Lily's Pond of Fictional Reflections

It is done: I have submitted it.

First original story to an original story competition.  It's been a ridiculous psychological roadblock; I know perfectly well that people are just people, and fan-people are just the same as snobby-original-writer-people (and possibly even less snobby than some snobby-fan-people), but... yeah.  It's been difficult, and scary.  Absurdly difficult for something that's only 320 words long.  I'm hoping, through practice, it will become less so.

I'm really proud of the work I wrote, and I think it fits the brief.  Most of all, I'm super, super proud that I did it.

Yes, I know it's April.  I've been a bit... focussed on writing, and unable to really lift my eyes recently, but I've finally got around to filling in my word count spreadsheet since about September last year, and starting a new one for 2017.

Final numbers for 2016 are:
Words written: 142,266
Words posted: 125,089
New posted stories: 41
% posted: 87.9%
Lifetime words written: 803,446
Lifetime words posted: 348,018
Lifetime % posted: 43% (up from 33% at beginning of the year)
Lifetime posted stories: 58 (counting an old drabble series as a single story)

My goals for 2016 were:
1) Write and increase my portfolio, posting at least one work every month, and working on fluency and finishing things rather than half writing and wandering away when the going gets tough. (I'll have to call this one success beyond my dreams!)
2) Read fic, when I read, like a member of a community and not a 'next fic' zombie (success mostly)
3) Read one book per month (fail--I think I managed five in the year--but that's still a massive increase on last year)
4) Finish Futureproof (fail)
5) Finish NaNoWriMo (fail)

All in all, I'm happyish.  I'd have to say, I'm doing great as long as I stay in fanfiction.  As soon as I head off into original, I fall apart, and I need to prioritise my mental health.  I'm pretty pleased with the sheer quantity of new stories I've written.  In the pretty much exactly 18 months since I came back to fandom again, to today, I've written 72% of my lifetime posted work.  But only 31% of my total words written.  It's the result of an incredible concerted effort to follow through, and I'm very proud of myself for acheiving it.  Given my trouble last year with original, and the way it did my mental health in, I'm not as certain anymore that my eventual path is to transition to original fic.  I'd still like to try, but I think I'm happier with the idea that perhaps it's not for me and I'll be okay if that's the case.

My goals for 2017 are:
1) Write and post like the wind as the new season of Sherlock was coming out and increase my fandom visibility.
Very much acheived.  I wrote and posted 16 new stories in January, and I've got a number of new followers as well as a number of new fandom friends.  :)
2) Keep writing for fan_flashworks every challenge
Going well so far.  I've even started properly claiming my badges, which is very satisfying, and I'm (given the mods asked me to only claim three or so at once) two or three challenges off being completely up to date.  Keeping up my challenges-in-a-row streak most motivational for keeping writing, and a couple of times having to pull myself up and write something to post has really saved me from disappearing into an anxious huddle.    (Although given the nature of my deadline-driven motivation and the time offset in Australia, I've woken up in cold sweats quite a few times in the horrified conviction that I've accidentally missed the deadline.)  The streak currently stands at 30.
3) Keep trying out writing different things: female characters, descriptive pieces, different genres, different fandoms.
Doing pretty well, I've got two pieces from female POV so far, and I think they worked well, and a couple of metas.  And I wrote my longest humorous story ever, which was in a bit of a different format breaking the fourth wall, which was absolutely tremendous fun and has been very well received.  Most different of all, I've accepted a position for at most one day per week as a research assistant for my best friend the university lecturer, writing up her papers for her.  We'll have to see how that goes.
4) Try out writing some original short fics, rather than staying all in on fandom all the time, to stretch and build up the original fic muscles without launching straight into a novel and hitting the trigger for a nervous breakdown.
Mmmm, sort of.  I've written two biographical short stories for fan_flashworks, which is a start.  And I have avoided giving myself a nervous breakdown thinking about it.  I've done a bit of research for short story competitions that seem doable.  Deadlines, prompts, etc.   Which made me realise the Vogel awards deadline is at the end of May and--it occurs to me that given I'll turn 35 in October, this is the last year I'm eligible to submit.  I'd always thought I might submit Futureproof for that when I finished it, but... less than two months away.  Hello, nervous breakdown.  I keep thinking... I could try.  But I'm pretty sure at this point I could only fail, and that would be very much not good for me.  I'm also pretty sure that what I write isn't really the right genre, so... let it go.  Let it go.  Focussing on some short stuff is, I think, very much the way to go.
There's a couple of competitions coming up--one I'm thinking of in particular which is for maximum 1500 words on the theme of "light" open only to Australian residents and a first prize of $5000, due in in two weeks.  It seems like an extremely attractive competition and should be well within my capabilities to finish something to submit, and best of all the winning entries available from previous years seem like my style.  I'm going to give it my best shot.
5) Don't obsess and have fun
Yeah, going pretty well!  I've been having anxiety issues touching a couple of other things--but I've been writing mostly freely and without too much obsessing.  Fingers crossed I can keep it that way.

Oh Em Eff Gee.  Does my muse not see the title of this document I'm working on for the Honey flashwork?!  "Short and sweet" it says.  Short.  And.  Sweet.

And so of course it's completely diverged from the drabble I'd originally envisaged where Sherlock has a mildly metaphorical dream about being a bee trapped outside the hive in the cold and back in Baker Street John pulls a blanket over him, and it dived *straight* for grief and mourning and angst and there is no freaking blanket in sight.  At least there's no Reichenbach.  Yet.

And it's refusing to end, so I'm going to have to keep writing until something vaguely resolvey happens.

---

Perhaps it's not surprising that my writing's off track, because I'm having... issues at the moment.  Mental health ones.

I should have known it was getting out of hand after what was happening with The Wrong Kind of Snow.  I'm having what I might call an episode, and it's been quite bad for the past few days.  It's getting to the point where the nameless dread just overwhelms me until I feel like I'm choking.  Where the procrastination gets so bad that I can't achieve anything at all until the very last minute or into overtime.  Where I can't stop what I'm doing and go to bed because somewhere in the whole falling-asleep process there would have to be a non-zero period of time where my mind would have to stop focussing on something and sit at its own mercy, so I stay up all night reading fanfic and not enjoying any of it because I feel too awful for even that to blot it out--to blot me out--but I can't stop because if I do then it'll all come rushing back all at once and that will be so much worse.  Where when a bad thought comes--and they come often--I confuse the kids by shouting or having a mini-fit at myself with my attempt to drown it out of my head before I can feel it.  Where I don't even know what I'm so desperately mortally afraid of because it's too terrifying for me to think.  Where I stop actually feeling like a real person so much as a robot inside a puppet body.  Where I sit next to my kids on the couch and read them a story and I can't feel them touching me and I can't feel any empathy with them and I can't do anything other that wish I that didn't exist.

Yeah.  Last few days it's got pretty bad.  To be clear, I'd never harm myself (or my kids).  I'm not that particular kind of unwell.  When I get like this I'm just... paralysed.  And empty.  I blot myself out mentally, any way I can.  And I still appear completely functional from the outside even when everything's gone white on the inside.

I know what the solution is, because I've been through therapy for this before.  The time when I went convinced I was going to have to be medicated for OCD, but the solution was simpler than that.  I don't need medication, I just need to be brave enough to let the monsters out into my head and look straight at them.  To let them do their worst, and put them in perspective so I can see that it's only the brain chemistry feedback loop that's winding them up to seem so bad.  And then start practicing mindfulness again, because as much as I hate doing it, it works.  But it's hard to get to a state where you can face being mindful when it physically hurts to consider stopping what you're doing long enough to let a genuine emotion cross your mind.  And it's hard to make myself do it when I know the solution's so simple that I could do it any day.  Perhaps even tomorrow.

It's not even the things themselves that I'm worrying about, it's the chemical state I've worked myself up into by being too frightened to let myself worry about things for fear of discovering my worries are right.

Futureproof has such awful power over me.  Awful, awful power.  But it's just a book.  In it and all the other decisions that I'm trying to make that have brought me to this, they're just decisions.  Not about anything that matters.  Not about anything I can get wrong.

Opportunity cost versus the opportunity at hand.  Those are the worst kind for me.

There's a pair of gorgeous Siamese kittens that I've found.  We've been looking for a while for some that suit us.  In personality and colour and gender and location and the environment they've been raised, these are simply perfect.  They're both blue point, which are definitely among my top three colour preferences (being tabby point, lilac point, and blue point).  Blue's possibly my favourite, my favourite colour is that edge where a soft seagull grey fades into white, which pretty much describes a blue point siamese down to a tee.  (But then again, stripey tabby point is so striking, and we've already had a blue point.  There was a lilac tabby who we almost got, but... reasons, which I'm still a bit devastated about.)  Possibly it's even nicer that they're both the same colour.  (Although, high speed cat chases, and not being able to tell who is who at a distance.  Although... two identical kittens curled up asleep together.)  Seriously, brain, why are you worrying about this?

Colour doesn't matter, because personality personality personality, and personality these two will have in spades because they've been raised by a family with small children and regular handling, they sleep in a six-year-old's bedroom, they're a bonded pair of only two in the litter, and they're not the least bit skitttish at chaos.  (Although who knows with cats, are we doing the right thing going for a pair of girls?  Last time with a boy and a girl turned out disastrous, and they grew up to hate each other.  Like, really hate.  Two girls are meant to be more trouble than mixed pairs--but I never want a cat that expresses itself by spraying ever again.  And Siamese really do best with a partner, even in a high-stimulation household like ours.)

They'll be ready to go home on my birthday.  My actual birthday, despite not looking for them for that particular purpose.  Clearly, they're meant to be ours.  This should be a happy thing, because we want them, because the kids will be over the moon to have their begging finally pay off.  But I can't enjoy the excitement because I can't stop turning it over in my mind.  And what's worse, I know it won't stop when we get them home.  Choices suck because they literally never settle in my mind.  I'll always look at these two and think... we could have got different cats.  Maybe we should have got different cats.  Maybe different cats would have been better.  Or maybe they wouldn't.  And maybe I should have called them by different names.  Because naming them, that's going to be a whole nother kettle of worms.  Which so doesn't matter because in the past our cats have always ended up being actually addressed by a pair of easy-identify monikers such as boy-cat and girl-cat or white-cat and grey-cat.  (Only these two will be almost freaking identical.  Thin-cat and thinner-cat?  Lighter-cat and darker-cat?  Who knows what they'll end up with.)  We've got three pairs of proper names, the kind that actually go on collars, as frontrunners, and I just can't face the idea of choosing despite how very little it matters.

Because there's something fundamentally wrong with me that I can't even look at our children and call them by their names without thinking "I could have called you something else, maybe I should have called you something else, is it really really too late to change your name, I mean I like your name, but I'm not sure I liked it more than some of the other options, but now it's too late isn't it, I can't change your name, I just wish I knew whether it was the right decision."

Writing, at the moment, is like making that choice on every single word.  Like walking through a world where every choice screams its potential to get it *wrong* at me.  It's hard.  And it's not fun writing like this.

Fuck anxiety.  Seriously, fuck it.  What right does it think it has to intrude on my ability to love my kids like that, and with my ability to do the things I love?  To make me feel like a passenger in my own body?

Only the right I give it.

So yeah.  I'm going to have to stop being such a wibbling wimp, face my shit, and put mindfulness back on my daily habits list.  *sigh*

---

I've sort of been writing this in parallel with my flashwork, which is now finished and posted.  I was hoping that finishing a sweet little flashwork might help settle my mind, but despite making a very conscious effort to restart and go in a different direction and writing the start of literally twenty different takes on the prompt, still the only place I got to was angst.  But it's good angst.  Apparently I was carrying around more feels about the end of our last cat four years ago than I realised.  I was the one who took him to be put down when his heart failure progressed, and I held him while he died.  Possibly that's one of the things that the prospect of new kittens has been bringing up for me.  But I wrote it and--as happens for me--after people started reading it, I started feeling it, properly.  And maybe that's better for me than writing something happy.

And then, this evening, I made myself take an hour-long bath with no reading material and no urgent tasks or plot point obsessing, and I let the thoughts come.  And they were yuck.  And it felt awful.  But they were just thoughts, and when I let them come they really didn't make the anxiety worse.  Because it really isn't about them, it's about me, the way I work myself up to be more terrified of what I might think than I would be of the thought itself.  And even if I don't feel much better yet, I thought the thoughts and I'm still here, and that has to prove something.

I spent a few minutes this evening updating my word count spreadsheet, which had recently fallen by the wayside, and I'm very glad I did.

At a total of 6K words, posting The Wrong Kind of Snow has put me over two somewhat related milestones.  I'm now up to 104,823 words of fiction I've written this year, which is, like woah.

When people started talking about Get Your Words Out goals at the beginning of the year, I looked at the targets and I laughed and laughed.  And then I cried.  Even the 75K disability goal, if I counted anxiety and stress migraines and toddlers, seemed completely out of reach.  But hey, look at me!  Over 100K, it's September, and I'm still planning to do NaNoWriMo... I could have signed up for the 150K goal after all!

Possibly more importantly to me, I'm up to 101,916 words I've actually finished and posted this year.  (Yes, I started the year with about 12K words already written on things I've since posted, but that's possibly even harder for me than writing new stuff to post.)

Go.  Me.

I think I'm particularly proud of the ratio, because my real goal when I started the year--and the eventual reason I decided not to sign up for GYWO because writing more words was not actually what I wanted to focus on--was to stop half-writing things, stop hoarding and chewing on them forever, to finish writing them and to get them the fuck out of my head.  Because it's pretty damned crowded in here, what with the plot bunnies and the brain weasels and trying to remember my kids' names and all.

Discovering that I've passed such a massive milestone in both at exactly the same time makes me pretty bloody pleased. And I've been making progress on long term writing projects which are not postable as yet, so I'm totally chuffed.  If I can finish off Futureproof, keep up the flashworks, AND do NaNoWriMo, which is still my at least moderately realistic goal, the two might even finish the year not too far apart--but with words I've let go in the lead.  Now that's a goal to strive for.

So, now I'm finished the latest flashwork, it's time to put my nose back into Futureproof.  There are seriously only five scenes left that I am deeply unhappy with and/or are absent because I was deeply unhappy with them and in posession of a delete key.  Five.  A couple of them are big scenes, all are central to a dodgy point in some plot thread that runs through the whole story, but still. Five.

Move it, Lily.  Even if all you do is paste wallpaper over them and whistle loudly enough that nobody notices.

I may not have said this recently, because I've been too busy panicking about the bits that didn't work, but Futureproof seriously kicks arse as a story.  Like, there are so many amazing moments.  So many wonderful characters, with amazing, human motivations.  So many awesome plot complications, little bits of worldbuilding that first seem tangential but after turning up a couple of times suddenly interconnect with a host of other things to drive everything onwards.  And this pass I'm doing is making everything so much better, too.

It's finally come alive in my mind again, and I love this story.  It's also just tipped over 70,000 words, which is awesome, and I'm getting great feedback from Pear which is even better.

I'm almost half way through what I'm callling my 'second draft', although it's a bit nebulous how many times I've edited it, really, given how sporadic my efforts have been over the last ten years.  It's probably at least third.  It's much, much more than that for some sections, because I love to polish my shiny objects, but also the occasional difficult scene which has been ripped out and rewritten and needs to be ripped out again is barely more than an outline.  This pass is about sharpening characters and plots and foreshadowing and filling in those continuity gaps to make it smooth, so everything come together all inevitable and shiny.  Next pass after this will be focussing on incidental worldbuilding and visuals.  Then the final one is the spelling/grammar check.  No, there's no way I'm going to hit my ten year deadline for those two - but hope I can make it to the end of this edit in time.  Maybe even the one after that, and have it be my deadline to send the whole thing off to a couple of people who can give me final-draft style feedback.

But... I'm about to strike the next unhappy valley where what I've written gets a bit dodgy.  Where the plot has changed since I first wrote the section and doesn't quite fit any more, or sections where I've never quite managed to write something I felt entirely pleased with.  Where I'm not entirely certain how I can make point A flow to point B.

It'll be okay, as long as I can keep a handle on the fact that it doesn't have to be perfect.  Done is better than perfect.  Done gets it out the door, so the golden moments can light up for people, so the characters can walk into their hearts, and the sly incidentals that turn out to be not so much so can blow their minds.  Occasionally, hands can be waved.  This is a story, not a mathematical proof.

All I have to do is a little bit of plumbing to connect it all up, and it will be golden.  These dodgy scenes don't have to be amazing.  The story is not only as good as its worst scene; quite the reverse.  Of course every scene won't be as amazing as the most amazing ones that carry their own freaking spotlight with them.  That's not every scene's job.  Some scenes are backstage workers, their jobs simply to say what they're there for, set everything up, and then get out of the way so we can move on to the payoff.  Not just for the reader, but for the writer too.

Futureproof is an amazing story, and it's not the incredible scenes that wrote themselves that will get it out the door.  It's the other ones.  The difficult ones.  The unsung heroes of any story: the bits that didn't feel quite right, but got written anyway.

They're not going to feel quite right, no matter what I do.  But I need to write them anyway.

So I've just got to the end of the crazy business that has been the last couple of months of my life.

There was July Writing Prompts, of course, and the associated burned-out mental exhaustion.  Mr. Two Years Old's birthday party.  And then today was Mr. Four Years Old's birthday party.  Attempt two, because as our first date approached it became clear that our house and our family were a biological contamination hazard, and we would all require worming tablets and a week's worth of conjunctivitis medication before we were fit to recieve company.  Yeuch.  In any case, all better now, so that's a relief.  And we got to have a Zoo Party!  I did an amazing cake, as usual, and also carved a watermelon to look like a hippopotomus, which I've never tried anything similar before, and went down a treat.

In the meantime, I had to do a whole lot of terrible, horrible, parent homework in videoing and editing Mr. Nearly Six's oral presentation for school about the construction of his house.  It took a long time, but apparently went down well with the class.  He was the only kid in school who did part of his video from on the roof of his house, which earned him lots of cred in school (and coincidentally made him forget to be a grumpy teenager-before-his-time for long enough to make at least *some* eye contact with the camera for that part).  So yay.

Same child went a bit scissor mad a month or two ago and cut 1) some bedsheets (actually, that was a while previously), 2) an electrical cable, and 3) one of the seatbelts in the car. Not happy, Jan.  Consequences have had to happen, which has been making him very grumpy, but we are now we are out the other side of that and he's got his scissor privileges and his iPad priveileges and his lap-sash belt privileges back again, the car is roadworthy again, and things are more settled with him.  Then of course I discovered Mr. Two Years Old running through the house while attempting to give himself a haircut with some pilfered scissors ("Nip! Nip! Nip!"  "OMG GIVE ME THOSE!!!") so....  Scissors are good for development of fine motor control.  Yes, yes they are.

I've made a couple of new online friends I've been getting to know, which has proved interesting, as it always is.  I think the thing I love most about online friendships is the way they go deep so quickly.  You don't know how the other person looks, but you know how they feel about the things that matter to them the very most, in words they've had time to consider.  It's cool to make that connection with something real rather than, you know, just mums in the schoolyard commiserating about how tough life is with kids and day to day trivialities, oh I know, etc.  Which, yeah, but it's different online.  Maybe that's just for me.

I've been keeping up with fan_flashworks, and now I've done eight challenges in a row.  Loving the way the urge to keep my streak going is forcing me to keep up the flashwork momentum, making writing and finishing little things just another part of life rather than a Big Deal.  Thinking of trying something a bit different for this one, an idea I've had niggling for a while, so an amnesty's perfect to actually do it.

And I've partnered up with Wild Pear to work on Futureproof.  She's both acting as my arbitrary deadline to get chapters finished, and looking at chapters as I send them to her, reflecting back what she gets from my characters, telling me where it gets a little bogged down or confused... and omg, it's so good. So reassuring.  So affirming.  And so inspirational to hear those little edges of things she doesn't see in the characters and the things that resonated with her that she does.  *loves*  If I'm actually going to get this thing done by my self-imposed deadline, I really need to focus on drawing lines and getting it out the door.  But there's so many distractions and other things I can just get done first, there's always a good reason not to do anything on it today.  New rule: my ten minutes writing per day isn't ten minutes in general, I know I can do that: it's ten minutes of Futureproof.

Speaking of Futureproof, I've spent the last week battling brain weasels again.  I've been alternately super busy or super exhausted by it, and I guess I've been caught up in my own brain researching... stuff.  Things I'm questioning about myself that don't really matter in the scheme of things, but that have activated the must-research-and-question-absolutely-everything mode, so I haven't managed to get the downtime I need to keep a lid on my anxiety and I haven't been sleeping well, and it's all just been snowballing.

I managed to write it out with the last flashwork--despite the fact that my writer's brain insisted the story should go a different direction to what I felt would be truthful and real.  It was an interesting conflict to deal with, usually the only battle I have to fight is 'this is wonderful, but am I really comfortable revealing that?' rather than 'this is something that I want to explore, but it is narratively unsatisfying'.  It made the final few lines very difficult for me, that battle between true and right, because unlike anxious wibbling which must be crushed, both of them are good reasons in their own right.  If the story doesn't... come full circle, to a satisfying ending, then is it really a story? How can I stop writing it if it doesn't end?  But if it doesn't tell the story I want to tell... is it really doing its job?  And I was super busy with party preparation and just needed to post it and stop obsessing, which I did.  *pats self on back* Apart from a couple of nods to narrative causality, I ended up making it the story I needed to write for me, even though the ending felt weak. I'm pretty sure the catharsis it made me feel doesn't come across in the same way to a reader who doesn't live in my brain, but ambiguity is part of the joy of an unreliable narrator anyway.  It reminds me a little of On Becoming an Axiom, which people seemed to think was a sad story, when to me it was a shiningly glorious truth.  I might end up tweaking the end a little when I crosspost, if I can think of something that unites the trueness and the rightness a little better.  And I've also left it open for a sequel if I need to do any more soulsearching along the same lines, so... good enough is good enough.  Out the door and posted, and out of my brain, for now at least.

I've got a couple of emails and a couple of comment replies still waiting on my to do list, which I need to just do rather than continuing to find them daunting.  Someone asked an insightful question on one of my stories which I am trying to to write an epic essay in response to the fact that I'm intrigued and not really sure of the answer myself.  The comments on my stories that give me most joy are always the hardest to respond to, but I'm working on just doing it without trying to do it justice.  And hopefully with a few of the real-life jobs out of the way, and with Pear backing me up, I can get things back under control and focus properly on Futureproof again.

So, I haven't posted for a while.

A few things:
1) I am writing like the blazing blazes, doing watsons_woes July Writing Prompts month, one fill for every day. Seriously. I don't think I've ever written like this, and I won NaNoWriMo one year. It's not so much word count output I mean, but idea-execution output. Not saying I'm posting Shakespeare every day, but completing, writing things good enough to be happy with them without skipping over some bits and obsessing over others, and some things have been surprisingly good. This is working. It's awesome. Writing 90% decent stuff is getting faster--and easier--and while I'm still working on the not-obsessing over it part, I'm hoping that'll get easier too. There's only so much it's possible to obsess when you're posting every day. Isn't it? Please? In some ways it actually makes it harder to let go, because I know that last line or that title could be better, but time limitations meant I didn't have the time to think of what it should be instead. Of course I'm obsessing over making them better. At least I've only really got room for one obsession at a time, so once I've completed the next 24 hrs story, I move on to obsessing over that one.

I might have to go fanfiction cold turkey at the end of this month, though, if I'm going to get Futureproof done in the following couple of months, which I am determined to do. It is not going to make it a full ten years without completing the final draft. And hopefully, all my practice in drawing lines, saying 'good e-freaking-nough' and letting things go will come into play there, and let me draw some lines and say 'good e-freaking-nough' to the good old albatross around my neck.

2) I've been getting involved in the Holmes fandoms, over at JWP month. It's been cool, meeting people, getting to know a few different people's writing styles, reading ten or so different responses to the same prompt with the same characters and it's... just intriguing. Too see how different all the ideas are, and the executions. How many wonderful interpretations there can be. Because when I've had eight different ideas and discarded seven of them for being too obvious, you'd think one of those 'obvious' ones would have been done by someone else, right? One? Apparently not.

3) I have lost too much weight again. I weighed in the other morning at 47.5kg, which is the lightest I've been I think since... ooh, actually, I do think I hit that when I was wasted with morning sickness on my third child! But before that it was probably pre-adulthood. My current BMI 16.2, which is way, way underweight. I generally try to stay above 50kg, which is still technically underweight but is about all I can manage to keep on no matter what I do. I knew I was down to 48kg for most of this year, because I never really put it back on after writing Living Conditions--and I was thinking I'd bottomed out, but apparently if I keep writing I can keep losing more weight, and another 500g is enough to make me worried. I don't want to stop writing. We're only talking 2.5kg under my goal, but... when you're on the pointy end of the scales, that's the difference between acceptably thin and skeletal. Time to do something about it anyway.

Perhaps I should move away from writing in a fandom where the character I personally identify with doesn't eat when he's working. :P I'd say I should get some more exercise to try to stimulate appetite, but my fitbit says I'm doing 10K+ steps per day just running around after the children, so it's not exactly like I'm sedentary. More likely, if I'm trying to dedicate some time to doing something about my weight every day, I should dedicate it to eating. Instead of, you know, skipping breakfast because I'm in a rush and skipping lunch because kids nap/TV time is the only time each day I get to spend by myself and who wants to waste that time eating?!

I've never had a big appetite. And hunger's never been a strong motivator, particularly when I'm busy or stressed. Unless there's incredibly delicious food right in front of me, I'd just rather do other things. But we're getting to the point where I either have to start making myself eat things, or start putting weights in my undies when I get on the scales. At the moment, my solution is stocking my writing chair with museli bars, and also making a conscious effort to get myself something to eat whenever I get the kids something. That should make a difference, hopefully. But I'll keep the weights in the undies in mind.

4) I was going to do a minor arsehole update, but this is an unlocked post. So, I'll just say things are stable and looking like they're heading in the right direction, and I am stable and managing to keep the boundaries in my head in the right places. Yay.

Terry Pratchett is and will always be sorely missed, and his mind would have been taken from us too soon if he had lived to be razor-sharp one hundred and fifty.  But in honour of Lilac Day, in rememberence of The Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May and the far too short-lived People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road, I have written a Discworld fic: Where's My Bath?

Expect none of Pterry's intelligence, or humour, or the skill of his writing, or his unexpectedly poignant insight.  My assignment for the ushobwri New Frontiers challenge was a piece of unapologetic fluff, something involving a heaving bosom and a baby duck.  I crossed a few new frontiers with this story: new genre, new fandom, new fandom-familiarity, new writing process.

The new process was probably the most interesting of those, as far as what I might choose to repeat.  I wrote in order, or as much as that makes sense for me: keeping the future in the front of my mind and a consistent complete narrative 'behind the cursor' even though I continually ducked (haha) back to fine tune the story I had so far.  I think doing it this way might have made the ending more difficult, although it's hard to tell whether a story like this would have refused to end even if I'd written the ending first.  But it definitely made the process of writing faster--I don't think I've ever completed a story longer than a drabble in less than a week before.  Whether it would work for something longer?  Or something more compilicated?  Not sure.  But it's been an interesting experiment, and certainly something I might try again.

So, looks like I'm currently writing a murder mystery.  Sort of.  And it's an interesting beast.  I tend to have small casts of multi-dimensional, living and breathing characters, but for this I need to be able to sketch a large cast of flatter characters.  I know why the murderer is doing it, and I know why the victim draws their attention.  The victim is also a suspect, and I have at least three more characters.  Maybe one more red herring character.  Which means at least five or six disposable, one dimensional OCs in addition to my main characters, who are the basic BBC Sherlock crew.  This is not a long story (are you listening, Brain?!), I'm currently estimating about 10K words, and to be honest I don't care that much about the mystery itself, it's more of a subplot than a primary plot.  Five plus new characters for a subplot of a 10K word story means that these characters need to be caricatures.  They need to be so incredibly one dimensional that people will 'know' them within a single line of description and then anything on top of that is gravy.  That's a difficult prospect for me.  But probably very good for my characterisation soul.

It's also an AU beginning, which is always interesting in the way that a lot of the dialogue tends to be directly taken from the original.  And I love that about AU beginnings, I love playing 'spot the original line', and seeing the way the more things change, the more they stay the same.  (Not entirely related: I remember reading an amazing Harry-goes-back-in-time-to-fix-everything story where as a minor side frustration to Harry, Lockhart was so self involved that his lines were practically identical, no matter how much Harry tried to redirect the conversation.  It was absolutely hysterical.)  But there's a delicate balance to walk between changing too much and changing too little.  No one wants to reread a lazy copy-paste job, even when the original dialogue is brilliant.  On the other hand, the original lines are the canonical character moments, that are by definition precisely what the characters would say--so in the same situation, it is wrong to have them say anything else.  So sometimes it's hard to make them change direction.

In particular, I'm rewriting Sherlock's initial deducing-everything-about-John monologue in a situation where he hasn't had access to John's mobile, so he's focussing on other things.  I like writing Sherlock's deductions, and I've had people tell me I'm good at them.  I'm super pleased with how far this one has developed over the past 24 hours I've been working on it.

But I'm finding it difficult giving something for him to be wrong about, because the single misconception of Harry's gender is perhaps the heart of John's rock-solid belief that Sherlock has to be for real; how very many logical reasons he had to get to a point that was essentially true in all its intricate detail but technically false because of a mistake he wouldn't have made if he'd found out any other way but the one he'd described.  It was great for a number of reasons, but not least because Sherlock was so repeatedly wrong about it - he refers to John's brother at least three times before he mentions Harry by name, absolutely sets it up as a given to the audience, who also haven't yet been introduced to the idea that Sherlock might be wrong, and John is beautifully blandly noncommital about it.  "Then there's your brother," he says.   "Hmm?" says John.  Gold.  Very much sets up his dry, sly, enjoyment of poking fun at Sherlock's rare missteps.  And then there's the fact that when it comes out that Harry is a woman, it is a humorous misconception. Brother rather than gay sister with masculine name is a totally obvious assumption to have made but Sherlock is so professionally annoyed with himself for making it, or perhaps with the world for being lumpy and occasionally falling ridiculously outside the bounds of standard distribution on something that he hadn't been even a little unsure about.

As Sam Vimes puts it:
He instinctively distrusted [Clues]. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

That, I think, is what the 'there's always something' moment with Harry adds to BBC Sherlock, because that's part of the suspension of disbelief with Sherlock Holmes that BBC Sherlock didn't require us to indulge in. Sherlock Holmes isn't magic; he's science. The way many of his deductions work is by playing the probabilities, and the thing about playing the probabilities is that--while most of the time, you are right--sometimes you are wrong. ACD Holmes knows this and while he gives some mysterious hints, he doesn't like to say much until he's certain, so by the time he speaks he has accrued enough evidence and narrowed down the pathways enough that when he explains what just happened he's always right.  But BBC Sherlock draws us inside the deductions straight away, shows off and struts like a peacock and drip feeds us his arrogant brilliance throughout the show rather than saving the explanations for the end.  I like it this way; it brings in the suspense, knowing that sometimes Sherlock can and will be wrong.

The thing in my story that's naturally falling out for Sherlock to be wrong about is... not like that.  It's good, character building stuff, but it's not in any way able to poke fun at, and neither is it something compellingly obvious.  It's possible I can fix the second one with some more references to set it up; I'm good at red herrings.  It's difficult, though, because it's not a funny thing, it's a bittersweet tugs-the-heartstrings thing.  In my writing.  What a surprise.  But that means even with Sherlock's lack of social graces, he's not going to be as obnoxiously I-know-something-you-don't-know-how-I-know about it as he was about John's brother.  So maybe I need to find something else.  But then... I wouldn't get to put in my cute little tugs the heartstrings bit that I've worked out how to make John say, as long as he's correcting Sherlock.  So maybe I just need to find a way to alter this bit that I've already got, that I love, to do the job that's in front of it.

So yeah, that's... today's thing to pointlessly agonise over.