ARGH.

[naodrith]

Thank God for mistful.

It's nice to know that I am not alone in being unable to keep my characters in control.

Joseph: Hornblower was a good show.
Zacharias: Yes, yes it was.
Joseph: Oh, I know! Since I'm supposed to be executed anyway, and God (figuratively speaking) only knows why I wasn't in the first draft, how about that finally happens?
Zacharias: Okay! And I will angst about, act tragic, and then tragically take the blame!
Joseph: And then Lasa and I can plan a jail break!
Zacharias: Only it doesn't work!
Joseph: We're brilliant. We should so be writing this story.
Nae: I refuse to kill either of you off. Because I am incapable.
Seth: Oh, and you can kill me off?
Nae: YOU'RE IN A DIFFERENT STORY SO SHUT UP.
Seth: No, really. You kill off most of the cast in my story. Including me. And I'm the cute one.
Zacharias: Good point. Good point. If he can die, why can't we?
Joseph: I'm the suicidal one here. Remember that, Zac, okay?
Nae: I DON'T LIKE WRITING DEATH SCENES.
Zacharias: And yet somehow, torture and near-fatal injuries come easily.
Nae: Yes. Precisely.
Seth: *wistfully* I wish she was actually writing my story.
Joseph: We come first. We're actually being rewritten and maybe someday published.
Zacharias: We're going to make Nae a lot of money if she can get over this COMPLETELY CHANGING THE PLOT thing.
Nae: Excuse me? I deleted three characters and added a few plot points. YOU ARE TRYING TO MAKE ME KILL YOU. STOP. I DON'T NEED ANY MUSES.
Joseph: But our ending needs work!
Nae: As Pyrae so gently pointed out, everyone dying DOES NOT WORK. Nor does ambiguity.
Zacharias: But everyone dying would be realistic!
Nae: I know. Pyrae said that, too.
Seth: Why don't you ever listen to Pyrae?
Nae: Because...because...because that involves...you know...listening.

In conclusion: Woe, I am never going to finish this story. Maybe I really should just go write the Holy Trilogy. Somehow it's much easier to keep the angst to a minimum when I know everyone dies anyway, if that makes any sense at all.

In the thirty minutes I have been online, I have gotten five junk emails. FIVE.

No, I cannot be bothered to put italics on anything. IS THAT OKAY?

I did find my Indigo Girls CD. But I didn't listen to it because of a series of events which took up my entire night and prevented me from doing anything else on the list.

Pyraepyraepyraepyrae, when can we watch Don Juan DeMarco? It is good. I swear. And you said you would watch it. But when? I have time. I have all the time in the world. Except that I really should be writing something. And now I must go work on my skirt. Farewell, adieu, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

my turn to put my 2 cents in
DONT KILL SETH

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

It must be done for reasons which I cannot iterate here.

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

I recommend not giving away spoilers to non-betas.

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

Elishabet is one of my betas. She is my weepy beta. I wuv her.

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

She is a don't-do-what-you-feel-you-should-do beta.

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

Well, so are you, to a point. No one feels that I should kill Zac, but I do.

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

Well, okay then. Let's hear why you think he should die. I haven't read far enough to understand and I know even less about the revised edition. Why do you feel it's necessary?

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

I said a lot of it in the post, I think.

I guess it's mostly because he's so worn out by the end. He's been tortured, running on pure adrenaline for weeks and possibly months. He doesn't even want to live, he just wants it all to be over. But the thing is, it would never be over for him. He keeps having this amazing luck that has nothing to do with how good of a spy he is, even though everyone (in the story, hopefully not the readers) assumes that "best Codebreaker" means "best spy." But he's an intellectual. He didn't mean to get involved, and he can't get out, and it's going to kill him. It wouldn't be a war story if he survived. He was doomed from the moment Jen found him, and it just feels cheesy and cliche and wrong to me if, after everything, he turns out to be such a Gary Stu that he can overcome everything the war has thrown at him.

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

Okay, I can see that. I suppose the reason I'd have objections to it is because it ends the story on such a depressing note--does anyone actually get anything out of it? If Zac dies, Joseph's sort of screwed. Lasa doesn't seem to get anywhere. I think you have to show that they did something worthwhile, that the story wasn't completely pointless--people ran around and in the end none of it really mattered...well, I guess if you're shooting for that kind of story it works. But I think someone (not necessarily Zac, especially not him if it doesn't feel right) has to have a better future because of everything the main characters did.

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

That's the thing, I think. Basically, whatever happens, America is screwed. Separation and the New Constitution saved it for awhile, but whatever happens in the story, America's doomed. We lost two hundred years of development to the Pax Americana, and there's no way to catch up. It was a tragic and fatal mistake and it shouldn't have happened and can't be fixed.

All I can hope for, I guess, is to show that everyone who survives the war has at least a little while of good times, and leave the reader to the delusion that maybe everything would be okay, even though a little bit of deep thought would show that it can't be.

God, I'm depressed now.

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

I don't see why it can't ever be better. Nothing is doomed eternally like that; there's always a fix, even if it takes a thousand years to find and implement it.

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

If America gets the technology back, its enemies will see a repeat of the events that led to the War in the first place, and with their extremely-advanced technology, will take out America in the way that should have been done right at first.

If the technology is kept out but freedom is given back, eventually some idealistic geek will start to campaign for a return to technology, and the same thing happens, somewhat belated.

The only way America can be saved, I think, is if the other countries end the War and bring about the Pax Tierra before that happens. Which, I guess, would be nice, but wouldn't be a part of my story, anyway.

I just love talking about Pax-whatevers. See what reading newspaper editorials does to me?

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

So there is a way. You don't know exactly if it'll happen or not but the country is not unchangeably doomed. If it is, the whole story will basically be paraphrased into: Things bad. People try to fix. People fail. Things worse. DEATHDOOMDESTRUCTIONAPOCALYPSE. The end.

Sure, you could do that. But it's awfully fatalistic and the world isn't like that.

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

I think what I'm shooting for is more like this: Things bad. People try to fix. People accidentally start a war. People weep about how terrible this mistake is. People accomplish what they set out to do, but there's still that little problem of the war. Things are, possibly, even worse than they used to be. People try to fix new situation. Lots of people die, not all of them main characters. The war ends, more or less. Things better, but not perfect, because life is not perfect and never will be. The end.

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

Yet the ending as you're explaining it isn't "Better but not perfect," it's "Better except not really."

[naodrith.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I never really liked my original ending and I haven't got to the second one yet. What I think I'm trying for is not necessarily a "quick fix" to all of America's problems. I want it to be obvious that things are, indeed, better, but that there are still things that the heroes couldn't fix, and other people are going to have to fix them. I want Lasa's story (and all the stories bound up with hers) to be, more or less, over. But I don't want everything to be over because that's not realistic.

I also don't want to leave it so open-ended that I can be talked into a sequel.

[pyrae.livejournal.com]

Ew. Quick fixes are bad. I like what you described here. Definitely aim for that.