professional bad example

i'm vaguely writing about the eighth doctor and sarah jane and there's so many things that don't actually mean what they appear to at all. it's really quite irritating. i'm actually having to stop and wonder what exactly they're talking about, here. yeah, authors not being in complete control of the way their stories play out is definitely a thing. i mean, i could force it to play out however i wanted, but that wouldn't be the way the story is meant to turn out anymore and completely defeat the point of writing it at all.

(don't expect to ever actually see any of this, though. there's a snippet of a different fanfiction in my tmp folder that i've been working on for over a year and there's no sign of me ever finishing the damn thing even though it would likely turn out to be less than 1000 words long. yeah.)

i oddly feel like writing something. maybe i could do a 1character or 1fandom set? they're to regular fanfiction what warioware's microgames are to regular video games, or even more accurately, like warioware: D.I.Y. to multimedia fusion. coming up with one sentence is much easier than coming up with even a drabble, though at the same time implicating entire situations and even stories in single sentences and not just writing crap like "and they kissed under the full moon" for "moon" (though that would be more the domain of 1sentence, which i didn't mention above because i don't feel like specifically writing pairings). i can come up with longer plots, actually they rather tend to come up with themselves, but when it comes to putting them into writing, i quickly lose interest or just don't even care because they're already complete in my head, after all.

i just don't actually know what fandoms i feel up to writing for. heh.

the thing when i try to write fiction is, i get a lot - if not all - of it worked out in my head before i ever get the idea that it could be a story, then when i try to make it one, it just feels like there isn't actually any point in writing it down anymore because it's basically already all played out, hasn't it?

i may be missing the point.

i feel like writing fanfic. how weird, that's usually something i do every few years...

i could do that other doctor who/his dark materials fusion where differing from the first one, gallifreyans do have dæmons, but they're not physically seperate, unlike the humans of that world, and then there's sort sort of psychic phenomen or artifact that temporarily makes the doctor's more tangible. problem being that i really don't know which doctor that would work with (except that it wouldn't be either of the modern ones because i just don't want to write about them) or what sort of minimal plot i could work it into.

or i could do the "what if han solo was force sensitive" star wars thing. which would decidedly not try to give him jedi-level skills - i've seen several authors try to do that and it always turned out boring and cliched and just doesn't work with his character. no, it would be more of a "maybe he does have a little ability in that area, because you can't tell me his particular brand of luck/intuition hasn't made you wonder, but he doesn't really want to have it because it's too irrational/unpredictable for his taste" kind of thing. because going by the MBTI, he's so a sensing type.

yeah, i don't do long, plotty, character-driven things. just consider that when i was writing that last fic, i didn't even know which doctor it was about (though looking back, it's pretty clearly an alternate eight)...

(also, i think said alternate!eight's dæmon was named by sarah jane. or she at least played a big role in finding a name. that's just a feeling though, not something i particularly feel the need to write more about.)

do you know that thing where every book seems to be far too short? i bought the wee free men today, two hours later i was done with it. hnglrh. and you may remember me mentioning that i read the bulk of jonathan strange and mr. norrell in two nights? 800 pages or so? yeah.

i told you there's a reason i list "reading very quickly" as an interest.

did you know i've always wanted to write a discworld/dirk gently crossover? because one day i got the thought that, hey, dirk's habit of not discounting things just because they're impossible might counteract the thing where people don't see death because they believe he can't be there. and that might be amusing. guess i'll never actually do it, though. i kind of considered a dirk gently/hitchhiker's guide crossover too, because dirk and ford are too damn similar characters in some ways and that could also be funny, but i'm even less serious about that idea. and i'm not much of a writer anyway, not in that i'm bad at it, but in that i don't enjoy it that much. i prefer other forms of creativity.

rereading infinity welcomes careful drivers, the bit where lister says he failed his GCSE in technical drawing caught my eye. because considering spanners ended up going into engineering, couldn't that be the point of divergence between lister and him, similar to how not being held back a year was that between rimmer and ace? hmm.

also got hit with an idea for an alternate ending to timeslides where the explosion hits lister instead of the newly revived rimmer. even though while that might end up interesting, it's really not at all funny, more like sad and depressing and lister being hard pressed to keep his optimism up and rimmer feeling an enormous amount of guilt. that and it's really quite cliched, so unless i think of a constructive direction to go with it, i won't even try to do anything with it. not like i'm likely to to begin with.

also ended up with a bunch of slashy ideas involving ace when he somehow snuck into my dreams. uh.

also found that i write more easily if i just write the random snippets that come into my head and then try to connect them, rather then forcing myself to start at the beginning.

and oh, look, over 1000 posts. their signal-to-noise ratio hasn't really increased since i hit 900 posts. or since i got this journal, for that matter. which is to say it's around 0. story of my life.

someone tell me why lister looks so smegging young in stasis leak? i just can't figure it out. sure, he does in all of the earlier seasons, for obvious reasons, but somehow it's especially noticable here. it's driving me craazy.

may i also note that somehow i love any scene set on pre-accident red dwarf? dunno why. it just seems right. like it's really a logical continuation of present-day culture. it's so... imperfect. there's things that don't go right. there's people that aren't perfectly well-balanced and successful and happy. there's machines that don't work exactly as they should, and there's tasks that aren't done by machines because it'd be a waste. there's little everyday problems, some of which don't get solved. some things are more advanced, some have changed, but the basics are exactly the same. the people are exactly the same. it's very different from, say, star trek in that respect. it's a believable future i could see happening. it's familiar. something that seems like it could be your home.

and actually i love all of red dwarf, and especially the world it's set in, for these same reasons; it's just clearly more obvious in the pre-accident scenes because you see more little bits of everyday life in them.