#this is a very self-indulgent ramble. it was cathartic i guess

[muffinswritingstuff]

Just wanted to add a complete side note to the Turning Red conversation. Well, more like "share an opinion" inspired by it. An opinion that's not an opinion at all, more like a thought.

(A positive one, don't you worry. I absolutely adore that movie.)

Animation, being the magnificent form of visual media that it is, is great for a lot of things. Obviously.

But I only now realize how good it is for implementing subtle, yet meaningful details into your work.

(Realizations come to me once in a blue moon, don't judge me.)

Again, duh. And, considering how much time, effort and money goes into creating a single frame, of course they (The Art Gods) wouldn't want to waste it.

It's neat, though. You can do so much with just background elements, y'know? Just think of how many people got excited and genuinely happy thanks to those two characters with diabetes patches. And there was that one character in a wheelchair at the 4Town concert. (Sigh... Living the dream).

*

So, the reason I bring this up is, you could say, selfish.

It's just that I, as an ✨aspiring writer✨ , really struggle with that sort of stuff. I always feel that I'm boring the reader with too many words. I'm constantly afraid of actually writing out a main character's appearance, because, to me, it feels unnatural and "oh, look, look! this character has red hair, did you know that? you need to know that, because i said so!"

Y'know?

I know I shouldn't, I know every writer must face this beast of a task. But damn if they aren't eye-rolling – not in a mean way, in a Pavlov's Dog kinda way; especially in first person POVS.

How do I... justify my weird little feelings...

When you actually put stuff (be that appearances, descriptions, or even movements) into words – they take up space, they stay on that page/screen. It is therefore required of the reader to get to the end of this and that word pile if they want to continue with the story.

It puts the flow of the piece on pause. On such an awkward, "this is painful for the both of us, but it'll be worth it, i promise" pause, and it makes me squeezy.

But there's no such pause in movies! And that's so cool, I'm so jealous!

The viewer's brain processes what it sees so quickly, it requires absolutely no effort. You look at the main characters in Turning Red, and you know immediately what they're all about. The essence of that knowledge is thanks to *chef's kiss* character design, but the speed at which that knowledge plants itself in your brain mass is due to a single glance. In short: monkey brain need not wait and read if it can see.

And you don't need to describe every background detail... Or outfits... Or "the upturn of their lips"...

Again, I feel the need to state: I know how much goes into animation, or a single piece of art, or character design.

But (and here I'm being disgustingly selfish) it seems so much easier to put a description on paper using a pencil than it is a pen.

*

(We need to invent straight-from-brain projections. Capture those waves, code them, and make them real. Monkey brain's getting lazy.)

*

Recently, I've come to terms with the fact that I'm desperately trying to, like , imitate visual media with my writing.

(Which is physically impossible, it's a completely different medium, and I really should keep that in mind and use the advantages of said medium instead of poorly mimicing another... But l'm dying on this hill, it seems.)

Still. I meticulously describe movements and expressions exactly the way I picture them un my head – and the way they play in my head, you guessed it, flows like a cartoon.

Like, I'm a bad writer. I can't wax poetic about expressions or surroundings, I can't let a character go on a beautiful internal monologue about how they've been feeling for the past few days or something along those lines.

I just. Describe stuff. And I love describing stuff! But I cannot do it in a literary way, the pretty way.

And that inability comes not only from the lack of skill or experience, but from a certain sense of self-deprecation.

(Yay.)

I love reading and immersing myself in a world or a character's feelings.

Also, it really helps me when I understand who, when, where and how is speaking/acting. When I can't picture the people's faces or the room they're in, if they are having emotional conversations in a white void, it kinda takes you out, man. Doesn't it?

Then can I please stop freaking out every time I try to do that!

I feel great writing dialogues, they are fun and come more-or-less easy to me. But then I go, "Wait, the theoretical person reading this won't have this epic movie I have in my head right now to rely on to picture how exactly this conversation is flowing..." So of course I then try to add the necessary descriptions , but 😐. They take up so much space...

I shouldn't mention every twitch and blink, but oh how I want to.

But then it feels hollow - because I focused too much on the movement itself, not it's, like, meaning; empty - because l've neglected to describe those gosh darn surroundings; and meaningless - because, no matter how much I want to, those little twitches and blinks don't do anything. Yeah, they might provide characterisation (at least, I'd hope so), but they take up so much space...

*

That doesn't happen in animation, or comics, or movies. The surroundings, the expressions and the movements all fit in a couple of frames.

*

Yeah, I shouldn't complare them. But I might as well finish what I started.

(Dramatic.)

If I don't put in "meaningless details", if I weigh every word and sentence... I'll crumble under pressure, bestie. I'm already struggling, I don't wanna struggle some more... Apparently, I choose jealous suffering.

*

I'm treating my hypothetical readers as arrogant babies with short attention spans.

But, as probably Jesus once said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

With this probably-Jesus quote I am bearing my soul before you and admit that I am, in fact, an arrogant baby with a short attention span.

If there are no long words, complex emotions and beautiful literary devices, I turn into an annoying snob.

At the same time, on a completely different side of the spectrum, there are ✨chatfics✨. I love them. I eat that shit up. There's literally nothing, and it's so fun. Their humor carries them so hard, the jokes are essential to that particular genre of modern literature.

And guess who doesn't have neither the words and devices nor the jokes?

This aspiring writer.

P.S. Go do yourself a favor and watch Turning Red if you haven't, yet. It's a gem of comfort, it's totally worth it.

[wiredandrewired]

Was trying to actually work on something but my brain is stuck on loop.  So instead I’m gonna make a post of the Voltron stuff sitting unposted in my writing WIP folder to help me organize my thoughts.

I guess since I’m posting this, if you have anything you wanna say/ask about any of these feel free.  I respond well to outside interest.

1. Project ReVolt is without a doubt the project I’ve posted about the most here.  And talked about in random tags.  And tangents.  Originally it was just the name the project had in my internal brain filing cabinet but it’s kind of spread and stuck to where my wife and I just refer to it as that when we talk about it.

ReVolt is basically going to be a VLD series rewrite more along the lines of how my wife and I would have done it or at least liked to see it done.  In some places it will probably stick pretty damn close to the events of the series canon, but in others go completely off the deep end.  We’re each going to be doing one, so a lot of the headcanon and worldbuilding and such that we’ve worked out together in various other stories and RPs will be consistent between the two stories, but it will also give us a place to veer out and do things without the others’ input (as we’re not gonna let each other see our fics until they post, tee hee).  I’ve done a SHITPOT of rules and infrastructure work using actual alchemy tracts to try and make sense of the series’ largely Powers As The Plot Demands system,  and am pretty convinced I’m going to A)fall hard into my very common Esoterica Ranting Mode pitfall and B)enrage literally everyone who reads it with my character and plot choices.  Most conservative estimate says this will be six ‘books’ long as again, we’re doing literally the entire series.  Current status: at the ‘ridiculously large amount of notes and setting up actual arcs and outlines’ stage, and waiting for the wife to finish ‘Happier HOPEless’.

2. There Are No Monsters Here is a fic I really want to do but cannot seem to get off the ground, set to take place entirely in the ‘last universe’ from season 8--the one native-Honerva died in and crazed-death-god-Honerva picked out as her ideal and tried to wedge herself into.  I guess the basic idea was that, like the ‘main’ universe, it got rebuilt pretty much as it was prior to Nightmare Mom Ruining Everything, and I have it with no one fully remembering the events of season 8 that took place there, but characters really closely tied to those events having some itching feeling that something happened, and all the Altean alchemists agreeing that some kind of massive quantum Event certainly occurred even if they don’t know what.  

Mostly the story exists as  a place for me to have a canon-compliant AU that still lets me explore stuff like Altean history, the racial and cultural tensions of the Coalition, dink around with Oldadins that DON’T die in one fell swoop, a living Daibazaal and Altea, Lotor growing up with a decent-but-not-without-strains relationship with his dad, teen Allura and tiny Lotor being absolute shits to each other while also coming to terms as they grow up with who and what they MUST be both on a political and quantum scale, and generally prove that even a perfect universe isn’t, all in one place.  The title is entirely facetious, and anyone who’s read any of my alien culture headcanons for this series knows that.  Lol.  Current status: lots of bits and pieces, but no good beginning or connective tissue.   I have a lot of notes, some arc outlines, and a few scattered scenes and bits of dialogue from later in the story, but my god, I CANNOT get it off the ground.

3. Someone Must Get Hurt (But It Won’t Be Me) is supposed to be a pretty wholly Honerva-centric fic that starts...sometime in her youth?...and carries forward to an as-yet-undetermined point.  Probably her death.  I mean the first one.  I’m not sure.  Another chance to dig my fingers into Altean culture and Alchemy, this time leading up to All The Bad Shit That Happened, with the added bonus of being done from a focal point of a character I have a lot of really strong feelings about both positive and negative that’s resulted in me somehow being EVEN MORE wrapped up in her than I was before I added abject knee-jerk trauma hatred to the mix.  In no way meant to make Honerva more sympathetic, I think I just want to write her even more like my mother so I’ll feel EVEN BETTER about killing her?  Idk man my feelings about her are so complicated.  Also an excuse to write a shitpot of her and Zarkon because listen, I’m really glad they’re married because I ship them so fuckin hard.   Current Status: SO many notes.  SO much infrastructure.  Like three pages of an opening I’m almost definitely throwing away because I can’t decide where, when, or how to open but feel like this isn’t it.  One short but very telling scene of Honey and Zarkon from late in the story.  I’m obsessed with it but I can’t get anywhere. 

4. Currently Untitled Demon Hunter AU started because my wife talks to me about Happier HOPEless a LOT and I just got an itch in my bones to work on one myself.  In spite of the entire Demon Hunter AU thing getting started by a prompt on a Shance blog, neither Shiro nor Lance are set to appear for at least a chapter?  And I am not confident in my ability to not veer off into utter non-shipping anyway because man, am I bad at it.  Or like...just an entirely different ship for either or both of them.  Current Status: A lot of vague notes, a POWERFUL urge to structure the chapters and overall arc after Ripley’s Gates even though that limits my chapter count and means I will DEFINITELY have 20k+ word chapters, and about seven pages of the first chapter so I guess I’m committed now?

5. Currently Untitled Post Series Fic basically exists for me to vent my frustrations about two main things: The Universe is Fucking Huge And There Are Dangers Other Than Galra, and The Galra Empire Was Huge and Is Not Going To All Fall In Line Behind Voltron Coalition and Especially Behind Keith Who Just Arbitrarily Fucking Decided To Tell Them They Couldn't Pick A New Leader According To Their Own Traditions And Need To Do What They’re Told Now What The Fuck.  Also there was a lot of stuff in the series that got left hanging, and while ReVolt is an IN-series fix-it fic, I wanted something that patched up loose ends in a way that was satisfactory to me but also kind of canon-compliant.  Current Status: A lot of notes and screaming.  No one has seen my progress on this and they might never.

6. Dog Runs And Death Dreams is a warmup file turned deeply self-indulgent series of scenes in which I choose to assume that Shiro’s rare neuromuscular disorder was left so ambiguous so I could plug the symptoms of mine into it.  It’s genuinely not any deeper than that.  The whole thing is set pre-Kerberos, and includes copious Shiro x Adam content because of it, but also not the kind that makes me feel good about writing because that means it includes the ‘slow fizzle’ that leads up to their breakup before the mission.  Ugh.  Working on it does make me feel better when I've been having symptoms, though, and I’ve been letting myself write it, unchastised, in a really loose rambly way that I usually deride myself for.  It’s just cathartic.  Current Status: no notes, no plan, just strain-writing between seizures, but somehow it feels like it has some kind of structure and just keeps growing?  Possibly too close to the bone for me to ever post.

7. Birth and Rebirth was born out of two things: the fact that Zarkon is shown to have two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT reactions to first being presented with his baby son in different flashbacks and different seasons, and the fact that in spite of the flashbacks we get at the end of the series, earlier on, the impression I got of Lotor and Zarkon’s relationship wasn’t of a young man who had never had affection from his father, but who had instead lost it.  Well, three things: I have a lot of underlying issues at work, at play, and at large when it comes to the Galra Imperial Family.  Also, anyone notice the monitor blips in the first baby Lotor flashbacks indicate a heart murmur?  Anyway, it was supposed to be a thoroughly self-indulgent and thoroughly self-hurtful examination of Lotor’s early life and the death by degrees of what was left of his father in the husk Rift Adventures left behind, but I got stuck on it a little way in.   Current Progress: ten pages, a lot of notes, and some wistfulness.  I keep hoping I’ll get inspired to pick it back up again.  Contemplating rewriting some of the beginning, maybe it’ll help?

Bonus entry that is not actually in any form of progress soever:

50/50 Voltron Trashfire Edition is spawned from the ‘50/50′ challenge on an old TF board I used to haunt.  It’s a fifty-prompt smut challenge using the list of ‘50 reasons to have sex’ from some tv show, and the idea is to write a different ship for every prompt (hence the name).  My wife is blazing through it and has several (like twelve?) up on her AO3, but I’ll be utterly blunt: I haven’t written fifty porn fics in my LIFE.  Over ALL my fandoms.  Current Status: Literally all I have done is assign a ship to each prompt, and I might actually have some prompts with just question marks beside them still.  I have one aborted start to one entry.  That’s it.  It’s not happening.  But the empty file is technically in the folder, SO.