Aftermath: Part 1

[peroxidepirate]

After spending all last night writing & posting, I can't believe I spent so long in front of the computer today, too. But evidently, I had to get this out.

Round 1 of the Smackdown is over, and I know I'm not the only one saying, “Oh, thank God!” There have been so many people rumbling and rambling about how burnt out they are, treanz even announced a schedule change to give us more down time between rounds. Round 2 nows starts on March 4, giving us about 8 days to recuperate (and giving the mods time to catch their breath before setting up the next round, as well).

Goldenlake's homepage is now the very top item in my browser's list of “most visited webpages,” beating out Facebook, Livejournal, and the default browser start page. Arena 1 is currently #10 on the list and Arena 2 is #5. The webpage where I check the weather has been bumped off the list, and my work email is down to #9. My entire email in-box is LJ comment notifications from fellow Goldenlakers. It's been a long time since anything had me this obsessed.

It feels very, very much like a “morning after” to me right now (despite being evening). Still, I'm entirely glad I decided to participate, and to participate to this degree.

It took me a long time to figure out that I sometimes have to do stupid things. My best friend doesn't get it – one of only a few things about me that she will never understand – but it's a part of me. It's a way of dealing with extreme stress (in this case, her illness, work, and my parents splitting up). When I was younger, I tried to fight it – unsucessfully – with the result that I occasionally would go off the deep end and make really bad decisions regarding sex, recreational drug use, and quitting jobs without thinking about how I was going to pay next month's rent.

These days, I settle for things like walking 4 miles home through a snowstorm, or staying up almost all night writing fanfic (but no, I didn't do both on the same night!). I figure, if I'm going to do something I know is a bad idea, at least this way, I minimize the repercussions.

I knew I'd get some level of obsessed with this project, and I knew I'd write a lot. I wasn't prepared for the emotional investment I ended up making in Buri/Kel during this last fight (and see above regarding doing stupid things -- I know it's just for fun, but I got to the point where I really wasn't believing that anymore). Joren supporters, I'm sorry – I'm trying to be adult about it, because I know some of you cared about this fight every bit as much as I did. I think it's best if I don't say anything more about it right now, except this: it's never really about what it's about, for me. I'm sure there's some reason I haven't articulated yet that this fight is the one that drew me in so completely.

The other thing that took me by surprise is that I can feel the Smackdown changing me as a writer. I've posted before about how my perspective on writing has changed recently. It'll never be a career goal, say, but it's becoming something I care about in a way I didn't before. And surprisingly, I think the Smackdown is more good for my writing than bad.

Good things to come out of it:

• I've gotten better at trusting myself to just write, rather than obsessively editing as I go along.
• It's helped me immensely with characterization. Writing one character, Kel, as she interacts with so many others has been a really valuable exercise. So has taking minor characters and fleshing them out in fic.
• I've gotten better at dialogue.
• I've gotten better at romance and mild smut.
• (little thing, but) I'm getting better at trusting my spelling. On account of the names, I usually write with spellcheck turned off, and then check spelling at the end. I feel less like I really have to do that, now (typos made at 3 a.m, or today after very little sleep, notwithstanding).
• Apparently, I can do humor sometimes. I still can't do it on purpose – it's either there or it's not – but still, I enjoy knowing I can do something other than wangst.
• Apparently, I write friendship really well. This shouldn't come as a surprise to me, since I value friendship so highly in real life, but I've lost count of the number of (I thought) more-or-less shippy fics I've posted, only to have someone comment, “I like the friendship here.”
• I've learned some of my limits, as far as what I'm comfortable writing, what I can grow to be comfortable with, and what I probably never can (more on that in another entry, momentarily).
• I'm reaching a point where I can just sit down and drag myself into the appropriate headspace and write, whether I initially wanted to or not. That's something that's happened just in the past week, here, and relates to...
• I'm getting my word count up! At 4900 words, my Kel/Aly saga, “Holidays,” was previously the longest project I'd ever worked on. Taken together, my Kel/Buri fics alone total at least 5600 words (although they're not all connected, or even set in the same chronology). All told, I've written 126 Smackdown fics this month. If they average 125 words each, that's almost 16,000 words. NaNoWriMo, here I come!

Of course, there are still limitations to something like this. Bad things about writing for Smackdown:

• It discourages me from editing (editing: the double-edged sword of literary ambition).
• It has not helped me with descriptive language (except for smut) or any aspect of scene-setting.
• It has not helped me with plot. Really, really, not at all.
• I'm worried that I might be starting to write in sentence fragments when I should be using whole sentences.
• I'm worried that my ability to write gen/non-romance fic might never recover.
• There are places where the Smackdown's made it possible for me to stay entirely inside my writing comfort zone (more on that in the next entry, too).

Still, these are little things, for the most part, and I think the good outweighs the bad. I knew Smackdown would be fun, but I wasn't expecting it to help me as a writer, and I think it has. And it's only half over!

Comments

[pineappleyness.livejournal.com]

*contributes to LJ comments in your inbox*

I know I've commented on a fic of yours saying about the friendship, and the fic I'm thinking of, I remember that it had both friendship and potential shippyness, and I think that that's really great. I think it's important to remember that a relationship isn't just all romance, especially with characters like Kel and Buri, and it's something I should try to write more often. :) So yay for you! :D

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

Hee, thanks! It's not something I was disappointed about, at all; it's more of an interesting observation, and a little telling about how I see relationships, in general. :)

Also, I forgot to put this in the above meta, but: one of the mistakes I made in the first fight I wrote for was getting to the romance too soon in my story, and then running dry on inspiration. If I start slow, I can sometimes get more drabbles out of one idea!