Becca Stareyes

As in, it thinks doing a Kino's Journey/Slayers fusion fic would be a good idea. Or even a crossover type dealie taking Kino, Hermes and the feeling of Kino's Journey* and bringing it into other settings. Just as kind of a series of one-shot crossovers to play with settings/characters of various series and to write Kino and Hermes.

* If you like thoughtful anime, I recommend this series highly. Basically, the premise is that Kino is a traveler who only stays a few days in each town she visits and Hermes is her motorrad (think motorcycle with AI). A lot of the episodes are stand alones or two-part arcs, and they're very concept oriented. For example, the first episode, Kino visits a town where the inhabitants developed an ability to read each other's minds. As time passed, they discovered that knowing the innermost thoughts of even loved ones was making it impossible to live with them, so they all isolated themselves and used robots to do everything. The one person Kino meets tells her this, then invites her to stay, since she's the first person he's talked to in a while and he wants to live with people who he can't read. It's a very matter-of-fact anime, showing great beauty and kindness, but also great suffering, irrationality, and brutality. (Oh, the ending...) "The world is not beautiful, therefore it is."

I really liked it, because it was... I guess because it wasn't depressing for the sake of angst, but because it was matter of fact, showing the world which was. It's on my list with Haibane Renmei and Mushishi for cerebral anime that I liked from club and want on my shelf.

The NaNo auto word-counter (the one that validates that you indeed wrote 50,000 words and links you to the winner page where you get a button and a printable certificate) is more generous about words than my writing program. Not by much -- a difference of maybe 200 words in a 30,000 word passage -- but enough that it boosted my mood. Browsing on the forum shows that Word and OpenOffice users are having the opposite problem -- special characters like em-dashes and curly quotes apparently mess up their ability to count words, so they give more words than the NaNo site.

I also made my 30K, which means I'm only a day down. I could either do a hard day's writing tonight again, or just make sure I'm setting my daily goal to 2,000 instead of 1,700.

Plus, I'm getting a free lunch out -- the speaker today is taking us to the Mediterranean restaurant instead of letting the department buy us all pizza.

I am learning that I'm less happy with my original fiction than my fanfiction when NaNoveling. As is, I think I'm going to be just writing the first half of a novel -- I'll get to a solution, but really it's not all of the story, and I'll have to keep going, and weave some of my threads back in. I might try the 90-day novel community on Insanejournal (except it's dead) instead for original fiction in the future, and stick to using NaNo as an excuse to write longer fanfiction work, where 50,000 words gets me a lot more. (The 90-day novel is 750 words a day for 90 days. Even then, this might run short -- the writing every day thing does work for me, and keeps me from spending most of my evenings goofing off on the interwebs).

But, after this I have a fanfiction to write for Yuletide, and probably other obligations that I've forgotten about.

I really need to just get a feed made from this journal, so I don't have to cross-post everything. I'm already behind about things like that.

Anyway, I have two whacked out crossover-fusion ideas. The less weird is a Fullmetal Alchemist/Vorkosigan Saga crossover* with tinges of Elizabeth Bear's work, involving nanotech. The second is a Firefly/Crest of the Stars crossover, mostly themed around 'loss of the frontier' and probably AU to the Big Damn Movie.

* I totally blame othercat@LJ. Well, that and the fact both series ahve main characters who are Very Self Conscious about their heights, and probably would have been much taller, if not for unforseen Tragic Circumstances. (The fact Miles's mother nearly died of poison gas when she was pregnant wiht him, and the whole 'Ed bound his brother's soul to armor' thing.) Plus, Miles is one of the few adult men Ed is taller than.

Granted, given the number of other Large Fanfic Ideas I have -- In the Shadows of the Flames, The Sun, Half Covered (and the end of that trilogy -- why did I finish the second one first again? Oh yeah, NaNo.), the Avatar AU, a couple of mid-sized Dresden Files fics -- I think it's safe to say I will never write these. Especially not if I just sit and play RPGs and Harvest Moon after work.

Fics written in 2007
( A meme... )

No word count tricks, no nothing. I even took out the Emergency Summary (the thing I typed a few days ago in case I hit 50,000 words but couldn't get to the end of the plot before the 30th).

Things I learned From NaNo This Year:
A lot of plot can be gotten from having characters with interesting backstories, then putting them into conflict. Half of my words were fights, and plot points I hadn't thought of in October.

I like this a lot better than last year's.

I'm nearly done with my NaNo.

This means I have an action scene. I hate writing action scenes.

Conclusion: Zelgadis Greywords studies at the Commander Vimes's school of diplomacy.

In other news, I hit 25 k. And now I get to write ninjas and demons. (Yes, this was my reward.)

I forgot this benefit of NaNo. I get very creative on my other projects when I can't work on them. Like, I scrawled a bit of Crest of the Stars fic this morning. And I just thought of how I wanted to end a fic I need to pick up again, In the Shadows of the Flames -- which requires watching Vision of Escaflowne again, and rewriting the first two chapters. As in, I have the text of the last paragraph in my head, and have to write it down.

Well, to do that and get back to work.

Would there be interest in a sort of fanfiction write-a-thon? Something like NaNo, but a little less intense?

( For great Justice! )