Arrant Nonsense

The BeeFic is either the most pretentious piece of crap I've ever written, or the most lyrical. Finding the exact right words for this sucker is tough, man.

However, words are coming. If it's crap...well, crap can be edited.

I have a theme. I have bookends. I'm keeping track of numbers in a way I hope makes sense.

Part of my problem here is that I feel semi-detached from my characters. This may be a function of the style it's written in, but I'm not sure. I guess I'll just have to finish it and see how it looks with an "END" at the bottom.

So, I made a couple of icons.



In other news, I've broken a thousand words on the BeeFic. I think it's nearly done. Writing not-boring battle scenes is hard. Also, introducing character names in this thing is, for some reason, a cast-iron bitch. My character is the princess; she'd know everyone's names, but sliding them into the narrative without it being all awkward is...awkward.

Yeah, that's me, the writer-person, being all articulate and stuff.

...for the poor little badfic author. She's probably feeling quite picked on by now.

( Again, for my own records, because I'm betting it'll be gone in the morning... )

In other news, I broke 850 words in the BeeFic. It's nearly done, I think. I just need to think my battle through a little better. But seeing as it's three in the morning, I'm going to sleep on it.

That JLA fic? She took it down. We'll have to see if she posts again, or if I've crushed her little writer spirit. I hope not; that wasn't my intention, and I really tried to keep the snark to a minimum. Still nothing in my inbox by way of reply.

ETA: And it's back. Still one big block o' text...but now it's double-spaced! I don't know whether to throw my hands up in the air and give up, or just flat-out offer to beta it for her. The problem is, her "plot" sucks so badly that I don't think I could save it...and it's not my fandom anyway. She incorporated the question mark I told her about, and she fixed the "hays," but she obviously has no idea how to format it so it's halfway readable.

She's trying, dammit.

In other news, I'm reading "The Warrior's Apprentice" by Lois McMaster Bujold, and enjoying it tremendously. It's well-written and the characters are drawn very realistically.

Da Boy is in bed; the Hubby is off at work until late tomorrow night. I should write. Especially since I have the info I need on the bees.

*cracks knuckles and whip* Okay, fuzzy-butts. Let's go.

WHY is it so difficult to find the specific piece of information I need for this damb beefic?

It's a well-known fact that if you cut off a cockroach's head, it will live until it starves to death. Cockroaches are tough little buggers.

However...what happens to a bee if you whack its head off? How long does it live? Can it still fly, or sting?

I called a beekeeper. He didn't know, but suggested trying the library. I've looked through Google until I'm blue in the fingertips.

And I'm squeamish about catching a bee and cutting off its head to find out for myself. That just seems...I don't know. Unnecessarily cruel. To a bug.

Yeah.

And the damb story is stalled until I find out one way or the other. CRAP.

In other news, apparently the author I've been stalking reviewing at FFN has taken the reviews to heart...in a way. She's fixed the script format, but now it's all one big block of text. The word "sinus" is gone, so yay for that.

It looks like she can be taught.

So I left the aforementioned badfic author a review on her newly-uploaded JLU fic.

( Behind the cut, because, are y'all bored yet? )

Writing? Oh, yeah, that. I got stalled at "mouse-leather armor." Guess I should start poking it again...

ETA: And that one's gone now, two hours after I reviewed it. Still nothing in my inbox...

Yes, little fangirl. I am stalking your FFN account. Learn to write and format properly, and I shall cease.

But I'm over it. I've started the same story, only from the faerie POV, that I think will be much better, and also saleable. Go, me.

We took the boat out for the first time yesterday. It ran really well, and we had a good time with a friend of ours, who also brought his boat out. He did some waterskiing behind our boat, which is somewhat tiny but did all right.

And there were grebes! All over the place! With babies!

And I forgot my camera. *cries* Because some of them were carrying the babies on their backs. The male (I'm assuming) was diving for food, and the female with the baby was staying on the surface, calling to orient him, so he could keep track of her when he popped back up. It was so cool. I've never gotten to see behavior like that before, and it made my little biologist heart go pitter-pat.

And then we hit the drive-in, where "Evan Almighty" was playing with "Shrek the Third."

Understand that we approached "Evan Almighty" with a certain amount of trepidation. Hollyweird has a penchant for taking people of faith and turning them into child-molesting monsters. However, we really liked "Bruce Almighty, so we decided to take a chance on it. And I'm so glad we did, because for once we got to go to a theater and not be insulted. It was refreshing to watch a movie that treats God and prayer and faith with a modicum of respect. We saw the trailers for this one and thought "This is going to be really good, or really terrible." And it was really good. "Going in the DVD collection" good.

Honestly, I think the only reason this movie got made and distributed by a major studio was because of its environmental message. But that message wasn't over-the-top, although certain things were exaggerated for comic effect. Also, this movie is safe for your kids, although the bird-poop might be slightly overdone and there's a duck-penis joke--which is funny because it's true.

Also, Steve Carell and Wanda Sykes are made of win. And having Evan's wife named "Joan" was icing on a scrumptious cake. What made that joke so funny was that they didn't even belabor it with the obvious reference. They assumed the audience was smart to figure it out.

The BeeFic sucks, man. Big, green, mossy rocks. No way can I turn in something that awful to a writing competition. And I don't have time to fix it, not really--especially since I don't know how to fix it. Unless I swap the POV over to the faerie's, and that would (also) take more time than I have.

I fail at IronPen. Alas, my Pen is Cheap Plastic, rather than Iron. Woe.

That being said...I have the bones of Story. I'll probably poke it some more, with the aforementioned POV swap. And maybe I'll find a market for it someplace.

In the meantime, we're going boating. So there.

...has an END at the bottom of it.

Am I happy with it?

No. Of course not. How could I be? There's no point to the frelling thing. Bees and faerie fight, lots of them die, the end.

Bah. And it's only 424 words, too. Which, go, me, writing original flashfic, but...

It's missing something. Probably a lot of something. There's no larger...thing. *sigh* I'm a writer and supposed to be all articulate and stuff. YoSaffBridge I'm not.

ALSO. NOTE TO SELF:

When e-subbing a story to a major market, it might help to actually, you know, attach the thing to the email.

BeeFic.

Yes. The "honeycomb" prompt for the Utah Arts Festival IronPen competition has prompted me to write a story about a pitched battle between bees...and faeries. Because I'm a genre writer, dammit.

And this is an interesting writing exercise for me, because somehow I think that the only bee in a colony with an "I" mentality is possibly the Queen. All the rest of them, at least in my little universe here, are "we."

Now, there are subsets of "we." There are the foragers, and the builders, and the larvae tenders.

However, this is making it hard to personalize this battle. I feel like I've got the bare bones of a story here (which isn't complete, but I know how it ends, and that's half the battle), and it needs to have organs and muscles and nerves and things added before it's a full, actual story.

And now I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to tell it from the faeries' viewpoint. Hm. Will need to ponder that.