Since Criminal Minds was a repeat (again!) last night, I ended up writing! Only 500 words, and not on my remix (which I have picked out, and if you know me, you will know it's mine by the title alone), on an idea that really needs someone who can write long plotty gen, but which has instead landed with me, and I will muddle through in my own (less plotty, gencesty) way.

I really wish my writing brain could grasp the intricacies of suspense/mystery plotting. I get it in theory, but I just can't do it. Or, I should say, I can't do it with any kind of regularity. I did it once, way back in XMM, where I think it was more a question of hewing to the noir formula, but even there, it kind of all came together for me without any planning - it was more one of those, 'OMG THAT'S WHY THAT HAPPENED!' light bulb kinds of things where I realized why certain things in the story had happened in hindsight, once I realized what the big reveal would be. And I still love it when that happens - and it does happen quite often to me, which is possibly why I really don't like planning things out too much, because that moment of epiphany is a sweet rush - but it's usually not with the plot-type stuff - it's usually the emotional arc that reveals itself to me that way.

(And when I say "plot" etc. I mean external action/adventurey plots - I write casefiles, but they're very straightforward, with very few twists that aren't telegraphed from paragraph one, and I wish I could make them more suspenseful and twisty, but I have a hard time coming up with obstacles that are hard enough to stymie Our Heroes without being too hard to actually solve. I guess because it's usually the less important part of the story for me? That the casefile stuff is usually there to reveal something about the characters, and once it's done that, I get frustrated by being held up by the casefile bits and make it "good enough" and let it go, instead of spending the time to make them as strong as the emotional and character bits; now I'm wondering whether if I liked hurt/comfort better I could use all that physical damage as a way of building suspense, but since I don't, it never occurs to me that causing the characters an injury is a good obstacle to them solving things too quickly. I know that's generally not why people who like h/c like it, but I wonder if it isn't a kind of plot spackle. Hmm...)

I read a story the other day that had been recced and I mostly enjoyed it, but it ended before I expected it to - the ending felt rushed to me, like the writer had gotten the main couple together, so she didn't care about the plot stuff anymore and so wrapped it up as quickly and easily as she could, but it wasn't particularly satisfying. Like, I get that if you shipped the main pairing, which I enjoy but don't feel OMG OTP about, you probably would be satisfied? but I felt like there was still more story that was just not told.

And then I thought, this is probably how it feels to read one of my stories when you're not me. So I should probably work on that, huh.

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Today's poem:

Getting This Far

It can get cold here on the open road,
way past the old roadblocks and graves.
Still trying to teach away the demons,
praying to live another day.

I thought it would end long ago.
Said and done,
no loose ends,
quiet and simple.

The Raven still circles,
whispering his lame proclamations.
Leaving me tired and hurt,
filled to overload with history.

We...we are what is left.
Comforting with clean soft words.
Taking time to caress,
to smooth the long tough reach.

~Mark Hebard

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very Sam and Dean, no?

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This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/162797.html. people have commented there.

Oh my god, you guys, it is SO FUCKING HOT in my apartment right now. I am sitting here in my underwear with the window open, but the heat is still banging in the pipes. If I disappear, it's probably because I've been broiled to death. *fans self*

*

I was very happy to see the Giants did not, in fact, need Plaxico Burress to win. Let's hope that keeps up. I still am all WTF? about the whole thing. He literally shot himself in the foot leg. *shakes head* The depths of dumbness required for that are best not plumbed.

*

This week, Katee Sackhoff is on Law & Order. I may actually watch in first run for that. They're actually advertising her like she's a big star or something. I am a little confused.

I've mentioned the Chuck casting spoiler, right? ( casting spoilerCollapse ) Now if they would just get Lena Olin to show up as Chuck and Ellie's mom. That would be so BEYOND AWESOME.

*

You guys, I am having trouble writing. I am having plotting issues again. I was rereading some of resonant8's posts on plot, and other stuff about writing I've got in my memories, and I just...I find it really difficult to come up with an external plot that is complicated enough to be interesting, but not needlessly complicated, and something that doesn't rely on Sam and Dean being idiots to work. And obviously that somehow underlines or illustrates something going on with Sam and Dean, which is kind of the whole point, anyway. The plot is just a macguffin, but I'd like it to be one that keeps people reading until the emoporn hits, you know? I recently read something that, well, the whole problem could have been prevented if Sam had just done ten minutes of research, and since it's Sam, not only was it annoying that he didn't do the research if I thought of it, but it was out of character for him to not do it, since, hi, have you met Sam, the walking encyclopedia of weird? But there would have been no story if he had. Or the writer would have had to have come up with a way around the answer research would have given him. And that is the kind of thing I am really really bad at in my own stories (though I can sometimes spot them in other people's).

But I just had a conversation with angelgazing and she made some suggestions, and while it's a lot more complicated now (possibly more complicated than I can handle, as plot and I are unmixy things), I think it's also more interesting and it's got more of a story to hang the emoporn on. It might also take me a really long time to figure out and write, but it's not like I don't have a whole list of other things I want to write, too.

In my frustration with that last night, I ended up banging out (no pun intended) some snarky up-against-a-wall Dean/Bela smut:

Opposition Research
Supernatural; Dean/Bela; adult; 1,080 words
"You know, when this is over, we should really have some angry sex."

Because there's no other way Bela got the hand of glory out of his jacket pocket. And I am still bitter we never got any Dean/Bela angry sex in canon.

*

Seriously, I think I'm melting.

*

So I am once again being stymied by an action scene, a scene that's kind of necessary to the story, even though I don't think it's actually the climax of the story (it's the resolution to the putative plot, but it's not the emotional resolution), and it's the kind of thing that, because I don't feel it has any emotional heft, I don't care about writing it, and feel like nobody cares about reading it.

I think this is always my problem with action scenes that aren't sex scenes - sex scenes are action scenes, after all, they have to be choreographed and plotted out the same way fight scenes do, but since they DO (or they should anyway) carry the emotional weight, I am always much more interested in writing them, even when the choreography makes me a little cross-eyed and crazy. (If I can't get up the interest (um, pun not entirely unintended) to write a sex scene, I probably just fade to black; one of the things I try to do these days is not put in a sex scene unless it's necessary.) But I can't seem to regularly write action scenes where what happens in them is thematically or emotionally relevant. Like, the ghost or the creature - the story of what happened to cause there to be a ghost or whatever - is important (like the selkies leaving, or the girl who killed her newborn), but the actual solutions to the supernatural problems feel like afterthoughts to me - "And then Sam and Dean salted and burned the bones." - while all the important stuff goes on around them. So they feel like useless scenes to me, even though the supernatural plot is the framework on which the emotional stuff hangs.

Does that even make any sense? I can't tell.

Have a poem:

Lost World
"Nothing is truly beautiful except that which serves no purpose."
                                                                                   —Gautier

As four walls make a room
the pilgrims appear
through their map

The unreal flourishes
beyond imperious themes
and borders closed to laughing

And landscapes hold no proof
if intention is a sin
then dreams are guilty too

A blameless geography then,
blameless houses, blameless men,
a mistaken faith in color and light

Neutrality is to blame
for wanting us to agree
with its bland gestures

So much emptiness to fill
until we declare, quite innocently,
"There was a city on a river."

~Maxine Chernoff

***

* I was not in a good headspace yesterday, feeling useless and meh, tired and cranky and sick of everything, but today I am trying to be better. I did write some last night, and added a scene that's meant to be both funny and creepy into a story, but on reflection, I'm afraid it's not funny and not really creepy either. My funny has been on vacation since sometime last summer and I miss it. Meanwhile, in another story, I am stuck in the middle of a scene that has probably gone on too long and I cannot extricate myself - or Sam - from it, and neither of us wants to be there anymore. This is problematic, and I have yet to figure a way out of it. I may end up excising the whole scene.

* Which reminds me that seperis had a post yesterday about writers who are in such a different place that when you read their stories, you're blown away not just because you never saw things that way before, but you didn't even know it was possible to see things that way, and that is how I feel when I write stories that require externally driven plot. Like the blind man and the elephant, it never comes out quite the way I think it should, but since I feel like I don't know how to *do* it, I can't figure out why I can't, though I do think I know what it should look like when I'm done.

I wrote a successful mystery once, very early on in my fanfic career, and I should be able to replicate that, but it was all very seat-of-my-pants (and very much cribbed from a lot of the hardboiled detective fiction I love so much, and oh god, why is there not a Dean Winchester, PI AU, set in the 1950s? Someone should write that for me...), and I just... when people talk about how to write an action plot or whatever, I feel like they're speaking Xhosa or something - it's not even on the same continent as my brain, let alone the same zip code.

And mostly I manage by keeping it around the edges and engaging in a lot of "hey, look over there! emoporn!" handwaving when I can't, but more and more I feel like I am not skilled enough in the right ways to write some of the stories I want to write, and that makes me sad. I feel like poor Taran in Taran Wanderer, who was really good at nearly everything, except the one thing he really loved doing. Sigh.

* While taking a break from repeat listenings of "So Much Mine" this morning on my commute, "Spirit in the Night" came on, and I love that song, and I love the story I wrote inspired by that song, and I think that story has the best summary I ever ever wrote, which was Fuck destiny. I feel like that has become the motto of every SPN story I write, and one of my recurring themes in this fandom seems to be that people have choices - even when the choices are both *bad* - and the choices we make make us who we are, which is pretty much why I want to shake Sam at this point in time.

Other recurring themes in my fanfic include miscommunication/the failure to communicate/learning to communicate, reconciliation after bad things happen from said failure to communicate, learning to live with what you've been dealt instead of making yourself miserable wanting things you can never have, the equalizing/flipping of power imbalances, the public/private split between who appears to have power in a relationship and who actually has the power, and, of course, banter and porn, and best-friends-become-lovers.

I think you can probably see why I took to SPN like a duck to water.

* Man, sometimes I read what other people have to say about shows we both watch and I just... I wonder if we're even watching the same show. I mean, I know everybody watches a different show, lenses and personal experience inform everything, blah blah blah, but again, sometimes I feel like I'm all, "hey come on in, the water's fine" and other folks are all, "Sharks! Sharks in the water! And a tsunami on the horizon!"

Maybe I've just become less critical over the years, or more tolerant, or more easily manipulated, or something, but then I think of my response to Studio 60 and I know that's probably not it, but I'm just a big fluffy puppy who rolls over and begs when my buttons are being hit right, but when the wrong buttons are being hit, I'm just like a cranky pitbull. Or something. I feel that metaphor kind of escaped the leash. Um. Sorry.

* I'm going through my yuletide recs and adding in author names so I can post 'em to unfitforsociety, and two things strike me:

1. I really want more fic about Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale
2. There's so much more I want to read and I don't know when I'm ever going to get to it

* I am so not ready for remixredux and yet I am determined that sign-ups will start on Monday. I may end up giving up anonymity altogether. I still haven't decided. I am THRILLED, however, that dracofiend has graciously provided me with a matching algorithm, so that process should be streamlined. I really have no words for how grateful I am for this, and this is why even on days when I am down on fandom - and man, some days I am so far down on fandom I wonder if I'll ever see the upside again - I remember that the large majority of people who participate are usually wonderful, and it's just a small handful of folks who consistently engage in asshattery.

* I have become an iPod evangelical, apparently. In addition to convincing more than one co-worker that the iPod was the way to go (and every time I run into the latest convert now, she rhapsodizes about how much she loves it), my brother called me this morning to see if I thought it was worth it, and I kind of treated him to some rhapsodizing of my own, to the tune of about half an hour of, "oh my god, I don't know how I ever lived without it."

I love my tiny white overlord, even when it is defective and in need of being returned. Sigh.

* New SPN tonight! How much do I love Dean's T2 geekery in the director's cut? SO MUCH! Eeeee!

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