Check-In, Day 07

[mistressofmuses]

My day definitely got away from me. How about yours?

Poll #33702

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

View Respondents

Where are you in working on your WIP at the moment?

View Answers

Working on pre-writing: research, planning, outlining, etc.!
3 (37.5%)

Writing!
3 (37.5%)

This week is going to be all about planning!
0 (0.0%)

Working on something other than my intended WIP!
1 (12.5%)

Not working on anything/taking a break!
3 (37.5%)

Something else!
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[fleetsparrow]

I haven't written yet (and might not today) but I do feel better than the last 2 days, AND I looked over my current WIP, so I'm hopeful tomorrow will see some writing done!

[mistressofmuses]

I'm glad you're feeling better after the miserable side effect garbage! And looking over and reorienting yourself in the WIP is a good plan!

[igenlode]

I've managed to introduce my OC into the presence of the canon characters and established a bit of the set-up for this alternative universe (the existence of which is the main point of this crossover crack-fic; once I've managed to draw all the parallels, the story will effectively be over).
And I've finally managed to establish the character's name, which should make writing about him a bit easier from now on :-D

It's not that I didn't know his name from the start; indeed it was part of the impetus for finally creating this story. It's just that the form of the narrative made it a bit tricky to introduce it to the readers, as I wasn't writing from his point of view and there was nobody to ask him what he was called ;-)

[mistressofmuses]

Hooray for progress on getting everything established!

And hooray for getting to actually introduce the character's name: I can see it being challenging to write about him while avoiding a name that hasn't been stated yet.

[igenlode]

Indeed; I once got myself into the position (for a challenge entitled "What's in a name?") of having to write several thousand words in deep third-person viewpoint about a character who had discarded his hated birth name and spent years going under a variety of pseudonyms, but realistically wouldn't actually have referred to himself by *any* of them. So for the entire chapter the protagonist was basically simply 'he', while interacting with a variety of other named and unnamed characters, almost all of whom were also male... and I had to pull it off without ambiguity and without the prose sounding in the least strained as a result. While he was still young I could just about get away with the occasional reference to 'the boy' as versus the other characters, but 'the man' wouldn't work at all, so I really was down to 'he'.

I was very pleased with the way it came out in the end, and none of the readers whom I was able to ask even noticed what had been happening -- which was the entire aim of the exercise -- but my goodness, it was hard work. In this one I'm in a less deep viewpoint and am dealing with a protagonist who has never been named and can quite easily be referred to from the readers' perspective so far simply as 'the boy', but it's still nice to have managed to reach a point where I can actually have another character ask him point-blank what he is called, and get an answer that we can then use for narrative purposes!

[mistressofmuses]

That definitely sounds like quite the challenge, but a very neat one to attempt! I'm glad you were happy with it in the end, and it sounds like a really cool perspective for a story, but that does sound very difficult!

[igenlode]

If only that had been the actual terms of the challenge it would have been a deeply impressive achievement -- but alas, it wasn't! Just an unintended consequence that I accidentally inflicted on myself by writing about the period of the character's backstory before he had acquired the name we know him by in canon, because the whole point of the fic was to present a way in which he might have appropriated it from someone else...

(Other people write about him in childhood and I think just use the canonical name by default; but because I was writing about his having acquired it in adulthood, I couldn't. Ooops.)

[mistressofmuses]

Oh dear! Unintended, but definitely a very challenging challenge! It sounds like your version may have been more difficult, but that you wound up sticking to a really interesting decision, despite the difficulty!