IWSG – Stalled Out (+ An Idea Up For Adoption)

Lately, I  just don’t seem able to write.  Not much, anyway, especially not at a single sitting.  My blogging has almost stopped entirely (I seem to be averaging about 2 posts a month on this blog, and about 1 every other month on my other blog), and my regular writing has really stalled, too.

Part of that is due to the re-write in progress, I think.  I believe I said last time that I was currently re-writing last year’s NaNo novel (and had been for both this year’s Camp sessions) and that for the current attempt I’ve completely replaced one of the characters, which has necessitated massive shifts in story.  Some of the scenes are barely altered (largely because he’s not in them), some are still similar enough that they’re easy to deal with, and then you get to the sequence I’m currently in, where there’s more that’s 100% new than there is that’s been kept.  And I don’t mean how much text and I can copy-and-paste from the old draft.  I mean the entire situation of why they’re in town, what they’re doing there and how they’re going to get to the island off the coast has nothing in common with the original version.  Once they get to the island, things won’t be as different, but…they have to get there first.  Today (er, yesterday) all I did was look over what I’d written the last time I worked on it (some two or three days previous) and ended up doing nothing, because I just wasn’t feeling it.

I feel like that’s a big problem with this draft, is that while some scenes I’m really into (mostly the ones with the two male leads interacting and developing the possibility of the relationship I originally intended them to have before I started the initial draft) and then there’s scenes like this one that feel like a chore to write (mostly, these are purely story scenes that don’t develop their relationship, even though they do tend to develop their characters).  I think if I was going back to my fanfic, I probably wouldn’t be in this slump, but I don’t want to stop halfway through this kind of re-write, because I feel like if I did, I’d never finish it.

*sigh*

It’s very frustrating, because I feel like there are a lot of wrong answers about what I need to do right now, and no right answers.

Another thing that’s bugging me is the world-building.  Specifically, the world’s religions.  I’ve based each culture loosely on a real world culture, and I’ve tended to have the characters just toss off mentions — generally in the form of oaths — to their gods, pretty much on the assumption that they’re identical to their Earth counterparts.  (To the extent that some of them don’t even have their own names yet, and just get [Athene] or [Aten] or whatever for now.)  I’m thinking of using this November’s NaNo to write up the mythology of their world, so I can have them more organically reference their myths and stuff.  Since I’m planning on releasing the final book (for free via LeanPub) when the re-writes are finally done, I could just release the myths as well, either before, after or simultaneously.  I haven’t at all started planning it yet, aside from trying to decide some of the details of what kind of myths I want to write (cosmogonies and theogonies, first off, then stories of the gods and major heroic tales for the cultures of the three leads), but I feel like it’s probably a good idea.  I hope.

The idea is that what I’ll be writing will be a book from that world, specifically a book on world mythology.  I’ve already set up a character in the novel who’s a professor studying mythology, so I can have him be the “author,” and that way I don’t have to worry about setting up extremely different voices for the myths from the different cultures, because they’re all being re-told by the same author.

Given the way my writing seems to go, the myths will probably make better reading than the novel.

*sigh*

Aaaaaaanyway, it’s not that I’m running out of ideas.  It’s just that almost none of my ideas are about how to approach this rewrite.

However!  I had a great idea the other day (at least, I think it’s a great idea) for a movie musical, and I wanted to share it, on the off chance that someone might read this who happens to be (or know) a screenwriter.

The movie would be a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984.  Now, it’s been a very long time since I read the novel, but I seem to recall that Big Brother never showed up (in fact, the way I remember it going, I’m not sure he even existed) and I’d want that to stay the case in the movie adaptation…but he’d still get a theme song.  The way I envision it, the Big Brother posters would feature an artist’s rendition of Sting at whatever age seems appropriate for Big Brother (I’m picturing him the way he looked in the mid-’90s, but that might not be old enough), and the theme song would, of course, be “Every Breath You Take.”  Possibly with new lyrics that removed the lines that make some people mistake it for a love song.

I can honestly say that I think Sting would sign on.  (Of course, I don’t actually know much (or anything) about the man aside from his lyrics (mostly from the ’70s-’80s) and a couple of quotes I’ve seen.  But those lyrics lead me to believe he would be receptive to the idea.)

So, if anyone reading this happens to work in the movie industry (or know Sting), please think about this idea seriously!  I think that if the movie hewed as closely to the book as possible (using actual novel text for the lyrics of the new songs, etc) it could be quite something.  I give you this idea freely, and I want neither compensation nor credit should it be made.  I totally want to see it if done right, though.

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IWSG – Still Frustrated (But a Bit Less So)

The pinched nerve situation I talked about in last month’s post (also the last post before this one *shame*) is still not completely resolved.  There are probably a lot of reasons for that, but most of them, I fear, stem from the fact that I didn’t want to take an indefinite break from work, and almost everything I do at work exacerbates the situation and prevents it from healing properly.  But at this point I can type for a little while as long as I have the computer directly on my lap; putting it on a desk (like at work *cough*) continues to pinch the nerve and my entire right arm goes all tingly within about 30 seconds.

So, due to the fact that I can kind of write again, I did take the risk of signing up for July CampNaNo, still revising last year’s NaNo novel, just like in April’s Camp.  But this time it’s a bit more…lazy.  I’m counting re-reading time as revising time.  (I’m measuring my goal in minutes, rather than words.)  My goal at first is to go through and try to standardize the characterization of one of my two leads.  That and add any major stuff I can think of that’s still missing.  There’s also a draft with an alpha reader right now, who will hopefully let me know how I can fix up the novel’s structure, though goodness knows it may not be salvageable.  (Since I don’t plan on typical publication, if it’s that bad, I may just release it into the wilds with broken structure.  As long as the characters are solid, the dialog good, and there aren’t any horrific grammatical errors, I figure bad structure is probably okay in the particular context of this novel.)

I’m still frustrated by my lack of physical ability to write, though, because I had all sorts of cool plot ideas during that no-writing down time, and I wasn’t even able to write them down, so now I’ve forgotten a lot of them, or they’ve at least grown cold and fuzzy, which isn’t much better than being forgotten.

I’m hoping to get back to writing short blog posts sometime this month, though.

But unfortunately I’ve hit my limit for now, and have to stop.

*sigh*

IWSG – Post April Camp

Because I was just doing revision instead of writing something new, CampNaNo this time did not feel quite as…how do I even put this?  An impetus, I guess?  Only that’s not quite it, because it did serve as a low-level impetus, finally getting me to stop putting it off and start the reworking on my novel from November.

I think my biggest accomplishment was sort of a by-product, though.  I knew I wanted to add material (at about 80k, it was short for me, but that isn’t why) to try and get around the complete stoppage of action near the end, and also some fun stuff to flesh in the world a bit.  My attempt to prevent the stoppage absolutely did not work; it still comes to a screeching halt, and I have no idea how to change that.  But the fun stuff opened an amazing door.  It started out in the form of an advertising campaign trying to get people to sign on with a very shady trading company (like the British or Dutch East India Companies, only with trading ships flown around the world by pegasi, and no imperialism to make their gains even more ill-gotten) and when that failed to get out all the information I wanted, I decided to follow it up with their new employee handbook.  (Parts of it, anyway.)

I had a lot of fun with the new employee handbook, but more importantly, it made me realize two things.  One, if I started half my chapters with an excerpt from a promotional ad or an employee handbook from a company like that, any readers I might have would obviously expect the company to feature in the story, and they would expect them to be evil.  And two, that it would be really boring if it was as simple as them just being evil.

So I decided I should have the company just be, well, a slightly more powerful and sadistic version of the real thing, but with a twist:  there’s a secret society hidden inside the company that’s been guarding exactly what the heroes are searching for, and will spend the whole series gaining pieces of in a desperate race against both the villain and the clock.  (Well, the calendar rather than the clock; they have three years.)  That way I get around the earlier, rather ludicrous idea I had that all the clues were in a 700 year old book and no one had ever in all that time stumbled across any of the pieces to move them.  This way, they have to get the information out of the members of the secret society, instead of already having the knowledge they need.  And some of them will cooperate, and others won’t.

I’m afraid I need to find a beta reader now, though.  I need help with the structural problem; I’m too close to it to see the solution.  (If there is one.)  It’d probably be good to have someone tell me if the characters are totally annoying, or whatnot.  I’m not quite sure where to find a beta reader, though.  Probably through the NaNo forums.  I mean, technically, I don’t absolutely need a beta reader, because I’m not planning on publishing this professionally, or even self-publishing it in any meaningful way.  (To defeat a forum troll, I have to release it to the public in some way, but I’m just planning on putting it on LeanPub for free, and posting a few chapters on AO3 to increase the chances of at least one person actually seeing that it exists and maybe downloading a copy.)  But I’d still like to get it into better shape than this before I set it adrift on the interwebs.  (Admittedly, LeanPub allows you to edit as much as you want even after you release it, but I’d rather it be as fixed as possible first.)

The idea of getting a beta reader terrifies me, though.  They’ll be expecting something much better than my crappy writing…and I worry that they’ll dismiss the whole book just because I can’t write descriptions (or even visualize the things to be described) or anything much other than dialog.

IWSG – A Day Late (Again)

*sigh*  I suck.  This is the second time (though thankfully not the second time in a row) that I’ve only remembered my Insecure Writer’s Support Group post the day after it was supposed to go up.  I could make a lot of excuses (things are hectic at work, I had my first assignment (of sorts) due this semester, I’m generally a stressed-out wreck) but ultimately this is just me being my usual idiotic self.

The bitter part is that I actually had stuff to talk about.

I’ve got two things going on with my writing right now.  My super-massive fanfic (155k!) is finally getting a rewrite, more than a year after I wrote it, thanks to someone from AO3 volunteering to beta it.  I’ve never actually worked with a beta before (not in a proper sense; I’ve had a few people read things and then give me a few hasty notes with no accompanying back-and-forth) so it’s a little nerve-wracking, but so far it’s been really awesome.  She’s been giving me very helpful notes about places I needed to flesh out and follow-through on earlier plot threads.  (With so much text, it’s not surprising that things got forgotten!  Especially considering I wrote it in a month.)

The other thing is that I’m trying to get myself ready for this year’s NaNo.  I’ve had this idea kicking around for a while now, but wanted to get the fanfic urge out of my system before I started devoting any serious attention to it.  Only then I discovered Sparkler, an online magazine that would be the absolute perfect place to try to publish this project if it turns out good enough to try to publish it (which is, admittedly, highly unlikely), and so now I’m totally motivated to try and get this puppy written.

I did finally work out a really good solution to a backstory issue that had been plaguing me — which had the additional benefit of making one of the main characters already a wanted man before the story started, so he can’t possibly blame the other main character for dragging him into danger —  but I’m painfully aware of how little actual world-building I’ve done so far.  I want each country in this fictional world to be partially based on real cultures, but I have this distressing tendency to use that as a crutch, thinking of it so totally blatantly as a transported version of the country that my (chaotic) plot-development word processor file has placeholder names like notFrance and notJapan.  (And my dependence on their history was going to be even more ludicrously similar, to the point that they were going to arrive in France during the Reign of Terror and then (despite that they’re a century apart) end up in Japan during the Meiji Restoration.  Uh, not in the same book.  This is the start of a series.)

Trying to figure out the right way to handle that aspect of the world-building is challenging.  Though perhaps some of it can be left for rewrites?  I dunno, though, that sounds dangerous.

I need to focus more time and attention on the world-building before November (fortunately, it’s only September, lol!), but I don’t know how much time I have to do so.  I’m working more days than I used to, and my responsibilities have increased (which I’m not complaining about in the least; getting to design exhibits was something I really wanted to do!), plus my class this semester is what’s officially called “directed readings,” which basically means I’m self-directed and just check in with the professor every so often to make sure I’m on the right track…which means I really have to dedicate a lot of time to the research, since no one else is going to do any of it for me.  (I mean, I like that, but it’s also a lot more stressful when you stop to think about it.)

So, yeah, I’ve got a lot to be insecure about right now, and yet I’m also kind of in a hopeful place.

IWSG – I forgot! (Again!)

Somehow, I ended up forgetting my post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group again.  Ugh.  (But at least it wasn’t twice in a row!)

What’s bugging me right now as a writer (and yes, I realize it’s pointless to go into it when I’m a day late, but…I’m doing so anyway) is that it seems like I’m more interested  in dreaming up scenarios than I am in writing out the stories.  I’m still working on the same project I was this time last month, and have gotten very little accomplished on it in the past month.  (Though in my own defense, I did have to spend half the month working on class projects, to the exclusion of all else.)  Meanwhile, I’ve come up with a bunch of other plots I’d like to explore.  (One of them just hit me today, in fact.)

I don’t know if it’s just the way my brain’s wired or what, but it’s starting to get frustrating.  The feeling that I can’t ever finish anything because I get tired of it and want to work on something else.  (Even though I do actually finish a lot of first drafts.  But only first drafts.)  Which is one thing when I get snatched away by different characters (it’s always the characters that compel me into whatever I’m writing, not the story), but when it’s just the idea of putting the characters in a different situation…it starts to feel very counter-productive.

Though I guess my writing is always counter-productive, since it’s taking away time I could spend on actually productive activities like cleaning my horrific house.

IWSG: Conflicted

So I’m back to being insecure again.  (This, I suppose, should come as no great surprise.  If I wasn’t prone to insecurity, why would I be taking part in the support group, right?)

After some SNAFU stuff on the NaNo forums regarding my nearly submitting my 2013 NaNo novel for self-pub, I made a pledge to myself that “screw it; I’m never publishing anything, and that’ll teach those jerks!”  (And no, that didn’t entirely make sense even at the time.  And the people in question were not trying to be jerks.  (Most of them weren’t, anyway.)  But it’s one of those heat-of-the-moment resolutions that becomes firm and feels permanent, because you feel like you’ll have lost if you go back on it.)

After that, I took the smart path of withdrawing from the NaNo forums for the next couple of years, but I don’t learn too good (poor grammar intended), and so I’ve been active on the forums again.

And this time the guy really was trying to be a jerk.

Basically, he said that I’ll be a racist if anyone in my entire novel has a different skin color from everyone else.

Yes, he was advocating an entire planet of uniform skin color.

And he thought that was somehow less racist than having a diverse world.  Ugh.  (And keep in mind, I neither said anything about nor intend to introduce any ethnic stereotyping or prejudices.  It’s a world very unlike our own, without our social construction of “race”.  They have some prejudices, of course, but they’re based on culture and nationality.  (Read any 19th century work wherein the English discuss people from other European nations, and you’ll see the kind of thing I mean.)  But really even those prejudices are unlikely to come up much, because it’s a steampunk/fantasy adventure with heavy doses of m/m romance.  They’re going to be much too busy flying around the world looking for the pieces of the McGuffin and flirting/having sex for weighty social issues to come up much.  Because I write light escapism.)

So, because he said all this crap about the world I’m trying to put together for a series of novels I haven’t even begun to start writing yet, I feel like “now I have to publish it just to prove that f***er wrong.”

But that is in direct opposition to the 2013 doctrine of “never publish anything ever no matter what!”

Which puts me in a weird emotional bind.  All the more weird considering I haven’t even named the main characters yet.  (Well, it kind of grew out of an AU fanfic idea, so for my plotting purposes I’ve been using the names of the movie characters.  Though at this point there’s not much similarity between my characters and the movie ones.)

It’s probably a moot point.  I’ll probably finish the first draft of book one (assuming I ever start writing the thing) and go “wow, this is irredeemably terrible” and go back to writing other stuff.  (That is, after all, what usually happens.  Like my 2012 NaNo novel, the last time I tried to spin an original novel out of a fanfic idea.  I was enjoying writing it at first, but by the time I was done I was just like “ugh, I never wanna see this piece of trash ever again!” and I haven’t opened the file since.)

Anyway, amusingly enough, this all kind of ties in to this month’s optional question

Have you ever pulled out a really old story and reworked it? Did it work out?

Because that 2013 NaNo novel?  It was the result when I finally got around to writing something I’d been planning since I was 18.  (So the idea was almost twenty years old.)  I think I had actually started writing it back in the summer of my 18th year, but…not sure what ever happened to the manuscript.  (And I guarantee it had zero similarity to what I eventually wrote.)

IWSG – Detail-oriented

I’ve been thinking about some of my problems doing research for historical fiction (whether set hundreds of years ago, or just a few decades back) because it’s always sort of irked me that I, someone studying history in a post-graduate setting, have so much trouble with writing period pieces that actually feel period-appropriate.

If you asked someone what it takes to write — or research — a good piece of historical fiction, they’d probably tell you that you need a detail-oriented mind, or at least strong attention to detail in your research.  And I always feel like I’m pretty detail-oriented in my research, so why do I have so much trouble?

I think I finally figured it out.  It’s because I’m too caught up in the details.  I spend so long looking into one little thing that I miss the big picture.  (The same applies to researching a location as the setting for a story.  I’ll be so caught up in what the architecture should look like or what kind of trees grow there that I’ll miss big, basic stuff like the general lay of the land.)

Unfortunately, I haven’t the foggiest what to do about the problem.  But I guess since I long ago decided that I didn’t even want to publish my writing, it probably doesn’t really matter.  If no one’s gonna read it, it can be as inaccurate as I please.  (Not that it pleases me to be inaccurate, but if I missed something in my initial research, then I’m probably not really aware that it’s inaccurate, right?)

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This post has been pre-written last week, ’cause I’m busy working on my NaNo novel right now.

IWSG – The NeverReady Story

Please don’t kill me.  I know it’s a lame post title.

So for once I actually looked at the monthly theme for the IWSG post, and it was “When do you know your story is ready?”

I actually have two answers to that.  One for my original works, and one for my fanfiction, which I’m sorry to say has completely taken over my (writing) life since I allowed myself to return to it for July’s CampNaNo.

The original works answer is easiest, and the reason for the post’s titles:  they’re never ready.

There was a time when I thought differently.  When I thought they could be polished up and presented to the world.  But then I stopped and actually looked at what I was writing, and realized that no, they absolutely could not be.  So, I write them, and maybe polish a little, make a few changes to things that really bug me about them, and then I just let them be.

I know it probably seems like a terrible waste of time to write hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of words with no intention of ever letting anyone else read them, but…since no one would read them even if I released them into the wilds of the Internet, what would be the point?  It’d be a much bigger waste of time to go through re-write after re-write, trying vainly to make dull stories and uninteresting characters into anything other than what they are, only to fail spectacularly and only sell one or two copies (at $1.99 or less), and even then only to friends and family who would only give very polite “how nice for you” responses.

Now, for fanfiction, it’s a bit different.  Because there’s no expectation of perfection in fanfiction (although I wish other writers would at least edit their stuff before posting it!), no one’s going to criticize for a mistake or twenty, and even major characterization errors can go uncommented upon.  Plus there’s a built-in audience in the form of other fans of the original work, so a few people will actually read what I’ve written, unlike what would happen if I tried self-publishing my original fiction.

And, of course, for fanfiction, I’m in 100% control, so I can always go back and change something even after I’ve posted it online.

So for fanfiction, it’s easier to decide something is “ready.”  I’ve developed a process:

1. I let it sit for a little while, and write something else.
2. I give it the once over, looking for major mistakes, and places where whole sections might need to be torn down and replaced.
3. I give the twice over?  Well, whatever you wanna call it.  I look it over again for mistakes and needed changes.
4. Let it simmer a while longer.
5. At least two more passes looking for errors and changes.
6. Edit something else.
7. Return to it, and if I can read it two or three times without wanting to change anything, it’s probably ready.  That’s when I run the spellcheck….which is complicated in this new fandom, because I like to change the dictionary setting so that the English character’s POV uses English spellings, and the American character’s POV uses American spellings.  Kind of weird, yeah, but I’d feel like it was lacking all attempts at verisimilitude if my British character (inside his own head) was talking about “color” and “honor” instead of “colour” and “honour”.
8. Then I read it over one last time as I’m posting it online.
9. Then I sit back and watch people ignore it.

Of course, that’s for short fanfiction.  I’m not sure yet how to handle the novella-and-longer stuff.  (July’s word tally was 155k.  And I’ve got another about 55k that I’ve written since.)  It’s going to be a variation on the theme above, I guess.

Missing Letter Mondays – No “O”

Fanfic

Sadly,
It has taken charge in my brain
After all.
I lack any strength,
Can’t prevent further abuse.

It’s fun, naturally.
Sexy guys,
Dancing in my head,
At a tune that is in my imagining.
Maybe…
A bit lacking depth.
(Me and what I’m writing.)

But…
Everything else I write
Lacks depth as well,
Thus what’s the difference?
(Except these guys have
Real faces.)

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IWSG – Post CampNaNo

Though CampNaNo is over, I don’t feel the usual release I have after the actual NaNo.  Normally, by Dec. 1, I’m free of what I’ve been writing, and can move on to other things.

But this time I’m still obsessed.

Admittedly, in part that’s because I’m looking the piece over to fix the worst problems so I can send it to one of the people from my cabin as a beta reader prior to possibly posting it on a fanfic site, but that doesn’t really cover the crux of the problem:  these characters haven’t let go of my brain yet.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if they were my characters.

I’d try inventing original characters similar to them for an original work, but the last time I tried that (NaNo 2012) it didn’t work in any regard:  by the time Dec. 1 rolled around, the characters were utterly unlike the ones they started out as, I was horribly disappointed by the book (to the extent that I’ve never once re-opened the file to have another look at it), and the new characters never took up residence in my head for a minute, not even while I was writing it.

Anyway, while I’m still afraid I’ve re-opened the fanfic floodgates (there are so many other things I want to write about these characters!), I’m trying to focus right now on what the heck I want to do in fixing this story up.  (“Story,” she says.  About a 155k behemoth.)

The biggest problem — other than the inconsistent pacing, lack of description, spotty characterization and dangling plot threads that are typical of me — is this one particular sequence relatively early on.

Okay, so my piece gets its two romantic leads from the movie, the reporter and the rock star.  (Which would be a great title for it if it was just about their romance.)  At the start of the fic, the reporter is already essentially in love with the rock star, though he’s not quite prepared to use those words to describe it.  And he doesn’t figure he’s ever going to see the rock star again, so he’s mostly just trying not to think about him.  Only then he goes to his favorite bar for a drink on Saturday night, and the rock star just happens to be there.  (Which reminds me, I need to explain what the heck he was doing there…)  Well, this obviously does nothing to reduce his romantic feelings for the other man, but he’s still trying to fight it.  Only then, the next Saturday, he goes back to the same bar (well, it’s more of a club than a bar, actually) and runs into the rock star again.  (That one I did explain.)

Now, here is where the difficulty comes in.  Because by the time I was writing that scene, I already had in mind several other scenes about their relationship:  two in between scenes of the reporter pining for the rock star, the scene where the rock star shows up at the reporter’s apartment completely wasted and they end up having rather unsatisfying sex, and then the first time we get the rock star’s POV which ends with them having much nicer sex.  (Yeah, I know, there are a lot of problems with that.)

And the difficulty in that?  Because the rock star had only gone back to that bar in the first place because he was hoping to run into the reporter again, in order to score with him, trying to keep them from hitting the sack together at the end of the second bar scene was so difficult that the only way I found to do it was to have four horny fangirls show up and chase the reporter away.  Which isn’t very convincing (said girls being in the 18-22 range, and said rock star being 37), is awfully (in)convenient timing, and isn’t much fun to read.  Plus it really ticked off the rock star (in that he felt the reporter had abandoned him to his vulture-like fans), so that when he next shows up, he’s incredibly angry (he does that) and calling the reporter some very not-nice names, to the point that it was actually physically difficult for me to write it.  (He uses a particular profanity a lot in the movie, one which I really don’t like and never use myself (a very rare thing), and though I have no trouble typing it normally, because it was aimed at the reporter, it took me like half an hour to get that part of the scene written, because my fingers so didn’t want to type that.)

The real problem is that I don’t like the idea of just re-writing the scene so that the girls don’t show up and the leads hook up a bit over a week early.  Because the two scenes of the reporter pining for the rock star are really…it would be going too far to say that they’re good, per se, but let’s suffice it to say that I really like them, particularly the one where he goes to a gay bar in the hopes of having a one-night stand to make him forget the rock star, only to get jealous when the sound system starts playing a love duet sung by the rock star and one of his exes.  And that’s the one that can’t still be used.  The other one — in which he goes to hear the rock star performing live at a local night club — could be adapted and kept, but the gay bar scene absolutely would make no sense if they’d already hooked up, and putting it before their second in-fic meeting is too soon:  they only met twice in the movie (yet I am absolutely not inventing the reporter’s feelings for the rock star) so for him to be that obsessed that quickly would be a bit much.  In fact, it’s really kind of pushing it to have it after their second in-fic meeting.

*sigh*

Well, that’s something I’m hoping the beta reader can help me with.

I also have something like 8 or 9 temp names that need replacing with real names.  Characters have temp names like Ughanother Nameneededhere and Ihate Namingcharacters.  Things I can swap out easily with “find – replace”…if I can come up with names for them.  (For a fanfic, it has a ludicrous number of OCs.  Probably because the nature of the story requires a ton of characters for them to interact with, which the movie does not provide, particularly in the 1984 section.)

…

I think I had more I wanted to say, but my back is now screaming at me that it’s time to lie down, so I’m just going to cut off this rambling mess of a post here.

Tomorrow will hopefully be back to my regularly scheduled programming.

Assuming my back will let me write.