stunt_muppet

Very, very slowly. I wrote a whole 630 words this week! And most of it was on the Ficlet Project fic! Hooray! 

Miscellaneous things:

1. SARAH JANE ADVENTURES OMG. Maybe wanting something really really hard does make it happen after all!

I have been wanting Jo on SJA since...well, kind of since I started watching, and most especially since the Brigadier got a guest spot. And now she's here! And she's wearing all her rings! And she's meditating! And she says "Groovy!"! It's just. She's perfect. Katy Manning had mentioned that, if she did play Jo again, she'd want to play her very differently, and I was worried that would mean she'd lose some of her positivity and cheer this time around, and while obviously you can't tell everything about her character from a minute-long clip she isn't as radically different as I feared she'd be. Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that there won't be too much "life is so inadequate without the Doctor" angst, because that is so not what Jo's about. She walked out of the TARDIS with her head held high, sad but moving on, and I'd hate for her to get put in the same Box Of Woe as some other companions have after their tenure.

I am also shamefully holding out hope for some Doctor/Jo subtext I can subsequently make too much of and squee over.

I've tried to avoid any additional spoilers thus far, but I have managed to hear that Luke will no longer be with the SJA kids, which makes me very very sad, because I like Luke a lot. Given the tone of SJA I'm hopeful that he's not going to be killed off, because SJA doesn't generally do that sort of thing, but I enjoy Luke and the family dynamic he has with Sarah, and I'll be sad seeing that go. :( I hope he can come back at some point.

So the upshot of all that is basically SQUEE. I am so glad this series is still going. So glad.

Also I've been informed that there is, in fact, a Three/Jo/Iris Wildthyme audio out there somewhere. It is now my objective to make this part of my life.

2. Speaking of squee, someone on the anonmeme mentioned my fic! \o/ They mentioned it by name and everything, which sort of implies that enough people have heard of it to know what the anon was referring to when then mention it - or that they knew to seek it out when they were watching a specific serial. 

I know this'll probably make me sound like extremely eager for attention, but it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Because I know you're supposed to write for yourself, but I wouldn't write if I didn't want people to read and enjoy these stories, if I didn't want to share them and send them out into the world. And the thought enough people like my little fic for it to get referenced in a place where nobody has any expectation of me seeing it just makes all the writers' block worth it.

< /sentimentality>

3. In the midst of Trying To Write, I've been seriously plotting out which of the Big Huge Crazy AUs I want to write first, which ones I think I could finish realistically, etc. Because I do want to write them instead of just having them float around in my headspace. And so I've been trying to hash out a plot for the more nebulous Holy War AU (which has fewer definite plot points) in the hopes of writing it down one of these days.

So I have the basic idea of the more religious setting for the AU, with Primus worshiped instead of being unknown. But after Megatron and Optimus see how integral they are to the universal stream and take power, I don't know where I want to go from there. There has to be some external conflict, right? And I don't want to make the Church of Primus all scary and Spanish-Inquisition-y because that's been done a whole lot and it'd be boring.

So I got this other idea that only certain characters are part of the Churchess/castle/towns thing. People retreat to the monastic life to escape the unregulated lands and cities outside the citadel boundaries, which are largely lawless and much more dangerous. People within the Churches have different positions on how they should interact with the outside, if they should at all; there are those who want to tame and "civilize" the outside, and there are others who think that people should just stay inside and leave those outside the citadel walls to their own fate. 

The characters inside and outside the citadel in this story are both Autobots and Decepticons in other continuities - there are Autobots living in the rough lands outside and 'Cons living as, effectively, priests.

Starscream, for example, committed himself to the citadel for his own personal safety and security, but resents Megatron (whom he serves and guards) and the citadel system in general, and wants nothing more than to take control of the citadel and throw open its doors to the outside - or, even better, open it only to the people *he* wants to keep safe. Other Seekers, like Skywarp and Thundercracker, still live outside, and regard him as a "brother" (and so can't completely hate him) but don't like the fact that he abandoned them for the safety of the Citadel.

There are Autobots out there, too, and most of them aren't too happy about the Citadel system either - I'm thinking maybe Springer, Kup, and Drift could be among them, given their position in the Wreckers in IDW; maybe the AU version of Bulkhead, too, since he was originally a worker in TFA. Chromia and Arcee might also be outsiders, too. Sunstreaker and Mirage could be Citadel mechs; Sideswipe and Cliffjumper, outsiders. You get where I'm going with this. 

And that also gives me an outside antagonist who's not Megatron. There could be other Decepticons out there who either want to just take down the citadels or who function as warlords outside. I'm thinking Straxus might be good for that. Or, possibly, if I'm thinking of including the Liege Maximo in all this, Jhiaxus could be the exterior antagonist that forces Optimus and Megatron to act and think; he worked for Maximo in G2, and perhaps because the factions are so mixed, Maximo seeks to wipe out the citadel system and thus provoke the Autobot-Decepticon war and restore the Decepticons to what he thinks of as their rightful place. Of course, that gets into the overlapping retcons over the origins of the Decepticons, and, um. I don't really know what to do about that.

So, yeah. Just an idea I've been tossing around. Plus, that gives me a venue to write some of the popular pairings in a new light - because I kind of feel obligated to write Sunstreaker/Sideswipe or Thundercracker/Skywarp, but I've never really felt that inspired to, if that makes any sense? And in this AU context I could do something new with them.

I need to make myself a schedule for which of these BHCAU I want to write first, so that I can assiduously ignore it and start working on something totally different instead.

BUT FIRST. Ficlet project. And then Springkink fic.

4. So I wrote about 140 words of "teaser" for the Holy War AU in freewrite. I decided to put it here.



The universe is vast and multifold. Possibilities collide and tangle and tie knots round one another; timelines cross and double back, thick with all the lives and choices that will could have had happened.

Below and above the knot of the multiverse there is a city, and in this city there are a million strangers tonight, drifting down from the debris of universes. All are lost; some are trapped. And one is still wrapped in the web of his own world’s possibilities, soon to be dragged back to the surface gasping for air.

And on this night that one stranger stands in rapture in the darkest corners of the back alley, too still and strange for even the meanest of the city’s denizens to touch, and hears a whisper from far away: My servant, my son, this is who you are.  



I feel like I should post a bit of the Ficlet Project fic, because I've got over 500 words of it, but idk. That feels like it should be a surprise.


5. Have finally gotten hold of a scanner! We'll see if it'll actually scan my drawings instead of refusing to see them if they're not inked, because I hate inking. I'm looking forward to posting clean versions of some of my sketches. Might give me some drive to draw again.

6. It's not 1 in the morning, wow. I should probably go before it is.