I signed up for Yuletide. Excitement!

The Nano is going well, although it's really hard. It's Vikings and Monks and sort of magic. Hard. But so awesome to be writing it at last. Actually, in some ways it's really easy as the general form of it has been bubbling about in our minds for some time now. It's those fiddly bits of actual plot that are the hard bits.

These late 19th C/early 20th C stereoscopic views of life in Japan are stunning.

To paraphrase matociquala, don't worry, you're probably not doing it wrong. She says lots of wise things, but I liked this:

"if you consistently find yourself pausing a third of the way into the book to rearrange the first hundred pages, and then moving on, that's okay. It's fine. Go ahead and do it."

I do this all the time with stories: start them and then about a third or halfway through have to stop and reconsider everything. It's always do it with a sense of guilt, like I should've thought things through better before I started. But hoorah! It's okay! I don't have to feel guilty any more.

It makes me feel a bit better about the pile of unfinished stories where I got confused about halfway through, then got too guilty about my failure to plot properly and gave up. It's not plotting that's a problem, it's allowing myself time to think things through and to tell the story how I want to tell it.

emungere showed me this cool to-do list site called remember the milk. My fic to do list is a little bit scary, but I whittled it down. Prioritised for the coming month:

1. Saiyuki livelongandmarry story
2. Fedal holiday exchange story
3. Rafa's diary
4. Vampiro!
5. To be confirmed

Here are some answers to the questions people asked in March - these are for anenko and daegaer

( Your stories include sexual elements quite often, and they're all awesome and unique. How do you tackle the issue of sex in your fiction, and keep things fresh both for yourself and your readers? )


( I'd be really interested in your thoughts about co-writing with someone. I found Cupidity to be seamless - did you find that your style and emungere's matched easily, or did there have to be a lot of editing? )

Um, I seem to have written more than five thousand words about Edwardian vampires (working title: Vampires in the fog).

This is quite exciting! I even have a part two planned. But no part three, sadly. Maybe I won't need a part three. Part two have to wait until I've finished my Sweet Charity story, unless I absolutely can't restrain myself. Vampires in the Fog is really a Saiyuki AU, with Hakkai as a dark and sinister Romanian count, exiled a particularly damp and foggy part of England and Gojyo is the increasingly confused young man he seduces makes tooth marks in.

However, I need to really get on and write more of Sweet Charity, which is hovering around the 8k mark after last week's drastic prune. Drastic prunes! They are good for you. I've struggled through the painful part of shuffling the characters into place and now things can move forward, unless I've now forgotten what's supposed to happen. I did write it down somewhere...

In other, and not related, vampire news, I watched 8 episodes of RH Plus, all the while muffling my cries of glee at the painful acting and terrible plots combined with brain melting levels of pretty. I think daegaer sums it up best, and I quote: it's like pure liquid manga applied to the eyeballs by angsty gay vampiric hot guys.

Whoa, saiyuki_time has taken off well. From Wednesday to today, 29 answers to the prompts. Go peeps!

It's been a social whirl chez Lux. We discovered a great new pub near us called the Nag's Head and there has been much drinking of real ale and matching hangovers. We went to see a friend's band on Thursday and they did the most fabulous covers of Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn. The pub was tiny, like being jammed into someone's front room, but it was such a lot of fun and there was whooping and shrieking.

Today I need to do some cleaning and shopping, so that the place is fit for daegaer's arrival this evening. I can't believe the weather forecast though, I thought March was suppsoed to go out like a lamb? Not with snow and gales. It just hailed, gahhh. Also, slugs are eating my delphiniums. There will be slug retribution, just wait. Hopefully in form of being eaten by frogs.

In hair dye news, the semi permanent coppery colour I used seems to have faded completely after about 8 washes instead of the 26 it said on the box. Huh. I tried a wash- in wash-out red too last night and it left absolutely no trace of colour in my hair. It did make it nice and shiny though.

In other news, my sweet charity fic is at about 8k and not even close to finishing. Ooops. I don't feel bad about this though, because I'm loving writing it. As to that, i really need to sit down and write more later today, as I've let it sit for about a week with only small updates.

Finally, in the great post of randomness, these are amazing: Disney heroes drawn as pin ups

For puddingcat - and others, if interested, answers to your questions about how I write. I hope they're useful.

This describes how I think about story structure and also has some ideas about ways to practise writing, based on my own experience.

( cut for long )

Thanks for all the answers to the special powers poll. My favourites:

Sanzo:
If he had telekinesis, he'd never let anyone get within 50 metres of him.
Pissed off!Medium.
Slight precognition and slight telepathy, the rest is all attitude

Hakkai:
Psychometry, healing and life-force vampirism
Only acts like he's reading your mind.
Absolute direction sense like an internal GPS - this made me think of Mildmay!

Goku
Spidey-sense
Telekenesis or just plain superstrength. Maybe he's the Incredible Hulk?

Gojyo
The ability to give someone an orgasm just by thinking about it.
Charm / presence / awe-inducing magnetism. Or pyrokinesis.
Empathic / psychometry - quite a few people suggested empath for Gojyo.

*mulls it over*

Also, random thought of the day (last night): I was wondering if Koumyou kept Ukoku and Kouryuu apart on purpose. Kouryuu only has one memory od Ukoku, but it's clear Ukoku visited Koumyou sometimes - or even regularly? I really want to read more stories about Nii.

I had a book related mishap this week. I started reading Weaveworld by Clive Barker, thinking it was his Imajica. (They have similar covers, shhhh). I read about four chapters, thinking 'this isn't as good as I remembered, and where the hell's the hermaphrodite assassin anyway? Also, carpets? What?'

Anyway, Weaveworld (weaveworld refers to a magical world in a carpet) is interesting although it has random moments of gyno-paranoia that left me quite traumatised. Some of the imagery is just-- yeech. But well, this is Clive Barker I suppose. It's not gripped me enough to finish it.

Moving on, 'In Search of Dracula' by Raymond T McNally and Radu Florescu arrrived today. It's a seveties version with a lurid cover! It was only 39p, compared to the £15 for the more recent one with an Edward Gorey cover.

( cut for luridity )

Although there are surely more learned works, I'm hoping for the low down on Vlad Tepes - not so much the impaling as about his complicated relationship with his brother Radu, and the activities of his apparent nemesis, Mehmet III, who kept Vlad's head preserved in honey after his death. It's a strangely compelling story.

As an aside, I watched Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula recently. Weirdly, it makes perfect sense if you see it as a tribute to Roger Corman, especially if you go to IMDB and find out that Coppola worked as assistant director for Corman during the Hammer Horror years. I have to admit I squeed and then continuted watching the film through new, Hammer oriented eyes. There's something about the colours and the sets and the art direction that is deeply deeply evocative of Corman's Hammer films. I must've watched a Hammer horror film every Friday night for years when I was little, as probably did most of the UK population in the 70s.

***

In other news, bidding for my fiction services ends at midnight (GMT) tomorrow.

Cupidity chapter 22, for your reading pleasure.

I think we just finished our book tonight. Total word count is about 63k, from 1 November to 4 December. Chapters 22-27 need editing. But, we has done it, by jove. I feel quite dazed. And very very pleased!

I reread one of my latest springkink fics yesterday and discovered it wasn't as good as I thought it was. How extremely annoying of it. However, perhaps if I leave it and read it again tomorrow it will have got better again.

My brain does seem to work like this with my own stories. One day I can hardly bear to read anything of mine, and another day I can like it all again. Does this happen to anyone else? But just recently I see more and more flaws in my writing and where it could be better. Which possibly might mean I am on a learning curve, I suppose.