the WIP meme

[rm]

1. Torchwood Jack/Ianto:

It actually takes a couple of months for Jack to get motivated enough to search through Ianto's things, and really, he only goes for the closet, because it's right there. It's a double sliding door, and Ianto always slides the right side towards the left, but Jack can't help but wonder what he'll see if he slides the left side towards the right.

2. Torchwood Jack/Ianto:

Sometime around his second week at Torchwood One, Ianto Jones stopped considering anything that happened to him to be the last thing he had ever expected. That was a turn of phrase for ordinary people with ordinary lives who might one day meet a celebrity or win a lottery. It wasn't for Torchwood, and it certainly wasn't for a boy from a council estate who suddenly had a thousand pounds a month to spend on suits his father, had he still been alive, would have screamed and screamed about both because of expense and vanity.

3. Torchwood Gwen, Rhiannon:

The day UNIT released the bodies from Thames House, Gwen received a thick envelope without return address in the post. It was from Jack and contained the keys to Ianto's flat.

Make sure you check for anything that's ours before you let Rhiannon in. -J

Below, Ianto's sister's phone number had been scrawled.

4. Torchwood/Doctor Who Jack/Alonso:

This is almost like the last 207 days haven't happened, and almost like Jack didn't pay a masseuse for a hand job three fucking days after Ianto died just so he could have all the loss over and done and gone at once.

It is almost like, instead of burning his only photo of Steven, he had left it with Gwen instead.

5. Personal essay:

Gossip is an act of claiming. It is how we convince ourselves that every illicit celebrity affair somehow has something to do with us, no matter how empty our bed.

6. A bit of RPF I actually started writing for cruentum ages ago:

“You act first and think later, and just because you don't mean anything by it doesn't mean I'm not getting a little tired of you whipping your dick out whenever you think it's clever.”

7. Original fic, werewolf story:

No one, certainly no one Marinta was ever going to have the pleasure to speak to, really knew where the wolves had come from, exactly, just that they — both the sometimes human sort and the definitely not — lived now in the former public park in the center of the city. Self-proclaimed natural scientists In broadsheets also scandalously popular in salons and, particularly, hunting lodges, speculated on the nature and history of the wolves. Perhaps they really had always been in the city and amongst its citizens, but were not spoken about because they were a shameful thing, like a whore’s child, father unknown. Others theorized the wolves had arrived from abroad, as rats and plague came from ships, or sprung into being from soil tainted by the advent of electricity, coal and the burgeoning machine age. Marinta personally didn’t really see how coal was going to make wolves rise out of the earth like trees, but she didn’t really understand how trees worked either what with the dying and flowering over and over again, so she figured it was possible, even if anything various popular papers said was generally best ignored.

8. Original fic, gay airship pirates

Jelem had been born a tailor's son, and sometimes wished he had stayed one, going into the family business his father had entered via his father before him, and so forth back to an interval prior to the fashion of court becoming so extreme an alphabet of power.

9. Original fic, the novel - ConSweet:

Hope smiled and ran her fingers over the cool marble of the counter; he really didn’t plan for travel well. She picked up the razor and tried to imagine how it would feel in her hand if she were a boy, if she were Evan. She wondered too if he had forgotten his own shampoo, or if he just couldn’t be bothered. Would he pick up his clothes from the floor later, or wait for housekeeping to do it? It was all so ordinary and impersonal and lonely, like all business travel, all over the world. And that’s all this was for him. It made her fall in love, just a little; and it made her grateful, a lot.

She looked at herself in the mirror. The light was too bright, and the night was clearly taking its toll. Her hair was a mess from Evan’s hands too. She picked up one of the glasses on the counter and ran the tap, eventually leaning forward to fill it up. She had to get out there soon, lest he think she was in here crying or some shit. But this, this was really the only reason she ever did these things aside from a good tumble. She had to see the ordinary, had to find a way to be certain that these people who had made it to where she hadn’t yet, were just like her and took off their clothes at night looking at their reflections and longing somehow for a life they still didn’t have, and despite being able to taste it, still didn’t quite know how to get.

Comments

[tree00faery.livejournal.com]

These are all lovely! The Jack/Alonso intrigues me, as does the personal essay. And after hearing so much about ConSweet, I really want to read it. ^_^

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I posted another ConSweet chunk down in comments to someone else, if you're curious.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

The economy with which you write is amazing. I first read your Jack/Alonso snippet when you first posted it after The End of Time aired and those two sentences still sting.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I have written more on that story since I started it, but I'm still not done and that snippet is the part I'm still the most proud of.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

When I read your fic about Jack on the Mars Colony (Red and 4th, having a brain cramp) I was amazed at how you were able to put in so many worldbuilding details without falling into infodumping. Asides to the adapted calendar to deal with the different length of the Martian day and year, that sort of thing.

After the events of CoE, and seeing Tovey's performance in Human, I think I am applying what I know of George and having a need to shout "Run Alonso! It will all end in tears!" :-)

[bugeyedmonster.livejournal.com]

I'd like to read your original fic.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Werewolves deadline is supersoon, so soon!

[verasteine.livejournal.com]

The idea that you're writing a novel fills me with inordinate joy. It looks like it won't disappoint. #1 is a piece of writing brilliance, just in those two lines, and #5 I want to read because it sounds utterly fascinating to have your thoughts on that.

[rm.livejournal.com]

#5 is ... problematic. Because I know exactly what the essay is about and how it works structurally, but the execution is hard in part because it involves weaving together two stories about celebrities and me (although I'm more tangental to one of the stories than the other) and I don't want to identify one of them for a lot of convoluted reasons that may ultimately be incorrect to the structure of the thing. So it's a PitA, weaving it all together.

One day the novel will be done. I love it like crazy, and it will go out there into the world.

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

*is very intrigued by your novel*

That tiny glimpse is really interesting. I know that often the crumbling of the "wall of illusion" is accompanied by either disappointment (upon realizing that stars are ordinary and flawed), or elation (for the privilege of getting to see things others don't), but I got the sense that you're describing something entirely different.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hope is a girl who's email address is convixen77@gmail.com (really, I registered that). It's after he favorite B-movie ever, and hey, it's appropriate because she's an aspiring actress hottie who goes to cons and has a lot of consensual meaningless sex, and the more famous her partner in that, the better.

But the thing about Hope is that she's an actress, just not a successful or famous one yet (for a lot of reasons, including that she lives in Minneapolis (she's working on that!) and that she's Asian and has to deal with a lot of racefail in the business). And she has a kink for how everyone's lives in this business stay miserable and ordinary. Remembering this is how she tries to stay aspirational -- she's not as far from her goals as she thinks!

Of the three main female characters in the book, she's our slut. But she's not stupid. Quite the contrary and because of that she trips over herself a lot, and tends to have soft spots for a lot of unlikely people.

She's not the romantic interest of the book. She's that girl's best friend and just happens to sleep with the boy that's our romantic lead first. She provides a lot of our insight into people in the course of the book, which isn't what most people would expect from the tall, blond and slutty congirl.

When I started writing the book, she was my least developed character, but she's sort of become my favorite the more I've fleshed her out.

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

I never would have imagined that she wasn't your heroine. Having the female romantic lead's slutty best friend "get" the male lead (first?) is original - it creates an imperfect, more realistic universe.

So what's Hope motivation for starfucking? Is it the fascination you described in those two paragraphs, or does she believe this will advance her acting career? My instincts tell me it'll have the opposite effect but I'm such a stranger to that world that I wouldn't dare to presume.

Anyway, it's obviously going to be a very good read once it's done. I sounds like something that would fascinate and make me uncomfortable at the same time... ;)

[rm.livejournal.com]

A lot of it is just that Hope likes sex. But she's also insecure and has that motivator. She doesn't think it'll advance her career in the traditional sense, but somehow, I think she thinks if she lives close enough to it, it'll happen to her.

And it is uncomfortable. I looked long and hard for a part I was actually comfortable posting without the broader context of what I've written so far for that reason. This book has a lot of weird shit going on in it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Here's the heroine. She's cosplays She Hulk, by way of context for this:

Jean waved and her smile broadened as her shoes moved from the carpet of the event planning suite to the stone floors of the hotel. Click, click, click. She’d go upstairs, take a long hot shower, exfoliate the hell out of herself in prep for the body paint, and maybe order up some room service while she waited for Ashley or Hope to call.

Sure, she could do the green for most of her outfits herself (only the skimpier ones that also required that she paint her back were really a problem), but she preferred having help. Not just because it went quicker and she hated to miss a spot, but because putting on the green often mattered to her too much and sometimes it was easier if she had a distraction around so that she didn’t have to think about it too hard.

Jean had once read an interview with a woman about her tattoos. The woman said that watching the ink be carved into her skin felt not like begin drawn upon, but like having a picture that was always there uncovered and revealed. Sometimes, Jean thought, the green was like that for her, although she had worried when she’d first done it, both that it looked odd and fake and streaky (and it had; it had taken practice to get it just right), and the the whole thing was some weird act of self-hatred; most of the time she could count the number of non-white folks at a con on one hand. Being green didn’t always strike her as the best way of representing.

On the other hand, it hadn’t taken her long to discover that green girls were their own special geek minority, and generally she got more flack for that at these things than anything else.

The Green Girls Are Easy mantra (for which she heartily blamed Star Trek) wasn’t one she particularly appreciated; it hurt personally, and also on this level which was just hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t also a fan. In costume she was a guardian of the character she was portraying, and so Jean often felt that cruel commentary in such circumstances landed doubly hard.

“Like Kermit the Frog always said,” she muttered to herself, punching the button for the 18th floor, “it’s not easy being green.”

At a muffled laugh, Jean looked up, startled out of her reverie.

“You’re telling me,” a fat guy in a latex dragon suit, said.

She smiled and kissed him on his synthetic snout.

“Not going to turn into a prince, you know,” he said.

Jean patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, I wouldn’t want you to.”

Randomly, Dragon Guy is a random, recurring minor character whom I'm sort of ridiculously fond of and proves himself to be awesome in the end in part because he's instrumental in uncovering the gossip column author villains of the piece.

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

Wait a minute... nerdy green girl as the heroine? Dragon Guy?? gossip columnist as the villain??? *cue nerdgasm*

So she ends up getting it on with the (sexy/cool/famous) Actor????

Sorry, drowned in my own shallowness for a moment there... Ahm.

That she feels, in a way, more like herself while green, makes her wonderfully unusual. The glimpse into the soul of cosplaying, especially the ritualization of the costume/makeup application, is brilliant, but don't expect too many people outside cosplaying/acting to fully understand it.

I'm not sure I got this part:

"...and the the whole thing was some weird act of self-hatred; most of the time she could count the number of non-white folks at a con on one hand. Being green didn’t always strike her as the best way of representing."

Is she a PoC?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she's PoC. It's gone into at length somewhere else in the manuscript, but I'm avoiding posting any of that until I have my generous PoC readers check with where I need bashing with cluebat.

And yeah. It's about cons and nerds.

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

Okay, now it sits right.

So now when you've got me all excited, do you have an ETA on that baby...?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm about 20,000 words in, and won't really have an ETA until I know Patty's upcoming dig/school travel schedule, as the goal is to occupy myself with it while she's away.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The third female character you haven't met yet is a PR/manager sort of person who hates science fiction and is a close friend of the other two girls. She's also Evan's (our celebrity) babysitter for the con. Hew viewpoint is how I am trying to make the thing accessible to the less geeky than me reader.

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

Would that be Ashley?

I guess a person like that would find the whole sci-fi fan convention thing bizarre (OMG, look at all the freaks!), but if her close friend is "one of them" then she's not entirely disconnected.

And I'm guessing Hope would find it very helpful to have friends is strategic places :P

So, what's Jean's story? What does she do for a living? How did she get into that stuff?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Jean is a native Chicagoan (man, I chose Chicago for the setting, before frigging CCC got announced) who works in the hospitality industry. Specifically in event planning for one of the host hotels. Her drama, aside from the romance is, how not to get seen by her coworkers while painted green while also helping her friends when entirely stupid shit happens (like Evan, locking himself out of his room without his keys, ID or shoes).

She's second generation fen and she grew up going to cons. There's a host of minor characters in the book who have known her most of her life. Her father, who killed himself her sophomore year in college, left her his comic book collection.