Updates
It's been a long time since I posted anything, so I thought I'd check in and post various fanly (that's like fannish but more manly) things that I'm working on, thinking about working on, or that other people have worked on or thought about working on... if that makes sense.
Okay, on with it:
#1. Cool Art Thing
My friend bone_dry1013 made a cool art thing, which I will show to you now:
Isn't that fantastic? It's an illustration of a meeting between Buffy Summers and a character named The Dauphin from my fanfic, Clocks of the Long Now. Aside from the obvious skill on display, I just love the tone and feeling of this image. It's very close to the way I imagined the scene in my mind's eye, in everything from the frigid void of the Dauphin's office to the physical appearance of the cosmic crustacean himself. I especially like the atmospheric lighting, here. It's like the color of Jacques Cousteau's nightmares after a bad plate of shrimp.
Bravo, bonesy!
#2. Midnight Empire
I don't know where this is at. I honestly don't know. I don't want to say I've abandoned it, because I really don't feel like I have. It's just, I never feel like I have enough time to give it the focus it needs. It feels like I've been pouring every free second into either working on my own novel or working out (trying to lose that winter weight... and then some). The truth is, I've never been much good at splitting my focus among multiple creative projects (unless it's paid work, that is, which I don't have any emotional investment in). Some of this is due to a lack of mental discipline and to chronic bouts of boredom and/or distraction. But I'd be kidding myself if I didn't admit there are flat-out creative problems with the story itself, too.
So here's what happened: I had a certain perspective on the TV series, particularly on its anti-authoritarian and anti-nihilistic themes and its individualistic take on the quest for identity. These themes just really clicked for me on an artistic level, and pinged all the right pongs. So I decided to take a whack at writing what I conceived to be a (very long) epilogue to the "Buffy" story. The idea basically boiled down to:
Q. You've learned all the lessons and found the Self. All the external authority structures have been knocked down, the battle against hopelessness and nihilism is won. You have finally mastered the ship of your soul. What now?
A. You learn it all over again, dummy. Authoritarian structures are always forming and reforming, nihilism always hovers at the edge of meaning, and sailors are constantly forgetting how to sail. Duh!
That was "Clocks", in a nutshell. I think it mostly works as my mutant meta-critique of the series as a whole while still functioning as a new adventure/mystery story. I know I'll never be perfectly happy with it, but it's finished and is essentially what I wanted it to be about.
So, what the Hell is "Midnight Empire"? It's not that I didn't have any ideas for what it was about. I actually started out with a lot of them -- thinking back on it, maybe I had way too many! I don't think I ever settled on a coherent, central purpose to guide me through the tidal waves and droughts of the writing ecosystem. At first, I thought this would actually be part of the fun, because I might discover the central theme in the course of writing it. But I'm beginning to realize that I'm just not that kind of writer. I need to choose a main idea for that story before I can write another word of it... which I guess could mean I might never write another word of it. And chances are that even if the idea hit me like a bolt of lightning tomorrow, I'd still have to commit to finishing my original novel before I could even think about continuing work on a fanfic. Reaching that point alone could take years, so the story is in the freezer for the foreseeable future.
#3 Essays
I've been writing a BTVS essay on and off for a couple of weeks now (mostly off, admittedly, and more in my head than on paper). It's on a subject I've always wanted to write about, but never settled on a concise way of doing it. See, I've always wanted to write about the character of Riley Finn, but I've found can't write about Riley without writing about Maggie, and I can't write about Maggie without writing about Adam, and I can't write about any of these people without writing pretty extensively about The Initiative itself. So, I'm going to try to write about all of those subjects at once. It'll mean I'll have to strip it down some and omit a lot of detail, but I think that's fine. At worst, it could be an overview of my season four perspective that becomes a jumping off point for a separate essay about Riley himself.
I've also had an itch to write about Spike, lately. I think Spike has one of the more interesting meta-arcs in the story. As an symbol of anarchy in a show that explores and assaults authoritarianism in all its myriad forms, his evolving relationship to the other characters (and their attendant symbolic meanings) is pretty fascinating to me. I'm almost tempted to try approaching as it a graphics project, similar to the Campbell thing I did a few months back. I think there are many allusions to his conceptual nature beyond just the "punk rock" aesthetic and the general alienation, and that it might be useful to dig up some historical and literary images for comparison.
But, first things first: I gotta find the initiative to write about The Initiative...
Okay, on with it:
#1. Cool Art Thing
My friend bone_dry1013 made a cool art thing, which I will show to you now:
Isn't that fantastic? It's an illustration of a meeting between Buffy Summers and a character named The Dauphin from my fanfic, Clocks of the Long Now. Aside from the obvious skill on display, I just love the tone and feeling of this image. It's very close to the way I imagined the scene in my mind's eye, in everything from the frigid void of the Dauphin's office to the physical appearance of the cosmic crustacean himself. I especially like the atmospheric lighting, here. It's like the color of Jacques Cousteau's nightmares after a bad plate of shrimp.
Bravo, bonesy!
#2. Midnight Empire
I don't know where this is at. I honestly don't know. I don't want to say I've abandoned it, because I really don't feel like I have. It's just, I never feel like I have enough time to give it the focus it needs. It feels like I've been pouring every free second into either working on my own novel or working out (trying to lose that winter weight... and then some). The truth is, I've never been much good at splitting my focus among multiple creative projects (unless it's paid work, that is, which I don't have any emotional investment in). Some of this is due to a lack of mental discipline and to chronic bouts of boredom and/or distraction. But I'd be kidding myself if I didn't admit there are flat-out creative problems with the story itself, too.
So here's what happened: I had a certain perspective on the TV series, particularly on its anti-authoritarian and anti-nihilistic themes and its individualistic take on the quest for identity. These themes just really clicked for me on an artistic level, and pinged all the right pongs. So I decided to take a whack at writing what I conceived to be a (very long) epilogue to the "Buffy" story. The idea basically boiled down to:
Q. You've learned all the lessons and found the Self. All the external authority structures have been knocked down, the battle against hopelessness and nihilism is won. You have finally mastered the ship of your soul. What now?
A. You learn it all over again, dummy. Authoritarian structures are always forming and reforming, nihilism always hovers at the edge of meaning, and sailors are constantly forgetting how to sail. Duh!
That was "Clocks", in a nutshell. I think it mostly works as my mutant meta-critique of the series as a whole while still functioning as a new adventure/mystery story. I know I'll never be perfectly happy with it, but it's finished and is essentially what I wanted it to be about.
So, what the Hell is "Midnight Empire"? It's not that I didn't have any ideas for what it was about. I actually started out with a lot of them -- thinking back on it, maybe I had way too many! I don't think I ever settled on a coherent, central purpose to guide me through the tidal waves and droughts of the writing ecosystem. At first, I thought this would actually be part of the fun, because I might discover the central theme in the course of writing it. But I'm beginning to realize that I'm just not that kind of writer. I need to choose a main idea for that story before I can write another word of it... which I guess could mean I might never write another word of it. And chances are that even if the idea hit me like a bolt of lightning tomorrow, I'd still have to commit to finishing my original novel before I could even think about continuing work on a fanfic. Reaching that point alone could take years, so the story is in the freezer for the foreseeable future.
#3 Essays
I've been writing a BTVS essay on and off for a couple of weeks now (mostly off, admittedly, and more in my head than on paper). It's on a subject I've always wanted to write about, but never settled on a concise way of doing it. See, I've always wanted to write about the character of Riley Finn, but I've found can't write about Riley without writing about Maggie, and I can't write about Maggie without writing about Adam, and I can't write about any of these people without writing pretty extensively about The Initiative itself. So, I'm going to try to write about all of those subjects at once. It'll mean I'll have to strip it down some and omit a lot of detail, but I think that's fine. At worst, it could be an overview of my season four perspective that becomes a jumping off point for a separate essay about Riley himself.
I've also had an itch to write about Spike, lately. I think Spike has one of the more interesting meta-arcs in the story. As an symbol of anarchy in a show that explores and assaults authoritarianism in all its myriad forms, his evolving relationship to the other characters (and their attendant symbolic meanings) is pretty fascinating to me. I'm almost tempted to try approaching as it a graphics project, similar to the Campbell thing I did a few months back. I think there are many allusions to his conceptual nature beyond just the "punk rock" aesthetic and the general alienation, and that it might be useful to dig up some historical and literary images for comparison.
But, first things first: I gotta find the initiative to write about The Initiative...