Lily's Pond of Fictional Reflections

Futureproof (whose working title was Return to Sender) is nine scenes away from complete second draft. Perhaps five to ten thousand words all up.

Not all the rest of it is as polished as I would like (that would be third draft, for weaving and threeing), but it's more than adequate to support the story. Nine scenes, though, are pretty close to empty, with notes on things I need to happen there. A follows a reluctant B home. X dies. Y makes a stirring speech that contains crucial exposition and character development (ack! No wonder I'm having trouble with that one!). P gets manipulated by a guilty Q who can't help himself. All are in the third quarter of the story; the second half of the second act, where we're past the midpoint and the plot thickens with every word, but we haven't yet reached the point where the ball starts rolling inexorably onwards.

It's all important development, and each individual scene is incredibly close to reaching critical mass, where enough components fall into place that there's only one path and the writing simply takes care of itself. I feel like with enough brainstorming, it should just fall out. All I need to do is get back into it, put my head down and use the snowflake technique rather than the stare at the page until I think of something to write technique, and stop getting distracted by the shinyshiny rest of it.

Still. Nine scenes. Three times three.

I think my manuscript might be mocking me.

I’ve realised one of the reasons why I’m usually disappointed when I consult a thesaurus looking for whatever that word is that I’m really looking for—what I’m usually looking for is much closer to a word association dictionary than anything else.

For example, at the moment, I’m working on a paragraph that begins: It was like kissing a squid.

I love the image. For starters, squid is an excellent word in this context, because it’s short and punchy and the squ sound is uncommon enough to bring a little surprise to intensify the humour and onomatopoeically bring to mind a host of appropriate unpleasant words like squish, squelch, or squeeze. It’s creepy and unnatural and undignified; it’s a confusion of flailing limbs; it’s cold, wet, and impossible to escape the suction to surface for air. And don’t even get me started on camouflage, grotesque intelligence, coiled arms, inky eyes, beaky noses, or cold fish.

The word use is coming really easily; I’m having to rein it in with both hands and my teeth to halt the descent into madness. That's no problem. I'll pick a few (perhaps three?) of the best, and then scatter a couple of the more subtle ones into the remainder of the scene, the reader’s mind will fill in the rest.

But finding the words doesn’t always come this easy, and it’s obvious, now I think of it, why I hardly ever find it helpful to look in a dictionary, thesaurus, or even an encyclopaedia for help with imagery. None of them are close to the actual relationship between the words that I’m looking for, which I guess is why it’s so damn hard, and why it’s so damn awesome whenever you find a writer who pens excellent images.

Surely there’s a niche market out there, though, for an imageaurus? Something like Visual Thesaurus, where you can follow the links to relations of relations, to go from squid to ink to black, or squid+ink to cloud, etc.

What I really need to do is build a web crawler that examines text for words commonly found near “squid” (and every other word, of course) and ranks the strength of their relationship based on number of hits and proximity. Of course, it wouldn’t go all the way to producing original and compelling images, any more than a dictionary or a thesaurus does. It would probably even contribute the problem of having every kiss described as ‘passionate’ and every villain described as ‘evil’, but I think it’d be an awesome tool in the hands of a good writer...

On second thoughts, what I really need to do is to find that someone else has built this exactly as I want, with minimal effort to me.

Who said all the good ideas were taken? :P

Meme from the_zaniak: three radically different pieces of fiction, showing my breadth as a writer. I suspect he had me in mind when he made this one up - he knows I can't resist the threeness. :)

First, we have a poem: ( Wanderlust )

Next, a drama-ish flashfic which got the usual obsessive non-flashy Lily treatment: ( Lemons )

Finally, we have some humour. ZOMG, Lily writes humour? Yes, yes she does. Unfortunately, it’s hard to sustain, so the story this has been clipped from is unlikely to ever make its novellength way out to being posted. ( Ginny’s introduction from my crossoverfic )

The bottle of champagne my grandparents-in-law brought to my birthday party, which we cracked open to celebrate the departure of everyone and the completion of the dishes was... intoxicating.

Yes, that's right, I, The White Lily, your beloved fandom friend, is currently completely and utterly smashed.

As in, fingers-are-numb, typos-are-rampant, drink-lots-of-water-because-otherwise-boy-will-you-regret-this-in-the-morning, drump. I mean, drunk.

And yes, I just made a grammar error, two paragraphs ago, which I can still identify in this state. But no, I can't be bothered fixing it, unlike the last eighty-five typos. Particularly because I can't work out whether it actually is a grammar error. Should it be "am" for "I", or "is" for "The White Lily/your beloved fandom friend"? *ponders* *thinks it should be "am"* *decides doesn't care* *moves on*

What was it I had to say to you all?

( Oh, that's right. )

That's all I had to say, I think. Aside from things I've decided not to say, like Hubby suddenly deciding that the way to attract my attention is to croon "threeeeeeeeee" in my ear...

Okay, so I'm a sad, sad case. I already know this. :)