fic talk: remodeling

[sword_logic]

it's a little funny just how much my plan/outline can change in just under a week. i'm not sure what to think of it, except that i was going through my doc full of fragments looking for something in particular when i realized... i'm going to have to toss so much of this because of what i've changed. and here i'd been thinking, "oh, how nice, i've got so much of part iii written!"



it's frustrating, but at the same time, it's really incredibly liberating. hey! things change! that's how it is. plans can be fluid. i still have the major beats i want to hit, but the way i'm connecting them has changed really drastically — even just in the past week-ish.

at the base of all of this, i keep coming back to borderlands (specifically BL2) and how powerfully it influenced how i interpret chorus. there's a particular aspect of BL2 that i've managed to skip over entirely in "my" chorus so far, and as i was doing some thinking about it, i realized that it really, really should be in this fic. for some reason neither BLTPS nor TFTBL touched on this particular Thing – which was fine, those stories didn't hinge on it – but to me, it really, really resonates with chorus as a setting, as well as all the people from chorus we've met. hell, BL2 as a whole resonates with chorus for me, and not just because i played a shitton of BL2 when the chorus trilogy was airing (though i can't deny they're tied together for me, lol). this paragraph was vague as hell, soz, but yeah.

i've settled on a good way to work in this whole... concept? that's much better than what i had written before, so, adios to even more writing! indiscriminately dumping all of this is going to be a loss of ~4k words, which, now that i see it written out, is a lot more than it seemed. i might keep some of it, but i'm not particularly intent on doing so.

irl stuff has left me feeling very drained so i haven't written anything this week, but hopefully things will calm down next week and/or i'll have more energy.

Comments

[anneapocalypse]

I definitely feel that. I posted a longfic recently that I started four years ago, and in the past year as it's finally come together I've had to throw out a lot of stuff I wrote earlier, before I had a clear conception of the whole story. Things that wouldn't work because of restructuring or character decisions, or... in my case, just because I realized they weren't very good. :P I probably cut at least 5K, more if I count the parts that underwent heavy rewriting. I don't consider any of that wasted energy, though. There were pieces I was able to salvage and shape into something new that I liked a lot--and even the parts that were un-salvageable were part of the process.

I've never played Borderlands but I think it's really neat how different sci fi series can kind of play together in one's head that way. I can definitely think of a few that have influenced how I write in the RvB universe.

Good luck with those next steps. <3

[sword_logic]

cutting things out manages to be both liberating and frustrating and i don't know if i'm ever gonna get comfortable in that weird middle ground. it's such a strange mix of opposite emotions for something that's so normal and necessary. i'm gonna do it! flip a coin as to whether i'm gonna feel wiggly or triumphant about it!

borderlands shares a lot of the same humor as rvb (both good and bad, lol), and the humor is similarly a sort of top layer over a story that's got a lot of really heavy-hitting aspects to it. a diamond horse named butt stallion, a side quest called "shoot Face McShooty in the face," a gun that slows you down by 200% and also screams things when you shoot it — and also the effects of extreme capitalism: oppression, rebellion, grief, abuse, manipulation, and environmental collapse. not hard to compare the two. :B but yeah, it's always interesting to look back and think, "oh yeah, this is where i got inspiration for that thing; that helped me figure out how to handle this."

[anneapocalypse]

Borderlands sounds like such a trip! :D Unfortunately it is not my kind of game, gameplay wise, so I don't imagine I'd get far in it, but it's really neat to hear how it's influenced you, and the humor sounds great.