Shipwreck Light (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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rainbowlounge2012-05-02 01:03 pm
shipwreck_light) wrote in rainbowlounge2012-05-02 01:03 pm
Jealous of Roses ~*~ Arc 1 Free Talk
Jealous of Roses
Arc 1 Free Talk
Because if we're going to pretend it's 1998, we're going to do it right.
Things we are not discussing today: why some of the porn stuff got reshuffled. I'm not trying to be a jerk by sitting on that despite broaching the topic repeatedly and then not talking about it, but Arc 1's ending at a different place than I planned. It and what's now Arc 2 I'd pictured as enormous storyline, but in the end, or at least where we are now, it came to me that this was going to get pretty unwieldy. That's why we now have an introduction arc before much plot happens.
But, we are going to deal with the kinda messed up history of this thing that you've been reading. Because the truth is I've written parts of this story two or three times before. And they date back to 2001 in some cases.
The oldest ancestor would be what was, for lack of a better term, a text-based soap opera that another writer and myself ran for many years. I'm not sure how much detail I want to go into about that. First of all, that story is partly why I keep turning down co-writing collaborations even though I'm sure you're all lovely people and we could do some awesome work. I'm OK hashing out the details of a story with someone, but as soon as we're both writing the actual prose... yeah, I don't play well with others in that situation and I don't want any of you getting stuck with my leftover resentment from the whole part where I was doing all of the damn work in this other thing. Snippy dialog v. the entirety of exposition and action is not a fair division of labor. Second, a lot of the actual /stuff/ that went on in that story was pretty not cool in retrospect. I'm not just talking about the fact it contains the only noncon scene I ever had any hand in. That remains quite the elephant in the room, but there's a whole plot thread about the one guy being unabashedly prejudiced against kinksters. The good news being it does result in said guy /not/ getting laid. But! Some of it's still totally awesome- the fencing scenes, the kirsch incident and the pointless interludes of slice-of-lifey goodness.
I don't know what it is, but I was always been taken with domesticity plus underworld sorts. I think that's just the best thing since fanservice. Er, especially when it is fanserivce in and of itself.
Other author and I made two attempts at reconciliation in the forms of retooling attempts that possibly would have removed all of the unawesome from our sordid little trainwreck. Neither of them even sort of kind of worked and I went on to be angsty trousers for a long time when it came to what happened. I got a novel draft that's a wreck mood-wise because of this, and also because I fail at pacing without anybody's help.
One summer while I was out of work, I tried to tell myself another similar little yarn for want of anything to amuse myself. That crashed and burned. Mood and pacing issues I couldn't handle- big surprise. The notes got dropped in the binder and the binder got shoved under my bed and that probably would have been the end of things if it hadn't been for RBF.
I wanted to participate and I wanted to have something ready on opening day. I had about a week's notice to come up with said something. I don't know how your inspirations work, but mine apparently does better with a deadline. So, there I was with one, besides ten more years of experience and a pound of notes that went absolutely nowhere. This happened.
A lot of the ancestor stories were heavy on the dudes. Well, they were yaoi-intentioned so that's kind of inevitable, but first thing I said to myself when I started frantically throwing a story line together- this calls for more women, damnit. There's now a running gag among the remains of the soap opera fanbase that I'm still friends with. Caution: vaginas.
There was a guy names Siebenkas in the summer out of work story. He and the current Siebenkas bear little resemblance to one another. Snarky high roller type with a fondness for seducing his enemies instead of killing them outright? Yeah, why the hell are your named Siebenkas again? That doesn't even kind of fit. I enjoy writing for current Siebenkas a lot more than I figured I would. It's almost soothing to take over someone who's more or less /grounded/. I continue to be surprised by how popular he is. He and Pip seem like they get the best responses. You know, I wasn't planning to use his PoV that much when I started out, but it keeps working out and the audience keeps approving...
Roa's also new except for the name. It belonged to a much different person in the summer story, the resident mathematician/masochist. In the end, I don't know what that was about either, but I do know that Roa has the ignominious distinction of taking on the appearance of a character from a porno comic I'm not sure I want to admit to having read. Writing for someone who's supposed to be brilliant? Intimidating as all get out, but not enough to stop me.
Zephyr, well, I'm sort of infamous for writing characters somewhat along his personality line, and that dates all the way back to the soap opera. They show up a lot in what I turn out now and I accept their irreverent goodness as a feature, not a bug. Zephyr though is the first one to have a child, and also my first Papa Wolf overall (although as I mentioned before, I think I kind of broke that trope considering how young he is).
I confess to having a doll named Pip. It's fun to say. I don't write for a lot of children, let alone sprightly and odd children, so she was more a challenge I gave myself with a purpose and such. Starting out, all I knew about her and Zephyr's past was the scene at the window in "When the Dogs Do Find Her" and that I also had no experience with familial loyalty (cf. my inspiration, /Polyfaceted/). And hey, if I'm going to be gunning a story on short notice, I might as well try to learn something.
Nene got decided on at half past the eleventh hour. She has no ancestors in the other stories. She's light on backstory compared to the others because of this. But, what happened? Well, I wanted to have more women in the cast, but I also wanted to have a laid-back, genderfucked guy. And then all of a sudden I realized there was absolutely no reason I couldn't have a laid-back, genderfucked girl. Foreheads were slapped.
Ambra's inspiration was a picture I found in my enormous folder of picturey goodness. It's of a man and a woman sitting a bed. He's dressed. She's in what appears to be fancy underwear. The woman is smiling at the viewer with a book open on her lap, while the man's back to back with her, hunched over and possibly looking out the window. It has this impression of something going on, so narrating /what/ turned into Ambra and the scene with Austin and the book in her backstory.
Austin is the other person. He's curled up with himself, staring out the window. That's his deal.
Seine would be the fact the one radio station at work plays "Piano Man" at least once a day. I've always found that song sublimely depressing. I mean, to the point it's almost happy, that's how damn depressing it is.
Duclos goes way back to someone's lovely assistant in the soap opera. Of course, I'm still not sure said boss wasn't fictitious considering he never once appeared on screen. Maybe she was using his alleged existence as a cover? I'm glad she outgrew that. She emotes more than I'd figured she would, but she's had good reason and she's still taking names.
Doc Islington's intro story was supposed to be maybe 2K. She really got out of hand, but she got out of hand being herself. I think she harkens back to the chirpy doctor in one of the ancestor stories, but said doctor had no purpose besides showing up to dispense lollies and plot, so it's hard to tell.
Tian I'll have to talk about later. Sorry, Tian.
And with that, the floor's now open for questions! If you have any. You should know that I consider "When will A and B bonk like bunnies on viagra?" to be a legitimate question.
As a side note, I am kinda sorta maybe in the market for a beta reader. The only thing stopping me really is that this isn't a fun position. I don't imagine it would, anyway. Willing victims will be used for spotting typos, marking overused/repeat words and pointing out flaws in prose that make it otherwise unfathomable. So, pretty much all concrete stuff. They should be comfortable with a steady workload containing violence and kinky porn, some of which involves violence. There will, however, be no on-screen noncon.
Arc 1 Free Talk
Because if we're going to pretend it's 1998, we're going to do it right.
Things we are not discussing today: why some of the porn stuff got reshuffled. I'm not trying to be a jerk by sitting on that despite broaching the topic repeatedly and then not talking about it, but Arc 1's ending at a different place than I planned. It and what's now Arc 2 I'd pictured as enormous storyline, but in the end, or at least where we are now, it came to me that this was going to get pretty unwieldy. That's why we now have an introduction arc before much plot happens.
But, we are going to deal with the kinda messed up history of this thing that you've been reading. Because the truth is I've written parts of this story two or three times before. And they date back to 2001 in some cases.
The oldest ancestor would be what was, for lack of a better term, a text-based soap opera that another writer and myself ran for many years. I'm not sure how much detail I want to go into about that. First of all, that story is partly why I keep turning down co-writing collaborations even though I'm sure you're all lovely people and we could do some awesome work. I'm OK hashing out the details of a story with someone, but as soon as we're both writing the actual prose... yeah, I don't play well with others in that situation and I don't want any of you getting stuck with my leftover resentment from the whole part where I was doing all of the damn work in this other thing. Snippy dialog v. the entirety of exposition and action is not a fair division of labor. Second, a lot of the actual /stuff/ that went on in that story was pretty not cool in retrospect. I'm not just talking about the fact it contains the only noncon scene I ever had any hand in. That remains quite the elephant in the room, but there's a whole plot thread about the one guy being unabashedly prejudiced against kinksters. The good news being it does result in said guy /not/ getting laid. But! Some of it's still totally awesome- the fencing scenes, the kirsch incident and the pointless interludes of slice-of-lifey goodness.
I don't know what it is, but I was always been taken with domesticity plus underworld sorts. I think that's just the best thing since fanservice. Er, especially when it is fanserivce in and of itself.
Other author and I made two attempts at reconciliation in the forms of retooling attempts that possibly would have removed all of the unawesome from our sordid little trainwreck. Neither of them even sort of kind of worked and I went on to be angsty trousers for a long time when it came to what happened. I got a novel draft that's a wreck mood-wise because of this, and also because I fail at pacing without anybody's help.
One summer while I was out of work, I tried to tell myself another similar little yarn for want of anything to amuse myself. That crashed and burned. Mood and pacing issues I couldn't handle- big surprise. The notes got dropped in the binder and the binder got shoved under my bed and that probably would have been the end of things if it hadn't been for RBF.
I wanted to participate and I wanted to have something ready on opening day. I had about a week's notice to come up with said something. I don't know how your inspirations work, but mine apparently does better with a deadline. So, there I was with one, besides ten more years of experience and a pound of notes that went absolutely nowhere. This happened.
A lot of the ancestor stories were heavy on the dudes. Well, they were yaoi-intentioned so that's kind of inevitable, but first thing I said to myself when I started frantically throwing a story line together- this calls for more women, damnit. There's now a running gag among the remains of the soap opera fanbase that I'm still friends with. Caution: vaginas.
There was a guy names Siebenkas in the summer out of work story. He and the current Siebenkas bear little resemblance to one another. Snarky high roller type with a fondness for seducing his enemies instead of killing them outright? Yeah, why the hell are your named Siebenkas again? That doesn't even kind of fit. I enjoy writing for current Siebenkas a lot more than I figured I would. It's almost soothing to take over someone who's more or less /grounded/. I continue to be surprised by how popular he is. He and Pip seem like they get the best responses. You know, I wasn't planning to use his PoV that much when I started out, but it keeps working out and the audience keeps approving...
Roa's also new except for the name. It belonged to a much different person in the summer story, the resident mathematician/masochist. In the end, I don't know what that was about either, but I do know that Roa has the ignominious distinction of taking on the appearance of a character from a porno comic I'm not sure I want to admit to having read. Writing for someone who's supposed to be brilliant? Intimidating as all get out, but not enough to stop me.
Zephyr, well, I'm sort of infamous for writing characters somewhat along his personality line, and that dates all the way back to the soap opera. They show up a lot in what I turn out now and I accept their irreverent goodness as a feature, not a bug. Zephyr though is the first one to have a child, and also my first Papa Wolf overall (although as I mentioned before, I think I kind of broke that trope considering how young he is).
I confess to having a doll named Pip. It's fun to say. I don't write for a lot of children, let alone sprightly and odd children, so she was more a challenge I gave myself with a purpose and such. Starting out, all I knew about her and Zephyr's past was the scene at the window in "When the Dogs Do Find Her" and that I also had no experience with familial loyalty (cf. my inspiration, /Polyfaceted/). And hey, if I'm going to be gunning a story on short notice, I might as well try to learn something.
Nene got decided on at half past the eleventh hour. She has no ancestors in the other stories. She's light on backstory compared to the others because of this. But, what happened? Well, I wanted to have more women in the cast, but I also wanted to have a laid-back, genderfucked guy. And then all of a sudden I realized there was absolutely no reason I couldn't have a laid-back, genderfucked girl. Foreheads were slapped.
Ambra's inspiration was a picture I found in my enormous folder of picturey goodness. It's of a man and a woman sitting a bed. He's dressed. She's in what appears to be fancy underwear. The woman is smiling at the viewer with a book open on her lap, while the man's back to back with her, hunched over and possibly looking out the window. It has this impression of something going on, so narrating /what/ turned into Ambra and the scene with Austin and the book in her backstory.
Austin is the other person. He's curled up with himself, staring out the window. That's his deal.
Seine would be the fact the one radio station at work plays "Piano Man" at least once a day. I've always found that song sublimely depressing. I mean, to the point it's almost happy, that's how damn depressing it is.
Duclos goes way back to someone's lovely assistant in the soap opera. Of course, I'm still not sure said boss wasn't fictitious considering he never once appeared on screen. Maybe she was using his alleged existence as a cover? I'm glad she outgrew that. She emotes more than I'd figured she would, but she's had good reason and she's still taking names.
Doc Islington's intro story was supposed to be maybe 2K. She really got out of hand, but she got out of hand being herself. I think she harkens back to the chirpy doctor in one of the ancestor stories, but said doctor had no purpose besides showing up to dispense lollies and plot, so it's hard to tell.
Tian I'll have to talk about later. Sorry, Tian.
And with that, the floor's now open for questions! If you have any. You should know that I consider "When will A and B bonk like bunnies on viagra?" to be a legitimate question.
As a side note, I am kinda sorta maybe in the market for a beta reader. The only thing stopping me really is that this isn't a fun position. I don't imagine it would, anyway. Willing victims will be used for spotting typos, marking overused/repeat words and pointing out flaws in prose that make it otherwise unfathomable. So, pretty much all concrete stuff. They should be comfortable with a steady workload containing violence and kinky porn, some of which involves violence. There will, however, be no on-screen noncon.