overstuffed Narn
May. 10th, 2004 03:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabG'Kar knows just what he wants to say in response to Londo's letters, but I'm suffering textual constipation and, despite loads of inspiration, lack the necessary raisins to make the sucker talk.
My Farscape ficathon story's full-rounded and, in my mind, both sexy and compelling. I'm excited for the characters and the plot. Words won't come.
"Five Things That Really Never Happened to Markus Alexander" is stalled out on thing one, despite the fact I've got 'em all roughed out in my crazy brains. I wrote Victoria some Mal/Kaylee comment porn yesterday and that was the closest I've come to speechifying in some days now, and, written in less'n fifteen minutes, it don't rightly count as tapping the narrative flow.
In an effort to grease the wheels, I've come to play the talk-about-yer-titles game. Figure consulting the Early Sabine Canon can only serve as a kick in the pants, and, hell, writing in LJ's writing too, ain't it?
Pretty Life, aka "the Sports Night story where Casey sucks" came out of the Liz Phair song "Perfect World," and couldn't be more appropriate for Casey here, because we're in Casey POV and he's an unreliable narrator, and by the end he thinks he's got it made. Of course, from anyone else's perspective, Casey's a huge fruity delusional bastard, so I wanted something that had a little irony. You hear "Pretty Life" and you expect it to be either overly saccharine or anything but.
That's my favorite kind of title, actually, the sort of smashingly ironic Everybody Having a Good Time (aka "the X-Files story where everybody dies except some Canadians and a dog), where, obviously, no one is. That's from the U2 song "Until the End of the World," so it's got the apocalypse connotation lurking too. It gets misquoted on recs sites every now and again, where you get, like, "Is Everybody Having a Good Time?" which, while similarly twisted, isn't quite the same thing, dig?
When I set out to look for a title, I look for perverse irony first, and then, if I can't find anything good there, I look for something with rhythm. An overwhelming percentage of my stories have somewhat tongue-in-cheek titles, like A new device is being tested, which sounds like something out of a tech manual (it is), but goes on to describe Crichton's totally psychotic defense mechanisms, and his reckless wormhole-building. The title sounds reasonable and straightforward, and Crichton's a desperately unreasonable mess. I Do Believe in Ghosts is less overtly tongue-in-cheek; I just liked that it was Scorpius -- by all accounts, the spookiest member of the party -- who believes in ghosts, the ghost of Crichton, and Crichton who believes in the ghost of Scorpy.
Punk, of course, knows just what kind of kung-fu I like, and when she found me the title for General, dein Tank ist ein starker Wagen ("General, your tank is a powerful vehicle," aka the Band of Brothers story with the panicky blowjob where Winters hates the war) it was obviously the only thing the story coulda been called.
Pissing in No-Man's Land, the Yuletide H:LotS story I wrote for Luna where Kellerman and Bayliss are in prison, packs its very own irony all by itself, and was a product of nothing but my own crazy brains. Because, you know, pissing, to mark territory, right? But then, no-man's land, so, you can't, really, and anyway. I'm pretty proud of that one.
Celebrated Blue Period was stolen from a M*A*S*H episode, and Hawkeye uses it as ironically as Toby does, in this story. Coming Back from the War (aka, the West Wing story about Bonnie, who apparently thinks she's a writer) came straight out of Hemingway, who was writing a story that was "about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it." Which, I thought, worked well for Bonnie, because she was having her little war, and the West Wing was having its little war, but the story wasn't about either of these things, and instead had a lot to do with sandwiches and Ginger crying a lot.
Thanks of a Grateful Nation (aka the West Wing/X-Files crossover) is full of hollow, meaningless thanks, and even Chakotay's Home is miserable and unwelcoming.
The titles I'm least impressed with, or, at least, the ones that don't resonate, for me, are the ones that don't have any irony, that don't butt against the meaning of the story and ask the reader to look for the gallows humor underneath. Then again, I do think Where Have You Gone, Tom Glavine? is the best possible title for that story, and it's full of hope, and in many ways the story is too. 'Course, I don't tend to write stories that are full of hope -- usually with a Sab story you'll get cynical resignation at best, and exhausted defeat at worst. I tend to make my characters sort of sarcastic and grudging, and at the end, it's always another working day in Canada.
Which has its own kind of irony, of course. Punk laughed at me because I was two sentences away from ending my Babylon 5 ficathon story with another working day on Mars, or Geneva, or wherever. But then, Al Bester is Alive and Well and Living in Syria Planum's straight-up Sabby irony, as, though he's alive, he ain't well, and he's never going back to Syria Planum again.
My Farscape ficathon story's full-rounded and, in my mind, both sexy and compelling. I'm excited for the characters and the plot. Words won't come.
"Five Things That Really Never Happened to Markus Alexander" is stalled out on thing one, despite the fact I've got 'em all roughed out in my crazy brains. I wrote Victoria some Mal/Kaylee comment porn yesterday and that was the closest I've come to speechifying in some days now, and, written in less'n fifteen minutes, it don't rightly count as tapping the narrative flow.
In an effort to grease the wheels, I've come to play the talk-about-yer-titles game. Figure consulting the Early Sabine Canon can only serve as a kick in the pants, and, hell, writing in LJ's writing too, ain't it?
Pretty Life, aka "the Sports Night story where Casey sucks" came out of the Liz Phair song "Perfect World," and couldn't be more appropriate for Casey here, because we're in Casey POV and he's an unreliable narrator, and by the end he thinks he's got it made. Of course, from anyone else's perspective, Casey's a huge fruity delusional bastard, so I wanted something that had a little irony. You hear "Pretty Life" and you expect it to be either overly saccharine or anything but.
That's my favorite kind of title, actually, the sort of smashingly ironic Everybody Having a Good Time (aka "the X-Files story where everybody dies except some Canadians and a dog), where, obviously, no one is. That's from the U2 song "Until the End of the World," so it's got the apocalypse connotation lurking too. It gets misquoted on recs sites every now and again, where you get, like, "Is Everybody Having a Good Time?" which, while similarly twisted, isn't quite the same thing, dig?
When I set out to look for a title, I look for perverse irony first, and then, if I can't find anything good there, I look for something with rhythm. An overwhelming percentage of my stories have somewhat tongue-in-cheek titles, like A new device is being tested, which sounds like something out of a tech manual (it is), but goes on to describe Crichton's totally psychotic defense mechanisms, and his reckless wormhole-building. The title sounds reasonable and straightforward, and Crichton's a desperately unreasonable mess. I Do Believe in Ghosts is less overtly tongue-in-cheek; I just liked that it was Scorpius -- by all accounts, the spookiest member of the party -- who believes in ghosts, the ghost of Crichton, and Crichton who believes in the ghost of Scorpy.
Punk, of course, knows just what kind of kung-fu I like, and when she found me the title for General, dein Tank ist ein starker Wagen ("General, your tank is a powerful vehicle," aka the Band of Brothers story with the panicky blowjob where Winters hates the war) it was obviously the only thing the story coulda been called.
Pissing in No-Man's Land, the Yuletide H:LotS story I wrote for Luna where Kellerman and Bayliss are in prison, packs its very own irony all by itself, and was a product of nothing but my own crazy brains. Because, you know, pissing, to mark territory, right? But then, no-man's land, so, you can't, really, and anyway. I'm pretty proud of that one.
Celebrated Blue Period was stolen from a M*A*S*H episode, and Hawkeye uses it as ironically as Toby does, in this story. Coming Back from the War (aka, the West Wing story about Bonnie, who apparently thinks she's a writer) came straight out of Hemingway, who was writing a story that was "about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it." Which, I thought, worked well for Bonnie, because she was having her little war, and the West Wing was having its little war, but the story wasn't about either of these things, and instead had a lot to do with sandwiches and Ginger crying a lot.
Thanks of a Grateful Nation (aka the West Wing/X-Files crossover) is full of hollow, meaningless thanks, and even Chakotay's Home is miserable and unwelcoming.
The titles I'm least impressed with, or, at least, the ones that don't resonate, for me, are the ones that don't have any irony, that don't butt against the meaning of the story and ask the reader to look for the gallows humor underneath. Then again, I do think Where Have You Gone, Tom Glavine? is the best possible title for that story, and it's full of hope, and in many ways the story is too. 'Course, I don't tend to write stories that are full of hope -- usually with a Sab story you'll get cynical resignation at best, and exhausted defeat at worst. I tend to make my characters sort of sarcastic and grudging, and at the end, it's always another working day in Canada.
Which has its own kind of irony, of course. Punk laughed at me because I was two sentences away from ending my Babylon 5 ficathon story with another working day on Mars, or Geneva, or wherever. But then, Al Bester is Alive and Well and Living in Syria Planum's straight-up Sabby irony, as, though he's alive, he ain't well, and he's never going back to Syria Planum again.
