wherein Liz attempts to schedule inspiration; time will tell if the ruse succeeds

[edenfalling]

Okay, so. I have finished "Secrets," at long last! Oh frabjous day, etc., etc.

My next writing projects will be, in no particular order: my NFE fic, chapter 3 of "Weregild," and chapter 8 of "Trollstuck." Possibly also the Jade/Dave/Terezi crossdressing porn (which is still untitled, wtf). Once I have those out of the way, I want to start working on one WIP at a time until I knock more of them off. I like this sensation of finishing things! It's exciting!

I think "Lemonade" and/or "Guardian" should be first on the list, if only because they have languished incomplete for the longest. "Lemonade" should be faster to finish, both because the chapters are shorter and because it's closer to the end of the story. My outline claims there are five chapters to go. My outlines always lie -- I suspect it's actually more like seven or eight chapters -- but since my outline for "Guardian" claims there are twelve chapters to go, which is probably more like twenty in reality, and those chapters are ~4,000 words each compared to the ~2,100 word chapters of "Lemonade," well... it's no contest, really.

So starting in September, my goal is to finish "Lemonade" by the end of 2013. Then I will try to knock off five chapters of "Guardian," after which I will move on to finish "The Courting Dance" -- there my outline claims I have seven more chapters of ~1,500 words each, so hopefully I can get that done by the end of 2014 (eesh, I am slow). And then it's back to "Guardian" for another five chapters, after which, who knows! (Maybe back to "Weregild.")

Random WIP one-shots will be worked on as inspiration strikes, as always.

As for "Trollstuck," for the sake of my own sanity I hereby declare it a series rather than a monster-length novel. The current iteration will run until the end of the Vriska-vs.-Aradia plot thread is resolved, after which I will start a new fic to deal with another plot thread. The Gl'bgolyb plot will simmer along in the background. I will probably also give the current iteration a subtitle of some sort -- I am leaning toward "Trollstuck: Make Her Pay," though if you have another suggestion feel free to change my mind! -- and future installments will have subtitles from the word go. As with the one-shots, I will work on "Trollstuck" as inspiration strikes, since it's kind of become my go-to project when I have no idea what to write.

This is my plan. *resolve face*

Comments

[branchandroot]

*applauds* This is a fine and ambitious plan, which still seems do-able! I will be here with pompoms, and probably jealousy because I have /yet/ to be able to write more than a drabble every other month or so while also writing this damn diss.

[edenfalling]

If I were feeling really ambitious, I'd plan to finish "Guardian" altogether by the end of 2014 -- I mean, I wrote "Apartment Manager" (which is ~75,000 words) in ten months, so writing ~80,000 words of "Guardian" in a year should be doable, right?

Ahahaha, no. I will be quite happy with ~20,000 words, because I am perfectly aware that "Apartment Manager" was an aberation for me -- I don't think I have ever before or since managed to sustain both writing speed and writing focus for that many words over that length of time.

Here's hoping that editing and filling out the rough draft of your disseration will eat fewer mental spoons and you will have more left over for fiction!

[cherokee1.livejournal.com]

Hurray!
I look forward to reading "secrets".
And, iamsoexcited! Lemonade!
I love that story.
C

[edenfalling]

I hope you enjoy "Secrets." The writing in the early chapters is kind of awkward and it's a VERY internal story -- I spend a lot of time on Ginny's internal monologue as she struggles with guilt, depression, ethical dilemmas, and so on -- but there's a bunch of humor too, and world-building, and stuff about friendship and family. Plus, as the summary says, a guaranteed happy ending. :-)

I am looking forward to immersing myself in "Lemonade" again!

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

You have such ambition and drive. I love your writing so though, so am super excited! These days I feel good if I can get a one-shot out every so often....

On a related but semi-not-related note- I finally read Secrets. I have no clue why I'd never gotten around to it before. Harry Potter fic by you has always sounded wonderful and Ginny is a favorite character and the concept of Secrets was compelling...well, whatever. I've read it now and wow! SO much to love.

As usual your OCs are very realistic and show off such a nice vareity of different types of interactions and dynamics. I was left totally wondering what Ginny's next year was going to be like, what friendships might occur, what Daphne's reactions then would be (and Electra, and Ruth, and Apple, and Susan and the boys). There are many different types of friendships shown from the trio's tight circle to the more casual friendship of Caroline and Ann with Ginny, Ginny's friendship with the armor even too. It adds complexity to the nature of things.

I also quite liked your take on the diary, Tom's voice (how heart breaking that he did act like such a friend and Ginny's hard time overcoming that!) but also the specific spell they use and the way he slowly starts to manifest, the sleepwalking and then outright possession.

One thing I found very interesting was that you allow your protagonist to be wrong. Actually, Ginny spends most of the story doing really mean and petty things. We see the good side of her too and we love the well-roundedness of the character. I loved that deep sense of fairness that you give Ginny- that she can see Xanthe is nervous about being in Hufflepuff and gets mad at Daphne's lack of ablity (or perhaps her attitude of carelessness towards others feelings that showed sometimes) when Ginny herself displays that same fault so often herself. So many people complained that Ginny was an entirely different person in the later books, but I know you said you started this story before those were all out and that you had looked through the earlier books for the glimpses of Ginny's personality when she wasn't around Harry. To me, I felt like this was a very good impression of the Ginny we see in those later books- the temper and bravado and occasional insensitivy in a social situtation yet also occasional flashes of insight. The fact you got all this just really impressed me.

Also loved the attention Potions and Herbology both got. It was a bit of (your many moments of) world-building. Loved it, loved it, loved it!

[edenfalling]

I have no clue why I'd never gotten around to it before.

Perhaps because it had been unfinished for so long? *wry*

If you want a glimpse at Ginny's future, you can see some of my thoughts in Five Years Is an Awful Lot of Later and First You Have To Get There, which are not absolutely 100% compatible with "Secrets" -- the interpretation of the Chamber and the immediate aftermath in McGonagall's office is a tiny bit different (since I wrote "Get There" before I reached that part of "Secrets") -- but they both include Susan Ward and Apple Rumluck as supporting characters and Ginny's reaction to Tom is about what I'd expect for a few years after "Secrets." (The stories are both Harry/Ginny, but the mildest and most unromantic H/G you are probably likely to find anywhere on the internet.) They are also explicitly AU for OotP (since they were either written or begun before that book's publication) and thus address in passing the widespread prejudice against Slytherin and how Daphne has informed Ginny's opinion on that subject.

If you'd rather not read those fics, I shall sum up: by her fourth year, Ginny, Apple, and Susan have formed a sort of three-way friendship. Ginny is less close to Daphne, but because of Apple they have ended up hanging out a lot by default. Xanthe does not appear in those stories (since I hadn't really developed her yet in "Secrets" when I wrote or started writing them), but presumably she and Ginny are still good friends. In fact, I think their entire year has a remarkable number of cross-House friendships, which the students older than them find extremely weird, but which has made cross-House interactions less fraught for the students younger than them. This would have increasing knock-on effects toward the end of the HP series.

I'm glad my take on Tom and Ginny's possession worked for you! I was extremely annoyed halfway through writing "Secrets" when Rowling revealed that possession was a complete blank-out, since I'd been working on a dream-sequence theory, but I guess my scramble to paper over that discrepancy was successful. :-)

I didn't set out with the intention of writing a story wherein the main character is frequently (and of her free will) wrong. But I knew I'd have to break up her potential friendships with Apple and Daphne in order for the plot to work, and I didn't want to recapitulate the Harry-vs.-Draco dynamic (where Draco is always wrong, and even when he arguably isn't, Rowling's narrative tries to insist that everything is still his fault because Slytherin = EVIL!!!), so I decided to make Ginny the one initially at fault in her conflict with Daphne. Hopefully her reasons are clear -- that sense of outraged fairness on Xanthe's behalf and the ingrained prejudice she grew up with -- but I am glad that my narrative didn't come across as excusing or agreeing with her.

I based my version of Ginny somewhat on myself (she is therefore probably more introverted than proper canon Ginny, though perhaps canon Ginny just gives good company face, so to speak), somewhat on inference (she's a Weasley, after all! she couldn't possibly be a doormat), and somewhat on two specific scenes: the bits early in PS/SS where she's a bundle of energy and impatience at King's Cross station, and the part in GoF where she mocks Ron for his epic fail at asking Fleur to the Yule Ball. I adjusted a little according to revelations in OotP and HBP -- most specifically the backstory on teaching herself to fly -- but her temper, her tendency toward direct vengeance (hexes, punches, etc.), her resentment of being babied, and her love/hate relationship to being the only Weasley girl were already there in my mental image of her.

I will never stop loving Potions and Herbology. They don't have the drama and convenience of wand-based magic, but they're damn cool in their own right. I also liked shifting narrative focus to a professor (Sprout) who doesn't get much attention in canon, while still keeping Snape in his ambiguous villain role -- every story needs some good secondary antagonists, after all. :-)

Thank you for your review!

[wistfulmemory.livejournal.com]

I, too, just read "Secrets," and I really enjoyed it. It was interesting reading the story from a different angle, and it was fun trying to see if I could figure out where in the original story your scenes took place. I liked that you didn't make Ginny perfect. She was flawed, and there were many times when I wanted to shake some sense into her. I noticed you placed some links in the comments to other stories, which I look forward to reading later when I have time.

I look forward to you working on "Guardian" again.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the story.

You can generally place my original scenes by finding the nearest scene that includes Harry, finding it in CoS, and working forward or back. There are a couple scenes with Harry that are only implied in CoS -- specifically the one where he interrupts Fred and George jumping out from behind things and trying to scare Ginny, the card game with him, Ron, and the twins (which happens the night he and Ron go to find Aragog), and the afternoon by the lake in chapter 14 which leads to his conclusion that Ginny is "perfectly happy" -- but aside from that (and his summation of the plot in McGonagall's office) I think all of Harry's scenes and dialogue are taken directly from canon.

I freely confess that there were a number of points in the story where I wanted to shake sense into Ginny myself. That wouldn't have done any good for her depression, but it might have helped with her hypocrisy about Slytherins and prejudice and so on.

(I look forward to working on "Guardian" again too! Just not quite yet. *wry*)