stunt_muppet

I figured out what needs to happen to get me writing things again! What needs to happen is I need to wake up at 3am two days in a row for no reason.

I've been falling asleep at a normal time but waking up super early for a while now, and every time I do something to fix it (extra/heavy blanket, cutting off music for a certain time before bed, etc) it works for a little while before it starts over again. It's happened regardless of if there's anything in particular I'm stressing out about too, though it may be some kind of background stress due to *gestures vaguely at everything*.

It may have something to do with the fact that when I set my own bedtime I tend to stay up late; Fiance, meanwhile, goes to bed around 10:30pm pretty consistently. So maybe I'm waking up early because I'm not staying up as late as I used to? But he's had that habit since he moved in with me and the problem is newer than that.

I just hope I'm not becoming A Morning Person. I've never been A Morning Person! I don't want to be one! Morning People have, like, life plans and FitBits and stickers on their car about running marathons.

The writing's been nice, though. I should remember to do that first when I wake up early, instead of staring at the ceiling being annoyed.

So since Fiance has been playing Fire Emblem Three Houses, which means I am getting Fannishly Into Fire Emblem Three Houses, because it's much easier for me to get into a fandom if I have someone to blather to about it in real life. And I have written part of a Thing about it! 

Granted, the main reason I got the idea to write it was because ( behind a cut because it's Naughty. )
And so, since it was Lewd and since it was just something I was jotting down late at night, I started writing the thing on a Google doc on my phone. And now I've gotten it to almost 1500 words, but only when I write it on my phone.

I don't know why, but if I try to write it on my actual computer or even longhand, the inspiration dries right up. My current theory is that while it's on my phone, it still feels casual, like something I'm just dashing off and posting fast and not thinking too hard about. If I open it on my computer, then it's A Thing that I'm Writing and I have to put effort into it and it has to be Good.

As far as the actual game goes I mostly have thoughts on the characters and ships rather than the gameplay, but maybe that's for another post that I haven't hijacked to be all about my writing woes.  

One of the things I've been doing on Tumblr is the Six Sentence Sunday from AO3 Comment Of The Day. From their description:
Six Sentence Sunday is a writing thing where, on Sunday, you post six sentences from an unfinished work. It can be a new fic, a new chapter of a WIP, or even something you’re not sure you’ll ever post.

Choose an excerpt from any section (and it doesn’t have to be six sentences) and post it, letting people know what it belongs to or indicating that it’s something you’re working on.

I'll be backdating and posting previous Six Sentence Sundays from Tumblr (though possibly not tonight because it's late), but I wanted to at least start posting them here too. That way I'll get back in the habit of posting here and keep up my writing! Everybody* wins!

(*It's me. I'm everybody.)

Six Sentence Sunday for this week is below the cut. Voltron Legendary Defender fandom, Shiro/Allura/Lance, nothing nsfw at the moment.

( Snippet behind the cut. )

Backdated from my Tumblr post.

Voltron Legendary Defender, Shiro/Allura/Lance, sfw at the moment.

( Behind the cut. )

more voltron, gen this time, au-ish backstory stuff about honerva and the black lion.

( Behind the cut again! )

Just late enough to watch more TGWTG videos of cheesy horror TV shows and post a meme!

'The iPod Shuffle Meme

No, not that one. Let's be honest, when we need inspiration, the first place we go is our music library. So let's try something a little bit different. My music library is no help to me, but maybe it can be for someone else. Here's how this thing works:

1) Comment to this post, and I'll give you a prompt in the form of whatever song shuffles up next on whatever music player I've got going at the time.

2) Turn on the music player of your choice to shuffle, post this to your own journal and dole out prompts. No, you can't hide your shameful music. If it shuffles up, that's the gig.

3) Write/draw/whatever way you create for the prompt you've been given: post it. Again, no hiding the shame. Even if you think it's awful, post it.

4) Link your finished product to the prompt comment, because it's always lovely to see the results.'

I may skip a song if I can't find a YouTube link, since then I won't have a convenient way to link you to the music! 

Alas, I have not finished my own prompt because I am still slow. But again! Day off tomorrow. If I don't spend it napping (which I might) I may do some writing! Or just waste time on the internet, y'know.

I've been drawing and writing rather than posting anything. Oh, and surviving in the wonderful world of retail and its many cold germs.

...I had a cold three weeks ago, I've got another one now, and in between I had an eye infection, okay, I'm kind of pissed off.


So, in regards to the writing, would anyone be willing to beta a first draft of the first chapter of the Big Huge Crazy AU? I'd kind of like to finish at least two chapters before I start posting so this doesn't become a deadfic (although I did some writing on the second chapter of No Victims Only Volunteers today! I really really did!), but a lot of it was either freewritten or practically dragged out of my brain with a winch and cable, so I need to be sure it makes sense and I didn't muddle up my tenses again.

It's probably going to be about 2000 words when the first chapter's finished, TFA, post-S3, gen but dark. Would anyone be willing to beta?


Ugh, I hate head colds so much. *crawls through piles of tissues*

1. Write a whole bunch of John/Karkat specifically to piss everyone off.

Hey, hey, fandom, come over here I have something really exciting to tell you. Are you listening? Are you ready for it because I think you aren't it might just blow your mind right out of your face.

Ready okay here it is:

There is no such thing as an inherently bad pairing. Or an inherently good one, for that matter. There is no intrinsic moral or utilitarian worth to be had in any pairing given that they're all just ideas/devices for us to have fun with a media source on the internet. You don't have to like any particular pairing, but your feelings about them do not make them good or bad.

Now shut up and sit down and stop throwing fits about it. Cripes.

2. Sign up for Yuletide. Last time I tried that I defaulted and I'm pathologically incapable of doing much of anything on a deadline so it's pretty well covered why it'd be a bad idea to sign up for Yuletide but it always seems like so much fun and I am a greedy bastard who likes getting presents. :(

Plus, last time I signed up the fandoms I volunteered for (and the one I ended up getting assigned) included the movie The Fall, which is so unceasingly flawless that when I tried to write for it I tied myself in knots trying to construct Meaningful Symbolic Magical Realist Blather that equalled the unbearable perfection that is The Fall and predictably enough didn't get anywhere.

If I was going to sign up this time, I would sign up for movies like Van Helsing and Priest, because yes, there's a category for the Priest movie. The thing is, much as I enjoyed them, both of those movies were complete bollocks that I went to see mainly because there were pretty people in them. I would feel much less pressure writing for them.

Although I suppose if I wrote for Priest the recipient might expect me to know things about the manhwa and I really don't, so...

Also the Gabriel Knight games are on there and if I had played the last one I would sign up just to write that, MORE GABRIEL KNIGHT LOVE YEAAAH.  

3. Make some icons out of the pile of fanart I've right-click-saved from Tumblr. Oh wait I already did that.

Six Homestuck (mostly Equius and Equius <> Nepeta), 5 Transformers Animated (Sari, human!Wasp, Blackarachnia), and one random humanized Pinkie Pie because I can. Oh, and one Tarman from Return of the Living Dead, because the picture was funny.

( Icons! )



Don't make fun of my amateur icon skills. :(

4. Join Tumblr, for that matter, given that about a third of LJ seems to have moved there. Where are you gu~ys?

But I'd feel weird being on Tumblr - there's no real way to post fic or blog on there, you just have to reblog from other blogs, and I can't figureout how one's supposed to hold a conversation of any kind. Also it seems to be primarily fanart focused and while I've been going to the open model sessions at our local arts center I'm still not good enough to have any kind of consistent offering.

5. Spend an hour on the computer making a post when I should be doing something productive like cleaning my room or getting ready for work.

OH WAIT.

I had a cleverer title but I forgot it.[Poll #1792990]

2. If I named a fic (or a chapter of a fic) "Faaip de Oiad", how many people, approximately, would know what I was talking about?

I do on occasion hate the small reference pools fandom can inspire.

(It's Enochian for "voice of God", and a track on the Tool album Lateralus that samples a hoax caller to the Art Bell radio show. You can hear it here!)

Anyway I'd been tossing it around as a name for the Holy War AU on the occasion that I ever actually write the damn thing which looks increasingly unlikely, but there was one time back in middle school when I suggested a friend name one of her fis something in Italian and she ended up getting no readers because everyone thought the fic was in Italian. But I suppose if you don't know the reference, "Faaip de Oiad" just sounds like a nonsense phrase.

3. Hot damn does Homestuck make me want to start drawing again. I mean, Transformers makes me want to draw again too, but I have an excuse for being bad at it because they're all robots and I've never drawn robots before. (Except that most of the fanart I want to draw is of the humans trololo) And now all the characters here are humanoid, or at least most of them are, and as such I've got no excuse.

I feel like I almost need to go back to drawing because writing has become so listless and chore-like lately, like "Nobody likes what you write and you write boring crap nobody cares about and in a few years it'll all be useless because this isn't getting you a career or doing anything productive with your time bluh bluh", that kind of feeling. Drawing is still by that criterion a waste of time, but at least it's a waste of time that more people seem to be responsive to and thus more willing to give my sad ass validation. What with Tumblr and the fandoms I'm in being cartoons/comics (and thus imitable in artwork, whereas real-life people are harder to do fanart for), I seem to be in a more and more visually-oriented corner of fandom and sometimes I can't help feeling like I'm being left behind.

And yet every time I even try drawing it all ends up looking stiff and stilted and unrealistic and I get frustrated and scribble over it and YOU GUYS MAKE IT LOOK SO FUCKING EASY I CAN'T EVEN. *pouts*

Any...advice, I guess, on how to get better? Or at least not feel like crap about being bad at it and post it anyway?

4. What makes up for my lack of drawing skills is the fact that over the weekend I have made some incredibly kickass jewelry and I am gonna post pictures in the next couple of days and you are all going to be wildly jealous or something.

5.  Fandom seems determined to make me want things I thought I didn't even like. Oh, you don't like enemy ships/FoeYay? Surprise, Doctor/Master! Now you do*. Oh, you say that doesn't count because they were so polite to each other when they were Three and Delgado? Have some TF Prime Optimus/Megatron. Changed your mind? Oh, and you know how you were talking about not liking doomed and unhappy ships? I brought you some Animated!Optimus/Sentinel/Elita. Now you do.

What's that? Pseudo-incest doesn't bother you but biological incest ships aren't your bag? Surprise Dave/Rose motherfucker.

I am almost afraid to state out loud that I don't like furry or vore or other fringe stuff because I'm terrified of fandom somehow twisting itself around to prove me wrong and I don't want to like them.

*Of course, if I'm really looking back into my fannish history, even before I got into Doctor Who I still shipped CSI: Miami Horatio/Stetler really hard. But then again, Miami was kind of weird.

...you don't get to judge me, okay.

6. So, lets say a hypothetical fan who was definitely not me was writing a Transformers fic with the original thirteen Primes in them. And when she started writing it, there were only a few Primes named, and while there was talk of there being one female Prime she wasn't actually named yet. So this fan picked a new name for her Prime (Volta) and went about her fannish day without ever actually writing this damn fic.

Fast forward maybe a year or so. The list of Primes is much more complete, and the name of the one lady, Solus, is now public knowledge. And it's pretty official that she's the only girl.

Does the hypothetical writer who is in no way me:

a) Change the name from Volta to Solus, even though that requires a little more canonical justification?
b) say "fuck it" and keep the "second" female Prime because screw that, let's have us More Ladies?

7. Ravens, what are you doing, how do you blow a lead like that? :(

8. Aaaand I didn't do my homework again. Bleh. Do it tomorrow. I had a busy busy week last week and I have earned the right to goof off this weekend.

I'm actually finished studying for the night, but I should probably be in bed. But first, another meaningless poll as to what I should be working on next once this test is over, since I've got a lot of unfinished stuff and I can't decide.[Poll #1783689]