A Complicated Universe

Uhmmm… Hi guys… Surprise?

I just submitted a chapter of The Complicated Lives of Smith and Jones to Whofic.

Yeah like three months after my last one.  Sorry.

A few things happend.

1) I burned out, I completely admit.  NaNoWriMo was good in that I was prolific while it lasted, but then I got stuck.  The last chapter I wrote was terrible.  Absolutely terrible.   I was writing things I couldn’t believe were coming out of my fingers, and I’m pretty sure I deleted most of what I wrote already, which you should be very grateful for.  Have you ever read a fic and the first couple of chapters were pretty good and then it’s like a slow decline into plot hell?  That was what happened.

There’s still this hole left between the last acceptable thing I wrote and how to end the thing.  I know the ending.  I’ve put thought into what I’m going to put into that hole off and on for months now and I can’t get there, and I don’t feel like a huge time jump is okay to do because there are things that need to be in there (A proposal and a wedding, for two) but I don’t know the circumstances of those.

I’m still chewing on it.

2) I got too involved in tumblr.  No, not on this account, on my regular every day one.  And my big problem was I spent too much time browsing the Martha Jones tag which kind of made me devolve into starting to (gasp) resent Rose.  Not really Rose, but all the people who just can’t move on and still post nasty things about Martha all the time.  Which makes me just want to curl up into a ball and die when I think about finishing the fic.  I’ve lost a lot of loving feeling, which really isn’t fair to the character of Rose, who I clearly also love.  The anger I feel over what people say about Martha, though, drowns so much of that out.  When it’s not a competition, they are both amazing characters.  And I know it’s not cool to let other people’s hatred of Martha color how I feel about Rose, but that feeling dug in since so much of the Martha hate is because of people being unable to let go of Rose and see the other characters for who they are instead of who they’re not.

I haven’t actually watched series 1-4 in well over seven months now. I think it’s my plan at this point that after the regular TV season is over, I’m going to go back and rewatch everything of 9 and 10’s to re-fall in love with everyone again, and I’m hoping this will spark my love of writing Who Fic again.  

Until then, I’m going to publish the chapter I sent in today and the rest of the next arc of the Mickey/Martha story, put serious thought into how to finish this fic, and work on getting my loving feeling back for Rose and Rose/10.5.  I’ll probably have to stay away from a big chunk of the fandom for that, unfortunately.

I still have all my notes, I still have everything plotted out, I still really want to finish.

——

Quick note on the chapter I submitted today…

I don’t think it’s good enough, which is why it’s taken so long to get back into it, but in the end, I decided that it did the two things it needed to do…

(spoiler)

…get Martha thinking about leaving UNIT and getting the two of them in bed together FIN-A-FUCKING-LY

(/spoiler)

so I just prettied it up a bit and took a deep breath and mashed the submit button to get myself back into the groove.  Sorry about the lack of detailed porn.  I just can’t.  What I wrote for that scene is probably the closest my stuff will ever get.  Sorry.

Okay, that’s it.  Gonna get back to editing stuff. 

If you want to stay ahead of the game, it’ll be a good idea to go read or refresh your memory on Hallucinations before the next chapter gets published later this week.

Here’s a happy gif if 9 to celebrate me posting on this blog again!

Some thoughts on Martha & Mickey in TCLoS&J

There are a lot of things I specifically wanted to accomplish in writing all of my fic.  I wanted to fill in so many things I felt were missing in Journey’s End when I wrote ACEiTaS.  I wanted to flesh out the Doctor and TenII’s relationship. I wanted to give TenII and Rose a good start.  I wanted to get inside Ten’s head.  I wanted to introduce Martha and Mickey and try to get their relationship off to a natural start (and I hadn’t planned on expanding that fic when I wrote it, not until I was nearly done with it) so that there was some beginning to the bridge of what we see in End of Time.

When the ideas started solidifying in my head for TCLoS&J there were some other things I wanted that fic to accomplish.  

Since I’m trying to write the entire series to be 100% canon-compliant, something you can just drop in as headcanon with absolutely no conflicts to what we know happened in the show (and as much as I can manage, in the books, too), there were a lot of constraints I place on my writing.  But there is enough freedom that I can take the characters we have and show them at their best, too.

The main thing I wanted to do, of course, was showing a very natural progression of Martha and Mickey getting together and to make it really believable that these two would end up married.  I wanted to not force the issue at all and have them magically walk off the TARDIS in JE and be in love.  I wanted resolution to her relationship with Tom.  I wanted to show Martha’s slower fall for Mickey’s much faster (but not immediate) one, which felt believable to me.  I wanted their relationship to be about them, and not about the Doctor, TenII, Tom or Rose.  I wanted them to deal with all of those people in a realistic way, though. 

But most of all, I wanted to show Martha and Mickey both as kick-ass, awesome, mature people who may still have faults but make them rounded characters who it would be believable that they truly love each other.

There are WOC who I follow on tumblr, or who’s blogs I regularly read through the Martha Jones and Mickey Smith tags who talk a lot about how Martha was treated and reading their posts has educated me on how they feel WOC (Women of Color) are treated in the media quite often.  I’m white, and I’ve spent a lot of time the last few months pondering the topic and trying to educate myself on POC in the media in general to both help me be a better writer, and for my own edification.

For Mickey, the biggest thing for me was to always respect his intelligence and yet make sure I keep his voice true to the character.  His language is still what a lot of people would think of as “rough”, so I try to keep that, but he’s also a really smart guy, especially when it comes to technology, so I wanted to make that shine out.  I think there’s also a playful side to him, as well as a very romantic side.  He also has a few unresolved issues when it comes to the Doctor and is never afraid to speak his mind or criticize him.

For Martha, my #1 thing is always to show how absolutely brilliant she is, and yet I wanted to never put her on a pedestal of perfection.  She still has a few self doubts and even some unresolved issues when it comes to the Doctor, as well.  It’s not romantic anymore, and I think she’s forgiven him for some of the ways he treated her when they were together, but I don’t think she’s completely past everything that happened to her when she was with him, either.  So, after Tom couldn’t handle everything she went through, because of the Doctor, opening up to Mickey wasn’t easy.  

My other big thing has been learning that a lot of WOC feel that WOC in the media aren’t valued and seen as worthy of being protected.  They’re expected to always be strong and always be the person that everyone else relies on to be strong, often without reciprocation.  Even in series 3, that was Martha’s role.  She suffered mostly silently through her love of the Doctor, only opening her mouth about it when she was alone or someone else asked.  She saved his life time and again.  She protected him in 1913.  She supported him in 1969.  She walked the earth alone, the weight of the world on her shoulders alone.

Martha is strong and smart and can take care of herself.  I don’t feel like I need to prove that even a little bit, though I think I’ve shown quite a bit of that already on top of what the series and books show.   But she also should be valued and protected by those around her.  And that ‘s what I wanted to show in the last two chapters I just published, with the Germany adventure.  And coming up in the next 3-4 chapters I’m about to start editing and publishing, that’s what it’s about.  Martha Jones, you are loved, protected and cared for by three of the most incredible men in the universe.

The very next chapter is going to be new stuff and back to more talky, less adventurery.  But then the two or three after that is another huge shift.

I’m nervous about publishing these, because like the German adventure, it’s going to be a whole different take on something people who have read my fic are already familiar with (or at least should be) so I hope I don’t bore people by rehashing something they’ve already seen from a different angle. 

But I’m excited, because I think they’re good.  And I’m going to try to get them out there sooner rather than later.

Sorry for all my ramblings, guys!  I just had all this in my head and I needed to clear it out before I got back to work.  :D

What’s this? A new chapter of The Complicated Lives of Smith and Jones?

Just uploaded to Whofic!  I’m going to try to my hardest to get the next four chapters published quicker, and to get back to writing soon!  There’s so much more to go, I’m only like somewhere between halfway to two-thirds through the story I want to tell throughout the series, and I promise I WILL finish! :)

Keep an eye out here: http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=43002

New chapter of TCLoSmith & Jones just uploaded!

The holidays, this entire month, has been madness.  But I carved out some time today to work on fic, and I should have part two also uploaded this week. :)

Editing fic you wrote over a month ago and never looked at again is like reading a brand new story!

…sometimes a brand new, horribly embarrassingly badly written story.

New chapter uploaded this morning!

This is probably the last chapter for about 10 days.  I have family coming into town and just don’t have the time & energy to both work on fic and entertain.  Hopefully there will be a new chapter before Christmas!  Have a great week, everyone!

First new chapter in a month uploaded to Whofic

And it’s a big one, over 7k words long.  Whenever they do the next round of publishing today, it should be up. :D

The plan is to do one chapter a week for the next 5 or so weeks, hopefully by then I’ll have the rest of the fic written so I can keep doing 1 or so a week til it’s done.  I think I need 3 or 4 more chapters after the last one that I’m actually happy with, so that shouldn’t be a problem.  

Bad news and goodish news.

So the bad news is I’ve failed NaNo.

The good news is I still have over 37k words done.  The last 3k or so will probably be almost completely thrown out.  I just got completely bunt out and when I started really hating what I’d done and didn’t know how to back out of it while still continuing on I just froze, and it sucked.  

What I do have done and like will start to get edited and published very soon.  I’ll also decide on what point I need to erase from (probably just mostly the last chapter I did write) and how to fix things and continue on from there.

It’s all still going to get done, just not as fast as I’d hoped.  But I’m committed.  I have this to finish and two more big fics to write.  It might be another year until it’s all done, but it’ll get there.