#Refection

[hold-fast-and-rise]

[aestum]

(by espenbakketun)

[softalism]

Light, shadow, reflection

[huariqueje]

Reflection - Yves Beaumont , 2024.

Belgian , b. 1970 -

Acrylic on canvas , 40 x 30 cm.

[beauty-around-us-jo]

Happy Monday!

[roadtrippinlilly]

Source Me laf@ilyF ❤️

[onarangel]

Sunrise over lake

As the sun rises, its rays pierce the mist over a serene lake surrounded by forest.

[foundmemory]

[hold-fast-and-rise]

[deepfriedjunction]

Beware of nerds

[mychampagne-mybubbles]

Today’s reflection

The NY times - 21.10.2024

“The boys of One Direction were in the grip of such dazzling fame,” wrote Poppy Sowerby on UnHerd, “that it penetrates any vulnerability and seeks endless revenge for, inevitably, not turning out to be the person a 12-year-old fan imagined you to be 10 years ago.”

“Payne knew it. We know it, too. Turning children into international celebrities, putting them on the world stage and shining the spotlight on their every action, sexualizing them while infantilizing them, telling them they are demigods but not letting them make decisions for themselves, is dangerous.”

Nothing new, the brush of reality of an industry that considers little changes after so many losses before and that finds us under the cloud that Liam’s tragic departure has left behind.

Will this make any change at last? Liam’s fans and 1D fans add quite a volume, are we enough to push a change? And… are we ready to face the reality of our heros and idols (their human regularity, ways and shadows) and keep on investing our sweat, heart and tears in them.

You can read the article HERE 🇪🇸

[starryselenaria]

[crystal-overdrive]

Towards Tyranny Post Mortem

I put it to a poll whether folk wanted to read my thoughts on TT now I've finished it and you said yes, so here it is! Under the cut, 1675 words. Perhaps some minor spoilers but I don't outright say what the ending is.

PROCESS

Towards Tyranny was my first piece of fanfiction and my first long-form piece of prose. I worked on Towards Tyranny for ten months, at a rate of a chapter or 2 -4l per week. I was surprised at my ability to continue a project for this long, as by three months I’m normally chomping at the bit when I’m working on other forms of writing. I think releasing serially and getting constant feedback was a huge motivator I wanted to give my audience something every week and I looked forwards to what hey had to say. I’m not sure I could have written the whole thing by myself without showing it to anyone.

Unlike how I normally work, Towards Tyranny was not edited. It would have taken me about double the time if I’d edited, and editing chapter-by-chapter isn’t particularly helpful to me, as I tend to do a structural and character pass before delving into line edits. I think my writing must have improved over the course of this project, as I don’t believe it is too noticeable that the first ten or so chapters have about four rounds of editing, and subsequent chapters have none. So that’s nice!

Plotting and outlining was pretty odd on this project. I am normally very much a planner, but the fic diverged from the original outline very quickly. At points I abandoned the outline and went chapter-by-chapter. I did make (several) more outlines during writing, but the main purpose of these was to prove that the work could actually be finished than a guideline for writing. Having a bit of room for the characters to speak for themselves was a good thing, and I think this has taught me that I can relax a little with my outlining and still complete long projects.

The pace I wrote this at was reasonable, but it was only possible because I didn’t have a full time job. I “stole” time from uni, and during September and October worked on it full time to get finished. One thousand words a day is my full time pace which, while comparable with professionals, seems to pale in comparison to other fic writers. With any luck I’ll have a full time job soon, and I think on top of working, a reasonable pace for outside writing projects is something like 1k a week. That means I probably won’t be writing a longfic like this again. If I do write something of this size it will probably be an original. I’ve proven to myself I can write at length, and I’d like the challenge of original work.

This doesn’t mean I’m done with fandom, it’s just more likley to be the odd one shot when I feel inspired rather than anything big.

PACING AND STRUCTURE

I think it is evident from the text that my outline was changing during writing, as the structure is odd at times. It feels like the front half is all romance, the back half all plot, and then there’s almost a resolution which is undone by my subversive ending. The way Towards Tyranny ends is pretty typical of my work, but I think part of me was channelling the frustration I felt with the project into the characters motivations by the end. Perhaps a more simple romance ending without The Cell or Astarion/Gasper would have made for a stronger ending.

If I was to do a structural edit, I would either remove or make more of the political plotline. The Hand of Baldur goes nowhere, so I’d either add that in or replace it with the Drains and Underways, because they essentially did what Tav suggested the Hand of Baldur would do in that parliament session. I’d also make more of Jannath considering where she ends up. These are fairly minor things to catch in a structural edit, but for a released work they’re not great. This is just a hazard of releasing serially and changing the outline as I went!

Another issue I have with the political plotline is that it often develops between chapters. I thought writing it was boring, and therefore reading it would be. This means we get a lot of telling not showing in regards to Tav’s poltical prowess. If I had leaned in here and done more political chapters though, the work would have been so long, and it would have veered even further from romance as a genre.

One thing I think I do do well with is foreshadowing and setting up characters and mysteries. This was less deliberate planning, and more “I need a character, guess I’ll pull a name I’ve used before”, but it worked. There is also a lot of nice dramatic irony on a second read — I particularity liked Enver telling Tav he “had to have her before she took the Gate from him” in chapter two. Like, you STUPID man, if you’d have left her alone she’d have been no threat! I

Generally, while too much happens off screen and the structure is a little odd, every plot point feel like it is set up and paid off, and we have a cohesive main plot in the Bane storyline. And the Bane storyline is kind of the big gotcha here. Towards Tyranny isn’t really a romance. The real story is about Bane and Tav’s decent into religious fascism, but that wasn’t my original intent, and it wasn’t until about chapter ten that I actually figured that out. If this was an original and I was writing to market, I’d probably be looking at turning it into a political fantasy with a romance B plot rather than the other way around.

In terms of pacing, the political plots are fine, but the romance pace is a bit weird. We got from quite tame flirting to really quite sexual advances in chapter ten which was faster than made sense on a second reading. Again, if I was to edit, I’d add another romantic scene before it that started to cross the line. I would also add another sex or romance scene before the final chapter that demonstrates that while the power dynamics have changed, Enver and Tav do still love one another, because right now I feel like their feelings could be read as ambiguous at the end. Also, I just think it’s funny that they went from flirting to married in basically two weeks. Time was all over the place in the fic, and juggling a lot of plot points made it hard to manage at times.

QUALITY OF PROSE

I don’t consider prose my main form of writing, so I’m largely happy with how the prose turned out. There’s some really lovely metaphors, similes and description near the beginning that grounds the reader in Tav’s head and world. This does fall off as I stop editing and being to write faster, but in my defence, by chapter thirty, we don’t need more description of Wyrm’s Rock! Some of the description in the later chapters feels overly simplistic—more like stage direction than the sort of description and action that also conveys emotion, theme, tone etc.

While I was writing I was concerned about the overuse of things like smiling, learning, smirking, said, because I tended to use these as fillers between dialogue and they are known as somewhat annoying, but when I read back I didn’t notice it at all as a reader, and though action and dialogue flowed quite well. Nearer the end, we start to get heads talking in the void. I had purposefully used less action and dialogue tags because I had noticed that I used them more than I found them in published work. Looking at it now, I think, no, I don’t need to tag every line, but I prefer (in my own writing at least) more tags and action than less.

I am very pleased with my dialogue. I think it is natural and consistently in character. Each character has a distinct register that I am happy with.

FANFIC VS ORIGINAL

If this was an original, it would have to have been far longer. Through I do a lot of worldbuilding as far as Bane is involved, the pre-established worlds and characters do so much. Without contextt of the Gods, the cults, the adventure, it wouldn’t make sense. An original would have needed flashbacks to the adventure, or perhaps this would have to come as a part two.

I really enjoyed getting to take an established world and pick at it and expand it. By mid-way, when the main cast were mostly OCs and the story had become about my take on the cult of Bane, it felt closer to an original, but the process was still very different.

It had different motivations from writing an original piece too. While I love interacting with readers via comments, and at times it did feel like I was writing for comments, I was ultimately writing for myself, and at points as a form of therapy. During writing I went through a religious crisis, dropped out of a PhD, got engaged and dealt with a lot of family drama. Wonder where half of the plot of the fic came from…

On that note, I back and forthed a lot about whether Tav was a self-insert. She was a lot of my character traits, personality quirks, and I sort of wrote from a what-would-I-do perspective for a while. As she turned more and more evil, more of a gap formed between us, and I think that made writing harder. I started to feel uncomfortable that I had identified with a character whose morals were so unlike my own by the end. In the last few chapters I embraced Tav as not-me, just some cool evil woman, and that was better.

Overall, I’m really happy with Towards Tyranny. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever written, I feel so proud of how I committed to getting this done, and I like the end result!

[roadtrippinlilly]

Source Me laf@ilyF ❤️

[bymonstuff]

"For who do you keep your nails short?"

They asked the maiden of Lesbos 

Who rides apon a trusty steed of Subaru 

"A fair lady I have yet to meet" was her simple reply 

[grimgoblintales]