Bored now.

[jadesfire]

Yes, I've moved onto Buffy quotes. My brain for them is better than for Round the Horne.

I'm honestly and seriously fed up with this now. I fell over again this morning, straightening up from a drawer. Every time I get up off the sofa and go anywhere, I see stars for a moment and my knees wibble. DO NOT WANT.

Hurrumph.

I am comforting myself with my flist and old NCIS episodes, but I am bored and stressing about work (I have stuff to do! Doesn't my body know that?) and failing to get anything written which makes me grouchy. Grouchier.

Hurrrrrrrrrrrumph.

I know I haven't written anything in ages, but just in case anyone remembers that I used to....

Meme picked up most recently from topaz_eyes:
Ask me a question about one of my fanfictions. It can be absolutely anything in any fic and I will tell you the honest-to-god answer. Don’t hold back. Ask about major upcoming plot points if you want to. Whatever you ask, I have to answer truthfully.

And yes, 'will you ever finish anything ever again' is a reasonable question. Most of my fic is linked from the sidebar, but I'm working on a list that actually includes everything. Right now, my total stands at around 426,000, not including unfinished pieces. That's not too bad for 3 years' work, is it?

Right. Back to the pirates. \o?

Comments

[aeshna_uk]

I think there's a divide in what makes people interested in fanfic - for some it's primarily looking at the way the characters interact with the world, for others it's primarily looking at the way characters interact with one another. And there can be a very fundamental lack of understanding lurking within that divide - I've had the situation before now where I've said to someone that I mostly write gen and had a ten minute lecture on how H/C was actually smut in all but name (which I'd agree with - a friend describes it as "emotional porn" and I think that's pretty much accurate) before I've managed to interrupt and point out that I don't write H/C, I write gen. But the thought of writing anything that wasn't relationship-based was so utterly alien to the other person that they just couldn't work out the appeal.

I'm very strongly at the "interacting with the world" end of the scale, needless to say. :) I do write het and I do write slash - and I do it at the extremely porny end at that! - but I can't do it at any great length and I can usually slip a hint of plot into even a porn battle ficlet. I'll read both het and slash, but I've never had an OTP in my life and I'm much more likely to have avoidances than favourites where pairings are concerned. I'm with you on the unromantic nature - I couldn't write romance to save my life and really have very little interest in reading it.

But the thing is... it's easy to not concentrate on relationships. Canon manages it all the time, and TW is just chock-full of potential for gen storylines spread over a century and more! All of my longer bunnies are gen (though some with the proviso that, you know, Jack is in there) and mostly outside of the on-screen timeline, but I figure that someone'll read them even if others won't understand the appeal.... ;)

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of it in those terms before (and also hadn't thought of H/C before, although my Gen leanings might explain my complete lack of interest in the genre...)

I think I'd want to turn it around to 'how the world acts on the characters', mostly because the other way round implies that Gen *has* to have a plot, which I don't think it does. Most character studies, I would divide as Gen, but a lot of them don't have any more plot than 'character thinks'. Considering I'm a Gen writer, my plots suck, and I'm grateful that most readers over look the holes, or that my betas fill them for me as we go along. Mostly, I *am* interested in how the characters interact, and in general, a story will only work for me if I know what it's going to say about the characters. Plot is entirely secondary.

*g* It is hard to say you write Gen when you write Jack. He's pretty much his own fandom and his own genre!

[aeshna_uk]

H/C - one character is hurt, the other(s) comfort them, invariably leading to all of the physical and emotional closeness that one would expect with romance/smut, only not quite taking that final step. I know some folks who regard it as a distinct genre in its own right, while others think it's just slash (and I have mostly seen m/m) for the prudish or homophobic. I can't say that it's a type of fic I have much interest in but I will say that the emotional "hit" with H/C can be a lot stronger than in slash, where the focus is often more on getting the smut. The anticipation can be better than the pay-off sometimes.

I think I'd say that a story has to have a plot (something happens/changes) of some form, otherwise it's a snippet or a vignette. Gen/het/slash are just flavours (or colours, if you like) of all of those things. Character studies are character studies - I think they're often a beast unto themselves and don't fit into the neat gen/het/slash categories (much like Jack. ;)), and nor should they have to. There are no hard and fast rules, though, and that's good. People should feel free to write what they want to, just as readers should be free to cherry-pick their reading matter.

Still, "fic" seems to cover all bases and all writing formats. :) Cuts through a lot of the nit-picky taxonomy.

Interacting with the world cuts both ways - characters interact with and within their environment and that environment influences how they behave and interact with one another. I can't write something if I don't have a feel for that world and an understanding, if only in my head, of how it works - it's very much an extra canonical character for me. I'm absolutely no good with AUs that place the characters into entirely different lives!