#((sorry I'm having trouble with muse and Internet and time of day))

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD's Month-end Musings

Jeepers. Jumping Jaloopers. Jinkies, gang. Jeebus Kringle. It's the end of the month.

What has changed? I'm back in school, but that's manageable, somehow. I'm writing less, but that's fine. I'm not doing as much passive media consumption as I ought to - my watchlist / readlist towers up into infinity same as ever - and I haven't exactly lived up to my New Year's Resolution to correct that. But, hey, isn't that just how things are? It's easier for me, when I have the time, to write silly things, these days.

...that being said, what have I written recently? Let's put aside all other thoughts about the month's end and muse solely on this.

1. Divine Patronage: It broke three thousand views on AO3, which is fucking awesome. It's slowed down, but so have I. I finished the first arc of the story, and that did well, and now I'm onto arc 2, as determined by a poll I put up on Sufficient Velocity. I hacked out a prologue and then... silence. Sorry, gang.

For one, I'm in the middle of the term. For another, I can't quite figure out how to write where I want this thing to go - but then again I haven't really sat down and stewed on Divine Patronage the way I have a few other projects after I wrote that prologue. I lost a bit of my mojo there, and then I lost the mojo for this other project, namely...

2. BGC 2068 Screenplay: Thanks to the advice of an internet pal, I rewrote most of the 'first act' of this project. The Sabers are assembling, they're to fight Mason, but now the rewrite puts Mason more front and center in the plot, since he has his Boomer bodyguards (the ladies from OVA 2) kill Priss's friends. It's not shorter, but it is more informationally dense.

The trouble now is that I still am struggling with dialogue-heavy scenes that take up a lot of runtime. Like, I've got this one with Priss and Linna in a beef-bowl place - more Priss's idea than Linna's. And Priss harasses a Boomer waitress in such a way as to highlight said waitress's artificiality, to highlight that these more-human-than-humans are in fact anything but, and that a great many people play with them in ways they shouldn't, a silent symbol of resistance against the crushing omnipresence of GENOM's most valuable product.

It's very clever, but then the second half of the scene needs to be something involving Celia (Sylia, whatever) and Linna (Lena? Rina?), and their past together, since (have I brought this up before?) I'm stealing from the BGC fan audio drama (that I haven't listened to! Oopsie) where the two grew up together, with Celia and Mackie living under the Yamazaki roof until Celia turned eighteen (the way I'm writing it, around the time of the Quake). Needs to be a flashback, then - but what does it show? Celia's a little autistic around this time, but how to display that through Linna's eyes?

I wonder if I should just listen to the inevitably cringey American voice acting just to figure out what the guys behind the audio drama were thinking (and now that I think about it, there should be a new arc coming out this summer! Woo!). Or maybe I should just let this scene rest and get to another part of the script, move forward and fill what I know is there later. Or maybe I should shelve this and get back to Divine Patronage, something people will actually read.

Heh. Speaking of things people won't read...

3. RPG: Shelved. It was, in retrospect, too goddamn long, too much lore for a franchise that doesn't need deep lore. Ah well. If I come back to it, I'll do so in one big rush of useless content, and it will be all my own, no one else's.

4. Terrible BGC Crossover Ideas: I've had a few of these, recently. They're not terrible in terms of concept, more terrible in that no one would read them and they would end up being timesucks with no purpose. Which is a pity, because I'd love to read these stories, but no one is going to write them. I'll list them in a follow-up post.

Soooo... what now? Well, I need to get back to Divine Patronage, that's for sure, because people read that. I think the screenplay is a more interesting concept, it's more interesting to work on because It has to be compact, chunks written and rewritten. But it's not going to see the light of day any time soon.

I really should start building a portfolio of original work. Well - then again, I do have a creative writing class I'm doing right now, and I'm writing something for that, and dare I say it, it's pretty gooooood. We'll see where it goes in the coming month, same as the screenplay and Divine Patronage.