Otter's Rock

My 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.

I am working on a story for rarepairsexchange. Is it my assignment? No. It is not. However, it's what I had an immediate plot bunny for, and since my assigned recip left a list of generic DNWs and likes but almost nothing specific to either pairing in the fandom we matched on, I am going to have to canon review and search for a plot bunny. The closest thing I have to a plot bunny with my assignment is Thoughts on what a character from one requested pairing thinks of a character from the other requested pairing. Which would be an interesting story in the fandom and not one that's been done before, but would not fulfill my assignment. This is why I so much prefer when people have fandom-specific stuff in their signup rather than generic likes and DNWs. Quite often, I like the fandom and the pairing but I don't have any plot bunnies without something to prime the pump!

So, canon review it is. Hopefully, that will inspire me.

Homophones are words that sound the same but mean different things (and are usually spelled differently).  They are the bane of writers, ESPECIALLY in the modern era, because spellcheck often doesn't catch them.  So if you aren't sure which one is which, or just make a mistake ... your first line of defense isn't going to help.

Anyway!  Here is a list of common homophone fails.  If you aren't sure of something, you can check it here.
 

( Commonly Confused Words Ahoy! )

 

Rebloggable on tumblr.

There's this thing that happens in fictional weddings.  "If any of you has a reason why these two should not be married, speak now or forever hold your peace."  It is probably THE most common thing to have in a fictional wedding ceremony.

Problem is, it's ... very rarely used in ACTUAL weddings in the US.  It comes out of the Anglican tradition, because England had all sorts of laws about things that could prevent people from being married.  If you've ever heard of the banns being read, that was this thing where you had to post a notice of your intent to get married and have it announced in church for several weeks running, to give people time to dig up dirt or work up the courage to come forward with reasons why the couple in question should not be married.  It rarely actually happened, because mostly people lived and worked in small rural communities where everyone knew everyone else and everybody already knew the dirt on each other so if there was an impediment, people knew not to even try getting engaged.  But the mechanism was still there, and the "speak now" moment was the last possible moment to raise an issue the bride, groom, minister, and the couples' families might not be aware of.

Thing is, that's specific to the Anglican Church.  In the US, the Episcopal Church is part of the Anglican communion, and the Methodists (and a couple others) are offshoots of it.  Those groups MAY have the "speak now" moment in their ceremonies.  I don't know.

Nobody else does it.  Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, other branches of Protestant, Orthodox, any religion other than Christianity, any secular person doing a marriage, they're not going to say that.  It's not and never has been part of our traditions.  The ONLY reason for anyone who is not having an Anglican/Episcopalian minister (or minister from an offshoot church) saying the "if any of you has a reason ..." bit is that they've seen it on TV and their idea of what a marriage is supposed to look like is completely patterned off of TV.

If your fic is set in England, or the wedding is taking place in an Episcopalian church with an Episcopalian priest, well and good.  If it isn't?  And you do the "just cause" bit?  I'm going to side-eye you.

If you're wondering what you should use instead, if it's an American wedding there will probably be vows of some sort.  And there's ALL KINDS of templates online for wedding ceremonies.

Over the last couple of days, I've been going through my WIPs to figure out what I can finish and get posted and what will take more work.  One fic just required another scene added, which was done, and now it's off at the betas.  But the strange thing is, one of the fics was done.  I mean, it could use a beta pass, but like it was a complete story (not just ending at a logical place but at the place I had intended to end it).  Why the heck didn't it get sent off to the beta when I finished it?  IDK.  Hopefully they will both get published in the next few days.

Lo these many years ago, when I was just a fannish newb trying to post fanfic to LJ, my elders passed down to me a secret: how to html code your fic the easy way in Microsoft Word, without either introducing errors or weird characters.  You see, if you use a rich text interface and go directly from Word to the rich text posting, things like smart quotes (quotes which curl toward the quoted text, which is Microsoft's default) will come out as weird characters when viewed in some browsers.  If, however, you post into the html interface, you lose the smart quotes ... but you also lose all other formatting like italics and so forth.  And if you write while inserting the html tags as you go, it looks a lot messier and is harder to read and edit, at least for me, anyway.

And so here I am, passing on what I have learned so that nobody has to hand code all their italics.

Here's the simple and easy way of coding your italics and such in Word.

1. Write your fic as if it is a normal story.  If you want to have something italicized, just do it using Word's normal functions.  If you want something bold, do it using Word's normal functions.  Do this with all formatting like that.  Don't put in any html coding at all.  Just remember what formatting you put in that you will want to keep.
   1. EXCEPT scene breaks.  If you use something like this *** and Word turns it into lines for you, stop it from doing that.  (You can do this by hitting the backspace every time it does that, it should revert to *** for you.)  Use consistent characters for scene breaks, the same every time.
   2. Put a manual line break between each paragraph.  This looks nicest if you set it so that it doesn't automatically give you extra space between paragraphs, but you don't have to.  (This can be adjusted in the "Paragraph" dialog box, or in the Layout tab if you're using Word online through OneDrive.)
2. When done and ready to post, hit ctrl-F.  This will bring up the Find box.  There are three tabs at the top; Find, Replace, and Go To.  Click Replace.  There will now be two fields in the box, Find What and Replace With.
3. Put your cursor in the Find What field.  Type in whatever characters you use for scene breaks.  Then put your cursor in the Replace With field, and type < hr > (remove the spaces).  Click the "Replace All" button.  You now have the html code for horizontal lines at all the scene breaks.
4. Delete the scene break characters from the Find What box.  Click the "More" button; more options should show up.  Down at the bottom, there will be a "Replace" section with three dropdown buttons, one greyed out.  Click the "Format" dropdown and select "Font."  A new dialog box will appear.  Click Italic in the Font Style box, and then Okay.  This dialog box will disappear, taking you back to the Find/Replace box, and underneath the Find What field it will now say Font: Italic.  Move your cursor to the Replace With field and type in < em > (without the spaces).  With your cursor still in the Replace With field, click the "Special" dropdown at the bottom and select "Find What Text."  A caret and ampersand (^&) should show up in the Replace With field.  After the caret ampersand, type < / em > (no spaces).  It should look like this, except without the spaces: < em > ^& < / em >.  Click "Replace All."  All of your italic text will still be italic, but it will now have the html tags around it.  You don't have to worry about remembering to close tags--the open tag will be inserted just before the italics begin, and the close tags will be inserted just after they end, leaving the text in the middle just the same as you typed it.
5. Do the same with bold text, changing "italic" to "bold" in the Font Style box and using the strong tag instead of the em tag in the Replace With field.
6. Do the same with any other formatting you want to do in html.
7. Save As.  Instead of just hitting "Save," click "Save As" button and select .txt from the file type dropdown.  It'll ask you if you're sure, because that will strip out a lot of the formatting.  Click yes--you want to get rid of all of Microsoft's bulky and weird formatting, leaving nothing but your text and html tags.
8. Open the .txt version of your story in a program like Notepad that does nothing but read .txt files, and copy and paste from there into the HTML posting interface of the site of your choice.

And there you have it!  A lot simpler and easier than typing in your html tags by hand, with no chance of missing a close tag somewhere.

Rebloggable on tumblr.

I am writing an Agent Carter fic.  The show usually had some badass fight scenes between Peggy and the villain du jour, and I was planning on doing that.  But she’s an espionage agent, and so for her fighting often means she’s failed because she’s been spotted.  The most important thing, in most counter-espionage (which is what she’s doing) is to spot the enemy without being spotted in return, so you can tail them and find out their contacts and keep the enemy you know from being replaced by agents you don’t know (and hopefully feeding them false information while you do it).

It has just occurred to me that maybe instead of a fight scene, I should end this fic by the target being positively identified and put under surveillance.  But it seems so anticlimactic.   (On the other hand, it means I don’t have to figure out what the villain’s plot is, because that’s part of what the surveillance is meant to find out.)  (On the third hand, it also means I don’t have to write a fight scene, which is good because I suck at action.)  (On the fourth hand, given the time constraints, I think I’m going to write the surveillance ending so I can post it today before the deadline, then send it out to beta and see what they say–I’ve got a week until it goes live.)

Thoughts, opinions?

I was reading a Sentinel-AU fanfic, and it occurred to me that reading and writing such fics would be good practice for writing autistic characters.  Because Sentinel fics are all about the senses and thinking through what it would be like if you had hypersensitivity.

Guess what!  Hypersensitivity is a common symptom of autism spectrum disorders!  We’re not Sentinels, of course, but we are often really sensitive to things that allistic people don’t even notice, and we often have trouble filtering out the things we’re sensitive to.  That’s one of the more common causes of autistic children having meltdowns (which allistic people sometimes mistake for temper tantrums).  The world is a big, noisy, smelly, overly-bright place designed for people whose senses work differently than ours, and children especially have trouble processing it, and so they get hysterical because they Just. Can’t. Cope.  (Which is why one of the most effective ways of dealing with a meltdown is to take them into a dimly-lit, neutral room and have them lay down under a blanket you know they like the texture of, so you can block out all the overwhelming stimuli.)  Adults tend to have better coping skills and better ability to avoid the things that really knock us for a loop, but it’s no more pleasant for us as adults than when we were kids.

So you know how in Sentinel fics, clothes feeling like sandpaper is a major clue that Character A is now a Sentinel?  It is super-common for people on the autism spectrum to have that issue with clothes feeling like sandpaper.  And yet, at the same time, that same person might not even notice getting a cut–it’s a different sensation.  It’s not all things relating to a particular sense, for us; we tend to be hypersensitive to certain things.  For example, my nose is normally pretty bad, I’m not good at picking up and determining odors, but the “new car” smell makes me nauseous and I JUST CAN’T STAND IT.  Most textures don’t bother me to feel (and a few I really, really love), but there are a couple that freak me out.  So if you’re writing an autistic character, and you want to get into their head, pick a couple of sensitivities and show the reader why the autistic person doesn’t like them (or, conversely, really really likes them).

Of course, one of the differences between Sentinels in fic and autistics in reality is that when a Sentinel has a sensory issue, most people are sympathetic.  When an autistic person has a sensory issue, we’re told to get over it and stop being so weird.

I'm happy to be writing again!  But I wish I were writing something different.

What I should be writing: either completing the fics from the prompts I solicited last year to get me back writing again, or fics to get me eligible in certain fandoms for the main remix (remixers_lounge ) or femmeremix.

What I am actually writing: a Star Trek/Classic Hollywood RPF where Cyd Charisse is really a stranded Vulcan trying to build a life on Earth.  My brain, I don't even know.  (If I write an epilogue where the Crew of the Enterprise finds out and watches a Cyd Charisse movie, will that count as a TOS fic for the purposes of the remix or is it cheating?)

(And yes, that's Ginger Rogers dancing in my icon, not Cyd Charisse.  Nobody had legs like Cyd.)

I love Mark Twain--doesn't everybody?--and while re-reading one of my favorite of his essays, I had a thought.  The essay is "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," a hilarious critique of "The Leatherstocking Tales" by James Fenimore Cooper, the only one of which you have likely heard being The Last of the Mohicans.  Although they were hailed as classics and great works of literature in their day, they've largely fallen out of circulation, largely for the reasons Mark Twain lists.  (Though a modern critic would add quite harsh words about the overwhelming levels of prejudice and condescension towards non-whites in the stories.)

Anyway, the point is, that most of the problems Twain lists can also be found in the worse kinds of fanfic, the kind that make discerning readers hit the back button quite quickly.  I know that none of you, dear Readers, would ever commit these heinous crimes against the Literary Art, but in the hope that some among you may find them Useful, I hereby present "The nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction" as given by Mark Twain, with some additions by myself.

( Nineteen Rules ).

There will always be bad!fic, if for no other reason than that every writer has 1 million bad words in zir, and zie just has to write until zie gets them out.  (I know there is a great deal of my early work--two whole novels, and some other stuff--that will never see the light of day again.)  Still, it's a lot quicker to get those million bad words out if one has some idea of what to look for in good work, because if you can find it in your own, it's a lot easier to polish what you've got.