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chipped-chimera · 1 year

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WIP WEDNESDAY - 21/06/23

(I mean it’s technically Friday now between timezones and spoons but have this otherwise I’ll keep forgetting) My first WIP Wednesday! Thanks @theviridianbunny for the tag! I’ve been really getting stuck into modding - as well as falling into my usual mod habit of ‘start like six project at once and end up with a million WIP files' but I guess I’ll talk about the major ones.

Graphic design is my passion ...

(Long) rambling about mods I'm making + things I've learned below the cut~

My V’s tatt project is still ongoing, and I’ve (somewhat begrudgingly) been trying out Substance Painter to work on bits of it, mainly polishing seams between UV maps. It’s definitely got a lot of benefits, especially for graphic placement in really tricky areas (like anywhere in the entire head mesh region for example) but I still think a lot of the heavy work will still be done in Photoshop so I’ll probably be writing up both experiences with them when I do that tutorial I keep hinting at for complex tatt work. I’ve started drafting a tumblr tutorial but I wonder if that’s the best format, maybe a PDF? Google doc? Github wikis look cool? (tho I think I need to pay for that) - if y’all got suggestions for tutorial formats pls let me know!

As for the other arguably overly-ambitious-project-where-I-bit-off-more-than-I-could-chew ...

H A I R.

Hair has been the bane of my existence for about the past week( ... weeks? Maybe two?), most of it involving cursing, a lot of reverse-engineering game meshes and smashing my head against blender. But if not already evident from my monowire post - I am a stubborn bitch with too much time on my hands so even though there were at least two moments where I wanted to curl up on the floor under my desk and just stay there - we got there.

This all started because my favourite hair mod which I cannot split from my V’s identity was acting funky and the shape of it had been altered since a physics update. It wasn’t her anymore. So I needed new hair. I tried editing the existing hair. I tried importing the old hair mesh. I tried so many things and they didn’t work out one way or they threw a million errors or there were an obnoxious amount of verts.

I even tried looking for replacement mod hair. None of them fit, all of them felt too ‘clean’ for my V. So I just concluded: FINE. I’ll make my own damn hair. From scratch. At least then I’ll actually KNOW what’s going on with the mesh, right?

Problem with hair is tutorials are very limited in respect to Cyberpunk, so I had to learn a lot of this by myself and looking at other processes used for building game hair. I’ve had a previous stint in game design at uni but it was very introductory and more broad-strokes concepts not specific stuff like what ‘real time hair’ is and how you actually go about placing hair-cards (there’s a million different ways btw) but after another 3 days smashing my head against blender I finally got shit to work to a satisfactory level using hair tools for blender and the particle hair grooming system (not the 3.5 blender system, maybe more on that at some point).

Putting together the hair cards I was 120% convinced this was going to blow up in my face, primarily through vert count. But this hair tool plugin? Alarmingly efficient. I was frequently checking my work against Alt's hair mesh (one I was planning on rigging to) and here's the final-ish stats -

This is with only Alt's hair mesh selected (no cap) and then only my mesh(s - lots of layering to build it up), and by comparison I felt I'd built up the density of a chinchilla. This is not a brag, this is mostly genuine confusion over how efficient this plugin is, all I did was smack around hair curves. It did all the UV mapping junk on the fly.

Although structurally complete, I still consider this a WIP (yes I know there's a reeeeal fun vert funkiness in that second render, it's been fixed) since I'm having to go back and fine-tune some of the UV's the plugins mapped that I'm not happy with and generally figuring out my density problem because if anything, after putting it in-game it felt too dense.

Because yes, somehow I got it in game.

WITH. PHYSICS.

This may have driven me absolutely up the wall between having to learn blender from scratch then what the heck real time hair is and how that works etc. etc. but ... god, seeing her move back from the mirror and just feeling that instant catharsis of 'IT'S HER!' made it so. Damn. Worth it.

It looks too thick - this might be because I chucked in the 'doubled' feature Wolvenkit comes with because I hadn't spent any time doing backfaces. But it also might be because it's black? That's going to need investigating.

The physics need a lot of work too, I did a pretty rushed weight painting job last night on a merged version of the mesh because I was worried whether it was even viable and I'd already dumped an insane amount of hours into this between trying to salvage the old hair and building a new one (with some more bells and whistles. Mainly - curly). That wasn't without it's issues -

This almost fucking cracked me, given this was one of the issues I was experiencing before trying to fix an existing mesh mod. Turns out I was just being dumb and forgetting to export the armature, which I'd thought I wasn't supposed to do after having blender throw a bunch of errors on other hair attempts. I gave it a try after one last shot and boom. Worked. (I dunno what those errors were about man but now I know armature? very important).

Will I release this hair? no damn clue, depends on if I can get it to a level I feel is 'releasable'. I already know what I'm calling it though - Venatrix her side-handle I've decided on.

I look forward to adapting it into maybe a comb-back version, as well as a tied up version, so I can show off both her undercut + have the option of NOT hiding every damn tatt I've obsessed over placing on her neck haha.

In other news -

My much-needed wacom tablet replacement arrived (as well as other things I was looking forward to 👀) meaning my Wacom Cintiq, workhorse of ten years can finally enjoy her retirement. Her controls were getting funky, she had a few dead pixels but man. I'm convinced they won't make them like her ever again. Either way she's done unfortunately - upgrading my monitor to 2k made this painfully obvious. I don't think it's even running in full HD, it's that old. And with Phantom Liberty coming out this year? I'm probably going to need a new videocard and DVI compatibility isn't really a thing anymore.

So for future I think I'll just stick to the basic tablet set up, invest in screens. Also now I FINALLY know what her hair is gonna look like and with the tablet here, I can get back to work on the tattoo bodysuit.

Anyways, that's it for now! (Jesus Christ did you really read all of this? If you did you're a fucking trooper). Sorry for the extended ramble but MAN I did a lot, I needed to yell.

Till next time Chooms! Thanks again @theviridianbunny for the tag~ <3

Oh shit wait, have the blender renders before I forget because hahah I figured out how to do that too lol -

#cyberpunk 2077 #my mods #wip wednesday #kerytalk #god I am sorry this is a fucking essay but I had a lot to talk about I guess #one can do a lot in a week with nothing but the power of autistic hyperfocus and the love for one's OC blorbo ok #cp2077 mods #cp2077 modding

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thefearandnow · 2 years

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Happy New Year! 🥂

I've had this post saved for a while because since coming back to tumblr I've found it to be a really great space for setting myself accountable creatively. I've had a lot of ideas for goals I want to set for myself in 2023 so I'm gonna pin this post and keep coming back to it with progress/check ins. I'm also gonna queue this post for every month so I don't forget to revisit my list. Some stuff has to do with creating and some stuff are just personal things ✨

💀🎙 Write and produce monthly episodes of The Fear and Now

For my graduate degree I produced an analysis podcast about horror in fiction podcasts and part of changing my tumblr to The Fear and Now was partially to motivate me to make new episodes for the first time in more than 2 years. I'm basically going to reboot it entirely because I've become a much different producer since I started it but I'm excited to start working on it again. First step will be to relisten to the old episodes which is honestly what I'm most avoiding but I'm excited to do more analytical writing, research and use my improved editing skills to give it a facelift.

0/12

🎧 Write and post at least 25 Audio Drama Sunday posts

I've really been enjoying using tumblr as a way to recap my listening and get through my backlog of podcasts I want to listen to. On top of that it's been a great way to find new podcasts and support creators so I'm hoping to stay on a semi-weekly schedule but I'm also trying to set the expectation a little low 😅

1/25

🦉🌶 Finish writing the fiction podcast I started (8 episodes)

In 2022 I started writing my first ever fiction podcast, something I'd been wanting to do for years. It's been on hiatus for a few months but I want to come back around to it and at least get all the episodes in rough draft from.

2/8

✏️ Try NaNoWriMo for the first time

I discovered National Novel Writing Month (through a discord I'm a part of) this year and was a little too late to the party to try it myself but I'm really drawn to the idea of trying it November 2023. Of course, I think I'm gonna need to practice a lot to get myself prepared so I'm going to start setting daily word count goals every month.

Jan: 500 words | 75%

Feb: 500 words

📖 Read at least one novel a month

In 2022 some friends started a book club and it's really helped me get back into the habit of having structured reading time. Looking forward to reading more and keeping track of the new books I'll read in the new year!

1/12

💻 Give more feedback to writers/creators on tumblr

I've started following a few different writers on tumblr whose short stories I really enjoy and I want to get more into the habit of reaching out and telling them what I love about their work. It's one of those things that I've only recently spent much time thinking about but I think often I'm a passive enjoyer of content and want to actively be more involved as an audience member in 2023.

🎶 Self publish a mixtape of instrumentals

In 2022 I got into a routine of posting quick little sample-based sketches and beats. In the new year I want to take the best of those sketches and make them into a proper mixtape/EP that I'll publish via Bandcamp. I'm not really sure how to track the progress on something like this but I know I just want to have what I consider a finished project by this time next year.

✏️ Try NaNoWriMo for the first time.

Jan: 500 words

✨ Explore my hair/gender expression

This one is literally impossible to quantify but it's something I want to reflect on and be more actively engaged with this year. So much of my life I feel like I've tried to ignore thinking about and exploring my own style and gender and its only recently that I've felt some regret about it. I want to buy new clothes and try new hairstyles and feel more comfortable in my own skin and I think I've found that for me I need to write it somewhere if I actually want to do the damn thing 😅 so this is me doing that lol

#pinned post #new years resolutions #2023 goals #writing goals

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the-darklings · 2 years

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you mentioned that you sat down to draft dialogue and now i'm really curious abt your...writing method? or approach i guess? if you're ever willing to share!!

@writtenhuman

thank you for the ask, guys!!!

My process is... a mess. What I mean by that is that I find that every project is different, and I shift my approach based on what I'm writing.

If it's work-related, it's more linear in nature because it has to account for editor involvement, so I'm more heedful of what I put down. If it's for my original novel, it's a lot more structured and stringent (to my own detriment, frankly). I'm working hard on getting the first draft to good quality even if the first draft should be there to make it exist, so don't follow my example lol. But this is mainly because I tend to be loose with editing, so I want to do a good job from the get-go. If it's for fun (tibyim, coa etc), then I tend to jot down dialogue first often. I found that it especially fit my work pattern for tibyim. I like keeping myself moving because I tend to get wordy (as you've no doubt noticed lol), and dialogue under reminds me to keep it snappy. When writing scenes, I'm visualising the scene playing like it were a show in my head, so I'm essentially transcribing the scene.

#sorry if anyone else asked this but i was only able to find these two. my inbox is warzone rn dgjhdsg #so sorry to everyone i haven't replied to yet it's not intentional at all. i appreciate you all lots.#gonna try and clear out as much as possible #busy writing ahead today tho #asks

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wordsnstuff · 4 years

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Guide To Plot Development

Patreon || Ko-Fi || Masterlist || Work In Progress || Studyblr || Studygram

Where To Start

Start with the zero draft. Honestly, the only thing you need to know about your story in order to complete a solid zero draft is the basic timeline of events and 2-3 main characters. Zero drafts don’t need to include any minor characters, backstory, world building, subplots, anything. They’re just a rough estimate of what your story is going to be and where it’s going to go.

This way, you have something to work with when you do approach the task of maturing your story, which is a lot easier to do when you have already gotten the garbage ideas onto paper, seen them, realized they’re bad, clipped out the good parts, and developed a better understanding of your story’s trajectory.

Placing The Climax

The climax is two things; the apex of built tension and the turning point of the conflict. Recognizing that as a definition makes pin-pointing the climax of your story much easier, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes to start with a solid premise and work forward from there, rather than build a sturdy skeleton and fill in the blanks as you write the first draft. If you’re still having trouble, the climax is usually one of, if not the most exciting parts of the plot, and that comes from anticipating a massive shift in the story.

Outlining For Discovery Writers

I know a lot of people out there will read this article and question whether they can put it to use because they’re not an intense plotter who relies on outlines, character sheets, etc. A lot of writers prefer to let characters grow on their own and the conflict present itself naturally, which is less predictable but very exciting, especially when brand new ideas hit you out of nowhere. If you’re one of these people, fear not. An easy way to settle the slight nervousness that comes with diving straight into a blank page is to write down all of the basic or specific ideas you have in one spot where you can see it all and as you go along, refer to it for inspiration or answers when you hit a snag in your story’s flow. It’s not exactly an outline, but it’s a lead, and it’s worth doing.

Balancing Planning With Pantsing

A lot of writers who decide to take their stories seriously and commit to finishing a large project make the mistake of thinking that means they have to plan like a professional (which, spoiler, most professionals don’t do). What happens in these cases is that writers plan so meticulously for so long that the story becomes... boring. We all get kind of tired of stories when they take up too much of our imagination, but getting tired of a story before even a word of it is written should be avoided.

I have a personal rule that I never give myself more than 6 weeks to plan a story. That seems like a lot to most people, but I also zero draft all of my stories before I plan them, so I never start a first draft with a blank page. I suggest that if you frequently run into this issue, you try this method and between each serious draft, you give yourself at least a month of space from it in order to refresh your mind.

What Comes After Drafting

Foreshadowing, symbolism, subplot integration, and micro-development. These are all examples of things that writers try to plan before their first crack at a draft and end up betraying their ability follow through with writing the story at all. When it comes to complicating the story, these elements all come into the picture much later, when the main plot, character profiles, and structure is solid and ready to be finalized in the interest of moving forward in the writing process. When you’re plotting, shove these things out of your mind. You can’t input symbolism into a story that doesn’t exist, and you can’t develop characters that haven’t been born.

Common Struggles

– The common struggles section of my “guide to__” posts are general questions sent in by readers on the topic at hand. If you have a question that has not been addressed thus far, you’ll probably find the answer in this section. As always, you’re welcome to send other questions to my inbox if you don’t find the answer in this post. –

~ How do I correctly pace a story?... The pace should depend on the genre and point of view, as these things are the framework of every plot. Generally, anticipation should be a slow burn and the big moments should be snappy and explosive, rather than drawn out. The exposition, climax, and resolution should take up the least amount of time in your story, and the rising action should be the majority of the rest of it.

~ What needs to be in your beginning, middle and end?... The answer to this question is answered when you choose a definitive structure model to either follow or build off of. I have a whole post about it here: Plot Structures

~ How can I know if I’ve resolved my major conflict enough?... The resolution of your story should leave the reader feeling satisfied with the protagonist’s overcoming their obstacle, but still leave enough room to anticipate more to come.

~ How should the plot close?... This is entirely up to you, but I would take into account the possibility of a sequel. If it’s 100% a standalone story, give it a clean ending and tie up the loose ends, pat yourself on the back for all of the clever foreshadowing everyone missed, and leave the protagonists and beloved secondary characters’ futures looking bright.

~ How do you write a plot around a theme?... Most stories that have a central theme are born from answering a tough question. George Orwell’s 1984 asked “What would the world look like if totalitarianism ruled society?”. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 dealt with censorship and questioned whether bliss only belongs to the ignorant. Bottom line is, pick the theme you want to explore, and then ask yourself the tough questions. The story should be the process by which you find the answer.

~ What is the best way to handle a large cast within a plot?... You have your main conflict and the plotline that surrounds it, and then you have various subplots, around 2-3 where you explore the world/characters further and immerse the reader in the stories. You can convince the reader to become invested in a large number of characters by making them heavily involved in the subplots. They should all touch the main plot considerably, but the bulk of their development should be in the subplot, and if you were to have 15 characters, you’d want around 3 subplots where 3-5 of them were important players. However, large casts that reader’s have trouble keeping up with is a problem that usually results from a writer’s inability to make cuts or combinations. Remember: the reader’s experience is the most important thing. It’s better to downsize your ideas than lose your readers altogether.

Other Resources From My Blog That Help With This:

What Do You Do When You Over-Plan?

Resources For Plot Development

How To Write A Good Plot Twist

How To Foreshadow

Writing Long Stories Without Filler

Writing Stories About Your Own Experiences

Novel Planning 101

Tackling Subplots

Things A Reader Needs From A Story

How To Turn A Good Idea Into A Good Story

Planning A Scene

When To Stop Planning

How To Outline Outside Chapter Structure

Tips on Mapping Out A Series

Outlining By Chapter

How To Outline Effectively

Tips On Starting A Scene

How To Start A Novel

Character Driven vs. Plot Driven Stories

Plot Structures

Planning A Scene In A Story

Effective Ways Of Planning Chapters

Writing Meaningful Stories

Finding Your Own Writing Style

How To Write A Story Timeline

Making A Story Come Together

Tips on Planning A Series

Coming Up With Scene Ideas

General Resources For Plot Development

How To Engage The Reader

Coming Up With “Original” Ideas

Building Upon A Good Premise

Pacing Appropriately

–

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#writing #writeblr #writespo #writing resources #writing tips #writing advice #writer #writing reference #writing inspiration #writing motivation #writer's block #creative writing #wordsnstuff #authorblr #character development #world building #plot development #guide

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bettsfic · 4 years

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I find it in comprehensible when people who give writing advice tell me to just write my first draft without thinking, to just let it flow without correcting typos or pausing to fix a certain sentence's structure. To make it messy, just get my ideas down, and edit later. But I do recognize that it's probably a more helpful way to get the story out initially. Do you have any tips on how to let myself just write without editing as I go?

i think as my own process evolves, i’m not becoming better at writing as much as growing more comfortable with bad writing, and patient enough to make it better. it’s frustrating sometimes that i used to be able to sit down and write something in one draft, read it over, and post it. but now i’ve just lost all ability to do that. even if i think i have a pretty solid idea of a story, i get to the end of a draft and realize i was all wrong. i rewrite it, and rewrite it again, and then maybe i’m happy with it. but i find that i’ll churn out an 80k first draft, and then keep maybe, if i’m lucky, 10% of it. for short stories, i’ll keep maybe a single sentence or two. those sentences tend to be what i call keystone sentences, in that they unveil some major work of the piece, and i needed to write a ton of words to get to them that i then throw away.

on one hand, it’s such an arduous process that i am now very careful with the ideas i entertain, because i know even the simplest things will take a lot of work. on the other hand, i’ve found my writing is generally a lot better for it. i manage to work in more complicated conflicts and create more nuanced characters.

but damn if it wouldn’t be nice to switch from one ideology to the other at will.

back when i was a Clean First Draft kind of writer, i remember being very self-conscious when other, more established writers would tell me that the Shitty First Draft was always superior, and that good stories took multiple rewrites. blood, sweat, and tears and all that. now, looking back, i really don’t think there’s anything wrong with the Clean First Draft, as long as it’s a process that makes you feel good and encourages you.

there are many occasions where writers only opt for the Clean First Draft because they don’t yet know their own revision process, or because they’re afraid of their first try being wrong or bad. but there are also plenty of writers who do the Clean First Draft because they’ve done a lot of front-end work, and they take their time and think through scenes. i went to the Q&A of one author (sorry, i forget her name) who said she only really does “one” draft because she “combs” that draft hundreds of times while she adds to it.

i think what changed my process from the Clean First Draft involved getting more comfortable with revision, until revision became a majority of the process. once you know what it feels like to see a major project through to its final form, to the literal presses, it’s a lot easier to write badly in the first draft, because you know what’s ahead, and you know how far off your finish line is. and that line will continue to get farther away as your self-standards raise with each project.

so, i don’t think i ever really wanted to learn to write the Shitty First Draft. i wanted to learn revision, and in doing so, learned that the quicker and dirtier i got down that initial draft, the sooner i would know what the story was even about, and the sooner i could write it knowing what the fuck i wanted to say.

the more time you sink into an early draft, the less inclined you are to throw out what’s not working, because you took the time to make it pretty. if you’re making a ceramic cup, and the cup gets a crack in it and can’t hold liquid, you don’t then take the time to glaze and paint it, when you know you’re just going to have to make a new cup.

so if you already have a comfort with revision and rewriting, and if a Clean First Draft isn’t written out of fear of imperfection, then that’s just your process. maybe the typo-fixing and sentence-structuring is just how you generate thoughts and make progress.

but if you find you struggle to finish things, and you’re not happy with the things that you do finish, and the thought of being anything but perfect keeps you from writing, i think it’s worth it to focus on improving your rewriting and revision skills, so that you have more patience with early drafts.

i hope this helps!!

my carrd | writing advice masterdoc

#writing advice #process #tsthrace

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arsenicpanda · 3 years

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coming from an amateur writer, do you have any tips on writing smut?

ngl, I’m an amateur myself, having not finished much smut and still not written the actual act of sex from the perspective of one of the people experiencing it. So idk why you came to me, but I am flattered. I'm not great at advice on the act of writing, but I’ll do my best to talk about process and shit.

1. Read smut. Read lots of it, read varying qualities and varying lengths and as soft-core and hard-core as you’re up for. Read it for fun, just taking it in, and then read it with a critical eye. What works? What doesn’t? Are there any tropes (general, character-specific, or ship-specific) that you like or dislike? Why? What’s especially hot? What makes you cringe? What kind of language do you like? And so on and so forth. Ask questions and answer them.

2. What’s your setup? Like, which characters, which ship, which universe? If it’s an AU, how does the AU change things from canon (especially important if you’re doing ABO, which is its own can of worms I’m not getting into here)? What’s the relationship between your characters and what’s the situation in which they fuck?

3. How do your characters feel about sex in general and with respect to the ship you’re writing? How horny are they in general, for the other character(s) in the ship, and in this specific situation? What are they into and not into? What are their previous experiences (or lack thereof) with sex and romance? What experience do the characters have with each other? Are there specific experiences they might remember and use or is there certain knowledge they do or don’t have about their partner(s) (For established ships, I like to mention previous experiences and knowledge of what the POV character’s partner(s) are into as a way to show that there is real history there. For unestablished ships, I like to include that figuring out process some and the reactions to experiencing stuff for the first time, either in general or within the specific ship, to show that newness of the relationship. Maybe there’s mention of a certain preference the POV character already knows about, or maybe the POV character makes note of a preference they learn during the fic. Stuff like that.)? How loud are they during sex? Are there any sex acts that this ship would engage in no matter what (e.g. I maintain all smut with Jughead that isn’t a quickie should include him giving some amount of oral sex)? How many times can they orgasm? How sensitive are they? What’s their refractory period? And so on, and so forth. Note: once you come up with answers for this section for your ship once, the next time you write smut for them, you’ll really only have to make adjustments according to the universe you’re in, so that’s nice.

4. What kind of fic are you writing? Is it pwp? Smut within plot? A character or relationship piece? Basically, are there any arcs to get through, what are they, and how are they going to relate to the smut? How explicit is the smut? What language do you want to use to refer to genitals and orgasms and such? What POV are you writing in? How much do your characters talk? How “realistic” are things? Are they practicing safe sex, including safe oral sex?

5. What’s actually happening? I like to plan out a smut scene ahead of time so I know how it starts, where they are physically, what the characters are doing (hand, mouth, genital, etc location and movement), how one sex act moves into another, what can be seen/heard/felt/etc based on POV, what’s physically possible at all times, if there are any accessories or toys I need to explain them owning and where they’re kept before the smut, and how it ends. It also helps me make sure the smut doesn’t significantly overlap with something I’ve already written or am planning to write. I also write an outline, which you don’t have to do, but does help if you ever go weeks or months between working on it because then when you come back you don’t have to strain to remember what the plan was. You can also just go with the flow and just write, but definitely keep location of body parts and what the POV character can actually see/hear/etc (for example, if your POV character is blindfolded or bent over, they can’t describe their partner’s face) in mind as you do.

6. Write it. Vary your sentence structure. I find good smut includes not just physical action, but emotion and especially sensation, but you might disagree. If you're struggling with repeated words and shit, maybe look for lists of words to use when writing smut. Probably look up tips for writing smut in general, ask people for advice (which you already are, so good for you!), etc. Draw upon your own experience if you have any, and if you don’t, maybe look into people’s accounts, sex tips, etc and check if any questions you have about sensation have been answered online anywhere, e.g. on reddit. But don’t try and make it perfect all at first; just write it. One approach that’s often effective is to do writing "sprints", that is, sit down for fifteen minutes and just write; you can continue for another fifteen minutes when you're done if you want, but you'd be surprised how much you can get done in fifteen minute segments over multiple days. Also, I recommend writing in google docs with the setting of “Add space after paragraph” (go to Format, then Line & paragraph spacing) for ease of transferring to AO3. Actually, here's a good guide on working from google docs an moving to AO3; look at it before you start. Google docs is also useful for when you have a beta because it lets them make suggestions instead of straight-up changing things themselves. Also, take note of where you use italics and non-italicized punctuation together (this will be useful when you need to publish to AO3).

7. Read it carefully and with a critical eye like you would someone else’s fic up in #1. Make sure that you can follow the action based solely on what you wrote and that nothing impossible or contradictory happens (e.g. teleporting body parts, a single hand in two locations at the same time, people twisting or reaching in physically impossible ways). What do you think is missing, where, why, and how might you fix it?

8. Revise it.

9. Repeat 7 and 8 as much as you desire until you’re satisfied, or at least as satisfied as you can be without peer review.

10. Send it to beta. Like, seriously, send it to beta because, if nothing else, your beta won’t know what’s supposed to be happening in the scene, so they can tell you if you’ve successfully conveyed what happens. If you have anything in particular you are uncertain about or want help with, ask your beta to pay close attention to it. Seriously, betaing is going to be much more effective if your beta knows what they should be focusing on most.

11. Repeat steps 7 and 8.

12. Title it and write a summary. Feel free to ask your beta for help here.

12. Congrats, you’re done! Transfer it to AO3 from google docs and save it as a draft. AO3 by default puts a space between italics and non-italicized punctuation, so go through your list of those combos and manually delete the extra spaces. Now add your title, tags, and summary. Don’t tag side pairings/pairings the fic doesn’t focus on in the relationship section; if you need to warn readers of them, put them in the additional tag sedition. If you’re writing an ot3+ that isn’t an established, feel free to tag the pieces of the ship involved (e.g. Betty/Jughead/Tabitha would also tag Betty/Jughead, Betty/Tabitha, and Tabitha/Jughead). But if the ot3+ is already popular within fandom, only tag the ot3+. Don’t tag characters who aren’t central to the story. Tag all warnings and kinks involved especially.

I think that’s it? I guess I might have overly walked you through, but that’s the process I recommend. I mean, I don’t always follow all the steps (While I get the gist of character/emotional arcs before I start plotting the smut, I often really nail them down after I’ve decided on the events of the smut because the latter is generally what has me writing the smut in the first place and I tend to get ahead of myself. Things would probably be easier if I didn’t do that though), but they’re good guidelines, I think? Regardless, I hope this helps!

#asks #anonymous #writing #smut

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qwertyfingers · 4 years

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WOO CONGRATS ON THE TEET YEET!!! also also, your poetry is beautiful. can i ask how you got started?

thank u!!! apologies for how long this answer got i’m waffling

so i feel like the start of my answer is kind of unhelpful because i really just. started writing? no one encouraged me or helped me or anything i really just ran with it on my own. a lot of how i write is really just how i think - the metaphors and similes and weird comparisons come very naturally to me. i have no idea if this is how other writers feel?? but i can’t give any advice on how to develop that beyond just. writing a lot.

i’ve find poetry to be really good emotional outlet, so a lot of what i write about is very repetitive in terms of themes - a lot of mentions of my dad and my stepdad, compulsions, teeth and while i don’t think any of what i wrote back then was very good or worth sharing it did give me a lot of practice in kind of. building a writing headspace?

i can’t really point to any specific inspirations early on because i really didn’t read very much. most of my favourite poems when i was younger were very structured and used a lot of rhyme - i really enjoyed war poetry when we studied it in high school for example - but i’ve always written pretty loosely, a lot of enjambment and playing around with formatting. i felt very drawn to mary oliver and richard siken when i discovered them in my mid-late teens (although i defintiely think that i understand them better rereading them now as an adult).

i’ve written many different styles of poem, but i really only have two style of writing behaviour: either i write total stream-of-consciousness and don’t edit it until i’ve totally run out of things to say - pompeii, reimagined from this collection was written this way, as was FOIL - or i write very conscious of the formatting from the start - some examples of this are unholied, ajovy and my father thinks i should learn how to code. sometimes there’s a crossover like in inelegant fingers but typically its one or the other.

the city i live in now has a pretty big ~poetry scene~ with several regular live readings, even more random events throughout the year, and people regularly coming from out of town to read here. i hiiiiighly recommend going to readings if you live somewhere that you can get to them because it can expose you to a really wide range of writers, from first-timers to people with long publishing histories. being involved in that scene really taught me that there’s really no hierarchy of talent, that there are fantastic writers at every ~skill level~. and more than anything, that it’s possible to hate a poem or poet and still get a lot out of their work. i’ve made a lot of friends through going to and helping to host events too :)

some recommendations for writing that i personally find useful:

spend a lot of time thinking about writing! when i’m out walking, even when i’m getting groceries, i’m spinning thoughts around my head about writing. i frequently think up what i think of as the ‘headline’ of a poem when i’m busy doing something else. write that shit down! keep a notebook or note on your phone and write them down.

relatedly: absolutely cannibalise your old poems. if you’ve got a piece you don’t like any more, or that you could never finish but you’re attached to it, steal your favourite lines and work them into soemthing else, or challenge yourself to rewrite that poem in a new style or format

i keep a word doc full of lines and phrases i liked that i couldn’t fit into anything or that weren’t developed enough that i go back to and take things from. sometimes it’s just a handful of words - ‘ transposing neuroses onto neurons’ sat in that doc for months before i used it - and sometimes its entire lines or even stanzas. i also paste in here things i deleted from existing pieces during editing - sometimes you like something but just not in its current setting yknow

give yourself writing challenges! there are allllll kinds of things you can challenge yourself to do. find a photograph you like, and try to write the feeling it gives you, or write about the content of it, or from the perspective of the person taking the picture. pick an album or song and listen to it on repeat and write. go to different places and see if your writing feels different there. write a poem first thing in the morning or on your lunch break or write before you go to bed. write when you feel really happy, or scared, or angry or tired. write about someone you love, or someone you really hate. write using found-language - blackout poetry is one version, but you can also cut words out and collage them. a friend of mine wrote an amazing poem using ads on gumtree. i like to hit random page on wikipedia and challenge myself to write using the words on that page or about the content of it. i dont find timed challenges helpful but some people do. experiment! ask your friends for prompts! if you’ve friends who also write poetry, give eachother challenges and give eachother feedback

also, if you’ve got friends who write, absolutely ask for their input on a piee if you get stuck. my friend tasha frequently helps me with my grammar and punctuation to improve clarity and many more people have helped me with ideas, promts, challenges and encouragement :)

my personal favourite: write about fiction! a lot of my favourite of my own poems were about this. ;kodos in error - which desperately needs reworking but that i’m nevertheless very proud of - was written about the tarsus iv storyline in the original star trek. the only overt reference to it’s origin is the name kodos in the title - and it’s very much about myself too - but ultimately the entire time i wrote it i was thinking about that plot. i’ve also written about fortnite and the expanse

play around with what you want from a poem. sometimes it’s emotional, sometimes it’s all about the sound and the feel of it in your mouth, sometimes it’s about imagery and giving the reader a clear picture of something. Sometimes you want to do something fun with the formatting, or make it short and snappy or long and lilting. Try not to get stuck in one type of poem.

personally unless i’m writing for a specific thing - like a reading of to submit to a specific journal - i never think about a reader until i’ve finished at least the first draft. i’m not a professional; i share the things i like but ultimately i write for myself only. i don’t need to have an audience in mind for anything i write, and i think that helps me. not everyone finds this easier, but i do.

read poetry! read absolutely anything you can get your hands on - even when you don’t like something you can learn from it. poetry foundations

talk about poetry! i didn’t go to school for creative writing and most of what i learned in HS went totally over my head, but i find talking about poetry i like with friends to be infinitely valuable. discussion will help you find things you didn’t see before, and understand why the things you do like resonate so much, how you can maybe replicate those in your own writing etc.

if you’ve never written before, it is literally never too late to start. just get going! don’t let your inner critic get in the way, just write and write and try not to worry too much about whether its ~good~ until you get more used to writing. there are a thousnad different ways for a poem to be Good. if you write for emotional release and it works then its good. if you write to get other people to understand how you feel and that comes through, its good. if you just want to make it sound a certain way then its good.

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audreycritter · 4 years

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how do you balance creating fan works with juggling your responsibilities? I've been struggling with finding the time/motivation to write what I want.

First, my creativity output tends to come and go in waves. Some weeks I’m writing 1-3k a day, some weeks I don’t even open documents at all. Some weeks are in-between, where I open stuff and poke around and do a few hundred words here and there, but not much more. The “off” times I’m usually reading, playing games, watching movies or shows, talking to friends, and thinking about stories or scenes. Sometimes, this isn’t even anything I’ll ever write! Sometimes, I don’t think about stories I’m writing at all. It’s more whatever pops into my head and less structured. Part of me wants to be Disciplined and write every day, but the reality is that unless it’s a very tiny limit like 100-200 words, this really isn’t doable for me. I have kids I homeschool, I have a house and a husband and a dog and there are times in life when I need to deep clean a bunch of rooms, or plan out school stuff, or go on hikes, and I still have to have time to recharge. Writing sometimes is that recharging, but I can’t afford to force it when it isn’t.

Because the reality is that to find that time, you have to give up something. There isn’t a version of the equation where “finding time” involves creating more time than you already have. The things I can afford to cut out to work on writing are the things I do in my own entertainment time-- I write instead of doing those things at all, or as much. So, I tend to write when it’s the thing I want to do, and enjoy doing, because otherwise it would be an emotional and mental drain I couldn’t afford. When I’m writing a lot in a day, it means I’m not really reading fic or novels, I’m not watching much TV, I spend way less time chatting online, I don’t really scroll tumblr as much, I’m not playing video games. The things I usually do in the bit of time in the afternoons or evenings when I have a chance to just do something I want to do, that’s what I give up to make room. (Sometimes, I give up sleep, but I don’t recommend doing this often. I can’t say I fully regret the times when I’m on a roll and stay up super late, but this really isn’t healthy or sustainable long-term because I’m not in a position to sleep in late-- if you can afford to sleep in late, that might be different.) Two caveats: This is a fact, but not always a conscious decision. Sometimes, I might actually think, “Okay, so I’m not going to have time to watch this tonight after all,” but that’s pretty rare. Usually, if I’m giving up stuff to write, it’s just the natural consequence of really wanting to write and enjoying it and focusing on it. The same as if I’d gotten sucked into a really good book and spent the evening/night reading-- I’m not consciously deciding “I will give up other entertainment options for this today,” as much as I’m just doing the thing I want to do. The second caveat is that I have ADHD! Wanting to write and getting started can be two different things because of my difficulty switching tasks or starting a task. The rule that tends to help me the most are on the days I want to write, or think I want to write, and have stuff I’ve been thinking about writing, but keep not getting started, I give myself ten minutes alone with an open document. A timer, ten minutes, the document, and nothing else. No app switching, no scrolling, no background chores. Those ten minutes of boredom don’t always kickstart writing, but they give me the chance to determine if writing is the thing I actually want to do that day. I get going and I’m on a roll and I ignore the timer when it goes off, or I poke around, maybe write a few words, and the timer beeps and I’m free to go do something else because it’s not a good writing day.

I’m not always the best at balancing, to be honest. Sometimes, I give up sleep, or put off minor chores. Sometimes, I forget to eat. I do not recommend these, but I think it’s okay if you’re WORKING at balancing and sometimes realize you’ve made an error, as long as you scramble to catch up and give yourself some space to learn. Because my responsibilities are centered around tiny humans, I have a framework of school and meal times I can’t ignore; if your responsibilities are more “quiet” and easier to overlook (like homework, or self-care, or work from home) you might need to just teach yourself to not even open documents until you’ve done certain tasks. Jot down notes if you’re afraid you’ll lose something! But don’t buy into the myth that a “real writer” is completely controlled by impulse and whim. Will there be rare days when you ignore everything else to write for four hours? Maybe! But that shouldn’t be the goal, or the norm, because unless you have a household staff and responsibilities that cater to your whims, it’s really not realistic or healthy.

The big things are to figure out how to be hard on yourself and how to be gentle with yourself. If you’re too tired, really want to watch a show, overwhelmed by work, just need to talk to a friend or chat server for an hour, it’s okay to just do those things and not feel guilty. Unless you are writing fulltime as your job, it is a hobby and you don’t “have” to achieve a certain level of productivity to be valid as a writer. The times to be hard on yourself are when you know you want to write, and are enjoying the actual process, but your brain isn’t trained to focus on it for stretches of time-- when you’re writing and think of something to tell a friend, wander about a random fact, want to check tumblr when you pause to think about a sentence, that’s when you sternly tell yourself “no, give it thirty seconds before you jump away from this task” and see if you end up getting unstuck with that little breath of boredom space. If you’re really disengaging, that’s okay, but your brain might just need to build the muscle of staying focused on the structure of creative output. It’s a muscle! You might WANT to do fifty pushups, but if you haven’t made your body stick out five for a while, and then ten, and built up, it’s probably not going to cooperate and you’ll feel miserable and broken and useless if you just try to get to fifty the first time. But...building to fifty requires not getting distracted and wandering away when you’ve only done 2 of 5 the week you’re working on sets of five. My only other recommendation if you haven’t done a lot of writing before is to not fall into the editing trap. Unless you just REALLY LOVE EDITING and it engages and charges you to write more, don’t get stuck in the loop of opening a document or a notebook to write and spending all your time editing the few paragraphs you already have. A lot of the first draft stuff will probably suck. That’s okay. Just finish the thing. You know the cake analogy in fandom? “Write that hurt/comfort, it’s just more cake!”? Getting stuck editing the first bit of a story over and over until it’s polished is sort of like looking at a bowl of three ingredients of a cake recipe and going “This doesn’t look much like cake, maybe if I add more flour...” until you have a bowl full of something that really isn’t cake and isn’t anything closer to cake, no matter how pretty you’ve made those three ingredients look in the bowl. Maybe it’s a very lovely color and has pretty sprinkles on it! Still not a cake. You’ve wasted your limited time, and worn yourself out, and you know you still don’t really have anything closer to a cake to pull out of the oven and show off. The time to edit is when the cake is done and cooling, and you’re making icing and picking out trimmings and cutting up fruit and shaving chocolate or whatever. And then the next cake will probably be better because you practiced doing the whole thing and have a better idea of what to do and not do the next time. Then, opening a document or grabbing a pen and notebook can be a new, engaging chance to create instead of “oh it’s this same stale bowl of aesthetic half-batter.” (Again, if you find editing as you go super recharging, ignore this-- some people are just very good at tweaking batter as they go without stalling completely-- just give yourself the time to figure that out.) I hope this helps! Feel free to send follow-up questions or clarifications if I misunderstood something or you want a differently structured answer or just MORE INFORMATIONS.

#writing #chiropterancreed

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eintsein · 5 years

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After a few years of trial and error, I think I've finally found the perfect organization method.

In the early years of high school, I had a bullet journal. I was an artsy kid who found a way to combine art with organization in a way that benefited other parts of my life.

However, as I approached the end of high school, my schedule got busier, and I was involved in a lot more things, so owning a bullet journal was less practical. Because of that, I switched to an app called Edo Agenda.

I continued with digital planning in college since I knew I wasn't going to have as much time. But all the apps I tried out—Taskade, Actions by Moleskine, Any.do, Todoist, Wunderlist—weren't suited to my planning and organizational needs. They didn't have the specific functions I required and didn't incorporate an organization system I liked to use. The predefined apps were too restraining, but the more customizable apps weren't customizable enough.

So then I switched to a bare bones, uber minimalist bullet journal method. That worked pretty well my second semester. It was simple, portable, and most importantly, flexible—all the things one could wish for in a planning system. However, it wasn't always the most convenient to use since I couldn't effectively integrate all the different aspects of my life, which, to no surprise, is mostly recorded digitally.

There was just one huge problem with my digital organization system that made me hesitant to switch back in the first place: everything was fragmented. Notes were in Google Docs. Financial records were in Google Sheets. To-Do Lists were in my bullet journal. Team projects were in Trello. My poetry was on Bear. Things I wanted to try are carelessly pinned to random pinterest boards or added to my YouTube "watch later" playlist. It was a mess.

Over the summer, I found out about Notion from a friend, and I thought, this has so much potential, it could even be exactly what I need. It's essentially like an empty notebook on your computer with functions that make it 10x more powerful. Notion allows you to integrate all aspects of your life and work into one app. Some of the advantages that have made me partial to Notion are:

Even greater customization level. Notion is a blank canvas with tons of predefined blocks and different file types. You can make databases, spreadsheets, Kanban boards, to do lists, etc. Also, you can remain connected to other digital services. You can link websites, collaborate with other users, use different structures (e.g. documents, databases, tasks), embed images and videos, etc. There are also tons of formatting options, e.g. text color, highlight, heading v. body text.

Better organization. Notion allows you to have pages within pages within pages within pages—an infinite hierarchy that you can organize with tables of contents. These pages are made of blocks, e.g. tables, checklists, boards, databases. Both pages and blocks can be rearranged by simply dragging and dropping them to where you want them to be. In other words, I guess it's kind of like building a website to organize your life. Plus, their database feature is especially powerful as it allows you to connect all your data and get into as much detail as you wish (each entry in a database is its own page).

Templates. There are tons of templates created by both Notion and the community that you can use. These are especially helpful in the beginning since Notion does have a rather steep learning curve. There are template for almost every category: personal, planning, finance, job applications, design roadmap, etc. Check out their template gallery, this medium article called "10 Notion templates to inspire your use", or read on for my own examples!

Shortcuts. This makes typing and documenting so much faster. Notion uses Markdown, which is a text-to-HTML conversion tool, e.g. # = Heading 1, *, - = bullet point, etc.

Notion has some pretty awesome features, but how does one actually use it? Personally, I have four top-level pages: my planner, my personal journal, songwriting, and blogging.

Planner

I've been using my planner to, well, plan and track my day to day activities as well as my week and month. The way I've structured it is a calendar or monthly overview with links to pages of weekly overviews, and if needed, daily overviews within the weekly overview. This links things up so nicely, i.e. I don't have to be constantly flipping pages in my physical bullet journal or planner to find what I need.

I also have entertainment lists, which is mainly a table with all the shows I want to watch, the books I want to read, etc. I keep track of whether or not I've watched them, as well as my personal ratings. What I love most about this is that each entry is its own page, so I can type my notes for each book, show, or film and easily find them in the future. (Also the reason why I have plural “lists” instead of just one entertainment list is because you can filter entries by type of entertainment, e.g. movies, tv shows, books, articles.)

Personal

For personal notes, goals, journal entries, etc. This is kind of like an extension of my daily journal and just where I dump all my thoughts and keep track of the different aspects of my life: mental, emotional, spiritual, social, physical, and travel.

Another page I have is called "Stray Thoughts" and, well, it's pretty self explanatory. It's a lot easier to dump all my thoughts as they come and reorganize them later. Of course, this requires sacrificing the rawness of journaling, i.e. when the thoughts come and how you process them, which is why I still keep a regular journal that I write in daily.

Songwriting

I've been writing a lot of music over the summer and it's often hard to keep track of all of my songs and how far I've gotten in the songwriting process. So I created a table of songs - each entry of a song is a page with its lyrics. These are then tagged with the status of the lyrics (i.e. completed, in progress) and the status of the music itself (i.e. melody only, instrumental, mixing, mastering, revised). Eventually, I'll include demos in the database by embedding audio files in the document.

I have a separate section for inspiration and ideas, which is a kind of brain dump, e.g. words I think would make a good song, a certain theme for a song, a melody that's been stuck in my head, a vibe I'd like to try out, etc.

I've also been watching a lot of tutorials for music production and there's a section where I write my notes for that.

Eintsein

The last section of my Notion app is for this blog. Which has pages for

New posts. These are ideas for future posts, asks that I think would need longer answers, as well as posts that are currently in the draft stage (like this one was before I posted it)

Design assets. This is where I put all the visual branding material for Eintsein.com to be used in posts and any visual material on the blog.

FAQ. Having an FAQ document just makes it so much easier to make changes to your existing FAQ. Plus, if you ever change your FAQ theme, you just have to copy and paste what you already have.

Post directory. I keep track of all my previous masterposts, infographics, and generally longer and more comprehensive posts. It's the exact same as what you see on my Navigation page. And yes, the document contains direct links to the post.

New theme. A project I've been working on the past couple days is trying to create my own theme for my blog. This is where I put all my outlines, brainstorming notes, design inspiration, code snippets, etc.There are some pretty awesome features I’ve made use of in this page:

As you can probably tell, I'm absolutely obsessed with Notion since it has such awesome features and endless possibilities for customization. So far I've been using Notion for personal projects, which, since they are quite big in scale and have no set deadline, are important to organize well. My summer courses were only 6 weeks and weren't difficult to organize.

The formats above are just how I personally use notion. You could make some of your own, or if you don't think you want to build your pages from scratch, there are tons of templates to choose from. Here are some I think I'll be using in the near future and may be helpful for others as well, especially students like myself:

One drawback, however, is that Notion has a rather steep learning curve, but there are tons of tutorials online (especially YouTube) and I guarantee you it's all worth it.

Notion is not just a productivity app. It's a way to concretize your entire life.

Notion is free to use, but there are higher tiers that allow for more blocks, greater file size, etc. I use a personal account, which is $4 per month with unlimited block storage and no file upload limit (although I got it for $33/year). Personally I think the free plan would suit most people's needs, especially if you're not uploading large files.

#mine #eintsein #mymp #notion #apps #productivity #studyblr #studyspo #study hard #organization #document #graphic #design #infographic #masterpost #advice #tips

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aitaikimochi · 4 years

Text

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Ultimania Book Interview with Nomura, Kitase, and Nojima

This is the full interview from the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Ultimania Book where Director Tetsuya Nomura, Producer Yoshinori Kitase, and Scenario Writer Kazushige Nojima discuss the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, talking about how the game’s development, ending secrets, and more! Enjoy~

PART 1: This is the fifth installment within the Compilation of FFVII.

—When did the FFVII Remake project start?

Kitase: Actually, this project has been in existence for a very long time.

Nomura: When we developed the Compilation of FFVII, the installments included Advent Children, Before Crisis, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus, so we knew that we wanted to make a fifth installment. However, we were a bit short on resources as I was the only one heading the project, and since we were busy with other things, the project was put on hold.

—If the project was put on hold, what made it come back officially?

Kitase: When the Final Fantasy series almost reached its 25th Anniversary, I thought about what we should do to commemorate that milestone. That’s when I thought that if we were to go through with the FFVII Remake project to coincide with the 25th Anniversary of the Final Fantasy series, we would have to start it as soon as possible. That’s what got the ball rolling. After that, we had a meeting with producer Shinji Hashimoto as well as Tetsuya Nomura to discuss the details of the remake. Hashimoto was also the one who said he wanted to correct some of the graphics from FFVII Advent Children, and that’s the stage where all three of us decided that we should officially start this project.

—Initially, the project was to be made using staff from external divisions, right?

Kitase: Of course the company’s staff were still involved in the development, but most of the team that had worked on Final Fantasy series were assigned to other projects, so we started the Remake project with other external division staff. However, because we wanted to upkeep the quality of the Final Fantasy series, we decided that we still needed members who had experience working on Final Fantasy. Because of this, we had to do a major shift of staff positions to accommodate for this project.

—Since the Remake will be comprised of multiple parts, when did you decide that the first part will take place up until the escape from Midgar?

Nomura: We made that decision at the start of the project. Midgar stands as a very recognizable symbol of the world of FFVII, and for the Remake Project, we wanted to expand on that. The first installment will establish the root of the battle system as well as the type of basic structure, data assets, etc. that we needed to prepare, so it would take some time to do so. On that note, we had to accommodate in terms of the scale. Since the game would cover up until the escape from Midgar, the contents we needed to develop, such as the world system, level designs, etc., would increase, so we had many reasons to make the decision that we made [to create the story into multiple parts]. When we announced that the project would take on multiple installments, there were many who were worried about how we would be able to make a whole game based solely on Midgar, but I didn’t think it would be a problem. I’ve repeatedly watched videos of gameplay, and in the original game, it takes about 7 hours to go through the Midgar section. In the Remake, the map would need to be in 3D, so there would be much more information to account for as well as time that it will take to go from one point to another, and all that adds up. Since we knew that we would have to add scenarios to the story too, I knew that the overall gameplay of the Remake would be well enough to cover a whole game.

Nojima: We also felt that stopping it at this point would also allow for an adequate amount of story scenarios to be put in as well.

Nomura: After you leave Midgar, you move to a world map, and I mentioned this earlier, but level designs would have to yet again change. If we were to do that, we would also have to split up other scenarios and even if we add new gameplay, it would have to end in an abrupt point of the story. That’s why we felt that if we had everything focused in Midgar, we wouldn’t have to split up any of the story elements that happen there. We had requests to add more content or to make only one installment for the whole remake, but if you take into consideration the quality put into this game, I’m sure players would understand why we made this decision.

Kitase: The Remake is not something that we can finish all at once, so when we decided that the first installment would take place in Midgar, the FFVII Remake Project became a reality.

PART 2: The title “Remake” has two meanings…?

—Nojima-san was added to the team when the project was still being handled by the external division staff, correct?

Nojima: That’s right. I was the one who initially wrote the main scenarios, and the external division staff was responsibile for writing the sub scenarios as well. However, when we transferred the project to internal staff, Toriyama-san (Co-Director) joined and looked over the scenarios we had written up until that point. He then gathered all the scenes we had and rewrote them, and after looking over it myself once more, we decided that the project would take on this shape.

Kitase: After Toriyama joined, we were able to formulate the scenarios and input them into areas within the game itself, and in order to keep the integrity of the story, we let him rewrite some of the story.

—Nojima-san, in what degree do you write the scenarios and how specific do you make them?

Nojima: I lose myself in my writing a lot. I’m always concerned about keeping characters in character, so I constantly make corrections. However, after I finish writing the scenarios, Toriyama-san and his scenario team add revisions, which is then handed off to the dubbing stage, which also makes adjustments to the dialogue. So by the time the scenario reaches completion, I’m not even sure what exactly remains from my initial draft.

Kitase: Of course, the main story’s developments are usually left as how Nojima-san wrote them. The changes that are made are usually minor details that are formulated into the story.

—The title for the remake is just “Remake,” which is a bit rare to put in a title. Is there any specific meaning to it?

Nomura: I am the one who decided on the title “Remake,” but there are two meanings to the title. The first being that we wanted to quell the doubt that arised when we first announced that we were doing a remake. When the first trailer was released, there were people who weren’t sure if this installment of FFVII was merely a remaster or an actual remake, which made them worry. When we revealed the trailer at E3 in 2015, the reactions were as I expected, with some even asking if this was going to be a movie. That’s why I decided to clearly express to those with doubt that this is a complete remake of the original with the title “Remake” as well. In regards to the other meaning to the word “Remake,” well, I can’t answer that right now. Ask me again in a couple of years (laughs).

—The title’s logo with the Meteor is now outlined with a type of metal finish. How did you come up with this design?

Nomura: We wanted to put the Meteor in the title logo when we showed the trailer at E3, but we had not decided on the logo yet at the time the trailer was made. I personally wanted to have the Meteor be in a metallic finish to go along with the mood of this project, so when I conveyed my idea to the trailer editors, they came up with a design for me. The logo wasn’t just for use in the trailer, but it would be used for the main title logo as well. Also, during the E3 trailer, the word “Final Fantasy” isn’t shown, only the Meteor as well as the word “REMAKE.” This was because I wanted to make the announcement of the FF7 Remake with only the Meteor symbol. When the original Final Fantasy 7 was released, the marketing producer at the time suggested that the package design only have the Meteor and said to me, “Even if we don’t write the title, people would know that this is Final Fantasy 7.” Back then, we decided against that, but I wanted to have that idea come to fruition this time around.

PART 3: Wanting to Delve Deep into the Characters from these Realistic Scenes

—What part of the Remake did you pay extra attention to?

Kitase: In the original game, many people were able to live comfortable lives thanks to the power of mako energy; however, the same could not be said for those living in the slums underneath the plate, which left a great impression. In fact, I don’t really remember seeing much about the lives of those living above the plate where mako energy powered the cities in the original game. We wanted to draw out those details, such as in the opening movie where you see people and children riding bicycles throughout the city. The scene then turns darker where you see the effects of a lifestyle reliant on mako, where the light and dark contrasts. We wanted to brush upon this by having the player visit Jessie’s home above the plate.

Nomura: I wanted to keep the elements of the original story. In terms of the battle system, things like the ATB gauge or materia, limit breaks, etc. made up an important part of the game, and I wanted to try to bring over that to the remake. However, we had to consider not only the old fans of the game but the new ones as well. For the veteran players who knew the ropes already as well as the new players who were just getting into it, we wanted to create a satisfying experience for both. Not only did we take the original game’s structured elements and modernized them, but it was important for us to make it so that old fans would also be able to come to terms with the changes as well. Since the original game was released more than 20 years ago, if we were to change the styles to reflect modern ones, I’m sure people would accept them. However, let’s say that we changed Cloud’s hairstyle to not be spiky anymore- that would be weird, right? It was difficult to find a good balance [between realism and the original].

Nojima: When writing the scenarios in the game, I had to pay great attention to the fact that the characters that appear are no longer shown in cute graphics from the original game, but actual people now. For example, in the original game, there weren’t many houses shown in the slums, but in this game, there are tons of houses that allows you to strongly feel the presence of people living within a city. I thought to create scenarios where people are living and breathing in this space. Whether it be the AVALANCHE members or other characters in the story, I always dug deep and thought “Why are they living like this here?” when creating the backgrounds.

—One case of that would be when it was shown that Jessie used to be an actress at the Gold Saucer, right?

Nojima: I wanted Jessie’s mannerisms to be like that of someone who has experience in theater, and I delved into creating episodes about her past leading up to her current family situation. There were many plans to create these types of sub-scenarios for the game when the project first started.

Kitase: When we were in the middle stages of development, we decided to put as many sub-scenarios into the main story to give breathers and pauses from the over-arching plot. We put several sub-scenarios about the Turks as well.

Nojima: That’s right, we had conversations such as “What are the Turks doing right now…?” or “What kind of character from the Compilation of FFVII would appear here?” and etc. Other scenarios we thought of was Tifa asking her landlord to help her figuring out which dress to wear in order to infiltrate Corneo’s Mansion, among other episodes.

Kitase: For example, after Cloud fell into the Sector 5 slums, what was Tifa doing? How did she get into that Chocobo Wagon that took her to Corneo? We had a few things planned during the first half of production, but due to time restrictions, we had to cut it out.

PART 4: Cloud Tries to Act Cool like an Adult but Fails

—As we played through the game, Aerith’s lines left an impression on us.

Nojima: Aerith is the utmost important person in the FFVII Remake, and I was very careful with her lines. Each and every part of her carries a great meaning throughout the story, and I used that premise to write her character.

—In particular, during the nighttime flower field scene in Chapter 14, Aerith tells Cloud “You can’t fall in love with me. Even if you do, it’s not real.” For those who are familiar with the original story, this line carries a lot of meaning.

Nojima: To be honest, some staff actually told me that this line made it seem like Aerith was looking down on Cloud, so it got rejected a few times. If you know Aerith’s fate, then this line would really pull at your heart strings, but if you did not know what happens to Aerith, then you might interpret the scene in a completely different way. I thought the gap between the two interpretations was very interesting. On another note, in Tifa’s scene in the flower field, I wanted Cloud to not look cool in this scene. Even though Cloud and Tifa are close in age, he has a 5 year blank slate, and he doesn’t have enough life experience to consider himself an adult. Even though most of the characters are around 20 years old, there’s one guy, Cloud, who has the mentality of a 16 year old, and that person tries to be like an adult. I really wanted to write that into the story. After the Sector 7 plate fell, Barret comforted Tifa with the temperament of an adult, and Cloud saw that and wanted to do the same for her [in the flower scene], but it didn’t go as planned. I wanted to try writing him as being awkward.

Nomura: On that same note, when recording Cloud’s voice, we had his voice actor perform his lines slightly differently depending on who he was talking to. For example, when Cloud speaks with Aerith, he stands up and tries to act cool, with Tifa he loosens up a bit, with Jessie he sounds confused. When Cloud speaks with Aerith, he’s too self-conscious and gives weird replies.

Nojima: Cloud isn’t able to keep the distance between Aerith and him, right? (laughs). He seems pretty impatient with Jessie, but she finds that amusing and pokes fun at him for it.

Nomura: However, when we did voice recording, initially Jessie came off as a bit too nosy, more than we expected, which might have given the impression that she was being rude. In order to avert that, we had her say lines jokingly each time she teased cloud, giving off a sense of charm and attractiveness, kind of like a “haha, just joking” type of attitude. We decided these things in the recording studio.

PART 5: The Remake’s Scenarios Provide a Vast Setting for Events to Follow

—The Remake’s story has many new episodes that I thought followed the flow of the original storyline, but then there’s suddenly a huge plot device that gets revealed, and that surprised me.

Nomura: Is that so? (laughs)

Nojima: I’m sure you were thinking, “What will happen next?”

—How did this development come to being?

Nomura: When I requested a scenario to Nojima, I first thought, “if I am to create the FFVII Remake, I would like to do it this way.” I then conveyed my ideas to him. During that phase, I planned to make this be more than just a mere “Remake.” For example, the battle system this time around is in real timee instead of using an ATB gauge, and with that, the story itself took a turn that isn’t just the basic FFVII, but something new. That’s the kind of story I wanted to create.

Nojima: As for me, I knew that even though at the very core, this story is about Cloud, the works from the “Compilation of FFVII” have greatly increased [over the years], and I wanted to make something that takes all of those works and combine it into one. Each person who played the original version also has their own vision of the world of FFVII, and I wanted to preserve that too. The results of those feelings are shown within the Remake’s story. These were all the ideas I had, so in the beginning I would initially show it to Nomura-san, and I tried my best to explain them clearly to make sure he didn’t reject them (laughs).

—In regards to the story’s important key points, there must be a flashback scene from here on out, right?

Nomura: At first, the direction we took was that we did not want to put any of these hints while still in Midgar.

Nojima: Right, we originally planned to have the storyline diverge only slightly.

Nomura: We thought to have only a subtle change where in the ending you see Biggs alive, which makes you think, “Wait, this is weird…” and gives a slight sense of unease. But then the staff thought, well if there’s room for more scenes, then let’s just add it (laughs). When we did that, there were scenes that we had to say, “No this won’t do,” and removed it from the story. We didn’t add too many new things, but we did leave a few scenes in.

Nojima: I myself added about two or three scenarios to that too….I’m not too sure what happened to those scenarios at the end. (laughs)

—The scenes where Sephiroth appear in have also be greatly added into the storyline.

Nojima: In the beginning we didn’t plan to have him appear so often, more as an overlooming presence instead. During the middle of production, we changed our minds and decided to have him appear more frequently, and suddenly he was in a ton of scenes.

Nomura: At that time, Hamaguchi-san (Co-Director) quietly pulled me aside and said, “I want the characters to fight Sephiroth in Midgar” and consulted me with this idea. In the original story, Sephiroth exists in a different space, and apparently he gathered materials to persuade me to have the battle play out in this way, but I just said, “Okay sure,” and greenlit the idea. (laughs)

PART 6: Doubts that Arise from Things Not Explained in the Game

—In the Remake’s story, there are a few doubts that are left that I would like to brush upon…

Everyone: …..

Nomura: The story will still continue, so I don’t think we can answer much.

—Then let’s talk about things you can answer starting with the Opening Scene in the alleyway, which was also portrayed in the original game. What was Aerith looking at when she was crouching down?

Nomura: I remember someone saying that she was trying to gather warmth from it…

Kitase: I don’t think so (laughs). If you’re in front of a bonfire, you would see the embers pop, but what you see is the flickers of light from mako.

—In the Remake’s version of this scene, after she looks at the light, it seems like she’s running from something. Why?

Nojima: She felt the presence of the Whispers and wanted to run away from them. Perhaps it’s because Aerith had several bad experiences with the Whispers up until then?

—Why is it that Aerith knows about things that happen in the future or of things she hadn’t heard of before?

Nomura: I wonder why……Please wait until the next installment for that answer.

—At the end of the Midgar Highway, before you pass through the wall, Aerith says, “This is the point of no return. Destiny’s Crossroads.” What was she referring to?

Nojima: If Cloud and the others pass through the Wall of Whispers, then they will be outside the boundaries of the Whispers, meaning they will be going into a place where there is no predestined fate. She meant that they will be at a crossroads where they might or might not be able to cross.

—After you defeat the last boss, Cloud and Sephiroth have a conversation with just the two of them. What was the meaning of that?

Nojima: Exactly what their conversation said. Actually, the lines that Sephiroth said in that scene were written during the beginning stages of production where we did not know the exact placement of when they will be delivered.

—In the ending of the Remake, Zack is alive, which leads to a contrasting development to the original story. What is the meaning of that scene?

Nomura: That’s the biggest highlight of the mysteries that have been been set up in this scene, isn’t it? (laughs)

Nojima: And you can also clearly see the dog Stamp too…

—Stamp looks different in this scene though.

Nojima: Oh, does he know…? (laughs)

—Did you have plans in the beginning for the mascot Stamp?

Nojima: Yes, when we decided on the Remake’s storyline, we said “Well then, let’s have this loyal dog Stamp be the mascot.” Stamp is a popular mascot that everyone in this world recognizes, and we decided to also use him as AVALANCHE’s secret way of conveying messages.

Nomura: By the way, the Stamp that you see drawn by AVALANCHE members is actually the design that I was in charge of. I usually don’t get involved in these designs, but I felt that this character would be very important, so I decided to draw him myself.

—During the ending, Aerith murmurs, “The sky, how I hate it.” [English localization “I miss it, the steel sky.”] Is there some deep meaning to this?

Nomura: For Aeritih, the sky symbolizes sadness. The people who were dear to her, such as Zack and her mother Ifalna, had all returned to the sky, and the sky that she sees above her in the slums was covered by Shinra too. The calamity that destroyed the Ancients, Jenova, also fell from the sky. All of these incidents remind Aerith of the sky, which is why she says she hates it.

—At the end of the game, the words “The Unknown Journey Will Continue” show up. What does it mean?

Nomura: Initially, there was another sentence we were going to put instead, but under various circumstances, we decided to change it [to what it is now]. Kitase told me there should be something that connects to what lies beyond the ending. I also wanted to put something there too, so we ended up using that sentence. I think some might think that the meaning of the sentence is unsettling, but we’ve already taken that into consideration.

PART 7: Original Elements Expected to Happen but Do Not Want to be Erased

—After this first installment, the number of expectations must be very high for the next installment, but how many installments do you think the entire project will be?

Kitase: We have a general idea of how the story will play out, but we haven’t decided exactly how many parts, nor can we confirm anything.

—There has been talk that the story will be in three parts…

Kitase: We have not said anything concrete about how many installments this will be, so people are probably just speculating with no proof.

—The fans would like to know when the next installment will be released.

Nomura: It depends on how many installments we decide to make. If we divide the story into large chunks, then it will take a much longer time to develop. However, if we divide the story into smaller parts, then it might be possible to release them in a shorter amount of time.

Kitase: On that note, if we are to maintain the same quality and volume as the first installment, then it is unrealistic to say that we can churn out the next one in just one year.

Nomura: Personally, I would like to release them as soon as possible so we can take a breather. I’m sure the fans would also want the next installment to come quickly too (laughs).

—If we follow this Remake’s story, then the next installment might have major changes compared to the original, right?

Kitase: I’ve talked about this extensively with Nomura, but I’m sure fans of the original are expecting to revisit familiar locations and scenes, so we have strong feelings to not stray away from that. From here on out, we’re not drastically changing the story and making it into something completely different than the original. Even though it’s a Remake, please assume that FF7 will still be FF7 as usual.

Nojima: For me, I create scenarios that follow the general flow of the original story but with the assumption that the way things are presented or how events occur might be slightly different. Personally, I would like to include towns and areas that originally appeared first in Crisis Core FF7.

—Lastly, do you have any messages to the fans who have played the FFVII Remake?

Nojima: I’m sure that they had a lot of fun playing it and might have doubts on what will happen from here on out, but please remember those doubts you had since you’ll probably find your answer in future installments.

Nomura: This was a very popular game in the past, and since we are remaking it, the amount of attention it had garnered even before it was released was high, and there are many who voiced their concerns about the game too. However, those concerns did not affect our staff as we put in our all to create this work, and we just hope that people will be interested in it. The base for the Remake has been successfully established with the first installment, so we hope to meet your expectations in the next installment too! However, personally, I think there might be some who think “Since this is the Remake, I don’t need to play the original game anymore and just play the Remake instead,” but I want to prevent people from doing that. The original and the Remake are two separate entities. So even if you play FFVII Remake, I would also like you to play the FFVII original game afterwards as well.

Kitase: In this first installment, I think we were able to figure out the exact direction and shape we would like to take with the FFVII Remake. Within the Remake, many hints were strewn along, and we would like fans to get excited and think about on what exactly will happen in the next installments. The theories posted on the internet do reach us, and I think that type of communication between the fans and us will help in creating a story together for all to enjoy.

(Square Enix Interview recorded on March 19th, 2020)

#final fantasy 7 remake #ff7r #final fantasy vii #final fantasy vii remake #ffviir #final fantasy #square enix #tetsuya nomura #cloud #barret #aerith #tifa #red xiii #cloud strife #my translations

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fondnesses · 4 years

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roscoe’s notebook post

A while back I said I was going to write a post about the way I use notebooks for writing projects. This is the first of several posts about Writing Process I’ve been tossing around in my drafts for a little while as a result of conversations with friends, so bear with me.

I. Love. Notebooks. I genuinely would have to deeply overhaul my whole Process of writing anything on the longer side if I were to go paperless; I find physical paper pretty invaluable when I’m outlining, brainstorming, and researching, and I still probably write ¼-⅓ of all my actual content on paper first. (That proportion used to be a lot higher, but I’ve gotten better at being productive on a computer in recent years, which is great.) I’m a very visual person, so notebooks really help me visualize my ideas, story structure, etc. It’s very helpful to be able to use arrows and diagrams and physically strike things through, and the tactility is really soothing to me. If I show people my notebooks or talk about them, I often get a response like “this is so organized”, which is sort of true, but I have to stress that it’s “organization for a disorganized mind”; I can’t misplace ideas or notes if it all goes into the same physical object, vs. electronic notes, which are much more, like “Did I say that in a voice memo? PM it to myself on Discord? Leave it in a desktop sticky note? Write it directly into the Google Doc? Who knows! It’s lost to time!”. It’s very much an ADHD management strategy.

It helps that I’m a very neophyte stationery hobbyist and appreciate any excuse I have to use my pens, but I also will go off at any opportunity about how helpful I find them for writing projects, which is why I decided to just make a post about it. Right now I mostly use them for (fan and original) fiction projects, but I used a notebook for a very similar purpose when I was working on my undergrad thesis, and I have a slightly different but equally necessary-to-me approach to notebooks I use at work.

My typical structure for a notebook that’s devoted to one project only looks like this:

I always leave the first couple pages blank so I can go back and retroactively index bujo-style. I don’t always actually do the index, because sometimes I get too lazy, but I like having those blank pages there to give me the option. I also usually put epigraphs/inspo quotes on the first page.

After that, there’s often (but not always, I’ll talk about it) a couple pages at the start where I’m frantically jotting down loose brainstorming ideas before they've coagulated into a story structure. Just, like, vomiting into the void.

Stemming out of that, I usually write out about like 5-10 pages of outline-style notes in chronological order, laying out all the main story beats and charting out the story trajectory. This will inevitably get revised and rewritten many times, but I find the process of writing these wide-angle synopses really useful for dislodging ideas, making connections re: thematic threads, etc. from my brain.

I’ll devote a couple pages after that to specific things like "sex scene brainstorming", "random scene ideas/minor details that don't have a clear place in the outline right now but I'll turn to for inspo later" [this is what I refer to as “bits” in one of the later photos], "page where I just outline the Motifs And Themes", "research notes", "to-do list", "stuff to check on a second pass", "things to put in the a/n and AO3 tags", etc.--the specifics vary with the story.

Then, I skip ahead to approx. halfway through the notebook and cordon off the rest of the pages to be “free writing” space, AKA writing of actual content rather than planning, with the expectation there will be no internal organization and I’ll transcribe to laptop as I go. Writing on paper feels less binding than typing something on a computer; it’s like a little secret kept with myself, and it doesn’t need to go anywhere or be seen by anyone if I decide I don’t like it. Setting aside pages in the back half of the notebook means that, as more things come up re: planning, I can go back and add those in the rest of the pages that were intentionally left blank. This is how I avoid (for the most part) having the whole thing be a jumbled mess where there’s no separation between the notes and the actual story writing; I learned this the hard way via the first notebook I’ll show you in a second. I’ve recently gotten really into using Muji sticky note tabs to label any pages/sections of particular import that don't want to have to refer back to in the index and would rather just flip to instantly.

I do use notebooks that aren’t specific to any one project, but those are much less organized and less worth sharing.

Before I look at more recent stuff, here are some selections from my notebook for the project that got me into writing longfic, my Golden Kamuy canon divergence AU (with apologies for the bad photos, my phone’s camera is trash). I worked on this from Sept 2018-July 2019. It was a learning experience in a lot of ways, and notebook utilization was one of those. I’ve always used notebooks for keeping track of writing projects, as I said earlier, but before this it was largely without much organization or structure; just total chaos. Having a physical notebook became really important for this project because it was a sprawling multichapter story with rotating POVs and a lot of historical research. I also learned a lot about what not to do with a notebook, personally, or at least things that don’t work so well (for me). This was a college ruled spiral-bound Decomposition Book, for the record.

By the time I bought a notebook for it I already had a (very basic) plot outline in mind, so I wasn’t doing that very initial ground-zero brainstorming in here; I was copying out of my phone’s notes app, basically, and then going from there.

This is one of the first pages in this notebook; I wanted to visualize the relationship web between the four central characters in the story in terms of how they feel about one another. The two colours correspond to the POV characters (Sugimoto in orange, Ogata in pink), and I used this colour-coding throughout the notebook with highlighters, etc. to keep track of information that was more relevant to one character than the other. Tsurumi and Yuusaku aren’t POV characters, but they’re prominent in the story and their presence impacts the central relationship between Sugimoto and Ogata, and it was helpful to me to map out the emotional ecosystem, as it were.

(There are coffee stains all over this, because I wrote the vast majority of the story in coffee shops because I didn’t want to be around my roommates, lol. This is part of why I never do fiction writing in notebooks that are too nice, I get neurotic about needing to keep them tidy. I can’t use ones that are too shit though, either, so it’s a bit of a narrow window. I’ll talk more about brands and paper quality etc. later.)

As you can see, this is the first page of many I set aside specifically for jotting down different pieces of historical information relevant to my story. It’s about fictional characters who are members of an army division that existed in real life, and both the canon and my fic involve a high level of attention to detail with regards to which divisions were present for which battles, etc., as well as general historical details specific to the Russo-Japanese War setting--what did people eat in the trenches? What did they do to fill time? How did they get through the winter? What did third party observers have to say about the conditions? What were the specs of their weaponry (particularly important because one of the POV characters is a sniper and gun nut)? I did a lot of reading (and watching of antique gun collector Youtube videos... the things I do for love, eh), and it came in handy so many times, because it turns out it’s much easier to write trench warfare slice of life if you have factual details to pull from when you don’t know what to do with a scene! Imagine that!

This is the first of three “grid outlines” I made; this is a way I sometimes like to visualize a story outline all on one page, with the columns representing chapters and the squares within the columns representing sections/scenes within the chapters. As you can see, early on I was hoping to get this done in five or even FOUR chapters (whatmakesyouhaha.mp3), with POV switches happening internally within the chapters. This proved to be unwieldy for many reasons, so I revised the outline:

Here I’d come to terms with the fact this story was going to have a lot more chapters than I’d planned, and I rearranged things so that it would happen in ten, with each chapter belonging to only one POV character. This also needed revising later, and in the end the story looked a bit more like this (though it did in fact end up being twelve chapters, but only because Chapter Ten was like, 12k, and needed to be split in two chunks):

I must have remembered to bring my fineliners to the coffee shop this time, lol, because as you can see it’s properly colour-coded this time. This outline was made when I was already four posted chapters into the fic, which hopefully gives you a sense of the way in which I am sort of a planner and a pantser; I can’t get into a longer project without an outline, but the outline inevitably changes many times throughout writing and I often end up with a finished product that looks pretty different from what I was intending. My creative M.O. as always is Do The Maximum! Amount! Of! Work! Possible!

This is what a “free writing” page looks like, for me. In this notebook I didn’t set aside any specific spaces for free writing so it’s strewn throughout the notebook in a really disorganized way and I was constantly flipping through looking for bits I’d written and forgotten to transcribe, and I decided to be more organized in future as a result of that. If something’s crossed through, that means I transcribed it. As you can see, they’re often small sections, sometimes just a coupled decontextualized sentences. About 3/4 of what I write in a notebook makes it into the story, I’d say; some of it never goes anywhere, and that’s OK. I have less of an issue killing my darlings if they never make it off the paper page.

A very brief, top-down chapter outline, where the goal was not to get too bogged down in details and just to visualize the beats and pin down what they’re trying to accomplish. Chapters for this fic typically ran about 6k, and five or six scenes per chapter was pretty common, so the average scene length was about 1-1.25k words/scene. IDK why I called it storyboarding when I didn’t make drawings. (Margin numbers are to keep track of word count, since I was using a daily word count tracker while writing this.)

This page was, as titled, for keeping track of the various balls in the air when I was about 2/3-3/4 of the way through the story and really feeling the pressure with regards to tying up the various loose ends. This was... a struggle. I hadn’t ever written anything longish (this fic ended up just under 70k) that had an action plot before, let alone a canon divergence scenario where I had to engage with and explain away various canon plot elements so I could maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Now, I mentioned earlier that I learned various “things not to do” with my notebooks while working on that project. One of those lessons I learned is to be more realistic when assessing how big a project is likely to get, not least because I RAN OUT OF PAGES around the chapter 9-10 mark. In my defense though, that’s because I’d never written anything even half this long! But I know better now, and try not to be in denial. Finishing the notebook early was a way bigger problem than I’d anticipated, and was part of the reason the last few chapters took several grueling months to finish. The issue was that I needed to be able to use a notebook to maintain my workflow--attempting to do it only on a computer was dismal--but it seemed silly to start a notebook of a similar size to the one I’d finished (80pg, approximately B5 dimensions) when there was no way it would need that much space, especially since the reference pages, like the historical notes, didn’t need to be transcribed over. I was also pretty broke at the time and didn’t want to spend money unnecessarily, lol. I tried to get by using a Moleskine Cahier for a month or so because I had one lying around, but it was horrid; it was too small to be used comfortably, it wasn’t spiral-bound so it wouldn’t lay flat, the ghosting is terrible and I hate the way Moleskine paper feels, etc. Eventually I caved and went to Muji and bought a 30ish page A5 with closer to lay-flat binding, and I finished the story in there. I would take a comparative pic for you of the relative notebook sizes and include some of the scene staging diagrams, etc. I put in there, but I can’t find it :(

So I learned that specs really do matter, and it’s okay to be picky if the pickiness is going to make the difference between actually using a notebook or not. Things that are important to me in my notebooks:

Ruling (gotta have ruling, I can suffer through grid but blank or dot is a no-go)

Size (I can’t use anything smaller than at least a medium-large notebook, I find it claustrophobic and get miserly about page space)

Binding (twin ring is my preference because it looks and feels better than a classic spiral but has the same comfort of use with regards to bending the pages back to suit workspace size and laying flat with ease)

Paper quality and colour (I don’t like anything too slippery/smooth or with too much visible ghosting, and I strongly prefer an off-white paper to bleached paper--part of why I don’t use Decomposition Books anymore, the paper is scratchy and it’s too damn bleached!)

Pagecount relative to size of project

Portability (in non-COVID times; anything bigger than a B5 wouldn’t fit in the satchel I used to bring to work at my old job), etc.

But everyone’s taste is different in this respect, and the only way to figure out what works for you is through trial and error, I’m afraid. I also suspect I’m more neurotic and particular about the sensory experience of using a notebook than most people are, but I yam what I yam.

Now to talk about the notebooks for my current projects, where I’ve refined my approach somewhat. I’ve included less photos for these because they’re ongoing WIPs I don’t want to spoil completely, but I’ve tried to include some outline-type stuff to give you an idea.

My big bang fic is in the very ugly twin ring notebook on the right; I got it at a dollar store by my house because I needed something to work in and didn’t want to wait for an online order, but it’s been very serviceable for my needs. The paper isn’t even bad. The bigger notebook (B5) is my Sangcheng fic.

I wanted something with a lot of pages for this, because I knew it was going to be a long story, and for some reason the fact it’s smaller than my usual preference doesn’t bug me (I think it’s an A5?); it just fits this story, somehow. I’m not sure exactly how many sheets are in here but I’d guess about 150.

Because this notebook has upwards of 100 sheets, I made a lot of use of sticky-note tabs to label high-priority pages. The colour coding of these doesn’t mean anything, it was just whichever ones I had at hand at any given moment. These are those tabs from Muji I mentioned, I’m really obsessed with them--the shape makes them so much less obtrusive and more practical than conventional squares/rectangles OR flag shapes, IME.

My big bang story is nonlinear, so, similarly to what I did with colour coding for the two POVs for my GK fic, this story has two main colours corresponding to whether a given section takes place in the “before” or the “after” portions of the timeline, with blue as “after”, yellow as “before”. This is what the most current version of the outline looks like in there:

If you squint, you can see the alphanumeric notes in the top right of each section entry; I gave them each a code like “A3″ or “B5″ corresponding to their position in the story sequence (so, it goes A1, B1, A2, B2, etc., through to B9 and then the epilogue). [Unintentional that this schema overlaps with notebook size labeling and so is kind of confusing in the context of this post.] At first I was just keeping track of the sections via the highlighted titles, but it got confusing because I’d write down “Wedding” or “Yiling” in my notes and then refer to the notes later like “but there are multiple marriages?? and multiple scenes in Yiling??”. Stuff gets struck through with a straight line if it’s been written in a more-or-less complete form and crossed out with a squiggly line if it’s been cut from the outline or made redundant.

As I said earlier, I started out all the initial brainstorming for my Sangcheng fic in its notebook, instead of brainstorming it in someone’s DMs/my notes app/a voice memo/etc. and then transcribing it into the notebook in a somewhat more organized fashion, which is how my stories usually start out. Because of this, the first five-ish pages are basically just stream of consciousness rambling where I was trying to jot down every disconnected thought I had about the story concept. I don’t have photos for that because it’s too spoilerific for later developments in the fic, but I can show you some of the stages the outlines went through, once I was able to corral those initial notes into a story structure:

All the chapters in this fic have their own highlighter colour, so when I started trying to make sense of my initial brainstorm notes I just went through and highlighted stuff in the colour of the chapter it would make the most sense for, and then transcribed things more-or-less in chronological order into the relevant chapter outline. I later ended up rewriting all the chapter outlines AGAIN to refine them and divide them internally by the individual scenes, which makes them a lot more legible and less wall-of-text-y. They look like this now, with about four sheets per chapter:

Because this fic is on the longer side, I have some pages that are just for keeping track of other story elements, like this, where I refer back to whatever the fuck the “themes” are supposed to be whenever I forget what this fic is about:

It’s all about the visionboarding... Anyway, that’s most of what I have to offer, since most of these two notebooks is Forbidden Content.

With regards to brands/supplies, I really like this Kokuyo Campus Wide notebook that I’m writing Sangcheng in, it’s pretty perfect for me. I also like the B5 Muji twin rings, but those only come in 30 sheets, so I wouldn’t use it for anything above a ~20k project. The B5 Maruman Spiral Note 6.5mm ruled/80 sheet is another good one, though I wish it was twin ring instead of spiral. As you can tell, I like Japanese stationery brands because it’s easier to find decent paper quality and minimalist design without shelling out $$ than it is with American/European brands, at least IME. I like Rollbahns too. But honestly, I can usually find pretty serviceable random notebooks that aren’t brand-name from Asian dollar stores; it’s really not something where you need to shell out tons of money.

#notebooks #writing #idk how to tag this!

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faerieavalon · 4 years

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5 Favorites

Share 5 favorite bits of writing? Don’t mind if I do!

Tagged by @pedlimwen thank you!!!

I’ll pass this one along to @serial-chillr, @solas-disapproves, @johaeryslavellan, @rivainisomniari, @midnightprelude, @odekiax2, @elveny, @pikapeppa if you haven’t shared already. No pressure though!

From Sa'vunin - A Single Day, a collection of side stories within the Sule Tael universe, Mahanon is sappy:

Dorian grumbled and rolled over to face him, bringing one arm out of the blankets to press a palm to his cheek. “You insufferable tease, what did you tell her about me?”

He kissed Dorian’s wrist and laughed softly. “I told her that I have found someone special. A light in the dark. A refuge in the storm. An answer to the greatest question that has plagued my life. A man to whom I could pledge my heart because he cooled my mind burning with longing.”

“Oh.” Dorian looked away and turned a delicious shade of red. “That’s, well, that’s something.”

“Only something?” Mahanon pouted dramatically. “Vhenan, you wound me.”

Lifting an eyebrow at the display, Dorian laughed. “You are a despicable heathen and I can’t stand to look at you.”

“Such sweet things you say, oh love of my life.”

From Sule universe again, a ridiculous idea about construction:

Solas stood on a rock, looking from the building to a parchment in his hands. From the depth of his frown, she could tell he wasn’t pleased. It was his voice she heard, bickering in sharp tones with Abelas. The former Sentinel and his old friend Avalon were bare to the waist, impervious to the chill biting in the air as they worked. While the elders argued, the younger seemed quite content to continue packing clay into the woven wood walls. He was whistling a happy little tune, too. The structure was growing to be a simple mud hut with a strong, peaked thatch roof. A couple of small families would be kept warm and safe inside through the mountain winters.

Why they were the ones doing construction, and why they were arguing about it, was too interesting a puzzle to pass up. Ara’lan crept quietly closer, ducking behind a boulder to listen in.

“The entrance needs to be at the south wall,” Abelas grumbled. “Facing east will catch the wind and drafts will linger.”

“I have enough experience building in this climate to know differently,” Solas offered back a bit louder than before. “These plans have been used for ages without concern.”

“Respectfully, there was magic to secure the entrance then. We are lacking in that luxury now.”

“We will not be once I enchant the walls. Unless, of course, you never finish constructing them.”

From Sule Tael Chapter 21, Solas lets a big secret be known:

“I knew you were different.” She smiled kindly. “You have no valasllin and survived the ages. When all the other Gods ran happily into war, the Wolf's people did not. I assumed you were allied with them. With your talents it makes perfect sense you were a priest of his. Why does this trouble you to show me?”

“Fen’Harel had no priests.” His words cracked around the edges. "He did not want to be worshiped."

The memory, having run its course, faded away into silence. Solas closed his eyes. When they opened again, they weren’t the same color she loved so dearly. They were a swirling silver.

“I was Solas first. Fen’Harel was an insult I took as a badge of pride. It inspired hope in my friends and fear in my enemies.” He smiled bitterly. “The People needed me, but what I became-”

The power behind his stare stole the air from her lungs and caused her heart to race. The urge to run coiled in her gut as the joy she just shared fizzled out. Fighting against it, she bit her lip. Fen'Harel wasn't like the Creators. He couldn't be. Memories of dark pain, fire and screaming flashed in the back of her mind. Letting out a long breath, she clenched her fists by her sides until her nails dug into her palms and grounded her in the present. The longer she took to answer him, the sadder he became. Just as he was about to turn away she found her voice.

“Atishan, Fen’Harel.” Her lips shook but her words held steady.

Ara’lan slowly gathered her nerve. He wasn’t Mythal. If he was going to hurt her, he would have done it already. This was just as hard for him to show as it was for her to see. Releasing her tension, she reached out to him and brushed a thumb across his cheek. Her eyes softened and she breathed hope into the air between them. It was a small thing, but it was honest. Closing his eyes once more, he let out a breath. His eyes were back to normal when he opened them again. His voice broke under the weight of his shame.

“And now you know. Everything I hoped, everything I tried to do for our People, it all went so horribly wrong.”

Ara’lan pressed her forehead to his and sighed. “I see you, Fen’Harel. I see you and I am not afraid.”

Also from Sule, Chapter 33, Felassan gets his second chance to say something important:

“The first time we met, you scolded me for running straight into trouble.” He sighed wistfully and twisted a few strands of her hair between his fingers. “Told me a rebellion lived and died with the strength of the people that brought others hope and that I needed to take better care of myself so I could take care of them. You said I was lucky to make it into your care in time and you almost wanted to let me suffer a little longer to think about what I’d done.”

Ara’lan huffed a laugh and shifted in his lap to snuggle closer. She remembered that day, too. He had come in with a handful of refugees. All were broken, bloody, and starving but it was all from old wounds. He had a broken wrist, more cuts than she could count, and two broken ribs but he still lead them with a grin. They had stayed safe because he protected them.

“I did,” she agreed quietly. “You were quite the valiant hero, ma’falon, even if you were foolish.”

“I was,” he agreed with a sheepish grin. “You were right, of course. And then you were so charming after it all that I had to find ways to keep coming back and see you. Ways that didn’t always involve me getting injured.”

Ara’lan felt a heat crawl up the back of her neck as she smiled. He had always been so charming, even in the direst of circumstances. She was selfishly glad he hadn't lost that part of himself.

“Of course you would lecture me every time I had even a little scratch.” Felassan continued telling his story, only pausing for a moment to glance down and catch her reaction. “You have always been beautiful, da’asha. Not just for your appearance or your skill, but for your heart. Era’las truly was hope and love embodied. Now you are yourself. You have control of your future and your heart still shines through. Anyone who spends time around you can feel it.”

Felassan brushed a thumb across the swell of her cheek, cupping her chin in his hand. Ara’lan sighed, her breath catching in her throat, and looked up to find him staring intently into her eyes. The sheer focus of his attention and gentle reverence in his touch sent a shiver down her spine.

“You don’t need magic, power, or followers for anyone to love you. All you have to do is smile.” His voice dipped, gaining a roughness she didn't expect. “If that isn’t enough for the Wolf, that’s his loss. I know it was enough for me.”

Another from Sule, Chapter 60, Mahanon and Dorian again:

“Are you alright?”

“No,” Mahanon turned away from the basin to answer Dorian quietly. “But I will be. Don’t really have much of a choice, do I?”

“Of course you don’t,” Dorian quipped, tucking his concern behind a gentle smile. “Running off for a weekend to a salon with beautiful people feeding you fruits while they massage your troubles away is only going to make things take longer. But good to dream about though, yes?”

“A very good dream.” Mahanon sighed. “After Corypheus, then what? Solve centuries of trouble for the Dalish over tea?”

“If anyone could, it would be you.” His tone softened as he studied Mahanon’s face. “Two of the world’s greatest leaders already scramble when you beckon them. They owe you too much to count. I don’t know any cause more worthy of using that influence.”

“You think it would work?”

Dorian laughed. “I know you’re hard headed enough to make them try.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Mahanon smiled. “What would I do without you, vhenan?”

“A lot more moping, I’m sure, but I don’t intend to let you find out.” Dorian traced a finger down his chest, following a stray droplet of water. “Now get to bed before I forget that you’re still healing.”

#5 favorite passages #my writing #long post #revisiting these gives me feelings

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confusedgoldenflower · 3 years

Text

There is No Glorious Purpose Chap. 2

Hello, you beautiful Tesseract-loving bastards!

I've been meaning for a long time to update but I've been having a really bad time with the whole motivation thing, and what I had first thought of doing with this fic got thrown in a wood-chipper and sunk with the Titanic... so, I'm trying to pick up the pieces and decide where I want to go with this. I also wanted to do it episodically: Chapter One aligned with Episode One and so on. That has not worked partly due to the issues of the above so, well, I guess we'll find out together!

So sorry for any grammar issues, I did my best to look it over but got too sick of staring at it over and over again in my drafts.

Small Thor cameo!

Chapter Two: You Oafs

“Yeah, well, you’re a mischievous scamp--or at least, the other you is. Been killing our minutemen and stealing our reset charges. Been happening for quite a long time….” Mobius whistled lowly. Loki nodded slowly.

“If you know me or us as well as you say, what need have you of my help?”

“Like I said, mischievous scamp. And I know what makes a Loki tick, sure, but even Sherlock needed Watson sometimes--you do know about them, right? Really fun stories with a super smart detective and his below average side-kick--.”

Loki ignored the rambling, “I agree.” Perhaps then… after… peace? “Just tell me, please… is it true that I directly led to my mother’s death?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, definitely. Thor was pissed and then he dragged you along to Svart--Svartle… anyway, the planet of the Dark Elves with Jane because she absorbed the Aether. Then you faked your death, again . There’s that ‘doing a horrible thing then getting away,’ again. But Thor totally gets you back on Sakaar with those Obedience Disks. Yeah, yeah… oh, right, you don’t know--and won’t. He slaps one of ‘em on you when you betray him again, then dials it up all the way while he returns to Asguard. For a god, you get put down a lot .” Mobius chuckled.

Loki sucked in a shuddering breath, reverently laid the Tesseract down and stood, “let us catch this scoundrel then.” He faked a smile for the agent.

“Ok,” Mobius clapped and rubbed his hands together, “what a therapy session!”

Loki had a fleeting thought of, “he must be some Midguardian fool, possibly in some relation to Thor,” before he remembered that the all powerful Time Keepers had created the oaf in front of him.

“Ya know, for the record, maybe ‘undying fidelity,’ wasn’t the right thing to say to Thanos. Just saying. But this is good! We’re gonna be a great team.”

~~~@%*^*%@~~~

“Loki,” the orange clock whined on his ‘gifted’ desk. Though still somewhat transparent, Miss Minutes was a fairly good illusion.

“Yes?” He replied pleasantly, blue hand turning the page of a magazine. His slack-clad legs were propped on the desk, fine business shoes not too far from where she stood on a rather large book. The suit replacement of the prison wear wasn’t bad, he, of course, would have done better had he access to his seidr. But it was fine for the time being.

“Are you paying attention?” The angry little clock motioned to the old Midguardian computer screen which read in that same horrible orange color:

LET’S SEE WHAT YA KNOW!

Q2. Thanos has two apples. He eats both but realizes he wants more. He goes back in time 20 minutes and eats the apples again. Does this mean the apples will not have existed in the timeline he left?

No, because time is constantly happening

The question doesn’t matter because a branch cannot change another time branch

Thanos would’ve been hungry prior because the Grandfather paradox already accounted for the change in matter before it’s move.

TVA FILE EDIT VIEW MODE HELP

Of course he was paying attention, and of course he chose not to amuse them! One order after another; feeding off of each other even. He may have bowed to Thanos but he had never kneeled. Not truly. And he clung to that remaining dignity.

“Naturally,” he returned pleasantly. She sighed.

“What happens when a nexus event branches past red line?”

“Ragnarok.”

“Come on, Loki. What is it?... Loki!”

“It is when the TVA can no longer reset a nexus event. Are you satisfied?’

“Right. And that would lead to the destruction of the timeline and the collapse of reality as we know it.” He lowered the magazine lower into his lap and took his feet off the desk.

“Yes, indeed. Are you alive or a recording? Clearly, you can hear me.”

Her big cartoonish eyes moved around, “uh… sorta both?”

“So not an illusion or projection?” He swiped at her with the rolled up magazine.

“Ah!” A small smirk ghosted his face and he went after her again.

“Watch it! Where are your manners? Oh! Hey! Quit it! That is not nice, ya jerk!” She floated and then fazed back into the computer. He gave that ugly thing a few whacks as well. She pouted on the other side of the screen.

“Trainin’ going wel--is that my jet ski magazine? Put it down, Blue-Raz.” Mobius ripped the magazine from him, swivelled to his desk then swiveled again to flop a jacket in front of Loki.

“Gear up, there’s been an attack. Let’s go.” The agent commanded. Loki picked up the jacket. It unfolded from the collar, back facing him. “VARIANT” was emblazoned across it.

“Ah,” was all he commented as he moved to slip it on before his handler got any ideas while he was led down hallways. Norns knew the agent would have plenty of examples in his own life up to that point, much less his future or other variants.

“Good. Yeah. Smart.” Mobius commented with his fists in a move reminiscent of excited warriors as said human stopped to look back at his charge and the newly bestowed article of clothing. B-15 gave her usual droll stare. Her minutemen stood around her in a group.

“ C-20 and her team went dark shortly after they jumped into the 1985 branch. All signs point to another ambush. We've grabbed enough temporal aura to know it's our Loki Variant.”

The “actually dangerous” sort, Loki groused silently. Then Mobius opened his mouth.

“Here's the deal. When we get out on the branch, we're not just looking for a Time Criminal. We're looking for a Loki. A variation of this guy. A type we should all be very familiar with, because the TVA has pruned a lotta these guys, almost more than any other Variant. And no two are alike. Slight differences in appearances, or not so slight. Different powers, although, powers generally include shape-shifting, illusion-projection, and my favorite... Duplication-casting. Illusion-Projection.”

Mobius gestured to him when applicable in his little speech, also projecting other variations of Loki with his TemPad--all assumedly pruned likewise. Variation 8: L6792 looked exactly like he would now had he’d been afforded the luxury of keeping his clothes, but also with slight differences that led Loki to think that that variant must have been favored royally in some way he was rejected.

Variation 8: L1247 looked like a Midguardian sportsman happily holding a trophy of some kind. Variation 8: L6792 was an atrocity of him and the Hulk combined. Variation 8: L8914 was more strongly built with more prominent hair curls in their longer hair. They stood like dignitary with their hands behind them. Variation 8: L7803 looked like an oaf. A full, half-face helmet emblazoned with the horns in the wrong direction and even a piece of turf over the shoulder like a cape. Oh, dear….

“No.”

“...Huh?”

“Those two powers are completely different, although, I am unsurprised you cannot comprehend it.”

“Loki, what are you talking about--look, I’ve dealt with more of you than you’ve dealt with yourself.”

“The truth remains that those powers are not the same.”

“Then, please, Loki, tell me.”

Loki smiled easily and supplicatingly at the contempt and patronization, just like talking to anyone in Asguard.

“ Illusion-projection involves depicting a detailed image from outside oneself, which is perceptible in the external world, whereas duplication-casting entails recreating an exact facsimile of one's own body in its present circumstance, which acts as a true holographic mirror of its molecular structure.”

“Ok, take a breath. Noted. We’re gonna break into two teams, including myself and Professor Loki here”

B-15 still looked unamused and dubious.

“Whoever the Variant is, we haven’t been able to find them so I’m the Sherlock and he’s my Watson. Look, this’ll work.” Mobius said to her. She side-eyed Loki, Loki who had nothing but a branded jacket to protect himself with.

“And so my agency in this is to… tell you how brilliant you are.”

“Go outside, maybe touch some grass.” Mobius returned with a tilted smile under his twisted nose.

“Ah. I shall protect myself with your wit, then, should this superior being choose me as a next target.”

Mobius chuckled and mimed “talky-talky” again.

He passed through the portal B-15 had summoned, closed in on both ends by TVA agents. Immediately, he could feel his seidr swell within him again and redonned his Aesir glamor. The choker chafed as he glanced around, and he found himself much preferring the biting metal of the chains he was usually imprisoned in. The place they passed into was a celebration of old Midguardian times, further back than what the TVA modeled itself after, in direct juxtaposition of the modern technology with the humans held in their hands, and had used to both get to the location and create their sometimes elaborate costumes.

“Apex of nexus signature located, ma'am,” a minuteman said as they walked.

“Allow me to ask you this, why do we not travel to the moments prior to the Variant’s attack, to when they arrive.” Loki asked as the tent grew ever nearer.

“Nexus events destabilize the time flow. This branch is still changing and growing, so you gotta show up in real time. Did you watch any of the training videos you were supposed to?”

The minutemen twisted their batons, the ends glowing a shade that seemed to haunt the TVA as they neared.

Loki chuckled a laugh that was never and would never be heartfelt, “my dear Sherlock, you should know I am quite the scholar. But these ‘reset charges,’ they ‘prune’ a branched timeline which ‘allows time to heal all wounds.’”

Mobius made an odd gesture towards him, “he’s on it.”

Within the dark, torch-lit tent, limp minutemen laid about the displays which held real weapons and a large, stepped seating construct. Their bodies were splayed out in obvious struggle. Unactivated batons laid around as well, a few clenched in hands. A helmet bearing “C-20” laid, discarded within the scene. Loki hovered a hand over one display as he passed and they grouped around the scene.

“So he's taking hostages now?” B-15 spat.

“The Variant's never taken a hostage before,” Mobus returned.

“Maybe he's upping his game.”

“Or he pruned her,” a minuteman remarked.

“A Loki couldn't have gotten the jump on C-20.” B-15 returned.

“Fan out and search for her. And hurry up, we're at three units until red line.” B-15 ordered, her minutemen immediately moving to obey.

“Let's go. She's right.” A peon echoed.

Mobius concurred, “Come on.”

“Wait….” Loki said, brow knit as he studied the scene.

“What do you see?” Mobius asked as he stepped away from the entrance.

“I see wolf’s teeth.”

“Yeah, ok,” Mobius motioned for him to hurry and Loki got brief satisfaction that the human had no idea what he was talking about.

“‘Where there are wolf’s ears, there are wolf’s teeth,’” Loki echoed one of many sayings he heard during his childhood, especially before bed. He swallowed down the thought of a certain story about blue, darkly lined and vicious monsters.

“Ridiculous, really,” he laughed hallowly, “my people are gullible fools by nature. You remind me of them; the Time Variance Authority and the great gods of Asgard. One and the same. Drunk with power, blinded to the truth. Those you underestimate will devour you, and we’ve just walked into a wolf’s mouth.” He raked his eyes across his audience as he spoke, kneeling down in front of the helmet and stroking his hand in the grassy turf. The minutemen seemed to falter ever so slightly, B-15 rolled her eyes, and Mobius stared.

A TemPad beeped, “two units, he’s wasting our time.”

“No, step outside this tent and my other Variant will devour you,” Loki stated plainly. It was easy, nearly in a terrifying way, how he fell into the usual routine he had had with his oaf of a brother and his lackeys, who, similarly, never headed his words.

“We need to look for C-20.” B-15 repeated.

“Come on, Loki, we don’t have time for your lies.”

“Oh, I am not lying, and out of curiosity, when you find them, will you prune us both seeing as you will not have any need of me?”

Mobius sighed and gesticulated like a frustrated middle-aged Midguardian, “he’s lying.”

Loki’s head turned to the side minutely, in a ghost of a head shake. His stomach turned the way it usually did when he knew things were about to--.

“Aghr!” A minuteman had exited and had been consequently slaughtered. A brawl broke out just outside the small entrance. Innocent event-goers made exclamations outside as well. Batons revved, and B-15 and Mobius stalked to the opening. Loki walked behind them.

“The charge!” Someone yelled. The fight continued. A cloaked figure with amazing skill in combat fought them all while a crowd of civilians formed around them. There were a few smiles and jeers, no doubt thinking it was all a show.

“On behalf of t-... the Time Va-...Variance Authority, I hereby-... arrest you for-... for crimes against the… Sacred Timeline, V-… Variant!” B-15 huffed between blows.

“Ergh!” A minuteman got pruned. Loki’s cloaked variant said nothing, only continued fighting. He backed back into the tent, took aloft a jousting lance, broke it half and reemerged. For all their combined ability, the TVA was losing. The glow of pruning swung around arbitrarily. He dipped into the fight and caught his counterpart’s cutlass in the cross the two ends of the lance made.

“Pardon me, I mean no intrusion,” he said calmly to his other self, noticing a similar collar of metal that had adorned his own garments. He could feel the other’s tension as they reclaimed their sword and focused solely on him. It proved more of a poor decision than anticipated and he found himself holding his breath in pain more than he’d wanted. The wood was also useless and even though both it and he put up a valiant fight, his other self had taken hold of a baton along the line. His weapons were useless as they continued to share blows. He lowered the stubs of wood and opened his arms. The glowing end came close.

Then it wasn’t.

The grunting that followed was B-15 and Mobius disarming the variant of the baton and nearly restraining them.

“About to redline!” A remaining minuteman nearly yelled. B-15 and Mobius shared a look. A door was opened and Loki found the cloaked figure disappearing into a flurry of gold.

“What in the Rolling Stones was that, Blue-Raz?!” Mobius had him hard by the shoulder of both his jacket and dress shirt.

Loki blinked once then made eye contact with Mobius, “what ever do you mean?”

“He was about to kill you!”

“Prune,” Loki politely corrected. Mobius gawked.

“I kno--what were you thinking?!”

“Your only use of me is to capture me, I was assisting in that.”

“By letting you be killed by yourself?!”

“A mere distraction to the larger goal, Mobius.”

“And it almost worked,” B-15 piped from somewhere beside them. Her voice had dropped a tone or two.

“Yeah… almost had ‘im too.” Mobius admitted, letting Loki go. “But seriously, man, what was that?”

“Nearly fulfilling my role, as you yourself stated.” Loki replied pleasantly.

“We also barely pruned it in time and got outta there with our lives.” B-15 stated.

“Yeah…” Mobius rubbed the back of his head with his other hand on his hip as he stared at the floor. I was not lying, Loki wanted to say. To push. To scream. But he instead focused on the ache in his back. It should be fine in a matter of a few more hours given the time he had for recovery before the Tesseract opened the portal in New York and he was knocked from the Mind Stone’s, and thus Thanos’, direct influence.

~~~@%*^*%@~~~

Loki subconsciously touched his hideously blue palm as he waited outside of the judge’s office for his handler. The doors were decorated with sandglasses. How quaint .

Mobius finally emerged, stalking right past him. Loki fell in step behind him. He realized such only after he’d done it.

An angry finger wagged in front of him as they walked, “one thing, Loki, that’s all I asked.”

“The ‘talk’ from earlier.”

“No! Catching the superior version of yourself. We lost guys out there today-- good guys!” Good, yes, ‘good guys’ who also happened to have erased who knows how many people from existence.

“There would have been a lot more had I not been there and, likewise, a lot less had I been heeded.”

“And there you go again. That narcissism! Do you ever stop? Get tired of yourself?”

Loki didn’t respond as Mobius stopped and whirled on him, only gave him his schooled expression.

“I’m on thin ice ‘cause of you. I saved you, remember that? Didn’t that mean anything to your Asguardian standards or personal morals or anything?”

“If you recall, I was about to meet that fate regardless as I helped you bring in my Variant. I also have little doubt you will delete me if I survive assisting you in their arrest either way.”

“Oh, so I’m the bad guy? Ok. Well that other you is worse, remember that. He’s killed a lot of people--more than you. You’re just a little blue ice runt, crying in the cold.”

Loki chuckled and didn’t even need to bite back the urge to correct this “Loki expert.”

“Ever get tired of playing this same old part?” Mobius continued bitterly, “I’m getting sick of your constant need for sympathy, Loki!”

“Mobius?” He asked after allowing a few minutes to pass.

“What?” Mobius mumbled.

“This other Variant is after reset charges, why not supervise another ‘pruning’ in case we find the correct branch they target. How many happen in a day, usually?”

~~~@%*^*%@~~~

Loki almost choked when they entered into an Aguardian hall. The was beautiful and towering and held stones and architecture he could rewrite the books about. For one blissful second, he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of his homeland--or the place he was raised. His glamor fell over him unconsciously.

Then he had to play follow-the-leader with the TVA peons. He rounded a large corner and immediately knew how many steps it would take to get to his room, his mother’s and Thor’s.

“Loki?” A familiar voice boomed. Loki tensed. Mobius cast him a “good luck” glance and mumbled, “I’ll be back for ya, Blue-Raz”

Loki had the urge to run him through followed by his brother who should not—it didn’t matter, the timeline would be reset. The Thor bounding up behind him would be pruned with everything else… why did that hurt? He turned to face his adopted sibling.

“Loki, it is you? Isn’t it? I mean you look horrendous in that getup, but it’s you!” Thor held his hands out in what could only be described as reverence. But the esteemed Asguardian Prince was wearing dirty Midguardian clothes and had a beer gut to match. How? Barely any time had elapsed between that moment and when they were facing down in New York.

“It is me but what happened to you, brother?”

A shadow came over Thor’s face. His hands lowered and he reached out to Loki.

“Tell me the truth,” he whispered, “did you just escape the dungeons?”

Loki held his gaze for a few long moments. The timeline will be reset. There is no harm in it.

“No, Thor, I never—this me never went to the dungeons. Never came back to Asguard.”

Thor hissed an inhalation of breath as his eyes widened.

“Thor what happened to you? Why do you have mismatched eyes? Where is your armor? Or Mjolnir?”

“Oh, Loki! Loki. Loki. Loki.” Thor’s voice trembled with false laughter and an emotion Loki didn’t know, “what--you look horrendous. What in the Nine Realms are you wearing?”

“Thor, it is good to see you, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time for a chat.” Loki returned, clipped. Redline grew ever nearer.

Thor’s face fell again, “Loki… just tell me you’re alive. That I didn’t fail you on the Statesmen--Thanos is dead now, I-I killed him! I-... I killed him… I avenged you.”

“Oh, Thor,” Loki found himself saying as Thor’s eyes shined and tears spilled onto his cheeks. He allowed himself to be squeezed in the other’s arms… and found it to be the best hug he’d ever received… or the only hug….

“Thor… Thor, are you listening?” Thor only sobbed into his shoulder, holding Loki up against his beer gut and off of the actual floor.

“Y-yes?”

“Very soon, this timeline will be reset which means you will have never seen me here. So tell me, what happened to you?”

Thor whined in the back of his throat and plopped Loki back down, it was just hard enough to make pain spike up his nearly healed spine.

“I--You--Thanos--.”

Loki laid his arms on Thor’s biceps, squeezing gently, Thor shuttered then took a breath and smiled fondly at him. Fondly. Thor never did that. What sort of--how is he not the Variation?

“So after Ragnarok, Thanos… had all the Stones and killed half of what was left of Asguard including you. I wasn’t able to--I’m sorry.”

“Just tell me, Thor, I am right here.”

“Then I was found by the space morons and went to Nidevelir to forge Storm Breaker because Hela broke Mjolnir before Sakaar--Ragnarok happened because of her. Then we battled with the Avengers in Wakanda and… I didn’t go for the head! How could I have not gone for the head?! Thanos snapped and…. It was horrible, brother. Absolutely horrible. The whole universe. And so many extinctions followed and more tragedies. I-....” He hung his head. “I tried to drown my worries like the ‘oaf’ I am….”

“I thought your annoying little group was the ‘Avengers’ not the ‘Alcoholics.’”

“... Ha!” Thor slapped him on the back. The statement seemed to have brought about the intended reaction.

“Yes! Of course! So five years later, we found him and I slayed him! But Tony and Scott found a way to move through time to get the stones to undo it all, and so we did, and we succeeded! But still, Thanos haunted us and we had a final battle--which we won!” Thor seemed to have noticed himself that he was about to go into one of his long winded stories of victory, and cut it short.

Then his smile abated and his beard fell, “Loki, Steve and Tony lost the Tesseract in 2012 to you…?”

“Yes, yes, that would be me, brother.”

A gasp of breath as Thor readied himself for the most bone crushing hug in the universe was all that was afforded to Loki.

“Thor,” he wheezed slightly, “I know I was not kindest to you but must you kill me prematurely?”

“Oh, Loki! I never threw you off the Bifrost, and I-!”

“Charge is set, we gotta boogie!” Mobius interrupted, jogging over.

Thor allowed the interruption if only to interrogate him, “and who are you? How and why do you command my brother? If you are with Tha-!”

To Loki’s astonishment, a few electrical charges emanate off of his brother.

“No, time to talk. Put Loki down We gotta get outta Dodge.”

Thor’s grip tightened, “Thor, just do it!” Loki groused. Thor did. Mobius opened the portal.

“Sorry, big guy, big fan but I need your Buddy. You ever think of trying Old Spice?”

“Ah--I just--Loki just returned to me as he always does and you expect me to just give up?!”

“Thor, do not follow us, I would rather not see you get deleted.”

Heavy feet crossed through the yellow threshold and left 2023 Thor in 2014 with a gaping mouth and tear stained cheeks.

“So no Loki!” Mobius announced as he clapped his hands together, “that means we gotta get to work!” He went on to walk at a brisk pace. Loki trailed after, blinking back the stinging in his now red eyes.

“I was of the understanding that is what we were doing,” he put a hand over his throat while he cleared it.

“I need you to go over each and every one of this Variant's case files, and then, give me your... How do I put it?... Your unique Loki perspective. And who knows? Maybe there's something that we missed.”

Seeing as how you are so hypocritical, I would be surprised if you had not missed anything. Honestly, “all you Lokis are the same” yet in the same breath, “no Loki variant is exactly alike.” I think as I do.

“You are the expert, I trust your judgement” Loki said instead.

“That's why I'm lucky I got ya for a little bit longer. Let me park ya at this desk. And don't be afraid to really lean into this work. Here's a good trick for you: pretend your life depends on it. I'm gonna get a snack.”

For all his countless hours spent in not only the Grand Library, but others around Asguard and the other Realms, he found himself having little interest in sifting through all the instances in which that other version of him overcame the great TVA and triggered more animosity against themselves--and all other Lokis.

“Any motive, Sherlock?” He asked dryly.

“That’s what you’re for!” The agent chuckled, poked at his chest and walked away.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the agent walk away then turned his attention to the paperwork. The pattern was known to begin with but became… inane the more pages he flipped through: nexus event, dispensed TVA agents, the team goes silent, they’re found dead and without the reset charge, Mobius, the expert, is called in for investigation and then the branch is reset before redline.

One Loki… only one to best their happy little teams. I was bested, but I also have extenuating circumstances of the past year. Without Thanos’ interruption, could I have?... Yes, I fought alongside Thor and his foolish troup of warriors, I would have been able to exact my own damage. For a ‘timeline protection force,’ how are they schooled in combat?

“Pardon me,” he tapped the librarian’s bell. She turned to him with a nonplussed expression.

“Could you show me to the combat regimens of our dear agents?”

“No.”

“Infographics?”

“No.”

“Battle end-games?”

“No.”

“Well, you have been very helpful, thank you.” It was still a library after all and he more than knew his way around one seidr or not; his mind was still intact--somewhat intact and that had always been his greatest weapon.

So he sat back down at the table to form a plan of action, so to speak, of how he could find the files he wanted in the fastest and most assured way. But, he still had all the paperwork of this other Loki, dripping in red. Oozing. Gushing. Like Thor’s cape as yet more enemies were put to ruin under his brother’s sheer might. He never envied that red; never thought he could own it or have it become him… yet this other version had jumped--leapt into that pool of blood and ended all who stood in their way. Incapacitation would have sufficed. Has sufficed in innumerable cases. He’d both saved lives of his comrades and stupid brother, and saw the end goal in such a way.

He gasped and leapt up, running along the railing of the library.

“Mobius--.”

“No, I said, ‘don’t bother me until you’ve read all the files,’ and I know you don’t read that fast.” Mobius set his Js\osta down with a hard thonk .

“I have, but unimportant--.” Loki slid into the seat across from the agent in the cafeteria.

“No, read every file pertaining to the Variant.”

“The answer does not lie in the files, it lies on the timeline!” Mobius gave him a dangerous look at the slight raising of his voice. Loki took a breath.

“Look,” Loki began again with his arms fanning over the table, “they’re hiding in apocalypses.”

“Which one? There’s, like, a million?”

“Take Ragnarok, I assume you are familiar?”

“Yeah, total destruction of your weird coin planet and most of its people because of your sister Hela. I’m sorry.”

Sister? Hela? Thor mentioned her--unimportant now.

“Yes, well, that recent visit with Thor got me thinking…?”

Mobius regarded him but eventually sighed and sat back, making a small gesture, “yeah, sure, ok.”

“Nexus events happen when someone does something that is not meant to happen--.”

“A bit more complicated but yeah.”

“These can culminate into entire other timelines--.”

“Chaotic alterations of a predetermined outcome.” Loki did his best to ignore the interruptions. He forced animation into his movements as if trying to explain it to Thor. That was best, pretend he was explaining something that now seemed so basic to the warrior.

“Alright! So this is Asgard,” he plundered the agent’s salad bowl. Said agent gave sad push back. Loki continued.

“I could travel back to Asgard preceding Ragnarok and do whatever I wished; switch crowns, resoil linens, topple some columns. I could destroy the Rainbow Bridge.” He grabbed the small salt shaker and started pouring some in. Mobius mourned his food. Loki was not fed.

“None of this would matter. Not if I set fire to the courtyard. Or even killed the Allfather!”

“Why--Lo--God, Loki!”

“Excuse me,” Loki greeted Casey kindly at an adjacent table, “are you finished with this?”

Casey, who had his bunched napkin thrown on his plate in clear sign of being finished looked from his crumpled juice box to Loki, “you!”

“Yes, very nice to see you again,” Loki took the drink container and poured it into the salad, secretly relishing how the agent utterly deflated.

“Due to Surtur!” Loki finished.

Mobius rubbed his hand down his face, “what am I lookin’ at?”

“Apocalypses, Holmes.”

“Loki, you just apocalypse my lunch, I wanted to eat that!”

“You want my other Variant.”

Mobius leaned onto the table, “cut to the chase.”

“That is how they have escaped you for so long; no matter what happens, an apocalypse negates anything that would otherwise summon the TVA.”

“Oh, not bad. Not Bad. Hey, so, how do you weigh over five hundred pounds?”

That was a “jackknife”--as Midgaurdians may say--that he did not expect.

Mobius raised his hands, “hey, I’m not judging, just curious.”

“Focus, Mobius, please.”

“Ok, ok. My salad. Destroyed.” Another despondent hand waved at the bowl.

“I can show you my theory is true.”

Mobius laughed, “I’m not letting you go.”

“You come with me, naturally,” Loki pushed.

“Well, I’ve had enough of your troublemaking for one day.”

“No one has to know unless I am correct--which I am.”

“TVA agents can’t just go running around anyway. Waltzing into the White House would be a Nexus event.”

You are not listening!

“Pompeii, for instance, you Midguardians like talking about that catastrophe, we could go there!”

“Pompeii?”

“Pompeii. Everyone died and that town was not even the worst hit of the eruption of Vesuvius.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk, talk, talk. Oh, you’re so smart!” Mobius sneered and wiped his mouth with his napkin despite not having spilled anything much less eaten enough to make a mess of his face. No food for either of them it seemed.

“If I go along with this and you stab me in the back, you’re getting erased. Capische?”

“Understood,” I am fully expecting that regardless.

#loki #loki series #loki show #Loki Show Rewrite #loki series rewrite project #loki series rewrite fanfic #loki fanfic #loki fanfiction #cannon non-compliant #gentle reminder that just because a character says something doesn't make it true

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sheliesshattered · 4 years

Text

Clearly my spacing and stitch sizing is a little off, but for a proof-of-concept and just eyeballing the distances as I stitched, I think this (very) rough draft of the embroidery for the Oswin apron turned out pretty good! For the real deal, I’ll have to iron that linen fabric, and then lay out my stitches with a ruler, make sure both the length and the width is closer to screen accurate than it is here.

The late night lighting on my craft table makes the red look really orangey, but it’s actually a perfect match for the red of the dress, which is somewhat of a miracle considering that I ordered them online from two different sources, sight-unseen. I would have been happy with close enough, so that was a nice surprise.

Doing all the embroidery for the apron will definitely take quite a lot of time, but even just this little bit was so relaxing and satisfying, I’m suddenly really looking forward to this project. I’m going to try to keep myself focused on finishing the belt in time for Halloween -- and I actually made really good progress on the most complicated bit of it today -- but once I have a little more free space on my craft table I think I might work on getting the first part of this prepped and measured out, so I can start embroidering in the evenings. I’ll probably start with the middle of the neckband so that my roughest stitches will be the least visible.

But first, the belt!

I really do want to get the belt finished in the next two weeks or so, so I can have the whole base costume to wear on Halloween. I have all the pieces for the belt pulled together, but nothing is actually assembled yet, and I don’t want to start attaching things to the belt until I have all the individual pieces made, so I can figure out the spacing. I’m making several of the weirder bits from various odds and ends I have lying around, but the only thing I’m making completely from scratch is the wedge-shaped oddity:

The screen-used one was probably a bit of toy the prop department dug up and painted, but since this costume has no pockets or bags of any sort, I want to turn that wedge into a flap-top pouch to stash my phone and room key and such in -- on the assumption, of course, that someday I will eventually get to wear this to an actual con.

My original plan for it was pretty simple, just a wedge-shaped bucket pouch with a flap that secures with magnetic snaps, make a faceplate out of foam to replicate the look of the screen-used one, easy peasy. But my phone is so big that keeping it upright made the wedge way too big compared to the rest of the belt. Turning my phone sideways helps, but to keep the pouch from getting too wide, the phone really needs to stay at the top of the wedge -- which then leaves a weird smaller wedge of empty space below it.

So now I’m thinking an upper pocket, accessed by lifting up the flap, where the phone will lay sideways, parallel to the belt itself. Then below that, a smaller pocket in the lower part of the wedge, which turns out to be perfectly sized for room key, credit card, ID, cash, chapstick, etc -- all those small but important things that I hate not having a way to stash on me while I’m in costume. That bit will have a zipper closure, hidden under the flap, so I can make sure none of that important stuff falls out.

Which all sounds like an excellent and useful final product, but trying to think my way through the 3D shapes involved was seriously breaking my brain earlier. I ended up spending like 30 minutes just sort of staring into space, imagining moving the fabric around, how I would connect the pieces together, where the weak points are likely to be (specifically, the bottom of the pocket that holds the phone), how to make the whole thing hold its shape when built out of scraps of wool, suede, and craft foam, and how to machine-sew the seams in the wool in an order that won’t result in being unable to sew something without sewing the whole pocket closed.

I think I have it. I’ve drawn out the foam faceplate in its true size, based on the size of my phone, and I’ve sketched all the pattern pieces for the wool lining in miniature. There are a couple of places where cutting the seam allowance from a flat piece of fabric will be a little odd, but I think I’ve managed to shift those to the corners that can survive having small holes (ie, my phone isn’t going to fall through a hole that size, but something like a safety pin might). Tomorrow I’m going to cut the whole thing out of paper in its true size, tape the seam allowances together, and make sure it actually works.

Did you ever make those 3D papercraft cubes as a kid? Where the six sides of the cube are printed on a single sheet of paper, with fold lines and extra little tabs so you can overlap it in places and tape it down? This is just like that, only it’s an irregular wedge shape instead of a cube, and the interior is broken up into two parts, with a solid wall in between them. And for the real deal, I can’t tape the edges, I have to pass the wool through a sewing machine, hopefully without any of it getting too fiddly. But hopefully the paper-and-tape version tomorrow should point out any flaws in my plan before I start cutting out the wool pieces.

I also did a proof-of-concept today on gluing both wool and craft foam to suede, and it seems to have gone well. Suede (and leather generally) is odd in that sewing it actually weakens it, so my plan is to make the interior out of wool, with a bit of (faux) horsehair braid to give it extra structure along the straight lines. Then I’ll glue pieces of suede cut to size onto the outside of the wool, to provide the outer body of the pouch, and give the whole thing more structure and strength. The back panel of suede will extend up and over to become the flap that covers the top and front of the pouch, and onto the exterior of that I’ll glue the foam pieces with all the details to match the screen-used one. I think with all those together, it’ll have enough strength and structure to keep its shape, but the wool interior will provide a soft and quiet lining, so nothing in the pockets is banging around.

But honestly, I’m mostly using these materials because I have scraps of black wool and black suede that have been lying around in my fabric stash for, oh, let’s see -- just over 9 years for the wool, and almost 18 years for the suede, though the suede at least has been used in other projects since then. These are small enough pieces that this is really all they’ll be useful for, and the black should be unobtrusive enough that the only thing anyone will actually notice will be the foam faceplate that looks like the screen-used one.

That’s the theory, anyhow. We’ll see how it all comes together. This is by far the most complicated bit of the belt, and it’s up there with how complicated it was to flat-draft the pattern for the drape at the neckline of the dress. Once this is done, putting together all the other little bits for the belt should go a lot faster, really just combining pieces together, gluing them down, and painting.

Not counting today or the 31st, there are 17 days left until Halloween. I should be able to knock out the whole belt in that timeframe, but only if I don’t let myself procrastinate too much. And on that note, maybe I’ll start on that paper mock-up tonight rather than putting it off until tomorrow...

#my costumes #my cosplay #my sewing #my embroidery #Oswin Oswald cosplay #Clara Oswald cosplay #Doctor Who cosplay #one of those weird days when I accomplished a lot but don't actually have anything to show for it #but hey the planning phase of stuff like this is super important too #hokay back to work

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