Life is a Cabaret

In an extremely odd turnaround from, well, basically the past five or six years, I am much more on top of things in real life than I am in fandom. I have two holiday fic exchanges that I haven't even started yet (though on the plus side, I just finished reviewing my yuletide source material and I have an idea for the fic), plus things to beta, and I need to get a lot more done on moving my website.

I'm not really stressing about any of it. Not that much, at least. I've got awhile before anything is due. It's just odd, because normally I spend much more time on fandom than I do on real life, and now it's starting to reverse, and of course that's natural because fandom can't pay the bills, but still. Odd.

I might have to change my LJ name. I've been "real life dropout and online overachiever" for most of my time on LJ (meaning basically about five years, almost a quarter of my life), but now I'm not sure how well that fits, or will continue to fit. I do think I will continue to try and be on top of things in real life, because it, you know, feels very good to be on top of things.

I will need to come up with something appropriately pithy. XD

Also, I am still totally looking forward to winter break because there's a lot of fic I want to write but don't feel I have time for right now.

And on that note, I'm going to bed, because I'm going to try and get up a bit earlier tomorrow to finish something up and print some stuff out.

So I started getting New Who from Netflix, because I want to watch them again and Twin has her DVDs with her.

Oh, Nine, I love you. Chris Eccleston is a fantastic actor. :D And Nine is my Doctor. I love Ten a lot, but Nine...he was my first Doctor, and I guess that's just sticking with me.

( Random long-winded Doctor/Rose thought about Aliens of London, plus spoilers through Sound of Drums )

Okay, so that was longer than I expected. And sort of disjointed. I hope it makes sense. :p

Something I've been thinking about, off and on, since I read DH, and I wanted to put down in words.

The prophecy had to have been about Harry--it wouldn't have worked with Neville. Not because of anything inherent in Harry or in Neville, but because of Lily and Alice. It took me a bit to really understand why Lily's sacrifice was enough to protect Harry, because surely she wasn't the only mother willing to die for her child, or just one person willing to die to protect another. The difference was that Voldemort gave her a choice, and that she chose to die for Harry rather than live and watch her son be killed is what gave her sacrifice power. But Voldemort only gave her that choice because Snape asked him to spare her. Somehow I doubt that Alice had any inner-circle Death Eaters so in love with her that they'd beg their merciless Dark Lord to spare her life.

So if Voldemort had chosen to go after the Longbottoms first, I bet he would have just killed Frank and Alice on his way to Neville as a matter of course, and then Neville would have died. Then he probably would have just proceeded on to Harry, and thanks to Lily, Harry would have still been the Boy-Who-Lived.

Ever since OotP came out, there's been a bunch of Neville-as-Boy-Who-Lived AU written, and I guess I find it interesting that it's even more AU than originally thought. Neville fit the paramaters of the prophecy, but it wouldn't really have worked for him, not unless Voldemort would have been willing to spare either Frank or Alice, which I don't think likely.

I think I need to find some more HP icons. Hmmm...

I've had an odd relationship with fandom lately. It's sorta funny--for more than two years, I was pretty much strictly Harry Potter. Then Star Wars grabbed most of my attention for a year (splashed with a few other occasional fandoms), Kingdom Hearts for a few months, and now X-Files. And you know, I love all my newer fandoms, but I rather miss the days of being only HP, and having only HP people on my flist. Not because I don't enjoy reading the journals of people I've met through other fandoms, because I do, but because the people reading my LJ knew and were interested in the kinds of things that I would usually post. Part of the reason I've not been posting much lately is because I don't want to bore people who don't care about my Fandom Du Jour, and while, yeah, it's my journal and I can post whatever the hell I want in it, I feel rather like Remus in that I want to be liked, or at least interesting. But a side effect I've noticed is that, in not posting very often and in rarely commenting to others, there goes most of the friendly interaction that I count as one of the most valuable experiences of fandom.

One of my biggest problems has always been that I'm not very assertive, and that I really don't want to bother people, even if I'd like to talk to them. That's something I really need to improve on if I want to make new friends and keep up with older ones, which I most heartily do.

So, I finally got around to reading Legacy of the Force: Betrayal.

( Spoilers )

First of all, updated the website today. But that's not the main thing I wanted to talk about.

I was reading a bunch of the posts linked to in metafandom today, especially the ones about pacing and tension. That, perhaps randomly, made me think about angst, so...

( Watch me ramble about angst* )

*Everything here is my opinion, of course. Also, don't kill me for using the happy spider icon! I couldn't resist. :p

Plot, why do you plague me so? 8,000 words into the fic (which was supposed to be just a drabble), and finally I can start the sex.

How do people write Vadersex? Half of his body is mechanical, and the other half is completely covered up almost all the time. He can't even kiss someone in a normal atmosphere without choking to death, probably. And I have to wonder (very crudely), if he even still has a working penis, after lying face down on the banks of a lava flow for who knows how long. He reminds me of Shishio from Kenshin.

Ah well, I'll make do. This fic has way too much momentum for me to be deterred, and I have a few ideas. (And, thankfully, a beta reader who will hopefully tell me if I'm being too implausible or not.)

Perhaps the most important question is, why the hell am I still awake when it's bloody 4:15 in the morning? It's a good thing that it's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or I'd have to be in class in less than five hours. (Am back at school, btw, in case you couldn't tell. :p)

But since it is rather late, and I've got a lot to do tomorrow, I'll stop writing the fic and stop rambling here, and go get some sleep.

A couple days ago musesfool mentioned that if she has to sit on a story instead of posting it immediately after finishing/getting it back from beta, she constantly tweaks it. And I thought--hey, wow, I do the exact same thing. Even if I've just sent a story off to beta and am waiting to get it back, I'm constantly revising it, even if it's only inserting a word here or there, getting rid of extraneous commas (*winks at krabapple*), or what-have-you. What's sorta funny is that sometimes I end up fixing something that, when I finally do get the fic back from beta, my beta told me to fix, whether it's getting rid of commas, fixing typos, adding a scene to make something clearer, or whatever. I'm especially doing it with the SW chaptered fic I've got, since it's complete but not completely betad, and waiting to get the earlier chapters back gives me tons of time to fiddle with the later ones. It's almost compulsive editing, because it seems that there's always something to improve.

Sometimes I still get that compulsion after the fic is posted and therefore technically finished--especially if the fic is one of my older ones. Especially given things I've learned from my betas and can't help but start to notice now, even in my own writing before I had the betas I have--like noticing when I repeat a word too many times in a small space, thanks to allisonblair, or when I have tons of unnecessary commas, thanks to krabapple. It's a very rare fic of mine that I can look back on after a couple months have passed (anything sooner is still too recent to have completely gotten out of my head the way my older fics have) and think, hey, this is perfect, I wouldn't change a thing. They ones I do think that for also tend to be quite short.

So, part of what this ramble is leading to (apart from just being a ramble about me/my writing style), is: do fics ever end up being truly finished? As in, we're completely satisfied with them even years down the line, we have no urge to fix them up a bit more, etc. When I post a fic, I'm satisfied with it as it is at the time I'm posting it, but will that satisfaction change to discontent down the road, after my writing style's improved and I'm looking back at my old fics? Is the inability to count most of my fics truly finished because they're fics, not published novels or whatever, and I can edit them without having to reprint something? Hell, do published authors count all their printed stories as being finished?

Okay, done rambling. :p