Onus

I said a while ago that I thought this latest chapter of Where you Belong would be eleven to twelve pages, but after having gotten back on the old (hobby) horse, I'm thinking it's going to be more like  thirteen to fourteen, which is still reasonable so long as I don't think about how that's probably ~ 6500 words of text in its rawest form. I tend to blather a lot in my writing, and since this is my roughest draft, I just kind of let it be. A big part of revising for me is mostly just cutting things out. 

This arc is actually going to have two parts, I think. The first is Valerie being forced into an undead slice of life episode where she's going to make at least one small child cry, and the other is going to be more action-y, touching on something I've already brought up, but not in detail: A portal run. In fandom, a lot of people use portals for crossover stuff, but I've always felt they were under explored just as a way to explore just how crazy "life" can get. 

In my personal headcannon, anything that is pulled out of an alternate universe continues to operate based on its progenitor space's rules, and since those rules are infinitely varied, things can get pretty wild. I don't know what kind of things I want to throw at them, but I've been playing with a few ideas:

1. A universe that is actually one thing, its apparent separateness is an illusion brought on by the viewer's inability to perceive the correct number of dimensions. It responds to anything that tries to remove a part of itself with violence and hate. 
2. A post-apocalyptic society, where everything living has died, an artificial intelligence deliberately upkeeps the species home planet as though everyone is about to return home. It sings itself to sleep with the sounds of everything that once was. 
3. A society of meat lego people, interchangeable body-parts, right down to the personality and the brain, are regularly swapped out on the basis of buy, sell, or trade. The flesh is mutable and so is your soul. 
4. A place where arachnids evolved to be the dominate species. They communicate through giant, vibrating strings that span across the stars.

I really don't know, I haven't done the details that far out yet. What I am pretty sure of is that I want it to tie back into or at least echo the main theme: Belonging and not belonging, where you are Vs. where you want to be. 

Personally, I think I lack the technical skill to really pull such a large, complex story off - I think I have something like 20 - 30K written in roughs, on top of what I already have published, and if I had to guess the total length of the fic, it would be somewhere in the 200/k range, with three to four distinct arcs. On the same hand, I have to get better somehow, and if there's anywhere to write an overly ambitious OC-ridden epic, as based on a show from the early 2000s, fanfiction is the place to go. 

I really, really want to start revising and releasing chapters at this arc's halfway point rather than when its fully complete, but I'm still not sure if giving into temptation is a good idea or not.

Writing this at night, since I didn't have time in the morning. 

I managed to finish another page of Where You Belong, and I'm still really close to the end of the chapter. I'm going slowly 50% due to work and other projects and 50% because I want this upcoming interaction to be solid, even in rough draft form. 

I keep saying rough draft, but in a lot of ways, it feels like even less than that. Rough draft implies something that just needs polish, and this is more like, a linear collection of events, I guess, that may or may not make sense to anyone but me. 

Basically, this is the best method I've found so far to get myself writing in a way that gets the story done. Otherwise, I either dawdle on doing anything, or get so lost outlining and world-building on one end, and endlessly agonizing over getting a word or a sentence just right on the other, the gosh darn book doesn't get done at all. 

A little at a time, focusing on roughing out several chapters or even an arc first, then  turning back to edit and work on the piece. At least for now. 

It does suck not to be able to share what I have with everyone, though. This latest chapter is especially exciting because Valerie is going to get mind controlled. Even worse, she's going to get mind controlled as a direct consequence of advice she herself gave. 

After that, I'm still convinced I need that other POV chapter to further flesh out the world and get the plot moving in a direction that will finally start Valerie on the road I need her to be. This is all leading up to her trying to steal the infinimap, remember. She just needs to get some cultural education and a nice spoonful of suffering, first.

So I did manage that one page of fanfiction yesterday - hurray for small goals. I do wish I could set a better or more regular pace, though. I'm actually pretty close to finishing out the chapter. 

Valerie, as a character, is most interesting when 1) she is the architect of her own problems, and 2) she is cornered into admitting this, somehow. 

I'm still in the process of having her build those problems up, as best as my, admittedly limited, authorial skills allow. The current chapter has her showing off deadly weaponry to a child, shooting people for no reason, and advocating for being your own grown up because adults are just big kids really, who absolutely cannot be relied upon to help. 

She's definitely thinking of Vlad when she says this, but its coming at the expense of her father, who is arguably one of the best and most responsible adults we see in the show.