Swan Lake Hatesex Project

[damselfish]

After a frenzied day writing, shouting "I've had too much coffee, aooooaaaauuuu!" I finished my pet Swan Lake AU project at 43,000 words with almost 6,500 written today (my minimum is 1,000/day, my goal is 2,000). I even wrote the epilogue, which I hadn't planned to. I'm missing a few gaps here and there, scenes I need to get back to, but for the most part, the first draft is done. This was my last chance to write until after Wiscon, so I'm pleased as punch.

I haven't finished anything in ages, especially for a project that I had really enjoyed for about 90% of the writing. I wasn't even going to finish it, until I read what I had over again. This was a serious pet project, something I was sure I could never do anything (and so others have told me). Lesbian Swan Lake? Excites people but the market is small--both for f/f and for people who know enough about Swan Lake to care. This project came about when I asked myself "hey, what if Siegfried was the swan?" but instead of merely swapping the story and toying with the themes of female passivity in the swan figure (everyone knows Odette as if she's the star of the show, but she's the object to be battled over by Siegfried, von Rothbart, and Odile) I thought "hey, what happens if you don't break the curse, you just pass it on to somebody else?"

Thus I got the Siegfried/Odile hatesex project, which is officially The Stolen Star of Cygnus but I keep calling it hatesex despite the relative rarity of actual sex.

You ever read over your old stuff and go "jumping jehosaphat, this is exactly the work of the writer I want to be!" and have that weird realization that you made that?

I've been in a slump lately, which has battered my writing as well. Most times I'll look back at it and it's okay, but it's not quite what I wanted, I can read the depression cooties between the lines. All my failings laid bare.

This poured out of me over the course of two weeks back in March, a nonstop torrent of fire and fury, with exactly all the things that I thought challenged me and consciously worked on adding to stories--these things just appeared. Lots of character disagreements. Multifaceted conflicts. Then one day I looked at the screen and realized, I'd written everything I wanted to, I'd scratched the itch. It wasn't anywhere near done, but the overriding need was gone, and I went back to my "real" project. No one would see it, nothing. It was just a dumb idea that I really, intensely, needed to get out of my head.

I shared it with a couple people, including my harshest critic (love her, everybody needs a harsh critic), and the unanimous response was "omg need more, why isn't it finished."

It's the same characters from lesbian Swan Lake, but upending all the relationships resulted in some wildly unexpected tensions, alliances, and facets of the characters I didn't even know were there: Odile couldn't ever maintain her temper with Odette, but Siegfried consistently gets under her skin. You actually get a sense of Odette's fragility as well as her perserverence. You can really see how Siegfried doesn't know anything about Odette when he goes head-over-heels for her. More of Benno being the better son to the Sovereign Princess. Heck, I had no idea Siegfried could be so doggedly pragmatic or ruthlessly cheerful. I was never quite able to tease quite so much of a personality out of him as I did in opposition to Odile.

But damn, Odile, I'm tired out just thinking about how you are off-the-rails 24/7, whether in kicked puppy mode and/or rampaging bird-monster-fairy mode.

The trick to maintaining this while I finished up was listening to the right music... and the right music was by no means easy to come by. I asked for recs for "angry/smart" music since I was getting good mileage out of a Florence + the Machine playlist, but all I really found was that there's nothing like Florence + the Machine, nothing that evokes the embittered sense of wonder. I've never listened to the same thing over and over again in my life.

It was the same 17 Florence + the Machine songs, Nightwish's Imaginaerum (the film OST, not the album), some Birthday Massacre, Dvorak's 9th Symphony, with the epilogue/denoument to the Madoka Magica OST. Some songs, arranged in the right order, could also keep me in the right brainspace, but I found that the order was massively important: sinking into an action heavy sequence via Krypteria, only to have electroswing pop up, could really toss me out--even if I've written a whole lot of action scenes to electroswing before.

Well. I'd forgotten that writing can be so satisfying.