Catalyst - one last post
Jul. 6th, 2007 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopSomething I’m never sure how many other people notice is how much I like talking about writing. I like talking about where I get ideas from (the easy bit), how they get from being an idea to being a story (the hard bit) and all the other exciting pitfalls you have to get out of in the process of making it work outside your own head – but so I don’t sound completely self-absorbed, I should mention that I also love reading the same sort of stuff when other writers post it. It’s neat to get some sort of idea where others get their ideas from (and often as not, to find out everyone else falls into much the same pitfalls as you do). I’m never quite sure how many other people feel the same way about this kind of blather though – fortunately that’s exactly what LJ cuts are for.
I started Catalyst during the week I spent in Sydney last year for the rollerskating championships – so it’s a little ironic that I’m writing this now while I’m in Queensland for this year’s nationals. I’m going to hasten to add that that doesn’t mean it’s taken a whole year to get it finished – firstly because the nationals were scheduled early this year by three months, secondly because most of the nine months that did pass were spent putting it of while I worked on older (and newer) projects, and later, putting off finishing it because it had grown into a monster and getting it all typed up and into coherent order was a pretty daunting task. Having it finished at last is incredibly satisfying. It’s the longest single story I’ve ever finished by a good several thousand words (about 23,000 total, if anyone’s curious – yeah, yeah, not up to NaNo standard yet, I know). It’s also been a pretty interesting thing to work on for a lot of other reasons too – but I’ll blab about that later.
The idea for a Tsubasa/FMA crossover actually hit me while I was trying to come up with an idea for a xxxHOLiC/FMA crossover. It seemed like a good idea in principle – I’d get to play with the similar philosophies of equivalent trade and Yuuko’s insistence on prices for everything, plus Ed and Al definitely have a wish. The only problem was I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Yuuko would charge them for it. Somewhere in the process, it struck me that another character who could be interesting to mix in with the Elric brothers was Tsubasa!Syaoran. He and Ed have a lot in common when you start thinking about it – they’re about the same age, both have a genuine love for learning despite a the focus of both series tending to be more on how much arse they can kick, and both approach their respective journeys with a fantastic amount of single-minded determination. Not only that, but the series were practically designed to be crossed over. The whole Tsubasa concept revolves around the gang flying from one world after another, where they discover something suspicious going on thanks to the influence of one of Sakura’s feathers. And a lot of the early FMA stories involved the brothers out investigating another lead to the Philosopher’s Stone only to find no more than another red herring. All I’d have to do was throw them all in together and let them go for it – it was almost too easy.
The only downside was that it would have to be a big project if I was going to do it any justice, and I already had several big-ish projects in the works at the time and didn’t want another hanging over me. Then I got him from the rink, and turned out seven pages of writing at a stretch. This is the point I knew I was doomed. (And somewhere in the middle of those following months, I finally realised exactly what Yuuko would have charged the Elric brothers and went back and wrote the holic crossover after all. Go fig.)
Figuring out what to do with the plot of the thing was harder. I wanted something that would work like an episode of a short arc of either series, and I wanted it to be the sort of story that could slot neatly into the canon of both series without leaving a crack – the fact that was even possible was half the fun of the idea. I was going to need some kind of minor villain if I wanted any interesting action, but the idea of turning out another of the generic, cackling madmen who took on that role in the early Tsubasa or FMA stories bored me to tears. The solution was one of those ones that is so obvious after you think of it that you feel stupid for not thinking of it sooner – the villain would be a CLAMP character. After all, just about every world we’ve seen in Tsubasa has been full of alternate universe versions of characters an avid enough CLAMP fan would recognise – and even if the FMA world was already established, why should it be any different? Since I’d already had a vague idea of casting a creepy little kid in the role, ‘A’, the psychotic little three-leaf boy from Clover seemed an obvious choice – though he’d need a real name for this world, so Aiden was born. And once I was using A, naturally I needed his twin brother C/Ran in there as well (which fit in nicely too, as he’d show up just in time for me to give Kurogane and Fye an excuse to get out of the hotel when I needed them to).
(Of course, you could go on to argue that if I had a Ran, I should have a Gingetsu in there too, but he just didn’t quite fit anywhere that wouldn’t have been slightly too blatant a cameo – besides which, Fye and Kurogane had already taken over most of the rescuer role he played for Ran in the original story. But as far as I’m concerned at this point there’s nothing to say there isn’t a Gingetsu out there somewhere in the FMA world somewhere. Maybe he’s the one who’ll adopt Ran and Aiden. Or maybe he’ll show up somewhere else in their future. Ran doesn’t have the same accelerated aging problem he had in Clover, so there are plenty of possibilities. I’ll leave to any Clover reading the story to decide.)
The next problem was just what Aiden was going to do with the feather. The chimeras were something that dated back to those original seven pages (which included most of the first scene, and a lot of scattered snippets of conversation which would be used later on) – something just out of the ordinary enough to get the Elric brothers’ attention and give me the material for a few introductory fight scenes, but there had to be more to the mystery than that. It was horribly tempting to let one or both of the twins be a homunculus or even a successful human transmutation created with the aid of the feather, but that seemed just a bit much to sick on poor Ed and Al. It had to be at least remotely plausible that they could write of the feather as nothing more exciting than the fake philosopher’s stones of the early episodes by the end of the story, or I could forget any hope of turning out a story that wouldn’t damage continuity over much. Intended but ultimately untried human transmutation was much safer territory. Particularly when you remember that even in Tsubasa, it’s been spelled out clearly that the one thing no-one can ever do is resurrect the dead.
After that, the rest was detail. Alchemy is a terrific plot device to play with – even more so when you’ve got a backup like the feather to let you explain away any rules you bend. I got to invent chimera-theory and amplification devices and tricksy little ways to clean up a room in a hurry. I did also walk myself of having to describe a lot of fight scenes, which are always hard work for me. My lead characters didn’t come quite as well balanced as I could have hoped. On one hand there was Syaoran: smart, skilled at martial arts and getting the hang of the sword, on the other there was Ed: smart, skilled at martial arts, possessing of two metal limbs which could be rehaped into blade weapons as necessary and one of very few alchemists in the world who can transmute without drawing a circle. Scripting out the action so that Syaoran would stay relevant the whole way through did take a bit of extra thought.
But the highlight for me is always the character focused stuff, and if anyone couldn’t tell, I had a ball with some of those scenes. Getting the two groups to interact was as easy as I could ever have hoped, and in the end I managed to find space to give everyone – even Sakura and Mokona – a little decent screentime. Ed and Syaoran worked every bit as well together as I’d expected, and Al was wonderfully cute with Sakura and completely hopeless at dealing with Kurogane and Fye. And somewhere in all that, Ran and Aiden’s story picked up enough parallels to Ed and Al’s that that side slotted in better than I’d expected too.
The ending was another part I dithered over a bit. Anyone who’s read Clover will know that the original A is much more dangerous and crazy than his Aiden incarnation. Ben’s death might have been an accident, but B’s was viciously deliberate, so I’d already rewritten the mood of the story quite a bit. Even without Gingetsu, Catalyst looked to beading towards a much happier ending for them. But what the hell – it’s that kind of story, and a simple, happy ending kept me away from falling into the trap of letting too much of the plot become about the twins. The ending fits, and everyone deserved it and no lasting harm was done.
Now that it’s all finally done I’d say that it’s been a good exercise overall, because – quite apart from everything else – it’s made me think a lot more about plot and pacing and such than most of the fic I write. Feedback has been a bit sparse but generally positive, so I’d call the finished product a success. And if anyone’s curious enough about anything else to ask any more questions after all this blather, go right on ahead.
So, now that at long last I can go back to working on other stuff without that pesky little voice in my head reminding me how I need to be finishing that FMA/TRC crossover I’ve had in the works since October last year, here’s a quick list of what else is in the works right now.
xxxHOLiC AU’s
I am having so much fun! with these. Knew that another round of requests would be a good idea. ^___^ Did I say before I was aiming for drabble-length fic or less? I lied – not one of the ones I’ve worked on has clocked in at less than two pages, and a couple are up to three scenes. There did seem to be a little confusion over the difference between ‘concept for an AU’ and ‘mildly cracked plot development you probably wouldn’t expect in the regular universe’ in a few of the requests, but there were still more than enough good ideas mixed in for me to play with (and unfortunately, still far more than I had any real hope of getting through). I’m planning to start getting them posted a couple at a time once I get back home.
Guilty Gear fic
Being the one in where Ky is not only alive (or just hasn’t got around to dying yet, depending on your view, since this is early canon stuff) but hogs nearly all the screentime as well. Will probably be called something like ‘Chain of Command’(which I’d be more attached to by now if I didn’t have Jayne from Firefly going “It's the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who's in ruttin' command here” in my head every time I think of the phrase). And now it’s making me look up battle sites in southern Europe and translate lengthy passages in one of the oldest GG guidebooks about the structure of the Holy Order for reference. Ah, the stuff we do for fic.
Phoenix Wright fic
Not much more than drabble length, but I loved those games too much not to write something. (Plus, I had an Idea, and I’m rarely able to resist it when that happens.)
PenCafe Doujinshi stuff
There are two of these I’m helping with story stuff for – one for Kingdom Hearts and one for Naruto, both to be done for Waicon at the end of the year. And this time it’s quite a bit more involved than the ‘hey, let’s throw some ideas around’ role I had back when Lisa was drawing Cloud Tossing (though I’m definitely not under any delusions I’m doing nearly as much work as what the artists have to put in).
More random GG fic
Just a bunch of assorted snippets of things sitting in my notebook at this stage. May or may not make grow into being usable, we’ll see.
On the same subject, I am at long last up to having finished ten of the sixteen projects I listed way back in November last year, which is everything up to the stuff I had listed as ‘not really working on, but may still get back to eventually’. Still left on that list now are a couple of original projects, which I still definitely mean to get back to as soon as it seems like a good time, and a few other fanfics for Kingdom Hearts, Naruto and FFVII, which I should probably admit at this stage I’m not all that likely to ever get back to. Or… well, I dunno. I think I probably could still finish most of them without too much stress, but unless anyone particularly wants to see them done, the lure of newer stuff will probably be distracting enough to keep me busy.
I started Catalyst during the week I spent in Sydney last year for the rollerskating championships – so it’s a little ironic that I’m writing this now while I’m in Queensland for this year’s nationals. I’m going to hasten to add that that doesn’t mean it’s taken a whole year to get it finished – firstly because the nationals were scheduled early this year by three months, secondly because most of the nine months that did pass were spent putting it of while I worked on older (and newer) projects, and later, putting off finishing it because it had grown into a monster and getting it all typed up and into coherent order was a pretty daunting task. Having it finished at last is incredibly satisfying. It’s the longest single story I’ve ever finished by a good several thousand words (about 23,000 total, if anyone’s curious – yeah, yeah, not up to NaNo standard yet, I know). It’s also been a pretty interesting thing to work on for a lot of other reasons too – but I’ll blab about that later.
The idea for a Tsubasa/FMA crossover actually hit me while I was trying to come up with an idea for a xxxHOLiC/FMA crossover. It seemed like a good idea in principle – I’d get to play with the similar philosophies of equivalent trade and Yuuko’s insistence on prices for everything, plus Ed and Al definitely have a wish. The only problem was I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Yuuko would charge them for it. Somewhere in the process, it struck me that another character who could be interesting to mix in with the Elric brothers was Tsubasa!Syaoran. He and Ed have a lot in common when you start thinking about it – they’re about the same age, both have a genuine love for learning despite a the focus of both series tending to be more on how much arse they can kick, and both approach their respective journeys with a fantastic amount of single-minded determination. Not only that, but the series were practically designed to be crossed over. The whole Tsubasa concept revolves around the gang flying from one world after another, where they discover something suspicious going on thanks to the influence of one of Sakura’s feathers. And a lot of the early FMA stories involved the brothers out investigating another lead to the Philosopher’s Stone only to find no more than another red herring. All I’d have to do was throw them all in together and let them go for it – it was almost too easy.
The only downside was that it would have to be a big project if I was going to do it any justice, and I already had several big-ish projects in the works at the time and didn’t want another hanging over me. Then I got him from the rink, and turned out seven pages of writing at a stretch. This is the point I knew I was doomed. (And somewhere in the middle of those following months, I finally realised exactly what Yuuko would have charged the Elric brothers and went back and wrote the holic crossover after all. Go fig.)
Figuring out what to do with the plot of the thing was harder. I wanted something that would work like an episode of a short arc of either series, and I wanted it to be the sort of story that could slot neatly into the canon of both series without leaving a crack – the fact that was even possible was half the fun of the idea. I was going to need some kind of minor villain if I wanted any interesting action, but the idea of turning out another of the generic, cackling madmen who took on that role in the early Tsubasa or FMA stories bored me to tears. The solution was one of those ones that is so obvious after you think of it that you feel stupid for not thinking of it sooner – the villain would be a CLAMP character. After all, just about every world we’ve seen in Tsubasa has been full of alternate universe versions of characters an avid enough CLAMP fan would recognise – and even if the FMA world was already established, why should it be any different? Since I’d already had a vague idea of casting a creepy little kid in the role, ‘A’, the psychotic little three-leaf boy from Clover seemed an obvious choice – though he’d need a real name for this world, so Aiden was born. And once I was using A, naturally I needed his twin brother C/Ran in there as well (which fit in nicely too, as he’d show up just in time for me to give Kurogane and Fye an excuse to get out of the hotel when I needed them to).
(Of course, you could go on to argue that if I had a Ran, I should have a Gingetsu in there too, but he just didn’t quite fit anywhere that wouldn’t have been slightly too blatant a cameo – besides which, Fye and Kurogane had already taken over most of the rescuer role he played for Ran in the original story. But as far as I’m concerned at this point there’s nothing to say there isn’t a Gingetsu out there somewhere in the FMA world somewhere. Maybe he’s the one who’ll adopt Ran and Aiden. Or maybe he’ll show up somewhere else in their future. Ran doesn’t have the same accelerated aging problem he had in Clover, so there are plenty of possibilities. I’ll leave to any Clover reading the story to decide.)
The next problem was just what Aiden was going to do with the feather. The chimeras were something that dated back to those original seven pages (which included most of the first scene, and a lot of scattered snippets of conversation which would be used later on) – something just out of the ordinary enough to get the Elric brothers’ attention and give me the material for a few introductory fight scenes, but there had to be more to the mystery than that. It was horribly tempting to let one or both of the twins be a homunculus or even a successful human transmutation created with the aid of the feather, but that seemed just a bit much to sick on poor Ed and Al. It had to be at least remotely plausible that they could write of the feather as nothing more exciting than the fake philosopher’s stones of the early episodes by the end of the story, or I could forget any hope of turning out a story that wouldn’t damage continuity over much. Intended but ultimately untried human transmutation was much safer territory. Particularly when you remember that even in Tsubasa, it’s been spelled out clearly that the one thing no-one can ever do is resurrect the dead.
After that, the rest was detail. Alchemy is a terrific plot device to play with – even more so when you’ve got a backup like the feather to let you explain away any rules you bend. I got to invent chimera-theory and amplification devices and tricksy little ways to clean up a room in a hurry. I did also walk myself of having to describe a lot of fight scenes, which are always hard work for me. My lead characters didn’t come quite as well balanced as I could have hoped. On one hand there was Syaoran: smart, skilled at martial arts and getting the hang of the sword, on the other there was Ed: smart, skilled at martial arts, possessing of two metal limbs which could be rehaped into blade weapons as necessary and one of very few alchemists in the world who can transmute without drawing a circle. Scripting out the action so that Syaoran would stay relevant the whole way through did take a bit of extra thought.
But the highlight for me is always the character focused stuff, and if anyone couldn’t tell, I had a ball with some of those scenes. Getting the two groups to interact was as easy as I could ever have hoped, and in the end I managed to find space to give everyone – even Sakura and Mokona – a little decent screentime. Ed and Syaoran worked every bit as well together as I’d expected, and Al was wonderfully cute with Sakura and completely hopeless at dealing with Kurogane and Fye. And somewhere in all that, Ran and Aiden’s story picked up enough parallels to Ed and Al’s that that side slotted in better than I’d expected too.
The ending was another part I dithered over a bit. Anyone who’s read Clover will know that the original A is much more dangerous and crazy than his Aiden incarnation. Ben’s death might have been an accident, but B’s was viciously deliberate, so I’d already rewritten the mood of the story quite a bit. Even without Gingetsu, Catalyst looked to beading towards a much happier ending for them. But what the hell – it’s that kind of story, and a simple, happy ending kept me away from falling into the trap of letting too much of the plot become about the twins. The ending fits, and everyone deserved it and no lasting harm was done.
Now that it’s all finally done I’d say that it’s been a good exercise overall, because – quite apart from everything else – it’s made me think a lot more about plot and pacing and such than most of the fic I write. Feedback has been a bit sparse but generally positive, so I’d call the finished product a success. And if anyone’s curious enough about anything else to ask any more questions after all this blather, go right on ahead.
So, now that at long last I can go back to working on other stuff without that pesky little voice in my head reminding me how I need to be finishing that FMA/TRC crossover I’ve had in the works since October last year, here’s a quick list of what else is in the works right now.
xxxHOLiC AU’s
I am having so much fun! with these. Knew that another round of requests would be a good idea. ^___^ Did I say before I was aiming for drabble-length fic or less? I lied – not one of the ones I’ve worked on has clocked in at less than two pages, and a couple are up to three scenes. There did seem to be a little confusion over the difference between ‘concept for an AU’ and ‘mildly cracked plot development you probably wouldn’t expect in the regular universe’ in a few of the requests, but there were still more than enough good ideas mixed in for me to play with (and unfortunately, still far more than I had any real hope of getting through). I’m planning to start getting them posted a couple at a time once I get back home.
Guilty Gear fic
Being the one in where Ky is not only alive (or just hasn’t got around to dying yet, depending on your view, since this is early canon stuff) but hogs nearly all the screentime as well. Will probably be called something like ‘Chain of Command’(which I’d be more attached to by now if I didn’t have Jayne from Firefly going “It's the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who's in ruttin' command here” in my head every time I think of the phrase). And now it’s making me look up battle sites in southern Europe and translate lengthy passages in one of the oldest GG guidebooks about the structure of the Holy Order for reference. Ah, the stuff we do for fic.
Phoenix Wright fic
Not much more than drabble length, but I loved those games too much not to write something. (Plus, I had an Idea, and I’m rarely able to resist it when that happens.)
PenCafe Doujinshi stuff
There are two of these I’m helping with story stuff for – one for Kingdom Hearts and one for Naruto, both to be done for Waicon at the end of the year. And this time it’s quite a bit more involved than the ‘hey, let’s throw some ideas around’ role I had back when Lisa was drawing Cloud Tossing (though I’m definitely not under any delusions I’m doing nearly as much work as what the artists have to put in).
More random GG fic
Just a bunch of assorted snippets of things sitting in my notebook at this stage. May or may not make grow into being usable, we’ll see.
On the same subject, I am at long last up to having finished ten of the sixteen projects I listed way back in November last year, which is everything up to the stuff I had listed as ‘not really working on, but may still get back to eventually’. Still left on that list now are a couple of original projects, which I still definitely mean to get back to as soon as it seems like a good time, and a few other fanfics for Kingdom Hearts, Naruto and FFVII, which I should probably admit at this stage I’m not all that likely to ever get back to. Or… well, I dunno. I think I probably could still finish most of them without too much stress, but unless anyone particularly wants to see them done, the lure of newer stuff will probably be distracting enough to keep me busy.