still there. If I don’t write it for this, I probably won’t write it at all. On the other hand, maybe I should pass the thing on to someone else who has a better grasp of canon. Would that be better for the recipient?
The second has to do with figuring out how to extricate myself from my Iddy Iddy Bang Bang story. The problem there is that I never had any sort of end/goal/direction in mind. I probably could keep writing forever with the characters having the sorts of conversations that I enjoy writing (and reading) but that will make most readers want to throw rocks at them to make them shut up and *do* something. There’re also some issues of consistency in characterization that I have no idea how to fix in the time I’ve got. I didn’t bother being too picky about it as I wrote because, well, this is the idfic equivalent of… I’m not sure what, actually. I was going to say an infodump, but that’s not it at all. But I just came out with whatever occurred to me in the moment. When a story’s only in my head, that doesn’t matter.
At any rate, I think that the central character question of the story is, ah, tangential to most of what I’ve written. There’s a good bit of porn, and it doesn’t actually connect very strongly to the decisions my POV character needs to make. It’s just there because I had fun writing it.
I’m basically writing an AU of a fic that was AU (divergent) to begin with. It starts with Jasra capturing Merlin when she came to get him out of that cave instead of him managing to escape. From there, things aren’t too happy for Merlin. The AU from that story is that, instead of things getting better or potentially better, they get worse and Luke is involved, too. By the time Merlin got away, he was pretty shattered and extremely angry. That’s when my story starts.
Merlin ended up figuring out, with Ghostwheel’s help, how to build himself a Shadow that nobody could get into or out of unless he allowed it. He told himself he was doing it because he wanted to figure out how, but I’m pretty sure even he knew that was a lie. At first, the place wasn’t all that stable, and he couldn’t leave, even for a short time, without it falling to pieces. Once he started populating it (because he was lonely), he really, really didn’t want that to happen, but by late in the story, that’s kind of just a convenient excuse not to leave as opposed to a real concern (at least in the short term).
It’s been maybe ten years in Merlin’s personal timeline which is fairly trivial given how long people in his family live but still not a short time. My guess is that he’s been running extremely fast relative to Amber, probably because, in the back of his head, he thinks he’d rather not have them notice he’s dropped out of view.
I think I need Merlin either to decide that he can leave (and come back as needed) or to decide that he’s really going to go all in on trying to build enough power that he can feel safe. He’s lonely and wants people who are his equals, but the idea of letting those sorts of people in on anything like equal terms terrifies him. He has zero interest in having kids because that’s part of his backstory trauma.
I have stated a couple of times that Merlin and Ghostwheel are working on ideas for other constructs like (but not too much like— each should be unique) Ghostwheel. Given where Ghostwheel went in canon, anybody finding out about all of this might actually look at Merlin and figure they should nuke him from orbit since it’s the only way to be sure.
Merlin hasn’t quite figured out yet how powerful he and his constructs could be. He’s mainly going into this with the idea that they might, just maybe, end up being as trustworthy as Ghostwheel and help Merlin feel less lonely.
He has decided that pretending to be a normal human among other normal humans isn’t worth the effort. It just makes people think they can get away with hurting him. That means that the people in his Shadow fortress know he’s dangerous and not exactly human but also that he protects them and provides them with the means to take care of themselves. Merlin has been teaching some of them things that he knows that aren’t tied to the blood of Amber and that don’t require vast power. I suspect that Merlin, in the back of his head, is thinking that people with some power might help keep him safe. As long as they don’t have enough power to be a threat.
As I said, all of this is tangential to what I’ve been writing, but I think that the only way for the story to end is for Merlin to make some sort of decision about how he wants to go forward. I know he doesn’t want to return to Amber or to the Courts of Chaos. There are too many expectations in each place about who he should be, and neither place gives him anything that he really wants. Much as he would like to, he’s pretty sure he can’t trust any of his relatives, not in the way he wants to.
The threads I follow in what I’ve written have Merlin interacting with Ghostwheel, Martin, and Luke. The Luke stuff is fairly dark because Merlin is very hurt and very angry and very emotionally attached without wanting to be and has Luke as his prisoner. Merlin has to gradually decide whether or not he wants to be that person (and I’m not quite sure which way he’ll go on it). I think that the resolution of this bit will pivot to some extent on Merlin’s decisions about his path forward in the wider world. Or maybe that pivots on what he decides to do about Luke? I really don’t know.
The Martin stuff is Merlin’s attempt to reach out to the relative he thinks is least likely to try to screw him over, and this version of Martin is actually pretty good on that front and making a real effort not to make Merlin any more unstable than he currently is. He’s not going to abandon Merlin if he can help it. Martin’s not, however, going to intervene about Luke because he really doesn’t care about Luke except as far as what happens will affect Merlin.
The Ghostwheel stuff is fun to write but maybe not entirely relevant to my current problem. Ghostwheel has a serious case of Merlin-centric morality even though Merlin keeps pointing out things that Ghostwheel might disagree with him about and why.
The second has to do with figuring out how to extricate myself from my Iddy Iddy Bang Bang story. The problem there is that I never had any sort of end/goal/direction in mind. I probably could keep writing forever with the characters having the sorts of conversations that I enjoy writing (and reading) but that will make most readers want to throw rocks at them to make them shut up and *do* something. There’re also some issues of consistency in characterization that I have no idea how to fix in the time I’ve got. I didn’t bother being too picky about it as I wrote because, well, this is the idfic equivalent of… I’m not sure what, actually. I was going to say an infodump, but that’s not it at all. But I just came out with whatever occurred to me in the moment. When a story’s only in my head, that doesn’t matter.
At any rate, I think that the central character question of the story is, ah, tangential to most of what I’ve written. There’s a good bit of porn, and it doesn’t actually connect very strongly to the decisions my POV character needs to make. It’s just there because I had fun writing it.
I’m basically writing an AU of a fic that was AU (divergent) to begin with. It starts with Jasra capturing Merlin when she came to get him out of that cave instead of him managing to escape. From there, things aren’t too happy for Merlin. The AU from that story is that, instead of things getting better or potentially better, they get worse and Luke is involved, too. By the time Merlin got away, he was pretty shattered and extremely angry. That’s when my story starts.
Merlin ended up figuring out, with Ghostwheel’s help, how to build himself a Shadow that nobody could get into or out of unless he allowed it. He told himself he was doing it because he wanted to figure out how, but I’m pretty sure even he knew that was a lie. At first, the place wasn’t all that stable, and he couldn’t leave, even for a short time, without it falling to pieces. Once he started populating it (because he was lonely), he really, really didn’t want that to happen, but by late in the story, that’s kind of just a convenient excuse not to leave as opposed to a real concern (at least in the short term).
It’s been maybe ten years in Merlin’s personal timeline which is fairly trivial given how long people in his family live but still not a short time. My guess is that he’s been running extremely fast relative to Amber, probably because, in the back of his head, he thinks he’d rather not have them notice he’s dropped out of view.
I think I need Merlin either to decide that he can leave (and come back as needed) or to decide that he’s really going to go all in on trying to build enough power that he can feel safe. He’s lonely and wants people who are his equals, but the idea of letting those sorts of people in on anything like equal terms terrifies him. He has zero interest in having kids because that’s part of his backstory trauma.
I have stated a couple of times that Merlin and Ghostwheel are working on ideas for other constructs like (but not too much like— each should be unique) Ghostwheel. Given where Ghostwheel went in canon, anybody finding out about all of this might actually look at Merlin and figure they should nuke him from orbit since it’s the only way to be sure.
Merlin hasn’t quite figured out yet how powerful he and his constructs could be. He’s mainly going into this with the idea that they might, just maybe, end up being as trustworthy as Ghostwheel and help Merlin feel less lonely.
He has decided that pretending to be a normal human among other normal humans isn’t worth the effort. It just makes people think they can get away with hurting him. That means that the people in his Shadow fortress know he’s dangerous and not exactly human but also that he protects them and provides them with the means to take care of themselves. Merlin has been teaching some of them things that he knows that aren’t tied to the blood of Amber and that don’t require vast power. I suspect that Merlin, in the back of his head, is thinking that people with some power might help keep him safe. As long as they don’t have enough power to be a threat.
As I said, all of this is tangential to what I’ve been writing, but I think that the only way for the story to end is for Merlin to make some sort of decision about how he wants to go forward. I know he doesn’t want to return to Amber or to the Courts of Chaos. There are too many expectations in each place about who he should be, and neither place gives him anything that he really wants. Much as he would like to, he’s pretty sure he can’t trust any of his relatives, not in the way he wants to.
The threads I follow in what I’ve written have Merlin interacting with Ghostwheel, Martin, and Luke. The Luke stuff is fairly dark because Merlin is very hurt and very angry and very emotionally attached without wanting to be and has Luke as his prisoner. Merlin has to gradually decide whether or not he wants to be that person (and I’m not quite sure which way he’ll go on it). I think that the resolution of this bit will pivot to some extent on Merlin’s decisions about his path forward in the wider world. Or maybe that pivots on what he decides to do about Luke? I really don’t know.
The Martin stuff is Merlin’s attempt to reach out to the relative he thinks is least likely to try to screw him over, and this version of Martin is actually pretty good on that front and making a real effort not to make Merlin any more unstable than he currently is. He’s not going to abandon Merlin if he can help it. Martin’s not, however, going to intervene about Luke because he really doesn’t care about Luke except as far as what happens will affect Merlin.
The Ghostwheel stuff is fun to write but maybe not entirely relevant to my current problem. Ghostwheel has a serious case of Merlin-centric morality even though Merlin keeps pointing out things that Ghostwheel might disagree with him about and why.
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no subject
Date: 2016-08-29 02:55 am (UTC)Ooo that pinch hit one is tough. If it were me, I'd be nervous about my canon knowledge and happy to hand the thing over when given an out. Sounds like you're at least a little excited about doing the story though. You should keep it if you want it. They DID give you the choice. And who knows if the other person would come up with anything as good as your story anyway?
People DO tend to be action-oriented, don't they -- they want stuff to happen NOW. One review I read on a fic I'm following praised the author on the story but actually said "I just wish there wasn't so much dialogue" -- there was hardly ANY compared to the way *I* write! Sheesh. But surely there are those out there who enjoy dialogue too. I'd rather read a conversation than an action sequence. I am a big fan of writing awkward conversations. If the dialogue is interesting, that's okay, right? (so far so good for me, at least, in my tiny corner) People love porn so that's probably not a problem for readers... just for your own sense of making the story the best it can be?
no subject
Date: 2016-08-29 02:02 pm (UTC)Right now, I'm leaning toward keeping the pinch hit. I'm going to eat something and see how I feel after that. I do want to write this story.
I'm never sure how much talking is too much. The current scene I'm working on has definitely gone on too long, but I can't seem to find a place to cut things or a place to stop. I think that part of the problem is that the part of a story that appeals to me is the tension between things getting better and getting worse. A writer can't sustain that for very long and really shouldn't try because it never works, but I don't exactly want to move forward because whatever option I choose closes all the other doors. Does that make sense?
no subject
Date: 2016-08-29 11:49 pm (UTC)I see in your recent post you're keeping the pinch hit, yay!
Yeah that makes sense. Can you write several of the doors that will be closing and see which one you want to leave open maybe? Or is that like waaaay too much work with too little payoff?
no subject
Date: 2016-08-30 09:06 pm (UTC)I don't know if you wander around on DreamWidth at all, but there's an exchange currently running called darkestnightex (that's the community name), and some people have linked their letters/requests to a central post on the community. Maybe some of the things people are interested in there might be inspiring? They might not be for fandoms you're into, but they might still give you ideas.
I don't think I have time to write all of the doors, given that the story's due in about two weeks, but I'll try it if I can't find my way through some other way.
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Date: 2016-08-31 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-01 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-29 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-29 01:22 pm (UTC)I did realize that the reason Merlin didn't pursue ambitions in Amber was Martin. That is, if someone other than Random had been chosen, Merlin might still have pursued the throne, but Martin actually seemed to like his father just then, so... This version of Merlin has a strong sense of loyalty to friends and not so very many friends.