Anise, Occult P.I., Stakin' the Forsaken

A meme screenshot from the Garfield cartoon series. It show Garfield, a sarcastic, selfish cat, looking at a placard and saying, 'Huh. I wonder who that's for.' The placard says, 'GOOD ADVICE.'

MARCH EDITING, DAY 9: My dear sweet lovely Heroine, I gave you a best friend with boundaries so you can LEARN FROM HER

But THEY'RE ALL FUNNY D:

So I finished the whole skeleton outline and I'm going to let it marinate overnight. Tomorrow I'll give it a read, fill out the new bits so they're actual prose, and plug it back in. Then I get to struggle with the Heroine telling people to sleep six different times and cutting at least one.

(I'm... mostly joking. I am constrained by the requirements of characterisation to care. But I don't have to AGREE)

I was able to salvage most of the dialogue, actually, including the important ending bit, which has quite a lot of Tragic Backstory and Themes Made Clear and Worldbuilding Hard Truths and other meaty things I never touch on again because who CARES about why the Male Lead is an asshat

This is why skeleton outlines are so great. I'm not distracted by laughing at my own fucking jokes and can focus on the actual sense of things.

No wonder the damn conversation never worked!

Well, it was 'bout that time I realised the whole reason the Male Lead got angry with the Heroine was wrong. So I had to come up with a new reason (not hard; it's always the same reason for him: PERCEIVED LACK OF SUFFICIENT WORSHIP! Among other, plot-related things) and re-slant the whole thing.

Which is what I did. I put each line of extant dialogue in its own bullet, plugged in the themes, rearranged the dialogue in chunks around each theme, rewrote the themes into dialogue, and then, uh...

God, I love these things, they make shit so EASY. Got a theme? Got a subtext? Got something that absolutely has to be in there? No problem! Chuck the stage business and dialogue tags and just BULLET POINT EVERYTHING!

Ugh, anyway. I sat down to deal with The Argument today (or, as I fondly call it in my notes, 'The Male Lead's Explosion'), and immediately realised I should stop fucking around and just do a skeleton outline for it. So I did!

A meme screenshot from the Garfield cartoon series. It show Garfield, a sarcastic, selfish cat, looking at a placard and saying, 'Huh. I wonder who that's for.' The placard says, 'GOOD ADVICE.'

MARCH EDITING, DAY 9: My dear sweet lovely Heroine, I gave you a best friend with boundaries so you can LEARN FROM HER

Having a human body is a fabulous spectrum between 'ethereal creature who stuns at a distance' and 'tearing the supermarket apart for offal meats to replenish your blood supply'

Tubi is such a crazy streaming service. It’s like if the Criterion Closet was in a gas station

I wish we could powder this phrase so I could snort it for a cheap high

A screenshot of a right-click menu; the arrow cursor is hovering over, 'Save Image As...'

MARCH EDITING, DAY 8: In which I was punished for idly Googling character outfit ideas by stumbling upon a model that's basically a yassified Male Lead

Sometimes I worry that dumping all these Layers into existing scenes just roughs them up to unreadability -- above all, fiction should be READABLE, otherwise nobody gives a shit what's in it -- but, well, we do also want it to be BETTER. And I think it is, on the balance.

It's similar to one of the layers I need to add to the argument I'm wrestling with, picking up on the Romantic Death Threat I added to an earlier chapter a few weeks ago. A domino effect of enriching the text, is my point.

I also thought of a nice conflict I can bring out in a later confrontation which not only adds a little richness to one of the Male Lead's relationships, but also an interesting new motive I hadn't noticed until now. Shouldn't be too much work, either, since it's just buffing existing dynamics.

I replaced two big paragaphs in the preceding sex scene, because I had an idea of how to improve the Heroine's second climax. Another section I'd planned on fixing I might not, in fact; it's not a long, boring paragraph like I remembered, but just a sentence. Okay!

I wrote down the layers I want to put in, so there's some planning for that.

It's only a couple paragraphs, so it won't turn into An Ordeal; in fact, it's finicky BECAUSE it's so short. A lot needs to get across in a very small space, and it all needs to be Disguised.

My tinkering with the argument was frustrating. I already did heavy edits to it awhile back to make it flow, and now I'm being a little tender, even though I need to add a few layers. I eventually realised I'm going to have to pull it out and go ham, so that'll be tomorrow.

Not as much work done today as I wanted, but I HAVE been making notes over the past few days and even some line-edits, I haven't been COMPLETELY idle. And today I actually buckled down to address my remaining Chapter 17 punchlist notes.

A sentence I assure you I never wanted to write.

A screenshot of a right-click menu; the arrow cursor is hovering over, 'Save Image As...'

MARCH EDITING, DAY 8: In which I was punished for idly Googling character outfit ideas by stumbling upon a model that's basically a yassified Male Lead

At least until the last half-hour, when everyone goes to sleep and it forgets

The Beast is, of course, a classic, aptly if heavily using bestiality as a metaphor for a decaying aristocratic house. Although most of the attention is on the sexuality, it's really a magnificent unfurling of the complex web of dependents inherent to old, wealthy families.

I can't really recommend The Beast in Space, but it has arguably more plot than Bava's Planet of the Vampires. And lightsabres!

A dashingly cavalier space smuggler offers a weedy man in an unfortunately-spangled caftan some anti-psychotics. No, really

'It's a soulless cash grab.' Cash grab, yes. But soulless? Tell that to the guy playing the Han Solo lookalike who's having THE TIME OF HIS LIFE. And he's not even in any of the softcore scenes!