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Entitlement
Huzzah! The final chapter of Revision is complete at last; I'm just waiting for one of my betas to come back with results from the sneeze test. It will probably go online tomorrow. The story came out at just under 20k words, so it’s teetering on the borderline between novellette and novella.
For those who haven’t been following the story but might be interested: it’s online here at ff.net. And I’m a hopeless feedback junkie, so consider this a hint.
Revision is a Post-Stringer MacGyver story: in fact, it’s set immediately after the end of the series, and is my take on the first leg of Mac and Sam’s road trip. There are a lot of fics written about What Happens Next, of course – enough that Post-Stringer is basically its own genre, much like Post-Gauda Prime (PGP) was (and is) for Blake’s 7. At this very moment, in fact, there’s a woman on ff.net who is proudly posting a trilogy (!) about how Mac meets the perfect woman and settles down. You can guess my reaction to that, especially since she named her MS character ‘Beth’.
Oddly enough, the worst part of it is that she’s an excellent writer – or at least, when I read the first version of what is now the first installment of her epic, I was tremendously impressed by the quality of her writing. If she’d give up fanfic and simply write an autobiography, it would probably be at least readable, and possibly publishable.
I’ve maintained for years that Mary Sues can be well written; bad writing and character failure aren’t automatically the same thing. On the other hand, from my new perspective as an actual writer, I now believe that MS writing tends to degrade rather than improve. I don’t see how the mental state required to sustain the distorted plot structures that result from that level of character failure can possibly lead to growth as a writer. So I haven’t tried to read any of the recent installments. Possibly I’m shortchanging her; but once I’d started writing Revision, I needed to focus on my own mental picture of Mac and Sam’s first few months together.
And damn, it was fun. It’s the first time a story of mine has gone through a title change: the original working title was “Compass”, intended to reflect, first, the idea that they were free to go anywhere, in any direction; second, that there was a fixed centre around which they would move (as in a drawing compass), and a common sense of direction that would keep them from getting lost. That’s a sense and a theme that I’ll probably stick with if I write more stories set in this period of Mac’s life.
But the story retitled itself, partway through the second chapter, when I realised the key theme was a change of perception – a new way of looking at the world and at oneself. There are a lot of references to visual elements, both metaphoric and literal. Sam’s a photographer, and I chose to assume that he was a talented one (he’s self-sufficient at the age of 19, after all, riding an expensive motorcycle).
I love titles. Finding the right title is an incredibly powerful moment. I’ve been lucky; most of my stories have acquired their titles relatively easily, early in the process (sometimes even before I’ve really started writing). Of my finished pieces, 101 Uses For a Dead Uzi is undoubtedly the clunkiest title of the lot, and I was stuck with that one from the outset. But at least it’s funny. I finally started calling the thing “101 UDU” for short.
I sometimes wonder, though, if the title is offputting. 101 UDU gets less casual traffic than a lot of the others. It’s the only short story of the lot; it represents less of a time commitment to a reader than the novellas and novels; it’s even conveniently perched at the top of the alphabetical list in my profile. I’m quite proud of it; I think it’s one of my best pieces to date. It’s certainly better writing than I could have accomplished a year ago. It even has major whumpage. Maybe I should put a whumpage note in the summary. “Caution! Whumpage Alert! Whumped!Mac in chains! Enter at your own risk!” It’s all in the advertisement, right?
I did warn you all that my weekend posts about writing were likely to be rambling episodes of meaningless egotism, didn't I? I didn't? Shoot. Well, tomorrow we'll have more lovely screen caps of RDA. Thanks for indulging me, mes cheries!
'Beth
For those who haven’t been following the story but might be interested: it’s online here at ff.net. And I’m a hopeless feedback junkie, so consider this a hint.
Revision is a Post-Stringer MacGyver story: in fact, it’s set immediately after the end of the series, and is my take on the first leg of Mac and Sam’s road trip. There are a lot of fics written about What Happens Next, of course – enough that Post-Stringer is basically its own genre, much like Post-Gauda Prime (PGP) was (and is) for Blake’s 7. At this very moment, in fact, there’s a woman on ff.net who is proudly posting a trilogy (!) about how Mac meets the perfect woman and settles down. You can guess my reaction to that, especially since she named her MS character ‘Beth’.
Oddly enough, the worst part of it is that she’s an excellent writer – or at least, when I read the first version of what is now the first installment of her epic, I was tremendously impressed by the quality of her writing. If she’d give up fanfic and simply write an autobiography, it would probably be at least readable, and possibly publishable.
I’ve maintained for years that Mary Sues can be well written; bad writing and character failure aren’t automatically the same thing. On the other hand, from my new perspective as an actual writer, I now believe that MS writing tends to degrade rather than improve. I don’t see how the mental state required to sustain the distorted plot structures that result from that level of character failure can possibly lead to growth as a writer. So I haven’t tried to read any of the recent installments. Possibly I’m shortchanging her; but once I’d started writing Revision, I needed to focus on my own mental picture of Mac and Sam’s first few months together.
And damn, it was fun. It’s the first time a story of mine has gone through a title change: the original working title was “Compass”, intended to reflect, first, the idea that they were free to go anywhere, in any direction; second, that there was a fixed centre around which they would move (as in a drawing compass), and a common sense of direction that would keep them from getting lost. That’s a sense and a theme that I’ll probably stick with if I write more stories set in this period of Mac’s life.
But the story retitled itself, partway through the second chapter, when I realised the key theme was a change of perception – a new way of looking at the world and at oneself. There are a lot of references to visual elements, both metaphoric and literal. Sam’s a photographer, and I chose to assume that he was a talented one (he’s self-sufficient at the age of 19, after all, riding an expensive motorcycle).
I love titles. Finding the right title is an incredibly powerful moment. I’ve been lucky; most of my stories have acquired their titles relatively easily, early in the process (sometimes even before I’ve really started writing). Of my finished pieces, 101 Uses For a Dead Uzi is undoubtedly the clunkiest title of the lot, and I was stuck with that one from the outset. But at least it’s funny. I finally started calling the thing “101 UDU” for short.
I sometimes wonder, though, if the title is offputting. 101 UDU gets less casual traffic than a lot of the others. It’s the only short story of the lot; it represents less of a time commitment to a reader than the novellas and novels; it’s even conveniently perched at the top of the alphabetical list in my profile. I’m quite proud of it; I think it’s one of my best pieces to date. It’s certainly better writing than I could have accomplished a year ago. It even has major whumpage. Maybe I should put a whumpage note in the summary. “Caution! Whumpage Alert! Whumped!Mac in chains! Enter at your own risk!” It’s all in the advertisement, right?
I did warn you all that my weekend posts about writing were likely to be rambling episodes of meaningless egotism, didn't I? I didn't? Shoot. Well, tomorrow we'll have more lovely screen caps of RDA. Thanks for indulging me, mes cheries!
'Beth