zoetrope

In recent years, I've been on a mission where I pick a worthy WIP out of many volunteers and finish it. So far I've completed:

• A Hundred Hundred Bolts of Satin, SGA | July 2021
• stop. motion., SGA RPF | September 2024
• New Year Market, Star Trek Reboot | September 2024
• Condition Zebra, SGA | May 2025
• Maybe He's Born With It (Maybe It's GlaxosEpsilonYor), Star Trek Reboot | January 2026
• The Feast of St. Olaf, SGA | April 2026

That covers my entire output of the last five years, with only one absolutely new fic posted during that time, the 15 sentence fake fake dating Star Trek fic Strange New Worlds, Etc. that I wrote for OTW's 15 year anniversary in 2022.

All of these WIPs were abandoned in various stages of doneness. I do this. Not on purpose, but I start a fic and get thousands of words into it and then either get anxious about it (writing can be a trigger for me, though it's gotten better through careful practice) or life gets in the way and I have to stop working on it and then get scared (anxious) to pick it back up again. But past!me's problems are a boon for present me who doesn't have to come up with ideas and has a bunch of notes for all these stories that can either be used or discarded. And because they've sat for a while, undisturbed, I'm able to work on them almost as if it's someone else's writing that I'm improving. I can kill the darlings that need killing and get on with it.

A Hundred Hundred Bolts of Satin was probably more like two stories when I opened it after a long period away from it. The opening part and the rest of it. I had to stitch the two together, and the opening section was just murdering me before I finally, after a lot of work, figured out which parts were important.

stop. motion. was done and betaed, but Joe Flanigan had gotten a divorce (sorry, Joe) while it was sitting on my hard drive and I wanted to work that in, which changed the tone—and purpose—of the story significantly.

New Year Market was done and had even been through two betas. I had some sentences that were annoying me, so I fixed them, and I am as shocked as you are that it took me less than a month to do that.

Condition Zebra was a complete draft, but I'd finished it in 2013 and never looked at it again. (I wrote it and then Emily died, and these two things were not related, but also were.) It needed a lot of polishing, and I had made Rodney too emotionally mature. So I made Rodney a little messy and John, in a move that surprised me, responded by becoming more emotionally mature. It seemed he'd grown up, too, in the twelve years since I'd written it.

Maybe He's Born With It (Maybe It's GlaxosEpsilonYor) was not as done as I thought it was. Instead of being nearly complete, it was only a couple of paragraphs in the file and then several pages of handwritten story. I transfered the handwritten part to the screen, editing all the while, and then did a bunch of writing to finish it and then lots and lots of revising to get Jim's voice right. This was him after the first movie, still a selfish frat bro, but with the capacity to learn from his mistakes, and I didn't want to quash his worst instincts, but it was hard for me to just let him be the (almost) worst version of himself. I had to keep removing the guardrails I built around him. And his literal voice needed to be way more casual. I got there in the end, though, and in the process learned that this Jim didn't like hedging language, no "just" or "almost" or "kind of"; everything's flat out with him, no room for doubt.

The Feast of St. Olaf (my 60th SGA fanwork!!) was basically a complete story when I opened it up in February. It had all the important parts—a title and a last line; there was just some empty space between a joke (which I did not...get? despite having written it??) and the last sentence. So I erased the joke and just started writing from there. I began this fic for the "blades" square on my kink_bingo card in 2011, but as I wrote toward the last sentence I had, using it as a guide, the focus of the story changed. It was no longer just about Ronon being good with knives; it became about loss and memory, a much deeper story. So I reworked the rest of it to match, and in the process the knives were no longer what the Kink Bingo mods refer to as the erotic focus of the story, and I didn't feel like I could add this fic to the Kink Bingo collection. (Sadly, because I adore posting G-rated kinkfic to the chat.)

Many of these WIPs went through similar changes as I finished them. Maybe He's Born With It came from a much lighter idea, less loss, more eye shadow. And stop. motion. lacked an emotional core before I worked Joe's divorce into it. So having these stories sit for a bit between their initial drafting and being completed benefited us both, in many ways. Though I'd honestly prefer if I could finish a story in less than ten years, it also lets me see how much I've grown as a writer, even in the last few years.

Next up is my Star Trek RPF from 2016, an extended version of my little Saturday Morning ficlet. As I recall it's completely finished, though the last scene needs some tweaking as I've never been happy with it. It has a title, but I've never been happy with that, either, and I've got a new one that should work. And of course, anything I haven't seen in ten years is going to need a polish as my writing sensibilities have changed somewhat in those years. I've been putting this one off because it's RPF from 2016, set in 2016, and stuff has changed! And I'm worried about it!! But it's not going to get any younger, and as I keep repeating to myself, it was the canon we had at the time. It's not like I could write it any differently today. Though I guess we'll have a chance to see.

The lyrics to 365 songs written by John "The Mountain Goats" Darnielle, including some that are unreleased, accompanied by musings on their poetics, musicality, and personal meaning. Darnielle is a thoughtful, funny, devout man who has lived a lot of different lives, and while he resists making this a memoir, it is, though you just as often see him decline to explain the personal significance of a song. I respect his honesty, and his self-reflection, and even his coyness. If he were a character in a book, I'd say he had interiority, which isn't something you can say about everyone who's written a memoir.

I really enjoyed this, even as it's basically just really, really thick liner notes. The book gave me a new appreciation for my favorite songs and even introduced me to some new ones. I bought "Horseradish Road" after reading the lyrics and listening to it on YouTube; I learned he had an album that came out in 2022 that I'd never heard of—probably because we had some other stuff going on at the time—and which I will be buying soon, and in the four months it took me to read this, I've been listening to the albums I already knew I enjoyed (Transcendental Youth, All Eternals Deck, We Shall All Be Healed) and those I never quite clicked with (Beat the Champ, Get Lonely). I did not listen to Goths, Jenny From Thebes, Dark in Here, Getting Into Knives, In League With Dragons, All Hail West Texas, or Ghana, but there's still time. And I don't need an excuse to listen to Tallahassee, The Sunset Tree, The Life of the World to Come, or Heretic Pride, as they are my absolute favorites and I'm listening to them all the time anyway. Also do not sleep on the Babylon Springs EP. (Though this book does.)

If you're a The Mountain Goats fan, or a fan of Darnielle's social media presence, and/or a poet, songwriter, or storyteller, there's plenty to think about here. Darnielle shares what he finds interesting as an artist, the phases and trends he's gone through in his career, and the echoes he finds in his work. He recommends reading one entry a day, thus the format, but I had to read several a day because this was a library book, and huge, but it definitely benefits from being read in small bites, like poetry, so you can sit with it a while.

Contains (in part): references to child abuse, drug use, addiction, overdose, suicide. The ebook duplicates the print book's index, but does not bother to link any of the song titles to their entries, which is bullshit.

( Status Updates from Goodreads )