Fannish Round-Up

1. Bidding is open at helpthesouth until May 25. I am offering fanfic, probably Sanctuary but we can talk, and my thread is here.

2. Voting is open at the sfa_ficawards until midnight my time tonight. We've more or less solved the James problem, but a few more votes couldn't hurt. ;)

3. I am looking for a list of horror tropes that can be used as chapters titles for my Kiss Kiss Big Bang story. So far, I've got The Woman in White, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Blood Mary.

4. I am also building a play list. If you have a song that you think is particularly perfect for a vampire apocalypse, I'd love to know. So far, I've got the entire "Fallen" album by Evanescence (more for atmosphere than words in most cases), the "Hot Summer Night" poem from "Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth" (because it's so, soooo Helen), the VSQ version of "Sweet Child of Mine" (which is for flashbacks), and U2/Green Day's "The Saints Are Coming" (because if that's not a Kate rescue song, I don't know what is). To give you an idea. ;)

5. STARBUCKS TODAY! When I get out of bed. Which will be soon. I'm almost sure of it...

How I Write: What To Do When You Can't

I'm not talking about the "can't write" part where you're sitting in Starbucks with your coffee and your iPod and that mocking cursor...I'm talking when you're bursting with ideas and prohibited, for whatever reason, from writing them down.

annerbhp actually inspired this post with her lamentation a couple days ago of having lost a perfect scene for not having been able to write it down. We've all been there. Some of us have lost entire stories to the void of Not Having Writing Materials On Hand. It's very frustrating. I am interested, however, in how you guys cope with that.

For my part, I have always been a note taker. If you look back through my university notes, you will find that I have entire SG-1 fics written out in the margins, on the backs of hand-outs, between the lines. When I worked at the Nursing Home, I always had paper in my pocket and at the end of the night, it would be split half-way between notes for charting and snippets of Daniel/Janet sequences. At the Book Store, I had oodles of time to myself and wrote entire stories while I waited for customers to come in.

This changed a bit with The Stone Thief. I took almost no notes beforehand, and wrote it so quickly that I didn't have time to take more than basic "What We Need To Do" notes as I was ploughing through it. Typically, I would stop writing it with a chapter still in my head so that the next day when I got back to the coffeeshop, I would know where I planned to start. I was basically racing myself through the novel, and I don't think it suffers for that.

It used to really, really piss off my uni friends that I could write my papers the night before and still get an A- (or a B+) on them. The truth is, I'd been writing that paper for a month at that point, but in my head. By the time I sat down the night before (or sometimes the morning of if it was a night class), I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I could write as fast as I could format. Writing fic has been a lot like that, since my Thesis anyway. I decide what I am going to write, and then I write it.

(Thank you, once again, Dr. Daviau! If I ever have a memory half as good as yours, I'll be content.)

But all of this assumes I can take notes. And sometimes, you can't. Because you're working or driving or chasing a three-year-old. Then what? Fortunately, I've trained myself to take notes in my head and remember them as well (again, largely thanks to Dr. Daviau, but also because of another trick I learned when I was little).

I used to have terrible, terrible nightmares when I was little, but I could never remember what they were. My mother had a friend who was interested in lucid dreaming, and so she taught me how to take some measure of control over my dreams. There are two amusing side effects of this: 1. I can wake up at 6:34 without an alarm almost any time I tell myself to, and 2. Any time I start to have a nightmare, I replace the villain with Boba Fett, because apparently when I was six, I found him an ineffective bad guy.

What this means is that if I think of something before I fall asleep, I can make myself dream it, and then I can make myself remember it. It's how I saw the closing scene for my Angel story "Transcendence" years before I wrote it down. It also means that when I'm stuck in the field digging shovel tests or walking for kilometres on end, I can recite the fic to myself until it's wedged in my brain, and then I just need to think about trees and blisters and there it is again (music is my preferred trigger, obviously, but beggars can't be choosers).

I do have a freakishly good memory, particularly if things come "in voice", but generally speaking I plan for weeks in my head before I actually write anything down (besides character names. If I didn't write those down, I'd never remember them).

I'm curious, f-list, what do you do?

Because if mylittleredgirl watches it, then she'll understand m

This is my "go to" list for converting people to Sanctuary. You don't really need to read it. Unless you are not watching Sanctuary, in which case you need to read it and then go and watch the episodes.

No real spoilers, just cut for a list.

( Season One )

( Season Two )

( Season Three )

Yes, I am recommending four episodes I haven't seen yet, based on my assumption that they cannot possibly suck.

+++

( A Few Notes )

Did I forget anything?

Fic: Bridges (Sanctuary)

AN: Okay, I said that there wouldn’t be a Kate tag for “Awakenings” because I was writing a longer fic about it. I lied, okay? I just can’t help myself. ;)

Spoilers: Awakenings

Rating: Teen

Disclaimer: Still not mine.

Characters: Kate, Helen, Will, Henry, The Big Guy

Summary: This is who you are.

( Bridges )

Notes: For mylittleredgirl, who doesn’t even watch the show, but who said “Second person present has a bit of a mystical air about it, like it's your character's higher self, watching her do stuff, or something. Second person future is a little more hardcore, like God on the Mountaintop saying Thou Shalt Go Forth And Have Ship.”

Gravity_Not_Included, May 22, 2011