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.
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This is really interesting! I knew a bit, of course, but I like the evolution, and I really like Ambra and Austin's story (obviously). And I like that you write because of our little community. That makes me happy.
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I gotta tell you, /Polyfaceted/ is not the sort of thing I would usually pick up if, say, roaming around the web at large while left otherwise to my own devices. But, the characters are super endearing and their situations compelling far beyond any genre or setting preferences I may express otherwise. Nevermind that, on closer inspection, it is more of a family saga than a mobster yarn, despite being about mobsters and all. And so full of delicious underworld domesticity. I'll get tired of watching Johnny cook when I'm deaaaad.
I don't usually go for mobster yarns because A) not enough self-determined women and B) I find here-because-of-familial-pressure type of situations depressing. You've got wonderful women all over the place and while not every Corlioni is happy as a Corlioni, there's plenty of variety that any predestined angst is like dark chocolate sauce on a very sweet cake. And speaking of cake, I'm not trying to butter yours up here, but very few people can sell me on familial obligation as a plot point. Hell, I'm not even sure I sold myself on it, but Pip has her daddy now so let's go with that and be happy.
If you like, I can send you the Ambra and Austin picture when I get home. The people in it don't resemble Ambra and Austin (while the girl is blond), and it's fanart of a series I don't often admit to having fanart *of*. Although, if you ever up and decide to write a high fantasy novel, I am going to make you watch the whole thing since it manages to cover all Fifty Things Not To Do In A High Fantasy Story Unless You Want People Who Actually Know High Fantasy To Facepalm in twenty-six episodes. Which is kind of impressive.
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written after sleeping ---->
I will get on beta reading "A Little Bit Dangerous"! I just have to post fic. I have an idea or two kicking around right now, so it's not like I'm writing at the moment; not taking up any of my time this way!
I would very much be willing to beta for you. It also double-ensures I'm up-to-date on Jealous of Roses so, you know, good all around.
You make me all warm and mushy! I'm really glad, though, that our characters are that compelling and the situations the same. I think maybe you got another Johnny-cooking scene out of this. AND I'm glad we have the self-determined women (Nic and Angela and Teresa and Martina are taking bows; so are others, but those four are foremost atm), and also that plot point, since it is kind of a big one for us. I'm really glad that works.
I would very much be interested in the picture. And my only fantasy is that one of ~the novels~ is low fantasy (remind me to talk about this in the emails once I email you back). That said, the idea of a single show making a whole bunch of people facepalm is intriguing and definitely impressive.
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In other news- HELLS YEAH. GOOD ALL AROUND. MUCH LIKE YOU HAVE MADE TODAY. Thank you so much, m'dear. On so many counts. Le squee and other fannish expressions of yay XD.
And roses. This calls for roses for everyone. Besides whatever Johnny's making for dinner~.
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These two are totally going to be a Saturation.
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OK, in all seriousness: can we stage some sort of an Everyone Posts About 50 Shades of Grey And Maybe This Isn't A Coincidence event? Because Nene has some thoughts on that topic, I'm sure.
In other news: do eeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
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In other words, I am all for as many of us ranting about this damned book as possible.
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(I am the same way about co-writing. Tried it once, it went badly, end of.)
If you're still interested in a beta reader, I will take a look. I'm really intrigued by this story, and have no problems with content.
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My characters might not speak with me as they do to you, but if they did, I think Roissy would have lost her composure at this point. As in slugged the news anchor and shoved her way in front of the camera while ranting with her middle finger up.
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And-it's true! Without RBF, there would be no Jealous of Roses. I'd be writing something else and quite probably happy with whatever it was, but I wouldn't have all of you and you wouldn't have cilnatro mohitos the haunt your nightmares. Personally, I like this situation.
I think what I would like to do, if you're not averse to the idea, is send you some of the Arc 0/Backstory parts when they come up. That way, everyone will get some surprises~. At this point, it looks like the next one of those will be about Duclos's father if that sounds interesting.
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My heart cries out for you.
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I have found pretty much every word I dislike in porn scenes in the first porn scene.
Mind = blown
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Auugh.
On the plus side, because of it, a single section of a Saturation is over 2400 words.
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With Christian Who Has No Recognizable Speech Pattern.
Excuse me a moment. I have to go die.
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Ana's is so stilted, and Christian's is unrecognizable, and they are so cardboard and he's so creepy and they're so bad.
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This makes my collection of unspeakable fanfic look tame and cute and just sort of charmingly awful.
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The section in the saturation, btw, is over 2500 words. JOHNNY HAD THAT MUCH TO SAY. And I do not blame him.
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Oh, on a related note: the muse is yammering and I may have beta stuff to send soon if this keeps up and...
Wait.
2500 words? That's as long as the plot point I just wrote. Hully shit.
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Do you have a doc of the Nic fic, or do you want me to take it from the emails and send it back that way? I could do inline edits if you send me attachments.