labingi

Perdita is away to the barber's--er, proofreader's--at last. I should say, Help the Gods is, as this is the edition I hope to release under that rather more interesting title.

Oh, Perdita, Perdita, I really don't know what I'm looking at when I look at you. My best analysis (21 years after I started writing and 11 after I "finished" the first edition) is that it has good parts and bad parts. In my most recent wordiness edit, there were moments it moved me to tears and moments that were just dull and a bit embarrassing. And there were some moments that were a bit embarrassing in a not-necessarily-bad-way, such as some slightly purplish romance. I wouldn't write that way today, but there's a reason it appeals, especially to young audiences, and Perdita is fundamentally a young person's book.

Here's my best assessment of the current version:

The Bad:
* Not very good prose. It's not as embarrassingly amateurish as the original, but it's very flat and rarely rises above functional.

* Those dang couple of plot points (no spoilers) that are just hard to justify in terms of character motivation.

* Some really dull bits, mostly surrounding Karmeena learning to mind read and the long, boring meeting--and, alas, as ever, chapter 1.

* Poor Laynia being stereotyped as seductress. I tried to make this interesting, but it still reads as stereotyped.

* My mom says the ending lacks resolution. I don't know. I think it's okay, but it is a "gray" ending.

The Good:
* Ethan and Sherayna, singly and together (overall: some bit read a bit "high school")

* Part 3--it's the part that seems most cohesive and moving.

* Leric. I still love him. He's one of those characters who is nothing like me yet whom I know well enough to just jump in and write. And Leric and Sherayna trying to work out their issues via playing First Causes is still a scene I love.

* The general theme, which one early reader summed up as "fanaticism." I think it makes its point.

(Ghanior--my icon--is not yet born at the time of this story, but I do think Ethan is one of his personal heroes.)

Chapters 1-5 on AO3

Chapter 5

I awoke to clamor, floundering in the water. A moment later, I woke truly on dry sand, woke to agony, throbbing, nauseous, his mind gasping, I did it, but where?, and a need to hide till the lightning in the brain stopped and sight was possible. And fear from us all, and cries and chatter.

A handlight clicked on--Chi'anové's. I groped for mine. So did Glin, and then three lights shown on the man crumpled by the embers of our fire.

I recall Tanez next to him, Tanez's voice, sharp, "It's Ghanior. He's a friend."

Ghanior? 'Ghanior Lastri'nom? The Director of the Walking Program. One of the First Walkers, the first generation. He had Walked to us--or been slammed, a thin, middle-aged man in a blue-black sy'gad's uniform, the second highest rank in the Ash'tor; he had come in Ash'tor's name.( Read more... )

Chapter 1
Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The next day we used the hand com to call for help. Again it was too easy. The general distress signal had been running not five minutes when an eager voice commed in:

"Hello? We are receiving. Respond please." The man spoke the Leddie language, Vunizh, for the same reason I am writing in Vunizh. For us, it's a lingua franca, and so for you of the future, at least, it should still be translatable. His accent was good but not native.

I described our situation, presenting myself as a diplomatic attaché and Chi'anové as a courier. It was so much our standard cover story it almost seemed the truth.

"I'm Tanez Shadowdell," said the man, "Of the Rha-Lutran Walking Academy."

Chi'anové and I glanced at each other. "Pardon me," I said, "You are the Tanez Shadowdell, the son of Sheseson?" If so, he was royalty among Walkers, son of one of the First to enter Jana.

"Yes, that's right." His tone, though amicable, suggested the question was a nuisance. "Two standard days ago, my fellow instructor, Soval, and I were taking three advanced students on a training Walk. Everything seemed ordinary, but when we Walked, Soval and I got slammed to this planet, like you."( Read more... )

29 – What is your current project or projects?

Being exhausted by 12-hour workdays in RL. But other than that, I have a good half dozen X-Men fic ideas. My current, current project is reworking my Raven/Erik fic to be, as it should be, more about Raven. I'm also trying to carve out time for Continuation stories because I don't want the fan fic (+ RL busyness) to completely kill my original fiction.

30 – Do you have a favorite fic you've written? What makes it your favorite? And don't forget to give us a link!

You know, my favorite fic I've written is probably the 30,000 word Banana Fish epistolary AU future fic because I feel like it does a nice job showing the transformations in Ash's and Eiji's characters and relationship over the course of several decades. I have to lump the sequel with it too because the letters don't have a proper ending on their own. Now, this is not going to be one people will rush off to read--cuz, dude, 30,000 words of old manga AU with touches of crossover--but here's the link.

27 – Where is your favorite place to write, and do you write by hand or on the computer?

My very favorite place is sprawled with my laptop on my sofa bed in front of the fire, but this only works in winter. Most of the time, I write at my desktop, which is not exciting but is where my main resources are (my laptop being somewhat old and broken). These days, I only write poetry/song by hand (and I do that rarely). I did write by hand from about age 13 or so when I seriously began writing up to around 23, when I started to transition to composing (vs. transcribing) on my computer. It was a hard transition. I still have many of my old notebooks, and sometimes they are valuable for checking old story ideas and Continuation canon. It makes me realize the dangers of digital ephemera. I have notebooks from when I was 15, but I've rarely managed to hold onto computer files that date from younger than 25, and those are fairly few, the big ones, like my novel that I keep saving and re-saving. Something's lost, quite literally, in moving to the computer.

( Small Remainder of the Questions )

25 – Music – Do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain "mood" to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?

I rarely listen to music as background for any other activity. I find it distracting, and if I tune it out enough to work, I usually feel like I'm missing it, so it's pointless to have it on. I do have playlists (mental playlists) for characters, though, and I do sometimes go through my character-typed songs as part of the same creative process that leads to fic. Most recently, I've been finding songs for Raven (X-Men), which has been inspiring me to fix my Raven fic.

( Rest of the Questions )

23 – When you post, where do you post to? Just your journal? Just an archive? Your own personal site?

I crosspost on DW and LJ these days, which seems a good system for automatic backing. I'm also coming to post more commonly on AO3, though I haven't gone back and posted much of what I wrote before I had an AO3 account. In the olden days of 2003-05 or so, I posted on fandom specific archives: BFA for Buffy and Leviathan for Farscape. I'm amazed I remember their names! My personal site (which is outdated and about to be moved) has some background reference information for the Continuation universe. Maybe some very small story fragments? Maybe not.

( Rest of the Questions )

21 – Sequels – Have you ever written a sequel to a fic you wrote, and if so, why, and if not, how do you feel about sequels?

Yes, I have. I wrote a sequel to "Sons and Lovers," a Death Note/Monster crossover, and I wrote a sequel to Love Letters, my epistolary Banana Fish epic. In both cases, more story needed to be told. "Sons and Lovers" took place in 1999(?) and DN (anime) takes place in 2007, so it begged the question of where the characters would be and what would happen in '07. The BF fic necessarily ended when Ash and Eiji stopped writing regular letters, which also happened to be when they met again, so obviously I had to write their meeting. Bascially, if there's more story, I'll tell it. (Oh, I also wrote a sequel to the Katze/Guy Ai no Kusabi fic, and that was to see how Katze and Guy would be doing once they'd been a couple for a while.)


( Rest of the Questions )

This is a Continuation story that is properly a side-story of the The Dying Cycle, but I'm going to start posting it as a standalone, mainly because I fully intend to write a crossover in which 'Eblia meets Charles Xavier. But of that odd psychological space, more later. Many thanks to Jamie and Jodi and louderandlouder for the excellent critiquing.

Mercy
by 'Eblia Te'Zhano Yoq

Dedication

'Ghanior, this is my love letter to you. It's for posterity too, for while this account can't be published in the current political climate, it might be of some historical value when these events have been forgotten. You and I know from 'Hasha's writings that love and history are not mutually exclusive. So here it is: my love for you--and for 'Shoan.


Chapter 1

I registered the signs but did not respond to them. In the month since Qer'yem had left me, she dominated my thoughts. I went to work in a fog, navigating by force of habit, and when the scenery changed, I noticed without noticing.

I was a spy then, an "Eye-man," in our language. (In Ash'torian, women are Eye-men too.) My partner, Chi'anové, and I served the Trae'dah Eye as field agents, he the tracker and I the reader. He would Walk in first to scout the assigned location. I'd follow in the guise of an attaché and listen in telepathically. This is against international law, but our government, for a warrior people, is remarkably discreet.

I've said Chi'anové was a Walker and assumed that you, my future readers, know I meant. Do you still have Walkers in your time, those adventurers implanted with a device that lets them enter the dimension called Jana and punch a line through it to instantly travel anywhere in our known planets? If you've never heard of this, it must sound like an incredible power. And it is. Yet I took it for granted, as I did Chi'anové.

Our assignment was routine, the kind we'd played dozens of times as smoothly as a high hand in fast-tac. But as soon as we were in the hall, Chi'anové said, "Damn, but you could smell the photo fear at that briefing," the fear of being held accountable.*

And I said, "Yes," because I'd felt it too, and thought no more about it.

In retrospect, it's clear they wanted to nullify my hypertelepathy. As an HT, I made a good spy, in part, because my telepathic skills are so sensitive that thoughts leak to me even through blocked minds, and since I don't have to reach out to read them, few sense the intrusion. But this could be as much as hazard for our handlers as for our marks. In this briefing, our handler had oozed unease. I was too preoccupied to care.

So much for my obtuseness, but what of Chi'anové? Later, for a time, it puzzled me that he wasn't more mistrustful. But it isn't hard to fathom. Covert intelligence is a fabric so famously woven of lies that lies become its honesty. They lied, he thought. We all do. Information, perversely, thrives in obfuscation. Insects call in the grass because on a slab, they'd be eaten. And so we grasshoppers sprang dutifully out into the meadow and into the waiting mouth.( Read more... )

17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?

I'm okay with titles. Sometimes I strike on one I really like... um... "The Madder, Better World" for my Please Save My Earth fic, which is a Doctor Who allusion and just came to me and captured what I wanted to illustrate. Sometimes I get really stuck for a title, and it's usually a sign that I don't know what my story is about yet. Usually, I come up with something that's fairly descriptive, either literally ("Kagetora and the Women") or metaphorically ("Exorcising the Demon," i.e. in Naoe's neurotic head).

( Rest of the Questions )