extrapenguin: Northern lights in blue and purple above black horizon. (Default)
All That is Solid Melts into Air now stands at 47.5k. I do not think I can complete it in under 75k. I got some extra time to write it, now that the [community profile] ficinabox deadline passed. [community profile] swrarepairs and [community profile] fffx to go!

Exchange commitments total: 22k
Of which fulfilled: 17.1k
Completion percentage: 77.7%

A thing I've noticed is that for me, "posted but unrevealed" (e.g. for an exchange) is somehow mentally much closer to "unwritten" than it is to "published". I guess I need someone else to observe the fic for the wavefunction to collapse.

For All That is Solid, I tried a different approach in some ways. Namely, I usually write longfic at my keyboard into a text editor. Sometimes I write shortfic into a text editor on my phone. However, my regular beta pointed out that Google Docs exists, so I could try using that for working at longfic while traveling/at work. I've done that – All That is Solid has been written on planes, trains, boat rides, and during the many "wait 15 minutes for a thing to happen" sections my job contains – but not when I'm on my laptop and not when I'm home with my desktop. It looks like for me, each story is heavily confined to its medium of transcription.

(I have a BlackBerry with a physical keyboard. No way in hell am I typing up a novel with a touch keyboard lol.)

Another thing with All That is Solid is that, in an effort to make navigation easier, I've been stuffing in chapter headings as I go rather than splatting them in post facto as I usually do. (I do not write with chapter structure in mind. Rather, chapters are to me as episodes in a cdrama: a chunk of story of given length, in this case 4-5k.) The chapter break between 1 and 2 came at an excellent spot, and I made chapter 7 shorter (a bit shy of 4k) because it was a self-contained thing of its own, but now I'm at chapter 9, and after about 2k of setup, I began a scene that currently stands at 3.9k, is nowhere near complete, and which includes the note [check RotS] (the characters present will look at a security recording – no, not that one – and comment upon it; I need to check canon dialogue). In the end, this long scene will probably also end up being its own chapter, but thinking about chaptering at this point is so annoying. Anyway. Have a snippet of the setup. I'm sure many of you will agree with Voe Atell's position!

Voe Atell steepled her fingers. "You're certain."

"Deathly."

"In that case, I vote we let the man sweep the rug from beneath Palpatine," she said to the other Senators assembled. "Let him be destroyed by his own creation and rot in his own piss."
extrapenguin: Northern lights in blue and purple above black horizon. (Default)
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, my RotS fixit fic, part 1 of a series, is now 43k words long and officially novel-length! (Last month: 38k.) I've been a bit slower on writing it now that I'm full swing on [community profile] fffx and [community profile] ficinabox.

Exchange commitments total: 20k
Of which fulfilled: 12.7k
Completion percentage: 63.5%

I have also added a second, shorter non-exchange WIP to my plate which will be basically just A'Sharad Hett and Anakin Skywalker discussing Tusken morality and how Anakin can atone. I'll reread the Republic comics with A'Sharad first, though.

And, as is traditional, a snippet from All That is Solid:

Kyber crystals bonded with their wielders and produced a blade that reflected some inner truth of their soul. Ahsoka's crystals had been green when she brought them from Ilum. That they'd turned blue when she'd gotten them back was proof of just how intensely Anakin had tinkered with them, adjusting the grip to her absent, growing hands and fiddling with the components. Now they were slipping back to green from her two pitched battles, and she was losing yet another mark of her brother's love.

Desperately she reached out with the Force to Anakin, hoping against hope his spirit would have something to tell her, some last dash of reassurance to send her way. She shivered under her paltry cloak as the warmth of exercise left her limbs and the cold damp of the spring rain seeped into her sinews. Anakin did not answer.

Her teeth started chattering. She tugged the damp cloak around herself and sent one final furtive plea to the Force.

When that, too, went unanswered, she sighed and trudged towards her lodgings. The clouds opened up, drenching her.

Gradually the forest began speaking again. Animals hid from the rain, not the events.

Ahsoka felt her eyes heat up. Tears welled to drop on her rain-wet face.

Anakin was gone. Her brother, her teacher, her friend had finally slipped away from even the slightest connection to the world of blood and dust. He'd joined oh so many of their brethren, their brothers and sisters in the Jedi Order, Master Plo and Master Obi-Wan and everyone else, in the Force.

Yet the Force, despite swelling with so many paragons of the light, felt clear like a muddy stream. It was no longer the air she breathed but the waters in which she drowned.
extrapenguin: Northern lights in blue and purple above black horizon. (Default)
I have two exchange projects to do (Fic in a Box and Five Figure Fic Exchange), but all my brain wants to do is think about All That is Solid Melts into Air. /o\

Various exchange documents: 8k+ words & equivalent
All That is Solid: 42439 words (incl some chapter titles). Officially novel length! Have a section from ch 9:

Wolffe watched the legions of his brothers drift closer to the world. He'd adjusted to being the only man with his face. Now reality had caught up and he'd be one of millions once more.

And these brothers had killed their Jedi. Stass Allie on the one hand and Obi-Wan Kenobi on the other. They'd all lost their minds and bowed to the invisible hand of the Sith, and were deeply, deeply kriffed up for it. Cody wouldn't admit to anything, of course, but Neyo had confessed to waking nightmares, his finger on the trigger, firing on General Allie.

Wolffe was perhaps the only clone who wouldn't have such nightmares. Instead, his were about betrayal, his brothers turning en masse on their benefactor and killing him without remorse.

He clenched his hands into fists. His brothers were coming to him, full of their own identical trauma, and for the first time in his life, no-one would ever know how he felt.


I'm currently in the phase where I realize I need to re-outline the last bit due to realizing I dropped a plot thread/didn't think things through enough and am daydreaming about potential plot trajectories. It feels like I'm lost in a swamp. But I think I have at least some clue about how the moving pieces should go. I'll have to bulk up some side plots in edits to set up both part 2b* and part 3, but the main plot will be there.

* I originally thought this would be a three-part series, with each part being set over ~one year and have multiple POVs. Then I realized part 2 would work much better as two separate single-person POV things, hence parts 2a and 2b. Also I suspect part 1 will not end up being a year long, but oh well.
extrapenguin: Northern lights in blue and purple above black horizon. (Default)
I have 38k so far of the RotS canon divergence fic. Another 2k and it'll officially be novel-length! (The third one I've completed, hopefully. I have one Guardian drawerfic WIP that's at a bit over 40k but I'd need to do a lot more to actually finish it, so it'll never see the light of day.) I have about 11 scenes left in the outline. Count about 1k per scene and an equal amount for transitions, and I think I'll break 60k with this. Not enough to dethrone For No Cradle Lasts Forver (Guardian) at 75k, but easily sliding into second place. And the RotS fic will have sequels, too, so the series will easily be the longest thing I've written. (Part 1 I estimated at 60k, Part 2a will probably be up to 5k, Part 2b I have yet to outline but 20k+, I think. And while Part 3 needs to exist to wrap up some plot threads, I need an actual plot for it as its own installment.)

The ETA for the finished fic? Well, I'm currently furiously typing up my [community profile] fffx assignment, and the next weeks I expect to be writing a bunch of [community profile] ficinabox fic, but I expect to be ready this year and hopefully start posting, too. Completion will be 2023, though – I am not going through more than 5k of copyediting a week, lol.

As for what it'll be called, well, for once, I have a title without crying and pulling teeth: All That is Solid Melts into Air. The series will probably be called Comes After the Bitter Glory. I even have chapter titles!!! (For chapters 1, 7, penultimate, and final. I'll need at least eight more before publication.)

But have a snippet as a reward for reading all that:

The Force was alive and vibrant here, nocturnal animals settling down for the day and diurnal ones just waking up as the plantlife woke up to the rays of the sun. Crepuscular creatures ran about, the height of their activity here at the junction of night and day. The vast roots of the bellcup flowers were at work, pumping products of photosynthesis from the edge that was already touched by the light to the mass still covered by the dark.

It was easy to be one with the Force here. Anakin sank down deeper and let himself be unmoored from his body.

From a myriad eyes, perhaps including his own, he saw the sky grow red, pink, and gold. The plants and ground were washed with soft colors and glowed in the dawn light. Scents rose from the earth and flora both, filling the jungle with a song that said *wake up, wake up, wake up*.

Then the sun crested over the trees. The Force pulled Anakin's attention up, up, above the sun and beyond the skies.
extrapenguin: Northern lights in blue and purple above black horizon. (Default)
I watched a YouTube video by Ellen Brock that categorized authors into four types based on a plotter/pantser axis and a methodological/intuitive axis. I already knew I was a plotter, but the methodological/intuitive bit was new. Then she said something along the lines of "methodological plotters usually do their major edits before even writing the outline" and suddenly, every problem I had ever had with every editing-related advice ever ("write a crappy first draft you can then edit!" etc) made so much sense. It does not apply, because I do my major edits before even typing up the outline, and then do any remaining major edits in the outline phase! In fact, this tendency is so strong for me that I once whined to a friend about having no idea where a fic was going and typed up the outline to show this – only for the friend to go "wtf, penguin, this is fine". I just hadn't been able to do the gross edits just by juggling stuff in my head; I'd had to put stuff down as an outline to discover what I wanted to do with the fic.

Brock also has some "signs that you think you're an X but you're actually a Y" stuff in her vid. She also has a playlist with the original video plus one ~30 min video for each type of writer with more specific guidance on problems common to the type and ways to solve them. Some of the methodological plotter issues weren't my issues, while other suggestions were pretty useful and I'm going to try them out in my current WIP of doom. I also watched the intuitive plotter video out of curiosity and basically everything there had me go "wow, this is super not applicable to me/I would find this counterproductive", lol.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure some of you would find this really interesting, and for me at least it showed why a bunch of advice just doesn't apply to my way of doing things. Did you have any revelatory experiences?

([community profile] sunshine_challenge amethyst round ficlet later, perhaps tomorrow.)
extrapenguin: Star Wars (star wars)
I wrote a thing for [community profile] fffx (the Five Figure Fic Exchange):
Daybreak (10444 words) by ExtraPenguin
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Katooni & Mace Windu
Characters: Mace Windu, Katooni (Star Wars), Anakin Skywalker, Original Clone Character(s)
Additional Tags: Order 66 Happened Differently (Star Wars), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, POV Mace Windu
Summary:

Palpatine is dead, but then the Coruscant Guard turns up in his office and starts shooting. Mace discovers that Sidious has left a final trap for the Jedi, and now it's a race against time to dismantle it and free the clone troopers before they break through the Temple doors.



The title was originally something different, then I decided that I'd swap it for Daybreak – a placeholder, I thought, but a better one – and spent 10 minutes explaining to my rubber duck just why Daybreak was the best title and better than the alternatives I'd come up with. Oops? (Order 66 is codenamed Operation Knightfall, and while I couldn't get anything as nice as the night/(Jedi) knight pun, I could flip nightfall on its head and get daybreak.)

This was not my original idea! I originally planned to do a different canon divergence AU, where the events of RotS happen as shown but Mace lives. I made roughly 900 words into my draft before I stopped and ignored it for months. When the deadline breathed down my neck, I realized I couldn't finish that – I needed Sidious to get rekt – and canon diverged two minutes earlier. (Also, [archiveofourown.org profile] ambiguously had, in the meantime, written a much better post-Order 66 Mace and Katooni fic in You'll find that the world has changed forever, and I'd used the concept of the second half of my originally outlined work – Mace teaming up with Maul – to much better effect in Undertow.) Nonetheless, I did do some outlining, even if I didn't mark off a wrap-up point, and write a few hundred words, so here's the entirety of take #1 for posterity:

needless to say, this will never be finished )
extrapenguin: Starry-eyed man looking upwards on a field of stars with the text 地星人 behind him (shen wei stars)
I wrote the final scene of Spaceship Rental. As per gedit, the wordcount for the file is 62 488 words. (This contains some hundreds of words of misc notes, plus gedit counts "even-handed" as two words while AO3 counts it as one.)

It's not the complete draft yet – I count at least 8 [scene here]s – but it's a start. Have an impromptu tour of the sausage factory!

Here's my top-level general notes:
Fixlog:
- more Da Qing, more mentions of ZXC, esp at start
- startish: ZYL has convo with ZXC abt YZ
- SW has two urgent whispered conversations with Li Si, edit one out
- add more Li Si and science fictionality to latter half
- fix initial situation to be more canonical
- impassioned speech on mutualism


And this is the first of the [scene]s:
[office sex]
ZYL: I heard Professor Shen would like a ride?
"Indeed. In more ways than one," Shen Wei replied. "If Chief Zhao would be so kind as to remove every single article of clothing on him?"
[SW rides ZYL into oblivion, then round 2 with ZYL on hands and knees]
[missed you + Regent being a fuckwit]


...but let me post the entire fic:
The woman sitting on the SID couch was young, wore white tai chi clothes, and there was something very much off about her. Upon seeing Zhao Yunlan arrive, she rose. "Greetings. I come from the Rigel Spaceship Rental Corporation. You appear to have crashed one of our spaceships into your planet."

[insert rest of fic here]

The Sun shone warmly above him. Everything would be fine.

(Details about especially the ending might still change a lot.)




In Bingo news, I'm one prompt off from getting the one remaining Hallow (Create a fanwork: Team) and nine off from blackout. I have a vague idea for Waiting, but unless major inspiration strikes, I'll hold a moratorium on filling more squares until I have a complete draft of Spaceship Rental or it's November.
extrapenguin: Woman in pre-Tang Dynasty official's garb reads officially. (xia dong reads)
Space Race was very busy for reasons unrelated to the actual exchange, but I had the pleasure of receiving a wonderful gift!
Adrift (3666 words) by draconicsockpuppet
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Zhao Yunlan/Ye Zun
Characters: Zhào Yúnlán, Yè Zūn
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Crack Treated Seriously, Animal Transformation, Worldbuilding, SID Ensemble Cast
Summary:

In the midst of investigating a derelict spaceship that's been knocked off course, Zhao Yunlan finds a prisoner who's been trapped for ten thousand years. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the prisoner is also a goose.



And the fic I wrote is the longest thing in the collection, which is just wonderful when one is the mod of a flash exchange and also pissing on five unrelated forest fires at the same time. Oh well!
Eddies in the Stream of Time (5735 words) by ExtraPenguin
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shěn Wēi/Zhào Yúnlán, Yè Zūn/Zhú Jiǔ
Characters: Zhào Yúnlán, Shěn Wēi, Lǐ Qiàn, Zhú Jiǔ, Yè Zūn
Additional Tags: Alternative Universe - Archaeology in Space, Alien Planet, Space Archaeologists Investigating The Ruins Of An Alien Civilization, Alien Character Visits Ancestral Homeworld, Time Travel, Archaeology
Summary:

Doctor Zhao Yunlan leads an archaeology expedition to a hitherto uninvestigated set of well-preserved abandoned buildings. The biologist contingent is very interesting. As are the buildings. And the artefacts they hide within them.


DVD extras and some blather about the above )

...and, last but not (necessarily) least, I wrote something for the AU square of my Guardian bingo!
He Who Eats the Sun (887 words) by ExtraPenguin
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shěn Wēi & Yè Zūn
Characters: Yè Zūn, Shěn Wēi
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Mythology
Summary:

The ten Suns should take turns, but one day they arrive on the sky together and refuse to leave. Ye Zun eats the extras.


It's sort of a mashing together of the Hou Yi legend and a just so story for the existence of lava. As a writing experiment, I also tried to write it in a tone you might find a myth told in, instead of the standard Western literary novel writing style. I'm not sure whether I succeeded, but it was fun!

Profile

extrapenguin: Northern lights in blue and purple above black horizon. (Default)
ExtraPenguin

April 2025

M T W T F S S
 123456
78910 111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated 23 Apr 2025 13:48
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios