• Mood: contemplative
• Music: "Who Needs Sleep?" by the Barenaked Ladies

Miscellaneous fanfic stuff

So, I think I'm about halfway through my new series, although it's hard to tell. This one has so much plot it makes my head spin :-/. I don't have a working title, but I've been thinking of it as "After Charles" since it opens with his obituaries from four different publications. I spent over a week reading a gazillion obits to choose the publications and to get the tone right in each one. It was giving me a skewed view of the news. I was feeling like everybody's dying! I was in danger of turning into one of those cranky people who goes around saying "Why don't they print any good news?" Oh well, it's done. At least that part is and a few more stories. I still have to write the Memorial Service, though. In this series, the X-Men have - at Cyclops's insistence - a private funeral for Charles, but they will succumb to pressure and have a public Memorial Service later. I've been to one New York Celebrity Funeral and will draw on that experience.

I took a break from writing the series last night and did a first draft of my xmmficathon assignment. You get to choose from three, but I'd already written stories that met two of the assignments, so it was an obvious choice. It's a post-X2 Pyro story, which was interesting for me to do, since it's very different from anything I've written before. I've never written Pyro and my post-X2 stuff has all been my version of the Phoenix story. So, it was a chance to focus on a character new to me, and also a chance to write Magneto. I've always wanted to do something with him, and particularly focussing on his Holocaust experience. This one ended up referencing post-Holocaust, his time in a dp camp in Cyprus. Anyone want to beta - particularly anyone with a good feel for Pyro, Magneto and/or Mystique - please let me know.

I've been doing more beta-ing lately. I always enjoy that. There's something very exciting about seeing a story take shape. And the detail-oriented anal-retentive part of me likes to catch the little mistakes.

I'm thinking a lot about power in relationships lately, and how that issue is explored in fanfic. I'm particularly interested in stories where on the surface power dynamics are obvious and simple, but in reality they are much more subtle and complex. A post in musesfool's journal reminded me of the Ptolemy quip that said that Alexander was never defeated, except by Hephaistion's thighs. I think it was intended as an epigram and it is kind of funny. OTOH, there's something so compelling about it, too. You can be the most powerful man who ever lived and you're still subject to the power of desire, the power of love. Recommendations on fanfic dealing with such themes would be gratefully appreciated. I'm flexible on fandom.