it's a magical world

I just sent the final chapter of Queen's Gambit off to my long-suffering betas.

Holy shit. Holy shit. One last round of edits, and I am fucking DONE with this fucking fic. I can't even. I don't even remember what it's like to NOT have this constantly open and glaring at me from a browser tab on my laptop. Three years. THREE YEARS. I am never ever ever posting a WIP again.

\o/!

(It is gonna be kinda weird saying goodbye to this universe, though. It's been in my head for so freaking long now.)

Catching Fire was really, really excellent. My friend and I agreed that it was better than the first movie. Also, I have a massive crush on Johanna already, so having her played to perfection by Jena Malone was made of awesome. I think I exhausted all my thinky-thoughts in our post-movie RL discussion, and now I don't know what to say about it anymore, but it's REALLY REALLY GOOD, guys.

I quit the temp job of endless data entry, thank god, because the extra cash just wasn't worth the misery. And it freed me up a bit to actually WRITE, which has been awesome. I'm 3000+ words into Secret Mutant with no end in sight. Like, my plot outline for this one has a whole chunk labeled "save this for the sequel", which doesn't mean I will ever actually WRITE a sequel, but, y'know. It's that kind of fic. I really wish I had someone to talk about it with right now, actually, because it's making my brain explode a bit. Maybe I should be preemptively looking for a beta or two? The whole anonymous exchange thing makes me wary of spilling too many details here. Let's just say it's not my usual XMFC POV character, plus some other complicating factors. Um. But I'm having a lot of fun building the 'verse for this.

I keep side-eying the next chapter of Queen's Gambit, too, because I was finally making good progress on that one when the wave of seasonal challenges hit. Maybe I should hop back and forth between Secret Mutant and that, it might save me from the hours of playing solitaire while rolling over plot issues in the back of my head. At least the plot part is no longer my problem with Queen's Gambit. (My sticking point there, for the moment, is worldbuilding what a Limbo that isn't in Dom Cobb's head would look like. I don't actually think I have a strong enough grasp on Raven's subconscious for this shit.)

Then there's Yuletide. I attended a Yule writers' meetup last week, which was fun. I only got one paragraph written, but at least now I know what story I'm telling for Yuletide, which is a massive step forward. Beyond that -- the deadline's not until weeks after Secret Mutant, so I'll leave it be until December. It's not going to be a super-long fic, and I'll do better under imminent deadline.

And I still need to do my massive revision for the Sleepy Hollow exchange fic, which is due in a week. Hmmm.

LOOK LOTS OF WRITING BLATHER NO ONE CARES ABOUT, LA LA LA. I've been tragically neglecting the blog-every-day-for-a-month meme, but I find it hard to care. I'll pick it back up again eventually.

...seriously, though, if anyone's willing to chat about the Secret Mutant fic and maybe beta when it's done, I would very much appreciate it. I hate making that request without being able to provide more details about it, but I'm trying not to throw all anonymity away this early in the game, and it's not like I'm writing one of the many "Erik/Charles holiday theme!" prompts for this exchange, so it really will be obvious if I say anything else about it. It will likely hit 10,000 words before it's done. It is slash, but more emphasis on plot than romance. It is AU. Anyone? I always feel like I'm imposing on people when I want to talk about my writing process, because that just seems so selfish to me, you know? But I'd absolutely be more than happy to reciprocate writing chat/beta for your own fic, if that helps.

So I legit had a dream last night that for some reason involved working out a plot snag on Queen's Gambit, and woke up and grabbed my laptop and started writing. (So I...incepted myself? I suppose that's fitting.) And while this hasn't been my most productive day ever, it did end up with several thousand more words written, and I'm only like two or three not-terribly-long scenes away from finishing the next chapter. Except now I'm having all kinds of weird self-conscious feelings about the fact that it's been nearly a year since I updated that fic, and nobody wants to read it anymore, and how the way I've broken up the next couple of chapters means that I'm banking everything on the hope that the handful of people who might actually still be reading are somewhat invested in Alex, because there is basically no Charles or Erik in this chapter at all, and ugh of course no one likes this fic as much as Boden's Mate because really the central character arcs belong to Raven and Alex, neither of whom are terribly popular characters in this fandom, and by now my brain is in some kind of weird awful feedback loop of fail.

In conclusion, this is a pretty good summary of why I haven't updated Queen's Gambit in close to a year. Um, that and the whole MASSIVE SERIES OF UPHEAVALS that have been the past ten months of my life, but yeah.

But I am only 2k words or so away from having the next chapter ready for beta. And for the record, Cain Marko's head is not a fun place to visit.

I've always kind of longingly side-eyed all the kink bingos, because it looks like such a fun concept but I'm, like, the least kinky writer ever. But then apparently cottoncandy_bingo happened, and THAT is some fluffy shit I can totally get behind. Not that I'll ever manage to finish a line, because my writing mojo has been rather lacking of late, but it's worth a shot! (Especially with unemployment looming. I'll need something to do other than apply for jobs I won't get.)

Also, I lucked out, because the fourth column? It's like they KNOW me!

( fluffy bingo )

Maybe this will kick me in the ass to finish my Charles/Erik Theatre!AU at long last.

I also signed up for xmenbigbang despite having precisely zero ideas for it. But the first check-in isn't until October, so I have faith in my ability to come up with a plotbunny by then. Seeing as I'm categorically incapable of writing fics that are less than 10,000 words these days anyway. I do have an intriguing two paragraphs of a fantasy!AU that I typed up hastily and without any accompanying notes a few months ago. I can't remember exactly what I wanted to do with it now -- from what I remember, it was basically inspired by a weird Erik dream I had, and I wrote it down really quickly early in the morning before running off to work -- but possibly I can mold something out of it.

And, urg, I really need to get a chapter of Queen's Gambit out, but every time I open that doc I kind of cringe and hide. I basically have one big missing piece of plot that I haven't figured out yet, and while I know I should just push through and see what happens, it's killing me to not know how to resolve that one thread. And it's been almost four months since I last updated, thanks to Reversebang eating all my writing mojo. Ugh, this is why I never post WIPs.

Apparently I misunderstood the X-Men Reversebang schedule -- and it sounds like I'm not the only one, since they just posted a clarification that while there's a mandatory author check-in on May 21, the rough draft itself isn't due until June 20. THANK JEBUS. Seriously, writing this thing has been like pulling teeth, and while I've been planning on devoting this weekend to working on it, it's extremely unlikely I'll be 80% done with the fic by Monday. And now I have a whole extra MONTH to get there!

I've shoved other WIPs to the side over the past few weeks to work on this one, which has been massively frustrating given my lack of significant progress, but now I think I can allow myself to poke at Queen's Gambit again. Because I'm finally at the exciting part of that fic, but I didn't want to give it too much attention while I had this huge deadline hanging over my head. I feel so free now!

...though, okay, I'm crap at the collaborating-with-your-artist part of Reversebang, because for me, writing is a very private and isolated process -- I almost never share WIP drafts with anyone else until they're polished to a ready-for-beta point (which, for me, means I've gone through and done my own edits several times through already). Even Queen's Gambit, which I'm posting as a WIP -- I need to have a complete, coherent 10k-ish word chapter before I'll even show it to my betas. I don't know how to write collaboratively. Should I be e-mailing my artist scenes as I finish them, even though I know I'll rewrite them a bunch more times and I hate hate hate having other people see my roughest drafts? Should I, like, offer to share the gdoc with her? How is this supposed to work?

Reread Hunger Games Monday night and Catching Fire last night, trying to hold off on giving Mockingjay another go immediately because there are totally other things I'd like to be doing with my limited and quickly-disappearing free time but seriously, who do I think I'm kidding. And now vid bunnies are biting for the first time in months, which is a pity, because there is no Hunger Games source yet and the ideas I have really need to wait for the rest of the movies to be made anyway. But theoretically, somewhere in the future, it's entirely possible I will do another Vienna Teng vid series for Hunger Games, because her songs, they are speaking to my fandom brain again. "Hope On Fire", definitely -- lyrics far too eerily appropriate, ugh, my heart. (Gotta leave, gotta bleed / You've gotta stop lying still / 'cause this is no kind of life. CHRIST.) I want some Catching Fire footage for that one, though, for obvious reasons. And I'll have to wait through all of Mockingjay for "Gravity", which very much wants to be an endgame Katniss/Peeta vid (So don't turn away now / I am turning in revolution / These are the scars that silence carved on me). But, y'know. That. HELP ME I AM HAVING FEELINGS, CANNOT COPE.

Zero fic drive for this fandom, though. I might trawl AO3 for any decent Katniss/Peeta fics, but I don't have high hopes, and I have no interest in writing anything except possibly that X-Men fusion bunny where District 13 is run by Charles Xavier, who's been keeping it hidden from the Capitol for years and years and yeah, no way do I have any intention of writing this, I have a whole 'nother fusion 'verse to finish.

Anyway. Went home early from work today because I felt like shit -- I've been sick for about a week now, and it's starting to really piss me off. Not seriously ill, just a bad cold or minor flu or whatever, but it's lingering on way longer than it has any right to, probably because I haven't had a single day off to actually rest (and won't get one until the last weekend of April). I'm just exhausted. But there's nothing I can do about that. Next show loads in Friday.

Okay, going to try to keep writing X-Men fic now. (I have managed to write a complete scene today. This is...not really progress.)

Is anyone else on DW getting BUCKETS of spam comments today? Because I am, and it's incredibly annoying. This happens occasionally on LJ, but this is the first time I've been hit on DW, and it's...quite a lot of them in a short span of time. I've just added a CAPTCHA setting for anon comments, hopefully that'll help.

Completely unrelatedly, I am feeling super meh about the X-Men Reverse Bang. Not because the art isn't lovely, because it totally is! There's a lot of really gorgeous artwork up there! But while I've enjoyed looking at it all, only a bare handful of the prompts interest me as a writer. Which makes me a super crappy unimaginative writer, I guess. There are plenty I'd be interested in reading but don't feel confident or interested in writing myself (i.e. a Regency!AU -- would love to read it, but I'm not really familiar enough with the historical period to feel comfortable writing it, Austen aside; this is where being a very research-committed writer trips me up, because I don't want to just wing it and Get Shit Wrong). There are a couple that do pique my interest strongly, but honestly, not enough to fill out the requisite quota of five options, and I would hate to put an artist into a situation in which they're stuck with a writer who isn't 100% thrilled about their prompt. Which probably means I should just drop out, but, man, I really do want to participate in this one. Urg. I'll sit on it and have another look through the prompts tomorrow and see if I can come up with five. Again, I can definitely pick WAY more than five beautiful pieces of art in the exchange. But some of the pieces I admire the most are for AU scenarios I just don't think I could write. Argh.

After spending an hour and a half futzing around, I have come to the conclusion that I am completely stupid when it comes to Tumblr. Everything about what that site is and how it functions is completely counterintuitive to the way my brain processes information. UGH. I like the pretty pictures! I just can't figure out how to do anything with the site except follow people. Which is cool. I've had an empty tumblr for months now for the sole purpose of following other people. And I honestly have no idea what I would post there myself, but I feel like I'm missing some crucial element of fandom interaction, and it saddens me. Anyway, I'm kaydeefalls on tumblr. There is nothing there. Possibly I will start clicking the reblog button when I see pretty pictures I particularly like, and pretend I'm somehow contributing to fandom. :/ (I can't even make my own pretty pictures anymore. My father insisted I install Lion on my laptop, which then rendered invalid my entire Adobe Creative Suite, and I can't afford to drop $700 on Photoshop right now. I am SO ANGRY about this, guys, you don't even know. I used Photoshop way more than I give even the smallest shit about any of the features in the OS upgrade.)

I'm also just deeply frustrated with life in general right now, so this may just be an offshoot of that. And it's been one of those mornings where the phone is ringing off the hook and people keep trying to make awkward small talk with me and I just want to be left alone for five fucking minutes. Um. Sorry about that.

ANYWAY. 2011 Year in Review Meme! Which I typed up like two weeks ago and then never posted. Whatever, I'm slow with these things. And mainly I had to wait for the secret_mutant reveals, because those totally add to my 2011 word count total.

( 2011 by the numbers )

( fanworks )

( year in review meme )

( WIP snippets for 2012 )

Stealing the idea shamelessly from many Yuletiders and also pocky_slash:

Guess my secret_mutant fics! Posting finishes later today, and I think reveals are sometime tomorrow. Lots of people do this for Yuletide, which I think is silly because there are approximately WAY TOO DAMN MANY fics involved in Yuletide for guessing to be at all viable, but secret_mutant only has like a hundred fics to sort through. I think I have been staggeringly obvious about one of mine on this journal, but what the hell, it's not like I'm going to take off points for my own carelessness in posting about it.

Hints:
-I wrote two fics.
-Both are more than double the minimum word count for the exchange; neither are the longest fic written for it.
-They are not written with the same POV character(s).
-One is AU, the other is not.
-No guarantee that both have already been posted, as the exchange is not quite finished yet.
-No, seriously, staggeringly obvious, the both of them.

And anyone who guesses either of them right gets a ficlet of their choice. Which, given my inability to write short fics, who knows what that'll turn into.

Comments screened. :)

secret_mutant fic done! Now it just needs, y'know, a beta. And for me to reread it when I'm not a wee bit tipsy. (Finishing fics drunk after a pub crawl: not highly recommended. On the other hand, alcohol breaks through writer's block like nobody's business.)

I'm not usually a music-oriented person when I'm working on fic, though I do have a generic writing playlist of soothing background noise. (And I write a lot of Boden's Mate / Queen's Gambit with the Inception soundtrack on loop.) But seriously, Tom McRae is my Charles/Erik fanmix. Every single damn song of his relates to them in some way or another, I swear to god. And I'm not usually the sort of person who assigns every love song on the radio to my current OTP. This is NOT normal for me. And yet. Guys, the dude has a song titled "Ghost of a Shark", and that is not even the most fitting element of the song. ("I'm gonna leave any minute...") For this fic, in particular, I've been listening to "Best Winter", "Houdini and the Girl" ("He says I’ve been under the water / I’ve been under the ground / And honey one thing’s certain / There’s no escaping now"), and "Sound of the City" ("And I watch you fall from a great height / and you watch me fail night after night"), but...ugh. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH, and Tom McRae is totally their soundtrack for ever and ever amen.

And now I need to write Yuletide. FUCK.

Okay, there were legit things I was going to post about, but never mind. I was thinking idly about X-Men fic while walking down the street, and I saw a bus with a poster for the new Alvin & the Chipmunks movie (which, ugh, why), so now all I have for you is this:

Alvin = Alex, Simon = Hank, Theodore = Sean.

I CANNOT UNSEE IT.

So I spent the past two evenings rewatching the first two X-Men movies, which I haven't actually sat down and watched in years. Now, of course, I'm seeing everything through the lens of First Class. And doing my best to ignore the continuity errors, because First Class is in many ways more of a reboot than a proper prequel. Still. I can actually see the evolution of Erik into Magneto far more directly than Charles into Professor X -- I think Fassbender's performance lines up with McKellen's better than McAvoy's with Stewart's. (Which isn't meant as a criticism -- from what I've read in interviews, the First Class actors were told to make the characters their own, and deliberately NOT to try to impersonate younger versions of the X1-X3 incarnations. So.)

But my god do I ever adore Ian McKellen's Magneto. He does legitimately AWFUL things, and yet I root for him the whole time. Because he is both snarky and baldly honest at all times, I think -- I have a huge amount of respect for that. Rogue asks if he's going to kill her, and he says yes, he is. Logan calls him on his hypocrisy (sacrificing Rogue instead of, y'know, himself) and he doesn't even attempt to argue otherwise. I'll take Magneto's brutal honesty over Xavier's constant evasions or lies of omission any day.

(I prefer McKellen's Erik and McAvoy's Charles, if I must choose. I just connect to those two individually more than Fassbender or Stewart. But both older and younger pairings have such utterly fantastic chemistry together, it really doesn't matter.)

And Mystique! No lie, I spent much of X-Men 1 yelling at her whenever she was onscreen, because NO HONEY NO, LOOK AT YOUR CHOICES, RAVEN WHY ARE YOU DELIBERATELY POISONING YOUR BROTHER'S CEREBRO JUICE, AND ALSO THAT THING WHERE YOU IMPERSONATE BOBBY TO BITCH OUT ROGUE IS SO FUCKING CATTY, YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

But then X2 happens, and I swear to god, Mystique is actually the hero of that movie. Because she's like the only character who actually makes choices and ACTS rather than just reacting, and also, she is responsible for every single positive step forward the plot takes. LET ME SUM UP. In X2, Mystique:

1. Impersonates Senator Kelly, keeping the Mutant Registration Act off the Senate floor.
2. Attempts to protect the X-Men by insisting to the President of the United States that the mansion is just a school.
3. Finds out that Stryker is involved in Erik's imprisonment.
4. Hacks into Stryker's files to find the location of Erik's prison and intel on the guards.
5. ...and, oh yeah, that Stryker is building his own Cerebro.
6. Seduces the guard and injects iron into his bloodstream, enabling Erik to break out of jail.
7. Impersonates Logan to infiltrate Alkali Lake and kicks everyone's asses once she's inside.
8. Hacks into the Alkali Lake mainframe to find Cerebro.
9. Impersonates Stryker in Cerebro to convince Jason to alter his illusion.
10. Pilots the motherfucking helicopter off the dam.

Granted, there's also the bit with the attempted genocide, which she perpetrates, and leaving the X-Men behind to die. And attempting to seduce Logan for no reason except to fuck with his head, which, frankly, the way he keeps hitting on a basically-married woman who has turned him down at every single impasse and yet he never stops harassing her, I gotta side with Mystique on this one.

In contrast, our nominal hero Wolverine stabs some guys, steals yet another of Scott's vehicles, gets shot a bunch, and then abandons his entire team at Alkali Lake in order to get his own personal vengeance. Yeah, whatever. If it weren't for Mystique, Erik would still be in prison and then Charles would have killed all the mutants on the planet because the X-Men would never have put Stryker together with the assassination attempt, therefore never thinking to have Jean read Kurt's mind to find Alkali Lake in the first place.

So basically, this was a good reminder of why I'm writing Raven as primary protagonist in Queen's Gambit, especially given Stryker as the primary antagonist. Because Raven gets shit done while Logan's too busy manpaining.

(Also, the way Charles freezes the entire fucking museum just to tell off a couple of his students for showing off? Oh, Charles, you arrogant bastard. Your precious code of ethics is on a slippery fucking slope, isn't it?)