Title: In the Flesh
Characters: Sae and Reika, mentions of Gunnar and Ichiro
Warmakers Adventure: 14
Word Count: ~3,300
Summary: Sae's sister is her twin, but that doesn't mean their bodies are the same. Sae likes her Guardian powers, but that doesn't mean she's comfortable with what her body can do.
Notes: All of the twins' conversation comes from an email RP with shadawyn.

( Still on the B-52 ... )

Title: Long-Distance Communication
Characters: Sae and Gunnar
Warmakers Adventure: 14
Word Count: ~1,200
Summary: The Guardians are chased out of Tokyo by devils. Gunnar and Sae have a chance to talk. Both things are pretty scary.
Notes: Much of this fic was co-written in an email RP with ratzeo, Gunnar's player, and involves a minor retcon of what happened during the adventure.

( Having a low Charisma means you tend to put your foot in your mouth. Having a high Wisdom means you know it. Neither one makes you a better conversationalist. )

Squeaking in under the deadline of tomorrow's adventure ...

Title: Reflections, Distortions
Characters: Sae, Reika, and a little bit of Miya, Gunnar, and Ichiro
Warmakers Adventure: 12 and 13.
Word Count: ~3,200
Summary: Reflections aren't always accurate; reflections can be stretched, bent, distorted, depending on the mirror. The same image has infinite possibilities for change.

( Sae is reflected in those around her. )

So, if one were particularly dorky, one might have imagined this fic representing an "episode" of Warmakers that centers on Sae's character development, the way that a lot of anime series dedicate an episode to individual character introspection. There would be a lot of artistic still shots and blank screens with text, a la an episode of Honey & Clover or Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou. The text would be anonymous, yearning questions, such as What does it mean to be different? and How do I change myself without you? And maybe the opening scene, with young Reika and Sae, would be echoed in a closing image of two hands, larger than children's, letting go of each other.

But only if one were particularly dorky. ;)

Galath and Nexus talk. Nexus thinks. Nym watches.

Thanks to ratzeo for helping me RP with Galath (an NPC), which I used as a loose guide for this story.

( Aftermath )

I need a Nexus icon. Hm.

Anyhoo, this is a little mini-fic I started writing a while ago, to start exploring Nexus' concept of gender. Then miss_arel's character brought the subject up at Sunday's game, so it seemed apropos to finish it up and post it.

In case it isn't clear, this scene takes place when Nexus is very young, before it rebelled from its former owner, and is still a soldier.

( A Dialogue )

I am totally up past my bedtime. Damn you, ratzeo. XD

I wrote this because I wanted to have a record of the awesomeness that was Saturday's adventure. As such, this is mostly a straightforward recounting of the events of the final battle. I hope it's accessible (and interesting) to people who weren't at the game. I really do think this is one of my favorite adventures that I've ever played, and I hope to convey some of the excitement for others.

That said, the details of the events may not be entirely accurate. Because, well, I forgot them, and my notes are at ratzeo's place. :P Additionally, I got GM approval for retconning a bit at the end so that Nexus could take a token from Kershahk.

( Battle's End )

Teenage angst (and delusions)! Mommy issues! My Warmakers OTP!!1!

( Limits )

Two (and a half) adventures in, and ratzeo has me writing fic for his game. I don't know if that's cool, or sad. :P

My character in this game is Nexus, a construct based off of the Warforged race from the Eberron campaign setting (just with a different origin story). It is three years old, and has spent over two years wandering on its own, since it killed the man who once controlled it. It is a chaotic neutral Crusader whose powers are granted by Tempus, deity of warriors. (It also eschews gender identity, for reasons I'll probably write about later.)

In this story, it has just survived a battle against a cult of evil werewolves who threatened to overrun a human town. Lyson (played by Rommel) is its faithful sidekickhuman companion. Other characters who show up are Anora (zinjadu, Luth (Kindra), Levanter (casaval), and Buron (niwatorimegami). Those may or may not be the correct spellings of their names.

( War Trophies )

Another Warmakers story, taking place during Sunday's adventure, in which Sae retrieved her fated Guardian artifact. Includes introspection regarding Sae's role as a Hero of Destiny, as well as some geeky references/foreshadowing about her class progression.

As always, thanks to irishninja for a great adventure.

( Tests )

It's really bloody hot in my house.

... Which apparently triggers my brain to write fic for Warmakers (irishninja's game). Who knew.

Takes place during Episode 9, "Trained to Kill," wherein our heroes are interrupted on their train ride to Moscow on their way to continue their holy quest. My character, Sae, is usually very reticent during game sessions. So I made her talk a lot.

( Compromises )

feminist_writer

I figure some of you guys would be interested in this. :D I haven't worked on my writing in a really long time, but I joined anyway because this sounds like it'll be a great space.

Home. Have fortified self with ice cream. Story file is open.

Told myself self wouldn't go to bed until self had 500 more words written (to bump story over 2000-word mark/halfway point).

May not get much sleep tonight. May be zombie for lovely Valentine's dinner tomorrow.

Still good. Glad I went to showing, even if cut into writing time. People are hilarious, fun, and twisted as all fuck.

Now to conjure up artistic genius. Am sure this won't go badly and that promise to self won't bite self in ass.

Edited 1:42 a.m.: 554 words (total 2108). The highest word count I've had more than 24 hours before the story was due. A winner is me!

So, Friday night I left the ADP showing early to start work on my short story. Instead, I spent the evening writing a rant that eventually got eaten by the computer. (See whiny post below.)

Yesterday I was going to work on my short story. Instead, I wasted the afternoon (I'm still not sure how, but it involved the ready-made distractions of people visiting and the TV being on). Then I spent the evening writing a rant which *did* get posted. (See ragey post below.) Then I spent the night rearranging my icons (including finally changing my default icon, whee).

The result? I now have less than 1000 words of my story written, and it's due tomorrow morning. *sigh* You know, I would take shadawyn up on her book rec, because that would be really useful for my problem, but reading it right now would just mean wasting more time. :P

(I will also not read Blog for Choice Day, which celebrates the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. However, I will put the link here so I can read it later.)

Ten seconds away from hitting "post" on my entry, and the computer decides to freeze. This is a computer that hardly ever freezes -- I can literally count the number of times I've had to do a hard shutdown on one hand. And not just a single program going buggy, either -- it was one of those totally-unresponsive-complete-cessation-of-all-activity freezes. (Though I suppose I would have lost the entry whether Firefox or the whole thing crapped out.)

All I can say is, thank goodness it didn't happen when I was working on my short story, which is due Monday morning for class. >_>;; Although at least I would have saved that -- when I'm writing in Word, I'm a neurotic ctrl+s masher. But there's no save feature in LJ, and I kept thinking I should save, but then naah, I'm almost done ...

Gnargh. Maybe this was punishment for not working on my story, though. I mean, I did say I was going to skip the showing and go home to write my story, so as to avoid another Sunday night spent desperately typing into the wee hours of the morning ... You know, I should really learn to just write like a normal person instead of going on these 48 hour literary binges. At least this time I have a planned outline, though. (It was a required assignment. XD;;;) That's better than last time, when I didn't have a plot until Friday night. Or the time before that, where I had a plot, but didn't start seriously writing until Saturday evening. I mean, that's improvement, right? :P

... But my entry was full of ranty goodness. A lot of ranty goodness. Expending all that energy in rage and then losing it all is ... kind of a bitch. XO Ah well. I'm letting it go. But maybe I'll finish my story and have time to try and rewrite the rant. It's been too long since I've had a good rage, and they're therapeutic. :P

Since the quarter is winding down and our portfolio due dates are looming, we spent the majority of our time in Intermediate Verse Writing today discussing revision. One of the things we did was compile a list of all the tips we had heard/tried that we could use during our revising process. There are only 11 students in my class, so discussions really become slightly structured conversations -- and I was just sitting there, listening to my classmates discuss the same concerns about poetry that I have. Someone would describe a technique, and someone else would say "yeah, that works," or "yeah, that helps with ..." And I got advice and heard people talk about grappling with the same problems that make me rip out my hair, or playing around with the same things that I think are fun, and it was just. Agh. I'm not the only one. This isn't the way it was back in high school, where I didn't really have an environment that allowed this kind of thing. This is why I'm here, you know?

Of course, this does seem rather obvious. I'm studying creative writing, and I just realized that I get to learn about writing? :P But it's one of those things that can lapse into the mundane, and it was good to remember how awesomely cool this is.

(But then I also remember, holy crap, the quarter's almost over. I'm not ready for Winter Quarter! Hell, I'm not ready for winter -- why was the ground white this morning??)

I decided this weekend on a new tactic for combating my inability to get any writing done -- namely, setting aside a half hour, roughly 8:00 to 8:30, to work on my revisions. It's worked so far -- admittedly, I've only been doing it for three days, but hey, it's all about setting a routine to follow. :P The technique thwarts my usual laziness, because I can't put off my writing until "later." It accounts for my perfectionism, because I don't have to make the story perfect (a prospect which will render me instantly paralyzed with lack of self-confidence); I just have to work, for half an hour, on improving it bit by bit. Thus far, I have finished the revision of the story I submitted to the girls a couple of weeks ago (or, at least, have messed with it to the point where I can't mess with it anymore). Tonight I started on my last story, from May, and I've done some set-up to include more detailed/unique fantasy elements, which I developed a little in my set of drabbles.

Good stuff. And now I want to babble about the books I've been reading since my last post.

( Interactive clicky list brought to you by Amazon.com )

Robin Hobb on fanfiction.

An entertaining and eloquent response.

I find this sad because Robin Hobb, when she came to lecture for us, was very lovely and seemed quite reasonable. But this rant is a more articulate version of the usual arteeste hissyfit that makes me want to tear my hair out.

The response post generally covers my feelings on the matter, the most important of which is this: authorial intent is not divine decree. The legitimacy of fan interpretation is a well-established tradition in pop culture as a way for the audience to increase their love and ownership of a given work. And that's a good thing. Fan ownership does not mean legal ownership (except in the case of a few nutjobs), but rather a greater personal investment in a given work. That means we like it more, and we're more likely to give you money to make more of it.

You can't always convey exactly what you want the reader to see in your writing. That's just the way that writing works. Writers try, through editing and workshopping, to improve the communication of their ideas ... but at a certain point, you have to accept that the reader will just think something different from you. And if the reader is using his or her different thoughts to do something as creative as writing about your work? Well, I don't know about you, but that's a level of energetic intellectual exchange that I would love to see, if and when I publish my own work.

(As for the "personal masturbatory fantasies" ... It is true that a good chunk of fanfic is just that, and has little redeeming value. But fans are imagining this stuff anyway; the fact that they write it down and post it is just a result of the instant gratification of mindless feedback that the Internet provides. It's not a flaw inherent to fanfic.)

Oh, and let me say that yes, writing fanfiction *can* be used as a way to improve one's fiction writing abilities. It's all to do with how you take advantages of the particular challenges and opportunities it provides, in addition to other ways of practicing writing. The statement that "You will learn more from writing one story of your own, no matter how bad it is, than the most polished Inuyasha fan fiction that you write" is very, very false. But that's a rant I've done before, as is the rest of it. I'll just let people read the original, and the response, and come to their own conclusions.

I feel both exhausted and accomplished (hence, "exhaumplished"). This week and past weekend I vanquished a couple of major projects, including both my short story for class and a massive filing endeavor at work; and it suddenly feels like I've been inundated with recognition. Today, I had a great and ego-inflating workshop for my story -- not that there wasn't criticism, of course, but I received a lot of praise concerning things I was particularly invested in, and the critique focused on aspects that I knew needed revision anyway, so it was actually encouraging. I also opened my email to find a sort of virtual fanfare from many of the women in my office concerning the project I just finished. And I found out yesterday that I aced the English lit midterm I was fretting over last week. So, yes, ego-boosts all around. I could get used to this ... or highly suspicious. As it is, I already think all this is sort of weird. >_>

Anyway, now that the boring self-congratulations are over, I have a question for the writerly types out there. At the beginning of the quarter, my short story instructor had us brainstorm about -- among other things -- what themes we tend to write about. I looked at my responses again after finishing this latest short story, and was interested to see that the same themes had cropped up in this piece. My short stories from this past year all address, in some form or another, the idea of control (of self and of others) and of self-deception.

So my question for you: What themes/issues do you address in your writing? Even if it's not always in the forefront, what tends to show up, even if you don't consciously intend it? Obviously it's not always easy to recognize this in our own writing, but what have you noticed? Do you talk about ego, unrequited love, competition? Do you always write about sibling relationships, etc.? How do you think your treatment of these issues has changed or matured?

Done.

4695 words.

*dies*

I don't know how I'll feel about it in the morning, though I do know I already look at the ending with distaste. But it's complete, at least, and that's all I can manage for now. I'm hoping that the rest of today's writing went as well as I thought it did, and I can just fix the rest later.

Good night, all.