sholio | This is what happens when she doesn't have Internet...

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This is what happens when she doesn't have Internet...

... she writes long posts, and posts them later. *g* (I wrote this in the airport, waiting for our flight.)

I've finished up three WIPs on this trip (still have to edit and post the second two), and then my

sticksandsnark story remains to be posted in early April. And I have a

sga_genficathon story to finish, as well as

astridv's "Finders" AU (which I absolutely love in concept, but cannot put together into a coherent shape, so it may take awhile). Beyond that, though ...

I like the idea of trying to hit a cumulative total of a million words of SGA fic this year. My count so far for the year is about 30K, so in order to reach the goal, I have, what, 90K to go ...? i.e. one long story, or a handful of short-to-midlength stories.

I've probably got about that much in unfinished WIPs already. What I realized, though, looking through my last few years' worth of WIPs in the process of finishing up the ones I've already posted, is that the WIP folder is one of the reasons why I haven't written much over the last couple of years. I don't really want to start anything new 'til I finish at least some of the three dozen or so stories I've already started. They just keep piling up, taunting me ...!

But most of them are abandoned for a reason. Some are utterly plotless, just an idea and a collection of random vignettes that never comes together. Some represent an idea that used to appeal to me but has since lost my interest, as my changing fannish tastes and canonical developments have made them obsolete. The ones that really bother me are couple of fairly long stories -- one's stuck at about 15K words, the other at about 25K -- that I've lost interest in; I think that with a lot of work I could revise them into something that suits my current writing tastes, but I prefer the idea of starting something new to trying to retrofit something I've been staring at for almost four years.

I'm thinking about making a fresh start: sweeping my WIPs into a folder to save in case I want to mine them for spare parts or take a second look at them someday, and starting clean, in a neatly uncluttered WIPs folder that contains nothing but just the couple of stories that I'm committed to finishing (the genficathon story, and

astridv's story).

Here are a small handful of story ideas which I'm currently noodling with:

- I really, really want to do a long post-canon story. My previous "main" fandoms (Trigun and DBZ) were closed-canon fandoms, and what interested me the most in both fandoms, even though not all my stories dealt with it, was exploring the characters' lives post-canon. It's actually kind of exciting to me that we can write long, unlikely-to-be-jossed, post-canon stories for SGA now. I have a number of vague story ideas and scenes exploring various aspects of canon that I'd like to revisit (the Hoffan plague; Kiryk, the Runner with the teleportation device; the Coalition; the evil Asgard) -- I'm not sure if I'd rather do one long epic-length story, or a number of smaller ones. In particular, I have a Kiryk + Hoffan plague story in mind, but it only really involves Rodney and Keller from the canon cast, and I'm thinking it might work better if it was woven in and out of another plot involving the Coalition or the Asgard or the Wraith or some other galaxy-spanning story arc that's more focused on the other characters.

- Another idea I've been tossing around is a pretty dark "Lost Tribe" AU, in which the evil Asgard become a major force in the latter half of season five. I love the idea of the Asgard as baddies (think of all the old alien abduction cliches!) but where I'm running into trouble is figuring out how to handle a "left turn from canon" AU without simply rehashing a lot of episodes. The "left turn" is that the Asgard take Rodney with them when they leave the planet at the end of "Lost Tribe" (this would be a character-death story, just FYI; I'm not planning on having him come back, at least not in any sort of condition that he'd ever be Rodney again -- she said ominously), and subsequently begin abducting and experimenting on Pegasus humans in their quest to prevent what happened to "our" Asgard from happening to them. So this would be a season five without Rodney and with the addition of the Asgard as a major plot device. It's interesting trying to work through a season five sans Rodney; removing him doesn't seem to change the second half of the season in any major plot-arc way, which is actually harder to deal with than if it did -- that's where I'm stuck figuring out whether to rehash episodes or just take off in a totally non-canon direction.

- There's a "Shrine" tag I want to write; ever since rewatching the episode with Derry when she was here, I've wanted to write something dealing with the euthanasia subtext. As many "Shrine" tags as I've seen, I don't ever remember one that explicitly dealt with the fact that they didn't take Rodney to the shrine planet to cure him, they took him there to die, and I really want to do something dealing with the moral and emotional ramifications for the other characters. I'm not suggesting that euthanasia was the wrong choice in this case, but it couldn't have been an easy decision to give up on finding a cure and pull the plug on him, especially for Jeannie. The episode even made it quite explicit that they were talking about hastening his death ("death with honor", as Ronon put it), not trying to find a long-term cure. We saw Keller struggling with the ethical aspects of it, but not any of the other characters, so that's the story I want to write -- what they had to go through in deciding to hasten the end of his life, how cultural differences played into it (we've definitely seen in earlier episodes that Athosians are a lot more fatalistic about death than the Lanteans), and so forth.

- For that matter, I really want to do more tags to episodes from season four and five in general. I feel like that era in the show's history hasn't been very deeply mined by the fandom, compared to earlier seasons, and there's so much territory to explore.

I noticed on my vacation that writing smaller stories (like the "Defiant One" tag I posted) is a nice way to unwind, or to kick-start my creativity for working on bigger projects, if I let it be -- that is, let go of the need to make my writing count by finishing up long-abandoned WIPs, or by using the opportunity to "improve" my writing in some way (not that stretching myself is bad, just that trying to make every new story an experiment seems to be a creativity-killer). I'm not sure whether to set writing goals, or just kind of let my creativity go and see what I can accomplish if I let myself play a little bit more.

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Those ideas all sound interesting (though killing Rodney... *shudders*, but if anyone can write a deathfic with him as the deathee and make me like it, you can!! *g*).

I'm coming around to realising that most of my WIPs are unlikely to get finished. There's two I really want to get done - one is the genficathon story that Jayne has come in as co-writer on, and another one has Ronon and Rodney meeting inside the Epiphany time dilation field (sans villagers) and having to survive until rescued by John et al!! The rest I've lost interest in or can't get to work at this point. So, I've decided that I'm not going to worry about them!

Of course, I've hit a strange period where writing is hard and I'm relying more and more on Jayne to co-write with - but I'm hopeful this writing fugue will lift!

Anyway, I look forward to reading more fic by yourself - and 1 million words of SGA fanfic? Sounds cool to me!!! *gets out pom poms* Go, friendshipper, go, go, go!

Oh, the Ronon and Rodney one sounds really interesting! :D

I do think it'll be good for me to sweep away all my WIPs and start over fresh. I can always look through the old ones if I'm really stuck and want to see if they jog anything loose, but I think they're becoming a major source of creative block. And I've finished the ones I liked best anyway.

I've never stayed in a fandom as long as I have with SGA. I'm wondering now if one of the reasons why I tend to lose interest is because I collect unfinished WIPs and eventually get frustrated and move on to a new fandom. I don't think it's the only reason, certainly, but the pleasure of starting over in a fresh fandom, with a clean slate, probably has an effect. I haven't experience that in ... well, four years, I guess! Maybe it's time to make a clean start with SGA (well, minus the stories I've promised to various people, of course), and launch myself into some fresh new WIPs ... that may never be finished, but what the heck ...

Those ideas all sound interesting (though killing Rodney... *shudders*, but if anyone can write a deathfic with him as the deathee and make me like it, you can!! *g*).

*laughs* Well, it's not so much that I want to kill him as a desire to invert some of the usual fannish cliches that turn up in these sorts of stories. I actually do that a lot ... I don't think I'd realized how much until I was reflecting on the stories I want to write (which are largely reactions to other stories in fandom -- not really specific ones so much as general trends) and then looked back on the ones I'd already written in that light ... and dang, I do it a lot. "Fading Sun" for example -- the one with two Sheppards and McKays -- is totally a reaction to the standard sort of post-Trinity stories. I think this story is very much that way; it's my riff on torture/recovery h/c (much as "Staring at the Sun" was me dealing with magically-healed-disability fics in my own way).

I would be very interested to see your Shrine tag. The euthanasia issue is why I've had such a hard time with that episode - especially with Ronon's and John's actions. I haven't found a way to make it work for myself within canon (the out-of-show answer of course is to blame the writing). I was hoping there would be more fic addressing the issue, but if it's out there I haven't seen it.

*nods* I find it really interesting that fandom hasn't addressed it at all (at least not that I've seen), considering how often that episode has been tagged. On the other hand, it does seem like there's a tendency for fannish tags and meta to focus on one aspect of an episode (in this case, Rodney's loss of intelligence) and not really explore all the ramifications. But it's such a central part of the episode, and it's definitely text, not subtext. In Ronon's case, I can see it being a fairly straightforward bit of cultural projection -- with good intentions, he's doing what he would want done for him in that situation, not what Rodney would likely want -- but I can't figure out John and Jeannie at all. Which is why I want to write the tag!

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Heh, I missed the whole skeeviness with the timing, actually, until you pointed it out. And, um, wow -- now that I'm thinking about it in that light, I'm having a really hard time coming up with a good spin on it that doesn't make it seem a bit manipulative on Ronon's part. Emotional obliviousness, maybe -- all the characters are pretty bad about that. And maybe he was caught up in the Lanteans' focus on finding a cure, and he's not really close enough with Rodney to have had this conversation with him until it was too late.

erg. That's going to be hard to write around without making Ronon come off badly, though now I'm intrigued by the challenge. (I already found "Shrine" kinda OOC for Ronon, but now that I'm thinking about it in that light, it's worse than I thought! Or else we're supposed to believe that Ronon is a much more callous person than I prefer to think of him.)

*grin* Now I'm embarrassed for deleting my earlier post - I just was second guessing myself and thinking that maybe I was using your post to air my frustrations about the episode and that it might not have been appropriate. Thanks for the response. :)

It has been hard for me to wrap my brain around though, I agree. I'm not wanting to bash Ronon - it's just...well. How do you work around that? If anyone's up to the challenge, though, it's you - and I look forward to your tag. :D

The Shrine tag intrigues me, as I would love to see what everyone went through on deciding to go to the caves. Especially John not because he's my favorite ;) But because it did seem to go from him refusing to accept that Rodney may die to taking him to this place to say good-bye, and it did seem a tad out of the blue for John.

I hear you on the accumulation of WIPs. My own folder is getting quite fat with them. Many of them I know I'm not going to finish, but some I would really like to finish but can't seem to. Then there are all these ideas I hope write but have absolutely no motivation to write them, but I blame that on me getting distracted by another fandom;).

Yeah, I'm starting to think it'd be better for me as a writer to just accept that I'm not going to be able to finish everything and move on, rather than continuing to get stalled on trying to finish these stories. In a way I guess it's a commentary on how I've grown as a writer, because I really do write better now than I did four years ago, which is a little startling to realize -- but I think explains a lot of my dissatisfaction with those older stories.

I'm glad that people seem to be interested in the Shrine tag! Yeah, it's John that I have the most trouble with; it seems to go against his established characterization that he would be willing to give up so readily, and I need to explain it to myself in the form of fic (as I so often do :D).

Yes! They took Rodney to the planet in "The Shrine" to die! Jennifer was right to object (which does not mean that others were wrong—but Jennifer is a doctor, which gives her particular responsibilities).

Yes, this! And it's not that Jennifer was necessarily right in an absolute sense -- but she was certainly right for her (as his doctor, and someone who was dedicated to curing him). It's much harder for me to understand the other point of view, in a way that makes sense for the characters; it's not that I'm necessarily opposed to the decision they made, it's just that I don't really understand why those characters made that decision, particularly considering that it seems to me to go against how they've been characterized in the past (though admittedly, I'm not sure to what extent John's "never say die, leave no man behind" philosophy is more fanon than canon).

I guess this is yet another of those SGA episodes where we're really not supposed to question the characters' actions too deeply about it because things worked out okay (in spite of them). But I'm intrigued by the thought processes that went into making that decision.

I really love reading your story ideas. :)

Thank you! Hopefully I'll actually write at least one of these. :D

I'd love to read that Shrine tag (despite parts that I love, it's no favorite of mine). Something that really explored what everyone, especially John and Jeannie, was thinking and how they came to their decisions.

A couple of off the cuff thoughts on the question of taking Rodney to the Shrine to die. I figure that is what Ronon and Teyla believed it to be, certainly. I think that for John, it maybe wasn't. He believes in the last minute save, that they'll find a way to cure Rodney. That's why he can't say good-bye on the pier; he can't accept it. I think that he didn't believe Jennifer would find a cure (and don't believe she would have, myself), certainly not in time to help Rodney, so he could rationalize that the risk wasn't Rodney-living-waiting-for-a-cure/Rodney-dying-sooner-but-with-his-wits, but Rodney-dying-soon/Rodney-getting-his-wits-back-and-finding-a-way-to-save-himself. Maybe that's me rationalizing so that I can go on liking the character.

Jeannie is the one who flummoxes me. I've finally just settled on a mixture of motivations for her: she wanted that last chance to talk to and say good-bye to the 'real' Rodney, she trusted the team (Ronon) to want what would be right for him, believing they probably knew him better at this point than she did, and maybe an element of natural antipathy to Jennifer and Jennifer assuming authority over Rodney as his doctor.

People tend to have more than one and often contradictory impulses, after all, and everyone involved likely did a lot of rationalizing their choices to themselves, so that anything they said was a reason, likely had little to do with their real emotions.

Exploring all that, whether you buy into my own estimates, would be fascinating to me, much more so than the painful devolution of Rodney's intelligence; the show handled that more than sufficiently.

Interesting thoughts. I definitely agree that they were very unlikely to have found a cure in the time they had remaining. On the other hand, I am not sure if it really works for me that John anticipated finding a cure on the Shrine planet, since they didn't take any sort of equipment for actually researching it (nothing more advanced than the usual scanner, anyway). Considering John's seat-of-the-pants approach to everything, though, it may be that he wasn't considering the "... only works for a day" part of Ronon's description of the Shrine and believed that if it actually did work, then everything else would take care of itself. That totally sounds like John to me, actually. :D And, hell, I can work with a more selfish characterization of John, where he's willing to accept the trade-off of shortening Rodney's already short lifespan in return for having one more day of "normal" Rodney; it's not particularly nice, but it's human. (And that's even more true of Jeannie -- more sympathetically, even -- since it would give her a chance to talk to her brother one last time. Actually, in her case, this does make more sense to me than with the teammates who'd been with him all along, because she probably hasn't seen him since "Miller's Crossing".)

tringasolitaria pointed out a more serious problem that hadn't occurred to me, though, which is that Ronon and Teyla had to know about the Shrine all along, but didn't bring it up with Rodney until he was no longer capable of understanding or consenting to being taken there. (The original comment was deleted, though you still can see my reply.) And I really don't have a good way to explain that one away, in terms of character motivation at least (since the actual answer is obviously "narrative convenience") unless it was just that Ronon didn't want to suggest it until it was fairly obvious that a cure wasn't forthcoming.

People tend to have more than one and often contradictory impulses, after all, and everyone involved likely did a lot of rationalizing their choices to themselves, so that anything they said was a reason, likely had little to do with their real emotions.

Oh yeah, I absolutely agree with this! Actually, one of the things I really love about writing fic is extrapolating the characters' reasons and motivations based on the external view of them that we get in the show. SGA happens to be especially murky on that front in a lot of cases ...

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