Sorry for the mind-numbingly long post.
Yeesh. Every time I think the universe is going to stop chasing me up a tree and then taking potshots at me, something else comes out of nowhere and blows one of my kneecaps off. Not going into detail about it here, except to say that several ongoing things have kept me sidetracked and very nearly given me an ulcer.
Once again, the issue appears to be resolved...but at this point I'll believe that when a few months go by and nothing
else goes wrong.
Now, to see if I can catch up on a few things I've been missing, here....
On the stigma of fanfiction...I keep thinking it's becoming more widely accepted nowadays, but then I run across someone commenting on a forum thread or blog post and equating fanfiction with bad writing. Insulting a movie's script by calling it fanfiction-level writing, for example. Because of this, I've mentioned to only one person I know in real life that I write fanfiction, and I have only a few online friends who know about it...there's always this worry that if anyone else finds out, they'll think there's something wrong with me. Even though I see it as just another venue for storytelling. It's good for exercising your creativity, experimenting with plots and characters, and just having some fun with a particular setting.
I've only told a few people about the original stuff I write, as well. Only one real-life friend knows about it, and it hardly ever comes up in conversations anymore. Only a few online friends know about it. Friends I made on my previous job, many of whom I'm still in contact with, don't know about it, and no one from my current job knows about it either. One of the reasons is because for twenty-two years, I was a complete and utter failure at getting anything published. Though that changed a year ago when one of my novels was finally accepted by a publisher, so now I'm debating with myself whether to mention it to my friends. I'm thinking I might do it when it's finally released...but then I'm kind of expecting a whole lot of "why didn't you tell me about this
years ago?"
On writing scenes or stories you never intend to actually publish...I don't really do that, but sometimes I have an idea that sticks in my head and I just have to write the scene or chapter or whatever, then keep it in my "notes and scraps" file until the story it'll fit into "catches up" with where it needs to be.
I've actually got one right now that I thought I'd bounce off you. It'll probably be quite a while before it can fit into
Freelancers, and I'm still in the process of working out the details, but it's one of those things that sticks in your head and kind of forces its way to the forefront when you're trying to concentrate on a current work-in-progress, so maybe talking about it will help me get it out of my system enough to focus on the stuff I need to finish writing first. It involves my turian "Spectre-turned-porn-star-turned-Spectre-again" (heh, long story
) character, Valeria Terakkis, and her husband/costar Irving Kostmeyer....
The basic idea is that a merc Valeria crossed paths with during her first stint as a Spectre has set out for revenge and abducted Irving and a group of civilians to lure her to his base, where his personal army will capture her and bring her to him for execution.
The reason Valeria walked away from the Spectres years ago was because she didn't like the kind of person the job turned her into. Even more so now that she has Irving; they met after she left the Spectres, when she started working for Fornax, and never wanted him exposed to the ghosts from her past. And after she had to rejoin, she's now worried that the job will change her...worried that one morning he'll wake up in bed with someone who looks like the woman he married, but isn't her anymore.
But now that he's been captured by an old enemy and his life is in danger...well, she comes just a little bit untethered. 
And when she tracks down his location, she announces her presence by blowing up the hangar containing the mercs' shuttles and gunships....
Cut to the room where Irving and the civilians are being held, surrounded by guards and the merc leader. The explosion happens, a huge chunk of the hangar slams into one of the big windows and nearly shatters it, and the mercs start to freak out. So do the civilian captives. Irving, battered and bruised from being worked over by the mercs, merely smiles. He looks at the other prisoners and says, "She's here."
Off to one side, there's a console where a merc is monitoring the base and a huge wall displaying the bio-readouts of all the mercs who are charging in to intercept Valeria. "Intruder detected in Building 4, ground level. Level 2...level 3...level 4--oh, hell..."
Seven of the readouts flatline, each within a split-second of the others.
"Intruder now on level 8--oh, bloody hell, she just vaulted out the window and landed on the roof of Building 3. She's cutting through the door with some sort of blade generated by her Omni-Tool. She's inside. Gamma team is moving to intercept. Oh, God--"
Ten more life sign monitors flatline within seconds. Second by second, the merc comes closer to soiling his armor.
"She's on Level 5--no, 4. More troops on the way...."
Cut to Val bulldozing her way through the mercs--gunning them down, then stabbing, bludgeoning, snapping necks, breaking legs, and cracking carapaces wide open when they get too close to shoot.
The guy at the monitors backs away, turns to stare at his boss, and starts to hyperventilate. "We're all dead!"
Val reaches the control tower and the boss decides to run like hell. The guy at the monitors goes into full-throttle panic and bursts into tears when Valeria cuts through the bulkhead with her Omni-Blade. She storms in and he faints. She starts to pursue the boss, but then she sees Irving on the floor and rushes over to him. He reassures her that he only has a few bruises but is otherwise fine, then he says, "Go get the son of a ****!"
Cue chase across the base and deeper into the city, from one rooftop to another, jumping onto passing aircars, hopping from one to another, a plunge from one of those to a hovering freight carrier, bits of hand-to-hand fighting on each before the boss tries to escape by jumping off to another vehicle or rooftop, knowing that if she gets a solid grip on him, he's done.
I haven't decided yet whether she wastes him or just arrests him at the end...but I'm gonna have fun fleshing that whole sequence out.
As for certain settings that are more suitable for writing...I pretty much do all my writing at home, at my desk in the living room. I live alone and don't have much of a social life...I go to work and go shopping and that's pretty much it...so I don't have to worry about interruptions most of the time. Which works really well for writing, except for all the stuff that's been keeping me sidetracked over the past few months. If things ever smooth out, I'm hoping I can get back to a somewhat normal routine with writing.
I've tried taking a laptop to different places, and it never really worked out. In places like libraries, I get all self-conscious when I'm trying to write with other people walking around. I end up worrying that they'll see what's on the screen and can't concentrate on writing.
When I lived on the Oregon coast, sometimes I'd take my laptop to one of the nearby parks and try to find a somewhat isolated picnic table and spend an hour or two writing with the sound of the ocean in the background. But the climate in that area being what it is, rain pours almost constantly for most of the year, making it a bad idea to sit out in the open with a laptop. And even on sunny days, even during the summer, the temperature hardly ever rose above 65 or 70, and within minutes I'd end up shivering and my fingers would get too cold to keep typing.
After I moved to Tucson, that wasn't a problem anymore.
I did have days when I could sit on my balcony for hours and write with no distractions...until my laptop's hard drive died.
So now it's pretty much my desktop or nothing.
For music, I find that something instrumental works best. If there are lyrics, it tends to distract me. On the other hand, if there's an instrumental track that I particularly like, I end up stopping to just listen to it. When writing, I tend to cycle through various
Babylon 5,
Mass Effect, and
Doctor Who soundtracks, occasionally mixing in other stuff like the
Transformers Prime soundtrack. Other times, I use various ambient sounds, like the
Normandy's drive core or other background sounds, or sometimes the
Enterprise's engine idling or bridge background sounds. And other times, I use various nature ambience tracks I've found on YouTube, usually something related to summer, meadows, wind in trees, and so on.
hot_heart wrote...
Not really a question, more of a grumble actually, but anyone else find they really hit their stride with their writing when it gets late. On a work night (or a school one, for you young'uns).
Or maybe I'm just too tired to give anything a critical eye. Yeah, probably that.
I used to have a fairly regular time during the afternoon and evening when the writing flowed better than others, but over the last few years various things in my life have disrupted my routine to the point where I just have to squeeze in some writing whenever I can. I have noticed, however, that very often late at night my brain won't shut down and just keeps going over scenes and dialogue and whatnot, but when I try to actually write it out during those hours, I'm rarely able to get it from my brain to the keyboard, and I end up just sitting here staring at the screen like a cow looking at a dictionary.
Gamer072196 wrote...
Sometimes I stay up all night typing, tweaking, and spell checking my chapters before I finally post them (no joke, this has happened about a dozen times). Maybe I shoud try to type in bursts more often, but that seems so work against me sometimes.
Question: Does anyone have certain chapters in your stories planned out way before you actually get to them, and when you do get to them, do you either, a) put in a lot more detail than you were planning to, or 
end up changing most of what you had planned?
I've had it happen quite a few times. Ex.: I plan a chapter to be a ten-fifteen minute read and it ends up being a half hour/fourty-five minute read instead. Sometimes it could turn out to be an hour's read. It's weird... {smilie}
I've done the same thing a few times--staying up all night, or at least until 3 or 4 in the morning, finishing up a new chapter and refusing to go to bed until it's done and posted. I don't know, for some reason, I sometimes get into this mode where the damned thing simply
has to be done
tonight, and I can't allow myself to move on to anything else until it's done. It hasn't happened in a while, though...but if it did, I might actually come close to being as productive as I used to be.
As for the question, I've had that happen with chapters and even entire novels. I've had two novels that I planned out which ended up being almost completely different from what I'd originally planned. That's one of the reasons I don't even try to write up an outline for any novel or story, anymore. I'll write the story as it forms in my mind, and then, for the purposes of submitting the novel to a publisher, I'll write the outline from the finished draft.
I've also had quite a few scenes and whole chapters turn out much longer than I intended. Usually that happens when I get caught up in a certain bit of dialogue or an action scene. I end up enjoying the banter between characters, or the flow of their conversation, and keep coming up with more stuff for them to say as I'm writing it. And with action scenes, I find myself getting ideas and throwing them in while writing them. As an example, quite a few months ago, I had an idea for my krogan character to chase Kai Leng through the rubble of Tayseri Ward...and shortly after I started writing it, I had them both Parkouring over the rubble, up and down the walls of shattered buildings, and from rooftop to rooftop. I ended up keeping it because I just loved the idea of a krogan being that agile and quick on her feet (and, of course, giving Leng the epic and life-ending curb-stomping he so
thoroughly deserved).
And on that note, I should wrap this up. Once again, sorry for the length of this post. I keep hoping I'll be able to post more frequently and therefore in smaller chunks, but things never seem to work out that way. Maybe this time it will. I can keep hoping, at least....
Modifié par ftkerns, 04 février 2014 - 07:41 .
That one scene where it's like an MC Escher art piece, and he goes from walking on the bottom of the platfor to the top of it, and his bulge is the first thing you see for a frame or two when he'sswinging up...there are no words. Excellent movie...but now I have the urge to watch it and The Neverending Story
Retour en haut
Stop lookin' into mah brain!!!! 
