InsaneJournal

Current mood:

blah

Meh today...
Well I suppose it wasn't a bad day. But hubby and I had a minor spat over something goofy, and after that, I never really was able to recover my creative streak.

I did read through this one scene in "Blood Relations," and it felt wrong. So I ran the idea by hubby and went online to the horror forum to solicit opinions there too. And it turns out the scene was historically inaccurate for some of the bit characters being armed with guns. Not in Scotland in 1939, which is when the scene has to take place in order to maintain historical accuracy with what Vicky's said in other stories. So I've written up a new version of the scene without the guns, but I'm not quite happy with it yet. I'll have to come back to it in yet another revision.

I did work some on the fantasy story, but this is a lot harder than anything else I've done, and despite me reading a lot of straight fantasy, I'm struggling to make this story work. The two places it feels weakest to me are in physical descriptions, and in world building. There's no sense of scenery in many cases, it's just a brief cap of the location, and then the situation is laid out, or the dialogue is given. Even if the team is a bit unconventional, the story itself feel like a formula that I'm just plugging numbers into. It's looking like: Character X requires Y item to complete their quest. Character E has bonding moment with side character A. Fight scene. Character E has bonding moment with Character B. Bit character #2 bites the dust. Magic scene. Fan-service lesbian-elf-sex scene. Heh, okay, that last part would be hard, since there's only one female elf on the team. And if she's playing with herself, that would be masturbation, not lesbian sex. It's entertaining, to be sure, but...but probably not really needed to advance the story.

Where was I going with this? Oh, right. The thing is, I try to think of something which isn't so formulaic, and I think I have it. But then I write an idea down, and the editor in my head reminds me that it's still part of the same kind of formula. So even if I can figure out how to get this story to a rough draft stage, I suspect it's going to need a lot of work to make it something more than just standard fantasy fare. It doesn't matter if the story is canon to the rest of my series. If I can't make it exciting, no one will want to read it. But no matter what basic idea I come up with, it feel like the end result builds up tension, only to drain it away too early. And that's not good.

So...meh. I'll head off to bed and ponder how the heck I'm supposed to fix this. I have a hunch that what I need to do is finish this out, and then do a complete rewrite. Then I can know what to keep, and what to toss in favor of something more exiting. Or, that's one possible theory...we'll see what happens.

Later...