Bryony

I'm at work right now, but January is my slow month and my boss is out of town, so I don't feel too guilty about doing this while I work, mwahaha. :) Hopefully having this written down somewhere will remind me of my train of thought when/if I settle down to do some REAL writing!

I've been thinking, in the last few minutes, about a very old, very unfinished fic of mine called Voice of God (the title now makes me gag a little bit, but it is fairly accurate, teehee!). I haven't posted a new chapter in about five or six years, for no reason in particular, I just kind of stopped. I think, like I may now be at risk of doing with Operation Zero, I just got overwhelmed with the large-scale war plot I'd decided to try out and then couldn't wrap my head around. It's too bad, because I think, despite being written mostly when I was 16-17, it contains some of the best writing I've ever done. It also of course contains a lot of cliches and immature ideas and solutions, some of which I won't be able to do anything about, and some of which I hopefully will. That latter is is what I'm thinking about today, because I've always intended to finish this fic at some point, and revising the problem points which would have the most wide-ranging impact would probably be a decent place to start.

IMO, Duo is the fic's biggest problem at the moment. I take issue with his characterization. Changing it would mean tweaking the plot a little bit, but again I think that would be for the best if I were to go back and keep writing. Right now he's a leader, and frankly I think that's kind of bullshit. Duo does not know everything or necessarily best, and he does not lead. There's a fic I'm reading at the moment that characterizes Duo similarly to how I did in VoG and it drives me absolutely crazy to read it, too. (It's particularly annoying because otherwise the quality of writing is so high - hella better than I could do, I'm sure, lol!) So Duo as leader must go, which means that to an extent the people Duo is leading must also go. This is also a good thing, because they are kind of just amorphous undefined blobs at the moment who pop up as and when I needed a convenient plot device. I think they should mostly be replaced with the people who I'm sure I've hinted at or mentioned in places in the fic - the people (who will hopefully be less amorphouse, better defined, not-just-plot-devices) who Duo inspires, without necessarily meaning to, but does not/cannot control & who end up hurting his cause more than helping it. And in cases where that doesn't make sense, those sections should probably just be deleted altogether.

Of course, I also need to figure out how to handle the conclusion of the whole voice of God thang that the fic is based on in a way this isn't totally Shtoopid with a capital S. And my ideas on that score now are not, I don't think, much better than they were when I was 16 and hadn't really worried too much about it. Oh well. There's still time! (Although *cough*spoiler*cough* time for Duo is running out - I kill him off shortly after the point where I stopped writing...)

Anyway, time to go home! I think it's raining out...

Soooooooooooo I seem to have become a lurker. As per my usual, I have been thinking about fics quite a lot, writing nothing, and reading a little when I'm being sneaky at work. But I am still here, the moss on the log. But today I logged into lj and saw a big fat line through terravayne's profile and that made me sad. I don't like it when things change and I don't know whether it's just her lj profile or fandom generally. Maybe if I wasn't such a shameful lurker I'd know these things, lol.

In other boring news, I have nothing to do this weekend, and I'm looking forward to vegging out immensely. Been busy with my silly am dram club for the past month or so, which has caused some stressful moments, but after the 18th of Feb when my show goes up it'll be back to just one night a week, which will probably be great for about a month, and then I'll start feeling like I need a more active life again! I also, in the end, did get fed up with my sad little laptop and bought a new one. Then someone in my bookclub brought up this game Bioshock, which I thought sounded familiar, and then I remembered that it was a game my brother convinced me to play shortly before I moved to Edinburgh, so I got partway through and never got to finish it. So of course, dork that I am, once I knew the name again and had this new powerhouse of a computer (relatively speaking) I just had to go out and get it so I could try again. Well, dear readers, this was a very foolish use of my money, because while the game works, it doesn't work quite as well as it did on my bro's comp, and I can never quite get myself looking in the right direction to deal with stressful situations in a timely manner, and I just succeed in making myself frustrated. So I'm backing off on Bioshock and devoting myself to soothing SimCity instead. And as if playing a computer game wasn't nurturing my inner geek enough, I kind of find myself wanting to watch an anime I haven't seen before (which shouldn't be hard given that I haven't seen many). Something imaginative, since so many western shows aren't, that I could potentially obsess over for a few days before remembering that GW is my one true love. Any recommendations?

And so concludes my life update until the next time I report back, hopefully then with fic in hand. (I'm still thinking of that 3x9...)

I applied for a job at the Edinburgh festival and they're going to interview me! :) Aaaand if (ififif) I get the job I might be able to afford a kitty, which would make my life just about complete lol.

Yay!

(Hehe, the other thing I might be able to afford is a new laptop - I've been whining about my current one for about two years now; it's still hanging on to its last breath, but every time I log onto the Internet I get about fifty gazillion messages about low memory and blahblahblah. And Mot, if you're reading this, I know you said you wanted to IM me sometime, but every time I go into my e-mail it says I need the latest Java to chat, which I can't seem to successfully download. I've tried, though, honest! You'd better just root for me to get a higher-paying job, lol.)

I had a dream, I guess it was about a year and a half ago now, about Quatre showing up at Duo's door in great agitation because he'd had a brain tumor removed and had discovered on waking up that his "soul of outer space" had disappeared too. Duo didn't fully grasp what Quatre was talking about and Q was frustrated at being unable to explain. I didn't plan at the time to write anything based on that, but then a couple of months ago when I was feeling very sleepy and possibly a little drunk, I wrote this.

( random4 )


I think that's everything I wrote and didn't post over the last few months that has any scrap of potential at all. Now maybe over the next few days I can catch up on my reading. :)

A longer time ago, before I was actually on livejournal I think, the gw_dark challenge was for Duo and tentacles. I still had such good intentions, having just finished the Noin one, and I had this idea in the shower one day. But the result is neither very good nor very dark, just kind of stupid. The scenelet is supposed to take place around episode 2, when OZ/the Alliance are looking for Heero's Gundam.

( Duo and the whale )


Yeeeeeah....

A couple of months ago on gw_dark Wufei was the character of the month and the challenge was incest. Unfortunately, the only Wufei incest scenarios I could come up with were more funny/ridiculous than dark so that didn't happen. But then the other day I thought of a Trowa/Catherine scenario and thought, what the hell, I'll try it.

I haven't gotten very far, but it feels more circusy than the 3x9 I've started, so I'm happy with that at any rate.

(And if you're totally grossed out by incest, don't worry, I haven't actually gotten to that part yet lol!)

( random2 )


...And that's it. But gosh, I'm blushing posting it for the public eye lol!

I have Internet at home once more, so here I am again. I don't have any finished fics, or at least not any that are fit enough for official posting, but I will put up a few random bits and pieces since I did say that I would use this to post my unfinished crap.

Remember two or three posts down when I said I wanted a 3x9 circus fic? Well, I wrote two whole pages before I got stuck, lol. Voila:

( random1 )

Details of Noin's backstory follow, since who knows whether it will actually get written!

( spoiler )

I'm not really sure how to go about the rest of the fic. Or even, really, if I should keep any of what I have, haha. When I sat down to it it felt like it should be a 1st-person pov, but now I'm not so sure; it seems kind of flat. Le sigh. Then I got the notion that I should maybe tell part of the fic through flashbacks, because I wasn't sure how to take it forward in the present, but I'm not convinced about the one I started to so I didn't include it here. Anyhoo. Yeah. We'll see what happens. Any plot suggestions toss 'em at me. Or write them yourself and let me read them, which I'm sure in the end would be much more satisfying. :)

A couple more randoms to follow in the coming days, but for now it's late and I'm off to bed so I can get up for work tomorrow.

I should have an Internet connection in my flat in two weeks, meaning I'll soon be able to get back into my usual routine of wasting my life online, lol. No fully-fledged fics to show for myself, but I expect I'll post a couple of scenelet/teaser type things, which I hope I'll be committed/productive enough to someday finish properly.

Anyway, back soon.

I just did this on absinthe_waltz's lj and said I'd put it here so now I am.

( meme )

Re 35, I probably won't go and answer all these questions again, because the answers would all just be the same. So if you wanna know, you should go read absinthe_waltz's post.

Been moving and am now back in a flat without Internet access. Le sigh. Dunno how long that will last, depends what the rest of my bill situation is like I expect.

Had a weird dream last night in which Wufei and Buffy the vampire slayer were fighting each other to the death. They were in public bathroom stalls trying to shoot each other's legs through the gaps under the stalls. It was weird. And not very effective. I'm not sure who was in the right...but I'm thinking Wufei? I think Duo was there helping him out too but I'm not positive.

Anyhoo, clearly I should really find some productive fic-related things to do with my time.

What with gw_dark's August challenge and motley_sis's new Noin fic, I've got her on the brain. And RL has conspired to put lots of clowns and circuses in my path the last couple of years. Proper nasty, grim clowns and circuses. So naturally I want them combined.

I want a post-war, post-Mars 3x9 fic in which Noin joins Trowa at the circus and discovers that it's not at all the nice place she imagined it would be.

The only trouble I see with this scenario is that the ringmaster always seemed like a pretty decent guy and might not tolerate abusive clowns running amok.

Ho hum.

File this under "Fics I will spend lots of time thinking about but never start/finish."

Finally got my UK driver's license - another hurdle down! (Now let's just hope I never have to use it.)

( much, much, much ranting ensues )

Just got back from the ballet - Return of Ulysses danced by the Royal Ballet of Flanders (and played of course by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra - whoop, whoop). Yum. I adore watching dance live, and it was a very nice way to top off the fact that I have now finished watching Season 5 of So You Think You Can Dance. Ahhhhh. (I do think I preferred Season 4, however; I felt like there was more camaraderie between the contestants last year, and as a result I felt closer to them and more emotionally involved. Or maybe it's just the difference between watching on my crappy laptop and my parents' fancy tv.) But the ballet. So pretty. I feel like watching dance is like porn for girls. It's so sensual, but at the same time very emotional. I love watching hip-hop because it always makes me feel like "omg, how do they DO that?" and I love watching ballet because it always makes me feel like "omg, how do they make it look so EASY?"

In other news, the thing I love about the Gundam Wing fandom is that, even after being here for like ten freaking years, I'm still finding new stuff, or in some cases old stuff that I just haven't seen before, that delights me. Maybe I'll become one of those people who starts posting fic recs in their journals.

ALSO, another random plug. One of my college friends was part of a 48-hour film project a while back, and they posted their film on YouTube. So if you're in the mood for some random sci-fi -- and really, if you're in the GW fandom, how can you not be? -- you should check out what they made; I thought it was surprisingly good (and don't worry, it's quite short!): VIDEO. My friend plays the creepy dude, which totally cracks me up. He's such a stylized actor.

Ooooh, my first meme, how exciting. I consider myself a bit of a bookworm, so naturally I couldn't resist this.

( meme )

Whooooooops! Posted this all over the place, except for here on my very own journal. Oh, Bryony, Bryony. Written for the August gw_dark challenge Noin/technology.

( to the fic... )

And speaking of technology I was reading jellybeanz_04's 18 June 2009 LJ post about the Lagrange points, and I was stunned to discover how far away L3 is from the Earth! It's on the opposite side of the sun. Like, what?? L3 is farther away than Mars. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I feel like the idea of having a colony there is almost kind of...backwards in a way. According to my (perhaps questionable) sources, using today's space shuttles it would take about 9 months to get to Mars, and about 7 months to get to the sun. Therefore, it would take at least 14 months to get to L3 (since presumably you'd wanna go well around the sun)! But hey, I can understand why there'd be a strong independence movement there; they'd be soooooo isolated from the rest of humanity. It kind of makes me wonder, too, how come L3 isn't the one that's run-down and poverty-stricken, you'd think it would be so much harder to for commerce to flourish in such isolation. Food for thought, eh?

===
EDIT! I thought I should edit the entry proper in case anyone should happen to care but not read the comments. I'm kind of reveling in my dumbassedness at the moment, so this might get a little rambly.

west_side just pointed out to me that the reason that it seems retarded to build a colony on the other side of the sun is because it would be, and GW didn't do that.

motley_sis linked me that lovely article on Lagrange points, and I honestly did read it. In fact, while I was reading the section about Earth/moon Lagrange points (as opposed to sun/Earth Lagrange points) I believe I even thought something along the lines of "wouldn't that make more sense?" Yeah. Uh, hello Bryony. Way to put two and two together. FAIL.

To sum up, while there is an L3 on the other side of the sun from the Earth, there's also an L3 on the other side of the Earth from the moon, and it would only be sensible if this was the Lagrange system that the GW colonies use. Thus making the above ramblings irrelevant.

Of course, now I'm rethinking what I thought about L4. If I'm remembering what I read correctly (although of course we clearly know now that can't be taken for granted) we know that there's not a lot of stuff collecting in the Earth/moon L4 point, and we haven't explored the sun/Earth L4 point sufficiently to know whether there's asteroids or whatever collecting there, as stuff is theoretically prone to do at L4 and L5. I'm pretty sure the L4 economy/Winner fortune is supposed to be based on asteroid mining, so in this instance it seems like the sun/Earth system would make more sense.

Can I have it both ways? No?

I guess I'll just have to satisfy myself with being a dumbass then.

LJ is reminding me of my own birthday. What's up with that? In other news, I discovered over the weekend that I can watch So You Think You Can Dance online. This makes me sooooo happy. Of course, it's the like the ONE reality show that the US didn't steal from Britain and that the UK hasn't copied yet - not to mention the one reality show that I actually like! - so I was pretty bummed when I thought I wouldn't get to see it this year. I've now marathoned through the first two eliminations. On the flip side, when I called home to share my joy, I discovered that my mother dearest has no concept of not spoiling the ending. Oh, ma...you so silly.

Festival season has started here in Eburgh. Went to listen to a Nigerian percussionist last night with a buddy from work along with her professional musician friends, then got into a discussion about Edinburgh vs. NYC arts scene. Reminded me of the last show I saw in New York - unbelievably a YEAR ago now! Note: If Fuerza Bruta is still playing at the Darryl Roth Theatre and you live in the NY/NJ/CT tri-state area, you should definitely go see it (just try to make it when they're having some kind of deal, because otherwise tix are wicked expensive). I'm a big fan of it and its predecessor De La Guarda. Much fun.

Am off and on working on some fics. Wrote the randomest piece of crap for the old gw_dark challenge about Duo and tentacles, but it's so short and stupid I don't really see the point of posting it. I'll probably get desperate enough to do so in a few days anyway, though. Also dabbling in a Quatre ficlet based on a dream I had last year, which I did not at the time plan to turn into a fic, in which Q's little empathy thing turns out to be linked to a brain tumor. Too bad for Quatre he only finds this out only after said tumor has been removed, and there is much subsequent angsting.

Have a couple of ideas for the next couple of scenes of Op Zero, but still need to write them. Soon. It's just that So You Think You Can Dance calls to me.........

( continued... )

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Gosh! So what do you think happens next????? O.O

(No, seriously.)

All right people, this is it. Forget all the other fics I've posted on this journal to date - this is the one I actually want you to read. No, it is not complete yet; but it IS one that I want and intend to finish, and any help I can scam out of people to that end I will! ;)

Warnings: AU
( to the fic... )

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Fic's too long for one post! Ack!

Hehehe, I just reread this in the wake of reading Ch. 1 of cozzybob's fic Vicarious on gw_dark (oops, we named our serial killers the same thing, womp-womp), and let me just tell you now - there's no comparison. Her fic is soooo much better than this one: Wufei and Sally are awesomely characterized, they're having this fabulously sexy covert affair - and the relationship apart from the sex feels totally gritty and real too, and the writing is awesomely sharp and wonderful.

This...I do like the ideas I planned to use for it, but the execution is pretty uber-crap. (To be fair, I think at the time I was writing I was mostly just concerned with getting down the parts I had in my head ASAP, not with making them good, but still.) Will it be finished? Whooooo knoooooows, but this beginning will need some major revisions if it is.....!!

Ah, if only I could just get someone else to write my ideas for me, so I could just have the pleasure of reading them. That would be so much nicer. ;)

Also, part of the premise of this fic is shared with a round-robin I was involved in a few years ago on WuSal, but the path I plan(ned?) to take this should be sufficiently different that no one would confuse the two, lol.

Oh, and also this was the other fic that was conceived in the middle of my X-Files binge. Anyway...

( to the fic... )