Shipwreck Light (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shipwreck_light) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowlounge2012-07-15 10:58 am
shipwreck_light) wrote in rainbowlounge2012-07-15 10:58 am
I other news, I still do not know how to punctuate my own title.
In answer to the question that's been on exactly nobody's mind, this is why the porn in Jealous of Roses got rearranged. It's made of meta and writer angst.
As I mentioned previously, Jealous of Roses has ancestor stories, quite a few of them totaling several thousand pages. It serves as the most recent iteration of a theme: house full of underworld sorts.
There was one previous version in particular that I was trying to harken after and all that good stuff, one that had notes of dysfunctional family to the situation and a penchant for novel sexual encounters therein. On one hand, you had a bunch of the characters (none of whom were related) calling a guy Mom and then treating him that way. On the other, they were all perfectly content to forget his Momness once the sun went down. Guys can be moms if they want, but in general one does not tie Mom to the bed for lascivious purposes. And I should probably mention this was supposed to be brainbreaking for the audience, besides fun as hell for me.
The original plan for Jealous of Roses was based off of this situation and billed in my head as The Great Poly Plot Twist. I was gradually going to work everyone (minus Pip, holy shit!) into everyone else's beds. Little by little they would open up to one another, first sexually and then otherwise. Planned result being lots of tasty biporn interlaced with horrible murders and the complexities of functional polyamory.
So, what happened? Short answer: Siebenkas. This is mostly his fault. The rest belongs to a few characters who aren't even in this story and the audience, by which I mean you personally if you ever commented on anything I posted. You did this. And I owe you drinks.
Wait a moment, how is it that I'm blaming a character if I don't have discussions with my cast like, say, most of RBF at large? Well very little of what I write turns out exactly as planned. Off the top of my head, the scene in "Contes Barbares" with the guy who takes the car did. You're way more likely to hear me going on about how this changed at the last moment or I almost cut that or something along those lines. There's some fidelity loss when it comes to translating what I'm watching in my head into words. I may be a visual person, but words are not a visual medium.
Let's think of it this way. Most of you are anthropologists. I'm a director and a shitty one at that.
You could almost make a case for things going haywire /because/ I don't have these conversations. I don't go into scenes with deadset hard specifics for every motivation or opinion that any given member of the cast may have. Just impressions and instances and glances. It's part of the reason I will forget to make points with any specificity and part of the reason I can be writing this, and I can be the final say about everything, but I can still have no clue what some of these people are thinking.
Then again, they don't ever interrupt what I'm doing IRL to share their opinions on peanut butter.
Some aspects of the way I do things are better, and some are unbetter. In the end, it's just different.
Speaking of which, there was a /different/ Siebenkas at one point in development. He was suave and sarcastic and really into seducing his friends as well as his enemies; the kind of person who'd save someone's life in return for sex, make them believe he loved them, ditch them, and then tell his roommates about the whole thing like it was some hilarious adventure. Oh, and by the way, he was still going to have to "be the dad" (asshole banker if we're using Monopoly terms).
I haven't got a clue how that character would have worked out because obviously that's not what I wrote. And why not? Because that guy, the Doppelsiebenkas- if you don't know, the novel Siebenkas is where the word doppelganger comes from so, oh man the irony just hit -posed absolutely no challenge to me as a writer. I can do smarmy bastards standing on my head. Maybe I did want to go back to something familiar that I missed, story-wise. But that didn't mean I had to do everything the same.
I just kind of said to myself: I'm going to write about some guy who was married and had a kid and comes with actual inhibitions/morals/whatever you want to call not being Doppelsiebenkas despite the whole killing people business. Take that, smarm crew.
(I'm sorry. I still love you. That was for dramatic emphasis.)
The truth is, I knew Siebenkas was broken from the instant I finished reading over the first installment. I posted it anyway.
He was supposed to hug Pip. That was the whole point of that scene. There's nothing not adorable about a middle-aged assassin glomping a kid.
But when it comes to prose that's not exactly as intended? At first, I couldn't put my finger on it, which was part of the reason the scene at the TV came up next instead of Roa. The audience had an interest and I wanted to see if I could figure things out. Come "Hey Mr. Florist" I pretty much knew I was done for. The AU ending I wrote later? That was supposed to be cannon, but something inimitable, almost physical, stopped me. That's why what is cannon finishes at an odd place. "My Cherrie Amour", I wanted to see if I could handle just how done for I was and went with it. You know what, I don't think I got it until "A Goldfish", which had no intentions behind it whatsoever. I got carried away with the intro to "A Replacement Goldfish".
Siebenkas was /not/ supposed to be this tenderhearted. I expected his motivation was his sense of duty. He had a job, he was there to do it, and if he found himself bonding with anyone, that was going to suck for him on a certain level.
It still does, really. It sucks because he does care and it doesn't matter how many times he tells himself that's not the case, he's got enough of a handle on his own head that he realizes when he's lying to himself. Further vicissitudes: he lives with people who also know when he lies to himself.
Basically, I bungled the hell out of whatever I was planning to do there. I still had the power to fix it. I could have booted everybody back into line.
But it was just so damn interesting. Having to sit down with myself and work out what the screaming hell was behind all of these semantic shifts that kept adding up to whatever I didn't want.
It's true what he said in "The Typewriter Operator". His motive is love. Fancy love with hairsplitting Greek names. And you might think this would be most excellent fodder for The Great Poly Plot Twist. But, as I said. Hairsplitting love.
So, what was I going to do about this? Since there went my relationship overplot. Right out the window.
I thought about the ancestor story. Really, I've got the poly family business covered in another outline of mine. But, I'd never done, you know, just the family. Drop the adjectives. It's a family and that's the end of it. Only question remaining: who here has the guts to call a spade a spade? And whatsmore, holy crap, am I actually going to have anybody do it?
I wrote five different drafts of the conversation between Siebenkas and Pip. They got progressively less angsty.
In the end.
-He loves her
-He knows she's cognizant of this fact
And while there are plenty of reasons for him to pretend otherwise, there were a lot more for him to give in. So, he did. And I quit worrying about it too.
It's been enlightening. Thank you, everybody. For all of the time you've wasted. I appreciate it quite deeply.
As I mentioned previously, Jealous of Roses has ancestor stories, quite a few of them totaling several thousand pages. It serves as the most recent iteration of a theme: house full of underworld sorts.
There was one previous version in particular that I was trying to harken after and all that good stuff, one that had notes of dysfunctional family to the situation and a penchant for novel sexual encounters therein. On one hand, you had a bunch of the characters (none of whom were related) calling a guy Mom and then treating him that way. On the other, they were all perfectly content to forget his Momness once the sun went down. Guys can be moms if they want, but in general one does not tie Mom to the bed for lascivious purposes. And I should probably mention this was supposed to be brainbreaking for the audience, besides fun as hell for me.
The original plan for Jealous of Roses was based off of this situation and billed in my head as The Great Poly Plot Twist. I was gradually going to work everyone (minus Pip, holy shit!) into everyone else's beds. Little by little they would open up to one another, first sexually and then otherwise. Planned result being lots of tasty biporn interlaced with horrible murders and the complexities of functional polyamory.
So, what happened? Short answer: Siebenkas. This is mostly his fault. The rest belongs to a few characters who aren't even in this story and the audience, by which I mean you personally if you ever commented on anything I posted. You did this. And I owe you drinks.
Wait a moment, how is it that I'm blaming a character if I don't have discussions with my cast like, say, most of RBF at large? Well very little of what I write turns out exactly as planned. Off the top of my head, the scene in "Contes Barbares" with the guy who takes the car did. You're way more likely to hear me going on about how this changed at the last moment or I almost cut that or something along those lines. There's some fidelity loss when it comes to translating what I'm watching in my head into words. I may be a visual person, but words are not a visual medium.
Let's think of it this way. Most of you are anthropologists. I'm a director and a shitty one at that.
You could almost make a case for things going haywire /because/ I don't have these conversations. I don't go into scenes with deadset hard specifics for every motivation or opinion that any given member of the cast may have. Just impressions and instances and glances. It's part of the reason I will forget to make points with any specificity and part of the reason I can be writing this, and I can be the final say about everything, but I can still have no clue what some of these people are thinking.
Then again, they don't ever interrupt what I'm doing IRL to share their opinions on peanut butter.
Some aspects of the way I do things are better, and some are unbetter. In the end, it's just different.
Speaking of which, there was a /different/ Siebenkas at one point in development. He was suave and sarcastic and really into seducing his friends as well as his enemies; the kind of person who'd save someone's life in return for sex, make them believe he loved them, ditch them, and then tell his roommates about the whole thing like it was some hilarious adventure. Oh, and by the way, he was still going to have to "be the dad" (asshole banker if we're using Monopoly terms).
I haven't got a clue how that character would have worked out because obviously that's not what I wrote. And why not? Because that guy, the Doppelsiebenkas- if you don't know, the novel Siebenkas is where the word doppelganger comes from so, oh man the irony just hit -posed absolutely no challenge to me as a writer. I can do smarmy bastards standing on my head. Maybe I did want to go back to something familiar that I missed, story-wise. But that didn't mean I had to do everything the same.
I just kind of said to myself: I'm going to write about some guy who was married and had a kid and comes with actual inhibitions/morals/whatever you want to call not being Doppelsiebenkas despite the whole killing people business. Take that, smarm crew.
(I'm sorry. I still love you. That was for dramatic emphasis.)
The truth is, I knew Siebenkas was broken from the instant I finished reading over the first installment. I posted it anyway.
He was supposed to hug Pip. That was the whole point of that scene. There's nothing not adorable about a middle-aged assassin glomping a kid.
But when it comes to prose that's not exactly as intended? At first, I couldn't put my finger on it, which was part of the reason the scene at the TV came up next instead of Roa. The audience had an interest and I wanted to see if I could figure things out. Come "Hey Mr. Florist" I pretty much knew I was done for. The AU ending I wrote later? That was supposed to be cannon, but something inimitable, almost physical, stopped me. That's why what is cannon finishes at an odd place. "My Cherrie Amour", I wanted to see if I could handle just how done for I was and went with it. You know what, I don't think I got it until "A Goldfish", which had no intentions behind it whatsoever. I got carried away with the intro to "A Replacement Goldfish".
Siebenkas was /not/ supposed to be this tenderhearted. I expected his motivation was his sense of duty. He had a job, he was there to do it, and if he found himself bonding with anyone, that was going to suck for him on a certain level.
It still does, really. It sucks because he does care and it doesn't matter how many times he tells himself that's not the case, he's got enough of a handle on his own head that he realizes when he's lying to himself. Further vicissitudes: he lives with people who also know when he lies to himself.
Basically, I bungled the hell out of whatever I was planning to do there. I still had the power to fix it. I could have booted everybody back into line.
But it was just so damn interesting. Having to sit down with myself and work out what the screaming hell was behind all of these semantic shifts that kept adding up to whatever I didn't want.
It's true what he said in "The Typewriter Operator". His motive is love. Fancy love with hairsplitting Greek names. And you might think this would be most excellent fodder for The Great Poly Plot Twist. But, as I said. Hairsplitting love.
So, what was I going to do about this? Since there went my relationship overplot. Right out the window.
I thought about the ancestor story. Really, I've got the poly family business covered in another outline of mine. But, I'd never done, you know, just the family. Drop the adjectives. It's a family and that's the end of it. Only question remaining: who here has the guts to call a spade a spade? And whatsmore, holy crap, am I actually going to have anybody do it?
I wrote five different drafts of the conversation between Siebenkas and Pip. They got progressively less angsty.
In the end.
-He loves her
-He knows she's cognizant of this fact
And while there are plenty of reasons for him to pretend otherwise, there were a lot more for him to give in. So, he did. And I quit worrying about it too.
It's been enlightening. Thank you, everybody. For all of the time you've wasted. I appreciate it quite deeply.
no subject
no subject
Erp. I never did ask if it was OK to post this sort of thing here, but I felt odd redirecting people to my personal journal. And also, as certain 4,000 word letters betray, it would please me immensely if other people would run OOC meta here. But! If you want me to quit it I will totally do that.
So, some other fun quirks that might interest you personally.
-This all came to a head at the end of March, hence my inquiries into other people talking to their characters.
-What really gave away that The Great Poly Plot Twist wasn't going to work was these repeated "ewwwwwww" moments trying to figure out how to get Seb and Roa into bed. I was actually floating "Nene talks them into it" around at one point, but by then it was kind of "You two don't want to bonk, do you?"
-But, now you know where the "My dear, sweet Roa" came from.
-Given what's going on in the story now verses what would have been going on in the story otherwise, the audience has officially missed a scene with Zephyr grinding on Seb's lap. The only thing I feel truly bad about given all this is the reduction in ambient m/m. (For now, anyway *whistles*.) (And no, there will not be any Seb X Zephyr in cannon either; that ship has been scuttled as well.)
-The father character in the story I was harkening back to at first was motivated by power. He had terrible issues expressing himself and frequently got over-reliant on his resident telepaths to that end. Imagine if it took Seb a whole paragraph to work up to patting Pip on the head. Because that happened given roughly equivalent characters in the previous version.
-Doppelsiebenkas would have been motivated by sex and frequently misused the phrase "Give daddy some sugar." ...and quite possibly gotten socked in the face by Zephyr for accidentally trying it on Pip.
-Doppelsiebenkas may show up as another character if only so he can have a knock down drag out with the Siebenkas that seems to go over so well here. I'm somewhat concerned the meta may impact spacetime in some way.
-I sat on the description of Siebenkas for ages because of the issues discussed. I kept it in my gmail drafts and poked it at lunch. Over a matter of weeks.
-Now that all this is said and done, I still have no idea /why/. Siebenkas's motivation is different. But what lead to that in the first place...
That I don't know. I just know I'm happy to be here and I'm happy I made you happy.
no subject
I can only sorta see Seb/Zephyr working with this Seb. It is too bad about the lack of m/m, though.
The meta of Doppelseb and Seb in the same room would be amazing, oh my god.
Everything you said is really interesting! I love your background, writing this, and how the story as-is came about. And obviously, I love the story as-is.
no subject
The lack of m/m is sort of temporary in the sense that the audience will get some later. But, still.
Have this to tide you over:
http://rainbowlounge.dreamwidth.org/19310.html?thread=608110&style=mine#cmt608110
Seb/Zeph thought over like this while I was working: "So here is where the S/Z ust goes! ...but they're being so charming otherwise. Well, maybe next time."
I thought about a way to bring Doppelseb into the fray while I was out walking on Sunday. It'll take some time, but I think Imma do this. Seb needs something to occupy him besides be the dad in the next arc anyway. And actually... *mullmullmutter*
*bows* And absolutely none of it would have happened without you. So there. *heartbubbles ensue*
Butternut's here. It's droolsome.
no subject
Oh yay, butternut! I'm glad it arrived.
*heartbubbles right back*