Thursday, December 17, 2015

The rest of the year

I make plans, the plans don't go to plan, I make new plans, those plans will also not be definitive.  Such is the way of things.

This started out as a place to collect my mostly Left Behind related fiction fragments, but I haven't been following Fred's work on the subject with the greatest interest of late so I'm not writing as much on that.  This isn't, by the way, a put down of Fred.  It's just that I haven't been in the right mindset.

Next added was undoubtedly Twilight, which was a result of following Ana Mardoll's deconstruction, a work that hasn't been touched since mid July last year.  At some point I'm going to have to go through Twilight on my own, without the safety of having Ana's insight and commentary diluting the ick, or the inspiration of her pointing out wrong things leading to me trying to make those specific wrongs right.

It's hard to look at my copy of Twilight, a gift from Ana (who prefers lighter, comfier, easier to search e-readers, I believe) and think, "Yeah, what I really want to do right now is read some of that book.  Thus writing more Twilight stuff seems to always end up infinitely postponed.

Then there was Narnia.  My interest really faded with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  It also peaked there.  If the Heroes did their Jobs is my most serious and in depth Narnia stuff.

It's not that I can't write on The Horse and His Boy, I did a Snarky Twilight style conversion between Edmund and Susan before we even made it to that book and here's a version of the meeting of Hwin and Aravis.  But it's the same problem as Left Behind, I'm not feeling that spark of late.

Very little of my original work really calls out for additions.  Yes, The Princess Story must go on, probably The Band Story (I just had to stop writing and make an index for it because I didn't have one yet) too, but there's still a right frame of mind problem.

So, I've kind of been stuck.  Not completely immobile though.  I've more been in a rut; progress can be made as long as said progress follows a set path.  That path, at the moment, happens to be related to Kim Possible.

The Kim Possible stuff is ... fraught.  On the one hand, I've been having at least some success writing things related to it (thus stuck in rut, instead of just plain stuck), on the other hand I know that it's the stuff that's least likely to be of interest.  Don't get me wrong, there has been some interest shown, I can think of at least four people off the top of my head who have actually commented on the *looks up number* 48 posts tagged with "Kim Possible", and doubtless if I actually went through the posts checking who commented I would find an additional person or two.  But I definitely get the impression that most readers here aren't that into Kim Possible stories.

I would like to get Life After revised by the end of they year.  Take the three rushed and one very, very rushed, condensed and otherwise screwed over chapters and make them into the 6 not overly rushed chapters that they're supposed to be.  That's probably doable.  Not to say that it will be done, but it seems like it, at least, could be done.

Everything else was left off in a place where I'd kind of like to hit a degree of closure.  I don't mean that I want to end the stories, they're not nearly ready for that, but they're in a place where things are left hanging that are not, in fact, going to be left hanging for the whole story.

Specifically:  Being more than a Simulacrum is currently left off at the first part of a two part installment, Bent, not Broken still hasn't reached the present day and is thus still in flashback, and in Forgotten Seeds the characters aren't even on earth yet.

Bent, not Broken would take at least two installments to be done with the flashback, meaning four things to get those immediate points concluded, add to it the six revised chapters of Life After and . . . (Almost certainly) no way I'm going to get ten story posts by the end of the year, but that's not the point.

The point is that given that my impression is that the Kim Possible posts are only being appreciated by a small handful of people, all of them included in the ranks of people who seem to be devoted enough to read whatever I write, it's kind of ... um, less than good that that's the only area I'm really having inspiration and will doubtless be how I close out the year.

Also on Kim Possible, I want to get the decon rolling again because it's my hope that people who have never seen the show can get context out of that and thus be more likely to be able to appreciate any fiction I write in that arena.

2 comments:

  1. I'm sorry, I really find it hard to post here (or anywhere) if all I have to say is "yes, I liked that, but I have no further insight to offer".

    None of your worlds is one with which I have strong emotional involvement. The only one where I'm familiar with the primary source material as opposed to the cultural gestalt surrounding it is Narnia, and I read that 35+ years ago in a less critical frame of mind.

    Which basically comes down to, as far as I'm concerned, write. Write what you feel like writing, force yourself to work on stuff you don't feel like, your call which, but keep writing.

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  2. I'm pretty much co-signing what Firedrake said. (Well, maybe not necessarily the "force yourself to work on stuff you don't feel like" part, because that's what I'm trying and mostly failing to do with my own soap opera for the last two months - doesn't seem to work for me all that well. It *might* work for you, though, I don't know.)

    I'm here. I don't comment much, but I'm here. Reading.

    ---Redcrow

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