LONG
- Demon of Crosstonross
- Elf Confidence
- Mizzenmast
- Dark Country
- Divenska Dreams of Kings and Queens
- Street of 2 Doors (erotic)
- Harem story - girls in a harem, fantasy
- Lesbian school girls - college
- Exodus style camp
- Creationstyle kids story with the dinosaur pals!
- Zeem through the underworld
- Rania, Aphen, Anton
- Steampunkvamp
- Girl meets sky-pirate who comes to his school
- Dead grandmother's book re. vampire has girl make vamp friend.
- detective future eunuch DREAM
- Fauns & Pan
- Frankie Goes To Perugia (Luminael & St Francis of Assissi)
- King of the Air (Zeem's ex girlfriend and how he ended up where he is)
- Zeem in Africa with Mama Wati
- Chinese dragon crash lands...
- (Mizzenmast) Location, Location - a flying house crashlands in a crap neighbourhood
- (New Persia) Message of the White Deev (eroticesque)
- (qverse) Guy murders another guy while plugged in a la Steve Mann
- (New Persia) Story of thief (fantasy) who works like Gig, hacking people
- (-) Religious priesty story I don't know what yet but I like stories like that
- (Mizzenmast) Story about world with holograms so like the internet
- (Mizzenmast) Stinker Tinker in trouble with Morality
- (-) Man who can see through walls totally fails by killing wife & mailman
- (-) Schitzophrenic chick with goblins who give her powers!
- (-) Computer AIs don't like to talk about the fact that they're descended from viruses
- (-) Girl falls in love with a plant
- (-) Hit list of 10 uploaded photos. Detective races to find the people and prevent killage.
- (Mizzenmast) Large Hadron Collider invention to get rid of things. Jessica!
- (-) A world sans abortion. Article-style.
- (-) Righting antarctic shelf - avec MW
- (-) Wife steals husband's affair
- (New Persia) Woman sells men to country folk
- (Mizzenmast) Carrying a virus as a weapon.
- (Mizzenmast) Hunting AIs like old English families
- (-) Eros fighting with Cupid over who gets to fill the world with love
- (Mizzenmast) Playing poker/card games with a psychic/empath
- (-) Letters from Utopia
- (-) Gay Clockworld-themed story about Josie/football/planetary fun
- (-) Person recognises murderer from childhood events and knows them.
- (-) Two kids with amulets who can see each other through time
- (-) Love affair, one lives in the Victorian/Regency/Renaissance/whatever era, one in the present day
- (Mizzenmast) A huge Skein through which you can see ocean animals
- (-) Two guys, one lake (erotic hopefully)
- (-) Morphing kid... maybe YA?
- Geeks rule the universe
- Obese lesbians in the future with exploding brains
- (-) How I Got To Be Employee Of The Month
- (-) Enid and the Prince, Spec fic for Kids
- (-) What the Pauper Did Next - New Myths
- (-) How We Left The Desert - 3 lobed burning eyes, Ticeronga,
Lonestar, electric spec, damnation, nossa more, minight echo
I wonder if my obsession with the Ottoman boys is linked to Andy's head-tumour. Both Ottomans suddenly came-to-be around the time Andy got his diagnosis. I think it puts you in a funny situation to have a partner or close relative with a fatal or chronic/on going illness, so perhaps they're my way of sublimating my own fears. Ohh, too much honesty for Zeem journal! Perhaps I put myself more into my stories than I like to think.
Anyway. I am a little more relaxed now that chapter three is elsewhere and am prodding chapter four with a large stick. This is the first time I actually introduce Lucian *as* Lucian into the story, and it's also the first time I go into Bink's existence and his connection to the Desanguas beyond OH I HAVE A CRUSH ON ALLELUIA BOTTLE, because let's be fair, even I have a crush on Alleluia. Saucy little minx she is.
Explanatory note: My MC Bink is the clone of his brother. :)
----
When Royal Ottoman was thirteen he found a funny lump in his chest, a tiny nodule shaped a bit like a jelly bean.
At the time he didn’t think it was anything important. He’d had funny lumps before: chicken pox, mosquito bites, pimples, med-rash, blood blisters and even a nasty boil Mr Takuira said he’d gotten from not eating enough fresh fruit. So he didn’t tell anyone about the lump, especially not his mother (who would worry, who was always worrying). Most of the time he forgot it was there, but now and then his t-shirts would brush against it, and he’d think: Funny.
A year later Royal started feeling dizzy when he woke up, so much so that his best friend Gwyn started calling him torus-apad—wobble-foot in pirate Creole. It got so he was tired all the time, it got so bad he would wake up and have to go straight back to bed again, and at night he dreamt his body was falling apart like a battered old airship, panel by panel.
Eventually Mr Takuira drew Pachito aside and said, “There’s a problem with your boy.”
“His father died,” said Pachito. “He’s grieving.”
“His father died six years ago,” said Mr Takuira. “I think this is something else.”
january - this does not go there
february - you'll track mud everywhere
march - you fix it
april - i should have married this other guy
may - i don't know why you're laughing
june - you said you'd fix it and it still isn't fixed
july - were you born in a tent
august - how many times do i have to tell you
september - that outfit makes you look like a clown
october - fine i'll fix it myself
november - you smell
december - i told you so
i just need 12 models. who are all wives. who don't mind posing in a nagging way to suit these themes.
it will be the best calendar ever
I've decided to try my old story about a psychic linked up with an asshat guy, who wins money at cards. It'd be good for me to play with Bouboucar Bottle a bit before I start writing her For Serious.
So basically it's going to be POV of this chick and she's stuck with this guy who's ruined her rep so she can't work anywhere else, and then Boo talks to her and is like, HEY, I need your help to pwn that guy, and the chick is like fine OK, and then they're in the card game and Boo starts telling a story about ... and here's where things break down, I need a good story about a girl who takes back power over someone who's wronged her, scammed her, and it doesn't matter how long you wait... and then Boo like PWNS the guy and wins the chick. :)
I'm pretty sure I'm getting whiter. I mean, looking through old photos, I'm sure as frik not the same colour I used to be.
I actually have three cousins who I SWEAR growing up were olive skinned, a shade or two lighter than me, but are now very pale-skinned. Old pictures of my dad show him about the same colour as this Malian chick I found on the internet image. He's certainly not that colour now.
I know this is a long term concern of mine but it's really tripping me out. Maybe it's a genetic eff up, like how my family gets extra sets of teeth. (Less fun than you think it is, if you were wondering.)
DAMMIT I'M AFRICAN wtf.
( See evidence )
I wrote a long rant about this but the @#$@$ stupid ass thing didn't work.
The reason I'm having trouble with this is not plot based. It's because I have no motivation to fix the weakness of the beginning, and I can't be bothered trying to write a happy merry Christmassy few paragraphs to start about how pretty Wickley looks in winter.
This is all in bits and pieces. May be hard to read.
( Johnny and Babushka )
You'll be able to see the issue with Location, Location very quickly - it has NO PLOT. Well, it as many opportunities to plot but no solid direction that will firmly interlink the ideas of slumming it in a new territory in a SHORT NEAT WAY. Certainly I'm sure I can ramble on about other things, but this is already close to 2000 words, and I need to wrap this up in the next 2500 words. With love. That means three-four more scenes, five tops, to complete it.
I've had lots of ideas suggested over this one, but none of them is werkin' fer me because none of them utilises the plot and concept (and conciet?) to its full potential and also will be doable within the very tight framework of the word count. Unless the conclusion and road to it can be plotted out quickly, it won't help.
Also, the central character is undefinied - are we following Penny or the twins or the husband? Does it matter? What about Jeff?
I also feel I should change the names. I always figured this all happened in India, but of course the names are totally wrong for that.
( Location, Location )
The stories I have that are unfinished I've decided I'll post here in all their unfinished glory and see if people comment and have ideas of where to take them and what to do with them. Most of them have already appeared up here but a lot of them haven't, and never without being locked down.
Three are unfinished Zeem stories.
Frankie Goes To Perugia - set in the past, Zeem and St Francis of Assissi and the archangel Luminael debate matters of free will.
Lady Wati - In a Nubian city in the desert, Zeem encounters a dying tribe with a dodgy well. Zeem saves the day by shagging a hot chick, getting poisoned, spewing water.
Johnny and Babushka - Johnny Flannery mistakes a woman from the Salvation Army for Babushka; No one corrects him. He *is* Johnny Flannery, y'know.
Then there are one shots and Mizzenmast stories:
[MIZZENMAST] Location, Location - a flying house crashlands in a crap neighbourhood. This has a fantastic opening. AND NO PLOT.
[FANTASY] Message of the White Deev - an erotic story about two soldiers from opposite sides of a war who are forced to bunk together.
[MIZZENMAST] Holoworld - a guy has to steal someone's identity in a holo-world.
[SCIFI] Girl falls in love with a plant - no plot.
[MIZZENMAST] Jessica P-W creates a large Hadron Collider out of the engine of daddy's merc. - No plot.
[FANTASY] Woman sells men to country folk - no plot. Previously (recently) seen here.
[MIZZENMAST] Hunting AIs like old English families - no plot.
[MIZZENMAST] Playing poker/card games with a psychic/empath - no plot.
[SCIFI] Love affair, one lives in the Victorian/Regency/Renaissance/whatever era, one in the present day - no fucking plot. Lots of sex, though. :( And no idea where to sell it.
[MIZZENMAST] A huge Skein through which you can see ocean animals - uncertain plot.
IF YOU THINK one of the above sounds interesting I'll post it first. :)
Let's be fair though I was like a teenager or practically one when I wrote that story, so it's not THATTTTT BAD. It could be WORRRRSE.
It’s sort of her day job.
On fine days like this the ocean is so still it’s like walking along glass and her bare white feet leave tiny dimples in the soft sheath of the Skein. Plump lace jellyfish swarm beneath her, their feathered tentacles curling up to stroke her soles; shoals of bearded parupeneus bifasciatus, the species the locals call goatfish, chase her shadow through the coral reefs. Now and then Amy sees sharks, the ominous blade of their dorsal fins carving the water more skillfully than any ship’s rudder.
She picks her way carefully along the Skein’s surface, cleaning as she goes, erasing fingerprints and footprints alike. With a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other, Amy sometimes feels more like a janitor than a research student. But the view makes it more than worthwhile. Right now the Skein is set at 80-50: eighty meters deep, with fifty percent visibility—reef territory. Once the research team clocks on they’ll be powering north into the heart of IndiO and the engineers will crank the Skein up to 300-80, but at the moment the world between her toes is all pink coral and lush fronds of seaweed and the whiskered mouths of anemones, licking food from the currents with their thin worm-tongues.
It’s pretty awesome, her day job.
The Skein is one mile wide and one mile long and takes up the entire bottom floor of the floating Kruger-Wei Marine Complex. It is made of four hundred plates of interwoven bionethic plasmid. The plasmids amplify light and texture, and it’s this that makes it possible for the research team to see down into the ocean’s depth without lowering cameras. According to the engineering department, using the Skein is like being able to cut the ocean into layers, just like you’d see in geological diagrams of sediment. But Amy thinks it’s more like Superman’s x-ray vision, except the walls here aren’t solid brick-and-mortar but the liquid stratum of salt-water.
( Continued )
And, while thinking of putting together Ave Pasifika... I drew'd Bouboucar Bottle, the most badass character I've ever written. And the protagonist of Ave Pasifika. Or at least the er, anti-hero. Check out my awesome colouring skillz. Oh yes. Check them out.
Also, Andy agreed to put together an ave pasifika website on deadgeekcircus for me and to do the arts for it.
Perhaps taking pity on me after watching me attempt to colour the above with my tongue stuck out and being like, oooooo SQUICKYCOLOURS.
So. My curiosity is piqued. I think my writing would suit the whole cyberfunded thing, given that I only write about two universes most of the time. I have a domain to put it all on. Which is actually already cyberfunded, thanks to
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ciceronianus. XDAnd I've also kinda been wanting to write more, early pirate stuff set in pre-Mizzenmast world. Just as the whole pirate territories were evolving. I've always wanted to do this - in my head it's called Ave Pasifika.
So. It's... tempting? To have a go? I'm still thinking over how I'd do it. Perhaps using a wordpress template of some description - I like the one Third Order uses but I'd be a total ho if I nicked it.
Any thoughts?
rippatton suggested on the specficnz board that we make an actual magazine like ASIM for new zealand.I am so hyperactive about this idea I want to bust out with something. I work part time now and have sooo much time available to work on a mag. AHHH.
But you can still be witness to my long-standing obsessions here with masks and Pygmalion complexes and such things.
The robot tender fixed a passable breakfast: eggs, sausage and bacon sauced in grease. Malachy wolfed his hi-cal serve while the husband scanned prenup sub–clauses. Outside the wife chain-smoked, silhouetted against the misty predawn light. No trophy wife, this: her long, hard body was evocative of a greyhound’s wiry economy. A far cry from the fanciful, buxom bombshells Malachy regularly encountered.
At her feet lay a flapping bird of newspaper, an old street rag gone soggy and solid that she’d found in a gutter and kicked all the way from the carpark. The rising wind had infused it with new life and it flayed open its pale body against her boots with a wet sound, like something sick and trapped.
‘Your first wife?’ Malachy asked, turning back.
The husband looked up blankly, biro circling a section of small print. ‘No.’
‘Frequent flyer, then?’
‘None of your goddamn business.’
It contains a rather cute sex scene, though:Two minutes later he was blind-balling the crotch of her nylons, his body wracked with a unique and vicious lust, dignity sitting this one out, and she laughed at him again, pinioning his hips with one mock-skin thigh, and rolled away to expose the naked nerve center he’d seen in robot catalogues: warmer than warm, or colder than cold, rough or near-frictionless, sex reduced to a minutiae of specifications. I am living out another man’s sexual fantasy, Malachy thought,and just then it started to hail.
www.bewilderingstories.com/issue338/wife
But it's rather fun.
Trouble is I'm having a few issues plotting it out logically. I'm kind of hoping it will magically all fall into place but the story is fairly complicated and I'm having trouble tying "weight" issues into ecological/reseach animals/guinea pig issues in a way that doesn't involve a massive shoe horn. Or whether it's necessary. The plot conclusion relies on Valery's weight and I don't know how to plug that in without either using very lame flags like "OH BY THE WAY" or "IMPORTANT PLOT POINT IS IMPORTANT".
Hnnn, I don't see it's necessary to justify characters' race* but I still see it necessary to justify fat. I am highly illogical batman.
:/
*Translation: All my characters are British.
omizu physically and then given a horrible reupholstering in the personality department which turned her into a jealous bitch. It didn't work out at all, mainly because I don't like writing about sad self-hating girls and partly because I couldn't really see Val hanging around one. And also because Amy was smart, really smart, and I don't want my smart female characters to go all wanky over a boy and turn into gobshites. Not that smart girls don't, all the time. I just don't want to seeeeee it.
In the end I ended up ditching Amy and stuck Val's sister Alleluia in instead, which worked pretty great, because this is one of the few stories I have that doesn't make me cringe when I read over it.
Anyway, I've been puzzling over this cute concept I have which is where Alleluia's studying her biology degree on a floating science complex in the Indian Ocean. And for the first time ever Alle and Val were not gelling with each other at all--they didn't want to talk to each other, and Alle was sort of like, why the fuck are you in my story anyway, you git. And it's such a FUN idea, being able to see 20,000 leagues under the sea without actually having to go down there, and it has MERMAIDS in it (sort of), and I didn't want to can the whole thing.
I've just had another look at Amy's story and realised that while she didn't work in Signs over the Pacific and Alle did, Amy is going to TOTALLY work for this new story, and I'm booting Alle out. Sure, Amy is a physics major, but maybe she can, er, switch and study biology instead for a bit. Why the eff not, hey. And in this situation I can give her personality a tweak so that she isn't a hyperwtf bitch and instead calms herself down to come across perky. Oh joy.
I think this story is going to be SERIOUSLY AWESOME, and not just because it has MERMAIDS. Bounce. Bounce.
I could also be just generally happy because
nopejr thinks she can work with my shitty notes on Mizzenmast 3. Or just because I love writing in Mizzenmast universe. nopejr in the hope she can clean it up and have also sent it to omizu for advice. I feel a little better about myself generally right now.
I hope my mess is fixable.
I might start on chapter 4.
I actually know how that's going to run. Sort of. Maybe. I'll go home and find out!
nopejr has suggested that I find someone else to write the chapter for me.This is something that would work perfectly for me, as all the dialogue is there, all that I'm missing is the ties between the dialogue + action bits. And I already know how they would happen. I mean I have the full 10 pages here, only 6 need connects, and I can fix the dialogue real quick and add tags where things need to be so someone can fix it.
And it's not like I haven't done this before, as large sections of Harmonica + Gig were written by Lloyd, Maggie, Inky and a bunch of other people as well.
The issue here is finding some one to fix it who a) I've never worked with before/don't currently have stories pending with and b) who I like the writing of/can assimilate Mizzenmast's faintly wanky style without too much trouble and c) I can pay in either fic or porn or very terrible sketches, on account of my total money fail right now and Job Lackage. And while there are totally people I would love to do it, I don't think I can go crawling after them saying OH PLZ because it'd be all uncomfortable and weird and if I was rejected I'd be like, Having The Worst Prom Ever.
Anyway. I don't know if taking this approach is going to take significantly longer or not.
Thoughts and suggestions on the back of a postcard, you sexy people.
I'm really, really freaking good and I don't deserve this at all. I don't deserve to have my life monopolised by a stupid chapter of a stupid story that's really freaking excellent and it just drives me insane.
It really does.
I know I try so effing hard to be positive about this but a lot of the time I just want to die. I can't believe that I'm so badly blocked. I can't believe I haven't gotten past ANY story's chapter 3.5 since 2003.
I think I have the set up. But I keep saying that. I KEEP SAYING I THINK I'VE GOT IT THIS TIM
And then I eff about and waste more of my life and this stupid chapter has taken up so much of my time. I don't go out. I haven't gone out for YEARS because I've been sitting staring at this thing and alternately crying and screaming. It affects my marriage and my friendships and just about everything else.
I want to do this but it's not happening. And I'm not going to give up as so many people keep suggesting because, y'know, if I can't do this, wtf can I do? Write more shitty short stories? Well y'know I've been doing that for three years and I've run out of markets I genuinely want to get so it's all lost it's fun at this point.
I need some sort of... fix.
I need this to work.
/writerbreakdown
( Read more... )
And there you go.
It's actually not going all that badly. I have most of the chapter worked out. The trouble is getting enough ACTION into the whole thing for it to work. I mean it's not an action filled chapter. It's a THINKY chapter. Like OMG MY DADDY IS AN ASS. I'm sort of caught between what my character would do and what the PLOT should be doing.
Gah. Luckily I'm having a boat-crash in there. I like crashing boats.
