rallamajoop

LJ, as much as I love it, is kind of dead these days, and was never a particularly great fanfiction archive to begin with, and as for fanfic.net - well, they killed any hope of being taken seriously as a major fic archive the day they banned anything beyond a PG rating. AO3's pretty much where it's at for a lot of fandoms these days, and most of a year and many hours of furious dithering later, I finally finished the mammoth task of getting all my fic uploaded over there.

...yeah. Just in case anyone was actually wondering how you take that long copying what my stats tell me came to over 390,000 words worth of 88 different fic, that's about the size of it.

A few more thoughts on how I've been finding the whole AO3 experience:

( Why Kudos are awesome, the edit form is an exercise in frustration, and the bugs in the tagging system burn me to the very core of my geekish soul )

Okay. So. Making slow-but-steady progress on getting all my fic up over at AO3. All my xxxHoLiC is up (excluding Ghost Stories, which still isn't back from the beta reader), Guilty Gear is done, a half dozen minor fandoms I have had brief flirtations with over the years are done, and I'm up to Cable & Deadpool at last.

This also means I'm up to figuring out exactly how to go about posting that convoluted, multi-threaded AU monstrosity that is Summers'son.

Given the way the action jumps around from scene to scene and timeline to timeline, I'm thinking it's going to make much more sense as a series than as a single fic. (For all AO3's faults, options like the support for posting fic as a series make up for any multitude of sins.) That way, I can post the introductory chapters as one story, and each of the individual timelines following the split as a separate one. So, chapters 4-6, plus those three short epilogues (wherein Nate realises his attraction to Wade on his own terms and still manages to make a mess out of confessing to it thanks to an awkward psychic bungle) would become one fic, and the first part of chapter 7 would be another, and... okay, and here it gets complicated, because there are a few different ways I could break some of this down. I'm also about to need a whole bunch of new titles.

( Hashing out some of my options and throwing around some possible titles under the cut )

Making these sorts of minor logistic decisions always takes me far more angst than it's worth, so if anyone wants to throw their own opinion/preferences/better ideas for titles my way, I'm all ears right now.

So I got a few long and detailed responses to that last post from people who clearly very much wanted to help. Unfortunately, what they mostly managed to demonstrate was that I can’t have done a very good job of communicating what the problem was in the first place. I’m going to make one more attempt to clarify things so that, at the very least, people will have some sort of explanation for why I’ve been feeling too awkward to reply to all their comments properly.

( blahblahblah )

It's been so long since I last posted fic that I really wanted to at least have something new posted by the end of the year, but it probably goes without saying that I've had more trouble than I counted on getting back into the swing of writing again after all that cosplay stress leading up to November. (All those posts about stuff in recent Marvel comics? You can safely read them as a sort of sideways attempt to get myself back into the writing groove again.) The good news is I'm finally writing again, and I have the next chapter of that high school AU needing only a few last edits and a beta before it's done! The bad news is ahaha no way is that happening by new year's.

But in the interests of having something to share by that arbitrary date, and because I feel the need to celebrate the fact that it appears this will actually still be canon-compliant following X-Sanction, I'm reposting this short fic I wrote for a kink meme request a couple of weeks ago. Very brief context for reposting purposes: the request was for Deadpool and a newly resurrected Cable meeting on the pages of Uncanny X-Force, but I must also credit this recent scene where Spider-Man and Johnny Storm do almost the exact same thing for inspiration as all I could think reading it was, wow, you'd hardly have to rewrite this to do make it Cable and Deadpool instead...

( Script format, as I like to imagine this is exactly how it might go down on page )
And a Happy New Year to you all!

I can only suppose that by this point, it would probably surprise anyone who's still reading for the purpose that I haven't completely forgotten about The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories - a.k.a. the novel-length xxxHolic/Tsubasa post-apocalyptic AU fic that I posted in draft form back in 07/08, and have been promising to revise and repost ever since. *hangs head in shame*

Actually, most of my own edits have been finished since earlier this year. Unfortunately, since then distractions have been myriad, and now it seems that neither of the friends who originally volunteered to beta for me have been having much luck finding the time to go through this 90,000 word monster of a fic. :/ So more than a year since I posted the final chapter, I'm finally back to hunting for anyone who may be willing to beta for me. Soon for preference, though I'm painfully aware I don't have much freedom to be picky in that regard.

<.< Any volunteers?

Obviously I didn't attempt NaNo this year or you would've all heard about it. But since one thing or another has kept me from writing or posting hardly any fic since I finished the Ghost Stories draft in late July, I did declare November Local Get On With It Already Month, and turned out the reasonably respectable total of about 20,000 words (most of which haven't been edited or posted yet). That's not counting over 15,000 words worth of posts since I got back from Japan about all that stuff I've been up to lately, which doesn't strictly count but does chew into one's writing time in a significant sort of way. So I'm going to call that a decent sort of success.

While I'm talking about writing, I thought I'd post a new WIP list - partly so I can use it for my own checklist, but also for anyone who might be interested in what's in the works (or who wants to put in a vote for where my priorities should be out of all those different projects). No proper extracts this time because I am feeling lazy though convincing me to add them in probably would not be all that hard.

Also while I'm talking about writing, cheloya and lunargeography, I know neither of you are on LJ much lately, but if you are reading this, are you still up for betaing duties if the story in question is ready some time soon? ^^;

( xxxHOLiC/Tsubasa fic )

( The World Ends With You fic )

( Guilty Gear fic )

...yep, that should about keep me going for a while. x_x

Somewhere in the middle of all the running around sorting out moving-related stuff this week, I had a birthday. Proper celebrations are going to be delayed this year until things calm down (needless to say) but I got to go out to dinner with my family to mark the occasion at least, so at least I get to feel remembered. ^^; Thanks also to everyone who wished me a happy birthday via online channels especially the ones who did so via email and whom I completely forgot to reply to in the busy couple of days that followed. And lots of love go especially to saqra for drawing Sol/Ky birthday fanart just for me. <3

Right now, we're hoping to have a combined house warming/birthday party the weekend after next - it may depend how organised the place is at that stage. Speaking of moving, the official date to lug the bulk of the furniture across and set up properly has been set for next Saturday. Still tons of packing to do between now and then, but the bulk of the phoning around for power/gas/etc is done about we're making decent headway with the furniture situation. Got to experience Ikea's extra giant new Perth store yesterday in all it's airport-scale glory, but I'm sure we'll be back again once we've moved in properly and have had time to really figure out everything we're still missing around the place.

On the writing front, the next chapter of Ghost Stories is going to take a little longer than I expected - not so much because it's giving me trouble or I don't have time to finish it, but because earlier this week I got hit with actual inspiration! for one of the harder scenes to come in chapters not so far ahead (and which I've been dreading having to put into words since way back when I started all this), and so editing the chapter 24 into shape got shunted down the priority list a few rungs. Hoping to get to it within a day or two though. I've also finally got my latest Guilty Gear fic back from my beta reader and only needing a few edits before it can be posted (also put off on account of the need to write out that Ghost Stories scene before inspiration left me again) and a piece of Discworld fanfic in the works (which I have told myself I was going to work on just about every evening for the last two weeks, hahaha ><) just for something a bit different. Come to think of it, I should really ask for betaing volunteers for that last one while I'm here. Anyone?

With a little luck, I can probably hope to get at least the first two of those fic uploaded in the next week or so, considering how very close to finished they are already. But considering that we'd probably have to be very lucky to get our Internet connection at the new place sorted out without any trouble, after this week, all bets may be off for a while. If I vanish from the Internet for a bit, at least you'll know why.

Meanwhile, I keep planning out all these posts I want to make about Crisis Core and the new xxxHOLiC episodes and everything and then I keep not finding time to write them. Oh well. Maybe next week. Or the week after that...

Happy New Year, everyone! I'd say I had a decently productive '07.

( Fic from this year, mostly xxxHOLiC/Tsubasa and Guilty Gear, but with a surprising number of FMA crossovers )

( Summary, goals for next year, and what's in the works now )

Unlike a lot of the rest of fandom, I’ve never personally picked up much attachment to the whole ‘plot bunnies’ way of talking about ideas. However, jaseroque and I have come up with our own fun little writing analogy which we’re quite proud of, and which I wanted to share in the vague hope of getting others to try it out.

This all began at a writing panel at a Swancon a few years back, where one of the panellists (Paul Kid, a sort of minor local BNF, and generally good value at those sort of panels) commented that he felt writing a story was a bit like nailing down a snake. He suggested that a good approach was to get the head and the tail nailed down first (the start and the end, so to speak), and then you’ve just got this angry mass whiplashing back and forth in the middle to be pinned down in some shape or other as best you can (with running commentary to the effect of “wait, how did he get over there?” and “no that character isn’t gay!” to demonstrate just how much trouble that part can cause XD). As analogies for the writing process went it worked entertainingly well. We liked it, anyway.

We’ve been bringing it up now and then ever since, but it pretty much stayed in that format until late last year when, while stuck in the middle of a seething mass of WIPs, I commented to jaseroque that my own approach to writing had become something rather more like aiming a nail gun into a box of snakes while blindfolded. I never knew what I was going to hit. If I was lucky, I’d hit the same one enough times that it’d be worth getting out the hammer and going down there to get the rest of it nailed into some kind of shape. However, there was still the danger that one of the others would come along and bite me while I was doing it, so I’d have to go and nail that one down just to keep it out of the way – and you can see where this is going. Before long, I’d be lucky if I could even remember where I’d been nailing the first one down to begin with.

( From there, the metaphor has... gone a bit feral. And possibly developed teeth. )

So, how do you all go about nailing down your snakes? ^_~

I had this giant post of Guilty Gear stuff I was going to write tonight, but it's going to have to wait until tomorrow, because I spent too much of this evening horribly distracted. factorielle and I have come up with the best Doumeki theory ever.

(Actually, most of the comments on that post aren't relevant. The important part starts at the end of this comment and picks up again a couple of comments later at this thread.)

You just try and tell us that's not all absolutely true, and a work of genius. XDXD

Edit: Oh yeah, a warning - everything on that post contains recent xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa spoilers liek whoa.