Writing process babblings

[auronlu]

I haven't ever joined NaNoMo, because I've never had the time and immediately explode when I have deadlines. However, I've been pecking at writing again in November. It's as difficult as ever— how I miss being a young, naive writer who never saw my flaws, who just wrote for writing's sake— but at least it's happening. Unfortunately, the mundane writing I've been doing for the last year seems to drive my creative muse out of my skull. So it's one or the other, and I cannot afford to play for too long.

Yes, I'm still pecking away at LHAD. I believe that story is the best thing I have written, and I want it finished, for me, and for mugs, and for everyone who's ever given me good fic or feedback and might enjoy it, although it's taken much too long. 

Right now, however, I'm being self-indulgent, letting a lightweight FF5 story take me wherever it wills.  After LHAD's ten thousand plot threads and original character arcs, I feel a twinge of embarrassment in falling back on a "replay a game from one character's POV and throw in a romance."  However, FF5 is such a delightfully simple and undeveloped story that it begs for all kinds of embellishment.  Alas, "romance" isn't exactly the term for a disaster waiting to happen. I'm waiting to find out whether it remains a farce or turns into a Greek tragedy.

Unfortunately, I set myself an impossible task by writing the first chapter in an idiom which is foreign to my nature. It's one part Dorothy Sayers and one part ellnyx's "They Call This Progress," an FFXII western Victorian AU. (Sorry, link is flocked, but anyone who's read ellnyx's more mannered Balthier stories will have some idea what I'm mimicking, clumsily.) Final Fantasy has its own recurring archetypes, and Faris is obviously some distant and Fangish antecedent of Balthier.

Also, as this is relevant: George Lucas. Luke/Leia. Did he intend them to be siblings from the start, or did he tweak their relationship and execute a 3-point-turn halfway through writing Empire? And was it bungled, or a brilliant way to invoke a classic tragic-mythic archetype without letting it go too far? (cf: Splinter of the Mind's Eye; Lucas really should've warned that author what was coming in the third film.) As I tiptoe gingerly along the same hoary archetype, I can't help pondering. Also, how might that saga have ended if Han had turned out to be the long-lost sibling? 

Comments

[ex_pendency799]

I think in a really horrible upper class British accent. *g*

[auronlu]

It's overwrought. It works. I keep falling more in love with that thing every time I read it. What can I say?

It reminds me very vaguely of Emma Peel and Steed trading jocular puns while fighting thugs. Except you did it with a much, much, much more serious story with archetypes and stereotypes and symbolism and gender role subversion.

I want to be able to do that.

[heavenscalyx]

Dear heart, you are not allowed to say that LHAD has taken you too long until you beat my 10 year record for Archimage. ;) You've had other things going on. Real life is real.

[auronlu]

Well, yes, but Archimage is brilliant!

[saharasnow]

Ah.

You know I take five years to write just up to recent chapters, and trust me that wasn't even a quarter of the whole story...