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startrekholidays fic is done and posted, and my yuletide fic is at the "bus pass" stage--it's not as polished as I would like it, but if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, it would count as fulfilling the assignment. I also have a treat that I'm working on, which is going well, but I'm sort of concerned about how long it's going to be. I hope it will not turn out to be like From Castle To Palace, a 17k-long treat I wrote in 2016. There are other treats I would like to write!
Speaking of long fic, I am going to do the "digress like Hugo!" festival that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
petra is going to be hosting next year. You know all those 19th Century novelists like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, where they'd have these long digressions (whole chapters sometimes!) about stuff that was only vaguely related to the story? Like, in Les Mis, you get literally 70 pages in before you even meet Jean Valjean, the main character. There's chapters about everything from the Battle of Waterloo to French religious life, where the action stops completely while the author lectures you about whatever. Melville was the same (wales are fish!). Dickens didn't have whole chapters that were digressions, but he had lots of shorter digressions within chapters.
Some of us have a natural inclination to write like that. For me, worldbuilding is my jam, and I regularly have bits of worldbuilding I come up with that ... I can't actually fit into the story itself. It very much informs how I'm writing the plot and characters, but the reader doesn't need to know it and it would stop the story to go into all that detail. So to have a fic fest where we are encouraged to put in all that stuff, is just going to be so much fun.
I'm going to write Star Trek. My main self-insert OC, back when I was a young otter, was a Vulcan priestess who was also Spock's daughter and married to a human starship captain. Besides the adventures I had them go on (most of which I can't recall, none of which I ever wrote down) I filled notebooks with lore. (backstory! family history and geneology! timelines! etc!) And I still today, when I'm daydreaming, will have T'Amanda and her husband the Captain show up in various Star Trek shows. (They go to DS9! They have a wacky wormhole accident and end up in the Delta Quadrant with Voyager! They have a wacky time travel accident and end up on Captain Archer's Enterprise! They have a wacky time travel accident and end up in the Reboot universe! ... etc.)
I am going to be completely self-indulgent and use them as the base story to do Vulcan worldbuilding digressions around. Marriage customs! The history of various inter-clan disputes! The history of Vulcan/Human romantic relationships (and sexual harassment)! Saavik's history and how it impacts her relationship to Vulcan culture! Religion on Vulcan and what high priestesses do when they're not performing the fal-tor-pan! What aromanticism and amatonormativity look like in the 24th Century!
The challenge is going to be, "can I figure out enough plot to hang the digressions on?" and we shall have to see about that. I'm definitely going to go the Victor Hugo route of "we're not even going to MEET the main character until we get a whole long section of stuff about this other character who is pretty minor in the grand scheme of the story." It's not going to be seventy pages long (I hope), but it'll be there.
startrekholidays fic is done and posted, and my yuletide fic is at the "bus pass" stage--it's not as polished as I would like it, but if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, it would count as fulfilling the assignment. I also have a treat that I'm working on, which is going well, but I'm sort of concerned about how long it's going to be. I hope it will not turn out to be like From Castle To Palace, a 17k-long treat I wrote in 2016. There are other treats I would like to write!Speaking of long fic, I am going to do the "digress like Hugo!" festival that
petra is going to be hosting next year. You know all those 19th Century novelists like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, where they'd have these long digressions (whole chapters sometimes!) about stuff that was only vaguely related to the story? Like, in Les Mis, you get literally 70 pages in before you even meet Jean Valjean, the main character. There's chapters about everything from the Battle of Waterloo to French religious life, where the action stops completely while the author lectures you about whatever. Melville was the same (wales are fish!). Dickens didn't have whole chapters that were digressions, but he had lots of shorter digressions within chapters.Some of us have a natural inclination to write like that. For me, worldbuilding is my jam, and I regularly have bits of worldbuilding I come up with that ... I can't actually fit into the story itself. It very much informs how I'm writing the plot and characters, but the reader doesn't need to know it and it would stop the story to go into all that detail. So to have a fic fest where we are encouraged to put in all that stuff, is just going to be so much fun.
I'm going to write Star Trek. My main self-insert OC, back when I was a young otter, was a Vulcan priestess who was also Spock's daughter and married to a human starship captain. Besides the adventures I had them go on (most of which I can't recall, none of which I ever wrote down) I filled notebooks with lore. (backstory! family history and geneology! timelines! etc!) And I still today, when I'm daydreaming, will have T'Amanda and her husband the Captain show up in various Star Trek shows. (They go to DS9! They have a wacky wormhole accident and end up in the Delta Quadrant with Voyager! They have a wacky time travel accident and end up on Captain Archer's Enterprise! They have a wacky time travel accident and end up in the Reboot universe! ... etc.)
I am going to be completely self-indulgent and use them as the base story to do Vulcan worldbuilding digressions around. Marriage customs! The history of various inter-clan disputes! The history of Vulcan/Human romantic relationships (and sexual harassment)! Saavik's history and how it impacts her relationship to Vulcan culture! Religion on Vulcan and what high priestesses do when they're not performing the fal-tor-pan! What aromanticism and amatonormativity look like in the 24th Century!
The challenge is going to be, "can I figure out enough plot to hang the digressions on?" and we shall have to see about that. I'm definitely going to go the Victor Hugo route of "we're not even going to MEET the main character until we get a whole long section of stuff about this other character who is pretty minor in the grand scheme of the story." It's not going to be seventy pages long (I hope), but it'll be there.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-13 12:24 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2021-12-13 01:13 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2021-12-13 01:21 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2021-12-13 02:00 am (UTC)From:I can't wait to delve into my DOTV digressions (once all the exchange assignments are fulfilled).
Your Trek concept sounds exciting, and I look very much forward to reading the resulting fic. YAY for self-indulgent world-building!
no subject
Date: 2021-12-13 06:33 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2021-12-14 01:36 am (UTC)From:also my Vulcan self-insert OC in my teens was T'Aman
who was half-Romulan
you know, like you do
no subject
Date: 2021-12-14 02:22 am (UTC)From:My OC's name was "T'Amanda"