opera142

Meme yoinked from Red Fiona. Last lines of my last 21 fics. ( All are available at my ficjournal Theropeopera. Where it's easy to leave feedback. Just sayin' )

Fic meme

1. Go to page 7 of your most recent WiP
2. Count seven lines down
3. Copy and paste the next seven lines of text

Okay, I fudged some. Exactly seven lines down meant a mess of sentence fragments and an odd ending point. So I picked a little further down the line and went a bit longer because of my ginormous ego because it wound up being an amazing summary of the whole fic. Whateva rule-followers, I do what I want.



[AJ] sucked in his bottom lip, vowing right then to put the brakes on he and Daniels’ latest means of killing time during car rides: coaching AJ on The Dignified Arts of Verbal Sparring and Silencing Cretins. For the most damning comebacks, Daniels told him to simply, “agree with the premise but return the onus back onto your opponent.” AJ asked what onus meant, then looked it up later to make sure.

It didn’t mean a kind of donkey, which had been AJ’s first guess. Onus meant blame, but fancier. Likely there were other details involved-- Daniels dealt in two-faced vocabulary, the kind that lured with sweet, convivial sentiments, then pounced on the first stutter. Christian spoke it too.

AJ jerked but Christian held tight and asked, “What are the Lord’s feelings on sodomy?”

“Nothing about it in the Commandments.” AJ said. Half a stone tablet about coveting though. A bit of his heart scarred over, and he asked again, “About my title shot.”

The Panics hit me hard today. I'm at the early-draft point where the story seems huge and tangled and flawed and a re-hash of all my ruts. I am running around the den, flailing like Lucy from the Peanuts while Moe, Schroeder-like, plays piano Mass Effect 3 or something.

Awesome run at the keyboard today. Highlights include:

-revising an okay sentence into a much, much better expression of the character's mood.

-finally, finally FINALLY polishing a scene that refused any and all previous attempted at refurbishing. I had taken to calling the scene Fuckleberry Sinn, which is funny and relevant only to me. That damn thing fought me at every word. I WON.

This week's writing issues:

1. So much abstraction and navel-gazing. So many paragraphs blathering on and on about sin and goodness and guilt and temptation. 1793* called and they want their moralizing novels back.

Also why so much pluperfect tense? And the modal verbs. I sound like Ric Flair when I moan "Oh God" during edits. I am a better writer than "should", "could", and "would". My use of "ought" however is a sign of genius.

2. The prose lacks umami. Don't know what the literary equivalent is so I'm calling it umami. The basic taste sensation that's sorta meaty, sorta savory and all about complexity. To abuse the food metaphor further, think about a really good spaghetti sauce. Garlic, basil and oregano are perceptable, but what really, really makes the sauce great is how all the flavors blend; the whole is rich, heady, savory. Right now, my prose is four hundred tiny hot fudge sundaes. Yummy, sure. On the sentence level, some of the lines are my best writing ever. Gobble, gobble. However, after the fourth or fifth bite, even though they're super yummy, they also come off as one-note-ish, uncomplex and uninvolving.

3. Part of the above comes from, I hope, my self-challenge to write longer sentences. Oh, the sprawling, wandering messes I've written. Some are terrific, believe it or not. Balls awesome. Musical, clear, clever. I can't believe I pulled them off. The thing, though, is that well-done long sentences are such complete thoughts. What needed to be said, was. Every speck of it. And, I find it difficult to build the next sentence because nothing is wanting from the last.

4. Expansion. Geez brain. Every sentence I write seems to open an entire scene that wants to be written-- the more sidetrack-y the better. Seriously, a character reflects on a roadtrip and the WHOLE DAMN TRIP wanted to be written about-- the driver's obsession with his CB radio, the assface riding shotgun, the sleeping dude, the passing scenery. I wanted a two or three sentence fond memory, my brain was like how about some total recall. Doubly annoying is the story itself is already flashback, fond memory, navel-gazing heavy. Quit writing more. Just make what's there more meaningful and active.

5. I'm writing for myself. Not in the selfish sense (or rather, the most obviously selfish sense like here's the unedited, ungrammar checked guide to my fetishes and story buttons), but in the

a)I'm making shit up when it suits me. I'm trying to be diligent about dates and PPVs and other verifiable crap. But with other stuff, I'm doing what I want. I doubt the character was brought up as religious as I'm making his past. The wrestling business does not operate like I'm protraying it. Let's hope some people aren't the dicks I'm writing them as.

b)I won't call this autobiographical, but there is A LOT of me in this. I'm counting on the whole What Seems Baldly Obvious To Me Is Nothing No One Else Will Catch Onto, but meh, I still feel stupidly exposed.

c) is tediously Operafic even without the point above. My current MO seems to be Let's See If I Can Turn Even The Most UnOpera Story Into a Totally By Opera story. Sometimes I worry that all my little writing projects within a story (write long sentences, write ugly characters, write characters no one would expect me to write) isn't just a self-deluding cover-up to avoid acknowledging that all I write is the same, snarky-smarky, dismal stories over and over.













*Take that, 1999 fic.

Choose five lines of description/non-dialogue and five lines/exchanges of dialogue from your stories that you consider to be favorites, or that are especially meaningful/important to you. Don't agonize over this: go with your first instincts!

( Okay, then )

I had a very good writing session last night. Not much in word count, only a couple of hundred. BUT, I got some major structure issues resolved, and a I cut about a page and half of placeholders/filler. I love that moment when the story's path clears, and culling the bramble gets easy.

Starting wordcount: 0
Ending wordcount: 722
Eats/keyboarder enstickyinger: Iced Tea, chicken quesadilla.
Internet time-waster Research: olive oil, how the f is it made; faux-gothy name for a Franco-German castle.
Tyop du jour: ducky for duchy
Things accomplished: Figured out how to mingle theme with seemingly ordinary description of a covered bridge. Then derailed myself by wondering what the purpose of a covered bridge is, as opposed to an open one. Also, calling the bridge Baylon's Bridge as a shout-out to Martin, but will likely change that.

Writing panics of the day:

a)When writing 3rd person POV, I spend way too much editing energy on fretting over whether a character's name or his/her pronoun works better in each use.

b)I've been working on the re-write of a placeholder paragraph for a week now. UGH. It's missing that one image or idea or idk-what that makes it CLICK. It feels unwhole somehow, like there's a gap in the logic.

c)Setting/background noise is giving me no end of hand-wringing. Sometimes I feel like my characters are yakking away on an empty stage. Othertimes, I feel like the story is way too cluttered. I guess it's a matter of finding/including the right details rather than a certain percentage, but UGH. Setting has always been my weak spot, and most writing how-to books just talk about the big picture stuff and authenticity. Which matter, but do not help me much with this particular story's setting problems.

I used some variation of "slop" 5 times in a 7-page draft. Verb, adverb, adjective, adjective, adverb.

No crime in slopping up a draft mucking up a draft, and hooray! for noticing the repetitions. But, it's like pulling fingernails trying to make myself swap out those 5 "slop"s. I <3 them all.