Playing with words

I love that we got so many Vault tracks on Red (Taylor's Version)! I am mostly listening to them, actually - I feel like her vocal control and maturity shows a little too much in the re-recorded tracks? This album is all about the headrush, spinning-out feeling of falling wildly in love and then getting your heart absolutely crushed. The desperate edges in her younger self singing these feel more authentic to me still, but maybe it's just because I'm so used to hearing them? So my fave tracks to play on repeat right now are New to Me ones: The Moment I Knew, Come Back...Be Here, Nothing New, Better Man, Message in a Bottle and All Too Well (10 minute version).

Actually the last track (and the accompanying short film) is mostly what I want to talk about, because it's brought up a lot of talk about age gaps in relationships in a couple of different places for me, and I had some very different conversations about what the film depicted:


Taylor cast these two very deliberately - the ten year age gap is the same as the one between her and Jake Gyllenhaal, and this song is famously autobiographical about their relationship when she was 20. Back when ATW was the 5 minute version, it seemed like a song about great love found and lost, but it's morphed into something a lot darker and expository in its new iteration. So he's been trending on Twitter since the album dropped.

Jake Gyllenhaal calling Tom Holland ‘kid’ for the entirely of the far from home press tour

Tom Holland being the same age as Jake’s girlfriend… pic.twitter.com/SCvaihqKcF

— jess (@ripcowstoenails) November 13, 2021

Sorry for this one #RedTaylorsVersion pic.twitter.com/hLJpFD5T4S

— Meredith Cash (@mercash22) November 13, 2021

"I'll get older but your lovers stay my age." OUCH. Taylor dragging him full out, spelling out a few more memorable incidents (like him standing her up on her 21st birthday), this noticeable relationship pattern of his and his emotional withholding power games. On a personal note, my mother was in Uni when she met my (24 years senior) father, who had gone back to Hong Kong after his divorce expressly for the purpose of finding himself a young, new wife. She never finished her degree: he took her back to Canada, where he isolated and abused her (and us kids) for almost 15 years. And my SIL is mid-divorce right now from her 10 years older husband, who she met while he was coaching her club at Uni. You know the thing I remember most about her talking about him? "Kenka shinai," she said, absolutely beaming. (We) don't fight. It took her literally years to realize it was because she was just doing everything he told her to. And yes, he followed the pattern too: they're getting divorced because he was cheating on her with his new girlfriend, a university student. 


I'm glad Taylor is speaking up about this? Like it's a dynamic that our culture and media reinforces as Absolutely Fine and even Ideal - see how hard it is for a 40-something year old actress to be cast as a love interest for a 50 year old actor. 🙄 And I am absolutely not saying all men are serial predators, or that all age gap relationships with this specific age gap are doomed. But I'm glad she's putting the full truth out there now that she can look back at the relationship from a distance and go, "yeah, that was fucked up." Just look at her new album cover. It's her in the driver's seat now.

So I spent the weekend backing up fics and reviews that are on ffnet to AO3, since signs are pointing to ffnet circling the drain. Another one bites the dust, but I'm not terribly sad about it since AO3 is superior in most ways anyway, and I've only been putting up fic on ffnet as an afterthought. Still, it made me rather nostalgic. I had completely forgotten how I'd had a phase where I wrote a new, spite driven Forwood fic after every new ep of TVD, and re-reading all those old reviews made me think of the Genesis awards forum. <3

Also I noticed the stats on one of my series while I was clicking in and out, and if one more person bookmarks it is going to be SUBLIME. :DDDD 



I really want to write a new Skittles chapter that is exactly 3030 words to make it all 3s, but I don't know if I have it in me! LOL Besides, this author has already won at AO3 word/chapter count number manipulation, LBR. I find it extra delightful that it is Lucifer fic! Link here I've only read the first chap of the first fic, but so far it's good!



Also: made a couple new TQG sets recently. This Chess Players/moving pieces set was another fun challenge. I had to learn to make pale GIFs because I wanted it to look chessboard-y, and I think the final effect is pretty nice, although Tumblr isn't playing nice with the timing and refuses to sync the GIFs which are actually all the same frame order and length! Grrrr. Anyway, it was neat to look at the different way the actors learned to move the pieces, and I love the elegant way Beth captures pieces the best, although I found capping Benny violently taking pieces the most amusing. Like he would hit the piece with his, and then use the dead piece to punch the clock after, and apparently TBS modeled it off how Bobby Fischer played.

I also tried that trendy vibrant painted background GIF effect on the first GIF of this B2 set. Will have to attempt it again in a scene with less movement, but I think it's a decent first effort!

Day 10

In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs.


( Mutual pining and Mirroring )  

So this was going to be a straightforward squee post about Rogue One, which we saw yesterday.

( Spoilers galora. )

Wow. Finished at last.
It's both cool and weird at the same time.
Thinking back to when I was first writing Aftermath, with the idea burning in my head amidst the frenzy of wedding preparations, I feel incredibly gratified that the story has come this far. It was just a little Cloud/Tifa fic. They sooo needed a break from what canon was tossing them. And I had a few ideas for other chapters. So in Oct/Nov last year, I sketched out a rough plan- it looks like this:

( The rest under here... )  about the original version of A Taste of Home. Am I a writer or a storyteller? Do I tell instead of show? Is there a flair to my writing? These are questions she brought up that I still ask myself  as I write/edit my chapters. While I won't claim that I'm a good writer now, I think I'm a much better one than I was a few months ago. And like teaching, where you go back over a lesson to see how you could have taught it better, I think that ongoing self-scrutiny is what leads to improvement.

Part of the experiment was also seeing how well I could work with deadlines. The verdict? I did well getting out chapters every month... until I got pregnant. Hey, you try writing when you're falling asleep in front of the keyboard! :P Jonathan Stroud recently wrote in his NaNoWriMo pep talk about how writers have to be dedicated to writing under pressure. A year's deadline is actually only 5 or 6 months when considering all the editing, etc. that a book also needs to go through.It takes dedication and a certain amount of "forcing yourself" to get that first draft out. And since this was supposed to be practice for writing my own novel, I'm feeling buoyant about my future as a novelist. (BTW, I'm not doing NaNo, but I got a peek at the pep talk through somebody in the Bartimeaus community! LJ, I <3 you.)

Another part was keeping it realistic. I did a lot of research, both in my canon sources to make sure my characterizations were accurate, and on scientific things like solar energy. This was actually something Stroud recommended on bartiforums that I read ages ago. Want to make your fantasy story believable? Look it up, and stick in proper details. It's a lot of work for a line or two, but then it no longer sounds like you are just making stuff up. Yes, your readers can tell when you have no idea what you are talking about. And actually, the geeky part of me found this a lot of fun. Bioluminescent creatures are pretty cool!

Another thing I tried was writing in different styles. Could I make it clear who was talking through simply dialogue? What if I had two time-lines? Am I any good at writing an action sequence? (Something I avoided for a long time- until a reviewer mentioned it.) Creating suspense? Making a scene sparkly and euphoric? Maybe. I tried, anyway. You know what they say about practice...

I also experimented with symbology and themes- Square's "wolf" interpretation of Cloud's character, for example. Was I successful? I don't know- honestly, I think I've only had a single reviewer notice the deeper themes. So this probably still needs work. But I don't mind- I like knowing they're there, at least.

In my quest for improvement, I joined the Genesis Awards forum. Not just a forum where the LTD is done to death, but one where fanfiction writers actually talk about writing. It's amazing what sort of tips you can pick up by reading through old threads. And in getting some in-depth feedback from another member, I realized that, for example, my knowledge of punctuation was not up to standard. (It still isn't. Sigh. Double dashes still look weird to me, wheatear .) I also started to read a lot more critically- both my own work, and that of others.

It wasn't until Full Circle got nominated (for which abrogate_nadir  gets eternal gratitude!) that I finally got a beta, though. (Ha! Irony!) It was great to have that second critical opinion of my work. It made me a lot more confident about publishing, and I've actually done few retro-edits to Level Up, Preludes and Full Circle (Epilogue)- something I used to do compulsively for the other chapters.

Actually, I'll still be editing- judging is just around the corner, and I want it to be in the best shape possible before it goes before them. I have no idea when I'll start writing again, but I think "Crucible" will be my next project. A short little 5 chapter fic that will require loads of research. Sounds like fun, right? :)