All that I’ve currently got of Chapter 6 of The Great Escape is now up on Archive of Our Own.I wish I had more of this beyond a tangle of notes. But I don’t, yet. I’ll have to see if at some point I can actually untangle the various problems to wrap it up neatly.
In the meantime, giant bugs are attacking in Leatherbound… call the flyswatters!
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
Well may your writer’s blocks be pulverized and notes untangled in good order.
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Thanks. 🙂
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Thanks.
And yeah, lots of complexity proliferation.
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Have you tried just roughing it in and fixing it later? I had to do this with my novel.
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That’s what my notes are. Brain is just too tangled, and RL hasn’t eased up enough for me to relax and unravel the plot threads.
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Well if the story you’re currently focusing on isn’t cooperating, try poking at one of the other works you have on the backburner to see if anything emerges.
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How on earth do you make notes work for you? When I tried that, I did pretty much nothing but update the notes.
Which is why I was suggesting just writing the story, knowing it’s going to be a mess, and having someone else point out to you what’s wrong over email.
Strangely, keeping track of the characters of The Hot Place wasn’t the issue. It was remembering facts about the real world.
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Fiction writers can be very different.
One writer may not have anything to do with another.
You create a certain amount of information while you are creating the story, but you actually only put a smaller portion of that in the story. If you are writing an outline that will be turned into a story, the information that gets put into that is a small portion of what goes into the story. If one is the sort of writer that needs to plan, and one has experience, one gains a certain feel for what the outline actually needs.
Dave Drake is notorious for long wordy outlines. His website has an actual example of one he did for one of his Leary books. Most outliners would write a much shorter outline for a story of the same length.
The benefit of writing the ‘bone’ words first, without writing the ‘flesh’ words, is that you can look at the ‘bones’, and make sure the story has a working skeleton before spending the time to write the meat words. If you write the meat on the bone first, you can’t always see if the skeleton is intact and makes sense. Then, if you find out that it doesn’t make sense, you have to rewrite both the meat and the bone words. Of course, when you write the ‘bone’ words without the meat words, you sometimes have to write most of both anyway when you do a draft that has both.
Authors can be very different. What is cheap for one may be expensive for another.
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I like where the Great Escape is going, this sort of cold war style ‘find the Sekirei’ concept is great. Sad to see it go on the back burner, but I get where you’re coming from with the complexity.
As for what you do next, I’d love to see you touch back on the Monstrous Compendium or Waking to another sky. both of those are sitting at high tension points and it’s driving me insane.
Love your work though, and I’ll be waiting to see what you roll out next!
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Thanks! Trying to get Leatherbound roughed before the fickle bunnies can abandon me, but I am hoping to get back to one of those afterward.
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I’m eager to see what you get done, but figure that the various problems you’ve mentioned on the projects aren’t something that me asking will resolve.
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I’ll be honest, I’ve had somewhat mixed feelings (read ‘mild existential crisis’) over The Great Escape ever since I realized it was essentially a ‘and then they watched the other group’s show’ fic with some extra bits thrown in. Never thought I would find one of those I actually enjoyed reading and it’s kinda thrown me for a loop. Waking to Another Sky did me the same way. Still, I /have/ enjoyed it and I’m sad to see it go. Looking forward to great things in the future and here’s hoping for all the best with writing Leatherbound. (Also would like to mention my vote for a sequel to Walk Through the Valley. Love that fic. Very interesting take on how the realistic and unrealistic mechanics of Rurouni Kenshin could work in a futuristic setting. No pressure. Just geeking out. 🤩)
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And you have just put your finger smack on why those two fics stalled. I fell into the swamp of “this is what X characters need to know to figure out what’s going on”, and have not yet been able to drag myself out.
It robs you of momentum. Severely.
Digging my way out of that will not be fun. Ow.
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Of course when writing one constantly has to beat down certain types of bunnies. You know, the type that go like this:
“XYZ would be awesome!”
“That’s completely unworkable, we’d be turning the story into pure crack just to make it ‘cool’.”
“But it would be so Awesome!!”
“I just said-”
“It would be an Awesome Tale of Awesomeness!!!”
“….Right, no more mister nice author. You’re getting evicted the hard way.”
As for why I bring it up, I was looking at the current situation (and immediate future) of Minato’s flock. While taking down Minaka ASAP would be nice they would probably want to relocate out of New York (along with the other Flocks that are fleeing the ‘game’) to various places so that it’s that much harder for MBI to track them. The problem is finding a place crazy enough that Minato and co don’t really make a blip on the radar while at the same time allowing them to have a ‘normal’ life. And I’ve been rereading ‘What Comes Around’.
Tony: “Don’t worry, I know the perfect place. You two will even be able to finish college there, well at least via on-line courses.”
-pulls out his phone and starts dialing-
Pepper: “Tony, are you calling who I think you’re calling?”
Tony: “Maaaaybe……Hey, this Simon? It’s me Tony….What do you mean ‘which Tony?’ The Tony that built you that holo-projector for the latest Sinbad movie of course!….Yeah I know, long time no hear…..Yeah I can get you copies of the footage from the alien invasion. The non private stuff anyway. Listen, I heard you had gotten into the education business and was wondering if you could do me a favor…….Well you see I got some young ladies and gentlemen here that would probably fit right in with the ‘non-standard’ courses that I hear you’ve been doing and need to get out of New York. I’ll tell you more tonight.”
Elsewhere Ja’far gets an all new feeling of impending doom.
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Bunnies: No, Colorado Springs. You see, if you mash up a bunch of media, Egypt had to have been a weirdness magnet, with all sorts of SEP effects. That was caused by the operation of that particular gate. Running it in Colorado had to have done similar sorts of damage to the local mystical fields.
Me: This is a waste of time.
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*Cackles*
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