Hours Gone By

As it says on the tin, answer one question about fandom for the next 30 days. The list of questions is below the cut.

( 30 Days of Fandom Questions )

29. What is your current project or projects?

NaNoWriMo. I keep telling myself I'll get the word target for the day done and then maybe switch to something else but it's actually quite difficult to write 1,667 words per day which is annoying because I used to be able to write 2-3,000 per day no problem. Plus I fell behind a couple of days and it was hard to catch up.

Still. ~1,667/day while waiting for the increased antidepressant dosage to kick in is better than 0/day without them. (For me, at least. This is not true for some people, please don't say to someone 'you'll be more creative if you take your meds!' Might not be true.)

Next year I think I'll start with a structured outline instead of stream-of-consciousness and see if that changes anything. Well, and for anything I might write in between. It's not like I wait till November to write stuff.

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

I like to write on a laptop with a movie or a show playing in the background. (Netflix is so great for this.) I usually prefer to write stream-of-consciousness so having something to distract me works very well. Sometimes if I've had an idea floating around in my head until it solidifies I'd rather use music and have nothing else to distract me so I can get the words down right.

I'll sometimes write by hand if all I have available is a notebook but my handwriting is atrocious and I tend to run into the problem of not being able to read it afterwards. :S

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?

Sometimes, sometimes not. I don't have playlists right now (since Grooveshark shut down and I'm still building up on Spotify and Windows Media Player) but I'll often just put a whole album in and let it play. I do like to have some background noise when I'm working. Netflix is great for that: I can marathon a show (How to Get Away With Murder S1 right now) and just type stream-of-consciousness while I'm half distracted.

What I can't deal with is frequent interruptions: phones, timers, people trying to talk to me but coming and going at intervals just long enough to derail my train of thought.  Especially if they're coming and going but on the same topic. For the love of god, put together your thoughts, decide what you have to say, and then come tell me.

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

I post to AO3 and on my journal (because you never know when archive sites might go down, though AO3 seems pretty entrenched). I used to have a personal site, years ago, but switched to LJ when fandom moved there as opposed to newsgroups and mailing lists, and if you're posting on AO3 someone else is handling site maintenance and upkeep. It's just easier.

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?

I haven't, no, though I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea. Sequels can be good - Aliens is a classic example, same with Star Trek III - but if you're not careful or you're just doing it to get hits/money they're probably going to go downhill pretty fast. Witness many of the sequels to slasher films in the 80s, or the progressive degeneration of the Jaws franchise.

19. When you have bunnies, do you sit down and start writing right away, or do you write down the idea for further use?

It depends where I am and how much of an impression it makes. Quite often I'll wait - I figure if the bunny stays in mind for a bit it'll be something I can work out. If not, it probably wouldn't have developed anyway.

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?

Bane, definitely! I try to use something descriptive or a line taken from the fic and I always do titles last. Most of my stuff in progress is saved under things like 'challenge fic #X', 'so-and-so go to/in *wherever*', '*something* happens' and I have a shameful amount of things saved as 'untitled'.

I haven't done chaptered fic but if I ever do the answer will almost certainly be 'not', unless it started life as a connected series of challenges or prompt responses or such.

15. Warnings – What do you feel it most important to warn for, and what's the strangest thing you've warned for in a fic?

I think it's important to warn for things that are major phobias and/or commonly experienced and the reader has a reasonable expectation to have a heads-up about. Sexual assault, suicide, abuse, violence etc. You can't warn for everything - you really can't - because people are so varied and have such a wide variety of personal experiences.

Nothing I've written has really warranted warnings. I think there's a note on To Chain Together about cursing, but to be honest if you're a Doctrine of Labyrinths fan you should expect that.  I checked all my stuff on AO3 and it's all 'No Archive Warnings Apply'.

13. Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

Usually I prefer canon, but I'd incorporate fanon if it made sense or were useful to the plot, or wasn't annoying me. Fanon tends to run the risk of taking one trait from a character (or even making some up) and blowing it all out of proportion. For example, in the early years (and possibly still, I haven't been paying attention) of Supernatural, fandom latched on to Dean's liking for pie and made it into a constantly referenced obsession. I counted once on a rewatch, up to the end of S3, and I think he mentioned pie maybe five times? And there was a sharp increase in S3 as the writers caught on.

Writing fanfic for a fandom has changed the way I saw a character, slightly, yes. When the idea for what would become the opening of To Chain Together popped into my head, I wondered what Mildmay would have to do at a lighthouse. Felix has his research, but Corambis clearly has a thing for magical machinery so I didn't think there would be a whole lot of upkeep or whatever for Mildmay to do. Maybe some stuff around the house, but he wouldn't have to light the lighthouse every night, probably. Plus, you can only do house repairs for so long. That ties into an underlying theme of the series: everyone, including Mildmay, tends to focus on Felix instead of thinking about Mildmay's needs. To be fair, Felix is hard to ignore. I did some thinking about Mildmay and his actions through the series, and realized he has a semi-suppressed nurturing streak. So I gave him a garden.