anyway yes fanfiction

I always miss Six Sentence Sunday - it's the last day of the working week for me and my inclination to even look at Scrivener is pretty low by the time I close up. But today I had a good look through and I realised the reason I've not been working on A Sense Of Fatal Allegiance even though I know more or less how it ends is that it's so INERT. Like - I think the scenes are well written but they're just cutting back and forth from the same conversations on the same evening and it's all moving so slowly. The current way of filling a chapter - one scene checking in with each of our PoV ghouls and giving them a moment to discover something or push for something or just to witness, from the outside, an intrigue I don't want them or the reader to entirely grasp, and me writing enough to hit that point and then cutting to someone else - well, at this rate we're never going to cover any ground at all. So I may need to shake things up a little bit and, not to put too fine a point on it, cheat. Tell-not-show that vampires are talking to vampires but at the end of a long night it's all just vampire bollocks and they don't tell their ghouls anything and their ghouls are the protagonists here so what they don't know won't kill us.

It all feels like a cop-out but it's in the interest of getting to write something more interesting for the next four chapters. I don't even get to do any scene-setting bits because I already SET these scenes three chapters ago. It's a fault in the process - each arc has seven chapters and each chapter has four scenes (plus a bit of elision if it's been a while and I need to reintroduce an idea or draw a veil or whatever). It's not like I Just Want It Done or anything but I don't think I'm interested in the minutiae of who said what to whomst on the phone and neither should you be. And the tone of this one is starting to get out of my control as well - like I'm not doing the work on character beats after a revelation because the situation that forces the revelation is urgent, and as people who've sat through my Skyrim Opinion (TM) will tell you, if there's one thing I hate it's setting up an urgent plot situation and then sculling around on stuff that ain't that forever. Even if the character work that needs doing and that fanfic is for and that justifies a fanfic's existence to me is, er, being crowded out by all that plot stuff that I say I don't like.

TL;DR I am dissatisfied by my WIP and hope that skipping a bit will let me get on and enjoy writing it more and I hope I'm not letting these characters down. I could use my Biggest Fan right about now, but she got married and hasn't really done anything fandom-wise since then, which isn't really a bad thing but is sapping my momentum a bit. Selfish, huh.


( Here's an extract, does it even work? )