Eventually I'll decide "Probably" and keep going, but what a mood-killer

[darkluna]

Where many fanfic writers might work like this:

La la la, I have the idea for teh hot pr0n!
*scribbles madly without a care in the world*

I'm more like:

Ooh! Idea for hot porn!
*scribbles madly*
Hey, wait. I wonder if they have circumcision in Amestris.
*thinks very hard*
I cannot proceed without a satisfactory answer!
*stops composing hot porn; begins composing letter*
Dear Arakawa-san, Could you please answer a few questions for me so I can write more accurate smut?...
*realizes this is stupid, pouts*

Comments

[havocmangawip.livejournal.com]

*Snerk* Heee... NICE.

I'm guessing no on the circumcision... they may do it... but it's probably like Australia. It's RARE. XD Only about 10% of the population is cut.

Damn need for research... it kills my mood every time. This chapter of WIP alone I had to research hand controls so I wasn't just going off of anecdotal evidence and "sympoms of a UTI in people with SCI". Whee. How fun.

(I'm so glad you research!)

[darkluna.livejournal.com]

I knew that out of all the people on my f'list, I could count on you to have an opinion on this. :-)

You're probably right. 'cause it wasn't the norm in our world 'til sometime after WWII, right? Now that I can research. *glee*

[vinnie-tesla.livejournal.com]

For my current project, I'm trying something: whenever I hit a logistical snag, but have a pretty good idea where I want to go afterwards, i just fake it, on the theory that I can go back and fix it afterwards.

The main oddity this has produced in the current document is characters with truly mercurial names.

The idea here is to let my writing self run free, without interference by my editorial self, and see how that goes. I'll let you know.

[darkluna.livejournal.com]

i just fake it, on the theory that I can go back and fix it afterwards

That's kind of how I write anyway!

The answer to this particular question is probably not even relevant to the scene; I'm just a fiend for being canonically sound, and oddly enough, it wasn't covered in the series.

Pardon me for going all pomo on you here

[vinnie-tesla.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that there's an irony to all the controversy around fanfiction. You can't write a story set in someone else's universe. All you can do is base your setting on your experience of someone else's setting. And infringe their trademarks, of course.

I suppose you could make a case that the worlds of, say, Star Wars and Star Trek are already so massively collaborative that there's no necessary real difference between Paramount's Star Trek and yours. But for, say, Middle Earth, for all the reams of supporting material we have, there's still a vision, a mood, that was in Tolkien's head that informed every sentence he wrote, and that can never be perfectly recreated.

Re: Pardon me for going all pomo on you here

[darkluna.livejournal.com]

So I can't truly be canonically sound in a fictional world that was invented by someone else; I can just take my best aim and land near it? I know.

But even though I'm lazily using someone else's universe and characters, I still want to keep everything as plausible as I would if they were my own. I have seen enough iPods at Hogwarts in bad fanfic that I want to do better than that.

The urge to write fanfic is a strange one that I could probably talk about for a long time...