You want it darker?

So I'm pretty amped about this current fanfiction project I'm working on. I've been wanting to write an Expanse novella (or several, but one to start) ever since I finished reading the series and the authors said they didn't plan to write any more in that universe. The Expanse fandom really isn't a great hub of creative fanwork, especially the book fandom. I'm one of the only people I'm aware of that has done fanart for the final three books, which never got adapted for television. It kind of drives me crazy that there is so much free real estate that nobody is using.

For those unfamiliar with the books, there are nine main books, which are all sprawling multi-POV epics, and then there are ten novellas. You don't have to read the novellas to enjoy the main series, but each one provides some insight into characters, places, and events that are mentioned in the main books but never get their day in the limelight. The authors also do a thing where they like to use each book and novella to dabble in different genres, even if they are all first and foremost scifi/space opera. So for example, Leviathan Falls is a detective story, Caliban's War is a spy thriller, the novella Strange Dogs is more horror with inspiration taken from Pet Sematary. But they all take place in the same universe and share the same major thematic throughlines, just exploring them from different angles.

So there is a shit ton of opportunity to create original flavor fan novellas that explore a million different things from a trillion different angles, but nobody is fucking doing it! So I decided I would do it. Well, I said I would over a year ago when I first finished the series, but until recently, all I had was a bunch of manic handwritten brainstorming scrawls on my iPad and a list of things I wanted to see novellas about that I posted on Tumblr (I'm still mad that my girl Elsa Singh never got to star in her own novella - hopefully I'll get to that one next. I bet she grows up to be a pistol.)

So recently, I decided to revisit some of my old scrawlings and started roughly developing one of the ideas. I had a title, I had a fuck ton of groundwork laid for character backstory and motivations, and I had a number of scenes completely outlined. But it wasn't coming together. Even when I found my thematic linchpin, it still felt like it was in danger of being more of a loosely related series of vignettes than a story with a proper arc (I have problems with plot. We've talked about this).

And then, like getting hit by a bolt of lightning from the muses, a whole new idea popped into my head. Initially, it was going to be a companion piece to the one I was already working on. But then I started thinking that it would make more sense to take the most important bits of the old story and integrate them into the new one. So the new story grew to encompass the heart of the old one. At first, I thought the new story would be a cinch. "It came to me fully formed," I said. "I can probably write it in one sitting," I said.

Well, friends. That did not last long. The story was originally conceptualized as a relatively contemplative-albeit-melancholy psychological drama that mostly consisted of characters discussing metaphysics and existentialism while working through some ambiguously spec-fic psychological phenomena. This was more or less in the same vein as my original short story Metanoia With a Dead Star, which also served as the basis for a play I wrote called Open Sky. So I was like, "Okay, I've written variations on this same story before, but not in this fandom, so it's fine." Then I started developing the story more, and psychological drama quickly evolved into psychological thriller. Then, it grew some real teeth, and now it's full-blown psychological horror. So I guess that's the genre I'm dabbling in here. Really picking up that thread from Leviathan Falls and running straight to Hell with it.

So what originally started as something I thought I would be able to potentially write in one sitting, which would max out around 10k words, has undergone a complete transformation into a very thematically ambitious, very technically challenging piece that is probably looking down the barrel of 40k words at this point if the outline is anything to go by. One particular section also going to require me to engage in some hardcore typesetting fuckery in the vein of House of Leaves, so I also not only have to figure out exactly what I'm going to do there to get it just right for conveying what I need it to, but I will also have to figure out how to translate that over to sites like AO3 that don't support the full range of formatting I need. I may have to rely on using a vector graphic for that entire scene instead of text, which means also figuring out how to do it in a way that doesn't totally break the flow (although that is kind of the point of the scene so maybe that's okay). Update: it looks like I will probably be using a custom AO3 workskin with an obnoxious amount of CSS.

Regardless, I am actually super amped about this story. I think, if I can pull it off, it will probably be the best thing I've ever written. It has an actual fucking plot, for starters. Like a full arc. It fits the five-step story structure to a tee and the climactic scene I've arrived at is already partially written and has honestly been an absolute ball to write so far. I'm also doing both my favorite fanfic shticks, which are (1) taking a very minor character and giving them a whole story, and (2) taking a more prominent character that people don't fucking appreciate enough and using the story as vehicle for my manifesto about why they should be more fucking appreciated. A few of the people I've talked to IRL about this story have said that I should try reworking it into an original story instead, both because there is not much of an audience for fanfiction in this particular fandom and because it has a lot of thematic potential to stand on its own. However, it is extremely in dialogue with the source material in a way that I am neither sure I can extricate from it nor particularly want to. I can always come back at a later date and adapt it into something original, but honestly I just enjoy the act of writing something that is in conversation with something else, especially when the themes resonate with me so hard. At this stage, I am very much writing for me. I'm hoping a few fandom folks who match my freak will be here for it, but first and foremost, I'm just enjoying the feeling of having such a clear creative vision after not writing much of anything for two years, and I just want to follow where the muse is leading m and take simple joy in the act of creation and telling the story I have to tell, without worrying about whether or not anyone is going to read it. My main focus is making sure that my vision comes across the way I want it to for anyone who does read it.

I also had a chuckle looking back at my pinned post where I answered the question what I write about with "Existential stuff. Sad stuff. Difficult stuff. Bittersweet stuff. Fucked up stuff. How to go on existing in a world that's full of horrors. People dealing with (or not dealing with) the darkness inside themselves. People who become better. People who become worse. People who find connection with each other. People who try and fail. People who fall into dark pits and climb back out of them, and people who fall in and never get out. Understanding them. Understanding the world we live in. Bearing witness. Appreciating beauty. Coming to terms. Finding peace. Making a path for oneself." Because I think this story might hit every single one of those, and I wrote that list long before this idea was a twinkle in my eye. Ha. There's also a shit ton of stuff about Jungian psychology, which is precisely my brand of bullshit. I like that I am writing something that is really trying to approximate original flavor and is still so quintessentially mine that nobody else would write it if I didn't, not even the original authors.

I also did the thing I always do when I'm writing something, which is make a playlist to help me set my atmosphere. I keep a collection of all my story playlists. The playlist I made when I wrote my fucked up Hojo fanfic Possession was probably my old favorite, but this one might be my new favorite because some of these songs work so well it's not even funny. Even if you're not in the fandom and have no interest in my story, feel free to take a peek if you are a fan of industrial, darkwave, grunge, and/or dark acoustic folk. If this is your jam, then hey, maybe you'll also be into what I'm cooking up over here, even if you are going in fandom-blind. I was annoyed I couldn't find the original Taylor Holmes recording of Boots on Spotify, but I did find this fucked up remix that is apparently from the 28 Years Later soundtrack, so that's actually pretty cool.

After 11 rejections, I got three poems published!

What's funny is how many people have said things to me like, "Oh, wow! 11 rejections! I'm so sorry. That's terrible. Are you okay?" Yes, I am okay! I am actually amazed that it only took 12 tries to get an acceptance. People who have never tried to get published don't realize how normal it is to get rejected. It's the norm. It's the outcome you should expect going in.

Expecting rejection is why I didn't get demoralized, and it is why I won't get demoralized in the future. It's what made it even better when I saw that email in my inbox and said, "Oh, look, another rejection," but then, when I opened it up, it wasn't. There's no disappointment. Only pleasant surprise.

What's also funny is that out of the five poems I submitted to that particular site, they took the three I liked the least. Which I guess is just a reminder that I am the least worthy judge of my own work.

My brain has been completely exhausted lately, so despite the long reading list I've set out for myself, it's not really coming along, I've hit pause for now on my attempted cover-to-cover read of Being and Nothingness at page 100 (out of 800) and am instead reading Caitlin Doughty's latest book Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, in which she answers children's questions about rotting corpses. For whatever reason, reading about death and decay always puts a girl's mind at ease.



According to my app, I've done about 3 hours of cumulative plank in the past year, and I'm working on getting my daily plank up to 2 minutes (currently averaging 1 minute and 30 seconds). I went for a hike the other day, which felt really nice for my muscles. I'm upset about how online I have become in the past few years due to COVID and the effects it is having on my mental and physical health. I miss being able to go to my martial arts classes and roller derby and have a job that had a strong physical component. I know I can make my own exercise routine, but I haven't been very good at coming up with one that I can stick to other than doing my daily plank exercise. Otherwise, I am quite sedentary and, given that I have poor eating habits and am staring down 30, I don't like it.

I need to find a new therapist because of the move, and I am going to start working on restricting my internet time. It's hard when all of my work is being done online, but there is also plenty of time I spend online when I'm not working, and I want to work toward reclaiming that time for myself. There are many wonderful things about being online - meeting new people, being exposed to new ideas, especially in a time when I've restricted my in-person interactions so much - but I'd be dishonest with myself if I didn't acknowledge that I use it primarily a source of instant gratification and dopamine hits. I genuinely worry about the effect spending so much time online is having on my brain. I so rarely am truly alone anymore, and I need to get back to being able to just be with myself. I need to renew my focusing on meditating (something I am admittedly shit at with my ADHD but that is still good for me), private journaling, and doing my art without something constantly going on in the background. My self-discipline is truly terrible when it comes to things like that, so I'm going to need to put my foot down with myself and develop a system.

Now that I've settled in after the move, I am going to start seriously considering looking at going back to school (again), although I really don't know 100% what I want to do. I have been considering MFA programs in creative writing, but I don't know if they are worth the time or money. I continue to be interested in law school, particularly going into labor law. Human rights law of some kind as been something I've imagined going into since high school, but the truth is that I don't know if I have the emotional wherewithal for it, which is what has kept me from pursuing it so far. I do believe I have the mind for it, but I struggle with bureaucracy and burnout. I have always suffered from being more thinker than doer. It's still up in the air with COVID because I do not want to be in a classroom environment when things are still as they are, but I also don't want to get ripped off for inferior online classes. I want to go to the best school I can get into and get the best experience I can out of it. But maybe that just another excuse for me not to shit or get off the pot and avoid taking the next step in life. I'm going to be getting in touch with the career office at my alma mater, since their services are available to all alumni, and hopefully talk to somebody who can help me pick a path and start working on it. The fact that I don't want to attend school now doesn't need to stop me from applying. I can always defer an acceptance.

I reached out to a playwright friend of mine recently - an old friend of my mother's who I got close with after I did graphic design for several of her shows back when I was in high school - and asked her if she would be interested in mentoring me. She said that she would love to, so now she is going to guide me through the process of writing my first play. I need to come up with a few pitches before our first meeting next week, so that is what I will be spending this weekend on. I am trying to decide if I should try adapting one of my existing stories or write something completely new. I will probably write up pitches for both and then talk them through with her and see what she thinks. I'm not worrying about the possibility of getting something produced because that would be premature when I haven't written anything yet, but I will admit I have daydreams about it.

My damn laptop is going in for repairs again. Fortunately, I dug up my old HP Stream, and it seems to still work well enough for me to do basic things. But this puts a wrench in my art because the Stream doesn't have enough memory to set up my tablet and usual art programs on. So I will probably have to wait until my main laptop comes back to be able to do much digitally. That's okay though because I haven't worked on my traditional art much recently, and it wouldn't kill me to do some practice there, even if it means I won't be producing anything polished or portfolio-worthy.


I also need to get my ass in gear about submitting poetry to journals. I said I would do 100 submissions this year, but so far I've only done four. I have no excuse but my sheer laziness for that one.

My writing has always skewed dark, but lately I've been plumbing some new depths and taking more risks in what I am willing to write about, and that has gotten me thinking a lot about the problem of gratuitousness. My fic "Possession" is probably the darkest thing I've published, at least going by the sheer number of warning tags it required, but it also could have been a lot worse. I chose to tone some things down and exclude certain scenes I had considered putting in that could have bumped it into "Dead Dove" territory. I didn't choose to exclude these scenes because I was worried about offending anyone, nor because I was particularly uncomfortable with writing them. It was because I felt that including them would be gratuitous.

What makes something gratuitous is, as with most things in art, subjective. I'm sure there are people who would argue that some of the scenes I left in are still gratuitous. I settled on the rule of thumb that if you are using a scene to get a reaction from the audience without telling them anything new, it's gratuitous. And sometimes gratuitous is okay! For example, Videodrome (one of my favorite films) is incredibly gratuitous, and that's the point. Videodrome is about voyeurism, and it sends its message by making the viewer a voyeur. But in cases where you are trying to tell human stories and invoke pathos, gratuitousness is kryptonite because it is just so...disrespectful of the characters. By being too gratuitous, your story can cross over from cathartic to sadistic. A great example of this is Titus Andronicus. It's the 17th century equivalent of an exploitation film, and by all accounts, that was Shakespeare's intention in writing it. For that reason, it is most commonly done today as a black comedy instead of a tragedy because nobody can take it seriously as a tragedy. I suppose it's easier to watch a play where a girl is gang-raped and has her hands cut off if they make it hilarious. And it's definitely more fun to watch her dad bake the rapists into meat pies if he's wearing a blood-stained chef's hat.

WARNING: the following contains spoilers for the movie Wind River.

I recently watched Wind River on Netflix after having it in my queue for a while. In a lot of ways, it was very much my kind of movie. It was dark and visceral, but also beautiful and poetic. With a haunting score by THE Nick Cave and gorgeous shots of snow-covered landscapes, it had its tone down pat. It isn't the kind of movie that let's you go when you finish watching it. It sticks around afterward.

This song. Oh. My. God.

While I enjoyed the movie on many levels, there were two big issues I had with it. The first was the casting of a white man in the lead role, which I felt was unnecessary because it would have been so easy to make the character Native and center Native voices in a movie that is ABOUT missing and murdered Indigenous women. Which is not to knock on Jeremy Renner, who gave an amazing performance. I'm just sure there are lots of Native actors who could have given equally powerful performances, and then the story would have avoided falling down the White Savior hole.

My other big issue was *ding ding ding* the rape scene. I hated it for multiple reasons. First of all, I thought it was just lazy writing. In a film that tells its story by going back and forth between the past and the present, it would have flowed a lot better. But having a single flashback come out of nowhere in a mystery film to just show you exactly what happened is shitty writing. Not only does it disrupt the narrative, it's a glaring case of showing instead of telling. Nobody had even solved the case or put the pieces together in-universe. This wasn't Poirot explaining how he figured it all out. They just decided it had to spelled out for us for some reason, so they spelled it out. If they felt we needed a complete picture of the events, it would have been far more effective to have had Cory make Pete to recount it all on the mountain as part of his confession. Hearing every line of it agonizingly extracted from Pete's mouth as he faces down his well-earned comeuppance would have been much more gratifying for the viewer and much more respectful to Natalie's suffering.

Instead they just chose to...show her being raped. Why? It would not have been that hard to just drop a few more breadcrumbs for the audience to put together exactly what happened that night. We're not stupid. We knew from the beginning that she was raped. We knew that they murdered her boyfriend. As soon as the security guys started acting shady, we knew they had something to do with it. It's not that fucking hard to piece it together. So why do we have to watch every detail of it? To drive home how horrible it was? To make the viewer angry? We already knew it was so horrible that she ran six miles barefoot in the snow until her lungs burst and she died. We've been shown the heartbreaking toll her death has had on her family. We already know! We're already mad! That right there is the essence of gratuitousness. Telling us she ran six miles barefoot in the snow was already enough for us to understand how much she suffered. But they still went and made her suffering (and, by extension, the suffering of Indigenous women) into a spectacle for...reasons?

I'm definitely not saying it's inherently bad to depict rape or anything else. Pain and cruelty of all kinds ought to be confronted in art without kid gloves. I'm just saying that it's important as artists to ask ourselves why we are choosing to show certain things versus keeping them implied or offscreen. Making the audience uncomfortable is all well and good. In fact, I'd even say it's great. But we need to ask ourselves, "To what end?" I love being made uncomfortable when it makes me question my fears and prejudices or look at an ugly part of myself. But some things are uncomfortable in ways that don't want you to question or examine anything. They just want to make you feel dirty. And that is what is to be avoided.

I had a conversation the other day with my mutual (see: one of my two lovely mutuals) about the difference between drama/tragedy and melodrama, and I remembered the quote that in drama, the characters drive the plot, while in melodrama, the plot drives the characters.

I am just gonna go ahead and say it: I love characterization, and I am BAD at plot. So I almost never run the risk of the plot driving the characters (except sometimes in fanfiction when the plot is pre-fabricated, where my job becomes to flesh out the characters in order to justify the plot - one of my all-time favorite writing hobbies). Now anyone who has talked to me for five minutes knows that I am a theater geek. My mother is heavily involved in the theater scene in the city I grew up in, and I have seen hundreds (maybe even over a thousand) of plays in my life. I've worked crew, I've been in the ensemble, I've done design stuff for shows, I've taken workshops, I've hung out with (and been babysat by) dozens of playwrights and directors and producers. I never aspired to be a professional actor, but it was something I really enjoyed as a teenager, and all the youth workshops I attended + my time at a performing arts high school transformed me from a shy, anxiety-riddled, quivering chihuahua of a child into an assertive woman who can at least fake confidence.

I've never actually studied characterization as a writer, so I don't know how much the average writer's approach to characterization differs from the acting approaches I learned in my teens, but those are the ones I still use for writing. I actually think this is especially effective in fanfiction, when you are approaching an existing character, because that is very similar to what an actor has to do: the plot is already there, but you need to create the character in a way that justifies it. You need to build your character's motivations in a way that everything they do to move the plot forward stems naturally from those motivations. When I'm writing, it's the advice of my old acting teachers that plays back in my mind: the summer workshop teacher who told me "never judge your character," the high school drama teacher who asked me who my character really was "in the dark, with the lights out" when he felt I was taking her too much at face value, the other high school drama teacher who made me fill a composition book with the entire first-person back story of Gertrude from Hamlet.

Now when it comes to writing original fiction, I've taken to developing my characters first and letting them lead me to the plot. Because, as I said before, I'm shitty at plot. I almost never, ever just have plot ideas. Instead I imagine different people and how they would behave in different situations. That's probably one of the reasons I love TTRPGs so much. You provide the character, the GM provides the circumstances, and then the resulting choices become the plot.

I actually never played a TTRPG until April of 2020. When I created my first (and favorite) character, I was completely overwhelmed by the creative freedom I was being given. So I went online, and I started filling out a long-ass character questionnaire like my high school drama teacher (the "who you are in the dark" one) used to make us do. For the base questions, if I couldn't make up my mind, I rolled the dice. Then, as the foundation came together, it became easier to answer the more in-depth questions because I had something to build on. Suddenly, I had a fully-developed character with a detailed history and a shit-ton of WORLDBUILDING that had sprung up around her. World-building has always scared the hell out of me because it's completely overwhelming, but by starting with a single character and really fleshing her out, suddenly I found I'd also build a lot of her environment. Because so much of who we are *is* our environments. And that's when I realized that to tell an amazing story, it's best to start with an amazing character and let everything follow naturally.

What I'm getting at here is that I've been filling out characterization questionnaires for the past week and haven't actually written any content, but my answers are getting increasingly fascinating, and I'm optimistic that, by the time I'm done, I'm going to have some really interesting stories that have already largely written themselves.

Tonight's the night, y'all. I am going to wade into the depths of an abandoned draft and start rewriting. There is NOTHING I hate more than reading my own drafts. I will procrastinate for months between finishing a draft and editing because I hate it so much. Back when I used to act, I could never watch myself on video. It's the same exact thing. I know it's bad and completely unsustainable for an artist, and it's something I acknowledge that I need to just get over.

The funny part is that the draft is usually not that terrible in the end, and even if parts of it are truly awful, it's not that hard to fix. I'm not sure what I'm so afraid of. I suspect part of the problem is that I force myself to go into a trance and shove aside my inner control freak while I'm writing because if I didn't, I'd never get a single word onto the page. But then I need that control freak part of me to be at peak performance to edit, and the control freak part of my mind is intimidated by the uninhibited part and the potentially weird, embarrassing, uncomfortable stuff it has to say. At the same time, weird and uncomfortable is ON BRAND for me and something I actively cultivate, BUT in a very specific way. Weird and uncomfortable in a targeted, thought-out way is good. Unintentionally weird and uncomfortable is bad.

Do I need to rethink my need for control over my attempts at transgression? It makes me think of my senior year of undergrad when I was in this religious studies seminar. It dealt with surveillance, imperialism, and authoritarianism as modern representations of the eyes of God. You know, classic liberal arts shit, highly mock-able. But it was a great course with a brilliant professor. Anyway I wrote a paper on the book Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which features a conspiracy called the Wallflower Order that is basically the white patriarchal colonialist anti-fun brigade. They, like me, crave control and hate dancing, but, unlike me, they want to piss on everybody's parade. So I wrote the first draft of my paper and went to discuss it with my professor in office hours. He read it, and then he said, "It's an exemplary essay, and that's the problem. It's like it was written by the Wallflower Order."

Therein lies my predicament.