InsaneJournal

Current mood:

contemplative

The Rest is Still Unwritten
I'm not heavily into black teas other than chai anymore, but I have an ongoing fondness for Bigelow's Constant Comment, especially in the fall. I've looked at other orange pekoe teas and I've yet to find one that smells or tastes so sweetly delicious. I've been known to just sit and smell the teabags a while before steeping them, because I love the smell that much. *sips*

I've been extended on the job again, pretty much through the end of November. I'm choosing to take the high road with it--more money, staying close to my pals, knowing where I'll be at Thanksgiving--but I confess to a certain ongoing amusement that I've tried to quit this job twice and yet they still WILL NOT LET ME GO. I also sing Hotel California a lot.

Last night, The Husband and I got to see Cate Blanchett in Streetcar Named Desire, the combination of two of my favorite things. I don't even know what to say about it. Other than the ache in my knees that is the punishment for being tall and going to the theater, it was an absolutely perfect evening. It was one of those times when you forget where you are and you forget that you're watching something and you forget that these people are only pretending and you get entirely swept up in story. I'm no conoisseur by any means, but I am an avid fan of theater and to be able to see a favorite play put on live AND to be able to see a favorite actor perform it (AND to be there with The Husband, who'd never seen ANY version of Streetcar and didn't even know what it was about...)... It was magical. Absolutely magical. If all the performances weren't sold out, I would've absolutely gone again, later in the run. *sighs*

On the writing front, I really feel like I'm slipping into Appetite again. I feel shakiest on the characterization, remembering who these characters are, their habits, their voices, but I also feel immersed again, the restless need to be thinking about them in idle moments, scratching at the story's rough spots like a mosquito bite. One of the things about how I write larger stories is that (often), I'll start writing, off the cuff and I'll be quite some distance in before I realize that I either don't know where I'm going at all, or my vague idea of where I'm going isn't fleshed out enough to actually TELL ME how to get there. And so when I do "outlines" (Which are really more of a beat sheet), they're usually only from chapter four onward, or similar. I have to be invested enough in the story to a) want to sit down and figure it all out and b) to not get scared off by an outline. Which is a little piece of persiflage that has no real point, other than 'huh'.

I'm finding it's a little weird trying to switch gears between AKB and Appetite, which is funny because when I first started Appetite, I felt as though the stories were very complimentary to each other and it was much easier to flip between them. I'm taking this as a good sign as to how each of the stories has branched further off on their own arc, but it is a little weird. I'm worrying about losing my voice for one or the other, though there's not much I can do about that except slough through.

The whole realization about the outlining came about because I realized that, while I know where Appetite is going and I have some very specific plans for things that happen LATER in the story, the part that I'm currently IN is a vague, rosy haze of "and this is the part where they fall in love" and I didn't have a lot of specificity about how I was going to show all that. So I did knuckle down and give myself a beat sheet from my current point to the end. Right now there's about 15 "beats" that I need to hit, though I'm not sure how that's all going to work out scene-wise.

On the one hand, it feels good to have it so concretely in front of me, to know where I'm going next and what I have to do there. On the moon hand, it's a little intimidating to have it outlined so concretely in front of me and wonder how I'm going to make all that happen. *laughs*

On the AKB front, I'm having a bit of a dilemma about what I want the next scene to be. There's what I planned and then there's the dark horse scene that came up when I veered off track. I'm thinking about writing both scenes at the same time and seeing which has more pull and which seems more...relevant, but I don't know. I really do want to focus on Appetite. I'm feeling in need of self-reassurance that I CAN write original fiction AND complete it.

So I think I've decided that I'm NOT going to do prettylightsfic because while I think I could write RPF in other fandoms than SPN, I don't know those fandoms or actors as "intimately" as I know the SPN ones and I know me. I'll end up doing all this research to try and get it "right" and I just don't feel like investing that kind of work in fandoms I'm not nearly as interested in. And I just feel guilty only offering SPN fandom. Besides, 99% of the fandom is J2 and while I CAN write it, and I enjoy reading it, writing it doesn't turn my crank the way it used to. So why set myself up to write something I won't really enjoy?

OTOH, I'm wondering if there's enough of us, yet, who might be interested in a JDM ficathon. Not NOW, obviously; I'd probably want to wait until all the winter fests are past, but... Yeah. A JDM-centric ficathon. Het, slash...hell, I'd even take JDM gen. Just JDM and SOMEBODY. A human shaped person. Anybody maybe interested in that? Sometime in January, maybe?