the deep moans round with many voices

December 18: mapping worlds and fandoms (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

Heh. This one requires some visual aids, I think. :-)

(I am assuming you mean physical maps, by the way, not social maps.)

I don't draw maps for my fanfiction work. The closest I've come is a seating diagram for the Great Hall in Hogwarts (did you know it changed between the first book and the later series?), a terrible architectural sketch of Ayakawa Yukiko's apartment building, and a vague attempt at assigning locations to a few buildings in Konoha.

Here are the two HP seating diagrams:






Here is an illustration of why I should never be an architect:



FYI, the section labeled A-D and the section labeled G-J both go up to the 7th story. The E-F section stops on the 5th or 6th story, which is why there are two staircases. The water tower sits between the front and back sections, and that little area is where Yukiko sometimes goes to get a bit of privacy. (IIRC, her own apartment and office are the E and F units on the 1st floor -- aka the ground floor, for Europeans.) The only time I really bothered to dig up and reference this diagram was when I had to assign Sasuke an apartment number.

And here is a terrible and probably incompatible with canon sketch of Konoha at large, which I don't think I have ever actually used as a writing aid:



I do have some ideas about 'what goes where' when it comes to parts of the Narnian world that aren't on any of the (incredibly implausible) maps of dubious canonicity, but they're entirely held in my head or in verbal form -- you can read my first Thoughts on Calormen post to see what I mean. I have made a similarly verbal attempt to rationalize Kaori Yuki's contradictory statements about the geography of Heaven and Hell in Angel Sanctuary, but again, that's not a map.

Original work is a different question entirely... and in fact requires so many illustrations that I am still in the process of scanning and/or photographing stuff and haven't even begun uploading things to Imgur. So I'm going to talk about that tomorrow, since I don't currently have an assigned topic for the 19th. Serendipity! :-)

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December Talking Meme: All Days

Things I have written in the past two days:

1. 300 words of "Trollstuck" ch. 5, bringing me to a total of 550, which I still cannot post because it breaks off at the start of a pesterlog between Karkat and Terezi rather than at any kind of natural pause, and I'm drawing a blank on what Terezi should be doing when Karkat contacts her and how they should interact. I need to go reread their early chatlogs from Hivebent.

2. 200 words each of two sections of "The Transient and the Eternal" (which, yes, I am in fact still writing), neither of which I can post because neither is done.

3. 350 words of Jade and Dave planning temporospatial logistics for the frog hunting/breeding quest on LOFAF. Because seriously, they had to be looping like crazy to make that work, and also find time to visit Echidna and figure out things like that Adagio Redshift combined time/space attack they used on Jack later on. All of which we never got to see. And again, I can't post the fic because it's absurdly far from done.

Gnrgh.

I want to FINISH SOMETHING ALREADY.

...

*faffs off to try writing more Narutostuck*

(ETA: Okay, got 150 words of "Damaged Goods," bringing me to a total of 675, and I officially give up for the night. Hopefully I will be able to think better tomorrow.)

I'm doing thirtyforthree again, this time for Kira Sakuya/Mudo Setsuna/Mudo Sara from Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary. There will be spoilers in nearly every theme -- given the characters, it's nearly impossible to avoid them! -- and a lot of potentially objectionable content. This is because the source manga has a lot of potentially objectionable content. If incest squicks you, or you know you'll be bothered by some unusual and often negative interpretations of Judeo-Christian theology, you probably won't want to read any of these stories.

With that said...

Theme: #6 - If only
Warnings: spoilers!
Notes: This fic is set post-manga, in March 2038. Sara is 54 and Setsuna 55. At some point in the past decade, they moved back from Nagasaki to Tokyo since their parents are both dead now (father from a heart attack, mother from pancreatic cancer) and they're not that worried about hiding anymore. In terms of internal series continuity, it falls between Babies and "If it wasn't you..."

I wrote the first half of this story in 2008 and the second half in 2011, but only got around to the last few paragraphs tonight. I therefore suspect the ending is a bit rushed; if you have any suggestions for smoothing it out, please tell me! (1,900 words)

( The Transient and the Eternal: If only )

---------------------------------------------

There. That is my token gesture toward productivity for today. (And my choice of story to finish has no connection whatsoever to my approaching 30th birthday, certainly not, I can't imagine why you might think so! *overly dramatic shock*)

Tomorrow I must buckle down and actually work on my poor neglected Narnia Big Bang. I know how to fix the current scene I stalled on, and while I am not quite sure how to get from Rabadash-makes-Ilgamuth-buy-a-spare-horse through the rather nebulously outlined war section to the closing scenes in Tashbaan (which are already written and just need a little polishing once I know what the immediate lead-in will be), I am sure things will shake out in the actual writing. I have done most of the necessary world-building in my head over the past month while I was making no progress whatsoever in terms of word count.

Tonight I wrote about 500 words, which is pretty good for me lately. (I have been in something of a writing drought since... well, since shortly before Grandma Doris died, honestly, barring the exception of Remix.)

The problem is that those words are split among four different stories, none of which are the two I am trying to finish right now.

*headdesk*

I got about 100 words of "Secrets" ch. 15, only to realize I've been away from that story so long I've hit the "what the hell is with these characters, and why, exactly, don't they like each other anyway?" point. Which means I am going to have to reread all 144,000 currently posted words of it, my god, before I can go much further. Ow. *stabs Susan and Ginny with imaginary knives*

I got 150 words of "The Transient and the Eternal: If Only," which is the one where Setsuna and Sara get old, their various immortal friends deal badly, and Sara deals badly with their dealing badly. Or something like that; I don't have much of an outline.

I got 100 words of "The Transient and the Eternal: Giving Up," which is the one where Lucifer breaks Alexiel out of Eden, gets captured, and Alexiel breaks through the guard around Atziluth and find Jibril, who takes her into hiding. (And now you know the plot. But not how I'll get there, because not even I know that.)

And I got about 150 words of "The Light in Your Eyes," which is a long and rambling Star Trek: AOS fic about Spock, Uhura, and Kirk and the aftermath of their return to Earth in Nero's wake. It is about grief and connections and Vulcan customs and stuff like that. And also sushi, because I can.

...

Maybe tomorrow I will actually get work done on either "Friends and Neighbors" or ch. 6 of "The Courting Dance," which are the stories I meant to work on tonight. *sigh*

Ha! I figured out why I was stuck on "Babies," which is one component fic of "The Transient and the Eternal," my thirty-fic Angel Sanctuary story cycle thingy for thirtyforthree. See, I was trying to make the wrong character voice an important thematic point, which was gumming up everything because A) Lucifer wouldn't say that, and B) therefore I couldn't get Setsuna or Sara to respond in any coherent fashion.

Anyway, I fixed that error, and I think I see how to wrap the fic up now. And the ending will circle back to the beginning, so all the digression has actually had a point rather than just wandering further and further away from the prompt! (Plus I have slipped in a few continuity references, which is always useful.)

To reiterate: ha!

(5,400 words and counting)