KJ

Another round of DOINK! (aka Final Fantasy Exchange) has come and gone, and although I still have plenty of modly stuff to do, I'm happy to present my gifts, both given and received.

Firstly, my gift from laughingpineapple was a really beautiful artwork of Larsa and Al-Cid, reconnecting their friendship. I think this may be the first time I've ever gotten art as a gift, so that's exciting all on its own!

"Actual Deep Political Talk"
On AO3 / On Tumblr

I only wrote the one story this year, in part because of mod stuff and in part because I'm having issues with concentrating on writing lately. (Also why I haven't been posting much.) A long story, and nothing I want to get into right now, but anyway it kept me from playing around in Moogle Fluff or taking any pinch hits. Hopefully it will all resolve soon. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with my gift to wimblydonner, who requested something about any character reacting to the changes in Spira brought by the Eternal Calm. After noodling around with some ideas, I settled on Dona and Barthello, largely because I've never really written about them before.

Title: Rebuild
Fandom: FFX/X-2
Rating: Mature
Wordcount: ~3400
Characters: Dona/Barthello, Lucil, Nooj
Spoilers: For the end of FFX, and some implied for X-2
Notes: Fits within the continuity of Aftermath, but you don't need to have read that story to understand this one.

Summary: What's a summoner to do when there's nothing left to summon, no Sin left to defeat? Dona begins to search for her own answers.

On AO3

Days written: 20/31
Words written: 9,411
Words of fic written: 3,733
Percentage of fic words written on the last day of the month: 27
Stories worked on: 4
Stories posted: 2 (One Chocobo Down, one EX Mode)

( Graph behind the cut )

Well, that pretty much sucked. As I observed on Twitter, this is the third March in a row that I have been utterly unable to keep to a writing schedule. Not sure whether it's coincidence or otherwise -- March is a busy month, what with birthday festivities and the end of the quarter, and it seems like I often have my annual work conference event in or near March, and this year and last I had the videogame time suck problem. But I have to wonder if it's something else going on too, with rhythms of life and seasons and fandom. Fortunately, FFEX is this month, and that always helps my productivity.

Anyway, on to specific goals, where I did a little better:

1. Write at least five days per week. On a week by week basis, not even close. On average... no, still not even close. Closer to four days a week, I'd say.

2. Finish and post EX Mode fic. Done!

3. Make significant progress on Alice/Pirates fic. I worked on it, but I wouldn't say the progress was significant. That's okay, though, because...

4. Aftermath draft! ...is sent to beta! And, as of yesterday, I have a complete draft of the epilogue. I might actually finish this story. I can hardly believe it.

5. Wrap up some niggling WIPs. Finished and posted the CD story but that was all.

Except for the writing schedule, and especially given that, I did pretty well with this. And now, we put March behind us and move on to the promise of a new day in April...

1. Write an average of six days per week. Back to the higher goal, because I have no excuse not to, really.

2. FFEX assignment(s)!

3. Depending on beta, finish and post Aftermath.

Keeping it light on specifics, since I don't have my Doink! assignment yet and so it's hard to say how much time that will take up. I'm sure that will give me more than enough to do.

Title: Pilgrim
Fandom: FFX/X-2
Rating: G
Wordcount: ~400
Characters: Isaaru
Spoilers: Yes, both games
Notes: Remember back when I took requests to write character sketches? No one asked for this one, but it came to me, in force, as I was re-reading the latest chapter of Aftermath today, and demanded that I write it. Set between the games.

( Isaaru had waited his whole life to make the trek across the Calm Lands, but he'd never dreamed it would be like this. )

Clearly, I underestimated the havoc that Final Fantasy XIII was going to wreak on my writing schedule.

Days written: 21/31
Words written: 9,734 (32,693 for the year)
Words of fic written: 5,055
Stories worked on: 4
Stories posted: 1
Chapters of "Aftermath" posted: 1! \o/

( March graph behind the cut )

Specific goals:

1. Write an average of six days per week. Ha. Hahahahaha. Ha.

In retrospect, I should really have factored the release of FFXIII last month into my plans. Although I couldn't have predicted that T was going to want to play every night after dinner. Probably I'm lucky to have written on as many days as I did.

2. Finish and post at least one more story (ideally two) from the Alphabet Fic Meme. Posted one, and completely drafted another. Check.

3. Finish and post "Aftermath" Chapter 4 (depending on beta) and/or complete an outline for Chapter 5. Yes!!!! Chapter 4 is done and live! This makes up for everything. If I fail every other single thing I set out to do this year and get "Aftermath" finished, I will count 2010 as a success. Also got a few thousand words of Chapter 5 written.

Missed one goal, got two. Not so bad, given the delusions I was laboring under when I set them...

So I want to set more realistic goals for April, but it's tricky without knowing what my FFEX assignment will be. Between that, FFXIII, and a business trip/vacation at the end of the month, let's keep it modest:

1. Write five days per week. (I really hate to bring this number down from six, but better that right now, I think, than set it too high. Realistic goals, that's the watchword.)

2. Finish the current WIP for the Alphabet Fic Meme and draft at least one more.

3. Write first draft of FFEX assignment.

4. Complete first draft of rules/documentation for Mega Flare. (That counts as a writing project, doesn't it?) (And hell yes, that name is going to stick. Why would I ever give that up?)

This may or may not help catch me up on getyourwordsout -- I'm now more than 15,000 words behind the pace, eep! -- but at least it will get me started. FFEX did wonders for my productivity last year, so here's hoping.

FFEX signups are open! I have signed up. Everyone else should go do that right now.

Also, I had a birthday brunch on Sunday, and it was excellent. I have awesome friends.

Also also, on Saturday I took a chocolate tour with T and amybang. This is highly recommended. Three hours, walking around downtown San Francisco, tasting different kinds of chocolate and truffles, and discovering a couple of excellent shops I didn't even know existed. Yum. And fun.

Also also also, I'm making excellent progress on Chapter 4 of Aftermath. It's only been what, a year and a half? Geez. But anyway, I am on track to post the chapter before getting my FFEX assignment! This is very exciting.

And last but not least, watch this space for an update on the Final Fantasy Big Bang project. Because a few people have asked: no, it's absolutely not too late to drop in on the initial entry and express interest! Take the poll, leave your thoughts. I hope to have a new post with a tentative schedule ready this weekend.

This was a particularly sweet long weekend because, up until Wednesday, I wasn't sure whether I was going to get it -- there was an event on Monday that I originally thought I would have to be present for, but my boss got me off the hook. Fabulous. It was too short, as such weekends always are, but it was still the break I needed to recover from the rush to get ready for the new quarter. I'll have to hit the ground running today, of course, but I might actually have the energy to do that now.

It was pretty low key -- Friday night was the school staff holiday party (yes, in January; that's the tradition at my school. In December there would be too many conflicts with finals), which was fun, if too loud. Saturday was be-lazy-around-the-house day. On Sunday, SE and SF came up for an excellent crab dinner. Monday I had made tentative plans for lunch and a movie with SE, but the long-promised winter storm blew in that morning and we decided it was too icky to go out, so I spent most of the day writing instead.

Writing Aftermath.

Anyone who has talked writing with me lately knows that Aftermath has been much on my mind in recent weeks, largely as a source of frustration. There is no question that this has been the hardest story for me to write ever: I started setting it down in October 2006, the first chapter was posted in February 2007, and it has continued to be a slow and painful process. Every year since 2007, "finish Aftermath" has been my primary fic-writing goal for the year to come, and every year I have failed to do so. Sometime, I pull it out, look at it, and put it away again; sometimes I pull it out, make edits, and put it away again; every so often, I pull it out and add a few words, get an inspiration for one scene and set it down, then get stopped dead by the next and put it away again.

Until yesterday, when I started writing, futzing around with ideas, took a couple of false starts, then suddenly hit on the right direction. And the next thing I knew, the chapter was nearly finished, and I knew not only how it was going to end but where the next chapter was going, which has been a problem throughout with Aftermath: I finish one chapter, segment, or scene with no idea what's going to happen after that. Aftermath is the first long story I ever started without a clear vision of where it was going to end. I have complained about writing endings in this space before, but that's in the context of shorts. Normally, when I start a long story, I have the image of the last paragraph in my head. It might change in the meantime, and I may have no idea how it's going to get there, but I have a destination. Aftermath began life as a short -- the first scene of the first chapter, Beclem at Operation Mi'ihen, was going to be the entire story -- but as I was writing it, the vision of the second scene (Beclem finding Nooj, who is on the run from the Travel Agency) appeared whole in my brain, and suddenly I was writing a novel. I knew from that point that Aftermath was going to be the story of the Youth League, but that was all I knew. Inspiration has come slowly, it has come in fits and starts, and it has come from talking ideas through with people, but the true leaps forward have only ever come from actually sitting down and writing.

This is a truism of writing, at least for me: inspiration may or may not come from writing, but it will never come from not-writing. I don't know why I have to keep re-learning this fact, but I do. And yet I continue to find ways to distract myself from stories that aren't coming easily -- catching up on Google Reader, chatting with people, getting sucked into the latest metafandom conversation, betaing and working on fandom projects. I don't want to give any of those things up, and I don't plan to (betaing, particularly, I think helps me to become a better writer, and so I think it should at least partly count as writing time), but I need to better learn when I am genuinely taking a break and when I am avoiding working on a story. Maybe if I hadn't avoided Aftermath for so long, it would be done by now and I could move onto the next major work with a clear conscience.

So I ask you, dear writers on the friends list: how do you tell the difference? How do you get started when the blank screen is staring you in the face and the weight of your own expectations for the story seem too much to bear? And how, short of tearing the Internet connection from the wall, do you shift your focus when the time comes? (I have thought of going offline, but I actually find the lack of a distraction to be more distracting than the distraction itself, if that makes any sense. I keep wondering if I'm missing anything. It's similar to my inability to concentrate in total silence.)

By the way, I finished the rough draft of Chapter Four this morning, and, in a first for this story, set down the first few words of Chapter Five, which ought to be the last. So the end is, possibly, in sight. Wow.

I've done this before, and now I'm doing it again. This iteration is from auronlu.

Comment with the word "ICONS" and I'll select six of yours for you to talk about in your journal.

( Auronlu's choices and my explanations behind the cut. )

In other news, I have an amybang all week, so if I'm a little scarce the next few days, that would be why.

Title: The Reason
Fandom: FFX-2
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 470
Pairings: Beclem/Yuna
Spoilers: For the end of FFX only.
Notes: In the spirit of finishing things up before the end of the year, I caught up on transferring everything I've written this summer and fall to my archive, including my three Trick or Treat 2008 stories. Usually, when I participate in a fic battle, I don't post the ficlets individually in my journal, but I've been meaning to make an exception for these, and this one in particular. The prompt was "Beclem/Yuna, murder", and I was so strongly put in mind of "Aftermath" that I couldn't help but write a metafic for it. Set post-game (and so post-"Aftermath" as well).

( 'I had to kill them, you know.' )

So I was going back through my LJ archives, and I just noticed that it's been a year and a day since I posted Chapter Two of "Aftermath". Crikey! How did that happen?

I did complete a first draft awhile back, but it was in need of a lot of help -- it was more like a detailed outline than a real draft, and thank god for having a beta reader who was willing and able to tell me so -- and the prospect seemed daunting, so I kept setting it aside. Fortunately, a few weeks ago I got inspired to pick it up again, and I've been making good progress on it for the first time in ages. Including a little bit today, and a good discussion about my changes so far and my future intentions with said beta, which was nice and energizing. So maybe it won't take me another year to finish the story.

Sometimes I suspect what's blocking my writing in general is the feeling that I really ought to be finishing this fic rather than working on quicker and easier things. So I feel guilty for spending time on shorts, and don't give them the attention they deserve, and can't finish them, (or in some cases even get started), and so everything suffers. Also, this is the only multi-chapter story I've written alone since "Salvage"; every other larger effort since has been in collaboration with kunstarniki. And while I absolutely loved writing collaboratively, I wonder if I became too dependent on the feedback from my writing partner. I got used to the idea that someone would be taking a look at every scene I wrote and that I would have feedback within a day or two of sending it along. I'm not getting that with "Aftermath", and so I get tempted into working on shorts that I can finish more quickly (in theory anyway -- it took me *months* to get around to finishing "Simple", for example). Am I really admitting that I'm this much of a sucker for feedback? I guess I am.

I know this lack of time, inspiration, and motivation to write is a bug that's going around fandom, and this is probably just how it's manifested in me. Blah blah whine. If nothing else, making a public statement that I fully intend to keep this story going, and to finish sooner rather than later, might keep me on track to actually do it.

Title: Aftermath
Fandom: FFX-2
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: ~6400 (Chapter 1 of ?)
Characters: Beclem, Nooj
Pairings: n/a
Spoilers: For Beclem and Nooj backstories; nothing serious.
Notes: And KJ makes her glorious (?) return to FF.net with the first chapter of the fic that she never expected to write. This story has been a long time in the making; it was bunnied almost a year and a half ago, by a comment yuna_flowering left on an AGL review, asking about Beclem and what turned him so strongly against the past. I always meant just to write a short about that, but then Nooj showed up and... well. I've been working on this off and on since at least October and I figure I have enough to start posting. So here goes. Thanks to bottle_of_shine for a beta read.

Link to Chapter One