Stuff and Moonshine

Posted more Meadowville and Gentleman of the Shade.

Watched the first couple of episodes of Bookish, starring Mark Gatiss as Gabriel Book, who runs Book’s Books and solves mysteries on the side in 1947 London, along with his wife Trottie (Polly Walker) and assorted other characters.

Just posted another short chapter of Gentleman of the Shade.

Finally put up a new chapter of WWMBD? (Ao3’s going down for a few hours tomorrow, for a code update or something, so read it tonight or wait): WWMBD (15246 words) by moon_custafer
Chapters: 10/?
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Musicians, Academia, Romantic Comedy, Rock and Roll, Age Difference, 1990s, Smoking, Bodyswap, Trans Character

Finally posted a new (short) chapter! https://archiveofourown.org/works/55953232/chapters/202134506

Woke up early this morning thinking of The Wild Guys, a play from the 1990s that (fairly gently, iirc) satirized mythopoetic men’s retreats, which were a Thing at the time. Eventually I had to go look up Iron John: A Book About Men and Women Who Run With the Wolves to see who’d written them (Robert Bly and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, respectively).

As someone in SFF fandom, I don’t know how to feel about Jung-based movements. I get that some stuff is hard to convey except by analogy, or by constructing some kind of initiation ritual that puts people into a context where the thing you’re trying to tell them is more likely to make experiential sense. And of course I’m likely being unfair to Bly and Estes, whose writings may well be more down-to-earth than their popular image. Bly, at any rate, seems to have had a sense of humour, if this poem is anything to go by. 

The advantage of fiction, and art and music, is that you can explore and play with these same kind of potentially-useful ideas without asserting them.

Meanwhile in my own mythopoetic life, I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to figure out if I’m having those menopausal hot-flashes people talk about, or if it’s just the late-September weather—the temperature has been swinging between twelve and twenty-four degrees here. Either way, I’ve spent so much of my life too cold that this, whatever it is, kind of feels like unlocking superpowers. Flame On!

I wasn’t planning to include a supernatural element in WWMBD? but, uh, after some waffling I decided a body-swap plot makes narrative sense*. So then I had to go back and rewrite the ending of the most recent chapter, since that’s where the swap would need to take place.

 WWMBD (7759 words) by moon_custafer
Chapters: 5/?
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Musicians, Academia, Romantic Comedy

* 1. Gives me a plot thread (trying to reverse the body swap)
2. I was going to switch to Sam’s PoV (still might eventually) but this way I can put Jim’s PoV in Sam’s body
3. There’s a detail about Sam that Jim hasn’t yet twigged to, and this is a hilariously awkward way for him to discover it
4. I think Sam’s reaction to having Jim’s body could be…interestingly mixed

About two days ago a narrative in my head got vivid enough I thought I’d better start writing it down. I might be able to incorporate it into a multi-chapter fic I’ve been working on—it fits with some imagery from earlier chapters and might provide some much-needed backstory. And I don’t want to get side-tracked from the multi-chapter fic, and it’s due a new chapter, and I don’t want to let down myself and the two people reading it.

Howwwwever, the idea is also showing signs of developing into its own stand-alone short story, possibly even something I could try submitting somewhere. I think it’s been a decade since I bothered trying to submit anything anywhere, but I can dream.

The obvious solution would be to write both versions—but I saw a tumblr post a few weeks back by a professional writer whose novel got flagged by her publisher’s anti-plagiarism filter, whereupon she had to explain to her editor that the reason her novel shared a couple sentences with a very sexually -explicit LotR fic posted on Ao3 a couple of years back was because she was the author of both, and had figured those lines were too good not to reuse in her professional work.

I wonder if simply setting the multi-chapter fic to members-only would be enough to keep it from being spotted in the admittedly-unlikely event that I try to get the other version published someday. Both my readers are Ao3 members, so it wouldn’t inconvenience them.

I wonder how often this kind of thing is going to be a problem, now that there’s an option to check for plagiarism by having a computer check every word in a work against everything else findable on the internet? Not to mention the cases that probably exist where a writer didn’t intentionally steal, but did subconsciously recall some turn of phrase from a story they read as a kid…

The Yuletide fic exchange heaves into view, which means that in a few weeks I’ll likely have to put both Spooked!...in Soho and Gentleman of the Shade on hold for a couple of months (tbh, Spooked!already stalled out a couple of months back), and also that I need to start thinking about what fandoms to nominate. Iirc you can only nominate fandoms that already have at least one fic on Ao3, and fewer than one thousand, I think?

https://archiveofourown.org/works/49863202/chapters/144042439

Courtesy of nineveh_uk and a_t_rain: post the first sentences of your last ten fics, and look for patterns. (I’m combining my moon_custafer and bayone screen IDs)


No. 1: Opens spam
— “Reasons Why Jack F. Is No Longer Allowed to Use This Radio Station's Work Computer” 

Sphinxes are usually described as having the head and breasts of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of an eagle.
—“Dream Sequence” 

Ellen carefully filled in a series of triangles that diagonally crossed the surface of her canvas, mixing deeper and deeper shades of orange to achieve the chromatic effect she wanted. 
—“Spooked!…in Soho” 

“Ye’ve mislabeled this one, Brody.”
—“Correction” 

The problem with this prisoner, as far as Marcus was concerned, was that he would not stop singing. 
—“A Grand Romp” 

He’s been huddled there since the ambulance men went away, taking it with them.
—“Keith sits on the floor beside the rumpled bed” 

“Have you ever seen a ghost? I’ve always wanted to.” 
—“The Face” 

“Let me see!” 
—“1967”  (I’ve abandoned this one)

“So what is it you have to show me?” 
—“Ensuite” 

Winter in London is cold as winter in the country; and city snow doesn’t even whiten the sepulchre of the frozen streets— city snow is dirtied the very moment it touches the grimy cobblestones. 
—“Who Labours to Out-jest” 


Don’t really know what this says about my writing – half of these begin with longish descriptive sentences, but half begin with short dialogue statements.

I don’t know how I decide which stories get told in past-tense and which in present-tense. I suspect it’s purely vibes-based.

Sometimes I’m enthusiastic about coming up with titles, and sometimes I just stick to one word. It’s like TOS vs TNG titling conventions.