Cimorene

I've been thinking more in the last few years that I'd like to write a 1920s-30s murder mystery.

On the other hand, I haven't finished many novel-length stories over the years, and I've never tried a mystery at all. And also the last time I wrote regularly was 2016.

The puzzle structure of murder mysteries means they have a different set of planning and pre-writing requirements, and that's a bit intimidating...

Nice that Yuletide is open for nominations! I've been looking forward to that.

It's finally my opportunity to nominate Harlequin/Pierrot from Commedia dell'arte!

It probably won't make it since nobody else but me has ever shown an interest in it that I can find - except that one fanartist on Tumblr -, but I'm sure there are people who know more about it than me too. And it's always nice to sign up for a few old standby fandoms too. It seems like in recent years Yuletide is the only time I really write anything; otherwise there's a lot of fannish interests I have no interest in writing and fandoms I like enough to write that don't have a fandom presence, so it seems pointless. (There's writing for yourself and writing for yourself!)

The plumber said he'd come do the radiators next week, so I now expect him (although I would not be surprised if he just didn't show up, exactly, but I do expect him to actually come, so that's nice) to fix the radiators! Or at least to start to. And our new sofa should be delivered and our old sofa abstracted tomorrow!

I've been reading one of those fascinating writers who seem to have a great deal of talent and no self-discipline.

By that I mean they're writing only for pleasure, yes, but that doesn't indicate lack of self-discipline in itself because in principle writing just to please yourself is a very good thing; but sometimes I just think the author HAS to be having a great time since everything is PAINFULLY obviously driven by wish fulfillment rather than taste, logic or characterization. In spite of obvious talent and skill at writing itself, I mean, where the surface level of writing is good or even great, things like narration and dialogue: this is a writer who could produce stuff I'd rate 110% if they were given a detailed plot outline by someone better at plots than they are and then edited by a sufficiently harsh beta.

As a reader, I... don't really enjoy reading about how all my favorite characters from disparate corners of canon, no matter how remote and unlikely, meet and become the best friends ever and subsequently triumph over every single character I've ever disliked through various embarrassments and humiliations while the world in general agrees explicitly how great my faves are and how pathetic their enemies. I did briefly write a few things like that when I was ten or twelve, and I read the slightly more refined wish fulfillment/Chosen One genre avidly a bit longer than that (Mercedes Lackey mostly), but... for my present enjoyment things would have fewer unpleasant people popping out to be vanquished and the skill and renown of the protagonist wouldn't be continuously increasing so regularly and explicitly. Partly it's just that it's so blatant that it's embarrassing to read and strains suspension of disbelief because I keep noticing the characterization being bent out of shape (hence my reference to the 'slightly more refined' version, ie wish fulfillment that is all about the Chosen One being showered with praise and recognition but without straining credulity as obviously and usually, when published as books like Harry Potter or the Vorkosigan books, broken up with more challenges and problems). But it also just leaves me a bit cold in this form because it's not my particular narrative kink, as it were.

I suppose this kind of wish fulfillment reading must feel for some people like the most engaging and soothing and comforting thing to read ever, so... then the question becomes, what DO I want for my favorite characters?

It isn't something I'd given a lot of thought to over time, but fortuitously, just a couple of weeks ago yvannairie recommended me this gen Transformers series, Xenoethnography by Therrae. And this is pretty much that ideal made real. In fact, I don't have a strong preference for gen, but this is such great gen for such a long time that it's an exemplary opportunity to examine the best stuff that can happen to a beloved protagonist personally as opposed to interpersonally: Therrae's OC social scientist is useful, in fact, crucial for her expertise, and she is introduced to the community of extraterrestrials living in secret and helps them and others in important ways while constantly learning more about their alien culture and psychology and gradually getting to know a wide variety of different characters. (It's Transformers fic, which is hilarious because Transformers, so the aliens are sentient robots, but the genre and register is very classic [second wave or later] science fiction.)

Put like this, the description also explains why I love CJ Cherry's Foreigner series, which was my favorite in high school (I haven't read the last few books mostly because it's so long now that trying to reread it all to remind myself what happened can take months and months each time and I keep getting distracted. I probably need all of them as ebooks in order to manage). But this learning and confidently using extant expertise also pinpoints some of the stuff we in fandom often loved about, say, SGA fic (applying to Rodney but also to John), and also to part of what really entices me about my current favorite book series, Catriona McPherson's 1920s Dandy Gilver mysteries. The found family and alien culture window character applies to popular portrayals of Stiles in Teen Wolf (although this dynamic quickly got overrun with the "pack mom" fanon, which felt weird and kinky for me and kept grossing me out to the point of becoming a pet peeve) and to the Nero Wolfe mysteries that I devoured last year at princessofgeeks's recommendation.

I've been trying to think of an idea that would support a whole plot for another Singin' in the Rain fic since 2015, but last night I thought of one at midnight, when I had been on the verge of falling asleep. Predictably it's one that would require me to do several months' reading, though, so I'll set that aside for now and focus on making candy to take to Wax's aunt's xmas eve dinner tomorrow.

You really should check the names of garments and especially check what kind of underwear people were wearing whenever writing historical fiction, even if you think it's well within the era of modern clothing.

(You could be surprised all the way up to the 1960s! The modern bra - with cups - didn't really come into existence until the 1930s, although brassieres were first sold in the late 1800s; and elasticated fabrics first appeared in the 1930s, but they weren't like modern stretch fabric. Meanwhile, just because a corset was involved doesn't mean the standard pop culture perception of undergarments that went with it is correct. There was a vast difference between the early 17th century and the early 20th century, and the early 1800s were often uncorseted or corseted only minimally. On the other hand, the Victorian era, which may seem the most familiar to many people because of its frequent appearances in pop culture texts, demonstrably involved about twice as many garments and undergarments as many, including those educated by popular movies and television, are aware.)

Anyway, I've just discovered that two errors in historical undergarments is my limit before flinging my phone down in exasperation, and even though in this fanfiction it would be an easy fix, I don't know that I'll be sanguine enough to compose a polite, casual, and friendly comment on the subject any time soon.

Imagine being easily able to imagine how it feels to not care about the minute details of historical costume! I can't. I mean... I've tried. I've gotten as far as logically understanding that people don't, but there's a huge emotional gap. The narrative just won't hold together. It's essentially a complete cipher to me.

Sometimes writing is more about the world building than the plot; sometimes it's basically all about the world building at the expense of plot, either because the author's not good at action or just doesn't care as much about it. And sometimes that's okay with me if the world building is more interesting (or is interesting enough to make up for plot problems, I should say).

In a book I was just reading the absence of plot included:

• A lot of things happened one after the other, but without significant causal relationships.



• Frequently there was no sense of real agency associated with these events - like the type of newspaper writing that elides responsibility and agency through a variety of linguistic acrobatics that are widely and incorrectly labeled by many people as "passive voice" although that isn't what passive voice actually means. People made choices but the ones the narrative spent time on weren't the ones which were significant to the course of events.



• A lot of new information was presented like a twist or revelation, but most of these didn't pay off or go anywhere or tie into anything.



• Revelations eg suddenly unveiling the motivation or unmasking the secret identity of characters other than the protagonist were presented as if to make things more meaningful or resolved when in fact these revelations had no particular bearing on the outcomes. They were also presented only at the end even though the protagonist who was narrating had figured them out much earlier, with the clues that led to the protagonist's conclusions not being revealed to the reader (a frequent practice of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, but they weren't the narrators of their own stories. An omission like this on the part of a narrator who is omitting relevant facts artificially to increase tension is gimmicky).



• Characters were introduced and described but relationships formed almost entirely offscreen, without real character development being seen and without the work of creating their relationships with the protagonist being done. They simply appear in an introduction scene and perhaps exchange some words, get some vague exposition, and then proceed to appear as very close friends or as enemies without any work being shown.

The reason I say that in this book the author cared about world building at the expense of plot was that most of that page real estate was spent on exposition and description instead, on all sorts of scales. It reminded me of one of those elaborate miniature setups, like model railways or people who build miniature rooms and scenes and villages, or the settings of more elaborate role playing games in the hands of enthusiastic dungeon masters. (Of course it's possible for a story to have flaws like the above or otherwise a bad or missing plot without this focus on world building.)

But what I started thinking at about the 30% mark in this fantasy novel was:

If you're going to put that much effort into world building, you should do it right.

I mean at least that way if I'm reading a book that's essentially just world building the reader could then be spending that time enjoying the world building.

It should make sense. Practical questions don't have to be your sole concern, but if you're giving practical details they shouldn't appear to glaringly contradict other practical details. Basically, there should be... logic. Also it's kind of odd to be spending 80% of your time and effort with exposition that is often needlessly detailed without apparent cause and then to also just be going super vague and skimming over other details when they should have appeared on the page.

I have another entire rant I could make about the use of made-up language bits (as opposed to more complete and systematic constructed languages) in a lot of generic-level high fantasy, which is typically annoying, and then how much worse than that this book was while not improving on it in any respect, but in retrospect that isn't really relevant to the point (except inasmuch as it's a further example of the world building not being done with sufficient work/care and its corresponding lack of logic).

For most of the month of November (though not since) I managed to write almost every night, and I created a cozy little routine of fixing cocoa with amaretto in it and taking the laptop into the library with me and making a cocoon of blankets on the sofa there, where it's cooler than the rest of the flat and very dark and quiet. It's like being in a bubble, which is necessary because otherwise I am too easily distracted.

But writing only late at night, after putting the bunnies to bed and feeding the cats, doesn't leave that much time for it, because I can't easily stay up half the night anymore. I've been meaning to try to transfer this routine to the daytime, but that feeling is elusive. The library's just as cool and quiet, but when there's sunlight - which okay, is only between 9 am and 3 pm or something like that, but still most of the day - it doesn't feel cocoony at all, because there's stuff in my peripheral vision. (It would probably be soothing to write inside a pod, but unfortunately I don't have one.) Probably if I hadn't gone so long with writer's block I would not struggle so much with distraction, but the only way to fix that is to make new routines...

It's quite poignant to have 100 works uploaded to AO3 (although honestly, some of them are just polished comment- and chatfics that don't really belong there, but it seems even sillier to take them down now they've already been there for a while) and not have written anything in 4 years except Yuletide.

When I was a teenager, I stayed up all night writing RPF more times than I stayed up all night writing essays.

At this point writing 200 words of fiction in a day, like I did yesterday, is an infinite improvement over every day since last Yuletide deadline, but my main reaction is still "This is nothing compared to my high point in 2007-8 when 6000 words a day wasn't unusual."

I think there's a little thread of feeling chuffed under there, but it's hard to feel it.

It's the Yuletide reveal!

Never Let No One Man Worry Your Mind (5538 words) by cimorene
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cosmo Brown & Don Lockwood, Cosmo Brown/Other(s)
Characters: Cosmo Brown, Don Lockwood
Additional Tags: Queer Gen, Queer History, vaudeville, Chicago, Friendship, Drag Queens, Queer Themes, Mistaken for Being in a Relationship, Queer Culture
Summary:

"Cos! Thank God you're alive, I thought my double act was about to become a single," Don said. "Where have you been?"

"In jail," Cosmo whispered back, "Happy birthday."

Don clapped him on the shoulder. "Thanks; you're a little late, but... in where?"

"Keep your voice down," hissed Cosmo, just as a hail of applause blew the curtain back and practically deafened him. "In jail."

I got assigned my all-time favorite movie since childhood again, which is always exciting, and seeing my recipient was interested in Cosmo's roots got me even more excited to research because I've always wanted to know more about vaudeville.

I had a great time learning about it, a very frustrating time trying to learn about queer culture of the time, and went way overboard listening to period music to use (there's a playlist, but that's less than 1/5th of the music I downloaded - I listened to 1900-1930 pop hits for about a month, prompting waxjism and perhael to worriedly tell me to relax, 50 tracks is enough!! etc several times).

I've always shipped OT3 (and written it), and it was almost an accident that I arrived at the decision to write their love as brotherly here (but still very much the center of the story), but once I decided it went surprisingly smoothly.

I just realized that I forgot to post this here when I posted it to Tumblr on the 1st.

The Affair of the Private Affairs of Miss Lemon (3069 words) by cimorene
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Agatha Christie's Poirot (TV), Poirot - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Felicity Lemon, James Japp
Additional Tags: Queer Themes, Queer Gen
Summary:

"I wonder why Miss Lemon hasn't married," said Hastings presently.

"Indeed, Hastings?"

"I mean, she's not bad-looking!" said Hastings. "As a matter of fact, Poirot, she's a very attractive girl."

"Oui, mon ami, and she has also the filing system most excellent."

I must thank waxjism and perhael, by convention, for their assistance with this story, although I think they're too involved with hockey and J-rock respectively to notice the omission if I didn't.

The main thing is to thank my recipient, though, for the opportunity to venture a small amount of Poirot pastiche. I've had ideas about dialogue and narration bouncing around in my head for ages, without enough unified direction to turn into a story until now. It was lots of fun and gave me an excuse to rewatch about half of the Suchet episodes again.